#well TOO BAD you get what you get. this is what my monkey brain dictated i draw at....2:30 in the morning yesterday

[deranged-ink]

Dear editor in chief.

Yesterday I was reading a magazine -your magazine- while waiting for my coffee. I´ll admit that I was so into it that, to my embarrassment, I failed to notice the girl approaching until she left the coffee with some croissants on my table. That would be a big mistake if I were reading on the company time.

I was too involved in a single line of your last editorial:

What is your hobby? A simple and dull question, but not to my eyes. I can't help but wonder about what kind of person is asking. Is it someone intelligent? Someone with a really deep understanding of the human nature or just the typical dumb brick monkey behind a typewriter. I can assure you that one honest to god smile cameforth to your inquiry, simply because it is one of those easy-to-answer questions using a triviality, difficult to answer with The Truth.

I suppose that if you force me to answer with nothing but said Truth I would have to admit, with the proper amount of blush on my cheeks, that I like to look at the people, please take note that i am not a stalker, it's just that in order to be good at my job I have to describe myself as a rather avid observer.

I like to look at people, especially on my job. You have to understand, sitting on an uncomfortable chair for countless hours, drinking cheap coffe and killing cigars in some dirty ashtray, just waiting for the phone to ring to do my job... I would have turned crazy long, long ago if I wouldn't found a way to kill some time.

But from my hobby something really good came up.

I learned, no. I found something fascinating while observing these biological machines. Well first, I´ll confess, everything started with a game: Guess what it will do now?

From that game I discovered that all this elaborated, commercialized and consumed idea of freedom is -for most of these poor bastards- fundamentally, a lie . A lie that may or may not be true, that's the beauty of the whole subject. A liar's truth.

Before you burn your brains trying to imagine something like that, let me add something, whatever you imagine, it will be right.

If you think about it, it's a beautiful "oxymoron". Freedom is a useful farse (A dream for the most) where you must be aware of what you do and stop doing. You must fully understand each of your actions from its very root. Thats the really hard part.

Do not get me wrong, I have always said that true freedom is real, a primordial part of what reality is. The problem lies in the excuses that the lower minds uses to escape from the weight of freedom.

They fall for the supposed "unmeasurable plots" of some great powers and some others imaginary enemies (that for some not-even-god-knows reason will try to brainwash or enslave them).

They gave these plotters this divine attribute of being untouchable. And closing their eyes, they turned themselves into beings without a real opinion, without control over their lives. That's nothing short of stupidity. Themselves wrote the fairytale that they now fear, and did it in order of escaping the responsibility of knowing/taking control of their lives.

Themselves choose their imaginary chains and in the same thought, choose the more imaginary saviour that will come to brake them! Just look at those pocket warriors of the social networks, reading only what supports their ideals and burning the rest!

-Oh, traditional book burning! The irony!-

Thats how they define themselves acording their position on said system: left, right, pro-life, pro-choice, feminist, traditional, pro-system, anti-system, pious, atheist.

But what they call "the system" is just a playing field. Not some godwritten rules that will never change.

And there they meet failure without being able to realize that they act as the said system expects them to act. All the pieces on the board have a use. Even when trying to escape, when trying to think and act outside of the box, they only succeed -in a beautiful way if you ask me- to prove that they are wrong.

They do not realize that the system is not a box, but actually a box of many, each box is full of boxes and the fact that you can "get out" of the box only confirms this.

You can -with ease- point out all the poor bastards who buy a t-shirt with the face of Che Guevara (or someother communist symbol). Ironically, they are being part of a capitalist market with them as their target. The same can be said of those really patriotic friends, they really love America and they also really love their flag to be made in china. Sweet irony.

This is the same for freedom. To be free, you must be aware of what you are, truly aware, also accept what you can and can not do and that each of your actions has an effect on the great cosmic pool that is this life, each action is a small or a large stone that falls on water. You will imagine that with so many rocks that big pool is not calm at all. And thats life my friend, actions that modify our actions in one way or another. The real freedom lies in understanding this, accepting it and continuing to live.

Playing "Guess what it will do now?" I had an eureka moment some years ago. From an open window I was looking at the people on the street with my telescope, when I learned something that saddens me: "People" sold their freedom for a manual.

Life is not easy and that´s why most decide to live thinking it is. I honestly ignore the reason behind such a stupid decision. "People" gave away their freedom in exchange of beliefs, just to not question. Just to take the world as it was presented, without thinking, without asking. Only assimilating it and calling it true.

Name your manual however you want... Luck, Destiny, God, the almighty Horoscope, Reptilians or Super corporations that plan to dominate the world. It is in their hands that our world and our lives rest and not on us.

I bet that sounds better than the truth.

Everyone is free to believe in whatever they want, even when those beliefs take away their freedom.

Especially when they take away their freedom

The "manual" depends on many things, such as their upbringing, the books they had read, the books they didn't, their general education, but above all these things, of something greater, something with more force than those preconceived ideas of a man's life being the direct and ultimate result of those first twenty years of his life.

-Those who affirm that are the "intellectuals" who seek to justify mediocrity by blaming society.-

I discovered a truth, a sad truth, that goes beyond. Are you ready?  Our life depends on ourselves

-Surprising, right?-.

It depends on our decisions, our actions and how much we want to be ourselves. How much do we want to be free.

For the rest the world you have that manual that handles their lives or that simply points to the people or entities that will do it. Manuals that dictate the routine of each of them, from how, when and where they go to work, to what they stop to eat and why. What they believe in, how they think, how they feel.

So many "children" blame the manual and I can only feel sorry for them.

I can only look at them straight in the eye and say: Do not blame the manual, blame yourselves for accepting it. Blame your weakness for letting yourself be destroyed to that point.

To the point of acting... In automatic, each and every one of "them" lives like this, in automatic.

I say "them" because I do not know if "you", whoever reads these words, also do it. And no, do not let the fact that you are a reader of newspapers, books and intellectual publications make you think that you are beyond this fundamental flaw of the human being. Maybe you are also, a zombie, a computer that acts according to a list of things to do. That is why I refer to them as "It" or "them", maybe you are, or not, so I consider that these words can be one of two uses for you;

1: A call to wake up.

2: A lesson in what you should never do to yourself.

"They" are predictable, "they" are stupid. A person is a completely different topic, the problem is that there aren't many individuals left, individuals are now an endangered specie. But there are many "people". There were many individuals who decided to stop being individuals to become people.

Good people. Bad people. That doesn't matter. Cuz people is predictable. And it's something that in my line of work I've learned to do, it's a fundamental part of it.

For example; Look at this guy, for the last six days I've seen he it come and go, always in the same old beige suit and dull shoes, with its eyes on the ground, dragging its feet every morning. That's when I guess it goes to work. But not so surprisingly, it walks with the same vigor when it goes back in the afternoon. Two days ago was the day of "bring your son to work" but it didn't bring anyone. I got curious so during one impromptu walk to the donut shop I passed by it and could not help noticing that it doesn't have a single ring in its hand, nor a scar, much less any characteristic feature or mark added by life experiences. It was programmed that way, throughout his life it decided to accept what the rest thought of it, from its parents to its classmates, it let each and every one of their opinions form what it is today, unfortunately those opinions were everything but positive.

If forced to guess I would said that when It was a He, was one of those people with an artistic mind, a characteristic completely undervalued by his parents, repudiated by his peers and misinterpreted by his teachers who were unable to see beyond their own mediocrity.

If I have to bet: I would say that he did not grow up in the city, he was born and raised in a dying small town, one of those that somehow still linger in the 21th century. His parents decided that the life of an artist was not for him, that he deserved better, that he had to be someone "normal". He decided to listen to them. And being a person of unique thinking is not difficult to guess that he ended up in an office job that hates, earning a pittance to make his boss buy a new car every year. Thats how He became It.

But it's not the boss's fault, it's just that It is not good at what It does, it's almost like wanting to screw a chair using a rock. The wrong tool for the task. That is why this could be the best thing that ever happened to It, it may be the wake up call that leads It to recover its life. To become a He.

We can also see the perfect opposite; with a badly rolled joint in the mouth, practically finishing learning to smoke without coughing or looking like a complete idiot: A skinny boy in a leather jacket that barely fits him, too tight jeans, expensive but too big shoes, hair full of hairspray and tinted in three shades of pink that I do not have the slightest intention or desire to learn how to differentiate.

I always see him in the same place, the alley that is right beside the donuts shop, pretending to be the most badass punk of the block for hours. Actually, that doesn't seem to be the place he choose to spend every morning, I think that it's the place that was chosen for him.

He is never alone, always accompanied by others who dress just like him, the same spiky hair but of different colors. They skip school to spend their mornings laughing at the people passing by, provoking them, intimidating them, smoking, but until now they have never said anything to the police.

- Every time a cop walked in front of them they just kept quiet hiding their eyes in their expensive last generation smartphones. They even treat the "autority" with the utmost respect! It's funny but sad.-

This is fashion. Just a trend, fighting against the system, to rebel against their parents, against society, to paint walls with messages of anarchy and rebellion. With no actual desire to do so.

Just playing to be free without accepting consequences or duties, to be free to do what you want while keep on sucking from the old tits of your mother, a whole case for Freud to write two more books. Want me to guess? He never felt hungry. He must come from a boring and average middle-high class family. His parents gave him everything he ever wanted, but never a proper slap, must be the only child or at least the youngest of the siblings. And the only reason he plays the whole punk behavior is that he is bored

That's why he came up with this whole idea of rebelling against the system or rather, copied it, like his friends, without noticing the most comical aspect of all this, wanting to be different they all became the same. Acting the same, acting from a manual.

I bet that He will run, shout, beg to the police as soon as he sees the red rush. If he is smart, he will realize that he is wrong, that the system is not the enemy, is not the monster that makes this world the shit hole it is. The actual monster is the man with the rifle.

#writers #writing #prose #books & libraries #literature #ficcion

[eveninglottie]

write what you want regardless of the genders. it's better to spit the story out and then go back and revise then get hung up on whether or not every interaction or plot point could be part of an 800 word call-out tweet-longer that briefly trends on fanfic twitter. everyone comes at fiction from their own distinct background. you could write the most 'pure' romance ever, regardless of the genders, and it could still inadvertently trigger someone or raise concerns. comfort can be misleading.

so I don’t want you to think I’m disagreeing with you here, because you’re right. people spend way too much time thinking out the possible doomsday scenarios of what they might do instead of just doing it to see what happens. I am one of those people, for sure, it’s stopped me from doing pretty much everything I’ve ever wanted to do my whole life, so we’re on the same page here with both the concept of not worrying about what other people will think and also how no one holds the magic gatekeeping key which dictates what is problematic or not. every person is different and some things will upset people in a way that doesn’t upset you. that’s just a given. 

but I think that’s not really helpful when you’re trying to figure out your own motivations for doing something. 

like, yes, is a lot of this affected by how I think other people will react to things I create? of course. everything i do will be affected by how I think other people will react. that’s just how my brain works, and it’s my job to keep growing more confident in myself to counteract that (because the older you get you really do give less of a fuck and boy it’s so nice!!) what I was trying to bring up in that post was my own reasons for feeling more comfortable writing one thing than another. 

because I just think it’s fascinating and complicated and I’ve mentioned more than once to friends that it really just surprised me how freeing writing m/m has been vs m/f. it’s like my descent into sk was this moment of enlightenment when I realized “hey this is a hell of a lot easier to talk about when there are two boys involved!” like I realize that the majority of my writing the past two years has been on my own, and even though I can tell you’ve I’ve written well over 500k words and only posted maybe a fifth of that I can’t prove what I’m about to say so you’re just going to have to take my word for it, BUT I’ve included so much more discussion about sexuality and how characters express it and grow with it and figure out for themselves what they are. like it was never a thing I thought about a lot when I was writing my m/f fics (even tho all the women were still bi but that’s a whole other barrel of monkeys). it was never me sitting down and interrogating my choice for writing that pairing the way I did. I just did it. (I didn’t stop to consider the gender is what I mean, I thought about literally all the other things but gender and sexuality were not included in that) but now there’s a whole other sphere of characterization that I keep finding myself drawn to, and even without realizing it, it becomes a big part of how I write certain characters. (like deciding to write keith as demi while still being sexually and physically attracted to shiro has been really eye opening for me as someone on the asexual spectrum.)

because like, for example, I wrote a fem!bilbo fic, right? so clearly I was thinking about gender a bit, but most of that had to do with me having always reimagined that story (and lotr) with female protagonists. that’s what I did with a lot of childhood faves, actually, eragon, harry potter being two of the most prominent, and thinking about fem!bilbo and how that would change the story especially if she was in a relationship with thorin and the shire was maybe a bit more stifling for a woman, etc. - BUT that was one of those pairings that I’d never been drawn to when it was m/m. I couldn’t really get into it, and I was not a fan of the hobbit movies at all, honestly, and I tried, and it was only when I switched things around did that fic click for me, but I wonder a lot if I were to have come to hobbit fic later, after I’d gotten over my aversion to m/m (not in general, just me writing it, because reasons), would I have written it with bilbo as a boy? would I have been less likely to imagine bilbo as a woman? or was it a number of factors that led me to write that fic which really couldn’t have existed in any other incarnation, and would it have been a different fic entirely?

