#but marine biologist with benefits works way too well

[bohemian-rhapsody-in-blue]

Bebop Crew July Challenge, Day 1: Midnight

Thanks to the @bebopcrew community for the prompt list! I’ll be writing fics based on their July 30-Day Challenge all this month (if I can!); I’ll also be posting them to AO3 here!

Fittingly, I wrote most of this around/past midnight—my sleep schedule is so messed up these days that I’m most productive between the hours of 11 PM and 4 AM, so that’s probably when I’ll be getting most of these stories posted. So if you see me posting, for instance, my fic for Day 1 on what’s technically July 2, well…that’s what I have to say for myself.

This fic was also (minorly) influenced by @graysongraysoff’s first fic for Beboptober 2020, “3, 2, 1…Let’s Jam!”

Also, enjoy this rejected first line: “There are many benefits to being a marine biologist bounty hunter….”

As the clock ticked past midnight, Spike and Jet sat on neighboring barstools, keeping a sharp lookout for the bounty head who was rumored to pass through this bar tonight—or from a message from Faye indicating that the bounty head had visited the bar where she was stationed, instead. There had been no sign of the guy for a while, and the only messages from Faye just consisted of her complaints of boredom. (The bar was on a relatively remote asteroid, after all.) The anticipation and the silence—other than the occasional attempt at conversation from Jet or the crack of peanut shells (no drinks for them tonight, or at least minimal drinks; they needed to focus)—gave Spike a lot of time to think about the reasons he’d become a bounty hunter in the first place. The reasons he’d chosen this offbeat, freelance profession to fill this part of his life—such as it was.

Sure, the paychecks were irregular, often scanty, and—more often than the crew would like—nonexistent. And he wasn’t one to pretend that the money didn’t matter, that he was purely in the bounty-hunting business for the love of the job or whatever. And sure, one could go on and on about catching bad guys, keeping them off the streets, bringing justice to the world—and Spike supposed those were advantages too, though he preferred to leave the philosophizing to Jet. And they definitely weren’t the reason he’d picked up the work. Anyway, on nights like these—when he and Jet and Faye were in their element, and he was sure a fat stack of Woolongs was on their way—Spike preferred to focus on the more practical benefits of the job.

Spike knew he’d chafe in some corporate 9-to-5 job, or in retail or customer service, or in any position with set hours and fake smiles and a supervisor breathing down his neck. He’d struggle and squirm as if wearing an ill-fitting jacket. And he couldn’t imagine having to say things like “actionable items” or “let’s circle back” with a straight face. He often griped and complained about the woes of bounty hunting, but he was feeling unusually optimistic tonight, and he had to admit, the freedom that this job afforded him suited him perfectly.

Take the work hours, for instance. Twelve A.M. and he was wide awake, raring for a catch; in twelve hours he’d probably be passed out on the Bebop’s couch. And the job was so unpredictable that in another twelve hours, he might still be asleep. This was the kind of schedule that suited him; he wouldn’t have it any other way.

And to be honest, midnight wasn’t a bad time to be up and working. The sky outside the bar was pitch-black, but the streets hummed with life. As Spike looked around, he saw flickering neon signs, sporadic streetlights, headlights of cars and spacecrafts, and the occasional tiny flame of a lighter filling the darkness. And while he and Jet were quiet, the bar was replete with lively conversation, raucous laughter, and the sounds of games of pool, foosball, and darts, often accompanied by wild cheering. These were technically Spike’s work hours. This bar was sort of his office. The gun resting securely at his side served as his office supplies. What boring corporate job would let him say that?

For another thing, he didn’t have to deal with any stupid dress codes; he never had to memorize the meanings of words like “business casual” or wear the same polo shirt with the same embroidered logo of the same megacorporation as everyone else. He did business dressed up in a suit and tie because he wanted to, and, in his opinion, it looked stylish as hell. (As bonuses, it also allowed him a lot of freedom of movement and was very comfortable, as was evident from the few times Ed had stolen and wrapped herself in it, gleefully flapping the ends of the sleeves.)

Perhaps the best aspect of the job, though, was that every day of it was different. It brought the Bebop crew in contact with such a wide variety of criminals and other strange characters—from senile old chessmasters, to vindictive bombers using teddy bears as their weapons, to homicidal genetically-engineered clowns—that no two people they encountered were ever the same. And if Spike decided a bounty head was too boring, or too much of a small fry, he didn’t have a boss forcing him to take it. (More often, he had an empty bank account and a disapproving look from Jet forcing him to take it—but that was neither here nor there.) Also, the work took Spike and his crewmates pretty much everywhere in the Solar System. He was constantly on the move, never staying in any one place for long. It suited his restless spirit perfectly—and made sure that nothing, or no one, from his past would be able to catch up to him.

“Spike.” Jet’s voice startled him out of his thoughts. “That’s the guy.”

Spike glanced over to where Jet was gesturing, and sure enough, the muscular, grizzled man entering the bar, with a suspiciously gun-shaped bulge under his trenchcoat, matched the description in the criminal records and the picture on Big Shot exactly.

With a grin, Spike rested his hand on his own gun. “Let’s get him.”

Sometimes, when he was in a more brooding mood than tonight, he’d reflect on how his life never felt real. How it felt more like a constant dream he could never wake up from. The ephemeral, meandering nature of bounty-hunting, with its strange and amorphous structure, felt dreamlike sometimes, too. And for someone on the outskirts of society, seeking autonomy—well, he guessed that applied to his whole group of crewmates, in one way or another—it was perfect. As much as he liked to complain about the job, it fit him better than he’d like to admit.

And here he was now, in the dead of night in a random bar on an even more random asteroid, easily dodging the bounty head’s blows and landing his own—without making too much of a scene that attracted the rest of the bar. The fight was over quickly enough that the man didn’t even need to pull out his gun. Just the way Spike liked it. As he threw the final punch that rendered the man unconscious and Jet tied him up, he was completely comfortable. Relaxed. In his element.

There were worse ways to spend a dream.

#cowboy bebop #bebop crew #july 30-day challenge #prompt challenge #anime #spike spiegel #jet black #midnight #bounty hunting #character study #fic #my fic #textpost #maya’s musings #maya’s masterpieces #hi bebop crew! i'm not dead!!! #apologies for just disappearing from the discord for a while #sometimes mental health just gets to be...A Lot #and sometimes the way to self-regulate is to take the pressure off yourself and write NO bebop fanfic #and other times the way to self-regulate is to write 1000 WORDS of bebop fanfic #all while listening to the killers' 'the cowboys' christmas ball' #20 times #on repeat #in july #that's just the way it is

[alarawriting]

52 Project #53: After The Chicken Story

And here it is, the bonus story, a sequel to the one I started this project with.

*********

Things have been kind of crazy around here the last few years, not just because of the pandemic, but there’s been a lot going on. Gotta say that mostly, those years haven’t been real great for us. Lots of changes, some good, some bad, some eh, but that’s life, right?

So my oldest daughter went to college to become a marine biologist, and now she’s on an expedition to study the Kraken in the harbor. Gotta say I didn’t expect it. Not because she didn’t show any interest in marine biology, she was crazy for it when she was young, but because every girl around here seemed to want to grow up to be a marine biologist, kind of like every girl when I was growing up wanted to work with horses. Except my wife, she’s terrified of them. Most of the kids who wanted to be marine biologists did not end up that way, but my daughter’s working on a master’s degree in it. Wants to do all this stuff with conservation and the Bay. Which, I guess, the Kraken  lives in the Bay and if we piss it off enough by dumping crap in its home territory so there’s no food for it, it might burn the city down again, so there’s a good conservation argument for you.

My oldest son, the ninja, has actually left the country; he’s gone to Japan to study under ninja masters at some ninja school. Either that, or break into working for Nintendo, because what he really wants in life is to make video games. Being a ninja isn’t a profession for him, it’s a way of life. I miss the kid, he never writes home. Would it kill him to drop us a note on Discord? But it sounds like he’s happy, which is the important thing.

And my younger son has a web comic going. Well, it’s not exactly a web comic, more like one of those mixed media things where he’s got comic pages and audio files and animations and mini-games and all that kind of stuff, about, supposedly, a fictionalized version of himself going into the tunnel under the road and traveling to the Underworld. It’s like, Dante’s Inferno as rewritten by Gen Z. Not literally Dante’s Inferno, I think he’s only ever read the Wikipedia article about it, but similar concept. Surprisingly, it’s mostly a dark comedy. I haven’t asked him if any of it is true, because I don’t want to know.

My youngest kid’s not doing nearly as well, since we brought back her timeshadow from the moon. I never took her seriously when she used to say she had a clone on the moon; turns out that, while a timeshadow is technically not a clone, she did actually have a copy of herself up on the moon. (Nowhere near my family’s barbeque grill. I’m starting to think I’ll never see that thing again.) The thing about timeshadows is, if your timeshadow touches you, it merges into you and then you have all of its memories, but if it had problems, you probably got them too. And living on the Moon for most of your life is not good for timeshadows any more than for regular humans, so when they merged, my kid got frail and weak – not as bad as someone who’d lived on the Moon their whole life, in the weak gravity, but worse off than she was. She didn’t get any taller, though. The timeshadow had shot up like a string bean, side effect of Lunar gravity, but when they merged, my kid got the deficits and not the benefits.

I wish it hadn’t happened and part of me regrets bringing the kid back from the moon, but the thing about a timeshadow is, it’s not entirely real, but it has thoughts and feelings just like the real human it’s a copy of, so what was I gonna do? Leave someone who is essentially my daughter up on the Moon without family? My daughter has lost enough of her childhood memories that she no longer has any idea how the timeshadow got on the Moon or why she even had a timeshadow, and the daycare she used to go to is out of business, so I don’t think there’s any way I can find out.

Things got kind of bad for my wife, too. The last time I talked about things, it ended up looking like we were going to buy our annoying neighbor’s house after my wife harassed her into leaving the neighborhood. Well, that didn’t happen, because my wife lost her job, and then ended up with breast cancer. They had to take them off. She looked into getting breast missiles but the damn things are too hard to reload, so she got pockets instead. Now if she really wants to keep something safe, she can stick it in her boob, not just in her bra. I always thought that those things were only for drug smugglers, but my wife wants to be able to go to the beach by herself and keep her credit cards and ID on her person when she goes in the water, and apparently she can seal up the pockets to be waterproof. So far evidence suggests she’s cancer free and the thing never made it out of her breasts, and that’s good, so things could be worse. The people who did buy the annoying neighbor’s house are nice folks, a Hispanic family where the father works in some kind of industrial chemistry as a scientist… I think. At least, he’s got some crazy shit in his swimming pool.

And then, my idiot boyfriend let the Fae know his true name. He’s a trans dude and very proud of the name he picked. He wasn’t going to go deadnaming himself when the Fae dude he met asked if he could have his name. So now his paperwork is not going through, and some stupid thing keeps happening every time he tries to legally change his name, because apparently the Fae now own his name. He’s considered changing it to a different name, but once you start to think about yourself as a name, that’s apparently your True Name. So he could maybe solve the issue of the paperwork, but he can’t solve the problem that fairies know his name and keep calling him. Sometimes he tries to sleepwalk straight out of the house; we’ve found him in the middle of the street in a fugue state, or talking to people we couldn’t see. My wife’s been trying to help him with the paperwork, but since she’s had her own battles to fight, it hasn’t worked so well.

We still have chickens. But now we also have a 2 dimensional dog, a cockatoo who works tech support, and approximately seventeen cats. I can’t really keep track of them all. They’ve cleared out the rat population, which is good, because Orion the assassin cat has been getting up in years and isn’t quite as murderous as he used to be, but they break out into two clans and the clans feud like the Hatfields and McCoys. We’re not at war with the city over the chickens anymore; now it’s the yard. Mostly about the Fae circles, but also about mowing the lawn, which, you try mowing over a Fae circle. And tell me how it went, fifty years when you pop back into reality, if you ever do.

Anyway, this story isn’t about the chickens, or not nearly so much as the last story was. It’s more of an explanation of why things ended up the way they did.

So first off, work. Now, I’ve been working from home from before it was cool; got my own IT company, works with Amazon Web Services helping other businesses deal with them. When my wife lost her job, she started working here as well, which was just as well because then when she got cancer, she could get all the time off for chemo and stuff that she needed. A year or so later, when the news about the pandemic first hit, business was jumping. Everybody wanted to get into the cloud and not have to come into the office anymore.

Huh, actually, no, that’s not where it starts. Let’s start with the two dimensional dog.

So my youngest kid really wanted a two dimensional dog. They’re pretty rare, on account of being two dimensional. You ever hear of a paper tiger, well, this is a paper dog. They’re not really two dimensional, but something about, most of their mass is phased into a different dimension and we can only see the part of them that intersects with this plane? They can be very intimidating because you look at this dog, you think, goddamn that is one skinny dog, and then it comes up to you with its jaws hanging open, panting, and it looks like a smile. A giant smile. A giant, very toothy, very scary smile. This is a dog you want to keep happy because you don’t know what it will do if it’s not happy. They’re very tall, and very long, and very very skinny, but the mass is there, as you can tell when the dog jumps up on you.

Ours came from Russia. Well, her parents came from Russia. Well, her ancestors. We’re not really sure when it was that Russia engineered two dimensional dogs, but we know that when the Soviet Union fell, people over there started selling these dogs to the US because they were weird, and rich people love weird, and Russians after the collapse of Communism really wanted the money. Then some people who probably weren’t all that rich spent too much money on the dogs so they could look richer than they were, and ended up having to sell off puppies for a lot less than they wanted when the dot com boom busted. My daughter wanted one ever since she heard about them. She was super into science and math, and the idea of a two dimensional dog really appealed to her.

My wife’s ex used to have one he got from a rescue, but we went looking for the rescue and found out it had to shut down after they accidentally accepted a Hound of Tindalos, and you know how that goes. So we had to buy our dog. Her name’s Svetlana and she will do anything to get some peanut butter, regular butter, cheese, potato chips… you know, anything you might imagine your teenagers would clean you out of. Being that she’s two dimensional, she will absolutely slip through any crack in a door you leave, including the fridge door if you don’t shut it all the way. We’ve lost so much butter that way.

Now, Svetlana loves cats. Loves cats. Before we got her fixed, she loved them in a kind of not-entirely-PG-rated way, but even after that, she really wants to play with cats. She is six times as tall as a cat. Cats do not want to play with her. At the time, we had three cats – Orion the mighty hunter/assassin cat, Odin the grumpy ancient man who our best guesses had at 24 years old then, and Tiamat, the tortie who thought she was human. Well, who at least thought she deserved to be able to get chicken out of the refrigerator and sit at the dinner table. They had their normal cat idiosyncrasies; Tiamat liked Rice Krispies but hated fish, Odin enjoyed sleeping in the litter box, and Orion liked to cross-dress. Well, not sure you can call it that since female cats don’t generally wear frilly doll dresses, either. But the kids – and my boyfriend -- thought it was fun to put dresses on him, and while the others would immediately divest themselves if you tried to make them wear anything, Orion seemed to enjoy his dresses. He’d even head-butt the kids if one of them was holding a doll dress, until the kid put the dress on him. None of these cats wanted anything to do with Lana.

Coincidentally, my boyfriend’s parents in Canada had a bunch of local feral cats who’d just had kittens. You see where this is going.

Sylph was a pretty little Siamese kitten who enjoyed playing with my boyfriend’s parents’ dog. We thought she’d make a good friend for Lana, and because she had a sister she was inseparable from, we didn’t want to separate them. So we ended up with Raven as well, a solid black cat who became the photographic subject of many memes about how the void wants chicken.

Lana, big dumb goofy nerd that she was, got too enthusiastic about playing with the kittens. The kittens didn’t appreciate it. Then the kittens turned into teenage female cats, at which point we discovered that Lana is actually a lesbian xenophile… ailurophile? You can’t call it bestiality when they’re all beasts. This was more than a little disturbing, and we all wanted to return to our illusions that our dog loved our cats in a wholesome friendly way, so we arranged to get them all fixed, Lana first.

And then Covid hit.

If you had pets you might remember that right after Covid started, the vets all turtled up, nothing but emergency appointments. Fixing animals was apparently not an emergency. Lana got done in time, but our little girls, not so much.

We did our best to keep them inside, but with all the secret tunnels in the basement, the rat warrens that come up in the laundry room, and the holes in reality that the wall squids made, we cannot in fact keep anything the size of a cat in, or out. I mean, cats can’t usually phase through walls, but they are one of the only animals on the planet fast enough to catch a wall squid, and if they tag the thing, they can often follow it right through its phase. Since they can’t actually enter the dimension the things come from, though, this generally leaves them outside whatever wall they were going through, which is fine when it’s the interior living room wall and not so great when it’s the wall covered with ivy outside. The only thing that keeps stranger cats from turning up in our house at random is ours are so damn territorial, and the only thing that keeps our cats in is nothing. Nothing can keep our cats in.

By the time we got Sylph and Raven rescheduled for their spays, they were both pregnant with kittens.

There are some vets that will abort kittens while spaying. Not the ones around here. Also they both had lots of them. Sylph had six, Raven had five. We have a tradition around here that kittens don’t get real names until they’re adults, they get temporary names. So Sylph’s six were Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charmed, and Raven’s five were named after five members of Voltron, from the old series my wife grew up with, not the reboot. And she left out Sven. I think she forgot he existed.

As if this was not bad enough, Tiamat got pregnant. See, we’d never fixed her, because the one time we had an appointment, she managed to disappear, and she’d get fat and then thin again within weeks, not long enough to bring a pregnancy to term. We knew that her father and her brother were the same cat, so we figured she might have some kind of genetic abnormality preventing pregnancy. Nope! Or, maybe. Maybe she needed exposure to cat pregnancy pheromones to be able to bring a litter to term. She had four. We named them after the Three Musketeers plus D’Artagnan.

If you’re counting, you know that at this point, we had a total of twenty cats.

