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#i wear hijab and it's still hard to find a better job here even in my country that is the biggest Muslim population
underthestarlitsky · 3 years
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I would love to hear your thoughts on YJS3
sure! fair warning, though, I'm a ranty person by nature so this might end up being a bit long. sorry in advance ♡
anyway! things I liked:
the humor: s3 was pretty funny lmao, theres that whole collection of outta pocket scenes from throughout the season that I find hilarious each time + the humor was a little more dirty which is nice bc the audience has also grown up from the kids they might've been when they watched it on CN
dickbabs!: I'm not a huge fan of dickbabs, I prefer dickkory (no hate to dickbabs stans btw I just vibe more with dickkory) but this dynamic between the two of them was so sweet and well-balanced I couldnt help but squeal everytime they were on-screen
Clark and Conner getting along: them calling each other brothers was so CUTE I canttt
FORAGER: an absolute legend 10/10 freaking love him
That Episode With The Hallucination: mmmmmmm I miss wally. SO MUCH. and the og 6 I was Super Mad about the first timeskip so it was nice to see them all together again🥰
yeah that's about it for things I liked lmao. now time for the Much Longer list of Things I Hated:
HALO: young justice the bar was so fucking low how are you still successfully doing the limbo what the fuck. you take a muslim immigrant in what is VERY CLEARLY a hijab and 1. infantilize her to an exceptionally uncomfortable degree (I KNOW SHE WAS THE MOTHERBOX, I DONT CARE) to the point where she resembles a five-year-old with every sentence she speaks or action she takes 2. you made a visibly muslim girl claim that she's actually no longer muslim, she's just wearing the hijab as some kind of security blanket???? I'm sorry??? what the fuck were you aiming for here exactly 3. why did you have to name her violet harper. what. 4. really?? the immediate romance with brion? What the shit was up with that...you make her Muslim in some aspects like victor not seeing her hair when she brushes it but her LITERALLY making out with brion like I'm sorry what the fuck are you doing??? you had one muslim character and you fucked up so bad holy shit...like...it could've been simple as hell, man, but no...Big Yikes.
M'gann: I've said this before but I really feel like once they introduced artemis m'gann immediately became a side character whose only job is to be villainised again and again even though it doesn't really vibe with her character. Secret teams?? Lying to Conner??? This isn't s3 but that whole thing with their breakup in s2...what the shit are they doing to M'gann, man. I loved her so much in s1, she's literally trying her best after having gone through so much and it's never fully explored...like we get half explanations every season but we're never shown half the shit that we were given for artemis. And by making her the Uncool Girlfriend at points it just looks like they're trying make her easy to hate like what the fuck. no. stop it
The Plot: too overcomplicated, too many characters. It's only season three, why are you introducing Apokolips already. Why are there so many characters?? what's with all the subplots yall were switching location cards every five minutes. And it's so convoluted...like...what was going on with Beast Boy and the monkey-god-doom-patrol-exposition stuff? I can't even remember if there were two granny goodnesses or just the one. All of those meta kids left over from the last season are a cute cast but like...I was so bored??? we know you can do well-written self-contained storylines a la s1, so hop to it, yeah?
THE ANIMATION: ok ok ok so. season 1 and two (one especially) had a very distinct feeling to them and that feeling was very late-2000s Cartoon Network Action Show - the base model for the males and females is the same (like Ben 10 Alien Force) the colors were not dynamic (stayed the same no matter the lighting, lots of cel shading, and generally were realistically colored in the sense that suspension of disbelief was not entirely necessary) CHEEKBONES, gritty textures and purple skies (Batman the Brave and the Bold). overall theres a certain Tone to the earlier seasons that spoke a lot to the animation capabilities of the studios at the time, as well as the general feel of the show. however, season three was a MAJOR downgrade in terms of animation. they made it both simpler and more complicated - they started using their DCAMU animation style which while it does give muscles to the women, adds too many unneeded shadows and a strange stiffness and dullness to every character. There are now extra lines and uncessesary shadows on the face of every character, and their eyes and facial features are almost identical. There's also less highlights, and the hairstyles are way too overcomplicated now to be appealing (see mgann and dick) - the hair is unspeakably dull and and the skin tones and hair colors are painful on the eyes. This isn't even taking into account the shitty backgrounds they've started using (AHEM AHEM ARTEMIS'S KITCHEN) because while the earlier seasons may have had unappealing, mostly empty settings, the characters still fit in to the scene, unlike now.
the lack of sisterhood????: apparently, only artemis goes to see zatanna for her Dr. Fate appointments. Apparently, M'gann barely talks to Artemis after the very tragic apparent death of Wally. the two of them, dare I say even the THREE of them, should be close as hell considering they spent their early years super-heroing together on a team full of boys. M'gann LITERALLY called Artemis her sister in the SAME EPISODE she was introduced, and neither of them had any real girlfriends other than each other at this point. M'gann who fell apart so hard Artemis died in her head that she almost killed them all in her grief. Like. You're telling me, you're SHOWING me that these two aren't each other's support system? Where is the sisterhood, bitch????
Lastly: the costume design. I understand that they're constrained by the need to make it simple enough to animate, but COME ON. if you're going to borrow Diana's DCAMU/JL: War costume, at least keep the metal silver. What the fuck is that green-gold. And Tigress? god DAMN that mask is ugly. Cassie looks like she robbed a goddamn supermarket discount clothing aisle for her outfit. Why is bart's outfit Like That it's so ugly it makes me want to cry. @ young justice costume designers Please Rethink Your Decisions
that's about all I can think of right now. it got REALLY negative whoops, but theres just so much I didn't like about this season :/ hopefully the next one will better ;-;
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itsadifferenthope · 4 years
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Ok, I really thought about posting or not this..thing. I don't even know what this is, but I just had to let it out. I mean, I have like 3 folks who read what I write, so 🤷🏻‍♀️
I just wanna say I'm Italian, I'm not Muslim but I'm Christian.
And I tried. I really tried to give a shot to the last season of skam italia. But, cmon. Some of the things they did are so so so so.. so wrong.
And I'm saying it cause I really think that if they tried a little more, it would've been a really good job (even better than some other remakes *cough*)
Of course first thing first, they should've cast a poc actress. I didn't even like Beatrice's acting skill in season 1, but here she genuinely seems to have improved her skill. But, cmon, it never was believeble. And no, you can't tell me that actors job is to act some role, cause one of the really cool thing about skam og was that they choose to cast real teenagers and not actor, so they could portrait teenagers really without filters. So skam italia can't make the excuse that they didn't find any good Muslim poc actress.
But ok, they found Beatrice and they fall in love with her, I accept that.. But dear God, it was so hard to just make her an Italian white Muslim? A converted or the daughter of converted. How cool could that be? So much better than make her pretend to be a poc.
Ok, let's talk about the Muslim adults representation. Sana has a father who seems more like her grandpa, and also super cringy (that scene where he smoke on the balcony?). Than we have the parents of one of sana's friend who kicked their daughter out just because she was seeing a not Muslim dude, than we have Luai's parents who send their son to have an exorcism just because he's gay... And than we have sana's mother (with a really nice actress, I have to admit) who, when her daughter asks her a question about Islam, answer only with 'that's what's written, so you have to accept it'. Really???????
Now let's talk about one of the biggest disappointment of this remake: Italian Chris. I never liked her, but they actually made her a bully? REALLY? Why? How? Chris would never do something like that, seriously.
I don't want to talk to much about the hijab mess, cause I'm not Muslim and apparently there are Muslim girls who didn't felt offended by that, but 1 first time we see Italian Jamilla and no one is wearing hijab, it was to much to have two hijabi in one scene? 2 she took off her hijab cause she was in front of two gays.. That make them less man? I find it insulting. 3 che fregna! Really? You're actually calling her beautiful for the first time exactly when she's without her hijab?
I found some nice things too, don't get me wrong. The mosque scene was a first on the skamverse, I liked balloon squad, I liked the soundtrack and I really (unexpectedly) liked Italian Elias (Rami). But, sana può partire se ci sto io a fa la guardia. What? Last scene of the season, and still Sana can go to vacation with her friends just because there's gonna be her brother to be her guard? I'm speachless.
And don't let me talk about the Fandom who say this is the best season four ever, when they clearly don't care about Sana or sana's story (I actually went a bunch of time in the tag, and out of 20 post, only 5 were about Sana, and out of 55 posts, I saw Malik's face once, ONCE)
This got longer than I thought, I'm so sorry, but all I want to say is: there was actually a potential there, and I appreciate that they tried cause this is the first time ever that Italy has a Muslim girl on screen, and God knows how much we need this. But not like this. It's like they tried to destroy every stereotypes for nine episodes just to confirm every single one of them at the end. And it's a shame. And I'm glad that there are people who felt represented, but I'm so so sorry for all those people who didn't.
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sixth-light · 4 years
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Chekhov’s Garden Shed
For the last four or five years, the RoL fandom has had a masterpost of Chekhov’s guns/unanswered questions from the series – the last version, with links to the original, can be found here. Past contributors include @deviantaccumulation, @the-high-meggas, @maple-clef, @uncommonsockeater​, and @flannelgiraffe, as well as others who I have doubtless forgotten. [If that’s you or someone you know, please speak up!]
Ben Aaronovitch has indicated that he views the various open questions of the series as less of a set of ‘guns on the mantelpiece’ (which must be taken down and fired before the series is finished) and more a ‘garden shed’ of things he thinks might be useful one day but could also end up rusting in the back after getting buried under other things. The fun is finding out which is which. (Thanks to @ilikesallydonovan for originally reporting this and chasing down the link!)
So, without further ado, here is the renamed Chekhov’s Garden Shed Of Stuff That Might Come Back Later. It’s separated into Answered Questions, Partially-Answered Questions, and Things Still Buried At The Back Of The Shed. I enthusiastically welcome comments, corrections, and missing items. Contains spoilers for all published RoL-related material including the novellas, comics, online snippets, and interviews with the author. A mirror of this version can be found at Dreamwidth – I will try and keep it updated as I update this one.
ANSWERED QUESTIONS:
·        What the fox said to Abigail in WuG It was warning her about Chorley’s involvement with/interest in Skygarden. 
·        Peter’s father needs a few thousand for dental work; his mum is very keen to get the money so that he might re-launch his career. They’ve already done a gig (beaucoup money) for Ty. Will this be a vulnerability for Peter at some point? Apparently not; his dad’s band do regular gigs for the demi-monde, his dad has his new teeth, and Ty doesn’t seem to have been involved at all. Peter just has to live with his parents being better-informed about his work and new world than he might like! 
·        Will we see Awa Shambir again? Her of the suspiciously expensive hijab to be cleaning the offices (of a front organisation for an evil wizard) in… Goodbye Awa Shambir the Somali cleaning lady, hello Lady Caroline Elizabeth Louise Linden-Limmer, surreptitiously aerial scion of nobility. 
·        What was Molly doing in the tech cave? Is she on facebook/twitter/tumblr/a cooking forum? Looking up recipes? Has she discovered online shopping? Molly is active on Twitter gossiping and swapping recipes; it’s not a secret from either Peter or Nightingale, they just pretend not to know. 
·        Is that watch Nightingale gave Peter going to have any future relevance? Peter and Caroline had a watch-off in The Hanging Tree which Peter won, and the practitioner habit of wearing mechanical (and hideously expensive) watches enabled Peter to identify Chorley as the Faceless Man. 
·        Who is Mr. Nolfi’s mother? Where did she learn magic? and Have any other Newtonian wizards continued to practice in secret and/or trained apprentices in other parts of the country, without telling Nightingale? (Broader: was Nightingale mostly wrong about being the last wizard in Britain or really, totally, 100% wrong?) and What about the “female affiliates” of the Little Crocodiles? and How many wizards did Wheatcroft actually train and where are they now? Most of an answer to all of these: there’s a long-standing tradition of women practicing and teaching each other Newtonian magic dating back to before the founding of the official Folly. Mr Nolfi’s mother and the ‘female affiliates’ of the Little Crocodiles could well have come from this tradition. And Nightingale was totally utterly wrong about being the last wizard in Britain. Practitioners exist trained by ‘hedge’ wizards and witches, trained by Little Crocodiles, immigrated and bringing other traditions with them…that cat is not only out of the bag, it was never even in it. C.f. Patrick Gale and co. in Detective Stories and Lies Sleeping. However, many Little Crocodiles never really learned magic at all, or managed to brush it off after university as unimportant – unfortunately for them, Martin Chorley targeted them as tools and bait.
PARTIALLY-ANSWERED QUESTIONS:
·        What happened at Ettersberg that caused magic to disappear? Answered in various interviews: magic didn’t disappear at Ettersberg as an objective thing, but a lot of practitioners were wiped out by the war and the Nazis, as well as a lot of genii locorum and other fae and magical people. Nightingale over-indexed on this because he was depressed and traumatised, and the magic ‘coming back’ is a combination of a new generation of gods, fae, and practitioners growing up, and Nightingale noticing the ones who were there all along.
·        Where are the notes Peter was promised? Peter has a deal with Nightingale about getting questions answered in return for magical progress; we haven’t seen him look at any old wizard’s notes specifically but he doesn’t seem to be waiting on them. 
·        What was Nightingale doing in the 70s that he managed to miss the original FM’s adventure in Soho? Working with the Met, apparently - he was called in when Woodville-Gentle got his at Lady Helena’s hands, but too late to determine whether it was magic. Seems like he just wasn’t paying enough attention to what was going on around him!
·        What was Peter doing after he left school and while he was a PCSO? Why did he have problems during his A levels? Why did he join the police? Peter flatted and worked retail for a while after he left school (possibly while he was at school, too). We still don’t know what happened with his A-levels or what led him to join the police. 
·        Outwith the Met, does the Folly answer to the Home Office (or higher)? There are hints at that (cf. Walid in RoL), but nothing more and Who is Nightingale’s boss/who does Postmartin send his files to?  No direct answer to who they answer to beyond what we already knew, but we learn in THT that they have their own source of funding and aren’t an official part of the Met. Nightingale does not appear to have any direct supervisor beyond the Commissioner (or presumably they would have been informed/called when he was kidnapped in Night Witch). 
·        How do “Hedge Witches” practise magic; how does it differ from formal Newtonian magic and will we get to meet any? Are “Hedge Wizards” simply rusticated Newtonian wizards, or do they also have informally-developed skillz? Per the one we meet in Black Mould: hedge witches and wizards have informally-developed skills rather than just being rusticated Folly wizards, but how close their magic is to the style Peter is learning, it’s hard to say (because it was a comic.) Others are probably from the female tradition, ex-Newtonian wizards, etc – it’s a mixed group.
·        How old is Postmartin, exactly (Peter thinks he looks older and frailer than his Dad, who’s in his 70s, but that’s just his guess)? How did he get that job, and is he ‘just’ a civilian affiliate, like Walid, or something else? Who does he answer to, and what happens if/when he needs replacing? What’s his twitter handle?! Postmartin served during the Korean War, so must have been born between 1928 and 1936 (per @sparrow-wings) - he’s currently in his 80s, as it’s late 2015 in current book time. His Twitter handle might be “dyingforafag” (who Molly is chatting to in Body Work). 
