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partnersatfazbear · 3 years

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Fazbear Frights: What We Found Analysis

Here’s my analysis for What We Found, the third story in Gumdrop Angel. I wrote this as I read so it may be a little different than my previous analysis where I read the story first and went back.

If you’re a Michael Afton fan I highly recommend this. Also, there’s possibly some insight into William Afton, Mrs. Afton, and Henry too, so it’s worth a skim.

Pg 144 '...a place thirty-some years forgotten' Just reconfirming FNAF 3 is 30 years past *one* of the FNAF closings, presumably FNAF 2 location.

Pg 145 "The whole building was giving him [Hudson] a headache." FIX THE VENTILATION BRUH

Pg 148 '...they were able to use salvaged derelict equiptment original to the old pizzerias.' Another confirmation of something we heard from Phone Guy.

Pg 147 "How old are you?" "Twenty-three, same as you." I think this gives us Michael's age during FNAF 3.

EDIT: This kept me awake last night. Obviously this is impossible because he has to be alive for at least 10 years before 1983, BUT maybe its just reconfirming FNAF 3′s year? 2023?

Pg 149 "Hudsan's dad died and his mom married Lewis, a ridiculous balding man who wore plaid vests and smoked a pipe" Did... Did this book just seriously imply Mrs. Afton left William for Henry? Really? (Yes, there's differences; the husband is dead and the man wears plaid 'vests' but it seems very odd to include that detail. This could just have been the writer's own imagination, though.) I have seen this as a fan theory and 100% explains the jealousy aspect of William, but I can't help but kinda hate it. I think this is very important, though, and probably Scott's intention. "This horrible little man [Lewis]... would make Hudson's next ten years a living Hell" This REALLY intrigues me given the context I just went over. The text implies Lewis was fairly neglectful to our main character / Michael stand-in Hudson. Maybe I'm wrong and for some reason Mrs. Emily left and went to William? XD Haha, I'm reading too much into this page. Maybe I'll come back to this later. I figure it's more of Scott possibly including double-details (contradicting stuff with the same character that really applies to two, which has been something I heavily pointed out in previous anaylsis on this blog) Having said that, I'm going w/the former because I can't imagine Henry being abusive (neglectful yes, abusive no) and he's never been portrayed that way in official works like William has in the novels.

Pg 150 "Hudson began to screw up in class...a product of spending the night in fear that his stepfather [Lewis]... [would] beat him just for the fun of it." Ooof. Big confirm on William actually being abusive. Unless we stick with the Henry theory for Lewis (combined with Midnight Motorist Henry theory / alcoholic). "...near-daily beatings..." "his mom started taking pills to get through the day..." So, whoever Mrs. Afton is, she was definetly not paying attention. But then, most people married to serial killers either don't notice because of denial (like this) or because the killer is so manipulative / careful they can't notice.

"Barry, who had red hair and freckles..." Yo?! Is that a description of Fritz?! These friends in the story could be the other kids Michael knew's stand-in's, aka the two gravestones with names he used (Fritz and Jeremy), as shown in the checks for the games and FNAF 6. I've long figured Michael was probably friends with the victims--it makes them easier, although riskier, targets [for William]. The two friends are male, too, like Fritz and Jeremy. If you're curious about Duane's description (our stand in for Jeremy), it's "tight black shirt... muscles... black hair long enough for a glossy ponytail..." I'm not sure if this matches anything found in the novels or contradicts them, though. (The novels = TSE trilogy)

"And so it went... until the night of the fire." For context, this is before FF burns down. We're learning of Hudson's life from his close friends in childhood, his father's death, his mother remarrying, to his abusive stepfather, to his grades slipping to this line. This would be a new fire not seen/mentioned in the games...

Pg 151 "...go to Charlie's for a sundae..." Really. Really Scott. Just gonna use this name again. OK. I'm not even gonna discuss this because it's probably irrelevant. *This is confirmed on pg 158 to be an ice cream shop. No lore relevance aside the annoying name coincidences Scott loves to troll with.

"This is not... an advance into enemy territory, a fight with demons, or a descent into Hell..." Uh, what? What is Hudson talking about? XD I'm only noting it because it seems so out of place. He's probably talking about video games or something.

Another note, although I don't have a specific reference since it is mentioned off-hand many times, is that Hudson keeps referring to his "history" which is implied to have kept him from getting a well-paying job and a girl he's crushing on doesn't know this "history" which is good for him. Seems good old "Michael Stand-In" has done some jail time or something. Edit: On pg 154/155 the girl asks Hudson, "Did you do it?" Seems he may have killed his stepfather or been involved with something else just as bad. Edit 2: No, I was thinking too deep into it. This probably refers to Evan's death at Fredbear's. DUH.

Pg 156 describes an actual "prize corner" in FF! What am I even reading? IIRC this is in FNAF 3, too. So they just hand out these scary gift boxes to people that complete the attraction? (Hudson says he *would* have fun handing out the scary toys to kids when this location opens--kind of a bully thing to do, eh?)

"[Hudson] avoid[ed] glancing in any of the mirrors..." I'm only pointing this out because it could be reference to one of two things. 1) We know because of one of UCN's music tracks, William has a fear of his reflection. Michael probably shares this trait, especially since 2) after Ennard and all... and later on pg 157 it also says, "he never wanted to face: himself" Sounds like guilt, my guy.

Pg 157 "blonde hair... blue eyes..." Hudson shares an eye color with Michael. It's possible Michael had blonde hair as a child and it changed to brown (it's common, something I personally went through being technically blonde/ blue eyed myself)

"He [Hudson] knew from personal experience that toys could turn from fun...to torture ina heart-beat" Fairly self explanatory. Either Hudson's worked at a creepy location before or he doesn't like remembering Fredbear's.

*checks how much is left.* There's still 35 pages (not counting back/front) left of this... This is gonna be a lot of notes.

Pg 158 Hudson doesn't have a car. Poor Mike, probably having to walk everywhere. Especially as a corpse.

Pg 160 This page describes many physical issues Hudson has that prevents him from entering the Navy, all from the abuse of Lewis. Obvious paralell to Michael becoming an undead [because his father sent him to CBPR indirectly causing his condition]

Pg 161 "How's your granny, Hud?... ...Is she still alive?" "I don't think she can die." Does anyone in the Afton family really 'die'? XD

Pg 162 These few pages discuss Hudson's grandmother. She's described as "a seer who claimed to know the future... ...wore big men's plaid flannel shirts with baggy jeans" Um, more plaid / flannel? AGH. STAHP. Lowkey, I would totally headcanon my Aunt Jen like this, though.

Pg 163 "Hudson's mom... the way she was before Hudson's dad had died... never... particularly warm and fuzzy... but... effiencient and responsible..." More about Mrs. Afton, so that's kinda neat.

"Hudson's dad was fun and attentive." There's a good Dad in this series?

"Unfortunetly, he also struggled with mental illness." "invisible low points" (Pg 164) Kinda reminds me of how Henry is described after Charlotte's death in the books.

Pg 164 "When Steven got himself into a bad deal that cost him his small business... he'd taken his life." Oh, it is Henry! SMH. Way to use confusing paralells. So, from our understanding thus far, Hudson's real father, Steven, is our Henry stand-in. His step-father despite being described similar to Henry, is actually our William stand-in. Fair game, Scott.

Pg 164 "...he [Hudson] was locked into a supply closet..." Oh shit, you guys. So, let me go on a tangent here, because this IS important! I just watched a retrospective on Sister Location and FNAF 6 earlier and one theory for Midnight Motorist was the person in the chair was the mother and the kid was Michael. I think this little line may confirm that. In fact, the story may be the key to figuring things out. Obviously, the line is a paralell to FNAF 4's scene in which Crying Child was locked in the supply closet of Fredbear's. I know some people, including Matpat, believe[d] CC was Michael, and in this book's context, it sort of works. This does contradict Step Closer and 1000 other things that make Michael the older brother, but maybe it's hinting at MM? Abusive stepdad (possibly Henry... maybe William is gone at this point), checked out Mom (hey, grey couch lady with Foxybro's font). IDK, but its definetly something to think about.

Pg 165 Lewis is mentioned as calling Hudson "nothing" and saying "you're nothing" on several occasions on this page. Just more abuse, for those accurate fanfic writers like me. Also I kinda wanna watch Morel Orel again. Yall know my fav character is Clay. Yall know.

"You're smoke." <-- Lewis / The text later reads, "...there was some irony, given what eventually happened." BRUH. Why did your stepdad die in a fire? :V TELL ME.

"When his family's house burned down at the end of his senior year..." Huh. Is there a fire we don't know about in the game-verse? Could this explain what happened to the FNAF 4 house before MM house?!

"...it purged Hudson of Lewis and his mother." MRS. AFTON BURNED ALIVE, TOO? Bruh. I can't with this story.

The text later describes the fire is concluded to be man-made and Hudson was blamed for it. Can't say if this ties to Michael, but it IS interesting... TBF, there is a small paralell to draw between Henry in FNAF 6 and his history of suicide in the books, too.

Pg 166 "...this place's [FF] busted thermostat.." I just find this line funny.

Pg 167 "...after three weeks of keeping an eye on the place" Some more timeline context for FNAF 3. We know that Michael worked there a little while before we start playing the game thanks to one of the phone calls, IIRC, so this makes sense. If Michael was accused of [something] and also wanting to hunt down his father, then it makes perfect sense why he's working a dead end job at Freddy's over and over and over. Fun fun fun.

Pg 169 "He hated to think about a functional character [Foxy]" This line is in regards to Hudson not liking the set up of Pirate's Cove and Foxy's hook to scare people. Sounds familiar, don't it? (For Michael anyway.)

Pg 173 "Some big find is arriving tomorrow." SPRINGY BOI! COME ON BOOK, get on with the show?

Pg 176 "Granny was wearing a red-and-green plaid shirt and her baggy jeans." Nothing special, but it was specifically brought up twice. I'm kind of racking my brain trying to understand what the point of this character is outside of "woooo everything is haunted don't you know that" kind of character.

Pg 180 "...dropped the crate on the linoleum with a resounding thud." HEY. Poor Springtrap, just gettin' tossed around like the trash he is.

Pg 186 "If you weren't so stupid, I'd tell you more about it." Springtrap bringing the burn. =:)

"A voice with a burr-like rasp...hint of a Southern accent" I'm going to assume this is because it's Lewis probably in the suit in this story and not our old British lad.

"It's was Mr. Atkin's voice." THE MATH TEACHER? *goes back to check* 'The algebra teacher'. Okay...

Pg 190 Okay, so Hudson hear's Lewis' voice this time. Okay, I get it now. Springtrap in this kind of imbodies all of Hudson's old bullies, including the teacher. He also has PTSD, just FYI. IDK if anyone finds that important, but it's fairly obvious by the line "He wasn't in his bedroom. Lewis didn't just slam his head into a desk; his head had been slammed into the [arcade] game."

"Why did he hallucinate a scene from his childhood?" Oh, it's not PTSD, then. It's just the VENTILATION ERROR. lol Okay.

Just a note, as I'm reading through the more action-based stuff, I kind of feel bad for Michael if he had flashbacks like this guy. They're intense.

So, Lewis' voice finally comes out of Springtrap on Pg 213. There's that.

Pg 220 "You can just stay there [in his room]" Kind of a paralell to Midnight Motorist. Lewis is saying it to Hudson. I really feel like the kid in the MM game is Michael because of this story...

Pg 223 "Heat purges. Fire heals." I'm sure that's Henry's life motto.

The ending was stupid, but most in these stories are. Hudson is hallucinating and is implied to have burned himself alive in FF's oven. Meh? The first half of this one is A TRIP and a little insight into what I 100% believe is Michael's childhood. I think the saddest part of it all is that we never got Springtrap speaking to Michael in FNAF 3--and if it's ever remade I hope we get more of them interacting.

#fazbear frights #fnaf spoilers #spoilers #what we found #michael afton #springtrap #fnaf theories #fnaf theory #fnaf 3 #midnight motorist #mrs. afton #henry emily

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sneyrwrites · 4 years

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|Hands Off| Rockstar!Levi Ackerman x Reader

TRIGGER WARNING!: SEXUAL HARRASMENT

The smell of sweat mixed with beer was drowning your senses.

The only thing you could see, besides the bright lights from the stages, were bodies the double of your size. Turns out watching your boyfriend perform from the crowd was a little less fun than what you expected.

You were just standing there, in between two huge dudes that were rocking the whole “Punk rock vibe”, filed with piercings and tattoos, wearing all black outfit and even mohawks You felt a little underdressed on your black jeans and Levi’s band t-shirt.

His band had become really popular in the last year, and you were so happy for him and the rest of the guys. The only downside was the lack of time you and your lover got to spend together.

As of lately, Levi was always busy. If it wasn’t a recording session it was a tour, if it wasn’t a tour it was an event, or an interview. The only proof you guys were actually dating were the pictures of you two on his verified Instagram account, and still, some people didn’t believe you.

He had recently come back from a tour around Europe and you still hadn’t seen each other. So, tired of waiting around for his schedule to clear up, you bought a ticket to his show that night. You wanted to experience the entire thing, it wasn’t the same when you were backstage. The adrenaline rush as the crowd jumped was missing. Levi wasn’t even aware you were there that night, if he knew he would insist that you remained on the stage's side, waiting for him.

Suddenly a thundering guitar cord erupted from the amplifiers, and the lights went out. You felt the crowd suddenly starting to push forward, everybody eager to get to the front. With someone forcing you to move from behind had no other choice but to go with the flow, not knowing where the hell you would end up. Something cold collided with your chest, and you realized it was the metal fence that was a few feet from the stage. You were all the way in the font row.

The lights turned on again and there they were, Through Titans in all their glory. You wanted to laugh every time you heard the name of the band. Hanji, the bassist was such a Mythology freak. It was endearing, really.

Levi was already sitting on the stool in front of the drum set. He playfully hit the hi-hat a few times, as his face remained stoic. But you, being his significant other for several years, could notice the joy that was radiating from him. You plastered a slight smile on your face when you notice he was wearing the tank top you had gifted him last christmas.

“How’s everyone doing tonight?” Mike talked into the microphone. The roar of the crowd, including you answered him. “We’re Through Titans and we’re thrilled to be here performing for you guys, so we hope you enjoy”

He stepped away and nodded to Dita, turning to Levi right after. You watched with anticipation as he lifted the drumsticks and tap them three times. Hanji’s Bass riff started, and you immediately recognized the song.

Singing at the top of your lungs, you forgot about everything for a while, just enjoying your favorite band, and having a good time by yourself. Around the fifth song, the guys started to get a little more active on Stage, interacting with the first row, and having fun. Mike’s voice had a raspy quality to it that brought chills up your arms, but it was nothing compared to the flips your stomach did every time you focused on Levi.

You knew how much he hated the hot stage lights that usually suffocated the shit out of him, and caused him to be dripping wet from the sweat with just a few minutes into the gig, but besides that he was really enjoying himself. His black hair flying everywhere as he nodded his head to the rhythm of his drums, smashing the toms mercilessly. His biceps flexing each time he lifted his hand to hit the snare.

He hypnotized you, your eyes glued to his figure, captivated as he closed his eyes. Until Hanji spotted you in the crowd.

The song was getting into the bridge when her eyes found you jumping up and down in front of the stage. She smiled at you and got close, kneeling in front of you while still playing effortlessly with years of practice.

” Holy shit Girl!” She exclaimed. The chick standing next to you went nuts, thinking Hanji was referring to her, her screaming somehow even louder than the music. “What are you doing here? Does He knows?” She said, barely audible even tho the proximity.

You just shrugged, smiling to her, too busy singing to the last chorus to answer. Hanji shook her head and got up. A smile on her face as the song finished. You cheered with the rest of the crowd trying to ignore the curious looks from the people beside you that noticed your interaction with Hanji.

A more upbeat song started, and she made her way back to Mike and Dita, whispering something to them.

Three pair of eyes snapped into your direction. Mike smiled playfully to you and Dita winked an eye. You rolled yours and waved at them, entertained by their dumb behaviour. So good for your low profile. Now it was obvious the band knew you.

You observed as Hanji made her way to the back of the stage, where Levi’s drum set was stationed, him playing his heart out. Now you understood why he was so strong, banging things like that, it must be tiring. When she got there, Hanji called Levi’s attention, you could see his lips forming a ‘what?’, annoyance written all over his face. Hanji's joyous expression didn’t falter, her teasing look intensified as she pointed towards you.

Levi looked unimpressed as he rolled his eyes at his bandmate, turning his head to see what she was signaling at.

His eyes met yours his and his rhythm faltered slightly, the surprise messing with his sync. You could see Dita burst out laughing in your peripheral vision, but your eyes were glued to him. Smiling, you lifted a hand and blew him a kiss, he winked at you and resumed his playing, a small smile on his lips.

Trough out the rest of the song you could feel his gaze you you when you were busy making faces at Hanji to make her laugh. Being in the cow was way better than being backstage.

Or it was until you felt an arm sneaking around your waist.

A chest collided with your back and you tensed up. Turning your head to the side, you were face to face with a smiling drunk man, who was at least a foot taller than you. Dread filled your veins as you tried to push him away. He let go of your waist only to circle your shoulders with a stinky arm. The smell of sweat emanating from him made your stomach churn.

You grabbed his wist, trying to brake his choke hold, but he interpreted it the wrong way, dragging you further away from the front row and into the cluster of bodies. You lost your footing as his hold on you was strong.

“Hey, dude.” You said, turning to him, shaking your head no “Let me go, I’m not interested!”

He didn't heard you, the blasting music drowning your voice. He got his face closer to yours, his free hand still circling you, the other holding a beer bottle. You tried to elbow him in the gut, hoping he would let go of you, but he just laughed.

“Hey, I’m serious, let me go” You said again, trying to get over with this fucking nightmare. Sadly, people took advantage of the crowd and the packed environment to get off with other pepole’s bodys.

He pulled you closer to him, and as fast as lightning his hand grabbed your boob. He was fucking groping you. It petrified you with horror. You never had experienced sexual assault on this level. You started struggling against his hold, trashing around, and he just laughed in your ear, face in the crook of your neck., You were shaking with rage, tears prickling your eyes. His bigger build making it almost impossible to break the hold he had on you. The surrounding people were too busy enjoying the show to pay attention to the abuse you were suffering,

You kept trashing around as he held your breast, squeezing painfully as his growing erection pressed against your lower back.

“Shh, it’s okay pretty girl” he purred in your ear, and you wanted to crawl out of your skin. You felt caged.

Still struggling, your eyes went to the stage, Hanji looking confused at the place where you used to stand, now occupied with another girl. Levi’s Eyes were searching the crowd, trying to find your face, his gaze jumping from one place to the other. You dissociated from the hell you were living, trying to focus on anything else but your current assault.

You found it amazing the level of skill Levi had. He could focus on searching for you and still play on the beat.

