#200 increasingly desperate hours spent wondering where he was

[preparethepreparations]

Finally finished TOTK (the main story at least, I still have a bunch of side quests to do) and it was great, I love it, I think I like it even better then botw and botw was my favorite game ever…

But I’ve got one thing to say.

WHERE THE FUCK IS KASS!?

[choupichoups]

Press F (Instagram/College AU) 

Lucas swears he’s the absolute master of undetected stalking. Or: Eliott is instagram famous and Lucas is the disaster gay who accidentally likes his post. 

He smiles down at the screen, scrolling through the hilarious comments on the post. The exaggerated marriage proposals are probably his favourite because, honestly, same but he’d never be caught dead saying shit like that. Even as a joke.

Maybe.

Lucas sinks deeper into the couch, dimming the brightness on his phone screen just in case Yann happens to look over at some point. It’s not like Yann doesn’t know what he’s up to most of the time, but he’d still like to save himself from some of the teasing, thank you very much.

“Did you see that?” Yann yells at no one in particular, fully engrossed in the game they’re playing. Or they had been playing, since Lucas died in the game a good few minutes ago. He’s got better things to do anyway— like check the guy’s profile for any new updates he might have missed. Lucas isn’t exactly on top of his game when it comes to keeping up with Instagram but ever since his great discovery, he’s spent more time scrolling through the app in more recent times that his entire high school years combined.

“I’m doing another round of this before we switch up the game, okay?” Yann murmurs, already pressing the buttons before Lucas even replies. The latter shrugs, doesn’t care whether he gets to play for the next while. He’s much too preoccupied staring at the new photo he’s been graced with.

The dude, the myth, the legend. Eliott Demaury.

Lucas found out about him nearly two months ago— or more accurately, he found Eliott’s short film, Polaris, while scrolling through Youtube one dull Friday night. He’d watched the entire thing at three o’clock in the morning and promptly obsessed over it for the next couple of hours. Finding the director’s Instagram and seeing a puzzle posted on it hadn’t doused his interest either. If anything, that just made it worse. His last two braincells had worked in overdrive trying to rewatch the film and solve the puzzle at the same time.

Needless to say, he’d managed to find Eliott’s personal account in the end but the feeling of accomplishment only lasted until he saw that quite a lot of people had also found it. Mr. Demaury, has, in fact, half a million followers on his Instagram and Lucas could have probably found it easily if he’d just googled it instead of driving himself nuts figuring out what the riddle meant.

“Man, this is too hard.” Yann groans from beside him and Lucas can only assume he’s lost another round. He offers a vague noise of sympathy for his friend. “Are you really doing this right now?”

“Hm?”

“You’re really out here stalking your man during our we time?”

Lucas drags his gaze off of Eliott’s majestic photo so Yann can get a full view of his frown. “Our what now?”

“This is our time, Lucas. Best friend bonding time. 22h to 24h, it’s on the contract.”

He starts laughing, can’t help it when faced with the truly affronted expression all over Yann’s face. “What contract?”

“You signed it when you were like two years old.”

“Uh huh.” Now certain that Yann’s just talking nonsense, Lucas returns his attention back on his phone. “Legit age to be signing contracts.”

Yann doesn’t say anything but he steals Lucas’ phone from his grip and holds it out of reach when Lucas scrambles to get it back. “You don’t even follow him, what the hell?”

“That doesn’t matter, give it back!”

“So what, you just search up his profile all the time?”

“What about it?”

“That’s so sad, Lucas.”

“Shut up,” he says, snatching his phone back once it’s finally in his reach. “Imane knows this guy, I won’t hear the end of it if they get even a little hint that I’m looking at— Yann!” he screeches, shaking Yann’s shoulder with one hand while his other holds the phone up to his face.

The horror in his voice must be evident because Yann immediately straightens up, dragging Lucas close so he can take a look at the screen as well. “What?”

“Oh no… oh no no no.”

“Oh shit.”

