#tried to start a cult or something during Covid
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thiswaycomessomethingwicked · 1 year ago
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Thoughts on writing and poetry from one of my favourite contemporary poets Jaclyn Desforges
I won’t speak for other lit scenes but in Canada the chronic fear of being blunt and therefore incredibly vulnerable is a bane on our poetry. Everyone feels they must be coy or emotionally removed or hyper intellectual and it, to my mind, results in bad poetry.
Fear of being direct, of being blunt and, perhaps, ugly, of saying what we mean—all of that makes for bad writers.
And gods know I suffer from the same knee jerk reaction of wanting To Be Poetic and To Be Intellectual and Smart in my writing and in doing so forget what I’m writing about
I remember talking to a poet, brilliant brilliant woman, Robin Richardson, and she asked me “tell me exactly what this poem is about in plain language” and I did—step mom stuff, childhood trauma stuff—and I was having that Voice Cracking Looking At Ceiling So I Don’t Cry moment
And the poet said, “your poem needs that in-your-face pain. It needs to be a hurt seven year old. Are hurt seven year olds coy and overly poetic? No, they’re blunt. Try that and see how you go”
And of course this doesn’t mean you don’t use imagery or metaphor or things like that—but at the core you can’t be afraid of ugliness and bluntness
Best advice I ever got as a writer.
Anyway, some random Saturday morning musings brought to you by Jaclyn Desforges and Robin Richardson.
(Also, Robin’s thoughts on the unsympathetic voice are great too—can’t grab the link but the essay is titled “the unsympathetic voice in poetry” and it’s in the North American Review from like 2015)
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wool-f · 2 years ago
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Let’s have a real chat about mental health
I have a secret. 
I have had a secret for the last ten months. 
My secret is that despite my outward presentation, I’ve been really struggling with my mental health for the most part of 2022. 
I find it difficult sometimes to be open and vulnerable about it, because I feel that so often my own issues and struggles are so much less severe than other people out there, and that I have enormous privileges that other people don’t have access to. 
So in that vein, I want to first acknowledge and express with the greatest gratitude the luck that I have in having great parents, understanding friends and a roof over my head. I am surrounded by people who care about me, and I have access to food, hot and cold running water, and a great job that I enjoy doing most of the time. I have everything that a person needs in their life to be happy and healthy, and yet I still struggle with my mental health. 
So let’s really talk about mental health, self care and the trend of toxic positivity. 
Throughout the pandemic, my circumstances changed (by my own choice) and for the most part, I was happy and can honestly say, I built a number of health habits that I maintained throughout the lockdown period, that I carried through until we were well and truly out of the worst of it. 
I went through a phase at the beginning of this year, where I got a new job and started working In a role that I had never even thought possible for me just two years prior. I am now a paid journalist, working in Melbourne, and I get the opportunity to do some really cool things during the week while I’m working. 
At this time, I was also recovering from Covid, which I also link to my decline in mental health, as a few things happened on the peripheral of my life at that time, which caused me to really think about who I was spending my time with, and where I was sharing positive and supportive energy. 
Throughout the following months, I started to really retreat back into myself. I was spending more and more time at my parents house, I found little joy in the work that I was doing, I fell behind in uni and stopped doing the things that I loved to do. I also stopped following the habits that I had so carefully maintained and built throughout the lockdowns in Melbourne. 
I think it was only in August of this year, where I really stopped myself and looked in the mirror - I was a person that I barely recognised anymore. I had lost my zest for life and I was really not enjoying anything. My body had changed, due to lack of healthy physical activity, and my focus had strayed from anything productive. 
I journaled and tried to start doing all the things I knew would help to pull myself out of this self-made hole, but to no avail. It came to a head at the end of August, when I moved back into my family home, and I had the space to really let myself relax, feel safe, and heal from the inside out; until I got to a point where I could look at what was going on inside my head from a space where I could actively do something about it. 
What I have found is that despite the fact that everyone is constantly trying to be “that girl” or portray a life of perfection and constant positivity, it truly is not conducive to a healthy relationship with yourself. I know that is not by any means an original thought at all, but the more I notice it, the more I can’t un-see it. 
I have clocked it in myself, that when I am attempting to portray a life of perfection and pure joy 100% of the time, it is in fact when I am the least happy, And when I am trying to convince others that I don’t care about a potentially hurtful situation, I am actually more often than not, very upset about it. I can’t speak for anybody outside of myself, but I think it’s worth saying - that it’s ok to care about people and things. 
My generation particularly, and from what I am seeing of the following generations, are so caught up in trying to care less, and pretending to be too cool for things, because the whole cult of mindfulness has been only partially absorbed - when something is genuinely upsetting, you are allowed to be upset about it. People treating you badly is a very good reason to be sad, losing an opportunity that you really wanted is disappointing, and not being exactly where you expected yourself to be right now can be extremely disconcerting. Pretending that you’re fine when in fact you are struggling, are sad, are unhappy or uncomfortable, or just generally annoyed, is stifling your ability to express yourself in a healthy way. 
I noticed after moving back into my family home, that I had found myself in a place where I didn’t feel comfortable expressing myself fully in any other environment. And among other things, the little voice in my head that I normally keep wrangled in a genie lamp, had become so powerful and loud, that it was all I could hear and all I was listening to. And it was at that point, that I was actively able to step away from the negative self talk inside my own head, and start doing things that would allow me to recalibrate my brain. 
Obviously this is not an all in one fix or solution, and for many other people they need more assistance than a journal and a couple of weeks in a safe space with more than 4 hours sleep a night, and I probably could use the help of a therapist. But for now, I am truly trying to do my best to feel emotions as they come to me, and to not suppress them. I am doing my best to counteract negative and invasive thoughts with my own active positive thoughts. I have started doing things I love again, I have started making lists and enjoying the life I am living again. I am trying new things, and realigning with my goals and dreams again. I am truly moving back into the old self I had cultivated in 2020, and it wasn’t by pretending everything was fine and I was perfectly happy with the way it was going. 
I’m not saying this is for everyone, but I really want to try and be as open as I possibly can be with my own mental health struggles, because I feel as though everyone talks about them on a surface level, but never really tries to tackle them in depth or go into them in a serious way. This was very much just a rambling post about where I am in life with my mental health and I’m not really sure I said anything helpful, but it’s helped me in a way, so someone else out there might need this too!
Anyway, that’s all for now, I’m going to be a lot more active on my social platforms from this week going forward, so you’ll hopefully be seeing a bit more from me. If you’ve gotten to the end of this post, thank you so much for being here, I love and appreciate all of you that take the time out to consume what I create. Please feel free to reach out at any moment in time, or comment down below what struggles you’re having currently - a problem shared is a problem halved. 
Good night, love you all. 
G xxx
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jippy-kandi · 4 years ago
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Digimon Adventure: 2020 – Episode 45: Activate, MetalGarurumon (Review)
Thoughts on the forty-fifth episode of the Digimon Adventure reboot series.
I . . . was not impressed with this episode. I did kinda like it because it had a lot of Yamato, but . . . I just expected more for a Mega evolution episode. It really shouldn’t have been a filler episode.
Narration: “Yamato and Gabumon showed signs of a new power. And now, that true form is about to be revealed.” Why does the narration insist on spoiling the episode?! :P Of course, the episode title does too, lol. But MetalGarurumon 100% should’ve happened in the episode where they “showed signs of a new power” . . . and not in this unremarkable episode.
I like how just in the previous episode, the kids didn’t have time to spare, and only conceded a bit of time to eat (a necessity) . . . but now they’re open to spending an entire (useless) day at a racing circuit. Wow, Toei, you really planned this series SO well!
Gabumon: “Yamato . . . I wanna run!” OK, I admit, Gabumon was super cute when he said this. The cutest he has ever been. But this sudden interest and passion in running is so abrupt and over-the-top? Also . . . DID YOU NOT RUN ENOUGH FOR 7000 LIFETIMES, NON-STOP, FOR TWO MONTHS OFF-SCREEN???
Machmon has a cool voice. I like him. But he’s a little too serious.
LMAO at the instant Garurumon was going to overtake Machmon - and Machmon got angry and started cheating. XD;
WTF, Garurumon just TOSSED YAMATO OFF HIM . . . at speed . . . and Yamato is completely fine. Ridiculous! :P
Why Gabumon/Yamato cared so much about Machmon (A CHEATING COMPETITOR) is beyond me. Toei, you actually need to develop bonds and friendships! DO THIS FOR THE EIGHT CHILDREN, TOO!
Gabumon smacks into a wall and has a bandage on his nose and one arm to show for it, lol. OK, fair. :P
Machmon tried to kill Gabumon in a death race to remain the racing champion . . . and everyone is OK with this? Let's just race??? You don't usually befriend people so quickly - especially when they tried to murder you . . . over a race. =| This is just ridiculous. I know, I know, it's a kids' show . . . but what are you teaching kids here? If someone tries to kill you (OVER A RACE), just befriend them!? It'll turn out OK! FRIENDSHIPS SOLVE EVERYTHING! Even attempted murder. Over a race! . . . OK, I’m over it now. :P
Yamato: "That sudden shift in Machmon during the race. Machmon supposedly lost control . . . but there's more to it . . . something else. If we race, we might find that answer." Well, a flimsy excuse to do the race, but OK I suppose! It’s actually fine, but how everyone reacted to Machmon’s attempted murder on Gabumon/Yamato, and their attitudes about the race going ahead, is just bizarre . . .
Jou as the announcer with his Digivice microphone was fun, though!
OMG, Sora, Mimi and Hikari cheering for Garurumon (and, by extension, Yamato) in Lillymon-esque cheerleading outfits was I-C-O-N-I-C. And poor Takeru! LMAO. Plus we all know Sora is really cheering for her man, Yamato. Thanks, Toei, I forgive you for all your sins now. :)
Koushirou informs everyone that Parasimon has infected Machmon and blah blah blah. Really? This was worthy of a Mega evolution? *rolls eyes*
Yamato . . . kicked . . . a Digimon . . . lmao. He looked cool in the beginning, though! What a total Chad. *love heart eyes* Chaos on Discord coined the term “Chadmato” - so that’s his name now. :3
Yamato: “We’ve raced together [Machmon] . . . We’re friends!” Is that really how it works, Yamato? If so, can I race you as well, please? x)
WereGarurumon is way too attached to someone he just met (who also attempted to murder him during a race . . .). The feeling is nice - but it’s also just out of nowhere and doesn’t feel that genuine or believable.
Yamato: “Even if you’re tormented by your mistakes or solitude, don’t give up! You must overcome your past, your present, and move forward!” This was a nice little speech before the Mega evolution and gave it some weight, I suppose. So, yay? I dunno. Whatever?
I really liked the Mega evolution sequence to MetalGarurumon, though! <3 And Jou’s reaction to his evolution was funny. XD;
But MetalGarurumon vs. Parasimon was a non-event, seriously. Like . . . REALLY? The Mega evo should’ve happened against that crazy cult Digimon. Sigh.
MetalGarurumon is a total boss, though. And he’s so BIG! Yamato looks so tiny on him. XD;
Yamato runs like he has toilet paper stuck between his arse cheeks, lol.
Yamato, Gabumon and Machmon crossed the finish line at the same time . . . Yamato is a tiny mortal and he can keep up with them!? These Digimon be slow AF. :P Also gotta quote Crispy on Discord: “Now Yamato allows participation awards for races. -_-” XD;
It was an OK filler episode . . . but for a Mega evolution? Utterly underwhelming and a giant disappointment. I know COVID messed with Toei’s plans, but still . . . they really have such a thin arse plot that they had to pad out the series with a Mega evolution filler episode. That’s just next level bad. I need people fired, Toei!
The next episode looks to be better at least . . . Takeru to the rescue! Even though they’re apparently resurrecting a storyline from 7869 years ago . . .