You felt the drunk’s breath on your neck as he pressed his lips to the tender skin. Tears spilled. You had turned limp in his arms, exhausted mentally to act. You closed your eyes for a moment, trying to block everything out.

The sudden stop from the drums snapped your eyes open. A shrieking sound emanating from the amplifiers as Levi got up from the stool, knocking the mic to the ground as he stomped his way to the front.

The guy behind you took his face out of your neck, estranged by the interruption of the show. But his arm still on your chest.

“What the fuck” He muttered

You watched as Levi snatched the Mic from Mike’s hand. The rest of the band shocked at his actions. Levi made its way to the edge of the stage. You could see the murder in his eyes as he focused on the guy grabbing you.

“Get your hands off of her” The melodic voice of Levi filing you with relief “Or I‘m coming down and tearing your sorry ass to shreds”

Hanji’s eyes followed Levi's attention and found you. She went running to the security guy next to the stage, saying something to him and pointing to you.

Relief filled your body. But the guy didn't move a muscle, his head turning from side to side, trying to find the cause of the commotion, oblivious.

“Don’t play dumb buddy.” Said Levi, Signaling to him.” I’ll count to three, if you don’t let her go I’ll make you.” He dropped the mic to the ground and was about to lounge to the crowd, but Mike stopped him. Your boyfriend struggled against the singer’s restrain, desperat to get to you.

Taking a deep breath in, you turned my head, trying to hide the tremble on your voice.

“He’s talking to you.” You said, eyes hard with resentment, “Let me go”

He looked at you strange. It was almost as if he tought he could go around groping girls on a crowd. Disgust swarm inside your body, as you, for the tenth time, try to get away from him.

“What do you mean? It’s not like you were opposed to it, you were just playing hard to get” You clenched your fist, aching to slap the missoginy out of the drunken bastard.

The crowd had parted like the red sea, allowing the security guards trough. Looking up at the two guys you left a relieved smile as they tear the abuser’s hands off of you. Finally, free from the torture you turned to Levi again. His expression was still murderous towards the guy, but when his eyes met yours a brief relief shined in his eyes.

“Hey, miss.” One of the security guard spoke to you. “Please follow me backstage, Hanji asked me to get you somewhere safe.” You nodded your head, following his lead, right behind the other guard, dragging the asshole by the arm as he started spitting curses and threats.

The crowd started clapping as they escorted both of you out, and you were just happy that it all ended. They took you to a long hallway and gave you a water bottle. You could still hear Mike talking into the mic, preaching about respect and how “there’s no fucking way someone can come and violate someone's body like that in our fucking concert”, the crowd going wild to his words.

The security guard named joe, as you found out, was very kind. Keeping you company and offering whatever you may need.

“We called the cops, as I’m assuming you’re pressing charges. Right?” He asked, standing guard next to you .

“Yeah...” You said trailing off. Everything felt surreal.

The sound of hurried steps came from the end of the aisle, and both of your heads turned to the direction of the noise. Levi was running to you, a crease of concern on his eyebrows. You got up from the plastic chair and threw yourself in his arms.

A sigh of relief came out of him as his arms squeezed you, his cheek pressing against your forehead. The smell of sweat on him was comforting, in notable contrast to the gut-freezing disgust you felt towards your attacker. Levi pressed a kiss to your temple, and you lifted your head from his neck.

Levi dismissed Joe with a nod, and you two were alone.

“You could’ve warned me” He started “I would’ve gotten you a backstage pass, dumbass.”

“I’m sorry,” You apologized “I just wanted to experience a concert of yours for real.” His eyes softened at your words.

“I love you, but next time I’ll ask one of the guards to stand next to you. Just in case.” He said, and you knew he was serious as fuck.

The clapping from crowd got louder, and you knew Mike had finished with his speech, Levi had to go back on stage.

The moment he let you go was almost painful. He pressed your lips together, the tenderness of the kiss something you rarely got from him, butterflies erupted and they chased away the reminders of the previous fear, felling you with nothing but love for him.

“I have to go back, there’s only two songs left.... Can you wait for me? I’ll take you home later. “

“Of course. I’ll be here.” You answered, smiling. You still had to wait for the police to take your statement anyway

Levi kissed your lips one more time before disappearing in the hallway, rushing back to get the concert over with so he could get you home and try to chase away the lingering touches of the bastard with his own caresses.

✘ Masterlist

#Levi ackerman x reader #fanfic #reader insert #Levi x reader #attack on titan modern au #x reader #fluff #rockstar!levi #punk!levi #levi ackerman

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eldritchsurveys · 4 years

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1057.

made by @bitterstardust

1. Have you ever played a Scene It game? What did you think about it? Are you interested in trivia games at all? >> I’ve never played that. I’m not really interested in trivia games, mostly because it’s not an area I’m adept in.

2. Are you skilled in programs like Photoshop or do you find them difficult to comprehend? What is something you have made using such a program, if anything? >> I used to be, because I was actively using PS to make elaborate themes for my Vampirefreaks profiles and user-run forums, and in later years I would use it to make gifs. I haven’t used it in years now, though, and I’m sure it’s changed since the last time I used it.

3. Do you decorate your house outdoors for any holidays? >> We don’t live in a house. 4. Tell me a story about something that a relative / your family has done that might cause someone to think you have a dysfunctional family: >> I was subject to various forms of abuse, abandonment, and neglect by various members of my family, so... I think “dysfunctional” is the best way to describe them.

5. What sort of photographs make you the most emotional, & what kind of emotion do you feel when you see these particular photos? >> I’m not sure.

6. How often do you find yourself dwelling on the past? What is the hardest thing to let go of from your past? >> Relatively often, as a person with CPTSD...

7. Do most of your family / friends refer to you by the same name, or do you have multiple nicknames from different people? Does it ever become confusing? >> Most of the people who call be my name just use my legal name. A couple of people on tumblr still call me “Rev”. Even when I actively had more people calling me by different names, it wasn’t confusing. Everyone knows I have multiple names. It’s not that weird of a thing amongst people I know anyway.

8. If you were to take a movie trivia test, which movie would you know the most about? >> I’m not sure. My memory for that sort of thing is unpredictable.

9. Are you always logged onto [insert preferred social networking site here], even when you are away or asleep? Do you ever get messages from people that become aggravated from your lack of responses? >> Well, I mean... the browser keeps me logged in so I don’t have to enter my credentials every single time I awaken my computer? But if I’m not actively on the website at the moment, I don’t consider myself “logged in”.

10. Is there a spot in your house / room where you plop down all of your stuff when you get home, or do you put everything away promptly? >> No, I just put my stuff where it belongs. I don’t have a whole lot to keep track of, so it’s not a big hassle. It’d be a bigger hassle for me to have stuff out of place.

11. What would you consider your favorite bird, if any? Would you ever consider [if you don’t already] owning a bird as a pet? >> Crows and ravens are my favourite birds. I would not want to own one as a pet. I just want the crows that live around here to recognise me as crow-friend and eat my peanuts.

12. Of all of the animals that are available as pets in pet stores, which would you least likely consider having? >> All of them.

13. Would you be comfortable with your significant owning aforementioned animal, even if it made you uneasy? >> ---

14. Do you believe that you have a purpose in life? What do you think that purpose is, or have you not found it yet? >> I don’t consider life as a thing with “purpose”.

15. Would you consider surveys a hobby of yours, or just something you do every now & then when you are bored? >> I suppose it could be seen as a hobby. I’m not sure what makes something a hobby, though.

16. When was the last time you received a balloon as a gift, if ever? Can you recall what was on it? >> ---

17. Do you like to shop at dollar stores or do you consider their merchandise to be flimsy & well.. cheap? >> Depending on what you go to a dollar store for (and which dollar store it is), the merchandise is flimsy and cheaply-made. Dollar stores, in my experience, are great for food (if you’re not particular, which, unfortunately, I kind of am) and disposable things like party decorations + favours, paper towels, some toiletries, etc. Some dollar stores (Family Dollar is one, I think) are good for hygiene products because they’re just drugstore-brand stuff at a discount. Those chaotic mom-and-pop type dollar stores are great if you like kitsch, weird toys, or random cute knicknack type things. If you go to dollar stores enough, you figure out which ones are good for what things.

18. What has been the most money you have spent on a book? >> When I got one of my retroactive checks from Social Security, I bought a study Bible, a study Quran, and a Tanakh and I’m pretty sure those were the most expensive books I’ve bought.

19. Where do you go to get prescriptions filled? Or, if you don’t have prescription medication, what is the nearest pharmacy to your house? >> The nearest pharmacies are CVS (north of me) and Walgreens (east of me), which are both equidistant from me.

20. If someone dropped you off five miles from your home, would you know your way back without a map, or are you not very familiar with your location? >> Of course I’d know my way back, but I’d be hella fucking irritated that I’d have to walk that distance.

21. Are you dreading or looking forward to the coming cold temperatures? >> Dreading, of course. Seasonal depression is definitely a thing for me now. I’m basically solar-powered.

22. Do you know anyone that has such foul breath you can smell it when they are near you & talking? >> Thankfully not.

23. When it comes to hard candies, do you prefer sweet, fruity flavors or minty ones? >> Minty or some kind of licorice/anise type flavour.

24. Do you ever download fonts? What do you use them for? >> I used to, when I used Photoshop.

25. Is there anything on your computer that would upset your significant other if they discovered it. Or, if you don’t have one, is there anything that would upset your parents? >> I assume not.

#surveys #survey #random survey #not for reblogging *glare*

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kaypeace21 · 5 years

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The Mind flayer’s motivation and Will’s destiny to defeat him (deep dive analysis/theory)

Before I get into my theory/analysis I must preface this by saying that I will be using references not only in the show, but of the cannon comic book series, as well D&D wikia. Any paraphrased quotations about the background of the mind flayer or supernatural powers are from there.

1.So I first have to explain all the cannon evidence (in the show) of Will having powers before the upside down incident.The easiest way to do so is by comparing him to EL. They both could communicate through different dimensions (Will exploded 2 phones , El exploded a radio at the school). Both of their moms’ had “crazy aunts” - powers are genetic. Both had their brain waves monitored at the lab and their measurements were off the charts, plus they were being unknowingly recorded on video. El and Will are the only people who could touch, speak, and hear each other in the void. They both tore through walls (with that pink gunk between the normal world and upside down). Both communicated psychically by transferring their conscious- El to talk to Mike in his basement using the void (in s2) & Will to his mom in the living room (in s1). And they are the only magical d&d characters (mage & cleric).Also before Will goes missing , he asks Dustin for his X-men comic- later in reference to El ,Dustin asks “Do you think El was born with her powers like the X-men?” And when Mike says El is “channeling him (Will)”. Dustin says “like professor x”. clearly hinting that they were both born with powers, like the X-men.

And in s1 Will was described to be “shadow walking” . In D&D Shadow walking is – “ largely illusory, but quasi-real. characters can use this spell to travel rapidly by stepping onto the Plane of Shadow, moving the desired distance, and then stepping back onto the Material Plane.” This quote perfectly summarizes Will’s power - which he was shown to be using in s1 & s2 (before his possession)- he can be partially-present and can physically interact with both dimensions at the same time. This explains how he was standing in the real world next to Mike in the field, while the mind flayer took possession of him in the upside down version of the same field.

In fact the comic verifies Will was born with several powers: shadow walking, teleportation, and invisibility. All 3 of these powers in D&D are powers of a wizard/sorcerer - which is synonymous with the term mage (which is used to describe El).According to D&D invisibility is a level 1, teleportation is level 5, and shadow walking is a level 6 in order of increasing difficulty. It wasn’t until Will’s possession that Will truly became a cleric (which I’ll explain in detail later).

Will always had powers and was unaware he was using them (before the upside down incident)- the only powers he used at the time were invisibility and teleportation.Do you guys remember when Jonathan said Will was “good at hiding” cause teleportation and invisibility seem like something a kid who hid from his abusive father might of used accidentally A LOT! In fact the comic overemphasizes his ability to hide

The comic also verifies his ability to shadow walk. Out of fear, he powers-up from level 5 teleportation to level 6 shadow walking.He sent himself accidentally to the upside down (the lightbulb glowed just like all the lights in Hawkins did when El closed the gate to the upside down in s2).

This is made even more clear in the fact that the demagorgan is far away from him at this moment. And the comic also verifies that the demagorgan attacks people before sending them to the upside down.

The fact that Will is a Wizard and not a cleric at this time is emphasized in the comic as well. Clerics have different sources for their powers and different abilities than wizards.Season1 says Will is a cleric but the comic makes it clear that he is not one yet.

Mike corrects Lucas and says they can’t change classes now because “it’s fate” Will will become a cleric. But before this, the comic shows he’s indeed a wizard (with all the innate, born abilities that entails). Also, in the show the password Will picks for castle byers is ‘Rhadagast’ (a wizard in lord of the rings)

Also if you still don’t think Will has powers this boy literally closed his eyes and imagined lights (in another dimension) flickering and got them to do so!

2. So now I’ll discuss how Will became a cleric. It’s because of the Mind flayer- “they are evil and sadistic aberrations, feared by sentient creatures in many worlds across the multiverse due to their powerful innate psionic abilities.” The upside down is an alternate dimension/universe the mind flayer previously took control of.

“These beings sought to expand their dominion over all other creatures, controlling their minds to use them as hopeless slaves (demogorgans and demo-dogs).

“A mind flayer who decides to follow the path of WIZARDRY transforms into an ‘undead’ Alhoon- this is a mind flayer who combines powerful wizardry and sorcery with his innate skill of psionics to become a new threat. He becomes this ‘new threat’ by creating an undead elder brain (from the minds of others) and then merging his own sentience into it. Most of apprentices are destroyed in this arcane ritual” (except Will).

A Mindflayers’ religion states, “the greatest wish of a mind flayer is to conjoin/form into an elder brain, obtaining immortality by having its life experiences merge into the consciousness of those he’s sacrificed”. He essentially used these people to gain immortality and to become more powerful. Now that the mind flayer is this new ‘undead’ immortal entity/a god of sorts -he as the elder-brain is now “capable of granting divine powers to his followers.” In this case, Will, his apprentice.

The Mindflayer never intended to sacrifice Will. He thought he was special.The Mind flayer used his various powers to kidnap Will . Mindflayers have a power called scrying where they view a subject at great distances and even across other planes of existence (when the gate opened he saw Will and knew he wanted him as an apprentice). He took possession of a demorgan (who chased Will down) even though they are supposedly only attracted to blood (and Will wasn’t bleeding at the time) . And in ep1, this is the only time we see a demagorgan use telekenesis to unlock Will’s house door. This is because it wasn’t a normal demogorgan,at the time, it was possessed by the mind flayer. Also it’s interesting to note that , mind flayers can detect invisibility- a “ spell that allows a caster to see invisible creatures.”

The comic alludes to the idea of him thinking Will is special by having an unknown voice say things to Will such as “do not fear... ” and in reference to Will the mind flayer says “I want him to live forever”. And even more telling “ Do not be dismayed... am your... will strengthen you... with my righteous...”

My assumption is the mind flyer believes Will’s abilities to travel to alternate dimensions without the need for a portal makes him special and this is why he wanted to become one with him, in order to possess his powers (trying to do so in s1 and 2). He possessed Will because he wanted them to become one entity together- to become a god. The mind flayer’s main purpose in life is to “take dominion over dimensions” so with Will’s power they would be unstoppable.

3. However, since the mind flayer could never complete his possession over Will’s mind. Will is left with remnants of the mindflayers/elderbrain’s powers - and this is when Will becomes a Cleric.

“Clerics are given their powers by a god” (in this case the elder brain/mindflayer)

Typical Powers of Cleric include

-Plane shift- the shadow walking was accidental but plane shifting allows a cleric (and up to 8 people who are holding hands in a circle ) to travel to the other plane of existence or an alternate dimension (that could come in handy)

- detect chaos and evil (Will was able to do this in s2)

-Scrying- “a mindflayer can view a subject at great distance and possibly across the planes of existence...Clerics have a similar spell they call magic font.”

There are also various subcategories of clerics (the closest to Will’s description was a )-Light Cleric. “Light clerics- are infused with the radiance and power of their god and charged with chasing away lies and burning away darkness (in this case the upside down). Fire features prominently for the spells and abilities of Light Clerics.”

Note that in the first ep Will was told to use a “fire ball” to kill the monster- and the mindflayer and its minions have a weakness to heat/fire.The power that the Mindflayer gave him will be his undoing. Especially because now that the mind flayer is an “undead elder brain”. The fact that clerics can destroy/control the undead will make Will a powerful adversary.

Infact in D&D lore, “there was famous Elder brain who had many mindflayer apprentices and 1 human apprentice . The human apprentice killed over 2000 mindflayers who were about to sacrifice her to a dark deity- and there were rumors she was a dragon in a human disguise” (*cough association with fire).

So by s5, Will is going to be the one who destroys the upside down once and for all! The meaning of his name means "resolute protector" after all.

#stranger things #will byers #stranger things 3 #stranger things theory

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scato006-blog · 5 years

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Searching for a title and feedback.

New to this, would appreciate any feedback.

My mother’s hand squeezes around my infantile one, small, petite, and plump even for a 12-year-old. I feel the cold, hard shaft of the metal handle, the gun weighty in my hand. My mother’s breath, laced with Bacardi rum and stale Marlboro lights, coaches me to squeeze harder, my tiny fingertips biting under the pressure and turning light purple at the tips from being held so forcefully.

“You have to hold it like you mean it, steady.” She coaches.

“I don’t want to,” I whine, almost silently.

The wind kept biting my plump cheeks, and I felt my legs, bare in the November air, tingling and pocking with cold bumps.

This has become a routine, my mother getting intoxicated or high, and taking a sudden interest in her children and choosing the worst time to suddenly teach us some life skills. My brother, with his autism, is too heady a project to undertake. So, it is me, who at 11 pm is hauled from my kitten covered sheets and dragged outside for an impromptu lesson on protecting myself, undoubtably due to some loosely based on a true story Lifetime network film where a girl, most likely Tori Spelling, is victimized.

Thankfully, she loses interest surprisingly fast this time, and when she loosens her grip on my hand, I am able to wrestle past her, knocking her to one knee as she curses and I bolt back into my bed and lock the door. She staggers in and pounds for several moments, calling me names, before I hear her door shut and know she has passed out.

My mother hasn’t been quite right since my father died. I see her leaving often to doctors’ offices, complaining of ailments ranging from pains to depression and anxiety disorders. Her pills litter the tops of our 80’s style maroon kitchen counters; every consistency you can imagine from syringes to tiny multicolored capsules. In the mornings, we see her guzzling down the liquid medications, never using the tiny, clear ridged top that is supposed to serve as a barbie sized measuring cup. Instead, she uses that as a pseudo lid when she gets too inebriated to remember where she put the child proof cap the pharmacist carefully clicks into place. Her arms are littered with pock marks from needles. Some self-inflicted and some from all the blood draws ordered by her physicians. She has become obsessed with this idea of teaching us how to protect ourselves since my father passed. Which later I will realize is terribly contradictory, since the basis of most our inflictions come from her blatant negligence.

