#i’ve been traveling and in china so it’s been a struggle being online at all lmao

[therdjspectrum]

sympathizer premiere pics review, plz? 🤩

(and if you want and have the time, any or all pics from the recent Esquire interview ... 🫶)

i’m sorry it’s taken a bit longer than usual for me to post after an event, but—

After a year of being bald for the sake of art, Bobfather is making up for it by officially stepping into his Slut Era™ with his sheer shirt and hooker heels. All eyes are on him as he shows how much of a slut he is for his wife, his co-stars, and most importantly, the cameras. Love that for him and for us. 😌🕺🏽 || April 9, 2024

Robert Downey Jr. at the premiere for The Sympathizer in Los Angeles

[somerabbitholes]

Indian Non-Fiction

A list of books on India, almost all of which are by Indian writers; most of them are about history in one way or other but they also involve politics, culture, and religion. (Doesn’t include writing in Indian languages because most of my non-English reading has been limited to fiction). I’ve also added links to online editions for ones I found.

History

Pre-, Postcolonial India (+ other assorted history)

Land of Seven Rivers by Sanjeev Sanyal - looks at Indian history through its geography; great if you want an introduction. it’s a small book but has very interesting insights; definitely would recommend. Also check his Ocean of Churn, which looks at Indian history in terms of the Indian Ocean

The Lost River: On the Trail of the Sarasvati by Michel Danino - looks into the research and evidence on the existence of the Sarasvati river and makes a case for its existence

Hooghly: The Global History of a River by Robert Ivermee - about Hooghly as a centre of a trans-Asiatic and trans-oceanic commercial network

Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization by Namit Arora - what it says, it’s new and was well-received; it paints a holistic picture to start you off

Modern South India by Rajmohan Gandhi - this one’s new, and I’ve only barely read it. It’s the history of south India from the coming of the Portuguese to modern times and it’s really important because we don’t study about this or even talk about this in mainstream conversations

India Moving by Chinmay Tumbe - on migration within India and how migrants and migrations has shaped history, politics, and policy

The Courtesan, the Mahatma, and the Italian Brahmin by Manu Pillai - a selection of stories (real ones) from Indian history; very engagingly written and very, very interesting stories. Also check other works by Pillai - The Ivory Throne and Rebel Sultans. He also writes a regular column for the Mint

Panipat by Vishwas Patil - (a translation from Marathi) a history of the Battle at Panipat in 1761, which basically created a vacuum for the East India Company to step in and grab power; really expansive and highly detailed

Rama and Ayodhya by Meenakshi Jain - on the Ramayana and its cultural spread across Indian since the ancient times; also about the Ayodhya movement

Decolonizing the Hindu Mind by Koenraad Elst - lays down the ideological and intellectual development of the broad umbrella Hindu revivalist movement; really good starting point to understand the rise and development of a significant chunk of Indian politics in post-independence years; really straightforward work, very clear in its objectives

1962: the War that Wasn’t by Shiv Kunal Verma - on the Sino-Indian conflict in 1962; haven’t read it yet, but it’s supposed to be one of the best ones on the conflict

1971: A Global History of the Creation of Bangladesh by Srinath Raghavan - on the creation of Bangladesh; places the history in a Cold War context and includes all stakeholders like the US, China and Russia; has multiple layers to its narrative.The Most Dangerous Place by Srinath Raghavan - on American foreign policy in South Asia right from the earliest times.

Cricket Country by Prashant Kidambi - about how cricket took hold in colonial India and the making of the first all-India cricket team; super excited about this book, I added it to my list too

A Corner of a Foreign Field by Ramchandra Guha - on the growth of cricket in India; takes into account race, caste, and religion in pre- and postcolonial times; looks at how the sport was adapted in local cultures and how it became an expression of resistance

Himalaya: A Human History by Ed Douglas - basically what it says; very thorough and very fresh; about more than India because it takes Himalaya as a unit and so it’s really transnational in its approach

Colonial India

Plassey by Sudeep Chakravarti - a very detailed study of the Battle of Plassey which kicked off the colonial project in India

India’s War: World War II and the Making of Modern South Asia by Srinath Raghavan - on India’s involvement and contribution in World War II

An Era of Darkness by Shashi Tharoor - about the economic impact of the British Empire in India; highly elaborate and detailed work on the economic drain in India during colonisation

Goa Inquisition by A. K. Priolkar - about the Portuguese colonisation of Goa and the subsequent evangelical campaign by the Portuguese crown and the Roman church; very, very, thorough and great if you (like me) know nothing about the whole thing

Hicky’s Bengal Gazette by James Otis - on the development and running of India’s first English newspaper; a fun read because honestly the story of the paper is very dramatic and full of political/colonial gossip; also tells you a lot about the early ideas of free press in colonial India

Sati: Evangelicals, Baptist Missionaries, and the Changing Colonial Discourse by Meenakshi Jain - about the discourse on sati and the need for reform; reviews the idea of the abolition of sati being a progressive act

Castes of Mind by Nicholas Dirks - about the intersection of caste, race, and colonial knowledge and policy

Politics, Sociology, Commentaries

The Indian Trilogy by V. S. Naipaul - a semi-autobiographical work on the kind of civilisation Naipaul sees India to be; very, very honest; paints a picture of postcolonial India over the years. the trilogy includes An Area of Darkness, India: A Wounded Civilization, and India: A Million Mutinies Now. I’ve only read the first one; but I’ve heard and read great things about them all

Republic of Caste by Anand Teltumbde - about caste in post-Independence India; looks at political and policy-related developments and their impact on caste dynamics; sort of subaltern history; it is a little difficult to understand if you don’t already have some amount of knowledge on Indian politics; also a very academic work so not exactly easy to read - I’ve only read parts of it myself

Annihilation of Caste by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar - technically a speech that was never delivered because it was thought to be too explosive; argues that caste is rooted in oppression and for the complete destruction of the caste system; an excellent work, although you do need to know about caste in its religious and political terms. Really just read all of his writing (it’s an entire 14 volume set), they’re excellent and far ahead of their time

The Idea of India by Sunil Khilnani - an analysis of sorts of what pre-colonial and colonial society and the freedom struggle mean for the republic and the kind of nation-building that has happened.

A New India of India: Individual Rights in a Civilisational State by Harsh Madhusudan, Rajeev Mantri - rethinks the “idea of India”; traces cultural and historical legacy in making of modern politics, and explores how individual rights are reconciled with the state’s goals; great thing is that it takes a fresh look at things; perfect to be read after The Idea of India 

10 Judgements that Changed India by Zia Mody - recounts ten most important legal cases and court rulings in India; good starting point at understanding how the law works and its development

Republic of Religion by Abhinav Chandrachud - about secularism and religion in India in light of colonial rule, and its implications in postcolonial India

India Unbound by Gurcharan Das - it’s a history from the Independence to 2000 that focuses largely on the political economy and unpacks the kind of growth we’ve seen; it mixes the personal with the political/economic progress and it’s really easy to get into; best when read with his India Grows at Night

People

Kanshiram by Badri Narayan - a biography of Kanshi Ram, who pretty much laid the foundation of modern Dalit political movement in post-independence India; looks into how the movement developed under Kanshi Ram; a useful insight into both the man as well as early Dalit politics in India

Savarkar by Vikram Sampath - first part of a two-part biography (second part isn’t out yet) on V. D. Savarkar, one of India’s first revolutionary freedom fighter; looks at an insane variety of sources and highly detailed; a must read.

History Men by T. C. A. Raghavan - about the friendship of three of colonial India’s first native historians (Sir Jadunath Sarkar, G. S. Sardesai, Raghubir Sinh) and how they collaborated and supported each other in writing Indian history using scientific methods; also looks at their contributions to Indian history in general

Rammohun Roy by Amiya P. Sen - a biography of colonial India’s first social and religious reformers who reinterpreted Hinduism for modern times; very well-written, great for understanding how early reform worked out

Daughters of the Sun by Ira Mukhoty - about women in the Mughal dynasty. note that it only looks at women connected to and part of the royal household, but an interesting read nonetheless. Her other work, Heroines: Powerful Indian Women in Myth and History is a wonderful book on women in history right from the ancient times; also analyses and explains the changing perceptions of women

R. N. Kao: Gentleman Spymaster by Nitin Gokhale - really, really, really interesting book on R. N. Kao and the development of India’s espionage machinery

Art

Indian Art by Partha Mitter - a history, he’s one of the best on Indian art, very useful

The Dance of Shiva by Ananda Coomaraswamy - a collection of essays on Indian artistic tradition in aesthetic and philosophical terms

The Spirit of Indian Painting by B. N. Goswamy - specifically about painting; explores different themes in different regionals tyles; also check other books by Goswamy, he’s kind of a big deal in art history

Indian Painting: the Lesser Known Traditions by Anna Dallapiccola - pretty much what it says; takes into account a ton of styles and traditions that are lumped together ‘folk art’

Cities, Travel etc

The Great Indian Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux - four-month journey from London to India by trains only; explores themes like colonialism, American imperialism, poverty. One of my favourites

The Epic City by Kushanava Chaudhary - memoir on Kolkata as the author explores and re-discovers the city when he comes back to it after staying in the US for most of his life; a lovely book, delves in the history of Kolkata a little in relation to how the city still feels it, how its people are still negotiating with it, and the kind of future the author sees for Kolkata

Bombay, Meri Jaan by Jerry Pinto & Naresh Fernandes - a collection of essays on Mumbai by a wide collection of people from Naipaul to Khushwant Singh to Manto and Salman Rushdie, compiled by Jerry Pinto; one of my favourites on the city

No Full Stops in India by Mark Tully - writings from when Tully was a journalist in India; commentaries on things he witnesses, also includes a fair amount of personal involvement; explores poverty, postcolonial development, religion and culture in post-independence India

Mumbai Fables by Gyan Prakash - a history of Mumbai city; looks at colonisation, industrial development, the regional politics, architecture and art, as well as the underworld/mafia

Banaras by Diana L. Eck - on Varanasi (Banaras), probably India’s holiest city; tells its history from its conception to now; blends religion, mythology, politics, and history. Also check Eck’s India: A Sacred Geography

The City of Djinns by William Dalrymple - semi-autobiography about living in Delhi; looks at the legacies of independence and partition while thinking about its past

The Book of Indian Journeys by Dom Moraes - it’s an anthology of essays and excerpts from works of a bunch of writers on travelling in India, it’s a favourite when I’m travelling

This is not exhaustive and I will keep updating when I find the time. I’ve tried to keep it diverse (and organised) in its content; hope you find something you like :)

[avinaccia]

A Completely Objective and Logical Ranking of Every Hetalia Character Song

New character songs are dropping,  I have too much time on my hands, let’s go. 

Also here’s a Youtube playlist for the ~✨nostalgia✨~

Bring it on in the tags 

71. Ah Legendary Class⭐The Awesome Me Highway [Prussia]: Absolutely tearing it up on the drums and on the vocal cords alike (I pray for Atsushi Kousaka). Great for the memes. 

70.  Happy Thoughts Museum [???]: This is listed as an official song but I had literally never heard of the title. Then I listened to it and BAM! Smack back to 2013 watching the teasers for the show on Funimation. Not sure I’d count it as a character song though...

69. (Nice)  My Song that is written by me for me [Prussia]: Deafened me but I can appreciate the industrial grind.

