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tiramisiyu · 3 years

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Thoughts on Xia Yan’s Anniversary/Kiss Date

Not a translation, but rather an unleashing of the many thoughts I had for his date because it made me feel so many emotions and think so many things;;

Wordcount: 2.8k

Date Translation

Preamble

Tears of Themis’ 1st anniversary features one of the most significant in-story events you can view within an otome game - the confession event between MC and respective male leads. The gravity of this confession event, however, is intensified with respect to the ML Xia Yan, as their emotions towards each other is not the only focus of said confession - he must also reveal the heartbreaking truth that his life is likely to end in three years.

In the below sections, I will discuss the significance of various components that comprise Xia Yan’s anniversary date. My primary focuses will be on Xia Yan’s internal struggles, his care for MC, and the nature of the confession, and I aim to ultimately express why this date had such a major effect on me and whoa if you’re still reading this rambling part, I applaud you. I’m really just doing a fancy thoughtdump here.

The Nature of the Confession Event

From the beginning, XY never intended for the confession to be full of pomp and circumstance - and this was out of concern for MC, fearing that she would be too swept up in emotion to make it. Based on how the other guys’ cards look (them being outside and MC’s all dressed up), I assume that there was some ceremony-like aspect to their respective confessions, and I think that this draws a stark contrast to XY’s (who staunchly refused Yang Xiao’s offer to help make his confession just as ceremonial). In XY’s, MC’s not dressed up the way she is for the others, and both have been drenched in rain and are dissolving into tears of sadness as they speak. In addition, their desires are conflicting (rather than a situation where both parties confess and get together, and thus have coinciding interests) - despite what XY has said before, he does not want MC to be with him, while MC wants the exact opposite. It’s not a beautiful or gorgeous scene by design - instead, it’s very raw, very 狼狈 as the two lay bare their own painful emotions, discuss/cry about heavy topics, and show very vulnerable sides to each other, trying to get through to the other person.

Speaking of showing vulnerability, the fact that Xia Yan is so anguished by what he has to say that he has to sit down and cry hits particularly hard because he has always, always tried to put on a strong face in front of MC. Whenever his illness strikes and MC sees it, such as in aquarium date or Neruda poem date, he’ll smile and/or joke about it after. When the two were talking about his posthumous letters during the RRG date, he still had a calm smile on his face. Even when he talked about being shoved into a car trunk to be “disposed of”, he was still calmly smiling. As MC noted, his job has taught him to have extreme control over his emotions, so it’s almost overwhelming, trying to imagine how much sadness pushed him to that point.

Pathetic fallacy also plays a part in increasing the impact that the confession event had. In the days leading up to the last part of the date, storms keep striking suddenly, such that it’s even described as “strange”. Storms are, of course, generally associated with less-pleasant things, such as conflict, anger, depression, difficulty, and so on. The meaning behind why they appeared suddenly or frequently is a little harder to understand, but my assumption for the frequency of the storms (rather than an ongoing storm or gloom) reflects how things could not completely “clear up” (despite uplifts in emotion from time to time) until they confronted each other with their feelings. During the confrontation, not only is the storm still going on, but they’re also harshly drenched in the cold rainwater. It is only after the kiss, after their interests finally coincide, that the storm lifts and the beautiful starry sky casts its light on Xia Yan, who was holding the majority of the conflict/sadness/depression between the two of them. (This is also highlighted in how MC notes that Xia Yan feels slightly cold (during the kiss), and she tries to transfer her warmth over to him, trying to alleviate that heavy emotion that’s wrapped itself around him.)

The Location

The attic of their old home remains an important location for these two, and I pretty much can’t think of a better choice to set the confession. It contains their childhood memories, and it also came into play during Xia Yan’s first birthday after his return (i.e. the idea of continuing to make memories there). It’s also interesting to note that Xia Yan, from his rational mindset, did not intend to see MC… yet he still came to this place - a place that was equally meaningful to both of them, and a place where he’s likely to get lost in emotion. He may be restraining his emotions for MC’s good, yet they still show in small places. (At least, there doesn’t seem to be any logical reason for him to be there, since he wasn’t setting anything up there…)

The Humanizing and Internal Conflict of Xia Yan

I call it “humanizing” because I’ve done some commenting before on how Xia Yan has felt a little superhuman - so many skills everywhere, and rarely a moment of weakness. Now, this date really drives home that he is just human too, with the harsh reality of imminent death hanging over him (especially since we also learn a few more concrete details on exactly what his illness is). This point is brought into attention when he talks about how he’s neither able to be as brave as Schumann (who acted based on emotion) nor as silently strong as Brahms (who acted based on reason). He’s pulled in so many directions for all the things he wants - a desire to stay by MC’s side and do so much with her, whether as family or as something more, versus his rational mindset that tells him to not see her at all, to disappear from her life after, or to push her away even after her confession. There was also his “rationally” created plan in which he would give her the letter and let her decide, yet he still tries to convince her to not be with him.

The Schumann/Brahms comparison shows how he keeps getting pulled back and forth between reason and emotion. He reveals his feelings to MC (Schumann), but wants her to make the optimal decision, which he believes is to not be with him (Brahms). He then kisses her after hearing her conviction (Schumann) and then gives her the gift that’s linked to Brahms. In realizing that he’s not able to stick to either path, he calls himself a coward - but he doesn’t need to be like either person. As MC says, his restraint is a part of his own background, and his emotional wavering is because of his care for MC - all in all, his motivations are because he is Xia Yan, not Schumann or Brahms.

Personal Story Chapter 2 Parallels

In Xia Yan’s personal chapter 2, Yang Xiao sets up the story of 零/Zero and 玛丽薇莎/Marivisa to mirror MC and Xia Yan (respectively). The mention of what will bring Zero and MC happiness is starkly similar in these two situations:

⊳ Personal Ch.2-9

Xia Yan: 因为...这样，零会更幸福... 她不是在牺牲，她只是用自己的方式让零能幸福。Because this way, Zero would be happier… She wasn’t sacrificing herself. She was only using her own methods to make Zero happy.

MC: 但零的幸福就是她啊。But Zero’s happiness is her.

Xia Yan: 她已经无法给零幸福了。 It’s already impossible for her to give Zero happiness.

⊳ Date

Xia Yan: 如果你选择别的男人。。。只要他能给你幸福。我只会带给你不幸，我没有时间了。。。If you choose another man… As long as he can make you happy. All I can bring you is unhappiness. I don’t have much time left…

MC: 你怎么可能带给我不幸，你怎么可能做不到给我幸福。你在我身边，你的存在本身，就是我的幸福。How is it possible that you can only bring me unhappiness? How is it impossible for you to bring me happiness? You being by my side – your very existence – is my happiness.

Yes, the Zero/Marivisa story was intentionally made to parallel these two, so it might feel moot to compare them like this. However, I still really appreciated that they brought this discussion of what brings MC/Zero happiness back, especially since XY’s chapter 2 was very major in developing his character. Back then, MC is vehement in that Zero would have been happier spending all the time he could with Marivisa, as well as even having the choice to spend that time with her. I think that this part was instrumental in Xia Yan eventually deciding to tell her the truth and letting her make her own decision (as he explicitly stated to Yang Xiao in part 1 of the date). However, he still wasn’t fully convinced by what MC said back in chapter 2, so we satisfyingly see this discussion of happiness come full circle by the end of this date, when Xia Yan finally trusts MC to make the best decision for herself.

Xia Yan’s Considerateness

Xia Yan’s enduring consideration for MC displays itself in nearly every single action within this date.

The flashback, when he thinks about MC potentially having to go through what the widow is now experiencing, and how his own happiness for three years isn’t worth that

His conviction to give her the right to decide in this matter that involves both of them, because he can’t be the one to decide everything

He insisted on not making it a romantic event, because he wants MC to make the best decision without having a mind clouded by emotion. He’s also made peace with the idea of not being with MC, for the sake of her long-term happiness. All he wants is for her to know the truth of his feelings and illness.

His decision to still make MC a gift to retain some aspect of the romance in the confession (but he only gives the gift after MC has made her decision, again to ensure that her mind isn’t clouded). I think the concept of the gift is particularly beautiful - the little, happy holograms of them inside the glass, as if ensuring that he will always be by her side in some way; the music that brings back their childhood memories and alludes to an enduring, quiet, and protecting love that puts the recipient first (i.e. Brahms to Clara); and the rainbow, which has its childhood memories and treasure implications that are already mentioned in the date, but it also reminded me of the miraculous double rainbow in his Lost Gold date. That double rainbow was the trigger for Xia Yan to proactively seek out a future with MC, when he took the initiative to ask MC if she could be with him to seek out more miracles. Overall, there are a lot of beautiful memories and implications wrapped up in that music box/snowglobe.

The little comical segment where he worries about the optimal time to deliver the letter, worrying about MC’s sleep or if she’ll be able to eat well.

His stress over what he should’ve done after the letter was delivered, and how he immediately answered MC’s call out of pure worry, despite being so resolute about not answering her calls that he’d turned on airplane mode before.

Their ensuing discussion in part 3 is just full of Xia Yan’s consideration for MC at its peak -

Rather than being ecstatic about MC’s confession, his first instinct is to tell her to take a few days to think about it logically. (But really, emotions aren’t logical to begin with, so it’s not like MC would’ve stopped liking you after mulling it over for a few days, haha)

His immediate apology after yelling that he has to mention his death

His worry about how MC will cope after he’s gone, going so far as to saying that she would be better off with another man

I think that this particular (above) line got a particularly visceral reaction from Xia Yan fans, including myself. Because like MC, our initial thoughts fell along the lines of “How could I ever choose someone else when the only person I like is you? There’s just no way someone else could make me happier…”. Another reaction that I’ve seen among Xia Yan fans (yep, including myself) is how we originally viewed the story in third-person, seeing “MC” in the story, but this date (and this particular scene, where MC says nearly everything that I myself would want to say) dragged us into a first-person position.

The heartbreaking scene where Xia Yan cries from being unable to give MC the happiness that he wants to give her (or so he thinks).

He’s just so painfully selfless. I also really like the line during the kiss where MC tries to transmit her warmth to him, trying to balance things out between them and have him feel better, when he had already written himself off by thinking that his happiness is better off sacrificed for hers.

Jin Xian’s Voice Acting

Jin Xian’s voice acting deserves a whole section to itself, because I think that he did an amazing job of portraying the intense emotions Xia Yan feels during the date. Just going to list some lines that really hit hard - both because of the content, and because of the voice acting that really considered how Xia Yan would be feeling then.

我可以去追她，我甚至可以和她结婚。我可以把最后的三年过得很好，过的毫无遗憾，但是然后呢？她一个人要怎么办。。。谁陪她走出来，谁来照顾她。。。(“I could pursue her. I could even marry her. I could live my last three years happily, without the slightest of regrets. But what about after? How will she cope on her own… Who will be with her as she handles this? Who will take care of her…”) The ups and downs of this section’s voicing really hit hard.

The gentleness with which he speaks about what he plans to tell MC, especially the line 她从来都是这样 (“She’s always been like that.”)

He’s so cute in Part 2!! The tone’s a lot happier and relaxed and it’s really nice to see and hear.

In part 3, the vehemence with which he talks about how the risks of MC’s work aren’t comparable to his established time limit, which then softens into something sadder when he talks about how Yang Xiao’s efforts haven’t extended his time by much.

The intensity when he says 我必须说 ! (“I have to say it!”) (when MC reacts to him using the word “death”), and how he immediately softens his tone after. But then his voice starts to rise again as he worries for how MC will bear his death… and then he takes a break to calm down, and then makes the suggestion of MC finding another man with a near-inflectionless tone that gradually slips into a whisper

His whispering voice makes the impact of 我在乎。。。！(I care…!) hit even harder because it’s suddenly loud, and you can clearly hear the tears in his voice. Once again, he takes a breath to calm himself down and quiet his voice. But even as he keeps talking in a voice that descends into a whisper again, you can tell that he’s still on the verge of crying…

Also the 我也。。。好喜欢，最喜欢你. (I also… like you. I like you the most) line left me screaming with how it was whispered but really strong and adamant-sounding aaaaa

Anyways I could list more but at that point I might as well list Jin Xian’s entire script lmao. He did such a good job!!!!!!

Sound Effects

I’m laughing at myself for including this section - if you turn off the music that accompanies Xia Yan’s card, you’ll… hear some very interesting sound effects [狗头]

They’ve got to make the most of their limited time together, after all, and this is the only date out of the set of four that’s indoors… it makes sense…

Other Thoughts

Two kisses!!

What sort of treatment would leave Xia Yan infected with drugs with prohibited components? What were they even trying to do?

The date was short relative to the other, super-long Themis dates, but I’m personally alright with that because it places focus on the confession itself. It hit all the points that I personally was expecting for Xia Yan’s confession, including his past struggles with the idea of staying with MC, his confession about both his feelings and his illness, and how resolute MC is about staying with him vs. how hard he tries to get her to understand the implications of being him, considering that he doesn’t have much time left.

I think now’s a good time for the two of them to get married if they’re well aware that Xia Yan’s time is limited, so Xia Yan, where’s the ruby ring?

I wonder what implications this will have on the main story - e.g. will the rest of NXX find out about Xia Yan’s illness in Chapter 7.2? Or will they never know? Actually, I wonder if they’ll have MC be aware of his illness in the main story because… that implies his confession happened, which might anger fans of the other boys.

Conclusion

I love Xia Yan and I love this date.

#tears of themis #xia yan #luke pearce #rambles #this whole thing is kinda messy so kudos if you made it through

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sometimesiwrite · 3 years

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Essi Daven: Character Reference

Aside from my own Headcanons and Theories concerning Essi Daven, I wanted to compile a character reference sheet for those of you who may want to write her or think about her independently from my own creative perspectives. This is, of course, still subjective, but I’ve linked my conclusions directly back to the source text and kept strictly to canon information for this. There is still conjecture, but that is largely where the role of fanfiction steps in. I hope you enjoy. Physicality

Right away, we see Essi as a blonde-haired, fine-featured, petite young woman. Nothing remarkable or extraordinary about her appearance aside from her eyes. As we come to know her more and more, it’s her behaviour and physical mannerisms rather than her appearance that make her more alluring as a side character. Throughout this story, we see her “smile oddly”, “snear”, and on more than one occasion, she’s seen “defiantly” tossing her head (usually accompanied by blowing her lock out of her face).

On more than one occasion, she’s seen drawing her head to her shoulders. To me, this is not shyness or desire to hide. It is a turtling at times if she’s feeling particularly vulnerable or overwhelmed, but it’s also a very casual pose. On the terrace during the banquet, Geralt finds her leaning on her elbows with her shoulders hunched up looking at the water. She’s capable of poise and all the social graces required of a banquet, but when she has time to herself, she slouches, reverts to what’s comfortable, is a dork when she’s in her own head. Yet she “daintily” steps onto the pier to join Geralt the following morning. Based on this information, I put to you that she is someone whose eccentricity cannot be fully tamed by “refinement”.