(Apologies for the late review. Sometimes I get carried away socialising with people on our Discord server and . . . well, I end up having to watch/review the episode on a later day! :D)
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junikshanasar · 4 years ago
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Yona’s Cult of Personality
idk dude, I have world history and it’s remarkably helpful in understanding our society and politics, and also amazing in understanding world-building. Like, does anyone read Spy x Family? More people should read Spy x Family, it’s absolute gold, but anyway the conflict between the fake countries that serves as background to the story is so obviously based on WW2 and the Cold War. I actually got super excited, and it made the manga 10x more fun.
But this post is not about Spy x Family, it is about Akatsuki no Yona (Yona of the Dawn). BEWARE OF SPOILERS AHEAD.
I know it’s like, one of the ‘big shoujo’, that a lot of people like, but I tend to procrastinate on reading more famous and mainstream manga for... absolutely no reason actually. But whatever, procrastination doesn’t need a reason.
Anyway I kept seeing it recommended everywhere, even my mom really liked it (we used to read manga in the library during my brother’s hockey practice - before covid ofc). So I finally read Yona of the Dawn two months ago, and absolutely loved it.
I feel like I say that for a lot of manga, but my tastes are all over the place, so. (it’s what happens when you’ve read manga from practically every genre)
Anyway I loved it, loved the characters, loved Yona. I tried so hard to make Yoon and/or Kija my favourite, but they came second to Soo Won no matter how much I liked them. Like rip, the guy everyone hates is my favourite. But it’s whatever, he’s a very good character, and my heart aches whenever I think of what he, Hak, and Yona could’ve been. I adore this author’s story-telling (so freaking funny), and I was pleasantly surprised to find they were the same author of some short works I enjoyed reading awhile back, so I’m glad I finally tried this series.
Right so while I was reading Yona, we were talking about the famous/infamous (depends on where you’re from) former Cuban leader Fidel Castro, and like, bro.
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This guy’s whole rise to power story sounds straight outta a novel. Or manga.
For real though, like he has comrades that help him, a bunch of which die in dramatic ways. Like, this one guy, Abel Santamaria, was a leader along with Fidel Castro and his brother Raul Castro, for the Moncada Barracks Attack that basically jumpstarted Castro’s revolution. They all got arrested by the government afterwards, and like Santamaria was tortured and killed. Apparently his hands were sent on a tray to his sister? She was also a member of the revolution, but like the tragedy of her bro’s death and the death of her boyfriend led her to commit suicide.
But yeah, after being released and chilling in Mexico for a bit to stay on the down low, Castro comes back with Che Guevara and begins the fight against current government run by Fulgencio Batista, who everyone lowkey hated cause he was corrupt and mean. 
So Castro starts from gaining the support of the people. He promises change and like actually does stuff to prove it, like asking for shelter and food from the peasants, and then paying them back through labour. He and his men treated them respectfully, and kindly, even going as far as to teach people how to read and stuff. His revolution was known as the 26th of July Movement, named after the day of the Moncada Barracks Attack that was the spark for all this, but they had a super funny nickname, Los Barbudos, which basically means ‘the Bearded Ones’, to describe what most of them revolutionaries looked like lol.
They were infinitely popular amongst the poor as a result, and through garnering public support and fighting against Batista’s army with guerilla tactics, the revolution overthrew the government and Castro eventually rose as leader of Cuba.
You’re probably wondering why I gave you a super brief history lesson (I omitted a lot of stuff), but consider this:
Who else comes back to their nation with a bunch of new allies, after staying on the down low? Who else aids the poor people in their country and treats them with kindness and respect, spreading their popularity throughout the public? Who else has a super funny nickname for their group?
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Yona does. Guys, I was painfully reminded of the Dark Dragon and the Happy Hungry Bunch while doing the reading on Castro’s rise to power. There are so many parallels it felt like an epiphany. Yona is Fidel Castro.
Jokes aside, I felt like I finally understood the politics going on in the manga, and what exactly adviser Kye-Sook was so scared of when he found out about Yona’s spreading reputation. I thought it was a little weird, especially since in the eyes of the people, Soo Won was a much better king than Emperor Il (Yona’s dad). He was afraid of Yona’s innocent creation of a cult. 
The term ‘cult of personality’ usually refers to when people adore a figure almost religiously, which is why most dictators you read about in history, like Castro, ensure they build up appeal within the public so they can rise to power (once they’re finally in charge, efforts to maintain this ‘cult’ often dip into something more fear-based). For Castro, he promoted himself as the ‘saviour’, who would save and protect the Cuban people from Batista, and then later from the USA. Of course there’s more as to the why and how and what, that I’m itching to type up, but it’s not relevant to this post.
If you recall, in the manga, the story of the ‘red dragon’ is one that is a legend of their land, and the ‘red dragon king’ is someone who was and is revered (especially in the Fire Tribe). Yona becomes associated with this legend, which only makes sense as she is his reincarnation and has collected the four dragon vassals from the legend. Due to this, she becomes immensely popular amongst the people in addition to her reputation of helping the poor, particularly in the Fire Tribe, and solving issues around the nation such as the human trafficking in the Earth Tribe town, Awa, and the drug issues in the Water Tribe’s town, Nadai.
She becomes someone who actually does something for the people, similar to Castro. So all in all, Yona builds a name for herself, and somewhat unintentionally creates a cult of personality wherein the people adore her. I thought this was a super fun comparison that shows how exactly Yona’s rise to power is happening. Personally I think she’ll be an amazing Queen when the time comes (I hope it does), especially after witnessing all her character growth. As much as I like Soo Won and believe he is a remarkable King, he lacks that empathy he’s locked away, something Yona has that allows her to help the people that much quicker and more effectively, as well as come to more peaceful and efficient conclusions (i.e. the resolution of tensions with Xing Kingdom).
Anyway, I can’t believe I only recently figured out that the best world-building works off lessons and events from history (like, it’s pretty much common sense, huh?).
But, now that I know, history class is a little more exciting! ~\(≧▜≊)/~
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aleatoryalarmalligator · 3 years ago
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I’m copy pasting this somewhat from a letter I wrote to my friend earlier this evening. It is pretty concise as to what is happening with my mother thus far.
The last few days have been very worrying. My mother’s condition with covid got worse. She’s nauseated and deliriously ill and struggling to breath. She was sent back to the hospital four days after they released her. They released her because the beds are filling up so fast, not because she was better.
She tried to go to four different hospitals but they had no room. Eventually she was ambulance driven to a hospital in a rural town fifty miles away. It was a nicer hospital and the staff took more care of her but her situation became even more dire. She has double pneumonia delta variant covid. Two days ago Allison and I called her and god she sounded horrid. She whimpered in agony to talk. She was horribly sorry that she didn’t get the vaccine. I looked it up online and she has a 40% survival rate. We have been devastated. The sick idea of her suffering in the hospital alone is disgusting. She’s not even sixty yet. Every breath is a struggle. At night the doctors spend several hours trying to fix her oxygen.
I’m heartbroken and sick with worry. I go between being numb and sobbing and feeling helpless. She’s suffering. I may never speak to her again. I don’t know how to contextually articulate what that means to my existence but it changes everything. Even if she gets better, I will never be the same. She was part of who I am even when we weren’t close.
Today they emergency flew her to Boise to be on a ventilator. Allison messaged me at work and I fell apart and had to leave. They’ve covered my shifts for this weekend. I sobbed outside until Allison and Eddison came and got me. Happy oblivious people in close quarters looked at me strangely from a completely different reality where covid is merely a year old concept they loosely take seriously. The only bright thing I can say is that her being on a ventilator is actually good news in her situation, not bad. I mean, it’s horrible. But the fact that they gave her one when Idaho has run out is more fortunate news. It means she’s lucky to have that.
Her breathing is stabilized. She still may die. They have a better understanding of how to treat covid than they did last year. I’m trying to stay positive. I love my mom. Hell despite everything I really like her. I just want five to ten more good years with her. I’m writing this in a semi composed way, but I’m not really composed. I’m absolutely unable to focus on much else. The world is just never going to ‘go back’.
Other hideous news is that my grandma Marie, which you may vaguely remember from my life story, and her boyfriend Foreman are both deathly ill of covid. I was very close to her in my late teens and early twenties. He’s a fanatic conspiracy theorist. He believes all the Alex Jones nonsense. They were getting sicker and sicker and when my grandma tried to get better he physically prevented her and yelled at her for trying to get medical help. Maria found out and called an ambulance anyway, which they gave her oxygen and sent her home. She was angered and resentful and when she got back Foreman took half her oxygen for himself. I have no idea how oxygen works or how they take it in, but I will accept what I’m being told.
I really don’t like him and he’s very cult like. He’s someone who is harmless in certain contexts but has the potential for doing great damage and evil mindlessly when the opportunity would arise. My grandma and foreman are now so sick that they can’t move. Their organs are shutting down. They have decided to die together. I half don’t believe this was my grandma’s true will as she was adamantly trying to seek help early on. When they sent her home she gave up. I’m sure hearing about my mother’s condition had broken her spirit also. They have defacated and have feces all over themselves coming off the bed. My sister Maria is trying to take care of them but it’s hard.
David has bronchitis. He’s going to be okay but this whole thing is horrible. He’s focusing on niche news and political topics, and i worry about how his obsession and focus is largely on moral outrage. He’s not a conservative but i see this inhinged need to be angry at ‘a side’. He hates communism and pretty much accused a political people of communism.
My grandma gave into white nationalism and science denial and racism and hate during the end of her life. It started when Obama was first running. I think it gave her something to live for and believe in. Though the potential for hatred and prejudice was in her system she gave into something and it kind of warped her into something that made me want to avoid her, even when I knew and loved her dearly deep down. She was a multitude of people in her time and she was also a very good person in many ways with a limited understanding of the world around her. She had a hard battle to find independence. She’s a victim of what happens when children don’t get hugs.
Old age and loneliness made her open to Fox News and worse. Overtime it made her resent and hate an imaginary enemy every day. Anger and fear that she never coped with distorted her ability to be open. I’m sorry it’s ending this way. She deserves so much more dignity. I know a better side to her and it cuts me to think of her right now wheezing and dying in that manner. She’s very old and I was willing to accept her death. But this is a whole other level of disturbing and sad. She doesn’t deserve to die covered in feces alone. It makes me want to puke.
I’m kind of mad at Maria and her kids because they brought covid to the house and to my grandma. It was to ask for food and gas money. They knew they had covid and didn’t say anything. Now Maria is remorseful and trying to take care of everyone. I’m not actually mad at her. She’s got to be suffering horribly. This is one of the ugliest times in my entire life.
There is nothing anyone can say. I’m disgusted at politicians who politicized this and made people afraid to get vaccinated. They have blood on their hands and they don’t care as they misguide their voter base into death. Even conservatives in other countries aren’t creating myths about covid to create rifts between parties. My mother is a sweet person. She isn’t really good with critical thinking and wasn’t able to access the truth with logic. She’s gullible and childlike. She was fooled. Which was that she was high risk and needed to get vaccinated.
Anyway, there isn’t much else to say. I hope you are staying safe wherever you are. Hold your loved ones close and don’t forget to appreciate the time we have with those people.
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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years ago
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K-Zombies
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When you and your friends put your fingers on the ouija board planchette and it starts moving around, there's a chance your friends are just yanking your chain - but just as possible is that your friends are experiencing the ideomotor response.
That's when your unconscious mind directs your muscles without your conscious knowledge. The movement of the planchette doesn't tell you what's going on in the spirit world, but it does tell you something about the internal weather of your friend's psyche, fears and hopes.
Our narratives are social-scale planchettes, directed by mass ideomotor response. When a fake news story takes hold, it reveals a true fact: namely, the shared, internal models of how the world really works.
