#hiroshima death match

[tired-reader-writer]

A birthday gift for my dear friend @akatsukitrash , a fanart of his OC Senju Akemi with her cousin Tsunade, based on the eighth chapter of their fic Far Beyond The Woods of Dawn. It is a beautifully written fic with exceptional characterization, fascinating worldbuilding, and immersive writing. I absolutely adore it.

The chapter depicts a ceremony to bond a Mokuton wielder to their guardian. There's a lot of symbolism in the chapter itself, but I ended up adding my own in this fanart 👀

The descriptions of their ceremonial clothing in the fic is as follows:

“Tsunade looks at herself in the mirror, fixing invisible wrinkles in her simple, light green kimono.”

×

“Akemi enters and is guided by a nun to the pillow in front of Tsunade. She’s paler than normal, wearing a pure white kimono. Their clothes have to match their chakra colours. It’s tradition.”

×

“Kiyomi kneels beside [Akemi] and caresses her hair, nicely done into a bun held by an ornamental hairpin.”

I first decided to give Akemi a hairpin adorned with ginkgo leaves, as its name in my native tongue, “tree from the dawn of the world”, immediately reminded me of Akemi as a character.

As for the other reasons I have chosen ginkgo:

“In Asia, the ginkgo is considered a holy tree and is often found near temples and other places of worship. In Buddhism, Taoism and in the teachings of Confucius, the tree has acquired great symbolic significance, representing long life, vitality, and hope. In China, the ginkgo tree is also called "Buddha's fingernail".”

×

“Ginkgos, like cedars, are resilient survivors. They have deep roots and can tolerate adverse conditions, including wind, pollution, and fire. Notably, these trees withstood the 1923 Kanto earthquake and even survived an atomic blast, the 1945 atomic bomb on Hiroshima, even when located less than 1½ miles from the epicenter. Despite scorched bark, stripped branches, and the destruction of a nearby temple, the ginkgo trees remarkably survived and leafed out the following spring.”

×

“For centuries the ginkgo tree and leaves have been seen as a symbol of peace and hope, aiding to its continued presence throughout human history.”

×

“Another powerful example of the importance of the ginkgo tree as a symbol for hope, is the survival of the gingko tree, known as the "bearer of hope" that survived the bombing in Hiroshima. This tree is regarded as a symbol of hope, and prayers for peace and healthfulness have been engraved into its bark.”

The Senju are Buddhist in the fic, drawing from the Buddhist imagery surrounding them in canon, and ginkgo leaves just felt appropriate for that. I shan't talk much of Akemi herself since I don't want to spoil the future arcs and chapters Idir has planned, but in my opinion... yeah. The ginkgo is very suited for Akemi in particular.

I will get to the camellia in her hair, in both their hair, later.

I also decided to give Akemi a chihaya to wear over her kimono— chihaya tend to be worn by Shinto priestesses during religious ceremonies— and in Japan there is much incorporation and syncretism between Buddhism and the Shinto faith. A variant of chihaya (or perhaps chihaya is a variant of it) was apparently worn in the Heian court by nobility, and was called “kariginu”.

And then there is the wisteria ornament in Tsunade's hair.

“The wisteria is associated with youth, love, perseverance, immortality. The Japanese name for wisteria, "fuji" can also mean "immortality" [fu: no, lacking + ji/shi: death] and Mt. Fuji's name is also tied to immortality.”

×

“The wisteria also features a lot on Japanese family crests too, and the "Fujiwara" were a very prominent and powerful family in the history of Japan who kept marrying their daughters into the imperial family.”

Considering Tsunade's prowess with healing, her youth and vitality, the wisteria seemed like a good fit to her. The wisteria hair ornaments I've seen typically have two colours, purple and white, but I decided to just keep it white because it's like Tsunade has a piece of Akemi in her hair, and Akemi has a piece of Tsunade in her hair, and they both have matching camellias in their hair.

It's very neat, imo.

And then! We get to the camellias.

The tsubaki/camellia symbolize gods and the divine, and apparently used in religious rituals though I don't know how. They are offerings to the gods, they're sacred, they also symbolize faithfulness and longevity though they also symbolize a noble death (associated w the samurai) because rather than losing petals apparently the entire blossom just falls off the stem, and which is why it's a terrible idea to give a sick person a camellia as a gift because the flower beheads itself, essentially.

Those who awaken the Mokuton among the Senju are thought to be sacred, closer to Buddha and the gods, and the camellias felt like a good way to pay homage to that.

Anyways, Idir, I hope you like my gift!

Some close-ups:

[denimbex1986]

'It was the early hours of 16 July 1945, and Robert Oppenheimer was waiting in a control bunker for a moment that would change the world. Around 10km (6 miles) away, the world's first atomic bomb test, codenamed "Trinity", was set to proceed in the pale sands of the Jornada del Muerto desert, in New Mexico.

Oppenheimer was a picture of nervous exhaustion. He was always slender, but after three years as director of "Project Y", the scientific arm of the "Manhattan Engineer District" that had designed and built the bomb, his weight had dropped to just over 52kg (115lbs). At 5ft 10in (178cm), this made him extremely thin. He'd slept only four hours that night, kept awake by anxiety and his smoker's cough.

That day in 1945 is one of several pivotal moments in Oppenheimer's life described by the historians Kai Bird and Martin J Sherwin in their 2005 biography American Prometheus, which provided the basis for the new movie biopic Oppenheimer, released 21 July in the US.

In the final minutes of the countdown, as Bird and Sherwin report, an army general observed Oppenheimer's mood at close-quarters: "Dr. Oppenheimer... grew tenser as the last seconds ticked off. He scarcely breathed..."

The explosion, when it came, outshone the Sun. With a force matching 21 kilotonnes of TNT, the detonation was the largest ever seen. It created a shockwave that was felt 160km (100 miles) away. As the roar engulfed the landscape and the mushroom cloud rose in the sky, Oppenheimer's expression relaxed into one of "tremendous relief". Minutes later, Oppenheimer's friend and colleague Isidor Rabi caught sight of him from a distance: "I’ll never forget his walk; I’ll never forget the way he stepped out of the car... his walk was like High Noon... this kind of strut. He had done it."

In interviews conducted in the 1960s, Oppenheimer added a layer of gravitas to his reaction, claiming that, in the moments after the detonation, a line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, had come into his mind: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

In the following days, his friends reported he seemed increasingly depressed. "Robert got very still and ruminative during that two-week period," one recalled, "because he knew what was about to happen." One morning he was heard lamenting (in condescending terms) the imminent fate of the Japanese: "Those poor little people, those poor little people." But only days later, he was once again nervous, focussed, exacting.

In a meeting with his military counterparts, he seemed to have forgotten all about the "poor little people". According to Bird and Sherwin, he was instead fixated on the importance of the right conditions for the bomb drop: "Of course, they must not drop it in rain or fog… Don’t let them detonate it too high. The figure fixed on is just right. Don’t let it go up [higher] or the target won’t get as much damage." When he announced the successful bombing of Hiroshima to a crowd of his colleagues less than a month after Trinity, one onlooker noticed the way Oppenheimer "clasped and pumped his hand over his head like a victorious prizefighter". The applause "practically raised the roof".

Oppenheimer was the emotional and intellectual heart of the Manhattan Project: more than any other single person he had made the bomb a reality. Jeremy Bernstein, who worked with him after the war, was convinced that nobody else could have done it. As he wrote in his 2004 biography, A Portrait of an Enigma, "If Oppenheimer had not been the director at Los Alamos, I am persuaded that, for better or worse, the Second World War would have ended... without the use of nuclear weapons."

The variety of Oppenheimer's reported reactions as he witnessed the fruition of his labours, not to mention the pace with which he moved through them, might seem bewildering. The combination of nervous fragility, ambition, grandiosity and morbid gloom are hard to square in a single person, especially one so instrumental in the very project provoking these responses.

Bird and Sherwin also call Oppenheimer an "enigma": "A theoretical physicist who displayed the charismatic qualities of a great leader, an aesthete who cultivated ambiguities." A scientist, but also, as another friend once described him "a first-class manipulator of the imagination".

By Bird and Sherwin's account, the contradictions in Oppenheimer's character – the qualities that have left both friends and biographers at a loss to explain him – seem to have been present from his earliest years. Born in New York City in 1904, Oppenheimer was the child of first-generation German Jewish immigrants who had become wealthy through the textiles trade. The family home was a large apartment on the Upper West Side with three maids, a chauffeur, and European art on the walls.

Despite this luxurious upbringing, Oppenheimer was recalled as unspoiled and generous by childhood friends. A school friend, Jane Didisheim, remembered him as someone who "blushed extraordinarily easily", who was "very frail, very pink-cheeked, very shy...", but also "very brilliant". "Very quickly everybody admitted that he was different from all the others and superior," she said.

By the age of nine, he was reading philosophy in Greek and Latin, and was obsessed with mineralogy – roaming Central Park and writing letters to the New York Mineralogical Club about what he found. His letters were so competent that the Club mistook him for an adult and invited him to make a presentation. This intellectual nature contributed to a degree of solitude in the young Oppenheimer, write Bird and Sherwin. "He was usually preoccupied with whatever he was doing or thinking," recalled a friend. He was uninterested in conforming to gender expectations – taking no interest in sports or the "rough and tumble of his age-group" as his cousin put it; "He was often teased and ridiculed for not being like other fellows." But his parents were convinced of his genius.

"I repaid my parents’ confidence in me by developing an unpleasant ego," Oppenheimer later commented, "which I am sure must have affronted both children and adults who were unfortunate enough to come into contact with me." "It’s no fun," he once told another friend, "to turn the pages of a book and say, 'yes, yes, of course, I know that'."

When he left home to study chemistry at Harvard University, the fragility of Oppenheimer's psychological make-up was exposed: his brittle arrogance and thinly-masked sensitivity appearing to serve him poorly. In a letter from 1923, published in a 1980 collection edited by Alice Kimbal Smith and Charles Weiner, he wrote: "I labour and write innumerable theses, notes, poems, stories and junk… I make stenches in three different labs…I serve tea and talk learnedly to a few lost souls, go off for the weekend to distill low grade energy into laughter and exhaustion, read Greek, commit faux pas, search my desk for letters, and wish I were dead. Voila."

Subsequent letters collated by Smith and Weiner reveal that the problems continued through his post-graduate studies, in Cambridge, England. His tutor insisted on applied laboratory work, one of Oppenheimer's weaknesses. "I am having a pretty bad time," he wrote in 1925. "The lab work is a terrible bore, and I am so bad at it that it is impossible to feel that I am learning anything." Later that year, Oppenheimer's intensity led him close to disaster when he deliberately left an apple, poisoned with laboratory chemicals, on his tutor's desk. His friends later speculated he could have been driven by envy and feelings of inadequacy. The tutor didn't eat the apple but Oppenheimer's place at Cambridge was threatened and he kept it only on condition that he see a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist diagnosed psychosis but then wrote him off, saying that treatment would do no good.

Recalling that period, Oppenheimer would later report that he seriously contemplated suicide over the Christmas holidays. The following year, during a visit to Paris, his close friend Francis Fergusson told him he had proposed to his girlfriend. Oppenheimer responded by attempting to strangle him: "He jumped on me from behind with a trunk strap," Fergusson recalled, "and wound it around my neck... I managed to pull aside and he fell on the ground weeping."

It seems that where psychiatry failed Oppenheimer, literature came to the rescue. According to Bird and Sherwin, he read Marcel Proust's A La Recherché du Temps Perdu while on a walking holiday in Corsica, finding in it some reflection of his own state of mind that reassured him and opened a window on a more compassionate mode of being. He learned by heart a passage from the book about "indifference to the sufferings one causes", being "the terrible and permanent form of cruelty". The question of attitude towards suffering would remain an abiding interest, guiding Oppenheimer's interest in spiritual and philosophical texts throughout his life and eventually playing a significant role in the work that would define his reputation. A comment he made to his friends on this same holiday seems prophetic: "The kind of person that I admire most would be one who becomes extraordinarily good at doing a lot of things but still maintains a tear-stained countenance."

He returned to England in lighter spirits, feeling "much kinder and more tolerant", as he later recalled. Early in 1926, he met the director of the Institute of Theoretical Physics at the University of Göttingen in Germany, who quickly became convinced of Oppenheimer's talents as a theoretician, inviting him to study there. According to Smith and Weiner, he later described 1926 as the year of his "coming into physics". It would prove a turning point. He obtained his PhD and a postdoctoral fellowship in the year to follow. He also became part of a community that was driving the development of theoretical physics, meeting scientists who would become life-long friends. Many would ultimately join Oppenheimer at Los Alamos.

Returning to the US, Oppenheimer spent a few months at Harvard before moving to pursue his physics career in California. The tone of his letters from this period reflect a steadier, more generous cast of mind. He wrote to his younger brother about romance, and his ongoing interest in the arts.

At the University of California in Berkeley, he worked closely with experimentalists, interpreting their results on cosmic rays and nuclear disintegration. He later described finding himself "the only one who understood what this was all about". The department he eventually created stemmed, he said, from the need to communicate about the theory he loved: "Explaining first to faculty, staff, and colleagues and then to anyone who would listen ... what had been learned, what the unsolved problems were." He described himself as a "difficult" teacher at first but it was through this role that Oppenheimer honed the charisma and social presence that would carry him during his time at Project Y. Quoted by Smith and Weiner, one colleague recalled how his students "emulated him as best they could. They copied his gestures, his mannerisms, his intonations. He truly influenced their lives."

