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jacquirebriggs · 4 months

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A Really Fair and Sincere and Proper Review of an 8-Bit Final Fantasy 4 port.

My Gameplay: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLf09CtI2VGXoyA4U0ot9QyIIylm4AvIiU

Alright. I know this place is not the best for Video Game reviews, but I want to get this out to advertise my stuff on my channel and before I ghost the place for good. I did a review on this game already, but it was short and the words move too fast. This time, I am going to make a proper review on this bootleg I decided to play out of boredom while I was wondering what will be my next discord stream.

I present you:

Zui Zhong Huan Xiang IV Guang Yu An Shui Jing Fen Zheng

Like I said, this game is an unlicensed Chinese NEs port of Final Fantasy IV. That’s already a language barrier here The playable characters are the same as the original. The portraits are the same, just mushed up to NES Pallete. The NPCs on the other hand are a different perspective. Mostly due to their portraits. I believe they are taken from other games. Some I believe are from Megaman (The “Baron Soliders”), a Dragon Ball Z bootleg (Female NPCs, Scarmiglione, Cagnazzo), and some unknown Dark Fantasy Game (Golbez is one of them.) Can’t the bootleggers easily just take the Head Portrait sprite and make it the dialogue portrait and call it that? I can do it in five seconds. Besides, Golbez is armored from head to toe. Not unmasked lol. Also, why are Dark Knight Cecil and Kain’s overworld sprites are mixed up? Kain’s Overworld sprite clearly has dragon horns. Can they not tell the difference? I can go on about Scramiglione having Zemus’s sprite, Barbariccia having Bomb’s but this nitpicking will eat up most of the review. Let’s move on.

Music is the next thing I wish to talk about. When you hear Chrono Trigger music when you start the game, you know it’s a bootleg. Any music taken from Final Fantasy IV is near to nonexistent. The Battle Music for enemies is played on when you fight Bosses. Makes the bosses more irritating considering how long the mid to endgame bosses take to kill them. Regular enemies get a squashed-up sample of Final Fantasy II’s generic enemy fight. The FF2 chiptune is only the first verse over and over… while the FF4 music oddly has the full song for some reason. Did I mention both tunes distorts into monotone when I used a certain magic? (Google Translates says it is Psychic which attacks with a flashy gear.) I rather have the NES-fied FF4 battle themes like the other FF4 bootleg has. Hence why in later parts, I slapped Fanmade NES-styled FF4 music mainly because I am tired of hearing that same old sampling. FF4’s wide variety of music is for enchanting the setting and mood of the game. Since this is the NES, of course none of this exists. Instead, we got the aforementioned Chrono Trigger music in the start (and possibly the map and other towns?) and a very questionable music choice:

The Chocobo Theme in castle-related areas. This makes the scene with Golbez very hilarious, that I cannot take it seriously.

The story may be mostly the same to the original, but it differentiates as I play through the end. Before I cover the story, I want to talk about the battle system first.

Gameplay:

The battle system is simplistic. It’s not a clone of earlier Final Fantasy Games. You still have 5 party members at a time, but you don’t get any magic spells from the canon games. You have to equip a magic stone to use magic; only of a single certain element. This sadly locks the mages out of various elemental damage…not that it matters because of reasons I will go over. AoE Magic is unlocked so late and by the time you unlocked it, you will be only fighting one enemy at a time. Healing Magic is scarce. Only thing besides Asura summon is unlocked at leveling the light stone to 3 or 4 and it is outclassed. Nice. Unlike the Final Fantasy VII NES port created by the same company. It has summons. You get summons as you progress and talking to some guy on a sidequest story that he’ll go with someone on a honeymoon. Depending on how you time them, they can be useful for dishing out extra damage and makes bosses easier. This is where go to the biggest flaw: Level progression and zero enemy variety. You deal so little damage even at the endgame. You can keep attacking with your weapon and spam magic, but you’ll get nowhere on leveling them up. (Even then you must visit a store to upgrade them.) Late game is such a slog because of this. I know Chinese companies are known for making their unlicensed ports really hard, but there’s a difference between difficult and GODDAMN near impossible. The basic enemies are always the EXACT SAME no matter where you encounter them. The only think different are they scale with how far you progress Also, most of them are taken from FF3 (even a few of the bosses) with the occasional Toad and Goblin Enemies actually stolen from the original games and devamped for the NES. Scripted battles are eliminated. Wanna know which boss fights.

Story:

If Google Translate properly tells the truth, then the story is the exact same as the original FF4, just having various key event removed. The Other FF4 bootleg only cuts Optional Areas, Tower of Babil and Giant of Babil. This NES ports cuts most of the endgame areas! I pay respects to the lack of Leviathan and Bahamut summons. I don’t care if they’ll take long to unleash, still extra damage. Some events have been repurposed in other areas in the Rom’s limited area selection. The events in the Underworld area for example has been relocated to Mysidia without the Calcabrina fight. (That’s okay. That fight is so annoying for me anyway.) Because of this, the story at the end is way different compared to canon. To spoil:

Yang and Cid sacrifice themselves after you get Edge. Edward joins the party at the end instead of Kain. (If you’re not gonna readd Kain at the end, at least pick a character that is endgame worthy like…*points at Yang.) The ending is really different. After Fusoya and Golbez kill Zemus with Meteor, Kain appears out of nowhere and defeat them. Kain’s Hatred causes him to transform into Zeromus and he absorbs FuSoYa and Golbez to become unstoppable. Of course, until we slowly kill him. And then what happens next? Kain dies. Fusoya and Golbez are dead. There is no implication that Cid, Yang, and the twins survive. All it gives is Golbez’s spirit telling to forgive him as his soul moves with light and dark shining the world and then it boots you back to the title screen. With little fanfare. I wanna get mad because I like Kain a lot, but is parts of the story taken from the FF7 bootleg of the same company? This may explain it.

Difficulty:

I think we’ve reached the boiling point that I will review. Amongst the greatest sin of bootlegs: The Diffcultly. Bootlegs games are notorious for them being extremely difficult. This is no exception. Not getting helped by the tedious grinding system, either. There are two difficult gauntlets. The one in Baron ( I have to unequip Palom and Porom and set myself up for a hard time.), no breaks on Yang, Baigan and Cagnazzo. And the grueling hard Zeromus gauntlet. Yes, endgame is brutal. I must slow down the summons to beat Zeromus. Not helped by how much HP he has despite trying my best.

Overall:

I believe Kain becoming Zeromus is better than most of the whatifs in Alter Destiny (besides Rydia being antagonist to Cecil for killing her mother, but even then: everything else went downhill.) I still can’t forgive the grueling difficultly or the questionable choice for Kain’s replacement. Since this port is like a sister of the NES FF7 port made by the same company, the problems will be the same as of course. I could give it a 1/10 but it’s a bootleg, so it wouldn’t be fair and I’m reviewing this rom in the Dawn of 2024 for some reason. Let’s give a fair review in bootleg standards. I’ll give this game a:

3/10. 5/10 disregarding the brutal difficultly.

My gameplay of this thing: Here

I present you:

Zui Zhong Huan Xiang IV Guang Yu An Shui Jing Fen Zheng

Also known as Final Fantasy IV: Light and Dark Crystal Conflict

Overall Setting:

Like I said, this game is an unlicensed Chinese NEs port of Final Fantasy IV. That’s already the language

Barrier here The playable characters are the same as the original. The portraits are the same, just mushed up to NES Pallete. The NPCs on the other hand are a different perspective. Mostly due to their portraits. I believe they are taken from other games. Some I believe are from Megaman (The “Baron Soliders”), a Dragon Ball Z bootleg (Female NPCs, Scarmiglione, Cagnazzo), and some unknown Dark Fantasy Game (Golbez is one of them.) Can’t the bootleggers easily just take the Head Portrait sprite and make it the dialogue portrait and call it that? I can do it in five seconds. Besides, Golbez is armored from head to toe. Not unmasked lol. Also, why are Dark Knight Cecil and Kain’s overworld sprites are mixed up? Kain’s Overworld sprite clearly has dragon horns. Can they not tell the difference? I can go on about Scramiglione having Zemus’s sprite, Barbarricia having Bomb’s but this nitpicking will eat up most of the review. Let’s move on.

Music is the next thing I wish to talk about. When you hear Chrono Trigger music when you start the game, you know it’s a bootleg. Any music taken from Final Fantasy IV is near to nonexistent. The Battle Music for enemies is played on when you fight Bosses. Makes the bosses more irritating considering how long the mid to endgame bosses take to kill them. Regular enemies get a squashed up sample of Final Fantasy II’s generic enemy fight. The FF2 chiptunr is only the first verse over and over… while the FF4 music oddly has the full song for some reason. Did I mention it distorts into monotone when I used a certain magic? (Google Translates says it is Psychic which attacks with a flashy gear.) I rather have the NES-fied FF4 battle themes like the other FF4 bootleg has. Hence why in later parts, I slapped Fanmade NES-styled FF4 music mainly because I’m tired of hearing that same old sampling. FF4’s wide variety of music is for enchanting the setting and mood of the game. Since this is the NES, of course none of this exists. Instead, we got the aforementioned Chrono Trigger music in the start (and possibly the map and other towns?) and a very questionable music choice:

The Chocobo Theme in castle-related areas. This makes the scene with Golbez very hilarious, that I can’t take it seriously.

The story may be mostly the same to the original, but it differentiates as I play through the end. Before I cover the story , I want to talk about the battle system first.

Gameplay:

The battle system is simplistic. It’s not a clone of earlier Final Fantasy Games. You still have 5 party members at a time, but you don’t get any magic spells from the canon games. You have to equip a magic stone to use magic; only of a certain elements. This sadly locks the mages out of various elemental damage…not that it matters because of reasons I will go over. AoE Magic is unlocked so late and by the time you unlocked it, you’ll be only fighting one enemy at a time. Healing Magic is scarce. Only thing besides Asura summon is unlocked at leveling the light stone to 3 or 4 and it’s outclassed. Nice. Unlike the Final Fantasy VII NES port created by the same company. It has summons. You get summons as you progress and talking to some guy on a sidequest story that he’ll go with someone on a honeymoon. Depending on how you time them, they can be useful for dishing out extra damage and makes bosses more easier. This is where go to the biggest flaw: Level progression and zero enemy variety. You deal so little damage even at the endgame. You can keep attacking with your weapon and spam magic, but you’ll get nowhere on leveling them up. (Even then you must visit a store to upgrade them.) Late game is such a slog because of this. I know Chinese companies are known for making their unlicensed ports really hard, but there’s a difference between difficult and GODDAMN near impossible. The basic enemies are always the EXACT SAME no matter where you encounter them. The only think different are they scale with how far you progress Also, most of them are taken from FF3 (even a few of the bosses) with the occasional Toad and Goblin Enemies actually stolen from the original games and devamped for the NES. Scripted battles are eliminated. Wanna know which boss fights .

Story:

If Google Translate properly tells the truth, then the story is the exact same as the original FF4, just having various key event removed. The Other FF4 bootleg only cuts Optional Areas, Tower of Babil and Giant of Babil. This NES ports cuts most of the endgame areas! I pay respects to the lack of Leviathan and Bahamut summons. I don’t care if they’ll take long to unleash, still extra damage. Some events have been repurposed in other areas in the Rom’s limited area selection. The events in the Underworld area for example has been relocated to Mysidia without the CalcaBrina fight. (That’s okay. That fight is so annoying for me anyway.) Because of this, the story at the end is way different compared to canon. To spoil:

Yang and Cid sacrifice themselves after you get Edge. Edward joins the party at the end instead of Kain. (If you’re not gonna readd Kain at the end, at least pick a character that is endgame worthy like…*points at Yang.) The ending is really different. After Fusoya and Golbez kill Zemus with Meteor, Kain appears out of nowhere and defeat them. Kain’s Hatred causes him to transform into Zeromus and he absorbs FuSoYa and Golbez to become unstoppable. Of course until we slowly kill him. And then what happens next? Kain dies. Fusoya and Golbez are dead. There is no implication that Cid, Yang, and the twins survive. All it gives is Golbez’s spirit telling to forgive him as his soul moves with light and dark shining the world and then it boots you back to the title screen. With little fanfare. I wanna get mad because I like Kain a lot, but is parts of the story taken from the FF7 bootleg of the same company? This may explain it.

Difficulty:

I think we’ve reached the boiling point that I will review. Amongst the greatest sin of bootlegs: The Diffcultly. Bootlegs games are notorious for them being extremely difficult. This is no exception. Not getting helped by the tedious grinding system, either. There are two difficult gauntlets. The one in Baron ( I have to unequip Palom and Porom and set myself up for a hard time.), no breaks on Yang, Baigan and Cagnazzo. And the grueling hard Zeromus gauntlet. The Tower of Zot streak comes close to being one of them. Thankfully, you can lose to Golbez when only Tellah fights him, but if you unequipped Kain and Rosa beforehand prepare for a very hard Barbariccia battle. Yes, endgame is brutal. I must slow down the summons to beat Zeromus. Not helped by how much HP he has despite trying my best.

Overall:

I believe Kain becoming Zeromus is better than most of the whatifs in Alter Destiny (besides Rydia being antagonist to Cecil for killing her mother, but even then everything else went downhill.) I still can’t forgive the grueling difficultly or the questionable choice for Kain’s replacement. Since this port is like a sister of the NES FF7 port made by the same company, the problems will be the same as of course. I could give it a 1/10 but it’s a bootleg, so it wouldn’t be fair and I’m reviewing this rom in the Dawn of 2024 for some reason. Let’s give a fair review in bootleg standards. I’ll give this game a:

3/10. 5/10 disregarding the brutal difficultly. It’s not the worst bootleg game. At least it can be finished without cheating if you’re determined. Unlike the other FF4, the three parter, where the game bugs out in the second part in Dark Elf Cave where you cannot move after entering. Someone I’ve watched have to do some hex editing on a save state to pull through. I’m pretty there’s something way worse that I won’t be aware of its existence.

Final Fantasy IV runs on the SNES system for a good reason.

#game review #final fantasy iv #final fantasy

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linguacoreana · 3 years

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We learn all kinds of languages. Many people learn languages like Chinese, which has over one billion speakers. Others learn something like Swedish with over 10 million speakers. Both are valid. There is no optimal number of speakers to learn a language, and there is nothing shameful about learning a very niche and rare language. Usually, if you learn Swedish, Nahuatl, or Amharic, you need to learn how to deal with a language with few resources.

Tip: Use native level content

You might have a difficult time finding content created for learners. You won’t find the slowed down, simplified language that is created for those learning. It will be difficult to find a YouTuber with a good budget that explains some deep grammatical differences. However, this is a blessing in disguise. Instead of being held down by the expectations of a learner’s mind, you can be thrown into the lion’s den.

By using native level content, you can actually accelerate your language learning process. You can see the language exactly how natives use it. There is no need to focus on the trite expressions that some phrase books are obsessed with. Also, you can focus on the words that natives use instead of the words that books say that natives use, which already focus on providing words that are helpful for specific basic grammar points. The native level content is much better at providing the words natives would actually use. In English, we would describe a cake as soft, dense, moist, or dry. That language might not use the equivalents of those particular words. You can see that yourself by observing how natives talk about certain things.

Tip: Talk to a native

Interactions with natives are one of the most important things you can do in any language. However, if this is a language that has few resources, this might be the most useful tool if used correctly. They’re going to help you fill in the gaps in your knowledge. If the gaps in your knowledge are so much, you’ll need to talk to natives a lot.

Language exchange is extremely important to any language learner, and it will be helpful if you have a native who speaks your language to a decent level. They have the experience you want, but it’s in reverse. They already have a mind for language. Ask them why they used this word. Don’t hesitate to ask them if the sentences you wrote sounded natural. People are kind to those who want to learn their language. Use that kindness to your advantage to reach your goal of improving your language skills.

Tip: Go undercover as a native on social media

Sometimes you don’t have native speakers around you. You could live far away from the country, or the immigrant community in your city may be very small and overly assimilated. You still need to see how natives speak. What’s the solution? It’s the answer to all life’s problems these days: go online.

Look at how people are speaking online and copy them. Make an account where you pretend to be a native. Why can’t you just openly admit you are a learner? Well, for research! Natives always lower their complexity when around learners, and this is especially true for natives of languages with very few learners. They have extremely low expectations for learners. You need to get around this by pretending you are a native.

As a native of English, I always assume mistakes in comments are the result of typos, not the result of a deficiency of the person’s English. (This is also why you should never apologize for your English, especially proactively. It primes the listener to look for mistakes.) Natives of all languages think the same. They will think your mistakes are the result of typos or carelessness. As such, they will give you a true view into the real language, which is what you desperately need when you are stuck with a language with few resources.

Tip: Wring out every source for all the content it has

When you deal with something with few resources, whether it’s Hausa or Basque, you cannot squander the few resources you are lucky enough to have. If you have a textbook, you better be memorizing every vocab word in that thing! There should not be a second thought of hesitation in your mind if there is a show from 40 years ago meant to teach English teachers the language. Beggars can’t be choosers. It does not matter how dated it is or how much second-hand embarrassment you get. You need to use every inch of the resources you have.

Tip: Look for resources at universities

If you are a university student, check your library’s collections for resources on this topic. I remember mine had every single language I could imagine. Every native American language and every African language I knew about existed in the library as a physical book or a digital copy on the library website. My university might have had a lot of resources, but I know our school was definitely not famous for its nonexistent linguistics department.

If you are too old for university, ask someone who is in university if they could check their university library for you. More often than not, university libraries can help. Universities order so many books that they don’t know what to do with them. I have really good memories of grabbing random language books on my library’s fourth floor and just reading. Usually, those books had never been checked out, or it had been at least 30 years since the last time. University students do not care why you need help; they will just help you.

Read more on my blog.

#minority language #minority languages #study #language learning #polyglot #hyperpolyglot #language #how to study #language study

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thechekhov · 4 years

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Hey Chekhov, it has been a few years since I logged into tumblr and checked on your blog, but I thought of a question for you the other day. I cannot remember what it was. However I have a handful of other ones that came up since I've been thinking of you. A lot of them are direct and I hope they don't come off as abrasive. Most are based on the assumption that you are still in Japan. Question 1: Is the fact that LGBT is criminalized in Russia part of the reason you stay in Japan? (1/?)

Hey there, welcome back to tumblr!

I’m going to put this under a cut so that it hopefully does not take up too much space on people’s dashboards, because it will get LONG!

I’m gonna preface this whole thing with first clarifying -

I have not lived in Russia for the past… 17 years. It’s been a while. Although I’ve been back to visit family for prolonged periods for numerous occasions, it’s not quite the same as a permanent residence there. So take what I say about russia with a grain of salt.

Before I moved to Japan, I was living in the states. I was in the states for about 12 years. I imagine that will color some of my answers in a specific way.

Question 1: Am I staying in Japan because Russian law criminalizes LGBTQ?

No. I’m staying in Japan because I currently have a job in Japan and also because American healthcare sucks. I have national healthcare in Japan and I rather enjoy not going bankrupt if I have to go to the hospital.

Now, granted, I’ve been propositioned by my grandparents and other family SEVERAL times (read: every time we talk on skype) to return to Russia and resume living there. The reason I refuse THAT is, by and large, because of the attitudes and laws towards LGBT in Russia. (: My spouse and I have even considered going to visit there, but we keep putting it off because we would have to take some significant safety risks, and it’s just dodgy.

Question 2: Was I ever outwardly LGBTQ+ in Russia?

No, not ever. Not beyond presenting androgynously in public (which I also tone down on when I’m over there).

I am not out to ANYONE in my family except for my mother, and although I make my opinions on matters of LGBTQ+ stuff quite clear when I’m with family, I am personally not mentally up for the amount of arguing that would ensue were I to come out to them.

