#his name is Valentín

[canirove]

Have I ever mentioned that I have a kid at work who could be De Bruyne's lost son? 😅 They have the same eyes, similar hair and skin colour...

[sp00kymulderr]

Desiderium

San Valentín part 2

Series masterlist

Pairing: Javier Peña x afab Reader (no pronouns)

Warnings: 18+, Angst angst angst, possessive sex, jealousy, light choking, Javi is a menace and also can’t handle his feelings, dirty talk, love but it’s all kinda fucked up

Word Count: 3k

For months you had convinced yourself the only feelings you had for Javier were carnal; fuelled by those hot Colombian nights and the constant frustration of your job, that it was nothing more than a casual fling for the both of you. But since Valentine’s Day, and the jumble of emotion brought to the forefront in your mind, it has become clear to you that you’re already in way too deep and want far more from this than you ever thought you would.

Even knowing that, things go on the same way for weeks longer; you and Javier, Javier and seemingly every other woman in Bogotá. And each time you swear it’s the last, but then he gives you that look and tells you how much he needs you and before you know it you’re giving yourself over to him once more. Begging him for it again and again, even as you feel how much it blackens your heart to do so. After all, you had known from the beginning that Javier does anything he can for the job, and you promised him you’d wouldn’t let it get to you.

But when you’ve memorised every pattern of the damp-stained ceiling of his bedroom, and what feels like the schedule of half the women in the city you have to do something to get him off your mind. Find a way to stop your heart racing every time he says your name in that quiet, seductive drawl you’ve come to know all too well.

You’re not proud of how you deal with the situation, how you try to get him off your mind. Desperately attempting to shove those feelings back in to the deep, dark Pandora’s box that they were locked in by finding another man who might be able to make you feel as good – specifically Jason, a CIA lackey you’d had drinks with once or twice outside of work before.

Jason isn’t unattractive, and you knew he liked you, he’d made it pretty clear before. You’d always been curious so it’s not exactly a hardship for you to make a move that ends up with him back at your place on a stuffy Thursday night fuelled by too much drink. Sure he isn’t like Javier, but few men are and you’d already known that. When he fucks you it isn’t so desperately passionate, but it’s nice and you’d like that to be enough. 

You hate yourself for wishing it was Javier, every single moment.

Nothing feels right when it isn’t Javier. And unfortunately that’s how you know you love him, and if anything is going to land you in a pit of distress it’s figuring out that you’re in love with your co-worker and the man who’s known in every local brothel.

You’re a fucking idiot. What do you do? What can you do? Javier has always been caring towards you, he gives you attention and affection and makes you feel more wanted than any man ever has. It wouldn’t be impossible that he feels the same way, that he wants more but is too uncertain to ask for it.

If your choices are to be unfulfilled for the rest of your life, or be the first one to confess your feelings you know what you need to do. You have to tell him.

--- The next evening, you find yourself with shaking hands at his door. You have this whole admission memorised, knowing every word you want to tell him. When he opens the door to you and he’s in that black shirt you have to force yourself to concentrate so you don’t forget the entire speech.

Javier looks you up and down with a smirk before letting you in to the apartment, stubbing out his cigarette before he offers you a drink. Your throat feels so dry you gladly accept.

“Heard you had a good time last night” he states matter-of-factly, with what you might consider a hint of jealously in his voice. The walls are thin, but neither of you had exactly been loud so it takes you by surprise that he’d open with that.

“Uh, yeah. I went out for a drink with some of the CIA guys. It was fine” you shrug, not giving anything away. It’s odd, that you feel so guilty about it and you wonder if that’s how Javi feels after his various rendezvous.

“I think Jason might have enjoyed it more than that, saw him leaving this morning looking pretty pleased with himself” he notes in a low voice and bitter, making you shiver despite the heat.

“Oh. Well...yeah, we slept together. It-it was nice” you babble sheepishly, unconvincing.

“But you’re here tonight” Javier reminds you, giving you that look - the one that always gets you in to all kinds trouble. He’s drawing you to him until he’s leaning over you and his lips are almost on yours.

“I’m here” you agree dumbly, goosebumps raising on your skin where his fingers are tracing up your back.

When he kisses you it’s so easy and nice and you melt in to him, letting him deepen it as his hands hold you firm to him. You know straight away tonight isn’t going to go the way you had planned, but you follow his lead unable to stop yourself once he brings out your desire.

He has you immediately, it shouldn’t be a surprise by now. Every time he touches you, you turn to jelly and he can shape you and move you however he wants. He holds so much sway over you when you’re alone together and he knows it. Already removing your clothes, his hands roaming your body and he discards your t-shirt then helps you step out of your pants with your lips only parting for a matter of seconds. You let him guide you and give yourself over to him with no hesitation, desperate for the affection.

The tight grip of his hands on your hips is devastating, he’s so demanding as he pulls you with him on to the ugly old couch that you’ve always hated. Everything is too hot, his touch scorching against your skin until you feel almost dizzy with it. The climate of the small, familiar room is heady, stifling – your breath catching even before he’s got you straddling him and is pushing the flimsy lace fabric of your underwear to one side.

“Did you get this wet for him too?” he murmurs darkly as his fingers begin to explore you, one digit slipping inside you with ease already. You can’t fathom how to answer, the question takes you by surprise and you can’t tell what kind of game he’s trying to play. Thankfully he doesn’t demand a response, instead enjoying the beautiful gasps he’s eliciting from you as he withdraws and finds your clit – circling it so slowly it’s almost frustrating.

It’s difficult to remember how you felt just half an hour ago, when you had been so sure how tonight would go. Your big speech—the whole stupid plan—expelled from your memory as he presses two fingers in this time and curls them inside of you until you’re squirming with delicious pleasure. Javier always manages this so easily it’s embarrassing; turning you in to a speechless wreck with his talented fingers and some well placed kisses against your neck and collarbone, his thumb circling your clit with so little pressure it barely counts at all.

Grinding down against his hand you will him to give you more, letting your eyes do the begging until he obliges you. You tighten your grasp on the back of his neck, arching your back as his thumb presses harsher against your clit and sends tightening shocks to your core. It’s so sinful how this feels, you naked save the forgotten lace and him fully clothed and holding you close as he fucks you with his fingers. His teeth then tongue dragging along your skin, free hand following to pull and pinch at your nipples.

He’s built up a punishing rhythm with his fingers and his thumb, working you until he feels you tense and tighten. He knows you’re close, has seen it enough times by now, and for a moment some cruelty crosses his features that makes you think he’s going to stop. Perhaps if his cock wasn’t so painfully straining in his pants he would, but instead he increases his tempo until you’re arching and moaning his name in to the heavy air.

“That’ right, that’s it” he moans against your skin, lips ghosting across your too-hot flesh “I want you to cum all over my fingers and then clean them up for me while I fuck you. Do you want that? Taste yourself while I fill you up? You’re so beautiful when you come for me - let me see, show me baby”

If you weren’t so close to breaking point you might be taken aback by the filth coming from his mouth, he’s not usually so much of a talker and certainly not like this. But you’d be lying if you said his words didn’t spur you on more and you kiss him hard in some attempt to etch the obscene words in to your memory. You pull back when the orgasm hits, knocking the breath out of you until you’re quivering.

Javi’s fingers work you through it but he doesn’t stop when you do, still rubbing over the now sensitive nub with unabashed determination as his fingers continue to hit against that perfect spot. It’s too much but, christ, it could never be enough.

“Fuck, Javi” you gasp, not even finished with the first when another wave of pleasure submerges you and leaves you crying out for him – eyes squeezed shut so tight you feel a tear slide down your cheek. The second orgasm lands quicker than the first but leaves you dazed and motionless against him save your heaving chest and thumping heart so loud to you it could wake the dead.

Wet fingers trail your thighs as he manhandles you on to your knees, pulling your underwear off of you and letting you collapse against the arm of the couch for a moment as he positions himself behind you. You don’t have to tell him how much you need it, pushing back against him with a whimper when he rubs himself against you, coating his cock in your slick.

“Ple-” your voice is hoarse, more a moan than an actual word coming out of you. “Please, Javi. I need you, I fucking need you inside me right now. Please” you whine, and oh it spurs him on.

You don’t get to finish whatever string of supplications you were about to start, instead whimpering quietly as he pushes easily in to you and slowly, achingly fills you with his thick length to the hilt. He’s taking his time and you can’t decide if it’s to torture you or just so he can take as much pleasure from you as possible. Damned if you care at this point.

When he stills to let you both get reacquainted with the feel of him filling you so well, he brings an arm around you and guides you up until your back hits his chest. His breath lands hot on your neck, placing a rough kiss against your salty skin and letting his lips trail up and over the back of your ear as he starts to move his hips tortuously languidly – making you feel every inch of him pressing in to you. You’re already seeing stars when he taps his fingers against your mouth until you take them in, letting you taste yourself on him. The whole act is so lascivious and indecent, but it feels better than anything you’ve ever imagined.

“Does anyone else make you feel like this, fuck you like this? Did he make you beg the way you do for me?” He questions, speaking right against your ear and pulling you harder against his chest, locking you there with a strong arm as his thrusts up in to you with increasing fervour.

God, you can barely think but that pulls you in to some more lucid state for a moment. Is he serious? Asking you that. You think he’s getting off on it, thinking of you with another man and then asking you to confess your sins to him. You don’t entirely want to give in to his game, but you’d never be able to deny it doesn’t turn you on a little too much. If the unfathomable roll of his hips wasn’t making you feel so delirious, maybe you’d have more sense than to answer him the way you do.

“Javi, no one else comes close to you-” you gasp out as he roughly gropes your breasts and his other hand presses against your stomach, making a slow trail downwards “You make me feel- feel so so good.” You moan out as he thrusts so hard in to you now that your legs are beginning to shake.

When Javier brings his fingers back to your overstimulated clit, you lose yourself entirely. He could make you recount every single moment of last nights tryst and you would willingly do so and then you’d beg him for forgiveness. Any self control you might’ve had to take back the power that is so obviously in his hands perishes the moment he moans your name against your ear and you beg him never to stop.

“You make me lose my mind” you whisper, not even sure if he can hear it. It’s the most simple truth, you’re not in control of yourself any more.

He doesn’t respond, lost in his own pleasure as he grunts and groans behind you when you tighten around him as he continues to do his best to divert you from reality completely. A hand around your throat, squeezing lightly, that’s the thing that finishes you off and whatever you were going to cry out in that moment merely comes out as a serious of incoherent whines and whimpers.

“fuck that’s it, come for me just like that. Just for me” he groans as you come down from the heavens.

For a minute your vision goes blurry at the edges as he changes his tempo again, and his fingers are still on your clit just pressing there. You wonder if he’s actually trying to destroy you for a minute, but then he’s tensing up and pushing completely in to you. He finishes inside of you, holding you so tight you can’t feel anything other than him until he’s emptied every last drop in you, and then finally you’re both collapsing together on to the pillows beneath you.

