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incorrect-ikevamp-quotes · 1 year

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Comte’s Drama CD: Track Two, An Extraordinarily Elegant Awakening

All right, I gotta preface this one with the content warning that it is so domestic fluff it may induce cardiac arrest. I haven’t recovered and it’s been like two months, so take that as you will. The title is pretty self explanatory on this one, in that it’s basically a morning between Comte and MC, and he brings her breakfast in bed.

I will say this one is less meta only because I spent most of it squealing and/or hiding my face in glee LMAO. I’m weak to the man of my dreams, sue me Additionally most of it is just Comte being so on brand of like: “share my time with MC with others????? In my me????? It’s less likely than you think--” That also includes being the most doting and affectionate husband ever, which is the only kind of energy I want in my life. (It keeps making me think of that post that goes something like “goth husbands who are hopelessly in love with their wives is the only vibe I enjoy in hetero couples.”)

Anywho, enjoy the translation and fangirling beneath the cut! I put the sound effects in brackets, because leaving them out felt criminal to Comte stans everywhere~

Mm…morning already…

My dear lover… (HE SAYS ITOSHII WAAAAAAAH)

[chuckle]...You’re still dreaming

…you look awfully happy and cozy. I wonder what kind of dream you’re having?

[giggle] Since your lips are smiling, it must be a nice dream.

Just looking at you is enough to fill me with delight too…

Besides, I can’t help but think I’m the only one who gets to see this cute sleeping face. Just a few more minutes…

Literally what more can be said than him being the sweetest man alive. The affection????? Wants her all to himself as much as possible????? Just waking up to her beside him is enough to make him overjoyed?????? Anybody got some tissues sobsob I just love him sm 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭

[kiss sound] To witness this kind of defenseless position is a lover’s privilege alone… (👀)

Since that wasn’t enough to wake you up, I’ll do it again… [kiss sound]

…Oh, [giggle] did you wake up?

Are you awake, princess…? (ohimesama) Good morning~ [kiss sound]

Haha, a good morning kiss was enough to make you blush…you’re so adorable.

With such a sweet greeting, you’ll make me want to do it over and over again.

Okay but I gotta tell y’all. I was re-listening to see if there was anything else I wanted to convey and like. The way his voice is a little sleepy and wispy at the beginning, just super content/relaxed/indulging. Then she wakes up and you can just hear the YAYAYAYAYAYAY SHE’S AWAKE. OKAY, BE CHARMING PERFECT LOVER I WANNA SEE HER BLUSH AAAAAAAAA, and I just. That’s so adorable???? I’m dying????

He’s so playful and giddy????? So many kisses????? Excited for her to wake up????? It’s so bad for my heart???? Truly nobody does romance like them, 11/10 I gleefully kick my feet every time I listen to it. Damn, me too MC, if I woke up to that every morning I would be error 404 shut down blush constantly

Also that first line. For lack of better words to describe my thoughts, BOW CHICKA WOW WOW. But more seriously I do love how much he prizes and respects the vulnerability that’s shared between lovers. This isn’t the first indication of it by far, but something about the deep value he places in intimacy and sincerity shared between them hits different in the best way. I guess, as a pretty serious and sensitive person myself, I can’t help but appreciate the same sentiments reflected in him.

[many, many kisses] Well, if you wanted a deeper kiss, of course I’m happy to oblige…now, what do you want to do? [seductive whisper, Horie-san have mercy]

I’m sorry. Don’t turn away, I won’t tease you anymore (THE WAY HE INSTANTLY BACKTRACKS. WHEN I TELL YOU I WHEEZED AND THEN COOED)

…I’m sorry for being mean. (STOP I’M YELLING THE PLEADING, HONEY YOU DID NOTHING WRONG. I CAN FEEL THE DROOPING DOG EARS)

I don’t mean to make excuses…but I can’t help but think you’re the cutest. (that is the best excuse ever, and in the sexiest pout voice imaginable, you are forgiven)

Now that you’re awake, let’s have breakfast soon…I know, would you like to have breakfast in bed?

[chuckle] Well...because I still want to have you all to myself. [kiss sound, more sultry murmur] It’s okay once in a while, isn’t it?

I can’t get over how fast he’s like masaka when she turns around because she’s overwhelmed by his teasing, it’s so funny to me. She’s not mad, Comte!!! You’re just too powerful!!! Have mercy, she's just a human woman!!!! And not only that, he tells her two seconds later he wants her all to himself. When I say he has me by the throat, figuratively ofc because SOMEBODY keeps his fangs to himself--

If that’s the case…I’ll get breakfast ready then.

You should stay in bed a little longer, I’ll be right back.

--------------------------------------------------------------

Is it alright if I come in?

Sorry for the delay, I’ve brought you breakfast.

A freshly baked baguette, and omelets from Sebastian--

and our favorite morning teas, of course.

It’s a special breakfast for an exceptionally elegant morning.

Okay the way I snickered when he mentioned the baguette, the man really do be like “world cold and sad, baguette warm and soft.” Is this part of why he’s obsessed with MC’s thighs?

Come on over and eat. I’ll feed you, so open wide.

We’ll start with the omelet…it was just finished, so we’ll have to cool it down first.

[He’s blowing on it lmfao]

[laughter] There’s no need to be embarrassed, is there? It’s just me and you here. Come now, don’t be shy…

[chuckle]….That’s a good girl. Yes, aaah…

[laughter]…Ah, I’m sorry. You just look so pleased to eat it, I can’t help but wonder.

You taught me that smiles can even emerge in such everyday moments. (the fondness in his voice I 😭😭😭😭😭😭😭😭)

Yes, next time I’ll feed you potage…aaah (OPPORTUNIST Ò//Ó)

…is it good? Haha, [BOYISH LAUGHTER SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP] that’s good. I’m glad you like it.

I can’t believe I get to see your happy face this close first thing in the morning…I think today will be a good day.

I’ve specially planned our day together today, so I hope you enjoy it.

…let’s have a great day together, shall we? [kiss sound]

Honestly MC deserves more credit for not imploding on the spot, I know I’m not strong enough to be faced with all that and not literally become the PANIK meme. I love him more than life itself but that does not mean I’m ready to be doted on--

I have to say though, I really am touched by relationships that are built on little, day-to-day pleasures like this. The way he’s just happy to share mundane things with her, that every day together is a gift. The idea that her smile is enough, that he simply loves to be with her and look after her. Every time Comte manages to far exceed my expectations. (KING OUR EXPECTATIONS WERE ON THE FLOOR AND Y E T--) Well played, monsieur, well played. I concede defeat 👑

#ikemen vampire #ikevamp #ikevamp comte #ikevamp saint germain #ikevamp translations #fangdad propaganda #literally every time i read through the transcript i made i have to lie down #like??????? hello????????#the man is just full to bursting with affection #it's a wonder i haven't developed more cavities #and his laughter???????#he's so cute idfk how im supposed to cope ashfjkdlgfdhjflsdhkjkhjdfg #so many kisses too **covers face**#ive always been a big fan of getting cozy in bed and lazy mornings so this was devastatingly on brand for me #if you'll excuse me ill be sitting here and wondering when my time will come #comte out here worried about mc dying when one day he will be the c a u s e SMFH #enjoy and stay tuned for part 3! c:

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irisu-syndromemes · 2 years

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on irisu's diary, uujima's memory, and contradictions

something i havent seen anyone talk much about is irisu's diary. no, not the cough medicine txt file. irisu's in-game diary. you know, this?

...except in english. i havent seen many people ever talk about this except for when it spooks them during videos. well, i figured someone should transcript it. so i did. heres the full text, from the english translation patch:

"I moved a lot as a child so I never really made any friends. I was so scared of becoming close to someone that eventually, I stopped talking. All my classmates, and even my teachers, shunned me. But I had a friend, in the corner of the schoolyard. Every time I got close to the cage, it'd come wobbling over to greet me. I'd reach through the netting, and pet its forehead. It liked it. I think it was taken in as a weakling by the school, but no one came to see it. It was weak, shy and covered in scars. Half of one ear was torn off. There was a cat at the school, too. Everyone played with it. I got sick whenever I played with the cat, so I stayed away from it, and everyone else. That boy showed up to help one day. Apparently he lost a bet. And that's how I started to like him. Maybe I was being selfish, but I slowly got closer and closer to him. In the middle of those dark and gloomy days, being with him may have been the only happy moment of my childhood. One day, I came to my friend's cage to settle it down. The door was open. In the middle of the cage, I saw red liquid splattered all over. All that remained in the cage was it severed head. And the cat, licking the remains That cat,"

first, i feel like i should point out that its impossible to know what comes after "that cat" so in actuality, we dont know if in english the sentence would start with that (for the record: in japanese you could say "i hate cats because of that cat" but the order of the words would be completely different, so saying "that cat is the reason why i hate cats" would be a more literal translation of the sentence, in accordance to the order of sentence parts. i dont speak japanese, nor am i knowledgeable and articulate enough to explain myself, but the basic gist is that the translators translated what they could read). second, i genuinely have no clue what "settle it down" means in this context, i feel like that doesnt make any sense, so ill just ignore it. lastly, this post will take this diary entry as "truth" aka what irisu experienced as a kid.

this diary entry shines light on something that isnt explored very well in the diary entries in uujima's suicidal rabbit diary: he talked to irisu... so i assume. "showed up to help one day" at least to me implies they talked. taking into account the small comment about the bet, we can assume that was just a half-assed excuse uujima made up to be with her, but the fact that this is never mentioned ever again leads me to think uujima simply forgot about the small lie. this wouldnt be important if not for the fact that he cant remember irisu from back when they were both kids during the events of his diary txt file as college students. we know this because he never mentions remembering her from anywhere. and youd think decapitating a rabbit to make said girl more sociable would be enough reason to remember her, right? in the in-game diary excerpts, he claims to have always watched her from afar... but this seems suspicious to me.

many claim that uujima didnt actually kill uutarou, because one of the diary entries say that the rabbit was lying on the floor of the cage, dead. but the last ripped diary page mentions he saw the rabbit's last moments. so which is the truth?

there are other things that make me suspect that uujima has memory problems. he seems not to remember why he "saw"/"sees" the rabbit's red eyes in his sleep, and there is an instance of him apparently not remembering the foreign picture books of dying rabbits. his general personality also points to that of a person who's careless about what happens to himself (like being suicidal, but careful in more "important" matters, such as thinking of irisu's plan backfiring on them due to evidence and such), so i cant help but think that whether the rabbit was killed or was already dead is honestly rather ambiguous.

i dont know if all these contradictions are the result of the writer/s not writing the details properly into the game, translation issues, or just purposeful writing that puts emphasis on lost memory. of note, there are different instances of canonical material (as in, both found in and from the game, as well as dataminable files) that refer to the boys as satoru and takeru, but sometimes theyre satoshi and takeshi. in the end, im just left confused.

-Mod transcribing that whole text was a chore. oh well~

#irisu syndrome #analysis.txt #hope this is interesting to read for at least someone! it was interesting for me to research this

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thinkingisadangerouspastime · 3 years

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hi! i really like your posts and recently i came across some anti kataang arguments and i would like to see your opinion on that (if you want to answer because you must be very tired of answering those lol)

“i remember perfectly aang forcing himself into katara. not only once, but a lot of times. in that talk they were having during the play it was one of the moments aang was intrusive”

“i saw people saying that katara was jealous of aang with that kids in kyoshi island, which she obviously was not. she was annoyed at them”

“kataang had no development. it feels like a ship made out of nowhere”

“aang is completely obsessed with the idea of katara being his. proof is that episode were the guru tells him he has to let go of her and he choses to break the connection. it’s like: look what i did for you, you should stay with me. aang learning to let go would have been a evolution for his character”

“making them stay together in the end just because aang is the protagonist and has to stay with the girl is boring and adds nothing to the plot”

“he spend years after a girl that never felt the same for him”

hi anon! im very flattered you like my posts 🥰💛 and you’re not wrong that sometimes it gets a lil tiring addressing anti kataang arguments, but that’s because 90% of them are the same foolish rhetoric dressed up in a different costume, lol. i finally have some free time, so i’ll take a stab at these for you!

“i remember perfectly aang forcing himself into katara. not only once, but a lot of times. in that talk they were having during the play it was one of the moments aang was intrusive”

not gonna lie, this particular “argument” made me crack up laughing because they “remember perfectly… lots of times” but can only name one instance 😂 like i am on the floor, because trying to get away with that in a formal essay would earn them nothing more than a goose egg. you need evidence to support a claim, which this “claim” has none of. i mean,, when does aang force himself onto katara?? when katara initiates every cheek kiss they share?? when they are mutual participants in several shared hugs?? don’t get me started on DOBS - the Now or Never Kiss that falls under literally requires reciprocation from both parties, lol. but regarding the ever-so-infamous EIP episode they bring up:

This post talks specifically about EIP and the play’s portrayal of Aang and Katara (and how it cannot be used to define their relationship). This post explains the true source of Katara’s conflict in turning down Aang (i.e. the war itself and the risks the war presents for both of them) and why the EIP kiss did not “ruin” Kataang’s relationship. This post explains how the EIP kiss was resolved through narrative parallels. This post explains how the EIP kiss is so often blown out of proportion. This post explains how Aang did not “threaten” Katara in EIP (with some excellent commentary in the notes, too).

the fact of the matter is that yes, aang overstepped a boundary with katara there. no one has ever contested that because to do so would be to disregard canon, and here’s the thing about kataang shippers: we love atla canon. it gave us everything we wanted and more. (imo, that’s what anti kataangers don’t understand.) the EIP episode can be interpreted as a “low point” for many reasons, but the primary “takeaway” is that the play performed was imperialist propaganda that preyed on the gaang’s insecurities and demeaned them (much to the pleasure of the Fire Nation audience), which had negative consequences, one of which was aang kissing katara largely out of desperation. no one has ever excused that! thus, what i think isn’t clicking with anti kataangers is that aang and katara’s miscommunication in EIP is not a representation of their relationship being doomed to fail. aang made a mistake and immediately backed off without question or hesitation. katara has time to make her own decision and chooses to forgive him. doesn’t it strip more of katara’s agency away to conclude that katara could never ever ever forgive her best friend for a single mistake that - comparatively - could have been a whole lot worse?

(im just saying.)

“i saw people saying that katara was jealous of aang with that kids in kyoshi island, which she obviously was not. she was annoyed at them”

honestly, i have a question for whoever came up with this jfksjdasks. okay, yes, she was annoyed. that’s a given based on her exasperated eye rolls and sighs. but why was katara annoyed with them, hmm?

here’s my thing about katara’s feelings in this ep: jealousy and annoyance are not inherently the same, it’s true. a person can be annoyed without being jealous (obviously). as such, there are essentially two possible interpretations that have validity, although one in my opinion has greater weight in canon:

1. yes, it is possible to interpret katara’s annoyance that episode as being solely related to their delays on kyoshi island. one can reasonably argue that katara’s romantic feelings for aang were not as strong so early in the series (it’s only episode 4, after all, although lbr - she was Looking at aang’s tattoos in episode 1 lmao), and therefore the primary reason she was annoyed at the fangirls is because they were one of the causes extending their stay on the island when katara felt they needed to leave. it’s a fair interpretation.

2. a different and stronger interpretation, in my opinion, is that katara’s irritation was a product of both annoyance at their extended stay and jealousy of the fangirls’ obsession with aang. because here’s the thing about jealousy: it doesn’t have to be some extreme, exaggerated emotion/reaction! when katara gets jealous of on ji in book 3, she makes a single comment about aang and on ji dancing together. when aang gets jealous of jet in book 2 (because of sokka’s teasing), he, too, makes a single comment (i.e. that it would be a bad idea for katara to kiss jet). i bring these two moments up because they explicitly demonstrate within atla canon that reactions of jealousy do not have to be dramatique and outrageous, à la zuko throwing ruon-jian across the room in book 3, lmao. jealousy can be simple! kept to oneself! as such, katara’s disgruntled manner in that episode - which, might i add, is largely if not only shown in reaction to aang with the fangirls - can certainly be interpreted as a quieter form of jealousy akin to several other moments within canon.

more than that, however, if the writers did not at all want jealousy to be an interpretation on the table… why on earth would they have bothered to mention jealousy as a possibility? here’s the relevant excerpt from the episode transcript:

Koko: [Stomps her foot in annoyance and puts her hands on her hips, while another girl happily waves at Aang; irritated.] What’s taking you so long, Aangy?

Cut back to Aang and Katara; the former enthusiastically waves back at his awaiting fangirls, while the latter raises an eyebrow at the scene.

Katara: [Slightly mocking.] Aangy…

Aang: [Enthusiastically.] Just a second, Koko!

Katara: [Sarcastic.] “Simple monk,” huh? [Annoyed.] I thought you promised me that this Avatar stuff wouldn’t go to your head.

Aang: It didn’t. You know what I think? You just don’t want to come because you’re jealous.

Katara: [Close-up; angrily.] Jealous? [More high pitched voice.] Of what?

Cut to a broader shot. Aang moves back slightly, when an irritated Katara resumes to ferociously stuff the basket with more fruits.

Aang: Jealous that we’re having so much fun without you.

Katara: [Irritated.] That’s ridiculous.

(sidebar, but can i just say that seeing “ferociously stuff” to describe putting fruits away is arguably the funniest thing i’ve ever read sjkdhsjalks)

to me, this excerpt alone all but proves katara’s irritation is a mixture of annoyance at the girls’ (and aang’s) behavior/their delayed departure and jealousy regarding how the fangirls’ fawn over aang. katara clearly demonstrates frustration at aang’s seeming lack of concern for their time crunch and how he’s letting his status get to his head (and remember, y’all: this is very early book 1 aang, he’s barely begun to truly reconcile what it means to be the avatar and the last airbender, which is understandable and a-okay! can’t have growth if he doesn’t start somewhere!). that checks out. but next thing you know, katara’s reaction proceeds to dramatically heighten when aang teases the idea of jealousy to her. again: why include this moment if jealousy was never on the table whatsoever as an interpretation for her feelings of irritation? why make katara’s response intensify so strongly if she’s not jealous even a little bit?

in sum, while i don’t think katara’s aggravation is solely fueled by jealousy, the episode itself points to jealousy as at least a part of it. simple!

“kataang had no development. it feels like a ship made out of nowhere”

this take screams willful ignorance, like did they even watch the whole show?? it’s not worth addressing over and over, ngl.

This post and this post explain how Katara’s feelings for Aang develop throughout the series. This post explains how Aang consistently supported Katara throughout the series. This post demonstrates how Kataang is literally ingrained in every episode.

“aang is completely obsessed with the idea of katara being his. proof is that episode were [sic] the guru tells him he has to let go of her and he choses [sic] to break the connection. it’s like: look what i did for you, you should stay with me. aang learning to let go would have been a evolution for his character”

“completely obsessed” h e l p i weep for the lack of brain cells 😭 it is so hard to just say “kataang isn’t my cup of tea” and go?? seriously?? i thought we were past making stuff up to support shipping agendas. lord help us. real quick:

This post explains how Aang never acted like he was “entitled” to Katara’s affections. This post explains how Katara and Aang do not “idolize” each other. This post and this post talk about Aang’s chakra being blocked and unblocked, and how it had to do with fear, not attachment. This post talks about Aang and the Avatar State, explicitly discussing “The Crossroads of Destiny” and the notion of attachment/letting Katara go.

okay, let’s take this claim one sentence at a time:

“the guru tells him [aang] he has to let go of her [katara] and he choses [sic] to break the connection.”

first of all. FIRST OF ALL. can you imagine the hellfire that would have rained down if aang hadn’t chosen to go rescue katara? here is a piece of the episode transcript:

… Right before he is able to completely open the final chakra and master the Avatar State, however, he hears a shriek from Katara and sees a vision of her in chains. At this, he jumps out of the energy sphere and runs away from the Avatar Spirit. The energy bridge that leads him there slowly vanishes behind him until it catches up and falls from underneath him, causing his image to plummet toward Earth. This cuts his connection to the Avatar State, which forces him back to reality.

Aang: Katara’s in danger! I have to go! [Prepares to exit.]

Pathik: No, Aang! By choosing attachment, you have locked the chakra! If you leave now, you won’t be able to go into the Avatar State at all!

Aang hesitates but leaves anyway, leaving Pathik concerned and disappointed.

aang chose to leave because katara was in danger. if he had chosen to stay,, dear god. the vitriol that would have been thrown around. “aang doesn’t really love katara! he chose not to save her!” “aang is so selfish and greedy! he chose power over love!” it’s literally a catch-22. damned if he does leave, damned if he doesn’t leave. #fandomlogic

anyways, yes, sure, aang chose to leave, which at the time broke the connection. he was indeed in avatar state limbo for a Hot Minute. whoop de do.

“it’s like: look what i did for you, you should stay with me.”

logical fallacy: ad hominem, hasty generalization, ∴ not worth our time 💛

“aang learning to let go would have been a [sic] evolution for his character”

i have amazing news for those who perpetuate this take. aang did let her go! he would not have been able to enter the avatar state in COD if he hadn’t! point blank, it is utterly untrue to pretend aang did not “let go” of his attachment to katara. now, im not going to get into the concept of “attachment” here and what it truly meant for aang to have “let katara go” in the book 2 finale (if it was good, bad, etc. etc.). there is a lot of material to work with there that would require like,, an entire post to dig into, if not more. the fact of the matter is that aang did let katara go, and the proof is that he successfully entered the avatar state before azula killed him. the above claim thus sits in complete contradiction to canon and is a moot point.

“making them stay together in the end just because aang is the protagonist and has to stay with the girl is boring and adds nothing to the plot”

“making them stay together” again, is it so hard for someone to just say “kataang isn’t my thing, im gonna stick to fanon pairings, but y’all have fun” i mean that really, really does not seem so difficult to me! also, “making” is a hilarious word to use just because,, atla is a work of fiction. in that respect, the writers “made” everything happen. you cannot escape their sphere of control.

anyways. that’s just funny to me lmao

but no, aang and katara did not get together in a romantic fashion just because aang was the lead male protagonist and katara was the lead female protagonist. i refer back to these posts from earlier:

aang and katara got together because their relationship had been developed since episode 1, duh. reducing their relationship to “lead guy + lead girl” completely disregards the legwork done and the foundation laid for their romantic partnership. like, all someone has to do is rewatch the show 😂 and i hate to break it to whoever created that take, but to say kataang “adds nothing to the plot” again ignores how their relationship is one of the two most important in the show (the other being aang and zuko’s relationship as narrative foils). it is not a cheap coincidence that kataang embodies multiple complementary themes/motifs of atla: push and pull, yin and yang, air and water, oma and shu, etc. etc. their relationship adds emotional depth! how is that not relevant to the plot! atla is a show where just about every relationship is important in some regard (this post touches upon how aang alone transforms all of his friends - think of the bigger picture, then, and how every other dynamic weaves in a crucial thread to create the beautiful tapestry we call atla!).

my point is that kataang is relevant to the plot the way every relationship in atla is, whether or not someone ships/enjoys them. you cannot have a good show without having intimate relationships (emotionally, i mean). can you imagine if someone said zuko and iroh’s relationship wasn’t relevant to the plot?? there is a reason it is such a powerful moment when iroh and zuko reunite in the finale. similarly, there is a reason yue’s sacrifice and sokka’s consequential (and lasting) grief is so poignant. there is a reason it is so heartbreaking when katara and sokka have to leave behind their father at the beginning of tsr. to tie back to kataang, there is a reason it is so hard to watch katara dismiss aang in that same episode. there is a reason so many people are moved when katara pulls aang out of the avatar state when appa is stolen. there is a reason emotional reactions are incited during atla and it is because these relationships are so important!! i don’t care if someone thinks kataang is “boring” - that’s their opinion, they have a right to it. but to insist their relationship wasn’t relevant to the plot? to the story? when in fact it was a key component from episode 1?

are you kidding me?

“he spend years after a girl that never felt the same for him”

“years” lol doesn’t atla take place over the course of a year at most? pretty sure this person didn’t even watch the show 😂 for a third time, i refer to these posts:

i hope i addressed these (nonsensical) arguments to your satisfaction, anon! a lot of them are the same tried-and-failed anti kataang arguments, smh. not to incite new discourse lmao, but it’d be nice if there was at least some variety 😂 thank you again for your kind words, my friend! 💛

#kataang #aang #katara #aanglove #atla #avatar the last airbender #atla analysis #kataangtag #amy answers #anon #amy analyzes

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dishwater-blondie · 2 years

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Or anything from The Best and the Worst Thing Universe?

