#for me is figuring it out; figuring myself & the world out; trial-and-error to carve an environment & lifestyle best for me

[letters-of-libertas]

I'm bi and yeah your note on women not having solidarity seems sadly true. Apart from not dating men would there be anything you would suggest to improve ones life apart from stating away from those women if possible?

I love this question because this is how to start thinking: being practical.

What it takes to "improve ones life" is subjective so with that said firstly define what a better life(style) for yourself away from moids would look like. Temporarily mentally remove xy terrorist existence. What would your habits/routine be? What would you work towards & pour your energy into? What would you want to be? What would you center your life around? Take your time with these questions or anymore that come up. Have a general idea then be more specific and start breaking your life down into sectors/sections/areas, then look at where you want to be in those areas and work towards it.

For example; I divide my life into 6-7 aspects:

Physical Strength - Not just about muscle but knowing how to fight, where to hit and when to fight. Being stronger makes it easier to defend yourself in altercations (especially with other women). Some mfs will try you & you cant always rely on others coming to your rescue. Also work on building stamina to help endurance, and keeping as healthy as possible.

Emotional Strength - If you cant control your emotions they will control you. In a world of chaos being emotionally strong will let you cut through the noise and focus on what truly matters. Building emotional strength is not easy but it's worth it. Being able to rise above immediate reactions and pace yourself will allow you to assess situations more rationally & make more beneficial choices.

Finances - Get your bag up. Having money to gain resources is imperative to quality of life. I dont care what anyone says having a certain amount of money in life WILL make you happier as you're able to meet your needs better. Having more money/resources also makes it easier to support other women should you choose to do so, it also allows you to be more influential and have more control over your life. However, dont become a slave to getting money tho because that's how you get scammed.

Network - The type of people you hang around can make or break who you are as a person. Aim to connect with likeminded women who will encourage & inspire you as you go on this journey. Hang around people that value & will be honest with you while giving you grace. Not all women you engage with have to be single & childfree but beware the moid crazy ones because they will bring danger to you in their quest for maIe validation. Life isn't perfect but you cant go wrong having the right people around you, valuable relationships are hard to find but it goes a long way even if it's just online. However, no company > bad company.

Spirituality/Guide - Having something bigger than yourself to guide you through the chaos in this world can offer guidance/purpose that keeps you grounded & focused. For many people generally this is religion/god. Not everyone needs or ascribes to religion/spirituality though, but at least consider sets of morals/beliefs to follow. However even that isn't for everyone. So if you feel better off without spirituality or a 'higher' guide at least be clear on it & your reasons why (for yourself).

Hobbies & Interests - As turbulent as the world is, find things to enjoy amidst the chaos. Constant work, doom, and gloom will not change anything you will only hurt yourself. Take time to indulge in things that make you happy to recharge & relax. Engage in hobbies that serve you, share your passion with other women & hear theirs out too. It goes a long way in terms of mental health.

Security - It takes privilege to decide to not get married or have children as a woman & live it out. Everyone's situation is different so what I'll generally suggest is to constantly look into how you can protect yourself, have backup methods, and stay in the loop of xy predation. Dont drown in it but moids are predators & being completely blind to them is being blind to danger. Elaborated on point 10 here.

Sounds like a lot? Great, it'll keep you busy because this isn't a vacation or destination but a lifestyle. And to be honest, some of y'all can do with the busyness as it'll let you focus on what actually matters. This not to say to overwhelm yourself in things for the sake of it but to prioritise your energy on effective things for your life. As you focus on building you'll find that you have less energy to care about insignificant stuff or stuff out of your control anyways. For example, Instead of getting wound up about user somerandomadjectivefem stirring discourse calling you an extremist or whining about how impossible it is for her & other women to live without romantic love n' whatnot (or even women irl pulling this crap), you either ignore or quickly shut down the conversation & swiftly move on.

Everything I've mentioned are just examples, you may feel differently do whatever you feel best applies. Also remember to enjoy the process along the way as you are living through it afterall :3

Long story short: Work on building resources & other aspects of your life up for yourself.

#Many tend to shy away from the single childfree lifestyle bc the traditional map/railguards aren't there but thats the fun part of it #for me is figuring it out; figuring myself & the world out; trial-and-error to carve an environment & lifestyle best for me #Few side notes bc I dont want the blog to be too long: #Regarding physical strength: I know that no amount of training will make you as strong as the average moid but it isnt in vain #as other women can also act up & there's a higher chance of taking them on successfully without weapons vs xys. #Regarding section on being busy: Personally I dont care for discourse surrounding this topic because my mind is on other things like making #sure my reps for the day are in; making sure I'm staying up-to-date with knowledge I need to do my job; building sources of income #outside of my job;engrossing myself in my interests; for example. You become productively busy enough & what other women do doesnt bother #you. That's not to say completely ignore or not criticise moid-aligned actions; but dont spend too much time wallowing in doing so. #female separatist #female separatism #blackpill feminism #blackpill feminist #wineauntmovement #wine aunt #decentering men

[girlrenewed]

In the Final Stretch

What a decade 2022 has been.

I feel like this year has brought us some of the highest highs and the lowest lows. Moments where we feel like things are starting to change for the better, only to be followed by moments that make us feel like we’re taking 3 steps back. A wild ride is an understatement.

But as we approach the the final stretch of this year, I wanted to jot down a few lessons I’ve learned from all of the blessings, mistakes, and trial and error moments I’ve had.

If it comes, let it, if it goes, hold the door open.

I am NOT for everyone, and that’s okay.

I am EXACTLY where I’m supposed to be.

People cannot treat me any better than they treat themselves.

I deserve everything I want.

I am not entitled to reciprocity- no one is obligated to be good to me because I am good to them.

Drink ice coffee at home more.

If someone’s actions reflect that they do not care, it’s because they don’t.

Rip the band aid off.

I have no idea what the f**k I’m doing and I love it here.

My friends are the loves of my life.

I have to be okay with being the villain in someone’s story.

I have time to figure it out.

More sunsets.

I am not cut out to match peoples energy. If I care and they don’t, I leave.

I need to stop making excuses for people who are not nice to me

I feel my best when I remember to carve out time to enjoy things that make me happy (including writing, and I’ve been so neglectful of this page I started so this is me saying sorry to myself lol)

There is still so much love in this world; to give, to know, and to feel. Embrace it. Move towards it. Go wherever it is, and stay there.

I wrote this really as a list to refer back to for myself with no intention of it leaving the drafts, but If you’re reading this, I hope this helps you too.

-Nur

[tonydeynupsidedown]

First time using Voxel.

This week I tried out Voxel for the first time. The goal was to create a good world and an evil world from our summer work. I decided I’d create the bunker from my summer work. This would be my good world. Voxel is a 3D computer program where you can make three dimensional creations with little cubes. I remember my first time using Photoshop was rather overwhelming to start with, so I was expecting similar from Voxel. However Voxel was much harder to get used to. Let me share my experience with you. 

After familiarising myself with some basic tools.

I started by creating a large flat surface from which I could build everything else from. I created another large cuboid. this would eventually be the back of the mountain and front of the bunker door. I then started to block out some rough shapes of the mountain. 

I build up the texture on the top of the mountain. It turned into more of a hill so I decided to roll with it. I figured if I block out the basic shapes I could then refine it  later on.

I start to create some curves and more organic shapes on the top of the hill. In retrospect this wasn't the best idea. It would have been better to create all the main shapes of the hill before refining anything. However I grew impatient and started this process too early. 

After a grew bored of texturing the hill I decided to start work of the bunker door. With a process of trial and error I was able to find the circle tool which I used to carve out the front of where the door would go. In all honesty I really dislike using the tools Voxel provides, I find them finicky and tedious. Perhaps more practise would remedy this. I carved as far back as I could into the hill before it went through the other side. I did this to allow myself as much room as possible to work with.

After about two hours of working with Voxel I was left with a half baked result. I was really unhappy with it. I felt disappointed with what I had created and angry at the tools I was left to use. In my anger I decided to completely delete what I had created. This surprised me as I'm usually really good at controlling my emotions. This assignment really got under my skin. I found the layout of Voxel very confusing. I also thought the tools where extremely confusing. In the end I do believe deleting my work ending up being the right decision, I needed a fresh start. I am defiantly someone who prefers to work with a pen and paper to create my art. I really dislike digital art. I'll learn from my mistakes and do a better job on my next Voxel Project.

[asinnersalibi]

Creative Blocks

Because that’s what’s bothering me right now. 

Writer’s block, artist’s block, sculptor’s block, doesn’t matter who you are, or what you do, your creativity is being blocked and if your anything like me, finding the source of that block is worth committing arson. 

There are plenty of types of writer’s block, anywhere from lack of motivation to a lack of inspiration, but that isn’t going to help you get out of one. Granted knowing what’s stopped you could be the key to unblocking yourself. For me, in the middle of two different books, I just stopped. It was gross, but that in itself is called a Procedural Block, does knowing that help me at all? No. But perhaps knowing could help one of you. 

Procedural Block - Hitting a roadblock in the middle of a work. 

It’s suggested to do some writing prompts, remind yourself how to write again. Personally, step back, take a deep breath, let your mind go, and go get some water. Start at the beginning of the chapter, the mass in which you are creating; whether it’s a chapter, a limb (in sculpting), or a tapestry, go back and follow your steps. Figure out where you tripped, sweep it up and keep going. Don’t go to the beginning, especially if you've gotten far. You’ll get overwhelmed, and you’ll find mistakes, you want to write, not edit. Find your last checkpoint, your last landmark, and go from there. It’s okay if you have to go further back, but don’t go to the beginning. 

Psychological Block - Psyching yourself out

A psychological break is when you’ve convinced yourself that there is no point to writing because. . . 

a) it’ll never be published

b) no one will read it

c) no one who does read it, won’t like it

or d) in which you feel like your work is not worth working on (i.e. it’s not good enough)

Who are you writing for? Who were you writing for when you started the project? "Myself,” should be the answer to both of those questions, and sometimes it’s not. It is recommended to write for yourself and I agree. Creation is an extension of the soul, when one wishes to put forth such efforts, you are not writing someone else’s story, don’t worry about what they’ll think of it. Write, even if it’s shit, practice makes progress. Perfection is a concept. What do you expect when you reach this concept  perfection anyway? 

“Make happiness, make perfection in your progress.” 

“Creativity Block“ - A lack of inspiration or direction

Brain really said, ✨ no ✨ a lack of creativity is not the end of the world, not knowing what to draw, paint, sculpt, stitch, carve, whatever, is a bitch in general and as per recommended, indulge yourself in your interest, Pinterest is my personal favorite, but to each is own. Interest yourself, let your mind lighten up at the idea of a new project. It won’t happen immediately, and that’s okay, it might not happen for days, weeks, or even months (at this point, for my gremlin brain at least), that’s okay too. (As frustrating as it is)  

Procrastination Block - In which there is always something else to do

It is recommended to set a schedule, a specific time you set aside for yourself to write, but frankly, I am no one to suggest schedules but I can recommend setting a time period in which you are comfortable writing. This way, you aren’t set to 15:00 (3 p.m.) rather, noon to 15:00, and not writing in your specific time block is perfectly fine, you’re writing. That was the goal. 

Distraction Block - Unfortunately, most of us do not live in secluded mountains away from the bustle of daily life, things are going to distract you. 

Make a writing space, it can be in your bedroom, it can be on a hotel roof (responsibly), it can be in a local library. Wherever you find comfort and solace is ideal and this may be a trial and error process. Your bedroom may be too close to a tree of squirrels, police and pedestrians may keep thinking you’re going to do something stupid, libraries can be too quiet. It’s a preference, and know that it’s okay to change writing spaces. After a while, our brain begins to find little things we didn’t notice before and it can be comforting or distracting. Nothing is ever perfect, just progressive. 