(the hp thing in particular is SO WEIRD to think about now because a lot of what I’ve been grappling with in my drarry fic is very male-centric? not like in a bad way, just thinking about the rivalry and bonds between boys and how boys look up to their male mentors and authority figures in very different ways than they do their female counterparts and also what does being interested in other boys do to one’s internalized and very misogynistic/homophobic ideas of Legacy and Family and Proper Gender Expression specifically when it comes to sex with other men like it’s Very Gendered in my head and it’s hard to separate that from what I used to be interested in which has expressed itself in other ways, specifically roslyn as chosen one in ascendant which I’ve said before was the result of a decade of rewriting those boy heroes as girls because I felt so connected to them and wanted girls to be every bit as important as boys, like I could draw a straight line from me writing bits and bobs of girl!harry as a fourteen year old and me writing roslyn in ascendant and wow I kind of want to punch myself in the face for how long I’ve rambled on about my own stuff but you know what no this is my tumblr and I get to obsessively and exhaustively talk about my own fictional worlds if I want to)

so it’s been a bit of a mindfuck trying to reconcile this shift in my own interests with the fact that I am a woman who identifies as largely asexual. and I think it’s important to sit down with yourself every once in a while and really look at the things you produce and do some self-examination. because I do wonder a lot if my comfort writing m/m now is because of this lack of pressure I normally feel when writing female characters or if it’s because I don’t have to interact with Me As Author so much when I write about boys because I am not a boy or if it’s because I feel a lot more comfortable identifying as queer when for the majority of my life I’d forced myself to be straight even though it didn’t feel right. 

then there’s the whole conversation about women writing m/m and how a lot of queer men feel they’re being fetishized or that their stories are being appropriated by women, in the same way that white people writing stories about people of color can be appropriative, men writing about women, straights writing about lgbtq+, cis people writing about trans or genderqueer people, et cetera with literally any minority being written by someone not from that minority, right? 

and I think it’s a bit reductive to say that it doesn’t matter. because it does matter. you’re right in saying that it matters to someone and I think the job of anyone who creates any kind of content is to think about that and be mindful that you don’t create in a vacuum. your art has power even if you don’t think it does, if you don’t want it to, and that’s something no one should take for granted.

now, I am not saying that certain people do not have the right to write certain stories. no one has the right to write anything, just as no one is forbidden from writing anything. and no one writing anything should be harassed for writing something that people perceive is out of their wheelhouse (because a lot of marginalizations are not visible! abuse, disability, sexual orientation, gender identity, whether you’re neurotypical or not! and there’s no requirement that you make public your trauma/identity to provide cred! in fact it’s kind of horrific that anyone thinks this!) it’s a complicated dynamic but the more we talk about these things the easier it is when a marginalized person says, “hey this thing you wrote is kind of bad,” the writer can go “oh man I’m sorry, let me think about it and see what I did wrong so I can do better in the future” OR “oh wow I see what you mean, but this is important to me” and the reader can go “I respect your right to write what you want and in the future I’ll do more to shield myself from this kind of content” instead of Cancelling someone because they didn’t effectively prostrate themselves before the ultimate judges of problematic content, a bunch of randos on the internet.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, yes, I agree with you that it’s not necessary to worry about this stuff, and that a lot of it is energy wasted especially when you’re worrying about theoretical responses from people who read your stuff, but that’s not helpful to me, because I think that’s disregarding the fact that we live in a society with weird power dynamics that are constantly shifting. I think it’s my job as someone who is mentally capable of dealing with this kind of self-examination to push back on some of these things when I can. because if I didn’t challenge myself every once in a while, I wouldn’t grow as a person or a writer and if there was one mantra I would live my life by besides the assertion that I would be blissfully happy if I downloaded my consciousness into a robot body, it would be that You Have To Be Okay With Critique and It’s Good When People Call You Out In A Safe Setting, like everyone is a dick and an asshole and a Bad Person and pretending you’re not is the most useless battle you could ever fight. we contain multitudes and some of those tudes are downright ugly.

quick sidebar: I would not have been able to have this kind of conversation with myself four years ago, and something I have not even talked about is how my shift toward more m/m content began at the same time as I was getting used to getting medical treatment for my grab bag of mental illnesses, like it’s pretty obvious that I got into sk right about the time I settled into my meds so what does That even mean?? so many THINGS to consider!!

idk. I know when I write stuff like this people think I’m beating myself up over it, but I’m really not. I just like talking about it sometimes and this tumblr is where all my neuroses go to live forever more in the annals of this blue hell until I chicken out and delete them the next day. I guess I know that when I read other people talking about things I’ve also been thinking about, it’s nice to hear. and as this is something that is still new to me, fandom in general is still bonkers to a part of my brain because I came into it as an adult, the whole conversation (if there even is a conversation because there might not be but there’s one going on in my brain) about women writing m/m is interesting complicated and something I think about a lot. clearly without any real focus or conclusions to be drawn, because I dropped out of college and never learned how to make my point in a concise and understandable manner. 

anyway I hope you don’t read this as me arguing with you nonny, I just wanted to clarify what I mean in the original post

#oh boy this got very long #anonymous

[secretshinigami]

Author: @translightyagami For: @kratqa Pairings/Characters: L, Light Yagami, Kiyomi Takada, Sayu Yagami, Kyosuke Higuchi Rating/Warnings: T for, you know. Murder happening off screen but its still gross. Prompt: Roleswap AU between L and Light. Author’s notes: I hope you like junior sleuths Light and Kiyomi, L and Ryuk having a mutual candy-and-TV = Death Note agreement, and letter-writing, because when I write a fic…you know there’s gonna b letters. i also appreciate your patience with any typos; I am a human with sticky fingers.

To-Oh during spring made Light’s skin crawl: love notes proliferated the campus from students not quite grown out of youthful notions; heat creeping beneath his sweaters, tugging at them as if to say short sleeves begged entrance; and the anniversary of his father’s heart attack—one year past—hung over all the landmarks no matter their relation to cardiac health. In that way, he noticed the newspaper story of the murderer who died of a heart attack blaring on a nearby kiosk. Without any real eye of the bizarre, Light didn’t notice things unless their relevance was near to his own life or those around him. Dark ink stared back at him, a jack-knifed business man laid out next to a graphic discussing murder statistics in the Kanto region. It was of no surprise or consequence to Light, whose policeman father made him all too aware of how life flitted from a people every day.

Slipping payment to the newsstand worker and stalking off to his next class, Light read through the story: a well-liked business man succumbing to a heart attack mid-quarter projections meeting and was found—after a house search was requested by the detective L—to have four intact human skeletons buried in his backyard. The wife, a woman with a name that flew in one ear and out the other, claimed no knowledge of her husband’s cruel hobby of picking up young men and then poisoning them with club drugs concocted in their garage; however, the great detective was said to still hold her in suspicion and no innocence was assumed.

A woman bumped into Light, who flicked his newspaper down and apologized for not paying attention. His thoughts were scrambled between happiness for a murderer slain and a stomachache—born not of bad food but an innate strangeness to what he’d just read. The newspaper went into his bag, the story out of his mind, and Light continued classes at To-Oh without much more than passing conversation devoted to “that criminal who died of a heart attack, can you believe it?”

Which, of course, wasn’t his last thought on the case. He chewed the flavor out of the incident, but in quiet. Light never liked to burden people with more than they could take and while his own voice was his favorite song, he knew people had limits. Off-hand, he mentioned the report to his father at dinner, whose murmured response left Light’s trap shut tight to further inquisitions.

“How troubling,” his father said. “We must treasure every day, and live our lives as honestly as possible.”

Three weeks later, in a smaller column, another criminal’s heart attack was reported; this time, Light didn’t pay for the newspaper as Kiyomi put her copy down in front of him. Her near-despot rule over the school’s journalism outfit drove her to often drop stories in front of him, asking for his interest and time to discuss various dictates of law enforcement. For this story, however, she asked not for his expertise, but instead to prod in tandem with her at the curiosity of it all.

“It’s weird, isn’t it?” She traced a finger over the meager profile shot of the victim, who was discovered post-death to have been collecting severed human fingers in his fridge door. “That one guy dies, turns out to be awful, and then another one?”

“Makes a person want to believe in patterns.” Light looked at her through his lashes, fork to his lips as he took another bite of their shared tart. Whenever they discussed important issues, Kiyomi liked to do it at cafes; Light suspected it was out of journalistic habit, since she took all her interviews to the same place they sat now. “Or even luck, I guess.”

“Luck?”

“Well,” he said, “luck for anyone who would have been those guys’ victims. Luck for the rest of us. Not so much for them.”

Kiyomi took a larger piece of tart, shining with a glazed cherry, and chewed it in vigorous gnashes. “Do you believe in patterns?” Her question was idle, almost absent between chews.

Light shook his head, fork placed down on a napkin and his hand now free to fish his phone from his pocket. “I don’t think there’s anything to this random stuff besides a few jerks getting their comeuppance,” he said. “Nothing but justice, you know. I have to go; my sister texted me.”

Sayu sent him a string of texts, to be honest, about how his mom needed him to come home and help with dinner. Of course, when Light arrived he saw the situation for what it was: his sister needed to watch a TV drama premiere; his mother needed onions chopped; and both of them were unwilling to compromise. Fortunately, the best brother and good son arrived home in time to accommodate them by chopping onions and fending suggestions that he was on a date with Kiyomi.

He fell into his computer chair, swung himself around in lazy circles until his brain became dizzy—one word thoughts all that remained. Onions. Kiyomi. Death. Patterns. Luck. Sticking his foot out, Light halted his movement and froze. In two scoots, he was at his keyboard, and he typed in his query to the Internet as quick as he thought it: Recent Murder Investigations Detective L. After a second, he added quotations around the phrase Detective L and pressed enter. Floods of pixel results washed over him as Light took in link after link to articles covering the great detective who solved any case put on his desk but never revealed himself to the public.

Three articles spoke of specific cases L solved: the Monkey Thief Theory (a jeweled monkey stolen from a well-loved heiress, ultimately found to have been absconded by her own hand); the Pit Viper Peril (a man who used viper venom to poison his business associates); and the Beautiful Woman Break-ins (a woman broke into several of the world’s richest mansions but stole only their fresh fruit. The woman was caught, but no details on her arrest were ever given to the public.) Two articles called L the single most important person in criminal justice history. One article mentioned, albeit as an end note, that L had worked on both cases whose solving had more to do with sudden heart attacks claiming the perpetrators than his own prowess.

A headache formed at the horizon of Light’s skull after reading too close to the screen, so he tried to print the articles. Only one printed all the way—on the second, he ran out of paper and went to Sayu’s room to bug her for using all the printer paper, which she insisted she needed for art.

“You print off pictures of that actor guy in full color and paste them onto your binders,” Light complained. “I need that paper for important stuff. You can’t be so wasteful.”

“It’s the art of collage,” she intoned. “You wouldn’t understand. You don’t have passions like I do, otherwise you’d go out with Kiyomi.”

Light took a third of her printer paper as revenge for the comment and brought in the articles to show Kiyomi. Her eyes were luminous when he arrived at the café table, arms similarly weighted with information which they swapped. She gave him a newspaper with intriguing, if distressing, updates: another man killed by cardiac arrest, revealed to be a secret killer.

