#and i am a very lucky person. my life is cushy and i want to rip my skin off because what does that matter when it doesnt let me help people

[blackidyll]

.

mmm i’ve been kind of in a mental spiral lately (literally feels like i’m having an existential crisis 70% of the time). like you know, 2020 was super fucked up but as time went by we all kind of adjusted? and things are not fine but you can juggle all the balls just so and breathe a little, but a couple of weeks back something tipped the balance for me and it’s like mentally i’ve been thrown off the cliff 

i can pinpoint what threw me out of whack though -- at the end of feb we got the call to return to onsite for work (my country went back into lockdown in november... we’re technically still under lockdown but employers don’t give af anymore i guess). we’re supposed to be on team a/b (team a goes in/team b works from home one week, second week the teams alternate) but i was pulled into this project immediately upon my return to the office, and i went into the office every. single. work day. in march. and because this project was so damn urgent? i was working my weekends. i worked every single day for three weeks straight until i threw a (silent) fit the final weekend and refused to open my email, and even then one of the managers was calling me at 5:20 pm that Friday as i was about to shut down my laptop. 

“luckily” i am good friends with that manager - a colleague who got the promotion recently - so i literally scream-ranted at him 80% of the time and then kicked him off the phone at 5:45 because i was fucking going to my apartment that weekend and I REFUSE TO WORK ANYMORE IT IS OFF WORK HOURS.

anyway. i am kind of not doing great. work is a mess. in october last year i was approached by my manager’s manager for a job role that was 1) effective immediately but 2) “i can’t actually tell you any details about it because it involves P&C information 3) also you can’t tell anyone because re: P&C. 

i said yes, because it’s not like i could say no (like, it’s nice they phrased it as a question and all, but i’m pretty sure the underlying message was that this is a job transfer, not a new job role offer). 

so after i said yes to the new role, i got to learn what it involved! long story short, suddenly i wasn’t working for just a manager - my new boss is getting a major promotion so the stakes are a million times higher! also, my new role reflects that, i am not only supporting literally only the VPs and senior managers (instead of working with my fellow rank and file colleagues) now, but it also involves skillsets that i don’t actually fucking have (like tracking/reporting finances! i spent my first three weeks in the new job almost crying over numbers and spreadsheets. even now i get a bit panicky when someone throws me a curveball and i don’t know how to get the information i need. i am very lucky that the actual data and finance people have been very patient with my gaps).

and to top it off, i am still just a fucking employee, although my job scope and requirements are so much more now. every single person i work with is a manager or higher so of course with their cushy pay and privileges they take the odd/long hours, and since I have the work with them I end up having to do the same. but it’s not the same because i don’t get the same fucking compensation they do and i don’t have a team that works under me. I don’t actually want that. I want work-life balance and less fucking stress. if you ask me if i would have taken the job if i knew what it involved, the honest answer is that I would not. 

(but it’s not like I had a choice really, because literally the entire company - not just our division - went through a major reorganization, so if i didn’t have my current job i think i would have no job). 

and to be fair my boss is pretty decent as far bosses go. he subjects himself to the same crazy hours that we do. he doesn’t scream or yell (like some horror stories i’ve definitely heard of others in the org). he values my work, and makes sure to tell me so. i did get a pay raise. he mentioned trying to push through a promotion mid-year (let’s see if that pans out). he knows i was very much out of my depth and gave me a lot of leeway despite the mistakes i inevitably make, but on the other hand he also got me into this fucking situation so :<

anyway. i don’t know. i’ve been struggling a lot since last october. every month and quarter close is a financial reporting and review nightmare. having to deal with office politics is hell. i was not joking when i say that playing genshin was literally the only thing keeping me sane those early months, because gaming forces me to not think/panic over work because i have to concentrate on the battles. and this past few weeks i have been depressed enough that even gaming lost its spark for me. 

i haven’t been on tumblr much lately and probably will continue to be sporadically active in the future. when i was working from home i could log in during breaks and take a breather, but now that i’m back in the office i can’t even get on twitter on my phone (because engineering company, i can’t get a good data signal inside the office due to the shielding, and i am sure as hell not checking my social media using the work wifi). i don’t really have much energy after i get home from work. and when things are bad a lot of other things kind of pile up, like falling sick easier and interrupted sleep, and the it becomes this cycle of everything just dragging you down. today i worked from home but tomorrow i’m due back in the office. 

i’m sorry if you’ve messaged me and i haven’t responded. it’s been.. really difficult. i’m hanging in here. i just don’t know when i can find my balance again. 

on a bright side? i am really, really looking forward to building houses in genshin. the thought of it feels really calming. guess they knew what they were doing when they named it serenitea pot. 

#while tumblr is not eating posts just a quick update from me i guess #never mind that wasn't quick at all #*

[lydiadarlingtonxo]

( victoria pedretti, female, she/her )╰ ✧ ˔ ⭒ magic is in the air !oh wait - that’s just our newest neighbor, lydia “lady” darlington, the 25 year old FLORIST. they’ve been relocated from pastoral city, and so far the locals claim that they’re EMPATHETIC and JEALOUS, just like LADY from LADY & THE TRAMP. if you ask me, they seem like the type to enjoy SILVER “RETURN TO TIFFANY & CO.” LOCKETS AND CANDLELIT ITALIAN DINNER DATES. apparently, they are CAUTIOUSLY OPTIMISTIC about entering rome pines, and i don’t think their power of EMPATHIC PERCEPTION VIA TOUCH will help them this time. let’s just hope they can adjust to the new neighborhood…⭒˔ ╮{ ooc: kate, 26, PST, she/her }

summary 

(tw: parent death) lydia renee darlington is a simple girl born on december 25th, 1994 to two simple people, renee and michael darlington, in the beautiful affluent town of pastoral city. growing up, she was surrounded by love and flowers. her father gave her a beautiful heart shaped pendant from tiffany & co for her 13th birthday, joking that the “if lost, please return to tiffany & co” would be better suited to her than being brought back home should she ever go missing. her thoughts were all spun sugar and glitter. whatever she wanted, she got and then some more. lydia--affectionately dubbed “lady” by her parents--was born into a dream world that she was lucky enough to call her reality. 

then, her mom got pregnant with the future christopher darlington. things changed, but renee and michael included lady in all the planning. she helped pick out the nursery furniture, the clothes, and even which walker would sit in their former 3-person living room. while she’d previously expected neglect, the impending arrival of her little brother brought the family even closer together and lady found herself excited to meet the 4th member of the darlingtons. 

on july 7th--7/7, what should’ve been the luckiest day of the year--ended in tragedy when her mother passed away due to complications during child birth. they left the hospital the same way they’d arrived: a family of three. 

from then on, life was different. her father, while still the loving and thoughtful man she’d always had the privilege of knowing, retreated and hid behind his job and lady did her best to surround her little brother with a sense of normalcy. she told him stories of their mother when rocking him to sleep and put her picture up in his nursery where they’d planned to put pictures of baby animals only months prior. michael continued to provide a cushy lifestyle for their family and always came home for dinner and though lady thought losing her mother would mean the end of her life, days came and went one at a time and a new normal blanketed the darlington household. 

when lady turned 16 and held her little brother’s hand in the park, she felt an overwhelming sense of fear and panic. her heart beat in her ears, her body trembling like a car with its bass set to maximum. she looked down at chris, whose face had fallen and whose grip had tightened on hers like a boa constrictor. and then: a dog ran up, face level with chris and the fear in her stomach boiled, unbearable and steaming. after a few moments, the dog licked chris and his shoulders sagged with relief. all at once, the fear pulsating through lady’s body evaporated almost as quickly as it had come. she didn’t know what happened, but it was only the first day she experienced what she would soon come to know as empathic perception. 

now, as a 25 year old florist newly relocated to rome pines, lady is trying her best to converge where she’s been and where she’s going. the love she has for her brother and father are never-ending and the darlingtons have dinner together every week. in a new, semi-terrifying place, lady tries to remain hopeful for what lies ahead. 

bullet points 

because her empathic perception happens via touch, lady always wears a thin pair of lace gloves. she’s tried learning how to control when she feels an emotion from someone else, but she’s not yet able to turn it off/choose when it happens. for now, the gloves are helping her preserve her sanity and stay close to those she loves. 

her passion for flowers came from her mother who used to wake her up early to go to the plant nursery down the street, pick out a new bundle of flowers, and plant them in their yard at least twice a month. when chris was old enough, lady started taking him to do this. 

lady would throw herself off a cliff if it meant saving her loved ones, namely her little brother. while lady wishes her mother could still be alive, she’s thankful for the extra chance to bond with chris so heavily. 

if she had the choice, lady would eat spaghetti with fresh grated parmesan for every single meal. 

lady has serious jealousy issues and is very possessive of the people she loves. she doesn’t like to feel threatened or have her relationships encroached upon. her jealousy manifests in a very petty, passive aggressive way and she will often blow up seemingly without warning because you didn’t “recognize the signs” she’d been putting up. 

she has not taken off the silver tiffany’s necklace her father bought her for her 13th birthday since he first put it on her and does not plan to do so. 

when lady feels she needs to share something difficult with someone, she will drink too much and spill her guts. she finds it very hard to open up, even to people she’s close with, because the person she was the most vulnerable with left her so early on in her life. 

unbeknownst to her father, lady has taken up smoking cigarettes. 

painting is lady’s favorite creative outlet and she will often set up an easel by her favorite window in her apartment and paint while eating her breakfast on the weekends. 

to better her health, lady tried to start drinking tea instead of coffee. it only took about a week before she went out and bought her own espresso machine and began making a minimum of 4 lattes a day at home and donated all of the tea she’d gotten to the coffeeshop under her apartment. 

lady one day hopes to open up a flower shop/cafe called darlingtons so she can combine two of her favorite things--flowers and coffee--into a passionate business. 

ooc intro

hello my sweetest friends! i apologize for this intro being so long overdue. the u.s. do be affecting my mento health these days. anyways, i’m kate, recently 26 (as of october 24th), she/her, living in the pst timezone! this is my lovely lady girl, whom i’ve played in a few disney rps before and am now completely in love with her as a character. we share a love of lattes and carbs. if you love lady as much as i do and ALSO love angsty/dramatic plots...please message me bc i would love to wreak havoc w you ♥︎

#intro post #about lady

[beneaththetangles]

The Samurai Steps Out on Faith…

“Would you consider joining our team?”

I have to admit, when I saw those words appear on my screen a few months ago, I was beyond stunned. Me? You want ME to join up with Beneath the Tangles?!

Me? A guy who updates his own blog once a year AT BEST?!

Me? A guy who wrote a scathing series of articles about a VERY controversial subject resulting in some PRODIGIOUSLY cutting reviews and commentary leaving me mentally MIA for a whole month?!

ME? A guy who has been known to turn into an Angry Black Man on a wide variety of subjects including politics?!

You seriously want me, a mid-thirty’s black man from Louisiana who just so happens to have spent the last 25 years of his life consuming and loving anime to come write for Beneath the Tangles?

Knowing all this, you want me?

“Well…alright then. You got me. I probably can’t give you much, but you’ll get the best of what I got.”

And with that…here I am.

Hi. I’m Joshua. You can call me Josh. Or Cajun Samurai. Whichever you prefer. Heck, I’m not picky. I’ve been called so many things in the course of my life. Heck, the last few MONTHS I’ve been called some REAL colorful things. Heck, once when I was engaged in a heated political debate (as I tend to do), I was once called a lizard. I wore that name with pride for a while. Lizards are cool. Steve Irwin, God rest his soul, taught me that. In any case, for simplicity sake, I’m Josh. I’m sure most of you got to know me really well in my introduction on Twitter when I spammed your timelines with anime likes and dislikes. If you think THAT was a lot of info, you should see what I post on my own Twitter account. I’m the self-crowned prince of reaction pictures and live-tweeting.

As I mentioned above, I’m a Louisiana native. And before you ask, no, I don’t live in New Orleans. Honestly, I don’t really go to New Orleans that often unless it’s for my yearly trek to MechaCon…and even then, after next year, MechaCon will be going bye-bye, so my trips to NOLA will probably be even more infrequent. Unless I can score some Saints tickets. Cam Jordan, if you’re reading this, I know you’re an anime fan. Hook a brother up.

Once upon a time, I once had a pretty okay blog called The Cajun Samurai. It was just a place where I could get some reviews done and write up some small articles. At the time I started it, I was working a desk job that allowed me plenty of free time to write until my heart was content. But then, things happened, and I got laid off from my cushy job of seven years, and I had to go back out into the real world and do some real work. From a major airline to a major shipping company, to a local automotive parts company to a major lab testing company, I’ve been blessed to see so many different things and have so many different experiences, but sadly, my time to work on my blog was truncated severely and my poor blog was dang near neglected.

I did, however, find time in late January to write up a series of posts about a…particular hot topic that shook the anime community in 2019. I won’t get into it here, but suffice it to say, it was a MAJOR project for me, and a couple of my more…heated posts…caught some REAL undesired attention…which put me in a mental place that I did NOT want to be in. I found myself second guessing a lot of what I did, and I spent the entirety of February wondering if I was actually right in what I wrote. Did I go too far? Did I take it to a level that it didn’t need to go to? Did I compromise my own spiritual beliefs? All this went through my head and it was just so overwhelming. Suffice it to say, when I look back at February 2020, it won’t be the best of times. However, here we are in August, and, in the words of Elton John, “I’m still standing.” However, I can honestly say I didn’t get through it alone, not by a long shot.

Faith was something that I leaned on every step of the way. If it wasn’t but for the love and sweet mercy of the Lord, I would’ve driven myself completely insane. There was SO MUCH prayer going on during that time, and sometimes it was a struggle to get by on an hourly basis, to say nothing of a daily basis. In fact, I fully believe it was God working through TWWK that provided so much support to me both spiritually and emotionally; I can’t even put it into words how much I relied on his support and strength and just knowing that someone else out there was pulling for me, praying for me…it’s a beautiful feeling. I know I’ve probably driven him crazy with my many messages during that time, especially since he has his own family and life, but honestly, I doubt I would’ve been able to get through this without him and some of my other friends online. Also, knowing that the Beneath the Tangles crew were praying for me touched my heart so much. I owe them so much.

Then, one day, TWWK asked me that infamous question about coming over to write and do some Twitter posts. At first, I admit I was hesitant; I was almost ready to turn him down because of all the issues that I went through over my blog posts. I would never…EVER want to expose anyone to drama that involves myself and another person or group of people, and I felt that the target on my back, however faded and off center, would be a target on anyone I was affiliated with. But then I remembered a bit of scripture that pretty much smacked me across the face like Mrs. Kamiya slapped Tai across the face in that one episode of Digimon:

Have not I commanded thee? Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee whithersoever thou goest. – Joshua 1:9

“Be not afraid”. “Be NOT afraid”.

Those words rung in my head loud as a bell. And it was for ME specifically. For this particular bit of scripture to be found in the book of JOSHUA…the book I am named after that tells the story of a man who had nothing but his faith to step out on…it was like a spiritual “Hey, Listen!” Sometimes, you have to step out on the strength of your faith and see where it leads you. It’s one thing to say that you believe in God and you trust in God, but at some point in your lives, be it making a small decision like joining a Christian anime blog, or a large decision like getting married or starting that new business, you have to take that leap OF faith ON your faith.

Many times I’ve found myself on that cliff about to take that leap of faith and many times I thought “Dang it, is this the right thing to do? Did I do everything right? Maybe I should rethink this…” but then I say “You know what, God? You brought me to this point. You said You would not put more on me than I can bear.  You picked me up each time I fell. You know the outcome of this. What do I have to be afraid of? I trust YOU. Lets do this.”

And so…here I am. For as long as you’ll have me, I humbly offer my services to you, dear reader. It is my hope and prayer that God blesses me with the writing acumen that will entertain you, challenge your thinking, and maybe make your day just a little bit better.

With that out the way, borrowing an idea from TWWK, I offer up my (CURRENT) top 30 anime of all time as a way to introduce myself anime-wise. Keep in mind, this list is always changing. In fact, up to the time of posting, this list has probably gone through about 20 changes. Why? Because just like the autumnal wind, my tastes and interests in anime ebb and flow. Today’s hotness will probably be tomorrow’s “meh”-ness. But as it stands right now, this is it. Yes, there’s some old stuff, yes there’s some new stuff…there may even be a few titles that will surprise you. Hopefully this list, and any subsequent posts, will give you some kind of idea of what kind of anime I like, and by extension, maybe what kind of person I am.