We see more evidence of this in her handling of her “birthday present”:

At first, her reaction to the stinky mollusk is, “Yuk!” and she responds in a “typically dainty” way, holding the shell at arm’s length. That is, until she's given permission to like the shell. No longer socially “required” to find the smelly slimy ocean thing disgusting, Essi lets her more relaxed side out, pulling a knife from her belt (!), and dumping the insides out the window with the practical announcement that “the cats can eat it.” Her ability to turn 180° from “Ewwww” to “Oh, here, let me just shuck this with my casual waist-knife and chuck it out the window” makes for a high likelihood that she wasn’t that grossed out to begin with, but was rather performing societal expectations.

This brings us to:

Personality

We’ve already touched on this a little, but I want to focus now on Essi’s personality, which is rather complex. One of the most general details about her personality, however, is in her speaking: she’s direct. Oftentimes blunt. Even if she’s feeling unsure, she’s not unsure of her words. She often says or asks things seemingly out of the blue, and doesn’t shy away from Depth in her conversation. Rather, it seems to be her comfort-zone, since she defaults to asking Geralt what he associates with the sea rather than making smalltalk.

That last statement, that she’s neither calm nor composed, to me says a lot. She speaks what she feels, often more easily than what she thinks. And I suspect that she often experiences her thoughts as feelings—something that comes from her gut rather than her head which is reserved for biting wit and incisive observation.

Essi knows people. Knows them well enough to push their buttons, either jokingly or politically. She’s not afraid of authority, and even though her emotions fill her entirely—to the point her hands will shake—they do not render her helpless to them; rather, it seems, her emotions fuel her rhetorical capacity. Being a bard, this makes sense since the language of song and poetry are driven by the dialogue between emotion and intellect.

Moreover, she speaks what she feels to be the truth of her experience, whether it’s her experience of someone else, or her experience of herself. What she believes to be true (however subjectively) she speaks. And if she doesn’t know something, she asks and bluntly:

The fact that she “blanches” yet doesn’t stumble over her words here tells me she’s an excellent performer, and reinforces my previous comment that while her emotions fill her, they don’t rule over her. And yet, we also know she is impulsive and impetuous from her conversation with Geralt on the terrace:

In this exchange, we see one of Essi’s most fascinating self-contradictions at play. She claims not to know how to control herself, says she is impetuous, reactive (the next morning she bluntly admits to being “nosey” and owns it). And yet her ability to recognize and acknowledge her lack of self-control indicates a depth and a level of self-awareness that reinforces my previous statement that she experiences life as a series of feelings—impulses, emotions, “vibes”—more than what we would categorize as “thoughts”. Essi doesn’t have an internal monologue; she has an external monologue of whatever internal experiences make their way into a verbal headspace. She’s not one to prattle on, talk for the sake of talking (like some Other Bards we know) because even though she has a lot going on internally, only some of it will ever make its way into words.

As demure, dainty, and fragile as Essi seems to be, she also has, as Dandelion puts it, “a dark side”.

Exactly what that is, we never really learn, but we get a glimpse of it from Geralt’s perspective at the banquet:

What did she say? While we may not be meant to ever know the answer, we know that a) Essi was smug about it; and b) whatever it was was cutting and more than likely sexually demoralizing in nature.

Which brings us to…

Sexuality and Romance

There are several instances throughout A Little Sacrifice that indicate a level of sexual maturity and confidence in Essi that contrast interestingly with her emotional naivety (which I’ll get to in a moment).

It’s possible, in this instance, that Essi simply doesn’t not abide by the same “rules” about physical boundaries and various social meanings behind physical touch. This moment is certainly not enough to draw any conclusions one way or another. However, the description of her kiss with Geralt on the terrace is less ambiguous in this way, more ambiguous in another.

I first want to fully acknowledge that this scene is a mess of different signals, and I believe the lack of further insight on the part of the author is not intriguing, but lazy. But I digress. She kisses him eagerly and expertly, which suggests that she, mechanically at least, knows what she’s doing with her face and someone else’s. The fact that she distances the rest of her body from Geralt suggests a few things: a) she wants to kiss Geralt but doesn’t know whether he feels the same way, so doesn’t want to commit fully; b) she knows that Geralt doesn’t know why he’s kissing her, and so is trying to distance herself from him so that neither of them makes a mistake; c) she’s caught off-guard and doesn’t mind having a good smooch but doesn’t want him to get the wrong idea about her wanting anything else; d) all of the above.

I would include the possibility that she feels threatened by him and is merely going through the motions, but there’s enough evidence before and after to refute that as a forefront possibility. That’s not to say it isn’t in the background, but the use of “eagerly” would suggest that she’s enthusiastic about a little lip action. We do know that she’s not “looking for a man for the night” from the end of their conversation before going back inside.

I have a few headcanons about Essi’s sexuality and I shuffle back and forth between them depending on the day. There’s enough evidence to support a halfhearted claim that Essi is a virgin (which doesn’t inherently negate the evidence for sexual confidence), but I lean more toward the notion that Essi is sexually experienced (thought likely far less than Dandelion), picky (hence the red-eared young man at the banquet), and romantically inexperienced. There is, I will say, a level of modesty, vulnerability, and hesitation in her interactions with Geralt that lead me to believe she has had minimal directly-sexual encounters.

Is it projecting to say she reminds me a lot of myself in my early-20s? Yes. But to say this character resonates very strongly with my personal experiences, I think, gives some character insight where information and road signs are lacking from the author. And I will say, it is very in-keeping with Essi’s ongoing self-contradictions to be both bawdy and sexually inexperienced. Her canon story arc, unfortunately, doesn’t allow us to imagine her a few years older, but the idea of a more confident, self-assured Essi at 23/24 makes me very happy.

Now, I’m not going to slog through the dialogue disaster that is Essi’s emotional outpouring to Geralt, but suffice it to say, it’s clear she’s never been infatuated/in love before, though she is clearly a romantic. She hates the feeling of being in love, hates that it turns her needy, hates the way it makes her skin crawl and her stomach churn. But there’s something appealing about it as well, and I think there’s a part of her that is desperate to make love. Regardless of whether or not she’s sexually active, to me it’s clear that she wants an emotional-physical connection of some kind; she seeks out comfort from Geralt, seeks out affection, tenderness, but she is also seeking an emotional return—the little sacrifice that Geralt cannot find within himself to give. If she’s had bedmates in the past, it would be remiss to call them lovers.

That’s it, folks! That’s all I’ve got for the time being. As always, questions and observations are welcome (as well as disagreements as long as you’re willing to do it nice and polite like).

#Essi Daven #Character reference #canon reference #tw canon discussion #character analysis #canon criticism #A Little Sacrifice #The witcher #The Sword of Destiny

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biglittlesshop · 3 years

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has a very clear memory of christopher simultaneously peeing while declaiming in that voice which no one could ever keep from imitating after fifteen minutes with him before the roman came to rye or out to severn strode the rolling english drunkard made the rolling english road a reeling road a rolling road that rambled round the shire and after him the parson ran the sexton and the squire I leave it to the reader to imagine that voice in the tiled acoustics of a hollywood bathroom we met a second time in munich where the last unicorn was being dubbed into german most of my memories of that time and of chris lee have to do with books and authors he had known both j r r tolkien and a writer who mattered more to me t h white we had a long ongoing argument in munich about a chapter of the sword in the stone that appears in the english edition of the book but not in the american one he turned out to be right he usually was he never failed to mention the last unicorn as one of his very favorite books and as one of the movies he was most proud of having made indeed he left my whopperjawed as mark twain would have put it when we were being interviewed together on austrian television and he announced oh yes I simply couldn’t resist a chance to play king haggard one more time even in another language after all and he looked straight into the camera it’s the closest they’ll ever let me get to playing king lear the camera swung toward me to catch my stunned reaction and chris looked across the studio at me and winked but my most vivid memory chilling as it remains to this day has to do with the day that I and michael chase walker associate producer of the last unicorn and the one who really got the film made in the first place somehow found our way out to dachau I can’t now recall how we managed it considering that neither one of us spoke german and that you had to take both a subway and a bus to get there from the hotel where the crew were staying but we got there somehow and spent a good half of the day roaming with other tourists around a legendary concentration camp peering blindly into the huge crematoriums but staring with equal horror and fascination at the endless rows of filing cabinets containing every record of every human being who was ever imprisoned starved gassed or simply worked to death in this place michael and I grew quieter and quieter that afternoon until by the time we started back to munich we weren’t speaking at all I think we both felt that we might say anything in words again the first person we met in the hotel lobby was christopher he took one look at us and announced you’ve been to dachau we nodded without answering chris strode toward us looked all the way down from his six foot five inch altitude lowered his voice and inquired still smells doesn’t it with the end of world war ii christopher as a member of the special forces and whose five or six languages included fluent german had been assigned to hunt down and interrogate nazi war crminals and had been present at the liberation of dachau and yes the smell of death had undoubtedly faded somewhat since 1945 but it was still as real as michael and me wandering dazedly between the ovens and the filing system we just didn’t know what it was but christopher did and i’d know it again I never saw him again after munich though we spoke on the telephone a few times on the last occasion when I had called to wish him a happy 90th birthday I remember him assuring me that if by the time you come to make your live action version of your movie I have passed on do not let it concern you I have risen from the dead several times I know how it’s done he worked almost to the last as the real artists of every kind do they work to be working because that’s what they do and they die when they stop I always regarded him as the last of the great 19th century actors that bravura larger than life style went with him no modern rada trained performer would ever attempt it today nor should they it would inevitably come out parody however earnestly meant yet there was always more to christopher lee as an actor than dracula or the mummy or saruman or sherlock holmes for that matter though he was very proud of having played not only both holmes and watson but sherlock’s brother mycroft as well lord summerisle of the original the wicker man probably his favorite of his own movies is most likely closer to chris’s dark benignity than any other role he ever inhabited I believe this because lord summerisle sings a surprising amount in that movie and chris passionately loved singing if there is any such thing as an afterlife or reincarnation I truly hope no believe that christopher lee will return as a wagnerian opera singer if he hadn’t been considered too old in his 30s to be accepted for formal vocal training he might have been in his own eyes at least a happier more fulfilled man but we would have been deeply poorer for it and never have known See Other related products: Mimi Witch Broom Halloween T-Shirt

#Great #Dane #5 #Things #You #Should #Know #About #This #Woman

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lovemesomesurveys · 4 years

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800 questions survey part 10

451) How many sms/txt messages do you receive on average a day? I don’t receive a lot of texts and certainly not everyday. I get less than a handful on a given day. They’re generally just quick texts between my parents or brother and I, not ongoing conversations.

452) How long did you last phone call last? About 10 minutes.

453) Do you go to car boot sales? No. What’s a “car boot” sale?

454) If you saw someone drop a £10 note, would you claim it for your own or try to return it to them? If I saw someone drop it then I’d definitely return it to them.

455) Have you ever helped someone cross the road? No.

456) Have you ever been horse riding? I’ve been led around by an adult in a circle on the back of a pony. <<< Yeah, that’s the extent of it for me as well.

457) Have you ever walked a tightrope? No.

458) Have you ever demolished a wall or building? No.

459) If you and a friend both wanted the same thing would you let the friend get it first? What is it that we both want?

460) Have you ever argued over who should pay for something? Not argued, but went back and forth for a bit with someone about it.

461) Do you have any family heirlooms? No.

462) Are you related or distantly related to anyone famous? Not that I know of.

463) What’s your favorite ocean? I don’t have favorite one.

464) Do you correct peoples mistakes? Not usually, but it depends.

465) Have you ever helped out an injured animal? No.

466) Do you throw bread for the ducks? I did that as a kid. I know now it’s not good to do that, though.

467) Do you think babies are little bundles of joy or smelly noisy things? I think they can be an even balance of both, depending on when you’re lucky enough to associate with them. <<< lol true.

468) Do you give money to buskers? Had to Google, “buskers”, but yes I have before. If whoever is taking this also isn’t familiar with the word, it’s a street performer.

469) Have you ever tossed your own pancake? No. I’ve never made pancakes.

470) Are you any good at egg and spoon races? I don’t think I’ve participated in that before. I’ve done other relay races in elementary school, but I don’t think that was one of them.

471) Are you allergic to anything? Tangerines.

472) Are you ticklish? Just my neck.

473) Do you prefer tea, coffee or cocoa? Coffee, duh.

474) Do you like Turkish Delight? I’ve never had it, I didn’t even know what it was until now, but after a quick Google search it doesn’t sound like something I’d like.

475) Do you buy people presents to bring back when you go on holiday? Yeah, sometimes.

476) Are you tired of answering questions yet? No. I haven’t been doing this survey all at once, just like 2 parts a day.

477) Have you ever been wheelbarrow racing? Like when someone holds your legs as handles and you use your hands to move? Yes.

478) Do you ever forward or reply to chain mails? I ignored most of those except for the ones that said something about someone I love dying if I didn’t forward. I don’t believe in those things, but for some reason I couldn’t ignore those kind.

479) Do you often have a tune in your head you can’t name? I usually know what the song is.

480) Has anyone ever approached you thinking you were someone else? Yeah, it’s happened a few times.

481) Have you ever been approached by someone who knew you but you couldn’t remember them for the life of you? I’m pretty good with remembering people.

482) What do you do to keep fit? Nothing.

483) Are you the sort to step in and try to break up a fight? No. I wouldn’t be of any use or help in that kind of situation.

484) Have you ever been in a fight? No.

485) Have you ever started a rumor? No.

486) Have you ever heard any outstanding rumors about yourself? No.

487) Have you ever been in or had a food fight? Nope.

488) When it’s your birthday do you always wear an age badge? Uh, no. I never wear an age badge.

489) Have you ever starred in an amateur or professional video? I did some for school projects and stuff I made with friends for fun, but no definitely not anything professional.

490) If you were comfortably rich would you work hard for more or rest on your laurels? I honestly think I wouldn’t continue working.

491) Have you ever been in a position of authority? Just when watching my brother and cousins when they were kids.

492) Have you ever been caught in a compromising position? even despite a valid explanation? No.

493) Have you ever tried to make your own alcohol? No.

494) If you were ruler of your own country what would you call it? Yikes. I definitely don’t want to be a ruler of any kind.

495) And what title would you give yourself?

496) If you invented a monster what would you call it? I don’t know.

497) And what features would it have?

498) Have you ever had a dream you chased only to be let down when you achieved it? Kind of.

499) Is there anything about the opposite sex you just don’t understand or comprehend? There’s a lot of things I don’t understand about people in general. <--, this 100%. <<<<

500) Who was your favorite teacher at school and why? My 4th and then later 8th grade teacher, Mr. M. He was such a cool teacher who genuinely cared about his students and their education. He wanted you to succeed. He made learning fun and interesting. Everyone loved him.

#personal #text #survey #surveys #800 questions #451-500

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reminiscences · 4 years

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another attempt at blogging

i started this tumblr a couple years ago at the same time kate did. i can’t remember why—i’m sure tumblr was in the news again for some reason. i guess it was before the great porn purge. i was talking about blogging again this week with my friend daniel, and i woke up this morning and he had sent me a blog he wrote on a new tumblr account early in the morning, so to continue my regression to the early 2010s, i too have rebooted tumblr, given it an era-appropriate name, and decided to give it another go.

the problem with having a newsletter is that i don’t think anyone wants to hear from me in their inbox daily, so i’ve become very precious about the things i write there. it feels like it has to really matter. i like blogs because they’re disposable and can be dumb and not your best writing. how many two-graf tumblr posts did i write in 2011 that were just thoughts i idly had during a statistics lecture? anyway, here’s the first blog, they won’t all be this long probably.

