#he gave up his education to pursue a modelling career

[brandybradyrandyandyndy]

WHAT. ARE. YOU. WEARING. I CAN'T DO THIS ANYMORE. THEY GOTTA BE DOING THIS ON PURPOSE.

[chrisbitchtree]

Can't Touch This

For Harringrove Flip It Reverse It - Day 4

Prompt - Angst turned into fluff - "Don't touch me!"

***

If you’d first asked Steve when he met Billy what he thought the blonde would pursue as a career, kindergarten teacher would have been way at the bottom of the list, under mechanic and carpenter, below bartender or surf shop owner, even down below stripper.

But to Steve’s shock, it’s what Billy had chosen, finding that he had a passion for it, and he was thriving. He came home every day covered in stickers and finger paints, glitter and confetti in his hair, his curls up in a bun and one of his signature pastel button-ups on.

He’d regale Steve with stories about what a beautiful tree Lily drew or how Eddie had finally corrected his habit of drawing half the letters in the alphabet backwards on his worksheets. He glowed with pride over every single one of his student’s accomplishments, and it was the highlight of Steve’s day every single day to hear about it.

Billy always got home earlier than Steve, so he would make dinner. Steve would sit at their little wooden table for two, watching Billy with a dreaming look in his eyes while Billy would whip up spaghetti, sauce bubbling away at his side while he boiled noodles, or flip baked chicken breast and fluff up Rice-aroni, they favourite side, talking a mile a minute about the fact that Timmy was no longer scared of the toilet or that Rachel hadn’t tried to eat paste in three days.

It helped Steve unwind after a long day as a high school math teacher and all the drama that went along with educating dramatic, hormonal teenagers who would flip on a dime, going from polite model student one minute, to raging asshole the next. It took a lot out of Steve, but he got a lot out of it in return. But that didn’t mean that he didn’t envy the cozy little world Billy had created for his own students.

***

When Steve arrived home late one sunny April afternoon, he could tell something was wrong the second he saw Billy. His face was pulled into a tight grimace, his shirt was untucked, and he was trying with all of his might to scratch the middle of his back. From the way he was hopping around, his arm fully extended, it didn’t seem like it was going to well for him.

“What’s up?” Steve asked, trying not to laugh at the image in front of him, difficult as it was. He really wished he had a camera right now.

Billy kept hopping around, seemingly unable to find relief. “Don’t know. I’m so itchy, and it won’t stop. It’s been like this all day.”

Let me have a look, Steve said.

Billy stopped moving for a minute and Steve lifted the hem of his shirt. Billy’s back was covered in small, red spots.

“Ummmm, Billy? Have you ever had chicken pox before?” Steve asked, lowering the shirt and walking down the hall to the bathroom.

“No?” Billy said, although it came out more like a question. “I don’t think so? Why? Do I have it? Don’t touch me!”

“Well, I guess it was bound to happen at some point, working with little kids. I’m honestly surprised that you lasted this long. And it’s fine. I’ll put on gloves.” He returned to the kitchen a minute later, calamine lotion in one hand and a pair of rubber gloves in the other. “Take off your shirt and lay down on the couch. I’ll put some on your back and it’ll help with the itch.”

Billy did as he was told, laying on his front on the plush, floral couch that was the centrepiece of their living room. Steve straddled his hips, flipping the top on the bottle. He poured some into his palm before closing the bottle and dropping it onto the carpet. With the pointer finger of his other hand, he painted the dots, trying to make sure he caught every one.

He gave the lotion a minute to dry before having Billy stand and take off his pants, so Steve could check for spots below his belt. Thankfully, except for a couple on his thighs, he seemed safe so far.

“Stupid kids,” Billy grumbled. “Stupid parents letting their kids go to school sick. Now I’m going to have to take time off. We were supposed to vote on who won the art contest tomorrow. They even promised they wouldn’t just all vote for themselves. Now stupid Sandra is going to get to do it.”

Steve watched him with amusement as he ranted, the lotion drying an adorable pink colour that stood out in stark contrast from Billy’s golden tan. He’d come a long way from when they were foulmouthed teenagers, when every second word was fuck or shit or goddammit. Now it was all stupid and silly and gosh. It was cute that he was getting so worked up over this.

“It’s ok, baby,” Steve chuckled. “I know this means a lot to you, but there will be other art contests. It’s important that you stay home and get better, so you don’t make any of the kids sick.”

Billy sighed. “I know, it just sucks.” He raised his arm to scratch his back and Steve swatted it away.

“No scratching, that’s how it spreads.”

Billy stuck out his lower lip, pouting. “But it’s itchy! I can’t take it!”

As Steve’s mother had done for him when he’d had chicken pox years ago, Steve grabbed oven mitts for Billy to slip on his hands. “Here you go, this’ll help keep you from scratching. Sit down, put a movie on, and try not to think about the itch. I’ll order a pizza and then come sit with you. Ok?”

Billy nodded in agreement, making his way to the couch.

Steve watched him fondly, forever grateful for this sweet, kind, silly, wonderful man.

[kimhyeon]

BASICS

FULL NAME: KIM HYEON [ 김현 ]

» MEANING: Kim [is written as "김" gim in Korean. ("김" solely by itself has no specific meaning unless specified by its underlying hanja or derived from context.) The hanja for Kim can also be transliterated as Hangul: 금 geum "metal, iron, gold". The Kim family is also the ruling family in North Korea.]; Hyeon [Sino-Korean 賢 (hyeon) meaning "virtuous, worthy, able" or other characters that are pronounced similarly. It usually occurs in combination with another character, though it is sometimes used as a stand-alone name.]; Mason [The word mason (“stone-worker”) is derived from the Old French “masson.”]

NICKNAME: Hyeon is also well-known as Mason, his American name which his mother gave to him at birth. It's her favorite name.

AGE: 30-years old.

DATE OF BIRTH: 1993 July 4th, early evening...

PLACE OF BIRTH: Seoul, South Korea.

OCCUPATION: Hyeon models sometimes but his full-time job is being a flight attendant at a major Korean Airline. He also owns a small business online which he established about five years ago. They sell beauty products mostly stuff coming from Korea.

RELIGION: Family's Christian, non-practicing.

ORIENTATION: Bisexual; Biromantic.

GENDER: Cisgender Male.

PERSONALITY

STRENGTHS: Tenacious, Highly Imaginative, Loyal, Emotional, Sympathetic, Persuasive

WEAKNESSES:  Moody, Pessimistic, Suspicious, Manipulative, Insecure

APPEARANCE

FACE CLAIM: Kim Woo-sung.

HEIGHT: 5′8 [172.72 cm.]

WEIGHT: 143 lbs. [65 kg.]

BUILD: Lean.

GAIT: Relaxed.

HAIR COLOR: Black; Hyeon does color his hair sometimes. Right now it's a lighter brown.

EYE COLOR: Brown.

BIRTHMARK: TBA. 

OVERVIEW: » SCARS: Tiny ones but nothing noticeable.

» TATTOOS: Hyeon has a few. Details to be added.

BACKGROUND

HOMETOWN: Seoul, South Korea; Los Angeles, California.

RESIDENCE: Seoul, South Korea; Los Angeles, California.

NATIONALITY: Korean.

ETHNICITY: Asian.

FINANCIAL STATUS: Middle class.

EDUCATION LEVEL: Bachelor's degree.

DEGREES: Degree in Hospitality / Hotel Management from UCLA.

SPOKEN LANGUAGES: Hyeon was born in Seoul but most of his childhood was spent in the US where his family moved when he was very little. His first language is Hangul and then English. He's fluent in Japanese and some Mandarin. He can curse in different languages, mostly Asian languages, he learned from his co-workers.

RELATIONSHIPS

PARENTS: Emma [m.] and Henry [f.] Both are still alive.

SIBLINGS: He has an older brother and an older sister.

CHILDREN: None.

PETS: He has a cat named Rocky.

SIGNIFICANT RELATIONSHIPS: 

» Hyeon is close to his siblings and mother. He is cousin to Rain.

FAMILY HISTORY: Nothing extra-ordinary about Hyeon's life. He grew up in a nice and respectable family. However, after Hyeon's older sisters started having problems in school due to bullying, the family migrated to the US since they have relatives in the country. Hyeon's mother did not want them to go through the Korean school system and not enjoy student life because of bullying. Hyeon did well in school in California where his family settled. They were surrounded with other Korean families and were great friends with them so they still grew up having that sense of culture and where they came from.

Every school break, Hyeon and his siblings went back home to stay with relatives and grandparents. After graduating college at UCLA, Hyeon decided to move to Seoul where he pursued many careers but loved flying so much that he decided to become a flight attendant.

ROMANTIC HISTORY:  Currently single. Although family friends' parents try to have their daughters date him.

PLATONIC RELATIONSHIPS: Hyeon is best friends with co-worker Samantha Lee. He is also close with his cousin Rain.

THOUGHTS ON LOVE: "It will happen when the time is right."

HEALTH

PHOBIA(S): None, clinically.

HANDICAP(S): None.

MENTAL DISEASE(S): Hyeon suffered some depression and anxiety when he was very little due to what his sister went through.

PHYSICAL DISEASE(S): None.

[k-18-news]

14 Bollywood Artists who didn’t finish college and decided to join the film industry

We have been captivated by some well-known Bollywood stars. We are intrigued by their early years, as they made a lasting impression on B’Town. It’s surprising to discover that these celebrities who are highly paid have not graduated from college

We have compiled a list of Bollywood stars who achieved great success despite not having attended college.

1. Alia Bhatt

Alia Bhatt started her movie career shortly after graduating from Mumbai’s Jamnabai Narsee School. In 2012, Alia Bhatt became an actor in the film Student of the Year. She didn’t go to college. Alia didn’t receive any education beyond High school.

2. Aamir Khan

Aamir finished his 12th Grade at Narsee Monjee College and then dropped out. The actor soon joined a theatre company, and he began full-time acting. As a 16-year-old, he appeared in Paranoia and was an assistant director for his uncle Nasir Hussain. This celebrity hasn’t looked back since then.

3. Deepika Padukone

Deepika was a model, and she stopped playing badminton. She attended Mount Carmel High School, her hometown. After graduating from Mount Carmel High School, she went on to study sociology at the Indira Gandhi Open University (IGNOU) and has a Bachelor of Arts. To help her modeling career, she dropped out of college.

4. Priyanka Chopra

Former Miss World wanted to become a criminal psychologist. Bareilly’s Army Public School was where she completed her education. Priyanka had to leave Jai Hind College, Mumbai in order to pursue her modeling career.

5. Akshay Kumar

Akshay completed his education at Mumbai’s Don Bosco High School. He was enrolled at Guru Nanak Khalsa College but left to become a chef and learn the martial arts. He returned to India and began acting.

6. Kangana Ranaut

Kangana graduated from DAV Chandigarh. Kangana wanted to become a doctor and pursued a career as a physician. After failing an exam, she decided to change her mind and go into modeling. Then she landed in B-town as an actress.

7. Katrina Kaif

Katrina’s mom was involved in social services and the family had to travel to different countries and migrate on a regular basis. The actress was home-schooled with a number of tutors and never went to school. She started modeling at a young age and was never able to finish school.

8. Ranbir Kapoor

Ranbir was awarded 54% in his 10th Grade. Ranbir walked up and told his parents that he did not want to continue his education. Ranbir didn’t graduate high school. However, he did spend some time studying filmmaking in New York. It was his diploma that mattered.

9. Kareena Kapoor Kan

Bebo attended Mumbai’s Jamnabai Narsee School, and later Welham Girls School. She had hoped to study law at Mithibai College but decided to model instead.

10. Aishwarya Rai Bachchan

Aishwarya originally intended to study medicine but changed her mind and enrolled at Rachana Sansad Academy of Architecture. She gave up on her plans to become an architecture professor in favor of modeling.

11. Salman Khan

Salman was educated at Scindia School, Gwalior, and then St. Stanislaus High School Mumbai. He enrolled in St. Xavier’s College Mumbai but later dropped out for personal reasons.

12. Tiger Shroff

Junior Shroff graduated from the American School of Bombay. He didn’t want to go to college. The actor ended his 12th Grade and began modeling immediately.

13. Arjun Kapoor

Arjun attended Mumbai’s Arya Vidya Mandir School for his education. After failing his 12th-grade board exam, he dropped out of school.

14. Kajol Devgan

Kajol graduated from St. Joseph’s High school in Panchgani. At the age of 17, she began her career as an actor. The actor was unable to finish her high school education.