30. Yamada-Kun and the Seven Witches 29. Hitorijime My Hero 28. Silver Spoon 27. Bunny Drop (Usagi Drop) – PLEASE DON’T READ THE MANGA. PLEASE… 26. Lucky Star 25. Daily Lives of High School Boys 24. Hunter X Hunter 23. Sarazanmai 22. Nichijou 21. My Love Story 20. Azumanga Daioh 19. Moribito: Guardian of the Spirit 18. Persona 4: The Animation 17. Beck: Mongolian Chop Squad 16. Kodocha 15. Nerima Daikon Brothers 14. Digimon Tamers 13. FLCL (Original) 12. Neon Genesis Evangelion 11. Ghost Stories (English Dub) 10. Aria: The Animation 9. Nagi no Asukara 8. Assassination Classroom 7. Toradora! 6. Mysterious Girlfriend X 5. Planetes 4. Aria: The Origination 3. Aria: The Natural 2. Cowboy Bebop 1. Digimon Adventure (1999)

Admittedly, I’m not a HUGE fan of countdown lists because I always feel I’m forgetting something and I’m never FULLY satisfied with my choices, but I think this is a pretty comprehensive list! Of course, I’ll probably lay awake in bed tonight scrolling through Crunchyroll and think “OH CRAP! I FORGOT XYZ SHOW!!” and then kick myself for not including it, but hey, for the time being, this list is pretty much THE list. Just know that, quite literally, this list was updated and picked over all the way up to the day it was published!

And I think I’ve taken enough of your time! Funny how this post went from just being an introduction to a testimony to an anime countdown, huh? As a southerner, we tend to digress quite often. I ask that you please put up with my many digressions as I start this new God-given path I set out on with my new friends. Ya’ll have a good one and, as we say down here in Louisiana: Laissez le bon temps rouler! (let the good times roll!)

#Anime #Christianity #Articles #Author: The Cajun Samurai

[master-thief-gray-shadow]

So as of today it’s been exactly one year since I first watched Revue Starlight, and it’s been a really interesting year. I’ve been thinking about the impact the series has had on my life lately and felt like I needed to get some thoughts down.

TW: self harm mention, suicide mention

Love Live changed my life. It was not my first fandom ever, but it was the first one where I got seriously involved with the community. Not only did I manage to make friends within the fandom (and to be honest these friends have proven truer than any I’ve had in real life), but I also managed to meet not one but two amazing partners, which is two more than I’d ever anticipated I’d have. Love Live was good to me, and for a good three years I happily allowed it to consume my very soul. But things like these don’t last forever.

I don’t talk about it much (there’s a reason why but that’s another story), but I am autistic and I do have ADHD. Obviously hyperfixations are a big part of my life. The big ones tend to last for years. Naruto was three or four, Touhou was a solid three, Kancolle was less than a year but I feel like it would have been longer if I hadn’t forcibly divorced myself from it due to the fact that my mental health at the time was spiraling out of control. Love Live was just another one of these things. For years it was constantly in my thoughts, and at the height of all this I couldn’t watch a movie without thinking “hm, what if this was Love Live characters?” It gave me a reason to live and got me through a few rough patches. But my interest did eventually start to wane. Unfortunately this coincided with one of those rough patches, and this particular one had something that I hadn’t had to deal with in a while: uncertainty.

Early last year I quit my job. It was a customer service job, one that I had been at for a few years and was starting to get tired of. I figured that I would be unemployed for a month or two (which at the time sounded refreshing, one of the reasons I quit was because the job had become so soul-sucking that I didn’t have energy for anything else) before getting a new one, preferably one with better hours and better pay. What I hadn’t counted on was my depression, which was already a contributing factor in my somewhat fragile state, utterly consuming me now that I didn’t have any kind of routine or purpose, and was therefore at the mercy of my thoughts at all times. I tried to take refuge in Love Live like I always had, and for a while, it worked. But eventually it just kind of...stopped working. So here I was, unemployed, depressed, and rapidly losing the ability to find joy in things. All that, but thankfully in no actual, real, physical danger. But apparently my brain thought I was. So that’s what it started telling me.

I’m not gonna go into what I specifically believed was happening. The long and short of it was that I started having irrational fears about my health, brought upon by some discussion that was going on in the spaces I hung out in. At first I was able to just dismiss it as paranoia, but certain things happened that only served to deepen it. Eventually I started thinking that I needed to go to the hospital, but what for? Nobody would believe there was anything wrong. I didn’t even believe it myself, at least consciously. But my brain was telling me I needed to go. And if I didn’t have an obvious reason to, I should give myself one.

I did not actually reach the point of doing self-harm, fortunately. But I came close. One evening something triggered a massive panic attack, and I, sincerely believing my life was in danger, began seriously, seriously considering it. I was very lucky that my parents kind of knew what was going on and rushed me to the hospital before I could do anything I might regret. I ended up spending a few days in the hospital’s psyche ward, which from what I’ve gathered was actually pretty okay as far as psyche wards go, but it was still a quiet and sterile place with no clocks and no contact with the outside. I was relieved to get out, to say the least. Even spending five and a half hours a day in intensive therapy, five days a week, was an improvement. I even managed to keep the job I had just started.

And that was the state I was in when I first watched Revue Starlight. Crawling my way out from the bottom of a pit. I had heard of the show, I’d seen it on my dash a few times, and this one anon, you know who you are, kept recommending it to me, which I had responded to every time with “okay, I’ll consider it.” For the past month or two I had been watching JoJo for the first time, and I had just finished Stardust Crusaders. Stardust Crusaders, if you haven’t watched it, is not bad at all. But it is very long and has some pacing issues. I needed a break from JoJo. A short one-season anime like Revue Starlight? The perfect palette cleanser. After all, it’s just Love Live with swords, right? It’s not like it’s gonna take over my life or anything.

And it didn’t. The first three episodes were...uh...well, I was more than a little confused. I didn’t really gel with any of the characters or understand what was going on, so, upon finishing episode 3, I unceremoniously closed the tab and declared myself done. At least that was how it was initially. One evening a couple days later I found myself bored, and figured that I might as well just finish the thing. I had time to kill, after all.

Now this was what did the trick. This time I found myself blown out of the water, especially by the finale, which had just aired that day. Revue Starlight quickly flooded in to fill the void Love Live had left, and I found myself giddy with that new hyperfixation feel. Therapy was going extremely smoothly, I started getting the hang of my new job, and I was even going to the gym regularly. I had something to live for again. A rope to hold onto so I wouldn’t fall deeper and hit the bottom that I’d struggled so hard to climb away from. No matter what happened, I would have the 99th Seisho class to fall back on.

Things, of course, did happen. I grew to resent my job, which wasn’t well-suited for me, so I started looking for a new one. A better one. I had my eye on one in particular, it seemed like a nice cushy desk job that probably had good pay and benefits. I was sure I had nailed the interview. I’d opted to finish the holiday season with my current job, but I really, really wanted that new one. I’d just start once I was finished with my current one, and I had gathered the next starting date was early in the spring. It was for this reason that I wasn’t too concerned when the place I was currently working at got closed down. No problem. I’d just wait for my new job to start.

And so I was unemployed again. In winter, no less, so my depression was particularly monstrous now. For two months I sat in figurative and literal darkness, clinging onto two things: the expectation that I would hear back from the people I was hoping to hear from, and my love for Revue Starlight. I was absolutely miserable. But I held on. I held onto those two things. And finally, the date where I would be called in for an initiation drew near.

Unfortunately, it turned out I actually hadn’t gotten the job after all. I nearly fell apart completely.

I’m kind of convinced that if I hadn’t gotten into RevStar and renewed my need to hyperfixate on things I might’ve actually gone through with killing myself. The sheer despair I felt when I found out I had just spent so much time sitting around for nothing, that I had wasted a whole two months of my life, was crushing. In the heat of the moment, I really did think about it. I felt so utterly worthless and foolish, and if I took my own life I wouldn’t have to feel that way anymore. But I couldn’t. Because I did have a reason to keep living and to move on. I still had Revue Starlight.

Eventually I did manage to get a job, my current one. It’s not ideal, but the pay and hours are better than either of my previous ones, as is the nature of the job itself. The effects of my hormone replacement therapy, which I had only been on for about a month when everything had fallen apart, soon started to become more apparent. Now that I had a steady and regular source of income I decided to make plans to go out and see my girlfriend, who I figured it was about time I met in real life, which I eventually did, and she was wonderful. And those were just things that happened within my personal life. As for Revue Starlight? Shortly after I’d gotten the job, I managed to actually watch the stage plays, which I hadn’t seen yet, and they were amazing, especially the second one. Starira got an English release, pulling new blood into the fandom. Sato Hinata was slated to appear at Anime Central, which is the one con I actually bother to attend, and I got to meet her. For real. In person.

And if I’d gone and killed myself? I would never have gotten any of that. I would have missed out on so much. As much of a fool as I had felt like at the time, at least I didn’t do the single most foolish thing that I could have. And I’m glad. And thankful.

So thank you, to that one anon (you know who you are) for pointing me in the right direction. Thank you to the fellow fans who make up this community that I’ve settled down in. Thank you to the seiyuu in front of the mics, and the artists, animators, composers, writers, and coders behind them. I’m here right now because of you. Thank you.

#i've just been thinking about this #like a lot #because so much has happened in the past year #so much has changed and i feel like a different person now #and i feel like i really do owe it to this series #revue starlight #gray posts

[sidbridgecomedy]

Jokes I Can’t Make Work: Work

I’ve covered a lot of general topics in comedy, so I thought it would be fun to get a little more personal and talk about topics I haven’t had any success with on stage.

This post is going to be interactive (hopefully), so when I link it on Facebook, I’d love your replies on the questions at the end.

When workshopping new material, I try darn near anything - sometimes I don’t know what’s going to hit with an audience until I spitball a few things and find out.

One topic I’ve had consistent failure with on stage is my day job. My official title is Manager of Corporate Communications and I work for a real estate investment company. I feel lucky because I like my job - it provides security for my family, plus the company has been very good to me. 

Of course - like any job - there’s ridiculousness to point out, and I feel like it should be funny. Heck, Scott Adams of Dilbert fame made a living out of poking fun of office life. Mike Judge’s Office Space and, of course, The Office, also proved that white collar life is funny.

So why isn’t my job funny? I have a few theories:

1. It’s too white collar: The company I work for has been quite successful. Often, I have to jump on a plane and jaunt from city to city in order to do my job. I believe audiences often find it off-putting to hear someone talk about any topic they perceive as above their status. It gets even worse if I complain about it. It’s hard to sound like an everyman if you’ve ever ridden on a corporate jet.

2. It’s too close to home (in a bad way): This is a guess, but I would wager at least 50% of the audience currently sits in a cubicle or something smaller, ticking away the moments of their lives, staring at a computer screen. My joke might take them to a bad place. If the punchline doesn’t kick ass in a big way, it won’t break the tension I just caused.

3. Lots of people don’t have jobs: Bitching about having a job is a really rude thing to do if you’ve got people in the audience who don’t have jobs (or have terrible ones). Plus, the majority of that room has a friend or family member facing unemployment. I might want to write a great joke bitching about going through 28 revisions on a 15-page slide deck, but it sure as hell sounds petty. (I say this to myself every time I hit revision number 25 on a slide deck, by the way.)

4. Ranting is less effective when its personal: So... It’s Monday and I am on revision 29 of a 5-slide PowerPoint deck. The revisions I have gotten are beyond ridiculous, including eight different iterations of “try differently-shaped bullet points.” Am I really on stage telling a joke or am I blowing off personal steam? There’s a very fine line between hilarious exasperation and real exasperation. If that anger is coming from a real place, sometimes the audience gets a little too into character with me and they can react like I’m yelling at them, personally. Audiences get emotional - that’s why they laugh. As a show wears on, they are vulnerable to empathy. If you laugh, they laugh. If you get angry, they get angry. 

5. It requires too much explaining: If I was a truck driver, all I would have to do is get on stage and say “I’m a truck driver” and the audience knows exactly what’s going on. I’m not a truck driver. I’m Manager of Corporate Communications for a real estate investment company. Every word of that sentence requires an explanation. In the comedy world, jokes that require a lot of research and assembly are DOA. 

6. I don’t want to do it: I really like my job, so every time I find something offbeat or funny, I may take note of it, but I just can’t bring myself to talk about it on stage - I think most of us who lead double lives as comics and day job workers keep a level of separation between the two. It’s safer that way. This also limits the number of work-inspired topics I can use.

7. I’m doing it wrong: Comedy is a never-ending writing and learning process. I’ve tried several different bits, including material about riding on the corporate jet, a song called the “Your Presentation is Due Tomorrow Funk Groove” and a couple of other ideas. None have worked. This article wouldn’t be complete if I didn’t shoulder some of the blame. Here’s an interesting rule of comedy - you can make ANYTHING funny if you work at it hard enough. Sometimes the search for the right punchline takes years. I may just not be there yet.

Here’s the interactive part: What do you think? Can a cushy, white collar job be funny? Have you had the same challenge with material that comes up on your job?  Give me some feedback - either here on Tumblr or on Facebook and I’ll share the best of it in a later post. Thanks!

#comedy #standup comedy

[pentakillmaven]

The Nose Knows, Chapter 11 (NaNoWriMo 2018)

Here we are--the penultimate chapter! Once again, thank you so much for all the likes, reblogs, and new followers! I will be revising and posting this on Archive of our Own, along with a bonus sin chapter :) so please look out for that! Also, this chapter includes links to visual references for the outfits I have in mind for the characters if you want to check those out.

Chapter Rating: T

Chapter Warnings: Mild language, canon-typical violence

Chapter 1 | Chapter 2 | Chapter 3 | Chapter 4 Chapter 5 | Chapter 6 | Chapter 7 | Chapter 8 Chapter 9 | Chapter 10 | Chapter 11 | Chapter 12

Chapter 11

The next week seemed to pass by in a blur; between school, Ladybug duties, and working on her dress for the fashion show, Marinette was lucky to get five hours of sleep a night. But unlike the week before, when the dread of the standardized testing had dragged her down, she felt light as a feather despite the relative lack of sleep.

When Saturday rolled around, Marinette was just putting the finishing touches on her dress, hand-stitching the green embroidery along the neckline. The dress itself was a fairly simple knee-length, one-shoulder black dress, with leather-edged horsehair ruffles giving the skirt some dimension. On the bodice, playful embroidery brought to mind one particular feline superhero. As always, Marinette stitched in her signature, letting it flow into the design running down the side of the bodice under the single shoulder strap. She tied off the thread, snipped the excess down, and stepped back to survey her handiwork. "Well, Alya, what do you think?" she asked, turning to her best friend.

"I think… it looks amazing! This has definitely got to be some of your best work yet!" Alya, on her part, was already dressed for the evening, opting for a burgundy-colored full-length jumpsuit with a tie waist that offset her hair beautifully. Said hair was up in curlers at the moment, while Marinette's was still unstyled, a messy topknot keeping it mostly out of the way. "And you finished just in time, too--we only have three hours to get ready before we have to leave."

"Oh, merde, is it really that late already?" Marinette whimpered as she looked at the clock, confirming that it was already after four. "All right, I'm going to jump in the shower really quick, and then we can finish your hair before we do mine."

"Sounds good, girl! See you in a few minutes."

Marinette slipped into her strappy pumps, wrapping one of her mom's black faux-fur stoles around her shoulders for warmth as the girls put on the finishing touches to their outfits. The choker Adrien gave her nestled right at her collarbone, the green stones in the pendant pairing beautifully with the embroidery just below. "I feel like that should be a bell instead of a pendant," Alya teased Marinette gently. "That way Adrien knows where you are at all times."

Marinette giggled, an embarrassed flush visible even through her makeup. "I don't think Adrien's really the collaring type… Now, if it was Chat Noir, I wouldn't be surprised."

Alya's eyes widened in shock at the innuendo, but she burst out into laughter a moment later. "Oh my god, Marinette! Since when do you have such a dirty mind?"

"I guess someone is rubbing off on me," Marinette said pointedly. "Or am I not the one you confide into regularly when it comes to your love life?"

"Touché. I'll give you that one." The two girls hustled downstairs, where Nino was waiting with his car. Being the oldest of their friend group, he was the first to get his license, and his side gigs as a DJ allowed him to afford to get a car. It wasn't a top-of-the-line model by any means, but it was better than public transportation or walking. "Ooh, don't you clean up nice?" Alya asked as she slid into the front seat alongside her boyfriend, leaning over to kiss him on the cheek.

"Thanks, babe--you look pretty foxy yourself." Nino gave Alya a wink. Marinette didn't miss the glare and subtle tilt of the head that Alya gave Nino in return, figuring that it was in response to the "foxy" comment.

For once in his life, Nino wasn't wearing his hat, though Marinette could see it tossed into the back seat alongside his pea-coat. He had on a nice button-down with a waistcoat and tie paired with dark-wash jeans and a leather belt. "You look very nice too, Marinette," Nino added as he pulled away from the bakery. "Adrien's going to have a heart attack when he sees you."

"That's the idea," Alya replied, turning up the heater and crossing her arms over her chest for warmth. The night was clear, but cold, temperatures already in the single digits Celsius now that it was past sunset.

"Okay, so I'm headed to the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, right?"

"Yeah, that's it. Adrien said there will be people directing traffic, so we just have to show them these badges. Apparently we get special parking, too." She pulled the three VIP badges out of her clutch, handing one to each of her friends and keeping the third for herself. She slipped the lanyard over her head, nestling it under her wrap.

"Damn, I knew Adrien and his dad were, like, famous and all? But I had no idea that things were going to be this cushy tonight."

