#unremitting weirdness

[frank-o-meter]

Divine as Edna Turnblad in “Hairspray” (1988)

The New York Times said of Divine’s 1980s films: "Those who could get past the unremitting weirdness of Divine's performance discovered that the actor/actress had genuine talent, including a natural sense of comic timing and an uncanny gift for slapstick."

[sweetmage]

WIP WEDNESDAY! 🎉

A little Disco Elysium fanfic (first ever!!) that I've been chipping away at! I'm about 4k into chapter one, it's definitely gonna be 2-3 chapters.

For a little context, this takes place 7 months post game and they just had an impulsive and awkward kiss on the precinct rooftop while avoiding the office party inside. The kiss also came right on the tail end of Raphaël prophesizing to him about the Pale and the end times (again) 😅 This is them back inside, about to part ways for the night.

---

YOU - "Uhhhh…" Your mouth is dry, so you try to wet it with a gulp of stale breakroom coffee. The 'good stuff' tastes bitter when it's gone cold. Like the aftertaste of regret. "Could I get a lift?"

KIM KITSURAGI - "Oh." He doesn't look surprised, but something about his tone seems disappointed. "I was hoping to go home right away. I need to switch over the laundry and…"

EMPATHY - It's a polite 'no'. He's trying to let you down easy, but the 'no' is firm.

SUGGESTION - If he meant 'no' then he would have said 'no'. Maybe there's a loophole. Think like a lawyer, not like a cop. Find an out, a technicality. It's there, somewhere.

INLAND EMPIRE - Hey, do you feel that? That unremitting buzzing in your the back of your skull?

ELECTROCHEMISTRY - And your crotch!

INLAND EMPIRE - And your crotch. You're special, you possess the otherworldly power to transcend all logical thinking and defy the natural laws of the universe itself! If you can see through the veil of reality, if you can tap into the preternatural consciousness, you can simply reach into his mind and change that no to a yes.

YOU - You stare deep into the lieutenant's eyes, past his physical form. In a way that can't be fully described with words, you feel the pathways in his mind. His thoughts are an ocean, deep and fathomless, the tide slowly lapping at your feet as you wade through them. You can almost see it, that no just waiting to be converted. It just takes a few little tugs at the neurons then--

KIM KITSURAGI - "Khm. What are you doing?" The lieutenant is giving you a look, a slight frown and raised brow that is equal parts inquisitive and annoyed.

YOU - There goes the buzzing, fleeing like a flock of birds at the sound of a gunshot. The connection is gone and now he just thinks you're weird. "Nothing. Sorry." There's no way to explain this, so you don't.

KIM KITSURAGI - "On second thought, maybe a drive is what you need. I'll just have to stop and switch my laundry on the way."

INLAND EMPIRE - It worked!

YOU - "Ha! It worked! Suck it, fate!"

COMPOSURE - And now he's definitely going to think you're weird.

KIM KITSURAGI - "Excuse me? What worked?" He seems skeptical. No, scratch that. He's flat out confused, but not in a curious way. This is the confused frown you get when you start talking about cryptids and conspiracies or prophesizing on rooftops.

YOU - "Um. Nevermind. Thanks, Kim."

KIM KITSURAGI - "You didn't rearrange my thoughts, detective."

HALF LIGHT - How did he know you were trying to do that? Could it be that he felt your presence? Or maybe he can see into your thoughts?

YOU - "Hypothetically speaking, if I was trying to do something like that, how would you even know?"

KIM KITSURAGI - He sighs, exasperated. "Hypothetically speaking, you have tried this before. It doesn't work. You simply looked out of it so it didn't seem like a good idea to turn you loose into the streets."

YOU - "Well, you're still taking me home, so if you think about it…"

KIM KISTURAGI - "No. We've done enough thinking for one night. Let's just go." He waves his arm as if to clear the conversation and walks past you towards the stairway down.

[loneberry]

"Physically-healthy Dutch woman Zoraya ter Beek dies by euthanasia aged 29 because she did not want to live with depression"

Read the article here.

Here's another article from before the procedure.

I think it was brave of Zoraya ter Beek to speak so publicly about her decision to be euthanized for depression and other mental illnesses, and it breaks my heart that she was met with so much vitriol:

Ter Beek was forced to delete all her social media profiles after an article about her case was published in April, which led to many users bombarding her inbox telling her not to go through with the procedure, which left her in distress.

“People were saying: ‘Don’t do it, your life is precious.’ I know that. Others said they had a cure, like a special diet or drugs. Some told me to find Jesus or Allah, or told me I’d burn in hell. It was a total s–tstorm. I couldn’t handle all the negativity.”

I am still ambivalent about legal euthanasia for mental illness. I was once suicidally depressed and now feel quite grateful to still be alive. But I understand this woman's desperation to find relief, having tried out every treatment modality myself.

There's something weird about the temporality of depression tho--it has a way of canceling the future. What is felt in the moment (pure suffering) is imputed to both the past and future: it will always be this way. Yet that is not always the case.

That said, I don't doubt that there are people who are, I guess you could call, incurable. They might become "curable" as humans unravel the mysteries of mental illness. But it seems impossible to really know whether someone is actually incurable or temporarily believes they're incurable--I probably would have thought I was one of the incurables when I was in it. The main difference between Zoraya ter Beek and me is: she tried everything and did not improve. I tried everything and eventually improved through a lengthy psychoanalysis.

Maybe I'm slowly coming around to Zoraya ter Beek's perspective. I think her critics probably cannot get into the mind of someone who experiences consciousness as unremitting torture.

From my journal:

She coolly says, there will be no music when they put her down. No funeral. She will exit this world sitting on her couch with her partner. Yes, she’s afraid of dying—death being the ultimate unknown. She feels guilty about leaving her loved ones behind. “But sometimes when you love someone, you have to let them go.” Her words prick me. Why couldn’t I just let you be…gone? When a deer is mortally wounded we speak of the need to put the poor creature out of its misery, but we felt no guilt about demanding you stay alive. I still hear Amelia Rosselli, from beyond the grave, whispering about “those who destroy me by making me exist.”

Is it possible that requiring someone to stay alive (against their will) is a form of torture? Do people have a "right" to die? Is the desire to keep someone alive more about the narcissism of living loved ones than altruism?

[vickyvicarious]

WE had resolved not to go to London, but to cross the country to Portsmouth, and thence to embark for Havre. I preferred this plan principally because I dreaded to see again those places in which I had enjoyed a few moments of tranquillity with my beloved Clerval. I thought with horror of seeing again those persons whom we had been accustomed to visit together, and who might make inquiries concerning an event, the very remembrance of which made me again feel the pang I endured when I gazed on his lifeless form in the inn at ----.

As for my father, his desires and exertions were bounded to the again seeing me restored to health and peace of mind. His tenderness and attentions were unremitting; my grief and gloom was obstinate, but he would not despair. Sometimes he thought that I felt deeply the degradation of being obliged to answer a charge of murder, and he endeavoured to prove to me the futility of pride.

1818

The voyage came to an end. We landed and proceeded to Paris. I soon found that I had overtaxed my strength, and that I must repose before I could continue my journey. My father's care and attentions were indefatigable; but he did not know the origin of my sufferings, and sought erroneous methods to remedy the incurable ill. He wished me to seek amusement in society. I abhorred the face of man. Oh, not abhorred! they were my brethren, my fellow beings, and I felt attracted even to the most repulsive among them as to creatures of an angelic nature and celestial mechanism. But I felt that I had no right to share their intercourse. I had unchained an enemy among them, whose joy it was to shed their blood and to revel in their groans. How would they, each and all, abhor me, and hunt me from the world, did they know my unhallowed acts and the crimes which had their source in me!

My father yielded at length to my desire to avoid society, and strove by various arguments to banish my despair. Sometimes he thought that I felt deeply the degradation of being obliged to answer a charge of murder, and he endeavoured to prove to me the futility of pride.

1831

The difference between the different versions of Henry's letters comes in here. In 1818, he'd been eager to plan where to go next with Victor, and now Victor can't bear the thought of seeing where they had visited together. Meanwhile, Alphonse is admittedly trying his best to cheer up his son who is lost in frightening grief and despair, and even (it must seem to him) madness.

In 1831, their travels home have been in a different direction and so the Henry-specific avoidance is no longer a factor. But instead there's a lengthy and frankly astonishingly out-of-touch version of Alphonse trying to get Victor out to socialize with people. I think this was done with the intention of establishing another parallel between Victor and the Creature - he fears society "each and all" abhorring and hunting him from the world, which is exactly the reception the Creature has faced since his birth. Similarly, Victor's mixture of abhorrence/feeling drawn to even the most repulsive of them (and his phrasing "fellow-creatures" to ensure the comparison is on your mind) reflect the Creature's anger towards, yet longing for, society and humanity.