“Do you know who was pursuing this one’s death?” He paused, pushing the paper away to give the waitress his full attention and order: black coffee and banana muffin, if they still have some. Kiyomi ordered ahead of him, and her meal sits in front of her pock-holed by her absent bites. In answer, she shakes her head and takes another minuscule clump of her rolled omelet.

“Nobody special was named, if that’s what you’re asking,” she said. “These articles are pretty good, but it’s hard to know whether L has been involved in more without knowing how many heart attack deaths like this have happened.” She gestured with her chopsticks as she continued, pointing at the highlighted National Police Association in the paper’s text. “From what I can gather, the Japanese police are the ones that found the posthumous evidence in the man’s apartment, same as with the other ones.”

“What’s the rub is how would they know?” Light tapped his chin, wristwatch catching café lamp glow and projecting a jiggling circle down on the laminate table. “A heart attack happens, you can just rule that as someone’s poor health, or maybe just a sad stroke of fate. But someone must be alerting police to these people’s suspicious nature for them to be investigating in depth.” He coughed, his next sentence making his throat close in embarrassment, but continued. “Listen. I support the police, you know that, right?”

“Sure,” Kiyomi mumbled around more egg. “You support your dad, at least.”

“Yeah. Well. I know the guys he works with, and while they’re not stupid, there’s no way they got this intuitive so quick.” His muffin slipped in front of him and Light nodded his thanks to the waitress, waiting until she left to pull over one printed article. “Here’s what I know: at least one of these cases was under L’s purview. Who’s to say the other ones aren’t also?”

Discarding the article, Light reached for the condiment caddy and snatched up two creamer cups, while Kiyomi set her chopsticks down in contemplation. Her eyes—dark blue to the point of midnight—scanned both the newspaper and articles. With her mouth pressed together, red lips shining with waxen smoothness, Light could see why she held sway over so much of the school’s masculine consciousness: a beautiful woman who thought before anything. His own attention settled further from attraction and more into an approach toward admiration; she would’ve made a good rival, were he still seventeen and looking for the challenge.

“How would we find out what cases L has worked on?” Kiyomi’s gaze darted from the papers to Light’s coffee, swirling ever more auburn with the creamer added. “Why didn’t you just get a latte, if you’re going to make it so sweet with cream?”

“I like to make things myself.” Light waved his hand to dispel her remark. “I don’t know how to find all the cases lining up to this particular situation, which also have L’s involvement, but I think I can get us to a starting place.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. But I’ll need my computer.” Light took a sip of his coffee and couldn’t resist the pleased smile it brought to his lips: the satisfaction of something useful and pleasurable mixed into one cup. “And about an hour of time, so I’ll probably skip contemporary law today. You don’t have to come, but you can if you like.”

“I should stay, go to class to get notes so you don’t fall behind.” Kiyomi ran her finger around her own teacup, liquid no longer steaming but cool and green with tea leaves solidified at the bottom. “Can I ask you something?” Her voice wavered and Light couldn’t catch its true colors—only flashes of uncertain purple, vulnerable red. “Is it silly to be excited about this? Trying to figure out a mystery together?”

Swallowing, Light pretended not to hear the word together as he knew she meant it: you and me, an item, a duo. “No,” he said. “It’s exciting to solve mysteries, in any case. Every time I’ve worked on stuff like this with my dad, I feel changed, uplifted. Like,” he paused, rubbing his fingers together, “someone just turned on the lights in a pitch-dark room, and now I get to see all the secrets around me.”

“I understand,” Kiyomi said, and in that moment, Light looked at her midnight eyes and saw that she did.

…

It was easier than expected to hack into his dad’s account on the NPA intraweb, although Light knew he used the same password for everything: ssl226. He wanted, in a strange way, for his dad’s heart to be harder to crack—to know less about the key and earn it fitting in the lock—but couldn’t dig into why he felt such a way. Not with Kiyomi sending him text after text from class, each one a more urgent call for updates on his progress. His attention snapped from phone, to computer, to an odd hole in his stomach after their earlier meeting.

He never enjoyed when people tried to get close to him, as though they wanted a piece of Light the same way a child wants a piece of adulthood—desperate without knowledge of what lay beneath. While a social creature, thriving on connection, he cringed from women’s fumbled confessions of attraction and roamed away from their asking mouths toward men, who wanted silent partners to their escapades and were willing to return the favor. In many ways, those interactions left Light cold as well: tacky plastic bandages peeling off at the slightest friction.

The truth was it was easier to want what was right in front of him and not consider the far off. So, Light’s fingers flew across his keyboard with the neon flash from his cell phone ignored. He flipped through files labeled in long numerical defaults—a mark of his father’s tech-illiteracy—with time ticking away. When he finally alighted on the correct documents, his phone inbox was full. Without reading any of the messages, he deleted them all and texted Kiyomi to meet him later at the library.

Armed with a large stack of paper, he weighed down his backpack and left, waving off his mother’s question about why he was skipping class. On the television, a reporter spoke about rising stock in the Yotsuba Corporation’s new make-up company. She laughed after her speech and admitted to wearing their lipstick during the segment. Both Sayu and Light’s mother laughed along too. Light ran out the door, his bag smacking on his side.

The library was quiet except for a few students banging on keyboards, their faces shining with essay-deadline sweat. Light found Kiyomi lounged on a two-seat bench, her legs propped onto the low table and a style guide opened over her face. She sat up when he dropped in beside her, pushing the guide off and starting into an interrogation on why he didn’t answer her texts. Holding up a hand, Light pulled out his papers and set them on the table, smacking a finger on them.

“I know who he’s attacking next,” he said.

“What?” Kiyomi pushed his hand aside and flicked through his findings. “Okay, so these are the last, what? Twenty or so cases the NPA worked on with L?”

“Yes, about twenty,” Light agreed. “But we don’t usually call on him, unless it’s a difficult case. I mean, it’s pretty rare he takes any case at all unless it’s big news. But look at the cases he’s worked on since 2002.”

“Heart attacks.” Stopping at the top page, Kiyomi drew her finger along the chart labels—suspect name, suspect location, case title, behavior—and ended on the final column of conclusion. “Not all of them, though. Only a few scattered ones.”

“I know!” Light couldn’t stop a little eagerness leaking in; his sleuthing was about to pay off. He took out another stack of paper—thinner than the last—and handed those to Kiyomi. “I looked at those cases. All of them had victim counts lower than ten. Some of them were even cases the NPA didn’t put much resources behind. But,” he raised his finger in emphasis, “these ones had interesting details. Like the guy who had skeletons in his backyard? He was some kind of cannibal who left organs behind. The finger guy was notorious, even though he was pretty low activity.”

“You sound like you have a theory.”

“I might. Check out the most recent listing.”

Kiyomi flipped back to the case chart and narrowed her eyes. “Do we know this guy? Kyosuke Higuchi?”

Light sighed and tapped his finger to his knee. “He’s some kind of executive, at the Yotsuba Corporation. I tracked the case listed to one about a bunch of their new make-up brand’s younger interns going missing. The count is five right now, but one of them was the niece of a big government person so the NPA got told to ask L about it.” He smiled at Kiyomi. “Do you want to hear my theory?”

She tapped the paper stack and set it on the table, turning her full attention to him. “Someone is picking off the small fries,” she said, “with heart attacks, and the link between cases is L.”

A frustrated puff of breath exited Light. “Well. Yeah. I guess,” he said. “But it’s pretty smart, right? Getting rid of the guys who you can find, but can’t super prove anything about, before they get to higher numbers.”

“He’s still killing people,” Kiyomi said. “I mean, isn’t that just like what they’re doing? These guys are victims too, in a sense, and this L guy is offing them before they get a trial. What if he’s wrong?”

Light folded his arms across his chest. “But he hasn’t been wrong,” he said. “Not yet.” Shuffling in his seat, he leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and took a deep inhale. “I want to send him a message.”

“What? A message?” Kiyomi laughed, her long earrings shaking with her clipped hair. “What’re you going to say? We’re on to you, buddy. Better watch out.” She shook her head, laughter making way for a more serious expression. “It’s not a good idea,” she said. “We don’t know how he’s giving people heart attacks, other than by magic or something. It’s dangerous.”

Air lifted and deflating from Light’s chest as he mulled her response around inside. It burned a trail through his soft meats, where enthusiasm continued to grow through whatever scorch she inflicted with sense and caution. His body was a garden growing thicker at just the idea of communicating with the person who had such a power, who made such a decision as to end someone’s life when they ended someone else’s.

Headless of his contemplation, Kiyomi stood and took the papers. “It’s interesting, I’ll give you that,” she said. “But we shouldn’t contact L directly. It will alert him to our own knowledge; we’d give more ground than gain. Let me look over what you have, and later this week, we’ll pool our thoughts and start to put together a better case.”

He handed over his print outs, not too precious about them since he had the real digital versions at home. As she left, Light’s eyes danced away from Kiyomi’s prim stride and toward the tall bookcases. His mind brought to him a scenario where he, and everyone else in the library, was crushed by toppled bookcases and the ceiling caving in. A tragedy without a pinpoint reason behind it—only a god who wanted to see something destroyed. Or maybe it was some kid who leaned too hard. Life was so random in how it could be taken or given, and that thought propelled him further into whatever L’s powers were.

Somehow, there was a man out there able to control death and Light, despite Kiyomi’s warning, wanted to know the shape of his tools.

…

L counted three red candies from his pack and collected them into his palm. They rattled against each other like gemstones, gleaming under computer-haze lights until long black claws pinched one away.

“Red ones are best,” Ryuk said. “Except for cherry flavor.”

“Cherry flavor is fine if you get the right brand.” L turned back to his laptop, nabbing a pink hard candy for himself and sucking its watermelon flavor into a slow, sugar liquid. It subsumed his entire mouth, coated his tongue and teeth. His hand stayed outstretched as Ryuk one-by-one crunched the red candies into his toothsome mouth. Clattering shards collected at his lip corners only to be wiped away by his skeletal hand.

At the moment, both occupied the same opulent hotel room despite their aesthetic pairing more implied them existing in different realities. L had laid out over his hotel desk his laptop, a bowl of packaged sweets, and a thin notebook—opened to a page half-filled by his scrawl. Methodical in his fingers, he looked over the most recent reports sent in from Japan, his interest waning here and there into an intense focus on whatever candy he opened next. Ryuk, on the other hand, was taken up by the television, which L left on for him in most hotel rooms, and all the small colored blotches fizzled together on the screen. He laughed as one blotch fell down a flight of stairs.

Their relationship often balanced on this mutual agreement for entertainment—it flowed between them as Ryuk received TV, movies, and candy from L and L, of course, got the Death Note. While this arrangement meant they were in constant contact, Ryuk did fly between the human world and Shinigami realm on his own whims; he told L human poker wasn’t as good as the death gods played it, which L couldn’t argue being he wasn’t too fond of poker either way. At one point, L asked why he—of all people on Earth and beyond—received such an unholy tool of death and Ryuk responded, “Oh, yeah. The thing sort of fell out of my pocket. I need one of those chain wallets, keep that on me.” As if to prove his point, the next time Ryuk showed up to see how L and the Death Note were progressing, he had his personal Note hooked to a thick metal chain.

“Made it myself.” His voice smacked of undue pride, although L complimented the chain without trace of sarcasm. “Not as good as the human ones, but pretty cool.”

L didn’t care if the Shinigami made a thousand ugly chain wallets, or watched TV all day. What he cared about was the ease the Death Note brought to his work. So often fissures of stress cracked along his psyche when dug into cases which were clean cut—to him, at least—but couldn’t get traction enough with local enforcement to make arrests: to bring justice to people who screamed their guilt to L’s careful crow eyes. But with the Death Note, all he had to do was write a name, wait and assign a search team to the killer’s home posthumously.

Spread in front of him, he tapped a pen end to the blank Note page. All that was left in the Higuchi case was to find a time to kill him while he was alone; for that purpose, L wormed around several important forms and decision-makers to install camera into the vile businessman’s home and office. Blue connective fuzz overlaid the images displayed on his laptop and made Higuchi, idling behind his large desk, appear alien. To some degree, L felt the man was alien to him—in thought, in action (or lack of it), in intention—and had no interest in learning a scrap about Higuchi. He cared more about the space beneath the man’s home, which would be unlocked and unloaded of its human prisoners once Wedy got her go-ahead; keeping a successful thief on his payroll benefited L tremendously.