"Yeah, have you read these passes, Marinette?" Alya asked, looking down at the fine print on the back of the badge. "We get free VIP parking, special seating, free appetizers and drinks, the works! I bet this is what it feels like to be Jagged Stone."

"I heard a rumor that he might actually be here tonight, actually. Another DJ I see around sometimes has a cousin whose best friend is acquaintances with Jagged Stone's agent, and he said Jagged had some big party to go to."

"If he's there, I'll have to say hi," Marinette replied absently, staring out the window. She was starting to feel nervous, the butterflies building up in the pit of her stomach. Even though she didn't have any of her work on display in the fashion show, this was still a huge event, and she was wearing a dress of her own design. What if some famous designer said it was horrible? What if Audrey Bourgeois was there and she called it a failure? What if Adrien didn't like it?

"Hello! Earth to Marinette!" Marinette jumped as she snapped out of her thoughts, looking toward Alya, who had turned in her seat to look back at her friend.

"Sorry, Alya, what's up?"

"I was going to ask if you wanted to grab a bite before we go, since we have time, but you look like you're about to be sick. What's wrong?"

"Oh, you know… just nerves, that's all."

"Marinette, honey… you look banging, your dress is lit and you're just going as an guest, not as a designer. You have nothing to worry about. If Adrien doesn't declare his undying love for you tonight, the boy has way more serious problems in his future."

Marinette gave Alya a small, wan smile. "Thanks for the vote of confidence, Alya. But I am kind of going as a designer. There's always someone there who asks the VIPs, 'Who are you wearing?' If I tell them I designed my dress myself and people don't like it, that could mean my design career is over before it even begins."

Alya reached out a hand toward Marinette, who took it; Alya squeezed her fingers comfortingly. "I highly doubt that. You're a talented designer! Even if this dress doesn't dazzle people--which I think it will--you still have a lot to offer in other departments. Your hats, your purses and bags? I mean, you designed Jagged Stone's glasses that one time, right?" When Marinette nodded in confirmation, Alya continued, "So if formal dresses aren't your thing, then you design what you do know that you do well!"

"That's true; thanks, Alya. I needed that." Marinette let go of Alya's hand and leaned back into her seat, tucking her arms back up under her wrap for warmth. She looked back out the window, watching the city lights go by, a quiet sigh escaping her lips. 

The trio decided to forgo a food stop for the sake of getting to the venue early; it ended up being a blessing, as traffic was absolutely snarled in the vicinity of the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles. It was already close to 8 when Nino pulled off of the road, spotting a sign for "VIP Parking." With a flash of their badges, the guard waved them on. "Pull up to the side of the building over there and a valet will take your car from there," the guard explained.

"Valet parking?" Nino glanced back at Marinette through the rear view mirror; the midnight-haired girl shrugged in confusion. "Damn, this really is fancy. I could get used to this." Pulling up to the building, a young man in a red vest approached them. The three teens all climbed out of the car, Nino passing the keys to the valet along with a five-Euro bill. "Merci beaucoup," the valet replied with a bow, hopping in the driver's seat and pulling away from the curb.

"Wow, this is kind of incredible," Alya said. Just ahead of them was a red carpet, paparazzi lining both sides snapping photos while Nadja Chamack interviewed a group of people for the local TV news station. "Oh, shit--isn't that Chloé and her parents?"

Marinette's head whipped around, spotting two familiar-looking blondes standing near an older man with a red, white and blue sash wrapped around his torso. "God damn it… I was really hoping not to run into them… I should have figured they would be here."

"Hey, Marinette, it's okay! Just keep your head up and don't let them see you sweat." Alya reached up and unhooked the clasp holding Marinette's wrap closed, revealing the embroidery on her dress. "No matter what, you created this. Your hard work deserves recognition. All right?"

Marinette couldn't help but smile. "Thanks, Alya. I needed to hear that." Shaking her head and straightening her back, she led the group of three toward the red carpet.

"Marinette Dupain-Cheng! What are you doing here?" Marinette clenched her teeth to maintain a smile at the sound of Chloé's voice.

"Hello, Chloé. We were invited by Adrien personally," she replied, gesturing to the VIP badge hanging from her neck.

Chloé looked at Marinette, Alya and Nino behind her, then turned away with a sniff as she crossed her arms over her chest. "Well.. I hope you have a good night, then," she muttered under her breath.

"Chloé, who are these children? Do you know them?" Audrey Bourgeois pulled her sunglasses down, peering at the teens over them. "Oh--you're that girl, the one who made the feather hat, aren't you?"

"Yes, Mme. Bourgeois." Marinette straightened up a bit more as Alya poked her in the back, tugging her wrap off of her shoulders to fully expose the embroidery.

"Your dress is… fantastic! That embroidery work is impeccable. Who is your designer?" Audrey asked.

"Mère! You can't be serious!" Chloé whined, stomping her foot. "Her dress is so, so... "

"It's inspired, is what it is! Tell me, did you design this yourself?" Audrey continued.

"Yes, madame. I was actually inspired by the necklace, you see." Marinette reached up and touched the pendant hanging from around her neck.

"Oh, yes, I can see the influence! The color selection is fantastic, and the texture of the ruffles is divine compared to the smooth embroidery. Well done!"

Marinette's whole face was flushed under Audrey's praise, though only a faint glow came through under her makeup. "Thank you, madame." She looked toward the door, realizing that Nino and Alya had gone ahead of them. "I need to be getting back to my friends, but thank you again."

Audrey nodded; with that signal, Marinette made her way around the rest of the people on the red carpet as politely as she could until she got to the door leading inside the building. Through the glass, she could see Alya and Nino talking to Adrien, who was dressed to the nines in an impeccably tailored black suit with patent leather shoes.

"Gee, thanks so much for having my back, guys," Marinette said as she walked up, shoving herself between Alya and Nino and giving them both a playful elbow.

"Why would you need us to have your back? Clearly you handled yourself out there just fine!" Alya replied. "Chloé looked like she was going to combust when her mom started praising your dress."

Marinette couldn't help but giggle at the mental image of Chloé exploding like a firework. Turning to Adrien, she smiled shyly, entangling her fingers behind her back. "So… what do you think, Adrien?"

The blond just started at Marinette dumbly for a long moment until Nino sidled over. "I think he might be broken," the bespectacled young man said, reaching out to poke his friend in the side of the ribs. Adrien jumped in surprise, shaking his head. "Are you with us now, dude?"

"Y-yeah, sorry… Marinette, you look… wow." Adrien seemed to be awestruck by Marinette's appearance.

Marinette's flush became even more pronounced at Adrien's praise. "I'm glad you like it."

"And you're wearing the necklace," Adrien said, his voice soft.

"Of course. It's part of the reason i designed this dress specifically."

"You designed that dress? And made it in a week? Marinette, that's incredible!"

"Thanks, Adrien. That means a lot, coming from you."

"Adrien? Adrien, where are--oh, there you are." Nathalie walked up to the group, her noticeably pregnant stomach covered with a soft empire-waisted dress in a navy blue color. "The show is about to start. You're needed in the back."

"Okay, Nathalie, I'll be right there." Adrien turned back to his friends. "You guys are going to be right up at the front; any of the ushers can lead you to your seats. I'll try to come out and sit with you guys if I get the chance."

"Are you modeling tonight, Adrien?" Alya asked.

Adrien shook his head. "Thankfully, no. I'll probably have to come out on stage with Father and M. Spadafora at some point, but I won't be wearing any of the designs."

"Oh, that's too bad. I know Marinette always likes to see you on the catwalk." Adrien's eyes widened for a split second before he chuckled, rubbing the back of his head.

"Sorry to disappoint. Maybe next time. I'll see you guys later!" With that, Adrien turned and walked away, leaving the other three teens alone.

"Guess we should find our seats, if the show is about to start, huh?"

"Yeah, sounds like a plan," Nino replied. "Marinette, since this was all because of you, why don't you lead us?"

"Oh, all right." Marinette headed toward where the seating area was set up, creating a U-shape around a temporary raised stage with a catwalk jutting out of it. Around the perimeter of the seating area, more men in red vests waited to lead guests to their seats. "Hello, we're in the VIP Section?" Marinette said questioningly to the nearest usher.

"Of course, mademoiselle. Right this way." The usher led the three down to the very front on the left side, into a seating area marked off with red velvet ropes.

Rather than standard folding seats, this area was furnished with soft, cushy-looking couches, a handful of waiters holding trays of champagne glasses and hors d'oeuvres. Marinette could see the Bourgeois family sitting in a similarly-furnished area on the opposite side of the catwalk. "Oh, thank God we don't have to sit with them," Marinette whispered to Alya and Nino. "I think I would have had a heart attack."

"Yeah, I don't think I could handle an entire night of sitting with them, even if we didn't have to speak to one another." Alya glanced over to see Nino already stuffing his face, giving a heavy, long-suffering sigh. "Why don't you go find us a seat? I need to get my boyfriend before he makes a fool of himself."

"Sounds good." Some of the couches had already been claimed, but there was one couch right up at the front that was still empty. Marinette hurried over, using her wrap and Nino's coat to save seats for the other two. Glancing down the row of couches, she spotted some familiar faces--and a very familiar crocodile. "Jagged Stone! Penny! It's great to see you!"

"Marinette Dupain-Cheng! It's wonderful to see you, doll," Jagged Stone said as Marinette made her way closer to their sofa. "What are you doing here? Do you have some designs in the show? Killer dress by the way. Very Rock and Roll. Made it yourself, I presume?"

Marinette couldn't help but laugh, unable to get a word in edgewise until Jagged stopped to take a sip of champagne. "I was invited by my friend Adrien; his father is the owner of the Agreste fashion design company, so they're hosting the show. No, I don't have any designs in the show itself, but yes, I did make this dress. I'm glad you like it!"

Penny smiled gratefully at Marinette for coming over, struggling to hold Fang's leash as he tried to climb up onto the sofa with them. "I'm glad you're here, Marinette. Jagged is working on a new album, and he actually wanted to ask if you'd be willing to design another album cover for him."

"Really? I'd love to!"

"Great! I believe I still have your email, so I'll send you some of the tracks we have recorded so far so you can get a feel for the album's sound. Do you think you can have the cover done in, say, two weeks?"

"I can definitely do my best! I look forward to getting the email from you."

"That's what I like to hear!" Jagged piped up, leaning over and scratching Fang on the head. "Who's a good boy, who's a good boy?" he baby-talked to the enormous crocodile.

Penny couldn't help but smile at the man, who was now sliding off the sofa to sit on his knees in front of his pet. "Thank you again, Marinette, and tell your parents thank you for hosting us last time.  Oh, and if you see Ladybug, will you thank her for me as well?"

"Wh-what makes you think I would see Ladybug?" Marinette asked quickly, tucking her hands behind her dress to hide the sudden shaking of nervousness.

"Well, because you live here, and we don't. We fly back to the States first thing in the morning for more recording."

"Oh--of course! That makes sense. I'll definitely let her know if I see her."

"Thanks, Marinette. It looks like your friends are back, so we won't keep you, but it was great seeing you!"

"Great seeing all of you too! Good-bye, Fang!" she specifically said to the crocodile, who turned its head and lolled its tongue out at Marinette almost like a dog. With a giggle, Marinette returned to the other end of the VIP section, where Alya and Nino had taken up station on the couch she'd reserved.

"Well, would you look at that?" Alya commented. "Nino's friend was actually right!" She took a sip of her glass of champagne.

"Yeah, I guess so. Honestly I thought his 'information' was pretty sketchy, but he was right for once," Nino added

"I'm not surprised," Marinette replied. "He is a celebrity, after all. Celebrities tend to get invited to these sort of events."

"True." Alya handed Marinette a glass of champagne, but the midnight-haired girl waved it off. Shrugging, Alya finished off her own and then started on the second. "So when is this thing supposed to start?"

"I think any minute now." As if on cue, the lights in the exhibition hall dimmed, twin projection screens rising on the back of the stage. A video started to play, showing drone footage of Paris on the left screen with footage of what Marinette presumed to be Milan on the right. A female voice started to speak in English:

"Paris and Milan. Two cities separated by over 600 kilometers, a mountain range between them--yet never before have they been closer than they are today."

The drone footage on the Paris side closed in on the Eiffel Tower, while the Milan side focused on a massive Gothic cathedral. With both landmarks on screen, the Agreste logo and Spadafora Leatherworks logos appeared, superimposed over their respective cities.

"With the collaboration between Milan's own Spadafora Leatherworks and Paris's crown jewel, Agreste Fashion, these two cities are coming together like never before."

Twin spotlights came up, focusing on either end of the stage. From the Paris side, Gabriel and Adrien stepped out; Gabriel was wearing a similar suit to Adrien's, both impeccably tailored, showing off the family resemblance between father and son. On the Milan side, Vincenzo Spadafora walked out with his own twin children, his bald head gleaming under the spotlight, contrasting with his blue-tinted sunglasses and dark goatee. Gabriel and Vincenzo approached the center of the stage, shaking hands and then embracing like old friends as if to show the closeness of the collaboration between their companies. The crowd erupted into cheers at the sight, the screens going black except for the combined logos for the new collection that would be premiering in France for the first time.

Gabriel began to speak, his voice amplified by the microphone clipped to his lapel. "Good evening everyone; thank you all for coming. It is my great honor and pleasure to introduce to you, for those who may not recognize him, the president and CEO of Spadafora Leatherworks, Vincenzo Spadafora." The bald man gave a wave at the introduction. "Like Agreste, Spadafora is a family brand. The Spadafora family has raised cattle in central Italy for over ten generations. When I first visited Vincenzo's family's cattle ranch in Tuscany, I knew they had something special going there. However, the Spadafora legacy has spread beyond the family ranch. The Spadafora Leatherworks global headquarters in Milan is where the real magic happens. Tuscan leather is turned into high-end accessories fit for any fashion-forward individual, and the company is spearheading the development of eco-conscious faux leathers that are truly indistinguishable by the naked eye. That was when I knew that the Spadafora and Agreste companies could create something truly special. And that is what we bring you tonight." The crowd broke into applause and cheers once again. "Please sit back, relax, and enjoy the show. Thank you so much." The two families split off, heading backstage, while the spotlights reset for the start of the show.

"This is so cool!" Alya hissed in Marinette's ear as the music started, a deep thrumming bass practically shaking the floor. Marinette just nodded, her eyes trained on the stage, watching the first handful of models walk out to show off the collaborative designs.

"I wish I would have brought my notebook!" Marinette replied, more to herself than to Alya. Her fingers were itching to draw, to create, inspiration striking at the most inopportune time.

"What do you think, Nino?" Alya turned to her boyfriend.

"I think whoever is in charge of the sound needs to turn the bass down a bit, or they're going to blow out the subwoofers," the DJ replied, wrinkling his nose. "I can barely hear the treble over the shaking of the bass line."

"Well, you're no fun either." Alya took another sip of her champagne, tucking her other hand under her arm.

Marinette looked over at Alya apologetically. "Sorry, this really is awesome! I can see all of the little details from here. It's just making me want to draw!"

"That's fair!" Alya conceded. "So what makes this stuff so special anyway?"

"Well, from what I've been able to find out, Spadafora has been able to make a faux leather that feels and acts like real leather. The only way to tell the difference is under a microscope or with other scientific equipment."

"Oh, that's neat!" Marinette nodded in agreement.

"Yeah, I'm actually kind of surprised there wasn't a crowd of protesters outside when we pulled up--stuff like this can sometimes draw those kinds of people, you know?"

"Yeah, I've seen stuff on TV before, especially around Fashion Week. Isn't that part of the reason why the locations of some of the events is kept private?"

"Yeah, that's part of it. Also the secrecy helps to protect the different fashion houses from having competitors rip off their designs."

"Oh right! That's, like, a big deal in the design world, isn't it?"

Marinette nodded again. "Yeah. All of the major fashion houses have their employees and models sign things like non-disclosure agreements, and some of them even require non-compete clauses."

"Wow. That's pretty serious. Is the fashion world really that cutthroat?"

"You have no idea."

All of a sudden, from behind the seating area, a loud crashing sound interrupted the show, a sudden chill coming into the exhibition hall from the blown-off front doors. Standing in the entryway was a villain whose outfit seemed to span myriad different fashions, ranging from a Renaissance-style neck ruffle to bell-bottom jeans. In one hand, she held a large, feather quill, which seemed to glow with dark magical essence. "Peasants! I am Villainista! Turn over Ladybug and Chat Noir's Miraculous to me at once, or suffer the consequences!"

Screams erupted at the sight of the villain, the mass of people in the exhibition hall running for the exit on the opposite side of the room. However, before some of them could get out of range, a beam of the dark energy shot out of the pointed end of the quill, striking the victims. At the moment of impact, they froze in place for a moment, before righting themselves and approaching the villain. "Is there anything we can do for you, Mme. Villainista? Anything at all! Just say the word!"

"Bring me Ladybug and Chat Noir at once!" Villainista ordered her simpering slaves.

"Yes, Mme. Villainista! At once!"

Marinette, Alya, and Nino watched the exchange with horror in their eyes, but before any of them could react, Adrien ran over and grabbed Marinette by the hand. "Come on! You need to get somewhere safe!"

