#1) my worst weakness may be that i still am struggling with describing actions and any sense of place

[thecodeveronica]

Annnnnnnnnnnnd I'm done! Met my self-imposed writing deadline with only 1/4 of the day left, phew.

Not 100% satisfied with the end, but there IS an end, and now I can agonize over editing.

Trying to decide if I achieved my goal of avoiding my dangerous habit of... shall we say, "soft boi-ifying" characters yes i know i complained about cinnamon rolling in the past, but this is a different issue, or if in my conscious effort to do so I ended up going too far in the opposite direction. Gonna mull it over a bit about one part in particular.

But by and large, the first big piece to resolving my writing issues puzzle is in place, aww yeah.

[hovercraft79]

Magic

Chapters: 1

Word Count: 5,703

Fandom: The Worst Witch (TV 2017)

Rating: Teen

Warnings: general family discord

Summary: Still roiling from Hecate’s entrapment in the mirror, Ada and Hecate cling to one another, thankful for the chance to be together. Just in time. As Agatha’s influence grows within the school, they’re going to need each other more than ever.

Notes: This fic covers the Week 7 prompt ‘confession.’

The title of this week’s fic is from the title of Olivia Newton-John’s song. Yes, that one. The one from Xanadu. The movie I actually own a DVD of. Don’t judge me - seeing it as a child was a very formative experience. For those of you who may be unfamiliar, the movie stars Newton-John as a muse, Michael Beck as an artist in need of inspiration and Gene Kelly as a washed-up musician. And they were all on roller skates. I said don’t judge me.

Once again, this fic is much improved by Sparky’s faithful editing.

No matter how hard she tried to avoid it, wakefulness kept creeping over Hecate. She snuggled deeper into her pillow, which was warm and cozy and… breathing? Hecate’s eyes popped open. She lifted her head and found herself gazing into the serene blue of Ada’s eyes. “Ada?”

“Mmm… Good morning,” Ada smiled warmly down at her. “Afternoon, really.” She traced her fingers softly over Hecate’s cheek, which was now imprinted with the weave of her jumper. “Glad you’re back.”

Hecate leaned into Ada’s touch. “Glad to be back.” She shifted, her shoulder starting to ache – a lasting memento of her time with Mistress Broomhead.

“You’re so beautiful.”

Grunting, Hecate shook her head. “I’m wearing sports clothes… and a splotchy red herringbone pattern on my face.”

“Like I said…” Ada winced as Hecate shifted again.

“I’m sorry… I should mo—”

Ada covered Hecate’s lips with her finger. “When you were trapped in the mirror, I had this moment…  You were gone and it was all so real… you might stay gone forever. That made me realize… well, that I’ve been a foolish old woman.” She traced Hecate’s eyebrow and tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. “I’ve found someone to love and, for reasons I can’t comprehend, she loves me back. How could I let some responsibility I never chose get in the way of that?” She lifted her chin. “I can’t. Not anymore. So… if you want to budge up because you’re uncomfortable, then do so. But if the only reason you’re moving is because you think I want you to, I can assure you I’d prefer you stay exactly where you are.”

Eyes shining with tears, Hecate nodded before burying herself in Ada’s arms. Sighing, she let herself melt against Ada, warmth flowing through her as she felt Ada press a soft kiss against the top of her head.

 The noise from the Dining Hall spilled into the hallway despite the closed doors. Hecate paused for a moment to listen. Normally, the cacophony of nearly one hundred teenaged girls was enough to set her nerves jangling. Not now. Now the boisterous noisiness provided its own sort of comfort – a reminder that she was where she was meant to be. Even though she’d been trapped in the mirror little more than a day, the differences still haunted her. One of those differences had been the girls. As Ada always said, happy girls are noisy girls. The girls in the mirror had been eerily quiet.

Shaking herself back into the present, Hecate pushed through the doors. She’d spent most of the walk to the Dining Hall steeling herself for another meal stuck between Geraldine Gullet and Gwen Bat. At least Gwen could carry on an intelligent conversation – in a voice that didn’t sound like she was scraping a burned potion out of the bottom of a cauldron with a metal spoon.

She scanned the teachers’ table, stopping short when she realized that only one of the Cackle twins was present. Ada, she guessed, since she was seated at the end of the table.

“Care to join me?” Ada asked, suddenly at her elbow.

Once she’d managed to swallow her heart back down into her chest, Hecate nodded. She followed Ada to the table, eyes moving back and forth between her and her sister. She’d overlooked Agatha’s lack of glasses, simply assuming because she was in Ada’s usual chair that she must be Ada.

When they arrived at the table, Geraldine pulled out the chair between her own and Agatha’s. “Here you go, Miss Cackle, we’ve saved a spot just for you.”

“Thank you, Miss Gullet, but I’ll take a spot down here. I have a few things to discuss with Miss Hardbroom.” Ada sat down and patted the chair beside her.

Hecate gingerly lowered herself into the chair, feeling a bit more like the world was as it should be.

----- 

Geraldine groaned for the third time in as many minutes from the chair in front of Hecate. Rolling her eyes, Hecate checked the time on her watch again. The weekly staff meeting should have started ten minutes ago. It wasn’t like Ada to be late. On the contrary, she preferred arriving early to take advantage of the weekly order of pastries and all the latest gossip.

Finally, Agatha stepped to the front of the staff lounge and began the morning’s agenda. “We have a few items to go over. First, as you all know, every four years the Magic Council sponsors the Witchcathalon competition. Magical schools from across Britain compete for the honor of representing Britain in the international finals. Now, after a disappointing finish four years ago, my sister and I are determined to see Cackle’s reclaim its status as champion. Please develop your action plans to improve our performance and have those ready by meeting-time next week.”

Hecate struggled to focus as Agatha droned on about inconsequential things, snapping back to attention when she started discussing their latest OfWitch inspection results. Surely they should have waited for Ada to deliver that information. “As expected, Cackle’s Academy scored well.” She let the pleased twitter spread through the room before allowing it to subside. “However, my sister and I are disappointed to say that the score wasn’t perfect in most areas.” Agatha summoned a short stack of papers and floated them out to the teachers. “As you can see, our greatest area of weakness is Health and Safety. Only one teacher scored a perfect one hundred percent. Let’s all give Miss Gullet a round of applause.”

An anemic smattering of applause dribbled in, petering out quickly. Geraldine’s gloating smile faded into a pout.

“Since we have such an exemplar of Health and Safety with us,” Agatha carried on, “We’ve assigned Miss Gullet to conduct regular inspections of the different areas so that she may offer her expertise to any of our teachers who might need it.” This caused Geraldine to resume gloating like a puffed-up toad.

“Well done, Miss Gullet,” Ada said as she entered the staff room at last. She nodded at Agatha. “Please, do continue.”

“We’ve just finished. Dismissed, all. Don’t forget your action plans for next week.”

Her crumpled report in her hand, Hecate snatched up the rest of her things so she could leave, but Ada signaled her to stay.

Ada approached her sister, hands clasped tightly behind her back. “Sister, didn’t you tell me I was to expect a mirror call from the Great Witch at nine o’clock? I was meant to call her at eight o’clock.”

“Oh…” Agatha blinked innocently at her sister. “Did I get that wrong? Oh, dear. I suppose that’s how it goes as we age, forgetfulness you know. After all, you’re older than I am.” She grinned at Ada. “Well, no harm done, I’m sure. Have a good day, sister. I’ll see you for our portrait sitting this afternoon.”

Ada started to respond but snapped her mouth closed so quickly that Hecate could hear her teeth clicking together. She took a deep breath before facing Hecate. “What’s wrong?” she asked, seeing the anger radiating off Hecate.

“This is what’s wrong.” Hecate sent the report floating into Ada’s hands, unwrinkling it as it went.

Plucking the paper from the air, Ada scanned through it. “I assume the issue is your ninety-seven percent in Health and Safety?” Ada cocked her head. “Ninety-seven is a perfectly good score, Hecate. I know you’d prefer to make full marks, but—”

“I should have made full marks, Ada. I was docked three percent because the inspector found an unsanitary terrarium of Mus musculus on my desk.”

“Mice? I’m sure it was just an oversight or something—”

“My students were practicing the identification of crow’s feathers compared to raven’s feathers and their inherent properties. Miss Gullet’s Spell Science classes, however, were working on holding spells. May I remind you what creature is considered best practice for use in teaching a holding spell?”

“I’m well aware that it’s mice, Hecate. I’m sure there’s a perfectly innocent explanation for it.”

Hecate simply raised an eyebrow. For a moment, neither woman would back down. Then Ada vanished the report and sighed again.

“Fine. I’ll concede that innocent is not an adjective typically used to describe Miss Gullet.”

“I should say not,” Hecate agreed, drily.

“Will you come to the portrait sitting this afternoon? Once your classes are over?” Ada’s hopeful tone was hard to miss.

“Hmmm… watching you and your sister sit for a portrait… that sounds quite as exciting as watching toadspawn dry.”

“That’s a yes, then?”

Hecate waggled her head back and forth as she pretended to think it over. “Of course.”

-----

Sitting for a portrait. Hecate snorted. That was certainly false packaging, she thought. The session had started late, thanks to the twins bickering over what to wear. Hecate had quickly turned her attention to studying the Ostium Alternis as they kept at their squabble. They’d finally compromised on dress blouses and skirts, neither of them happy with the choice, but Agatha particularly dissatisfied. She’d fussed and fidgeted the entire afternoon, irritating everyone involved. Of course, there was a price to be paid for that, Hecate thought, smirking every time she looked at the portrait. Ada, seated, looked lovely and kind in her red dress. Agatha, on the other hand, stood looming and dour in her dark blue dress. Hecate hoped she would be present when Agatha finally saw her likeness, though she sympathized with Ada for the tantrum she would have to endure.

As expected, Agatha’s first glimpse of the portrait provoked another disagreement. Hecate was pleased to say Ada more than held her own, finally sending Agatha retreating with scathing last words: “Perhaps you’ll learn not to act like the arse end of a troll with the artist painting your portrait!” A chortling Hecate had been forced to dematerialize for several long minutes after that, buzzing ears be damned.

“I’ll pay for it for weeks, you know,” Ada said with a grim sort of humor. “No doubt she’s brewing up some sort of revenge even as we speak.” She handed Hecate a cup of tea and a biscuit. Ada waved her cup at what was left of the mirror – a few shards stuck in a broken frame. Pulling Hecate free had caused it to shatter. “You’ve been studying that for hours now. Any brilliant epiphanies?”

“I’m afraid not.” She glanced at Ada. “I know I was in there for scarcely more than a day, but… I keep dreaming about it. I… I know that this is my life, the one I’m meant to live, but…”

“It’s no small thing to be given a glimpse into what might have been,” Ada soothed. “When mother said things on the other side would be different… well, I must confess that I worried that you would choose to stay.” The white-knuckle grip on her teacup belied the calmness in her voice. “Freedom is no small thing to give up. Plus, you still had Pippa, Indigo was alive and well… I hardly know why you’d come back.”

“Freedom for me, perhaps, but at what cost? Pippa’s freedom? That’s quite the devil’s bargain. And yes, Indigo seemed happy enough, but a whole school of other children was miserable.” Hecate set her teacup aside and threaded her arm through Ada’s. “Most importantly, you were not you. The Ada in that world was a cruel, vindictive harridan. I wanted my Ada back.” Stepping in front of Ada, Hecate cupped her cheek. “You are more than enough to bring me back, Ada Cackle. Whatever that other life may have promised, it didn’t have you. You are my first choice.” Her lips trembled into a smile, and she brushed an errant tear from Ada’s cheek with her thumb.

Ada could feel her cheeks heating. “And you mine.” They stood together, enjoying the feeling of just being, knowing they shared the same feelings. After a moment, Ada cleared her throat and pointed at the mirror’s remains. “It still doesn’t explain this, does it? I can’t imagine any of our girls getting into something like this, but it seems even more farfetched that anyone else would try to harm one of the girls.”

Turning back to the frame, Hecate tilted her head, lips pressed in a thin line. At her sides, her thumbs rubbed furiously across her fingertips. “I don’t think it was meant for one of the girls.” Ada’s eyes flew open wide. “Veronica said it wasn’t there when she hid in the alcove the first time. That was already after curfew. If someone meant to harm one of the students, why place the mirror after they were all meant to be in their rooms? Why not place it there earlier in the evening?”

“It certainly seems likelier that it would be meant for an adult, but still… one of the teachers?” Ada staggered backwards, landing heavily on the sofa. “Then… you’re saying it was meant for you? You were doing rounds that night!”

Hecate chewed at her bottom lip, hesitant. “But I wasn’t supposed to be, remember?”

Ada’s eyes roamed the room as she thought about it. Dropping her head in her hands, Ada groaned, low and mournful. “It was Thursday. My night. I was so worried… I just… I don’t think it even occurred to me. You’re scheduled to do rounds on Wednesday.”

“That’s right. Indigo’s… anniversary had fallen on the previous Wednesday. You’d offered to trade so I could have the evening free after my appointment with Miss Hagsmet.”

“But you already had a detention scheduled for that Thursday, so you took the next.” Her face puckered as she processed the implications of that. “Who would want to do that to me?” Ada’s expression hardened as Hecate said nothing. “It wasn’t Agatha.”

“I didn’t say that it was.”

“But you think it could be,” Ada pressed.

“It could be almost anyone,” Hecate conceded. “It could even be nothing more than a student prank that got out of hand. The only thing I know with absolute certainty is that I didn’t place that mirror in the hallway and neither did you.” She chuckled softly. “I’m also fairly confident it wasn’t Gwen Bat.”

Ada tried to picture Gwen laying out a trap with an enchanted mirror. The image brought a rueful smile of her own. “I would tend to agree.” She pushed herself up on unsteady legs. “I’m going to send out a directive to all the staff – no one is to do rounds alone until further notice. We need to find out what it takes to create an Ostium Alternis.”

“I’ll start researching straight away.”

-----

Hecate squeezed her eyes closed, trying to work up enough tears to quench the burning in her eyes. She’d spent almost all day in the library, researching the Ostium in the restricted section. Miss Inkwell had announced to the handful of students present that the library would soon be closing for the evening. Snapping her book closed, Hecate floated it back to its place on the shelf.

Few books had mentioned an Ostium Alternis Vitae. None explained how to create one. The book in Ada’s office had been the only one with the spell for rescuing someone trapped in one. Hecate rolled her shoulder, trying to loosen it up after a day of little use.

A soft tapping caused her to open her eyes. “Miss Inkwell, apologies… I was just…”

“Thinking? Sleeping? Passed out from lack of food? You’ve been in here all day.” She waved a pair of dawdling girls along. “I take it you haven’t had any luck finding whatever it is that’s kept you in that chair all day.”

“Let’s say thinking, shall we?” Sniffing deeply, Hecate sent her notes back to her rooms. Whispering in a back corner caught her attention. “Depart, girls! Curfew begins in ten minutes!” She called in her most Miss Hardbroom-y voice.

“You know… as the librarian, you could let me help you find whatever it is you’re looking for.” She leaned closer. “Rumor has it there’s been a magic mirror floating about.”

Hecate felt her stomach drop. While what had happened could hardly have been kept secret with Veronica Catsear’s involvement, she and Ada had hoped that tales of her mishap wouldn’t spread through the castle with quite the speed of balefire. “Thank you, but… it’s a bit of a personal matter.”

“Bats. Just when I was hoping to find out who’s the fairest of them all.” Miss Inkwell sighed dramatically before magicking out the table lamps. “Suit yourself, just remember – all you have to do is ask. I can assure you of my discretion. It’s why I’m here. Librarians don’t search and tell, you know.”

Hecate choked on her own saliva. She’d heard that phrase before. In another library that wasn’t quite this one, from another librarian that wasn’t quite Miss Inkwell. Faint memories of a small envelope flickered into her mind. “Th-thank you,” she stammered, already rushing for the door. She was halfway to the corridor before it occurred to her to transfer.

Scrabbling to keep her feet after her sloppy landing, Hecate flung open the door of her clothes cupboard. She rifled through her clothes, missing it twice before she found the sports uniform she’d been wearing when Ada pulled her back into this reality. She fumbled in the pockets until her fingers closed around an envelope. “It’s real,” she breathed. Part of her had feared she’d imagined it. With trembling fingers, she opened it and pulled out Miss Inkwell’s results. She scanned through it before reading it through more carefully. She’d done it. The other Miss Inkwell had found out how to undo the marriage scroll. She needed to take the note to Ada straight away.

Didn’t she?

Hecate leaned against the cupboard with one hand, studying the note she held with the other. The elation she expected to feel hadn’t materialized. Instead, a new strain of anxiety twisted in her belly. They wanted this, didn’t they? Even though it was made of paper, the note weighed like a stone in her hand.

Breaking the marriage scroll is a beginning, not an ending, she told herself. Again and again. Hecate pushed herself upright. She convinced herself that it didn’t matter. Ada needed to know that they could be released from one another. She slipped the paper back into the envelope before tucking it up her sleeve and spelling it into place for safekeeping.

Hecate transferred to the hallway just outside Ada’s office. As she lifted her hand to knock, she heard raised voices coming from inside. Lowering her hand, unsure of whether to knock or go away, Hecate wound up listening to the row – a rambling brawl that covered everything from childhood disagreements, pedagogy, the color of Ada’s hair… Hecate could hardly follow the train of it.

Suddenly, she heard the sound of glass crashing against stone, then silence. Jerking away from the door, she transferred around the corner just as Agatha stormed out. She’d barely rematerialized when Agatha slammed into her.

“Get out of the way!” Agatha rammed Hecate’s bad shoulder as she passed, spinning her around.

Hecate stumbled against the wall, knocking the air out of her lungs. Bent at the waist, hands on her knees, she sucked in air, trying to catch her breath.

Gentle hands stroked her back. “She shouldn’t have done that… I’m sorry you’ve had to bear the brunt of our argument.”

“It wasn’t your fault.” Hecate gave her a tight-lipped smile. “I was eavesdropping outside the door.” She took a deep breath, slowly blowing it out. Wincing as she straightened, Hecate rolled her shoulder, vainly trying to ease the ache.

“I thought I felt your magic nearby.” She wrapped a steadying arm around Hecate, resting her hand on her hip. “I could do with… well… I rather think I could do with a glass of wine. Care to join me?” Hecate nodded and allowed Ada to lead her into the office.

Once they were inside, Ada set her protective wards. She didn’t care for any more disturbances tonight – she certainly didn’t want to hear anything more from her sister. She magicked another log onto the fire and a bottle of wine on the coffee table. Hecate stepped forward, but Ada held her back.

“Let me.” Ada warmed her hands with a tiny trickle of magic and placed them on Hecate’s shoulder. She let the heat soak in for a moment before rubbing light circles with her thumbs. Hecate stiffened for a moment but didn’t move away. Bit by bit, Ada increased the pressure, pleased when Hecate’s rigid posture eased. She shifted her hands down, massaging the muscles just below her shoulder blade. A satisfied grin spread across Ada’s face as she felt Hecate relax beneath her fingers. “Does this help?”

“Not really,” Hecate admitted, “but it feels delightful while you’re doing it.”

“Good enough for me,” Ada said, chuckling. She pictured the pattern of pale scars that ran down Hecate’s shoulder, tracing where she thought they went with her hands. Someday she wouldn’t have to rely on the memories of one brief glance she’d had of the injury when Hecate was in the infirmary. Someday, she’d be able to run her fingers across Hecate’s bare skin. “You know… any time you want one of these, all you have to do is ask. I’m more than willing.”

Hecate reached up and placed her hand over Ada’s. “I’ll keep that in mind.” Turning her head, she pressed the back of Ada’s hand to her cheek. Since she’d returned, Ada seemed to have come to terms with her role as Sealkeeper. Hesitant touches and warm words had become almost routine, though neither had worked up the nerve to share that first kiss. Hecate’s chest warmed at the memory of a late-night walk on the roof, ostensibly to check the wards, when Ada’s hand had slipped into hers, their fingers lacing together.

The note up her sleeve practically burned against her skin. Ada deserved to know that they could end their marriage. Fake marriage, she reminded herself. But now didn’t seem the right time. Ada was obviously still rattled by her argument with Agatha. Moreover, Hecate knew the massage was soothing Ada’s jangled nerves  as much as it was her shoulder -not that she would complain about why she was getting a massage. Later, she said to herself. I’ll tell Ada later. To Ada she said, “How about we have that glass of wine?

-----

Even from her spot in the back, Hecate could see the strain Ada carried as she conducted the weekly staff meeting. A glance at the table, still piled high with sweets, told her Ada wasn’t the only one feeling anxious. Typically, the weekly treats, from Cosie’s Old Mill Tea Rooms in the village, were devoured before the meeting ever started. Today, it seemed that no one had much of an appetite. A week of Geraldine Gullet, prowling the castle with her clipboard in hand, had left everyone frazzled and annoyed. After her second ‘inspection,’ Hecate had banned Geraldine from the potions lab. Tamping down her irritation, Hecate refocused her attention on Ada.

“I just know that this year will be Cackle’s year in the Witchtathlon compe—” Ada stopped when Agatha loudly cleared her throat. A dimple that only appeared when Ada was particularly annoyed showed clearly at the corner of her mouth. “Yes, Agatha?”