During the early 1930s, as he strengthened his academic career, Oppenheimer continued to moonlight in the humanities. It was during this period that he discovered the Hindu scriptures, learning Sanskrit in order to read the untranslated Bhagavad Gita – the text from which he later drew the famous '"Now I am become Death" quotation. It seems his interest was not just intellectual, but represented a continuation of the self-prescribed bibliotherapy that had begun with Proust in his 20s. The Bhagavad Gita, a story centred on the war between two arms of an aristocratic family, gave Oppenheimer a philosophical underpinning that was directly applicable to the moral ambiguity he confronted at Project Y. It emphasised ideas of duty, fate and detachment from outcome, emphasising that fear of consequences cannot be used as justification for inaction. In a letter to his brother from 1932, Oppenheimer specifically references the Gita and then names war as one circumstance that might offer the opportunity to put such a philosophy into practice:

"I believe that through discipline... we can achieve serenity... I believe that through discipline we learn to preserve what is essential to our happiness in more and more adverse circumstances... Therefore I think that all things which evoke discipline: study, and our duties to men and to the commonwealth, war... ought to be greeted by us with profound gratitude; for only through them can we attain to the least detachment; and only so can we know peace."

In the mid 1930s, Oppenheimer also met Jean Tatlock, a psychiatrist and physician with whom he fell in love. By Bird and Sherwin's account, Tatlock's complexity of character equalled Oppenheimer's. She was widely read and driven by a social conscience. She was described by a childhood friend as "touched with greatness". Oppenheimer proposed to Tatlock more than once but she turned him down. She is credited with introducing him to radical politics and to the poetry of John Donne. The pair continued to see each other occasionally after Oppenheimer married the biologist Katherine "Kitty" Harrison in 1940. Kitty was to join Oppenheimer at Project Y, where she worked as a phlebotomist, researching the dangers of radiation.

In 1939, physicists were far more concerned about the nuclear threat than politicians were and it was a letter from Albert Einstein that first brought the matter to the attention of senior leaders in the US government. The reaction was slow, but alarm continued to circulate in the scientific community and eventually the president was persuaded to act. As one of the preeminent physicists in the country, Oppenheimer was one of several scientists appointed to begin looking more seriously into the potential for nuclear weapons. By September 1942, partly thanks to Oppenheimer's team, it was clear that a bomb was possible and concrete plans for its development started to take shape. According to Bird and Sherwin, when he heard that his name was being floated as a leader for this endeavour, Oppenheimer began his own preparations. "I’m cutting off every communist connection," he said to a friend at the time. "For if I don’t, the government will find it difficult to use me. I don’t want to let anything interfere with my usefulness to the nation."

Einstein would later say: "The trouble with Oppenheimer is that he loves [something that] doesn’t love him – the United States government." His patriotism and desire to please clearly played a role in his recruitment. General Leslie Groves, the military leader of the Manhattan Engineer District, was the person responsible for finding a scientific director for the bomb project. According to a 2002 biography, Racing for the Bomb, when Groves proposed Oppenheimer as scientific lead, he met with opposition. Oppenheimer's "extreme liberal background" was a concern. But as well as noting his talent and his existing knowledge of the science, Groves also pointed out his "overweening ambition". The Manhattan Project's chief of security also noticed this: "I became convinced that not only was he loyal, but that he would let nothing interfere with the successful accomplishment of his task and thus his place in scientific history."

In the 1988 book The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Oppenheimer's friend Isidor Rabi is quoted as saying he thought it "a most improbable appointment", but later conceded it had been "a real stroke of genius on the part of General Groves".

At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer applied his contrarian, interdisciplinary convictions as much as anywhere. In his 1979 autobiography, What Little I Remember, the Austrian-born physicist Otto Frisch recalled that Oppenheimer had recruited not only the scientists required but also "a painter, a philosopher and a few other unlikely characters; he felt that a civilised community would be incomplete without them".

After the war, Oppenheimer's attitude seemed to change . He described nuclear weapons as instruments "of aggression, of surprise, and of terror" and the weapons industry as "the devil's work". At a meeting in October 1945, he famously told President Truman: "I feel I have blood on my hands." The President later said: "I told him the blood was on my hands – to let me worry about that."

The exchange is an arresting echo of one described in Oppenheimer's beloved Bhagavad Gita, between Prince Arjuna and the god Krishna. Arjuna refuses to fight because he believes he will be responsible for the murder of his fellows, but Krishna takes away the burden: "View in me the active slayer of these men... Arise, on fame, on victory, on kingly joys intent! They are already slain by me; be you the instrument."

During the development of the bomb, Oppenheimer had used a similar argument to assuage his own and his colleagues' ethical hesitations. He told them that, as scientists, they were not responsible for decisions about how the weapon should be used – only for doing their job. The blood, if there was any, would be on the hands of the politicians. However, it seems that once the deed was done, Oppenheimer's confidence in this position was shaken. As Bird and Sherwin relate, in his role at the Atomic Energy Commission during the post-war period, he argued against the development of further weapons, including the more powerful hydrogen bomb, which his work had paved the way for.

These efforts resulted in Oppenheimer being investigated by the US government in 1954 and having his security clearance stripped, marking the end of his involvement with policy work. The academic community came to his defence. Writing for The New Republic in 1955, the philosopher Bertrand Russell commented that the "investigation made it undeniable that he has committed mistakes, one of them from a security point of view rather grave. But there was no evidence of disloyalty or of anything that could be considered treasonable... The scientists were caught in a tragic dilemma."

In 1963, the US government presented him with the Enrico Fermi Award as a gesture of political rehabilitation, but it wasn't until 2022, 55 years after his death, that the US government overturned its 1954 decision to strip his clearance, and affirmed Oppenheimer's loyalty.

Throughout the last decades of Oppenheimer's life, he maintained parallel expressions of pride at the technical achievement of the bomb and guilt at its effects. A note of resignation also entered his commentary, with him saying more than once that the bomb had simply been inevitable. He spent the last 20 years of his life as director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, working alongside Einstein and other physicists.

As at Los Alamos, he made a point of promoting interdisciplinary work and emphasised in his speeches the belief that science needed the humanities in order to better understand its own implications, write Bird and Sherwin. To this end, he recruited a raft of non-scientists including classicists, poets, and psychologists.

He later came to consider atomic energy as a problem that outstripped the intellectual tools of its time, as, in President Truman's words, "a new force too revolutionary to consider in the framework of old ideas". In a speech made in 1965, later published in the 1984 collection Uncommon Sense, he said "I have heard from some of the great men of our time that when they found something startling, they knew it was good, because they were afraid". When talking about moments of unsettling scientific discovery, he was fond of quoting the poet John Donne: "Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone."

John Keats, another poet Oppenheimer enjoyed, coined the phrase "negative capability" to describe a common quality in the people he admired: "that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason." It seems as though it was something of this that the philosopher Russell was getting at when he wrote of Oppenheimer's "inability to see things simply, an inability which is not surprising in one possessed of a complex and delicate mental apparatus." In describing Oppenheimer's contradictions, his mutability, his continual running between poetry and science, his habit of defying simple description, perhaps we are identifying the very qualities that made him capable of pursuing the creation of the bomb.

Even in the midst of this great and terrible pursuit, Oppenheimer kept alive the "tear stained countenance" he had foretold in his 20s. The name of the "Trinity" test is thought to have come from the John Donne poem Batter my heart, three-person'd God: "That I may rise and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend/Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new." Jean Tatlock, who had introduced him to Donne, and with whom he is thought by some to have remained in love, had committed suicide the year before the test. The bomb project was marked everywhere by Oppenheimer's imagination, and by his sense of romance and tragedy. Perhaps it was overweening ambition that General Groves identified when he interviewed Oppenheimer for the job at Project Y, or perhaps it was his ability to adopt, for the time required, the idea of overweening ambition. As much as it was the result of research, the bomb was the product of Oppenheimer's ability and willingness to imagine himself as the kind of a person that could make it happen.

A chain smoker since adolescence, Oppenheimer suffered bouts of tuberculosis during his life. He died of throat cancer in 1967, at the age of 62. Two years before his death, in a rare moment of simplicity, he drew a distinction that marked out the practice of science from that of poetry. Unlike poetry, he said, "science is the business of learning not to make the same mistake again".'

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 8.6 (after 1940)

1940 – Estonia is annexed by the Soviet Union. 1942 – Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands becomes the first reigning queen to address a joint session of the United States Congress. 1944 – The Warsaw Uprising occurs on August 1. It is brutally suppressed and all able-bodied men in Kraków are detained afterwards to prevent a similar uprising, the Kraków Uprising, that was planned but never carried out. 1945 – World War II: Hiroshima, Japan is devastated when the atomic bomb "Little Boy" is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people are killed instantly, and some tens of thousands die in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning. 1956 – After going bankrupt in 1955, the American broadcaster DuMont Television Network makes its final broadcast, a boxing match from St. Nicholas Arena in New York in the Boxing from St. Nicholas Arena series. 1958 – Law of Permanent Defense of Democracy, outlawing the Communist Party of Chile and banning 26,650 persons from the electoral lists, is repealed in Chile. 1960 – Cuban Revolution: Cuba nationalizes American and foreign-owned property in the nation. 1962 – Jamaica becomes independent from the United Kingdom. 1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. 1986 – A low-pressure system that redeveloped off the New South Wales coast dumps a record 328 millimeters (13 inches) of rain in a day on Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. 1990 – Gulf War: The United Nations Security Council orders a global trade embargo against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. 1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW makes its first appearance as a publicly available service on the Internet. 1991 – Takako Doi, chair of the Social Democratic Party, becomes Japan's first female speaker of the House of Representatives. 1996 – NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life-forms. 1997 – Korean Air Flight 801 crashed at Nimitz Hill, Guam, killing 229 of the 254 people on board. 2001 – Erwadi fire incident: Twenty-eight mentally ill persons tied to a chain are burnt to death at a faith based institution at Erwadi, Tamil Nadu. 2008 – A military junta led by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz stages a coup d'état in Mauritania, overthrowing president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi. 2010 – Flash floods across a large part of Jammu and Kashmir, India, damages 71 towns and kills at least 255 people. 2011 – War in Afghanistan: A United States military helicopter is shot down, killing 30 American special forces members and a working dog, seven Afghan soldiers, and one Afghan civilian. It was the deadliest single event for the United States in the War in Afghanistan. 2012 – NASA's Curiosity rover lands on the surface of Mars. 2015 – A suicide bomb attack kills at least 15 people at a mosque in the Saudi city of Abha.

[whattheabcxyz]

2023-08-01

Singapore

CCTV cam catches Grab delivery man defecating along Geylang HDB common corridor - how are we a so-called 1st-world country again?!

MAS seeks views on framework to combat potential money laundering at single-family offices - Our government concerned about money laundering?! That's a laugh! 🤣

More info on upcoming CDC/GST voucher handouts

Aljunied-Hougang Town Council to raise service & conservancy charges from Oct

Business groups cite "complexities" in response to calls for ban on using lorries to ferry workers - in other words, they're saying it's impossible to survive as a business here unless they exploit the desperate... which is true!

Shophouse sales climb in Q2 after ABSD hikes for residential properties

Finance

Singapore: Home loan rates remain high

Health

Singapore: At least 3 patients had urgent treatments delayed by private specialist who put them through needless tests - 1 died!!! 🥺 This is why you should be extremely wary of trusting doctors in private practice, as you never know when they are trying to profit off you, rather than cure you!

Cancer survivors model for charity

Nature

Standing sunbear from China zoo has visitors thinking it is a man in disguise - this is what happens when your country & people keep churning out fake stuff so much so that everyone loses trust in everything

Travel

What happened to 64-year-old Indian woman who disappeared from cruise ship? - cruises are a great place to murder someone, tbh, so I'd say the husband is the main suspect

...& just earlier this month there was a suspected murder-suicide case involving a mother & son who fell from another cruise ship

What Malta has to offer

Science

Scientists intrigued by clever trick that makes cancer cells self-destruct - but we are "still a long way from developing a drug for humans that takes advantage of this gene hack, assuming it's actually possible in a practical way"

Society

USA: Man electrocuted to death after jumping into lake - probably caused by poor electrical installation at dock ...I didn't know you could electrify an entire lake tho'!

Entertainment

^ "Oppenheimer" is, according to Peter Hitchens, a failure - did the Japanese surrender because of the Hiroshima bombing or not?!

Gossip

Prince Harry is bringing his charity polo match to Singapore - shunned in the UK then US, so now has to resort to coming to Asia? 🙄

[numbersbythebook]

The 3rd Occurrence of 442

written by Will Schumacher

Per my last post the towers at 9/11 fell after 442 minutes. There were 442 nuclear power plants in operation at the time of the 3/11 Japan earthquake/nuclear event. 442 is the gematria of Enoch translated which is a type of the rapture.

My thinking was that this 442 number is a rapture number. It is in a way but there was another 442 event that I could never understand but I believe I have a better understanding now. So it leads me to believe this 442 number is a judgement number. I’ll try to explain it.