Visit Us For more Useful Link :- Bollywood news latest

News of bollywood

[nightlyterrors]

MUSE FILE: ALEXANDER SAMUEL MORGAN

name: alexander samuel morgan | age: twenty-six | orientation: heterosexual | occupation & education: f1 driver and model | languages: english and dutch | height: 6'4 (193cm)

overview.

alexander is the oldest child to danielle morgan, a retired football superstar turned filmmaking producer. as a kid, it already showed that he had his mother’s charisma and sports spirit, always having had dreams of becoming a sportsman as famous as his mother. he had no interest in pursuing careers through college or such and thus did not focus on that at all. for this reason, alex didn’t do too well in school despite getting plenty of extra classes to help him along. it was clear he preferred working with his hands and focusing on sports, which went from football to karts. his mother supported him in this and supplied him with all he needed, which gave him a good advantage as opposed to most. and with her connections, it didn’t take long before alex’ talent in racing was noticed and he was brought into higher classes to train further. as his talent grew and his mindset proved similar to his mother’s, alex became an f1 coureur at only nineteen years old. first starting as a reserve, he proved himself during sickness of one of the drivers by picking up well. now, at twenty-five, alexander has become a f1 star on the rise, renowned for his innovative way of driving and the games he obviously plays with his fellow coureurs. on the sidelines, he has also taken up modelling for various brands, mostly focused on underwear and colognes.

along with that, alexander has struggled with his nepotism and people constantly paying attention to him. his slate isn’t as clean, with a barfight and a scandal here and there to taint it. still, once in his inner circle, alex shows to be surprisingly emphatic, curious and interested in many things. he has a secret talent of painting and drawing, something so far only his mother and sister know of, though his works can be secretly found at some places under different aliases. he’s very close with his mother and sister, but seems to back out once someone else attempts to get close to him. on top of that, he also has many masks he seems to put in in different settings, along with outing his emotions in ways that sometimes aren’t deemed responsible; a drink too many, a fist accidentally landing to someone’s face.. perhaps he’s got more to him than what people think.

[globaltalentexchange]

A R2I STORY: SADANAND SINGH

Mr. Sadanand Singh is currently working as a Principal Research Scientist. He had moved to San Francisco, USA to pursue his Ph.D., which is where he began his professional journey. 

He has an impressive professional journey, with over 10+ years of experience with deep learning, machine learning, numerical modeling, and scientific computing in production environments. He also has an excellent publication record with 600+ citations in high-profile journals like Nature Materials.

Our team was interested in getting to know him better, understanding his path, and getting feedback on his experience working with GTX.

Read on for a glimpse into Sadanand’s journey.

Could you give us a brief about yourself?

I am currently the principal scientist at Micron India, after making my move back to India from the U.S. with the help of GTX.

I had shifted to the U.S. for my Ph.D., after which I worked at several reputed companies as well as with a couple of start-ups. 

What made you choose the U.S. for pursuing higher education?

India is great for an undergrad degree, however, back in 2008, I felt the opportunities for higher studies were better in the west. I was seeking a high quality of education, which is why I moved. 

How was your experience in the U.S. during your time there?

When you are young, new experiences are definitely exciting- personally as well as professionally. There were other Indians that I connected with as well. 

One thing to mention was that the academic experience was both challenging as well as humbling for sure. 

While in the West, did you feel anything was lacking? What made you consider a move back to the homeland?

Though I felt relatively satisfied professionally, I felt something missing in the personal aspect. Once you grow up and mature, you realize the importance of family and it dawns on you on a daily basis just how much you miss them. I felt very lonely at times. The family structure in the U.S. is nuclear, which is very different from what we’re used to back home. It hits harder once festivals like Diwali come around- you think you can just go back to visit, but how often can you do that, after all? I also really missed the food back home.

An obstacle that I faced in the U.S. was the terrible medical/healthcare system. Everything seems hunky dory till you fall ill, after which you can easily lose a majority of your savings- the American dream comes crashing. 

How long did you plan for the move before actually taking the plunge?

We (my wife and I) had started contemplating the move back in 2019. Covid in 2020 gave us even more time to consider our priorities and think them through. I wasn’t sure about the opportunities available in India. Collectively, we were earning nearly half a million in the U.S. but I didn’t find such pay in India. Luckily, once GTX contacted me with an awesome role, the pace increased. After that, it just took 3-4 months. 

How did you tackle this salary gap? How did you come to terms with what was being offered here?

I talked to a lot of people who work in India and have built impressive careers. It made me realize the quality of life that was possible with even the minimum that I was being offered back home. The lifestyle this kind of salary can get you is great and impressive. I live a lot better than I did in the U.S.

For example- I was renting a 2 bedroom house there, and paying triple the rent that I would have to here. Now, I am living in a 5-bedroom villa, and I can afford to hire a driver as well. 

This kind of lifestyle is something I could not have even imagined in the West. 

Do you think a lot of the NRIs scare away because of the salary discrepancies? 

Definitely. I feel a lot of people, especially my generation, don’t realize the opportunities in India and the changes that have taken place. Just, for example, the UPI system is brilliant. India is booming – in fact, the U.S is still lacking in several aspects. 

Did you face any hindrances/obstacles during your move back?

No, I didn’t. I really appreciate Micron for making the move easy for me- they helped in every regard. Global Talent Exchange helped immensely as well and made the cross-country moving process way easier. 

What were you seeking out in the career opportunities in India? 

I did set firm boundaries and operated my search within that. I was not willing to take a probational shortcut. I was also not willing to take any steps back, and my professional career should not be compromised. I wanted to remain in the research field. While I was applying, all I could think of were the IITs. It was a rigorous process- luckily, GTX approached me. It made the entire journey efficient and manageable. 

Would you agree that a good opportunity requires some digging and patience? 

I 100% agree! A lot of the NRIs are unaware of what steps MNCs are taking to grow their business in India. It’s also important to mention that a large number of people are under the impression that India is a “back office”. That’s not the case anymore at all. It’s also difficult to find something that aligns with the competencies of the NRIs that have good work experience and have built a strong skill set. Back then, even I didn’t think it would be possible to get the kind of role I got in Micron. GTX helped massively.

How was your experience working with the GTX team throughout the entire process? 

From the time the team initially contacted me till the time I made my move back, they were very helpful. The recruiter helped me understand the title and walked me through the requirements and the company profile. Even though it was during Diwali (festival time), I noticed that there were efforts made to prevent any lapses from either end. After I was connected to Micron, I felt an instant “click”.

GTX made my life easier, I would say. They were very considerate about my schedule and time zone and planned the meetings at a time that was suitable for both. They enabled conversations and followed up regularly. I really appreciate your active involvement and efforts. 

Could you talk about some of the myths that you were holding on to back in the U.S. about what life would be like back in India? 

Definitely the lifestyle aspect- did not think such a luxurious life is possible. Also, I didn’t know India has the kind of opportunities that I now realize it does. I’ve got an impressive position back home. 

There’s also no dearth of anything that you may want- in fact, the choices are endless. For example: If you feel like eating a homely meal, India has a wide variety of “dhabas” (small food joints) but also has stunning 5-star hotels where you could dine in luxury. 

Also, I thought I wouldn’t be able to access nature walks and beaches as I did in the U.S. However, even in India, several people have gotten together to form backpacking groups, tour groups, etc. Everything is available, you just have to find it. 

If you could convey any message to the NRIs that might be looking to move back, what would you say? What developments would you tell them about?

The digital payment system is very impressive and India is headed toward building a cashless economy. The developments in Southern India are something to be marveled at. Bangalore and Hyderabad are a few places that have no dearth of opportunities- in fact, they are at par with the U.S. I would say that there are several job opportunities similar to the San Francisco Bay Area. 

I would definitely advise them to be open about it, and talk to a lot of people. I would urge them to not squash the feeling- if they have an inkling that they want to move back, they shouldn’t ignore it- the emotion is arising for a reason. I would recommend that they research, talk to friends and talk to family. Most importantly, I would recommend they talk to Global Talent Exchange!

Lastly, I would tell them that they can easily find what they seek, they just have to be patient. 

[psitrend]

Interview with Dr. Li Jingmei, Senior Research Scientist at the Genome Institute of Singapore

New Post has been published on https://china-underground.com/2020/03/16/li-jingmei-scientist-genome-institute-singapore/

Interview with Dr. Li Jingmei, Senior Research Scientist at the Genome Institute of Singapore

Dr. Jingmei Li, a Senior Research Scientist at the Genome Institute of Singapore, uses genetics to improve women’s health and prevent breast cancer.

Dr. Jingmei Li is a Senior Research Scientist at A*STAR’s Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS). She holds a bachelor’s degree in Science from the National University of Singapore (NUS), majoring in Life Sciences and minoring in Technopreneurship. She pursued her Ph.D. at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. A decade later at GIS, Jingmei leads her own group under a national initiative that seeks to use genomic sciences to improve public health and public prosperity in Singapore. Jingmei’s personal mission is to improve the lives of women. She studies genetic and non-genetic risk factors of breast cancer, including X-ray images of breasts (known as mammograms), to identify women who are more predisposed to developing the disease. In 2014, Jingmei received the prestigious UNESCO-L’Oreal For Women in Science International Fellowship for her work on breast cancer. In 2017, she received the Young Scientist Award administered by the Singapore National Academy of Science, a prominent accolade given to young researchers and scientists. Through her work, Jingmei has unearthed insights into the mechanisms and variants that can increase a woman’s risk of developing breast cancer. Jingmei is passionate about science communication, education, and promoting breast cancer awareness. Jingmei’s research pushes the boundaries of what we know in science to benefit society and make a difference to the worldwide community.

What’s the story behind your motivation to study Science and Human Genetics? Was it a childhood dream to carve a career in the fields of Science?

Like any child, my what-I-want-to-be-when-I-grow-up moment is based on what I read about in books. I have imagined myself as a doctor, nurse, teacher, mathematician, engineer, astronaut, and rocket scientist among others at different points. As for how I ended up studying breast cancer, I like to tell people that it’s love at first sight. For my graduate school (Karolinska Institutet, Sweden) I was drawn to a group of brilliant clinicians and researchers who were really passionate about the work they do. Above and beyond science, they genuinely cared about the patients. The energy was positively contagious!

She is a well-known advocate for women’s health. Her research can help women to understand how often they should get themselves checked for early detection of breast cancer. She is focused on saving lives, making an impact globally in the fight against breast cancer.

Who had inspired you and greatly influenced your life philosophy?

I stand on the shoulders of giants. I am also incredibly lucky to be blessed with shining role models – both men and women. I have done a lot of work in the space of women’s health, most notably – my work on breast cancer. Typically seen as a woman’s disease, it is easy to forget men who have also contributed significantly to improving women’s health. One in every 100 breast cancer happens to a man. Science is genderless. Every day, I walk into the research institute as a woman. But once I am in the lab, I am a scientist like everyone else. Whether it’s a man’s problem or a woman’s problem, it is a problem that we must tackle and solve. Naturally, we have a lot to thank men who worked really hard to improve women’s health. Take for example my own Ph.D. supervisor, Professor Per Hall in Sweden. He was originally a radiation oncologist but later became a full-time researcher. The reason he gave was that as a doctor, he could only treat one woman at a time. However, as a researcher, his findings could potentially make a difference to millions of women.

That’s why he was very passionate about doing studies on how breast cancer can be prevented. Also, it wasn’t a one man’s war against breast cancer, Per also infected many of his students with his passion. I found even deeper motivation when I shadowed a breast cancer surgeon in Singapore when he ran clinic to see breast cancer patients. It was only for a day, and I acted as a translator in dialects when I could. But I felt the same anxiety when the patients come in for the visit, not knowing what diagnosis they would hear. When they cried with relief and profusely said thank you when told it wasn’t cancer, I had to fight back my own tears. There are millions of reasons why I choose to work on breast cancer because every breast cancer case is a motivation for my work to continue. Can you introduce and tell us about your work and researches?

The focus of my research is on disease prevention. Or at least early detection. The total spend on cancer drug discovery outnumbers prevention research by as much as 40-fold, according to the European Commission during Framework Programme 6 (2002–2006). Too much hype is focused on looking for a cure; too little attention is spent on preventing cancer in the first place. In my projects, I look into the book of life itself. I scrutinize the DNA that defines us to look for genetic differences that spell who is likely to get breast cancer, and who is not. The same goes for who is going to die from breast cancer, and who will die with breast cancer. My aim is to discover novel susceptibility markers and mechanisms, which are bits and pieces of clues essential to solving the puzzle of the disease. Knowing what makes the cancer bomb ticks will ultimately be helpful in stratifying the population according to the likelihood of getting the disease so that resources can be reallocated to individuals at high risk more often than those with the below-average risk of getting breast cancer.

Breast cancer is the most common cancer in women and the leading cause of cancer deaths among women. Survival can depend on when the cancer is diagnosed. The research could provide future opportunities for early intervention to stop breast tumors developing. Predicting an individual’s cancer risk can go a long way towards detecting cancer early.

What were the biggest challenges you encountered during your researches?

Clinical and follow-up data is usually kept by each hospital separately. Retrieval of samples and data and coordination between different sites can be laborious and time-consuming. Quality, for example, too many missing values, may also be an issue. IMHO, breast cancer research has come a long way in Asia. With the confluence of affordable genomic analysis, accessible information and educated public, the potential to improve women’s health are tremendous. There is also an emphasis on clinicians to be active in scientific research. The barriers to breast cancer research pale in comparison to barriers to bringing the fruits of science to the public.

What gave you the strength to go on and achieve your goals?

Like I said before, there are millions of reasons why I choose to work on breast cancer because every breast cancer case is a motivation for my work to continue.

What did winning the L’Oréal-Unesco Women In Science International Fellowship mean to you, and what has changed for you since then?

As many wise men said: “Talent is everywhere but the opportunity is not.” I find joy in encouraging others to explore the education and funding opportunities that were offered to me. To be honest, I may not be in the Science field today if my senior in high school did not pass me an application form to apply for a Science scholarship. Without the support of initiatives such as the L’Oréal-UNESCO For Women In Science International Fellowship, the importance of breast cancer awareness and the work we do may not be shared as widely to the correct audience (through press releases, etc.). Through digital media and public outreach, I hope to bring the same opportunities to young aspiring scientists.