So I get why it's here, but the way Victor's father pushes so hard for this showcases such a blatant lack of understanding of his son that it's a bit surprising to find in the 1831 version. Don't get me wrong, it's not like he understands Victor more in that version, but in general the family conflicts have been smoothed over a lot, and so having his determined efforts to comfort Victor replaced with him urging his son to get out and about here is a weird switch. Similarly, in 1831 he seems to try to "argue" Victor out of his despair, when in 1818 he just tried his best to give him tenderness and attention. Of course, in both versions he jumps to 'your pride has been hurt by being falsely accused', which is a bonkers assessment of Victor's mental state, so. You know, 1818 Alphonse is by no means perfect here.

[neruomancer]

Something I really like in the Gumshoe system is aberrance. Aberrance is something that was introduced in Creatures of Unremitting Horror and Fear Itself, it is the ability of a creature or being to wrap reality. Since Fear Itself and Esoterrorist deals with beings that change the fundamental order of perceived reality to accomplish there ends they have a stat that labels this based on how powerful of an ability that is for them. Since Gumshoe includes Trail of Cthulhu and Fall of Delta Green I have really tried to implement how much mythos entities change the fundamental shape of the universe as the characters perceive them. Something small like a ghoul, okay that is fucking weird but maybe they are just a weirdo who shaped there ears and acts like a wolf, to something larger like the psychic manifestation of a ancient alien priest at the bottom of the Pacific ocean implanting false memories of r'lyeh in the minds of people looking for Atlantis or Mu.

[gnostotron]

Thoughts on cis-ness

I think that we cis people don’t talk about gender enough.  I mean *our* gender, as we experience it in ourselves, not in the wider shitshow that is society.  And I get it. I mean, I'm cis - when I was born the doctor took a look, said "this is a dude" and the little voice in my head shrugged, said “sure”, and then I proceeded to not have to think about my gender ever again.

Ignoring the fact that this is one of those exceedingly rare occasions when a doctor is correct in their initial diagnosis, what kind of tests did they do to identify me as male?  Did they do any genetic tests to see what chromosomes I was carrying?  Nope.  Did they, I don’t know, test the levels of testosterone and estrogen in my blood?  Ha ha ha no.  No, all they did was look to see if I had a dick, or at least something approximately dick-like.  That’s it.

Now here’s the thing - if I were to lose my junk in a bizarre gardening accident that little voice in my head wouldn’t suddenly say “welp, you’re not a dude anymore”.  Heck, society wouldn’t say I wasn’t a dude anymore because nobody gets to see what I’m packing unless I explicitly give my permission (or unless I get up at night for a glass of water and can’t be arsed about closing the curtains).

If losing my junk now wouldn’t affect my perception of myself as “male”, then it wouldn’t have affected me had it happened last year.  Or thirty years ago. Or when I was a child.  Or even when I was in utero - fetal development is a crazy time.  But if it had happened before the doctor got a chance to tick the “m” or “f” box, I wouldn’t be cis - I would be trans.

And that’s all there is to it.  Oh, there’s more details you can dig into, like “where does this little voice in my head come from?” - well, it’s in my head so it obviously isn’t something dangling between my legs.  It probably comes from the same mix of genetic and developmental pressures that make me, say, right-handed instead of left handed or ambidextrous.  

What seems weird to me now is that I was a middle-aged man before I realized how fucked up it was that I had never even thought of questioning my gender.  It just never crossed my mind, even though I had agonized over practically *everything else* - how I fit in my family, how I fit in society, my sexual orientation, whether or not there was a god, heck, whether there was even an “objective reality” in any meaningful sense.  I spent a lot of time questioning my sanity (mind you there were lots of people questioning my sanity, so I was in good company).  But somehow whether or not I was a dude *never crossed my mind*.  AND I was a fey, small, non-athletic boy in the 1970s and if there was one defining quality of the social milieu of boys at the time (I’m hoping it’s less of a thing now) is that it was an unremitting assault of attacks on one's masculinity.

We all question the world we were born into, we just don’t all question the same things.  I think it’s helpful to remember this when presented with ideas that we find so ingrained that we don’t even know how they could ever be questioned.

[bernieanderson]

The Niche Formula: How to Quickly Find Your Niche

(Interests/Expertise) x Intersection

I’ve spent my life as a generalist. There are advantages to this for sure. I’m never bored. Easily entertained. Interests abound. 

The downside is probably bigger than the upside.

Like — iceberg-below-the surface-of-the-sea bigger. 

Distraction.

Lack of focus.

Confusion.

Incompletion.

Wondering like a Took, from here to there and back again.

It’s a problem.

There’s always pressure to “niche down”. It’s what the marketers and the content creators are always telling us. Narrow your focus.  Specificity is power. And, as someone with knowledge and an interest in marketing, I must concede to this truth.

I read Range by David Epstein a couple of years ago.

It helped me come to terms with my own free-range tendencies. 

Here’s a line from for the introduction:

“We learn who we are in practice, not in theory.”

Christopher Lee, the actor who played Counts Dracula and Dooku, as well as Saruman, was also a singer in a beautifully weird gothic metal band.

Steve Martin is a funny guy, an actor, and an amazing banjo player.

Dorie Clark is a business consultant and author who writes musical performance art.

It is possible to be more than one thing at a time.

Here’s the catch: It is very difficult (I argue, impossible) to do more than one thing at a time.

The key to niches is understanding where your interests intersect with your expertise. 

Interests vs. expertise. 

I am interested in quantum physics. (I’m not lying. The little I understand about it is absolutely fascinating. I recommend reading the 4% Universe and The Fabric of Reality, if you want to get your feet wet on the subject. Range, man. Range.)

However, I have absolutely no expertise in quantum physics.

I have a lot of expertise in public speaking and rhetoric. 

But I don’t necessarily have an interest in making that “my thing”. 

Interest is innate. You either are or you’re not.

Expertise is gained.

Currently, I may not be an expert in quantum physics. I could take some classes, go to school, and write some papers on the subject, and became an expert in quantum physics.

This is true for any subject you are interested in. 

This leaves us with three questions for determining a niche:

What are your interests?

Where are you an expert?

Where are they intersections?

Interests

 If you are free range like me, this can be a long annoying list.

Quantum Physics

Books

Writing

Fantasy Fiction

Story Structure

Technology

Web design

Productivity

Leadership (Particularly the development of leaders)

Guitars

Songwriting

Travel

Culture

Organizational health

Foreign languages

Film editing

Photography

Celtic Spirituality

Videography

Gardening

Sound engineering and recording

Podcasting

Vinyl

Theology

Apple products

I made this list in less than two minutes. I’m also not finished yet.

But let’s stop here. You get the idea.

Some of you have a much narrower focus of interests, which means you are probably a much saner person. Kudos for that.

But no matter how long or short your list may be, remember this. You can’t do it all.

Culture tells us the lie that we can do everything we set our minds to. It’s a lie. We can’t.

Oliver Burkeman calculates that we all have about 4000 weeks to live. Total.

That’s not a lot in the grand scheme of things.

He argues in his book of the same title that real freedom and productivity happen when we embrace the reality of our mortality. 

“The average human lifespan is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short. But that isn’t a reason for unremitting despair, or for living in an anxiety-fueled panic about making the most of your limited time. It’s a cause for relief. You get to give up on something that was always impossible—the quest to become the optimized, infinitely capable, emotionally invincible, fully independent person you’re officially supposed to be. Then you get to roll up your sleeves and start work on what’s gloriously possible instead.”

As someone who’s well over their halfway point (2875 weeks old, at this writing), I comply – and resonate.

Be interested in as much as you want to be. But remember, it’s not possible to act on all your interests.

Now you go: Inventory your interests!

Make an exhaustive list of all your things. Have fun with it! Look at your list, remembering, no matter your age, it won’t be possible to do it all. That’s okay! Now move to the next question.

Expertise

Choose your expertise from the items on your interest list.  Where are you a pro based on your experience and education?

FeetNote: It’s possible to have expertise in an area you don’t have interest in.  I’m an absolute expert at untangling Christmas lights.

It’s not something I want to call a niche. You get the idea.

Right-now expertise: experience

Circle all the things on your interests list that you’ve spent a lot of time doing in your professional life.

This will be a much shorter list:

●      Leadership (Leadership development has been my entire career)

●      Culture (I used to live and work cross-culturally, and continue to have a lot of cross-cultural interactions)

●      Productivity (I have an entire story here, but this is a huge part of the training I do)

●      Organizational Development (not as long of a history here, but is much of what I do with Growability®)

●      Christian Spirituality (This is my educational, as well as vocational, background.)

Everything else on my list remain interests. They might be potential hobbies or research areas. They are most likely not where I will gain professional expertise.

With an exception.

One-day expertise: education

Do you have any interests so compelling that you’d like to invest the time and money necessary to gain expertise?

I love music (a lot!) I can play some guitar and really wanted to be in a band when I was younger. However, at this point in my life, it’s not something I feel good about devoting the time and money needed to move beyond a hobbyist level.