·        What sort of experiments were the Nazis doing with vampires? (Do we want to know? Proooooooooooobably not.) and Can the Rivers be killed, if they’re badly injured enough far enough away from their river? What happens then? We found out in Lies Sleeping you can use ‘tinned vampires’ to kill and hurt genii locorum and discomfit practitioners, so that’s…you know…fine. Rivers can definitely be killed in general, c.f. the former Lugg whom the Methodists got to. It’s only functional immortality.
·        What’s the deal with Mr. Punch when Peter’s leaving London at the beginning of Foxglove Summer? Is he coming back? Is it only Peter who senses him? If so, why? and How are Lesley and Punch connected? And What powers does Lesley have now aside from face-changing, if any? Martin Chorley was trying to murder Punch, who was a god of chaos and vengeance, in order to 1) gain magical power 2) ????? 3) glorious white supremacy. Lesley agreed to help Chorley to get back at Punch, but may still have some connection to him, having survived possession by him; she certainly has magical powers of her own now, being able to change her face at will. They wanted Punch powered up so he’d be a better source of magic when taken down. Punch was still pinned to London Bridge, but was freed by Peter. He can be talked down by his daughter Walbrook, but for better or worse, he’s out and a player in London’s magical ecosystem. Let’s hope Peter’s right and he plays an important role in it.  
·��       How and why did Isis become immortal, since just marrying a River doesn’t appear to do the trick? Kelly tells Tobi Winter in The October Man that sometimes the partners/spouses/better halves of Rivers do just pick up immortality, although even she as an elder River doesn’t know exactly how or why that happens. Probably it’s what happened to Isis. Why it hasn’t happened to George McAlister is an open question.
·        What does it mean that Michael Cheung is ‘the new guy in Chinatown’? and Is there something going on with Guleed (PLEASE NO) or is she just picking up things about the demi-monde via her friendship with Bev (…and others)? Michael Cheung is the latest of a long line of people who have responsibility for any magical shenanigans in London’s Chinatown, so 1) the Folly/Nightingale don’t have to worry about it and 2) Chinatown doesn’t have to be offended by their attempts to worry about it. He’s dating Guleed and teaching her cool martial arts magic. Whether she has other demi-monde contacts is not yet clear.
·        Who is Chorley’s mole within the Met?  Probably not Seawoll, Stephanopoulos, Richard Folsom, Guleed, or Carey, due to the security practices put in place during Operation Jennifer. But if not any of them….then who?
·        How/why the fox knows about [Skygarden and Chorley], (and why it would tell Abigail) According to Abigail, the talking foxes view themselves as secret agents, and someone like Chorley would naturally draw their attention. Why they do so and who they think they should be reporting to is still unclear (but may be elucidated in the Abigail novella).
STILL BURIED IN THE SHED SOMEWHERE:
·        What about the paintings of Molly and a blue-eyed elderly man who looks like Nightingale that Peter found in the coach house?
·        Are there really werewolves or just creepy magic trackers called werewolves? (I’m waiting for them to turn up.)
·        Why does Fleet have a captain of dogs? What do her dogs do? (Is this related to the werewolves? Were-dogs?)
·        What’s the actual connection between Wheatcroft, FM1 (Woodville-Gentle, if that’s him) and FM2? Did he train them both, or did W-G train FM2? NB: Unlikely to be directly answered now Chorley is dead.
·        What’s up with Abigail’s apparently useless protection charm?
·        Is there a special reason that Nightingale is called The Nightingale? (+ is he strong/good at magic because of hard work or something else.)
·        People I’d like to know more about: Nightingale’s uncle, David Mellenby, Nightingale’s family.
·        How much do senior officers in the Met really know about the Folly/Nightingale/magic? Is it well-known that Nightingale has been running the Folly since the 1940s?
·        How did Nightingale learn the language Father Thames speaks?
·        How much does Nightingale and/or Walid know/suspect about the deaging thing? How much of this aren’t he/they telling Peter?
·        How did Walid and Nightingale meet?
·        Are there aliens?
·        Was the 1911 decrease of odd magical activity in Herefordshire linked to Molly?
·        Why does Seawoll dislike Nightingale so viscerally?
·        Did Peter really drop architecture because of his draughtsmanship or was it something else? Is it related to why his chemistry teacher wrote that letter to the newspaper?
·        How active is the ex-wizard grapevine, really? Is the FM connected to it at all?
·        What was the Faceless Man actually planning on doing with his Crossrail lair? Why build it so close to the Folly?
·        What happens if one river tries to userp, unseat or in any way properly fight another? Are the results ‘mythic’?
·        Was Emma Wall really a waste of space? As a character she is a bit of a smoking gun - red herring, or something else? She was living next door to our two, and *in* one of the flats where… stuff was being put. Any happily waltzed out on d-day. Peter never really got a chance to speak to her - but Lesley did, and was the one to dismiss her from suspicion. Which is suspicious (to me)!
·        Although we found out after that he’s been around for much longer, Nightingale said that Father Thames was definitely the same person in 1914. So presumably they met then… In what circumstances?
·        Are fae genetically different to other humans? Are they human? What about changelings (like Zoe in FS) - and will she get in contact with Dr Walid? NB: Dr Vaughan is getting some genomes sequenced, so answers to this question may be forthcoming....
·        What did Lesley say to her family about what happened to her face? Do they know about magic?
·        Just how much of an age gap is there between Peter’s parents?
·        Why did the Virtuous Men blame the British for Ettersberg? What was the agreement between them that Nightingale was referring to?
·        Postmartin made a show of wanting to get Peter alone to have a ”big” talk with him. Yet, the discussion we, the readers have witnessed was relatively small. Nightingale only arrived to The Eagle and the Child an hour later. What was said between Postmartin and Peter in the meantime?
·        Peter’s narration at certain points (like Chapter 14 in Moon Over Soho) waivers between past and present tense, and he is occasionally referring to events in (presumably) later books. Just what point in the future is Peter actually narrating these books?
·        When Nightingale got an infection in MoS, how did Walid know? Did Molly phone him and do her Nightingale’s being an idiot silence, or was he just visiting anyway?
·        What does Molly do on her days off?
·        When Nightingale doesn’t go to Peter’s parents’ for Christmas, did his not wanting to leave Molly excuse have any truth to it, or did he just say that so Peter didn’t realise that Nightingale planned to work (and so Peter didn’t feel he should be missing his own Christmas to help)/ he had a reasonable excuse to not go to Peter’s family’s Christmas celebrations?
·        (tongue-in-cheek) What would have happened if Peter and Lesley had given Molly a Heston Blumenthal cookbook?
·        What’s the deal with Lady Helena (and Caroline) - are they connected to Chorley and/or Lesley’s face being healed?
·        What does Caroline want to escape from? What was she doing posing as a cleaning lady at the County Gard offices? 
·        What do the Virginian Gentlemen want, and how connected are they with the American government?
·        What’s their specific definition of a ‘shade’? 
·        When and how did MI5 learn about magic, and do they have any practitioners of their own?
·        Was Christina Chorley a practitioner, possessed, or something else? 
·        Who sold and bought Molly, Foxglove, 'Charlotte' (the Pale Nanny), and 'Alice' (the Pale Lady)? Where were Foxglove, Charlotte, and Alice before they were put in the oubliette and rescued by Woodville-Gentle and then Chorley? Where is the fifth girl who was with them before they were split up?
·        Is it important that Walbrook is also Isis of London? Are there any other Isis-figures in the UK and Europe (aside from Isis who is married to Oxley, and is probably an Isis of Oxford?)
·        Are there any other non-Mama-Thames tidal Rivers? What exactly is Lea’s relationship with Mama Thames, as they see it?
·        What WAS Chorley's master plan, aside from ‘become Merlin, Profit!’?
·        How is the Difference Engine linked to magic, and why? NB: May be answered in ‘False Value’, which is about computing to some degree
·        Who or what is killing talking foxes (as Peter discovers in The Furthest Station)? Why?
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schalaasha · 4 years
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Favourite Games of 2019
I don’t like making ranked lists anymore. So here’s a bunch of games old and new I played in 2019 because I was busy catching up due to not playing FFXIV as much as in previous years.
 Ciconia When They Cry Phase 1: For You, The Replaceable Ones
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I think going in, and even starting to play it, I felt like maybe the game would abandon the WTC mystery game conventions. It ended up not doing that, because the game leaves you with far more questions than answers at the end. The A3W World (“after World War III”) is still trying to deal with political issues and social issues that existed prior to World War III. A global stalemate exists due to the military implementation of the Gauntlet weapon. Eventually things happen where different countries need to deal with a shortage of resources, territorial conflicts, etc which sets off a chain reaction to World War IV.  However, the children who grew up in the A3W era, settled into new ideologies and views of how society currently works are at odds with what the older generation wants and requires of them. Along the way, they need to deal with other groups and conspiracies in order to maintain the Walls of Peace.
 So in essence, R07 still crafts a mystery for readers to figure out, but it isn’t a murder mystery. It’s an international conspiracy mystery and I am more than okay with that. I think this chapter required a lot of worldbuilding to set that kind of story up and coming out of Phase 1, I understood why the first chapter wasn’t exactly like Umineko’s. I thought that it was handled well, despite some of the purple prose (but if you’ve played a R07 game before, you’re likely used to it).  I also thought he really tried to introduce and incorporate themes including gender, generational differences, societal tiers, geopolitics disguised as sports events (possibly mirroring the 2020 Olympics in Japan), etc. as well as he could throughout the story through the game’s cast. Even if the game meanders a bit (and it definitely feels that way towards the start), when it actually starts to roll, I felt compelled to keep reading.
 And truly, the game has an incredibly large cast of characters. The TIPS section handles introductions well, and while some cast members don’t have as much time in the spotlight as others, I can see them getting their time eventually in subsequent chapters. Clearly Phase 1 exists to focus more on the children from the Arctic Ocean Union (the “AOU”) as evidenced by the additional stories unlocked at the end of the game so hopefully other chapters have the same amount of character backstory for the other factions.  I also genuinely enjoyed that the big international cast of characters allowed for many different types of designs with characters with different types of hairstyles and hair texture or characters wearing hijabs and still managed to make them retain adorableness or a sense of style. I do not recall seeing it as often in Japanese media and I’m very happy to see it here.
 I think Ciconia Phase 1 is a very good start to this subseries’ planned four episodes and I hope to see more sociopolitical commentary. It feels as though R07 looked at everything happening in Japan and social media/how news is consumed and decided to write a four-part SFF series about it. I’m eagerly looking forward to the next chapter.
  Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night
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I backed Bloodstained when it got put on Kickstarter a few years ago.  It was shipped to me at… possibly the worst time since Shadowbringers was coming out very shortly after.  My fiancé and I played ours for a short bit, felt very positive about the game, then dropped it to play Shadowbringers.  We didn’t return to it until maybe September/October?  Both of us ended up getting our Platinum Trophies for it so we both played through everything the game had to offer.
 Bloodstained is a good experience, but not without its issues. I played on PS4 and I’ve had a few outright crashes or some glitching into walls early enough that I couldn’t come out of them again due to not having the required skill to try to get out of it.  I also felt like the game meandered or had a bit of padding in its earlier stages). Later on, you realise you have to put in the farming work to have a better and faster time not unlike its Igavania counterparts, but I did feel like the drop rates prior to actually working towards higher luck stats/drop shards were low enough almost to the point of unfair or deliberately wasting my time.  I also felt as though there were too many weapon types; with adequate shard use and shard grinding eventually you can settle into one weapon type that suits your playstyle or eventually use the gun for everything when you get the special hat quest reward).
 However, I’m speaking about this game as someone who platinumed it which requires a lot of farming and synthesis.  As a player going through the main campaign, I think the maps are adequate. The backgrounds are very lovingly crafted, and the music is absolutely one of the best of the year. Boss design is also fun and rewarding, requiring the player to learn how all the different weapon types work, adequate backstepping and closing in, and boss patterns. If you suck, the game will show you that you suck very quickly and deliberately.  Essentially towards the end, I felt as though Bloodstained tried very hard to cater to fans of the metroidvania style of game, and the classicvania style of game. I personally don’t think it completely succeeded but for a first time experience of trying to combine the two into one, it did its job with preparation for another game.  
 I also feel like some criticism was lobbed towards the game’s narrative for being told in library/book entries, and while I understand that (I actually couldn’t open all of the books for fear of my game crashing), I don’t think elaborate cutscenes and continuous dialogue would work well with this game’s flow. Bloodstained prioritizes gameplay elements and player exploration over anything else, and to be honest, I’d rather it happen that way than with long elaborate cutscenes.  I also felt as though I got more out of the game because I’d played the 8-bit prequel as well.
 Overall, Bloodstained is a passable experience. I’m glad I played it, and I’m glad I put the work in to try to make the game a better experience. I got what I wanted out of the game for as much as I backed it and I hope they try again with a similar formula because this is a very good first step.  
  The Touryst
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Sometimes when I see a game with voxel graphics, I feel pretty compelled to pick it up because it looks so darn lovingly rendered and it usually ends up being fun.  The Touryst does a good job with its graphical style and visiting new islands is a complete delight because of it. It looks like a game with style, and performs super-well on the Switch. It’s also one of the freshest games I’ve played in a while.
 Basically you’re playing a blocky dude with a moustache who just wants to have a good time but when he gets to TOWA Monument, he’s told he has to find monument cores to unlock the world’s secrets. And then you can do whatever you want. The different islands have their own little personalities: there’s an island called Fijy which is volcanic, there’s Ybiza with a bunch of dudes chilling on the beach and passed out on their chairs, there’s Santoryn which is just Greece, and a few other places that are essentially recreations of real-world places.
 As you explore, there’s a lot of stuff to do. A variety of things to do.  There are puzzles and mechanics that don’t necessarily overstay their welcome, you can play footy, you can play spelunker, you can take helicopter rides, you can take pictures, get stuff for a museum, surf, play rhythm games…. It’s your vacation, do what you want. It’s a little like Vegas. Unlike Vegas, you can use your ever-increasing money and diamonds to get new moves for your moustached character to reach new objects.
 As a little game where you can do whatever you want little by little, and makes for a smooth experience, I’m glad I picked up the Touryst after asking another person what they thought of it. It has great puzzles, lots of stuff to do and explore and see, and ton of minigames for whatever mood you feel like you’re in. The game is fairly short, but I’m very glad the holiday doesn’t overstay its welcome.
  A Short Hike
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A Short Hike places you in the shoes of a bird who is utterly determined to walk to the top of Hawk Peak to get signal for her phone.  I totally understand; sometimes you’ve gotta do what you gotta do.  
 But the game allows you to undertake that journey however you want to. You can go right away and finish up and get that darn signal. Or you can take your time and we’ll build that bridge when we get there. There are different types of terrains to explore if you opt to take the scenic route… and it’s rewarding to do so. You can find treasure, you can water a flower, you can talk to the Animal Crossing-esque characters to do some sidequests, you can do whatever you want.
