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the-storming-sea · 3 years

Note

For prompts: Todoroki using every single Toshi-Izuku interaction to add to his "Izuku is All Might's secret love child' conspiracy board

Tfw its been like two to three days but Many Things have happened in that time. Oops

Uh, anyways–

"Dude. What. The. Fuck."

Sero, Kirishima, and Yaoyorozu stared, wide-eyed and nearly slack-jawed from the futon they currently sat at. Across from them, hanging off the wall was a large pinboard, polaroid pictures and newspapers articles with certain words and pictures circled in with bright red marker tacked onto different places, red string connecting each and every single one of those pictures together.

And in front of that pinboard stood Todoroki Shouto, one of the most powerful students at UA, son of the current Number One Hero, wide-eyed and wild-haired and probably, by definition, out of his fucking mind.

"Listen. I'm not crazy–"

"Literally everything that's happening now is providing evidence to the contrary."

"–but All Might is Midoriya's father."

"That's." Kirishima blinked, once, his brain attempting to process what his classmate was saying. "What?"

"All Might. Is. Midoriya's. Father," Todoroki said, slower, like he was trying to explain quantum physics to a toddler. Or to anyone.

"Todoroki, All Might's never been in a public relationship before," Yaoyorozu replied, slower. Of all of Todoroki's eccentricities, this had to be the weirdest one yet. "Not to mention, all of All Might's speculated relationships have been with men."

"Then at least one of his partners is trans, or he's trans!"

"They don't even look the same!"

"Then Midoriya gets his looks from his mother! They have the same quirk! They practically act the same!" Todoroki threw his hands up in exasperation, frost creeping on the side of his fingers. "I'm still right!"

"Bro, you've met Midoriya's mother."

"Artificial insemination! Adoption! Again, secret love child!"

Todoroki slapped his hand on the board, slightly burning the edges of one of the newspaper clippings. "Look, see here," he said, pointing to the clipping. Kirishima tentatively walked up, squinting at the headline. "Read this."

"'Mystery Samaritans Found Cleaning Up Takoba Beach.'" Kirishima frowned. "So?"

Sero's eyes brightened. "Oh, I remember that! I used to go to the beach all the time with my family," he said. "What's that gotta do with anything?"

"Look at this photo!"

Kirishima turned his eyes towards the photo, frowning. His eyes widened in shock.

"Holy shit, is that Midoriya?"

"Huh, so it is," Yaoyorozu said. "And...is that...?"

"YES!" Todoroki exclaimed, once again slapping his hand on the pinboard and startling his friends. "All Might, as he currently looks now, and Midoriya found at Takoba beach a full year before the school year starts. That means they knew each other before the school year started!"

"You repeated yourself."

"I know I know I know but why," Todoroki pressed, taking a deep breath, "why would All Might, in his weakened state before Kamino, be seen with Midoriya unless...unless that was his secret son."

He clapped his hands together just as he was finishing his point, clearly pleased by his argument. The three stared back at him, slightly alarmed.

"Or...maybe he just met him recently and they decided to clean the beach together," Yaoyorozu said tentatively. "It could happen."

"Or, or they decided to train for Midoriya's UA Exam together by lifting appliances at the beach! Or working out around the beach a year before!" he protested. "My father used to make me train by lifting up heavy objects ten times my size and pushing my quirk before the UA exam too!"

Sero frowned. "Todo, I know good parenting is a foreign concept to you, but comparing your relationship with your dad to Midoriya and All Might maybe isn't the best of ideas."

"I'm pretty sure Iida used to train with his hero brother in a very normal way," Todoroki nearly fucking pouted. The guy was really fired up– metaphorically and a little bit literally, judging by his floor. "But, but anyway, what I'm trying to say was that All Might, trying to make sure Midoriya would be strong enough for the entrance exam, made him clean up the beach because he was helping to train his son!"

Kirishima stared at him. "Bro."

"I'm right! Not to mention, why would he be in his thinner state around Midoriya if he wasn't his son?!"

"Maybe he told him about the weakened form back then by accident?" Sero said. "Todoroki, seriously. You're looking too deep into this."

"I agree," Yaoyorozu said. She loved her friend, truly, but as good as it was for Todoroki to exhibit any other emotion besides confusion and rage, this couldn't be healthy for him.

Todoroki groaned. "Okay, okay, fine. Exhibit B!" He pointed to a picture of All Might and Midoriya walking into All Might's office. "They eat lunch together! Who does that with a teacher?!"

Kirishima hummed. "Okay, I'll give you that one," he said, looking back at the others. "You gotta admit, that is a little suspicious."

"You forget, Midoriya broke his bones a lot at the beginning of the year just by activating his quirk," Yaoyorozu said, calmly. "As the Heroics teacher, All Might would want to make sure they can find a way for Midoriya to improve his quirk use without breaking his bones, so it would make sense for All Might to meet up with Midoriya out of class."

"But why continuously?!" Todoroki pressed. "Even after Midoriya got a handle of his quirk?!"

Yaoyorozu frowned. "Well, Bakugo meets with them now. Is Bakugo All Might's son too?"

"Details, details," Todoroki said with a wave of his hand. "Bakugo's practically Midoirya's boyfriend anyways. All Might probably wants to vet him or something."

"Somehow I believe that less than your 'All Might is Midoriya's dad' theory."

"They're going to get together, just you wait," Todoroki said. "Anyways, back to business. It's not just at school too! Even now that we're in the dorms, lately All Might will eat with Midoriya, alone, just the two of them!"

He pointed to another picture of Midoriya and All Might eating meat buns on a bench, no one else in sight, lightly chatting. "See! It would make sense if All Might ate with any one of us, or if there was a bigger crowd, but it's just those two! That's a normal parenting thing, right?"

"Dude how did you even get that picture."

"Irrelevant."

Yaoyorozu ran her eyes over the full board again, wincing internally. As...off-putting as her friend's efforts were, he did have a point. All Might's actions towards Midoriya were unprecedented of a teacher, Aizawa would certainly never be caught dead with any of them. And sure, they simply could be good friends who met a little before the Takoba news article picture, friends could be of all ages after all, but with the way All Might treated Midoriya daily, it was getting more and more likely that Todoroki's theory was correct. Which had some very interesting implications and also a media shitstorm on its way if it was true.

"And," Todoroki continued, now rambling as fast as Midoriya was, "did you know that All Might visited the Midoriya's to talk about the dorm system alone?"

Kirishima's mouth dropped. "Seriously?"

Todoroki nodded, eyes wide and a small smile on his face. "Aizawa-sensei told us himself back when he asked my father if I could stay in the dorms! My father asked where All Might was and Aizawa-sensei told him that they split up right before the Midoriya's!"

Sero's eyes widened. "Okay, I will admit that that's weird."

"I know right?!" Todoroki exclaimed, out of breath and restlessly pacing the floor. "Not only that, but All Might was one of the first people Midoriya texted right after he got his hero license. And Midoriya ended up interning with a hero who All Might knows directly and worked with Nighteye during his work-study who's All Might's only sidekick! And then Midoriya was invited personally to I-Island by All Might! And–"

Knock knock.

The group froze.

"Young Todoroki? Can I speak with you?"

Fuck.

Todoroki tentatively walked over to his door, opening it just enough to find All Might standing behind it, a worried expression on his face. "Are you all alright? The kids downstairs reported a lot of yelling, and I think you may have frozen and burnt through your floor?"

Todoroki looked back at his floor, which now looked slightly more like the training room back home than it did his dorm room. "Right. I can pay for that."

"No need my boy, just make sure it doesn't happen again or I think Aizawa'll have all of our heads," All Might chuckled. He then frowned, slightly opening the door more. "What on Earth is that?"

His eyes were pointed directly behind Todoroki, to the pinboard the high schooler had been deliriously gesturing towards for the past few minutes. Kirishima, Sero, and Yaoyorozu stared at each other awkwardly, shuffling their feet.

"Um...well, y'see–"

"All Might, is Midoriya your illegitimate child?"

The air paused. Everyone turned their eyes to the teen.

All Might blinked. "I'm sorry...what?"

WHAT THE FUCK, TODOROKI?!

"Todoroki, bro, you can't just ask shit like that!" Kirishima exclaimed, who now, like the many people around him, was going through all the stages of grief. "That's not one of those things you can just ask people!"

Todoroki tilted his head. "I asked Midoriya."

"YOU ASKED MIDORIYA?!"

"I–"

The kids now directed their attention back to All Might, who had managed to shake himself out of his stupor and somehow made his way to the pinboard. "I'm not...young Todoroki, believe me when I say I'm 100% sure I'm not Midoriya's biological father," he said, rapidly glancing back and forth from the board to Todoroki. "As...creepily impressive as this is," he continued, gesturing to the entirety of the board, "I've never had a child, and besides, young Midoriya's biological father works overseas, in America."

He pointed to the slightly burnt newspaper clipping of Takoba beach, looking back at Todoroki. "Is this about the Takoba beach cleaning?"

Todoroki nodded.

"Huh." All Might turned to the clipping, a strange, soft, thoughtful look on his face. "I didn't know they did a report about it." He turned back to Todoroki. "May I keep this?"

Todoroki nodded again, even slower, and a delighted smile appeared on All Might's face. The four students watched with wide eyes as he took the newspaper clipping in one hand and the pin in between his other fingers, gently lifting the pin from where it had been embedded in the pin board, lifting the newspaper clipping from its place, and placing the pin back where he had found it. Seconds passed. All Might rubbing his thumb over the picture in the newspaper with a soft chuckle. He then gently folded it, each crease careful not to tear the newspaper apart, before placing it in the pocket of his tracksuit.

Then, as if he remembered that there were other people in the room, he turned to Todoroki. "Ah, Aizawa-kun said that you had redecorated your room yourself, yes?"

Todoroki nodded, still stunned. "Perfect! The bots will be up here in a few minutes or so to repair your floor, and then refurbish your room any way you see fit." All Might clapped his hands together, a bright smile on his face. "Just try not to do it as much, alright? And please stop stalking young Midoriya and I. I don't know how many times I can catch you in the act before telling him that one of his best friend's have been stalking us to obtain proof of our non-existant biological relationship."

"You saw me?"

"Young Todoroki, I've been the number one hero for three and a half decades."

"Oh." Todoroki frowned. "Sorry."

"Just don't let it happen again, please." All Might took a heavy sigh before finally addressing the others in the room. "Young Kirishima, Yaoyorozu, and Sero, I'll be seeing you in class tomorrow. Plus Ultra!"

"See you!"

"See you tomorrow All Might!"

All Might left the room, closing the door behind him, leaving Todoroki, Kirishima, Sero, and Yaoyorozu in the room, waiting for the repair bots to arrive, silent and bewildered with what had just transpired in the past ten minutes. The four of them couldn't move, only the sound of breathing being proof that any of them were even alive. After what felt like several, long, painstaking seconds, Todoroki turned to his friends.

"Y'know, All Might worked in America for a while."

"FOR GOD'S SAKE, TODOROKI."

#thestormingsea posts #yagi toshinori #toshinori yagi #all might #bnha #todoroki shouto #shouto todoroki #dad might #mentioned midoriya izuku #mentioned izuku midoriya #mentioned deku #he doesn't take a part in this story but just in case ig #and then kirishima sero and yaoyorozu are here but they don't do much

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cyndavilachase · 4 years

Photo

I’m Looking Forward Now 💖Thank you and good bye

So, it’s been a little over a week since Steven Universe Future ended…

I’ve been hesitant to write this, honestly, but I’m tired of holding myself back from properly expressing myself in fear of appearing overly invested in the media I consume, even in private. Writing helps me organize my thoughts and feelings, and I feel like these thoughts in particular may resonate with many, so I want to share them. I want to talk about what Steven Universe has done for me personally, both as an artist, and as a person.

I’ve been around since the day the first episode of the original series aired. I actually remember when Steven Universe was just a logo on Wikipedia’s “List of Upcoming Cartoon Network Shows” list, back when I was a freshman in high school. It piqued my interest, but when commercials finally dropped for it, I thought it was going to be bad because of the way marketing handled introducing Steven as a likeable character. There was still something about it that made me want to give it a chance though, so I went online and watched the pilot before the first episode's release. I was hooked immediately. I knew I was going to love it, and I did. I fell so absolutely in love with Steven as a character, and the world that he and the gems lived in. I became obsessed. I was always so excited for new episodes to come out. Little did I know what else it would do for me as I went through my adolescence alongside it.

As the show progressed, it was evident that what I wanted out of a western animated childrens’ cartoon was finally coming into fruition: this show was becoming serialized. There was continuity, there was plot, there was character development-- it was getting deep. It was pushing the groundwork that Adventure Time laid out even further (thank you, Adventure Time).

I will give credit where credit is due: earlier western childrens’ cartoons I grew up with like Hey Arnold, and Rugrats, among others, also touched on heavy topics, but Steven Universe was able to take similar ideas (and even more complex ones, concerning mental health and relationships) and expand on them outside of contained episodes and/or short arcs. These themes, which were a part of the show’s overarching story, spanned across its entirety. Continuity was rampant.

What did this mean? It meant kids cartoons didn’t have to be silly and fun all the time and characters weren’t just actors playing a part in 11-minute skits. Steven and the gems would remember things that happened to them, and it affected them and how they would function and play a part in their story. This was a huge deal to me as a teenager. I always wanted the cartoons I grew up with featuring kid characters to feel more. In my own work, I often felt discouraged when combining a fun, cutesy western art style with themes as dark or layered as anime would cover. I always thought it had to be one or the other because an audience wouldn’t take a combination of the two seriously enough, based on discussions I had with classmates, friends, and online analysis I read at the time. Steven Universe proved to me otherwise. This show was opening the door for future cartoons exploring in-depth, adult concepts. I felt so seen as a kid, and was inspired to stick with what I love doing.

I was actually very worried about the show’s survival. It was in fact immensely underrated and the fandom was miniscule. Then in 2014, JailBreak dropped, and it’s popularity exploded. Part of it was because of the complex plot and the themes it was covering like I mentioned, but also because of its representation.

I remember when fandom theorized that Garnet was a fusion due to grand, tragic reasons. Turns out, she’s simply a metaphor for a very loving w|w relationship. This was huge. I cannot stress how important it is that we continue to normalize healthy canon queer relationships in childens’ media, and Steven Universe finally was the first to do that proper. Introducing these themes offers the chance for a kid to sit there and ask themselves, “Why is this demonized by so many people?” I asked myself exactly that. Ruby and Sapphire were my cartoon LGBT rep. They were the first LGBT couple I ever ecstatically drew fanart of. I was dealing with a lot of internalized homophobia at the time, and they showed me that I was allowed to love women and feel normal about it. The process of overcoming this was a long one, but they played a part in my very first steps into becoming comfortable with my sexuality. I could go on and on about it’s representation in general-- how it breaks the mold when it comes to showcasing a diverse set of characters in design, in casting, and in breaking gender roles. It’s focus on love and empathy. Steven himself is a big boy, but he's the protagonist, and the show never once makes fun of his weight, or any other bigger characters for that matter. It wasn’t hard to see why the fandom had grown so large.

Fandom was always a joy for me. It was a hobby I picked up when I was in middle school, like many of us here did. I would always cater my experience to fun, and fun only. I only started getting more deeply involved in SU’s fandom when I had just turned into an adult. During the summer of 2016, between my first and second year of college, I drew for the show almost every day non-stop when the Summer of Steven event was going on and posted them online. This was a form of practice for me in order to become not just more comfortable with experimenting with my art, but also to meet new artists, make new friends, and learn to interact with strangers without fear. I dealt with a ton of anxiety when I was in high school. When I was a senior applying to art school for animation, I decided I was going to overcome that anxiety. I made plans to take baby steps to improve myself over the course of my 4 years of college. Joining the fandom, while unforeseen, was definitely a part of that process. I started feeling more confident in sharing my ideas, even if they were fan-made. I fell in love with storyboarding after that summer, when I took my first storyboarding class, and genuinely felt like I was actually getting somewhere with all of this. I remember finally coming to a point in my classes where I could pitch and not feel hopelessly insecure about it. I was opening up more to my friends and peers.

But this process, unfortunately, came to a screeching halt.

My life completely, utterly crumbled under me in the Fall of 2017 due to a series of blows in my personal life that happened in the span of just a couple weeks. My mental health and sense of identity were completely destroyed. All of that confidence I had worked for-- completely ruined. I was alone. I nearly died. My stay at college was extended to 4 and half years, instead of the 4 I had intended. I lost my love for animation-- making it, and watching it. I could no longer watch Steven Universe with the same love I had for it beforehand. It’s a terrible thing, trying to give your attention to something you don’t love anymore, and wanting so desperately to love again. I dropped so many things I loved in my life, including the fandom.

Healing was a long and complicated road. I continued to watch the show all the way up until Change Your Mind aired in the beginning of 2019, and while I still felt empty, that was definitely a turning point for me with it’s encapsulation of self-love. I was hoping James Baxter would get to work on Steven Universe since he guest-animated on Adventure Time, and it was incredible seeing that wish actually come true. The movie came out and while I enjoyed it and thought highly of it, I was still having issues letting myself genuinely love things again, old and new. It was especially difficult because cartoons were my solace as a kid, when things got rough at home. I remember feeling sad because the show ended, and not getting the chance to love it again like I used to while it was still going.

By the time Steven Universe Future was announced, I was finally coming around. I was genuinely starting to feel excitement for art and animation again. I wasn’t expecting there to be a whole new epilogue series, but happily ever after, there we were! Prickly Pear aired, and the implications it left in terms of where the story was going did it. I was finally ready to let myself take the dive back into fandom in January of this year. My art blew up, something I wasn’t expecting considering my 2-year hiatus. Following this, I was invited into a discord server containing some of the biggest writers, artists, editors, and analysts in the fandom. I had no idea there were so many talented people in the fandom, some already with degrees, some getting their degrees-- creating stuff for it on the side just for fun. The amount of passion and productivity level here is insane, and so is the amount of discussion that has come out of it.

I didn’t realize it at first, but it was actually helping me gain back the courage to share ideas. I lost my confidence in pitching while I was taking the time to heal, and graduating meant there would no longer be a classroom setting I could practice in. This group helped immensely.

I have made so many friends through this wonderful series, and I have so many fond memories talking to like-minded creatives, getting feedback and a myriad of sources for inspiration, as well as all of the memes and jokes and weekly theorizations that came about as we all waited on the edges of our seats for episodes to air. I needed this so badly, I needed to get back in touch with my roots, when I would go absolutely hog-wild over a cartoon I loved with people who loved it as much I did. Future has been a blessing for me in this way. I graduated feeling like I was back at square-one, but now I feel like I’m on my way again.

It’s 2020 and while I’m doing great right now, I am honestly still recovering from the total exhaustion that followed after graduating a few months ago, and finally leaving the campus where my life fell apart behind. Needless to say, watching Future was like looking into a mirror. Watching one of my favorite characters of all time-- one that grew up with me-- go through so many of the same things I went through not too long ago was absolutely insane to watch unfold. It’s such an important thing too, to show a character go through the process of breaking down over trauma and all the nasty things that come with it, and to have them go on the road to healing. Steven got that therapy. He wasn’t blamed. The gems were called out. The finale was everything I could have ever hoped for. The catharsis I experienced watching it was out of this world.