Even if you could find your voice, you wouldn’t know what to say. Javier mutters some obscenity in Spanish as he pulls out of you but nothing more, and you’re glad that he doesn’t let you go – instead draping his arm over you and kissing your shoulder softly. It’s so peaceful, lying there in his arms, that you almost forget the turmoil still ongoing in your mind for the 15 minutes that it takes for you both to get your breathing back to normal and regain some feeling in your body.

He’s gently pushing aside the hair stuck to your forehead when you finally bring yourself to speak.

“Javi that was.... I don’t think I can move”

“Don’t, stay here” he murmurs, voice so soft you’re taken aback by it. How can he go from being so demanding of you to so gentle in just a moment?

You turn to face him and he looks calm, relaxed, happy to have you with him.

This has to be your moment, right? The way he looks at you right now seems to mirror the way he makes you feel, like you’ve got something to live for. You run your fingers over his cheek and along his jaw, taking in his handsome face and for-once untroubled demeanour – this is how you always want to see him.

You have to say it, this is the right time.

“I think I love you, Javi” you whisper your admission shyly, eyes meeting his and a soft smile on your lips “I think we should try...to make a go of things”

Javier’s expression changes in an instant. He sighs, breaking your eye contact and then he’s sitting up away from you.

“I just- I hated myself last night, it didn’t feel right” you scramble, “Like it should have been you not him and I always want it to be you...” you follow suit, sitting and immediately feeling so horribly exposed as he does everything he can to not meet your eyes. 

“Javi?”

He hangs his head, murmuring your name with such disappointment that anger bubbles up and you feel a rush of heat to your face - you stand to find and pull on your clothes, whole body vibrating with embarrassment. How could you have read the situation so absurdly wrong?

“Don’t do this, we’ve got a good thing going and you know it can’t be more than that” he tells you with so little emotion in his voice that you feel tears start to sting in your eyes,

Snatching your t shirt that had been flung to the other side of the couch, you try to keep some semblance of balance in your voice when you speak again.

“But we were so- I thought you cared about me. You were so...so- I thought you cared? And what? You don’t want me?”

Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t fucking cry.

He shakes his head and whether you imagine the pained look in his eyes is unclear, but when he answers you know everything is screwed and as selfish as it makes you, you wish you’d kept your stupid mouth shut

“No. I’m sorry”

So that’s how Javier Peña breaks your heart.

[beatleswings]

alright thats a big one, cardon has kids right? wanna give us some information about them? their bday, when theyre born, maybe who is their godparent(s) >:3

CarDon kiddos, you ask? Oooh this is gonna be a ride so get ready!! (Note: I have yet to draw them so....I'll be using the picrews I made of them for visuals).

So Don and Carmen do end up having kids, five to be exact! They wanted a big family.

Their first born is a girl, Valentina Pilar Escamillo de la Rosa. She was born on February 16, just two days after Valentine's Day AKA Carmen's birthday hence her name. Pilar...was from one of the girl names they were going to give her, María de Pilar, before Don and Carmen were informed that she would be born on or around Valentine's Day, hence the love themed name. Had she been a boy, she would have been named Valentín or Amador ("lover" in Spanish) or both. She may not have been born on the 14th but the following day, Carmen started having contractions the night of February 15 and eventually went into labor and of course the 16th, the little one was born, at around 6am! Valentina resembles her mother but has most of her father's coloring such as his hair color and eye color. Her godparents are Narcis Prince and Aran Ryan. Don wasn't sure if Aran was "godfather" material but was somewhat relieved when he saw little Valentina giggling at Aran.

Luis Martín Escamillo de la Rosa is Don and Carmen's second child, a son. He was born on February 26, three years and 10 days after his older sister. He is named after his maternal grandfather, Carmen's father Luis, and his second name, after Carmen's maternal grandfather (her mom's dad) Martín Álvarez. Like his mother, he is mostly referred to by his second name instead of his first. He resembles his father a lot, so much, he's like a clone of him but he does inherit some of his mother such as her hazel eyes. His godparents are Valeria and Masked Muscle.

Nicolás Raúl Escamillo de la Rosa and Rosario Elisa Escamillo de la Rosa are Don and Carmen's third and fourth children, in other words...they're twins! They were born on March 19, three years after Martín, six years after Valentina and on the first day of Spring. The twins were born 5 minutes apart, first Nicolás and then Rosario. Despite it was twins, Carmen still went for a natural birth anyway.

Nicolás or Nico as he is called, got his names picked by Carmen. She liked the name Nicolás but his middle name Raúl, Carmen got that after the actor Raul Julia, the actor who played Gomez Addams in the 90s Addams Family movies. Carmen loved his portrayal of him. Rosario's names? Don picked them. He was going to name her Rosalina but Rosario is one that stuck to him. Elisa comes from his paternal grandmother (his dad's mom) Elisa. The twins resemble Don the most but have most of Carmen’s coloring such as her blonde hair and hazel eyes. I definitely see their godmother being Dolcita.

Antonio Samuel Escamillo de la Rosa is Don and Carmen's fifth and youngest child. He was born on March 10, nine years after Valentina, six years after Martín and three years after Nicolás and Rosario. Unlike the previous births, Carmen had some complications and had to give birth to Antonio via C-section. Thankfully she and baby were okay. After the complications, Carmen and Don decided to stop having kids and plus, with five, the family feels complete now. :)

Don decided to give his second name Antonio to him and his middle name? That comes from Don's maternal grandfather Samuel Márquez. Little Antonio resembles Carmen a lot, her older siblings even point out how much it feels like they're seeing little Carm again, but he does have Don’s features like his brown eyes. I'm still deciding on a godparent or godparents for little Toño, once I think of one, I'll update this.

Aside from having their own aunts and uncles from each of their parents' sides, they also see their parents' friends as their aunts and uncles too and if their parents' friends had kids, they're honorary cousins.

As you can tell, all of Don and Carmen's kids are February and March babies, one is an Aquarius (Valentina) and the rest are Pisces. This idea, I was inspired by Paul and Linda McCartney. Their children together Mary, Stella and James are all Virgos and born on August 28, September 13 and September 12 respectively. Linda was also born on September (on the 24th) like Carmen was born on February just her two oldest. And Don and Paul were born in another month from their spouse and kids. August for Don and June for Paul. So far that's what I have on the kiddos.

[heysweetheart-writes]

The Kissing Booth xoxo MJ/kiwiana-writes

My rating (1-10): I only watched 2 and 3 for obvious reasons. I'd say I give TKB2 a solid 7 and TKB3 a... 5?

My favourite character: MVP Mr. Marco Valentín Peña my beloved. My angel baby boy. I also like Chloe very much.

My least favourite character: What's his name, the main love interest. Jacob Elordi's character.

The character I think I'd be friends with: Marco OBVIOUSLY, also I'd be friends with El because she seriously need some girl friends. Or at least less straigh ciswhite men friends.

The character I think I won't hit off with: Jacob's character.

My favourite episode/scene: Marco singing "What I like about you" makes me feral EVERY TIME.

Whose clothing style I like best: Chloe ugh she is so beautiful

Times I watched it (and if I would again): Twice the second one. Would definitely watch again.

This was so much fun!! Thank you for sending this!!

Send me the name of a film/series and I'll tell you my feelings about it

[spookyspaghettisundae]

Nobody Laughed Anymore

Dusk turned to night over the Rocky Mountains. The clouds of the day’s overcast sky never cleared.

It was going to be a dark, starless night. As if to defy nature itself, tiny lights—white, yellow, green, and red—all glowed and blinked inside the cockpit and back cabin of Future Proof’s airlift. The deafening noise of rotors drowned out all conversation save for the tinny transmissions going back and forth over radio between the helmets of everybody aboard the chopper.

Mostly, Chloe Grant filled their closed circuit by asking questions, while the rest of the crew offered answers to the new recruit.

“Is there gonna be overtime pay for our away team investigating the Anomaly? On Christmas Eve?”

Pruitt, sitting in the cockpit at the controls with Sears, chuckled.

Ruiz, who was seated across from Grant, answered her. His grin was audible, even if the helmet’s visor concealed his expression.

“You really got fast-tracked into this job, huh, Graham? Bennett was supposed to brief you on accounting if Singh didn’t.”

“Name’s Grant. And I ain’t even met Bennett yet.”

Chloe Grant looked down at her operative suit. Of course Valentín Ruiz hadn’t gotten her name right. Unlike the other operatives with her in the back cabin, she was the only agent without a name tag on the fatigues. A blank Velcro bar marked her black-clad chest, a spot where the others’ names were legible.

Last update on the ETA to the drop zone?

Seven minutes.

Right next to Chloe sat the ever-quiet and burly Max Carter. He could have taken up two seats with his broad shoulders and bulk. For now, he rhythmically tapped the back of his EMD like he was listening to some music that nobody else could hear.

Next to Ruiz sat Natalya Mischchenko. She had let the others do a lot of the talking thus far, but it was immediately clear to Grant that Mischchenko took point in their squad.

“Animal control”, as Singh had introduced Mischchenko to her. Probably a hunter of sorts. Mischchenko clearly also knew her way around guns, though the weapons they all carried with a sling were nothing like Grant had ever trained to use. Too light, too small—more like toys, and outfitted with battery packs instead of regular ammunition supplies to weigh her down. They looked like a science fiction movie’s cartoonish idea of a firearm—silvered, black plastic, outfitted with flashlights and scopes, and with lots of switches and dials and little lights tacked on.

Despite the visors and helmets, Mischchenko had followed Grant’s gaze. She asked, “Do you know how to operate your EMD?”

“I don’t even know what the abbreviation stands for, ma’am,” Chloe answered.

“Call me Nat,” Mischchenko said. “Not ma’am.”

Pruitt chuckled again at the helm.

“Electro-Muscular Disruptor,” Ruiz said. “There are five types or models of the weapon to date. You’ll quickly get used to them as our primary platforms in the field.” He patted the long-barreled model slung in front of his chest. It was bigger than the one Singh had given Grant in Future Proof HQ’s armory. “This here is a Type-4. Bit heavier and bulkier than the new standard-issue Type-5 you’re stuck with on tonight’s tour, but it’s got way more range and power. In case we run into something like a T-Rex, y’know?”

“Shit,” Carter drawled out with disdain. He clicked his tongue. “It better not be a fuckin’ T-Rex.”

The circuit stewed on his comment. Nobody said anything.

Grant had so many more questions. Following the flow that night, she kept them coming.

“You had to put a T-Rex down before?”

“Nope,” Mischchenko said. “But word has it, the ARC in Britain dealt with one.”

“How the hell did anybody ever manage to keep that out of the news?”

Ruiz shrugged. “Ask Stantz. He’s Future Proof’s resident spin doctor. If the ARC’s got anybody half as good as him, who the hell knows what they’ve covered up?”

“Haven’t met him either,” Grant mumbled into her radio. “Yet.”

