#yales

[citrusreadstoa]

Reading The Dark Prophecy: Chapter 32 (SPOILERS)

"ADOPT-A-HIGHWAY / NEXT FIVE MILES SPONSORED BY: / TRIUMVIRATE HOLDINGS" LMAO WHAT? Is this a real thing? Naturally, I looked it up. The Adopt-a-Highway and Sponsor-a-Highway programs encourage companies to keep a section of road free from litter and in return, they get brand visibility on that section of the highway. Neat. I'm glad Triumvirate Holdings cares about- cares about- I'm sorry, I can't keep a straight face. These guys were just about to flatten the entire Long Island Sound forest.

"as if I were bathing in a cold soup--Apollo gazpacho." GAZPACHO (n.): a cold soup and drink made of raw, blended vegetables, also called Andalusian gazpacho. It originated in the southern regions of the Iberian peninsula and spread into other areas I need to try this someday. Cold soup is the best.

"When the spirit of Trophonius said 'first light,' did he mean nautical twilight? Dawn? the moment when the sun chariot's headlights were first visible" Yes, finally someone thinks about the details! "Dawn" is an incredibly vague time but stories tend to act like it's very cut and dry. I reckon they have until the sky is fully blue.

"Those are yales." Are we sure these cows are Ivy League material? I know their students can be snobby, but bullheadedness is another thing. "they sound almost cute. Let me assure you, they were not." Google Images shows me that they look sort of like a cross between a boar, a gazelle, and a unicorn?

"yales are on the endangered-monster list." You've got to be kidding me. So you can kill them, you just shouldn't. Good to know the mythological world has endangered monster lists, too. I imagine killing one would be akin to killing a god's sacred animal and then getting smote or cursed. "When monsters start to fade from mortals' collective memory, they regenerate less and less often from Tartarus." Oh, so mortals' memory affects monsters, too! I figured it must have, but nice to have confirmation. Guess the Minotaur and Medusa and the sirens aren't going away anytime soon.

I doubt any demigod would be having the same internal struggle about whether to kill these monsters or not. It'd be slash-slash-dead.

"As yales attacked, their horns swiveled . . . The horns also spun" WHAT THE HELL? Their horns swivel and spin??? Is this an animal or a power tool?

"I would've gotten millions of likes on GodTube!" Are there even millions of gods? I guess nymphs and spirits use it as well. Do you think demigods and legacies have access to the divine Internet?

"These harvards aren't going to give us time." They might get offended by that. Don't the two have a rivalry or something?

"Get ready." "For what?" "No spoilers." Not the time, Meg! Really, very much not the time.

"One spring bubbled diluted white" Get your mind out of the gutter, Citrus.

"a coil of rope was tied to an iron piton." PITON (n.): a peg or spike driven into a rock or crack to support a climber or a rope

"We have to drink." Meg is coming too? Does she also have to swallow death and madness?

"Mnemosyne, the Spring of Memory, is black. Lethe, the Spring of Forgetfulness, is white." The Lethe keeps switching from black to white and vice versa. The Hypnos cabin had Lethe water that was milky white, but another time the river was mentioned (maybe in "The Sword of Hades" but I don't recall exactly) it was black. Now it's white again. Unless this Lethe spring is separate from the river? Don't tell me this is another Rhea-Rhea Silvia situation.

"No time!" Uh oh, Meg is going into the Oracle cave with zilch for protection. Is she gonna make it out sane?

[leninisms]

i wish i could say this more eloquently but watching these college solidarity encampments popping up around the world… watching university faculty use themselves as shields to protect their students from the police… watching these students put their own safety on the line to demand divestments… i’ve never seen anything like it, and every update moves me to tears.

[tomi4i]

[kvothes]

louise glück was a tremendous poet in her own life and also taught, advised, and nurtured uncountable other poets. her picking richard siken’s crush for the yale younger poets prize is a well known fact, but she selected a number of other poets for publication during her tenure as the contest judge that i think are worth knowing.

peter streckfus, cuckoo (2003)

richard siken, crush (2004)

jay hopler, green squall (2005)

jessica fisher, frail-craft (2006)

fady joudah, the earth in the attic (2007)

arda collins, it is daylight (2008)

ken chen, juvenilia (2009)

katherine larson, radial symmetry (2010)

poetry is a community! read her—and also read the poets she wanted to promote.