Beyond that, my social circle of peers in Russia is nonexistent at this point. Any friends I used to have in my youth I’m no longer in touch with. When I go back, I interact with family and no one else.

Question 3: How am I navigating Japan’s strict immigration laws?

I’m not sure which laws you’re referring to specifically. I came in on a working visa, have renewed it multiple times throughout my contracts, and have now changed it over to a spouse visa. Aside from copious amounts of paperwork, I’ve not had any trouble.

Question 4: Has my androgyny caused me trouble at the workplace because I work with children?

So far, no. At least not to my knowledge. I know that at least SOME people read me as androgynous because when I was new at the office, I had an older man straight up go up to me and say (in English) “You - man or woman?”

Younger kids also can’t read me well and argue about my gender in front of me. Their teachers are usually very quick to ‘correct’ them, though. Teachers treat their inability to gender me on the first try as something embarrassing and seem to be mostly fine with my androgyny, perhaps finding it somewhat ‘unfortunate’ that I look the way I do. They’ve never been unkind about it, though, and my job has never been affected by it on a professional level.

Question 5: Do I have a background in art + education?

I actually have a background in Linguistics - specifically the acquisition of languages (second languages… foreign languages…) I’ve never taken art classes except for a Generals course in community college. It’s just something I do as a hobby.

BUT (segway time!)

Question 6: Does art provide a significant income for me?

Yes.

Which is actually shocking for everyone involved, especially me, because I never foresaw my art as being profitable, which is why I never went to school for it.

Now that my Patreon is thriving, I’m making QUITE the headway into repaying my student loans. Granted, I never thought it would be possible, but the fancomic I’m doing of the White Diamond AU gave my artwork so much more visibility that I’m now able to say I DO make a profit on my art and could probably continue to do so.

No one is more surprised than me! I do think that having a background in art can give you more TOOLS to start with. You can definitely make a living on art but it takes a while to get the momentum of it started, so having a backup steady job like teaching (as you mentioned) helps you stay afloat while you figure out the creative niches you have to fill.

For your last question regarding racism:

Racism in Japan is different than racism in the US (duh). Most of it is actually directed at Korean and Chinese and southeast-asian immigrants living in the country. In some ways, there’s also racism towards black people and latino people and etc - but it looks different than racism in the US, or racism in Europe.

I’m hesitant to say that white people experience ‘racism’ in Japan as such. There’s definitely xenophobia that’s running rampant in Japan as a whole, and there’s issues of fetishism on a HUGE scale - stereotypes GALORE! Some people literally try to get with a white person ONLY for the sake of having mixed-race babies because they are “cuter”. It’s uh. Super weird.

But frankly, that’s all really minor compared to what you get in the states. It will change, of course, depending on your race, but if you’re white, rest assured that you are likely to get special treatment in Japan instead of discrimination. (Though of course that comes with the bonus of having to field really weird questions based on myths perpetuated by being an isolated island country.)

If anyone else living in Japan wants to chime in, feel free, but that’s all I’ve got.

If you read this far...

#chekhov answers #Anonymous #russia #japan #lgbt #lgbtq #lgbtqia #lgbtqa

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auroraluciferi · 3 years

Text

a white supremacist apparently had an issue with this random post I made.

my post was about the shocked reactions people all over the world were apparently having to American ads for prescription drugs played on the break during the Meghan Markle interview.

the point I was trying to make is that the avalanche of consumer ads for prescription medicine is yet another insane hallmark of the profit-driven US healthcare system which most people fortunately do not experience and no one seems to fully understand.

I feel this one detail helps to breach the facade shielding the dystopian reality which divides us, and it helps to explain for many why the United States has been especially crippled by the effects of the global pandemic. the suffering, deprivation and cruelty of our health infrastructure is an essential feature of capitalism, not a glitch. For many people it has been a time of reckoning.

so this worthless asshole clearly decided now was the time to plant his racist flag - he messaged several times over two days, then I guess he got upset with what I was saying and blocked me.

what follows is unpleasant and contains racist and deeply offensive language, copied verbatim from my inbox and chat.

it has been formatted to fit your television screen.

dee6000 submitted:

Can your socialist BS. The ads/big pharma are separate from or profit medicine. What harmed US medicine was result of democrat politicians copying Europe’s socialists that treated citizens rights with contempt. In the past US medicine was the envy of the world, British, Europeans, Canadians many others would travel here to receive care. Dems blocked enforcement of immigration laws hospitals went bankrupt and taxpayer funded medicaid was overburdened. Just as the influx of tens of millions of illegal aliens and migrants caused rents to skyrocket and wages to be dragged down. Hospital based infection skyrocketed as well hospitals started hiring illegal aliens who did not follow cleaning rules. These infections weren’t new, they are the norm in Latin America and other third world countries. Years later these hospital infections started showing up. Obamacare requires doctors under threat of fines to refuse to perform some diagnostic testing on some patients. Socialist and communist countries have even worse outcomes. And Britain and Europe are experiencing the results of 3rd world imported substandard doctors and nurses.

@auroraluciferi:

lmao. "ads/big pharma" are somehow "separate" from for profit medicine and everything else is the fault of these filthy immigrants from the third world

good luck with whatever ax you're trying to grind

dee6000:

Lmao, people controlling their own labor, by charging for their work, unlike in your communist, socialist sewers where the government elites enslaves people and profit off those slaves like parasites.Big pharma came about under globalism, globalism is Trotskyite international communism. Prior to Clinton’s pushing manufacturing out of the US, US pharmaceutical companies manufactured product here, under fda law, the drugs were tested. Now drugs made in communist China and socialist India are not manufactured safely, there is no oversight, illnesses have resulted as a result and while workers in those countries are abused hypocrite Chinese and Indian elites profit. You might resent truth but that is your problem. Superbugs took hold in western countries as they started allowing displacement of their citizens in health care jobs, from cleaning, nursing, etc with third world people, who yes do not respect hygiene and health and safety rules. That is a fact. When US citizens cleaned hospitals and nursing homes there were no superbug outbreaks, before illegal aliens were illegally working in US food manufacturing, children weren’t being sickened and killed from eating ecoli, salmonella, and mold contaminated peanut butter and peanut products as dozens of children and adults were in 2008-2009 when Peanut Corporation of America machinery then operated and “maintained” by illegal alien Mexicans, had developed toxic black mold because the illegals didn’t bother cleaning the machinery despite knowing that was the jobs they were paid to do. Hearings in congress were held and parents spoke about it. I don’t care what you think, I know you are a fascist

@auroraluciferi:

Okay then, I'll humor you - honestly I feel sorry because it clearly took a lot of effort and mental gymnastics to type up that word salad you sent me. Let's look at each of the "points" you just tried to make.

"People controlling their own labor by charging for their work" - that is a laugh. How exactly do you control your own labor if you are forced to sell it to the lowest bidder, competing against millions of others? If a business lays you off or goes bankrupt due to mismanagement, market fluctuations, accidents or a natural disaster, your labor then becomes worthless. The choice you are given as an employee or contractor unsupported by social welfare programs is "accept whatever pathetic wage we decide your labor and time is worth" or "lose your home and starve to death".

Your idea of "control" is an illusion in an economic system where human survival is based on abritrary market conditions and greed rather than the quality of life itself.

"Big pharma came about under globalism, globalism is Trotskyite international communism." - are you suggesting that some of the largest and most profitable companies on earth are the result of a global, communist conspiracy? Johnson & Johnson, Bayer AG, GSK and others follow the corporate conglomeration and consolidation model pioneered and perfected by 19th and 20th century capitalists and industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, William Hearst, and Cornelius Vanderbilts. Hardly a group of jaded communist revolutionaries.

The multinational companies they founded and combined have systematically destroyed competition within their respective industries, forced both their consumers and employees to accept substandard, dangerous products and poverty wages, then used their wealth to influence both conservative and liberal politicians to deregulate industries and labor laws for their own benefit. All done by willing and eager students of Adam Smith, not Karl Marx.

"Prior to Clinton’s pushing manufacturing out of the US, US pharmaceutical companies manufactured product here, under fda law, the drugs were tested." - I assume here you're talking about NAFTA and Clinton-era regulations, both of which were enormous gifts to those same companies I just described.

These manufacturers left America to gild their pockets by voluntarily exploiting the workers of countries that do not have labor laws, have substandard or nonexistent environmental protections, and would accept even lower wages than Americans. They could have easily remained in the US, paid higher wages to American workers, followed the most basic regulations, and still would have made obscene levels of profit - the demand of shareholders for more profit motivated the outsourcing of US jobs, not because a spineless corporate lackey like Bill Clinton forced them to.

At the same time, NAFTA enabled US agribusiness to flood the Mexican and Central American economy with cheap, government-subsidized corn - instantly destroying the ability of Mexican farms to collectively set fair prices, driving millions facing starvation and poverty into cities and ultimately North into the United States. It's pretty ironic that your illegal immigration crisis was created by massive corporations supported by the US government, but I guess that's inconvenient history for you.

Again, this is another pretty obvious feature of capitalism, not communism or socialism. Businesses have a natural tendency to cut expenses and maximize profit any way they can. In an actual socialist system, there would be no incentive to do that - healthcare and medicine would be provided as a right, rather than a paid-for privilege as exists in our current system. Workers would not have to compete with each other to survive if their basic needs were provided for.

Also just thought you should know, the FDA regulations apply both to drugs that are imported just as they are to drugs that are manufactured in the US. Furthermore, there would be no FDA at all without American socialists, reformers and consumer advocates pressuring Congress into creating it - not sure how you can pretend otherwise. It was made specifically to address how the 19th-20th century market failed to "self-regulate", resulting in toxic food and drugs manufactured here, in the US.

"Superbugs took hold in western countries as they started allowing displacement of their citizens in health care jobs, from cleaning, nursing, etc with third world people, who yes do not respect hygiene and health and safety rules." - This is pretty racist, and also the opposite of reality. "Superbugs" are the natural result of bacteria and viruses adapting and evolving to ever increasing levels of antibiotics, antivirals, and hyper sanitation in our food supply and cleaning products, as well as natural mutation. Diseases like the coronavirus are inevitable - the US has failed to respond effectively because our for-profit healthcare system does not have a market incentive to create stockpiles or public infrastructure to combat an outbreak, whether it's from China or Cleveland, Ohio.

People from other countries know how to wash their hands. They know how to clean. You have absolutely no evidence which would dispute that, just your own feelings and the idea that filthy brown people caused this totally avoidable disaster rather than a lack of basic planning.

Finally, when people are sickened by improperly cleaned equipment or tainted food and medicine, it is the result of a failure by the manufacturer or producer to properly train and supply their facilities out of negligence, to save on operating expenses, or because they ignore existing regulations and are not penalized for doing so - not because there is an army of dirty, ignorant Mexicans at the controls. Untrained, underpaid, and unsupervised workers will have a greater tendency to make mistakes regardless of if they are White Americans or immigrants.

"Facts" and "truth"? I don't see anything besides your own personal bias, poor logic and uncited bullshit that you have no proof of. The American healthcare system and things like advertising for drugs on TV are mocked and reviled across the rest of the world because people can clearly see how vulnerable it is to inevitable pandemics like this.

But I guess there will always be people like you who are happy to ignore reality and instead demonize normal working people for fleeing their capitalist-raped economies and come here in an attempt to provide for their families - exactly the same thing you would do in their situation.

dee6000:

Lmao! Then explain why for decades and they, the WHO, Doctors Without Borders and other wastes of resources still bemoan the fact that in Latin America, take Mexico for example the majority of the people not only don’t wash their hands before eating a meal, they don’t wash their hands after going to the bathroom. They send nurses into schools to make a game of washing one’s hands but it doesn’t take. Next you’ll tell me that it isn’t true that child rape is part of Latin American culture. Mexico is so substandard health and hygiene wise that it’s water supply is contaminated with feces. Which is why foreigners are warned not to drink it or anything with ice in it. Because intestinal diseases, parasites are the norm. Go into any hospital in the US that employs illegals and they do not smell like antiseptic but dirty. I do not care what you think, the data shows superbugs started showing up in the US a decade after hospitals and nursing homes felt entitled to ignore employment laws and hire illegals. And yes, US corporations that off shores and were indulged by communist China and the rest that have no environmental regulations, no labor laws (because under communism and socialism the people are slaves of the state) are only paid what the government thinks they deserve which is very little) they could profit more, or so they think. They became addicted to it and allowed their patents etc to be stolen. Under capitalism a worker has the right and power to reject a low wage. Under capitalism in the US a middle class grew and flourished, and poverty shrank. Under democrats and RINOs, who serve the same interests as democrats, the Clinton, Bush’s and Obozo the middle class was decimated, and poverty skyrocketed. Under Obozo more people became homeless, more so than during the Great Depression. You can spin and spin all you like. Your lies fall apart easily. Under illegal alien invaded democrat run California, the streets are tent cities, cholera, typhus and the plague have been found in Los Angeles, as well as other diseases.

At this point, he apparently blocked me. I didn’t realize this until after I was done writing my response, but here it is anyways

@auroraluciferi:

It's pretty clear you feel all of your grievances can be blamed on those black and brown people and "Communist" China that you hate so much. I feel sorry for you, but I don't actually believe that anything I say is going to change that.

Your illusions are so wrapped up this weird ethnocentric pride and your comforting blanket of privilege that you're basically helpless against what's coming. You're burning all this energy being angry at people of color for "wasting" resources you apparently feel you are especially entitled to, when you can't even see that the scarcity of those resources is a dominant feature of capitalism.

The wealthy and powerful who benefit from that scarcity - both here in the US and in China - look down at sad little racists like you and they clink their champagne glasses together and smile. By blaming their crimes on Mexicans or whoever it is you clutch your pearls about, you're just making it easier for them to divide and conquer the working class globally.

So go ahead, do their work for them - whatever makes you happy.

Waste all your time and energy hating someone you do not know, whose experience and culture you do not know. Blame all the diseases and scarcity and crime on them, instead of on the cruelty and pointless waste of capitalism

Squabble over the pathetic little crumbs they kick down to you from above or whatever you can compete with against your neighbors for, then proudly claim your little dirt heap for an imaginary concept of white culture.

Like I said before, good luck with that.

#2021 #us #united states #healthcare #health #racism #meghan markle #oprah #interview #pharmaceutical industry #big pharma #ads #advertising #racist ask #@dee6000

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better-be-reddie · 4 years

Text

Absconding, Aberrations, & Alligators

'It starts with Richie standing on a small stage in front of a decent crowd. It's been a good four months since his giant fuck up in Chicago- four months since the great Sewer Tour sequel- working title. He's finally working to get his career back on its feet, before he no longer has an agent or manager or all the other people that make his career somewhat functional. They're starting him off small, a test run to see if he's over whatever mental breakdown that caused him to bomb his last show and cancel the tour he'd been in the middle of. Spoiler Alert: he was just getting started.'

Richie takes an impromptu trip to Florida, somehow it all works out.

Hey! So I posted this fic to ao3 awhile ago but now that I have a blog I’m porting it here too. Rated T for language I guess No warnings, just 11,000 words feat. Richie’s gay crisis.

It starts with Richie standing on a small stage in front of a decent crowd. It's been a good four months since his giant fuck up in Chicago- four months since the great Sewer Tour sequel- working title . He's finally working to get his career back on its feet, before he no longer has an agent or manager or all the other people that make his career somewhat functional. They're starting him off small, a test run to see if he's over whatever mental breakdown that caused him to bomb his last show and cancel the tour he'd been in the middle of.

Spoiler Alert: he was just getting started.

Apparently Richie "Trashmouth" Tozier was never really off his bullshit. It's just, the nearly nonexistent filter he did manage to keep was corroding faster than he could keep track. And if he's being honest, it didn't actually start on that meager lounge stage in LA.It didn't even start three months ago when answering a knock at his front door forced him face to face with one Edward Kaspbrak, fresh from serving his now ex wife-mother monstrosity divorce papers.

"Just looking for a place to lie low for a bit." Eddie had shrugged in front of his small mountain of suitcases.

"What and they ran out of fucking housing in New York?" Richie had come back with.

"Fuck you, man! You said if I ever needed-"

"Yeah yeah," Richie made sure to cut off the would-be rant, "Get in here then." He'd said, throwing the door open and stepping aside, letting Eddie into his sorry excuse of living quarters.

He quipped and sassed his best in order to keep the fact that he was internally screaming hidden. Especially when he noticed all of Eddie's little facial ticks giving away just how abysmal he found Richie's standard of living. The thing was, when they had parted ways in Derry, Richie had been ready to let go, to push down his feelings and the impossible level of affection he'd held for his friend. Afterall he had lived twenty-something odd years of his life without Eddie, so he reasoned that he could keep on living without him.

That's what he had told himself anyway, over, and over, and over in the month it took Eddie to just show up unannounced. Richie didn't want to admit just how awful his pining had gotten those four weeks alone, but it had been bad. Somehow being reacquainted with the man had set off his aching heart almost more than he could care to control. But no, this shitstorm he was about to set off didn't start that day three months ago, nor any of the subsequent days after wherein Eddie settled in and became an integral part of Richie's daily routine. It didn't even start those four months ago when Richie walked into that damn Chinese restaurant and saw Eddie for the first time in decades, which had him falling dick-first into one hell of a sexuality crisis. Again. It didn't start when they were awkward, gangly thirteen year olds and Richie was stabbing his hands full of splinters in order to carve an embarrassing hommage to his dear first love on the rails of the Kissing Bridge. If Richie was being honest with himself, which he rarely ever was, he would admit that it all started a good thirty-four years or so ago when Richie was fresh into the first grade. Sometime after he'd mastered his ABC's but before he got his glasses that would magnify his eyes and really solidify his place as a loser; early enough that Richie would brag about being a master of mud-pies but back before anyone knew he was certifiably blind, except for Stan and Bill who worked as mediocre guide-dogs while everyone else just labeled him as a clumsy kid.

It was a cool fall day when Stan and Bill hadn't been around which left Richie particularly vulnerable to his "clumsiness", this time to the result of him tripping and scraping his hands up. Richie had huffed and tried to wipe the mud off his palms and onto his pants when a pair of sneakers entered his bleary vision.

"You should really clean off that dirt." The newcomer spoke.

"What?" Richie had asked dumbly.

The smaller boy sighed and readjusted the fanny pack strapped to his waist before replying, "If you don't wash the dirt out and patch up your cuts they'll get infected and you'll die."

Richie had been startled but also bemused. He got cuts and scrapes all the time, and was almost always covered in dirt from playing.

"I won't die!"

The boy shook his head, "my mommy told me that if you keep dirt in a cut it'll go bad. You don't want to have to go to the doctor and sit in the awful rooms just to make sure they don't need to cut anything off."

Richie laughed, "That sounds fake, why would they cut anything off?"

"If the cut goes bad they might have to!" The boy spoke, growing irritable, "Know what? Forget it, I might have something in my pack." The boy dug around in his overly stuffed fanny pack making Richie smile."Got it, now hold still and let me fix your gross hands." The boy said, followed with, "I'm Eddie, by the way."

Richie's smile grew at how the boys- how Eddie's voice turned shy as he introduced himself.

"I'm Richie."

It was that moment, decades ago on a school playground, that had started the chain of events that would build, and build, and build until Richie was so unbelievably in love that he would never really be able to move past it. It was the first domino in a series of ridiculous and probably ill advised life decisions that would leave him standing on a small stage in LA about to segue into his next joke featuring the infamous "girlfriend" character his writers just loved him to bitch about. It was a bit that he had rehashed over and over in his different routines, this new variation he had mastered last week before ever setting foot in the small lounge.