It isn’t until I start having sleepovers with girls outside my neighborhood that I will realize this isn’t a normal occurrence. I spend time with girls whose parents bake them cinnamon buns in the morning slathered with extra crystalline icing, whose mothers collect little figurines cased in glass cabinets without fingertips smeared on them and father figures who go off to work, kissing cheeks instead of backhanding them like the other dads in my neighborhood would do. It’s a foreign world to me, and oddly, it makes me surprisingly uncomfortable to be in such a serene environment. Almost mundane as wild as that may seem to some. Beige. I always notice this common color scheme in these safety net homes, everything was always varying shades of beige from the carpets to the placemats to the sheets. Beige everywhere.

In the morning, it’s as if nothing has happened, as she bustles around the kitchen getting my brother’s routine down to match the Velcro pictured descriptions that are supposed to help with his over stimulation. I can tell there is something tangible and tense in the air, the blatant ostracizing of me from our tiny family unit. I will learn later that it is due to embarrassment over her own actions, but in the moment from my young perspective, I have somehow failed her.

I gather my things, my teal Jansport backpack smeared with pen marks and patches, and dig in the back cabinet, shoving expired bags of chips and soup out of the way to find a long lost granola bar and walk out the door, pausing before turning the silver knob to look back slightly out of my peripheral at my mother to see if she pauses at the sound of me leaving. She doesn’t.

The bus stop holds a sense of comfort for me, knowing that I will be headed to the one safe institution I have in my young life, school. There are rules, teachers, consistency, and scheduled mealtimes. I know what is coming and when. I know what is expected of me and it isn’t laced with alcohol and substances, or parties in my home with strange men who grab in places they shouldn’t and burn your arms with their cigarettes when you try to yell in protest for someone who is too inebriated to come to your rescue.

Teacher’s take special interest in me, I must exude some sense of chaos at home, my behavior is mildly disruptive with chattering to my fellow neighboring classmates, often causing my desk to be moved adjacent to the teachers to curve my “social butterfly” antics.

Years later, I will run into my favorite English teacher, Ms. Mueller, and she will subtly hint at the signs of abuse she saw from my rumpled clothes to my bruised arms and vacant expression from exhaustion. She will tell me of a time she went to my mother’s store, at the height of our home tsunami during my high school years, and the words heatedly exchanged between them. From that point on, in school, before I have this knowledge, I will choose to spend an hour every day after school with her and be exposed to various forms of literature. She will bring books with her and give me deadlines throughout the year, hoping to keep me driven and expand this world I escape to through books.

Oddly enough, my thirst for books came from the very person I was trying to escape.

In fifth grade I had a teacher I absolutely loathed. It was truly, the first person I had a deep hatred and resentment for. I remember the feelings of rage and a craving for the demolition of our high-ceilinged classroom. Ms. Symzick was a small, petite woman who would prance around her classroom in various shades of loud pinks and magenta, shouting in her irritatingly shrill, chalkboard scraping screeching voice. She had a serious inclination to class favorites, and those favorites tended to be the children of affluent parents she co-vacationed with in the Bahamas and Jamaica, frequently referencing scuba diving explorations and inside jokes she had created with the kids poolside while they showed off their attempts at underwater hand stands. She accused my indifferent attitude towards her and my inability to pay attention to her reading “out loud” to the class on comprehension issues. My mother responded, in typical Tammy fashion, and greeted me that afternoon with a stack of VC Andrews books. Her philosophy was that I needed something to read that could hold my attention in a mildly traumatizing way. Make the book risqué enough for me to care, and it would cure my non attentive approach to active listening. It certainly worked.

While my classmates were reading books about bridges crossing into Terabithia to conquer exciting pretend lands, I was obsessed with mentally trying to connect the incest family trees of wealthy families stuck in attics, toiling away pasting together paper flowers to create gardens. I craved reading about these fucked up families, and was elated to find that not only where the books thick with small font which meant they lasted longer than my classmates small flirtations with literature, but they also were in series so I could follow these families for generations. I would blow through a book a day if it was the weekend, absorbing finally, every comma and black small printed letter flowing into my mind through an osmosis of obsessive reading.

I sit next to Holly and hold her hand under our jackets in solidarity. Holly has the same house as I do, which is baffling and comforting for my young mind. Her brothers shout and throw things in their drunken rages, blaming their parents for their adult failures and losses of custody over children. Her father sits on the couch, sleeps on the couch, drinks on the couch, argues from the couch, he exists on the couch, never intervening. When he would winded from yelling, he would clutch a small, metal vile necklace he always wore. I would learn later it contained a single pill that would melt under his tongue because he was prone to panic attacks from his time in the military.

Holly will sneak into my room, late in the night, when things get bad and she climbs into my bed, cold hands and feet pressed against my calves for warmth. She rustles under my sheets and presses her perfect little bud lips against my cheek and snuggles into my neck and falls asleep fast, just as our thermostat registers the drop in temperature from the window being pried open for her to come in and the furnace clicks on, as always, I fling my leg out from under the blankets, so as to not wake Holly and soak in some cool air as her body heat radiates against my own. I love her and want to protect her, as she is the only one who has ever expressed a kindred likeliness to what I experience behind closed doors. She protects me as well, when my mother opens the door slightly to see if I am awake or when she is under the influence ready for another “life lesson,” she will always close the door and slither away when she sees Holly’s body next to mine.

Holly knew about these moments, in the dead of night when my mother would make her way into the room. She was the one who saw the handprint makes in shades of black and blue, purple then fading to yellows and lime greens. She would take my arm, and lay her hot, brown palm slowly and softly on top of the blue and purple marks so gently, brushing the tops of the soft baby arm hair then would turn over, as if nothing had happened. It was the act of acknowledging, that would transition into acts of protection. She knew if she was there, those marks wouldn’t appear. Holly became an ever-present staple in my life, it was truly as if she was holding me together, fastening my frayed edges to keep them from being burned by my mother and faceless men’s lighters.

This is my day to day, and night to night. The seeking of comfort in concrete things and people outside my home and struggling to find a purpose outside of myself.

Years pass, the same abuses remain constant, even after the school nurse contacts my mother over concerns she has when she sees my bandaged fingers from a screaming hot iron. The difference is the older I get, the more I learn to fight back, slick mouthed and learning to block hands quickly with forearms. I develop the internal switch, for numbing and hardening emotions to dispel any sense of misery or hopelessness, I don’t allow myself to be vulnerable around her and show any form of pain or exaggerated anger. I treat her with complete indifference, which in her drunken, high moments causes absolute meltdowns. Her emotional levels skyrocketing due to inebriation, and my disconnect growing more profound with each outburst. I start to want more, more than these walls and house. I want to sleep peacefully, quietly, and safely. A concept I had never visualized for myself that I thought was coveted for children with two parents and yards without brown spots and littered with dog feces.

I sit, at 15, in my English class, the scared space I have carved out for myself. Ms. Mueller, walks past, having just kicked Gary out of class for shouting at her.

“Dyke gave me a F,” he rages after we are returned our midterm grades.

“Out!” Ms. Mueller declares, stunning me at how she so gracefully and passively dismisses him and his hate slurred words.

As she passes back to her desk, I feel a blue piece of paper get slid under the flesh of my forearm. I slide it under my notebook, I can tell through its delivery, she doesn’t want me to attract any attention through receiving it. She looks pointedly at me, and when the bell rings I rush out to see what it is she has slipped me.

She knows I am not happy with her today. Ms. Mueller detests Holly. There is this just under the surface acknowledgement that they don’t address one another, ever. Holly feels Ms. Mueller is trying to come between us and take time I should be spending time with her and instead am choosing to spend it reading, which is the most boring thing in Holly’s mind. Oddly enough, Holly has detention or make up tests almost every day after school, so her time wouldn’t be spent with me regardless. Holly is known to have her behavioral issues, shouting at teachers and authority figures much in the same fashion as her older brothers do to her and her parents. It is a cycle that has already began its inheritable rotation.

“She’s not good for you, you have too much inside you for that one.” Ms. Mueller had told me suddenly, interrupting me reading silently beside her while she worked on the summer reading list for the class, and my own which had easily an extra fifteen books added to it. At the time, I didn’t really understand what it was she meant.

“Too much inside me? What the hell?” I thought. I glared defiantly at the top of her head, wishing I had the nerve to reach out and rustle her short, cropped hair out of its artfully tousled with hair paste landscape just out of spite. She didn’t look up, nor acknowledge my anger filled face, and after some time I set my mouth in a taught line and kept reading. Leaving that day without saying a word when our hour was up.

I open it up and see it’s a flyer, for some summer program called Upward Bound and kids interested in colleges. I had never imagined myself being on some pristine collegiate campus. That was also reserved for the cinnamon bun kids whose parents showed up to every sporting event, cheering them on from the sidelines and pumping their fists in the air, visualizing college scouts coming with hefty scholarships and grants. Not for me, who begged for rides to and from practices, relying on my grandparents for transportation sparsely, so they wouldn’t see the state of our house. My mother would always get angry when her parents came to drop us off, always insisting on coming in to survey the

damage in the house from holes in walls to dirty dishes crawling with critters and cats licking dirty pans for burned egg pieces.

I folded the flyer in half and hastily shoved in under my stack of books on the bottom self in the locker I share with Holly. I am always the bottom shelf, to take my lacking height into consideration. She can’t see it; she will lose her mind. I know this, our codependency has blossomed into a full relationship of unhealthy proportions, two emotionally crippled humans attempting at something far too adult.

I wait, as always, for her to come meet me briefly, and she does. Angry brown eyes, jet black hair, browned skin from her native American heritage, and slanted eyebrows. I forgot she was angry with me from this morning when I pulled my hand away from hers when Kim snatched the jacket up that hid our weaved fingertips.

“Mr. Mason is such an asshole,” she huffs slamming her books in the locker, standing on her tip toes to launch them to the back where we hear them ding as they hit the metal back.

“What happened?” I ask, gauging her temperance to see where we are at. Holly drives the emotional state of our relationship; she being the more volatile of the two of us.

“He gave me detention for missing all that homework,” she huffed as she slammed the locker shut. “I just want school to be done already, I hate it.”

I watched her stalk off, wordless, now definitely wasn’t the time to broach the subject of an academic summer camp that focuses on colleges. Holly was not interested in anything remotely studious, let alone something that would separate us for an entire summer.

I watch her turn the corner of the light seafoam green colored hallways, waiting until I can be sure she is completely out of sight before slamming my elbow into the door right above the turn lock, causing it to pop open, a little trick Tommy showed me last year when he had this locker. I hop up on the toes of my sneakers and grab the flyer out from my Roman History classes textbook.

It is in that moment; I realize I don’t want to stay closeted with Holly and hide holding hands. I don’t want to stay in a home I feel constantly threatened in, showing all the scars on my skin and inside of my flesh. I don’t want to be stuck slinging burgers at the diner down the street, or as a cashier at the grocers. I don’t want to struggle against the New England seasonal depression of grey skies to salt crusted and frost heaved roads. I don’t want to be tied to this place where I feel like a hamster on a spinning wheel, never moving forward and back, just in one constant place.

The flyer announces the meeting is today, in Ms. Mueller’s classroom of course, but an hour after we usually meet. I know Holly has detention, so if there was ever a time I could go and take a glance at what this whole thing is about, it is today when she will be occupied for a definite set amount of time.

I watch the clock anxiously for the last two periods, bouncing my leg in anticipation, choosing to focus more on the seconds hand than the other two since it moves at such a faster pace. Holly isn’t in my last two classes; they are AP and she is sequestered into the more remedial ones where they mostly watch movies instead of getting lectures from young teachers who still feel they can make a difference and impact our lives.

Ms. Mueller is at the door, leaning against it with her arms crossed, her cuffs folded up at the elbow, creased slacks and pointed shiny ebony dress shoes, almost as if she was waiting for me. Now that I look back, I think she was.

“Well here she is, take a seat.” She gestures to the open door.

I look in and see every seat is filled mostly with kids from other schools and a couple familiar faces of girls I have barely exchanged two words with. I slide into a seat near the door, resolving that if I need to make a quick getaway, I will at least have an easy shot to the door. Ms. Mueller positions her chair in the doorway; it’s like she can sense what I am thinking and gives me another one of her pointed stares.

A young man with a lot of vigor and energy and radiant brilliantly white smile bounds up to the front of the room. I will learn almost immediately that his name is Craig when he finally stops bounding around and announces who he is, that he went to Bates College, and dives into a lengthy description of what Upward Bound really is. There are other individuals up there as well, all standing in a line with various colleges strewn on their tee shirts and sweatshirts: Colby-Sawyer, Keene State, UNH, Plymouth State, are some of the names I spot.

The program is a six-week summer session that focuses on preparing students for college and even offers opportunities to take college level classes that can be accredited. Six weeks on a college campus, right in my hometown, sleeping in the dorms, going to classes, they even offer sporting events and excursions to local spots for day trips. It sounded too good to be true.

I looked around the room and saw most of the kids had that same look as I did, clinging to every word. “Give me an escape, please. Tell me I won’t fall through the cracks and be left right here where I started.” Their faces all seemed to say.

Craig took the basic Q&A after his dialogue of wonderous academia enchantment and promise, everyone asking the same things I was wondering. I wouldn’t raise my hand and attract attention to myself, no way.

I saw her then, Jodie, sitting with her hand up to ask more about the sporting opportunities offered, field hockey specifically. She sat with her blonde hairspray scrunched hair, long eyelashes and friendly, wide open blue eyes. I was amazed at how drawn I was to her instantly, like she was the bright glinting Christmas tree of hope in contrast to Holly’s darkness and shadowing pessimistic outlook on life and humanity. There was also this underlying feeling emanating from her. She was wearing adidas snap pants and her field hockey jacket, I knew without knowing, I knew she had the same attraction to females as I did. When Craig answered her question to her satisfaction, Jodie thanked him, and I saw her sign the sheet to enroll and receive more information. I watched that sheet for the rest of the presentation and when we were wrapping up, Ms. Mueller caught me at the door, the sign sheet in her fingertips.

“You forgot something,” she stated, a black pen in her other hand, held out to me.

I stepped aside, opening my mouth to let out a string of excuses, all based in fear and simultaneously worried that if I failed at this camp, I would disappoint her.

“Don’t.” She held up her palm that held the pen. “Sign the paper.”

I realized in that moment; this was my chance. I was on the edge of something, a choice. I knew what I would lose, and I quickly sobered to the reality that what I stood to lose, didn’t outweigh what I had to gain.

So I made the choice, to take a chance, put the pen to that blue paper, and signed my name, choosing to take that chance, choosing something so much bigger for myself than I could have ever imagined and taking the first step to end the cycle that would have ensnared me just as it did many others. It even would claim Holly in the end, leaving her to browning pine trees, closeted and affairs in secrecy, the shame and impending alcoholism, cursing from her couch just as her father did.

#feedback writer nonfiction

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violetsystems · 5 years

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#personal

I’ve been trying to take a lunch hour just to get away from work. I usually just walk away from my office as far as possible. Things these days are beyond claustrophobic with little explanation or respect for my feelings or emotions. This is the city let alone the world at this point in my eyes. After spending so much time away from America it feels like the problem is the country at large. This isn’t to say that I’m not exposed to a lot of different cultures here. There is a rather large uptick in the diversity I see every day which is inspiring. But I still feel like I have become a fixture in the background much like a billboard. A service for people to point to as a sort of beacon but won’t acknowledge or give credit for existing. A light switch to flick on and off. A manufactured piece of consent paraded in front of people as the good guy though nobody knows my superhero name, my powers or what I even do. I guess this is what I get for wearing so many fonts and statement shirts. On my lunch break I passed a man being followed by a real live pigeon. It came to my attention that pigeons seem to communicate better than most Americans. I said that out loud. The man made a howling sound that was at once laughter and at once judgement. Those kind of interactions are fun sometimes. But it was a very real sentiment. I wake up every morning to two feral cats on my doorstep. The other morning my neighbor ran into me feeding them on the porch. It was a friendly interaction but they seemed hesitant to proceed up the stairs. My neighbor asked if they would bite. My landlord has asked this too. I never really assumed anyone would be afraid of cats but it’s a valid safety issue. I wonder why these cats aren’t afraid of me when historically everyone seems to make me out as the monster behind my back. I used to be afraid of dogs when I was small. The thing I love about animals is that they communicate their emotions very intelligently. You get back what you give. While science might explain away domestication of cats as emotionless manipulation of humans for food it doesn’t explain how humans treat each other for capitalism over money and power. In a city where for years people have been afraid to accept that I have dreams, desires, and needs I’ve become a Frankenstein like figure. The one thing I can agree with the current trends in America for social justice and cancel culture is that it is confusing, isolating, and divisive at times. But serving these societal needs sometimes is not as satisfying as you would like it to be. We resist and protest in America to change things. Change requires organization, planning and strategy. Also an endgame that results in either compromise or complete destruction apparently. And when you are the only one with a plan three years running, you start to think maybe you need a new plan or a new life entirely. Because everyone wins at the cost of you losing year after year.

I was listening to Chomsky instead of the debates the other day. He had remarked that you can predict the outcome of an election with scary accuracy just by looking at the funding. And it is true that in America you are mostly free if you have the money to justify the air you breathe. But America also has a history of taking freedom away for the benefit of others. In liberal circles this is called “sharing power.” Sometimes this is justified depending on the lens you view it through. Is it fair? For all the shit we talk about capitalism and how it is evil how is it any different? It’s not concerned with a balanced budget or being fair. It’s about profiting at any cost and our country depends on it regardless if someone else’s freedom. life, liberty or pursuit of happiness is at stake. The same can be said about human capital. If I’m the one doing all the work shouldn’t I be the one who profits? I believe you shouldn’t profit at the expense of others. This is why I generally work a non profit job. Dj’ing is also a non profit job in my experience along with making music since it makes no money. People pretend they’re worth gold because of it. It may return some sort of social capital for people. But my entire legacy of social capital is null and void these days. All I can really rely on is the fact that I have a stable enough job and lifestyle to pay my bills and stay healthy. I’m not the kind of person who is viewed as successful but I’m the person everyone always needs. I have no social support network other than what I’ve built here anymore. I’ve had the luxury of opening up about my experiences here and had people read from all over the world. Maybe people who value me more than anyone possibly could in my home town. But as far as how people view me in my own city it’s perverse and disappointing at best. People point to me as some sort of example that nobody wants to make the sacrifices to become. And people laugh at me because of it year after year and call me crazy. I just sit here alone at my kitchen table thinking how hopeless it’s all become. People in America love to shout from the mountains that they have freedom of speech but they never listen to anyone but themselves. Or worse they surround themselves with people who constantly validate them and never make any sort of criticism. Art school is full of critique. I saw a flyer on the wall for critique in Chinese. I thought that was amazing. I’ve been the subject of English critique for over two decades and look where that got me. Everybody’s favorite water cooler topic to bully and make fun of. It’s like I’m the mascot. Charlie Brown with hair. Or Edward Norton overlayed in CGI green. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.

