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god-whispers · 10 months

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jun 29

can we talk - new wine

"after two days He will revive us; on the third day He will raise us up, that we may live in His sight." hos 6:2

i don't know how many of you out there are big youtube watchers, but i find it interesting that God is raising up so many watchmen in these hours. (and yes, we all need to be discerning about what we allow in.) no longer is truth to be gleaned exclusively from our church and pastor, many of which are even leading masses astray or hesitant to deal with the later days. God is speaking directly to those who are willing to search the scriptures and open up knowledge sealed for these end times.

one of those watchmen i love to watch is tyler on channel "generation2434." for those who don't immediately grasp it, the name is taken from matthew 24. "assuredly, I say to you, this generation will by no means pass away till all these things take place." that's directly from our Lord and many of us take Him at His word.

new revelation is saying that the feast of pentecost is not the traditional time always celebrated, but instead on the feast of new wine celebrated on the 9th of av, our july 26th sundown this year. i don't have time or space to explain it all here, but tyler has several videos explaining it in detail. suffice it to say that one would assume pentecost should be fulfillment of a feast as all of Christ's life was a fulfillment of scripture. it also makes sense why many of the crowd at peter's preaching would think they were drunk.

they say this is also when boaz took ruth (a gentile) to be his bride. boaz's union with ruth is a clear representation of Jesus and His gentile bride. it is a summer time, a harvest time when ruth came to Him in secret. proverbs says, "he who gathers in summer is a wise son," and we know Jesus is a wise son.

whether the 9th of av will be the rapture of the church is a matter of speculation, but i believe it qualifies as a high watch time. the year still depends upon when our Lord was crucified: 30, 31, 32 or 33 AD. whichever year it is, it means that we are now in a four year possible span which rounds out the two thousand years, the second day in God's timetable. i lean toward 30 AD because the temple was destroyed in 70 AD and that is 40 years from 30 AD, a highly significant number with God.

if indeed it is to happen this year, it would mean we are only about a month away from joining our Lord. at least it means that for those of us who believe in a pre-trib rapture and i see it confirmed more in scripture everyday. so 2030 minus the seven year tribulation equals 2023. "God did not appoint us to wrath" 1 thess 5:9, and the whole seven years is His wrath being poured out and isn't complete until the last bowl is poured out. "the seven last plagues, for in them the wrath of God is complete." rev 15:1 there is no place of safety thru such turbulence; only a deliverance from. His wrath, having been fulfilled, awaits His righteous judgment.

i know there is much dissension in the body whether it will be pre-trib or post-trib. it's understandable how someone could take either stance. after all, why should this generation be exempt from the suffering of all previous saints? i would answer that many right now are suffering through trials and tribulations, but it is not God's wrath. it is man's. and indeed, even if there be only one month until our rapture, who knows what wrath satan and unrepentant man may deliver to believers? if it hasn't touched you already, it may yet.

even now, war is rumored as imminent, lives of children and adults are being willingly mutilated, lawlessness runs amuck, confusion and deception reigns while artificial intelligence prepares us for the final great deception. all the while people are blindly "eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage;" entranced by the bobbles around them and blindly oblivious to the terrors awaiting them. "but even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing." 2 cor 4:3

scripture says, "when they say, 'peace and safety!' then sudden destruction comes upon them, as labor pains upon a pregnant woman." 1 thess 5:3 if this preludes the coming of the Lord at the end of the tribulation, how could people possibly be thinking "peace and safety" and what possible "sudden destruction" could surpass what the seven years has not already brought? it says, "unless those days were shortened, no flesh would be saved" matt 24:22

whatever one believes, our Lord is coming and He's coming soon. so how should our conduct be? Jesus scolded those at His first coming because they did not recognize the season of His coming. we should know the season. the convergence of sin and signs are all around us. "the night is coming when no one can work." john 9:4 we must seize the day and work feverishly for His glory; for sinners sake and the Father's heart.

"exhorting one another, and so much the more as you see the day approaching." heb 10:25 this is the day all the saints of old have been waiting for and they shall precede us into glory. look up all you who love the Lord. "thus the Lord my God will come, and all the saints with You." zech 14:5 yes, we shall return with Him when He comes, to rule with Him in the millennium yet to be. we eagerly await Your summons, oh Lord!

no - we're not into date setting. this is season setting. whatever you think; whatever you believe - don't be afraid to hope and don't quit watching for His soon return. some day it really will be THE DAY!

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lambden · 3 years

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Here’s some belated Geraskier fic that I finally get to post, as last week’s flash fic challenge has wrapped up! This was originally published anonymously; kudos to those of you who guessed that I was the author. Head to the collection to see the picture prompt that inspired this, as well as view the other works. I've been having a great time participating in fandom events like this; I promise there's more on the way!!! (Read on AO3)

Up To Date

prompt: "You were so hot that when you asked if I was the blind date you were looking for, I lied and said yes. But then your actual date comes up to introduce themselves and I'm so embarrassed."

G, 2.3K words, modern AU, Geralt/Jaskier

It shouldn’t be this difficult to find inspiration. He never used to struggle like this in high school, finding his muse in everyone and everything. Even his mundane trip on the city bus to and from school would give Jaskier hundreds of ideas, for poems too personal to publish or lyrics too deep for his band to use. Back then he had thought he lacked discipline and experience, so the clear choice had been to take his interest in poetry one step further and go to university.

The problem, as he’s now discovering halfway through his second year, is that he maybe hates university. He loves it, of course; he loves the praise from his professors and peers, he loves learning about the history of literature and art. He even loves the academic rivalries that wax and wane every term, and the competitions that ignite a mean streak in him he didn’t know he had.

But his assignments are of worse quality than anything he’s ever written before, and try as he might, they aren’t getting any better. Putting words on the page just to meet a count is impossible for a poet, not when the space and thoughts and images are all supposed to be cohesive. Poems used to flow from him so freely he hadn’t been able to keep track and now his well of motivation has just about run dry.

That’s what led him here, for the third time this week. His creative dysfunction has forced him into the day-to-day habits of an elderly man who spends his days reading in public gardens. It hasn’t helped so far, but maybe this third time will be the charm. Jaskier finds his favorite place: right by the koi pond, next to a strange art installation with ivy crawling along it. He sits at the base of the giant question mark, dropping his backpack onto the bench beside him.

“This better fucking work,” mutters Jaskier to himself and the koi, opening today’s book to a random poem. He refuses to let his mind wander at first, gluing his eyes to the page and reading with intense intent. The first poem he sees is about love.

Groaning, Jaskier flips the page. The next poem is also about love.

The third poem is about war, and Jaskier thinks that might be alright, until he realizes what this long-dead poet is trying to tell him, which is that war is also about love. Because it is, of course, but also of course it is. Jaskier scowls deeply and flips through the book to a random page, hoping to find something to spark inspiration that won’t just make him feel hopeless and single and hopelessly single.

Before Jaskier can get through the title, someone speaks to him, startling him so badly he jumps. “Are you Yennefer’s friend?”

Jaskier scrambles to catch the book by its cover and nearly drops it. He hadn’t even heard anyone approach. “Sorry?”

The stranger audibly sighs, as if Jaskier has inconvenienced him terribly. With all the force of someone announcing their presence at their own death row, he grits out, “I’m here for a blind date she set up. With you.” Jaskier looks up at the man and sees him wearing a blank expression, pointing at the question mark in front of the bench. “By the thing.”

“Oh,” Jaskier says, still looking at the man. It takes a second for the words to sink in because the stranger is perhaps the most handsome person Jaskier has ever seen. He could write a thousand poems and still fail to capture his beauty. He has golden eyes, for one, and a sharply chiseled face. Even grimacing like this, his jaw is set in the loveliest way, and his stern brow is framed by platinum white hair, half-tied up. He’s wearing a fairly gloomy outfit for a blind date, but maybe he told whoever Yennefer is that he would be dressed in black. Regardless, he’s making it work.

The gorgeous stranger is still waiting for an answer, scowl worsening as Jaskier tries to make his decision about how the fuck to handle this. Really, there’s no decision at all— he just impulsively takes the leap. All his best ideas come when he’s stumbling forward blind anyway. “Yes,” he finally says, jumping to his feet. “Yes, um, I’m sorry, you caught me off-guard. I’m Jaskier.”

“Geralt.” They’re of a similar height, but Geralt is so much wider. Jaskier wants to climb him like ivy on a question mark. “I’m sorry I interrupted.”

“It’s fine! I got here a while ago. You know, can’t be too early!” Jaskier has never been early for anything in his life. He sits down again and shoves his books into his bag as quickly as he can. Geralt shifts his weight back and forth between his feet before awkwardly sitting on the bench next to Jaskier, looking out at the garden. “I’ve never done this kind of thing before,” he admits, which is true. His usual lies and schemes are much less chaotic.

Geralt doesn’t reply to that, leaving Jaskier to privately wonder about his dating life. He stares at the plants, giving the impression that he might be hideously nervous. Jaskier has no idea why someone like Geralt would be nervous about anything but it’s an awkward situation, to say the least. Right as Jaskier’s about to suggest they get out of here before Geralt’s real date shows up, the man asks, “What were you reading?”

“I was studying, sort of,” Jaskier says. “I’m a student.” Then abruptly he wonders how much Geralt knows about who he’s supposed to be, and he swallows, pulse racing.

Glancing over, Geralt’s yellow eyes meet his. There’s no obvious doubt there, just a curiosity. “What’s your major?”

“Poetry,” Jaskier grins as their conversation starts to pick up something resembling a rhythm. “What about you, are you in school?”

“No,” says Geralt, cutting his dreams of a normal date conversation short. “Are you any good? At writing poetry?”

What a weirdo. Jaskier’s heart thrums. “I’d like to think so!” This, at least, is something he knows how to talk about. Except, of course, it isn’t really the truth. “Well… recently, I’ve been in a bit of a creative rut. Just waiting for the right burst of inspiration to come along.” Perhaps this blind date that he’s stolen will suffice, but he doesn’t say that. “This place is great for that, actually. I mean, it hasn’t worked yet, but I’m sure any day those fish will sing for me.”

Geralt blinks. Jaskier feels a bead of sweat run down the back of his neck. He tries a different tactic, crossing his ankles and asking politely, “Are you a reader? What kind of things do you enjoy?”

“Nonfiction,” Geralt answers, slightly stilted. His gaze drifts over to the plants once more. “Not biographies, more like… encyclopedias and field journals. I like field journals.”

“Alright,” Jaskier says, shrinking into himself. This is going terribly. “I’ll have to go bribe some scientists for their field journals, then.” The corner of Geralt’s lip twitches, and Jaskier’s stomach flips. Gorgeous and weird and maybe, although he’s trying his best to hide it behind seven layers of nerves, maybe a little amused by Jaskier. Jaskier is going to fuck him right here in the garden. “Do you take journals of your own for work?”

A rather roundabout way of asking ‘what the fuck is it that you do’ but somehow, it lands. “I’m a… researcher,” Geralt mumbles. How very vague. “But I don’t publish my findings very often.”

Jaskier raises an eyebrow. “Do you work… for a company?”

“No.”

“Right. So you’re just keeping all your findings to yourself for no good reason at all.”

“No.”

“Then it sounds like you’re a pretty terrible researcher, actually.”

Geralt’s eyes flash as he turns to glare at Jaskier. “What?”

“Well, if you don’t share what you’ve found with anyone—”

“My… colleagues—”

“Aha! So you have colleagues!” Jaskier pokes Geralt’s side. “You aren’t just holed up in some depressing storage unit with months and months of research just for you.”

Once more, Geralt half-smirks. Not even half— more like a one-fifth smirk. “Years,” he admits.

“Years…” Jaskier tilts his head to the side thoughtfully. “Why do I have the feeling that you’re perhaps a significant number of years older than me?”

“I had the same thought when I saw you sitting here,” Geralt mumbles.

Jaskier snorts. “Seems like something Yennefer should have warned us about, perhaps. I would ask you directly how old you are, but I’m fairly certain that the only response I will get is a very gruff no.”

“No,” says Geralt, nearly smiling.

Making a show of pouting, Jaskier folds his arms over his chest. “Is that your favorite word?”

“No.” Geralt breaks into laughter as he repeats himself, and his whole face lights up with it. Jaskier laughs too, delighted by how joyous Geralt looks. He’s even more beautiful when he’s happy like this, and Jaskier wants very badly for this not to be their last date. “If I tell you my favorite word, you’re bound to judge me for it, as a poet.”

“As a poet, I swear not to mock you,” Jaskier raises his hand to cover his heart, barely restraining himself from grinning.

But before Geralt can share whatever it is, someone else approaches their bench. A second stranger— a woman about his height with short brown hair, wearing a pretty blouse. Jaskier notices her much more quickly than he’d noticed Geralt, and he makes the connection instantly. This can’t possibly end well.

“Oh, Yen wasn’t kidding,” says the stranger, eyeing Geralt. “You are very distinctive!”

Geralt stares back at her, slack-jawed for a moment. “What?”

“I’m Renfri,” Geralt’s date introduces herself. Jaskier wishes the earth would open up and swallow him whole, especially when she glances over at him. Her gaze slides back to Geralt, as does Jaskier’s, and yeah, he is very fucking distinctive with that white hair and those yellow eyes. Damn. “My friend Yennefer set us up for a blind date…?”

As Jaskier contemplates throwing himself into the koi pond, Geralt twists to stare at him. Jaskier can only imagine how mortified he must look right now; his face burns as both Renfri and Geralt look his way. Perhaps Renfri will figure it out before Geralt says anything; she looks like a smart woman.

But Geralt just gets up, dusting himself off and shaking his head. “No,” he tells Renfri, which would almost be funny if it weren’t the weirdest thing Jaskier has ever seen anyone do. Then Geralt leaves, turning to walk away from both of them, leaving Jaskier and Renfri alone together in the garden. Renfri frowns, watching him go with obvious increasing confusion. Jaskier also jumps to his feet, equally confused but determined not to lose sight of Geralt.

He chases the man— and it does feel like a chase, Geralt must be fucking speed-walking away— and finally tracks him down well outside the garden. Geralt is thundering down a set of stairs leading to a parking lot and he doesn’t stop at the sound of Jaskier careening towards him. Only when Jaskier desperately calls his name does he finally stop, slowing until he reaches the bottom landing and then standing there, still.

“I’m sorry,” Jaskier calls down the stairs, breathless. He begins to descend them but Geralt doesn’t turn around. “Fuck, you’re fast! Shit. I’m sorry, Geralt.”

Without looking his way, Geralt complains, so quietly that Jaskier nearly misses it, “Yennefer is going to kill me.”

“I would have fucked off,” Jaskier says quickly, hurrying down the rest of the steps until he gets to the bottom. Geralt still doesn’t look at him so Jaskier slides none-too-gracefully into his space, demanding his attention. He’s hardly red in the face or anything, but he looks embarrassed. Jaskier crumbles. “I’m sorry. I— seriously, I don’t care, I would have fucked off. I should’ve left, I should’ve— You should go back there, she’s beautiful!”

Geralt’s nostrils flare but he doesn’t look away. “Why did you lie,” he demands, flat.

“Well,” Jaskier deflates. “Um. You’re beautiful.”

“Hmm.”

“I really am sorry,” he offers.

Geralt, still watching him closely, says, “You don’t sound sorry.”

“What do you want me to do?” Jaskier throws his hands in the air, breaking away from Geralt’s stare— in the greenhouse, surrounded by bright lights and open, manmade nature, it had been easy to sit under the weight of Geralt’s eyes on him. Down here, at the end of a staircase and the entrance to a dark garage, chest still heaving, it feels too intimate. He puts some distance between them, sighing. “You want me to go back there and explain the whole situation to poor Renfri?”

When Jaskier finally turns around again, Geralt’s gaze hasn’t left him. “I want you to come have dinner with me instead,” he says, slowly but purposefully.

“Oh,” breathes Jaskier. “That’s— well, if you want that.”

“I already made a reservation for two. My name’s on the list.” Geralt is fidgeting with the end of his sleeve at first but when he approaches Jaskier he drops it, striding forward without hesitating. “Table for Geralt and one young brunet friend of Yennefer’s.”

Jaskier chokes on his own surprised laugh. “I don’t actually know Yennefer,” he needlessly explains.

“She’s going to hate you,” says Geralt, half-smirking, and then he adds, “Well, she’ll hate both of us now.”

They get to the restaurant twenty minutes late, Geralt’s hair mussed up and lips a bitten red and Jaskier wearing his backpack and a shit-eating grin. The host sees them and immediately tells them their table has been cancelled, and they end up getting terrible two-dollar slices from a hole-in-the-wall pizza place. They eat on the way back to Geralt’s car and then he drives Jaskier back to campus, kissing him soundly in the door to his apartment until Priscilla comes home and yells at Jaskier to get a room. As they squabble Geralt apologizes, polite and nervous, and kisses Jaskier’s cheek and tells him it was nice to meet him.

Jaskier goes inside and spends the next thirteen hours writing the best poetry he will ever write.

#my writing #geraskier fic #geraskier #flash fic challenge #events

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theshedding · 3 years

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Lil Nas X: Country Music, Christianity & Reclaiming HELL

I don’t typically bother myself to follow what Lil Nas X is doing from day to day, or even month to month but I do know that his “Old Town Road” hit became one of the biggest selling/streamed records in Country Music Business history (by a Black Country & Queer artist). “Black” is key because for 75+ years Country music has unsuspiciously evolved into a solidly White-identified genre (despite mixed and Indian & Black roots). Regrettably, Country music is also widely known for anti-black, misogynoir, reliably homophobic (Trans isn’t really a conversation yet), Christian and Hard Right sentiments on the political spectrum. Some other day I will venture into more; there is a whole analysis dying to be done on this exclusive practice in the music industry with its implications on ‘access’ to equity and opportunity for both Black/POC’s and Whites artists/songwriters alike. More commentary on this rigid homogeneous field is needed and how it prohibits certain talent(s) for the sake of perpetuating homogeneity (e.g. “social determinants” of diversity & viable artistic careers). I’ll refrain from discussing that fully here, though suffice it to say that for those reasons X’s “Old Town Road” was monumental and vindicating.