That was probably why his mind was elsewhere as he began, he was debating in the back of his head what Eddie would like for dinner later, whether he should pick up take out on his way home or it took him a moment to realize that the next words out of his mouth were not exactly what he'd practiced from his script,

"So, my boyfriend Eddie and I decided to try and -" Richie stumbled on the sentence, his brain kicking in a moment too late as a couple surprised noises came from the audience, and a few claps and hollers rang out.

Thirty- something odd years of pining and daydreams of the day he'd finally get to call Eddie his had finally broken through his shitty barrier and merged his fantasies with reality. Boom. Domino effect.

Richie began to realize not only had he just come out, unscripted onstage, but also that this show was being streamed online...live.

He also knew that he couldn't afford to fuck this up, or make it look like he'd fucked up again so he stumbled his way through through rest of the sentence and ad-libbed the joke with alarming grace considering he felt like he was about to throw up.

His manager was going to kill him.

He knew taking it back would have only ruined the show made it even more impossibly awkward, so he pushed on until the act was complete, rushing off the stage a little more quickly than he normally would, if only so he could hide behind the scenes and panic good and proper.

If Richie's manager didn't take him out in the next five minutes, Eddie surely would.

---

Richie had less than five minutes alone to panic in the dingy back hallway that lead to the club's emergency exit before his manager was marching up to him.

"You had one job!"

"I-I know!" Richie said, voice possibly a tad strained.

"Rich, what the hell."

"I know !"

"You're single handedly making me go grey! Okay calm down- we can- we can roll with this- see online opinion polls and then come up with a strategy. God we might have to renegotiate-"

But Richie wasn't listening to him anymore, he didn't have the brain capacity to listen or be grateful to the man who had, once again, watched as Richie doused himself in gasoline and lit a match. He should have felt bad for the guy, and maybe when his own panic died down he would, his manager was only trying to offer an extinguisher. He definitely felt like he was on fire- and not in the good way of speaking. Sweat dripped off his brow and his skin prickled as his stomach churned, twisting and writhing itself into knots. All he seemed to be aware of was the near constant vibration against his thigh that his phone was giving off, as it blew up with notifications.

Richie's hands shook as he reached for his device, the finger scanner refusing to work due to the alarming dampness of his hands. He unlocked the phone using his code instead and balked at the notifications. He could see Bev’s name pop up next a bold 10 to indicate how many messages she alone had sent so far, and the little numbers over his text app were steadily going up as the rest of the losers blasted him.

Great.

Good to know he had an audience.

His heart seized as the screen changed suddenly and Eddie's picture took over, blocking his home screen. It was a great picture, a wonderful candid Richie had taken of Eddie in one of his full blown road rage meltdowns. Richie had laughed heartily when he'd seen how the picture turned out; Eddie, on the other hand, had been less pleased and demanded he delete it. Naturally Richie made it the man's profile picture instead. The photo always managed to get a giggle or smile out of him as if he were some schoolgirl with a crush. He wasn't laughing now. His eyes darted between Eddie's comically angry face and the green answer call button. Richie felt frozen unable to respond as the tightness in his chest grew, he felt dizzy as the walls closed in around him. The vibration of the phone stopped and the screen flipped back to his home page. A new notification for another missed call appeared, followed seconds later by a notification for a new voicemail.

Richie gasped and began to move quickly towards the exit door shouting an excuse to his manager who called out in alarm behind him. He all but fell against the metal door and staggered out into the hot LA sun, the thick air and humidity nowhere near the relief he wanted against his already flushed skin.

His phone jumped to life once more, vibrating in his hands as Eddie's familiar picture flashed onto the screen once more. Richie gulped and swiped over the green answer button and brought the device up to his ear with shaking hands.

"Richie? Fucking finally- what the hell?"

Richie's eyes widened and he quickly hung up, nearly dropping the phone in order to do so. He didn't know whether to laugh or scream, an uncanny hysteria bubbled in his chest and everything just felt like too much. Eddie must hate him. There was no way he couldn't. His phone alerted him to text another text.

Eddie.

'You better have been disconnected.'

Richie's phone rang again. Richie swiped to ignore.

'Pick up. We need to talk.'

Panic seized him. There was literally no good reasoning behind the phrase ' We need to talk.' God, he even added a period at the end. His phone rang. The panic boiled, crested in a mind blanking peak.

Richie blinked owlishly at the broken remains of his phone. Shattered against the dirty pavement of the alley. Great.

"Hey...Rich?"

Richie definitely did not jump. He turned to see his manager behind him, peeking out from the door.

"You good bud?"

He was definitely not good.

"Yeah. Yeah, sorry."

"Okay, okay, you sure? Cause you sort of seem not good?"

Richie had a strong sense of deja vu all of the sudden. He shook his head. His mind was coming back online and he had no idea what he was supposed to do. He couldn't just stroll into his house like nothing was wrong, Eddie was waiting for him at home and Richie liked his dick attached to him thanks. He looked back to the shattered phone.

"Hey can I borrow your phone?" His manager side-eyed him dubiously, cautiously and then the broken phone on the ground.

"I guess- as long as it isn't going to end up like that."

Richie's first instinct had been to call Bill, he was closest afterall, and he was the man with a plan; but that would have been his most obvious move. Eddie would no doubt storm the place in the midst of a rage so deep Richie didn't even want to picture it. So Bill had been mentally crossed off his list. Stan, Richie loved , as much as he could platonically love someone, but that would be obvious too. Plus he and Patty had been on somewhat of a retreat. Something about doing something relaxing and therapeutic after nearly dying and Richie really didn't feel like intruding on that. Beverly would have his back. She would laugh in his fucking face, but she would also give him one of her hugs after and let him mope. The problem with Bev though, is that she came with Ben. Now Richie adored Ben, it was literally impossible not to, however all it would take was one angry look from Eddie and the man would crumble faster than a house of cards in a hurricane. He couldn't lie for shit, especially when emotions were high. And that really left Richie with one last alternative. Which is how he found himself stepping off a plane, with no more than his wallet and the clothes on his back, half way across the god damn country, in fucking Florida. Richie looked around the airport as if it had personally offended him, and honestly it sort of did simply for being located in such a subpar fucking state. He really didn't see what the hell Mike saw in the place. He really didn't get it. Speaking of Mike.

"Richie!"

Richie looked up and saw the man of the hour waving him over. Mike beamed at him and greeted him with arms wide open.

"It's good to see you man!" Mike said,

"Yeah, yeah you too." Richie agreed.

It was good to see Mike again, they'd stayed in contact the same way they all had; through group chats and Skype calls mostly but this was the first time since they all separated in Derry that Richie had seen Mike in person. He really wished it was for better reasons. And not in Florida.

"Alright, let's get your bags and then we can head out. There's a good diner not far from my place, I think you'll enjoy it."

Richie shuffled awkwardly, "I'm all here man!"

Mike looked confused for a moment then somewhat incredulous."You- you're all-? Did you not bring anything with you?"

"I said it was an impromptu trip didn't I?" Richie said.

The look Mike shot him appeared as if he were waiting for Richie to crack a joke, when none were forthcoming his brows raised.

"Alright man. I guess we can stop and pick you up some stuff you'll need. I have an extra toothbrush at home you can-"

"You were always the most prepared outta us!" Richie cheered possibly putting too much energy into a...toothbrush.

Richie knew it was weird, the whole situation was weird. He knew it was weird, and he knew Mike now knew it was weird. He could only hope that his fake enthusiasm could be obnoxiously distracting enough that Mike would let it slide unquestioned.

"Uh-huh." Mike said still eyeing him up, "Well, follow me I guess."

Richie breathed out a sigh that at least they weren't going to have this conversation in the middle of the Arrivals gate.

Mike's home was small but cozy, it had the foundations of something older with character that had maybe been remodeled sometime in its recent history. The living areas were clean but cluttered; books, and notebooks, and loose leaf were strewn around in somewhat organized heaps that probably made sense to Mike and Mike alone. The home was nestled amongst a forest of tall trees and brush that gave a sense of privacy, and to the side was a barely visible trail which Mike had pointed to when they pulled up and told him went straight to a little beach. Richie had eyed it dubiously, on one hand, beach day but on the other hand, he didn't feel like running into any gators, or snakes, or whatever the fuck else lived in this hellscape of a state. If he wanted to die that badly he would've stayed in LA thank you.

The first night the two of them had enjoyed boxes of take out which were supplemented by maybe a bit too much alcohol. They talked into the night, catching up in a roundabout way that dodged the elephant in the room. Of course that was mostly in part to the way Richie would circle the conversation back around to another of Mike's many research projects whenever the man looked like he was readying himself to broach the subject on what the real reason for Richie's visit was. Apparently Mike had been in an out of service area at the time of Richie's show and either hadn't yet heard about the disaster that it was or was too polite to corner him about it. Still, it sort of left Richie feeling like he was waiting for the other shoe to drop. Then again, that could have also been caused by the fact that he was still without a phone and thus had no clue how extensive the damage he caused actually was. Well, he had a tiny idea. He'd already ruined the best damn thing in his pathetic life, what did the rest of it matter? Richie ended up taking the bottle of vodka to bed with him that night.

The next day Mike took them both into town to pick up some more things for Richie under the disguise of grocery shopping. During which, Mike casually asked if Richie was thinking of replacing his phone.

"You said it broke right?"

"Yeah," he sighed, " Yeah, okay I guess I should get on that."

Before his manager had a full on aneurysm. He was sure his publicists were already dead from shock or stress.

After spending way too long in a small outlet shop in a nearby strip mall Richie finally had a new phone set up. Richie played with the device as Mike drove them back towards his house. He hadn't turned it on yet, he simply passed the phone from hand to hand, it gave him something to do. He got the same model as the one he'd broken so that he could keep using his old SIM card. He told himself that he would turn it on once he got inside, face the music. Of course once the two made it back Richie went about the rest of his day doing anything but set up his phone. Richie even let Mike lead him down the death trail to the small beach, which would have been really nice had it not been in Florida.

"And not a gator in sight!" Richie said enthusiastically as he sat on the sandy shore.

"You joke, but that pic I sent you guys last week was only a twenty minute walk from here, in a river that a-ways." Mike gestured behind and to the left of where they sat and Richie shot him a dirty look.

"I came here to try and relax."

Mike only laughed.

That night, after the sun had set in a myriad of colors much less impressive than the ones which shone in good ol' Cali. Richie found himself curled on a deck chair Mike had on his front stoop, watching the moths and other bugs circle the porch lights with an intense fixation, the darker it got the more of them had appeared. His phone was once again in his hands. It had been charging all afternoon, face down on the coffee table. He sighed and finally stopped his fidgeting to turn his attention to the device. He waited for it to load up after he turned it on. Before long he was staring at the familiar screen, there was only about a second of silence before the phone jumped to life and loaded the-

Jesus Christ -over a hundred notifications. He felt a little bad as he skimmed over the list of people vying for his attention, mostly he had messages from the Losers. Maybe it had been a kind of dick move to drop off the face of the earth for two days. He quickly turned to his email. He winced at the couple he had from sponsors. Well, former sponsors he assumed without having to open them.

He instead concentrated on the email from his manager.

'Alright Rich, I'm assuming you still have access to email, despite your sudden vacation but please make sure you tell me when you have a reliable phone, I'd like to discuss some things further. Good news: Your live-stream is trending, and there's been a lot of supportive interest within a whole new demographic. With a little work-shopping we can pull this all back together and make something out of it. Bad news: we lost a few sponsors, some of the higher ups weren't happy with your unpredictability. Also there's been some negative press from some previous demographics, as well as some confusion on whether you were serious in your bit. After hashing things out with the team we think you should start forming more of an online presence, we are working on getting your Twitter verified. Make a statement, control the flow of rumors, if you would like I can talk to the writers about coming up with a statement for you. We need to encourage support from this new demographic by reassuring people your coming out bit wasn't just a bad joke. Call me once you've read this, and get your ass back to LA.'

Richie let out a shuddering breath. A bit of the hysteria he had felt back in LA had begun to crawl up his spine. He could feel his pulse quicken at the mere thought of taking to social media, especially to what? Tell everyone he's gay? Again? Hadn't the first time been horrific and awkward enough?

His teeth clenched together as he worked his jaw until it ached, his breath seemed to burn his nostrils and tightly wound throat with every motion. Emotion thick and cloying wrapped around him until he felt as if he were drowning. He felt the sudden urge to jump up and run. As if he had anywhere to go in fucking Florida that wouldn't end with him in the jaws of some ugly reptile.

He placed his phone to the side and rubbed his hands together, feeling inexplicably dirty suddenly. He had run half way across the country and he still felt just as bad as he had in LA. All the gross intrusive thoughts were still there, the voices telling him how disgusting he was, how he'd disappointed his friends, driven them off. That he'd wind up sad and alone again. Behind that overwhelming fear was shame, shame that he had been lying for so fucking long, and yet behind that was the fear of anyone finding out, which circled back to more shame over his feelings to begin with. He shot his phone a scathing look. His manager wanted a statement? What the fuck was he supposed to say? What the actual hell was he supposed to Tweet out? ' Hi guys, it's true, I love cock but don't worry I hate myself more than any of you ever could!' ? Yeah, like that would go over well. Richie tried to amuse himself by picturing the look on his publicists face. God, it was suddenly even more tempting. Though he really couldn't afford to lose another one, especially while dealing with this latest fuck up. He wondered if he should finally face the music, open up all of the Losers unread messages. He opened his messenger app and immediately felt even more overwhelmed. His thumb hovering over the list of names. His eyes fixated on 'Eds '. Still, he hesitated. Terrified by what he'd see.

A small part of him tried to hold onto the sliver of optimistic news his manager had relayed, however it seemed slippery and hard to keep hold of it lieu of all the other shit. He pressed down over Eddie's contact name and held until it highlighted and with shaking hands he quickly deleted the message thread, erasing all of their previous conversations as well as the slew of unread messages. Almost immediately he felt as if his stomach had fallen into his gut. Regret and fear churned in him and he felt more strongly than ever as if he'd lost something. Richie startled as his phone buzzed obnoxiously; he looked down, heart in his throat, expecting to see Eddie's picture and was surprised to instead see Stan's.

He swallowed thickly before accepting the call.

"Hello?" Richie winced at how tepid his voice sounded.

"So, he is alive." Said Stan, dryly.

Richie groaned and slumped even lower in his chair, covering his face with one hand as if blocking his vision could also block out his embarrassment. There was a beat of silence before Stan asked,"So, what's going on Rich?"

And Richie couldn't help it, all the stress and emotional upheaval- that fact he was in Florida of all places - hit him all at once and bubbled up. First as a near silent giggle, then falling apart into gasping, full bodied laughs. Tears tracked down from his cheeks and Richie honestly couldn't tell what sort of emotion was behind them. Stan, bless his heart, waited patiently for him to gather his wits and calm himself down before prompting him again with a: "Yeah?"

Richie nodded despite knowing no one could see him, "Yeah." He agreed.

"The groups been pretty worried." Stan pushed gently.

"I- I don't know what to say." Richie admitted, feeling his guts churn with unease.

"Well, that really is something isn't it?" Stan said, "not everyday we find something that shuts you up."

And Richie can't help the startled laugh that escapes his throat. Despite his unease, his fear, the smile doesn't leave right away."It's been an eventful few days." He finally agrees.

"And how do you feel?"

Richie pulled a face, "Who are you? My therapist?"

"Pretty much except the pay is shit. Now answer the question."

Richie sighed, "I feel-" he cut himself off trying to discern a word he could use, "bad."

Surprisingly Stan didn't mock him for his eloquence, or lack thereof.

Richie tried again. "I'm…"

His guts continued to knot and squirm until he had to physically draw up his long legs to his chest, hoping for a respite, "I feel kinda sick."

"You always did get queasy when your nerves were high. You threw up on the first day of school."

"How the fuck do you remember that?"

"Like I'd ever let you forget. You threw up all over Greta Keene's light up shoes."

Richie groaned, "I mean, she kinda ended up deserving it?"

"True." There was another beat of silence, but this one was much less awkward.

Richie looked out into the dark foliage, lost in thoughts. "I can feel you thinking." Stan said softly.

"I fucked up."

"A bit, but probably not as much as you fear."

"I-I doubt that. Did you- Did you see it? The show?" Richie asked tentatively.

"Yes," Stan said after a moment's pause, "not while it was live...but afterwards."

"Then you know I fucked up."

"Yes, but as I said-"

"I don't know what to do." Richie interrupted Richie could hear Stan sigh through the phone.

It didn't sound like a noise made out of frustration but Richie's own self doubt was making him question everything.

"It's okay to be scared."

Richie felt his throat constrict at the words and he had to close his eyes against their sudden burning. He suddenly really wished Stan was here with him.

"I- I am. Scared." He said, haltingly.

"That's okay. You're not alone though, you know that right? You don't need to be alone."

"What if- what if they hate me?” ‘What if he hates me?’

“They could never. There's no way you're getting rid of any of us that easy."

Richie let out a humorless chuckle.

"Why do you think they would hate you?" Stan asked softly, though the question felt more like a prompt than asked out of genuine curiosity.

Stan always had a way of sounding older than he was, like he already knew the answers he was trying to make you understand as well. Richie felt suddenly off kilter as he wondered if Stan had somehow already known.

"Because-- Because I'm- Gay." He swallowed down the bile that suddenly threatened to rise up. He had never said it before. Not out loud and never to anyone else.

There was a pause as Stan waited to make sure Richie had said all he was going to before answering.

"Richie." He said, "None of us think any differently about you. You need to know that."

"How- how do you know- I mean what if-"

"None of us think any less of you. I'm not going to say this isn't a big deal, because to you it is. This is, well, it's obviously been something eating away at you. And sure, maybe you decided to come out in somewhat of a dramatic fashion and freaked yourself out, but you don't have to face all of this alone. We are going to be here to support you one hundred percent."

Richie sniffed back a few wayward tears that threatened to escape.

"Are you...are you sure?"

"Have you read any of the messages they've sent you?"

"No- I- no."

"You should. I think it will help. Also everyone was super worried when you went AWOL. You are...safe aren't you?"

Richie felt a pang of guilt at the hint of unease that marred Stan's voice.

"Yeah. Yeah I'm safe." He eyed the bushes warily, "as safe as I can be."

"Good. But...I could be in LA in just over a day you know."

Richie felt his heart swell and he wiped away a stubborn tear that refused to be pushed down. "Thanks, but I'm okay...plus I'm...not exactly in LA right now."

"You're not?" Stan said sounding a bit alarmed.

"Nah, taking a small vacation."

"Have you told Eddie? He's been-"

"We haven't spoken."

"Richie." Stan sounded tired now.

"I - I can't, okay? You saw the fucking show. What the fuck am I supposed to say to him now? 'Hey! So I told the whole world about my big gay crush on you! Oh, by the way, I have a big-'"

"Richard!"

"What!"

"Promise me you'll talk to him. Whatever happens, it won't be as bad as you're making it out to be in your head."

"Fine." Richie said begrudgingly followed closely by a put upon huff.

"Thank you. Now, will you be okay?"

"Yeah," he said, and though it was with little confidence, a little was still more than he'd felt previously.

"Good. Call me anytime if you need to talk. But you should try messaging the others, I know they'd like to hear from you and...they'll understand Richie. Losers gotta stick together."

Richie smiled despite himself. "Losers gotta stick together."

He parroted back.

"And call Eddie."

"Okay mom."

"I'm being serious Richie."

"Goodnight Stanley!"

Stan sighed but gave in, "Goodnight."

Richie took the phone away from his ear and ended the call. He sat staring at the screen until it flipped automatically back to his homepage. He hesitated for a moment before taking a deep breath and opening his messaging app. He clicked on the first name on his timeline list and began to scroll, eyes darting over the string of texts, a small smile making its way into his face as he took in the words of, yes shock but also support. Once caught up, he moved on to the next Loser until he had read through them all. And no he definitely didn't cry.