“He’s been alone for two hours,” L said, to himself and also Ryuk, if the Shinigami wanted to hear. “If I kill him now, how long before someone finds the body?”

“Weekend,” Ryuk piped back. L looked over his shoulder to see his long ebony chicken legs crossed on the bed while yellow eyes stared at the television without blinking. “He might just rot there over the next two days.”

“Oh, I think so—,” L stopped mid-speech at Higuchi’s secretary and her brown ponytail bobbing into frame. She stood at near two inches taller than the man, who sneered as she spoke. At the very least, L knew she was not in danger of kidnapping. He sat straighter and leaned to hear their conversation over the microphones, the secretary’s voice soft and faint from many miles away.

“A young man left this for you.” She held out an envelope; even at his angle, L saw no address or marker beyond Higuchi’s name. “He said he needs you to give it to someone.”

“What?” Higuchi’s nasal intonation pinched his words. “I’m not some kind of messenger. Tell him to just send it by post, if he needs someone to see it so bad.”

“He sounded urgent that you give it,” the secretary said, and dropped the envelope down. “I’ll tell you something, he was very handsome. Seemed like a smart young man. This is probably his resume, you know.”

“Ah.” Snake oil slithered through Higuchi’s response as he took hold of the envelope. “Well, who am I to keep down a young upstart? Anything else he said?”

The secretary taped her finger to her lip and hummed. “Just that it was important someone get this message,” she said. “Someone powerful, who knew what you’d done. I don’t know what he meant by that.”

L’s eyes lit up; Higuchi became pale. “Ah yes,” the businessman simpered. “I’m not sure I know either. Well, why don’t you go home? I’ll see you on Monday.”

The moment the secretary left, Higuchi threw the envelope into the trash and L whipped around to Ryuk.

“Can you fly somewhere for me?” he asked. “And pick something up?”

“Dunno,” Ryuk said. “Depends what I get in return.”

After an hour and a promise for several all large candy purchases, L held a faintly sticky gold envelope in his hands. His hands, covered by white fabric gloves, turned the item over and over in curious rotation. Thumbing the corners, he admired how thick the stock seemed, how elegant the adhesion of the close seemed to lay, and upon opening it, he was sorry to mar the lines. Out fell a quarter-folded page with lines as crisp as the outer shell. L unfolded the page, smoothed it with both hands with delicacy he hadn’t practiced on something non-confectionery in years. Across the fine surface was hard-black typed words, struck out in small font but for some reason read to him like slow cream—a voice L never heard before but caught him, easily, by his mind’s tongue.

Dear L, the letter started. I know what you’ve been doing, but I don’t know how. I’d like to know. I’d like to know you and what tools you’ve picked up that let you wrack such havoc inside cruel men’s bodies.

Are you like them? A cruel man? I can’t say; but I’d like to be able to reject the sentiment.

Each word dropped into L’s consciousness as water on a garden and flourished greenery within him until his interest became a full forest. Someone caught on to him; their fingers brushed his toes but couldn’t quite hold the tiger. Still, the letter’s writer was unknown and on this front, L couldn’t abide. He took to his laptop and rolled back footage upon footage until video of a man at Higuchi’s secretary’s desk showed. At all times, the man’s face was out of view and his voice so low, L couldn’t make out his exact words. Had the letter writer known he’d been watched? A subtle tingle wormed through L’s chest: he knew about the cameras, or suspected them; he knew Higuchi was next; and he knew L was listening, in some capacity.

But how much did this man—who still carried handsomeness in his stature, turned head or no, and had a whisper coated by sugared familiarity—actually know? L frowned and turned back to the letter, scanning it again. He then turned to Ryuk.

“If someone wanted to send a message with the Note,” he said, “how might they do so?”

Ryuk laughed, throaty and amused. “Few ways,” he demurred. “You’re a smart guy. You figure it out.”

L raised an eyebrow, but not an argument. After all, he was the world’s greatest detective; a smart guy who could figure it out. He set to work and by nightfall had a plan. As he finished, he imbued his last pen stroke with some warped hope—that the letter writer saw what his message truly was: not cruelty but a hand beckoning him closer. An invitation.

“A challenge,” L said, to himself, to Ryuk, to the young man whose face he didn’t know. “And an answer.”

…

“Is that the newspaper?” Light slipped in next to Kiyomi, who held ink-covered pages in front of her face, elegant nails curled against headlines like red slashed wounds. Their first period literature class—a dreaded requirement on their degrees which neither enjoyed—found him harried from waking up late. He was unpracticed in disordered sleep and didn’t know how to control panic when it seeped from his pores and into his routine; ever since he gave the letter off to that Higuchi, Light was aware to his core something might happen—something deadly, even.

Kiyomi tilted the front page down enough to show her disappointed gaze trained on Light’s perfect smile—beguiling by practice, not nature. “You can buy your own,” she said. “After all, you don’t want anything from me, much less information.”

“Don’t be like that,” he countered. “You know, I didn’t make any moves.”

“Don’t lie,” Kiyomi said. “Look,” she flattened the newspaper to the desk, and after glancing around, pointed to a large headline, “your little love note found its recipient.”

Light leaned over the paper and scanned the article. Phrases floated forward—a sex dungeon with the women freed by an unknown accomplice—and others were faded but intriguing—Higuchi succumbing to cardiac arrest after consuming an energy drink, a large latte and a bottle of caffeine pills. His eyes froze on one paragraph, detailing a letter found in Higuchi’s handwriting and tucked inside his pocket.

“Experts say the letter was written within an hour of the man’s death,” the article read. “It’s contents are, however, not addressed to anyone known to the victim but instead a mysterious figure called ‘letter writer.’ Beneath we have listed some of the letter, which was confiscated by police and edited for clarity.”

Kiyomi sighed. “You’re in real danger now,” she said softly. “We’re both in danger.”

“He responded,” Light said, breathless. “He wrote back to me.”

Dear letter writer,

I don’t want to alarm you or make it seem as though I am on a crusade. Far from it. This is just my job, and I am good at my job. I get rid of people doing terrible things, but time and resources don’t always play on my side. This is my way of prioritizing.

I’m not a cruel man; and I hope you never think of me as such. But understand I can’t tell you what my methods are. After all, where’s the interest in that for me? But I can give you something small, something to hold onto: without your face, I can’t harm you.

Speak to you soon,

X

Light’s heart thudded in his throat. “Do you still have that chart on you?” He asked Kiyomi, who brought out the papers with eyes warmed by the prospect of research.

“Of course.” She laid them out and shrugged in closer to Light. “What are we looking for? What do we do next?”

Light couldn’t answer. Around and around in his head echoed Speak to you soon in a voice he didn’t know. Yes, they’d speak again soon enough, but he just needed to find out what they’d talk about. Right now, the room was dark; it was all a matter of turning on the light and seeing the secrets in the room.

#fanfiction #L #L Lawliet #Light Yagami #Kiyomi Takada #Sayu Yagami #Kyosuke Higuchi #pairings: none #ratings: teen #murder #translightyagami #kratqa #B's Bitchin Borthday 2k19 #submission

[monkey-network]

Steven Universe is Anime Garbage (And That’s Okay)

WARNING: This is gonna be a very weebish brain fart. I didn't come into writing it for any purpose, I just decided to write out my general stream of thoughts to see where it took me. This was the result. Thank you, take care out there, and enjoy.

A key to enlightenment is the severance of attachment

Can’t deny it. Steven Universe is a cartoon practically on the boundary with its many fans. Some find it engaging and wonderful, others find it wasted potential and struggling, and others are terrible fans with no sense of control or integrity, like most fandoms really. But I, a fan since its beginnings, wish to make a case that could potentially bring everything and everyone together in somewhat reasonable understanding (a stretch, somewhat). Steven Universe is a trash anime....and it is the best trash out here. Now I’m not saying this because it has an anime look, or that Jasper is a tsundere, or especially...

“Hey it’s a reference to that one anime that’s also very aesthetic™ and sad with lesbians and allegories!”

Nah, I’ll be real with you here. Now we really can’t deny that Steven Universe has its major flaws, not a hard pill to swallow way I see it. Wishy washy in tone, seldom in world building, basic animation, off putting character models, and so forth (though the last point is a malleable nitpick tbh). Furthermore, we can’t deny that the “plot” is up in the air and really not in the mood on coming down with anything truly shaking yet (putting a pin in that). But, I won’t deny that it looks good, some characters are worth my investment, and there is some development to be had in all this, for better or for worse. You could say it’s down the middle, so where am I going with this? Well, I think I found something that may be able to bring this together: Sword Art Online

*imitating Austin Powers* YEAH, BABY!

For those unaware, Sword Art Online is a light novel turned RPG Game turned full series anime about thousands of people getting trapped in a VR game with one seeking to escape by beating the 100 levels of the game. It has action, death, good game feel, wonky gameplay, and fanservice.... I do not and will not recommend this to anyone, nor am I just comparing this to Steven U because both have OP protagonists, a myriad of female characters, and how one character is generally Lars if a better person initially. To repeat, I’m not saying these shows are the same in plot and such. Though the similarities certainly come in their perceptions and reactions.

Also dual wielding

Let me sidetrack a bit and do understand, at the time SAO premiered, otakus, anime fans, and even esports fans were hyped! This was before My Hero Academy blew millions away, before Attack on Titan throttled its theme music onto people, many were stoked and kept up that stokeness for this for quite a bit. This was SAO’s keepsake: Mass Appeal and timing. Then people started seeing the cracks of the show’s true faults, and now we’re at the point where more of the franchise is coming and the fandom is dragging between people that find it sucks or never should’ve been invested in the first place, people that continue to make the lemons into lemonade regardless, and the creeps (you know who they are). Sound familiar?

I mean we could say the same thing for the current Star Wars fandom, but that’s a tad more complicated

But this isn’t enough to say this is trash anime. No, like SAO, there is one thing that can tie everything together to implode into an enveloping infinite wormhole of foolishness and cleverness. One moment that just brought everything together and is gonna put everything together in the end. The definitive proof that...

Rose Quartz was the Origami Killer all along!!

But seriously, this was a twist that certainly cemented itself into being on par in writing with SAO and similar trash series. I mean, from a meta perspective, it’s pretty hilarious that the biggest twist the show presented was mostly considered a joke in the same way people thought The Simpsons could predict the future with the absurdist jokes they made. And really, all the symbolism and foreshadowing from every episode previously doesn’t excuse the blue balls I felt with the recent two seasons. I’m sorry guys, the eye opening revelation can go so far with someone who was only glad something actually came together after so long (even if the episode leading up to it lacked that “special shit”).

But as for Pink Diamond being the real Rose Quartz, the twist admittedly lack that impactful-ness and really shows how they’re twanging a string in the efforts to make you take the story seriously. For one thing, it’s pretty stupid to believe that nobody questioned the abilities the one Rose had compared to a typical quartz, not to mention that it felt pretty convenient that she never lost her form revealing her gem to anyone beside Pearl. Secondly, it kinda bait and switches not just the ideal, but a reasonable idea of Rose Quartz for just being the ambitious dictator turned anti-villain bent on liberating the Earth from her bigger than thou parents and more or less her own armada. Like, “Ha ha, you thought Rose Quartz was an ordinary gem that had to make genuine sacrifices in her efforts to best the higher ups and liberate her kind. But in reality, she had the abilities to win all along and generally did everything for the sake of not being a dictator anymore. MWAHAHAHAAAA” We can examine the complexities behind her motivations all we’d like, but that just feels like rewriting the already stupefying concept to make it sound more sensible.