How much has changed in the research of genetic risk factors for aggressive breast cancer from when you started your study? What has been achieved and what significant challenges that still needs to be overcome?

In the past decade, I have been deeply involved in a journey to identify common genetic variants (i.e. SNPs, pronounced “snips”) that are linked to breast cancer. To date, there are 313 such known breast cancer SNPs. Individually, each SNP increases breast cancer risk by only a little bit. I call them “genetic fortune cookies” since the associated increased risk is often so small. However, when the information from all known 313 SNPs is combined, the collective ability to group women into those with high and low risk of breast cancer is tangible and actionable.

It is important to know whether an individual has high or low blood pressure so that he or she can modify diet or lifestyle to prevent heart diseases.

Similarly, it can be immensely helpful to know whether a woman is at high or low genetic risk of breast cancer so she can make similar lifestyle changes to prevent cancer. More importantly, knowing one’s genetic risk allows a woman to make conscious and informed choices about whether to go attend mammography screening, which has been shown to save lives through the early detection of breast cancer.

However, the bulk of genetic knowledge we know today is based on studies performed on participants of European descent. Less than 14% of the studies were Asian. The frequencies in which disease-associated SNPs can vary greatly between populations, potentially leading to inaccurate risk estimates and limited clinical utility in other populations.

Dr. Li Jingmei seeks to detect the disease early and save lives. She hopes that by combining mammographic density, polygenic risk score with epigenetics data that incorporate the effects of lifestyle and the environment, we can detect cancer early.

Apart from genetic susceptibility to disease, Asian women are substantially different from women of European ancestry in nearly all aspects: lifestyle, reproductive profile, cultural and religious beliefs related to health, socioeconomic status, and drug metabolism and response.

Major differences are also known to exist within ethnic subgroups. Among the three main ethnic groups in Singapore, Chinese women were at higher risk of developing breast cancer in comparison to their Malay and Indian counterparts (Singapore Cancer Registry Annual Registry Report 2015, National Registry of Diseases Office). However, Chinese breast cancer patients were less likely to die from breast cancer compared to Malays and Indians.

My team and I are currently working with other Asian breast cancer cohorts to clarify and address potential differences for the diverse populations in Asia. Take for example Singapore, which has government-subsidized nation-wide mammography. While the ideal attendance for a screening program to be effective is ~80%, the percentage of women in the target age group who have gone for a recent mammogram scan is only around 35% in recent years (2010-2015). If 35% of the population who attend screening is random, we can expect to detect ~28% of all breast cancers. (Mammography screening itself if not perfect and not 100% effective, hence the lower estimate.) However, if the women were ranked by their genetic risk and only the top 35% at the highest risk were screened, we can expect to find a higher proportion of breast cancers (~50%) in a smaller group of women. The bottom line is: knowledge is power. Knowing what puts us at risk can help to save lives.

Science has made great gaits in research. Do you think there are still personal fears, which may lead some women to choose to postpone breast cancer screening? Or are women getting more concerned about it?

The barriers to breast cancer research pale in comparison to barriers to bringing the fruits of science to the public. I agree with the UK chief scientist when he said that “Science is not finished until it’s communicated.” There is evidence that risk-based screening for breast cancer saves lives, but women, especially those of the age who are most at risk now, still largely hold on to a “don’t know, don’t care” mentality. Some cultural influences may also lead women to believe that any sickness is the will of God and because of that, they delay going to the doctor. In summary, the bigger challenge in breast cancer research is how to communicate relevant findings to the public and patients in a way they can take personal action. Knowledge without action is after all not power, but impotence (misquoting someone else). The bigger questions beyond scientific findings which would be good to address are: Implications of low public genetic literacy. What are the consequences? The critical challenge of educating the public about genetics​. How do we do that? Facts don’t change our minds. How do we change women’s behavior?

The information and increasing breast cancer awareness can help to get clear the personal risk of women and about this disease. Prevention and early detection is the most effective way instead of finding only the cure.

Can a balanced lifestyle (healthy nutrition, fitness exercise and psycho-physical meditation) make the difference and contribute to control and pre-treatment over potential patients at risk? What tips would you like to give to women?

The reason for my emphasis on identifying women at high risk of developing breast cancer is because there can be life after breast cancer if the disease is detected early. The survival rate for early detected cancers (stage 0 or stage 1, usually through mammography screening (i.e. X-rays of the breast)) is almost 100%. While mammography screening can save lives, it does have drawbacks (false positives, missed cancer, radiation, anxiety, etc). In an ideal world, women with higher risk will be screened more often, and women with lower risk can be spared unnecessary screens.

The ability to use germline genetics to identify high-risk women is important as currently only family history (not genetics) is used to make this distinction. If a woman has family members with breast cancer, she is also at a higher risk herself.

However, family history has limitations. Family sizes are getting smaller; relatives may not be on super close terms; taboos regarding the talk of diseases. A person’s genome can be more informative about a person’s medical history (perhaps medical future is apter?) than anyone else in the family. Genomics will become an intimate part of our lives, be it in disease prevention, early detection, or treatment.

Pertaining to your question, while genetics can identify women at high risk of developing the disease, genetics is less likely to be the culprit of the INCREASING breast cancer incidence rates globally. (New mutations take a long time to establish in a population.)

Lifestyle and reproductive factors are the likely culprits for the rapid change in breast cancer incidence rates. These factors predominantly include a number of children (which dramatically changed over just two generations in Asia) and obesity (which also dramatically changed) and to a lesser extent, other factors such as age at menarche and age at menopause.

A breast cancer risk profile comprises both genetic and environmental components. Making healthier lifestyle choices overall will certainly reduce the risk of breast cancer and other diseases.

You are a woman in science working for women. There is anything else would you like to share or do you have supportive advice?

Madeline Albright has this famous quote: “There is a special place in hell for women who do not help other women.” There are good women, and there are good men.

Photos courtesy of Dr Li Jingmei

#BreastCancer, #Health

[dwellordream]

“...In one way, the marriage of Eleanor and Louis was unusual, for he was also a teenager (born c.1120–23) and little older than his bride. In numerous aristocratic marriages, the bride was much younger than her spouse; it was not uncommon for teenaged noble maidens to be married to men in their thirties or older. The couple’s similar ages likely gave Eleanor higher expectations that their marriage had more likelihood of turning into a true love match than other aristocratic marriages with great age disparities. No doubt, their similar ages also led Eleanor to assume that their marriage would be a true partnership; and she would feel more free to express her opinions to her young husband and to persuade him to accept her ideas than if he had been a mature, experienced man. 

In several ways, however, the bride and groom were mismatched. Louis the Younger, apparently a good-looking youth with shoulder-length hair, was quiet, serious, and exceedingly devout. The second son of Louis VI and Adelaide of Maurienne, his upbringing had aimed at preparing him for an ecclesiastical career with studies at the school attached to Notre-Dame Cathedral on the Île de la Cité in Paris not far from the royal palace. Louis’s elder brother Philip, heir to the throne, was killed when he was thrown to the ground and crushed by his falling horse after it “stumbled over a diabolical pig” in the road. This unexpectedly elevated Louis to the position of heir to the French throne. 

The boy left Notre-Dame’s cloisters at about age ten to be crowned king in accordance with the custom established by the second Capetian king of installing the current monarch’s heir in his own lifetime to ensure a smooth succession. Twelve days after his brother’s death, Louis’s consecration as king took place at Reims Cathedral in October 1131 in the presence of a great council of prelates presided over by the pope. Louis VII apparently returned to his religious studies after his coronation, and his clerical education would make a powerful impression on him throughout his life, imprinting on him simple tastes in dress and manners and an earnest piety. 

His Capetian predecessors had sought to present themselves as models of Christian kingship, stressing their close relations with the Church as compensation for their modest military power. Louis’s reputation for piety and spirituality surpassed that of earlier French monarchs, however. As one contemporary wrote, “He was so pious, so just, so catholic and benign, that if you were to see his simplicity of behaviour and dress, you would think . . . that he was not a king, but a man of religion.”

Young Louis thought of kingship as a religious vocation, and he felt called to govern according to Christian principles. In his first years as king, his confidence that he was God’s agent as French monarch gave him an unrealistic notion of his power, and he tended to over-reach, pursuing excessively ambitious political goals. In his youthful enthusiasm, he often displayed an inclination toward rash decisions taken in anger and without reflection. Yet he sometimes seemed sluggish and unenthusiastic for his task of governing, partly due to a distaste for political intrigue, and partly due to a lack of perseverance, his ardor rapidly cooling and giving way to periods of indecision and inactivity. 

Although he held a very high view of the monarchical office, he could be timid, and he allowed himself to fall under the influence of members of his entourage. Most prominent among those seeking to influence this impressionable youth was his young wife Eleanor, and he readily allowed her to take part in political decision-making. Such a mild husband as Louis VII was unlikely to find happiness with a wife such as Eleanor of Aquitaine. His young bride had already seen more of life than his sheltered upbringing had allowed him. A girl brought up at a sophisticated and lively court where no more than conventional piety was observed and whose own grandfather had lived openly for years with his paramour would find the Capetian royal court’s piety and repression confining. 

If Eleanor had been too young to remember life at William the Troubadour’s court, she grew up surrounded by people who had tasted its pleasures willing to tell her about it. Looking back on her earliest childhood while in Paris “through the prism of her imagination,” she could only compare the austere Capetian royal court unfavorably with an idealized image of her grandfather’s court. A widely quoted quip ascribed to Eleanor that she felt that she “had married a monk, not a king,” while hardly an authentic quotation, captures the feeling that she surely came to hold for Louis.

Although his clerical education had not prepared him for a fulfilling marital relationship, Eleanor’s beauty and charm captivated him at once and soon he fell deeply in love with her. Indeed, some observers of the couple’s marriage described the king’s love for his wife as “almost childish” and passionate beyond reason. The intensity of Louis’s love for his bride may have made him an anxious husband, easily roused to jealousy. Despite evidence of Louis’s attraction to his bride, the Church’s notoriously misogynist view of women and teachings of the early Fathers had ill-equipped him for the robust sexual relationship that Eleanor expected. Louis, brought up in a clerical environment, was prudish and repressed in a way that the queen could not understand.

…The royal bridegroom and his entourage reached Limoges on 1 July 1137, and after stopping there for prayers at the shrine of Saint Martial, Louis and his party arrived at Bordeaux on 11 July. They raised tents and camped on the banks of the Garonne river across from the city, where they waited for boats to cross the wide waters. The entry into Bordeaux of Louis the Younger, crowned king six years earlier, marked the first French monarch’s visit there in three centuries. The wedding took place on 25 July in the cathedral of Saint André, constructed around the end of the eleventh century. Today only its surprisingly plain façade survives from Eleanor’s time.

In full summer heat, a great throng of nobles of all ranks came from throughout Eleanor’s lands to witness the couple’s exchange of vows. As part of the ceremony, Louis had his bride “crowned with the diadem of the kingdom.” To commemorate the occasion, young Louis had brought along lavish gifts for his bride that a chronicler asserted would have required the mouth of a Cicero or the memory of a Seneca to expose their richness and variety. Usually aristocratic marriages were preceded by lengthy negotiations between the couple’s parents about financial arrangements. 

…In the case of young Eleanor, she was bringing to her husband a great duchy, and no other wedding gift was expected. No doubt she retained revenues from her ancestral estates in Poitou, and it seemed pointless to designate lands from the limited French royal domain as her dowerland. As the young couple set out on their journey to Paris, she offered her new husband another splendid present, however—a vase carved from rock crystal, one of her few possessions that survives today. The vase was a cherished possession, connecting her to her grandfather William IX, who had brought it back to Poitiers after an expedition to Spain.

Louis VI marked the marriage of his son and heir to Eleanor with grants of important privileges to the ecclesiastical province of Bordeaux, acting quickly to secure the support of the bishops in Aquitaine. Before Louis the Younger set out for Aquitaine, the king renounced any claim to rights of lordship over the dioceses of the province of Bordeaux, allowing them free episcopal elections. This concession ended the traditional ducal privilege of playing a part in the selection of bishops in the six dioceses of the province of Bordeaux.

…As soon as the wedding celebrations ended in the evening of 25 July, the newly-weds lost no time in beginning their journey toward Paris. Eleanor and Louis stopped to spend their first night together at Taillebourg, a formidable castle looming over the Charente river, where their host was its lord, Geoffrey de Rancon. The most powerful of lords in the Saintonge, Geoffrey held wide lands stretching from his castle of Taillebourg eastward to La Marche, to Poitou proper in the north, and southward into the Angoumois. He and his heirs would be important players in Poitevin politics throughout Eleanor’s lifetime. Whether the young couple consummated their marriage that first night at Taillebourg cannot be known, but royal retainers surely looked for evidence, since both the Church and popular opinion held no marriage to be an indissoluble union until it was consummated. 

By the beginning of August, the couple arrived at Poitiers, where a week later Suger organized a formal investiture of young Louis in the cathedral of Saint Pierre, a religious ceremony signaling the Church’s sanction for his ducal title. Young Louis, already crowned and anointed king of the French, did not adopt the titles “count of Poitou” or “duke of Gascony” on his marriage; instead, he had only the additional title “duke of Aquitaine” engraved on his seal. The title that he adopted implied that his bride’s duchy, though under Capetian administration, was not to be absorbed into the French Crown lands, but would preserve a separate identity with distinct institutions.