Fake news is an oracle, in other words.
https://locusmag.com/2019/07/cory-doctorow-fake-news-is-an-oracle/
There's no spirit-realm directing planchettes. Supernatural phenomena are nonsense, in all their guises. Mediums are fraudsters or deluded - and so are soothsayers who claim to be able to predict the future. That goes for fortune-tellers and futurists alike.
A shocking number of self-described "rational" science fiction writers share the delusional view that they can predict the future. These pulp Nostradamii point to "predictions" of sf that have "come true" and claim to have an inside line on the world of tomorrow.
Sf *has* an important relationship to the future, though! It can be a planchette: all the futures imagined by all the sf writers are a kind of mutation-space, and the fitness factor that determines whether a story thrives or sinks is whether it captures public imagination.
Sf writers and readers are a means for society to reflect back, amplify and examine our unarticulated hopes and fears about our *present* technology. Sf doesn't predict the future, but sf readers and writers do an excellent job of predicting the present.
And since the present is the standing wave where the past is being transformed into the future, knowing about the present can be a source of insights into what's coming - and not just because sf reveals what's going on in the present, but also because it influences it.
People who are captured by imaginative, futuristic parables about the problems and possibilities of technology acquire a set of intuition-pumps for coping with the future when it arrives, reflexive views and actions about what the future demands of us.
Gene Rodenberry didn't predict the Motorola flip-phone. Rather, when a generation of Motorola designers and engineers were asked to make a mobile communications device their minds immediately flew to the Star Trek communicators they grew up with.
Thinking of fantastic fiction as measurement device and influence machine is a productive way to pick apart the meaning of literary trends.
As I wrote in my intro to the bicentennial re-release of FRANKENSTEIN, the rise and fall of Shelley's book tracks to the rise and fall of fears related to the book's various themes:
https://muse.jhu.edu/chapter/1974387
So what are we to make of K-zombies? Korean pop culture is experiencing a golden age of zombie movies, games, comics and other media.  
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-02-23/zombies-are-everywhere-south-korea-fears
Zombies have a lot of different themes, of course, and some are easy to map to the current situation: the fear of contagion and the need to distance yourself from loved ones who have become infected. The parallels to covid hardly need explaining.
But the K-zombie phenomenon predates the pandemic, and zombie stories aren't merely contagion stories - they're often stories about the lurking bestiality of nearly everyone around us.
That's behind stories like The Walking Dead, about the propensity of all our "normal" friends and neighbors to transform into an insensate, rampaging mob. These zombie stories are a throwback to the "cozy catastrophes" of John Wyndham and co:
https://pluralistic.net/2020/03/29/grifters-gonna-grift/#wyndhamesque
These are stories of racial and class anxiety, of xenophobia and the literal othering of someone who *seems* to be just like you but is actually a secret monster. Again, on a divided peninsula, it's not hard to see how stories of lurking otherness would catch hold.
Zombie stories are also stories about the fragility of social cohesion: stories about how we're never "all in this together" and how, when the chips are down, it'll be "the war of all against all." That, too, feels very zeitgeisty given recent South Korean politics.
South Korea has an ugly, authoritarian past that is at odds with its founding myth as the "good Korea," the "democratic Korea." But the post-war reconstruction of the country by the US elevated an elite to a position of near-total authority and impunity.
They abused this power in ghastly ways, running forced-labor camps for poor people and people with disabilities, with rampant physical and sexual abuse. Families who lost their loved ones were traumatized to learn that they'd ended up in the camps.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160423131643/https://bigstory.ap.org/article/c22de3a565fe4e85a0508bbbd72c3c1b/ap-s-korea-covered-mass-abuse-killings-vagrants
These forced-labor camps (which continue in a slightly modified form to this day) supplied slaves to chaebols, the conglomerates that represent the country on a world stage. Unsurprisingly, the leadership of these companies is also grossly corrupt:
https://www.bangkokpost.com/business/2052871/samsung-chief-jailed-for-2-5-years-over-corruption-scandal
Korea is also riven by messianic cults, and the leaders of these cults have close ties to the Korean political class, an incredibly politically destabilizing fact that has caused recent Korean governments to collapse:
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-37971085
South Korea, in other words, isn't just haunted by the spectre of aggression from the north - but also by the possibility of internal rupture. It has a huge, authoritarian secret police force that has been caught secretly meddling in electoral politics.
Far from reining in this spookocracy, the South Korean political class has tried to hand them even MORE powers, with LESS oversight. Today is the fifth anniversary of the Korean opposition's filibuster to stop the worst of these.
(Seo Ki-Ho, a politician with the affectionate nickname "Milhouse" for his resemblance to the Simpsons character read the Korean edition of my novel LITTLE BROTHER into the record during the filibuster!)
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https://memex.craphound.com/2016/02/26/south-korean-lawmakers-stage-filibuster-to-protest-anti-terror-bill-read-from-little-brother/
This othering is also sharply illustrated in the country's culture of misogynistic voyeurism, which goes beyond "upskirt" videos and includes a roaring trade in videos captured with hidden cameras in toilets, changing rooms and hotel rooms.
It's hard to overstate the reach of this practice, and its political salience: it has provoked a vast mass-movement of women and allies demanding an end to the practice and a reckoning with institutional sexism:
https://www.khaosodenglish.com/culture/net/2020/10/21/voyeurs-are-selling-photos-of-women-at-the-protest-online/
Zombies aren't ever just about contagion - they're also always an expression of a deep anxiety that your neighbors aren't what they seem, that in a pinch, they'll turn on you, and not just because they've been infected, but also to protect themselves and their comfort.
US zombie booms always have an element of this: 1950s (reds under the bed); 1980s (red menace redux); 2000s (immigration "crisis"), etc. It'd be amazing if the only thing driving K-zombies' popularity was the pandemic, or even less plausibly, a mere aesthetic coincidence.
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jaffacakerebellion · 3 years ago
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I posted this on Saturday but I really need people to hear this
There was a protest in my city today, by a group called ‘white rose’. They were protesting lockdowns, masks and vaccinations. They’d stuck up stickers all over a certain area, outside a library, near a university campus, and around a park. It scared the shit out of me, seeing the people in town, with about 10 police officers keeping the 25-50 protesters in a tiny (and incovenient tbh) space, not too far from where they’d put up the stickers. As I was walking home, I found some of the stickers, and tore down as many as I could see.
Some of the stickers were obviously theirs- meme templates from reddit, claiming the government was lying about the pandemic to stop people from ‘living their lives’, saying ‘the media is the real virus’ and ‘if you tell a lie enough times it becomes the truth’ and all sorts of shit. Some other stickers were much more inconspicuous- little round ones with a pair of hands tenderly holding a blue dove. Around the edge they said ‘I do not consent to another lockdown’ and ‘I do not consent to get vaccinated’. This was very similar to some of the banners they were holding, and some were wearing ‘FREE HUGS’ t-shirts.
The one sticker which stuck out to me most is one which said something like ‘how do you think the German people felt when the Nazis were taking over, with no power to stop them?’ This is the same rationale the Nazi Party used at the time to gain ‘support’- convince people there is no other way, that their system is the strongest, the right system, how will you disprove us? They scared people into their system, turning vulnerable people into fascists. The White Rose is employing Neo-Nazi thinking. To be honest, it was fucking terrifying.
After they were presumably done, they started coming back to the park where they’d already posted plenty of stickers. It’s a hot Saturday afternoon, so lots of people are in the park, families, children, and I’m busy ripping these stickers (most of them about half the size of a bumper sticker) off bins and signposts. Now, at this point I’ve already been confronted by:
- a woman with red hair (dyed red) in a black suit. She asks me what I’m doing. I tell her that some people have been spreading misinformation, and she recalls the demo in town. She agrees ‘yeah, that did look kinda like misinformation. huh. well, cool, okay’. She may just be bad at interacting with people, but there was something pointed, and I don’t think that she could pluck up the courage to tell me to look them up and find out jus how wrong I am. She didn’t look much like the other supporters.
- a woman in a ‘FREE HUGS’ t-shirt. When she asked me ‘why are you taking those down’, I already had a headache and didn’t fancy an argument, so I said ‘they’re the wrong ones.’ She couldn’t hear me, because so many people were walking past. She yelled ‘what?!’ so I repeated ‘THEY’RE THE WRONG ONES’, nodded affirmatively, and walked in the opposite direction. This, of course, was nonsense, but it left her looking incredibly fucking confused, and she eventually just walked away, which I was thoroughly delighted about, as I wanted to return and take more stickers down. I later realised that the men walking past and making so much noise was probably most of the others at the protest, like 25 men and me and her in an underpass. If they’d have seen me taking the stickers down, who knows what would’ve happened. (yes I know I made some bad decisions today and it would’ve been my fault but fuck it, when a dog shits on the pavement someone’s got to clean it up)
-Two bald middle aged white men, both holding pints. One of them yelled ‘what are you taking them down for? Read what’s on them, you might actually learn something!’ I just said nothing and stared at him as he walked away, whilst continuing to crumple one up, which I’d just taken off a railling.
- Some old Scottish guy and his family. I pretended to be taking them down bc the QR codes didn’t work and the sticker had to be replaced. He asked me why I had a mask on, I lied and said my mum wouldn’t let me out of the house without it and took it off. He told me what to go and tell my mum, whilst standing way too close, with his family gathered around him (like 6 people in total, including 2 kids). He was the reason I took a COVID test when I got home, alongside the blaring headache.
-Another family, this time the patriarch was a skinhead in a black polo shirt and jeans, same height as me (kinda short). Just like the others I was confronted by, his regional accent was very strong. Again, I said the QR code didn’t work. I started to walk away this time, kinda scared, and all his family walked up into the park, but he left his teenage daughter behind for a bit to make sure I didn’t come back (how brave). I came back anyway, but they wanted to go into the park and have fun.
But the last pair is what got me. One of them claimed to have done a biomedical science degree at the local university back in 2005. He was the only non-white person involved, and the only one who had anything scientifically based to say. However, the more I asked him about the degree he said he had, the more he started backing physically away from the conversation, claiming he had to go. The discussion I had with him lasted maybe 20 minutes, during which he confessed a belief that big pharma was dishonest and covered up heinous activity, which I agreed was absolutely right, but these ideas came to the total wrong conclusion.
I’m not explaining this very well anymore, it’s late and I’ve still got a headache, but his strong short white skinhead friend kept walking away then coming back, even at one point claiming that he was going to go and get someone. When I asked the first if he agreed with the non-scientific way the first man’s ‘friends’ were talking, and the fact that he is coming at this argument from such a different angle, he just changed the subject. It was around that time that I noticed that he wasn’t blinking, and that he was wearing a ‘Guardians 300â€Č t-shirt. I’ve since looked them up. They’re a cult. Nobody’s talking about it. He tried explaining the science to me, and I said that I don’t know enough about science to understand what he was saying, but tried to change the subject away from science- it just clearly wasn’t about that for any of the protesters except him.
Anyway, after he was done talking to me and claimed he had to go (right after I claimed to know a few lecturers in the university (I don’t but it was worth a try to see if he was bluffing) and started questioning him on who he knew), I turned around and just kept on taking off those fucking stupid stickers, including two which the skinhead had stuck on while we were chatting. They saw me doing this. I wanted them to see it, but now I’m not so sure. It was a dangerous move.
When people feel certain of something, you have to listen to them to let them air their uncertainties and change their mind. They were aware of this. I was aware of this. Neither of us listened much to each other. I was, to be honest, freaking out all the way home. What the fuck? I’d only seen people say this online, usually Americans, I’d heard about them on the news too. Suddenly I was getting looks from strangers, whilst taking down these stickers, and honestly had no idea who was who, or what they thought of me. And anyway, I’m trans, and have the fear of being looked at funny for that compoundedïżœïżœwith the fear of what a member of this group could do, it was terrifying.