I’ve given up on so much shit this last year. Nobody really cares how much I’ve sacrificed or how it’s made me feel. At least not on the surface. But imagine an entire life of having to walk the streets with your ear scraping the ground every moment of the day. Just to know people’s intentions about why they feel the need to interact or acknowledge you. There’s people who see me on the street and think it’s my problem that I don’t recognize them. Like nobody understands that largely for years other people have caused more problems for me demanding my interaction. Chicago has a very forced sense of community. It goes far back to the days of shady politics that still haunt our city. People with money and power who intimidate you in and out of situations. I have been hurt tremendously over the years sticking my neck out for people who don’t care if I live or die. The minute you stop is the minute people have an opinion about it. Like my services to people moved way past good Samaritan mode. Now it’s an expectation that I bend over backwards for everyone while I suffer in obscurity. I don’t often try to argue any of this. I’ve almost nearly just shut up and down completely. I don’t leave my house much other than to travel an hour on public transit to mow my mom’s lawn. And even then people are always trying to get to know you and start some trouble. Use you as a prop or an example then call you a hermit behind your back. For years that is really what I have become. A prop in the background to manipulate. An urban legend that has no form and thus no real need to appease with anything material. Unlike a Chupacabra I do have physical form. I don’t have a personal life. It’s been bludgeoned to death by abstractions and expectations from greedy people. To this day nobody ever really addresses me like a human other than maybe cats on my doorstep at five in the morning. I’ll never be good enough or successful enough to break free of my landlord. I’m always negotiating my right to frown about my situation. My privilege is checked at the door when I leave only to be greeted by a city that swings it’s own clout around in my face. And then there’s the people on the internet who would rather argue about it like it’s a dirty secret. I am that secret. I am the one suffering in ways you could never imagine. And everybody is just ok with it. Nobody has any sort of emotion at all. There is no closure. It’s just me week after week typing into a void hoping that somebody is listening that knows how much it all hurts. And generally if I take a deep breath and a sip of coffee I know this to be true. Just like I know the world is bigger than America and it’s view of profit before people. Just like I know the universe is vast and the planet is small. In another month I’ll be back in New York. And a couple of months after that. And so on and so on until it clicks. I’m worth more than this. The trick is believing it enough to save yourself and wait for something that actually appreciates it. That’s what intimacy is all about. Save all the abuse, psychological manipulation and anger for the stand up routines. They don’t call it the Second City for nothing. I deserve to live in a world that puts me first after all this. <3 Tim

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lit--bitch · 4 years

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On ‘A Girl’s Story’ by Annie Ernaux, translated by Alison L. Strayer (2020)

(Disclosure: There are themes in this review which some may find triggering, so please don’t read on if you feel particularly vulnerable to the subject matter I’ll be unpacking in this review. A Girl’s Story was first published by Gallimard in 2016 as Memoire de Fille and subsequently it’s been translated into English and published by Seven Stories Press (US) and Fitzcarraldo Editions (UK), it came out in April just gone. So I’m working with the Fitzcarraldo Editions edition. As for Annie Ernaux, I don’t know her. I don’t know Alison L. Strayer either. I am familiar with Fitzcarraldo Editions, insofar that I applied for an internship there once which I didn’t get (and that hasn’t changed my feelings at all about the press nor the work they publish). Fitzcarraldo Editions was founded by Jacques Testard, who is joined by Tamara Sampey-Jawad and Joely Day. They’ve got two categories, fiction and essay. As for their name, they’re named after the typeface their designer came up with by Ray O’Meara. I feel like a lot of the writing they publish lies at the intersection of the writing world and the art world, they blur the two together and make them sort of indistinguishable. Not sure if they’d agree, that’s just my opinion. But I do trust Fitzcarraldo Editions, because you can tell that their selection process is careful and considered. They’re not just interested in your book, they’re interested in your whole cause, everything you’re going to write about in future. They maintain connections with their authors, explicitly so. Tbh, it’s rare to find publishers who do that without falling prey to nepotism. Their livery is beautiful: white font on blue for fiction, blue font on white background for essays. They’re lovely books to hold and to shelve.)

So onto the book: Alison L. Strayer does an amazing job. I’ve read Annie’s work both in original French and English, (I’m bilingual in French from my Algerian upbringing) and I can tell you she absolutely, hands down, conserves the entirety of Annie Ernaux’s voice. Hardly anything is compromised within her translation of A Girl’s Story and that deserves applause, because translations are an art form in and of themselves. She seamlessly keeps all the descriptions, tonality and pace of the work intact. For that reason, this text has to be commended for its precision and accuracy, because Alison hit the nail on the head.

It is absolutely clear to me why Annie Ernaux is so revered and loved in France. Her work is deeply rooted in her French experience, and of course that means her work is an artefact of French culture and history. Her work is peppered with French references, places and figures, e.g. Juliette Gréco, Mylène Demongeot, Orne, Caen, si t’en veux plus, je la remets dans ma culotte, cha-cha-cha des thons... etc. Annie Ernaux is 78 years old, so she possesses experiences quite divided from today. This makes her work a contribution to discourses on feminism, self-identity, womanhood, abortion, women’s rights, etc. within the 20th century. And she has set out to write the differences of her time in essays which divulge her trauma most acutely. A Girl’s Story is a rumination and a recalling of the events that took place in France, in 1958, at a holiday camp in ‘S’, to Annie Ernaux, née Duchesne. It recalls of her work as a camp instructor over the summer, and her first sexual experience with a man named H, her rejection and the “verbal hegemony” of her peers, prejudices and judgements made of her which she internalises as truth. Later, after the summer, she sets out to become H’s “ideal”, she dyes her hair blonde and develops an eating disorder. A Girl’s Story speaks of a time where provocation is conflated with “whoredom”, where the worth of a woman is vested in her virginity. She hammers down the volatility of the slave/master dynamic between men and women, in a time ‘pre-dating by ten years the slogan ‘my body, my rules’.’ (p.95.)

A Girl’s Story is a tough read. It’s a memoir that distrusts itself and analyses the legitimacy of memory compounded by years of separation from the event. It ruminates on the female condition, the teenage girl’s self-perception which seems to be a collection of external voices and embarrassments. This is all happening in 1958, during the Algerian War on Independence, which is when this narrative begins to slip up on oversights, misinformation and very subtle political bias. I have so much to say about A Girl’s Story but I can’t possibly say it all without boring many people to death and without it turning into a 200-page essay, and frankly I’m not interested in turning this review into a thesis, but I think I already have, because this “review” is L O N G. So I am thankful to you if you do decide to read it all, including my criticisms of the work.

I have read lots of reviews talking about A Girl’s Story from a feminist slant. I have no desire to repeat a review totally akin to them. I’m interested in the political bias and implications of that bias, and the ignorance of Annie Duchesne and Annie Ernaux, respectively. That will be the main focus of this review. If you want pure praise, and to read a review on this book that focuses on the girl and the girl’s suffering in A Girl’s Story, you can go here, here, and finally, here.

I want to say, firstly, that I respect the acute self-awareness of Annie Ernaux’s writing, and her courage for writing these painful chapters of her life. I am expressly grateful to her book, Happening. She has, at times, helped me. So I don’t want anyone to think that I’m being heartless or insensitive about the predicaments and sadnesses Annie unpacks in her writing. Because I do understand these traumas.

What I don’t share, is age. There is a massive age gap between myself and Annie Ernaux, which means that the way she’s had to deal with shit has probably been harder because when she was 18, men had the upper hand way more than they do right now, women weren’t invited to exploring their sexuality without being rendered a whore, and abortion was illegal.

There are times where I find Annie’s reference to herself at the age of 18 as, ‘the girl of S’, or ‘the girl of 1985′, a bit melodramatic and corny, but at the same time I’m empathetic of the pain these memories must stir inside her psyche. The fact that this torment has caused Annie to mentally create divisions of herself in such a way, that she requires an entirely different name for herself at a specific point of her life, that’s upsetting. That is an incredibly vulnerable thing to expose about yourself, in your writing, and for this text, it’s an integral part to digesting Annie Ernaux’s multi-faceted perceptions of memory.

There’s a sort of clairvoyancy-esque tonality to Ernaux’s voice at times, points where she makes predictions based off her past self, because she distrusts her memory so much. For example, ‘I perceive, in the persistence of these memories, the girl’s fascination for a rigorously organized world...’, ‘I perceive a desire to acclimatize to the new environment [the camp] but also a pervasive fear of being unable to do so’(p. 38). This voice brings about new dimensions to Annie Ernaux’s voice which characterise her as historian, archaeologist and psychologist to the remains of this “long-lost” identity:

But what is the point of writing if not to unearth things [...] something that emerges from the creases when a story is unfolded and can help us understand — endure — events that occur and the things that we do?

What I’m most upbeat about in A Girl’s Story, is the universal truths Annie unpacks about the philosophy of writing the truth, and writing about writing. It’s so good that it sometimes makes me jealous. And that’s how I know I’m reading good writing, when I actually wish I’d written some of these things myself. When Annie (Ernaux) in the present, confesses to wanting to call some of the people who tormented her from the camp, she elaborates:

I wanted physical, tangible proof of their existence, as if to continue writing I needed them to be alive, as if I needed to be writing about what is alive, to be endangered in the way one is when writing about the living and not in the state of tranquility that prevails when people die and are consigned to the immateriality of fictional characters.

And then the Big Truth:

There is a need to make writing an untenable enterprise, to atone for its power (not its ease, no one feels less ease in writing than me) out of an imaginary terror of consequences. Unless, now that I think of it, there is some perverse desire in me to make sure they’re still alive in order to compromise them, as I attend to my business of disclosure: to be their final Judgement.

There is a desire in writing, sometimes, to condemn and call out the people who’ve hurt you or fucked you over by name, especially if that betrayal is acutely felt, even more so if it stands the test of time. There is an urge to feel the quality of consequence, and to dissolve our sealed lips. I resonate with this: I have, sometimes impulsively, taken it upon myself to write writing that condemns hurt other people have caused, and no matter what anyone says, it does feel good. Especially if the work gets published. There are good and bad reasons for why it feels good, they are mostly all futile, and jejune.

It’s the ‘pushing the big red button’ of writing, I feel. It says don’t do it. But you do it anyway, because you can. As Annie says:

I do not envy him [H]: I’m the one who is writing.

Certainly in A Girl’s Story, this whole memory contains the pain behind Annie Ernaux’s whole impetus for writing, it marks the origins of where her work is seated. On shame and abuse and the convolutions of self-image as female. I don’t think Annie so much condemns the people in this essay. Rather, she is reconstructing scenes, and deconstructing her feelings and the projections she creates for herself as a result of being manoeuvred by the expectations and sensitivities of other people. Confessing all this is admirable, and makes for a book which is acutely self-aware.

A Girl’s Story is a narrative I and many women share. After the narration of Annie Duchesne, Annie Ernaux moves away from the shame of her memories and gradually begins to walk towards herself. She sees the symmetry of her experiences in the histories of Billie Holliday and Violette Laduc, sadnesses of love and intoxication of other in the same year of 1958. She begins to experience resonance:

the eighteen-year-old girl [...] were less alone, less forlorn — saved, in a sense — because these forsaken women, unknown to her then, even by name, had lived in desperate solitude at the same time as her. [...] to shatter the singularity and solitude of an experience that is more less shared by others at about the same time.

This realisation is part of the second half of the book which contains all the reasoning and steps Annie Ernaux makes towards articulating her selves in language. That these memories, though she is dubious about the reliability of them, and of her feelings, she can write this as part of the purpose to write A Girl’s Story. She can realise her intentions for her writing, recognise a purpose in sharing the experiences so that they might perhaps “save” other women from the solitude of their own experiences. And as she does, the memory of ‘the girl of 1958′ begins to “fade”, and what is left is the now, the now, being the most reliable source to yourself at any given point in life. A part of this book’s nature, for me at least, is one of reciprocity, in the sense that we as an audience might reflect on the banks of our memories, and unite ourselves with our pasts and futures in the collective whole of our present selves.

It’s for these reasons I enjoyed the text, but there are more difficult things going on in the background which pertain to Annie Ernaux’s, and of course Annie Duchesne’s, politics and ignorance. For me there are three very different narratives going on. I’ve unpacked the first two as briefly as I could, above. There is Annie Duchesne and her perspective of the world, her feelings, her torment, and the events unfolding at the camp in S. Then there’s present-day Annie, as Annie Ernaux, recalling these events and writing in the first-person to administer her present-day reflections and hindsights.

The third narrative is the narrative which is rarely acknowledged and mostly alluded to: it’s what’s happening in the rest of the world, and how both Annies remain still pretty oblivious to it. It’s this third narrative I’ve felt most engrossed by.

It is really hard for me to not make this book about Algeria in many ways, but the fact that both Annies gloss over the subject of the Algerian War, gives me impetus to address this “glossing” as being a problem in and of itself, and highlights other issues within the work. You’d think this dismissive inclusion of French political affairs is intentional, because by her own admission, she states her attention towards these world affairs was displaced by the agonies of men and love: ‘Perhaps as a result of that blindness to everything that was not the camp, I come to an abrupt halt when my eye is caught by the date of 1958′. It would make sense that Annie skirts around these issues when she speaks of herself at the age of 18, and that’s implied from the very start.

Annie tries to recreate the version of herself in youth by aligning you to her ideology and her principles at that age. Just three pages into the essay, she says:

That summer [1958], too, thousands of servicemen left France to restore order in Algeria. Many had never been away from home before. In dozens of letters, they wrote about the heat, the djebel, the douars — tent villages — and the illiterate Arabs, who after one hundred years of occupation still did not speak French.

You immediately get an impression for the mentality she once harboured. And it’s also a really misinformed one, because she implies that Algeria is made up of Arabs and that’s not true, the dominant demographic in Algeria and most of North Africa is the Amazigh, also known by the derogatory term “Berbers”. This is true of back then and it remains true of now. The thing is, what’s so enraging about this particular statement, and at several other points of this book, is that she oscillates between her present self and her 18-year-old self at random junctions, and she doesn’t really come back to Algeria in great detail, because as I say, her mind is elsewhere occupied by her affections for H at this camp and the reduction of herself as slave to his desires. That how she legitimises her ignorance as Annie Duchesne, y’know, which is understandable of a young girl looking to fall in love. I mean, of course the book isn’t about Algeria, it’s about her mind and desire for affection and to be seen, in a tiny, damaging bubble at a camp, at a time when Frenchmen were being sent away to fight for a mythical land called “French Algeria”. In which case, what’s the point in being so deliberately inflammatory about something you’re not going to later unpack in detail, as your present-day self? (I’ll come back to that in a couple paragraphs).

Secondly, it’s important that we know Annie Ernaux no longer “agrees” with the French Occupation of Algeria. She doesn’t identify with her 18-year-old self. On page 19, she says:

The longer I gaze at the girl in the photo, the more it seeems that she is looking at me. Is this girl me? Am I her? For me to be her, I would have to be able to solve a physics problem and a quadratic equation in maths read the whole novel given out with Bonnes soirées magazine each week [...] support the continuation of French Algeria

There’s the confirmation. But I’m not convinced that Annie Ernaux feels for the collective destruction that annihilated both sides, I’m not convinced that she really cares beyond the confines of French life and French borders. When she speaks in her present-day voice, she is still clearly biased, and I have no care for the logistics of this, that it’s more convenient for her to not turn this into a political essay. This is because about halfway through the book, she remarks:

My memory retains no trace of world events, reduced to a distant rumble that reached the camp by way of the television set in the dining hall. [...] I don’t believe the boys ever mentioned the constant threat they faced, from which none was exempt, of being sent to fight in the djebel, in Algeria.

On the Internet, I read the list of terrorist actions that occur almost daily between late August (fifteen attacks on the 25th) and the end of September 1958: an attack against Jacques Soustelle that killed one passerby and wounded three, the sabotage of railways, machinegun attacks on cafés and police stations, fires at factories (Simca in Poissy, Pechiney in Grenoble) and refineries (Notre-Dame-de-Gravenchon-Marseilles) [...] All were perpetrated by the FLN, [Front Libération Nationale (the Algerian rebels fighting for independence basically)] which brought the conflict to metropolitan France.

I don’t think Annie Ernaux has ever left France, at least not mentally. And for me it’s this essay’s downfall, which is still clearly blinded by French propaganda. This is the extent Annie Ernaux goes into detail about the Algerian War for Independence. And there’s nothing in that entire passage, nor in any part of the essay, about the genocide native Algerians were abjected to. You’d think that age and knowledge would bring this clarity to Annie Ernaux, at least, but it doesn’t, and I’m perplexed by her choice of words, “the constant threat they [French soldiers] faced”, “terrorist actions”, “perpetrate”, as if France was a victim here, and still coming back calling North Africans ‘crouillat’ (it’s a racist term, look it up). I’m not saying that these events weren’t offences, or by any means, acceptable, but this is a country that took Algeria by force, and left it in a mess from which it has never recovered... And Jacques Soustelle, by the way, rendered native Algerians as “backward savages” due to their “primitive technology” and gave them second-class status. He was a fascist. He joined a terrorist group called l’Organisation Armée Secrète (OAS) to fight against Algerian independence. He worked alongside Charles de Gaulle and was responsible for his renewal as France’s President and the Fifth Republic. Like, she’s coming up with all these shitty counter-attacks committed by people whose families literally had their entrails pulled out and their houses burned down. Like my own grandmother’s house. These people had shitty pistols to fight with, the French had technology you can’t even imagine. The only reason France didn’t stick with the occupation was because the fight was becoming expensive and people were just tired of rebellion, so they gave Algeria a self-determined referendum. It was a pragmatical decision.

So there’s a really big division in me created by this incredible, sad narrative of a girl’s struggle, navigating sexuality and femininity within the confines of a patriarchal, limiting society which punishes her. That’s the woman in me, reaching out, saying “Yes!”. We need memoirs like this, we need stories like this.

And then there’s this other kind of background narrative of politics and world affairs, which is one-sided, and isn’t really relevant or important to Annie’s 18-year-old self but “it should be” but it isn’t, and like, it’s so absent-mindedly written for a woman who is now 78 years old. Her focalisation is that of French suffering, not global suffering. And I think this isn’t just a style of Annie’s writing, I think it’s an outlook, you can see it in other books like The Years. This is the Algerian woman in me, that is beginning a career in narrating the reality of Algeria and what it means to have Algerian family, and possess inherited traumas beyond your understanding and control, and still read books like this written by French people. And Algeria’s not just background noise for Annie to peddle in her narratives of life without fully considering the impact and shape they’ve taken in history. Ergo, don’t loosely include it in your essay if all you’re attempting to do is legitimise your ignorance. And don’t later on, pretend to care, and then cherry pick the events which minimises France’s accountability for genocide. Cos why the fuck would you still want to?