#writing #writers of tumblr #writing block #writers on tumblr #creativity #creativity block #wanting to write #getting started #gremlin thoughts #gremlin things #gremlin writing #gremlin brain cell #gremlins #writing advice #advice #advice for writers #procrasting #how to write #getting to write #write what you want

[bigskydreaming]

How do you tackle this set of ADD/ ADHD problems? You start writing, you veer off path, rambling now, oh no it's becoming a book have to make conscious effort to end this train of written thoughts! Vs. Revising! Editing! Going over the entire thing you wrote! I have the added bonus of skipping phrases, from one word per paragraph To Whole Sentences! And I somehow skip again during revisions. I hate it here!!

Ooof. Its not easy and takes a lot of trial and error to figure out, at least for me. Its also a big part of why my posting style is the way it is....it is really easy for me to draft and write a lot quickly, but the editing and revising process takes me SO much longer because I have to keep.....resetting my eyes back to the top as I realize halfway through editing a paragraph that I’ve gotten distracted and allowed my mind to wander even while I kept moving my eyes down the page as though that actually accomplishes any editing....lol. So I like....have to prioritize. I pretty much have to stockpile my editing/revising projects for when I can afford to devote a full day of medication to the process because like.....its one of the things that I absolutely just CAN NOT pull off when not on my medication, I just.....keep going through the motions and never quite pay enough attention to actually be worth it. 

Luckily, over the years of kinda....developing my own inadvertent coping mechanisms for my ADHD while growing up, since I didn’t get my diagnosis until much later in life, like....I somewhere along the line got pretty good at drafting things in such a way that I don’t tend to NEED a ton of edits. Like my drafts are always fairly clean and legible and say what I want them to say....they just say a lot more than I need to say too, lol. Essentially, my drafts ARE my posting style, that’s what they look like, and in my editing process, I just....take a weedwhacker and hack and slash my way through the unnecessary stuff and trim things down until I get an actual polished product.

But because like, that editing process is so, so crucial to my process and like, I HAVE to be on my meds during it and whatnot....that’s why I don’t really bother editing my posts or trying to keep them short and just....word vomit on the page whatever I’m trying to spit out as quickly as it comes and then just move on to the next thing. I could make each of my posts as polished as any fic I write, lol, its just.....in order to do that I’d end up writing 75% less than I do as is, because its not the writing that takes up my time and focus, its the editing and trimming. 

So basically I mean, for me, personally, it ultimately came down to figuring out what my personal priorities were and aligning this with my medication schedule/how fast I metabolize and building an actual writing and editing schedule and process around this, specifically in regards to Official Projects I’ve dedicated myself too.....

And then the tradeoff, the ‘sacrifice’ so to speak, in order to allow me to maximize the amount of time-while-medicated I can devote to the stuff where that’s most crucial, like editing, is that like....I give myself permission to just NOT regulate the stuff I do where ‘good enough’ will suffice. I mean, I’m perfectionist as hell, so it wasn’t easy to train myself into accepting it as a necessity, lol, but at the end of the day, like I’ve always said - my blog is just my personal thing, everything I post is stuff I just need to get out of my head and onto a page somewhere as much as it is stuff I want or need to put in front of other peoples’ eyes.....so, y’know, at the end of the day, it doesn’t HAVE to be anything other than what it is, the way I do it. I can post whatever whenever and I don’t need to be like, on my meds or on a specific schedule or routine to do stuff like this, and it occasionally grates because sometimes like when I AM on my meds and wrap up a work session early and pop on tumblr while still medicated, I look at some of my posts and I’m just like oh for fuck’s sake, why. LOL. But. Whatever. Y’know?

So that’s my advice I guess. I know the Trials of Rambling Exponential Explosion of Growth from one totally manageable idea into like, a whole fucking book when it really didn’t have to be like that, brain, and its annoying and can definitely end up cutting into your productivity despite being ironically ‘more’ productive......and for me, the answer ended up just being....to stop seeing it as a problem. Giving myself a break and not trying to tell myself it was an Issue that I needed to find a solution to, that this was me doing writing wrong and I was never gonna get anything done this way. 

And instead I just kinda....let it be what it is and found a way to repurpose my rambling kind of writing and the time/energy I’d felt was being ‘wasted’ by that, like.....instead of finding a way to stop it from happening, instead I just focused on figuring out a way to get something useful out of it when and where it does happen....when ultimately, it was going to happen no matter what. 

And that eventually ended up being like....this blog. My posting style and habits and my just...using it to burn off the more frenetic of my writing energy so that when I actually want to write in a ‘productive’ sense as in something that will be polished, that I concentrate on editing, that’s meant to not just be read but ENJOYED as a reading experience....I HAVE the time and mental space and focus and spot carved out in my medication schedule that I can devote to that, because I’m not wasting all of THAT stuff trying to just.....rework the things I crank out in my more manic-writing-sessions, like my posts, which are ‘good enough’ as is and don’t ACTUALLY need the benefit of me being on my meds or spending time editing and revising them into a more polished form....not when I don’t actually need them to be that in order to serve the function I’m intending them to be.

Basically......instead of trying to make everything I write perfect and necessitating I cut my content production in half and settle for only getting a much more finite amount of the stuff in my head that’s labeled To Be Written, like, from there and onto the page....I let the stuff that doesn’t actually need to be peffect have permission to exist just as it is the way it comes out initially, even when its all rambling and spat out in a rush...and save my polish and the physical and mental resources I need to devote to something to MAKE it polished for like.....just the stuff I really need or want to be that way in the end.

And that way, I don’t waste my time essentially just doing the same stuff twice and get to keep my production levels up to something I’m happy with instead of down where I’d constantly be kicking myself about how little content I actually manage to get out into the world and instead is just stuck up in my head driving me nuts and annoying me.

[livingdarwinaward]

Isle of the Lost

I stumbled over the side of the small boat, legs cramped from the days at sea. I stretched, then looked around. “Damn.” The island was creepy, the rocky beach filled with bones, bodies, torn sails, and driftwood from ships. The tidepools glowed with lost souls, and heaps of trash were caught between boulders. I kept my hands on my knives as I walked toward the massive building in the middle of the island, warily eyeing the sirens dotting the beach.

“A shame,” one of the sirens told me. “Had you come in a larger ship, Heran could have added to her hall.” She indicated the building in the middle of the island, clearly made from wrecked ships. “I’d like to at least live up to my grandmother’s legacy.”

“That is exactly why I came in a small boat. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have business with Heran.” I continued walking toward Heran’s hall.

A mermaid stopped her weaving for a moment to smile at me. “You’re clever. I like you.” She kept weaving, hiding her face as she continued, “And between you and me? Take everything she tells you with a grain of sand.”

“Heran?”

The mermaid nodded, and I started walking again, coming up on an actual path, the entrance of which was littered with bits of old statues. I made to step over the pieces, but a stone hand shot up and floated in front of me in the universal ‘stop’ signal. I stopped, wishing I could step around it as the pieces cobbled themselves together into a mostly human form.

“All the missing statue parts of the world and you couldn’t find a nose? Seriously?”

The statue glared at me (somehow, even though not a single change in facial expression) and said, “You seek entrance to Heran’s hall.”

“Yes,” I told it. I sensed spirits, but they felt different than most. Trapped, somehow. Bound. I couldn’t tell how I knew. “Who are you?”

“We are Lost,” a different voice said. The statue crossed its arms, somewhat awkwardly due to the arms being in multiple pieces, and the same voice spoke again. “Do not become Lost yourself.”

Don’t. Don’t take the path. That was a normal spirit, one only I would be able to hear. Apparently sensing my confusion, the spirit continued. If you get lost on the path, you lose yourself, you become Lost. Bound to Heran. It will be worse for you than most, being what you are.

Meaning? I asked it.

You’re a raven, you’ll be tasked with keeping all of the spirits on the island, an enemy of Helcor. The scrap of mist next to me resolved into an image of another raven in human form. Our beloved goddess made that very clear when I was stripped of my cloak.

“Do you wish to pass?” A third voice came from the statue of the Lost.

I looked between the other raven and the statue. “I have to take the risk. I have to find Dicey.” The statue moved aside and I started onto the path.

The second my feet were on the path, ground ahead of me erupted. Sand, pebbles, rocks, and just about everything else launching up to form a city, mud brick buildings decorated with primitive murals.

Okay, now the high possibility of getting lost on the path makes more sense, I thought. I jumped at the voice of the other raven, who’d apparently followed me onto the path. I couldn’t see his face anymore, As he was back to being just a wisp, but I could just feel his grin on me.

What? He asked, Did you think I’d let you go alone? I’m Haloti, by the way.

“Nice to meet you, I’m Pan. Thanks for helping, but no, I really didn’t expect you to,” I said in a rush. “I’m assuming we have to find the hall through this.” I paused. “Whatever this is.”

Lost civilizations, Haloti told me. More than just objects and people can be lost. Heran has a ‘library’ of all lost knowledge and ideas, or so I’ve heard.

“This will be more difficult than I thought.”

It always is with gods. Haloti shivered. We should start looking. Stay together— separating can get one of us lost easier.

“Makes sense.” I stepped forward, and shades appeared, not true spirits, but images is the past. “D’ya think we can ask them for directions?”

Where would we ask for directions to?

“Places with things of value or things that get thrown away, probably.”

Or places of power or importance, Haloti said. If I had my cloak, I’d be able to sense spirit trails and corruption.

“Take mine.” I got ready to unclasp my cloak, dreading the loss. I’d never taken it off, never wanted to lose my identity, but if it came down to Dicey, I’d do it.

Haloti changed back from his wispy most to his own form, just to give me a look. Are you kidding? He asked, as near to shouting as a spirit could get. I’m not getting you in trouble, too. The consequences will be more severe for lending it to me of all people.

“Why?”

I was stripped of my cloak for a reason. That’s all I’ll say. I won’t take it.

“Wait.” I pulled up my hood, launched myself into the air, spiraling up and up. I looked out across the maze, and saw Heran’s hall. “Ha.” The hall was somehow more distant than before, and more so than I thought the size of the island would allow. If I could grin with a beak, I would have. I dove back down to the maze and Haloti, who seemed to have figured my plan out. “I think we can just fly over.”

You can. I don’t have my cloak.

“You can’t fly without it even as a spirit?”

Yes.

I paused. I honestly didn’t want to go on without Haloti, as he seemed to know more than I did. “I may have a way you can come with me.”

How?

I scraped my foot against the ground. The hard dirt of the illusion held, so I knelt and pulled out my stylus, drawing a rune on the ground. The illusion melted away, but only where the rune was. Right, I’m dealing with a goddess’s magic here. I drew a circle around the spot where I’d drawn the rune. The illusion in the circle melted a bit, but held. I cursed. Some more trial and error experimentation eventually got me a circle of the actual ground, with a bit of driftwood that was half carved into a dolphin. I held out my hand to Haloti. What should his rune be? “Give me your hand,” I told him.

Haloti looked dubious, but gave me his hand. I thought for a moment, then wrote alone on his hand. “What does that rune mean?” he asked.

“It’s what I’m naming you. That one means alone,” I said as I wrote that rune on the bit of driftwood, surrounded by binding runes. “I’m binding you to this--” I held up the wood “--so that I can bring you along when I fly over.”

Haloti looked even more dubious now. “If you think it’ll work.”

“It should. I’d test it by throwing the wood, but I feel like you’d just end up as a Lost.”

I pulled my hood up, then grabbed the wood in my claws and flew upward. Once the hall was in sight, I flew toward it. I didn’t look down, fearing that if I did, I would get lost. Haloti’s thoughts were loud, but incomprehensible. He seemed worried, but I didn’t focus too hard on him, trying to keep Heran’s hall in sight as it seemed to flicker and shift. Then it vanished. Shit. I dove, trying not to think too hard about how it was ruching up far too fast to account for my own speed. Haloti’s thoughts became a scream in my head, just as we hit the ground.