Funny enough, Rose could’ve definitely working as the Charles Xavier of this series but they never delve into that reasonably valuable concept*

Lastly, it sort of--lack of a better term--irons out the whole show up with Steven being Pink Diamond, if that makes sense. In the back of my mind, I’ve generally lost my suspension of disbelief in believing that a fourteen year old child is not only the reformation of a failed rebel leader, but said failed rebel leader actually being the supposed antagonist and jumpstarting source behind everyone’s frustrations, ambitions, and tragedies. As if Steven wasn’t special enough on the fact that he can revive the dead, like Sword Art Online, it’s already apparent that he’ll generally win in the end due to him being the Special, the Ninetail, the Last Jedi, the Hollow, and the Fullbring all in one. It’s kinda hard getting invested in your story when I can’t care about your protagonists! Maybe he might actually suffer long term consequences, but I don’t have much in the future since it now feels hard to relate to the protagonist, who by the way is the central protagonist meaning no episode can go without his presence apparently.

He’ll enter your dreams if he must

And I’m afraid that Steven Universe has officially sunk to trash tier anime. And frankly, it’s always been anchored to this. I mean with SAO, as much as I saw before quitting, there was plot variety, not plot flips. It is one thing to have your series shift from light villain of the week slice of life to something like Oedipus Rex, but to get this far, nose diving into this belly flop of a reveal, to then ask to be taken with a modicum of seriousness, what? To put so much ambition into your work, that you’re essentially believing your own hype, barely exploring a big handful of your own ideas, until now, trying to make sympathy and reason coincide with the villain(s) instead of making them somewhat real. One could say “Monkey, it’s not about taking on villains, it’s about achieving resolve within the group’s personal struggles.” And while that is a reasonable and pathetic way of saying violence can’t resolve things, it doesn’t bear the fact that the Crystal Gems were essentially fighting villains beforehand while achieving resolve, so why change things up now? Especially when the villains before don’t bear any quirk of their own besides being relative to the plot. Or a plot, since again, it wants to be taken seriously with the “story” it has, but juggles way too many things that it can feel hilariously jarring when the show actually gets somewhere.

And as a character drama, the establishment of its world and idealogies don’t feel as valuable when the importance and passion to them are continuously muddled or dull

And this is the way of trash anime. People shouldn’t have to continuously think of how things could’ve been better, why plotlines and characters don’t mesh well, why it can just feel so contrived. Yeah it’s unfortunate that an SU Critical community exists, and yeah sometimes they deserve scrutiny because some try to make it deeper than it is, but we can’t deny that this all appeared from a vacuum. With criticisms can come a consistent string of logic that some things have turned up wrong, something that the series failed to grasp previously. Like SAO, most Shonen works, and “those” shows that I won’t speak of, this series was and has become a glorified gamble on your interests and the anticipation to see where it lands, how cathartic it’ll be, and what’s to look forward to and look back on.... has somewhat slimmed. While it is most certainly its own thing, it doesn’t bear that evolutionary yet timeless nuance Avatar and Adventure Time has, nor the continually captivating hook the best anime can have with its episodes and characters. This series has gotten stupid...and I say it’s not wrong to think that way.

Anime isn’t that big of a mistake, you guys. Come on.

If there’s anything I learned as one of the smartest idiots around, it’s that stupidity can be enjoyable; trust me, I know. So while I say SU’s anime garbage, I’m not saying it’s the bad kind that kills your mood/investment like the shit I found. it’s the Rocket Raccoon of Cartoon Network (and if you’ve seen Guardians 2 and get where I’m coming from, I love you for it). It’s still enjoyable, for the most part, and I’m not gonna ignore the influence it had on its fans. Hell, Black Panther is a movie I find flawed as fuck, but I and the millions (and the millions) still recognize and appreciate it for what it provided, for black people especially. While it can be predictable, there are some good moments to think over, for better or for worse, like how the Rose Quartz was subtly hinted at throughout the seasons. It’s still competent in some aspects, there are a few characters I still love and, to unpin, things look like they’re finally heating up. It still has that “Fuck yeah” spirit buried underneath, like many anime good and trash. It’s certainly better than Star vs th- Point I’m getting at is that this series sure as hell ain’t bulletproof, but I’ll gladly bandage it up and see it through to the end. Not as some guilty pleasure, but as a series that staggers constantly and consistently but makes up in keeping it compelling (in a way). That’s a quality only the best trash anime achieves, shooting itself in the foot while proudly making that run to the finish line. I’m not just blatantly criticizing it or supporting all the hype it makes, I’m embracing it for going this long with this many bruises, willing to take more hits, all the while never really losing sight of what it set out to do. I’ll still smack it upside the head for the stupid shit it might pull, because I know it can and will, but that smack is delivered with love. And really, is that not a reasonable feeling to have?

Steven U is anime garbage... and I’m fine with that.

#steven universe #su #su critical #su criticism #rose quartz #pink diamond #cartoons #anime #reviews #analysis #long post #Good Stuff #Roy Macintosh #awesome #brain fart #sword art online

[jheaton416]

Ace and Sep’s Greatest Hits

With Sad Hands and heavy hearts we bid farewell to Ace and Sep's Buffy recaps...  

"I get it now. The Slayer thing really isn't about the violence. It's about the power. And there's no one in the world who has the power to stop me now." Just then the Hubris Police step in in the form of Rupert Giles and throw a bolt of green energy at Willow, knocking her clear across the room. "I'd like to test that theory," says Giles, all tall and authoritative. Oh, Giles! Hi! I missed you so much this season! We have so much catching up to do! Let's see. I just finished my finals, and I think I did rather well. And I met a very nice boy who just happens to live in England, so when I'm over there this summer, if you wanna hang out or something just let me know. I gotta hand this over to Ace now, but... call me!

Sep, "Two to Go"

Sep: So there I was. At Trader Joe's, and boom. No Booty to be had. And you know my dedication to all things snack.  Ace: I feel your pain. The other night I was at TJ's and they had all these different kinds of Booty from Fruit Booty to Vegetable Booty, but not the Booty that I wanted.  Sep: Yargh. That blows.  Ace: Snerk. So anyway. Ash asked me if I wanted to get one of the other varieties, but I just felt that if I couldn't have the Booty that I wanted, it was better to have no Booty at all.  Sep: Dude. That's deep. And also would have saved me much pain and humiliation in my early twenties.  

There are tiny colonies of single-celled life at the bottom of deep fissures in the sea using their cilia to tell each other, "Buffy used Spike." Can we please move on?

Sep, "Never Leave Me"  

Ecch, I hear a noise like forty cats being squeezed too hard around their middles. Turns out it's Cordelia singing "The Greatest Love of All."

- Ace, "The Puppet Show"  

i dont have time to read all theze post but did u hear what happens in the finale? every vamp and demon that buffy has ever kiled is rezrected and they all sing at spike and angles WEDDING!!!! OMG!!! laterz Sep (Go on. Ban me. I dare you.)

Sep, in the forums  

Aw, Willow is wearing shorts and showing more Willow-leg than I believe we've ever seen. What a cutie. ... Giles finally pipes up that he's sorry he missed the encounter, but he actually sounds like he's sorry these damn kids won't leave him alone so he can pour himself a nice single-malt Scotch and watch that Letty The Lusty Librarian tape he has hidden in his nightstand. ... Dracula wears a sweater vest? Well, I guess that answers the age-old question: "What does Dracula wear under his cape?" Or was that Scotsmen? Who does he think he is anyway, Chandler Bing? ... I would like to point out that Spacky is wearing more eye makeup than the entire female cast combined.

Ace, "Buffy vs. Dracula"  

Credits. Who does James Marsters have to sleep with to be billed before Michelle Trachtenberg and Emma Caulfield? Ooh! Please let it be me. C'mon, if y'all give me James I won't ask for anything else for my birthday or Christmas. What? It worked when I was ten. ... Look! Xander is using a skill! Effectively! As he's building shelves for Giles, I notice that he's attired in jeans and a plain long-sleeved shirt. It looks like after his other half fell into the Gap, he managed to climb out with a basic grasp on the matching theory.

Sep, "Out of My Mind"  

I know this is an unpopular opinion, but I love the 'Bot; I really, really do. She's so cute and happy and chirpy and I just know reanimated Buffy is going to be an angst-y pained ball of angst just like she was all last season, and sometimes I wish we could just replace her with the robot permanently. Especially if she keeps making jokes about marzipan.

Ace, "Bargaining I"  

Damn, Marc Blucas makes James Marsters look like a tiny, tiny man. After last week's showcase it's sad, but also amusing, to see Spike reduced to an elfin laundry-stalker.

Sep, "Shadow"  

WARNING: Contents may have shifted during shipping. Oops, that's the wrong warning. The warning is this: This recap contains opinions.

Ace, "Tabula Rasa"  

Evil Dead eh? I'm just going to take that as a shout-out to me and my Evil Dead t-shirt that I ordered out of the Fangoria (shut up) catalog twelve years ago and have been wearing consistently ever since. David Fury must have seen me in it or something. ... Buffy notices Ben sitting somewhere else and goes over to talk to him. Oh GREAT. You know how, whenever there's an outbreak of some sort of nasty infectious disease, during the news reports they often retrace the path of the virus on a map? Well, that's what my mind is doing with Ben right about now. First I only had to live in fear during the hospital scenes. But then he leached into the hospital parking lot. And now that he's just showing up at the Bronze all willy-nilly, he could just ooze on down the road anywhere his little slime trail will take him. Curses. Greasy Intern Ben is spreading. I wonder what his vector of infection is?

Sep, "Crush"  

Tough Love - Or, "The Unedited Buffy You Never Wanted To See." Buffy routes paperwork. Buffy repairs an appliance. Buffy folds laundry. Buffy goes to a parent-teacher conference. Dawn does homework. Dawn does homework some more. Glory practices personal hygiene. The recapper props her eyelids open with spork tines. To spice things up a little, Giles goes all Ripper, Tara goes all Forrest Gump, and Willow goes all Fairuza Balk. The recapper falls asleep and drools on her cat.

Ace, "Tough Love" recaplet  

Spike stumbles, bloody, bruised, and wild-eyed, down the hall to the elevator, and if I weren't a fan of this show and were just flipping by I might think it was a clip from a Behind the Music on Billy Idol.

Sep, "Intervention"  

...Marci needs to find "the key."  ...Darcy or Shannon or whatever her name is  ...Sheila or Lisa or whoever 

Sep describing Glory before her name was revealed, "Family"  

...the guy, who I've decided to call Gee Dub McChoad for no reason whatsoever...

Sep describing Tara's brother, "Family"  

Willow screams, 'Noooooooo,' and a rippling force shoots out of her mouth and zaps Osiris, who vanishes. Oh, the heartbreak of halitosis!

Ace, "Villains"  

My roommate brought home a big pile of Marshmallow Peeps from a post-Easter sale. I took one look at them and screeched, "Peeps show!" before grabbing one, winging it into the microwave, and making "Bamp-chicka-bow-wow" noises while watching the Peep swell and undulate in the microwave. Try it. It's fun. Also, I have in my notes from the first airing of this episode, "Dawn no like monkey-brain marshmallows." I think I'll just leave that in. You'll either find it as amusing as I do or marvel at my illiteracy.

Sep, "Conversations With Dead People"  

Willow incants more at the effigy (who looks like she's ready for a doctor to check her tonsils) and then sends green energy blobs shooting out of her breasts towards Santa's Phallus. It's a lesbian thing -- you wouldn't understand.

Ace, "Grave"  

Cut to Xander chaining Spike up in the basement of Casa Summers. Dawn, Buffy, Wood, Giles, Willow, the UN Security council, three random passersby, and a small hedgehog are all in attendance. Okay, not really, but seriously. The number of people present for this is way unnecessary. Giles, Willow and Buffy will perform the spell. Xander, Dawn and Wood will distribute small snacks and throw Jujubes at Spike's head. ... Spike's mum tells him that he "needs a woman in [his] life." He replies that he does have a woman in his life. She is momentarily taken in, but then realizes that William has some really serious Oedipal issues. Victorian etiquette dictates that it would be in poor taste to mention this, so she pretends to be flattered. He promises to always look after her, but she has a coughing fit, hoping to die and escape her creepy son. Knowing that Spike's women-paragon obsession thing in which he defines himself and his moral center by the dominant female figure in his life started back when Spike was human, and has continued until the present day, really makes me realize how pathetic a creature he truly is. You'd think that after the first hundred years he might have self-actualized or something.

Sep, "Lies My Parents Told Me"  

Let me amend that. It's a long, thick, snake-like demon with a head shaped just like a penis, that squeals at Buffy and then sprays liquid out of its mouth and onto her. Just think about that for a minute.