I think there are very few things which stand between a person coming to a logical conclusion about what’s going on and a less logical conclusion and getting sucked into dangerous territory, although in this day and age there aren’t many logical things left. I’ve experienced the Dunning-Kruger effect at school, but some may never have experienced that, to feel like their understanding of something can only ever go so far.  I’m alright with saying ‘I don’t know’ and admitting that I’m not an expert, but I feel like all these people feel like they do have to know everything, and their genuine, valid fears have turned them to these crazy ideas because they’re nicer than the truth. I got told by a lot of people to ‘do your research’, but I didn’t say that to them, because they may well do their own research, but not necessarily using reputable sources. 
This is how Fascism works. If I had the same beliefs as them, I know I’d probably be doing the exact same things- trying to spread awareness. They genuinely think that they’re making a positive difference when they ‘change people’s minds’. Either that or those stickers were put up to get ripped down, to show their followers that ‘everyone is out to get you’. I was definitely scared most, however, by how close we all are in this day and age, to being them. I’ve attended protests, argued online, sent people links, spread my views. Most of my friends and I share the same views, we share each others’ information, when something’s wrong we blame ‘them’, or ‘the government’. These radicalised people were people I’d probably passed in the street before, who I’ve bought bread next to or admired their dog in the park. I met the next Nazis today, and they looked just like everyone else.
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imagitory · 4 years ago
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Obama was no trump, but he want spectacularly great either. All he did was fix the economy, let gay ppl get married, and try (and fail) to give us healthcare. Not that those things aren’t good, but he had 8 YEARS. And that’s all he did? The Obama cult on this site just needs to calm down
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...Anon, I’m really sorry, but...I couldn’t completely bite back a laugh at that second sentence. XD; I’d say “fixing the economy” is a pretty significant feat, eight years or no -- and I’d say there are many gay Americans who are very happy that the Supreme Court decided to honor their civil rights and allow them to marry, regardless of what state they lived in. I’d also say that there are many, many people with preexisting health conditions who are rather happy that the Affordable Care Act became a thing -- if nothing else, when the Republicans tried to repeal “Obamacare” after Obama left office, they pissed off quite a lot of their constituents, who didn’t love the thought of being denied the coverage they received under Obama’s law, and ultimately those Republicans had to back down. And admittedly there are other significant net positives that one could point to as being part of Barack Obama’s legacy, such as ending the War in Iraq, repealing the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy, and giving the FDA the power to regulate the tobacco industry, as well as more understated things like acting and adding onto President Bush and Clinton’s policies on pandemic responses so that we weren’t affected by the H1N1/Swine Flu pandemic like other countries were. (I don’t think we could truly appreciate this until seeing how thoroughly Donald Trump has mismanaged things with Covid-19.) Then of course there’s just the fact that Obama acted infinitely more presidential and professional than his successor Donald Trump and (I would also argue) his predecessor George W. Bush did, in the way that he was incredibly well-spoken, intelligent, methodical in his word choices, and very cognizant of how other countries viewed him and therefore America and the people he represented. There are polls showing that internationally America was more respected under Obama than in Bush or especially Trump’s tenures, and that’s because Obama actively engaged in rational, respectful, diplomatic foreign policy more than either of those two Republican presidents.
I’m not going to act like Barack Obama was a perfect president or anything -- there are plenty of things I wish he’d fought harder for, like universal health care and gun control legislation at the federal level, and there are things he did I really didn’t approve of, like the shift toward drone strikes as a replacement to having troops on the ground. And yes, he had eight years as opposed to Trump’s four...but doesn’t that in itself say something? He did enough for the American people in four years to have earned a second term -- and honestly, I’ll take eight years under Barack Obama before eight years under George W. Bush any day of the friggin’ week, considering that Bush ran our economy into the ground and got us engaged in two wars in the Middle East, while Obama saved the economy and pulled us out of one war and started the withdrawal out of the second. And of course Donald Trump has already done more than enough damage in four years: I would hate to see what he could do if he somehow had gotten more time.
I honestly have never seen any sort of “cult-like” devotion toward Obama the way I most assuredly have for Trump despite his laundry list of failures and debilitating character flaws...but if people are a little over-dramatic in their love for Obama, Iïżœïżœïżœd say they might have some cause, considering what we got after Obama’s departure. Nostalgia is an understandable and inevitable thing, and I think after we came under Trump’s watch and were able to look back at Obama’s presidency with hindsight, we realized how much we’d taken for granted.
Obama would laugh and make fun of himself at the White House Correspondents’ dinner -- Trump flat-out refused to host the dinner at all, and he absolutely cannot take a joke made at his expense. Obama got emotional during speeches, such as after the shooting at Sandy Hook -- I have never once seen Trump show any genuine emotion or tears for anyone other than himself. Obama would tell the American people when things were going to be hard, but still give us hope by explaining what we’d have to do to face the problem -- Trump only ever expresses confidence that things will work out or that he’ll take care of it, with no specifics or insight. Obama planned things out -- Trump flies by the seat of his pants. Obama was cool, calm, and collected -- Trump is hot-tempered, petty, and vindictive. Obama allowed photographers inside the White House outside of the standard press conferences, so they could take candid photographs of the First family -- Trump never has. Barack and Michelle Obama were openly affectionate with each other -- Donald and Melania’s lack of chemistry and affection has been pretty obvious since day one. The Obamas had a dog! The Trumps have no pets.
Even if one’s view of Obama is a bit rosy, I think it’s kind of an understandable rosiness, given where we are as a country. In my opinion, the nostalgia surrounding Obama is a helluva lot more justified than the nostalgia that’s popped up around presidents like Ronald Reagan.
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reginaofdoctorwho · 4 years ago
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weird shit that would probably have something to do with me in a horror movie
no one wanted this but i’m bored and found a bottle so you’re all getting it. yes these are all true. check the tags, if u think i’ve missed something please let me know!
there was a murder (technically, i don’t really count it as a murder) next door when i was four years old on christmas morning
the weird antique glass bottle i found half-buried in the woods in the woods yesterday with living bugs in it that made no attempt to leave it once i uncovered it
there is a local cult in the next town over. this is not the same as the local cult that was in the other town over where my mom grew up
random completed animal skeletons in the woods behind our house, i’m talking prey and predator, both laid out like in a goddamn scientific diagram. for a while there’d be ones in the middle of our yard, always the same type of animal, always just the bones and nothing else, laid out like it was posed. this has been happening for over half a decade and we have no fucking clue how, why, or who is doing it
the screaming from the woods that i’m going to assume is a fox
my sister almost dated a murderer. his niece or something is in my class
there is a house that is now part of a “local ghost tour” that belonged to my great+ grand parents during the civil war where my great+ aunt died allegedly murdered by her husband who is actually blood related to me. family history says she died of childbirth, which given that it was the 1800s... probably is true
there was an actual murderer in our family a few generations back but he married in and killed his wife and her sister. they didn’t find out about it until they read his journals after he died where it apparently told everything he did and they decided. “well, that wouldn’t look good for the family, and they’re already dead anyway” and just kept it hidden??
the fact we have my great great grandmother’s dress from probably 1890s or 1900s. even more so the fact that i fit in it. if this was fantasy horror (vampires, some immortal thing or ghost) i’d be fucking dead or cursed
fairly certain i was possessed by the ghost of a puritan as a kid
my family seems to have a curse with babies and nurses? my great uncle died when he was born because long story short, hospitals were the new hot thing, he was perfectly healthy, then a nurse dropped him and he died instantly. my sister died when she was a toddler and the hospital actively tried to delete her hospital records to cover it up and ended up getting fined by the state for it. the nurses responsible were not arrested or punished in any way.
my family all has fucked up connective tissue, in my brother it was bad enough he had to get a steel bar in his chest so it wouldn’t cave in.
the many times i have almost drowned, sometimes due to intentional actions by humans (my dad, it was my dad)
this in addition to the other fucked up shit he did before the divorce when he still lived here, including but not limited to: killing my mom’s favorite pet goat, hanging its skull in a tree, and leaving the body in the woods. not letting his kids learn how to cook. anytime someone asked him to cook he’d put as much pepper/hot sauce in as he could (even for like, scrambled eggs) and give it to the youngest person, usually a toddler. this was me at times. taking his kids out to the woods and threatening murder. taking his kids out to the woods and threatening burning. purposely locked the basement from the inside so we couldn’t get the gaping hole in the stairs leading to one of three kids rooms fixed. tearing up pictures of the kids whenever my mom did something he didn’t like. i had more here but i tried to cut it down a litttle
people have threatened to murder me before. one time a girl didn’t threaten, and actually acted like she was starting to like me, but her cousin read her diary or something and found out she was planning to commit a lot of murder, and told her parents and she got sent to a psychiatric ward for a couple weeks
my mom lived down the street from a family that got axe-murdered by one of their two sons when she was a kid. the murderer did get out on an insanity plea and is still in the area. also their neighbor’s mom “lost her mind” (how the story was told) when she had to protect their kids while her husband went over to try to protect the non murderer son when he got home from school and ran over screaming about his brother trying to kill him and had killed their parents
also she knew a girl who almost got kidnapped by this really fucked up traveling serial killer that has his own wikipedia page that is,,, lengthy. the girl had [alleged] mafia ties, and the guy ended up dying shot by police despite them being told to bring him in, which sounds kinda suspicious
long story short i’d probably be the sequel where one comes back
apparently i go to the “bad” school, which i found out in a coffee shop when i overheard two girls talking about how one’s dad went there and how horrible and dangerous it is
school fights are weird. either they don’t happen or they come freakishly close to murder. people slam heads into lockers, stomp on bones, drag people by hair along the ground. one time in my brother’s class a 4â€Č9″ girl sent a 6â€Č2″ football player to the hospital. there was video of a fight a couple years ago that’s still around. it was brutal, but also one of the girls fighting was taking one for the team in it and got the other kicked out
we don’t have a ceiling in all of the third floor, and the cafeteria has 2. this is not relevant in any way, but it’s important to me that you know this
also the guys kept ripping the heating vents/radiators/whatever off the walls in their bathrooms and got almost all the bathrooms locked. including the girls’ ones.
also everyone kept punching holes in the walls so on some of them it’s just,,, metal sheeting down the whole hallway
there are so many fucking shootings in the next town over. literally five years ago it was this nice place where kids would go on history tours, i did when my sister worked for that group. now there is pretty much one business that has not been held up at gunpoint, and if u look up to the serial killer bullet point, it is for v similar ties. it’s a pizza place and if u ever stop by u gotta try it
women in my family have weirdly good intuition but every couple generations we get doubtful. my great grandma didn’t want a hospital birth but decided “hey it’s the hot new thing for a reason”, my mom switched churches based on nothing but intuition and it turned out someone was a pedophile there (found out years later), i instantly could tell my friend’s boyfriend was a pos and wasn’t surprised later when he told her he’d murder and dismember me in front of her, and upon meeting him told him he was a fucking coward and couldn’t do it. he broke up with her a month later.
i was really good friends for a while with two guys that burned a building down. yes they were arrested. i was friends before and after the fire. they’re pretty nice, but this girl they used to date (at different times, they were brothers, yes it was fucking weird and uncomfortable for everyone involved except her but that’s it’s own thing) said some fucked up shit and it was the closest i ever got to starting a fight. anyway i’m still friends with both on facebook. one of them shares a lot of king of the hill memes
speaking of that fight, i 100% would’ve tried to kill her in that moment. u know that john mulaney quote like “i didn’t understand how a person could want to kill another person. then i got cheated on, and i was like ‘oh, okay.’”? that was me, but replace “cheated on” with she told me it was good my five year old sister was dead because she was a waste, and told me she hoped i’d die of covid”. it was mainly the sister thing. i couldn’t move because if i did i’d start a fight with the [way] above mentioned shit.