68.  My House is...Quiet. ~With the Trolls~ [Norway]: I have never heard this song, nor can I find any version of it online. By default it goes here and I am so sorry Norge.

67.  Make a Wish to Santa♪ [Sealand]: The discordant notes and childish exuberance only serve to make this sound like a demonic plea to Santa to eliminate the singer’s enemies.

66.  Heaven and Hell on Earth [Rome]: Rome sounds like he’s been in the corner of a restroom. Extra points for the metal version, minus points for the fact that the beach scene was replayed like 1764 times.

65. Canada Complete Introduction [Canada]: Quiet af until Kumacheerio shows up and blows out your speakers. they did you dirty my darling 😔

64.  It’s Easy!!! [America]: I don't think any video of this has ever stayed up for more than 20 seconds. Sounds cool, but like I was listening to 20 different genres at once, someone make him calm down.

63.  Bù Zàiyì the Small Stuff ☆ [China]: I cannot for the life of me find the complete song anywhere, clips have a cool beat though

62.  Let's Boil Hot Water♪ [Italy]: Exactly what it says on the tin..though a bit too close to elevator music for my tastes.

61.  The Fragrance of Early Summer [Japan]: Very ‘from the books’ Japan-esque song

60.  Peace Sounds Nice…[Baltic Trio]: All well and good until the radio demon shows up

59.  W●D●C ~World Dancing~ [America]: How a song can sound like it’s from 4 different decades at once is beyond me

58.  Overflowing Passion [BFT]: This is just drunken karaoke and I have 0 clue what’s going on #iconicforallthewrongreasons

57. Ren●Ren●Renaissance♪ [Rome+Chibitalia]: Wholesome Grandpa with Grandson content - barring the fact that Italy sounds on the verge of a nervous breakdown and Rome has had too much wine.

56.  Roma Antiqua [Rome]: Similar energy to any one of China’s songs - there’s a part of the song where it sounds like he’s singing in the shower, and I will never not laugh at [CENSORED]

55.  Country From Where the Sun Rises, Zipangu [Japan]: Very chill, very Japan, but just meh for me.

54.  Moon Over Emei Shan [China]: Good message, okay song.

53.  My Friend [England]: What a mind palace you must have Mr. Kirkland

52.  With Love, from Iceland [Iceland]: Three words: Heavy. Metal. Puffin.

51.  Having Friends is Nice...♫ [Russia]: Russia is the cutest thing ever

50.  Mm. [Sweden]: Smooth transition from WWE Smackdown to shopping at IKEA.

49.  Why don’t you come over? ~Beyond the Northern Lights~ [Iceland]: I don’t want to be mean but...this does sound like the second closing theme to an anime whose first closing was much more popular (à la Soul Eater)

48. Gakuen☆Festa [Germany, Italy, Japan]: Sounds like a 60s song of the summer but oh dear their voices do not go together. Hella cute though.

47.  Wa! Wa!! World Ondo [Main Cast]: One time I travelled 10 hours in a coach bus with a bunch of teenagers to a city of note in my country, and the only souvenir I bought was the fucking PAINT IT WHITE DVD. Perfectly chaotic, UN ĐĕùX~~

46.  In the Bluebell Woods [England]: In the album cover for this song he’s holding a guitar but this is not a rock song. Still has ‘running through the hills’ levels of dramatism though.

45.  Poi Poi Poi♪ [Taiwan]: You’re telling me that Taiwan, someone whose has *ONE LINE* in Beautiful World (which is criminal tbh what kind of representation-) managed to get an eNTIRE CHARACTER SONG???????

44.  White Flame [Russia]: There’s something to be said for a song that is 3x the length of any Hetalia episode

43.  Ich liebe… [Germany]: Baking cakes for your friends has never been so wholesome.

42.  We Wish you a Merry Christmas [America, China, England, France, Russia]: Nice to see they’ve gotten their shit together since United Nations Sta-hmm.

41.  Ah, Worldwide à la mode [France]: Sounds like a Disney Princess song, hard not to picture France frolicking in a field of flowers.

40.  Che Bello! ~My House is the Greatest!⭐~ [Italy]: Would not be out of place in an advertisement for Sea World.

39.  May You Smile Today [Japan]: THE feel good song of the summer

38.  Let’s Look Behind the Rainbow [Italy]: I will protect you.

37.  I'm your HERO☆ [America]: “Anyone who’s sad or sullen will be arrested” did NOT age well.

36.  Mein Gott! [Prussia]: Alternating headphone effect at the beginning is cool, so is the confidence...the actual singing on the other hand...

35. Nihao⭐China [China]: Listen, all of China’s character songs are great, I just can’t vibe with this one like some of the others.

34.  Pechka ~Light My Heart~ [Russia]: I’m still having difficulty wrapping my head around the fact that this and Winter were released at the same time.

33.  Pukapuka⭐Vacation [Germany, Italy, Japan]: Seems just a bit too much like they’re running on a treadmill that’s picking up speed and trying to sing at the same time. Peppy.

32.  Santa Claus is Coming to Town [Germany, Italy, Japan]: This is unironically the best song sung by this trio; can only vibe with for two months out of the year though.

31.  Excuse Me, I Am Sorry [Japan]: Japan’s character traits speedrun. Gives me barbershop quartet vibes for some reason but is catchy as hell.

30.  The Story of Snow and Dreams [Russia]: A superhero anime opening in the making

29. England’s Evil Demon Summoning Song [England]: Sir that is not how you roast a marshmallow, don’t cut yourself on that edge.

28.  Moi Moi Sauna♪ [Finland]: Exactly the type of song you’d expect and it’s wonderful

27.  United Nations Star⭐ [America, China, England, France, Russia]: This isn’t as much of a song as it is a four minute struggle for everyone to sing without America yelling every 5 seconds...Like a particularly musical episode of Hetalia.

26.  Paris is Indeed Splendid [France]: Paris-pa-pa-pa-paris

25.  Absolutely Invincible British Gentleman [England]: Poppy, rocky, polka-dotty

24.  Vorwärts Marsch! [Germany]: To quote the comment section: “This sounds like a German version of I’ll Make a Man out of you.” There’s some truth to that.

23.  Hamburger Street [America]: The product of America’s rapper phase. 8/10 because he’s trying so hard and because I can unironically sing along to all of this.

22.  Hoi Sam☆Nice Guy [Hong Kong]: A song that would absolutely destroy the ankles of anyone in DDR.

21.  I Am German-Made [Germany]: There was once a version that had Germany and Prussia singing at the same time and it sounded positively demonic and Broadway could never

20.  La pasión no se detiene ~Unstoppable Passion~ [Spain]: Talented, brilliant, incredible, amazing, show-stopping...

19.  Fall in Love, Mademoiselle [France]: Sounds like it should be in Mozart Opera Rock, I have kiss kiss falled in love.

18. Embrace the Très Bien Moi [France]: This is the definition of SELF LOVE PEOPLE. 

17. Carrot and Stick [Belarus&Ukraine]: Absolutely DRIPPING in 2000s power ballad energy. The type of song that plays on repeat in the mind of the widow whose millionaire husband ‘mysteriously disappeared’ (and the only legit character song ever acknowledged by the anime)

16. C.B.C (Cowboyz Boot Camp) Vol. 1 [America]: AH MAH GAWWDDD

15. Winter [Russia]: Heavy metal fever dream and the perfect song for an angst-ridden teenager

14.  Seychelles Here ⭐ Vacation Island [Seychelles]: UN👏DER👏RA👏TED SONG👏OF 👏THE 👏SUM👏MER👏

13.  Nah, it will settle itself somehow [Romano]: One day I aspire to reach this level of chill

12.  Let’s Enjoy Today [England]: I will never not feel happy when listening to this.

11.  Einsamkeit [Germany]: Ludwig manages to air every single one of his worries about not being good enough compared to his friends and always being perceived as mean or uptight when he’s actually just a softie and now my heart hurts. 💔

10.  Aiyaa Four Thousand Years [China]: A very poignant and beautiful song about the passage of time and the inevitability of its passing; comparable to an ancient ballad complete with explosive crescendos and meaningful lyrics.

9.  Bon Bon Bon❤️C’est Bon C’est Bon! [France]: Peppy, cheerful, adorable, groundbreaking; has been my alarm tone for six years and I’ve yet to tire of it. 9/10 The moaning interspersed throughout has been an interesting wake-up call.

8.  Let’s Enjoy! Let’s Get Excited! Cheers! [Denmark]: This is on par with Everytime we Touch by Cascada in terms of rage potential unlocked (the good kind)

7.  Dream Journey [Japan]: Whoever’s playing the shakuhachi is absolutely KILLING IT. Dramatic, wonderful, great metaphors.

6.  Gourmet’s Heart Beginner Level [China]: Absolute banger, I’m a vegetarian but this would inspire me to eat shumai.

5.  Always with you...Nordic Five! [Nordic FIVVVVVEEEE]: Everyone harmonizes beautifully except for Denmark. Extremely catchy, number placement seemed appropriate. 

4.  Pub and GO! [England]: I love this trash man

3. Maji Kandou⭐Hong Kong Night [Hong Kong]: If you thought Denmark’s song was a banger JUST YOU WAIT. I WILL BLOW OUT MY SPEAKERS LISTENING TO LO-HA-SU.

2. Steady Rhythmus [Germany]: THIS SONG IS METAL AF. Seriously, if it can be classified as ‘hardcore’ by my father and his group of 50-somethings who have decided to single-handedly gatekeep the metal and hardrock genres, it can do anything.

1.  The Delicious Tomato Song 🍅 [Romano]: Beautiful, absolutely awe-inspiring, poignant, catchy lyrics with an extremely deep meaning that only years of meticulous research and analysis can unlock, Romano I love you.

BONUS: Closing Songs

5. Hatafutte Parade (World Series) 

4. Hetalian⭐Jet (The World Twinkle): The song is good, the dancing is cursed 

3. Chikyuu Marugoto Hug Shitainda (World⭐Stars)

2. Marukaite Chikyuu (Hetalia: Axis Powers): nE NE PaPA

1. Mawaru Chikyuu Rondo (The Beautiful World)

[rainbowsky]

To the person who sent me the thousand word essay, if you check out my ask policy I don't publish these kinds of long asks. I used to get tons of them and it got to be too much. Also, a lot of your comments contain anti talking points that I will not publish on my blog. But I can respond to some of the issues you raised.

TW/CW - brief mention of homophobia and suicide.

Basically your message was a sort of cataloguing of your doubts about BJYXSZD. To quote your closing paragraph, "Ah....i am just desperate for them to be a couple after all these months and the bts videos and inteviews, but it just doesn't add up anymore. So, as a confused fan, i thought about seeking reassurance to you."

I don't think it's my place, nor is it really anyone's place, to try to convince you or reassure you that GGDD is real. You will either believe or you won't believe. In my experience, people who are filled with doubts and in need of a steady stream of candies and clues to keep them satisfied are going to find themselves on a constant emotional roller-coaster of euphoria and misery.

Let go of your need for certainty.

As I've said in the past, when you let go of your need for certainty you will find that certainty comes a lot more easily. People who need certainty approach GGDD like a detective agency or a hungry ghost, focusing on their craving for proofs and candies that never quite seem to satiate them, and they miss out on the real joy of just being a fan.

