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just-a-random-cipher · 3 years

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!Theories about Gravity Falls!

Enjoy Reading:)👁

I recently came to the understanding that some people in the Gravity Falls fandom are slightly confused as to what little the fandom knows about Bill Cipher’s past. Everyone who watches the show knows he comes from another dimension known as the Nightmare Realm, which is decaying and fated to be destroyed by its very own mechanisms. However, given the release of Journal 3 by Alex Hirsch and Disney, and a rather interesting and hidden page on the Disney XD site (found here), Bill’s background is obviously not as simple as him being a megalomaniacal, dimension hopping villain.

Let’s start with the Axolotl.

Most people know this amphibious being from the last few seconds Bill is alive. He says something close to, “Axolotl, my time has come to burn. I invoke the ancient power that I may return.” If you want to hear it yourself, check out any of the YouTube videos on the subject. However, this seems to point out that Bill knows of, or somehow personally knows, the Axolotl. This is where the hidden link comes into play. Below is a picture of where the link leads to.

Take note of the first highlighted section. Dipper is asking what the Axolotl knows about Bill Cipher. Now, seeing as the Axolotl resides in the “time and space between time and space,” it could have the ability to see and know all of what happens in other places of time and space. This would give the Axolotl a distanced, somewhat unbiased view of what happened in Bill’s original dimension.

The riddle that is boxed gives some insight into Bill’s past from what the Axolotl knows. The first two lines refer to Bill - proof of him being an equilateral triangle due to the three sixty degree angles the Axolotl describes.

The third and fourth lines explain what happened to Bill’s dimension. The dimension burned, and he misses it. The “can’t return” at the end of the fourth line seems to hint that he is trying to get back to his dimension, or is trying to undo its destruction. Also note that Bill watched his dimension burn, meaning he was likely already outside of his dimension. Say this was his first time dimension hopping, and his first time leaving his dimension had some kind of effect like Weirdmageddon did on Earth - only, instead of there being weirdness waves that changed the environment, it was something much worse which basically rendered the entire dimension uninhabitable or entirely wiped it from existence.

Moving on, the Axolotl implies that Bill is lying to himself about being happy, and possibly other things. “Blame the arson for the fire” could have several meanings at this point. Was there someone else who actually destroyed Bill’s universe? Should we be blaming Bill because he is the arson? Does Bill blame someone else who is the true arson? Seeing as the word “Blame” is a mere imperative verb that is ordering a person or thing to do something, and there is no other person or personal pronouns given in the sentence, it is hard to say who the Axolotl is ordering. If it was “blames,” then it could be derived that it means “Bill blames” since “You blames,” referring to Dipper and likely the only other person the Axolotl could be thinking of in this context, doesn’t make grammatical sense.

The seventh line seems fairly obvious, and the only questions left are: who is Bill shirking the blame to, and what blame precisely? He has supposedly committed hundreds of atrocities and probably broken all the laws in every universe just to say he did, so is he putting the blame for all of his actions on someone else, or just a singular time where he was to blame?

The eighth line likely connects to Bill’s last moments in Stan’s mind. As stated before, Bill says “Axolotl, my time has come to burn. I invoke the ancient power that I may return.” Notice how Bill uses Axolotl’s name, and later says invoke. Kinda obvious connection there. But also note how Bill says “my time has come to burn.” Now, we do see literal fire taking over Stan’s mind, but we never see him actually burn. Of course, this could also point toward a more metaphorical description or that he just needed to rhyme, just as the Axolotl did in answering Dipper’s question, in order to truly invoke the Axolotl.He could also be referencing that he is dying, and that he probably should have died ages ago with the rest of his dimension which burned, but hey. I look for double meanings everywhere. Especially with Bill Cipher.

As for the last two lines… The fandom can only speculate on it. Bill can only liberate himself by doing one singular thing. And apparently a different form and different time are involved. That could have many different meanings. “Different form” could be physically or mentally - Bill could be a different shape, could be reborn as another species somehow, could reaffirm himself and admit the truth, or he could simply get some kind of interdimensional cold and be “out of shape.” The other half seems pretty obvious: “a different time.” It could be the future, the past, the present, the in between times, or even the second or third or hundredth time he tries to make amends.

A different form and time could also refer to a different universe, which holds a different form and different times, or himself entering Gravity Falls’ dimension and gaining a physical body (new form) and trying to start a new reign in another dimension that (this time) won’t just collapse someday without warning.

Basically, the Axolotl states that (in my own opinion) Bill possibly had a hand in the destruction of his home dimension, but likely tried to stop said destruction and failed. He misses his home and can’t return, but is still trying to find a way back to it. He’s lying to himself and someone is definitely to be blamed for the destruction of his universe, but he won’t admit to it. Bill needs the Axolotl in order to put the blame on someone else, and there is only one way, in another time and another form, that he can free himself from the blame.

Alright. Onto The Oracle. Finally.

In the Third Journal, Ford explains what exactly what happened for those 30 years he was missing. After getting attacked in a 2-D Dimension, he met The Oracle in Dimension 52. She knew all about him and his “mission” to defeat Bill. She was the one who helped Ford get a metal plate in his head. She also was the one who told Ford about Bill’s past.

The first few things I want to go over is the page in which Ford depicts The Oracle. She stands, staring with crossed arms partially obscuring an amulet, in front of what seem to be tapestries of the Axolotl. Bubbles and/or orbs seem to be hanging from the ceiling and rising from the floor in front of the tapestries.

The Third Journal does show that some people in the multiverse know of the Axolotl and the Oracle seems to have some kind of psychic power, evidence when she knew Stanford’s name, his purpose, and what he was destined to do. So perhaps that isn’t as interesting as it first appears. The amulet is also rather intriguing… Could it be in the shape of an eye?

But what about the bubbles and orbs?

I kinda feel like I’m looking too deeply into this, but the only other time when bubbles seem to be important is during Weirdmageddon when Bill uses a bubble to trap Mabel and unleashes weirdness bubbles on the town. It seems somewhat weird that the person who gives Ford all the answers seems to have some kind of connection to Bill - albeit a stretched connection with just these pieces of information in hand. It just seems too much like he’s being used again, which I’ll get into later.

Ford, on some level, seems to notice the connection between the Oracle and Bill. The symbols underlined above the circled Axolotl can be decrypted to read, “The opposite of Bill.” This seems to make sense with what little we know of her. She seems to know all, but never tells Ford that she is indeed psychic or omniscient - notice how Ford states, “Whether she was psychic or had just read my wanted poster is hard to say,” implying that he doesn’t know how she knew about him. She is also noted to be “calm” when talking about her desire to end Bill’s reign. However, Bill seems to believe himself to be omniscient due to his ability to peer into all realms from his Nightmare Realm. But he constantly doesn’t foresee issues - Mabel knocking the safe’s code out of his hands in Dreamscaperers and outsmarting him in Sock Opera, the Weirdness Containment Bubble around Gravity Falls, the dino-arm pulling his eye out, the Stans swapping clothes. He also is known to be rather hotheaded and, as many people in the fandom point out, likely to be insane.

Now, you might be wondering where all this comes into play, right? Well, if you look at the second page, where Ford details their encounter a bit more, he says that the Oracle told him that Bill was power hungry, which caused him to burn his dimension and everything and everyone in it.

That doesn’t sound like what the Axolotl said, right? Which is why people are conflicted on what, or rather who, to believe.

But why would she shape her words into something that Ford could easily misinterpret? Well, first things first: she’s an oracle and prophecies can be easily misinterpreted. But that seemed to fit a bit too easily, so I looked a little harder at the wording of the document and came to one conclusion:

She wants Bill dead and out of the picture.