[perennii]

GUYS, ELECTION RESULTS ARE IN!!!

[agentfascinateur]

From Gaza to the Student Protest Movement, with love:

Thank you 💜

[pierppasolini]

Sextool (1975) // dir. Fred Halsted

[mysharona1987]

It sounds like literally thousands of many straight A+ students with perfect scores and after school activities apply to these colleges every year. Most don’t get in.

Honestly, unless, you are a star athlete, a legacy or have a parent with the means to donate millions and millions (looking at you, Jared Kushner), it is incredibly tough and competitive.

The real problem is legacies and wealthy donors. But since no one wants to go after rich people, let’s just blame black people.

[inthedarktrees]

College student wearing striped suspenders with tailored suit

Yale Joel, ”Bare Kneed Boys with—What?” Life, Sep 21, 1962

[wh0reforcoriolanussnow]

Mom, I am a rich man || Tom Blyth x gf!reader

Summary: Fans have always speculated that Tom was dating someone until he confirmed it in an interview. After digging through Tom’s socials, fans stumble upon you, a Yale law student.

Warnings: fem!reader

Wc: 341

A/n: anyone studying law atm? 🙋‍♀️ ALSO THANK U SM FOR 6K AHHH THATS INSANE!!!

Divider by @pommecita

“I did it!” You slightly furrow your eyebrows at the text message your boyfriend sent you before clicking onto the link that he sent. It was a 2 minute interview that he did while at one of the premieres for his hunger games movie.

Tom looked insanely good in his tailored suit, exuding confidence as he engages with the interviewer. Cameras flashed around him, capturing the glamour of the event, and you couldn’t help but smile, feeling a sense of pride for your boyfriend.

The interviewer, a charismatic host with an air of familiarity, turns his attention to Tom, eager to delve into the behind-the-scenes of the blockbuster. “Tom, how was the filming process for ‘The Hunger Games’?” She’s asks, a glint of curiosity in her eyes.

Tom smiles, his eyes gleaming with enthusiasm. “Oh, it was fantastic. The whole cast and crew brought so much energy to the project. But what made it truly special was having my family here. They visited during filming, and even my girlfriend, who took some time off uni to be with me. I greatly appreciated that.”

Your heart swells with warmth at his words. Tom, ever the supportive partner, acknowledges your sacrifice and commitment to being by his side during this whirlwind experience.

Your 2 months in Berlin with Tom was a great opportunity to take a break from all your uni work, and of course, spend some much needed time with your boyfriend. The revelation that he has a girlfriend elicits a gasp from the woman interviewing him.

That video goes viral on the internet. With Tom’s fans searching the internet for anything that could lead them to finding out who Tom’s girlfriend is.

With hard digging, fans discover your insta page. Your posts containing photos of your life as a law student at Yale and fans were pleasantly surprised to find never seen before photos of Tom that you’ve posted.

y/n_y/l/n just posted a story!

y/n_y/l/n

Liked by tomblyth and 2,941 others

this months dump!

view all comments

yourfriendsusername: 😍😍

↘️ y/n_y/l/n: ily!

yourfriendsusername: uh oh, ur getting famous…. remember me pls!

↘️ y/n_y/l/n: sorry, who are you 😂

user1: omg so this is Tom’s gf? SHES GORGEOUS

user2: damn she’s hella smart huh?

↘️ user3: DUH SHES IN YALE

user4: eh, she’s mid

↘️ user5: studying at one of the ivy league’s is far from being mid lol 😭

user6: she’s been posting him for so long now, how have we only just found this out 😂

user7: so she’s pretty, she’s smart, and she’s bagged Tom Blyth? Damn girl. Teach us ur ways!

user8: THE LAST PICTURE AWEE

user9: the bouquet behind his back- the way she’s looking at him- my single heart cannot 😭✋

user10: studying in Yale is such a flex oml. And studying law too? Imagine being able to say, yeah my mom’s a lawyers. COULD NEVER BE ME. 😃

~

tomblyth

Liked by y/n_y/l/n, rachelzegler, phoebedynevor, tomblythupdates and 8,307,163 others

yeah my girlfriend is cooler than me.

view all comments

y/n_y/l/n: Alexa, play brooklyn baby by Lana Del Rey 😁

↘️ tomblyth: volume up Alexa!

rachelzegler: y/n’s side eye 🙈

↘️ y/n_y/l/n: 👀👀

↘️ tomblyth: side eyed me the whole damn time

user1: HE FINALLY POSTED HER!

user2: can’t wait for more gf appreciation posts 😆

user3: what’s a uni student doing dating an actor like Tom Blyth?

user4: first pic. sleeping on the road tn.