A lot of the doubts you listed are things that don't really fit with why BXG believe BJYXSZD. We don't base our belief on the fact that they did a BL show together. We don't base our belief on the fact that they get along well together. We don't base our belief on candies. We base our belief on the insight we accumulate over a period of time, and that's not something that can be passed on to someone else. It's something everyone has to discover for themselves.

GGDD have nothing to prove. BXG have nothing to prove. We are all just here to enjoy them, love them and support them.

My advice: just relax, let go of your need for certainty, and enjoy GG and DD. Certainty will come or it won't, so there's no need to fret over it.

A couple things I felt the need to respond to:

Hidden relationships

Hidden relationships are totally a Thing in the entertainment industry, of course. Andy Lau with his 24 year hidden relationship is a great example. But you seem fixated on the idea that if GG or DD were hiding a relationship, it must be a heterosexual one.

Heteronormativity is a huge part of why so many fans have a hard time believing that GG and DD could ever be a real couple. There can be endless signs that a man is in a gay relationship and the fans will just dismiss it all, but if that man so much as smiles at a woman, fans are immediately ready to believe he's in love with her. Heterosexuality is seen as the default, and that makes homosexuality invisible to a lot of straight people.

You mentioned Leslie Cheung. I recommend this excellent post if you want to see why the world wasn't ready for him. He was an inspiration to LGBTQ people, without any doubt. I think he was equally a cautionary tale for a lot of people, even if the tragedy of his death wasn't necessarily directly related to his queerness or how he was being treated by the public.

There's a trope in society and in media and entertainment, that queer people are tragic figures. Queer characters are often presented as emotionally and psychologically turbulent people who meet untimely, tragic ends. Queer stories tend to be focused around "the struggle of being queer" and the rejection, fear and bigotry queer people face. The violence, the death, the suicides.

How could this not feed into the fears we have as queer people growing up in an often hostile world? How could a story like Leslie's fail to scare as many people as it inspires?

And besides, there are closeted gay couples in the entertainment industry in China.

I have talked about the whole hidden relationship thing, the whole 'needing to appear single' thing, in the past. You can find some of those posts linked at the end of this one. I've also talked about the pressure to appear single (along with the pressure to enter a straight marriage) previously here.

DD and the anti bullshit you've read

I can tell you've read a lot of anti lies in your travels. You're carrying a lot of the toxic ideas that antis spread online. I'm going to take a wild guess and say you spend most of your time on Twitter and YouTube, where these lies are part of the air people breathe on those platforms.

The rumors of DD being in a relationship with that heiress are nothing but harassment and bullshit. She is a known celebrity stalker who has caused scandals with multiple celebrities. Antis spread those lies because they are harmful to DD, not because they're true. DD denies them because they are false, not because he's got something to hide.

DD has never once been spotted with her. He's never once been photographed with her. There exists in the world exactly zero evidence of any common thread between her and DD. Zero evidence that they've ever even been in the same room together. Zero. There's no candy, nothing.

Meanwhile the candy connecting DD and GG together is so abundant it would put Willy Wonka out of business. There are constant reports of them being seen together, evidence of them being together, etc. Some of that stuff is stalker material that I won't share on my blog - such as DD's suitcase being spotted in GG's car a few days ago - but yeah, if you believe in the stalker heiress BS but not GGDD, that only speaks to your ignorance of the situation.

One of the things I find most frustrating about being a BJYXSZD BXG is that we are constantly characterized as spectacularly naive and deluded, meanwhile it's our most vocal critics - the antis, toxic solos and insecure turtles - who unquestioningly believe anything they read.

As for 22*7, you can always tell a DD anti by their willingness to claim DD should have spoken openly about GG during the whole scandal last year. No one who knows anything about GG and DD or about the situation could say in good faith that DD should have spoken up. I view that whole attitude as a litmus test for who knows and understands and truly supports GGDD, and who is either uninformed or an anti.

You can read more about that here and here.

And no, GG has never issued any statement denying BJYXSZD. Neither of them has.

BJYXSZD is not based on old BTS and interviews

I sometimes get sick of seeing clips and photos and metas about the Untamed, I sometimes get tired of talking about the same old interview clips and BTS. I see these things as ancient history - something fun to visit every now and then, but not where I want to live. I don't base my present belief on any of that. All that stuff can ever really do now is give us background on how things started and give us a bit of insight into how they get along and interact.

No BXGSZD that I know of bases their belief on "old BTS and interviews."

Both GG and DD have interesting new projects and endorsements. There's a ton of new content coming out all the time. We still regularly see new evidence that they're together. The past stuff is just for context.

Wrapping this all up, I'll just reiterate what I said before. No one can, or even should, convince you that GGDD is real. That's something you'll have to make peace with for yourself. If you want to get there faster, just relax and enjoy being a fan, and take some time to learn more about GGDD. Certainty may come in time. If it doesn't, well at least you had fun!

Since you are a newer fan I recommend checking out my BXG glossary, along with my masterlist post for some of the things I've talked about in the past.

[hsu-liangyu]

“Orientalia”: White Fascination and Nostalgia for China and the Orient

4/11/2021

Denver, CO

CW: Racism, anti-Asian and anti-Chinese sentiment, violence/sexual assault

Preface:

Today was certainly a day. I’ve been on a cross country trek, which I’ve come to call “The Great Journey East”, where I’m driving from my home in the Seattle area to Portland, Maine to ply my usual trade, working aboard some traditionally rigged sailing vessels that operate from the Maine State Pier. I’ve most recently arrived in Denver, CO, after a tumultuous night of camping in un-ideal circumstances on the shores of Great Salt Lake in Utah. I decided to treat myself to a middling hotel downtown to try to affect an aura of urban tranquility before I head out for Wichita in the morning, and then on to see my mother’s family in Oklahoma. The drive thus far has been marked by astounding natural beauty, kind people, and a long series of audio books that I’ve only just begun to make a dent in. I began this journey listening to “Tribe” by Sebastian Junger, which I found to be extremely interesting and helped some of my own understanding of how society today does not serve the community, and how we may one day return to a society where the people come first, as opposed to the individual. After finishing Mr Junger’s audiobook, I turned my ears to a tome that I have put off reading for a long time: “The Chinese in America: A Narrative History” by Iris Chang.

Listening to this audiobook over the last few days, which begins in Qing dynasty China and ends in the modern day, I can say a great many things. I can say that I deeply feel the experiences that were collected by the author and compiled into this book, not only on an intellectual and emotional level, but on a spiritual level. I can say that, despite years of my own research into my familial experiences and the experiences of contemporary Chinese Americans, my level of knowledge was severely lacking, even though I considered myself to be a relatively robust lay-scholar on the topic. I can say that the experience of we Chinese Americans, foreign and natural born, has changed very little in our time here. While circumstances change from person to person, family to family, and era to era, we are all bound together in trends that have haunted our communities, not unlike the tigers that have stalked southeast Asia for time immemorial, striking out when least expected.

All of that, however, is a surface level understanding. Those realities are the first few layers of a complicated and long history of horrific, violent, brutal, and inhuman oppression in the United States.

I began this audiobook believing that I knew most of what I needed, enough to enlighten the odd person in online discourse, or conversation over dinner. Enough to tell-off the casual bigot that accused me and other Chinese people of overblowing our racial, social, and economic anxieties while making them look a fool. I realized very quickly that while I was not wrong in my knowledge, my staunchly anti-racist rhetoric, or my suspicious attitudes towards the US government and law enforcement, I was missing so much of the story. I was not missing the statistics or the legislative history: I was missing word-to-paper stories of my ancestors -- our ancestors -- and the cold, hard, and hellacious reality that they faced when they got here. These realities may have differed from generation to generation (the Chinese washer-man and washer-woman, miner, and restaurateur of the 19th century was faced with markedly different circumstances from the Chinese who fled WWII, the PRC, or settled in other areas of the world during the diaspora), but they are cold and hard, none-the-less.

I have cried more in the last three days than I think I have in the last three years. My heart hurts for our ancestors, our elders, our parents, our siblings, our uncles, our aunties, and our future children as we exist in a country that has committed nearly every atrocity it could think of to rid us from their stolen land.

This was the state of being I’ve come to Denver with. Finally in the privacy of a hotel room, I showered and talked with my partner. She found a book today, written by the child of white missionaries who fled China just before WWII, that was a compilation of “Oriental” inspired needle-work patterns. She shared the preface of this book with me, which I found to be incredibly alarming, and has prompted me to write on the subject of “Orientalism”, the exotic, and how the experience of white Europeans and Americans in China was vastly different from the Chinese people. Out of respect for the author and their work, which I believe was written as an honest tribute to Chinese culture and its influence on them, I am choosing to omit the author’s name and the title of the book in question. While some may see this as underhanded, I am choosing to do so because I do not wish to wage a war of rhetoric with an author who I have very little personal knowledge of, because I believe it is unethical of me to do so.

However, I will be addressing some problematic concepts that are present in the preface of this book, as they are worth speaking about as we attempt to further society’s collective understanding of differential experiences between people and people groups.

Thank you for reading on, as well as for reading my preface. The following issues are things that I have struggled with for a long time, and I hope that my words bring you additional perspective on Chinese American issues.

“The Orient, the Oriental, and Orientalia: A Curious Lens of Exoticism Riddled with Racism”

Today, I saw a word that I had not seen in a very, very long time.

As most any Asian person will tell you, the words “orient” and “oriental” are generally unwelcome descriptors of Asian people and culture. These two descriptors are applied to clothing, architecture, pottery, art, furniture, cookware -- the list keeps going. I often joke to those who use these words, “what am I, a rug to you?”, which normally drives the point home in a friendly way They are both hangers-on from an era that we’d best leave in the past. An era where the Occident and the Orient were opposites of one another, incompatible, and fundamentally in conflict. The two terms saw relatively common usage in the 19th century, and many Euro-Americans considered “the orient” to be interchangeable with “the far east” while the occident was a catch-all word for Euro-American civilizations ranging from western Europe to the New World. It could be said that the Occident and the Orient began as harmless descriptor words that only communicated a vague notion of differences between cultures, they were rapidly weaponized as anti-Asian, especially anti-Chinese, sentiments began to flare in the western world. Imperial Germany used the two terms to great affect, framing the differences between the Occident and the Orient to be far more than cultural and societal. It was a matter of life and death.

The Occident was the pinnacle of industrialized civilization. It was moral and upright, beholden to the Christian god, supported by the titans of industry, government, and cutting-edge military technology. The Orient was backwards, overrun with dirty Chinese heathens who constantly lied, cheated, and stole from the superior whites. The Chinese were looking to enslave white women, turning them into sex slaves or take them as wives so that they could propagate a wretched half-breed race that would overrun the world and mark the end of all Occidental civilization.

This rhetoric was incredibly powerful, and one only needs to look at early anti-Chinese political cartoons and articles to see these words used in incredibly derogatory ways. The other side of the Orient/Oriental dichotomy was steeped in foreign luxury and exoticism, which served to peak the interest of wealthy whites that bought up all kinds of Asian furniture, clothing, fabrics, cookware, and art from unscrupulous dealers and certifiable importers alike. Affluent white women of the 19th century are well-documented as being deeply invested in luxurious goods imported from “the Orient” and marketed as “Oriental” or “Orientalia” to garner societal notoriety, whereas their fathers, husbands, brothers, and sons would have dressing gowns, cravats, and handkerchiefs created out of fine imported silk. All of these goods were considered exotic and other-worldly, which is not a debased outlook for the time, considering that so few westerners had actually managed to travel in the vicinity of China, let alone disembark in one of the few official trading ports open to European traders. This fascination with all things Chinese, entirely divorced from the reality that many Europeans and Americans viewed the Chinese as grave existential threats to white civilization, is not without irony.