As for Lil Nas X, I’m not particularly a big fan of his music; but I see him, what he’s doing, his impact on music + culture and I celebrate him using these moments to affirm his Black, Queer self, and lifting up others. Believe it or not, even in the 2020′s, being “out” in the music business is still a costly choice. As an artist it remains much easier to just “play straight”. And despite appearances, the business (particularly Country) has been dragged kicking and screaming into developing, promoting and advancing openly-affirming LGBTQ 🏳️‍🌈 artists in the board room or on-stage. Though things are ‘better’ we have not yet arrived at a place of equity or opportunity for queer artists; for the road of music biz history is littered with stunted careers, bodies and limitations on artists who had no option but to follow conventional ways, fail or never be heard of in the first place. With few exceptions, record labels, radio and press/media have successfully used fear, intimidation, innuendo and coercion to dilute, downplay or erase any hint of queer identity from its performers. This was true even for obvious talents like Little Richard.

(Note: I’m particularly speaking of artists in this regard, not so much the hairstylists, make-up artists, PA’s, etc.)

_____

Which is why...in regard to Lil Nas X, whether you like, hate or love his music, the young brother is a trailblazer. His very existence protests (at least) decades of inequity, oppression and erasure. X aptly critiques a Neo-Christian Fascist Heteropatriarchy; not just in American society but throughout the Music Business and with Black people. That is no small deal. His unapologetic outness holds a mirror up to Christianity at-large, as an institution, theology and practice. The problem is they just don’t like what they see in that mirror.

In actuality, “Call Me By Your Name”, Lil Nas X’s new video, is a twist on classic mythology and religious memes that are less reprehensible or vulgar than the Biblical narratives most of us grew up on vís-a-vís indoctrinating smiles of Sunday school teachers and family prior to the “age of reason”. Think about the narratives blithely describing Satan’s friendly wager with God regarding Job (42:1-6); the horrific “prophecies” in St. John’s Book of Revelation (i.e. skies will rain fire, angels will spit swords, mankind will be forced to retreat into caves for shelter, and we will be harassed by at least three terrifying dragons and beasts. Angels will sound seven trumpets of warning, and later on, seven plagues will be dumped on the world), or Jesus’s own clarifying words of violent intent in Matthew (re: “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword.” 10:34). Whether literal or metaphor, these age old stories pale in comparison to a three minute allegorical rap video. Conservatives: say what you will, I’m pretty confident X doesn’t take himself as seriously as “The true and living God” from the book of Job.

A little known fact as it is, people have debunked the story and evolution of Satan and already offered compelling research showing [he] is more of a literary device than an actual entity or “spirit” (Spoiler: In the Bible, Satan does not take shape as an actual “bad” person until the New Testament). In fact, modern Christianity’s impression of the “Devil” is shaped by conflating Hellenized mythology with a literary tradition rooted in Dante’s Inferno and accompanying spooks and superstitions going back thousands of years. Whether Catholic, Protestant, Mormon, Scientologist, Atheist or Agnostic, we’ve spent a lifetime with these predominant icons and clichés. (Resource: Prof. Bart D. Erhman, “Heaven & Hell”).

So Here’s THE PROBLEM: The current level of fear and outrage is:

(1) Unjust, imposing and irrational.

(2) Disproportionate when taken into account a lifetime of harmful Christian propaganda, anti-gay preaching and political advocacy.

(3) Historically inaccurate concerning the existence of “Hell” and who should be scared of going there.

Think I’m overreacting?

Examples:

Institutionalized Homophobia (rhetoric + policy)

Anti-Gay Ministers In Life And Death: Bishop Eddie Long And Rev. Bernice King

Black, gay and Christian, Marylanders struggle with Conflicts

Harlem pastor: 'Obama has released the homo demons on the black man'

Joel Olsteen: Homosexuality is “Not God’s Best”

Bishop Brandon Porter: Gays “Perverted & Lost...The Church of God in Christ Convocation appears like a ‘coming out party’ for members of the gay community.”

Kim Burrell: “That perverted homosexual spirit is a spirit of delusion & confusion and has deceived many men & women, and it has caused a strain on the body of Christ”

Falwell Suggests Gays to Blame for 9-11 Attacks

Pope Francis Blames The Devil For Sexual Abuse By Catholic Church

Pope Francis: Gay People Not Welcome in Clergy

Pope Francis Blames The Devil For Sexual Abuse By Catholic Church

The Pope and Gay People: Nothing’s Changed

The Catholic church silently lobbied against a suicide prevention hotline in the US because it included LGBT resources

Mormon church prohibits Children of LGBT parents to be baptized

Catholic Charity Ends Adoptions Rather Than Place Kid With Same-Sex Couple

I Was a Religious Zealot That Hurt People-Coming Out as Gay: A Former Conversion Therapy Leader Is Apologizing to the LGBTQ Community

The above short list chronicles a consistent, literal, demonization of LGBTQ people, contempt for their gender presentation, objectification of their bodies/sexuality and a coordinated pollution of media and culture over the last 50+ years by clergy since integration and Civil Rights legislation. Basically terrorism. Popes, Bishops, Pastors, Evangelists, Politicians, Television hosts, US Presidents, Camp Leaders, Teachers, Singers & Entertainers, Coaches, Athletes and Christians of all types all around the world have confused and confounded these issues, suppressed dissent, and confidently lied about LGBT people-including fellow Queer Christians with impunity for generations (i.e. “thou shall not bear false witness against they neighbor” Ex. 23:1-3). Christian majority viewpoints about “laws” and “nature” have run the table in discussions about LGBTQ people in society-so much that we collectively must first consider their religious views in all discussions and the specter of Christian approval -at best or Christian condescension -at worst. That is Christian (and straight) privilege. People are tired of this undue deference to religious opinions.

That is what is so deliciously bothersome about Lil Nas X being loud, proud and “in your face” about his sexuality. If for just a moment, he not only disrupts the American hetero-patriarchy but specifically the Black hetero-patriarchy, the so-called “Black Church Industrial Complex”, Neo-Christian Fascism and a mostly uneducated (and/or miseducated) public concerning Ancient Near East and European history, superstitions-and (by extension) White Supremacy. To round up: people are losing their minds because the victim decided to speak out against his victimizer.

Additionally, on some level I believe people are mad at him being just twenty years old, out and FREE as a self-assured, affirming & affirmed QUEER Black male entertainer with money and fame in the PRIME of his life. We’ve never, or rarely, seen that before in a Black man in the music business and popular culture. But that’s just too bad for them. With my own eyes I’ve watched straight people, friends, Christians, enjoy their sexuality from their elementary youth to adolescence, up and through college and later marriages, often times independently of their spouses (repeatedly). Meanwhile Queer/Gay/SGL/LGBTQ people are expected to put their lives on hold while the ‘blessed’ straight people run around exploring premarital/post-marital/extra-marital sex, love and affection, unbound & un-convicted by their “sin” or God...only to proudly rebrand themselves later in life as a good, moral “wholesome Christian” via the ‘sacred’ institution of marriage with no questions asked.

Inequality defined.

For Lil Nas X, everything about the society we've created for him in the last 100+ years (re: links above) has explicitly been designed for his life not to be his own. According to these and other Christians (see above), his identity is essentially supposed to be an endless rat fuck of internal confusion, suicide-ideation, depression, long-suffering, faux masculinity, heterosexism, groveling towards heaven, respectability politics, failed prayer and supplication to a heteronormative earthly and celestial hierarchy unbothered in affording LGBT people like him a healthy, sane human development. It’s almost as if the Conservative establishment (Black included) needs Lil Nas X to be like others before him: “private”, mysteriously single, suicidal, suspiciously straight or worse, dead of HIV/AIDS ...anything but driving down the street enjoying his youth as a Black Queer artist and man. So they mad about that?

Well those days are over.

-Rogiérs is a writer, international recording artist, performer and indie label manager with 25+ years in the music industry. He also directs Black Nonbelievers of DC, a non-profit org affiliated with the AHA supporting Black skeptics, Atheists, Agnostics & Humanists. He holds a B.A. in Music Business & Mgmt and a M.A. in Global Entertainment & Music Business from Berklee College of Music and Berklee Valencia, Spain. www.FibbyMusic.net Twitter/IG: @Rogiers1

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onyourzeus · 3 years

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• stress-free | kwp

ykcyj ➝ arskyh

title: stress-free pairing: kim wonpil (of day6) & you (she/her pronouns) genre: FLUFF, college!au words: 3.4k

author’s note: @pirimiritiddy requested a fic about wonpil, and here it is. it went on for longer than i previously planned, buuuuut. i hope it’s still okay aaaa

(this is the 1st time i’ve written something for wonpil so if i get his personality wrong, i do apologize. i am also a baby myday huhu)

this dot fic (bullet style) is part of the falling asleep on the bus scenario that i intend to write for each day6 member. check out the others: dowoon (currently only 2/5 completed)

any requests? check my pinned post if i’m accepting any at the moment, thanks!

wonpil hates his schedule for this winter term

who assigns a class that is only available at seven in the evening??

3 times a week

during THE WINTER

did he mention it’s a major lecture he’s required to take??

psychology of stress, more like

this class is giving him the kind of stress it is specifically warning its students about

anyway, what can he say. he chose this major, there’s only 1 more term after this one and then finally: graduation

it’ll be fine, he’ll live

thank the heavens they didn’t need to attend the first two meetings, but some reading material was provided

and was expected by the professor to have been read and reflected upon

the class is really living up to its name because when wonpil opened the pdf

it was 30 pages of tiny font sized sentences (for ants!) about the definition of stress and how it affects every part of the body yada yada yada

wonpil tried. he really tried

that is to say he fell asleep on his desk while going over the same 20th page of the document

if it weren’t for jae shaking him awake, he’d miss his first night class

it would’ve been nice… if only the professor didn’t take attendance (something about being generous enough to make the first 2 classes “free,” so everyone has an obligation to come in for the remainder of the semester)

great, he’s stuck freezing his ass off just walking to the bus stop alone

hopefully they turn the heater all the way up in the auditorium or else

the thousands spent in tuition would have literally been for nothing

overdramatic wonpil, can you blame him

he thinks about reading the remaining 10 pages on the bus, even if he knows nothing of value will be absorbed

he wants to tries anyway, he does feel a little bit refreshed from that impromptu nap

the bus has arrived, and it’s packed as usual; a lot of the students riding the shuttle are just yet to take off in the following stops

wonpil squeezes his way inside, 30 pages of stress psychology research gripped in both hands

“excuse me, sorry,” wonpil mumbles, eyeing for a spot to sit to make him comfortable

because once all the people standing up leave, it’s usually a race for the exit

he’ll never understand college students

finally, he sees an empty seat way in the back. there was a girl on one end and two other students who seem to be ready to get off on the right side

wonpil doesn’t mind sitting next to someone, but once those 2 are gone he’ll just scoot over to give the girl on the left some privacy

she seems very much in deep sleep anyway, wonpil wonders if her stop is coming or she’s riding to go to campus?

wonpil doesn’t have time to think about other people, it causes him unnecessary stress

once sat down, his eyes focus on the last page he left off of

the words register as gibberish in his brain, and with the bus moving so much it makes it even more difficult to follow along the paragraphs

wonpil takes in a deep breath, holds it in, and sighs very heavily

his patience is usually the best out of his friends, but this class is turning more and more into the psychology of how to get you stressed tf out instead

the bus nears its next stop, and the two people on his side stand up to leave, yes he can breathe normal air

however

hold on

his shoulder feels heavy

turning his head slightly, for some reason once the bus had stopped its engine the girl’s head had flipped over to lean against wonpil’s shoulder instead

oh no oh no oh no

his shoulders suddenly freeze, as if blasted with a ray gun filled with ice

it’s heavy and he can’t move, it’s numb and this girl’s hair is splayed all over his his sweater

and she

she smells of coffee, and wonpil inhales it in

it’s not foul or anything, but it’s definitely exuding notes of espresso bean and freshly roasted coffee

it makes wonpil feel a little more awake

but he still can’t move his shoulders, and suddenly he’s panicking because the bus started moving again and even though capacity has lessened by 80%

someone decided to sit on the other end of the row he’s at

so if he even attempts to move, he’ll still be seated next to someone

wonpil grumbles, lower lip jutting forward

something shifts

and he realizes he shook his shoulders a little bit with his frustration

“ah…” he exclaims inaudibly, panicking at the possibility that he had woken her up from her nap

wonpil tenses up, shoulders stiff and eyes peering at his side to see what she’s up to

she lifts her head just a few inches off of wonpil’s shoulder, and for a moment he’s relieved that maybe she realizes what’s going on

but wonpil only hears a soft yawn coming from her, and she returns to using his very rigid shoulder as her pillow during this bus ride

let’s just say that the next thirteen minutes was more stress-inducing than wonpil wanted it to be

right when the bus reaches the final stop (main campus), wonpil exerts any and all efforts he has to shake his shoulder, up and down, enough to elicit an awake response from this stranger

the moment he feels her let up, wonpil dashes through that bus door like there’s no tomorrow

he is greeted with the coldest wind hitting his face, and his shoulder feeling numb from all the.. pillow roleplaying it did, if you will

wonpil feels bad, borderline guilty for leaving her like that— what if she’s asleep until now?? he can almost hear soft snores from her end for a minute there, too, and it took so much of wonpil to resist chuckling at it while in panic mode simultaneously

suffice to say, he was not able to read the rest of the document

in wonpil’s defense, he had encountered it first hand — how stress overcomes one’s body and mind

he forces himself to focus on what’s ahead, as boring as it sounds

he enters the lecture hall with a few minutes so spare, deciding to sit in the back

the projector screens are big and wonpil is not about to take his chances of getting called on today

luckily enough, he finds a row with visibly no other student sitting around the area

shoulder feeling more alive, he comes back to his senses as well

he takes off his outer sweater as it had become toastier inside. he still had a couple layers beneath his clothes

as the professor starts talking, wonpil finds himself yawning a few times

he doesn’t know if the video playing on screen is boring him or the girl in the bus affected his sleepiness

suddenly he remembers the smell of coffee, and how that’d sound real good right about now

he slaps both of his cheeks lightly, trying to take him back in the zone of at least writing down important notes

he’s on the fifth bullet point of his note-taking when the door behind him opens abruptly

it wasn’t loud or disrupting to the whole class, virtually no one even batted an eye

but thats because they’re far from the door

and wonpil is literally ten feet away, so when he feels the cold suddenly hit his back he had to know the source of the sudden hit in temperature

the class hadn’t been going on for less than an hour, and there have been students coming in on the other end of the auditorium

so wonpil isn’t that surprised that another student has just arrived

he caught a glimpse of her hair, but that’s about it as wonpil goes back to his tedious notes

until the very same person scoots herself in wonpil’s row

he huffs under his breath, the illusion of some privacy now shattered

with a polite (semi-forced) smile, wonpil turns to the side to greet his classmate

again, wonpil becomes frozen in spot

kind of like when you feel a magnetic pull somewhere, you follow it

and then suddenly you see it from afar, not believing your eyes if it’s actually real; if it’s actually there

in wonpil’s case, he’s one seat away from her

recognizing the flow of her hair, but more importantly

that distinct scent of coffee beans from her clothes

this time, wonpil has a clear look on her face and he’s… speechless

his polite smile has turned into a look of awe, eyes glued towards her

she senses his gaze, turns to him and quickly bows down as a polite greeting

“sorry, but has the class been going on for a while?”

she speaks

“oh, um, what— what?”

“oh,” she looks confused, but rephrases her question, “what time did the class start? i had a hard time finding this lecture hall.”

she’s talking to him, not just leaning her head on his shoulder

“seven”

was all wonpil could say

“it started at 7? cool, i’m not that late then!” she cheers, grinning shyly. wonpil watches the way she puts a strand of hair tucked beneath her ear. she’s pulling out her laptop from her bag when she notices a pair of wide eyes still on her person

“is… is this seat taken?” she asks, and wonpil hasn’t even taken in the fact that this is the same person from the bus

“yes”

tongue-tied wonpil strikes again, blinking back his own obliviousness to her question

“i mean— no, now it is, by you. you’re sitting there, um, i— feel free to sit wherever you want”

he’s scrambling for his words, flustered cheeks heating up amidst the warmth of the room

she just nods her head in understanding, and wonpil finally realizes he’s been staring at her direction for longer than he should have

“STRESS”

the professor verbalized into her mic which causes wonpil to look to the front all of a sudden

right, right. he’s at a lecture. what’s gotten him so fidgety and embarrassed and now all that he’s pretending to type on his google doc is

sdfjfjdfhshllsghgjghsh

just so he looks busy next to the girl who fell asleep on him on the bus

was there any point in preoccupying his mind with thoughts of her, and her head resting on him? no it’s stupid, wonpil knows this.

people do it all the time, by accident, due to exhaustion, they don’t mean a thing by it

but wonpil is curious, and this is going to kill him. for sure

so he peeks at her again, and like a normal, decent student that she is (compared to wonpil at this point let’s be real) her hands are busy hand writing whatever the professor was saying

meanwhile, wonpil continues to sdfjskgnglddfjs his way to a passing B in this class

even in this large, spacious lecture hall he can still take in her scent

maybe it’s a new perfume that’s up and coming, that’s why it smells so strongly on her

oh! he can ask that? hey, do you mind sharing what line of perfume you’re using? it smells really good

it sounds like a common question, right? i mean if you wear strong fragrances you’re bound to be asked a question about it

he’s about to ask, he really was so ready to ask, what was he gonna lose? his dignity?

over a simple, inquisitive question?

“and now before we go on a twenty minute break, it’s time to introduce yourself to the person sitting close to you”

...

why do college professors have to do this?

wonpil bites his lip, at this point in time he’s a senior who’s fed up with ice breakers like this. if it were any other person sitting next to him, in front of him, behind him— he would just go with his usual introduction

“hi i’m kim wonpil, studying psychology and i graduate in the spring. i’m taking this class for a major requirement”

then go about his merry way.

but with her? she and him have history

sort of, and it’s the kind of history that is recent and wonpil is unsure if she is even aware of the weird string of fate-like connection they have

or, wonpil, hear your consciousness out

it’s not a big deal, and in the scenario she doesn’t remember she fell asleep on the bus on another person

then you can just say hi like usual, and cut the string of fate there and then

(but does wonpil really want that?)