“Shit,” Carter repeated. “You really are fuckin’ new here. Did you sign on today or somethin’?”

Pruitt chuckled a third time.

“Affirmative,” Grant said. “Matter o’ fact, I did.”

“Shiiieeet,” Carter drawled out yet again. Everybody chuckled to that. “Real baptism by fire.”

“Speaking of which, you still haven’t answered my question, Grant,” Mischchenko said.

“What’s that?”

Mischchenko pointed to the EMD Type-5 slung in front of Grant.

“If that nerd, Singh, gave you a crash course in operating these.”

“He did not. But how hard can it be? Firearms safety first, aim the business end at hostiles, pull the trigger. Does that about cover it?”

Pruitt laughed heartily across the intercom.

“First off, we’re not supposed to ‘put down’ the dinos from Anomalies,” Mischchenko said. “Did Singh skip even telling you the Protocol?”

“I… I don’t even what that is,” Grant replied, sighing into her mic.

“Okay, Protocol first, then the operation of your EMD will click.”

Pruitt recovered from his laughter and spoke up, “Rule number one of the Protocol: preserve the timeline.”

“That’s damn right, Pruitt. Glad you still give a damn about any rules,” Mischchenko said, every syllable dripping with sarcasm. “Which leads us to rule number two: minimize temporal damage and prevent paradoxes.”

“And to do that, we have rule number three,” Ruiz chimed in. “Send any specimens from Anomaly incursions back to their original time. Alive, and as unharmed as possible.”

“Uhm, why would that matter, though? Don’t the dinos get wiped out by a meteor before the first humans are even born?” Grant asked.

“An asteroid,” Carter grumbled. “It was an asteroid.”

“God damn, look who’s been paying attention to Trémaux’s sermons,” Pruitt said with another chuckle.

“Yeah, whatever,” Mischchenko interjected. “To your question, Grant—any changes to the past can lead to cascading, disastrous effects in the present. Maybe a fossil isn’t found where it originally was, preventing a scientific breakthrough or discovery, and, before you know it, a whole bloodline of humans in the present vanishes from existence because, who knows, someone’s grandma never met her husband at a conference, or whatever. That… is why we stick to the rules.”

“Contain specimens from Anomalies if they cannot be sent back immediately,” Ruiz continued. “That’s rule number four. Sometimes, the Anomalies open up again. With a bit o’ luck, we can send ‘em back when that happens. That’s what Containment in the FOB is for.”

“The rest o’ the rules are kinda less important for our squad, more in the ballpark of the suits and lab coats,” Carter added.

“Negative, Carter,” Mischchenko said. “We always gather data from the Anomalies and incursions, secure evidence, and prevent public awareness to the best of our ability. Rules number five and six. Seven is damage control.”

“Damage control. Do I even wanna know?” Grant asked.

“We rarely reach ‘damage control’ on a tour,” Mischchenko said. “The ADS gets us on site, fast. And Stantz and his PR bla-bla, and Spencer with his connections tend to foster quick cleanups.”

“What happened at the stadium in Michigan,” Ruiz said, “that was ‘damage control’.”

“Friendly reminder unless you want a pay dock, we don’t talk about that incident,” Sears said. The pilot next to Pruitt glanced over his shoulder. A dark visor on his helmet concealed how he scanned the passengers in the back cabin, yet Chloe Grant sensed his burning gaze sweeping over her.

Mischchenko nodded. Carter nodded. Ruiz shrugged. Grant dared not drill for more on it.

At least not on her first day on the job.

“Ready for action, kids,” Pruitt said. “ETA zero. We’re at the drop zone, baby. Prepare for touchdown.”

“We’ll go over the EMD settings once we’re on the ground,” Mischchenko said with a nod to Grant.

Carabiners clicked, belts unbuckled, other straps pulled tight. The four former soldiers and hunter readied to disembark.

Cold winter air blasted into the cabin once Carter yanked the hatch open. Nylon ropes unfurled, and the squad in the back rappelled down from the black, unmarked helicopter.

Boots thumped down, snow crunched underneath them. Carter and Mischchenko set foot on the hill first, then Ruiz and Grant followed.

“Bring me a souvenir,” Pruitt said, chuckling into the microphone. Barely visible in the cockpit of the chopper above them, he performed a mock salute to send off the four operatives.

All the trees swayed and bent from the torrent of air the chopper was blasting down as it hovered in place.

“Copy that,” Mischchenko responded. “Hear they’re big on Bigfoot ‘round these parts. Maybe we’ll snap an authentic photo of Sasquatch while we’re down here.”

The chopper’s droning noise faded quickly once the airlift set into motion. It flew upwards, gaining distance from the drop zone. The away team readied their EMDs and Mischchenko turned to Grant, gesturing to her weapon.

“The setting next to the safety toggle switch there modulates your EMD’s power output. On the lowest setting, it’s pretty much a cattle prod, good enough to direct specimens back into an Anomaly. On the highest, you can knock out a woolly mammoth in three shots, and you might kill a man with it if he’s got a weak heart. Just keep in mind, if you K.O. any specimens, you gotta drag their heavy ass into the Anomaly, which is why we usually operate on the lowest settings first.”

“Yeah, they may feel like toys,” Carter said, “But they pack some serious fuckin’ punch.”

“Hey, hope you’re done givin’ Graham the quick ‘n dirty,” Ruiz said.

“It’s Grant,” she corrected him again. “Chloe Grant.”

“Uhuh.” Whatever he was staring at absorbed Ruiz and robbed him of any politeness. He did not sound like he would learn her name right this time, either.

He was kneeling in the darkness off the edge of the drop zone. Focused on something in the dark, focused on by the flashlight on his weapon.

Flashlights on the other EMDs clicked on and the squad grouped up around him. He was squatting between some boulders and tall firs. The blinking lights of the thundering helicopter gained more distance, delving the away team in a shroud of darkness, in which only their flashlight cones shed any illumination.

“Boss, I reckon we got a problem on our hands here,” Ruiz said as the other three huddled behind him. “What we were just sayin’ about damage control?”

His flashlight’s cone cast light onto blood on the ground.

Lots of blood.

Crimson spatters had pockmarked the snow. A human body, losing a lot of blood, had been dragged through there.

And between them, huge footprints littered the grounds.

“Shit,” Carter said, chortling. “Pruitt might get a pic o’ Bigfoot after all, Nat.”

Big, bare feet had left those prints. Bigger than any human could have had.

Mischchenko’s gloved thumb flicked the power output toggle on her EMD, setting it to the middle notch.

“Hominid. Big. Maybe late Miocene?” she said.

“Who cares,” Carter growled. “Leave the I.D. job to Burch after you file report.”

The large Type-4 EMD in Carter’s hands clicked as he readied it, scanning their surroundings.

Their voices now sliced through the wintry air with clarity, no longer reduced to tinny headset transmissions.

“Merry Christmas, Grant,” Ruiz muttered. At least he got her name right this time. “Welcome to the job. Bigfoot today, and who knows—maybe Chupacabras for New Year’s Eve?”

Nobody laughed anymore.

Wind howled between the trees of the Rocky Mountains. The dark forest around them stayed eerily silent.

Chloe Grant mimicked Mischchenko, adjusting her own EMD’s power output. Unlike the squad leader, she switched her Type-5 to the top setting.

The futuristic weapon’s battery whined. One tiny green bar on the lights of its side display turned into three.

A red bar flared up and joined the three green bars.

Grant took a deep breath.

They followed the trail.

They marched into darkness.

[denimbex1986]

'...Close Your Eyes led the nominations alongside Andrew Haigh’s All of Us Strangers with 10 apiece. Strangers ended up the biggest winner of the day with four: Lead Actor Andrew Scott as a gay man finally coming to terms with his painful repression; Supporting Actor Jamie Bell as the ghostly, apologetic dad who failed to save him from bullying; the film’s entire otherworldly Ensemble, including strong turns from Claire Foy and Paul Mescal; and writer-director Andrew Haigh for his lovingly crafted Adapted Screenplay based on a novel by Taichi Yamada...

BEST PICTURE

1. Close Your Eyes 2. All of Us Strangers...

BEST DIRECTOR • Lila Avilés – Tótem • Victor Erice – Close Your Eyes – WINNER • Jonathan Glazer – The Zone of Interest • Andrew Haigh – All of Us Strangers • Radu Jude – Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – Runner-up • Justine Triet – Anatomy of a Fall – Runner-up

LEAD ACTOR • Paul Giamatti – The Holdovers • Karim Leklou – Sons of Ramses • Josh O’Connor – La Chimera • Andrew Scott – All of Us Strangers – WINNER • Manolo Solo – Close Your Eyes – Runner-up • Koji Yakusho – Perfect Days

SUPPORTING ACTOR • Jamie Bell – All of Us Strangers – WINNER • José Coronado – Close Your Eyes – Runner-up • Mateo Garcia – Tótem • Milo Machado Graner – Anatomy of a Fall • Charles Melton – May December • Ben Whishaw – Passages

SUPPORTING ACTRESS • Claire Foy – All of Us Strangers • Julianne Moore – May December • Da’Vine Joy Randolph – The Holdovers • Catalina Saavedra – Rotting in the Sun • Ana Torrent – Close Your Eyes – Runner-up • Ana Torrent – Foremost by Night – WINNER

ENSEMBLE • All of Us Strangers – WINNER • Anatomy of a Fall • Asteroid City • Close Your Eyes • Society of the Snow • Tótem – Runner-up

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY • All of Us Strangers – Andrew Haigh – WINNER • The Beast in the Jungle – Patric Chiha, Jihane Chouaib, Axelle Ropert • Killers of the Flower Moon – Eric Roth, Martin Scorsese • Poor Things – Tony McNamara • Society of the Snow – J.A. Bayona, Jaime Marques, Bernat Vilaplana, Nicolás Casariego • The Zone of Interest – Jonathan Glazer – Runner-up

CINEMATOGRAPHY • All of Us Strangers – Jamie Ramsay • Close Your Eyes – Valentín Álvarez • Inside the Yellow Cocoon Shell – Dinh Duy Hung – runner-up • La Chimera – Hélène Louvart • Samsara – Mauro Herce, Jessica Sarah Rinland – WINNER • The Zone of Interest – Lukasz Zal

EDITING • All of Us Strangers – Jonathan Alberts • Anatomy of a Fall – Laurent Sénéchal – WINNER • Close Your Eyes – Ascen Marchena • Do Not Expect Too Much from the End of the World – Catalin Cristutiu – Runner-up • Oppenheimer – Jennifer Lame • Society of the Snow – Andrés Gil, Jaume Martí

SOUND DESIGN • All of Us Strangers – Joakim Sundström • The Boy and the Heron – Koji Kasamatsu • Maestro – Richard King, Steve Morrow, Tom Ozanich, Jason Ruder, Dean Zupancic • Oppenheimer – Richard King, Kevin O’Connell, Gary A. Rizzo, Willie Burton • Samsara – Xabier Erkizia, Luca Rulio – WINNER • The Zone of Interest – Johnnie Burn, Tarn Willers – Runner-up...'