My reasoning? 1) Look at the line “She spoke of him without anger, but with a calm, steely, clinical resolve to see his reign end.” Pretty straight forward. Ford can tell that she doesn’t like Bill’s reign and will not stop until he is stopped. 2) “She… said I had the face of the man who was destined to destroy Bill.” She said destroy Bill, not Ford’s constant “defeat” that he mentions throughout the series. Destroy means to utterly annihilate, reduce to nothing, ruin emotionally and spiritually, to kill. If this is what she said to him, then she obviously wasn’t just messing around. 3) Ford and her spent the entire night partying after she revealed this. They were partying about someone’s death. Kinda harsh

There is one other point that really hammers it into me that the Oracle was manipulating her own words: her own name. The first paragraph reveals her name to be Jheselbraum the Unswerving. The Unswerving. Which means that once she’s dedicated to something - like destroying a dimension hopping demon by the name of Bill - she will not stop until she succeeds.

Seeing as Ford mysteriously found himself in another dimension after he and the Oracle partied together, it’s pretty obvious that she didn’t tell Ford about him being destined to defeat Bill until that last day. You’d expect someone whom could pull someone out of another dimension into their own, whom knew who Ford was way before they met, whom already had a difficult surgery in mind to aid Ford, and whom was obviously invested in taking Bill down to simply tell Ford that he was the multiverse’s savior, right?

She instead kept it all a secret until the last day, at which point Ford was even more resolute to kill Bill instead of just defeating him and keeping him out of his dimension.

So who do you trust more? Or do you trust no one? On one hand you have a mysterious being that answered Dipper’s question with a riddle instead of a straight answer, and said riddle could be seen in a variety of lights. On the other, you have an equally mysterious Oracle who might have manipulated her words to ensure Ford’s resolve against Bill.

It's just my opinion! So you don't have to say anything about it! :)))

#gravity falls #gravity falls theory #gravity falls bill #axolotl #dipper pines #mabel pines #digital art #drawing #bill cipher

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youngster-monster · 5 years

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innocence died screaming

The Voice of Riven disappears in a burst of Darkness and the echo of an eldritch scream, burning into nothing from Razel's last blow and taking his sword with it.

As for Uldren, liberated from its clutches, he wavers on unsteady feet, just the half second it takes for his body to remember gravity and collapse like a puppet with its strings cut.

He never hits the ground.

What he does hit – or rather what hits him – is Razel's fist. It catches him in the stomach, would have winded him if he had any air left to lose. Instead it sends him flying back, the blow powerful even without Solar power behind it. He crashes against the floor and it's hard to tell if the cracking sound comes from the ground or his back.

"Razel!" Petra cries, more surprised than disapproving. They've never been too friendly, Uldren and her. Close because of a shared love for Mara more than genuine friendship. After what he's done it stands to reason that she'd let Razel get a good punch in.

But Razel doesn't stop here. Doesn't even seem to hear her when she repeats his name as a warning. He strides toward Uldren, embers trailing in his wake, flames licking at his skin. He's lost his gloves at some point, burned against his Sunsinger sword or torn against Scorn or Taken, but the burn disappear as soon as they form on his bare skin. Guardians, Uldren thinks scornfully. Mindless brutes, uncaring of the fragility of life.

As he moves forward, none of the grace of a stalking predator and all of the danger, he tears his helmet off and throws it behind him, uncaring of the clatter as it bounces against the stone floor and the glass visor cracks.

(Poor floor doesn't deserve the abuse it's going through at the Guardian's hand.)

Under it his hair is a mess, his mouth twisted in rage, sharp teeth bared, but his eyes –

His eyes flash fire-bright, more than a mere Awoken glow, Solar energy magnified by the shine of unshed tears. Anger or sorrow, Uldren can't tell.

And then he's on Uldren, fisting his collar and dragging him up to his level. It's am awkward position, Razel kneeling over him like that, but there's an alien fear spreading through his veins like hoarfrost and he can only gape as Razel gets in his face, spitting in rage.

Uldren doesn't let him get a word in edgewise. He's always been too much of a smartass for his own good, according to Jolyon. If he's going to die anyway, he won't go quietly.

"Still angry about Cayde-6 then?" He asks, mock-surprised. He knows, now, how popular Cayde-6 was. How loved. Killing him was a deliberate attack on anyone but Cayde himself, but the effect it had... Oh, it was definitely a perk, knocking Guardians down a peg or two.

It doesn't have the desired effect. Razel doesn't fly into a rage, only freezes, fingers tightening against Uldren's collar.

"How could you?" He growls, voice hoarse from disuse. He sounds so angry, so sad, so outraged it all but makes up for the lack of volume. Softer, so anguished it makes Uldren's teeth hurt, he repeats, "How could you? He was the best of us, he was- he was my best friend."

Uldren feels a pang in his chest, not for this pathetic Guardian but for Mara, dead and gone–

And never to be brought back, by the look of things.

"People die," he snarls, pitiless in his grief.

Razel pushes him down unexpectedly, slams him against the floor. "He didn't die!" He roars. "You killed him! You-"

He raises a fist, brings it down on Uldren's face.

"Killed!" Another punch, like punctuation. "Cayde!"

The impact of the third makes his head whip to the side. He grimaces, cheek pressed against the cold stone, and the movement makes his lower lip sting where he cut it on his teeth. He prods a loosened teeth with his tongue and tastes only blood coppery and bitter.

Out the corner of his eye he can see Petra, hovering a few feet from them. Not knowing how to intervene, unsure if she even wants to.

Uldren's attention is brought back to Razel by a hand gripping his jaw, jarring his head back to look into Razel's eyes. He looks frustrated now, on top of the mess of bitter brief tangled in his burning glare.

"Not much fun hitting a guy who's already down, huh?"

He doesn't reply, just punches Uldren – this time there's a crack and pain, hotter and sharper than the rest, blooms in his face as his nose breaks.

"Though I guess killing him was fun-"

Another blow, so hard it makes his vision go black for a painful second.

"Pathetic," he spits. He's never known how to stop. "He was pathetic without your precious Light, crawling-"

"Shut up!" Another punch. "Shut up!" And another. The pain blurs together

He grins, teeth as bloody as the rest of his face. It's a cruel expression on him. "Have you tried shooting me? It worked on him-"

The last thing he sees before blacking out are bruised, bloody knuckles, already knitting back together.

He's not out for long – ten, thirty seconds maybe. He could always take a beating. What was it Mara said? Measuring his worth by the things he could survive? Yeah, that sounds about right.

Razel... Isn't hitting him anymore. He's staring blindly at Uldren, eyes hazy with a numb kind of despair. Uldren coughs, tries to clear his throat, and he blinks out of his daze, just slightly. His eyes scrunch up weirdly and then he half collapses on top of Uldren, shoulders shaking with – laughter? No, he's... Sobbing, tears finally spilling from his eyes and down his cheeks, landing like warm rain on Uldren's bruised skin. He makes barely a sound and his hand shakes against Uldren's collarbone, fingers tightening around his collar until they've gone white as if it's the only thing anchoring him there. His other hand claws against the ground, bearing his weight.

"You killed him," he chokes out, wet hiccups breaking his words. "He's dead, he's never coming back, you killed him, you killed my best friend, he's gone-"

Petra takes a step toward them, looking worryingly close to intervening – stopping Razel, maybe. Uldren bares his teeth in another cruel smile and grits out, "And I'm still there."

Razel nods numbly, fingers tightening briefly then releasing him completely. He stumbles to his feet, then a few steps back, as if giving up–

As if sparing him–

No, Uldren thinks, thinking of an eternity in the dark of the Prison of Elders, thinking of dead sisters, thinking of nothing at all but the awful possibility that there might be some mercy left in that man.