“hi”

oh crap she’s started it

wonpil braces himself for whatever outcome this interaction comes out to. he’ll let her speak, and tailor his response from there

“i’m sorry, this might be really weird but that’s your sweater, right?”

so she didn’t give her name, her major, anything substantial about herself but instead shoots wonpil a question

pointing at the sweater that’s draped on the seat in front of wonpil

wonpil doesn’t even check to look. he gulps, nods his head and squeaks, “yeah… why?”

something in her eyes flash by, almost like a glint of recognition

she puts a hand on her mouth, and wonpil can make out the faintest shade of pink blushing its way to her ears

it’s kinda cute

“did someone happen to… fall asleep on you on the bus coming to campus today?”

“... yes?”

“that was me” she buries her face even further into her hands, almost lowering down to the chair

wonpil thought she was gonna fall for some reason so he had to remedy the situation somewhat

“i.. i, um, did you have a good nap?”

great comeback

wonpil was so ready to leave the auditorium and never come back after the break

but he hears her giggle, and slowly come out of her shyness

and it’s a sweet sight, to finally see the way her cheeks look full of embarrassed laughter

as she twirls around a length of hair nervously

and taps the pen on the surface of her desk repeatedly

it was endearing, and wonpil forgets about why he was panicking in the first place

she then explains that she had work the whole day, and only had an hour to rest up before going to this 7pm class

wonpil listens intently, watching her mannerisms and the lilt in her voice when she continues to apologize for falling asleep on him without realizing it

“i’m not usually a deep sleeper, but work was exceptionally tiring today and i just needed at least a bit of shut eye” wonpil nods understandingly, almost worried about her health

“where do you work if you don’t mind me asking?”

“at the coffee shop a few blocks away from campus,” she answers, head tilting to the side “i’m still wearing my uniform for it… is it too obvious?”

wonpil didn’t even realize her black long sleeves was a cafe uniform

but it did explain her strong coffee smell

“something like that,” wonpil decided to say, curling his lips upward, feeling content and relieved at the turnout of events

for the 20 minute break, wonpil thought they’d reconcile over what transpired between them and mind their own business soon enough— even if he thinks it’s hard to do that now knowing something about her

which intrigues wonpil

and, quite frankly, he’d like to talk to her more

just so he has an excuse to watch her emotions paint her face beautifully

but there was a pause right after their short conversation

and in real Awkward Wonpil Fashion, he shows her the 30 page reading material, in all of its flimsy glory and starts asking questions about it

“so uh did you read the whole thing? i thought it was interesting up until the part that i dozed off”

and wonpil got his wish; he sees her eyes shine in surprise at his sudden attempt of an intellectual discussion

but she doesn’t deter him away

and actually, she’s read the whole damn thing. and wonpil was beyond amazed at the level of detail she explains to him about the parts he didn’t understand

he actually starts typing real notes while she was talking

this made her laugh in between her explanations, and wonpil didn’t understand what was so funny about

the fight or flight response

“it’s just. the way you’re typing this down so seriously, i’m sure the prof can explain it better”

wonpil shakes his head no, shakes it so much it hurt his temples

she laughs again, and he likes hearing that sound

“do you want to see what i’ve typed the past hour and a half of this class?’

“bet :p”

“actually nevermind” flashbacks of dsfkjsdjffdslkg ring true in wonpil’s mind as he quickly backspaces the nonsense in his notes

and the conversation continues from more psychology talks, to figuring out they’re in the same major but she’s a recent transfer student from last year

and had been juggling work and school since the start of her senior year

wonpil wonders why he hasn’t seen her in the coffee shop yet

he would have done a double take the first time meeting her there for sure

“oh you’re too kind,” she suddenly replies???

wonpil had said his thoughts out loud

without further embarrassing him, she says that she had only started working there since it’s more convenient for her; wonpil feels grateful she doesn’t dwell on the compliment any longer

alas, the break finishes and the droll of the professor’s voice reverberates throughout the room

this time, though, wonpil definitely feels more alert (awake enthusiastic) as the two of them exchange little comments about the class material

and before you know it, class is over and wonpil is an excited bunny. since they’re by the door they got to leave before everyone else

wonpil thinks it’s time to part ways… but this time they’re not fully strangers at all. they’re taking the same class, same major, they even know each other’s name.

surely this isn’t the last time, right?

“hey, wonpil…” he didn’t even realize that they have started walking towards the bus stop together

“hm?”

“i think i owe you one,” she starts, stopping her tracks to face him. eyebrows up in hesitation, wonpil waits for her to finish

“you know, for taking over your personal space for my own comfort”

“oh that? haha that’s nothing :)” honestly if wonpil can do it again he’d volunteer in a heartbeat

“no, really. let me make it up to you. coffee? on me? i make a mean cappuccino” she winks

it strikes through wonpil’s heart

no need for resuscitation.. yet

“or a matcha latte? whatever you’d like it’ll be on me”

“anything!” wonpil exclaims, suddenly realizing the offer being given to him, the excitement bubbling up inside him again. “i mean, anything you’d like to have me try. surprise me,” he corrects himself

that manages to have her grin widely, eyes twinkling in excitement similar to wonpil’s and he thinks

they can get along

they can get to know each other better this way

“would you be up to go for one now?”

“oh— oh! now?”

“yeah, that way none of us takes the risk of falling asleep back on the bus hehe”

well, he really wouldn’t mind that happening a second time

“really now, wonpil?”

andddd he exposed himself again

it’s fine, she tugs his hand slightly to lead him to the bus that has arrived and wonpil follows in a daze

it’s a little full, so they have no other choice but to stand and hold onto the railings above

“guess no falling asleep here…” she teases, and now wonpil can’t use his hands to hide his blushing face

but the feeling of her just close by

and the scent of coffee lingering in the air

in between them

just inches away from each other

it’ll do for now

#day6 imagines #day6 scenarios #day6 au #kim wonpil scenarios #kim wonpil imagines #kim wonpil x reader #day6 fic #dot series #by:jiae

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scarlettrose0 · 3 years

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Part 3/?

I don’t agree with everything in this post, specifically it claiming that evolution is false. I’m honestly still studying that and thinking about it. But, I’m sure you get the main idea, the main audience or rather the target audience is Christians.

Made in God's Image: Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…" –Gen. 1:26

📷God exists as three persons in one Trinity. Likewise, the triune God created tripartate man, with body, soul, and spirit (1 Thes. 5:23) and He also imprinted our world with His triune nature. Space exists in three dimensions, height, width, and length, as does time in past, present and future. There are protons, neutrons, and electrons and the primary colors of red, green, and blue. We live on this third planet from the Sun and enjoy matter in solid, liquid, and gas. We build with the strongest shape, the triangle, and our DNA uses only three-letter words. Human beings live here, in heaven, and in hell, with those who love Him crying out, "Holy, holy, holy." Being made in God's image imagerefers to our form, and being made in His likeness refers to our essence as sentient, morally-responsible persons. Charles Darwin hoped for evidence that apes eventually began standing erect. However, thousands of kinds of animals made by God, along with all the four-footed beasts, have a stooped stance and look to the ground, whereas men and women alone stand upright created with a heavenly gaze and as the most social of creatures. For the first thing that God created was a form, that is, an image, for the eternal Son to indwell (Col. 1:15; etc.). And in that image "He made man," and not in the image of apes (see AmericanRTL.org/Darwin). But He made them "male and female" as Christ affirmed (Mark 10:6), "from the beginning of creation." And as Moses wrote in Hebrew צֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים‎‎, which in Latin is imago Deiand in Greek, εἰκόνα θεοῦ: "So God created man in His own image; in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them" (Gen. 1:27). And because a fish is not made in God's image, one can eat another without guilt, and it is impossible to "murder" a tomato or a turkey. Only a human being can be murdered. For God prohibited the shedding of innocent blood, "for in the image of God He made man" (Gen. 9:6). See more at rsr.org/3.

Pain in Childbirth Resulted from Sin: [As a result of Adam and Eve's sin:] To the woman God said: “I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children..." –Gen. 3:16

God DID NOT inflict this pain in childbirth as a sadist but IN MERCY toward the child, and thus, toward the mother too. How so? Please consider that after being created on the sixth day (Gen. 1:27), Adam sinned so quickly that his wife did not even have time to conceive a child before the Fall. However, if Eve had given birth before the Fall, she would not have experienced pain in childbirth. Why not? As a result of Lucifer tempting Eve, God then put enmity between him and mankind. And as a result of Eve's sin, God multiplied the length of time for human gestation. Sin and death destroyed the perfection of the cosmos itself, for "the creation was subjected to futility" (Rom. 8:21) and as the Apostle Paul continued, "For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now" (Rom. 8:22). So after man's sin, the Earth lost its original environmental perfection as a paradise and instead became a relatively hostile place in which to survive. This would be especially true for tiny human newborns who would face a terribly high infant mortality rate being born not into an Eden but into our current world struggling to survive in freezing weather, sweltering heat, with less than optimal nutrition, and fighting pathogens. We know that with loving care and great wisdom God designed the development of the fetus in the womb. So because sin would destroy the perfection of the cosmos, God created a genetic contingency for Adam and Eve such that, if they sinned, as a biological consequence, a fetus would then remain in the womb for a longer period of time, in order to grow much larger and stronger (as compared to His original design and as compared to many animals like the koala, opossum, and kangaroo.). As God said to the woman, "I will greatly multiply your sorrow and your conception; in pain you shall bring forth children" (Gen. 3:16). To "multiply... your conception" does not mean that after the Fall women would conceive more children, for previously God had commanded the first parents "to be fruitful and multiply" (Gen. 1:28). And of course children themselves are not a curse but one of the greatest blessings from God (Ps. 127:3-5). So what does this mean? In this context the term "conception" is a metaphor meaning gestation. A typical figure of speech is the use of the beginning of something, say a book or an alphabet, to represent the whole, such as the ABCs and the word title, as in "That author wrote three best-selling titles." We understand the figure, that he didn't just write the titles, but the entire books. So by this common language convention, here the term conception is a metaphor which means gestation. By multiplying a woman's gestation, God gave her baby a much greater chance of surviving in our hostile world. This comes at the expense though of mom's discomfort and pain. However, just as the Apostle Paul wrote that "the sufferings of this present world are not worthy to be compared with the glory which shall be revealed" (Rom. 8:18), so the members of American Right To Life who are moms have made it clear that the pain in childbirth, though it is often severe, is nothing compared to the joy of holding their newborn child. Interestingly, Scripture may contain sufficent clues to indicate the length in months of the original gestation period. By His original design, a woman may have labored with child for six months. Why? Today we say that a full-term baby is one who is born at nine months, and they average 20 inches long weighing seven pounds. At six months the fetus (which is Latin, for bringing forth and offspring) is half-a-foot shorter and weighs just under two pounds, so that a perfectly healthy woman (like Eve) delivering a tiny child like that would not experience today's intense labor pains. Further, an original gestation of six months is biblically appropriate because from the Genesis to Revelation, six is the number of a man. For he was created on "the sixth day" (Gen. 1:31) and the antichrist uses 666 because "it is the number of a man (Rev. 13:18), and in the Ten

Commandments God wrote that for "six days you shall labor (Ex. 20:9). And nine is the number for judgment, as shown in the crucifixion when Jesus took the judgment for man's sin, for "from the sixth hour until the ninth hour there was darkness over all the land," (Mat. 27:45; Mark 15:33) similar to "darkness over the land of Egypt" in the ninth plague (Ex. 10:21) which was followed by the death of the firstborn and the Passover. "For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us" (1 Cor. 5:7), crucified on the very daythat the passover lambs were being sacrificed. So as Luke reports at "the ninth hour... He breathed His last" (Luke 23:44-46). So six is the number of man, and nine is a number of judgment. Thus God likely multiplied the original six months by one and a half to get today's nine months of gestation in mercy for both mother and child.

Rights Come from God: "Thou shall not murder... Thou shall not steal. Thou shall not bear false witness..." –Exodus 20:13-16 Then God said, "Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness…" –Gen. 1:26

Human rights do not come from the government, for then they wouldn’t be rights; nor from the majority (consider America and slaves, Germany and Jews, China and Christians); nor from the delivery doctor or hospital. For rights come from our Creator, at that moment we are created. That's why the right to life commences at conception, and not at some arbitrary later time. Further, Jeremiah 1:5 quotes God, "Before I formed you in the womb I knew you." The Declaration of Independence affirms what those who believe in God have always known. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life…” We have human rights because we are made in our Creator’s image and likeness, which is why parents, unlike animals, have a moral obligation to protect and love our children, born and unborn. Further, as said to Bill Maher on ABC, "You cannot elevate animal rights without denigrating human rights." Human beings have the right to due process as affirmed by God when He said, "Thou shall not bear false witness against your neighbor." And we have the right to own private property as affirmed by God when He said, "Thou shall not steal." And we have the right to life as affirmed by God when He said, "Thou shall not murder."

#prolife #prochoice #abortion #christianity

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a-duck-with-a-book · 3 years

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REVIEW // Seven Blades in Black (The Grave of Empires #1) by Sam Sykes

★☆☆☆☆

Disclaimer: while I was reading this book, I found out that Sam Sykes has been accused by numerous women of sexual harassment. You can find more information about it below: - a post listing several accusations of misconduct - twitter post responding to the situation - one of the accusations against Sam Sykes - his quickly-deleted apology Suffice to say, I have no intention of continuing this series or reading any more of his books.

I have a lot to say about this novel, so I’ll begin by making a quick bullet point list outlining what I liked and disliked:

Liked:

Cavric <3

Lisette deserved better

Some interesting concepts in the world building

Disliked:

Sal as a narrator

Sal as an antihero

Sal as a person in general

Writing style

Constant interruptions

Meandering narrative

The “narrator knows something but the writer avoids revealing it until the end for the drama” trope

This is a Big Tough World and Nobody Gets To Be Happy

Lesbians written by a man who harasses women

Unnecessarily long

// image: official cover art Jeremy Wilson //

Let’s begin with the full review by starting with the (few) positives, shall we?

First and foremost, I genuinely enjoyed Cavric and Lisette. It is unfortunate that they had to deal with Sal for the entirety of the novel, but we’ll get to her later. If this book had been a buddy adventure with these two, in which Cavric slowly shows Lisette that she is in a toxic relationships and deserves to move on and find someone better for herself, I probably would have enjoyed it a lot more. Secondly (and finally), Sykes introduced some genuinely interesting world building. The background of the Empire and the Scar was fascinating to read, but unfortunately did not save the rest of this mess.

Alright now let’s rant.

I have 35 notes and 52 highlights from this book, so this might get block quote heavy. (Go check out my notes if you want to see me slowly lose my sanity)

Sal is awful. I know she’s meant to be awful, but she’s not flawed in the way that I think Sykes was trying to write her. I believe she was intended to be a scruffy, lovable antihero who fought her way through a dangerous landscape with her sharp blade and even sharper tongue. A girl who had wrongs committed against her in the past, who did terrible things but is now on the road to an epic redemption arc. She shoots bad guys, she says f*ck and a*s a lot, and she is morally complex. That’s the character that Sykes was trying to make. The one he created, however, is a genuinely terrible person who I had no desire to see come out on top. I have a myriad of issues with her, but let’s outline a couple below: (1) She is incredibly toxic for Lisette. Am I getting a bit too heated about a fictional relationship? Sure. Was I happy to read a toxic lesbian romance written by a man who sexually harasses women? Nope. It kind of grossed me out, actually. Anyway, let me give you a run down of their relationship. Sal arrives. Sal and Lisette sleep together. Sal asks Lisette to give her weapons and or fix things for her. Sal sneaks away, telling herself no good will come of this relationship and they will only cause each other pain. Sal needs something. Sal comes back. Repeat over and over. She constantly says, throughout the book, that it would be better if they just left each other, but then again Sal is the one who goes back to Lisette over and over, causing her renewed heartbreak. I don’t know if Sykes thought that simply making Sal aware of how terrible this behavior was was enough, but it just made me incredibly frustrated. At one point Sal says:

”Intellect like hers is a curse. The more you understand of the world, the less of it you trust.”

Yes, Sal, that’s what’s giving her trust issues. Her intelligence. Nice. By the end of the book, it seems that they are on the mend-I’m getting end-game vibes from these two. But honestly, I spent the entire time thinking that Lisette deserved so much better than Sal. Like literally a chicken would have provided healthier companionship. I’ll end with this quote, in which Lisette outlines perfectly why Sal does not deserve her:

“What am I doing wrong that you’d choose this over me?”

(2) Sal is annoying. Really, really annoying. I kid you not, half of this book is made up of Sal’s snarky comments. She is badass. She has a gun. She is an outlaw. And she will never, EVER shut up about it. Imagine a quirky line after an otherwise dark or action-packed sequence. Funny, right? Might break the tension, make the narrator more endearing, etc. Now imagine one such line after every. Single. Paragraph. Picture a violent battle scene where the protagonist is fighting for their lives against a ruthless opponent. Now insert a snarky comment after every other paragraph and watch the entire flow of the scene fall apart with constant interruptions. That’s what this book is-which brings me to my next point.

The writing isn’t great. There are constant interruptions, meandering narratives, and the trope that haunts me in nearly every dark fantasy novel I read-This is a Big Tough World and Nobody Gets To Be Happy-is shoved repeatedly in your face. Let’s start with the interruptions, returning to my previous point (ie. Sal never shuts up), by looking at this sequence:

I followed the shrieking wind. I had come here prepared for something bad. But I wasn’t prepared for just how bad it was. I rounded the corner of the hall, came out atop a battlement. The wind struck me with a screaming gale, forcing me to shield my face and cling to the stone for purchase. My eyes squinted against the harshness of the light, the kind of offensive pale you only see in your nightmares. And through them, I could see the bowed shapes of towers sagging, the flayed flesh of banners whipping in a wind that wouldn’t cease, the shadows of figures frozen in a death that had brought no peace. And I knew where I was. There was nothing that had ever made Fort Dogsjaw special. It had never been crucial for defense, never a hub for trade, it hadn’t even been named for anything special—the commander just liked the sound of it. It lived its whole life a regular, boring Imperial fort on the edge of the Husks. It only got important at the time of its death. Over three hundred mages and a few thousand regulars had assembled here in one day—some to receive assignments, some to man the garrison, some to head back to Cathama on leave. They had been laughing, cursing, drinking when the news came that the new Emperor of Cathama was a nul, born with no magic. And then there had been a moment of silence.