[whileiamdying]

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” ’s Voices in the Dark

The Argentinean writer Manuel Puig’s novel-in-dialogue forces the reader to be both director and detective, interpreting how the lines will be spoken and searching each sentence for clues as to what is going on. 

By Isaac Butler December 11, 2022

icki Baum, the author of “Grand Hotel,” once wrote that “you can live down any number of failures, but you can’t live down a great success.” After witnessing the fall and rise of his novel “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Manuel Puig likely would’ve agreed with her. Originally released to critical dismissal—Robert Coover called it “a rather frail little love story” in the Times—the book landed with a thud, managing to make Puig a celebrity in the gay enclave of New York City’s Christopher Street, but not much else. Yet “Kiss of the Spider Woman” had a remarkable afterlife. A play adaptation, co-authored by Puig, became an international success, and led to an Oscar-winning film starring William Hurt and Raul Julia as well as a hit musical written by John Kander, Fred Ebb, and Terrence McNally. Puig disliked the film, and, shortly after a disastrous workshop of the musical at suny Purchase, died from a heart attack, at the age of fifty-seven. Yet for all his frustration with the adaptations of his novel, they guaranteed its longevity. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is the only book of Puig’s in English that remains steadily in print—his first novel, “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” was recently issued for the second time this century by McNally Editions—and the cover of the Vintage International paperback boasts the same typeface and image as the playbill of the Broadway production.

The film and musical so overshadowed their source material that, when I first encountered the book, in a course called Subjectivity in Literature my freshman year of college, I thought that my eccentric professor had assigned a novelization to us as a way of challenging our assumptions about which books were worthy of study. Within a few pages, I realized my mistake. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a mysterious, formally inventive, beguiling work about two prisoners during the Dirty War in Argentina: a Marxist guerilla named Valentín and a gay window dresser named Molina, who develop a transformative relationship as the latter narrates the plots of his favorite movies to the former. When I was nineteen, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” struck me as a work about finding love and preserving one’s humanity in the most inhumane of places. It is in some ways the opposite of Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” a play in which the psychic scars of the Pinochet regime in Chile prove a universal solvent, dissolving any attempt at decency, or humanity, or truth. Reading the novel in the period between the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act and the repeal of sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, I believed it to be a work of protest art, one that defiantly asserts Molina’s personhood even amid the Dirty War’s depredations. Reading “Kiss of the Spider Woman” today, the prison seems less like a real place, and the novel seems far trickier, and far harder to nail down to any one meaning. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” slips between different interpretations, just as its late-night conversations wander from the most frivolous of trivialities to the deepest of truths.

Puig would likely have objected to the idea that frivolity was opposed to truth. His sensibility was rooted in cursi, a word that lacks a direct English translation but is key to the consciousness that underlies his work. Cursi is the Blanche DuBois to machismo’s Stanley Kowalski, passionately insisting “I don’t want realism, I want magic!” Its closest equivalent in the United States is camp, but the two are not exactly the same. There’s a yearning to cursi, and a nostalgic fabulousness. Puig was the great twentieth-century writer of the cursi sensibility. He disdained the self-seriousness of many of his contemporaries in the Latin American Boom, particularly Gabriel García Márquez, who he felt had been ruined by critical praise. “Every sentence pretends to be the maximum phrase of all of literature,” Puig griped, about the future Nobel Prize winner’s “The Autumn of the Patriarch,” “and each one ends by weighing a ton.” Puig’s novels are deliberately playful and provocatively effeminate. They often ride the line between satire and sincerity, producing a result that is somehow both sincerely felt and heavily ironized. As Puig himself put it once in a letter, “that’s the real me: Cursi and truthful.”

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” grew out of Puig’s frustrations with the politics of his era and his contemporaries. He eschewed explicit polemic in his work, which led to his being viewed with suspicion by both the left and the right. His first novel was panned by the center-right magazine La Nacíon for using colloquial Argentinean Spanish and accused of having Peronist sympathies. Living among fellow exiled Argentinean intellectuals in Mexico City, Puig found that he “was still a reactionary for not having joined the movement. Worst of all my book had been banned by the right wing and the Argentinian left didn’t care.” From this pain, he began taking notes on a novel in which two men—one straight and one gay, who “doesn’t have much education, but a great fantasy life”—would “meet through a mediator—movies.”

Puig, who wanted to be a screenwriter and only turned to writing novels after his thirtieth birthday, all but grew up in a movie theatre. According to “Manuel Puig and the Spider Woman,” a biography of Puig by his translator and friend Suzanne Jill Levine, his home town of General Villegas, in the Argentine Pampas, had one movie house, which showed a different film every day. Beginning in 1936, his mother, Malé, with whom he would remain extremely close throughout his life, took him to see “mostly American stuff” almost daily, at 6 p.m. Staring at the screen, he fell in love with the female stars of the thirties, constructing a pantheon out of Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Greta Garbo, and others. “I understood . . . the moral world of movies, where goodness, patience, and sacrifice were rewarded,” he later said. “In real life, nothing like that happened. . . . I, at a certain moment, decided that reality was what was on the screen and that my fate—to live in that town—was a bad impromptu movie that was about to end.” Malé had initially only intended to stay in General Villegas for a year and passed her frustrated dreams of cosmopolitan life down to her son. “It was like living in exile,” he would later say, and, in his first two novels, he would create a thinly veiled version of his home town, called Colonel Vallejos, and treat it unkindly. As Clara, his fictionalized aunt in “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” puts it:

When I got off the train, my first impression was awful, there’s not a single tall building. They’re always having droughts there, so you don’t see many trees either. In the station there are no taxis, they still use the horse and buggy and the center of town is just two and a half blocks away. You can find a few trees that are hardly growing, but what you don’t see at all, anywhere, is real grass.

The Puigs left Villegas, moving to Buenos Aires by 1949, and it’s unclear whether Manuel ever returned to his home town, except in his imagination. Much of his life was lived in one form of exile or another, particularly after his novel “The Buenos Aires Affair” was suppressed in Argentina in 1974.

“Betrayed by Rita Hayworth” highlights again and again the contrast between the magic of cinema and the tawdry doldrums of everyday life. Puig preferred melodramas, which he called “the language in which the unconscious speaks,” along with screwball comedies and, once he got over the trauma of seeing “Bride of Frankenstein” at too young an age, cheap horror films. In his essay “Cinema and the Novel,” Puig wrote that the films of the thirties and forties had such lasting power because they “really were dreams displayed in images. . . . When I look at what survives in the history of cinema, I find increasing evidence of what little can be salvaged from all the attempts at realism.” He disliked much of Italian neorealism and the films of Martin Scorsese (“so much pretension and slowness”), and called Meryl Streep, Ellen Burstyn, Jill Clayburgh, and Glenn Close “the Four Horsewomen of the Apocalypse” for ushering in a more realistic femininity onscreen.

Escape into the dream world of cinema was an obsessive quest. Later in life, he would write his friend Guillermo Cabrera Infante a long list of the authors of the Latin American Boom as Hollywood starlets. Borges was Norma Shearer (”Oh so refined!”), García Márquez was Elizabeth Taylor (“Beautiful face but such short legs”), Mario Vargas Llosa was Esther Williams (“Oh so disciplined (and boring)”). Among the eighteen names was Puig’s own. He was to be played by Julie Christie, a “great actress, but since she has found the right man for her (Warren Beatty) she doesn’t act anymore.” Years later, after his writing had brought him money and international acclaim, Puig would buy television sets and VCRs for friends, and then cajole them into recording classic films for him, eventually amassing a library of more than three thousand movies on upward of twelve hundred video cassettes.

Popular culture at its most cursi undergirds Puig’s work. It’s there in his titles— “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” “Heartbreak Tango,” “The Buenos Aires Affair,” “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” “Pubis Angelical,” “Eternal Curse on the Reader of These Pages,” “Blood of Requited Love,” “Tropical Night Falling”—which feel as if they could be printed in the most lurid of fonts, accompanied by the most sensational of exclamation points. His frustrated attempts to work as a screenwriter gave birth to his signature style, in which dialogue, stream of consciousness, and fake secondary sources like diary entries, surveillance reports, and newspaper articles bump up against one another. This marriage of high modernist experimentation with low cultural reference points and subject matter frequently led to his dismissal by Argentinean literati. He struggled for years to publish “Betrayed by Rita Hayworth,” and the accusation that he was a lightweight shadowed him even after his death. Reviewing Levine’s biography in the Times, Vargas Llosa wrote that “of all the writers I have known, the one who seemed least interested in literature was Manuel Puig,” before sniffing that “Puig’s work may be the best representative of what has been called light literature . . . an undemanding, pleasing literature that has no other purpose than to entertain.” Vargas Llosa’s estimation couldn’t be further off the mark. While Puig’s novels are entertaining—often riotously so—his formal techniques aren’t mere games, and his experimentations with dialogue still seem radical and groundbreaking decades after his death.

The novel in dialogue form is not new—authors from Diderot to Woolf and Gaddis have experimented with it—but there is something eternally transgressive in its austerity. To work only in dialogue is to limit or altogether renounce such pleasurable tools as point of view, description, free indirect discourse, and narration. Playwrights know that their dialogue will be mediated through a production, through the choices and interpretations of a director and actors, and they can leave instructions in the form of stage directions and notes explaining their intent. But the novel in dialogue forgoes all this. It forces the reader to be at once director and detective, interpreting how the lines will be spoken, and searching each sentence for clues as to the basic facts of what is going on.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” takes place in prison, yet it is six full pages of testy back-and-forth before the reader gets any glimpse of where the story is situated. Even these clues are related briefly:

The next movie Molina swoons over is “Destino,” a Nazi film about the evils of the French Resistance. The movie, a composite invented by Puig, is an inversion of the Hollywood film “Paris Underground,” its female protagonist rather unsubtly named Leni. Molina knows that it’s Nazi propaganda but loves it, “because it’s well made, and besides it’s a work of art.” The stage appears to be set for an extended dialogue about the relationship between art and truth, aesthetics and politics, naïveté and logic, and so on. Yet Puig shifts gears again, introducing footnotes written in parodic academese that trace a post-Freudian theory of homosexuality. The footnotes grow so extensive that they take over the book, drowning out the prisoners for pages on end. These give way to stream-of-consciousness asides that take us into Molina and Valentín’s thoughts, the former self-pitying and sentimental, the latter obsessive and fevered. The text becomes marked with ellipses to denote physical actions that would normally be described, culminating in a sex scene composed solely of the words spoken by the two men:

I can’t see at all, not at all. . . . it’s so dark.  . . . Slowly now . . .  . . . No, that way it hurts a lot.  . . . Wait . . . no, it’s better like this, let me lift my legs.  . . . A little slower . . . please . . .  . . . That’s better. . . .