When I think about eventually looking back at this year I think about what I want to remember from it. I will remember the first week of March. I’ll remember the last birthday party I attended in person at Branch Ofc, a perfectly serviceable Crown Heights bar that was very full of people. I’ll think about that night and how I showed up to the party with a Ziplock full of homemade salted chocolate chip cookies in my purse, how I shared them with a table where the birthday-haver and their friends sat. Breathing in the same air as the four dozen other people crammed into the bar. I can’t imagine it now. I like Branch Ofc because it is unpretentious without pretending to be a dive, unlike Sharlene’s, which tries too hard to mimic the aesthetic trappings of an authentic dive bar but is really just a normal Park Slope bar. Branch Ofc is just a bar where you can buy drinks, and it was an eight-minute walk from my old apartment. It used to be a bar with a photobooth and Big Buck Hunter but I think both of those are gone now.

For a few days in March, it felt like people were preparing for a snow day. Everyone was slightly more on edge than giddy—but only slightly. “WFH but make it a coffeeshop” I saw on someone’s Instagram story, a selfie with four of their friends coworking somewhere in Bushwick, completely nullifying the point of a work-from-home edict. I ran into my friend Maddie at the renovated Key Food on Nostrand the next week. Maddie, her roommate and I were in the aisle with the Pop Tarts and the Oreos. “I feel like I should get those?” we asked each other, pointing at junk food. I wasn’t wearing a mask or gloves; nobody was. Some guy wearing a Cornell University Sigma Chi tshirt walked by us with the largest bag of dried beans I’ve ever seen in my life slung over his shoulder. That was a man who had never soaked dried beans in his life. I wonder if he ever ate the beans. We were a bunch of idiot 20-somethings blindly grabbing for cans of soup and Fritos for the end of the world. What were any of us doing there? Why was it imperative that day that I make and freeze a lasagna? Maddie’s roommate had fresh lasagna noodles from Eataly she wasn’t going to use before she left for her parents’ house, and she said I could have those. She brought them over for me and I idly wondered if you could get Coronavirus from someone else’s fresh pasta noodles or if the heat of the oven would kill the germs. I made my lasagna.

I’ll think about how March-to-May is just one long gray blurry streak in my head. I baked, I got into running, I said “running with a mask? No thank you, no more running for me,” I got a job, I felt bad about getting a job when everyone I knew in journalism was getting laid off. I did a lot of Zoom Zumba. At first I slept terribly, and then I started sleeping too much, and then I stopped sleeping again at some point during that stretch. There was a novelty to suddenly being inside all the time that made it feel like an excuse to get “really into martinis.” I got really into martinis. Then I stopped drinking for a couple months. Remember “Zoom happy hours”?

The thing I use most as a means of setting apart different eras in my head is the music I used as a soundtrack at the time. I rang in the 2014 new year in my cute apartment on Westcott Street in Syracuse with my college boyfriend, drunk and blaring Cold Cave, before we walked down the street to Alto Cinco and got Mexican food and passed out. It was my senior year and I only had a few more months of living like this and I loved the small life I’d built for myself there. Of course, it couldn’t stay. When we broke up a year and a half later after he moved to New York, where I had been living for most of a year, I walked around the neighborhood near the Myrtle-Wyckoff stop, close to where we were living together, listening to Mitski’s 2014 album Bury Me At Makeout Creek. I sat in Maria Hernandez Park and watched a bunch of kids play Red Rover. I didn’t especially want to go home because I hadn’t taken an escape route into account when we broke up and somehow timed it out so that things ended after the first of the month, leaving me with three-and-a-half weeks of continuing to share an apartment with someone whose heart I had just broken. In retrospect it’s clear to me that I had just outgrown a relationship with someone five years older than me who hadn’t grown up at all, but I hear that Mitski album now and all I think about are the cold early April days of 2015 when no place and no person felt like home. There’s a line in First Love/Late Spring, by Mitski, where she sings “胸がはち切れそうで,” which translates to something like “My chest is about to burst (with grief).” My advice to recent college graduates moving to New York is to simply not do anything the way I did it.

So when I think about 2020, I do not want to associate any music I previously had fond memories of with this year. This is unfortunate because every musician I like who produces sad music has nothing but time on their hands now and they’ve all come out with new songs and albums. My recently played selections on Spotify look like a cry for help: Phoebe Bridgers, Bright Eyes, even Tigers Jaw.

On Saturday I couldn’t sleep in. I woke up at 5:30 and watched the sun appear through my bedroom windows. I kept rolling over, trying to sleep again, but it was futile. Eventually I got up and got dressed, and left my apartment on foot. The walk into lower Manhattan is a few miles from my new place in Fort Greene. I walked west on Fulton, and then down Flatbush. It would have saved me ten minutes to take the Manhattan Bridge, but I’ve always regarded it as the ugliest of the bridges to cross on foot or on bike—last fall, I would walk home from Ben’s apartment over the Manhattan Bridge, and it was just so grey. You get an okay view of Dumbo, I guess, on the walk east, but it isn’t much to look at. When I got back to the Brooklyn side on those walks, I’d get on the A at High Street and take it back to Nostrand instead of walking the last couple miles.

So I chose the Brooklyn Bridge this time. It was as busy as you’d expect it to be in a non-pandemic event. Instagram boyfriends took pictures of their girlfriends, who took off their masks for a few seconds for the right shot. I saw a couple taking engagement pictures in front of the lower Manhattan skyline. It felt so normal, pedestrians and bicyclists squeezing past each other at the narrow points.

I was listening to Saint Cloud, the Waxahatchee album that came out a few months ago, turning it over and over in my brain like a rock you pick up at the beach and end up carrying with you on a long walk. The album, outwardly, has this gauzy blue-sky Americana vibe but when you listen to the lyrics of some of the songs it feels like peeling back layers of skin until you hit a raw nerve ending. Every song feels like a eulogy for this year. “You might mourn all that you wasted/That’s just part of the haul,” Katie Crutchfield sings on Ruby Falls. I got to the title track, which closes out the album, as I ascended the bridge. When you get baaaack on the M train, watch the cityyyyyy mutaaaaaaate, she sings. I guess she’s singing about New York. Is there another M train somewhere? I don’t know. I’m going to think about this stupid year whenever I listen to this album, I thought.

I got off the bridge at City Hall, surveyed the ongoing occupation movement there and the literal dozens of cops that had seemingly been deployed to stand there and, at best, do nothing. I walked down Centre Street, eventually winding through the little park by Baxter Street where two adults were playing ping pong, which felt like a socially distanced sport, all things considered. I walked down all those side streets in Chinatown as the sun struggled to break through the oppressive clouds. I walked by Nom Wah, past the salon Polly taught me will give you a very good $12 blowout, past that annoying bar where the bartenders are dressed like scientists, past the place where Kate and I got our auras read on her birthday in January, and ended up at Deluxe Green Bo. I ordered my spicy wontons in peanut sauce and ate them right there, the hot plastic container burning my knees as I sat on the sidewalk.

Afterwards I walked by all my favorite places—the skatepark under the bridge, Cervo’s, Beverly’s (RIP), Little Canal, Jajaja, the Hawa Smoothie near the East Broadway F. The skaters were hanging out in Dimes Square. Everything had changed but standing outside Kiki’s, it felt for a second like almost nothing had. It was almost a normal Saturday on Canal Street. The sky stayed electric blue until I got back to Brooklyn.

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macgyvermedical · 5 years

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Top 10 Public Health Triumphs of the 20th Century (in the USA)

Have you ever gotten stuck in an elevator with me? Because let me tell you, it would be a good time. We would talk about all kinds of fun stuff, like this top 10 list of awesome public health things.

A lot of people think of “Public Health” as a new field, but its been around for a long while, and it actually has a lot of power when it comes to law and people’s behaviors. This list was compiled by UC Berkley based on information from the CDC and Johns Hopkins, and is pretty interesting. I even put pictures in to keep it lively!

Promise.

1. Vaccine (and Vaccine Mandates)

Even if you personally have never been vaccinated, there’s a good chance a vaccine has saved your life. There are currently 17 vaccine-preventable diseases that are targeted by US vaccination policy. Studies say that every year, 42,000 people are born (annual cohort) who won’t die of vaccine-preventable illness. And that’s not even looking at the 20 million cases of illness that straight up won’t occur in that same annual birth cohort because of vaccines. Check out this handy before-and-after chart from the Association for Ohio Health Commissioners:

For those of you more monetarily-minded, the use of vaccines saves each annual cohort $14 billion in direct healthcare costs, and $69 billion in lost work and other societal costs.

2. Motor Vehicle Safety

Cars and other motor vehicles have been a massive technological advancement in the last century. Unfortunately, crashing those motor vehicles into each other also causes a lot of death.

But don’t fret! Even though we travel more than 10 times the number of total miles yearly in motor vehicles that our 1920′s counterparts did, we’ve seen a dramatic decrease in death rate. In 1925, for example, 18 people would die per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT). In 1997, that number was down to 1.7 people per 100 mil VMT.

How did we do this? Those fuddy-duddies over at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration figured out they could use epidemiology to track causes of traffic death, and came up with some cool interventions. These included things we take for granted today, including speed limits, road improvements (reflectors, breakaway signs, etc..), DUI laws, and vehicle improvements (seatbelts, airbags, head rests, etc...).

3. Workplace Safety

In 1913, 67 workers out of 100,000 died in workplace accidents. By 1997, that had dropped to only 4 per 100,000. While some of this is simply that people moved to less dangerous work (heart disease from sitting at a desk for 30 years is not counted), some really does have to do with increased safety measures on the job site. Some workplaces are inherently dangerous- Loggers, fisherpeople, and aircraft pilots among the most likely to die today as a result of their work. Even the most dangerous industry today, logging, with about 135.9 worker deaths per 100,000, doesn’t even touch one of the most dangerous jobs of 1911- mining, at 329 deaths per 100,000.

This decrease in workplace deaths comes from a variety of interventions. In the later part of the century, organizations like OSHA, NIOSH, MSHA, and USBM began to study workplace practices, publish standards, and inspect workplaces for compliance. They required the use of safer equipment (better ventilation systems), safer workplace practices (like dust suppression and wearing hard hats and other PPE), safety training for employees (OSHA certification, first aid training), and specialized training for healthcare professionals who might see occupational injuries.

4. Sanitation and Hygiene (and Health Department Police Power)

Do you like food? Water? Do you like not getting sick because you consumed it? Do you like flushing a toilet? Do you like not worrying about whether people with known cases of active TB are running around in public? Me too!

I want to be very clear that these weren’t always things you could count on. In fact, about 33% of deaths (of which, 40% were children under 5) in the US in the early 1900s could be traced to poor sanitation and lack of outbreak investigation and control. Today, that number is down to less than 4.5% (and that’s including HIV as an ongoing pandemic).

You may not be aware of this, but your local health department has a staggering amount of both legislative and judicial “police power.” For one thing, they are a separate entity from local government (under the health commissioner), and can therefore make their own decisions, even if the mayor orders otherwise.

They can...

Decide which restaurants, schools, businesses, and childcare centers are meeting health safety standards and therefore can stay open

Decide what the vaccination requirements for entrance to the schools and certain other public places are (and why you might have to wear a mask at work during flu season if you’re a medical professional who hasn’t gotten a flu shot)

Mandate the construction of public health infrastructure like sewer lines

Enter private property for reasonable suspicion (of a potential threat to public health)

Subpoena medical records

Issue mandatory quarantine, isolation, and vaccination orders

Detain people under police guard in a home or hospital if they have a significant communicable disease like active TB, meningitis, or ebola and are trying to escape (called a Code Brown in my area... thats a terrible name tho).

This is a really good thing. It allows the health department to do things that decrease the number of deaths from spoiled food and poor food handling procedures, as well as chlorinate your drinking water so you don’t get cholera, and make sure other people making poor choices aren’t going to be a threat to you personally.

5. Reduction in Heart Disease and Stroke (recognition of the role of risk factor management in disease)

You might recall from the Vaccine part of this post that Heart Disease and Stroke are leading causes of death today, so the idea that we somehow significantly reduced these deaths may not immediately compute. That’s because of 2 main things. One, just a staggering number of people were dying from infectious disease back then. Like, unless your name is literally Steven Grant Rodgers you have no freaking clue how many people were just... dying. All the time. From stuff you just straight up don’t see today because of vaccines and sanitation. And two, the peak for heart disease and stroke deaths came in the 50′s (307.4 deaths out of 100,000 due to heart disease in 1950), long after those initial measurements were taken, and have since decreased by about 56% (134.6 deaths out of 100,000 in 1996).

This decrease came, mostly, from a recognition of risk factors as a way to manage and prevent disease. The idea that there were certain things that you could do or not do that would make you more or less likely to end up sick or dead was unheard of before this. Studies done by a man named Ancel Keys of populations’ dietary habits throughout the US and the famed Framingham Heart Study determined that high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, and dietary factors played roles in the development of heart disease. This list was later expanded to include socioeconomic status, obesity, and physical inactivity.

The recognition that modifying risk factors (like changing one’s diet, increasing physical activity level, and quitting smoking) could prevent morbidity and mortality, and that screening for blood pressure and cholesterol could allow disease to be managed early before it resulted in a heart attack, is credited with saving those lives.

6. Food Safety and Nutrition

Can you imagine a time before we knew what a vitamin was? Or even, that food was made up of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates? Or a time before we were well aware that poorly handled or packaged foods caused illnesses like typhoid fever, botulism, TB, and scarlet fever?

Well, there was one, and it was only the early part of last century. In 1940, 16% of the population had trichinosis, a disease of the muscles caused by eating under-cooked, infected pork. By 1996, only 38 cases were reported yearly. Similarly, typhoid fever occurred at a rate of about 100 per 100,000 in 1900, only to drop to a mere 1.7 per 100,000 by 1950. There are many, many more of these statistics, but I didn’t want to type them out.

Basically, we made food safer and healthier in many ways, including but not limited to:

Pasteurization of milk and other products

Use of prompt refrigeration

Hand washing before food prep/processing

Application of pesticides and insecticides

Control of application of pesticides and insecticides to prevent harm to humans and the environment

Improved animal husbandry and processing systems

Introduction of preservatives

Better antimicrobial solutions to sanitize food prep areas

Fortifying staple foods with vitamins and minerals to prevent nutritional deficiencies like rickets, beri-beri, and scurvy

Improved surveillance of food-borne disease outbreak

7. Maternal and Infant Mortality

Listen, the US hasn’t totally got this figured out compared to other countries, but we’ve gotten better over the last century.

Overall, in 1900, 100 children out of 1,000 live births died before their first birthday (that’s not a typo, folks, that’s 1 in 10) and the mothers of 8-9 out of 1,000 live births died in childbirth or infection afterward. At the same time in many US cities, up to 30% of infants would die before their first birthday, mostly due to infections. By 1996, that number had been reduced to less than 0.1 death out of 1,000.