As I continue my own healing journey, I will always look up to the storyboard artists, revisionists, and designers that I have been following over these past 7 years, as well as the new ones introduced in Future. It's been such a joy watching these artists release their promo art for episodes, talk about their experiences working on the show, and post the work they've done for it alongside episodes airing.

Thank you Rebecca Sugar, the Crewniverse, and the fans, for making this such a truly wonderful and unique experience. Thank you for reminding me that I am, and always will be, an artist, a cartoonist, and a fan. Thank you, my followers, for the overwhelmingly positive response to my artwork. I have had so much fun interacting and discussing the show with you all again over these past few months. Steven Universe and it’s fandom will always have a special place in my heart, and it will always be a classic that I will return to for comfort and inspiration for decades to come. I am sad that the cartoon renaissance is over, but so many doors have been opened thanks to this show. I am so, so excited to see what this show will inspire in the future, and I hope one day I get the opportunity to be a part of that.

Goodbye Steven, thank you for everything. I wish you healing, and I wish Rebecca and the team a well-deserved rest. ♥️

-Cynthia D.

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wisdomrays · 4 years

Text

TAFAKKUR: Part 158

Standing against Radicalism: The Example of Abu Hanifa

Radicalism is a destructive force that threatens bonds within a society. It violates social order, for those who adopt radicalism assume their views as the norm and dictate that all must follow their lifestyle. Radicalism has a potential to reveal itself even more violently when aligned with some religious beliefs, which often serve as a great source of motivation for their adherents, especially when the religion itself is misinterpreted.

Abu Hanifa (d. 767 CE) is considered a leading scholar of Islamic law and his thoughts led to the formation of the Hanafi school of Islam, which has the greatest following among schools. Abu Hanifa's time was an era of intense political and social mobility. While new conquests brought in new cultural and religious components, the political authority aspired to disseminate an official form of Islam; at the same time, new groups and formations emerged to respond to changing conditions. Unfortunately, these conditions led to some groups being radicalized. Abu Hanifa's stance against radicalism was exemplary and his arguments are still worthwhile today.

His political attitude

Abu Hanifa represents the prototype of an independent scholar. He was wary of state power, believing that it corrupted intellectual honesty in the interest of preserving power; thus, he did not hold an official political position. This was a brave stance, as he was seriously persecuted for it. Yet his independence allowed him to see radicalism - on both sides of the political spectrum - for the danger that it was.

Understanding of Islamic jurisprudence

Abu Hanifa is considered the pioneer of the school of sound opinion (ray), which advocates seeking solutions to social-judicial problems by using reason together with religious essentials and scholarly comparison (qiyas). Deductive reasoning (ijtihad), juristic preference for the better (istihsan), and acceptable custom (urf) have an important place in his understanding of Islamic jurisprudence. We can infer that he also believed in the necessity of taking social and psychological realities into account when making religious judgments; this was what he did in practice.

Abu Hanifa did not choose a reductionist approach by restricting himself to the frame of religious essentials, but produced solutions to the questions he faced—or could possibly face—by benefiting from the sources mentioned along with the Qur'an and Sunnah. It is possible to define his approach to jurisprudence as an understanding that places humanity in the center; his views expanded the domain of legitimacy and accepted components of historical and cultural heritage that do not contradict the spirit of religion and belief of Divine oneness, such as local customs and practices. This broad perspective ran contrary to radical beliefs. Because the Hanafi school of Islamic jurisprudence does not disregard real problems in life, it is more capable of solving them.

Abu Hanifa viewed education and debate as essential to his jurisprudence. He would bring a certain problem - some of them contemporary, and some hypothetical - to the attention of his students, each of whom was an expert on an Islamic discipline such as tafsir, hadith, and fiqh; he would let them discuss that matter in detail, follow the discussions with patience, and come to a conclusive judgment according to the strength of the arguments. But he would still tolerate the opposing thoughts of his disciples, such as Imam Muhammad and Abu Yusuf, and let those thoughts come to life. All of their opposing thoughts were recorded, and people acted upon most of them.

We can accept Abu Hanifa's educational method as a pluralist and democratic one, which also teaches how to forbear different opinions with patience. It shows the value of viewing an issue from different points of view. Despite its value, there were some groups that did not support Abu Hanifa's methods.

His understanding of belief

Some groups had formed prior to Abu Hanifa as extensions of the extremist Kharijites. They not only directly declared believing Muslims who sinned were apostates, but they also attacked them and tried to exterminate them in the name of religion. The Kharijites even declared Caliph Ali - and many other devout believers - apostates. Though the Kharijites were the most violent, other groups - including the Mutazilites - also persecuted certain religious groups when they came to political power. Unfortunately, this act of dividing society into groups inevitably led to more violence.

According to one definition, it is possible for religion to be a dividing or uniting factor within a society. It can be a great force for good when it is kept separate from the political machinations of power. In his work Fiqh al-Akbar, Abu Hanifa defined the concept of religion (din) in terms of its contents by saying, "Religion is the title given to the entirety of religion, faith, submission, and religious judgments." Abu'l Muntaha, the scholar who annotated this definition, states that the word religion has different uses, sometimes meaning belief, sometimes submission, and sometimes as the Divine judgments conveyed by a certain Prophet. However, at his answer to the question directed to him about the difference between religion and religious law, Abu Hanifa he expressed that he saw a difference between them. He did not only acknowledge this difference, but also gave a religious and rational explanation for it.

According to Abu Hanifa, religion (din) and religious law (shariah) are separate concepts. He accepted religion as the principles to be believed in - namely, the belief of Divine unity, and faith in the existence and unity of God. Religious law, however, is a body of judgments related to different aspects of human life such as worship, interpersonal relations, and the like. Abu Hanifa interpreted the Qur'anic verse meaning, "I have not created the jinn and humankind but to worship Me (exclusively)" (Dhariyat 56), in the sense of, "So that they know Me and acknowledge my Oneness."

He believed the origin of religion is the belief in the unity of God. Obviously, this definition is based on the distinction between the essence of religion and what it necessitates. Here, belief is the absolute condition of religion, because a person belonging to a certain religion is a matter of accepting the essential teachings of that religion, rather than observing the acts of worship commanded by that religion.

Abu Hanifa came to this conclusion about religion by considering the fact that the essentials of belief brought by the Prophets are the same, but there are certain differences on other issues, such as worship. The Prophets of God did not belong to different religions. None of them commanded their people to forsake the religion of the previous Prophets, since their faith is the same. On the other hand, every Prophet invited their people to follow the law they conveyed, as decreed by God Almighty for that specific people, not necessarily following the exact law conveyed by the previous Prophets. There were many different codes for different peoples. It is for this reason that God Almighty states, "(For each community) ...We have appointed a clear way of life and a comprehensive system (containing the principles of that way and how to follow it). And if God had so willed, He would surely have made you a single community (following the same way of life and system surrounded by the same conditions throughout all history)" (Maedah 48).

The faith of Divine oneness is always the same and religion does not change from one Prophet to another in this sense; it is the systems and their rules that change. If "religion" were fulfilling everything God commands and avoiding everything He forbids, then a person who fails to observe only one command or commits one forbidden act would be an apostate. As such, the legal judgments between fellow believers such as marriage, receiving an inheritance, attending a funeral, and the like would be invalid. However, it is having belief that makes them lawful between fellow believers. Other commands come after having accepted religion. If the commanded acts were faith itself, then God would not call His servants believers until they fulfilled the acts He commanded.

In order to support the point stated above, Abu Hanifa asserted the fact that when believers are excused from certain acts at certain times, they are still considered to have faith: a menstruating woman who abandons the daily prayers, a man who has a valid excuse abandons the Ramadan fasting, or a poor man who cannot give the alms of zakat are still considered believers. If such observances were identical to having faith, failing to observe them for some excuse would have the same meaning. However, it is impossible to make such a claim. According to Abu Hanifa, there is no complete relation between faith and deeds, since they are separate things.

Abu Hanifa stated that the following verses and others of similar meaning also point to the same fact:

"Tell those of My servants who believe that they must establish the Prayer in conformity with its conditions..." (Ibrahim 31); "O you who believe! Prescribed for you is retaliation in cases of (deliberate, unjust) killing..." (Baqarah 178); "O you who believe! Remember and mention God much" (Ahzab 41).

If the commanded acts were identical with belief or faith (iman), then God would not address people as believers until they fulfilled those acts. In addition, God Almighty separates having faith and good deeds in other verses as well:

"Except those who believe and do good righteous deeds..." (Asr 3); "No! Rather, whoever submits his whole being to God (and does so) as one devoted to doing good, aware that God is seeing him, his reward is with his Lord, and all such will have no fear, (for they will always find My help and support with them), nor will they grieve" (Baqarah 112); "But whoever wishes for the Hereafter and strives for it as it should be striven for, being a believer..." (Isra 19).

This distinction proves that faith is not the same as deeds. Believers observe the prayers, fasting, zakat, Hajj, and they make remembrance of God owing to their faith - but they are not considered to have faith for having observed these. This proves that they do good deeds after having faith (iman) already.

In his letter to Uthman al-Batti, a scholar from Basra, Abu Hanifa stated this view with reference to different proofs. He used the following example: an indebted man firstly acknowledges his debt and pays it afterwards, but not vice versa. His acknowledgement of the debt is not for having paid the debt, but his paying is for having acknowledged the debt.

Abu Hanifa did not believe that a person who sins is out of the sphere of faith; nor are they an apostate. He expressed this point, saying, "Those who have acknowledged the direction to turn for worship are believers. I cannot count them as having forsaken faith owing to some command they do not observe. As for one who abandons some obligatory acts in spite of having faith, that person is a believer, but a sinful one (he is not a disbeliever)."

Abu Hanifa argued that what would make one an unbeliever is not committing a forbidden act, but considering it lawful; not abandoning an obligatory command, but considering it unnecessary.

Abu Hanifa also pointed out that real believers commit sins not by considering them lawful, but by giving in to their carnal soul. When asked, "If God is dearer for a believer than everything, why does a believer rebel Him? Is it possible for a person to rebel while having sincere love for God?" the great imam replied, "Yes, a child loves his father, but sometimes disobeys him. The situation of a believer is the same...He commits sins not owing to a lack of love for God, but for giving in to the feeling of lust or something similar."

Some claimed that this stance aligned Abu Hanifa with the school of Murjia, whose adherents believed that sins would not nullify one's faith, but Abu Hanifa soundly argued that it is not possible to guarantee anything in matters of faith:

"We cannot say that sins do not harm a believer at all. Similarly, we cannot say that a person who commits sins will not enter Hell. Neither can we say our good deeds are accepted and our evil deeds are forgiven... However, who commits good deeds in conformity with all of the conditions of validity...and dies as a believer without nullifying those deeds, then God does not let those deeds be in vain, but rewards them." We need to clarify at this point that by this definition Abu Hanifa did not refer to an argument as if religion was a matter of conscience only; religion for him is a comprehensive system of life that concerns all aspects of believers' existence.

While founding the most developed school of Islamic jurisprudence, Abu Hanifa defined religion with reference to its essence, pinpointing the difference between religion and other factors related to religion. His definition of religion as the faith of Divine oneness is very important in terms of maintaining social unity. Such a definition does not lessen the importance of religion's other requirements. Moreover, the political and social conditions of his time called for such a definition. For this reason, Abu Hanifa made a definition that referred to the essence of religion and aimed to maintain unity in society by counteracting the tendency to easily condemn those with different opinions.

This is valuable even today, as taking belief in Divine unity as the basis of religion allows followers of different monotheistic religions to meet on common grounds. In the Qur'an, God Almighty addresses Muslims in the person of the Prophet and demands them to call People of the Book to a common word between them: "O People of the Book, come to a word common between us and you, that we worship none but God, and associate none as partner with Him, and that none of us take others for Lords, apart from God" (Al Imran 3: 64).

Conclusion

When Abu Hanifa's world of thought and understanding of life are studied, it's clear that his viewpoint valued differences and did not permit persecution. This perspective still bears significance in terms of peaceful coexistence in today's societies. Such a magnanimous attitude can help to combat radical attitudes and inclinations for violence.

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aetherschreiber · 4 years

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The Cycle of Fandom

I am an early Millennial. As a 1982 baby, I literally came of age in the year 2000. A lot of hay has been made about how my generation does things differently from our parents. And by now, plenty of it has been made about why, as well. I won’t rehash the talking points, but it comes down to how much things changed in our formative years. Our parents went from vinyl to 8-tracks. We went from cassette tapes to CDs to MP3 players to streaming over our phones. That’s a lot to have to adapt to and as a result adapting is just what we do.

But when it comes to fandom, the human condition really hasn’t changed that much. People like things and when they like things they obsess, collect, analyze, and sadly they eventually eventually gate-keep.

Now, let me preface all of this by saying that I don’t really have any citations for any of this. But, as someone who was thoroughly raised in fandom, I also have a tendency to get hooked on things a lot of my generation would scoff at for being old. I love the original Lost in Space and Man from UNCLE, the very first Mobile Suit Gundam is my favorite, I’m fascinated by the puppetry in Thunderbirds, and I’m a complete sucker for just about anything with Cary Grant. I will binge-watch classic Doctor Who as much as I will the new stuff and love every moment of each for what it is.

For most Millennials, this isn’t the case, for whatever reason. It’s neither a good thing nor a bad thing. It just is. Most folks in my generation have heavy nostalgia for the 80s at the oldest and just don’t really concern themselves with very much from before that. It’s not that they don’t have an appreciation, but they don’t have the resulting fangirl crush I have on David McCallum that I will commiserate with my mother about (Illya Kuryakin is an adorable badass and I will die on that hill).

I like to think that this has given me a bit of a unique view on fandom, in general. I participate in some older fandoms, where things move a bit more slowly and where the average age is usually at least one generation removed from me and therefore a bit wiser in a lot of ways. They’ve just sort of... already covered this ground, so to speak.

The difference is the pace at which they did it. But the cycle is the same.

It’s never anything that starts maliciously. No fan I know of has ever set out to point-blank keep someone else from liking the thing. Rather it starts with a sense of seniority. “You like this thing, now, too? Great! I was there for the beginning and let me tell you, back then...” It’s always like a fandom big sibling who wants to show their younger counterpart the ropes; get them proper caught-up and versed in the lore so that they can better participate.

I love fandom when it’s at this stage and it’s the type of fan I strive to be at all times. I don’t like setting conditions for fandom. I think it’s partly because I am such a late-comer to so many. The idea of being a fan of something that was made 30 years or more before you were born is a hell of a thing, but I’ve never let that stop me. And for the most part, these fandoms that are much older than I am have reached the point where they are welcoming and just sort of stuck in the big sibling stage. Sure, you have the occasional troll, the guy that scoffs that I can’t understand because I wasn’t there at the very beginning. But they’re usually slapped to the ground pretty quickly by everyone else.

There is the occasional exception, of course. But one of the things those such fandoms have in common is that there is still new content being made for it. Doctor Who is a prime example, as is Star Trek, Star Wars, and Lord of the Rings (yes, I do count the upcoming Amazon series and other non-book content as new content, deal with it). There’s something about new content being made for a fandom that causes an odd anxiety that thing that the fandom loves is going to be somehow ruined.

I’m going to use Doctor Who as an example for a lot of this. The show turned 56 years old this last November. 56 years! And the fact that it had a couple of decade-long breaks in there, which were themselves only separated by a single two-hour movie, only serve to highlight the changes it went through.

My second-oldest memory is of Doctor Who. I remember the regeneration from Tom Baker to Peter Davison. Now, Whovian historians, before you freak out because that change-over happened in 1981, before I was even born, remember that back then the US got episodes around two and three years later than the BBC, in syndication on public television channels. So for me, that change happened when I was two. I remember there being some Big Thing (tm) that my dad was anticipating. I remember the burgundy and red outfit that Tom Baker was wearing while laying stricken on the ground, surrounded by his companions. And I remember him suddenly turning into a blond and sitting up, wide-eyed and mystified. I didn’t understand any of it at the time, of course. And so I also remember turning to my dad, who was watching with excitement, while the credits were rolling and asking why the man turned into another man. Oddly, that’s where the memory ends. I don’t remember the response. In fact, it’s only having since seen that episode as an adult that I have been able to identify it for what it was.

After that, I don’t have much in the way of Doctor Who related memories until the Paul McGann movie in 1996. I was 14 and not well-steeped in Whovian lore at the time and I thought it was great. My dad was more luke-warm to it because it just wasn’t the same as what he grew up with. It was a sentiment shared by many, unfortunately, which meant that Paul McGann’s wonderful take on the Doctor was relegated purely to audio adventures until the 50th anniversary in 2013. Sadly, in the early days of the internet, those of us who liked it weren’t quite able to find each other yet. In the days of Usenet and mailing lists, it was still only the most hardcore fans of a thing who got together to geek out. Meaning that most of the conversation was “oh, that’s all wrong.” Lurking in those conversations, I saw pretty much every tremulous young person who dared to say that they liked it get slapped to the ground and told they weren’t a fan of “the real thing.”

Gate-keeping. It’s nothing new. And in 1996 Doctor Who fandom ran smack into its pad-locked closed barrier. Around that same time other old but still active fandoms were starting to manifest the same thing on the internet. It was when Trekkies suddenly separated into Trekkies (who had seen the original as it aired) and Trekkers (who came long later), for reasons I have never understood.

No, that’s not true. I understand it. Us humans tend to get possessive about our stories. We have a sort of emotional ownership to them, even if not a legal one. And when you feel an ownership of something, there is an instinct to protect it, keep it pure. And to do that, it’s natural to try to set oneself up as an authority on the subject.

It took another decade for Doctor Who to come off the shelf again, in 2005. I was 24 by then, the age that marketers tend to target. A friend got his hands on a digi-copy of Christopher Eccleston’s first episode, “Rose,” that had been leaked to the internet in its entirety about a week before it actually aired. We watched it before our D&D group met and I was instantly hooked. And the friend that was responsible for the new addiction was only too happy to have new fandom friends.

The pendulum had swung. Gate-keeping was out and welcoming people to the fandom was the MO. Of course, there were and still are to this day old school Whovians who deny that anything past Sylvester McCoy exists, calling the 1996 movie and the current series a different show entirely. There will always be those people. But for the most part, Whovians welcomed new fans with open arms throughout all of Eccleston’s and David Tennant’s runs.

Now, that one cycle, from welcoming to gate-keeping, and back to welcoming, took 42 years. Most things don’t last anywhere close to that long. A show might be on for five years or a movie and its sequels be around for ten and after that, for the most part, it’s done. And in the pre-internet age of fandom, the pendulum swung slowly enough never to hit a repeat in the cycle.