Meanwhile, we were hoarding food. Frozen and nonperishable, I’m not talking about stuff you have to refrigerate. We bought three new freezers (which took forever, because everyone else apparently had the same idea), filled them with meat (we hooked up with a butcher and got a whole cow, a whole pig, a whole emu, and a couple of deer), then filled our pantry and multiple bins with dry food. With Covid going on, we didn’t want to have to leave the house and go shopping any more than we had to. We even got dry milk. Which is disgusting, by the way, do not use it for your cereal, but it does tolerably well when the instant mashed potato box says to use milk to make mashed potatoes. We didn’t go full prepper with MREs and dehydrated food, but only because my boyfriend’s parents were preppers and he was able to advise us that that stuff tastes like shit.

Twenty cats produce a lot of cat poop. My boyfriend, whose job it was to clean the cat boxes, was frequently distracted by the Fae trying to call him. My wife and I were overwhelmed with work. My son the ninja helped out for a while, but then he got accepted to study under a ninja master. I thought there was no way he’d be able to go; we were in lockdown. Japan wasn’t accepting US citizens. Hell, Canada wasn’t; my boyfriend could go visit his parents because he was actually a Canadian citizen, but we were worried that he wouldn’t be able to come back, so he didn’t.

Ninjas, apparently, have resources that most ordinary Japanese citizens don’t. They came in a helicopter in the dead of night, and we only knew about it because he went to say goodbye to the chickens and woke them up and they started clucking, which set off the dog. We got outside in time to see my son disappear up the helicopter ladder, promising us, incorrectly, that he would write. You’d think ninjas wouldn’t use something as ostentatious as a chopper, but the truth is our city is lousy with choppers. Police choppers. News choppers. Medevac choppers. Elementary school bus choppers. Ghostbuster choppers. No one here blinks when they hear the sound of a helicopter overhead, and a blacked-out ninja helicopter looks exactly like a blacked-out police helicopter.

Since then we mostly hear about him through his brother, who does not have the level of detail sufficient to make my wife happy, but at least we know enough to know that his ninja cover is that he’s interning at Nintendo. Apparently ninjas do not really live in secret compounds where they dress all in black and train non-stop; the point of being a ninja is that you blend in, so ninjas get real jobs, and they’re plausible jobs that the ninja is good at doing. My son’s always wanted to make video games, so he’s in the best possible place, I think. I hope he’s doing well at learning Japanese, though. They only had French, German and Spanish in school and he somehow managed to skip out on learning any of them. I think the school decided that C++ counted as a language.

But this meant my son wasn’t around to help with the cats. My older daughter had moved out a while back while she was getting her degree, and she was living in her own apartment so she didn’t need to come back home for Covid like the college kids in the dorms did. My younger daughter hadn’t yet merged with her timeshadow, we didn’t retrieve her from the moon until the following year, but neither she nor my younger son were willing to be much help. Meanwhile, dry food, in bins, much of it in cardboard boxes that bugs can slip into, some of the bins chewable by mice. Plus, all the restaurants were closed, so the bugs and the mice and the rats all wanted to find someplace that still had food. And our house, as mentioned earlier, is porous to anything the size of a cat, or smaller.

First we had the plague of mealmoths, that infested everything we owned made of grain or nuts. We love nuts, and my wife is crazy for pasta, and we have rice, and cold cereal, and bread. The way you’re supposed to purge your house of mealmoths is throw out all your grains and don’t bring any in for two weeks. This was not happening. I wanted to build a cedar pantry, but a. very busy at work and b. not allowed to go to Home Depot, and not about to try to have expensive wood shipped to the house. The business was doing well, but not that well. I knew from my tunneling project and my attic renovation that if you need wood shipped to you, you end up having to buy way more of it than you need, which is why there are still piles and piles of lumber in my attic.

Instead we ordered tons and tons of jars and plastic cereal bins with bug-proof seals and stuff like that to store all our grains in, and my wife had to go through them all to identify what the bugs had already gotten to, and then throw bay leaves into all the containers. Apparently mealmoths hate bay leaves.

The dishwasher stopped working. By now, we could get repair people again, but the repair guy said that the wires underneath the thing had been shredded by mice, and he didn’t know how to fix that. We tried getting a warranty repair. Turns out warranty repairs don’t cover shredded by mice.

So we got a new dishwasher, and I stashed the old one in the garage, figuring I might be able to repair it once I had some spare time. Twenty cats managed to clean out the rats before they even got a foothold, but apparently they had been slacking when it came to dealing with the mice. It was understandable, given that most of those cats were kittens and three of the cats who weren’t kittens were occupied raising kittens. Odin was too old and there was only so much Orion could do by himself.

The world outside basically stopped. My daughter didn’t go to her middle school graduation, didn’t attend the school she’d been so enthusiastic about going to for high school, and then by the time they opened the schools again she was too fragile to walk around the school building. We tried to get her into a program where she’d get to still be attending school from home, but the school did not understand how a timeshadow merge could possibly have made her too weak to go to school, and they refused. Meanwhile, my son just stopped going to high school, basically marking time until he turned 18 and could drop out, working on his web comic. And me and my wife worked from home, and my boyfriend was on disability and didn’t work anyway, plus you really can’t work when the Fae are trying to summon you and you have to hide out from them. So nobody ever left the house. My wife would go out for groceries, when we weren’t doing Instacart or when she needed to pick up stuff for my home improvement projects, but aside from that, nobody went anywhere. Not even the yard; my wife used to garden, but we were busy, plus, Fae circles. No one wants to risk stepping in one of those.

When there’s no routine, when nobody has to leave and nobody has school and the people who have a job are working pretty much all the time, time disappears. I’d look up from my PC and find an entire month had gone by. It seemed like this was a bit much even for the liminal timelessness of no routines, and then we found the infestation of time flies. Fuckers love fruit. You know the saying, time flies like a banana, but we had a peach tree and apple trees and a mulberry bush and grapevines and tomatoes all over the place, and this apparently attracted the time flies, who then moved into the house after we killed the mealmoths. Time flies don’t look too different from regular flies; they look just like cluster flies, those incredibly stupid little guys who live in the walls and are too stupid to figure out how to get back into the walls once they get out, so we’d never noticed. They lay their eggs in fruit, but they themselves eat time, and they don’t care about bay leaves, or mint, which we were using to try to drive the mice off.

Problem was, with five people never leaving a house, hoarding food, and having twenty cats, as soon as the time disappeared the house became an utter disaster, and there was no way we could have an exterminator over. Also no way to call an exterminator anyway, because nobody was actually answering phone calls! Anywhere!! And we didn’t have the time to follow up on anything. It’s a miracle we got the cats fixed and managed to give some of them away. Not nearly enough, mind you. I don’t know whether we got rid of three or five or seven but we still have an absurd number of cats. And cats will chase mice, and wall squid, and Orion was willing to go after rats, but none of them were gonna touch a time fly.

We put up flypaper, of course, and rubbed mushy banana on it to attract them, but once the time flies have infested your house, you have a lot less time to get anything done, including getting rid of your time flies. Then the oven broke, but since we have two halves of a house, we had two ovens, so we didn’t do much to get it fixed. My wife wanted it to get fixed before Thanksgiving, but with the time flies, that was ambitious.

Then my boyfriend brought home a cockatoo. How he managed to find the time to get a cockatoo, I’ll never know. The family who’d owned the cockatoo apparently had to get rid of her because she was “wrecking our home.” I wondered, how does a bird you can keep in a cage wreck a house?

The bird decided she was my mate, and that my wife and boyfriend – who did most of the bird feeding chores – were her rivals in a harem anime. When I let her out, she wouldn’t let them come near me. Apparently the home-wrecking in question had not been literal destruction of a house, though she was capable of that too if she was bored enough. My boyfriend kept trying to win her over, but my wife had never forgotten about the birds who pecked her dog’s eyes out because the dog claimed that birds didn’t exist, and she was an introvert, so she was happy to go hide in her office all the time and never go near the bird.

Meanwhile, if I put Jessica – the bird – in her cage, she shrieked. All the time. Ever hear the Cure song “Like Cockatoos?” Where Robert Smith says that the night sang out like cockatoos, and it sounds all sad and romantic? Yeah, Robert Smith never went anywhere near a cockatoo. They do not sing. They screech. And they burble, and they talk, but when they’re bored, or angry, or angry and bored, they screech.

I couldn’t have Jessica climbing all over me while I was working. Sure, everyone loves when your cat photobombs the Zoom call, but the bird could talk, and did not give a shit about professional office language. I couldn’t have her screaming either. So I gave her a job. She was now Tier 1 tech support. One of her favorite things to say was, “What the fuck, Amazon?”  This endeared her to the customers, who were generally calling in because AWS had done something to screw up their day. She really enjoyed interacting with the customers, they liked her, and my existing tech support team liked having someone to semi-screen the calls. Of course, she couldn’t type what the customer’s complaint was into a ticket, but she could peck a touchscreen with a co-worker’s face and make a call to tell them what the complaint was, so they could enter the ticket.

Cockatoos don’t eat time flies, either, and the time flies loved the fruit in her bowl, so we started losing even more time. The bills didn’t get paid. There were gaps of three months in telemedicine visits that were supposed to have been two week follow-ups.

We got rid of the majority of the infestation when the summer ended and all the fruit had been harvested. Turns out that time flies really do not like caffeine. We used old coffee and painted it on bananas and apples, they’d come lay their eggs, and then the eggs would die because of the caffeine. We couldn’t do anything about Jessica’s food because you can’t feed caffeine to a cockatoo, but time flies don’t really like dried fruit so much, unlike Jessica, who loved it. They also don’t care for seeds or nuts. And we weren’t feeding the chickens fruit, and obviously neither the dog nor the cats ate the stuff, so we finally managed to take a breath, come up for air, look around ourselves -- and realize that now we had a massive roach infestation.

We tried spraying. We thought that would be enough. Then the new dishwasher stopped working, we got a warranty repairman, and he told us he couldn’t do it. Warranty wouldn’t cover it. When he took off the cover and showed us the little roach apartments, with the roaches sitting around their dining room tables feeding the crumbs they’d stolen to their four million children, looking up at us and giving us the finger (technically, the leg, but I knew what they meant), we realized that spraying commercial pesticide was not going to solve this. But now the fuckers had destroyed our second dishwasher, so this meant war. And without time flies draining all the time away, we had the resources to go to war.

I’d planned to spend the winter months renovating the bathroom. I didn’t mention our bathroom, did I? The new house, the one my wife’s parents bought, had two bathrooms – a nice big one on the upper floor and a tiny little water closet with just a sink and a toilet on the first floor. But in our original house, the one we owned, there was only one bathroom, and it was a galley where literally most of the length and width of it was taken by the bathtub, so to get to the toilet on the other side of the bathroom you had to slide along the wall like you’re making a home music video for “Walk Like An Egyptian” by the Bangles. Or else stroll through the tub. Or else use the rings I bolted to the ceiling joists for my ninja son and swing along the ceiling, but he was the only one who could do that. My boyfriend, a big guy, could barely use the thing. So almost immediately after we got the other house, everyone stopped using that bathroom and switched to the one next door, except for my ninja son because his bedroom was right next to it and it was convenient for him. Ninjas are good at slinking through narrow passages. Now that he had left, I’d planned to tear the whole thing out, and his bedroom, and replace them both with a normal-shaped bathroom and a slightly smaller bedroom.

I didn’t get the chance. We needed to do battle.

It hadn’t helped that some neighborhood ne’er-do-well, who was probably high as a kite, broke into our house in the middle of the summer because our dog was mouthing off to him, threatened the dog, told the cockatoo he’d fuck her up (we know this because she started saying “Gonna fuck you up!” every time we told her it was bedtime or that she needed to be quiet or stop climbing in my hair), and smashed all our fishtanks. Fortunately we had no fish. Unfortunately we had like five fishtanks because my boyfriend had wanted to rescue feeder goldfish and breed guppies for sale, so we’d filled up three forty gallon tanks and two twenties, plus a few tiny five gallons, and then due to the time flies we’d never gotten around to putting fish in them. This did terrible damage to the floor. We had the guy dead to rights on video, managed to actually get the city police to pick him up and a prosecution going, and then he jumped bail and fled, possibly through a Fae circle because no one ever saw him again. He was gonna owe us several thousand dollars for the floor damage.

After we got rid of the time flies, we discovered that the damaged floor had become completely porous to roaches, so what had probably started as a basement infestation had become a full blown house emergency. There were roaches in the cereal. (This was the fault of whoever wasn’t following the mealmoth protocol and leaving the cereal out of the protective plastic bins.) They’d destroyed the dishwasher and were working on the refrigerator. Every cabinet and drawer we had was entirely full of the little assholes, plus the condos they’d built in the dishwasher, plus several of our sealed bins of food that turned out to be less sealed than we’d thought.

Meanwhile the city had sold our house to some asshole lawyers in Ohio, because we hadn’t mowed our lawn, and we had allowed Fae circles to spring up there, which was considered a hazard. Which it was, yes, but only to us and people trespassing on our property, and how the fuck do you safely get rid of those things anyway? We had racked up several thousand dollars’ worth of fines for not being able to mow the lawn because of the Fae circles and not being able to get rid of the Fae circles because we couldn’t safely mow the lawn, and then the time flies interfering with our ability to remember to pay the damn fines before they ballooned. We were still in a state of national emergency at this point, the vaccine was right on the horizon but no one we knew had qualified to get it yet, and they wanted to make us homeless because we didn’t mow our lawn. This was absolute bullshit, and personally, I think may have been retaliation from people at Animal Control, who are not the same guys that fine you for your lawn but they work under the same overarching department in the city government. If we hadn’t gotten rid of the time flies, we might not have been able to respond in time. There was stuff in there that was nonsensical, like fines for having high grass and weeds in February, or for not having cleaned up the area where we put our trash cans in 2019, or for too many kites on the roof. Why does it even matter if there are kites on the roof? We put them there to distract local falcons away from our chickens! They can’t fly into the power lines, they’re tethered with metal cable!

Also they threatened to chop down our mulberry tree because it was in the way of the street light, which didn’t work anyway and which, when it did work, blinded people in my son’s old bedroom, which my younger son was going to move into as soon as we finished the bathroom renovations. Which as it turned out we couldn’t even start, but he moved in anyway because his room didn’t have a ceiling. His older sister had been exorcising ghosts from that room and somehow this made the ceiling fall in, so we’d been using cheap fake paneling in lieu of a real ceiling, and this does nothing to stop ghosts getting back into the room. So my wife put barbed wire around the mulberry tree. Well, it wasn’t really barbed wire, it was tomato cages she’d unraveled and linked into each other in a crazy way that made a fence with sharp wires sticking out of it in all directions. The city fined us for that, too, but she was going to challenge that in court, because no one was going to hurt themselves on it as long as they didn’t try to trespass on our property and mess around with our tree.

Anyway, so we paid off the lawyers in Ohio to get full title to our house back, and we paid off the city’s fines, which, due to lockdown, involved going to city hall, then going to the basement of city hall because the front door was locked, then giving several thousand dollars in cash to a garden gnome because someone at the city had thought it was fun and whimsical to replace the cash drop with a garden gnome. The cash drop was now in his mouth. Then we called every day for a month before we managed to get someone on the phone who could confirm that yes, the garden gnome had had the money and the city managed to get it out and put it on our account, but they wanted another $200 in interest because the time between us dropping the cash and them picking up the cash and putting it on our account was somehow our fault.

And all this time, we’re battling the roaches.

They’d proved themselves immune to pyrethin or whatever that stuff is in most commercial pesticides, whereas we had a house full of people who’d blow up with allergies when anything even slightly nasty was in their airspace, so no more pyrethin for us. We had to get by on organics. Cloves, lavender, mint, citrus – turns out there is a reason humans eat a lot of the stuff we eat, and it’s not just because it tastes good. It’s because it preserves your food, because pretty much every critter except for bedbugs and time flies hate the stuff. Mixtures of boric acid and sugar. Diatomaceous earth. A new dishwasher that’s fully enclosed so it’d be a lot harder for them to get in, and putting the old dishwasher into a gigantic garbage bag, then buying dry ice and filling the bag with it to try to suffocate them all. It worked, but the dishwasher was still toast, and once again, the warranty repair people wouldn’t fix it. The roaches might have been dead but the repair guy could plainly see the condos they’d left behind.

While this was going on, the second oven broke, so we had to get people in to fix them both. Guess what. No, no, you’ll never guess. No warranty repair. No repair at all, actually. The oven that had been under warranty turned out to have been fried by a pair of lovebird mice that had decided to get amorous right where their pals had been gnawing at electric wires, so when we turned the stove on, the current went through both mice, and now we had furry mice skeletons trapped forever in a posture that made it clear they’d been mating. The other oven was destroyed by roaches, and the repair guy, who we were paying for, not a warranty repair, refunded our money because he wasn’t willing to touch it.

We had no ovens and we were sick and tired of buying warranties that would never be honored, so we went to a place called Roy’s Discount Appliances, which was in the basement of a warehouse that used to belong to Toys R Us before they went out of business, and was a maze of ovens, dishwashers, refrigerators and washing machines that were used, refurbs, or on deep clearance because the manufacturer had discontinued them. Nothing like trying to shove two ovens into a minivan where you’ve removed the back seats, but you brought three people, so now one of them has to ride home sitting on the side of an oven and your tailgate won’t close so you have a bungee cord holding it down. We paid cash to get a 5% discount, and I strongly suspect some of those appliances fell off the back of truck, if you know what I mean.

Meantime, we’re repairing the floor. This means putting everything from the first floor of the house, except for the kitchen since it has a stone floor, into one of those portable rental units – not a storage facility because we wanted close access to it. The basement tunnels are prone to flooding, so we didn’t want to use them, also the staircase down there is a little too rickety for me to feel secure carrying my 80-inch television down it.

The city refuses to give us a permit for the storage unit. Says we have to pay our fines. We just did that. They record this stuff in cuneiform printed by dot matrix printers onto carbon sheets, so we have no way to tell if the fines they’re talking about are new fines, or the old fines that we paid cash to a garden gnome for, because we’re not organized enough to know where most of our mail is, so we don’t have the originals. Also we can’t read cuneiform. My wife’s dad can, but my wife doesn’t want him to know how big our fines are or how badly organized we are, and she thinks she could learn cuneiform if she had two weeks of free time. She does not have two weeks of free time. But my boyfriend makes friends with all the neighbors – he always did, but it’s especially been important since the Fae started calling him – and the Hispanic family with the chemist dad offers us their shed, which turns out to be significantly bigger on the inside, for less than we’d have paid for a portable storage unit. They’re just a couple of houses down the block, so it’s almost as good as a unit.