Here’s the thing, and I’m being as brief as I can here. In 1958, when Annie Duchesne was being taunted, harrassed and in my view, sexually abused, by some holiday camp leaders in S, for having not slept with a boy (I refuse to call him a man), but for somehow being “a whore”, all of which is terrible, this is what was happening in Algeria at the same time:

My grandmother and grandfather’s house had been burned down by the French in the Province of Kabylia, which is Amazigh territory, aka Algerian countryside. She fled to Algiers with her three babies.

Then, shortly afterwards, my grandmother’s 5-year-old daughter was killed by the French Army in a street in Algiers.

Algerian-Muslim votes in political elections were still considered to be unequal to that of French Algerian votes.

My grandfather was about to be shot in the leg and have to travel to France to save it (since all the hospitals in Algeria had been destroyed, and the French at the time were dismissive of indigenous Algerians and their ailments).

French soldiers were raping Algerian women left, right and centre to punish FLN members.

FLN members were bombing French army barracks. French soldiers were doing the same thing back. Mutual torture and rape from both parties was committed.

The death toll of Algerians was reaching (by my own approximations which I’ve studied hard cos this is a specialism of mine, there isn’t a confirmed statistic, because that’s how much people care) its peak. It was heading towards 20 million dead since the year of 1830, when the French Occupation started.

My grandmother went her whole life without holding her daughter’s killers accountable. She never had a voice and she never had the opportunity to write a book, or several, about it. And I hold my hands up: it doesn’t do well to quantify pain or the severity of experience. Your life is your life, there is only you living it, and whatever happens to you in your life is going to be important to you, even if the saddest thing that ever happens to you is that the flavour of ice cream you like has run out at the shop.

But it’s hard for me to really let myself just go ahead and resonate with Annie Ernaux. I don’t get caught up in the symmetry of my experiences, because a lot of the time, I’m just relating it back to the atrocities of genocide that Kabyle women like my grandmother were caught up in during 1958. I’m not saying that Annie’s miseries, past and present, are lesser than the miseries of that time for French soliders and Algerian soldiers and civilians enduring the devastation of war. I’m saying that her perspective is narrower. And that’s something I can’t change about Annie, nor this work.

I think what this text tries to do is explore a lack of accountability in many different facets. There is lack of accountability in the people that saw to Annie Duchesne’s humiliation and suffering, there’s a lack of accountability to her parents and their enforcement of religion, there’s no accountability for the people that suffer at the hands of other people, whether it’s a genocide or a sexual assault, and there’s the lack of accountability in having endured the patriarchal constructs which force you down on a bed to find out why your periods have stopped, i.e. an intact hymen (page 86).

The only resolution, ultimately, is to write about these horrors, and by writing about it you might achieve a narrative which produces a brand new discourse, or a brand new insight previously not seen or understood. By writing about it, we achieve awareness, clarity, even if we mistrust our memories of it all, as Annie does. And I do think Annie achieves clarity, at least, for me as a reader, with A Girl’s Story and this essay should be seen as a contribution to a feminine history, a lesson in where women still feel unvalidated by their own trauma, and the work it takes . I feel that Annie Ernaux has a desire to tell her stories, to admit her truths and confess her sensitive past, her vulnerability and expose the vulnerability of others. By doing so, and allowing a wider audience to access work like A Girl’s Story she carries out her justice. Her truth is evidenced and validated by her readership, by her audience, by it being a book.

But equally, for me again, A Girl’s Story is held back by some of the more subtle and problematic word choices and convoluted prose that I think is quite disillusioning and deceptively narrow-minded, this is something you’ll have to see for yourself by buying the book.

I think of this essay as an admonition to the follies of youth and of boys, not men, boys. I think of it as a documentation of female struggle and identity. I think of it as a text that intimates privilege even when it is not felt. And I’m torn by A Girl’s Story, which made this review terribly difficult to write, and I don’t think I’m blowing it out of proportion, I do think there’s an indication of a non-condemnation of France’s historical role in genocide. And maybe this subtle admission is just as brave of Annie, as is writing her autobiographies.

If you’re interested and want to make assertions for yourself, please do buy A Girl’s Story from Fitzcarraldo Editions here.

And if you want to share some of your own thoughts, please do feel free to comment and discuss. I’m interested to see whether people agree or not.

#annie ernaux #essay #review #bookreview #litbitch #books #contemporaryliterature #fitzcarraldoeditions #reading #new publication #translation #alisonlstrayer #french literature #memoir

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luluguardainofcreative · 7 years

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GZtales; Up Coming Parents ch.4

Papyrus held Adin close to him, her stomach had grew since he found out they were going to have a daughter. Adin was at 18 weeks now, she look more beautiful than before but she was always beautiful to him. It took them an hour just to get Adin comfortable to lay down. They were asleep till Papyrus felt movement. He open his eyes a little to see if Adin was okay. She hadn’t moved since he gotten her comfortable, he soon went back to sleep when Adin woke up as she felt something kick her.

It was soft but it was enough she could feel it. Papyrus woke up a little worry when she say up a little. “What’s wrong? Are you okay? Do you need to to the bathroom? Any ice packs?” He asked panicking a little when she smiled.

“No, no, it’s not that.” She giggle “The baby just kicked.” She took Papyrus’ hand over her swollen belly placing it on top. Papyrus felt a kick as he smiled. “I bet she letting us know she’s awake.” Adin smiled as Papyrus kissed her belly letting their daughter know he was here as well. Papyrus soon kissed his love. Adin giggle as she kissed him back.

Frisk wanted to see Adin and Papyrus to see how they were doing, but they were starting to make a room for baby, they wanted to help out. They knew Toriel and Sans were there, but they wanted to help out so bad since they heard about the baby.

They notice Adina nd Toriel were outside talking. “Are you sure we should leave them alone?” Adin ask a little worried if there was still something wrong in the brothers’ bond. “I’m sure they’re okay. I know you’re doing all the housework.” Adin just gave a nerve grin when Frisk show up. They waved as Adin wave back at them. “Honestly, doesn’t he help or is he used to you doing them?”

Toriel seem to have not forgiven Papyrus about the abuse he had caused on her and Toriel was the closest to a mother figure Adin had right now. Frisk smiled looking at Adin’s bump.

“What is it? A girl? Boy? human ? monster?” Adin try to calm down Frisk, they were excited to see the baby and they were happy too because they would be their friend. “Frisk calm down, we’ll tell you next week.” They were so excited that they started to jump up and down. Toriel giggle a bit as she look over to see it the skeleton brothers were fighting or not.

Sans and Papyrus painting the room that was going to be the baby’s room a soft yellow. Sans happen to look over his shoulder as Papyrus was busy starting on the next wall.

“Don’t you ever stop working?” Sans ask. Papyrus stop for a moment as he set down on the floor. “Well we could start putting together the crib?” Sans sat next to him as he got something for him to drink.

“Stop before you dry up.” He said handing him a bottle of water. Papyrus was in corner at this point but he had a point as well. He needs to be in good health as well for their daughter.

Adin happen to come in looking at the room. “It’s looking good. You sure you don’t need my help?” She ask them as Papyrus got up kissed her cheek. “It’s best you two don’t. We got it here.” He said as Sans look at how big Adin’s belly has gotten. He could see the beat up human, he couldn’t tell it was her. Sans wonder if her sister; Adora would have felt about being an aunt?

It was still hard to believe he was going to be uncle. Still he wonder too if their father; Gaster would have felt about being a grandpa. Sometime he fear if he was still here he would experiment on their grandchild.

He try to ignore them when Frisk came into the room almost tripping over the paint cans. “Anything I can do?” They ask when Adin place a hand on their shoulder.

“Maybe you can help make some lunch for everyone.” She said as they smiled a bit. “Will you be okay?” Papyrus ask touching her face as Adin blushed.

“I’ll be fine, don’t worry.” She kiss him when Frisk help Adin into the kitchen. “Is she okay doing all the work?” Papyrus look at his brother as he look back a Adin when she was in the kitchen. “I help her out, I don’t want her to...”

Guilt was starting to kick in again. Was Adin still reliving those times too? When he had her as servant was she expecting a bone attack or something?

“I know what you mean, but the others still have hard time trusting you...with her. But I trust you and I know you love her.” Sans told him as Papyrus happen to notice a butterfly on the window. The butterfly left as Papyrus start to paint it on the wall. “But, everything turn out alright in the end.” He said smiling as he finish painted a green butterfly on the wall. Sans realize he was quoting Adin’s sister.

Sans wonder if Adora was watching them in some ways. Almost like an angel watching them he wonder if the others humans souls were watching as well. “What?” Papyrus look over at him as he seem to be looking at him.

He shook his head smile at him as he help make another butterfly on the wall. “I’m just happy to see you again.” Sans said. He was talking about having his brother back. It was just nice to see him smiling again.

Adin and Frisk were cutting some fruit since Adin was craving fruits lately. She would take a piece out of the bowl they were using as she took most of it. “Adin you should leave some for the rest of us.” frisk said giggling as Toriel took the bowl away trying to make a fruit salad for everyone.

“I’m sorry, but the baby want some too,” She said giggling as took a sip of milk tea. Toriel suggest that Adin sit down to drink her tea. She didn’t fight with her as she just sat there till she felt a kick. She felt another kick as if the baby was letting her know she like the tea or the fact she needed to rest. Adin touch her belly as the baby kick again.

“Mommy is trying to relax.” The kicking seem to have calm down a bit. She felt bad now that she wasn’t doing anything now as Frisk help Toriel as she was drinking tea. She began to hum a song that she remember.

Not the one she had her sister would have sung together, but something her sister would listen to often. It was catchy since it was from the 80s but she always seem to listen to this one often. She couldn’t remember the artist or the song it seem to have Aodra listen to it a lot.

“Oh I heard Mettaton singing that at one of his shows, isn’t that a Berline song?” Frisk ask her as Adin remember it now. Adora would play it over and over again and she never catch the artist name. “Guess you know more about 80s music than me.” Adin said as she felt a small kick. “And I guess the baby likes it.”

Toriel just let Frisk go as they touch Adin’s belly as there was another kick. The skeletons brothers came into the kitchen later as Papyrus kissed Adin’s forehead as she kissed back on his cheek.

“How’s the painting going?” Toriel ask as Sans gave her a thumbs up. Papyrus took Adin to see the painted room as she notices the butterflies painted on side. “It looks amazing Papyrus, but why are they’re only two on this wall?” Papyrus smiled as he handed her brush. “It was Sans’ idea, he thought that...well..if any of our friends would like to make paint one..for her..” Papyrus was blushing as if the idea was silly as Adin kissed him. She felt the idea was cute as Papyrus kissed back as they were saying yes to each other.

It was now 20 weeks now as Papyrus went shopping for some milk and some food that Adin was craving. He texted her asking her what kind of milk she wanted. As he waited for a text he notice a human covering up their face a little. It wasn’t a robber or someone who was trying to cause trouble. It was an adult human with a child.

A seven year old child asking their mother if they could get something sweet as the mother said yes. Papyrus could see part of the woman’s face as almost a dark circle around her face. The mother could sense him staring at her as hide her face more as her child come back.

Papyrus saw that she had a black eye. He began to have flashbacks all the abuse he gave Adin. Was this women in a abusive relationship that her child have to be apart of? He thought about his soon to be daughter as he fear that he would go back to the way he was and abuse her again. He heard his phone went off as he notice a text from Adin asking for whole milk, he look at the woman and her child leaving the store, he grab two gallons of milk before they left.

He went up to the cash register hoping to see them, he thought if he said something to them it would help but he was abuser at the time so there was nothing he could say to them.

“It’s okay, they’re fine.” The cushier said to him. “I know the woman, she slip on something hit the side of the table or wall or something. She wasn’t in one of those relationships.” Papyrus let out a deep breath as the cushier look at him.

“You were?” She ask him. Papyrus didn’t know how to answer that, how can he said her was abuser to someone. How would humans see him abusing a human? He might be one of the reasons if there was another war between humans and monsters or his daughter.

“No in the same way…” He told her as he purchased the items, he didn’t want to answer the question when he notice the cashier's name tag. It said Ariel on it.

He and Adin haven’t thought of a name for their daughter still. He notice how the cushier’s name was also like a word font sort of like his name and sans’ were. They had no idea what their child would be human or monster but the name came into his mind as he pay for his items. “Your wife with child?” The cushier ask while Papyrus look up at her.

“You just have that look of a new coming dad. I didn’t know monsters..like you can have babies? Sorry if I sound like idiot insult.” she said as Papyrus just smile back letting her know it’s okay. Papyrus didn’t really get into it but he told her it wasn’t insult. The cushier smiled as she finish checking him out and give him something on the house. “Some ice cream, can’t go wrong with that.” she told him as he thank her for that and left.

When he got home, he notice that Adin was on the couch. “You two okay?” He asked putting the bugs on the the table. “Well, she wouldn’t let me get comfortable on the bed, so the couch was the second choice.” She said since the couch was closer to a window as well. Papyrus had notice that Adin was looking through a book of names while he was gone.

“She really want one of us to pick a name for her..” she said tiredly. Papyrus went over to her holding her kissing her cheek. Adin was looking at names that have started with A all the way to Z. He look at the names, this reminded him of looking at a list of names that he would have to remember during his time as guards’ captain.

But his name he would always remember, he happen to notice one of the names were Ariel as well. He wonder if seeing the cashier's name tag was some of sign for his daughter? If it was, he would change it the E in the name to an A instead. Adin look up at him seeing how he was in his thoughts. “What is it?” She ask a little worry about him.

“What would you say...if we name our daughter..Arial?” He asked her. Adin felt a light kick as she giggle. “I think she wants us to call her that.” She giggle as she pull his hand on to her bump. Papyrus felt his daughter kick inside of her, it was different from when he abused her, kicked her around, he could have cause internal bleeding if he went on. It would have killed her by now if went on, but he held her gently, it was nice.

“You’re not going to hurt her or me.” she said sleepy leaning her head against his chest. “So don’t worry..about hurting me..” She doze off a little as Papyrus felt tired mentally as if listening to Adin’s breathing and heart was like a lullaby to him. JUst being with her was enough.

He happen to notice the radio she had own was playing some music was playing, he was tired and just let play and it was better than listening to Mettaton’s stuff.

“Sorry..I’m just scared to hurt you..” He told her holding closer to him. “ or just lose you.” He said kissing her. Adin nuzzle him as her eyes slowly close. “I will always love you..through pain...even in death.” She said holding him. “Everything will be alright in the end…”

The two kiss before falling asleep on the couch forgetting about the bags on the table.

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Undertale (C) Toby Fox

GZtale @golzy

Adin @luluguardainofcreative

#undertale #papyrus #sans #toriel #frisk #gztale #Ganz #fanfic #adin

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justanotherbandomdevotee · 7 years

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Title- The Universe Hates Me.

A Brendon Urie One Shot.

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Pairing- Brendon Urie+ Original Character.

Era- Too Weird To Live, Too Rare To Die.

Word Count- 2,701

Warnings-

Angst.

Pretention.

Mentions Of Drug Abuse.

Unrequited Love.

Horribly Written.

Terribly Long.

Trying Too Hard

!�� *

A/N-

This wasn’t requested or anything, i just felt like writing something angst-y. It’s not as good as I imagined it to be. Feel free to leave criticism and point out my mistakes.

Disclaimer-

This is a work of fiction based on real events. I only own the Original Character. I do not know what happened in Cape Town.

-Sentient Potato.

“Do you, Sarah Orzechowski, take this man to be your lawfully wedded husband? To love him and cherish him in sickness and health, until death parts you?” The evangelist asked the beautiful girl in white who nodded and uttered a soft ‘I do’. Her nude lips framed her perfect teeth and were the supporting stars of her award winning smile. Her eyes were big, blue, and innocent. He had always been a sucker for long legged, petite waisted, innocent angels, which is why I always wondered what he saw in me.

The evangelist repeated his question to the man in the black tuxedo who was smiling so big that I couldn’t even hate him for it. He was so happy, something that he wasn’t back when I knew him. He nodded and repeated the black haired angel’s words.

The sun was pricking my bare shoulders, ringed ears, and bare neck when the wedding venue erupted in cheers because the couple was kissing. People were clapping, children were giggling, somewhere far away, fan girls were crying their smudged eye liner eyes out, and the attending women were crying, trying very hard to not ruin their makeup that was worth more than my entire existence, but then again, my existence was pretty pointless and forgettable. The couple separated their lips and gazed at each other like the bag of tissues, cartilages, bones, veins, and arteries in front of them was the most genuinely fascinating thing in the world and they couldn’t believe that they were lucky enough to be the other’s one and only. It was sweet, so sweet that it triggered my nonexistent diabetes.

The open field, where the vows and ‘I do’s’ were exchanged smelled like fresh flowers, strong colognes, aftershaves, expensive perfumes that sat on the dressing tables of expensive houses as a show piece, and heartache. I would apologize for my blunt description and borderline bitter tone, but that’s who I am. So, I won’t.

The couple walked down the strip of green grass that served as a walkway and still had a few stray pink petals on it. There it was again, that smile that I fell in love with all those years ago. That smile that reached his ‘typical brown’ brown eyes, every part of his face lit up, and his jaw became more prominent. That smile made it impossible for me to hate him, I tried to imagine him with a frown on his lips, but my brain stuttered and died. It decided to focus on that breath taking smile of his instead.

The couple disappeared from my line of sight after a while, but I can’t blame them, I am tragically short.

The attendees started moving towards the golden handled brown double doors that had intricate wooden patterns on its chipped surface with a general sense of hurriedness. I walked across the lawn leisurely, like I had nothing else better to do. To be fair, I didn’t.

I moved from the sweltering heat of April and into the air conditioned insides of the banquet hall. I lost my breath when I noticed the insides. With pale pink walls, white marbled floors, high ceilings, low lying, intricate and grand chandeliers, and a wall of three giant windows that were functioning as the only light source it looked like a ballroom from a Disney movie. I was in awe. That’s the only adjective that I could think of to describe my feelings. I guess Brendon took Monica Gellar’s words to heart and went all out to give Sarah her perfect wedding.

The circular tables with pale yellow and stark white table cloths and a centre piece of pink and red flowers arrangement hosted the guests. At the north wall, the groom and the bride sat with their posse, the west wall was the window wall and had the buffet line, the east wall had a bar, and the south wall housed the entrance. I could hear the clicks of my heels as I walked across the wooden floor in search for my seat.

I found mine and it was in the groom’s peripheral vision line, great. I was hoping to have one awkward eye contact and one forced conversation and I was done with both of them. I had caught him just before he had to walk down the aisle and wait next to evangelist and shared an intense and awkward eye contact for 10 seconds when the evangelist asked to come forward and recite any qualms that one might have regarding the holy matrimony of Brendon and Sarah.