The impact was delayed. We went through, Haloti said. We’re underground.

I shrugged off my hood, stretching as my body shifted and grew into my human form, then picked up the stick I’d bound Haloti to. “What is this place?” I didn’t expect any true answer, but Haloti was completely silent. I looked over at him. There was no definition to his features, a wisp of soul standing far too still. I could feel the current of unease in his mind. “Haloti?”

This is the Limbo. I didn’t know it became lost after… after I came here.

“‘Here’ being the Isle, I’m assuming?”

Yes. Haloti seemed to turn around, looking at the hazy wisps of trapped souls kept from the after. Have you heard of what happened? Why the Limbo was lost?

“Legend was that the Limbo was sealed to all but the gods, but something happened to lock even them out, so the whole system was lost, but no one was even sure it had ever existed. Many ravens I knew thought it was an old story the gods told to keep us in line somehow.”

It most likely was, but I doubt anyone is told the whole of it. Haloti formed just enough to smile at me, but it was strained. I wouldn’t have— I never knew it ended like this, though.

“You—“ I stopped as I noticed Haloti staring at one soul.

No, not her. That should be— Haloti looked at me. I should explain, he started before another soul caught his attention. I felt a whisper of relief go through him as he looked at it.

“You don’t need to.”

I should. Someone needs to know the whole story.

Leaning on the nearest wall, I gestured for Haloti to go on.

That man, Haloti said, gesturing to the second soul he’d seen, pulled Avi— he gestured to the first soul —into his scheme to bring an army from the Limbo into the world to destroy the gods. Avi was human, one of my closest friends, and when he— a rude gesture was aimed at the second soul —tricked her into helping him, she went to me to borrow my cloak and come here. The Limbo hadn’t yet been sealed, so she got past the barriers and nearly got souls out. My cloak was stripped from me because I’d lent it to Avi, but I was given the option to bring Avi to justice… Haloti trailed off for a bit, and I understood why.

I couldn’t kill her, so I ran. For five years. I knew someone else would be sent, but I couldn’t bring myself to betray Helcor so completely. I didn’t realize Avi’d ended up here. I’d heard the Limbo had been sealed, but not that it’d been lost.

“Why’d you come here?”

I heard somewhere that cloaks that we’re stripped came here. I wasn’t sure if it was true, but I came anyway. I wanted to find my cloak. Destroy it. Hopefully then I could escape the shame of letting Avi die.

I stood up. “I doubt that’ll work, but you can try. Now let’s try to find our way to Heran.”

Haloti nodded. Yes. Perhaps some souls may know.

We had to be careful to find a soul who wouldn’t trick us, but we could only do so much to ensure that we followed a trustworthy one. Haloti advocates for Avi, but I argued that she would be the obvious choice and may give the wrong directions.

You have a point. Haloti said as we left the room we’d been in to explore the catacombs further. As we followed the voices of souls, we went deeper, even as we never picked one.

Suddenly light broke out and we found ourselves in front of Heran’s hall. The door looked ancient, ornate.

“We come to deal with Heran,” I said.

The door swung open. When Haloti and I entered, we were faced with a maze. Heaps of things that had been lost forced us to have to find our way through, and when we could see the walls, ancient artifacts— probably priceless— were hung up or on shelves. We eventually found our way to the back, where Heran herself lay, her long tail coiled over the ground and around swords, bones, stones and other ancient, lost treasures.

“You come for your cloak,” she said to Haloti. “And you come for your friend. She is not here, little one.”

“I know,” I said. “I come for information. Can you find her?”

“Perhaps, for a price.”

I pulled out my bag, tugging out the bones inside. “Bones of a mermaid who died on land. Her body was lost to the sea, and she rotted like a human.”

Heran grinned, and I fought back a shudder. “How nice,” Heran said, drawing out the phrase. “Yes, this may do. For your request. You, however--” she addressed Haloti now, “--must pay your own price. Think hard.”

Heran turned back to me and beckoned for the skeleton. When I handed it to her, she tucked it behind her, then dragged herself over to a crack in the wall and stuck her head in. something inside began to glow, and I heard Heran chanting.

I looked at Haloti. He hung as a wisp of mist in the air, and I barely heard the whisper of his thoughts, only the faintest trace for me to know that he was thinking, but not enough for me to tell what he was thinking. A sound pulled my attention back to Heran, and I saw her pull her head from the crack, frowning.

“I cannot find your friend,” she said. “She either is not lost or is dead.”

“Or she is lost beyond your reach,” I muttered.

Heran looked at me with raised brows. “How so?”

“She opened a portal to disappear. I’m not sure it was to any place in this world.”

“You think she is in the Rift.”

“Or another world.”

Heran looked at me. “Hope that that is so. You should go to the City of Heroes. There is a way to travel between worlds there, much safer than portals.”

“Thank you.” I bowed, then turned to Haloti. “Would you join me if I asked?”

He materialized, then shook his head. No. I thought of my price. At Heran’s encouragement, he continued. I will give my soul.

“You wish to become Lost?” Heran asked. “Truly a strange request.”

I wish to forget. If that is the way to do so, I will take it. I only ask for my cloak to burn first.

“Haloti--”

“I will grant it.” Heran heaved herself to find the cloak.

The last thing I heard before I found myself back in my boat, the island nowhere in sight, was Haloti.

I’m sorry, Pan.

#writing #my writing #fantasy #original #gods and goddesses

[bedrooming]

character creation tag

i was tagged by @thecadmiuminkwell (thank you so much!) and i decided to do two characters for mine. so i’ll answer the questions for louis because people like him (lmao) and then i’ll also do camille because i want more people to know her. both of these characters are from my main wip, alterations.

1. what was the first element of your character that you remember considering?

louis - his age. i wanted a character that was a little bit older, but not as old as cerdick. i also wanted a very emotional character, and i wanted to be able to exploit his point of view, so i decided that he would have a journal.

camille - camille started off because i created leo and i wanted her to have an ex still in the friend group. that’s it. then this very awesome character was born. 

2. did you design them with any other characters from their universe in mind?

louis - yes! i designed him by thinking of the other character’s actions and how he would react, as well as how he himself would make the other characters react. since he’s a very emotional person, that’s pretty much how i first carved him. idk if that makes sense?

camille - as previously mentioned i created her in the intention of having this ex-girlfriend dynamic with leo, so obviously, yes

3. how did you chose their name?

okay so my novel takes place in current day quebec, which is predominantly french speaking. the characters have french names because of that.

louis - louis, i just love that name tbh. and i thought it was very fitting for a wild, sentimental man. idk. for the last name, cardin is just a common quebec last name that’s easy to pronounce in english and louis cardin sounds cool.

camille - she’s named after my cousin camille because they are very alike. the last name nelson in common in haiti (her father is haitian), and once again, i thought camille nelson sounded cool together.

4. in developing their backstory, what elements of their world played the most influential part?

louis - both his parents were altered (which means they have superhuman sensory abilities). elise (his first serious romantic interest) was not altered, so when cedrick, who IS altered, comes along, he freaks out, because he’s not used to this anymore and not being able to stay secretive about his feelings freaks him out

camille - camille is literally altered... other than that i don’t really know what to add lmao

5 / 6 / 7. is there any significance behind their hair color/eye color/height?

louis - not much meaning in any of these. he is pretty short tho which is convenient because he does stupid shit like climbing in trees

camille - everybody loves her hair because it’s really big and wild and curly. and she’s pretty tall.

8. what do you relate to within their character/story?

louis - his mindless behaviour, doing risky things like climbing on stuff and lighting things on fire and then getting hurt all the time. very me like bitch same

camille - our personalities are very alike, she’s an overthinker and she’s very cartesian. she loves science and plants and space, and me too.

9. are they based of you in any way?

louis - not really, no. that’s a very deceiving answer i’m guessing, but i didn’t have myself in mind when creating him, we’re very different (aside from the ‘getting in trouble and being clumsy as fuck’ thing).

camille - a little. she is kinda based off of my cousin, but off of me too. and her experience with leo is based off of my relationship experiences lmao

10. did you know what your character’s sexuality would be at the time of their creation?

louis - i knew he was gonna be attracted to men. i knew he was gonna be into cedrick. what i figured out a bit later, was that he is elise’s ex, and elise is non-binary. so i have no idea what his sexuality is and it doesn’t matter, i don’t want to label it

camille - yes, she’s very much a lesbian, and as mentioned earlier she was literally created to be another female character’s ex sooooo yeah

11. what have you found is the most difficult art form in creating your character?

I CAN’T REALLY DRAW LMAO

12. how far past canon events that take place in their world have you extended their story?

louis - his childhood, with his parents.

camille - idk yet but so far, her early teens

13. if you had to narrow it down to 2 things you must keep in mind while working with this oc, what would they be?

louis - first, he gets very easily flustered. second, he cares about people easily and gets attached easily, even if he’s never actually met the person (cough NORBERT cough)

camille - first, she’s curious and loves to learn. second, she loves herself and knows that she doesn’t deserve to suffer. so don’t try to hurt her because she knows better

14. what is something about your oc that makes you laugh?

louis - how god damn ANGRY he gets at his own emotions (especially his feelings for cedrick)

camille - she does a lot of trial and error, which means she fails a lot and it’s hilarious

15. what is something about your oc that makes you cry?

louis - the same thing i just said was funny can sometimes be... not funny and very relatable. the way he doesn’t know how to control the way he feels and gets easily emotionally put off makes him suffer sometimes

camille - how introspective she gets. when she starts asking big questions.

16. is there some element you regret adding to your oc or their story?

louis - idk if the fact that his parents were both altered is really pertinent, so idk if i’ll keep it

camille - i can’t think of anything!

17. what is the most recent thing that you’ve discovered about your oc?

louis - the fact that he cares for leo and really wants her to become a better person

camille - how much self respect she has, not in an egocentric kind of way, but the healthy way. she knows what’s good for herself and she knows to cut the toxic shit out of her life

18. favorite oc fact?

louis - he has tons of lil scars all over and they all have a story about how he did some clumsy shit and ended up hurting himself

camille - she left leo, because leo wasn’t good to her, and she knows that she deserves better. also she loves fishing!

{tagging} @enby-writer @melissaswriting @girlnovels @kit-tells-a-story @skyryf and anyone else who wants to do it (also if i tagged you and you don’t feel like it that’s ok luv)

#tag game #wip: alterations #oc: louis #oc: camille

[livingthedragonlife]

Orbs

fandom: overwatch

series: zenyatta appreciation week 2018

warnings: n/a

words: 2,490

summary:  There are mysteries all around us, everyday. Fortunately, many of them can be explained.

[ao3]

A bright yellow sun shone through the tops of the trees, painting the forest floor with sunlight and shadow, dancing pictures of light and dark chasing each other in and endless – and fruitless – game. Birds sang merrily, squirrels chirruped in the trees, the occasional fox or rabbit would scurry under large roots and under rocks, leaping away into the trees at the sight of two outsiders in their midst. Two metallic figures sitting, still as stone, under the comforting canopy of an oak tree’s leaves.

One with white plates like armor and brown muscle-like material, accented with green as the grass he sat upon. Despite being deep in meditation, his posture held the likeness of a solider: sharp and alert at all times. The other, floating above the ground, was a shining silver and gold, contrasting with the mottled dirty yellow cloth he wore, small bright red wires and sash of reddish-brown cloth, sky blue lights on a metal-gray head. Around him, nine fist-sized orbs circled, each chiming like a bell, harmonizing with the previous noise.