my family has a literal feud with a local farming family. i mean, we keep farm animals (sheep, goats, chickens), these people have that, pigs, and crops too. the feud was because their great uncle (or great grand uncle, i’m a little fuzzy on the details) published an autobiography (despite not being anyone famous/important) and in it talked about when he was friends with my grandfather and how creepy my great grandfather was (this was the one with the dead firstborn son) because he kept newspaper clippings of the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapping and murder pinned to a board on the wall of his office/basement. also because he was a child of german immigrants who wanted to fight against nazis in WW2 (how suspicious [sarcasm]). members of their family are in my grade. they charged my sister for almost half an extra pound of goods, too, which just revitalized it.
i live by corn fields. i am surrounded by cornfields. (joke one)
i was friends for a while with this girl whose baby teeth,,, didn’t really fall out completely? she was 17 the last time i saw her in person, she’s probably 19 now and judging by her facebook pictures they’re still Like That. she had a very symmetrical mouth/teeth, which made it weirder. just to clarify, she had some of her baby teeth pushed forward and up, so they kind pointed out a little? and all her adult teeth. she was literally so pretty.
a teacher who is v sexual with his female students came into my english class (he is a science teacher) to demand why i wasn’t signed up for his class. we then both became increasingly passive aggressive and he told the whole class where i live with specific directions and landmarks. the guy sitting next to me had to try to tone things down despite being obviously confused as to why it was even happening (me too buddy). he lives down the road from my sister. when my niece had her birthday party at our house i was outside setting things up and he slowed his car down and honked at me. fuckin creep
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if the GOP could win for real, they would do a lot less cheating
Something you have to understand about recent American history is that the Republican party lost its shit in the 1960s. There are always plenty of reasons for decades-long historical trends, but arguably the core one is that Lyndon Johnson’s administration made a bunch of human rights advances known collectively as the Great Society, the cornerstone of which was a sincere and substantive effort to address the unfinished business of Reconstruction with the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
Racist white people who didn’t want to share democracy with everyone else became reliable Republican voters, but they’re nowhere near enough to win an election on their own. Republicans realized that their ideology is a miserable death cult that can’t win a fair fight. They could have gotten better ideas, but instead, they started sabotaging democracy.
I am not here to overwhelm you with a list of all the American right wing’s assaults on democracy. But there is a relatively narrow subset which forms a pattern that has become increasingly urgent: times Republicans have abused, usurped, or radically and unilaterally bastardized the power of American government in order to limit voters’ ability to hold them accountable in free and fair elections.
Because it only includes events backed up by reliable and freely available sources, it necessarily only includes the times times they were ham-fisted or sloppy enough to get caught. It has over two dozen entries and is almost certainly incomplete.
1968: Richard Nixon sabotages peace talks to end the Vietnam War because anger over the war is a winning campaign issue for him. Johnson catches him and calls him out, but doesn’t tell the public. Nixon wins and takes office.
1972: Nixon’s re-election campaign, the Committee to Re-Elect the President (or CREEP, because these people are fucking Bond villains) goes on a crime spree which includes multiple break-ins at Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel.
1992: President George H.W. Bush asks British Prime Minister John Major’s government to dig through official archives for anything compromising on his rival Governor Bill Clinton from Clinton’s time at Oxford University.
1992: A political appointee at the Bush State Department has Governor Clinton’s passport files searched for potentially embarrassing information.
1992: Bush’s Attorney General William Barr pressures federal prosecutors in Arkansas to make some public movement on a white collar crime case tangentially associated with Governor Clinton.
2000: The Florida state board of elections does a racist voter purge, targeting largely Democratic communities of color.
2000: A mob, mostly Republican congressional aides, force election officials in Palm Beach County to shut down its recount.
2000: Five Supreme Court justices appointed by Republican presidents shut down the Florida recount in an unsigned opinion so specious and nakedly partisan that it irreparably damages the legitimacy of not only the Bush presidency but the Supreme Court itself.
2004: Republican election administrators in Florida attempt another racist voter purge, only abandoning it when they get caught.
2006: The Bush administration leans on federal prosecutors to influence the midterm elections with bogus investigations into Democratic politicians and prosecutions of non-existent “voter fraud” cases. After Republicans lose the midterms, several attorneys who resisted the pressure are fired.
2010: Five Supreme Court justices appointed by Republicans, in an existential fiat, reclassify money as speech, opening the floodgates to swamp every level of politics with dark money.
2013: The same five Republican Supreme Court justices gut the Voting Rights Act, specifically and explicitly because it has been relatively effective in preventing racist voter suppression.
2010s: Republicans in various state legislatures pass a bunch of laws to suppress the ability of voters to hold them accountable.
2016: Associates of Trump consigliere Rudy Giuliani loudly and unprofessionally conduct numerous bullshit investigations into Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton. They successfully pressure FBI director James Comey – himself a veteran of the corrupt and politicized Bush Justice Department – into several improper and decisive actions against Clinton.
2016: Donald Trump conspires with Russian intelligence and business interests to sabotage his opponent in a presidential election.
2016: Republican Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell blackmails the Obama administration out of explaining the Russian government’s sabotage of the presidential election, leaving state boards of elections and the general public vulnerable to the assault.
2017-18: The Republican administration sits on evidence that Russian military hackers have penetrated state voting equipment.
2018: Republican Georgia secretary of state Brian Kemp insists on overseeing the election in which he is running for governor. He squeaks out a “win” after purging thousands of voters, arbitrarily closing or refusing to equip polling places, and baselessly accusing his Democratic opponent of trying to hack the election.
2018: A Republican congressional campaign in North Carolina hires operatives to defraud local senior citizens who were attempting to cast absentee ballots.
2018: Republicans lose the governorships in Wisconsin and Michigan, but keep control of the state legislatures due to gross gerrymandering. Before the new governors can be sworn in, they cram through laws stripping power from the incoming Democratic governors.
2019: Trump administration officials try to warp the data which will be collected in the 2020 census in a way that will enable future gerrymandering by undercounting largely Democratic constituencies. When they get caught and stopped, they try to justify themselves by lying to the federal courts.
2019: Donald Trump privately tries to extort the president of Ukraine into announcing bullshit investigations into prominent Democrats during the 2020 election.
2019: Donald Trump publicly pressures the government of China into opening bullshit investigations into prominent Democrats during the 2020 election.
2019: All but one House Republican opposes impeaching Trump for his extortion of Ukraine – until that one guy is pushed out of the party. Therefore, no House Republicans vote to impeach Trump.
2020: With one exception, every Republican in the Senate validates Trump’s attempts to rig the 2020 election by voting to acquit him.
2020: Republicans dig in their heels and refuse to take easy and obvious steps to keep voters safe from COVID-19 at the polls.
This is just the list of things that I could remember off the top of my head and could find receipts for with relative ease. It doesn’t include things that are plausible but unproven, like the allegations that Reagan’s 1980 campaign staff tried to repeat Nixon’s first stunt by working to prolong the Iran hostage crisis because it was a winning campaign issue for him. It doesn’t include dirty, bigoted campaigns that you might call awful but lawful, like the racist “Willie Horton” ad campaign in 1988 or the repulsive homophobic ballot initiatives that were engineered to bolster George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign. It doesn’t include the wide array of brutalizations of a constitutional small-d democratic system which aren’t specifically and concretely about elections – everything from eroding the credibility of scientists, experts, and reporters to packing the courts with proto-fascist hacks to lying the American people into war in Iraq.
It really doesn’t matter whether or not I think Republicans win elections legitimately. It’s extremely important that Republicans do not believe they can win elections legitimately.
Now think for a second about their cherished “voter fraud” trope. All this time, Republicans have been screeching that SOMEONE was out there trying to steal elections FROM THEM. It is absolutely correct to focus on and be upset about the racist history and intent of this particular conspiracy theory. I would simply argue that white supremacism is not the only unforgivable aspect of this nonsense trope. The other is the way those claims make it impossible to deal with actual threats against legitimate elections.
This is similar to what psychologists call projection, or the tactic domestic violence experts refer to as DARVO. It is not unrelated to “swiftboating” or the phenomenon students of genocide refer to as the “accusation in a mirror.” It is the axiom small children cite when they say “he who smelt it, dealt it.”
I don’t know the ONE WEIRD TRICK to make it not work. I just know that it – maddeningly – does work, not least on the Very Serious Experts whose ONE FUCKING JOB it is to know better.
So I’m sorry to disappoint if you were expecting a “many bad people on all sides” disclaimer about who does political dirty tricks, but “both sides” is not operative, no matter how desperate the hot-take-industrial-complex is to make fetch happen. It hasn’t been operative for twenty-five years, and it’s really not operative for the next six months. You can bury yourself deep in literature about asymmetric polarization, but you don’t have to do all that to understand what’s important here. Democrats support democracy and want to stop the plague, Republicans support the plague and want to stop democracy, and you should be extremely skeptical of anyone who claims not to know the difference.
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dropintomanga · 4 years ago
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Attack on Titan's Ending - We're Now All Free
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So this was finally it, huh? A manga that debuted in 2009 which became an anime/manga phenomenon in 2013 and would later still have a significant place in manga history ended this month. Hajime Isayama's Attack on Titan was a title that I liked a lot and while there were some great moments in its final arc, the manga seemed like it tried a bit too hard to emphasize the complexity of human beings. Then again, maybe that's been the whole point of the series.
Spoilers abound after the jump.
I got to read up on the chapters that made up Volume 34. To be honest, it felt like somewhat of a mess. The whole backstory about Ymir Fritz confuses me a bit. I know that I will need to re-read the entire series to get a clearer idea. I got that the series became some kind of commentary on how people are always finding ways to divide one another via their differences.
It's just that I missed the old days, pre-basement. Attack on Titan was labeled as a horror action manga to a certain degree. I recently was reading an article about CM Punk (a former WWE wrestler who was very popular, but left the business after frustrations with management) and he talked about a horror movie he was cast in. Punk was asked about his love of horror and he said:
"I grew up on it, you know? I grew up on it because it was taboo. When things are taboo and you’re told you’re not allowed to watch it, what do you do? You watch it! You watch a lot of it. As you grow older, smarter and get some wisdom about the world, you realize that horror is the genre that tackles, before any other movie genre, the hard-hitting issues. Dating all the way back to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead tackling racism. I love a great slasher movie, right? Jason Voorhees and some camp counselors. Just let them loose."
As many fans who follow Attack on Titan will tell you, the story takes a huge shift from the days of Titans eating humans and the mystery surrounding them to a world where humanity is actually thriving and politics are a big reason why the events of Attack on Titan are the way they are. I know some people dropped the series after that. I don't blame them because to be frank, the series loses some of its unique appeal as most fans have seen stories of the latter quite often. There were still horror elements (albeit very few), but the tension delivered later on in most scenes weren't ones that gave readers chills down their spines.
I wrote a lot about Attack on Titan. I wrote about Mikasa, Hange, Annie, Eren's stress, Levi's past, etc. But once that time-skip happened, I never felt compelled to write about Attack on Titan much. There was some good exploration about Reiner's guilt about his actions early on. But nothing was super-compelling to talk about honestly to me. I think the time-gap between the 1st and 2nd anime seasons didn't help and so many exciting series (mostly from Shonen Jump) were coming out around that time period.
I did think the ending was okay. I do believe that Isayama was trying to point out that bringing real change in society comes from talking to one another in person despite differences. This was reflected in a campfire scene before the final battle where all of the "good guys" and the "bad guys" sat together to hash it out. You don't have to like one another, but never let differences become radicalized to the point of no return. I'll admit that this isn't easy and these things never are. Plus, talk should mostly be a starting point to get rid of injustice.
What I've learned from my own experiences is that I sometimes get anxious over certain conversations with people that I may not agree with. But once they happen in a safe environment and no one's shouting, I actually learn something and so does the other person. I can't assume everyone who disagrees with me is an awful person. I will never, ever suggest social media as a way to have those kinds of conversations because some people are either too awful or just say well-intentioned things without thinking about the person's true feelings.