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” moves from an avalanche of verbiage to a space where language is inadequate, and out again, with the two characters, having physically joined their bodies, finding new selves beyond the limits of their roles. It’s not entirely clear whether, were the book written today, Molina would even be described as a man. He often identifies as a woman throughout “Kiss of the Spider Woman” and at one point says, “As for my friends and myself, we’re a hundred percent female. . . . We’re normal women; we sleep with men.” Here, Molina is contrasting his social circle with “the other kind [of gay men] who fall in love with one another.” The objects of Molina’s desires are straight men. “What we’re always waiting for,” he says—she says?—is “a friendship or something, with a more serious person . . . with a man, of course. And that can’t happen because a man . . . what he wants is a woman.” Molina is filled with self-loathing, and unable to form any kind of real community or engage in political action, because “you see yourself in the other ones like so many mirrors, and then you start running for your life.”

Molina and Valentín’s prison cell, a filthy space of isolation surrounded by the threat of torture and execution, becomes a nearly utopian arena where identity can be transcended. The two characters live, briefly, in a world beyond the self, beyond sexuality, beyond gender, beyond language. Molina describes this as feeling like “I’m someone else, who’s neither a man nor a woman” while Valentín describes the feeling as being “out of danger.” The novel that began as a series of oppositions—gay and straight, woman and man, naïve and political, dream and reality, cursi and honest—hasn’t resolved any of its conflicts so much as called into question whether these categories, and many of the others we use to organize our lives, aren’t arbitrary, as limited as they are limiting. Among the book’s many insoluble contradictions is how it demonstrates these categories being overcome but only in a prison cell and only through a near-total deconstruction of the self. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” refuses to neatly suit any kind of political program—Puig called gay readers offended by his portrait of Molina “Stalinist queens”—instead burrowing deeper and deeper into what its author called “the struggle for human dignity.”

As with Puig’s other novels, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” requires far more work on the reader’s part than we are accustomed to, but the result is a profound imaginative and emotional investment. We have, to an extent far greater than normal, created the world of the story we are reading. We are in that jail cell with Molina and Valentín, eavesdropping on their conversations, witnessing their slow transition from antagonistic cellmates to friends to lovers to something that cannot quite be put into language. Our struggle to piece together the action of their scenes together mirrors their struggle to understand each other and, perversely, the struggle of the secret police to determine what Valentín may know about the resistance unit he has until recently been leading.

“Kiss of the Spider Woman” further confounds as it goes along. Just when you think you have a handle on it, it wriggles away and changes shape. The book begins with voices in the dark, as Molina relates the real-life 1942 film “Cat People” from memory, waxing rhapsodic in his micro-detailed descriptions of clothes, lighting, faces. Soon we learn that the two men have agreed to an experiment. To help pass the time after lights out in their cell, Molina will recount films to Valentín. These movies—there are six of them in all—form the book’s backbone. As he narrates the story of “Cat People,” Molina is expansive, romantic, and charming. Valentín is the opposite: terse, controlling, and analytical. When Molina describes the protagonist as “not thinking about the cold, it’s as if she’s in some other world, all wrapped up in herself,” Valentín responds, “If she’s wrapped up inside herself, she’s not in some other world. That’s a contradiction.” (Later, Valentín establishes the rules of their talk, demanding that Molina’s stories contain “no food and no naked girls.”) Valentín only likes the movie once he is able to interpret it in Marxist and Freudian terms. The highest praise he can offer is “it’s all so logical, it’s fantastic.” Our sympathies are drawn toward Molina. He’s the dreamer, the romantic, the sincere one, and Valentín—who studies all day and cannot even tell his girlfriend that he loves her, because the resistance needs them both more than they need each other—feels almost inhuman in his discipline, incapable of recognizing that his dream of Marxist revolution is a romantic fantasy of its own.

It is no wonder, then, that the adaptations, which reduce the story to a romance between two seeming opposites amid a backdrop of degradation and fantasy, proved so much more successful. Ultimately, however, it is the book that will survive. The musical hasn’t been produced in New York since its hit Broadway run ended in 1995, and the film today feels painfully, at times hilariously, dated. William Hurt, an often wonderful actor, was miscast as Molina. Puig had objected to Hurt, responding to his signing on to the film with “in my bed maybe, but not as Molina!” And even though Hurt won an Oscar for his performance, Puig was right. Hurt, physically too large and obviously impersonating rather than inhabiting a fabulous gay character, somehow overacts and underplays at the same time. The director, Hector Babenco, primarily known for documentaries, lacks the sense of visual style the film demands, and the movie seems embarrassed by the two men’s sexual relationship. The screenplay reduces Molina and Valentín’s affair to a one-off favor that Valentín does for Molina, and the camera cannot even show us the titular kiss between the two characters, on which the ending hinges. The film is a work of compromise, between director and stars, between screenplay and Hollywood mores, and between Puig and his pocketbook—one that reinforces the very categories that the novel sought to break down.

Unlike the movie, which feels fixed in time, the novel of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” feels timeless, or perhaps newly relevant again and again. Its meaning has already shifted for me over the decades, from a moving insistence on gay personhood to a prescient and acutely felt dramatization of how the gender binary imprisons us all. Who knows what it will mean when I revisit it again in a decade—but it will be waiting, provocative, defiant, cursi, and ready to challenge whatever boundaries we put around ourselves. ♦

[cyberholic77]

WIP WHENEVER

Got tagged by @ouroboros-hideout! Thank you for always tagging me uwu

Right now I'm not drawing anything xD I haven't draw shit since I made that Johnny Silvercat with the dick shaped cake(? But I've writing a lot and right now I'm working on a small thing about Valentín. My canon ending for Valentín is him commiting suicide so I'm writing him saying goodbye to his mom because he's a mama's boy. His mom is in Chile while he stayed on NC so they just talk through phone.

"—Valentín, mijo, are you having trouble sleeping again? Why are you calling, it must be so late there in Night City.— As any other mom, she could feel it, she perceived Valentín's dull tone of voice, the whistling sound of his lungs as if he struggled to breath yet trying to hide it. —I'm okay mom, just wanted to call now that I have a few minutes, that's all.— Valentín tried to supress a cough. In Johnny's face he saw disaproval because they both knew Valentín was lying to his mother, saying everything was fine while holding a gun on his hand, grasping it so tight that his knuckles were turning white.

—Will you come to visit soon? I can maybe cook something for you, bebé, you can bring Kerry too so I can finally meet him in person. Te amo hijo.— It hurt so much, to hear his mother's sweet, gentle tone, hopeful. If Johnny saw tears on Valentín's eyes, he said nothing."

I live for the angst. I need to check the grammar and add more things but for now that's all the WIPs I have sdndoidnfd OH I'M ALSO PLANNING THE STORY FOR A NEW V BECAUSE I HAVE 550 HOURS ON STEAM AND I NEED TO MAKE THEM 1.000

As always no pressure for the people I'm tagging. <3

@sacredcyber @leota-nexus @streetkid-named-desire @hesperdern

[a-prekliatyvlk]

                Meet Valentín (Val-en-teen) Roman Vuxakin 

Valentín Roman is Vavrinac’s only full blood wolf biological son or Pure Blooded Wolf. Skuli, Vali and Artem are all bitten wolves so they do not count. Valentín was supposed to inherit the pack but he got wounded and Vavrinac made sure he kept his son locked away. Valentín was kept under lock and key by a curse so to speak, think sleeping beauty. He was kept alive in a hidden location and when Vavrinac died he would be released form that sleep and essentially wake up. 

Valentín has the same features of Vavrinac so when he did wake up, he scared the shit out of everyone because it basically made him appear in the the pack house back yard and everyone almost flipped their lids when they saw him. He does have cuts on his back and cheeks must like Katia does because technically speaking he was in her shoes, only the hunters didn’t really want him they wanted Katia. 

He tends to be very formal, not in a weird way but the last time he’s seen anyone is a very very long time. He doesn’t want to rule the pack he does just kinda want to live. He wants to do stuff and see the world. Only the twin’s arent sure if thats a good idea considering. But they just watch over him while they do things. Val or Roman just likes being apart of things. 

Here are some stats on Valentín Roman. 

Preferred name: Val, Roman or Valentín Roman. 

Height: 6′9″ 

Eyes: Violet / Baby blue 

Hair: white blonde hair that is fluffy at the top

Favorite Color: any color, but he tends to like red. 

Favorite Flower: Roses

Favorite Food: Pasta

Favorite Drink: Red Wine 

Sweet, Sour, Salty or Spicy: Prefers a combo of Sweet and Spicy

Birthday: Unknown 

Scars: A scar across his right cheek all the way down and under his neck and into his chest. He does have tons of scars across his back as well and that is something he tends to not really speak about but they sort of match Katia’s but are more sporadic and deeper. 

Favorite Season: Summer 

Music: Prefers classical music

Books: Shakespeare anything by him Valentín loves.  

[ezekielurquhart]

@senatusstarters location: the FUNCTION notes: Ezekiel as Cardi B, Adamo as J Balvin, and Amico as Bad Bunny. Big shoutout to Eren, Eric, and Elijah as the backup dancers. Isla, Cloe, and Flora on backup vocals.

A backwards somersault off a set of satyr-made enchanted turntables brought Ezekiel to the front of the dance floor as the backup vocalists started in. "Yeah baby, I like it like that," Grin wide and bright, he pointed at Remi through the parting crowd as they funeral attendees made space for Lil' Nasty, Amico, Adamo, and their backup dancers. They made walking around in small circles and smiling look effortless.

"You gotta' believe me when I tell you," "I said I like it like that," "You gotta' believe me when I tell you,""I said I like it like."