Enoch’s gematria of 442 =”translated” is from this verse:

Hebrews 11:5 By faith Enoch was translated that he should not see death; and was not found, because God had translated him: for before his translation he had this testimony, that he pleased God.

3/11 was 23958 days from Japan’s first nuclear event, the bombing of Hiroshima during WW2 on August 6, 1945. 23958 = 33 x 726. Strong’s G726 = “harpazo” or what we call the Rapture.

This is verse 23958 about the coming of Jesus:

Matthew 23:39 For I say unto you, Ye shall not see me henceforth, till ye shall say, Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord.

The verse jump from Matthew 23:39 to Hebrews 11:5 is 6220. Enoch was born after 622 years.

3/11=311. 622=311x2. All numbers point to Enoch.

This is verse 6220. It has a gematria of 2718:

Joshua 15:17 And Othniel the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it: and he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife.

This verse about Enoch has the matching gematria of 2718:

Genesis 5:21 And Enoch lived sixty and five years, and begat Methuselah:

So Joshua 15:17 has something to do with Enoch. Let’s see the story.

Joshua 15:15-17 And he went up thence to the inhabitants of Debir: and the name of Debir before was Kirjathsepher. 16) And Caleb said, He that smiteth Kirjathsepher, and taketh it, to him will I give Achsah my daughter to wife. 17) And Othniel the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it: and he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife.

Kirjathsepher means “the city of books”. Othniel means ”the lion of God”. Achsah means “anklets” or “fetters”. She is in bondage to something.

So we have the Lion of God taking a city of books and marrying someone in bondage. We have the New Testament picture of this in the book of Revelation. This is the only time Jesus is called a lion in the Bible.

Revelation 5:1-5 And I saw in the right hand of him that sat on the throne a book written within and on the backside, sealed with seven seals. 2) And I saw a strong angel proclaiming with a loud voice, Who is worthy to open the book, and to loose the seals thereof? 3) And no man in heaven, nor in earth, neither under the earth, was able to open the book, neither to look thereon. 4) And I wept much, because no man was found worthy to open and to read the book, neither to look thereon. 5) And one of the elders saith unto me, Weep not: behold, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the Root of David, hath prevailed to open the book, and to loose the seven seals thereof.

Further, Kirjathsepher is renamed Debir. Debir is the same word used for the Holy of Holies, where God resides.

In my posts on Revelation and Rebekah I showed why I thought this book that the Lion of God was holding was the Book of life.

This story of Othniel is a picture of the redemption work of Jesus and sitting down at the right hand of the Father as the owner of the Church/Enoch/Book of Life.

Then the other 442 event.

On June 1, 2015 a Chinese ship called “Eastern Star” sank after going into a violent storm. Sadly 442 people died and thankfully 12 lived.

The “Eastern Star” reminded me of the star from the east that was the sign of Jesus’ first coming.

Matthew 2:2 Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.

June 1, 2015 was 1543 days after 3/11. According to Wikipedia it sank at 21:32 which begins minute 1293. The numbers 1293 and 1543 can be seen in the second half of the story of Achsah.

Joshua 15:17-19 And Othniel the son of Kenaz, the brother of Caleb, took it: and he gave him Achsah his daughter to wife. 18) And it came to pass, as she came unto him, that she moved him to ask of her father a field: and she lighted off her ass; and Caleb said unto her, What wouldest thou? 19) Who answered, Give me a blessing; for thou hast given me a south land; give me also springs of water. And he gave her the upper springs, and the nether springs.

After Othniel marries Achsah she asks Othniel to talk to her Father Caleb about something she wants. She tells her father she has been given a “south land” which means a “dry land” so she wants the upper springs and lower springs. Strong’s H1293 (matching time of incident) =”blessing”. Strong’s H1543 (matching day count)=”springs”.

I will say I don’t have a 100% confidence in what I think this means, but I will give my 2 cents worth. Springs in the Bible are “living waters”, they are abundant life or eternal life. I think that part is clear.

However this “upper and lower water/spring” and “dry land” remind me of Creation.

Genesis 1:6-9 And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters. 7) And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. 8) And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day. 9) And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.

In creation you have heaven dividing the upper and lower waters and dry land appearing. Achsah is given dry land and now she wants and upper and lower water from her father/the Father.

Is this a reference to the new creation coming? The bible refers to a new heavens and earth with our eternal life dwelling with God-like Debir-in the Holy of Holies.

Revelation 21 1-3 Then I saw “a new heaven and a new earth,”[a] for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and there was no longer any sea. 2) I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. 3) And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God.

The Eastern Star has a hint of Noah’s ark to it also. 12 were saved, 442 died in this storm of water. In Noah’s story there was water from above and water from below flooding the earth, then dryland appeared. The 12 saved is like the 12 tribes of Israel. The Church is part of spiritual Israel.

So this 442 number must be a judgement number otherwise 442 would have been saved. The Rapture is a judgment.

This is verse 442. It is about the judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah:

Genesis 18:17 And the Lord said, Shall I hide from Abraham that thing which I do;

There are 2 verses in the Bible with a gematria of 442. The first is about who is in charge of a nation. Whoever is in charge is in charge of judgement. The second is about judgement:

1 Kings 22:47 There was then no king in Edom: a deputy was king.

So the number 442 appears to be about judgement. When 442/ judgement is complete the last tower will fall, this is 9/11. Part of the coming judgment is the Rapture where the Church is saved-this is 3/11. The third 442 from the Eastern Star is that judgement of the righteous -the 12 saved- and the judgement of the wicked- the 442 that perished.

[atomic-diarrhea]

Battles Without Honor and Humanity: Deadly Fight in Hiroshima (1972)

Dir. Kinji Fukasaku

[twilightronin]

Hiroshima Death Match (1973)

[omercifulheaves]

Battles Without Honor or Humanity: Hiroshima Death Match (1973)

[canmom]

Toku Tuesday Ten: SHIN GODZILLA

Evening toku nerds! This week we have two tens-digit-increases for these movie nights: Toku Tuesday’s turning ten, and Animation Night’s hitting sixty! We’ll come to Animation Night later in the week, but for now, what’s the first ‘big one’ for toku night gonna be..?

Well, I think we have enough Godzilla under our belts to tackle Shin! This was actually my first Godzilla movie (not counting dubious American knockoffs), and it was quite the introduction.

Shin Godzilla sees good old Hideaki Anno (who we’ve joined on many occasions, e.g. Animation Night 18, Toku Tuesday 4) putting his spin on a Godzilla movie - but this being Anno, he wouldn’t just make a Godzilla movie but reboot the whole franchise (again) with, in effect, a return to the themes of the original film. That is: nuclear disaster, anthropomorphised, or uh, lizardmorphised, in a big old lizard.

For the makers of the 1954 Godzilla (which we watched back on Toku Tuesday Two), the nuclear terror on the horizon was both the ongoing aftermath of the American bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the reports of even larger atomic bombs being tested out in the ocean. In 2016, it was instead the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi power plant disaster, in which the 2011 earthquake and tsunami caused a cooling failure leading to three meltdowns and explosions, releasing large amounts of radioactive material and forcing extensive evacuations across Fukushima. And while the disaster caused few deaths compared to the tsumani, abruptly radiation was back: no longer a distant Cold War fear but something immediate, combining with all the images of flooding and debris.

More so than his other live action films, Shin Godzilla sees Anno in the mode we recognise from Evangelion: it’s tragic, it’s fascinated with infrastructure and machines both civilian and military, it’s got an incredible eye for spectacle and memorable images. So while the later Godzilla movies have tended to lean more into the big monster fights, with Godzilla themselves becoming something of a protector figure who will often save Japan from the other monsters, this one attempts to return to a sense of huge alien terror: a Godzilla who seems to be in terrible pain, who leaves a trail of mindless destruction, accentuated by an especially haunting soundtrack.

This Godzilla goes through a variety of forms, from the leering deep see fish to something as chunky and huge and bumpy as the original, but now scaled up to better stand against the modern Tokyo skyline. For the first time, she is not a man in a suit, but fully CGI character (with suit acting surviving as mocap). This is a shame in some ways, because those suit scenes were charming and do not date as fast as computer graphics, but thankfully the art direction ensures that this version is still effective... especially the vivid glow of Godzilla’s spines, and the new interpretation of her radioactive breath, and the compositing of Godzilla into realistic scenes of rubble.

Anno is famously a very depressed man, and the story goes that when approached to make the film by Toho, he refused, so exhausted by the aftermath of making Evangelion 3.0 and unconfident of his ability to match the first movie:

"I refused [the offer] since I didn't have confidence that I could exceed the first film or come close to equaling it. But I thought that if I were to come close even a little, I would have to do the same thing [as the first film].”

But he was eventually brought around; he seems to have seen directing a Godzilla movie as a big, almost spiritual task:

Eventually, it was Toho’s sincerity and the enthusiasm of my ally, Director Shinji Higuchi, and I decided to take the job as Director that March. My prayer is that this will not be just a repeat of science fiction visuals of the past, and the wish we put into the Tokusatsu Museum Exhibit, was to embody the idea of giving back to the creators and artists who came before us, which was our intention and our responsibility. And when that epiphany occurred to me, my resolution was to undertake this task. Now, one does because they can, not because they cannot. I made my decision because this is a new, once-in-a-lifetime chance. This is not EVA. This is not an original creation of my own, and is something I’ve never done before — this is why I decided to do it. ... However, movies have pride, even trifling little films; therefore, just as in the case of the new EVAs, I’m going in full force. When I think about what I’ve accomplished, the twists and turns befitting a screenplay, everything has led to this point. I write this with the hope that the reader might understand at least to some degree that no matter what a creator says, it’s just an excuse, but I’m under pressure to make a visual effects fantasy film representative of modern Japan, with the full awareness of our current situation, which will be subjected to intentions both good and bad.

So of course, we had better take that invitation to make comparisons with the original! As ever, we see the military bring all their might to bear, only for it to be futile - but Anno manages to really bring it home, with more modern military hardware that looks considerably less toyetic while, Eva-like, they bury Godzilla in missiles... only for her to keep coming, implacably. (Godzilla is a girl don’t fight me on this.)

So how do they defeat her? In the original, the Oxygen Destroyer is science in all its horror and power, a terrible discovery which must not be allowed into the hands of the men who dropped the atomic bomb. Shin Godzilla instead looks at the rebuilding in the wake of the tsunami; hundreds of people coming together in a collective effort to turn the infrastructural machinery of trains and cryogen manufacturing towards a different purpose. It’s an interesting one to me in that it tries to see what affordances all these systems may have beyond the usual functioning of capitalism.

There is however a different, common reading of this movie that sees it as more of a nationalist film; that argues that the film criticises bureaucracy in favour of militarism - based on for example scenes of the President dithering on whether to call airstrikes, knowing they will cause civilian casualties. From my memories of the film, that seems totally off base (the military is fucked - for all their toys, there’s nowt they can do against the cool as shit atomic breath), but I’m looking forward to seeing how much I’ve forgotten and getting into it in chat with you all!

What’s Anno been up to since? Apart from depression, anyway? Shin Godzilla turned out to be the most successful Godzilla movie in many years, and Anno started getting invitations to make ‘Shin’ versions of other franchises; first as producer and screenwriter on Shin Ultraman which will drop this year. (Anno’s a huge fan of Ultraman, and its fingerprints are all over Eva, so this is kind of like him coming home - though whether that’s enough to make Ultraman work is another question.)

In a couple of years we’ll also see his take on Kamen Rider too! Back on the anime side, Evangelion 3.0+1.0 has at long last dropped in Japanese theatres earlier this year... but we may have to wait a while before the JP blurays are out and the fansubbers can get their teeth into it, let alone hope to see an official English-language release.

Toho, meanwhile, have not been able to make a live sequel to Shin Godzilla due to a non-compete clause contract with American company Legendary, who made a couple of Godzilla movies; that contract’s up but they’ve declared they’ll go for a general Reiwa-era shared monster universe in the Marvel mould, rather than making any direct sequels to Shin Godzilla. So we’ll see how that turns out. Tough act to follow... I wonder if Shin Ultraman counts as part of that?

Toku Tuesday Ten will be starting in about an hour (around 21:30 UK time) at twitch.tv/canmom! I have some other things I gotta do tonight, so I only have the one film, but hopefully it’s such a good one that nobody will leave unsatisfied. See you there!

[chica-manos-de-tijera]

racha de pelis 2020

1- children of men

2- moonlight

3- lazzaro felice

4- jojo rabbit

5- match point

6- uncut gems

7- 1917

8- roma

9- pizza, birra, faso

10- parasite

11- the irishman

12- little women

13- upa!

14- upa! 2

15- frances ha

16- gran budapest hotel

17- moonrise kingdom

18- el huésped (2006)

19- get out

20- la lavandería

21- mi vecino totoro

22- volver

23- hereditary

24- el discreto encanto de la burguesía

25- perdí mi cuerpo

26- gone girl

27- call me by your name

28- 500 days of summer

29- mulholland drive

30- jennifer’s body

31- v de venganza

32- horse girl

33- assault on precint 13

34- repulsion

35- how much wood would a woodchuck chuck

36- drácula (1931)

37- yo maté a mi madre

38- la ventana indiscreta

39- raw (2016)

40- ciudadano kane

41- matador

42- el viaje de chihiro

43- blowup

44- the lobster

45- persona

46- la princesa mononoke

47- mother! (2017)

48- diario de una camarera

49- tres colores: bleu

50- el regreso del gato

51- tres colores: blanc

52- los amantes del circulo polar

53- tres colores: rouge

54- la niña santa

55- what we do in the shadows

56- mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios

57- okja

58- singing in the rain

59- kiki entregas a domicilio

60- almost famous

61- átame!