And about people I truly dislike, I just look at them with pity because I know they're just being brainwashed by grifters/scammers/cult-like leaders.
Having those kinds of perspectives really benefited my mental health, so I guess I can appreciate Isayama for highlighting what it means to live among people who I don't always feel comfortable around.
I also love the Ackermans (Mikasa and Levi) for being the ones to take out the end-game threats. They're a family known to be Titan-killers, but there's also some Asian blood within them. I got a funny sense of Asian pride in seeing Mikasa and Levi wreck shit and getting respect for it.
While the ending felt similar to Code Geass, I kind of understand the view point on being the world's enemy to bring the world together. It's just a bit too naive. Even after all that, people are still at conflict with another only without Titans around. Maybe that's the whole point - the fact that self-sacrifice isn't a panacea to life's complexities. Martyrdom is sometimes worshipped a bit too much and there's a good number of disenfranchised young men who fall in love with that idea.
To end this post, I think back to how Isayama came up with the idea of Attack on Titan. He said that the story came to him after seeing a frustrated customer grab him by the collar while working at an internet cafe. Isayama noted how scary the person was and it was hard to communicate with him. The whole point of Attack on Titan is not just freedom, but getting past communication barriers with other people we fear.
When it comes to freedom, a lot of people seem to have a naĂŻve and/or child-like sense of it. I see this a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic. They think freedom is basically the right to do whatever you want and not be punished for it. However, true freedom involves doing as you please and having the ability to be responsible to yourself and other people.
I know this viewpoint irks people, but the whole ending gives off that vibe. I have to respect Isayama for that.
I think that's all I have to say about Attack on Titan. This series played a big part in helping the anime and manga industries post-2008. It also made me see the possibility of a mainstream shonen hit that wasn't from Jump. I was one of the first people to pay attention to the series before it was licensed in English. I even got praise from Kodansha folks saying that I played a huge part in bringing the series over.
So I have a lot of fun memories. One of my personal favorite memories was during NYCC 2013 where a huge gathering of Attack on Titan cosplayers at Kodansha Comics' booth and Japanese news programming was there to film it. I got to witness all of that interaction between Americans and Japanese. I left the gathering thinking that things were really on the up-and-up for anime and manga perception over in the U.S. We're now in a golden age of anime/manga and Attack on Titan deserves credit for bringing us to it.
So thanks, Hajime Isayama, for showing the world what Kodansha stories are all about - inspiring impossible stories.
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danwhobrowses · 4 years ago
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America, We Need to Talk
For some reason in these past years the concept of ‘Reason’ and ‘Sense’ has departed your country, I’ve hissed, I’ve simmered, I’ve hit my head against the wall hoping that in the end IN THE END the collective mass of the American People will open their eyes, stop making excuses and realise that for 4 years, America has not become ‘Great Again’ I’ve resisted the urge to unload many a time, but news that Donald Trump is to be nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize is just too much, because this is literal horseshit. For some part it feels like they’re only trying it just so Republicans can force a rhetoric as if Trump did a better job than Obama - who won in 2009 for easing religious tensions, preventing Nuclear Weapons distribution and profiting, working towards fixing climate change and assisting with the UN - as people die of COVID, cities burn and violence against peaceful protests continue to ravage your country.
I have to say that again, Ravage, because I feel as though some people are blind to the matter at hand. Donald Trump will say something and his cult of followers will believe it, when someone disagrees and presents evidence it’s deemed irrelevant or forged, if a Democrat says something on the contrary they need a full powerpoint presentation to prove it, somehow this mentality has poisoned the American society when the louder people will say something in confidence only for the rest of the world to read and think it’s one of the dumbest shit they’ve ever read. This isn’t just coming from a Brit, this is coming from family in Chicago, a co-worker who moved out of America and worked in the army, Italians, Greeks and someone who was in Hong Kong during the riots. The people who believe in Democracy, Majority Vote, Free Healthcare, Fair Wage, Equal Rights AND international peace that doesn’t look towards World War Fucking Three look at your country in shame because the state of your leadership and how it’s been allowed to continue with ridiculously boneheaded and stubborn reluctance to see the truth. So let’s start with the boiling point shall we, a Nobel Peace Prize Nomination? Have you learned anything from the last year? Or has the far-right got the prize so by the balls that this nomination is used as a cheap add-on to coincidentally peacock the Trump administration in its build to an election. The nomination to Trump has been cited to be in favour of the following things; Israel-UAE relations (aka ‘Saving the Middle East), Serbia-Kosovo deal (aka ‘Saving the ‘Middle East’’), Inter-Korea relations and likely the support of Jerusalem and Hong Kong, and in face value that may sway the common person who knows nothing about these deals. But a simple amount of research cuts most of these at the legs. Let’s talk Serbia and Kosovo, since it’ll directly involve Israel, relations were tense but they have not been at war, they are peacefully not talking to each other. The media will have you think that Peace has been brokered by Trump only in this but in reality Serbia still refuses to recognize Kosovo’s independence, the tensions are still there you can just travel there now. This is an agreement that’s been build up since the economic and trade agreement in 2013. If that year isn’t surprising you that is 3 years before Trump was elected, when Barrack Obama was in office - Republican Public Enemy Hillary Clinton was at the forefront of that when she was Secretary of State. So no, Trump hasn’t saved the Middle East by this deal, mainly because Kosovo and Serbia are in Europe, they have been part of the EU for quite some time and the deal is already jeopardized since Serbia won’t build an embassy in Jerusalem if Israel recognize Kosovo as independent - which was part of the original deal. Also for all the Republicans’ use of ‘fear by Communism’ to slander their opponents they sure love to rub shoulders with countries also rubbing shoulders with Russia and China. So this segues into Israel-UAE, the Arab Nations have mainly been reluctant to recognize Israel as independent. On the 13th August a deal was struck called the Abraham agreement establishing Diplomatic Relations. Except, this was in the making since 2012 and only delayed to help progress Israeli-Palestine conflicts (which Trump’s actions with Israel led to Palestine cutting ties with the administration and his ‘Peace Plan’ falling apart 3 years after announcing it). UAE and Israel had been in conversation before Trump was signed in, but only made headway when the FDD - already funded by the UAE - took over. For 3 years USA did little for the relations, UAE and Israel doing it themselves, it’s only now do the US mediate a peace agreement, which meant that Trump didn’t really do much in terms of convincing both sides, he just made sure things didn’t get out of hand - which was never close to happening since there is little tensions. It was Kushner who requested the meeting and Mossad also had a huge part in it. Also I want to add that the US are only buddied with these two out of fear of Iran - you know, that country that Trump almost goaded into war in January after bombings and the death Assassination of General Soleimani who helped the US in the wake of 9/11 track and hunt down the Taliban, as well as fighting ISIS, how peaceful was that? The Middle East is still in Civil and Proxy Wars, no saving has been done there, the US just were there for Israel and UAE to confess that they’re friends. Which leads me to Korea. The Olympics helped more than Trump did, a shared effort where both countries had to travel and accommodate each other. Tensions may’ve eased in 2016 but they were far from resolved and in 2020 not much is better. Korea still antagonize one another and the North still antagonizes the US, any ‘peace’ the Trump Administration will claim to towards Korea faded quickly. And finally, Hong Kong, the US may be supportive and rightly so but this is again fear of Communism, it should’ve happened sooner but the US was hoping for that big and meaty trade deal with China. And this isn’t months I’m talking about it’s years, the proposal first took place after the Umbrella Movement...in 2014, it was annually brought up in Congress but postponed until the Senate decided to. And after Trump signed it he said he might veto it in favour of the China trade deal
“We have to stand with Hong Kong, but I'm also standing with President Xi: he's a friend of mine." - Donald Trump, November 2019
So really, this Nobel Peace Prize is the product and efforts of other people that set events in motion that Trump was there just to sign his name on. Meanwhile, in the country he is President of, the COVID Death toll has officially risen to 190 Thousand. 20% of COVID deaths are in the United States. Tear Gas/Pepper Spray - which is a recognized chemical weapon not allowed to be used in warfare - is used by Trump Supporters along with paintballs to attack peaceful protesters and Trump calls that peaceful because ‘Paint is not bullets’ - as someone who has been hit with Paintballs from safe range, they will hurt like a bitch and if you don’t wear protective gear they can do enough harm to crack and sometimes even break bone, the asthmatic co-worker I aforementioned that was in Hong Kong also notes that Tear Gas is awful, it may not kill you but it is far from peaceful. In the same breath Trump refuses to condemn a 16 year old carrying an AR and shooting someone in the head. He has also refused to condemn Epstein’s financier Ghislaine Maxwell and ‘hopes that she’s well’...the sex trafficker, but when you mention late Civil Rights leader John Lewis and his words are ‘can’t say one way or the other...he didn’t come to my inauguration’. This is your leader. The embodiment of the standards the country upholds itself to, it baffles me and many many others that the American People Chose a racist, bigoted, misogynistic, careless, self-important, naive, power-mad, severally-bankrupted, reality tv personality man-child, who is also intending to use US Taxpayers money to cover lawsuit fees against him alongside all his other golf trips. The man literally said that no other president has done more for Black People than he has, this is while he profusely condemned Kaepernick taking a knee to protest Police Brutality against Blacks and POC only for years later the world support it as BLM protests still happen because action has not been taken. We’ll also see what happens on the 14th regarding the Felony Hearing of the officers in Buffalo who pushed over Gugino and gave him a brain injury which he is still rehabilitating from after Trump tried to sell him as an Antifa member. Just in case you’re unaware, antifa stands for anti-fascist but Trump will paint that again in ‘Fear of Communism’. If you actually look up this stuff, the web of Trump’s lies unravel, and yet people just forget about. The man is a pro at gaslighting I’ll give him that, I mean leaking e-mails that condemned Clinton right at election time was some cutthroat stuff, but a man who needs to rely on preying on xenophobia, paranoia, fear, racism and invests mainly on smear tactics and dismantling, is not someone who can lead a country to prosperity, the amount of leeway this man gets from his supporters just hurts my head. So let me ask you America, truly, what is it that you want? Because it can’t be this, can it? Protests, Riots, people refusing to wear a simple face mask to limit the spread of a deadly virus because they think it’s a fake thing that the entire world decided to get in on with WHO just to spite Trump? Teenagers carrying guns? Refugees refused asylum and kept in cages? Do you want to keep spending your savings just to go to the doctors? or do you think that ‘Patriotism’ is blindly defending your country’s flaws and clinging to archaic and outdated thinking because centuries ago your country prospered in it? I’ll tell it to you straight: America is not the greatest country in the world, it hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t know what your history books tell you; that Native Americans were fine with slaughter, that the US won WW2 with the military might they always had, that Vietnam was a moral victory, but the present day should tell you that your country is a mess, and the man who has been at the helm for 4 years will not fix it in another 4. There’s only so much of Obama’s policies he can plagiarize as his own; he has left the UN, left the Paris Agreement for cleaner air and energy and all his original campaign members have been arrested, an alarming amount of people associated with him are facing criminal charges - is that not a red flag? Don’t let your thoughts that as a patriot you have to support your country no matter what, true patriotism is not just the love of your country but the hope and strive to better it because you can love it but accept that it has flaws. I mean even I’ll admit that the UK has a lot of its own shit to deal with, doesn’t mean I hate where I live I just know it can be better. If this were anyone else, hell if this were a Democrat the Republican party would be booking them a flight to the other side of the world with the stuff Trump has done and let to continue on with afterwards, through him you went from the United States to an Absolute State and the rest of the world wonder if this will either lead to World War 3 or a Second American Civil War You don’t have to like Joe Biden, but he clearly looks like the lesser of the two evils here, and at least in 4 years time America under him won’t be on fire. If you still don’t like him someone new could be elected after, but right now you are on a downward spiral and need someone who can put you back into a stable place, that man is not Donald Trump. The man who wants to intercept mail-in voting and outcry its ‘risk’ of tampering when he himself voted by mail is not a truthful leader, the man who tried to cancel the World Health Organization when they simply asked to not call COVID a racist name that incited xenophobia after decrying cancel culture is not a moral leader, and the man who said that COVID would peter out and suggested injecting disinfectant into the lungs to combat it only to now suddenly buy out all the experimental treatment so that they can try and engineer a cure in time for the election campaign, is not a wise leader. All the stuff you see in these coming months is just an attempt to win your vote, for the most part it’ll be Trump stamping his name on something other people worked on for years and claiming that he did all the work. So make sure you actually check the truth of these things, research and fact-check yourself with valid, neutral sources. Take off the blinders, take a breath and actually see the full picture. And please, as well as not letting this man have the Nobel Peace Prize Don’t give this guy have a Second Term
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naturepointstheway · 5 years ago
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LIS2 Redemption Ending headcanons:
--Daniel as a twenty-something young adult being invited by Jacob to help start an online support group for people who’ve just come out of religious cults and are looking for support to help them recover from trauma. Daniel definitely accepts Jacob’s invitation to help. 