The internet has sped up everything about fandom. The airing of just about any show in any country might as well be a world-wide premiere these days because it all just travels that quickly. It has to if it wants to maintain any sort of surprise in its story lines, otherwise internet chatter will spoil it. These days, things move so fast that even the few hours between an episode of Doctor Who airing in the UK and in the US is enough that one can be subjected to spoilers. And the swing of the fandom pendulum has sped up accordingly.

For Doctor Who, it started swinging back again when David Tennant left the show and Matt Smith took over. Tennant’s Doctor had a lot of fans who desperately didn’t want “their Doctor” to leave, many of whom took to the internet, swearing off the show. They said it would never be as good because David Tennant was just the best Doctor ever. By then, there were a number of us Millennial Whovians who had dug into the lore and were comfortable with the concept of regeneration as a part of it. After all, it had already happened nine times. And there was a bit of a tendency to call those people who swore off Matt Smith’s episodes as being fans not of Doctor Who but of David Tennant. Meanwhile, of course, old school Whovians were patting us all on the head going “aren’t you cute. Now you understand why Tom Baker leaving was such a thing.”

And so, the pendulum started to swing back. You started having people call other people “not really fans of Doctor Who.” That only got worse when Peter Capaldi took over and there was a significant portion of the fandom upset that the Doctor was now an older guy instead of the 30-something Doctors we had grown accustomed to.

Gate-keeping reared its ugly head for most of Capaldi’s run and, sadly, I think that kept a lot of people from the fandom and from really appreciating the 12th Doctor. That cycle has started to swing back with Jodie Whittaker’s Doctor, but the gate-keeping is in a stage where it is desperate to hold on to what Doctor Who was when they became fans and therefore is very toxic right now. It’s not pretty. But those asshats are starting to be slapped to the ground on social media thanks to a new influx of fans who are now once again more comfortable with the idea of regeneration and its possibilities.

Similar swings are happening with many other fandoms. The Star Wars fandom is a really ugly place right now, quite frankly. Star Trek seems to be on the welcoming end. There are always the exceptions to every generalization, of course. There will always be “that guy” in fandom.

This swing has always existed. Millennials are just the first generation for whom it has swung multiple times in the life of the show. The internet is probably the biggest contributing factor to that. What that means is that we’re the first generation to really have the chance to see the pattern for what it is. A few of us have even been able to extrapolate back and understand that, no, this is how it always has been, just slower.

The hopeful part of that is this; by virtue of being the first to recognize the pattern, we are the first ones with the opportunity to learn from that history. And now we’re starting to see fandoms that actively abhor gate-keeping and just want more people to come in and play. But those tend to be very young fandoms.

The one that comes to mind for me is Critical Role. This is a fandom that was wholly born on the internet, as the series is streamed live on Twitch. It’s really unlike anything that has ever had a fandom this size before. It’s only been around for four years or so. But the cast is on its second D&D campaign which means it’s already had the opportunity to have the elitism gate that could be closed. But something different seems to have happened. The very moment that people started saying “I’m a real fan because I watched the Vox Machina campaign, not just the Mighty Nein,” they were told to shut the hell up and let people like things. A foot was stuck into the gate and wrenched it back open before it could close. And you know what? The fandom has absolutely exploded in the last two years. And I have yet to run into a single instance of someone gate-keeping for it that didn’t get an overwhelming and harsh rebuttal from the folks who welcome people to the fandom.

Sadly, the Critical Role fandom is distinct from the Dungeons & Dragons fandom on this point. But therein lies the difference. D&D is over 45 years old, ten times and more the age of Critical Role. And the “satanic panic” over it in the 80s made a lot of D&D players very protective of the hobby, only amplifying that. The age of your average Critter is only mid-to-late 20s or so. At 37, I’m a little bit of an outlier, I have found. The Critter fandom is big on TikTok which I... don’t grock, frankly, because I’m turning into an old fart. But I’ve never, ever, been made to feel unwelcome because of that difference. It’s been a refreshing experience, frankly.

In contrast, I really feel like I’m only now starting to be considered a “true Whovian” by the old school Whovians. It took me 15 years and required me getting hooked on the classic stuff (which I was all too happy to do). People who have never seen any of the classic stuff and don’t care to are often still looked down upon. That needs to change.

The Critical Role fandom is still young and all of this may prove to be overly-optimistic in the end. But I think it has the opportunity to be the first big fandom not to go through the gate-keeping cycle. I sincerely hope we can hold on to that. The cast and crew are a big part of that, with how they always hammer on the idea of inclusivity and engage so directly with the fandom. “Don’t forget to love each other” is Matt Mercer’s sign-off at the end of every episode and serves as a constant reminder. And if more casts and crews of more fandoms do that sort of engaging in the future, it will help break the cycle of fandom gate-keeping all the more thoroughly. This is a fact that production companies are starting to awaken to as Millennials, comfortable with social media, age into positions of authority.

So, welcome people in, gate-keep, almost cause the whole thing to collapse, repeat. That’s the cycle that fandom has engaged in for three generations and more. But I think we’re on the cusp of breaking that cycle, for the most part. The idea that you can be a fan of something without knowing absolutely everything about it has been gaining very visible traction in the last five years or so and it is wonderful to see.

Now, please, people. Don’t prove me wrong.

#fandom #Doctor Who #Critical Role #social observations #gatekeeping #toxic fandom

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steve0discusses · 5 years

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Yugioh S3 Ep22: Mokuba Gets Murdered

So today’s is...a long update, I may half it, but I’m gonna be away from my computer a whole bunch for a few weeks so like...if I half it you’re gonna be waiting on that other half for...kind of a while and by then I may have sort of forgotten what was happening in the first half. So I dunno, maybe I’ll just make this a huge ass...59 cap post.

honestly it’s mostly 59 caps because, surprisingly, no one dueled this episode.

I KNOW.

When I saw that “To be continued” last episode I really thought I’d have to deal with more paper-form BS but Noah finally plopped over at the beginning of this episode so I guess he’s just officially done playing cards now. Everyone has been turned back from being stoneware with absolutely no consequential brain damage. Probably because you could not do any more damage than what has been previously done.

But don’t worry he’ll get some more brain damage in by the end of this episode.

Remember the plot point that Tristan was slowly becoming a real monkey? I think he forgot about that because he’s been a monkey for...a realllllly long time and he kinda like...continues to just be Tristan. Maybe Tristan was nearly a monkey to begin with?

We also get a rare sighting of an actual real deal hug on this show and it was from the last person you’d ever expect.

Surprisingly heartwarming for this show.

If that duel disk goes off, both of them are super dead. Hugging in a duel disk might be the most dangerous sport either of these boys have ever done.

Anyway, because Seto and Mokuba were the first ones to go, they have no idea that any time has passed at all.

He seems pretty OK for Yugi just nonchalantly taking his dragons but this is VR and...the cards aren’t...actually here. So like...Yugi didn’t actually steal anything? No proof, no crime.

To be honest, no one should have any cards in any of their decks right now, but the show kind of forgets that these digital cards need to be drafted each round. It’s fine.

Anyway, in the wake of losing a card game, Noah just remembered that he’s a freakin god of this universe so he decides to just go for plan B, which you would think would be most people’s plan A.

(more under the cut)

Ya Noah could have peaced out at any point in this show, but because he was trying to impress Daddy he just...didn’t?

Not like it mattered because the integral plot device was like “oh yeah guys, I’m in this show, too, completely forgot. Oops, is it too late? It’s already episode 22? Eh, better late than never.”

and don’t be deceived by the cap, it showed like...every millennium item for some reason. You’d think it wouldn't show the rod because Yugi doesn’t have that, but apparently Marik up there on the ship was like “the hell is this going off for?” and then just shrugged it off.

Noah gets...mostly this image of a well waxed Pharaoh while Yugi gets images of Noah’s memories, where he finds out each of Yugi’s friends and Yugi himself were stuffed in little sci fi VR pods. You’d think that they wouldn’t need to access Noah’s memories to realize that. Should’ve been the first thing they realized when they got here. In VR.

Like, think about it, the only other person that got kicked out of here was Pegasus. And to kick out Pegasus it took all of Yugi’s friends except Bakura. Apparently this time all Yugi needs is for Pharaoh to focus (and Bakura to be just...youknow...present, I guess. Assuming the writers haven’t forgotten that Bakura’s still in there)

I think they mostly did this memory exchange as an excuse to give us a review--thing is there’s so much weird stuff to review it feels a lot like exposition. Like I don’t remember seeing these big boys before:

There is just...a lot of design put into this robot you only see like a couple of times. Some concept artist when all ham so I wonder...was this his OC? I’m so glad his weird OC sleepytime bot got into Yugioh. Good for him.

So at this point I kinda turned to my bro and was like “this feels a lot like the Matrix, doesn’t it?” and then in rolls in the bright purple cloud of “you don’t even know.”

I’ll just leave this here.

back to Yugioh.

Yo I kinda forgot in the mayhem that Kaiba’s Dad was clearly here this whole time. I figured we’d run into him, I didn’t really think he’d Castlevania it up in the sky in order to do it.

So this show presents these two brain orb AI monsters as being pretty well...alive...in that Orb because we’ve only heard this explanation from two AI beings who are pretty sure they never died. But, are they alive, really? Did they really transcend to a higher plane like Noah thinks? Or was this a thinly veiled murder/suicide? Did Gozaburo Kaiba kill his son because he could not allow him to be crippled, seeing an opportunity test out this crazy orb AI that needed a human brain in order to function--knowing full well what he was doing? And then later kill himself after losing everything to Seto?

Like, I’ve heard that in the Japanese version, Gozaburo commits suicide and in the English version he does not. But, at least from where I’m sitting...I think he commits suicide in both versions. Like, maybe it’s because I’m an adult watching this and not a child, but it feels like Gozaburo did this in order to set a trap for Seto as his last screw you before he left this mortal plane.

Either way, Noah’s kind of an idiot and so he still has not caught on. What followed was the three very worst Kaiba boys just kind of shouting at eachother for 5-10 minutes but, like, on completely different wavelengths, every single one. The lack of communication between these dumbasses right after Gozaburo drops this horrifying bomb of “and then I killed myself to kill all of you” was actually pretty low key hilarious.

The dub then got very confused as to when Noah died. Really confused, I’m not going to analyze that too much, it’s dub problems. Dubs do that sometimes.

Also, this is a new Noah outfit. Huh. shame we never got to know it.

Anyway, as the truth comes out, suddenly this accidental Kaiba family therapy

sesh everyone else in this High School class is privy to just starts escalating.

OH OK, KID’S SHOW.

Yo, remember how many jokes I made that Kaiba was raised in Outer Heaven? Apparently I was WAY closer than I realized.

And speaking of Metal Gear:

Anyway, remember that random idea that Noah dropped on us to consume the world with VR tech? I knew it would come back, just not quite like this. Not with a nice Power Point slide show via the sky from the Most Evil Mufasa.

And that was how Kaiba’s Dad decided “I was once scorned by a rude 12 year old, lets destroy every human on Earth and extinguish all civilization.”

So basically the entire freakin ocean is just filled with these robots? Just completely polluted with nighty-night bots?

Yo.

So like this whole time we’ve been following Marik, who’s trying to destroy the world, and keeping babysitting tabs on Bakura, who’s trying to destroy the world, but Kaiba just wants to be the best and show everyone else up so he just decided to set in motion the entirety of humanity’s destruction BEFORE THIS SERIES EVER STARTED.

*coughs* I can’t believe Yugioh just did the Matrix better than the Matrix.

Now listen, I know what I said--and I have to tell you, the Matrix was one of my favorite movies when it came out when I was wee middle schooler and watched it secretly at my friend’s house. It was rated R for absolutely no reason, and so I wasn’t supposed to watch it--but I did anyway and it was very thrilling to break the law like that. Keanu Reeves did a middle finger--yes, that was the cuss that put it into R territory--and I was like “wow, he is crazy!”

But, while it’ll always hold a place in my little tween heart, that one did not age well. Mostly because, once it stepped away from the cave allegory you have to start asking questions like “so...how did everyone get trapped in the Matrix?” and it was like “because the robots needed batteries. So like...humans...became batteries...rather than..........actual batteries.�� which makes a lot of sense when you’re like a child and you don’t know how batteries work, but as an adult it’s like “...so they’re not very smart robots, then?”

But, Matrix came out about 1999, and because it was super cool, it influenced everything. This show was about 2001, and Kaiba’s wearing a floor length coat--I really think there may have been a bit of an influence?

And I think they may have explained how all humanity would get placed in the Matrix better than that movie series that was like 3 movies and a bunch of video games and a very violent cartoon. And like, the Yugioh explanation is still balls insane, but hey, at least this motive makes sense.

And then, at this point, Mokuba’s Stockholm Syndrome came back, but this time it’s just plain old fashioned Stockholm Syndrome, no weird brainwashing on the part of Noah was necessary to make any of this happen.

Like I really think Moki’s finally snapped. It’s finally snapped. He doesn’t know have any idea what is going on anymore and desperately needs a nap. A nap that will last like 5 days. Moki needs to go to the beach and just...not move for about a straight week to recover from the mess of this tournament.

Most people at this point would be like “yeah I think maybe Noah isn’t trustworthy” but this group of kids--this is the only group of kids that sees a cackling undead digital ghost dude hunched over like this who has already tried to kill them on multiple occasions--straight up just 10 minutes ago--and says “he’s probably much better now.”

Just 10 feet away from them, Marik is desperately trying to finish the arc he started, but keeps running into filler problems. Which is this door.

This X-men door, the most powerful filler villain in the Yugioh universe.

I can’t believe they explained away Marik--super powerful evil villain that bested Bakura--by using one singular door that kept him occupied for like 20 episodes.

Apparently the bedtime bots are equiped with Huge Lasers.

Which kind of defeats the purpose of keeping everyone alive to send them to the VR realm?

But whatever, they have huge lasers, but little do they know, Marik can shoot lasers out of that necklace he stole off Bakura, and he didn’t actually do that and it’s kind of a bummer. Instead he reflects the lasers with the rod. Which then makes you wonder--is that why Bakura didn’t use his laser attack then? Because of the reflection issue?

Sorry I can’t believe I even entertained that idea. Clearly they completely forgot about S1 at this point. It feels like it’s been so many years since things were simple and you could shoot lasers out of your eyeball/necklace.

And then, canonically, Marik gave up on this door. This normal ass door. The only foe he has ever stepped down to.

This door has faced the ultimate evil, it has stared down an actual fallen god born of anger and violence, who, after thousands of years steeped in an abusive tomb, has risen to consume the entire world, but, this door, using all of it’s bolts and joints you can buy at your local Home Depot, sent that fallen god back whence he came. Which was a blimp. Marik came from a blimp.

This door should be the 4th God Card.

(I want y’all to know that I originally wrote “5th” god card and bro corrected me because I literally thought there were 4 this entire time.)

The amount of time that Mokuba was not kidnapped after Yugi and co just saved him? I want to say maybe 10 minutes. He got one hug from Seto, and then went back to the kidnap zone.

Apparently, Noah decided to trap everyone else in their old memories--which is an interesting way to recap what happened in S2. The trap doesn’t trick them very well because these guys are missing a fair amount of memory at this point, so they basically got served a bunch of weird nonsense.

So while those guys are going to go down their very, very short memory lanes, Noah takes Mokuba to the same exact Dave & Busters that Tea and Yugi went on a date to back in like S2. Like this is the same exact one. And what’s nuts is I think they even redid the backgrounds, but definitely used S2 as reference. It’s quite the devotion to detail.

Noah tried to invent some sort of weird mystery doorway but then Mokuba was like “yeah it’s in the game right? Don’t say no, because I am hankering for some arcade time--don’t touch the other stick though, I want to play solo.″ and then Mokuba just proceeded to play this 2 person arcade game by himself while Noah just...watches.

In Dukes memories, Tristan looks the same as Duke’s always perceived him.

There’s just a lot to take in here.

But don’t worry, it gets weirder than three cultists on one small toy monkey, because here comes some romantic development that had absolutely no basis in reality. This is just so freakin weird, get ready for it.

They definitely almost run over Duke and Serenity--Joey’s sister--and Joey does not not seem to have any reaction to nearly running over his little sister on the road, because one second later, this is happening.

And that was how Noah managed to insert his JoeyxMai fanfiction into Joey’s head and tried his damnedest to make it canon. It’s wild. I can’t believe Noah was a shipper this whole time. Like, who else has he been secretly shipping???

Noah had a split second to use his fabulous orb brain to deal with Joey, and while he used actual memories from the other kids, when it came to Joey, he sort of stopped and went “oh yes, my OTP!”

So then, in this split second Noah kinda turned to his pile of Joey fanfic he keeps stashed in the corner of his Orb Brain Consciousness and was like “well I have this really good one I wrote where Mai wasn’t in the coma yet, and there clearly aren’t enough romantic sunsets, and like...what if they were getting married? Oh man I love this AU! This is so good, can’t wait to upload it to his brain, OMG, he’ll love it. What if they were in Hawaii or something!? OMG they’re so freakin cute.”

Like everyone else on this show who has a canon relationship had to go through some type of sweet hell terror memory but Joey--just Joey--got to go on a date or something and then seal his love with a ring. Like we’ve seen many indicators that Noah is a small child but this was probably the biggest indicator we’ve seen of Noah’s maturity level when he was like “this is how relationships work.”

Again, Yugioh just writing your fanfiction for you--did you want an AU where Mai and Joey’s age wasn’t an issue and she also wasn’t in a coma yet and was uncharacteristically like “lets run off and get married?” because usually you’d have to search Google for that content, but now it’s just here and given to you on a silver platter.

At about the same time they were fully convinced none of this was a real memory, they all ended up back here, minus Kaibas. Joey apparently took the longest amount of time although he had the most bizarre set of memories. He probably just wanted to see where that fic would pan out, but like most fic’s, it kinda stopped updating at about chapter 3 so he gave up on it.

Just a few blocks away, Mokuba and Noah’s playdate from Hell is going according to plan, and Noah is just biding his time before snatching a body. But, before he does, I guess Noah did want to see what happens in this arcade game Moki’s playing because he’s just been standing here admiring Mokuba’s work.

Even Noah at this point is surprised at how deeply Mokuba has Stockholm Syndrome. Noah was just not prepared for how low Mokuba’s expectations are regarding his evil and pathological brothers.

Actual line of the show through this whole ironic experience, Noah just saying “wow...I almost feel bad”

Anyway remember that DDR game--that huge screened DDR game where Tea had a dance fight with Johnny Steps during her date with Yugi?

Did you ever think it would, one and half seasons later, become the scene of a horrific crime?

Did you ever think that the crime that would occur on the inane DDR machine that Tea once had a dance fight on against a guy wearing fringe moccasins would later be the scene of a family betrayal where Mokuba got murdered by his own dead secret older brother?

Because I sure didn’t.

Anyway, now equipped with his ultimate form--a very small kid with hair that weighs more than the kid itself, Noah rises from his grave.

I kind of love evil Moki, not going to lie.