62- carne

63- solo contra todos

64- zonas húmedas

65- trainspotting

66- la ola

67- ponyo

68- el padrino I

69- sin aliento

70- irreversible

71- pompeya

72- gato blanco gato negro

73- la naranja mecánica

74- dogtooth

75- billy elliot

76- drácula (1992)

77- viento del este (1970)

78- la chica del dragón tatuado

79- little miss sunshine

80- nacimiento de una nación

81- las dos tormentas

82- hellraiser

83- entreacto (1924)

84- dónde está la casa de mi amigo

85- el bonaerense

86- intolerancia

87- perro andaluz

88- the florida project

89- midsommar

90- home (2008)

91- crepúsculo<3

92- la madre (1926)

93- el fin de san petersburgo

94- reservoir dogs

95- the man with the movie camera

96- nanook el esquimal

97- las furias

98- la pasión de juana de arco (1927)

99- todo sobre mi madre

100- spiderman: into the multiverse

101- emma

102- los imperdonables

103- mother (2009)

104- sherlock jr

105- the cameraman

106- nosferatu

107- chunking express

108- rostros y lugares

109- bringing up baby

110- what’s up doc?

111- a night at the opera

112- los espigadores y la espigadora

113- solo los amantes sobreviven

114- incendies

115- el gabinete del dr caligari

116- m, el vampiro negro

117- el increíble castillo vagabundo

118- el hijo (2002)

119- acorazado potemkin

120- take me somewhere nice

121- rocky

122- octubre (1927)

123- cat people (1942)

124- amanecer (1927)

125- la noche del cazador

126- an affair to remember

127- freaks

128- it happened one night

129- el exorcista

130- cero en conducta

131- lady bird

132- escondidos en brujas

133- el seductor

134- otello (welles)

135- the lady vanishes

136- eyes wide shut

137- f for fake

138- roma, ciudad abierta

139- alemania, año cero

140- el ladrón de bicicletas

141- la grande belezza

142- pickpocket

143- noche y niebla

144- hiroshima, mon amour

145- un condenado a muerte se escapa

146- los 400 golpes

147- lina de lima

148- el robo del siglo

149- a propósito de niza

150- la ciénaga

151- gone girl

152- horton y el mundo de los quien

153- baby driver

154- loveless

155- ballerina

156- anomalisa

157- black panthers

158- lost in translation

159- los pájaros

160- what did the lady forget?

161- tangerine

162- the big lebowski

163- la maffia

164- blood simple

165- fargo

166- barton fink

167- good time

168- punch-drunk love

169- boogie nights

170- a ghost story

171- cigarettes & coffee

172- true grit

173- velvet buzzaw

174- klaus

175- the dreamers

176- burning

177- point break

178- coraline

179- she’s gotta have it

180- mid90s

181- hot summer nights

182- supercool

183- lawrence anyways

184- burn after reading

185- american history x

186- ema

187- charlie y la fábrica de chocolate

188- mommy

189- blue velvet

190- what we do in the shadows

191- retablo

192- mean girls

193- the conversation

194- i’m thinking of ending things

195- eraserhead

196- el ángel exterminador

197- babel

198- la balada de buster scrunggs

199- el inquilino

200- el fondo del mar

201- castro

202- lejano interior

203- phantom thread

204- vértigo

205- el ciclista (1989)

206- dallas buyers club

207- synecdoche, new york

208- no country for old men

209- death proof

210- blade runner 2049

211- the social dilemma

212- psicosis (1960)

213- rojo (2018)

214- in the soup

215- y tu mamá también

216- borat

217- borat 2

218- la jetée

219- whisky

220- lock, stock and two smoking barells

221- les amours imaginaires

222- ciudad de dios

223- american beauty

224- marie antoniette

225- historia de lo oculto

226- mank

227- being john malkovich

228- supercool

229- yo, adolescente

230- dolor y gloria

231- fight club

232- la mala educación

233- hard eight

234- jamon jamon

235- la noche del demonio 3

236- cleo de 5 a 7

237- el lado de la costa

238- saludos, cubanos!

239- balnearios

[chaeshosie]

What’s Happening with Legacies Season 3 and How do all the Theories Fit?

hello quick disclaimer i am very confused with tumblr and i haven’t used this in years i’m just lazy to summarize the essay so i’m putting it here