"Adrien!" Marinette's eyes widened as she was dragged bodily away from the VIP area. "Forget about me, you need to get somewhere safe too!"

"Come on, I know a hiding spot. You can wait there for Ladybug and Chat Noir to get here and take care of the villain."

"What about Nino and Alya?" Marinette looked over her shoulder for her friends.

"I saw them running away too. Come on, this way." Marinette started running under her own power, following Adrien, his grip still firm on her hand. On the far end of the exhibition hall, Adrien opened the door to a supply closet, shoving Marinette inside. "Stay here until I come get you, all right?" Adrien said.

"But, Adrien," Marinette started, but the blond interrupted her with a quick kiss to her lips.

"Please. For me." Marinette nodded mutely as Adrien closed the door between them. As soon as she heard his footsteps running away, she opened her purse, Tikki flying out.

"I don't know what just happened, but there's an Akuma outside, and we need to take care of it. Tikki, spots on!" A flash of light filled the supply closet as Marinette transformed into Ladybug. She opened the door and darted outside without looking--only to run smack-dab into a solid chest. A very familiar chest.

Chat Noir stood in front of her, a knowing smile on his lips. "I was hoping it was you, My Lady."

#miraculous ladybug #miraculous tales of ladybug and cat noir #ladynoir #adrinette #marinette dupain cheng #tikki #adrien agreste #ladybug #chat noir #alya cesaire #nino lahiffe #chloe bourgeois #jagged stone #gabriel agreste #nanowrimo #nanowrimo 2018 #identity reveal #cat noir

[burnedtm]

**   AFTER  MANY  QUESTIONS ,   COMMENTS ,   CONCERNS ,   ASSUMPTIONS ,   &   SALTY  ANON’S ,   I’M  GONNA  EXPLAIN  MY  JESS .   you  can  either  love  her  or  hate  her ,   i  really  don’t  care .   i  just  wanna  get  some  things  straight .   (   aka  it’s  my  turn  to  be  salty .   i’m  not  calling  out  anyone  in  particular ,   nor  am  i  mad .   i  just  want  people  to  understand .   speaking  of  which ,   if  you  have  a  problem  with  how  i  choose  to  play  her ,   that’s  okay .   it’s  chill ,   but  please  take  it  elsewhere  other  than  my  inbox  or  dash .   )

BEFORE  DEATH   :   i  haven’t  gotten  the  chance  to  write  much  of  college  jess ,   but  i  hope  to  soon .   all  we  really  have  from  canon  is  her  name ,   birthdate ,   death  date ,   &   her  halloween  costume  from  2005 .   that’s  pretty  much  it .   because  of  this ,   jess  is  essentially  an  oc .   prior  to  her  death ,   i  believe  she  was  a  happy - go - lucky  student ,   outgoing ,   &   had  an  attitude  that  went  a  long  way .   she  was  bubbly ,   friendly ,   kind ,   &   welcoming .   in  the  world  i  have  set  up  for  her ,   she  was  a  sorority  girl  who  was  on  her  way  to  becoming  a  surgeon .   for  most  of  her  life  she  wanted  to  be  a  surgeon ,   ultimately  settling  on  pediatrics  before  even  getting  the  chance  to  practice  medicine .   with  all  of  this  in  mind ,   i  kind  of  assume  she  came  from  a  good  family .   normal  parents  who  were  still  in  love ,   a  couple  siblings  she  was  close  with ,   &   money  to  go  along  with  it .

AFTER  DEATH   :   this  is  where  shit  gets  tricky .   please  remember  that  no  matter  what ,   she  is  my  character .   i  know  a  couple  people  out  there  hoped  that  she’d  be  much  like  college  jess ,   but  that  isn’t  the  direction  i  went  in .   when  i  set  out  to  write  jess  in  the  first  place ,   i  knew  she’d  come  back  with  a  darker  twist   &   would  be  a  hunter ,   primarily  because  i  miss  writing  sam   &   dean  as  hunters .   that  aside ,   what  she’s  become  in  the  last  couple  months  is  a  direction  i  was  unclear  about ,   but  a  lot  of  her  personality  is  starting  to  take  shape .   so  let’s  get  into  it .

+   choosing  hunting  over  a  normal  life .   though  she’d  spent  five  to  thirteen  years  in  heaven   &   was  cushy  upstairs ,   coming  back  was  a  jab  she  hadn’t  expected .   falling ,   picking  herself  back  up ,   &   wondering  how  the  hell  to  function  was  by  far  the  toughest  thing  to  do .   the  night  she  died  she  knew  it  was  something  otherworldly .   when  she  returned ,   as  much  as  she  wanted  to  leave  it  alone ,  she  couldn’t .   it  was  weeks  of  research ,   spending  a  lot  of  secluded  time  in  shelters  with  a  stolen  laptop .   unbeknownst  to  her ,   the  supernatural   &   hunting  were  real  things   ;   real  monsters ,   real  people ,   real  weird  deaths .   it  was  a  conclusion  that  took  her  for  a  wild  ride .   once  she  figured  out  the  reason  why  she  died ,   she  tried  to  move  on .   eventually  creating  a  fake  name   &   backstory ,   leaving  her  old  life  before  death  alone ,   getting  a  job ,   &   doing  whatever  she  could  to  feel  normal  again .   something  about  hunting  took  up  most  of  her  thoughts .   there  was  no  possible  way  she  could  be  a  surgeon  anymore .   it  wasn’t  in  the  cards  for  her   &   it  was  a  loss  she  mourned  for  quite  some  time .   sadly ,   in  all  of  her  strides  towards  normalcy ,   she  resulted  into  the  mindset  that  if  she  couldn’t  save  lives  in  a  normal  way ,   she’d  save  them  in  another  way .   it  was  a  weird  thought  process ,   but  it  ultimately  saved  her .   all  of  her  temper ,   anger ,   grief ,   &   recklessness  was  taken  out  of  her  system  once  she  met  up  with  other  hunters   &   learned  their  ways .   it  wasn’t  for  months  until  she  heard  the  name  winchester  again .   she  wanted  to  look  sam  up  before  but  didn’t  have  the  heart .   instead  she  made  up  a  fantasy  that  sam  was  a  lawyer  married  to  a  beautiful  woman   &   had  kids .   instead ,   after  hearing  his  name ,   she  did  google  him  only  to  dig  up  dirt   &   the  first  supernatural  book .   hearing  her  own  death  in  great  detail  was  enough  for  her  to  shut  down .   she  knew  that  she’d  come  across  them  eventually ,   but  wasn’t  in  a  hurry  to  do  so .   now ,   no  matter  who  tries  to  talk  her  out  of  the  life ,   it  all  goes  in  one  ear   &   out  the  other .   she’s  stubborn   &   hard  headed  once  she  makes  up  her  mind .   she’s  scarred  up ,   but  doesn’t  care  anymore .   her  reckless  nature  may  get  her  injured  or  possibly  killed ,   but  if  it’s  helping  save  someone ,   she  doesn’t  mind .

+   death ,   drinking ,   coldness .   she’s  hardened  out  completely  since  returning .   in  college  she  was  a  girl  who  was  easily  frightened ,   spooked  by  scary  movies ,   &   huddled  up  near  people  to  show  that  she  was  genuinely  afraid .  it  was  cute .   now  she  wonders  how  she  was  so  clueless .   it  takes  a  lot  to  get  through  her  hard  exterior .   there   are  walls  she  puts  up ,   emotions  she  ices  out ,   &   memories  she  tries  to  block  out .   the  happy  ones   &   the  bad  ones .   she  doesn’t  like  to  feel  but  will  sometimes  seek  out  ways  to  feel  just  to  make  sure  she’s  alive  still .   it’s  very ,   very  easy  for  her  to  turn  off  her  emotions   &   just  shut  down .   it  takes  next  to  nothing  for  the  walls  to  go  back  up   &   for  her  to  be  emotionally   &   mentally  armed ,   sealed  tight  with  armor .   her  drinking  helps  soothe  everything .   it  puts  her  mind  at  ease ,   relaxes  her ,   &   helps  her  block  out  everything  that  makes  her  human .   death  after  resurrection  should  probably  be  protected  at  all  costs ,   but  she  refuses  to  see  it  that  way .   death  is  almost  welcomed .   in  no  way  is  she  trying  to  die ,   but  she  knows  it’s  better  upstairs  than  it  is  here .   though  there’s  a  part  of  her  now  that  feels  tainted ,   wondering  if  heaven  is  even  an  option  next  time .

+   why  she  is  the  way  she  is .   there’s  no  telling  honestly .   when  she  returned  it  seemed  as  though  her  mind  turned  into  a  giant  clustered  mess .   there  was  resentment ,   anger ,   depression ,   &   a  million  other  things  that  were  felt  instantly .   it  killed  her  that  she  wasn’t  her  old  self ,   that  she  could  no  longer  be  the  girl  she  once  was .   life  was  different   ---   the  world  was  different .   everything  seemed  darker ,   uglier ,   more  confusing .   it’s  taken  quite  sometime  to  get  her  bearings   &   she’s  not  quite  sure  she’s  found  them  yet .   she  continues  to  have  an  attitude ,   a  fuck  it  attitude  for  the  most  part .   the  girl  is  stubborn ,   bratty ,   &   doesn’t  like  to  hear  that  what  she’s  doing  is  wrong  or  dangerous .   it’s  not  the  person  people  once  knew .   she’s  different .   the  world  has  changed   &   so  has  she .   expect  walls  being  built ,   traps ,   cinderblock   ---   literally  anything  to  keep  people  out .   smiling  doesn’t  come  often ,   but  when  it  does  its  hidden  away .   she  doesn’t  like  being  vulnerable  or  emotional .   it’s  tough  to  do   &   she’s  constantly  on  edge ,   waiting  for  the  hint  of  a  threat .   vulnerability   &   softness  does  not  come  easy .   when  she  does  show  that  side ,   it’s  because  of  trust   &   she  does  not  trust  easily .

+   the  winchester  situation .   i  feel  like  this  always  comes  up  so  here  it  is   :   she  doesn’t  care  either  way .   that  meaning  finding  the  brothers ,   seeing  them ,   being  taken  in ,   loving  them   .   .   .   none  of  it  was  necessarily  a  road  she  had  to  take .   if  it  happens  it  happens ,   if  it  doesn’t  it  doesn’t .   when  it  comes  to  sam ,   she  wonders  if  it’s  best  to  leave  him  alone  or  not .   she  took  comfort  in  sam  long  ago   &   still  does  now ,   but  gets  confused .   for  one ,   she  imagined  spending  the  rest  of  her  life  with  him .   that  all  got  shot  to  hell  once  she  came   &   learned  the  truth .   it  was  another  thing  she  mourned   &   still  has  trouble  coming  to  terms  with .   he’s  not  the  same  soft   &   gentle  guy  she  knew  in  college .   he’s  hardened ,   worse  for  the  wear ,   it  kills  her  to  see ,   but  she  understands  in  her  own  little  way .   there’s  a  part  of  her ,   the  part  she  died  with ,   that  will  love  him  forever   &   wants  to  hang  around  him  if  she  gets  the  chance  to  do  so .   it  took  her  awhile  to  realize  that  they  weren’t  twenty  anymore .   she  was  supposed  to  be ,   but  they  weren’t .   sam ,   along  with  everything  else ,   has  taken  some  getting  used  to .   as  for  dean ,   she  takes  solace .   they’re  relatable ,   giving  her  some  odd  comfort .

i’ll  probably  add  more  eventually .   for  now  that’s  all  we  need  to  know .   if  you  have  more  questions  then  you  are  more  than  welcome  to  im  me or  send  an  ask ,   but  please  be  nice  this  time .   i’m  fragile   &   don’t  like  the  feeling  that  jess  is  getting  shit  on  for  not  being  canon  compliant  when  we  don’t  know  anything  about  her  whatsoever .   i  apologize  if  she  isn’t  the  jess  you  expected ,   but  there  are  other  wonderful  jessica’s  on  the  site  who  choose  to  be  more  like  what  we  saw  in  the  pilot .   for  now ,   do  whatever  you  want  to  with  this  information .   just   .   .   .   be  nice ?

#* — — ONCE DEAD & TWICE ALIVE. › HEADCANONS #* — — I’LL RAISE YOU LIKE A PHOENIX. › OOC

[sadbirder]

Precarity In The Art World: Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs), The Art Market, Short Term Contracts and the Absurd Pointlessness Of Art As An Industrial Structure, Is It A Joke?

As the Earth rapidly becomes inhospitable due to human actions being at odds with elemental processes, some people are shooting for the moon (literally) while others (me) struggle to see the point in playing the peculiar game of earning a living.

To be clear, I loathe money. I hate working to get money, even when the mode of obtaining currency is selling my art. I enjoy making art, but trying so hard at it to the point of stress? No thanks. Money is ok as well because it gets me things. I like things and stuff.

My hatred of earning money comes from giving up my time. Like most other extremely broke and depressed young people (Hankinson 2017); I am painfully aware that my lifetime may be shorter or significantly more compromised than I had been led to believe when I signed up for my free trial of doing a life. Worse still, this is due to circumstances that I cannot control but indeed very much wish did not exist.

Despite awareness of the futility of my actions and lack of time, I live under pressure to be a successful consumer-citizen (Southwood 2010). I am expected to be grateful for any opportunity to give up 40hours or more each week to exchange my maximum output of physical and emotional labour (Hochschild 2012) to a company offering the minimum possible injection to my bank balance. As it stands, I have no chance of buying a home, I cannot afford my rent and I will probably never retire (Hankinson 2017).

I once lamented about my lack of time and money to my partner’s parents. “I want to earn 6-figures, in one month, working a 3-day week. Then I want to quit and never work again.” They told me that there are not many ways to do that, which are not illegal. The realisation is that selling my artwork very much is a way that I can do that. The catch is, it is extremely unlikely. I will probably have to give up a lot of time, work very hard and hope I get real darn lucky. As artist Larry Poons said, “You do what you can do” (The Price Of Everything 2018).

Before my time studying at Gray’s School of Art, I spent my early 20s practicing and working as an artist. Trying to earn a stable income, as a young artist, is difficult. Art practice is rarely cast within a business as a permanent role. Most opportunities are temporary, offered on a one-off basis through self-employment. The consequence is that the artist is dealing with precarity in work and is constantly looking for a job, “leisure time is turning into labour” (Boyer and Morton 2021 p. 87) and job seeking becomes a job (Southwood 2010). This mode of operation is more akin to the temporary agency worker/jobseeker at a career centre. It is surprising that it is also true to the art world, a place often deemed as cushy and elite (Rafferty 2020). In my Creative Futures module this semester, I was sold the idea that it was a privilege to climb the career ladder in my personal time while holding down a part-time job to make ends meet. It is discomforting to know that, even in the supposedly forward-thinking art world, I am expected to leap at short notice for unpaid roles to boost my CV. To do this while juggling commissions, lengthy applications (I’ve done several longer than this essay) interviews and networking around shifts at my non-art part-time job that actually offers me a monthly wage. This is stressful and leaves me with very little leisure time because I have to work while I am not at work.

As it was presented to me in the course, my success (or lack of) is up to me. I am supposed to be stoked about having a so-called Side Hustle. Any unwillingness to live this way is framed as a personal attitude-problem and shows that the art world has adopted the same rhetoric of self-help/self-blame (Southwood 2010) towards career building that is present in the difficult and stressful world of temporary agency work that Ivor Southwood discusses in his book Non-Stop Inertia.

Capitalism has overtaken everything to the point that it undermines the quality of life on Earth (Jackson 2021). I have less chances for income stability than my parents, as “work is no longer a secure base, but a source of anxiety” (Southwood 2010 p.76).

I looked at ways other artists have made money. I have noticed that some artists possess the ability to eschew the dreadful art-practice-rebranded-as-entrepreneurial side hustle. Furthermore, they are doing so while subverting the pointlessness of seeking a successful career while everything collapses at such an alarming rate that techno-billionaires are racing to colonise planets known to be unable to support life in order to secure continued expansion of the economy (Jackson 2021).  

In his lecture on Digital Readymades, Dr. Jon Pengelly brought to my awareness the existence of Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs). NFTs are a means to trade and authenticate digital materials, including images. The reason they are critical is because they can be traced infinitely and never duplicated (Hern 2021). This gives them a scarcity that can be proven, which is something that rich people look for when buying or investing. This is particularly true in the art world (The Price Of Everything 2018).

James Ettelson is an Australian artist and surfer, whose work stood out to me recently. I read in Stab (surfing magazine) that he sold $30K worth of images of his work as NFTs in a collection titled “Wallet Talk” during October 2021. It is not specifically that the NFTs he sold are of much interest; it is how and why he did it and the video artwork he created in response to selling his first NFTs that are significant.

Wallet Talk video frame-grab - RANKIN, M., 2021.  In: STAB MAGAZINE, 2021. Stab Magazine. [online]. Australia: Stab. Available from: https://stabmag.com/features/james-ettelson-surf-nft/ [05/12/2021].

As an artist myself, I am sceptical of NFTs from both ecologically conscious and image-conscious standpoints. NFTs have a large carbon footprint, so they are bad for the environment. A single NFT trade has a carbon impact 91 times worse than mailing an art print via airplane across the United States (Davis 2021).