 I’m sorry to say that when the game introduced fishing, I spent a lot of my time doing that. Fishing ruins me. The completionist in me wanted to fish. But the whole thing is that you don’t have to do any of this. If you want to finish the game, you can absolutely positively focus on that and the game doesn’t pressure you for it.  
 And that’s one of the things I like about it. It’s just whatever about the whole ordeal. I don’t feel like I’m completely and utterly missing out if I don’t decide to do something. Even the task of getting Golden Feathers to progress is fine since you only need eight for it, and the game easily gives you enough rewards to get four or five before sidequests or exploration is factored in.
 Sometimes you just need to take a walk and kind of think of nothing just to clear your head. And A Short Hike accomplishes that very well.
  Worldend Syndrome
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In my effort to try to find other games to play in 2019 because I’d fallen a little out of love with FFXIV, I realised that taking baby steps with visual novels and bite-sized games would be the best idea to try to get back into traditional games (particularly since I was, and am, still questioning whether I like games as a hobby or not). On a whim, I decided to download a boatload of visual novel demos one night and tried a bunch of them out. Worldend Syndrome’s demo didn’t exactly grab me until perhaps halfway through the demo when I a) realised that this demo was long af, and b) nothing appeared what it had seemed as I kept going through it and the characters were enjoyable.
 So I decided to get the game and dragged my fiancé along for the ride. It’s one of those standard decision-making/pick which girl you want and go down her route VNs but it didn’t really feel skeezy or ecchi other than one particular point in each girl’s story where you get confessed to.  You go through the VN as an unnamed protagonist who is visiting his cousin over the summer, and you and your friends get dragged into a school club whose focus revolves around folklore. The town the protagonist finds himself in is haunted by the Yomibito, spirits of the undead who look exactly like regular people but are eventually driven mad enough to kill.
 One of the things that drew me to this visual novel was its assortment of animated backgrounds. They colourful and gorgeous. Every CG looks nice and coloured well, and the backgrounds for each area you visit are so beautiful and makes every single location easy to settle into.  The cast is also surprisingly decent, where I expected to hate a few people but I ended up being okay with them because they were written well and weren’t as tropey as I had expected.  I was also very pleased that the character that you were roleplaying as wasn’t skeezy when put into situations where he could have been, and that he treated the girls very well (though I won’t deny that there are some spots where behaviour was questionable but it doesn’t happen as often).  Because the characters were written adequately enough, the game’s true ending route comes together very well and very naturally to a point where I could seriously believe that every character got along with one another to make sure the emotional impact of the mystery was satisfying.
 In order to finish Worldend Syndrome, you have to do each route. A few characters’ routes don’t get unlocked until halfway through the game or even until the very end. The game also remembers everything you’ve done when it autosaves the system data on the world map, so if you need to reload a save to figure out someone’s schedule or if you mess up, it’s relatively easy to come back to something you’ve missed. I’ve played a lot of multiple route VNs before and Worldend Syndrome is easily one of the better VNs that allows the player to skip through to something they’ve missed or skip through previously-viewed text for another route.
 As it is, Worldend Syndrome doesn’t really try to do anything spectacular, nor does it try to stand out like other visual novels of 2019 have (ie: Ciconia, presumably AI but I only tried the demo and I hated parts of the script, sorry). It does its job and tells its story which has a very good payoff in the end.
  Judgement
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I bought my fiancé Judgement earlier this year, as I had retired from playing Ryu ga Gotoku after Dead Souls/Ishin, and he was still playing the series religiously.  I watched him play through part of it and I felt compelled to get my own copy because the combat looked nice, and the characters were compelling enough that I felt comfortable picking it up.
 Judgement follows former lawyer Takayuki Yagami who is now a detective.  His tale is one of redemption and conspiracies, reminiscent of some Phoenix Wright games (which this game gives clever nods to when the protagonist is in the courtroom). Yagami is more serious and down-to-earth than Kiryu is so the tone of the game feels quite different than other RGG games (or at least the ones I’ve played).
 It still feels like a regular RGG game where you’re still wandering through Kamurocho, you’re still getting into fights with randos and Yakuza dudes, you date girls, you go to buy food, you play minigames, etc. But it isn’t as big as a standard RGG game; because you stay only in the one area, the cast is smaller, you get a job board to get your sidequests from, and the story itself is fairly short and sweet.  I actually prefer that as a lapsed RGG player since it’s easier to get back into the games this way.
 Judgement, however, disappointed me just a little in how little you spend in the courtroom.  You’re given opportunities to present evidence, do some suspect tailing, use your smartphone to catch a cheating husband, or use a drone to search for evidence. I felt like when you had to use the drone to search for evidence, it ruined the pacing a little. The tailing missions are also reminiscent of Assassin’s Creed, and no that isn’t a good thing! Due to this, I felt like Judgement was not necessarily a great detective game but it did a decent job of trying to mold the RGG experience to a different main character.
 Yagami can… fight… for some reason so he can beat up whatever randos come up to him on the streets. He’s actually more acrobatic than I remember Kiryu being in previous RGG games. He can kick off objects, he’s hard to back into a corner, he can do wall-flips, etc. It’s also much easier to earn XP where it’s all in one bar so you can do whatever you want to fill it up like play darts and just put stuff into his lockpicking. As a lapsed fan, the streamlining feels okay. The streamlining for combat also feels good because if you fights go on too long, the popo can come for you and you’d get fined, so emphasis is on finishing fights cleanly and quickly.
 Overall, as a lapsed RGG fan, the way Judgement looks and feels and wraps up its twists and turns was really exciting for me. It may not have as many things to do as other RGG games, but honestly I think being a leaner experience was better and thus didn’t make the game overstay its welcome.  I also am eagerly awaiting RGG7 since I enjoyed the demo a lot and I think the new protagonist can carry the series the way Yagami carried Judgement.
  Cadence of Hyrule
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Sometimes, after my fiancé and I bought our Switch, I’d wake up, go brush my teeth, and return to bed just to see my fiancé awake and playing Cadence of Hyrule. I was perplexed as it’s been ages since he’d willingly played a Zelda game, and his hands are super-huge for the joycons so he doesn’t like using them much.
 You can easily say that Cadence of Hyrule is just a Crypt of the Necrodancer reskin with Zelda stuff all over it, but feels pretty clever in that it uses stuff from roguelikes and a rhythm game and makes the A Link to the Past world feel incredibly fresh. Bosses, especially, feel very fresh. Enemies move according to the rhythm and have a unique pattern that’s easily memorized so you can fall into the rhythm and take advantage of. If you’ve played Necrodancer, you’ll probably feel at home in this aspect, especially since the maps are also randomised (which leads different playthroughs feeling fresh).
 The Zelda feels comes from recreating tunes from older Zelda games in puzzles, the magnificent sprite art, the great Zelda remixes, a simple-enough story, and a standard set of things to find in each procedurally generated dungeon. You also find a variety of traditional items like the bow, the bombs, boomerang… and a spear? It’s a nice blend of Zelda and Necrodancer.
 The caveat is that it takes a little getting used to, since you’re not exactly used to not being able to freely move in a Zelda game. But when you do get used to it, it feels good. Everything is pretty expendable and if you die, you don’t feel like you necessarily lose a lot since you can accrue it all easily enough again. It’s unpredictable and that random roguelike nature is something that makes the Zelda experience feel fresh.
  Spirit Hunter: Death Mark
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My fiancé and I were trying to find spooky games to play for Halloween that wouldn’t make me squeamish because despite my profession dealing with analysis of body parts and human body fluids, I can’t see that kind of stuff on TV or in games in a realistic sense. It grosses me out. At least when it’s in front of me, it’s already out and off someone’s body and in a fume hood/biosafety cabinet and I didn’t have to see how it happened. My fiancé picked up Spirit Hunter: Death Mark on a sale we went through it together.
 Death Mark is a tale about horror-themed urban legends and a curse that needs to be broken.  People get marked with a crimson bite mark in the game’s H City and they eventually develop amnesia and die. A group of people live and gather at a spirit medium’s mansion (who is dead upon arrival).  The only hint to break the curse in this mansion is a little talking doll named Mary. The protagonist eventually goes through several mysteries in an effort to break his curse and stop others from dying.
 Death Mark does some surprisingly well-crafted worldbuilding. Each spirit you deal with has a well-told backstory, sometimes especially ghoulish (particularly the bonus post-game episode, the first episode, and the one episode with the telephone booth). The game excels with psychological horror and the enemies involved in each boss battle assist in making the player feel that way as well. The backgrounds also lend well to this as while they are simplistic, the shading and colours used help to execute a sense of dread. One particular chapter harkens back to Japan’s Aokigahara, and the backgrounds used connect very well to that particular location so that it feels super-eerie.
 Regardless, Death Mark relies a lot on its text to establish its atmosphere and as someone who reads stuff like R07 VNs and other regular VNs with a lot of text, I was okay with that. The localization was well-done, albeit with some issues that would have been caught in editing but overall it carried the story very well.
 There are boss battles prior to the end of each chapter, where you must use each item you find in your exploration segments. You need to use specific items in a specific order (even with the correct party setup) in order to achieve a good ending for that particular chapter (and thus eventually the game). I thought this was an interesting mechanic and while it got a little tired depending on the spirit, it showcased how creepy some of them can be on your screen.
 Unfortunately, Death Mark does not have a variety for its soundtrack and it’s almost disappointing that the same piano tunes and boss themes played repeatedly as I felt it detracted from the experience.
 Otherwise, I felt like Death Mark was a short and sweet horror experience that played into urban legends and folklore experiences. I loved the little vignettes that eventually ramped up to a central story point. I hope the sequel is good when we get around to it.
  Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice
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So my fiancé and I are doing this thing where we’ve started buying one copy of a game so we’d both own it together and go through it together. Sekiro and Man of Medan were two of those games this year.
 Sekiro isn’t really like Souls. Eventually you’ll come to learn that very quickly when the game throws a boss at you and if you try to play like Souls, you’re not going to get the job done.  It will show you that you never learned how to parry properly and you’re going to have to go back and learn it.  Or if you didn’t grab a prosthetic that will make the job easier, you’re gonna have to do that too.
 The game is interesting in that you aren’t exactly whittling down health bars all the time; you’re striking properly so you can overwhelm their posture bars, find an opening, and go in for the kill. Enemy health bars are essentially secondary to that posture bar. You have your own posture bar so you’ve got to learn how to parry properly. Sometimes you need to parry complete combos in order to deliver posture damage back to an enemy. It’s all about getting into the flow and rhythm of combat. And you must beat bosses in order for you to get a stat boost, so being able to beat a boss lies in your skill, and not necessarily your level/equipment.
 Sekiro is Souls-like in its storytelling and worldbuilding. You can run around rooftops and areas to find secrets off the beaten path. You go back and forth between areas and speak to different NPCs to find out their backstories. The plot is also told via NPC conversations with the main characters. At first it’s a little dry but the story opens up eventually. It also has some great voiced NPCs for quests (one quest in particular had voicework that made me feel so sorry for the character that I was like “we need to get the proper item for this guy please don’t make him suffer”).
 It feels rewarding to put in the work in order to beat the bosses, make it so you don’t resurrect as often to make people sick, and meet whatever standard Sekiro is throwing at you. It lets the player know that they’ve met that standard, and then throws another boss phase at them so you have to get even better.
 Owl I’m looking at you.
  Super Kirby Clash
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My fiancé and I bought a Switch together this year (which, outside of dinner and movies and clothes, etc. was one of our major purchases together).  We downloaded a few demos to try the control scheme out, including Super Kirby Clash.  I am aware that this game is probably old, but hey it’s still going and it’s still being supported and I’m catching up.
 I’m probably putting it here due to bias, but I think It’s really cute and the hats are super-adorable. I love getting new hats and new weapons for my little Kirby.  It’s fairly standard as far as a “mobile experience” is concerned and playing it a little when I have the time to and hacking away at it little by little is rewarding when I get a new hat or new gear. My fiancé and I played it in multiplayer as well, which felt a lot like Kirby’s Return to Dream Land.
 It’s pretty inoffensive and I haven’t paid real-life money for anything in it, and I still feel like I’m progressing. So as a Kirby game with light RPG elements (ie: something I’ve wanted for years and years), it’s nice to finally see realised.
 Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom
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An artist I commission very often from convinced me to move this game further up in queue than I originally had it when we were talking about games we were playing after finishing Shadowbringers’ main campaign.  
 Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is the spiritual successor inspired by Wonder Boy III, with the formula being modernized for a new era. It feels fast, and it looks soooooooo pretty. The tracks are bumpin’ too. It’s also a little tough but with every difficult section successfully platformed through, you feel really good about it.
 You play as a plucky boy named Jin whose uncle is an insano who turns everyone in the kingdom into animals. After you experience sweet freedom as a human boy platforming across things easily for like 15 minutes, Jin’s uncle turns him into a pig. Whoops. From there the platforming gets a little harder and you need to learn how to manipulate different forms and different spells in order to get across various sections.
 Different animal forms give you different skills. Pig form allows you to sniff out secrets literally, snake form lets you cling to walls and go through tiny passages, frog has a sticky tongue for swinging, and lion form lets you go through obstacles. You need to use these forms well to platform well enough to get through each area and finish the game. Being successful at platforming in this game feels good and fulfilling and satisfying. As you unlock more, platforming experiences get more and more complex with more obstacles put in your way, so in essence it feels like the opposite of a standard metroidvania.  Playing both Bloodstained and this in one year felt like playing polar opposites. That said, the checkpointing in Monster Boy is really good. Game Atelier knew what they were doing.
 The bosses by contrast were really easy and it’s nice to take the time to look at the art for each boss. All of the effects are also super-nice. Playing Monster Boy on a 4K TV is quite a visual treat for its boss sections, its town section, and its platforming sections. The colours are off-the-charts. Each animal sprite has its own set of unique animations: the piggy farts and looks like >_>, froggy looking at flies, etc. And the music is so good. If this game were a 2019 game I’d definitely put its soundtrack on my list, but it isn’t. It’s a nice blend of new and old stuff and it’s a delight to hear in-context as encouragement to keep going when you fail a platforming section.
 Monster Boy and the Cursed Kingdom is a faithful representation and homage of the old Wonder Boy games. It’s filled with references and secrets and awesome art, and I’m glad to have been convinced to move it up my queue for this year.
  Most Disappointing Game: Final Fantasy XIV: Shadowbringers
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I love Final Fantasy XIV. It’s brought me closer to so many people in recent years and I’ve met so many more through it. Playing this game means so much to me and I want the best for it for years to come.  It’s one of the reasons why I’m so critical about it. If I hated this game, I would stop playing and honestly, I wouldn’t care about its future.  I will say this before getting started:  I like Shadowbringers’ story so far (we aren’t going to be finished with its story until 5.3).  I don’t think It’s necessarily as consistent as Heavensward, but I think Shadowbringers’ story is the most Final Fantasy story we’ve gotten since perhaps FF10. Truly, it’s the best we’ve seen for the series this decade.  
 I had a lot of hopes and hype for Shadowbringers.  I hated Stormblood, for a myriad of reasons: social reasons, gameplay reasons, and narrative reasons.  The direction Shadowbringers was going and all the trailers made it seem like it was going to be fresh and exciting and new.  My fiancé and I (and a few others) swapped servers+data centers in advance of the expansion for a fresh start, to boot. I watched the Job Actions trailer over and over and tried to decide what I was going to eventually main and gear up because I didn’t really have a main in Stormblood due to the combat changes and how easy things became for certain things.