“What do I do?!” Lucas waves his phone at Yann, almost decking him on the nose in the process. Yann stills him, shaking his head at the bright red heart below Eliott’s post. “Do you think I should unlike it? I can still do that right? He won’t see the notification, he gets a lot anyway.”

“No, man, that just makes it weird.”

“But…”

“You have to follow him.”

Lucas gives him a withering look. “Are you serious right now?”

“It’s natural! You like the post, okay, chill, next you follow. He gets lots of notifications, as you said. By the time he checks back, 200 other people would have followed him too. Wait a couple more days then unfollow and unlike.” Yann rubs at his back, sounding so sure of himself. “Then you can go back to your sad stalking ways after that.”

He shoves at Yann with a scowl, making sure to kick at his friend’s limbs as he slides off from where he’d basically crawled into the other’s lap in a desperate bid to retrieve his phone. And look where all that effort has gotten him.

“You sure that’s not weird?”

Yann throws a pillow at his face. “I already said it’s natural. Honestly if somebody did that to me I wouldn’t think anything weird of it.”

“Okay.”

Lucas hits the follow button, closes out of the app, and shoves his phone under the cushions. Whatever happens next is a problem for tomorrow.

He doesn’t go back on Instagram until well into Tuesday evening, choosing instead to finish all of his homework and maybe do a little bit of reading ahead of time for his biology class. It’s a wonder how much one is capable of getting done while avoiding the thing they usually obsess over.

But he’s only human. So letting go of all the self control he’s managed to conjure up the entire morning, he pulls up the app and slowly scrolls through the new content. He doesn’t know why he’s dreading this so much anyway— literally nothing is probably going to happen. Eliott won’t even notice the new addition to his massive following and Lucas would be able to see his posts without having to search up his username all the goddamn time. It’s a win-win.

Lucas doesn’t curb the smile pulling at the corners of his lips, even though a small part of him is a little disappointed. Not that he’s expecting anything to come out of this ridiculous infatuation anyway but knowing what Polaris is paired with that caption, the post sounds increasingly more romantic the longer he thinks about it.

So Eliott’s taken already. That’s cool. Great. But this is nice, at least, Eliott’s posts being readily accessible for him like this. Maybe he shouldn’t have made a big deal about following the guy in the first place. Only Imane seems to know both Eliott and Lucas anyway and she’s not the type to unnecessarily pry into other people’s business. 

He still doesn’t hit like on the post though. He has to be subtle about this, he’ll wait a couple more posts to go before liking another one. Lucas is extra careful to avoid double tapping the screen when he goes back to his feed, no longer holding his breath for a catastrophe as he mindlessly goes through other new posts and notifications. 

Which explains why he’s entirely too unprepared for what happens next.

srodulv started following you.

He clutches at his phone with both hands, forcibly shoving down the urge to scream and throw his phone out the window. He’s ill-equipped to deal with this. It’s not supposed to happen; Eliott shouldn’t have noticed him and Lucas should be free to get on with his life without knowing that some god in human form has probably seen the dumb photos he posts with him and the gang and— oh god, what did he post during that party last week again? It doesn’t look too stupid does it?

Lucas frantically skims through his own profile, wanting to shrivel up and die for every post he finds way too embarrassing to be seen by the guy. 

The apartment door creaks open and Lucas throws himself off his bed, running out to the living room and most likely startling Yann out of his mind but that doesn’t matter right now.

“Yann!” he yells out, reminiscent of the panicked tone he’d used the night before.

“Huh?” Yann turns around, dropping his bag on the floor as he slips out of his shoes.

Lucas stands in front of him, holding out the phone over his head like it’s Simba. “He noticed me,” he whispers as if there’s a chance that anyone else would hear them.

“Who?” Yann looks from Lucas’ wide eyes to the phone in his hand. The screen is eye level for Yann so he merely peeks up to see what all the fuss is about. “Oh.”

And then Yann starts laughing. Lucas, personally, doesn’t find anything amusing in this situation.

“Can you stop that? I’m so stressed out right now,” he huffs, bringing the phone back down to his chest so he can stare some more at the notification that changed his life.