I want to hate NFTs because of climate change and the idea of them is so uncomfortable. Who cares if you have an image in your phone? I agree with Ettelson (2021) who says in the Stab article “Yes, I think it’s tragic at the same time but also exciting,”.

If defining oneself through tangible commodity is an embarrassing display of toxic masculinity. For instance, when the proverbial man with the loud Lamborghini drives past and people on the street start offering suggestions that the oversized vehicle may be disproportionate to his mummified gender binaries. Then, to do so via digital commodity certainly fits the same sort of “dick waving” (Eccles and Saltz 2018) bracket.

I want to love NFTs too though. What a great way to squeeze cash out of the wealthy! Give some corporate bozo a .jpeg of one of my paintings so they can have bragging rights over owning the scarcity of the image I created and I receive a decent wage in return? Sign me up.

I swear if I could make £30k from one .jpeg, then I’d be all set. I think I could make a secure life for myself, I would buy a modest shed, retire from precarity before I’m 30 and humbly work casually making art and selling it without the pressure of chasing short-term art-job applications and funding. Boy, do I hate the endless administration involved in being a self-employed artist. Being a Millennial has its perks. My income is so hilariously low, that I believe I’m resourceful enough to retire at 27 years old on the occasional £30K artwork. Anyway, isn’t that how Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos did it?

James Ettelson is a punk. He did what I would love to do. He used his cool-points as “maker of art” to convince some more wealthy/less cool, stiff corpo-types to exchange money for some one-off .jpeg images of his paintings minted as NFTs via the help of a nerdy friend (Smith and Ettelson 2021). The whole thing has the beautiful stench of collaborative DIY-punk-ethos. For better or worse, he made art and then he made money. That is why he sold his art as NFTs. He did it so he does not have to sweat it out in a warehouse, jobsite or office (Smith and Ettelson 2021). So he can surf when he wants and do his best at using his artwork as a means of maintaining a pleasurable life of leisure. There is something very admirable about that.

To return to all the dick-talk, there was a point to it. In an interview in Art Review, Jerry Saltz designated the buying of art in public purely to be seen buying art, a “dick-waving” competition (Eccles and Saltz 2018). Considering this, does that mean that privately owning an artwork, digital or in real life (IRL), is for those who are inclined to an antiquated system of patriarchy-sympathetic-thinking who have something to prove?

RANKIN, M., 2021.  In: STAB MAGAZINE 2021. Stab Magazine. [online]. Australia: Stab. Available from: https://stabmag.com/features/james-ettelson-surf-nft/ [05/12/2021].

It would seem James Ettelson has noticed this. In response to the sale of images of his paintings as NFTs, he constructed the IRL art objects into a sculpture and burned it. As if titling the collection “Wallet Talk” wasn’t enough of a nod to Jerry Saltz’s “dick waving” suggestion, Ettelson filmed the burning of the artwork and cut the clip to the song My Dick by Micky Avalon, claiming that “It’s taking a subtle jab at all the guys flexing,” (Smith and Ettelson 2021). He took the bold move of making money out of a group of people to make fun of them for engaging despite their support. This isn’t the only instance of an artist displaying displeasure towards the sale of art as NFTs. Banksy made a print titled “Morons” in an edition of 500 and sold number 325 as an NFT for £300,000. This edition was burned and similarly was filmed as the token was minted (Hern 2021). Although burning one print out of 500 is not as bold as Ettelson’s burning of all traces of the artwork sold, it similarly points to the humour in placing the value of an artwork upon its scarcity in the digital realm.

BANKSY., 2021.  In: GUARDIAN, 2021. Guardian. [online]. UK: Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/12/non-fungible-tokens-revolutionising-art-world-theft [05/12/2021].

Dominic Boyer and Timothy Morton in Hyposubjects, a key text presented to me in a lecture from Dr Jen Clarke, also discuss this financial boasting that Ettelson and Banksy have pointed out. They explain that the patriarchal system of buying and owning, will have powerful white men, which they term Hypersubjects, download themselves to the grid, become augmented by artificial intelligence and fly themselves to Mars before they will confront any problems on Earth in earnest. The attitude is: “Once we white guys get our shit worked out, then we’ll be able to help out everyone else.” (Boyer and Morton 2021 p. 70).  That is to say, by conforming to a way of being based on ownership, nothing can ever truly be achieved except acts of selfishness and humanlessness.

The dick waving that Jerry Saltz is referring to, and transcending the grid to which Morton and Boyer are referring are precisely the same kind of cowardice. A symptom of the pandemic of competitive capitalism, is that it is inducing a fear of living with immediacy on Earth so potent that it is literally sending those-who-can on a death-drive into the lifelessness of space with the aim of transcending life on earth (Boyer and Morton 2021). Ironically, those seeking to become more human than human, more alive than life, are doing so outside the only place known in the entire spectrum of all conceivability where the human and living is possible. This turn towards ignorance of living is mirrored in the way that people are setting a preference for consuming art lifelessly in the vacuum of digital space opposed to experiencing art as a visceral and essential (Jackson 2021) part of real life. The twisted hilarity is that this is happening at the expense of life and a habitable ecosystem in the one place it exists.

Undermining the concept of ownership and confronting the role of the art market in discussions of digital being is vital. If people are to find their way out of precarious work and the heinous 5-day week, questioning the value of objects and subverting displays of status via wealth to reflect the meaninglessness of everything, as Ettelson and Banksy have done, is a crucial point of departure. Reflecting upon notions of wealth creation and distribution from an absurdist perspective importantly brings humour and playfulness to the discussion.

When everything gets too serious, as all current things are, lightweight confrontations such as this will play a fundamental role in what Timothy Morton and Dominic Boyer (2021 p. 76) call, “dismantle[ing] the apocalypse”. To break apart the dire situations we find ourselves in with humour is to subtly deny the competitiveness that drives the lifeless machine of buying and owning.

Reference list

BOYER, D. and MORTON, T., 2021. Hyposubjects: on Becoming Human. Www.openhumanitiespress.org. Open Humanites Press. Available from: http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/hyposubjects/ [Accessed 12 Oct 2021].

DAVIS, E., 2021. The Carbon Footprint of Creating and Selling an NFT Artwork. [online]. Quartz. Available from: https://qz.com/1987590/the-carbon-footprint-of-creating-and-selling-an-nft-artwork/ [Accessed 5 Dec 2021].

ECCLES, T. and SALTZ, J., 2018. Jerry Saltz. [online]. artreview.com. Art Review. Available from: https://artreview.com/jerry-saltz-other-people-and-their-ideas-no-4/ [Accessed 13 Nov 2021].

HANKINSON, A., 2017. The Lost generation: “I’m 30-something and Still Depressed and Broke.” [online]. The Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/money/2017/apr/02/the-lost-generation-credit-crunch-thirtysomething-brokebroke [Accessed 6 Dec 2021].

HERN, A., 2021. Non-fungible Tokens Are Revolutionising the Art World – and Art Theft. [online]. The Guardian. Available from: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/mar/12/non-fungible-tokens-revolutionising-art-world-theft [Accessed 5 Dec 2021].

HOCHSCHILD, A.R., 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling Kindle Edition. 1st ed. USA: University of California Press. Available from: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Managed-Heart-Commercialization-Human-Feeling-ebook/dp/B007GMRICS/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1638732986&sr=1-1 [Accessed 15 Nov 2021].

JACKSON, T., 2021. Billionaire Space race: the Ultimate Symbol of Capitalism’s Flawed Obsession with Growth. [online]. The Conversation. Available from: https://theconversation.com/billionaire-space-race-the-ultimate-symbol-of-capitalisms-flawed-obsession-with-growth-164511 [Accessed 5 Dec 2021].

RAFFERTY, C., 2020. Art World Elitism in the Contemporary Age. [online]. Reporter. Available from: https://reporter.rit.edu/leisure/art-world-elitism-contemporary-age [Accessed 6 Dec 2021].

RANKIN, M., 2021.  In: STAB MAGAZINE, 2021. Stab Magazine. [online]. Australia: Publisher. Available from: https://stabmag.com/features/james-ettelson-surf-nft/ [Accessed 5 Dec 2021].

SMITH, J. and ETTELSON, J., 2021. Why Did an Australian Artist Burn $30K Worth of Art and What’s It Got to Do with Kelly Slater? [online]. Stab Magazine. Available from: https://stabmag.com/features/james-ettelson-surf-nft/ [Accessed 13 Nov 2021].

SOUTHWOOD, I., 2011. Non-stop Inertia. Winchester, Uk ; Washington: Zero Books.

‌The Price Of Everything., 2018. [film]. Directed by Nathaniel Kahn. USA: YouTube [Accessed 5 Oct 2021].

#Art #NFT #painting #art market #critical writing #writing #philosophy #space #jeff bezos #elon musk #james ettelson #timothy morton #hyperobjects #banksy #jerry saltz

[newstfionline]

Warren Buffett Says Your Greatest Measure of Success at the End of Your Life Comes Down to 1 Word

By Marcel Schwantes, Fast Company, Sept. 13, 2018

Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett is rarely wrong, especially when it comes to investment and innovation. As most of us know, the Oracle of Omaha is also a sage imparting wisdom that transcends industries and generations and cultures.

And that wisdom, however common-sensical? (ever thought to yourself, “Wait, I could’ve said that myself!”), is usually spot-on. Like this hard-hitting bit of truth telling:

If you get to my age in life and nobody thinks well of you, I don’t care how big your bank account is, your life is a disaster.

That’s what Buffett once told a group of students at Georgia Tech when they asked him about his definition of success. Let me expand on why success doesn’t come from wealth, power, fame, or how many expensive toys you own before you die.

As part of that same quote above, which was captured in the Buffett biography The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder, Buffett also dropped this slice of profundity on the students:

Basically, when you get to my age, you’ll really measure your success in life by how many of the people you want to have love you actually do love you.

I know many people who have a lot of money, and they get testimonial dinners and they get hospital wings named after them. But the truth is that nobody in the world loves them.

That’s the ultimate test of how you have lived your life. The trouble with love is that you can’t buy it. You can buy sex. You can buy testimonial dinners. But the only way to get love is to be lovable. It’s very irritating if you have a lot of money. You’d like to think you could write a check: I’ll buy a million dollars’ worth of love. But it doesn’t work that way. The more you give love away, the more you get.

So let me get this straight: The most important lesson and “the ultimate test” of a life well-lived has nothing to do with money and everything to do with the most powerful emotion a human being can feel: love.

You betcha.

As the third richest person in the world and nearing 90 years of age, Buffett has lived and continues to live what he preaches with his commitment to philanthropy, like the Giving Pledge, which invites the richest people on the planet to pledge a big chunk of their wealth to charitable causes.

Closer to home, you have to wonder: How can regular working people, leaders, managers, and entrepreneurs with big ideas live out this principle of “the more love you give away, the more you get back”? To put it another way, what should you do to become so beloved by others that, when you’re ready to hang it up, they’ll lavish you with praise, accolades, admiration, and tell the world, “He loved well”?

I posit that there are a few ways--albeit totally counterintuitive ways--that you can put this practical kind of love into motion, if you are daring and courageous:

1. Think and act selflessly without expecting anything in return. The laws of love are reciprocal, but someone must make the first move--why not let it be you? When we choose to love someone first--whether it be lifting up a colleague with encouragement, helping develop an employee under your leadership care, or infusing deep meaning and purpose into someone’s work role, love comes back in full force through respect, admiration, trust, loyalty, commitment, and discretionary effort.

2. Choose a culture of love. Buffett said, “I love every day. I mean, I tap dance in here and work with nothing but people I like. There is no job in the world that is more fun than running Berkshire, and I count myself lucky to be where I am.”

Work can be a grind, political, and filled with toxic personalities, but the best brands on the planet (and maybe your own company) are places where people love coming to work because leaders display practical love (with results) and the culture is positive and uplifting.

The evidence is clear: When you share the same values, ethical behaviors, beliefs, and norms in a psychologically safe environment, every individual contributor is uniquely positioned to give and receive love without fear of retribution. This leads to a high-performing company that will attract other, like-minded people.

3. Work the “Platinum Rule.” We’re all familiar with the universal Golden Rule: “Treat others as you would like to be treated.” But the Platinum Rule takes it up to a whole new level of loving well: “Treat others the way they want to be treated.”

Dave Kerpen, author of The Art of People, says this about the Platinum Rule:

The Golden Rule, as great as it is, has limitations, since all people and all situations are different. When you follow the Platinum Rule, however, you can be sure you’re actually doing what the other person wants done and assure yourself of a better outcome.

It goes without saying, this has everything to do with your ability to demonstrate your emotional intelligence and, more specifically, empathy--that underrated leadership strength of love where you imagine the world, or a situation, from someone else’s point of view rather than your own.

4. Do what you love. In closing, I bring back Buffett for one final quote: “In the world of business, the people who are most successful are those who are doing what they love.”

Think about it. Does that thought ever run through your mind in your daily work? For most of us, we take for granted our cushy paycheck, health benefits, and job security, even though we may dislike our jobs and wish we were doing something else--something we actually loved.

Doing what we love is a major contributor to our happiness as humans. And, more important, knowing what you love should be a top priority. If you don’t know what it is you love, then finding out what it is should be your first step.

#success #love #Warren Buffett

[orbemnews]