 During a live letter, they mentioned that they’re changing how things work in battle, and that’s when I became a little cautious. I was hoping for the best leading up to release and then I saw the scholar/healer changes and got very worried.  I changed mains in Stormblood because playing Scholar was freaking horrible at the start of Stormblood.  
 I eventually had to change mains at the start of Shadowbringers because I was not having fun playing Scholar. For people who didn’t bother to level a healer at all, the writing was on the wall for healers during Stormblood. Essentially, it introduced an age of healing where you barely ever used your GCDs to heal. You mostly used OGCDs and preplanned shields. 90% of the time if you wanted to be a good healer, you’d mostly DPS. I don’t think I’ve cast a GCD heal at all in SB and ShB content unless things were going super-wrong.
 The healing changes introduced in Shadowbringers made us think that things were going to change, that things were going to be harder to heal.  I had my doubts, however, because all fights are scripted and if they were to introduce a substantial change to incoming damage, they would have to make it so most people (casual, midcore, hardcore, less experienced newbies, experienced folks) would be used to It and could handle it.  There was no way they were going to introduce more difficulty given that subscription numbers were increasing.
 And so, healers during Shadowbringers got some damage skills taken away, but in their place, they were given more tools to heal with:
-          White Mage came away from this as a very well-rounded healer at launch. It had its damage spells, it had a damage spell with a stun, it finally had long-standing and easily useable mitigation, it has substantial MP recovery, and it has a damage spell that rewards you for using three GCD heals to make up for damage lost. White Mage still making out like a bandit in 5.1.
-          Scholar felt dramatically different and didn’t feel as solid as it used to be. It had most of its damage tools taken away, the usefulness of its fairy was decreased because let’s be honest it was super-overpowered, it got one of its fairies and its AoE esuna taken away, and it was given its PvP move to act as an AoE that doesn’t have another effect. I had to completely unlearn everything I did as scholar in the last 5-6 years in order to play current scholar. Current 5.1 scholar is overpowered as heck and I don’t feel as satisfied to play it in SB/ShB content.
-          AST LOL. All the cards are balance. MP regen is what. Heals are what. Everything is just what. Other fun skills were removed. That said, I really like AST just because it feels like I have to work twice as hard to achieve the same effect the other healers bring to the table.
 So eventually with all of these changes, we had assumed that healing was going to be harder.  It wasn’t. It’s the same experience and all we’re doing is pressing one single button all the time.  I barely have to heal in dungeons.  I barely have to heal in raid unless my party members step in stupid. I just can’t bring myself to play healer every single day anymore, and I love healing in this game. Or I loved it back when it was more dynamic. I just press one button over and over and over and over and over and maybe sometimes another but I just press one button a lot. It’s really sad and it makes me miss old Cleric Stance of all things.
 I like Shadowbringers’ story. I felt rewarded playing through it as someone who’s played the game for years and did everything when it was in-content. So for me, it was like a good reunion.  There were a lot of points where the story dragged or felt rocky. I felt like the start of the 5.0 campaign was utterly boring and poorly paced.  It picked up again, then slowed down again, then picked up again, then got REALLY BAD, then picked up again for a good finish. I don’t think it’s as consistent as Heavensward’s 3.0 campaign, but it was very solid and made up for the 4.0 campaign.
 However, story is only 20% of the experience for me.  The rest of the time, I need to actually play the game. I actually liked the levelling and crafting changes and new skills they brought in during 5.0 because leveling a crafter never felt easier. I felt like I still had to work hard but the payoff came quickly and my macros still worked as well as they did from during Stormblood. I also used my Stormblood melds and Stormblood equipment for the entire levelling experience and had to make concessions for some of my macros as time went on.  I still had to know what my skills did, basically. The 5.1 crafting/gathering changes kind of make me want to craft less since I don’t feel like I have to solve a puzzle anymore and to be honest, everyone crafts now so you make far less money than you previously did.  The desynth changes also made it so that most of my markets tanked since what’s the point of gathering half the materials when desynth makes those materials easily accessible.  I’m not saying to gatekeep at all, but I feel like the experience should have been a little harder (ie: like the Ixali experience where you had to learn what your skills did or desynth shouldn’t be this easy to keep the market fairly balanced). My server is a crafting server so I am more impacted in general from this. That said, I don’t have anything to spend gil on so it doesn’t matter, I guess.  I just feel far less inclined to participate in what was one of my favourite pastimes in XIV.
 I mained Ninja which got killed in 5.0. I was already dealing with the servers moving from East Coast to West Coast, so adding a bunch of stuff to squeeze into your TA window in 10 seconds in Shadowbringers utterly killed the job for me. 5.1 Ninja throws me off as someone who played this game since the time Ninja was introduced, and I can’t make myself play it. The current opener is the Doton opener (which is something I didn’t like in SB at all) and I can’t always rely on my tank to bring the thing to my Doton. That, and making it so you do different things per every other or every third TA just makes the job a little unpalatable for me at 80. I’m one of those people who wants TA to go. I don’t like that Ninja’s become the TA bot in recent years.  I can still do well with it. People still throw buffs at me, but I don’t find enjoyment in the job anymore and I hope we get a proper retool in 6.0.
 I switched back to ranged. Thankfully Bard hasn’t changed as much since SB (though I still prefer HW Bard like a weirdo), and Dancer is one of those “I worked too damn long today and I just wanna do the mindless brainless rotation” jobs.  I miss old Machinist oddly enough.  It felt really good when you played it well and pulled off a decent wildfire. Now it’s a little easier and I don’t feel as fulfilled playing it. That said, it’s probably the best incarnation of the job since it’s sad little introduction in 3.0.
 Even tanking is substantially easier and that’s a mostly good thing. It sucked going into a low level dungeon and having trouble keeping aggro due to the level syncing and your DPS’ stats. Now you can just turn your stance on and go to town without losing any damage potency like you used to. I kind of miss swapping stances after I’ve established aggro though, because you could tell the difference between a good tank and a bad/less practiced tank if they didn’t bother to swap stances in a fight. Tanks came out of this expansion very balanced, though. They might need some work here and there (warrior I’m looking at you), but overall, they came out the best out of the three roles.
 Other than that, you have monks not knowing what they should be, samurai continuously getting buffed and nerfed, black mage staying consistent, red mage being lol, summoner getting changed to the point where now it’s overpowered, among other DPS changes. DPS overall don’t have as much synergy so you can take any job you want to into raid and it’ll get the job done. That said if you want to do as much damage as possible, you’re generally going to take the same few classes into the raid if you’re less educated about them.  And I feel like the lack of synergy or utility between classes or even the loss of something like mana shift makes the whole experience a little boring.  It’s very “f you, I got mine” or the onus is on the player for their own personal burdens and no one’s really helping each other unless you’re a dancer, trick attack bot, dragoon or bard.
 I really hope the other pieces of content are substantial but what I’ve seen aren’t exactly what I had in mind. Boss refights with an alternate version is really neat but I didn’t really want that for this raid tier. I wanted something more original given what we had to deal with in Omega.  I don’t really care for the Nier Automata crossover because, again, I wanted something original to the XIV lore and the First. I think doubling down on Blue Mage is a bad idea and while some folks like its party-based content now, I can’t bring myself to keep doing the content given that it’s clear they don’t know what to do with it (or didn’t know what to do with it). With one dungeon coming per patch I have to question what’s happening internally or what they’re working on. I know SE is weird internally and I really hope that the kind of stuff I’ve read in previous postmortem articles isn’t happening.
 Either way, I’m really disappointed that I want to stop playing XIV so much when it’s the most popular among my friends and followers because it’s so dissatisfying to me and it’s the most accessible that it’s ever been. I hope things get better eventually but going by what I think they have in store and their old reliable formula, I don’t have hope. I’m tired of the formula and I feel like it needs a shakeup. Overall, I’ve been less happy playing FFXIV than I’ve ever been and it makes me feel really sad. 
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nihalsjourney · 4 years
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Not wearing my hijab anymore
We’ve entered a new decade, it’s 2020. To be honest I’m not a big fan of New Year’s Eve and the hype around it, which is why I waited with a new blogpost. I think it’s nice to look back on some things, one of them being my very first blogpost on here. (link) December 8, 2015 was my very first day without hijab. I can still feel the stress and anxiety of that day. After that, I never talked about it anymore because I still felt guilt and shame. It’s been four years and I feel like I’m able to talk about this past chapter in my life much better.
So we’re going waaaaay back, beyond those 4 years!
My mother is Dutch and my father is Turkish, my mother converted to Islam 24 years ago. When my parents had my brothers and I, baba (father) felt a stronger sense of practicing Islam better as well as raising us with our Turkish identity. Seeing as how Dutch society forces immigrants to assimilate rather than to integrate. The thought and fear of us losing our Turkish identity really stressed him out. 
Being in an interracial relationship asks for more different responsibilities I think. My mother and baba were integrating in each other’s culture, learning one another’s language while working hard and raising us with best of both worlds. 
As we got older our parents signed us up to an Islamic elementary school. With a school bus we’d go in the early morning from Valkenswaard to Eindhoven. There were both Muslim and non-Muslim faculty. My personal experience wasn’t great, I was already dealing with depression, anxiety, and trauma. I don’t remember a lot from what I learned because I dissociated quite often. It was difficult for me to learn because unfortunately we were taught Islam from a cultural perspective and fear inducing. To me Allah seemed like a big angry man and I refused to believe that.
I remember that all female teachers wore a hijab. Muslim or not. The girls also wore a hijab starting very young. After school they would take it off, others didn’t. I remember one time after gym class that I didn’t put my hijab back on. One of the male teachers who saw us on our way back to class shamed me for it. Looking back it was so awful how at first the girls didn’t even bother or noticed. But once the teacher said something about it they started whispering loudly to each other ‘haram’ ‘she didn’t put her hijab back on!’.
There was this unspoken rule that a girl should wear her hijab ‘full time’ when she’s 12. We’d ask each other, ‘When will you wear your hijab?’ ‘If you don’t start wearing it now you never will!!’ ‘Wearing your hijab at 16 or 18 is too late, you should wear it when you’re at least 12!’ Alhamdulillah (thank God) I can say that my parents never forced me.
I switched schools when I was 8, it wasn’t an Islamic school but I still kept wearing my hijab to school as force of habit.  Once I turned either 10, 11 or 12 years old I started wearing my hijab. After age of 12 I had to switch schools again, this time a dominantly white school. From the maybe 200 students, there were 5 students of colour, 4 of them Muslim and I being the only one wearing a hijab. I was facing a lot of discrimination and Islamophobia already and it only got worse from then on. The majority of white people questioned me about every single little thing, my hijab, Islam, if I sympathize with terrorists, if my father came here for money and if I was oppressed. ‘When did you start to realize you wanted to wear your hijab?’ ‘Did you feel ready?’ ‘So you’re Muslim, right? What do you think of ISIS?’ The older I got, I hoped that the questions would stop but they never did. I had very little knowledge, yet people thought I did because of my hijab. Like I was a living, walking human museum or encyclopedia.  
I started to question myself. Did I feel ready? Do I understand what wearing the hijab means? Can I justify myself to Allah for wearing my hijab though the intention of wearing it is non-existent?
It made my heart hurt so much because I had to face reality. I didn’t have an answer. At first I tried reading and researching more about Islam, but back then there was very little willingness of me to do so. I tried to move on despite feeling unhappy, guilty and confused. When I was 18 I decided to talk to my mother about it. She said she had always been worried that I never made my decision to wear my hijab consciously because I was so young. Together with my mother I began brainstorming for ideas and options. Such as trying to wear my hijab in different styles to see it makes any difference and talking with a few women who had taken their hijab off. When I listened to their stories I felt scared. Clueless of what I should do, standing at a cross roads having no idea which path to take.
Once I decided that I wanted to stop wearing my hijab, I talked with my baba. He was very confused and upset. He always tried to protect us from the Western world, so he was worried that it influenced my choice. I told him it didn’t. Although he didn’t agree with my decision he emphasized that he will always be there for me and love me. That’s all I needed to hear. I knew that baba needed his time to get used to things.
Sometimes I still think that I have to explain to others that I used to wear a hijab. Specifically to sisters who wear it. Because I understand all too well what it’s like to be a visible target of Islamophobic violence. There has become such a huge shift in my daily life that sometimes I feel like the odd one out when I’m with Muslim women (who wear the hijab).
Talking about a huge shift in my daily life. In the beginning especially, I noticed how Muslims and non-Muslims were now treating me differently. Whenever I’d greet a sister ‘Assalaam aleikum’, (peace be upon you) she’d look me up and down disapprovingly and wouldn’t return my greeting. It felt awful, I stopped greeting anyone all at once to give myself some sense of security because I was feeling so vulnerable back then. Instead, non-Muslim (majority white) people started to happily greet me. It was mind boggling. 
Like it was some sort of game, I’d keep track of all these differences. How in the past people wouldn’t sit next to me in public transport even when it was busy, to by passers saying ‘Allahu akbar’ or ‘terrorist’ under their breath when walking past me, getting checked by security a lot faster or accused of stealing, always being refused when applying for a job (in my city, Eindhoven, discrimination on the job market is very high) etc. 
When I have to show my ID, that has a picture of me with my hijab on, people always feel the need to tell me ‘You look prettier without hijab!’. When that happens I get a, what Dutch Iranian artist Saman Amini calls in the play ‘A Seat at The Table’, racial freeze. Cashing in the comment, reacting with a fake smile and getting back to my day. Not allowing myself to feel the hurt or the frustration.
It has definitely been a struggle the first year or two. I had to adjust to how society was treating me, nobody sees my hijab but sometimes I still feel like I wear it. A lot of my life experiences before taking it off were based around my hijab. And as I’m writing, realising it now, hurts. Wearing the hijab since a young age, I was basically robbed of my childhood and sure that may sound dramatic but it’s reality. It impacted my quality of life because I was an easy target for Islamophobic violence both verbal and non-verbal.
I got to see first-hand what it’s like to be treated both with and without hijab by non-Muslim and Muslims. Whether I’m a bad Muslim or a well ‘integrated’ (read assimilated) immigrant. 
We still teach girls to judge other girls. In my time we’d judge those who chose not to wear their hijab (yet) or who wore their hijab the ‘wrong’ way. As I got older I started to realise how toxic this behaviour is. But I find that this way of thinking is still deeply rooted. Because I still have some moments that when I see a sister with a hijab showing hair, my first thought is ‘Oh My GoD sHe Is ShOwInG hEr HaIr!! AYIB!!’ it’s been happening a lot less. But when it does I mentally slap myself in the face and remind myself of how toxic that way of thinking is because it does not contribute to anything positive. The judgement I had towards myself and others has lessened immensely. I’ve become a stronger person and learned so much (I’m still learning!!). All the things I named and more, I had to experience. Before I was so caught up with myself. Trying to survive. Now I able to make room in my heart for others to heal.