Then Razel bends down to pick Cayde's gun, left where Uldren dropped it, and he exhales a sigh of bitter relief.

"Razel-" Petra says, jerking forward as if to put herself between him and Uldren. But she doesn't have anything to say, doesn't want to stop him anymore than he wants to be stopped, than Uldren wants him to be stopped. She unholsters her sidearm and steps up next to him. Two avengers in bright pink armor, the sight so odd Uldren feels laughter bubbles up in his throat.

「Wait!」 Another voice – Razel's Ghost, appearing in a puff of Light.

「Think about what you're doing. What would Cayde think of you? What would Cayde do?」

Razel aims the gun at Uldren's head. "I know exactly what he would do," He says, soft and low, tired. Like all the fight has left him, like he's only up out of spite, or momentum. Like he doesn't dare stop in fear that he can never stand back up again.

「Then-」

"I'm not Cayde."

I've lost Cayde, he doesn't say. Uldren hears it, an echo of his own voice, words he's used as motive and excuse both countless times in the last few years.

「What would he want you to do, then?」

"I don't know." He cocks the gun. "I don't care."

He squeezes the trigger.

(And there is mercy no more.)

#writing #destiny 2 #petra venj #uldren sov #my ocs #razel #this is pretty dark sorry

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qqueenofhades · 5 years

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So dare I ask what the nightmare in detail is regarding Brexit right now?

@tollers-and-jack said: I’m asking for the rant…

@rhymeswithtessa said: I’m a big fan of your rants gimme your thoughts on brexit

@onlymorelove said: Ahem. I am interested in your rant. If you feel like sharing. 💗

Ahaha wow. Apparently this is something the people really want to hear about. Disclaimer, just remember that you asked for this, and that this is, as Captain Holt would say, a trigger for me. So if this periodically devolves into incoherent screaming/application of capital letters and exclamation marks, and what have you, just know that.

So… I wrote these posts soon after Brexit in 2016 explaining what a spectacularly stupid idea it was even then. If I said anything optimistic in those posts, in a sort of grasping-at-straws-maybe-this-will-work sort of flailing way, please disregard it. We have had empirical evidence of how this played out. Spoiler alert: it failed. It failed so comprehensively on every possible level that it seems almost ludicrous for a supposedly modern political system, but this is 2019, the world is dogshit, and we are all retreating into our little late-capitalism xenophobia bubbles with our right-wing strongmen and our populist rhetoric and the UK is now a global laughingstock. Which believe me, the ex-British Empire richly deserves, especially given the part that anti-immigration paranoia played in this whole debacle, but also, I live here and really would Rather Not.

I do not even know how to sum up the ridiculousness of the past few months, where – almost at the end of the two-year period of triggering Article 50, with just a very short amount of time to the original exit date (29 March 2019) – the UK finally managed to secure a withdrawal deal. Mind you, it was a shit deal that both sides hated, but by golly, It Made Brexit Happen, and since the Theresa May-bot has only been able to repeat over and over that she will Make Brexit Happen, there you have it. Not surprisingly, it proceeded to be comprehensively defeated in Parliament by the largest majority ever seen since World War II. It then was subject to surface-level makeovers and cosmetic tinkering about the backstop in Northern Ireland (since among many other things, the ardent Brexiteers forget that oh yeah we share a land border with an EU country and peace in Ireland is kind of a thing that should be paid attention to). The DUP (Democratic Unionist Party) of Northern Ireland, whose 10 MPs prop up the minority Tory government, absolutely hated it and would not support it, since it would effectively introduce different regulations for NI than the rest of the UK and thus jeopardise the, you know, United Kingdom. Plus it would require the EU’s assent to end the arrangement, and also we can’t have that. Because reasons.

The deal was then thumpingly defeated for a second time, people got worried because uhhhh aren’t we supposed to leave the EU in like a week, Parliament had to institute emergency measures and hold a series of votes on Brexit alternatives, those also got defeated and May would not even commit to honouring the will of the House, 6 million people signed a petition asking for Article 50 to be revoked and the Brexit process cancelled (the biggest in parliamentary history) and got ignored. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage led a pathetic procession of 200 diehard Leavers against literally 1 million people in London calling for a new referendum, the deal got defeated for a third time after they had to do all kinds of fancy-dancing to get it back for yet another vote, they got the EU to agree to a crunch extension to 12 April, and now that that is three days away with absolutely no consensus in sight, have sent May back to Europe to beg Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron to extend the deadline to 30 June. They actually had to pass a bill (by one vote) forcing her to do this in order to avoid a no-deal Brexit. The EU is justifiably exasperated with this utter, unbelievable incompetence, the fact that the hard right wing of the Tory party pulled this absurdly irresponsible jackshit without any clue how to do it, and the way the UK still thinks it can just pick an a la carte deal where we’re great and the EU sucks and blue passports and blah blah Great Britain is Great!!! And there has been absolutely no collective awareness from either major party that maybe, just maybe, trying to undo a legal and political and cultural alignment that has existed since at least 1973 when we were a founding member of this project, in two years, with no idea how, to please a xenophobic lying campaign, WAS A STUPID FUCKING GODDAMN IDEA!!!!!!!!!!!!

(we pause while the blogger breathes and drinks heavily)

Anyway, that is the short version of Nobody Still Knows What The Fuck Is Going to Happen. Technically if we stayed in the bloc past 22 May, we’d have to hold elections to the European Parliament, which bitch bitch whine whine, the Brexiteers don’t want to do. Maybe we think we’re entitled to more special treatment (no scratch that, we definitely do) because we can’t sort our heads from our asses and have been so wildly and bogglingly arrogant and incompetent that it would almost be funny if people’s lives and livelihoods and futures weren’t at stake. And we have the goddamn European Research Group (aka the hard Brexit wing) yapping about how no deal wouldn’t be that bad and we should just take it on the chin because Blah Blah Blitz Spirit, Nationalism Patriotism Our Freedom From The Tyrannical EU. (Sidenote, if someone just punches Jacob Rees-Mogg in the elitist Little Britain face, you don’t know where I was, God I hate him so much.) Every single business, manufacturer, industry, finance, medicine, food, education, you name it outfit has been warning that no, actually, no deal would be catastrophic and the UK is not remotely prepared for it. To the point we have the military on standby to deliver basic goods if it happens??! How. How is this acceptable??!?!? I don’t understand??!?!

(And the Brexiteers who are like “this is Britain let’s all just hunt hares and grow food in our back gardens,” which, yes, is something I heard actually said, are out of touch to a truly stupendous degree. Yes I’m sure that a modern first-world country wants to resort to subsistence farming to feed its 66 million people. Do they. Even. Hear Themselves. Racism is a hell of a drug, my friends! And if you want to be like “oh no it’s not about racism/anti-immigrant sentiment, it’s about the economy,” let’s just say that the newsreader covering a Brexit march said that he’d never seen so many white people in one place and was forced to apologize, because racist white people don’t like it being pointed out to them that they are racist white people. That tells you a lot. And the Leave campaign has been convicted multiple times for breaking electoral law and just flat-out Lying to the public, so the people who voted Leave thinking they were in fact getting a better economic deal were deceived outright and have indeed often expressed regret that they were so wildly and deliberately deluded. So anyway. Fun!)