“I noted that both Miss Gullet and Miss Hardbroom have listed Penny Pestle on their teams. The rules state that a girl may compete in only one event. She’ll have to be dropped from either the potions or the spells competition.”

Hecate narrowed her eyes. “Miss Pestle won first prize in her Second-Year potions project – as did each girl on my team during her second year.”

Geraldine twisted around in her seat. “Well I’m bloody well not giving her up! She’s the best Spell Science student in her form! You can just pick some other girl to lose in potions.”

“Ladies!” Ada raised her hands, signaling both women to stop. Geraldine huffed and turned back to the front while Hecate glowered daggers at the back of her head. “We’ll sort it – after I’ve spoken with Penny myself.” With a few last details about upcoming events for the week, Ada dismissed them. She stepped into the hallway to wish each one a good day as they left, stepping back in as soon as she realized Geraldine and Hecate had not left the staff room.

“I tell you, you aren’t gettin’ her!” Geraldine insisted, her voice even more nasally than usual. “Just because I’m not going around trying to get my way by cozying up to the Headmistress…”

“I beg your pardon!” Hecate drew herself up to her full height. “I don’t know what you’re insinuating, Miss Gullet, but my personal life is none of your business. I’ll have you know—” She cut herself off as Ada stepped between them.

“I believe Spell Science with the First-Years is starting, is it not?” Ada asked, her voice treacly sweet. “Let’s dive back into this cauldron later. In my office.”

“It’s not bloody fair!” Geraldine spat as she stalked out of the room.

Ada turned back to Hecate just in time to see her transfer away. She blew out a gust of air, irritated with Agatha, with Geraldine, with herself… She hadn’t been so foolish as to think that her relationship with Hecate would go unnoticed, though she’d hoped they would have time to find their footing before it was fodder for the gossip mill. We haven’t even kissed yet, Ada groused. They shouldn’t have to deal with this nonsense this early. Shaking her head, Ada went in search of Penny Pestle.

As expected, when Ada pulled the girl from Witchory, Miss Pestle wanted to compete in potions. Miss Gullet would no doubt snap a broomstick. A prickle of a headache started at the base of Ada’s skull just from thinking about Geraldine’s screeching voice.

Lunch came and went with no sign of Hecate. Ada took the opportunity to tell Geraldine that Penny wanted to compete in potions. She tried to offer some alternatives, but Geraldine would hear none of it, moving to an empty seat on the other side of Agatha. Ada tried to ignore their dramatics and focus on her food, but she couldn’t stop casting furtive glances down the table. She didn’t manage anything more than pushing her peas around her plate. She gave that up when Agatha slid into the chair next to her.

“I must say, Ada, Miss Gullet is rather displeased. I do hope you aren’t showing Miss Hardbroom any… special privileges.”

Running her tongue along the inside of her cheek, Ada inhaled a long breath. “I spoke with Miss Pestle, Agatha. Miss Gullet never asked her to compete in spells; she simply put her down. The girl wants to compete in potions. She’s already begun practicing with the other girls on the team. It has nothing to do with Miss Hardbroom.”

Agatha faked a smile. “That’s good to hear, sister. I’m sure you can see how one might… wonder. Especially if Hecate gets the girl for her team…”

“The girl she actually asked to be on her team.”

“Miss Hardbroom is getting all those expensive new cauldrons while the rest of us are told to tighten our belts,” Agatha added.

“Mother authorized that expenditure last year, as you well know.”

“As you say,” Agatha quickly raised her hands to ward off any protest. “But even you must admit it looks… inappropriate.  It certainly makes one wonder what her… motivations might be.  A young, attractive thing like her?” Agatha made a point of looking Ada up and down, lingering on her midsection. “I mean, I can see why you’d want to show her special attention, but her? Well… they do say love is blind.” She slapped the table. “I’ll let you get back to your lunch.”

Ada watched her sister leave, taking what was left of her appetite with her. Perhaps Hecate had the right idea when she chose to skip lunch. She forced herself to make small talk with Miss Swoop before taking her leave. Her mood was already ruined. She may as well work on the monthly expense reports.

 One by one, the First-Year girls filed out of the potions lab, still giggling from the effects of their laughter potion. Ada idly wondered if a nip of the leftovers would improve her day. When it seemed the last girl had exited, she stepped into the room, softly closing the door behind her. “Are you avoiding everyone today? Or just me?”

Hecate glanced up at her before continuing to clean up after her class – by hand, a sure sign that the day had gone widdershins for her, too. “Everyone but you,” she said, finally. She folded her hand towel into precise quarters before placing it carefully on her workbench. “I tried to speak with Miss Pestle this morning…”

Ada stepped further into the lab. “Yes, she said she wishes to stay on the potions team.”

“Did she?” Hecate tapped her fingers against the casing of her pocket watch. “I didn’t have the opportunity to speak to her directly.” She cut her eyes to the floor and didn’t look up again. “When I arrived at the classroom, I overheard her discussing the matter with Mavis Spellbody. Before I could announce my presence, I heard young Miss Spellbody tell her that she needn’t worry about anything because – and I quote – ‘Miss Cackle is sweet on Miss Hardbroom so she won’t take you off her team.’”

Hecate was still staring at the floor. Ada stepped closer, close enough to gently lift Hecate’s chin. “She’s not entirely wrong you know. I am a bit sweet on you.”

“It’s not funny, Ada. The students are speculating about… about our… love life.” Hecate’s cheeks burned in embarrassment. “We don’t even… we haven’t even…”

Ada cupped her cheek before letting her fingers trail down Hecate’s arm and tangle with hers. “It’s all right, dear. All in due time.”

Her hand felt warm in Ada’s.  “Perhaps I’m overreacting. We’ve never said we’d keep this…” she shook their joined hands back and forth, “a secret. I just can’t stand the thought of being the subject of staff room gossip. What must people say?”

“I don’t want to keep it a secret either. We’ve done nothing wrong. We’re doing nothing wrong. Not that I’m looking to get snogged in the middle of the Dining Room, but…” That, at least, got a weak smile. “As for what they might say… I can tell you what Agatha said. She said the only reason an attractive young woman such as yourself would be with a relic like me is either because you’re using me or I’m using you.”

“That’s not so different from what Geraldine said to me this morning.” Hecate pulled away. She didn’t know if now was the right time, or if there would ever be a right time, but she didn’t feel right about keeping her secret from Ada any longer. “I’m afraid I have a bit of a confession to make…” She pulled the envelope from its place in her sleeve. “When I was in the mirror, I asked that Miss Inkwell to help me find a way to break the marriage scroll. Everything was so topsy-turvy.” Hecate looked up at her and shrugged. “She found it.”

Ada took the envelope from Hecate’s outstretched hand and tucked it into her pocket without reading it. “You’ve had it all this time?”

Hecate nodded. “I should have told you straight away… but we always seemed to be in the middle of something. I’m sorry.” She closed her eyes, waiting for Ada’s anger, or worse, her disappointment, to hit. It didn’t.

“I suppose things have been… topsy-turvy.” Fighting down an unexpected feeling of disappointment, Ada took up Hecate’s hand again. “Well, I for one say ‘good riddance’ to that scroll. I don’t want our future to be forced on us, Hecate. As much as I want us… I want any joining to be our choice.

“And as for Miss Gullet,” Ada sighed, “I heard what she said.” She took Hecate’s other hand in hers. “They aren’t what matters, Hecate. You are. We are. Agatha is just… being Agatha. And ten years from now, Geraldine Gullet will have moved on and you’ll still be here.”

Hecate pulled abruptly away. Turning her back to Ada, she hugged herself and staggered a few steps towards the door. “It still all comes down to that, doesn’t it?” Her voice broke. “It’s always going to be hanging over our heads.”

“What are you…” Ada could feel the blood draining from her face into her gut when she realized what Hecate meant. “NO! I’m not talking about that. Hecate…” Hurrying to her, Ada wrapped her arms around Hecate from behind. “I only meant that we will still be together, my dear. I hadn’t even thought about your confinement.” She felt Hecate relax against her, just a little.

“What does it even matter? In fifty years, everyone will be gone, and I’ll… I’ll still be here.” She twisted in Ada’s arms, wrapping her own arms around Ada’s waist and crying into her hair. “I don’t even think this cursed confinement will let them remove my corpse when I die. I can’t even be buried in the Hardbroom family plot.”

Ada rocked her gently back and forth, cradling the back of her head with one hand whilst rubbing soothing circles on her back with the other. “Sshhh… that’s a long ride down the river, dear. Who knows what could happen between now and then?” Ada pulled back just enough to see Hecate’s eyes. “Besides, it doesn’t matter. I hope that when the time comes, that you’ll be with me in the Cackle family plot. With your family.”

Hecate buried her face again and sobbed even harder. Ada kept rocking her. “You can’t… mean that,” she managed to choke out.

“I’ve never meant anything more, Hecate. You’re my first choice. You’ll always be my first choice.”

[cannabisrefugee-esq]

(via A "Rational Suicide" Note. Ft. Anne Örtegren.)

November 9, 2019

This is a “suicide” note left by a ME/CFS sufferer who sought and found relief from her suffering via legal, medically assisted suicide.  She says this manifesto took her months to write, which I do not doubt a bit: it is long, detailed and polished and was written when she was feeling terrible.  She wrote it with the intent to describe her almost indescribable pain and experience, and to convince others to take action on behalf of ME/CFS sufferers, both of which are lofty communication goals when anyone is seriously ill.

Describing and convincing have been my most impossible endeavors since I’ve been seriously ill myself and I think I have mostly failed, judging by others’ reactions to everything I’ve managed to gather the physical and emotional grit to attempt to communicate: that I am seriously, hopelessly ill with an incurable, progressive disease, that there is no bottom to how bad this can get, and it matters not what anyone thinks about it.  Some things are just true regardless of whether anyone believes it.

In this note, ME/CFS patient Anne Örtegren describes symptoms and dilemmas I have experienced myself and she foresees logical outcomes to her predicament, something sick people and especially sick women are never allowed to do because catastrophization. For example, she knows that her heightened sensitivity to light and sound will make treatment or recovery in a hospital setting impossible where the standard of care in that environment requires constant activity and interruptions, and provides no privacy and no escape from the harsh industrial lighting, interrogations by (allegedly) well meaning staff and the general hustle and bustle of capitalistic money making on the backs and bodies of sick and dying people.

That is but one example of a sick person making informed prognostications regarding likely outcomes of the things other people want to do to us, and as someone who shares these sensitivities to light and sound (and therefore an aversion to hospital settings) as but one example of our shared experience of being seriously ill, I appreciated her spelling it out.  I also feel extremely sad that she had to, and furious that no one who allegedly cared about her wellbeing including medical professionals who should be fucking sensitive to the actual needs of real patients could make the leap themselves.  There are many such examples in this letter.

See for yourselves, and understand that as illuminating and raw as this letter is, it’s also been edited by the publisher and a so-called suicide prevention expert because the bottom line everywhere appears to be that there is no such thing as rational suicide or euthanasia because well people and people who make money off of the long-term sick and dying say so.  And because living in this capitalistic, patriarchal nightmare is so hideous for so many people that “suicide contagion” exists, where just knowing that someone, somewhere had whatever it took to end themselves is likely to cause untold numbers of happy, healthy consumers with bright futures to do the same damn thing.  Yeah that’s it, let’s keep telling ourselves that.

The letter as published is reprinted below.  The unedited letter supposedly exists online somewhere if anyone cares to look and has the energy to figure out how and where the edited version differs from the original.  Comments are open below.

Farewell – A Last Post from Anne Örtegren

Nobody can say that I didn’t put up enough of a fight.

For 16 years I have battled increasingly severe ME/CFS. My condition has steadily deteriorated and new additional medical problems have regularly appeared, making it ever more difficult to endure and make it through the day (and night).

Throughout this time, I have invested almost every bit of my tiny energy in the fight for treatment for us ME/CFS patients. Severely ill, I have advocated from my bedroom for research and establishment of biomedical ME/CFS clinics to get us proper health care. All the while, I have worked hard to find something which would improve my own health. I have researched all possible treatment options, got in contact with international experts and methodically tried out every medication, supplement and regimen suggested.

Sadly, for all the work done, we still don’t have adequately sized specialized biomedical care for ME/CFS patients here in Stockholm, Sweden – or hardly anywhere on the planet. We still don’t have in-patient hospital units adapted to the needs of the severely ill ME/CFS patients. Funding levels for biomedical ME/CFS research remain ridiculously low in all countries and the erroneous psychosocial model which has caused me and others so much harm is still making headway.

And sadly, for me personally things have gone from bad to worse to unbearable. I am now mostly bedbound and constantly tortured by ME/CFS symptoms. I also suffer greatly from a number of additional medical problems, the most severe being a systematic hyper-reactivity in the form of burning skin combined with an immunological/allergic reaction. This is triggered by so many things that it has become impossible to create an adapted environment. Some of you have followed my struggle to find clothes and bed linen I can tolerate. Lately, I am simply running out. I no longer have clothes I can wear without my skin “burning up” and my body going into an allergic state.

This means I no longer see a way out from this solitary ME/CFS prison and its constant torture. I can no longer even do damage control, and my body is at the end of its rope. Therefore, I have gone through a long and thorough process involving several medical assessments to be able to choose a peaceful way out: I have received a preliminary green light for accompanied suicide through a clinic in Switzerland.

When you read this I am at rest, free from suffering at last. I have written this post to explain why I had to take this drastic step. Many ME/CFS patients have found it necessary to make the same decision, and I want to speak up for us, as I think my reasons may be similar to those of many others with the same sad destiny.

These reasons can be summed up in three headers: unbearable suffering; no realistic way out of the suffering; and the lack of a safety net, meaning potential colossal increase in suffering when the next setback or medical incident occurs.

Important note Before I write more about these reasons, I want to stress something important. Depression is not the cause of my choice. Though I have been suffering massively for many years, I am not depressed. I still have all my will and my motivation. I still laugh and see the funny side of things, I still enjoy doing whatever small activities I can manage. I am still hugely interested in the world around me – my loved ones and all that goes on in their lives, the society, the world (what is happening in human rights issues? how can we solve the climate change crisis?) During these 16 years, I have never felt any lack of motivation.

On the contrary, I have consistently fought for solutions with the goal to get myself better and help all ME/CFS patients get better. There are so many things I want to do, I have a lot to live for. If I could only regain some functioning, quieten down the torture a bit and be able to tolerate clothes and a normal environment, I have such a long list of things I would love to do with my life!

Three main reasons So depression is not the reason for my decision to terminate my life. The reasons are the following:

1. Unbearable suffering Many severely ill ME/CFS patients are hovering at the border of unbearable suffering. We are constantly plagued by intense symptoms, we endure high-impact every-minute physical suffering 24 hours a day, year after year. I see it as a prison sentence with torture. I am homebound and mostly bedbound – there is the prison. I constantly suffer from excruciating symptoms: The worst flu you ever had. Sore throat, bronchi hurting with every breath. Complete exhaustion, almost zero energy, a body that weighs a tonne and sometimes won’t even move. Muscle weakness, dizziness, great difficulties standing up. Sensory overload causing severe suffering from the brain and nervous system. Massive pain in muscles, painful inflammations in muscle attachments. Intensely burning skin. A feeling of having been run over by a bus, twice, with every cell screaming. This has got to be called torture.

It would be easier to handle if there were breaks, breathing spaces. But with severe ME/CFS there is no minute during the day when one is comfortable. My body is a war zone with constant firing attacks. There is no rest, no respite. Every move of every day is a mountain-climb. Every night is a challenge, since there is no easy sleep to rescue me from the torture. I always just have to try to get through the night. And then get through the next day.

It would also be easier if there were distractions. Like many patients with severe ME/CFS I am unable to listen to music, radio, podcasts or audio books, or to watch TV. I can only read for short bouts of time, and use the computer for even shorter moments. I am too ill to manage more than rare visits or phone calls from my family and friends, and sadly unable to live with someone. This solitary confinement aspect of ME/CFS is devastating and it is understandable that ME/CFS has been described as the “living death disease”.

For me personally, the situation has turned into an emergency not least due to my horrific symptom of burning skin linked to immunological/allergic reactions. This appeared six years into my ME/CFS, when I was struck by what seemed like a complete collapse of the bodily systems controlling immune system, allergic pathways, temperature control, skin and peripheral nerves. I had long had trouble with urticaria, hyperreactive skin and allergies, but at this point a violent reaction occurred and my skin completely lost tolerance. I started having massively burning skin, severe urticaria and constant cold sweats and shivers (these reactions reminded me of the first stages of the anaphylactic shock I once had, then due to heat allergy).

Since then, for ten long years, my skin has been burning. It is an intense pain. I have been unable to tolerate almost all kinds of clothes and bed linen as well as heat, sun, chemicals and other everyday things. These all trigger the burning skin and the freezing/shivering reaction into a state of extreme pain and suffering. Imagine being badly sunburnt and then being forced to live under a constant scalding sun – no relief in sight.

At first I managed to find a certain textile fabric which I could tolerate, but then this went out of production, and in spite of years of negotiations with the textile industry it has, strangely, proven impossible to recreate that specific weave. This has meant that as my clothes have been wearing out, I have been approaching the point where I will no longer have clothes and bed linen that are tolerable to my skin. It has also become increasingly difficult to adapt the rest of my living environment so as to not trigger the reaction and worsen the symptoms. Now that I am running out of clothes and sheets, ahead of me has lain a situation with constant burning skin and an allergic state of shivering/cold sweats and massive suffering. This would have been absolutely unbearable.

For 16 years I have had to manage an ever-increasing load of suffering and problems. They now add up to a situation which is simply no longer sustainable.

2. No realistic way out of the suffering A very important factor is the lack of realistic hope for relief in the future. It is possible for a person to bear a lot of suffering, as long as it is time-limited. But the combination of massive suffering and a lack of rational hope for remission or recovery is devastating.

Think about the temporary agony of a violent case of gastric flu. Picture how you are feeling those horrible days when you are lying on the bathroom floor between attacks of diarrhoea and vomiting. This is something we all have to live through at times, but we know it will be over in a few days. If someone told you at that point: “you will have to live with this for the rest of your life”, I am sure you would agree that it wouldn’t feel feasible. It is unimaginable to cope with a whole life with the body in that insufferable state every day, year after year. The level of unbearableness in severe ME/CFS is the same.

If I knew there was relief on the horizon, it would be possible to endure severe ME/CFS and all the additional medical problems, even for a long time, I think. The point is that there has to be a limit, the suffering must not feel endless.

One vital aspect here is of course that patients need to feel that the ME/CFS field is being taken forward. Sadly, we haven’t been granted this feeling – see my previous blogs relating to this here and here.

Another imperative issue is the drug intolerance that I and many others with ME/CFS suffer from. I have tried every possible treatment, but most of them have just given me side-effects, many of which have been irreversible. My stomach has become increasingly dysfunctional, so for the past few years any new drugs have caused immediate diarrhoea. One supplement triggered massive inflammation in my entire urinary tract, which has since persisted. The list of such occurrences of major deterioration caused by different drugs/treatments is long, and with time my reactions have become increasingly violent. I now have to conclude that my sensitivity to medication is so severe that realistically it is very hard for me to tolerate drugs or supplements.

This has two crucial meanings for many of us severely ill ME/CFS patients: There is no way of relieving our symptoms. And even if treatments appear in the future, with our sensitivity of medication any drug will carry a great risk of irreversible side-effects producing even more suffering. This means that even in the case of a real effort finally being made to bring biomedical research into ME/CFS up to levels on par with that of other diseases, and possible treatments being made accessible, for some of us it is unlikely that we would be able to benefit. Considering our extreme sensitivity to medication, one could say it’s hard to have realistic hope of recovery or relief for us.

In the past couple of years I, being desperate, have challenged the massive side-effect risk and tried one of the treatments being researched in regards to ME/CFS. But I received it late in the disease process, and it was a gamble. I needed it to have an almost miraculous effect: a quick positive response which eliminated many symptoms – most of all I needed it to stop my skin from burning and reacting, so I could tolerate the clothes and bed linen produced today. I have been quickly running out of clothes and sheets, so I was gambling with high odds for a quick and extensive response. Sadly, I wasn’t a responder. I have also tried medication for Mast Cell Activation Disorder and a low-histamine diet, but my burning skin hasn’t abated. Since I am now running out of clothes and sheets, all that was before me was constant burning hell.

3. The lack of a safety net, meaning potential colossal increase in suffering when the next setback or medical incident occurs The third factor is the insight that the risk for further deterioration and increased suffering is high.

On top of the nearly unbearable symptoms it is very likely that in the future things will get even worse. An example in my case could be my back and neck pain. I would need to strengthen muscles to prevent them from getting worse. But the characteristic symptom of Post-Exertional Malaise (PEM) when I attempt even small activities, is hugely problematic.

Whenever we try to ignore the PEM issue and push through, we immediately crash and become much sicker. We might go from being able to at least get up and eat, to being completely bedbound, until the PEM has subsided. Sometimes, it doesn’t subside, and we find ourselves irreversibly deteriorated, at a new, even lower baseline level, with no way of improving.