Apparently Moki’s evil in Season 0 so I’ll probs have to go back to that season eventually to get more of that evil Moki fix.

I hope this is the type of scene that will end this entire show, TBH, just a crazy ass Moki cackling over the bodies of every other card player. That would be such a good way to end this series.

Anyway, I don't know whennnn the next update will be. I may update on that later--maybe not, but until we meet again, we’ll just leave evil Moki here in this nearly abandoned SeaQuest, laughing his face off over the sweet tunes of some Plantasia.

youtube

#yugioh #yu gi oh #episode recap #photo recap #S3 Ep22 #yugi muto #seto kaiba #mokuba #tea gardner #tristan taylor #serenity wheeler #joey wheeler #duke devlin #I can't believe Mokuba's freakin dead #again #Joey considers matrimony and it's not even the weirdest thing that happened this episode #ygo #tw suicide

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pennnotes · 5 years

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a sort of rant about a Persona album review

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/k-pop-stars-bts-the-biggest-boy-band-in-the-world-sbx3nn7r3https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/k-pop-stars-bts-the-biggest-boy-band-in-the-world-sbx3nn7r3https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/k-pop-stars-bts-the-biggest-boy-band-in-the-world-sbx3nn7r3https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/k-pop-stars-bts-the-biggest-boy-band-in-the-world-sbx3nn7r3This is my opinion on an opinion-piece (lol) please don’t flame me and also don’t go flame this critic, hate isn’t beneficial constructive discussions are :)

A summary of some points I wanted to touch on if you don’t want to read:

-You don’t have to like anybody’s music or art or actual existence and you are entitled to your opinions

-Artists are humans and not pre-packaged dolls (despite how some may come across) so try to consider commentary on artists themselves in a more personal context

-Please consider getting to know something before you trash it in its entirety, especially if your job is to critique things :)

-When considering an issue try to take a step back and gain a wider perspective before you get too involved in your own

aNyway I read this Persona album review from The Hollywood Reporter and I was confused + disappointed + sad. Here’s why:

His actual review of the album was strange and dismissive. Here’s what I mean by ‘strange’. He said basically every song was bad (which is his opinion of course) but he did it in such a weird way. Kind of like how he described the whole album as “a tasty snack that leaves a bitter aftertaste” lmao what?? He’s trying to spice up his piece with some rhetorical techniques I guess... He could have just listed technical reasons for him not liking songs and moved on but he had to make everything super spicy (for lack of a better word). This is somewhat understandable because he’s a journalist and he’s trying to add interest to his piece and I feel a bit ridiculous giving this any more attention so let’s move on. More importantly, he was very dismissive. He criticizes the album line up, says the group has no clear music taste and calls them “prolific dabblers” (I guess he’s trying to say it’s hard to tell what genre they actually prefer/aim to work in? It’s weird how some see this as a con but others admire this sort of diversity. I guess I can understand it somewhat, but personally, I like hearing lots of different sounds from artists I follow). Some of my other favorite lines include “The songs play like unintentionally comedic genre mistakes”, “The new record is bracketed by its weakest tracks, “Intro: Persona” and “Dionysus,” particularly off-putting songs that leave a lingering sour aftertaste” and “Like much of the mega-pop-artists’ work, this album in particular feels like it’s packaged on an assembly line and by committee”. My head hurts from trying to stop at three lines this whole review is absolute gold. He calls RM’s line about Icarus in Boy With Luv “stodgy” and “middle-school-level” and then sums up all their references as clumsy. His perspectives on their songs really make me sad because it seems like he got no meaning from them and it’s like he was hearing a whole different album than what I listened to. It isn’t the fact that they weren’t his taste that upsets me, it is the fact that he felt they were so empty when I found them to be so full. (This really applies to their work as a whole - not every song is super meaningful to me, but regardless, they are genuine and there are some that have stolen my heart).

He actually made a four-in-one in one album/artist/genre/fanbase review. I have a hard time understanding this. Admittedly I don’t read album reviews often but I am pretty sure that critics aren’t supposed to be reviewing entire genres(fact-check me please. I read some about writing album reviews and I didn't see much on this point). If he was going to do such an extensive review I wish it had been a separate piece not labeled as an album review and I would hope it would also boast well-informed opinions based on extensive research (am I hypocrite?). To me, it seemed that he didn’t actually know that much about the group, the fanbase, or the genre and, in turn, he seemed to know very little about the songs. It felt like he was writing off not just this album, or BTS’ music, but BTS themselves as fake and shallow. Like they are sell-out musicians who were perfectly crafted to have mass appeal and have shaped themselves for success in America and that’s all there is to them???? Their songs apparently have no meaning? It’s like he takes these tiny seeds of truths from the Korean entertainment industry or global marketing of popular artists and uses them to grow a commercial farm of opinions (I think I need some metaphor tips from him my game is weak). This article seriously gave me flashbacks to that interview/commentary from The Times. Throughout, I got the sense that he was just shoving in certain passionate opinions he had which were formed through minimal research. Like he just went on social media, watched a few videos, browsed a few fan tweets, heard a bit of the music and took it from there. He comes off as condescending and his delivery reads like he thinks he is gifting some profound revelations to all the intellectually-stunted fans out there. To sum it up it seemed like he didn’t understand that A) BTS’ fanbase is huge and is made up of many different people B) BTS are actual human beings C) The messages in the music (and there are messages there) are genuine. I think this article on the whole Times controversy sums up my feelings on several issues fairly well. (I know it’s Pop Buzz I’m linking it bc the perspective is valuable tRuSt mE pls)

The acknowledgments he made throughout the piece. For example, he acknowledged that their music has helped people but it felt like at the same time he was labeling people who were touched by their music as shallow. I should have probably expected this because generally large followings get shit for stuff like that but I hoped it wouldn’t be mentioned (meaningfulness behind different music is always being debated). He says that in this album “BTS keeps doing BTS” but makes it feel like a diss. Like some sort of pat on the head for everyone involved (sure honey BTS is one of a kind...one of a kind at being stellar a commercial product to please the masses). Similarly, he acknowledges that they have meanings in their songs but sums it up as “Reddit-bait” and paints it all as a marketing tactic. There is some truth in the point that adding lots of easter eggs and stuff is to garner more interest, but there are some very heartfelt messages in their music as well and it seems like a sizable oversimplification to chalk all of it up as part of a ploy for money and fame.

Sort of disclaimers:

I got the sense that reviews aren’t supposed to just be about whether something is genuine or not but more about whether it is technically good (which is why I stated that, in my opinion, the writer should have focused more on that and less on social commentary). I don’t think BTS is a revolutionary group whose music or concepts are unparalleled. I am not a crazy fan with too much time on my hands, I’ve been thinking about the different takes on music people have for a while and have wanted to write something specifically like this since The Times incident. I welcome commentary and I want people to continue to share honest opinions and feelings I just hope for some more professional (is insightful a better word?) commentary from people whose job it is to write reviews. I understand writers are busy and no one has time to do extreme research but I still think more extensive research is necessary for opinion pieces (reviews, commentary, etc.). I mentioned “seeds of truth” earlier and I think the reviewer has some good points they are just addressed horribly and don’t really directly relate to the album itself.

Feel free to correct me, share your opinion, tell me “it’s not that deep sis” or scroll past this entirley lol bye

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giantpredatorymollusk · 5 years

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This is a story about farming. It is quite long. I think it may be worth reading anyway, but unfortunately I have no way to prove it. I’ve also tried my best but I still don’t know if it actually makes perfect sense in every way? But it did all actually happen; so it all kind of has to make at least a little bit of sense, even if doesn’t really seem like it.

The trouble all started in 1901, when my great great grandfather emigrated to the United States from the modern-day Czech Republic and later, in 1911, bought a 90-acre farm there. Many years later, most of that farm came to belong to my grandfather, and roughly 10 years back he retired from his job selling tires at the tire store and started making the 40 mile drive north to the farm to spend his summer days there and plant a garden (in the area that wasn’t already rented out to be planted with soybeans.) Not long after that, he had enough produce to start selling stuff at a nearby farmers’ market in an upscale town, physically not far from the farm, although psychogeographically immensely distant from that chunk of desolate, isolated, fairly representative rural Ohio.

I was dragged in in the summer of 2015, from the end of June to the beginning of July, mostly pounding stakes into the ground so that the roughly 1000-1500 tomato plants that my grandfather had planted that year (with occasional help from my grandmother and uncle) could be tied up between them and the fruit wouldn’t lay on the ground and rot easily. I hated it there (in fairness, I probably would’ve hated anything that involved leaving the house during that time in my life) and when my dad got me out of it (by hiring me to help him paint a house) I quickly divested myself of the money I’d received there to wash my hands of the place and resolved never to go back. My dad was never in favor of me going to the farm, knowing as he did that the work could be dangerous (operating old, large, and unreliable tractors and backhoe with minimal training or safety precautions; running large, dangerous power saws in creative ways without the proper guards, gear, or safety precautions, mostly to put points on stakes; operating saws in an unsafe manner while standing in the raised bucket of the old and unreliable backhoe in order to trim trees; etc) and probably also suspected that I personally (especially then) was fairly vulnerable to being psychologically manipulated into performing difficult tasks that I was unhappy doing over a long period of time while being underpaid under some circumstances. Hmm.

I returned to the farm for the entirety of the summer of 2016. After barely surviving/graduating my senior year of high school that year I had given up on life and settled pretty quickly back into the routine of the daily back-and-forth farm trips. It is true that I was getting paid; it was also true that I was being challenged and learning things, mostly the basics of planting vegetables, like which plants were cold-season crops and which were warm-season and how far apart to space the transplants, and how a PTO works on a tractor; and it’s certainly a fact that on a personal level, I was still completely taken in by my grandfather’s wit and farm wisdom and overpowering managerial confidence. I made myself completely subordinate to him, and blamed myself when his ideas for what we should be doing next were completely obvious to him but rather opaque to me; I remember it frequently happening that he would tell me what to do and I would reflexively go off to do it, and then realize I was unclear on what he meant and have to timidly re-approach him for further instructions. This kind of slowed down the learning process. Much later I would also realize how superficial his constant confidence could be, and how it was often less the natural attitude of someone who knew what they were doing and more a tool he used to impress people into doing things without thinking too much about any of the potential alternatives. Also, according to my admittedly fallible memories, I was getting paid $35 per day for what were generally between 7 and 8 hour days. I was, in fact, 18 years old that year and probably could have gotten a different job that for one thing paid a better hourly wage and for another left me less reliant on the caprices of my family; but this was neither a thing that happened nor a thing that was expected from me, least of all by me. My internal world hadn’t expanded as I’d grown older; my universe of possibilities was limited to the things that were already present in my somewhat simple life. This was probably symptomatic of some larger problem or problems with the functionality of my brain at that point in my life.

One can become trapped in many different ways. You can be trapped in a specific city, or a zip code, or in a geographic region sorely lacking in cities, or one which they are considered entirely strange and outlandish things; in a job, in a career, in a lifestyle, or in a set of lifestyles considered realistic given your high school grades, ability to connect with others, and standing in society and life; in a friend group, or in an identity, or in a lack thereof, or in any number of the various rules and regulations that govern how one is allowed to interact with the rest of the human race; in a comedy, a tragedy, a pastoral narrative, or in any combination of the above kinds of story that one no longer wishes to be part of. For all I know, thanks to the stereotypical farm benefits of character building, meaningful work experiencing, and nature connecting-with, working at the farm for that year may have actually been good for me; nevertheless, I wish that it had been my last full summer there. I had showed up, learned some stuff, earned a small amount of money, and, in retrospect experienced at least the majority of what this particular 90 acre area of the planet had had to offer. Alas.

2017! This year, we had a pretty consistent schedule that I can remember clearly to this day: we left at 9:30 AM, when my grandfather would pull into my driveway and blow his horn, and got back between 7 and 8 o’clock at night. Built into that schedule is a one hour commute each way (we both lived about 40 miles away from the farm, which was actually inhabited by my uncle, who was often around and occasionally helped with the work but frequently made fairly abrasive and critical comments (if often correct) comments about it (for example, about the fact that our work day started so late in the morning)) and a daily grocery store stop for drinks for the cooler. I was the driver (once my grandfather’s problems with what I suspect is undiagnosed narcolepsy had almost killed us a couple of times) which you would think give me control over the stereo, but I quickly learned that my grandfather had pretty specific taste in music (country from the 50s and 60s) and a temperament unsuited to most podcasts. Obviously, most of that time in the daily schedule was taken up by the work day (so generally either planting tomatoes (which gets a little less rewarding after about the 500th one, which that year only put us at about a quarter of the way through the tomato plants, not counting the hundreds of eggplant, cabbage, and zucchini plants or the miscellaneous corn, squash, and beans), pounding stakes and tying string for the tomatoes, or harvesting tomatoes) which lay at the end of the lonely highway on a lonely work site at which the same 2-4 people showed up every day. (It became four people once you counted my younger brother, who came up to the farm that year until the start of marching band season got him out of it, and who fortunately made it his main job to get everyone to pack up and leave promptly at the end of the day. Once he stopped showing up, and even though I persuaded my grandfather to move the schedule up an hour so that we could get home earlier, we never left as consistently as we did when he was there; I didn’t have the stamina to find my grandfather (who didn’t carry a phone or a watch) and tell him what time it was at the end of the day every single day so that he could start to think about leaving.) I was being paid $40 a day, with a $20 bonus for market days once they started, which with our theoretically 35-hour work week ends up being about $6.29 an hour? Huh. In addition to the extra $20, the market season was nice because picking stuff is less tiring and more rewarding than planting stuff, and because I got to see way more people every day in the form of our market customers, even if I was interacting with them mainly through the intermediary of my grandfather.

Another nice thing is that this is the first year I have a decent photo album for! I started experimenting with old 35mm film cameras in late June and by early July I had my first interchangeable-lens digital camera, which I relied upon to keep my brain alive for large parts of the summer. I have… a lot of pictures from this season.

Finally, at the end of the year, I ended up in college. Any criticisms of my grandfather that I might offer up here have to be tempered by the fact that he did in fact drive me to the local (relatively) cheap higher-education dispenser and basically registered me for me (technically, I applied but there’s a 100% acceptance rate.) This was something I desperately wanted to do but was unable to make happen by myself. I won’t say that my grandfather every really understood the problems I went through while experiencing formal education, but as perhaps the member of my family least comfortable himself with the concept and culture of higher education, he was the most willing to notice and accept that I needed help getting started with it.

However, I did do quite badly that semester (I started out enrolled in 4.5 classes and ended enrolled in 2, with a C average) and going to the farm to work 4 days a week still (after morning classes and also on Saturday) did not help that except in that it provided a convenient distraction from it; an opportunity for me to distract myself from my frustrations by wearing myself out.

Why did I come back to the farm for 2018? I wasn’t happy there in 2017, I have the journal entries to prove it. Reasons: it was the path of least resistance, it was something I was more already familiar with than any other job, and my grandfather remained a very difficult person for me to say no to. (Also, he asked me (and my brother) to commit in midwinter, when it still seemed non-threatening and pretty far away.) The schedule was pretty much the same as I described for last year except that for some reason we went up 6 days a week as often as 5 (weather permitting.) My brother went up with us for the same period of time as he had previously, but was even more ornery this year than he was the last, which was an accomplishment; this didn’t stop me from being grateful for his presence. Mostly, I recruited him to work on whatever I was working on during the day, whenever I had a specific project: like building a fence around the second patch, or digging drainage ditches on the lawn, or moving the rainwater collection tank trailer to water stuff before Grandpa could realize that something that he didn’t plan for us was happening. My uncle became extremely fond of complaining that we were getting less done working on the same thing together than we might have working on different things far apart; this may have been true, but I was unwilling to test the theory.

As I implied above, I had a lot more freedom this year to pick projects that I thought needed to be done instead of following instructions all day, as long as I could seem confident about it under scrutiny later. I responded in two ways: I started wearing earbuds and listened to music and occasionally podcasts for most of the day, which was great except that it ruined earbuds and made me feel slightly spacey like I wasn’t even physically there sometimes, given that it was the main input that was actually making it to my brain, and I gave myself three new jobs. The first was to pick, display, and sell produce at a roadside stand that I set up back home (ideally without attracting too much attention from my uncle, who was doing the same thing); the second was to start picking for and selling at a new weekday farmers’ market; and the third was to fix an old dump truck that had been sitting in the back barn for the better part of the decade with a broken brake line, with the help of my dad, who came up to the farm a few days to show me what to actually do. The stand was very successful but 20% went to my mom for stocking it during the day and another 20% went to my grandfather for owning the farm; the new farmers’ market only required me to pay off my grandfather but had too many vendors for the customer base and was generally very slow; and the truck project was a huge disaster that consumed countless hours and brain cells: one brake line burst after another, we ended up having to remove and replace the two brake cylinders in each of the back wheels (which necessitated jacking the 12.5 ton vehicle up and removing both rear wheels and axles), the wiring for the lights was fucked from a previous botched repair job by a person or persons unknown, the bed needed to be attacked with the farm’s one working boom truck to get it to even move, and even after it was going up and down smoothly the hydraulic pump was occasionally leaking fluid, which I was neither qualified for or willing to try to fix; then, during the first test drive with a potential buyer, the radiator apparently exploded, and he convinced my grandfather to sell it to him for $1000, which was split between him, me, and my dad and uncle for helping (more or less.) I eventually calculated that with those three extra projects in addition to my regular salary (up $5 a day but without the weekly bonus, resulting in a net raise of $5 a week) I nearly made minimum wage working there that summer. (Hey, if Quinn is going to read this, I should probably note that minimum wage in Ohio was $8.15 an hour, at least when I wrote this, it’s up to $8.55 an hour now.)

Also, after going on three years of the whole “pull into Mitch’s driveway and blow the horn for a while” routine, the horn on my grandfather’s F-150 finally gave out and he locked the keys in my car while climbing inside of it to use its. (He did admit to this but also told me that I should never have left the keys inside of a car with “automatic locks.”) I had a much better spring semester this year, but it still wasn’t made easier by my 28 hours a week at the farm (plus the commute) right up until October 25th, when I finally quit.

Performance review:

Another part of my feelings about the farm that I have to mention is that the whole time I was there, I was pretty well aware that it was not nearly as productive as it should have been. One large part of this was just flawed soil management practices; by the time I got there, my grandfather had been planting mostly the same plants in mostly exactly the same spots for nearly 10 years, which is absolutely not how any of that is ever supposed to work. He sent soil samples away for analysis, got back reports prescribing long lists of fertilizers to be applied in massive quantities to help production, and then went back to using what he was planning on putting down anyway (mostly starting fertilizer (which we dragged around in 5 gallon buckets for the entire planting season), calcium spray to try to prevent previous years’ blossom end rot epidemics, and some poorly labeled sacks of miscellaneous stuff that he had gotten at a farm auction and that had been taking up space in a barn for years.) My grandfather’s managerial attitude was that all ideas were suspect unless they occurred to him first, which meant it sometimes required some stamina to get certain things done; he would ride up on the lawn mower and stare at you suspiciously if he wasn’t sure of exactly what you were doing.