Well, maybe only a little. He felt another pang of loss when he remembered just why Eddie's name wasn't on his messaging list. He quickly opened up a new message draft and selected Eddie's name off his favourites list and then froze.

Stan's words played over in his head, encouraging him. All Of his friends show of support warmed him to his core, he could do this- A loud rustle from the underbrush sent Richie's heart jack-hammering in his chest. He froze, wide-eyed as he stared into the dark. A loud snap of a twig sent Richie vaulting over the side of the deck chair and nearly ripping the screen door off its hinges in his haste to get inside. 'Not today Satan', he thought as he slammed the front door closed behind him and slid the deadbolt into place. Richie huffed and wandered over to the pullout bed that had become his new home and collapsed onto it. He looked at his phone once more, and the opened draft before he deleted it and turned the device off. He'd message Eddie tomorrow.

Richie did not message Eddie the next day, nor the day after that.However, in his defense, he had been busy. Richie helped Mike with odd jobs around his property and was becoming more and more convinced that there was a large reptilian monster of some sort living on the grounds. Mike could roll his eyes all he wanted but the truth of the matter was that one day Richie swore he saw scales moving slowly through the brush.

Richie had also taken up his managers challenge and started trying to revamp his online presence. Now that he was officially verified he began, as the young ones would say, shitposting. His first order of conduct being a small tweet which read:

Richie Tozier @OfficialTrashmouth 'Turns out my biggest joke was pretending I was straight.' It had taken him a good three hours of nervous sweating before he had finally been able to post the tweet but he had also felt an immense sense of relief after receiving a screenshot of his own tweet from Bev minutes later followed by some words of love and way too many emojis. The rest of the losers had also sent their love and support through the group chat and private messages. He mostly ignored his twitter feed though, he had made the mistake of checking up on the tweet and its relevance earlier and had immediately felt overwhelmed. Not to say that most of the feedback was bad or anything, however as someone who had spent such a long time clinging to a carefully constructed persona, suddenly being unmasked and thrust into the spotlight was...scary. it was hard not to feel the shame and frustration he had been fighting off all his life.

Later, Mike had proven that he wasn't as much of an internet phobic recluse as Richie had begun to believe him to be, when over dinner that night he had clapped Richie on the back and told him only a little awkwardly that he was happy for him and that he hoped he could live the rest of his life with more confidence in who he was. Which? Okay, damn.

Richie had simply nodded, taken aback from how touched he'd been, luckily Mike had not seemed to be expecting anything back from him and the rest of the night flowed into something more familiar. Before they split for the night to retreat to their own sleeping arrangements, Mike asked if he had spoken to Eddie yet.

"Bill said Eddie was sounding pretty worried about you."

Richie had felt the swirl of something related to guilt settle over him, leaving him feeling restless with a negative energy he couldn't quite shake off.

"Eddie's a big boy, he'll be fine." Richie said, mind already wandering and worrying.

Mike sighed but let it drop before wishing Richie a good night. Another day another battle.

Richie lay awake well into the night, going over all the little dominoes that had fallen over and lead him to where he now was. Which of course meant that, mostly, he thought of Eddie. He reminisced about hot summer days spent by the quarry, of nights spent tempting Eddie out of his bedroom window to go look at the stars, he remembered the nights when they would talk about all the things they wanted to do with their lives, about how much they wanted to leave Derry behind but never each other. Their pinky fingers interlocking in quiet promises that extended far beyond the reaches of Derry.

He wondered a little bitterly how he could have kept his feelings contained even as long as he had, when there had been so many moments, so many times when he felt ready to explode with them. All the times he felt the need to pull Eddie’s metaphorical pigtails because he just couldn’t stand not being the center of his attention any longer. God, had he gotten good at it though. He couldn’t help but smile as memories washed over him, so precious for how long he’d gone without them. A chasm opened up in his gut though as his thoughts drifted back to his future, and its shaky foundations- hell, it didn’t even have foundations to be built upon. All Richie had was an email from his manager and the knowledge that Eddie must hate him. The thought of moving on with his life without Eddie by his side somehow seemed so improbable, so completely terrifying that Richie’s chest seized considering it. He wondered angrily where his conviction he’d had just over a month ago had gone. When he’d been so ready to keep lumbering onward. Maybe he had succeeded simply through lack of foresight. By waking up each new morning with a heavy despair in his chest and starting his day by pushing it down, down, down, before he could find the curiosity to examine it. By busying himself with distraction after distraction.

He wondered why his patented technique wasn’t working now.

Eddie had stepped into Richie’s apartment and scrubbed it until it sparkled and he must have done something to Richie himself as well. It was like the moment Eddie had stepped back into his life he’d swept away all of his previous coping mechanisms. Richie felt a wave of irrational anger suddenly. Anger at Eddie for throwing his life off its axis by his mere presence, at himself for growing comfortable with it so damn quick that he’d tricked himself into believing it was permanent.

Richie stewed in his tumultuous emotions in the darkened living room of Mike’s Florida home with nothing to distract him from his circling thoughts and growing loneliness except the obnoxious singing of the swamp insects that inhabited the area.

“It’s not a swamp.” Mike said, shaking his head and fixing Richie with a tired look.

“Listen, if it looks like a duck and quacks like a-”

“It’s a floodplain.”

“It smells like shit and is full of fucking snakes and gators Mikey.” Richie argued sometime during the next afternoon.

He’d gotten a somewhat fuzzy photo of a snake curled up next to a tree by the water and had uploaded it to his Twitter account with a “ Get out of my swamp!” caption and had been arguing with Mike on and off ever since. Honestly Richie had been on a roll with creating a new Twitter, uploading mostly photos and quips but he wasn't really in the mind to be too serious while on the platform. His manager was still thrilled.

“What is with you and the alligators?” Mike questioned with a shake of his head, “You haven’t seen one since you got here and you’re still somehow obsessed.”

“Do you know how old those things are Mike? They are nature's perfect killing machine. Evolution fucking stopped cause it got it right on like the first go, it just just paused long enough to make them a little smaller. They were here before us and will probably outlive us.”

“Eddie tell ya all that?”

Richie scoffed and made a bit of looking awfully offended. Mike laughed so he counted it as a win. Sort of.

“...speaking of-” Mike began.

Richie’s gazer darted to Mike, eyes narrowed.“He called this morning.” Mike continued.

Richie felt his heart rocket into his throat and his stomach drop into his gut so quickly he had to swallow down the urge to dry heave onto the sand.

“What?”

“He’s looking for you. Did you honestly not tell him where you were going?”

“You didn’t tell him, did you?” Richie gasped.

“Hey now- calm down Richie. He just sounded really worried.”

“Did you tell him?” Richie demanded. Mike sighed then replied, “I told him I’d get you to call if you popped up.”

Richie’s eyes narrowed but he wasn’t such a dick that he would call Mike out for lying without proof. “I can’t face him right now.”

“Why not? I mean, it sounds like you have a lot to talk about.”

“Nope.”

“I saw the video.”

“Oh for fucks sake!” Richie threw his arms up, “Isn’t privacy a thing anymore?”

“You live streamed the show Rich, I don’t think privacy was a concern at the time.”

Richie folded his arms and scowled.

“Listen, just, call Eddie. Before he drives Stan and Bill crazy.”

That made Richie pause, “Stan and Bill?”

“If you would go into the group chat instead of hiding you’d know what I mean.”

“The moment I go on everyone will be able to see, including Eddie, so.” Richie shrugged, “No group chat.”

“Full offense, bud, but you’re treating this whole thing like a child would.You won’t be able to avoid Eddie forever.”

“Watch me.” Richie muttered, knowing full well that he was only reaffirming Mike’s accusations. Mike rolled his eyes but seemed to give up the argument and left the porch to retreat back inside to let Richie mope in peace. Not long later Richie heard the shrill ring of Mike's home phone. Why the man bothered to have a home phone instead of working off a cellphone like a normal person Richie would never know, regardless, he couldn't pick up what was said from where he sat. A few minutes later Mike was back out on the porch.

"I'm going into town for a bit. Got some errands to run. Why don't you relax and think about what I said? Maybe call Stan." Mike suggested, shuffling his feet a little awkwardly.

Richie took in the man's tense posture and shifting eyes. Mike was usually the type to stand strong, make eye contact as he spoke. Richie started to feel a little bad, thinking perhaps he'd been a bit too much of an ass today.

"Sure, okay." He said agreeably in an effort to make up for his earlier prickliness.

"Need me to pick you up anything?" Mike asked as he circled around his truck.

"No," Richie said, already feeling like he'd put Mike out enough for crashing at his abode for so long.

Mike shrugged and tossed his keys with almost a nervous energy before nodding and saying "Alright, well, I'll just, uh, be going then."

Richie nodded and waved him away, "if I'm not here by the time you get back, assume the gators got me."

Mike huffed but there was a smile on his face as he hopped into the cab of the truck and started it up. He waved to Richie again as he circled around and started down the long drive to the main road. Richie was bored by then end of the hour. There was very little to do while in the boonies that didn't run the risk of being eaten by the local wildlife, especially without Mike there to help spot potential risks and watch his back.

Richie wandered about Mike's home, exploring and generally being a nosy little shit. He was able to amuse himself for a good thirty minutes after he found an honest to God banjo tucked away in the attic. He brought it down to the porch ready to strum like mad and make a damn good nuisance of himself when Mike got back. However, as the minutes ticked by Richie's attention wandered and he poked around some more, flipping through Mike's extremely niche and weird collection of books, his notes, examining his bits and bobs. He took pictures of things he found particularly weird and bizarre, he was busy going through his photos and trying to think up anything that might have been considered funny to Tweet about, because that was really a concern now apparently, when Richie finally heard the telltale roar of Mike’s truck engine coming up the drive. He sort of hated the flash of excitement he got from the sound, he was a grown adult who should be in enough control over his life that he didn't rely on others to bring him amusement; of course that being said, if Richie had any semblance of control he wouldn't have even been in Florida, would he?

Richie stood up from the deck chair and raised a hand in greeting when the truck came into view, the banjo resting behind him ready to go. However, as the truck moved closer and the sun reflecting on the glass of the windshield shifted Richie began to become aware that Mike wasn't alone in the cab of the truck. Richie walked off the porch and into the front yard to try and get a better look but it wasn't until Mike was all but pulling onto the property that Richie's eyes locked onto none other than Eddie fucking Kaspbrak glaring daggers at him through the glass.

Now, Richie had experience many terrifying things in his life, the variety of traumas he had locked up would be enough to personally fund some lucky psychologist for years if he felt so inclined to go. So it's with great authority and experience that Richie swears that seeing Eddie fuming in the passenger seat of Mike's god damn car, in fucking Florida, was the second scariest occurrence he had ever witnessed. Only being trumped by the horrifying reality he'd been forced to watch in the deadlights. He knew he must have made one hell of a picture, still slightly hungover, hair unbrushed, jaw dropped and eyes wide. Richie felt frozen in shock at the sight, Eddie, his Eddie in fucking Florida. The truck had barely finished rolling to a stop before the passenger door was being thrown open and Eddie was bursting out of it like a mini tornado of rage.

Richie couldn’t help but note the state Eddie seemed to be in, hair usually perfectly groomed looked knotted and windswept, his skin pale despite having tanned in the LA sun and his eyes looked haggard, dark bruises from sleepless nights weighing heavily, even his usually ironed shirts and slacks looked wrinkled; his rough appearance did little to take away from the bright angry sheen in his eyes as he fixed Richie with a sharp look and began to march over. Richie had known for a long time that there was something seriously wrong with him, what, with his seemingly perfect ability to self destruct at every possible turn, however the point was really hammered into his head when the only thought that seemed to penetrate his shocked and empty brain was ‘My God he’s fucking gorgeous.’

That was until of course Eddie’s sneer picked up a notch and he opened his mouth to let out a scathing,

“You fucker!”

Richie took a giant step back shaking his head eyes fixed so solely on the short angry demon marching up to him that he didn’t even see Mike get out of the truck afterwards.

“I can’t believe you! ” Eddie continued, “Don’t you dare take another step Richard, I swear to God!”

And all at once, all of Richie’s survival instincts were kickstarted back online.

“Nope!” Richie said, voice a little higher pitch in his fear, and he turned and ran.

“RICHIE!”

Richie didn’t turn to look back, he just went for it, dodging past Mike’s small home and straight into the Floridian woods. There wasn’t any logic to his actions, he didn’t even bother to stick to the trail, Richie simply pushed his way through the trees and grasses. He had no destination in mind, just the strong urge to run, much like the one he felt during all of his life's most uncomfortable moments. He ran, and ran, and ran, until he could no longer hear the sounds of Eddie and Mike calling after him. It was only when he felt like his chest was about to explode that he stopped to wheeze against a tree, he clutched at his side as he sputtered pathetically at the ground and silently cursed the decades he’d spent mostly ignoring his physical health.

“Jesus fuck” He grumbled once he’d finally remembered how to properly pull air into his lungs and breathe.

He took a moment to look around only to realize that he had absolutely no idea where he was. Mike had to have, like, neighbors somewhere, right? Richie groaned he knew this was stupid, he had nowhere to go except further into the Florida wilderness and that was one stupid way to die. Sighing, and mentally preparing himself, Richie turned to go back the way he thought he had come from.

He snarled as he pushed his way through the thick bushes and trees grumbling at the sticks that caught the fabric of his clothes and scratched at his skin, he was going to look like he’d come out of a fight with a pissed off alley cat after this shit. God Eddie was going to be so incomprehensibly furious at him. He cried out in victory as he pushed through some particularly thick bushes, only for his cries to turn almost immediately alarmed when the ground under his feet seemed to disappear and sent him careening down a muddy, slick embankment and face first into green tinged waters.

Richie resurfaced with a loud gasp as he flailed and coughed out a mouthful of disgusting water, swearing profusely. He splashed until he was able to finally get his feet somewhat stable on the thick muddy bottom of the riverway he seemed to have fallen into. The water luckily seemed to be slow moving without too much of a current. It was however, quite deep, reaching up to his chest. He glanced around and cursed his luck, the river was narrow but he definitely didn’t recognize it. Which meant he had most definitely been moving in the wrong direction. He cursed again, this stupid shit wouldn’t have happened to him back in LA.

All at once Richie felt the hair on the back of his neck stand on end as his whole body erupted into a strong shudder that had more to do with instinct than the cool waters. He turned, eyes darting back and forth along the murky water when movement locked his attention to the opposite embankment. Richie felt ice cold terror grip him as he watched a huge alligator pull itself down the muddy shore and slip gracefully into the slow moving water. Panic seized him and he spun around to begin clawing at the shoreline desperately, uselessly, his hands coming away with chunks of mud and grass, doing nothing to pull him out of the water. A noise he wasn’t proud of escaped from his throat as his mind whirled. This was not how he wanted to die, not in some fucking swamp water, not to a fucking alligator and certainly not in fucking Florida.

He pulled himself along the shore trying to get to a narrower portion he could climb up when he heard a splash behind him. Richie didn’t turn to look though everything in him wanted to, but right in front of him was a tree, and Richie wasted no goddamn time pulling himself up. Thinking back, he had no idea how he found the strength to climb all the way into a tree when he could barely make it up two flights of stairs without needing to pause for air, but one moment he was in the water with certain death and the next, he was curled up in the branches looking down. Richie looked over the water and shouted out a relieved cry at the pair of reptilian eyes he could swear were staring at him, no more than ten feet away,

“Yeah, fuck you! Not getting any of this today pal!” Richie laughed and felt himself sag against the scratchy bark, “Now just, go fuck off so I can leave.”

He finished with a grumble. And then waited.

And waited

And-

Richie was going insane, every time he would begin to think that stupid animal had finally buggered off, there would be a ripple in the water or he’d catch sight of a pair of eyes bobbing above the waters surface. He had no way to call for help, his phone abandoned somewhere back on Mike’s porch, and even if he had had it with him Richie wasn't sure the device would have survived his impromptu bath. He had tried calling out for help a few times but had gone completely unanswered. He was totally alone.

Besides from stressful, being stuck in a tree because of a potentially murderous gator was beyond boring and extremely uncomfortable. There was nothing to keep his mind occupied and distracted enough from re-analyzing the series of events that had him stuck here in the first place, and the hot humidity in the air made it so he never really dried off from the water and instead just became more and more itchy and cranky.

As the minutes dragged on into hours, he had taken to singing, badly, to himself when another sound caught his attention. Richie paused his singing to listen, ears perked for anything out of the ordinary. For a moment there was nothing, and then all at once he heard it again. His name, distant but there.

“HEY!” Richie shouted as loud as he could, “OVER HERE!”

Richie felt an intense burst of relief as his cries were immediately answered by another shout of his voice and a barely heard: “ Where?”

“HERE!” He shouted again,

“Richie?!” Mike’s voice.

“BY THE RIVER!” He called out hoping Mike was familiar enough with the land that he knew what that meant.

“ARE YOU HURT?” Eddie’s voice rang out, so much closer.

Eddie.

Richie’s chest tightened but he would willing sit through whatever lecture Eddie had as long as he got away from this stupid- oh god.

“WAIT!” He shouted, “BE CAREFUL! GATOR!”

“WHERE?” Mike again

“RIGHT FUCKING UNDER ME!” Richie yelled glaring spitefully at the large reptile that had decided to make camp on the sand, less than a body's length away from his tree. There was rustling in the undergrowth, and Richie knew they were close,

“You’re close, I can hear you, be careful!”

Moment’s later Mike and Eddie burst through the thick bushes with a swing of a long machete Mike was wielding.

“Jesus, Rich-” Mike cursed when he got a good look at the precarious situation Richie had gotten himself into.

Next to him Eddie wasn't doing much better.

“What the fuck? What the actual fuck Richie! Are you kidding me, are you fucking kidding me? Can you go literally nowhere without pissing shit off? That's a fucking alligator!” Eddie began screeching and pointing.

“I fell into the water!” Richie tried to defend,

“Oh my GOD!”

“Hang tight Richie, I’ll call the animal control or something I guess,” Mike said, taking out his phone.

Even as he did though, Eddie was bending down to pick up a large rock from the ground, eyes wild and half-mad looking. The smaller man grunted as he winded up and threw the huge stone, hitting the alligator right in the side with a thunk.

“FUCK OFF!”

“Eddie! Shit , Stop!” Mike cursed, phone half way to his ear.

Eddie wasn’t listening as he picked up a large branch and threw that next, the gator made a loud hissing noise and thrashed it’s tail to the side, spraying sand into the air. Richie’s jaw dropped at the sight of Eddie attacking a fucking alligator, it honestly would have been the hottest thing he’d ever seen if he wasn’t so instantly terrified that it would end with Eddie dead.

“Eddie, Eddie fucking stop it, I swear to god!” Richie said, even as he began calculating how he could throw himself onto the damn thing if it decided to charge his friends.

Eddie picked up another large stone and threw it, cursing the gator out as it sailed through the air and hit the large beast right in the eye. The animal recoiled and Richie felt his stomach drop thinking that it was going to retaliate for sure and that he was going to have to die to try and stop it, but for once in his miserable life luck seemed to be on his side. The alligator pushed itself quickly away, sliding into the water and making a B-line for the other side of the river.

Eddie barely took the time to breathe before he was yelling at Richie further,“Get down! Get down right now, or I swear to god Richie, I’ll use Mike’s fucking machete to cut the tree down with you in it and leave you to the swamp!”

Richie was only scrambling to obey, and after nearly falling twice, his feet finally touched the ground.

“Phew,” Richie said and whistled, “That was sure an adventure, huh guys? And you said this place wasn’t a swamp, I swear it almost smells as bad as-”

“Beep beep, Richie.” Mike said, looking too exhausted.

Richie’s mouth snapped shut and he felt a little guilty for causing the man so much stress. He sighed as he walked over to the other two,

“Look, I’m-”

“Don’t.” Eddie said, cutting him off.