Travel Quarantines: Enduring the Mundane, One Day at a Time May Samali knew she’d reached her limit when she saw a tentacle emerging from her hotel dinner in Sydney, Australia. “I called downstairs and said, ‘I’m a vegan now, thank you!’” she said. “It was just so much fish. I’d gotten to the point where even thinking about it made me gag.” Ms. Samali swore off the seemingly unlimited seafood while in the middle of a required quarantine in the Hotel Sofitel in Sydney this December and early January. An executive coach, she was repatriating back to Australia after her U.S. work visa expired. In addition to an excess of fish, Ms. Samali was confined to her room all day, forbidden from stepping outside, for two weeks. Air travelers around the world are finding themselves in similar situations, enduring mandatory government quarantines in hotels as they travel to countries that are very serious about containing the coronavirus. Their quarantine is not the cushy experience of shorter-term quarantines or “resort bubbles” found in some destinations like Kauai and the British Virgin Islands, where you are able to roam relatively freely on a resort’s expansive grounds while waiting for a negative coronavirus test. This is the more extreme, yet typical experience of quarantine life. These mandatory quarantines involve confinement to your room, 24 hours a day, for up to two weeks (assuming you test negative, that is). And with some exceptions, you are footing the bill — quarantine in New South Wales, Australia, for example, costs about $2,300, or 3,000 Australian dollars for a two-week quarantine for one adult, and up to 5,000 Australian dollars for a family of four to quarantine for two weeks (in January, Britain announced a mandatory 10-day quarantine from high-risk areas with a similar cost of about $2,500 for one adult). Travelers now journeying to countries with mandatory hotel quarantines, which also include New Zealand, mainland China and Tunisia, generally must have compelling reasons to do so — visiting ailing family members, “essential” business travel or permanent relocation. Most accept the inconvenience and inevitable claustrophobia of the quarantine as the price of traveling. But while there can be comfort in establishing some kind of routine resembling normal life, travelers find themselves craving human connection, fresh air and, well, different food (the staff at the Sofitel happily accommodated Ms. Samali’s request; she is still off fish). Travel quarantine might seem manageable, even familiar, for those who have been living in places with shelter-in-place orders and working from home. Pete Lee, a San Francisco-based filmmaker, wasn’t concerned about the quarantine when he flew to Taiwan for work and to visit family. “I was a little bit cocky when I first heard about the requirement,” said Mr. Lee, during his eighth day at the Roaders Hotel in Taipei, Taiwan. “I was inside my San Francisco apartment for 22 out of 24 hours a day! But it’s a surprisingly intense experience. Those two hours make a big difference.” Destination: unknown Much of quarantine life is determined by your hotel. And depending on where you are traveling, you may get to choose your quarantine hotel, or you may be assigned upon arrival. Mr. Lee, in Taiwan, was able to choose and book his quarantine hotel from a list compiled by the Taiwanese government, complete with information about location, cost, room size and the presence (or lack thereof) of windows. He also footed the bill. Similarly, Ouiem Chettaoui, a public policy specialist who splits her time between Washington, D.C., and Tunisia, was able to choose a hotel for her weeklong quarantine when returning to Tunis with her husband in September; she based her selection, the Medina Belisaire & Thalasso on price and proximity to the Mediterranean Sea (“We couldn’t see it, but we could hear it … at least, we told ourselves we could!” she said). Brett Barna, an investment manager who relocated to Shanghai with his fiancée in November, could select a district in the city, but not the hotel itself. In an attempt to improve their odds, Mr. Barna chose the upscale Huangpu district where, he hoped, the hotels would be higher quality. “There were four possible hotels in the district, three of which were nice enough. And then there was the budget option, the Home Inn,” he said. Mr. Barna and his fiancée, to their dismay, ended up paying for quarantine in that option, which had peeling wallpaper and bleach stains on the floor thanks to aggressive cleaning protocols. In Australia and New Zealand, there’s no choice in the matter — upon landing, your entire flight is bused to a quarantine hotel with capacity. In most instances, travelers do not know where they are going until the bus pulls up at the hotel itself. Joy Jones, a coach and educator who is based in San Francisco, traveled to New Zealand with her husband, a New Zealand citizen, and two young daughters in January. She learned before their departure that they would have no say where in the country they would be quarantined. “That was probably the hardest part,” she said. “I could put together a bag of activities for my older daughter, and plan on doing laundry in the sink. But not having an answer to where we’d be — after more than 21 hours of flying, with masks — would we have to get another flight? A three-hour bus ride?” They didn’t. Ms. Jones and her family were taken to Stamford Plaza in Auckland, just 25 minutes from the airport. Pim Techamuanvivit and her New Zealander husband, however, were not so lucky. After arriving in Auckland from San Francisco, they were promptly directed to board another flight to Christchurch, and to the Novotel Christchurch Airport hotel. “At that point, we just really, really wanted to get to the hotel!” said Ms. Techamuanvivit, the chef-owner of Nari and Kin Khao restaurants in San Francisco and the executive chef of Nahm in Bangkok. Relief at arriving — finally — might be the initial reaction, but it doesn’t take long for reality to set in. The hotel room is all that you’ll see for a not insignificant period of time. As Adrian Wallace, a technology project manager who was quarantined at the Sydney Hilton in August after visiting his ailing father in Britain, put it: “That moment when the door slams … it’s reminiscent of the opening scene of ‘The Shawshank Redemption’!” Mr. Wallace said, referring to the 1994 prison movie with Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. Passing the time The challenge is managing the tedium. Working remotely helped pass the time for a number of the travelers, including Tait Sye, a senior director at the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, who traveled to Taipei, Taiwan, from Washington, D.C. in November. Mr. Sye attempted to maintain East Coast hours for the majority of his quarantine at the Hanns House Hotel, working from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. Mr. Wallace ran a half marathon around his Sydney hotel room (he was unable to adjust the in-room air-conditioner and got very sweaty). Mr. Barna and his fiancée in Shanghai had date nights on Zoom, since official policy required them to quarantine in separate rooms. A major highlight of their days came when a hotel employee, clad in full, hazmat-style P.P.E., knocked on the door and pointed an infrared thermometer at their heads. They were not allowed outside. In New Zealand, travelers who test negative for the virus are allowed on the hotel grounds for supervised constitutionals after checking in with guards at multiple checkpoints (masks and distancing are still required, and the rules can quickly change if there is any threat of an outbreak in the country). The ability to get fresh air and walk was crucial for Ms. Jones, and a key part of the routine she created for her family. Other aspects included morning yoga, remote school, nap times, playtime and art projects (her husband worked remotely from the bathroom). “We decorated a paper horse that we hung in our window — every day, a different part of it — that was a favorite activity. We’d have dance parties. And we’d watch a movie every night. We did what we could to bring some fun into it,” Ms. Jones said. Three meals a day Meals become very important in quarantine life, to mark the passing of the time and as regular occurrences to break up the monotony of the day. Food quality, though, varies widely, as Mr. Sye learned in Taipei, where meals were ordered from nearby restaurants. He recounted the highs of a Michelin-starred meal from Kam’s Roast Goose and the thoughtfulness of a Thanksgiving dinner decorated with a paper turkey to the low of an absolutely terrible pizza (at least it was accompanied by a beer). For Ms. Techamuanvivit who documented her quarantine in Christchurch on Twitter, ordering food and grocery delivery was a life-saver. “I’m a chef. I suppose I am, shall we say, a snob!” she said. “As a restaurateur, I don’t have much love for UberEats. But ordering Indian takeaway proved to be important.” (Others who had delivery options available similarly cited them as game-changing). Ms. Techamuanvivit spiced up hotel meals with leftover Indian pickles and found that Greek tzatziki sauce ordered from the grocery store worked well as a salad dressing. She and her husband also treated themselves to nice bottles of wine from the hotel restaurant’s wine list (In Australia and New Zealand, quarantined guests were limited to a delivery of six beers or one bottle of wine per person per day, perhaps to ward off belligerence. In Shanghai, alcohol was not allowed). Seeking connection on social media There are Facebook groups dedicated to hotel quarantine, by region and even by specific hotel, where members share tips for boiling eggs using in-room kettles and “cooking” with an iron. They were also a source of community; Mr. Wallace, who learned of the Sydney Hilton’s Facebook group while on the bus from the airport, participated in a daily Zoom call with members of the group (the meals of the day were a constant topic of conversation). Mr. Lee moderated filmmaking conversations on Clubhouse, an invitation-only social media app, and spent time on Tinder while in quarantine; he connected with a woman who was nearing the end of her confinement in another hotel across town. Ms. Jones documented her family’s quarantine experience on her private Instagram account, showing forts made of blankets, paper airplane competitions and “bowling” with water bottles and a crumpled ball made of paper. She was touched that friends and family, both in New Zealand and in the United States, sent her family meals, treats and toys for her daughters in response to her posts. “It was a really cool way to feel love, and connection, from such an isolated space,” she said. Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook. And sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to receive expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Source link Orbem News #Day #Enduring #Mundane #quarantines #Time #Travel

[drunklander]

Drunj!Der Yells About Outlander

Thoughts on Ep. 308

I’m an Eeyore, blah, blah, blah, whatever, sorry. Ramblings under the cut but seriously maybe just keep scrolling. Why am I even here.

Oh cool. More voiceovers. They’re bugging me way more this season than they used to and I’m not sure why. Maybe because they’re not used as much so when they show up again it’s more jarring?

Young Ian being proud of his skills as a criminal is adorable. Young Ian being proud that Fergus thinks he’s a good criminal is adorable. Young Ian in general is adorable. I’m basically just hanging on to how much I like Young Ian because I’d like to be positive about something.

Ok, I’m sorry, I want to like Jenny. But jfc. Calling Claire a stray? I get that she has complicated feelings about the situation or whatever but can people please stop treating Claire like she’s a piece of crap who no one wants around? It’s getting old. And annoying af.

Also, can Claire please stand up for herself? Like Claire. You suffered enough and were shit on for so long. You don’t need to put up with this crap anymore. You didn’t fucking kill a guy in cold blood. A guy tried to fucking rape you, you defended yourself, he fell, and you tried and failed to save him. That’s a far cry from the fucking murder they’re making it out to be. And it took all of one fucking sentence to explain.

Although good on Jenny for seconding how Claire called out Jamie last week for how he was with Young Ian. Because wtf, Jamie.

Oh hey, Jamie remembers how he learned that beating people isn’t the best form of “punishment.” The smallest of gold stars for you, JAMMF.

Ok I don’t get why they didn’t just have Janet be Kitty. Like we’ve been introduced to Young Jamie, Maggie, Kitty and Ian. Why bother even introducing another rando Murray kid?

Also, did the Murray kids start having babies at like 16? Because the smols running around are pretty old considering Maggie and Young Jamie are like in their early 20s.

Also if Claire and Jamie lived at Lallybroch for a year that the show basically skipped over in season two, Young Jamie would probs definitely remember Claire. But cool that the show needs literally everyone to make Claire feel unwelcome. *eye roll*

Not sure how I feel about Jenny acting like she was entitled to Jamie sharing his grief. Like that’s his call? You’re not entitled to anything? I get wanting to help your brother and stuff, but idk. She seems to be making it about her and what she needed and I’m not here for that?

“I barely wanted to breathe, let alone speak of it.” Cool, Jamie, then maybe start acting like you actually want Claire around? Because last week you were a douchenozzle of epic proportions to her.

Good on Jenny for knowing Jamie’s full of shit when he tells her the BS about where Claire went. The story like isn’t really believable.

Yes, Claire. Tell Jenny the truth. Dooo it.

But fuck Jamie for thinking Jenny wouldn’t be able to accept the truth about Claire. Literally everything in this episode makes it seem like she’d believe them. And it’d work so well if they’d just tell her. If they tell her next week, fine, but I’ll still be mildly annoyed because like why drag it out unnecessarily?

Also, they bring up Murtagh and Jamie forgets to tell Claire he’s alive? Because if she knows and they had that conversation off-screen I’ma be pissed.

The shots of Jamie climbing up to the tower thing are so overly dramatic I can’t even. Like when his hands come up over the wall thing but then he just like casually steps over it. Like wat? What am I watching.

Also the jewels in that box look like the plastic stuff I had in my dress up box when I was a kid.

Caitriona Balfe’s face during the whole greylag thing kills me. Basically Caitriona Balfe’s face during this whole episode kills me. *throws awards at Caitriona Balfe’s face*

Glad they didn’t have the kiddos interrupt sex because Joan is basically a fetus, but the “daddy” thing is still so weird. Especially from Marsali. An 18 year old who calls her stepdad “daddy” is fucking weird. Especially if that stepdad only lived with them for a couple months.

Good to see Laoghaire is still just as fucking terrible as ever. *eye roll* Seriously. After ep. 208, I was like cautiously optimistic that maybe Laoghaire would have some character growth. Like yeah, she’s still fucking insane, but to have her just barge in with the same old over the top “my whole purpose in life is hating Claire because I’m unhealthily obsessed with Jamie” nonsense is annoying af.

Claire’s reaction during this terrible nonsense, though... *throws more awards at Caitriona Balfe’s face*

Ok Joan’s adorable and Da!Jamie is lovely, but like, did we really need to spend this much time on this scene? I get it, Jamie loves the girls. Jamie really loves being a dad. But I’m just getting really annoyed that literally anything and everything keeps taking precedence over Claire, and fixing the relationship between her and Jamie.

“Well there are other redheaded men in Scotland, Claire.” Jfc, dude. Read the fucking room. Does this really look like the right time for sass? He’s been so hot and cold toward her it’s like fucking whiplash since she came back and now that his other marriage is out there he like can’t stop for a minute and fucking be serious with her? Fucking asshole.

“You’re the one that told me to be kind to the lass!” Go fuck yourself, Jamie. Do not throw this back on Claire. Claire asking Jamie to thank Laoghaire could be part of how Jamie rationalizes it being ok to marry her to himself, but to throw it on Claire like somehow that’s the equivalent of her giving her blessing is not a good look. Fucking own your damn choices, Fraser.

“I’m a coward. I couldn’t tell you, but I’ll totally twist your words so I can feel good about myself for marrying someone I know tried to kill you.” Yes. Jamie. You’re a fucking coward. Own that cowardice. Sit in that fucking cowardice. Don’t fucking say you’re a coward and then immediately try to throw the blame for the situation back on Claire. Own your fucking mess, dude. You fucked up. You need to work to fix that. Jfc.

Yaaas Claire, call him on his bullshit about leaving him. Call him on ALL THE BULLSHIT. Seriously her face though. *throws awards*

Ok don’t you mansplain your manpain at Claire, bro. She had 20 fucking years of manpain being mansplained at her and my girl deserves fucking better.

Really wish Claire would throw more back at Jamie. She still hasn’t gotten across to him just how hard things were for her. It really does seem like Jamie thinks he won the pain and suffering contest. (It’s not a contest, but it’s getting super old that he seems to think she just went back to this cushy life and sure, was sad, but because he was in prison and a cave and stuff he somehow has the moral high ground now.)

Claire spent 20 years not being able to speak. She spent 20 years just enduring a terrible situation and not being allowed to feel or grieve or be herself. Jamie needs to fucking hear that. Because how dare he think that she doesn’t know what it’s like to live without a heart. How fucking dare he. Fucking drag him, Claire. He needs to hear it and you need to say it. But of course we don’t get that. Because have you seen this season? Why would they start treating Claire well now. It’s only 8 episodes into a 13 episode season. Ugh.

I know Jamie’s like insecure and jealous and whatever but at some point who gives a fuck about Jamie’s manpain. Claire needs to say her piece and she still hasn’t been able to and I’m really annoyed about it apparently.

Also I really wish they cut them starting to rage bang and instead just had them yell more. Because they’re definitely not done yelling. Yes. They use sex to communicate, but rage banging isn’t going to make things better. Especially rage banging that isn’t welcome on Claire’s side at first. They haven’t done enough actual communicating yet. And by they, I mean Claire. Let Claire fucking speak, show.

Like oh hey, Jamie says he loves her, but like I’m distracted by Claire not wanting him to touch her and him still touching her? And you haven’t been acting like you love her, Jamie, so this line feels like the same lip-service as you saying you were a coward and then immediately punting blame?

Ok fuck Jenny very much for her little rant at Claire. Yes, it’s fucked up that Claire dropped off the face of the earth. And I get she had to see Jamie go through a ton of shit. But to just automatically be this much of a dick to Claire? Jfc. I’m so over everyone being a fucking dick to Claire. Claire needs a fucking spa weekend or some shit.

But ffs, why can’t they just tell Jenny and Ian the fucking truth. (If it happens next week I’m just going to be annoyed. They’ve set it up like 23985230589 different ways this week to do it. Just fucking do it.)

“I’m still the same person you fell in love with.” But you’re really fucking not, Jamie. That’s the whole fucking point. Ughhh, wtf.

Ok but where the fuck did Laoghaire get this gun? Like who gave her a pistol? (Yes, I know, it’s from the book. It’s still fucking stupid.) There has to have been a way to do the Laoghaire stuff in this episode that isn’t like dialed up to 11 on the crazy meter. Because this is just absurd.

Also wtf is with Claire’s like body check thing? Like push her away or something if you have to but like full on hockey checking her or whatever is dumb af?

Oh hey, Young Ian is being a cinnamon roll again about Claire’s surgical tools. Just going to enjoy that for a minute. Keep being adorable, Young Ian.

“You’re the only one who calls me [Auntie].” “Uncle Jamie’s lucky you’re here.” PROTECT YOUNG IAN AT ALL COSTS. GET HIM A WOLF PUP TO ASSIST WITH THIS.

Ok but wouldn’t Claire feel that Jamie has a fever when she’s checking his bandages? No? Ok, whatever. Moving on.

Jamie’s face when Claire’s giving him the cup makes me want to smack him a little. Like, dude, do you not know how much shit you’re in? Like his little smile and heart eyes or whatever he’s doing there makes it seem like he’s not taking the situation as seriously as he should be.

Making Jamie agreeing to marry Laoghaire be all about the kids is the only way it could possibly work even a little, I guess? Because yeah, Jamie wants to be a dad. A lot. But still, two minutes with rando children at a party is really not enough to then say you’ll spend the rest of your life with the crazy bitch you know tried to kill your wife in an effort to get you to love her. Also, there are approximately 29358238923598 smols running around Lallybroch and I’m guessing a fair number of other widows out there who aren’t fucking insane. Whatever. Jamie’s reasons for wanting to get married are all legit. But I’m still side-eyeing the choice of woman given what he knows about her. (Yes, it’s in the book. Yes, I still get to side-eye it. Yes, he’s still a fucking coward for not telling Claire sooner.)

“To care for Willie...or Brianna.” Cool that Bree’s still the afterthought. Cool cool cool.

“I couldn’t bear the thought of someone being afraid of my touch.” I still wish they would have found a way for the marriage to fail that didn’t involve Laoghaire being a victim of abuse, but given what Jamie went through at Wentworth, that’s a legit reason for him to leave. But like, if the whole thing was about the kids and him being a dad, wouldn’t he fucking move somewhere closer than fucking Edinburgh? I guess the kids don’t actually matter that much? This whole thing is a fucking hot mess.

OK BUT THIS CONVERSATION ON THE STAIRS WITH JENNY WHEN SHE’S TALKING ABOUT NOT KNOWING WHERE CLAIRE CAME FROM AND HOW SHE SAVED THEM WITH THE POTATOES IS THE PERFECT FUCKING TIME TO TELL JENNY THE FUCKING TRUTH AND GAH, WHY CAN’T YOU JUST DO IT. THIS IS APPARENTLY THE HILL I’M WILLING TO DIE ON.

Ned Gowan gets the award for having the correct reaction to seeing Claire again. Gold star for you, Ned Gowan. Ned Gowan, Young Ian and Fergus should start a club for people who aren’t dicks to Claire.

I’m here for Jamie not wanting Laoghaire transported because of the girls. I’d side-eye him like whoa if he wanted to go that route. But jfc, they can’t use that as leverage to lower the alimony? Like sure, send them some money so you don’t leave the kids hanging, but not the insane amount she was apparently asking for?

“I’m just not sure if we belong together anymore.” I hate that they end the episode like this, with no actual resolution between them. Like I’d like to think that Claire would never believe what she says, but jfc, she’s been treated basically like how Frank had treated her by pretty much everyone except Fergus and Young Ian since she got back. To the point where she’s fucking romanticizing the 20 years she spent just going through the motions and being basically emotionally abused by a vindictive husband. The fact that it doesn’t seem out of character for her to say she thinks it was a mistake kills me because jfc, sorry, but she deserves better than she’s gotten.

“I had a life.” Yeah, one where you were constantly told that you weren’t enough and that you were a horrible person.