Occurring alongside Chapter 4 of The Worst and Best Thing.

Content Warning for some vague self-harm and suicidal thoughts.

When she reads his caller ID on the screen, her breath lodges in her throat, turning to stone.

The phone is off most of the time, and she keeps it out of reach. Only a couple times a day does she check her messages to respond to the well-meaning texts Adrien sends inquiring after her health. Otherwise, she lies in bed facing the opposite direction with her head hovering over the bucket on the floor. She hasn’t kept any food down in almost a week. She hasn’t tried to eat today. She hasn’t been on her feet except to use the bathroom and brush her teeth, over and over again to get rid of the sour taste clinging to the back of her tongue.

She must’ve forgotten to switch the phone off the last time she checked it, because she heard it buzzing on the nightstand, and thinking Adrien must have been calling her, she forced herself to roll over and stretch her arm as far as it would go. Soon enough, she managed to secure the device in her clammy grip, but the name she stares at now isn’t Adrien’s.

Gabriel Agreste greets her like a flare of light. A looming wildfire. The glint off a knife’s edge.

She doesn’t answer. She isn’t ready to hear his voice. But to her dismay, a voicemail shows up in her notifications a moment after the buzzing ceases.

Listening to it sets her breath in motion again, rapid and shallow:

“It’s me. We should meet to talk - actually talk this time. I had no idea, Nathalie. Truly. If I’d known, I would have handled this…”

He doesn’t finish that sentence. Of course he doesn’t.

“Let me know when you’re ready.”

She’ll never be ready. Nathalie can’t begin to convince herself otherwise, and that’s why the numbing miasma that has enveloped her since the day after Christmas finally breaks. Tears pour down her cheeks as she lies there terrified, eyes flitting across the transcription of the short message over and over again. A familiar, haunting agony seizes in her chest, and no breath feels like enough to help sustain her. She wants it all to stop, for her life to switch out like a light, and leave her with no knowledge of the world she’s leaving behind.

Nathalie doesn’t know how much time passes before she rises out of the deepest valley of her panic. What she recognizes is that she isn’t crying anymore, her head is throbbing, and her phone is in desperate need of a charge. By some miracle, she gets out of bed to plug it into the wall, and then, dissuading herself from sinking back under the covers, she turns on the shower and discards the pullover and pajama pants she’s been wearing for four days.

She won’t look at her body in the mirror. The water is still cold when she steps under shower head, but it warms up fast and the room is thick with steam when she finally has the will to get out, not before furiously brushing the knots out of her hair and carelessly nicking herself with the razor several times. Every spark of pain just made her deserve it more.

Nathalie drinks a liter of water, which helps her headache, then, while her hair air-dries, she changes the sheets on her bed and washes the few dishes that have accumulated in her sink since the 26th. Her body screams at her to lie down again, close her eyes, and let the voicemail vanish into oblivion, but every time she considers it, she wants to shake herself. This is what she wanted, isn’t it? To talk? To hear him say something, anything about what’s happened between them? To acknowledge it with more than a dumbfounded gawk?

She throws on an oversized flannel shirt, which she hopes hides the evidence that she’s starting to show, and opens all the curtains in her apartment. It’s a bright winter day, the sunlight piercing through a thin veil of clouds and washing her rooms in a soft yellow glow.

Yesterday was her birthday.

Nathalie takes a deep breath. She unplugs her phone from the wall and opens her text messages to Gabriel. It takes her about ten minutes to compose the simple sentence, but once it’s written, she sends it and collapses on the bed.

You can come over now.

#gabenath #the worst and best thing #nathalie sancoeur

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hard-boiled-criminal · 3 years

Text

Venus Ambassador - 1

Loki x gender neutral reader

Loki tv spoilers

Prologue

You could feel your frustration build as you read through a court hearing where the judge and the defendant just kept going in circles, repeating themselves over and over and you were sick of it.

With a groan, you tossed it back on to the desk and leaned back in your chair, massaging your temples to try and soothe your growing headache.

‘I wasn’t made for all this legal shit,’ you thought, frustrated and annoyed. ‘Couldn’t they have, I don’t know, spiced it up a bit for me at least? All I’m asking for is maybe some more information on these different worlds and species. It’d be good to know what the heck a Daijiq is, not about how “x did this and altered the timeline so we gotta dust ‘em” and all that boring bullshit. They’re just having me read the court transcripts and write documents about how my dimension works. Not to mention making me watch that Hanna-Barbera-esque cartoon and then quizzing me on it.’

With another groan of mental pain you slouched back forward.

“You know what? Maybe I just need a (tea/coffee) break. Yeah, that sounds nice.”

You stand up from your chair and stretch, groaning as your bones and muscles protest at moving after being idle for so long. Thankfully, you were able to easily convince the TVA to provide you with a (tea/coffee) maker, which now sat and a small table in the corner of the room. You purposely placed it in the corner furthest away from your desk so that you’d be forced to get up and stretch your legs every so often, lest your muscles waste away into nothingness.

As your beverage was brewing, two knocks rapped at your office door. Before you could respond, they let themselves in. They held up a manilla folder and gave you a nod.

“New variant case.”

“Thanks.”

They placed the folder on your desk and promptly left. It seems neither you nor the TVA were still quite used to each other’s presence, despite you being here for a month already. You couldn’t really blame them. Afterall, your dimension’s inner workings completely went against their own and their ideals.

With a sigh, ‘more paperwork. Great,’ you head back to your desk with your piping hot drink. Not wanting to pick up that dreadfully boring court transcript you were reading, you decided you might as well take a look at the new file.

You take a sip of your drink as you open the file and gasp, accidentally letting in too much of the almost-boiling drink. You immediately start coughing and sputtering, and your tongue is definitely burned. After your coughing fit subsides, you rub your eyes and look at the file again in disbelief. You had only learned that this was the TVA in the Marvel Cinematic Universe last week; you weren’t expecting one of the characters to be here as a variant so soon!

Loki.

Drink forgotten on the desk, you grab the file and rush out of the room. You couldn’t let your anxiety take over now, not when you had the chance to meet the Loki. If we were talking about problematic favorites, then they were number one on the list. ‘I mean, they’re a villain and they’re hot. What was I supposed to do? Not simp over them?’ You knew Loki would be here eventually, having seen the trailers for the tv show, but when you arrived here, you had no idea what point of the timeline you were at. The show hadn’t aired yet, so you have no idea what’s to come. That thought makes you both nervous and excited.

It doesn’t take you long to reach the circulation desk. You hand the file to the person sitting there, and a bit out of breath you ask, “that variant… where are they?”

They give you a strange look before looking through their own files. “It looks like they are currently with Agent Mobius in Time Theater A, floor 2WE.”

“Thank you,” you hurriedly grab the file and speed-walk to the elevator. You’re not about to risk running through halls filled with armed TVA that could vaporize you with a single tap from their zappy sticks, especially since it seemed many of them didn’t quite like you. Luckily, there’s an elevator close by and you get there quickly, waiting for it to come to your floor after hitting the button. As soon as you confirm the elevator is empty after the doors open, you rush in and hit the button labelled ‘2WE.’ Now stuck with nothing to do but wait, your mind finally has a chance to catch you up on all the anxiety you forgot about—all those doubts that started to build up, wondering if this was a good idea. You start to pace around the small space as nerves get the better of you, nearly jumping out of your skin when the elevator dings and the doors slide open. There’re people rushing about, like always, and you do your best to squeeze past them to Time Theater A.

You slip through the theater doors as quickly as possible, letting out a quick sigh of relief as soon as you’re out of the crowd. You look up, and there he is, sitting on the steps to your left, face in hands and tesseract beside him.

He looks so… lost.

“Um, are you okay?” You asked without thinking, immediately berating yourself in your head. ‘Stupid! Of course, he’s not okay! They just got kidnapped by the TVA and now look at them! He looks so… despaired? Unsure? Like everything he thought he knew was a lie? Again?!’

He glances up at you, slightly lifting his head out of his hands and raises an eyebrow.

You stand there awkwardly for a couple seconds, not quite sure what to do. ‘They seem like a tea person; I should’ve brought tea… wait, shit, I don’t have a thermos. There’s no way I could bring some tea all the way down here without spilling it all over myself and—okay, you know what. Fuck it,’ you leave all caution to the wind and walk over to him, sitting on the steps to his left.

“…that was a stupid question, wasn’t it?” you said, letting out a single self-deprecating huff of laughter. A moment of silence passed between the two of you. You take a deep breath. “It’s okay to feel things, you know. It’s also okay to let others see that you feel things. I know that it’s hard, but sometimes it’s easier with a stranger. So, if you want to, you can…vent? Fuck, sorry, I can’t think of the other word for it, and you don’t have to do anything you’re not comfortable with—actually, you know what, forget it, just forget I said anything at all and now I’m rambling and making a fool of myself—okay, deep breaths.”

You felt absolutely mortified. He you were, tiny insignificant mortal you, trying to comfort a literal deity who you may or may not simp for and making a complete fool of yourself. This time, it’s your turn to bury your face in your hands. You want to scream in frustration at yourself, but there’s no way you’d do that in front of them. You peek at them between your fingers to see that he’s looking at you with confusion written on his face.

“Heheh… sorry about that. I tend to ramble a lot… especially when I don’t know what to do,” you take another deep breath and turn to look at them. “But where are my manners. I’m (y/n), nice to meet you—"

“Loki,” Agent Mobius cuts you off as he enters the room, wielding the phaser stick.

‘This… this is not a good situation right now, is it?’

Hey. I know some people (like myself) like to be added to the taglist so… if you wanna… lemme know and I’ll slap your name on it. Ok. So. I’m going to try to update this weekly as the episodes air. Maybe biweekly if I need to cut some chapters in half because they’re long and I wanna post what I’ve finished so far. But maybe, just maybe, as we get further into the series, I’ll drop some little omakes here and there, small fluffy interactions…

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parvuls · 4 years

Text

fic: in the space between (1/2)

the astronauts/scifi au literally no one asked for. a 3k ficlet of eric bittle thriving in places the world thinks he can’t -- in every single universe.

(part 1 | part 2 | read on ao3)

FABER 15 AIR-TO-GROUND TRANSCRIPTIONS

00 00 00 34 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Just letting you know your trajectory is headed straight into Driucs, Zimmermann. Over.

00 00 00 41 COMMANDER J. ZIMMERMANN

Roger. We copy that, Houston. Changing courses now.

00 00 00 48 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Get on that. Things aren’t looking good ahead. Over.

00 00 00 55 SECOND PILOT B. KNIGHT

Can’t believe you don’t fucking trust this guy. He’s already tense as shit, Lards, you got nothin’ to worry about.

00 00 00 57 SECOND PILOT B. KNIGHT

Over.

00 00 01 06 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Keep it clean on the coms, Faber 15. Administration is already on your case. Over.

00 00 01 12 COMMANDER J. ZIMMERMANN

Roger. You’re welcome to come shut him up. Over.

00 00 01 19 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Wish I could, Zimmermann. Change courses, now. Or I’m stealing a ship and coming to beat your ass.

00 00 01 22 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Off record, Houston. Delete from written transcriptions.

00 00 01 24 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Just get out of dodge, Faber 15. Over.

00 00 01 30 COMMANDER J. ZIMMERMANN

Roger. Trajectory adjusted, should be going around Driucs. Over.

00 00 01 36 CAPCOM L. DUAN

(Music: “It’s About Time”)

Driucs is a ball of hot pink mottled with orange from the sandstorms raging on its surface. Shitty thinks that it’s pretty, wants to screencap the ship’s monitors so he can ask Lardo for a painting of it later. Jack thinks that it’s an unnecessary hazard ringed with a dense asteroid belt, and that all he wants to do is bypass it as quickly as possible without colliding with a mass of solid carbon.

“Chillax,” Shitty says to this, kicking his feet up to the control panel. His toes are edging the radar display, and Jack grinds his teeth, shoves them off without bothering to argue about it once again. He’s so tense that he doesn’t even comment on Shitty’s choice of socks; galaxy printed with tiny marijuana leaves, crisse. “Everything will be A-OK. Always fucking is, Jacko.”

Jack wipes his brow with the back of his hand, shifts his hold on the control wheel and tries to focus on getting them through safely. “You know I hate it when you’re being cavalier.”

The door to the flight deck slides open, and someone exclaims, “Oh, what a view!”. Jack doesn’t need to turn his head; Bittle walks up between the two piloting seats, leans right on the center panel to gaze up at Driucs through the big windows. “It’s absolutely gorgeous, ain’t it? We should make a stop there.”

It’s what he always says. Jack specifically asked Holster to keep Bittle in the sleeping quarters until they’re out of the Merudan System because he’s got no patience for this right now. “It runs a hundred and two degrees, Bittle. We can’t make a stop there.”

Bittle talks about everything like they’re driving Route 66 down to Arizona and landing on a foreign planet is just a stop at Wendy’s for a Vanilla Frosty mid-roadtrip. Some days Jack can’t believe NASA ever let him out of the Solar System; other days, he thinks that maybe they did this so he’d never come back.

Bittle either doesn’t notice Jack’s impatient tone or, most likely, chooses to ignore it completely. “A hundred and two degrees is just another hot day in Georgia,” he huffs, rolling his eyes dramatically. “Goodness, it must stop being winter in Canada sometimes, does it not?”

Shitty snorts. His feet are back on the panel again, scratching against each other absently. “I think he means a hundred and two degrees Celsius, brah.”

Bittle pauses, hovers over Jack’s shoulder for a moment. And then says, “Oh. Well, that is rather warm, indeed.”

They picked Bittle up from a tiny space station right by Cleto, where they'd stopped for supplies. The order came from high up in Houston, and was very specific: Bittle was to join them on all ground missions until further notice, and was to lead all communication with nonhum species. They were provided with no background information or justification for expanding Jack’s crew, and Flight Director Hall hung up on Jack when he tried asking.

Bittle, the moment he stepped into the ship through airlock, pulled off his helmet to reveal a head of blonde hair and a radiant smile. His suit had pins of rainbows and bunnies on it next to the American flag, blatantly disobeying uniform regulations. He offered his hand for an enthusiastic handshake despite the bulky EV glove covering it -- without decontaminating first -- and Jack’s first thought was that all of it must be a joke.

But it wasn’t. It’s been three months since orders came and no further notice was given. Instead, every day since has been filled with ceaseless chatter and pop music playing in the communal area and Bittle’s petulant morning complaints about intergalactic coffee being just not the same.

“You’re not even trying,” Shitty tells Jack nearly every night. He’s made a habit of crawling into Jack’s bunk since their first year on the same crew, gives bullshit excuses about how Jack keeps him warm in the cold, cold outer space. It’d be less troublesome if he at least bothered to put some clothes on to save Jack the uncomfortable conversations with Mission Control Center about workplace relations. “Do not motherfuckin’ lie to my face, Zimmermann -- you are not trying, you didn’t try once, Bittle is a tiny Southern bundle of delight and you’d like the shit out of him if you could get over your sorry ass and try.”

But Jack doesn’t want to try. Jack wants to get to his annual performance review and pass with spotless marks, which may as well not happen if Bittle insists on striking conversation with every nonhum race they encounter during the simplest of missions. Jack didn’t leave Earth to make friends, neither with crewmates nor alien species, and he certainly isn’t looking for friends who put his job at risk.

Shitty won’t stop pestering him about it, though, so Jack takes to pushing him out of the bed and shoving a pillow over his ears. It doesn’t make Shitty stop talking, but Jack is good at pretending to fall back asleep.

Evor is five days’ flight past Dricus. Jack assembles a mission brief in the communal area the night before landing, gathers the boys around the large screens covering the rounded center of the ship. The screens are currently displaying all known information about the people of Evor, who are notoriously unfriendly and are especially inhospitable towards humans. There are reasons, Jack figures, but he never looked too deeply into it; he has no intention of contacting them at all.

“Mission goal is to extract soil samples from the mines on the mountainous side of the planet,” Jack says. The images on the screen behind him switch on voice command, are now a rotating photo of said mines. “It’s mostly unpopulated, so there shouldn’t be any run-ins with the locals. Mission estimated time is three hours on Earth clock.”

Ransom shoves his hand into the bag of chips balanced between Holster and him with a contemplating expression. “Sounds like child’s play. We all going in?”

“Yes,” Jack crosses his arms. He’s no doubt that any of the boys would like to stay behind and get a few extra hours of rest, but he doesn’t like taking unneeded risks. There’s strength in numbers, and he feels safer knowing that they have several eyes watching several backs out there. “Solid landing, no risk to the ship, no reason for anyone to stay here. Get your gear ready tonight.”

“Wait, Jack --” it’s Bittle. Of course it’s Bittle. Jack takes a deep breath and turns to him. He’s sitting in a single seat, legs crossed and hands clasped in his lap. “Listen, I’m not sure it’s such a great idea.” Jack’s scowl must be deeper than usual, because Bittle cringes and hurries to explain, “I mean, no offence to your -- mission planning, or. You’re usually great at that. I just mean, the Evor people don’t like strangers, and they sure as heck won’t like us, and they’re a people of warriors, you know, like, they make their money off lending their fighting skills to other armies --”

“Is there a point to this?” Jack cuts him off. It’s not that he doesn’t think Bittle means well, because he’s not blind: Bittle is made of nothing but good intentions and sunshine demeanor. His tendency to babble on and on simply isn’t welcome during mission briefs. Too time-consuming.

“Yes,” Bittle insists. He looks unhappy, a tiny furrow wrinkling at his forehead. “Going in with more than two or three men can be seen as a threat, and I just don’t think --”

“It doesn’t matter,” Jack interrupts, “because if all of you will follow orders there’s no reason for us to come across them or stay on the ground for long enough to be perceived as anything but transients. Leaving crewmates behind is a risk that we won’t be taking.”

“But --”

“End of story, Bittle,” Jack says, and it’s louder, meaner than it usually would be. He can see Shitty frowning at him from the corner of his eye, can see Holster glaring into his handful of chips. He gets that they feel overprotective of Bittle, being the smallest and the newest, but if Bittle wants to be part of the crew he’s got to either get with the program or quit. Jack can’t lower his professionalism standards just because Bittle might be offended. “Any more questions?”

There’s silence, so Jack adjourns the brief and turns away. He can hear, muttered from somewhere behind him, “Yeah, what crawled up your ass?”. He chooses to ignore it and focus on turning off the screens, instead of giving it enough thought to start doubting himself.

The worst thing is: Jack can’t figure out how the hell Bittle got there.

“I think he has a degree in like, sociology or something, man,” Holster told him a few weeks after Bittle had come aboard, while they were waiting outside the showers and listening to Bittle’s off-key rendition of a song that’d been in the radio maybe a decade before. “A master’s, I think, definitely no doctorate.”

Holster actually really liked Bittle, right off the bat; they all did, bar Jack, which just made the whole situation even more irritating. But they hadn’t gotten a lot of sleep that night and Bittle’s singing was truly awful, so Holster was probably feeling less kind than usual.

“Shitty’s got four PhDs,” Jack said, banging his head back against the wall, abstractedly thinking that a concussion might make the singing stop. “Ransom’s getting his second one now. While in space. You don’t think it’s fucked that some undereducated humanities kid from nowhere, Georgia is going through the cosmos like he’s on a third grade school trip?”

Because Bittle was terrible at physics, and he paled visibly whenever someone started talking about biomechanics, and Jack had once caught him snoozing while Ransom had been fervently explaining the primary composition of Krer’s atmosphere. The most insulting part of it all, probably, was that NASA used to demand a STEM degree to even qualify for a program, and Bittle barely had a dubious understanding of astronomy, while traveling space.

Of course, the moment the words were out of Jack’s mouth the singing stopped and the bathroom door slid open, Bittle standing behind it. He was wrapped in a towel, beads of water still lingering on his temple, dripping down his cheekbones. His face was red, blotchy, but the hard expression on his face made Jack think that the color wasn’t necessarily from the water temperature.

“Excuse me,” he said, voice uncharacteristically cold. His shoulder knocked into Jack’s when he passed them, leaving behind a wet patch on Jack’s shirt. Bittle was small, and the door was adequately sized, and there were a good two meters between Holster and Jack, which left the obvious conclusion that it was most definitely on purpose.

Holster followed his departure with bleary eyes, shifting the bundle of clothes in his hands guiltily. “I think he heard you, bro.”

Jack rubbed at the wet patch with his right hand. “No kidding,” he grunted, and couldn’t really find it in himself to care.

Bittle seems wary from the moment they step foot on the jagged surface of Evor. Holster and Ransom force their way into the space by his sides, bracketing him like two towering bodyguards. They do their best at trying to get him to lighten up while climbing up to the mines; the crew figured out that they all played hockey at some point of high school, so Holster is animatedly explaining the rules of zero-G hockey, all of which he’s made up himself.

“And sometimes we do full out matches when we meet other ships,” Ransom says, struggling with the unfamiliar gravity force to hoist himself up a big rock. “But a few months ago we were on Islikaru and there was this Russian crew, and this dude, Alexei, oh my god --”

A few small stones tumbling downhill bump into Jack’s boot, drawing his attention away from Ransom’s voice, and he mutes the coms to listen closely for any noises. There’s a rumbling coming from the other side of the mountain. It sounds like -- oncoming thunders, maybe, or a little like --

“Prepare for attack,” Jack turns the coms back on immediately, dives in front of Shitty to block the crew’s path up to the mines. Shitty stumbles, catches himself with one knee and both palms flat on the ground. “Abandon mission, now! Back to the ship!”

A dozen of Evor warriors descend from beyond the peak of the mountain, closing in on them faster than they can run. Jack’s crew doesn’t carry weapons. The Evor warriors are big, look like an odd mix of a gorilla and an elephant that’d be classified as some sort of reptile. Ostie de tabarnak, Jack knows next to nothing about them, and definitely nothing about how to beat them in a fight three-on-one.

“We’d never make it back on time!” Shitty yells, clambering to his feet and shoving the rest of the boys back down the mountain anyway. He’s right, but Jack has no backup plans and less than no time to come up with any. This was not supposed to happen, there was no reason for this to happen. They’ve been on Evor ten minutes, not even that.

Bittle jumps from between Holster and Ransom, scrambling up to reach Jack. He grabs Jack’s arm, face white and rapid breaths fogging up the visor. His expression is just as terrified as the rest of them, but Jack has never seen him this determined. It makes his feature look sharper, less angelic. “Let me go talk to them! Jack, let me --”

“What?” Jack rips his arm away, tries to shove Bittle back towards the ship as fast as he can. “Bittle, are you insane, they’re coming to attack us --!”

“Because we seem like a threat!” Bittle yells. The volume of his voice catches Jack by surprise, gets him to stop racing down for a moment just long enough to remember that Bittle said the same thing at the previous night’s mission brief. That Bittle must be holding himself back from screaming, I told you so, and now look where we are. “Let me go talk to them, I can explain the situation --”

“No! They’ll attack you before you get a word out --”

“They won’t! I understand their culture, the way they work -- Jack, you just -- you gotta let me try!”

“You’ll die --”

“Oh, Lord, we’re gonna die either way, so what’ve you got to lose, Zimmermann? You gotta trust me to have your back! ”

Jack stops. His breathing is loud in his ears, heart pounding. Shitty, Holster and Ransom are ten meters down the mountain, staring at Bittle and he wide-eyed, waiting for a decision. The Evor people are fast, and they look furious; they’re ninety or maybe a hundred meters away, and closing the gap with every second. Jack swallows, tramps down the panic rising in his throat.

“Go,” he says finally, voice gravelly. “Go, Bittle.”

Bittle gives him one last wild look, and runs towards imminent death.

FABER 15 CREW GROUND-TO-GROUND TRANSCRIPTIONS

00 00 02 04 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Faber 15, Faber 15, this is Houston. Over.

00 00 02 06 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Faber 15, this is Houston. What is going on. Over.

00 00 02 09 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Faber 15, this is Houston. Answer me. Over.

00 00 02 11 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Goddamnit boys, what happened!

00 00 02 14 COMMANDER J. ZIMMERMANN

Houston, this is Faber 15 returning to ship. Over.

00 00 02 17 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Jesus Christ, Jack. Tell me what happened.