PEM is not something that you can work around.

For me, new medical complications also continue to arise, and I have no way of amending them. I already need surgery for one existing problem, and it is likely that it will be needed for other issues in the future, but surgery or hospital care is not feasible for several reasons:

One is that my body seems to lack repairing mechanisms. Previous biopsies have not healed properly, so my doctor is doubtful about my ability to recover after surgery.

Another, more general and hugely critical, is that with severe ME/CFS it is impossible to tolerate normal hospital care. For ME/CFS patients the sensory overload problem and the extremely low energy levels mean that a normal hospital environment causes major deterioration. The sensory input that comes with shared rooms, people coming and going, bright lights, noise, etc, escalates our disease. We are already in such fragile states that a push in the wrong direction is catastrophic. For me, with my burning skin issue, there is also the issue of not tolerating the mattresses, pillows, textile fabrics, etc used in a hospital.

Just imagine the effects of a hospital stay for me: It would trigger my already severe ME/CFS into new depths – likely I would become completely bedbound and unable to tolerate any light or noise. The skin hyperreactivity would, within a few hours, trigger my body into an insufferable state of burning skin and agonizing immune-allergic reactions, which would then be impossible to reverse. My family, my doctor and I agree: I must never be admitted to a hospital, since there is no end to how much worse that would make me.

Many ME/CFS patients have experienced irreversible deterioration due to hospitalization. We also know that the understanding of ME/CFS is extremely low or non-existent in most hospitals, and we hear about ME/CFS patients being forced into environments or activities which make them much worse. I am aware of only two places in the world with specially adjusted hospital units for severe ME/CFS, Oslo, Norway, and Gold Coast, Australia. We would need such units in every city around the globe.

It is extreme to be this severely ill, have so many medical complications arise continually and know this: There is no feasible access to hospital care for me. There are no tolerable medications to use when things get worse or other medical problems set in. As a severely ill ME/CFS patient I have no safety net at all. There is simply no end to how bad things can get with severe ME/CFS.

Coping skills – important but not enough I realize that when people hear about my decision to terminate my life, they will wonder about my coping skills. I have written about this before and I want to mention the issue here too:

While it was extremely hard at the beginning to accept chronic illness, I have over the years developed a large degree of acceptance and pretty good coping skills. I have learnt to accept tight limits and appreciate small qualities of life. I have learnt to cope with massive amounts of pain and suffering and still find bright spots. With the level of acceptance I have come to now, I would have been content even with relatively small improvements and a very limited life. If, hypothetically, the physical suffering could be taken out of the equation, I would have been able to live contentedly even though my life continued to be restricted to my small apartment and include very little activity. Unlike most people I could find such a tiny life bearable and even happy. But I am not able to cope with these high levels of constant physical suffering.

In short, to sum up my level of acceptance as well as my limit: I can take the prison and the extreme limitations – but I can no longer take the torture. And I cannot live with clothes that constantly trigger my burning skin.

Not alone – and not a rash decision In spite of being unable to see friends or family for more than rare and brief visits, and in spite of having limited capacity for phone conversations, I still have a circle of loved ones. My friends and family all understand my current situation and they accept and support my choice. While they do not want me to leave, they also do not want me to suffer anymore.

This is not a rash decision. It has been processed for many years, in my head, in conversations with family and friends, in discussion with one of my doctors, and a few years ago in the long procedure of requesting accompanied suicide. The clinic in Switzerland requires an extensive process to ensure that the patient is chronically ill, lives with unendurable pain or suffering, and has no realistic hope of relief. They require a number of medical records as well as consultations with specialized doctors.

For me this end is obviously not what I wanted, but it was the best solution to an extremely difficult situation and preferable to even more suffering. It was not hasty choice, but one that matured over a long period of time.

A plea to decision makers – Give ME/CFS patients a future! As you understand, this blog post has taken me many months to put together. It is a long text to read too, I know. But I felt it was important to write it and have it published to explain why I personally had to take this step, and hopefully illuminate why so many ME/CFS patients consider or commit suicide.

And most importantly: to elucidate that this circumstance can be changed! But that will take devoted, resolute, real action from all of those responsible for the state of ME/CFS care, ME/CFS research and dissemination of information about the disease. Sadly, this responsibility has been mishandled for decades. To allow ME/CFS patients some hope on the horizon, key people in all countries must step up and act.

If you are a decision maker, here is what you urgently need to do: You need to bring funding for biomedical ME/CFS research up so it’s on par with comparable diseases (as an example, in the US that would mean $188 million per year). You need to make sure there are dedicated hospital care units for ME/CFS inpatients in every city around the world. You need to establish specialist biomedical care available to all ME/CFS patients; it should be as natural as RA patients having access to a rheumatologist or cancer patients to an oncologist. You need to give ME/CFS patients a future.

Please listen to these words of Jen Brea, which sum up the situation in the US, but are applicable to almost every country:

“The NIH says it won’t fund ME research because no one wants to study it. Yet they reject the applications of the world class scientists who are committed to advancing the field. Meanwhile, HHS has an advisory committee whose sole purpose seems to be making recommendations that are rarely adopted. There are no drugs in the pipeline at the FDA yet the FDA won’t approve the one drug, Ampligen, that can have Lazarus-like effects in some patients. Meanwhile, the CDC continues to educate doctors using information that we (patients) all know is inaccurate or incomplete.”

Like Jen Brea, I want a number of people from these agencies, and equivalent agencies in Sweden and all other countries, to stand up and take responsibility. To say: “ME! I am going to change things because that is my job.”

And lastly Lastly, I would like to end this by linking to this public comment from a US agency meeting (CFSAC). It seems to have been taken off the HHS site, but I found it in the Google Read version of the book “Lighting Up a Hidden World: CFS and ME” by Valerie Free. It includes testimony from two very eloquent ME patients and it says it all. I thank these ME patients for expressing so well what we are experiencing.

My previous blog posts:

From International Traveler to 43 Square Meters: An ME/CFS Story From Sweden

Coping With ME/CFS Will Always Be Hard – But There are Ways of Making It A Little Easier

The Underfinanced ME/CFS Research Field Pt I: The Facts – Plus “What Can We Do?

The Underfinanced ME/CFS Research Field Pt II: Why it Takes 20 Years to Get 1 Year’s Research Done

Take care of each other.

Love, Anne

Comments Open.

[tetelfuentes]

HARMONIZED HUMANITY

    “You must not lose faith in humanity. Humanity is an ocean; if a few drops of the ocean are dirty, the ocean does not become dirty.” – Mahatma Gandhi. In this quote he stated that we must not lose faith in humanity and many people right now lose hope because of loss of connections, when we encounter this we start to feel hopeless and these problems can come from change, death, divorce, and other valid causes.

    What does hope for humanity mean? According to the urban dictionary, the Hope for humanity is a beautiful thing and can create peace. Sadly, it disappeared years ago and is only used when exaggerating but for me, hope is an essential thing to humanity because it is the one that can build our confidence and give us trust in ourselves.

    We are still discovering that the hope of humanity lies not in programs or ideas and teachings. It is that lies at the beating heart of the spiritual traditions in the world have a great work of allowing our actions of the hidden energy of love. A world that is completely puzzled and scarred by violence in religion begins to realize that the earth needs genuine human beings that only the Lord will save us. It is a sign to remember what is necessary for oneself that it is only by coming into a relationship with the inner preeminence of oneself that can be possible to act in a way that can make disparity. Compare to what we are, we cannot love, help beyond at one point to what we are. It is possible to allow new life to enter the life of our violent being, a cruel world. We still don’t have enough ideas about the higher force that humankind is made to acts into the earth. We may be very close to the critical moment. But we are speaking about basics and not just words.

    Why is hope so important in our daily lives? It is important to have hope in our lives because it can make your life much better in some ways. It is not only to make a tough situation or decision more bearable but it can also improve our lives in the way of imagining as a future possibility to have a better future and motivates you to take the steps to make it happen. Whether we think about it hope can also be a part of everyone’s life and all of our hopes for something. It’s an essential part of being a human being. It can help us define or describe what we want in our future and it is part of our lives that we have been thinking inside of our minds. Hope is not just the same as the hopefulness and confidence about the future or the outcome of something. An optimistic generally is more helpful and kind than others. On the other hand, the most optimistic person you will ever meet can still be hopeful for something. Hope is very specific, it’s usually on one issue. Most people connect hope with an awful situation. People hope to avoid and escape difficult circumstances and their problems. It is often that people had to find themselves hoping passionately, but it can also provide the key to make their life even better than before. That’s because they think of something hopeful, the child seeing herself riding a new bike for example it gives a child a moment of joy and happiness. It can make present difficulties much easier to endure all of it. An example of that is reported by the APS or American Psychology Association that children who grow up in poverty but had been successful later on in their life had one thing in a common hope. According to Dr. Valerie Maholmes who worked on this research said hope includes planning, motivation, and determination to get what your hopes for. In this way, having hopes that connect in your past, present, and to the future. We have a vision for what our hope will be supposed to happen, whether it does not just to think of making yourself feel better, and if something you can somewhat control like the kids that are working hard to get out of poverty to have a better life. Hope can motivate you to take whatever circumstances and steps that you take you can do it.

     What makes us lose hope for the humanity? “Society” Humanity implies two meanings, one is the collective category of human beings, and the other one is quality of humanitarianism. So, society defines the second category. Each of the society follows a different criterion to measure this quality based on its values, norms, customs, and traditions. Humans are the products of society and they behave in a particular way since they are socialized in that way. I counter your question with mine. What makes you hope in the humanity, who made you do that? The one which creates that can be destroy. A final clarification of the hopes itself expects something, adding to that you are attributing certain qualities to humanity which are time and culture-specific, so with the different experiences of abnormalities you tend to lose hope in humanity. Problem with your perception (functionalist stand). Capitalism makes you lose hope in humanity because of the increased alienation (Marxist view).

     What makes people lose hope? So here are some possible why people lose hope;

1.Lack of sense of power- When there are problems, and when you can’t find the solution to it, you start to demonstrate ‘learned helplessness’, and lose the confidence in yourself to solve life’s problems. When you feel that you are powerless to steer your own life’s direction, you get overwhelmed, you lose hope.

2. Narrow worldview/Limited Exposure- One environment greatly affects oneself. Perhaps you come from a not as privileged, or dysfunctional family, and only see the worst examples of people and circumstances. Things that make you lose faith in the world, humanity. You learn from your environment that it will be hopeless because it seems as if everyone around you is failing, and if you have some degree of low self-esteem, you will think that you will fail too. If you seek your inspiration from your immediate surroundings and cannot find it, you will feel that it is hopeless. Venture out of your 50cm radius, go closer to your light, to what inspires you. Your favorite artist, why do you like that artist? Think not about what you don’t like, but what you like. In it is I think the clue to doing a complete reversal.

3. Law of attraction- You have been in a pessimistic state for quite a while, and you have attracted many people with negative energies, and things happen to reconfirm your beliefs that life is hopeless when it could’ve been your energy shaping your destiny.

4.Lack of love/self-love/self-encouragement- It is human to get tired, to only care about the pain at the moment, and not be able to zoom out and see the forest for the trees. Conversely, perhaps you are seeing a scary tree and am zooming out to see a forest full of it. At these times, when people are in a stable support network, full of love and warmth, they have that hope and strength to press on. Perhaps you have thoughts you’ve bottled up and not shared with anyone? Perhaps you have no support, you’re weary, and the worst-case scenario, if you don’t even properly love yourself, you beat yourself up thinking you’re a failure! Please don’t do so! And because you’re asking this question in a ‘Why’ format.

5. Loss of self- The world is a noisy place. Recently I’ve just discovered that I’m an Enneagram type 3, someone who wasn’t allowed to be oneself. When you are in a place with strong personalities, you may lose touch with your most inner core, of yourself. What do you define as success? Do you remember what makes you happy? Are your needs being met? What are your needs? What do you need, do you remember? What hope did you want to grasp onto? The hope of what? Are you putting your happiness in someone else’s hands? Are you the master of your fate? Are you banging your head against a wall, in a futile endeavor or dying industry? Why do you think it didn’t work out? Is there a lesson in it? The night is the darkest before the dawn.

     Dark times are richly packed with lessons. Like a crash course. Usually, the same things repeat again and again in life until you get the lesson. You’re strong from all the difficulties you’ve endured. You think you’re weaker from everything bad that’s happening, that the pain will only continue and you can’t take anymore, but the truth is one can only come out stronger from every obstacle. And eventually, I think why you are losing hope, is your mindset. You are your greatest saboteur. I used to be a pessimist, I wished every day to just sleep and never wake up, and there was nothing I looked forward to. But now I try my best to reframe my thoughts and “let go” and I stay in the joyful present. I think life and future, these sorts of things they are uncertain by default, so don’t ‘lose hope’ so fast and make life something so definite, like a given prison sentence that needs to be toughened out. Life hasn’t decided but you decided in weakness. Watching people helping each other to those who are victims in the calamities, and choose to help others before themselves. Sometimes with mass media focusing on the Big and sometimes really stupid (see Kardashian anything for examples) stories that get clicks, it's easy to feel overwhelmed by the foolish and dangerous moves made by those in power, but these aren't the only things going on in the world. When the news gets me down, I deliberately look for the things that uplift me. Videos of cute animals, TED talks, good news sites that collect the beautiful stories…it's important to take time to recharge your emotional batteries so that you don't lean too. These are reminders that all you're seeing is not all that Is.

     Our country has been through many struggles and even challenges and they found a way to reunite and restore. We produce new expectations, current dreams to pursue. It's human nature. Try to become part of the solution. Tomorrow needs your piece toward the better stuff. For humanity, life on Earth is to move on as long as there are hopes that keep us on track in the pursuit of a peaceful existence of the human race.

1. Peace is not just in the physical realm, but also being attained in the spiritual realm.      

2. A balanced global eco-system progressing and revolving orderly in accordance with the laws of Nature.

3. No more sufferings or dying due to hunger.

4. True unconditional equality for all, the awakening to the fact that after all, we are of the same source.

5. Greed becoming meaningless as everyone will treat other fellow humans as part of him/her. In other words, one will see the individuality in every person they meet. A greedy person is extended to the whole means no greed for the self. A selfless greed person will not harm people.

6. No more opinions, attitudes, or judgments arising from man-made differences regarding races, genders, religions, and the like.

7. The laws of the land no longer protecting only the privileged few and at the expense of the underprivileged masses. No more supporting the rich and terminate the poor in the name of justice (fake justice).

8. Permanent global disarmament to be achieved. Arms race among nations will cease to an end. Humans will have a long-lasting peace not because they exist delicate among aggressive nations, but because there is a global sharing of wealth and understanding.

[bluewatsons]

Jesse S. Summers, Addiction by Any Other Name, 22 Phil, Psychiatry, & Psychology 49 (2015)

Why characterize addiction at all? George Graham reasonably points out that a good understanding of addiction should exchange “surface resemblances…[for] real facts about explanatory forces” (Graham 2015, 45). Understanding causes and cures of addiction will indeed help addicts’ lives more than the best characterization could. But we should beware the false dichotomy. Determining “real facts about explanatory forces” is valuable, and so is characterizing “surface resemblances.”

Philosophers’ déformation professionnelle often inclines us to look for essential features of natural phenomena, leading to broad definitions that capture disparate phenomena. But, instead of characterizing addiction in general, why not separately characterize heroin addiction, gambling addiction, and so on? For that matter, why unify types of addiction by the object of the addiction? Is there just one characterization of all alcoholics? The partying alcoholic, the shameful alcoholic, the depressive alcoholic, the self-medicating alcoholic, and the bad-influences alcoholic have different etiologies and patterns of use. These differences are lost in speaking of ‘the alcoholic,’ and even more in speaking of ‘the addict.’

I want to keep three criticisms separate. (1) My characterization in particular may not be the right one; (2) no characterization of addiction may be correct; and (3) there may be no value even in looking for a characterization of addiction. My limited response to (1) and (2) is that my characterization captures the range of addicts, which is some evidence that it is a good characterization—although I doubt there is only one right characterization. This leaves (3), the question of whether any characterization of addiction is valuable.

First, however, does my characterization of addiction actually fit the range of cases? Graham suggests that my characterization may not capture willing, wanton, and resigned addicts. Benjamin R. Lewis, by contrast, doubts that my characterization captures the unwilling, akratic addict.

Graham rightly points out that willing, wanton, and resigned addicts do not fit our stereotypical views of addicts. They are not described by the still-common characterization of addiction as a ‘chronic relapsing disorder,’ nor by talk about addicts’ ‘struggles’ with their addictions. These addicts have no internal struggle over the addiction, do not try to quit, and therefore do not relapse. Call this group ‘no-conflict addicts’: addicts who are not struggling with or even opposed to their own addictions.

My characterization does much better with no-conflict addicts than most alternative characterizations. Consider a good alternative characterization: [End Page 49] the addict cannot quit, even if she (actually or counterfactually) wants to. We may quibble with this characterization, about whether an addict genuinely ‘cannot’ quit, but, regardless, this alternative does not capture the problem with no-conflict addicts. Their problem is that they do not want to, not that they cannot.

The larger problem with this alternative characterization, however, is that it also characterizes non-addictions, which one similarly ‘cannot’ quit. Smokers can more easily quit smoking than sleeping or eating, but that does not make eating a more serious addiction. So, although this alternative characterization is in fact a plausible description of many addictions, it is a description that does not distinguish addictions from passions and appetites.

My characterization makes this distinction explicitly, and thus better captures no-conflict addicts. An evaluative element and an element describing reinforcement are relevant, on my proposal, to characterizing addicts, including no-conflict addicts. These two elements exclude normal patterns of appetitive and passionate activity that otherwise resemble addictions, which helps to characterize the no-conflict addict in a way that distinguishes him from the non-addict.

Consider a hard case: how to distinguish the alcoholic who prefers bourbon from the bourbon connoisseur who drinks the same amount and would also steadfastly refuse to give up his passion, but who is not an alcoholic? The first element of my characterization helps here, because (I assume, arguendo) we will not say of the second person that his underlying motivation is misguided, that he ‘misvalues’ bourbon. Or, to the extent that he does misvalue bourbon, his misvaluation is reinforced differently from the alcoholic’s, as the second part of my characterization captures. An alcoholic’s motivation has some non-thinking, irrational (or ‘arational,’ anyway) element (what I call ‘impulsive’). Together, these elements distinguish addicts from those who make deliberate but misguided decisions. The bourbon connoisseur may drink way too much, but if every drink is chosen so that he can add an entry to his bourbon-tasting notes notebook, this is a passion. At worst, it is a worthless hobby. But that is not an addiction. Neither a pattern of bad decisions nor a pattern of unthinking actions is itself an addiction; both elements of the characterization, appropriately related, are necessary.

The distinction is murkier in actual cases. For example, the bourbon connoisseur is difficult to distinguish from the no-conflict, bourbon-loving alcoholic because the no-conflict alcoholic may rationalize her addictive actions. She may say that she wants to keep drinking so that she can fill her notebook with tasting notes on each and every bourbon, when really she is filling the notebook as an excuse to keep drinking. This is an important way in which an addict may be a no-conflict addict. Rationalization also sheds light on Lewis’s question about whether my characterization captures the akratic addict.

The akratic addict acts despite his judgment or valuation, suffering from a weakness of will (Holton 2009). My account emphasizes the role of impulsivity as a form of unthinking action that reinforces a misvaluation, and I believe that is the chief role of impulsivity in addiction. Although I do not want to rule out akrasia, I am skeptical that—as usually described—it characterizes much of addiction. It is nice (for us and for addicts) to imagine that they are struggling valiantly at every moment against an addiction that, itself, occasionally overcomes their (other) desires (Frankfurt 1988). That story may even be true for the newly abstinent, for whom every moment may be a struggle, and the story may remain therapeutically valuable for others. But, although addicts may not rush eagerly into their addictions, I doubt the story of constant struggle is quite right either.

More likely, the addict is not akratic in the way of constant struggle and occasional overpowering, but instead regularly experiences rationalizations and judgment shifts (Levy 2011; Yaffe 2013). Addicts do not typically just ‘find themselves’ acting addictively, despite all efforts to resist. Rather, they talk themselves into using: just tonight, only socially, I have proven that I can quit if I want to, and so on (Watson 2004). These addicts then look more like no-conflict addicts, but they were turned into no-conflict addicts by their addictions. Their lack of conflict is not exactly willing or unwilling, not resigned, but not clearly akratic either. I will not speculate (here) on what more to say about willingness and akrasia.

I do, however, want to say why we should care about giving any characterization of addiction at all. Does it matter whether Paul Erdös’s use of amphetamines was addictive, a decision to maintain his high level of work despite any consequences, or some rationalized combination of the two? What is so special about the word ‘addiction?’

Characterizations serve different purposes. Sometimes we want to know why something should be called a ‘disorder’ at all. Sometimes we want to capture a disorder’s etiology for the sake of research and prevention. Sometimes we want to direct treatment: naltrexone is not prescribed for procrastination but is for addiction, although addiction and procrastination are both patterns of action that prioritize short-term pleasures over long-term benefits. Treatment, research, and prevention should all be informed by knowing what the problem to be treated is, which requires characterizing the problem in a way that distinguishes it from others, although different characterizations may be useful for different distinctions.