--Daniel worrying on a near-daily (if not daily) basis about Sean dying from COVID-19 virus when it rampages through the latter’s prison. And then being relieved when it’s all over and Sean is okay. And so is he. He isn’t always the most cautious of people (he can get reckless sometimes even in his 20s), but he takes the quarantining and staying in his bubble seriously. No question Sean’s worrying for him too during the pandemic. 
--Speaking of Sean: imagine Sean finding a scrap piece of paper to write some “final words” for Daniel should he die from the virus. “Daniel, if you’re reading this, it means I’ve succumbed to the virus...” and he’d end on a final note insisting that Daniel continue to live his life and not feel too sad for his passing. 
--Daniel making sure either he or someone in the family visits Sean on the latter’s birthday every year, just as he had in 2018. 
--Sean stopping at that old cabin on his travels post-cutscene, to see if Mushroom’s grave is still there. To his amazement, it is still intact, cross and all. He makes sure to take a picture to show Daniel the grave is still untouched to this day. 
--Sean stopping at the graves of their grandparents on his solo journey to give them his final goodbyes he never got to give to them when they died. 
--Daniel keeping in touch with Brody through the latter’s website, keeping him updated on how he (and Sean) are doing. He’s glad he has someone to talk to as he over the years gradually begins to understand on a deeper and more complex level as he matures just how unfair and unjust Sean’s situation really is. 
--Daniel experiencing life as a teenager and young adult, sometimes catching himself thinking about how Sean has barely, if ever, gotten a chance to experience youth in its fullness, even in  his twenties. 
--Sometimes Daniel questions if he should’ve fought harder for Sean not to go to jail all those years. Sometimes he feels angry thinking about how little his own family did to fight for Sean’s sentence to be shortened or at least for him to get a fucking trial at least. He blames himself sometimes, even though he knows he was only ten at the time and couldn’t have done very much. 
--Young Chris keeping Sean updated on Captain Spirit’s adventures, with input from Daniel. He might’ve met Sean only once, but he’s never forgotten his friend’s brother’s kindness to him. 
--Lyla having regular chats over the phone or email to help Daniel come to terms with everything that’s happened, because she cares that much. She does this whether or not Sean had called her at least once during their flight in 2016. 
--Also, I like to think that Lyla would have tried her utmost to fight for justice if not just for Sean, but other prisoners (especially POCs) who have been unjustly jailed. 
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popculturebuffet · 5 years ago
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Ducktales Reviews: The Lost Harp of Mirvana!
The ducks head under the sea, no accusations just friendly crustacians under the sea.. along with some sorta monster, mer hippies voiced by voice acting legends and della being unable to enjoy any of this because she’s hiding back at the sub. Take a dive under the cut. 
I’ll confess this wasn’t one I was even remotely excited about going in: I’ts not that I thought it’d be bad: the series is at it’s peak right now, I figured i’td be entertaining like last week, it just had the misforutne of being right before we finally get Daisy next week, and recent episode solicits for the two afte ronly made it worse: Fenton’s third episode (hopefully he gets two this season), that’s also hueycentric and will hopefully make gyro less dickish, and a wrestling episode because i’m a casual wrestling fan and huey having to play the heel against a norse snake god sounds fucking amazing. SO yeah “Hippie mermaids and Louie being suspcious only to oh no be proven wrong about being suspcious” as I predecited the episode would go sounded boring in comparison.  But i’m not afraid to eat crow... metaphorically, literally I don’t want to eat a crow it’d taste miserable and I don’t want to eat this crow because I love him.   
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But on dreading this ep.. I was blown away. Part of it is low expectations: I had really none other than “it’ll be decent” going in, but that only carries you so far. No this episode was fantastic, adressed a problem i’d had since “Timephoon!”, if not earlier, and had some great guess casting. It was a throughly enjoyable, funny episode. Will it probably end up on my faviorites list like the premire duo might? no, but it’s still damn good. Let’s get into the why shall we Our story this week is fairly simple: The Ducks are headed under the sea to find the lost harp of mirvana, sans Launchpad because he had to go help an ex girlfirend, hang out with darkwing, it was his day off, they had enoguh characters to juggle as is, he got his head stuck in a jar again, I dunno. But refreshingly Beakly is present! Seriously this IS something I wanted since season 1: her coming along with the family more. She rarely does, which makes some small sense given she’s the housekeeper but has made less and less since they have a ghost butler and sh’es family at this point.  I get she has to earn her keep and what not, and wants to show up her ghostly rival, but come on. Thankfully they have come on and while i’m not sure if it’ll be a common thing going forward, it IS nice to have her for this one.  The story itself is nicely divded once our heroes run into the mirvanans themselves, zen mermaids, our focus ones voiced by  hyden walch and greg cripes, who you may know as starfire and beast boy from the teen titans cartoon... andtheotherone... as well as voicing Princess Bublegum and 2k12 Michealangeo respectivley. I Love these two and it was a treat to have them voice mermaid hippies.  Our party quicklky splits up into three plots that converge at the end: Louie, being naturally suspcious after nearly being sacrificed by seemingly benevlonet societies 20 something times (and Dewey having 71 according to the tally given this episode that I painstakingly counted. The boy is one braincell starved for attention) is suspcious this is a midsommar type thing and he’s in the middle of some sorta death cult as usual, while webby, a trusting soul, belivies nothing is wrong and the mer people are genuine, with Beakly backing her up despite seemingly going against her nature.  Now this plot alone seems stock for any show, but works here since it’s rooted in character; Louie sees all the angles and thus all the cliches adventurers run into. He’s been at this for at LEAST a year, he’s seen just enough to get how a certain story will probably go and being a grifter by nature, he dosen’t trust easy to begin with.  In contrast while Webby CAN be suspcious, her being naturally trusting has also been part of her character from the start.  She genuinely TRUSTS people and gives them a chance first and unless their a clear enemy of scrooges, will not turn her back on them. This is best shown with her relationship with Lena: even AFTER getting clear evidence Lena was a  spy the whole time, and even without the evidence that after a certain point it was a lie, she refused to fully belive Lena had betrayed her... and was rewarded with Lena giving her life for webby. She trusted Violet even after Violet had been hiding her intentions and had a dangerous magical artifact from her arch enemy on her, and was again rewarded this time with Lena coming back and getting another lifelong friend out of the deal in Violet. Webby has a faith in people that pays off more than not..t hough we’ve also seen that faith backfire, mostly in scrooge as scrooge is a flawed man and has serious issues, whether it’s a combination of flu and gaslighting driving him insane, or him lashing out at her at his weakest moment. Her optimisim both fuels her and has made her life better but has sometimes blindsided her to the flaws in people, especially her hero. It’s as bojack horseman put it “When you look at life through rose colored glasses, you miss all the red flags”. What keeps this intresting as the two go into an off limits danger cave to find out what’s inside, Louie to find proof he’s right and Webby to go with him to prove he’s wrong, is Beakly. After saving the two from a monster, Beakly keeps boosting webby..then privatley admits as the audience probably guessed she’s also deeply suspcious and simply dosen’t want to shatter her niece’s worldview until they have evidence. And this is where that thing I wanted comes into play: see last season during “Timephoon!” beakly is directly conrasted as a parent with Della, having raised two children and being wiser. And while she was in that moment.. Beakly isolated her grandchild, and basically kept her in a guilded cage while training her to be a weapon out of fear of loosing what little she had left. LIke with Donald’s smothering parenting, it’s understandable, but it should be adressed.. and this episode does, but thankfully dosen’t make Betina unsympathetic either: Every parent, or in my case uncle, has to lie once in a while, especially now with the Covid-19 pandemic. It’s natural. But Betina has gone overboard to try and protect Webby’s inoccence.. and it’s backfired. Not preparing her for scroog’es worse behavior lead to him outright destroying her during “Last Crash of the Sunchaser” when he temporarliy disowned her.  And here it leads to a damn powerful scene with great acting from both Toks and Kate . The trio find the harp, voiced by Rhetta aka Donna from parks and recreation, whose basically the harp from the “raiders of the lost harp” episode of the original, the first episode of said show I ever saw and a classic about a harp that would melodically say “no no no, your fibbing fibbing fibbing” when someone lied, which this harp does, if not every time. She reveals her former owner, the king of mirvana who the hippies build their society after his example, basically ducked repsonsiblity while things fell apart and spent too long underwater (the mirvanans can also walk on land) and became the monster from earlier, and the rest will share his fate if not told
The powerful part comes when Beakly tries to lie.. and the harp keeps shutting her out till she’s forced to admit the truth: you can just.. feel the pain coming from the poor woman, and webby folds into a depressed state. Naturally Louie realizes, once they get back to the rest of the family, more on that in a second, and seeing that the mermaids did NOT realize their king was a monster nor plan to feed them to him, webby was right and tells them to have hope and that the society they built IS valid even if their king was a dipstick, he rebuilds webby and after everythings wrapped up webby and beakly apologize and hug. It’s a damn good plot even if the “Louie realizes he was wrong and wasn’t right abotu them being evil” parts were predictable.. it worked due to the excellent character work, with Louie also realizing being a cynical dick is kind of obonxoious. A damn strong a plot The subplots are also rooted throughly in character while still being entertaining,especially once the a-plot gets heavy towards the end: Della in the c plot stays behind because she’s afraid of fish, only conquering it breifly at the end to help her family and punch a man in the face, but it’s nice to not only see some new bits to her as well as some neruosis of her own. She is donald’s sister: he can’t hog all of it for the two of them.  The main subplot though centers on the remaining family trying to earn their way to the harp by doing zen arts and crafts and works due to character: Donald becomes a hilaroius zen master in moments (though earlier he rebuffed a gently pat on the chest by the lady mermaid, though given she’s super pretty and he’s, for now, single and has been for a while.. jsut go for it. You’ll probably get a three way with the other one (who isn’t my type but it’s more the man bun than anything. Loose that and.. yeah i’ll be int hat mer sandwitch), but I digress, Donald finds inner peace, likely because well. he WANTS IT. He wants to be happy and calm, even if the world smacks him in the face and tells no. Granted said peace is disrupted in the most hilarous way possible simply by Huey telling him they think his barbeque is merely okay, but he deserves credit. The boys also quickly find it, Dewey making a mermaid tail with hot rod flames and huey making a woodchuck one but what makes the subplot is that scrooge..c an’t. He hates this society, he hates hippies and he LOATHES self reflection. It’s like this society was magicaly generated to piss him of and i’ts wonderful to watch.  And as a quick aside bit before we go Rhetta is awesome as the harp, not the parks cast member I woudl’ve chosen as my first round draft pick for the series but she does greatly and has great timing (especially when Louie talks about selling her) and it was nice to see a bit of my first ducktales experince come back in an intresting new way.  Overall this episode was a VERY plesant suprise, and taught me to be more open to an ep in the future even if it dosen’t look like it has a huge personal draw. It was excellent.And now before I go i’ve decided each week, especially now we have a enough, to put the episode in the ranking of each and every episode this season and placing them in comparison of one another. I might do a list ranking the first season and second seasons on their own for fun. But for now here’s season 3 so far, so you can see where the ep stacks comparitvley: 1. Quack Pack! 2. The Challenge of the Senior Junior Woodchucks! 3. The Lost Harp of Mirvana! 4. Double O Duck in You Only Crash Twice.  I”ll see you next week for DAISY AT LAST, the return of my boys the cablleros and some suprises and pies of all sizes ashurldy. Until then, courage. 