00 00 02 21 SECOND PILOT B. KNIGHT

Jesus’ got nothing to do with this, Lardo. This was all Eric R. Bittle.

00 00 02 25 COMMANDER J. ZIMMERMANN

Mission didn’t go as planned. Sending you a full report as soon as we’re back on board. Over.

00 00 02 29 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Roger. Tell me everyone’s okay, Zimmermann. Over.

00 00 02 34 SECOND PILOT B. KNIGHT

Alive and kickin’. Can’t get rid of us that easy. But seriously, tell whoever sent us Bittle that I’m getting them a fruit basket whenever I’m back on Earth.

00 00 02 38 CAPCOM L. DUAN

Roger. I’ll tell them to expect that. Get that report done ASAP, Zimmermann. And never do this to me again. Over.

00 00 02 42 COMMANDER J. ZIMMERMANN

Roger, Houston. Out.

The boys all separate into their quarters as soon as they’re back in the ship, their postures slumping and their hair damp with cold sweat. Jack stays behind, twists the airlock chamber shut. It feels like his entire body is heavier than usual, and it isn’t because of the ship’s gravity.

When he looks up, he finds that Bittle’s still there; there’s an uncomfortable pause when they both hesitate by the passageway. Bittle’s back is turned to Jack, muscles tense beneath the dark fabric of his undershirt, but his head is tilted over his shoulder, searching for Jack’s eyes. His face is closed off, looks as blank as it can get. Jack’s hands clench into fists by his side and it makes the rubber of the gloves creak. He works his jaw as he tries to find the right words to say.

“That was --” he begins, and then swallows with difficulty. Bittle doesn’t turn to fully face him, only lifts his gaze until their eyes lock together. There’s spots of furious red high on his cheeks, his mouth pressed thin. Jack has no idea how to translate this information into any sort of social clue. “You. Euh. That was good, Bittle. Good work.”

Bittle’s mouth parts, his eyebrows knitting together, but his chin drops down so his expression is hidden from Jack’s view before he can try to read into it further. His right hand, leaning on the passage frame and keeping him in the mid-motion of leaving, tightens almost imperceptibly.

“Thanks, Commander,” Bittle says finally. His voice is steady, neutral. He’s still facing away. “Just doing my job.”

He carries on walking away, then, like his pause in the passageway never occurred at all. The insulating door slides closed behind him, and Jack is left standing in his gear, staring at the white expanses of the walls. He has this sinking feeling that he made a critical misstep has no idea how to undo.

#zimbits #omgcp #omgcheckplease #zimbits fic #i don't even have words to defend myself i'm sorry #pavfics #check please!#jack x bitty #THIS IS LITERALLY A DRABBLE OK

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ootori-sibs · 3 years

Text

Kyoya's second shot

Episode two: The shadow council

The week passed without anything notable happening, Haruhi and Tamaki were a lot better with public affections, and it truly disgusted Kyoya, Haruhi didn't even seem to care that much about the king's affections- always seeming so disinterested in her godly boyfriend.

But that would soon change, he could get Tamaki the love he deserved. It was Friday after all, and everyone he'd emailed had agreed to show up. He watched the other hosts gathering their stuff to leave after he'd gone over the budget and weeks profits with them, he felt a fizzy sort of feeling- excitement. It was the first time in literal months he'd felt like this, usually he just felt sickened or hollow. He was almost excited to feel excited! He knew being evil would make him feel better!

He only had twenty minutes until everyone arrived, so he quickly made his way down into the second hall, it was still huge, but a lot more modest then the main hall. He set up a table, with a chair for everyone, making sure to set seating arrangements that would be the most efficient for how each person could contribute to the discussion. He set up his whiteboard, read to present his ideas in slideshow format as he was used to with the hosts- it truly was the best way to convey information to dummies. He even lit candles instead of using the chandelier, he knew the first thing to being an effective villain: presentation, and he knew that candles would go a long way to presenting his plans- especially considering his demographic. Of course he needed to accommodate the more morally correct party that would be attending, and the best way he saw to do so were via the snacks served at the meeting; chocolate chip cookies, small garlic crackers, apple slices, and some watermelon treats he'd picked up from a commoner store- specifically for the commoner.

Before he knew it, there was a shadowy figure in the corner of the room. Kyoya sighed, staring right at it. "Step out of the shadows would you Nekozawa, I hope you're not planning to usurp my title." He joked calmly, causing the mage to jump, not expecting to have been spotted so soon.

"My, my, Ootori-san, awfully perceptive aren't you?" Nekozawa sculked out of where he was hidden, heading slowly towards the table. "I'm intrigued to know what you have in store for this meeting of yours, not to mention finding out exactly who else you've invited." He sits down in his designated seat, looking over the snacks that had been presented.

Kyoya chuckles at that, inspecting one of the watermelon treats he'd picked up. "Well-"

"The president of the black magic club meeting with the school demon lord? Now this is a scoop." Ah, Komatsuzawa was here. Kyoya glances towards him, nodding curtly.

"You were looking for a conspiracy, were you not?" He questioned, knowing all too well the answer. "Sit down," he invited, gesturing to the designated chair set out for the head of the newspaper club. He watched as the Akira took his seat, looking around curiously and clutching a little clipboard. "You don't need to take notes, I will provide transcripts after the fact."

"Yes, well, I would like to take notes of simple details I note during the meeting, I know you'll be doing the same Ootori, I don't doubt the hypocrisy but I resent the businessly attitude towards your scandals."

"It's not a scandal until it's published, Komatsuzawa." Kyoya raised an eyebrow at him, knowing too well how he would have to reign this boy in. Akira wanted nothing more than to expose Tamaki for whatever he could, and Kyoya refused to let that happen.

"I hope you know I lied to my brother's face for you, why didn't he know you'd invited me to a meeting, what are you planning?" Chika Haninozuka stood there, still in his karate outfit, hands on his hips. When he noticed all eyes were on him, he began to walk towards the table, looking around.

Kyoya smiled. "Thank you Chika, I appreciate the lie." He gives a small bow of his head, knowing that lying to an older sibling was nowhere near the pain Chika made it out to be. "To answer your first question; your brother would be highly disapproving of my plans. He- and that goes for all the other hosts- cannot know what goes down at these meetings. Understood?" That last part was spoken to all of them, and it was a clear threat. He had mirrored the tone he'd heard his father use on his own underlings many many times.

Clearly it worked, he saw all three of them freeze in place, eyes like frightened animals. Kyoya felt something, a rush of… power. This must be how his father, even his brothers, felt every day- Kyoya had to have more. He felt a smirk resting on his face, going to grab his black book when he heard the door behind him open.

"Oh, uh- am I late? Sorry I had to get changed first!" Here came the commoner, Arai was running just a little late, but Kyoya was just glad he was here. He watched in amusement as his other guests' expressions turned from surprise to confusion at the sight of the commoner they'd never seen before.

Kyoya himself just smiled and gestured to the commoner's seat. "Not to worry Arai, we wouldn't start without you." He watched the poor boy take a seat and went straight for the watermelon snacks as predicted, Kyoya took a quick note before the meeting.

19:19 - Everyone has arrived, the meeting shall begin. The commoner was late. Chika made Honey aware that he was staying late, but did not provide the real reason.

"So," Kyoya began, hands tucked behind his back, "I'm sure you're all wondering why I've called you all here today?" There was a resounding murmur of curiosity and Kyoya continued. "Well I'm sure you're- nearly all of you at least, are familiar with my-" he coughs a little pointedly at that, "interests?" He watched both Umehito and Akira exchange a look, almost looking concerned, and he sighed, before turning to Chika and Arai, who both have no clue what he means. "Well to put it lightly, as much as I see her as a friend and equal: Haruhi is my enemy." That was the most honest Kyoya has ever verbally been, and he watched in what was almost fear, as each and every one of them clocked on to what he was saying

"Oh now that's one hell of a scoop!" Akira really couldn't keep his damn mouth shut could he? Kyoya shot a simple death glare at him, but was quickly distracted by the sight of Umehito pulling out one of those little wooden cursed dolls. Kyoya sighed for a second time.

"Look, I didn't want it to come to this, but something must be done-" -or he was going to lose his goddamn mind, that part stayed silent. "So I've come up with a plan, one that will benefit all of you in both the long and short term." The moment their own benefit was brought up, each of their eyes went wide, greedy for more than they had- all except the commoner. Typical.

Arai had frowned, crossing his arms slightly. "I'm sorry, could you explain how Haruhi is your enemy? Sorry again if I sound dumb, I'm not quite understanding..?" Oh of course, Arai couldn't have any way to be aware

"Well you see, Haruhi has a boyfriend. That boyfriend just happens to be-" Kyoya attempted to explain, being completely interrupted by Nekozawa, rude as usual.

"- Souh-san, president of the host club and the person Ootori-san's been in love with for the past...year? Year and a half?" He pondered the maths quietly, Arai's eyes widening with every word.

He turned to Kyoya in mixed shock and indignation. "You want to steal her boyfriend? If you knew him longer why didn't you ask him out?" ...commoners are so daring…

There was complete silence from the other three, hell- even Kyoya himself was shocked into silence. His rage was very quickly reaching it's point, fists clench. "Oh. Oh I'm sorry, why don't you go up to the guy that never shuts up about 'making every woman happy' and tell him you've been in love with him from the day you met him? See how that goes?" He let out a hefty sigh, taking his glasses off and running a hand through his hair. "I didn't even know he was bi until he started asking for advice on how to confess to her." That was probably the most painful of Kyoya's life that evening, that stabbing pain was unbearable yet he couldn't say a thing to Tamaki about it.

He put his glasses back on to see poor Arai shaking like a terrified feral cat, maybe he'd been a little snappy with his words… he looked around to see everyone else wide eyed too. "...my apologies, I'm not sure what came over me just then." He coughed awkwardly, switching his slideshow on and pulling out a pointer to help demonstrate. "Let's just get to the matter at hand shall we?" He smiled.

The plan was simple and they all had a part to play, poor Arai clearly had a lot of objections but was too shaken to voice any of them, Kyoya would have to discuss it with him afterwards. The snacks were gone pretty fast, luckily Kyoya managed to take a couple for himself between explanations, surprisingly the watermelons were the most popular- most folks there never having tried commoner's food before. Akira seemed more than excited to have so many opportunities to publish articles that were sure to go viral across the school and maybe further, Umehito was definitely up for some spooky happenings, the moment Chika heard he got to fight Honey and win he was on board, and Arai… if Kyoya was honest, Arai was probably just too frightened to object. He was definitely the weakest party there: Chika could kill him easily, Nekozawa had more than enough 'power', Akira had all the connections he could ever want, and Kyoya… was an Ootori- not to mention being a high ranking person in Ouran if his own volition. Even one of them had enough money to completely ruin Arai's life, and enough spite to do so if pushed. It really wasn't all too fair on him.

Two hours had passed by the time Kyoya finally finished laying out the details of his plan, at least the main overview. Turns out, without Tamaki to reel him in, Kyoya's plans can get a little over detailed- that was where the devil was after all. He smiled, putting his pointer away. "-and that would be where we part ways. Any questions?" He looked at the four of them, waiting for someone to say something, Chika visibly frowned, raising his hand.

"How does this help us at all?"

Kyoya knew this question was coming and he relished in its arrival, clicking to the next slide, with a picture of each of them, labelled with what they would get. "Well it's obvious what I get, but what you get, Chika, is both victory over your brother, but the knowledge in which you'll be annoying the crap out of him." As a younger sibling himself, he knew full well what that sparkle in Chika's eyes meant, the tiny Honey clone was more than on board. "For Nekozawa; to chance to exercise your powers and befriend Tamaki like I know you've been failing to do, trust me- it's alright." He chuckles a little, they were in similar situations, albeit Umehito's was a platonic one. "For Komatsuzawa it will be publicly, I know how you've wanted it so much, not to mention you're finally getting permission to cover the host club- isn't that what you'd asked me for?" He knew he was right, and he knew that Akira knew he was right. He was giving the boy what he'd previously denied him. "And for you Arai…" he chuckled, "our little commoner friend here gets his childhood sweetheart. It's clear you still have feelings for her." He couldn't help but smirk as Arai's face turned pink.

"I still respect her more than that!!" He squeaked out, still trying to pretend he had pride. All Kyoya had to do was raise an eyebrow and he sank into his seat.

Kyoya gave a curt bow. "Alright then, that would conclude our meeting. We're all in agreement of what we're doing, those of us with tasks will complete them by next week, when we will meet again- this time over video call." He watched them all stand up and prepare to leave, staying silent until they were all almost as the door. "Farewell then, I'll see you soon."

21:46 - The meeting has concluded, everyone has agreed to their parts. I will now stand by for Nekozawa's part to be completed.

He made his way home after clearing up, or rather, he made his way to the limo. His bodyguards wrapped him in his blanket the moment he sat down, making sure he was alright. He appreciates that someone cares about him, even if they're paid to do so, so he let them have the remaining snacks from the meeting. They seemed happy with that, so he let his mind wander on the journey home.

Next thing he knew he was laying in bed, it was late at night, he must have fallen asleep. He looked to his side to see a bowl of commoners ramen with a note explaining that the cooks had already left for the day. Kyoya sighed, taking the bowl over to his sofa, slowly eating his food. It was a cold night, but this cheaply made food was strangely comforting to him.

He gazed out his window, the moon was high. He was usually awake at this time, sure, but it felt different now- it felt almost lonely. The dawn of a new day felt so far away now, and the arms of his beloved friends felt further. He knew he was doing them wrong, but he couldn't see any other way to keep himself afloat. He had to be happy again, he had to. This was just how he was going about it. But the sinking guilt, the swallowing loneliness enveloped him gently but mercilessly, and he couldn't breathe for realisations.

His friends might never forgive him, he may become ostracized from the only community he's ever really had, and for chasing happiness no less. His methods were underhanded and his motives were wicked, his family might finally be proud… but Fiyumi at least would not. His loving, caring sister… would she be mad at him? For being unable to sacrifice his own happiness for his friends? Would she call him stupid? Selfish? Would she tell him he deserved all the pain and guilt he felt? He felt she would be right. He's done nothing but plan yet, he hasn't hurt his friends in the slightest. But he still felt incredibly guilty, incredibly empty…

He looked down at his bowl of ramen, it had gone lukewarm. He sighed and put it down on the table, laying on his side. He could turn the lights off, he could turn the heating off, he could turn off so many things, but he couldn't turn off his own thoughts, he couldn't turn off his tears.

#ouran high school host club #kyoya ootori #nekozowa #chicka honinozuka #chika Haninozuka #tamakyo #kyoyassecondshot

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jarofrebuke-transcripts · 3 years

Text

Jar of Rebuke Episode 5 Unofficial Transcript

Season 1 Episode 5: Perfect Attendance

INTRO

The following audio recording is classified documentation for Case [audio distortion] with the Enclosure. Unauthorized access to this information will lead to immediate intervention. Progress further if proper clearance has been given.

TODD

Hey Jared, it's Dr. Carmen. Listen, I know you asked to cash in on some of that paid time off you've got, but I wanted to let you know that I couldn't fulfill your request quite yet. There's one little thing I need you to look into for me first. There's some circulating rumors of a former teacher causing some trouble at the local school. I say former because she's been dead for about a hundred years or so. I don't know the exact details yet besides what Dr. Rahal heard- footprints with no source, flying clocks, startled janitors- you know the drill. So I need you to go and investigate. Since you're just so good with those little kiddos that come by your place at night, I figured you'd be even better with some actual kids. And since you've been doing a little personal community outreach, why not put that to use? Now go see what you can figure out and report back to me, then we can discuss that vacation time of yours. Oh, also you're welcome for the plumbing fixture, by the way. I know you've been too busy to stop by with a proper thanks, but I'm just glad we could get that all fixed up for you. Well, I'll keep an eye out for your report by the end of the week. See you around.

JARED

“Oh you're welcome for the plumbing fixture, by the way.” Oh, geez Louise, I literally never asked them to fix my plumbing. I called it- now he's gonna hold that over my head for gods-know-how long. I know that some folks say that being motivated by spite ain't the best way to live but it's a real hell of a motivator. I don't plan to delete this voicemail till I get that chat about time off because if I get brushed out about that PTO again after everything, I'm going to remind them that he guaranteed me a talk about it. I mean he normally sends me out over the dangerous stuff, but this was just tedious. More like Todd just wanted to send me out on an errand and just threw me out over the first thing that he could. I mean, considering that I drowned a few weeks ago, this was expected to be a bit of a piece of cake. While it wasn't life-threatening, it was annoying. And draining.

So today, I just so happened to bump into the principal of the local school. I know that she goes to the Chronicle Inn’s country store a lot, especially during her lunch breaks. So I went in the afternoon and spent some time there talking with Ester and Laura as I waited for her to arrive. Ester was wearing a really lovely dress and a floral apron, the pale pink accented her gray hair really nicely. And Laura was already in her denim overalls and plaid flannel. Apparently she was wanting to get some woodworking done in her workshop, but then she decided to stay in and help Ester out with managing the shop for the afternoon rush, you know, since all the folks started pouring in on their lunch breaks. And that afternoon rush was what I'd waited for because that's when Mrs. Anika Ralsh showed up. We haven't really ever talked much, just enough to get to know each other's names and general identities. So when she saw me she greeted me with a small smile and a wave. She asked how I'd been doing, you know, what I'd been up to, the usual. I had planned on how I was going to broach the subject of the haunting in the school considering that it's not exactly something that just, uh, comes up naturally in conversation. I needed to find some inconspicuous way to shift focus to, to that topic in a way that wouldn't trigger too many red flags. But then she dropped the bombshell on me!

She said that she'd spoken to Darius and that he mentioned that I had some curiosity with the supernatural, which was weird because I remember mentioning that passively to him like once when I panicked when he asked me what I do for a living. And that was a while ago. I'm shocked that he remembered. So I basically told her what I told him. Yeah, I'm a scientist who studies natural phenomena around here but I also have an interest in supernatural phenomena but that's more of a hobby. Which is a boldface lie, but far more acceptable than the truth. The script in my head of how the conversation would go was now entirely thrown off which did, in all honesty, throw me completely off my rhythm. But she actually got far more to the point than I would have planned to so I guess it worked for the best.

Anika said that she hadn't been sure who to reach out to about this, but when Darius had mentioned me she thought it'd be worth a shot to ask me to look into things. That there's a ghost of a deceased teacher that keeps stirring up trouble at the local school. It was a former teacher who taught fifth graders back in like the 80s or something like that. She taught up until the day she died, and she's rumored to still linger around. But she's been getting more disruptive than before and it's getting a bit out of hand. So, Anika asked me if I knew a way to get this ghost to calm down, but to not get rid of her. Apparently this Mrs. Alice Caller has been a part of the school community for so long that even if she scares or startles people sometimes they don't really want her gone. She startles the staff more than anything, the teachers and all that. But the students seem to get a kick out of it. Every building has their character after all, that's what Anika said. And I guess you could consider a haunting to be a splash of character.

Anyways, so yeah, after chatting for a bit and pretending that I had my knowledge of ghosts and hauntings due to at-home research and not my nine to five, even if it's more of a six to five. I told her I could investigate, but I'd probably want to do it when there weren't, you know, students in the halls? She'd asked if I was free literally that evening and considering Todd was basically holding my paid time off as hostage I said of course. I mean the sooner I got it done the sooner I could have some sort of vacation. As preemptive compensation, she bought me lunch which was really nice and told me to come by school after I finished eating. She took her food to go, but I stayed and ate there at the end and chatted with Ester and Laura a bit more. I also texted Darius and asked if he told Anika about my supernatural interests. He said yes and apologized if he shouldn't have told her but I said that it was fine, that I was mostly surprised that he'd remembered. I'd mentioned it a while back and we really don't ever talk about it, so the fact that he remembered... it was sweet. I mean especially considering I let him do most of the talking in conversation. He has a nice voice and tells really nice stories. I was flattered more than anything.

After I ate and played some mindless puzzle games on my phone I headed out towards the school. If I'd really wanted to I could have walked but I had driven to the end from my house anyways and had no reason to just leave my car behind. I got there a little before the last class ended and just went to the front office. After some light chit chat, I was given a tour. It was one floor, maybe like 13 classrooms in total. Not including the small computer lab, the gym, the restrooms or closets. I saw teachers wrapping up classes and students getting ready to head home. Nothing seemed off during the first walk through. She asked me when I got into tracking the supernatural and I told her about two years ago. Not a lie, I guess. She asked what I did for the Enclosure. “We don't really know what it is you all do, I guess we're just curious,” is what she'd said. I felt like she was reading every movement and microexpression in response to whatever my answer would be. I kind of panicked. I told her that I just keep tabs on the natural anomalies, animal behavior primarily. I told her I'm involved in monitoring wildlife just to make sure that the ecosystem is in balance and stuff like that. Then I quickly changed the topic because I know jack diddley about biology beyond the basics.

I got to talking to Anika about what's been happening, which was what Todd had said and then some. Flying clocks, footprints, and startled staff. But there were also a few other things as well. Things apparently turn on and off by themselves, like the janitor's vacuums or the lights. One time the cleaning staff heard some stuff moving around in an empty room and then when they investigated the room, apparently a bunch of desks got moved around and flipped over. Seems that this Mrs. Caller has also been knocking over projectors and has made things go missing, especially in the old classroom where she taught. After Anika showed me around the whole school, uh, greeting kids as classes let out, which, let me tell you, made me incredibly uncomfortable. Again, I'm not good with kids, so I just kind of gave awkward waves and half smiles to them. Anyways, after she showed me around and led me back to where Mrs. Caller's former classroom was, she asked if I needed anything before she'd go back to work and leave me to meander. Right before she walked away though she asked if I had any tools for the ghost hunting. I hate calling it that. I'm not hunting the ghosts or anything, I'm more just trying to communicate, check in and see what's going on. They don't always want to talk and I definitely respect that. I mean, heck, there's times I sure don't want to talk to people. I told her I mostly wanted to check out the place first. I would bring in my equipment from my car once all the students were gone. She asked if I needed to wait till night time and I told her that that's just a rumor. Paranormal investigations often happen at night because it's quieter from interruptions and easier to use the night vision. But if the ghost has been haunting during the day then it makes sense to investigate during the day as well.

So we walked back to the front door. She went into what I guess is her office and I went and grabbed my kit that I keep in my trunk. It's got an EMF sensor, a voice recorder, which is basically just a fancier version of what I use for these journal entries. An infrared thermometer, high power camera, other nifty little tools. Mostly the basics, they don't give me the heavy duty kit for assignments like these, of course. I made my way back to Mrs. Caller's former classroom and gave passing greetings to everyone that I passed and made eye contact with. Just a little smile and wave, asking how are you, as neither party planned for an extensive conversation. I got over there and introduced myself as I set up the equipment. I definitely felt something. I wasn't sure if it was her or not but with the way that it felt, well I felt more comfortable. It felt more familiar. So I told her my name, that I was there just to communicate and see if I could help calm her down at all. I explained what I was setting up and what all it would do. I felt my muscles relax as I just felt far more comfortable in this situation than being surrounded by students while talking to Anika. Nothing against Anika, I felt quite comfortable talking to her back at the restaurant. I think it was just the whole being surrounded by people thing. So I got everything set up and started to poke around the classroom. I started asking general questions, ones that I'm encouraged to ask based on protocol. What do you want, how did you die, why are you here? And so on. I hate those questions. What makes anyone think that those spirits would want to answer them anyway?

So after I got very little response I sat down on top of one of the desks crisscross applesauce, put the equipment down and just chatted. I asked how she was feeling. I apologized if it was bothersome being pestered with questions especially if she'd been primarily been being ignored, except for people prying. I asked why she lingered in her former classroom, like why this place? That was when a small frame holding up what looked like an obituary caught my attention, a hung up above the door, so I asked her about it. I heard some beeps from my pile of tools but I didn't need to pick it up. I knew that particular beeping. It wasn't an auditory reception, it was an energy spike. And I could feel the shift in… the atmosphere? The mood of the room? At first I just felt like I was being watched, but then I felt like it was more, um, that I was encroaching in someone else's living space. That I was somewhere that I shouldn't be or doing something that I shouldn't be doing. I slid myself off the desk and went to start gathering my supplies, but then the feeling went away. Seems like she'd just been upset that I was sitting with my feet up on the desk like that. So I muttered an apology and just made my way over towards the door to take a closer look at the obituary. It felt like something was practically breathing down the back of my neck. Not literally, but, I don't know. I could just feel it there. I turned around slowly and saw, unsurprisingly, nothing. But I knew in my gut that she was right there.