Like this.

(Of course, the farm was not really run with the purpose of maximizing production, anyway. My grandfather kept it going year after year initially because he was retired, and wanted something to take up his time, and because he wanted to turn himself into a farmer; later, he got the idea that he was going to turn me into one.)

The other main obstacle to growth was the fact that we were surrounded by 80 acres of soybean fields that were at a slightly higher elevation than our plants, which meant that 2 inches of rainfall was more than enough to flood the place. This is not actually a good thing for any plant’s growth (except for cucumbers, and I guess sometimes zucchini.) I ended up (with my brother) digging hundreds of feet of drainage ditches in 2018 to try to combat this. Like, with a shovel. We had a trencher, but its hydraulic pump leaked fluid like a sieve, which had prevented it from being used for years, kind of like that dump truck I mentioned fixing earlier. Other broken down equipment included two boom trucks (one of which was specifically designed just to lay railroad ties), two full-size tractors (an Oliver and a Farm-All), a handful of mechanical tractor attachments that lay scattered throughout the barn-adjacent grass, a smallish red Troy-Bilt riding lawn mower, and a 1963 Buick Riviera.

On a personal level, going to the farm every day felt like dying? It was long hours of difficult, tedious, low-paid work in a desolate and isolated location. It was sort of like a sensory deprivation chamber, but for thoughts and feelings instead of for senses. On one hand, I regret every single miserable second of it, and hope to never see the place again for as long as I somehow manage to live (sadly unlikely); on the other hand, I do think it made me more appreciative of the moments when I do feel like I’m alive in the world, even when they’re not exactly easy ones. I have more enthusiasm for certain types of fear now, like driving to a strange and distant city to see a band play by myself, actually talking to the host in the AirBNB there, and descending into a strange subway system without really knowing how I’m going to get anywhere I’m trying to go from there; or signing up for classes for next semester without knowing exactly what they’ll be like, and talking to the strange person sitting next to me, or even just emailing the professor to ask for an explanation of an assignment that I don’t understand. It reminds me that I’m not as trapped anymore.

This contradicts what I want to be true, which is that the farm was just a background event in my life, instead of something that defined it for all of those years. The things that I was doing in the background of this, the story about farming, were the things I now realize were actually important to me at the time: taking those pictures, going back to school, the music I was listening to while I was out in the field, pounding in tomato stakes… I was also re-learning the piano in the evenings when I still had the energy. Unfortunately, the farm did define that part of my life to a large extent because of the way it served as an obstacle to me pursuing those things. The thing is, I wasn’t really trapped there, in any real physical or consequential sense; the farm took over my life because I was unable to recognize and act on the fact that I did have access to real sources of happiness.

Also, I guess the whole time I was technically committing tax evasion?

Anyway, whenever I see one of those posts about how nice it would be just to leave society and go live on a farm or something, this is what I’m thinking of.

#yes. long. maybe save this for when you already know that you're going to be bored #if anyone actually makes it to the end please interact

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mintyjin · 6 years

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mermaid au: jooheon

I’ve heard your cries for part two of mermaid! au changkyun and shownu (seriously, guys, you’ve flooded my ask box lmao), but listen, this concept is vibing with me tonight. enjoy!

once, a long time ago, there was a war between two cities

no one knows for sure why it started, but everyone agrees on one thing: it had something to do with magic

one city specialized in magic capable of moving and creating fire and earth, the other in taming the wind and water

you can kinda see where the conflict arose

years passed, bringing bloodshed and loss to everyone involved

to this day, it is the ugliest war to take place on the grounds and in the waters of your kingdom

and with all ugly wars come stories

this war is no exception, but the stories have a bit more of a peculiar tone

you see, it’s rumored that, to protect their magic and their lives, citizens of the wind and water city did something strange

they dove into the ocean and their legs morphed into tails, their necks creating small gills

and there, in the ocean, is where they dwelled as the earth and fire lineage took the throne, afraid of persecution, of further genocide

and there, it’s said, they remain

no one can definitively prove they exist, but every now and then, there are sightings of these mythical, magical people

and everywhere you go, there are murmurs saying one day, perhaps someday soon, they will grow weary of the ocean and walk back onto land

and on that day, the age-old war will continue

you see, the current monarch is a wielder of fire and earth

and he hasn’t forgotten the stories of his grandfathers

how do you know this so certainly?

well, you’re his only child, the first in line to the throne

while the story entertains you, you’re not so sure it’s entirely accurate

would generation after generation really subject themselves to a life of constant concealment?

magic, too, has its limitations. you know of gill spells and swimming potions, but could there really be a magic powerful enough to allow an large group of people to survive for so long underwater?

that said, you can’t just shrug off the legends completely. the war, after all, did happen

one day, during a particularly heinous arithmetic lesson, you gaze in boredom out of your window, which overlooks the sea

the sight of the rolling sea, ornamented with birds diving in and out of the water, gives you an idea

you should escape this lesson for a little while and go let the water run over your toes

the castle gets so stuffy, and not just because nearly everyone within it is a fire wielder

you excuse yourself to the bathroom, quickly ducking into the hallway of servants’ quarters and slipping through the door at the end

you leave your shoes at the door and dash over to the sand, relishing the way it shifts beneath your feet

and then you sprint as fast as your legs allow so that no one sees you leaving

and when the castle is out of sight, your lungs are burning and your feet feel heavy but you’re so exhilarated at the feeling of freedom that you throw off your unnecessary layers of clothing and hurl yourself into the ocean

with strong strokes, you pull yourself to the calmness of the deeper waters

you turn so that you’re floating on your back, feeling the cool, gentle lull of the waves beneath you, closing your eyes against the sun

and it’s so warm and peaceful that you just lay like that for a while, feeling your stresses melt away

when you grow bored of that, you watch the sun send specks of light dancing along the waves and you decide to try to mimic that light with your magic

you conjure up some small sparks in your palm and lightly blow, casting them onto the sea

they spark and pop like tiny fireworks, the ashes crumbling in the water

not exactly what you wanted

but then you hear a splash behind you, followed by a voice

“Woah... that was actually very pretty.”

you whip around, hand raised, ready to fend for yourself if need be

but the sight that greets you forces you to falter

there, in front of you, is a boy. a very handsome boy, to be exact. with small, dark scales on the sides of his eyes and neck

and unless your eyes are tricking you, you can see the beginnings of a silvery tail beneath the water

mermaid... he’s a mermaid

you shake off your surprise, still poised and on guard. “Who are you?” you ask

“Jooheon. You don’t have to be so tense, I won’t hurt you.”

you still hold your stance, aware that his people don’t have a great relationship with yours

he just sighs and narrows his eyes and says, “Just because our ancestors fought means we have to? And here I thought this could be a fun conversation.”

and you finally put your hand down but you’re still unsure

this could be a trick. he could be waiting for you to relax.

“What do you want?” you ask

he shrugs. “Not sure. I’ve never spoken to a human before.”

and you're like... huh

“I’ve never spoken to a... mermaid... before.”

and to your surprise, he laughs, throwing his head back a bit, his smile magnificent

“Then this should be interesting. Have you ever seen water wielding before?”

you shake your head, no, and he smirks

he dips one hand into the ocean and cups some water in his palm, blowing a bit of air into it not unlike how you did

and then the water seemingly comes to life, taking the shape of a dragonfly and flying to you, landing on your shoulder

and it’s beautiful magic, you can’t deny it

you also can’t fight back the astonished smile that spreads across your face

what you don’t know is that jooheon is like, wow.... she's cute...

“This is amazing!” you exclaim, your previous hesitation forgotten

and jooheon’s like, “Naturally.”

you roll your eyes but seriously, you’re impressed

“Ok, Jooheon,” you say, noticing how he starts when you say his name, “but can you do this?”

you hold your hand palm up, concentrating

and then a flame bursts from your hand and you focus harder, controlling its movements so that it forms a small orb of fire floating a few inches above your palm

and jooheon is already transfixed because he’s never seen fire this close before, but then you snap your fingers and he watches in amazement as it blows away in some invisible wind

and naturally, he has to one-up that, so he shows you another trick of his

which leads to a whole thing where you’re each showing off your magic to the other

you end up laughing a lot, half at this boy’s antics and half in amazement as he conjures things you never could’ve imagined possible

but then you notice he’s giving you a funny look and you ask why and he goes, “You never told me your name.”

“Oh, it’s Y/N.”

“Ok, Y/N, do you trust me?”

“Depends. Why?”

he points behind you, towards the direction of the palace. “I think someone is looking for you.”

you turn and he’s right- even from a distance you recognize the silhouette of your teacher and groan

“I know a place you can hide out,” jooheon says, “but you have to trust me.”

and you’re a little hesitant again but you nod and he pulls you underwater with him

your eyes fling open, bearing the sting of saltwater so that you can see what jooheon is doing

he makes a fist with one hand and then brings it to your mouth, motioning for you to open

when you do, he pushes what feels like a small bubble into your mouth and, to your surprise, you can feel yourself breathing

breathing..... underwater

you even notice the sting in your eyes disappearing

you’re sure your surprise is written all over your face because jooheon laughs, but when you go to open your mouth, he clasps a hand over your lips and shakes his head

you take the hint- don’t open your mouth

from here you can see the entirety of his tail, which is gorgeous

it’s silver, like you thought, but with dark translucent fins

he gently grabs your wrist and pulls you towards him, wrapping an arm around your waist so that you’re pulled right up against him

and it’s not like you mind,,, he’s very warm,,, and uhhhh also very attractive

then he places his mouth above your ear and whispers, “Don’t panic, ok?”

and starts swimming, still holding you

and you’re just looking around in amazement because on one hand, there’s jooheon, who is very fun to look at, but then there’s also schools of fish you’ve never seen up close before swimming by

and you’ve never seen the sun through water like this

it’s all so beautiful and fascinating and you can’t believe you’ve gone your whole life without seeing it

but before long, jooheon swims to the surface and you emerge from the water to find that you’re in a small sort of enclosure

like a small cave

“Where is this?” you ask

“Right behind the castle,” he says

you can’t conceal your surprise, saying, “What? I never knew-” before catching yourself

jooheon has been friendly enough, but that might change if he finds out you’re a member of the royal family

the family that caused his people to jump into the water in the first place

thankfully, he doesn’t seem to have any suspicions

“So, what’s human life like?”

“Kind of boring, to be honest,” you say, launching into descriptions of your teacher and various classes

and you think it’s horribly monotonous but he’s hanging on to your every word and asking questions left and right

he’ll interrupt a story to ask what a bathtub is

and you're like oh yeah I guess you wouldn’t really have a use for one would you

he tells you stories of his life, too

of exploring sunken shipwrecks and huge, expansive corals with his friends

and it’s all so alien and interesting that you figure you could listen all day

but before long, it gets dark and a bit cold, so you think you should go

he notices your glances and is like, “Ah, they’re probably looking for you back at the palace, aren’t they?”

you flinch. “How did you know I live at the palace?”

“I get that our societies are a little separated, but my people know of your family.”

“Oh.”

and he senses that you’re uncomfortable so he takes your hand in his, a blush dusting his cheeks

“I think you’re a good person. Regardless of what our families did to each other, you’re good,” he says

and you squeeze his hand, not meeting his gaze

“Y/N,” he says, oddly serious, “I don’t want this to be the last time I see you.”

and you’re like.... yeah, me neither

and you agree to meet him in that small cave behind the palace wednesday night

you pull yourself out of the water, jooheon’s hand steadying you to keep you from falling

and once you’re on dry land, you bend down to kiss his cheek, smiling to yourself as it turns bright red

“Goodbye, Jooheon.”

“Nononono don’t say it like that it sounds so depressing and as if I’ll never ever see you ever again-”

you just laugh and wave goodbye

as you leave, you turn around and jooheon is just staring at you, watching you leave with his chin resting on his hand

he gives you a smile and waves goodbye with the ferociousness of a little kid

and you’re like.... if the rest of the kingdom could see this, peace would stand a fighting chance

but for now, you’re just excited to see jooheon wednesday night

#monsta x #monsta x scenarios #monsta x imagines #monsta x reactions #monsta x jooheon #monsta x jooheon scenarios #monsta x jooheon imagines #monsta x fluff #monsta x jooheon fluff #jooheon #jooheon scenarios #jooheon fluff #jooheon imagines #mermaid au

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alymation · 3 years

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The Excellence that is Pixar’s Soul (2020)

We all know that Pixar movies are generally well written and have a tendency to pull on the heart strings with relatable themes and wholesome characters. The company was definitely proven, time and again, that they can make adults cry if they wanted to and know just how to do it. Yet, though some may see it as formulaic; and to a degree it may be, Pixar seems to be able to evolve with the times and adapt to the social climate of the present. This is what I realized when I watched their latest Animated Movie: Soul. Soul is a little less ugly crying and more happy realization tears, for me at least.

Soul is about, Joe Gardner, A part-time high school band teacher, who lands the gig of a lifetime playing with one of the best Jazz Musicians: Dorothea Williams and her band the same day that the school offers him a permanent full-time job. Joe has the typical mother who just wants him to be stable in life and take the permanent teaching job of course but his heart was in the music and in playing Jazz.

While on his way home from auditioning and landing the gig with Dorothea though, what appeared to be the day his life would change forever, his life ended. (Don’t text or call while walking). Joe finds himself on the path to the “Great Beyond. Quite freaked out of course, Joe jumps off the conveyor belt like path and find himself in the “Great Before” or what they now call the “You” Seminar. He meets the Jerry’s, the entirety of the universe condensed into forms humans can comprehend. After the mandatory tour of the You Seminar, Joe is brought to the Mentor’s orientation and is promptly paired up with an unborn soul called “22″ who has been in the You Seminar for a long time and hasn’t been able to gain her “earth badge”, A badge that would allow a soul to get to earth.

As he quite literally stole the name of the actual mentor who was supposed to be there, Joe begins to show 22 his life and, in the process, realizes how his life amounted to nothing (something most of us can relate to). With 22′s apathetic feelings toward being born into the world and Joe’s desperation to get back to his life to fulfil his life’s purpose, they device a short lived plan to get her earth badge and give it to Joe so he can go back to earth. As mentioned, this was short lived and they resorted to seek the help of Soul mystic Moonwind who traverses to the soul world to help lost souls get over their “obsessions”. Apparently, when you really get into the zone with something you tend to lose yourself to what you’re doing and momentarily traverse to the Cosmic Realm. Of course there are those who are swallowed by the things that they do and become lost souls.

Moonwind successfully gets Joe back to earth but 22 was pushed to earth with him. Joe woke up in the hospital in a cat’s body while 22 was in Joe’s. Following a string of rather funny scenes, they meet Moonwind on earth and ask him to put Joe back in his body and get 22 back to the You Seminar. They agree to meet at 6:30 in front of the lounge that Joe is supposed to play at that night and so Joe and 22 head back to his apartment. They run into Dorothea and her band on the way and Joe “loses” his chance to play with the band as Dorothea thought he was going crazy seeing him in a hospital gown in the street. Though, the band’s drummer, who got Joe the gig in the first place, told him to still show up at the lounge early and he’ll talk to Dorothea about it. With that sliver of hope, Joe, or 22 in Joe’s body, gets ready. As he does, 22, who is still in Joe’s body meets one of Joe’s student’s and is fascinated by how she, one minute, wanted to give up on Jazz and all of a sudden wanted to keep at it. 22 also meets one of Joe’s friends, Dez the barber, after a terrible hair accident. She is equally fascinated at the thought of Dez being happy despite not achieving his life long dream of being a vet. Lastly, 22 meets Joe’s Mom after tearing the pants of his suit and Joe expresses to his Mom, through dictating to 22, why he loves Jazz so much and of course, His mom offers him the suit of his father and altered it to fit him.

As 6:30 arrives, 22, Joe and Moonwind meet in front of the lounge as planned but 22 expresses that she wants to search for her “purpose” for living on earth and doesn’t want to go back to the You Seminar. She runs away and is chases by Joe the Cat. Through out this whole madness, another “celestial being” called Terry had been pursuing Joe and 22 as she discovered that Joe was a run away and was really supposed to already pass on. Terry catches Joe and 22 and take their souls back to the You Seminar. Miraculously, 22′s earth badge is complete and Joe attributes this to having lived his life for a day. Angered by this, 22 gives Joe her earth badge and storms off. Joe returns to earth, convinces Dorothea Williams to let him play and have the night of his life. it wasn’t until after the show that Joe still feels empty after having supposedly “achieved his dream”. His thoughts dwell to 22 and the memories that 22 made in his body along with memories of just living his own life. He traverses back into the Cosmic Realm as he gets into the zone of playing his piano and meets Moonwind who tells him that 22 has become a Lost Soul.

Joe tries to confront 22 in her lost soul form but she runs away from him. Eventually, 22 “swallows” Joe and Joe sees what’s inside the storm that has surrounded 22 and manages to get her back. He tells her that she is ready to go to earth and should go to earth and live her own life. In true Pixar fashion though, this wasn’t the end for Joe either. As he was on his way to the Great Beyond, the Jerry’s decided to give Joe another chance at life because he had inspired them.

As we are discussing the story of Soul, I would like to take this time to just admire the amazing Animation that this movie show cases. Lighting, clothes, dust? All beautiful and smooth and just perfect. The idea of making the “Jerry’s” somewhat 2D in comparison to the souls in the You Seminar is genius and something I’ll get into later. In addition, I don’t think I can say anything to justify how much I love the soundtrack of this movie. Personally, I was never the biggest fan of Jazz. I mean, I admire the talent that musicians have but this movie just used music and the theme of it so well in this movie that I can’t put it into words.

Going back to the story of Soul and how I feel about the film, It was, in my opinion very very well done. They had a dedicated research team, much like how they did for Coco, that made sure that how they portrayed Joe and the African American community was accurate and not stereotypical. Which should honestly always be a part of movie making especially if the story you’re trying to tell is particularly specific to one ethnic group. Being Asian, I didn’t know much about the accuracy of the movie to African American culture so I can’t comment on the accuracy of their portrayal but actually having a team to make sure that you were being accurate is something to mention and applauded. They didn’t just want to make a film that appeals to the African American community, No. They made the decision to hire people who could help them accurately portray the culture and the people. Let’s hope Disney’s upcoming movie, Raya made a decision to do this too as the trailer and promotional materials seem to give off a somewhat South East Asian vibe.

In terms of quality of the story. I believe they did a superb job with getting their message across. The “obsession” with achieving your dream can sometimes cloud your present. It’s here that the old saying: “It’s not about where you’re going, it’s about what you do to get to where you’re going”. In this sense, we get to see that Joe is convinced that his purpose in life was to be a Jazz Musician and play Jazz professionally. What this movie tells us that, you weren’t born with a predetermined “purpose”. In juxtaposition with the rest of the You Seminar where souls are given “personalities”, the last thing a soul must have before getting their earth badge is what they called a “spark”. This supposed “spark” was initially presented, or what the audience was made to think, as a soul’s purpose. It was by the end of the Film do we realize that this “spark” isn’t a soul’s purpose. In fact, the Jerry even seemed to laugh at the idea that mentors thought about the purpose of their lives. That last box gets ticked when a soul is ready to live.