“Sorry, you gotta admit it’s a little funny.”

It’s not, but okay. Lucas continues frowning down at the screen, wondering if it would be too weird to mass delete half of his old posts.

Yann takes his phone away before he does anything stupid.

“You said he won’t even realize,” Lucas mumbles miserably, mind flashing back to that one stupid meme he’d posted about three weeks ago. God, Eliott’s going to unfollow in the next ten minutes.

“I’m not right about everything. Anyway, isn’t this a good thing? The guy only follows like 20 people and you’re one of them.”

Wait, what?

He reaches up, tilts his own phone in Yann’s hand so he can confirm that with his own eyes.

And okay, maybe that makes him feel a little giddy inside. Deep down. Just a little.

“Congrats, man. Not everyone gets noticed by their crush.” 

“I don’t have a crush.”

“Sure.”

“Shut up.” 

His phone beeps with another notification and they both look down at it simultaneously, like birds honing in on loose bread. It’s almost comical the way they gasp in unison when the notifications start popping up. From instagram user srodulv. Eliott. Eliott’s straight up just… liking a lot of his posts. Embarrassing memes included. 

Yann opens his mouth to say something but Lucas grabs the phone out of his grip and runs back into his room, shutting the door so he can freak out in peace. 

[ladystylestores]

Remote Learning? No Thanks. – The New York Times

Want to get The Morning by email? Here’s the sign-up.

Good morning. Virus hospitalizations are surging. The Trump administration will send more agents into cities. And desperate parents are thinking about home schooling.

The coronavirus is so widespread in the U.S. that many schools are unlikely to reopen anytime soon. Already, some large school districts — in Atlanta, Houston, Los Angeles, Phoenix, suburban Washington and elsewhere — have indicated they will start the school year entirely with remote classes. Yet many parents and children are despondent about enduring online-only learning for the foreseeable future.

So it makes sense that the topic of home schooling is suddenly hot.

Parents who never before considered home schooling have begun looking into it — especially in combination with a small number of other families, to share the teaching load and let their children interact with others. Some are trying to hire private tutors. One example is a popular new Facebook group called Pandemic Pods and Microschools, created by Lian Chang, a mother in San Francisco.

Emily Oster, a Brown University economist who writes about parenting, has predicted that clusters of home-schooling families are “going to happen everywhere.”

Of course, many middle-class and poor families cannot afford to hire private tutors, as my colleague Eliza Shapiro pointed out. But there is nonetheless the potential for a home-schooling boom that is more than just a niche trend among the wealthy.

Consider that the population of home-schoolers — before the pandemic — was less affluent than average:

Eliza told me that she thought many families, across income groups, were likely to consider pooling child-care responsibilities in the fall. Children would remain enrolled in their school and would come together to take online classes in the same house (or, more safely, backyard). In some cases, these co-ops might morph into lessons that parents would help lead.

As for high-income families, they may end up having a broader effect if a significant number pull their children out of school and opt for home schooling. “We could see a drain on enrollment — and therefore resources — into public schools,” Eliza said.

As Wesley Yang, a writer for Tablet magazine, asked somewhat apocalyptically, “Did public schools in major cities just deal themselves a deathblow?” And L’Heureux Lewis-McCoy, a professor at New York University, recently told the science journalist Melinda Wenner Moyer that any increased privatization of education was likely to “widen the gaps between kids.”

It’s too early to know whether home schooling is more of a real trend or a social-media fad. But the U.S. is facing a dire situation with schools: Remote learning went badly in the spring. The virus continues to spread more rapidly than in any country that has reopened schools. And, as Sarah Darville points out in an article for the upcoming Sunday Review section, the federal government has done little to help schools.

No wonder parents are starting to think about alternatives.

How can school districts respond? Jay Mathews, a Washington Post education writer, has a suggestion: Superintendents should abandon trying to devise a single solution for an entire school system.

“Let principals and teachers decide,” Mathews writes. “They know their students better than anyone except parents, who would just as soon get back to work.” His column includes specific ideas he has heard from teachers.