We had always joked about how he would put on a fake wedding as a front and burst in like his entrance from ‘I write sins not tragedies’ music video during that part of our wedding.

He and I were always super cheesy and dramatic. I suppose the universe gets off my pain. No wonder we don’t get along.

I stared at the cursive font of my place card as the best man and the maid of honor gave their respective speeches with clichéd versions of Brendon and Sarah’s already fairytale-esque love story. I was fingering the rim of the champagne flute that was in front of me when I felt a presence next to me.

“Is this seat reserved?” Asked a sharply dressed Spencer and I couldn’t help but smile at his adorableness. “No.” I replied without looking up at him. The chair scarped back and Spencer placed himself on it. He was facing me, of course he was. He wanted to talk, ‘Wow! You are full of observations and deductions today, Sherlock.’ The voice in my head spoke, more like sneered.

“How are you?” Spencer asked after a short and awkward silence. ‘Suck it up and talk to him. He never wronged you.’ The voice reasoned. Now it uses its gentle tone, great. I closed my eyes and forced myself to shut up. “I am well. What about you?” I spoke after opening my eyes. I could feel my mascara coated eyelashes separating from each other as I did that. From my peripheral vision, I could see Spencer smiling. He ducked his chin into his chest and scratched the nape of his neck. “I’ve been better, to be honest.” Spencer spoke as he pulled his head up. That was Spencer for you, he was brutally honest and never sugarcoated anything, especially when it came to him.

“Still brutally honest, I see.” I noted and finally, finally averted my eyes from the flute and my clear coat covered pointer finger’s nail and chanced a glance in his general direction. “Still your cherry self, does it ever get tiring, being that happy?” Spencer sassed and for the first time since my arrival to the public display of my heart break, I laughed.

Spencer smiled a mega watt smile when he heard me laughing and placed his right elbow of the table, causing the table cloth to crease, and leaned against it. Spencer loved making me laugh, he had admitted to it on countless occasions. “God, I still love that laugh.” Spencer remarked.

“Don’t let Hayley hear that.” I replied without missing a beat and leaned back to rest my back against the back rest of my chair with a smile on my dark red lips. This was us, we were chilled, easy going, we were basically hippies without the psychedelic drugs flowing through our veins. Well, no drugs flowed through my veins anyway.

“I, uh, I and Hayley broke up.” Spencer spoke after he recovered from the shock of hearing his ex’s name. “Oh,” My stumped brain managed to get the exclamation past my lips. “I, um, I am sorry.” I paused and gulped as I uttered my apology. Spencer smiled his smile that caused millions of fan girls to swoon and die in the same comment on social media everywhere and shrugged it off. “It doesn’t matter. I am perfectly happy now.” Spencer smiled a close lipped smile to punctuate his sentence. His eyes were twinkling with happiness. His beard dotted, pale cheeks were colored a pale red due to the sudden rush of blood. He seemed happy, really happy. The kind of happiness that one experiences when they are with someone whom they want to murder, but don’t cause they’ll miss the dead too much, he was in love, genuine, proper love.

“You know your right hand doesn’t count as a girlfriend, right?” I questioned in a joking manner and felt his knuckles bruising my bare upper arm. I moved to rub it, to soothe the supposed wound. “Oh stop it! It wasn’t even that hard.” Spencer commented after seeing my over the top antics, but his words held a weight of concern to them. Spencer was the elder brother that I deserved but not the one that I needed, I had Ryan to fill that department. He was my cousin, but he was still my brother.

“How is Ryan?” Spencer asked the dreaded question after asking me about Jon, his voice held pain and confusion. I knew it was coming. I was prepared to face this question ever since I got the invitation 2 months ago, but now that it was actually happening in real life and not in my head during a steamy shower where I controlled both aspects of this difficult conversation, my heart started thudding and my mouth became dry as every answer took a flight.

That night in Cape Town had left its dark mark, of varying degrees, on all of us. Spencer lost one of his best friends and a brother. I lost my boyfriend and my friends, Jon lost 3 of his close friends, and Brendon lost his best friends and lover.

“He is doing well.” I lied through my teeth. I couldn’t tell him the truth. I couldn’t tell him how utterly broken and sad Ryan is; how much he misses them. How he cries himself to sleep every night because he misses them so much. I am, generally, a very sulky person, but I suck at delivering bad news. I am not built for it.

“You always were a shitty liar.”

After speaking for a few more minutes, Spencer took his leave and Brendon replaced him. After exchanging pleasantries, congratulations, and quick summaries of our time apart, Brendon brought up the one topic that I had been trying to avoid all night, our past.

We didn’t have a clean break up, far from it actually. It was messy, almost brutal, words were exchanged, and insults thrown in the air. Our actions were less than graceful. We, also, never got closure.

Brendon sending me his wedding invite was the first time he had reached out to me in four years. “Brendon,” I started with a sigh, a pain started surging through my head. “No, wait, just hear me out.” Brendon practically pleaded, his words held a sense of urgency. A hundred and fifty people at this wedding and not one of them is wondering where the groom is. The universe really needs to stop getting off my pain.

“Look, things were said and actions were carried out and I just want you to know that I am not proud of the way I acted. I should’ve been more mature about it, but I was doing so many drugs back then that I couldn’t differentiate between right and wrong. I was horrible to you when I had no right to be horrible. You were extremely kind to me during our relationship and I treated you like shit after the release of fever and I am so sorry. You apologized after every single fight, you stayed up worrying about me all those nights when I stumbled through the front door late at night, you slept on the couch so many times, and sometimes, you didn’t sleep at all because the drugs were causing me to have hallucinations and I was scared and confused. You held my hand through everything for so, so long. You refused to believe that I was cheating on you when everyone was telling you that I was. Even when they showed you compelling evidence, you still refused because you trusted me so damn much, and I only broke that trust. I took your heart and poisoned it. I was a shitty human being back then. You said ‘I love you’ to me so many times and I never once said it back to you. I broke you, I damaged mentally and physically and, I just…” And at this point of his rant-apology, Brendon’s voice cracked, his eyes filled with tears, and he took a shuddering breath through his quivering lips to stop himself from crying. He ran a hand through his hair after ducking his chin into his chest. He was breathing heavily, hyperventilating.

For the second time in 7 years, I saw the broken Brendon Urie, the raw, scared version underneath all of the pretence and the faux primadonna.

“Brendon,” I started as I uncrossed my legs. On numb legs, I got up and crouched in front of the shaking groom. “Bren,” I placed my hand on his right knee and he placed his hands on top of mine. “I am sorry, I am so sorry for being such an ass to you. I am sorry for never saying I love you to you.” Brendon burst and practically bawled his words out. He was shaking uncontrollably and his tears were streaming down his clean shaven cheeks. His eyes were red rimmed and his lips looked darker than usual, probably because he had eaten his dead skin off by biting his lips out of nervousness, an old habit of his. His condition caused my heart to ache.

I had hated Brendon for so long that his very name ignited a ball of fury in my core. I was so bitter, but crouching here in front of him on the night of his wedding, I decided to forgive him.

“Brendon, I forgive you.” I spoke in the most convincing tone that I could muster through the crack in my voice. “Do you?” He asked in a soft and broken voice. He looked at me through the lashes that curtained his brown eyes. He looked so tired and broken. I nodded as my eyes filled with tears. I pressed my lips together and worded it out. “I do, I forgive you for everything.” A weight lifted off my chest and suddenly I could breathe properly, which was weird considering that Brendon had just pulled me into a bone crushing hug.

“Thank you, fuck, thank you so much.” Brendon mumbled into my shoulder. I smiled against his tuxedo clad collar bone.

Sure I still loved him and watching him with Sarah hurt, but I couldn’t control it. He is happy with her and that should bring me enough solace. We pulled away from each other and smiled after taking in each other’s crying faces. It felt good. It feels like I was drowning and someone came along and finally saved me.

“I should go and have my first dance with my beautiful wife.” Brendon said and started getting up. I got up as well, my numb legs and knees threatened to drop me like a bag a potatoes, and moved aside after making a remark about how I am taller than Brendon in heels. He whined a little and lightly punched me. “She really is beautiful, by the way.” I said and he smiled before he started retreating.

Years and years of negativity and hatred and all it took was a tear jerking rant to find peace, maybe the universe didn’t hate me after all. “I did love you at one point, I just never told you cause I was a piece of shit back then.” Brendon remarked halfway through his retreat.

The ballroom was empty. No wonder people didn’t come up to us, everyone was out on the fairy lights lit patio, waiting for the first dance to be shared between the bride and the groom. I smiled a small, sad smile.

“I’ll always love you.”

You know what, I spoke too soon, the universe does hate me.

J��K#�

#brendon urie #p!atd #panic! at the disco #angst #unrequited love #wedding #spencer smith #sarah orzechowski #no smut

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yourguruisproblematic · 6 years

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Sogyal Rinpoche

TW: Accounts of sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, gaslighting.

Author of the bestselling The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, which has sold over 3 million copies and has been praised by John Cleese, Thom Yorke, and Michelle Yeoh. No mention of the below allegations, or his current work in the wake of his resignation from Rigpa, the organization he cofounded and led until 2017, appear on his website.

Accused by 8 of his former senior students of decades of physical, psychological and sexual abuse (Sydney Morning Herald) with supporting evidence that resulted in an independent investigation report. The report concluded, “Sogyal Lakar should not take part in any future event organised by Rigpa or otherwise have contact with its students.”

Physical Abuse

Allegations of punching and kicking students, “pulled hair, torn ears, as well as [hitting the 8 students] and others with various objects such as [his] back-scratcher, wooden hangers, phones, cups, and any other objects that happened to be close at hand. (Open letter dated July 14, 2017)

Gut-punched a Danish nun in front of an assembly of more than 1,000 students at Lerab Ling in France because his footstool wasn’t in the right position. Then refused to continue with the retreat as students questioned this action, speaking through an employee: “Sogyal, he said, was upset that people should be questioning his methods. If people didn’t understand what had actually happened, then they probably weren’t ready for the promised higher-level teachings, and Sogyal would not teach again during the retreat.” (SCMP)

In 2001, took on a woman named Drolma as his assistant. "The first time Sogyal hit her hard on the head with the backscratcher that he carries everywhere, Drolma says, she accepted it as part of his ‘wrathful’ training. ‘I thought, “Wow, he really trusts me.”’ It was the beginning of years of physical abuse and verbal humiliation. ‘If he became anxious about his mother, or over a relationship with a girlfriend or some financial thing, he would slap me across the face, or hit me over the head with his backscratcher.’” (ibid)

Abuse that “left monks, nuns, and lay students of yours with bloody injuries and permanent scars” (ibid)

Drolma in an interview with Good Weekend: “If anything went wrong and his anxiety got the better of him, he would take it out on me. One of those times he grabbed me by the ear and it was torn all the way along the back. There was blood pouring down my neck.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

Verbal and Emotional Abuse

“In December 2005, in a live streamed teachings from the unfinished temple, Sogyal Lakar said that Ian Maxwell, one of his oldest students, was “an asshole”, as Ian lay dying in the hospital in Paris. After Ian’s death Sogyal Lakar said that Ian, ‘died spitting up blood' because he had defied him in the past. Sogyal Lakar regularly used this incident, saying, ‘Do you want to end up dying spitting up blood like Ian for defying me?' as an example to other students when he threatened them with dire consequences if they did not obey his commands“ (Open letter dated July 14, 2017)

Sogyal Lakar told Graham Price that his beloved partner, Elena, got sick (and died a year later) because Graham had shouted at him. “In reality Graham didn’t even raise his voice.” (ibid)

Publicly humiliated a male attendant during a teaching session who had erred on travel plans. "Sogyal got him to kneel at the foot of the podium and then run backwards and forwards across the tent. I felt terribly uncomfortable but I also thought he was very fortunate to have such close attention from the teacher.” (SCMP)

Sexual Abuse

Within a year of the publication of The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying, groomed and sexually abused a woman named Dierdre Smith who attended one of his retreats after the death of her father. “For several months Dierdre put her everyday life on hold and travelled with Sogyal as his servant, sex partner and arm candy. She recounts how the smile on Sogyal’s face and the unctuous charm of his of his public presentation vanished the moment they were hidden from view: ‘There must have been about 10 women in his inner circle,’ she says, and it was our job to attend to his every need. We bathed him, dressed him, cooked for him, carried his suitcases, ironed his clothes and were available for sex. He was a tyrant. Nothing we did was ever good enough. He went into screaming rages and beat us. If I tried to question the way he treated us, he became angry. The only way to avoid this was to stay silent and submissive.’” (Behind the Thangkas)

In 1994, a $10 million civil lawsuit was filed against Sogyal Rinpoche and Rigpa by an anonymous plaintiff, who was given the name “Janice Doe” to protect her identity. The complaint alleged infliction of emotional distress, breach of fiduciary duty, and assault and battery. (The Telegraph)

In 1995, an anonymous female student told The Telegraph Magazine: "It's a relationship that you haven't chosen, agreed to or discussed. Because he was my spiritual teacher, I trusted that whatever he asked was in my best interests. You're chosen which makes you feel special. You want to help the teachings, you want to progress on the spiritual path. By sleeping with the teacher you get a closeness to him which everyone is hankering after. You want to be a 'good student.' It's a sort of submission. I saw it as part of the teachings about the illusory nature of experience and emotions. But in fact it caused me a lot of pain that I wasn't able to dissolve." (The Daily Telegraph Magazine)

Another female student spoke for the same article: “When, at length, Rinpoche made a sexual advance to her, she says that she felt 'confused'… Her understandings of the teachings, she says, did not help her resolve her confusion. But while her doubts grew, she did not feel 'justified' in expressing them to Sogyal.…'All of the older students, the people I went to for advice, told me repeatedly that I must "abandon my discriminating mind and use my wisdom mind" in dealing with Rinpoche,' she says. 'Every time I tried to do that I ended up doing what he wanted and feeling bad about it later." (ibid)

“The distress felt by students who have had sexual relations with spiritual teachers can be analogous to incest.“ (ibid)

In 2000, Janine, the daughter of a follower of Sogyal Lakar started attending his teachings to spend time with her father who had begun to neglect her. After engaging with Sogyal in a few public settings, she was “ordered to wear a best dress and turn up at Sogyal’s house for dinner. At this moment she realised the whole set up was somewhat bizarre: ‘There was Sogyal surrounded by five or six young pretty girls and there were no other men. Iit was quite fun actually, we had nice drinks and we danced for him. Then at a certain point he asked me to go upstairs with him and massage his head. I made some sort of smart reply and he became angry. He said I was too proud and he would have to break my pride.’” Janine became inducted as an unwilling member of Sogyal Lakar’s harem and forced into orgies. “‘They were terrified of being beaten…During the time I was with him continuously, one of us would be beaten every day – because you forgot something or did something wrong. For one girl it was because the way she walked was too proud. I got a little less than the others — some would get a serious, really bad beating. He got irritated with me because when I did something wrong I would hand him something to hit me with and that would spoil the fun.’” (Behind the Thangkas)

“Indoctrination into the inner circle is designed as a life sentence. A young, vulnerable woman is programmed to accept Sogyal’s god-like status and to be compliant with his wishes and whims, slave-like in her willingness to accept a punishing workload and available for sex on demand. She is separated from her family and friends, discouraged from contact with the outside world and persuaded to see Rigpa as her family, with Sogyal (confusingly as father-lover) in absolute power and control. In the majority of cases, it works. By the time these women realise they are being abused and exploited and are deeply embedded in a coercive cult, it is too late for them to extricate themselves. Their investment is total and their chances of making lives for themselves beyond Rigpa have dwindled into non-existence.“ (ibid)

Allegedly instructed students to strip, show their genitals (male and female), provide oral sex, provide photos of their genitals, to be sexual partners and to describe other sexual relations with other partners. (Open letter dated July 14, 2017)

Allegedly ordered students “to photograph [his] attendants and girlfriends naked, and then forced other students to make photographic collages for [him], which [were then] shown to others.” (ibid)

Allegedly “offered one of [his] female attendants to another lama (who is well known in Rigpa) for sex.” (ibid)

Met Victoria Barlow in 1976 for a private teaching, “He roughly put his hand up my long dress, groped my privates, unzipped himself and lay on top of me, literally grunting for the minute or two until he released. Immediately, he got up, said he had things to do, that he was getting ready to travel across America.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

Gaslighting

Food was not hot enough

Awakened from nap a half hour late

Phone list was missing a name or the font was the wrong size

The internet connection was slow

The television movie guide was confusing

Technology failed to work

Students failed to “tune into [his] mind” and predict what he wanted

Upset with one of his girlfriends. (ibid)

Sogyal Rinpoche denies all allegations.

#sogyal rinpoche #rigpa #your guru is problematic #your fave is problematic #tibetan buddhism #buddhism #me too #metoo #the tibetan book of living and dying #john cleese #thom yorke #michelle yeoh #toxic masculinity #patriarchy

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mondkendrick · 6 years

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For The Love of Voice and… Relationships!! - Vocal Science…

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We fix not only voices, but we also mend broken hearts, wounded souls & spirits and… nevertheless, relationships! Why relationships, you my reader, may ask?

The answer is, while the voice is getting healthier and thus stronger, the confidence of the sufferer also becomes stronger. A lot of voice repair cases are emotionally induced and a lot of them are also caused by (supposed-to-be) the closest people they are related to.

How ironic - you may wonder…

Ironic indeed!

On this note, let me tell you my own story: In 1989/1990, my own voice suddenly and, I thought, without any reason, seized.

Naturally, not knowing then what I know now, I was really puzzled as to why something like that would happen to me out of all people?

I knew that I always was promoting a healthy voice; and thus, could not attribute its failure to poor vocal technique, or anything like that.

After long suffering an investigation how to deal with it (via trial and error), I realized that my very unsuccessful and emotionally abusive marriage was actually the prime cause of it.

Given all of the above I finally got introduced to, and educated in, the holistic approach to the human body.

And, of course, I added to the equation of the latter my already quite extensive knowledge about the voice.

My thyroid had locked on me. In the holistic teaching, the thyroid represents suppressed emotions; and thus, as a consequence, the voice is unable to get through the vocal box and out on the surface in order to produce a sound.

I healed my vocal anatomy with the natural herbs and remedies; and then, of course, applied my already-thriving voice/vocal technique which, in the later days, was named the Vocal Science Method, and then in 2002, it earned its trademark with the Government of Canada.

Interestingly enough that my own relationship with my ex-husband, from that point on, started improving exponentially…?

How so, you may ask?

It took me some time to think about it and I came to the conclusion that the abusive man who I was married to was actually a very weak man.

He was pushing his superiority complex on me, while concurrently creating my inferiority complex. So my spirit was shut down and my stress-level was rising exponentially.

With the latter, my voice had become compromised.

When I regained my voice via the use of my technique and the application of the natural herbal (and some homeopathic) remedies, my confidence was reestablished - I became stronger and “got back on the hoarse”.