The same is not true for writing.  I take the time to write this newsletter every week because I want to be a better writer. I spend time punching ideas into a word processing document because I’m doing what it takes to gain opportunities to write at higher levels. To do so will take a sizable time investment. Get in your reps. That doesn’t happen over a weekend. 

Which of your interests (if any) would you like to invest in at a professional level?

Circle those, too

Now comes the fun part.

Intersections – The Multiplier

Pick three areas of both interest and expertise. Connect them.

Here’s mine:  I work at the intersection of leadership, spirituality, and organizational development.

This is where I spend my time and energy: 

Aiming my career and my content at helping leaders and potential leaders know their purpose, build community, and experience God through the process.

Your interests divided by your expertise, multiplied by their intersection equals your niche!

Your niche is your idea machine.

This is the power of the multiplier. When you multiply your interests that have been divided by your expertise, you have more than a niche. Every intersection is another area for you to solve problems and provide value! Productivity is the intersection of leadership and organization. Community is the intersection of organization and spirituality. The rhythm of Celtic spirituality is at the intersection of leadership and spirituality.

See how that works? Intersections can multiply a niche into a hundred interesting directions.

Here’s why niche matters:

Your niche is your market.

That’s the thing about niches.  It’s where you are most uniquely you. And it’s where you find an audience (or customers, readers, donors, etc.)

Niche-finding is a worthwhile process.

It’s also worth noting that things can change. This is not the same place I would have landed 10 years ago. It may or may not be where I land 10 years from now. But here I stand at the end 2022. 

 Find your niche!

●      List your interests

●      Circle your expertise

●      Create your unique intersections

That’s your corner. Your neck of the woods. Your unique piece of real estate in Internet (or wherever!) It’s the place where you can be most generous for the common good.

Let me know in the comments where your interests and expertise intersect!

What’s your niche?

[adz]

It was at such a degree that he’d started leaving traps for himself. Things like putting the steak knives blade side up into the dishwasher’s silverware basket. He smoked unfiltered cigarettes on the balcony with a cynical expression. One weekend, he unscrewed and then hand-tightened the bolts holding on the wheels of his Subaru. When he woke up each morning, he would dress, look at himself in the mirror, and think “This is it, I guess. Here I go. I’m going to look stupid as fuck on the autopsy table.” But it never seemed to come to that.

He felt seriously physically ill, but apparently wasn’t. When he twinged or got sudden headaches, he’d invent elaborate diseases for himself. Crumplebrain and Eruptive Glandular Cysts and Pulmonary Insomnia and Fatal Continuous Unremitting Laughter.

Each day was like any other in its misery but unique in the misery’s flavor. Each misery sprung from a different terroir winding its way from his intrusive thoughts, his fear of incontinence and incapacitation, his loneliness, his thinning crown, his useless and weirdly shaped penis, drinking through its roots and bursting at its ends into ripe fruit.

His spam emails were no longer sexual calls to action, but seemed targeted at his isolation. 

i take pleasure in helping you solve difficult problems. i will never make you leave the house.  i will be a constant source of affection like a beloved pet. your anxieties make you sooo unique.

He did leave the apartment sometimes, to eat or on occasional mandatory visits to the office where he was supposed to work. His car, sleek, silvery, with a leather-lined interior, was a padded room. On the way anywhere he would play talk radio to blot out an internal voice but each trip would end in his own frenzied screaming, then composing himself before going into one building or another, walking around and communicating with people, walking out of the building and back to his car, then talk radio, more frenzied screaming, then home.

There was a computer game he’d enjoyed as a teenager. He was trying to pick it back up. In the game, he was a detective with a gun in a large white room like a warehouse with no exits filled with people of various races, ages, genders, and occupations. The game used advanced machine learning on a database of secretly recorded conversations to generate realistic dialogue for every situation.

His job was supposedly to find a murderer amongst innocents, but he’d discovered he could play a different way: at the start, he would gather all the NPCs at the center and tell them he intended to kill each of them until, through sheer probabilistic certainty, the murderer would die. However, he said, he would allow them to arrange themselves however they liked.

According to their programming, which instructed them to avoid death, the NPCs would argue bitterly with one another. He would watch, and when it got boring, he would kill one, and that would rev them up again, and so on.

Sometimes the curious AI-generated conversations made him forget about his weird penis but more often the process itself made him feel like a creature incapable of feeling pain. Like a hunched thing that lives outside, an animal on a wet rock with no love or empathy. That would also result in him temporarily forgetting about his weird penis.

He went to sleep with the stove's gas on, placed the steak knives blade side up, loosened the bolts a little more, pondering probabilistic certainty.

[azomi]

The Curse of the Oracle: Corvids in Myth and Lore

by Giles Watson, A Witch’s Natural History

There are cultures in which corvids are revered. For the Koryac, and other tribes from within the Arctic Circle, Big Raven is at once the world’s creator and denizen. It is often remarked that the mischievousness of corvids is derived from boredom, like an intelligent child deprived of toys; Big Raven and his wife cure their ennui by becoming demiurges. The mountains are his excrement, and Raven himself is both celestial and earthy. His human weird is cantankerous, swallowing the sun in anger when his love-designs are thwarted, and puking it out again when he is tickled by his beloved. During a deluge, he resumes the form of a raven in order to fly to the heavens, so that he can plug up the vulva of the universe’s wife, which is shedding unremitting rain. This Siberian mythos has its counterparts across the Bering Strait, for the Raven is also regarded as creator amongst the Inuit and the Haida tribe of the Queen Charlotte Islands.

Pre-Christian myths about corvids are characterized by not hatred, but by awe. Crows have always had the dubious honour of carrying the curse of the oracle, baring uncomfortable truths to those with too much power. In Greek mythology, the crow, originally white and personified as Cronus, was an oracular bird, and was said to house the soul of a king after his sacrifice. The crow was cursed, blackened, and banished by Athene after he reported to her that Herse, Pandrosos and Agraulos had plunged to their deaths from the Acropolis. Variants of this story, reinterpreted by Ovid, remain sympathetic towards the crow or raven, who is turned black for telling Apollo quite truthfully, that his lover was unfaithful, and given a croaky voice for being tardy in fetching a cupful of water after being distracted by a meal of figs. A Christianized variant from the Tyrol has the child Jesus blackening the raven for soiling water he was about to drink. Perhaps this in turn was part of the genesis of allegations about Jews and witches poisoning wells...

A thirteenth century bestiary insists that “the raven signifies the blackness of sinners”, but rather than dwelling upon this notion, proceeds to contrast the raven’s supposed neglect of its nestlings with assiduousness of the crow: “Men should teach themselves to love their children from the crow’s example.” However, the bestiaries were quick to deride the classical reverence for corvids: “[The Greeks] say that the crow can reveal the purpose of men’s actions: it can disclose the whereabouts of an ambush, and predict the future. This is a great offence, to believe that God entrusts His counsels to crows.” Christian hegemony ensured that corvids, once the oracular birds of classical and Celtic paganism, were now suitable only as auguries for the heterodox. For Shakespeare, a fearful faith in the prophetic utterances of corvids could only be suitably expressed by a villain:

Stones have been known to move and trees to speak;

Augures and understood relations have

By maggot-pies and choughs and rooks brought forth

The secret’st man of blood

(Macbeth, Act 3, Scene 5)

Macbeth feared that corvids would denounce hi as a murderer, as in the case of the child-murderer Thomas Elks in Knockin, Shropshire, in 1590, but it was now left to witches to consort with them directly, or even to become them. Isobel Gowdie’s confession (1662) included crows amongst her favourite forms taken by witches for the flight to the Sabbat. Possession of familiar crows was a sure sign of an old woman’s isolation, a folk belief summed up neatly by Seldiy Bate’s lyric:

There was a woman by the hill, if she’s not dead she lives there still.

The henbane all around her grows, her only friends are big black crows.

Most damning for corvid reputations was the advent of the Black Death, which swept Europe in the mid-fourteenth century, killing between a third and a half of the population of England. Whole villages were wiped out, and survivors were often to few, or too terrified of contagion, to bury the dead. This unprecedented human tragedy can only have been a boon for carrion birds, whose taste for human flesh had previously only been indulged on battlefields and hangman’s gibbets. The sight of great flocks of black birds descending on the waste land, and picking the eyes from the skulls of one’s neighbors or relatives can have done little for the estimation of corvids in the minds of survivors…

By the nineteenth century, it seems, the demonization of ravens was complete. The Romans had interpreted its call as “cras”, Latin for tomorrow, an expression of hope. Poe’s raven only says “Nevermore”, a prophecy of doom.

[athingofvikings]

I don’t usually do “call-out” posts, but this case is particularly egregious.  It’s not strictly plagiarism, but it definitely qualifies as some form of creative dishonesty, and I need to vent on it.

So last night (Nov 15, 2020), I saw that my “Related Works” tab on AO3 had iterated up a digit and went to investigate.

What I saw made my blood boil.

“An Englishman Among Vikings” by Heinkelboy05

Checking the comments, I found that, unsurprisingly, the serial liar had lied again, saying, flat out, that he hadn’t worked with me on his story.