Richie looked at him and frowned, Eddie appeared more stony faced than he had been since he’d shown up hours before.

“Mike, lead us back.” Eddie demanded.

Mike took a moment to look between the two before he nodded, “Sure, follow close and watch your step.”

The walk back to Mike’s house was spent in mostly weighted silence that had Richie growing increasingly uncomfortable with each step he took. It was of immediate relief when they made it back to the small abode, Richie’s eyes were trained on the door as he made a B-line for it, he couldn’t be out of the open air fast enough, he needed a shower and maybe to sleep for like a week. He carefully wasn’t looking at either Mike or Eddie when he was stopped in his tracks by a hand gripping his sleeve.

“Go on ahead Mike, we’ll be in in a minute.”

Richie gulped nervously as he sent a silent plea for Mike to save him. Mike, though, barely took the time to glance at them before he was nodding and heading into the safety of the house.

Richie took a deep breath and knowing that he couldn’t possibly run anymore turned to face Eddie. Eddie for his part seemed to be working himself up again, there was a deep furrow between his brows and his lips were pressed into a thin line. Richie waited a moment to see if Eddie would speak first, before he decided to just get it over with himself, he had barely parted his lips to speak when the silence of the early evening air was broken.

“Florida Richie? Fucking really?”

Richie’s snapped his mouth shut.

“I can’t believe you just took off like that! You didn’t even text me! Do you have any idea what that was like? You just disappeared! Once I realized you weren’t camping out at Bill’s or Stan’s or-or the others, I freaked! I thought you were fucking dead, man! What the fuck!”

“Wow, breathe Eds.” tried to deflect, noticing just how red Eddie’s face was getting.

“FUCK YOU!” Richie winced and looked to the ground.

There was a beat of silence.

“I looked everywhere for you, I was so worried,” Eddie continued, softer this time, “I even went through your phone numbers and called your manager, but he told me he couldn’t divulge any information about clients and-” Eddie sighed, shaking his head and said, “You can’t ever do this again.”

“I’m sorry,” Richie’s heart was thumping in his chest.

Eddie’s face twisted, “Why the hell did you take off like that?”

“I-”

Richie didn’t even know where to begin, all of the past weeks emotions were battling it out in his chest and abdomen, made somehow even more striking with Eddie standing right in front of him, his fist still clenched around Richie’s sleeve as if he were afraid that Richie would bolt again if he let him go. Eddie was looking up at him, eyes cleared of the anger that had been burning so bright since he’d shown up, he looked confused, worried, and maybe something else that Richie couldn’t quite name. But he was looking at Richie with all of his attention, and god, Richie almost wished he’d never stop, never stop looking at him, holding him, it terrified him how much he wanted Eddie.

He almost cracked a joke, because of course he would, but he held back, swallowing it down at the last moment. The thought of lying to Eddie, was causing him even worse discomfort than he was already in. So, for the first time in a long time Richie decided to be brave.

“I was scared.”

Eddie’s brow creased again.

Richie took a shaking breath, “I was scared and I didn’t- I didn’t know what to do-”

“So you ran to fucking Florida?”

Richie sighed and shot Eddie an annoyed look.

Eddie snapped his mouth closed and motioned for him to continue, “I panicked, and yeah, I ran to fucking Florida because-because even this god damn swamp was less terrifying than going home and having to- having to lose you and-”

“Lose me?” Eddie interrupted again looking impossibly more bewildered.

“You-You saw the show. I fucked up- I know I did but-”

“Did you mean it?” Eddie said, cutting him off again.

“What?”

“In the show, was that- was that some sort of joke to you? Were you jerking me around or did you fucking mean it?”

Richie was sweating, he was sure of it, his wide eyes burned from how much he wanted to just blink, but he was frozen, everything around him seemed to have stopped, his field of vision narrowed down to Eddie. The rest of the world could have evaporated and Richie wouldn’t have known the difference. In the stillness, he knew that the next words out of his mouth were important, more important than anything else he has ever said. He could feel another one of his life’s dominoes tipping.

“Every word.” He whispered, “It wasn’t a joke, I hadn’t even meant to say it, but I did mean it, every damn word. I- I like you Eds, I have for years. Almost as long as I can remember, even when I couldn’t remember- it was always you.”

The silence was deafening. All at once Eddie’s hand which had been holding his sleeve was gone and Richie felt as if his heart was going to shatter. He tried to prepare himself, for the rejection or disgust, but even so he wasn’t sure how he could possibly survive it. Suddenly, he felt hands clench at the collar of his shirt and yanked him off his center of balance, he barely had the mind to stop himself from falling before everything went blank and he died.

Or at least, Richie was assuming that’s what happened because there was no way that Eddie would be kissing him otherwise, he had to have died. It took his brain a second more to realize that no, this was happening, Eddie was kissing him, and that he needed to fucking respond before he ruined it.

Richie brought his hands up, one to grip Eddie’s hip and pull him closer, and the other to gently cup his cheek as he finally began to kiss him back. All at once Richie felt himself settle, all of the turbulence and anxieties that had plagued him for as far back as he could remember finally dissipated, his head felt light as the elation hit him even as the heat coiled in his belly, grounding him. Richie could scarcely believe this was happening, he sighed into the kiss as he felt one of Eddie’s hands trail up to tangle in his curls.

Eddie was the first to pull away, only when the need for oxygen grew too strong. Richie couldn’t keep the smile off his face as Eddie kept his hands on him, leaning up to rest their foreheads together, breathing the same air. Richie opened his eyes, unsure of when they’d even closed, and took in everything he could. The slight flush to Eddie’s cheeks, the small upturn of his lips that hinted at a smile, Richie wanted to kiss him all over again- and then keep kissing him. But before he could, Eddie was backing away.

“God I can’t believe I did that.”

Richie had a brief flash of anxiety as he suddenly worried he was about to lose it all.

“You were practically swimming in that swamp , god you’re filthy! Uhg, no, no more, go inside and shower right now! I’m not kissing you again until you do.”

Richie’s face broke out into a huge grin, he didn’t know it was possible to feel this happy, the suddenness of it felt like getting whiplash.

“But Eds-”

“No, absolutely not! And that’s not my name!”

Richie’s grin grew impossibly large as he opened up his arms and went in for a hug, delighting when Eddie screeched and tried to dodge him. The two of them chased each other up the porch and into the house, Richie giving up the game and instead taking Eddie’s hand in his, his stomach swooping pleasantly when Eddie not only allowed it but gave him a reaffirming squeeze.

Yeah, they still had a lot to talk about but Richie had never felt more excited to do so.

It ends with Richie walking out onto a large stage in LA, his palms sweaty as he smiles and waves at the cheering crowd. There was a nervousness clawing at his chest as he made it to center-stage, but with it also a giddy sort of anticipation. He picked up the microphone and stared out over the audience, not seeing much due to the bright lights shining over him, but still the silhouettes carried a touch of intimidation. He breathes, smile growing as he greets his audience, his voice steady and loud, cheers rise up in accordance and he plants his feet, grounding himself, readying. Yet despite that, the usual pres-show dread that Richie is used to feeling crawl in his stomach is absent, in its stead is a right sort of deliberateness that he’s never felt while walking out in front of a sold out crowd- or any crowd for that matter, not since being picked up decades ago in LA. There’s something peaceful about the steadfastness of his conviction, about knowing however the audience takes this new show will be a drop in the bucket compared to the opinions of the people he’s already shared the script with. Eddie’s approval meant more to him than any of these fuckers combined. So it was easier for him now, more than any other time in his life to recite the words from his script- words he himself had written.

Yes, he was nervous. But he was also resolute as he turned to look into the camera and the audience and say:

“So, my boyfriend moved in recently, like officially and-”

The smile that broadens Richie’s face is more genuine than any one he’d given on stage before as his audience hoots and cheers. Maybe he’d really send that fruit basket he’d been considering over to his publicist, or his manager for convincing him to take to Twitter to improve his fan-base. Fuck it, he’d send his whole team fruit baskets. A thank you to everyone who had been supportive of him, who continued to back him while he figured his shit out. People who gave him the opportunity to stand on stage and feel the pride that ballooned in his chest at each laugh and holler each of his jokes got. Pride was a feeling he’d had very little of in his life, it was hard to grasp when you’d spent most of your life in hiding. There were moments even now, despite everything, that had him instinctively wanting to curl up and slink away, because having pride in oneself is a learned behavior and one Richie was working on still. It got easier though, with every smile from his friends, any and every little touch Eddie blessed him with, and every morning he got to wake up and have Eddie right there next to him- everyday was full of little moments, little opportunities for him to feel so fucking lucky. So, yeah, walking out on that stage was an ending. A metaphorical book closing on a life lived in hiding and in shame- and he wasn’t going to miss a second of it.

Richie was starting a whole new novel, one composed of all those little and big moments worth holding onto, even if they were scary, maybe especially so; because for the first time in as far back as he could remember Richie wasn’t running away. He was pushing forward with the strength of more than just himself, and he was making a conscious decision to finally make his leap of faith, because even if he fell, he had six great people waiting to catch him. Richie pushed onward, because even though this was an ending, it was also the start of something so much greater. -

#IT #reddie #fanfic #mike hanlon #eddie kaspbrak #richie tozier #stan uris #fanfiction #fandom

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everlastingscul · 4 years

Text

character sheets.

tagged by: @midnightpapllion tagging: no one! feel free to take this from me.

full name. fayette pronunciation. fay-yet nicknames. wind child, little bird, bee, and ‘vessel’ (this is from the nameless one.)

height. 5′4″. age. spiritually, 42. this is marked on her SOUL ID. physically, her body is 19 years old. in literal terms of her formation, she is only 3. zodiac. [REDACTED INFORMATION.] languages. french, japanese, english, nobody, heartless, the language of hope’s peak, and aetherian.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS.

hair colour. a duller dark brown. eye colour. a yellow and pinkish-red gradient. skin tone. a slightly saturated brown. body type. hourglass. her legs carry a lot of the illusory fat that whilreanis once had, but so does the very top of her upper body. she has a particularly toned stomach, having visible abs. accent. nobody gibberish. it’s kind of like a baby learning to speak, but a bit older, if you can imagine that. dominant hand. left for most things. posture. she stands only somewhat straight when resting. often times, she prefers to be curved due to her flexibility. tattoos. not a tattoo, but there’s a strange birthmark on the back of her neck. it’s shape is very similar to someone else’s... most noticeable features. a bee hairclip on her left bangs gifted from nora, her many freckles dotted along her body, and the scar on her chest, when it’s visible.

CHILDHOOD.

place of “birth.” hope’s peak. hometown. the village of the eastern shrine. manner of birth. whilreanis casting her body aside in a last ditch attempt to prevent the world eater from killing her on that fateful day. first words. ‘alive’. siblings. [REDACTED INFORMATION.] parents. margaux eledine hunnie (mother). kaviel aerhala (father). parental involvement. none once she was formed. nora took this responsibility instead.

ADULT LIFE

occupation. traverse town’s “guide girl”. member of the traverse town defensive council, serving as one of it’s prime knights. current residence. traverse town. relationship status. currently completely single. she’s still figuring out how love’s intricacies work, but is capable of getting crushes. driver’s license. she does actually have one, according to her soul id. she also has the license necessary to man trains from her time as whilreanis. this muscle memory is retained despite her lack of regular memories. criminal record. nonexistant.

ROMANCE.

sexual orientation. pansexual. romantic orientation. panromantic. love language. fayette will often show her affection and love through baking for the target of her affections, be it romantic or not. romantic interests will often get more carefully made things, though. stuff that takes a lot of time to pull of correctly. she also is very fond of the language of touch, often hugging within the limits of one’s boundaries and doing things like holding hands. she doesn’t see holding hands as romantic, but she will have a firmer hold when romantically interested in someone.

MISCELLANEOUS.

character’s theme song. gurenge - lisa hobbies to pass the time. she often bakes things to pass time, but you can catch her drawing a lot in a personal sketchbook on her offtime from her balcony, along with dancing. mental illnesses. no notable things, however, she is extremely prone to breakdowns when certain trigger words are spoken at her directly. calling her “my honey” is one such trigger word. physical illnesses. [REDACTED INFORMATION.] fears. monophobia, fear of being alone. claustrophobia, fear of being in an enclosed space. (this one is why she has bead doors.) self confidence level. ...average. fayette often puts others before herself, she doesn’t particularly care about what happens to her. it’s when she fails others that she breaks down. vulnerabilities. fayette is particularly weak when it comes to verbal harassment or abuse. she’s grown up in a positive environment for the most part, with little exposure to a harsher reality. she recklessly believes people are good, and this also means she can easily be taken advantage of, despite tenbrien’s pleading. her neck is also her most sensitive part of her body, meaning anyone who grabs her there has her limp out of fear almost instantly.

full name. beraich amaleria-chiyoko. pronunciation. bear-ai-k nicknames. berie, herald, shadow, and “forbidden one” (by the nameless one. they are very edgy.)

height. 6′3″. age. 17 physically and mentally. his SOUL ID records his spiritual age as completely unknown, meaning it’s bugged beyond belief, zodiac. standard zodiac: libra. chinese zodiac: dragon. languages. english, japanese, aetherian, the language of hope’s peak, nobody, and heartless.

PHYSICAL CHARACTERISTICS.

hair colour. dark brown, almost black. single blonde streaks in his braids. eye colour. green on the right, purple on the left. skin tone. dark brown. body type. lanky. has a toned upper body and legs, though. the muscle isnt visible, but it is feelable. accent. has a strange accent unknown to even hope’s peak. according to mrs. portsmire, it’s an aetherian dialect she’s rarely heard. dominant hand. right normally, but ambidextrous in combat. posture. stands fairly straight. this is a result of learning around nora. tattoos. not a tattoo, but he has a libra birthmark on his left hand. glowing cheek ‘tattoos’, as well. most noticeable features. his heterochromia and cheek markings. the kazokaíma is also one.

CHILDHOOD.

[this segment contains REDACTED INFORMATION.]

ADULT LIFE

occupation. serves as one of traverse town’s defensive council’s members. still next in line to become the east wielder. current residence. traverse town, with fayette. relationship status. single.

ROMANCE.

sexual orientation. bisexual. romantic orientation. biromantic. love language. beraich is.. very awkward. often he’ll stutter over his words, and try to find amazing things to show the person of his affections. like fayette, he takes to baking, but he also knits things for them. the knitting one is very rare, though.

MISCELLANEOUS.

character’s theme song. children - escala hobbies to pass the time. tends to practice his swordsmanship in his free time if he’s not knitting or making food. likes to go on strolls through traverse town or hang out with the permanent residents, as well. mental illnesses. [REDACTED INFORMATION.] physical illnesses. [REDACTED INFORMATION.] fears. atelophobia, the fear of not being enough. self confidence level. kind of deplorable. beraich has serious self confidence issues, consistently believing it’s his fault that nora had to push him and take his place. his nightmares are full of this and more, and it leads to breakdowns he tries to hide. vulnerabilities. he’s particularly fickle when it comes to his self esteem, as mentioned. if someone prods at him the way his nightmares do, he can either burst into a fit of uncontrollable rage or break down crying. both result in him becoming completely distant and non-responsive for a solid hour or so afterwards. the anger is particularly dangerous, as his swings become erratic and he’s not thinking rationally,

#long post #I DID IT FOR BOTH OF THEM #heyyayayHSH #beraich tag pending.#✥ the body inbetween | fayette ✥#✥ everlasting soul | memories ✥

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flechxtte · 5 years

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repost, don’t reblog !

𝐛𝐚𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐬 !

FULL NAME. shen (i haven’t. decided on his full name yet) | lord shen | various aliases as he was wandering around for 30 years PRONUNCIATION. i. i mean. it’s kinda. self-explanatory NICKNAME. that goddamn peacock none GENDER. male HEIGHT. 5′7″ish AGE. about 53 or so SPOKEN LANGUAGES. i used to have it decided on whether his mother tongue is cantonese or mandarin but i can’t remember now rip he probably speaks a number of different chinese dialects tbh. he also probably knows enough of the languages of the surrounding countries to get by, at least. it’s possible he traveled all the way to africa during his banishment given he. somehow. obtained the loyalty of his two gorilla guards

𝐩𝐡𝐲𝐬𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 !

HAIR COLOR. (plumage) white, red eyespots EYE COLOR. red, but close-up you can tell there’s flecks of orange and violet in them as well BODY TYPE. Shaped Like A Peacock(TM) ok but i still stick to my headcanon that when set next to other peacocks he will be noticeably smaller (yes, he did grow to be smaller than both his parents) but otherwise isn’t visually thinner or thicker than them ACCENT. I MEAN YEAH OKAY GARY OLDMAN VOICES HIM AND HE’S BRITISH BUT no in canon shen does not have a british accent. he does speak very properly tho VOICE. well-spoken, large vocabulary, but aggressive. he uses threats very efficiently lmao DOMINANT HAND. right-handed but he’s somewhat proficient in using his non-dominant hand as well POSTURE. peacock (TM) fjfieiea; I MEAN OKAY AGAIN he looks kinda slouchy bc he’s shaped like a peacock but that aside, he really does have good posture. he doesn’t slouch at all, he’s actually quite tense and. Twitchy TATTOOS. none BIRTHMARKS. none MOST NOTICEABLE FEATURE(S). that is one white peacock. also that’s a long train of feathers coming off his butt

𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐥𝐝𝐡𝐨𝐨𝐝 !

PLACE OF BIRTH. china HOMETOWN. gongmen city BIRTH WEIGHT. idk but he was Tiny and sickly BIRTH HEIGHT. listen he hatched from an egg ok he was Tiiiiiny MANNER OF BIRTH. honestly i think everything went about the way it was expected to. i have seen fanon that maybe shen’s parents had some troubles conceiving, and i do kinda like that idea tbh, but otherwise, the birth itself was uncomplicated. he might have needed some extra help hatching tho just bc he was so weak as a newborn FIRST WORDS. lbr it was probably ‘nana’ or something like that and my heart just imploded SIBLINGS. none PARENTS. mother | father i haven’t. given either of them names rip PARENTAL INVOLVEMENT. rather limited and distant in early childhood... shen was born very sickly and weak, and his parents turned over care of him to the soothsayer instead since they felt she was more equipped to tend to his illnesses, etc. they also, on some deep level, were afraid of getting attached bc he was so weak. so shen was raised mostly by the soothsayer instead, even after he grew stronger as an older child. while his parents did genuinely love him, they also felt. disconnected from him and guilty due to their decision

𝐚𝐝𝐮𝐥𝐭 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞 !

OCCUPATION. beach bum NEET he currently does not have one CURRENT RESIDENCE. gongmen city, specifically the soothsayer’s home CLOSE FRIENDS. none rip RELATIONSHIP STATUS. single in main verse, ship verses uhhhh vary FINANCIAL STATUS. broke as hell in the main verse DRIVER’S LICENSE. this is. like. the song dynasty, dude CRIMINAL RECORD. OH BOY attempted genocide, so much murder even outside of that, attempted world domination??

𝐬𝐞𝐱 & 𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 !

SEXUAL ORIENTATION. homosexual ROMANTIC ORIENTATION. aromantic but it could just be that he has a very dim view on romance PREFERRED EMOTIONAL ROLE. submissive | dominant | switch | equal PREFERRED SEXUAL ROLE. submissive | dominant | switch | equal LIBIDO. uhhhhh idk it’s there. but he views sex mostly as a way to pass the time TURN ON’S. whispers pain (both receiving and giving), edging TURN OFF’S. humiliation, degradation, too much mess LOVE LANGUAGE. nowadays? it’s nonexistent. unless you mean platonic, in which case the only way you’ll know he loves you is if he never physically hurts you rip but emotional attacks aren’t off the table

RELATIONSHIP TENDENCIES. present-day they’re nonexistent lmao in the last 30 years, he was a participant in a gradually dying relationship that eventually was held together by a mutual desire for sex and nothing else, which was fine with him at the time. as a teen and very young adult, he was considerably more affectionate and loyal. however, he has always been selfish, narrow-minded, and naive, so even then there were hiccups

𝐦𝐢𝐬𝐜𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚𝐧𝐞𝐨𝐮𝐬 !