↘️ y/n_y/l/n: pls don’t 🙏

↘️ user5: AHH SHE REPLIED TO YOU

↘️ user6: UR SO LUCKY TO CALL TOM UR MAN.

↘️ user7: nah, he’s actually my man.

user8: crying. screaming. throwing up.

user9: it’s happening 😭 Tom finally posting about his gf

[maxwell-grant]

There's a trend people have pointed out in superhero stories over the past 20 or so years that is the death of "regular" supporting casts, an increasing absence of un-powered sidekicks or people involved who aren't in the thick of the action or in the hero's secret. Everyone who interacts with superheroes is a couple issues away from becoming one, every story involves a supervillain encounter or several dozen, every hero's gotta have a lunchbox-ready "superhero family" made from these characters, and every side character that doesn't join them is either going to die or become a supervillain.

The defining example people use for this is Spider-Man's supporting cast, with every Spider-Man cast member short of Aunt May and J Jonah Jameson getting some kind of powered upgrade or symbiote, and I'm gonna say Amanda Waller is an excellent case study of how this kind of thing happens, and I think it helps to explain why Amanda Waller has been, Like That, for the past 30 years.

She’s wearing a grey shirt underneath a blue blazer and it’s tucked into a similarly blue skirt that stops at mid calf. She reminds me of the neighbourhood aunties I used to see leaving for church every Sunday morning.

My mom used to say that you are the company you keep. So what kind of person does it take to keep a variety of bruised, battered, and dangerous personalities in check? - Amanda Waller: DC's Most Terrifying Woman

To those of you who haven't read John Ostrander and Kim Yale's Suicide Squad, there once was a time where Amanda Waller was something more than a powerful antagonistic force able to butt heads with the biggest superheroes, and something other than a heartless establishment face out to make superheroes miserable for ill-defined reasons. Structurally speaking, Suicide Squad is a comic about marginal DCU characters forced to deal with actual real life problems, and it's central character is a marginalized person forced to deal with DCU problems and characters. The members of the Squad are a rolling parade of costumed misfits and maniacs assigned to go around the globe to fight and kill and die on dirty missions to deal with dirty laundry and stop war zones from erupting, while Amanda Waller is forced to shuffle around her cadre of D-list supervillains and disgraced superheroes and get into stand-offs with secret spy societies, living nukes, voodoo cartels, and Batman.

Amanda Waller neither looks nor acts like the kind of character that stars in a superhero comic, and she is the central character throughout the 66 issues of the run and we follow her character arc from beginning to end as she's forced to spin plates to accomplish her goals and prevent bad situations from getting worse. She is the most fully realized character in the run and everything rests on her shoulders. We spend a lot of time inside her head, her team, her associates, she is the center holding together an extremely chaotic book with no two characters on the same page. She is, and has to be, an extremely powerful person, someone who stands her ground no matter what, an unbeatable force of will because that is the only way she's going to survive the situations she's in, the only way she can be "The Wall", the kind of person who can repel Batman, command a platoon of monsters, talk her way out of Deadshot's contract, someone who can stare at Darkseid and credibly threaten the President into letting her live.

That's the part that everyone is more or less familiar. But there is, or at least used to be, much more to Amanda Waller than just being The Wall, not in the least because being The Wall is also hampering her effectiveness as well as straight up killing her.