Then what scared me more than anything was that the classroom door flew open behind me. Not enough to slam on the wall or anything, but enough to make a sound. It was just some student who apparently left her notebook behind her something. She couldn't have been more than, what ,13? She was sweet, asked what I was doing back there. I told her a half truth, which is pretty much just my life at this point. I told her I was investigating on behalf of Mrs. Ralsh, which in my opinion is not a lie, just not the whole truth. She then went on to tell me about an experience that her dad had last year. Apparently her dad is one of the school janitors that had an incident early one morning when he'd come to clean up the place during the weekend. He was helping wax the floors in the halls by the back door, and at some point he turned to see footprints in the wax finishing on the tile. Her dad got pretty freaked out since he knew that he did not hear or see anyone walk by and the footprints were all too small to be his. He followed the footprints to the back door. He tried the handle but the door was locked, it was a door that needed a key to be unlocked. So he used his key to open the door and discovered footprints leading from the door to the direction of the town's cemetery, which wasn't too far away. The same cemetery that Mrs. Caller was buried in. I asked her if her dad had experienced anything else since then with Mrs. Caller, and she said that he's seen loads of stuff. But normally he sees the aftermath, like he has to clean up the messes that she makes if the other teachers can't for whatever reason. So I thanked her, she grabbed her things, and then she wished me luck before she hurried out.

So once again I stood alone in the classroom. Well, alone besides the presence of Mrs. Caller, which was definitely still strong. Maybe it was a bit smarmy of me, but I asked her, “now why would the girl wish me luck?” I was told that Mrs. Caller isn't aggressive towards people but she definitely wants her presence to be known, and I guess she didn't like the idea of the disrespect in my tone in her own classroom. Suddenly there was a blur in front of me and the sound of shattering glass, the framed obituary that hung above the door had been knocked off the wall and landed practically at my feet, which made me jump instinctively. Thankfully my boots are sturdy enough that I didn't have to worry too much about getting hurt from the glass, but I noticed that there was something tucked behind the obituary in the frame. My hands are already fairly scarred up from work and I don't think the nerve endings in my fingertips really work as well as they used to, so I kind of just reached down without thinking. I brushed away the glass and picked up the paper so that I could examine it.

The obituary itself was hardly remarkable, exactly what I'd expect from a beloved school teacher who passed away many many years ago. But what was behind it was odd. An old Enclosure business card. I still have it with me. It looks probably as old as the obituary, if not older. It's the same general logo but it doesn't look as modern, as if they've updated it since then. The colors aren't as bright, aren't as jarring. But something about it made my stomach twist. It felt wrong, not like the uncanny valley wrong, but just I don't like looking at it. I pocketed the business card and carefully put the obituary on the desk. I asked what Mrs. Caller was trying to tell me, but the energy felt... tired? Strained? A little concerned. I asked for literally any other message, any other sign, anything that could be helpful with whatever this, this business card is. Then I saw chairs in the classroom start to move. Instead of them all being pushed into desks they were all shifted as if whoever was seated in the chairs were all facing me. I was the focus at that point. It suddenly felt like I was being watched far more intensely than I've been in a haunting situation. It was like I was standing in front of a crowd who were all watching me with narrowed, scrutinizing eyes. At first I just gave a huff and said “oh haha, very funny”. But then, the smell of something sweet. It was... it was a mild smell, not like anything I've ever smelled before, but as soon as that smell hit my senses my chest hurt and my stomach churned. I looked back at the obituary on the desk and saw Mrs. Caller's smiling face, then looked up to see the words “do your homework” written on the whiteboard in neat handwriting and one of the markers uncapped on the little storage ledge thing. So I told her, okay, I would, but I had to leave. I felt sick, which has never happened in a situation like this before. I normally have a gut of steel but something about that sweet smell just shook me to my core. I hurriedly capped the marker, wiped off the whiteboard, and then rushed over and started to power down my equipment that I hardly even used. I have been chased, drowned, attacked, and so many worse, worse things than having empty chairs turned to face me, but my heart was thudding in my chest and my palms started to sweat. I needed to leave. The sweet smell still lingered and I couldn't stand it!

I packed up my equipment and just got out of there. As I made my way back towards the front door I knew I couldn't be seen by anyone like that, I couldn't stand the idea of anyone's eyes on me at that point. I ducked into the bathroom, I tucked myself into a stall. I put my box down on the floor and just sat on the toilet before I just... stared at my hands. My scarred, now nicked-with-glass fingers, the creases in my palms, the swirl of my fingertips. I just reminded myself that I was there. The sweet smell was replaced by the smell of cleaning supplies and other musty smells. While it wouldn't normally be a pleasant smell it was far better than whatever I had smelled previously. After a few deep breaths I finally stood up and started to prepare to leave. That was when my bathroom stall flew open to reveal... nobody. It was more like Mrs. Caller was telling me to skedaddle on home and get working on my homework. I don't know why I couldn't fully see her like the ghost set the Chronicle Inn, but I could surely feel her presence strongly enough.

I'll admit I got a little huffy with her. I told her it was rude to barge into a stall like that and I was getting ready. Considering I hadn't actually used the bathroom, I just grabbed my stuff and headed out. Thankfully I made it to the front entrance without really catching anyone's attention. I was actually even able to slip by the front door without anyone noticing me, or at least they didn't call out to me. I felt a little bad without saying goodbye to Anika, especially after only being there for like, what, an hour? But I just wanted to get home. And now I'm home. And what was my homework? Well I decided to look more into this Alice Caller. She had a husband who passed away not long before she did. The husband worked in town and apparently had some ties with the Enclosure. Not an employee, they don't really hire townsfolk. But seemingly a friend of a former employee. I did hours of digging after I got home and found a mention in a newspaper of him and a Dr. Severin Kelder. I don't know why that name stuck out to me, but it did. I don't know if I've seen it on a research file before, or what. But I'm going to look more into it when I have my work computer at the lab tomorrow. Maybe Mrs. Caller saw the Enclosure logo on my equipment or something? But why was that business card even there? This business card isn't even for a particular person. I mean, it has a phone number on it but no name. I don't recognize the number and when I looked through my roster of numbers it didn't match anything. So perhaps, it was an older, no longer used number? Also, Todd said that Mrs. Caller died like a hundred years ago. Well, if this business card from the Enclosure was there, then that's impossible. The Enclosure settled here in like the 1930s. I think Todd was just exaggerating. Also both Anika and the obituary said that she taught and then died in like the 80s, so, whatever. Not that that really matters.

I put the old Enclosure business card away in the back of one of my drawers. I don't want to look at it anymore than I have to, it reminds me of that sweet smell in the classroom and I hate it. I normally love sweets and sweet smelling things, but something about that particular smell, it… I don't know. It triggers flight or fight down to my very core. Even if I know logically that I'm safe. [shivers] Just thinking about it is sitting me on pins and needles. Oh gods, and I didn't even tell anyone about the broken glass. A janitor probably had to clean it up. Totally forgot. Now I feel like a jerk... should I send an apology? Should I call in the morning?

[tapping sounds] Oh, I hear you! But you're not coming in, not after last time! I don't want to have to replace my couch again. I told you to just please, please leave me alone. Why'd you even want in my place so bad? There's other houses for you to knock on! [takes a deep breath] They're just kids, Jared. They're just doing whatever it is that they do. There is no need to shout at them. They don't know better. Sorry! I'm gonna stop the research for tonight and get some rest, I've stayed up way too late and I think that the black-eyed children are drawn to my house due to the fact that my lights are still on. I'm gonna call Anika in the morning and see if I could come back Friday after school, have the place relatively to myself, examine a bit further. It also gives me time between now and then to do some more research. I know Todd wanted the files on his desk by the end of the week, but I could always go in Friday afternoon and drop off the files Saturday. Still at the end of the week, he never specified what day. So, till next time, I guess. This is Dr. Jared Hel, signing off.

OUTRO

Jar of Rebuke is written and produced by Casper Oliver, who is also the voice of Dr. Jared Hel. Dr. Todd Carmen is voiced by Conrad Miszuk. The intro is read by Vanessa Rosengrant, and credits are read by Ashley Craft, who has created the podcast official graphics. Music was created by Luke Menniss, spelled m-e-n-n-i-s-s, who you can find and support on Bandcamp, Spotify and Twitch. Find us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter for updates. You can support us on Patreon or Podhero by following the links in our episode description. And special thanks to our patreon supporters Becky Thompson, Perry Bruns, Tristan Fraud, Nico Allen and Devin Wright.

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ladyhistorypod · 3 years

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Episode 19: She Blinded Me with Science

Sources

Jocelyn Bell-Burnell

PhysCon

Star Child – NASA

NPR

Reflections on women in science -- diversity and discomfort Ted Talk (YouTube)

We are made of star stuff Ted Talk (YouTube)

Dame Jocelyn Bell Burnell describes the discovery of pulsars (YouTube)

Concepción Mendizábal Mendoza

People Pill

México Desconocido (Mexico Discovered)

She Builds Podcast

Instituto de Investigaciones (Investigations Institute)

CAPSULA DEDICADA A LA ING. CONCEPCIÓN MENDIZABAL (Capsule dedicated to Concepción Mendizabal, YouTube)

Seattle Times

Further Learning: Nuestras Voces (Our Voices)

Rosalind Franklin

US National Library of Medicine

SDSC

National Geographic

Further Learning: PBS NOVA

Click below for a transcript of this episode!

Archival Audio: “There’s something else. When you and Jack were little and wanted to know what made it rain, what made the telephone work, whom did you ask? Not dad. He was at work. But I didn't learn about science in school. I had to dig out the encyclopedia later to satisfy you. So you see, women need to know as much about science as some men do.” Haley: Lady History made me smarter. So my dad and I were watching Jeopardy, and I can't tell you when this was but Alex Trebek was in it and also I don't think the new season came out but I digress. It's the final question where you have to like write it down and it's like this whole very awkwardly put question about like French history and it was like who did she– like she murdered X, Y, and Z who is this. And my dad’s like Joan of Arc and I was like no, Charlotte Corday. And he said “how did you know” and I was like “honestly dad this is like a ninety five percent like balls to the wall guess, but I'm gonna say Charlotte Corday” and it was Charlotte Corday and I was just sitting there like haha! Because my dad– I think I spoke about this I think it was with like Erin– that my dad, the way we would get like our allowance was through… Alana: Riddles and trivia questions. Haley: Yeah. So he's still on that like this whole– Lexi: You still get allowance? Haley: No no no no. Lexi: Oh. I was like wow, okay. Haley: No. I still– I don't get allowance, I wish. The way that we like we just spend the holidays was either playing Codenames, which is like a fun fun board game, everyone should just play it, and then doing crossword puzzles. New York Times comes out with these like questions from the news… like it's ten– usually ten questions, or for the new year they did like thirty questions. So his thing will be like everyone has to answer the New York Times, and he won't give out the answers until we've all done it just to see like who's the smartest of the week. And I've only got like the smartest of the week once. Alana: Nice. Haley: To be fair, they watch the news everyday and I do not. I use like my like news app to get like notifications and if I go on some sort of site, that's how I get the news. I'm awful, no one like model after me. But Jeopardy came in clutch just because of this podcast. My dad was like “oh so the podcast like is actually like helping education, growth” and I was like… Alana: Yes! Haley: Yaaaas. Thank you. He also said we have a cool logo. Alana: Um, shout out to Alexia Ibarra, you can find her on Twitter and Instagram at LexiBDraws. Lexi: So we've proven that the show's educational. Haley: Yes. Lexi: We now can continue that claim. Haley: Yes. Alana: We knew the show was educational. Lexi: Although, is it only educating us? Haley: I have faith we have listeners. Hi listeners. Alana: Hi listeners. To be fair, we’re kind of the primary… like we can see our reactions to the podcast the most. Lexi: Hey, listeners. Are you there, it's me Margaret. [INTRO MUSIC] Alana: Hello and welcome to Lady History; the good, the bad, and the ugly lady you missed in history class. I'm not sure how she ended up always being first introduced, Lexi. Lexi, what's your favorite science? Lexi: I should probably say like astrophysics or something because I'm currently interning at the Air and Space Museum, but that would be a lie because my favorite science is probably like earth science, environmental science would be my real favorite science. Alana: That means next up is Haley. Haley, what's your least favorite science? Haley: Physics. Hard core physics. Alana: I really wanted you to say astrophysics. Haley: I was about to, but like I will forever say physics just because I have a really hard time with numbers and letters being in the same math groups. Alana: And I'm Alana and as a child I went to science camp for upwards of five years. Haley: Okay, so my question is did y’all ever learn about like the history of science in class? Because I don't remember, especially I was thinking about this for twentieth century like STEM women because that's our theme. And I realized like I conceptually like didn't realize like what happened in the twentieth century, even though I know it's like the nineteen hundreds that's the twentieth century. But realizing that like my history class didn't really go through that. Like I had no concept of like people from the twentieth century doing impacts of science. Lexi: We didn’t learn about it in history class, we learned about in science class. Haley: Yeah, in my science class I can't pull from it I can’t– Alana: I had– I forget who the author is, but I met him at a Politics and Prose event– when I was in my tenth grade chemistry class, we had reading from a book called The Disappearing Spoon, which was like the discovery, the history of the discovery of a bunch of elements which was really cool and so that was like kind of our history of science thing, that was fun. Also Crash Course recently did a history of science. Haley: Yes, that’s why I loved it. Yes. So, Crash Course– Hank and John Green, hello. Alana: Hello. Hank? Lexi: it wouldn’t be an episode without a Green brothers reference. Haley: I truly was trying to like figure out a way that wouldn't bring them up with this question. Alana: I literally was like… you said history of science and I was like Crash Course. Crash Course. Crash Course! Haley: That's how I got into like not just like forensics and like history of like science and history. But they were the ones that made like science fun for me in high school. And then I got hooked on their history, and then it was college where it was like you can study history, medicine, and bones! Congrats, Haley, here it is! But like in my high school curriculum nothing like twentieth century history and or science was like… science was not a thing. We just were still learning basic cells. Like I just remember every year, come January, we were fucking learning what a cell was. And it's like, okay, mitochondria– Lexi: You were talking about biological cells every year in school? Haley: I don't know why, but like at least two years in high school because I was in like the intro to bio and then chemistry even we talked about like cells because it was biochemistry as a unit. And then I took AP bio junior year and then for forensics she brought up cells because of like blood cells and everything. Lexi: I mean, cells are important. Haley: Yeah, cells are important. Alana: Do you remember Punnett squares? Lexi: Yeah, I love Punnett squares. Alana: Those are my favorite. Lexi: Genetic science is actually my favorite science. And it's my mom's favorite science, my mom was actually a biology major. Haley: Low key… Lexi: Because she loved Punnett squares. Haley: I thought like something was wrong with me, like I had a terrible genetic mutation because I could not tell the difference between a capital P. and lowercase P.. Archival Audio: Is astronomy a significantly more inviting field for women today than it was thirty years ago? Jocelyn Bell-Burnell: Yes, I believe it is and I believe it's getting better all the time. We are becoming more conscious of the differences between men and women– the different ways they work, and the contribution of women is becoming more and more recognized. It's still got a bit to go, but it's coming along very nicely. Lexi: On July 15th, 1943, Dame Jocelyn Bell-Burnell was born near Lurgan, Northern Ireland. As a young girl, she encountered astronomy through her father’s extensive book collection. Her family, who knew educating girls was important, encouraged her to explore her interest in the subject. She received support in her studies from the staff of the Armagh Observatory, which was near her home. When Jocelyn was attending preparatory school, only boys were permitted to study science. In a TEDx Talk from 2013, Jocelyn recounted being separated from her male peers and assuming it was for physical education, but it turned out the girls were being sent to the “home economics” class while the boys were being sent to science class. Of course, she went home and told her parents. And her parents, who as I mentioned before, believed girls should be educated just like boys, were angry to hear that the school did not allow girls to participate in science class. So along with the parents of two other girls at the school, Jocelyn’s parents fought for her right to study science. The three girls were moved into the science class, but being the only girls in class was not easy. The teacher kept a close eye on the girls. So it was hard for them to overcome being the only girls in that class. But, Jocelyn received the highest score on her science final at the end of that term. She did it, she passed all the boys, and got the highest score despite being disadvantaged by being one of the only girls and by them trying to keep her out of that class. Jocelyn went on to study at the University of Glasgow, where she earned a degree in Physics. She graduated in 1965, and went on to pursue her doctorate at Cambridge. Jocelyn worked with her advisor Antony Hewish to study the mysteries of space. And she assisted in the construction of a radio telescope, which would be used to track quasars, which are large celestial bodies and there’s like a lot more science that makes them… It’s a deep science thing… deep astrophysics. Again, astrophysics is complicated and too big brain for me. But they’re things in space. And when the telescope was ready to operate, Jocelyn was assigned to operate it and analyze the results it produced. And this was like way before computers as we know them today, so the telescope actually printed its results out on a big chart and then she would look at the chart as it was printing out and analyze it that way. Jocelyn began to notice strange results on the charts produced by the telescope, which were faster than those typical of the quasars. Jocelyn did not know it yet, but she had discovered the first evidence of pulsars, highly magnetized rotating compact stars, which are different than the previously mentioned celestial bodies. At first, Jocelyn and her advisor were suspicious that the signals may have been signs of alien life, so they nicknamed them “little green men” signals. A year later, her findings were published in an academic journal. As scientists around the world began to investigate the signals further, they were able to identify them as coming from the stars that I mentioned. And the term pulsar was applied to this type of signal. The press, upon finding out that the discovery had been made by an attractive, young, female graduate student, pounced on the story, of course. But instead of asking her about her scientific studies and the research she was doing, they pestered her with questions about her appearance like “what’s your waist size” so we love that. In 1968, Jocelyn earned her doctorate. That same year she was married, and unfortunately spent much of her marriage focused on her husband’s career rather than her own, moving place to place as he moved place to place. In 1974, her advisor was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for Jocelyn’s contributions to the discovery of pulsars. Alana is raging in the background. After her marriage ended and her son had grown up and gone off to live on his own, she went back to pursuing her own passions. She went on to teach with the goal of making science welcoming and accessible to all students, regardless of gender, class, or race. She became a professor at the Open University, a non-traditional college that allows students to take courses at their own pace, and she was appointed as the chair of physics. Her appointment made her one of only two female physics professors in the United Kingdom, so she joked that they had doubled the number of physics professors that were women in the country, so that’s a little sad, but you know… at least there’s two. In 1999, Jocelyn was interviewed for NASA’s StarChild program, which I believe is now defunct but it was an educational program in the 90s, and you can hear some great audio clips of her answering interview questions on the StarChild website which I will link in the show notes. And Jocelyn has also given several TED and TEDx talks, one of which is about women in science and what it’s like to be a woman in science. And I used it as a source so that will also be linked in the show notes. You can find that there if you’re interested– in the further learning. And I will leave you with a quote from her 2013 TED talk which I thought really summed up her experience, “Those of us who've been early in a field have often had to… play the male game. And I hate to think what a lifetime of doing that has actually done to me.” She should have won the Nobel Prize but they gave it to the guy who was her advisor instead, even though she actually made all the discoveries. And her accent’s adorable. Alana: Is she still alive? Lexi: Yeah, she’s 77. Alana: I’m not good at math. Lexi: She’ll be 78 this year. Alana: She’s a Cancer you didn’t point that out. Lexi: You’re– that’s your thing. Haley: Concepción Mendizábal Mendoza. I definitely pronounced her middle name incorrectly, I am so sorry. The Z-A with un acento on top of the A always messes me up for some reason. My little lisp comes back. But Concepción is how I’m gonna refer to her. Actually I think it means conception in Spanish, so like that's fun. Here's my little side note read this: my Spanish is declining because my mom is Cuban, therefore my Spanish came from my grandparents so when they died I never had that continuous we talk every single week every… sometimes like every single day, and I'd be speaking Spanish so in those like six years I have not spoken Spanish. I’ve read it and translated it for various projects, however, pronunciation is difficult, apparently. And that also comes in with our gal, coming from Mexico City, a lot of like the publications and references are coming from Mexico, so it took me like ten plus hours because then I was like trying to see what resource was a blog or what resource was like an actual resource and then I found some YouTube and some podcasts. But again, don't stop researching someone even if they come from a different country and you have a hard time like researching. It was still fun. I knew her from like a book of like STEM– she's an engineer, we'll get into it, don't worry. Just sit back and relaxing. It was fun reading in Spanish honestly. My Google translate kept popping up, but some of the Google translates for like the scientific terms were just no Bueno and also with how they like conjugated her name of being conception didn't look great sometimes. But that's Google Translate’s problem. So her being an engineer is rad in itself, but she's Mexico's first female to earn a civil engineering degree, so snaps for that. Ahora abramos nuestro libro de historia! I practiced that five times in the mirror even though I knew how to say all those– Lexi’s cracking up, I just wanted to do a good job. I have a big fear about speaking Spanish even though I'm technically fluent. Alana: It made me smile. I thought it was cute. Haley: So Concepción, with her upbringing, it was written in the stars if you will because she was the daughter of the famous engineer Joaquín de Mendizábal y Tamborrel and growing up she was motivated to study. And like one article described her as like her life being a little sheltered? Honestly I think that… that was just like me translating because it did use the word– literally translated sheltered, but it's noted that like her father was an engineer motivating her as well to study. And again being like the first woman engineer, yeah your life was probably a little sheltered in Mexico City where like no other females were studying the same thing in a sense. And in school– and for orienting ourselves in the timeline– it's 1913 to 1917, and her… she had her like basic education at la Normal para Maestras de la capital which is the normal for teachers in the capital. That's like the crude translation. And then she was enrolled into a higher level math in another school, the Escuela de Altos Estudios– which is the school for higher education essentially– and she was one of four women at that school. And this gets a little dicey because not only did she stand out for like being that sparkly fish in the pond, being one of four women, but she was able to tackle difficult civil engineering courses, finishing them without failure. And moving forward a little bit to 1922, she attended Palacio de Minería which is the Palace of Mines and Mining, which is now a museum actually. So it was first built as a space for the Royal School of Mines and Mining, like the royal court there, and then changed to the school for engineering, mines, and physics. However, it's now a museum. Like I said, it kind of gets dicey around the 1913/1917 when she’s taking classes and now we’re a few years later in the 1921s, where she got into the school in the sense that she… she was there listening to classes; however, not fully enrolled until 1926 because she didn't have the high school certificate yet. But again, she passed with flying colors because obviously. And she passed the engineering exam on February 11, 1930 and quick side note because some of y'all are screaming at me saying that she was not the first woman to get a civil engineering degree in like Mexico. There is contention, because around like 1930ish– before, because 1930ish was when Concepción Mendizábal got her degree, so her being the first at 1930. There's another woman who apparently went to the engineering school before her, but from the end result of my snooping, there was no other registered woman at the school between 1792 and 1909, and then also no other like registered woman to have graduated. At this point, it's Concepción because she graduated, and she was the first woman to graduate. She wrote down a lot through her education and post education, and it’s Memorias Prácticas, which is practical memories. And literally what I'm thinking of practical memories is books and notes. Again with my research it's very much scattered of translating from what I deemed as the best resources coming from Mexico. Please give me more research sources, let me learn more about this gal. So practical memories, I'm guessing are just like her books and notes and they're still in the Palacio de Minería or the Palace of Mines and Mining, again, which is now a museum. So I thought that was like really cool how like her school like recognized that she was just like such a beautiful mind and like so great and talented that they've kept all her stuff. I really want to see it. The Palace of Mines and Mining is not a great website, so I couldn't like go through their collections and actually see it. Maybe one day I'll make it down to Mexico City. And in 1974 she received the Premio Ruth Rivera which is the Ruth Rivera Prize which goes to the best woman in engineering and architecture, which I thought was like really cool because she like continued– she didn’t go after school and like settle down like none of what I read was like her settling down with like a husband and kids, it was all like concretely what she did for engineering. So post her getting the prize and just also she died in 1985, just up to her death she was still working. She wrote a lot. She was the author of like a fifty two volume book– she just knew how to conceptualize or kind of put a lot of hard engineering concepts into writing and into paper which is a really hard thing to do. And the fact that I obviously couldn't see many of them… I tried, maybe I was looking in the wrong places. But I just wanted to see if there was more for like the engineering mind, or if she wrote some things for us as non engineers to read them. Kind of like what Hank Green does. Because that's what interests me. I love when people take what they're like very very good at, especially when it's like a hard science and dwindle it down for people not in that field. Alana: That's what we do. We’re trying to make our knowledge more accessible. At least that's what I feel like we're doing. Lexi: That's what we're trying to do. Alana: That’s why we interrupt each other to be like Hey… Haley: Yeah. Alana: What is that? Lexi: Hey, explain more in depth that thing… Alana: ...that we all kind of understand, but yeah just in case. Alana: So. I'm going to start off my story here with a joke that you might know, you might have seen, that joke is… What did Watson and Crick discover? Haley: Absolutely nothing. Alana: Rosalind Franklin's notes. Haley: Gold. Alana: Thank you. It’s not mine, but I really like that. Lexi: Exquisite. Alana: Thank you. If I do a bad job– just like a heads up if I do a bad job explaining the science part of this, I'm sorry. Lexi doesn't speak Chinese, I don't speak science. That's just how it is. So Rosalind Franklin was born July 25, 1920, a Leo, in London, England to a prominent Jewish family… and I'm having an identity crisis because I think I was born into a prominent Jewish family? Anyway. I should talk to my mom about that. She attended Saint Paul’s School for Girls which focused on women getting degrees other than their M. R. S.. Haley: What’s an MRS? Alana: Oh, I was waiting for a laugh at my joke and Lexi snapped but I didn't get an audible laugh. M R– your MRS degree is Mrs degree… you know… Haley: Oh my God I just got that! Lexi: Wait, I thought you were like playing dumb. You’ve never heard that? Alana: You've never heard MRS degree? Haley: No. Alana: It’s my favorite thing. It's like why women in… Like it was this phenomenon of women in the forties and fifties going to college… Lexi: Yeah. Alana: … to meet their husbands. Lexi: To meet men. Haley: Ring before the spring, I know that one. Lexi: I’ve never heard ring before the spring but I have heard MRS degree. Alana: MRS degree! Haley: So dumb. Alana: I think they make that joke in Grease. Haley: It has the same letters as… Alana: MRS degree. I was waiting for a laugh because I– Lexi: Your Master’s in being married to a man. Alana: The MRS– I love that joke, it’s my favorite joke. I think it's so funny. We can dive into why I think that's so funny in therapy. But I have more pressing issues for therapy. So Rosalind was very good at math and science and also languages. She left St Paul's a year early to go to Newnham College which is part of Cambridge University and was one of only two all women colleges at Cambridge. She graduated in 1941. I'm going to summarize the rest of her academic work so that we can get to the good stuff. She earned her PhD in physical chemistry from Cambridge in 1945 after studying the microstructures of carbon and graphite at the British Coal Utilization Research Association where she had done research during World War II. Instead of going into the kind of war work that other women were doing during the war she was doing war-oriented research on carbon and graphite which was more what she was interested in doing the science-y stuff and not like building weapons which was another important part of women’s work in World War II but we're not talking about women in World War II even though I have a lot of feelings about that. In 1947 she started working at a lab in Paris, the name of which I'm not even gonna try to pronounce where she learned how to analyze carbons with x-ray crystallography which is sometimes called x-ray diffraction analysis. I'm sorry I can't explain more about what that is, it's just what it's called. You use X-rays to– Lexi: If you tried to explain it I wouldn't understand the explanation. Alana: But maybe… Maybe our listeners will understand and can help explain to me what X-ray crystallography slash diffraction is. Let us know. Write in. A friend of hers, Charles Coulson, suggested, “hey what if you did this, but make it larger biological molecules.” So she took over a project at King's College in London from a scientist named John Randall using X-ray diffraction to take pictures of DNA molecules. This is where Rosalind crosses paths with Maurice Wilkins, who is the first villain of our story. He’s not actually a villain, he's just kind of a chauvinist and annoying. I'm just being dramatic, as usual. Maurice Wilkins thought that our dear Rosalind was just a lab assistant when in actual fact she was conducting her own research. One of my sources was like “this is understandable given the university's attitude towards women at the time.” It's not an excuse. That's not an excuse. You suck. Period. Anyway, so. The specific note that Watson and Crick discovered was a photograph called Photo 51. I can't find any copyright free images of it, but if you go to our show notes… which will be at ladyhistorypod dot tumblr dot com… under further learning there's a PBS website where you can learn more about the photo specifically and see it. The point is it's a very clear photograph of a DNA molecule where you can kind of pretty clearly see the double helix structure, which is like a twisted ladder. It really was only a hop, skip, and a jump for people to figure out that, using this photo, the structure of DNA was the double helix which is like a twisted ladder if you don't know. Maurice Wilkins showed this picture to James Watson and Francis Crick who were also doing DNA research without Rosalind's knowledge or permission. Frustration noises! I'm so angry about this. So Watson and Crick beat Rosalind Franklin to the punch publishing their research even though they were really publishing Rosalind's research. It's like if they were doing a 200 piece puzzle and Rosalind had put in 198 of the pieces, but Watson and Crick came in and put down the last two and were like “look we did a puzzle!” I almost knocked my headphones out I was so angry. Oops. Lexi: It's like when my mom makes dinner but then my grandma takes it out of the oven and she tells my dad that she made dinner. Alana: Yeah pretty much. Rosalind left King's College– I wonder why– for Birkbeck College where she did some X-ray diffraction work with the tobacco mosaic virus– which as far as I can tell only infects plants– as well as the polio virus, specifically on their structure. Rosalind Franklin died of ovarian cancer in 1958 at the age of 37. Four years later, Watson and Crick were awarded the Nobel Prize, which Rosalind would not have been eligible for anyway– I guess– because they don't nominate or award posthumously, but still really annoying. Anyway, Rosalind Franklin, she's really cool, she deserved better. I love her very much, my girl. Even though I have no idea– what she… like I know what she did but I don’t understand how. Lexi: You know it's absurdly easy to nominate someone for a Nobel Prize. Alana: It is absurdly easy to nominate someone for a Nobel Prize. And the research was published before she died, so maybe just be like “hey–” Lexi: It's even easier today. I mean I can't speak for back then, but literally there's a form on a website you fill out. So like someone could have done it before she died. Like I said, they did not have the website back then. But it's not easy today… Alana: Yeah. Lexi: There was like… easier then too. Alana: So that's really annoying to me. They couldn't even be like “hey, you know Rosalind Franklin actually took this picture, and that really helped us.” Lexi: Just like what happened with my lady. Alana: Yeah. Lexi: Her supervisor could be like “actually my grad student really did all the grunt work on this,” you know. Alana: It's not like Rosalind was even a grad student though. Like she had a PhD and was doing this research. Lexi: Yeah, it’s just women in science get real… What all women in science, regardless of… the situation. Haley: And this wasn't that long ago. Alana: This wasn’t that long ago! Lexi: We’re talking about the 20th century. Alana: We’re talking about the 20th century, it’s the 21st century. My grandfather was born in 1927 and he's still alive. And Rosalind was born in… Lexi: The woman I talked about is younger than my grandmother, yeah. Alana: They're all still here, there’s still work we gotta do on being more welcoming to people of non male genders just in general. Haley: There’s just work we have to do as human beings just all across the board. Alana: In science fields and ever. Ever where. Lexi: You can find this podcast on Twitter and Instagram at LadyHistoryPod. Our show notes and a transcript of this episode will be on ladyhistorypod dot tumblr dot com. If you like the show, leave us a review, or tell your friends, and if you don't like the show, keep it to yourself. Alana: Our logo is by Alexia Ibarra you can find her on Twitter and Instagram at LexiBDraws. Our theme music is by me, GarageBand, and Amelia Earhart. Lexi is doing the editing. You will not see us, and we will not see you, but you will hear us, next time, on Lady History. Haley: Next week on Lady History; she will be the history. We're talking about some modern gals and their impact on our lives. Really we’ll be fangirling a lot. I'm excited, are you excited? Of course you are. Lexi: It's called “Tomorrow She’ll Be History'' if that inspires anything. Haley: That's what I was gonna do. I was just gonna repeat the title and see what else comes out of my mouth. Lexi: Yes I love when… I love when you like mouth– mouth vom. Word vom. Normal vom is mouth vom. But… mouth vom.