My own characterization of addiction starts from a philosophical concern to distinguish the disorder of addiction from patterns of action that are not disordered—or are not disordered in the same way. This is motivated by some background concerns about when we are responsible, how we guide our own behavior, and what makes behavior irrational (Graham 2010; Shoemaker 2015). What is wrong with spending all of one’s money developing an extensive knowledge of bourbon is not the same as what’s wrong with spending all of one’s money on bourbon-centered alcoholism, even if both spend too much money on bourbon.

All true characterizations—for whatever purpose developed—should be compatible, and at best they illuminate each other. For example, my characterization highlights why addiction is not just a pattern of regular drug use. If we are not aware of this, we cannot have productive discussions about use of cognitive enhancers, painkillers, or even recreational drugs. My characterization alone will not settle when each of those patterns becomes an addiction. But without a good characterization of what is wrong with addiction, we are too easily swayed by the superficial features of addictions— like a difficulty in quitting—that addictions may share with non-addictions. We are then likely to count too much or too little as addictive, which ultimately may make a difference to treatment, research, and prevention. My characterization is only one of many good characterizations, but it does what philosophical reflection on mental disorders can do. It describes the clear cases in a way that helps us to think more clearly about both the easy and the hard cases, a small step toward dividing human action more finely than into just ‘rational’ and ‘irrational.’

References

Frankfurt, H. 1988. Freedom of the will and the concept of a person. In: The importance of what we care about, 11–25. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Graham, G. 2010. The disordered mind: An introduction to philosophy of mind and mental illness. New York: Routledge.

Graham, G. 2015. Words, worlds, and addictions. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 22 no. 1:45–7.

Holton, R. 2009. Willing, wanting, waiting. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Levy, N. 2011. Resisting ‘weakness of the will’. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 82, no. 1:134–55.

Lewis, B. R. 2015. “The drugs didn’t mix”: On the overvaluation of misevaluation. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 22 no. 1:41–3.

Shoemaker, D. 2015. Responsibility from the margins. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Summers, J. S. 2015. What is wrong with addiction. Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 22, no. 1:25–40.

Yaffe, G. 2013. Are addicts akratic. In Addiction and self-control, ed. N. Levy, 190–213. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [End Page 51]

[networkingdefinition]

Girl Quotes

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• A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you’ve been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high full of the single greatest commodity known to man – promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow. This particular aura can be found in the gait of a beautiful girl. In her smile, in her soul, the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like it’s going to be okay. – Michael Rapaport • A gifted small girl has explained that pins are a great means of saving life, “by not swallowing them. – Charles Edward Montague • A girl can wait for the right man to come along but in the meantime that still doesn’t mean she can’t have a wonderful time with all the wrong ones. – Cher • A girl conceived in China has to run an eerie kind of gauntlet if she is to survive. many parents will use the ultrasound technique. and, if it reveals. a girl, they’ll abort her. If it reveals the baby is a boy, they’ll celebrate. – Steven W. Mosher • A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous. – Coco Chanel • A girl with brains ought to do something with them besides think. – Anita Loos • A guy and a girl can be just friends, but at one point or another, they will fall for each other… maybe temporarily, maybe at the wrong time, maybe too late, or maybe forever. – Dave Matthews • A liberal is a person who sees a fourteen-year-old girl performing sex acts onstage and wonders if she’s being paid minimum wage. – Irving Kristol • A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other. – George Eliot • A wise girl knows her limits, a smart girl knows that she has none. – Marilyn Monroe • Alas for those girls who’ve refused the truth: The sweetest tongue has the sharpest tooth. – Jack Zipes • All girls should have a poem written for them even if we have to turn this goddamn world upside down to do it. – Richard Brautigan • All little girls should be told they are pretty. – Marilyn Monroe • Always been a goal-oriented girl. it was both her strength and her weakness. She had a drive to completion that always gets things done, but it also made her inflexible, and stubborn. – Neal Shusterman • Always know that if you’re not happy with yourself, no one else can change that, no girl or guy, no amount of money; only yourself. – Shannon Leto • Always take a compliment, Caroline. Always take it for the way it was intended. You girls are always so quick to twist what others say. Simply say thank you and move on. – Alice Clayton • Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid. – Hedy Lamarr • Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. – Albert Einstein • As Deborah Rhode describes, “When 1,100 Michigan elementary students were asked to describe what life would be like if they were the opposite sex, over 40 percent of the girls saw advantages to being male; they would have better jobs, higher incomes, and more respect. Ninety-five percent of the boys saw no advantage to being female, and a substantial number thought suicide would be preferable.” – Deborah Rhode • At a recent show, I looked out and I saw this girl crying in the audience and it really affected me. I wanted to stop the song and go and give her a hug. I should have, actually – I regret not doing that. – Elena Tonra • At the fourth grade level, girls at the same percentages of boys say they’re interested in careers in engineering or math or astrophysics, but by eighth grade that has dropped precipitously. – Chelsea Clinton

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Girl+', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_girl').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_girl img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying. – Lena Dunham • Be that strong girl that everyone knew would make it through the worst, be that fearless girl, the one who would dare to do anything, be that independent girl who didn’t need a man; be that girl who never backed down. – Taylor Swift • Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him. – Marilyn Monroe • Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don’t, to something that women want and men can’t be bothered with. … The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year old boy. – Nick Hornby • Big girls need big diamonds. – Elizabeth Taylor • Boys think girls are like books, If the cover doesn’t catch their eye they won’t bother to read what’s inside”. – Marilyn Monroe • Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn’t matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls. – Anne Frank • But I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all, and what follows are hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that struggle. – Lena Dunham • But I’ve always been fascinated with that prettiest-girl-in-the-class person that I never was, getting inside her head and showing that she’s just as tormented and messed up as everybody else. – Cecily von Ziegesar • Byrd, the former Klu [sic] Klux Klan Kleagle, is taking a stand over states’ rights, or his rights over State, or some such. Whatever the reason, the sight of an old Klansman blocking a little colored girl from Birmingham from getting into her office contributed to the general retro vibe that hangs around the Democratic Party these days. – Mark Steyn

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Diamonds aren’t a girl’s best friend. Freedom is. – Camille Grammer • Due to the potent combination of my sexual recklessness and the slutty nature of some of the girls I have slept with, I have accumulated enough stories and anecdotes about abortion that they could name a Planned Parenthood clinic after me. – Tucker Max • Eating has always come up whenever and wherever. Maybe it’s because we’re girls, we have a lot of interest in eating. – Kim Hyo-yeon • Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth. – Calvin Trillin • Every girl is a goddess. – Francesca Lia Block • Every girl likes feeling hot and sexy and beautiful and likes hearing it. – Hayden Panettiere • Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away. – Laurence J. Peter • Every girl wants to be the one girl that can change that guy – Lauren Conrad • Everyone fixes up their face if it’s not ideal, you know? That’s because of the race-mixing. For example, a Russian marries an Armenian. They have a kid, a cute girl, but she has her dad’s nose. She goes and files it down a little, and it’s all good. Ethnicities are mixing now, so there’s degeneration, and it didn’t used to be like that. Remember how many beautiful women there were in the 1950s and 1960s, without any surgery? And now, thanks to degeneration, we have this. – Valeria Lukyanova • Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easily. They want such simple things. – Neil Gaiman • Fun is fun but no girl wants to laugh all of the time. – Anita Loos • Girl with the burning golden eyes, And red-bird song, and snowy throat: I bring you gold and silver moons, And diamond stars, and mists that float. I bring you moons and snowy clouds, I bring you prarie skies to-night To feebly praise your golden eyes And red-bird song, and throat so white. ~Vachel Lindsay “To Gloriana” God wrote His loveliest poem on the day He made the first silver poplar tree, And set it high upon a pale-gold hill For all the new enchanted earth to see. – Grace Noll Crowell • Girl, when he gives you kisses twain, use one, and let the other stay; And hoard it, for moons die, red fades, and you may need a kiss—some day. – Ridgely Torrence • Girls are like exotic birds. They are pretty to look at but hard to catch. – Howie Dorough • Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes, and drive a man out of his wits for the fun of it. – Louisa May Alcott • Girls are trained to say, ‘I wrote this, but it’s probably really stupid.’ Well, no, you wouldn’t write a novel if you thought it was really stupid. Men are much more comfortable going, ‘I wrote this book because I have a unique perspective that the world needs to hear.’ Girls are taught from the age of seven that if you get a compliment, you don’t go, ‘Thank you’, you go, ‘No, you’re insane. – Lena Dunham • Girls aren’t beautiful, they’re pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else. – Henry Rollins • Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who’s sorry for a gnat or girl? – Elizabeth Barrett Browning • Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also. – John Steinbeck • Girls have an unfair advantage over men: if they can’t get what they want by being smart, they can get it by being dumb. – Yul Brynner • Girls like to be played with and rumpled a little too sometimes. – Oliver Goldsmith • Girls like to see girls dressed up like princesses occasionally. – Nelly • Girls see these defined roles they’re supposed to follow in life, but when I was a young child, my parents told me I could be anything. – Joan Jett • Girls should go on thinking that there is a world out there and that it is theirs for the taking. – Anne Bancroft • Girls are like buses, miss one, next fifteen, one comin. – Gucci Mane • Girls. You never know what they’re going to think. – J. D. Salinger • Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. – Muriel Spark • God forbid you be an ugly girl, ‘course too pretty is also your doom, ’cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room. – Ani DiFranco • Growing up, I wanted desperately to please, to be a good girl. – Claire Danes • Hannah expected this to make her sob even more, but instead she found her tears drying up and her tummy growing warm. How dare they? How dare they do this to little girls? She understood now why her parents go so angry when they saw the result of bombers in the white hot streets of the Middle East, why men and women wailed in anger as well as grief as they lifted the limp bodies of children from the rubble. How dare they? No, she wasn’t going to die like this, wrapped up like some helpless baby. – Stephen M. Irwin • Harder is Better! Post work out! Foot in the Ice Bath. A girl has to make a living! #hardcandytoronto. #addictedtosweat – Madonna Ciccone • Have you heard about the morning after pill, or what I like to call breakfast in bed. Well have you heard about how some of the girls who have taken have died a few days later? Talk about two birds, looks like I will be going to the game this weekend boys. – Daniel Tosh • Honestly if a girl’s wearing, like, a Gucci shirt with a Gucci belt and a purse and a visor, that’s not cute at all. You can’t get away with that – with me – but you can always sprinkle it in there with your own stuff and it’s all good. – Kreayshawn • How long do small girls play with their dolls? As long as they are not married and do not live with their husbands. After marriage they put the dolls away in a box. What further need is there of worshipping the image after the vision of God? – Ramakrishna • How long is a girl a child? She is a child, and then one morning you wake up she’s a woman, and a dozen different people of whom you recognize none. – Louis L’Amour • I abstain from any kind of release for six weeks before a fight, no self-pleasure, nothing. Even in my dreams, I’ll be about to have sex with a beautiful girl and I’ll say, ‘Sorry darling, I’m fighting in a few weeks.’ That’s control, bro, when you’re turning down a hot chick in your subconscious. – David Haye • I always see guys get all, like, flexed on other people, trying to show off that they are tough, and it is just, like, no girl really likes that. – Kreayshawn • I always tell my mom I don’t have regular problems. I have problems, like, what type of girl is going to say they’re pregnant by me today? Those are the types of issues I have. – Fetty Wap • I am an artsy girl. It’s no secret that I am artsy, you know. – Kreayshawn • I avoid the young adult section altogether if possible, although it’s sometimes fun to catch a girl lying on the floor, reading “Gossip Girl.” – Cecily von Ziegesar • I basically became a cheerleader because I had a very strict mom. That was my way of being a bad girl. – Sandra Bullock • I could not lose unless I was caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. – Edwin Edwards • I did find a wonderful girl last year, but the photographs that we did were more about motorcars. – Helmut Newton • I don’t get it when girls say ‘I’m fine’ but don’t mean it. – Conor Maynard • I don’t like that sort of school… where the bright childish imagination is utterly discouraged… where I have never seen among the pupils, whether boys or girls, anything but little parrots and small calculating machines. – Charles Dickens • I don’t want to be one of those people who falls out of cabs drunk. But I don’t want to be known as some boring girl who just sits at home and doesn’t do anything. – Pixie Lott • I don’t want to be remembered as the girl who was shot. I want to be remembered as the girl who stood up. – Malala Yousafzai • I don’t want to be stinky poo poo girl, I want to be happy flower child. – Drew Barrymore • I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover’s mind if she knew the whole of it. – Anthony Trollope • I get some letters from girls that if their mothers knew what they were writing me in these letters, they’d get their butts whipped. – Rick James • I got started dancing because I knew it was one way to meet girls. – Gene Kelly • I hate dainty minds,’ answered Marjorie. ‘But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it. – F. Scott Fitzgerald • I have never been a material girl. My father always told me never to love anything that cannot love you back. – Imelda Marcos • I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives. My start has been so very full of interest, and that is the sole reason why I have to laugh at the humorous side of the most dangerous moments. – Anne Frank • I have the same goal I’ve had ever since I was a girl: I want to rule the world. – Madonna Ciccone • I just don’t want to cozy up to the guy whose girl I have every intention of stealing. – Aprilynne Pike • I knew the men were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load of liberals for hard work and good times. – James Crumley • I like Dancing of Indian girls more than my parents’ prayers . Because they dance with love and passion . But my parents just say their prayers because they got used to it . – Ali Shariati • I like the idea that I can talk to any teenage girls. You know, in a language that makes sense to them. – Louise Rennison • I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man. – Dario Argento • I love a girl with a sense of humor. Someone who can make me laugh and that I can get along with and talk with and who is just sweet overall, inside and out. – Logan Henderson • I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. – Maya Angelou • I love you girl…to the moon and back. – Abbi Glines • I loved when my boyfriends would call me their Amazon girl. – Patti Hansen • I may be a man, but I fight like a girl. – Andy Cohen • I met eight great members. I really don’t think that anyone else could get along like how our nine girls get along so well. Because we’re girls, there can be a lot of jealousy going on. Thinking back on it now, I think I’m a kid who received a lot of good fortune. – Kim Hyo-yeon • I might get some more animals or something, but I’m done with the kids. I got a boy, I got a girl, and I got an older boy. I’m straight. – Jada Pinkett Smith • I never cheat unless you count the girls I cheat on – Drake • I pray to God I get inside a girl’s head one day and see what in the WORLD they are thinking. – A. J. McLean • I really can’t deny it, I am who I am. I’m pretty normal. I’m not that smooth type of girl. I run into things, I trip, I spill food. I say stupid things… I really don’t have it all together. – Katie Holmes • I think girls are the most beautiful when they become a mother. – Minzy • I think it’s important to make all women feel like they’re princesses, because every girl is a princess. I’m serious. – Justin Bieber • I try to not be too hard on myself regarding my diet. I’ve always been a workout-to-eat kind of a girl. I like to eat, to say the least. – Jennie Finch • I want girls to feel the confidence you get from being smart. – Danica McKellar • I want to make sure I’m with a girl that’s a good kisser, and that when I wake up, I have coffee and a cigarette. That’s all I really want out of life. That, and world domination. – Ryan Adams • I wanted to give young girls something positive to look up to…I wanted to give them their Blizzard of Aahhhs, Ski Movie or High Life, but done in a way that also shows the elegance, grace, community and style that is unique to women in the mountains. – Lynsey Dyer • I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty… you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. – J. D. Salinger • I was coming off of The O.C. and had very little interest in doing another teen drama. And then I got sent theGossip Girl book series, and I was like, ‘I might not be ready to leave high school after all.’ – Josh Schwartz • I was not a Southern California girl. I hated having my photograph taken. I felt shy and embarrassed around famous people. – Allegra Huston • I was so thrilled that I was having a girl, because I just am so girly myself, but I think the teenage years are going to be very interesting. – Sarah Dessen • I wish my mother had left me something about how she felt growing up. I wish my grandmother had done the same. I wanted my girls to know me. – Carol Burnett • I wrote the story myself. It’s all about a girl who lost her reputation but never missed it. – Mae West • I’m convinced that a world in which girls are educated is a safer, more stable, more prosperous place. – Barack Obama • I’m not a vomit in the club kinda girl. – Lady Gaga • I’d never really babysat. I feel like I’m Blair, or ‘Gossip Girl.’ A teenager, basically – and now suddenly I’m a mom? – Cecily von Ziegesar • If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody. – J. D. Salinger • If a girl thinks she isn’t beautiful, I’m here to prove her wrong. – Kendall Schmidt • If I get married one day, or meet the girl I like, I’ll prepare 100m to 150m of candles, or maybe red carpet – Lee Donghae • If I had to give a definition of capitalism I would say: the process whereby American girls turn into American women. – Christopher Hampton • If I were a girl, I’d despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them. – Robert Graves • If the media is sending girls the message that their value lies in their bodies, this can only leave them feeling disempowered and distract them from making a difference and becoming leaders. – Jennifer Siebel Newsom • If we are to maximize the potential of young girls everywhere, we have to think, in this instance, literally outside the box. And the first step of doing that is to see the box for what it really is: A perfect, pretty PROBLEM. – David Trumble • If we’re going to reach a broader audience, we have to stop thinking about that audience strictly in terms of teenage boys or even teenage girls. We need to think about things that are relevant to normal humans and not just the geeks we used to be. – Warren Spector • If you can educate girls, you can change the world. – Cathie Black • If you can make a girl laugh, you can make her do anything. – Marilyn Monroe • If you invest in a girl or a woman, you are investing in everybody else. – Melinda Gates • I’m a cereal girl. I have always loved my cereal ever since I was a kid. – Rachel Stevens • I’m a Mommy’s Girl – the strongest influence in my young life was my mom. – Susie Bright • I’m a role model for lots of young girls. – Jennie Finch • I’m down to bleach my eyebrows again. I tell you what, though – that didn’t go down well with my boyfriend. Girls love it. Guys, not so into it. – Florence Welch • I’m into the girls fancying me and stuff, mad for it. – Liam Gallagher • I’m no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I’m pretty sure that’s flirting – Ransom Riggs • I’m not God but if I were God, ¾ of you would be girls, and the rest would be pizza and beer. – Axl Rose • I’m still chasing girls. I don’t remember what for, but I’m still chasing them. – Joe E. Lewis • I’m the girl who still believes prince charming exists somewhere out there. – Taylor Swift • I’m tired of playing little girls. I’m a woman now. I can’t run around forever being the Little Miss Fix It who bursts into song. I want to get out of Hollywood and get a fresh approach. – Deanna Durbin • I’m usually the sparkle in a closet full of conservative clothes. Either that or my customer has a closet full of my clothes and a few conservative suits from Calvin Klein. I think you’ve got to give a girl what’s missing from her closet. If something jazzy, tacky or sexy is what’s missing, I provide it. – Betsey Johnson • I’m weirdly flexible, so when I dance, I dance like a 17-year-old girl. – Michael Angarano • In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other’s affairs, who come out together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude. – Cyril Connolly • In my 20s I was going round seeing agents who were patronising because I was fat and a girl, which was a double whammy. I knew what it was to feel out-of-the-loop. – Victoria Wood • In school, I was the quietest girl ever! I had a lot of trouble in school. Kids were mean to me. – Cher Lloyd • Independent minded girls that are naked sounds like a great start to something. – Joshua Homme • It had never once occurred to me that the paper I wanted to work for would not want me. Certainly I never expected to be rejected solely because I was a girl! – Kathryn Tucker Windham • It’s all up to you, girls. You have to be strong. These are the days of post-women’s liberation. You have grown up by now and you have to take care of yourself. No one’s going to help you. – Kathy Acker • It’s like — I don’t know, sometimes it’s like chasing a pretty girl on the beach. And things I never thought I could do… I can do. – Ryan Adams • It’s not beauty but fine qualities, my girl, that keep a husband. – Euripides • It’s the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time. – Tallulah Bankhead • It’s tough now to meet a girl who wants to hang out with you because she likes your personality – who hasn’t seen you on TV and is like, ‘Hey!’ – Shaun White • Ive always loved when girls carry their wallets as a clutch instead of a bag. – Alexander Wang • I’ve been looking for a girl like you – not you, but a girl like you. – Groucho Marx • Just watching a girl can give me the best reason to smile. Girls are something very special and you got to treat them that way. That’s why I always say don’t stare right at a chick. She’ll begin to fidget, wondering if her hair’s messed up or if her make-up is smeared. It’s kind of like going to an art gallery to see beautiful paintings. If you look at a painting just the right way, you get the most out of it! – Michael Jackson • Kissing babies and hugging fat girls. – Dave Bautista • Like every other girl in the world, my most embarrassing moment had to do with a guy completely turning me down. His loss! – Kelly Clarkson • Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. – Robert A. Heinlein • Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl. – Stephen Leacock • Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. – John Ciardi • Modesty is invisibility… Never forget it. To be seen – to be seen – is to be… penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable. – Margaret Atwood • More men than women like ‘Strangers With Candy’. Pretty girls don’t like the show. They don’t like to see an ugly lady. – Amy Sedaris • More than anything, acting helped me discover who I’m not. I’ve learned that I’m a girly girl, but not a prissy girl. – Debby Ryan • My mother was my Girl Scout leader, and George’s mother was his Cub Scout leader. In fact, that’s when some say her hair turned white. – Laura Bush • My real dream is to have a whole, like, buy a whole piece of land. Imagine, like, a long driveway. Like, a cul de sac-type street, with maybe, like, seven houses. Me be right here. Have my mom be able to be right here. My brother over here. My girl’s grandmother and family right here. Friends over there. That’s my real dream. – J. Cole • Nature makes boys and girls lovely to look upon so they can be tolerated until they acquire some sense. – M. William Phelps • Never call a girl fat, even if you’re joking. – Demi Lovato • Never love someone whom you think you need to mend – or who makes you feel like you should be mended. There are boys out there who look for shining girls; they will stand next to you and say quiet things in your ear that only you can hear and that will slowly drain the joy out of your heart. The books about vampires are true, baby. Drive a stake through their hearts and run away. – Caitlin Moran • No girl wants a secretly gay boyfriend, every dude wants a secretly gay girlfriend. – Joe Rogan • No legal ceremony–no election of the woman–no penalty for the perfidy of the man–no law to compel him to do his duty, no compensation for the poor woman who is turned adrift like the girl of the street, penniless, to sell herself on the best possible terms. This is Divine marriage, or Moses and the Bible lie; and this is Bible divorce–putting away! – Victoria Woodhull • No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t. – Marilyn Monroe • No one knows how it is that with one glance a boy can break through into a girl’s heart. – Nancy Thayer • Nobody loves a fat girl, but oh how a fat girl can love. – Jim Croce • Only one girl has ever really wrapped my stomach into pretzels. She didn’t give me butterflies. She gave me pterodactyls I’m talking terrible internal bruising and the first time I kissed her was like the first time I saw fireworks, which was like the sky first kissing me in the eyeballs – George Watsky • Over 270 girls were kidnapped for going to school in Nigeria! They are still missing! I’M outraged and you should be too!! I’m supporting www.globalfundforwomen.org Join me and take a stand!!!!!!! #Bringbackourgirls #revolutionoflove – Madonna Ciccone • Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. – Albert Einstein • Put yourself in Hamlet’s shoes. Suppose you were a prince, and you came back from college to discover that your uncle had murdered your father and married your mother, and you fell in love with a beautiful girl and mistakenly murdered her father, and then she went crazy and drowned herself. What would you do? Go back for a masters? – Art Buchwald • Sex is something I really don’t understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it – the same night, as a matter of fact. – J. D. Salinger • She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives. – Michael Chabon • She’s the wild, feline, untamed part of you, your sexual alter ego and the opposite of the “good girl” or “little lady.” Some of us know her better than others do, but I would venture to guess that your erotic creature hasn’t seen nearly enough light of day. – Sheila Kelley • She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong. – Mae West • Some guys like to undermine a girl’s self-esteem with little verbal jabs. Eventually it all adds up. One bee sting doesn’t hurt a horse, but enough bee stings can kill a horse. – Oliver Gaspirtz • Sometimes I see really skinny girls. They may look great, but…they’re not happy. Have a cupcake. – Kathy Wakile • Straight to the top, rooftop glows. With a hand full of girls and they all so foreign. Brain so poisoned, rainbows flowing. – The Weeknd • Take away the Big Bang and what has God done? Burned a bush and got a girl pregnant. Great, he’s a high school junior. – Stephen Colbert • The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant – John Steinbeck • The best accessories a girl can have are her closest friends. – Paris Hilton • The best thing a girl can be is a good wife and mother. It is a girl’s highest calling. I hope I am ready. – Nancy E. Turner • The cuter girls kinda went off from the older women because we’re younger, and we’re cuter, we’ve got better bodies, and for some reason that’s like a huge issue with older people. – Heidi • The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, ‘It’s a girl.’ – Shirley Chisholm • The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things. – Karen Russell • The girls show more skin these days, but I think, generally, they behave the same way as when I was growing up. – Cecily von Ziegesar • The jamaat was an almost silly mish-mash of people: Rude Dawud’s pork-pie hat poking up here, a jalab-and-turban there, Jehangir’s big Mohawk rising from a sea of kufis, Amazing Ayyub still with no shirt, girls scattered throughout – some in hejab, some not and Rabeya in punk-patched burqa doing her thing. But in its randomness it was gorgeous, reflecting an Islam I felt could not happen anywhere else … If Islam was to be saved, it would be saved by the crazy ones: Jehangir and Rabeya and Fasiq and Dawud and Ayyub and even Umar. – Michael Muhammad Knight • There are many facts within fiction. This captivating story provides invaluable insights into the childhood of a girl who has Asperger’s syndrome. Fiction allows the author to explore different perspectives and add poignancy to the experiences of sensory sensitivity and being bullied and teased of someone who has Asperger’s syndrome. The title Delightfully Different describes Asperger’s syndrome but also the qualities of this novel. – Tony Attwood • There are no good girls gone wrong – just bad girls found out. – Mae West • There are so many girls, and so few princes. – Liza Minnelli • There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you. – Winston Churchill • There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan. – Jeffrey Eugenides • There is no shortage of evidence that when we support the fundamental freedoms of women and girls, they are able to realize their full potential to engage in, contribute to and benefit from sustainable development. In doing so, we will all reap the benefits; in our homes, throughout our communities, and across our nations. – Sam Kutesa • There is not one female comic who was beautiful as a little girl. – Joan Rivers • There was a little girl, When she was good, she was very, very good. But when she was bad, she was horrid. – Jun Mochizuki • There was the time I bought three cars in the span of three or four weeks. It was crazy; it wasn’t greedy. It was mine, my girl’s, my mom’s. I got Benzes for my ladies. But I felt crazy. You have to understand I come from a world where we’re very modest. But that’s not greedy. That’s nice, right? – J. Cole • There were about ten years of trying, failing, trying again, suffering rejection, etc. My first published book, ‘Story of a Girl’, was the fourth book I wrote. – Sara Zarr • There’s no point for me to party. I have a girl that I love. I don’t need that. – Ryan Cabrera • There’s only a very small representation of girls among you. Too little. Women have much to tell us in today’s society. Sometimes we are too machistas and we don’t allow enough space to women. But women can see things from a different angle to us, with a different eye. Women are able to pose questions we men are unable to understand. Look out for this fact: she is the only one who has put a question for which there is no answer. She couldn’t put it into words but expressed it with tears. – Pope Francis • These Jews who run things, who are producing this mental illness ¬-teenage suicide…all these Jewish sicknesses…that’s nothing new. The Talmud’s full of things like sex with boys and girls. – David Duke • This attitude means you haven’t met a girl worthy of your attention. You’ll want to get caught if the right girl comes along. – Simone Elkeles • This is why I can’t be with Levi. Because I’m the kind of girl who fantasizes about being trapped in a library overnight-and Levi can’t even read. – Rainbow Rowell • This was how the modern working girl behaved. She didn’t hide her femininity or apologize for it, as they did in the old days. She flaunted it and, having been given more than any woman before her, demanded even more than that. – J. Courtney Sullivan • This-this was what made life: a moment of quiet, the water falling in the fountain, the girl’s voice. . . a moment of captured beauty. Those who are truly wise will never permit such moments to escape. – Louis L’Amour • To find out a girl’s faults, praise her to her girlfriends. – Benjamin Franklin • Today’s girls are tomorrow’s women – and leaders. – Isabel Allende • Too many girls follow the line of least resistance, but a good line is hard to resist. – Mae West • Wait until France gets a hard shot in the nose. Wait until France reacts with some nasty work. They’ll get a golf-clap from the chattering class over here and a you-go-girl from Red America. France could nuke an Algerian terrorist camp and the rest of the world would tut-tut for a day, then ask if the missiles France used were for sale. And of course the answer would be oui. – James Lileks • We are living in a material world and I’m a material girl. – Madonna Ciccone • We do not suffer by accident. It does not often happen that the interference of friends will persuade a young man of independent fortune to think no more of a girl whom he was violently in love with only a few days before. – Elizabeth Bennett • We had no irony when it came to girls, though. There was just no time to develop it. One moment they weren’t there, not in any form that interested us, anyway, and the next you couldn’t miss them; they were everywhere, all over the place. One moment you wanted to clonk them on the head for being your sister, or someone else’s sister, and the next you wanted to….actually, we didn’t know what we wanted next, but it was something. Almost overnight, all these sisters (there was no other kind of girl, not yet)had become interesting, disturbing, even. – Nick Hornby • We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us… and we drown. – T. S. Eliot • We must not close our eyes to the fact that there are conspiring men who would pollute young boys, and girls of corresponding age, for sake of increasing profits. – David O. McKay • We’re every age at once and tucked inside ourselves like Russian nesting dolls. My mother is an 8 year old girl. My grandson is a 74 year old retiree whose kidneys just failed. And that’s the glue between me and you. That’s the screws and nails. We live in a house made of each other and if that sounds strange that’s because it is. – George Watsky • Well Stephanie, I’d like to thank you for giving me such a kind Christmas gift, but unfortunately I didn’t get you any gifts. But then again, what can you get for the girl whose had everyone? – Chris Jericho • Well, we’re living in a material world, and I’m a material girl… or boy. – Adam Sandler • What are you two doing flirting with this nerd? I told you, you are supposed to be in charge of the 50 dancing girls I had set up for Miz’s celebration. – Alex Riley • What better job is there for a 17-year-old girl than being in a pop group? – Susan Ann Sulley • What do I like in a girl? I like a girl that likes me, a girl that knows how to smile and see the bright side of things. A girl that makes me a better person. – James Lafferty • What does being a girl have to do with it? There’s no time to think when you’re on the spot. – Bisco Hatori • What I know in my heart is that women and girls on the ground are powerful and that they are leaders. – Charlize Theron • When a girl cries over a guy,she really loves him.when a guy cries over a girl ,he will never love another girl like her. – Lil Wayne • When a girl is beautiful, she gets to pick – she never has to wait for someone to choose her. – Adriana Trigiani • When it’s all over I won’t miss the bruises he gave me to impress girls, or the occasional scar which will give me a story to tell my grandchildren, but I’ll definitely miss the pranks and the laughing and all the making fun of each other. I’ll miss the funky advice he gives me about everything – football, girls, video games, clothes. Most of all, I’ll miss having an older brother. – Skandar Keynes • When you were a little girl, Madam…..was this the woman you dreamed of becoming? – Andrew Sean Greer • Whenever I’m about to have sex with a girl, I play it smart and just automatically assume she has herpes; because that way I don’t have to tell her about my herpes. – Anthony Jeselnik • Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away. – Alberto Giacometti • Why does a man take it for granted that a girl who flirts with him wants him to kiss her – when, nine times out of ten, she only wants him to want to kiss her? – Helen Rowland • Why is it that every time a girl says a guy is bothering her, it’s fluffed off with oh, he just likes you, as if that makes it okay? – Kelley Armstrong • Yet little by little, I was also becoming the girl who was learning to live with this, all of it, letting it weave together with everything else, the good and the bad, as life moved forward, because thats what life did, regardless of whether we were ready for it or not. – Donna Freitas • You and I both know there’s got to be some greater storyline for you than ‘girl gets heart broken, was sad forever’. I think a nice one would be ‘girl gets heart broken, was sad for a while but in her heartbreak she found freedom, friends, and the ability to look back and laugh at all she’d learned. She now lives her life on her own terms and still has fantastic hair.’ – Taylor Swift • You are the one girl that made me risk eveything for a future worth having. – Simone Elkeles • You don’t have to wait for anyone’s approval to do things. You don’t have to try to get a job and go through set steps before you start a career or start your life. That’s what I want young girls to know – you can do anything you want. Just start. – Petra Collins • You eventually get used to looking at girls picking their leotards out of their bums and that sort of stuff. – Adam Garcia • You know you love me. Xoxo, GossipGirl. – Cecily von Ziegesar • You know, honestly, if a girl can make me laugh, I’m pretty much sold. – Ryan Lochte • You may admire a girl’s curves on the first introduction, but the second meeting shows up new angles. – Mae West