We spend a few months ripping up badly damaged tile and rug, all of which date from at least the 70’s and I always hated anyway, scrubbing off floor adhesive, and laying down a new hardwood floor, just us. By which I mean mostly just me, my wife doesn’t do handyman stuff (she helped with the scrubbing part, and she buys the supplies, but that’s it) and my boyfriend hasn’t really been useful for anything since the Fae started calling him. So now the roaches can’t get upstairs from the basement, but it’s too late, they have a beachhead here now, and so what we’ve just basically done is locked ourselves in with them. We start seeing more of the little fuckers. Now they’re getting into books and DVD cases and clothes hampers. Some end up in the bedroom.

You may ask why we don’t hire an exterminator. Remember the twenty cats? Maybe down to thirteen or seventeen or something by now – some of them spend all their time outdoors – but there are a lot of cats. And they’re at war with each other.

There’s the Canada clan – Sylph and Raven themselves have decided they are outdoor cats, but most of their kittens still live with us – and Tiamat’s clan, which includes Orion and Odin because Orion is one of Tiamat’s brothers (hopefully not the one who is also her father, but we got them from a hoarder’s kid going through his parents’ property, so we never actually found out), and she’s decided that Odin is less awful now that he’s a gazillion years old and she has the Canada clan to compare them to. My youngest daughter, who is mostly confined to her room due to physical weakness and compromised immune system, treats Tiamat’s kittens like they’re her own children (including carrying them around baby style, putting them in toy strollers she is way too old for, and occasionally putting one in a toy Pack n Play and then covering it with a large cardboard box as a “time-out”), so they have a home base. The Canada clan grew up in our bedroom, so they have a home base. The rest of the house is a war zone.

Whenever you walk through the house, there are cats hissing at each other, yowling, swiping at each other, chasing each other, the works. It’s still cold outside, so we can’t get them to go out and do their fighting outdoors like civilized cats. Our homeowners insurance dropped us when they found out about the tunnels in the basement. (They didn’t know we made the tunnels, and we didn’t admit to it, but insurance inspectors can be incredibly thorough when they want to be.) We haven’t been able to get a new policy yet. So my wife does not want a guy traipsing around the whole house where he might get tripped or scratched by warring cats. We’ve all learned to dodge, but an exterminator wouldn’t necessarily be experienced with being in a cat war zone.

It’s one thing to get repair guys into one or the other of the kitchens, they have doors and we can lock the cats out if we have to (I know most kitchens do not, in fact, have doors that can lock out the rest of the house, but we needed one back in the days when we had Angel, our beagle who we called that because as soon as you weren’t looking at him he would sneak into the kitchen and eat anything he could find, like the Weeping Angels on Doctor Who except with less neck breaking and more stealing your PB+J the instant your back was turned. That was before we had the other house, but we installed a similar door on the other house to keep the two dimensional dog from sneaking into our bedroom and pooping there.) It’s another thing to have a guy going all over your house while your cats are setting up ambushes for each other. And without homeowner’s insurance, we can’t risk it.

So it’s down to us. But we’re creative. My boyfriend has been seeing giant bugs that look like a cross between centipedes and beetles. Like the wall squid, they’re not entirely in our reality; he can see them because of his connection to the Fae. Well, my wife looks them up and apparently they are predators who eat bugs. We just have to get them over into our reality, and then figure out how to dispose of them. We can’t get frogs because the cats would attack them, and we can’t get an anteater because exotic animal, need a permit and besides, it’s not called a roach eater. We can bring the chickens inside to go roach hunting from time to time, but they poop all over the floor so the cure’s almost worse than the disease.

In our yard, there’s an old wooden gate that fell off the new house shortly after we got it, and instead of throwing it out, we leave it in the yard and move it around from time to time to kill weeds. The Fae made a circle on it. We carry the wooden gate into the house, and then my boyfriend leaves out sugar water to attract the centipeedles through the circle. Now we have centipede beetles the length of a human foot (which is mostly a lot shorter than the measurement named for it) in the house. Possibly this was ill thought out. The cats try attacking them, but it turns out, cats find centipeedles just as creepy as humans do, and the damn things have some pretty tough armor. It doesn’t take much before the cats get intimidated and leave them alone. Even Orion the assassin cat gives them a wide berth.

Turns out, the centipeedles are great at killing the roaches, but no one wants centipeedles in their pantry, or their silverware drawer. My daughter just literally stops eating off anything but her own private stash of sealed paper plates and plastic silverware because she’s so creeped out by the thought of either roaches or centipeedles touching anything she might eat off of. This isn’t great, the kid is already too thin and too easily put off her food. She was always picky, but apparently the timeshadow spent ten years eating moon cheese and is having a hard time stomaching Earth food, so now everything nauseates her, gives her a stomach, or is unappetizing in the first place.

One thing I will say for chickens: they’ll eat centipeedles. They don’t care, it’s all food to them. The cats have learned that chickens are much more of a threat and much less of a prey than they might think. Lana the two dimensional dog will happily chase the chickens, but she’s less two dimensional than she used to be. She doesn’t get enough exercise and she steals a lot of food, so she’s looking considerably more three dimensional than when we got her, which is good because it keeps her from slipping through closed doors, though bad in the sense that it’s not that healthy for her. There is enough clutter around the place, what with my tools, piles of lumber for the floor, and boxes of books that were deemed too heavy to carry over to the neighbors’ shed, that chickens have plenty of places to take shelter from a two and a half dimensional dog. And if we let Jessica the cockatoo out, turns out she thinks centipeedles are a fun piece of moving string to catch and tear in half. You’d think that a predator like a cat would be better at killing a centipeedle than a hookbill bird, but turns out, the centipeedles’ bellies are barely armored and the cockatoo has nearly opposable thumbs on her feet. She can flip them over, and then peck, peck, crack, done.

So we’ve got the chickens running around the place in chicken diapers to eat the centipeedles that we brought over from the lands of the Fae to eat the roaches, but we still have roaches and we still have centipeedles because it turns out you can’t control house bugs with predators. Spiders might be better at it and my boyfriend wants to get some, but my wife shoots that down.

I’m kinda at my wits’ end here, and then my youngest son wants to show me something.

So to understand this, I gotta tell you something about the layout of my house. We’ve got a full duplex, both sides, thanks to my wife’s dad. The front of the house is on a busy street, and my bedroom and my youngest daughter’s bedroom face that. The back of the house faces our deck, and my ninja son’s former bedroom (from the original side we had) and the guest room (from the new side we got) face that. Then there’s a room in the middle of our original house, that my younger son used to have, but now he’s moved into his older brother’s room. The bathroom is next to the boys’ bedroom, and also faces the deck.

Back a few years ago, before Covid, I did a renovation on my ninja son’s bedroom where I made it a little smaller, in preparation for making the bathroom wider. Then I didn’t have the opportunity to work on the bathroom. So there’s a narrow corridor between the bathroom and the bedroom. I threw together a quick and dirty closet to occupy some of that space, so the boys’ bedroom now has a closet in the corner that faces the bathroom and the deck. My younger son guided me over to this closet, and pulled up a trap door that I hadn’t known was there. There was a spiral staircase underneath.

So I went down the spiral staircase, of course, but I was freaking out. This hadn’t been here when I worked on the boys’ bedroom. I redid their entire floor, when they were so young they shared the room and my older daughter had the middle bedroom. There was no way this trap door could have been there when we moved in. There’s also no way it could be going where it’s going. My sons’ bedroom sits over the kitchen, but the kitchen has an addition in the back where we keep the laundry machines. This spiral staircase would theoretically be going right down into it.

Except it’s not. I’ve got pretty good spatial perception, so it doesn’t take me long to figure out that this very narrow little column is going between the two houses, at the edge where the kitchens meet the additions. I don’t know how it’s possible that I missed it. I’ve done so many renovations in this house. This is crazy.

The spiral staircase goes down underground and into a tunnel, which is not one of the tunnels my son and I dug to connect all the basements in the neighborhood. Technically this tunnel isn’t even in my basement; the foundation only goes as far as the original house, so the additions have no basement. This tunnel goes under my deck, then deeper underground, then turns, and comes up…

Ok, this is super weird. It’s a buried pillbox. This is like a basement, except what if your basement had a roof of its own rather than just being part of your house, and it was sticking out of the ground about two feet, with a lot of windows, and it was the size of maybe two rooms in your house put together, and it was at the back of the yard belonging to the neighbors with a swimming pool.

The room is mostly empty. There are tools, and some very iffy towels, and several empty beer cans, and a bottle of Windex and a really nasty roll of paper towels with spiderwebs all over it. I ask my son, “Did your brother know this was here?”

“I don’t know. If he did, he never mentioned it.”

“How long has it been here?”

“I don’t know, I just found it!”

There is no door, aside from the one we came in, and no staircase up to the ground level, but I open one of the windows and squirm through.

The fence around the neighbors’ swimming pool is about five feet tall, so I can see over it. My neighbors are sitting on their swimming pool. I mentioned the father’s a chemist or something, right? He’s got these substances that you mix into your water to change its solidity. They’ve turned about three quarters of their swimming pool into a semi-solid – a little bit squishy, their feet are leaving footprints in it when they walk around, but it holds their weight – and the remaining quarter, they’ve left as water so they can dangle their feet. There’s an entire entertainment center sitting in front of the pool, including a huge CRT TV, a VCR and a dozen super old video game machines like the Sega Saturn or the Nintendo GameCube, protected from the rain by a shade umbrella. Nothing is protecting this stuff from the water from the pool, though. They’re watching The Little Mermaid. I lean against the fence, and my neighbors notice me. The chemist greets me. “What’s going on, man?”

“I just discovered that this structure you have in the back of your yard is connected to my son’s bedroom.”

“Oh, wow,” he says. He gets out of the pool. He’s wearing swim trunks, but aside from his legs, he’s completely dry, since he’s been sitting on top of his pool dunking his feet and watching The Little Mermaid with his family. “You didn’t build that thing?”

“No, I didn’t build it.”

“But you built the tunnels.” I like this guy; he discovered the tunnels shortly after moving in, but he thought they were great. He wanted to get chickens himself, but there isn’t room in his yard with the swimming pool. The roof of the underground structure is completely covered with planter boxes full of tomatoes, peppers, flowers, herbs, and rutabagas. I don’t know why they’re trying to grow root vegetables in planters, but there’s enough foliage that I can tell what it is. The sign doesn’t help, it’s in Spanish. For obvious reasons I can read “tomato” and “jalapeno” and “serrano” in Spanish, but not “nabo sueco”, which probably means rutabaga because that’s what’s planted there.

“Yeah, a few years back, but I had no idea this thing was even here. Most of the tunnels go directly between the houses, not under the back yards.”

“Cool. I thought it was yours, but I didn’t know for sure. Can I go inside?”

“Well, there’s no door, but if you want to come to my house we can go down the staircase from my son’s room.”

So we traipse back over to my house, and then up to my son’s bedroom, down the stairs, through the tunnel, and into the empty underground structure. “This gets a lot of light for a thing underground,” he says. “A lot of windows.”

“It’s nice. I don’t know what it’s doing here, but maybe I’ll install some doors to give you and me privacy, and then make a trap door in the roof. I might have to move your rutabagas, though. That way you can come in and enjoy the space, too. Maybe we’ll make it some kind of den. You play board games? Role-playing games?”

“Not in English, not the role-playing games. I used to have an 11th level paladin before we moved here, but I was playing in Spanish. Board games, it’s mostly been Chutes and Ladders or Monopoly or some shit like that.” His kids are younger than mine.

“Well, we can put some furniture down there if there’s a trap door to lower it through, and get some lighting in.” There’s only one lamp, a work lamp clipped onto one of the ceiling joists. Its bulb works but is very dim. There’s one power outlet in the place. I’m gonna have to trace it back to see if it’s my electricity or his. “Set up some board games, maybe a mini-fridge with beer and Coke. We could hang out sometimes.”

“Yeah, that would be good. You like zucchini? My wife has too much zucchini.”

“I don’t, but my wife loves it. I could trade you some eggs.”

So that’s how I made friends with the mad scientist guy down the block. No idea what company he works for but they make some crazy shit. That stuff that makes the pool solid? Amazing. I don’t know how he keeps it from circulating through the entire pool, though. Maybe he’s got underwater baffles up to control the flow.

I tell my wife about this thing, and she looks at me funny. “Uh, yeah. You built that.”

“I did not.”

“You did. You got drunk one night and you said you were gonna seriously screw with the woman who called Animal Control on us. Then you built a tunnel to her house.”

“How the hell did I build that entire basement structure thing?”

“Oh, no, that was already there. You just connected to it. Same way you connected to the city’s underground tunnels.” Yeah, truth is, my son and I didn’t really build the entire tunnel system under the neighborhood. There was already a tunnel the city made and we just dug connectors to everyone’s basement, few years back.

“When were you going to tell me about this?”

“Why would I tell you about it? You’re the one who built it. I thought you’d remember.”

Okay, maybe I need to control my drinking, but that was a stressful time, with that woman being responsible for me losing my two roosters to Animal Control. Roosters aren’t allowed in the city, because the city is sexist. Apparently I built the trap door, the entire spiral staircase, and the connecting tunnel in one night, and I made my wife, my boyfriend, and my ninja son help, and now I’m the only one who doesn’t remember it. That’s embarrassing. After that woman did that, and tried to stop us from rescuing our own chickens, my wife started anonymously harassing her and sending her moldy videotapes until she sold the house and left town. Gotta say I like the new owners a lot better.

I hang out with the scientist a couple nights a week, after we get some furniture in there. My wife goes swimming in their pool, but I’m not a big fan of swimming; I go to the bunker with him and we shoot the shit and drink some beers, while my wife and his wife talk about gardening and practice my wife’s very rusty Spanish. My wife learned about ten languages but isn’t fluent in any of them, although she can say “This beautiful green Earth will soon be mine!” in Japanese. Maybe she shouldn’t have learned so much of it from anime.

It’s not easy to admit to anyone that you’ve got a roach problem, let alone a new friend, but liquor lubricates a lot of conversational topics. Yeah, okay, so it’s not always beer we’re drinking. Sue me. I tell my friend about the roaches, and he tells me his company is working on this really amazing fantastic pesticide. It’s a fungus that destroys exoskeletons, and it infects bugs, and only bugs, and makes them do Cordyceps type bullshit where they crave light instead of hiding in the dark like verminous bugs usually do, so they come out where you can see them. Then you can kill them, or let the infection kill them. I’m kind of worried about zombie apocalypses but he assures me that the fungus cannot infect humans, or anything without an exoskeleton. That’s the only place the spores can grow.

That sounds awesome.

So we get some from him and we mix it with sugar and we put it down everywhere. Big rectangular squares around all the furniture. Up table legs and counter sides. All around the edges of the tables and the counters. We’re taking no chances. We pull out the dishwasher and oven and coat the bottoms and backsides of them. Normally this stuff would be scary expensive, but our pal is giving it to us for free – well, “free” meaning we’re giving him tons of ground beef from the cow we bought, plus weird organs because his wife knows how to cook them and me and my wife would have to google it, plus eggs. And my wife is helping his wife learn English, but that maybe doesn’t count because she’s helping my wife learn Spanish, so that’s a pretty even trade. We watch their kids sometimes too; we don’t have a swimming pool, but we do have practically every game machine released in the US and a couple that were Japan only, and a gigantic library of media on hard drive, most of which was legal. Well, somewhat legal. Well, a good bit of them, my wife borrowed from the library and then ripped to hard drive. The kids are not unhappy to come over our house, is my point.

By this point everyone is vaccinated and my friend’s workplace always was pretty safe because it’s a clean room, where people wear Tyvek suits over their entire bodies, and masks and goggles, long before Covid was a thing, and his wife doesn’t work and me and my wife work from home and their kids are still going to school online and mine aren’t going at all anymore. So we feel pretty comfortable sharing air even with Covid still going on. We’re seeing a lot more bugs, but my pal reminds me that that’s part of the goal of this stuff, to entice them to come out and bask in the sunlight so we can kill them more easily. His kids like to run through our house with water guns full of soapy water, shooting bugs (and each other, and my boyfriend, who plays with them). I don’t mind as long as they stay well away from the computer equipment and they clean up the water spills once they’re done. It’s free housecleaning. These kids are more helpful at keeping the place clean than my own kids have been in years.

Then we start to see clusters of the bugs stuck on the wall. It looks like spots of mold, but turns out to be mold-covered bugs sitting on the wall semi-stuck to each other. I’m allergic to mold. My friend says it’s not that kind of mold, am I allergic to mushrooms? And I point out, the spores, yes I am, because I used to grow mushrooms in my basement and they’d spray spores out every so often and my nose would run like it was training for a marathon. He’s chagrined, says he didn’t know, because yeah, of course these things are gonna come out in the sun and spray spores. Light makes them spore, that’s why the mold makes them want to go into the light.

So now I’m popping Zyrtec like it’s candy and there are more and more moldy bugs turning up. For some reason they really want to join up together, like the mold wants them to make a mold mat, so they all go stand next to each other, centipeedles and roaches and ants and fleas, all together. It’s getting flies and mosquitos and mealmoths, too; they don’t eat the sugar we mixed into the liquid suspension of spores, but if they land on the mold mat because they think it’s ordinary wall or floor, they’ll be joining it in a day or two. Spiders, too, presumably getting infected by eating infected bugs. It spreads outside because the house is porous and the bugs can go in and out; there’s a giant ant colony burrowed into the dirt walls of the tunnels I made a few years back, and those guys are coming up out of the dirt and making giant mold mats of ants on the sidewalk and in the grass. It’s pretty gross. My friend begs me not to tell anyone who asks about the product I used; apparently it was experimental and he could lose his job for giving it to me. Well, thanks, buddy, wish you’d warned me! He assures me this never happened in the lab. I’ll bet they didn’t have nearly so many bugs in the lab, and they were probably in terrariums or something where there just weren’t all that many bugs per habitat.