Ace, "Doublemeat Palace"  

At the Pub the Chuckleheads are sitting around a table strewn with empty beer pitchers, randomly slapping and picking nits off of each other. One of them is trying to remove his shirt but gets his head stuck in it. I can sympathize with him. I've done that -- sober.

Sep, "Beer Bad"  

Rack is creepy. Then about ten more anvils crash into my room, followed by a minor deluge of cow pies as we launch into a trippy-druggy sequence the likes of which has not been seen since The Trip and Psych-Out.

Ace, "Wrecked"  

Willow is wearing what Ace called a poncho, but I think looks more like a tube with no armholes. If anyone remembers the commercial for the plastic device that enabled you to turn a crank and produce miles upon miles of useful and fashionable yarn tubing, well, it looks like that. Either that, or Willow took up knitting but hasn't figured out the secret to sleeves yet. Patrolling against vampires and other night-haunting demons with your arms bound to your sides by an acrylic strait-jacket doesn't seem like a wise move, but what do I know about fashion? Oh, that's right -- a lot more than Willow, obviously.

Sep, "Something Blue"  

Suddenly, my TV screen fills up with a bunch of monkeys, all dressed up in platform sandals, cunning frocks, feather boas, and mascara. They form a menacing circle around Dawn. I think they're all guy monkeys, but y'know, it's a little hard to tell with the simians.

Ace, "Potential"  

It's Cruella D'Will. Heh. That's why she flayed Warren last week. She's making a coat out of him. Man, how much cooler would this episode be if Willow pranced around singing, 'See my vest! See my vest! It was once Warren's chest!' ... This is a test of the Emergency Snorecast System. Everything operational.

Sep, "Two to Go"  

Sunny Valley, Arizona Ace, a beautiful, brainy, and brilliant recapper for TWoP, that world-famous website and recipient of three Nobel Prizes for Internet Criticism, piloted her pink bubble-shaped hovercraft to the landing strip on the roof of her lux penthouse apartment. Slim and clad entirely in her everyday garb of form-fitting leather, she headed quickly to her Operations Control room, stopping only to scratch the chin of her almost-sentient leopard, Francesca. "Follow me, little one," Ace purred to her feline companion, "for tonight we view a new Buffy!" In Operations Control, Ace flung her shapely form onto the low designer sofa and thumbed the remote to her wall-sized liquid television. As the episode progressed, Francesca began to pace the room in agitation, for she had never before seen her merry human companion in such distress. Ace's perfectly manicured nails caressed her flawless face as she murmured, "How will I recap an episode so sorely lacking in plot? An episode that consists mostly of Andrew's fantasies and stolen videotaped vignettes of the Scooby gang? Without a narrative structure to follow, at what point should I mention the disturbing basement sex of the un-reunited Xander and Anya, or the empty and unsatisfying riot occurring at Sunnydale High?" Finally, Ace knelt, and attractively wept into the silken tawny fur of Francesca, "I face my greatest challenge ever! Just as the tears of repentant Andrew closed the Seal of Danzig in the school basement forever, so do my hot tears of rage seal my unrepentant loathing of this season!" Los Angeles, CA The evil genius Jane Espenson cackled evilly as she polished her six-inch chrome stilettos and flipped her shiny titian hair. Whirling menacingly in her secret headquarters beneath Reseda, she flipped open her tiny red Mobicom and hit speed-dial. Upon hearing a voice on the other end of the line, Jane leered and snapped out, "Hello, Joss? I think we've broken Ace already. The tears are the beginning of the end. That'll teach her to complain about Andrew's poor grasp on reality!"

Ace, "Storyteller" recaplet  

The Knights are gonna get the Key, toniiiight! The Scoobies drive a big RV, toniiiight! This year, the minutes seemed like hours The arc progressed so slowly And still no end in siiiight!

Sep, "Spiral" recaplet  

Xander gets snide about what a "simple" decision this must be for Buffy and then leaps up, snarling, "You know, if there's a mass-murdering demon that you're, oh, say, boning, then it's all gray area." Hee -- go Xander! I'm not really taking sides in this argument because I think both Buffy and Xander are both right and wrong here, but I really think it needed to be said that Buffy totally put aside all her Slayer standards in order ride Spike's man-pole, and she's never really admitted that to or faced it as far as I can tell. She's mumbled about how it was bad for her, but never seemed to realize what a betrayal of her calling it was. Buffy wins The Lame Comeback Of The Century Award when her only reply is that Spike is "harmless." Harmless except for the whole part where he could and did harm you, Buffy. Nice self-preservation instincts there, honey. Let's kill Anya because she could hurt men. Let's not kill Spike because he can only hurt Buffy. Uh, where was I?

Ace, "Selfless"  

This whole Spike with Buffy thing? My fault. When Angel was on the show, I hated every second of him and his dazed "you can tell I have a soul because I look like I just walked into a tree" method of acting. (Angelus was a different story. A cooler story that didn't spend so much time whining and moping.) Then, when he left, it was like light pouring in through the heavens. I was excited. Happy. I had a new lease on life. I thought, "No matter what, Buffy's next boyfriend won't be so bad." Enter Riley. Riley with his potato nose, thinly-veiled chauvinism, and women issues. And so it was, until it came to pass that Riley endeth. And lo! Happiness reigned far and wide across the land (defined as my apartment), there was much rejoicing, and it was good. Again, I foolishly allowed myself to be confident that this had been the worst. Surely Buffy's next boyfriend...

Sep, "Two to Go"  

ASH is really giving a killer performance here. I wonder how many takes it took for him to stop laughing. His singing sounds very soulful and I'm convinced it's his own voice, just very badly synched. Maybe the sound crew had to work overtime on all the Buffy/Riley moaning and ran out of time for the important things. Bad prioritization, guys. For a whole week following this episode, my poor cat is tortured by me following her around the house and bellowing, "No ooooone knows what it's liiiiike/Toooooo be the baaaad cat/Tooooo be the saaaad cat/Behind blue eeeeeyeees." I swear, one of these days she's going to lose her patience, pack her little kitty suitcase and leave. Well, at least I don't make her watch The Others with me anymore.

Ace, "Where the Wild Things Are"  

Luke is chanting, "The Sleeper will wake and the world will bleed. Amen!" Because vampires are such religious creatures. Don't you remember that one heartwarming episode they had when they showed them all going to church? Sure, they wanted to eat the rest of the congregation, but as long as they're worshipping in Glen Oak with the Camdens I really don't have a problem with that.

Sep, "Welcome to the Hellmouth"  

D'Hoffryn introduced himself, and Aud replies, "I am Aud." Hee. That's a funny pun. You know that saying that goes, "Puns are the lowest form of humor"? That always confused me. I mean, I wondered who decided that, and what the highest form of humor was, and why the phrase always seemed to be uttered only by the very humorless, who wouldn't seem qualified to judge. Anyway, this is 2002, and the saying is obviously obsolete. It comes from an older era. An era before the fart joke. Fart jokes are quite clearly the lowest form of humor, and I suggest that we petition the correct powers that be to have the saying updated for modern times. ["The lowest, and yet consistently the most reliable. Hee. Farts." -- Sars]

Ace, "Selfless"  

Willow and Buffy walk up the steps to school, and Xander catches up with them. I'm sorry that I can't recap their conversation, but I'm sure you'll understand once I tell you about Xander's red and moldy green-gray sweater paired with brown and yellow plaid pants. As if that combination wasn't horrific enough on its own, Willow is wearing an orange and yellow striped fleece shirt. It's at times like this that I wish I were blind -- just like the wardrobe people.

Sep, "Passion"  

Ace: "I don't know why Buffy was all surprised when Spike tried to kiss her. That's what you do at the end of a date and drinking, dinner, and pool all add up to a date." Sep: "It totally was a date. My last date ended exactly the same way. Someone threw a wad of cash at someone else, the words, 'You're beneath me' were uttered, and one of us was left crying alone in an alley." Ace: "You've got to be kidding me." Sep: "Actually I am. My last date ended with me threatening my beau with a spork."

Ace and Sep, "Fool for Love"  

[nodeleteky-blog]

mercy killing

I work in a child care centre. I’m not bad at my job - I get along well enough with kids and I have my mother’s yelling voice, which helps with behaviour management (that’s a fancy educating word for stopping kids from lighting fires).

A couple of terms ago we were in the middle of vacation care, which is different to regular term-time care because instead of dealing with children before and after school (when they’re at their best - either sleepy or just stoked to not be learning), you’re dealing with them for 8 hours at a time.  A lot can go wrong in 8 hours. 

Every school holidays we have a bunch of chicken eggs delivered by a company called Henny Penny Hatching (a name shared with Henny Penny Foods, a Novocastrian fast food chain suspiciously specialising in fried chicken). At the end of the school break, they’re taken away to ‘live’ (die) at a ‘farm’ (slaughterhouse). The idea is the kids get watch the chicks hatch and then take care of them. This is a misguided attempt to teach them about caring for baby animals, the circle of life and value for living things. I say misguided because:

1) a child is not qualified to care for anything more evolved than a sea monkey (even then I would say that’s an ethical grey area),

2) the circle of life is a vicious, unpleasant circle to be involved with,

3) we ate sausages for lunch that day. Living things are priceless, dead things are $3.80/kg. By the third day of the holidays, all of the chicks had hatched but one. One lonely egg, sitting in the incubator like a drunk on the train that slept through his stop. My coworkers and I assumed that this egg was a dud, but by the afternoon it was showing signs of life. The chick was making his way into this cruel world, one peck of his underdeveloped beak at a time. As the miracle of birth was occurring I gathered the children around the incubator, hoping there would be something vaguely inspirational or educational about watching one of nature’s dumbest creatures leave a room with no door. As time went on, it became increasingly apparent that this bird was not naturally gifted at being born. He managed to peck a small hole in the shell, from which logic (and millions of years of evolution) would dictate his head would emerge. Instead he managed to summon the incompetence to thrust his backside through the opening, widening it with his scrawny chicken feet as he went. 

There was something oddly prophetic about coming into the world butt first: this chicken was falling into something he wasn’t quite equipped or prepared for, even by the standards of baby chickens.

Eventually the chick (whom the children had named ‘Plucky’, either for his courage in the face of adversity or because they knew plucking was something that happened to chickens) managed to struggle his (or her, it’s really hard to tell with birds) abdomen out through the hole, leaving the eggshell stuck on his head like a space helmet. On reflection, this bird was in a very peculiar situation: having just become self-aware, he knew he must break free of the only home he had ever known. Having barely achieved this feat, he thrusts his posterior into the unknown. Then, just when he had earned his freedom - his head was left trapped in the sanctuary that had now become his prison. Can you imagine what would have been running through that chicken’s head? Based on my knowledge of chickens, probably not a whole lot (even the fully grown ones don’t use their brains for much: take for instance that headless chicken that survived for 3 years post-decapitation). But if I’m going somewhere new, I want my head to lead the way. It has the greatest hits of sensory organs - nose, ears, tongue, eyes. All the classics you know and love. If someone offered me a free trip to Portugal, but the offer was only good from the neck down - I would have serious reservations about accepting that offer.

It was at this point the children urged me to intervene. I did feel compelled to act: I had invited them all to witness a new life being ushered into our world, after all. If I had to put my thumb on the scale, so be it.

So I reached into the incubator and grabbed Plucky by his not-yet-fluffy bottom and gently broke the shell-noose away from around his neck. 

It became very clear from that moment that Plucky was not a blue ribbon chick. His head looked too small for his body, like a raisin with a beak. Even so, his neck still seemed unable to support its weight. It rolled listlessly, like a flaccid penis in the afternoon breeze. Despite spending the longest in the proverbial oven, he still looked underdone. Plucky just... wasn’t right.

Thinking he might still just be recovering from his hatching ordeal, I placed him in the pen, under the lightbulb amongst the sawdust and chickenshit. Almost immediately, his siblings approached him for what I assumed would be a fraternal greeting and a congratulatory flap - instead they started to peck aggressively at his eyes. An age old hierarchy had just been established: having been the last to arrive, Plucky had become the designated runt. There is no such thing as being ‘fashionably late’ in the animal kingdom. 