Barely after the ceremony had ended, a messenger arrived from Paris with the sad news that King Louis VI had died on 1 August, aged almost sixty. The intense summer heat demanded his immediate burial at the abbey of Saint Denis without waiting for the arrival of Louis the Younger and his bride from Poitou. Young Louis, already a crowned and anointed king on his father’s death, had to take on royal responsibilities at once, and the newly married Eleanor became a queen. Now King Louis VII, he had to leave his bride in the care of Bishop Geoffrey of Chartres to continue her progress toward Paris, while he led a force to subdue the rebel townspeople of Orléans, who had taken advantage of the old king’s death to proclaim their city a commune, taking rights of self-government for themselves.”

- Ralph V. Turner, “Bride to a King, Queen of the French, 1137–1145.” in Eleanor of Aquitaine: Queen of France, Queen of England

[nissakii]

What do Mystic Messenger characters represent in society? [MysMe]

Mystic Messenger which is a game filled with a lot of action, drama and some sort of romance is still really close to our reality.

Especially the characters represent a lot of us and the many different situations people can be in and suffer from, as every and each of them offers us a route in which we can see more of the character and help them to achieve their ending (or not if you are curious to get the bad endings).

Yet what do those characters represent in our usual lives?

Where do we see each and every one of these characters in our society?

In the following blog post, we will see that every character shows us a certain place and piece of our reality that Cheritz put in their game.

Yoosung Kim

Starting with the youngest member of RFA let’s take the one who hasn't experienced the world of work yet.

As an uni student Yoosung is the very representation of someone who isn’t sure where life could lead him after achieving one big goal: getting into university.

Because despite the fact that standing on one’s own feet starts at that phase in life it is mostly the time where many feel lost as they see themselves stuck in their current life.

And Yoosung is one of those many cases that represent those people in Mystic Messenger.

Living alone for the first time and suddenly feeling the overwhelming force of being responsible for his own mistakes, he sees the sudden challenges of life that come with it.

On top of that with the death of his cousin Rika which he loved so dearly, nobody is very considerate of his feelings, depression and sadness that still lingers inside of him despite that they all claim it is understandable.

His dream job as a vet that was closely tied to the death of Rika’s dog is the more unattainable and painful to think about after the events as he requestions the morals and standards of society.

Being in the age of constantly being expected to give good results and succeed in order to become valuable to society’s standards, he starts to realize how unfair the chances in life are as he compares himself to Jumin Han who was born rich and with his future already set.

We already discussed a lot about Yoosung’s insecurities and general character in another blogpost, but referring to it Yoosung constantly sees no value in whatever he does beside in helping the RFA which as well due to the death of Rika became inactive until MC appeared.

When someone stops to value what he does or sees no merit in it, there are always the questions:

Why did I start this anyway?

What is the whole purpose of this?

Maybe it’s not for me?

And with those questions, with the heavy burden of a private life and social circles that also have a place in one’s life, sometimes there is a need to escape them all.

As a student just running away or taking holidays is not that easy leaving a bunch of responsibilities behind, so the next best way to stop thinking about the life around you is, immersing into another life- gaming.

Gaming may be a good coping mechanism but also a big threat for those who want to constantly flee from their reality slowly developing a game addiction without realizing, just like Yoosung slowly started to lose himself in LOLOL.

Studying, sorrow, wanting to flee but also wanting to become someone standing on stable footing.

They are all parts of finding oneself in the process, going through the harsh times of slowly diving into the world of adults and that is what Yoosung represents - the start of a new phase in life, probably one of the harshest.

Jaehee Kang 

Close, but still more experienced would be Jaehee Kang the only female of the RFA next to the MC, a chief secretary at C&R and  also the assistant of Jumin Han.

Jaehee is someone seen as a prime example and role-model, being a stable career woman who achieved a lot in her life and has a fairly high income to support herself.

In society’s eyes she is someone who contributes to success and as she is even an early top university graduate for which she got a scholarship in highschool making her extremely diligent and intelligent since her childhood.

Yet Jaehee gave up a lot to be in the position she is right now, she even cut her long hair and wears glasses despite her good vision since it is part of the demands Jumin made for the job as his secretary.

As she said herself her work contains a lot of tasks which some of them she isn’t even supposed to do and go beyond her ordinary secretary job, yet she does them and doesn’t complain since she gets paid for it.

In Zen’s DVD she tried to find a bit of happiness in her daily monotone routine as she works day in and day out, where she even eats out a lot and until late hours, having to take care of her boss’s cat when asked to.

In one of the chats in which Jaehee and Yoosung are talking about how successful and stable Jaehee is unlike Yoosung who is still feeling lost and doesn’t have that stability in life which she wouldn’t understand.

Jaehee on the other hand responds that despite having a job it’s not really that what she wanted to do and that she is still wondering what it is that she actually wants to do as she mentions that she used to go hiking a lot as her hobby, showing that despite being in a good position in society Jaehee still doesn’t feel fulfilled and rather a bit trapped in her monotone working routine which she basically devoted her life to.

Jaehee represents those of who seem like they have achieved a lot and do have a place in society job-wise but are still not sure what it is what they really want to do as they live in and out of their secure routine which they maintain and people expect them to be satisfied with.

Zen

Zen or how he is called by his real name, Hyun Ryu is one of the few characters that actually went through and made his dream his actual job.

Despite his looks he did not become a model but an actor depicting many emotions and roles in which he loses himself in while giving his best to show the audience the true nature of the persona he is currently playing.

We see Zen being a bit more on the easy-going side and encouraging Yoosung for example to follow his heart and dreams like he did, since it worked out for Zen. Yoosung encounters that Zen has the looks to follow the way he wants to which he won’t deny yet it’s not the only quality Zen bears.

He is a very hard-working person, strict on himself when it comes to working out or dieting and also tends to be a workaholic engrossing himself in constant development to fulfill his dream, which is not tied to his looks. Quite contrary Zen despises the fact that some people choose him a role only fitting for his looks and even worse asking him only to model instead of acting, as he mentions that it is acting that he wants to do and not modelling.

In that way his wishes often get disrespected or disregarded due to his looks, also he is being seen as shallow which may lead to people jumping to conclusions.

We see in Zen’s route what a harsh path he had to take in order to pursue his dream, it took him a lot of sacrifice, patience and work to be where he is and it’s only the start for him.

He ran away from home since his parents did not approve of his dreams, he was not the best at school and also dropped out renting an apartment for himself struggling through hard times to survive.

But despite that he never gave up since his dream was his passion and something he did with much eagerness and seriousness, even though many may call it foolish or risky.

Zen is the best representation of the people in our society who choose to derive from the usual path striving for a stable job and take many risks to achieve their dreams.

Because of those dreams life may get a bit harder and the chances are not high, yet Zen is the best example that it takes time, sacrifices and sometimes harsh circumstances to reach that what you want to do.

He is the hard reality of chasing your dreams.

Jumin Han

More or less in our category of society, Jumin Han is a less common case of working hard to achieve a high status and standard in that sense which doesn’t make him lazy or given everything for nothing, but makes his life sure easier from a materialistic perspective.

Cue materialism the first thing that not only RFA mentions when MC enters the chatrooms in the first days but also a misunderstanding from the start is that Jumin only sees numbers and facts, wielding his money to obtain whatever he desires and living an easy life.

Sure enough, money is one of the most fundamental problems that make life much harsher when it's lacking, also it’s the main cause of many stress factors since education, work and status are all basically tied to money. 

If the world is not about money in a certain sense why are we struggling that much anyways to get amazing jobs and maybe in some cases like Jaehee give up part of our life and identity?

But Jumin is the perfect example that the rich people who exist out there or at least some of them do not rely solely on their privilege of being born rich, yet still work hard to prove their position in society as Jumin still graduated as a top student, being part of MENSA which requires high IQ to become a member of and has a policy of working as efficiently as possible.

In that sense Jumin is a talented, intelligent young man who doesn’t want to simply rely on his background but also showcase his skills as he always strives to get the best results in the company to make sure he deserves the place as the CEO in line.

Since Yoosung constantly nags and complains about Jumin’s background being a bliss and that he had a comfortable and easy life, Jumin does not tell him he might be wrong but that he simply did not decide to be born that way and still encourages Yoosung that he has good qualities which Jumin finds appealing enough to hire him as an intern, showing him that it’s still important which skills someone hones.

Yoosung is just one example of people viewing him as someone who is just lucky enough to be born rich or the unfairness of status by birth, but they do not see the the dark side of Jumin’s life as he never had any stable relationships beside V that he cherishes so much also that people only put light on his status but not the work that he himself put into, visiting lessons since childhood not growing up like a usual kid playing freely without fearing to be kidnapped.

Therefore the concept of love is quite strange for him and beside in the good ending of his own route where he finally starts to learn about it, the box of emotions Jumin holds is always hidden deep within him projecting his own weaknesses on Elizabeth the 3rd who gives him the secure form of love and loyalty.

In any other situation love is not needed in the world he grew up in since facts and cold logic represented as results of success is what the people need to see from him, mistakes are a sign of weakness and incompetence especially him who everyone is constantly watching.

Jumin represents those in society who may seem to have high status, wealth and cozy life yet struggle due to the things that cannot be merely achieved by money alone, highlighting the importance of interpersonal relationships.

Saeyoung Choi/707/Luciel

That the world is not an easy place that can be seen only as black and white shows us the next character who suffered a lot through the dark and hidden secrets that society often tries to brush under the carpet.

Saeyoung Choi and his twin brother who we will examine later, show us the cruelty hidden in a small apartment living with an abusive mother who used to beat them up, verbally abuse them as a consequence of them being the illegitimate child of the prime minister.

Since Saeyoung was the more skilled one from a young age, he was treated badly but not as worse as his brother Saeran, which left him with no choice than using his talent to save his brother.

In order to that there was only one option and it was to leave his brother behind leaving him in the hands of V and Rika to protect him while Saeyoung would study to make sure when comes back he and Saeran could run away together.

And he took that option instead of fearing to be killed by his father one day or even by his mother.

In the end Saeyoung landed in an agency which stripped him of any identity and made him work like a machine even before he turned legal due to his level of skill and intellect.

With no place to escape anymore and the only light thinking that Saeran is safe and protected from some floppy disks he has with some pictures of him, he gave into corruption but not turning bad since his intentions kept him pure.

The RFA were a little safespace for him yet Seven never had the right as he claims for that since he doesn’t even have an identity anymore being neither Saeyoung nor any other person as his jobs demands for him to constantly change names and places if needed, therefore he doesn’t even have personal data anywhere.

He even forgot who he is at some point if it wasn’t for V and the floppy disks leaving him in an identical crisis and no hope to be understood by anyone as he constantly wears a mask and never is his true self.

In his eyes his is constantly extorted by his agency and even in some routes he claims that RFA puts a heavy load of work on his back which he likes to do but there are some endings in which Seven finds out that Saeran is under bad circumstances and even worse the hacker who infiltrated RFA and wanted to get rid of him, leaving him to lose trust in the last person he had, V.

Saeyoung Choi represents those who are mistreated, used and extorted in society, forced to live a life in which they cannot decide for themselves and were left to make choices that led them to an unfavorable position instead of helping them.

He is the one showing us that the shadows exist and fear of losing existence due to being nuisance and eyesore for people who have a more favorable place in the eyes of the government.

Saeran Choi/Unknown/Ray

Last but not least the other part of the shadows, Saeran Choi also known as either Ray or Unknown.

Unlike his brother he is at first not shown to have any special talent and since childhood he was a very fragile and kind boy who was seen as weak due to his nature.

A trait that made him prone to being attacked and mistreated not only by his mother but many other people.

But starting with his mother as he was less free than Saeyoung and even tied him up to avoid that he would roam around freely, his mother used to call him weak, useless and of no value as his brother is far better than him and skilled, at least making him worth to be kept alive.

She even deprived him of food and water at times, beat him up and made sure he would know his place in the world as she describes people like us comparing him to her.

Yet Saeran always looked up and trusted his brother since he was a good-natured person despite the fact that he started to manifest the idea that he himself is useless and a burden.

Even when Saeyoung left he was sure that he had a good reason and blamed himself for being useless, but due to certain circumstances and manipulation he was told that Saeyoung ran away from him.

It took a lot of torture and brainwashing to make Saeran finally give up the idea that Saeyoung will keep his promise and never ran away from him. which he later fueled his grudge with.

Rika who used him for mint-eyes plans made sure to keep him as Ray, the one who knew that he was of no merit or value to the outside world, and the moment he would leave the place he now belonged to would be the moment people would trample him, the weak down to the ground.

She also made sure to make him believe that there is no other place for him since he is someone unstable, someone who can only bloom if he worked for mint-eye and that his skills are not needed beside in here the place that would never betray him.

As we notice in Ray’s chats, the same exact words are used when he speaks to MC as he tells her if he doesn’t succeed he would be thrown away and that the world outside is an unprotected place full of people who are cruel.

Weirdly enough in one of the chats Ray shows MC a photo of two plants that sprouted in the from the same ground, but one was almost dying while the other one bloomed as he referred to Saeyoung and himself,  noticing that the stronger one used the weaker to survive therefore he cut the stronger one and used it as a fertilizer rejecting the idea that in any kind of way the stronger could win over the weaker one even in nature’s way.