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[equitiesstocks]

Girl Quotes

Official Website: Girl Quotes

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• A beautiful girl can make you dizzy, like you’ve been drinking Jack and Coke all morning. She can make you feel high full of the single greatest commodity known to man – promise. Promise of a better day. Promise of a greater hope. Promise of a new tomorrow. This particular aura can be found in the gait of a beautiful girl. In her smile, in her soul, the way she makes every rotten little thing about life seem like it’s going to be okay. – Michael Rapaport • A gifted small girl has explained that pins are a great means of saving life, “by not swallowing them. – Charles Edward Montague • A girl can wait for the right man to come along but in the meantime that still doesn’t mean she can’t have a wonderful time with all the wrong ones. – Cher • A girl conceived in China has to run an eerie kind of gauntlet if she is to survive. many parents will use the ultrasound technique. and, if it reveals. a girl, they’ll abort her. If it reveals the baby is a boy, they’ll celebrate. – Steven W. Mosher • A girl should be two things: classy and fabulous. – Coco Chanel • A girl with brains ought to do something with them besides think. – Anita Loos • A guy and a girl can be just friends, but at one point or another, they will fall for each other… maybe temporarily, maybe at the wrong time, maybe too late, or maybe forever. – Dave Matthews • A liberal is a person who sees a fourteen-year-old girl performing sex acts onstage and wonders if she’s being paid minimum wage. – Irving Kristol • A toddling little girl is a centre of common feeling which makes the most dissimilar people understand each other. – George Eliot • A wise girl knows her limits, a smart girl knows that she has none. – Marilyn Monroe • Alas for those girls who’ve refused the truth: The sweetest tongue has the sharpest tooth. – Jack Zipes • All girls should have a poem written for them even if we have to turn this goddamn world upside down to do it. – Richard Brautigan • All little girls should be told they are pretty. – Marilyn Monroe • Always been a goal-oriented girl. it was both her strength and her weakness. She had a drive to completion that always gets things done, but it also made her inflexible, and stubborn. – Neal Shusterman • Always know that if you’re not happy with yourself, no one else can change that, no girl or guy, no amount of money; only yourself. – Shannon Leto • Always take a compliment, Caroline. Always take it for the way it was intended. You girls are always so quick to twist what others say. Simply say thank you and move on. – Alice Clayton • Any girl can be glamorous. All you have to do is stand still and look stupid. – Hedy Lamarr • Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves. – Albert Einstein • As Deborah Rhode describes, “When 1,100 Michigan elementary students were asked to describe what life would be like if they were the opposite sex, over 40 percent of the girls saw advantages to being male; they would have better jobs, higher incomes, and more respect. Ninety-five percent of the boys saw no advantage to being female, and a substantial number thought suicide would be preferable.” – Deborah Rhode • At a recent show, I looked out and I saw this girl crying in the audience and it really affected me. I wanted to stop the song and go and give her a hug. I should have, actually – I regret not doing that. – Elena Tonra • At the fourth grade level, girls at the same percentages of boys say they’re interested in careers in engineering or math or astrophysics, but by eighth grade that has dropped precipitously. – Chelsea Clinton

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Girl+', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_girl').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_girl img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Basically, anything a sexual predator might do to woo a small suburban girl, I was trying. – Lena Dunham • Be that strong girl that everyone knew would make it through the worst, be that fearless girl, the one who would dare to do anything, be that independent girl who didn’t need a man; be that girl who never backed down. – Taylor Swift • Before marriage, a girl has to make love to a man to hold him. After marriage, she has to hold him to make love to him. – Marilyn Monroe • Between the ages of fourteen and twenty-four, foreplay changes from being something that boys want to do and girls don’t, to something that women want and men can’t be bothered with. … The perfect match, if you ask me, is between the Cosmo woman and the fourteen-year old boy. – Nick Hornby • Big girls need big diamonds. – Elizabeth Taylor • Boys think girls are like books, If the cover doesn’t catch their eye they won’t bother to read what’s inside”. – Marilyn Monroe • Boys will be boys. And even that wouldn’t matter if only we could prevent girls from being girls. – Anne Frank • But I am a girl with a keen interest in having it all, and what follows are hopeful dispatches from the frontlines of that struggle. – Lena Dunham • But I’ve always been fascinated with that prettiest-girl-in-the-class person that I never was, getting inside her head and showing that she’s just as tormented and messed up as everybody else. – Cecily von Ziegesar • Byrd, the former Klu [sic] Klux Klan Kleagle, is taking a stand over states’ rights, or his rights over State, or some such. Whatever the reason, the sight of an old Klansman blocking a little colored girl from Birmingham from getting into her office contributed to the general retro vibe that hangs around the Democratic Party these days. – Mark Steyn