So.  

Let me get the record straight.

Here is his first message on ffnet, note the date:

May 27, 2018 

Hello there. This is Heinkelboy05. I'm a 21 year old college student studying to become a history teacher. I'm a big history buff and I try to incorporate it into my stories. My current story is one based on the game Valkyria Chronicles set in an alternate version of 1935. It's mostly historical though with some twists into it. Anyway, before I bore you with anymore details, just bought I'd let you know that I've been reading your story and it inspired me to try and do something similar here for HTTYD. I'm still working on it and trying to get some historical background and such. It's going to have historical information but also some small twists here and there as well. Still working a bit on finding historical information on some things. This one is going to be set earlier in the Viking Era. Just thought I'd let you know.

I responded positively, because hey, why wouldn’t I?

And thus, with the hook set, he reeled me in, talking exclusively about his own work.  We shifted to talking on Discord quickly, but it was just draining to talk to him; he only ever wanted to discuss his own ideas, and he wanted real-time discussions; he would ping me with “free to talk?” and if I wasn’t there right then, he would go off-line.  Once I didn’t get there in time for a week, and I got a passive-aggressive comment that basically was designed to guilt me.  

But, hey, I’m a nice guy, right?  So I invited him to the ATOV Discord server in October 2018, after we’d been working on his story for nearly five months.  

And once he was invited in, he settled in to feed like a vampire at a boarding school dormitory.  

In the following 18 months, he almost never engaged with other people on the server outside of his writing, just pushing his own drafts regularly, and whining that he wasn’t getting any feedback or interest.  Once, he even pinged @everyone because he wanted attention and feedback on the draft he’d just posted.  

And then he made a mistake.  The specific details amount to this: He had claimed back in his first message above that “I’ve been reading your story”, and I had taken it on good faith that he was a reader of mine.  

He wasn’t.

Because in April, he asked in the history discussion channel if anyone had heard of a historical group who show up in a major fashion in my story.

@kalessinsdaughter confronted him later and got him to admit that he’d read “less than half” (i.e. almost certainly a lot less) of my work.

He gave me an “I’m sorry I got caught” nonpology, clearly hoping for a return to the status quo.  

He didn’t get it.  

The long and the short of what followed is that we didn’t kick him from the server immediately; meanwhile, he tried a half-assed charm offensive to try to bribe his way back into my good graces.  I saw right through it, and he ended up getting so offensive and hypocritical that at the end of June, after a breathtakingly disgusting display of White Privilege, I told him that he could either leave or wait for me to find an excuse within the server rules to ban him.

He left.

Last night, I saw that my “Related Works” tab on AO3 had iterated, and went to check it out.

After two years of working on it, he had finally started posting the fic that he had badgered me and others to help him with.

And in the comments was this.

https://archiveofourown.org/comments/363482519

PoeticalHufflepuff on Chapter 2 Sun 15 Nov 2020 11:10AM EST

Oh wow, this looks interesting! The premise reminds me a lot of A Thing Of Vikings, but set later in history. Did you work with him on it?

Heinkelboy05 on Chapter 2 Sun 15 Nov 2020 05:17PM CET

No, I did not. I do however read his story. I’m having this series tied to the events of the HTTYD series to differentiate it from ATOV.

“No, I did not work with him on it.”

Now, the premise of his story is very similar to mine, and that’s fine.  

But, well.  *motions to entire history*

I left a response earlier this morning.  Since I’m not sure if he’ll delete my comment or not, I’ll copy the full text here.

athingofvikings on Chapter 2 Mon 16 Nov 2020 09:42AM CET

Well. Imagine my surprise when my "Related Works" value on my dashboard iterated up a digit last night and I found this waiting at the other end. And then, just to make it worse, I decided to check the comments out of some masochistic impulse and found you lying--as usual.

I suppose I should feel shocked, I really should, given just how brazen this lie is, but I'm not. Because it's always all about you... well, I'm not surprised that those months I spent "working with you" nearly every day two summers ago--remember those days? back before I invited you to the ATOV Discord server?--doesn't count as having "worked with you". Still. Just wow. It's amazing. I knew that you were a Grade-A self-centered asshole, but this really takes the cake. You lied to me, used me, and took advantage of my kindness for two years, and now you have the sheer unremitted gall to deny that I gave my time and effort trying to help you before I realized how much of an emotional vampire you are?

So, let me make this clear to anyone reading this, and I'll be posting this elsewhere as well: I do not accept this work as "inspired by" my own. It was made abundantly clear during Heinkel's time on the ATOV server that he hadn't actually read my work, and that persisted until he was caught in a direct lie on it. Before being caught, he spent nearly two years feeding on people's attention and not giving back to the community I had built; one of the other authors there described trying to help him as "exhausting". Prior to when he was invited to the server (by me in one of my biggest mistakes), he portrayed himself to me as being one of my readers who needed help with his own work. I gave that help freely--and it was exhausting, because he was this weird combination of "I want more clicks/attention", "I want historical accuracy like you do" and "I want these specific ahistorical elements because they're Cool" that just made dealing with him a chore.

I'm not going to call him a plagiarist, because that would require him to have read my work first, and he only did that past the first few chapters after he was caught in his lie. Yes, he took the general premise that I had come up with, but it's so mutilated by the inclusion of ahistorical elements that it's an 'in-name-only' Hollywood-style adaptation, akin to Artemis Fowl, and that's not plagiarism. Anything he might have taken from me directly was just from the first few chapters, because that's all he read before he was caught lying.

But while he's not a plagiarist, he IS a toxic, creatively dishonest, attention-starved, self-centered, exploitive and all-around inconsiderate jackass who used me, used my community, and lied to me all the while, all the while pretending that he was morally upstanding (remember that time you AllLivesMattered my explanation on antisemitism, Heinkel? I remember. I was explaining why my people are so hated and you had to butt in with a "Well, I'm so morally upstanding and good!" comment; pity that you don't actually practice what you said there). When he was caught in his lie by his own clumsiness--he asked if "anyone heard of the Jomsvikings" after they'd been a part of ATOV for years--and after having presented himself as a reader of ATOV for years, he desperately hoped that he wouldn't be called to account. And when he was called on it, he admitted to my friend that he had read "less than half" of my story and gave me an "I'm sorry I got caught" nonpology. I cannot and WILL NOT forgive him for all of that. This lie that he never worked with me on this story is just par for the course with him.

So go ahead and write your fic, Heinkel. It's clear that I can't stop you, and neither can your sense of shame or your sense of honesty, while your sense of integrity has been demonstrably MIA for a while now. But as I told you before I threw you out of the server, you're not getting anything more from me. Not attention, not acceptance, not friendship, not readers. You lied to me for two years, and this is just more of the same self-centered falsehoods. First you kept whining at me to pay attention to you, and passive-aggressively sniping at me when I didn't hop to it, did the same on the server because you were so desperate for attention of any kind--I haven't forgotten that you pinged @everyone because you wanted feedback without having to work at it by giving back to the community--and now you're saying that all of hours I spent helping you in good faith didn't exist, all of the time you spent getting advice and help from people on my server didn't exist.

And now you have the gall to say that you didn't work on it with me.