I cannot emphasise enough the sheer, staggering arrogance and delusion of the people who proposed this project and then forced it through, because the British public has believed throughout its entire history that it’s better than the whole world (see again: imperial nostalgia and Oh No The Foreigners Are Coming and etc) and has been fed for a good 25 years on this point on a lot of bullshit stories about how terrible and Liberal and Anti-British the EU is, because the British popular press is a flaming dumpster fire (you think Fox News is bad, and it is, but so many of the tabloids are basically Fox News UK). So the Brits feel as if they’ve been so unfairly repressed by the EU and need to Take Back Control (once again, there is a very long history of this rhetoric of the English being supposedly attacked and repressed by foreigners, dating back to the idea of the “Norman Yoke” resulting from the Conquest, which became a big deal in the 19th century – I am a historian, I can pull receipts for days on this). Once again, they think they can just do whatever they want, the EU is the bad guy for not giving it to them, that we should set ourselves on fire and jump out the window rather than sit at the table like grownups with the rest of Europe, and just take our ball and go home and yet still think we are entitled to preferential treatment.

I just…. I don’t even. I DO NOT EVEN. I seriously lack the words.

So we may get another rolling series of short-term extensions, we may not, nobody can come to any agreement on what should be done, May promised to resign to get the deal through, the deal did not get through, the whole setup is so unsustainable that it feels like a general election is an inevitability, and the obvious solution would be another referendum to see if the people even still goddamn want this. But the Brexiteers, for all they bluster about upholding the will of the people to leave, resist this with all their might (what are you fucking afraid of? If you’re so confident that you’re still the majority, you should WANT another referendum to confirm it, but you’re cowards and you know you’d lose and you’re tied to this stick of dynamite for Ideology Reasons, god damn it). The message has been always that We Must Deliver Brexit and This Is What The People Want, while the people are breaking records saying that no, actually, we’d like another say, because everyone has now seen that this is an absurd shitshow that cannot be accomplished (and ONCE AGAIN WAS NEVER! FEASIBLE! IN THE FUCKING FIRST PLACE!!!!) and it hey, actually was not a bad idea to be in the EU.

This is again, the alignment of the entire post-WWII political and legal world. It confers countless benefits, freedom from tariffs, the single market, a customs union, visa-free travel, no roaming charges, the right to live and work in 27 other countries, etc. But because the ex-British Empire (which really wishes it was still the British Empire) has its fragile racist panties in a bunch about other people coming to live here (when as ever, the problem isn’t immigrants, it’s austerity budgets and the Tories absolutely gutting government and NHS funding and social programmes and thinking that the solution to knife crime is to punish teachers for not noticing their students getting into it), they have decided this is actually the best course of action. Because we don’t want those Non British People telling us what to do. Ew gross.

As people have said, it’s like trading a gourmet three course meal for a bag of crisps and feeling self-satisfied about it, because boy we sure showed them. It has been bungled to a degree truly stupefying to everyone who isn’t a marching Brexiteer ideologue, Labour have…. really not inspired any confidence whatsoever that they’d be able to handle it better (since they have wildly see-sawed between what they will and won’t support, if they’d revoke Article 50 or support a new people’s vote or so on) and the Prime Minister has failed on an utterly fundamental degree to build cross-party consensus or engage with other European leaders or display any ability to consider alternatives. The Tories have truly felt that they can ram this through without any reference to anyone or anything else, and fuck consequences, I guess. The British economy has already lost approximately £66 billion as a result of Brexit uncertainty and loses more every day, every major firm is moving its headquarters to somewhere they can take advantage of EU law, this will leave us poorer, more isolated, less secure, with fewer options, and generally a worse deal in every imaginable way, and yet, because again, racism and xenophobia is a hell of a drug, there are still some factions who feel like yes, this is absolutely what we should do.

It is truly a slow motion car crash of nightmares, it’s completely avoidable and yet nobody has the backbone to do that, Parliament and the PM have completely broken down, nobody is listening to the British people for whom they are supposedly doing this, and once again, the British Empire absolutely 100% deserves this. But as someone who lives here and would actually kind of like to get a job here, Jesus Christ. Jesus. Christ. JESUS. CHRIST.

#politics for ts #brexit for ts #did i say everything #i'm not even sure i did #god #long post #romancelvr #ask

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dandelionpie · 5 years

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So I’ve been Having Ideas About My Future lately. And right now this one feels like the very beginning of a soap bubble - the part where you’ve started to blow into it but it hasn’t closed around itself yet. And I want to be really cautious with it so it doesn’t just pop before it can even get into the air, so I wasn’t gonna talk about it for a while, but also.

[Click through for a very long post about Maddy’s Career Options - replies are fine but please be gentle with my baby bubble hopes]

Okay, you guys.

So I was on the phone with my mother the other day, and I was having a sort of a panic attack (you know, like you do when you’re on the phone with your mother [kidding this is not normal and should not be trivialized, etc]), and I was trying to conceal this fact from her but it was Not Working. And I was dismayed about where my life was going, my lack of definite plans for a career, etc., and she said, “You know, I was actually gonna tell you - we had a lady come visit our school the other day and she’s an art therapist.”

And...here’s the thing. Usually my mother’s career suggestions kind of go in one ear and out the other. Because my mom’s great! Really! But she isn’t me, and she doesn’t always get what my life is like. So I usually just say “hm, yeah, I’ll look into it,” and then I don’t.

But I had genuinely just forgotten that art therapy existed. I knew about art, and I knew about therapy, and I knew somewhere in the back of my mind that people were putting those two things together, but somehow I’d just sort of filed that info in the General Trivia drawer instead of the Potential Grown-Up Jobs one. And...I’m getting sort of cautiously excited about the idea.

RANDOM OBSERVATIONS I HAVE HAD SINCE THAT CONVERSATION

(I Started Writing Them Down and Then They Became Legion)

Every piece of art I like has a strong psychological element. That’s the common thread, dammit. That’s why I’m so picky about song lyrics, that’s why I can’t get into a book unless it’s got some sort of strong interpersonal/intrapersonal thread for me to snag my little English major hooks in. At the end of the day, the narratives that interest me are the ones where people are constantly feeling and processing things and I have to think a lot about why they’re doing that the way they’re doing it.

Not trying to sound like I think I’m super virtuous or whatever, but I tend to see good in most people, which might be an asset in that field? I get along well with a lot of personality types that friends of mine have cited as abrasive. Like, I can find people obnoxious but still notice enough of their good qualities to enjoy their company or at least tolerate it. And that’s a strength that’s served me well on a personal level, and a little on a professional level too (getting along with people helps just about anywhere), but I never thought of it as something I could use to particular effect in an actual career track.

That said, I have NO background in psychology. I had a couple lab rats, but they didn’t really teach me any of their secrets.

On cursory examination I have decided that I Do Not Like neurology. I have a lot of friends who seem to love it and that’s great, but....look, it just freaks me the fuck out. Maybe it’s because I’ve spent so much of my adulthood (read: all of it) preoccupied with the vulnerability of my physical being to various surgery-requiring problems. But the idea of my mind (that place where I spend so very very much of my time) being subject to the physical limitations of my brain (a part of my corporeal body [which has in the past proven itself to be somewhat unpredictable]) is so fucking terrifying to me that I’d prefer to spend as little time on that as possible please and thank you.

(Aside: I know the phrase “I don’t like the Brain; I just like the Mind) is like peak dualism, but I’m sure you all know what I mean, right? It’s possible to think about and work with the mind without focusing on the physical brain that gives rise to it. I’ve been doing that on the client end of things for years.)

A lot of the art I do is actually pretty therapeutic! To me, I mean. I never did figure out how to translate the whole cancer thing into an autobio comic (I eventually realized I simply didn’t want to and it was one of the most liberating moments of my life). But I have been relying on art for years to process my trauma. Most of my creative projects and ideas for them go back to that in some way, even if it doesn’t come across to the other people who experience them.