also this is a 6-page essay i just think i should warn people beforehand

~~~

Season 3 focusing a lot on consequences and obsession

As we’ve seen through most of what season 3 has been released so far, a lot of the character arcs and plot developments that the writers are trying to pull off have something to do with consequences. Some of the observable ones are the consequences of Hope’s actions from the recent episodes, Josie trying to find a sense of normalcy at MFHS after dealing with the consequences of Dark Josie during the earlier parts of season 3, the consequences of Lizzie kinda betraying MG in 3x08 being MG leaving the school, etc. I think that the “big bad” of the season isn’t really a creature, Malivore, or the artifact, but rather the antagonist of the season considerably be the consequences that the characters deal with as a result of their actions. If we take into thought the Puck theory and how his character in the Shakespearean play mismatched the couples, the dynamics between the characters and the ship of the show (mostly Handon-Hosie) in the episodes after the 3x03 can be considered the consequences of Puck matching the wrong people together. The most noticeable of these consequences are Hope and Josie’s lack of interactions and Hope’s obsession with Landon.

While we’re on the topic of obsession in relation to consequences, let’s tackle how 2x11 can possibly be foreshadowing to Hope’s character arc in season 3. Hope and Alyssa Chang are essentially reflections of the same character. They’re both considerably reckless with magic and both come from tragedies in their families (parents’ deaths) that they at least partially blame themselves for. In 2x11, the audience watches as Alyssa tries to kill Kym and MG while under the influence of the Obsession arrow. What we can consider the consequences that Alyssa faces here is not only Kym leaving, but also MG (who she had a crush on) distancing himself from her. Now we can see parts of that being reflected in Hope’s arc throughout season 3, most noticeably starting by around 3x04. Hope has been obsessed with Landon and even just protecting him in general (but let’s be honest, it’s been like that partially in season 2 also) that she’s going through such lengths just to make sure that Landon’s safe. This reaches to the point that she’s already hurting the people she loves like Josie and Lizzie while her obsessive love for Landon seems to be her driving force this season. This very much reflects how Alyssa willing to hurt MG, whom she had a crush on, just to get what she wanted. I think it’s good to note also that in this episode, it was Pothos that was pulling the strings and not Cupid. In mythology, Cupid or Eros is the god of attraction, affection, and passionate desire while Pothos is the god of longing, yearning, desire. Seeing as to how obsession is quite linked to one’s desire we can see how this plays out for Hope’s arc involving her desire to keep Landon alive while balancing her relationships with the other characters. In relation to Hope and Josie or rather Hosie in general, longing and yearning can be referenced to how they’ve been slowburn for most of season 3 with their very small amount of interactions and how their ship has always been mostly about longing and yearning, even stemming from Josie’s crush on Hope when she was younger.

Even the references they make throughout 3x09 have something to do with consequences and/or obsession. Let’s start with the monster references they’ve made. In fact, the first monster Hope references, which is a cherub, is very often mixed together with imagery of Cupid. Cherubs are known for helping people deal with sin that separates them from God (Judaism) and also said to keep record of everything that happens in the universe (Christianity), but more on that will be expounded later on. On the other hand, pixies grant wishes in exchange for favors, which can fit to the kitsune!Hope theory with its similarity to how kitsune grants supernatural wishes in exchange for kindness. The Jinni reference can be related to how Lizzie was “obsessed” with trying to find the perfect reality; we’ll go back to this reference in a while. We also have a reference to an artifact similar to the Inari wishing pot which is the Monkey’s Paw. The Monkey’s Paw is said to be a story that acts also as a cautionary tale which reminds us that unintended consequences often accompany the best intentions.

Now that we’re on the topic of artifacts, let’s talk about what the artifact, which is believed to be an Inari wishing pot, is connected to the whole plotline of season 3. We see three different historical figures connected to it, namely Einstein, Rasputin, and Napoleon. In relation to consequences, these three people have all experienced some kind of consequences that may or may not be related to the artifact. But with the fact that the writers take the effort to acknowledge that they owned the artifact, it can be assumed that these consequences have something to do with the wishing pot. We’ll focus on Einstein more compared to the other two because he was seen having a direct relation to Clarke in the flashback scene in 3x09. Considering that in the scene where Einstein and Elsa were seen, it looked to be like they were leaving their house so I assume this is when they left Berlin to go to the United States. Based on what I researched on this history, before they reached the train station, Einstein and Elsa had to close up their house at Caputh. In the scene, we saw them about to leave their house right before Clarke and the guys he was with (I’m guessing Triad at the time) raided the place looking for what I assume would be the artifact. Clarke also mentioned that they had to find it before “der Fuhrer” got there. “Der Fuhrer” was actually a term used to refer to Hitler at the time, which lines up well with history given Einstein’s historic distrust of the German political body especially with Hitler’s sudden rush to prominence. This line suggests two things, either Clarke meant that Hitler and/or the military was going after Einstein or that Hitler knew about the artifact’s existence. Moving later on to history, Einstein was said to indirectly have caused the atomic bomb due to a letter he wrote to the U.S. President Roosevelt about the Germans possibly making an atomic bomb, which then led to the death of thousands with the bombing of Hiroshima. In fact, if we look at the history of these three historical figures, their “consequences” have something to do with death. Einstein with the deaths caused by the bomb, Rasputin having been said to predict that if he died because of a Russian nobility, their whole family would be assassinated (which did end up happening), and the deaths associated with Napoleon due to his persistence towards victory with the French Revolution. Given that we’re going to see a banshee in 3x10, a supernatural creature which is said to literally be the “harbinger of death”, I’m thinking that we get to see these consequences to Hope’s wish of bringing Landon back finally coming into play, seeing as to how the consequences of the past three historical figures had something to do with death. Aside from that, as observed by some people, the wishing pot can be seen in the background of the season 3 poster as some kind of window of sorts.Interestingly, windows are often associated with symbolism for opportunities, fresh starts, beginnings, protection, views or opinions or perceptions. I think the opportunities part could be attributed to “opportunities” that would come depending on what wish you made with the Inari wishing pot while the “fresh start” could not really be fresh but more in the sense of Hope starting to finally have something to her character or possibly even a fresh start as a tribrid (??). Windows can also mean that one is too quick to judge, which can be applied to how Hope’s obsession over Landon has made her too quick to judge everything around her thus affecting her relationships with the other characters in the Super Squad.

Hope’s Character Arc and How the Theories Affect It; The relation of Kitsune to Sprites in the context of the Puck and Kitsune!Hope Theories

Now that we’ve covered most of what 3x09 really adds to the theories, let’s go to the theories themselves. So for this, we’ll be covering the Puck theory, possessed!Hope or kitsune!Hope theory, and the “the Landon that came back is actually MaliLandon” theory. Let’s go over the Puck theory real quick first. So in short, a sprite named Puck Goodfellow was the MOTW in 3x03 aka the musical episode and was sort of a “good” monster in the sense that he didn’t really directly affect the plot or try to kill the students but then he was more of a psychological monster that influenced the relationships of the characters with one another (Hope and Landon in particular). Seeing as to how he was able to control or implant memories/thoughts into the students’ minds makes me assume that he has some kind of telepathy powers. In fact, in some folklore it is said that some sprites have telepathic powers, specifically to project thoughts in the sense of psychic persuasion and confusion inducement/misdirection which I think is what we see Puck actually practice a lot in that whole sequence with MG trying to figure out his identity. Although they actually did tackle three celtic supernatural creatures in season 3 alone, I think Puck is the one with the most important role. Several stories describe sprites as mystical beings that either help humankind or trick some unsuspecting human into a sad tragedy of sorts. I think we would be able to watch Puck do both of that as seen in the earlier episode and later on in season 3 if/when he does come back. 

So how does the Puck theory relate to the kitsune!Hope theory? Well in Japanese folklore, sprites exist as yosei. They’re said to more or less have the same powers as yosei are simply the Japanese counterparts for sprites and the difference is mostly just in the term used to call them. Yōsei or Yousei, are small magical creatures (specifically fairies or sprites) which can regularly attract ghosts to them. What differs Yōsei from their European counterparts is that they can learn the human spoken language, and they also have mastered sign language. The one thing that actually directly links Puck (as a yosei/sprite) to the whole theme of consequences surrounding death is that many folklore actually included beliefs that yosei could bring the dead back to life. The thing is though, that there’s this thin line between yosei and yokai, the latter being where kitsune usually falls under. In fact, some kitsune are often mistaken by several folklore to yosei (depending on which story you read). One example would be Hakuzōsu, a kitsune that takes over the place of a monk it killed, who is often mistaken as a yosei in some stories. The essential difference between yosei and yokai is that yosei are shape shifting animals and water-spirits and city ghouls (if you know spirited away, those are practically yokais). Meanwhile, yokai are, yes, demons, but are the embodiment of a moment: a feeling of dread and bewilderment, or even awe and wonder of an event; OR a strange sound or peculiar scent. This doesn’t necessarily mean that yokai are automatically evil, it’s just the strong association of a specific distinction to them such as emotions or a scent. This is the reason why some kitsune are often mistaken for yosei, as they are also shape shifting animals with a strong connection to nature. Some yosei can also be mistaken for yokai, one example being tsukumogami which are spirits that haunt household objects. This is why some stories have both kitsune and yosei interacting with one another or at the very least acknowledging each other’s existence, a favorite reference yosei make about kitsune being the Tamamo No Mae. Another thing that helps connect kitsune to the whole theme of consequences involving death is that kitsune can be consumed by negative emotions easily, especially when it comes to seeking vengeance, to the point that it can lead to death. 

How I think the rest of s3 will play out if these theories do end up happening, esp with artifact

Now that we’ve established the connections between the Puck theory and the kitsune!Hope theory, this is how I think these two theories would play out in season 3 alongside the Inari wishing pot (the artifact) and the possible MaliLandon theory. 

First of all, let's connect the theories to the episodes of season 3 that have already aired, basically 3x01 to 3x09. In connection to what Clarke said in 2x01 about Hope being Malivore opening the gates which would most likely end up allowing other monsters including the kitsune to escape at some point during season 2. While Hope was in a coma from 2x16 to 3x01, it's assumed that the kitsune possessed her, which would be easier for the kitsune since it's easier for them to possess people who are asleep or in a comatose state. From late 3x01 to early 3x03, this is the closest we get to Hope's actual personality outside of being obsessively in love with Landon. We even get to see Hope being critical of Landon and upfront with him in the end of 3x02 and for the first three-fourths of 3x03. In fact, we can actually connect Hope starting to become more attached and we could say obsessed with Landon after her interaction with Puck. For most of 3x03, we see Puck mess with the minds of the students, making them believe that he was always a faculty at the school. This could obviously be taken as a form of psychic persuasion as part of the telepathic powers that several sprites have. Then we see Puck talk to Hope right before she goes on stage to sing Always and Tomorrow. Interestingly, their conversation hardly has anything to do with Hope and Landon's relationship entirely. In fact, it was more focused on her legacy as a Mikaelson and how opening herself to feel that heartbreak that came with the loss of her parents is what allows her to grow. It would've been the perfect chance to see Hope grow as an individual character outside being Landon's girlfriend and finally see her live out the Mikaelson legacy along with the build up of her character in The Originals. But instead we see her sing a song directed towards Landon, get back together with him, and proceed to become more and more obsessively in love with him in the future episodes. I think that Puck didn't exactly put any kind of love spell/potion on Hope, but rather he mostly used psychic persuasion. The fact that we've already seen him do it throughout the episode might as well be the writers priming us to consider the possibility of Puck telepathically messing with Hope's brain. But if you take Puck's lines about losing people and feeling that heartbreak and think of it from the kitsune's perspective. Many kitsune usually travel in packs (similar to werewolves) so imagine what it would feel to the kitsune who's been consumed by Malivore thousands of years ago, having lost the rest of her pack at this point and as alone as Hope probably does. I honestly think that the kitsune might have even possessed Hope not purely out of spite or for revenge against Malivore, but because it was still weakened from being stuck in Malivore for so long without being able to feed that it relied on a powerful body she could find. And honestly, what's more powerful than a tribrid? So I think Puck's words spoke not only to Hope, but to the kitsune as well. But along with these words, Puck did some kind of telepathic psychic persuasion that allowed the kitsune to surface more with Hope and have more control. Considering how both Puck and the kitsune know what it's like to be stuck in Malivore, it would be understandable for Puck to take the kitsune's side. This is also putting into consideration that by the time of the musical, the kitsune must have spent a few weeks to at least a month in Hope's body which would allow them to have enough strength to gain control. In the episodes after 3x03, this is when Hope begins to use her "wolf eyes" more. The noticeable difference though with her eyes is that they are more gold-toned compared to the usual yellow color of the other werewolves' eyes. This along with gold lighting from the previous season 3 episodes can be attributed to the connection kitsune has to the color gold. Aside from this, kitsune often flash their eyes as a sign that they're in control (this was also utilized in a korean show centered on kitsune/gumiho so I'm taking reference from that also). Then we reach 3x04 where it's very possible that the kitsune killed MaliLandon/Landon by having sex with him, taking his life force, and reducing him to his original goo form. The catch that the writers included here is that he took Hope's Mikaelson necklace with him, which can also possibly be the kitsune's life orb in its jewelry form. Then we move to 3x05 where the artifact is first introduced. Seeing as to how the artifact is an Inari wishing pot based on the jewels, structure, and the fact that it opens, it makes sense for Hope to be the only one able to open it considering that she's possessed by a kitsune. Here we get the wish that Hope makes which is to bring Landon back. But then we also put into consideration the kitsune's wish which is to get back their life orb. I believe that the artifact mixed these two wishes together, bringing back MaliLandon and creating a mirror version of Landon that's the more "idealized, perfect" version of him. This is in the sense that a new malivore portal appeared (which would give the kitsune a way to get the necklace back and a way for MaliLandon to come back) and hope got her idealized version of landon (which was missing the necklace because he's not really Landon or MaliLandon). By 3x08, Hope starts to work to get Landon back which ends up with her putting Lizzie and Josie in danger. Considering how the Malivore portal can be assumed to have opened somewhere around 3x07 and Hope getting Landon back the episode right after, this could be the artifact granting their wishes. But then to get her idealized version of Landon, the wishing pot can only grant wishes involving material things. This is where the dark magic in 3x08 comes in which gives the artifact something tangible to form into that idealized version of Landon that we see in 3x09 and possibly the later episodes as well.