At the point where the outdoor walls start getting covered with mold mats made of ants and earwigs and the fleas that lurk in the grass waiting for unsuspecting cats to walk by, the city gets on my ass. Apparently my walls are covered with mold and I need to clean them off, it’s unsanitary and releasing spores. “You think?” I say with my red, teary eyes and in between violent sneezes as I fish for more Kleenex in my pocket. I cannot actually get anywhere near the mold mats, not without a full on respirator. We have N95 masks and safety goggles, but I try those things and a. the safety goggles immediately fog up so I can’t see and b. it doesn’t help, the spores are getting into the safety goggles and getting into my eyes anyway.

My wife, my boyfriend and the friend-who-got-me-into-this-mess step in to help out. They’re spraying the mold mats with bleach, which would kill the bugs even if the mold hadn’t killed them yet, and scraping them off the walls with shovels and brooms. The ones they find in the yard, they dig underneath and cover them with dirt, then copper fungicide because, unlike bleach, that won’t kill plants that try to grow in the dirt. My friend has some more weird chemicals he thinks might help, but frankly I’m done; I got centipeedles to kill the roaches and then I got this stuff to kill the centipeedles and the roaches and it’s just made matters worse. Everyone in the world is allergic to roaches but not nearly as badly as I am to this mold. I’ve graduated to Benadryl, and bourbon, which does nothing about the allergies except to help me sleep through them. My wife says I’m not supposed to drink while taking Benadryl but I ask you, how do you look at your walls covered with mats of dead bugs that are growing mold and not drink?

The ants apparently go everywhere. Other neighbors are ending up with mold mats on their lawn. This is getting out of hand. I joke about setting the neighborhood on fire, but my wife reminds me that setting mold on fire just spreads spores.

So that gives me an idea.

We’ve got this water main that’s been broken for, oh, ten years now. The city keeps coming out to fix it and it just doesn’t fix. First it was up the street, pouring water down our street for years, winter and summer, which meant the road would turn into a slick sheet of ice every winter. Then they fixed it so that now it forms a pond in the median right outside my house. Maybe eventually they’d have stoppered that up too, but they left a backhoe on the median and somebody stole it. Not me or my family, for once; we checked the cameras but they weren’t pointing at the backhoe so we never figured out who did it. Anyway, mold likes damp, but things that like damp don’t necessarily like serious amounts of water, right?

My friend and I hook up pipes to the broken water main, and connect them to hoses, and connect the hoses to pumps, and pull all the water up the street to some of the neighbors behind my house who paved their back yards. We empty out the furniture from the underground room and clean out our respective basements, first, and park the cars up the street on the hill above all this. Then we let the water go.

This floods the neighborhood.

Yes. Again.

Everything below the level of where we’re pumping the water main to gets flooded. Yards and basements fill with water and wash down the hill to the river, which is really more of a cranky little creek most of the time, and the river washes it all down to the bay, where it should be diluted to the point where it won’t hurt the crabs. My friend assures me that this mold was bio-engineered to not be good at handling a lot of water. It can drown, too, even its spores. If they’re floating in water and they encounter a crab, they won’t be able to germinate on its shell. This is very important because around here we love our crabs. Of course, all this disturbed some local ghosts – ghosts don’t like flooding – but honestly I feel like it’s just negligence if you still have ghosts. We had all those floods a decade ago, like the one my car floated off in, so everyone should have known by now that there are ghosts in the area and they don’t like floods, so get them exorcised pre-emptively. It’s kind of like not having fire extinguishers in your house, if you don’t get the exorcism done.

We go around to any of our neighbors with a mold mat on the walls, and spray it off with a power washer. So far thankfully none of them have ended up with mold mats inside their houses, which just goes to show you how much the gods hate my house. We do not admit that any of this is our fault, just being good neighbors and helping out, but unfortunately my neighbors know me too well.

So this is great. Our animals are free of fleas, there’s no flies or mosquitos around for once in our lives, the mealmoths and the roaches and the centipeedles are gone, there’s no ants. And this is true all over the neighborhood. The bees seem to be fine; bees seemed to know not to land on the mold mats, and we didn’t poison with sugared fungus outside, so there was nothing to attract them to the fungus. Wasps, unfortunately, are fine too, but fuck it, they’re pollinators and I have fruit trees so I guess that’s okay. So this all ought to be great, right? Everybody happy, the whole neighborhood free of bug pests?

The city is now fining me out the ass for “stealing water”, even though come on, it’s bubbling up from the broken water mains so much it made a mosquito-growing pond, and I’m the one who got rid of the mosquitoes. (For the larvae in the pond, we just used mosquito dunks, plus our stunt temporarily drained the pond.) My neighbors are suing me for various things, including pain and suffering, water damage to their yards, riling up ghosts, and the death of so many poor innocent little buggies. (Are you kidding me? There are people around here actively mourning the deaths of flies and roaches. What the hell is wrong with people?)

And that is why I have posted this GoFundMe. Because I got rid of an entire neighborhood’s worth of bugs, at least for this year – no illusions about them coming back next year now that we’ve washed away all the spores – and people are suing me for it. And I’m not willing to throw my chemist friend under the bus legally, since he could lose his job, so the defense “this guy told me it was okay” is not gonna help. And everyone who wanted to get into the cloud when Covid hit already has by now, so business is not exactly booming anymore. Anybody want to help a guy out?

#52 project #comedy #surreal #magical realism #I actually have no idea how to describe this genre

[phantomchick]

In Other Waters

Okay game rec time, I’m awfully late here as this one came out 2 years ago but I only just started it this year/finished my playthrough of it today. But regardless, In Other Waters is that golden indie game accidentally stumbled upon, that the entire indie game industry aims to be for people, I found this by accident and the quality of the game and the sheer emotional heft to the plot was so surprising and such a treat, it’s really really clear that this game was a labour of love by the developers.

I’ll try to keep this spoiler free, what is the game’s whole deal: You wake up on an alien planet with a strange woman talking to you, only to realise you’re the ai in her dive suit, but despite this dramatic premise the entire game is like a relaxing fantasy of being a marine biologist,personally I inched my way through the game collecting bits and pieces of animals and plants here and there whenever I was in the mood to play it, and I’m really glad I did because I feel like my appreciation of the story was fuller for not rushing it.

Ellery, the lady you’re helping navigate the waters of planet Gliese 677Cc, is here because her former coworker and ex lady love Minae (They’re are many benefits to being a xeno-marine biologist) sent for her and then when she arrived on the completely isolated planet was nowhere to be found and the dive suit she’s in has an AI not designed for  so it take three clicks to move in any direction, (her priority is still Minae tho, whipped lol). She’s a very sympathetic character and you can really feel her wonder at all the life around you, her notes on the creatures you help her documents really bring the world to life, which is necessary as because you’re just a confused computer AI you can only see the vivid world she’s exploring vicariously through the notes she takes. Good thing she’s competent at her job. The gradual growth of your bond with her as her sole confidant in this vast world is really well articulated too.

The game can be frustrating at times when you’re looking for specific samples in areas you’ve been over more than once,  but that was rare for me and kind of added to the realism of the whole thing, when I got really stuck I looked up a playthrough of the part I was at and then I was rolling again. I mostly ran into difficulty because I prioritised foraging over the plot a little too much and there are areas you can’t access even if they’re within areas you’ve already found, until you do certain story beats.

This game was honestly so chill and so fun. I especially love the ending, spoiler alert until the end of this paragraph: the complete acceptance of the damage humans have done at the end, I like that the unforgiveable crime humans have committed isn’t deflected as not Ellery’s fault for not being involved, she’s a human and she accepts responsibility at the same time as hoping death isn’t the only thing that humans will bring to this planet. - and the quiet resolve to do better, be better, and reach out in the hope that the relationship between humans and nature, humans and the artificers can change and heal really harmonised with the overall tone of the game. Ellery’s work ethic in regards to that goal, made me really happy and the refusal to act like Gliese 677Cc was only hers to decide the fate of really hammered home the evil of Baikal and the difference between them, woohoo science for science’ sake.

Anyway, in conclusion.

If you’re looking for a solid game to test the waters with. In Other Waters really hit it out of the park for me.

#In other waters #steam #in other waters game #dr ellery #game rec

[just-a-cup-of-anxietea]

I posted 2,173 times in 2022

83 posts created (4%)

2,090 posts reblogged (96%)

Blogs I reblogged the most:

@unashamedly-enthusiastic

@thegreenpea

@princessasmosprincess

@daydreaming-optimist

@nettlewildfairy

I tagged 1,468 of my posts in 2022

Only 32% of my posts had no tags

#animals - 98 posts

#mutuals - 85 posts

#friends - 77 posts

#there are many benefits to being a marine biologist - 46 posts

#uquiz - 46 posts

#asks - 39 posts

#grace speaks - 38 posts

#answered - 34 posts

#posts i show my mom - 30 posts

#best posts - 29 posts

Longest Tag: 138 characters

#the narrative being it being ‘you’re not pretty enough to wear no makeup. you need to wear makeup to look like a passable human person <;3’

My Top Posts in 2022:

#5

No but do you think that Percy Jackson who is canonically studying marine science would take a marine mammals course and just like,, make stuff up? Prof would call him out on his nonsense and Percy would be like, no it really does happen I can show you. And then he’d take the prof to a random spot where he’s already conversed with the local wildlife to perform as suggested in his paper that his teacher admonished him for. I just like to think that Percy would make the most of his marine degree by being maximally chaotic about his abilities.

13 notes - Posted November 18, 2022

#4

13 notes - Posted March 17, 2022

#3

I love meeting people and having those moments of “no shut up no WAY you like this incredibly niche thing too????” And then asking one million incredibly niche questions about the incredibly niche thing

16 notes - Posted November 12, 2022

#2

Thanks for the tag @the---hermit ! 💕

Nickname: tbh i don't really have one? Some friends call me b. Just the letter b. (Short for Bea.) Others call me Emma or Sara bc for some reason people seem to mistake me for those names fairly frequently. Like a weird amount. Neither of those even slightly resemble Grace, but i guess they still count as nicknames?

Sign: Cancer

Height: somewhere around 5'7? 5'8?

Last thing I googled: EDC removal biodegradation

Song stuck in my head: Fired My Therapist by Madelline

No. of followers: on this account it's a pleasant 198!! Love you guys! 💕💕

Amount of sleep: 2 hrs. Help. Akjxkajska

Lucky number: 3, 7, 11, 12

Dream job: probably like a museum or hotel guest services specialist. Working with people directly to teach them about local wildlife and natural history while also still having highly variable days that allow me to work within a WIDE skill set. I think I'd also really like consulting as a sustainable design specialist! Or being a professor! Or scientific diving! Or-!

Wearing: Very comfy teal-ish pajama pants + yellow shirt + pinkish peach sweatshirt

Movies/books that summarize you: BOOKS: The Martian by Andy Weir, The Library of Babel by Jorge Luis Borges, The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan, Instant Karma AND Cress by Marissa Meyer, Journey to the Center of The Earth by Jules Verne, Island of the Blue Dolphins by Scott O'Dell, Brain on Fire by Susannah Cahalan, Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. MOVIES: Princess Bride, Moana, Finding Nemo, Frozen, The Sound of Music

Favorite song: Take the Weight by Kristin Stokes and Rob Rokicki. (Subject to change in the next 30-1300 seconds)

Aesthetic: morning light shining through crystals in windows and casting rainbows all around a room. Water splashing up and sparkling in the light during an early morning paddle out to a quiet surfing spot. overgrown jungle trails teeming with unusual life. Paint stains on old t-shirts and paintbrushes tucked into perpetually wild hair. Well-worn field guides, pocket-sized sketch pads, multi tools long since broken in, creased maps covered in scrawled writing, and pages and pages of notes (with exclamation points aplenty) on how to read the land, sea, and sky. Stacks of books lovingly arranged and filled with homemade book marks (paint swatches with doodles inked on). Dream destinations tacked up on the wall. Musical instruments and songbooks in every corner. Whiteboards with doodles and architectural sketch ideas with arrows pointing to hastily written acronyms and questions. Laptop with one million tabs open. Leg always bouncing, eyes always starry, shoes always tied tightly ready for the next adventure. Always humming. Faint smell of green tea and vanilla.

Favorite authors: Marissa Meyer, Rick Riordan, Neal Shusterman, Rachel Carson

Favorite animal noise: when my dog gets really excited she does this lil grunting thing that sounds a bit like a contented Berkshire pig. She's so weird i love her so much.

Random: I have a long term goal of watching all the Disney movies in the primary language of the country in which they’re set, so I’m trying to learn like All The Languages. It’s a lot but it’s FUN. The University of Hawaii at Manoa sent me a copy of Moana in Hawaiian like a year ago and I’m STILL freaking out about it ITS SO COO L.

No pressure tagging: @daydreaming-optimist @contre-qui @seasoftea @sttchingllies @oceanok @willowstea @thiscolorfulmess @suckstobehuman @whats-in-a-username @silhouette-of-sarah @humble-boness @earlymoderngothic @cheshire-castle-library @noa-the-physicist @backtomycorner @permanentreverie @notetaeker and anyone else who wants to join in!

16 notes - Posted November 4, 2022

My #1 post of 2022

Picrew Chain

Make a picrew that looks like your interpretation/imagination of the person you've reblogged from!

@contre-qui and I both loved this picrew by Grgikau.

(No pressure) tagging @contre-qui (hi Mari!). We're going to reblog with our mental images of each other so you guys can get an idea of how this works!

70 notes - Posted April 20, 2022

Get your Tumblr 2022 Year in Review →

#tumblr2022 #year in review #my 2022 tumblr year in review #your tumblr year in review #love that my longest tag is in fact a tag with a typo

[meowizard]

consider this ask ur free pass to ramble ab something!!

OHHH GOSH its like- okay well its midday here but I've just woken up and the only thing i can think of in clarity is ocs so

so i made caviar a wife. sjksjdksdj i'm gonna try speedrun finishing her ref in a little nit bc talking abt her is gonna make me SO motivated again but ANYWAY she's a lighthouse keeper in the creme republic

(because i fucking love lighthouses i love them. it's becoming increasingly obvious i want to be a lighthouse keeper, or some kind of marine biologist- i hear there are a lot of benefits. the sea cookies never really appealed to me but i love how the fandom took one look and said. yeah. one big family. so i'm adding another one to the mix.)

she's based off rock, which i reckoned was cute because it's a traditional sorta seaside sweet, plus it has the stripes and is very, yknow, strong.. i its fitting

and then i was like...,. oh yeah, this decor exists. but that's okay because the lower city has a harbour too, and i can imagine they're not disciples of the divines, so they have a normal lighthouse. plus that titchy goddamp lightbulb aint doing anyone favours.

since rock isn't a sweet pastry or salty, she's an immigrant to the republic. she's a lady, in that she welcomes visitors with coffee and cakes even though she hates company. i also made the bottom floor home of the lighthouse look look look

there're myths about her being a ghost, she's so elusive and basically nocturnal. she's friends with sea fairy, and gives offerings to black pearl to stop her from attacking the republic, even though she's seen her only once.

she's married to caviar in the way they had a six-ish month relationship and now they hardly talk. he's with her whenever he's on land, but. it's complicated but healthy, let's put it that way.

game wise she's a super epic (because she deserves to be hashtag special), her gacha quote is "it's getting dark... time to get to work." and her role is defence.

here's a wip playlist i made 4 her :3c

#THANK YOU INDULGING ME TY SOO MUCH #but waaaaaa i feel like im so incomprehensible when it comes to this stuff #i'll make content for her at some point :P #ask tag #oc tag #rock candy tag

[blitzturtles]

Title: Goldie

Rating: Teen and Up

Fandom: JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stardust Crusaders (Future Fic)

Pairing(s): JotaKak

Summary: “I was going to replace him if that ever happened. Shit.”

“You-- what?”

“Well, I didn’t actually expect it to happen,” Jotaro pointed out. He carefully removes his hands from Kakyoin’s midsection and hesitates a moment before moving away entirely. He makes his way over to the aquarium and winces.

Notes: Vent fic after losing one of our dogs this weekend. Fic features minor animal death, so please be careful.

-

“Goldie isn’t moving!” Jolyne announces from the doorway of the kitchen while Kakyoin is busy brewing coffee. It’s early, too early for Kakyoin to be awake, and certainly too early for Jolyne to be having a crisis, but Kakyoin nods as he allows himself to be dragged along. Surely Goldie is merely sleeping. Too still for an energetic child like Jolyne. Only he sees it the moment he rounds the corner. Where Goldie is indeed unmoving. Worse, Goldie is on his back, floating rather than swimming.

“Oh,” Kakyoin breathes before he can stop himself, and Jolyne must see it in his eyes because she breaks into a loud sob that strikes Kakyoin to the core, where panic is already building. In all the time he’s spent desperately consuming books on parenting--an attempt on his part to catch up on missed time--none of those books had ever once mentioned how to deal with a child’s first death. Much less one that surrounds their beloved pet fish.

“He’s dead!” Jolyne all but wails, and Kakyoin can’t exactly argue with that, though he wishes he could think of something to say.

“Jolyne--” He starts, and it’s a very strong start if he does say so himself. His voice is relatively steady, and he gets her attention focused on him rather than on the upside down fish. But then he falters at seeing her eyes filled with tears and tracks already down her cheeks. There’s a thickness in his own throat now. One that makes swallowing difficult, but he does his best to clear his throat, so he can make another attempt. “Goldie might be asleep. We just--” He cuts himself off with a near howl as her little foot stomps no less than three of his toes.

“He’s dead!” Jolyne shouts it this time. More anger now than overwhelming grief, though her eyes shine in the reflection of the aquarium’s light.

Kakyoin opens his mouth to say something, but she’s really got the unfortunate aim of her father. What would be nothing to anyone else is a shot of pain up frayed nerves, and it travels from the tips of his toes to the base of his spine so quickly that it nearly drops him to his knees. He tries again to speak, but she’s gone in a blink. Off around the corner and disappearing passed the doorway of her bedroom before he can form a single word. Jotaro’s sliding to a halt outside of their bedroom door at the same time, apparently jolted awake after all the ruckus.