“I didn’t hate Boston.” Girl. Listen to yourself. That’s how you phrase it when you’re trying to convince yourself it’s true. Not how you say it when you actually believe it’s true. (I know, she didn’t hate everything 100% of the time, but she’s still just trying to convince herself that what she had was better than it actually was because now that she’s back, she’s just getting more of the same BS thrown at her.)

“I had a career.” Yeah. You did. And you deserve to be around people who respect that and see how important it was to you.

“A home.” You really want to keep those rose colored glasses on about that, Claire? Seriously, I needed her to like lash out at Jamie about what it was really like for her because I still don’t think he fully gets it. Whatever. Le sigh.

“Friends.” Girl you had one friend. Which I guess is more than you have back here... #TeamJoe

Noticeably missing from Claire’s list? Fucking Bree. Wtf?

Can I just give Claire a hug? Because jfc, if someone has ever needed a hug in the history of hugs, it’s Claire.

“It wasn’t so bad, really, was it?” Yes. Yes it was, Claire. And fuck the show for dragging this out for yet another episode. Everything is still somehow Claire’s fault and Claire’s still just like flailing around, trying to be fucking seen and heard for once.

“When has it ever been easy.” Jamie, ffs, don’t brush off her pain like that. Can you just listen for fucking once to what she’s telling you. But nope. He gets like one romantic line per episode and apparently that makes everything cool? Blergh.

Oh hey, a random book line followed immediately by them getting interrupted so lol who cares about that failed emotional beat. I’m sensing a pattern, show. And it’s not one I’m enjoying. At all.

Also there’s no way that fucking ship pulled up its sails or whatever the actual term is that quickly and then dropped them again in the span of like two minutes.

So now we’re off to start the shipnanigans but still no fucking resolution between Jamie and Claire. Because why would you spend part of this episode with them actually working through their shit and coming to a new normal while they’re home at Lallybroch when you can save it for when they’re on a fucking ship in the middle of high seas adventure nonsense? Because lol #angst. Whatever. This is fine. Le sigh.

This show is fucking exhausting.

#* #drunj!der yells about outlander #outlander starz #outlander 3x08

[supernoondles]

2017

this year i learned that (white) people send holiday cards, and i guess these posts have always been mine. to revive the three pronged thesis from the trenches of middle school: i traveled a lot, i started grad school, and i became more horny.

on travel

i kept track of every place i slept this year. here is a map:

and a bar chart:

locations serve as a good summary of stuff that i did for “work” or “career” or whatever. life fell in segments. having graduated undergrad, i interned at [generic tech company] while living in san jose from the beginning of the year until mid may. one time i fell asleep in a meeting that i called. around late feb/march i also missed over 15 days of work (lol) because i was touring all those phd programs--that was a lot of fun!

i went to 3.5 conferences this year: one in cyprus that was my first talk (though about work i think has fundamental flaws), a preconference in san diego for communications that was awful, one at MIT with an associated week long ‘summer school’ that i enjoyed, and one in orlando for digital humanities that made me very grateful to be in HCI.

i spent summer in europe and that was the dream. i was a really bad researcher, but can anyone focus on doing work when surrounded by the beauty of paris? after my research stint ended (and financed by that internship money) i did what every other college grad with newfound wealth did and traveled around europe. i went to iceland, which i had been wanting to do since i was 12! on my way back to the states, i stopped in chicago to see some friends and also drove down the pnw to see the solar eclipse. a lot of planes this year! feeling bad for my carbon footprint. oh, i also bought my first car (i survived in the peninsula for 10 weeks without one...sigh), so that ain’t helping either. though i do now commute by bike to school, which is really great (and good cardio)!

a brief media interlude

here is my annual best of playlist. this year i went to at least 15 shows, mostly in the bay area. the ones i remember: thom yorke, grizzly bear, tennis, badbadnotgood, radiohead x 2 (berkeley + arras), avalanches x 2 (sf + boston), andrew bird x 2, gorillaz, the national & sufjan stevens et al (planetarium) in paris, mitski, the xx, blood orange, lcd soundsystem. when i saw thom in december my first thought when he stepped on stage was ‘he’s so fucking ugly and needs to wash his hair so badly,’ a stark contrast from the first time i saw him (at 14) which was incoherent crying and worshiping--character development, i guess?

this year, more so than any other (perhaps my nomadic nature), i’ve started to have vivid associations of songs with place. kendrick’s damn (album of the year) or tennis’ (band of the year) yours conditionally: listened to heavily while carpooling to work in the south bay in a truck 20 years older than i. radiohead’s man of war: dashing to the pompidou when it was released to watch the music video as i didn’t yet have data, and then blarring out of speakers in a late night coffee shop as folks wandered the streets of arras, waiting for the first morning train home.

i also read 14 books this year, potentially the most books i’ve read in any year in recent memory--that’s what graduation affords. i started actively seeking out stuff written by asian americans (especially millennials) and i am soooo glad that i did. favorite ones are pamela: a novel (pamela lu), when i grow up i want to be a list of further possibilities (poetry, chen chen), chemistry (weiki wang), and sour heart (jenny zhang). is this how white people feel all the time, seeing their stories and narratives and experiences captured and validated and published?

on grad school

i spent a few weeks agonizing where and with whom to spend my next ~5 years, which to like literally anyone not in the academy as a computer science phd student just sounds like crying because you can’t decide between artisanal ice cream flavor x or y, so i won’t elaborate. but--i visited the campus i’m now at the day i had to make a decision and met with some faculty on the roof of the new art building. the bay stretched the distance, sunkissed. when they left, i just sat, waiting for my mom to pick me up, and i started crying, because i felt so lucky, because i felt like i really had the opportunity to achieve my dreams, and i didn’t even know what those dreams were (i still don’t). i’m trying to hold on to that feeling.

it’s only been 10 weeks, and i definitely am having a good time (the cushiness of private school!), but i still miss my undergrad. i moved out of a 140 person co-op and into a 2 person apartment (heavily subsidized by my school) in the heart of silicon valley that i think is bigger than the house my parents live in. no more spontaneous dinner hangouts because campus is its own city and the downtown 1.5 miles away is too fucking expensive anyway. while the peninsula can’t compete with east bay, i have met some really radiant folks here, but i wish we hung out more. in the start of this year, when i was still living in berkeley, i was getting dinner or exploring the city or doing something dumb (or just doing work together and getting distracted) with people i really loved every day. i didn’t expect graduate students to be closer to working adults than undergrads in terms of their social lives, but that’s what i’m feeling. 2018: a year of foraging closer bonds, the kind that make you feel like you’re overflowing. also 2018: a year to get serious about school again. i feel like i just had a lot of fun in 2017! gotta work harder.

on being horny

this year i had a very necessary and very belated realization of my attraction to the White Man™ (just look at the kinds of media i idolized when i was younger, or my hometown). i was also in love, at some point, with two of them. one helped me formulate my own definitions and actions around romantic love (granted, this has always been/will always be happening, but it was a catalyst to get me to explicitly think about these things). one helped me further that and also breach into the realm of touch. i had identified somewhere in the grey ace spectrum for the last 4 years of my life (around the same time i realized gender was a painful lie, the same time i went to college and escaped white suburbia, stumbling upon the qpoc oasis i’m still trying to create in grad school) but i think a lot of it was because i associated sex with shame and denial. but hey, physical intimacy is cool! i know it seems painfully obvious, but it wasn’t to me.

six chronological selfies from 2017

mt haleakala at sunrise / cyprus at sunset / me as asian fuckboy / me as asian tourist in versailles / me as european fuckboy post italian haircut + glasses / the most beautiful place on earth

i wore 4 different pairs of glasses (most current not pictured) this year cuz i kept on breaking ‘em!! 2018: the year where my ass sits only on things it should.

#noon's shitty end of the year summary posts #2017 #mundane #i'm not going to comment on the macro events of 2018 cuz it's too damn sad

[dontshootmespence]

I Just Want to Help

A/N: An anon request for a Spencer x Reader where they have been dating for a while and he’s been noticing the way she walks and her arm movements and makes a deduction. He asks the reader about it because she’s never mentioned it before, and she breaks down crying. Comfort fic @coveofmemories​ @sexualemobitch​ @jamiemelyn​

P.S. As always, when I write about a real life thing such as this, I am by no means saying that this is how everyone in that particular situation is; it’s a look into one person. Shouldn’t have to justify myself, but I get chewed out every time, so here’s the disclaimer. I hope the requester and the rest of you enjoy.

                                                             ----

Very slight, barely perceptible and only occasional walking on her toes.

The ability to write perfectly well, but not be able to pick up fairly lightweight objects with the same hand. 

Unknowingly clenching her fists on occasion.

If Spencer didn’t know any better he’d say Y/N had a very mild case of Cerebral Palsy, but was she aware and just hadn’t told him, or was it so mild that she’d never noticed it before, or maybe his overactive brain was just moving a mile a minute and seeing things where there was actually nothing? He had no idea.

All of a sudden, the barista handed Y/N a cup of coffee, letting go before she had a good grip on the cup, which unfortunately sent it shooting to the ground at her feet, hot liquid spraying all over her legs and onto the floor. “Oh my god, I’m so sorry!” The barista came out from behind the counter, spouting excessive apologies as she dried Y/N’s legs with a handful of napkins.

“It’s okay,” she said. Her eyes were darting around between the barista, the coffee, Spencer and pretty much everything else in the cafe. “It was my fault. I couldn’t get a grip on it for some reason.” After getting dried off, she placed another order for a second cup, which Spencer grabbed this time. “Sorry for making a scene, Spence. I know how you hate being the center of attention.”

Spencer walked carefully with Y/N down a mini grouping of three steps and sat on the cushy couch they normally stayed when they were here. “It’s fine,” he said, smoothing back her hair after having put the coffee cups on the table in front of the couch. “I’m just glad you’re okay.” He lifted her legs into his lap, ensuring there were no burns. “Can I ask you something?” The thought came out of his mouth before he even thought about it. Last thing, he wanted to do was insult her, because that’s absolutely not how he meant it, but he also wanted to be able to help with things (even grabbing a simple cup of coffee) if it meant her avoiding these instances that drew the kind of attention she hated. 

“Sure, Spence.” She pulled her legs off his lap and curled into him, grabbing the cup with both hands and bringing it up to her lips.

He swallowed hard, unsure of where to begin. “It’s just...we’ve been dating for three months, and I’ve noticed some things.” She was slightly confused, but she said nothing, instead listening as he listed off the few things about her walking and motor skills that led him to his conclusion. “Do you have a mild form of CP?”

Her face dropped, tears forming in her eyes before she looked him in the eye. “Yea,” she said, as a small teardrop fell. “You know my mom was a special education teacher so she noticed that I wasn’t hitting milestones when I should have been. It’s been mild, but it’s also been hard...when things like that happen.” Y/N cocked her head toward the counter where they could both still see the sheen of mopped up coffee on the floor. “Most people don’t notice - or if they do, they just dismiss it as me being clumsy.”

Apparently, the clenching of fists that Spencer had noticed happened more often when she was anxious, but she barely realized she was doing it. “I don’t want this. Any of it.” She buried her head in his shoulder and cried softly while he kissed her forehead. “Because my case wasn’t as severe, any progress I’ve made has been due to my parents shelling out all sorts of money for things that would help me. I fell through the cracks and was dismissed as clumsy. Even in school, when I was still learning to write, I couldn’t get extensions on tests and things because people couldn’t ‘see’ my disability.”

She was sitting comfortably in Spencer’s lap as she told him her story. The worst of it was the walking on her toes, but with the help of corrective boots, it only happened occasionally now, and much less severely. When she reached out again for the coffee cup she’d set down earlier, she couldn’t get a good enough grip, got frustrated and smacked her leg. “I’ve got it,” Spencer said. He held the cup in place in front of her as she steadied her hands and got a good grip on it.

“Thanks,” she smiled. “I’m...I’m sorry I didn’t tell you. I should have known you’d notice.”

He turned her head into his and gave her another kiss. “You didn’t have to tell me if you didn’t want to. Even after I asked,” he said. He knew as well as anybody that there were just some things that didn’t want to be spoken aloud. “That being said, if there’s ever anything I can do to help, I don’t mind. Even if it means just grabbing your coffee cup.”

After finishing her coffee in silence with Spencer at her side, she placed her legs in his lap again. “Thank you for being so understanding,” she said. “I’m luckier than a lot, but sometimes it’s still hard to have people look at me like a freak. I drop stuff all the time.”

“It doesn’t matter to me whether you drop things or not. Maybe we can work on some strength exercises for your hands,” he said excitedly, immediately straightening his back and turning his head toward her. “If you want, that is...I just want to help.”

She was lucky to have him. “I could use some physical therapy again,” she said. “I just haven’t been able to afford it. But if my lovely, genius boyfriend could help me that would be the next best thing.” Another few minutes passed by before they decided to leave and go grab something to eat down the street. As she reached down for her bag, the strap slipped out of her grasp.

“Do you want me to get that?”

She sighed. Her coordination and motor skills were always worse after an earlier incident - it was almost subconscious. “If you could lift it and put it over my shoulder that would be great,” she replied. “And Spence-” She grabbed his hand and gave it a squeeze. “Thank you again. It’s appreciated more than you know.”

#spencer reid #spencer reid x reader #spencer reid fanfiction #spencer reid fic #dontshootmespence #i just want to help

[steamishot]

Homeless Swing

Starting the day off with writing a few things. Work isn’t too busy so I’m taking my tasks slow. I’m also trying to be less distracted at work. I think I can do my job well enough on the surface level, but to prevent myself from being bored, I want to actively be more organized and increase my expertise on the subjects I handle. It will definitely help me see my work as more purposeful as I learn things to do tasks with intent and not just with the purpose of completing them.

Last week, I had lunch with a floor mate, C. She normally eats at her desk. We decided to go to in n out on this day. It was my first time eating out with her. We’ve had lunch (food brought from home) together a few times before. After in n out, I decided I wanted to go pick up a small snack/drink at Trader Joes. As we were crossing the street on Westwood/Weyburn (C was walking to the left of me), this semi hobo/druggie looking white guy who was walking opposite of us, quickly walked towards C and swung his fist towards her face. Luckily she was able to dodge his fist, but he scraped her neck with his skin. She ended up tearing up because it was so random and terrifying. It didn’t occur to me to really look at the suspect so that we could report him later. I just kinda pulled her away and walked away fast because I was more scared he was gonna come back and try to attack her/us some more. A few strangers came up to her and asked “What was that about? Are you okay?” She also mentioned how it wasn’t the first time it happened to her. As a college student, she was once walking up Bruinwalk and a hobo swung his bag at her. I thought it was kinda strange, like she was a magnet for these crazy people. Anyway, we walked to TJ and I wasn’t sure how to comfort her. “Do you want anything? I’ll get it for you.” But she declined. When we got back to our floor, I told my supervisor and colleague what had happened. I normally don’t initiate conversation but I actually had something to say that day. “Something weird happened during lunch” I announced to I, L and student worker S. They advised that she tell the HR director so he can request some patrol officers to be in that area. We later called UCPD together over the phone and tried to describe what the suspect looked like. She remembered a pink shirt, I remembered green for some reason. She remembered shades, I didn’t. She remembered a ponytail, I remembered dreadlocks. Memory is a hard thing to rely on. Because at the moment, you’re more terrified than anything. It made me think of rape/crime when sometimes a victims story wouldn’t add up and they are dismissed as lying. A police officer later came by to see her in person and said that this same person was reported by someone else, and he indeed was wearing a pink shirt! I don’t wear my glasses normally so my eyesight is not crisp most of the time. I feel like this could be hazardous if an event like this happened again and I don’t even remember what the person looked like. When I told my mom the story later, she said I am so lucky because the guy targeted her and not me.

On Saturday, I hung out with a former coworker (a social worker at my last two jobs). She is 48 years old, a single mother, and has twins who are currently going to separate colleges. I hadn’t seen her for at least a year and a half. She used to live in the 626 area but decided to buy a home in Lytle Creek (middle of nowhere, 20 minute drive up the mountain lol). I drove us to yoga, and she mentioned how I sound different- that my voice is stronger/less meek. I said ah, I didn’t realize it but it’s probably a product of working in an American environment versus Chinese. I probably became more fake and overly energetic as well LOL. I didn’t tell her this but it took me a while to get used to her voice and accent again. B is a spunky person who DGAF lol. She reminded me of who I used to be. Staying true to herself. She lives isolated in the woods. Has an art studio. Is doing social work and is studying for a Psy.D. Her boyfriend is a 66 year old Japanese American detective who worked on the OJ Simpson case. I got to meet him for lunch after yoga. He lives in little Tokyo, a 15 minute walk to his work. We went to a random Japanese restaurant around that area. I thought we were an odd bunch- a 66 year old male, 48 year old female, and a 27 year old me. My friend joked that we could pass as his daughter and granddaughter lol. But, he looked good for his age. He actually grew up in the LA area too, in the neighborhood next to mine. He went to my rival high school, which he said at the time was about half Asian, half Latino, and a sprinkle of blacks. During my time I think it was like 90% Latino. All the Japanese Americans had moved away by that point. I asked him a little about crime- he says the majority of perpetrators are homeless people- killing and hurting strangers in broad daylight. Not sure if his statistics are correct, as he’s more of a detective than a police officer, but it was interesting he mentioned that after the incident that happened to my friend. He told me that just last week, a homeless stabbed/killed a 70 year old man in little Tokyo from behind at like 4:30pm. Anyway, I thought it was pretty awesome to have had the opportunity to meet him. When we got to the restaurant, he was all “order whatever you like”, but I felt a little weird having someone I didn’t know pay for me. I just looked him up on transparent California, and it seems he is a Deputy Attorney General and makes about $150k, so I shouldn’t feel too bad lol. He probably would feel emasculated and weird if a young girl like me ended up paying for my own meal. From what my friend told me previously, he is married and has kids, and my friend is like the other woman. He also acts as a father figure to my friends daughter (helping around the house, helping daughters move to college, etc). I was curious but didn’t want to ask him about his other family.  