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Diamonds aren’t a girl’s best friend. Freedom is. – Camille Grammer • Due to the potent combination of my sexual recklessness and the slutty nature of some of the girls I have slept with, I have accumulated enough stories and anecdotes about abortion that they could name a Planned Parenthood clinic after me. – Tucker Max • Eating has always come up whenever and wherever. Maybe it’s because we’re girls, we have a lot of interest in eating. – Kim Hyo-yeon • Even today, well-brought-up English girls are taught by their mothers to boil all veggies for at least a month and a half, just in case one of the dinner guests turns up without his teeth. – Calvin Trillin • Every girl is a goddess. – Francesca Lia Block • Every girl likes feeling hot and sexy and beautiful and likes hearing it. – Hayden Panettiere • Every girl should use what Mother Nature gave her before Father Time takes it away. – Laurence J. Peter • Every girl wants to be the one girl that can change that guy – Lauren Conrad • Everyone fixes up their face if it’s not ideal, you know? That’s because of the race-mixing. For example, a Russian marries an Armenian. They have a kid, a cute girl, but she has her dad’s nose. She goes and files it down a little, and it’s all good. Ethnicities are mixing now, so there’s degeneration, and it didn’t used to be like that. Remember how many beautiful women there were in the 1950s and 1960s, without any surgery? And now, thanks to degeneration, we have this. – Valeria Lukyanova • Everything here is so weak, little girl. Everything breaks so easily. They want such simple things. – Neil Gaiman • Fun is fun but no girl wants to laugh all of the time. – Anita Loos • Girl with the burning golden eyes, And red-bird song, and snowy throat: I bring you gold and silver moons, And diamond stars, and mists that float. I bring you moons and snowy clouds, I bring you prarie skies to-night To feebly praise your golden eyes And red-bird song, and throat so white. ~Vachel Lindsay “To Gloriana” God wrote His loveliest poem on the day He made the first silver poplar tree, And set it high upon a pale-gold hill For all the new enchanted earth to see. – Grace Noll Crowell • Girl, when he gives you kisses twain, use one, and let the other stay; And hoard it, for moons die, red fades, and you may need a kiss—some day. – Ridgely Torrence • Girls are like exotic birds. They are pretty to look at but hard to catch. – Howie Dorough • Girls are so queer you never know what they mean. They say No when they mean Yes, and drive a man out of his wits for the fun of it. – Louisa May Alcott • Girls are trained to say, ‘I wrote this, but it’s probably really stupid.’ Well, no, you wouldn’t write a novel if you thought it was really stupid. Men are much more comfortable going, ‘I wrote this book because I have a unique perspective that the world needs to hear.’ Girls are taught from the age of seven that if you get a compliment, you don’t go, ‘Thank you’, you go, ‘No, you’re insane. – Lena Dunham • Girls aren’t beautiful, they’re pretty. Beautiful is too heavy a word to assign to a girl. Women are beautiful because their faces show that they know they have lost something and picked up something else. – Henry Rollins • Girls blush, sometimes, because they are alive, half wishing they were dead to save the shame. The sudden blush devours them, neck and brow; They have drawn too near the fire of life, like gnats, and flare up bodily, wings and all. What then? Who’s sorry for a gnat or girl? – Elizabeth Barrett Browning • Girls have a way of knowing or feeling what you feel, but they usually like to hear it also. – John Steinbeck • Girls have an unfair advantage over men: if they can’t get what they want by being smart, they can get it by being dumb. – Yul Brynner • Girls like to be played with and rumpled a little too sometimes. – Oliver Goldsmith • Girls like to see girls dressed up like princesses occasionally. – Nelly • Girls see these defined roles they’re supposed to follow in life, but when I was a young child, my parents told me I could be anything. – Joan Jett • Girls should go on thinking that there is a world out there and that it is theirs for the taking. – Anne Bancroft • Girls are like buses, miss one, next fifteen, one comin. – Gucci Mane • Girls. You never know what they’re going to think. – J. D. Salinger • Give me a girl at an impressionable age and she is mine for life. – Muriel Spark • God forbid you be an ugly girl, ‘course too pretty is also your doom, ’cause everyone harbors a secret hatred for the prettiest girl in the room. – Ani DiFranco • Growing up, I wanted desperately to please, to be a good girl. – Claire Danes • Hannah expected this to make her sob even more, but instead she found her tears drying up and her tummy growing warm. How dare they? How dare they do this to little girls? She understood now why her parents go so angry when they saw the result of bombers in the white hot streets of the Middle East, why men and women wailed in anger as well as grief as they lifted the limp bodies of children from the rubble. How dare they? No, she wasn’t going to die like this, wrapped up like some helpless baby. – Stephen M. Irwin • Harder is Better! Post work out! Foot in the Ice Bath. A girl has to make a living! #hardcandytoronto. #addictedtosweat – Madonna Ciccone • Have you heard about the morning after pill, or what I like to call breakfast in bed. Well have you heard about how some of the girls who have taken have died a few days later? Talk about two birds, looks like I will be going to the game this weekend boys. – Daniel Tosh • Honestly if a girl’s wearing, like, a Gucci shirt with a Gucci belt and a purse and a visor, that’s not cute at all. You can’t get away with that – with me – but you can always sprinkle it in there with your own stuff and it’s all good. – Kreayshawn • How long do small girls play with their dolls? As long as they are not married and do not live with their husbands. After marriage they put the dolls away in a box. What further need is there of worshipping the image after the vision of God? – Ramakrishna • How long is a girl a child? She is a child, and then one morning you wake up she’s a woman, and a dozen different people of whom you recognize none. – Louis L’Amour • I abstain from any kind of release for six weeks before a fight, no self-pleasure, nothing. Even in my dreams, I’ll be about to have sex with a beautiful girl and I’ll say, ‘Sorry darling, I’m fighting in a few weeks.’ That’s control, bro, when you’re turning down a hot chick in your subconscious. – David Haye • I always see guys get all, like, flexed on other people, trying to show off that they are tough, and it is just, like, no girl really likes that. – Kreayshawn • I always tell my mom I don’t have regular problems. I have problems, like, what type of girl is going to say they’re pregnant by me today? Those are the types of issues I have. – Fetty Wap • I am an artsy girl. It’s no secret that I am artsy, you know. – Kreayshawn • I avoid the young adult section altogether if possible, although it’s sometimes fun to catch a girl lying on the floor, reading “Gossip Girl.” – Cecily von Ziegesar • I basically became a cheerleader because I had a very strict mom. That was my way of being a bad girl. – Sandra Bullock • I could not lose unless I was caught in bed with a dead girl or a live boy. – Edwin Edwards • I did find a wonderful girl last year, but the photographs that we did were more about motorcars. – Helmut Newton • I don’t get it when girls say ‘I’m fine’ but don’t mean it. – Conor Maynard • I don’t like that sort of school… where the bright childish imagination is utterly discouraged… where I have never seen among the pupils, whether boys or girls, anything but little parrots and small calculating machines. – Charles Dickens • I don’t want to be one of those people who falls out of cabs drunk. But I don’t want to be known as some boring girl who just sits at home and doesn’t do anything. – Pixie Lott • I don’t want to be remembered as the girl who was shot. I want to be remembered as the girl who stood up. – Malala Yousafzai • I don’t want to be stinky poo poo girl, I want to be happy flower child. – Drew Barrymore • I doubt whether any girl would be satisfied with her lover’s mind if she knew the whole of it. – Anthony Trollope • I get some letters from girls that if their mothers knew what they were writing me in these letters, they’d get their butts whipped. – Rick James • I got started dancing because I knew it was one way to meet girls. – Gene Kelly • I hate dainty minds,’ answered Marjorie. ‘But a girl has to be dainty in person. If she looks like a million dollars she can talk about Russia, ping-pong, or the League of Nations and get away with it. – F. Scott Fitzgerald • I have never been a material girl. My father always told me never to love anything that cannot love you back. – Imelda Marcos • I have often been downcast, but never in despair; I regard our hiding as a dangerous adventure, romantic and interesting at the same time. In my diary I treat all the privations as amusing. I have made up my mind now to lead a different life from other girls and, later on, different from ordinary housewives. My start has been so very full of interest, and that is the sole reason why I have to laugh at the humorous side of the most dangerous moments. – Anne Frank • I have the same goal I’ve had ever since I was a girl: I want to rule the world. – Madonna Ciccone • I just don’t want to cozy up to the guy whose girl I have every intention of stealing. – Aprilynne Pike • I knew the men were probably terrible people who whistled at pretty girls, treated their wives like servants, and voted for Nixon every chance they got, but as far as I was concerned, they beat the hell out of a Volvo-load of liberals for hard work and good times. – James Crumley • I like Dancing of Indian girls more than my parents’ prayers . Because they dance with love and passion . But my parents just say their prayers because they got used to it . – Ali Shariati • I like the idea that I can talk to any teenage girls. You know, in a language that makes sense to them. – Louise Rennison • I like women, especially beautiful ones. If they have a good face and figure, I would much prefer to watch them being murdered than an ugly girl or man. – Dario Argento • I love a girl with a sense of humor. Someone who can make me laugh and that I can get along with and talk with and who is just sweet overall, inside and out. – Logan Henderson • I love to see a young girl go out and grab the world by the lapels. – Maya Angelou • I love you girl…to the moon and back. – Abbi Glines • I loved when my boyfriends would call me their Amazon girl. – Patti Hansen • I may be a man, but I fight like a girl. – Andy Cohen • I met eight great members. I really don’t think that anyone else could get along like how our nine girls get along so well. Because we’re girls, there can be a lot of jealousy going on. Thinking back on it now, I think I’m a kid who received a lot of good fortune. – Kim Hyo-yeon • I might get some more animals or something, but I’m done with the kids. I got a boy, I got a girl, and I got an older boy. I’m straight. – Jada Pinkett Smith • I never cheat unless you count the girls I cheat on – Drake • I pray to God I get inside a girl’s head one day and see what in the WORLD they are thinking. – A. J. McLean • I really can’t deny it, I am who I am. I’m pretty normal. I’m not that smooth type of girl. I run into things, I trip, I spill food. I say stupid things… I really don’t have it all together. – Katie Holmes • I think girls are the most beautiful when they become a mother. – Minzy • I think it’s important to make all women feel like they’re princesses, because every girl is a princess. I’m serious. – Justin Bieber • I try to not be too hard on myself regarding my diet. I’ve always been a workout-to-eat kind of a girl. I like to eat, to say the least. – Jennie Finch • I want girls to feel the confidence you get from being smart. – Danica McKellar • I want to make sure I’m with a girl that’s a good kisser, and that when I wake up, I have coffee and a cigarette. That’s all I really want out of life. That, and world domination. – Ryan Adams • I wanted to give young girls something positive to look up to…I wanted to give them their Blizzard of Aahhhs, Ski Movie or High Life, but done in a way that also shows the elegance, grace, community and style that is unique to women in the mountains. – Lynsey Dyer • I was about half in love with her by the time we sat down. That’s the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty… you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are. – J. D. Salinger • I was coming off of The O.C. and had very little interest in doing another teen drama. And then I got sent theGossip Girl book series, and I was like, ‘I might not be ready to leave high school after all.’ – Josh Schwartz • I was not a Southern California girl. I hated having my photograph taken. I felt shy and embarrassed around famous people. – Allegra Huston • I was so thrilled that I was having a girl, because I just am so girly myself, but I think the teenage years are going to be very interesting. – Sarah Dessen • I wish my mother had left me something about how she felt growing up. I wish my grandmother had done the same. I wanted my girls to know me. – Carol Burnett • I wrote the story myself. It’s all about a girl who lost her reputation but never missed it. – Mae West • I’m convinced that a world in which girls are educated is a safer, more stable, more prosperous place. – Barack Obama • I’m not a vomit in the club kinda girl. – Lady Gaga • I’d never really babysat. I feel like I’m Blair, or ‘Gossip Girl.’ A teenager, basically – and now suddenly I’m a mom? – Cecily von Ziegesar • If a girl looks swell when she meets you, who gives a damn if she’s late? Nobody. – J. D. Salinger • If a girl thinks she isn’t beautiful, I’m here to prove her wrong. – Kendall Schmidt • If I get married one day, or meet the girl I like, I’ll prepare 100m to 150m of candles, or maybe red carpet – Lee Donghae • If I had to give a definition of capitalism I would say: the process whereby American girls turn into American women. – Christopher Hampton • If I were a girl, I’d despair. The supply of good women far exceeds that of the men who deserve them. – Robert Graves • If the media is sending girls the message that their value lies in their bodies, this can only leave them feeling disempowered and distract them from making a difference and becoming leaders. – Jennifer Siebel Newsom • If we are to maximize the potential of young girls everywhere, we have to think, in this instance, literally outside the box. And the first step of doing that is to see the box for what it really is: A perfect, pretty PROBLEM. – David Trumble • If we’re going to reach a broader audience, we have to stop thinking about that audience strictly in terms of teenage boys or even teenage girls. We need to think about things that are relevant to normal humans and not just the geeks we used to be. – Warren Spector • If you can educate girls, you can change the world. – Cathie Black • If you can make a girl laugh, you can make her do anything. – Marilyn Monroe • If you invest in a girl or a woman, you are investing in everybody else. – Melinda Gates • I’m a cereal girl. I have always loved my cereal ever since I was a kid. – Rachel Stevens • I’m a Mommy’s Girl – the strongest influence in my young life was my mom. – Susie Bright • I’m a role model for lots of young girls. – Jennie Finch • I’m down to bleach my eyebrows again. I tell you what, though – that didn’t go down well with my boyfriend. Girls love it. Guys, not so into it. – Florence Welch • I’m into the girls fancying me and stuff, mad for it. – Liam Gallagher • I’m no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I’m pretty sure that’s flirting – Ransom Riggs • I’m not God but if I were God, ¾ of you would be girls, and the rest would be pizza and beer. – Axl Rose • I’m still chasing girls. I don’t remember what for, but I’m still chasing them. – Joe E. Lewis • I’m the girl who still believes prince charming exists somewhere out there. – Taylor Swift • I’m tired of playing little girls. I’m a woman now. I can’t run around forever being the Little Miss Fix It who bursts into song. I want to get out of Hollywood and get a fresh approach. – Deanna Durbin • I’m usually the sparkle in a closet full of conservative clothes. Either that or my customer has a closet full of my clothes and a few conservative suits from Calvin Klein. I think you’ve got to give a girl what’s missing from her closet. If something jazzy, tacky or sexy is what’s missing, I provide it. – Betsey Johnson • I’m weirdly flexible, so when I dance, I dance like a 17-year-old girl. – Michael Angarano • In America every woman has her set of girl-friends; some are cousins, the rest are gained at school. These form a permanent committee who sit on each other’s affairs, who come out together, marry and divorce together, and who end as those groups of bustling, heartless well-informed club-women who govern society. Against them the Couple of Ehepaar is helpless and Man in their eyes but a biological interlude. – Cyril Connolly • In my 20s I was going round seeing agents who were patronising because I was fat and a girl, which was a double whammy. I knew what it was to feel out-of-the-loop. – Victoria Wood • In school, I was the quietest girl ever! I had a lot of trouble in school. Kids were mean to me. – Cher Lloyd • Independent minded girls that are naked sounds like a great start to something. – Joshua Homme • It had never once occurred to me that the paper I wanted to work for would not want me. Certainly I never expected to be rejected solely because I was a girl! – Kathryn Tucker Windham • It’s all up to you, girls. You have to be strong. These are the days of post-women’s liberation. You have grown up by now and you have to take care of yourself. No one’s going to help you. – Kathy Acker • It’s like — I don’t know, sometimes it’s like chasing a pretty girl on the beach. And things I never thought I could do… I can do. – Ryan Adams • It’s not beauty but fine qualities, my girl, that keep a husband. – Euripides • It’s the good girls who keep diaries; the bad girls never have the time. – Tallulah Bankhead • It’s tough now to meet a girl who wants to hang out with you because she likes your personality – who hasn’t seen you on TV and is like, ‘Hey!’ – Shaun White • Ive always loved when girls carry their wallets as a clutch instead of a bag. – Alexander Wang • I’ve been looking for a girl like you – not you, but a girl like you. – Groucho Marx • Just watching a girl can give me the best reason to smile. Girls are something very special and you got to treat them that way. That’s why I always say don’t stare right at a chick. She’ll begin to fidget, wondering if her hair’s messed up or if her make-up is smeared. It’s kind of like going to an art gallery to see beautiful paintings. If you look at a painting just the right way, you get the most out of it! – Michael Jackson • Kissing babies and hugging fat girls. – Dave Bautista • Like every other girl in the world, my most embarrassing moment had to do with a guy completely turning me down. His loss! – Kelly Clarkson • Little girls, like butterflies, need no excuse. – Robert A. Heinlein • Many a man in love with a dimple makes the mistake of marrying the whole girl. – Stephen Leacock • Modern art is what happens when painters stop looking at girls and persuade themselves that they have a better idea. – John Ciardi • Modesty is invisibility… Never forget it. To be seen – to be seen – is to be… penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable. – Margaret Atwood • More men than women like ‘Strangers With Candy’. Pretty girls don’t like the show. They don’t like to see an ugly lady. – Amy Sedaris • More than anything, acting helped me discover who I’m not. I’ve learned that I’m a girly girl, but not a prissy girl. – Debby Ryan • My mother was my Girl Scout leader, and George’s mother was his Cub Scout leader. In fact, that’s when some say her hair turned white. – Laura Bush • My real dream is to have a whole, like, buy a whole piece of land. Imagine, like, a long driveway. Like, a cul de sac-type street, with maybe, like, seven houses. Me be right here. Have my mom be able to be right here. My brother over here. My girl’s grandmother and family right here. Friends over there. That’s my real dream. – J. Cole • Nature makes boys and girls lovely to look upon so they can be tolerated until they acquire some sense. – M. William Phelps • Never call a girl fat, even if you’re joking. – Demi Lovato • Never love someone whom you think you need to mend – or who makes you feel like you should be mended. There are boys out there who look for shining girls; they will stand next to you and say quiet things in your ear that only you can hear and that will slowly drain the joy out of your heart. The books about vampires are true, baby. Drive a stake through their hearts and run away. – Caitlin Moran • No girl wants a secretly gay boyfriend, every dude wants a secretly gay girlfriend. – Joe Rogan • No legal ceremony–no election of the woman–no penalty for the perfidy of the man–no law to compel him to do his duty, no compensation for the poor woman who is turned adrift like the girl of the street, penniless, to sell herself on the best possible terms. This is Divine marriage, or Moses and the Bible lie; and this is Bible divorce–putting away! – Victoria Woodhull • No one ever told me I was pretty when I was a little girl. All little girls should be told they’re pretty, even if they aren’t. – Marilyn Monroe • No one knows how it is that with one glance a boy can break through into a girl’s heart. – Nancy Thayer • Nobody loves a fat girl, but oh how a fat girl can love. – Jim Croce • Only one girl has ever really wrapped my stomach into pretzels. She didn’t give me butterflies. She gave me pterodactyls I’m talking terrible internal bruising and the first time I kissed her was like the first time I saw fireworks, which was like the sky first kissing me in the eyeballs – George Watsky • Over 270 girls were kidnapped for going to school in Nigeria! They are still missing! I’M outraged and you should be too!! I’m supporting www.globalfundforwomen.org Join me and take a stand!!!!!!! #Bringbackourgirls #revolutionoflove – Madonna Ciccone • Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. – Albert Einstein • Put yourself in Hamlet’s shoes. Suppose you were a prince, and you came back from college to discover that your uncle had murdered your father and married your mother, and you fell in love with a beautiful girl and mistakenly murdered her father, and then she went crazy and drowned herself. What would you do? Go back for a masters? – Art Buchwald • Sex is something I really don’t understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right away. Last year I made a rule that I was going to quit horsing around with girls that, deep down, gave me a pain in the ass. I broke it, though, the same week I made it – the same night, as a matter of fact. – J. D. Salinger • She was a natural blonde, with delicate hands and feet, and in her youthful photographs one saw a girl with mocking eyes and a tragic smile, the course of whose life would conspire in time to transpose that pair of adjectives. – Michael Chabon • She’s the wild, feline, untamed part of you, your sexual alter ego and the opposite of the “good girl” or “little lady.” Some of us know her better than others do, but I would venture to guess that your erotic creature hasn’t seen nearly enough light of day. – Sheila Kelley • She’s the kind of girl who climbed the ladder of success wrong by wrong. – Mae West • Some guys like to undermine a girl’s self-esteem with little verbal jabs. Eventually it all adds up. One bee sting doesn’t hurt a horse, but enough bee stings can kill a horse. – Oliver Gaspirtz • Sometimes I see really skinny girls. They may look great, but…they’re not happy. Have a cupcake. – Kathy Wakile • Straight to the top, rooftop glows. With a hand full of girls and they all so foreign. Brain so poisoned, rainbows flowing. – The Weeknd • Take away the Big Bang and what has God done? Burned a bush and got a girl pregnant. Great, he’s a high school junior. – Stephen Colbert • The American girl makes a servant of her husband and then finds him contemptible for being a servant – John Steinbeck • The best accessories a girl can have are her closest friends. – Paris Hilton • The best thing a girl can be is a good wife and mother. It is a girl’s highest calling. I hope I am ready. – Nancy E. Turner • The cuter girls kinda went off from the older women because we’re younger, and we’re cuter, we’ve got better bodies, and for some reason that’s like a huge issue with older people. – Heidi • The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says, ‘It’s a girl.’ – Shirley Chisholm • The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things. – Karen Russell • The girls show more skin these days, but I think, generally, they behave the same way as when I was growing up. – Cecily von Ziegesar • The jamaat was an almost silly mish-mash of people: Rude Dawud’s pork-pie hat poking up here, a jalab-and-turban there, Jehangir’s big Mohawk rising from a sea of kufis, Amazing Ayyub still with no shirt, girls scattered throughout – some in hejab, some not and Rabeya in punk-patched burqa doing her thing. But in its randomness it was gorgeous, reflecting an Islam I felt could not happen anywhere else … If Islam was to be saved, it would be saved by the crazy ones: Jehangir and Rabeya and Fasiq and Dawud and Ayyub and even Umar. – Michael Muhammad Knight • There are many facts within fiction. This captivating story provides invaluable insights into the childhood of a girl who has Asperger’s syndrome. Fiction allows the author to explore different perspectives and add poignancy to the experiences of sensory sensitivity and being bullied and teased of someone who has Asperger’s syndrome. The title Delightfully Different describes Asperger’s syndrome but also the qualities of this novel. – Tony Attwood • There are no good girls gone wrong – just bad girls found out. – Mae West • There are so many girls, and so few princes. – Liza Minnelli • There are two things that are more difficult than making an after-dinner speech: climbing a wall which is leaning toward you and kissing a girl who is leaning away from you. – Winston Churchill • There is a small window of opportunity for freckled girls to tan. – Jeffrey Eugenides • There is no shortage of evidence that when we support the fundamental freedoms of women and girls, they are able to realize their full potential to engage in, contribute to and benefit from sustainable development. In doing so, we will all reap the benefits; in our homes, throughout our communities, and across our nations. – Sam Kutesa • There is not one female comic who was beautiful as a little girl. – Joan Rivers • There was a little girl, When she was good, she was very, very good. But when she was bad, she was horrid. – Jun Mochizuki • There was the time I bought three cars in the span of three or four weeks. It was crazy; it wasn’t greedy. It was mine, my girl’s, my mom’s. I got Benzes for my ladies. But I felt crazy. You have to understand I come from a world where we’re very modest. But that’s not greedy. That’s nice, right? – J. Cole • There were about ten years of trying, failing, trying again, suffering rejection, etc. My first published book, ‘Story of a Girl’, was the fourth book I wrote. – Sara Zarr • There’s no point for me to party. I have a girl that I love. I don’t need that. – Ryan Cabrera • There’s only a very small representation of girls among you. Too little. Women have much to tell us in today’s society. Sometimes we are too machistas and we don’t allow enough space to women. But women can see things from a different angle to us, with a different eye. Women are able to pose questions we men are unable to understand. Look out for this fact: she is the only one who has put a question for which there is no answer. She couldn’t put it into words but expressed it with tears. – Pope Francis • These Jews who run things, who are producing this mental illness ¬-teenage suicide…all these Jewish sicknesses…that’s nothing new. The Talmud’s full of things like sex with boys and girls. – David Duke • This attitude means you haven’t met a girl worthy of your attention. You’ll want to get caught if the right girl comes along. – Simone Elkeles • This is why I can’t be with Levi. Because I’m the kind of girl who fantasizes about being trapped in a library overnight-and Levi can’t even read. – Rainbow Rowell • This was how the modern working girl behaved. She didn’t hide her femininity or apologize for it, as they did in the old days. She flaunted it and, having been given more than any woman before her, demanded even more than that. – J. Courtney Sullivan • This-this was what made life: a moment of quiet, the water falling in the fountain, the girl’s voice. . . a moment of captured beauty. Those who are truly wise will never permit such moments to escape. – Louis L’Amour • To find out a girl’s faults, praise her to her girlfriends. – Benjamin Franklin • Today’s girls are tomorrow’s women – and leaders. – Isabel Allende • Too many girls follow the line of least resistance, but a good line is hard to resist. – Mae West • Wait until France gets a hard shot in the nose. Wait until France reacts with some nasty work. They’ll get a golf-clap from the chattering class over here and a you-go-girl from Red America. France could nuke an Algerian terrorist camp and the rest of the world would tut-tut for a day, then ask if the missiles France used were for sale. And of course the answer would be oui. – James Lileks • We are living in a material world and I’m a material girl. – Madonna Ciccone • We do not suffer by accident. It does not often happen that the interference of friends will persuade a young man of independent fortune to think no more of a girl whom he was violently in love with only a few days before. – Elizabeth Bennett • We had no irony when it came to girls, though. There was just no time to develop it. One moment they weren’t there, not in any form that interested us, anyway, and the next you couldn’t miss them; they were everywhere, all over the place. One moment you wanted to clonk them on the head for being your sister, or someone else’s sister, and the next you wanted to….actually, we didn’t know what we wanted next, but it was something. Almost overnight, all these sisters (there was no other kind of girl, not yet)had become interesting, disturbing, even. – Nick Hornby • We have lingered in the chambers of the sea By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown Till human voices wake us… and we drown. – T. S. Eliot • We must not close our eyes to the fact that there are conspiring men who would pollute young boys, and girls of corresponding age, for sake of increasing profits. – David O. McKay • We’re every age at once and tucked inside ourselves like Russian nesting dolls. My mother is an 8 year old girl. My grandson is a 74 year old retiree whose kidneys just failed. And that’s the glue between me and you. That’s the screws and nails. We live in a house made of each other and if that sounds strange that’s because it is. – George Watsky • Well Stephanie, I’d like to thank you for giving me such a kind Christmas gift, but unfortunately I didn’t get you any gifts. But then again, what can you get for the girl whose had everyone? – Chris Jericho • Well, we’re living in a material world, and I’m a material girl… or boy. – Adam Sandler • What are you two doing flirting with this nerd? I told you, you are supposed to be in charge of the 50 dancing girls I had set up for Miz’s celebration. – Alex Riley • What better job is there for a 17-year-old girl than being in a pop group? – Susan Ann Sulley • What do I like in a girl? I like a girl that likes me, a girl that knows how to smile and see the bright side of things. A girl that makes me a better person. – James Lafferty • What does being a girl have to do with it? There’s no time to think when you’re on the spot. – Bisco Hatori • What I know in my heart is that women and girls on the ground are powerful and that they are leaders. – Charlize Theron • When a girl cries over a guy,she really loves him.when a guy cries over a girl ,he will never love another girl like her. – Lil Wayne • When a girl is beautiful, she gets to pick – she never has to wait for someone to choose her. – Adriana Trigiani • When it’s all over I won’t miss the bruises he gave me to impress girls, or the occasional scar which will give me a story to tell my grandchildren, but I’ll definitely miss the pranks and the laughing and all the making fun of each other. I’ll miss the funky advice he gives me about everything – football, girls, video games, clothes. Most of all, I’ll miss having an older brother. – Skandar Keynes • When you were a little girl, Madam…..was this the woman you dreamed of becoming? – Andrew Sean Greer • Whenever I’m about to have sex with a girl, I play it smart and just automatically assume she has herpes; because that way I don’t have to tell her about my herpes. – Anthony Jeselnik • Whores are the most honest girls. They present the bill right away. – Alberto Giacometti • Why does a man take it for granted that a girl who flirts with him wants him to kiss her – when, nine times out of ten, she only wants him to want to kiss her? – Helen Rowland • Why is it that every time a girl says a guy is bothering her, it’s fluffed off with oh, he just likes you, as if that makes it okay? – Kelley Armstrong • Yet little by little, I was also becoming the girl who was learning to live with this, all of it, letting it weave together with everything else, the good and the bad, as life moved forward, because thats what life did, regardless of whether we were ready for it or not. – Donna Freitas • You and I both know there’s got to be some greater storyline for you than ‘girl gets heart broken, was sad forever’. I think a nice one would be ‘girl gets heart broken, was sad for a while but in her heartbreak she found freedom, friends, and the ability to look back and laugh at all she’d learned. She now lives her life on her own terms and still has fantastic hair.’ – Taylor Swift • You are the one girl that made me risk eveything for a future worth having. – Simone Elkeles • You don’t have to wait for anyone’s approval to do things. You don’t have to try to get a job and go through set steps before you start a career or start your life. That’s what I want young girls to know – you can do anything you want. Just start. – Petra Collins • You eventually get used to looking at girls picking their leotards out of their bums and that sort of stuff. – Adam Garcia • You know you love me. Xoxo, GossipGirl. – Cecily von Ziegesar • You know, honestly, if a girl can make me laugh, I’m pretty much sold. – Ryan Lochte • You may admire a girl’s curves on the first introduction, but the second meeting shows up new angles. – Mae West