“What the fuck?” Jotaro asks, making his way to Kakyoin quickly. He rests one hand on his stomach, for Kakyoin to lean into, and the other on the small of his back, ready to catch his husband should his knees buckle entirely.

“Goldie,” Kakyoin says, waving a hand vaguely toward the offending animal.

Jotaro looks confused at first, but he’s perceptive enough to at least look in the aquarium’s direction when he hears the name of Jolyne’s beloved pet fish. “Oh shit,” he breathes, and oh shit, indeed, Kakyoin thinks. “I was going to replace him if that ever happened. Shit.”

“You-- what?” Kakyoin demands, breathless still and utterly in disbelief.

“Well, I didn’t actually expect it to happen,” Jotaro pointed out. He carefully removes his hands from Kakyoin’s midsection and hesitates a moment before moving away entirely. He makes his way over to the aquarium and winces. “He’s not that old. I wonder-- anyway. I was just going to replace him. She’s too young to deal with this shit.”

“You can’t just lie to her about death,” or maybe he can. Kakyoin’s the step-parent here, and, again, none of the books said anything about how to deal with a definitely dead fish (even the Marine Biologist agrees with his initial assessment, which means there’s no getting out of this.)

“She’s six, Nori,” Jotaro scrubs a hand over his face. Then both. His fingers rake through his hair after that, and he pulls at the ends. All of it is an attempt to clear the last of sleep from his mind and allow his brain to think past the fog. None of it works.

“I know,” Kakyoin sighs. He doesn’t like this either. He remembers his own childhood and growing up relatively sheltered from at least that one aspect of the brutality that is life. “What do we do now?”

“I have no idea,” Jotaro admits after a moment, and that makes Kakyoin slump. Both in defeat and in relief. At least he isn’t alone in this. There’s no chapter he skipped over or paragraph that he skimmed. Neither one of them knows what to do, and suddenly that’s worse than the idea that Kakyoin’s gone and fucked all of this up on his own. If neither one of them knows what to do, then they’re both screwed.

“We should talk to her?” Kakyoin offers, more questioning than suggesting.

Jotaro nods after a moment. “Yeah, yeah, I guess so. Did she--”

“It’s not a big deal,” Kakyoin says quickly, waving a hand in Jotaro’s direction and dismissing the question before it can be asked. Jolyne’s upset. Overwhelmed and struggling to process her grief. It doesn’t totally excuse the behavior, but Kakyoin doesn’t think she meant to actually stomp on him so much as whatever happened to be in her way. It’s not ideal, but it’s better than the malicious alternative.

“Still,” Jotaro says after a moment, like he isn’t sure that he should be getting onto her, despite his own words. “I guess we should address the fish thing first.”

“Fish thing first,” Kakyoin agrees.

Jotaro makes his way to Jolyne’s bedroom. The door’s wide open, and there’s a distinctly child-shaped pile in the middle of the bed, hidden under a mountain of blankets and pillows. The effort would be more effective if not for the obvious trembling and the equally distinct sobs. His heart aches in his chest, and he sincerely regrets letting Kakyoin get up before him. If he had only caught sight of the damned fish before Jolyne…

“JoJo,” Jotaro calls in a soft voice. It’s enough for her to stop moving, but not enough for her to poke her head out. If anything, it’s almost like she’s trying even harder to hide from him, despite clearly being spotted. “Jo, we need to talk.”

“I’m sorry,” Jolyne says immediately. She scoots sideways, closer to the wall and further from Jotaro, but the man is quick to grab her before she makes contact with her skull. She lets out a startled yelp and instantly pops her head out from under the blankets on instinct. It all but breaks Jotaro’s heart to see the tears and snot smeared across her face, and her hair is somehow more of a mess than it usually is in the morning.

“It’s okay,” Jotaro starts before pausing and rethinking his words, “Well, it’s not, but we’ll talk about that later, alright? You’re already forgiven.” He won’t let that hang over her head. Not when she’s already in her own little hell. Struggling to deal with the loss of her favorite fish. Jolyne loves all the fish in the aquarium. Has given them all names, but Goldie is--was--her’s. Picked by her hand and bought with her own money.

Carefully, Jotaro pulls his daughter into his lap. He fixes the blankets so that they remain bundled around her. She’s like Noriaki in that she likes the constricting sensation of something being wrapped around her. Something about the weight of it seems to soothe their nerves. Jotaro’s never been one to question it. With Noriaki, it just makes sense. What with his Stand. For Jolyne, he figures it’s related to her age.

“I know this is a lot for you to deal with right now,” Jotaro says, barely refraining from wincing at his own words. He sounds too impersonal, but she’s quiet against him, aside from the sniffling and hiccups, which means she’s at least listening.

The rest of the conversation goes about as well as he expects. There’s a lot more tears and snot--most of which ends up on his nightshirt. Then there’s the questions. Plentiful as per usual with his daughter, but also painful in a way that he hadn’t been prepared for upon waking up. Then, of course, there’s the guilt of her taking her anger out on Noriaki. (“I really didn’t mean to,” she swears, and Jotaro reminds her that it’s her duty to explain that to Kakyoin herself.)

Overall, Jotaro thinks it’s not his worst moment as a parent. (That honor still goes to the day he explained that he and Marina would no longer be living together.)

They decide to go find Noriaki together, and they make it as far as the fish tank before Jolyne bursts into another round of tears and turns toward Jotaro with her arms raised. He doesn’t think twice about scooping her up and carrying her past the aquarium. Her head buries against his neck, and there’s a fresh wetness that makes his heart ache duly in his chest. Maybe replacing the fish would have been as much for his benefit as it would have been for her’s.

“Oh, JoJo,” Kakyoin says with a voice that sounds like he’s hurting for her as much as Jotaro.

Jolyne reaches out for him without fully letting go of Jotaro. She knows better than to put too much weight on Kakyoin, but the three stay like that for a while. With the two men pressed close and their daughter held between them.

#jolyne kujo #jotaro kujo #noriaki kakyoin #jotakak #kakyoin noriaki #jolyne cujoh #kid jolyne #blitzwrites #jjba #jjba part 3 #future fic #stardust crusaders #blitz

[thosewickedlovelies]

we could be Dreamers - Prologue

Pairing: Marcus Moreno x GN!Reader

Rating: T

Summary: How this world came to be

Word count: 1,671

A/N: Hiii friends 🤗 soo there’s not really a lot of plot or Marcus Moreno :( here, but consider this a prologue/worldbuilding for a Marcus Moreno x reader fic I may eventually write lol. I’m really interested in how this universe got from The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl to We Can Be Heroes, because like. Sharkboy and Lavagirl were literally just some kid’s imaginary friends that somehow magically became real, so what does that mean for the other Heroics? Where did they come from?? So I kinda wanted to write something that would make you Think :) and explore the ramifications of such a transformed universe.

Consider my previous Marcus Moreno fic a prelude to this prologue 💗

--

It was a little unnerving sometimes, being in a room with so much power. No matter that this particular training arena at Heroics Headquarters was at least the size of an American football field- when all of the Heroics are gathered in the same confined space, focused on a single purpose, you can feel it. Like their power prances tauntingly in the corner of your eye, slipping away when you try to look directly at it. Like it winds through the air, worming its way into your veins, so your very blood breathes at you to run, run, run.

Not all of the individual Heroics gave off such uncanny vibes; some were simply ordinary people with extraordinary abilities. Techo-No, for instance, and his gift for creating fantastical gadgets. The implications of his works relevant to the world at large could be worrying, but he had limits. He was just a man. Determined, and creative (even more so with his son throwing ideas at him), but ultimately human.

Not like those with powers who’d been Dreamed.

Take Sharkboy. The temper for which he’d been infamous in his youth had cooled, but when he snapped, he did so literally- blade-sharp teeth an audible clash when he bared them in a ringing snarl. Any water in the room would roil and froth- but the most hair-raising sight was his eyes, tinged with the unreadable, abyssal blackness of his namesake. Focused with a predator’s calculation on the object of his fury. (It made you think that, ironically, his temper had cooled too much- concentrated into something as icy and merciless as the depths of the sea. Just as well his wife was a lava goddess).

It was well-documented that Sharkboy could influence his oceanic kin, seeing as he was half-shark himself. Some marine biologists postulated- in low voices- that fluctuation in his emotions could unknowingly influence shark activity no matter how far from the sea he was. But nobody at Heroics Headquarters had ever dared suggest attempting a study.

That you knew of, anyway. You wouldn’t be surprised if there was a classified government branch somewhere which dealt solely with more insidious studies of the Heroics. Their weaknesses. Ways to defeat them.

Just in case.

Sharkboy and his emotions had stabilized as his Dreamer matured, but not all Dreamers were so invested in the well-being of their creations, or of the world they inhabited and could inadvertently affect. It was suspected that not all Dreamers knew that they had Dreamed at all, that they unintentionally brought Dreams into being far from where they were located and simply never became aware. This resulted in some Dreamed individuals being...unstable. Incomplete, really. Brought forth from a child’s mind, a young person who didn’t yet fully grasp the complexities of existing in this world, or indeed, the intricacies of what made one human at all.

Dreamers were children, more often than not. Their imaginative abilities generally far outstripped those of adults, worn down as they were with the grind of building a real life. The younger the person, the more time and creativity they maintained. The fewer methods they possessed to process their struggles which were grounded in reality, and not their imaginations.

--

Despite the years that have passed, nobody quite knows what happened to lead up to the Incident. How a single young boy had imagined so powerfully that it had warped reality; how his imaginings had given him the ability to design the universe at will.

The Daydreamer.

Max, as he later insisted on being called. An almost disturbingly innocuous name for a boy who had changed the world. Who had all but envisioned himself into having terrific powers- and enabled others to do the same.

In the years following the Incident, Sharkboy and Lavagirl continued to visit him in secret (Later, scientists realized that this why they recorded occasional, inexplicable disturbances in seismic and marine activity). But it wasn’t long before a larger threat to the entire Earth appeared- and so did they. To defend the place which they declared to be their new home. Though they had been willed into existence to protect Planet Drool, as Max determined to relinquish his daydreaming abilities and by extension, his dreamworld, so did the planet and its life diminish. Their presence there was no longer required, they’d explained. But earth could still benefit from their protection- especially after the reality of the threat came to light.

Someone else had Dreamed.

It wasn’t clear who, or how, or what their intentions had been. But once it had been said, everyone was forced to acknowledge the truth of it- or at least, admit that there was no other explanation. The villain’s origins were not terrestrial in any previously established sense.

Anyone who had ever met a child could have a predicted it. Too many young people ended up feeling outcast, overlooked, by both their peers and adults in their lives. It should have been obvious from the way they whispered his name. Not Max- a moniker far too average and relatable- but what they reverently regarded as his true title. The Daydreamer. A near-holy figure who had changed the game for youths everywhere. Now they had a way to combat those who plagued them. A way to create or become the superheroes who previously only existed in comic books and TV shows.

Or some did, anyway. Individuals with the strength of will and heart to Dream weren’t rare, but they weren’t quite common, either.

The only truly neutral positive of the Dreamer evolution was that governments everywhere suddenly accepted the need for increased mental health resources. Designed to increase healthy socialization for all ages and give young people ways to process and communicate their emotional needs, such programs were approved seemingly overnight in schools from elementary to university aged. “Small town life” flourished, and many city quarters and apartment buildings took to implementing “community builders” or, less charmingly, “social facilitators”- positions designed to create cohesive areas of living and minimize the kind of isolation and negative feelings that could leave someone to Dream of improving their life.

--

Nowadays, not all super-powered individuals were Dreamed. The second generation of Heroics was a testament to that. As if the universe itself had reckoned with the self-inception of the Dreamers, and seen fit to provide reality-warping countermeasures of its own.

Less than a year after the Incident, babies with...unique qualities began to be born. Few and far between, it seemed at first. Whispered reports swept from far corners of the globe, a phone tree branching from frantic parents to anyone who could provide even the slightest bit of reassurance. It seemed like doctors everywhere were swapping glances, no one willing to admit what was happening- until a second Villain appeared.

Every incident report said the same thing: a baby started crying, and then the hostages were saved by a power outage. A wash of sparks that darkened half the city.

Webbed with red lightning.

You sneak a look at the fully grown Heroic now, the long braids of her ponytail slipping over the shoulder of her characteristic red training outfit. Red Lightning Fury flexes her fingers as she listens to the head trainer explain today’s exercise- the usual sort of ‘heroes versus villains’ battles, with you and your fellow specialists assisting as villains- but judging by the lack of the smell of ozone, she isn’t yet using her powers. Blinding Fast, on the other hand, appears to fritz in place every few seconds, and you guess he’s running invisible laps to pass the time. It’s hard to tell if that’s what’s causing Lavagirl’s hair to tendril like neon pink smoke even though she’s standing still; usually the hypnotic heat shimmer of her lava flow causes the effect naturally.

You stretch in place while team arrangements are announced. As the majority of the Heroics filter into the stands to wait for their match, the buzzing, writhing presence of their power fades, and you can breathe more easily.

A figure flickers into being beside you, and you jump. “Jeez, Visi! How many times have I told you not to do that?”

Having anticipated your reaction from the countless previous times she’s snuck up on you anyway, Invisigirl laughs. “You think you’d be used to it by now.” Your closest Heroic friend grins at you, all pearly teeth against smooth brown skin.

And she’s right, which is why you were so disgruntled. Having been caught unawares too many times by the invisible hero’s silent movements, you had once asked her to give you lessons. Her instruction had improved your own stealth immensely, and now that you knew what kind of signs to listen for, her attempts at startling you didn’t work nearly as often as they had. But- “It’s hard to focus on anything with all of your powers clogging up the air,” you grumble. The birthed heroes understood what you meant- they felt it too, the nagging hiss of something other in the Dreamed heroes’ energy.

Across the arena, it looks like Miracle Guy and Marcus Moreno are waiting to be your opponents. Interesting. Miracle Guy, with his Dreamed up Superman-like abilities, was the only one who had a way of seeing Invisigirl. What it was precisely, you couldn’t recall. You make a mental note to ask Visi later.

Marcus, however, telekinesis aside, is clearly meant to be the counter to your strengths. The two men are discussing intently, but as if feeling your assessing stare, Marcus glances over. He lifts his eyebrows at you in playful challenge, a hint of a smile quirking his shapely lips before he’s pursing them at his duel-mate again.

Suppressing the pleased flutter down your spine, you turn your attention to the task ahead as Invisigirl dips her head toward you. Planning something clever, you realize, intrigued by the glint in her eye. “Let’s talk strategy.”

When the starting bell rings, your partner vanishes, and your smile curves as sharp and gleaming as the blade in your hand.

#marcus moreno #marcus moreno fic #wcbh fic #wcbh #we can be heroes fic #we can be heroes #pedro pascal characters #marcus moreno x reader #marcus moreno x you #let me know what you think!!! #🙈🙈🙈 #and if anyone wants to help me dream up a plot for this...i have Some Thoughts

[ycras]

Hi y’all, I’m Blue & this is Yara! It’s been a hot minute since I’ve rp’d so I’m excited to be here! Feel free to hmu for plotting! 

welcome aboard, yara whitney, student #5. we are excited to set sail with you !  has anyone told you that you look like zendaya? according to our records, you hail from los angeles, united states,  prefer she/her pronouns, are a woman and are here to study marine biology. we also see you received a spot on the ss university because of your money — we won’t tell anyone. during your first few weeks here, other students said you were + charismatic, + compassionate, but also - brazen. it sounds like you spend most of your time at the game deck. upon checking your luggage, we noticed you packed a surfboard. hopefully your roommates don’t steal it!

Born & raised in LA and she was born into moneyyyy

More or less grew up on the beach–she’s always liked water from a young age and between living right near the ocean & all the yacht parties, etc. she just really took to the water

She’s super active and has always had trouble sitting still. She always really liked sports so growing up she played soccer, tennis, basketball, baseball, volleyball, boxing (only for a little while then her parents FLIPPED and made her quit b/c they were scared she’d get seriously hurt), and surfing–she absolutely loves surfing. You name it and she most likely played it at least for a little while.

 Honestly got the Cali surfer-girl vibe down pat; she’s usually pretty chill and go w/ the flow and it takes a lot to get her to pop off just because she like…doesn’t care? Like she’ll most likely just stop talking to you if you annoy her which is probably her toxic trait.

Don’t mess w/ her brother, Santos, tho ‘cause she’ll fuck you up. 

Her mom never really liked that she was so sporty, especially when it came time to go to fancy functions and she’d ripped her dress from skateboarding in it or had band-aids on her arms from playing too rough

One of her mom’s friends made an off-handed comment about how beautiful she was, her impeccable skin, bone structure, etc. when she was younger and mentioned modeling and her mom really took to that idea and started having Yara do print ads, etc for high-end brands.

Yara was annoyed by it when she was younger but as she got older she didn’t mind it quite so much because it’d get her out of schoolwork sometimes and it got her mom to stop nagging her so much. She started to realize that if she could do this and show up looking presentable at events to appease her parents, she could do her own thing when she wasn’t. 

That continued on into adulthood, even walking in some shows, etc. She was essentially just modeling and socialite-ing during her early adulthood until she decided to go legit recently. She kind of…got bored with what she was doing. Like there was no real excitement or challenge and it was never something she really wanted to do which is how she ended up here. 

She’d always liked animals growing up, especially marine animals and when she was little she wanted to be an animal trainer at the zoo so she decided she might as well study marine biology on the ship. She actually likes the challenge of it so far.

She likes to party but doesn’t necessarily always need to get fucked up to have a good time--she definitely had her little hedonistic phase which was exacerbated by the fact that she was modeling and put under a lot of pressure and it was what everyone else was doing but she just got tired of it. She’ll still party and drink and smoke and turn up but not all the time.