Both had been sitting for hours, as per their routine. It was not often they found such a nice place to meditate – travels in unfamiliar lands often lead to unfortunate places – and they had snatched up the opportunity with relish. It was, curiously, one of the moments that they cherished most with each other – sitting still and breathing and melting into serenity. A conversation that required no words, no gestures, nothing traditional. The sound of peace was different for everyone, and the pair found peace in listening to it.

The chiming of the floating orbs slowly, slowly, faded into the air like a whisper on the wind until they silenced altogether. Tekhartha Zenyatta, the omnic that they had circled, roused himself from meditation, letting loose a quiet sigh, or the robotic equivalent of such a thing. The orbs spun quickly, their circle growing wider, and then contracting to positions themselves around the omnic’s neck like giant beads of a necklace, rotating slowly about themselves in all different directions. Organized chaos. Or, at least, that’s what Zenyatta called it, in jest, of course.

Zenyatta flexed and clenched his metal fingers, refocusing on himself – long bouts of meditation often required a return to his mind, even after having practiced it for most of his life. It had gotten easier, of course, but over the years there still lingered that part of his soul, always a small piece caught in the endlessness of tranquility, that needed coaxing back down. Often this method of “coaxing” included simply being aware of himself, of what was directly in front of him, and – most effectively – conversation. However, that last one might have to wait.

Zenyatta turned his head to his student, the cyborg, he found, still meditating. Genji was stubborn in all things, and the years had not changed him. It took him a long time (a very long time) to even want to consider meditation as a part of his healing process, and an even longer time to learn it. Though, once learned, Genji had taken tranquility in a chokehold, determined to wring every last drop of peace that he could from it. Despite his student’s rather aggressive approach to recovery, Zenyatta could not blame Genji for latching on so tightly to any form of hope he could possibly grasp. The cyborg’s life had been mildly tumultuous at best and violently chaotic at worst. He deserved his peace, possibly more than anyone Zenyatta had ever met. And though he had made extraordinary progress compared to when Zenyatta had first met him, total recovery for Genji was going to take a bit longer. Likely more than a bit. But Zenyatta was prepared to help him every step of the way.

For now, he decided, he would let his student awaken at his own pace. If they had been expected somewhere (rarely, but it happened), Zenyatta would not have hesitated to rouse Genji on his own. But Zenyatta’s chronometer read that it was only early afternoon – they had plenty of time to spare.

While he waited, Zenyatta plucked an orb from his neck and idly spun it between his hands. It responded without him touching it, naturally, so his hands were not necessarily required for the activity, but he enjoyed how it looked. Much like a magician, he mused.

As the first orb spun, Zenyatta sent another to join it, flattening his hands and spinning the orbs faster. As the two orbs spun in rapid circles, the omnic sent third, and it joined the fray seamlessly. The orbs spun faster and faster and faster, blurring with their speed, chasing each other between Zenyatta’s hands. He flicked his fingers, and ghosts of blue energy shot toward the sky, spinning and evaporating into the air. He did this over and over again, and on the fifth time, he sent the orbs after their energy. They flew into the sky, spinning in a tight circle, and then shooting out at Zenyatta’s beckoning.

The omnic felt his student stir at his side, and slowed the orbs into a slow, lazy circle.

“Having fun, Master?” Genji said. His smirk passed through the air, as it always did.

“Good afternoon to you, as well, Genji,” Zenyatta replied, watching his orbs spin. He had them change color – blue, gold, purple, white, and back again. “And yes, I am rather enjoying myself.”

Genji laughed quietly, and Zenyatta looked over to find his student watching the spinning orbs, mesmerized. They sat there for several minutes, watching the orbs spin and change color, seemingly at will.

“How do they work?” the cyborg asked, leaning back on his hands, and stretching out his artificial legs in the grass.

“I suppose I have not told you much about them, have I?”

“I only know what is apparent.”

“Which is?”

“They hurt when you throw them at me.”

Zenyatta laughed, and his orbs chimed in unison. “Then, if you wish, I will enlighten you.”

Genji nodded and spread his hands, urging the omnic to continue.

Zenyatta called the three spinning orbs in the sky to come back to sit around his neck, and beckoned a different orb to sit in front of himself and his student on the grass. The blades stuck up around the edges of the metal orb, like trees against a golden sky, the blue rings outlining a sun, and the crevices of the designs like lightening form the clouds.

“Before I left the Shambali,” Zenyatta started, “I realized that self-defense was a necessity in order to keep myself and the other monks of the monastery safe. It –”

“That wasn’t a part of the temple already?” Genji interrupted. Zenyatta looked up from his orb to stare blankly at his student. “Sorry, Master,” the cyborg added, hastily.

The omnic’s irritated façade quickly faded. “I appreciate your desire for learning, my student, but you may find it easier to learn if you listen first, and see if your questions are not answered.”

Genji nodded, and Zenyatta refocused his attention to his story.

“To answer your question,” he continued, “Mondatta had never employed self-defense, and in fact, opposed the idea when I first presented it.”

He heard his student take a breath in as if to speak, but heard it cut off just as quickly. The omnic turned towards his student and the orbs around his neck chimed.

“You are learning,” the monk praised. “Well done, Genji.”

“Thank you, Master.”

“As for Mondatta’s opposition,” Zenyatta said, “I fought with him for weeks until, finally, I decided to learn how to defend myself, and my fellow Shambali, in secret. It did not take long for him to find out what I was doing, of course, but he could not have stopped me if he tried.”

“Did he try?” Genji prodded.

Zenyatta laughed heartily, taking in the memory. “Oh, he wanted to. I remembered him passing by the courtyard and seeing me practice – he could have brought the mountain down with the looks he would give me.”

Genji chuckled. He had not known Mondatta long before he and Zenyatta left the Shambali for good, but the leader of the monks was always hospitable, if a bit distant, toward the wayward cyborg. Zenyatta was almost sorry for leaving, and preventing him from becoming closer with Mondatta. He figured they would have gotten alone quite well. For the most part.

“Anyhow,” Zenyatta said, brushing the memories aside, “Mondatta could not stop me, so he seethed from afar. Insisted that I was provoking ‘needless violence’ and that I would be damaging the Omnic Rights movement exponentially. But,” he said, unabashedly preening, “he quickly changed his tune when I defended a small group of monks from a particularly violent hate group that attended one of our speeches, single-handedly, without a single life lost on either side.”

“You did what?” Genji asked, leaning forward with excitement.

Zenyatta gently rested a hand on Genji’s shoulder. “A story for another time. The part that is relevant to this conversation is that I made these weapons –” he indicated the orb on the ground with a hand, and it chimed “— when I first began to train myself. And what ultimately saved the lives of many.”

Genji looked at the orb with newfound reverence. “How did you make them?”

“The Shambali have many contacts all over the world,” he answered. “I simply called a few friends to get me what I needed.” He indicated the orb again, and it began to rise off the ground at his will, rotating in a lazy circle. “A combination of omnic technology, nanomachines, and biotic field technology reside within every one of them.”

Genji watched the spinning orb so intensely, Zenyatta almost laughed. “How did you build them all so perfectly?” he asked.

The omnic sighed, more for flavor, as he didn’t have lungs. “It was an extremely long process of trial and error.” He made the orb spin a little faster, and slow down again. “But in the end, I learned. I programmed them to my hard drive, so that I can control them at will. I carved them myself. And they respond to omnic energy.”

Genji looked away from the orb, and back to his master. “Omnic energy?”

Zenyatta gestured toward the orb, and it began to glow a bright blue. Without warning, the glow around the orb punched into the ground, leaving a perfectly round crater in the dirt. But the orb itself hadn’t moved at all.

“Wait,” Genji said. “How did you… But… How?”

“You did not think I was hitting you with the physical orb, did you?” Zenyatta teased. “That would damage them rather irreparably.”

“But I can reflect it!” the cyborg protested.

“It’s true, you can,” Zenyatta said. “The omnic energy that is produced from the nanomachines are quite physical.”

“That doesn’t make any sense. Energy isn’t physical, you can’t see it.”

Zenyatta held up a finger, and the orb started spinning again. “Normal energy isn’t. Omnic energy is something different entirely. It’s a phenomenon to most, but some speculate it to be a mixture of kinetic and electrical energy.”

“How is it a phenomenon? Don’t you know what you’re doing?”

Zenyatta shrugged. “There are some things that I lack answers for, even about myself. I know that if I concentrate, I can create a physical force.”

“That’s impossible. That can’t be right.”

Zenyatta tilted his head. “You can summon a dragon from your blade, can you not?”

“Yes, it’s been in my family for centuries.”

“Dragons do not exist, Genji. Tell me how you are able to summon it.”

“I can summon it because I –” the cyborg started, and then fell short. “I don’t know.”

Zenyatta spread his hands on his lap. “Thus, you have demonstrated that you, too, possess a physical phenomenon that cannot be explained.”

“I understand, Master. I’m sorry for doubting you.”

“It’s quite alright – I would have been skeptical in your position as well. Always ask questions, my student.”

The cyborg nodded, and pointed to the slowly spinning orb again. “You said it has biotic field technology. What else can it do?”

Zenyatta clasped his hands together. “Exactly what you’d expect a biotic field to do. It heals. But it can also harm.”

The omnic waved his hands around the orb, spinning it, and it radiated a deep, sinister, purple light. The grass around it began to dry out, wildflowers wilted, and even the bright afternoon sun seemed to darken. But he spun the orb again, the opposite direction, and it shined bright yellow. The grass and flowers sprung back to life. A bird flew down from a tree, landing on the glowing ball. It pecked the metal once, and flew away. Zenyatta laughed softly, and spun the orb back to dormancy.

“Can biotic fields do that?” Genji asked, a bit of fear lacing his voice.

Zenyatta shook his head. “No, I assure you. That was a bit of experimenting on my end. It does not work at the molecular level, as a biotic field does, so it is not as effective at destruction as it is at healing. But reversing similar components of a biotic field’s polarity created some…interesting effects.”

Genji shivered.

“They are for self-defense,” Zenyatta reminded him. “And I would never have created it if I did not have use for it.”

“I know,” Genji said. “It’s just…unsettling.”

The monk nodded gravely, looking at the small hole caused by his omnic energy. “Near-effortless destruction is never something to take lightly.”

“Is it effortless?”

“Almost. It does take a toll to be in such close proximity to this energy, even when dormant. But that is why I meditate, and find peace in the Iris.”

Genji’s tone grew worried. “Is it hurting you?”

Zenyatta reassured him with a gentle laugh and small pat on the knee. “No, my student, but I thank you for your concern. It is somewhat mentally taxing, but I am in not great danger.” The omnic called the lone orb back to its rightful place around his neck, joining the circle of its siblings. “That is everything that they are capable of, aside from floating.”

“What about the chiming?”

The orbs rippled gold, hopping up and down and chiming a single note each. “That,” Zenyatta said, “is a special secret of mine.”

“Oh, come on,” Genji complained. “You’ve told me everything else!”

Zenyatta looked up into the trees, the sun streaking through the leaves and dappling his faceplate with spots of sun and shadow. “Every flower must bud before it can bloom, my student.” With that, the omnic stood, and brushed off his pants of dirt and grass. “Shall we continue on?”

Genji stood up as well. “Yes, Master.”

And the two outsiders, metal in a world of wood and stone and grass, continued on through the forest, swallowed up by the trees, leaving nothing but a small, rounded, crater in their place.

#she speaks #my writing #overwatch #zenweek2018 #zenyatta appreciation week 2018 #this one has been sitting in my drafts for like 70 years lmao #thank u for giving me an excuse to finish it

[jan-ploeg-blog]

Eyes on stalks

We began our brainstorm on Monday and I’m happy to admit it worked for me. My word ’to binocularise’, which I came to use on the meadow for the decision to apply my binoculars for something that drew my attention out in Galway Bay, was welcomed my Michael in spite of lack of dictionarial support which nicely ties in with my rebel nature.