"Amanda's toughness has taken her a long way" "It's taken her as far as it can. But it can't take her no further. It's actually starting to drag her down. I'm scared for my baby sister, rev - scared that the anger in her is congealing into hate." - Suicide Squad #31

We get to know her backstory, her plans, her points of contention with the system, her relationships with people around her, and how deeply she cares about things and people even as she sends them to the meatgrinder. From the start we learn that Waller staffs her team with people she's prone to getting into disagreements with, like Simon LaGrieve and Rick Flag, specifically so they can cover her moral blind spots and pick up the slack in emotional intelligence she's lacking, be the heroes that she can't afford to be. It is unspeakably crucial that the Squad is led by Rick Flag as well as Bronze Tiger, a fallen hero who owes Waller for his recovery who eventually takes Flag's baton. Waller stands up for her team, gets into fights with her superiors when they decide to terminate them, and takes the fall for them when necessary. Waller is a person who does Bad Things - but she is not a Bad Person.

The book in no uncertain terms frames the Suicide Squad's existence as monstrous in a scale Waller doesn't understand until the very end, and it digs deep into the unethical things Waller has to allow for and perpetrate in order to keep it running no matter how many lives it saves, and she spends the first half of the book on a downward spiral. But then there's the 2nd half of the book:

In the first 39 issues, Amanda’s flaws are her undoing. As she pushes away the people she hired to act as a balance, she grasped tighter and tighter to her uncompromised vision of the Suicide Squad despite the constant changes and derailment. Her choices had consequences: the death of Rick Flag, her demotion, employees quitting, and finally, the disbandment of the team.

The last 27 issues have Amanda rising up from the ashes after a year in jail. She’s less in her own way – she communicates, her anger isn’t driving her, she’s more receptive of alternative perspective and recognizes when she’s wrong in real time – but she’s still just as scary.

Waller rebuilds her relationships with the people she drove away, takes a different tack to how the team works, and starts going out into the frontlines with the Squad. She brings Oracle (who actually made her debut in this comic) into the fold, saves her life and plays a big role in Barbara making progress in overcoming her Joker trauma. She genuinely puts in the work to improve as a person and do things a better way than before, even if there is an inescapable immorality to the very existence of the Squad and what they do. That immorality never goes away, and it only further horrifies her when learning how badly her project has gone. In fact, it's that very inescapable immorality that ends her arc.

She learns that the CIA has started using a new Suicide Squad to support a brutal regime in South America, and when faced with the full extent of her complicity in Western imperialism? She decides right then and there to end the Suicide Squad for good after they liberate the population of said regime from said Squad. She is the only person who gives a shit about the country enough to start the assignment for free once she knows about it, force the Squad along, lead the mission in field, and personally (and even gently) usher the villain to his death at the end, to end what began with her.

She does bad things, and she does good things. She cares about people, and she uses people. Her decisions ruin as well as save the world. She spins a million plates to match wills and wits with the strongest, wickedest, most cunning humans and superhumans alike, and she still has superiors to answer to and people close to her she hires to judge her for what she does. She endured racism and misogyny and poverty for decades and rode whatever she could to attain as much power over her own life as someone like her could possibly attain, and to have it, she must be a willing tool of the state and bend the knee to Ronald Reagan, the man she derides for what he did to her community, hating every minute of it.

She lost her family to sexual and racial violence, and now she wrangles a penal battalion comprised of some of the worst people on the planet to inflict violence on her orders. She has saved and redeemed people, and she's haunted by the corpses she's left in her wake. She is oppressed and oppressor, someone who could only escape the ravages of American imperialism by becoming one of it's chief enforcers, and still she rebuilds herself into a better person from it upon confronting and challenging her role in it. She is not a bad person, she is not a good person either, she is just afforded a degree of agency and complexity unpowered characters in superhero books simply don't get.

Okay cool, now what is she up to these days?

That, I guess. That is what a strong but unpowered person who does not allow themselves to be bossed around by superheroes or supervillains looks like now. Everytime there's a call for a military bad guy, Waller gets tagged in to be DC's Henry Gyrich. There was a point where Waller was made to contrast the likes of Sarge Steel and Wade Eiling, someone who butted heads with them because she was a well-meaning person working for and committing evil as often as she attempted to stop it. These days, the most consistent beat with her is that she is the most dangerous person alive and worse than the villains she wrangles into working for her. She is a thing to be overcome, a hypocrite to be exposed, a challenge to the natural order of the universe, and she is too terrific at it to be shuffled off quietly. She is a Bad Person and so everything she says and does is Bad (and thus can be ignored).