Once my “beloved” ex-husband witnessed my newly-found strength, he suddenly became very attentive and even loving again…

However, me by nature, possessing a very analytical mind, had already then the understanding that the men like him are only good when their women are strong and vibrant.

So, God forbid, that the woman they are married to will fall ill or get in an accident, they will be first to leave her and never offer a helping hand.

By the way, presently, I have been working with two women who have almost identical stories as mine.

Both ended up with voice repairs, primarily because of their situations with their husbands.

I predicted for both of them that once their voices will become healthier and stronger, their confidence will be regained and their hearts and souls will be somewhat mended.

On that premise, their spouses will run right back to them and even will become (one more time again) romantic, just like before when they were dating them…

However, I also warned them that this effect will only last until the next breakdown (not with voice) but, God forbid, on any other level and with anything else.

Unfortunately, I know it first hand via my own experience and over 43 years of teaching and consulting thousands upon thousands of people.

It may sound negative to you, but with such awareness, it is better to be safe then sorry, shall we say.

However, I wish all of my clients, and all of my potential clients, to enjoy their relationships while they last; but at the same time, I advise everyone to keep their guard up and, needless to say, look after yourself - your heart, your spirit (needless to say, your voice) and your health overall!

My wish for you:

Be good, be healthy and be well!

from A Voice Apart https://ift.tt/2EHuHCE

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aootle-blog · 6 years

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Essential Elements That Must Contain (Or Not!) In Your Curriculum Vitae

Essential Elements That Must Contain (Or Not!) In Your Curriculum Vitae The 'right' way to write a curriculum vitae seems to change every month. Since the rules keep evolving, how do you know what you should or should not include in your resume? The first rule when writing a resume is to summarize the job you want. Your experience, skills, and abilities should all reflect the position for which you would like to be hired. How to do it? Here are some timeless rules you should follow when writing your curriculum vitae: What Does It Contain? Your Name and Contact Details You may be amazed at the number of people who forget to include this vital information. Be certain to put your contact information at the beginning of your resume where recruiters will not be able to miss it. A telephone number and a personal (but professional looking) email address should suffice. Do not use the email address of your current job. Also, enter only the contact information that hiring managers can use as they see fit. Abstract A summary at the beginning of your curriculum vitae allows recruiters to know your strengths at a glance. Make sure to write a short and direct summary. Avoid any inconsistency. Enter only information related to your employment history and skills. You are not writing your memoirs. Job History This is the essence of your curriculum vitae. State your experiences in reverse chronological order, adding a few points about your achievements to each position. In general, we recommend that you only register the roles related to the job you are applying for. Education Your post-secondary education, if you have finished it, is the highlight here. Enter the details of your high school education only if you graduated recently or if it is your highest level of education. Prizes and Certificates Prizes have a positive effect on you. If you have won a prize, do not hesitate to brag about it!! Certificates or awards you have earned in your field will make you stand out from other candidates. Examples and Parameters Recruiters love quantifiable information. Provide facts and figures about your accomplishments to confirm your statements rather than just vague statements. Do not write: "the project was a success." Write instead: "the project has increased revenues by 30%". Social Media If you are professionally active on social media, do not hesitate to state it on your curriculum vitae. LinkedIn and Twitter are often advantageous since they are frequently used in the field of work. However, Facebook and Instagram are usually used for personal purposes, and this is why it is recommended not to mention them. Think of it this way: If you are not 100% comfortable knowing that your boss is reading any of your messages, do not talk about it. Skills When writing a curriculum vitae, the 'skills' section is a gray area between what's good and what's bad. Some skills are sought, especially when they relate to specific software or industry. On the other hand, generic qualities such as 'organized,' 'working,' 'likes to work with people' or 'team spirit' have been abused to the point of disgust. You will be better able to demonstrate these general skills through your achievements than by stating them purely and simply. Links To Your Work If you are looking for a job in the creative field, such as writing or designing, recruiters will greatly appreciate finding a link leading to your portfolio. Just make sure the link looks professional and easy to type if you use the printed version of your resume. Creative Design A creative concept to help your curriculum vitae stand out among others that are presented simply in black and white. Make sure, however, that the concept does not overshadow the content. Your resume should still include relevant information about your qualifications. It should also allow for textual search, as many companies pre-screen resumes using the software. The Truth Do not even think about inventing skills or beautifying your experience. Even if a lie could help you get an interview, the truth will come out before long. Be honest, work hard and get your dream job sooner than you think. What Does Not Have To Contain? An Objective Statement Any good guide to writing a curriculum vitae will teach you that objective statements go back to the last century. Do not be bothered by this archaic custom. Hiring managers know that your goal is to get a job, no matter how you express yourself. State The Details Of Your Education Did you attend elementary school? Everyone did it! You might think this is an interesting fact, but you can use the space better. Do not dwell on the education that preceded high school. You can even remove this information if you have studied further than high school or if you have full-time work experience. What You Did Before High School If this is an experience lived before the age of 18, you should delete it from your resume. Winning the 'most punctual' student award when you were 12 years old is irrelevant and is a pretty ridiculous piece of information about your resume. It's like you've never done anything more recently. Personal Information To Excess Personal information includes your date of birth, marital status, political affiliation, religious affiliation, information about your children and anything that hiring managers are not allowed to know. Employers are not allowed to consider this information when hiring, so you have no reason to mention it. Pictures A few years ago, there was a tendency to include your portrait on your curriculum vitae. It may seem like a fun way to get visual interest, but no. The pictures of yourself may seem futile or even forget your true qualities. Text Walls When a friend sends you an article that looks like a wall of text that has little or no air, you think how exhausting it is to read. You probably decide it's not worth it and you move on. The same is true of curriculum vitae. Make sure you include your information promptly and that it is easy to scan (for example, with bullets or subtitles) to make your resume more inviting. Page 3 There is no cause for your curriculum vitae to go to a third page. If you are unable to summarize your resume on two pages or less, you lack a professionally crucial skill - conciseness. Look at your resume and see what it's worth to include. A curriculum vitae on one page is even better. Creative Design That is true. Creative concepts have a positive side and a negative side. If you do not have the eye to create a clean and clearly defined concept, do not even try to be creative. Badly matched fonts and color combinations that shock the eye are distracting. Even worse, they do not look professional. If in doubt, limit yourself to black and white. Even better, look for an existing curriculum vitae template that is both simple and attractive. Buzzwords You might think that you look smart using words like "synergy" in your curriculum vitae, but recruiters do not see it the same way. Avoid jargon to limit yourself to a language that is both clear and concise to say only the essentials. Have you followed these rules on writing a curriculum vitae? Would you like to share your own rules? We would like to hear your comments on social media. https://aootle.com/computer-genius/ Read the full article

#curriculumvitae #curriculumvitaeformat #howtowriteacurriculumvitae #resume

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kaypeace21 · 5 years

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The Mind flayer’s motivation and Will’s destiny to defeat him (deep dive analysis/theory)

Also if you still don’t think Will has powers this boy literally closed his eyes and imagined lights (in another dimension) flickering and got them to do so!

2. So now I’ll discuss how Will became a cleric. It’s because of the Mind flayer- “they are evil and sadistic aberrations, feared by sentient creatures in many worlds across the multiverse due to their powerful innate psionic abilities.”The upside down is an alternate dimension/universe the mind flayer previously took control of.

“These beings sought to expand their dominion over all other creatures, controlling their minds to use them as hopeless slaves (demogorgans and demo-dogs).

The comic alludes to the idea of him thinking Will is special by having an unknown voice say things to Will such as “do not fear… ” and in reference to Will the mind flayer says “I want him to live forever”.

3. However, since the mind flayer could never complete his possession over Will’s mind. Will is left with remnants of the mindflayers/elderbrain’s powers - and this is when Will becomes a Cleric.

“Clerics are given their powers by a god” (in this case the elder brain/mindflayer)

This idea is reaffirmed in the comic. when the mindflayer tells Will “ Do not be dismayed… am your… will strengthen you… with my righteous…”

Typical Powers of Cleric include

- detect chaos and evil (Will was able to do this in s2)

-Scrying- “a mindflayer can view a subject at great distance and possibly across the planes of existence…Clerics have a similar spell they call magic font.”

So by s5, Will is going to be the one who destroys the upside down once and for all! The meaning of his name means “resolute protector” after all.

Sorry, had to repost this old theory since it disappeared from all the tags

#stranger things theory #will byers #stranger things meta

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clarenceomoore · 7 years

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Voices in AI – Episode 8: A Conversation with Esther Dyson

Today's leading minds talk AI with host Byron Reese

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In this episode, Byron and Esther talk about intelligence, jobs, her experience in being a backup cosmonaut and more.

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Voices in AI

Visit VoicesInAI.com to access the podcast, or subscribe now:

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Byron Reese: Today, our guest is Esther Dyson. Esther Dyson is a living legend. She has been an angel investor, and sits on the boards of a number of companies. She is also a best-selling author, a world citizen, and a backup cosmonaut for the Russian Space Program. Now, she serves as the Executive Founder for a non-profit called Way to Wellville. Welcome to the show, Esther.

Esther Dyson: Delighted to be here.

Let’s start with that; that sounds like an intriguing non-profit. Can you talk about what its mission is, and what your role therein is?

Yeah. My role is, I founded it. The reason I founded it, was a question, which was… As I was an angel investor, and doing tech, and getting more and more interested in healthcare, and biotech, and medicine, I also had to ask the basic question; which is: “Why are we spending so much money and countenancing so much tragedy by fixing people when they’re broken, instead of keeping them healthy and resilient, so that they don’t get sick or chronically diseased in the first place?”

The purpose of Way to Wellville is to show what it looks like when you help people stay healthy. I could go on for way too long, but it’s five small communities around the US, so you can get critical mass in a small way, rather than trying to reshape New York City or something.

The basic idea is that this happens in the community. You don’t actually need to experiment and inspect people one-by-one, but change the environment they live in and then look at sort of the overall impact of that. It started a few years ago as a five-year project and a contest. Now, it’s a ten-year project and it’s more like a collaboration among the five communities.

One way AI is really important is that in order to show the impact you’ve had, you need to be able to predict pretty accurately what would’ve happened otherwise. So, in a sense, these are five communities, the United States is the control group.

But, at the same time, you can look at a class of third graders and do your math, and say that one-third of these are going to be obese by the time they’re sixteen, 30% will have dropped out, 10% will be juvenile delinquents, and that’s simply unacceptable. We need to fix that. So, that’s what we’re doing.

We’ll get to the AI stuff here in a moment but I’m just curious, how do you go about doing that? That seems so monumental, as being one of those problems like, where do you start?

Yeah, and that’s why we’re doing it in small communities. Part of the drill was, ask the communities what they want, but at the same time I went in thinking diabetes and heart disease, and exercise, and nutrition. The more we learned, the more we actually, as you say—you’ve got to start at the beginning, which is prenatal care and childhood. If you come from a broken home or with abusive parents, chances are it’s going to be hard for you to eat properly, it’s going to be hard for you to resist drugs.

There’s a concept called adverse childhood experiences. The mind is a very delicate thing. In some ways, we’re incredibly robust and resilient… But then, when you look at a third of the US population is obese—a smaller number is diabetic, according to age. You look at the opioid addiction problem, you look at the number of people who have problems with drinking or other kinds of behavior and you realize, oh, they’re all self-medicating. Again, let’s catch them when they’re kids and help them be addicted to love and children and exciting work, and feeling productive—rather than substances that cause other problems.

What gives you hope that you’ll be successful? Have you had any promising early findings in the first five-year part?

Not the kind you’d want. The first thing is in each community, part of the premise was there’s a group of local leaders who are trying to help the community be healthy. Mostly, they’re volunteers; they don’t have resources; they’re not accountable; so it’s difficult. We’re trying to help bring in some—but not all—of that Silicon Valley startup culture… It’s okay to fail, as long as you learn.

Plan B is not a disaster. Plan B is the result of learning how to fix Plan A, and so forth. If you look at studies, it’s pretty clear that having caring adults in a child’s life is really important. If you look at studies, it’s pretty clear that there’s no way you can eat healthily, if you can’t get healthy food, either because they’re too poor, or it’s inaccessible, or you don’t know what’s healthy.

Some of these things are the result of childhood experiences. Some are the result of poverty, and transportation issues… Yes, you’re right, all these things interact. You can’t go in and fix everything; but if you focus on the kids and their parents, that’s a good place to start.

I learned a lot of concepts. One of them is child storage, as opposed to child enrichment. If your child is going to a preschool that helps them learn how to play, that has caring adults, that can help the kid overcome a horrible home environment… It’s not going to solve all the community’s problems, but it’s definitely going to help some percentage of the children do better. That kind of stuff spreads, just the way the opposite spreads.

In the end, is your hope that you come out of it with, I guess, a set of best practices that you can then disseminate?

People know the best practices. What we really want to do is two things. One, show that it’s possible and inspire people that are [in] regular communities. This is not some multi-million dollar gated community designed for rich people to live healthy and fulfilling lives and go to the spa.

There are five of them, real places in various parts of America: Muskegon, Michigan; Spartanburg, South Carolina; North Hartford, Connecticut; Clatsop County, Oregon; and Lake County, California; that normal people in these places can fundamentally change the community to make it a place where kids are born lucky, instead of unlucky.

Yes, they can look at what we did and there will be certain things we did. One includes… The community needs to come together in different sectors; like the schools, and business people, and the hospital system need to cooperate. And, most likely, somebody needs to pay.

You need coaches to do everything from nurse visits, pre- and post-birth, early childhood education that’s effectively delivered, caring teachers in the schools, healthy school lunches. Really sad to see the government just backtracked on sodium and other stuff in the school lunches… But in a sense, we’re trying to simulate what it would look like, if we had really wonderful policies around fostering healthy childhoods and show the impact that has.

Let’s zoom the lens way out from there, because that might be an example of the kinds of things you hear a lot about today. It seems like it’s a world full of insurmountable problems, and then it’s also a world full of real, legitimate hope that there’s a way to get through them.

If I were to ask you in a broad way, how do you see the future? [Through] what lens do you look at the future, either of this country, or the world, or anything, in ten years, twenty years, thirty years? What do you think is going to happen, and what will be the big driving forces?

Well, I get my dopamine from doing something, rather than sitting around worrying. Intellectually, I feel these problems; and practically, I’m doing something about them the best way I know that will have leverage, which is doing something small and concentrated, rather than diffuse with no impact.

I want a real impact in a small number of dense places. Then, make that visible to a lot of other people and scale by having them do it, not by trying to do it myself. If you didn’t have hope, you wouldn’t do anything. Nothing happens without people doing something. So, I’m hopeful. Yeah, this is very circular.

So, I was journalist and I didn’t persuade people, I told them the truth. Ultimately, I think the truth is extremely powerful. You need to educate people to understand the truth and pay attention to it, but the truth is always much more persuasive than a lot of people just trying to cajole you, or persuade you, or deceive you, or manipulate you.

I want to create a truth that is encouraging and moves people to action, by making them feel that they could do this too; because they can, if they believe they can. This is not believing you will be blessed… It’s more like: Hey, you’ve got to do a lot of the hard work, and you need to change your community, and you need to think about food, and you need to be helping parents become better parents. There are active things you can do.

Is there any precedent for that? That sounds like it calls for changing lots of behaviors.

Well, the precedent is all the lucky people we know whose parents did love them, and who felt secure, and did amazing things. Many of them don’t realize how lucky they are. There’s also, of course, the people who had horrible circumstances and survived somehow anyway.

One of the best examples currently is J.D. Vance in the book Hillbilly Elegy. Many of them were just lucky to have an uncle, or a neighbor lady, or a grandmother, or somebody who gave them that support that they needed to overcome all the obstacles, and then there’s so many others who didn’t [have that].

Yes, certainly, there’s these people who’ve done things like this, but not ones that are visible enough that it really moves people to action. Part of this, we’re hoping to have a documentary that explains what we’re doing. Now, it’s early, because we haven’t done that much.

We’ve done a lot of preparation, and the communities are changing, but believe me: We’re not finished. I will say, when we started we put out a call for applications, and got applications for us to come in and help from forty-two communities.

Then, in the Summer of 2014, Rick Brush, our CEO, and I picked ten of them to go visit. One of them we turned down, because they were too good. That’s the town of Columbus, Indiana, which is, basically, the company town of Cummins Engine, which is just a wonderful place.

They were doing such a good job making their community healthier that we said, “Bless you guys, keep doing it. We don’t want to come in and claim the credit. There’s five other places that need us more.”

There are some pretty wonderful places in America, but there’s also a lot of places that have lost their middle class, people are dispirited, high unemployment. They need employers, they need good parents, they need better schools, they need all this stuff.

It’s not a nice white lady who came from New York to tell you how to live or to give you stuff. It’s this team of five that’s here to help you fix things for yourself, so that when we leave in ten years, you own your community. You will have helped repair it.

That sounds wonderful, in the sense that, if you ever can affect change, it should be kind of a positive reinforcement. Hopefully, it stays and builds on itself.

Yeah. It’s like, if you need us to be there, yes, we believe we’re helping in making a difference. But at some point, it’s their community, they have to own it. Otherwise, it’s not real, because it depends on us and when we leave it, it’s gone.

They’re building it for themselves, we’re just kind of poking them, counseling them, and introducing them to programs. And, “Hey, did you know this is what they’re doing at adverse childhood experiences in this or that study. This is how you can design a program like that for yourselves or hire the right training company, and build capacity in your own community.”

A lot of this is training people in the community to deliver various kinds of coaching and care, and stuff like that.

Your background is squarely in technology. Let’s switch gears and chat about that for a moment. Let’s start with the topic of show, which is artificial intelligence. What are your thoughts about it? Where do you think we’re at? Where do you think we’re going? What do you think it’s all about?

Yeah. Well, so, I first wrote about artificial intelligence inside a newsletter back in the days of Marvin Minsky and expert systems. Expert systems were basically logic. If this, and that, and the other thing, then… If someone shows up, and their blood pressure’s higher than x, and so forth. They didn’t sell very well.

Then they started calling them assistants instead of experts. In other words, we’re not going to replace you with an expert, we’re just going to assist you in doing your job. Pretty soon, they didn’t seem to be AI anymore because they really weren’t. They were simply logic.

The definition of artificial intelligence, to me, is somewhat similar to magic. The moment you really, really understand how it works, it no longer seems artificially-intelligent. It just seems like a tool that you design and it does stuff. Now, of course, we’re moving towards neural nets, and the so-called black boxes and things that actually, in theory, they can explain what they do; but now, they start to program themselves, based on large datasets.

They’re beyond the comprehension of a lot people, what exactly they do, and that’s some of the sort of social/ethical discussions that are happening. Or, you ask a bot to mimic a human being, and you discover most human beings make pretty poor decisions a lot of the time, or reflect biases of their culture.