MC who can be as nice to Ray/Saeran as she wants to be, he will always bring up the fear of being left behind as he has the stigma of being unstable by himself or unusable if not finishing the job as it’s the only thing he can bring any profit in and that he is no use if he doesn’t fulfill his role as a puppet.

Saeran Choi represents the undermined and discarded people of society who were not give a chance nor an option to show their ability, but were stigmatised or manipulated to act as puppets as they are only of worth when they can fulfill the needed tasks as their weakness is something unsightly and doesn’t have a place in this world.

The weak never survives, it’s the survival of the fittest… which means if there is no merit in what he does there is no need to keep him.

Are there any other characters which you see in society that are also part of the mystic messenger cast?

Do you feel especially tied to one of the characters in one of these aspects?

Until then - I just got a message

Makii

Original Source

[heavyarethecrowns]

Kate Middleton: Prince William’s Decade-Long Mistake - Oct 2010

Who is Kate Middleton? After nearly 10 years of seeing Kate’s recorded behavior, this is my impression: Kate Middleton doesn’t care about any causes, charities or anything outside of living for pleasure. I doubt her ability to handle royal responsibilities – beyond dealing with privileges and paparazzi – because in the ten years the world has watched her, she hasn’t demonstrated she can take on anything but a royal c*ck and a jolly good time. While true, she isn’t married to William and isn’t in fact a royal (and may never be, for all we know), her perseverance implies she’s in it for the long haul and plans to become the Princess of Wales. As such, she should have taken these years to demonstrate to the world that, although she’s a common-bred, middle-class girl, she’s an exceptional lady who rises above the rest. But Kate has failed profoundly in that respect. The last thing the women of the public should be thinking when they see William’s marital choice is, “What on earth makes her so special? I could have done that/been in her place – and done it better! -Maybe I should have gone to St. Andrews!” But that’s what women, including myself, are lead to think of her. Coming from her background, as a common, everyday girl, it shows her complete lack of humility, and is borderline arrogant, for her to assume she can live like a spoiled brat who doesn’t need to prove herself. She enjoys a privileged life that she wasn’t born into – and for the life of many, we can’t understand why. Why was she chosen? Why not someone else? Why not a woman the vast majority can respect and admire? Let’s be honest here: William can have nearly anyone he wants – and he’s settling for this average circus monkey?

At first glance, Kate seemed like a well kept, nicely mannered woman – and well-suited for a royal position. In the first few years of her royal relationship, she shone as an attractive, educated, beautifully fashioned, friendly, and conservatively-behaved young lady. But that was then. Now, upon looking back at Kate’s near-decade as an unofficial princess-in-waiting, her behavior reveals her as a underwhelming choice for the monarchy. She’s demonstrated that she’s far from exceptional, and that aside from her pursuit of a crown, she’s a disappointing, arrogant underachiever of little substance.

Ambitious In All The Wrong Ways:

Those who know Kate often describe her as ambitious; and in the beginning, that’s the side of her the public got to see. Kate worked hard on her academics so she could attend the prestigious St. Andrews University, where William was also set to attend. While there, she met William and completed the same degree as him, in Art History.  Following their graduations, William began the demanding military career he still pursues today. However, surprisingly, the once ambitious-seeming Kate did nothing: She remained jobless for nearly two years, living off of her parents (and William, I’m sure). Kate finally got a part-time job as an accessories buyer at the fashion chain, Jigsaw, but quit after only 11 months. Notably, rumors suggest Kate only got the job to passify Her Majesty, The Queen, who took notice that her grandson’s significant-other was a lazy freeloader. After that, she worked for her parent’s internet business, Party Pieces (which to many read like an unemployment cover-up). Apparently, Kate made updates to their website and took photos for it. That sounds pathetic and hardly full-time. Not to mention, Kate’s monthly getaways to exotic locations with William attest that her parents gave her an overwhelming amount of time off whenever she wanted it. That’s hardly a real job. And if that’s not disappointing enough, Kate quit the job all together in October of 2009 and has officially been doing nothing but shacking up with William while he pursues his career ever since. I’m sorry Katie dear, but for any 28 year old – especially a potential Queen of England – that’s absolutely not good enough.

There are several obvious problems with the reality of Kate’s ambitions (or lack thereof). She was ambitious about her education, but clearly didn’t want or need it for a career – So, what was she even at St. Andrews for, and why was she ambitious about getting there? She graduated from a top notch university, only to settle for unemployment and a job her parents provided? Logically, it’s mismatching for someone to aggressively pursue a top-tier education only to fall flat as a lazy, career-underachiever immediately and permanently thereafter. The fact that Kate did just that leads me, and countless others to believe she was only academically driven so she could put herself in William’s way and try to form a relationship with him. Also telling are the numerous reports by those close to Kate’s mother that Mrs. Middleton pushed her daughter’s attendance to St. Andrews in hopes of her becoming royalty.

Kate: The Attention-Loving Wild Child

When Kate’s not working – and that’s most of the time – she goes shopping, attends leisurely sporting and social events, and parties ’till her heart’s content in Britain’s most luxurious night spots (Paris Hilton style – ick). The photos of her nightlife are less than flattering – actually, they’re flat out embarrassing – especially for the potential next Princess and Queen of Wales. She often looks extremely intoxicated, and her attire and car-exiting-techniques have granted the paparazzi dozens of “crotch shots”.

[picapp align=”none” wrap=”false” link=”term=kate+middleton&iid=756945″ src=”http://view3.picapp.com/pictures.photo/image/756945/kate-middleton-birthday/kate-middleton-birthday.jpg?size=500&imageId=756945″ width=”234″ height=”151″ /] Kate characteristically grinning as she’s hounded by the paparazzi

Any other 28 year old woman would be focused on a career or starting a family – or both; But Kate just parties like she’s some rich 19 year old without any responsibilities. In fact, she’s only too happy to show that side of herself to the paparazzi – and the world. Her parents and William (taxpayer dollars) have financially supported her throughout her twenties – extravagant vacations included – and Kate’s habitual ear-to-ear smile indicates she’s loved every minute of it. As long as she’s attached to William, she doesn’t have a care in the world that other (common) women like her have – aside from her image, and she’s let that fall to the wayside. From the bright red coat she wore to William’s military graduation to the never-failing smile she wears for the paparazzi, Kate’s self-presentation says she loves being a celebrity and all eyes being on her. Unfortunately, Britain needs a princess who naturally exudes a respectable image when she provokes the world to look.

William’s Mistake – William’s Responsibility

I understand William’s need to pick a lady who’ll roll with the punches, deal well with the crazy, public lifestyle (privacy invasion, etc.), and conform to suit the monarchy’s needs. Nevertheless, it’s his mistake in assuming those are the only criteria a future princess must meet. If there was a checklist for the “Qualities of the Most Ideal Future Princess of Wales”, Kate would scantily fulfill 20% of them:

Intelligence and Wit

Humility

Career ambition/self sufficiency

Physical beauty – (C’mon, princesses are supposed to be pretty! -Especially when the prince is popular enough to take his pick. Kate’s…just…okay…)

Noble/Aristocratic blood (if not this, then a woman who stands far above the crowd of other commoners)

Grace and Conservative femininity (that goes out the window when you’ve been banging the prince for a decade without a commitment – Oh, and the rumored accidental pregnancies (abortion fanatic if they’re true! *cough* TMI *cough*))

Charity and service for those in need (I volunteered like crazy in college, and I’m not anywhere near royal… Why didn’t Kate?! – And why hasn’t she since??)

Respectable and responsible image (yeah, umm, no)

Takes on royal responsibilities to earn royal privileges (Kate’s only got the acceptance of privileges part down…)

Aaaand the list goes on…

Of course, there’s the possibility that Kate’s the girl who’s a match for William’s heart. But I doubt it. Kate’s the girl with everything to lose if the relationship fails, and everything to gain if it succeeds – her greatest skill is that she’s willing/desperate enough to jump through all and any hoops, including waiting 10+ years for a proposal – and William knows it.

It may have been 10 years, but it’s not too late for William to turn around and make a better decision. Kate hasn’t been cheated – contrary to some’s beliefs. She’s lived a decade of fantasy and wonder beyond her wildest dreams, and has continually been treated to luxuries she doesn’t deserve. William owes it to himself, and his country to make a responsible choice about the future Princess of Wales. Yes, he needs to choose a woman he loves, but his privileges require sacrifices on his part, and that means choosing a bride that will be an honorable partner for the people’s sake too. If William was going to wait ’till his late 20s/early 30s to wed, he could have waited to meet a woman who’s getting a PhD, or who runs a charitable non-profit organization, for example. But no : Instead, he’s burdening his country with wishy-washy, Waity Katie.

It’s not about choosing a girl who loves being photographed or relishes living her fantasy of being a fashion icon – or even a real, live princess. It’s about choosing a self-sufficient woman who has something amazing to offer the country and the world: A role model, a charitable, caring person who views joining the monarchy as a responsibility, and an opportunity to serve the people – not just an entitlement to luxurious privileges. Right now, the latter is Kate Middleton; And I don’t foresee her entire irresponsible, pleasure-loving personality changing just because wedding vows are exchanged. What we’ve seen is what we’re going to get as Lady Di’s shoe-filler – if William decides to go through with it. One can only hope that won’t be the case.

[thedistrictroleplay]

ID: 

Name | Nickname | Age:  Nicholas Scott Vanderbilt | Nick | 30 Birthday | Astrology:  March 17, 1991 | Pisces sun,  Pronouns | Sexual identity:  He/him | heterosexual  Birthplace | Raised: Tuxedo Park, NY | New York City, NY Residence: Upper Northwest  Occupation: Attorney, Assistant Law Professor at Georgetown Faceclaim: Scott Eastwood 

TRIGGER WARNINGS: drug mention tw

TIMELINE: 

March 17, 1991- Nicholas is born as the 2nd son of Patrick and Elaine Vanderbilt.  He joins older brother Peter, and will later be hounded by brother Christopher, as an extension of the New York Vanderbilt legacy of politicians. 

Summer 2003-2008 -  Nick is sent to summer camp, along with Peter, to Camp Walt Whitman in New Hampshire.  When Christopher turns twelve, he also joins the annual tradition. 

August 2008-June 2009- Nick long-distance dates Aly Acosta, whom he met at Camp Walt Whitman

June 2009- graduates high from St. Judes Prep in NYC and is Princeton bound.  Nick and Aly amicably break up before going their separate ways to college.

August 2009-June 2013- attends Princeton University, ultimately graduating with a bachelor’s degree in Politics, with political economy emphasis.  

September 2014- starts at Columbia Law school, alongside Aly who has moved to NYC to attend business school at Columbia.  Nick plays hard and works harder, graduating #2 in his class.

sometime in 2015-  Nick and Aly blackout and wake up married, courtesy of Nick’s fast-talking, lying his ass off to a judge who is friends with his family.

June 2016- Aly graduates and immediately begins traveling everywhere for work.  Nick applies for an international dual-degree program that moves him to Paris for his last year of law school. 

August 2016-October 2017- Nick lives and studies in Paris, both degrees conferred in October when he returns to the United States.

February 2018- takes the NYC bar exam. 

March 2018-July 2018- UN internship in Vienna as legal affairs intern. 

July 2018-January 2021- Ambassadorship in Belize.  He checks out a little early after Aly’s abuela dies and he’s traveling back and forth; his attention is too divided and he knows it. 

January 2021- moves to D.C. for international trade attorney job.  Also begins working at as part-time assistant professor at Georgetown and, over the spring, settles into a home in the area. 

BIOGRAPHY: 

Nicholas Scott Vanderbilt, Nick to most, was born the second son of Patrick and Elaine “Lainey” Vanderbilt on the luckiest day in the land, two days late and establishing that he would do what he please and when he damn well wanted. The last name Vanderbilt, no matter the spelling, conjures an image. They’re practically a brand. Young Nicholas and his brothers, as well as his extensive network of cousins, were raised to enhance and support that image. It could be argued his grandfather, William, was a cult leader raising young men to take over the world. Every Vanderbilt son was pressured to be the best, to seek their interests as long as their interests were both academic and high-end, and to pursue a political career. Their last name opened those doors, whether it was a prep school Model UN, the right university, or a job. All they had to do was follow their grandfather’s every instruction and the world would be theirs. It was their birthright, after all.  At least, that’s what they threw out there into time and space.  Nick didn’t exactly agree, preferring to exploit those opportunities with hard work and clear-cut goals -- but he absolutely benefitted from the system and knew from an early age how to selectively keep his mouth shut and manipulate outcomes. 

He wasn’t the typical middle child, acting out for attention. He did what was expected of him, but he always did it his way. He could talk his way into and out of trouble, and his energy left his parents exhausted. Just kidding, he wasn’t raised by his parents.  They checked in, but he was raised by an army of well-educated and well-paid nannies and tutors. He was always smart enough to excel, always duty-bound enough to show up, and always rebellious enough to do it on his own terms. He grew to have a taste for expensive things, too pretentious to do low-class drugs or drive basic cars, but also with a few quirks. He didn’t quite have the temptations or shortcomings of his brothers – the constant need for women and the trouble they brought with them when any woman would do, the friends who lived off his money for their good time, the artistic side that barely masked an identity crisis. Instead, he was selectively social, even though it gave him the reputation of being an unequivocal snob, preferring indie bands and concerts, craft beer in off-the-beaten-path bars to escape haranguing of Page Six and other such nonsense, and other “hipster bullshit” according to his younger brother. He didn’t care. He wasn’t sure anyone had anything to offer him anyway.  Maybe there was something to the ‘snobby’ part of his reputation.  As he grew, he realized there was something to the ‘asshole’ part, too, and he never really felt like apologizing for it, so he didn’t. 