I only wish that I was surprised.

~~~

So that’s the situation.  

Don’t go harassing the guy.  Don’t report him to AO3--while skeezy, he hasn’t violated the TOS as far as I can tell.  

But I had to get that off my chest.  

[duckbeater]

Courtship, pt. 2

Writing about happiness is very difficult and boring. The below are some small attempts I’ve made to write through my happiness. My small, important readership deserves an update, says my brother, whose sensibilities have only rarely steered me catastrophically wrong.

I AM BUYING CHAMPAGNE TO CELEBRATE MY LOVER

Today’s the last day of his job and he’s throwing himself a little party. In September he begins med school and in the next month he’ll put his affairs in order, readying for the big move. I have the sense that tonight begins our diminuendo, despite his staying over last night and spit-fucking me, and I’ll surely stay over tonight, after the many champagne toasts to his prosperous life ahead. 

We’ve started sleeping as two spoons embracing chest to chest, with our faces tucked awkwardly in a neck or an armpit. Of course I wake up gasping, my mouth sucking after a less hot pocket of air, and turn, and enjoy that he pulls me tightly back to him. He’s a heavy sleeper and I’m a light sleeper, and our bedding situation resembles something like a rock in a tumbler with my rolling over and over and over again, arising too early, wildly underslept, shining with sweat, but ecstatic that we’ve touched all night long. I’m attending his celebration in a sleep deficit that I’ve covered with caffeine and a long, soulful run beside the lake. I’ve been thinking about us a lot. 

He wouldn’t call himself my lover, I think, but I’m hoping the expensiveness of the champagne I’m bringing will convince friends in attendance that that’s what we are. I’m hoping my largesse goes noticed and commented on—that it’s interpreted as my being in love with him, and that his peers compel him, by either fretting over my largesse, or pitying me for it, or anyway finding it impressive or amusing or tender or charming—that they tell this young man I’m adoring him and I’m adoring him well. That my adoration seems steadfast and considered. And despite the riskiness of the circumstances (our differences in age, the widening gulf in distance, a sometimes depleting lack of shared cultural references), when we are together I feel comfort and joy. This must be obvious to him without the expensive champagne. I’m always saying it out loud, or anyway variants on the theme of “comfort and joy,” like a seasonal blessing, a profusion of blessings, needing remarked upon. I’m seriously afraid I mother him.

“Let us take in the scene,” I have said before, “let us only observe for the moment my sitting in your lap, your hands on my neck, my constant kisses. What joy!”

He’s done something to my sense of my proportion, and also my prose style. I can’t seem to describe our relationship without slipping into the sardonic, recursive, mildly-institutionalized voice of Robert Walser, a writer I find too cute by half. I’m finding my life too cute by half, I fear. If this is what happiness feels like, I don’t really want much more of it. It’s making me stupid. “People will think that pain has made you stupid,” wrote Walser, a statement that comes back to me when I can’t distinguish between the good times and bad times making me an idiot.

AFTER THE SPIT-FUCKING

We stayed up late talking about what it means to say goodbye to people who don’t know you’ve cared for them. I don’t pretend this conversation had subtext. For the last two years, he’s worked with profoundly disabled people, first as a case worker and then, after the pandemic closed the campus and made that job “nonessential,” as a nursing assistant on the same floor. 

He spent months feeding, changing, bathing and bedding non-ambulatory children and adults. Most cannot speak, a few cannot see, and none can walk, of course. It is a world I’ve rarely thought about—indeed, a world many of us rarely consider, because in its theater of human need are scenes of unremitting hopelessness. It is a languageless suffering and it perdures. I can become very mystified, very shallow-breathed thinking about his care for these souls, however quick he’s been to dissuade me from romanticizing or elevating his ministrations. “One of my verbal residents tells me to fuck myself all the time,” he’s noted. Still, I would point out that birth defects and accidents account for a small percentage of his caseloads’ impairments, and that active neglect and abuse perpetrated intentionally by former guardians (or unwittingly by the American healthcare complex) have hobbled his charges for life. I don’t like hearing stories about choked babies and toddlers left so long in beds their soft bones grow slab-wise, so I’ve asked him, coward that I am, to please skip origins if he’s entering an otherwise benign workaday anecdote.  

His most patient complaint: using his iPhone to FaceTime parents who want to see their son, then listening to one-sided conversations, burbling, giggles, tears, even story-time. His campus closed to all guardians—a devastating precaution. “Don’t send anything xrated today,” he’d text, and I’d know he was hosting a reunion. So I’d keep my clothes on. And he’d answer the phone from an immediately weeping seventy-year-old mother saying, to her forty-year-old son, “Why good evening, Max, good evening. This is your mother. Hi, baby. Hi. I love you. I am your mother. I will always be your mother. I am sorry I cannot touch you, I cannot hold you, I cannot be with you in this time, but you are my Max, and I am your mother. And I love you always. You can hear me and I’m gonna tell you all about my week, okay? And then I’m gonna ask Scotty here how you’ve spent your week, okay?” He said he usually cries on these calls and when I asked why, he said, “Because it seems polite?” And I pressed harder and he said, “Because I get to—I get to connect these people who have missed each other so much, and it’s so sad. They haven’t touched in months. They might not touch this year. My phone sometimes runs out of battery. It’s so weird.”

I’ve asked him whether families are happy to be rid of their incredible dependents and he said that by and large families are miserable to give over members to the institution: that age arbitrates the giving. “A mother and father have a baby at twenty-five. They can care for him well into their fifties—their twenty-five-year-old, their thirty-year-old son. But when these parents enter their sixties? Their seventies? They can’t lift an adult male. They can’t bathe him or change him. Even basic nutrition gets hard. Meal prep is tiring. It’s long. They start to lose track of medications, and they have medications themselves, you know? So the situation gets very difficult and if they want to live, and if they want him to live, they feel like they have to give him up.”

We’re at the point now where intimacy is a given. He doesn’t swallow, but brings me to orgasm, taking me in his mouth and then dribbles it, I guess, my cum, back onto my stomach, apologizing with a flushed red smirk. “I hate that,” he says, “I really hate it.”

“Go ahead, eat it,” I say, joking.

He gives me dark eyes and showily palms the wad into the black pillowcase behind my head.

“Holy Christ!” I yell. “The nerve! The pluck! The audacity!”

There must be a phase in relationships when extracting intimacies—not only of the “terrible things I did in high school”-vein, or the “times I cheated”-vein, or the “unwittingly right wing ideologies I support”-vein—that close couples endeavor. Where you’re always compulsively revelatory, to seem as interesting as you did in early courtship, as erotically forward and emotionally captivating. We’re in that moment and we surprise one another with small tributes as befits that level of affection.

One of the intimacies I proffered is that I’m going through a religious re-awakening, a need for ritual and sacraments. He finds this funny. (I find it embarrassing.) Yet one of his duties has been wheeling charges to his building’s Tuesday Mass, and then helping to administer the Eucharist. I don’t think he in fact touches the host (I don’t think many in his care can safely take of the host; “I’m mostly there in case anyone seizes,” he said), but he did slip a large wafer away for me and now it’s in my apartment, among my candles, possibly growing mold. He asks me when I’m going to eat it and I tell him around Christmas. 

(That was a lie. I’ll eat it when our romance is over, to consecrate the time we had.)

“I eat it,” I say, and he glowers.

I TOLD HIM ABOUT A MYSTERY SURROUNDING MY FAVORITE AUTHOR

Norman Rush. For a decade and better I’ve wondered about the long dedication in Mating, whose last lines read, “...and to the memory of my father, and to my lost child, Liza.” The novel, set in Botswana and borrowing heavily from Rush’s time there as director in the Peace Corps, suggests that perhaps Liza died in Africa or was born still. She goes unmentioned in his Paris Review interview, in subsequent novels, short stories, and reviews. There’s no hint of Liza’s fate. (As I edit this, I recall a phrase in Mortals, the narrator’s idea that “children exposed you to hellmouth, which was the opening of the mouth of hell right in front of you.” Explaining further: “[I]t was the grandmother, the daughter, the granddaughter tumbling through the air, blown out of the airplane by a bomb, the three generations falling and seeing one another fall, down, down, onto the Argolid mountains. With children you created more thin places in the world for hellmouth to break through.” And then, in Subtle Bodies, Rush describes a wayward teen boy, whose angry and aggressive behavior corresponds exactly to Rush’s own troubled teen son. In fact, Subtle Bodies is about the decision to have children at all. Nina follows Ned to a funeral, to fuck him. So, Rush has indeed remarked on children and strife, as he has lived it. Anyhow—) Yet by accident I listened to an old Fresh Air interview where Rush is asked to comment on the aspect of family in his novels, and to clarify that inscription. 

“I have a daughter who is now thirty,” he says, “who was born with diffuse brain atrophy and has been institutionalized for many years. Um. But I think the rest is pretty self-explanatory.”

“What was her condition?” presses his interlocutor.

“She is uh profoundly retarded,” pauses, “and will be so.”

“So you feel she is lost to you?”

“Yes. There is no recognition possible between her and us.”

I reproduced this exchange from notes on my phone. Scotty replied, “I don’t think that’s right, actually. Maybe between her and—who—who was it?”

“Norman Rush and his daughter Liza.”

He said, “Maybe between Liza and her dad—yeah, maybe she was so disabled she couldn’t recognize him. I take care of men like that. But I recognize them.”

We were talking about important books at all (I mean that semi-seriously) because his co-worker had gifted him three works, including a volume of Yeats’ complete poetry.