Integral to Suicide Squad's structure was the fact that Waller was the center holding everything together, the ultimate third party: spinning plates working with, for and against all of the others so she can bend rules and be bent by them. Bent, but never broken, because The Wall doesn't break, others break first. Waller was a one-of-a-kind character, and that broke her, because beating Sarge Steel and Wade Eiling at their own game means replacing Sarge Steel and Wade Eiling. Waller doesn't look like them, she doesn't look like the superheroes either, and so she can't be one of them. She can't even look like herself a lot of the time, they try to slim her up everytime they think they can get away with it.

Suicide Squad was preoccupied with exploring a perspective from a world outside the superhero worldview, but we no longer have her perspective or that of people around her, we only know her through the superheroes she inherently defies and has had an adversarial relationship against from day one. She is someone with a viewpoint that is charitable to neither superheroes nor institutions, and thus, the universe is increasingly less sympathetic to her, the less utility she has to the grander narrative where everyone has to pick between one of two options. If she wasn't powerful and assertive, she'd be another Leslie Thompkins, another Jiminy Cricket the heroes passively ignore. But because she is powerful and doing morally compromised things without asking Batman's permission, she must have a personal grudge. She must be a government monster. She must attack the superheroes for no reason, no ideology, no motive.

So now she's just The Wall 24/7, the mean icy establishment boot who is strong and clever and cruel and hates superheroes and wants to destroy superheroes and rule the world from the shadows. Everything she does is a fuck-up she refuses to take responsability for, everyone is right to hate and distrust mean old Waller, and now everyone gets to look good by dunking on her. They couldn't make her a superhero, so they made her a generic supervillain instead. And now that she's a bad guy, she no longer has to believe anything, she doesn't really have to mean anything, they don't have to write stories about something other than superheroes and supervillains, and they don't have to let a fat woman of color take up space and screentime they could be giving to Harley Quinn and Slade Wilson instead.

Even by the time of Waller's debut on the tail end of the 80s, her career opportunities were on their way to extinction

Days Of Future Past marks the triumph of the superhero comic that's pretty much concerned with no-one but superheroes. Where Ditko and Lee's Spider-Man featured a single costumed crimefighter in the context of a commonplace existence, the X-Men of the 80s focused on a huge cast of mutants who had little if any lasting involvement in the everyday world.

By the 21st century, the corporate superhero comic would largely - if not exclusively - concern itself with little beyond a large class of superhumans and their fantastical existence. I suspect there's a significant correlation between that and the continuing cultural  peripherilisation of the superhero comic - Colin Smith

Amanda Waller is one of the strongest characters in all of comics, she was as powerful as an non-superpowered character given center stage could possibly be, a perfectly designed character from which an entire corner of a shared universe was developed out of with her as the center making it work, but as the room for civilian casts and unpowered protagonists got smaller and smaller, so did Waller's options. If she was a Spider-Man character and somehow didn't get killed or made into a villain, they would have slimmed her up and given her a symbiote, because you're nobody unless you're web-swinging. Characters didn't look or act like Amanda Waller, and unfortunately, they still don't. It's just instead of making more characters like her, they gutted Waller to be more like the rest. If she couldn't make it, who else even could.

Keep your eyes peeled for this summer when she'll team up with two meaningless robot baddies to burn down the Justice League and I guess the universe for the next reboot or something.

[perrysoup]

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

REMEMBER TO BLOCK OUT FACES!

If you photograph the protests

[tomi4i]

[twosignificantfigures]

whenever i rewatch criminal minds episodes i'm always reminded that emily is actually crazy good at her job

today i was rewatching seven seconds (best cm episode ever btw nothing will ever top seven seconds) and if you look at emily's face when the uncle was explaining that maybe katie was just playing dress-up you can see in her eyes how she put the pieces together in her head that there was something going on and that the uncle may have done something to katie

it's even more obvious when you watch the clip like you see the moment when it clicks for her but she couldn't say anything unless she had proof of it

and i have to admire paget's acting here too because she was just so good at the subtle changes with just her eyes and body language she was just too good in this ep this was HER ep

i still get chills thinking about the scene where she was getting the aunt to confess what she did to katie and goes "you have robbed katie of her childhood, are you going to steal the rest of her life from her as well?" with so much fury and passion my god she is excellent

[perennii]

an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a boop for a boop

[pierppasolini]

L.A. Plays Itself (1972) // dir. Fred Halsted