His educational dossier reads like something in a leather-bound tome, planned out by his grandfather from the moment Nicholas blessed the world with his presence. The only exception is he went to Princeton for his undergraduate, instead of following the family footsteps to New Haven. Mostly, he did it for the sake of being different, not because he cared what the piece of paper said. He had bigger aspirations but made his mark by being slightly different than some of his cousins with their sights on Congress or being Governor. He still did all of his undergrad in politics, emphasis on political economy, and then went to law school at Columbia. While the name didn’t hurt anything, he was confident he got in based on the strength of his academic resume, and he graduated near the top of his class only because he let someone else have that likely last, shining accomplishment in their lives. He doesn’t even remember the woman’s name and he definitely didn’t sleep with her. Or did he? He won’t tell one way or the other, because his parents messed up when they didn’t make discretion part of his middle name. Part of his success was his selective ability to do what he wanted under the radar. His brothers and cousins were just a little too obvious with their exploits, and Nicholas was determined to be smarter and better than them.

Take, for example, the time he got married during year 2, while profoundly drunk in Atlantic City, to a girl from Miami he’d met at a bougie send-away summer camp.  He had attended the camp every year from age twelve to age seventeen, and she was there the whole time.  They had continued to date through their senior year of high school, in spite of the distance.  In addition to liking her, he also liked the privacy of dating someone who didn’t live in the surprisingly-claustrophobic New York world.   Either way, she wasn’t an unknown quantity by any means and his parents and grandparents liked her well enough, even if her mother was a bit much and bit too new-money-ambitious in her efforts to prove herself.  With the wedding, the real problem was he used his silver tongue to lie to a judge, who blessed the wedding without a waiting period. It left him in a rough spot professionally, because he couldn’t get a divorce and admit to the lies without it being political suicide before he’d even graduated from law school.  Aly had ambitions of her own and they split again, like they had during high school but different, and mostly went their own ways. She was young and wild, and he was all over Europe finishing a dual degree in something that was a mouthful to set him up for a career at the UN or as an ambassador, so they only connected sometimes.  They’d had a youthful pact to marry each other at forty if they hadn’t married other people anyway, and not bothering with a divorce kept them away from the messy need for a prenup that hadn’t happened.

HIs parents thought the split went through years ago, fast enough Amy Acosta couldn’t start to model the Vanderbilt family jewels, and they’re very mistaken.  However, he’s always been good at hiding where his heart truly lies, playing off emotions, sounding flip and sarcastic when things get tough. They think he’s back in the States to move forward, long past the one youthful indiscretion where they have only minimal details. The next planned step in the Vanderbilt legacy is marriage and children. After all, what is a legacy if it is not continued?  Now that Nick isn’t just pushing thirty, but is actually there, it’s time for him to turn his attention there, at least in their estimation.  It’s on him to continue their legacy because God only knows his brothers, take your pick of an artist or a consummate playboy, are never going to give his parents and grandfather anything to be proud of.

So it’s up to him. After quietly supporting Aly through some hard times, quitting his hard-won job in the embassy in Belize was easy. After his family’s not-so-subtle attempts to force him home to settle down, moving to the District was easy, because he can still progress his career. He doesn’t want to be around the Vanderbilts any more than he has to these days anyway, so New York wasn’t an option.  And, you know, maybe becoming an esteemed law professor or legal scholar isn’t the worst idea.  It allows a certain amount of flexibility and conjures up a whole new image, even if it’s one he hasn’t considered before.   

Nick is written by M.

[playgroundrp]

PUBLIC PROFILE:

CINDY CINDY PARK

TINKER VISUAL, VOCALIST

BTS:

She was born under the California sun to a pair of struggling restaurateurs; the autumn air wrapping her in hues of soft gold, blaze red, and mustard yellow. From the moment she took her first breaths, mother and father knew that she was going to be something remarkable, so they immediately rushed over to the store to pick-up a camcorder before making it home from the hospital—the excitement over their first daughter making them feel like new parents all over again. Up until this point, the couple had only birthed sons (four, the be exact) and had always hoped for a change of pace, but now with their little girl—who they affectionately named Cindy—they knew they didn’t have to try anymore; their undivided attention now set on their final child.

As she grew up, she knew nothing but adoration, cameras, and a perfect wardrobe—her mother almost treating her like a doll as opposed to a human-being. From her first small breaths, she was made to look immaculate no matter where the family went, and more often than not, her dad was wielding a camcorder that captured her every move. In their eyes, she was their precious princess, their soon-to-be star, and they did all they could to make sure that she knew how special she was. While their intentions were nothing but good, they later found out that their obsessive coddling created a monster; one who would begin to fully reveal itself upon the entrance of school.

Throughout most of her academic career, she was able to get by due to her charm and wit; her precociousness often impressing educators. Amongst her peers, though, she learned that she could use the same skills to win them over, too. All it took was a little bit of sweet-talking to make people swoon, and in middle school, when she began to grow a little more into her personality, she would often use her beauty to get her way. Boys loved her, so Cindy found it simple to flirt her way into their hearts; coercing the smarter, “nerdier” ones to complete her homework for her in exchange for a little attention. It was how she was able to remain a cheerleader for as long as she did. Honestly, it was a pretty good system, but all the while, her home life wasn’t great.

Having always fostered a gambling addiction, her father later succumbed to it fully—his once “innocent” goal of trying to turn his family into millionaires turning into something a lot more sinister. With so many mouths to feed at home, he couldn’t really handle the stress anymore, so he walked out on them; leaving the restaurant to his wife. He would make appearances intermittently as Cindy worked her way to high school, but after awhile, he disappeared forever. She filled the void he left behind with boys, recreational marijuana, and the leftover wine her mother didn’t drink; her mom’s way of coping being clutching onto the bottle in hopes it’ll make her feel alive again. Once their family business went under, they made the decision to move back to South Korea.

Culture shock was far more vicious than she anticipated. Did she speak the language? Yes, but her life had revolved around speaking English back home, so it took her awhile to find her footing with it. Not to mention she was miserable for having to leave all of her friends behind in California. Her life had become so dull in Korea, and it was clear that she was going to find some way to head back to the USA when she could afford it. For now, she had social media in order to keep close to her loved ones; her world slowly starting to revolve around apps like Instagram. She had a strong presence, that much was obvious, and it read stunningly in photographs. No wonder her family used to follow her around with a camcorder way back when. This magnetic appeal later attracted the sights of a talent scout for KN Entertainment. Later, she agreed to become a trainee.

It seemed as though no time had passed from the moment she was signed to the time she stood on-stage for her début. A mere six months had been eaten up by extensive training measures; her schedule no longer allowing the high school classes she had to drop out of eventually. Luckily her background in cheer gave her a experience in the art of performance, and well, she wasn’t the worst singer in Korea by any means; she was just very ill-prepared and undertrained. There wasn’t one single time that she didn’t rely on a backing track to handle her vocals and she came under fire for that a lot. As she was named TINKER’s “visual,” Cindy seemed to also work as the group’s punching bag. The general public was really harsh on her, but mostly because they thought she was too Westernized to be considered a classically Korean beauty.

She was further placed underneath a microscope due to her collective’s rapid rise to popularity, and she was often rumored to be classless and rude off-stage. Many were quick to blame her lack of respect for Korean culture on being poorly raised by her family; others said that she was just plain stupid. It never really seemed to end. It was hard for her to stop reading those hateful comments at first, but after awhile, she decided that other people’s opinions weren’t important for her growth. It just sucked that she had to learn that in such a rough way. All of this stress affected her in a variety of fashions initially, but overall, it made her crave excitement and pleasure in order to counteract it. What fun would work be without a little bit of playtime?

Even though it was completely against the rules to fall into romantic relationships, Cindy couldn’t help but indulge in a quite a few of them. She has an aura that’s been doused in Venus’ essence; her pheromones and femininity make her a valuable target for men looking for a girl to claim as their own. It’s fun to be pursued, after all. She’s always had an easy time winning over the hearts of boys—especially the gullible, traditional ones. It isn’t easy being desired all of the time, though. Because she’s had (and still has, to a degree) so many suitors, it’s always difficult for her to settle on just one. Being unfaithful is something her father left behind for her… and it’s too bad that she took to it so kindly.

After a few years with her group-mates, she’s been able to warm up to them more. She had to create a new family in them after being so distant from her friends back in Valley Glen. People still criticize her, but instead of focusing on her appearance now, it’s more-so due to her overall lack of talent. Her fanbase is quick to comeback with their positive opinions, too, but in truth, Cindy knows that she’s not really ever going to be a good idol. She relies heavily on her appearance and her stage presence, but in KN Entertainment’s eyes, for the most part, that’s good enough. Just like with most of her life, all she has to do is get dolled up and smile for the camera. Hopefully that’ll be her saving grace for the long haul.

Presently, she’s seeking out different opportunities in order to repair her image. It’s been a tireless game of trying to win over the Korean public, but she’s adamant to prove to her company that she’s not a liability. She just hopes that, if she does pick up modeling gigs, CF deals, and acting work, she won’t be completely picked apart by everyone. The last thing she wants is to bring bad energy onto TINKER. That, and with her father gone, she feels responsible for the well-being of her family. She’ll be the breadwinner someday—which is a lot for her to digest. For now, all she can do is hope that this experience won’t screw her over in the end.

[spotlight-on-black-women]

Edmonia Lewis: Sculptor

Sculpting has been around for centuries. The art of chipping, carving, and sanding away at various materials such as marble, granite, metal, ceramics, and so on, has played an important role in art’s history for generations. To recognize art as a whole, we must recognize the contributors to one of art’s purest forms; sculpting.

Mary Edmonia Lewis, “Wildfire,” or more commonly referred to Edmonia Lewis, was born in July of 1844 (although the information of this is inconsistent) and lived in the Albany area of New York. She often gave misinformation regarding her origin, telling various “white lies” about where she was from, how she grew up, and even her age. What we do know about her is that she spent most of her adolescents in the Newark area of New Jersey. She was born to a mixed-race woman by the name of Catherine Mike Lewis; who was of Mississauga Ojibwe and African-American descent and to an African American father (thought to be either Samuel Lewis who was Afro-Haitian or Robert Benjamin Lewis who was of Native American and African American descent).

After her parents’ death, she and her brother Samuel lived with their aunts near Niagara Falls, New York, for four years, selling Ojibwe baskets, moccasins, embroidered blouses, as well as other items to tourists, also going by her Native American name, Wildfire. When Lewis was 15 she was sent to Oberlin, Ohio, where she attended Oberlin Academy Preparatory School, then attending Oberlin Collegiate Institute, one of the first American higher-education institutes to admit women and people of different ethnicities. She boarded with Reverend John Keep and his wife in 1859 and studied art.

After college, Lewis moved to Boston in early 1864, where she began to pursue her career as a sculptor. After taking the art form more seriously, she began trying to find an instructor, with the aid of both John Keep and his wife. After three male sculptors refused to become her teacher, Edward Augustus Brackett became her sculpting instructor. Specializing in portrait busts, Brackette had many famous abolitionists as clients. After ending her time with Brackett, Lewis opened her studio to the public for the first time with a solo exhibition in 1864.

Robert Gould Shaw, 1864

Anna Quincy Waterston, 1866

Having been inspired by the lives of abolitionists during the Civil War, she used some of the most famous abolitionists of her day as subjects for her artwork. She met Union Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of an African-American Civil War regiment from Massachusetts, throw her connections with Brackett and created a bust of Shaw’s likeness, impressing the Shaw family, so much so, that they purchased her work. Lewis then made plaster casts of the bust and sold roughly one hundred of them for 15 dollars apiece. The bust was so popular that Anna Quincy Waterston, a poet, even wrote a poem about both Lewis and Shaw. This became her most famous work to date and the money she earned from the busts allowed her to eventually move to Rome in 1866.

“I was practically driven to Rome in order to obtain the opportunities for art culture, and to find a social atmosphere where I was not constantly reminded of my color. The land of liberty had no room for a colored sculptor.” - Edmonia Lewis, Dec. 1878.

Lewis spent most of her adult career in Rome, benefiting from Italy's less pronounced racism during the time, allowing her an increased opportunity to thrive as a mixed-raced Native American and Black female artist. Living in a circle of fellow expatriate artists, Lewis established her own space, enjoyed more social, spiritual, and artistic freedom than what she previously had in the United States. She began working within the neoclassical manner, yet focusing on naturalism within themes relating to black and American Indian people. She was greatly inspired by her surroundings of the classical world and this influenced her work. While in Rome, Lewis continued to express her African-American and Native American heritage.

Old Arrow Maker, modeled 1866, carved 1872

Hiawatha, 1868

A major spike in her sculpting career was participating in the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia where she created a grande 3,015-pound marble sculpture, The Death of Cleopatra; which portrayed the moment in Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra in which Cleopatra allowed herself to be bitten by a poisonous asp following the loss of her crown. Having already found fame and fortune through her previous work, Lewis truly outdid herself with this particular piece at the time, having been considered  "the most remarkable piece of sculpture in the American section" of the Exposition by J. S. Ingraham, drawing thousands to view its beauty.