I look back to these past four years a lot. Feeling thankful and amazed. Never before did I have such a close relationship with Allah and myself. Honestly, I feel ashamed when I say the following. So may Allah forgive me for my ignorance and wrong doings, may He accept my good deeds, prayers and efforts of learning…
I never prayed, sometimes during Ramadan. Like I said, I forgot what I learned as a kid because of dissociating. When someone tried to teach me about Islam I didn’t have the space to listen, my mind never saved the information. Alhamdulillah, with its ups and downs, the past four years I have now been saving the knowledge I learn about Islam. I’m praying 5 times a day, reading translations of the Quran, going to lectures with an open heart and mind. Soaking up all the information I can get my hands on, eager to learn.
I’m not saying this to brag. But to stress that once again, I had to go through these things to grow through them. I had to experience all of this in order to become the person I am today. A better version of myself. Because with this experience and knowledge I am able to stand even stronger on my feet.
Lastly, I want to emphasize that my experiences I shared above, especially the negative ones have nothing to do with Islam. It’s man-made culture. Please see religion separate from its people.
Also there is unfortunately still way too little awareness of how children mimic our words and (misogynistic) behaviour. Pretty much everything I named in my story I learned from aunties, uncles and the girls around me. So especially to us women, I hope that we can start to truly uplift each other and not tear each other down any longer.
Thank you so much for taking your time to read this. A Dutch version of this blog post will soon follow.
Take care, peace and blessings upon you all! Much love,
Nihâl
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starforged · 5 years
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we’re going nowhere: the magnus archives fic
Basira doesn't sleep, not like she used to. Thoughts race. The dark creeps in. Another book requires her attention. More information is needed. It's soothing in a way that cop work never was, although she misses it.
Even if she had been asleep, the pounding on her flat door would have woken her up instantly. Years in the force had made her a light sleeper.
But she's not asleep. She's in the kitchen, at her table, three books open before her.
“Basira!”
Daisy is likely to wake the whole building at this rate, with the way her voice booms through the door and into the halls. She uses her police knock: heavy-handed and intimidating.
Basira leans back in her wooden chair, listening to its familiar creaks. She rubs her eyes, realizing only now that they burn with exhaustion. The knock comes again, and she sighs. “Alright, Daisy, hold on.”
Daisy not being a cop is perhaps the worst thing that could have happened to her, in Basira's opinion. But it's not like they can go back. They've burned those bridges.
She opens the front door to find Daisy digging her fingers into the frame, leaning in.
There's so much about Daisy that makes sense, knowing that she's part of a power involving hunting. She also thinks that since it was given a name, her drive is more intense, more brutal, more violent. Daisy is a hunter; she wants to kill.
“It's late.”
“Yeah, but you're up.”
She barges past Basira without an invite, helping herself to the fridge. The lines of her body are taut, and she breathes in pants. Is she excited, or anxious? She’s not even sure if there’s a difference anymore when it comes to Daisy.
Basira closes the door and locks it, feeling more satisfied as the click slides into place. It’s swallowed up by the pop and fizz of a beer being opened. Daisy is leaning against the fridge door when she joins her, but the bottle remains in her hand, fingers wrapped around the neck. Basira notices that her knuckles are white. She could snap the bottle and not even notice it.
She crosses her arms over her chest, leaning back against the counter top. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing.”
There’s a clock in the kitchen. When she’s up reading, she lets it monotonous clicking soothe her. Now she looks over at it to check the time. Shit, when did it become past three in the morning? Has she really been up for over 24 hours?
She rubs her eyes.
“Nothing in the middle of the night? You can do better than that, Daisy,” she mutters.
Daisy finally brings the bottle to her mouth, brown glass resting against her lips. She doesn’t tilt it up. She doesn’t tilt her head back. She doesn’t drink. Her hand drops to her side again. There’s a light that bounces around in her eyes when her gaze lands on her face. It sends a chill down Basira’s spine.
That light is madness.
It’s not something she’s really seen before. Either because Daisy has tried to hide that from her, or because she’s getting worse. Her head cocks to the side. An uneasiness settles in the pit of her stomach, but the curiosity is almost just as bad.
“I miss you,” Daisy finally manages to say. It fills the stretch of silence that spread between them. “I know you’ve got this job and all, but I meant it when I asked you to come on a hunt with me.”
“I know you did.”
Her brow furrows, teeth baring. Does she know she does that sometimes when an answer doesn’t suit what she wants? It’s - attractive. Unnerving, but attractive.
“And?”
“There’s too much to do before--”
“Fuck the Unknowing, Basira!” This time, she does take a swig, draining it in half. “Before this, before Jon and the Institute.” Her nostrils flare. She finishes the beer. “We were good.”
There’s an ache in her chest over the outburst. They were good partners, before Basira had to duck out of the force and leave her behind. Before it all got too much for her. Before Daisy disappeared amidst a bloody trail. She presses her lips together, watching the way the bottle cracks when it’s slammed down on a counter next to the fridge. It doesn’t shatter, at least.
“Daisy, we’re still good.”
“Are we?”
No.
Probably not.
There are a lot of things in the way now that wasn’t just the job before and Daisy’s need to hide the darkest parts of the world from her. That had been annoying but - also attractive. It is a sad fact that everything about Daisy has been attractive since day one.
She doesn’t take her gaze off of Daisy, though, even when Daisy does her best to look elsewhere to fume with the occasional glance back in her direction.
They aren’t good now. She knows she’s bait for Elias to keep a tight leash on Daisy. She knows that every day brings her closer to an end that she never planned for. She knows that they are going to go into a dangerous situation, and they’ll probably die.
“I’m not going out with you right now, if that’s why you’re here,” Basira tells her. She points to the clock. It’s late, Daisy. She’s not going to hunt monsters right now.
“Will you? Just one more hunt?”
Basira doesn’t like to think of herself as a sappy romantic. It’s just not in her bones. So she doesn’t know why she says it, only that she knows she means it. “After the Unknowing.”
It’s holding a promise that she knows neither of them can commit to. She wants it to be an oath. We’ll come back, because we said so. We have something to do.
She knows that Daisy thinks of the idea with a thin layer of disgust. Her lip curls up, and those teeth come out again. But part of her is her normal self again, the way her eyes cool and land heavily on Basira, the flat affect of her voice.
“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve heard. We can go right now,” Daisy argues.
“No.” She pushes herself off of the counter and reaches for Daisy’s hands. Her skin is hot, on fire, like her blood is boiling. “I don’t have time.”
Her nails dig into the backs of Basira’s hands. “I don’t want to think about any of this.”
She sounds defeated, soft, broken. Basira’s lips part, words on the tip of her tongue, but she can’t remember if they’re supposed to be tired or comforting. She can’t remember because Daisy’s mouth is on hers, boiling and demanding. It’s like she can taste the lust of the Hunt on her lips, and it twists something inside of her that makes her want. She drops Daisy’s hands in favor of twisting her fingers into the fabric of her wrinkled shirt. Did she wear this yesterday? It looks like she was wearing it yesterday. Hot fingers slide over her neck, thumbs pressed to the sides of her jaw, fingers beneath her hijab. Careful, so careful to not disturb the fabric, her hair.
Even in a frenzy, Daisy remembers that one.
She presses her hips into Daisy’s until she’s pinned against the door of the fridge. “Stay,” she breathes into her mouth.
Daisy’s hands slide down her back, draw lightly over her hips until she grabs her hard by the belt loops and tugs her closer. Her fingers are already unbuttoning her jeans. “Hope you weren’t planning to sleep.”
“I never do.”
There’s not going to be an after. But she wishes that Daisy would have lied.
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{fic} That Old Sweet Feeling (part 18)
Fandom:  The Adventure Zone:  Commitment Rating:  M Chapter Warnings:  None Relationship:  Nadiya Jones/Mary Word Count:  1,494
Here on AO3. Read the rest: Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 Part 4 Part 5 Part 6 Part 7 Part 8 Part 9 Part 10 Part 11 Part 12 Part 13 Part 14 Part 15 Part 16 Part 17
Tagging @someone-called-f1nch, @voidfishkid, @mellowstarscape, and @jumpboy-rembrandt!
Not sure how I feel this chapter, but here it is. Look forward to next week, when we get another reunion.
Chapter Summary:   Flanagan takes a compliment. Addison tries their best. Nadiya thinks about science.
__________________
“I’m going to die,” Remy moaned. “This is it. This is how I go.”
“It’s just curry,” Flanagan said, embarrassed. “Pretty easy.”
“You don’t understand,” Remy said, pointing his fork at Flanagan. “We haven’t eaten anything not from a convenience store or a sewer in, like, a week. This is so much better than sewer granola.”
“They were power bars,” Nadiya grumbled, “and the sewer was clean.” She couldn’t complain too much, though; she was already on her second helping, and Kardala was on her fourth.
“Geez, you guys have really been through the wringer, huh?” Addison said sympathetically.
“Little bit,” Remy agreed. “Oh, hey, man, by the way, sorry about knocking you out back at the ‘Berg. I really didn’t mean to. Glad you got out okay.”
“Oh, yeah, no worries,” Addison said, waving a hand. “I couldn’t, uh, couldn’t stop channeling, so it’s probably good you knocked me out like that. Flanagan took care of me, it was all fine. I mean, honestly, she was the one who –” They broke off.
“It’s fine.” Flanagan sighed. “All three of our powers were sometimes a little… wonky, right from the beginning. I mean, with Mary, obviously, it was a totally different story, but when they were all activated together? Not great. That’s why Addison couldn’t stop channeling, and I couldn’t stop… amplifying? Generating? I dunno. Anyways, when you broke the current, it messed me up a little.” She took another bite of the curry and spoke around it. “Just weird… like, I go non-verbal sometimes. Well. More often than I used to,” she corrected.
“Dang. I’m sorry,” Remy said, his face falling.
“It’s okay,” Flanagan said. “You had to. Mary probably would’ve died, or she would’ve finished channeling and shut down all the electronics, and that would’ve been bad. This is, like, the best of all possible worlds, really. You guys are in way worse shape.”
Remy looked at Nadiya and Kardala. “Yeah, okay,” he admitted. “We’re not doing great. And we don’t know what we’re doing.” He absentmindedly rubbed one hand over his still-bandaged wrist.
“You guys done?” Addison collected plates. “I’ll take care of these.”
“I’ll help,” Nadiya said abruptly, standing up. “If that’s okay.”
“Uh, yeah, sure,” Addison said with a shrug, leading the way into the kitchen. Once they both inside, they turned to Nadiya. “You really wanted to help with the dishes?”
Nadiya wilted slightly. Caught in the act. “I want to know anything you can think of about Mary Sage,” she said. “To help us find her. And –” She stopped. “Yeah. You and Flanagan knew her best, right?”
Addison frowned as they started filling the sink with soapy water. “I guess. I mean, I don’t know if I’ll be telling you much you don’t already know. She’s… pretty closed-off. Sarcastic. Resentful, I guess. Didn’t talk to us much.”
“I know all that,” Nadiya pressed, taking the dish Addison handed her and drying it.
“She thought everyone was out to get her,” Addison said after a moment, hands stilling in the water. “Everyone. I knew the, uh, the bare bones of her backstory. With her parents getting arrested and everything. She thinks everyone’s in on it. She even thought Flanagan and I were, and it only got worse after she got the stimplants. She made a run for it, right afterwards. They tried to, uh, sedate her, but it didn’t work. She stole a skimmer and just… ran.” They resume washing. “None of us could really get through to her at that point. She wouldn’t even listen.”
“Fuck.” Nadiya takes the next dish and dries it methodically. “So, hypothetically speaking… if we came across information that said that there was a giant conspiracy under all this and that everyone was out to get her…”
“No wonder she ran,” Addison finished. “It would be her worst fears come true, I think. It seems like she trusted you guys a bit, but after something like that, I bet she felt like she couldn’t trust anyone.”
“She could’ve trusted me,” Nadiya said. “Us. She could’ve trusted us.”
“I know,” Addison said. “And she probably knows it too, deep down. But if she ran off like that, she wasn’t thinking straight.”
Nadiya thought about Mary Sage’s breakdown in the sewers, her quoting the Bible. Saying I’m scared.
Burying her head in Nadiya’s lap.
“It’s not your fault she doesn’t trust you,” Addison said. “Whatever you’re thinking. It wasn’t –”
“I know that,” Nadiya said sharply.
“I’m just saying –”
“Well, don’t.” Nadiya balled up the dish towel and threw it onto the counter. “Don’t just say when you don’t know.” She stalked into the other room, grabbed her bag from where she’d left it on a chair. “Is there anywhere in this house I can get some goddamn privacy?” she snapped.
Flanagan looked over from the table. “There’s a bedroom down that way,” she said, pointing down the hall. “But –”
“Look, I just need a fucking minute to myself, if you don’t mind,” Nadiya said, and without waiting for a response, walked through the door indicated, closing it behind her a little more loudly than she probably should have.
It was a nice room, she guessed. Homier than Jamie’s entire place seemed – somehow, Addison and Flanagan had found knickknacks to put on the dresser, a few pictures to hang on the wall. The comforter, if a bit dusty, was a clean and only slightly faded blue. Nadiya sat down on it, the mattress creaking under her.
God, that felt good.
Nadiya let her face drop into her hands, fingernails digging into the sides of her head. Slowly, the ringing in her ears started to die down. She let out a breath and straightened up again. She still had a headache, though, so she unzipped her bag, digging around in it for ibuprofen.
Instead, what her hand closed around was a small picture frame.
Nadiya very nearly shoved the frame deeper into her bag, but after a second of hesitation, pulled it out.
She didn’t even know why she’d stuck it in her bag. It wasn’t like it held a bunch of amazing memories.
It wasn’t like she even remembered when her parents were together like that.
Her mother was wearing her hijab in the picture. Her father was wearing his glasses, like he’d just gotten up from reading over a journal article. He probably had, and then gone back to it right after they’d snapped the picture.
Don’t get attached, Nadiya, she heard her father say. We’ll be moving on sooner or later. People, places, they come and go. The only thing that isn’t transient is science – and even then, you can’t always rely on it. Well, he was pretty fucking accurate on that point. Jobs, apartments… people, came and went. Mary Sage, transient, leaving the minute she got freaked out. There was no predicting it, no preparing for it.
It was like quantum mechanics, Nadiya thought. Since quantum mechanics was based on probability, there was intrinsic randomness in everything related to it. The laws of physics themselves were random. A biochemical roll of the dice spiraling towards entropy at every moment.
Remy’s mom, Nadiya thought, was probably full of shit. Bonds like the ones she’d described weren’t random enough for a universe like this. In a world where bonds existed, she wouldn’t be on the run from a cult run by a would-be dictator. She wouldn’t be crying into a coworker’s shoulder because her own fucking mother didn’t bother being around, or even in the same country. She wouldn’t be wondering if her father even knew she was missing.
Fuck both of them. It wasn’t like she cared.
Abruptly annoyed, Nadiya shoved the photo back into her bag and zipped it closed.
“Nadiya?” There was a soft knock at the door. Addison. “Can I come in?”
“Yeah, sure,” Nadiya said with a shrug, and the door creaked open, letting Addison in. They looked nervous. “What?”