Personally, “When a soul is ready to live” seems rather vague. How does an infant soul know when they are “ready” when most of the souls who are on earth don’t even know when their “ready” to fall in love or open themselves up to other people. The concept of being “ready” is rather vague and subjective. To a degree it does explain why 22 took so long before she found her “spark” but it doesn’t explain what was it on earth that made her get her spark. In my opinion, that last box is ticked when you find something that makes you want to live. Something that makes a soul excited about life. I think this runs better with the themes of the movie as it is about living your life to the fullest every day you get. “Carpe Diem” as they say. I think 22 got her spark on earth and not at the You seminar because what excited 22 about earth wasn’t any invention or hobby or activity that was in the Hall of Everything, it was the people. The people and how unpredictable they and life in general was.

At first it was the unpredictable-ness of life on earth is what scared 22 as she expressed that she preferred to stay in the You Seminar because, although it wasn’t exciting, she knew what to expect. It was this same unpredictable-ness was what made 22 want to live. She experienced it with the sudden change of mind of Joe’s student from wanting to quit Jazz to suddenly wanting to keep at it. She experienced it with finding out that Dez the Barber was still happy despite not having achieved his dream of being a vet and she experienced it with Joe’s Mom who, despite being firm about wanting him to have a secure and stable life, changed her mind and supported Joe at the lounge.

This is what Joe realized by the end of the film as he was reminiscing about his memories. He achieved his dream, sure but this made it bland for him now as he was able to predict what was going to happen to him after that first show. Dorothea Williams told Joe as they exited the lounge: “We come back tomorrow and do it all again”. This didn’t sit well with Joe and realized that he was so blinded by his supposed purpose of living and achieving it that he was expecting something more spectacular. He romanticized what his life would be after that night so much that when he got there, it didn’t live up to his expectations.

Soul shows us that Life is unpredictable and that’s not a bad thing. You may not always know what to expect and what’s going to happen but that’s what makes it worth living to the fullest. Of course it is still very important to have goals and dreams and something to work towards but it shouldn’t hinder you from experiencing the roller coaster ride that is life. Achieving those dreams shouldn’t be the only thing that defines your life. Soul is telling us that you are more than your goals in life, you are more than what you achieve or didn’t achieve. You decide who you are, what you do and how you do it and remember to not limit yourself to one thing.

Some people tend to forget this. They get enveloped with not knowing what to do with their lives and with not achieving the goals they set up for themselves that they don’t realize that it’s Ok to not know. In the You Seminar, 22 became a lost soul because she was taken over by the lack of purpose of her life. The amount of people/mentors that have told her that she wasn’t good enough and that she wasn’t going anywhere took a toll on her and she succumbed to it. Society like’s to pressure people into achieving their dreams and in being successful if not for themselves for their family or the people around them.

As an Asian, I’ve personally had that problem. The constant pressure to find what you’re good at and hone that skill so we can make money off of it one day and be successful is very real. When we’re not doing well in school or earning money or doing something “meaningful” in society’s eyes, our life is being wasted. Constantly being strained about the purpose of our lives and what we’re living for is quite burdening and often times, when we do “find” that purpose we let it drive our whole life closing off all possible roads that can lead us to other things that we also find interesting.

As much as it is good to “know your purpose” for living to keep you on track, we should also keep in mind that life is unpredictable, One day the purpose of your life may be one thing and the next it could be something else. Nothing is constant. Everything fluctuates one way or the other. Go with it.

#Soul Pixar Purpose Meaning Film Animation

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avalonbayblog · 6 years

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Availey Encyclopedia Part 2 - Bailey

Background

Abigail Bailey Rose Mitchell was born *February 28th in Canberra, ACT, Australia to William Mitchell and Eleanor ‘Ellie’ Mitchell (nee Howe). At the time of her birth, William and Ellie were not married, though marked Bailey’s last name as ‘Mitchell’ on the birth certificate. Bailey was born on time at 6 pounds and 2 ounces. Since then, she’s had a habit of being punctual at nearly every turn.

When released to her parents, Bailey was a little delayed in her milestones, especially in comparison to Avalon. However, it was nothing of her parents to be worried about, the doctor explained, she didn’t have any developmental problems, Bailey simply moved at her own pace. She preferred to watch those around her and learn before grasping concepts and taking a stab at them herself. It is that natural curiosity that followed Bailey through the rest of her life, aiding in her academic pursuits as she got older. While William and Ellie were excited to have Avalon to bring them close together in their relationship, as such relationship started out in an affair as William Mitchell’s wife was dying of cancer unbeknownst to Ellie, Bailey was an accidental pregnancy. Something of which Bailey didn’t learn until much later.

Much like Avalon, when growing up Bailey was a curious baby, wanting to understand how everything worked. Unlike Avalon, she didn’t throw many tantrums and continued to sit quietly while watching those around her. However, when she started to walking, she did nothing more than follow her sister around, wanting nothing more than to be with her. Avalon, in turn, was excited for her baby sister to play with and protect. Their parents treated her with as much love and adoration as they showed Avalon when she was an only child.

Avalon doted on Bailey since she was born, playing with her as much as possible, hugging her, kissing her, changing her, feeding her, and watching her whenever asked with little to no complaint. Ellie was over the moon with her second daughter, still there was no marriage between her and William Mitchell. (Unbeknownst to her, William already had children of his own; eldest Ryan and daughter Dana only a few years older than Avalon). Avalon took her role as the older sister needing to protect the younger one very seriously.

However, once William started to treat Avalon differently, wanting her to be as structured as possible, Bailey didn’t notice as much, William then turned his adoration and affection to her, to Bailey’s delight, then making her daddy’s little girl. Ellie, on the other hand, continued to treat her daughters the same, giving them enough cuddles, hugs, and kisses while spending as much one-on-one time as she could with both her daughters.

William, moving up the ranks of his government position, determined it was time for Bailey to go through the same planes of work that Avalon had; spotless cleaning and straightened beds, Avalon tried to help as often as possible. Bailey, on the other hand, took to it and her academics like a duck to water, always seeing a new challenge and tackling it head on. Intellectually, she knew there was a reason for everything to be spotless and in its place so she took to the new measures in stride. It wasn’t long before Ellie and William both noticed Bailey’s intellectual advancements, they were sure to nurture it; giving her as many books for grades higher than her as the time passed. However, it was when she started school that her love of academics and her advanced stage in school made her a target for bullying.

At first, she took it in stride, keeping her head held high. But with fragile emotions, Bailey couldn’t keep it quiet for long and whispered her secret to Avalon. Quickly, Avalon made it her mission to protect her little sister form bullying as much as she could. She’d walk Bailey to school, holding her hand the entire way, and waited for her when her classes ended to stave off any teasing she received.

Bailey never noticed the mounting tensions between her sister, her father, and her parents, living blissfully and naively unaware that her life was about to change forever. Behind the scenes, unbeknownst to Avalon and Bailey, it came out that Captain William Mitchell had not been forthcoming about his life to Ellie, thus making it difficult for them to continue their relationship. With the parents unmarried, a custody battle came to fruition with Captain Mitchell being the more financially stable to take their daughters while Ellie fought to keep them. The girls were used as leverage against each parent and as things become heated, were sent away to live with their aunt in Angel Grove. However, said aunt did not currently live in Angel Grove, thus leaving Avalon and Bailey alone.

Knowing their parents are fighting and having had her parents bad mouth each other to her, Avalon is reluctant to go back home thinking neither of their parents want them. She starts to harbor hatred for them by the time they land in Angel Grove and vows to protect Bailey. Bailey, on the other hand, continues to reassure her sister that their parents will come back, not knowing the truth that was being hidden. But she loved her sister and trusted her dearly, too young to know what to do herself. For their first few months in Angel Grove, Avalon and Bailey lived in women’s shelters, trying to avoid any mentions of where they came from and talking to the police. Avalon looked for jobs, working under the table at a few places, but found money came in slowly.

Bailey watched her sister as she met Chase, Summer, Skye, and Lance, the current members of the Vipers who had been ‘watching her for a while’. From the very beginning, Bailey disliked the gang members. Even before knowing they were in a gang, she had a bad feeling about them and voiced it to Avalon every chance she could. Nevertheless, when hanging out with them, Bailey did notice that Avalon did receive a lot of money…as well as the bruises and open wounds she tried her best to hide. It didn’t take long for Bailey to figure out what was going on, that they were a gang and trying to initiate Avalon into it. She begged and pleaded for Avalon to stay away from them but Avalon reassured her she knew what she was doing. That the money was worth it.

Understanding Avalon was simply trying to protect her, trying to provide for them, Bailey made sure to keep herself safe and away from them, going to the library every day. She noticed the looks the librarians gave her, often having to field away questions of why she wasn’t in school—“I’m homeschooled,” to keep attention off her. With Avalon in the Vipers, she continued to make enough money for them to live in a one bedroom apartment that quickly became a home to them as well as Angel Grove.

She couldn’t help but notice the sudden appearance of the rainbow colored super heroes—the Power Rangers—that appeared one day and saved them from the monsters that showed up like clockwork. It was the most exciting thing she’d ever seen, and wanted to learn more about them. She rattled on and on to Avalon about them and while she knew Avalon didn’t care so much about the Power Rangers, she talked about them as well, theorizing on who they could be.

It was during that first year of monster attacks that, on her way to and from the library, Bailey noticed a group of teenagers who were always together in the park and at the youth center. She didn’t pay too much attention to them, other than seeing they wore the same colors nearly every day.

Bailey’s noticed Avalon slowly cut herself off from everyone around them, only trusting her. Bailey, on the other hand, tried to stay as positive as she could, wanting to be the bright spot for her sister to rely on. But all the while, she had the need, the want to go to school. She wanted friends, someone to talk to. Avalon denied the possibility at first, then gave in, as Bailey knew she would. Her sister loved her and would do anything for her.

Avalon and Bailey enrolled into Angel Grove High and Angel Grove Middle School where Avalon soon ran into a bunch of teenagers who had a very peculiar fashion sense and Bailey meets a boy her age who she can’t seem to ignore…

Personality

Bailey’s personality stays stagnant throughout most of her run as a ranger. She’s very bright, inquisitive, happy, loyal, curious, na��ve, and willing to do anything for a friend though not quite confident. Unlike Avalon, she doesn’t become too jaded and cynical once moving to Angel Grove, wanting to keep the faith their parents would come for her. Though Bailey’s aware of the trouble they’d get into if it were revealed they lived on their own, if it was revealed Avalon was in a gang, so she keeps quiet. All the while, Bailey continues to hold out hope that their parents would come for them. She continued to hold them in high regard.

It isn’t until they visit Australia on Avalon’s school trip that Bailey starts to realize what her father is truly like. She starts to become a bit harder but continues to hold love for her father. Over the years, Bailey becomes more confident in herself and her abilities as a ranger, making her speak up more rather than continue to be everyone’s ‘little sister’.

Throughout the entirety of the Avalon and Bailey series, you can see her personality shift as she becomes grows into being a more confident and self-fulfilling young woman though continues to hold her bright and bubbly personality.

Other notes

* - I am still unsure of what Avalon’s and Bailey’s birth years as well as the exact gap of age between them. In New Beginning, Avalon is 25 and Bailey is 18, thus making them at least seven years apart. However, at the end of their high school years Avalon is a 18 year old senior and Bailey is in Middle School and about 13. I’m aware of the discrepancies in ages and am working to fix it.

Part 1

Part 3

#Power Rangers #fanfiction #Availey #Avalon Mitchell #Bailey Mitchell #Avalon #Bailey #Availey Encyclopedia

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im-youngmin · 7 years

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[TRANS] 170728 MXM’s Interview with Xportsnews

Group Interview:

Youngmin: As someone who has the dream of becoming a singer, I’m very thankful for having had the chance to let people know of me through ‘Produce 101’. I’m very proud because it feels like I’ve reached my goal of debuting through this program. Although I’m worried that a lot of my lacking areas will be seen since I received this love so suddenly, I am in the middle of working hard in order to show my growing self.

Donghyun: I’m happy and thankful to have gotten a chance of debuting. If I received love for my overflowing charms during ‘Produce 101’, then I believe that I gained the opportunity to show my musical side through MXM, so I’m very content.

MXM’s pre-release title song, ‘GOOD DAY’, is a refreshing and bright song that is fitting of the first idol group to come out of their company, Brand New Music. It garnered interest once it was known to have been composed by WANNA ONE’s Lee Daehwi.

Youngmin: A lot of people predicted that a song would come out with Brand New Music’s hip-hop style. However, it’s formed with songs that are bright and strong with energy. ‘GOOD DAY’ is a song that we practiced we Daehwi, but it fit well with the concept, so we included it.

Donghyun: There’s a Busan dialect killing part by Youngmin hyung, but looking for that is one of the fun elements of this. I personally think it’s stronger than ‘I’m a bit intoxicated’ (T/N: Youngmin’s line from ‘Boys and Girls’). Since both of the pre-release songs are self-composed, I think you’ll be able to see MXM’s refreshing charms more.

MXM’s promotions are at the same time as WANNA ONE’s promotion period. As much as Lee Daehwi and Park Woojin from Brand New Music are under WANNA ONE, I feel like the meaning must feel different.

Youngmin: We haven’t been able to contact Daehwi and Woojin due to being too busy. However, what I believe to be meaningful is how the four of us practiced together, but will now be standing on the same stage. Them as WANNA ONE and we as MXM.

Donghyun: Even though our teams are different right now, since they are people who will be in the same team as us, I am thinking of it positively and we are supporting each other from our own spots. Although it’s different and fascinating to meet as a different team, I think we’ll still support each other a lot. It will be really fun if we meet. That also goes for WANNA ONE as well as other trainees from ‘Produce 101’ Season 2.

As expected of a duo, these two showed how they perfectly match. They especially showed showed off their friendship by saying that they have always picked each other for the trainee they are closest with. So to these two, what does the other’s existence mean?

Youngmin: I have always picked Donghyun as the trainee I am closest to. We lived together during ‘Produce 101’ as well and had a lot of instances of being on the same time. And our personalities normally match really well too. Although our tendencies are very different, they strangely fit well. So one of the meanings of our team name is ‘MIX & MATCH’, but I believe it’s because we think of each other a bit more and give into each other that we can match even better in the future.

Donghyun: I haven’t been a trainee for a long period of time, but the hyung I relied on the most while doing it was Youngmin hyung. We don’t express it well to each other. However, since he’s the hyung I relied on the most, I’m thankful and happy with the fact that I’m able promote as a unit under the same team.

When I asked to sum it up in just one phrase, Im Youngmin replied, “A real younger brother who seems like a friend” while Kim Donghyun answered “a needle and thread”. These two who are always together answered that the only people they contact even on breaks are each other. Kim Donghyun quickly added, “I’ll be the thread. Hyung, you be the needle,” and brought out laughter.

We asked what they wanted to say to fans since the two of them did not forget to express their thanks towards fans’ love during the entirety of the interview.

Youngmin: Although we were trainees, we were able to come out with an album due to the large amount of love we received. We heard that there were a lot of people who waited for a long time even after ‘Produce 101’ ended, so we worked hard to prepare this. Although we’re still lacking, we will work hard in order to show the best side we can, so I ask for a lot of love. We will show our continuously growing selves.

Donghyun: In order to give back to the large amount of love we have received, we are working hard in preparations. We will work harder on the album and show a better side, so I think I will be thankful if you could give a lot of support.

Youngmin’s Interview:

He is now 23 years old. What could have been the reason behind Im Youngmin creating his dream of becoming an idol?

Youngmin: I really liked dancing since I was in my 2nd or 3rd year of middle school, so I started it then. While dancing a hip-hop style, I naturally fell into hip-hop. I think I started my dream of being an idol ever since then.

However, he said that while being a trainee, his thoughts strengthened in wanting to be an artist who just does music rather than become an idol. It was also connected to the reason why Im Youngmin chose Brand New Music and not another place.

Youngmin: “Since I normally did hip-hop and rap, there were a lot of seniors that I liked in Brand New Music. While thinking it was a company I really wanted to go to, I heard that they were starting an idol project, so I applied and made it through the auditions. At that time, there was an offer from another company as well, but my ‘favorite’ was Brand New, so I ended up picking this. I believed that even if Brand New Music were to make an idol group, they would still help my artist tendencies grow.

To Im Youngmin who respects all artists in Brand New Music and sets them as his role models, we asked him who his role model outside of the company would be.

Youngmin: I really like Block B seniors. Of course I like their music style, and I think the color of a team that can harmonize well despite each of their colors having a variety is charming. On my recent guesting of tvN’s ‘Problematic Men’, Park Kyung senior was there, so I told him I was a fan, but because I was so nervous, I wasn’t able to express it enough, so that was regrettable. I also wanted to take a picture, but because I was so nervous and tense, I wasn’t able to ask. I want to go there next time and tell him for sure. Also, ever since I was younger, the person I set the most as my role model is Park Jaebum senior. It’s really cool to see how he can do everything including dancing, singing, and even producing. It’s also really cool to see him take good care of the singers in his company as the CEO of AOMG. I also thought a lot about ‘It would be nice if I were like that’. In the future, I hope to become that kind of artist.

Im Youngmin was a trainee whose fandom power was amazing even within ‘Produce 101’ Season 2. Including the subway support advertisements, they sold-out in a hoodie that he wore and showed that he has rose as a ‘trend’.

Youngmin: When we first did the broadcast, I didn’t know what was going on outside. However, from just seeing the support I received during the concert, I was receiving so much love. I’m really thankful for the advertisements as well and a lot of people sent in letters, but while reading one-by-one, I gain strength from their efforts. There were difficult times while preparing for this album, but I gained a lot of comfort from letters full of love’s sincerity that I haven’t received before.

When I told him that someone I know had Im Youngmin as their ‘ultimate bias’, Im Youngmin showed a happy smile and said, “Whenever I hear things like that, I feel really happy and good.”

To his subway advertisement, he stated, “Whether it be idols or someone who has dreamed of becoming a singer, there is an ideal image about things like birthday advertisements. I had the thought of ‘I want to be there too’, but I didn’t know I would receive it so quickly. I was deeply moved. Chinese fans also gave a lot of advertisements, but I hope an opportunity comes where I am able to visit their country and meet them.”

‘Produce 101’ Season 2, which has allowed Im Youngmin to rise as a star. What could his most memorable moment have been?

Youngmin: When we did our first recordings for ‘M! Countdown’, it was really difficult. It was a scene where 101 trainees danced to ‘나야 나’, but we matched the choreography for the entire day and set the formations through the night. Our recordings were the next day, but it was tiring to the point where I wondered whether or not be drained out if this continued. After we finished, I felt a big sense of freedom in thoughts that I successfully did it. Since I successfully did this, I felt that we could endure through almost any difficult situation that may appear.