“Why did Paco give you Yeats?” I asked.

“He thinks I need more poetry,” said Scotty.

(Frankly I have felt and still feel sexual jealousy against Paco, who recently got brilliant red and black knee tattoos of spider webs. Like, Spider-Man spiderwebs, covering both kneecaps. Every few weeks he cooks a large meal for Scotty, and they talk about life until 4 A.M. drunk on bourbon, immobilized by edibles, full and warm and caring, and it makes me mad. It makes me mad, because I can’t really see the point of staying up until the uncomfortable small hours between 2 and 5 unless there is sex involved, but Paco is straight, a father, an excellent chef, a dedicated friend, and so my grousing is a kind of unwarranted possession that baffles me into silence on the matter.)

I didn’t have anything intelligent left to say about Norman Rush. I groped along a narrow thought, however, a thin ledge. “You know—a novelist, especially a novelist as concerned with language and comprehension as Norman Rush, would feel particularly devastated by the condition of his daughter. He would see it as ironic and then as punitive and again as senseless—supporting his comforting regime of a militant atheism.”

Although very sober, I recited the first stanza of The Second Coming, tripping over two lines (but the best lines), saying, “The worst lack all conviction, while the best/Are full of passionate intensity.”

“What?” said Scotty.

“I just—that was Yeats.”

“Who?”

“Go ahead and tell your boy Paco that your hot fuck gave you a teach on William. Butler. Yeats.”

“What?” said Scotty. He grinned at me. He got up and ate a yogurt.

[rivertalesien]

Do those M-Cap memories ever really have a purpose? They chose to include that specific dialogue and image of Lexa from the City of Light so is that supposed to mean anything? Not even related to a possible Lexa return (I don’t see it happening at this point) but I’m curious if there is supposed to be a reason for the particular scenes they show. If there isn’t they really do suck for basically being like hey remember this scene and that one time we brought Lexa back as a surprise...

It’s just bait and filler. They’ve had more setups in the past three seasons dealing with potential flashbacks or memories or the like where Lexa could make a reasonable appearance, then backed off. My favorite is how in season 6 we learned being close to the anomaly could give you hallucinations of something you desire or fear and how often Clarke would head in that direction, only to turn around at the last second. Or how it just never affected her that way at all. 

Red Sun Toxin supposed to have a similar effect, but nope. 

Clarke gets m-capped. We don’t even see her memories.

Season 6, Clarke gets to spend time in her mind space: Lexa is painted there (would be weird if she wasn’t), but Clarke is too traumatized by Lexa’s death to have her in her dreams. Convenient way of saying: we never asked Alycia to appear in this logical place for her to appear, because...we’ll tease this shit, but we’ll never give it to you. Want queerbait? Here you go.

Previous seasons: Clarke was to get the Flame. At the last possible minute: nope. 

With no reason to bring the Flame into play in season 5 (the time of the Commanders was over, right?), they did anyway, but not to give it to Clarke or even have Clarke remove it from Madi, but so Lexa, the living character, could have a conduit in Madi. Convenient.

Fans *did* *not* bait themselves in believing she would appear again. It has been teased for a long time. M-cap was just the last thing. We’re told, by Madi, that she communicated the most significantly with Lexa: she was the last Commander and therefore her “memories” should be at the fore, but they’re not. She wasn’t even a blip on that screen. The “I’ll always be with you” is just cruel, especially after what they did to Madi. Especially after all of Clarke’s promises. To drop that story between them is, imo, deeply mean-spirited.  

Spoilers had Lexa’s tattoos as having some significance. Then we see from Madi’s m-cap, that it was just the memory of Becca punching in the code that mattered. Becca everywhere. Everyone had a crush on her. Everyone admired her. Gabriel, Raven, that guy from season 6 she slept with who died, can’t remember his name. Lexa is no one to the story. They’ve been telling us this whole time. It’s just...Becca. Played by an actor who has shown open disdain and unkindness to Clexa/Lexa fans. I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. An ugly one, but still.

All the potential to bring a Commander back and the one we got was a lame-ass psycho who couldn’t scare a tic off a dog (but reiterated Grounder Commanders as Bad and pretty much erases Lexa).

All that tech (included simulations, memory readers, mind drives, cloned embryos grown in tubes, etc), and none of it led in any logical fashion to an exciting, uplifting conclusion. It was just smoke. 

Doesn’t even matter about the “ship.” They could have brought Lexa back in any number of ways because it would have been a kick and it would have brought them ratings and maybe even some goodwill. Instead, they just stewed in this nihilistic bog of unremitting stench.

Imagine thinking that was a good idea. 

[anthropwashere]

Neurologist officially changed diagnosis to New Daily Persistent Headache. Y'know, the one that literally nobody knows how to treat and can give you daily unremitting headaches for anywhere between three months and five years

She's also putting in another push for medical separation (as much as a Navy doc can, medical gets weird between branches). So. That's fun.

If I hadn't practically demanded to get a referral to an outside clinic I'm pretty sure she would have done the same as rheumatology did after diagnosing me with fibromyalgia: "that's rough buddy. here's a pamphlet." I don't have enough experience with civilian doctors to know if this is normal. Either way, I'm tired

[quietlypondering]

Timeless | Chapter 4

Read on A03 Ship: Prinxiety Summary: In a society where superpowers are the new era on the horizon - Virgil is happy flying under the radar, as much as he can, with government issued blockers. Life was… Normal - Or, at least, as normal as he could be. Until one day, as cheesy as it sounds, a simple train ride would change his life forever. Word Count:  1642 Chapter Warnings: Suicide Mention, Nightmares (including burning/boiling alive imagery, suicidal imagery/ drowning imagery. All of this will be in Italics if you wish to skip.) Tags: Superpower AU, Angst w/ a happy ending, unreliable narrator A/N: Thanks again to my wonderful beta reader @kolurize <3

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Burning. Boiling. The sounds of water bubbling away brings him to his senses. Virgil blinks awake - a feeling of vertigo sends him reeling forward, and when he looks up, the smell of chlorine hits him like a truck. He keels over, eyes blurry, head stuffy, and realises he’s standing on the edge of a swimming pool. And it writhes beneath his feet, forceful and unrelenting. He feels the heat rise, almost catching his breath in his throat.

Without any warning, he feels his feet slip. His heart pounds in his chest as he begins to fall, grasping for dear life for some sort of edge. He does - barely - his fingers numb against the rough side of the swimming pool. Smoke licks at his feet as he holds on for dear life. He tries to yell, to scream, to make any sort of sound come out of his mouth, but it doesn’t. After all, it’s hard to scream when you’re dreaming--

--Virgil awoke with a start - his head pounding, unremitting, like it was the worst hangover he’d ever experienced. Even the dull light filtering through the window was causing his eyes to ache and burn and pulse at the back of his skull. His chest tight, his arms heavy - Virgil could barely gather up the courage to move a finger, let alone an arm, much less his whole body.

He rolled over in an attempt to shield his eyes from the light, but all it did was force him into a bout of dizziness. He gritted his teeth, pulling himself out of bed with all the strength in the world. Virgil let out a groan, pushing his palms into his eyes in an attempt to get the pulsing to just stop.

He trudged over to the bathroom - startled, momentarily, by the way his face looked in the mirror. Pale and ashen, and a thin line of dried blood ran from his nose all the way to his chin. He grimaced, splashing some water in his face and thoroughly scrubbing the blood away, hoping he would at least look a bit presentable.

Quietly, Virgil shrugged on his hoodie and slipped discreetly out the door. His hands shoved deep inside his pockets. The feeling of cool wind at his neck made him shiver, yet was oddly comforting against his clammy skin.

He found himself wincing at every other step as he trudged down the street, garnering several odd looks from passersby. One little old lady even stopped and asked him if he was alright. She commented on how ghostly pale he looked - but when Virgil didn’t bother to answer (out of awkwardness, or his feverish stupor), she quickly left him be.

By the time Virgil made the audition, he could barely even remember why he was there.

His movements were weak and lethargic, so much so that as he stumbled through the door, he evidently made such a scene that those sitting in the waiting area had their faces contort into a look of startled concern.

Truthfully, he could barely see. He made quick work of tripping over his own feet, and as if on cue, another pair of feet appeared just inches away from his own. A pair of arms caught him and when Virgil finally looked up, he saw a familiar face. Curly hair. Blue eyes. A look of quiet unease set firmly on his face.

“Are you alright?” It was Roman. Roman, looking a mix between confused and concerned, tilted his head slightly. “...Do we know each other?”

Virgil could barely even think straight (or ever, really, for that matter,). But, he managed to squint at him in his semi-conscious state and mumble, “No. Not this time” before his entire world went completely black.

Hot. Hot hot hot, burning against his skin. He’s yanked away from the edge of the pool by an unknown force, and thrust deep into the vat of boiling water. He opens his mouth to scream, but hot, scalding water just enters his lungs. He struggles to breathe, writhing, trying to scramble his way to the surface - but he just sinks. Sinks all the way to the bottom of the pool and - and then he’s falling.

Falling hard and fast through the air. His stomach drops, but as he looks around he sees nothing - nowhere to hold onto - he’s just falling. The wind catches his breath. He closes his eyes, squeezes them shut as tight as they will go - and then… nothing. He opens his eyes. He’s inside a kitchen - or, rather, just outside one. He recognises it, it’s the kitchen from his old house. 

There are voices that he can’t quite make out. Angry and bitter. He tiptoes closer, fingers just barely touching the door handle as he pulls and peeks into the room.