THREE MORE BIG STORIES

1. The biggest bet yet on a vaccine

The Trump administration announced a nearly $2 billion contract with Pfizer and a smaller German biotech company to produce a potential coronavirus vaccine. The contract is the largest yet from Operation Warp Speed, the White House program to fast-track a vaccine.

The government won’t pay the drugmakers until the vaccine gets F.D.A. approval. “It’s like a restaurant reservation,” explained Noah Weiland, who covers health care for The Times. “You pay for dinner when you eat it, but you’ve got yourself the prime table in the restaurant instead of having to wait in line.” If the vaccine works, individual Americans would receive it for free.

2. Where the virus is under control

No region of the United States suffered a worse virus outbreak this spring than the Northeast — but few places have managed to bring it under such good control in the last couple of months.

“It’s acting like Europe,” Ashish Jha, the director of the Harvard Global Health Institute, said. After cases and deaths surged in Europe and the Northeast, both places responded with aggressive lockdowns and big investments in testing and tracing efforts. Residents have also been willing to follow public health advice — wearing masks, staying out of confined spaces and more.

In other virus developments:

3. Trump sends more agents to cities

The Trump administration says it will send hundreds of additional federal agents into cities to confront a rise in violence. The plan calls for sending about 200 more agents to Chicago, 200 to Kansas City, Mo., and 35 to Albuquerque.

In Portland, Ore., early this morning, federal officers fired tear gas near the city’s mayor, Ted Wheeler, who had joined demonstrators outside the federal courthouse. Coughing and scrambling to put on goggles, Wheeler called the officers’ tactics an “egregious overreaction.”

Media watch: Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh and other conservative pundits have seized on the Portland protests as a pro-Trump rallying cry.

Here’s what else is happening

After ordering the Chinese Consulate in Houston to close, the State Department accused Chinese diplomats of spying and attempting to steal scientific research.

China began what it hoped would be its first successful journey to Mars, launching equipment on a voyage that will last until next year.

The House voted overwhelmingly — with 72 Republicans joining the Democrats — to remove statues of Confederate figures and white supremacists. Mitch McConnell, the Senate Republican leader, is likely to block the measure.

President Trump again sought to showcase his mental fitness by repeatedly reciting what he said was a sample sequence from a cognitive test. “It’s actually not that easy, but for me, it was easy,” he told Fox News.

Employees of Hearst Magazines — the publisher of Cosmopolitan, Harper’s Bazaar and Marie Claire — described a toxic work environment, including lewd and sexist remarks by the company’s president, Troy Young.

Lives Lived: “My analyst told me/That I was right out of my head.” The woman who wrote and first sang those memorable lines was Annie Ross. Best known as a member of Lambert, Hendricks and Ross, probably the most successful vocal group in the annals of jazz, she was also, later in life, a movie actress and a cabaret mainstay. Annie Ross died at 89.

By 2070, the extremely hot zones that now cover less than 1 percent of the Earth’s land surface — like the Sahara — could cover almost 20 percent. Water sources would vanish. Farms would go barren. And hundreds of millions of people would be forced to choose between flight or death.

“The result,” writes Abrahm Lustgarten in a new story for The Times Magazine, “will almost certainly be the greatest wave of global migration the world has seen.”

The Times Magazine and ProPublica have modeled what that migration could look like. “Northern nations can relieve pressures on the fastest-warming countries by allowing more migrants to move north across their borders, or they can seal themselves off, trapping hundreds of millions of people in places that are increasingly unlivable,” Lustgarten writes.

The article is part of The Magazine’s climate issue, which also includes pieces on Argentina’s fearsome thunderstorms; the teenage activists leading the climate change movement; and the Louisiana communities that may be lost in a plan to protect the coastline.

PLAY, WATCH, EAT, MUPPETS

Eat some cheese

Cervelle de Canut — which translates to “silk worker’s brain” and describes a simple cheese spread — is a mainstay in Lyon, France, where the author Bill Buford researched French cuisine for his book “Dirt.” You can whip up the spread in about 10 minutes by blending fromage blanc with chopped shallots and fresh herbs. Serve with a baguette (or just eat it with spoon).