Along with the decline of infectious and foodborne disease through improved sanitation, the introduction of vaccination schedules, antibiotics, oral rehydration therapies, and pasteurization greatly decreased both maternal and infant mortality.

A lot of the problems for the mothers had to do with poor hygiene in those attending the birth (resulting in sepsis before the invention of antibiotics), excessive use of medical intervention (including operations and induction of labor) in labor, and bleeding. The invention of cleaner and safer operative deliveries, safer induction medications, and safer blood transfusions improved this considerably.

Its also worth mentioning that the availability of safer, legal abortion starting in the 1960s reduced mortality from sepsis after illegal abortions by 89%.

8. Family Planning

Following right along, family planning- the ability to literally plan how many children you want to have and when you want to have them, is also a major public health triumph.

In 1900, not a lot was known about conception and family planning, and what was known was actively suppressed. By 1912, through the work of Margaret Sanger and others, it became legal for healthcare providers to discuss contraception and family planning methods with married couples, including use of condoms, diaphragms, douches, and withdrawal methods. The rhythm method was introduced in 1928 with the understanding of the menstrual cycle and fertile period, and by 1933, the average family size had decreased from 3.5 to 2.3 children.

The number of children increased in the post-WW2 era to 3.7, but in 1960, two major breakthroughs- hormonal birth control and the IUD- further granted women the freedom to more effectively plan their childrearing. In 1965, it finally became (federally) legal for married couples to use birth control (again, not a typo, it really took that long).

By 1994, a combined effort of hospitals, Planned Parenthood clinics, and health departments were preventing an estimated 534,000 unintended births, 632,000 abortions, and 165,000 miscarriages annually through the use and education of contraception.

9. Fluoridation of Drinking Water, Toothpaste, and Other Products

This is another controversial one (why are interventions that save lives, decrease disability, and improve health so controversial in the US? Nothing is perfect, but we have the research to show this stuff works. Do you at least see how frustrating this is to healthcare and public health peeps by now? Your entire life has been saved and improved by these measures in some way or another. Stop it.)

No one likes going to the dentist. And whether you like it or not, if you drink tap water from many places in the US, you’re passively avoiding doing so! Yes, I’m talking about the fluoride in your water.

How did that fluoride get there? Well, its a much longer story than this, but, turns out, many water sources in the US already had fluoride in them- ranging from less than 1ppm to about 12ppm. A dentist named Frederick McKay noticed that people in Colorado Springs had an odd discoloration to their teeth. McKay found that there were other places in the US that had similar discolorations and hypothesized that there might be a connection to something in their drinking water. He had the water tested, and found that what these areas had in common were high levels of fluoride in their water. Another thing they had in common were lower rates of tooth decay. This sparked the possibility of controlling the amount of fluoride in drinking water to 1ppm- high enough to prevent cavities, but low enough so as not to cause the discoloration.

In communities where fluoride is added to drinking water, there are about 18% fewer cavities. This may not seem like a lot, but it results in a savings of up to $53 dollars per person per year in dental care, which is heavily skewed towards savings in lower-income communities. Compare this with an average cost of between $0.31 and $2.12 per person, per year to fluoridate the water, and you see significant savings. At least partially because of this (as well as increased access to dental care and the addition of fluoride to other things, like toothpaste), baby boomers are the first generation expected to reach their 60s with the majority of their teeth intact!

10. Recognition of Tobacco as a Health Hazard

Okay, folks, almost done! No one is happier than I, who has spent over 8 hours straight researching and writing this tumblr post. But I committed to it despite having (ironically public health) homework to do, and finished it shall be! Onward, Public Health!

I don’t think many people would be surprised when presented with the fact that inhaling smoke is bad for humans. I think the CDC said it best when they typed “Smoking- once a socially accepted behavior- is the leading preventable cause of death and disability in the United States.”

I sh*t you not, in the US in 1963, the average PER CAPITA consumption of cigarettes was 4,345. That’s the equivalent slightly more than of half the total US population being pack-a-day smokers that year. It is now (in 2015 at least) about a quarter of that, at 1,078.

Tobacco use contributes to many cancers, heart disease, COPD, low birth weight, asthma and many other diseases, either because of how damaging it is to lungs and blood vessels when smoked (smoke particles less than 2.5 microns enter the blood stream and damage the vasculature, and therefore all tissues with blood vessels in them), or because of the effects of nicotine and other toxic substances on blood pressure, intrauterine growth retardation, and substance dependency. Death by lung cancer was 4.9 deaths per 100,000 people in 1930 vs 75.6 per 100,000 in 1990.

By recognizing tobacco as a health hazard, public health and healthcare professionals were able to initiate widespread anti-tobacco education in schools, which has drastically reduced teen and young adult smoking rates. They could also restrict advertising of tobacco products, increase taxes on those products, and introduce counter-advertising campaigns. It also allows physicians and other healthcare workers to be a part of the smoking cessation process (if you smoke, you’ll be offered cessation resources at every doctors appointment and hospital visit). This from only 60 years ago when doctors actively encouraged smoking and were used in advertising.

Fortunately, with these campaigns and reduction in overall tobacco use, we are seeing a decrease in death rates from tobacco-related illnesses listed above. Indoor air quality laws and the prohibition of smoking on many college campuses have reduced public exposure to second-hand smoke, and also helped decrease smoking as a norm.

The jury’s still out on newer nicotine-containing products like vapes and juuls. They’re probably better for you than inhaling smoke, and nicotine by itself is not known to be cancer-causing, but they can contain other substances humans also probably shouldn’t be breathing. Like everything, we’ll know in about 50 years.

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#public health #writing reference #whump reference #20th century #vintage med

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namjoonchronicles · 5 years

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not about angels | two

↳ genre crime, thriller, angst, romance, psychological

↳ words 3.1k

↳ description Jungkook purchased a beautiful townhouse on the hills of La Bella Lake, fit for the richest of rich. Upon settling in, he discovers that the majestic house might have more secrets that it cared to let out. Little by little, with the help from a neighbor, the story of previous owner begins to unravel.

↳ characters Jungkook, Seokjin

↳ warnings mentions of blood, domestic violence, corruption

↳ glossary *grant, legal: meaning a grant of public land, especially to an institution, organization, or to particular groups of people.

↳ namjoonchronicles’ tag list @kai-tashi @septemberalien @joon94net @yourlocalalien @snugglemejeon @yoongiseesaw @majestikblue

↳ parts one | two | three | four | five

Kim Seokjin.

In the stuffy confinement of his office, Seokjin let out a heavy sigh. He absolutely despised commercial cases. The intricacy, the witness mentions, the twist and turns, the amount of money involved; a recipe for disaster, Seokjin concluded. But cases that fall in this category had been the ones of largest profit if everything turns right. If he were to be given a choice however, he wouldn’t take this case even if his firm depended on it. He’d rather do crime cases.

Mahogany wood, the fine smell of wooden varnish were some of the most eye catching criteria of the office. His self portrait hanging on the left wall, his law degree and companies he had associated with--decorated the otherwise, dull and uncharacteristic room. On the right corner, there were newspaper cliparts sounding the cases he had won and the argument he had used in the court as the headline. The picture of his alumni was also there to remind him where he came from. Family pictures? None. Carpets from Persia, custom-made couch made of black leather, tea sets from Ox Bone glass collection of Mainland China, runner from Morocco, they are all gifts from clients. Of all these gifts, the dove arc is his most prized one. They were from someone very important.

Walking over to his rows of files, Seokjin begins carding his fingers to the ones ongoing trials and those that has been a success. But he couldn’t fight the urge to push the front rack away and reveal the second rack behind it. There’s approximately four main boxes for this particular case. It was something that was very important to him. He paused at the sight of it, and felt himself holding his breath. For what? He didn’t know.

It took him back to few days ago, when Jungkook came over for a visit to his house.

He remembered it all too clearly. When the question left Jungkook’s lips, it felt insulting as it was comforting. Someone remembered that before the house was empty, it was someone’s home. The tragedy that happened in that house was unforgettable and yet, no one chose to talk about it. Or won’t.

“Do you know the previous owner of the house I lived in?” the young man asked. Do I know the man who lived next door? He was my best friend.

Was--is a painful fact to regain memory of. Seokjin’s forefinger glided along the rim of his teacup before he brought them to his supple lips, “Kim Namjoon used to live there,” pauses, “With his wife,” the lawyer spoke through the cup and took a soundless sip.

“Kim Namjoon was an engineer, a very talented one too. And his wife,” a succulent name passed, “She herself is a devoted woman, an activist, she ran an orphanage house before it was taken over by the Ministry.”

With the simple information, Jungkook was not very surprised. The next question implies his curiosity, “Where are they now?”

“Namjoon…” Seokjin pauses,

“Namjoon currently, is in the state prison.” The words felt corrosive as it left his lips, but it had to be said. It was the truth. The bitter truth.

“Why?”

“Domestic violence… and.”

The shrill sound from the ringing phone jolts Seokjin back into that day. It was his assistant, reminding him that he has lunch with a client. A man in his 60s, with bad breath and discolored dentures was his date. He has an obnoxiously loud laugh and had a bad reputation in public, especially as a customer. There was always something wrong with his food or his drink, or with the delivery of the said two. He would complain if the food didn’t come fast enough and threatens to not pay for any slight inconvenience he experiences.

The reason why Seokjin is withholding his anger?

Simple. The man brought him a lot of customers, clients and cases, you name it. The downside of erecting a personal firm is you will have to be grateful for cases that come. Doesn’t matter if the clients were in the right or in the wrong, Seokjin was thankful to have any cases at all. He had to rely on Mr. Bang’s connection and for his triumph and dismay Mr. Bang surely impresses with his suspiciously corruptive friends. That only meant endless money flow for Seokjin, to keep the firm running, to keep his assistant and pay the office bills. He is good at his job. That’s why, he didn’t understand why it happened.

Why did Namjoon rejected his help? His advice?

It was a pleasant morning one September when Seokjin heard a siren from a police car pulling to a stop where Namjoon lived. Seokjin grabbed his coat and walked outside. He jogged up the steep climb towards Namjoon’s house and he heard the police threatens to break down the door should Namjoon fails to open the door in a timely manner.

“What’s going on here officer?” Seokjin’s question went unanswered. “Kim Namjoon, by the warrant issued by Judge Kim, you are under arrest for domestic violence and murder of your wife on July 2nd 2016. You have the rights to remain silent,” the officer pushed Namjoon against the wall and had him cuffed. His shirt had blood stains, was what Seokjin remembered.

The officer continues, as he brought Namjoon down the flight of stairs, “Anything you say may be used against you in a court of law, you have the right to consult an attorney before speaking to the police and to have an attorney present during questioning now or in the future. If you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you before any questioning if you wish.”

The car door is slammed shut, Namjoon’s expression remained unreadable. He kept his head down as Seokjin asked him what he did. Seokjin kept knocking on the car window, calling his best friend’s name. But the police took him away without stalling. Seokjin did what every friend should.

He secured the house shut and grabbed hold of the handle of his car and went after the entourage. He couldn’t believe what he heard, but he wasn’t going to sit around and wonder. He had questions and he will get answers. He would throw his law degree in the fire if they wouldn’t let him in.

Domestic violence? Murder? How ridiculous is that? On Namjoon?

The guy has puppies back in his hometown and left it there with his parents because his wife was allergic to it. Namjoon who asked him to cook for dinner because he wanted to surprise his wife with a good meal. Namjoon who puts aside his work because his wife was ill. And his wife? The lady so polite, everyone find pleasing to converse with. You had no problems establishing friendship and people trust you easily because you were honest. You fetched Namjoon from work and planned birthday parties for him. It was beyond imagination. Never once had Seokjin saw you being frightened of Namjoon, vice versa. No suspicious bruises that is resulted from a punch or anything like it. Seokjin couldn’t believe what he was hearing at the police station as the officers clarifies Namjoon’s accusations.

Namjoon was taken to custody and was granted an hour to meet his lawyer. Seokjin appointed himself as Namjoon’s representative and granted his way inside the interrogation room before the police started interrogating. It is stated in his rights.

“Before anything…” Seokjin laced his fingers together on the metal table, maintaining a sharp gaze on Namjoon, who is seated opposed to him.

The accused scratches the skin on the tip of his left eyebrow, his left hand followed suit because he still wasn’t uncuffed despite being under full surveillance in the police station. Seokjin wants to file a misdemeanor in handling a fully cooperative suspect, done by the officers when he has the chance to take in the case later. His car was equipped with the necessary documents and writing pads for a surprise arrest like this, so he had his pen ready.

“This is a first degree murder case, and domestic violence… For domestic violence, fines are not more than 400 thousand won and six months imprisonment, but for first degree murder, life imprisonment without parole and death penalty….I need to know if it’s…” Seokjin rambled in speed.

But Namjoon’s next respond wasn’t what he expected. After all he had come prepared, all Namjoon--his best friend, his neighbor could say was…

“The land grant is underneath the cupboard in the master bedroom. Sell the house,” Namjoon said, death in his voice.

“Namjoon, you could be hanged. You wouldn’t do this to your wife, Namjoon… I know you, I know her… please tell me this is a joke,” Seokjin desperately replied. Before he could say more, Namjoon bangs both of his shackled hand on the metal table, sending the police to rush inside to keep Seokjin safe. Seokjin stumbled and pushed his chair to fall back. His heart is racing, ringing in his ear. He had never seen this side of Namjoon in all their years of knowing each other.

Officers pushed Namjoon’s upper body, and slammed Namjoon’s face down on the table with a loud thud. They put his cuff behind him and cuffed his ankles as well. The sight had Seokjin holding his breath. Eyes wide, and panic rising. And still Seokjin heard Namjoon’s low voice, speaking through harsh hisses, his eyes pleading at his dear friend in desperation, as he groans against the surface of the table,

“Sell the house, Seokjin… Sell the fucking house, that’s all I need you to do.”

The sixty year old man’s face came to view and Seokjin scrambled to find his floating attention. “Your face drains blood when I asked you when was the last time you did a first degree murder case, are you sure you’re an experienced lawyer?”

Namjoon’s case was the first and the last homicide case Seokjin had ever encountered.

“It is not my forte,” Seokjin feigns a professional smile to hide his fear, “Murder case, blood and gory details, is not my cup of tea. I do appreciate a good backstory. I find it more interesting to listen than to deal with the people involved in it.”

Seokjin sighs as Mr. Bang comes back to being his whiny self, complaining to the waitress about his cold coffee after sending the half eaten steak back to the kitchen because it wasn’t cooked in the middle.

“But you ordered medium rare, sir,” the waitress explained. “I didn’t expect it to be that rare! My gums hurt,” Mr. Bang fusses.

It hurts because you wear dentures you old money laundering prick. Seokjin swirled his sparkling water and took a sip. He wipes the corner of his lips with the napkin and pushed his chair back. “I wish I could stay longer, sir I do,” he lied, “But I got a text message that I have an appointment. If it pleases you, shall I pay for your lunch today?”

Seokjin made enough, but not as much as Mr. Bang. But he knows the old man is a cheapskate. He also knows the reason behind his nitpicking is because he doesn’t want to pay. The steak was beyond alright. Succulent and well thawed. The mashed potatoes were perfectly seasoned and the asparagus were beautifully grilled. It was a superb lunch, Seokjin had. Even if the partner he had them with, wasn’t at par in terms of quality.