“I’ve got, uh, an idea of how to find Mary,” they said.
Instantly, Nadiya was razor-focused. “What? How?”
“Well, Remy was explaining the bond thing,” Addison said, “and I thought… maybe that could help. Flanagan and I can mark off some places that seem like Mary’d go, and we can drive around and see if we can feel the pull.” They paused. “You know what I mean by the pull, right?”
“Yeah. I… figured that out. How do we even know she’s around here, though?”
Addison shrugged. “We don’t. We just have to trust, I guess. Trust that she was… drawn to us and to you guys. What else can we do?”
Nadiya clenched her hands into fists. Nothing. There was nothing else they could do. She had to trust – trust Mary Sage, Remy’s mom, Addison and Flanagan. All the transient people who were going to disappear sooner or later.
“Nadiya?”
“Okay,” Nadiya said. “Fine. Okay.” She swallowed hard. “What else can we do.”
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automatismoateo · 3 years
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Islam basically ruined my life via /r/atheism
Submitted July 03, 2021 at 09:08PM by anonymousjajaj (Via reddit https://ift.tt/2TpAUR5) Islam basically ruined my life
I left islam a few months ago because I didn't agree with it, and have been an atheist since. I haven't told my family because they're VERY religious and absolutely hate every non-Muslim. So I still have to wear a hijab and pray sometimes so they don't clock. For the most part I still have a good relationship with my parents, we have conversations all the time and we probably have a better relationship than most children have with their parents, apart from the trauma they've given. However once they find out I'm an atheist, the relationship will go down the drain because their religion is more important than their daughter lol.
But my parents are really strict, they don't let me out of the house at ALL, unless one of them is with me. I can't even go into the garden without their permission. I've never been out with my friends, the only place I ever saw them was at school, and I haven't been going to school since September 2019 because we moved cities and I started homeschooling. I kinda just stopped talking to all my old friends because I didn't want to burden them if we could never see each other. So ever since I moved, the only time I leave the house is to go shopping with my mum, and sometimes I don't even go shopping anymore because I can't be asked.
The reason I'm not allowed to go out? Because I'm a girl and islam says that girls should stay at home.
Another thing they don't let me do: I'm not allowed socials.
Why? Because the only type of girls that have social media are 'kanjari's' (translation: whore/slut/prostitute).
I'm also not allowed to go to uni (I'm not old enough to go yet anyways but this is just another thing)
Why not? Because uni is the place where people fall into sin (basically saying premarital sex and alcohol and drugs and shit, they didn't actually say this, but I'm pretty sure this is what they meant). Except for this one I'd still go to uni regardless of what they said, but my education is going shit since I started homeschooling (which makes me so sad because I was a straight A kinda student in school) so I probably wouldn't be qualified enough to get into one.
And I'm not allowed to get a job either
Why not? Because jobs include the mixing of men and women and that's a sin. And because in Islam men are the ones that work, women should stay at home and take care of the family.
My brother is allowed to do all of these things.
I honestly don't know how I'm going to get out of here when I'm older, because there's no way for me to become financially independent because my parents don't let me get a job. And I can't escape to uni, because I'm not allowed nor do I have the resources for that (I've been trying to improve my education as much as I can but it's hard to teach myself from books)
I came here because maybe a lot of you guys have similar experiences and could help I guess.
I literally don't know what to do. I'm 16 right now but I don't see any good way for my life to go.
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actualmuslimwomen · 3 years
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CHAPTER 4
ANALYSIS OF THE LIFE CONDITIONS AND ISSUES OF MUSLIM STUDENTS
    It must be rather hard for the students who are studying abroad to live away from their family while having to survive and be successful in their study at the same time. Pressures come from all directions and their success depends on how strong they are to overcome obstacles in their life. The stories of their life in Japan will be shown below.
4.1. Islam as a faith
    In the previous chapter, I have described two Japanese women who had converted to Islam and wore hijab as one of the ways of showing their faith. But, here in this chapter, I will point out two students who admitted that they did not wear the hijab despite of being a Muslim. The reasons are related to their interesting backgrounds. 
    Fadiya is a Bangladeshi and a born-Muslim. According to the Pew Research Center, Bangladesh is currently the fourth country in the world with the largest number of Muslims after India as the third ("Mapping the Global Muslim Population", Pew Research Center, www.pewforum.org/2009/10/07/mapping-the-global-muslim-population/. Accessed 28 December 2017). This means that Fadiya was born in a Muslim-majority country. Her family members are all Muslims and her mother habitually wears hijab, but Fadiya does not wear one. Fadiya argues that it is not mandatory to wear hijab for Muslim women in Bangladesh and there is no government's regulation for Muslim women to wear hijab, either. Fadiya continues her argument that it all depends on the individual and the family culture. Fadiya's mother always encouraged her to wear hijab, but she never actually said that it was a must for Fadiya to wear hijab. Because her mother never forced her, Fadiya decided not to wear hijab. Nevertheless, she still observes other Islamic law related to Muslim obligations such as performing prayer and fasting. 
    Iesha has a different story on her choice in Islam and, to be honest, it is quite a startling story. Iesha came from Turkey, which is considered as the eighth country in the world with the largest number of Muslims. But, even though Turkey is considered as a country with a large number of Muslims, not everyone practices the faith so well. That is also the case with Iesha's family. Iesha's mother does not wear hijab. She performs prayer but only sometimes practices fasting. Though Iesha's mother does not wear hijab, she knows that she ought not to wear clothes that are too vulgar, so she wears clothes that rather covers her body. Iesha followed her mother as a role model, by just wearing casual clothes and not wearing hijab. One of the other reasons Iesha decided not to wear hijab was that there are situations in Turkey that forces women in headscarves to wear wig or take off their headscarves completely. By wearing wigs, they comply with the state regulations and try to fit in with the definition of the Modern Turkish women, at least in appearance. In turn, they were given access to education and workplace (Kavakci, 2010: 96). So, instead of forcing herself to wear hijab, Iesha chose not to wear one at all.
    Now let us examine the cases of Eneng from Indonesia, Aishah from Malaysia and Tedha from Turkey. These girls were raised in an environment where they were taught the law of Islam well and their awareness of the duties as Muslim women was also grown. Although Aishah and Tedha did not clarify about how they decided to wear hijab at the beginning, they indicated that they already had worn hijab since they were younger (Tedha specifically told that she had started wearing hijab since she was fifteen years old). They were already used to wearing one and their behaviors did not change even after they came to live in Japan. Eneng told that she had started wearing hijab since her high school days. It was her mother who first encouraged her to wear one. Eneng's mother already wore hijab and she wanted her daughter to understand that it was about the time for her to wear hijab to fulfill one of the Islamic laws. 
    As far as I could understand, the reason for someone to decide something important is often due to a few simple keywords that came out of other people's statements or attitudes, especially those of parents. Fadiya interpreted her mother's statement and she decided not to wear hijab. Iesha saw her mother and thought of her mother as a role model and that made her not wear hijab just as her mother. This author too, decided to wear hijab because of my mother's statement. When my aunt decided that it was free for me to wear hijab or not during the wedding, to my surprise, my mother stated the otherwise. Since she wanted everyone to be uniformed whereas I was the only one who was not wearing hijab, she wanted me to wear hijab, too. It was only because of this kind of trifle matter shown by her attitude that I felt encouraged to make a big decision. 
    This section has shown some of the histories of the students regarding their religious faith. The students discussed above grew in an Islamic environment and they were all given the knowledge of Islamic law in their family. Despite of being so, they all have their own ways in practicing their faith. For them, Islam is fascinating yet complex religion and each individual chose the best way for them in practicing Islam in their daily life. How they live their daily life will be analyzed in the next section. 
4.2. Activities as a Muslim Student
    Since they came all the way to Japan, these Muslim students have also been involved in many activities in their daily life other than studying for the main purpose. For some of them, to have other activities else than just studying has really been precious, while not so for the others. 
    Iesha came to the University of Shizuoka as an Exchange Student and has been much involved in several other activities, inside or even outside of the campus. As a foreign student, Iesha participates in the International Friendship Community at the university. In that community, she would meet other foreign students too, and enjoy communication and sociality with the Japanese students. They sometimes hold events for international cultural exchange. Outside of the university, Iesha participated in many English Clubs. She often participates in international cultural exchange meetings after finding them out through Facebook. Iesha admits that she really enjoys this kind of events, because people would learn English and she would learn Japanese at the same time and both would learn each other's culture more deeply. Iesha also says that she is doing arubaito (part-time job) as an English conversation teacher. So, basically Iesha is involved in activities that she has always been interested in and she is really interested in meeting new people to exchange ideas. By the way, Aishah, Eneng and Tedha also participate in the same International Friendship Community because all of them are studying at the same university. Only Fadiya does not join this community because she only wishes to focus on studying according to her. In case that she is to participate in other activities, those are the kind of activities that she attends once or twice a month. She admits that she has an English Language Club to attend sometimes if her dormitory friends happen to gather. But, she spends most of her time at her research room.
    Let us go to the next case of Tedha. She participated in the Photography Club during the first semester of the University of Shizuoka, but it did not last long because she could not bear the heat of summer while they often had to go out to look for photo objects. Although it did not go well, Tedha kept trying to do other activities. She was actually doing arubaito as an English teacher, just like Iesha was. Tedha taught English to some Japanese people who were mostly employees and then taught them English through practical conversation. The English Conversation lessons are usually held at coffee shops, which the students had chosen. To correspond to these students’ activities, this author also had the experience of joining the activities of the International Friendship Community. The community had a schedule once a week for everyone to gather during the lunchtime. On Wednesday lunchtime, they would have small conversations among the foreign and the Japanese students. Before the lunchtime is over, the community's leader proposes a discussion and voting session for their next events. The events are various. It could be a field trip, cooking party and even Christmas party. This author only participated in some of the events that seemed interesting like the field trip, because it was necessary for me to go somewhere that seemed unreachable by myself. I quitted the IFC after the second semester set in because I was starting to be very busy with my classes.
    Different people might have had different attitudes. Eneng was in the same situation as this author, being busy in studying because Eneng and the author were both pursuing the Graduate Degree Program. Despite of her being busy, Eneng actually managed to participate in many activities inside and outside of the campus. She took part in the International Friendship Community too, although she only attended the big events without attending the weekly lunchtime gathering. Outside of the university, Eneng was engaged in two functions, namely, the Shizuoka Muslim Association, which was responsible for connecting the Muslim students at the University of Shizuoka and other Muslims who live especially in Shizuoka City, and Shinzen Taishi, which focused on introducing Indonesian cultures to the Japanese at schools. She also joined many study meetings with people from small and medium enterprises. Eneng who came for studying in Japan seemed to have taken a good chance in spreading her wings to get to know people better and get more knowledge. She considers that meeting people is precious for her, especially when she meets people that are admirable for her. Compared to the other students, Eneng was quite active in these organizational activities. Sometimes she would not only introduce Indonesian cultures, but also introduce Islam to the Japanese. She also often participates in events that the Shizuoka Muslim Association holds, such as in Ramadan. There is the breaking fasting event that gathers Muslims and any other Japanese who are interested from all over Shizuoka. This author attended this breaking fasting event once and it was pretty amazing with a great number of non-Muslim Japanese who were interested in and respecting the religious event by it themselves. 
    Other than participating in activities like those mentioned, Eneng also had arubaito. During her earlier years in the university, she was already doing arubaito in a hospital where she was mostly assisting the nurses to clean the surgery rooms after surgeries. But when she entered the second year of Graduate Degree Program, she had a different arubaito in a factory, packing pork meats into boxes. In Islam, it is not allowed to consume pork and any derivative of it. As mentioned in the Holy Quran, "He has only forbidden to you dead animals, blood, the flesh of swine, and that which has been dedicated to other than Allah. But whoever is forced [by necessity], neither desiring [it] nor transgressing [its limit], there is no sin upon him. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful." (Al-Baqara: 173) Therefore, Eneng worked in a factory, packing meat, but she did not consume it, so it was still permissible. This author was also in the same situation as Eneng. I was working in a tonkatsuya restaurant (restaurant specialized in pork cutlets) and the main tasks were to cook and serve the pork cutlets. But, of course, the author had no single desire to consume pork and everyone in the restaurant understood my choice.
    To summarize, study is definitely the main reason these students came to Japan. Aside from studying, these students also participate in several community activities and services. As Muslims, even if they have to practice one of their duties according to the Islamic law in between their activities, they never stop doing their works. Practicing the religious faith and doing the secular activities can sometimes be contradictive, but there is always a solution to let both practices to be in accordance. These girls also try to balance their personal issues related to their faith. The next section will point those out. 
4.3. Personal Issues
    As the five students all came from a Muslim majority country, they would have had concerns before they came to Japan. Those concerns could be anything from how to get halal food, where to perform prayer and fasting, how to communicate with the local society, and even about experiencing of living alone.
    Aishah was quite eager to tell about her experience. After she graduated from the high school, she decided to take a chance of studying in Japan through scholarship. She then took the test and preparation lesson for the scholarship and then she was chosen. Aishah admitted that she had been concerned about many things before coming to Japan, because she had never experienced living abroad. She just imagined how the situation in Japan would be. She was also concerned about food and friends, because for the first time in her life she was going to live alone in Japan, away from her family. As a child who was still young and had been living with her family all of the time and suddenly had to stay separated from the family for four years, it was a big concern for Aishah. She was very careful in making preparations to go to Japan. Aishah said that she had brought food, medicines and her hijab collections to Japan. When Aishah arrived in Japan, half of the predictions that she made actually came true. She thought that it would be hard to get halal food in Japan and it turned out that the only place she could get halal product near her area was the Gyomu Supa (supermarket for business retail). Since then, she always bought halal chicken meat and other halal products that she could get there. She also brought medicines and vitamins from her home country because she was not sure whether the medicines in Japan were safe to be consumed or not. Aishah's first experience in living abroad had made her do something that she was not previously used to. That was cooking. Aishah told that she could not cook, but somehow her survival instinct worked and she had to prepare her own meal every day, especially since she was living by herself. In fact, she told that she would not mind eating chicken every day because that was the only halal meat that she could obtain and also because she did not like seafood.
    The other girls also had issues with halal food and each of them got different ways to solve their halal food issues. Fadiya explained that, although she sometimes went out eating noodles or vegetables, she also often cooked by herself at her dormitory. She also went to the Gyomu Supa to buy halal meat and some seasonings. Iesha and Tedha, who were living together as roommates, also often shopped at the Gyomu Supa. Meanwhile, Eneng had more options to shop for halal meat. She would sometimes shop at the Gyomu Supa too, but she also liked to buy halal meat from other Muslim women. From one of the women she knew at the Shizuoka Muslim Association, she could order halal beef, sausages, minced-meat, and even meat-balls. She only needed place an order through a private messenger and, when the products arrived, Eneng would pick up the ordered goods at the Musalla, the prayer room that functions as the official place for the Shizuoka Muslim Association. Looking at this, this author sometimes asked Eneng for her help to order meat for myself. Actually, if Eneng had not told me that ordering halal meat was this easy, I would probably have only shopped at the Gyomu Supa or just eaten fish and vegetables every day. So, it was quite helpful for the author, too. 