I’ve bolded for emphasis, but do you see what I’m talking about? The paragraph-line-paragraph-line format is so annoying to read, I had to put the book down at certain points because of how frustrated I got. It interrupted the forward movement of the story, making the novel drag on and on.

You know what else makes this feel like the nightmare version of the Never-ending Story? The page count. I don’t mind long books-The Priory of the Orange Tree is one of my favorite reads so far this year, and it’s longer than this one-but they have to have a reason for being so hefty. As I mentioned earlier, a considerable chunk of Seven Blades of Black is Sal making her awful, awful, AWFUL asides. I literally cannot express how much I despise those comments. Okay, let’s move on before I get hung up on THOSE STUPID COM-*cough*

This novel is marred by unnecessary lines and a meandering plot that drag out the story. One instance is the amount of times that Sal is a second away from killing someone and, for some reason (usually not a good one), fails in her goal. She places a gun at someone’s head and goes through a whole monologue in her head until the person miraculously escapes. This type of subversion of expectations is fine every once in a while, but if you are going to build up to a crucial moment and then take away the satisfaction of the defeat of some villain (or mini-boss, as many of the antagonists in this book feel like), then you need to have a good reason for doing it upwards of twenty times in ONE BOOK. Secondly, if you spend almost the entire novel setting up more and more villains and stressing how hard they are to kill and how dangerous their powers are (and presenting them separately and isolated), then when you have them all in one place at the end, at which point the protagonists starts going through them like a plate of french fries at a seagull convention, then you’re kind of taking away the satisfaction of the death. Somehow, this book manages to do both. We are constantly teased with almost-kills, then at the end Sal just blows through everyone in five seconds, easy-peasy.

I’m almost done, I swear-just two more gripes.

So much of the tension of this book rests on the fact that Sal, our narrator and our main viewpoint into the story, knows something that we don’t. I’ll be upfront with you-I hate this trope. If our POV character, the one whose mind we are in constantly, is entirely aware of something that happened before the beginning of the novel, and the author keeps from revealing that something for the entirety of the story solely to add drama, then I will not be a happy reader. Where is the logic. We are in this person’s mind. Just show us already and add tension ELSEWHERE.

And FINALLY (as painful as it was for you to read this, it was worse for me to write it), another issue I have with a lot of dark fantasy (see my review of Nevernight) is that the author really, really wants us to know that this is an incredibly dangerous and dark world by filling it to the brim with edge lord narrators, Big Guns, and, usually, women being harrased-because why not force all your female readers to constantly have to read about women getting assaulted? Apart from Sal’s 300,000 comments explaining to us that she is an asshole, that the Scar is Dangerous, and that she has Killed A Lot of People, we as readers must sit through hundreds of lines of dialogue and exposition that beat us over the head with the fact that this is DARK fantasy. This isn’t your nice little fairy adventure-no sir. Here we have Swear Words and Violence and Men writing Queer Women. To emphasize just how blatant Sykes is with the dark part of dark fantasy, let me tell you about an exchange Sal has with three old ladies who run a criminal empire. In the 2-3 pages that these women appear in, we are told, in some form or other, that they are grandmas who kill people, a grand total of, I kid you not, ELEVEN TIMES. Here are some excerpts from that whole situation:

”“Now, now.” Yoc, old and white haired and sweet as a grandmother—if that grandmother also had people killed on the regular—smiled at me. “I’m sure she has a good reason for being here.” She raised the hand that had signed the contracts that had killed a thousand men and women and took up her whiskey glass. “After all, I’m sure she knows how much we don’t like having our game interrupted.”” *I counted this as one since it’s in the same exchange but technically he mentions it TWICE

”…one didn’t waste the Three’s time if one didn’t want to end up with their teeth pried out.”

”How often do you meet the three old ladies who have people killed for money?”

”I said we should kill her on principle.”

”“But you know how many orphans I’ve made, don’t you, dear?””

”“He’s not so unlike us, is he? A murderer, yes. A monster to some. But, at his heart, a businessman.”

”Theirs were the hands that signed a thousand death contracts a year.”

”When they could be bothered to look up from their game, they decided who lived and died with a stroke of their pen.”

”At a word, they could have me stripped, tied, tortured, and cut up…”

”the Three don’t lie. Their assassins do. Their thieves do. But they don’t.”

”I had already wasted their time and I knew the Three were being generous just letting me fuck off instead of having me killed for the effort.”

TL;DR - Sal is annoying, Sykes is a bad writer, and Someone should have stopped me from reading this book

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benjimirthursby · 4 years

Text

"Before and Again." - The Book of Thursby: Scions of Numenor [SB]

*Revised from Prompt 8 of FFXIV Write “Clamor.” See end-notes.

"By the reckoning of years on home shores the fleet had been in flight thousands of years. There were as many years ahead of the fleet before reaching the intended galaxy. From the beginning, if there is such a thing, it was resolved not to compromise the mission in vain hope of finding a way to shorten or speed the journey. Few temptations to break faith with their mandate were greater than that in Arda 922."

- Tinifalas Thursby, "Seven Stars in the Horizon."

The jaunt to the Company Hall was a different process than that to Limsa the day before. Aubreen provided Benjimir with a tiny crystal which he palmed before she departed ahead of him. As instructed, he gripped the crystal and internally focused his thoughts on where it was he wanted to go, void of images as he had not been there. He augmented his focus with, as his friend instructed, “happy thoughts” and as the memory of the laughter from the previously nights night cap filled his mind, sure as enough he felt himself able to fly. Again his vision filled with soft light and flares, faded to black and returned.

Benjimir’s vision resumed from the black interlude with the vivid light of a small, man-sized crystal, then a pathway, which he noticed was blockaded by an assembly of people. As he felt himself “slide off the bed” to the ground he emerged into the clamor of the mass of people clapping and making assorted cat calls. The culprits for the welcoming committee were Bondermir and Aubree who gestured to the crowd which Benjimir took stock of. Captains Riehnheart, Hayes, Vaunter, his brother Tinifalas, Osmira Miegs the master of keepers, alchemy and craft as well as assorted officers previously from “up well assignments. Friends all, if usually through Benjimir’s usual formality. Never the less he laughed and smiled and approached his friends.

Captain Hayes kicked off the friendly ribbing. “Did he heave too?” she said. “No I most certainly did not.” Benjimir said in mock indignation.

Hayes passed a few gil to Rienheart. “Did he drink?” Vaunter asked skeptically.

“No. He most certainly didn’t.” Aubreen announced, to which most assembled including the commodore began tossing gil at Vaunter.

Benjimir laughed and pointed at his protege, “I expect a cut out of that Captain, after all, it was my sacrifice.”

Tinifalas cupped a hand over his mouth and cried “Cough, Chocopoo, cough cough.”

Benjimir whipped a finger at his brother, “Your out of the will. Now lets be about this show to tell of Miegs’ and have a look around this place.” All filed into the Hall and up the stairs. Bondermir paused to speak to a ginger headed young woman with a stroller and taking a box from her tipped his head and gave a pouch of gil to her.

Benjimir asked his brother as they walked up the stairs. “Something I ought to know?” gesturing with his head back down the stairs where the woman was leaving and Bondermir turning to join them. Tiniffalas looked back and quickly shook his head. “Oh, no. That is miss Yvaine, she is a local baker and shop-keep. She’s just started offering services here by Captain Tessariel’s leave.”

“I see,” Benjimir said. “What’s she bake?” he asked as he entered the second floor’s open space of tables, a bar and small stage.

“Find out.” Bondermir said, walking around Benjimir’s left side and pressing the small box into his chest. “Finest to be had courtesy of the White Tree.” he finished with a smile. “Not near my demonstration however.” Miegs said approaching. “This way sir.” She led them to the small stage where a long table was setup. The table had two seemingly identical setups. The first had a sliver of crystal in a setting. Behind the setting was a small miners lamp burning brightly. The light shown through the crystal and cast a glimmer onto a small board which stood between it and another crystal in an identical setting. This crystal also gleamed and illuminated the other side of this board.

“This is a simplified version of the experiment sir, but it will suffice to demonstrate what we have found.” Miegs said in her usual precise, measured pace. “Note the second crystal here, “ she pointed to the crystal without a lamp. “No obvious source of light.”

Benjimir nodded. It was an experiment most early academy students were taught in their youngest years. Gifts were made of sets to replicate it in home quarters for birthdays. “Photon Dossimir Translocation.” He said. Miegs nodded affirmatively. Benjimir smiled. “I did learn something of it while I was a student of….”

“History.” most all those present said as one.

Benjimir took liberty to glare around himself a moment. “I feel judged.” he mocked. “Continue please.”

Miegs placed another board between the crystal next to the lamp and waved it between the light and setting several times, interrupting the light, then extinguishing the lamp. The gleam from the first crystal ended with a flicker. Immediately all eyes were fixed on the second crystal. Luminous as before.

Miegs continued. “These shards were taken from the hull of the SNS Aundustar,” she carefully noted it as the Sons of Numenorl Ship which differentiated it from the more recently commissioned Scions Air Ship of the same name. “Each was half a hull length from the other and were lodged by impacts following the fall of Dalamud.”

“Could the second crystal be in resonance with another?” Bondermir asked. As he did, the second crystal flickered and went dark, mirroring Miegs’ steps moments before.

“No.” Miegs said plainly. The first crystal then flared to life again, flashing before taking on a steady gleam.

“We’ve long been unable to determine the cause of a growing number of discontinuities these past five years. Chrono sync issues, delayed Dossi coms, inconsistent system and hull fatigues, and so forth. We think this may pose a partial explanation and suggest new questions.” Miegs concluded.

Miegs then moved the lamp from the first crystal and placed it next to the second and relit the flame and waved her hand in front of the flame, duplicating the flicker in the first crystal perfectly. The light from the first crystal went dark again.

“We are continuing to consult with lore keepers down well and are exploring the full meaning and possible applications. However we cannot offer any conclusions at this time.” Miegs then extinguished the lamp once more.

“We’re going to need more crystals.” Benjimir said quietly.

*******

*Note: I’ve decided to cease posting for FFXIV Write within the timing of the official “entries.” Work and hypothetical needs becoming very real on Wednesday with a seriously ill family member make the turn-around time untenable. I will continue participating though, it is always a great exercise that pushes me to sharpen skills and focus. But I will not be entering posts in competition for a prize. Since I’m not trying to win something, I’m also going to edit my posts moving forward such as this one since it was a bloody mess looking back. I can’t include it in my larger work in its original form. But I’ll leave the first posting up for comparison.

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rwmhunt · 3 years

Text

Leviticus, Chapter 26

1. It's my training- I find With polarizing factors- In essence, they are Attentional. And lo, we're on to how pandemics End, And where I say that I find it normal To see false flags on everything. The victims Are disseminators In isolation stasis, As believers are cast into many Disparate factions- desperately seeking Their own audience and fracturing Reality in their processes. They plead the cause of a deepening iniquity As to a factor for relief, But maketh of ye here, no idols, no bones about it; And rear thee up no columns, No analogue that might measure or mock me with restraint; No feat that might inspire ye to fall, For tis ME. And all of you Need fear More Than hope Now.

2. And here Moses might only be seen In the reflected beam Of his own headlamp, As by it he travails into The little that it casts, For, tis about time we said Goodbye to Sinai, And, having toyed with the pretence, Admit that it is no place to biggeth of a home. But, let us first cut our losses With the aforementioned, spurious Sacrifice.

3. Then walk in My statutes, And in effect, I will take the lot. From Exodus through Numbers, Leviticus Shall appear in the role of Mose's malignant, Functioning as something of a priest in prototype, Here, used for example of what is otherwise superfluous.

4. Thus shall he chafe, at first, against the thing at work- Twas the people who provoked him into the begetting Of a golden idol, whence he went before them and said, - For whom does it end, and who as so doth get to decide? I'll give ye the reigns to such a season as they be deigned for, And hence hath he tapped into some rural frustration, By atleast pretending to pay an attention Unto those who'd’ve had it That they were deserving of an attention, And hitherto presuming That they were getting not of it, Because it was a given that it be going unto others.

5. And, warming- Threshing Shall verily reach unto the vintage, No timescale shall lie upon our dessert, And thence, that it should there suffice And be so furthered of a surfeit also- Sick and tired of winning. There’s an uncertainty about the path That goeth forward, which was always there, But masked By Mose's exceptional approaches from god, With troubling things to report From the frontiers of the rhyzome As dictated by him from a distance; Be it tented or from way up on Sanai. More to the point, with Aaron found in a position Where the idol he created is out of his control, Mose is perhaps more eager now than ever To retain his grip on the base, so To the top of the Mountain, where he again Is lolling with a god who has legacy to defend, And from where he’s tolled upon the god, Who now hath a record of statutes Which need be ramified over time to maintain The same supplication from the base hereunto- By a means that looks increasingly precarious;

6. And still he blew- I can cause evil beasts to cease your path, And slope away, out from the land, So be it a safe space for thinking, yet, Even before Mose had left Egypt, Aaron was charting a course that would bring his horn to clash In conflict with the legacy his brother hath sought As that from up on the mountain. - He, without standing- Made Manifest Destiny As Aboriginal Calamity; Lo, that He should speaketh Only through ol' measly Mose, It’s sick. It’s a sick joke- that’s what it is, And it’s not a joke as far as I’m concerned, It's April the first.

7. And Mose, as responding to winds only when forced to, Is always leveraging to give away the wiggle room For people to interpret his position however they would. He’ll say things vaguely enough to send one message Unto his base while maintaining deniability when questioned By Dr Moloch, with, - we were able to pivot, _, But here, defending himself publicly against his former compatriots, Who had criticized him as a “rogue” and a selfish coward- And of Denver Riggleman hath he chastened as an enemy unto the good, That he shall fall before you as from a sword; where swords believe not... Because sometimes a little bloodletting...

And he trails off...

8. But, as marketing hath recently divined unto Me, In allowance that there shouldst be For a different kind of people to be present at storytelling- The national need for experts in critical languages and other regions- Go thither - that it shouldst not always be Mose, As effective a spokesperson as he fairly is- - We wouldst be able to pivot, deep Into a different frontal cortex and through The past year, shew how powerful our mind could have been, So Denver giveth five of you wriggle room to chase a hundred, And a hundred of you are now chastening of ten thousand; As so shall I up thee thy ante, And my enemies will fall before you as by a sword, For I thought it funny- that there could be no room For anybody who should come As would be so dumb as to think it real, But, lo... it's complicated. When ideas are swords, there broods a tribal metaphor, Absorbing the recondite and thus blooming the tribe, trained To a stream of algorithmy on a fact-immune, ignorant, Analytic white paper.

9. Lo, and compliant with the photograph, I shall have respect as unto you, And make a fruitful of you, and multiply the effect of you; And shall establish My covenant as parley with you; However, with you there, shall I stop- And if you shouldst know of an influencer, That goeth as amongst you, It is upon you, to cut them off, And cast them from the convention, To leave them afloat In the void of their influence; Know me, you are not missing out. And they looked at each other

10. And carried on through A buildingsite for hackers, unto The streaming platforms, as linkethed up Among these sealed back channels, deep In amid online influencer culture, As aideth escape from our antibodies Who deeply infringe into the working of others, Which I see no incentive in trying to dispel, Saying- ye shall eat old-store pottage long kept, And ye shall bring forth such vintage from before the new; The seed shall be my seed and my seed only; me a monothe, find There are plenty of such who want this pandemic to continue; - 'Exactly.' ...But it's not us. - 'Exactly. Thanks to you, Dr Moloch.' And away I rode As quick as I could.

11. Lockdown is as a low gloss and of loss- Gratitude, thank you, thank you, 80 neg 95 from the day before, My soule shall not abhor you In these toxic patterns thrash, For even though there's darkness, Let it be as such that is found exhilarating; For there's nothing like a sword to save us.

12. I will walk among you, And lo will I figure the triggers That allow keeping it alive in a tiny form. A worldly preserve from a range of exotic, begotten In order to find what goes on in the yard; As without ever leaving The bold tent of meaning, Where the project itself shall take care of me. I must not run out; The shelf of ideas must not be let empty.

13. When people ask, ‘When will this end?,’ They are asking about the social conclusion, Where the real answer Is very close To the wrong answer. But you’ve all been doing it, in various ways, And that's evinced as an important reminder Of what we are yet culpable for. Go upright- the answer Affects us all; Differently.

14. But! lo, A better question might be About the so-called-end, Dr. Moloch, he sayeth, - For withdrawal Is a-talkin' 'bout affect- Oh, pay no attention to changes.

15. If, enervated in heat, Wounded with guilts, Stained with sins, An image without a caption, so advanced That all she could offer were comfort care; An hour later, declare the epidemic as so over- Here, as memories are going to be difficult to archive; For the seed hath been sewn by the hackers, Where hackers had shewn a new level of stealth, For they had bade a solitary star, As softly warn on solar winds, To infiltrate networks, take The footprint far, far from Babylon, Raise columns and fresh idols- With such malware attached As may still be working.

16. Then I will appoint terror, same, Death be a-killing people- Catenated, then moderated, then killed off: Lost in the entropics of cancer That so maketh the eye to fail And the soul to languish; Thus, this incident with the Golden Calf , The incident as so nearly brought God To deracinate intrigue, where nobody new Walked in on our room for all our wide length of time; Who- who would escape the crime for a role in the affair ? Aaron was not the teflon idol-maker his resilience, Built, as of an impossible Self-reliance, should determine him to be; Aaron is eroding. And he shall sow your seed in vain, For my enemies shall maketh a relish of it; Then needst I seek for your polluted replacement; Catenated, then moderated, then killed off: The human condition shall not save itself, Ellis said; I find it normal.

17. We are told to use a common inference to decide Whether an aggadah be taken as lateral or vertical; And once you've come to smelt the rood, Drempt of the chundering of swords, Quietly dumped the lot that was- The wild dream, thus superseded With a totem dream- you turn, bearing An unforgotten, felt as a missing, As so make you up to grab of it back- Loss.

18. The calvary the calvary- To characterize this away from me, If amorality be light years over the sky-effort of casting an opinion onto everything, As all be bedraggled before the judgment Of its own rhyzomic scruples, Then I'm not passing nothing; I don’t do horses, ok, Should the fox be all of one beast You me, as the cavalry Charge Decidedly, then seven times worse- Know of our own action, a fiction; I wouldn't say we'd be comfortable In the skin of it today, or ever. If.