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grandmas-against-old-man-onion · 4 years

Text

shit transcript

note that all censoring here was done by me

trigger warning for:

- genital mention

- r/pe

note that hes pausing like every 2 words i just couldnt be bothered to type that

video starts with this screen.

[screen reads: “SHIT” in big white lettering on black background, “I’M A ‘YOUTUBER’, I ONLY DO THIS BECAUSE I’M A GOOD PERSON AND I CARE!” in much smaller white lettering, “now buy my merch, donate to me & check out my video ads... tee hee hee!]

“Chris Hansen is no worse than Repzion, than Repzilla, than Blaire White, than Edwin's Generation, than any of these people.

Because they all monetised bullshit drama, they ignored a woman named Sarah who said she was raped right after she turned eighteen.”

screen changes to this

[screen reads: “She literally said she was vaginally r/ped by a “black man” she tates he tried to put it in her butt, but it would not fit, so he vaginally r/ped her instead.

No idea why she specified his race.

Instead, the same woman ran a bullshit campaign against myself months after she apologized for r/ping me, saying “I’m sorry for r/ping you guys” - when in fact the context was s/xual extortion, which she literally admitted to committing against me live on camera.

Again, Edwin’s Generation, Blaire White, Repzion, Repzilla, Chris Hansen, none of them care about her being r/ped by a “black man” and none of them care that I was s/xually extorted. The[y] would only care if I was that black man, or if I was the one who admitted to doing something awful like Sarah did.”]

Onision continues talking as the screen changes

“She said she was r/ped by a black man.

They all ignored this.

They all ignored an actual crime to witchhunt myself, Onision, for things that were crimes against me.

I was sexually extorted-”

[the screen changes back to the original, at the top]

“-by Sarah’s own admission, into sex, with her, as an adult.

[the screen changes to a clip from Sarah’s interview with (I believe) Blaire White where she (Sarah) is sitting on her couch with low camera quality]

Sarah: “Uh so basically the NDA or whatever, like he brought it up and I was like, ‘I don’t really wanna do it’ and he was like ‘Oh well yeah, we’re- we’re just having everybody sign one, like that’s it.’ ‘Okay well, haha, uh, well, I want a clause in there that says, like, if I, like, sign, I want something I’m actually signing for’, like, yknow. I basically was like ‘Oh yknow, only if we do stuff will I sign the papers’ huhu.”

screen changes to this

[screen reads, in caps: She literally had to blackmail us to have sex with her for the first time well after she became an adult

She literally just admitted to a crime, yet you dumb motherfuckers somehow concluded I was the bad guy???

For being sexually extorted????

What would you say if the roles were reversed????]

??? I think Sarah, in much better mic quality: “It was a fucking joke!”

the video is quiet for a few seconds

[the screen changes to a clip from Sarah’s interview with ??? where she (Sarah) is sitting on her couch with low camera quality]

Sarah: “Yeah, basically, he was like, ‘yeah you didn’t sign it’, I-I made jokes about not signing it” [note that Sarah is looking down and fidgeting, clearly uncomfortable] “unless I ‘got something out of it, got what I wanted’ du dudu dudu.”

???: “So...”

Sarah: “And he thought I was being serious, like-”

???: “So you wouldn’t- you didn’t force yourself on them- you- I don’t think you could, like let’s be realistic here.”

screen changes to this

[screen reads: A little education on r/pe, r/pe is when you get someone to have s/x with you through FORCE or FEAR (like threatning them).

Sarah earlier said she could “destroy” our lives if she wanted to, we had no idea what she meant at the time but obviously, now we know. After threatening us, she said she would only sign the NDA (that protected both us and her) if we slept with her.

She is willing to blatantly lie to hurt people who later refused to have s/x with me.

Once we said enough is enough, and refused to f/ck her, she violated the NDA and went to Blaire White and the other idiot YouTuber begging to use “Onision” in their video title.]

screen changes to this, no audio since the sarah clip

[screen reads: TO PARAPHRASE

Sarah: I’ll only not destroy your lives if you f/ck me.

Onision (months later): I can’t have s/x with you, I don’t want to even be in your life, I just can’t stand the fact you do cocaine, you deal drugs, you plot to comit federal crimes related to green card abuse, you s/xually extorted us & admitted to r/pe... I’m done Sarah.

Sarah: DEAR INTERNET! ONISION IS A MONSTER!!!

Internet: YUSSSS GURRRRLLLL!!!! (collects AdSense, GoFundMe, Venmo & Merch paycheck immediately)]

screen changes back to original, at the top

"I committed no crime.

And now you blame Chris Hansen for someone not being arrested, for not doing anything wrong.

You guys are basically the worst piles of shit I have ever encountered.

The problem isn’t just Chris Hansen.

It’s Repzion, it’s Repzilla, and every other motherfucker who is pimping out their merch while pretending to care for alleged victims, yet ignoring actual crimes like-”

screen changes to this

[screen reads: “Again, Sarah said ‘black’ not me. Race is irrelevant to the issue but I’m using the only description she gave me.”]

onision continues talking as the screen changes

“-Sarah being r/ped by an alleged black man right after she turned eighteen.

Nobodies talking about that-”

screen changes back to original

“-nobody cares about an actual crime, instead they’d like to go after the person who actually has a searchable name on YouTube.

Why?

Because they wanna sell their fucking merch, they wanna get donations through GoFundMe, they- [scoffs] *Sarah* had a donation through GoFundMe for a new laptop that was four times the value of the one that alleged evidence was on, but nothing ever came of it, ironically.

Let’s actually talk about real crimes, and let’s stop blowing smoke up each other’s asses.”

screen changes to this

[screen reads: YOUTUBE WHITE KNIGHT

DRAMA

We don’t actually give a fuck, but we pretend to because being a fraud pays better!]

“And for the love of fucking God, stop monetizing your shitty drama videos, Repzion.

Stop monetizing your shitty drama videos, Repzilla.

Stop monetizing your shitty drama videos, Edwin’s Generation.

Stop monetizing your shitty drama videos, Blaire White.

Stop monetizing your shitty fraudulent videos, Chris Hansen.

And admit what you are.

You’re all frauds, and you’re all only here for the money.

That’s it.

That’s all you ever were, and the reason I call this video shit-”

screen changes back to original

“-is so I wouldn’t be like you, monetizing fucking bullshit.

Keep cancelling people who did nothing wrong except get s/xually extorted.

I guess- My bad!

I’m sorry for getting s/xually extorted into f/cking an adult, you guys, you’re right, I’m the worst.

Have a nice fucking day you pieces of shit.”

video ends

#onision #anti onision #Antio #antionision #anti o #anti onion boy #rape tw #rape #tw rape

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empressxmachina · 4 years

Link

--Also on Wattpad--

Mouse Trap, pt. 3

“I can see you just fine.”

“Oh… Oh, my god,” Lauren breathed in her own panic and filth, slid down her wall with her back to it, toppled in a puddle of regurgitated food, sweat, fear, and tears.

If she was indeed in one of his spaces as it had appeared, then it was sensible that he could see her whenever he desired. Knowing how or, worse, why, however, was another story that she wasn’t sure that she wanted to read. As exciting as the technology seemed, was she as safe as this overbearing onlooker tried to claim?

With every new action and word, Lauren’s confidence waned.

The enhanced zoom on the screen was then stretched further out, revealing the entire plaza that held Lauren and later, eventually, the whole block in which it was contained. Everything not within a certain radius from the center was smudged into a blur, almost as if he rubbed it all out for himself, giving all that was untouched a tilt-shift feel. Her form, now more antlike than ever, was illuminated in a bolder, verdant glow to differentiate her from everything else, which proved immediately useful.

Mesa Metro was, in her eyes, the miniature megapolis she had only envisioned it was to him up and over yonder.

The snapshot then became a living map of sorts, changing to a silent video with a snail trail in Lauren’s same green hue following her as she exited the area, taking some insectile public transit as far as she could go before walking the rest of the way. The rest of the days between then and now was spent with her glow spiraling in the same place as where she currently was: home, never leaving, never having expected a response.

With as much surveillance as she had for her things and how dystopian Mesa Metro could be at times, she never felt more out in the open than she did now. Luckily for her, there seemed to be no footage of her inside the house. Still, how much had he already learned of her domicile with her glasses and watch just sitting there?

Did his omnipresence include space within walls, too, or various altitudes of places, or other angles than the locked bird’s-eye – more like a midday sun’s eye – view? What were the chances he already figured out her house’s floor plan and her place in it?

“I haven’t gotten to probe your existence from end to end to know for sure, yet,” a new message started, somehow still legible from her further distance away, “but much is already clear.”

“Y-Yet?” Lauren echoed, audibly coughing from her own confusion. Whether he meant that he hadn’t finished or hadn’t started, she could only wonder... and hope he’d reconsider both options.

But she didn’t have to, for long.

“One could say I’m already halfway deep in prodding, managing this conversation and all,” the transcriptions continued. “So, why stop now?”

Lauren’s heart sank, her wishes vanishing like his words every few seconds. ‘Halfway?’ In only some minutes!? She was officially stuck in quicksand with not enough calmness to get herself out. The remaining semblances of peace she could imagine were all in the after, nothing in the now. With that crater from a pen’s cap still fresh in memory, multiple visions of ends of days once again flashed in her head, ranging from elongated and cataclysmic to subtle and swift, all of his doing, surely, and it was all her fault.

“Well… with you not having manipulated your new ‘update’ for some time, now, perhaps you’ve seen enough of it.” Truer words had never been spoken. Lauren had seen enough of a lot. “Though with that research I appear to have interrupted, I would’ve guessed otherwise, believing you’d want as much as you could get.” That statement did nothing to relieve Lauren, either, proving he could go and had gone further into her data – her existence, even – on top of reading her psyche unfortunately well.

How deep would he go? How far could he go?

The dictating carried on. “You’ve fawned over me with your tiny files up to moments ago, and you’ll continue to do so. But in this now, despite all that…”

The ellipsis lingered, and Lauren waited for a judgment to be dealt unto her. Whatever she was to get, she deserved. She couldn’t say the same for Mesa Metro and all past it if it came to it, despite their flaws; she prayed she’d be forgiven when it was all over. That end wouldn’t be today, it seemed, as the foul stench of a new purpose – extreme subjugation or maybe just her upchuck – began to waft over her.

“…I grow tired of this single-handing for what should be a two-way affair, so I shall leave you to satiate.”

Before she could say or think anything else about this whole encounter, the disembodied domineered, shutting down his presentation, sucking every visual and word into a simulation centered on the screen. For uncomfortably long, it left a frozen void in which Lauren could only stare at her drained, draining self as she pushed off the wall and crept toward it.

Just as it started, it was nothing again.

Time went as slowly as her computer was dark, and she hated having to think for herself again. There were too many new variables now, and none of them made any sense.

“What… the fuck… was that?” Lauren interrogated herself, running a hand through her stringy hair, slumping in her chair. “Was… Was that shit real? Any of it?” With the pains in her body and the wetness on her clothes, there surely was no denying something bizarre went down just now. But saying that this was the first time she had ever gone delirious and malnourished in her own home would be a lie.

It was late. Lauren hadn’t gotten proper meals, exercise, sleep, or sunlight for days. The lack of lights on her computer showed that it wasn’t merely on standby or sleep mode but was entirely shut down, probably from inactivity. Her glasses and watch mirrored that, fading to a dim lime on the now dormant network connection. Her phone had died. Her room was a mess. She was a mess.

Her present was a repeated past and a probable future. Nightmares as daydreams were a constant for her. While there was no way of denying the astral projection and municipal annihilation from days ago with her data and the outside news, she couldn’t think of any sane reason why a higher being like that – he – should waste effort on someone – something? – like her. Directly her.

She didn’t deserve the attention. She never did before, so why now?

Lauren could feel the essence of sleep attempt to overtake her, pulling her toward another haggard hibernation at her desk, despite her bed being within reach. On instinct, she began to pull her hoodie’s hood over her head and retract her arms out her sleeves to make a makeshift cushion that’d hopefully bolster her and any nearby gear and tools on her eventual fall out of consciousness.

A crick in her neck was eminent in a couple of hours as her figure faltered down… but the Fates decided to bring it in early with some sun.

Just as her eyes were to close, the computer suddenly awakened, shining its near-blinding light across Lauren’s scleras. She jerked back into action, seeing her lock screen come into focus.

“S-See?” she argued through a yawn. “It was just an update, after all. No need to worry.”

With no intention of continuing research further into the morning, Lauren decided to just play it safe, checking that the update didn’t set any progress back. If it had, she’d have to make a journey into one of her several external drives or servers and make a new surface-level copy. Going from program to program – note-takers, stimulators, other data aggregators – all appeared to be well, softening Lauren’s heart for a quick retiring to bed.

Her last stop was her blueprinting software, where she had a deconstructed view of the materials and layers used to construct her space-warping lenses and its logging watch supplement. So much technology stuffed within such a narrow space. Companies tried to do less with less success, yet here Lauren was, literally going out of the box, out of this world.

It was a marvel to see in action, and it was even more marvelous that it worked. Lauren knew she had prowess – she wouldn’t be freelancing, otherwise – but she was also her harshest critic. The collections of her own comments on her own works badgering how and why she did things in a particular way (and how they somehow managed to work) probably weren’t right for her mental state, but they pushed her to work harder with each new design.

The text and links in her margins and other documents linked externally were worthy of their own analyses and bibliographies. They all followed a just-as-intricate organizational system, too, categorizing thoughts by time, purpose, solution, and the like, along with graphic dividers like color, font, and size. With how frequently Lauren looked at her green sheen and its related script during testing and active use, she vehemently didn’t use them to jab at her own processes.

So, despite her tiredness, it was clear to see the lone flag of that scheme, amidst the waterfall of colorful banners and bubbles, slightly bolder and more massive than the rest.

“What?” Lauren questioned, scratching her scalp with uncertainty. Doing so showed her that she required a shampoo session, finding filth collecting under her nails, but that was an issue for another time. “Did… Did I make this?”

Hovering the mouse cursor over that flag, she found its author listed as not her name or alias but instead “<null>,” leading to several possibilities, all discomforting. A) it was her own comment, and self-referencing was apparently terrible, now, B) an invalid character was put in the wrong place, which could have its own map of reasons, or C) an unauthorized entity had gotten access to the system. Nothing in the background showed any signs of a virus, and nothing in the foreground gave any clue as to which cause was the true one. So, with bated breath, Lauren clicked twice and dove in.

The window hung for a period, a loading circle replacing the pointer and her anxieties with doubts of security again. She knew that doing anything when not at 100 percent or at least sixty percent had such a high probability of something going wrong or something important going missed. But she couldn’t back out now, not with her computer likely to lock up. Luckily, all stayed free and open, and that flag dimmed from being accessed. Though, from the looks of it, there was no reason why its reference should’ve frozen her system as it did.

It was a PDF with just a handful of pages, and two of them were blank.

The bookends were empty, and the inner layers didn’t have much to them, either. In fact, one of the pages was an exact copy of a print that Lauren had already made. Her materials list as diagrams was reposted as the second page. The page after that was similar, except that about half of the items were deleted. But the last page was a puzzle: an almost literal puzzle.

The second page was copied again; however, the missing items that Lauren knew were replaced with a new set in a similar style. They were all recognizable in some way, reasonably findable from a store or online, but a combination that she had never considered. Both as a group by itself and in totality with everything else, the question was how they all fit together.

Its creator, quickly made visible to not be herself, clearly knew what they were doing with the additional subtitle in the footer of the page: ‘to satiate.’ At the realization, a chill ran down Lauren’s spine.

It hadn’t been a dream.

There were no instructions, just visuals, and as the genius she was, Lauren knew what they all were meant to be, stating their purpose with a wheeze,

“An earpiece.” An optimized headset with a mic and speaker from which she felt a disgusting aura of déjà vu.

This was his earpiece: the one that put her in this debacle in the first place.

If her intuitions were right, then the construction wouldn’t be complicated. Maybe time-consuming, sure, based on the glasses and watch being the bases for it, but not hard. They would make things harder if she went through with making them, though. But did she really have a choice?