While Chinese peasants and workers died in droves from starvation, disease, localized conflict, or at the hands of white Europeans and Americans acting with impunity in a country that was barred from holding them legally accountable for their actions, cargo hold upon cargo hold of Chinese goods were exported for consumption by westerners. These westerners had military and diplomatic presence in China, especially in the mid to late 19th century, often seizing prime real estate in Chinese port cities for international settlements where it was the westerners, not the Chinese, in charge. These ostentatious settlements, coupled with missions run by Christian organizations from all over the western world, exercised great influence with local Qing dynasty officials, and western nationals all throughout the southern coast of China were free to use and abuse the Chinese around them as they please. These prosperous settlements, a highly visible and permanent show of colonization and foreign aggression, were made so by the labor of Chinese workers and peasants. The same workers who were forced into horrific working conditions in and around the settlements while western nationals were free to treat them as they please with no repercussions, ever for outright murder. Any fascination with the Chinese lifestyle, manner of dress, and other items that could be quickly imported to the west as exotic tokens of the Orient was inherently divorced from the horrific reality of daily life within China, and was nearly always a fascination that arose from social tiers that could afford to be ignorant of those realities while directly benefiting from them.

“Orientalia and the Noble Savage”

The westerners’ fascination with all things Orientalia outlines another phenomenon present in the west’s view of China in the 19th and 20th centuries, an phenomenon that Americans are familiar with as it is applied to Indigenous peoples in North America: the Noble Savage.

The Noble Savage idea and stereotype found quick traction with American colonists as they fought to drive out Indigenous peoples from their ancestral lands all over North America. These Indigenous groups, savage as they were perceived to be, were often regarded as principled and noble in their way of life, whether that was seen in their treatment of the lands, natural resources, their art and craftwork, their societal structure, or in how they treated white settlers when they were taken prisoner. While all of this talk of nobility betrayed the slimmest undercurrents of admiration from white settlers towards Indigenous peoples, the second word of the phrase was integral to its application: Savage. Despite these noble ideas and practices, a savage is a savage is a savage. This two-faced admiration served only one purpose -- to communicate the slightest inkling of fake remorse in widespread acts of genocide against people that white settlers hated and chose not to understand.

For the Chinese and Chinese Americans, the idea of the noble savage is easily translated. While Indigenous peoples in North America had a comparatively low level of technology to Americans, the same could not be said of the Chinese. Despite lacking robust gunpowder arms and other advanced forms of military technology, the technological prowess of the Chinese people was without doubt. Massive cities, sprawling agriculture, advanced irrigation, roads, palaces, and so much more was plainly evident to any westerner who arrived on Chinese shores (the same can be said of Indigenous populations throughout the Americas despite the prevailing myth of "primordial wilderness" perpetuated by white settlers) . Despite the different perspectives that westerns had between the two groups, westerners applied the Noble Savage ideal to the Chinese just as quickly and easily as they did to the Indigenous peoples across the oceans.

While the Chinese were obviously proficient in architecture, engineering, and in art, many westerners were quick to follow up any admiration of their eastern counterparts with staunch, racial criticism, highlighting their savagery in their daily lives such as gambling, long fingernails, or their seemingly archaic dress. Much of the criticism leveled on the basis of savagery had to deal with the assumption that Chinese men would, without hesitation, steal from white men and kill them, while selling white women into slavery. And while this was based in very loose reality (the triad societies of Canton did, indeed, participate in the sex trafficking of Chinese women to California and the Coolie trade that sent enslaved Chinese men to work on plantations in South America), the fears were stoked by ferocious anti-Chinese rhetoric in Europe and America.

The Chinese who emigrated to America were seen no different, and while public opinion waxed and waned, it was always understood that the Chinaman was a noble savage at best, and the earthly embodiment of evil at his worst. While modern Chinese and Chinese Americans may not be subject to the Noble Savage ideas from two centuries ago, it is not uncommon for Americans, especially white American youths, to take this idea as gospel, tormenting their Asian classmates throughout their formative years.

“China’s Sorrow: Nostalgia for a China that did not exist”

(As a forewarning, this the section where I may become quite emotional.)

Something that I encountered today was nostalgia. Not my own nostalgia, but the nostalgia of an author who grew up in a mission or international settlement in pre-WWII China, and fled from the country just before Pearl Harbor. This author, who shall remain nameless for the reason I stated in the preface of this essay, spoke highly of China’s sights and sounds, the people, the food, the craftwork, and of their pleasant life as the child of white missionaries in China. They spoke on how the pace of life in China was different than America, and that they much preferred the comforts of life in the Orient, surrounded by Oriental people and objects, enamored with Orientialia well into their adult life.

I found this passage to be absolutely appalling. I understand that I may be picking the wrong fight here, but this is my emotional response to an issue that I have found difficult to articulate that managed to, somehow, someway, manifest succinctly in the preface of a book that I randomly encountered. I lay my thoughts here:

White missionaries in China lived privileged lives, much like the other westerners that inhabited international settlements all throughout the major cities of the country. Missionaries, like the other westerners, were an extremely privileged class, living privileged lives in a country that was being torn apart by colonization, internal strife, famine, disease, and violence. While the average Chinese peasant in late Qing, early republic-era China had to contend with the daily realities of starvation, material scarcity, and the reality that a western could beat them or kill them and face no legal consequences for that action. Merchants were forced to deal with countless one-sided trade and land treaties, while government officials struggled to keep the country together, if they weren’t themselves contributing to the horrendous reality. Life in international settlements for western nationals is often reminisced upon as idyllic, quaint, and prosperous, which paints a stark contrast to their Chinese neighbors’ experiences. The westerners were off-limits, exempt from legal prosecution, and largely able to conduct themselves as they saw fit, even when their conduct directly endangered Chinese lives.

Meanwhile, outside of these international settlements, war ravaged the country. When the Qing dynasty fell and the Republic of China was established, the country fractured. The nationalist government was constantly at war, sometimes with itself, sometimes with bandits and warlords, sometimes with organized crime, and most of all with the Chinese Communist Party. The Koumintang government, in the wake of Sun Yat-sen’s death, saw Chiang Kai-shek seize power. The Japanese began to aggressively push their borders into China, fighting with superior military technology and training while the national army faltered from unwilling conscripts led into disastrous battles by inept, corrupt, and tyrannical officers. The CCP fought a guerilla campaign against the KMT that further muddied the conflict, with innocents caught between two radical and violent sides while Japan tightened the noose. Communist and Nationalist fought together against the Japanese one day, and may have fought against each other the next.

While the country was torn apart, the westerners in international settlements were unconcerned with the wars raging across the land. They continued to live their idyllic lives until the war was literally at their doorstop -- only then did they become concerned with the plight of the Chinese people.

Only then did the westerners in international settlements care for the circumstances of the average Chinese peasant in the countryside or worker in the city. They could bear no concern while they benefited from cheap Chinese labor, horrific working conditions, or while some of them got away with murder. They could bear no concern while Europe and America colonized China and ransacked the economy. And they could bear no concern for the Chinese being tortured, beaten, raped, and murdered in the countryside, far from their gates, until it was on their doorstep.

The nostalgia that some westerners feel for China, a China that existed before the chaos of the 1920s onwards, is propped up by lives of privilege and white-washed memories that ignore the struggle of the Chinese people right under their noses.

They feel nostalgia for a China that did not exist, because the one that existed was destroyed in part by their international settlements and the colonization efforts of their home countries.

This nostalgia for a China that was at least slightly better than the chaos of the 1920s through the 1940s, or better than the Cultural Revolution, or better before Tiananmen Square exists also within the Chinese immigrant community. But this nostalgia strikes in a way that the other does not.

While the westerner who lived in an international settlement may be able to intellectually sympathize with the Chinese experience during this tumultuous time, it is the Chinese themselves who bear the actual scars. Many of our elders long for a prosperous China as well, but there is a key difference in this: our elders, our family, sometimes we ourselves, bear the scars of the past. Our nostalgia is momentary, continuously shattered by the very real heartbreak that the Chinese and Chinese American community has been subject to over the last century. While circumstances and perspectives differed, the China that some of us long for is just as much a painful sore on our souls as it is a pleasant memory. The pain, the loss, the grief, anxiety, and struggle.

It is a nostalgia for our ancestral land that cannot be found anywhere else, as precious as it is painful.

Hsu Liang Yu

[anthropardon-me]

western media

i’m an asian growing up in asia. ever since i was young i’ve been consuming foreign media. white people was everywhere i looked. grownups praised me for my english skills while my peers struggled to pronounce a word i’ve already learned years ago on youtube.

i take great interest in the arts. i love creating original content. i’m an art hobbyist and a writer, mainly. i usually post my creations online and in english, as i knew i had to adapt to my viewers. the majority of them spoke english. if i shared a poem i wrote in chinese, no one would care. but if i shared a poem i wrote in english, everyone would read it!

when i was ten~eleven, i wrote a great amount of fanfiction online. many had the characters in middle/high school. i was still in elementary school then, and had little-to-no idea about how american school systems worked. did they change classrooms in between lessons? i think so. they had lockers? okay. for my viewers to understand, i’ll write about things i was unfamiliar with. otherwise, no one would pay attention to me.

i also wrote original stories. i could create ocs to fit into my world! i had total control over my universe! i didn’t realize it, but i’d always make american-coded ocs. they all attended american-coded schools. they spoke english. their race was usually ambiguous but their nationality definitely wasn’t asian.

i didn’t understand why the asian authors i had books of wrote about our own culture. who wanted to read about asian culture? it just wasn’t common in mainstream media. most people spoke english. most people were white. most people were western. why would you write an entire book about asians in asia doing asian things? who would read it? you had to write western things, or else no one will care!

you can see i’m still like this in this post. i used “elementary school” instead of the “primary school” i’m used to in real life because i know most of you people use elementary and not primary. i have to force myself to use your words just to make myself clear.

can you see the problem of mainstream media? i’ve learned to adapt to create western-coded content just to make sure people understood me, otherwise no one would get it, because i grew up around western media while the environment around me is eastern. if i wrote my heart out about my people and my culture, i doubt i would’ve gotten all those online readers’ support when i was ten~eleven. i could pass as an american if i didn’t state my race. some people actually mistaken me as american online.

the media made me think that western culture is the norm and everyone else is just other. i had to follow the norm, or else no one will pay attention to my creations. they’d raise an eyebrow if i wrote about the middle-school students staying in their homeroom for most of their lessons because it wasn’t their norm. they’d raise an eyebrow if i wrote about the characters having two legal names in two languages. they’d raise an eyebrow if the setting of the story was in hong kong.

i’m tired of adapting. i just wish one day societal norms will just disappear and i can write all i want about my culture in a book that’s not exclusively about asian culture and racism. i just want to write a ya book where the characters can casually hop on an mtr train to travel between districts without calling it the subway. i want to write about the buildings and landmarks of my hometown hong kong like i’m an american describing boston. i want to tell everyone that hall monitors/prefects and school houses don’t just exist in the harry potter books, but in many non-american schools across the globe.

i want everyone to be able to brandish their culture without the book or drawing or music piece or play or anything being exclusively about culture and race, but it just casually just being there, without the artwork being the “token minority” artwork. we shouldn’t be called the minority. there are more people in china than in the usa. why should the media be western-centric? why can’t there be no majority? why can’t we all just co-exist? when can our art stop being the token artwork a white person consumes to feel good about supporting other culture? when can we be part of the media like an american?