A kettle boils on the stove. Two people much, much taller than him argue. He hears no words, but he feels them, crushing and debilitating. There’s a pause. The two figures in the kitchen turn, two pairs of eyes stare at him - glower in his direction. There should be words, but there are none. His breath catches, and he shuts the door. The arguing continues, as it always had, and as the kettle begins whistling, he rushes out of the house.

He turns back. The whistling of the kettle still in his ears as he begins to run. He looks up at the sky, grey-black clouds tumble across it with purpose. With a gasp, he turns to find himself in a field. Beyond it is a sprawling dark forest - he watches as the trees begin to close in. The field becomes smaller, until it’s just a clearing, as if he’d changed the size of a camera lens. The space between the trees grows smaller, and he can no longer breathe, no longer see anything but writhing vines and rotting wood.

The hairs on the back of his neck stand up - he feels eyes - eyes on him, like something is coming, like a sense of impending doom. The ground beneath him shakes, and when he turns - the sky is dark. Dark and clouded over, the only thing in the distance is a pair of too-bright headlights. As much as he tries, he can’t seem to tear his eyes away.

He looks down - feet glued to sodden wood train tracks. As he lifts his gaze up, he sees it coming, a large, black train. He opens his mouth to scream - Wait - No - but it continues forward in its unyielding course. He screws his eyes shut - arms moving to cover his head, bracing for the impact. But it never comes.

Virgil awoke shaken and confused - and hot, an unbroken fever bubbling beneath his skin. Distant hushed voices, something cool on his forehead, a touch on his arm. It occurred to him, briefly, that he in fact had no idea where he was. He bolted upright, immediately regretting it for the woozy, light-headed feeling that came across him.

“Oh- You’re awake. Are you alright?”

Virgil was not, in fact, alright.

He turned to the unrecognisable voice, squinting so he could attempt in vain to see through his hazy eyes.

“...You fainted. I’m sorry, I should’ve called an ambulance, but, well, I live really close and-”

It wasn’t until then that slowly, his memory began to filter back in, along with an inexplicable sense of dread. He frowned, trying to assess the unfamiliar location. Red bed sheets. Plush carpet. Desk. A bedroom? He turned, and it quite quickly dawned on him that he knew exactly who this was.

“What’s your name?” The person - now identified as Definitely Roman asked - and Virgil sat a moment with his mouth entirely agape.

“I’m… Virgil.”

“Roman. Roman Prince!”

Virgil felt a slow feeling of alarm creep into his chest. “Wait, the audition--?”

Roman shook his head. “..Sorry. We missed it.”

Virgil sat in shock for a moment. He felt his stomach drop. His chest tightened as he managed to say, “you missed it, too?”

“Well, yeah! You’ve been asleep for a few hours. I guess I wanted to make sure you're alright.”

While Virgil appreciated the sentiment - he couldn’t help but feel an incredible sense of disappointment. He’d made someone miss a likely important audition, all because he couldn’t keep it together for a few minutes. Shit.

Virgil panicked - screwing his eyes shut in an attempt to kickstart what little of his power he had left. Instead, as he was half way through working himself up, Roman placed a hand on his arm and gave him a pointed look. “It’s fine, you don’t have to do anything,” Roman said.

Virgil froze. “Wait, how do you…” Roman simply pointed to Virgil’s very obvious wrist, metal blocker wrapped around it, and grinned sheepishly. “...Oh.” He grimaced. Of course. “I’m still the one who caused you to miss it…”

“Look- Virgil, right?” Virgil nodded briefly. “Virgil, it was just a low budget show. There’s always the next one!”

There was a pause - Virgil could almost feel Roman studying his demeanor.

“...How do you feel, anyway?” Roman inquired.

Virgil barked out a laugh. “Like I got hit by a truck.” It rang hollow and bitter - and Virgil felt a pit growing in his stomach from the comment. He didn’t look in time to see Roman’s reaction, but...

“I know some people get weird about answering this but… What ability do you have?”

Instinctively, Virgil made to cover the blocker on his wrist with his large hoodie - but quickly decided against it. Roman already knew, anyway.

“It’s cool if you don’t want to talk about it-”

He pondered for a moment, mulling it over in his head before, without really giving himself much of a chance to decide, he said, “I can control time.” Another pause. “Well. Control is a loose way of putting it. It’s more like I can ride the waves and sometimes I get yanked underwater and can’t breathe.”

Roman frowned - and Virgil wondered if that’s all anyone ever felt. Damn Pity. “That does sound dangerous. No wonder you need that.” Roman pulled backwards on his chair. “My question is-- What’ve you been doing? You look like hell - uh, no offense.” Virgil swore he saw a twinkle in Roman’s eye.  “How have you been using it this much? Are you on some sort of quest? Finding a long lost love?”

Virgil turned away, feeling his cheeks begin to heat up. “S-Something like that. I suppose.”

Roman leaned back in surprise. “That’s pretty admirable, dude. If someone did that for me, I’d marry them on the spot.” He laughed, “Not that I can- well, nevermind.”

Virgil flopped back onto the pillow, an arm hiding his flushed face. Slowly, he moved his arm a little so he could peek at Roman out of the corner of his eye. “...What’s your power, anyway? You have one right?”

He watched as Roman mirrored the same movement he’d done earlier - pulled his sleeve over his blocker, almost instinctively - and he shrugged.

“It’s kinda hard to explain.”

Virgil quirked an eyebrow. He could feel his mouth as it began to run completely dry. “Hard to explain?”

“Well I- I haven’t had it for long, as far as I know. It just kinda came in a few months ago.” He bit his bottom lip with what Virgil could only assume was embarrassment. “I haven’t told anyone about it before, really…” He trailed off meekly before adding, “apart from registering myself, of course.” He lifted his half-hidden blocker and flashed it to Virgil with a toothy grin.

“..So what can you do?”

Roman paused a moment to take in a deep, contemplative breath. An unmistakable look of discomfort passed on his face, before finally replying with--

“...I’ll show you.”

TAG LIST // @royallyanxious @kolurize @softanxiouspatton @purp-man  @hexatrash

[ruminativerabbi]

Omar and Tlaib: A Way Forward

Sometimes I have to search around to find the topic I wish to write about in my weekly letter to you all, but other times the universe simply presents me with an issue that it feels almost impossible not to write about. This is one of those weeks. And that was before President Trump called the loyalty of Jewish Americans who vote Democratic into question.

I am thinking, of course, of the huge brouhaha surrounding the proposed, then banned, then half-unbanned, then cancelled trip of Representative Ilhan Omar (D-Minnesota) and Rashida Tlaib (D-Michigan) to Israel.

The single point of near-universal consensus is that the whole incident was handled maladroitly by all concerned—and that really is saying the very least.

The congresswomen, by declining to go on the actual trip of members of the House to Israel that took place just a few weeks ago, were making it clear that they had no interest in actually visiting Israel or hearing what representatives of our staunchest ally in the Middle East might or might have had to say to them…and then feigned shock when they were called out for insulting the leadership and citizenry of Israel by planning a propaganda tour featuring meetings solely with Palestinian bigwigs and Arab members of the Knesset. (The itinerary for the trip they then proposed to make on their own confirmed their intentions clearly, although Rep. Omar now says—contrary to the itinerary she herself released—that she would have met with at least some Israeli officials.)

President Trump, by putting his oar in where it wasn’t even remotely needed, seems to have made Prime Minister Netanyahu feel obliged to ban the Omar and Tlaib from entering Israel lest he appear weak or—and, yes, I know how weird this sounds to say out loud—unmanly. (The ensuing firestorm on this side of the world would have been considerably less hot had it not seemed that the Prime Minister’s decision reflected more than anything his desire not to provoke President Trump or to irritate him—which paradoxically actually did make him look and sound weak. And unmanly weakness was indeed the specific issue in play: the President’s tweet confirmed as much: “It would show great weakness if Israel allowed Rep. Omar and Rep. Tlaib to visit.” He didn’t have to say who specifically was going to be labelled weak for not banning the two!)

For his part, the P.M. himself, more than aware of the importance of playing ball with his nation’s biggest supplier of foreign aid and himself an extremely savvy politician, seemed somehow not to understand what a huge error of judgment it was going to be to appear to disrespect members of Congress…and, at that, the specific members of the House that the world was just waiting to see if he would dare to insult.

The whole incident played out in Israel entirely differently than it did here. For your person-in-the-shuk Israeli, the whole rumpus was basically uninteresting. I saw very little coverage in the Israeli press—not none, but nothing like what I saw on every American website I visited while we were in Israel. When it did come up, most regular Israelis I talked to seemed confused why this was even an issue. Although I think most Americans surely do not, everybody in Israel remembers when, in 2012, the United States barred a Knesset member, Michael Ben Ari, from entering the United States because the party he represented, the Kahanist Kach party, was formally labelled as a terrorist group. (Nor, for the record, is it unheard of for the United States to bar entry to people deemed undesirable for one reason or another, a list that over the years has included such dangerous criminals as Amy Winehouse, Diego Maradona, and Boy George. For a full list of people now or once barred from entering the United States, click here.) So the notion that Israel would bar entry to two individuals who have been outspoken in their animosity towards the Jewish state and who openly and shamelessly support the BDS movement, and neither of whom is above lacing her rhetoric with openly anti-Semitic language, merely because they were also elected to Congress—that didn’t seem that big a stretch to most Israelis that I heard giving forth on the topic. Indeed, when I did hear Israelis talking about the issue, the question was more why Israel shouldn’t decline to offer unambiguously hostile people a public platform on which to promote invidious policies than it was why they should let them in without any assurance that they would be at least minimally respectful of their hosts’ sensitivities.