I didn’t have a clue how to interpret it into art, but the recognition  gave me, what I like to coin, Einsteinian confidence. Explanation: Albert says ’Something can not become nothing’. I like to use this when I’ve lost something. When I search with the solemn conviction that what I’m searching for exists, my perseverance is more likely to lead to the desired result. So having been led to believe my choice of word suggested potential, this kept me searching till I found something inspiring.

Kahlil Gibran gave me great solace by saying: ’The deeper the dagger of sorrow carves into your soul, the more joy you can contain. This balancing of extremes I translated into: ’The further your eyes are apart, the more depth you can see’. If you are bipolar you intuit the world from two extremes, which gives you rather a wider perspective than when you have an even temper. I can attest this from my own experience as a mental veracity. But I have often wondered if this is true in the physical sense. And thus I have looked at hammerhead sharks, but found no particular evidence supporting my theory. I also looked at chicken. When they walk their head is going to and fro with every step. That would suggest that looking for seeds from two positions might be helpful in finding them.

So how could I watch the world with eyes farther apart than I’m born with. The obvious answer to that would be with mirrors. So yesterday after college I went to Lidl, Dunnes and two pharmacies, but to no avail. I was dreading to have to go to Boots. I’ve only been to town once, in the very beginning of my attendance to LSAD. I went through my legs when crossing the street, which so freaked me out that I thought I’d better first get some of my energy back before I’d venture there again. When I entered studio 1 was welcomed by Beate and another very nice girl whose name has escaped me. We talked about our sculptural plans and Beate offered to help me get my mirrors. I gladly accepted and about an hour later her husband drove in to deliver them. To me that was magic. I always have had to do everything myself, but at school anything is possible.

Like the tech support I can avail of, I needed a way to put the mirrors in a vertical position and all I had to do was ask and explain and Des made them for me in less than a quarter of an hour.  

Until now I’ve just been testing the water. My expectation is to see more ‘around’ an object, like when you photograph a person’s head with a normal lens as opposed to with a zoom lens from a larger distance. The latter pic will show a slightly ‘fuller’ face as from a distance the sight lines have a slightly wider angle. I have always liked this effect and often photographed my sculptures with my 300 mil zoom lens, to literally ‘make the most of them’.

The two main variables in the set up of the mirrors are the angles to place them in and the distances between the mirrors. My initial assumption was to place the first two mirrors at an angle of 90° with each other. Then the second two mirrors should be, I figured, in paralel opposition to the first mirrors, but so far to the side that they don’t block the sight line.

Of course in a scientific strategy I should pre-determine a set of distances that I hypothesise to be effective and then test the resulting images.

There is a sense of triumph in finding the expected results of predictions, an exclamation of ‘I was right all along’. I know for myself I have sometimes considered in arrears faking premises that led to a true achievement. But it is more rewarding to try and figure out how I actually came to my conclusion than enjoy social appraisal for a ‘reconstructed’ achievement. There is no shame in a ‘lucky strike’ as often I set up the conditions that made it happen or I had the good sense of identifying one as such.

But as an artist I feel sometimes it does pay off to succumb to emotion and my inner child had no patience for a rigid, systematic approach so I began moving the mirrors around on impulse. Suppose you can see an object from the south-west and see that same object from the south-east. That would produce two pictures as panoramic neighbours, with in the middle some overlap. So I put the second mirrors far apart. That made it rather difficult to find my object. The mirrors are only 10x10cm and rapidly become smaller with distance. Also, in turning to adjust the mirrors they easily stray from their symmetric location to each other. As for the first set of mirrors, I found that the closer I put them to my eyes the wider view I got, so that was a reliable positioning. I also noticed that angling them smaller than 90° did make an even wider view possible.

This deviation of expectation I find interesting. Mathematically it makes sense to assume my eyes to look paralel, but in practice, when I look at an object the sight lines from each eye meet at the object. The distance determines the degree of swivel my eyes have to make. This may be minute, but it is unavoidable. Try to look simultaneously with one eye at one finger right in front of that eye, while doing the similar thing with the other eye and finger. That’s not possible, our eyes are geared to meet in whatever distance we focus. Could this aberration from a 90° angle account for the divergence of my eyes? Because I’m so close to the mirrors. But I’m not looking at the mirrors, I’m looking in them at something reflected in the second mirror, much farther away. That’s how I experience my looking, but taken literally I’m looking at an image in the mirror by looking at that mirror. The image in that mirror is in fact an illusion and so is the distance it seems to be at.

That sounds like an acceptable explanation, only it’s not. When I look at my image in a mirror and then look at the mirror itself I have to refocus and thereby increase the angle between my eyes. Never mind, a falsified hypothesis also contributes by narrowing down the options.

Let me for now take the reduced angle from 90° for the first set of mirrors as a given. There is the risk of a hiatus multiplying itself, like errors tend to, but so there is in frustration about the unfathomable. Also, I’m away from my actual, physical inquiry, so I have to imagine a complex situation instead of a factual trial and error approach, and I’m in hospital, waiting for surgery, not the most favourable circumstance for these reflections.

Jan Ploeg, room 4,ward 1b, UHL

[dragnews]

After a President’s Shocking Death, a Suspicious Twin Reshapes a Nation

WARSAW — For six weeks, Jaroslaw Kaczynski kept up the charade.

By day, he appeared at political rallies, campaigning in mourning clothes as a stand-in for his twin brother, Lech, who had been running for a new term as Poland’s president before he died in a shocking plane crash over the Russian city of Smolensk in 2010.

By night, he took off his black tie, went to the bedside of his ailing mother and told her lies. Lech was on a trip to Peru and Argentina. A volcanic eruption in Iceland had slowed his return. He even printed fake newspaper articles chronicling the fake journey, which a former associate saved and showed to The New York Times.

Only after Lech was buried and his mother had recovered did Jaroslaw Kaczynski tell her what had really happened.

“There were moments that I wanted to believe those stories myself,” Mr. Kaczynski said in a rare interview the year after the crash. “That Lech was alive.”

It is an aching testament to filial duty and sibling devotion, if also to dark personal obsession. Eight years later, Mr. Kaczynski is the dominant political figure in Poland, an enigmatic man operating mostly in the shadows. His Law and Justice party has eroded democratic freedoms and weakened the rule of law in Poland, while pushing the country into an increasingly acrimonious dispute with the European Union.

The confrontation between Warsaw and Brussels is another major challenge for a European Union already under siege from anti-establishment, populist parties across the Continent — partly because of Poland’s economic and military importance, partly because of the symbolic blow of seeing a country once synonymous with democratic yearning turn the opposite way.

It is also part of a broader pattern in Central and Eastern Europe, where Mr. Kaczynski has formed an alliance with Hungary and its populist leader, Victor Orban. Their nationalist rhetoric has found emulators in neighboring countries.

When Europe’s leaders gather in Brussels this month to discuss whether Poland should be penalized for changes to its judicial system that many experts say undermine the rule of law, other nations will be watching closely. Failure to take action, critics worry, may embolden nations like Slovakia and Romania that are flirting with their own brands of “illiberal democracy.”

What complicates the situation further is Mr. Kaczynski, and how he has blended the personal with the political. From the moment of his brother’s death, he has nurtured a mythology of martyrdom and aggrieved nationalism around the Smolensk crash, using the tragedy as a narrative to try to reshape Polish identity, even as two independent inquiries placed blame on bad weather and human error.

The government has opened a new investigation and hauled up political enemies for questioning — even as his party is tightening its grip on the judiciary. His critics say he is using Smolensk as a pretense to arrest political enemies before elections in 2020. Others wonder if he is simply gripped by anguish, vengeance and paranoia, and is dragging his country along with him.

Or, perhaps, it is both.

“It is impossible to overestimate the significance of the Smolensk crash in the life of Jaroslaw Kaczynski — and in the life of Polish politics in general,” said Marek Migalski, who ran for the European Parliament as a Law and Justice candidate in 2010 and is now a lecturer at the University of Silesia in Katowice. “For Kaczynski,” he added, “public debate is no longer a political one — between people of different values; it’s an eschatological war between good and evil.”

For years, Mr. Kaczynski’s party has pointed to a host of possible devious scenarios — a thermobaric bomb that blew up the plane without leaving evidence; assassins using artificial fog to obscure the runway. But the heart of the narrative boils down to two basic unproven accusations: The Russians did it, and Polish political opponents of Mr. Kaczynski deliberately conducted an inadequate investigation to cover up their own negligence.

For Mr. Kaczynski’s supporters, it has become an article of faith that the crash was no accident. Instead, it reinforces ancient realities: that Poland still faces a threat from Russia to the east and should remain wary of the great powers to the west that have betrayed Poland in the past. When the governing party declares that Poland’s sovereignty is under threat, the smoking plane wreckage in the Russian woods is considered proof.

A few weeks ago, tens of thousands of supporters gathered in Pilsudski Square in Warsaw to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the crash. A new monument to the 96 people killed in the crash was unveiled — a block of solid black granite, with 18 stairs carved into the stone, a symbol of both the stairs leading onto the plane and of a stairway to heaven.

The Law and Justice party has spent years trying to discredit the findings of the earlier inquiries and, since taking power, government prosecutors have ordered the remains of nearly all the victims of the crash exhumed — sometimes without even informing the families of the victims. As the anniversary approached, officials promised that they would present new evidence that would reveal the truth.

The anniversary came and went with no new details made public.

The faithful, however, remained unshaken.

“The Kaczynski model of political strategy, within his own party and for the country as a whole, has always been ruling through division and conflict,” said Marcin Buzanski, a senior adviser at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, an independent, nonpartisan research institute.

During a heated session of Parliament last year, the depth of Mr. Kaczynski’s anger was captured on video.

“I know you’re afraid of the truth, but do not wipe your treacherous mugs with my late brother’s name,” he said, banging his hand on the podium. “You destroyed him! You murdered him! You are scoundrels!”

It was a rare public outburst from a man who apparently prefers to wield power from behind the scenes. He holds a seat in Parliament but is neither prime minister nor president. He does not use email, or carry his own mobile phone or wallet. He rarely holds anything resembling a news conference and gets most of his news filtered through aides.

He has never married, has no children and lives alone with his cat. Yet, as leader of the Law and Justice Party, his power is unquestioned. If he thinks a law needs to be passed, it is usually passed. His control is not total — there are factions even within his party that he must contend with — but it is sweeping, according to friends and foes alike.

For more than a month after Mr. Kaczynski went to the hospital to have knee surgery on May 5, much of the nation’s pressing business was conducted by his bedside. He recently left the hospital, but his prolonged absence from the public stage raised questions about the direction his party and country will take when he leaves.

For years, the one person who could persuade Mr. Kaczynski that he was veering off course was his twin brother, Lech. They had once starred together as child actors, appearing in a 1962 hit movie, “The Two Who Stole the Moon,” in which they played mischievous twins who set out to capture the gold moon and sell it.

Of the two, Lech grew to be the more outgoing, public figure, while Jaroslaw was regarded as brilliant but also mercurial, largely keeping his own counsel.

No one doubts Jaroslaw’s grief over his brother’s death. On the day of the crash, Lech Kaczynski was flying to visit a memorial in the Katyn Forest, a place haunted by history, killing grounds where more than 20,000 Poles were slaughtered by Red Army soldiers in the early days of World War II, a crime that the former Soviet Union long denied and outlawed Poles from discussing.

In the plane crash, Lech died along with the top ranks of the Polish military and members of Parliament.

But whether Mr. Kaczynski truly believes the conspiracy theories that he promotes is harder to know.

Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska, who served as Mr. Kaczynski’s campaign manager in 2010, spent nearly every day with him immediately after the crash.