(this entire post might sound juvenile. that’s because i’m barely a freshman. i just want westerners to hear a teenage poc’s thoughts. hopefully even my immature rambling can spark some inspiration in you. if you, as a westerner, an american, a white person, ever thought about the things i just wrote about before instead of gliding obliviously through life on your part-of-the-majority, privileged buttocks, then thank you for considering.)

[justanotherexpatinkorea]

Update 2020~2021 // 업데이트 2020~2021

January 22, 2021 / 1월 22일 2021

WHAT A WILD RIDE IT’S BEEN (AND WILL BE)

It’s been almost a year since my last blog update. It feels like so much yet so little has changed.

For one, coronavirus has taken over our lives. Because of the virus, we’ve had to stay inside, stay home. I miss being able to travel, visit people, make new friends. All of that has come to a halt. In some ways it feels like life has stalled, become stagnant. Yet that’s the price we pay for staying safe.

COVID 19 has become more than anything we could’ve imagined. A global pandemic that affects the lives of every person on this planet. We’ve had to confront the worst possible outcomes, and find it within ourselves to work together with our communities to overcome it.

As of this writing, here are the stats:

South Korea:

confirmed cases = 73, 918

total deaths = 1,316

United States:

confirmed cases = 24,196,086

total deaths = 420,285

WTF AMERICA….

No country has been perfect in their COVID response. This is a wickedly difficulty problem to tackle. However, living in a foreign country during this unprecedented time, I’ve gained a valuable perspective on this pandemic.

I hate to say this, but I am embarrassed. So many countries around the world look up the US. We’re one of the wealthiest, most developed countries in the world. A strong democracy renowned for its freedom, liberty and justice for all. Among my friends and coworkers here in South Korea, many of them aspire to travel or live in the US one day. I used to encourage them to do so. However, I’m more hesitant now.

I was extremely disappointed in the way the US responded to the virus. We have all the resources, the manpower, the knowledge. All the things that make other countries think so highly of us. Yet despite our alleged greatness, why did the US fail so miserably? fail to contain the virus? fail to keep Americans properly informed in a timely manner? fail to provide strong leadership in such a desperate time? If ever there was a time to step up and band together, this would have been it. Yet in my opinion, America missed the mark horrendously. Hospitals are overflowing. COVID patients are dying in makeshift hospital beds set up in parking garages. People are ignoring the heed to mask up and socially distance. Simple actions that could save ones life and that of others. Yet many Americans are too selfish to look out for the health of their fellow countrymen.

Watching news from back home, there are things that seem so strange to me now. As an expat, I live outside the frame, analyzing from a different context.

Masks. I cannot for the life of me understand how masks become so  politicized. Korea, like many Asian countries, have been wearing masks for years. There is nothing controversial about it. It’s a piece of fabric designed to keep you and the people around you safe. A mere health-related courtesy. The fact that so many Americans cannot concede to this simple gesture makes me greatly concerned. Are we so divided as a nation? That when a global pandemic strikes - the worst health crisis in our lifetime - we cannot recognize the humanity in one another? Is there no love within us, to help us overcome this small personal discomfort for the sake of our fellow Americans? For the sake of us all? If we can’t grow up and do this one simple thing, I worry for our ability to tackle together the more complex issues facing our nation.

THE SOUTH KOREAN RESPONSE:

South Korea was one of the first hit by COVID. The proximity to China and the rapidity with which coronavirus spreads should have drastically increased the likelihood that the country would be decimated by the virus. But that’s not what happened. South Korea has become known worldwide as a model for how to approach the virus.

Widely and readily available testing and contact tracing

Mandatory masks and social distancing

Daily televised updates from government health officials - sharing data, updates on cases and deaths, etc.

Government measures (the closing and re-opening of schools, restaurants, businesses etc. depending on the current situation, in response to confirmed case numbers, etc. )

Quarantine for people coming from overseas, people who have had contact with COVID patients

In short, the Korean response was swift, thorough, and transparent. It required (and still requires) the collective will and cooperation of the people. Which includes myself.

As a teacher, my life has been affected professionally as well. I’m so lucky to have steady employment here as a government employee in the public schools. COVID-related measures in schools include: wearing masks at all times, washing hands regularly, sanitizing classrooms, social distancing as much as possible, keeping students separated and spread out in the cafeteria. And moving to online class when needed.

The government has a system of levels from 1 to 3. Here’s how the levels are decided and what measures they trigger. (For example, most places move to online classes around Level 2~2.5)

What is Level 1?

if the average cases per week are:

30 or fewer in a given province, 100 in large cities

socially distance when going out, wear a mask

What is Level 1.5?

if the average cases per week are:

increasing by 30 or more in a given province, 100 in large cities

if the average cases for people over 60 per week are:

increasing by 10 or more in a given province, 40 in large cities

Level 1+ thorough sanitizing of dangerous, infected areas

What is Level 2?

more than a week of level 1.5, and the cases in the affected community double and persist

OR total national cases reach at least 300, and persist for a week or more

Level 1.5 + recommend that unnecessary outings are limited, reduce meetings and gathering

What is Level 2.5?

total national cases reach 400~500, increase drastically and persist

special consideration - number of hospital beds for those with pre-existing conditions, elderly

Level 2 + stay home

What is Level 3?

total national cases reach 800~1,000, increase drastically and persist

Level 2.5 + stay home whenever possible, limit interactions with others as much as possible

YEAH, IT SUCKS

Around Christmas / New Year, Korea saw a spike in cases, about 300~500 a day. For Korea, this is considered dangerously high. (As an American I laugh at how small these numbers are, comparing it to the thousand of deaths that are occurring every day back home. But alas, this is no laughing matter, regardless of the magnitude of cases.)

The government introduced a new policy:

Gatherings of 5 or more people are banned.

This sucks big time. I was planning on doing a Secret Santa gift exchange with my friends, all thirteen of us. I really wanted to spend the holidays chowing down on sentimental comfort foods, having a drink or two, watching movies, etc. But we had to cancel everything. It was originally only a two-week policy, but the government has continued to extend it two weeks at a time. If COVID cases aren’t dramatically reduced, they’re not going to lift it. It sucks. I wish I could hang out, go out to restaurants and cafes and bars. But everyone is struggling through together. It would be easier to cast my worries aside and let up a little. But the risks are out there. COVID is a serious disease with serious consequences. Even if you don’t die you have the aftereffects of damaged lungs. And who knows what else? Years down the road, who knows what health concerns survivors will have to endure? It’s not worth it.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Like everyone else, I can’t wait for this to all be over. I can’t wait to travel again, explore, and live my life carefree. But who knows exactly when that will be.

However, there is one thing I know for sure. I’m  not moving back to the US any time soon. I’d rather live in a country where I have stable employment, in this unstable world. Where I can get rapid testing and readily available (and affordably dirt cheap!) health care should I happen to have a COVID scare. (Or any other health concern, for that matter.) Where I know the people around me respect their communities, and will wear a mask, etc.

Where people with guns and molotov cocktails and weapons don’t attack the buildings of their democracy. Where facts and reason aren’t under attack, in a way that is tearing apart the fabric of the nation. (But that’s a conversation for another day.)

Of course Korea isn’t perfect. There are flaws in this society that concern me deeply as well. But at the end of the day, I feel much more safe and comfortable in Korea than I do back home. As long as that’s true, this is the place where I will continue to live and make my life.

[kayincolwyn]

Whatever It Means To Be Human (Easter reflection, 4/12/2020)

As many others throughout the world have been pointing out over these last couple months, these are strange times that we're living in.

Back in December around Christmas I started getting sick, and in January I had to go to the ER for some kind of infection that was giving me a sore throat as well as a fever and headache, got a look over and a prescription for a week long course of penicillin which seemed to knock out the infection (and later got hit with a 1200 bill for that ER visit, because my insurance didn’t cover it, that I still need to pay back, which I was livid about when I first found out about it but now am trying to accept as best I can because I have bigger things to worry about). A couple weeks later I had a followup checkup (with a very sweet and very pretty nurse, so no complaints there) and I remember staff at the clinic being pretty jumpy about some virus over in China (now widely known around the world as the coronavirus, or Covid 19) that I honestly hadn't heard about before then, and they were asking me if I had traveled to China or had any interaction with anyone from there, and of course I said no, and I remember being kind of annoyed by their jumpiness at the time. Well, needless to say, now I can see why they were being so jumpy.

I've had some kind of bug or another off and on since then, like a lot of people do in the wintertime, but because of, well, 'everything that's going on' (a phrase I've been using and I've heard a lot of people using lately, like it's become some kind of collective cultural meme) I find myself worrying much more than usual about a little cough or stuffy nose or feeling a little under the weather. At first, like a lot of people, I thought this was no big deal, that it would be another of those diseases that infected a few people but would be quickly contained, and then when that didn't happen I thought, like a lot of younger folks, that I would be fine and just needed to worry about older folks that I care about, but now I know that I could potentially be taken out by this virus too, and even at the ripe old age of 37, so now I worry about myself as well as others, and I admit that, while I’m trying to be brave, part of me is scared.

Even with that worry and anxiety, and with the whole world changing so drastically in just a matter of weeks, I'm still working (with the realization that janitorial work has more value than perhaps I initially thought or felt) and still busing it to and from work and going to the grocery store as needed, while usually wearing my newly acquired neoprene half mask (with inserted filters provided by a friend) like armor, and while washing my bloody hands more than at any other time in my life, and while trying to boost my immunity as best I can with vitamins and supplements of various kinds. Strange times indeed.

I admit it's kind of odd to be considered an 'essential worker', to hear some even hailing people in my position as 'heroes on the frontline' or something like that, when for years I've felt that being a janitor was equal to being at the bottom of the totem pole, and over the years I have on occasion been made to feel less than by others because of my place on the totem pole (though to be fair I've also received my share of gratitude and kindness from others concerning my work as well, which I'm thankful for and appreciate). I mean, I don't really see myself as particularly heroic (I see doctors and nurses and other healthcare workers who are directly risking their lives in order to save others as far more heroic than myself, for example), but just as a guy trying to do his job in order to provide some service to others while also making a living, but I appreciate the validation nevertheless.

As an 'essential worker' (though even among 'essential workers' I still feel like I'm at the bottom or at least near the bottom of the totem pole), I just want to say that I feel that we all have a part to play in this world, that we all have something that we can contribute to the world, even if it may not seem like much.

Like I have seen some people online ragging on celebrities for trying to entertain others from the safety and comfort of their homes (with many of them being out of work at the moment for obvious reasons) but I would say that trying to entertain or encourage others in whatever way you can, even from a distance, can be meaningful and has its place, because we could all use a little entertainment and encouragement sometimes. I mean, for example, people out there can rag on Gal Gadot for trying to sing Imagine with a bunch of other celebrities who may or may not have any musical talent or ability in some online video, but even as cheesy and cringe-inducing as that may be, I still loved her as Wonder Woman (and through that role she has inspired many people, including many young women and girls) and I appreciate her desire, as well as the desire of everyone in that video, to uplift others in some way. Heck, even just trying to stay home as much as possible, trying to keep your distance from others, trying to be mindful of others, as she and many other celebrities as well as everyday people have been and are doing, in this time can be meaningful and shouldn't be completely discounted.