Really likes to travel (then again who doesn’t??) and has been to many countries throughout her life but it was always in a way that was pretty luxurious and grandiose--this will be different/a change of pace because they’re not staying at the nicest most expensive hotels and suites

She didn’t really have many friends until she got older b/c when she was a kid the bougie circles her family ran in thought she was a bit of a heathen tbh

Can come off as standoffish or intimidating to people but she’s usually pretty friendly and chill unless you disrespect her or do something to piss her off. 

Few Fast Facts

Certified disaster bisexual 

Is a twin - her and her brother santos are twins

Speaks several different languages including being fluent in Spanish, French, Swahili, and Mandarin. She also has some level of proficiency/knows at least basic Italian, Korean, and Portuguese

She’s a vegetarian/on the verge of vegan but can’t give up cheese & eggs

Adventurous and thrill-seeker--loves roller-coasters and all that

Still pretty spoiled in a lot of ways i.e. has never done laundry a day in her life and never plans to

9/10 not wearing a bra 

Really likes dolphins--wants to specialize in them as a marine biologist

Still working on an official connections page but some connections of top i’d really like are: 

best friend trio - these two are her best friends, be it that they’ve known one another for a while or they became fast friends on the ship and they most likely get into shit together

study buddy/major classmate - someone else who’s study marine science or something similar to her. maybe they don’t like one another but grudgingly have to admit they both have talent/skil or maybe they bond over their shared interest and end up working on different projects or research together

romance - smthn romantic (very detailed, ik). but could be enemies to lovers, exes that had to break up for w/e reason but never stopped carrying about one another, maybe they’re friends w/ benefits but secretly like one another, maybe it’s old fashioned enemies to lovers or friends to lovers, i’m open to w/e! 

Pretty much anything! i’m dtp, if ya know what I mean ;) (down to plot)

#seasintro

[wristcheckstore]

Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 “Save the Ocean” Special Edition One of the Most Requested Seiko Watch at WristCheck.Store

o many Customers can't be wrong Right why is the diving watch so popular? I took a closer look at it for you and found out some amazing things.

About WristCheck.Store

The Internet portal WristCheck.Store is specialized in the online sales of watches of considerable manufacturers such as Gucci, Emporio Armani, Oris, Tissot, Hamilton, or Seiko.

Buying a luxury watch is a moment to cherish, but it shouldn’t cost you an arm and a leg.

My name is Joel. I love watches and I wanted to create a place where others could search for the best watches online for a great price. In my experience, finding the best price online takes a lot of time and effort. Many people do not have the time to shop around and miss out on the best prices.

That’s where I come in. With WristCheck, you can be sure to get a more competitive price than most web retailers and save 20% or more on your purchases. You can choose from our wide selection of watches or send us a special request via email to get you the best price. We source our watches from several vendors within the US, Europe, and Asia. This allows us to offer wholesale prices for a wide variety of luxury watches, produced with the highest quality in material and design. Because we ship from multiple warehouses, please allow for up to 4-5 working days for any items that may ship from international warehouses. In cases where the delivery is quicker, we shall send you a message to let you know.

Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 “Save the Ocean” Special Edition Review

Seiko’s Prospex with the reference number SRPF79K1 and the nickname Samurai is in many ways an exciting watch, which offers a lot at first glance and appeals to a wide target group. A well-known manufacturer, a professional diving watch with an automatic movement and an iconic design are just four of the features that Seiko’s Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 uses to captivate potential buyers. Understandably, who wouldn’t be intrigued by these features?

The Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 is all about Seiko’s “Save the Ocean” campaign, which the traditional Japanese manufacturer uses to advertise. In the spring of 2018, they entered into a partnership with ocean conservationist Fabien Cousteau.

The oceanographer is fully committed to protecting marine biodiversity. The Fabien Costeau Learning Center has been in existence since 2016. The facility is intended to become an information center for the protection of the oceans. Costeau wants to bring together marine biologists, environmentalists, divers and other experts here to educate about climate change and its consequences. As a world-renowned manufacturer of diving watches, Seiko is supporting the project. Across its product range, there are model collections in a “Save the Ocean” special edition. When you purchase one of these products, Seiko donates a portion of the proceeds to the Fabien Costeau Learning Center. That sounds worthy of support and somehow too good to be true. What’s the catch?

The first impression

From a black cardboard box with a silver Seiko inscription, I take out the Seiko watch still wrapped in protective foil. “Prospex – Save the Ocean” is written on the inside lid of the box.  The Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 is a bulky diver with a massive buckle closing the silicone strap. I twist and turn the watch. Immediately, the wave design of the dial catches the eye, revealing that this is a “Save the Ocean” model. Last year, Seiko already introduced two new Prospex models from the “Save the Ocean” series that bear the distinctive surface structure. On a blue background are manta rays that seem to float across the dial. Combined with the blue bracelet, this is a perfect match for a diver’s watch with this name.

I touch the cold surface and touch the Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 for the first time. The watch feels very valuable. Huge dashes as indices, a date magnifier, and a countdown bezel give the Seiko model its classic diver design. In terms of naming its watches, Seiko is in a class of its own. The Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 owes its nickname “Samurai” primarily to the design of the hour and minute hands. This is inspired by historical samurai swords. The watch manufacturer is proud of its roots in the country of Japan.

The Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 on the wrist

Flipping it over, I’m amazed how light the Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 is on the wrist. With a diameter of a massive 44 millimeters and a height of 13 millimeters, the diver’s watch really doesn’t have to hide. The low weight, on the other hand, is astounding. Finding matching outfits for the Seiko watch does not turn out to be a great difficulty. The sporty casual design suits many occasions. At the same time, the Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 brings a certain prestige to the wrist with its sheer size. However, you should like the size and flashiness of a watch. The timepiece does not know the word understatement. But for me, these dimensions simply belong to a diver’s watch!

The Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 in detail

The case

For the case of its Prospex Samurai in “Save the Ocean” design, Seiko put a lot of emphasis on good build quality. The solid case structure is made of stainless steel, which has both polished and brushed surfaces, depending on the component. As you can easily see on the back, the middle part is visually separated from the lugs. The dial is protected by sapphire crystal. In the manufacturing process, Seiko made it anti-reflective, which benefits the readability under water. Those who really want to use the watch on the high seas or underwater will quickly appreciate this feature. I find the date magnifier at 3 o’clock very useful and well done. Most of us will probably associate Rolex watches with it.

The crown has a size that matches the watch, which makes it easy to operate. In the first stage, it is completely covered by a crown protector. In everyday life, this improves the wearing comfort immensely. The screw-down crown also stands out due to its easy-to-grip surface structure. If you turn it now, you’ll notice the slight play that the crown has. In my experience, this is a great relief when setting the time and date. The hands never shoot forward too quickly, so you can set the time accurately.

Bezel and case back

The bezel is a diver’s bezel or countdown bezel. The tactile feel when the clicks engage is outstanding! Visually, it frames the lighter dial.

The cashback is screwed down six times. Instead of the usual date window, you’ll find the famous engraved waves on Seiko watches, reminiscent of “the great wave of Kanagawa”, a famous Japanese painting. If you search a little bit, you will also find your production number. 163 is the number of my Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K.

In its case, the Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 withstands a possible water pressure of 20 bar. 200 meters maximum diving depth would be possible. However, hardly any amateur diver will penetrate into these spheres.

The movement

For the movement, Seiko uses an automatic movement from its own production. In this case, it’s a Seiko 4R35 caliber, which is very reliable and durable. For the number freaks among you: with 23 jewels, the Seiko 4R35 has a power reserve of 41 hours. The oscillation frequency is 21600 vibrations per hour.

The Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 shows itself at its best…

…with the dial. The wave structure is something completely new, which I actually haven’t seen on a diver’s watch like this before. With the neatly printed rays, it gives the Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 a very interesting design.

And it is practical, too. That should be the focus for diving watches. The large line indices ensure perfect readability. To guarantee that even at night and in the dark, Seiko has given Samurai hands and indices a luminous function. Apart from the manufacturer’s lettering, the 200M indication, and the rectangular date window, there are no other elements on the dial. But that’s how it should be, after all – simple and straightforward.

Perfect for the water: the silicone strap of the Seiko Prospex Samurai SRP

Silicone and rubber straps have emerged as one of the best solutions for diving watches. They do not age and are easily adjustable. This is also the case with the huge specimen that my Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 is equipped with. The buckle is made of stainless steel and bears the engraved Seiko lettering. However, what I liked the most about the bracelet is its practicality. In addition, it is quite comfortable to wear.

My conclusion about the Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 – a diver’s watch for everyone.

I can understand why this Seiko diver with the reference number SRPF79K1 is so popular among customers. This Seiko Prospex in the “Save the Ocean” special edition is the diver’s watch for everyone! It looks exactly how you would imagine a diver’s watch to look: large, blue-black, with a bezel and a dial to match. On top of that, there are good materials, a high-quality finish, and stand-out features like the maritime skate design.

This already very good overall package is comparatively affordable. This makes the Seiko Prospex Samurai SRPF79K1 interesting for collectors and beginners alike.

If you have any questions or feedback, we would love to hear from you! Please contact us at [email protected] and we will be able to help you with any inquiry you have.

#Seiko watch #watches online #watch store #just watches #wristcheckstore #luxury watches online #mens designer watches #women watch #designer ladies watches #womens designer watches #mens luxury watches

[paulinedorchester]

Hodgson, Vere. Few Eggs and No Oranges: A Diary Showing How Unimportant People in London and Birmingham Lived Through the War Years 1940-1945, Written in the Notting Hill Area of London. London: Dennis Dobson, 1976. Reprint (as Few Eggs and No Oranges: The Diaries of Vere Hodgson 1940-45), with a new preface by Jenny Hartley, London: Persephone Books, 1999.

Winifred Vere Hodgson (1901-1979) was born in Edgbaston, Birmingham, into what seem to have been shabby-genteel circumstances. On the one hand, after her father’s death in 1907 her mother was obliged to run the family home as a boarding house in order to make ends meet; on the other, she was educated at King Edward VI High School for Girls before reading history at the University of Birmingham. She was a niece of Thomas Vere Hodgson, the marine biologist on the H.M.S. Discovery during its voyage of 1904-6.

After graduating, she taught for several years at – wait for it – L’Istituto Statale della Ss. Annunziata, Florence, Italy, where – wait for it again – Edda Mussolini was among her pupils, and then for several more years at schools in (apparently – I’m a bit confused about this) Folkestone and Wimbledon. Deciding on a complete change, in 1935 she answered a “positions available” advertisement placed by a philanthropic body. Thus began her career as a social welfare worker, which seems to have been deemed important enough to have kept her from conscription during the war.

The organization for which Hodgson worked, the Greater World Christian Spiritualist Association, was located at 3 Lansdowne Road – still standing, this building was referred to at that time as The Sanctuary – and served primarily the Notting Hill and Holland Park areas, both of which seem to have been pretty down-at-heel at the time. They operated a night shelter for homeless women and gave grants of money and needed goods to the poor. (The Greater World, as its staff called it, doesn’t seem to me to fit the definition of a cult, so I’ll refrain from making any value judgements; you can read more about it here and here. It is still active.)

Hodgson’s job involved a good deal of secretarial and clerical work, but she also worked directly with the association’s beneficiaries as well as making nice with its benefactors. She often spent nights at The Sanctuary, either to be present for the women sheltering there or, once the war began, to take her turn as a fire-watcher. Although in her diary she always expresses gratitude for any free time she had, the job clearly brought her a great deal of satisfaction:

Went to see one of my poor old souls today. She has been getting a bit of chair-mending to do, and was better. She dreads the winter – as last year she was compelled to beg in the streets; but now we shall help her. The dread of complete destitution is terrible.

Like Clara Milburn, another wartime diarist whose output was published in the 1970s, Hodgson wasn’t writing primarily for her own benefit. Mrs. Milburn kept her diary with an eye to creating a record of the home front for her son, Alan, an officer in the British Expeditionary Force who was taken prisoner in Belgium in 1940. Miss Hodgson initially wrote for a cousin, Lucy Hodgson, who when the war began was in England on sabbatical from her job as an education officer in what was then known – to some people, at least – as Northern Rhodesia, and returned there in the Spring of 1940 “with grave misgivings,” according to Vere Hodgson’s introduction to the book.

Hodgson began sending installments of the diary to Lucy, who returned them to her and also sent parcels of cheese, tea, and other rationed foods. At some point Vere began mailing the pages to a round-robin of friends and relations, the last of whom would then send them on to Africa. (Amazingly, only one installment went missing.) Another thing that Hodgson’s diary has in common with Milburn’s is that she didn’t actually use printed diaries, allowing her to write very long entries at times.

The diary first came to public attention when Hodgson answered another advertisement, this one from the journalist Leonard Mosely, who was looking for first-hand accounts of life in wartime London as source material for his 1971 book Backs to the Wall (which is clearly something that I need to read). He quoted her entries for September 3rd, 1939, and May 7th, 1940. This resulted in a request from the publisher Dennis Dobson that Hodgson prepare an edition of her wartime diary as a whole. According to a publisher’s note in the Persephone reprint, “This she did, cutting by about three-quarters and editing substantially.” Since the reprint runs to 590 pages, one has to wonder what the original was like!

Few Eggs and No Oranges begins on June 25th, 1940, with the announcement that “Last night at about 1 a.m. we had the first raid of the war on London.” Air raids were at the very center of Hodgson’s war. She details, blow by blow, each and every raid and alert that she experienced. Indeed, she offers so much granular information on raids – where bombs fell, how many people were killed, etc. – and other topics that British newspapers weren’t permitted to discuss in any detail that it’s a wonder that the diary was never censored on its way out of the country. (At one point she reports that the censor returned to her a letter that she’d sent to a friend in Canada, so clearly this was something that really did happen! At the same time, she records many major events of the war all over the globe, seeming to assume that Lucy won’t have heard or read about them and leaving me wondering whether Northern Rhodesia can really have been that isolated by 1939.) Her preoccupation may have had something to do with the fact that she always found herself living on a building’s topmost floor: when the war began she was renting a room in a boarding house at 56 Ladbroke Road; in October, 1941 to her great delight, she moved to a “flatlet” across the street at 79 Ladbroke Road, the process of furnishing which she recounts with relish. Among other advantages, this allowed her to shelter friends who needed it: one of her friends was bombed out three times over the course of the war. To be sure, Hodgson did develop a good deal of sang-froid: “Very blitzy indeed last night,” she remarks off-handedly on January 10th, 1941.

When bombs weren’t falling, Hodgson simply recorded everyday life, often hilariously:

Spoke my mind to the cat. It is disgraceful that all the Cats have joined some sort of Pacifist Organization. To keep a cat in these awful days of food scarcity, and then have to catch the mice yourself, is a bit thick. I explained this to our animal.

As you might guess from the book’s title, food was another of Hodgson’s central preoccupations. There seem to be two conflicting narratives about food rationing in the U.K. during and after World War II. One is that pre-war Britons were overfed on a fatty, starchy diet, and that the nation’s overall health improved as a result of rationing. The other is that rationing was not only damaging to the nation’s morale, but led to widespread borderline malnutrition. Hodgson was inclined to the latter view. She repeatedly details all of the edibles she’s having to do without (fresh fruit was a major lack), either because they’re simply unavailable or, in the case of unrationed goods, because their prices have skyrocketed. On the other hand, she takes great joy in her own and other people’s ability to make whatever food could be had go further. (She writes about her Auntie Nell’s jam-making activities with obvious pride.) And whenever she had a windfall she was happy to share it.

And about those windfalls: Hodgson gleefully records each of the “gifts” of extra food she received from retailers – which included oranges that only children were supposed to get – and items bought from roadside vendors on trips out of London. It’s really quite shocking how common fiddling the system seems to have been, and how unrepentant people were about doing it:

Went for my bacon ration and while he was cutting it had a word with the man about the Cubic Inch of Cheese. He got rid of the other customers and then whispered, ‘Wait a mo’.’ I found half a pound of cheese being thrust into my bag with great secrecy and speed!

Then going to the Dairy for my butter ration I was given four eggs and a quarter of cheese!

Despite the housing and food problems she and her friends and neighbors had, Hodgson seems to have enjoyed a lively social life throughout the war, with neighbors, co-workers, former pupils, visiting relatives, and complete strangers she encountered over lunch at the Mercury Café. She saw plays at the Mercury Theatre and wrote about them as well as the films she saw. (She seems to have had no objection to American adaptations of British literature – How Green Was My Valley was a favorite – but did complain that American films were too fast-paced for her liking.)

Hodgson’s answer to the iconic question “Is Your Journey Really Necessary?” was nearly always an emphatic “Yes!” Throughout the war she made frequent trips to Birmingham to see her mother and sister (there, too, she recounted air raids and the damage they caused); to Brede, Sussex, where two more aunts lived; and occasionally to other places in search of fresh air, quiet, and a change of pace. Although she makes note of the bad travelling conditions that she often endured, she almost always persevered.

Her politics are difficult to pin down. She idolized Winston Churchill (“The bravest of us all!”), even though his policies led to the internment of a close friend, and on weekdays she read The Daily Telegraph. But on Sundays she read The Observer and The People, and once Germany invaded the Soviet Union she became a great fan of the Russians. Hodgson was also enthusiastic about Americans: she expresses equal admiration for Roosevelt and his 1940 opponent, Wendell Wilkie, and remarked that “Really the Americans seem to give the best Postscripts,” after hearing one from Dorothy Thompson in August 1941. (She seems never to have actually met any Americans, however.)

On religion, too, she is very vague. She greatly admired the altruism and sheer energy of Winifred Moyes, the founder of the Greater World Christian Spiritualist Association, and at least in the published version of her diary she never criticizes Moyes’s Spiritualist “meetings,” but neither does she ever seem to have attended one. She appears to have been only an occasional church-goer, more often listening to broadcast services. However, she did regularly read her horoscope, as well as Edward Lyndoe’s predictions in The People, and was irritated by a Mass-Observation report that disapproved of the finding that 40% of the British public had some degree of interest in astrology.  

A couple of aspects of Few Eggs and No Oranges did make me uncomfortable. One is Hodgson’s enthusiasm for what could be called “air-raid tourism”: as soon as possible after learning where bombs had fallen during a recent raid she went to have a look at the damage, telling her readers about what she saw. This seems to have been a popular pastime, as she rarely seems to have been alone in her rubbernecking. People probably wanted to be reassured that others were worse off than they were, which is understandable but doesn’t make the behavior any less creepy.