He didn’t want to stay any minute longer at the restaurant, embarrassed at the scene Mr. Bang caused. How can a multi-billionaire business owner make a fool out of himself like that? That’s what dirty money does to you. They rip you off your shame and make a national embarrassment out of you. Mr. Bang would kiss the prime minister’s shoe if it meant he could get a land without the necessary documents. He was granted a contract outside his financial capability and took more than he should which results to unpaid workers. And unpaid workers were angry and they filed lawsuit against Mr. Bang. Guess who had to come down, and persuade those workers and take commercial cases even though he dreads to? You’ve guessed it.

Cynical remarks from Mr. Bang dented his ego. Seokjin is once again standing before the rows of files and this time his gaze fell to case box labelled: Kim Namjoon. 2016. Homicide.

On the day where old case files are sent to be demolished along with its evidence, Seokjin came to repossess the box from the tractor. Not willing to let this case go. Not even his current assistant knew the existence of this file. Question is, what will he do with the case files if the one accused didn’t bother to reopen the case or find the need to defend himself? It’s like he accepted his fate far too easily.

Jungkook waits for Seokjin’s explanation.

“Namjoon loved his wife, very much…” he began, setting the cup down on the saucer and leans back to lace his fingers together. It rests on his lap as Seokjin looked outside the window where Namjoon’s house were, the house Jungkook is currently living in.

“Were they fighting?” Jungkook wondered, leaning forward, his elbows on his knees. “Nothing violent, never violent,” Seokjin reminisce.

Seokjin grew up with Namjoon. They were close up until college. Where they briefly parted ways due to difference in interest. While Seokjin is a fan of social activities, Namjoon is a meek and shy character. There’s many reasons to this. Namjoon’s parent was against his aspirations to be an engineer. They wanted him to continue the family business but Namjoon refused. So instead of mingling around those of his own social class, Namjoon chose his own friends.

Not an ounce in his blood was he talented in it. In business.

If anything, Namjoon was interested in things he wasn’t introduced with—the life he wasn’t a part of. He spent his term break building machines for rural areas, villages, helps children invent things, all kinds of things. Namjoon is the lover of nature and is in love with love. Something he thought he never had experience in. Namjoon is kind, attentive and fiercely loyal.

So when he fell in love, he fell hard.

“From what I could remember, they were everything a married couple should be,” Seokjin hums, his gaze casted downwards, “The way Namjoon looks at her, he was completely enamored. They were in love. He loves her.”

Namjoon is the epitome of a perfect husband. The couple usually rode bicycles together on the weekends and spent enormous time together, reading, walking. They weren’t shy about showing it to others. When they attended a neighborhood gathering, they had a synergistic energy, both very pleasant to be around and when they are next to each other, the sexual tension was high and everyone in the room could feel it. It was neither repelling, or inviting. It was just there. Always on her waist, his hands was always on her waist, and hers? They are always caressing his arms. They are always touching each other, even if they weren’t.

“There was once, their car was shaking uncharacteristically, parked just outside their house… the way it was moving, you don’t need any other explanation that they are… you know,” Seokjin chucks in a thinly lit smile, “They’re a bit of exhibitionist.”

“Was there foul play?”

Seokjin inhales deeply and exhales before he begins, “There once or twice or maybe more, I didn’t keep track, but they do bicker… just like any other married couples do,” Seokjin recalls.

One night, in the middle of June, the bickering seem to be continuous.

In a way, it increased in volume and it led Namjoon to leave the house several times. But without a driving license; Namjoon would knock on Seokjin’s door. They’ll watch anything on television. When Seokjin asks what happened, Namjoon would cast his gaze downwards and replied simply, “It’s just one of those days.”

One of those days, end of that very months in 2016, thunder crackling in the night sky signalling the impending rain that will arrive, Seokjin covers the shade to prepare for bed. But his curiosity won over him because when Seokjin looked through the opal shade of his bedroom window and saw Namjoon’s silhouette, he became extremely conscious. Namjoon seem to be backing away from his wife.

“In a glance, it seemed like she was telling him something he couldn’t accept. That’s how I rectify it...but I leave it at that because I was thinking about, ah, it’s just another argument. I remember being jealous about it, about having someone to fight with, and of course, they make up… they always do.”

Seokjin expected Namjoon to ring his door, but that night, he didn’t.

The next day, the couple was seen leaving together for work, just as Seokjin was watering his plant in his work attire. Namjoon bids him farewell. A little later that morning after sending Namjoon off, his wife asked Seokjin if Camellias will be good as a gift for a very good friend.

To which Seokjin replied, “Yes! Especially white, because they bring good luck!”

Jungkook kept his eyes on the saucer while Seokjin fetches another doughnut, “Would he have hit her?”

“I personally had never seen it. He wouldn’t hit a fly. He is meek and full of love for her. And so does she. When they’re apart, she’d text and call him, and vice versa. They planned to have a child…” long pause, “But maybe one night, he lost all control.”

Maybe he had threw his fist on her, grabbed her by the neck. Her feet dangling a couple inches from the floorboard. Her nails clawed into Namjoon’s hand as she turns blue. Veins protrudes on Namjoon’s forehead.

Maybe He did.

“How was her body found?”

A week had passed since the awful lunch date with Mr. Bang. He returned home very late that evening. Seokjin unlocked the front door while his garage shuts. Then his maid handed him a parcel that came through the mail. He threw a glance at Jungkook’s house from his wide window that stretches along the balcony. And he saw the boy writing in his night robe, wearing glasses out on the third floor balcony.

Today, a call came from prison. It was his best friend, Kim Namjoon.

“I have a visitor today. And he brought something that he thought belonged to me. His name was Jeon Jungkook. He asked me why I killed my wife.”

The phone call ended before Seokjin could say he was sorry. He wasn’t sure what he was sorry about. He only did what Namjoon told him to do. And that was to sell the house.

And to take his mind off of it, Seokjin unwrapped the parcel and was struck by a familiar, tantalizing scent. In that parcel, delivered without a return address, lies a single stalk of white Camellia.

“Where was her body found?” “They never did.”

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prettyboysdontlookatexplosions · 5 years

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ratinthewall replied to your post: Hi! So your reread is both hilarious and I love...

so… this does mean you have to dish on your horoscope headcanons for the rest of the kids too :)

i mean this from the bottom of my heart: SO glad you asked. honestly the animorphs, except (appropriately) for ax, are like, so easy to identify with astrological archetypes when i went through it i almost thought these were all too obvious? like, oh, pegging the leader as a capricorn, real thoughtful. but just as jake is a capricorn not just because he’s the leader but because he is a million-year-old disciplinarian who hates himself and will throw down at the drop of a hat, the more i thought about all of these the more convinced i became.

cassie is a pisces. the elemental rules of thumb lead us straight to water for someone as ruled by her emotions, and as full of real respect for the power of emotion, as cassie; cassie herself, of course, has a number of meaningful interactions with water and water animals herself, from suggesting their trout morph to making friends with a psychic whale to channeling the whale to drown the veleek to the spiritual regard she has for dolphins to bidding aftran farewell in water form. pisces is associated with dreams and sleep, which also are recurring cassie motifs, from her reception of ax’s distress call to her interpretation of her own nightmares about choosing someone’s death in MM1 to the dreams that hint at the unraveling of the alternate timeline in MM4. when i think of pisces i think of a certain porousness, the end of the zodiac meaning, kind of, the aspect of human existence nearest and most prone to drifting into the broader fabric of the cosmos, which is cassie all over; jake calls her mystical in the very first book, she’s sub-temporally grounded (whatever that means), she’s kind of the only one of the animorphs that gives a shit about what happens to the non-human parts of earth in the events that the yeerks when for real, she has a talent for beautiful morphing (pisces is also a mutable sign). empathetic to a fault, alternately wise beyond her years and blinded by the immediate overwhelm of her own emotion, trusting her gut more than anything else. pisces. keywords: intuitive, dreamy, artistic, humane, sympathetic, sensitive, compassionate, perceptive, tender, impressionable

tobias is a libra. libra is the only inanimate sign of the twelve, which feels appropriate for someone whose sense of self as an actual person is as weak as tobias’s. libra is the scales, which is to say justice but also a balancing act, and, like, is that not tobias’s entire life? hawk/boy, predator/prey, kill/save. he’s looking, always, for the true balance of the components of himself, and in true libra fashion is never fully satisfied. he’s also the most consistent swing vote on the team, specifically because he’s the only animorph who consistently sees both sides of a story, who can hold the micro and the macro in his mind simultaneously, who can really look simultaneously at benefits and costs—and he often expresses himself carefully, waiting to speak until he can articulate himself, not getting caught up in the back-and-forth of marco/rachel on one hand and cassie on the other. my favorite passage in the entire series is his interior monologue in 23 about how every single human lives on that edge between savage and saint—about how for everyone, doing the right thing is a balancing act, doing the right thing in fact requires a balancing act because there’s never going to be just one right answer that gets you through everything. he can be judgmental, but he is also willing to cut people slack—he tells rachel, gently, to back off a teammate more than once. IMO tobias is the character through which the true moral message of the books—which (again IMO) largely hinges on exactly that idea that there are no shortcuts, no easy answers, that you are constantly figuring out what is needed today and you don’t always get to be sure it was right—gets most clearly expressed, which i mention mostly because, and i did not know this when i first pinned tobias as a libra, K. A. applegate is a libra too. keywords: just, sociable, refined, accommodating, kind, fair, diplomatic, likable, indecisive, respectful, artistic

rachel as an aries, again, like, it feels almost too obvious? is it jake that literally calls her the goddess of war? but, well: rachel’s comfort zone is the fight. she’s a creature of action, someone who likes doing better than she likes thinking, and who is not great at sitting still. she is quick to anger, she does have the temper of someone ruled by mars, and she will fuck your shit up if she decides you deserve it. she’s got that aries impulsivity, too—how many times does she do something only to think immediately afterward, or even as she’s initiating the movement, “so, this is stupid of me”? she’s not one for planning ahead, and although she’s aware of the biggest picture she doesn’t intuitively take into account the consequences of whatever they’re considering. she’s restless, driven by an internal battery. but she’s thrilling to be around, she lights people up, she radiates strength that others can use. jake calls the shots, but rachel is the one metaphorically waving the flag. keywords: active, initiating, leading, independent, aggressive, impatient, combative, energetic, pioneering, naive, assertive. plus, rachel as aries gives some fun things with both pisces-cassie and libra-tobias. rachel and cassie very much are poles on the animorphs spectrum, which is captured by placing rachel as aries (the baby of the zodiac, holding only itself) and cassie as pisces (the eldest sign, containing all of them); the two of them are simultaneously nestled next to each other and a universe apart. meanwhile aries and libra are sister signs, which: Aries is drawn into the Libran mystery and benefits from diplomacy when they become confrontational. In comparison, Aries can teach Libra the skill of quick decision making; which although impulsive provides the spontaneity they need. Libra can be indecisive to a fault, they can benefit from any help in this department! sound like anyone we know? i also (1) as a capricorn who has only dated arieses and libras like the idea of them as a cardinal sign power couple and (2) love and find very fitting with them and the series as a whole the idea that rachel is ruled by the god of war while tobias is ruled by the goddess of love.

marco is a gemini. motormouth whose speed of talk is outpaced only by the speed of his brain. big on intellect, low on internal emotionality. a joker, vibrating a little higher, a little faster than everyone around him. difficult for other people to get a handle on, comes across as more glib, more callous than he is (i, a gemini rising.... Can Relate). a people person, interested in others—he is the only animorph we see trying to strike up new connections well into the war, and like yeah it’s mostly because he’s the thirstiest animorph by virtue of being the only human without a counterpart on the team onto whom he can focus and have reciprocated all that desperate energy but still—but also good with others, charming and likable and the best liar on the team by far, the quickest on his feet. containing a central duality, not the way tobias does, where there’s a constant tension and ongoing recalibration between hawk and human, but completely, even comfortably: the lightest animorph and the darkest, the most chipper and the most terrified, the most normal and the most ruthless, and, crucially, given to switching from one to the other on a dime. thinking in multiple dimensions. keywords: talkative, mental, adaptable, flexible, changeable, responsive, sociable, superficial, versatile, inquisitive, witty. (also, interesting to think of marco & cassie as the two mutable signs to whose openness, changeability, etc. cardinal jake is drawn to.)

ax... you know, it really is fitting that he’s the most difficult one. does astrology even apply if you weren’t born on this planet? is his astrological birthday the day of his first human morph? do andalites have their own zodiac, their own archetypes, their own beliefs about how the constellations shape their lives? (i bet they do. military andalites are probably too rational for it, but i bet everyday andaites do have their own set of astrological concepts). at first i thought aquarius, because of the easy Out There/weirdo/alien connection, and his technological prowess connoting a certain intellect, but the thing is, although ax is well ahead of humans scientifically because of the advanced position of andalites as a whole, we don’t know that he’s particularly impressive by andalite standards, and in fact the series strongly suggests he is... not. (falling asleep in xenobiology, anyone?) now i think—and again, i’m less convinced of this than of the others, but the more time i spend with it the more right it feels—i like him as a taurus. the food thing is obvious, yes, tauruses like to eat, like sensual pleasures, and we know that ax finds human senses just absolutely mindblowing all the time and has NO shame about sharing this fact. but ax is also determined (to kick visser three’s ass, as a mere aristh!), and yes, can be stubborn (”yes, prince jake” / “twenty-five of your minutes”). think of how he builds a scoop for himself, fills it up with concrete physical things to make it a home—that’s very taurean, to me. (the tauruses i know fucking love nesting.) i also like the idea of ax as a taurus to jake’s capricorn, because (as a capricorn) i always think of taurus as like, capricorn’s less deranged little sibling, and i think there’s something to be said for the fact that ax and jake are similar people—unimpressive students who deeply want to Do Right—who have a similar outlook on the war (which is to say that they’re the two who think of it most fully as a war instead of a series of battles, ax because he brings in the bigger picture of the yeerks and jake because he has to take a broader perspective in order to make the calls and lead the team), but ax is 6000% less tormented and fucked up about it than jake is. keywords: persevering, down-to-earth, stable, stubborn, possessive, prosperous, dependable, physical, sensual. in my reckoning, the only fixed sign of the bunch, which feels true. yeah, i’ll take it.

#animorphs

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bobbynolanios88 · 5 years

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Bitcoin is 10 years old: Here’s what to expect in the cryptocurrency’s second decade

Oct. 31 marks the 10th birthday of one of the most promising, yet divisive technological advancements of the 21st century: Bitcoin.

In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the first and most famous cryptocurrency emerged from an underground network of libertarian-leaning cypherpunks. Over the past decade its popularity has soared, but so has the number of its detractors. On the eve of its anniversary, here’s a look back at some of the glorious — and infamous — moments in the short life of the world’s most famous cryptocurrency.

And where it all began:

‘I’ve been working on a new electronic cash system that’s fully peer-to-peer, with no trusted third party’

Satoshi Nakamoto, Oct. 31, 2008, 06:10:00 PM

That was the first email in a series of messages sent by Satoshi Nakamoto, the presumed pseudonym adopted by the creator of bitcoin, in a proposal for a payment system that is completely anonymous running on a decentralized distributed ledger, known as the blockchain.