Focusing now on 3x09, the lines "those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it" vs. "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it" are very easily applicable to the situation with the artifact and with Hope's character arc. We see that Hope has already seen firsthand what obsession does to a person yet she still hasn't "learned" from it which is why she's repeating it in season 3. Aside from this, we can also take into consideration that Puck matching the two people together and being wrong could also mean that he does end up fixing it later on. The line is also a reference to Handon and how they’ve broken up and gotten back together way more than the number of k-pop albums I have. And that they also need to learn from the history of the artifact and the consequences that come with using it. The line about not remembering the past can be a direct nod to how those who are consumed by Malivore are forgotten by everyone. This could be in reference to how the kitsune was forgotten by the world because of being consumed by Malivore, and this is also considering that kitsune existed mostly in the Edo period (1603-1867) which is also near the time Puck must have existed (if we take into Shakespeare’s years of being alive which were 1564-1616). This allows us to consider the possibility of Puck and the kitsune having at least aware of the existence of the other considering the close relations between a lot of the supernatural creatures. That being said, this could have a factor in the psychic persuasion that Puck did in 3x03. To address what other people are saying that “Puck’s dead why are you still making theories you’re just desperate” whatever, remember that sprites/yosei are literally shape-shifting animals and/or spirits. Puck could’ve easily just shapeshifted when the Necromancer stabbed him, especially since the original form of sprites are usually depicted as small creatures that are often not easily noticeable by the human eye. In relation to the kitsune, the color of Hope’s wolf eyes have become more similar to the common yellow color of other werewolves as compared to the gold color earlier in the season. This is most likely because of the kitsune spending too much time away from her life orb (in the form of the Mikaelson necklace) which caused it to lose its control over Hope over the episodes.

Given that Hope/kitsune has already used the artifact, certain consequences which would most likely involve death would follow in the next episodes; explaining why we get a banshee in the 3x10. I think that there’s three possible options to how this would go: mirror version Landon would die which would cause Hope to go crazy obsessed over protecting him again, the kitsune would die because of being separated from her fox marble/life orb for too long, or Alaric would die since they’ve been hinting at it already with the sphinx which would allow for Josie to enter the storyline and back into the SBS drama. Given that the mirror version of Landon is bound to die anyways since it’s not really Landon but something that the artifact conjured from dark magic, he has to die at some point. Given how Hope feels this need to protect Landon, I think that there would be some kind of conflict with Hope’s character in that context when it comes to the two versions of Landon (mirror version Landon and MaliLandon). On the other hand, if they go through with the kitsune dying, I think it would end up being anticlimactic in the sense that they never really had to deal with the kitsune in the beforehand. Lastly, if they do kill off Alaric as part of one of the consequences  from Hope’s wish would obviously cause something to come up between Josie and Hope’s relationship, especially given that Hope had guilt tripped Josie to help her in 3x08. This would also cause another rift between Hope and Lizzie given how Lizzie reacted for the most part of 3x09. This would allow the audience to see Hope finally go through the consequences of everything she’s done in 3A just to get what she wants.

On how Puck and the kitsune can come into play in 3B, I think that Puck would most likely come back after the death to sort of patch things up in a sense which works with his “putting people back together.” I also think the part of his plan to “break people apart” would be pertaining to separating Hope and the kitsune so that Hope wouldn’t be possessed by the kitsune anymore. Once the two are separated, this would allow Puck to “put them back together” by suggesting a sort of team up between Puck, the kitsune, and the Super Squad to get MaliLandon and the kitsune’s life orb back. This would serve the goals of the kitsune and Hope so it also seems likely that they’ll reach that agreement some point in time. Lastly, Lizzie saying people get hurt whenever Hope gets in the way and that she’s only there when she needs something could be some sort of foreshadowing towards Hope needing something from the artifact which was her wish, even if it is very OOC for this line to describe Hope’s character in the earlier seasons, but it also hints on the possible consequences being that someone gets hurt, possibly leading to the death of someone that majority of the characters have a direct relationship to. Oh and also, Emma being in Shanghai seems to be either intentional or coincidental considering one of the most popular kitsune figures, Tamamo no Mae, was born in China.

~ END ~

i have no idea what tags to put lmao

[xhxhxhx]

I Know, I Know, I Know

In Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Kurt Vonnegut quotes David Irving for the death toll from the firebombing of Dresden: 135,000 dead. Irving happens to be a Holocaust denier. And that number happens to be a lie.

Towards the end of the book, Vonnegut quotes Irving by name:

One of the books that Lily had brought Rumfoord was The Destruction of Dresden, by an Englishman named David Irving. It was an American edition, published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston in 1964. What Rumfoord wanted from it were portions of the forewords by his friends Ira C. Eaker, Lieutenant General, U.S.A.F., retired, and British Air Marshal Sir Robert Saundby, K.C.B., K.B.E., M.C., D.F.C., A.F.C.

I find it difficult to understand Englishmen or Americans who weep about enemy civilians who were killed but who have not shed a tear for our gallant crews lost in combat with a cruel enemy, wrote his friend General Eaker in part. I think if would have been well for Mr. Irving to have remembered, when he was drawing the frightful picture of the civilians killed at Dresden, that V-1’s and V-2’s were at the very time falling on England, killing civilian men, women, and children indiscriminately, as they were designed and launched to do. It might be well to remember Buchenwald and Coventry, too.

Eaker’s foreword ended this way:

I deeply regret that British and U.S. bombers killed 135,000 people in the attack on Dresden, but I remember who started the last war and I regret even more the loss of more than 5,000,000 Allied lives in the necessary effort to completely defeat and utterly destroy nazism.

So it goes.

The figure is significant. It is more than Hiroshima, where 70,000 to 80,000 died in the initial bombing. “Not many Americans knew how much worse it had been than Hiroshima, for instance,” Vonnegut writes early in Slaughterhouse-Five. “I didn’t know that either.” Not until he read Irving. presumably.

That figure was significant to the press coverage, like the New York Times review of March 31, 1969:

Kurt Vonnegut Jr., an indescribable writer whose seven previous books are like nothing else on earth, was accorded the dubious pleasure of witnessing a 20th-century apocalypse. During World War II, at the age of 23, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned beneath the city of Dresden, "the Florence of the Elbe." He was there on Feb. 13, 1945, when the Allies firebombed Dresden in a massive air attack that killed 130,000 people and destroyed a landmark of no military significance.

Or the Sunday review of April 6, 1969:

Kurt Vonnegut speaks with the voice of the “silent generation,” and his quiet words explain the quiescence of his contemporaries. This is especially true of his sixth novel, “Slaughterhouse-Five,” in which he looks back -- or tries to look back -- at his wartime experience. In the first chapter he tells us how for over 20 years he has been trying to re-create a single event, the bombing of Dresden by American and British pilots. Vonnegut had an unusual perspective on that event. Safe, as a prisoner of war in a deep cellar under the stockyards, he emerged to find 135,000 German civilians smoldering around him. Dresden had been an open city. We closed it. We.

They led with the figure. It was important. This was the above the headline in the Sunday review: “Like Lot’s wife, he looked back -- at the destruction of Dresden and 135,000 dead.”

As Richard Evans discovered in the 1990s, Irving more or less fabricated that figure. As he recounted in Lying About Hitler (2001):

How many people did Irving think had been killed in the raids, and on what evidence did he base his estimates? The first source he used was information supplied to him by Hans Voigt, who had been a local official in Dresden at the time of the raids. Four days after the attack, missing persons search bureau was set up in the Saxon Ministry of the Interior. Voigt, at the time an assistant school master. was put in charge of establishing a dead persons department for the bureau to collect the records and personal effects of those people already dead, and of those still buried in the ruins. Irving said that it was this department which was “responsible for the identification of the victims and for arriving at some final estimate of the death-roll.”

Voigt’s office had four different filing systems for different data. The first were garment cards, onto which samples of garments taken from unidentified bodies were pasted, together with date, location, and so on. Voigt told Irving that up to the time of the capitulation “we had almost twelve thousand of these cards completed.” The second list was of miscellaneous personal belongings of the unidentified. The third was an alphabetical list of bodies identified by personal papers. The fourth was a list of wedding rings recovered from bodies. With these four indices the dead persons department was “able to clear up the identity of some 40,000 of the dead.” Thus Irving arrived at an “absolute minimum” death toll of 40,000. This in turn tallied with the figure of 39,773 given by Georg Feydt, the first person to write a reasonably considered account of the attack in 1953.

However, Irving did not accept 40,000 as the actual figure because Voigt had told Irving that he himself “estimated that the final number would have been 135,000.” In 1963 Irving was reported to have explained: “The Germans simply struck off the first digit to make the figure more acceptable to the Russians, who contended that Bomber Command was not a powerful weapon.”” In other words, he apparently thought that the Russians wanted to reassure the citizens of the Eastern bloc that Western bombing was not very dangerous. There was no evidence for this supposition. Voigt wrote to Irving as early as September 1962, blaming the amendment on “Dresden officials” (especially the then mayor Walter Weidauer), who “reduced the figure out of fear of the ‘Big Four,’ so as not to speak ill of them.” This did not seem to me to be particularly strong motive. The Russians were not involved in the bombing of Dresden. At the height of the Cold War, they would have had every incentive for inflating the figure, so as to put the Western Allies in a bad light. Yet Irving repeated the claim in 1995.

There was no corroborative evidence of any kind about the missing digit. Moreover Voigt was apparently not a popular man with the communist authorities in Dresden. Weidauer decried him as a “virulent fascist” who had been rightfully thrown out of East Germany. This was typical of the language the Communists used for people who proved a nuisance to them. Still, Voigt, then living in West Germany, may have had a political motive in accusing the Soviet and East German authorities of falsifying the statistics. Weidauer added that the death register was still extant in the Dresden Town Hall with a highest card number of 31,102 for an unidentified body. In addition there were the so-called street books. The numbers in the street books, which were compiled according to the streets and houses where the dead were found, exactly matched those on the registration cards. Irving could only sustain the figure of 135,000, therefore, by relying on a postwar speculation which he must have known was shaky and was discounted by most other writers on the raid, with good reason. This did not say much for his claim that he based his work on careful research into contemporary documentation.

In later editions, Irving further falsified his numbers, and claimed higher death tolls, but the 135,000 always depended on that invention. He put a "1″ in front of “35,000″ and claimed that as the figure.

The probable death toll was lower than that 35,000, maybe 25,000 to 30,000. That came out in the judgment at Irving’s libel trial, David Irving v Penguin Books and Deborah Lipstadt, [2000] EWHC QB 115:

13.124 When asked what was the supporting evidence for these inflated claims, Irving relied on the estimates for the number of casualties made by Mehnert and Fetscher and on the recollection of Frau Grosse, which I have mentioned. He also testified that his claims had been based on estimates as high as 250,000 which he had received from a great many individuals. Irving neither identified the individuals nor disclosed the letters. He prayed in aid also the fact that there were in Dresden at the time an unquantified number of refugees fleeing before the advancing Russian army. Finally he relied on the estimate of Hans Voigt, summarised in paragraph 11.52 above, that 135,000 had been killed. But, as stated in paragraph 13.126 below, none of this material casts significant doubt on the accumulation of evidence that the true death toll was within the bracket of 25-30,000.

[...]

13.126 It appears to me that the evidence which I have summarised in paragraph 13.124 affords a very slender basis for the claims which Irving has made for the numbers killed in the raids. The evidence of Mehnert, Fetscher and Frau Grosse was secondhand and unverified. In the absence of any indication on what they were based, I do not consider the Irving should have given any credence to estimates in letters from unidentified individuals. His speculation about the number of refugees does little to cast doubt on the reliability of the figures quoted in the official reports. Voigt's evidence was uncorroborated and unlikely to be correct in the light of the number of deaths recorded on the official cards. In my view, Irving should not have quoted numbers based on this evidence. ... In my judgment the estimates of 100,000 and more deaths which Irving continued to put about in the 1990s lacked any evidential basis and were such as no responsible historian would have made.

For Irving, Dresden was a useful tool. If there were 135,000 or 250,000 dead at Dresden, it helped even the scales with the Allies. It was the mirror image of his Holocaust denial: German crimes were overstated and Allied crimes were understated.

Irving wanted his readers to see the bombing of Germany as the moral equivalent of the Holocaust. Evans again:

Irving wrote to Kimber in 1963 declaring his view that the crime of World War II had not been genocide but "innocentocide," the killing of civilians, and that therefore the Eastern and Western powers were just as guilty in his eyes as the Germans and the Japanese. For him Dresden was a crime. Nowhere in the earlier editions was there an explicit effort to draw the parallel. Instead, Irving allowed others to draw this obvious conclusion and then somewhat disingenuously congratulated them on their independence of mind. Thus he wrote to Sydney Silverman MP, who had reviewed the book in Tribune: "I am not someone who holds political views similar to your own, but I really must congratulate you— in spite of this—for having stuck your neck out so firmly and unmistakably by drawing a parallel between the Nazis' atrocities and what happened in Dresden; this is something I myself did not claim in my book.”

Three decades later, Irving was making the parallel explicit. In a speech delivered in Toronto on 8 November 1992, he estimated the numbers who died in Auschwitz (“most of them from epidemics,” he said) as 100,000. “Around one hundred thousand dead in that brutal slave labour camp.” Around 25,000 of these had been killed by shooting or hanging, according to German radio reports from Auschwitz received and decrypted by the British, he added. He continued:

Twenty-five thousand killed, if we take this grossly inflated figure to be on the safe side: That is a crime; there is no doubt. Killing twenty-five thousand in four years—1941, 1942, 1943, and 1944—that is a crime; there is no doubt. Let me show you a picture of twenty-five thousand people being killed in twenty-five minutes. Here it is, in my book, a vivid picture of twenty-five thousand people being killed in twenty-five minutes by the British (in February 1945) in Pforzheim, a little town where they make jewellery and watches in Baden, Germany. Twenty-five thousand people were being burned alive. ... That is what it looks like when twenty-five thousand civilians are being burned alive in twenty-five minutes. One person in four, in twenty-five minutes. One person in four in that town. As I said when I was speaking in Kitchener yesterday, it is as though somebody came to Kitchener, a town of about a hundred thousand people, and killed one person in four in twenty-five minutes. That too is a crime. Twenty-five minutes! In Auschwitz it was a crime committed over four years. You don't get it spelled out to you like that. Except by us, their opponents. When you put things into perspective like that, of course, it diminishes their Holocaust—that word with a capital letter.

Irvings almost incantatory repetition of the figures "twenty-five thousand" and "twenty-five minutes," mentioned in this passage respectively four times and five times, compared with his figure of twenty-five thousand for Auschwitz mentioned only twice, left no room for doubt about which crime he considered the greater.

That was what Dresden meant to Vonnegut, too:

I happened to tell a University of Chicago professor at a cocktail party about the raid as I had seen it, about the book I would write. He was a member of a thing called The Committee on Social Thought. And he told me about the concentration camps, and about how the Germans had made soap and candles out of the fat of dead Jews and so on. All I could say was, “I know, I know. I know.”