That said, I am...not the biggest autobio comic fan. There are so many things about that genre that rub me the wrong way. I’m glad it exists, I just don’t tend to enjoy consuming or creating autobio comics. However, this might be a chance to see autobio comics through a new lens! And it also has the potential to set me apart - there are quite a few art therapists, but I’ll bet there are fewer whose background is in comics specifically.

I could have an office. I could go into private practice and have a place that I could build into a safe space for people to talk about their problems and work on them. I know it’s just a little thing (and I’m not sure yet if private practice would be feasible/right for me, at least right away), but I like the idea of making physical space for that kind of work. (And if I sometimes also used it as a studio for comics, well, I don’t think that’s illegal or anything.)

I could be relatively independent in my career. I could work for an agency (and I think I’d probably have to, at first, but I gotta look into how all that works), but I could also spend at least some of my time in private practice, or working pro bono or on a sliding scale, or doing other stuff that allows me a great deal of flexibility and control over my schedule.

I like the idea of a type of schooling that has experience built into it. Like, you have to get a certain number of internship hours before you can be certified. I’m sure there’s more to it than that, but it’s nice to see a field that’s so up-front about the fact that you need experience before you can do your job.

A lot of art therapists work with traumatized kids, and I find that prospect faintly terrifying. But also maybe it would be good to get over that, if I want to Help People and Use My Strengths to Do Good Things In the World. Those kids are gonna be traumatized either way, and if I can handle it, it’d probably be cool if I helped them.

It would be so nice to not be broke literally all the time. Even with student loans, I think this has the potential to help that happen, if I do my research and play my cards right. And I might even be able to work *gasp* less than 40 hours a week, thereby freeing up my time for other projects. Or, you know, kids. Hell, maybe I’d even be able to feed them.

Nobody would be able to make me work Saturdays.

Not sure yet whether it’d be better to get an Actual Art Therapy Degree or do a more general thing and then get a specific art therapy certification after/during that? I’m leaning towards the latter because I’d like more versatility, but I’m getting the sense that the rules for who can call themself an art therapist are slightly stricter in Oregon, so I’m gonna have to talk to the people who run the program.

What with the horse in the hospital and all that, I was thinking about a career in activism. But I’m not sure I have the temperament to be a lawyer, and I hate talking to strangers (I’ll do it if I have to, but damned if I’m gonna go door-to-door every day). But this way, I could maybe help activists balance their lives and their activism. Activists need therapists.

I could help people like me, with medical trauma. I know all about medical trauma! It has literally been a constant since I was 18! And in college and after, I hated feeling like my problems were fake and that my illness affecting my life was the result of some moral defect. Without therapy, I don’t know if I would have kept going to doctors and trying to figure everything out.

Visual art has in many ways been a great avenue leading away from self-harm, for me. The physicality of it is so much more powerful, for me, than almost anything else.

I’ve been so conflicted lately with lots of ideas about art-as-saleable-product vs. art-as-catharsis-and-narrative-control. I kind of thought my interest lay in the former but now I’m wondering if maybe it’s the latter. Like, I still love comics and storytelling and I want to make comics for people to read, but at the end of the day, I don’t want to do advertising. I don’t want to build a brand. I just want to tell stories and draw pretty pictures that make people happy. And I know that’s not what art therapists do, but in some ways it feels like the field still lines up better with my goals than commercial illustration. Does that make sense?

Lewis and Clark has a program. PSU has a program (though not an art therapy one specifically I think). There are online ones and low-residency ones as well, although honestly I think I function best in a classroom. Right now I think I’m leaning towards L&C because I’ve heard really good things about their education grad programs from a couple of people, but: gotta look further into it.

I’m liking the prospect of being a student again. I like going to lectures. I like notebooks and pencils and pens and libraries. And according to one person I talked to, as a therapist you actually have to keep taking courses throughout your career as the field changes. It’s like a condition for licensure or something (at least in some parts of the field). I’d love to be able to keep learning my entire life in such a deliberate way.

And I think I’d be better at being a student now than I was at Reed. I remember realizing waaay too late that you could just...ask your professors for help with stuff. And they could say no! But they weren’t going to, like, set me on fire. So what if I just set up a meeting with someone involved in a program and said, “Hey, look, I have no psych background and an intense interest in therapeutic work; how do I do this?” They could tell me to go away, but that’s probably about it. In a way, I think it might be nice to take another stab at academia - redeem myself.

(I have no idea what my Reed GPA is and should probably figure that out. Pretty sure I got a C in Chem and at least one other class? But maybe they won’t mind.)

My original plan had been to fund my comics habit with a freelance illustration career. Because almost nobody makes a living in comics, at least not just in comics. It happens, but very rarely does it happen with creator-owned work. A lot of indie comics artists freelance or have some other sort of art day job, and I thought that was a lifestyle I could get into.

But the Horrible Deep Dark Secret is...I don’t actually like freelancing that much, at least with my life the way it currently is. I mean, I love drawing and I love not being broke, so please keep sending people my way if they want someone to draw something (please please please I need the money). But the illustration industry is downright exhausting. It’s so hard to switch off, and it’s so much work even convincing people you deserve to get paid, let alone getting them to pay you. Mad kudos to anyone who has the time/energy to do that, but I’m not sure I do, at least at this point in my life.

But if I was planning to supplement my comics with another, art-related career anyway, what if I did this instead? What if it ended up being something I, Maddy, could enjoy and feel good about? Doing this (with my temperament) might actually a) pay better b) offer me more time and c) lend a sense of structure to my days that I definitely need and that freelancing sorely lacks.

Actually, having comics projects might even help with work-life balance in this field. I don’t know yet, but I’ve been told that a lot of therapeutic practice is establishing healthy boundaries between your work and your life, and I think it might help to have somewhere else to pour emotional energy when I’m off the clock.

Having another career wouldn’t mean I couldn’t make comics. Hell, it wouldn’t even mean I couldn’t sell comics. I could still make a website and freelance sometimes. I could still set up a Patreon. I could still publish my stuff on the web and in real life. I could still table at cons. And if things started going better than I’ve been planning for them to go, comics-wise, I wouldn’t have to keep being a therapist full-time. I’d have some flexibility, especially in private practice.

Anyway, I literally just started thinking about this a few days ago, so I have no idea if I’m gonna stay this excited about it. But...I’m enjoying looking into it. I’ve felt so much more hopeful the past few days - like my life might actually go someplace I could like. It’s a nice feeling and I would like to keep it.

I dunno. I’ve talked to some people and I’m gonna talk to some more people. Maybe set up an interview at the college in the next couple months if I can swing it. Prereqs would probably be somewhat hellacious, but that’s what I get for majoring in the humanities.

Okay cool I’m gonna go eat something and clean the kitchen.

#personal #job stuff #self-harm mention #medical trauma #in which maddy begins to consider grad shool

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thesinglesjukebox · 5 years

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youtube

ITZY - DALLA DALLA

[6.56]

The most views for a K-pop debut ever, but are they our new fave too?