I had now reached an impasse - do I let nature take its gruesome course and allow Plucky to be pecked to death by his kin, in front of a live studio audience of impressionable children? Or do I become God himself - intervening in matters of life and death, disrupting the natural order to preserve the innocence of my young charges? I decided that since I had already violated Star Fleet’s Prime Directive by helping Plucky out of his shell, I had better remove him from the situation until he had his bearings. I placed him in a small box under another heat lamp, safely nestled in more sawdust.

Isolation did not help Plucky’s cause. His breathing was shallow and laboured, like a phone call with my dad. He couldn’t move, though maybe he just didn’t see the point. It became clear that Plucky was dying.

Looking back now, I had no obligation to do anything other than let nature take its course. Children all must learn about death and loss, sooner or later (honestly, they should probably learn about it before their first McNugget). But in a misguided attempt to spare them the emotional torment of watching the slow death of a chick they’d grown inexplicably attached to, I decided to do something I never thought I’d have to. I was going to kill Plucky.

I’ll spare you the details, but I will say I am burdened to this day with the guilt of cold blooded (if well intentioned) murder. When I returned the next morning, I found the incubator was lined by at least a dozen homemade signs, clearly drawn by the naive hands of children. I picked one up - it read:

‘RIP PLUCKY

TOM NEXT’

[jishinsjourney]

North End (working title)

Just a chunk carved out of my monkey-on-typewriter NaNo ramblings. I figured since it got an “ow” out of @expatriots-wife that it must be at least reasonably decent.

I don’t know that this piece actually fits in the book. In fact, this might actually be somewhere in book two. I’m just writing scenes until I have enough that I can piece it all together.

I ran away from home when I was ten. Every kid does this, usually because they’re tired of being picked on by a sibling or think that whatever chores they’ve been given are unfair dictates handed down by the rulers of life on high, their parents.

Andrew and I got along about as well as most brothers, which is to say that on good days we got along splendidly, and on bad ones someone could have claimed we’d started our own little version of the Grand Campaign in the street and not been too far off. To be fair, sometimes those were the good days, too. Andrew is a brilliant engineer. By the time I was old enough to get scooped up by the military, I’d already learned plenty about incendiary devices from close personal experience with my big brother.

Drew was the one who made it go. He caught me while I was packing up, and promised to run interference instead of ratting me out. I don’t know what he was thinking. Maybe the raw victory of pulling one over on Mom and Dad was the temptation. Looking back now, I’m not sure what I was thinking, either. Just that I was tired of the flat world of wheat and that I needed to get beyond the beyond.

My parents weren’t fairy-tale ogres by a long stretch. They ran a mercantile in a small town out in the Laughton prairie, on the far side of the Switcher Range and about forty miles from the desert. Linden wasn’t a city by a long shot, but it was big enough to be a thoroughfare. Dad spent most of his time cutting deals between the local farmers and traders that came through, and what didn’t get sold or traded directly across was what Mom put up in the shop. Drew and I both got a thorough education on stocking, shelving, cleaning, and customer service when we weren’t being schooled.

Education was a simpler thing back then. Reading, ‘riting, ‘rithmetic, and ritual. Linden’s magic is all tied up in those aforementioned amber waves of grain. The usual blessings were for health and wellness, strength and productivity. Wheat conducts all of those things pretty well. My brother somehow figured out how to turn old kernels into eraser-sized fireballs. I mentioned he was a genius, right? He never shared that little secret, though.

I wandered off that golden afternoon, hobo bag slung over my shoulder, and ambled down to the creek. I followed it for hours under the cover of the trees that shaded it, at least as far as Drew and I had ever been on our own, until the twists and turns grew unfamiliar and I spent as much time looking backwards as I did forwards, making sure I wasn’t lost. Though how you get lost when you’re following a creek, I don’t know. You can always turn around and go back. Even little me knew that. It’s just easy to second-guess yourself when you’re alone and somewhere new.

Dinnertime came and went. I scarfed down the provisions ten-year-old me had figured to bring -- bread and a sausage, a couple of apples and a candy bar. It had been a long day’s haul, and I was tired. Part of me was vaguely surprised no one had come in search of me yet, and part of me reassured myself that when Drew said he’d handle it, he’d meant it.

About then was when the real anxiety set in. There aren’t any big critters out in Laughton, but I hadn’t been all that thorough about planning where to lay my head. The things that escape you when you’re ten. I’d thought enough to bring a towel, in case I needed to clean myself up wherever it was I was going, but nothing intended to be slept on. Little me probably thought that a building would somehow appear that I could stay at, because I was a kid and no one would turn a kid away.

It kept getting darker. I wished my brother had taught me that fireball wheat kernel spell; that way I could have comfortably set a campfire no matter where I’d been. Since he hadn’t, I gathered what twigs I could find in the deepening gloom and tried to figure it out on my own. No dice. It probably would have helped if I’d had any kernels to begin with. I scoured the ground for breadcrumbs that had escaped me in the hopes that that would do. That was still wheat, right?

Even if they were, there weren’t all that many of them. I gathered them painstakingly under the twigs and muttered the hearthfire blessing. At least that always worked at home, albeit on blessed straw that every family kept for the purpose. The crumbs popped some sparks, then fizzled. Dismayed, I rushed to catch one of the sparks on the candy bar wrapper. It flickered and faded. I held my breath.

It nursed itself slowly on the paper, and I eased it down into the nest of twigs, still shaking. It felt like it took an hour to finally catch, which probably meant it took five minutes. Time stretches to a ten-year-old, especially a nervous one. I curled up in my towel and blew on the whole mess gently until it caught.

Next time, I caught myself thinking as I stared up at the stars, I’d come better prepared. The next thing I remember was waking in the morning, curled up on my side with the towel over me and the fire out.

“Hey, sprout.”

“AAAAH!” I bolted up, grabbing at the towel in terror. “Oh. It’s just you.”

“Mmhm.” Drew kicked the pile of burnt twigs into the creek. “Just me. And if you don’t want it to be just me and Mom and Dad, we’d better get back to the house.”

The way he said it was cheerful but somehow ominous, even to a little kid. I stashed my stuff quickly back in the hobo bag and shot to my feet. “But --”

“I know. It took you all afternoon to get out here. Don’t worry, I know a shortcut.” And with that mysterious pronouncement, he took me by the elbow and steered me away from the creekside. “Here’s the thing, Piet. You helped Miss Morency all day with her firewood, and were so tired you fell asleep at her place. She didn’t want to wake you so she sent us a message by runner last night. Got it?”

Miss Morency was our schoolteacher. Strict in the classroom, but pretty, and kind. Half the boys were in love with her and all of the girls wanted to be her. I blinked at Drew owlishly, trying to wrap my brain around the story. “Uh-huh,” I agreed, a dozen questions already bursting to mind, topmost of which was why my big brother was going so far out of his way to help me, and second of which was how we’d managed to get back to Front Street in what seemed like ten minutes or less.

“All right then. Ditch your bag where you can sneak it in later, and here we go.” He breezed into the house with me trotting behind him as if he’d been looking for me all along. “Just in time for breakfast, like she said,” he called out to our mom. The table was set for all of us, and she was just pulling pancakes off the stove. “Said he did a good job, too.” I did my best to puff up and look professional. Mom didn’t even bat an eye.

I never did find out what Drew had been up to that lone afternoon. My parents treated everything as if it were perfectly normal, despite what even ten-year-old me thought was a paper-thin excuse. All I know is that he spent the next several days holed up in his room working on something. He did that a lot. No one thought too much about it, although it had little-me piqued. Those multi-day hole-ups always meant he was coming up with something off the beaten path.

When my brother disappeared a couple months later, he didn’t come back.

#nanowrimo #ji writes #north end (working title)

[furynewsnetwork]

I receive far too many rations of shit from my fellow libertarians for pointing out things that President Cheeto is doing to further libertarianism.  Specifically, he is reducing government regulatory intrusion into business, he is calling out the corrupt and disingenuous press, and he is doing his damnedest to throw a monkey wrench – albeit incoherently at times [like, all the time] – into the unelected bureaucracy that actually runs everything political in this nation.  The Swamp, the Deep State, whatever you want to call it.

The rations of shit I receive go like this, “Yabbut, yabbut … he’s not a libertarian – you have no grounds to support him!”

I never claimed, nor have I ever implied, Donnie Combover to be a libertarian.  He is libertarian only to the degree that libertarian ideals are not inconsistent with his own priorities.  I’ve simply acknowledged that some of the things he’s doing are in our favor.  Until libertarians stop gazing into their navels and create a cogent, coherent political philosophy that deals with reality in a manner that large numbers of our fellow citizens can accept, the only way libertarians will get any part of their philosophy enacted is by such coincidence.  As long as Trump is doing those things that I – and we – favor, I will acknowledge that he’s doing them.  …as should every other libertarian, frankly.  Intellectual honesty counts for something.

The next ration of shit I am attempted to be force-fed is, “Yabbut, yabbut … he’s doing X, Y and Z that are very very anti-libertarian!!”

No kidding, and when the subjects of X, Y or Z come up – as they have many times – I will be found among the libertarians criticizing his policies or other efforts.  To be honest, I will criticize those efforts  substantially more intelligently than most other libertarians can muster, judging by what I’ve seen from fellow libertarians.  For I will criticize those policies, whether directly from him or from those in his administration, consistent with libertarian philosophy, and not from a position saturated with personal desire.

Case in point: the caterwauling over the directive given to federal prosecutors to advise mandatory minimum sentencing laws be invoked once more upon drug offenders.  We had just gone through an eight year hiatus from those laws under the Justice For Sale Barry Hussein administration.  I will say once again: the Attorney General does not have a legitimate luxury of picking and choosing which laws he will enforce, contrary to what Shyster Generals Holder and Lynch claimed.  The Executive branch is the law enforcer, not the law maker, nor the law reviewer.  If laws are stupid, then it is the legislature’s obligation to correct them.  If laws are unconstitutional, then it is the courts’ duty to nullify them.  I understand that mandatory minimums are stupid but, libertarians, please remember what political philosophy you claim to support.  Stop justifying a government that does what it wants despite the rules it must follow.

Besides which, because the nation is now beginning to wake up to the dual realities that mandatory minimums are stupid, and that drug prohibition in general – and marijuana specifically – is stupid AND not a legitimate federal power in the first place, the draconian enforcement of mandatory minimums on drug offenders may just push enough of our major-party fellow citizens out of their statist stupors to support a widespread correction of the matter.  But in the mean time, let’s pretend we’re better than idiot liberals.

It’s often at this point of the conversation that I point out that among the non-libertarians are both Ron and Rand Paul, Thomas Massie, and Justin Amash.  They, also, are simply doing a few things that lie coincidentally in the direction of libertarian ideals.  These individuals are simply more libertarian than, say [and my apologies for once again picking on liberal democrats], Maxine Waters, Nancy Pelosi, Chuckles Schumer, John McCain, Lindsey Graham …

But libertarians they are not.  If Rand Paul were a libertarian, he would not continually sponsor tepid legislation that would permit the courts to ignore mandatory minimums if, like, no one had a problem with it, or anything.  He’d instead sponsor a law that would completely rescind mandatory minimums.  And he’d also sponsor legislation taking drug criminalization out of the hands of the federal government and its unelected DEA dictators.

Similarly, if Justin Amash were a libertarian he wouldn’t be playing into the hands of the Deep State swamp by enabling the swamp’s frantic histrionics over a political outsider threatening the Deep State’s unelected way of life.  Libertarians who are libertarian are noticing that “the appearance of impropriety” is suddenly an impeachable affront to our form of governance when it has never been before.

Libertarians who are not libertarian, though, are lauding Amash for having the principle to acknowledge that the corrupt FBI director being fired for being corrupt looks bad enough to be impeachable, so therefore it is.  It looks bad because the corrupt FBI director was in charge of the agency investigating the allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign to swing the election to Trump.   It becomes “Obstruction of Justice” – i.e., inappropriately using the influence of the position of President to sway the activities of others.

Those investigations are continuing.  Firing Comey didn’t even provide a speed bump to them.  The “looks bad” argument is thus unsupportable.  No justice was obstructed there nor, by the looks of it, will it ever be.