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beautifulpaxielreads · 5 years ago
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March Wrap Up
Books Completed (ratings out of five stars)
Educated by Tara Westover (begun in February, ★★★)
The weight of feathers by Anna-Marie McLemore (begun in February, ★★★)
Serpent & dove by Shelby Mahurin (Serpent & dove #1, ★★★★)
All the bad apples by Moïra Fowley-Doyle (★★★)
The Hunger Games* by Suzanne Collins, audiobook read by Tatiana Maslany (The Hunger Games #1, ★★★★★)
Books currently in progress
Ace of shades (The Shadow Game #1) * by Amanda Foody, audiobook read by Saskia Maarleveld
Catching fire (The Hunger Games #2) * by Suzanne Collins, audiobook read by Tatiana Maslany
Radio Silence by Alice Oseman
Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen
The gilded wolves (The gilded wolves #1) by Roshani Chokshi
*reread
Challenge and Game Participation
Completed Historical Fantasy Fiction Bookcub Recommends quiz on listchallenges.com, set by @bookcub​ (my result on Tumblr here)
Completed the Queer Books Bookcub Recommends quiz on listchallenges.com, set by @bookcub​ (my result on Tumblr here)
Answered @lizziethereader​’s Weekly Bookish Question #173 (March 22nd-28th) - If you’re currently quarantined or self-isolating, what effect does that have on your tbr? (my response)
Tag Game - Name Your Top 5 Female Characters from novels you’ve read, tagged by @karynlibrarian​ (my response)
Ask Game – Some new bookish asks for you all, tagged by @elfspectations​ (my responses)
Shelf Confidence Book Photography, March, Day 10: Archenemies (set by @myownlittlebookcorner​)
 Answered @lizziethereader​’s Weekly Bookish Question #171 (March 8th – March 14th) – Have you already tried something new this year? A new genre, reading spot, reading project,.
? (my response)
Completed Aliteraryprincess’s 100 Best Books in YA Literature quiz on listchallenges.com, set by @aliteraryprincess (my result on Tumblr here, see my tags)
TBR Buster Challenge, set by @bookbandit​ – completed The weight of feathers
GoodReads 2020 Reading Challenge – 19 books out of 70 (27%) completed. According to GoodReads, I’m 2 books ahead of schedule. That’s 1 book down from last month where I was 3 books ahead of schedule.
Reading (and reading-related) Goals for April
Before I begin this, I should say that I’m currently in near-lockdown conditions where I am thanks to the dreaded COVID-19 outbreak, so that means I have less of an excuse not to achieve this month’s goals. And the next month – and the next

Finish all the books currently in progress, especially the audiobooks
Read Slay by Kim Curran. It involves a boy band who have a side job as demon-slayers. Not my usual fare, but it got good reviews so it should be a fun, light read.
Read at least 1 book from my backlist
As ever, participate in at least one bookish challenge or game
MAYBE start doing reviews now I have more time to do so. Don’t hold your breath though.
Update the spreadsheet I’m using to track my reading
Try my hand at making moodboards. I have said I’d do this previously, but this time I’m really going to do it. Time to start exercising those graphic-making muscles again!
Make a start on my last book purchases this month – The Priory of the Orange Tree by Samantha Shannon, and a non-fiction book, On the Trail of Genghis Khan: an epic journey through the land of the nomads by Tim Cope. The latter book is a written account of Cope’s overland trip from Mongolia to Hungary, a trip documented in a TV series I watched some time ago and really enjoyed.
Make a start on Mockingjay as read by Tatiana Maslany. I have no doubt her work will again be excellent.
Reflections on March’s Reading Goals
Despite my not actually reading as many books this month, I did complete all but one of my reading goals, so yay me!
Didn’t start reading Northanger Abbey until the end of March and am still reading in April, so there goes that resolution. Hopefully, I should finish it by the end of this month though.
New Followers
36 new followers! Thanks one and all – as ever, know I appreciate every single one of you and please feel free to get in touch. This goes for my rusted-on followers as well – I promise I don’t bite!
Interesting observations
So I didn’t read as many books this month – instead, I thought about what books I wanted to read! That counts, right?  On a more serious note, I do want to read more that I’m under near-lockdown conditions.
On the strength of her reading of The Hunger Games trilogy, Tatiana Maslany needs to do more audiobooks. As a side note, I’ve started watching Orphan Black and it’s creepily disturbing, but so good! Thank you, Ms. Maslany!
Audiobooks seem to be a theme for me this month – I also started rereading Amanda Foody’s Ace of Shades, read by Saskia Maarleveld. I’ve downloaded Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid to listen to at some point, as it features a stellar voice cast and is – from what I’ve heard – the best way to appreciate this book.
In a review I wrote a couple of months ago, I described myself as a convert to the cult of Alice Oseman. This month I started reading Radio Silence and I have to say I’m a bit disappointed – don’t get me wrong, it’s still very well-written but it doesn’t have the same knock-out punch that I was born for this had.
That’s a wrap for March! I hope you’re all keeping well both physically and mentally during these challenging times. On to April!
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loyolahcmass · 5 years ago
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Homily on Tiger King
This week Fr. Rossi will be talking about the show Tiger King! Here is the preview of his homily: 
The “Tiger King” Dethroned “I don’t think we’re done blowing s--- up today.”                                                         Joe Exotic Last month, the most-watched show in America was a seven-part documentary series about a gay, polygamous zoo owner in Oklahoma. Joseph Maldonado-Passage (“Joe Exotic”), breeds tigers, commissions and stars in his own country-music videos and presides over what he describes as “my little cult” of drifters and much younger men. To top it off, he ran for governor of Oklahoma in 2018 on a libertarian platform. He’s also currently serving a 22-year prison sentence for, among other charges, trying to arrange the assassination of his nemesis, an animal-sanctuary owner in Florida. __________ There are no heroes in the Tiger King saga. “Nobody wins,” as one character says. Not Joe Exotic, with his stripy mullet and blue-green sequined jacket. Not Carole Baskin, the owner of a Florida sanctuary for big cats, who Tiger King insinuates—in a strikingly un-journalistic way—might have killed her husband. And definitely not Eric Goode, the New York animal-rights activist who co-directed the series, and whose disdain for the dentally-challenged and leopard-print characters is abundantly apparent. __________ And yet Tiger King still consumes the pop-cultural imagination a month after its last episode. It’s the stuff memes are made of, a carnival sideshow. The more scurrilous or degrading the concept, the more Netflix hopes we’ll watch. __________ America right now, in the midst of a pandemic, is reliant on collective behavior, adhering to rules, and taking sensible precautions to avoid danger. Tiger King is the TV equivalent of licking a NYC subway pole. Its characters have managed to construct whole worlds around themselves rather than curtail their worst impulses in any way. They’re any documentarian’s dream, and yet you can’t help but wonder what the directors hope to get out of giving these showmen the mass exposure that they desperately want. __________ On its face, Tiger King is about a remarkable subculture in the U.S.: people who collect and (illegally) breed big cats. There are, the show reveals early on, more privately-owned tigers living in America than there are existing in the wild. In 2003, authorities discovered that a man in Harlem was cohabiting with a 400-pound tiger named Ming, in the same apartment that his mother was using to babysit children. __________ Joe Exotic, for better or worse, is the show’s central character, and Tiger King sketches out a sparse biography that only hints at the forces that shaped him. The challenge seems to be that anything he says is stated in the service of inflating his own mystique. Including how he reacts after one of his employees is mauled by a tiger while at work. “I’m never gonna financially recover from this,” Exotic sighs, while the rest of his employees try to tend to the victim’s severed arm. __________ Hardest to endure is how he behaves at the funeral for his youngest husband, Travis, who accidentally shoots himself in the head. Dressed up like a minister, Exotic seizes the spotlight. He sings, cracks jokes, and reminisces fondly about his late partner’s private parts while Travis’s mother sobs. __________ Mostly, though, Exotic communes with tigers. He cuddles them while they’re riding shotgun in the front seat of his truck; he wrestles with them; he uses a steel hook to wrest newborn cubs from their mothers and then complains that the screaming babies are making too much noise. Tiger King’s unified theory of tiger obsession falls short, however, when it reaches Carole Baskin, the owner of a Florida animal sanctuary devoted to big cats. This shortcoming might explain why the show takes such pains to portray her as a kook, and possibly even a murderer. Baskin is Exotic’s bĂȘte noire, a woman who has dedicated her career to trying to outlaw the breeding and personal ownership of exotic cats in the U.S. __________ The show’s treatment of Baskin is where it indulges in its most egregious displays of false equivalence, as it tries to elevate her eccentricities to stand alongside those of Exotic. Baskin, Tiger King painstakingly lays out, is obsessed with animal print. Sometimes she wears flower crowns! She has an uncanny gift for search-engine optimization! She rides a bicycle! Her sanctuary relies heavily on unpaid volunteers! The show underscores all these facts, while making the most of the mysterious disappearance of Carole’s husband in 1997 and interviewing family members who seem convinced that she killed him. __________ “There is absolutely no physical evidence at this time” implicating any one individual as a suspect,” a police detective firmly and rather crushingly points out. Tiger King doesn’t care. It would much rather imply several times that she could have fed her husband’s corpse to tigers, had she been so inclined. In this, it has succeeded wildly: just check out the number of internet memes that insist she did the deed! __________ The degradation in Tiger King starts to feel contagious after a while. The directors filmed the series over five years, and the longer they spend with their subjects, the more obviously things fall apart. One of Exotic’s ex-husbands, John Finlay, gives shirtless interviews that show off his abundant tribal tattoos and his undeniable lack of teeth. (Not until Episode 5 does Tiger King stop to note that meth has been a prevalent factor in Exotic’s world the whole time.) The interviews become more and more invasive. Travis’s mother is asked about her son’s death while she’s seemingly intoxicated. __________ Exotic is the only one who appears unchanged, even as the plot makes its way toward his 22-year jail sentence for conspiring to have Baskin assassinated. The persona he’s crafted, you sense, is strong enough to survive anything, even prison. No misfortune can shake his sense of self. No humiliation can shame a man who refuses to be shamed. __________ Even now, he’s fast approaching cultural-legend status, as Hollywood stars spar on Twitter over who gets to play him in the already-approved miniseries. “Yeah, roll the cameras,” is how a reality-TV producer describes watching Exotic at his most idiosyncratic and badly behaved. Netflix obviously agreed. But the question is: why can’t the rest of us look away? After all, these days don't we need to watch something with moral substance to help us be better people in this crisis? __________ “I came so that they might have life and have it in abundance.”                                                                         Gospel of John About his song “Smoke Clears,” Andy Grammer says he and his wife have had a rough year. Her grandfather passed away. He’s had fainting episodes that are mysterious in origin. But they were able to be there for each other during this dark time, more so than ever before. __________ Together!  For each other! Christ sees how important that is and so does Andy Grammer. “You'll never be alone even when your world explodes 'Cause after all the smoke clears, I will be right here.”                                                 Andy Grammer, “Smoke Clears” __________ Think about it. At the end of 7 episodes of Tiger King, after everything implodes, can you name even one person who thought of anyone but themselves? That’s not the spiritual model we need to follow in the age of COVID-19.
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