Still, Israel could have turned this whole affair to its own advantage by inviting Rashida Tlaib and Ilan Omar to come to visit, but by making the invitation conditional upon their agreement to meet with Israeli officials and learn about the Israeli take on the Middle East conflict. It would have been a good thing if that happened too, because, as their comments about Israel over the last few days prove, both Omar and Tlaib are as naïve as they are hostile towards the Jewish state. Omar wants Israel to grant Palestinians “full rights,” but without saying what she means exactly. Does she want Israel to annex the West Bank and make its Palestinian population into Israelis with the full rights of citizens? It seems hard to believe that that’s what she means. But then what does she mean? Is she in favor of a two-state solution featuring a State of Palestine in which the Palestinian citizens would have “full rights?” But then why is she not addressing the Palestinian leadership and telling them to declare independence and get down to the work of nation building? When she denounces the Israeli decision to bar her entry as “unprecedented,” does she not know that our own country also bars entry to people deemed hostile or dangerous, or likely to promote views considered inimical with the nation’s best interests? When she speaks about “the occupation,” does she not realize how bizarre it is to blame Israel for “occupying” the Palestinians’ land when Israel has repeatedly offered the Palestinians an almost complete withdrawal in exchange for their willingness to live in peace? And, of course, also without showing the slightest interest—at least as far as I can see—in the places in the world that actually are occupied by foreign powers—Tibet, for example, which has been occupied by China since 1951 or the part of the Western Sahara that Morocco has illegally occupied since 1976.

For her part, Rashida Tlaib sounds more calculating then naïve. When she denounces Israel for setting up roadblocks that inhibit free travel from the West Bank into Israel, she conveniently forgets to mention the reason those roadblocks were set up in the first place: to prevent terrorist attacks on innocents of the kind that were part and parcel of daily life in Israel during the first and second Intifadas. To suggest that those roadblocks were set up to harass innocents like her elderly grandmother instead of owning up to the fact that they have worked so well, as has the security fence, that terror attacks inside Israel have plummeted to almost zero—that crosses the line, at least in my estimation, from finessing the details to make a point and approaches something more reasonably called manipulating the facts to create a wholly false impression. (I think we can all be confident that, if violent terrorists were blowing up children in discotheques and pizzerias in her own home district, she would support any plausible effort to end the carnage even if it caused her grandma some inconvenience.)

It would, therefore, be a good thing for both Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib to come for a visit to Israel. Nor is it too late. In my opinion, Israel can and should offer to invite them to Israel if they are willing to listen, to learn, and to refrain from promoting anti-Israeli views while they are in Israel as guests of the State. Contrary to the President’s tweet, principled reaching-out towards people who have in the past been hostile but who could conceivably change their minds would be seen by all—or certainly by most—as an act of strength, not weakness. There is, after all, a lot to learn. Understanding Israel today requires knowing a lot about Jewish history and its impact on Jewish reality today. It requires understanding the relationship between Israel and both Judaism and Jewishness, a relationship that is obscure in many ways even to relatively savvy observers of the Middle Eastern scene. And it requires understanding the specific way that Israeli identity has been forged over the decades against a background of unremitting hostility on the part of most of its neighbors and, even more perfidiously, on the part of the United Nations—and how decades of exposure to that kind of stark enmity so often tinged with not-so-subtle anti-Semitism has made Israelis, to say the very least, wary and mistrustful of the world.

It would surely have been better if we hadn’t come to this impasse in quite the way we have. But having come to this crossroads, we must now traverse it and I believe we can. If they are truly sincere in their interest in learning about Israel, Representatives Tlaib and Omar should indicate their willingness to come and to listen. Israel, for all it is barred by its own laws from admitting to the country people who advocate policies inimical to the nation’s survival (and specifically the BDS movement), should find a way around that restriction to welcome them both and to help them understand where Israel is coming from and why it acts as it feels it must. If everybody involved is willing to take a step back and to calm down a bit, what at the moment is an impasse can become a crossroads that all concerned can grow mightily by traversing.

[secret-diary-of-an-fa]

Some Bally Good Sci-Fi Shows For Your Consideration

You ‘orrible lot may have noticed that I haven’t written anything on here in a really, really long time. Even longer than usual, in fact. There are two reasons for that. Firstly, I have a column with a real online magazine now. I’m a regular contributor to Culture Matters. So suck on that. Secondly, I’m happy for the first time in awhile, because I’m seeing someone beautiful and amazing. Since my best writing definitely comes from a place of hate, I don’t write during those periods when my life doesn’t suck. However, the world of cultural commentary still has need of me, so here I am. today’s topic, is sci-fi shows! I’ve moaned about the poor quality of Doctor Who and how distasteful I find its cheap, nasty gender-flipping antics (way to get rid of a great example of non-toxic masculinity, BBC... you fucking berks). But now I think it behoves me, as your guiding voice in the modern cultural wasteland, to suggest some alternatives. If you’re looking for offbeat space sci-fi that can replace the gaping Who-shaped hole in your life, I have a few suggestions. Read on, ye fuckin’ reader-man.

1. Red Dwarf Yes, I know I bring up Red Dwarf every time I talk about TV, but there’s a reason for that: it’s great. For those of you who somehow don’t know what it is, it’s a British sci-fi show about a slobby, well-meaning human, an uptight, sarcastic hologram, a narcissistic cat-person and a prissy cleaning droid with a head “shaped like a freak formation of mash potato”. They’re trapped in space on a failed mining vessel and therefore, inevitably, get involved in all sorts of high-concept sci-fi misadventures. As you can probably tell, it’s a comedy. The genius of it, however, is that the sci-fi scenarios themselves are totally serious and carefully-plotted. The humour arises from the neuroses of the characters and their skewed, off-kilter reactions to the perils they find themselves in. Speaking as a Brit, I think it encapsulates our sense of humour and our attitude to science fiction better than any other show. Including Doctor Who when it was still good.

2. Farscape Farscape is brilliant. It may be the single greatest space opera ever told in a visual medium. I could tell you it concerns a random assortment of aliens on the run from a fascist galactic police force while an internecine and complicated interplanetary conflict bubbles away in the background, constantly threatening to spill over into outright war. However, that sounds a bit generic and doesn’t really do it justice. The greatness of Farscape lies in its patient and heartfelt characterisation and the care and authenticity it uses to develop every planet and civilisation. There are wonderful digressions and side-plots that flesh out world or characters and feel just as vital and important as the main plot arc while you watch them. It helps that the universe it portrays is actually completely unique and unlike anything else in the genre once you get past the broad-strokes stuff. 

3. Hyperdrive Another British space comedy. I’ve heard it described as The Office in space, but it really isn’t. It applies the bureaucracy, incompetence and mild weirdness of a UK office environment to the process of space exploration, but it’s not like The Office. For a start, it’s fundamentally optimistic. The Office was bleak as fuck (which is also good, but not relevant here). It’s kind of nice to watch people who are a bit like people you actually know bumbling their way through theoretically-epic space adventures. Watching Hyperdrive always feels a bit like slipping into a lovely, warm pair of well-worn slippers, even if you’ve never seen it before. It’s just nice. It’s also piss-yourself-laughing funny.

4. Lexx Lexx isn’t just an alternative to modern Doctor Who, it’s an antidote to it. Cynical, nihilistic and bitingly satirical, it regularly features entire planets getting blown up for no reason, random support characters being reduced to protein or devoured by sexy plant-women, gleeful acts of wholly unnecessary sadism and moral quandaries that never actually get resolved. It’s also never heard of gender politics, but has a surprisingly egalitarian attitude towards fan-service, so expect lots of nudity and weird sex shenanigans that serve no purpose other than to remind you that Lexx doesn’t care one fucking jot if normal people are grossed out or offended by it. The unremitting ethical void that the show offers instead of a conventional sci-fi universe is balanced out by the core cast, who are all loveable losers, who alternate between trying to be good and just trying not to die. It could only have been made in the 90s (by a Canadian and German production team, no less) and it’s amazing.

5. Space Dandy Why yes, I have mentioned Space Dandy before. It’s the demented space-manga that features entire episodes about hunting for great ramen or sentient vaccuum cleaners falling in love with coffee machines. It’s also got a talking genius gorilla in it who dresses like a cross between George Washington and a mad scientist. Because reasons. Bizarrely, it actually has continuity, but that continuity is subjected, within the show’s lore, to the unpredictable nature of an infinite pseudo-multiverse. It’s bonkers and I  urge you to go watch it right now.

Right, that lot ought to keep you busy. Honourable mentions go to the 1980s version Flash Gordon, in which Brian Blessed plays a vengeful humanoid kestrel (the film says ‘hawkman’, but he clearly looks more like a fucking kestrel), Cowboy Bebob, which came out of the same minds as Space Dandy but doesn’t reach quite the same level of transcendent weirdness and The Orville, which is just Star Trek if the characters all had the rods surgically removed from up their arses.