19. And I will bust the pith of your power; And I will glove your heaven with iron, And your earth will be rung like brass. Why not? Nobody’s coming round my house. We kept moving, flashing in at the high post. Sparks of titanium came over in a shower, Mose was feeling plangent And understood that the rituals of hegemony Were both ridiculous and necessary; filled, If pulled and scrubbed of reference to _, It was a lot to deal with- Open it, he said, whatever it is. - Did not convince them.

20. Entropy. A runner with beautiful legs- Unsure why I was called here: I can't see any questions You haven't attained a ransom for; Is there reason to speak If it isn't with answer or question?

21. And if ye walk cater-cornered unto Me, And will not hearken to My rune; I will bring seven times more plague Upon your, as-yet-unvisited, doom, Each according to your ills in the manner apt as I see them; Why, lo! Me? Sanctimonious? Is it a sin? - It's ridiculous That you should think To hear the voice of god, Opined Leviticus, - When you don't even know What I've come to mean. - If I am deluded, And I am speaking counter-wise to my meaning, Then who is it who is speaking? And if I walk contrary as to myself, And I am deluded, Who is it that should so moveth, as within me? Nae, you are deluded- You were not deluded, and You have not reached the threshold of paradox; Someone is coming to help.

22. As i stood on Bilston roundabout, No chance of a crossing- Cars Fast revveth they past- I smelt the sting Of their kind of damage; I looked into their eyes, They had an inkling To what's going on. The Golden Calf- Loss.

23. But they're just hire vans Picking up wood and what have you. So Belisha was a beacon on the road to captivity, I fear for the understanding and the regard Of increment and consequence, Now endentured within the culture, And exhibiting an inordinate amount of animus To conventionally pollute the landscape; I too have proved dependent On lorry drivers. Still no?

24. Then I'll do the crab, And I'll drop you again, A fulle seven times deeper in, Among the analogue of what Streamed out of the book of Leviticus- Manifest Destiny, Aboriginal Catastrophe, Rout the field; the rave plague- Widescreen monoculture; No one's coming for us.

25. So hear The horror At harvest time- Of produce Being plunder, A proof Upon the alter That poses itself As a given Which isn't to give.

Your past is unintrudable. Until that they come.

26. By suggesting an invalid value As to the nature of the work, I pool you into the conceit via the threat of its loss; There, lost, found budded and blossomed, Producing the taste of ripe almonds, It's base near the solar wind farm, Whispering soft that shepherd is a crook. And, woe is me! but, worry not, I aim to set it up as something, for a while. Where bread of bread be broken and never enough, Even though all women bake forever at once. Exodus hath let his rod turn unto a snake, Then stretch itself out in order To bring on the first plagues; May hey go pound sand.

27. Still? Really? I defy you, Creeping normally over Hebron In fear for the understanding and regard -As I told you- Of consequence and increment, Endentured in the culture; An inordinate amount of animus exhibited- And a swordly sword upon you- saying you're gone When you're not even off the sacremount. A vengeance of a covenant I'm unsure that you've ever agreed to, But the veil has been bought over- Pestilence and loss.

28. Furious, me, Seven times seven times seven times worse. i.e. as optimized to amplify outrage, unearthed, although, I'm not sure I've invoked enough dimension to illustrate All of what should be press-ganged unto the frontal lobe.

29. Eat your children. There- that's me. I'm my own actress.

30. And I will devoid your high places, And cut down thy sun-pillars, Leave you a skeleton crew to a ghost ship, Intemperately adrift.

And so the carcass wore on, And so hath foundered against the carcasses of idols; And so His soul hath fairly abhorred me.

31. Loss, loss, I'm not sniffing. Slowly go back, A little bit broken, Caution is the easiest option; A draggyness will reinforce a positive While performing an unintended habit; It’s not enough to treat either of us with the end of the week- Make sure the reward is something i experience as of when you are amid your behaviours. No, I'll say it, Die at the tent of an open market, Between repetition and habit formation, I shew correlation, that is not causation — Not with the repetition, for lo, I'm emotion- I will always be idiopathic- Think it a divine dispensation. So tired of the restrictions I declare the end over, And, that the virus continue to smoulder, All characteristics in being so mutable- Then Moses stood in the door of the tent, Amid multiple failed predictions, - I deserve the ability to return to my life.

32. There is a number we can all be comfortable with. Have it then, So bad as to make your enemies feel some for you. And who goes looking for replacement? Speak, and he spoke, That "something big" would partake; That a truth would emerge "next week". Some of those watching the mountain from afar Came to consider, at the end, - That, looking back, we have a weak narrative. - We have a weak narrative.

33. Scattered among the nations- waste-spaces. Some say a prediction of entropy is as the general theory Of a safe bet. What may be looked upon from within The tent of meaning to be a magical, Mystical voice of secret wisdom, As sayeth we needst people push'd unto an inflection point, Where that they pick up a stone, find another and thither lay hands- That, as a weird snake, goeth crazy and kill Itself, Aaron became spokesperson for a fish oil supplement Made up of sophisticated spies who spoke foreign languages and travelled, Which, when filled, if pulled and scrubbed of reference to a golden calf, Could descry my covenant of such that We're determined not to be, By our psychological nor pathogenic ends, But by the primary given of our socio-political twin-set, As ever, we, ridiculous, replacement and necessarily, Can go pound sand.

34. It's all about sevens, in sabbaths- I warned you, you owe me a desolation, Old saying, “Spy one, ring one, leave one.” For a sabbath is my parle with dust. Should you push back against the notion of endings, What are you thinking to be, as thus pushed back against? What are you claiming when you say, No, no it isn't ending?

35. Desolation is rest, Even the rest of a draggyness, And like most things will be, Twas named twice- Once in ignorance And once in knowledge, Which it got not on your busy weekends, when ye dwelt, While otherwise engaged, upon it. If the Act gets signed, It’ll be today; Or tomorrow. Not a day later; Before we hang up, he mutters, - Twas a smuggler what done it, And needst be taken out In the name of Babylon;

36. For I shall send a faint unto the heart of the remainder In the lands of those jaded by you; and the sound of the driven leaf Shall give chase; so away do you flee, as one fleeth from ideas of a sword Or a satellite-controlled gun in the sky, Where no terrorists are present on the ground. And so shall fall they, when none pursueth, as by the draggyness Of where we're OK with a god watching over us, Because he might maketh protection of us, By shewing no incentive as to try and dispel, And by this, the virus hath gained Our blueprint for its future, Where Dr. Moloch just said - This is this sort of conflict now- That each epidemic amplifieth the next, From where all epidemics begin, anecdotally- In China.

37. And they shall stumble, one upon the other, And so through a very depressing time, when Everything is read about, and only of how Everyone's at loggerheads And nobody's cooperating with anybody. So hie, on Trump Time? But! That’s then, The suspected culprit, be it Hackers and their alleged paymasters, The smuggler what hath done it Or more malign actors- it's No reasonable person. No reasonable person should be found liable. No reasonable person should be found liable to believe it. - Did not convince them.

38. Here Aaron hath a parting message for those who might still be caught upon the roiling forums of this sort of carcass, as he once was, - Don’t leave your habits to chance, To be a derision among My enemies— It is not real- I did not think, until the very end, that it was necessarily for me to maketh the call On whether to blow it all; lo, Tiny Habits. Twas a wonderful opportunity to be deliberate. Easy, it is, to fall in line with peace and society and be so mindful. Where the lights returneth to the eyes, That at this moment, remaineth dormant. Perish, and I shall eat you up.

39. No, pine away; with thy fathers pine inside of a tree. There's a need here, so be ok With a god that watcheth over, because he, Before he role-played the insurrection and ransacked the seat of the tent of meaning, Said that the human condition cannot save itself, That our memories are going to be difficult to achieve, So now we're lost to workshops, listening sessions, A training in equity, inclusion and cultural awareness- As unto the host, the producers and the skeleton crew, And here the real answer Is close within The carcass of the other; The parody to the tragedy, Closer than is comfortably recorded By the ummim, the thurim, The uncomfortable fascinator- The wriggle out Did not convince. Focus on the wrong.

40. So to the Sacrifice, Which is short, and for a sacrifice of well-being, Sins of the father and of their own as, finally, confessed- - You’ve been killing yourself for the rest of your lives By going after the big calf, even in jest; I don’t think we’re meant to do a life alone, While community support can be really empounding. Then Aaron invoked the analect of What was hitherto only alluded after- Lord shew mercy o'er the soule Of poor olde Martin Elginbrod, As He would do, as He is god and You, but Martin Elginbrod. Nae, no sacrifice- god can furnish himself.

\/\/\...Major disruption expected until end of service... Someone is coming to help.../\/\/

41. If your intelligence... Doesn't move... At the speed of your lips... ... Then... That's not to say... And so ... won't be said... I suppose... It's not hard to... Overflow... U's address- - It's outrageous; who gets To claim the end? As Dr. Moloch skewered, - Where U's Without wiggle room; then Why would you release this information if it wasn't true? - It intrigues my botherance and no more.

42. There's a vacuum at the top that can always Be rendered to the service of sociopathy- So Aaron had reached the merrye age of 123 when on his back, Forking it over, he remembered the covenant; How transacting with God had always left him feeling dubious- At once on the bum-end of a raw deal and at the same time, A confidence trixter; that he was present only as a matter of course, As would allow for the whole to happen and what else? I got a shot of the obligatory handshake- it looked obligatory. I will remember the land.

43. Lo, for the land, the land as she lie Forsaken, shall late enjoy, in finding Return on her sabbaths in desolation; And they shall repay of the crime by iniquity- A draggyness, and then an emptiness, A peace and a solemnity. Oh my sabbaths, my covenant of sevens, Leave you me memories, On remember the land, How pandemics End, For they who to decide, And as go pound sand, Because, even because of thee and thy Rejecting of My ordinance, and then all souls abhorred, All lost, for The attention economy Where holes get called into question, Then provoked, Beyond their outskirts Flash.- I used to run. Leave me you memories. And the land- lyrical several hundred miles westward went we. Where failed mechanisms Are left to turn as ever Then, by the cypher, Reprise to page one, But my sky bolts- They are not regular And cannot be relied upon With your imperfectly leaky recall, Unqualified insight and inadequate processing- Tis an inapt power.

44. Still, for all that, I'm with you, yeah- Why, if I sell you a pipedream That will last you out your days; Which, smiled at, across your ashes, As with a wink, so with a nod, And then that, with a fondness, thus wains;- Will it not do? A 'freewill', as a given, unto you, As also upon the universe, Whereby bestowed Within a periodic Doubling to chaos, As might interpret the efficiency Of its instruments and Deny you the myths; Let to live among bad ones. Might.

45. The weight of a human collapse Is quite light, And leaves not a trace in the ground. I lie on the bank, benign Beneath the long, lean, slantage of the sun. So Moses disposes Of my properties from here; It's good bye to the Umim and to the Thurim. My brother writes my will best, As he once bade sacrifice of me; So smite him, for I'm still a grudgeful god, Still, mostly, I'll be thinking about Egypt, I find it my Culloden, In other words, An end can occur not because We grow tired of the mode And learn to live with the damage, But, In moping that fate should be The brighter star, Get on.

46. The cave closed behind Mose On his retreat from Aaron's bier, through the thickening air; And what of the Urim and Thummim- stripp'd When he wenteth so, as before the store? Aaron's memory was left for people who came after him, The pillar of cloud which proceeded in front of the van As god disallowed, disappeared with Aaron's death. Coincidences of events form the structures of time-space and give, In inference, to the retched conundrum Of how to respond- the 'you are the same of a different Stage in the only narrative there goes to tell' notion- Sinai. At another site gazelles were found At the feet of several burial mounds- - Why'd you bury them there? Enriquez enquired. - Has to be a reason. But a hypothesis is An implicit bias to begin; Hard as it be To set off without one; a return to the rushes, To the brushes- Been moiled among words For a little too long. The angel's death march On the day of revelation; the path of obsolescence To an end of ministration; god actively bows, And then obliterates the lot of them.

Why bow? He ponders. Ponders? Never. Sorry.

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alexsmitposts · 4 years

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Black Deaths are About White Fear Fifty-seven years after Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream” speech, thousands of black Americans turned out on the same Washington Mall to reaffirm that ‘Black Lives Matter’ on Saturday, August 29th, setting off speculation that the country may be descending into a kind of civil war. Black American history began with the importation of slaves from Africa by the first white settlers more than four hundred years ago. Yet neither the nineteenth century civil war that killed more Americans than all of the country’s foreign wars, nor the legislative measures taken since it ended to ‘guarantee’ black Americans ‘equal treatment under the law’, have sufficed: With 15% of the total US population, Blacks continue to live in conditions that in fact maintain the suspicion and abuse that culminates in unjustified police killings. At the same time however, community colleges as well as a growing number of prestigious institutions seeking to burnish their ‘progressive’ credentials, have enabled black Americans to gain the intellectual tools with which to challenge white intellectuals. Nowhere is this seen more dramatically than in the growing number of black journalists on newspapers, progressive magazines, and major television networks, both as anchors and guest commentators. As I write this, two young black women who report together on the sports world demonstrate a larger remit, pointing out that when a white policeman shoots seven bullets into the back of an unarmed black man while clutching his shirt with his other hand, it is out of fear. Subliminally, that same fear explains why in the face of growing injustice, intellectuals’ respect for the Black Lives Matter movement is dropping. Meanwhile, athletes are moving in the opposite direction. In 2016, star white football player Colin Kaepernick began kneeling to protest racial injustice as the national anthem was played before games. With ‘taking a knee’ going viral, the football bosses fired Kaepernick, ultimately realizing that they could not do without with this valuable player. And when the assassination by police of George Floyd was followed by that of Michael Black, on the off chance that he might have been carrying a knife (one was safely stored under his car floor), teams across the country issued a statement that they would no longer allow their bodies to be used as entertainment while black murders continued. This demonstration of political maturity by ‘jocks’ (men valued only for their ability in sports) forced the press to highlight the stark differences in the way police arrest black and white ‘offenders’. When a seventeen-year old took it upon himself to ‘assist’ the forces of law and order in the city where Black was shot, killing two protesters in broad daylight, it showed him being politely ‘taken into custody’ and offered food and water by police. The contrast set off the race war that Trump had been promising were he to lose the up-coming election. Relayed by a media always eager for a juicy story, the President’s derogatory references to black people, referred to as ‘dog whistles’ are bearing fruit. Donald Trump’s main motivation for seeking the presidency having been to get four years of uninterrupted limelight, however his white supremacist backers hired him to transform a flawed democracy into a race-based dictatorship. His history of run-of-the-mill racism, such as conniving to keep Black tenants out of his rental properties, suggested that he would be a willing accomplice. And while public attention was directed toward accusations of Russian election intervention in his favor, Trump was campaigning to Make America White Again, benefitting from police traditions that hark back to the days when they were tracking down runaway slaves. But the story doesn’t stop there. While the ‘race war’ occupies the headlines, New York’s Attorney Generals are preparing indictments that could land Donald Trump in jail for the rest of his life once he is no longer protected by his office. To prevent that from happening, he tried to render the post office incapable of counting the mail-in ballots that many voters would prefer to Covid-spreading voting facilities. When that failed, he unleashed a race war, banking on human avoidance of change during a crisis. Should the election nonetheless go badly for him, in the interval between the November election and the January swearing in of President Biden, Trump will enlist ‘his’ Attorney General, Bill Barre, and the Republican leader of the Senate, Mitch McConnell, in efforts to somehow put his white collar crimes out of reach. Should that attempt fail, Americans can only hope that he absconds to a friendly country, such as Turkey, rather than encouraging all-out civil war from behind the scenes. The county has entered a perilous moment, that has nothing to do with foreign threats to its democracy.

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socially-inept-marketer · 4 years

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7 Tips for Awesome Local SEO

Insert places and your issues are compounded.

Identifying the search engine optimization methods for automobile dealer promoting that most efficiently pull in neighborhood visitors is a shifting target.

Last year Google alone produced over 500 changes to the way they position and index a company site in their search engine, as well as their newest Hummingbird upgrade that basically rewrote their whole search engine they are on a collision-course to greatest that amount. So it’s highly likely that some site changes you might have made a few years back are now obsolete (if not entirely prohibited ), whereas new criteria and best practices for local SEO might be absent from the site in addition to your off-page resources such as social media and company listings.

Therefore, in the event that you’ve been thinking that your visibility appears to have crashed you are likely accurate.

However, where there’s difficulty — there’s chance, and if you aren’t content with the regional search engine results, here are 7 SEO tips that are certain to drive more neighborhood discovery to your small business — regardless of if you’ve got one or a number of places.

1. Keywords

The component forcing traffic isn’t the website’s region . Search engines don’t observe the components of your site. Nevertheless, it is sensible to focus as much care there as you can.

You may use a tool such as Google’s Keyword Planner to construct your plan. Download your list of keywords to Excel for additional filtering and editing on a regular basis — quarterly inspection works good but certainly no less than two times per year. I am a major supporter of audits for functionality KPIs, promotion and business analysis.

Position for a hundred key words that nobody is looking for is a waste of energy, determine keywords most likely to push the ideal kind of visitors to your business and build your website (and off-page activity) around people. You fueling your self.

For customers, I concentrate on approximately 35 key words & phrases Generally, and spend a few hours’ selections. Every strategy is exceptional for customers in precisely the business vertical.

SEO** TIP**: Filtering consequences of this Keyword Planner instrument by geographical regions (state, state, county, and town ) will exhibit the regional need for your key word entered in addition to project a feeling of how competitive it’s going to be for you to rank for people on search.

2. Keyword META & Mapping

Now that you have your strategy down let us put it to great use.

Looking in the key word list (Excel spreadsheet), you will likely observe you could group together similar key terms to form classes (I predict those silos).

Does your site have a webpage for every category? It ought to.

Your webpages must aim the facets of your enterprise — although you do not need tens of thousands of pages to your site. Your list of key words is your point.

Looking at your keyword list, be certain that the main keyword for a webpage is utilized as near the front of the opening paragraph of this site as possible and consider highlighting your key word in bold. Same holds for the administrative components of this site known as the META — that the part folks can’t view, but search engines may (not all site platforms allow using bold , do not freak out if yours does not ).

There are 3 components of META on a Site

Ensure each site page contains unique META components (all those three) and place your key keyword as near the front of your wordings as you finish these components.

META Keywords aren’t a ranking component, so use them sparingly — no longer than 10 words/phrases — and do not sell-the-shop by listing the most important keywords on your competitors to discover. Do however be sure to record your state, city, and zip code in addition to the conditions”automobile parts”,”Mopar components”, and”automobile body parts”.

Some of the most common search engine optimization mistakes for smaller companies I visit are META that’s not optimized or that’s not unique for every webpage.

3. SCHEMA

Tool for neighborhood advertising needs to do with having a very simple html code known as SCHEMA — also known as structured info or microformat — to identify and classify a number of the most essential info on your site to search engines, including your place and contact information.

Google, Bing, and Yahoo loosely accepts this code which makes it a must-have for every single small business.

Speaking of search engines, remember that Google is not the only choice worth courting. Facebook has also incorporated a search feature named Search Graph this season, as well as one-in-seven individuals in the world having a Facebook accounts which makes them (technically) the greatest search engine on earth.

SEO TIP: All these tools can enable you to finish & examine your code: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQSVsHvpTTA

Doing this will lower the total amount of html coding which search engines need to read since they load your webpage creating your page load quicker — and the rate a site page opens is a search engine optimization element which affects ranking. Quick is good.

Adding things such as your contact info here will make it simple for individuals to associate with you what page of the site they’re on. This is particularly true on cellular devices. Have multiple places — think about utilizing a split footer in which one side is to get the satellite or local company | another for the primary site.

As an extra plus, getting your contact information on each page may also raise neighborhood indexation of your site by search engines, which makes it much easier for local searchers to locate you.

5. I am not going too heavy into blogging and social networking, there has been much printed already on the subject, but suffice to say you have to be actively generating content (story telling).

Most small companies begin to sweat at the idea of composing blog & social networking articles, but here is a very simple strategy which will get your articles advertising roaring like a 440 Six Pack.

Collect 12 pictures (electronic ) that best exemplify your major keyword phrases and place

Cool vehicle part graphics and”title the component” quizzes make good articles

Describe who, what, when, where, why, or how about the picture

Make certain your keyword is in front of your name, description, and message.

Insert a connection back to the webpage of your site this key word goes to (Step 1.)

Utilize a scheduling app to automate those 12 articles to print after a month. You finally have one narrative to post each month. Wasn’t that simple?

Now produce over the subsequent six months and then add them and continue composing and adding. It is literally that simple.

My preference would be to get a separate to double a companies marketing stations. You might also have an onsite (site ) site to curate the articles from the off-site site, no injury there — only be sure to offer new blog articles a couple of days to populate search engines prior to re-publishing them.

SEO TIP: Sensible includes a content advertising tool which automatically selects the best time to organize your site and societal networking articles based on if your audience is the most likely to read . It might take a couple of months in order for it to find a fantastic read on your own followers & buddies, so hang in there — it works excellent. This tool also lets you set automatic re-posting, just make sure you write with an ever-greening tone so that your backup does not date and place a realistic end-date in to drama.

6. NAP Consistency —

Among the most significant local-SEO varies from 2012 to 2013 is that the significance of correctly formatted and proper small business contact info.

Any mention of a company’s name, its physical address, local telephone number, and site are known as a company citation. The components tied to a company location (title, address, telephone ) being called NAP. The pin-point accuracy of this dataset is essential for local advertising as it supplies search engines identification of your place and contact info. Sounds straightforward enough but almost 50% of small business have data or formatting errors within their citation NAP — their regional visibility on hunt is guaranteed to bring a hit for this.

Consider this company:The Mopar Parts Main St, Your City of bob

Thus the Mopar Parts of Bob received market share that was diluted . Not a fantastic thing in any way. There are 720 mixtures of companies NAP mistakes which could be produced out of the information.

Discovering and adjusting citation mistakes is not a glamorous job and it might take weeks to make any considerable progress, but at the big picture, adjusting your NAP information will pay massive dividends for your regional visibility.

Automation (support business or software application ) does not work well for citation or connection construction. Not only are you planning to make duplicate listings (not great ), but you can’t build as detailed a list using automation as you possibly could by hand (scanning ). And you may dismiss the”Your profile is 100% absolute” directives — which usually just means you’ve completed 100 percent of the mandatory minimal areas — there is typically a good deal more work to perform.

Search engine optimization is in the facts, and at a hyper-competitive marketplace like the automobile parts sector, the tiny details can make the gap between #1 position on the initial page and #11 standing on the second-page. If you’re thinking about subscribing to a nearby link building service such as Yext, know your listings will probably revert to the condition before you hired them if you cancel your operating arrangement, and you’re responsible for locating and correcting any copy listings their support generates. Businesses like sanp seo can also provide building services for local direcotries.

7. You’ve probably heard of the company review website”Yelp” and’ve likely heard both Google and Bing provide directory listings for companies, but did you understand that these inspection and company list sites can give your company a substantial increase in visibility?

The bulge happens in a few ways. All these directory and search engine listings include a credibility component to your company by verifying the consistency of your NAP (title, address, and telephone ) along with your keyword attention as removed from the story of the list. A number of these listings also include a”class” element farther classifying your small business. Additional info like your own hours of surgery, and the kinds of payment you take in may also be noticed and confirmed via these company listings (also known as backlinks since all of them have a link pointing back into your own company ). NAP verification raises confidence and at time, raise your visibility.

If citation link building building pains your mind, think of it like filling a hot air balloon, then it requires a great deal of atmosphere to find the balloon away from the floor and required regular action to help keep it afloat. If you quit hitting on the burners or run out of gas, the balloon return to earth. Now consider your advertising activities like one connection from a directory list, search engine, website, or societal websites article were the equal of a single cubic-foot of air. It might take some time before you began to understand your standing and visibility increase — but such as the balloon, after it removed, it is going to stay flying high provided that it’s tended to.

For example, it’s well-known that Google Maps supports information with YP.com along with other citation information suppliers, so be sure to only use the local telephone number enrolled to your physical place and don’t record a call-tracking number in your site or for any internet citations. In addition, don’t use scripts which reveal the local amount but conceal the call-tracking one, revealing a viewer different info than that which search engines see is known as cloaking — and it is a breach of search engine guidelines that if captured could make a hefty punishment from search businesses.

A directory list that is correctly optimized and formatted may appear on search engines if somebody is searching. If you had one of these elements appear with your site your marketplace share that is online would double!

Websites with greater PageRank — show in search.All united, focusing on those 7 components of neighborhood SEO will increase your visibility on search engines and drive more visitors to your site.

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f-117-nighthawk · 4 years

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More playlist meta bc I don’t wanna do homework and Jimmy kicked me out of the TA room saying I’d been in there for far too long for a Friday (it was four hours! Interspaced between classes! Workshop kit inventory is just an excuse to blast Gloryhammer to me, it’s fun)

Since I was talking about Ten Thousand Against One earlier, I’ve been thinking about the timeline and which event the songs are connected to. Long post under the cut

Turn the Lights Out is... sort of an odd case. It’s not like Remnants of Stars, which is about Galran and my philosophy about how we were created, what happens to us when we die, and the cycles that power the universe. Of course, Remnants of Stars is a little more than just philosophy. It actually describes (in a rather metaphorical way) the actual process of the marthinazik filtering quintesence into new stars, planets, beings, anything you can think of. It also has a very important lyric for much much later like, post Sticky Notes later. Now that I think about it, it actually defines a good chunk of that maybe-sequel-maybe-idea era in conjunction with Soul Extract’s Filaments.

Anyway, back to Turn the Lights Out. It’s an odd case because it’s sort of like Remnants of Stars in that it’s more about the philosophy, but it’s before Remnants of Stars because it’s also kind of an event. If you read interviews with Delain about Moonbathers, Charlotte states that Turn the Lights Out is about Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, specifically the character of Death. I confess I haven’t read those comics, but my interpretation fits her rather well I think. To me, Turn the Lights Out is about a gentle god who accepts they will not always be seen as who they are but will give their everything to protect those within their universe. Now, who does that sound like? Which characters have been around since the birth of the universe, under various names, whether they be Ibeshganszá, ‘kibrraldíl, Marduzbazí, or Vôltrôn?

You can make an argument for Your World Will Fail to be directly after Turn the Lights Out, but I rather like it after Remnants of Stars too. Turn the Lights Out is the beginning of the universe, so naturally, it goes first. Sentient life needs to evolve for Remnants of Stars to truly fit, and even though Your Would Will Fail technically can happen at any point between the first Plank time and the next, it also happens when the comet that becomes Voltron crashes into Daibazaal. The Your World Will Fail/Dark Matter/Eater of Worlds trio is both a general, entire timeline-spanning idea, and a specific event.

(Your world will fail my love/It's far beyond repair/Your world will fail my love/It is already there)

(Bring me your soul/Bring me your hate/In my name you will create/Bring me your fear/Bring me your pain/You will destroy in my name)

(Can't imagine the violence/The rage and the love in my madness/I am the eater of worlds and I'm looking for someone to feed me)

And then, right after that event, or even during, you have Apocalypse 1992. The death of the dream, the final madness before the triumph of chaos.

You Keep What You Kill is very much the odd one out out of everything. Helion Prime based it off a book I forget the name of, but here it’s purely about Zarkon’s empire. The “Holy Half-Dead” have lost so much of their culture, of the family bonds that kept them together even when their mistakes threatened the destruction of all, but they still remember the songs of glory. And they do keep what they kill.

And then there’s a rather large time jump of about five thousand Earth years to The Seven Sisters. This song is pretty well encapsulated in Child From the Stars (Lost in the Dark) (which is a lyric from Closure, but Closure is later for Reasons), but the other half of it is connected to Memories of a Girl I Haven’t Met.

Who Will Save You Now has gone through so many iterations of what it’s connected to I honestly don’t remember what it actually is anymore. Given its placement between The Seven Sisters and Nobody Gets Left Behind, I think it’s related to the SFSS Genesis’s disappearance. But it could also be placed in conjunction with A Simple Plan and be about something slightly different...hm, I’ll think on that. This song has such a Dark Matter vibe to me, but it hasn’t found a home that sticks in my brain yet.

Nobody Gets Left Behind is really there bc it’s a fun song and when I found 1551 I immediately had to put something in. BUT it is a good song about family dynamics and, well, that’s Voltron in a nutshell right? (and then you get, right there in the first verse, “Don't even try to pretend/That you're rough and just as tough/As when you're missing a friend/Attack and take him back/Cause when the team isn't whole/You've got a hole in your soul/So step up to your fucking role/We might get hurt/We might be taking some hits/But when you're taking our friend/Then that's some personal shit” and you cannot tell me that’s not everybody’s mood post Battle in the Sarnan Nebula)

A Simple Plan is a new addition in the past few weeks. I rediscovered The Spiritual Machines a few weeks ago and the lyric “How long can we hold off ending/How long can we pretend we're ok” hit me right in the Keith feels. So this one is in conjunction with the first verse of Nobody Gets Left Behind. The entire song actually reminds me of Dark Matter with how it’s centralized at one event but contains hints of other things (The truth arrived too slow).

Memories of a Girl I Haven't Met is maybe one standard year (so six earth months-ish?) after A Simple Plan.

String Theory is... weird. It’s mostly there for the title, but the lyrics do contain themes found in other parts of the playlist that fit really well but don’t map to the event I associate the song with. It’s honestly about Shiro missing Adam and the rest of the people on Earth. Which, granted, given the point in the timeline the title is associated with makes a certain amount of sense but...idk. And the bit that begins with “You don’t believe in space” is about something entirely different. It’s confusing, but all inexplicably related to the title event.

Interesting fact: My Dark Matter drafts/ideas folder is actually split int pre- and post- String Theory folders. It was originally because String Theory is such a pivotal moment in the Coalition’s efforts, but it also ended up vaguely the middle of the timeline. It’s the point where things absolutely, truly, have no relation to what happens in canon. The butterfly effect stemming from the events of Shatterpoint (and an implied secondary shatterpoint in another fic) have changed things enough that apart from one general event, nothing happens the same way (and that event is for drastically different reasons). All in all, it fits the weird vibe of the song rather well.

Next is Belgrade, the Ultimate Klance Song, about three months later. Fun Shenanigans happen in conjunction with this absolute bop.

Here’s the surprisingly big gap of just over a standard Earth year, in which several important events happen that don’t have songs attached to them (Roentgen, maybe)

Then we get Birthright/Firewall, a set of songs about reclaiming yourself from the depths of hell with just a liiiiiitle bit of help from your family.

(It's time to take ahold of what belongs to me/It's time to walk away with no apologies/Voices in the mirror start quietly/And now they're screaming back at me!)

(This force knows what you can do/And what you can make/With your tattered shell)

Here Comes the Reign technically starts during Birthright/Firewall, but doesn’t come into full effect until a month later, and then even fuller around five months after that. Meanwhile, we have The Day the Earth Collapsed, which is rather self-explanatory.

A few months later there is Darker Matter. The fic connected to this is real weird, but also real important. Suffice to say it’s gonna be confusing, and a universe doesn’t like the Paladins for a while.

And then we have Closure. Child From the Stars (Lost in the Dark) is actually the first of four fics inspired by Closure’s chorus. (I also drew a picture for each fic. They’re combined into my desktop background, and the first one is still my phone background and my pfp) “I am the child from the stars/That got lost in the dark/Between heaven and hell/I am forced to live on/I am the cause when you sin/I am the demon you skin/But there is no more tears to beautify/This is my last goodbye”

Closure is a rather sad song actually, but the way I’ve interpreted it ends on a bright spot of hope. The first related fic I’ve already posted/talked about, the second would be around the time of A Simple Plan. The third is somewhere in the gap between Belgrade and Birthright/Firewall. I’ve placed Closure at the approximate time of the fourth fic. I actually just moved it while writing this, because I realized this makes more sense after Darker Matter and with the Fall of [Redacted]. I’ve chosen to interpret the last line as finally deciding to stay instead of the (probably more likely given the rest of the album) darker interpretations.

After Closure is Ember, which is actually super connected to Darker Matter which is why I originally had them next to each other. The thing is, all three of these songs are connected to very specific events, the latter two of which are in direct response to the first even if there is a month or two between them. Ember is on the playlist for two reasons: the first is the line “dark matter falling from the sky” that basically required me to put it somewhere; the second is the fact that I keep mishearing the lyrics. “chthonic” is not “cuthonic” (which is not a word, but I interpreted as meaning Cthulu-like) and it’s “riches to embers” not “witches to embers.” Make of that what you will.

And finally, after almost seven Earth years, we get to The Reckoning/This is a Call/World on Fire/Louder Than Words. The Reckoning sort-of picks up where The Day the Earth Collapsed left off, spanning at least a year before going full force into the frantic five days of the other three songs.

(In blood and tears/A thousand times/We rise against/We'll always hold the line/Of reckoning)

(This is a call to action/This is a call to arms/All lives for one, together/There are no false alarms)

(World on fire with a smoking sun/Stops everything and everyone/Brace yourself for all will pay/Help is on the way)

(We have the force to fight/We have the blinding light/A war is more than heard/Coming in louder than words)

#i am dark matter; your road to ruin #dark matter playlist #to the tune of sketchy galore: meta galore #god I hope the under the cut works this is so long #its also two am i'm going to sleep it's been a long few hours #DM Playlists

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eternityunicorn · 5 years

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Remember Me? - Part Three

Author: eternityunicorn

Genre: Romance/Drama/AU

Pairing: Elijah Mikaelson x OC

Warnings: Violence, Smut (*Smut chapters marked +18)

Summary: Set in TO Season 5 - Elijah Mikaelson didn’t know who he was, but he had stopped searching for answers. Instead, of trying to discover his true identity, he settled in a small village in the south of France, spending his days as a musician. Then a mysterious woman begins to show up, night after night, to drive him insane, when he refuses to return to his old life with her. However, his course is set as he learns more about the woman and the past he left behind, leading him down an emotional path of infidelity, betrayal, and heartbreak. Can he ever put the broken pieces back together?

NOTE: OC and original elements are from my up and coming novel series!

AUTHOR’S COMMENTARY: So, I wasn’t going to post a new update for this fic until tomorrow, but because of my lovely friend @inmylifeilovedthemall I decided to post the next part early. Hope you enjoy it!

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Before long, the Original was sitting in a cafe just outside the city limits with Antoinette sitting across from him. He had just finished telling her that Greta was dead, killed by Eternity, but that Roman had thankfully escaped unharmed. She looked mournful for the loss of her mother, but it wasn’t a deep, devastating sort that one might expect. It was a mild sort of mourning that one might feel for a complete stranger that died tragically.

“Are you alright?” Elijah asked her softly, reaching across the table to touch her hand.

“My mother brought this upon herself,” Antoinette replied quietly. “My mother did all these heinous things because of some deluded ideology that vampires need to be pure. She carried on a war that she could not win - that her followers will not win. Not only do they have your family to contend with, but....” She trailed off, looking down.

“Eternity too,” he finished for her, swallowing thickly in speaking the other woman’s name. “Actually, I think that it is only her they’ll have to deal with since the Mikaelsons are scattered and unable to reunite. So, it is only her that will stand against them, and she will slaughter them all effortlessly, I’m sure.”

Antoinette looked at him with an indescribable expression that resembled a mix of curiosity, worry, and jealousy.

It was his turn to look away. Then Elijah confessed, “She told me something at Shiloh Place. She told me that we had a daughter together named Arianna.”

His fiancée blinked rapidly, “A daughter? But that’s not possible. Vampires can’t have children.”

He shrugged and finally returned his gaze to her face. “Apparently, with a little divine intervention, they can,” he sighed, then he spoke his thoughts rapidly from there without thinking, “If it’s true, then I have missed seven years of her life - of my daughter’s life! What kind of father am I, if I intentionally abandoned her? If I left her alone this entire time? I keep thinking about it and I can’t help but feel horrible. Not to mention, I intentionally abandoned my wife too, the mother of this miracle child, erasing them from my mind! Just what kind of man was I to do such a thing?” He scrubbed his hands over his face in frustration.

“I guess that means the wedding is off,” Antoinette smiled sadly, while playing with the engagement ring on her finger. “You’ll be going back to them - to her, yes?”

Immediately, Elijah realized what he had said and part of him wished he could take it back. He sighed heavily, “I-I don’t know. I love you, Antoinette. I do, and I still desire our future together, but this is my daughter we’re talking about. I left her alone, let her grow up without me, and I have no idea who she is. At the very least, I need to see her. I need to meet her.”

His fiancée licked her lower lip, still refusing to look at him. “If you go there, you’re going to get your memories back,” she murmured shakily. “You know that’s what will happen. We both do. Then you’ll forget all about me, because you’ll have your wife and your daughter. You’ll have your old life back and I’ll be nothing to you. These seven years will be nothing compared to the thousand with your family and the many with your wife. I’ll lose you. Forever.”

He didn’t know what to say to comfort her. In fact, he didn’t think that there was anything he could say to do so. He found himself to be very torn between his old life and his new one.

“Well, your daughter is probably at the Mikaelson compound in the French Quarter. Perhaps you can reach out to her somehow,” Antoinette suggested, after realizing that he wasn’t going to attempt to reassure her that wasn’t the case. “Maybe there is a way that you can see your daughter. Though, I’m afraid I can’t go with you. You and I both know that Klaus would capture me, then torture, and probably kill me, if he laid eyes on me because of what my mother tried to do to his own wife and child. I can’t risk being seen there. It’s too dangerous for me.”

Elijah swallowed thickly, knowing what he was implying would hurt her, as he reluctantly proposed, “He might kill you on sight, but he can’t do that to me. I could probably just walk in without too much of an issue, even if Klaus saw me coming. More so, if I explained to him why I had come, he’d leave me alone, I think anyway.”

His fiancée looked sad, but she tried to put on a brave face, “Then you have your plan of action and I suppose this is goodbye for you and I.”

As she moved to stand up, he grabbed her hand to stop her. “Goodbye? I’m just going to see my daughter. I still want to be with you, Antoinette. You are the woman I love. Just wait for me by the river. I’ll meet you there before sunrise and then we can go wherever you want in the world.”

Antoinette smiled slightly, her eyes glassy with unshed tears. “Alright. The river. I’ll be waiting.”

With that, she walked away, leaving Elijah to his mission.

Finding the Mikaelson compound was easy. All he had to do was compel the local bartender at a place called Rousseau’s to tell him where the place was at. From there, he moved at vampire speed to reach the establishment in record time. He did have his lady waiting for him after all and didn’t have time to waste. He needed to find his daughter, see her, and then go.

With the stealth of a predator, Elijah infiltrated the compound, moving into the courtyard, only have a surprise waiting for him. Klaus was standing there with a blonde female vampire and a brunette male one; Rebekah and Kol Mikaelson!

“Ah, Elijah, welcome home,” Klaus greeted him with a wide, mischievous smile. “It’s about time you showed up. Had trouble finding the place, did we? With amnesia and all that, I’m sure it was quite the challenge.” Then he called behind him, “Are you ready, love?”

Eternity came forth, coming to stand in front of the hybrid and his siblings. She didn’t show any sort of emotion when she saw him. She remained cold and stone faced.

“What the hell is this?” Elijah demanded quietly, sensing a trap immediately.

“You are here, so that I can destroy the Hollow, as a piece of it resides in each Original here, you included, if that wasn’t obvious,” she told him clinically. “I cannot allow that evil thing to remain in this world, so I have brought the four Mikaelsons together to extract the spirit and wipe it from existence.”

He narrowed his eyes on her, feeling deceived, “So...wait. Our daughter? Was that just a lie to get me here? Does she even exist?”

Eternity nodded, “She does exist. She is here even. However, you’re not allowed to see her. At least, not as you are. If you want to see your daughter, you’re going to have to agree to having your memories restored. I will not let Ari see this...stranger, who will see her this once for curiosity’s sake and then dart off to some far off corner of the world with his new lover. I won’t let such a father that does not even know who she is, who can’t remember the day she was born or the first time he held her his arms or her first steps, near her.”

“You used her just to get me here,” he realized. “To pull me back into a life I don’t want.”

“I did, because it is the right thing to do,” she answered unapologetically. “The Hollow needs to be destroyed and I need to undo this madness you have put upon yourself in erasing your memories. I knew that the only way to get you back here was to tell you about Ari. I realized that not the bonds you shared with Niklaus or myself would suffice, only her. Now that you are here, I can save the world, along with my broken family, the very one you gave to me because you loved me...the very one you denounce, along with me.”

Elijah didn’t know what to think, except that he wanted to see his daughter and he would do anything to do so.

“You have to decide what you really want,” the ethereal beauty told him with finality. “Your daughter? Or your new existence...without her? You have until I finish the extraction of the Hollow to make your choice. Come.”

With that, Eternity turned gracefully and lead the other three Mikaelson siblings over to a more open space. He didn’t move immediately to follow, but eventually he went over to stand on south side of the pale woman, while his siblings took the north, east, and west positions around her.

“Are you lot ready?” She asked the four of them rhetorically.

Then powerful woman stretched her arms outward and began to chant in a strange language that wasn’t of Earth. A mighty wind picked up around them and flashes of lightning lit up the shadowy courtyard with claps of thunder echoing off the walls.

Soon, a painful burning sensation welled up inside Elijah’s chest, forcing him to hunch over in agony. He vaguely noticed it was the same for the other three too. They all contorted and howled in pain as the evil energy inside them was drawn out. Then with a loud bang and a blinding flash of light, everything went dark.

In his temporary unconscious state, he saw Eternity there, as he did every time he closed his eyes. She was smiling in the distance per usual and calling his name, beckoning him to come to her. There was also a little girl he couldn’t see the face of with the pale woman, giggling and playing near her. Yet, every time he dared to make that step toward her, he found himself unable to ever close the distance between them. There was always the same canyon sized separation between them, no matter what he did to try and get to her.

It was heart wrenchingly painful in such a profound way that he couldn’t stand it.

When he awoke, Elijah was laying on the ground where he had apparently collapsed. He heard the groans of the others and sat up to find his siblings all waking at the same time. At first, Eternity was no where to be found, as he got to his feet and looked around to spot her.

His vision had cemented his decision for him.

Then Eternity came into view, looking rather weary as she was embraced by Klaus, Rebekah, and then Kol in their relief to finally be rid of the Hollow bad to be able to be together again without the world ending. They were all grateful and joyful that the ethereal beauty had saved them all from the dark entity. It was a touching scene, one that Elijah didn’t dare try to participate in.

He waited awkwardly for her to approach him, which she did once the celebratory hugs were done being exchanged. She came to stand in front of him, gazing at him coolly and didn’t speak. Instead, she waited for him to give her his answer to her earlier ultimatum.

“I want my daughter,” Elijah wasted no time in telling her.

Eternity’s expression softened somewhat. It wasn’t as icy as it had been before he’d agreed to her terms. She simply nodded and motioned for him to follow her. “Come this way,” she spoke softly.

The ethereal beauty lead him upstairs and down the hall into one of the bedrooms, where she proceeded to shut them away from the others. She turned to him, leaning against the door, while he watched her curiously.

“This seems a little romantic, don’t you think?” Elijah quipped with a slight grin, trying to lighten the tense mood.

She gave him an unamused look, before she approached him, coming to stand mere inches away from him. He watched as she reached and rested her hands upon his chest, pressing herself into him slightly, while gazing at him with a swirl of different emotions that he couldn’t quite name or perhaps he didn’t want to.

“Kiss me, Elijah,” commanded Eternity softly, averting her eyes slightly as she did.

He hesitated, not quite understanding how his kissing her was going to undo the compulsion. At first, he thought that this was some kind of trick, that she was playing him. Yet, despite his amnesia, he somehow knew that she wouldn’t do that. He chose to believe that she was doing this out of some sort of necessity.

“Kiss me,” the ethereal beauty said again, more urgently. “Please, Elijah.”

Without hesitating further, Elijah threw caution to the wind and let his mouth descend upon hers in a sweet, but cautious kiss.

Immediately, he felt the heat of energy upon his lips. He was mesmerized as the sensation spread over his face upward into his mind, yet he didn’t cease in kissing Eternity, even though the feeling was foreign to him. He grew slightly nervous over it, especially as it grew more and more intense, eventually making his brain feel like it was on fire.

From there, the return of his memories was instantaneous. Everything came back in an swift flood of memories. The visions started from the beginning a thousand years ago and working up to the present day.

He knew who he was! He finally remembered it all, including the woman he held in his arms.

Pulling his mouth from hers, Elijah Mikealson looked down at Eternity. He recognized the woman he loved more than anything for the first time since she started showing up at his bar in France. He cupped her face in his hands and grinned from ear to ear in his happiness. Unable to help himself, he peppered her face with kisses and then hugged her to him tightly, overjoyed to have his memories back and more importantly to have the threat to his family destroyed.

However, Eternity remained stoic, stiff and motionless. She didn’t seem to share in his joy.

Concerned, he pulled back and gazed down at her. He found her head hanging down, concealing her face from his view. Then just as he was about to call to her, to ask her what was wrong, she looked up at him coolly and said, “You have met my terms. Come, I’ll take you to Ari.”

With that, she swept past him, opening the bedroom door and walking out without looking to see if he was following her. He felt guilty and hurt as he watched her go, understanding why she was being so cool to him. He had acted horridly in his desperation to protect his family from the Hollow. A heavy sigh left him, as he followed her out of what was their bedroom.

Eternity took him down the hall to another bedroom, where she knocked on the open door to alert the person inside to her presence. She disappeared into the room then, as she greeting the occupant, “Hello, my little love!”

“Mom!” A young voice shouted excitedly, just as Elijah came to stand in the doorway. “You’re finally back!”

The Original watched as a young girl of nine with long, wavy brown hair hopped off her bed and went to his wife, embracing her tightly. Ari!

“Yes, my darling,” the ethereal beauty replied and then she turned to him, revealing the girl, “and as promised, I have brought your father home as well.”

Arianna Katerina Mikaelson was the most beautiful little girl Elijah had ever seen. She had grown so much in the seven years he had been away. She had she’d her baby fat long ago, was walking and talking as anyone else would, and she looked like a mirror image of himself. That was except for the curls and waves of her long brown hair, as well the large almond shapes to her sapphire colored eyes that were all features of her mother.

His daughter looked at him cautiously, but only for a moment. Then her eyes began to water with joyful tears and she immediately ran to him, to throw her arms around his neck as he crouched down to meet her. He embraced her tightly as his own eyes began to water. His emotions were so profound that he ached painfully, as he felt an incredible joy like no other that was marred by a deep regret.

What had he done?

Elijah pulled back to take a good look at the child he had foolishly abandoned. She smiled brightly at him and it was infectious, for he was soon doing the same. “Hello, darling girl,” he murmured sweetly as he brushed back her hair and kissed her cheek. “I suppose we have a lot of catching up to do, but I must know: can you ever forgive me for being away?”

Immediately, Ari nodded her head rapidly. “Yes,” she said with a shaky voice as she tried to hold back her tears that nearly overwhelmed her. “You’re my dad. Of course, I can!”

The little girl embraced him again, giving Elijah the chance to look at Eternity, whom had silently watched the scene unfold before her. The immortal queen gazed at them with a tender affection that was marred by underline sadness and pain. Yet, she smiled at him as she moved past him to exit the room.

As both the Original and the girl pulled away from each other to stare at her with curious questioning, the ethereal woman spoke her parting words softly to them, “I’ll leave you two to your catch up and I shall return later.”

With that, she swept from the room, giving him time alone with their daughter.

Once Eternity was gone, Elijah sighed heavily again as he watched her go once more, before turning his full attention to the little girl he hadn’t seen in years.

“Mom doesn’t seem very happy,” Ari commented with innocent worry.

“She’s just exhausted from destroying the Hollow and restoring our family,” he explained gently.

The nine year old looked at him in consideration. “No, it’s not that, although I'm glad that she has,” she said matter-of-factly. “She’s cross with you. She’s mad that you had your memories erased and that you left me without a father since I was already without her.”

Elijah smiled slightly, knowingly, “You’ve inherited your mother’s psychic powers, I see.”

Ari rolled her eyes and crossed her arms across her chest authoritatively, “I did, but I don’t need to use them to know why Mom is sad. I’m quite cross with you too, by the way.” Her expression became sad as she asked in a small voice, “Why did you leave? Why did you forget?”

His heart broke. He reached to pull her back into his embrace, holding her close in comfort as he quietly explained, “I’m so sorry, Ari. I left because I had to, in order to keep the Hollow away from your cousin, Hope. I forgot because I thought I was a danger to my family, to you, as I cannot stand aside when any one of them is in danger or in need of help, especially your uncle Niklaus. I didn’t mean to hurt you or your mother. I was simply desperate. We all were, to defeat a great evil that threatened our family - and the world, without your mother here to help us.”

“Yeah, she’s been away off and on all these years, you know,” admitted his daughter. “There was a war or something that kept her from home more often than not. So it’s mostly been just me with Aunt Freya and Aunt Hayley...Hope too.”

Elijah wasn’t all that surprised to hear this news. The war that Ari spoke of had broken out somewhere in space, just as the Hollow had awakened to stir up trouble in New Orleans. Eternity had wanted to stay and fight to protect her family, but her duty to her people elsewhere had put pressure on her to leave. He remembered telling his wife to go, to deal with the war. He recalled promising her that he and their family had could handle the Hollow until she got back. It had been with his blessing, she had reluctantly left.

However, Eternity hadn’t return in time before the conflict with the Hollow reached it’s peak and that had left the Mikaelsons desperate to save Hope from it’s evil, of whom had been possessed by it. They had done what they thought they had to, since none of them had any idea when his powerful wife would return home to save them - and the world.

“I apologize for...everything,” Elijah told the little girl gently. “Neither your mother or I wanted to leave you without us. We were simply trying to do the right thing for everyone.”

“I know, Dad,” Ari replied, reaching to cup his cheek in her hand understandingly. “It’s okay. I get it. Heroes need to save the day.”

He smiled lopsidedly, “Well, I’m certainly not a hero, but your mother is. She’s the light of this family and saves the day often. I know she saves us all from a lot of misery and woe every day she’s with us.”

“If that’s true about Mom, then you need to fix what’s been broken,” his daughter said with a wisdom that was beyond a nine year old...or at least, it should have been. “You need to go make up with her.”

Elijah nodded, “I know and I will. First, however, why don’t we go sit, so you can tell me what you’ve been up to all this time that I’ve been away.”

Ari grinned and agreed readily. She took him by the hands and lead him over to her bed, where they sat and talked, catching up on lost time.

To Be Continued....

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Tag List: @elejah-wonderland @dendrite-lover @xanderling @hawaiianohana31 @esclisa @elizamonet @missnmikealson @elejahforever @freshsuitcasewinnereagle @lalabluues @lolelijahishot @x-memi12 @loulouisa @teekillerin

#elijah mikaelson #daniel gillies #original character #elijah x eternity #klaus mikaelson #hayley marshall #hope mikaelson #elijah x antoinette #romance #drama #alternate universe #sad story #ahgst #the originals #the originals fanfiction #the vampire diaries #the vampire diaries fanfiction

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terresdebrume · 6 years

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Pensieve post

Because it’s a way to practice informing people about my life rather than not say anything for week and then ask people for news when I’m not feeling well (which is probably better than barge in demanding emotional support but still probably not as healthy as it get). Plus, if nothing else, it helps me sorting through the stuff I’ve been dealing with recently which is a goo thing to do in conjunction with therapy. Today’s update is mostly going to focus on the crushing situation because that’s what I’ve had on my mind for most of the week and easier to deal with than the whole family situation (1) so….follow the cut to read about my life, I guess.

So, remember on October 1st, how I rode in on the high of coming out on Facebook and feeling like a functional adult (ish), and said I was thinking of maybe asking my crush out? Well it may come as no surprise to you that I then proceeded to Not Do That. And you know, perhaps my friend Julie had a point when she said I didn’t do things by half (and perhaps I had a point when I worried it might be a little too much to undertake in one go) because not only did I Not Do That, I proceeded to sink in a long week of stress, anxiety, and depressed thinking. Because why not.

Context: when I made both these decisions on October 1st, my workplace had just finished four days of big examinations in which I had to overview exam preps and be a jury in oral examinations (which, fyi, is super tiring) and capped it off with an end-of-the-week meal with coworkers and the new boss (2). So, pretty intense week, coming on the heel of a holiday weekend with Julie, Julie’s fiance and the Crush...which I’m only now realizing might have been a little too much excitement in one go because, like I said, the next week kind of went off the rails a little.

I’m gonna spare you guys the exact rundown of things I gave my therapist because that was two thousands of words long and I don’t feel like going back through it. Suffices to say I felt tired, stressed out and kinda miserable all week, with a combo flavor of ‘can I even do something right’ and ‘maybe people secretly hate me and maybe the Crush specifically grew tired of me and wishes I were out of his life because if not then why does it feel like he’s putting a distance between us that wasn’t there before?’. Which, now that I write it down, I’m wondering if I wasn’t projecting a little there.

I mean, it would make sense. I was feeling miserable and un-viewable (3) which I dealt with by not talking to/looking at people when I could avoid it, keeping myself absorbed with my computer to avoid seeing...I don’t know, confirmation that people who have previously expressed that they liked my company (explicitly so and in written form, in the case of the Crush, no less) suddenly found me pitiable at best and contemptible at worst. Which I do realize is not rational but somehow didn’t at the time (4) and still have trouble believing it now (emotionally speaking).

After that uh...interesting week, let’s call it, came Pchum Ben. It’s one of the major holidays observed in Cambodia and like a lot of major religious holidays around the world it entails people going back to their families to celebrate and spend time together. What that means, when you live in Phnom Penh and don’t go away during the holidays, is that you suddenly find yourself living in a literal ghost town. 95% of businesses close down, people leave, etc. It’s actually pretty cool and impressive, really.

Except, if you’re like me (aka: doesn’t generally travel on your own for reasons unknown and spent too much money the previous month) that means you went out of your flat exactly twice in the last five days. Which, I fully agree, is not ideal at all but that didn’t prevent me from doing it (5)...and so, what that means in practice, is that I had five full days of nothing to do but alternated between worrying about the Crush and then find ways to trick myself into thinking I was not worrying/obsessing/go into catastrophe-thinking about the Crush! Yay! :D

Not Yay. (6)

Because the end result of all this obsessing-but-pretending-I’m-not-but-kinda-obsessing-anyway is that I shot my sleeping pattern to the ground (again), stressed out for nothing, didn’t see direct sunlight for a while, and slept badly enough last night that I woke up twice and got maybe seven hours of sleep.