Russia could not have swung the election by any illegal means in the first place.  Everyone with at least two brain cells to rub together in sentience understands this … which necessarily excludes most liberals.  The Deep State swamp understands this as well, but they’re too busy whipping up their insentient supporters to care.

For the record, the only two ways of illegally swaying an election are as follows: 1] Rig the vote-counting mechanisms so that 2+2=5 in Column A but 2+2=3 in Column B.  This did not happen; all precinct totals were tallied multiple times and – thanks to Jill Stein – tallied once again just to make sure. AND 2] Create individual votes that do not belong, or alter individual votes after they have been cast.  Because the US no longer uses paper ballots, altering votes after they are cast is simply impossible.  But it is very possible to create votes that do not belong … by voting multiple times under false names, or in multiple locations.  I don’t think I need to remind anyone of which political party does not wish to have Voter ID laws to reduce the occurrence of improper voting…

No.  If Russia did anything, it was to serve as a conduit for, or even instigator of, political espionage that made internal democrat party data public. …data that made Hillary “Medusa” Clinton look like the manipulative, drunken, corrupt, vile-tempered shrew she is.  Data that pointed out who manipulated her own party’s primaries to the dismissal of the socialist twit Bernie “Trotsky” Sanders.  In other words, if Russia did anything at all, it did what a free and independent press would have done to the democrats, just as they had been doing to the republicans, were there a free and independent press in the United States to do it.  But of course there isn’t, because they are corrupt and disingenuous as all libertarians understand.

Nonetheless, the libertarian hero, Justin Amash, abets the corrupt and manipulative unelected Deep State swamp by signing onto their frantic hyperbolizing about the “looks” of impropriety.  And he is called principled for doing so.

Yet where was Amash during the Barry Hussein administration when Barry impropriously attempted to manipulate a federal court reviewing his Obamacare, by claiming that courts do not have the Constitutional authority to review legislation for constitutionality?  The answer is: he was in Congress saying nothing about it.  He was especially not saying that Barry Hussein’s infantile challenge to the federal courts was a bad looking attempt at Obstruction of Justice at least as onerous as Trump firing the corrupt and mealy-mouthed FBI director Comey.  Amash didn’t have principles at this point.

Where was Amash during the Barry Hussein administration when Barry created, and validated, a treaty with Iran to the exclusion of the Senate which is Constitutionally required to ratify all treaties prior to their validation?  The answer is: he was in Congress saying nothing about it.  He was specifically not saying that the Iran deal was a thorough subversion of the Constitution by power manipulation and thus comprised an actual threat to the republic.  Actual power manipulations are significantly greater than the mere appearance of power manipulation.  Amash didn’t have principles at this point either.

Where was Amash from the winter of 2015 to the late summer of 2016 when Medusa  was found with tens of thousands of emails from her days as Secretary of State sloughed off onto a private, unsecured computer server hidden in her bathroom, among which were hundreds of classified conversation threads and – significantly more damning – evidence that the Clinton Foundation was selling foreign policy considerations to the highest foreign bidder, to be delivered upon the election of Medusa as President?  Answer: he was in Congress saying nothing about it.  Still no principles to be found in Justin Amash.

Where was he when Medusa’s husband, Cuckold Bill, visited Barry Hussein’s second Shyster General, Loretta Lynch, who was in charge of investigating the mishandling of classified information by ex-government officials … to “talk about grandchildren”?   By coincidence, or not, it was immediately afterwards that any meaningful investigation into Medusa’s classified data problem and her sale of future US foreign policy was dropped onto the lap of the same corrupt FBI director Comey.  Amash was in Congress saying nothing about it.  Still no principles.

Where was he when the corrupt FBI director Comey invented a brand new caveat under the “mishandling of classified data” laws saying that even though Medusa did in fact violate the same laws that hundreds of normal people are in prison for violating, and thousands more have permanently lost their clearances and can never hold a job for the government again, somehow, because Medusa did not “intend” to violate the law, there was no prosecutable violation of the law?  He was in Congress saying nothing about it.  A continuation of no principles.

If Amash – not to mention his libertarian acolytes – wish to claim that holding our government officials’ feet to the fire in the face of appearance of impropriety is a libertarian principle, I will eagerly agree.  Government officials in a free society are required to be beyond reproach.   …whether they are elected, appointed, or hired … But Amash did not realize he had a principle on this subject until Trump fired the corrupt FBI director for being corrupt.

The sad fact of the matter is, there isn’t a government official whose actions are anything but reproachable.  This includes Amash, Massie, either of the Pauls – and certainly includes Trump, his imperious authoritarian predecessor, and his drunken, psychotic challenger.

But Amash doesn’t stand on principle, here.  He forfeited any claim to principle when he sat idly by during the reign of Barry Hussein silently watching the guy, and virtually everyone under him, abuse their power.  I do not accept that Amash suddenly found Mises and became a born-again libertarian.  Anyone who claims Amash is acting to further libertarian philosophy for any reason other than coincidence is delusional.  Amash is furthering libertarian ends only insofar as they are not inconsistent with his own priorities – which in this case is significantly more consistent with protecting the Deep State swamp.

Except for protecting the Deep State swamp, he’s not much different from Trump.

The post I Know Why the Caged Libertarian Chirps appeared first on The Libertarian Republic.

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The Rules Of Texting (Explained By Guys)

A special thank you to Brittany and Kristi for the article inspiration, Anna for panel recruitment and research assistance, and to the panel of experts for contributing.

As single millennials, the Should I text him first? inevitably pops up in my friend group chats from time to time, followed by thorough deliberation. This time, I went straight to the source for the answers to what, if anything, is appealing about the chase when it comes to texting, what the game is about, and how to play. Five guys, ages 20 30, opened up about what goes through their minds before they hit send.

Our panel of eligible male millennials: (Names have been changed.) David, 20 Braden, 20 Cameron, 23 Ben, 27 Nate, 30

1. Are there rules to texting?

Lets cut to the chase pun intended. Four out of five of the guys said yes, there are rules to texting. According to Cameron, 23, the golden rules are to mind your grammar and abide by three strikes youre out if hes not responding: Always use complete sentences and never send more than three unanswered texts.

Nate, 30, says the golden rule is No emojis if you are over the age of 16.

Ben, 27, thinks it goes beyond whether or not you send those monkey emojis: I definitely think there are unwritten rules to texting. A lot of these rules are generated by society and pop culture, and dictate how we converse with one another. I think these rules are also reflective of the relationship you have with someone. The frequency and type of text definitely differs between friends, work associates, girlfriends/boyfriends, best friends, crushes, siblings, parents, etc.

Ultimately, I think there is a general set of baseline rules that most people follow like being polite, funny, respectful and then the rest just falls into personal expectations.

2. What is appealing about someone being hard to get?

There was a clear divide here. Two out of three of the 20 23 year olds said there is nothing appealing about someone being hard to get. David, 20, clarifies, It makes them seem conceited and uninterested. Nate, 30, weighs in with the younger crowd on this one, stating that nothing is appealing about a girl who is hard to get. He advocates the straight to the point approach: I am always one who is aggressive and goes after what I want. You know pretty quickly if someone is into you or if you are into them. Whether its via text, at a bar or Steak n Shake, hard to get is a thing of the past. I have noticed over past 3-4 years even females have been more aggressive in pursuit.

On the other side, Braden, 20, says, It makes them seem desirable; if lots of people want someone, then that person probably has something good about them.

Ben, 27, sheds more light on the appeal: [Its] the old adage of nothing easy is worthwhile. I think everyone can agree that the more time and effort you put into someone, the more interested you are. But being hard to get is definitely a game and

I think it totally depends on the type of person you are. Each individual has a different threshold of hard to get that they are willing to tolerate. When youre texting someone that you like and they are hard to get, its nauseating, exciting, and thrilling, waiting for someone to respond the fact that its new and unknown is exciting. The anticipation and re-reading of texts can drive you mad but its that pain and agony that makes it so much better when they respond.

3. How often is too often for a girl to text just to say hey?

According to Braden, 20, more than once a day is too often, while Cameron, 23, says texting just to say hey is always fine. Nate, 30, agrees that the text conversation should be open-ended to keep the conversation flowing.

Ben, 27, wants a more creative conversation starter. If you are actively pursuing someone, you better come up with something better than hey or you will lose their interest, he cautions. But dont underestimate the guys ability to play hard to get: However, if I know someone is interested in me, and maybe Im playing hard to get, just saying hey after a lull in conversation can let them know that Im still interested, but still give me the control.

4. Is it a turnoff if a girl is always the one to text you first?

We have a consensus here everyone answered no. Nate, 30, explains, Its 2016; Chivalry isnt dead, but her texting first is kind of a turn-on, actually. It shows interest. Ben agrees, adding that, It shows that she knows what she wants. If Im not interested, its not a turn-off, but it does become annoying if they continually

text you first when you dont show interest.

5. Are there weekend texts and weekday texts?

No surprises here Weekday texts are more conversational, and are meant to serve as distractions while at work. They are also sober texts (usually). Weekend texts tend to get more flirtatious, and the senders are more likely to have a drink in the other hand (you dont say).

Ben, 27, cautions the tipsy texters: Once you start drinking, you start texting less with your brain and more with your emotions, which can lead to a disaster the drunker that you get.

When asked the difference between a weekday text and a weekend text, Nate, 30, says that there isnt one unless it is after midnight and the bars are closing. I feel compelled here to remind everyone of the Jersey Shore wisdom of Nothing good happens after 2:00 A.M. (unless youre at Steak n Shake and Nate will be there with chivalry and cheese fries).

6. Is there a reason or strategy behind your texting habits?

Maybe the bad texter isnt always a myth. Some guys generally dont like texting as a whole. David, 20, dislikes communicating through texts because of the inability to convey emotions properly through words. Nate, 30, would also opt out: I am more of a phone caller, [it] shows more intimacy.

Unfortunately, the fear that the guys inbox is full of conversations with other girls may be a valid concern. That is, at least, if youre talking to Braden, 20: I treat it like a game where I try to talk to as many people as possible at the same time.

Ben, 27, is our breath of fresh air. Im not one for games, he says, and the older I get, the less and less I play them. But I do think it is important to not come off as desperate or clingy when first meeting someone, because you dont want to spook them. When can you expect a non-strategized text from him? After 2 3 dates, I usually stop worrying about the time or frequency of my texts as strategic, because I feel that I have a read on them and whether or not we like each other.

7. What is your favorite text to get from a girl?

Ill let the guys speak for themselves here.

David: I dislike all texts equally.

Braden: hey (:

Nate: pizza and hockey game?

Ben: I think that depends on the girl; for example, I loved getting hey there stranger from my first serious girlfriend who I took to prom. The words didnt necessarily mean anything, but between us it was an inside joke or something we always said to each other. So I think the best/favorite text to get from a girl is where they reference an inside joke; it shows they care without actually saying the words, and its unique to your relationship.

Cameron: Anything that means they were thinking of me (e.g. miss you/ something reminded them of me) and compliments.

8. When was the last time you ghosted a girl and why?

For questioning readers, Ill save you the Google search: Ghosting is when someone youre dating or talking to or seeing (#Dating in 2016 problems) ends the relationship by ending all communication without explanation or warning.

Interestingly, the 20 23 year olds werent as familiar with the term. David, however, appears well-versed in it. When asked when the last time he ghosted a girl was, he replied, This week, I didn’t want to talk to her. Fair enough.

However, sometimes ghosting is the simple solution to an online dating match gone bad. Ben, 27, last ghosted a girl after a first [Tinder] date. She had a lot of baggage, he explains, and brought up that she recently broke up with a boyfriend she had been dating for several years She was not ready to date and that was what I was looking for.

Nate last ghosted a girl last year: She said she was a Cubs fan.

9. Have you ever waited a day or longer to respond to a text? If yes, why?

Most of the panelists said yes, by accident or yes, to not come off as eager. Nate, however, knows better than to wait too long to reply to your text: You wont find yourself anywhere but the doghouse if you dont text back within a few hours.

The takeaway? To summarize the findings, here is the most important graph. Send the text. Keep it thoughtful If you were thinking about him, let him know. Mind your autocorrect, dont spam him, and be your witty self even if that calls for emojis (personal opinion). Happy texting.

Read more: http://tcat.tc/2jyDsoW

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