And Pete Wells recently spent more than six hours on a Zoom call with Buford to learn the art of poaching a chicken.

Read something thought-provoking

Zadie Smith — the acclaimed author of “White Teeth” — is back with a timely collection of short essays, “Intimations,” that covers the killing of George Floyd, the class divides exposed by the pandemic and more.

“The virus map of the New York boroughs turns redder along precisely the same lines as it would if the relative shade of crimson counted not infection and death but income brackets and middle-school ratings,” she writes in one essay. “Death comes to all — but in America it has long been considered reasonable to offer the best chance of delay to the highest bidder.”

Good news for Muppets fans

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[titoslondon-blog]

New Post has been published on Titos London

#Blog New Post has been published on http://www.titoslondon.co.uk/what-has-and-hasnt-changed-5-years-since-the-rana-plaza-disaster/

What has—and hasn’t—changed, 5 years since the Rana Plaza disaster

The 24th April 2013 started like any other day. I buzzed around the house getting ready to head into Eco-Age’s London headquarters, when I made out the word ‘Dhaka’ in a radio news report in the background. Anybody who has campaigned for a cleaner, safer fashion industry is alert to hearing the Bangladesh capital—the country is one of the world’s largest exporters of fast fashion, second only to China.

Details were still patchy—a building had collapsed, over 150 people were believed to be dead. Although Rana Plaza was reported as a multi-use complex, when I phoned my friend and fellow campaigner, British journalist Lucy Siegle, we instinctively knew it was a fashion factory. Workers interviewed from banks and shops said they noticed a crack in the building the day before and their companies sent them home. But one group was forced back into the building to continue working—the garment workers.

As the true horror emerged, our worst fears were realised. When the complex folded like a house of cards, killing 1,334 people, it exposed the true cost of our fast fashion habit. How to make sense of that terrible tragedy and the aftermath? I’ve found it almost impossible to reconcile. Rana Plaza cannot be shelved as an ‘act of god’ and, of course. neither was it deliberate. Technically the disaster qualifies as an accident, but to me and the many campaigners who challenge the fast fashion system, it was avoidable. Greed, speed, corporate irresponsibility and a business model built on exploiting the most vulnerable—lowly paid garment workers—were the root cause of the Rana Plaza collapse.

In Los Angeles, when film director Andrew Morgan saw the front page of The New York Times featuring a photo of two young boys—the same age as his own sons—desperately searching through the Rana Plaza rubble for their mother’s body, he was hit by the true cost of today’s apparel industry. “Why would two young kids be looking for their mother amid this chaos? No bomb had gone off, no earthquake…[Behind its] aspirational, fun, carefree aesthetic there was obviously some terrible hidden danger in the [fashion] industry. Immediately I needed to find out what was going on.”

Determined to unravel the $3 trillion global fashion industry, Morgan spent the next three years travelling to 30 countries collecting footage from factories, workshops, sometimes even homes, in garment industry hot spots. His 2015 documentary, The True Cost (available on Netflix) exposes the dark side of an industry that we all contribute to.

Around the crater that Rana Plaza left behind, as international news crews departed the scene, the relentless cycle of fashion clicked back into gear. Orders that couldn’t be completed at Rana Plaza were quietly transferred to one of Dhaka’s many other factories. The manufacturing army of predominantly young women reassembled. Survivors of Rana Plaza, who’d been pulled from the rubble, queued up at the gates of a new factory, traumatised but in desperate need of work.