CHARACTER’S THEME SONG. The Grudge, for bby!Shen there’s Nobody’s Playing HOBBIES TO PASS TIME. christ i don’t think he has any anymore. you really have to understand that for the past 30 years, every little thing related back to his goals in some way. all of his ‘hobbies’, interests, relationships, ALL of it. with his goal having been blown out of the water (haha), he literally doesn’t know what to do to pass the time MENTAL ILLNESSES. oh, where to begin? paranoia, delusions out the wazoo, major depression. i do legitimately think he has some kind of psychosis, but it’s displayed in delusions and not. hallucinations or hearing voices, etc. so like. major depression with psychotic symptoms. it’s also nOT the basis for his violence or aggressive behavior i don’t want anyone coming away from this thinking that rip PHYSICAL ILLNESSES. respiratory issues, somatic complaints LEFT OR RIGHT BRAINED. he likes to think he’s left-brained but lbr he’s right-brained PHOBIAS. drowning, death SELF CONFIDENCE LEVEL. it’s in the dirt, dude. but you’d probably never guess it going by his behavior VULNERABILITIES. he’s fast and he hits hard and accurate, but he does not take hits himself very well man if you get a good hit in, he’s going down and he’s probably going to take a minute to get back up. he’s not po lmao

#;dash games #it took me like four months to fill this out jf c

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bucketofchum · 6 years

Note

So you've said you speak English and French. What other languages do you speak?

Fluently, only English and French.

I have a very elementary basis of German (A1). I can understand a good amount of Mandarin Chinese (85%) and I can recognise some very basic characters and I can try to conjure up some phrases too (arguably same level as German). I can read and write Devanagari script (Hindi) but it takes a lot of effort and I’m not unlike Milo from Atlantis trying to decipher texts. My Hindi comprehension though is nonexistent so even if I can read aloud and write the letters, I can’t really comprehend. I can say some basic words and phrases (also not unlike German, but significantly significantly less). I’m really rusty.

#also if you speak Spanish REEAAAAAALY slowly I can understand #but I can understand it if I read it #because it is close enough to French #facts about Modo

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taohua-shuohua · 6 years

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July 27th and 28th, 2018

The 27th was my first full day with my homestay family, after having met and gone home with them the evening prior. My family is smaller than I’d imagined: it’s just my host mother, Yichu (艺楚, yìchǔ), and my host sister Qinghan (清菡, qīnghàn), whom I refer to and address as Meimei (妹妹, mèimei, “little sister”). Qinghan, who was still asleep when I rose for class that morning, shares her surname (刘, liú) with me and her age (10) with my biological sister in America. Yichu had prepared breakfast: a vegetable bun, grapes, eggs, a bowl of milk, and my beloved youtiao. Once we had eaten our fill, we began the walk to my classroom, which takes about twenty to thirty minutes. Apparently, there was a quicker route that connected our neighborhood directly to campus in about five minutes, but that road undergoing some sort of construction meant we were using our detour for the foreseeable future. Some students had already arrived by the time I got to the classroom, so after bidding Yichu farewell I joined my peers in idle chatter about our host families. It was mostly positive; one girl was struggling to explain to her host mother that curly hair couldn’t be blow-dried and she would have to sleep with it wet, which conflicts with the Chinese belief that sleeping with wet hair leads to headaches later in life. Another’s host parents were over-enthusiastic about having a native speaker available to tutor their daughter in English, and she felt as though she wasn’t using her Mandarin enough as a result. My biggest issue had been the lack of readily-available cold water; I was able to address it by dashing to the student store a few minutes before class and purchasing the largest bottle they had in stock.

The three hours of class passed quickly, but they came with a caveat. Today was Yang Laoshi’s last day as our teacher, as she would soon be heading to lead a conference in Shanghai and then, after that, taking a two-year teaching assignment in Thailand. My goodbye present to her was an In n’ Out t-shirt, which I presented with both hands as per local custom. My gift reserves were running low—after Yichu received a UCLA shirt and hat, Qinghan got a UCLA sweater and tank top (both of which were far too large for her), and my partner on our trip to the local community center a few days prior got UCLA and In n’ Out hats, I was resigned to two In n’ Out t-shirts (one of which I had just given to Yang Laoshi) and a UCLA Hawaiian-print shirt, which was intended for my nonexistent host father. I am considering bequeathing the latter upon the teacher who wrote my recommendation for NSLI-Y in the first place.

Lunch passed, along with our lecture period (during which it was announced that I was student of the week!) and our interest groups which, for me, had shifted from folk dance to martial arts. Perhaps by her own design, the Intermediate 2 students finished the homework Yang Laoshi had assigned with about twenty minutes to spare. She then suggested that, as it was our last day together, we all go out to the front of the building and take a group picture. We readily agreed. Several attempts at jumping later, we had gotten a satisfactory shot of us in midair. I returned to the classroom to gather my things, hugged Yang Laoshi, wished her the best, and went out to meet my host mother.

I’m fairly certain Yichu actually works in the same building that my classroom is in, as she was just exiting an office when I greeted her. Together, the two of us exited the campus and made our way to a nearby restaurant. Yichu explained that Qinghan was currently finishing up her weekly flute lesson; we would begin eating dinner and she would make her way over independently. The food was excellent. I had some sort of beef-based broth and noodles. Following dinner, the three of us made our way to Cat Street (猫行, māo xíng) which is directly adjacent to the neighborhood our house is in and exactly what it sounds like: a street with cat-themed stores, cat murals, and live street cats. Qinghan and I visited a cat museum, which was essentially a dozen cats in a cage with a gift shop and café attached. It was there that I found a stuffed cat bearing my name (桃花, táohuā), which I promptly purchased. I’ve yet to find a definitive answer, but through various interactions with native speakers I’ve come to believe that “taohua”, in addition to literally meaning peach blossom, is used to refer to one’s luck in matters of romance and love. Between my taohua cat and my visit to Guandi Temple, I ought to be married by the end of August.

Afterwards, we ate dessert at a roadside stand selling “Four Fruit Soup” (四果汤, sì guǒ tāng), a mishmash of fruits and jelly-looking foods topped with shaved ice. I can’t say I cared much for it, but I’m glad I tried.

The rest of the evening was fairly low-key; I shared some of my art with my host family and let Qinghan use my tablet. Yichu informed me that I should get lots of rest; the 28th was to be the first of our two homestay family activity days, one of the rare instances in the program at Xiamen where we wouldn’t attend Chinese class, and one of the even rarer instances where I could get up later than seven-thirty.

I did, indeed, end up sleeping later than seven-thirty: I woke up around nine, and was greeted again by a Yichu-prepared breakfast. In addition to another helping of youtiao, she gave me an overview of the day’s schedule; I would first accompany her and Qinghan to the hospital so they could receive a type of traditional Chinese medicine that Yichu struggled to explain. She said it was made from ginger, and that they put it on during the hottest day of summer so it could make them healthier in the winter. After that, we would meet a friend of hers and his children, play golf, and finally head to Gulangyu (鼓浪屿, gǔlàngyǔ), Xiamen’s “Piano Island” and tourist hotspot.

Chinese hospitals are a fair bit quicker than American ones. After waiting for just under five minutes, we were shown into a room where Yichu briefly exchanged words with a doctor, who then invited Qinghan to bend over a hospital bed and expose a portion of her back and pressed six or seven patches onto it. Yichu received similar patches on her stomach. The whole affair concluded in about twenty minutes. On our walk to the mall (which was designated as the meeting place for us and Yichu’s friend), Qinghan inquired as to whether we utilized such patches in the States. I told her no, and she unleashed a long string of Chinese, which Yichu interpreted for me as her being jealous that Americans didn’t use them. I asked if they hurt, and Yichu said no, but they were very warm. In a climate like Xiamen’s, I could see how added heat could inspire jealousy in the heart of any 10-year-old.

The mall had at least four floors. I was exuberant. Yichu settled herself on a bench near a Starbuck’s and told Qinghan and I we could wander about until her friend arrived. Once I understood that she meant separately (my mom telling me that I didn’t have to take my little sister with me was a novel idea indeed), I visited every clothing or makeup store on the first floor, in the end buying only a wine-colored and berry-tasting lip paint and a canvas tote bag that read (in English) “Made in China”, which I found incredibly hilarious for reasons I struggle to articulate. The two were exactly the same price.

When I returned from my shopping trip, Yichu was sitting where I had left her (Qinghan in tow) and the rest of our party had yet to arrive. We waited about ten minutes more, and Yichu finally received word that they were stuck in traffic and we could go ahead and get seated for lunch without them. On our way to the 3rd floor restaurant, however, Qinghan began having some sort of issue. My Chinese wasn’t at a level where I could make out the specifics, but it seemed as though she had tired and was now electing to just drop and sit down in the middle of the mall. She and Yichu had a very heated conversation, which culminated in the latter simply walking away without Qinghan and beckoning me to follow. Writing off the ethics of leaving a child unattended in a busy shopping mall as a cultural difference, I obliged. Yichu and I put our names in and, with minimal wait, were seated at a table. She did some preliminary ordering and then left me in charge of the table while she went to retrieve Qinghan. All was well for a bit, but when a waitress approached me and began asking questions (assumedly) regarding the order in rapid-fire Mandarin with non-standard pronunciation, I began to panic. Luckily, Yichu and Qinghan arrived and the former was able to give instructions regarding…whatever was being discussed, without any input from me necessary.

Yichu’s friend (whom she knew from high school) and his children (who weren’t actually his children, but rather his nephew and two nieces) arrived shortly thereafter. The man appeared to have an excellent sense of humor, but his thick accent (I believe it to be the Xiamen local accent; among other things, h sounds are completely ignored, turning Zhongwen (the Chinese language) into Zongwen and shide (“yes” or “indeed”) into side) gave me a lot of trouble. One of the nieces (a university student) spoke a fair bit of English, and acted as a translator at times. For the most part, I focused on my kebab.

After the meal, we headed to Furong Lake (芙蓉湖, fúróng hú), a part of the XMU campus that I had previously visited but had no qualms with seeing again. We took a route through the area that was unfamiliar to me, and it eventually led us to a golf course, where I tried my hand at the richest, whitest sport I can think of, second only to polo. I excelled, but likely only because, instead of trying to hit the ball into a hole, the goal was to hit the ball as far as you could. And I could hit real, real hard.

Seven trays of golf balls later, we backtracked away from the course and navigated the rest of Furong Lake, eventually reaching XMU’s main gate, where we rode the public bus to the ferry terminal for Gulangyu.

Upon arriving, we learned that it would be about an hour and a half’s wait before we could board the ferry. I alternated between reading (I’m currently on number three of the four poetry books I brought on the trip with me, and the last chapter of my nonfiction work), letting Qinghan play games on my phone, eating spring rolls Yichu had prepared, and visiting the public toilet. I’m fortunate to say that squatty potties no longer faze me.

The actual time spent crossing the strait is about five minutes, but the time spent going through security and shuffling on and off the vessel doubles that number. It was dusk when we set foot on the island; after an extensive photoshoot for me by the main sign we made our way to a shopping street. I entered a generalized candy store; I was offered a free sample of a drink that tasted exactly like American cherry-flavored liquid medicine, and was ready to leave the store when I tried “milk pinecone”. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s definitely not actually pinecone. I believe it was some sort of white chocolate. In any case, it was delicious, and I bought a box, which I then ate for lunch the day after. I also purchased (from different stores) a necklace, as well as a bracelet to replace an identical one I had bought at Kaiyuan Temple and then proceeded to break a few days after. I visited the Chinese version of America’s Lush, which sold bath bombs and facial soaps aplenty, and saw a genuine, live pig just sitting in a cage on the street and, in a different area, a very large rat.

For whatever reason, people I interacted with made more frequent references to my being hunxue’er (mixed race, as you may remember from a previous post) than I had previously encountered. The highlight was an older woman who stopped me on the street, presumably ready to offer me a free sample of the food at her restaurant or a flyer advertising a sale at her clothing store, looked at me, threw her plans out the window, and asked if I was hunxue’er. When I said I was, she pumped her fist, said, “很棒!” (Hěn bàng; “so awesome!”) and walked away.

A little past nine in the evening, my enthusiasm was beginning to wane a bit as I thought of the full day of school awaiting me on the 29th. Our party’s meander home, however, was interrupted when we passed a seafood restaurant and everyone (author excluded) decided they were ready for round two of dinner. It was more of a snack than a meal, but it was enough—by the time we boarded the ferry back to Xiamen, it was ten o’clock. On the mainland (figuratively speaking, of course: Xiamen is actually an island. Gulangyu is just a smaller island. Like Pluto, if it had a moon.) we said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. Yichu took Qinghan and me to the curb, where she was among a herd of people attempting to hail taxis. No luck. We jaywalked across the street to a bus stop, and Yichu examined the timetables. Everything would take us further away. Already heightened by the time delay of the impromptu meal, my stress levels were through the roof. We went through an underground tunnel and reached another bus stop. At this one, we waited for a bus and rode it for four stops or so. We got off, walked about two blocks, and were greeted with the familiar sight of neon-lit ears, tails, and whiskers.

I’ve never been so glad to see a street full of cat paraphernalia in my life.

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garywonghc · 7 years

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Thupten Jinpa, Voice for Compassion

by Lindsay Kyte

“It’s in the teachings of my own Tibetan Buddhist tradition where I find many of the tools that help me navigate the challenges of everyday living in the contemporary world,” says scholar and translator Thupten Jinpa.

Ironically, the Buddhist tradition he finds so helpful in the modern world was developed during hundreds of years of self-imposed isolation inside Tibet, scrupulously avoiding contact with outside influences. That changed dramatically in 1958, when a failed revolt against Chinese occupiers drove hundreds of thousands of Tibetans, including major Buddhist figures such as the Dalai Lama, into exile.

Thupten Jinpa Langri was one of that first generation of Tibetans who grew up in exile. Now fifty-eight, he has been a pioneer in helping the Tibetan Buddhist tradition find its place in the world. The bridge he’s found between modern society and his ancient religious tradition is compassion.

“Compassion turns out to be the common ground where the ethical teachings of all major traditions, religious and humanistic, come together,” says Jinpa, who is the author of A Fearless Heart: How the Courage to Be Compassionate Can Change Our Lives. “Even in the contested political arena, compassion is one value that both sides of the spectrum are eager to claim.”

Jinpa defines compassion as “a sense of concern that arises when we are confronted with another’s suffering and feel motivated to see that suffering relieved. Compassion is a response to the inevitable reality of our human condition — our experiences of pain and sorrow — and offers the possibility of responding with understanding, patience, and kindness.”

It’s no coincidence that his words echo those of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, since he is best-known as His Holiness’ principal English translator since 1985. This former monk is now a family man living in a modest townhouse in Montreal. I sipped coffee with him on his backyard patio as he talked about how compassion permeates his personal life and his work as a scholar, author, translator, and leader in the dialogue between Buddhism and science.

Thupten Jinpa was just one year old when his family fled to India in 1959 in the wake of the Dalai Lama’s escape. At a school for refugee children, he had a traditional Tibetan Buddhist education. “Every Sunday afternoon, a monastic teacher would give a dharma teaching,” Jinpa remembers. “He told stories about Buddhism coming to Tibet, the sacrifices great translators made, and the invention of the Tibetan language system. The traditional culture was being preserved with the children.”

When he was six years old, Jinpa was chosen to walk alongside the Dalai Lama when His Holiness visited the school. “I remember holding his hand and trying to keep up with his pace,” he says. Jinpa asked His Holiness if he could become a monk, to which His Holiness replied, “Study well and you can become a monk anytime you wish.”

When Jinpa was nine, his mother passed away and his father became a monk, which was not uncommon upon the death of a spouse. Two years later, Jinpa decided he wanted to become a monk too. He joined his father’s monastery in southern India, but soon became frustrated with its lack of academic exploration. “The main education consisted of memorising and chanting liturgical texts without knowing their meaning,” he says. “I felt intellectually restless and increasingly uncomfortable.”

Jinpa realised that learning English was the key to exploring new ideas. “I had a basic ability to read English but my conversational skills were almost nonexistent,” he says. “I made do with comic books and a cheap used transistor radio. The Voice of America had a unique programme broadcasting in English, in which the presenter spoke slowly and repeated every sentence twice. This was immensely helpful.”

The early 1970s were the height of the hippie movement in India. Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s home and seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, was a favourite spot to hang out, smoke some chillums, and explore Buddhism. His Holiness’ teachings attracted spiritual seekers from across the globe, with whom Jinpa would practice his English, read Western literature, try exotic new foods like pancakes, and learn to use a knife and fork.

“Through English, I learned to read a globe,” Jinpa says. “That made the news of great countries come to life — England, America, Russia, and our beloved Tibet, which had tragically fallen to Communist China.”

At the same time, Jinpa deepened his knowledge of Buddhism and the Tibetan language with a teacher named Zemey Rinpoche, who recognised the young monk’s restless intellect. In 1978, Jinpa moved to Ganden, a large monastery in southern India renowned for its intellectual rigour. On completing his studies there, he was awarded the degree of Geshé Lharampa, the highest level of academic achievement in Tibetan Buddhism.

Then in 1985, twenty years after he had held the Dalai Lama’s hand as a small boy, Thupten Jinpa got a surprise call. His Holiness was scheduled to teach in Dharamasala but his English translator was not going to arrive in time. Jinpa had been recommended.

At first, he tried to refuse. “I said, ‘No, no. I’ve never done this before,’” he remembers. Though nervous, Jinpa eventually agreed to do it. The audience responded well to his style of translation, and when the official translator arrived, the audience requested that Jinpa continue.

Afterwards, the Dalai Lama asked to see Jinpa in his office, where he said, “I know you. You’re a good debater. You’re a good scholar. But I never knew you spoke English. How come I never knew?” Jinpa sheepishly explained to His Holiness that he’d kept a low profile because if others in the monastery knew how well he spoke English, he’d be inundated with tasks. His Holiness said, “People tell me that you have a very easy English to listen to. Would you come with me when I need you to interpret, and on my travels?”

Jinpa was in tears. “In my wildest dreams, I never thought I would have the honour of serving the Dalai Lama so closely,” he says. “For a Tibetan who grew up as a refugee in India, serving the Dalai Lama was also a way to honour the sacrifices our parents had to make in their early years of exile.”

Jinpa began translating for the Dalai Lama in India, and two years later travelled to the West for the first time. “The first country we stopped in was West Germany. I had never seen a supermarket or motorways with two lanes. The colours were very muted, even the houses and clothes. There were very few people, whereas in India there are people everywhere. It felt too neat and too clean. On the same trip, we went to the United States. Even the air smelled different.”

“My relationship with Sophie involved a bit of a learning curve,” says Thupten Jinpa about life as a married man. “It’s funny how the things that become so important in your life tend to happen accidentally.”

Though he was now the Dalai Lama’s principal English translator, Jinpa continued to develop a life independent of this role. He went to Cambridge University to pursue a B.A. in Western philosophy, and eventually got his PhD in religious studies.

Away for the first time, he began to think that his future might not be in the monastery, because remaining a monk meant he would eventually become a teacher. “Right from the beginning, I recognised that in serving His Holiness, I was also serving the world,” says Jinpa. “Whereas, if I tried to be a teacher in my own right, I may be successful, but my reach would always be limited.” He began to see he was in a unique position: “The strange karma I had of being a monk, yet knowing English, was pushing me to be a medium between the two cultures.”