    Basically, trying to survive in Japan is easy, provided that information is passed on correctly. As an example, Fadiya told that there were other Bangladeshi students who were studying in Shizuoka and they were all connected through a social media. Through this social media, they were sharing information about obtaining halal food or simply just connecting with other Bangladeshi Muslims. Fadiya also told that she could not speak Japanese and therefore often asked her friends to translate and explain for her, so she still should buy the items that she needed even though she could not read the kanji. 
    Aishah also explained that she connected herself with other Malaysian students through an online application called Hangout. Aishah was affiliated with a Malaysian Muslim Community through this application. She got information on halal food and could chat with other Malaysian Muslims. Besides chatting with people online, Aishah also said that she sometimes saw some of her Malaysian friends in Shizuoka and they often hung out together by playing bowling, going to the beach, watching movies and many others. It was just because Aishah did not want to feel lonely. While Iesha and Tedha were relying on each other because they were roommates, Eneng was always asking for her senpai's (senior) advices before she got everything by herself. Remembering that she used to be unable to speak Japanese so well like now, she often asked her senpai to help her a lot in many things. She was blessed with good senpai, because her senpai taught her where to pray in public places, for example, by pointing to the fitting room or the stairs space near an emergency exit. Or her senpai would take her to the restaurants that were safe for Muslims to eat at in Shizuoka. 
    This author also had been in almost the same situation as these students. I relied on my senpai who was my colleague back in Indonesia and also she always taught me what was to be avoided and what was to be acquired. What I felt really important was when I experienced shopping and talking at the customer service or even answering a phone call or making a taxi order. It was precious to understand these know-hows and, of course, to practice relying on self. 
    Another personal issue that is important is probably for Eneng and Fadiya, because they are already married, whereas their husbands are away from them. If the other girls probably sometimes called their families and told how they missed the people at home, Eneng and Fadiya missed their husbands. Living separated from their husband is sometimes hard and it would be nice to have supports from them most of the time, but they have to hold themselves for now only by calling their partners whenever they have the time. Eneng probably has to wait until she graduates to see her husband again, but Fadiya had her husband once come to visit her in Shizuoka and that might have made her a little bit stronger than Eneng. 
    From the data presented above, it can be concluded that, in fulfilling their daily meals, these students need to get products that are allowed in the Islamic law. The needed goods are not always easy to get, but they try their best to acquire themselves. Since most of them are living alone, however, sometimes they miss their family members and need friends. They are all fighting their loneliness and difficulties to survive. In the next section, they will tell stories about some merits and demerits living in their home country and abroad. 
4.4. Home country versus abroad
    In this section, there are some interesting stories to be unfolded. Each of the students tells how it is different to live in Japan in comparison with their living experience in their home country.
    Aishah told her story about performing prayer. Unlike in Malaysia, it was not always easy to pray in public places in Japan. When Aishah went to the university, she would go to the International Meeting Room that was meant for foreign students to hang out with the Japanese students, and also performed her prayer there. But if Aishah went out of the campus, she would have to find a secluded place to pray, such as the fitting room at shopping malls, stairs space near emergency exits or even beside a car in a parking lot. If Aishah were not careful, she would have been told to leave or warned. But, that never happened. Anyway, in Malaysia, the prayer rooms were abundant and provided everywhere. Even if people go along the highway, they will see a rest area with prayer rooms, or even when people go to stations, they can easily find prayer rooms as well. In Indonesia, the prayer rooms were provided everywhere as long as people wish so. Even at schools, because the Islamic lesson is included in the curriculum, having a prayer room is a must. Even the Christian or Catholic Schools had their own chapel inside the school. For the girls who all came from Muslim countries, mosques must have been everywhere to be found, unlike in Shizuoka. 
    Speaking about prayer, the author found out that they all had different styles in performing prayer. The Turkish and the Malaysian students stated that, when they were performing prayer, they only needed to wear clean clothes or the clothes that they were wearing if they were traveling. For the Bangladeshi student, it did not matter whether she wore short-sleeved shirt but, as long as she covered her head using long scarf, she could already perform prayer. The Indonesian students present the most unique case of all. It was a characteristic for Indonesians to wear abaya or mukena (both were dresses for performing prayer) to pray. This probably was a tradition in order to be more careful in performing prayer, because it was meant to present oneself to Allah with a cleaner and holier outfit. Besides the prayer outfit, there were also differences in the hijabs that the students wore. Tedha and Aishah liked to wear hijab with no pattern and the colors were usually darker. Meanwhile, Eneng liked to wear hijab with patterns although sometimes she wore the plain ones. For Eneng, it was important to match her hijab with her outfit. This author was different from Eneng, although both came from the same country, and I like to wear no pattern hijab and very rarely wear hijab with patterns. Eneng and I both like to wear colorful hijab, although I prefer more dominant bright colors. Compared to Tedha and Aishah, those are totally different choices. 
    The next story comes from Iesha. As previously mentioned in 4.1. about her faith, actually in Turkey, many people only put Islam on their identity cards but do not practice Islam completely. Her father is one of the examples and that is probably why her knowledge about Islam is lacking. Above all, in Turkey, discrimination occurs frequently. Tedha agreed this statement, too. Tedha experienced being stared in the street with disturbing eyes, and they just seemed to be impolite for Tedha. Regardless of whether they are in a Muslim country or in their home country, they are still stared disturbingly. While they are in Japan, they would sometimes be stared, but those might be curious stares and eventually the staring people would approach them and greet them. But this might not work for all foreigners, because this author had some experiences where I was stared by kids, and they were looking at me with a worried face. A kid even jumped at once when he saw me walking into a shop wearing a cap and a mask. Then he ran toward his mother but his mother spoke nothing. Some people are not yet used to seeing people with hijab, but for parents, at least they could have told their children that women wearing hijab were not bad people.
    One of the best things that could happen to a Muslim when Ramadan already finishes is to enjoy the Eid-al Fitri. In Indonesia, it is called Lebaran, a festival to celebrate finishing Ramadan for a whole month. There is another celebration, Eid-al Adha, the moment to sacrifice animals to show the believers' faithfulness to Allah. In those two traditions, it is common that people pray together in a mosque and, after the prayer is finished, everyone would gather and have a meal together. In Japan, unless somebody had a wide space to accommodate a lot of people, it is impossible to hold this event. Another thing is about sacrificing animal. In Japan, it is not allowed to slaughter an animal at places other than what has been designated so by the authorities. In Indonesia, regarding the Eid-al Adha, digging a hole at someone's lawn by the owner's permission, of course, or at a mosque's lawn is common. It is the whole process from praying together, slaughtering the animal, preparing the meat and having a meal together up to giving away the meat to those who need it, that is called iman (devout). 
    Lastly, there is another story from Fadiya regarding a Bangladeshi acquaintance that had passed away in Shizuoka. The deceased was a woman, but during the burial ceremony, no women were allowed to come. Only men were allowed to perform the prayer for the deceased in front of the body and only the men were allowed to enter near the grave. Fadiya had her husband to attend this burial ceremony at that time. This burial ceremony tradition was totally different from the Indonesian tradition. In Indonesia, before burying the deceased body, both men and women would gather and pray in front of the body. After the family agreed on the time for burial, some men and women, including the family, would also come to the burial ceremony and give the last prayer. 
    With all of the differences in culture and tradition, it seems that there are many efforts done to adjust themselves with the Japanese society. The Muslim students mentioned in this section arrived in Japan with the history of their home countries on their back. Some had bitter experiences in their home country, but, on the other hand, they felt accepted warmly in Japan. Some even wished the tradition that they had back in their home country could be celebrated in Japan, too. Although some of these students experienced being prejudiced, those were considered as small obstacles, considering their success of survival in Japan. In summary, despite of Japan being a non-Muslim country, they mostly keep trust and hope in Japan as a country that can accept diversities.
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dipulb3 · 3 years
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More than a second lady: How Gisele Fetterman came to serve Pennsylvania's neediest
New Post has been published on https://appradab.com/more-than-a-second-lady-how-gisele-fetterman-came-to-serve-pennsylvanias-neediest/
More than a second lady: How Gisele Fetterman came to serve Pennsylvania's neediest
A former undocumented immigrant who became a citizen and used her platform to help all manner of Pennsylvanians, she is far more than a figurehead or a lieutenant governor’s spouse.
That anyone would be called the n-word during a quick trip to the grocery store for golden kiwis is unsettling — all the more so once you learn what Fetterman overcame simply to give back to others.
The mother of three was at a grocery store in Braddock, a PIttsburgh suburb, Sunday evening when a woman recognized her and began haranguing her, saying she didn’t belong, calling her a thief and referring to her as the n-word that Lt. Gov. John Fetterman married, she told Appradab.
Gisele Fetterman’s family fled the violence of Rio de Janeiro in 1990 and grew up poor in New York City. Her mother told her and her brother to, “Be invisible,” and she has regularly shared childhood anecdotes of looking over her shoulder and fearing every knock at the door.
“So even though I’m 38 and I’m second lady and I have a family and career, I was immediately again a scared 9-year-old undocumented little girl at that grocery line,” she said of Sunday’s encounter.
“It was a hard reminder for me that it doesn’t matter what I’ve overcome, what I’ve achieved, that to some I will always be viewed as inferior simply because I was not born in this country,” she said.
Fetterman’s record runs deep. She has spent most of her adult life in the United States helping others, whether they’re impoverished, immigrants, LGBT, minorities, imprisoned or hungry. She’s also spoken out on the importance of wearing masks and participating in the Census.
She’s lighthearted, preferring the titular acronym, SLOP, over Second Lady of Pennsylvania, which she feels is “stuffy” — and is one of the foremost purveyors of positivity on social media, once quoting Rumi: “Even if from the sky, poison befalls all, I’m still sweetness wrapped in sweetness wrapped in sweetness.”
She told a writer this month she would never seek public office because “politics is mean and I am not.”
Here are some snapshots of what she’s achieved and overcome:
Her marriage was born of caring
In 2007, she read about the Rust Belt town of Braddock and learned that steel from Braddock and other communities was used in the Brooklyn Bridge, one of her favorite landmarks.
Fetterman had had her green card for a few years, and though only in her mid-20s, she was already an activist, focusing on nutrition and food equity. She wrote then-Mayor John Fetterman to find out more about the town, whose declining population numbered around 2,000 at the time, and his efforts to improve his community. After he wrote back, she began visiting Braddock.
“Of course he fell in love with me,” she told a women’s luncheon earlier this year, the Times Leader in Wilkes-Barre reported.
They were married in 2009, the same year she earned US citizenship. Since then she’s used her platforms as a naturalized American and second lady to help others.
She opened a free store for low-income families
On their fourth wedding anniversary, John Fetterman asked his wife what she wanted as a gift and she told him, “I want a shipping container.” He didn’t ask why, she told the Under the Radar entertainment blog earlier this month.
Gisele Fetterman had local artists paint the container, spruced up an abandoned lot and began doling out household goods, baby items and bicycles to those in need.
The store’s motto is “Because the best things in life are free.” It has spread to several locations and served hundreds of clients.
“We dream of a community built on relationships based on mutual aid and cooperation,” Free Store 15104’s website says. “We use the distribution of free items as a catalyst for change. We encourage recycling and reuse as a means to counteract excessive waste and consumption. We aim to eradicate food and clothing insecurity.”
She helped develop a clever way to fight hunger
412 Food Rescue, which she co-founded, sends volunteers to retailers who have surplus food that risks going bad and delivers it to nonprofits that serve the hungry.
“With the help of 2 trucks, 1 van, and thousands of volunteers, we are able to rescue perfectly good but unsellable food that would otherwise be wasted and redirect it to people who need it,” the nonprofit’s website says.
Based on the premise that it would take only one-third of the nation’s discarded food to feed its hungry population, it also strives to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions from food waste, which the organization says is almost double that of aviation and the iron-and-steel industry combined.
The Pittsburgh City Paper cited both the Free Store and 412 Food Rescue in naming Fetterman 2017’s best activist.
The Fettermans opened the ‘The People’s Pool’
When John Fetterman took office, the couple opted not to move to the 2,400-square-foot state residence in Fort Indiantown Gap, instead opting to live in a remodeled car dealership in Braddock. Fetterman told Pittsburgh magazine this year that it was “not appropriate” to live in a taxpayer-funded mansion with staff. Plus, he said, Braddock is home.
As a result, the property’s 30-by-40-foot swimming pool was going unused, so Gisele Fetterman opened it up to nonprofits and summer camps and instituted a program to teach water safety because federal statistics show African American kids have a 3 times greater risk of drowning than do White chlidren.
“We can have a direct role in changing those statistics,” she said. “Swimming comes with a painful legacy of racial segregation. If my children can swim in that pool, so should every child in Pennsylvania.”
She came to Antwon Rose’s defense
After an East Pittsburgh police officer fatally shot Antwon Rose during a 2018 traffic stop, Fettermen revealed that the “very goofy” 17-year-old volunteered at Free Store 15104 and appeared in one of her husband’s campaign commercials. She also spoke at the teen’s funeral.
“He looked you in the eyes and gave anyone speaking to him total attention and respect,” she said in her tribute. “He would look at you with his big sweet smile, and you would feel, deep in your heart, that this was someone who would make the world better.”
“Antwon’s death shakes my heart, it rattles my faith that things will ever get better or that injustices will ever end. Slowly, too slowly, things will get brighter, even though they’re now so dark,” she said.
A jury cleared the officer who shot Antwon of all counts the following year.
She does little things, too
In addition to tackling major issues like hunger and inequality, she knows smaller improvements can make big differences in a community, as demonstrated by her Braddock Bench Building project, which created places to sit at public bus stops — using repurposed materials from homes slated for demolition, of course.
She also sought to brighten Braddock’s primary thoroughfare with uplifting signs, such as “Eat More Vegetables,” “Believe in Yourself,” “More Hugs Needed,” “Follow Your Dreams,” “Be Kind Always” and “Hug a Tree.”
“The signs you see along the streets are always so negative — ‘Don’t park here,’ ‘Don’t loiter there,'” she told the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review. “We wanted to counter those with signs spreading cheer and kindness, signs with uplifting messages.”
The Fettermans spent $1,000 of their own money on the signs, the paper reported.
Inclusion is a major thrust of her work
For Good PGH, which Fetterman co-founded, drives numerous initiatives in the Braddock community.
Under the group’s umbrella, the Helping Out Our People coalition, made up of families in the Woodland Hills School District who lost a child to gun violence, mentors young people in hopes of “disrupting the disease of violence.”
The Foster Good program provides foster kids with unique suitcases rehabilitated by artists, Green Initiatives works to counter Braddock’s blight, Girl Code Woodland Hills introduces high school juniors to businesswomen in greater Pittsburgh, the Hollander Project serves as an incubator for “women-powered businesses” and Hello Hijab makes tiny Muslim headscarves for Barbies and other dolls to promote inclusion and fight stigmas.
Last year, Rodef Shalom, a Jewish congregation, made Fetterman the first woman to receive its 2020 Pursuer of Peace award, citing For Good PGH’s work.