Lewis, in making The Death of Cleopatra, had added an innovative flair by portraying the Egyptian queen in an inelegant and disheveled manner. This was quite the departure from the normally refined and composed Victorian approach that many artists had used previously. Considering Lewis's interest in emancipation imagery it’s fitting that Lewis eliminated Cleopatra's usual companion figures of loyal slaves from her work, bringing into her own relationship with Black slavery tied to her ancestry.

“The associations between Cleopatra and a black Africa were so profound that ... any depiction of the ancient Egyptian queen had to contend with the issue of her race and the potential expectation of her blackness. Lewis' white queen gained the aura of historical accuracy through primary research without sacrificing its symbolic links to abolitionism, black Africa, or black diaspora. But what it refused to facilitate was the racial objectification of the artist's body. Lewis could not so readily become the subject of her own representation if her subject was corporeally white.”

The Death of Cleopatra, 1876

Countless people from all over the world have written about Lewis’ finest achievements, praising her raw talent and each of her delicately crafted works. A testament to Lewis's renown as, not just an artist, but as a female Native American-African American came in 1877, when former US President Ulysses S. Grant commissioned her to do his portrait, spending hours modeling for her. During and since then, her work has been involved in many prestigious exhibits and held in the world’s more recognized museums to date, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Unfortunately, as a black artist, Lewis had to be more conscious of her stylistic choices due tot he fact that she had a largely white audience who often mistook her work as self-portraiture. To avoid this, many of her female figures possess European features as Lewis had to balance her own personal identity with her artistic, national, and social identity. She was notably tired of this trying balancing act that she continuously found herself in and it showed in her work.

“It is hard to overstate the visual incongruity of the black-Native female body, let alone that identity in a sculptor, within the Roman colony. As the first black-Native sculptor of either sex to achieve international recognition within a western sculptural tradition, Lewis was a symbolic and social anomaly within a dominantly white bourgeois and aristocratic community.” Charmaine Nelson, 2007

Hailed as the first female African American and Native American sculptor, Edmonia Lewis set massive strides in the direction of progression in the art world. Forever changing the medium and setting herself as a prime example that anyone of any gender, nationality, ethnicity, and identity can achieve unimaginable triumph in their passions, Lewis will continue to receive posthumous acclaim for her innovative and reforming pieces of art and be recognized globally for as long as her intricate sculptures and the history behind them remain.

[thewritewolf]

Eating Habits Chapter 3: Worry

A month into Marinette’s first semester at university, Adrien works a shift at the bakery before meeting Marinette for a date at their favorite restaurant.

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Enjoy!

Read on Ao3.  My ko-fi.

“...And that’s the best technique for kneading the bread, son! Any questions?”

Adrien felt Tom’s gaze on him as he worked the dough, his tongue sticking out a little as he concentrated. The past few shifts at the bakery had been very enlightening. Mostly for figuring out how Tom became so big and strong - the giant sacks of flour and the constant kneading of dough had already starting wearing Adrien down. And he’d had years of superheroics to toughen him up!

“No, I think I’ve got it this time.” Adrien glanced at the lumpy, slightly burnt excuse of a loaf of bread that he’d made earlier that day. “...Right?”

A giant hand patted him on the back. “I’m sure, son. You’re doing much better this time around.” After they’d set it aside to let it rise, Tom dusted off his hands. “It’s good of you to want to learn to cook. It’s a skill that everyone should have.”

They each picked up a platter of freshly baked croissants and walked out to the front of the bakery. The midday rush had just run its course and most of the shelves had been picked clean. It was the ideal time for them to restock with the lack of customers.

Sabine patted him on the shoulder as he passed. “Thank you for helping, sweetheart. It’s always wonderful having you around the bakery.”

“Aw, really?” Even after all these years, it was difficult to fully grasp sometimes - adults that actually enjoyed his company!

“Of course, son!” Tom laughed. “Heck, we were worried we’d be seeing you a lot less now that our little cupcake has moved out.”

Adrien smiled as he restocked the macaroons. “You won’t be getting rid of me that easily!”

“That’s great to hear.” Tom moved swiftly between display cases, much faster than Adrien was plodding along. “We’ll be needing all the help we can get around here.”

“Why’s that?”

“The bakery has been doing wonderfully,” Sabine said. “In fact…” She looked at Tom meaningfully.

The large baker’s eyes lit up. “In fact, we were even considering opening a second location.” They both glanced at Adrien. “It won’t be anytime soon, of course, but…”

“...But it’s certainly something to consider,” Sabine finished. “And we can’t be in multiple places at once, so we’d need extra help.”

Adrien wasn’t dense. Well, he wasn’t as dense as he used to be. He understood what they were getting at, but he still wasn’t sure about anything. Any thoughts about careers or education or businesses… that was all still in the air. Would he continue modeling? Would he pursue one of the many hobbies he’d be forced to collect during his lycee years? Who knows?

So, for now, he dodged the question by changing it to everyone’s favorite topic.

“Have you guys spoken with Marinette much recently?”

If they noticed his blatant evasion, they didn’t mention it.

“She tries to come over for dinner during the weekends,” Sabine said. “But other than that, no.”

“We aren’t that surprised, though.” Tom tucked the empty platter under his arm and leaned against the counter. “She always was the sort to throw herself into something with all her heart. Whenever we do get a chance to talk, she goes on about all the projects she’s working on.”

“And the organizations she’s joined?,” Adrien prodded.

“Not to mention how she’s become the head of some of them.” Sabine smiled proudly. “Our little girl was always a natural born leader. Even if she sometimes had a crisis of confidence, she always managed to find a way.”

Adrien smiled slyly as he finished stacking fresh baked goods. They were proud of her for being a leader, but they didn’t even know the half of it. Marinette lead more than classes and student bodies - she inspired the city and lead superheroes into battle. Adrien knew that he, at least, would follow her wherever she led.

And today, that meant letting her choose the venue of their date for today. He pulled out his phone. Still two hours to go, but…

“Do you mind if I clock out now? I’m meeting Marinette for dinner.”

“Of course, son. You’ve done more than enough for today..” As Adrien set one foot outside the store, Tom yelled after him, “I’ll let you know how your bread turns out, too. Say hello to her from us!”

Adrien flashed them a smile. “Don’t worry, I will!”

-------------

A shower, a change of clothes, and a kwami feeding later and Adrien was out the door of his apartment and heading for a nice little Italian restaurant that they both loved.

He’d been looking forward to this for days now. Finding the time for a date had proven to be very tricky ever since Marinette had started university. Not that he blamed her. He wasn’t sure about all of what university entailed, especially for a design student, but he knew that she wouldn’t leave him hanging intentionally. And he was patient. He was more than willing to wait for a date, just like when he’d tried to get that first date with her all those years ago.

His pleasant memories were disrupted by a jarring sight. Marinette was waiting for him, but there was a certain… dimmed quality to her, if that made sense. She was less vibrant. Paler. She’d done amazing work covering it up with make up, but he’d spent his entire life around the finest makeup artists in the business. Even if he hadn't see through it, there was an exhaustion in her eyes that no amount of concealer can hide.

Adrien pulled out the seat opposite her, his hand immediately reaching for hers. Her forced smile flickered and faded when she saw the worried expression on his face. She sighed.

“Yeah, I know. The semester has been a bitch.”

“But… you’re only a month in, bugaboo!” His eyebrows scrunched together in concern. “Are things really that tough over there?” He looked into her eyes. “Is there any way I can help?”

A smile - real, this time - lit up her face. “That’s very sweet of you to offer, but no. I don’t think there is.” She sighed. “Unless you want to spend a few hours holding fabrics for me, but even then-”

“Tonight? Sure, I can do that.”

“Kitty, I know you want to help, but this’ll be pretty boring.”

He shrugged. “Maybe. But at least I’ll be with you, right? That’ll at least make things go a little faster.”

“I…” She bit her lower lip, a little bit of the light returning to her eyes. “Thanks. I’d actually really love the company.”

He took her hand and squeezed it. “Me too. Now,” he raised an eyebrow, “would I be right in assuming you’ve gotten so caught up in work that you haven’t been eating?”

Marinette rolled her eyes and took back her hand. “Now you’re sounding like Tikki. I promise I’m eating, Adrien. It might not be three course meals, but it keeps me going.” She distracted herself by looking at the menu again. As if she would be ordering anything but her favorite.

Adrien took the opportunity to look her over again. He was reminded of the times during summer photo shoots when his normally strict diet became even more restrictive. The way he thinned out might have looked good on the camera as he modeled swimsuits, but he remembered how awful he felt during that time. It wasn’t healthy when he did it back then, and it wasn’t any better for his girlfriend now.

Maybe it was just a transitionary period. Maybe once she had a grip on her new workload, her eating habits would return to normal. But for now, something needed to be done.

While he was plotting, the waiter arrived for their orders. While Marinette asked for her usual of arrabbiata pasta, Adrien ordered two plates of his meal, plus extra appetizers. It earned him a strange look from Marinette, but he had a plan.

They chatted over their dinner. Mostly it was Adrien letting Marinette talk - about commissions, about classes, about the other students, whatever was weighing on her mind. He asked questions when he could to keep her going, offered advice whenever he could. It was gradual, but he could see the weight slowly lifting from her shoulders as she unloaded on him. It warmed his heart to see her start to come alive again.

But eventually, their meals were eaten. Marinette shot another curious look at his second plate, which had gone completely untouched. The mystery was solved when Adrien asked for it to be boxed up.

As they walked out of the restaurant, she asked in a teasing tone, “Don’t trust me to feed you while you’re over?”

Adrien chuckled. “This,” he tapped the box, “is for you, lovebug. I want to be sure you’ll at least have one good meal after I leave.” He winked at her. “Besides, we both know I’ll be the one cooking breakfast tomorrow.”

“It’s not my fault you get up at sunrise like some sort of monster,” she grumbled, but he could see her fighting down a smile. Adrien couldn’t cook much, but breakfast was something he had down pat.

He wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed the top of her head. “You’re welcome.”

-----------------

They got to her apartment and Adrien was surprised to notice that it wasn’t much different than when he had helped her unpack. It was as if she gave up on decorating partway through and her projects had taken over. And given that they moved her in not long before the school year started, that might very well have been the case.

They were barely in the door when Marinette let her hair down.

“Make yourself at home, sunshine. I’m going to slip out of this dress and into some pajamas.”

Adrien opened her refrigerator to stash the leftovers away and waited for the door to Marinette’s room to close. Once he heard the click, he opened up her purse and revealed a tiny red kwami.

Tikki blinked up at him in bemusement, a macaroon halfway to her mouth. “Um… hello, Adrien. How can I help you?”

“I can promise you Dupain-Cheng cookies if you give me the information I need.”

The kwami’s eyes widened as a calculating look passed over her face. Plagg may have been the more gluttonous of the two, but Tikki had her weaknesses. And there really wasn’t any better baked goods anywhere else.

Tikki floated out of the purse and glanced back at Marinette’s room. “You better ask quick, then.”

“Has she been eating?”

“Barely,” Tikki rolled her eyes. “If you can get her to eat more, please do. She skips meals all the time to get work done.”

“Is she taking on too much?”

Tikki shrugged. “You know how she gets. It’s a lot, but she is used to dealing with a lot.”

He’ll count that as a definite ‘maybe’ then. “How about-” Marinette’s bedroom door creaked open and Tikki flew away. It wasn’t much, but it was something. Not something reassuring, but at least now he had a sense of what he was dealing with. He walked around the couch and sifted through Marinette’s DVDs.

“Want to watch a movie while we work, bugaboo?”

Marinette sighed, a content smile on her face as she relaxed in her baggy sweater and yoga pants. “I would love to, kitty.”

-----------------

Saturday morning and Alya was already frustrated with Marinette’s apartment as she trudged up three flights of stairs. Granted, it wasn’t nearly as taxing as half the things she did as Rena Rouge, but it was the principle of the matter.

It was as she was angrily trudging up the stairs that she nearly collided with someone going the opposite direction. She managed to keep her grasp on her phone. Years of hanging out around Marinette had made sure that reflex was deeply instilled. After a quick second to confirm that she hadn’t dropped anything, she looked up at the person she’d nearly been bowled over by.

“Well, if it isn’t centerfold himself!” A wide grin crossed her face. “How’re you doing? Did you make a nocturnal visit, hm?” She waggled her eyebrows.

As hoped, Adrien blushed. “No- Well, I mean, yes, I did come over last night, but that’s not- we didn’t-”

She chuckled and put a hand on his shoulder. “Relax, sunshine. I’m teasing. Care to give me the news on what’s up with our favorite girl?”

Alya listened to Adrien as a frown slowly deepened on her face. It sounded a lot like half a dozen times Marinette had started to get too caught up in something before. Her work for Kitty Section. The many events she’d pulled off as class president for years. The weeks following Hawkmoth’s reveal. Compared to those times, this wasn’t that bad… yet. But knowing Marinette, they’d need to nip this in the bud before it blossomed into a big problem.

“...You see why I’m worried, right? It might not be serious now, but if this is how she keeps going for her entire college education…” He trailed off, nervously stepping from one foot to the other as he watched Alya.

“I get what you mean. I’ll see if I can talk some sense into her, but you know how she can be…”

Adrien seemed crestfallen. “Yeah, I know.”

“Still, thanks for the update. Don’t worry, I’m sure this is just her getting used to these big changes. See ya, later, hot shot.” Alya squeezed his arm reassuringly as they passed, already forming a game plan. She knocked on her best friend’s door.