Jinpa also had to face what his heart was telling him — he wanted a family of his own. “I’d had a yearning for family since my early twenties. The yearning was even stronger after my undergraduate time at Cambridge. So I made the decision to give back my vows.”

Jinpa wrote the Dalai Lama a long letter to apologise if he had disappointed him. A couple of months later, Jinpa got a call that His Holiness wanted him to translate in Switzerland. He explained that he was no longer a monk, but the Dalai Lama’s secretary said that His Holiness had personally requested him.

When he saw His Holiness, Jinpa remembers, “I said, ‘I’m so sorry to turn up like this in trousers instead of robes.’ The Dalai Lama laughed and said, ‘You always had a big head. But now, with hair, it looks even more impressive.’ His Holiness told me, ‘I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t disappointed and saddened by your leaving the monastic life, but I know you have not taken this decision lightly. I respect your judgement.’”

Then the Dalai Lama gave Jinpa this advice: “I have no experience in family life. But I have seen enough broken relationships to know that you shouldn’t have children before you’ve found the right partner. There are so many broken families with small children caught in the middle and parents expending so much energy trying to resolve conflicts.”

Jinpa says His Holiness’ reaction to his decision taught him a lot about compassion. “He could have scolded me. But he got to my level, understood me, and looked at the situation from my perspective. That changed everything.”

A year later, when His Holiness couldn’t make a scheduled radio interview in Montreal, he sent Jinpa in his place. Because Jinpa did not speak French, Sophie Boyer, a volunteer for the Canada Tibet Committee, went to the studio to help.

“The first time we spoke was on the radio,” he says. “Later she told me she was planning to go to India to learn Tibetan.” Jinpa arranged for Sophie to stay in his former monastery and he went back to Cambridge, where he was working as a research fellow in Eastern religion. The two stayed in touch and eventually married. Thupten Jinpa now smiles as he remembers the learning curve that being in a romantic relationship entailed.

“In the Tibetan community, once you grow up, there’s not much physical contact,” says Jinpa. “And having been a monk, physical intimacy was not part of my life, nor was the sharing of emotions. My wife, she’s French-Canadian, which is a culture that expects that intimacy. So learning that took a little while.”

Jinpa and Sophie have two daughters, now both at university, and Jinpa says becoming a father changed his perspective on compassion, which had been a little theoretical. “It helped me make real many of the sentiments around compassion that we, as monks, visualise and imagine. In the face of an infant’s immediate need, a loving parent is completely there for that child. That unconditionality, that total presence, is the quality of mind and heart that compassion and meditation tries to cultivate for all beings.”

Jinpa’s youngest daughter, Tara, taught him many lessons. “Between ages two and four, she was completely unmanageable sometimes,” he says. “I remember getting caught being very angry and frustrated. In relationships you have with colleagues or teachers, you’re not completely exposed from the personal side, whereas in the context of family life, you are as bare as you can be.”

Being a family man has allowed Jinpa to act as a bridge between the Dalai Lama and lay audiences. “Sometimes a question does not fully capture what an audience member wants to ask,” says Jinpa. “As a lay person with a family, I may be able to translate those unwritten assumptions. Conversely, I may also be able to explain certain points of His Holiness’ to the audience in a way that is more understandable because of my life situation.”

“I’ve always been interested in ideas, but I was never that interested in science,” Thupten Jinpa acknowledges. That changed in 1987, when he translated for the Dalai Lama at the first Mind and Life conference. For the first time, contemplative practitioners and leading scientists came together for a dialogue about how the inner research of meditation and the outer research of science could work together.

“For His Holiness,” says Jinpa, “what science offers is a very empirical way of grounding many aspects of Buddhism — the importance of self-discipline, having mastery of your emotions, having awareness of your own eternal mind. If you’re able to explain these ideas in scientific language and cite scientific findings, it’s a much more accessible way of conveying them to Western minds.”

There was more skepticism on the scientific side. “When the first Mind and Life Dialogues began, compassion wasn’t a major field in science,” says Jinpa. “But more and more research indicated evidence of empathy in animals, so you could no longer say altruism has been put upon us by culture. Until then, that was what a lot of scientists took morality and religion to be — a human invention to keep a lid on this brute nature. Otherwise, we’d be at each other’s throats.”

Jinpa’s role was more than translating mere words. “At the time, the conceptual framework wasn’t there for scientists to understand Buddhist philosophy,” Jinpa says. “If you started using Buddhist jargon, they had no way of appreciating the insights.” To build a foundation for productive dialogue, Jinpa and His Holiness had to create connections beyond the technical language of both worlds.

His Holiness’ message about the importance of compassion began to attract greater interest in the scientific world. Jinpa says that the Mind and Life conference at MIT in 2003 was a milestone. “That represented, from a mainstream scientific community’s point of view, a begrudging acceptance of the role Buddhism has had in shaping science.”

Compassion and the benefits of meditation practice are now considered legitimate subjects of scientific study. In 2005, His Holiness was a keynote speaker at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Since its first dialogue in 1987, the Mind and Life Institute has held more than thirty events on a wide range of subjects, including ethics, neuroplasticity, altruism, economics, and more. Thupten Jinpa is the chair of its board.

Another organisation studying and promoting compassion is the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education (CCARE) at Stanford University, which Jinpa helped found with neurosurgeon James Doty. There Jinpa developed the Compassion Cultivation Training program (CCT), combining mindfulness practice, compassion meditation techniques, and Western psychological insights. Free of religious terminology and with testable results, this eight-week training in empathy and compassion has been taught to thousands of people from Stanford students to Google engineers. Many of its principles and practices are found in Jinpa’s book, A Fearless Heart.

Thupten Jinpa says that over time he came to recognise that his destiny is to integrate classical Tibetan Buddhism into the contemporary world. He therefore turned his attention to preserving the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, in particular the extensive philosophical teachings that the Dalai Lama refers to as the Nalanda tradition, named after the famed Mahayana Buddhist university of ancient India.

Fearing that this knowledge might be lost as the Tibetan monastic system weakens, Jinpa decided to “translate, reformat, and recreate these Tibetan texts for better and more efficient use, and to make them part of the global literary tradition.” The Library of Tibetan Classics is an enormous project, a thirty-two volume set of translations of key texts. Nine have been published so far by Wisdom Publications, with the others in progress.

Jinpa also has what he calls a “hobby” — reforming classical Tibetan grammar to a more modern system to make it easier for future generations of Tibetans to retain their language. “Between the spoken and the written, there’s a big gap. I did a lot of research and wrote a book to help bridge this gap, and it’s now being used in some of the monasteries.”

A true Renaissance man, Thupten Jinpa says there is a drive that unifies the work he does in so many different fields: “It’s my belief that the preservation and dissemination of classical Buddhist knowledge and its practices, including compassion, is good for the world.” As Jinpa reflects on this, he pats the family dog, who has been sleeping at his feet. The dog wags its tail happily. This makes Thupten Jinpa smile. “Also, you know, I think I’ve just been plain lucky,” he adds, with a characteristic laugh.

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ashotofpeace-blog · 7 years

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“Never in the course of human events has so much been named after a man who spent so little time in a place”. Jim Baker That man is Sir Stamford Raffles, the founder of Singapore. His influence on the Malay Peninsula is not confined to Singapore, however. At the turn of the 19th century, France had taken control of the Netherlands, forcing the Dutch King to seek asylum in Britain. Fearful that France was about to go on a maniacal rampage in search for world domination, Britain struck a deal with the exiled monarch of Holland to temporarily occupy all of their colonial territories in order to stave of any provocations from the increasingly dangerous French. Britain and the East India Company had promised to return all the colonies to the Dutch once the war was over. For the formerly Dutch-occupied city of Malacca, the East India Company, in their typical pedantic and ruthless style, planned to honour this agreement but first wanted to burn it to the ground and force all of its inhabitants - at gunpoint if necessary - to emigrate to Penang, rendering it worthless to the Dutch. Luckily for the Dutch, but more importantly the residents of Malacca, Raffles vehemently argued against this plan. Raffles was an East India Company officer stationed in Penang, but had visited Malacca in 1808. Throughout the imperialist epoch, the British establishment peddled a false narrative of the positive moral impact of British colonialism on the native people in order to justify the true reason behind their foreign policy: to increase the Crown’s capital and power. ‘We are here to civilise you. Please ignore our ships full of your tea and gold.’ Raffles argument for not annihilating Malacca abstractly embodied this sophisticated doctrine of soft-power used by the British. Raffles put forward the case that forcing the citizens of Malacca to up sticks or die was immoral - such a policy would make the British no better than the ‘savages’ they were attempting to civilise. However, the fundamental reason why he argued against torching the city was his belief that returning the Dutch their territories was against the interest of British hegemony. Raffles wanted to keep Malacca as part of a larger strategy to expel the Dutch from the archipelago altogether. Arguing against both the Crown and the East India Company at that time took a level of bravery and self-righteousness that not many men possess. He eloquently convinced the establishment to leave Malacca in one piece. Had he not done so, Malacca might have forever been a city confined to history. Perhaps spurred on by this victory, Raffles went from arguing against the Establishment to downright mutiny in order to create Singapore. After the Napoleonic War ended the British returned the Dutch their settlements in the south of the Malacca Strait, despite Raffles’ objection. In his mind, such an act was a precursor to complete Dutch domination in the region. Consequently, he set out to establish a new colony south of Penang in order to prevent his prophecy. It is important to note that the British establishment did not want to return the Dutch their territories for the sake of fairness, but rather thought that a strong Netherlands would act as a counterbalance to any future French aggression in Europe. Both Raffles and the Crown were pursuing expansions to British power, they just disagreed on how to do so. Raffles got permission to search for a naval base in the Strait, but was under strict orders to in no way provoke the Dutch or encroach on their authority. What he did next was an act of a true maverick that would shape the history of the region. Prior to his arrival, Singapore was sparsely inhabited and was loosely ruled over by the Kingdom of Johor, which was in the Dutch’s sphere of influence. When Sultan Mahmud of Johor died in 1812, it was his second eldest who succeeded him, as his oldest was not residing in Johor at the time. Regardless, the Dutch and British Crown recognised the authority of the new Sultan. Raffles, in conjunction with other local powers, found the firstborn of Sultan Mahmud and agreed to recognise him as the true Sultan of Johor if he granted Singapore to the British. At no point did Raffles seek ratification of this plan from his superiors, and many were fuming when they found out as they feared he had risked ruining Anglo-Dutch relations. However, before any decision on Raffles’ action could be agreed upon, Singapore’s free trade philosophy began to make stupid amounts of money for the East India Company, quickly convincing the Establishment to keep the new colony and not return it to Dutch quasi-controlled Johor. Although instrumental in its founding, Raffles was only there for 10 months. Much of Singapore's success should be attributed to the man charged with putting Raffles’ vision of a free trade haven into action - Lord Farquhar. Farquhar’s name is nonexistence in Singapore, but nearly every building or road has either ‘Stamford’ or ‘Raffles’ in its title. Prior to arriving here, I had already decided I hated this city-state as I had to bin my vaping kit and supplies before arriving. To be caught with it would lead to a S$5,000 fine and 6 months in prison, or both. Purportedly this ban is for health reasons, although cigarettes are freely sold everywhere. The Singapore justice system is not to be fucked with - there is little grey area or leniency for rule breaking. Perhaps this rigid strictness is an attempt to atone for their vice-filled past, when anarchy and organised crime ruled the city. Prior to being under the British government's rule, the colony was overseen by the East India Company, who did not really care for the social society of Singapore as long as it was making money. The East India Company had only bothered to put twelve policemen in the territory, all of which were Bengali, none of whom could speak the language of the population which consisted solely of Malay and Chinese immigrants. Alas, it is hard to stay bemused at a city of this wonderment for very long. Singapore is the third largest financial centre in the world. Unlike London and New York, it doesn't have a rural population to support. Combined with their fascist approach to litter and mess, the end result is a city like no other I have ever seen. Despite its reputation as a city for the wealthy, there is a surprising amount to do for free. Each evening, Gardens by the Bay - an eco-park near the city centre - put on a free lights show, where artificial tree-like structures glow in unison to music. Each light show has a theme and when we attended it was ‘A Journey Through Asia’. I'm not sure how the history of the world's most diverse continent can be explained through lights, but it was nonetheless an enjoyable experience. A short ride on the MRT (their underground) is Chinatown and Little India. In every city, the Chinese get their own town whereas the Indians have to make do with the diminutive title of ‘Little’. Although obviously not free, getting food in either of these places is cheap - a hearty meal can be purchased for a pound. However, it is back downtown where the best attraction of all is found. The Sky Bar at Marina Bay Sands Hotel. Marina Sands is a marvel of modern architecture. Three towers elegantly shoot into the skyline, all connected at the top by a Sky Park. If you are a guest of the hotel, you can use the infinity pool in this park. If you are not, you can visit the Sky Park for around $20. But, if you go to Tower 1, you can go all the way up to the top for free and drink at the Sky Bar. Here you get the same view of Singapore and only have to pay for the drinks you order. You'd be forgiven for thinking the bar is a members only club due to their professional level of service, but no - they let scum like you in too, even if you are donning flip flops and a Liverpool shirt. Drinks are reasonably priced to pay for the awe-inducing view you are treated to. What seems like an infinite amount of cargo ships are dotted throughout the bay. Directly below is the Gardens by the Bay park, which was once so captivating but now seems like an irrelevant attraction when compared to view from the Sky Bar. Many people in the bar were conducting business meetings and why wouldn't you choose to do business here; just being here makes you feel important. I know it made me feel like I'm a man of great standing even though my only current inherent value to mankind is this blog which no one is reading. Looking down onto the horizon from this gorgeous, innovative, and luxurious piece of architecture, the impact of Raffles' vision and Faruqah’s action is astonishing. Had Raffles followed his brief not to disturb the Dutch, none of this would be here. Or perhaps it would, but the Sky Park would instead be called ‘Hemel Tuin’ or whatever Sky Garden is in Dutch.

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pog-the-frog · 5 years

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jackal-in-a-box replied to your post:Kung-food AU where everything’s the same but...

Italian??? Why? That’s so random. Chinese, English, and French are the three most important business languages.

I mentioned Italian since Italy and France are the main countries usually mentioned in reference to fashion, but my knowledge of the fashion industry is basically nonexistent so it might honestly just be baseless prattle on my part.

i just cant imagine a model ever needing to know Chinese, granted if Gabriel intends Adrien to take over his company one day it might be more relevant but im not certain exactly how much a CEO would need to talk to anyone outside subordinates and investors etc all of which I imagine would speak french or English, again I might be wrong and Chinese might be invaluable on all business levels and if so I retract my confusion about Adrien learning Chinese.

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takenews-blog1 · 6 years

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#MeToo Has Reached China, however Will It Have an Impression?

New Post has been published on https://takenews.net/metoo-has-reached-china-however-will-it-have-an-impression/

#MeToo Has Reached China, however Will It Have an Impression?

For anybody contemplating submitting official complaints of sexual harassment inside the Chinese language movie trade, the 2003 case of actress Zhang Yu is a cautionary story. As a younger girl simply beginning out within the Beijing-based movie trade, Yu claimed that she was pressured into having intercourse with over a dozen administrators with the promise of fame. After submitting plenty of lawsuits, Zhang supplied greater than 20 movies and audiotapes to the police, with plenty of clips and stills turning into public on-line. Although it was broadly believed that there was sufficient proof to show her case, she nonetheless misplaced her lawsuit and obtained no compensation. Along with her profession basically over, Zhang has since disappeared from the general public eye.

Fifteen years later, the Harvey Weinstein sexual abuse scandal expanded to Asia following a Dec. 12 report that outstanding Hong Kong-based producer-director Bey Logan, who ran the Weinstein Co.’s Asia workplace from 2005 to 2009, had been accused of a number of acts of sexual misconduct.

One has to marvel how Zhang’s case could be handled today. Instantly a topic thought of taboo was as soon as once more making headlines all through Asia, with the Logan scandal turning into the speak of Hong Kong’s insular movie world and the anti-harassment #MeToo motion even gaining momentum in way more tradition-bound China.

Now the Chinese language leisure sector — the second largest on the earth — is starting to grapple with its personal sexual harassment issues. However whereas age-old attitudes towards gender politics are positively altering within the Center Kingdom, insiders inform THR that vital cultural obstacles — sufferer shaming, an absence of authorized recourse and an all-but-nonexistent free press — will make progress tough.

Final October, the English-language, state-owned China Each day newspaper took down a column concerning the #MeToo motion that claimed sexual assault was much less prevalent in China than within the West. The writer, Sava Hassan, a Canadian-Egyptian educator and periodic China Each day contributor, argued that “Chinese language conventional values and conservative attitudes” safeguarded girls in opposition to “inappropriate conduct from members of the alternative gender.”

The column sparked an instantaneous backlash by readers, lots of whom cited statistics that present how widespread abuse in China actually is. Whereas it’s almost not possible to search out complete nationwide figures on sexual harassment in China, a 2016 survey by the China Household Planning Affiliation discovered that 35 % of school college students skilled gender-based sexual violence or sexual harassment. A 2013 survey of 1,500 girls by the Canton Public Opinion Analysis Centre, revealed 48 % of these between ages 16 and 25 stated they’d confronted sexual harassment.

Even the World Instances, a Chinese language paper intently tied to the ruling Communist Get together, admitted, in a Jan. four column this yr, that the survey figures have been “appalling.” The paper, nonetheless, argued that elevated experiences of abuse pointed to the truth that girls now have “dramatically enhanced standing in China” in contrast with neighboring India, the place, the author Liu Lulu writes, “the excessive fee of sexual harassment is an oblique results of the low social standing of females (in that nation).”

Just a few voices inside the Chinese language authorities have additionally begun to talk out and acknowledge China’s rising leisure sector has a sexual harassment downside too — albeit one with distinctive cultural manifestations.

“Hollywood handles such points in a really completely different approach from China,” posted Wuhu metropolis authorities official Zhou Peng An on his Weibo social media account in October, shortly after the Weinstein scandal broke. “In China, there are such a lot of sexual harassment circumstances within the leisure world. This will shock Hollywood. Not less than it reveals Hollywood is extra ashamed within the face of such intercourse scandals than the Chinese language leisure trade…. Some small actresses, who aren’t but well-known ‘huge gamers,’ they should meet all types of unreasonable sexual calls for from the producer, director and even buyers. We regularly name this phenomenon the unstated guidelines. It’s a extra major problem right here in China.”

“Girls within the Hong Kong movie trade expertise sexual misconduct and assault,” College of Hong Kong assistant professor Sylvia J. Martin tells THR. Creator of Haunted: An Ethnography of the Hollywood and Hong Kong Media Industries, Martin argues that institutional sexism and gender energy imbalances exist in each industries, however is turning into extra acknowledged in Hollywood because of extra activism and institutional buildings to struggle them. The historic legacy of Chinese language concubine tradition — basically the social acceptance of mistresses and marital infidelity that reinforces an age-old energy dynamic between women and men — additionally appears to exert a normalizing impact on sexually predatory conduct inside the leisure sector.

“The concern about retaliation in coming ahead about sexual harassment in China could be large,” Martin says. “In each Hollywood and Hong Kong, there’s a sense, particularly amongst older generations, that ladies who work in movie shouldn’t be stunned by harassment — an angle of ‘what did you count on?'”

Martin provides that traditionally, in contrast to within the U.S., China does not have a robust girls’s motion to offer a basis for victims of harassment who need to communicate out.

“There are options of the feminist motion within the U.S., equivalent to lawyer Anita Hill’s historic testimony about sexual harassment to the U.S. Senate, which are influencing Hollywood girls’s trade teams and campaigns,” she provides.