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jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'i', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_i').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_i img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

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jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'u', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '4', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_u').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_u img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); );

[ingerlizzy2]

Brutally honest reviews of the 32 books I read this year

Warning:

There are some spoilers below. Also, don’t be offended if I didn’t like a book that you like/love. These are just my personal opinions. Please don’t scream at me for spelling errors. 

The Mark of Athena, The House of Hades and The Blood of Olympus:

I’m doing all three of these in one go because I don’t really have any complaints about any of them. I have really enjoyed all the books I’ve read in the Percy Jackson universe. I find the books amusing and I enjoy the fact that even though some of these books are considered ‘kids’ books, Rick Riordan doesn’t ‘dumb’ down anything to appeal more to younger children. The books are easily read and very enjoyable. It’s easy to find characters that you can relate to and I don’t feel that any of the characters’ arcs were favored over others.

Score: 8/10

Badass Women Score: 9/10

The Demigod files:

Now, this is just me, but I don’t really enjoy these types of short stories. However, as with the other Percy Jackson books, I did find this one to be a good read and it was fun to dive back into some of the old characters’ stories.

Score: 7/10 +1 point for giving me more of Grover’s Blah-hah-hah’s. They have been missed.

Everything Everything:

This book had me in tears- in a good way! I finished this book in about 30 mins and I just couldn’t put it down.

Score: 9/10

Twilight:

I liked it… It made me nostalgic, had me traveling back to my thirteen year old self and my obsession with Edward Cullen. It’s better than the movie, okay?

Score: 5-6/10

Thirteen year old me’s Score: 12/10 *heart eyes* *sigh* 

New moon:

I like me a bit of angst but this ain’t enjoyable. Bella is an idiot and don’t even get me started on how unnecessary this book was for the series. (The movie too.)

Score: 2/10

Usefulness Score: Go die in a hole.

Eclipse:

I like this one the most out of all of them. More action, character ‘development’(I guess) and not everyone is a whiny little bitch in this one.

Score: 7/10

Whiny Score: Not that bad, I guess.

Breaking Dawn:

THIS FUCKING BOOK. I suffered. (SPOILERS!) Jacob is SUCH a whiny asshole in the first half of the book. The rest is meh.

Score: 2-3/10

Jacob Whiny Bitch Score: 100000000/10

Bella willing to die for the dick Score: 10/10

The Fallen series:

Read them, liked almost all of them. The last one had me struggling a bit. I was just not feeling the story anymore- it had just gone on for too long and it became a little annyoing.

Collective Score: 8/10

“You gargoyle bitch.”-Me, 2018

The Last Jedi:

I really loved this book. It was great being able to really step into the minds of my favorite characters and see the story beyond the film.

Biased Reylo Score: 10/10

Hand Porn Score: 12/10

The Infernal Devices:

Second time reading this one. Love the characters (aren’t we all weak for Herondales?), though they’re still not my favorite of the shadowhunter books. I am not as fond of the story in this trilogy as I am of the other series’ storylines. This one isn’t as interesting, in my opinion.

Collective and Biased Herondale Score: 9/10

“Never trust a duck.”- Will Herondale

The Vampire diaries books 1-4:

I like all the characters, except Elena. I think she’s whiny and annoying and she honestly acts more like a child than a teenager/young adult. I don’t like the whole angel plot-thingy and it was hard to continue reading after book two tbh.

Damon Sexy Murder Score: 10/10

Collective Book Score: 4/10

Creepy Pedophile undertones: A little.

Call Me By Your Name:

This book ripped my heart out and stepped on it. It was beautiful and the movie is just the same. Beautifully written and I loved having to read between the lines in this story. I can’t say anything other than it being one of my favorites of this year.

Gay Romance Score: 12/10

Book Score: 10/10

Guilty Pleasures (Club Vampyre):

I really like this version of vampires and Anita is a really relatable character. She’s badass, strong, human (but not whiny) and the story is really fun to read.

Badass Women Score: 12/10, fuck em up buttercup

Book score: 9/10,just because I am salty about there not being enough Jean-Claude for me.

Even When You Lie To Me:

This was a really beautiful book. It may sound like bad fanfiction if you only read the back, but the summary does not do this book justice. It’s a wonderful story of growing up and becoming yourself, learning who you are and learning to stand up for yourself. The main character doesn’t really get described much in the book, something that makes it that much easier to relate to her.

Book Score: 8/10

I have read this book five times this year… Pray for me.

The Sun Is Also A Star:

This book and this author are both amazing. The story has so much diversity and its written in a really cool way, not only showing you the thoughts of the main characters but also the people they interfere with. Realistic but not boring, I cried reading this.(I cry a lot)

Book Score: 9/10

Melon-butt Score: Melon/Melon

Eragon and Eldest:

Read this in English, please. I tried reading it in my own language (Norwegian) and I have never hated anything so much. (Everything sounded so ridiculous) The books are amazing and I love the fact that Eragon is just 15 and is not some super smart or extraordinary person. He makes mistakes and you get to watch him learn and grow as a person. There are so many amazing things about these books that I can’t even tell you. I can’t wait to read on, though they can prove a little difficult to read at times. (takes a while to read them)

Collective Book score: 8/10

Family Drama Score: Drama Llama

Alex Rider: Stormbreaker:

This book is technically intended for children but I thought it was really fun to read and it was a really nice break from reading heavy books.

Score: 7/10

Every Day:

I loved this book so much that i’m afraid to read the sequel because I don’t want it to ruin the story for me. This book doesn’t need a continuation at all.

Score: 9/10

Queen Of Air And Darkness:

Cassandra Clare strikes again and I couldn’t be happier about it. This book blew my mind and my heart to shreds. I was absolutely not expecting the ending that I got and I finished this the same day I bought it because I could not put it down. Throw all your theories out the window because you have no idea about what’s going to happen. I can’t even say anything because I’ll spoil it but this was by far my favorite trilogy in the shadowhunter universe and I need more.

Book score: 10/10

Herondale Score: I’m a hoe/10

“Come to papa.”- Jace Herondale

The Perks of Being a Wallflower:

Really good book, loved the mystery and the characters. Greatly written and I also really enjoyed the movie, even though it leaves out some important details.

Sadness Score: 8/10

Book Score: 8/10 +2 points for Rocky Horror references, -1 point for mentioning The Catcher in the Rye (You’ll understand later)

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone:

This was the last book i finished this year, but I have one more that I need to save for the bottom of this list because otherwise I’ll explode. (You’ll understand) I loved this from the first page and I am currently reading number two. 

Book Score: 9/10 +1 point for Dumbledore's beard.

Dumbledore’s Beard Score: Beardy Beard/Beard

The Catcher in the Rye:

Let me start off by saying that if this was my book, I would burn it in a dumpster fire. I know it’s considered a classic, but this book is the worst piece of crap I have ever read. The main character is an asshole. (which is fine) A lot of books have asshole characters and I don’t hate them because of that, but this book has nothing else. Holden is hypocritical, boring and has the vocabulary of a three year old (no offence to three year olds, I love you)The writing is repetitive and boring. The plot- what plot? I have never before been this angry at a book. It is useless, does nothing for anyone and there is no meaning to anything written in here. Nothing happens at all and I’m mad that I wasted three days of my life trying to finish this book.

Score: -3000/10

I am so mad.

(Spoiler!) The best part of this book is when the main character gets punched in the face.

“Is it legal to burn library books?”- Me, 2018.

[puclpodcast]

Pokemon of the Week #46 – Lanturn

Glub Glub PUCL readers, do you see that light in the distance, that haunting yet beautiful glow Illuminating the darkness of the ocean. If you get close enough you might see one of the most adorable Pokemon known to man but it might also be the last thing you ever see. Its a Lanturn and it happens to be my favourite Pokemon. It is another Generation 2 Pokemon with the perfect cross between simplicity and creativity in its design, and it has some interesting back story to boot. Before we jump into this article I want to shout out or Discord where I learned many of our members share a love of Lanturn and we had some great discussions.

National Dex #745 – Lanturn

Description: The Light Pokemon Type: Water/Electric Abilities: Volt Absorb/Illuminate Hidden Ability: Water Absorb Competitive: [Smogon PU] [Smogon NU] [Smogon RU] [Chinchou Smogon LC] Evolution: Chinchou -> Level 27 -> Lanturn

Origin: Lanturn’s name is a play on “lantern”. Since it learns Volt Switch I have linked the “turn” part to the Volt-Turn strategy. However, since that came out after Gold and Silver I’m sure the initial reason behind the spelling is that Lanturn “turns”��all frowns upside down with its adorable, goofy appearance. Lanturn is based on an anglerfish and though its appearance is much friendlier, its Pokedex entries often speak of it luring prey using its light exactly how an anglerfish would. Original Appearance: Pokemon Gold and Silver Dex Entry [Day: Sun]: Should you peer into the ocean at night and see a light shining like the stars, that is Lanturn. TCG:

Sun & Moon

Shiny:

Analysis:

Lanturn in my opinion is what happens when you cross an anglerfish with a dolphin. It has the cuteness of a dolphin with the uniqueness of the anglerfish. I have always described it as derpy, floating through the ocean doing its own thing with a big smile on its face.

Lanturn comes equipped with Illuminate, the best ability in the game for anyone scared of the Dark or hunting in the ocean. For everyone else there is Volt Absorb and Water Absorb. There are few Pokemon with two different immunity abilities, Bronzong is sort of one and I actually can’t think of any others right now. Either way though it forces the opponent into a guessing game, do you have Volt Absorb or Water Absorb. With Lanturn you almost always choose Volt Absorb since you already resist Water but I remember back in ORAS RU I ran a Water Absorb Lanturn + Camerupt core that was a lot of fun. On the stats side, Lanturn is very PU looking. Its strongest feature is its large 125HP with decent SpDef and SpAtt. Its Speed is mediocre and its Physical stats are poor.

SumtimesIFly’s sister’s homemade present to him

  Lanturn’s attacking moves are well defined. The standard Water and Electric STAB moves like Hydro Pump, Scald, Thunderbolt, and Volt Switch are there plus it has Ice Beam, Dazzling Gleam, and Signal Beam for coverage. I even thought of running Watmel Berry and Natural Gift to lure in Ferrothorn or Magearna which were huge threats to one of my teams. Its utility goes on forever and all of the moves offer interesting sets. Ion Deluge, Heal Bell, Eerie Impulse, Whirlpool, Icy Wind, Agility, Aqua Ring, Amnesia to name a few. My favourite is Amnesia/Aqua Ring/Heal Bell because I have dreams where no Physical Pokemon exist and Leftovers Lanturn sits there in its ring of water as Pokemon try to bother it but it doesn’t feel a thing. Unfortunately, that never works as planned but its cute thought. As with every new game I hope that in Ultra Sun and Moon Lanturn get access to Tail Glow. I know it isn’t technically a tail but it fits so well and would be a huge buff.

There are a few sets on Smogon that I’ll cover here. The first is Choice Specs. It turns out that in PU Lanturn’s speed isn’t the worst around and it can actually be run as an Choice Specs user with really any combination of moves you desire. Volt Switch, Thunderbolt, Hydro Pump, Ice Beam, Signal Beam, Dazzling Gleam, or HP Fire. I haven’t played much PU so I don’t know how effective it would be but it sounds like a reasonable threat. A much more interesting set that relies on Lanturn’s strengths is that of a cleric. It runs Leftovers for recovery, Heal Bell for clericing…, Volt Switch, Scald, and Toxic. Some sets run Protect over Toxic to get more recovery but I think it needs Toxic to prevent it from being free set up fodder. In lower tiers, status is very common and having a cleric can be game winning and single handedly counter some teams that rely on status as a win condition. Lanturn has free switch ins on almost all Electric, Steel, and Water types giving it plenty of opportunity to use Heal Bell, throw off a Toxic, or pivot out with Volt Switch. You’ll notice throughout all of these sets that Volt Switch is present. I think that Lanturns #1 best use is as a pivot since it is bulky enough to absorb a hit and then pivot out gaining you momentum. For this reason it is important your team has answers to Ground types because they will prevent this strategy from really taking off.

For the past week I have been playing all sorts of Lanturn teams that I’ve made. I would have done PU where it finds itself currently ranked but I received some challenges to show off Lanturn’s true potential! That being said it is hard to make Lanturn the core of a team due to its poor offenses so you will see that I use it as more of a support Pokemon to help set the stage for other threats. Here is my team for RU. This was my first foray into SM RU meaning I won’t recommend this team. There is plenty of room for improvement once I understand the threats and counters present in the tier but it can be a starting point. I initially tried the Aqua Ring strategy I mentioned earlier but that never had enough impact and I switched it up. Welcome the Heatran of RU PUCL. With Whirlpool it can trap an opponent’s Pokemon that would cause your team trouble or if you are lucky that you counter completely. Something like Galvantula, Blastoise, or Diancie. Once it has fallen into your trap you throw off a Toxic and Protect every other turn until they are toast. Since Lanturn is typically too slow for Substitute, which Heatran runs, I replaced it with Heal Bell to prevent the trapped Pokemon from Toxic-ing you back. When not trapping this set can still act as a cleric, throw off Toxic, or gain momentum because whirlpooled opponents can’t switch giving you an easy prediction. Here are some replays i have of it in action! (ignore my Zoroark lapse in game 2 please, it was kind of late)

http://bit.ly/2gBeHIe http://bit.ly/2eEY9Ce

Alright now for the real test of Lanturn’s merit, OU. I have been climbing the suspect test ladder up to #148 (1332 ELO) with this set. It has been a lot of fun too and I am much more confident in this team than the RU one so I encourage you to try it out. My goal was to pair Lanturn with an Electric weak team because it is not only immune to Electric types it walls the common sets completely. Tapu Koko, Manetric, not Xircuitry because of Energy Ball, and most Magearna sets. For this reason you see Gyarados and Celesteela present. The key thing about Lanturn is that it is Ground weak so it needs good Ground switch ins surrounding it. Both Celesteela and Landorus-T fit that category, plus Mew is there for Zygarde and Garchomp. Landorus is Scarfed to deal with Volcarona as well. Finally, I needed another threat to round out my mostly defensive team which is why I chose Magearna. With Fairy/Electric coverage it hits most of the things that the rest of my team can’t deal with. It can also switch in easily on moves that threaten the rest of the squad, Will-o-Wisp, Knock Off, and Toxic, then proceed to set up. Enough about the team lets talk about the star. I wanted Lanturn to be a slow pivot and that was it. I wanted it to take a hit then Volt Switch out into a counter. Therefore it is max HP and SpDef with a snazzy Assualt Vest. For moves it ran Scald to avoid being a free switch in by Physical attackers, Ice Beam and Dazzling Gleam for coverage. With a lack of threatening Ground and Grass type Special Attackers there isn’t a Special move out there that can put a dent in this sharp dressed fish. It is a great teammate to have when fighting Tapu Koko rain teams as well because it counters Pelliper, Koko, and Greninja. I actually found my set was too fast and that I was outspeeding things like Clefable. If I were making this team again I might run even less Speed because being a slow pivot is that important. It lets you get in your Gyarados or Magearna to set up and win in the late game or Landorus to put on pressure mid game. One more change I would make is to run enough SpAtt to KO Landorus with Ice Beam. Ground types are a serious threat to this strategy so luring it in with your bright Electric type light before demolishing it with an Ice Beam offers game winning potential. My final comment is that Dazzling Gleam may not be that important. The only Pokemon I really needed it for was Kyurem but I far more frequently struggled with Ferrothorn and Scizor so it might be a good idea to use that lure on your head one more time and learn HP Fire. I added some replays below of it doing its thing in OU!

http://bit.ly/2eFit6p http://bit.ly/2gANqFU

xRainxWhenxIxDiex

This article is super long, but I find it fitting for my favourite Pokemon. Lanturn’s little brother Chinchou may not have its cuteness but it does have much better recognition in its tier. I won’t get too into the details but both the Berry Juice and Choice Scarf sets can be very effective in Little Cup. Even in VGC, if you are looking to play some goofy games, you can run Soak Lanturn with Tapu Bulu/Koko to get some surprise KO’s. There is plenty of room for trying new things with Lanturn which brings us to the theory crafting of the week. Ion Deluge Lanturn. Ion Deluge is a unique move that Lanturn learns with +1 priority. It transforms all normal type attacks this turn into Electric type allowing it to not only eliminate the damage but to heal thanks to Volt Absorb. By adding Toxic onto this set you can wear down threats in your tier, such as CurseLax or Swellow in RU, while they futilely try to attack you, only being able to heal you instead. I haven’t tried it but it is next on my list of Lanturn sets for sure.