And to me it's not about being 'essential' or not, or 'heroic' or not, it's just about being human, and doing what you can to be a decent human in whatever way you can.

Of course being human is hard, as every human, no matter who they are or where they are, gets their share of suffering and sorrow in some way or another or at some time or another in their lives (though to be fair some certainly do seem to get a bigger share than others, and some comparatively less), and being a decent human is even harder, as it's often a challenge to do some good or do the right thing with all your faults and flaws and with all your limitations and shortcomings, and then going above and beyond that and being someone that most others would think of as a 'saint', well, that seems nigh impossible.

And what does it mean to be human anyway?

I guess that brings me to something that's been on my mind, and is on my mind more now what with it being Easter and having Jesus on the brain a little more than usual (hey, you can take the boy out of the Christianity but you can't take the Christianity out of the boy).

In times like this where the world is shaken up and we're in a semi-apocalyptic state of mind, where our mortality not just individually but collectively is more in question than usual, the question of what it means to be human looms large for many of us, along with those often asked questions about where we come from, why we're here, where we're going... you know, the usual fare.

Lately I've been reading some books by former evangelical Christians, including Unfollowed by Megan Phelps-Roper, granddaughter of Fred Phelps, founder of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, as well as books by Frank Schaeffer, son of Francis Schaeffer, an influential evangelical thinker and theologian.

Being a former evangelical Christian myself who is trying to find his way after questioning and deconstructing and for the most part walking away from that way of seeing and operating in the world, I can resonate with much of what they have to say and share, like the pain and loneliness there is in walking away from a community that you can no longer agree with to try and find your own path, or how with freedom to think for yourself comes an uncertainty that you have to get used to because now it's on you to decide what you will believe and where you will stand rather than just following what others have taught you or told you, or the mixed feelings about who you were and where you were when it wasn't all bad and it's part of who you are today and even while you don't want to, and really can't, go back, you're still grateful for it somehow.

And in their books they both wrestle with what it means to be human, what it means to be a good person, with the value of life and the value of love, because those questions and concerns still matter to them whether God or some higher power exists or not, just as they still matter to me on some level.

I've also been thinking a bit about Fred Rogers, better known to the world as Mister Rogers, the widely beloved children's TV host, after watching the recent film which stars Tom Hanks as Rogers, A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood, as well as the documentary Won't You Be My Neighbor?, and listening to a podcast about him called Finding Fred.

My late friend Erin McCarty was a big fan of Fred Rogers (I even sent her this Mister Rogers t-shirt that I found at a thrift store which she wore proudly in some of her photos on Facebook) whom she saw as a real saint, and she was far from being alone in thinking of him as one. Fred Rogers was one of those people who seemed to go above and beyond just being a decent human, as he was by all accounts a highly exceptional human, who, while having his share of quirks and eccentricities, more than most dedicated his life every waking hour to pursuing the good and showing love to others (and most especially children, whom he could be thought to be the patron saint of if he were canonized as a saint I should think) and even in such a way that no one with a sound mind and clear conscience could find any fault in him.

Those closest to him knew that he at times struggled with feeling inadequate, with feeling as though he wasn't really making a difference in the world, like what he was doing wasn't enough, but even so he continued to move forward, continued to try, an artist whose art-form was kindness and empathy (or as that podcast Finding Fred put it ‘a genius at empathy’).

I remember I was talking with a friend of mine about Fred Rogers the other day and he said that he thought if there was anyone who could perhaps have been the second coming of Christ it was Rogers, and while some might think that sentiment a little sacrilegious, I think it's a testament to the respect many people have for the man's character. People may on occasion playfully mock Mister Rogers for some of his mannerisms, for the way he talked or dressed or otherwise expressed himself (though of course much of that was for the sake of the children he was communicating with), but if you were to ask anyone with any sense at all they would admit that he was, if nothing else, a good man.

I guess the same could be said of Jesus, whose teachings about life and love Fred Rogers, being a Presbyterian minister who took his faith seriously (even if he was kind enough and wise enough not to push it on others as many religious folks tend to do unfortunately), sought to follow and apply to his own life as best he could. Many have parodied Jesus in one way or another over the years (in fact the next book I'll be reading just in time for Easter is Lamb: The Gospel According To Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal, which I look forward to reading as it sounds like fun) but most would agree that he was, if nothing else, a good man. Even the beloved comedy group Monty Python, most of whom were agnostic or atheist, after studying the gospels in preparation for what would eventually become their classic comedy Life Of Brian, decided against making a film where they mocked Jesus but instead made a film that mocked the church that often failed to follow his example. Instead of focusing on Jesus in the film they decided to focus on a guy named Brian who was mistaken for Jesus, following him on all of his adventures (or misadventures), while occasionally showing the real Jesus respectfully somewhere in the background (much as was done in the film Ben Hur). They said their reason for doing this was that they couldn't help but appreciate much of what Jesus said and did in the gospels, or as they said in their decidedly British way 'you can't take the piss out of it'.

As Frank Schaeffer points out in his book Why I Am An Atheist Who Believes In God (which I thought was a pretty clever title, and one I can kind of resonate with as I’m somewhere in the middle like that myself), some things that Jesus says and does in the gospels, or at least is recorded as saying and doing, don't really make sense or seem inconsistent with the general thread of kindness and empathy that can be seen in Christ's teachings, and having read the gospels at least a couple of times myself (or at least a couple of their English translations anyway, where no doubt much gets lost in translation), I would agree. He wonders if maybe some things were taken out or added in, if the writers sometimes spun some things to bolster their own point of view (which humans tend to do unfortunately), or if some things were simply a result of 'the telephone game' as it were (with most of the gospels probably being written decades after the events that they chronicle took place so that's not really out of the realm of possibility), and he may be right (as much as many Christians out there, especially the more fundamentalist among them, who may believe that scripture is infallible and inerrant, would hate to admit it).

But whatever the case may be, there is still enough of that thread of kindness and empathy in Jesus' story and message that countless people have been inspired by it through the centuries since he was said to have lived and died (and at least according to the Easter story, risen from the dead), including people like Fred Rogers, and also including people like Megan Phelps-Roper and Frank Schaeffer or myself, who even though they no longer identify as Christian still see some value in Jesus’ example and teachings, or at least as they now interpret them.

Many still seek to follow that example and apply those teachings today, including in these very strange, and very difficult, times, trying to walk a path of kindness and empathy when the world seems to be falling apart. I can't really say for sure how much I'm doing that myself, walking that path, with all of my faults and flaws and limitations and shortcomings, but I would like to think or hope that I manage to do a little good each day and get things right at least on occasion.

The truth is though that many of us, including me, feel as though we don't measure up to the standard that someone like Jesus sets (or at least appears to set when you read about the kind of life he led), or even to the standard of someone like Fred Rogers. It just seems nigh impossible to meet that kind of standard. I mean I can't really speak for everyone who struggles with this, but I know that I have often struggled with wondering if I'm good enough, have debated whether I'm making a difference in the world, and have had doubts about whether I am even a decent human, let alone a saint. I feel like I fail or fall short in some way or another every day, feel like I don't care enough, don’t give enough, don't live big enough or love deep enough. Maybe some of my family and friends who see more in me than I see in myself might argue with me on this, but it's still how I feel sometimes, or even much of the time, and is a daily internal struggle for me.

But hearing about Fred Rogers, who some half jokingly (but also half seriously) would call the closest thing to a second coming of Christ that they can think of, having similar struggles gives me some perspective and comfort though, and it makes me wonder if even Jesus himself had such struggles, even if they may not have be written about, even if they were only written in his own heart, as blasphemous as the thought of someone whom many claim and believe to have been the Son of God, or even God in human form, actually struggling with feelings of inadequacy and self-doubt may be, but blasphemous or not that thought gives me a strange kind of comfort.

I remember in reading the gospels one of the parts of Jesus' story that resonated most with me was him wrestling in prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane before he was arrested. Just imagining him being scared and uncertain and agonizing in the dirt and just being, well, more human like me, because I've been there too, is somehow encouraging, because if that's God, or a representative of God, or even just a very good man, maybe it's okay for me to be scared and uncertain and to agonize in the dirt too, because maybe I'm not alone in that.

One of the things that Fred Rogers is famous for saying is 'I like you just the way you are'. In the podcast Finding Fred, the podcast host, who greatly admires Fred Rogers, sometimes expressed struggling with that idea, being a black man who has experienced a lot of racism, and also being someone who has been mistreated in a lot of ways by others throughout his life, he wondered how he could like someone just as they were when, well, there was so much wrong with some people out there. One of his guests on the show, another admirer of Fred Rogers, suggested that what Rogers meant by 'I like you just the way you are' wasn't that everyone was perfect in every way, nor that everyone's words or actions or choices should be condoned, let alone praised, or that people didn't need to learn or grow in different ways, but rather that underneath all the dirt and the muck of our imperfection, our imperfect words and actions and choices, and no matter how deeply buried, there is something of value, something of worth, some spark of the divine in us, which can never be completely destroyed, and no matter how much others, or even we ourselves, may try to.

Of course, much like the host of the podcast, many of us struggle with seeing that that is true of those whom many of us would call 'monsters', the murderers and abusers and tyrants of this world, the worst of the worst if you will, but then it appears that Rogers was able to look at people even like that and see something of value and worth in them, seeing something of beauty beneath all of the ugliness, or at least the potential for it anyway.

I think of another man that many could think of as a saint, named Daryl Davis, who is a black man that has made it his mission to try to befriend members of hate groups, including members of the KKK, not in a concerted effort to convert them to his way of seeing things necessarily but simply to give them something to think about through their just knowing him. He has helped many to walk away from the KKK and other such groups simply by extending the hand of friendship to them, and he challenges others to try to break down divides by seeing the humanity in others, including those who are different from us, or even those who hurt us or frighten us.

I also think of Fred Phelps, who was the founder of the infamous Westboro Baptist Church, and who has become an icon of religious hate to many, and what his granddaughter Megan wrote about him in her memoir Unfollowed, how even though to most people he was a terrible human being, even a monster, to her he was her 'Gramps', whom she loved dearly even if looking back she knows that he got a lot of things wrong, and she spoke of how towards the end of his life when he was falling into dementia that he softened considerably, and even to the point that his own church effectively excommunicated him and abandoned him in a retirement home, where Megan and her younger sister Grace, who had recently left the church (and at great personal sacrifice to themselves), snuck in without permission from their family to see him one last time, and Megan says he was mostly lucid at that time, and instead of reproaching them for having left the church he only expressed his love for them in the end. It seems that at the end of his life Fred Phelps didn't cling to his dogma and hate so much as his relationships and love, which is encouraging.

Fred Rogers (the other Fred if you will), whom Fred Phelps himself often mocked as 'a wuss and an enabler of wusses' among other things, even going so far as to protest at his funeral, would have been proud I think that Phelps had come so far at the end, and I am sure he would have said to him 'I like you just the way you are' and I think the humanity buried even in someone like Phelps was what Rogers was pointing to by saying that to everyone he encountered.

Frank Schaeffer spoke of his mother, Edith Schaeffer, in his book Sex, Mom, and God, in much the same way, even going so far as to say that even being straitjacketed by the limitations of her religion and its dogma she was a force of nature and he could see her humanity shine through throughout her life, especially towards the end when, as Fred Phelps did, she softened, and said that ultimately she was better than her beliefs, or that something in her, her humanity, rose above that.

And maybe that humanity, or that divine spark, or whatever you want to call it, was also what Jesus was pointing to and trying to call out, and whether that be in the everyman on the street, or in the seemingly irreparably damaged people that you may find in prisons (or even sometimes in governments) or even among the religious who can get so mired in their ideology and self-righteousness as to forget that spark within them or in others.

It may seem nigh impossible, if not flatly impossible, to live up the standard of what many of us think of as saviors or saints, but I think of a scene in A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood where Roger's wife Joanne says that 'Rodg' (as she affectionately called him) wouldn't want people to think of him as a saint, as he believed that anyone and everyone could walk the path that he walked, or at least tried to walk, and in their own special way.

I also think of how Jesus said to his disciples that they would do even greater things than him, which when you think of the kind of example that someone like Jesus set, namely one where you are willing to die for what you believe in and stand for, that seems like a pretty tall order, but it makes me wonder if, as controversial as this may be and contrary to popular and widespread religious opinion that has been built up around him for centuries, maybe Jesus wouldn't want us to think of him as a savior anymore than Fred Rogers would want us to think of him as a saint, because maybe instead of putting them up on pedestals we're meant to try and follow their example as best we can.

I remember one of the guests in the Finding Fred podcast saying that maybe instead of just looking back on Rogers and his example with admiration and nostalgia, we could also try to be like Fred Rogers ourselves, much as those who seek to follow the way of Jesus (which Rogers himself was trying to follow) instead of just looking back can try to be like him as much as they are able, and in their own special way.

With it being Easter today as I post this, I honestly don't know whether or not Jesus rose from the dead, heck I am not even one hundred percent sure if he even existed (as there are those who argue that he didn't, even if most historians would agree that he did, though most of them think that most of what was written about him was just fanciful legend that was built up around him, which may or may not be the case, because none of us can really know for sure on that since we weren't there, and unless we invent time travel or something it will continue to be a matter of faith, and faith alone), but then I am willing to keep something of an open mind about it, and even with where I am now I can still understand why many look to Jesus as a symbol of hope and the love of God, and why people see something meaningful in the story of his life, death, and resurrection because even if it may not be literally true (and again on that front it is a matter of faith), that doesn’t mean it isn’t mythically true. Whatever the case, I believe that his example and message of kindness and empathy lives on (even if one has to dig through a number of inconsistencies and mistranslations to find it), much as Fred Rogers’ similar example and message lives on.

And I guess this brings me back to 'everything that's going on', and the question of what it means to be human.

One of the things that a lot of people have been saying through this crisis that all of us in the world are facing is that 'we're all in this together' and I think it's safe to say that there's nothing quite like a pandemic to remind us of how much we value our relationships when we are having to keep our distance from others, including those we love, for our good and theirs, and when we are fearing for not only our own health and our own life but also for the health and lives of others.

I recently watched the film Contagion, which came out about ten years ago, and many are seeing it as eerily prophetic as much of the film parallels what is happening now, but one of the underlying messages of that film, as one of my favorite Youtubers, Like Stories Of Old, pointed out, is how much our relationships matter, how much those connections that can so easily be taken for granted matter, when we are faced with existential threats such as the one we seem to be faced with now. More likely than not, as in Contagion, this pandemic, as bad as it may get, will not be the end the world, but it is certainly shaking it up and it appears it will continue to do so for awhile, and in the midst of that all we have for sure is eachother, even if we can only be there for one another mostly at a distance and in spirit.

In A Beautiful Day In The Neighborhood there was a moving scene where Rogers says concerning death and how difficult it is to talk about it that 'anything that is mentionable is manageable', and I think the same applies to the situation we are in now, we can face this and face it together, because we're not alone in this mess, not alone in the dirt, even as lonely as it may feel at times.

Our situation is also a reminder (and is another theme in Contagion) of how connected we all are, especially in this globalized world that we now live in. A friend of mine here on Tumblr was telling me in a recent message how this whole situation shows how interconnected we all are, and how every choice we make can impact those around us and can have a domino effect, even having effects, whether positive or negative, that we aren't even aware of.

What he said reminds me of this passage from the classic children's book Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, which I finished reading for the first time just a couple days ago, where there is this exchange between the book's chief protagonist Milo, accompanied by his loyal companions Tock and Humbug, and the princesses Rhyme and Reason:

“It has been a long trip,” said Milo, climbing onto the couch where the princesses sat; “but we would have been here much sooner if I hadn’t made so many mistakes. I’m afraid it’s all my fault.” “You must never feel badly about making mistakes,” explained Reason quietly, “as long as you take the trouble to learn from them. For you often learn more by being wrong for the right reasons than you do by being right for the wrong reasons.” “But there’s so much to learn,” he said, with a thoughtful frown. “Yes, that’s true,” admitted Rhyme; “but it’s not just learning things that’s important. It’s learning what to do with what you learn and learning why you learn things at all that matters.” “That’s just what I mean,” explained Milo as Tock and the exhausted bug drifted quietly off to sleep. “Many of the things I’m supposed to know seem so useless that I can’t see the purpose in learning them at all.” “You may not see it now,” said the Princess of Pure Reason, looking knowingly at Milo’s puzzled face, “but whatever we learn has a purpose and whatever we do affects everything and everyone else, if even in the tiniest way. Why, when a housefly flaps his wings, a breeze goes round the world; when a speck of dust falls to the ground, the entire planet weighs a little more; and when you stamp your foot, the earth moves slightly off its course. Whenever you laugh, gladness spreads like the ripples in a pond; and whenever you’re sad, no one anywhere can be really happy. And it’s much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn something new, the whole world becomes that much richer.” “And remember, also,” added the Princess of Sweet Rhyme, “that many places you would like to see are just off the map and many things you want to know are just out of sight or a little beyond your reach. But someday you’ll reach them all, for what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover all the wonderful secrets of tomorrow.”

While I think the main themes of The Phantom Tollbooth are the value of education as well as how you see and experience the world around you, I think this passage could also be applied to how we learn how to live and love, and how you follow a path of kindness and empathy.

It's a process to be sure, and we will all make mistakes along the way, but as Reason says, we can learn more from being wrong for the right reasons than being right for the wrong ones, and trying to apply what we've learned as best we can and holding onto our reasons for doing so is just as important as what we learn. And there's a purpose to it, to living and loving as best we can, and it can impact the world around us, it can be like a ripple in a pond that spreads out in ways we can't know or even imagine, and who knows, maybe it will take us to places that we couldn't have even dreamed of...

Maybe that's something to try remember whenever we get discouraged (and I know I do plenty, as I’m sure most of us do), much like Fred Rogers did, and perhaps even Jesus did, and when wondering whether or not we have cared enough or given enough or lived enough or loved enough, that even seemingly little things can have a great impact and can actually make a real difference in the world.

In Fred Rogers' last television appearance after 9/11 he spoke of how his mother said in times of crisis that you should "Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” I remember in the Finding Fred podcast they pointed out how in that message he was speaking to the children who are now grown ups themselves, the ones who had watched his program as they were growing up, and he was pointing to their own humanity, to that divine spark within them, and calling them to become those helpers themselves.

Even in that instance Rogers struggled, as he was so shaken by the enormity of the events of 9/11 that he felt that nothing he said could really help, and yet many, including myself at the time, even not being as familiar with Fred Rogers then as I am now, as I hadn't really watched his show growing up myself (I was more of a TMNT and Transformers kind of kid back in the 80s), were encouraged by what he had to say, and it made an impact, it made a difference. It helped.

And we can help too in our own way, and even if we too may feel shaken up by the events of our own time, these strange times that we're living in, we too can make an impact and a difference, we can help in some way, and however small and inconsequential what we may have to offer may feel, and whether it may feel decent or good or 'essential' or 'heroic' enough or not, we can help, and even if we may not know that we are helping.

As far as the answers to some of those big questions, like where we come from, why we're here, and where we're going, honestly I'm not sure what the answers may be, I mean I have some guesses, but I don't know with absolute certainty (and I'm having to learn to live without that anyway, even as I try to look forward with some hope and look back with some gratitude), but whatever it means to be human, I think it may have something to do with doing what you need to do even when you're worried and scared, with trying as much as you can to lift up others when they're down or maybe even when you're down, with the value of life and of love, with not being alone in the dirt, with seeing some measure of value and worth in jaded and cynical adults as much as you may see it in children, with extending the hand of friendship, and maybe even to those that are different from you, or looking for the humanity even in those that hurt and frighten you, with somehow loving those that others may only see as irredeemable monsters, with seeing the light in someone even if they are held back by things that limit and hem them in, with not insisting that others put us up on pedestals whenever we do some good or get something right but that they try to do the same themselves as best they can just as we are trying to do, with learning and growing in every way we can, with facing difficult times together, with trying to encourage and support and help one another, and even as imperfect as we may be and are. Maybe it has something to do with all of that.

I hope that we'll get through these strange times, that we'll not only survive them but that this may also push us to change some things for the better, that this will push us forward somehow, through death towards resurrection, that this will remind us of our humanity, that spark within us, and while I don't really know why we are in these strange times, or why 'everything that's going on' is going on, really I do hope that in the end it will move us a little closer to finding out, both for ourselves and for eachother, what it means to be human.

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Where reopening is working (NYT) Across much of the United States and Europe, the coronavirus has been spreading less rapidly than many people feared. Over the past six weeks—as communities have started to reopen, Americans have flocked to beaches and lakes and European schools have reopened—but the number of new cases has continued falling in many places. Across the Northeast and Midwest of the U.S., they’re down more than 50 percent, and often much more, since May 1. Nationwide, weekly deaths have fallen for six weeks in a row. And Europe “seems to have turned a corner,” Caitlin Rivers of Johns Hopkins University says. How could this be? Public health experts gave two main answers. One, the virus spreads much less easily outdoors than indoors. “Summer—being outside, warmer weather, humidity—seems to help, and we may have underestimated how much it’s helped,” Ashish Jha, the incoming dean of Brown University School of Public Health, told me. Two, many people are taking more precautions than they were in February and March. They’re wearing masks, remaining six feet apart and being careful about what they touch. The combination appears to have eliminated most “superspreader events,” like parties, concerts and restaurant meals, where multiple people get sick. Such events may account for 80 percent of all transmissions, research suggests.

Beleaguered and besieged, police try to come to grips with a nation’s anger (Washington Post) The crowds have thinned and the smoke has cleared, with more than a week of nationwide protests leaving in their wake a nation increasingly resolved to change a broken law enforcement system. But they also have left police officers badly shaken, and in some cases physically bruised. Nationwide, police leaders say the rank and file are struggling to come to grips with the level of animus they encountered on the streets, as epithets, bricks and bottles all came hurtling their way. Police have been targets of protest many times before, of course. But never quite like this. “I’ve had members say they feel like a Vietnam veteran returning home to a country that hates them,” said Robert Harris, a Los Angeles police officer and director of the force’s police union. “It’s not that our members expect thank-yous. It’s the difficulty in knowing that the protesters want to be treated with equality and fairness and respect, and what they’re protesting for isn’t afforded to the officers themselves.” “The morale is low,” he said. “They’ve taken quite a beating.”