On the plus side, it did give me time to talk about all this with my therapist, which is always good if only because it allows me to get some things out of my head (I swear sometimes it feels like this whole online therapy deal is the closest thing the real world has to a pensieve) and also get my mind blown. Why you ask? Because in the middle of all my catastrophic thinking and imagining the worst, my therapist pointed out that I completely failed to consider to possibility that the Crush might be interested in going out with me and seemed emotionally distant because I wasn’t making a move.

Which.

You know.

Somehow I haven’t considered that at all.

So basically my brains exploded a bit, but in a good way. It actually boosted me enough to try and actually send a message to the Crush, not to ask him out (I wasn’t there yet) but to apologize if I’d made it feel like I wasn’t interested in spending time with him last week. I mean, I know it most likely did but the goal was just to get the conversation going. He didn’t answer, which was actually not surprising because, again, major holiday time so it’s not like I wasn’t prepared for it. Did that help me not stress out/panic about the lack of answer? Not as much as I would have liked, but a little.

Of course, stressing out about that meant the prospect about seeing him today was enough to stress me into a terrible night last night but at this point I figure it could have been worse (as in, I could have not slept at all), and I’m still not done picturing the worst-case scenarios (hence, also, the need to write this post so I could stop obsessing about things). But I do feel...a little better now.

Funny how spending two hours and a half trying to type out a coherent summary of a situation calms you (or me, at least) down. It’s actually kind of why I miss writing, even if I somehow can’t get into it these days: stories are a great way to dig into how things feel and why, and that’s a pretty nice mean of catharsis.

Anyway, the good point of this little exercise is, I started writing this post feeling like I was five minutes away from tears and now I’m just exhausted (early bedtime tonight, yep) but actually more balanced, so that’s cool and maybe something I should do a little more often.

(I mean, I know I said a few weeks (months?) ago that I was glad I made less feels-vomit posts (pensieve posts? I might start calling them pensieve posts) but also that translated into me restraining myself from making one when I felt the urge and that turned out to maybe not be as unilaterally good as I thought it was. So. I guess I need to try and find a balance there.

Also, since I’m going into the good points of making this post now: I’m trying a new policy in the way I talk about my issues where if I know a word or phrasing would make me angry in someone else’s mouth, I won’t use it to talk about my feelings. I think it’s going to be a tough one, but if nothing else it can’t hurt, and considering that was a problem I had with a previous therapist, I hope it’ll be helpful.

Anyway, congrats if you’ve read up until now. If there was a point to this post I‘ve sort of lost it now, but I feel better now than I did at the beginning of writing it, and I have a less negative name for that kind of posts than ‘word vomit’ so, again, let’s count it as a win.

I mean, let’s all be honest here, if I want to delve into that particular problem I’m better off making a separate post for it, anyway.

Said dinner included fun gems like being seated in front of a colleague who, I’m pretty sure, dislikes me (which I tend to not do too well with), coming out as trans to the new boss, and drinking more alcohol than I should have. I mean, it went well overall, but I remember leaving the restaurant with a distinct nope feeling so in retrospect it’s completely possible that my bad week started there. I might need to try and come up with preventative measures against that kind of things in the future.

You know, that moment where you feel like a dumpster fire and wish people could avoid looking at you while you burn in shame, because you’re afraid they can’t have anything but contempt for you after witnessing that? Yeah. That, but for a week.

Side note: why is it that we can know the thinking pattern of doom our brains use, and still fall for it? I want a refund.

There are many reasons why I didn’t leave the house these past few days but I’d say the main two would be that all my friends were out of town, so what’s the point (not a dig against them at all, I just don’t tend to go out on my own) and I didn’t have an adequate means of transportation available because most of the rickshaw drivers and moto taxis were also out of town.

Okay if I really want to go in detail I do have to mention Julie and I spent the afternoon together yesterday and that helped a lot, even if I still obsessed.

#My Posts #Matt has a life #Matt has a crush #Shit from home #Pensieve post

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buzzdixonwriter · 6 years

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Vietnam: There & Then, Here & Now

I just finished watching Ken Burns’ Vietnam War documentary.

Quite an experience.

Vietnam was my generation’s war, the baby boomers’ war (i.e., those born between 1946 and 1964). I lived through the era of most of the events of the war, being old enough and cognizant enough to follow what was going on in the world around me.

From a historical POV, the Vietnam War documentary offers little new information, mostly puts everything we already knew in perspective and fairly linearly.

A few things did surprise me, such as the revelation that Nixon in order to keep the war from becoming even more unpopular, wouldn’t let draftees be sent to Vietnam unless they volunteered.

People were still being drafted (I was) but instead of being sent unwillingly to a combat zone, we were sent to foreign bases to replace enlistees who went to fight in our place.

I feel bad about that.

Nixon’s political logic was sound -- enlistees and draftees who volunteered couldn’t say they were going against their will and thus the potential for desertion and the general populace turning against the war were lessened -- but it doesn’t make it any easier to bear.

It’s one thing if everybody’s name is put in a hat and assignments are handed out at random.

It’s another if the names are put into two different hats (but then again, nobody’s name went into the Vietnam hat without their consent…).

Watching the series, it struck me that people analyzing the current American political scene are wrong when they liken it to the Civil War or the rise of Nazi Germany.

No, it isn’t.

It’s like the 1960s all over again.

Let’s back track a bit and start afresh.

From time immemorial, there has been conflict between those who think for whatever reason they should be on top and those whom they think should be under them.

The average human being just wants to be left alone to live their own life. We really don’t care what kind of socio-economic political culture we live under so long as it’s reasonably stable, consistent, and fair.

We have no problem with some people being very, very wealthy.

We just don’t want their wealth to come at the expense of everyone else.

By the 18thcentury, the first trade guilds were beginning to appear in Europe.

They were crushed by the aristocracy of their day, both the nobility / landed gentry and the financiers.

In the early 19thcentury the working class tried again with various trade unions. Again the aristocracy (more industrialists this time) crushed them.

The working class tried a third time in the late 19thcentury with socialism , again it was crushed.

Finally in the early part of the 20thcentury, communism came forth, and it was successful…at least for the better part of the century.

(Yes, I am grossly over simplifying a lot of history here, but I’m doing so to make this point: Every time labor got slapped down, it came back with something stronger until finally it won and -- in an effort to forestall communism -- the rest of then world more or less adopted some for of socialism.)

We ignored the plight of the Vietnamese prior to WWII because we (i.e., the Western democracies) only cared about the political and civil rights of white skinned people. We begged their help during WWII to fight the Japanese again, but afterwards we reneged on our deal with them because the French threatened to go communist if they lost their lucrative colony (spoiler: They eventually did lose their colony and, no, they didn’t go communist).

When the Vietnamese defeated the French, the United States viewed this as another domino falling in communism’s plan for worldwide dominance.

Since our internal domestic politics were consumed with a paranoia against communism -- because communism would keep us from going to church or owning guns and cars and houses or reading books, etc., etc., and of course, etc. — we could not let them succeed anywhere.

We fought communist forces to a bloody standstill in Korea.

We faced them down in tense situations in Europe and the Middle East.

And we were damned if we’d let them topple the first domino in South East Asia.

So, even though we knew we had no popular support among the South Vietnamese people, and even though we knew their leadership was too corrupt and inept to defeat the North Vietnamese, we backed them with money, materiel, and men in the form of “advisors”.

It didn’t work.

The situation rapidly turned into a huge hot steaming turd pile and nobody -- NOBODY!!! -- in either party could see a reason for being there except if we weren’t there, the other side would blame them for “losing” Vietnam.

The same way the GOP blamed the Democrats for “losing” China…when it was never theirs to begin with.

We refused to deal with communist governments because we’d be damned if we were going to deal with the likes of “them”…not when we could prop up a puppet of our own to run the show.

And we made this mistake again and again and again everywhere, refusing to cut deals or honor agreements because we weren’t going to bolster communism because we wanted to keep our God, our guns, and our gold.

Oh, yes, let’s talk about money.

When you analyze anti-communism, for all the high-falutin’ language about human dignity and freedom and whatnot, it really boils down to people being able to make money and not have to pay any of it to the government.

And if some people make more money, well, that just means they’re better people than those who make less.

Isn’t it?

So the U.S. fight against communism was to protect the rich, the corporations, the moneyed interests.

The Vietnamese were ancillary to this goal.

…if they were considered at all.

So we wound up digging ourselves deeper and deeper into a morass that we couldn’t win because our enemy, while quite easily defeated, simply couldn’t be beaten.

(The North Vietnamese were communists by default; there was no ideological purity to their struggle, at least not the beginning. They were nationalists first and foremost, and when the capitalist Western democracies ignored their desire for independence, they turned to the Russian communists. If Chicago baseball fans had offered them more support than the Bolsheviks, the North Vietnamese would have been Cubbies.)

This is all a long winded way of saying that even though every White House administration from Kennedy forward (and perhaps as early as Eisenhower and Truman) realized South Vietnam was a doomed proposition, they nonetheless kept funding the war because they feared they lose power if they didn’t.

Domestically, Americans were so terrified of communism and what they were told was its first cousin, socialism, that they would respond negatively to anyone accused of appeasing those God damned commie simp pinko bastards.

It was a recipe for disaster, as Ken Burns points out repeatedly.

But this post isn’t about the Vietnam era, it’s about what’s happening in the here and now, and to look at that we need to hit the major highlights of the Vietnam Was as perceived by the average American citizen (read average white Christian American citizen).

In the aftermath of Kennedy’s assassination -- and his killer being an on-again / off-again USMC deserter / defector to Russia who joined a bunch of iffy political movements when he returned to the U.S. sure didn’t help things -- Americans were shocked again when it was reported the North Vietnamese had attacked two U.S. destroyers.

To this day it’s still impossible to discern what really happened in the Gulf of Tonkin with any sense of accuracy.

Suffice it to say something happened and the North Vietnamese navy came out all the worse for it but nonetheless Johnson treated the incident as if the gawd damned commies were about to start invading New Orleans and the next thing we knew, the war had escalated from a few hundred American “advisors” to a couple of thousand active combatants.

This was in 1964.

The next big event to lodge itself into the American psyche was the Tet offensive of 1968.

The North Vietnamese and their Viet Cong allies (not one and the same!) launched a massive series of attacks across Vietnam in the hopes of spurring a popular uprising.

The tactical portion of the Tet offensive failed, but the strategic one worked perfectly (although it took seven years to see the payoff).

The reason the strategic part worked was that for the intervening 4 years between Tonkin and Tet, the U.S. had promised its citizens again and again and again that victory was just around the corner, we could see the light at the end of the tunnel, and we were winning by breaking the resolve of the enemy.

Well, Tet put the lie to that PDQ!

The most shocking thing about Tet was the photo and TV news footage of South Vietnam National Police Chief Nguyen Ngoc Loan blowing the brains out of Nguyen Van Lem, a member of a Viet Cong assassination team who had just killed some police officers and their families.

Look, let’s be honest, Van Lem richly deserved his fate under the rules of the Geneva Convention since he had killed innocent civilians while disguised as a civilian, and as such had lost all protections under international treaty.

But it’s pretty damn shocking to see him being executed again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again thanks to the miracle of television, and while most Americans still supported the war, God love ‘em still supported the troops, and agree Van Lem deserved death for his war crimes, it’s still a pretty damn shocking scene to see.

Most Americans supported the war.

But most Americans also wanted it over.

About a year later, Americans were shocked even more. Information on the infamous My Lai Massacre, which occurred in the aftermath of the Tet offensive in 1968, became public, including photos of women begging for their lives and the lives of their children, and the revelation that Americans had gang raped Vietnamese women and children before killing them.

Again, predictably, most Americans sided with the troops who committed these crimes, and continued to support the war, but despite that, one can’t shake the images of weeping women futilely trying to protect their children, or the piles of bodies just a few seconds later.

The anti-war movement, which had aligned itself with the civil rights movement and the nascent feminist movement (and, boy howdy!, is that a tale to tell but not in this post; stay focused) began opposing the war in more and more successful, and in larger and larger protests.

American presidents Johnson and (soon-to-be) Nixon did not want to lose any elections, and since the majority of Americans still supported the war -- whatever doubts they might possess about it -- they weren’t about to give any serious attention to the protestors demands.

(And, truth be told, there were a lot of show boaters among the anti-war protestors, bozos who just wanted to watch things burn.)

As protests mounted, Nixon (who became president by sabotaging Johnson’s attempt to negotiate a peace agreement in time for the 1968 election which, if bigoted George Wallace hadn’t acted as a spoiler, would have gone to Hubert Humphrey) fought back in an increasing number of ways, some quite petty, others quite deadly.

Among the deadliest was the Kent State protests in 1970 which resulted in the deaths of four college students, two of them innocent bystanders walking away from the direction of the protest on their way to class.

While shocking, again the majority of Americans defended the National Guard troops who slaughtered four students and wounded a dozen more, crippling one permanently.

But you can’t unsee an image, and though Americans hardened their hearts, they couldn’t forget the image of Mary Ann Vecchio over the body of Jeffrey Miller anymore than they could forget the image of Nguyen Ngoc Loan killing Nguyen Van Lem.

Like the Tet offensive, the battle may have been lost, but the war was being won.

More shocking turns awaited the average American. Vietnam Veterans Against The War was a surprisingly effective antiwar movement. They, along with the Winter Soldier congressional hearings in 1971, put the lie to the claim that it was only hippies and communist agitators who opposed the war.

Nixon and his vice president Spiro Agnew went on the offensive, denouncing anti-war protestors and appealing to the so-called “silent majority” of law abiding, church going, conservative, and -- dare we say it? -- white Americans who continued to support the war.

Nixon and Agnew (who had to resign due to scandals entirely unrelated to his role as Nixon’s vice president) stirred up class animosity in America, pitting working class Americans against the so-called “liberal elite” including college students and professors, preparing the soil for the coming campaign of ignorance that would devour the country in the post-Vietnam era.

But even though the average “silent majority” American continued to support the war, the vocal protestors were gaining ground, winning hearts and minds, and the images were searing themselves into the American psyche.

Also in 1971, the Pentagon Papers were released, documenting mistake after mistake after mistake the U.S. had mad, all the while acknowledging that was simple no way we could possibly win in Vietnam.

But still the fighting continued.

Nixon’s paranoia and pettiness proved his undoing,

As he and his underlings committed more and more brazen crimes to solidify their base, the Vietnam war continued unleashing horror after horror.

In June of 1972, 9 year old Phan Thi Kim Phuc was photographed running naked down a road, screaming in pain after 30% of her body had been burned by a South Vietnamese napalm strike.

Try as they like, the pro-war apologists (same rat bastards as today’s trolls) could not find a way of blaming her for her own misery.

By January, 1973 the U.S. started withdrawing in earnest and for America the war of over for all intents and purposes.

On March 8, 1973 the last official U.S. ground troops left Vietnam.

On August 8, 1974 Nixon resigned.

On August 15, 1974, the U.S. congress said “Hold! Enough!” and effectively cut off military support to South Vietnam.

On April 30, 1975, Saigon (now Ho Chi Minh City) fell, and the end that everybody knew would arrive sooner or later finally came.

All that…for nothing…

As noted above, the Vietnam war did not occur in a historical cultural vacuum, and there was not only the dread of an existentialist threat of a grossly misrepresented communist bogeyman to what the average white conservative Christian American held near and dear, but also the much more palatable fear of losing white supremacy to racial equality with…with…negroes (to use the term of the day), not to mention the first stirrings of the feminist movement, the first hint of a gay rights movement, and the hippies themselves, perceived as a great unwashed mob of dope swilling anarchists.

As the song goes, the dirty fucking hippies were right.

Ken Burns’ Vietnam War presents Vietnam to us in that context, a major component of a much broader picture, a picture that threatened the very soul of America.

Small wonder the reaction was the disco era and yuppies replacing hippies and cocaine going through the roof and Reagan replacing Carter as the latter tried to struggle with the economic bill come due after decades of reckless military spending.

Reagan, of course, devastated American in his own way, the opposite of the Tet offensive, in which he seemed to win easy victory after easy victory only now that he’s dead and gone we see those so called “victories” were actually a betrayal of everything America used to stand for.

America, at least in part, has always been a progressive nation.

The founding fathers may have been slave holders, but they left a mechanism in place that could deal with the issue of slavery.

The reactionaries came back against the founding fathers, even while claiming to honor their spirit, with Andrew Jackson, as vile a racist as one could hope to imagine, but they were countered by the abolitionists of the Civil War.

The same progressive spirit that made abolition possible also made labor unions possible, and pure food and drug laws, and trust busting under Theodore Roosevelt.

And when bad reactionary / financier / industrial policies brought the U.S. and the rest of the world to financial ruin, Franklin Delano Roosevelt fought to use progressive policies to save the country.

The reactionaries have been waging a war against America since the end of WWII.

They lost ground in the 1950s and 60s despite their successful promotion of anti-communism, but regained that ground in the 1980s to 2008.

There were a few brief respites with Clinton, as flawed a human being as one could imagine, and Obama, who became the target of the mindless white racism simmering beneath the surface of what passes for conservative thought in this country.

Now, as we near the end of their era ///and they know it///, the reactionaries and the 1% want to stack the deck as much as possible against the march of progress.

The march of humanity.

The march of the future.

We are not in a second Civil War or a second Nazi movement (though there are elements of same present).

We are in a second 1960s, only there aren’t the obvious clear crusades of Vietnam or civil rights to rally around.

We have just had our Gulf of Tonkin incident with the election of Trump.

We may have had our Tet offensive public execution photo with the appointment of Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, a short term tactical victory that will spell doom for generations to come.

But I’m afraid we’re still quite a ways away from our My Lai, our Kent State, our Winter Soldier, our badly burned girl.

I want to tell you, as someone who lived through the 1960s, as someone who was drafted at the end of the Vietnam war, we will survive this.

And we, the decent people of the United States, the people who truly believe in liberty and justice for all, will prevail.

It won’t be pretty, and it won’t be easy, but we will win.

#Vietnam #communism #capitalism #Christianity #white supremacy #racism #history #GOP- Republicans #Trump #morals #ethics #politics

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