Today, there are over 2,000 cryptocurrencies, most of which will fail and become worthless, according to Barry Silbert, chief executive officer of the Digital Currency Group, and there are already close to 1,000 dead coins, ones that either failed before launching or have ceased operation, according to a website that tracks such failures.

But the very first digital currency is still going strong, albeit with plenty of ups and downs. Once worth less than 1 cent, a single bitcoin fetched nearly $20,000 in December 2017. Today, one bitcoin BTCUSD, +3,419.44% changes hands for about $6,500.

Bitcoin’s 10-year run The early days

After the release of the Bitcoin white paper a decade ago, Satoshi started a chain of emails to a cryptography mailing list, largely made up of cypherpunks — those who promote increased financial privacy — looking to spread and champion computer encryption. The early emails were met with both enthusiasm and skepticism.

“Bitcoin seems to be a very promising idea. I like the idea of basing security on the assumption that the CPU power of honest participants outweighs that of the attacker,” wrote computer programmer Hal Finney in an email exchange with the group.

Read: Here are all the early email exchanges between Satoshi and the cryptographers

It was at least two months before the blockchain and bitcoin experiment got under way with the creation of the Genesis Block, the first 50 bitcoins ever mined.

A note that accompanied the copy of the Genesis Block gave rise to the notion that bitcoin, in part, may have been a response to the financial crisis. “The Times 03/Jan/2009 Chancellor on brink of second bailout for banks,” the message said.

However, in an interview with MarketWatch, New York University professor David Yermack, debunked this theory, but did say that the timing definitely contributed to the hype around bitcoin.

The Genesis block

Read: Here’s how much it costs to mine a single bitcoin in your country

But what were people meant to do with these bitcoins once they had been created, or mined?

“I guess the key problem right now is that once you generate coins, there’s nobody to test it with, even for dummy transactions. Is there a plan for a mailing list or some kind of trivial marketplace to give people something to do with their newly minted bitcoins?” wrote Mike Hearn, a software developer and early bitcoin developer in the cryptography email chain.

One year later, his question was answered.

First recorded transaction

While there were a number of early test transactions — the first being a transfer between Satoshi and Finney — the first documented transaction didn’t occur until 2010.

On May 22, 2010, Jacksonville programmer Laszlo Hanyecz, convinced Jeremy Sturdivant to send him two pizzas, and in return, Hanyecz would give him 10,000 bitcoin, which in today’s terms is more than $30 million per pizza. The transaction would become part of crypto folklore and May 22 will always be known as Bitcoin Pizza Day.

Eight years on, bitcoin is traded freely on more than 200 exchanges, with volume dominated by speculators hoping to make a quick buck buying and selling the most liquid cryptocurrency. There are now more than 250,000 on-ledger transactions per day, according to data from Blockchain.com.

Transactions per day, per Blockchain.com

At its peak in late 2017, there were nearly half a million transactions happening each day.

Mt. Gox hack

Four years after the first bitcoin transaction, the industry hit one of its lowest points. In February 2014, Japanese-based cryptocurrency exchange Mt. Gox was hacked, resulting in the loss of more than 800,000 bitcoins. At the time, Mt. Gox was handling more than half of all bitcoin transactions world-wide. The heist was the first big snag in the coming out of the opaque industry.

The Mt. Gox scandal was met with hostility and the company was forced to move its headquarters to its previous offices citing security concerns, the company said at the time.

But what it did do was put bitcoin on the front page of the news.

“I became enthralled in bitcoin when Mt. Gox ‘disappeared’ my bitcoin,” said Tim Draper, founder and director of Draper Associates. “When that happened, I thought bitcoin would collapse, but it didn’t, so I knew it was more important than it seemed on the surface.”

Draper would later become a household name in the crypto industry when he purchased the bitcoins the U.S. Justice Department seized in the Silk Road case. The bitcoins were sold for an average price of just over $300. Draper said he weighed the risk/reward at the time and figured there is a chance they could be worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars at some stage. “At this point, It looks like it will be the former, so I lucked out,” he said.

Read: Former Mt. Gox CEO does not want his billion dollars

Yet, security remains one of the technology’s biggest hurdles.

Limitations and headwinds

The Mt. Gox hack is just one in a number of thefts that has undermined the integrity of digital assets. In 2016, two years after the Mt. Gox fiasco, the Bitfinex exchange was infiltrated resulting in the theft of 120,000 bitcoins. All totaled, some estimate that more than 1 million bitcoins have been stolen.

However, the pressing question for bitcoin evangelists is adoption: Is there a place for it in the financial ecosystem? Right now that answer is not quite yet.

As a payment device, bitcoin can process around five transactions per second, while credit card companies like Visa V, +4.31% and Mastercard MA, +4.74% can process more than 5,000 per second. As a store of wealth its security flaws, as discussed earlier, mean it is far from becoming digital gold.

But according to Nigel Green, founder and CEO of deVere Group, a U.K. consulting firm, that will change: “There’s an ongoing shift away from fiat money, and the momentum of this is only set to increase over the next 10 years.”

Read: Winklevoss: If you can’t see bitcoin at $320,000, you just lack imagination

On the eve of its 10th birthday, 2018 has unveiled another flaw in bitcoin: volatility. While the trading community lap up the wild price swings, those pushing for mainstream use have had to withstand a collapse in the price of the No. 1 digital currency.

As euphoria was building, highlighted by the introduction of bitcoin futures, bitcoin fell more than 60% from its all-time high on Dec 17, 2017.

Read: What’s more volatile than bitcoin? You may be surprised

What the future holds

Depending on who you ask, the future of bitcoin looks like anything from the next U.S. dollar or digital gold, to a total bust that will be nothing but a footnote in financial textbooks.

As bitcoin proponents push for more complex financial products, most notably a bitcoin-backed exchange-traded fund, or ETF, regulators now play a pivotal role in the advancement of the cryptocurrency and blockchain movement. Lawmakers and regulators are weighing investor protection in an industry that is rife with nefarious characters, yet offers much potential.

Read: These may be the 3 biggest hurdles to a bitcoin ETF

For detractors, bitcoin is just a passing fad. One of the most vocal critics is prominent New York University economics professor, Nouriel Roubini, who has called bitcoin the mother of all bubbles, compared blockchain with a glorified excel spreadsheet and lambasted the crypto community as a bunch of “self-serving white men pretending to be messiahs for the world’s impoverished, marginalized, and unbanked masses.”

Read: Opinion: Roubini calls out the big blockchain lie

However, the nascent product may have received its biggest stamp of approval just weeks before its 10th birthday when financial services giant Fidelity Investments announced it was opening a cryptocurrency trading service for funds and sophisticated investors. Previously, large institutions had largely remained on the sidelines.

But now, coming upon 10 years since the inception of cryptocurrencies, the decentralized technology that began with bitcoin may have started a path where the so-called trusted third parties are mining bitcoin instead of printing money.

“I see bitcoin becoming the most important and most transacted currency in the world, not just for remittances, or cross-border transactions, but for every use currency. It won’t be long before bitcoin eclipses the dollar as the most popular currency,” said Draper.

Read: This is where cryptocurrencies are actually making a difference in the world

Providing critical information for the U.S. trading day. Subscribe to MarketWatch’s free Need to Know newsletter. Sign up here.

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#IFTTT #Cryptocurrency and Bitcoin

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transjoyblog · 3 years

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Sure Fire Ways to Financially Bullet Proof Your Relationship

Photo by Francesco Ungaro on Unsplash

Me and my fiancee have been together for almost 8 years now, and we have been through almost the entire gamut of employment and income situations. When Vee and me first met we were both in high school, summer school honors program, to be exact. Neither one of us had a job, but we had big ideas, and expectations about the job market that were completely unfounded. As we got older, we both struggled to find work, and it wasn't until I got my pharmacy technician's license that we had a modicum of regular income. When I say modicum, I mean about $500/month. We managed to save a good portion of our incomes no matter how sporadic, and believe me, this was not easy. We fought about things as simple as picking up a value menu meal to split, we were so poor. It took this experience, a lot more challenges, and a few screaming matches (I'm ashamed to say), for us to realize that we needed to have an ongoing conversation around our finances. We were perfectly comfortable speaking about the big goals and dreams, and we were pretty much on the same page with these, and we even agreed on how we were going to reach these goals. However, this does not mean that everything was perfect. We felt pressure from our parents to find more and better work, when none existed where we were living at the time. We had huge fights for 2 or 3 Christmas seasons in a row because we were not making very much, but we still felt pressure to buy gifts for everyone in the family. There is no need to go into the specifics of these fights but I feel like if you are still reading you may agree with me that you could learn from our mistakes and use the following as a list of topics to weave into this ongoing conversation about finances you and your significant other should regularly be having.

That's the point of this article. Conversations that need to be had, questions need to be asked, and values need to be defined and either agreed on or compromised on, especially when it comes to large purchases, credit use and management, and the kids and their futures.

Here are some suggestions from my personal experience:

Conversations to Have:

1. What are your spending habits? Can you make them work together?

2. What are your individual attitudes towards the desire for, and acquisition of large assets i.e. land, a house, a business, a rental property? -What are your goals and expectations for these assets?

3. What is the cutoff for telling your spouse about purchases? This can be sticky subject. Some people want to know every single purchase you make (be wary of this behavior, you are entitled to your own money, and control of it. I would temper this warning with a huge helping of responsibility for the material support of others, self-awareness, and a warning that everyone in the house deserves some level of input into the family finances). And some people want to completely separate their finances, which is fine, but you need to establish how you will handle joint expenses and assets including how you would like your children's inheritance to be split up, regardless of which of you passes first. Please be prepared for the legal ramifications of keeping married people's finances separate. You may need to look into establishing a trust, you may need to be more explicit with your wishes than the standard boilerplate will, or at the very least, set up an account specifically for legal fees associated with your estate to avoid leaving your children without an inheritance, and possibly footing an unwieldy legal bill on top of it.

4. What are your individual attitudes around credit usage?

5. What are your values around children? Do you feel the need to buy your children toys, gifts, and treats every time you leave the house with them? Does your partner? What do you want to model for your children financially? How do you want to teach them about money? What are your own shortcomings in your understanding of finance, and money management?

6. How will you plan for the future? Both your own and your children? Is it important that you be financially stable before you have children? What do you want your children's future's to look like? Do you want to save for college specifically, or for any eventual path that they may want to take?

7. What are your attitudes around technology? Do you like to be an early adopter? Are you more hesitant? How much of the budget are you willing to invest in or save for new tech?

8. Do you like subscription services? What are you and your partner's attitudes around these? (I personally recommend that you avoid these like the plague, but who asked me?)

9. How much are you willing to spend on holidays, birthdays, and get togethers? This goes hand in hand with a conversation you should also be having about the role that your individual families will play in your life. My fiancee has a decently sized immediate family and we have had to plan for a lot of gifts and get togethers, something I didn't know to expect coming from an immediate family with a total of 3 members, including myself.

10. What do you want your careers to look like? You would hate to enter into a relationship, or even marry someone, only to find out that they fully expected you to quit your job, or otherwise scale back the minute your family needs childcare. What are your expectations of your and your partner's ability to provide financially? Will a sudden and ongoing job loss (for either of you) cause you to reevaluate your choice in partner? For some it would. Which is why you need to have these conversations!

Actions to Take:

1. Do not spend a crazy amount on the wedding, without good cause i.e. cultural expectation. I am not here to tell you how to practice your traditions or faith. However, I strongly recommend you avoid incurring debt when paying for the wedding regardless of how much you need to spend.

2. Do set up at least one jointly owned account to handle recurring joint expenses. This helps more if both partners have regular income.

3. Do have at least one separate personal savings account for each of you. You can assign large goals to these accounts, such as using one for saving for a wedding and another as your family emergency savings. Or you could keep them completely separate and ensure that you both always maintain some level of autonomy and separation. Mad money is a good thing.

4. Keep the lines of communication going. Usually someone will accept the mantel of "the one who manages the money", and sometimes that arrangement works. That's definitely still ok. However, both partners need to have a say in the finances in general, and this happens by having regular conversations to keep everyone up to date, and to allow both partners to air grievances, and provide constructive input into how you both could manage the financial part of your relationship. If one person is a spender, and one is a saver, this will take a lot more work and willingness to compromise on certain individual goals. These conversations will need to keep these differences front and center to avoid a buildup of resentment.

5. Learn the signs of abuse, manipulation, and specifically gaslighting. Protect yourself, know yourself, and make your own decisions, while still allowing the people you love to have a place in your decision making process without completely commandeering it. This includes kids, parents, distant relatives, partners, and even friends. Everyone you invite into your life has the potential to hurt you, or want something from you, be aware of the common tactics that people use to part you with your money.

#money #moneymove #educateyourself #knowyourworth #tietheknot #marriage #relationship #family #family finances #finance #spending #budgeting #future #financialliteracy #financial planning

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breakingmllc · 4 years

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Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl Who Really Loves Knitting And Dogs It Was Me The End Heart T Shirt