Jessica Doyle: Well, it's the second reincarnation of 4Minute's "HuH" to emerge in two weeks, albeit with more musical ideas than the first try. The nods to constant surveillance in the video are worth a few thoughts, I suppose. It's hard to get excited about a debut with the refrain "we're different, we're different" when my first response is, "Well, if you mean 'we don't group-shout as well as Twice eonnis,' then sure." [4]

David Moore: Itzy grab a shard of a Hailee Steinfeld song and build it out again with frills and squiggles and rah-rah, hip 'cuz it's square. I don't know about the empowerment in the messaging (drippy from what I can tell -- "Keep your head up! Keep on dreaming!"), but the clatter and clutter in the sonics is its own sort of liberating. [7]

Alfred Soto: The grime motifs, mostly the distortions, and the rhythm changes work as ends in themselves, yet Itzy insist on adding, "I love myself." Damn straight. [7]

Thomas Inskeep: A refreshing change of pace in girl group K-Pop: "Dalla Dalla" translates as "Different Different," and these five women are proudly proclaiming their difference/s and independence. Fittingly, the track is hard electropop -- think Skrillex's first flirtations with pop -- with rap breaks folded into the batter, and Itzy sells it; their delivery matches their lyrics. Is this the start of a new era for girl group K-Pop? Dunno, but one can hope; this is a fine start. [8]

Nicholas Donohoue: There is the idea of fusion genre, a form of flattening some disparate elements in two or more genres and accentuating more friendly and harmonious elements to create an interesting and less off-putting product and style. You could call "Dalla Dalla" a fusion, but a more apt description might be patch job. The rate at which it shifts from its baseline to a more hard-edge hip hop, then to pure pop sweetness, then to cheer squad, then back to its baseline, makes it hard to consume because it never gives itself time to appreciate a feeling. [4]

Stephen Eisermann: Bubble-gum pop, but electric is a genre I didn't know I needed. The ladies of Itzy sound confident, assured, and like they're having a blast while singing to this song about how different they are. I'm not sure that I buy that they're that different than most K-Pop girl groups, but they certainly seem like they're having more fun. [7]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: Consider me floored: not since Weki Meki's "I Don't Like Your Girlfriend" has a K-pop single featured audacious genre-blending that played a crucial role in driving home its lyrics. In thinking about why "Dalla Dalla" works, I kept coming back to Why Don't We's "Something Different" and Hailee Steinfeld's "Love Myself." The former is a relatively anonymous boy band track that fails to impress because the group is too underdeveloped to have any recognizable personality; you can't convince listeners of your individuality when your music doesn't have any. The latter is a self-love teen pop anthem that succeeds because its chorus is a blaring wind tunnel that invites listeners to scream its "I love myself!" mantra without fear of anyone listening. Itzy combine the two ideas and sell it by going full girl crush concept; they encourage others to love themselves by flaunting their own uniqueness. Realistically, Itzy are too new to be understood on a quasi-personal level, so this methodology circumnavigates that issue with ease. There are flashes of early 4Minute and 2NE1 here (that "no no!" is a dead ringer for the latter), but the gimmick-free trap breakdown situates "Dalla Dalla" in a post-"BBoom BBoom" 2019. When the song begins, an elevator bell is heard to catch your attention, and it leads into a series of dubstep wobbles -- less "Bubble Pop" than "Night," though. Out first impression of these girls is that they're fierce, but it's only fully realized when they return to that sound after a bubblegum chorus. "I love myself!" they chant, and it's done with such fervor that one can't imagine a time when they were ever reluctant about declaring it. The bridge finds them explicitly extending their arm out, becoming cheerleaders for those who are afraid to express themselves. While their hopeful messages to "Keep your head up!" and "Just keep on dreaming!" would be enough on their own, the elastic tug of the beat embodies just how dead-set they are in ensuring your breakthrough. Incredibly, the final chorus returns to this exact beat, as if to announce that this -- this level of palpable confidence -- is something you could achieve. They exit with a final elevator ding: a cocksure grace note that serves as a reminder that one day, you might actually get on their level. [8]

Alex Clifton: The production on "Dalla Dalla" is disparate and messy, but it also... kind of works? I have no idea what's happening here. We go from 2NE1-style rap to a sugar-sweet chorus that rivals "Russian Roulette" to a screaming bridge that recalls Twice for some reason and I can't say any of the transitions are smooth, but it definitely stands out. Intellectually I think this is too jumbled for me to really call this a song I like, but I played it three times in a row trying to puzzle through it and I found something new and weird in each listen. It's not straightfoward in the slightest, but I do like maximalist bonkers pop songs, and I can't say that "Dalla Dalla" disappoints in that respect. [5]

Iris Xie: I get chills when I hear the instrumental shift into a sudden seismic snap at 1:50, with Yeji yelling "My life! I will live my own life! Don't you care!" The production disorients the listener and forces them to enter her defiance spatially for a split second -- her voice echoes in sharpness and the bass drops incredibly low, resulting in a bouncing effect that encloses you in the sudden sting of her defiance. Despite teen pop being in existence forever, I have never heard an accurate, sonic portrayal of what it is like to be an sassy, angry, defiant teenage girl that is absolutely fucking sick of people dictating how she is supposed to be, and pushing back hard with a cathartic forcefield fed powerful by the strain of expectations, all the while without putting down other girls. The intensity of that drop alone already sets this song above so much teen pop I've heard before. In addition to this, the 17-year-old me is so completely envious that this song only exists now in 2019. Back in 2009, the main active girl group I was aware of was The Pussycat Dolls, and funny enough, "Dalla Dalla" sounds like the more sophisticated little sister to "When I Grow Up." In their DNA, they both have the haughty and ambitious vocals, intricate but pumping flourishes, incessant warped synth and vocal hooks, and a stomping demand to be admired and taken seriously. But in contrast to "When I Grow Up," which serves as an aspiration to be admired sexually by men and a devotion to the attainment of fame, both which reinforces of PCD's "tough, sexy unnies" image, "Dalla Dalla" takes the breezy assertiveness and focuses it on a joyful, lush, and punky self-love, serving as a model for other teens to take strength in their brash and unapologetic confidence. The girls don't give a shit whether you find them attractive, their presence is not for your comfort or consumption. From a pop perspective, this song also glosses and refines the experimentation that we've heard before in other k-pop songs, like the mashup of styles for SNSD's "I Got a Boy,"while adding sorely needed complexity to other usual boring takes on self-love. The part at 1:42 is astonishing, because it fixes all the problems with Momoland's "Boom Boom" mid-track interruption, by not overstaying, and using it to prove a point, "I'm not sorry I'm bad!" which hints at the agency of a young teenage baddie's socially transgressive agency. That descends into the aforementioned snap of "My life!" that drops into bouncing minor chords for just a second, before resuming their cheeky, bright energy. We hear that again in the bridge of "Keep your chin up! We got your back!" The vocal overlays are such a powerful way of amplifying both a positive self-thought while also giving the sensation of girls cheering on other girls, which is sorely needed representation in a world replete with examples of competitive, internalized misogyny. Overall, this song moves me, simply because I can just join in and yell without hesitations because "I really don't care!" without having to think twice. (well, not completely.) [9]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

#Itzy #pop #kpop #music #music review #writing

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jennaschererwrites · 6 years

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How Instant 'Black Mirror' Classic 'USS Callister' Guts Toxic Fandom - Rolling Stone

It's a familiar image: a strapping, confident young white guy seated in the captain's chair of a spaceship, blaster at his hip, hair coifed just so, one elbow on the armrest, legs spread wide as if to say, "Mine is no tiny penis you are dealing with." He's a hero we all know, love and trust do the right thing in the end, whether it's James T. Kirk or variants like Han Solo, Peter Quill or Mal Reynolds. This is his story. He takes the lead. He gets the glory, and ever it shall be.

Except when it's 2018. And except when it's Black Mirror.

Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones' anthology sci-fi series kicks off its fourth season with an episode – "USS Callister" – that begins with what seems to be a loving homage to the original 1960s Star Trek. Then, slowly, methodically, the story starts unfurling its true form: a damning exploration of toxic masculinity and the dark side of fanboy nostalgia culture. Here, the heroic captain is anything but, and the misunderstood "nice guy" is the true monster lurking on the dark fringes of the galaxy.