Finally, the last live broadcast day. While the credits were rolling, Youngmin’s sobbing was captured on screen and made many fans feel sad.

Youngmin: I didn’t even imagine that would get captured (on camera). After it was over, I talked it with a lot of trainees, but Kim Taemin trainee was among one them. Since he was someone who had to leave due to being sick, I wasn’t able to contact him often, but he came to me and asked ‘You had hard time, right?’, but that one phrase made me explode in tears. Since there were a lot of trainees, I thought I wouldn’t be seen. I’m not the type to cry often, but once it exploded, I just refreshingly cried. I even heard ‘You cried prettily’ later on.

Im Youngmin, who went through many complications and is now debuting. It was recently known that he is appearing on tvN’s ‘Problematic Men’, and he is now officially starting promotions. What could his thoughts on his first variety show guesting be like?

Youngmin: The day before the schedule, I really almost threw up. I’m more on the side of liking math and science as well as logics. That’s why I was happy to the point of jumping when I heard about the guesting. A desire to do better formed, so I prepared this and prepared that, and before I knew it, I was so nervous that I was only able to sleep for around an hour the day before. During the recordings, they made the atmosphere very comfortable, so I was able to become less tense from the middle on. Although it’s regrettable that I wasn’t able to talk well, I think it was still fun. I asked the PD-nim to call me another time again. Saying that I can do even better.

Donghyun’s Interview:

Kim Donghyun, who is in charge of MXM’s vocals, revealed that he started his dream of becoming an idol ever since he was in his 3rd year of middle school.

Donghyun: I was in a band for my school club activity, but while performing during festival stages, I naturally formed my dream of becoming a singer. My parents’ strongly opposed at first, but I pleaded to them for a really long time. And my parents’ hearts weakened a lot from that. Now they really like it. They even say ‘Work even harder’.

When asked about how he joined his company, Brand New Music, Kim Donghyun brought up Hanhae’s name. He said that while listening to his songs a lot, he was able to gain a fantasy towards Brand New Music

Donghyun: The teacher who taught my singing had ties with the rookie development head of Brand New Music, so she introduced me to an audition. Since it was a company I really liked, I told her I would definitely do it. Because I had the thought of Brand New is a ‘company that’s good at music’ embedded in my mind. I auditioned with the thought that I would have much to learn and through that tie, I was able to become part of the company like this.

We asked who the role model of Kim Donghyun, who respects all of Brand New Music’s artists including Hanhae, would be besides someone from their company.

Donghyun: There are two people, but for music, it would be Park Hyoshin senior. Ever since I first started music, I wanted to learn from him and I practiced my singing a lot while always watching him. He improves on himself, changes his vocal styles, and even does musicals. Seeing how he works hard in various ways, I thought that I should always learn from him. Also, another person is ZE:A’s Im Siwan senior. He does his role as a member of his team and also receives a lot of acknowledgement as an actor as well. Because I think he’s a really cool person, I want to learn from him. If given the opportunity, I would also like to try out acting.

Kim Donghyun, who received a lot of love during Mnet ‘Produce 101’ Season 2, confirmed his high popularity through subway ads from fans even after being eliminated. To someone like that, when does he feel his popularity the most?

Donghyun: It’s really fascinating when I walk on the streets and they recognize who I am. When we were doing filmings, no one recognized me, but since many are recognizing me now, I feel that I’m receiving an even bigger love. We were given a break after the ‘Produce Finale Concert’ ended, but I was able to slightly feel (my popularity) upon having people from my hometown of Daejeon recognize who I am.

When asked about his most memorable moment during ‘Produce 101’ Season 2 filmings, Kim Donghyun answered, “Everything is memorable.”

Donghyun: But if I had to pick something that was most memorable, there was a time in the middle of filmings where I had to move to the interviewing area. There was a time where the PD-nim rode a golf cart, put me on, and dropped me off at the interviewing area, but during those short 3 minutes, I felt a big sense of freedom. The wind was refreshing and relieving. I remember talking endlessly with the PD-nim.

If you search up the name ‘Kim Donghyun’ on portal sites, there are almost 80 people with the same name. So does he have any thoughts on making a stage name?

Donghyun: I don’t think I’ll use a stage name during MXM promotions. However, won’t I use one later when we become complete and come out as a group? But if I am to use one, I want to use a Korean name rather than a name of a different language. There are many names that are pretty with just using Korean. I especially like pretty names like EXO’s Baekhyun senior, so since my name also has ‘Hyun’, I would like to similarly have a pretty name.

Where does Kim Donghyun, whose self-composing skills are amazing to the point where he participated in the composing of MXM’s new song, ‘I Just Do’, get his inspiration from?

Donghyun: I try to write songs whenever I have a chance. Because I normally enjoy watching movies, I’m the type that gains a lot of inspiration while watching a movie. I also read a lot of books, but I’m also receiving inspiration from Ha Sangwook’s collection of poems. The book I read recently is a book gifted by a friend called ‘The Temperature of Language’. Because my heart feels warm from it and I’m receiving a lot of influence musically, I’m currently trying to read a lot.

original source: xsportsnews 1, 2, 3 translation credits: @woojinprk

#produce 101 #produce 101 season 2 #mxm #im youngmin #kim donghyun #t: translation #t: interview #e: good day

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whitechrysanthemumsandlilies · 7 years

Photo

Taking Bomb Ass Notes on a Budget

Yes I am a Capricorn

Not all of us can afford the top of the range stationary of our dreams and with Enrolment day for colleges in the UK fast approaching, I thought Id share a comprehensive guide on everything I’ve learnt on how to make and take successful notes and how to get the grades you want on a low income budget.

Be warned: This post is mammoth.

A plan of 3 phases.

Phase 1- Pre School year

1.1- Gather supplies

For this to work, you need only the bare necessities- coloured pens/pencils, a ballpoint/gel pen, a 5 pack of highlighters (in place of midliners), and 2 notebooks (In Class and At Home)

In Class notebooks- Your In Class notebook is for scruffy notes taken on the fly. All these notebooks need is a lot of pages and a flexible margin. I recommend the metallic, geometric, spiral bound notebooks from Poundland for this. They’re simple but surprisingly good quality for a £1 product, the pages dont even bleed!

At Home notebooks- This is where the actual fun lies. At Home notebooks are the notebooks you use for your studyblr posts when you slip up and procrastinate an hour into your studies (we’re all human). Anything that gets you excited to rewrite your notes is good for this (re-writing your notes not only means you’ll be allowed bragging rights because you’re technically revising every night, you can sneak in the formatting and extra info you need without compromising on your note taking time in class)

Coloured pens/pencils/highlighters and a pen- These are pretty obvious supplies, used for the AH notebook’s colour coding and general decoration. The type of pens you use depends on how much your notebook pages bleed. Some recommendations I have are- 0.3mm assorted colour fine liners from The Works (The colours are great and they don’t bleed as much as other budget brands), the 20 pack of ballpoint pens from ASDA, and the 5 pack of highlighters from EITHER The Works or WHSmith if there’s a Back to School sale on.

1.2- Learn how you learn

This is possibly the most important step of all, you need to figure out how you can best take notes for your brain, i.e- what type of learner are you? This will greatly dictate how you format your AH notebook since different learners access different content to help them memorise, for example- a visual learner should fill their pages with arrows, diagrams and colour but a auditory learner would be better off writing summaries of their notes in the form of a speech to speak aloud later on.

(See x for a free quiz to determine your learning type :) )

1.3- Format your notebooks

Hannah Witton has a philosophy that if you’re spending more time on the organisation than actually executing your plan, you’re being inefficient. This step is to ensue you don’t fall into that habit. Formatting your notebooks before you start school means you have a pre-prepared resource that you can work straight onto, cutting the time you need to spend on your school work. Also its super fun! There are a few basic pages you need in both notebooks before you seize total creative freedom.

In Class- Really the only thing you need here is a Key page (see bottom of the section for an example) and a footnote at the bottom of your note pages to put the textbook reference in (this’ll save you so much time when you revise for tests and wanna expand on your notes honestly just so it, its worth it in the end)

At Home- Since this is a more traditional BuJo, you need a few more pages- A Key, a Index/Contents page and more heavily formatted pages (Ideally: A header (for the chapter name), a title (page contents/subject) and a footnote (revision guide reference))

For my Key, I like to include the colour code system (e.g- red for key vocab) and symbols for stuff like ‘needs more info’ and ‘info found’, relevant context ext. In my Index I like to break by chapter and then mini units (like how this is set out) but that’s a personal decision, that may or may not be how you choose to do it! I also like to include a Grade Tracker as a motivational tool but, again, you may decide against that.

P.S- For my note pages, I like to include a 2cm margin in which I can jot down symbols and colours without interrupting the flow of the page. Do with that what you will

1.4- Create a study space

The problem a lot of us have is procrastination and a catalyst for that is distraction. You’re never going to be able to focus sat on your bed near your phone and laptop with WiFi as well as you will in an environment where those distractions are removed (That’s why coffee shops and libraries are so popular!) Creating an environment that you associate productivity with can help to focus you on your task.

Study spaces dont have to be extravagant. Even if its just a chair and a desk in the corner of your room with a plug, a nice cushion, and a pencil pot. As long as it separates work and play, it will be more than enough for your studies.

Personal preferences will change the layout and atmosphere of your study space (e.g- background music or no background music, relaxed or stimulating, personal or detached) but I do recommend looking at the psychology of colour and doing some introspection to decide what will and will not work for you.

Phase 2- Study schedule

Once you’re back studying, you need to implement a schedule that’ll guarantee you stick to all the planning you did in phase 1 as opposed to having it sit there looking idyllic while you procrastinate by binge watching Stranger Things for the 9th time this month.

Obviously from 08:30am to around 15:30pm you’re out of your house and away from your study space, even longer if you travel via public transport, and unless you’re the worlds biggest morning person I wouldn't recommend studying from 06:00am unless its desperate cramming before a big exam SO that leaves the evenings.

A big mistake a lot of people make is taking a break before starting to study. This is the worst thing you can do, you know how the brain resets when you enter a new environment? Think of it like that. Once you sit on that sofa and watch some TV or start to scroll through Instagram, you’re not gonna want to move.

As soon as you get in, grab a big drink of water and a small snack and head up to your study space (it sounds painful and will be at first but as soon as it becomes a habit you’re gonna be much better off) I recommend devoting from 16:00pm to 18:00pm to studying, allowing time for you to make a dent on the piles of homework you’re definitely going to get without creating an antisocial and impractical eating schedule. Two hours is more than enough time to rewrite up to 4 subjects worth of notes (consolidating your knowledge and adding in any extra info “class you” wanted you to find) and to start on up to 4 subjects of homework, even if its 20 minutes for each task with a 5 minute break in between.

Those of you who work, like me, will have to negotiate this weekly to make sure you can slot the time in around your shifts, not forgetting weekends can be optimised as well. On weekends, operate on the basis of Hannah Witton’s schedule (my organisational mom)- The day is split into three segments, Morning, Afternoon, and Evening, work at a 2:1 ratio of Work:Play (unless you work weekends, also like me, in which case just aim to optimise the time you have left wisely while also not overworking yourself)

Additionally, make use of study periods!! If you know you have a study period that day, take one of your AH notebooks with you (I recommend the one you have the most notes for) and get ahead of time OR do your homework in the period so you only have to do your notes at home. Snatch up every bit of free home time you can! Its important to be allowing with yourself during this time, you’ll be doing heavy studying and while it is important to complete your tasks and not make excuses for not doing something, its equally important to relax and wind down and see friends because not doing so impacts greatly on your mental health and you come first!

It can be helpful to make study groups (as long as they’re used for actually studying) or meeting up with friends and studying together in order to get that interaction and escape from the stresses of student life. Having other students there means they can offer insight on any questions you have as well as being there as moral support, even if its just to compare notes with or to be talked to&at while revising. This is especially true near finals week and end of year tests, which leads me on to...

Phase 3- Revision

So you’ve got your selection of notes that you spent hours slaving over and you’ve got a perfect track record because of how efficient you were with your homework, what now?

Revising, much like this post, works in a rule of 3 trials- Reading, Creating, Applying (Id like to take a moment to thank my GCSE Geography teacher for this golden method of planning that I did not use but ShOUD HAvE)

Reading- 1 month (per subject). From start to finish, cover to cover, read your notes. Since they already include the relevant bits from the workbooks and revision guides, they are a vault of everything you need to know. Reading them in their entirety will refresh your memory of the stuff you forgot and allow you to see the subject as a whole, a perspective you might not have had previously since you were still learning it.

Creating- 2 months. Using what you’d forgotten, create resources (mind maps, flashcards, presentations, speeches) for you to revise from. This can be in the notebook or separate (I like to have them separate but that’s just me) just as long as they make sense for the learning style we talked about earlier. Use the resources and memorise them.

Applying- 4 months. Once you think you’ve done memorising, find past exam questions and papers and do them. Mark yourself (on the harsher side, just to be safe) and then check your grade. If you’re dissatisfied, go to the questions you didn't do well on, figure out what concept it was based on, re-revise it and find another question to try (repeat until happy) If satisfied, find harder and harder questions until you run out of material then get friends to make some for you OR think of the worst possible question you could get and then create it, answer it and mark it. Do this until exams happen or you feel like you’ve done enough.

Once you’ve finished the Applying phase, create a A4 page of max. 10 bullet points (for each exam) to peruse up until you enter the exam hall (bin it before you enter) then go in and kick ass!

A really good tool for this is GetRevising, a free site which helps you make study timetables and gives you thousands of pre-prepared resources (made by teachers and students) specified to your exam boards and subjects. Not spon i just fcking love GetRevising

If you do all this, you should find the work and stress load of studying greatly reduced and it’ll give you more than a fighting chance against the generation of harder exams that they’ve sprung on us.

Go fourth and get good grades babes.

All graphics were made with Canva

#studyblr #note taking #information #infographic #learning #school #college #bullet journal #student bujo #revising #uk #god this took years #ive been writing since 5pm #own post #jordan does advice #capricorn

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ouma--kokichis · 7 years

Text

Here is a theory I have been thinking of for a while regarding a possible "truth" of drv3. I have talked about it before, but this will be the entirety of it with added details.

It's going to be long and will contain spoilers- **MASSIVE SPOILERS** so please proceed with caution!

I at first watched a playthrough of Danganronpa v3 after its release. Since I did not own a vita nor a ps4, I assumed I will not be able to play the game for myself. However, after around chapter 4, I made to decision to buy a playstation vita and a copy of drv3. Although I did run into vita problems within the first week that I bought it, I was able to playthrough the game...and a few sections multiple times.

I initially believed in that the characters were indeed fictional characters, with their prologue selves as "true" selves and their SHSL to be fabricated. However, I then came around a Japanese blog which pointed out how terrifying and how strange it was that the "Remember Lights could implant SHSL skills at the level that Iruma, Saihara or Angie have shown to have." If Remember Lights truly were able to implant SHSL talents, then shouldn't "normies" not have to exist? This idea is what first made me doubt the fact the drv3 casts' talents were fabricated as Tsumugi says.

What first made me believe in the fabricated "talents"? The audition videos. They are very short, but the characters shown in the videos show very different personalities from their prologue counterparts. Akamatsu seems to trust Saihara enough to run away with him in the prologue and is the first to initiate conversation with Amami. Momota doesn’t display any sort of violent behaviour in the prologue despite his audition video to emphasize it. And Saihara does not know what "Danganronpa" is in the prologue, despite showing off that he is a hardcore fan. It seems to be safe to conclude that the Prologue characters and the Audition characters are different people.

I tried to remember the context in which the audition videos were used. Shirogane introduced them specifically to get Saihara Shuuichi to despair. All three videos were targeted at him- his own and the people that changed him's audition videos. The same Japanese blogger had pointed out the possibility that Shirogane could have cosplayed the characters in the audition tape. The audition characters were Shirogane Tsumugi's cosplay.

In chapter 1, Shirogane proved that she was unable to cosplay Akamatsu, a real person. If Shirogane was able to cosplay the "normie" Saihara, Momota and Akamatsu, then it would mean that those characters were the ones who were fiction.

The prologue is something that only the players (and Monokumarz) are aware of, so it is safe to assume what happened during this sequence was real. Since the epilogue (when Harukawa states that it is impossible for them to find out the truth of what they were like before(Here's the Epilogue. thank you @oumakokichi and @ne0dym for making this easily accessible!!) and Kodaka himself tells the players to replay this, I believe a key to figuring out the truth is here. The epilogue quote was also pointed out by this blogger here. )

Saihara and then Akamatsu remember that they were kidnapped already in the very beginning. They also don't know why anyone would try to kidnap nobodies like themselves. When we see the rest of the cast everyone else seems as confused as they are...except for Amami Rantarou.

Amami was one of the three characters to reveal their name in the first half of the prologue. He displays knowledge of the situation, knowledge of Danganronpa, yet seems to have his mind set to believe this is a copycat crime. No one else around him appeared to be a SHSL student. Just 16 high school students didnt make it Danganronpa, they needed talent.

Despite not recognizing the situation as Danganronpa like Amami, the rest of the students seemed to remember Monokuma, reacting to the words "moving and talking plushies" and "Monokumarz" Though the immediate connection to killing games or talents are not made at all. If these students really did audition for this show, you'd think they would have figured it out. Which they did, but only in Shirogane's false flashback shown in Chapter 6. This "flashback" never occurred. The validity of the audition videos is very unlikely now.

After the students are dressed appropriately, they are shined with the Remember Light and sent back to the start...but with talents. Akamatsu here has a small vision of herself wearing a weird device on her head. She quickly pushes that aside. But that device is actually seen later- in chapter 2.

In the form of the "first" Remember Light (since the characters do not remember the prologue one). Here Saihara states that they were running from the SHSL Hunt and decided that if they threw away their talents, they will no longer have reason to be hunted. What this device did was "seal away anything to do with SHSL talents". It wasn’t simply, forgetting talents, but hiding away things that would relate to talent. This would explain the lack of knowledge of Danganronpa in the prologue. SHSL talent is a staple of the franchise, and one can argue that Monokuma isn't as closely related to talent as Danganronpa is. Amami however, recognized the situation.

Amami was revealed to be the SHSL Survivor- a student who has participated in the previous game and survived. He then now has to participate in the next Killing Game. The memory of the "weird device" most likely never happened to Amami, since he didn't have any reason to "seal away his talents". Which was why the SHSL Survivor was able to see that the situation was similar to Danganronpa, while his classmates did not.

Akamatsu wasn't the only character to have a memory prior to the chapter 2 Remember Light, Amami had knowledge of the SHSL Hunt. Chapter 2 merely mentioned the SHSL Hunt and it was explained later on. (I belive around chapter 5?) The SHSL Hunt was performed by the protestors of the Gophel Plan. However, the Gophel Plan itself is something many Japanese players seem to agree is false.