Yesterday was a Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl Who Really Loves Knitting And Dogs It Was Me The End Heart T Shirt busy day of meetings and airplane travel for peter and connor but last night peter took some time to share his thoughts on the passing of the great christopher lee christopher lee was the tallest actor I ever knew he was also by far the most literate when we first met in a los angeles studio where he was recording his lines as king haggard in the last unicorn he had just recorded haggard’s speech about his first sight of unicorns and I mentioned that it was probably my favorite speech in the book he immediately wanted to know well did I do it properly we can always redo it right here of course he’d handled the lines perfectly but writers and writers’ opinions about their work mattered intensely to christopher that same afternoon we discovered that between the two of us we we could call to mind just about all the lines of g k chesterton’s poem the rolling english road we also discovered a mutual need to hit the men’s room and my son dan in his mid teens at the time still has a very clear memory of christopher simultaneously peeing while declaiming in that voice which no one could ever keep from imitating after fifteen minutes with him before the roman came to rye or out to severn strode the rolling english drunkard made the rolling english road a reeling road a rolling road that rambled round the shire and after him the parson ran the sexton and the squire I leave it to the reader to imagine that voice in the tiled acoustics of a hollywood bathroom we met a second time in munich where the last unicorn was being dubbed into german most of my memories of that time and of chris lee have to do with books and authors he had known both j r r tolkien and a writer who mattered more to me t h white we had a long ongoing argument in munich about a chapter of the sword in the stone that appears in the english edition of the book but not in the american one he turned out to be right he usually was he never failed to mention the last unicorn as one of his very favorite books and as one of the movies he was most proud of having made indeed he left my whopperjawed as mark twain would have put it when we were being interviewed together on austrian television and he announced oh yes I simply couldn’t resist a chance to play king haggard one more time even in another language after all and he looked straight into the camera it’s the closest they’ll ever let me get to playing king lear the camera swung toward me to catch my stunned reaction and chris looked across the studio at me and winked but my most vivid memory chilling as it remains to this day has to do with the day that I and michael chase walker associate producer of the last unicorn and the one who really got the film made in the first place somehow found our way out to dachau I can’t now recall how we managed it considering that neither one of us spoke german and that you had to take both a subway and a bus to get there from the hotel where the crew were staying but we got there somehow and spent a good half of the day roaming with other tourists around a legendary concentration camp peering blindly into the huge crematoriums but staring with equal horror and fascination at the endless rows of filing cabinets containing every record of every human being who was ever imprisoned starved gassed or simply worked to death in this place michael and I grew quieter and quieter that afternoon until by the time we started back to munich we weren’t speaking at all I think we both felt that we might say anything in words again the first person we met in the hotel lobby was christopher he took one look at us and announced you’ve been to dachau we nodded without answering chris strode toward us looked all the way down from his six foot five inch altitude lowered his voice and inquired still smells doesn’t it with the end of world war ii christopher as a member of the special forces and whose five or six languages included fluent german had been assigned to hunt down and interrogate nazi war crminals and had been present at the liberation of dachau and yes the smell of death had undoubtedly faded somewhat since 1945 but it was still as real as michael and me wandering dazedly between the ovens and the filing system we just didn’t know what it was but christopher did and i’d know it again I never saw him again after munich though we spoke on the telephone a few times on the last occasion when I had called to wish him a happy 90th birthday I remember him assuring me that if by the time you come to make your live action version of your movie I have passed on do not let it concern you I have risen from the dead several times I know how it’s done he worked almost to the last as the real artists of every kind do they work to be working because that’s what they do and they die when they stop I always regarded him as the last of the great 19th century actors that bravura larger than life style went with him no modern rada trained performer would ever attempt it today nor should they it would inevitably come out parody however earnestly meant yet there was always more to christopher lee as an actor than dracula or the mummy or saruman or sherlock holmes for that matter though he was very proud of having played not only both holmes and watson but sherlock’s brother mycroft as well lord summerisle of the original the wicker man probably his favorite of his own movies is most likely closer to chris’s dark benignity than any other role he ever inhabited I believe this because lord summerisle sings a surprising amount in that movie and chris passionately loved singing if there is any such thing as an afterlife or reincarnation I truly hope no believe that christopher lee will return as a wagnerian opera singer if he hadn’t been considered too old in his 30s to be accepted for formal vocal training he might have been in his own eyes at least a happier more fulfilled man but we would have been deeply poorer for it and never have known. Wild horses have lived in the kisatchie national forest and fort polk for over 150 years now however despite public outcry and ongoing litigation the u s army is removing horses from fort polk with many of them ending up in a kill pen you can help save these historic horses by signing a petition below and by making a donation to our friends at the pegasus equine guardian association to fund its rescue fostering adoption efforts at. She needs the best emcee baby do you want me please say yes you do come tidy up my crib I can tell you wanna peace to jane fonda let’s play like honda trucks peace to you for makin big bucks time is upon us you’re the star I like it you rule my world like the vikings u were at the corner store paparottzi made a sighting finer than pizza and cool like lightening so stop hiding come inside baby im wating for you your so true wrote that in 4 mins what you think bro

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Seriously loving my new touch of nude lipstick I normally hate brown tones on me but this is the Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl Who Really Loves Knitting And Dogs It Was Me The End Heart T Shirt perfect nude brown that I think will now become my new go to can’t go wrong shade so moisturizing too but not too creamy where it’s slides around on your lips. In response to last week s tatoosday post we got so many tattoos from last unicorn fans around the world that it will take months to showcase all of them to help make things go slightly faster than that and because it s neat to compare and contrast we re going to make today a two tattoosday post take a look at these very different approaches to showing the human and unicorn versions of peter s classic character in one image ashley knight schroeder s tattoo is beautifully stylized I just got this done on saturday the last unicorn has touched my life and helped me through many a rough patch even my sons will watch with me and sing talk along to the movie rippy s tattoos did the work I have no idea who did the original design I saw it and feel in love would love to find the original artist brittni lynn martin and her artist phil meyers from california opted for classic heartfelt look this movie has been my favorite since I was little and is now my favorite book and I have a 3 year old daughter who also loves it and we watch it together so it’s been a huge part of my life so beautiful both of these. If your events calendar or feed is full of baby showers anxiety this is for you life is busy but gifting a new mom baby should be easy with our collection of cute coordinating outfit sets multi packs stress less shop bundles baby place See Other related products: Once Upon A Time There Was A Girl Who Really Loves Knitting And Dogs It Was Me The End Heart T Shirt

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timeshuffles · 5 years

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misc. headcanons

hyacinthe

traditional means of warding off vampires, such as garlic, silver, wooden stakes, religious iconography, sunlight, and sheltering in private dwellings into which she has not been invited, do not work on her.

insect repellant does.

she eats primarily fruit. enormous quantities of fruit. strictly speaking she doesn't actually need blood to survive, only to nourish her eggs. however, blood is delicious and drinking it gives her a euphoric high, so she indulges in its consumption as often as possible.

she, like the sleeper and the thing under the manor, is an eldritch being from somewhere else and her very presence in our plane of existence breeds corruption and decay. she has been here since the world began, but is much older than that; for as long as there has been life to feed upon, she has existed in one form or another.

and by extension she cannot be killed, not really. her physical body can be destroyed but the primordial force that animates it will simply restore it to life or create a new one.

her blood is the essence of her power; it is corruptive, incredibly addictive, and preys upon the disposition of the person consuming it — a sensitive artist might be plunged into constant night terrors and vivid hallucinations, while a tough athlete might experience violent rages and unnatural bursts of strength. the only consistent symptom is an intense, all-consuming euphoria while under the effects; everything else is just the blood turning the drinker into an exaggerated nightmare version of themselves. prolonged exposure also causes mutation into increasingly arthropoid forms.

you know how female spiders sometimes eat males in the middle of mating with them? yeah.

delia

autistic. i don't make the rules

grabbing the make-believe glass lydia toasts with while joking about poisoning one of charles's business associates & smashing it with complete seriousness, and getting fully into the spirit of bj's let's-kill-people "game show" ("don't worry otho, we'll put you in the souuul box!") are both manifestations of how she copes with not being great at picking up cues — she can't rly tell when people are joking or not so she just. commits to playing along with complete earnestness and this habit is now so engrained she sticks to it even when a literal demon is planning her death

she quotes otho all. the. time. bc she feels he really helped her through the darkest times of her life and she desperately wants to help other people but doesn't quite know how so she repeats his sayings verbatim bc if they helped her they'll help other people too,

her cat is named amethyst and he fucking ADORES her and snuggles with her as often is possible but WILL jump onto the highest available surface and glare imperiously at anyone else who so much as looks at him and so help you if you try to pet him

she got sucked into an mlm scheme once when she was in college and is now extremely vocally anti-mlm

never had a horse girl phase growing up bc horses are scary

was born on february 29 and refuses to celebrate her birthday except on leap years because she feels that having a birthday party only once every four years makes it more special

dee dee

dated joanne for like a month one time. they broke up bc joanne kept calling her tony awards participation trophies

she has congenital prosopagnosia, which is the main reason she comes off as exceedingly narcissistic — she can't recognize faces, so she almost never remembers names and has terrible difficulty keeping track of other factual information about people.

(she is of course also actually a narcissist, but contrary to popular opinion that has very little to do with her inability to remember things about people.)

she always, always, always comes out the stage door no matter how awful the weather or how sick or tired she might feel; it's a huge shot of validation and praise and people wanting selfies and so on and bc of that it's frequently the best part of her day.

was stalked by a fan once and is still kind of nervous about it happening again

her first tony was for swallow the moon and her second was for a revival of follies wherein she played phyllis stone

the latter was won on in the midst of her very public and very messy divorce from ed sharpe and her acceptance speech 100% included a "thank you to my EX husband" and a joke about how yes, she could leave him. no one does petty like dee dee allen

elaine

lesbian

has always been at least vaguely cognizant of the narrator's influence in her life but didn't know what it was until she crossed paths with the witch; specifically as a character in the story she wasn't able to directly see or hear the one telling it until her first direct exposure to magic via breaking the curse of ugliness on the witch.

by vaguely cognizant i mean she had this feeling of entrapment and discomfort all her life but could never quite put it to words; like — she has everything she ever thought she wanted except for a child so she's happy but in reality she's discontent, even miserable — the story the narrator told for her is not the life she would've lived if she had the choice

what im getting at here is the narrator straightwashed her

after the narrator is killed all the unhappiness bubbles to the surface and gets intensified by the ongoing arguments with her husband, but she never has the time to rly pick through those feelings and identify that they stem in part from just not liking men in general, which is why she immediately goes for the first stereotypical Attractive Man who looks her way and why she's so disgusted after it's over

she can't do magic but she does has the knack for it — she could learn if she tried

craves adventure and just, new experiences? she doesn't mind baking and she's quite good at it but she gets so bored doing the same thing day after day.

great pastries but her specialty as far as baking goes is rly just straight up bread. she makes the softest fluffiest rolls ever and a nutty sourdough rye bread that is renowned for miles around.

#⌈ STULTIFYING HIDEOUSNESS ⌋ ( hc : hyacinthe. )#⌈ BUY MORE CRYSTALS ⌋ ( hc : delia )#⌈ DEE DEE TAKES LOCAL YOKELS BY STORM ⌋ ( hc : dee dee. )#⌈ BACK TO SHOULDN'TS AND SHOULDS ⌋ ( hc : elaine. )

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axolotiels · 7 years

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That’s Not How the Story Goes

Once upon a time when I was a wee little writer who had recently finished ASOUE, I was displeased that Lemony Snicket neither met the Baudelaires nor adopted them. I fixed that, and uncovered it recently, only to have to fix it again because little me wrote like a gremlin. You’ll see that not much has changed.

Enjoy!

It is my unfortunate duty to inform you that Lemony Snicket, a man thought to be dead many times over and with great penchant for writing utterly dismal stories about three ingenious orphans and their many escaped perils, has stepped out for a moment. I do not use the term 'step-out' to give another insinuation that he stepped out either in front of a moving car or off of a cliff to add another false death to his growing list; I merely mean that Mr. Snicket now has other obligations that are far more important than chronicling his dismay, delight, and other words that start with the letter 'd'.

'Delight' is not a word that many would associate with someone as melancholic as Mr. Snicket, and with good reason. Not only is his life an ongoing disaster, he also took the liberty of chronicling the equally disastrous lives of the Baudelaire orphans following their parent's demise.

Like it was my duty to inform you that Mr. Snicket has stepped out, it is also my duty to inform you that something most unimaginable has occurred following the end of his series following the Baudelaire orphans.

For those of you uninitiated in the final book written in his series of increasingly unfortunate coincidences, he stopped writing about his findings about the Baudelaires. Or rather, he stopped publishing his findings, because after that final book (Entitled 'The End') he had a very difficult time finding and following the Baudelaires.

He has entrusted the manuscripts that he has written to me, and I can safely assure you that there is little to no substance to them other than his signature writing style and Mr. Snicket bemoaning things as he is often prone to doing.

The Baudelaires, who had been through just about as much as a group of children could possibly go through, were staggering into a seaside town. It was a quiet place, and thusfar, nobody had noticed them. I wish, dear reader, that I could tell you how the Baudelaires managed to acquire new clothes, food, and medical treatment in such a short amount of time with nary a penny in their pockets (But with many pennies in the bank, which in retrospect, probably explains quite a lot.). I wish that I had been there to see it to pen it down with such accuracy as Mr. Snicket had before me, but alas... I would if I could, but I can't, so I shan't.

The Baudelaires were hardly lucky in anything that had thusfar happened to them, but in this tiny, dreary, seaside town that was riddled with caves and people who did not ask too many questions, they were relatively well off. Both Violet and Klaus were able to acquire jobs, though they didn't pay enough to allow them much extra beyond paying rent and eating food. It was almost a ritual that the Baudelaires had whenever either Klaus or Violet received a paycheck that they made some remark or other about 'it's better than being paid in gum and coupons'. Nobody laughed but it was in good enough humor.

They didn't see that many people, and were quite reclusive, as children who had been through so much were prone to being. In truth, they did not need the jobs they had. Violet, the eldest, had inherited the Baudelaire fortune on her eighteenth birthday; the fortune was one of the things that caused their many problems, but they would be quite foolish not to use it. Besides that, Violet and Klaus enjoyed having something to do, including forgetting that they had quite a lot of money as they tried to subsist off their wages, panicking, remembered their savings account, and starting the cycle again.

It just so happened that the 'something to do' on this fateful cloudy day was going out for a stroll while they went to the nearest supermarket in the midst of the town.

Klaus Baudelaire was the one who was walking along in the middle, Violet was tailing behind him and reading a list of whatever it was that they needed to procure, and Sunny was walking resolutely ahead of them. An old man was sweeping up the barber shop that stayed open despite seemingly only having three customers, and when they passed, they waved.

It is my gathering and the gathering of a fellow agent by the name of Kingsleigh that the Baudelaires largely enjoyed their home in the town by the sea because it was so close to water. It was not a beach, like the place from whence they had come, although there was certainly a gray and pebbly beach nearby, but it was a town that was so nearby water that it made them feel the littlest bit safer. After all, when everything you had kept going up in smoke, literally and figuratively, you'd take measures to counteract such things.

After disappearing into the supermarket that was hidden beneath a dull gray sky, they reappeared with a few bags of groceries and other assorted items. Klaus had picked up writing materials and common-place books, which he seemed to have an awful lot of, Sunny had purchased a few extra-strong teething rings for herself, and Violet had purchased a few random screws, nails, gears, and whatever it was that the market had in its tiny hardware section. Klaus was a reader, but he had taken quite a shine to writing as well. He remembered everything he had ever read, from the Baudelaire library, to the dismal secrets of VFD, even recipes to make foods which he was sure did not exist. Sunny was still working on special skills that could apply in a much calmer setting, but since she was a small baby (Which was not that very long ago, really) she had four very sharp teeth that could sever the toughest wires and even be used to climb large elevator shafts that happened to be empty. Violet was an inventor, and though her inventions now were mostly alarms, detection rackets, and ways to keep track of things that did not need keeping track of, she had proved quite adept at pulling inventions out of thin air when hurtling down a mountain backwards at high speed.

These skills were, for the most part, useless in their quiet life in the quiet town next to the quiet sea where scarcely anything happened. This was quite fine by them.

As they walked down the main street of the town, each of them thinking their own thoughts as most are prone to doing, Klaus suddenly looked at his elder sister and said, “Do you think we could stop for some tea?”

Violet looked up, surprised. “I don't see why not, but it does look close to raining.”

Sunny, who had overheard their conversation, responded with, “It always looks like it's going to rain.” But she said it in a merry way, like she was daydreaming, which the young Baudelaire was most certainly not.

Violet considered this and motioned for them to turn a corner a bit earlier than usual. Down the street was the town's only tea-shop, a store for tourists that sold the usual sand in bottles and colored seashells, a paint store that helped to paint said seashells, and a library that had been abandoned long ago and was now hollow of its books.

They stopped at the tea shop that only had outside seating beneath two weather worn umbrellas, and the Baudelaires sat down outside at a table and rung the service bell. Now that nothing was happening to them, they had a lot less to talk about, so they sat there in silence and watched whatever bird dared to flit across the sky above the town.