We open on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise-like USS Callister, where the swaggering Captain Daly (Jesse Plemons) and his trusty crew are fighting a space battle complete with harrowing music, old-school special effects and lots of high-grade phlebotinum ("plasmorthian crystals," anyone?). True to every trope, the good guys win the day.

Naturally, this being Black Mirror – a show that revels in gut-wrenching turnabouts – nothing is as it seems, least of all the hero. Daly is a bit tooswaggering; his crew is a bit too trusty. After he defeats the bad guy with suspicious ease, the men launch into a round of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow" while the women line up to be kissed by the good captain. Something is deeply wrong with this squeaky-clean scene: The crewmembers' smiles are plastered on, and there's a glint of malice in their fearless leader's eyes.

Cut to gray reality, where we meet the real Robert Daly: a whey-faced office drone with a receding hairline and the stooped posture of the pathologically insecure. He's the CTO of Callister Inc., a company that designs an immersive MMORPG called Infinity, in which players can explore a virtual cosmos in their very own virtual starships. The members of his "crew" are there too, belittling or ignoring him: The USS Callister's bowing and scraping second-in-command, James Walton (Jimmi Simpson), is the ultra-alpha head of the company; the communications officer (Michaela Coel) won't give Daly the time of day.

Our beta male is the brains behind the game, but everyone at his company treats him like gum stuck to the underside of their shoes. His office is decked out with posters and memorabilia from Space Fleet, a Star Trek-esque TV show from a bygone era whose aesthetic we instantly recognize from the opening scene. So is he a put-upon sweetheart, bullied by his peers, who escapes the drudgery of his day-to-day via a rich but ultimately harmless fantasy life?

Not so much. Turns out he's been secretly harvesting his coworkers' DNA in order to create digital clones to populate his own walled-off version of Infinity. We see him enact the process on Nanette Cole (Cristin Milioti), a new employee who idolizes Daly for his coding genius but commits the grievous sin of not wanting to hook up with him. And so he finds a way to possess her the same way he meticulously collects his complete set of Space Fleet DVDs (and Blu-rays and VHS tapes, natch).

We discover along with Nanette, who wakes up aboard the Callister in a pastel polyester miniskirt, just how bad things are for Daly's digital prisoners. He's the god of this tiny universe, forcing his crew to LARP along with him using torture and intimidation. He's every disaffected nerd-bro with an X-Box and an ax to grind who delights in torturing NPCs (non-player characters) for the sheer sadistic thrill. Except these are real people, and Daly has knowingly trapped them in his own private Hell.

And to make matters worse, he's pedantic about it, lecturing them about the vintage show's moral code ("It is a belief system, founded on the very best of human nature") even as he brutalizes anyone who defies his will. Daly's rigid adherence to Space Fleet fandom extends to more than just words: Women don't get guns, no one ever really dies and unwholesome genitalia are morphed into the flat, undifferentiated physique of action figures. This is the last straw for Nanette, who declares in a moment instantly GIFed 'round the Twitterverse: "Stealing my pussy is a red fucking line."

And that's when "USS Callister," thrillingly, becomes a rip-roaring space caper in its own meta-narrative. Except the scrappy, charismatic hero isn't Daly, with his posturing and his forced Shatnerian speech patterns; it's Nanette, who's smart as hell and sick to death of putting up with his expectations.

The best Black Mirror episodes – of which "USS Callister" is definitely one – identify issues lurking beneath the surface of the real world and extrapolate them into a future where technology has given them form and heft. In this case, it's the fanboy backlash that's become an all-too-familiar presence in our pop-culture conversation. We're talking about legions of speculative fiction fans on the Internet who feel that, in expanding the worlds of beloved sci-fi properties to include more diverse representation and worldviews, something is being taken from them.

Their complaint, broadly, is founded on the deeply limiting idea that all narratives should center on straight, white men, who have been the unquestioned default protagonists up until very recently. This is an idea that's particularly ironic in the world of sci-fi, which is all about imagining potential futures in which anything is possible. Daly, on the other hand, builds himself a world that is incredibly constricted, based on his devotion to a retrograde narrative. Does any of this sound familiar?

It's only a step from there to the current, very loud backlash against The Last Jedi, Rian Johnson's addition to the Star Wars universe that takes on some of the franchise's sacred cows: It puts a largely non-white, non-male cast at the center of the narrative, takes aged golden boy chosen one Luke Skywalker in an unexpected direction and asks whether the Jedi Order is really all it's cracked up to be. Certain loud, angry corners of fandom hated Jedi so much that a petition was created to have it struck from the canon and a group of alt-righters (surprise!) launched a campaign to lower the movie's Rotten Tomatoes score.

Equal ire has been leveled at Doctor Who, another sci-fi institution that shook off the dust recently when the good Doctor, who's been played by a series of men since 1963, regenerated into a woman (viva Jodie Whittaker!) And then there's Star Trek: Discovery, CBS All Access's long-awaited return to Gene Roddenberry's universe that has faced unabashedly racist reactions for casting a black female lead (Sonequa Martin-Green).

And just like Daly, they're deeply missing the point. What Star Wars, Doctor Who and Star Trek have in common – aside from decades of canon and rabidly devoted fandoms – is a vision of vast, multifaceted galaxies and universes teeming with diverse societies and life forms. All three franchises have taken a great leap forward in recent months to make their central characters reflect that ethos, and it's far past due. There will always be Dalys, but there will also always be Nanettes, too, boldly going where no man has gone before. (Black Mirror itself did, too, in its way — all of Season Four's six episodes feature female leads.)

The denouement of "USS Callister" offers one of Black Mirror's rare hopeful endings — and a low-key revenge fantasy to boot. The Callister has escaped and left Daly trapped in the starless black of his own switched-off bubble universe. (Turns out he was never a god ... just an oversized kid burning ants with a magnifying glass.) Released into the vast, Net-connected cosmos of Infinity, the liberated crew is thrilled to make contact with someone from the real world. But "Gamer691" (voiced by Aaron Paul) turns out to be an all-too-familiar kind of asshole who threatens to "bomb them to shit" if they don't get out of his quadrant.

And rather than bothering to engage in this unwinnable, childish fight, Nanette claims the captain's chair and instructs her crew: "Stick us in hyperwarp and let's … fuck off somewhere." They're off to explore the universe, and Gamer691 is left shouting into the empty vacuum of his lonely corner of the galaxy: "You better run! King of space right here. King of space." But no one is listening to him anymore.

#jenna scherer #black mirror #uss callister #rolling stone #toxic masculinity #television #sci-fi #sexism #the last jedi #star wars #fanboys #misogyny #representation #doctor who #star trek discovery #star trek

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isisapollon · 4 years

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Monday, January 20, 2020Blue DawnAge of Aquarius meditation was very successful and we have reached the critical mass, albeit barely. Around 150,000 people were actively participating:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33Yb3_60gwE&feature=youtu.be

This was just enough to push us over the energy threshold into the next phase of the Compression Breakthrough, the bubble rising subphase of the nucleation phase (number III in the diagram):

This subphase will see an exponential growth of Bubbles of Heaven within quarantine Earth. Bubbles of Heaven are pure luminous undistorted space time continuum anomaly-free emanations of the Source into 11th dimensional brane world space time continuum.

This practically means that there will be more and more Light present on the surface of the planet, this Light will grow exponentially faster and faster until it explodes into the Compression Breakthrough. We have now officially entered into the last phase before the Event.

As a result of our Age of Aquarius activation, all plasma toplet bomb layers, except the last one, were removed.

All Chimera that were living in physical spider bodes in underground bases have been successfully removed.