Michael handed Lil' Nasty his microphone as the aspiring rapper and DJ started off, his love of everything fine and flashy coming across with his overwhelming self confidence. "Now I like dollars, I like diamonds, I like stunting, I like shining I like million dollar deals, where's my pen, bitch I'm signin' (Signin') I like those Balenciagas (Those), the ones that look like socks I like going to the jeweler, I put rocks all in my watch (Cha-ching) I like texts from my exes, when they want a second chance (What?) I like proving people wrong, I do what they say I can't (he can't)" "They call me Lil' Nasty, banging body, spicy papi, hot tamale Hotter than a Somali, fur coat, Ferrari Hop out the stu', jump in the coupe (Coupe) Big Dipper on top of the roof Flexing on bitches as hard as I can Eating halal, driving the Lam' Told that bitch I'm sorry (Sorry) 'Bout my coins like Mario (Mario) Yeah they call me Freak Nasty I run this shit like cardio"

"Oh, damn Diamond district in the jag (Gang, I said I like it like that) Certified, you know I'm gang, gang (Gang, gang I said I like it like) Drop the top and blow the brains, wouh (Wouh! I said I like it like that) Oh he's so handsome, what's his name? (Yeah, wouh, I said I like it) Oh I need the dollars, cha-ching (I said I like it like that) Beat it up like piñatas (I said I like it like) Tell the driver, close the curtains (I said I like it like that, skrt) Bad kid make him nervous (I said I like it)" Ciro tossed Amico his own microphone as Ezekiel and the demon high fived. Incapable of not showboating, the vampire started breakdancing in front of the backup dancers as Adamo pulled a money gun out of somewhere and started making it rain on him. "Chambean, chambean, pero no jalan (¡Jalan!) Tú compras to'a las Jordan, bo', a mí me las regalan (Hehe-he) I spend in the club (wouh), what you have in the bank (Yeah) This is the new religion, bang, en Latino gang, gang, yeah Trato de hacer dieta (Yeah), pero es que en el closet tengo mucha grasa (Wouh)"

"Ya mudé la' Gucci pa' dentro de casa, yeh (¡Wouh!) Cabrón, a ti no te conocen ni en Plaza (No) El Diablo me llama, pero Jesucristo me abraza (Amén) Guerrero como Eddie, que viva la raza, yeh Me gustan boricuas, me gustan cubana' Me gusta el acento de las colombianas (¿Qué hubo pues?) Como mueve el culo la dominicana (¿Qué lo que?) Lo rico que me chingan las venezolanas (¡Wouh!) Andamos activos, Perico Pin Pin (Wouh) Billetes de cien en el maletín (Ching) Que retumbe el bajo, Bobby Valentín, yeh (Boo) Aquí es prohibido amar, diles, Charytín Que pal' picor les tengo Claritín"

"Yo llego a la disco y se forma el motín (Rrr)

"Diamond district in the jag (Gang, I said I like it like that)" "Bad Bunny baby, bebé, bebé, bebé"

Amico fell into the routine with the dancers, leading the number as the three men were clearly in their element. Ezekiel hadn't even broken a sweat. He was also a vampire so he didn't sweat but the important takeaway was that he was a performer.

"Certified, you know I'm gang, gang (Gang, gang I said I like it like) Drop the top and blow the brains, wouh (Wouh! I said I like it like that) Oh he's so handsome, what's his name? (Yeah, wouh, I said I like it) Oh I need the dollars, cha-ching (I said I like it like that) Beat it up like piñatas (I said I like it like)"

"Tell the driver, close the curtains (I said I like it like that, skrt) Bad kid make him nervous (I said I like it)

Udaeus tossed Adamo his microphone as Ezekiel did a standing full backflip, somersaulting into more elaborate breakdancing.

"Como Celia Cruz tengo el azúcar (azúca') Tu jeva me vio y se fue de pecho como Jimmy Snuka (Ah) Te vamos tumbar la peluca Y arranca pal' carajo, cabrón, que a ti no te vo'a pasar la hookah (Hookah, hookah)"

"Mis tenis Balenciaga me reciben en la entrada (Wouh) Pa-pa-pa-parazzi, like I'm Lady Gaga (Wouh) Y no te me hagas (Hey) Que en cover de Billboard tú has visto mi cara (Hey) No salgo de tu mente (Wouh) Donde quieras que viajes has escuchado "Mi Gente" Yo no soy high (high), soy como el Testarossa ('Rossa)"

"Yo soy el que se la vive y también el que la goza (Goza, goza) Es la cosa, mami es la cosa (Cosa, cosa) El que mira sufre y el que toca goza (Goza, goza)"

The three men sang in tandem as Amico stepped out of the head of the danceline to join the other two centre stage, Ezekiel in the middle of the two men unintentionally emphasising a height difference.

"I said I like it like that I said I like it like that (Rrr) I said I like it like that (Wouh) I said I like it like that Diamond district in the jag (Gang, I said I like it like that) Certified, you know I'm gang, gang (Gang, gang I said I like it like) Drop the top and blow the brains, wouh (I said I like it like that) Oh he's so handsome, what's his name? (I said I like it)"

The music faded as the dancers and backup vocalists dissipated into the crowd, Ezekiel ran a hand through his hair - the full face mask he’d been wearing was abandoned a long time ago along with the spiky jacket he’d had on. Ezekiel grabbed the first bottle of champagne he could find before he shook it, popped the lid and sprayed it over the crowd. “This party goes crazy!”

[nightsidewrestling]

D.U.D.E Bios: Zacarías Huerta

Billie's Second 'Baby Daddy' Zac Huerta (2020)

The second man to have a child with Lust herself Zacarías, Mr Huerta is a man with a family, and an extra 'unwanted' child after a night with Billie 'Lust' Lucifarian.

"Keep the kid, I want nothing to do with him."

Name

Full Legal Name: Zacarías Guadalupe Huerta

First Name: Zacarías

Meaning: Spanish form of Zechariah (From the Hebrew name 'Zekharyah' meaning 'Yahweh Remembers' From 'Zakhar' meaning 'to remember' and 'Yah' referring to the Hebrew God) and Zacharias (The Greek form of Zechariah)

Pronunciation: sa-ka-REE-as

Origin: Spanish

Middle Name: Guadalupe

Meaning: From a Spanish title of the Virgin Mary, 'Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe', meaning 'Our Lady of Guadalupe'. Guadalupe is a Spanish place name of a famous convent, derived from Arabic 'Wadi' meaning 'Valley, River' possibly combined with Latin 'Lupus' meaning 'Wolf'

Pronunciation: ghwa-dha-LOO-peh

Origin: Spanish

Surname: Huerta

Meaning: Means 'Garden, Orchard' in Spanish, ultimately from Latin 'hortus'

Pronunciation: WEHR-ta

Origin: Spanish

Alias: Mr Huerta, Mr H, Señor Huerta, Señor H

Reason: Zac is a teacher

Nicknames: Zac, Lupe

Titles: Mr, Señor

Characteristics

Age: 36

Gender: Male. He/Him Pronouns

Race: Human

Nationality: Mexican

Ethnicity: Latino/Hispanic

Birth Date: December 15th 1984

Symbols: Umbrellas, Rain

Sexuality: Heterosexual

Religion: Catholic

Native Language: Spanish

Spoken Languages: Spanish, English

Relationship Status: Married

Astrological Sign: Sagittarius

Theme Song (Ringtone on Billie's Phone): 'Him 'Em Up Style (Oops!)' - Blu Cantrell

Voice Actor: Diego Luna

Geographical Characteristics

Birthplace: Oaxaca de Juárez, Centro District, Oaxaca, Mexico

Current Location: Oaxaca de Juárez, Centro District, Oaxaca, Mexico

Hometown: Oaxaca de Juárez, Centro District, Oaxaca, Mexico

Appearance

Height: 5'7" / 170 cm

Weight: 150 lbs / 68 kg

Eye Colour: Brown

Hair Colour: Black

Hair Dye: None

Body Hair: Hairy

Facial Hair: Full Beard

Tattoos: (As of Jan 2020) None

Piercings: None

Scars: None

Health and Fitness

Allergies: None

Alcoholic, Smoker, Drug User: Social Drinker

Illnesses/Disorders: Poor Eyesight

Medications: None

Any Specific Diet: None

Relationships

Allies: N/A

Enemies: N/A

Friends: Heath Ott, Donato Santos, Vasco Romero, Ivor Rhydderch, Rafferty O'Sullivan, Caden McDermott, Darach Rhydderch Faust McConnell

Colleagues: Too many to list

Rivals: N/A

Closest Confidant: Iridián Huerta

Mentor: Darío Huerta

Significant Other: Iridián Huerta (35, Wife, Née Torres)

Previous Partners: Bienvenida Marino (37, Ex-Girlfriend)

Parents: Darío Huerta (66, Father), Jazmín Huerta (65, Mother, Née Guerra)

Parents-In-Law: Adán Torres (65, Father-In-Law), Pacífica Torres (34, Mother-In-Law, Née Moreno)

Siblings: Pía Simões (33, Sister, Née Huerta)

Siblings-In-Law: José Ángel Simões (32, Pía's Husband), Yéssica Chaves (30, José's Sister, Née Simões), Wálter Chaves (31, Yéssica's Husband),Valentín Torres (31, Iridían's Brother), Visitación Torres (Valentin's Wife, Née Duarte)

Nieces & Nephews: Úrsula Simões (11, Niece), Sócrates Simões (8, Nephew), Rosa María Chaves (10, Niece), Quintín Chaves (7, Nephew), Purificación Torres (10, Niece), Óscar Torres (7, Nephew)

Children: Antonio Huerta-Marino (14, Son), María Guadalupe Huerta (12, Daughter), Lucero Huerta (9, Son), Nayeli Huerta (6, Daughter), Yunuen Huerta (3, Son)

Children-In-Law: None

Grandkids: None

Great Grandkids: None

Wrestling

Billed From: N/A

Trainer: N/A

Managers: N/A

Wrestlers Managed: N/A

Debut: N/A

Debut Match: N/A

Retired: N/A

Retirement Match: N/A

Wrestling Style: N/A

Stables: N/A

Teams: N/A

Regular Moves: N/A

Finishers: N/A

Refers To Fans As: N/A

Extras

Backstory: Born and raised in Mexico, Zacarías travelled to the UK to gain his teaching degree before flying back home, having a short romance with Billie before marrying his childhood sweetheart.

Trivia: Nothing of note

[coffeemortis]

⌕ . ˚ ⅋. 「 TENOCH HUERTA. 35. CISGENDER. HE/HIM. 」 CAYETANO ORTIZ, otherwise known as GALEN, joined the libertalia five years ago as a SURGEON. around libertalia, the VIRGO has a reputation for being PATIENT & STUBBORN perhaps because they're best known for assisting in the recovering of the serena's blades of which they are most proud. while preparing for a heist, they listen to VER EM CORES by RASHID & LINIKER. makes sense considering they remind me of: comforting scent of lavander, vintage decor pieces, decaffeinated coffee with milk, green doodles in the corner of books, açaí bowls with banana and strawberry.

part one: statistics.

basic information:

full name: cayetano valentín franco ortiz.

nickname(s): cay (most people that he meets), tito (his sister and other childhood friends), caetano (most common mishearing of his name, that he just came to accept).

age: thirty five.

date of birth: september 12, 1987.

place of birth: san miguel de allende, guanajuato, mexico.

ethnicity: nahua, purepecha, and spanish descent.

nationality: mexican.

gender: cis man.

pronouns: he / him / his.

orientation: bisexual.

languages spoken: spanish (native), nahuatl, portuguese and english (fluent), lsm and libras (signed languages in mexican spanish and portuguese, both at beginner level), italian (couple of phrases).

accent: in any language that he speaks, his mexican background still evident (intonation patterns, rhythm of speech, the pronunciation of vowels and consonants…); in portuguese, there is a blend of his spanish accent with the accent of the pará region, including slangs and intonation of certain words.

family ties:

mother: evangelina ortiz (deceased).

father: unknown.

siblings: patrizia ortiz (younger sister).

spouse / partner: none atm.

children: none atm.

pets: nayru and kafei (3 years old, siamese cats).

occupational information:

codename: galen.

meaning behind codename: it is the anglicized name of a greek physician, surgeon and philosopher, who made many contributions to science through his studies.

position: surgeon.

skillset: wilderness medicine, first aid and emergency response, cross-cultural communication, research skills, navigation skills.

physical appearance:

face claim: actor tenoch huerta.

hair color: black.

eye color: dark brown.

height: 1,76 m / 5'9.29".

weight: 76 kg / 167.55 lbs.

build: athletic.

tattoos: various.

piercings: an earring in each ear.

clothing style: casual and practical, most of the time he's wearing lightweight pants and a fun shirt. he's very fond of sunglasses, and likes to wear accessories when he's not at work. has a collection of sneakers and hats, for various occasions.

distinguishing characteristics: almost always with glasses, his tattoos, cat fur in his clothes.

personality:

mbti: isfj.

enneagram: 1w2.

element: earth.

western zodiac: virgo.

chinese zodiac: rabbit.

positive traits: thoughtful, patient, detail-oriented, reserved, empathetic, dedicated, versatile.

negative traits: self-critical, stubborn, anxious, worrying, indecisive, pessimistic, overthinker.

hobbies: photography, yoga, collecting paintings, gardening, cooking, study languages, organizing and decluttering.

character inspiration: steve rogers (marvel comics), kara (detroit: become human), aziraphale (good omens), garen (league of legends), annie edison (community), catelyn tully stark (asoiaf).

part two: questionnaire.