“The first thing he said to me, unasked, was: ‘Don’t think for even a second that I believe this business about it being an assassination,’” recalled Ms. Kluzik-Rostkowska, who is now aligned with the political opposition.

She says she does not know what he truly thinks anymore, even as the question has taken on far greater significance.

Mr. Migalski, another former ally, does not have a definitive answer either. “Does Jaroslaw really believe the Russians assassinated his twin brother?” he asked. “If he truly believes that, then Poland is in great danger. Because if there was a crime there must be a punishment.”

The government is moving to settle scores. Bronislaw Komorowski, who became acting president after the plane crash, was summoned to the prosecutor’s office the week of this year’s anniversary and asked about government negligence in the investigation.

Donald Tusk, who was Poland’s prime minister at the time of the crash, has been repeatedly summoned for questioning in two separate Smolensk investigations, most recently in the trial of his former chief of staff, Tomasz Arabski.

Mr. Arabski and four other government officials who played roles in organizing the trip are facing charges of negligence. If Mr. Arabski is convicted, it could pave the way for prosecuting Mr. Tusk, who is currently the president of the European Council, which represents the leaders of the European Union. Mr. Tusk is widely expected to be the main rival of Mr. Kaczynski’s party in the 2020 presidential elections in Poland.

“One of the reasons Kaczynski is so eager to commandeer the Polish judiciary may be that he wants to use it against Donald Tusk,” said Marcin Matczak, a law professor at Warsaw University.

Indeed, many say that Mr. Kaczynski is trying to use the Smolensk crash to reshape historical memory, placing his dead brother at the center of the country’s hard march to freedom, and himself as the guiding force leading it into its next chapter, what he calls the Fourth Republic.

Behind the conspiracy theories is a deeply held belief of Mr. Kaczynski’s that when Poland first emerged from Communist rule to form its Third Republic, it did not properly cast out all those who had helped the Communists keep their grip on power.

Those people, in his view, still infect the system.

That belief has fueled the growing battle between Mr. Kaczynski and the man widely hailed as the hero of the Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, who has been a vocal critic of the mythologizing of Smolensk.

Mr. Walesa has posted messages on Facebook condemning the spread of Smolensk monuments, and he was going to take part in protests last summer at one of the monthly marches that were held to mark the crash.

But in response to growing demonstrations against the marches and the politicization of the tragedy, the government passed a law limiting where protesters could gather — a law widely criticized as undemocratic — and added hundreds of police officers to the route of future marches.

Mr. Kaczynski has become more strident in his accusations that Mr. Walesa, who was imprisoned for leading striking workers during the Solidarity movement, had ties to Communists.

He claims it was his twin brother, Lech Kaczynski — not Lech Walesa — who was the real leader of Solidarity.

For outside observers, the different views on Smolensk reveal how Poland, once a pillar and paragon in the defense of democracy, has become a land divided.

Graffiti in a bar in Warsaw summed up the debate: “Smolensk — lesson, tragedy, or the first Polish fake news.”

Follow Marc Santora on Twitter: @MarcSantoraNYT.

Joanna Berendt contributed reporting.

The post After a President’s Shocking Death, a Suspicious Twin Reshapes a Nation appeared first on World The News.

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[dani-qrt]

After a President’s Shocking Death, a Suspicious Twin Reshapes a Nation

WARSAW — For six weeks, Jaroslaw Kaczynski kept up the charade.

By day, he appeared at political rallies, campaigning in mourning clothes as a stand-in for his twin brother, Lech, who had been running for a new term as Poland’s president before he died in a shocking plane crash over the Russian city of Smolensk in 2010.

By night, he took off his black tie, went to the bedside of his ailing mother and told her lies. Lech was on a trip to Peru and Argentina. A volcanic eruption in Iceland had slowed his return. He even printed fake newspaper articles chronicling the fake journey, which a former associate saved and showed to The New York Times.

Only after Lech was buried and his mother had recovered did Jaroslaw Kaczynski tell her what had really happened.

“There were moments that I wanted to believe those stories myself,” Mr. Kaczynski said in a rare interview the year after the crash. “That Lech was alive.”

It is an aching testament to filial duty and sibling devotion, if also to dark personal obsession. Eight years later, Mr. Kaczynski is the dominant political figure in Poland, an enigmatic man operating mostly in the shadows. His Law and Justice party has eroded democratic freedoms and weakened the rule of law in Poland, while pushing the country into an increasingly acrimonious dispute with the European Union.

The confrontation between Warsaw and Brussels is another major challenge for a European Union already under siege from anti-establishment, populist parties across the Continent — partly because of Poland’s economic and military importance, partly because of the symbolic blow of seeing a country once synonymous with democratic yearning turn the opposite way.

It is also part of a broader pattern in Central and Eastern Europe, where Mr. Kaczynski has formed an alliance with Hungary and its populist leader, Victor Orban. Their nationalist rhetoric has found emulators in neighboring countries.

When Europe’s leaders gather in Brussels this month to discuss whether Poland should be penalized for changes to its judicial system that many experts say undermine the rule of law, other nations will be watching closely. Failure to take action, critics worry, may embolden nations like Slovakia and Romania that are flirting with their own brands of “illiberal democracy.”

What complicates the situation further is Mr. Kaczynski, and how he has blended the personal with the political. From the moment of his brother’s death, he has nurtured a mythology of martyrdom and aggrieved nationalism around the Smolensk crash, using the tragedy as a narrative to try to reshape Polish identity, even as two independent inquiries placed blame on bad weather and human error.

The government has opened a new investigation and hauled up political enemies for questioning — even as his party is tightening its grip on the judiciary. His critics say he is using Smolensk as a pretense to arrest political enemies before elections in 2020. Others wonder if he is simply gripped by anguish, vengeance and paranoia, and is dragging his country along with him.

Or, perhaps, it is both.

“It is impossible to overestimate the significance of the Smolensk crash in the life of Jaroslaw Kaczynski — and in the life of Polish politics in general,” said Marek Migalski, who ran for the European Parliament as a Law and Justice candidate in 2010 and is now a lecturer at the University of Silesia in Katowice. “For Kaczynski,” he added, “public debate is no longer a political one — between people of different values; it’s an eschatological war between good and evil.”

For years, Mr. Kaczynski’s party has pointed to a host of possible devious scenarios — a thermobaric bomb that blew up the plane without leaving evidence; assassins using artificial fog to obscure the runway. But the heart of the narrative boils down to two basic unproven accusations: The Russians did it, and Polish political opponents of Mr. Kaczynski deliberately conducted an inadequate investigation to cover up their own negligence.

For Mr. Kaczynski’s supporters, it has become an article of faith that the crash was no accident. Instead, it reinforces ancient realities: that Poland still faces a threat from Russia to the east and should remain wary of the great powers to the west that have betrayed Poland in the past. When the governing party declares that Poland’s sovereignty is under threat, the smoking plane wreckage in the Russian woods is considered proof.

A few weeks ago, tens of thousands of supporters gathered in Pilsudski Square in Warsaw to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the crash. A new monument to the 96 people killed in the crash was unveiled — a block of solid black granite, with 18 stairs carved into the stone, a symbol of both the stairs leading onto the plane and of a stairway to heaven.

The Law and Justice party has spent years trying to discredit the findings of the earlier inquiries and, since taking power, government prosecutors have ordered the remains of nearly all the victims of the crash exhumed — sometimes without even informing the families of the victims. As the anniversary approached, officials promised that they would present new evidence that would reveal the truth.

The anniversary came and went with no new details made public.

The faithful, however, remained unshaken.

“The Kaczynski model of political strategy, within his own party and for the country as a whole, has always been ruling through division and conflict,” said Marcin Buzanski, a senior adviser at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, an independent, nonpartisan research institute.

During a heated session of Parliament last year, the depth of Mr. Kaczynski’s anger was captured on video.

“I know you’re afraid of the truth, but do not wipe your treacherous mugs with my late brother’s name,” he said, banging his hand on the podium. “You destroyed him! You murdered him! You are scoundrels!”

It was a rare public outburst from a man who apparently prefers to wield power from behind the scenes. He holds a seat in Parliament but is neither prime minister nor president. He does not use email, or carry his own mobile phone or wallet. He rarely holds anything resembling a news conference and gets most of his news filtered through aides.

He has never married, has no children and lives alone with his cat. Yet, as leader of the Law and Justice Party, his power is unquestioned. If he thinks a law needs to be passed, it is usually passed. His control is not total — there are factions even within his party that he must contend with — but it is sweeping, according to friends and foes alike.

For more than a month after Mr. Kaczynski went to the hospital to have knee surgery on May 5, much of the nation’s pressing business was conducted by his bedside. He recently left the hospital, but his prolonged absence from the public stage raised questions about the direction his party and country will take when he leaves.

For years, the one person who could persuade Mr. Kaczynski that he was veering off course was his twin brother, Lech. They had once starred together as child actors, appearing in a 1962 hit movie, “The Two Who Stole the Moon,” in which they played mischievous twins who set out to capture the gold moon and sell it.

Of the two, Lech grew to be the more outgoing, public figure, while Jaroslaw was regarded as brilliant but also mercurial, largely keeping his own counsel.

No one doubts Jaroslaw’s grief over his brother’s death. On the day of the crash, Lech Kaczynski was flying to visit a memorial in the Katyn Forest, a place haunted by history, killing grounds where more than 20,000 Poles were slaughtered by Red Army soldiers in the early days of World War II, a crime that the former Soviet Union long denied and outlawed Poles from discussing.

In the plane crash, Lech died along with the top ranks of the Polish military and members of Parliament.

But whether Mr. Kaczynski truly believes the conspiracy theories that he promotes is harder to know.

Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska, who served as Mr. Kaczynski’s campaign manager in 2010, spent nearly every day with him immediately after the crash.

“The first thing he said to me, unasked, was: ‘Don’t think for even a second that I believe this business about it being an assassination,’” recalled Ms. Kluzik-Rostkowska, who is now aligned with the political opposition.

She says she does not know what he truly thinks anymore, even as the question has taken on far greater significance.

Mr. Migalski, another former ally, does not have a definitive answer either. “Does Jaroslaw really believe the Russians assassinated his twin brother?” he asked. “If he truly believes that, then Poland is in great danger. Because if there was a crime there must be a punishment.”

The government is moving to settle scores. Bronislaw Komorowski, who became acting president after the plane crash, was summoned to the prosecutor’s office the week of this year’s anniversary and asked about government negligence in the investigation.

Donald Tusk, who was Poland’s prime minister at the time of the crash, has been repeatedly summoned for questioning in two separate Smolensk investigations, most recently in the trial of his former chief of staff, Tomasz Arabski.

Mr. Arabski and four other government officials who played roles in organizing the trip are facing charges of negligence. If Mr. Arabski is convicted, it could pave the way for prosecuting Mr. Tusk, who is currently the president of the European Council, which represents the leaders of the European Union. Mr. Tusk is widely expected to be the main rival of Mr. Kaczynski’s party in the 2020 presidential elections in Poland.

“One of the reasons Kaczynski is so eager to commandeer the Polish judiciary may be that he wants to use it against Donald Tusk,” said Marcin Matczak, a law professor at Warsaw University.

Indeed, many say that Mr. Kaczynski is trying to use the Smolensk crash to reshape historical memory, placing his dead brother at the center of the country’s hard march to freedom, and himself as the guiding force leading it into its next chapter, what he calls the Fourth Republic.

Behind the conspiracy theories is a deeply held belief of Mr. Kaczynski’s that when Poland first emerged from Communist rule to form its Third Republic, it did not properly cast out all those who had helped the Communists keep their grip on power.

Those people, in his view, still infect the system.

That belief has fueled the growing battle between Mr. Kaczynski and the man widely hailed as the hero of the Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, who has been a vocal critic of the mythologizing of Smolensk.