There is still a small group of plasma Chimera spiders and they are in the last stage of removal.

The physical Chimera group is very small, yet still quite strong although it has suffered a significant loss of power in the days around Saturn-Pluto conjunction.

There is a small main Chimera group still present in DARPA and the previous director of DARPA Steven Walker has just resigned, effectively on January 10th, the day of the Lunar eclipse just preceding our activation:

https://www.defensenews.com/breaking-news/2019/12/17/darpa-head-resigns-moving-on-to-industry/

Steven Walker was instrumental in development of ZION control matrix network:

https://thebridgelifeinthemix.info/finance/5g-zion-manipulation-platform-works/

This DARPA Chimera group extends some of its influence into this place:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Army_Research_Laboratory

Which has just announced a very troubling progress in development of quantum network technologies:

https://www.army.mil/article/231525/new_device_accelerates_development_of_extraordinary_quantum_networks

There is a second even smaller Chimera group present in the US Space Command and it is interesting to note that the new chief of US Space Command took his position just two days after our activation:

https://themindunleashed.com/2020/01/space-force-swore-first-chief-space-operations.html

The purpose of US Space Command is not disclosure, as some erroneously believe, it was created as a Chimera defense force against Galactic Confederation which is taking over sublunar space and now also Near Earth orbital space:

https://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/forum.cgi?read=136981

As the Galactic Confederation fleet approaches closer to the surface as weeks and months go by, there will be more and more contact established. Therefore it is very relieving to see that more and more people understand that Prime Directive (non-intervention principle) is a lie and a construct of Archon mind programming:

https://www.skepticink.com/incredulous/2012/11/04/the-prime-directive-star-treks-doctrine-of-moral-laziness/

Another sign that we are close to the breakthrough is the dimming of Betelgeuse:

https://spaceweatherarchive.com/2020/01/10/the-fainting-of-betelgeuse-update/

Betelgeuse is a star in Orion constellation and its dimming is a sign of the end of duality, as triangulation of Orion is nearing its completion.

Betelgeuse is expected to become a supernova within the next 100,000 years and its current dimming is a sign that it may already be entering the supernova phase.

A gravitational wave in the region of Betelgeuse, a first potential sign of supernova explosion, has been detected just two days after our activation:

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7891181/Mysterious-burst-gravitational-waves-appears-coming-direction-Betelgeuse.html

If you have a chance to go outside on a clear starry night, you will see that Orion does not look familiar, as the upper left star is much fainter than it usually was. This is Betelgeuse.

The light curve of Betelgeuse is regularly updated here:

https://aavso.org/lcg/plot?star=BETELGEUSE&height=450&visual=on&grid=on&bband=on&auid=000-BBK-383&end=2458961.33125&uband=on&width=600&obstotals=on&start=2458761.33125&v=on&obscode=NMMA

The energies around Age of Aquarius activation were so strong that one aspect of planetary kundalini was activated and many volcanoes worldwide were releasing ash into the atmosphere to release the pent up pressure:

http://endoftheamericandream.com/archives/why-are-volcanoes-all-over-the-globe-suddenly-shooting-giant-clouds-of-ash-miles-into-the-air

Tael volcano in Philippines actually erupted DURING the activation itself, the eruption starting 7 minutes before the scheduled beginning of mediation:

https://www.phivolcs.dost.gov.ph/index.php/taal-volcano-bulletin-menu/9619-taal-volcano-bulletin-update-12-january-2020-04-00-pm-2

The level 2 alert was issued 19 minutes after the start of our meditation, just in the moment when most people were concluding the suggested 20 minutes of meditation:

https://www.phivolcs.dost.gov.ph/index.php/taal-volcano-bulletin-menu/9617-taal-volcano-bulletin-12-january-2020-02-30-pm

The alert level was raised to level 4 one hour and half later, and right now it still stays there.

This release of volcanic activity is actually a good thing, as it dissipates a lot of pressure that was held in the planetary energy grid and thus prevents potential more deadly earthquakes ad cataclysmic events.

To answer the question many people are asking, the deeper story behind the assassination of Soleimani is regime change in Iran in order to preserve the petrodollar system:

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2020/01/08/the-deeper-story-behind-the-assassination-of-soleimani/

https://www.rt.com/news/478082-us-establishment-support-iran-protests/

Iran owns the second printing press for US dollars, and US Treasury and the Fed hate competition when they create money out of thin air:

https://imgur.com/gallery/nDPsFj6

Gradual meltdown of the financial system is not an option anymore, when the crash happens it will be sudden and brutal.

Now the whole financial system got addicted to easy Fed liquidity injections and if the Fed would stop financing repo operations, the system would crash immediately:

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/repo-shrinkage-begins-february-thats-when-fed-cuts-each-term-repo-5-billion

https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/944-trillion-reasons-why-fed-quietly-bailing-out-hedge-funds

Sources are stating that behind the scenes, the Fed is also assisting with liquidity to keep European and Chinese banks and financial institutions afloat, to prevent the collapse:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/banking-crisis/european-banking-crisis-picking-up-steam/

https://internationalman.com/articles/david-stockman-on-what-triggers-the-next-financial-collapse/

Extremely strong cosmic energies now entering quarantine Earth will finally begin to remove trillions upon trillions of Reptilian entities that still exist on plasma and etheric planes as the last remnant of 1996 invasion. Many of those entities are entering broken human auras and are strongly influencing human behavior.

The vast majority of those entities will be removed in coming weeks and months, which will be a big relief for humanity.

Some of those entities were and still are controlling people who infiltrated my teams. A very precise and efficient protocol was activated by the Resistance last summer to remove compromised people from my network and this process is now mainly complete.

A new and much purer infrastructure is hereby being activated and is now ready to assist in our mission to bring in the Age of Aquarius.

The new official Cobra facebook page, named Age of Aquarius, is here:

https://www.facebook.com/login/?next=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2Fgroups%2F2540074986277003%2F

The previous Cobra facebook group (Cobra Etheric Liberation), recently hijacked and currently renamed to “Working together for Gaia’s – etheric - and physical – liberation now”, has no connection with Resistance Movement whatsoever and if you have ever joined that group in hope of contributing to our mission, now it is a good time to leave if you feel so guided.

Our official Youtube channel is here:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtc1bRVxgeujjXkmMw8FcKg/playlists

This Youtube channel will post main videos for potential future meditations / activations.

I am also in constant communication with the creators of this amazing website, which is constantly posting updated mass meditations that are needed in ever changing planetary situation:

https://www.welovemassmeditation.com/

The official Sisterhood of the Rose page is here:

https://www.sisterhoodoftherose.network/

Prepare For Change is a global organization that was created at Cobra conference in Laguna Beach in 2013 with the purpose of preparing the surface population for the coming changes. Their official website is here:

https://prepareforchange.net/

They have asked me to tell that a fake, imposter site, named “Prepare For Change Leadership” has nothing to do with the real Prepare For Change organization.

It is interesting to note that similar things that were happening to me behind the scenes were also happening to Corey Goode and David Wilcock, as you can hear in their interviews:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhV5oMkUSnc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qK-8hlWou4k

Needless to say, the following weeks and months will be very exciting and definitely not boring, as we delve deeper into the energies of the coming Age of Aquarius.

The Blue Dawn, the dawn of the new era, is here.

And for the end of Age of Aquarius activation report…when the Blue comes…in the flash of the moment…all that is Done will be Undone:

http://missionignition.net/blue/bluelament.php

Victory of the Light!

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iraklismytridis · 4 years

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Monday, January 20, 2020 Blue Dawn Age of Aquarius meditation was very successful and we have reached the critical mass, albeit barely. Around 150,000 people were actively participating: