#anons: *get mad*

[happyheidi]

moomins? aren’t they those hippos with the big blue house?

[shanastoryteller]

Merry bday! A continuation of Enola Holmes marrying the viscount of Basilweather would be really cool 😀

a continuation of 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8

She wrinkles her nose when Tewksbury passes over her cup of tea with two sugars, unstirred, and she knows.

She puts down the cup too quickly, blood pounding in her ears, and Tewksbury frowns, reaching for her hand. "Enola?"

"Got to go," she says, pushing herself to standing, almost just leaves him sitting there, hand outstretched, but he's her husband and she loves him, so she darts over to smack a kiss on his lips before she's running for the door.

"Enola!" he calls out again, but now he sounds less worried and more exasperated, which is better, which is good. There's nothing for him to worry about.

She wants her mother, who's banned from London and is causing political unrest in Southern France currently, or Edith, who's doing something clever and illegal in Scotland. She'd take Victoria, but Mycroft will be there, and he's the last person she wants to see right now. Sherlock, while beloved, is useless, but his boy is a doctor.

She drops in at 221B Baker Street, picking the lock like always, and is relieved that Sherlock is still asleep and decides not to have any opinions on the various bones scattered about the kitchen table. She assumes there's a reasonable explanation for them.

"Oh, Enola!" John grins and shoves some femurs to the side to make space at the table. "Here, join me, would you like some oatmeal? Are you looking for your brother? I can wake him-"

"I'm pregnant," she blurts out, then bites her bottom lip.

John blinks once, then twice, then says with a gentleness that had made her like him in the first place - because Sherlock wanted to be gentle, but was quite bad at it, so someone had to teach him - "This is what you wanted, isn't it?"

Wanted seems like not the correct word, although of course it is, because she and Tewksbury had been, not trying, but not-not trying, which probably amounted to the same thing, considering how often they - well.

"I can fix it," he says, voice low and serious, "if it's something that needs to be fixed."

Enola lets out a breath she hadn't realized she'd been holding. "No. No, it doesn't need to be fixed."

She loves that he offered. She loves John, more her brother than Mycroft will ever be, sometimes even more her brother than Sherlock is. If nothing else, her brothers had picked their partners well. Victoria and John are a delight.

John is the functional one between them, explosions and skeletons notwithstanding. John is the one that coaxed her brother into a proper relationship and John is the one that knew they were like parents to all the Irregulars and John isn't normal but he grew up normal.

"Are you worried something's wrong?" he asks. "I can look you over."

"No," she says, although, "I mean, yes, that'd be nice because Tewksbury will go spare, but no, I'm not worried anything's wrong."

He leans back in his chair, looking her over, and after almost ten years of dealing with her and Sherlock and even occasionally Mycroft he can read them almost as well as they can read everyone else.

"It's alright to be scared," he says finally. "Lots of women are when they find out, even when it's wanted, even when the baby's healthy."

"I'm not scared," she says, but for the first time her words feel like a lie. "I shouldn't be scared. What do I have to be scared of?"

She wishes her mother was here.

Will her children miss her like this too?

Sometimes she misses her mother even when she's right in front of her, and if nothing else, she's her mother's daughter.

John gets to his feet, stand in front of her, and opens his arms. She looks away even as she steps forward, like if she doesn't look at him when she does it then it doesn't count as weakness.

His arms close around her. He smells like chai and antiseptic and it's only years of association that make the combination comforting. "I can't wait to be an uncle."

He'll be an uncle. Sherlock will be an uncle. Even Mycroft, and Victoria will be delighted to be an aunt, and to raise her children with Enola's. Of course there's her mother-in-law, and Tewksbury's uncle, who have been angling for her to have a child from the day they married.

There's Tewksbury, who loves her, who isn't going to die on her or leave her if either of them have anything to say about it, who isn't going to leave her to raise their children the way her mother raised her.

Alone.

She's been saying she wasn't going to do this alone from the beginning, but standing here in Sherlock's kitchen, with John holding her steady, she really believes it.

[hansoeii]

the steard is making a return!

[somegrumpynerd]

I think that nightmare living with his boys after the truce(actually even before that) is literally hearing a clink and him yelling "KILLER, DUST, GET OUT OF THE KITCHEN AND STOP FIGHTING"

(I don't know if I worded that right so I'm sorry if you can't understand-)

Oh absolutely!! When Nightmare hears rummaging around in any room he has to go check, because usually it's just Horror preparing food or one of them doing something, but there's always a chance he's about to break up a fight

What I like to imagine is how long after an agreed truce (and assuming Dream comes to visit now and then) does Dream feel confident enough to break up the fights

(He's very good at it, as it turns out)

[genericpuff]

I wonder why christian misrepresentation are rarely talked about if compared to other religion misrepresentation. Like, I've seen people really vocal about Greek myths misrepresentation in LO and such (and it's valid because it's a culture and religion) but I rarely saw the same thing with christian even though there are many media who use christian religion innacurately, to the point where it comes off as using it as an aesthetic and not a proper religion.

Is it because of rampant religious trauma especially in western world? No ulterior motives on this question. I'm not a christian and yet I'm curious about this. I apologize if this sounds harsh.

I obviously don't have The Answer(tm) to this but personally speaking (and I'm about to get VERY personal here so take this with MOUNTAINS OF SALT), I think it's just the obvious - Christian mythology is one of the most well-documented and strongly protected out of virtually any other religion on the planet. Especially here in the West, it's commonplace for kids to go to Sunday school, for couples to have Christian weddings even if they're not practising Christians themselves, even the American anthem references the Christian God. It's simply not as easy to 'misrepresent' it because the representation is written into our very fabric of society. Even Greece itself is primarily made up of Orthodox Christians.

So anyone that does 'misrepresent' it are either completely mislead hardcore Christians, or people who are doing it intentionally, such as with the intent to make a parody of it or to deconstruct it through a different context or whatever have you. And of course, people will still get mad at those things, if you're implying that people aren't vocal about Christian misrepresentation then frankly IDK what to tell you there LOL If you want a contextual example in the realm of webtoons, Religiously Gay was dragged to hell and back during its launch for having a very crude and insulting depiction of St. Michael, and frankly, yeah I don't disagree because what the fuck is this-

(like at best it's just terrible character design lmao that said, there's also plenty else to criticize Religiously Gay for, including its fetishy representation of gay relationships and the fact that it's still just the "naive person who looks and acts like a child hooks up with mean person in a position of power" trope, blech, but the character design is definitely the first thing you notice)

There are even plenty of hardcore Christians who will deadass claim "misrepresentation" over things that ARE factually correct but they just haven't read the actual Bible and simply cherry pick what works for their own agenda. And of course those people are routinely called out by people like myself who know for a fact that Jesus wouldn't have promoted the war crimes that many modern day Christians are committing and justifying today. So it really depends on the definition of "misrepresentation" here.

The issue specifically with LO and Rachel that I personally call her out for (and many others) is that she's called herself a "folklorist" and claimed she's so much more knowledgeable on Greek myth than anyone else, while making a complete mockery of the original mythologies while not being honest about her intent as to whether LO is actually supposed to be a legitimate retelling OR a parody (because it sure acts like the latter more than the former, but she still seems to expect us to take it seriously and consider her knowledge of Greek myth superior?) Which leads to a lot of her teenage audience claiming shit like "Persephone went down to the underworld willingly" and "Apollo did assault Persephone in the original myths actually" and the classic "why would Lore Olympus lie or make up fake myths?"

You just can't pull off this extent of erasure with Christian mythology because we have a whole ass book of it that's been preserved, sold on shelves, and systematically integrated into society for thousands of years. Of course, there are people who will still try their damned best to twist the Bible to match their own bigotry with the whole "Jesus hates gays" bullshit (he would never), but it's met with equal amounts of 'misrepresentation' that are actually fully well-read and are intentionally subverting and changing things to either critique, parody, or restore the original intent of a lot of stories in the Bible without all the manufactured right-wing crap.

Greek myth, on the other hand, has some stories that are well preserved, and others, not so much. And in the modern day outside of the poems and hymns, you'll also rarely, if ever, see anyone use stories from Greek myth to ostracize, torture, and murder other people. "Misrepresenting Christianity" is more often done by actual Christians who are using the Bible to commit hate crimes than the people who have actually read the Bible and are just taking creative liberties with it for the sake of deconstructing / parodying / analyzing / subverting it. Veggie Tales "misrepresents" Christian stories because obviously Moses wasn't a fucking cucumber lmao but it still accomplishes its goal by retelling Christian stories in a way that's fun and educational for children.

By comparison (on the whole, I'm not comparing LO to Veggie Tales LMAO) LO just isn't clear in its intentions beyond Rachel's initial statements that she was trying to "deconstruct" the myths, while labelling herself as a folklorist. Therefore, I'm going to criticize how she does it because the way she's done it up until now has been very mishandled and has resulted in a lot of misinterpretations of the myths simply for the sake of fandom. And yes, these people exist in Christian media as well - they're called TV evangelists.

And that's my (very heavy) two cents.

[carnivalcarriondiscarded]

Barnaby finds a new way to cool off when he's angry: Shoving his face in Howdy's fluff.

so true

[handwrittenhello]

i think its kind of ridiculous to think that homestucks are seriously using bots in this poll because why the hell would they bot this poll instead of the tumblrwoman poll which was the poll EVERYBODY in the hs fandom was actually making a big deal out of . also because im going to be real but i dont think anyone cares about polls enough to rig one? even the bayonetta/miku poll turned out to actually not be vriska voter fraud (most people in the homestuck fandom voted miku anyway) i think people are just unable to comprehend that a lot of people are still dormantly into homestuck & probably just saw vriska serket at the front of the trending disco elysium tag and thought it was funny. like oh my godddd no one cares enough about the outcome of this poll to bot it . somebody with a lot of followers probably just posted about it on twitter or something mundane like that its not that deep . a lot of people on tumblr have read homestuck its not extraordinary that a lot of vriska voters exist. disco elysium fans im sorry your blorbo is losing you’ll probably be back in the lead in a couple hours anyway all of you need to chill out‼️‼️‼️

answering only this ask about the cheating/botting, and no others, because i'm getting a lot of asks about it. congratulations, this contest has officially had all the fun sucked out of it.

here's data i've been collecting for every poll i've run. it's organized by votes the character received per round, then the total number of votes on that poll, for all five rounds. then there are two columns for totals.

the next five columns, Notes 1-5, are the number of notes on each poll. i've highlighted two posts that were circulated with a greater-than-average frequency even after the poll ended (the loki/JC one because people were memeing on JC, and then HDB/Howl one because it gained popularity following a popular blogger reblogging it.)

V/N is the votes to notes ratio for each poll. it was taken by dividing the number of votes when the poll ended by the number of notes on each post. one limitation is that this was not taken at the same time each day, and so older posts will have slightly higher notes. however, i believe this uncertainty isn't enough to discount the conclusions i'll come to.

i've highlighted vriska's V:N ratio in red at the top. as you can see, round vriska's V:N ratio wasn't even the highest; she beat kaeya alberich easily, and the comments in the notes reflected that.

in round 2, things started to get interesting. this is where i and other people noticed a sudden flip, but i didn't think much of it. she was up against izzy hands. izzy was leading all day, and when i queued the next day's poll and went to bed, izzy was leading by 60%. when i woke up, it had flipped to 53/47 in vriska's favor. it's not a HUGEamount, but it is a NOTICEABLE amount.

keep in mind that every single day, there have been other, closer polls, that hovered around 49-50-51 all day, and which also flipped at the end of the day, or remained 50/50 and could only be determined by tumblr. in these cases, the notes also reflect the split. these polls also never swayed more than one or two percent.

in round 3, when vriska faced zuko, there was a clear and immediate lead for zuko, with him leading by 80%. keep in mind that by this point, all 28 other polls i ran, besides vriska's the day before, never swayed more than 1 or 2% once a clear lead had been established.

this poll went from 80/20 zuko to 59/41 vriska. that's RIDICULOUS. the only way that's possible is if an OVERWHELMING amount of people voted vriska and NO people voted zuko. for such a thing to happen, this post would need to spread really rapidly, right? surely this post had tens of thousands of notes and comments!

the V:N ratio for round 3 is TWENTY-SEVEN to one. that's the most out of any poll. the standard deviation for the round 3 polls is 9.0, compared to 4.8 and 4.9 the days before. not to mention reading those notes also does not get us an overwhelming amount of comments rooting for vriska.

today has also been highly suspicious. it started out with an 85/15 lead for harry. i wouldn't necessarily expect it to hold exactly at that percentage, but the flip was immediate and drastic. you can see the trend being tracked on this post. not at all suspicious, right? also note that the comments all day have been 95% rooting for harry and maybe 5% for vriska.

please also look at the GRAND TOTAL column, which has reliably predicted the winners of future polls each day. vriska has received 49,064 votes over the course of the whole contest. harry has received 64,644. that's 24% more votes. and yet the poll is locked at 50/50?

and if this isn't enough evidence for you, then remember the tumblr sexywoman poll. it is a FLAT FUCKING FACT that those polls were spammed by bots. out of respect for their privacy i won't go into detail, but they outright admitted it.

TO CONCLUDE,

it's pretty fucking obvious that something is up, and although i admit that there's simply no concrete way of proving it, there would have to be a really standout explanation for this.

and besides this being super lame, it's also removed all the fun from this contest. it's a stupid tumblr poll that wins literally nothing, congratulations!

also, to everyone making death threats in the notes, BOTH SIDES, you've failed my secret challenge of not being rude which means i'm judging you personally. be fucking nice.

[oifaaa]

Jason gets like a week into his red hood plan and then finds out batman is his sister instead of his dad and has to backtrack hard and come up with a whole new plan and he’s super mad about it.

Jason when he first realizes that it's actually Cass and not Bruce he's been antagonizing for 5 working days

[endivinity]

Would you be ok with indivituals using some of your fallouty unique deathclaws and other creature drawings as references when theyre running a private Fallout TTRPG campaign amongst friends?

Totally ok if youre not fine with that! I just wanted to check.

it may be possibly time for another long-winded explanation that will enrage precisely two people who will send me weird anon hate over it because they don't understand the notion of transformative works but - It's hard to state in plain terms what I am and aren't comfortable with people using my art for, because even for me there's a lot of handwavey 'am i really uncomfortable with this or is it just a kneejerk reaction' kind of thing with a lot of caveats

there's often a pretty big disconnect between what people view as references - some people will view it as a single image, like "for reference, this is what it looks like" and slap the art down on the table for their players to go WHOAAAA over (repost blogs tend to do this). For an artist doing this, it's usually as a study, or results in a pretty obvious 1:1 because the idea they're pulling from isn't diluted across a range of things.

The other use of reference is several images and enough of your own personal touch to put a unique spin on all of them in a cohesive artwork or design. This is the bit that a lot of people stumble over, because they go 'but I like this thing only' and don't want to venture beyond that. If you're able to not only pull a range of artworks, but a range of artworks by different artists, immense kudos to you. The way I construct deathclaws is from an immense knowledge of weird animals and different media. For instance, Spectral makes use of a deathclaw, a ghost leviathan from subnautica, a xenomorph, and the understanding of vestigial limbs, bioluminescence, diaphanized tissue, and opalization. Transforming this in a tabletop might therefore look like the image itself, but then adding say the aquatic spinosaurus theory in there and making it swim out of an irradiated lake with a paddle tail and a huge back crest. And a bigger mouth with worse teeth that can strip a human's arm down to the bone in one degloving bite. You don't necessarily have to be able to draw it (I'm in a bit of a niche and therefore shouldn't hold everyone to my same standards) but it also says good things about your ability to host a tabletop game if you're able to be creative with the unique ideas you put in it and your ability to visualize and describe them. Embrace that. (Some of the kickback against this was people going 'well artists do this all the time, they take other artists' works for their references, that's part of the industry standard' but that's the point of transformative works and not typically modern tabletop gaming. I'm also just one person doing this. I'm not an industry professional, I'm not a huge company for which my works are publicly available in an immensely popular IP. It may be fanart and I don't own deathclaws, but I still own all rights to the art itself. Some people (that one really furiously angry anon in particular) hold me to the same standard as if I was representative of Bethesda Softworks itself and therefore it's right and proper to take my shit, because it's deathclaws, and all deathclaws are Bethesda's, and I wouldn't be this popular without that, I should expect people to take my stuff, it's the internet - I am just one person making fanart. and I am very tired.) I think the biggest problem I have with people taking my designs for TTRPG assets is that it's the only reaction they have sometimes. the 'wow cool! can I take this?' reaction akin to a little child shoving things in their mouth. That doesn't reflect well on you, and for the artist it doesn't feel good. And most tabletop gaming these days is casual sessions that usually center around getting the campaign itself done with little creativity beyond what the players bring to the table, which results in using other peoples' art they found on google without being creative about it at all, which is why you'll see a lot of artists who have beef with it, because it also doesn't feel good. All this to say - if you ask and are respectful and credit back, it still feels weird to me, but like... sure! I do this for fun and to express creativity, so if it encourages other people to also have fun and express their creativity, I'd feel bad saying no to an earnest request! It's fanart, we're all fans here, etc But also most people who aren't respectful won't ask, won't be creative, or will get mad when I say Can You Don't, so I'm kinda preaching to the wrong crowd here - to those people, you're right, I can't stop you from doing it anyway. but it will not put you in my good books

[drdemonprince]

I recently read "Unmasking Autism" and it felt like coming home. (I have been misdiagnosed my whole life.) I was so excited to find community and start meeting other people like me. But now I feel alienated--I feel like online Autism is basically a leftist political identity. It's fair to assume we all care about disability justice, but we don't all have the same beliefs about Israel and Palestine, for example, nor should we have to. Is there Autistic community that is not explicitly political?

You better reread Unmasking Autism because you missed a fuckin lot if you think embracing your disability is not an explicitly political project. Maybe focus on the sections about the American police shooting Black Autistic men, and Israeli military members slaughtering Palestinian Autistic people.

[allastoredeer]

Bet that the one time Vox actually tried to hypnotize Alastor in their past was the closest he ever got to it working on him too. Alastor thought they were friends, Vox had earned that right to be as close to him as he was, he Trusted Vox.

He got to see exactly one second of Alastor's eyes glazing over and the ring effect starting before his vision fractured and he was on the floor. Alastor is standing over him in so much rage that he can't even speak, before he sinks into the floor and runs away. And Vox cannot grasp, cannot accept how things went so wrong. He thinks it's Alastor's fault for Not Trusting Him and running away like a Coward. Logging those immediate impressions as gospel thereafter.

"If only he'd Listened to him." Vox thinks about himself, but attributes to Alastor.

I really need to properly write out Alastor and Vox's backstory, because

[shinxeysartgallery]

If you still like jax after this last episode i think there's something fundamentally wrong with you

Y'all are WEAK

The guy known for being an absolute menace does something fucked up and y'all lose your minds. Like, what did you expect? Were you thinking he was going to suddenly become nice and be kind to everyone? lmao

Plus, Gooseworx said herself that he was going to get worse to a point he was unlikeable, so you should've expected it. Did you think she was joking?

Personally, I love him precisely because he's an absolute menace and I live for the chaos. I hope he gets worse. <3

[shanastoryteller]

I was wondering why Necromancers in SIAT are called mothers? I don't think it's been said why, and considering the story has male Necromancers, I don't get it?

free yourself from the gender binary and maybe you'll be less of a drag

anyway

He’s a necromancer. He’s a Mother. He knows how to come home.

He’s a Mother, and that gives him an edge over other necromancy practitioners

Draco pauses. “Is being a necromancer genetic?”  “Maybe? Being a Mother isn’t, though,” he says.

"So whoever did this specifically didn’t want us to know who they were and knows that you’re a necromancer, if not a Mother,” Draco says. 

If Slughorn were out there haunting someone or something, he’d be easy to find. Even a normal necromancer could do it, never mind Mothers that have worked with him for decades.

i could keep going, but i assume you get the point. all mothers are necromancers, not all necromancers are mothers

as to why i went with the term mother, what better title is there for one who commands life into death? who controls death and lives with it in a way that others do not? the first time you were brought into this world, there was screaming, and there was blood. the second time, mother holds their breath and no one bleeds

this post puts many quotes i'm fond of in the same place

In many ways, women are death’s natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women “give birth astride of a grave.” 

— Caitlin Doughty, from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

The part of sexism that bores and angers me most is the culling, the simplification of women into Hallmark cards of femininity. When I became a mom, no one ever said, “Hey, you made a death. You made your children’s deaths.” Meanwhile, I could think of little else. It’s scary to think of mothers as makers of death, but it sure gives them more power and complexity than one usually finds.

— Samantha Hunt, interviewed by The New Yorker

[batsplat]

Chad reed on always the entourages creating the drama. I cannot believe that is what caused rosquez downfall but also given the level of Vale's celebrity and the way he carried himself, I can totally believe that it was the entourage (iPad stand I'm looking at you) that brought the end

(about reed's 2020 quotes in this) yeahhh I mean the downfall was caused by a whole bunch of factors, not just any one thing... like all great tragic narratives, it feels inevitable from a global perspective and yet thoroughly preventable in its specifics, with loads of points where you think, 'oh, if things had just gone a little bit differently'... there's this tension in how, in the end, maybe it would've always gone wrong, but a lot had to come together for it to go wrong in quite such a spectacular fashion

reed's definitely correctly identified one of the factors - the entourages, and valentino's entourage specifically. though fwiw, I did cut off the article before reed predicted the marc/fabio rivalry was headed a similar way (this was from 2020, obviously before the arm injury):

for better or for worse, fabio has skipped the villain arc to head straight to the depressed frenchie arc

regardless of whether this rift would have happened or not, the idea that marc would have gotten a new appreciation for the situation valentino found himself in is at least an interesting one. though if anything, the rivalry with fabio would have more closely paralleled valentino's with the other aliens (new talent coming through, but with the previously dominant rider still a regular winner). now is the time marc's learning what it feels like to come back from a prolonged absence from being competitive at the highest level - and of course with a new superstar simultaneously making his debut

so yeah, anyway, tragedy, you can point to all sorts of strains and pressures and tension inherent to professional sport that were exacerbated by the personalities involved and the influence of the media and the passage of time etc etc. but never mind all that, let's get back to entourages! I know you mention everybody's favourite b-list shakespeare villain, but I'm going to basically mostly ignore him because it's well-trodden ground. yeah, it does help to have one guy who's whispering poison into your ear for a prolonged stretch of time before showing up at your motorhome doorstep with a bunch of telemetry and a dream. and yeah, there were people in valentino's entourage definitely encouraging this path to doom. but what I'm also interested in is the flip side - why nobody stopped him

I would like to submit into evidence this passage detailing the thoughts of vale's mechanic alex briggs. now briggs in this excerpt blames two groups for how things went down in 2015:

the yamaha side (specifically the press group) for not talking him down from the ledge before the presser

the crew chief and other assorted italians on the team for being too "yessy" and not standing up to him

let's briefly (for a given value of the word) focus on the first one. if you're a random yamaha pr person and you see the valentino rossi run to a press conference (given he was late) with a bunch of papers in his hands (well, he's not actually holding the papers in those gifs, but presumably somebody's got them), it's probably a tough ask to expect you to hold up the valentino rossi and ask him what exactly he's intending to do with those papers. also, is he really going to back off because you, random yamaha pr person, have asked him to please not accuse the competition of sabotage? added context is that some at yamaha were aware of what valentino thought about the race at phillip island (which we'll get to in a sec), but god knows if the pr people did. unless he confided in anyone on the yamaha side what the plan was, a lot of them would have been blindsided too - which does come back to the problem of how big a deal valentino is and how maybe you're a little more cautious about questioning what he's about to do with those papers than you would be with somebody else. it does feel like perhaps a bit too much to expect for them to have launched some last-minute intervention, or to even know what kind of intervention they could have gone for beyond low-level comedy hijinks to stop him from even getting to that room. why did nobody from yamaha place a banana skin in his path

but we do know that at least some in yamaha were aware of valentino's great big phillip island sabotage theory, because lin jarvis has very helpfully told us as much (from the post-sepang media scrum):

Q: Do you think it was a mistake for Valentino to [provoke?] Marc so much on Thursday with a very personal and hard attack? Jarvis: There are always many different ways of addressing different problems - Valentino chose to do it in that way. Perhaps that is what provoked Marc into being quite aggressive on the track. I really don't know, you need to ask Marc not me about that. Every action has a consequence. That's life. Q: And did you know before that Valentino was going to be so aggressive with Marc in the press conference? Did you know before? Did you discuss with Valentino about this decision or you didn't know until it happened? Jarvis: Personally, I was not aware of that. I was aware of Valentino's opinion of the race in Australia, but I was not aware... but I was not aware that he would - Q: Don't you think because Valentino at the end of the day is an employee of Yamaha he should discuss before with you about such an important decision, to attack a rider of another factory in such a heavy way [...]? Jarvis: You can't control every incident, everything that happens and you know, generally we have a very good [...] relation, connection with our riders, we talk to them before about things before, but anyway I think this is something Valentino felt strongly about and it was his decision and that's it.

note the use of the word "personally", which does leave the door open to others within yamaha (outside of valentino's inner circle) knowing what was going to happen. jarvis, unsurprisingly, comes down pretty firmly on the side of 'well what were we supposed to do'. given that jarvis admits he knew valentino's theory and is hardly a stranger to valentino's modus operandi - after all, he was already team boss at the time of another tense press conference in sepang eleven years prior that took place in the wake of valentino accusing a competitor of messing with him - you do have to wonder whether yamaha could not have tried a little harder to stop valentino. but again, accounting for the power of valentino's status and the power of his character, I'm personally unconvinced yamaha could've done much to convince valentino to change his mind

so then: the italians. a little bit of context - briggs started working with crew chief jerry burgess in 1994 and both of them were on mick doohan's team for all of his five 500cc titles. when doohan's injuries forced his retirement, valentino inherited his championship-winning team upon moving up to 500cc. jb was vale's very first crew chief in the premier class, and him as well as briggs have been working with vale since december 1999. understandably, this is a very tightly-knit group. it is one that made the jump to yamaha with valentino - here's just a quick excerpt (also from oxley's valentino rossi: all his races) about briggs' thoughts on that move:

When Valentino decided to defect to Yamaha, he was determined to have his crew go with him. Only one stayed at HRC. "We first got to know about the Yamaha deal in Portugal, I think [September 2003]," Briggs continues. "I wanted to stay with JB, because I hadn't finished learning what I wanted to learn. "I remember a clandestine meeting in the car park at Phillip Island, about salaries and how everything was going to work. It was really exciting. When I very first started working with Honda the whole group was very much a team. Towards the end we felt like it started to become a bit us and them: the engineers and management, then the mechanics and the riders. They'd sort of got too big for their boots - they'd designed this wonderful bike, so it was like it had nothing to do with us. That made it easier to leave.

and also about the move to yamaha, from the 2020 barker biography of valentino:

But with his trusted crew chief Jerry Burgess and most of his other team members from the Honda garage agreeing to defect with him, Rossi had the crew he needed, not only to win but also to enjoy his racing. It was a heartening display of loyalty and something of a risk for all involved. ‘When I announced to the mechanics that I was going with Valentino they said, “I’m coming too,”’ Burgess later explained. ‘Some of those guys were leaving very secure jobs and taking a big gamble.’

the group also survived the move to ducati (obviously a deeply frustrating two years not just for the guy riding the bike) and the move back to yamaha. but then, valencia 2013, valentino announced his decision to fire jb in a press conference organised for the pair of them. his 2013 season had been deeply frustrating - yes, he had gotten a podium in his first race beating both marc and dani, but after that generally speaking he couldn't come close to matching the other aliens when healthy. he was comfortably the fourth best rider that year, scrapping and clawing his way through midfield battles and having to rely on misfortunes befalling the three title contenders to achieve his podiums and his sole victory at assen. he was considering retiring at the end of the 2014 season once his current contract expired, but wanted to try everything he could to see whether he could be competitive again against the world's very best. and so, he made the decision to roll the dice and get himself a new crew chief, the italian silvano galbusera

now I have to say, personally I have a lot of time for this decision (even if it was maybe not... uh, enacted in the most graceful of manners, given how sudden it was). I come from a sports background where a certain ruthlessness in personnel decisions is encouraged and generally praised - if something isn't working, you should have the courage to make a change, even if it's deeply uncomfortable (including on an interpersonal level). also, while it was a sudden departure, it's not like burgess was that keen on sticking around much longer (again from the same oxley book):

Valentino ended his collaboration very suddenly at the end of 2013. Burgess was shocked but not too much, because he already knew that he was coming to the end of his own career. "When it ended for me I'd already been doing it 30-odd years and I'd told Valentino a few weeks earlier that I wasn't going to sign any more multi-year contracts. I was 60 by then, so I'd go year by year. I'd already signed a contract for 2014, but I would've thought if we hadn't had any more success by then that there wasn't much point in continuing. I felt we would win more races but I was more doubtful about championships. "I'd read enough sporting biographies to know that sportsmen change their coaches towards the end of their careers. It can give them a spike in results but it doesn't change the overall story. Looking back, Valentino's career went on longer than I expected. He enjoyed some success but no more championships and that's what you race for. Of course he was in the unique position of being able to get a factory bike until he retired. He was very special and deserved everything he got."

which, look. again, personal bias, but to me it's reasonable to part ways with somebody who doesn't think any more titles are plausible, because at that point it's just somebody who has a very different view on your career than you do and may well not stick around for much longer anyway. also, at the end of the day, jb was wrong! valentino came extremely close to winning another title, and just because he didn't, doesn't change the fact he could have. if it had rained on the 8th of november 2015 in valencia, we might be having a very different conversation. (or if they hadn't changed the bloody qualifying format post-2012.) honestly, if the 2016 and to a lesser extent the 2017 season had gone just a little differently - a working bike in mugello here and an unbroken leg there - he could have been a genuine title threat in two more seasons. in any case, what it does show is that valentino even at the end of 2013 was still as determined as ever, was ready to engage in what was a huge gamble (given how almost all his success had come with the highly decorated jb) on the off chance he might find what it took to win again. this will not have been an easy decision for valentino. here's a write-up of the presser at valencia, that stresses how uncomfortable the occasion was, how surprising a decision it was to jb, but how publicly at least there was a lack of recriminations (which, to be fair, wouldn't be much fun to do in a shared presser):

(you'll note that the phrasing in the presser about athletes attempting to extend their carrers by changing things up is echoed in what he says in that book interview where he adds that it doesn't change the overall story, again suggesting he didn't really believe valentino would be competitive. he also uses the same phrasing in ANOTHER interview that confirms as much, but I think you get the point.) valentino said at the time, "it was a very difficult decision for me because I have a great history with jeremy. he is not just my chief mechanic. he is like part of my family. my father in racing". this is somebody he'd been working with since age 21, somebody who is not only revered within the paddock for his work with several of the sport's greats but is also a man who valentino obviously has a close personal connection to. meeting for the first time when vale snuck into the honda pit to check out the bike he might ride next season, hitting it off immediately, countless rowdy dinners together, parties, jb and another older colleague sitting back when food fights started, watching valentino grow up, working with him throughout all his big manufacturer switches, all his successes and all his failures... as much as anything else, it's evidence of how strong vale's desire to win was, how determined he continued to be, to make this choice at this stage of his career. and jb was open to the idea (at least publicly) that it might end up being a smart call:

the 'dirtiest' part of the whole affair is how it was actually carried out - it's not great form to tell your crew chief the day before you end up doing a press conference together to announce your choice. for whatever it's worth, this is how valentino justified the timeline:

and lastly, which I think is the most key part, is valentino's belief. because at the end of the day, the only reason why he's doing any of this, and the only reason why what was to come was possible at all, is that he himself still thought that he could challenge for another title - as much as that belief had come under strain:

now what this piece also goes on to say is that nobody believes this will work. nobody believes that firing jb will lead to better results. people expect that this is going to lead to his retirement, quite possibly at the end of 2014. it's worth just remembering sometimes how extraordinary valentino's return to the top of the game post-2013 really was, how it went against how we expect a rider's competitive lifecycle to work, went far beyond the longevity exhibited by any top rider before or since - all while going up against riders who are widely believed to be some of the best to ever do it. valentino beat jorge in both 2014 and 2016, and remains one of two people to outscore prime marc marquez over the course of a season. not to engage in too much rossi prop here, but sepang 2015 can't really be understood without all the frustration that led up to it, to this one golden chance, this miracle that everybody had believed to be impossible (sometimes even valentino). this wasn't supposed to be happening. it was happening. and then, so so close to the finish line, valentino could feel it slipping, slipping, slipping away

but of course, we still don't know whether changing crew chiefs is the key factor that made him competitive again. maybe he just needed a bit longer to get back into the swing of things post-ducati disaster. maybe the bikes just started to suit him better. hey, maybe it was that nifty exercise regime he'd engaged in a wee spot of espionage for so that he could pinch it off his teammate. what we can say, however, is that valentino's choice both tells us a lot about his mindset, as well as (to finally bring us back to the actual point of this post) representing a massive shift in his 'entourage'. this is what briggs is referring to in his quote - the italians. the new crew chief. the people who couldn't stand up to valentino. now obviously, as mentioned above briggs had worked with jb for the better part of twenty years and can hardly be considered a neutral party. here were briggs' feelings on the matter (yeah it's from the same oxley book again, I got it new for eighteen quid which is a very generous price, would recommend):

When JB was out at the end of 2013 it was like losing my mechanic dad. I remember being in the garage when we found out about it. Then they arranged a kind of farewell, a kind of hodgepodge farewell. It was terrible, I didn't like any of it. I was just hiding behind one of the bikes in the garage, crying, going, what's going on here? It didn't seem right to me. I think maybe Valentino thought he would get faster again sooner, but I think it took at least a year to get the taste of the Ducati out of his mouth. I think if he'd stayed with JB we would've won the championship in 2015.

which. look. we don't have time to unpack all that. but. the point is that obviously briggs wasn't exactly a massive fan of the change within valentino's team, and his comments about the 2015 season do have to be read with that in mind. as to whether vale really would have done better in 2015 with jb at his side, your guess is as good as mine. all that being said, a part of me wonders how much losing that grounding presence enabled valentino's late-2015 spiral. maybe not in terms of talking valentino out of the great big fluctuating lap times treachery theory - to state the obvious, valentino got himself involved in plenty of drama during jb's time as a crew chief. jb himself occasionally helped add fuel to the fire in those feuds, like his infamous comment about how he would be able to fix the ducati's issues in 80 seconds that casey still brings up every three business days (the comments were poorly phrased but also somewhat taken out of context, in that jb was talking about a specific set-up problem). he's generally been pretty happy to be forthright about valentino's rivals, for instance this about casey:

My feeling at the time was that Casey probably only had one game plan, and having watched Casey over the years, he doesn't have a plan B. If it doesn't go his way from the outset, it's probably one of the weaknesses that he had through the youth that he had, through the lack of experience that he had. That's not a criticism of him per se, he was still only 22 at the time.

(this is about laguna seca 2008 and how he helped valentino win that race, including in plotting out vale's rather ruthless tactics - which casey was of course not exactly a fan of.) or these. uh. harsh comments about dani from spring 2010:

Q: Is that atmosphere or track knowledge? Is it like the Spanish finding something extra at the racetracks in Spain? JB: Well, therein we show the weakness, don't we? If you can get up on that weekend, on the technical racetracks of Spain, why can't you get up on the technical racetracks like Australia, where the Italians do? Lorenzo is a guy who will and does. Stoner has been able to get up on tracks all over the world. Unfortunately, Dani Pedrosa's into his 6th year in MotoGP, and he's won 8 races, Jorge Lorenzo's two months into his 3rd and he's won 6. It's night and day between those two, is the way I see it. Dani's an extremely fast rider, but a shockingly poor racer. Q: Were you surprised at Jerez [2010] when Pedrosa fought back when Lorenzo passed him? JB: When did Dani fight back? With two laps to go, and he didn't even get close enough to try to come back. Dani has never been a fighter in races, he's a lovely kid, don't get me wrong, but you can see that Lorenzo, having Pedrosa in front of him, it was never going to be the way he was going to finish that race. He was going to finish on the ground or he was going to finish in front of Pedrosa. That's the sort of race that we want, we had that with Biaggi and Valentino, and from history with Schwantz and Rainey. All the good riders have always had somebody they have had to put the target on the back of. It was Doohan and Gardner, and Doohan won that battle hands down, and I think Jorge Lorenzo's going to win this battle [with Pedrosa] hands down.

kind of a dick! so his attitude to valentino being valentino has generally been a) well having enemies is good, actually, with an added slice of b) good luck to his enemies :) - see also this quote (from the barker biography) in the context of the gibernau rivalry:

And that made Rossi even more dangerous, as Jerry Burgess pointed out: ‘Valentino is the sort of rider I wouldn’t want to get angry. He can take you apart on the track.’

so yes, jb is also perfectly brutal in his own right, as you presumably have to be to work alongside valentino so closely for so long. he is, however, also somebody valentino has a massive amount of respect for, somebody who helped turn him into a legend and is responsible for a lot of vale's success - not least, of course, in the pivotal move to yamaha. he was replaced by a man of a far far lesser stature in the sport, one who presumably would have been grateful to valentino for the biggest job he was ever going to get. if briggs is right and there was a shift in valentino in 2015, surrounded as he was by italians (derogatory) who could not stand up to him, who allowed valentino to insist on war and peace on the pit boards, to focus more and more on things that had nothing to do with riding... it would be going a little too far to say that valentino was missing an adult in the room given he was, in fact, in his thirties and should have been capable of being that adult. and who knows what jb would have said or thought or done about the great big childhood hero deception theory. but sepang 2015 was the culmination of a lot of things, including a pressure cooker of a season that grew more and more tense and put more and more stress on everyone involved - perhaps for none more so than valentino. maybe, just maybe, if he'd had somebody around him with fifteen years of experience in handling him, who could have just occasionally told him to knock it off, to concentrate on the racing, to keep things simple (always jb's defining philosophy), to maybe not get so wrapped up in the great big spanish collusion theory...

or maybe it wouldn't have mattered! maybe we're getting cause and effect all wrong here; maybe valentino was deliberately fashioning his entourage into one that was only going to give him positive feedback. maybe he would have just stopped listening to jb, maybe the very decision to fire jb makes it clear he was no longer interested in what jb had to say. it's a tragedy, after all! maybe it was always going to go like this. maybe it was always going to end like this

speaking of entourages, marc's manager played a bit of a cameo role in fanning the flames just a little further (article from marca, 26/10/2015):

alzamora obviously will be somebody valentino is familiar with, having raced him in 125cc and also having just coexisted in the paddock over the years. valentino could of course be lying, but idk, why would he? he's already made his case by this point, and what if alzamora were to contradict him? if it's true and this conversation did happen, you do have to say it's a spectacularly unhelpful intervention from alzamora. even if marc was mad at valentino, why the hell are you telling valentino this AFTER sepang 2015? what's the plan here buddy

^ 1999 world champions: alzamora in 125cc, vale in 250cc and alex criville in 500cc. people think motogp lore is complicated but if you know like, five guys, you're set for about twenty years of drama

which does get to the heart of the matter - a lot of these people have big egos and their own agendas and they love to run their mouths. they like talking a big game and getting involved in things they really shouldn't be getting involved in. is reed right that these people in the riders' entourages 'created the drama'? well, no, I think the two men at the centre of this particular tragedy were plenty capable of doing that themselves. nevertheless, you can point to how professional sports (and motogp in particular) forces you to rely heavily on a small group of people to keep you sane at the centre of the storm, and the risks that can emerge when that small group collectively unmoors itself from reality. you can point to the perils of fame, both in making your reliance on your inner circle so unnegotiable as well as in providing you with the status and power and ego to ignore anyone who might wish to change your mind. you can point to specific figures in this story who managed to incite the conflict between the two of them, as well as how the pressure cooker competitive environment they were operating within helped set up the ultimate catastrophe. you can point to how valentino lacked anyone with the power to stop him - both in the direct sense of forcing him to reconsider and the indirect sense of commanding his respect enough to make him see sense. maybe, just like in 2004, valentino had simply been "looking for an excuse" and he was always headed down this path. or maybe if somebody had just held him back a little that year, kept him focused on his riding, maybe if the right person had intervened at the right time...

maybe, maybe, maybe. that's why it's a tragedy

[cherubxkisses]

are you having fun making up a woman to be mad at? who do you know that is posting about the barbie snub and not also (moreso) the crisis in palestine? other than actual zionists who are not going to be affected by a shamey post about it

it is sad how you will do anything but listen to palestinians. it is sad how you claim us all to be liars. i’ve seen people who have been silent for over 3 months watch me post about this genocide and not say a single word. the second the barbie news came out, it was all over their social media. i am allowed to shame them for it. they should be ashamed

[ragri5]

Please draw demo doing the “my eyes are looking at you” thing with his fingers at medic but when he points at his own eyes he holds up one finger and he points four fingers at medic

My guy won't get uber for a very, very, long, time․