The Gophel Plan suggests that the students have been asleep for years in the large spaceship. Then the existence if the piranhas and doves in Yumeno's research lab and the bug eggs found in Gonta's research lab do not make sense. Its hard to believe those animals also were "put to sleep" like the students. This fact alone quickly made the Gophel plan unlikely. The Gophel plan also contradicts the entirety of the prologue- why would Akamatsu and Saihara wake up in the locker if they were asleep in the SHSL Astronaut research lab? But that doesn't necessarily mean we should disregard the SHSL Hunt, only what the game presents it as.

In a DRV3 thread a user brought up the idea that the SHSL Hunt was perhaps performed by the Team Danganronpa to gather the SHSL selected by the Gifted Program for their real fiction killing game. They did also admit they lacked any proof of this, but many points begin to connect with this idea. The reason the V3 students willingly sealed away their talents and the emphasis on "normal" in the prologue are something the Monokumarz hint at.

Here is a quick paraphrase of the conversation with the Monokumarz in the prologue

Monokumarz start commenting how the students look and react way to "normally"

-their "first memories" are not completed - which should have been finished before they woke up.

Akamatsu "if you guys are really the Monokumarz then..."

Then Monokumarz demands "who are you guys??" "Do you have any amazing talents"

Which the group responds with no.

Kaede mentions she has something she likes to do and does a lot, but can't call it a "talent"

Saihara and Momota agree.

Akamatsu continues try to ask about the Monokumarz but keeps getting cut off.

"Forgotten your special talents and turned into a regular Mob Chara High schoolers" -Monosuke

"According to setup, it was the "SHSL Hunt’s fault. The "SHSL Hunt" was what made you forget your memories and you became someone completely different" -Monotarou

Tsumugi asks what Monotarou is talking about.

"Telling you guys wouldn't do anything" -Monosuke

"Anyways, you guys need to hurry up and remember you "true selves" -Monotarou

"Get your memories back and grab hold of your "sealed talents" –Monofany

Outfit change occurs.

“An appearance fit for a SHSL” –Monofany

Saihara notices the words "SHSL"

And now for the awaited "memories" -Monosuke

"Once the seal has been released you are off to the world of "Mutual Killing" -Monokid

"Once we use the Remember Light to get your Wonderful Talents remembered, then the Wonderful story begins!" –Monotarou

Bye Kuma~~~

This ends the first part of the prologue. Its hard to believe the Monokumarz would lie here since it was something the students would forget anyways. The conversation amongst the Monokumarz themselves, sealed talents, don't forget your special talents "again" and according to the set up - it was the SHSL Hunt's fault. Its interesting that the concept of the SHSL Hunt was already there in the prologue but nothing on sleeping for years or the students being humanity's last hope. The idea that the SHSL Hunt did happen, but not the Gophel plan isn't as farfetched as initially thought. In fact, I believe it is very possible.

In conclusion, my theory is this.

Danganronpa is a popular variety show which collects real SHSL students and puts them into a mutual killing game. The SHSL Hunt was how they found those SHSL students and forced them to participate. The drv3 cast willingly gave up their talents and anything to do with it, because it was what made them targets in the first place. The students became "normal high school students" this way. But in the end they were found out and abducted. (The students recall being kidnapped but forget this after the first half of the prologue) This is why they didn't appear to have talents in the prologue- they didn't remember them. Amami is an exception to this, which is why he was able to understand the situation more than his fellow classmates. The audition videos shown by Tsumugi in chapter 6 were not real and her “reveal” that the DRV3 casts’ talents and backstories were fiction was also not real.

Thank you for reading this theory all the way to the end! This is merely a possibility since much of DRV3 is still left open ended. Any comments or discussion about anything regarding theories for this game is encouraged so please feel free to do so~!! I'd love to hear your thoughts through reply, comment or dm!

#DRV2--SHSLhunt--SealingofMemory--NormieLife--Abduction--Prologue--DRV3 #theories #drv3 spoilers #danganronpa v3 spoilers #random thoughts #alsiushaku #opinions

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fire-rides · 7 years

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Thank You Drag Race

I have known for an incredible long time that I am queer, maybe even ever since I could first form memories. My queerness has long been something I’ve struggled to fully embrace myself right up until perhaps two years ago when I discovered RuPauls Drag Race. Coming out of the closet 5 years ago at 19 was only the start of the battle in my head to admit to myself and to the world that I am a bisexual woman. University certainly helped me become more confident in being queer but in the world of the pretty strictly binary gay/lesbian/straight that I thought was the way things were meant to be I still felt left out, not just left out but not even real. I didn’t fit into any lesbian stereotypes I’d seen; I wasn’t the skinny, petite, white ultra femme with perfect hair and make up all the time, I wasn’t the well dressed butch with neatly ironed patterned shirts, skinny jeans and a pair of doc martens or converse, and this led to me feeling isolated from the ‘gay’ community, I knew who I was but not where I fit. I didn’t fit into any straight girl stereotypes either, I was definitely interested in men but very unlikely to pursue them to be perfectly honest I didn’t really feel confident flirting with a person of any gender. I was an awkward, tall, curvy, sensitive, nerdy girl not quite femme enough to be straight or a femme lesbian and not quite butch enough to be the lesbian stereotype. I couldn’t take myself seriously as queer because I’d never really done anything that had been presented to me at this point in time as being ‘queer’. Even while after having a series of relationships with women in my first 3 years at university I still didn’t quite know where I fit. People I had been with had questioned my queerness because of the way I dressed, the way I acted and most abhorrently because of my attraction to men. I was told multiple times by multiple people that if was to enter into a relationship with a man I would essentially be handing in my ‘queer card’ and I was now a straight person. Following these relationships and some similarly toxic friendships I found the group of people I am still friends with 3 years on, a mixed bag of genderqueer, gay and bisexual folk who made me realise there is no right way to be queer. While talking to one of my best friends from this bunch; George, I was asked if I watched RuPauls Drag Race, I hadn’t and I was honestly so fascinated by the concept as all I knew of drag queens at this point in time came from watching Priscilla in primary school, seeing Dame Edna on tv and not really understanding the ‘point’ of it. After much encouragement from not just my friend George but from all these great new friends I’d met I finally watched it, I was hooked from the first minute. These were not just men wearing dresses and lip syncing to We Are Family these were true artists, queer artists of great variety and even greater talent. Pretty early on I found myself feeling the most connected to the ‘weird’ queen in season 6, the first season I watched in its entirety, Milk. Milk is not a traditionally drag queen, nor is she a gender illusionist like Courtney Act, she is a gender bending artist. Her looks were not particularly popular with the public or the other queens, who were much more focussed on how exceptionally gorgeous he is out of drag but I loved how out there they were, nothing she wore made total sense and I love that. Beyond Milk’s amazing looks she had such a beautiful personality, he had clearly been bullied like most queer kids for being different and also in the queer community for not quite fitting into a box. Just like me he had never quite fit in anywhere and the drag community had become the sanctuary of acceptance he had been looking for. His attitude, amazing looks and outgoing personality had made me realise that the truly is no right way to be queer. Drag let’s people, primarily queer people, express a part of themselves they cannot express in any other way and this amazing show celebrates that. I am sometimes femme, I am sometimes butch and I am sometimes in between and that’s fine because no matter how I present myself to the world I am still queer. I would like to end by quoting Milk as she was eliminated from the show “I just want to thank you so much for allowing me to be who I am without fear of being riduculed”.

#queer #pride month #rupaul's drag race #milk queen #rupaul charles #drag queen #personal #bisexual #pride #pride2017

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colorguardian10 · 7 years

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Response to Mike Rose’s “Blue-Collar Brilliance”

I said I wouldn’t share this if another post didn’t show enough interest, but @yoursinfulsister asked to see it and I didn’t really need a strong excuse anyway.

For my Writing Seminar course, we were supposed to write a five-page response to this article. He wrote about how a lot of workers in low-class jobs are considered to not have intelligence, and about how it’s a gross misconception. I recommend reading it for the full context of this paper. Here was my response to his article:

Mike Rose speaks on the concept of most jobs fitting into one of two categories: the intellectual or “white-collar”, and the physical or “blue-collar”. Hearing these groups, examples come to mind: accountants, lawyers, teachers propped up against steelworkers, construction workers, or plumbers. We immediately categorize work differently in order to treat it differently. I’m not sure my first job could have been a more fitting example of this divide.

While I was in high school, my school district decided to try something new. Every student is given a laptop assigned to them to help with schoolwork and develop technology literacy skills, and every summer, they hire a few professionals to deal with the hundreds and hundreds of computers needing maintenance over the break. This year, they planned to hire a handful of mildly tech-savvy, and cheap, students instead. They also knew that they were short on janitors for cleaning each building while the students were out.

So, in the main library, applications were put out: you simply checked which of the two positions you were applying for, why you wanted to work there, and how many hours you would be available.

This turned out to be a grave mistake on their part. For starters, through some form of miscommunication, 12 “technology interns” were hired for the five open slots. For another, not a single person applied to be a janitor. Having relied on a boost of students to fill out their gaps, they were now even more short-staffed than before.

A solution was reached: the interns would rotate between the job they had applied for, and being janitors, to help even out the balance in each. Anyone unwilling to accept this could leave. (One quit, one threatened to sue for the position, and an additional two were later fired for committing crimes at work.) As much as I wasn’t happy with the arrangement, I knew that the administration was doing its best in an unusual situation, and certainly preferred it to not having a job at all. I stayed.

Working as an intern was repetitive, but concerningly easy. Our first task was to update the software on every laptop in the school and set up the school’s network (a process called “imaging”), which required first wiping them of personal data as a matter of policy. We simply had to memorize a series of hotkeys and administrator passwords and wash, rinse, repeat. All the interns of the day did for weeks was sit at a desk with two or three laptops in front of them:

ctrl + alt + D / ctrl + alt + D / ctrl + alt + D

Are you sure you want to reset to factory defaults? If so, provide credentials and press enter:

qu@k3r / qu@k3r / qu@k3r

Do you wish to download the latest software?

yes / yes / yes

You are using a private network. Please log in as a network administrator to continue:

qu@k3r# / qu@k3r# / qu@k3r#

Put them back in the computer carts, pick up three more from the “unimaged” cart. Repeat.

Certainly, it required basic computer skills, but it was pretty obvious why they didn’t bother to ask for previous experience on the form. Later, we were tasked with fixing broken hardware, which at least required the ability to unscrew the casing, identify and replace sensitive parts, and put the casing back on in one piece.

On the other hand, being a janitor was exhausting. Every summer, the entirety of every single building is cleaned from top to bottom: every desk, every chair, ceilings, walls, and cabinets alike. Furniture has to be removed so that all floors can get a new layer of wax. Outside maintenance is done, too. I was spared by only having to fill cracks in the tennis court with wet asphalt in the summer sun for just a few days. I was “accidentally” placed in the rotation for twice as much time as any other intern, though, so maybe not. I became very familiar with Laura, my immediate supervisor in this department.

I said it was exhausting. This was in part due to the fact that they were still short-staffed, and a quarter filled with unwilling teenagers to boot. I never got to stop. We had our 30-minute lunch break and two exactly-fifteen-minute breaks. The other eight hours were nonstop, moving, scrubbing, mixing solutions, lifting desks and slate tables, carefully picking up lamps, and putting everything back exactly how the teachers left it - they might complain about having to shift the desks again, I was told. Third floor to bottom floor, stripping the wax floors and re-waxing every room and hallway as we went. I could barely even interact with my family when I got back home from how mind-numbing it was on top of barely being able to move. I was given the “easy” jobs because I was young, and a student, and the other workers didn’t want me to “break something”. Laura had been working at my school longer than either of my parents have been alive. Despite this, I had never even heard of her.

My personal experience would support the notion that jobs come either physically taxing or mentally taxing (or perhaps physically or not at all). I might even have argued against Rose’s claims that they’re not so divided, but I have the sense to see that my examples are pretty far on either end of the spectrum, and that one came with very different pressures than the other. I know that the majority of “physical” jobs, such as a waitress like Rose’s mother, do require mental effort as well as physical.

Mike Rose mentions the complexities of something as externally simple as taking orders, one of many basic skills of a waitress - “Waiting on seven to nine tables, each with two to six customers, Rosie devised memory strategies so that she could remember who ordered what. And because she knew the average time it took to prepare different dishes, she could monitor an order that was taking too long at the service station.” (47) He goes on at length about the massive cleverness needed to keep your head on straight in the restaurant business.

Even being a janitor, which I’ve already stressed the physical effort of, came with its tips and tricks: solution #20 for the desks and the walls, #8 for the windows, but dab some #16 on first for stickers. Zizz-O® gets off permanent marker and mop in that white gunk to strip the floors – but if you actually touch it head straight for the chemical shower. And by the way, pour in some extra #20 in your bucket, here’s a bottle we popped with a screwdriver - the mixing machine dilutes it too much.

You might take Rose’s statements and counter that, obviously, waitressing must be a strange exception that really requires knowledge rather than endurance. He prefaces these remarks by describing her additional efforts simply navigating the restaurant, describing her as walking “full tilt through the room with plates stretching up her left arm and two cups of coffee somehow cradled in her right hand” and “weaving in and out around the room” when not holding dishes as a constant part of her work, “flopping” into a booth to take a break with him (Rose 46).

However, while I do solidly agree with Rose’s argument that the perceived division of jobs is untrue, I do not agree with the way he makes it. He states that physical jobs include a mental aspect as a way of giving them value. I believe they should deserve it regardless. Certainly my experience would suggest giving even more respect to physical work.

I do not agree with the notion of intelligence garnering respect, and the corresponding notion that roles not requiring it are not worth respect. To again apply it to Rose’s thinking, I agree that jobs are often divided into mental and physical, but I believe that this is an applied devaluing of jobs in the latter rather than a quirky misconception with side effects. Work not requiring a formal education is frequently devalued based on not requiring “intelligence”. Rose applies this to waitresses and argues that they deserve respect by showing that they need smarts to do their job well. I believe that he is trying to rise something up with an idea used to bring it down, and accepting his argument completely, to me, simply leads to the same problem he is addressing - just for other people.

The superintendent told us we might be getting paid less while janitors - for the same qualifications, for the same hours, technically even for the same job title! Why? Because it was “unskilled work”. So what kind of “skills” are we really talking about when considering pay scales? Rarity of required skills, and compensation of effort in gaining said skills, may be one factor, but who decided that removing an LCD screen was harder than removing an entire classroom? While certainly some work is worth more than others, efforts to funnel money out of working people’s hands has only been hitting those least able to get it back, resulting in a drastically unfair imbalance. Instead of trying to help each other, our society climbs over each other to get at the precious “fair” work left, and people who can’t compete with one-dimensional standards get work that’s even less valued. It’s not about “skills” or “effort” at all. It’s about your rung on the ladder.

Rose does make good points. He clearly shows through his examples that stereotyped categories of work (he also includes “pink-collar” or creative/empathetic work in his comparisons) are defective and out of touch. He gives examples of foremen and waitresses having aspects that obviously contradict the social divide. He even admits that intelligence doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with formal education – and then says that many jobs require intelligence even if they don’t require formal education. Even Rose can’t seem to separate himself from the root problem enough to denounce it. Most likely he is not conscious of this – few people knowingly perpetuate issues – but that doesn’t mean that I can suddenly agree with the underlying notion.

I believe that we should hold ourselves accountable when we notice ourselves keeping harmful ideas alive, at the most basic levels we can. That means, yes, don’t belittle work based on the perceived intelligence needed, but it also means don’t belittle work based on the actual intelligence needed. The original purpose of jobs and specialized work is so that everyone can provide for the needs of the populace. Roles are needed because no one can be their own doctor, and banker, and cook, and technician, and janitor. People simply can’t independently fulfill their own needs in modern society. We work to help each other. If someone is working in a position socially lower than you, then they are doing you a service. Respect them.

“Respect them.” What does that even mean? I know what I think that looks like, but I grew up in a rich neighborhood. I have more concrete examples of what respect for workers doesn’t mean. Do you remember Laura? I never even knew she existed until I had met her. When people are giving their time and effort for the sole purpose of making your life easier, we should appreciate that. Instead, we say these roles are “insignificant” or “low-level” and push them under the rug.

Have you ever had to wait in line at a fast-food restaurant because the service is slow? Think about this instead: the people behind that wall are working even harder than normal. Service isn’t being slow, demand is simply too high to keep up with. You have to stand still for a few minutes. They can’t stand still until everyone in there is gone, and probably haven’t for a while. I know far too many people who take a situation like this and complain, or leave pitiful tips. After all, you had to wait a long time to receive food you normally don’t have to wait for. To me, it always seemed that it meant the people serving you are doing an even better job working to fulfill your needs.

Part of recognizing that all roles aren’t divided into definite categories, as Rose and I argue against, is recognizing that work also can’t be categorized into quantifiable worth. The person making your Starbucks, the person making your sandwich, and the person wiping your floors are all working at least as hard as you are, and to your direct benefit. Treat them as such.

You may disagree with my earlier ideas, that work exists to help others. Isn’t everyone just working to provide for themselves? That’s how American society at least frames it. Rose shows his mother acting very differently. He says that many customers came in with a desire for human contact, and describes how she changed her behavior to suit that. Though he also says it was all to get a higher tip, this is an outlook we disagreed on from the beginning. One of the founding principles of a capitalistic society is that everyone has to compete to “earn” their right to live freely. And so, payment is phrased as points in some great unwinnable game and not as acknowledgement for doing your part. This is where the faults lie. We can’t ever be compensated properly when our compensation doesn’t treat our work as work. Beyond that fact, not everyone can “compete”. Certainly not everyone can compete in a system where your worth is measured by a singular quality. Waitresses have intelligence? Great. Why weren’t they respectable without it?

Again, I wish to state that Rose made a valid argument. I saw his article as halfway to getting at the true problem, but for many his view may be the first time they’ve seen it that way. I can think of a couple people back in my rich neighborhood who could have used the worker’s perspective. Maybe the girl who rented a stadium for her birthday, or my mother, who thinks that most of the janitors made minimum wage because they’re too lazy to get a degree. She can carry the accursed solid slate chem room tables for decades - then she can tell me what “lazy” is.

My experiences may be extreme, and my views radical. But I said above that it is necessary to prevent ourselves from perpetuating harmful ideals. That includes calling these ideas out when we see them. I know that the teenagers typing in passwords were placed at a higher worth than the full-grown adults working themselves to death. I saw Mike Rose’s criticism of a system that put those two forms of work on different pedestals, and I wanted to express what I meant by saying that this divide is unfair. Seeing so-called “white-collar” and “blue-collar” workers in different lenses is something we should recognize, and we should also recognize why we made that divide. Rose argued how inaccurate this difference is, and I argue that the difference shouldn’t even exist.

#this is phrased kind of like it was a learning experience but I was already aware of this kind of shit I just hadn't strongly experienced it #it was hard to keep myself from going on a full communist rant for a while there #also I tried to avoid pointing out the fact that I had my first job at 18 lol #mine #paper #I highkey suspect that the administration was taking advantage of me being the only one being nice about it #'my views may be radical' I can't believe I let myself write that sentence lol #yoursinfulsister

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