She was just a circuit in his machine, instructed to make new circuits for new machines for her circuitry in his machine to interact with the said machine and its circuits. It was laid out in front of her, like her monitor’s light across her face, including what would probably be an everlasting truth:

Her death would be heard.

#g/t #my writing #zero to one #giant male #sw #the trilogy is over #yet it'll only get worse from here

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gal-liveblogs · 4 years

Text

RWBY Chapter 12: Jaunedice Part 2

Well hello Professor Too Much Coffee.

Jesus, he really is just zipping already the room and literally drinking coffee. I love watching the students follow him like a tennis match.

Professor Coffee: Now! Have any among you been subjugated of discriminated because of your Faunus heritage?

Wow dude, that’s really insensitive of you. There is only one (openly) Faunus student in this room. You’re standing in front of her right now. You can’t just ask the room when there’s only one person who can answer, and you don’t just ask them in a public setting!

Some nobody near the back raise their hand. Is this a jokester just raising their hand for the lulz, or is this person a Faunus too? Can’t tell since they are a nobody and thus would not get a model that would show off their animal features.

Professor Coffee: Dreadful, simply dreadful! Remember, students, that it is precisely this kind of ignorance that breeds violence! Professor Coffee: I mean, I mean, I mean just look at what happened to White Fang!

I’m sure whatever White Fang is is very interesting, but I’m worried about your health, my good man. Do you perhaps need to lie down? Take a breather? Have some water instead of caffeine?

Oh my god, I’m getting so much second hand embarrassment watching Jaune try and answer a question he was not paying attention to.

Jaune: *Sighs* Pyrrha: I have an idea! *drags Jaune down the hall*

Pyrrha is planning on pushing Jaune off the balcony to end his suffering.

Jaune: Pyrrha, I know i’m going through a hard time right now, but I’m not that depressed.

Oh my god! I didn’t expect that to actually be a joke!

Pyrrah: NO!

OH MY GOD, PYRRHA!

I spy you eavesdropping on their conversation, Cardin.

Jaune: I wasn’t really accepted into Beacon.

Are we getting confirmation on my theory that he’s from an important family that pulled some strings? OH NO IF THAT’S TRUE CARDIN IS GONNA HEAR THAT AND USE IT TO BLACKMAIL JAUNE!

Jaune: I mean I didn’t go to Combat School, I didn’t pass any test, I didn’t earn my spot at this academy! I lied! I got my hands on some fake transcripts and I lied.

Oh. Oh shit. Well... That wasn’t what I expected. Honestly, I’m disappointed in you, Jaune. You didn’t buy your way in, or use any connections, you forged some documents and yeah, lied.

Jaune: I don’t want help, I don’t want to be the damsel in distress, I wanna be the hero!

I mean, yeah, being the one needing rescuing sucks, but when you suck you need all the help you can get. The fact that Pyrrha still wants to help you improve and isn’t made at your underhanded methods is amazing and you should appreciate her.

Jaune: If I can’t do this on my own then what good am I?

Well, clearly Ozpin saw something of worth in you since he made you the leader and all. Maybe lean into that whole teamwork thing instead of trying to lone-wolf your progress?

It’s breaking my heart that every time Pyrrha gets closer to him or reaches out he leans or turns away. Jaune, stop throwing a pity party for yourself and let her help you.

OH COME ON, SERIOUSLY? You climbed out the window and up the side of the building? Why? Do you have that much of a hard on for tormenting others that as soon as you overheard this juicy gossip you just had to get in Jaune’s face about it immediately??

Cardin: Jaune, come on! I’d never rat out a friend like that! Jaune: A... a friend? Cardin: Of course! We’re friends now, Jaune-y boy!

That sure sounds like a precursor to black to me!

Jaune: *choking in the “friendly* headlock* Cardin: And the way I see it as long as you’re there for me when I need you we’ll be friends for a long time.

Aaaaaand there’s the subtle blackmail.

Cardin: That being said, I really don’t have time to do those extra readings Dr. Oobleck gave us today.

“So do my homework for me or I tell everyone.” Yep, that’s about what I expected, and are you serious? Professor Coffee’s name is Dr. Oobleck? Why is he named after a non-Newtonian fluid?

And after that sinister note we get some whacky music that reminds me of Honey I Shrunk the Kids as we get a Dr. Oobleck splash screen. Greeeaaaat.

#gal liveblogs #rwby #rwby liveblog

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lingthusiasm · 5 years

Text

Transcript Episode 26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 26: Why do C and G come in hard and soft versions? Palatalization. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 26 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics! I'm Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: And I'm Lauren Gawne, and today, we're getting enthusiastic about palatalisation. That is to say, “What the heck is going on with G and C?” But first, thanks to everyone for your enthusiastic recommending during our November Recommend-A-Thon.

Gretchen: Yes, thanks so much for all your tweets, and posts, and shares, and all of the new people that you've brought in with you to listen to Lingthusiasm.

Lauren: We will be thanking every one of you who made some kind of public declaration about their love of Lingthusiasm. We'll give you until the end of the month to add yourself to that esteemed group of people, so we can thank you all in our annual anniversary post.

Gretchen: Yes, so you have till the end of November 2018 to be part of this year's Recommend-A-Thon thank you post, which will live in perpetuity on our website. Last year we thanked 100 people. This year, I think we can thank even more. I'm really excited by what we've seen so far.

Lauren: I'm feeling very confident about that. And of course, you can continue to recommend us to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life any time of the year.

Gretchen: I also want to thank everybody who came out to the live shows.

Lauren: Yay! I'm not gonna lie, we're recording this before the live shows.

Gretchen: So we're really hoping people actually come.

Lauren: We are just going to have to assume that they were an absolute rolling success.

Gretchen: We're recording well in advance at the moment to make sure that we have episodes for when Lauren's on leave. We're very excited about those live shows. I assume they were great. Thanks so much to everyone who came out in Melbourne and Sydney. It was so fun to get to see those cities. We also want to remind you that if you're thinking about getting Lingthusiasm merch for any linguists or language enthusiasts in your life, if you want to get someone a scarf with the International Phonetic Alphabet, or tree symbol diagrams on them, or a tie with the IPA on it, or various baby outfits, or T-shirts that say, “Not judging your grammar, just analysing it,” or many other things, now is a great time to place an order so that arrives towards the end of the year.

Lauren: Remember, it's also totally okay to use this as a list of suggestions for other people to buy you, or if you enjoy doing a bit of holiday shopping for yourself, we're not gonna stop you.

Gretchen: We definitely noticed from last year that RedBubble typically runs some sales this time of year, so hopefully, you can take advantage of those to get you and/or your friends and family some great Lingthusiasm swag.

Lauren: Speaking of the holiday season, it's a very important holiday season coming up that's the Northern Hemisphere winter conference season, which I'm usually excited about. Not doing so much travel this year.

Gretchen: Well, the Australian Linguistic Society is also having its annual meeting in Adelaide in December, which I'm going to be at because I'm still in Australia. Our latest Patreon bonus episode is all about the academic conference circuit and how to make it work for you.

Lauren: I had a lot of fun in this episode. This is all of mine and Gretchen's favourite survival tips for navigating academic conferences. If you've never been to one before, or you've only been to a couple, they're lots of fun, and they can be even more fun.

Gretchen: Yes, so you can go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm to check those out, or lingthusiasm.com/merch for the merch. We’ll repeat those links at the end of the episode, so you don't have to write them down now.

[Music]

Gretchen: So, G and C are really weird letters because they're these two letters that, in a whole bunch of languages, often come with multiple sounds. You have the sounds in their names like /dʒ/ and /s/, and then you have other sounds like /g/ and /k/, and then even more sounds. These letters are so weird.

Lauren: I'm not known for being the most reliable when it comes to a spelling bee, and I feel like it's often letters like G and C that trip me up because they have so many different pronunciation disguises that they put on.

Gretchen: They really do. They especially do that in different languages. You can do a brief sample of this through different languages' words for “cheese.”

Lauren: Ooo, let's do a cross-linguistic cheese platter!

Gretchen: Cross-linguistic cheese tour! First, we have the Latin “caseus” (/kaseʊs/) meaning “cheese.” And this gives rise to a whole bunch of other words for “cheese” in different languages. You have English “cheese” (/tʃi:z/), you have German “Käse” (/ke:zə/), you have Spanish “queso” (/keso/).

Lauren: Yeah. Because I was like, “Well, in Italian you have ‘formaggio,’” which is like a completely different historical word. But then I remembered that my favourite Italian pasta from Rome is cacio (/katʃo/) e pepe and that's – the Italian-Latin word for “cheese” is still hidden in that very excellent pasta dish.

Gretchen: And then because I started thinking about this, I was looking up other languages’ word for “cheese,” and I saw the Dutch “kaas” (/kɑːs/), which, I don't speak any Dutch, but there's one Dutch word that I know which is “pindakaas,” and “pindakaas” literally translates as “peanut cheese.”

Lauren: Oh. Oh, hang on. Like peanut butter?

Gretchen: Yeah, so the Dutch word for “peanut butter” is literally translated as “peanut cheese,” which at first seems like, “This is maybe an interesting dish,” but then you're like, “Is ‘peanut butter’ really any better as a term for it?” Because it's still a dairy metaphor.

Lauren: Yeah, because I was like, “That's a weird choice,” but actually, it's not that different.

Gretchen: It's really not that different at all. Especially, if you think of a cream cheese, which is like a creamier cheese, maybe? Peanut butter is kind of creamy sometimes.

Lauren: I'm still gonna eat it no matter what it's called.

Gretchen: Then you have Irish “cáis” (/kɑːʃ/), which is also from Latin “caseus”. “Caseus” is spelled with a C and an S. They're pronounced /k/ and /s/.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: But “cheese” takes that initial /k/ and makes it /tʃ/. “Käse” and “queso” and “cacio” keep that initial /k/ sound at the beginning, but “cacio” changes the /s/ into /tʃ/.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Dutch keeps it the way it was. And then Irish also changes the second one into “cáis” (/kɑːʃ/). Different languages have taken this one word that seemed like it had a fairly straightforward pronunciation and altered it in slightly different ways.

Lauren: I was trying to make a cheese metaphor about things, like, fermenting and going funky with age, but I guess this is why we’re a linguistics podcast and not a food podcast.

Gretchen: “Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a food podcast about linguistics.” And this is all this weird stuff that C gets up to between different languages, historically, and in different languages in the modern era. G does the same type of thing. If you were a kid, you might have learned about hard G and soft G, or hard C and soft C.

Lauren: I really struggle with the idea of hard C and soft C, and hard G and soft G. Just to help other people who might as well, hard G is the /g/ sound and soft G is when it's used more like /ʒ/.

Gretchen: Yes, /ʒ/ or /dʒ/, which is one of the reasons why this terminology is not generally linguist-approved.

Lauren: Yeah, I just – I think about, for example, when I was chatting with Suzy Styles on the work we do about how we have this cross-sensory idea and “hard” and “soft” as a metaphor just don't work for me for those sounds. Apologies if I leave Gretchen to do all of the explaining the difference between them today.

Gretchen: Well, I don't think I'm really going to use the terms either. I'm just gonna mention the specific sound because you see when it happens cross-linguistically, there's a lot more going on than just that. These are two letters that both have that hard-soft thing going on. We don't talk about “hard Q” and “soft Q,” or “hard P” and “soft P.”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So why do these letters come in hard and soft versions, even if you can't remember which version is which? To do this, we need to also go back to the Romans.

Lauren: Yes, there were simpler times back in Old Latin.

Gretchen: The Latin alphabet comes from Greek, as a lot of people know. But this is one of things that always puzzled me as a kid – because I was a kid who was into the Greek alphabet – I was like, “Look, the Greeks have this letter, kappa, which stands for the K sound, and it looks like a K, and it's where we get the modern K. And they have this letter, gamma, which was very clearly supposed to be a G. Who invented the C? Why is it there, and why does it cause me so much trouble?”

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: It turns out that this is explained by the Etruscans, who were people that didn't make a distinction between the /g/ sound and the /k/ sound, like the sound in “gamma” and the sound in “kappa.” They borrowed the Greek alphabet for their language, which we don't know very much about, but we know that they didn't care about the difference between gamma and kappa because they just borrowed one, which was gamma, and they used it for both because it didn't really matter for them. Then, the Romans actually didn't initially borrow their alphabet from the Greeks. They borrowed it from the Etruscans.

Lauren: Because the Etruscans were living on the Italian peninsula, so they just borrowed it from the locals.

Gretchen: Yeah, so they just borrowed it from the locals.

Lauren: I do love an ethically locally sourced alphabet, personally.

Gretchen: Nice, locally sourced alphabet. We have fragments of pottery from the Etruscans, but we don't know a whole lot about their language. We know it wasn't Indo-European because all the Indo-European languages do distinguish between the gamma and the kappa sounds. So the Romans borrow it from the Etruscans, and then they're left with like, “Oh, geez, we actually do want to make this distinction between these two sounds that we have, but the Etruscans don't have.”

Lauren: And so someone invented the letter G.

Gretchen: Like an actual person?

Lauren: Apparently. I mean, I'm quoting from Wikipedia.

Gretchen: Do we know their name?

Lauren: Apparently, his name was Spurius Carvilius Ruga, which definitely doesn't sound like a spurious name at all.

Gretchen: That's a really spurious name. So he invented the letter G?

Lauren: Yeah, so at this point the letter C was the third letter in the alphabet, still, and he was like, “Well, look, we have this /k/ sound.” K wasn't cool anymore as a letter to represent /k/. They were all using the rounded – what we think of as C now. He was like, “We need to make more of a distinction.” And so apparently – there are people who disagree with this, but I like this story about young Spurius – created the letter G and was like, “Now, we can make the distinction again.”

Gretchen: If you look at a capital G, it just looks like a C with an extra stroke added on to it, right?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: A gamma is like a right angle in the top left corner (Γ), and then you can curve it to make a C, and then you can add an extra stroke to make the G.

Lauren: So that's where the Romans got to. And he popped it in the alphabet in the seventh position, which is originally where a little Greek letter known as "zeta" used to live.

Gretchen: So is he responsible for the demotion of zeta as well?

Lauren: Yeah. I mean, well, no, Z also wasn't cool anymore, because the Romans didn't need it, so they never really borrowed it from the Greeks. Because, again, they got all their alphabet from the Etruscans. So the Romans weren't really down with –

Gretchen: Oh, that’s it. Okay.

Lauren: – zeta. They kind of had it there. He's was like, “Well, let's just drop that letter out, and we'll add this cool, new G thing that I invented.”

Gretchen: So he kicked out zeta and replaced it with G?

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: That's great. I love that. Latin actually pronounced – all of their C’s and G’s were /k/ and /g/.

Lauren: Imagine doing a Latin spelling bee. It would be so great. I mean, I guess that’s why they don’t have spelling bees in most languages that have regular orthographies.

Gretchen: Yeah, so easy! You know, you have your classic Latin phrase "veni vidi vici" (/weni widi wiki/) “I came. I saw. I conquered.”

Lauren: I like that you’ve used the original Latin pronunciation there, so you sound a little bit ridiculous.

Gretchen: I'd always pronounced this /vɛni vidi vitʃi/, but then I had a Latin teacher who told me, “No, no, it's actually /weni widi wiki/," and it just sounds so foolish.

Lauren: Yes, every time I hear it. So that "vici" is the C – what we think of as C – being pronounced as /k/, as in the word for “cheese.”

Gretchen: Then, in Late Latin, everything starts to go wrong. And by “wrong,” I mean “great.”

Lauren: For the Empire as well as the language.

Gretchen: Yeah, the Empire was a bit messed up. But also the language started fragmenting and becoming all these different versions. In many of the different areas, people started pronouncing the C and the G in a different way, sometimes.

Lauren: I love the “sometimes” bit. We talk about the environment that sounds are in can make them change, adds a bit of context. And that's really where the fun and the messiness of language can really play out, when you have language changing over time.

Gretchen: Yeah, we need to talk about a particular area of the mouth. This is the roof of your mouth. I'm touching it right now, but you can't see me, because it's inside. This isn’t gonna be a very useful demonstration.

Lauren: If you have clean-enough hands, and you don't mind looking a bit ridiculous in public, you can turn the tip of your finger up to the ceiling and press it into the roof of your mouth or use your tongue.

Gretchen: This is the back part of the roof of your mouth. Not the front bit right behind your teeth, but the back bit by your molars. There's kind of a little lump there. This is known in linguistics as the “palate.” There's a whole bunch of sounds that involve the palate and involve some sort of constriction at the palate, the back part of the roof of your mouth.

Lauren: It's a big chunk of space. You've got that soft bit further towards the back that you might not want to prod if you have a sensitive gag reflex.

Gretchen: Yeah, we don’t advise that.

Lauren: And you have that hard bit closer to the teeth. There's a lot of space to play with there.

Gretchen: Yeah, so there's a lot of space. You can drop your jaw and let a lot of space happen there. What's crucial about the palate is it's a space where you can make both vowels and consonants. You could make an /i/ sound, and your tongue will be towards your palate. You can make a /j/ sound, and your tongue will be towards your palate. You could make a /ʃ/ sound, and your tongue will be towards your palate.

Lauren: I'm just sitting here quietly going “sh, sh, sh” to myself.

Gretchen: I was teaching a roomful of Intro to Linguistics students about the palate, and I was saying, “Okay, we're gonna make a distinction between where S is produced, which is towards the front of the roof of your mouth –" and we don't call that the “palate,” we we use the “palate” just refer to the back part of the roof of your mouth – “and the /ʃ/ sound, which is on the palate or near the palate." I was getting the room to say “sss,” “shh,” “sss,” “shh,” back and forth. Then, I was like, “You guys thought you were enrolled in Intro to Linguistics, but you're actually enrolled in Intro to Parseltongue.”

Lauren: The very “sss-shh”-y sounds of the snake language of Harry Potter, for the three of you out there who aren't familiar. If you don't feel like making these sounds, or you want to see what other people's tongues are doing, as always with these episodes, I'm linking you to one of my favourite websites, which is where they stuck a bunch of phoneticians in an MRI machine, and you can see their tongues doing all these things, if you just click on the column of sounds called Palatals.

Gretchen: That's great. I like that website so much. So the palatals, and the /dʒ/ sound is also towards the palatals. At least it's a lot more similar to the palatals than /k/ and /g/.

Lauren: In contrast, /k/ and /g/ are made a bit further back from the palate, closer towards the back of the mouth.

Gretchen: If you’re just thinking about these palatal sounds, the thing is that because there are both vowels and consonants that can be palatal, and you have a vowel that's produced near the palate, and a consonant near it, the vowel tends to attract the consonant and make it more palatal and make it more similar to each other, because humans like to be efficient about these things.

Lauren: Even if you don't remember any terminology, and you certainly don't have to, the takeaway here is that our mouths are very good at being lazy, and they will strive to do as little moving as possible. It's like, “If I'm already there for the vowel, why am I taking myself all the way to the back of the palate? I'm just gonna hang here.” I'm always happy to celebrate laziness.

Gretchen: These palatal vowels, these vowels that are produced near the palate, tend to pull certain consonants with them. This is what happened to the /k/ and the /g/ sound.

Lauren: And it didn't necessarily happen the same way in all the different languages that descend from Latin.

Gretchen: Right, so in French, which is probably the most familiar to English because we borrowed a lot of words from French – so, sometimes you have /k/ becoming /s/ in English from Latin, sometimes you have it becoming /tʃ/ in English from Latin. You have things like “caseus” becoming “cheese,” but also something like “circus" (/kirkus/) becoming “circus” (/sɝkəs/). All those /k/’s get pulled more towards the roof of the mouth.

Lauren: But only if the vowel is luring them there, right? If the vowel isn't near that palatal bit, if the vowel is already back where the /k/ is, then it just stays there.

Gretchen: Yeah, so that's the thing. In a word like “circus” the /k/ is before an I, which was pronounced /i/, /sirkus/, whereas, the second C is before a U and that one stays /sirkus/, not /sirsus/.

Lauren: I like how I’m like, “/sirkus/ sounds completely normal. /sirsus/ sounds very wrong.”

Gretchen: Yeah, /sirsus/ is just like, “No, that didn't happen.” So, /i/ and /e/, which became I and E in English, are the ones that tend to pull the consonants towards them. Whereas /u/ and /o/ and /a/ are the ones that let the constant stay where they want to be.

Lauren: Which solves a mystery of – I mean, spelling bees are entirely mysterious to me, as I think we've established – but it solves that mystery of spelling bees, because I was always like, “Why would you ask...” – because you can ask in a spelling bee the origin of a word. And so if you ask like, “I have to spell the word 'circus.' Please, spelling bee master, tell me the origin of the word.” If I know it's a Latin word, like, “Well, that means it probably is C-I and not K-I, because originally it was probably /kirkus/”

Gretchen: Yeah, because you don't have K's in Latinate words because all of their C's changed when they were in front of an I or an E.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: This also explains why there's some disagreement about how to pronounce the word “Celtic.”

Lauren: Oh, yeah, there's a really great post by Stan Carey that goes into the history of this, but – I don't know. I have to think really hard if I say /kɛltɪk/ or /sɛltɪk/. But I think I say /kɛltɪk/.

Gretchen: I definitely say /kɛltɪk/, but there's some sports team that's correctly pronounced /sɛltɪk/, because that's what people say when they talk about the sports team?

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: I've definitely heard people say /sɛltɪk/. This is one of those ones where if you're obeying the Latinate rules, you're like, “Well, C-E, that must mean that the C is pronounced like an S.” And yet – because when Irish and Scottish Gaelics borrowed the Latin alphabet, it also hadn't had this sound change happen yet. All the C's were still pronounced like /k/, so all of the C's in Gaelic are hard. And so “Celt” /kɛlt/ is – there's no K in Gaelic. The C's are all pronounced /k/.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: So if you use the Gaelic pronunciation, then it's /kɛlt/, but if you're looking at it, and you're like, “Well, but I thought my rule was the C gets pronounced like S," then it's /sɛlt/.

Lauren: Which brings us to another major scandal in terms of how words are pronounced, which is, of course, the word that I say as /dʒɪbəɹɪʃ/ (gibberish).

Gretchen: And the word that I said on a previous episode as /gɪbəɹɪʃ/ because – I don't know. Why not say it that way?

Lauren: Yeah, I – to be honest – had not paid much attention to your pronunciation, but we had quite a few people draw attention to the fact that we have different pronunciations for this word.

Gretchen: Yeah, and this is the same thing like with /dʒɪf/ and /gɪf/ (GIF) where –

Lauren: Which is definitely not a major argument at all.

Gretchen: No, no one cares about that one on the internet. I've never heard any argument about it. With the G's, when we get a word from French, or from Latin, or from Italian, or sometimes from Spanish – but generally, Spanish, that's its own thing – we tend to pronounce that G as a /dʒ/ or a /ʒ/ like in “rouge.” But when we get it from a different language, we often pronounce it as a /g/ instead.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: So of course, when we get it from an acronym like with GIF, all bets are off, really. There's no statistical bias in either direction.

Lauren: We have been talking exclusively about C and G, but they are not the only letters that cause me grief with spelling, which is fundamentally about palatalisation. There are other sounds in English that are also very attracted to the palate.

Gretchen: Yeah, and these are both /t/ and /d/, T and D, and /s/ and /z/, or S and Z. They're pronounced more towards the front of the palate, but, again, if they're in front of an /i/ or an /e/ sound, they tend to get pulled back towards the palate instead of pulled forward. They all get pulled toward the centre of the mouth.

Lauren: The palate is like the black hole at the centre of the mouth universe.

Gretchen: It's got gravity pulling everything towards it. Yeah, it's a very attractive place. I think it's also kind of a very easy place to say because it's just right there in the middle. So it could be anything. You don't have to go to a lot of effort to make it happen.

Lauren: Yeah, the tongue is just kind of going straight up from its neutral spot. What kind of examples do we see with these letters?

Gretchen: There's some ones that are really old that are embedded into English spelling, words like “station” and “ratio” with that T-I-O-N ending. They were at one point pronounced like /statiʌn/ and /ratio/.

Lauren: Again, would have made spelling tests a lot easier.

Gretchen: Way easier, /ratio/! The Romans said this. But /ratʃio/, /io/ gets shortened into /raʃio/ or /steʃiʌn/ and eventually gets /steʃʌn/ and /reʃio/, and other words like that. Then there's also some that are super new, and they're not even reflected in standard English spelling. They're only in representations of informal speech. That's the words like "didja?"