 I made a macramé plant hanger for the first time with L. It was really nice to check out her DTLA apartment, although I admit I was a little bummed at first about having to pay $6 for parking to visit her lol. The amenities are super nice and it was definitely worth going to. We talked about career, friendships, and relationships. She instinctively acts as an older sister/mentor. I like it because she doesn’t come off as a know it all or overbearing and is a good listener. I found inspiration from her to keep working hard and to carve a career path for myself. She has had many years of doing LDR as well (at least 4). She told me that she has friends who similarly just started LDR, and come off as very confident that they will last. She noted that I/Matt seem to be more realistic and humbled regarding the distance, which is why she thinks we’re more solid and can work out.  

It's officially 2 months since he moved away. I was feeling quite sad over the weekend (not sure which part of my menstrual cycle that was on), but now I’m back to being more okay. Although I do share the sentiments as he said last time, that I don’t feel complete without him. I forgot what physical intimacy, kissing, and sex feel like. So in a sense, it’s good because I’m not thirsty haha. I’ve gotten over the initial wave of celibacy. Recently he asked me about what I want to do in life to try to help me with achieving my goals. I had trouble answering, as I feel my life isn’t very intentional. The only thing that came to mind was living abroad (outside of hobbies I can do with my current lifestyle). I told him I don’t really care what I do as long as it allows me a cushy lifestyle and abundant PTO lol. I told him that maybe I should’ve been a good Asian and just followed through with a specialized field like pharmacy or optometry. He then rebutted saying that I’d probably be unhappy and live life like I’m always pushing a boulder up a hill. Because that’s kind of how he feels, as he was pressured to go into medicine. He says he has no identity, which I think may partly be the case for me too, as we live more for our families/communities. 

Yesterday, he asked me about my goal income and age of achieving it. Then asked what my ideal household income is. This made me feel insecure because I know I’ll never hold the prestige or financial potential as that of a doctor. I know he has quite expensive taste (lol) so I started thinking, wouldn’t it be easier for him just to date someone of similar status so he will for sure reach his household income goal of 300k? In hindsight, I realize he is asking because he wants me to be the best version of myself, and he doesn’t like seeing wasted potential. He does the same thing to one of his best friends (who he says ignores him during these pep talks lol). He also sees it as a practical way for me to spend my time while he’s in residency. So that we both will be working hard towards our career during a period of time when he won’t have the capabilities of being an excellent partner. During our phone conversation, I asked him, “what happens if Connie can’t reach her financial goals?” He said, “she will be banned from life”. Then I said, “Mattay is gonna ban her from being with him”. Then he said, “you think so?” I said “yeah”. Then he gave me a serious “no” lol. I think what he means is that I’ll be losing in life because I’m not trying or giving my all, so, I’m not living life completely. At the end of our facetime call yesterday, he made goals for me in order of importance: 1. Get fit/strong by work out 45 min a day 2. Carve out a career goal and plan 3. Work on hobbies 4. Cultivate friendships and said I have to take care of myself before I can do anything else hence the importance of number 1. Anyway, I realized at the end of the day we were thinking about different things. I was honed in on my insecurities about not being able to offer enough in terms of social and financial status and worries about him not finding me ambitious or good enough. On his end, I think he was more concerned about me being bored and sad- and wanted to push me into doing something productive. These topics of discussion are uncomfortable but they are vital for growth. (Thanks Suze for helping me see this!)

[ontosenegal]

Back in Senegal

January 20, 2017

I am back in Senegal after a two-week vacation to Germany for Christmas and New Year’s. It was my first vacation outside of the country since coming here ten months before, and in addition to the obvious joys of seeing friends and family and eating tons of European food, it was really nice to be cold and anonymous for a change. Who would have ever thought I would get this excited about getting lost in a crowd? At below zero temperatures? On the flip side, it was not as easy to process these same crowds in the last-minute crush of Christmas shopping, towing bags and boxes of presents, when I had just arrived from a place where people are struggling to pay for food or medicine, let alone any gifts.

I worried I would struggle to “readapt” back to my simpler and quieter life in village, but fortunately it was just as if I had never left. It even seemed easier as I already knew what to expect. And, after all, I get to return to my comfortable and cushy life after two years, unlike the people who call Medina Yoro Foulah (MYF) their home. That’s not to say that I don’t like it here. To the contrary, I am actually quite happy. As are most villagers. I have mentioned this many times before, but I have rarely met a people as friendly, welcoming and seemingly happy as the Senegalese. Even if they talk about the US or Europe as if they are the promise lands, they ALL want to go there only temporarily to make money and then return home.

Life in rural Senegal is hard, there is no question about it. People often think that the country is doing quite well, at least in comparison to other African countries. But they are only thinking of the capital, Dakar. The rest of the country looks very, very different from this sprawling and wealthy metropolis with its many expatriates. My village is 90 km away (down an unpaved road) from the next “city”, Kolda, and its roughly 65,000 inhabitants. Most people in MYF live in straw-roof huts. Only the very few wealthy can afford regular houses and NO ONE has kitchens or bathrooms as we know them. People cook on open fires, they use latrines, and they wash themselves through “bucket baths” (you pull water from a well, empty it into bucket, take the bucket into a dedicated washing area, and then pour water over yourself with a smaller container). I have my own hut and walled-in bathroom area, which is considered very, very fancy. So much space would never be used by one person alone.

Most Senegalese make their living through agriculture and/or animal husbandry, but the work is often extremely strenuous, intensive, and pays little. In my village, for example, one 40 kg sack of peeled peanuts sells for about $40-50 US. The peanuts, however, had to be planted, watered, maintained, harvested, and then were peeled by hand! A baguette sells for about 15 cents; a banana for about 12 cents. With these prices, it is very difficult to support a family. In fact, most people in MYF live under the poverty level of $1.90 US per day.

I am well aware how different my life is and has been from that of the villagers. However, after a couple of months in village, this life becomes the new “normal”, and you got “used” to the conditions. It takes the excitement of a child over a new $3 school bag or a visit to Germany to remind you just how lucky you are. It also makes me want to work that much harder to do my teeny, tiny bit.

#peacecorps #senegal #howiseepc #lifeinvillage

[grimmwritings]

Laniakea

September 4, 2017

June 2nd, 2012

[Phillip- 5:47 AM] Don’t be late. This is the most important meeting of our careers.

[Me- 5:48 AM] I’m awake. I’m awake. I have the research by the door already.

[Phillip- 5:48 AM] Good. If Xytiques is gonna help all these people you say it will, you personally need to get your life together. Yeah?

[Me- 5:49 AM] I get it. Ouch though.

[Phillip- 5:50 AM] I speak nothing but the truth. We’ll have a phone meeting of our own after the real meeting, okay?

[Me- 5:50 AM] Sounds good. Talk later.

June 3rd, 2012

Call from: Phillip

“Hey Phillip.”

“Hey. So, what did you think?”

“I don’t know. I knew Xytiques couldn’t be free but… I never thought they would ask what people were willing to pay.”

“Business is never simple. You worry about the science. It’s my job to make sure Xytiques gets to the public.”

“They asked how much people were willing to pay to keep their mothers happy before they died. Don’t you think that’s inhumane?”

“I know it’s at a high price right now, but changes can always be made later. Even if it’s only helping the few who can afford it, that’s more than before.”

“I guess. But this isn’t your average anti-depressant, it’s for terminally ill patients. Most of these people already have hospital bills they can’t afford.”

“Hey, I’ve been on this with you since the beginning. I’m gonna take care of it. Trust me.”

“Okay. Okay. I’ll see you later.”

“Okay.”

September 25th, 2012

Inbox

Phillip Thompson

Subject: Xytiques sales through the roof!

Larry DeSanctis

Subject: Xytiques price reduction?

Iris He

Subject: What are you? A corporate god?

Megan Russo

Subject: My mother has stage four lung cancer

Rashid Khan

Subject: Please, Doctor, is there anyway we could get Xytiques?

September 26th, 2012

Call from: Phillip

“Hey! Did you see the new numbers? People are clamoring for Xytiques! It’s getting a reputation. Terminal patients are enjoying their final days instead of worrying about the end.”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re helping people. A lot of people.”

“But not as many as I could.”

“Is this about those emails? No matter what you do, there will be critics. Trust me. And I told you I would take care of the price. Progress is slow, but it is still progress.”

“I am glad lots of people are being helped by Xytiques.”

“Good. You should be. Talk later.”

“Okay. See you later.”

December 15th, 2012

[Phillip- 6:00 AM] Hey.

[Phillip- 6:00 AM] You better be awake.

[Phillip- 6:00 AM] Something happened. The company is having an emergency meeting.

[Phillip- 6:01 AM] You need to see this. Look up Luxavox before you come into work.

[Phillip- 6:01 AM] It’s gonna be a long day for everyone.

December 15th, 2012

LUXAVOX (fluvoxeline)- Visit the Official Website

Get Important Product Information And Savings Offer For LUXAVOX. Savings Card. Doctor Discussion Guide. Patient Resources. Patient Videos.

Side Effects Info

Full Prescribing Info

Savings Card Information

www.Luxavox.com

Luxavox (fluvoxeline) is a powerful anti-depressant specifically geared towards patients with a terminal illness or those in hospice care, all at an affordable price.

January 5th, 2013

Calling: Phillip

“Phillip, it’s killing people.”

“Woah. Wait. Hey to you too. What are you talking about? Calm down. Take a breath.”

“Luxavox. The Xytiques knockoff. It’s killing people.”

“What? How?”

“It’s too potent. It’s not killing enough people to get it pulled off the market, and the lawyers have been settling with the families. The patients are dissociating, losing touch with reality and eventually dying. You were right, they copied my research. But not the right version.”

“So you agree there’s a corporate spy? Awesome.”

“Yeah, I know. But the research they stole was incorrect, a formula I hadn’t mastered.”

“Okay. Calm down. I’ll talk to the company. The lawyers will take the appropriate information to the police.”

“Yeah. Okay.”

January 14th, 2013

[Phillip 7:00 AM] Don’t freak out, but I heard they’re gonna call you in for questioning.

[Phillip 7:00 AM] Just wanted to give you a heads up.

[Me 7:06 AM] What? Why?

[Phillip 7:07 AM] They’re interviewing everyone with access to the formula. It’s just procedure.

[Phillip 7:08 AM] Don’t worry. You didn’t do anything, so it’ll be just a formality.

January 15th, 2013

Playing all voicemails for: Phillip Thompson

<Play Voicemail. 9:13 AM.>

“Phillip. I need you to pick up. They fired me. Something about me taking my work home. There’s gotta be some way I can prove my innocence.”

<Play Voicemail. 10:00 AM.>

“I’m the original brain behind Xytiques. How can they fire me? I guess they have all the rights to my research. I’m irrelevant now. I need you to call me back, Phillip.”

January 15th, 2013

Call from: Phillip

“Hey I’m on way to your house. How are you doing?”

“Not well.”

“You’re gonna be okay. You’re a certified genius. You’ll have no problem getting another job.”

“God, don’t you get it?! My reputation is ruined. No research job will hire me when i have suspicions of corporate espionage on my record. I’ll never work in this field again.”

“We need to talk when I get there.”

January 16th, 2013

Phillip) 6:22 AM- Please answer me.

Phillip) 6:22 AM- You can’t avoid me forever.

Phillip) 6:23 AM- I was only trying to do what you wanted.

Me) 6:30 AM- You killed people.

Phillip) 6:30 AM- I tried to make it more accessible. It was finally affordable.

Phillip) 6:31 AM- They even offered both of us jobs working with Luxavox.

Me) 6:31 AM- You’re lucky I haven’t gone to the police yet.

Phillip) 6:32 AM- Please don’t go to the police. You’ll go to prison.

Me) What would I go to prison for?

Phillip) 6:32 AM- I was never cleared for access to the formula. You signed an agreement. If the company finds out you violated it, they will make sure we both do time.

Phillip) 6:34 AM- Just let me fix this.

Me) 6:34 AM- I think you’ve done enough.

Phillip) 6:35 AM- I can fix everything. We can send anonymous tips to the police and they’ll pull Luxavox off the market.

Me) 6:35 AM- All while you still work with Xytiques and I’m stuck at home. Job hunting.

Phillip) 6:36 AM- I’m the only one who can still make sure Xytiques goes down the noble path you had planned for it.

Phillip) 6:37 AM- We’ll need your real research to expose the knockoff.

Me) 8:00 PM- I’ll give you my research. It’s not like I’ll need it anymore.

September 27th, 2017

Welcome to FacePost

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May 22- Graduated from Renolds School of Nursing

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September 26- Currently employed at Boulding Memorial Hospital

October 2, 2017

Call from: Phillip

“So. You went into nursing school?”

“I work in the emergency room. I still want to help people, and these results are a little more.. Immediate.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I get that.”

“Yeah.”

“How are things? Things with you, I mean?”

“They’re fine. Things are fine.”

“Good, good.”

“How is work?”

“Work is good! We’re making some really great progress on providing Laniakea for everyone who asks.”

“Laniakea is the new name, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. After the company switch, we had to rebrand.”

“I get that.”

“Well… um. It was really nice talking to you again!”

“Yeah. It really was. Goodbye, Phillip.”

“Bye.”

March 4th, 2018

Call from: Katie Skaverdish

To: 911 dispatcher

“911, what is your emergency?”

“My friend is throwing up and she’s passed out!”

“Okay Ma’am. Can you tell me where you are?”

“Ummm. Somewhere on Mason Street. I don’t know the address.”

“Okay. Stay on the line. We have an ambulance en route to your location.”

“Thank you.”

“Does your friend have a history of seizures?”

“No. No. Um. She overdosed.”

“Can you tell me on what?”

“She called it Heaven, I think. It was some pill.”

“Okay. Thank you Ma’am. Stay calm. Your friend will be sent to Boulding Memorial Hospital as soon as possible.”

March 5th, 2018

Call from: Helena

“Hey, can you take my shift on Sunday?”

“I wish you’d give me a little more heads up.”

“I know, I know. But my dad isn’t doing great back home in Florida and I need to be there.”

“Yeah, I got you. Any patients I need to know about?”

“A girl named Ashley overdosed on something called Heaven, but we don’t recognize the substance. Her mom is very helicopter, so be ready for that.”

“Okay. I’ll try to find out what she has in her system.”

“Thanks. I owe you.”

March 9th, 2018

Channel 7 News App

Breaking News: 23 teens hospitalized over the weekend on a new drug known as Heaven. Symptoms include dilated pupils, grey vomit, and feelings of contentment.

March 18th, 2018

[Me- 10:17 PM] Phillip, pick up.

[Me- 10:17 PM] Phillip I am serious.

[Me- 10:18 PM] This is an emergency, I do not care what you are doing.

[Me- 10:18 PM] If you don’t pick up, I will go to the police.

March 18th, 2018

Call from: Phillip

“Woah, calm down. What’s all this about?”

“You weren’t even going to pick up until I threatened to call the police?! I called you eight times!”

“I just got back to my phone. What are you panicking about?”

“Heaven is Laniakea!”

“What is Heaven?”

“The drug that brought eight kids into my ER in one weekend. And fifteen others in hospitals around the county! What is going on?!”

“Why are overdosing kids my issue?”

“How are children getting Laniakea?”

“Loose restrictions were your idea, not mine. You should be happy. Everyone who ever needed Xytiques is now getting Laniakea.”

“I never wanted kids to die! Don’t turn this around on me!”

“You wanted cheap and available, that’s what I gave you.”

“Is it even legal anymore?!”

“Progress in the government is slow. If you wanted legal, no one would ever qualify for your medicine. I gave you a cushy job with legal distribution, and you still wanted more. Don’t act like I’m the bad guy.”

“I’m calling the police and telling them everything!”

“Everything I’ve ever done since we met, I’ve done for you! How dare you act like all of this was some saintly quest on your part? I have dedicated my life to making sure your miracle drug did everything it was supposed to do and now you’re trying to ruin me!”

“I’ll see you in prison, Phillip.”

March 18th, 2018

“Madison Police Department, how may I help you?”

“I have information regarding the distributor of Heaven.”

March 21st, 2018

My face morphed into one of terror. Phillip walked past me, hands in chains, on his way back to his cell.

“You’re getting the light sentence. What are you so afraid of?” He spat his words at me.

“You.”

#originalwriting