Mr. Walesa has posted messages on Facebook condemning the spread of Smolensk monuments, and he was going to take part in protests last summer at one of the monthly marches that were held to mark the crash.

But in response to growing demonstrations against the marches and the politicization of the tragedy, the government passed a law limiting where protesters could gather — a law widely criticized as undemocratic — and added hundreds of police officers to the route of future marches.

Mr. Kaczynski has become more strident in his accusations that Mr. Walesa, who was imprisoned for leading striking workers during the Solidarity movement, had ties to Communists.

He claims it was his twin brother, Lech Kaczynski — not Lech Walesa — who was the real leader of Solidarity.

For outside observers, the different views on Smolensk reveal how Poland, once a pillar and paragon in the defense of democracy, has become a land divided.

Graffiti in a bar in Warsaw summed up the debate: “Smolensk — lesson, tragedy, or the first Polish fake news.”

Follow Marc Santora on Twitter: @MarcSantoraNYT.

Joanna Berendt contributed reporting.

The post After a President’s Shocking Death, a Suspicious Twin Reshapes a Nation appeared first on World The News.

from World The News https://ift.tt/2JMeWRW via Online News

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[party-hard-or-die]

After a President’s Shocking Death, a Suspicious Twin Reshapes a Nation

WARSAW — For six weeks, Jaroslaw Kaczynski kept up the charade.

By day, he appeared at political rallies, campaigning in mourning clothes as a stand-in for his twin brother, Lech, who had been running for a new term as Poland’s president before he died in a shocking plane crash over the Russian city of Smolensk in 2010.

By night, he took off his black tie, went to the bedside of his ailing mother and told her lies. Lech was on a trip to Peru and Argentina. A volcanic eruption in Iceland had slowed his return. He even printed fake newspaper articles chronicling the fake journey, which a former associate saved and showed to The New York Times.

Only after Lech was buried and his mother had recovered did Jaroslaw Kaczynski tell her what had really happened.

“There were moments that I wanted to believe those stories myself,” Mr. Kaczynski said in a rare interview the year after the crash. “That Lech was alive.”

It is an aching testament to filial duty and sibling devotion, if also to dark personal obsession. Eight years later, Mr. Kaczynski is the dominant political figure in Poland, an enigmatic man operating mostly in the shadows. His Law and Justice party has eroded democratic freedoms and weakened the rule of law in Poland, while pushing the country into an increasingly acrimonious dispute with the European Union.

The confrontation between Warsaw and Brussels is another major challenge for a European Union already under siege from anti-establishment, populist parties across the Continent — partly because of Poland’s economic and military importance, partly because of the symbolic blow of seeing a country once synonymous with democratic yearning turn the opposite way.

It is also part of a broader pattern in Central and Eastern Europe, where Mr. Kaczynski has formed an alliance with Hungary and its populist leader, Victor Orban. Their nationalist rhetoric has found emulators in neighboring countries.

When Europe’s leaders gather in Brussels this month to discuss whether Poland should be penalized for changes to its judicial system that many experts say undermine the rule of law, other nations will be watching closely. Failure to take action, critics worry, may embolden nations like Slovakia and Romania that are flirting with their own brands of “illiberal democracy.”

What complicates the situation further is Mr. Kaczynski, and how he has blended the personal with the political. From the moment of his brother’s death, he has nurtured a mythology of martyrdom and aggrieved nationalism around the Smolensk crash, using the tragedy as a narrative to try to reshape Polish identity, even as two independent inquiries placed blame on bad weather and human error.

The government has opened a new investigation and hauled up political enemies for questioning — even as his party is tightening its grip on the judiciary. His critics say he is using Smolensk as a pretense to arrest political enemies before elections in 2020. Others wonder if he is simply gripped by anguish, vengeance and paranoia, and is dragging his country along with him.

Or, perhaps, it is both.

“It is impossible to overestimate the significance of the Smolensk crash in the life of Jaroslaw Kaczynski — and in the life of Polish politics in general,” said Marek Migalski, who ran for the European Parliament as a Law and Justice candidate in 2010 and is now a lecturer at the University of Silesia in Katowice. “For Kaczynski,” he added, “public debate is no longer a political one — between people of different values; it’s an eschatological war between good and evil.”

For years, Mr. Kaczynski’s party has pointed to a host of possible devious scenarios — a thermobaric bomb that blew up the plane without leaving evidence; assassins using artificial fog to obscure the runway. But the heart of the narrative boils down to two basic unproven accusations: The Russians did it, and Polish political opponents of Mr. Kaczynski deliberately conducted an inadequate investigation to cover up their own negligence.

For Mr. Kaczynski’s supporters, it has become an article of faith that the crash was no accident. Instead, it reinforces ancient realities: that Poland still faces a threat from Russia to the east and should remain wary of the great powers to the west that have betrayed Poland in the past. When the governing party declares that Poland’s sovereignty is under threat, the smoking plane wreckage in the Russian woods is considered proof.

A few weeks ago, tens of thousands of supporters gathered in Pilsudski Square in Warsaw to commemorate the eighth anniversary of the crash. A new monument to the 96 people killed in the crash was unveiled — a block of solid black granite, with 18 stairs carved into the stone, a symbol of both the stairs leading onto the plane and of a stairway to heaven.

The Law and Justice party has spent years trying to discredit the findings of the earlier inquiries and, since taking power, government prosecutors have ordered the remains of nearly all the victims of the crash exhumed — sometimes without even informing the families of the victims. As the anniversary approached, officials promised that they would present new evidence that would reveal the truth.

The anniversary came and went with no new details made public.

The faithful, however, remained unshaken.

“The Kaczynski model of political strategy, within his own party and for the country as a whole, has always been ruling through division and conflict,” said Marcin Buzanski, a senior adviser at the Casimir Pulaski Foundation, an independent, nonpartisan research institute.

During a heated session of Parliament last year, the depth of Mr. Kaczynski’s anger was captured on video.

“I know you’re afraid of the truth, but do not wipe your treacherous mugs with my late brother’s name,” he said, banging his hand on the podium. “You destroyed him! You murdered him! You are scoundrels!”

It was a rare public outburst from a man who apparently prefers to wield power from behind the scenes. He holds a seat in Parliament but is neither prime minister nor president. He does not use email, or carry his own mobile phone or wallet. He rarely holds anything resembling a news conference and gets most of his news filtered through aides.

He has never married, has no children and lives alone with his cat. Yet, as leader of the Law and Justice Party, his power is unquestioned. If he thinks a law needs to be passed, it is usually passed. His control is not total — there are factions even within his party that he must contend with — but it is sweeping, according to friends and foes alike.

For more than a month after Mr. Kaczynski went to the hospital to have knee surgery on May 5, much of the nation’s pressing business was conducted by his bedside. He recently left the hospital, but his prolonged absence from the public stage raised questions about the direction his party and country will take when he leaves.

For years, the one person who could persuade Mr. Kaczynski that he was veering off course was his twin brother, Lech. They had once starred together as child actors, appearing in a 1962 hit movie, “The Two Who Stole the Moon,” in which they played mischievous twins who set out to capture the gold moon and sell it.

Of the two, Lech grew to be the more outgoing, public figure, while Jaroslaw was regarded as brilliant but also mercurial, largely keeping his own counsel.

No one doubts Jaroslaw’s grief over his brother’s death. On the day of the crash, Lech Kaczynski was flying to visit a memorial in the Katyn Forest, a place haunted by history, killing grounds where more than 20,000 Poles were slaughtered by Red Army soldiers in the early days of World War II, a crime that the former Soviet Union long denied and outlawed Poles from discussing.

In the plane crash, Lech died along with the top ranks of the Polish military and members of Parliament.

But whether Mr. Kaczynski truly believes the conspiracy theories that he promotes is harder to know.

Joanna Kluzik-Rostkowska, who served as Mr. Kaczynski’s campaign manager in 2010, spent nearly every day with him immediately after the crash.

“The first thing he said to me, unasked, was: ‘Don’t think for even a second that I believe this business about it being an assassination,’” recalled Ms. Kluzik-Rostkowska, who is now aligned with the political opposition.

She says she does not know what he truly thinks anymore, even as the question has taken on far greater significance.

Mr. Migalski, another former ally, does not have a definitive answer either. “Does Jaroslaw really believe the Russians assassinated his twin brother?” he asked. “If he truly believes that, then Poland is in great danger. Because if there was a crime there must be a punishment.”

The government is moving to settle scores. Bronislaw Komorowski, who became acting president after the plane crash, was summoned to the prosecutor’s office the week of this year’s anniversary and asked about government negligence in the investigation.

Donald Tusk, who was Poland’s prime minister at the time of the crash, has been repeatedly summoned for questioning in two separate Smolensk investigations, most recently in the trial of his former chief of staff, Tomasz Arabski.

Mr. Arabski and four other government officials who played roles in organizing the trip are facing charges of negligence. If Mr. Arabski is convicted, it could pave the way for prosecuting Mr. Tusk, who is currently the president of the European Council, which represents the leaders of the European Union. Mr. Tusk is widely expected to be the main rival of Mr. Kaczynski’s party in the 2020 presidential elections in Poland.

“One of the reasons Kaczynski is so eager to commandeer the Polish judiciary may be that he wants to use it against Donald Tusk,” said Marcin Matczak, a law professor at Warsaw University.

Indeed, many say that Mr. Kaczynski is trying to use the Smolensk crash to reshape historical memory, placing his dead brother at the center of the country’s hard march to freedom, and himself as the guiding force leading it into its next chapter, what he calls the Fourth Republic.

Behind the conspiracy theories is a deeply held belief of Mr. Kaczynski’s that when Poland first emerged from Communist rule to form its Third Republic, it did not properly cast out all those who had helped the Communists keep their grip on power.

Those people, in his view, still infect the system.

That belief has fueled the growing battle between Mr. Kaczynski and the man widely hailed as the hero of the Solidarity movement, Lech Walesa, who has been a vocal critic of the mythologizing of Smolensk.

Mr. Walesa has posted messages on Facebook condemning the spread of Smolensk monuments, and he was going to take part in protests last summer at one of the monthly marches that were held to mark the crash.

But in response to growing demonstrations against the marches and the politicization of the tragedy, the government passed a law limiting where protesters could gather — a law widely criticized as undemocratic — and added hundreds of police officers to the route of future marches.

Mr. Kaczynski has become more strident in his accusations that Mr. Walesa, who was imprisoned for leading striking workers during the Solidarity movement, had ties to Communists.

He claims it was his twin brother, Lech Kaczynski — not Lech Walesa — who was the real leader of Solidarity.

For outside observers, the different views on Smolensk reveal how Poland, once a pillar and paragon in the defense of democracy, has become a land divided.

Graffiti in a bar in Warsaw summed up the debate: “Smolensk — lesson, tragedy, or the first Polish fake news.”

Follow Marc Santora on Twitter: @MarcSantoraNYT.

Joanna Berendt contributed reporting.

The post After a President’s Shocking Death, a Suspicious Twin Reshapes a Nation appeared first on World The News.

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[theseventhhex]

Trevor de Brauw Interview

Trevor de Brauw

Chicago-based guitarist Trevor Shelley de Brauw (Pelican, RLYR) has announced the release of his first solo album – a collection of power-ambient compositions – entitled ‘Uptown’. Trevor Shelley de Brauw’s 20 year musical career has manifested as an exploration of the vast sonic possibilities of the guitar. ‘Uptown’ marks a departure from the riff-oriented song writing of Pelican, taking a plaintive approach that unravels the meditative depth of washed-out riffs, deconstructed drones, and carefully controlled feedback. The record is a stream of consciousness sustained for too long, an aural pendulum swinging between poles of murky distress and cathartic resolve that takes shape somewhere in the hazy valleys between rock, ambient and experimental music… We talk to Trevor about improvisation parenthood and being vegan…

TSH: Like previous works, was your approach to a lot of the material on your solo record very intuitive and not thinking in terms of intent?