Vonnegut never amended Slaughterhouse-Five. So it goes.

[goldstarnation]

JANUARY 2021 GOLD STAR MEDIA SCHEDULES & REVIEW

Members may earn 3 points each (up to 6 points) for writing, by the end of February 7 KST:

A solo para of 400+ words based on their monthly schedule (does not count toward your monthly total).

A thread of six posts (three per participant, including the starter) based on their monthly schedule.

Threads do not have to take place directly during an important date listed on the schedule, but must be related to what the muse is mentioned to be doing in the paragraph explaining their schedule/the company’s schedule for the month and/or their thoughts on the mentioned activities or lack thereof.

These schedules may be updated throughout the month if new information needs to be added.

Reminder: December schedule posts are due by the end of January 7 KST. Please do not post schedule posts in the fmdschedule tag.

OVERALL COMPANY

The company holds their annual meeting near the end of the month to go over goals and plans for the new year and congratulate their artists (and other staff) on a job well-done in the previous year. Also typical, they’ll do their annual health check for the purposes of media-playing caring about their artists’ health. 2020 was a good year for the company’s profits and public relevance, even if things began to get messy behind the scenes. The meeting doesn’t show any sign of acknowledgement about the any behind-the-scenes planning problems, instead focusing on boasting achievements by their artists in Korea as well as other large foreign markets with the aim of “raising morale”.

Important dates:

January 26: Meeting for company artists and those who work directly with them (managers, PR, etc.) headed by CEO Bang Sunyoung. Gold Star Media’s goal statements and overall plans for 2020 will be delivered.

Various dates (up to individual muse): As per usual January Gold Star custom, all group members and soloists will be asked to individually schedule beginning of the year medical check-up appointments on Gold Star’s dollar if they have not had one in the past six months. This will be slightly media-played as it is every year by the company as the company having a clean bill of health regardless of the results, although any medical concerns will be privately addressed.

GOLD STAR SOLOIST 1

"Eight” is the hit everyone expects it to be and is a good omen as the release that ushers in the new year for Gold Star. Promotions are kept simple, as they usually are for her since she doesn’t need much push to succeed with the public, and she’ll film an acoustic performance video of “Eight” as a gift to her fans. She’ll be revisiting some old songs in the practice rooms behind the scenes as well to prepare for an upcoming mini-concert of her own on Yoo Heeyeol’s Sketchbook.

Important dates:

January 4: “Eight” Acoustic Ver. video filming (to be released: January 10).

January 9: Performance at Golden Disk Awards Day One at Gocheok Sky Dome (also performing: BC Soloist 1, BEE, Dimensions Soloist 3, Lucid).

January 11: KBS Cool FM Volume Up radio show guesting.

January 30: End of music show promotions.  

GOLD STAR SOLOIST 2

After the end of music show promotions, she’ll fly out to L.A. to do some networking and film an English interview there to promote the English version of her latest single. Gold Star has marketed it as her debut American single in an effort to rewrite her unsuccessful effort a few years ago. Gold Star would like to begin to promote her more online as well to reach more young fans, so she’ll film a cover video that will be uploaded to Gold Star’s Youtube channel, something they plan to have her do a semi-regularly from now on.

Important dates:

January 10: End of music show promotions.

January 18: Front Row Live Ent interview.

January 23: “Tango” cover video filming (to be uploaded: January 31).

GOLD STAR SOLOIST 3

He flies back out in the second week of the month to begin the North American leg of his world tour. He’ll tour for two weeks across the United States before he flies back to Seoul and has the remainder of the month free once again to recuperate and so that he can attend the company-wide meeting. 

Important dates:

January 9: Before We Begin tour concert at House of Blues in San Diego, CA, USA.

January 10: Before We Begin tour concert at The Van Buren in Phoenix, AZ, USA.

January 13: Before We Begin tour concert at Granada Theater in Dallas, TX, USA.

January 14: Before We Begin tour concert at House of Blues in Houston, TX, USA.

January 16: Before We Begin tour concert at The Basement East in Nashville, TN, USA.

January 18: Before We Begin tour concert at The Beacham in Orlando, FL, USA.

January 19: Before We Begin tour concert at The Tabernacle in Atlanta, GA, USA.

January 21: Before We Begin tour concert at Lincoln Theatre in Raleigh, NC, USA.

January 22: Before We Begin tour concert at The Fillmore Silver Spring in Silver Spring, MD, USA.

SILHOUETTE

Silhouette have a busy month without awards show to attend. On the second, their first day back to regular work after returning from the cruise and tour, they’ll hold a press conference to hype up their upcoming concerts. They’ll be asked and expected to answer questions about the concept (”til death do us part” / “seduction, desire, betrayal, revenge”), the songs they’ll be performing, and their feelings preparing for the concert without spoiling the set list or special stages. They’ll then hold four concerts over the course of the month, two in Seoul, one in Tokyo, and one in Los Angeles. In between concerts, they’ll fly to Bangkok to film their comeback M/V and shoot photos for the comeback.

Important dates:

January 2: Tonight 37.2°C press conference.

January 9: “Taller Than You” M/V filming.

January 15: Pre-release of “I Miss You”.

January 18: Tonight 37.2°C 19+ concert at Central City Millennium Hall in Seoul.

January 19: Tonight 37.2°C 19+ concert at Central City Millennium Hall in Seoul.

January 21-22: “You’re The Best” M/V filming, teaser photo shoot, and photo book shoot in Bangkok, Thailand.

January 25: Tonight 37.2°C 19+ concert at Shibuya Public Hall in Tokyo, Japan.

January 29: Tonight 37.2°C 19+ concert at Club Bound LA in Los Angeles, CA, USA.

ARIA

Aria has to do the final preparations for their comeback before it releases near the middle of the month. They’re running on quite a late schedule, perhaps a result of the poor management that’s slowly becoming infamous within the company, so both the album photo shoots and the M/V filming are rushed to be finished just before the comeback. Luckily, everything is still ready in time and the release goes off without a hitch. Unfortunately, “Eung Eung” doesn’t get the same attention “I’m So Sick” did, although it does succeed at outperforming their last two releases.

Important dates:

January 3: Comeback teaser photo and photo book shoot.

January 10: “Eung Eung” M/V filming.

January 18: Release of “Eung Eung” & Percent mini-album showcase, music show promotions continue through February 18.

ORIGIN

Origin begins their grand world tour this month with five dates in California. They’ll fly out to the United States for those five concerts before flying back to Seoul so that they can make it in time for the company meeting, though it will be close in timing. They’ll continue to tour for the next several months, but management passes down that Gold Star would really like to see them find mega-success in foreign markets this year and there are plans for both a Japanese comeback and a full English-language release before there are any plans for them to make a Korean-language comeback.

Important dates:

January 10: Performance at Golden Disk Awards Day Two at Gocheok Sky Dome (also performing: CHARM, WISH, Alien, MARS, 7ROPHY, Impulse).

January 16: Map of the Soul tour concert at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, USA.

January 17: Map of the Soul tour concert at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA, USA.

January 22: Map of the Soul tour concert at Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA, USA.

January 23: Map of the Soul tour concert at Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA, USA.

January 24: Map of the Soul tour concert at Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA, USA.

IMPULSE

Impulse has one more awards show performance in the form of the second day of the Golden Disk Awards. Before and after that, their priority for the month is to record their next comeback album. It’s their first full-length album since 2018. The sound is overall a bit brighter to match the spring season it will be released in, though the sleek sound they’ve headed toward recently remains in tact.

Important dates:

January 10: Performance at Golden Disk Awards Day Two at Gocheok Sky Dome (also performing: CHARM, WISH, Alien, MARS, 7ROPHY, Origin).

   ↳ PULS2

PULS2 will be doing a showcase tour in between recording for the full group comeback. They’ll be all over East Asia this month for the beginning of the tour, though they’ll stop back to Seoul in between stops.

Important dates:

January 17: Showcase tour concert at Broadway Theater in Macau.

January 20: Showcase tour concert at Zepp Divercity in Tokyo, Japan.

January 21: Showcase tour concert at Zepp Diverycity in Tokyo, Japan.

January 24: Showcase tour concert at Taipei International Convention Center in Taipei, Taiwan.

January 27: Showcase tour concert at Zepp Namba in Osaka, Japan.

January 28: Showcase tour concert at Zepp Namba in Osaka, Japan.

January 31: Showcase tour concert at Nusantra Hall in Jakarta, Indonesia.

FUSE

In place of any more awards show performances or attendances, Fuse gets back to touring. This time, they have two dates in Japan. It’s their first time touring in several months, so they’ll continue to rehearse beforehand to get everything down for the next few months of finishing their tour. Management is open about their plans for a sub-unit between the leader and main dancer now that the new year has begun, but the pair won’t begin working on their unit debut until next month.

Important dates:

January 9: La Rouge tour concert at Hiroshima Sun Plaza in Hiroshima, Japan.

January 21: La Rouge tour concert at Osaka-jo Hall in Osaka, Japan.

ELEMENT

Now that their comeback music is recorded, Element will throw themselves into mastering the choreography for the title track, as well as two of the album’s b-sides (the latter of which only involves the main vocal and maknae). At the end of the month, they’ll hold a mini fan-meeting to check in with (a few hundred) fans and will be expected to let slip that they’re working on a comeback to appease them. The fan-meeting will be short, but they’ll perform a few of their songs and get the chance to interact with fans who are brought up on stage.

Important dates:

January 31: Mini fan-meeting at Yes24 MUV Hall in Seoul.

FEMME FATALE

Femme Fatale continues their dome tour this month (see November’s schedule for special stages), with two stops in Osaka. While they’re in Seoul, they’ll get news of their comeback plans for the year (Gold Star promises them at least two comebacks) and they’ll receive the demo of their first comeback single of the year, “How You Like That”, before they go in to record it in the studio before the month comes to an end.

Important dates:

January 16: In Your Area World tour concert at Kyocera Dome in Osaka, Japan.

January 17: In Your Area World tour concert at Kyocera Dome in Osaka, Japan.

[brookstonalmanac]

Events 8.6 (after 1900)

1901 – Kiowa land in Oklahoma is opened for white settlement, effectively dissolving the contiguous reservation. 1914 – World War I: U-boat campaign: Two days after the United Kingdom had declared war on Germany over the German invasion of Belgium, ten German U-boats leave their base in Heligoland to attack Royal Navy warships in the North Sea. 1914 – World War I: Serbia declares war on Germany; Austria declares war on Russia. 1915 – World War I: Battle of Sari Bair: The Allies mount a diversionary attack timed to coincide with a major Allied landing of reinforcements at Suvla Bay. 1917 – World War I: Battle of Mărășești between the Romanian and German armies begins. 1926 – Gertrude Ederle becomes the first woman to swim across the English Channel. 1940 – Estonia is annexed by the Soviet Union. 1942 – Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands becomes the first reigning queen to address a joint session of the United States Congress. 1944 – The Warsaw Uprising occurs on August 1. It is brutally suppressed and all able-bodied men in Kraków are detained afterwards to prevent a similar uprising, the Kraków Uprising, that was planned but never carried out. 1945 – World War II: Hiroshima, Japan is devastated when the atomic bomb "Little Boy" is dropped by the United States B-29 Enola Gay. Around 70,000 people are killed instantly, and some tens of thousands die in subsequent years from burns and radiation poisoning. 1956 – After going bankrupt in 1955, the American broadcaster DuMont Television Network makes its final broadcast, a boxing match from St. Nicholas Arena in New York in the Boxing from St. Nicholas Arena series. 1958 – Law of Permanent Defense of Democracy, outlawing the Communist Party of Chile and banning 26,650 persons from the electoral lists, is repealed in Chile. 1960 – Cuban Revolution: Cuba nationalizes American and foreign-owned property in the nation. 1962 – Jamaica becomes independent from the United Kingdom. 1965 – US President Lyndon B. Johnson signs the Voting Rights Act of 1965 into law. 1986 – A low-pressure system that redeveloped off the New South Wales coast dumps a record 328 millimeters (13 inches) of rain in a day on Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. 1990 – Gulf War: The United Nations Security Council orders a global trade embargo against Iraq in response to Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. 1991 – Tim Berners-Lee releases files describing his idea for the World Wide Web. WWW makes its first appearance as a publicly available service on the Internet. 1991 – Takako Doi, chair of the Social Democratic Party, becomes Japan's first female speaker of the House of Representatives. 1996 – NASA announces that the ALH 84001 meteorite, thought to originate from Mars, contains evidence of primitive life-forms. 1997 – Korean Air Flight 801 crashed at Nimitz Hill, Guam, killing 229 of the 254 people on board. 2001 – Erwadi fire incident: Twenty-eight mentally ill persons tied to a chain are burnt to death at a faith based institution at Erwadi, Tamil Nadu. 2008 – A military junta led by Mohamed Ould Abdel Aziz stages a coup d'état in Mauritania, overthrowing president Sidi Ould Cheikh Abdallahi. 2010 – Flash floods across a large part of Jammu and Kashmir, India, damages 71 towns and kills at least 255 people. 2011 – War in Afghanistan: A United States military helicopter is shot down, killing 30 American special forces members and a working dog, seven Afghan soldiers, and one Afghan civilian. It was the deadliest single event for the United States in the War in Afghanistan. 2012 – NASA's Curiosity rover lands on the surface of Mars. 2015 – A suicide bomb attack kills at least 15 people at a mosque in the Saudi city of Abha.

[anteroom-of-death]

Life, For Dummies p2

a/n: quarentine’s brought out the worst in me, does anyone know anything anymore? idk... i hope you all enjoy part 2! part 3′s got the spice in my mind’s plotting... slow burn anyone???

It had been roughly a week since you’d join the Master on his TARDIS. It was cozier and the console room was an actual room, like a living room. Sure it had all the little knobs and a control center, but it had a mini kitchen and couches and soft chairs. As well as whatever books he had been reading at the moment. 

Homey. Comforting even.

Today’s adventure was less relaxing than his first he brought you on: A spa planet. Three whole days of being rubbed down, being fed gorgeous tasting health foods and relaxation. Closest to being a dog that chills in a rich socalite’s handbag all day. He of course, joined you in these revelries, and you even joined him as he made little jokes about other species' appearances and gossip.

This time was him killing off an entire planet for a Empress’s cheek. He offered you pour over coffee and a Danish as he giggled over the ash filling the air from an Adirondack chair as you tried to mentally stop yourself from crying over this. You, Y/N, were here with a genocidal maniac and you should really get a grip. You signed up for this. Anything you saw was your own fault, you told yourself as you cautiously took the coffee from the man and sat next to him.

“I can tell you’re thinking, love.” He said, “Why don’t say what’s on your mind? Hmm?” 

“Why me?” You tore your eyes away from the sight of a giant building falling downwards on itself. “You could have taken Yaz or Ryan or hell, even pick some schlub off the streets!”

He raised his hand and raised his voice. “So the Doctor’s the only one who can take a pet or two or more?” His eyebrows raised, there he was, always sprinkling in the word “pet” usually it brought a shiver down your spine. But not today. Not now.

You huffed and groaned, rubbing your finger into your eye, “No, Master-” you said the word as if it wasn’t your kink, but a derogatory term. “Why me? What do you expect? Huh? You’re gonna go after her one day and I will be there, looking like a traitor or a double agent or what the fuck ever, and here I am, getting attached to you and I’ve just seen you nuke a fucking civilization? I’ve never seen that happen besides like, footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.” You manually stopped him with a raised hand and all the venom you could shoot from your eyes. “I can’t yet reconcile friendships! It’s like eighth grade all over again and Tammy doesn’t like Britney and Britney is friends with Joe but Joe like likes Tammy and Joe’s just over here wanting to blow his brains out!” You gesticulated this flowchart of emotional entanglement before slamming down the coffee and deciding to slam the TARDIS door shut. You didn’t want an answer anymore. You accidentally revealed too much. 

You didn’t know what you felt anymore.

Sure, the man was hotter than your wildest fantasies of what a hot person could look like, and the name was enough to bring out any other types of fantasies you could have. It’s not like you weren’t already shaking off dirty thoughts about him and various pieces of furniture in here. 