001. the professor provides every member of libertalia a unique codename that reflects their personality. each codename is derived from various forms of mythology, folklore, or literature. why do you think the professor chose that name for you? do you agree or disagree with his decision?

⸺ “i remember the guy from my history classes, but only vaguely. he was nice and all, if you forget the questionable parts of his methods…” galen shrugs, pouring out more coffee on his mug, and continues. “it's kind of what i do here, be a little nice and very questionable. anyway, i think the professor is just calling me a nerd in a different language, but i will pretend that it's a flattering way to say i am a scholar or something.”

002. gaining an invitation into libertalia isn’t an easy feat. what do you think made you special enough to get handpicked by the professor? and what qualities do you think allowed you to join your position?

⸺ “promise me you won't think i'm being arrogant or anything, but,” he pauses, as if telling a secret “i'm really good at my job.” and then he laughs, lighting the weight of the previous statement. “but it's true, though. after so many years studying and being out there in environments that are less than ideal, having a doctor like me that is perfectly capable of handling emergencies and not freak out when, let's say, someone gets bitten by a snake or hit by a car is pretty valuable. it gets ‘easier’ to do dangerous things when you know that you won't die from the lack of immediate support.”

003. the captain’s crew is the highest position at libertalia, they are the select few who are aware of the professor’s identity. do you desire to graduate to this level?

⸺ “they're a bit like gods, aren't they? yes, it would be nice to know this organization's greatest secret, an honor, ever. it is a big responsibility though, a long, long term goal and not something that i can put in a five steps plan, unfortunately. i am happy to be where i currently am, with my fellow surgeons. maybe one day, who knows the future.”

004. although many members of libertalia don’t know each other’s personal lives, it’s rumored that many members came from suspicious backgrounds. who were you before joining and what was your life like prior?

⸺ he clicks his tongue, thinking before saying: “i was a doctor, always had been, and when my mother died, i knew i needed a change in my life. i joined a program of the brazilian government, in circa 2014, that takes foreign doctors to places in the country that need medical attention – that's how i ended up living in pará for years now and knowing so much about the amazon region.” galen says it softly, drowning in good memories. “i quitted when i got invited to join libertalia, though. i love primary care, but i need more in my life, if you know what i mean.”

005. what was your primary motivation for joining libertalia? was it for the riches or for the thrill of adventure? or is there something else motivating you to continue working for the group? what do you hope to achieve?

⸺ “first it was the money.” he confesses, with a timid smile crossing his face. “i really wanted to move out of the small apartment i had for my first years in the country. then it was just… what else am i going to do? i could go back to academia, maybe finally finish my doctorate, but it wouldn't be as exciting as the challenges that being a surgeon here is. some say that ‘knowledge is a reward in itself’, and i believe it is true in my case.”

006. how would the other members describe you? would you consider yourself to be a team-player or do you prefer to work independently?

⸺ “god, i hope i am good enough for these people.” a grin appears in his face as he makes the joke. “i couldn't imagine myself not being a team player, i mean,” he points to his equipment at the nearest table, “not trusting your doctor is a terrible way to die, in my opinion.

007. libertalia is anonymous, therefore necessitates secrecy outside of the group. how do you balance your personal life outside of this, granted you have one? is there a clear separation between libertalia and your personal life?

⸺ “i have the same policy since my college days: just because i helped with a bandage, it doesn't mean you need to follow me into eats and drinks later. i am here to help, that's all, no need to bring my problems from home to the group and vice versa. as much as i like to chat away about many, many things, i need to focus, as it is literally a matter of life and death sometimes. but, who knows, maybe if i trust you enough, one day i will let you know my mom's old quesadilla recipe.”

008. henry avery’s treasure has been lost since 1695. even with the brightest minds on the case, all leads to find the treasure haven’t turned up. avery’s treasure is the professor’s white whale and after several years of searching, many believe the treasure ceases to exist. do you believe the treasure exists?

⸺ “heavens, no.” a quiet chuckle escaped his lips. “i'm sorry, i know it's this group's lifelong dream, and i know it's important to have a target to shoot for, but there's a difference between ‘looking for a rare painting that was sold a couple years ago’ and ‘looking for a centuries old lost treasure using vague clues’. call me a pessimist, but i'd rather spend our resources in real things, not in… whatever this is.”

009. do you trust the professor? do you trust the libertalia?

⸺ he ponders the question while sipping the last bits of his coffee. “maybe.” galen chuckles, barely audible. “just because it's my job, it doesn't mean i have to blindly trust the professor. one thing is to trust my coworkers, or the captain's crew; another thing, completely different, is to blindly trust someone i don't even know the name.”

[brookeolin]

The film and musical so overshadowed their source material that, when I first encountered the book, in a course called Subjectivity in Literature my freshman year of college, I thought that my eccentric professor had assigned a novelization to us as a way of challenging our assumptions about which books were worthy of study. Within a few pages, I realized my mistake. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” is a mysterious, formally inventive, beguiling work about two prisoners during the Dirty War in Argentina: a Marxist guerilla named Valentín and a gay window dresser named Molina, who develop a transformative relationship as the latter narrates the plots of his favorite movies to the former. When I was nineteen, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” struck me as a work about finding love and preserving one’s humanity in the most inhumane of places. It is in some ways the opposite of Ariel Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden,” a play in which the psychic scars of the Pinochet regime in Chile prove a universal solvent, dissolving any attempt at decency, or humanity, or truth. Reading the novel in the period between the passage of the Defense of Marriage Act and the repeal of sodomy laws in Lawrence v. Texas, I believed it to be a work of protest art, one that defiantly asserts Molina’s personhood even amid the Dirty War’s depredations. Reading “Kiss of the Spider Woman” today, the prison seems less like a real place, and the novel seems far trickier, and far harder to nail down to any one meaning. “Kiss of the Spider Woman” slips between different interpretations, just as its late-night conversations wander from the most frivolous of trivialities to the deepest of truths.

[dailyrugbytoday]

Junior Wallabies vs Argentina - Rugby Championship U20s

New Post has been published on https://thedailyrugby.com/junior-wallabies-vs-argentina-rugby-u20/

The Daily Rugby

https://thedailyrugby.com/junior-wallabies-vs-argentina-rugby-u20/

Junior Wallabies vs Argentina - Rugby Championship U20s

Junior Wallabies vs Argentina Rugby Championship U20s have named their teams for Round 1 of the TRC U20. Nathan Grey has chosen a 23-man playing group to face Argentina in Thursday’s U20 Rugby Championship opener. Lock Toby Macpherson captains the team, with vice-captain Ronan Leahy playing inside center.

Jack Barrett, who recently made his Super Rugby Pacific debut, tops a front row that includes Bryn Edwards and Tevita Alatini, with Harvey Cordukes joining Macpherson in the engine room.

Aden Ekanayake, an Australian Sevens prospect, joins Reds flanker Joe Liddy and Brumbies number eight Jack Harley in the back row.

Junior Wallabies vs Argentina – Rugby Championship U20s

Australia will face Argentina on Thursday 2 May at Sunshine Coast Stadium (7pm kick off).

The Junior Wallabies vs Argentina U20 rugby match will be shown live and exclusive on Stan Sport.

Time Thu, May 2, 2024, 3:00 PM

Location Sunshine Coast Stadium

Junior Wallabies vs Argentina – Rugby Championship U20s Predictions

Australia performed admirably in the 2023 U20 Rugby World Cup, despite a difficult draw against England and Ireland. Argentina, on the other hand, had a more favorable draw, but faced inconsistent sides in Italy and South Africa.

It could be another tight finish, but I believe Australia will break away late in the game to win by ten or more points.

Australia finished seventh in the 2023 U20 Rugby World Cup.

Australia has won its last two matches, against New Zealand and Wales.

Argentina finished ninth in the 2023 U20 Rugby World Cup.

Argentina won the final two matches of the 2023 U20 Rugby World Cup.

Argentina Pumitas versus Australia:

CORREA , Diego (Club Atlético Estudiantes) 2. VIVAS, Juan Manuel (Los Tordos) 3. RAPETTI, Tomás (Alumni) 4. GARCÍA IANDOLINO, Álvaro (Los Tordos) 5. EFRAÍN, Elías (Jockey Club of Córdoba) 6. PENOUCOS, Juan (Belgrano Athletic) 7. FERNÁNDEZ DE OLIVEIRA, Santos (SIC) 8. BERNASCONI, Juan Pedro (La Plata RC) 9. DI BIASE, Tomás (Deportiva Francaise) 10. DI LUCCA, Santino (La Plata RC) 11. SOLER FILOTY, Valentín (Tala RC) 12. BOCCO, Tomás (Córdoba Athletic) 13. SÁNCHEZ VALAROLO, Faustino (Palermo Bajo) 14. ROSSETTO, Franco (Club Atlético Estudiantes) 15. ELIZALDE, Benjamín (Deportiva Francesa / Tigres RC)

Relacements:  16. CAMERLINCKX, Marcos (Bella Vista Regattas), 17. GARGALLO BAZÁN, Gonzalo (Córdoba Athletic), 18. GALVÁN, Gael (Pucará), 19. ASEVEDO, Luciano (Liceo RC), 20. ROSSI, Julián (RC High School), 21. PODESTÁ, Genaro (Marist RC), 22. FOSSATI, Mateo (Belgrano Athletic), 23. SILVA, Timothy (SIC)

Read more about U20 Rugby Championship Australia U20 vs Argentina U20

Australia U20 team versus Argentina:

1. Jack Barrett (Waratahs)

2. Bryn Edwards (Waratahs)

3. Tevita Alatini (Brumbies)

4. Toby Macpherson (Brumbies – captain)

5. Harvey Cordukes (Brumbies)

6. Aden Ekanayake (Waratahs)

7. Joe Liddy (Reds)

8. Jack Harley (Brumbies)

9. Doug Philipson (Force)

10. Joey Fowler (Rebels)

11. Xavier Rubens (Reds)

12. Ronan Leahy (Force – vice captain)

13. Jarrah McLeod (Brumbies)

14. Will McCulloch (Reds)

15. Shane Wilcox (Brumbies)

Replacements: 16. Nathaniel Tiitii (Waratahs), 17. Tavi Tuipulotu (Rebels), 18. Nick Bloomfield (Reds), 19. Ben Daniels (Reds), 20. Ben Di Staso (Waratahs), 21. Hwi Sharples (Waratahs), 22. Cullen Gray (Brumbies), 23. Angus Staniforth (Brumbies)

[vincentmaiquez]

THE AUTHORS EACH PERIOD.