Trevor: Definitely. Most of the songs would start by recording either kernels of ideas or improvisations and then I would go back and listen to what I had and think about how best to flesh the ideas out. Ultimately most of the performances on the record are improvised - just laying stuff down and then adding layers until things took on their own shape. When I started this album it was intended as a continuation of my Histoire project, in which improvised performance was something of an ideological guideline because the finished pieces were intended to act as a sonic journal; a specific moment in time captured in sound. This particular album deviated from that, particularly with regards to editing and even some moments where things are a little more thought out and composed, but I would say the earlier Histoire experiences informed the creation of this album.

TSH: Knowing you spent years refining compositions for ‘Uptown’, which factors would you say were most challenging?

Trevor: The biggest obstacle was carving out the free time to work on it; I am typically in three or four bands at a time and for the last 8 years I’ve been balancing those with a full time career/desk job, so most nooks and crannies in my schedule are full. There was also a certain lack of inertia that set in after the first couple of years - there were a couple of times that I thought the record was done and then I’d listen to all the material and realise that I didn’t have a set of pieces that would flow as an album, which got a bit demoralising.

TSH: Also, given the songs were birthed at vastly different times and places, do you feel this had some sort of varied effect on the end result?

Trevor: In some ways I suppose it must have. Insofar as one goes through tremendous personal changes over a long period of time, there are pieces on the album that were recorded by very different versions of myself. But one of the things that took so long was trying to amass a body of work that would flow as a cohesive album, so while the mentality and the approaches might vary from track-to-track, my hope is that those differences are not too obvious. I went through quite a few drafts of the album where the flow felt interrupted or stilted because there were too many jarring transitions or pieces that felt like they drifted off the path. I think these six pieces work together, perhaps, because the thread that ties them together is some sort of distillation of the constants in my persona.

TSH: With this body of work you, do you feel you were able to soundtrack certain sensations?

Trevor: It’s hard to say when you view them in retrospect. Because of the nature of their composition, the recordings evoke very specific moments and feelings, but I’m not sure if my memories of those emotions and sensations is through a veil of interpretation. They each act as a manifestation of the time in which they were created, but the specific sensations of those moments may be lost in the sands of time.

TSH: How would you assess the way you decided to incorporate the guitar throughout?

Trevor: Each piece was different. Some of them started on guitar, others started on electric piano or organ. With each of the recordings it was a matter of trying to figure out what sonic space needed to be filled, like grasping for puzzle pieces without having a guide to what the finished image was supposed to look like. Guitar ended up on most of the tracks because it’s the instrument I feel most comfortable playing, but in cases where it was not the primary instrument I made a point of trying to figure out whether it was even needed before going for it.

TSH: What’s the basic foundation for a track like ‘Turn Up For What’?

Trevor: That one started with the electric piano part. I love the sound of an electric piano drenched in reverb, so really it was just a matter of setting up that sound first and then seeing what ideas jumped out of my head. Once I had that initial piano track done I listened back and could hear saturated guitars in my head, so I dialled in a sound and improvised the two guitar tracks on top. The second one was intended to simply double the first, so I had to try and remember exactly what I played on the first pass - I came pretty close but the deviations from the original worked so I kept whatever “mistakes” ended up in there.

TSH: What aims did you outline whilst fleshing out ‘Distinct Frequency’?

Trevor: That one was a little more sonically adventurous. It was recorded around 10 years ago at this point, so the details of the recording are a little fuzzy in my memory. I think first I recorded the radio noise with a mic that was set up two rooms away. Then I started layering from there with electric piano and trombone (which I remember looping and then manipulating). I think the darkness and anxiety of the piece helps balance out some of the euphoria of some of the other pieces. It was recorded during the year that my wife and I lived in a farmhouse in rural North Carolina. We were never really accepted by the locals while we lived there and our time there felt a bit fraught and anxious. I think ‘Distinct Frequency’ is a pretty accurate sonic summary of some of the feelings of that time.

TSH: Was it gratifying to operate in your own lane with this record?

Trevor: Recording solo material tends to be less gratifying than playing with other musicians. There’s hurdles of communication when it comes to playing with others that can be challenging, but the rewards are far more immediate and palpable. Crafting these solo pieces is a pretty long process of trial and error, second guessing, labouring over details. And because of the experimental nature of the compositional process it often happens that all the time spent poring over stuff is in vain because the finished work is a failure. That said, there are elements of the process that are very gratifying - times when I was able to conceive of an idea and then execute it properly, the moment I was able to hold the finished record in my hand, and definitely most every time I play live as a solo act since the act of standing alone in front of people making this stuff is pretty daunting, so when it lands properly it feels extremely cathartic.

TSH: Is your former cat walking through the room in the background of one of the songs the only feature on this record?

Trevor: Yes, dearly departed Kitty Shelley de Brauw was my only guest. Uninvited, at that, but I wouldn’t have it any other way.

TSH: Have you heard any compelling movie soundtracks in recent times?

Trevor: Several. I really, really dug the Room 237 soundtrack; it was a very cool reimagining of established tropes. It seemed really fitting that the soundtrack was an homage to a certain style when the film itself is about taking a deep dive into critical analysis, like they were both different ends to a similar goal. I also love the Beyond the Black Rainbow soundtrack. It definitely stands on its own, but it also just completely made the movie what it is.

TSH: What makes you feel not very nostalgic as a person?

Trevor: I think that’s probably something I said before I was a parent. I think it would be really difficult not to be nostalgic as a parent. You live with someone you love more than anything in the world and they change so rapidly that they’re practically a different person every few weeks. It makes you feel really precious about every single moment because it becomes crystal clear how fleeting everything in this life is. And once that epiphany takes hold it puts every experience in life into perspective… Before I was a parent I was always looking forward and didn’t really pause to reflect too much. I don’t think either approach is right or wrong, but I am very happy for everything parenthood has brought me, including the sense of nostalgia and reflection.

TSH: What do you admire mostly about Jaki Liebezeit’s drumming?

Trevor: What’s so riveting about Liebezeit is how he crafts these virtuosic intricate drum patterns but then renders them hypnotic by repeating them endlessly. I love just getting lost inside his seemingly effortless loops.

TSH: Also, your verdict on the latest Mount Eerie album…

Trevor: I love Mount Eerie. It is a very difficult album to listen to; it is a raw expression of unfathomable emotional pain, without any pretence about trying to romanticise or poeticise it. There’s not really anything like it.

TSH: Talk us through what lead to the following tweet ‘Daylight savings aka a plot to drive parents of young children insane.’…

Trevor: I think it was in reference to the most recent time change and the challenge of getting a four year old to wake up on time for school on time the next day. Adults tend to be a bit more resilient when it comes to sleep deprivation.

TSH: How long have you been a vegan?

Trevor: I’ve been vegan for 23 of my 39 years. At this point I’m so different from the person I was before I became vegan that it’s hard to conceive what role my diet could have played in that.

TSH: Finally, what are your intentions with your solo career as you look ahead?

Trevor: I’m most of the way through another album. Or that’s what I think now and eight years from now I’ll feel dumb for having said that. But with any luck I’ll wrap that up sooner than later and get it out at some point in the not too distant future. I definitely want to keep playing solo shows, including shows outside of Chicago if I can find a way of doing that.

Trevor de Brauw - “They Keep Bowing”

Uptown

#Interview #Trevor de Brauw

[yellowpersonaconnoisseur-blog]

She will move mountains

She is growing up too fast. Sometimes I look at Mila and think, wow she is 2 going on 20. She is working hard to figure things out and making new connections every day. Always asking questions and reminding me that she "can do it" or lately "I got this". More and more I see the space she needs to explore, learn and do. It's space that is hard for me to let go of. I have gotten used to doing things for her, nurturing her and let's face it I want to protect her from harm's way. I want to catch her before she falls. I want to warn to slow down so that she doesn't trip. But she wants to run as fast as her legs will take her today, and try to run faster tomorrow.

I envy her courage. She is testing her boundaries, pushing up against the edges of every limit and beyond. I also worry about her, she doesn't know consequences like I do. She is so innocent in her exploration of the world around her. The thought of wrapping my happy baby girl in a bubble to protect her is tempting. But giving into my fear that she might fall does not serve her. She needs me to believe in her, to have faith in her ability to learn and grow, to fall and get back up.

Sounds easy right? Ha! This is wayyyy harder than I ever imagined. Especially when the exploration of limitations are my patience in picking out a pair of socks. There are no pink socks left, you will have to wear a different colour today. Oy. This conversation tends to go south quickly. How is it that no store in Ottawa sells a pack of pink socks?! Sure I've seen one or two pairs in one pack but that's not enough to get through the week! Billion dollar idea right there.

I not sure people notice that we make thousands of choices every day, most are so mundane that we  barely notice them anymore. But if you have a toddler chances are you are painfully aware of every single choice a new day brings. I personally love how empowering every day choices can be and see the similar effect it has on Mila. This requires constant communication, or as I like to call it negotiation. The days where I would scoop her up, walk up stairs and dress her are long gone. This goes for everything. Mila not only wants to participate, she commands her way. This is not new, and didn't happen overnight, in fact, Mila's first daycare provider would always say "she knows what she wants". It is one of her defining characteristics, she is a determined little girl. 

These days it feels more like "man she's bossy" but the articles I have read lately about raising "strong willed girls" have led me to believe that calling them "leaders" is more accurate and kind. In sum, Mila is the C.E.O of our household. By all accounts she makes all the decisions but behind the scenes Andy and I are either (a) ecstatic that our ideas align; (b) developing a strategy to convince her that she really wants what we want; or (c) scrambling to get through the fallout of the foiled plan b. Its a crap shoot.  

I find myself in conflict with how best to respond to certain situations. How can I encourages and empowers her but also sets limits? How do I parent without crushing her sense of independence  and keep my sanity? This is nothing short of a balancing act and sometimes feels downright contradictory depending on the situation.

An example of this, was on a walk at the dog park this winter. On this particular day Mila was determined to walk in knee deep snow even if this meant falling at every other step, often times getting stuck. This made for a very slow walk on a quite bitterly cold day. In frustration, I tried to explain to Mila the trail was much easier to walk on and compelled her to follow the trail. As the words came out of my mouth they tasted bitter. Is this something I want to teach Mila? Follow the train because its easier? No,  I want her to see the value in the path less travelled, which she is literally doing right now. Am I quashing her creative sense to explore and take the more challenging but rewarding road? Upon further reflection, his was not the moment for that lesson, and maybe there is value in taking the carved out path, especially on -20 days.  

All that to say, I think that's why there is no manual for parenting. Disregarding the fact that if someone did have the nerve to write one it would be filled with warning labels as ridiculous as the labels on all baby items  - e.g. Warning: do not strangle your children with love. If I had to put something down I would say, so far I'm working with courage, patience and love. My hope is to maintain a parenting approach that favours resilience over perfection. Even writing this I laugh because my parenting is not perfect, in fact it's quite messy. Because truth is I'm learning too. There is a lot of trial and error, and apologies, and hugs.  I can only hope Mila sees I that I am trying. We are all, Mila included, doing the best we can. 

Mila's leadership skills will prove to be a wonderful characteristic as she navigates the ups and downs of life (or climbs the corporate ladder as they say- if she so chooses).  As her  parent, I know this is going to be a journey for us both and at times it will resemble the sensation of riding le monstre at LaRonde. I can only hope that I find the patience needed in the defining moments. Give me courage, give me patience, and if all else fails, pass the wine.

#shewillmovemountains strongwilledchild noparentingmanual