And then there are the bits that brought me right up against the limits of my Anglophilia. On several occasions Hodgson mentions off-handedly, and for no apparent reason, that someone she encounters is Jewish: “Met Ivy [Croucher, an actress and elocution teacher; she’s the one who was made homeless three times] coming back from her lunch at the Grosvenor with her Jewish pupil.” Later, during a visit to Birmingham, she notes that she “got four [oranges] from a Jewish trader by spinning him a yarn.”

What exactly is the point? Did she enjoy inducing the produce vendor into actions that could easily have landed him in court? How did she even know that either of these people were Jewish? The distinctive dress of those now known in the U.K. as the strictly Orthodox would have been a rare sight at the time, especially away from London; and if Crompton’s pupil was eating at the Grosvenor Hotel, as is implied, then he or she can hardly have been Orthodox at all. And then there’s this:

Went to see The [Great] Dictator today. How I enjoyed it! Superb satire! For all its tomfoolery written with a profundity of serious purpose. The speeches of Hynkel, half-German, half-English, are there. People who understood German were even more convulsed than I was. ... The palace scenes, where Hynkel did not waste a moment, were all in the spirit of German thoroughness. But Mussolini in real life does not smile so much. All done by an East End Jew! [emphasis added]

One hardly knows what to say — other than “Wrong on both counts, sweetheart.”

When Persephone republishes a book, they don’t simply reprint it from the original, but set it into type anew. (Their reprint of Mollie Panter-Downes’s London War Notes 1939-1945 features a row of tiny U.S. flags at the top of each even-numbered page and a corresponding row of British flags on each odd-numbered one.) The original Few Eggs apparently included illustrations that aren’t in the reprint. All we get is a hand-drawn map of Notting Hill and Holland Park; while beautiful to look at, it’s reproduced here on such a small scale as to make it essentially useless. I’m slightly sorry that I didn’t try to find a used copy of the original publication.

Nevertheless, I enjoyed reading Few Eggs and No Oranges, and recommend it to anyone who’s looking for a (very long) first-hand account of the British home front.

#world war II #u.k. home front #first-hand accounts #diaries #a long post for sunday #the beta post editor is unable to handle a post of this length and complexity

[teenyfish]

Marine Biology Story of the Day #8

Before I start in on this one I would just like to say how all of your reblogs and likes totally make my day—thanks so much for the support!  I put a lot of effort into these so they read well! 

Okay, so as promised, this is part 2 of what it’s like to live on a working tallship.  You can check out part 1 and other information about this voyage here: post 7 and post 1  .  Today we are going to talk about what it’s like to do science on a sailing vessel. Our baby was the Robert C. Seamans, a 134 ft brigantine.

We were limited to what we could research-wise do since a sailing vessel does not have the same power as a modern vessel with an engine.  We were mainly researching plastic concentration (from trash and garbage that gets released into the ocean) in the north pacific subtropical gyre.  A gyre is basically a big ocean current, and they tend to concentrate plastic and garbage into central regions (shown below) we were studying the garbage patch off the California coast.

We did see a lot of large plastic, mostly in the form of in-tact plastic containers, buoys, or derelict fishing gear (known as ghost fishing, because this gear continues to catch and kill fish even though no one is benefiting from it).  

But, in actuality, most of the plastic found in these patches is nano or micro, basically little pieces that have broken off of larger pieces and get worn down by the wind and the waves. This also includes little pieces of fishing line (monofilament).  These pieces are often more dangerous because very small organisms (including plankton!) can swallow them, and the plastic can rip up their insides and release harmful chemicals.  

How did we sample for this micro plastic?  The same way we did plankton!  We used a net with very very fine mesh called a neuston net, which we towed along side the ship, and then we filtered the water into increasingly smaller sizes of mesh. After that, used a microscope to sort and count plastic, and to identify species within the plankton community.

We caught a lot of interesting organisms and species in these tows, including these types of zooplankton below:

Top row: Copepods and amphipods, which sort of form the bottom of the food chain out in the open ocean, Bottom left: pteropod, or a swimming snail, these guys have modified their “feet” to form wings that the flap to get around in the open ocean, Bottom right: velella velella, or by-the-wind sailors, are siphonophores (similar to jellyfish) that use their big sail to push them around the surface of the ocean.

We also caught a variety of larger organisms, including flying fish (which are a real treat to see IRL, they really do glide for hundreds of feet) and various species of squid.

We also collected water samples.  Water temperature, salinity, and dissolved oxygen are all important parameters that help us understand why certain species live where, and how climate change could impact these species habitats and ranges.  We used a hydrocast (shown below) to do this:

A hydrocast has multiple canisters that are all opened before the hydrocast is lowered down, and each cannister is programmed to snap shut at a different depth.  This way we could collect water samples at a variety of different depths, all the way down to the sea floor.  

We also sampled at night to collect deep sea plankton and fishes as they migrated up to the surface to feed (called diel vertical migration).  During the nighttime, there are less predators, so it’s more beneficial for them to come up to the surface and access the nutrients and phytoplankton on the surface.  If you want to check out some of these deep sea critters, check out my previous post! In the meantime though, to pass time, we would sometimes fish for squid. This involved shining a light down in the water to attract the squid, and then throw baited handlines down in the water—we were not often successful.

We were more successful at fishing for tuna and mahi mahi however, during the daytime. We would throw a baited line off the back of the ship while the ship was running at full sail. These fish would get fin clips for genetic studies, and would also get turned into some pretty boss cerviche, poke, and fish tacos (our stewards, or boat chefs, were AMAZING).  Don’t worry, we didn’t catch too many of these guys, but they were still pretty cool to see up close and in person.

Left, A mahi mahi, (or dolphinfish or dorodo, depending on where you come from) slowly loosing color; these fish die pretty quickly out of water, and they quickly become grey, loosing their bright blue and yellow coloration.  Right, a skipjack tuna; these are one of the smallest tuna species and are usually considered trash fish—the endangered bluefin and yellowfin tuna are like, bigger than a person.  It will blow your mind.

One last thing before we go—by the end of the trip they started letting us, the students become the chief scientist during our watches, which was an amazing learning experience, and we were bestowed the magical tutu of chief scientist-dom (made out of a torn neuston net).  

This picture of me was taken in the science lab when we officially hit 1000 nautical miles into our journey—at 3 am in the morning.  Yes, being a scientist was a 24 hour job on this trip, if you couldn’t tell from my dark circles. 

Alright, well that’s about all I have for today.  Next week I’ll reveal to you all what I do as a marine biologist currently, and while I’m no longer sailing on the pacific, I’m still doing big studies---and this time, they are all  

And as always, PLEASE don’t hesitate to ask about this research or anything else on this trip!

#marine biology #marine biologist #marine biologist story of the day #ocean science #ocean stories #tall ships #robert c seamans #seasemester #plankton #zooplankton #copepod #amphipod #pteropod #velella #flying fish #mahi mahi #dolphinfish #dorado #tuna #skipjack tuna #marine biology story of the day #plastic ocean #ghost fishing

[lisacatherwood]

Me and M.E.

The Horror

Fatigue as a word doesn’t begin to describe the horror that they casually call Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or M.E. - Myalgic Enephalo Myelitis

I was 14 in 1980 when I contracted a virus known then as glandular fever. I was seriously less than chuffed… I was an 800 meter runner. I was a member of my town swimming club, doing competitive swimming and planning to do scuba diving training (I desperately wanted to be a Marine Biologist). I played hockey and went on my bike to the athletics club on a Saturday. I had a lot to do, but I had friends who had had the illness, a cousin who had been very ill and had had a long recovery over some weeks, so we knew what to expect, and I wasn’t too worried.

I had a high fever and then a low grade fever and felt really rotten and it simply didn’t go away. It’s such a simple thing to write down but the reality was and is horrific for my family as well as for me.

I was finally diagnosed with M.E. (myalgic encephalomyelitis) when I was 22 years old. In the intervening time I had had nearly two years off school. I got O’ levels, at 16, doing two year’s work in a year but was then so poorly during my 6th form that I largely blew my ‘A’ Levels at 18. I spent some time in the metabolic unit at my local hospital as they tried to work out what was wrong, with no success. It was frightening and disappointing for me, and for my family. I was so exhausted, confused and miserable that I couldn’t even fill in the university applications never mind thinking of packing and going.

A pattern developed which has persisted until now, forty years later. I would start to rebuild my life out of the illness and then catch a bug or even just overdo it a little and be destroyed by it. The illness seems to be something to do with a defunct immune system. Some bugs, colds, flus etc. I catch and get over the same as other people, some I catch and it’s like my immunity fails. I can’t get rid of the bug and the symptoms persist for months and months. In my body it feels like the immunity starts to triumph in one part of the system, but is overwhelmed in others. Like chasing dry rot round an old house. The painful joints start to feel better and then it flares in my digestive system and I have nausea and other digestive symptoms. Or the headaches die away and I feel so physically weak, I can’t stand steadily, lift a kettle, turn a tap on, hold a pen. Not just tired, but sore and stiff and lacking control. I have had long periods of being incredibly fatigued cold and hungry. Mind numb, sluggish forgetful, time concertinas, days, weeks pass in weird disjointed forms, sometimes I can barely speak. Summer days spent in low light indoors with two duvets and a hot water bottle, the central heating on, the fire lit, still freezing cold.

Every year or two Something happens which knocks me down into bed for months, sometimes years. After the initial sickness illness the convalescence is unending. I have described it as being like the worst flu and hangover you have ever had combined and lasting for months – the problem with this description is that I don’t think it really explains it, people don’t really remember what that level of awfulness feels like. The brain has a gift for not really storing the memory of physical symptoms – pain discomfort etc. We remember as an intellectual exercise not as a visceral experience. Even if you can vaguely put together a sensation of what that might be like it doesn’t really scratch the surface. (Try thinking of what a strawberry tastes like – really imagine it, hard as you can. Now eat a strawberry. See?)

The terror of finding you can’t roll over in bed on your own, the humiliation of having to have your personal care taken care of by someone else, the days when all the radios in the world are on in your head, all light is too bright, all sound is too intense, the indignity of being questioned like a criminal in benefits offices and doctors surgeries. I think I can now write openly about all of this because I have nothing left to lose.

I think I had always tried to hide the damage the illness does particularly to my mind because I was afraid of a diagnosis of mental illness. I had an acquaintance who had the same symptoms as me when we were in our twenties, she ended up on a ward in our local mental hospital. They took her drawing materials away from her. They wouldn’t let her write. I fear this kind of thing more than anything.

I have not been idle. I have not been a scrounger. I have a tiny website design business. I work as much as I can always from home and now employ two people part time. I am a self taught artist and designer and love my work when I can do it and I do it as much as I can. Just at the moment that isn’t very much. But I live in hope.

I don’t have any children. We sat down and thought about it. It seemed that to bring a child into a house where their mother could spend long periods unable to look after them was a bad thing to do. We made the choice some years ago and given how my health has been subsequently we were right. We made an adult choice and we live with that every day. It doesn’t mean it wasn’t and isn’t painful. I say 'we' but my marriage broke up after 23 years due in no small part to the effect of my illness. When we married I was 25 and the prognosis was that the illness would lessen and in at worst 7 years it would be gone. I'd grow out of it.

I am writing now because I feel awful, my hands ache the tears of weariness and anguish are running down my face. The brain fog is ghastly and I feel so alone and isolated. My next major birthday I am 54. I have not learned to scuba dive. I didn’t become a marine biologist. In some ways it would not be over dramatic to say this illness has ruined my life. Certainly it has ruled it, changed it, made it unpredictable, difficult, at times nearly unbearable.

I saw a child on the TV the other night, recently diagnosed with ME/CFS, he is lying there, another little grey shape in a bed (we all go that way) and I saw the desperation in his mother and recognised myself and my mother. The silent scream of horror I had at seeing it all happening again was from the depths of my being.

That the scream was silent is partly because I don’t have the strength to scream and partly because I have no words. It is not just me – the English Language has not got the words.

I had a really bad flare which put me in hospital unable to walk in Oct 2018 and I’m still housebound/bedbound dealing with the consequences. Applied for disability benefit got a home visit and didn’t score a single point even after 40 years I am not believed. Too ill to fight for it and terrified about the future. My incredible Mum stepped in again to take care of me when this latest flare happened. I have no words to express my combined gratitude and shame for being this kind of endlessly needy daughter. l when, at this age I should be taking care of her.

Originally Written September 2012.

Header Artwork originally by me aged 15.

Added to in 2015 after my marriage broke up.

Updated July 2018 and again Feb 2020 for #MEAwarenesshour on Twitter every Wednesday share relevant content with the hashtag to help raise awareness.

Reposted July 2020 to send to @OxMEDiscovery

#mecfsartist #mecfswarrior #meawarenesshour #mecfs #myalgicencephalomyelitis #myalgic encephalomyelitis #MEawarenessweek #me awareness month #millionsmissing

[mroses25]

A Cup of Mindfulness

Are you aware of your well-being?

Well now’s the time to realize how important it is.

To sum up Mindfulness means to live in the moment,  being aware of feelings, surroundings, gratitude and the things you have that makes you feel ‘blessed’ and aware of how lucky you are to be in this world.

A cup of Mindfulness allows you to digest information on how to stay mindful within the busy chaotic world we’re living in 2020.

Astrologically, due to the recent Mercury retrograde which occurred on October 13th- November 13th 2020, known as the ‘bad transit’ where we energetically feel low, upset, anxious and lack of communication within our spiritual vibrations. There are ways in which we can detox our mind to make us feel relaxed towards December. Autumn season is also the time of stress, due to work, university and responsibilities we have to handle. It is important that we recognize our well-being especially being a practicing designer I feel as though there’s criticism we have to face towards our work, managing time and balancing our lifestyles. It is vital that we should prioritize our mental state too.

Practicing mindfulness can essentially keep you focused, a great boost in mood, feeling calmer, better sleeping pattern and feeling healthier. Throughout my journey of mindfulness I will now share the ways In which I’ve cared for my well-being whilst balancing work and university.  

I felt as though, having a messy room had impacted the way I was thinking and approaching work. It made me feel as though having this state of room made me rush my work instead of taking time. I learnt that once-twice a week is best to detox the atmosphere by lighting up candles and incenses that ‘uplifts’ our mood, whilst opening the windows to allow nature’s fresh air. De cluttering and using the ‘KonMarie Method’(Marie Kondo is a Japanese organizing consultant who has written books on organizing and has sold millions of copies,) technique which allows you to be mindful of the items you own. This allows you to use your inner voice to realize if you really need some of the things you own and to make space.

As a lover of tea, introducing herbal teas into my diet has significantly changed to the way I feel. Discovering chamomile, lavender, lemon balm, and passionflower tea. There are various studies which show these types of teas impacted sleep mostly. By drinking these teas for weeks this has impacted for better sleep, decreased anxiety and clearer skin which therefore has improved self-love and confidence.  

Going for daily walks has significantly helped me mindfully, I am able to endure nature and the fresh autumn breeze by being surrounded by the aesthetics of the season itself. This has benefited me as I am able to capture photos/videos, exercising and explore different parts of my area. As communicating to many creative professionals on LinkedIn some had mentioned that walking/running is one of their key essentials to supporting their well-being. 

Rain sounds have a beneficial effects on the body which leads to soothing the mind. The sound therefore does promote relaxation and can benefit for a better sleep, it concentration for work and meditation. The reason for is that we perceive them as non-threatening sounds, meaning that it blocks out noises that bothers us. This is known as our ‘white noise machine’. According to Marine Biologist Wallace J Nicolas argues that the sound itself allows our brain to wander which stimulates creativity.

Today, we don’t specifically have to wait for the rain anymore, with our phone devices and tablets  there are numbers of available applications which stimulate rain. On YouTube we have come across many different videos with hundreds of million viewers listening to relaxing sounds of nature that’ll relax them.

One way of relaxing the body is having a bath, being introduced to bath salts not only relaxes you but promotes better sleep due to the scent of Epsom which reduces stress as the neurotransmitters in our brains are boosted.

Remember that just reading about mindfulness isn’t enough. As the company Calm states that you have to “apply it in order to work, the longer you stick with it, the easier it’ll become”. This would finally be beneficial to your day-to-day lives as you’ll notice better changes on how you approach things.

 -Manisha M.

#mindfulness #mindbodysoul

[dlkardenal]

Sweet and deadly - The Hidden Badass trope

Hey there, travelers!

Today’s specimen is a controversial trope I have a love-hate relationship with. When done right, it can create wonders but when creators goof this up, oh boi… This one dooms generic shonen anime series and YA fantasy stories but has the potential to elevate basically every other trope there is-this is the hidden badass.

As the name suggests, the concept is fairly simple: take a shy, introverted and generally plain character and sprinkle on a twist where they show some secret and extremely flashy superpower that nobody knew they had to save the day. We first noticed this recurring element in Japanese cartoons where the titular badass was nearly always a teenage or even younger girl with a sunshine cupcake personality that spurred every viral male protagonist in a mile radius to protect her, just to take over the spotlight when the situation got really messy. Think about Lucy from Elfen Lied, Neliel from Bleach, or more recently Elizabeth from Seven Deadly Sins. At first, both Lory and I thought this to be an anime-only thing, but from that point on, we noticed this more and more in other works of fiction. How?

Well, there are a couple of ways creators utilize this trope, ranging from bad to amazing. The anime version sees them mostly as a plot device, a convenient in-world mechanism to solve problems when other options run out. This could happen when a hero is facing an enemy he can’t match for some reason, be it bravery, foolish boldness, or necessity. In these settings changing the story could deter either the protagonist’s character or the plot itself, so an external tool is needed to solve the situation. That doesn’t sound bad in itself, but you can mock this up really quickly. 

The easiest way to annoy your reader with this is to stick to the tried out and tested formula without changing a thing. Just recreate the sprinkle cupcake with a war machine split personality, going from harmless to merciless, and push both character traits to their comic limits. You can earn bonus audience hate-points if the hidden badass has telekinetic powers or superhuman instincts and/or speed so they can massacre a military task force. 