Kezrek (my phone background for the past several years)

  In the icy depths the sea churns, lost Pokemon can’t find their way, until by the soft glow of Lanturns, they are guided back to light of day. I hope this article didn’t drag on too long and that it helped fuel PUCL’s Lanturn love. Let me know your favourite Lanturn/Chinchou sets or facts either here or in the Discord! Until next time, SumtimesIFly

from Pokemon of the Week #46 – Lanturn

[greenspasm]

The Great Tory Terror

If you’ve been following this election and are not completely terrified at the prospect of another 5 years of Tories, then there is something completely wrong with you. Oh no, I’m not exaggerating; there must be something actually wrong with you if you look at the Tories and say “well they get my vote”. Whether its a compassion deficiency or just general ignorance, something isn’t right with you. Get it checked out. Consult a doctor while we still have them.

Do I sound alarmed? No shit! What, you thought this was going to be happy fun times? Oh blowing this out of proportion am I? Well let me break this down as much as possible.

Tory Track Record

Life under the Tories is like an endless boxing match between an enraged gorilla and a crippled, blind 5 year old. There are 4 types of people in this scenario. There are those who are the child - severely outmatched and outgunned, with absolutely no hope in sight of surviving let alone fighting back. There are those who watch from the sidelines - some cheering, some howling with pity. There are those who are the referee - trying to actually stop the onslaught by doing everything in their democratic power to fight back; and there are those who are the Gorilla - we call them Tories.

You see, Tories don’t give a shit. About what? Ha ha, does it matter. Tories don’t give a flying fuck about anything. They are husks. Empty shells posing as people that perpetually seek to fill their internal voids by taking. Taking what? anything and everything. Money, jobs, skills, education, sometimes even lives. Oh I’m not accusing them of murder, they just help. At their core, Tories have one single goal: to marginalise and even sometimes eradicate anything that isn’t them. They’re rich, so the poor have to go. They’re under private healthcare, so get rid of the NHS. They’ve never had to worry about employment or anything else, so those that can’t afford education or struggle to be employed, they’re just under achievers and have to be demonised. 

A Tory’s greatest weapon is abhorrance. The closest adjective I have to describe how horrifyingly malicious this is is ‘evil’. Tories teach you to hate. Hate everyone. Like a cancer they spread their viewpoints onto the masses. Hate foreigners, hate pensioners, hate the working man, hate doctors, hate teachers, hate the impoverished, hate them all and then hate some more. Tories have done this since day one. Every Tory government in some way shape of form has used hatred of others to win support. “Why should you help others? What did they ever do for you? Why should you pay for someone who can’t work? You’re a hard worker, so why should they get the money you earned?” They pump this shit out constantly and it works, and in the worst cases it creates a belief of “if it doesn’t happen to me, it doesn’t happen at all”.

Because the thing is people suffer under the Tories. Tory rule leads to cuts, leads to food banks, leads to zero hour contracts, leads to tuition fees and more. People suffer under the Tories, but the pre-installed abhorrance is the masterstroke. Right when your anger is about to boil over into taking action, the Tories swoop in and tell you who to blame. “Oh, your skill and trade is dying out? Blame the EU. You’re struggling to get a job, or an appointment with your GP? Well that’s immigration for you. You think crime is on the rise and the police are useless? Well that’s the youths of today - they expect handouts daily and when they don’t get it they commit crimes. No, no, no, it isn’t our fault. We didn’t outsource your skills to other nations because it was cheaper for us - the billionaires. We haven’t been dismantling the healthcare system or discouraging doctors - forcing them to strike. We haven’t been cutting funds to services countrywide. Don’t blame us, blame them!”

And people lap it up, because of course they do. This is bad enough as it is, but why then is this election seemingly more nightmarish than ever. Two reasons. One of them is Brexit.

The Problem with Brexit

On May 18th 2017, ITV held a debate where the leaders of each party stood on stage and argued their case. I hate these. All it is is bickering half the time and the stage is too full for any coherent point to be made. But even so, two people didn’t attend. Jeremy Corbyn and Theresa May. Now before you scoff and sneer at Corbyn, it’s worth noting he didn’t attend because Theresa had already pulled out. Had Corbyn gone on that stage without her, he would have been public enemy number 1 and would have received a royal bollocking from everyone else there. Why? Because he’s the opposition, the one closest to fighting back against May, and of course he wouldn’t have done enough - no matter what he argued. The worst thing about this is the Tories would get off scot free. Since they wouldn’t be there, they’d happily sit back and watch as their main threat is taken down live on television - plummeting Corbyn’s public opinion. So not attending was a smart move on Corbyn’s part, and had Theresa turned up, I reckon he’d have been there, but what was Theresa’s excuse?

Let me make something perfectly clear: Theresa May did not attend because she is a coward - like all Tories, really. Having been in power for 7 years now, the conservatives couldn’t even turn up to defend their actions. “Oh but Theresa hasn’t even been in charge for that long, so your point is invalid” oh I’m sorry, was David Cameron an alien from outer space, not affiliated with the Tories at all? Are we voting for one person in the election or the party they’re a part of? Theresa might only have been in charge for some 9 months or so now, but it has been a conservative government for 7 years (yes, I’m including the coalition because that was Tory lite, diet Tory if you will). If she’s part of that government, leader or otherwise, that’s the record she’s defending. 

And she didn’t have the balls to turn up. Oh but that didn’t stop the official Conservative Twitter account from tweeting about the debate.

Oh yeah. Didn’t have the balls to turn up but from the comfort of your safe space you feel you can just commentate and criticise, do you? If you’re that passionate about another party’s failings, TURN UP AND DEBATE THEM, but if you’re too spineless to do that, then sit down and kindly shut the fuck up.

This is what I’m getting at. Theresa May and the Tories are weak. Not in numbers, nor in the polls, but in character. They are weak, spineless human beings. They’re the bullies in the school yard who are all mouth when you’re alone and they’re surrounded by mates, but put them one and one and watch how suddenly quiet they become. Weak. Utterly pathetic and weak.

And some of you think they’re the ones to get us out of the EU?

Look, I don’t care if you’re a leaver or a remainer. I don’t care if you want hard brexit or soft brexit or no brexit; but knowing that this is the character of the conservative party, do you really think they’re the chosen ones to take on Brussels? 26 vs 1. That’s the reality here, folks. Doesn’t matter what you think is right, or for the best, the reality is it’s Us versus the EU in a web of complicated negotiations. To even see daylight at the end of this we need the best, and Theresa certainly isn’t that. “Oh but what about Corbyn, you think he’s any better?” I’ll take my bloody chances, mate! Corbyn’s actually talking about policies to do with Britain. The EU is there of course, but he’s not running an election on it. Unlike someone else I could name.

Right now Theresa and her merry band of nitwits are all touting the same rhetoric - “strong and stable”. Thing is, they used the exact same rhetoric at the 2015 election and look where we are now. Food banks on the rise, NHS crumbling, and we’re leaving the EU with absolutely no idea of what lies around the corner. This is supposed to be strong and stable? Christ. Quite frankly I can’t see things getting any worse with Labour. 

Also, there’s nothing strong or stable about holding a snap election after months of denial, right after triggering article 50. Don’t know if you know this, Theresa, but this is OUR time we’re wasting here. The EU will gladly just wait this out. But us? We’ve got 2 years, less than that now, to have a deal figured out with the EU. If we don’t have one:

Point is, we’re on a deadline. We haven’t got the precious time to piss about, and we’re dossing around with elections?! So yeah, strong and stable aren't the words coming to my mind when I think about you or your government, Theresa. Incompetent and delusional are closer.  

I have zero faith in this government as it is, but they also want the hard Brexit route, claiming its the will of the people. Even if you voted leave, hard Brexit is not what you want. Even if you think it is, it isn’t. It will isolate us completely and leave us with nothing. It has the potential to plunge Britain into a bloody depression, and no, this isn’t project fear. At a time when the world is at its most global, being isolated is national suicide. We will have very little, and we’ll have no help. “Well at least we won’t be in the EU anymore” What’s that, you’ve got a headache? Well let me decapitate you. Sure you’ll be a little on the dead side, but hey, at least your headache’s gone. Long story short, if you think the Tories will get the best deal for Britain and - by proxy - you, you are severely mistaken.

So Brexit is a massive chasm of shit to get through, but there is also another haunting thing the Tories have that is somehow equally as frightening.

The Monstrous Manifesto

Despite primarily running this election on buzzwords and Brexit, the Tories do actually have some policies to go along with it. Yeah, it’s most of the same. Cut this, add that. She hasn’t put down “kill all the poor” yet, so that’s a plus; but as you scroll through it, more and more policies start to get scary. 

For example, the Tories want to decide what you can or can’t say on the internet. Even if you’re thinking this isn’t full blown authoritarian yet, it’s the thin end of the wedge, and as I’ve already said, I don’t trust the Tories at all. Do not think they will have self-control. They will take as much as they can get away with, and if we’re out of the EU, that’ll be a lot. It’s in moments like these that remind me of how everyone criticises PC culture.

George Carlin once said “political correctness is fascism with a smile” and people have lauded that ever since. “How dare you tell me what I can or cannot say, that’s fascism” is the aggregate response to PC culture, but I think a lot of people don’t understand what fascism actually is. In regards to free speech, fascism is like the perfect Tory - it doesn’t give a shit. See, a fascist state can arrest you for speaking your mind. You can face actual punishment for having a different opinion from those in power, or worse, you can be killed. Alarming? You’re damn right it is. PC culture isn’t fascism unless it becomes law to arrest or kill racists for being racist. PC respects free speech, it just asks that you’re not a dick about it. You face no actual punishment for being a bigot or just being an all around piece of garbage - so stop comparing PC culture to fascism, especially when real fascism can just waltz into power with a breath of “strong and stable”.

Other elements of the manifesto include needing ID to vote. On the surface it makes okay sense, but one look across the pond and you’ll see how in the hands of the right-wing this will lead to problems. Tories already despise the poor and the young. They’ll never give 16 year olds the vote because JESUS they’ve been shitting on the young all their lives. Tuition fees are more than ever a joke now, and don’t even think of owning your own property you young bastards, we wouldn’t want you to aspire now, would we. Voter ID has the potential to lead to voter suppression. No matter what ID you bring, it might not qualify to vote. They’ll say it’s to fight voter fraud, but the reality is they simply don’t want certain people to vote; and since they’ll have our internet data, they’ll know just who to keep out.

Sorry if it’s all a bit tin-foil-hat right now. I’ll admit, we’re seemingly a long way from that, and maybe I am scaremongering, but ask if I think it’s beyond the Tories and my answer is a profound “Nope!” This is exactly in line with the way they do things. They’re essentially dictators living in a democracy, so much so that the longer they stay in power, and the fewer checks and balances they have, the less of a democracy we actually live in. 

Right now, the manifesto isn’t even a manifesto. It’s not trying to win votes. Nothing in there will sway non-Tories, even if their lives depended on it. The manifesto is unabashedly brutal on all fronts because they do not think they can lose. Tories are typically arrogant as it is, but this is the worst I’ve ever seen them. 

Don’t know what I mean? How about the t’wat Tory candidate for wakefield openly showing contempt for working class people in his constituency because, apparently, if you go to Costa coffee, you’re fair game:

He said this for the world to see, on Twitter, because he feels he can’t lose. What about conservatives with a platform calling underprivileged people with tragic pasts liars or lazy:

Then of course there’s Theresa herself, who is so unbelievably out of touch she says this and thinks nothing of it:

Just say “let them eat cake” and be done with it. Being employed isn’t a miracle cure for all life’s problems and this goes doubly so under Tory rule.

This is another reason why Theresa didn’t turn up to debate. She feels so confident in victory that she thinks she doesn’t have to try. That’s how little regard she has for you. You aren’t even worth the effort to win over. They think they are unstoppable, and its a despairing thought the think they might be right.

So in summary: the Tories hate you. They hate what you love; they hate what you hate; and they in no way want what you want. They can’t be trusted. No amount of buzzwords will change that. Like the vampires on the doorstep asking sweetly to be invited in, it doesn’t mean they won’t drink your blood as soon as they get chance. They’re leeches in every way. They’re cowards. They’re spineless, pathetic, and weak. They’re out-of-touch, closeted fascists who want to do all in their power to keep you in the stone age, and if they win this election, they’ll have nothing to stop them. 

On June 8, I don’t care who you are; where you live; what you want - for Brexit or otherwise - just don’t vote Tory. Vote tactically to keep them out of your your constituency and reduce their majority. Or don’t. Either way, just don’t vote Tory.

Don’t do it.

“Oh politicians are all the same” No, they’re really not. Not this time.

Vote, and do not vote Tory.

If you do vote Tory, you’re everything I just described above.

So don’t.

DON’T VOTE TORY! 

[xt1erminator-blog]

“Celebrity” DMs That Slay

I love Dungeons & Dragons. I love playing it, DMing it, reading about it, watching YouTube videos on subject matter relating to it (Nerdarchy, Matt Colville and Drunkens & Dragons: Play D&D Like A Badass are all great YouTube channels with quality content).  Some games are even great to watch live streams of, especially observing talented “celebrity” Dungeon Masters working their magic, some of them admitting a lot of their “performance” and the content they come up with for their players is improvised and off the cuff.  It takes a lot to pull that off.  Most games out there however, are very difficult to watch and enjoy. There are too many distractions among groups when streaming stuff and it can be boring.

So, for anyone new to the D&D hobby that might be reading this blog, I just wanted to write up some stuff on three of the best publicly known Dungeon Masters out there thanks to the Internet - most of us into D&D will know who they are, and they are all are on a lot of people’s Top 3 Dungeon Masters Ever lists I’m sure. These guys put in some crazy hard work to help the online community better ourselves as Dungeon Masters. Thank you.

(And you know, I should have mentioned this in one of my first posts on this site, but I’m not a professional blogger or even a good writer. This is just my space to shoot the shit (probably mostly talking to myself no doubt) about one of my favourite past times, D&D). Warning: some of this post may seem out of logical order, sorry in advance :)  I had to go back and edit it a few times. Apologies for any inaccuracies as well but I’m pretty confident it’s solid.

Chris Perkins, “Celebrity DM to the Stars”

Being a semi-regular reader of Dungeon magazine for quite some time, I didn’t really pay attention to names of the authors of the short adventure modules published within the magazine’s pages.  When I reconnected with the hobby a couple of years ago after hearing a lot of good praise about 5th Edition D&D, I did more and more research about the people behind it, and naturally stumbled across reading about Chris and the Acquisitions Incorporated live games run at some of the PAX (Penny Arcade Expo) Conventions with the Penny Arcade guys (Jerry Holkins, Mike Krahulik and Scott Kurtz, as well as occasional appearances by celebrities/TV personalities like Wil Wheaton and Morgan Webb, author Patrick Rothfuss, etc.).  Then I went back through old Dungeon magazines after reading that’s how Chris got his start to getting his foot in the door, and have since become a fan of his. He’s even replied to Tweets of mine once or twice. Woo.

I am very entertained by how Chris runs his live games. It’s quite easy to see why he is held in such high regard. I started to lose a little interest in his work however when his regular weekly Dice, Camera, Action web series started. They were starting to run a series based on The Curse of Strahd just before the book released. The PAX games are still great, as are the in-studio AI series episodes, however with Dice, Camera, Action things seemed to really be a struggle and it was hard to follow and really get in to. Between technical difficulties in the first few episodes, to things taking a long time to pick up due to excessive chatter which was in my opinion a waste of time (get on with the game ffs! This happened quite frequently), it was hard to keep myself entertained and motivated enough to finish watching each episode. By the 6th episode or so, I stopped watching D, CA entirely. I decided to revisit it recently and while the presentation is a bit better and they seem to have worked out the kinks in the system, I have come to the conclusion why it wasn’t a success for me: the cast picked for this series is not very good. It’s not Chris - how can it be. The guy is probably the most dedicated and passionate Dungeons & Dragons fan, Dungeon Master, works for the company who makes the game (Wizards of the Coast), and spends a shitload of time on Twitter answering questions from fans with his unique sense of humour, I love the guy (not that way).  The cast though. Very weak. Generally speaking they are either too silly to take seriously or not entertaining enough in role playing their characters (hey, I’m not very good when I play and probably an even worse DM so I’m not tooting my own horn by any means), etc. but they are on camera for this and I really cannot believe so many people like this show like they say they do. The whole “Waffle Crew” thing I just don’t get I guess. The cast isn’t exceptional and I think Chris should be spending his time with a different group doing bigger and better things. Again, I am a heavily opinionated bastard as stated in the header of this blog :) “ProJared” is probably the weakest link in the D, CA group. He just doesn’t bring anything to the table and quite honestly, his attitude sucks. It is a puzzle to me how he was chosen to partake in this show with the legendary Christopher Perkins, DM. Just watch his videos on his YouTube channel, ProJared Plays I believe it’s called. I suggest watching his video entitled “Worst Player Ever”. Wait for the part where he describes how he “loses his shit” with “Steve”.  But enough about him... Chris rocks.

Matt Mercer, He’s Pretty OK

One of the players in a campaign I run is a very, very big fan of Critical Role. If you don’t know what CR is, Google it. It’s one of the reasons she became interested in Dungeons & Dragons and wanted to try it out, which opened a huge floodgate for me that had been closed for several years, and caused my re-connection with the hobby a couple of years ago. The addiction resurfaced and hundreds (OK, probably thousands) of dollars later I am the proud owner of a collection of nerdy D&D stuff that has been amassed. Damn you, Liesl.

Anyhow.  I was curious and tried watching some episodes of CR. At the time, I wasn’t into it. Not at all. I wouldn’t say I am now either, but I have probably watched around half of the 80+ episodes and find quite a bit of entertainment in the performance everyone in that group delivers.

So, at the time we started getting into 5e via the infamous Starter Set, featuring the introductory Lost Mine of Phandelver adventure module. Naturally, I ran it improvising mostly everything and only referencing major area and plot details when absolutely required.  I admittedly do not care much for running any of the current 5e premade adventures and therefore probably won’t ever run any of them in their entirety (I will pick apart things, and throw in content from an old Dungeon magazine, even 4e source book, etc. or borrow a part from some other WotC hard cover adventure campaign book, that, like I said, will never run in its entirety). There’s good stuff in there, but it doesn’t play like modules back in the good old days. Anyhow I think it went well. The more we played, the more references were made to Critical Role and how Matt did things. So I got more and more curious and gave Matt and CR another chance. Glad I did.

It turns out what I really went back for though after thinking I didn’t like CR, was Matt Mercer (after awhile the cast of that show grew on me, but I was paying particular attention to Matt most of the time). It’s absolutely unlikely I would ever be able to pull off 1% of what he can do with voices, and describing and gesturing things when he spins his tale - but I try to absorb everything I can, and hope my poor little brain remembers just a smidgen of it and it enters my game at some point and does just a little bit to help my improvisational skills. I don’t think I’ll ever attempt performing NPC or monster voices, but who knows... like they say, you’ll never get anywhere with it if you don’t just start doing it, no matter how much of a fool you think you are making of yourself. There is a reason why Matthew Mercer is regarded as one of the best Dungeon Masters in the world, because he truly is just that damn good.

Also - FORCE GREY IS AMAZING. It’s a short run series Matt DM’d for several other celebrity players including the immortal Brian Posehn.

Matt Colville, the YouTube DM Activist

Finally, I think my personal absolute favourite "popular” Dungeon Master these days would have to be none other than Matt Colville. He claims to be a normal person just like anyone else, but he’s totally a celebrity now, to me anyhow. Ha ha. Dude, you’re on a now-quite-popular YouTube channel. You’re awesome. Thank you.

Matt is a writer by profession. He’s got a couple of fantasy novels he’s written that you can find on Amazon.com (Priest, and Thief I believe are the titles - check them out).  He’s also lead writer at Turtle Rock game studio in California. Makers of games like the Mercenaries series on consoles, and more recently the party vs. big bad enemy shooter Evolve (he says he’s most proud of this title), all of which Matt did major writing on. From the game sessions I have watched that he has posted on his channel, it is evident that he is very creative and an extremely bright person more than capable of running a really great game that is well thought out and has all the bells and whistles and logistics of everything worked out just right (in my opinion). I wish I could run my games with his brain :)

The last few videos I’ve linked on my blog here are a few of my favourites of his, and they have really kickstarted my brain. So now I am thinking of better ways to run my games, and attempting to infuse a similar kind of quality material that Matt seems to ooze out of his noggin.  Watch his videos, all of them. When I first discovered his channel, I was amused. However, after watching maybe a half dozen more videos, I had to stop. I think it was the rapid rate at which he discusses the topics presented, it was maybe overwhelming me. I took a break for a couple of months and avoided his channel.  Then a colleague and I were discussing him, and in hindsight I realized I really totally dug his stuff. So when I went back to checking out his videos and gave some thought about what it is that he is doing with his channel, and what he is doing to help Dungeon Masters (new or old) better the quality of their games. I watched every single video (and rewatch several frequently for inspiration) and it’s now my top rated Dungeons & Dragons influenced channel.

I respect his genuine passion for the game and how he conveys his message to us, and appreciate the time he takes to create such brilliant content for the DM crowd. I highly suggest subscribing to his channel. If you can get past the fast paced talking, it’s worth the time to check his stuff out. If there ever was such thing as a “Church of D&D”, Matt Colville should be the high priest of it.

In the words of Mr. Colville:

“Peace. Out.”

And now, enjoy some whiny ProJared! (”he’s such a dumbass!”)

-runDMsteve