The Master frequented between slightly soft and vulnerable to ready to kill off anyone. That wasn’t the most stable of mindsets.

You began shaking where you stood. What if he was now going to kill you? You were a lot more disrespectful than the Empress was. Your breathing became erratic and there was a definite lump in your throat forming. This, out of all the ways you thought death would come to you, especially since Time Lords entered your life, wasn’t how you expected to die. 

He slammed open the door and you let out a scream before dissolving into hysterics. The scrap of dignity you had left told you not to beg for your life. 

For a split minute you tried to gather yourself up and over before getting back up and spitting through your tears, “Kill me, go ahead, I dare you to!” Your breathing sped up as your heart slammed, threatening to break your rib cage. You were so close to pissing yourself as you scrunched up your eyes, you didn’t want to see your death or the man before you shrinking you to dinky size. 

Would it hurt? You thought as you mentally started internerising all you hadn’t accomplished in life and the pile of dirty clothes you left at home. 

“Well,” Trying to sound braver than you were, “Get on with it!” 

Mirthful laughter started and got louder as you closed your eyes tighter and evened out your breathing. “Kill me!” It came out half begging at this point, the coffee stirring up the acid in your stomach

It was a second later that a sarcastic sounding applause started and you opened up your eye, only one. For caution. 

“You think I’m going to kill you because you talked back once?” He purred. “Is your opinion of me that warped?” 

Pointing outside, “I have my rights to think that!” 

“Oh please, she thinks she can speak to anyone in any tone all her life and doesn’t like when people tell her no once, so I had to. The rest of the people are just a perk to add to her little lesson in decorum…”

“Not fucking funny!” Hauling out and hitting him in the arm, “You really had me going! I aged more in the past minute than I have all my life!” You sat down and moaned in pain as you massaged your forehead and worked on breathing.

“It was fun, loads of it. You gotta admit it.” 

You groaned and leaned backwards on the couch pulling the thick afghan over your face. “Sadist.” You muttered into the thick weave.

It could have been your imagination, but you for a split second thought you heard from the other side of the room, “And don’t you love me for it.”

It could have been your dirty imagination creeping up again. Maybe…

It was like he could read your mind, and it was his own monkey bars to swing around on.Testing you out and seeing how you’d react. 

Not that you’d expect someone who’s name was The Master to do anything differently…

Not that when you saw him and learned what his name was that you weren’t gunning to board the plane into subspace from dipshit-ville. 

Hearing him start the TARDIS up and go for another destination, you pulled it off your face and around you like a shawl, “So why does yours change shape all the time and seem like you don’t have to run around the console?”

“Hers is meant for multiple people to fly and it’s very, very broken.”

Of course, you rolled your eyes.

“It’s supposed to blend in, do what it’s pilot says. You know, rather like a car. You wouldn’t bring a dinky muddy Jeep Wrangler to a proper black tie event? Would you.” He flipped a switch and started entering coordinates into the touch screen.

“If you ain’t a pussy.” You muttered again. The statement smacked of classism you felt.

He elected to ignore that. Thank G-d. 

“So what are you in the mood for, Y/N? The best traditional Earth food the 34th century can offer or a nice shallow grave I can chuck your willing corpse into.” He smirked and wrinkled his nose at you.

“Woah. King of the non-sequitur.” 

“What even is ‘traditional’ Earth food?” Last time you checked, there were hundreds of what could be argued as “traditional” Earth foods. Your curiosity was genuinely piqued. “Yeah…” you nasalled, “Gimmie the best Earth food the 34th century can offer!” You leaned back down on the couch. 

“Get dressed better.” He ordered. 

You slumped off to the massive wardrobe and got something comfy yet nice looking. Just in case you had to run away from an explosion or something. 

Schlepping out of the depths, you twirled around, “I’m decent.” 

He made a noise like the Jeopardy buzzer. “Utterly not. Try again.” 

You did. 

Another buzzer noise. 

Third times a charm, you even put on a nice corset dress and a slide-on pair of sneakers. 

He marched you up in yourself ranting about how humans couldn’t be half-arsed to make their own decisions and he should just start picking your clothing out for you. 

You held your tongue and just waited for it to be over. 

“Get undressed.” He flipped a hand at you. 

Of all the places to strip down, in front of an alien was not on the list. It wasn’t like it was the person at the lingerie store sizing you up for a bra and panties. It was a man, alien albeit, and he was seeing you in your Hello Kitty underwear and tattered nude bra. Humiliating. 

“What do I even wear? You couldn’t even whip out the Space-Zagat or tell me how many Space Michelin Stars this place has!” You covered your stomach with your hands in an attempt at modesty. 

He went over to the hanger next to the door and seemingly manifested a shimmery purple ombre tulle gown and some glitzy silver strap heels.

He hastily unzipped it and said, “Pop in.” and you slid in as he zipped it up, you felt the warmth of his hands linger on the small of your back and the nape of your neck. He took his index finger and slid it up, the corner of the nail slightly catching on the soft baby hairs at the bottom of your scalp. You shivered and had a sharp intake of breath. You nearly felt more tears spring up for today. That felt good.

Suddenly, you felt a clink of a thick chain lock around your neck. “Turn around…” He ordered again, softly. He pointed towards a mirror. The sight of yourself was bewildering. It was off the shoulder and flattered you a little too much. It, paired with the solid gold chainmail necklace made you look almost regal? Queenly. All the big words. 

“Oh wow…” The words almost came out a choked garble, and yet barely above a whisper. The image before you was beautiful, and he was looming in the background, dressed to the nines to match in purple and gold. 

Then you exhaled. 

You looked like a power couple, like Bradjelina before the split, or Michelle and Barack Obama. You were sad how well you looked together. Though, how can an alien, especially when you saw what the females of the species did- eat a bar of soap and act like a racoon on trash night. 

You shook the lovely thoughts of that away. Tonight and the sensation of his slightly calloused, warm hands on your body were enough lust for one lifetime. 

“We’ve arrived.” He noted, drawing you out of yet another blank faced reverie.

You and your damn reveries. 

That’d be your death. 

Sashaying out as he took your hand and led you into this obviously very fancy and very expensive restaurant’s coat room from what looked like a small cupboard he led you to the reception where a humanoid with grey skin and spikes on their nose sat, “Name?” They drew lazily, a curious brow spike raised at the pair of you. 

“You will give us the best table and give us the best recreation-vintage.” He stated as if he was asking the weather. The creature looked dumbstruck and walked you to the table at the end of the dining hall, looking out on the vastness of space with planets twinkling and stars churning out light in the distance. The darkness contrasted well with the silver and whites of the place. 

As if by meaning, the pair of you stood out. Everyone else was in muted silver tones and you were specks of color demanding attention and respect. The center of a very odd universe. 

“Cotes du Rhone Red…” The waitstaff converged to you, “Sir, the finest of the Spiced Cheese Triangles...made this morning.” “Madame…” They all started simping postulating towards you.

Once you got your orders taken, you bit into one of the so called “Spiced Cheese Triangles”, it was a Dorito. 

“These are Doritos.” You whispered scandalised. “Do-rit-os.” He laughed, “Classic Earth food. You know how it is. The poor people love the food, the rich come in, spruce up the area, paint over the color, then charge a dozen times more for the same food. Don’t you know gentrification when you see it?” 

You guwaffed before taking a sip of your wine. The place was quiet except for the hushed chatter and soft sounds of eating. No music. Just the chasm of looking out into space. You rested your chin on your wrists and looked out. Where were you? Where was this place? So many questions scraped around your brain.

“You’re in the Black Eye Galaxy…” He responded quietly, “At the corner of it that looks into the mighty center…” 

You poked at your temple then towards his face. “I knew it!” You accused in a breath. “You can read my mind!” You leaned back and crossed your arms, “And you have me scrambling to find words every second of every day.” 

He winked. “A little. Human brains are very easy to rifle around in. I try not to read yours. Out of respect. I don’t mean to, all Time Lords are sensitive to the psychic vibrations of others. I was just a little more good at that when I was child. I use it to my advantage. Especially all things…” He trailed off, eyes growing dark. You made a mental note to pry later. Then tried to hide that and wipe it. He could read your mind, and you had to wrap your mind around that and compartmentalize that for another day. You didn’t want to ruin this lovely moment. Or a lovely half of a moment since it suddenly got dark. Your food got served and you continued to stare off into the great abyss of space. 

“Y/N?” Asked the Master. 

“Yes, Master?” You looked at him. His eyes were impossibly large and impossibly soft, framed by the longest and softest black lashes. It was strange how a man so universally feared and prone to fire-starting was capable of such a baby face. 

“I want you to tell me what you’re thinking. I’d rather not read your mind.” 

You felt yourself swallow a sudden lump in your throat. 

“I’ll work on it.” You promised.

Were you falling in love with him? Was this love? More confusion ebbed at your head. You scraped at your eyebrow with your pinky nail. 

You shoved that down deep into the caverns of your brain, where you kept your ballerina dreams and daddy issues.

You ate quietly. He barely seemed to touch a thing however. The evening drew on in a realm between too comfortable and oddly disheartening. 

As the evening drew to a close, he didn’t even pay. He just said to the waitress, “We’re finished.” And walked back to the TARDIS. This time not holding your hand. You didn’t know if that was a sign for you to grow up and stop fantasizing. You could take a hint. You weren’t as dumb as you looked. 

You marched to your room and couldn’t yet bear to rip your beautiful outfit from yourself. Especially the necklace, it felt oddly right. Like a collar or a letterman jacket. Something definitive of a bond. You sniffled. No more tears.

Wall of emotional protection, back up. Time to protect yourself. There’s no condom for your heart- you told yourself.

You went out back to the small kitchenette in the console room and made yourself a cup of tea to settle your stomach and saw him leaning over the counter of his little planning station, papers askew, hair mussed. It was sinful for one man to look insanely good while plotting something. 

“You’re still dressed?” He asked. Of course he’d stripped into something more comfortable, an unbuttoned waistcoat and jeans, a simple light purple button up. Did he sleep? You were contemplating PJs.

“Yeah. Problem?” You shrugged.

The look given was indescribable. 

“Utterly indecent.” He shook his head. He turned away for a second to bookmark the thick book he had. The way his jeans- midrise- shift around his bum was something funky. His hips were a bit wide so they slung over his body lavisciously. You caught yourself staring at it 

“Oh for fucks sake.” He said looking at you, your mouth sideways gaped, like you were some truck driver eyeing up a dime a ride whore at the stop. For all the rollercoaster of the day, the Master was breathtaking to look at.

He was in your mind again, and you were too tired and emotionally strung out to care. 

“I just want tea.”...and you, you mentally added, hoping that he’d get the subtext and either kill you to stop you from humiliating yourself further or make a move. Either or, it was something. 

He made a tutting noise and said, “Oh, you’d have to give me something in return.” A grin that was thoroughly wicked and possibly evil crept up and warmth flooded his eyes. His perfectly white teeth flashing dangerously in the ambient lighting. 

“What’s that?” You opened the line for bartering. You slid onto the table he was working at. Tea could wait for a second. Things just got interesting. 

He put one of those larger than life hangs on your neck and rested the crook of his thumb on your jaw, and petted it slightly. The rest of his fingers slightly applied a pressure to the base of your skull. His eyes traced over your face as he contemplated. He licked his lips slightly before speaking.

“I want you, fully. No more thoughts of ‘Oh, what if the Doctor catches us?’ or if you’re a traitor to her just because you are mine now. If she was truly a friend to you, and not just a preoccupation…”He cocked his head and focused his eyes on your lips. “She’d grant you this…” He moved his thumb down to the hollow of your jaw and pressed it. “She’d let you.” You closed your eyes and fluttered your eyelashes flipping around the millions of pro’s and con’s. You felt yourself relax and your body made your choices for you, you weren’t fighting it anymore. 

“What do you say, love?” He breathed in a husky tone.

“Yes.”

“Yes, who?” He chided in a guiding tone.

“Yes, Master.” 

“Good girl.” He laughed and dipped you down on the table inhaling your lips inward and pressed down with his free hand on your hip.

Giving up never would feel so good...

[rainydawgradioblog]

RDR Essentials - Metal (3/03)

RDR Essentials is a weekly newsletter of alternating genres that outlines key releases of the past month, upcoming events around Seattle and happenings in the specified music genre.

Made in collaboration between Rainy Dawg DJs and the Music Director.

Releases:

Chainsword - Blightmarch

Hailing from Warsaw, Chainsword recently released their debut album, Blightmarch. Right off the bat I can tell you that it is killer, especially for a first release. Chainsword takes a page directly out of Bolt Thrower’s playbook to give the listener a very For Those Once Loyal-esque feel. The chugging riffs, thundering bass, and pounding drums all come together to create a brutal soundtrack for the battlefield. While war certainly is not the most original theme, let alone World War II, Chainsword pulls it off to create a compelling album. The tracks that really stand out on Blightmarch are the ones where the Bolt Thrower inspiration is most apparent. For example, the eerie intro and chugging main riff of “Exterminatus'' coupled with the guttural vocals give me major “Anti-Tank (Dead-Armour)” vibes. Another standout track is “Daemonculaba'' which yet again has another powerful, chugging main riff that makes headbanging irresistible. The most haunting and brutal of all the songs on Blightmarch is hands down the closer, “06.08 9:15” which recounts the bombing of Hiroshima. The song begins with an audio clip from a documentary which leads into yet another absolutely punishing riff complemented by dark lyrics about the event. The song comes to close with more of a documentary clip and cuts off as the bomb is being dropped. While it certainly is not reinventing the wheel or anything groundbreaking, Blightmarch is a solid first effort from Chainsword. This album is straightforward, meat and potatoes death metal that does not disappoint. However, I may be a little biased since I absolutely love Bolt Thrower. Regardless, if you like old school death metal and/or Bolt Thrower then Blightmarch is an album for you. 

- Jack Irwin

Pan-Amerikan Native Front - Little Turtle’s War

Pan-Amerikan Native Front is a group from Chicago that plays a unique brand of black metal. They are one of the bigger names coming out of the Native American metal scene, along with Nechochwen and Ifernach. Their new album Little Turtle’s War is filled with massive riffs that stand out for their unique harmonies and sheer ferocity. The album starts with a mellow introduction that quickly turns into a wall of distortion with enough power to push you across the room. Production wise this release has the perfect mix of rawness and clarity, a balance that is hard to come by. Some of the tracks feature a distinguished martial melody, which matches the war-time lyrics. The themes intertwine the history of Native American resistance with spiritual awareness of the land, which is a welcome departure from the uninspired lyrics of most black metal, or worse, those inspired by right wing and nationalist politics. Pan Amerikan Native Front does black metal a big service by showing that the genre doesn’t have to stick to its exclusionary politics. Not only are the themes novel for the genre, there are some very unorthodox harmonies that play throughout. The tracks “Power of the Calumet Dance” and “The Battle of Wabash” both feature very effective riffs that avoid many of the cliches that other releases from the genre fall into. Additionally, the song “Michikiniqua's Triumph” is a great mid tempo “black and roll” banger that forces you can’t help but bang your head to. Overall, Little Turtle’s War is a monument for the emerging Native American metal scene and a great release for someone who prefers a more clear production style.

- Zac Weiner

Upcoming Releases:

3/5: Nightfall - At Night We Prey

Melodic extreme metal coming from Athen’s Nightfall. For fans of anything that’s melodic.

3/12: Enforced - Kill Grid

Brutal crossover from Virginia’s own Enforced. For fans of Iron Reagan and Municipal Waste who are looking for some more longer and complex songs. 

3/19: Saxon - Inspirations

Covers performed by the legendary British heavy metal outfit Saxon.

4/23: Paysage d’Hiver - Geister

Their last album is a tough act to follow, but the legendary Swiss one-man is back.