PERIOD OF ENLIGHTENMENT.

Graciano López y Jaena, commonly known as Graciano López Jaena, was a Filipino journalist, orator, reformist, and national hero who is well known for his newspaper, La Solidaridad. Philippine historians regard López Jaena, along with Marcelo H. del Pilar and José Rizal, as the triumvirate of Filipino propagandists. Wikipedia

Born: December 18, 1856, Jaro

Died: January 20, 1896, Barcelona, Spain

Parents: Placido López, Maria Jacoba Jaena

Place of burial: Fossar de la Pedrera, Barcelona, Spain

Nationality: Spanish

Books: Graciano López Jaena: Speeches, Articles, and Letters

Education: St. Vincent Ferrer Seminary; University of Valencia

WRITE: FRAY BATOD

Due to financial problems, he dropped out and returned to Iloilo to practice medicine. During this period, his visits with the poor began to stir feelings about the injustices that were common. At the age of 18 he wrote the satirical story Fray Botod, which depicted a fat and lecherous friar.

SOURECE:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graciano_L%C3%B3pez_Jaena#Biography

Marcelo Hilario del Pilar y Gatmaitán, commonly known as Marcelo H. del Pilar and also known by his pen name Pláridel, was a Filipino writer, lawyer, journalist, and freemason. Del Pilar, along with José Rizal and Graciano López Jaena, became known as the leaders of the Reform Movement in Spain. Wikipedia

Born: August 30, 1850, Bulacan

Died: July 4, 1896, Old Hospital de la Santa Creu, Barcelona, Spain

Nickname: Plaridel

Full name: Marcelo Hilario del Pilar y Gatmaitán

Siblings: Toribio H. del Pilar, Fernando del Pilar, Valentín del Pilar, MORE

Parents: Blasa Gatmaitán, Julián Hilario del Pilar

Children: Anita H. del Pilar de Marasigan, MORE

WRITE: La soberanía monacal en Filipinas

“La Soberanía Monacal en Filipinas” (Friar Supremacy in the Philippines) was among the first pamphlets he wrote in Spain. Del Pilar headed the political section of the Asociación Hispano-Filipina founded in Madrid by Filipinos and Spanish sympathizers for the purpose of agitating for colonial reforms.

SORCE:https://www.philippinemasonry.org/marcelo-h-del-pilar.html#:~:text=%E2%80%9CLa%20Soberan%C3%ADa%20Monacal%20en%20Filipinas,of%20agitating%20for%20colonial%20reforms.

PERIOD OF AMERICAN REGIME

[livehorses]

He compartido 602 publicaciones este 2022

49 publicaciones originales (8 %)

553 reblogueos (92 %)

Estos son los blogs que más he reblogueado:

@keepxsolxinxsolxinvictus

@livehorses

@queenofnevermore

@hectic-hector

@mademoiseli

He etiquetado 574 publicaciones en 2022

Solo el 5 % de mis publicaciones no incluye ninguna etiqueta

#❤️❤️❤️: 81 publicaciones

#disney encanto: 62 publicaciones

#fanart: 49 publicaciones

#yes: 31 publicaciones

#bruno madrigal: 28 publicaciones

#me tbh: 25 publicaciones

#cats: 24 publicaciones

#war in ukraine: 24 publicaciones

#pixar coco: 22 publicaciones

#mexican pride: 21 publicaciones

La etiqueta más larga tiene 132 caracteres

#and then suddenly everything became very solemn. a distant but very moving music started to play and i saw the both of them kneeling

Mis publicaciones más populares este 2022:

5

I would like to clarify on something I've seen the people have said a lot since The Sea Beast came out: the characters we see in the movie aren't pirates.

Why? Well, because pirates were people who stole property from other ships on the sea. There's no evidence in the movie that stated the crew of the Inevitable took away the richness of other nations. Not even in the name of the King and Queen as the corsaires did in their times.

The crew is completely a group of sea monster hunters sponsored by the Empire, they don't steal anything and aren't chased by any law.

I don't know if you like to call them pirates just because they behave like that, still, they're just common sailors and I don't see the point of calling them otherwise.

19 notas. Fecha de publicación: 25 de julio de 2022

4

You can congratulate me if you want, but just to be clear, here in México there's not such a thing like a mexican party for Cinco de Mayo. Of course, we have the day off, there are some commemorations in schools and the representation of the Battle in Puebla, but that's all. So no, I don't celebrate it and I don't consider it as the National Mexican Day. Wait four months later for September 15 and 16 to arrive and then we'll be talking.

22 notas. Fecha de publicación: 5 de mayo de 2022

3

Hispanic names (Both genders)

Here I leave a list of Hispanic names for people who write Coco and Encanto fanfics or any other Hispanic inspired story. I'll have reblogged each gender section separatedly because, as always, Tumblr doesn't allow me to have more than 4096 words per post. I'll start with both genders names and red will be used for less common names.

Adrián/Adriana

Alejandro/Alejandra

Alexis/Alexa

Andrés/Andrea

Camilo/Camila

Carlos/Karla

Cristian/Cristina

Daniel/Daniela

Emilio/Emilia

Eugenio/Eugenia

Esteban/Estefanía

Gabriel/Gabriela

Jorge/Georgina

José/Josefina

Juan/Juana

Julián/Juliana

Julio/Julia-Julieta

Luis/Luisa

Mariano/Mariana

Miguel/Micaela

Pablo-Paulo/Paula-Paulina

Patricio/Patricia

Renato/Renata

Valentín/Valentina

Víctor/Victoria

Agustín/Agustina

Alberto/Alberta

Alfonso/Alfonsina

Descúbrela

37 notas. Fecha de publicación: 29 de agosto de 2022

2

Descúbrela

47 notas. Fecha de publicación: 6 de mayo de 2022

Mi publicación más popular de 2022

I have something to tell to the people throwing soup at protection glasses of paintings

First of, why do you attempt against art? Do you really think it's useless and doesn't make any difference? Do you have any idea of how much it costed materially, physically and psycologically to the artists, principally Monet and Van Gogh? For these artists, their artworks were literally their lives. If it wasn't about how art made them feel alive by expressing their most profound feelings, was about how with art, they literally won their daily bread. It was their salary. Art meant so much for them as a way to send a message, to open up minds and challenge an elitist society that found impressionism worthless. They were outcasts.

Mainly for Van Gogh, life was rough. He couldn't even afford food, he only sold one (1) of his many paintings while he was alive, and he had way worse phsycological problems that you could ever imagine to the point he had to be half of his life on a mental hospital. But art held him on the worst times, gave him courage to go on. Even more, he tried anything before art to please his parents, to feel worthy, to make him feel useful, but nothing except art made him feel like he was doing something self satisfactory. Art doesn't have more worth than life, but life without art is meaningless. Art is nothing more than the incarnated manifestation of life experiences.Twelve Sunflowers in a Vase isn't but part of a collection that Van Gogh painted to show how much life was worth living for because society wasn't paying attention to little details that form part of our daily lives and make life beautiful. He was a social activist, and it can be seen that portrayed in many of his paintings. That painting you're attempting to, is the ancestor of the camera your pal was holding. Art makes more concience than soup spilled on a canvas.

Your points are very valid, and I agree with you. The World is at war, hunger and poverty is everywhere and we're on a climate World change crisis. Even more, it's outrageously immoral the prices that these paintings cost today. I think it would be better that these museums were open to the public in general but in the end, there is maintenance staff that live from the salary that the money won generates. But how do you expect to end worldwide hunger when you're wasting food on a multimillion dollar painting? Why do you brag of being against oil when you dye your hair with chemicals and use new printed shirts made out of this oil? How much did it cost the ticket to enter these museums? Why don't you spend that money donating to organizations that urgently need it? If the cans of soup you're throwing at paintings were better donated to home shelters or feeding organizations, people would stop starving. If you're against something, reduce, don't waste, be congruent.

There are other things you can do to stop these problems. There's a peaceful economic sabotage that you can do, way more effective than you think:

Stop buying oil based products like plastic, hair dye, cosmetics, clothing. Go for naturally made things, for artisan made things. You can buy clothing on second hand stores, and you'll reduce the massive clothing production that wastes an amount of water litters and contaminates air, ground and water.

Buy to local sellers. Many products are transported by vehicles like cars, airplanes and ships that use oil fuel and generates high amount of co2. The closer you buy, the better you're helping to reduce oil use. Also, go for public transportation or, if your destination is near, you can walk or use other transportation like bicycles.

Reduce your electricity use and the time you spend online. In the present, the majority of electricity is powered by oil based power centers, and all of Internet data is stored on centers that have to be cooled down by electricity so, the less you stay on social media, the more you will prevent the massive production of unnecessary electricity.

Donate money if you can to organizations that search for other electricity generators that are eco-friendly. Donate old clothing to people that need it, and consume food responsibly so you don't leave leftovers. The food that you get left can be donated as well.

Stop blaming art, and start looking to what artists of the past have to tell you and teach you through their paintings instead. Art is World Culture Patrimony. Start living responsibly and take real action, change your lifestyle, and you'll see how change starts becoming true. If no one uses oil, governments will stop producing it.

I will end this post quoting the russian author Fyodor Dostoievsky: "Beauty will save the World"

And this section of one of the many letters Vincent wrote to his brother Theo:

“What am I in the eyes of most people — a nonentity, an eccentric, or an unpleasant person — somebody who has no position in society and will never have; in short, the lowest of the low. All right, then — even if that were absolutely true, then I should one day like to show by my work what such an eccentric, such a nobody, has in his heart. That is my ambition, based less on resentment than on love in spite of everything, based more on a feeling of serenity than on passion. Though I am often in the depths of misery, there is still calmness, pure harmony and music inside me. I see paintings or drawings in the poorest cottages, in the dirtiest corners. And my mind is driven towards these things with an irresistible momentum.”

Descúbrela

194 notas. Fecha de publicación: 26 de octubre de 2022

Descubre tu resumen del 2022 en Tumblr →