On visits to Bangladesh I have been privileged enough to meet garment workers. More often than not, these encounters happen late in the evening as the workers stream out of the garment factories at a time when I’d be thinking about going to bed. This is all the spare time they have. At around 10pm I sit on the floor in a circle, with a dozen or so women who have been working since 7am. I learn about their lives—their migration from villages in the north where their kids are being looked after by relatives. I hear of their frustration that even after the Rana Plaza disaster, their hours remain unremittingly harsh, and their low wages and poor living conditions remain unchanged. And that’s before we even get onto the subject of whether or not they feel safe at work. They are quick to laugh despite all the hardship and very frank. “I am bored,” says a young woman. “This is a boring existence.” When I see them at work the next day, they avoid eye contact.

Those with life-changing injuries, who number over 2,500, began the fight for compensation, but in many cases progress was glacial. Over 700 orphans or at-risk children were created by Rana Plaza. The industry’s response was split into two main tracks: The Rana Plaza Arrangement—a compensation fund which brands pay into—and The Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh—a five-year, legally-binding agreement between 200 brands and trade unions intended to promote a safer and healthier garment industry in Bangladesh. Some US brands decided to develop their own response known as the Alliance.

On the fifth anniversary of Rana Plaza, expect a flood of hefty self-congratulatory announcements coming from these bodies. In fact, it has already begun. “We are extremely proud of the progress we have made in just five short years,” a spokesman for the Alliance announced last month. “With all of the investments we have made in the training and empowerment of the workers themselves, factory remediation remains on schedule,” he continued. “If these gains are going to be sustained over the long-term, however, they must be owned and led locally, from within Bangladesh.” To me, this sounds like they are passing the buck.

The Accord meanwhile has been extended to run until 2021, but it’s alarming that only 60 brands have signed up for round two, down from 200. Still the message broadcast is that lessons have been learned and that factories in Dhaka are safer. But by how much? And what does less bad really mean? These are questions that have vexed the whole process and it makes me wonder—is it even possible to reform the fashion production system?

According to Siegle, the current approach simply isn’t working. “Progress has been painfully slow,” she tells me. “Research in Bangladesh by Dhaka University academics has flagged up delays and gaps in implementation from the outset.”

Siegle is also concerned that some brands have had to be taken to court to pay up. In January, $2.3 million was finally extracted from a global fashion brand (name redacted by the terms of the settlement) at The Hague to fund overdue remediation to factories. “When Rana Plaza happened it was clear a clock was ticking, but the timescale appears to have been lost and the next generation of garment workers has again been subjected to unsafe, unacceptable and in many cases illegal conditions,” she says. “It’s really hard to [communicate] that to the shopper when the Accord or Alliance says your jeans are made in a factory that could be 84 per cent safer than it was five years ago.” We should, she rightly believes, be aiming for something better.

In my own pursuit for something better, over the past year I’ve worked closely with lawyers affiliated with The Circle,Annie Lennox’s NGO dedicated to championing women’s rights, to compile a report reviewing the minimum and living wages, and the protection of workers’ rights in 14 major garment-producing countries. Our objective? To show brands they have a responsibility to treat garment workers fairly. We are now using trade law to try and implement this.

In the five years since the Rana Plaza tragedy, the industry has often claimed it’s spearheading change to ensure fashion changes forever. In reality, the required overhaul of this unsustainable and corrupt business model has in no way been achieved. While some factories provide safer working environments, they haven’t considered the fundamental right to a living wage, and vice versa.

To see the real engine of change, we need to take an outside perspective. I ask Andrew Morgan if he thinks any progress has been made five years on from the disaster that compelled him to make The True Cost. “In an industry increasingly fixated on profit at all cost, Rana Plaza was an undeniable warning that people ultimately and always pay the price for our careless consumption,” he says, “This warning, while ignored by most major fashion corporations, has ignited a new wave of activists and entrepreneurs dedicating themselves to the belief that we can and must create a more just, humane and sustainable future.” This is the true change ignited by that tragic, fateful day.

1/7 Livia Firth at the Green Carpet Fashion Awards, Italia

Image: Getty

Image: Reza Shahriar Rahman

Image: Reza Shahriar Rahman

Image: Reza Shahriar Rahman

Image: Reza Shahriar Rahman

Film still from The True Cost

Image: The True Cost

Film still from The True Cost

Image: The True Cost

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