The second easiest way is to leave this trope hanging after the situation is resolved, assuring the readers that this was solely for convenience’s sake. If you want to avoid these yuckups, you need to integrate the badassery into your world. If a little girl suddenly goes berserk and evaporates an entire city, there will be consequences. Other characters yet unaware of this power will have opinions, their perspective will change and if they aren’t the holy paladin-type, some might even try and make use of this nuclear warhead hidden inside a tiny body. Also, please for the love of God, leave telekinesis out, it’s been done a zillion times. Be creative!

Another reason for this trope is more about the heroes than the titular hidden badass. If this trope character is particularly vulnerable before the great fuck-everything-up moment, the hero might form a sort of defensive personality towards them. You know, the knight in shining armor. Then when the badassery happens they can move on to a power couple situation now on equal footing. This way the start of their relationship is more alike to many young adult romance plots (or at least the older titles in this genre), but it can grow out of the damsel-defender setting. This can be really good if handled carefully. 

The main thing here in my opinion is the power balance and consistency. If the titular badass ridiculously outshines the hero it’s just a switch between roles (which can be a great story know that I think of it, just different from our original aim). Also, if the badassery is once-in-a-lifetime, then it falls into the same category as the previous paragraph where it’s painfully obvious it’s just a plot device.

As I mentioned, this trope can amazingly complement a lot of others like it does in many western popular media. My favorite is the coupling of the hidden badass and the outcast tropes in Freeform’s Siren. (Yay, finally!)

For those of you who missed this amazing show, Siren is set in America’s west coast in the fictional town of Bristol Cove, a tourist attraction known as the mermaid capital of the world. However, the local legends get a little too real when a mysterious young girl named Ryn appears in search of her older sister allegedly captured by the humans.

Ryn is a perfect example of how to handle the outcast-badass mix. She’s a mermaid with unnatural physical strength and mesmerizing voice magic that can fry anyone’s brain making the into a lovestruck drooling idiot. Also, because of the clever choice in casting, she looks tiny, adorable, and defenseless. So far nothing deviates too much about the trope, but the show’s brilliance is realism. Ryn as a mermaid knows jack shit about human society, and although she’s a quick study because of her more advanced brain functions, it takes a long ass time until she figures out to wear clothes, why not to kill anyone and how her siren song affects the humans around them. Without the help of marine biologist and lovestruck drooling idiot Ben, she couldn’t step outside and walk for a minute before killing someone and getting herself discovered and hunted like her sister. She is terrifying and powerful, but she needs humans to navigate her through society and eventually reach her goal. This element stays with her throughout the 4 seasons of this show (as of now). Her dissimilarity always and forever means certain benefits but handicaps as well, which creates a feeling that it’s an organic part of the show’s world and not just a plot element to sometimes cause trouble.

There are a lot of other tropes the hidden badass mixes with, like the sexy bad guy or the chosen one, but I think I rambled on for long enough for now. I hope you enjoyed it, and if you have a favorite hidden badass, feel free to share it! Also, what did you think of Siren?I’ll see you next week, stay sharp, travelers! Cheers,Dar

#trope #writing trope #writing #writerblr #wrtiteblr #book #series #siren #ryn #bookblr

[csnews]

Cambodia’s endangered river dolphins at highest population in 20 years

Stefan Lovgren - April 5, 2019

It’s 5:30 p.m., and several tourist boats linger in the middle of the Mekong River. A blood-orange sun casts a warm glow across the milky brown water, making it the ideal time to photograph the rare Irrawaddy river dolphins that congregate in deep, swirling pools. Not that these dolphins are particularly willing photo subjects, as the tourists on this day are finding out.

While marine dolphins often jump fully out of the water while swimming on a continuous path, the snub-nosed—and indisputably adorable—Irrawaddy dolphins, which grow to be up to eight feet long, will only partially breach the surface before diving back below. They may briefly pop up in one place only to reappear the next time in a random spot a few hundred feet away. The clicking of tourist cameras following each glimpse inevitably comes too late.

It’s an impressive disappearing act. Yet the most remarkable feat these dolphins have pulled off may be that they have not disappeared.

For decades, Cambodia’s Mekong River population of Irawaddy dolphins has verged on extinction. Once believed to have numbered in the thousands, the population began to plummet in the 1970s. During the violent reign of the Khmer Rouge and the years of war that followed, the dolphins were hunted for food. Indiscriminate net fishing, in which the dolphins sometimes end up as bycatch, took a further toll, and by the turn of the millennium, there were maybe fewer than 100 left.

Some conservation measures were finally implemented in the mid-2000s when the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) partnered with the Cambodian government to support law enforcement efforts combating unsustainable fishing practices, which include using poisons and dynamite. Around this time, the Cambodian government also began promoting the dolphins as a flagship species and tourist attraction. Yet it takes time to crack down on illegal activity, and in 2015, a population census showed only 80 individuals remaining.

Then, last year, came some good news. A new survey found 92 dolphins in the Mekong River, the highest number in more than 20 years. Researchers identified nine newborn calves. This year, three more have already been found. Eng Chea San, the director general of the Cambodian Fisheries Administration, says there may be a dozen or more previously unidentified dolphins living in the river.

No one is celebrating just yet, though. The dolphin population remains well below what is considered safe to ensure its future survival. A wide array of threats persists, most notably the planned construction of a new 2,600-megawatt dam in Sambor, Cambodia, which would eat into core dolphin habitat. High mortality among young dolphins also continues to mystify scientists. (Read why Southeast Asia may be building too many dams too fast.)

But, says Mark Drew, a WWF program director in Cambodia, which has spearheaded the dolphin campaign, “We may have been able to bend the curve.” The WWF’s country director Teak Seng calls it “fabulous news,” but adds that there is no time for complacency. “As threats to their survival persist, we need to redouble our efforts to protect the dolphins both for their future and that of the river and communities that live alongside it,” he says.

Ecotourism Stars

Less famous than their ocean-dwelling cousins, river dolphins are among the most endangered creatures on Earth. In 2007, the Yangtze River dolphin, or bajji, became the first mammal to go extinct in more than 50 years and the first cetacean species ever driven to extinction by human activity, according to a Royal Society study.

The Irrawaddy dolphins, which, with their bulging foreheads resemble small beluga whales, live in brackish water near coasts, river mouths, and in estuaries in southern Asia. But three freshwater subpopulations have been established in three rivers, including the Mahakam River in Indonesia, the Ayeyarwady (or Irrawaddy) River in Myanmar, and the Mekong, which originates in the Tibetan highlands and runs through six Asian countries before emptying into the South China Sea. (Read about how “electro-fishing” in Myanmar puts river dolphins at risk.)

The Mekong population, believed to be the largest of the three, occurs here in northern Cambodia. It’s an area that, like most of Cambodia, has experienced intense fishing pressure for decades. The biggest problem for the dolphins has been entanglement in gill nets, causing them to drown.

In 2012, the Cambodian government declared the entire stretch of the river a protected zone, with fishing prohibited at all times in core dolphin habitat. Today, the rules are enforced by a contingent of 32 river guards, and officials say overall dolphin mortality has gone down significantly. “It is no doubt because of the conservation efforts that we are seeing more dolphins,” says Eam Sam Un, a biodiversity and monitoring manager for the WWF. (Read more: Can the Mekong river basin be saved?)

Greater involvement from local communities has also helped, conservationists say. Revered in both Cambodia and Laos, where many people believe the animals are reincarnations of their ancestors, the Irrawaddy dolphins have become a focus of Cambodia’s burgeoning ecotourism sector, which supports the conservation work.

The attention given to the dolphins also has positive spillover benefits for other wildlife in the ecologically troubled Mekong region, says Zeb Hogan, a fish biologist at the University of Nevada in Reno, who leads a USAID research project called Wonders of the Mekong. “The dolphin is a flagship species, it’s well known in the area, highly visible and attracts national and international conservation interest and funding,” he says. “The protection of dolphins helps to protect the habitat of other wildlife in the area, including endangered turtles and large-bodied fish.”

Dolphin Catalogue

Researchers still have much to learn about the behavior and ecology of the Irrawaddy dolphins, says Lindsay Porter, a dolphin expert who traveled to Cambodia and works with the Hong Kong-based Sea Mammal Research Unit connected to the UK’s University of St. Andrews.

“We don’t really know why the dolphins congregate in these pools, some of which can be 150 feet deep,” says Porter. “It could be because of the availability of food there or possibly because there is less disturbance.”

Researchers are trying to keep track of all individuals in the population, which is no easy task. The only way to differentiate between individuals is by their small dorsal fins, which have slightly different shapes. The fact that the animals only pop up for very short moments and don’t bring their bodies out of the water make them incredibly difficult to photograph for identification purposes.

“It means you’re going to spend a lot of hours on the water,” says Porter, who is involved in a project to update the detailed catalogue of individual dolphins that officials maintain. Porter and other researchers are also planning to study the dolphins’ sophisticated use of whistling as a means of communication.

Teak, the WWF director, is optimistic about the animals’ future. “The Irrawaddy dolphin is Cambodia’s living national treasures and key indicators of the health of the Mekong River,” he says. “Their recovery is a hopeful sign for the river and the millions of people who depend on it. After years of hard work, we finally have reason to believe that these iconic dolphins can be protected against extinction.”

#news #research #wild #dolphin #river dolphin #conservation #irrawaddy dolphin #cetacean

[salavante]

for the OC tag thing: the Helmsman!

Cat’s out the bag so here’s The Helmsman featured with his real name! 

Full Name: Yawg-Ecthylion, The Helmsman, God of The Void

Gender and Sexuality: Male and eh I dunno, I’ve never thought about it, but his two romantic entanglements have been with women.

Pronouns: He/Him but I don’t think he’d turn his nose up at they/them, I think he sees himself as existing outside of human constructs of that kind of thing. He’s not really even organic.

Ethnicity/Species: Threnghelleon Deity

Birthplace and Birthdate: Hah ok, here’s a funfact that I’ll probably talk about later in something specifically about them, and that I think I talked about with Ethem-Cailo. All of the OG Threnghelleon gods were made by Jovix-Diocunigast’s experiences. There was awhile where whenever Dio had a new thought or action, a new god would spin into being. The Helmsman was created when Dio first conceptualized ‘nothingness’. I think there’s a little more to it than that, but that ball might be in my Co-DM’s court.

Guilty Pleasures: The Helmsman is cruel, bitter and sadistic, and enjoys inflicting pain on things. I think one can extract a lot from that alone. Before the hunt, he had spent most of his several millennia long life almost completely isolated, hunting eldritch abominations at the bottom of Threnghelleon’s icy ocean, which has informed a lot of his decision making in how he fights and sees his opponents. Wearing down large enemies slowly, making use of what’s left of the carcass - that’s The Helmsman’s game. Which is really a roundabout way of saying that he basically tortures his opponents and then takes trophies or makes scrimshaws, leather-working pieces, etc out of the dead gods and mortals that he faces on The Hunt. He likes to step on toes and rattle cages to get reactions out of people. Negative attention is better than no attention, and it’s certainly made him a fan favorite among Threnghelleon’s edgier viewers. I say this as a guilty pleasure because he is not incapable of guilt, and before the hunt, was a fairly honorable, lawful God, if not still violent and creepy. In rare moments of reflection, he wonders how he fell so far, but usually doubles down afterwards. The public and the rest of the pantheon saw him a certain light that gained him attention, and he, starved for any kind of connection to others, leaned heavily into it. He has allowed other people’s perceptions and opinions of him to shape his identity and sense of personhood, which I think is rather tragic, but he likes making belts out of human hair so...

Phobias: It’s hard for me to say what The Helmsman is afraid of because most of his worst fears have come to pass and have made him the bastard coated bastard we know today. Being alone, being forgotten countless times, having his expertise and hard work taken advantage of. Paranoia aimed at Jovix-Diocunigast has turned out to be entirely accurate - Dio felt threatened by how much attention that The Helmsman was getting for defending the realm and killing giant monsters, so Dio effectively cursed him so that no one could remember his name. People began calling him Yawg-Ecthylion less and less, and The Helmsman more and more. Ethem-Awnrah, Goddess of Memory, is the only one who remembered his real name.

What They Would Be Famous For: The Helmsman played pretty much right into Dio’s ploy and turned into a craven, vile weirdo, and the media circus that broadcasts The Hunt loves him for it.

What They Would Get Arrested For: Murder and turning corpses into crafts.

OC You Ship Them With: The Helmsman has had two canonical spouses which have both produced children. His first wife was mortal, a deep-sea marine biologist named Svea who came upon his ship, The Susurrant Phantasm, in her own submarine while researching the fauna surrounding the Mouth of Yawg, Threnghelleon’s entrance into the void/ether/unknown/whatever you’d like to call it. Their union produced The Helmsman’s demigod daughter Yawg-Enyion, who would later take up his mantle of defending the realm with her warfleet while The Helmsman was on The Hunt. However, between her inability to remember his name, and being torn between her own life and her duty as the wife of a deity, the two of them split. Enyion reminds The Helmsman of his ex-wife a bit too much for comfort, and the two of them have a very strained, complicated relationship.

The next one is a little bit of a doozy.

Yawg-Ecthylion and Ethem-Awnrah always kind of had eyes for each other, and were courting before he lost his name and was soft-shunned by the rest of the pantheon. This, naturally, disrupted all of that, and they would not reconnect until The Hunt occurred. In the time between The Circle going on The Hunt and The Helmsman slowly deteriorating into a monstrous douchebag, he and Awnrah clicked again and produced a son: Veth-Rawn, the mysterious god of Psychics. But Sal, you say, in that writeup you made a thousand years ago, didn’t you say that Veth-Rawn had uncertain parentage? Well, that is because The Helmsman being a nasty ass murderous bastard made The Goddess of Memory so incensed that she accidentally wiped all of the universe’s memory of their time together in a fit of passionate rage. This, unfortunately, included Veth-Rawn, leaving the God of Psychics mentally shattered, and forced to grow up utterly alienated by his would-be family, who didn’t know who he was or why he was there. It is only really recently that this came to light, and was one of my endgame plot twists.

If the team beats Dio, The Helmsman will go back to Threnghelleon with his comatose son to heal him and try to make things right with his daughter, Enyion. Awnrah is staying with the hometeam and the other defectors from The Hunt - Geeg, Derog and Wybjorn. I’ll probably touch on her sometime on her own, I’m quite fond of her, and she’s a Good Guy now so she’ll be featuring in post-Godslaughter campaigns.

OC Most Likely To Murder Them: Either Jonquil (his hometeam rival for the game), Jovix-Diocunigast or Jovix-Cailo. Jonquil spent the better part of the game trying to learn how to shove his soul into a diamond and hurl it into space. Jovix-Cailo has hated him for a very long time and enjoyed tormenting him as soon as he got a power bump. And Dio would just turn him into a smear for defecting. Awnrah could also utterly annihilate him if she wasn’t such a decent person, she could crack his psyche open like an egg.  

This is where the book/movie section usually goes but I’ll be real with you, I don’t think The Helmsman bothers with either. I think he sees most things of human invention as being kind of beneath him. But he especially hates most artistic interpretations of himself, and has very seldom happened upon one that he feels gives him due diligence.

Talents and/or Powers: The Helmsman honestly has a build that I would LOVE to use as a player character. It hinges largely on stacking DOTs (Damage Over Time) and status afflictions, making him able to whittle down opponents with large health pools as well as get a trickle of HP back to himself. His whaling hooks are called Black Tongue and North Star, and they give him some pretty impressive reach, and the ability to swing large, heavy objects around. He also has a few abilities such as “Where Strides The Behemoth” that gives him heavier damage output when he’s facing an enemy larger than him, and “Like Water”, where he effectively ignore gravity and can move freely through space. His very large peepers are usually squinting, as he is not really accustomed to full light, but in darkness, they open all the way into horrible, near perfect circles. Really, out of all of the Threnghelleon gods, The Helmsman is the most biologically compatible with his environment.

Why Someone Might Love Them: The Helmsman has a very primal, intense quality that I think a certain kind of person could find attractive. For many years, he did a very dirty, thankless job that benefitted all mankind and the pantheon, which is perfectly respectable. He’s fairly witty and is good at banter, and is handy in a fight, a couple of traits that Threnghelleon folk appreciate. I also think his more tragic qualities attract a level of pity that could entice someone to desire becoming closer to him. I dunno, he has magic eyes that see in the dark, some people dig that.

Why Someone Might Hate Them: He stalks/murders/tortures indiscriminately and treats corpses of pretty much anything like someone would treat the corpse of an animal. He does not see the distinction between humanoid person and animal/monster and considers it all free game. He’s mouthy, impatient, cruel and sadistic and has set aflame 10,000 worlds. What’s not to hate.

How They Change: The Helmsman’s arc in the game was the slow-dawning horror of the fact that pretty much all of his current murderous identity has been spoon-fed to him by other people, and he just kind of went along with it because he was weak-willed and desperate for attention. This troubles him pretty deeply and makes him lose his hutzpah towards the end of the game. He does end up defecting from the Hunt to the hometeam to help take down Diocunigast, the guy who cursed him and started his downhill slope. But I really hesitate to say that he’s a Good Guy. He doesn’t feel all that bad about all the people he’s tortured/killed/made into fanny packs, at least not to the degree he should. The Helmsman will still go about his nasty ways when he’s back on Threnghelleon, but will be more judicious about who he kills and how. He’s also resolved to try and repair his relationship with his daughter Enyion, and hopefully heal Veth-Rawn. He has no intention, however, to try and re-initiate a romantic relationship with Ethem-Awnrah, though he still kinda loves her. He knows he FUBAR’d that one.

Why You Love Them: I enjoy villains! His ferocity is cathartic and entertaining and challenging to to the PCs. I genuinely wasn’t sure if he was going to be alive or not by the end of our game. Sometimes it’s fun to just have a downright fucker in the mix. I also like his design, which while not THE most inspired, is a lot of fun to draw. The Helmsman was the first of the Gods that I designed, with Ethem-Cailo being second. Also an internet stranger said he was hot once.

#psygull