Lauren: As in, “Didja find out any good facts about palatalisation? Yes, I did.”

Gretchen: Yeah! If you have “did” and “you” – well, “you” can become “ya,” obviously. Then that "ya" sound, the Y at the beginning, it's also palatal, so it can pull the D towards /dɪdʒə/. I went to . a really great restaurant when I was in New York City a couple months ago, which was pointed out to me by someone on Twitter as a linguistically interesting restaurant that I should go to. It is called “Jeet Jet.”

Lauren: “Jeet Jet?”

Gretchen: “Jeet Jet,” spelled J-E-E-T J-E-T.

Lauren: Oh, as in, “Did you eat yet?”

Gretchen: Yeah.

Lauren: “Jeet Jet.”

Gretchen: “Jeet Jet?”

Lauren: That was great. Everything is just lapsing into the palatal centre.

Gretchen: So palatal! It's a palatal palace of food.

Lauren: This is why we're not a food podcast.

Gretchen: Every so often when I used to mark linguistics papers for Intro to Linguistics, you’d get somebody who would write – instead of “palatal,” they'd write “palatial.”

Lauren: Did you draw a little palace?

Gretchen: It sounds like it’s a little palace! But also, why is it not “palatial” because “palatial” is actually the palatised version of “palatal?”

Lauren: It makes sense. We might have to let the language kick on for another couple of centuries to let that process happen.

Gretchen: What's really cool about palatals is that they keep going with the trajectories of the language. In French and Italian, the C's and G's became /dʒ/and /ʒ/ and /ʃ/ and /s/, and that's pretty well-established. In Spanish, they did this other thing. The Spanish C in front of E or I went to /θ/ in Spain, like "cerveza" (/θerbeθa/), and to /s/ in South America like /serbesa/. The J, and G, and also the X – they’re now like a /h/ sound, like in "Xavier” (/havier/). But they stopped for a while at a /ʃ/ sound. For a while, this X in Spanish was pronounced /ʃ/.

Lauren: Hmm, just hung out there for a while?

Gretchen: Yeah, you can see that trajectory happening. It happened at a very specific point in Spanish history, because this point when X was being pronounced /ʃ/ also happened right around when the Spanish conquerors were first coming in contact with Nahuatl speakers in Central America. In Nahuatl, there was a sound /ʃ/, and the Spanish speakers were like, “Well, we have a letter to represent /ʃ/. It's an X. We're going to use the X to represent /ʃ/ like we do in our own language.” They transcribed certain Nahuatl words, like the word “Mexico” – /meʃiko/ – perfectly reasonably.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: But then Spanish kept changing, and not a lot of people spoke Nahuatl, and so /meʃiko/ became /mehiko/, because the X sound was shifted from /ʃ/ to /h/.

Lauren: And so “Mexico,” did the pronunciation of it – just went with it even though it was meant to be /ʃ/?

Gretchen: A representation of the Nahuatl word.

Lauren: Ah, there you go.

Gretchen: Other languages looked at it – like English looked at the spelling of this word and said, “Well, you have an X there. We have an X.”

Lauren: “We pronounce it /ks/."

Gretchen: “Here's how we pronounce the X.” And this is where we get /mɛksɪko/, but it's actually an attempt at representing this Nahuatl sound, but then Spanish changed out from under it.

Lauren: It reminds me of when “Beijing” was updated from the older word, “Peking.” We still have “Peking” in “Peking Duck,” and you have that /k/ there in the “-king.” When it was updated, it becomes “-jing,” because over the centuries since it was originally written down, palatalisation has occurred in Mandarin Chinese.

Gretchen: Oh, that's so good! I just thought the Europeans are really incompetent at transcribing things.

Lauren: I mean, the Europeans were pretty incompetent, and I'm sure that was part of the problem. But you actually have that palatalisation happening in Mandarin as well. It's not just an Indo-European phenomenon.

Gretchen: Oh, so there's just a sound change happening in Mandarin as well at the same time. That's so good.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: There's also a really interesting historical example of other languages doing palatalisation, because once you can spot palatalisation, you can find it everywhere. It's in so many languages. I'd be honestly more surprised to find a language that had never done any sort of palatalisation – that hadn’t done it – than I would be surprised to find it in another language. Bantu languages, which are spoken in a wide swath of Africa, they have a set of prefixes that go at the beginning of certain nouns and verbs to indicate which category the nouns belong to, in a very, very simple explanation of that. One of these prefixes is used before a noun to make it the language related to that noun.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: So you have things like – in the Congo, the language that’s spoken is Kikongo.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: In Rwanda, the language that’s spoken is Kinyarwanda. In Botswana, the language that spoken is Setswana. What's really interesting here is that this prefix, you can tell it's started out as /ki/, but in some languages it's become /tʃi/ or /ʃi/ or /si/ or /se/. You can tell that's because this palatal vowel has brought it more towards the vowel. So you have Kiswahili, but isiZulu or isiXhosa], or Tshivenda. Some of them still have the /ki/, some of them have changed it to /si/ or /tʃi/. You can see this relationship because they all have the same prefix, but it's changed differently because the sound changes have happened differently in the different languages.

Lauren: Exactly the same set of changes as we get with our cheeses of Europe.

Gretchen: The same cheese-changes. I have a very vivid memory about when I first learned about palatalisation. This was when I went to Scottish Gaelic summer camp when I was 10 or 12?

Lauren: The thing is we don't have summer camps in Australia. So I find all summer camps mysterious. I'm like, “Of course, you went on summer camp for Gaelic. Like, that's that weird thing that North Americans do. They go on summer camp.”

Gretchen: It is not very common to go on summer camp for Gaelic. Most of the other kids that were there, were there to learn, like, fiddle, or step dance, or something, which is still fairly rare. Most people go, like, canoeing or something.

Lauren: Okay.

Gretchen: But I was a budding linguist, and I wanted to learn Gaelic. So when I was learning Gaelic, they told me about this distinction between broad vowels and slender vowels. This is super important in Gaelic and in Irish as well, because a whole bunch of consonants in Gaelic change the way they're pronounced depending on which vowels they’re next to.

Lauren: Right.

Gretchen: So you end up with all these silent vowels where the vowel itself is silent, but it's just being used to tell you how to pronounce the consonant that it's next to.

Lauren: This is a bit like when I realised the reason you don't hear, in Spanish or in English – the word “guitar,” you don't hear that U – is because Spanish uses U in the same way there, to indicate that it should be a /g/ and not a /ʒɪtɑɹ/.

Gretchen: Exactly, it means the same U that's in, like, "Guillaume" to indicate that that is a /g/ – or in “guerre,” “guerrilla,” for “war.”

Lauren: Yeah, it was a complete revelation for me when I was like, “I'm not meant to – the U is just there to help me, not to hinder me.”

Gretchen: Yeah, it's to help you according to a completely different system that you only understand incompletely.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: This is the same thing for Gaelic. If you have a word, “fáilte,” which is the word for "welcome," and the last two letters are T-E, the way you know that that T is pronounced like a /tʃ/ is because there's an E next to it. Or if you have names like “Sean,” or “Sinead,” or “Siobhan,” the way that you know that that S is pronounced like a /ʃ/ is because it has an E or an I next to it.

Lauren: Just, like, “Come with me towards the palate.”

Gretchen: This is the kind of thing that they teach you in Gaelic 101. They’re like, “Here's the broad vowels. Here's the slender vowels. Here's why they're so important,” because they tell you how to do this with all your consonants. And yet, afterwards, I was like, “But English also kind of does this. Because if you have a word like “circus,” the way that you know how each of the C's is pronounced is based on the same distinction between what Gaelic traditionally calls “broad” and “slender” vowels, but we can call “palatal” or “non-palatal” vowels. The slender vowels in Gaelic are the same thing as a palatal vowel, or a front vowel to use the proper linguistic term. All of those are the same class of things that all cause the same types of sound changes. The “broad” vowels, or the “non-palatal” vowels, or the “back” vowels are all the same category of stuff that doesn't cause the sound change. And that totally rocked my world when I figured it out the first time.

Lauren: I think the thing is, given my general spelling issues, even though I have trouble with spelling, I really appreciate that palatalisation makes pronouncing things easier. In many ways, it's really great that the writing system we have captures this history of how these sounds were all the way back to Latin, all the way back to our friend Spurius, and they're there to help us.

Gretchen: Yeah, it makes certain connections easier to see. A word like “electric,” “electricity,” the C is still there, and when you add an I on to it with the “-ity” ending, you can see it change pronunciation. You can see the connections between those words more straightforwardly. Whereas, if there was a K at the end, you wouldn't necessarily know that it was one that was going to change its pronunciation if an I was added to it. I think what fascinates me about palatalisation is it's one of the ways in which linguistics lets us peer deeply into the soul of a language, or into history of a language, and into the connections between languages, and lets us think of these things that we think of as messy and anomalous as actually a unified part of our shared anatomy across all of the spoken languages that we have this in common, which is that we all find it easier to pronounce things in a certain area of our mouths the same. That makes us part of this really big human story in what seems to be just annoying ways to spell things.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm, and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple podcasts, iTunes, Google Podcasts, SoundCloud, or wherever else you get your podcasts. We're also now on Spotify, so if you use that, you can find us there. You can follow us at @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. And you can get IPA scarves, IPA ties, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, and my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com. To listen to bonus episodes, ask us your linguistics questions, help keep the show ad-free, go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Recent bonus topics include: hyperforeignisms, multilingual babies, homonyms, and how to have a good time at academic conferences. You could help us pick the next topic by becoming a patron. Can't afford to pledge? That's okay too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life. Especially this month, we're doing our special anniversary round to help the show grow.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne, our audio producer is Claire Gawne, our editorial producers are A.E. Prévost and Sarah Dopierala, and our editorial manager is Emily Gref, Our production assistants are Celine Yoon and Fabianne Anderberg. Our music is by The Triangles. Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

#linguistics #podcast #transcripts #episode 26 #palatal #palatals #palatalisation #phonetics #phonology #pronunciation #spelling #c #g #Latin #English #orthography #writing #history #sound change

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amarantine-amirite · 5 years

Text

November Syndrome

Imagine that you're a freshman. You're away from home for the first time, out from under the thumbs of veganism and expectations for high achievement that were previously foisted upon you. You have no sense of obligation other than avoiding being yelled at by parents and school. No discipline. No idea how to schedule anything. No sense of organization or time management. The only reason you ever got anything done before was because you had been emotionally beaten into submission by your higher-ups.

What happens? You go crazy. End of story. For the first two months, you go to every party and social event on campus, then, come November, you go bonkers over how much work you have to do, but you don't actually do any work. Instead of working, you escape into things like writing fanfiction, playing Fortnite, or something else unrelated to your studies. It's almost like you evolve into a master procrastinator.

Worse, you don’t even notice your lack of discipline until there’s no one saying “no” to every one of your ideas. As a premed, one of the courses I had to take was called "Computer Science for Scientific Applications". It sounded better than it was. It involved having to hand-write code. On top of that, we had to write in pen! It sucked. My handwritten braces looked like sideways boobs. It was just awful. What really sucked was that I write in cursive, so I did my code in cursive. The professor was not pleased when I handed my assignments in. Our assignments were graded based on whether or not they worked. We don't know until we hand anything in if it works. We don't test the code ourselves, he runs it for us. He put our assignments were put through a scanner, and the scans would be put through a piece of software that would convert the text on the image of the page into actual text. The text that it scraped would then be entered into the IDE for the language in question. Usually for freshman computer science, the language was Java, but our steam (recall I was in premed at the time) did Javascript. The only sort of editing that had to be done to the code once it was scanned and in the IDE was typically spacing related/missing character (the software was good but not perfect).

How was your assignment scored? If the code ran, you passed, and if not; you failed. And I failed my assignment (I only did one) because my handwriting always created a ton of problems for the transcription software. It was kind of a weird program. The software had an auto-detect-language-and-translate feature. Sounds cool, but because of my writing, it thought that I was writing in Hindi and it would "auto-translate" my code. Since the translation module for the software was not that good, stuff got mistranslated…a lot. I remember on one of my assignments, I wrote something in the comments and it got garbled into "radish boots". Ever since then, my nickname amongst my friends in CS was Radish Boots. I didn't hand in any more assignments for that class after that.

See, that's how it starts. Something very small, very unexpected like that. That's how you get the idea that your assignments are optional. And that was all it took to turn me into a master procrastinator.

Once I got the idea that assignments were optional, I just really let myself go. Within three weeks, I went from "good student" to "crappy student" to "how the hell did they get into university?" With no actual work weighing me down, I went ahead and participated in every campus social event ever. Paint-your-own flower pot day at the library? I was there! Fitness event? I was there! Halloween party? Take a guess? I kid you not, I was acting like one of those guys in a college movie. Rather than studying, I went to social events. It was great, except for one little thing. Turns out (and I learned this at board game night), people find people who act like they're in college movies really annoying.

Anyway, the incident that happened at board game night was related to something that happened in chemistry. We had one of those semester long group projects where they put you in groups of seven or eight people. One of the people in our group (Anne, I believe it was) was at the event, and she gave me an earful. Not going to lie, she was really mad that I wasn't doing any work. That's bad enough on its own, but she was angrier than I had expected her to be because we lost five people in the group (four of whom died in rapid succession in some bizarro chain reaction):

last Monday, Laura died of obesity related complications

last Tuesday, Alejandro took up jogging to avoid dying like Laura. He got hit by a bus

last Wednesday, Kevin became afraid of the outdoors (thanks to what happened to Alejandro) and sought refuge in playing video games. Come the weekend, he died of a blood clot from playing Starcraft for 62 hours straight

on Sunday, Melissa shunned all technology (because of what happened to Kevin) and went off to rough it in the woods. She died eating poisonous mushrooms

and yesterday, Michiru dropped out because she couldn't handle the pressure of doing the work of the people that died

Now, our group only had two people, and we had to do the work of seven people. Actually, scratch that. Since I wasn't pulling my weight, poor Anne was stuck doing the work of seven people. Understandably, she was fuming with me, and more than a few swear words were uttered. Anne made a point of saying that if I didn't step up in times of crisis, I had no business being a doctor. I would have agreed, but I had my first taste of freedom in my life. There was no one telling me how I had to respond, so I did what people in movies did: I told her to fuck off.

I don't blame Anne for being so ticked with me. After all, she was doing the work of seven people and I was being a coward, hiding behind a mask made out of lies and excuses. No one likes that.

And then, it happened. November rolled around. The amount of stuff that was past due was insane. Seriously! I missed literally every single assignment that wasn't a test (actually, I think I might have missed a couple of tests, too). I made the mistake of buying into the delusion that assignments were optional, and I ended up paying for it.

I needed to get my shit together and do work, but I couldn't. It went beyond lack of discipline. I never built a workflow, and now I couldn't, for it was too late to dig myself out of the hole. And so, instead of doing the work I needed to do, I did a bunch of irrelevant crap. I had run out of time as a procrastinator, but I acted like things were OK. The reality was, they weren't. My situation with school was beyond dire. Worse, I lied to myself about how it wasn't a big deal. Rather than own up to anything, I escaped into a world of playing video games, writing crappy fan fiction, and other bullshit that would in no way help me get on top of school. November called, and I didn't answer. I couldn't. I was stuck where I was.

I know that I sound like I am repeating myself a lot, but I really want to emphasize how I still didn't get my ass in gear even though things had gotten to the point that I really, really had to buckle down and actually do a ton of work to just pass. More specifically, I wanted to emphasize how much stupid fan fiction and creepypasta I read and wrote during that period. I don't know why I gravitated to creepypasta. I think I was trying to hide the fact that I was a coward, afraid to face the consequences of my procrastination. Liking works of fiction involving surreal horror and demented episodes of beloved childhood cartoons somehow must have translated in my mind to not being afraid of anything. Regardless of how the logistics of that excuse supposedly worked, I ended up being a creepypasta addict.

And that bled into my fanfic writing. I know because I tried to write this ridiculous JumpStart fanfic. It was supposed to be a creepypasta/fanfic (like the infamous Cupcakes), but it just came out incredibly stupid. The concept that powered the story was the little animals from the early elementary JumpStart titles (Frankie the dog, Eleanor the elephant, Pierre the polar bear, CJ the frog, etc…) acting like the folks on South Park. For instance, Frankie the Dog was "Kyle", CJ the Frog was "Stan", Eleanor the Elephant was "Cartman" (albeit with a hidden softer side), and I don't remember who was "Kenny" (I think it was Pierre the Polar Bear). Anyway, the actual story was this thing with vampires. The story was that, at some point, Eleanor got bitten by a vampire (and consequently, turned into a vampire). At the same time, Pierre (I think) was in the hospital with some pretty heavy duty muscular dystrophy, and CJ was trying to persuade people to fund stem-cell research in the hopes that they could save Pierre. However; Frankie thought CJ's thing was dumb and said that they could get Eleanor to bite Pierre so he'd turn into a vampire, thereby curing him of his muscular dystrophy. The only problem with that was, well, Pierre would be a vampire. Eleanor ends up being conflicted by the whole thing, and that's the conflict that drives the story.

I remember some time after I posted the first two chapters online wanting to have a twist ending (I'd written about 75% of the story by this time). I didn't know whether I wanted to do "you think it's the future but it's really the past" or "you think it's the past but it's really the future". I guess it didn't matter, because I noticed that I had only two hours left before the submission deadline for my biology term paper. After trying to convince myself that no, I wasn't dreaming this, I wrote the bare minimum of what I needed to write to fit the guidelines for the term paper disclosed on the webpage; then uploaded the results to turnitin.com, fingers crossed that I would at least pass.

Except I didn't. Not only did I not pass the term paper, I didn’t even hand it in. I found out the next day that I had actually uploaded the fourth chapter of my dumb-ass JumpStart fanfiction (and it was a scary chapter too...it was the flashback to when Eleanor gets bitten by the vampire). The prof was not impressed. Let's just leave it at that.

You have no idea how badly I screwed everything up. I managed to get a flat zero in every single course this term. The only exception was CS, where I wound up getting only 2%. Bottom line is that I failed everything. Yes, everything. My only shot at academic redemption is the final exam.

Even still, it might not be enough. As of this writing, I have less than twelve hours before I go in to write the exam. This is bad. I can't sleep even though I'm exhausted. I have to stay up and work. I need to sleep, but I can't. I'm stuck. I've made this bed, and now I'm going to die in it.

No, really. I feel like I'm going to die.

When I first started cramming, I was fine for the first hour and a half. After that, though, I started seeing static in my field of view. The static thing lasted for a couple of hours until it progressed to seeing shadow people. Or, at least I thought they were shadow people. They weren't even remotely humanoid. I was seeing weird, shadowy spider things. They looked like giant tarantulas, all four of them, and they were coming for me. Just before they got me, they vanished.

They were gone. They were 100% all gone. It was like it never happened. No static, no ghost spiders, nothing. Crisis averted. Back to work.

Nope. It's not that simple. The minute I went back to reading the textbook, I could feel my heart race. I tried to highlight stuff and write down key points, but I couldn't, since my right arm is numb. I switch to writing with my other hand, but that doesn't work. I can't write with my other hand too well. Worse, the minute I get the hang of writing with my other hand, I start throwing up like a volcano. After that, it's over. I can't study if I'm throwing up every three minutes. Even if I weren't throwing up the way I am, I wouldn't be able to focus on studying right now. I can barely form coherent sentences, much for your time like to undarastamnd the impotence of teh book biology and chemistry. Chemical biologrehcal flerbut connection ffrhhAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!

AAAAAAAAAA!

@the-writer-s-hideout

#writing #writers #writers on tumblr #creepy #short fiction #drama #short story #original fiction

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possiblyimbiassed · 6 years

Text

Sherlock and the media – ‘the full story’?

I’ve been thinking of writing this meta for a long time, but maybe now is as good a moment as ever? For the umpteenth time in the history of this show, a large part of the audience seems to pay more attention to what’s said in the media about it, than what’s said in the actual show. This show is screaming to us ‘don’t believe everything you hear from the media – it’s fairy tales!’ The show runners have told us repeatedly to not believe everything they say about the show, because they’re ‘lying liars who lie’. And yet… Same thing as always.

So let’s pay attention to the actual show instead. What is it with the media cover of Sherlock and John in this show – what role does it play? An essential role; in fact, I believe it’s one of the most important topics in BBC Sherlock. I’ll go through it episode for episode, so please bear with me.

Ariane De Vere’s transcripts are a veritable gold mine for this kind of research; all the spoken words are transcribed, but also what we see as text in the show, plus descriptions of the scenes. I can’t stress enough how useful this is.

I looked up all the times the words ‘press’, ‘paper’, ‘media’ and ‘journalist’ occurred in the dialogue or the descriptions, and the hits were so many that it almost got a bit worrisome. There are media references in every single episode except TFP – even in MHR - and in some of them media plays a central role.

Observations:

To begin with, John and Sherlock read newspapers a lot. This might give a touch of domesticity to the scenes at 221B, but maybe it could also mean something more deep and symbolic. Media is of course useful for Sherlock’s professional work, and we often see him studying newspaper clips as data collection for the cases. But in general, it’s not exactly a positive picture of the media that this show paints; all the contrary in fact.

Secondly, the whole show begins with a case that alerts the media. Apart from the scenes with John Watson’s solitary bedsit, the first thing we see in ASiP is a supposed suicide followed by the press. It escalates to a bigger police press conference when the number of similar ‘suicides’ grows to three. One of the journalists seems to be a bit sensationalist, since she’s immediately asking about serial killers and the public’s safety. Sherlock appears to have the phone numbers to all the attending journalists, since he repeatedly sends them the same text message, synchronized with Lestrade’s statements: “Wrong!” This indicates, to me, that the media isn’t getting the right picture of the events; thus, it’s not a reliable source.

This is a literal monster-post, so I’ll put most of it below the cut.

The forth victim of ‘suicide’ in ASiP is from the media according to Sherlock, going by the ‘alarming shade of pink’ of her clothing. (And what does he imply by this? Maybe that media people tend to want to draw attention to themselves, when they rather should reflect other people and the events?)

TBB Another media guy is murdered; Brian Lukis, a freelance journalist. This topic sounded promising to me; was this an investigative journalist onto some interesting case-related info? But in the end he turns out to have been a smuggler who was suspected for treason by his own criminal gang and executed. His diary does help Sherlock and John to solve the case though.

TGG Sherlock has collected old newspaper articles from the eighties about Carl Powers, the young swimmer who was killed by a supposed seizure in a pool. This info was wrong, however, as Sherlock could prove in what became his first ‘case’. But no-one listened. In the next case in TGG, media is gossiping about a dead celebrity – Connie Prince - and her family relations, which leads Sherlock on the track of the murderer. John and Sherlock themselves pretend to be from the press when they interview the victim’s brother. The murderer turns out to be the brother’s lover, who is crowded by the press when the police take him away.

ASiB This is where Sherlock and John start being famous; thanks to John describing their cases on his blog they have become an ‘Internet phenomenon’, and even Scotland Yard reads it. The press creates Sherlock’s famous deerstalker style when he grabs a random hat at a theatre crime scene to protect himself from photographers. But the effect is exactly the opposite; now Sherlock and John are suddenly ‘Hat-man and Robin’. The details of a news article (transcribed by someone in Ariane DeVere’s comment section here ) is particularly interesting; this is where media starts to make insinuations about the “confirmed bachelors” at 221B and the “salacious truth about their home life”.

(By the way – this newspaper also claims that John’s blog “has become one of the Internet’s most visited websites”. Yes; it got stuck on 1895 hits in ASiB, but if this newspaper is right (never trust that, though ;) ) the number from T6T – 18 493 – cannot possibly be correct either; the Internet is a vast thing… )

Sherlock doesn’t like his deerstalker image at all, but John publishes it on his blog, claiming some dubious reason for it: “People like the hat”. He thinks the whole hat thing is funny and can’t seem to resist teasing Sherlock about it when the picture shows up in a paper in THoB.

The central case in THoB is about Henry Knight, who believes a gigantic monster hound killed his father 20 years ago, a mythical animal which has eventually become the local tourist attraction of Grimpen village in Dartmoor. Media helps greatly to feed this myth, when TV makes a spooky reportage of it where Henry is interviewed. Sherlock does not approve of this take of the events, however; he stresses that he prefers to do his own editing. (Another little comment on media’s role, on the show’s meta level? Or maybe a hint about his mind palace being active?).