I impart something else upon you, for those initiated: the Baudelaires had previously acquired an infant. This child was someone they often thought about in their silent gray town, wondering where she was and how she was doing and whether or not she had been carried away by some large sea bird. The Snicket whose place I now take once had two siblings: a brother named Jacques, who was rather unfortunately murdered at the Village of Fowl Devotees, and a sister named Kit, who also perished but due to something that I am not allowed to talk about, despite Mr. Snicket having written at least 3 separate books containing information about what I am not allowed to talk about. (Which is a deadly fungus named Medusoid Mycelium). This sister, Kit, had accompanied the Baudelaires to their previous home (Here to mentioned in book 13; honestly, if you don't know all of this please go read this abysmal series for yourself.) and had the baby that the Baudelaires now thought an awful lot about. Beatrice, named after their mother, was quite ingenious and could read after only a few months, which is not something that babies are often inclined to do. The Baudelaires and Beatrice had been separated on their journey from their island home to the dreary mainland at which they found themselves now.

One can imagine that, though the Baudelaires tried their hardest to be happy and were happy for the most part, that such things like thinking about a lost infant that had become a part of a family that you no longer had would bring down your mood considerably. The saddened thoughts spread from sibling to sibling sometimes, as if they were all telepathically linked, which is a phenomenon that has not yet been taken as fact but may explain an awful lot.

The owner of the tea-shop stuck his head out of the door, took their order (Which, like the weather, was much too drab to remember properly, especially with only Mr. Snicket's rather hazy eyewitness account) and went back inside.

The Baudelaires, as you may have gathered, had become very suspicious people. They had not set out to become suspicious people, just as you never set out to become a strawberry-crazed maniac with a large stick or an associate and I to become ghost writers for one of our organization's last standing agents. It was merely the circumstances with which they found themselves that forced them from becoming three nice young kids to three nice young kids that would jump at the drop of a hat. Agent Kingsleigh has relayed to me that there was scarcely a day when they did not jump at shadows or unexplained noises in the night. So as you can imagine, the sight of a man in a gray suit staggering toward you with a suitcase in one hand and a look that was an amalgamate of several other emotions would most definitely arouse suspicion, even in a town as small and as nameless as the one that they lived in.

Violet looked up and eyed him down fiercely, sitting as straight up as she could. Before the man could speak, she held out one hand in a 'stop before I throw this screw-driver at you' gesture. “Can we help you?”

The man stopped, and the Baudelaires finally were able to get a good look at his face. His hair was black and neatly combed but still looked as all hair looks when its owner is under tremendous stress. His suitcase looked to barely be holding itself together, watermarks and scratches ripping their way through the dusty brown leather. Klaus held back a grimace; perhaps the most disconcerting thing about this shambling man was his face, and by extension, his eyes.

Eyes, like being suspicious, were also something that the Baudelaires were exceedingly familiar with. The man did not have eyes that resembled the insignia of VFD, but they knew those eyes. They were scarily similar to their own, weathered and gray beneath their actual color. The eyes of a person who had seen everything, lost it, worked hard to regain it and had it ripped out from under them like a poorly-woven rug. The man was not old but looked to be aged by stress, much like his hair.

Having met Mr. Snicket on a few occasions, though most of these were as he was on the run from quite a few rather rude men and women who wanted to tie him to the front of a boat and sail into the sunset or things of a similar ilk, I can say that Mr. Snicket exudes a very depressing aura. He is melancholy by nature, and with good reason to be. A melancholic aura was not the aura that the Baudelaires gathered about him that day. Agent Kingsleigh has reported that the aura that Lemony Snicket projected was that of horrifically happy disbelief, which is an amalgamate of 3 separate emotions.

He stood there with his mouth agape and the hand that held his suitcase shaking.

“I...” The man tried to speak and found himself unable, taking another step forward before being stopped again.

“Can we help you?” Violet said again, not in the mood for any more nonsense for the rest of her life.

The man in the gray suit cleared his throat and straightened himself up, but still looked windblown and disheveled. “I... you do not know me, Baudelaires,” He said, his voice a deep and saddened baritone that sounded like it was trying its best to be both nonthreatening and to keep its owner from coming to tears. “But I know... I know you.”

This is a very alarming thing to hear when one has led a completely normal life and has not been chased across the country and over the seas by a man with a unibrow and a bad habit of setting important things on fire while blaming other people. The Baudelaires had in fact spent quite a few years of their lives fighting away this man with a unibrow and every bad habit imaginable, so hearing a man who looked as though he'd been dragged through a hurricane over a particularly angry lake say that 'he knew them' was a rather frightening thing to hear.

“No. No, no, no, we have had more than enough of people following us and giving us trouble.” It was Klaus who spoke up this time, a defiantly cautious glint in his eye.

The man looked mildly disappointed for a second, but his expression remained mostly unchanged. “I-I know, Baudelaires. Forgive me for surprising you but-”

Violet stood at the table as the pleasant smell of blueberry pastries and sugary tea contrasted sharply with the less-sweet attitude with which the Baudelaires had surrounded themselves. “Unless you have come bearing news about anyone named Beatrice Snicket, we would appreciate it if you let us alone. Good day sir.” She said this like a man who was attempting to throw a small child from a chocolate factory. I do not know why she mentioned Beatrice, but bless her for doing so.

At the sound of the two names, both 'Beatrice' and 'Snicket' respectively, the man froze again. Even his shaking stopped, and for a few moments, he looked as though he were on the brink of collapse. His eyes flashed and he faltered again, but this time he asked a question. “Beatrice... Beatrice Snicket? There is no Beatrice Snicket.”

A cold wind blew through the street and shifted him a bit in place, hiding the shiver that racked him. With every passing second, his eyes seemed to grow bigger and the Baudelaires said no more, waiting.

“Beatrice married Bertrand.” The man in the gray suit said slowly.

“Beatrice didn't marry our father.” Klaus said, and saw Sunny give the man the most suspicious once-over he'd ever seen. “She never even knew out father.”

The man in the suit looked bewildered, running his hand through his dull black hair. “Who is... Baudelaires, I...” For someone who made his existence entirely on words, he found himself at a remarkable lack of any.

“We would greatly appreciate it,” Violet said in a calm but utterly venomous voice. “If you would leave my siblings and I alone.”

Once again, the man only stared, and the Baudelaires were left to wonder what was taking their tea so long. He straightened himself but still did not move in the quiet street of the quiet town. After he appeared to be lost in thought even among all of the other emotions that his face betrayed him of feeling, he said in a hushed voice, “My niece. Beatrice Snicket is... is my niece.”

It had taken quite a bit of time for Mr. Snicket to gather this information despite all of the evidence pointing at it in the most obvious way. When one has been through as much grief and gross disbelief as much as Mr. Snicket and the Baudelaires both had, it can be quite hard to articulate speech. This was precisely what was happening to Mr. Snicket at that moment in time. He actually managed to take a deep breath and exhale it slowly enough to speak in a more understandable and less chopped up manner.

“Baudelaires, I am sorry to intrude on your personal space but please allow me to introduce myself. I am Lemony Snicket. I'm the last...” He faltered, and spoke up again. “the last living Snicket. Unless my... my niece Beatrice is still alive.”

The Baudelaires said nothing, stunned but still not quite as stunned as they once would have been. They collectively wondered where their tea was.

“I.... Baudelaires, I've been trying to find you since the fire. The-the fire I was framed for.” He was allowed to take a few flat steps forward as another gust of wind funneled down from the sky.

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny exchanged judgmental glances. “The Snicket file?” It was Sunny who spoke up this time. Despite not even being a fully-fledged child, she was remarkably articulate, especially when things such as this came into the equation.

For a second, Snicket looked relieved. “Yes, that's... that's the one.” He became serious again quickly. “I'm very sure that you're well aware that Count Olaf started a great many of those fires, including yours.”

“What do you know about Count Olaf?” Klaus asked, trying to funnel away the almost mocking tone he had acquired. They were less threatened and more annoyed by now, but they were also curious.

A clatter came from inside the tea-shop's kitchen, and everyone jumped. 'Clatter' is a word which means a loud crashing of plates, or in this case, 'agent Kingsleigh finally realizes that Lemony Snicket is standing outside and rushes to contact our supervisor'. I am sorry to inform you that this clatter overshadowed the conversation. What you are about to experience is what is known as a chronological jump, in which I am forced to skip a few details which, fortunately enough for me, are not absolutely instrumental in the retelling of this account.

By the time the tea-shop completed the Baudelaire's order, Lemony Snicket was seated across from them at a table. The siblings had crowded close to each other like birds in a storm, listening and talking whilst trying to make some amount of sense. They could tell that this man who now sat across from them and who was trying to keep from bursting into tears at any given moment, had been through a lot.

They had told him about their endeavors on the island, which he had not been able to follow, and were about halfway through when the shop owner passed them their tea and blueberry turnovers before going back inside and tending to the telegram he'd received from me.

“So, Baudelaires please allow me to attempt to digest this,” They did and waited for his response. “Kit is in fact deceased, she had a baby whom you named Beatrice, and on your way back you somehow lost her and you have ended up... here.” He sounded as though he were about to cry, which was not a new development but a distressing one nonetheless.

Violet nodded. “We're sorry about your siblings, Mr. Snicket.”

“I can't imagine what it would be like to lose Violet or Sunny, especially after all we've been through.” Added Klaus, suddenly feeling very ill at ease, though he couldn't figure out exactly what made him feel that way besides everything.

Snicket gave them a weak smile. “I don't expect you to, Baudelaires. With all that's happened, I'd hoped that you wouldn't have to.”

There was something both oddly comforting and oddly unnerving about the things the man called Lemony Snicket said. I am to believe that at that point, he had told them that he'd been chronicling their misfortunes, and they had understood that it had something to do with VFD. There was also something else that Mr. Snicket was hiding, and this they knew well, despite having seen him for all of about twenty minutes.

“What are you going to do now, Mr. Snicket?” Violet asked while taking a tentative sip from her tea. She didn't think the tea would harm her in any way, but she was very put off by whatever was occurring, even if it was harmless and terribly sad rather than harmful and terribly sad.

He thought for a moment, penning down details that he had observed from the Baudelaires and their tellings of their time on the island whilst attempting to keep the wind from blowing them away. “I don't know. I never do. But,” he looked up with his eyes flashing, if only a little, “I'm not running from anyone anymore, not at the moment anyway. I suppose I have you three extraordinary children to thank for that.”

They looked at him a bit stunned. He was correct, of course, but it was still an odd thing to hear. What he said was 'thank you'; what he meant was 'thank you for killing Count Olaf or otherwise letting him die, as it now puts me further away from danger as well as you further away from danger'.

Lemony Snicket went back to his papers for a moment, his pen scratching furiously.

The Baudelaires were faced with a dilemma, a word which here means 'should we turn away this incredibly sad man with a tip of the hat once we leave' or 'should we further our interactions with this sad man though we are not obligated to do as such'.

Violet, Klaus, and Sunny all excused themselves for a moment and walked far enough away that the gusting wind disguised their hushed voices.

Again, I wish I could tell you what transpired, but neither I nor the agent working there that day was able to write down what it was that they were saying. Snicket was busy writing down thoughts of his own and glancing balefully up at the Baudelaires, appearing to almost believe that they would disappear like spirits or those who had been framed of murder if he did not keep looking to see if they were there.

Suddenly, Lemony Snicket had most of his work go up in smoke, a phrase which here means 'his papers did not spontaneously combust but a great few of them were scattered into the empty street by a rather rude gust of wind.' He clamped his suitcase shut and sprinted into the street, which is remarkable when one knows how many bone fractures he's had in the past.

The Baudelaires all rushed back to try and swat down the flutter of parchment, and with four people all hunting paper like cats, it was easily accomplished enough. Violet was given a perfunctory nod by each of her siblings while delivering a stack back to Snicket, and as she handed him the papers, she looked him in the eye.

“Mr. Snicket... do you have a place do stay?”

He furrowed his eyebrows, as if unable to comprehend the question, and then responded, “No, no, but I'll manage.”

“We know it isn't much, but we do have a couch.” Klaus spoke up from behind Violet; he'd taken his seat again alongside Sunny.

For a second, Snicket looked horrified. “No, no, Baudelaires, I couldn't accept that offer.”

Violet, who still held her cautious demeanor, was also struck with something akin to pity. “Please, Mr. Snicket you won't be any trouble.”

“Not to mention, it's getting a bit more blustery than this later tonight. Your papers won't survive a storm like this outside.” Klaus looked calmly at the man in the gray suit.

Snicket pursed his lips, deep in thought, as he often was. “I believe I've put you in enough danger already, Baudelaires. You never know who's following you when you're someone like me.”

Violet straightened up and looked him in the eye, an act that can be quite frightening, especially when one is a young woman who was ready to fight tooth and nail at any given time, should something go awry. “Even if you are being followed, Mr. Snicket, even you should know that we are more than capable of defending ourselves.”

Sunny glanced slyly at her sister and the now startled-looking man she was talking to. “She's right, you know. I still have my teeth.”

“I still have my inventing skills.” added Violet, crossing her arms.

“And I still have my memory and my books. More of the former than the latter.” Klaus crossed his arms as well, as did Sunny, and soon three fourths of the table was sitting resolutely with their arms crossed and their hair being mussed by the cantankerous winds.

“You've been through quite enough.” Snicket muttered, averting his eyes in favor of his scrambled parchments. It was not that he lacked empathy, but the fact that he thought he didn't deserve to be among their good graces. “If I were faster, perhaps I could have stopped some of those... those atrocious acts, but I was not. I don't want to be too slow for you again... it's best if I leave you be.”

The Baudelaires shared a thoughtful glance in the gusty afternoon in front of the tea shop. Violet, Klaus, and Sunny made a silent agreement without so much as a flick of the head. They ignored their forced cautious nature for the first time in a very long while.

Snicket had begun packing up his things when Sunny got up and placed one tiny hand on his forearm, and said in a strangely adult voice for someone so young, “We forgive you, L.” She said it with the implication that there was nothing to be forgiven, but all three of the easily startled siblings knew that he needed to hear it.

He looked up, and his expression of alarm seemed to melt into melancholic relief that only people like Mr. Snicket can manage. Once again, he looked as though he were about to cry, but once again again, this was not very new.

It took a moment for Snicket to respond while he made sure all of his papers and pens were in the right order and had not been rigged to explode. Once he was done, he was met by the three faces of the children it had taken him so, so long to find. He sighed and put one hand to his forehead. “I'm not going to change your minds, am I?”

“No.” They all responded in unison.

He quickly looked away with a soft grin playing on his lips as he wiped nonchalantly at one of his eyes, as if hiding tears was something he had to do often.

As it was my unfortunate duty to inform you that Mister Snicket stepped out, it is my much more pleasant duty to tell you that he did accept the offer to sleep on their couch. An even more pleasant bit of news is that this is the first time in at least ten years that he has not left the same post after three days of staying their. He has asked me to stop the recount here, and I shall respect his wishes. One more parting bit of information, but you did not hear it from me, and I did not hear it from Kingsleigh: The Baudelaires are quite enjoying having an uncle again.

#asoue #a series of unfortunate events #lemony snicket #his is prolly ooc af #lemony sniclets #jinx writes

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