Marinette answered. “Alya!” She smiled and wrapped her up in a hug. “I didn’t realize you’d be here so early.”

Alya smirked as she followed Marinette into her apartment. “Is that why I passed your lover in the halls? Should I give you a little warning so you can sneak him out earlier?”

Much like her boyfriend before her, Marinette blushed in embarrassment. “Alya…” she whined.

“You two are too easy,” Alya said with a snicker. She took the opportunity to put her nosy journalist skills to good work as Marinette returned to the piece she was working on.

The breakfast on the table - mostly untouched - definitely had Adrien’s hallmarks on it. The boy only knew how to make like three dishes well. All three were breakfast foods and she suspected some hairbrained advice from her boyfriend was to blame for that. She frowned when she saw that only a few bites had been taken out of it.

“Your breakfast is gonna get cold, M.”

Marinette groaned. “Now you’re sounding like Adrien. It’ll still be there when I’m done with this, I promise. I just need to-”

“Just need to have breakfast before your best friend force feeds it to you? Couldn’t agree more, M.” Alya put on a sickly sweet smile and Marinette dragged herself over to the counter. Alya joined her and sipped at the coffee she’d picked up on her way. “Now, what’s going on in Marinette land?”

While Marinette told her about a few tickets Jagged Stone had sent her for the Parisian concert, Alya dutifully listened. She had started mentally juggling her schedule to let her spend more time with Marinette. Alya was not one to let her friends suffer alone.

[spacetimewithstuartgary]

FREEMAN J. DYSON (1923-2020): SCIENTIST AND WRITER, WHO DREAMT AMONG THE STARS, DIES AT 96 Freeman J. Dyson, theoretical physicist and writer, who embraced the stunning diversity of the universe with unique spirit, died on February 28, 2020, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of 96. Dyson generated revolutionary scientific insights, including calculations bridging the quantum and human worlds. His contributions stem from his work in numerous areas, including nuclear engineering, solid state physics, ferromagnetism, astrophysics, biology, and applied mathematics. The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), which was Dyson’s academic home for more than 60 years, announced his death. “No life is more entangled with the Institute and impossible to capture -- architect of modern particle physics, free-range mathematician, advocate of space travel, astrobiology and disarmament, futurist, eternal graduate student, rebel to many preconceived ideas including his own, thoughtful essayist, all the time a wise observer of the human scene,” stated Robbert Dijkgraaf, IAS Director and Leon Levy Professor. “His secret was simply saying ‘yes’ to everything in life, till the very end. We are blessed and honored that Freeman, Imme, and their family made the Institute their home. It will be so forever.” “Freeman Dyson made fundamental contributions in an incredibly wide variety of fields in physics and mathematics,” stated Edward Witten, Charles Simonyi Professor in the School of Natural Sciences. “His contributions were so wide-ranging that it is virtually impossible for any one person to summarize them adequately. Quantum electrodynamics, quantum statistical mechanics, Diophantine approximation of numbers, and random matrix ensembles are just a few of the fields to which Freeman contributed at the highest level. But really, he left his mark almost everywhere.” In 1941, as an undergraduate at Trinity College in Cambridge, Dyson studied physics with Paul Dirac and Arthur Eddington and found an intellectual role model in the famed English mathematician G. H. Hardy, who had previously mentored the mathematical prodigy, Srinivasa Ramanujan. As a mathematician, Dyson published papers on number theory, analysis, and algebraic topology, developing the concept known as “Dyson’s transform” as part of his proof of Mann’s theorem, which serves as a fundamental technique in additive number theory. “Freeman Dyson was truly a ‘free thinker’ -- there were absolutely no bounds to what he was willing to imagine, no bounds of complexity, of conventional wisdom, of scope and time,” stated Charles Simonyi, IAS Board Chair. “His thoughts, just as the universe he was exploring, and expressed in the title of one of his many books, were truly ‘Infinite in All Directions.’” “A mathematician, physicist, writer, and explorer, who was never afraid to speak his mind, Freeman embodied the values of IAS and more importantly represented the principles that all great scientists aspire to uphold,” stated Jim Simons, IAS Trustee Emeritus and former Member in the School of Mathematics. “Freeman was a marvelous role model, bringing out the best in all those around him. He will be deeply missed.” During the Second World War, Dyson worked for two years as a civilian scientist conducting operations research for the Royal Airforce’s Bomber Command. He then enrolled at Cambridge University and graduated with a B.A. in mathematics in 1945. Dyson was awarded a Commonwealth Fellowship in 1947, bringing him to Cornell University, where he continued to focus his mathematical acumen on theoretical physics, pursuing his graduate work with Hans Bethe and Richard Feynman. In the spring of 1948, Dyson accompanied Feynman on a fabled cross-country road trip that culminated in one of the most remarkable breakthroughs of 20th century physics. After being steeped in the work of Feynman for months and spending six weeks listening to Julian Schwinger’s ideas in Ann Arbor, Dyson was able to prove the equivalency of their two competing theories of quantum electrodynamics (QED), which describes how light and matter interact. Dyson recalled the moment of discovery as a “flash of illumination on the Greyhound bus.” He had been traveling alone for more than 48 hours, making his way to Princeton, NJ, to begin his first membership at the Institute for Advanced Study. The seminal paper outlining Dyson’s discovery was published by The Physical Review in 1949 under the title, “The Radiation Theories of Tomonaga, Schwinger, and Feynman.” While this question was a central problem of physics, the solution was a mathematical one that Dyson was uniquely positioned to solve given his quantitative training. Dyson’s insights -- a Rosetta Stone of physics -- provided a more precise understanding of sub-atomic particles consistent with quantum mechanics and special relativity, enabled the first use of Feynman diagrams in calculating scattering amplitudes, and showed how perturbative QED could be logically understood. Shin’ichiro Tomonaga, Julian Schwinger, and Richard Feynman were jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 for their work in this area. At the invitation of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Institute’s longest-serving director, Dyson joined IAS as a member in 1948. Dyson returned to the Institute for a second membership in 1950. The following year, he accepted an offer of a full professorship from Cornell University. Dyson was invited back to IAS for a third time in 1953 to take up a permanent appointment to the faculty, joining a group of the century’s top physicists and mathematicians, including Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, Tsung-Dao Lee, Deane Montgomery, Marston Morse, Abraham Pais, Carl Ludwig Siegel, Atle Selberg, Oswald Veblen, John von Neumann, Hermann Weyl, and Chen Ning Yang. The Institute provided Dyson the freedom and flexibility to follow his curiosity to new areas and fields that interested him. In 1956, Dyson began a three-year association with General Atomic, where he worked to design a nuclear reactor that would be inherently safe, or, as colleague Edward Teller put it, “not only idiot-proof, but PhD proof.” The TRIGA reactor is still in production today and used mostly by hospitals. In 1958, he took a leave of absence from the Institute and moved to La Jolla, California to join General Atomic’s “Project Orion,” working with forty scientists to design an atomic spaceship capable of riding a wave of controlled nuclear pulses into deep space. Dyson recalled the fifteen months spent on the short-lived project as “the most exciting and in many ways the happiest of my scientific life.” The ambitious project had once set its sights on “Mars by 1965, Saturn by 1970.” Dyson was engaged in the public debate regarding the nuclear test ban treaty and whether or not an exception should be made for purposes of experimentation. In 1960, he was elected to the council of the Federation of American Scientists, and selected as its chair two years later. From this post, he became an effective advocate for the creation of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, which existed until 1999 when it was merged with the U.S. State Department. Dyson’s work with this newly created agency gave him greater opportunities to examine the potential consequences of a nuclear war. Concluding that further nuclear testing was “wrong technically, wrong militarily, wrong politically, and wrong morally,” Dyson testified before the U.S. Senate in favor of the nuclear test ban treaty in 1963. Dyson continued to educate the public on important questions of science, becoming a highly sought-after lecturer and frequent contributor to popular scientific publications on a wide variety of topics, including the relation of science to religion, the prospective colonization of the solar system, harnessing the energy of stars, and climate change. In turning from science to writing, Dyson often recalled the advice of his undergraduate mentor G. H. Hardy, “‘Young men should prove theorems, old men should write books.’ So I decided in 1975 to follow Hardy’s example. Like Hardy, I did not stop proving theorems altogether, but my output of theorems gradually diminished as my output of books increased. I have found, like Hardy, that the art of weaving sentences into a story can be as creative as the art of weaving ideas into a theorem.” Dyson produced a steady stream of books geared for the scientifically curious among the general public. Disturbing the Universe (1979) is a portrait-gallery of people he had known during his career as a scientist. Weapons and Hope (1984), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction in 1984, is a study of ethical problems of war and peace. Infinite in All Directions (1988) is a philosophical meditation based on Dyson’s Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology given at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. Origins of Life (1986) is a study of one of the major unsolved problems of science. From Eros to Gaia (1992) is a collection of essays and lectures, starting with a science-fiction story written at the age of nine, and ending with a mugging in Washington at age fifty-four. Imagined Worlds (1997) is an edited version of a set of lectures given in 1995 at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem about human destiny, literature, and science. The Sun, the Genome and the Internet (1999) discusses the question of whether modern technology could be used to narrow the gap between rich and poor rather than widen it. The Scientist as Rebel (2006) is a collection of book reviews and essays, mostly published in the New York Review of Books. A Many-colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (2007) is an edited version of a set of lectures given in 2004 at the University of Virginia. Maker of Patterns (2018) is an autobiographical account of Freeman’s life through letters written to his parents. For his contributions to science, mathematics, and public policy, Dyson has been honored with over twenty honorary degrees and has been elected to numerous learned societies, including the Royal Society and the National Academy of Sciences. Among Dyson’s accolades are the National Space Society’s Robert Heinlein Memorial Award (2018), the Henri Poincaré Prize of the International Mathematical Physics Congress (2012), the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion (2000), the Enrico Fermi Award of the U.S. Department of Energy (1995), the Oersted Medal of the American Association of Physics Teachers (1991), the Wolf Prize in Physics (1981), the Harvey Prize (1977), the Max Planck Medal of the German Physical Society (1969), the Hughes Medal of the London Royal Society (1968), the Lorentz Medal of the Royal Netherlands Academy (1966), and the Danny Heineman Prize for Mathematical Physics of the American Institute of Physics (1965). Freeman John Dyson was born on December 15, 1923, in Crowthorne, Berkshire, in the United Kingdom. His father was the musician and composer Sir George Dyson; his mother, Mildred Lucy Atkey, a lawyer and social worker. Dyson is survived by his wife, Imme; children Esther, George, Dorothy, Emily, Mia, Rebecca, and step-daughter Katarina; and 16 grandchildren.

[cam-rowe]

In what way does Yolanda encourage her kids to stay in toxic relationship for press / fame? Just curious as I have never been aware of such a thing!

Yolanda thought it was perfectly fine to push Gigi, 13 year old daughter at the time, into dating Joe Jonas, who was 20 then. Gigi said ‘no’ to Joe when he asked her out, then he gave his number to Yolanda who then passed it onto her underage daughter (who you know, had the actual sense to turn him down due to the inappropriate age gap). Gigi has dated up ever since in terms of the level of fame. She started off dating Cody Simpson and moved onto Joe within like 2-3 weeks after that.

Yolanda also (accidentally) admitted that Abel (the Weeknd) has been in their life/in their family since Bella was 17. Not only that but when they split in 2016 and he started “dating” Selena Gomez, Yolanda kept liking all these Abel/Weeknd posts despite the position he had put her in at the time. I’m not saying I know 100% but it was pretty clear from Bella’s side, especially through her IG posts/stories where she captioned them with Weeknd lyrics to promote his new album at the time, that she was under the impression that they were only splitting so he could do the promo run for Starboy and they would get back together after that. It was routine for them to split whenever he drops a new album because apparently the Weeknd can’t promote a new album when he’s coupled up lol. It was most likely that Abel slighted her by suddenly getting together with Selena (i think most of us don’t believe that things were real between those two anyway) and it left her humiliated because his fans and her fans could see that she was waiting around for him. Yolanda clearly didn’t care though cause she insisted on liking all his posts and even going on to tell the press how glad she was that Bella and him got back together, even though it was quite apparent by then that it wasn’t a healthy relationship, especially for her side of things. He already addressed this in After Hours - she takes him back every time despite all the cheating, she waited for him throughout that whole PR stunt with Selena and never moved on.

Also Yolanda seems like a toxic parent in general imo. She seems to favour her kids based on how successful they are in the field she wants them to be in. Bella didn’t even want to be a model, she wanted to go study photography at Parsons. Yolanda’s main concern at the time when this was being discussed on RHOBH was how Bella was going to keep up with modelling if she did school. In the end, Bella dropped out to mode full time. She did a very similar thing to Gigi, who ended up having to drop out of her criminal psychology course but at least Gigi really, REALLY wanted to be a model so she was giving up her education to pursue her dream career. Before that, Yolanda couldn’t care less about Bella and never bothered trying to hide the fact that she thought Gigi was prettier/better in general. She also pressured Gigi into quitting her high school volley ball team because “it’s a masculine sport” and the girls who play that kind of sport “are big and eat a lot.” Then she said some stupid stuff like “i thought my daughter was a lesbian” just because Gigi enjoys playing volleyball. I’ll never forget how Gigi was basically crying over how hungry she was and Yolanda told her to go suck on an almond to curb her hunger, like what?