Martin’s HKU colleague Tommy Tse, who co-authored the e-book Superstar Tradition and the Leisure Trade in Asia, argues that whereas China has opened as much as the West because the 1980s, “it hasn’t undergone feminist actions that, firstly, spotlight feminine sexuality as autonomous and acceptable and, secondly, change perceptions of ladies enjoying extra essential — even when not equal — roles within the political, authorized, industrial and public sphere. Marriage and household are nonetheless seen as most Chinese language girls’s final life objectives,” he says.

On the identical time, China’s cultural conservatism, Communist historical past and conventional Confucianism have resulted in a much less sexualized on a regular basis texture to society than within the U.S. — which appears to translate right into a diminished menace of quotidian harassment and assault. And as many ladies who’ve lived and labored extensively within the West and China will attest, there’s usually much less informal sexualisation of ladies in Chinese language society.

“Sexual whitewashing was inspired through the Cultural Revolution, and equating women and men in a approach nonetheless permeates in Chinese language society at the moment,” says Stephany Zoo, co-director of anti-sexual violence NGO Phoenix Risen, which works in China. “In my very own expertise of residing within the U.S. and Shanghai, there’s virtually a complete lack of sexual harassment on the streets right here. China is kind of protected for ladies in that sense.”

However when assault and harassment inevitably do happen — normally involving male abuse of energy, simply as within the West — those self same cultural forces are likely to encourage a bent of poisonous victim-blaming.

There’s authorized recourse for harassment and abuse victims within the office in China. However whereas the nation’s civil courts are likely to favor staff over employers normally, sexual harassment is an exception, based on Zoo.

“The response in Chinese language tradition remains to be sometimes first: ‘you will need to have been asking for it’ and ‘in case you have been being a superb woman, then you definately would not have gotten into this place,’” she explains. “This angle is 100 % culturally pervasive.”

Zoo’s NGO has carried out workshops in China designed to foster extra understanding across the problem of sexual misconduct within the office. Probably the most placing takeaways, she says, is that the majority Chinese language girls even empowered white-collar varieties, hardly ever disclosed private experiences of abuse to others, even shut girlfriends.

“It’s nonetheless taboo to be outspoken about ‘being taken benefit of sexually,’ difficult male superiors, or exposing themselves to ‘unfavorable conditions,’” agrees Tse.

After all, if there’s one factor the #MeToo motion within the U.S. has revealed, it is that company HR departments have been doing far too little to carry males in energy accountable and to make girls really feel protected in coming ahead. As a substitute, many ladies have gotten justice by outing predators by the press, from Weinstein onward.

Mainland China’s giant state-controlled media shops, nonetheless, usually tend to function simply one other barrier than as an outlet for exposing harassment. The federal government’s heavy-handed censorship of social media additionally goals to snuff out any viral phenomenon that carries a whiff of social discord.

When a 28-year-old girl named Xu Yalu posted on Chinese language social media service WeChat, utilizing the #MeToo hashtag and detailing how she had been groped by an older man in her neighborhood on a number of events, the submit went viral, attracting over one million views in two days — at which level it was promptly deleted by censors.

And even when a sympathetic press outlet has a number of sources prepared to go on file, publication is dangerous as a consequence of Hong Kong and China’s notoriously strict defamation legal guidelines, which place a excessive burden of proof on the media and accuser. If Weinstein have been a Hong Kong film mogul, native observers say, he could have been in a position to proceed far longer by litigating his accusers into the shadows.

One enviornment the place sexual assault seems to be gaining consideration in China is within the schooling system, and amongst very younger women.

A outstanding scientist at Beijing College of Aeronautics and Astronautics was suspended in early January after a former pupil accused him of sexual assault utilizing the #MeToo moniker.

“The college takes critically the lately named allegations made through social media relating to the ethics of our lecturer Chen Xiaowu,” the establishment stated in an announcement. “We now have arrange a working group as quickly as we might to analyze and ensure them with dispatch, and Chen Xiaowu has been quickly suspended from obligation.”

The accuser, a Chinese language scholar named Luo Qianqian, alleges the scientist lured to her to a personal residence after which tried to sexually assault her 12 years in the past. Notably, although, the alleged sufferer at the moment resides within the U.S., the place she has labored for years. She made her accusations over Chinese language social media after following the #MeToo motion stateside.

In the meantime, probably the most hard-hitting movies to deal with the problem of sexual assault in China got here out this previous fall, simply because the Weinstein scandal was reaching a fever pitch. Director Vivian Qu’s fictional artwork home movie Angels Put on White screened in the primary competitors on the Venice Movie Pageant and later obtained a considerable theatrical launch in China, incomes $three.four million — a robust efficiency for a low-budget indie title.

Qu says she spent over a yr researching sexual abuse in China, talking with quite a few Chinese language psychiatrists and legal professionals. The movie sees occasions unfold after a migrant woman working in a motel witnesses the prelude to the abuse of two schoolgirls by their middle-aged male companion.

“Our slogan for the discharge was ‘break the silence’ as a result of typically, folks in China usually are not speaking about it,” Qu tells THR. “Nobody desires to speak about it: mother and father, lecturers and society normally.”

To these accustomed to small-town Chinese language life, Angels Put on White presents a practical have a look at the fallout after allegations of abuse. The best way some males in energy collude to forestall publicity and the savage victim-blaming of preteen women make for a few of the movie’s most uncooked and uncomfortable scenes.

“Individuals don’t really feel an enormous duty to assist — they suppose they will simply neglect about it by not speaking or fascinated with it,” Qu says. “The reluctance of society to open up might be extra profound than any single case.”

However Qu reads the passion for Angel’s Put on White in better China as an indication modest turning level may very well be afoot. The movie was nominated for finest image, finest director and finest actress at Taiwan’s Golden Horse Awards in November, Chinese language-language cinema’s most esteemed awards occasion. Qu received in one of the best director class.

As in Hollywood, it’s seemingly that change will likely be pushed by extra of this: a brand new technology of unbiased girls behind the digicam, in positions of energy. Conservative attitudes towards intercourse are shifting amongst China’s youthful generations, and in lots of city facilities which are claiming a stage of independence and social freedom that quantities to a rising feminist motion of kinds.

Ivy Zhong, founding father of Jetavana Leisure studio, and considered one of China’s most achieved feminine movie executives, is main the way in which.

“From my perspective, sexual harassment is detrimental and insupportable whether or not it is in Chinese language or Western cultures,” Zhong says. “This new technology of [Chinese] girls is rising up in a multicultural world and receiving enormous quantities of data every day. I consider they are going to create many nice adjustments — and the movie trade will likely be one a part of the entire image.”

#Metoo

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dac-bonj · 7 years

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Lesotho Infinity And Beyond: 6 December 2016: South Africa- Cape Town!!!

My British friend George and I left for Cape Town from Hermanus in the morning. It was so stressful driving in a city with traffic again. We returned the car, super dirty and needing gas, but the car rental guy said he wouldn’t charge me, which was great. I checked into my hostel, Zebra Crossing, a really nice hostel with wifi and lots of indoor/outdoor chilling space (R170/night, the cheapest I was able to find in Cape Town). We wandered around a little bit, then decided to try to make it to the Kirstenbosch Botanical Gardens with the train. But it turns out that the trains were all screwed up and delayed due to people stealing parts of the train or something, so they weren’t running. TIA. So we wouldn’t be making it to the gardens. We then met up with these other girls George knew from other hostels, and went to their fancy hostel and swam in their pool, which was awesome. Then all of us went out on Long Street, which is the primary street for bars and music, etc. Every night on Long Street is loud and crazy, but this was Saturday night, so it was especially so, and really fun.

The next day, I went on one of several free walking tours of Cape Town. I ended doing all three they offered, but on that particular day, I did the historical tour. I learned the following: There are 4 million people in Cape Town, with 1 million in the surrounding townships. Most people are coloured and speak English as a first language. On the tour, we saw Desmond Tutu’s church, some Dutch East India Company buildings, the company gardens, the spot where Nelson Mandela made his first speech after being released from prison, and a court house where they determined people’s race with such banal things as the the “pencil test,” in which they stuck a pencil in your hair, and if the pencil stayed put, you were black. If it didn’t, you were white or coloured. The way they classified race was so arbitrary sometimes, and people would often be reclassified from year to year, depending on how some clerk thought they looked. Absurd. I didn’t realize that Apartheid only ended 22 years ago, and the effects are definitely still being felt. Our tour guide was very careful in his choice of racial terms, saying things like “African” or a specific tribe like “Zulu” instead of saying “Black.” Other guides I had had no problem saying “Black.” I guess it’s up to everyone’s specific preference. The first guide said that everyone treats the racial terms differently, some wearing a label like “coloured” as a badge of honor, but others refusing to be defined by their race. They used to call all black people “Bantu,” even though that’s a specific language classification, and certainly not all Southern African tribes fall under this category. Things were divided into “whites only” and “non-whites only,” and even important foreign businesspeople visiting from Japan and China were put into the non-whites category and were treated as second class citizens. Then eventually all Japanese people, and then Chinese people became honorary whites, being granted all human rights and privileges, because of important business dealings. Cape Town, from the start, was always treated like a business for the Dutch East India Company, being used as a pit stop half way between the trade routes, so I guess they decided that people who were favorable to their business interests should be treated well even though they weren’t technically white.

One of two benches outside of the High Court. The other says "Coloureds Only." They are just kept for historical significance; the benches in Cape Town aren't all like this!

One day, a few people from my hostel decided to rent a car and drive down the cape to go to Simon’s town and Cape Point. Our cast of characters include a paramedic/ambulance driver from England/Cyprus, a photographer and adventure company owner from India, and an annoying nature cult lady who only wore white from the US. We rented a car from Around About Cars and picked it up in the morning. Our first stop was Simon’s town/Boulder’s Beach to see the awesome and waddley penguins. They were so cute! I also found my Peace Corps Lesotho friend Hillary there too, who I didn’t even know was in Cape Town, so that was a total coincidence to run into her. She rented a bike for the day to go down the cape as well, because the trains were still out of commission.

Penguins!

Our next stop was Cape Point and the Cape of Good Hope, which had amazing views of the surrounding mountains and cliffs, as well as the endless expanse of the ocean. There were a few trails we walked along in the area, including to an old light house. (It was at this point where Nature Cult Lady split to go to a special beach to do her voodoo rituals. Obviously, we did not join her.)

The road to Cape Point

Cliffs at Cape Point

Hey guys!

Obligatory handstand

"The most southwestern point on the African continent."

So many lizards!

I'd never get tired of these views

Then on the way back, we drove through Chapman’s Peak, on a road that was partially cut out of a cliff, which was awesome. Then we arrived back in Cape Town in the afternoon to return the car. That evening, we decided to light the braai (bbq) and roasted some meat and vegetables. This oldish guy was talking about working as a cameraman all over South Africa and having lions jump at him, which was pretty entertaining to hear.

In Cape Town, there are two main mountains to climb: Lion’s Head and Table Mountain. The next day, I decided to climb Lion’s Head in the morning. The hike takes you spiraling around the mountain, giving views of the city, the harbor, the ocean, and the beaches on the other side. There are also ladders, chains, and staples to help you get up, which was super fun to climb up on.

A ladder on the path up to the top of Lion's Head

A view from partway up Lion's Head. Signal Hill is on the right.

Staples and chains

The beautiful city

A sign at the top of Lion's Head. Who knows what it originally said?

On the way down, I took the path down to Signal Hill, where they fire a cannon every day at the same time. I saw paragliders taking off and floating around, swooping toward the hill and then gliding out toward the sea.

Paragliders that just took off from Signal Hill

Hillary and I met up for Free Tour #2, which was a tour of the Bo Kaap neighborhood. It’s a super colorful area of Cape Town where everyone still greets you (“Salaam” – it’s mostly Muslim there), people look out for each other, and troublemaking kids play a kind of ding-dong-ditch game. Our guide had practically grown up in that neighborhood, so it was great to hear some of his first-hand stories of the area. He explained that it’s so colorful because a long time ago, when everything was painted white, one person painted their house a bright color to distinguish it from the others as a sort of advertisement for the business they were running there. Other people caught on, trying to be more colorful than the next, and the result is:

Hillary and I finished off the evening with dinner at Bisemilah restaurant in the Bo Kaap for some delicious bobotie, a traditional South African dish of spiced mincemeat coated in a kind of egg topping, served over rice. It was so flavorful!

About halfway through my stay in Cape Town, I decided to move to a new hostel. Zebra Crossing was great, but I wanted to check out another hostel that some of my friends had stayed at, Long Street Backpackers. While Zebra Crossing was calm and quiet, Long Street Backpackers had a reputation of being loud and crazy. And it delivered, in a good way. It was also R170 per night, but wifi wasn’t free. I wasn’t mad, though, as I feel like it forces people to actually interact with each other (gasp!), which traveling is all about anyway. Wifi is a crutch. Plus I had a sim card with a little data anyway, so I could do the essentials like Whatsapp and email.

View from one of several balconies of Long Street Backpackers

So the day after I moved hostels, I loaded up my Cape Town bus card and bussed to Hout Bay, which is a beautiful beach and harbor area just south of Cape Town. I really wanted to surf, but the waves were tiny to nonexistent. The surf shop guy there told me it wouldn’t be worth trying to surf. I love the ocean, though, so I couldn’t resist at least swimming in the (freezing) water anyway. On the way back from Hout Bay, I stopped by Lladundo and Camps Bay, incredible-looking beaches.

Camps Bay Beach

I got back to Long Street Backpackers and immediately met an Israeli girl staying in my dorm. All Israelis have to go into the army, and she just finished three years of field intelligence. She was traveling now and would start college in a few months, and felt behind compared to similar-aged people of other nationalities, because lots of them have already established their careers by now. But I told her that having three years of life experience was better, because now she has a better idea of what she wants to do with her life before going to college. Lots of people, me included, just went to college without really knowing what they wanted to do, because going to college is just “what one does” right after high school.

Other people I met at this hostel include a sweet but crazy English guy, covered in tattoos, who takes a few weeks off every year and just goes insane partying in some foreign location. His blood brother, one of the managers of the hostel, and this English guy were being crazy together while another manager, a guy with a beer belly and a ponytail, looked on with a mixture of indifference, judgement, and brotherly love. There were also a couple of stunt guys who liked to hang out at the hostel a lot, one of which legit looked like a ken doll. The fun and craziness continued through my stay, helped along by the hostel bar’s free-shots-for-varying-levels-of-nudity policy (which I did not personally participate in. Don't worry, Mom.).

Perhaps the most iconic destination in Cape Town is Table Mountain, named so presumably because it’s flat on top. Many afternoons, a cloud will descend onto the top and start spilling down the sides, which people aptly call the table cloth. I woke up early one morning and bussed up the long hill to the base of the mountain. I went to the info booth and they pointed the way to the advised path, which I heard was just 2+ hours of stairs up to the top. I asked where the fun/hard path was, and they told me that that path was not advised because it was more dangerous, and that if I got hurt and told someone that the info people had told me how to go up the hard path, they would get in trouble. After persisting, the lady reluctantly nudged her head in the direction of the start of the trail. Sweet! It was really fun, with lots of rock scrambling, some chains and staples where they didn't need to be, no chains or staples where they definitely needed to be, and great views of the city once I got toward the top. For those who don’t care to climb the mountain, there is a cable car that will take you right to the top in just a few seconds. The hard path up would have been almost impossible to go down, as I was hoisting and squeezing myself on and between boulders on the way up, so I decided to take the normal path down. Surprise, it was an hour and a half of stairs, to the detriment of my knees. Ouch. While I can go up a mountain all day long (and have), I always hate going down a mountain. I might have taken the cable car down had I known/wasn’t so cheap.

Partway up Table Mountain, looking at Lion's Head

"This is not an easy way down," accurately advises a sign at the top where the hard path pops out

The tiny city below

Another great place in Cape Town is the V&A Waterfront. It’s a big expanse of shops and restaurant on the edge of the harbor. AKA it's pretty fancy. I got some awesome food, including a pan-seared beef and feta cheese wrap and some bubble tea. There was a Korean cultural festival happening when I was there, and I watched some k-pop dance contest on the steps of a little amphitheater. Then I walked to the Sea Point Promenade, which is a path along the water.

These yellow frame things are all over the city

Tourists think they're funny

The main reason I was at the waterfront was because that’s where the Robben Island tour leaves. I had ordered my ticket online a few days earlier because they sell out pretty quickly. My tour mates and I lined up to get on the ferry, which takes you 45 minutes out to Robben Island. After we got there, we got on some busses that would take us around the island. Before getting to the prison, we had a small tour of the island itself and what buildings used to be what, and also saw some penguins. At the prison, we got a tour with this awesome ex-political prisoner who told us all about life in the prison. There were many people, including Nelson Mandela, who were held there for many years for being part of the resistance movement against apartheid. He told us about how you were only allowed to have a few letters per year, and they were heavily censored by prison authorities by having words and sentences physically cut out of the paper. He told us about working in the quarries hammering rocks, and that the prisoners used to have secret meetings there to discuss political plans against the apartheid government. Even in prison, apartheid was going strong, as black prisoners had to wear short pants like children, got easier jobs, and got less food, and coloured prisoners got better treatment. Then we all ferried back to the mainland. I don’t think I would have understood/appreciated the tour NEARLY as much if I hadn’t read Nelson Mandela’s book, Long Walk to Freedom. It’s super interesting, and in general it helped inform me about life in South Africa (and in turn, somewhat about life in Lesotho).

Entrance to Robben Island

Beautiful Table Mountain on the mainland

Our guide talking to the group in the prison yard

One day, I decided to take the third of three free walking tours, this time in the District 6 area of the city. The tour was pretty boring, so I abandoned it and walked to Woodstock, a neighborhood in the northeast of the city. It was such a good idea to go there instead of enduring the rest of the tour, because I found SO MUCH STREET ART! If you know me, you know that I love love love street art, and it was literally around every corner in this neighborhood. Some people sitting outside their houses were super friendly, and when they saw me with my camera, they even pointed me in the direction of the best pieces. So cool!

Woodstock, straight ahead

This was one of the murals that the tour guide showed us. It's very important, but the building owner was painting over it! We might have been some of the last people to see it. It depicted what life was like in the 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s in South Africa.

A huge mural

Beep

Lots of the murals were animal-related, including this elephant...

...and this rhino

And even some of the buildings are crazily painted

The last place I went around Cape Town was Muizenberg, a beach town known for surfing. By this point, the train was actually running again, so a German guy (who I had first met in Coffee Bay and was staying at my hostel again in Cape Town) and I trained about an hour down there. Someone had told him that the train was unsafe, but I found it perfectly fine. Sure, there was graffiti all over the outside, but I felt completely safe. Some people are just sketched out over nothing, I guess. After we arrived at Muizenberg, we both rented surf boards and wetsuits and tried our hand at the waves. I still kind of suck at surfing, but every time I do it, I have the best time. Then after falafel for lunch, we went on a quest to buy him a wetsuit that he could take with him when he went to New Zealand in a few days. He was doing the one year working visa, which I am becoming more and more enthralled by. He was going to be a hiking guide there, which sounds awesome because I heard that New Zealand is absolutely beautiful for hiking. We eventually found him a suit and trained back to Cape Town, sufficiently exhausted by the day.

A screenshot of all the places I had dropped pins on my maps.me app. It shows where all I stopped along the coast from Durban to Cape Town!

I was super sad to leave Cape Town, and I forced myself to buy a bus ticket to Pretoria a few days earlier because I knew that if I didn’t buy it, I’d just stay in Cape Town forever. A friend I’d made at the hostel was super nice and drove me to the bus/train station where I got on the Intercape bus to Pretoria. Cape Town was one of the best places I’d visited by far: outdoor activities, indoor activities, food, night life, ocean, more food, diverse cultures, and cool people, Bye, Cape Town! I’ll definitely be back!

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