(In this same episode, Sherlock is also suspected of being a journalist when he starts asking questions about the Hound, but he quickly denies this).

TRF This is the point of no return I believe; Sherlock and John start getting literally harassed by the media. In fact the whole episode is a big media circus. Every new case of any public importance that Sherlock solves, the press seems to be present. It annoys Sherlock to receive unwanted gifts of gratitude in public – especially when Scotland Yard (smirkingly) gives him a new deerstalker to fit with his (false) press image. It’s also in this episode that Sherlock finds hidden cameras inside his and John’s flat. We’re never told who put them there, though; it could be Mycroft (who talks about ‘surveillance’ in ASiP), it could be Moriarty (who according to John’s blog breaks into 221B around this time and makes a video of it) or it could be someone from media.

By TRF, the ‘confirmed bachelor’ insinuations are suddenly all over the tabloids, a fact that now seems to worry John to the point of telling Sherlock that they “need to be more careful”.

I find this particularly interesting, because for the first time John is reacting negatively to their fame – which he is personally responsible for, having tried to draw attention to Sherlock’s work with his blog posts for quite some time. And John was never particularly ‘careful’ about the things he wrote about Sherlock. But now the whole thing seems to be descending into the area of homophobia; the papers’ badly hidden speculations about John and Sherlock being a gay couple are done in a sensationalist way, violating their privacy. John doesn’t take this lightly, but actually seems to blame Sherlock for it, who never wanted public attention in the first place (“try to stay out of the news”…) Shouldn’t John have to eat his own words here, having claimed earlier that ‘people want to know about the real you’? Which means they’ll also want to know about the ‘real’ John Watson? John seems to have some negative experience of this, going by how he now describes the media:

I believe this point in the story is crucial; here Sherlock starts to see himself as ‘bad for John’, believing that it’s he, Sherlock, who is drawing unwanted attention to John. If homophobia is personified by Moriarty in this show, this is where it starts to seriously persecute Sherlock, and by proxy John. Maybe this is the real reason why Sherlock faked his death and disappeared from John’s life for two years? John was threatened by media’s homophobia, which made Sherlock believe it was basically his fault, and that he ‘needed to disappear’ so John wouldn’t be associated with him any more, at least until the storm had blown over? Perhaps that’s why Sherlock was looking sad when John couldn’t see him, as Molly suggested? I strongly suspect this is actually the case.

This is also the point in the story where Moriarty appears again, commits crimes to drag Sherlock into his little ‘game’ again and meets him for the first time since the pool scene in TGG. And the media – press and TV - cover it all thoroughly, to the tunes of ‘Sinnerman’ by Nina Simone. It’s all so suggestive that I believe the homophobic implications must be intentional.

There’s also Moriarty’s trial at the Old Bailey and Sherlock put behind bars for contempt, in spite of being summoned there as a mere witness. This is the same court room and very similar procedure as that of famous writer Oscar Wilde in 1895 (same number of hits that John’s blog was stuck on in ASiB, by the way). There’s even a sub-textual pun about it in the press: “Crown Jewel thief is to be tried at the Old Bailey.” The same prison (Pentonville) figures, where Wilde was held in hard labour two years for ‘gross indecency’, which broke down his health and spirit entirely and eventually led to his premature death. But homophobia Moriarty walks free, after having blackmailed the jury.

In another detail beautifully captured by Ariane De Vere, The Guardian writes at the end of their article: “The case is riddled with irony and intrigue but perhaps reflects a deeper malaise that seems to be at the heart of a society.” Is this ‘malaise’ perhaps meant to be homophobia?

(I’m aware many of these things have been pointed out before, by meta writers far more eloquent than me. I just think they deserve to be mentioned again and not be forgotten. Feel free to link to those meta if you have the links at hand).

During Moriarty’s trial, Sherlock meets a particularly nasty tabloid journalist in the men’s rest room: Kitty Riley. Kitty is pretending to be a fan and tries to flirt with him in an over-sexualised way, in order to get some juicy story out of him. Which Sherlock of course immediately sees through. He deduces an ink smudge on her wrist: “Journalist. Unlikely you’d get your hands dirty at the press”. So - what does this tell us about Sherlock’s view of journalists? Not willing to do ‘leg work’? When he refuses to give an interview, Kitty chases after him, starts making insinuations about him and John and offers to help him “set the record straight” for the press. It ends with a furious Sherlock expressing his disgust right into her Dictaphone:

Some time after this, John is summoned to Mycroft’s Diogenes Club to talk about Sherlock. It turns out Kitty Riley has published a defamatory story about him in The Sun - a big tabloid known for its misogyny, homophobia and Thatcherism during the eighties, with some insulting right-wing messages that even its own print workers refused to print. Possibly a hint in Sherlock’s little comment to Kitty about not getting her hands dirty at the press? When John sees the tabloid he asks Mycroft: “You read this stuff?” The article claims that Sherlock is a fraud, supposedly revealed by his ‘close friend’ Richard Brook (Moriarty in disguise).

Interestingly, when the Chief Superintendent of NSY later orders Lestrade to go arrest Sherlock, after Donovan has told him about her (very poorly founded) suspicions regarding Sherlock, he refers to him as “That bloke that’s been in the press” – a direct cause-and-effect scenario regarding media’s influence? Another interesting thing is that Moriarty claims himself (at their later encounter in Kitty’s apartment) to be an actor, a ‘story teller’ – something that he then repeats when he meets Sherlock next time, up at the roof top of Barts hospital: “’Genius detective proved to be a fraud.’ I read it in the paper, so it must be true. I love newspapers. Fairy tales. And pretty Grimm ones, too.”

And consequentially, after Sherlock has jumped, we see Mycroft reading the headlines and straplines of The Sun: “Suicide of fake genius” and “Super-sleuth is dead” and “Fraudulent detective takes his own life”. Indeed; in this show the media is not depicted in anything remotely like a positive light.

MHR In this little interlude in the hiatus between TRF and TEH, we get another noteworthy detail: As Sherlock travels around Eurasia solving crimes in disguise, he manages to get someone called Trepoff sentenced for murder (a reference to ACD canon) in Germany. And the case makes it to the headlines of the British press: CAM Global News writes “Trepoff ‘Guilty’ Sensation!” So this is Charles Augustus Magnussen’s news empire – the media personified. More about that later. And who has the ‘guilty sensation’? Who is feeling guilty? Could it possibly have to do with Sherlock feeling bad for what he did to John?

TEH The episode starts with Anderson trying to make a case for Sherlock still being alive and theorizing about how he made it, while the TV reporters are telling the world that Sherlock has been posthumously freed of all accusations; Moriarty did exist for real (they don’t mention Jim’s supposed suicide though). But the blame is now on the police - never on the media! At the end of the episode, Sherlock seems to have resigned to his media image; now that he has ‘returned from the dead’ and finally meets the press, he puts on his deerstalker and talk to the reporters outside 221B. It’s unclear to me why he actually does this - any suggestions?

TSoT By the time we reach this episode, media attention has turned to other stuff: a series of bank robberies have been committed during the last 1½ years, and according to the papers the police are ‘baffled’. Greg Lestrade thinks that the only way to capture them is ‘in the act’. But when an opportunity eventually comes to him, and they’re waiting for the criminals to fall in their trap, Greg receives an emergency call from Sherlock (or at least that’s what he thinks it is), and has to leave the credits to someone else.

Later in the episode John tells Sherlock about his friend and commanding officer, James Sholto, who lost a battle in Afghanistan and let a group of new soldiers to their death. Sholto is now living isolated because “the press and the families gave him hell”, and consequently he receives death threats. Yet another negative example of media’s influence. And when John and Sherlock later visit the Queen’s Household Guard to speak to private Bainbridge, Major Reed receives John in a rather condescending manner. Reed suspects him of being a journalist, and doesn’t want to let him in. But in spite of this, we are yet again confronted with “I’ve seen you in the papers - hang around with that detective – the one with the silly hat”. No end, apparently, to the negative influence the press has on John’s and Sherlock’s work.

Another case in this episode shows the Mayfly Man, who uses the newspapers’ obituary columns to find empty apartments where he dates certain women for just one night. There’s no sex involved, though; he just does this to get info about Major Sholto, whom he intends to kill. It might be of interest that the criminal in this case is the photographer of John’s wedding. Which could mean, if you want to look at it symbolically, that ‘death in the newspapers’ is connected to taking photos of people, which leads to attempts on their lives.

HLV And here we get to Charles Augustus Magnussen (CAM); a villain whom Sherlock loathes. On John’s and Mary’s wedding in TSoT he sent a card saying: “...Oodles of love and heaps of good wishes from CAM. Wish your family could have seen this.” Which makes ‘Mary’ look worried, as if there is a threat to this.

In HLV we learn that CAM is a petty but very powerful blackmailer who owns a news imperium. Sherlock sees him as a shark with dead eyes and is absolutely disgusted: “I’ve dealt with murderers, psychopaths, terrorists, serial killers. None of them can turn my stomach like Charles Augustus Magnussen”. “He uses his power and wealth to gain information. The more he acquires, the greater his wealth and power. I’m not exaggerating when I say that he knows the critical pressure point on every person of note or influence in the whole of the Western world and probably beyond. He is the Napoleon of blackmail...”

This goes far beyond the evil Charles Augustus Milverton in ACD Canon, and I think this is extremely telling: media is depicted as a villain – by Sherlock as well as by the show itself. It’s not about individual journalists; it’s about the whole concept of persecuting people, finding their pressure points, stalking their private lives and publicly speculating about things like their sexual orientation. It’s a form of blackmail which is mostly legal (in the name of free speech), but which totally has the power to destroy lives. Like Jeff Hope in ASiP, media CAM drives people to suicide whenever they try to resist his blackmail.

Isn’t the fact that CAM personally intrudes into Sherlock’s apartment, uninvited and with armed body guards at his side, quite symbolic as well? They don’t go in with unsecured guns like the CIA agents in ASiB, so why would Sherlock even allow this? Why would he allow them to intimidate Mrs Hudson with their mere appearance (remember what Sherlock did to the CIA guy in ASiB)? Why would he allow CAM to urinate in his fireplace without even a protest? Something is too weird to be true here, but that’s for another meta ;). What I want to point out is the metaphorical similarity between CAM and media’s methods: violating people’s private lives, getting into their homes and doing what he wants with them, because he has a hold on them: anything an individual say can be used against them, to smear their reputation. And there’s no way of stopping him from printing rubbish; “The world is wet to my touch”, indeed.

I believe the symbolism is unmistakable here; media has its grip on the nation as long as people sheepishly lap up whatever ‘warm paste’ they are served; even the authorities are under its thumb. Sherlock believes that he can fool media CAM, by distracting CAM’s attention to something he is prepared of (his drug use). But he learns in HLV that this is delusional, because CAM has his weakest pressure point entirely in his hands: John Watson. And as we perceive in TSoT, CAM clearly has some dirt on ‘Mary’ that can potentially harm John, even if I do think this might be something different from what it seems to be in HLV. Following the logics of TRF, I believe it’s more likely this has something to do with destroying people’s private lives, than with assassins and such.

The interesting thing is that Sherlock doesn’t actually solve this crime; instead he kills CAM in frustration, which temporarily keeps John safe (or at least so Sherlock believes).

But before this, there’s the whole debacle with Sherlock being shot (by ‘Mary’). His fake girlfriend Janine (who is CAM’s PA) comes to visit him at the hospital, but is acting very strangely. Janine has of course all reason to be upset that Sherlock lied to her and used her only to get into her boss’s office. But instead she has taken a supposed revenge on Sherlock by telling the press that he’s some kind of a sex god and have the tabloids print it. Why would this be so detrimental to Sherlock’s reputation, considering the reigning heteronormativity in society? It would rather ‘set the records straight’, as Kitty put it in TRF, so I find this a bit hard to understand as revenge. The weirdest thing of it all, though, is that not a word is printed about the famous detective being shot and almost killed! How is it even possible to keep this secret?? This isn’t really media as we’ve known it from the show; too ‘good’ to be true. I can totally understand that it hurts Sherlock on a personal level to be called straight, though, particularly since he’s in love with John Watson. But that’s not public, is it?

TAB Even in TAB, which partly happens in the Victorian age (where ACD canon took place), media is mentioned repeatedly. The Strand Magazine with the Sherlock Holmes stories (directly from ACD Canon) is sold on a London street, and Watson gets a copy of course. But Holmes doesn’t seem the slightest interested in talking to the news-vendor. In other papers, there are lots of sensational headlines, though, about ‘murder, mystery and mayhem’. The unsolved case of Emilia Ricoletti - the vengeful ‘ghost’ - seems to have particular coverage. Later in the show, Holmes gathers the news clips and tries to solve the Ricoletti case inside 221B, while influenced by drugs. Apparently even here, where the events are confirmed as happening inside Sherlock’s mind, the press is gathered outside his home. And for some reason Mrs Hudson seems to be serving them tea…

T6T The few things I can find in T6T that has to do with media is a) that John (supposedly) says on his blog that “You’ll have seen on the news about how Sherlock recovered the Mona Lisa”and b) that Ajay, ‘Mary’s old AGRA companion whom Sherlock had been fighting with about a Thatcher bust, seems to have a false identity as a journalist; Eshan Mohindra. Strangely, this is the third media person who gets murdered in this show (the first being Jennifer Wilson and the second Brian Lukis).

TLD In this episode, the media is back again as a concept; this time in the form of entourage around Culverton Smith, a philanthropist and TV celebrity who owns a hospital. According to Sherlock, though, Culverton is “the most dangerous and despicable human being”; a monster that “must be ended”. Sherlock is attacking Smith on social media, trying to make him confess to being a serial killer, but he gets caught in Smith’s public shows aimed to gain fame and sell products. There’s the Cereal Killer adverts and then Sherlock’s public chat to the hospitalized kids, together with Smith. But Sherlock seems unable to present any kind of evidence against Smith; at the end of the show we still have no idea who he has killed or where or when. But Sherlock gets his confession while Smith is trying to suffocate him (on his own request!). Hmm.

TFP In the latest episode of BBC Sherlock, media is surprisingly absent; not even 221B being blown up or the capture of Sherlock Holmes’ dangerous, murderous sister seems to have attracted any press attention (and not much of anyone else’s attention either, by the way). I wonder why that might be?

Anyway, this means we’ve now arrived to the end of my little monster-post research - thanks to everyone who has had the patience to read this far! Just for the fun of it, I’ve intentionally tried to write parts of this meta in a speculative way, in some ways resembling media’s methods of asking leading questions, of which there are many examples in the show. But even so, I think there are also plenty of evidence in it that begs the audience to pay attention to the mechanisms of media, and hopefully apply critical thinking to it.

In summary, I think the negative picture of media’s role in BBC Sherlock is blatantly obvious. What this actually means is not entirely clear to me, because in our society I believe media also has a very important positive role of spreading knowledge and important information, providing public insight into things like power abuse, investigating wrongdoings that otherwise never would be exposed, etc. This is not depicted, though. But since I tend to believe that this show is entirely presented from inside Sherlock’s head in one way or another, what we see might actually be Sherlock’s view of media. Which also would be consistent with his personal negative experience of them in TRF.

But in any case, the message I take from all these negative media references, is that we - the audience - should not just lap up whatever is said about this show in real life media. There’s definitely more to it than the ‘face value’.

Tagging some people who might be interested: @ebaeschnbliah @raggedyblue @sarahthecoat @gosherlocked @sagestreet @tjlcisthenewsexy

#media in sherlock

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lattetimes · 6 years

Text

Callout Post: Commandomal/Creepypastajack

hi everyone, sorry that this post i’m making is not fun but this is incredibly serious. a kind person approached me with some information about a user on Deviantart, and this needs to be shared. i’ve been trying to wrap my head around all of this for the past days and i honestly can’t for the life of me.

the person who gave me this information will be left anonymous (since the user is scared of being harassed for showing me this), so i will be sharing this on their behalf. i am copy & pasting the information they sent to me, and will keep the warnings for the links provided in case any of the content may trigger someone. links are bolded, and another post will not have the link (to keep the user who sent me all this anonymous), but there will be a transcript of the chats for everyone if you can’t read the screenshots.

please, be careful around this person.

the person in this callout is a 22-year old. she is NOT a minor (and there is proof in the 3rd link- screenshot below saying she goes to college).

Her disgusting little series: https://creepypastajack.deviantart.com/gallery/?catpath=%2F&edit=0&q=Stainglass (I urge you to read carefully: this is not satire)

Her pettiness after a 16 year old girl she gaslighted (She’s 22) stopped taking crap from her: https://comments.deviantart.com/4/28631558/4454834204

(And just in case you need proof she’s over 20: https://creepypastajack.deviantart.com/art/El-Cadejo-On-Strike-635280479 (it’s in the comments)

Her sympathizing with the Joker (a known abuser) and blaming Harley Quinn: https://creepypastajack.deviantart.com/gallery/?catpath=%2F&edit=0&q=Joker

Her stalker-ish obsession with that one guy from Eddsworld that hasn’t worked on the comic for 9-ish years: https://creepypastajack.deviantart.com/gallery/?catpath=%2F&edit=0&q=Tord

Her bringing religion into a F###ING R.P. EVERY. SINGLE. TIME.:

https://tdweallstarscamp.deviantart.com/art/Holy-Blackmail-666637195 (check comments)

https://total-drama-reboot.deviantart.com/art/Hell-Break-685927537

The journal entries of her throwing a tantrum and quitting the R.P:

https://creepypastajack.deviantart.com/journal/I-Can-t-Do-This-Anymore-687498888 (check the comments here, too)

https://creepypastajack.deviantart.com/journal/Why-I-Called-Everyone-Out-By-Name-687635692

https://creepypastajack.deviantart.com/journal/Don-t-Feel-Like-Myself-691654970

(This one is just her being ridiculous: https://creepypastajack.deviantart.com/journal/Devil-Won-This-Round-706091885)

(Found some Pseudo-incest-y R.P comments in some of these art submissions: https://creepypastajack.deviantart.com/gallery/?catpath=%2F&edit=0&q=Loki)

(All of the gallery examples have fetishing examples, but here’s a more recent R.P: https://comments.deviantart.com/1/733320123/4560036205)

(Also, all of her non-white characters (so, like, 4?) are stereotypes)

(I am so sorry you have to see this. If you want, you can post it. I’m still afraid she’ll send her hounds after me. I had to deal with a lot of her bullshit last year.)

attached are more screenshots, with the person giving me the link being left anonymous in order for them to avoid dealing with any sort of backlash.

anonymous: I'm sorry if it sounded negative. But it's been a decade. Most likely, He's moved on from Eddsworld, I mean, he is almost 30.

creepypastajack: This isn’t about Eddsworld, this is about getting Tord to return to doing his artwork again because those were his dreams before the bullies ruined everything for him

anonymous: Yeah, but look at the facts. It was 10 years ago. If anything, he's moved on. Heck, he could be making art again under a different name.

creepypastajack: If a bully causes you to give up on your dreams, that wound doesn’t just heal easily under a different name. Tord had full intentions of having his own series after he left Eddsworld but the bullies just wouldn’t quit and caused him to delete his Youtube as well. I’m just trying to encourage him to come back so all of his supporters can help heal the wounds not just because The Lord is leading me to but because I also care about his wellbeing. Have some compassion, why don’t you? He is a real person, not just some cartoon character that left early in the show.

anonymous: Actually, it does. People do it all the time. You never know. Plus, Ridgewell literally had to tell people to stop bothering him. Larsson's not upset, he's annoyed because both the haters and fans won't leave him alone.

creepypastajack: Well, if by any means you find an account somewhere with art that resembles Tord’s, let me know. Niether Tom, Edd, Matt or even Tord himself said that the fans who loved him had anything to do with this, they just said that Tord was being harassed without giving much detail. Thanks to The Lord, I was able to find proof that Tord was cyber bullied into leaving, photographic evidence as well as evidence that Tord leaving because of us was a lie fabricated by the same bullies to make him seem shallow. They are of the enemy and they sought to kill, steal and destroy. They wanted to destroy Tord’s reputation as well as his dreams. He is upset, I know he is because The Lord told me and I’m going to obey him and do everything I can to help him. Now it’s your turn for persecution...Why are you trying to push the Tord left because of the fans lie when photographic evidence of the bullying has been presented and just what are doing to help anyone on planet Earth? Why persecute the person who is trying to do something to help someone who was hurt? Are you in on it? Are you one of the bullies? Because after the way you acted on Total Drama Reboot, I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a hand in what happened to Tord...

anonymous: You know art styles can change, right? It literally came out of Ridgewell's mouth that it was all of the fans who were bothering Larsson. I didn't even know what eddsworld was until you started making art? I just looked into it. And those comments are not even cyberbullying, that's a bunch of stupid trolls that can't tell the difference between the character and the real thing. ...What did I do to you? I'm honestly confused.

creepypastajack: He said people and I quote “people” were harassing him, he never once said the fans were harassing him. Trolls are cybeybullies! If you are saying something rude to someone then you are indeed cyber bullying, especially if you’re saying something about someone behind their backs but of course you would be on their side, you came to T-Mack’s defense too after what she said about me. I’m not even surprised by you at this point...Whether they could tell the difference between real or fiction does not excuse their actions...They still hurt Tord’s feelings and they still made him give up on everything. You know exactly what you did to me, as I previously stated. You sided with a person who said terrible things about me where they thought I wouldn’t be able to see it and you kept attacking my characters when both me and my characters were in the right. I told you I forgave you for that and you completely ignored me then when you finally do say something to me, you’re actively trying to tear down something that I’m trying to do for good but this isn’t about me, you or even T-Mack this is about Tord and God’s will. Now, you can redeem yourself, change your ways, join the group and help us either support Tord or find more information about the bullying or you can just keep being the way you are while I continue to help out.

anonymous: I... I was just asking a question...I thought we were just having fun in TDR! It was like, the first time I've ever done something with people on the Internet! And that's what everyone was doing! Pixanne, Candy, Manda, T-Mack and DLZ accepted me with open arms, and I wanted to be your friend, too...

And then everything just went so crazy! Why did you turn Bunny into that?! You could've tried to talk it out with T-Mack (He wanted to talk it out), but all you did was start to bully everyone! And it was only the second episode! What did T-Mack say that made you flip the script and start drama?! Please, I just want to know!

creepypastajack: The fact that you think I’m the bully really shows how you think. I cannot associate with someone I can’t trust and T-Mack has proven to me that I can’t trust her. The first person who ever cyber bullied me started to get on Pixane for being friends with me and when T-Mack asked why I was a problem the person said my art was offensive then T-Mack agreed that I was problematic then when a few, more bullies started to complain about Thorn because their precious, snowflake brains can’t handle gospel, T-Mack agreed with them all and even linked them to some of my art and journal entries so they could harass me even more and you know what the worst part is? You, Candy and Pixane were all supposed to be my friends and you all sided with that two-faced fraud! Did any of your characters even think to ask Bunny what was wrong? Nope! She got the same cold, cruel treatment as me. Well, now both Vivian and Bunny are dead because of all of you so I hope you’re satisfied. You may have made me give up on T.D.R. momentarily but I will not let you keep Tord in this dark corner he’s currently trapped in. Once again, this isn’t about what happened in T.D.R. Tord getting his art back is more important to me than any of this petty drama.

anonymous: Ok. First off, T-Mack is a guy. Second, Pixane tried to talk to you, but you never explained what had happened to her. Third, I ASKED what was wrong through Waylon, and got ignored. I thought this was just a drama-filled R.P, but I'm a worrywart, so I asked just I case. You brought Bunny and Vivian's demise in order to get back at Candy. Don't blame other people for that. I...I'm just gonna go. Ok? No bad blood anymore. Please.

creepypastajack: I did explain to her and Candy both but they still sided with T-Mack over me. I wouldn’t have had to do that had she not done what she did. Fine, just no more tearing down anti-bullying groups at least, okay? I just wish you would apologize for what happened...

anonymous: was just asking a question... I'm a curious person. Goodbye.

creepypastajack: It sounded rude and you kept saying the same thing over and over after I had already answered you... It made me feel attacked...

anonymous: Sorry for sounding rude. Peace out.

creepypastajack: It’s okay.

#long post #callout post #incest mention

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