She’s an unapologetic advocate for immigrants
The Fettermans submitted a joint op-ed to several newspapers in August, recounting how Gisele “and her family lived in constant fear that they would be discovered and lose their shot at the American Dream.”
“No child should have to live with that kind of stress,” they wrote. “They deserve to feel secure in the knowledge that they can do normal things like go to school and play sports without living in constant fear that they will lose their family.”
In a 2019 editorial for the Tribune-Review, Gisele Fetterman, a Dreamer herself, wrote that she’ll always be grateful for her mother’s courage and how she took jobs cleaning houses and checking coats to support her family.
“She was routinely paid less than she was supposed to be, if she got paid at all, and she was even assaulted while at work,” Fetterman wrote. “She never complained — she just did what she had to do for her children.
The Brazilian immigrant also recalled how, at 8 years old, she broke her nose playing kickball and her family couldn’t afford medical care, but stories from her native Rio convinced her just how lucky she was to escape the violence.
“When I look in the mirror and I see my broken nose,” she wrote, “I am reminded of how much worse it could have been, and how grateful I am to have had the opportunity to grow up in the U.S.”
Today, she tears up when she hears the National Anthem and gets “super excited to vote,” and she geeked out upon being called for jury duty, she said.
“I wasn’t chosen for a jury, probably because I was so visibly excited to be there that the lawyers thought I was crazy, but for me, that was the sign that I truly belonged, and that I could come out of the shadows,” she wrote.
Appradab’s John Berman contributed to this report.
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sixth-light · 6 years
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uncommonsockeater
replied to your post
“Coming to the realization that the Nightingale I’m writing for the...”
Prompts? .... Abigail, ghost tour heckler? All quail before her withering contempt?
roisindubh211 replied to your post “Coming to the realization that the Nightingale I’m writing for the...”
Abigail asks Peter questions because he's her big cousin who's into weird stuff and probably won't rat her out to her folks
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Accountability check: I wrote 1200 words of the arranged marriage AU today while waiting for someone to get back to me so I could submit a revised paper I’M NOT GETTING DISTRACTED FROM MY FANFIC GOALS
(I am but. manageably.) 
“...Sir Henry died over a hundred and twenty years ago,” said the tour guide, “but –“
“Hang on,” Abigail said, pitching her voice to the tone that had brought looks ranging from resignation to terror to the eyes of her schoolteachers. “This place wasn’t even built until after the First World War. What’s this Victorian bloke doing haunting it?”
The guide, who was a white guy called Simon probably not too much older than Abigail was herself, had smiled politely when she’d opened her mouth. By the time she was done, the smile had gone a bit thin.
“I think you must have got it mixed up,” he said, with a chuckle. “Look around at this Gothic Revival -”
“They didn’t just all down tools one day in nineteen-oh-one and start on Art Deco buildings the next,” Abigail said. “My cousin’s an architect, he goes on about this stuff.”
That wasn’t exactly true but Peter had done his degree, right, it was just that jobs were hard to get. His tours were way better than this one, too.
Simon’s eyes narrowed, although he managed to keep up the smile. Some of the other people on the tour – all tourists as far as Abigail could tell, mostly white and a few East Asians – were starting to look uncomfortable.
“Look, do you want to hear about the ghost of Sir Henry or not?”
“I just think if you’re going to tell ghost stories they should be real ones,” Abigail told him. She meant it, too.
“As I was saying,” he said, loudly and firmly and making eye contact with everybody to draw them back in, “this building was occupied by an advertising firm before the Second World War, and the copywriters used to report -”
Abigail stopped listening and edged towards the back of the group, trying to look appropriately abashed. Nobody looked at her; they wanted to pretend she hadn’t said anything. Which also meant, she was betting, that when someone eventually noticed she was gone, ten or fifteen minutes from now, Simon the tour guide wouldn’t be interested in finding out where she’d gone to. He’d think it was good riddance.
She sidled down a hallway, tried two doors before finding one that was unlocked, and settled in to wait in the office inside. Nobody even walked past the door – they hadn’t noticed she was gone. Perfect.
She gave it half an hour before she went back down to the main foyer. Peter had done a ghost tour for a couple of years – he’d given it up for strict history because he said it got too many people who took it seriously – and Abigail had asked him about this place. One of the things he’d told her, or more like let slip because she was pretty sure he didn’t know what she’d been planning, was that there were security cameras but they weren’t infra-red or anything. And ghosts didn’t show up on camera, not the real kind, so as long as she didn’t turn any lights on she’d be fine. Now it was just a case of waiting until her ghost – the real one, not whatever that story had been – showed up. She sat down in one of the less-comfortable-than-they-looked chairs to wait.
Twenty minutes later, she thought she heard something – a door creaking – but when she strained to listen, there was nothing else. Then she thought she heard people talking quietly, but that went away, too.
That was the worst bit about ghost-hunting; you got worked up looking for things and started to hear things that weren’t there. Real ghosts, Abigail had found, were not subtle at all, and didn’t require any special equipment or concentration or anything like that to see them. They were just...there.
She shifted a bit, because her left leg was starting to go numb, and then sprang to her feet when the door across the foyer from her opened – not the main one – and a torch flashed right into her eyes. Her left leg gave out, prickly with pins and needles, and she stumbled, putting up a hand against the light. “Aaaaaahhh!”
“Well, that’s not a ghost,” said a sardonic female voice. “I’m disappointed.” Abigail couldn’t make out anything else after half an hour in the dark; she could barely see figures behind the torch, let alone details.
“Excuse me,” said a second voice – man, very posh, in a way that made Abigail hopeful neither of them was the building’s night manager, but not very hopeful that they’d accept her back-up excuse of having got lost from the ghost tour. It sounded more like a voice that was going to tell her to wait for the police to be called. It was, all things considered, probably a good time to make a bolt for it.
“Hold on,” said a third voice, and the torch dropped; Abigail blinked, trying to focus at the same time as she tensed to turn and run. “Abigail, is that you?”
“Peter?” She turned back. “What – you don’t do the ghost tour anymore!”
“No, I don’t,” said her cousin Peter, sounding baffled. “What are you doing here?”
“It’s for a story,” Abigail said, shrugging like it was totally normal to be found in an office building in central London at quarter to midnight by her cousin who did walking tours and – who were those other two people, anyway? “What are you doing here, then?”
With the torch directed at the floor, now, she could see that the woman – whose expression was about as sardonic as her voice had been – was tall for a girl and wearing a black hijab and a very cool leather jacket. Posh Voice was a white man in a three-piece suit carrying an actual cane, which would have made him a good candidate for the ghost she was trying to interview if he hadn’t obviously been not a ghost, and instead a real person studying her with a frown of mild confusion.
“I take it you know this young lady?” he asked Peter.
“Yeah, this is my cousin Abigail, she’s studying journalism,” said Peter, like a complete traitor. “For a story, Abigail, really? What the hell?”
“I am!” Abigail insisted. She could live with Peter thinking she was breaking and entering; she wasn’t going to tell him she was here to interview a ghost. He’d never let her live it down. He probably still remembered when she’d tried to tell him about the ghost on the train tracks, five years ago. “Come on, why are you here? You don’t do the ghost tour anymore.”
“Favour for a friend,” Peter said. “The night manager still remembers me, and there’s two law firms in this building so they’re not thrilled about warrants...does he know you’re here?”
“I –“ Abigail was already figuring out how to answer that when she processed the rest of that sentence. “Wait, warrants?” She took a step to the side, so the chair wasn’t blocking her path to the side door. It was probably futile with Peter right here and telling all and sundry she was his cousin, but still. She turned her attention to Posh Voice and the hijabi woman. “Are you the filth?”
“I’m afraid so,” said Posh Voice. “May I ask what sort of story you’re following up?”
“It’s for a class,” Abigail said quickly. “I’m a student.” She had a flash of inspiration. “I was supposed to meet someone, but I guess they haven’t shown up.”
“Mind telling  us who that someone is?” asked the woman in the hijab. She looked familiar but Abigail couldn’t remember where from.
“I wouldn’t want to reveal a source. And you haven’t told me who you are.”
The woman made a hmph noise and looked away, like she was trying not to laugh. Which was just insulting, really.
“Quite right,” said Posh Voice, and showed her his warrant card, which said he was Detective Chief Inspector Thomas Nightingale. Abigail made a show of inspecting it like she’d seen Peter do once when she’d come with him on a research trip and someone had made a fuss about them being there, but she didn’t know what she was looking for, really. It was just a way to gain a second, and see how Peter was taking this. He looked exasperated, and slightly suspicious, but not really worried. So maybe it would come out alright, if she could just persuade them to go away, somehow.
“Okay, Detective Inspector Nightingale,” she said. “And you are?” she asked the woman.
“Detective Sergeant Sahra Guleed,” said the woman. “Hey, that’s where I’ve seen you – you live on the same estate as Peter’s parents, don’t you?”
“Maybe,” said Abigail.
“Yeah, all her life,” said Peter. “You’ve probably seen her round. Sahra lives near me,” he explained to Abigail. “So she’s fine, and Inspector Nightingale’s a friend of mine, so – look, you shouldn’t be here, it’s nearly midnight. How about I walk you out?”
“I can find my own way out,” Abigail said, trying to look dejected. “It’s fine.”
“Ms - Abigail,” said Inspector Nightingale. “As Sergeant Guleed said – would you very much mind telling us who you were intending to meet? In general terms. I won’t ask for a name.”
“A guy,” Abigail said, figuring she could work with this. “Who had some things to say about…a cold case.”
“It wasn’t, by any chance,” he said, “John Geraldson?”
Abigail tried really hard not to react to that but she wasn’t sure she succeeded. “Uh…who’s that?”
Peter narrowed his eyes. He’d known her way too long. “Abigail. You know a few years ago when you told me about that thing, near school, on the train tracks…is it like that?”
“You didn’t believe me then,” Abigail said, and knew she sounded bitter and was annoyed at herself that she did. “Why are you asking about it now?”
“You changed your mind and said you were joking,” said Peter. “I thought I’d give you the benefit of the doubt.” He paused. “Also, fine, I didn’t believe you then, but I’ve had reason to change my mind since. So. Anything like that?”
“Are you telling me,” Abigail said, incredulous, “that these are the ghost police?”
“Wow,” said Sergeant Guleed. “That’s actually worse than anything I’ve heard down at Belgravia.”
“In that case,” said Inspector Nightingale, “perhaps -”
That was when the ghost threw the chair Abigail had been sitting in across the room, so things got a bit complicated after that.
                                                             *
Because it was after midnight they retired to an all-night caf and Peter bought Abigail a Coke, which was frankly the least he owed her.
“It’s that annoying time when I really want a drink but it’s too late to start,” he said, looking around. Inspector Nightingale made a noise of agreement.  
“You’ll live,” said Sergeant Guleed, not very sympathetically. “Besides, you can’t tell me Abigail’s old enough to drink.”
“I am so,” said Abigail, which made her sound like she wasn’t but was one of those things you had to push back on. “What, you want to see my ID?”
“Sure,” said Sergeant Guleed.
“She is, not that it matters right now,” said Peter. “Was that an exorcism, then?”
“Not really,” said Inspector Nightingale. “More like a red card. Although hopefully it lasts for longer than eighty minutes.”
“Now I’m going to have to go to a library and do research,” Abigail said, still feeling aggrieved. “You could have let me talk to him.”
“He didn’t seem to be in the mood,” said Sergeant Guleed. “In my extensive experience of ghosts.”
“Three months is rather more extensive than anybody else on the force at present,” said her boss. “So I’d say you’re qualified to make that judgement.”
“Oh, fantastic,” she said, and eyed Peter dubiously. “Have I thanked you again lately for getting me into this?”
“Every time you see me,” said Peter. “Abigail, look - I’ll put you in touch with someone at the British Library, I bet she’d love to help. She’s friends with Mum. And she knows all about ghosts and – all about ghosts, so you can just tell her the whole story.” He paused to take a bite of his kebab. “Isn’t this all a bit excessive for a first-year assignment, though?”
“It’s not just for the assignment,” Abigail explained. “I mean, it is, but sometimes I can publish things online, and sometimes I even get money for them, and that’s gonna look way better for my portfolio than just assignments.” Especially when there were people who had parents who worked for newspapers and things and got their stuff in them. She had to try harder, that was all there was to it. 
“What sort of website was going to publish a story with a ghost as an interviewee?” Inspector Nightingale asked, like he was just curious, but his eyes were sharp.
“I wasn’t going to put that in the story,” Abigail said. “Then all you get is, like, really terrible tabloids. I was going to figure out where I was supposed to have found things out after I found them out.”
“That doesn’t sound like great journalism,” said Peter.
“I wasn’t going to write anything that wasn’t true.”
“Ghosts,” said the Inspector, “are not always reliable witnesses, anymore than humans are – in fact they’re often worse.”
“Yes, but they’ll talk to you, and sometimes people won’t,” said Abigail. “Talk to me. And I know nobody else is out there interviewing ghosts, so it’s something I’ve got they don’t. Totally worth it.” She paused to sip her Coke. “But Peter just said ghosts and, so tell me, Inspector Nightingale. What’s ‘and’?”
“How about,” he said, “we won’t discuss and, and we also won’t discuss breaking and entering.”
Peter made a noise of protest at this – at least he was good for something.
“I didn’t break and enter anything,” Abigail said, not breaking eye contact with Inspector Nightingale. “I paid to go on a perfectly legit walking tour which had permission to be in the building, and I got lost on the way out.”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Peter. “Was that Simon’s tour? Were you heckling him?”
“Only at that last stop,” Abigail said. “So he wouldn’t be sorry I was gone.” She sniffed. “He was totally making everything up, anyway, it was embarrassing just listening to it.”
“It’s embarrassing knowing he’s in business, is what,” said Peter, “but I’m really disappointed in you, Abigail.” He paused for emphasis. “You should have heckled him at every stop.”
“Then he would have asked me to leave early,” Abigail said, but she grinned at Peter, and he grinned back, so at least they were all right and he wasn’t going to tell on her to her dad, which would be the worst, or to his mum, which would be the same thing except he could claim he hadn’t. Even Sergeant Guleed made an amused noise.
“I’ll accept there’s an argument about the legalities,” said Inspector Nightingale, and he was smiling a little bit too.
“So,” Abigail said. “And what?”
“She’s very persistent,” said Peter. “Fair warning.”
“A family trait, I see,” said Inspector Nightingale.
“She also did see you do sort of an exorcism,” said Sergeant Guleed. “I think it might be faster if we came clean.”
Inspector Nightingale sighed. “Ghosts, and – I’m a wizard.”
He said it very matter-of-factly, as if he were saying I’m a policeman or lovely weather today. Abigail took a moment to consider it.
“Why are you hanging out with a wizard policeman?” she asked Peter. She glanced at Sergeant Guleed. “Two wizard police officers.”
“They have a very interesting library,” said Peter. “And he’s right, we are a very persistent family.”
“You say it like it’s a bad thing,” Abigail said, and sat up a bit straighter, and decided that, even though it was nearly one in the morning and she had class tomorrow – today, this might be something worth being persistent about.
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