AI was really hard to do at scale, back when we had very underpowered computers, compared with what we have today. Now, it’s both omnipresent and still pretty pathetic, in terms of… AI is generally still pretty brittle.

There’s not even a consensus definition on what intelligence is, let alone, what an AI is, but whatever it means… Would you say we have it, to at least some degree, today?

Oh, yeah. Again, the definition is becoming… Yes, the threshold of what we call AI is rising from what we called AI twenty years ago.

Where do you think it will go? Do you think that we’re building something that as it gradually gets better, in this kind of incrementalism, it’s eventually going to emerge as a general intelligence? Or do you think the quest to build something as smart and versatile as a human will require dramatically different technology than we have now?

Well, there’s a couple of different things around that. First of all, if something is not general, is it intelligent or is it simply good at doing its specific task? Like, I can do amazing machine translation now—with large enough corpuses—that simply has a whole lot of pattern recognition and translates from one language into another, but it doesn’t really understand anything.

At some point, if something is a super-intelligence, then I think it’s no longer artificial. It may not be wet. It may be totally electronic. If it’s really intelligent, it’s not artificial anymore, it’s intelligent. It may not be human, or conceived, or wet… But that’s my definition, someone else might just simply define it differently.

No, that’s quite legitimate actually. It’s unclear what the word artificial is doing in the phrase. One view is that it’s artificial in the sense that artificial turf is artificial. It may look like turf, but it’s not really turf. That sounds kind of like how you—not to put words in your mouth—but that sounds kind of like how you view it.

It can look like intelligence for a long time to come, but it isn’t really. It isn’t intelligent until it understands something. If that’s the case, we don’t know how to build a machine that understands anything. Would you agree?

Yes. They’re all these jokes, like… The moment it becomes truly intelligent, it’s going to start asking you for a salary. There are all these different jokes about AI. But yeah, until it ‘has a mind of its own’, what is intelligence? Is it because of the soul? Is it purpose? Can you be truly intelligent without having a purpose? Because, if you’re truly intelligent, but you have no purpose, you will do nothing, because you need a purpose to do something.

Right. In the past, we’ve always built our machines with implicit purposes, but they’ve never, kind of, gotten a purpose on their own.

Precisely. It’s sort of like dopamine for machines. What is it that makes a machine do something? Then, they have the runaway machines who do something because they want more electricity to grow, but they’ve been programmed to grow. But then, that’s not their own purpose.

Right. Are you familiar with Searle’s Chinese Room Analogy?

You mean the guy sitting in the backroom who does all the work

Exactly. The point of his illustration is, does this man who’s essentially just looking stuff up in books… He doesn’t speak Chinese, but he does a great job answering Chinese questions, because he can just look stuff up in these special books.

But he has no idea what he’s doing.

Right. He doesn’t know if it’s about cholera or coffee beans, or cough drops, or anything. The punchline is, does the man understand Chinese? The interesting thing is, you’re one of few people I’ve spoken to who unequivocally says, “No, if there’s nobody at home, it’s not intelligent.” Because, obviously, Turing would say, “That thing’s thinking; it understands.”

Well, no, I don’t think Turing would’ve said that. The Turing Test is a very good test for its time, but, I mean… George [Dyson, the futurist and technology historian who happens to be her brother] would know this much better. But the ability to pass the test… Again, what AI was at that point is very different from what it is now.

Right. Turing asked the question, can a machine think? The real question he was asking, in his own words, was something to the effect of: Could it do something radically different than us, that doesn’t look like thinking… But don’t we kind of have to grant that it is thinking?

That’s when he said… This idea that you could have a conversation with something and therefore, it’s doing it completely differently. It’s kind of cheating. It’s not really, obviously, but it’s kind of shortcutting it’s way to knowing Chinese, but it doesn’t really [know Chinese]. By that analogy and by that logic, you probably think it’s unlikely we’ll develop conscious machines. Is that right?

Well, no. I think we might, but then it’s going to be something quite… I mean, this is the really interesting question. In the end, we evolved from just bits of carbon-based stuff, and maybe there’s another form of intelligence that could evolve from electronic stuff. Yeah, I mean, we’re a miracle and maybe there’s another kind of miracle waiting to happen. But, what we’ve got in our machines now is definitely not that.

It is fascinating. Matt Ridley, wrote Rational Optimist, said in his book that the most important thing to know about life is [that] all life is one, is that life happened on this planet and survived one time… And every living thing shares a huge amount of the same DNA.

Yeah. I think it might’ve evolved multiple times, or little bits went through the same process, but I don’t think we all came from the same cell. I think it’s much more likely there was a lot of soup and there were a whole bunch of random bits that kind of coalesced. There might’ve been bunches of them that coalesced separately, but similarly.

I see. Back in their own day, merged into something that we are all related to?

Yeah. Again, all carbon-based. There are some interesting things at the bottom of the ocean that are quite different.

Right. In fact, that suggests you’re more likely to find life in the clouds on Venus—as inhospitable as it is, at least stuff’s happening there—than you might find on a barren, more hospitable planet.

Yeah.

When you talk to people who believe in an AGI, who believe we’re going to develop an AGI, and then you ask them, “When?” you get this interesting range between five and five hundred years, depending on who you ask. And these are all people who have some amount of training and familiarity with the issues. What does that suggest to you, that you get that kind of a disparity from people? What would you glean from that?

That we really don’t know.

I think that’s really interesting, because so many people are on that spectrum. Nobody says oh, somewhere between five and five hundred years. No person says that. The five-year people—

—They’re all so different. Yeah.

But all very confident, all very confident. You know, “We’ll have something by 2050.” A lot of it I think boils down to whether you think we’re a couple of hops, skips, and a jump away from something that can take off on its own… Or, it’s going to be a long, long, long time.

Yeah. It’s also, how you define it. Again, to me, in a sense, I’ve been thinking about this and reading Yuval Noah Harari’s Homo Deus and various other people… But to me, in the end, there’s something about purpose, which means, again, it really is… It’s the anti-entropy thing.

What is it that makes you grow, makes you reproduce? We know how that works physically, but, then when you talk about a soul or a consciousness, there’s some animating thing or some animating force, and it’s this purpose in life. It’s reproduction to create more life. That’s sort of an accident, of something that had to have purpose to reproduce, and the other stuff didn’t.

Again, there’s more biological descriptions of that. Where that fits in something that’s not wet, how that gets implemented—purpose; we haven’t yet found. It’s like, we found substances that correlate with purpose, but there’s some anti-entropy that moves us. Without which, we wouldn’t do anything.

If you’re right, that without purpose, without understanding—as fantastic as it is with our very stone-knives-and-bearskins kind of AI we have today—I would guess… And not to put words in your mouth, but, I would guess you are less worried about the AI’s taking all the jobs than somebody else might be. What is your view on that?

Yeah. Well, in [terms of] the AIs taking all the jobs… That is something that we can control, not easily. It’s just like saying we can control the government or we can control health. Human beings collectively can—and I believe should—start making decisions about what we do about people and jobs.

I don’t think we want a universal basic income, as much as we want almost universal basic vouchers to… Again, I think people need purpose in their lives. They need to feel useful. Some people can create art and feel useful, and sell it, or just feel good when other people look at their art. But I think a more simple, more practical way to do this is, we need to raise the salaries of people who do childcare, coaching, you know.

We need to give people jobs, for which they are paid, that are useful jobs. And I think some of the most useful things people can do, generally—some people can become coders and design things and program artificial intelligence tools, and so forth, and build things. But a lot of people, I think, can be very effectively employed. This goes back to the Way to Wellville in caring for children, in coaching mothers through pregnancy, in running baseball teams in high schools.

We can sit here and talk about artificial intelligence, but this is a world in which people are afraid to let their kids out to play and everywhere you go, bridges are falling down. I live in New York City, and we’re going to have to close some of our train tunnels, because we haven’t done enough repair work. There actually is an awful lot of work out there.

We need to design our society more rationally. Not by giving everybody a basic income, but by figuring out how to construct a world in which almost everybody is employed doing something useful, and they’re being paid to do that, and it’s not like a giant relief act.

This is a society with a lot of surplus. We can somehow construct it so that people get paid enough that they can live comfortable lives. Not easy lives, but comfortable lives, where you do some amount of work and you get paid.

At the margins, yes, take care of people who’ve fallen off; but let’s do a better job raising our children and creating more people who do, in fact… You know, their childhoods don’t destroy their sense of worth and dignity, and they want to do something useful. And feel that they matter, and they get paid to do that useful thing.

Then, we can use all the AI that makes society, as a whole, very rich. Consumption doesn’t give people purpose. Production does, whether it’s production of services or production of things.

I think you’re entirely right, you could just… on the back of an envelope say, “Yeah, we could use another half-million kindergarten teachers and another quarter-million…”—you can come up with a list of things, from a societal standpoint, [that] would be good and that maybe market forces aren’t creating. It isn’t just make-work, it’s all actually really important stuff. Do you have any thoughts on how that would work practically?

Yeah.

You implied it’s not the WPA again, or is it…?

No. Go to the people who talk about the universal basic income and say, look, why don’t you make this slightly different. Let’s talk about, you get double dollars for buying vegetables with your food stamps. How do we do something that gives everybody an account, that they can apply to pay for service work?

So, every time I use the services of a hairdresser, or a babysitter, or a basketball coach, or a gym teacher, there’s this category of services. This is not simple, there’s a certain amount of complexity here, because you don’t want to be able to—to be gross, you know—hire the teenage girl next door to provide sexual services. I think it needs to be companies, rather than government.

Whether it’s Uber vetting drivers—and that’s a whole other story—but you want an intermediary that does quality control. Both in terms of how the customers behave, and how the providers behave, and manage the training of the providers, and so forth.

Then, there’s a collective subsidy to the wages that are paid to the people who provide the services that foster… Long ago, women didn’t have many occupations open to them, so second-grade teachers tended to be a lot of very smart women, who were dedicated, and didn’t get paid much.

But that was okay, and now that’s changing. Now, we need to pay them more, which is great. There’s a collective benefit to having people teaching second grade that benefits society and should be paid for collectively.

In a way, you could throw away the entire tax code we have and say for every item, whether it’s a wage or buying something, we’re going to either calculate the cost to society or the benefit to society. Those will either be subsidies or taxes on top of that, so that the bag of potato chips—

—The economic term is—

—Internalizing the externalities?

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. It’s actually the only thing I can think of that doesn’t actually cause perverse incentives, because in theory, all the externalities have been internalized and reflected in the price.

Yes. So, you’re not interfering with the market, you’re just letting the market reflect both the individual and collective costs and stuff like that. It doesn’t need to be perfect. We’re imperfect, life is imperfect, we all die, but let’s sort of improve things in the brief period that we’re alive.

I can’t quite gauge whether you’re ‘in theory’ optimistic, or practically optimistic. Like, do you think we’re going to accomplish these things? Do you think we’re going to do some flavor of them? Or, do you just realize they’re possibilities and we may or may not?

I’m trying to make this happen. The way I would do that is not, “Gee, I’m going to do this myself.” But I’m going to contribute to a bunch of people, both doing it and feeling… A lot more people would be doing this, if they thought it was possible, so let’s get together and become visible to one another.

Just as in what I saw happen in Eastern Europe, where individually people felt powerless, but then, they—and this really was where the Internet did help. People began to say, “Oh, you know, I’m not the only one who is beginning to question our abusive government.” People got together, and felt empowered, and started to change the story, both by telling their own stories and by creating alternative narratives to the one that the government fed them.

In our case, we’re being fed, I don’t know, we’re being fed short-term. Everything in our society is short-term. I’m on the board of The Long Now, just for what it’s worth. Wall Street is short-term. Government politicians are mostly concerned with being reelected. People are consuming information in little chunks and not understanding the long-term narratives or the structure of how things work.

It’s great if you hear someone talk about externalities. If you walk down the street and ask people what an externality is, they’ll say, “Is that, like, a science fiction thing or what?” No, it’s a real concept and one that should be paid attention to. There are people who know this, and they need to bring it together, and change how people think about themselves.

The very question you asked: “Do you think you can do this practically?” No, I can’t alone, but together, yeah, we can change how people think about things, and get them to think more about long-term investments. Not this day-by-day, what’s my ROI tomorrow, or what’s next quarters? But if we do this now, what will be different twenty years from now?

It’s never been easier, so I hear, to make a billion dollars. Google and Facebook each minted something like six billionaires apiece. The number of billionaires continues to grow. The number who made their own money, the percent that made their own money, continues to grow, as opposed to inheriting it.

Right.

But, am I right that all of that money that’s being created at the top, that isn’t… I mean, mathematically, it contributes to income inequality because it’s moving some to the end… But do you think that that’s part of the problem? Do all of those billions get made at the expense of someone else, or do those billions get made just independent of their effect on other people?

There’s no simple answer to that one. It varies. I was very pleased to see the Chan Zuckerberg Foundation. And the people that bother me more, honestly, are… There’s a point at which you stop adding value, and I would say a lot of Wall Street is no longer adding value. Google, it depends what they do with their billions.

I’m less concerned about the money Google makes. It depends what the people who own the shares in Google do with the money they’ve made. Part of the problem is, more the trolls on the Internet are encouraging some of this short-sided thinking, instant gratification. I’d rather look at cat photos than talk to my two-year old, or what have you.

For me, the issue’s not to demonize people but to encourage the ones who have assets and capacity to use them more wisely. Sometimes, they’ll do that when they’re young. Sometimes, they will earn all the money and then start to change later, and so forth.

The problem isn’t that Google has a lot of money and the people in Muskegon don’t. The problem is that the people in Muskegon, or so many other places… They have crappy jobs, the people who are parents now might have had parents who weren’t very good. Things are going downhill rather than uphill. Their kids are no longer more educated than they are. They no longer have better jobs. The food is getting worse, etc.

It’s not simply an issue of more money. It’s how the money is spent, and what the money is spent on. Is it spent accountably for the right things? It’s not just giving people money. It’s having an education system that educates people. It’s having a food system that nourishes them. It’s stuff like that.

We now know how to do those things. We also are much better, because of AI, at predicting what will happen if we don’t. I think the market, and incentives, and individual action are tremendously important; but you can influence them. Which is what I’m trying to do, by showing how much better things could work.

Well, no matter what, the world that you would envision as being a better world, certainly requires lots and lots and lots of people power, right? Like, you need more teachers, you need more nutritionists, you need all of these other things. It’s sounds like you don’t—

Right. And, you need people voting to fix the bridges instead of keep voting on which politician makes promises that are unbelievable or whatever. In a sense, we need to be much more thoughtful about what it is we’re doing and to think more about the long-term consequences.

Do you think there ever was a time that, like, do you have any society that you look at or even, any time in any society when you say… “Well, they weren’t perfect, but here was a society that thought ahead, and planned ahead, and organized things in a pretty smart way”? Do you have any examples?

Yes and no. There was never like a perfect place. A lot of things were worse a hundred years ago, including how the women were treated, how minorities were treated, a lot of people were poor. But there was a lot less entitlement, there was a lot less consumption around instant gratification. People invested.

In many ways, things were much worse, but people took it for granted that they needed to work hard and save. Again, many of them had a sense of purpose. You go back to the 1840s, and the amount of liquor consumed was crazy. There’s no perfect society. The norms were better.

Perhaps there was more hypocrisy. Hey, there was a lot of crime a hundred years ago and, sort of, the notion of polite society was perhaps not all of society. People didn’t aspire to be celebrities. They aspired to be respected, and loved, and productive, and so forth. It just goes back to that word: purpose.

Being a celebrity does not mean having an impact. It means being well-known. There’s something lacking in being a celebrity, versus being of value to society. I think there’s less aspiration towards value and more towards something flashier and emptier. That’s what I’d love to change, without being puritan and boring about it.

Right. It seems you keep coming back to the purpose idea, even when you’re not using that word. You talked about [how] Wall Street used to add value, and [now] they don’t. That’s another way of saying they’ve lost their purpose. We talked about the billionaires… It sounds like you’re fine with it, it depends on what their purpose of it all is with it. How do you think people find their purpose?

It goes back to their parents. There’s this satisfaction that really can’t be beaten. When I spent time in Russia, the women were much better off than the men, because the men felt—many of them—purposeless. They did useless jobs and got paid money that was not worth much, and then their wives took the rubles and stood in line to get food and raise the children.

Having children gives you purpose, ideally. Then, you get to the point where your children become just one more trophy, and that’s unutterably sad. They’re people who love the children and also focus too much on, “Is this child popular?” or “Will he get into the right college and reflect well on me?” But, in the end, children are what give purpose to most people.

Let’s talk about space for a minute. It’s seems that a lot of Silicon Valley folks, noteworthy ones, have a complete fascination with it. You’ve got Jeff Bezos hauling Apollo 11 boosters out of the ocean. Elon is planning to, according to him, “die on Mars, just not on impact.” You, obviously, have a—

—I want to retire on Mars. That’s my line. And, not too soon.

There’s a large part of this country, for instance, that doesn’t really care about space at all. It seemed like a whole lot of wasted money, and emptiness, and all of that. Why do you think it’s so intriguing? What about it is interesting for you? For goodness sakes, I can’t put you as “trained to be backup cosmonaut” in your introduction, and then not—that’s like the worst thing a host can do, and then never mention it again. So please talk about that, if you don’t mind.

It’s our destiny, we should spread. It’s our backup plan if we really screw up the earth and obliterate ourselves, whether it’s with a polluted atmosphere, or an explosion, or some kind of biological disaster. We need another place to go.

Mars… Number one, it’s good backup. Number two, maybe we can learn something. There’s this wonderful new thing call the circular economy. The reality is, yes, we’re in a circular economy, but it’s so large we don’t recognize it. On Mars, because you start out so small, it’s much clearer that there’s a circular economy.

I’m hoping that the National Geographic series is actually going to change some people’s opinions. Yeah, in some sense, our purpose is to explore, to learn, to discover what else might lie beyond our own little planet. Again, it’s always good to have Option B.

Final question: We already talked about what you’re working on, but… What gives you… Because our chat had lots of ups and downs, possibilities, and then worries. What is—if there is anything—what gives you hope? What give you hope that there’s a good chance that we’ll muddle through this?

I’m an optimist. I have hope, because I’m a human being and it’s been bred into me over all those generations. The ones who weren’t hopeful didn’t bother to try, and they mostly disappeared. But now you can survive, even if you’re not hopeful; so maybe that’s why all this pessimism, and lassitude and stuff is spreading. Maybe, we should all go to Mars, where it’s much tougher, and you do need to be hopeful to survive.

Yeah, and have purpose. In closing, anybody who wants to keep up with what you’re doing with your non-profit…

WaytoWellville.net.

And if people want to keep up with you, personally, how do they do that?

Probably on Twitter, @edyson.

Excellent. Well, I want to thank you so much for finding the time.

Thank you. It was really fun.

Byron explores issues around artificial intelligence and conscious computers in his upcoming book The Fourth Age, to be published in April by Atria, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. Pre-order a copy here.

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