Federal Debt Tops $26 Trillion for First Time; Jumps $2 Trillion in Just 63 Days (CNS News) The debt of the federal government topped $26 trillion for the first time on Tuesday, when it climbed from $25,960,547,920,986.11 to $26,003,751,512,344.91, according to data released today by the Treasury Department. The federal debt had topped $24 trillion for the first time on April 7, 2020.

A Single Session of Exercise Alters 9,815 Molecules in Our Blood (NYT) When we exercise, the levels of thousands of substances in our bloodstream rise and drop, according to an eye-opening new study of the immediate, interior impacts of working out. The study is the most comprehensive cataloging to date of the molecular changes that occur during and after exercise and underscores how consequential activity—and inactivity—may be for our bodies and health. Over all, the researchers were taken aback by the magnitude of the changes in people’s molecular profiles after exercise, according to Dr. Michael Snyder, the chair of the genetics department at Stanford University and senior author of the study. “I had thought, it’s only about nine minutes of exercise, how much is going to change? A lot, as it turns out.”

United will require passengers to complete health assessments before they fly (Washington Post) United Airlines on Wednesday became at least the second U.S. carrier to ask travelers to answer questions about their health status before they fly, part of a strategy to ease the minds of travelers concerned about flying in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic. United’s “Ready-to-Fly” checklist will ask travelers to confirm that they have not experienced any coronavirus-related symptoms in the 14 previous days or been in close contact with any individual who has tested positive during the same time period. It also will require passengers to verify that they are aware of the airline’s policy requiring face coverings when aboard an airplane.

Are religious communities reviving the revival? Outdoor worship is a US tradition (Religion News Service) Religious communities have been forced to find alternative ways to worship together during the coronavirus pandemic. For some that has meant going online, but others have turned to a distinctly non-digital practice steeped in this history of the American religious experience: outdoor worship. Prayer sessions in parking lots and services in green spaces formed part of an improvised response to the lockdown by religious leaders and they may now be part of the plan as the United States emerges from the crisis. Indeed, a team of clergy and scientists have issued a new guide suggesting, among other recommendations, that baptisms could take place in “flowing streams, lakes or in beach settings.” So are brick-and-mortar houses of worship essential? It is a question that states and courts, including the U.S. Supreme Court, have asked in considering the extent to which states can or should place restrictions on meetings in religious buildings. Religious communities, too, have reflected on whether the term “church” describes a building or a community. While white evangelical Protestants have been some of the more vocal protesters of government restrictions on houses of worship during the pandemic, they actually have a long history of embracing outdoor worship in services and revivals.

Watch kids near water (NYT) This year, with outings to the community pool, day camps and pool parties still on hold, kids cooped up at home will be eager to get in the water as the weather warms. Experts worry that parents are stretched too thin to provide the required supervision, leading to an increase in child drownings this summer. As of mid-May, both Florida and Texas—the top two states for child drownings in pools and spas—are already seeing higher numbers than last year. If you have toddlers and you think you don’t have to worry because you don’t have a real pool—just one of those little plastic or inflatable baby pools—you still have a hazard sitting in your yard. Little kids can drown in less than two inches of water. According to the American Academy of Pediatrics, drowning is the leading cause of injury death in children ages 1 to 4, and nearly 70 percent of the time, it happens when children aren’t supposed to be in the pool.

Zoom censors video talks on Hong Kong and Tiananmen, drawing criticism (Washington Post) Several prominent critics of the Chinese government, including protest leaders in Hong Kong and pro-democracy activists in the United States, have accused Zoom of shutting their accounts and severing live events in recent weeks under pressure from Beijing. The three incidents are reviving concerns about the fast-growing Silicon Valley company’s susceptibility to Chinese government influence weeks after the firm began facing scrutiny over security, including its routing of data through China. Coming in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, the episode also highlights the world’s dependency on services such as Zoom and their ability to control speech. Zoom on Thursday acknowledged that “a few recent meetings” related to China have been disrupted. In each instance, event organizers told The Washington Post that they relied on Zoom in lieu of in-person events because of social distancing and travel restrictions. And each of the Zoom accounts and events was created and hosted outside mainland China but appeared to be quashed under Chinese government pressure after publicly advertised.

EU pushes back on Beijing (Foreign Policy) China’s aggressive diplomacy in Europe is now causing serious pushback. The European Union, normally reluctant to speak out against Beijing, has accused the government of running “targeted influence operations and disinformation campaigns in the EU, its neighborhood, and globally,” along with Russia. The move may be a response to earlier criticism that the EU softened a report on the same topic. Meanwhile, Britain’s swerve away from China has been fast, with Prime Minister Boris Johnson proposing a D-10 alliance of democracies—the existing G-7, plus South Korea, India, and Australia—to build 5G networks free of Chinese influence. The Hong Kong crisis has further soured U.K.-Chinese relations, with Beijing warning that it may pull out a British nuclear power construction deal. Since the original nuclear deal was widely seen as a disaster in the U.K., this doesn’t give Beijing much leverage.

Poland troop plan falters (Foreign Policy) After U.S. President Donald Trump said he would remove 9,500 troops from Germany, plans to relocate troops further east in Poland have fallen into disarray, Reuters reports. A plan announced in June of last year to send 1,000 U.S. troops to Poland permanently has been held up over disputes over how much of the bill Poland would cover, where to station the troops, and whether they would gain legal immunity while stationed there.

Lack of beds slows Delhi’s virus fight (AP) In New Delhi, a sprawling capital region of 46 million and home to some of India’s highest concentration of hospitals, a pregnant woman’s death after a frantic hunt for a sickbed was a worrying sign about the country’s ability to cope with a wave of new coronavirus cases. “She kept begging us to save her life, but we couldn’t do anything,” Shailendra Kumar said, after driving his sister-in-law, Neelam, and her husband for hours, only to be turned away at eight public and private hospitals. Two and a half months of nationwide lockdown kept numbers of infections relatively low in India. But with restrictions easing in recent weeks, cases have shot up, rising by a record of nearly 10,000 on Thursday, raising questions about whether authorities have done enough to avert catastrophe. Half of Delhi’s 8,200 hospital beds dedicated to COVID-19 patients are already full and officials are projecting more than half a million cases in the city alone by July 31.

Chinese recovery (Foreign Policy) Some data indicates that the speed of economic recovery in China may be faster than feared, with oil use already back to 90 percent of pre-coronavirus levels. Domestic demand for consumer goods is strong, but a lack of global demand is hamstringing Chinese manufacturers: Reopened factories are struggling to find customers.

Floyd killing finds echoes of abuse in South Africa, Kenya (AP) Collins Khosa was killed by law enforcement officers in a poor township in Johannesburg over a cup of beer left in his yard. The 40-year-old black man was choked, slammed against a wall, beaten, kicked and hit with the butt of a rifle by the soldiers as police watched, his family says. Two months later, South Africans staged a march against police brutality. But it was mostly about the killing of George Floyd in the United States, with the case of Khosa, who died on April 10, raised only briefly. Despite racial reconciliation that emerged after the end of the apartheid system, poor and black South Africans still fall victim to security forces that now are mostly black. The country is plagued by violent crime, and police often are accused of resorting to heavy-handed tactics. Journalist Daneel Knoetze, who looked into police brutality in South Africa between 2012 and 2019, found that there were more than 42,000 criminal complaints against police, which included more than 2,800 killings—more than one a day. There were more than 27,000 cases of alleged assault by police, many classified as torture, and victims were “overwhelmingly” poor and black, he said. And in Kenya, the police force has for two decades been ranked the country’s most corrupt institution. It’s also Kenya’s most deadly, killing far more people than criminals do, according to human rights groups.

[hisvanity]

POKÉMON TRAINING: THE WORLD’S GREATEST LIE

i’ve headcanoned a lot of things about social justice in the pokémon world and so far, i’ve made it a pretty bleak place. a place where poc coordinators are routinely discriminated against, where team aqua is actually an indigenous people’s only recourse for a dignified independence, and where one power-hungry royal family controls the entire global media. but there’s one thing i haven’t touched. one thing you probably thought was safe. one thing that makes the pokémon world what it is, without which none of my other social justice ramblings would even be possible.

after all these months (or years? i forgot when i had it) of holding this hc in…it is time.

buckle up, kids. i’m going to ruin all your childhoods.

So What’s Up With Training?

several things, actually. 

one, given that all of the trainers are seen constantly traveling on the road and camping out, we can easily deduce that the vast majority of trainers are homeless.

two, since the only ingame source of income that a trainer has is winning matches against other trainers, we can assume that money is hard to come by.

and three, because we hardly see any trainers go to school, we can also assume that unless we see them in a trainer’s school geared specifically toward training, these kids aren’t in school.

there are some things that can be expanded upon with this. 

one, if we look at the mere fact that most trainers are homeless, we can clearly see that they’re not coming from a lot of money. if training was a sport favored by the wealthy or even the middle class, we’d see much less journeying on foot and many more taxis going from place to place, much less camping out and much more staying overnight in hotels. there are obviously exceptions to this rule, as we’ve seen some really posh/elite trainer schools in canon (think the first few dozen episodes of the kanto series, or the dojo that ash went to in johto). but i think it’s canonical that the vast majority of trainers are just out on the street with no transportation and not even a temporary home.

two, if you start off training while poor, it can be very hard to work your way up the socioeconomic ladder. if your main source of income is winning battles, and you lose money every time you lose a battle, every day is literally a gamble in which you could either get the necessary cash for your next three meals or lose everything you have and go hungry. sure, there are headcanoned ways to earn other money, such as entering tournaments and winning prize cash, or performing unskilled labor at a poké mart or pokémon center (because what else can a kid really do?) but even with these headcanons, most methods of earning money are either 1) contingent upon you winning battles or 2) not very rewarding at all.

three, it can always be assumed that trainers are attempting to get a decent education on the road. there could be online classes, there could be free classes offered by training schools. however, if trainers are both homeless and strapped for cash, concentrating in class and while doing schoolwork can be exceedingly difficult--and work or battle is usually a better use of time than study, because it ensures that you’re going to eat the next day.

from these things we can conclude that training, from a realistic standpoint, is a low-income sport that is commonly pursued by low-income individuals during which obtaining a proper education is difficult if not impossible, and attempting upward mobility presents a similar challenge.

in the real world, you bet your ass people would try to take advantage of that.

Why Trainers Should Give Up on Their Dreams

let’s be honest. training is like sports is like having a career in the arts. it is devilishly hard to succeed in any of these fields--hard to the point that most artists have to work a second job just to stay afloat. only the top 0.001% of trainers will ever see six figures, with the rest forever plugging away at the grindstone, hoping that one day they’ll get that shiny carrot of success that’s been dangled in front of them from the moment they chose their profession.

this is the life of artists.

this is the life of sportspeople.

there is no reason to believe that it will not be the life of a trainer as well.

this fact about training will never be fixed, and that is because there’s a benefit to the upper class if this is the case. if poor people are distracted by training from doing anything truly productive…they stay focused on their pokémon instead of societal injustice. and they stay out of school, which means they’re less likely to threaten the incumbent upper class with potential upward mobility.

if you’re thinking three steps ahead, you’re absolutely right!

Modern training is a global capitalist conspiracy to keep poor people uneducated, and to keep them from questioning their rich oppressors.

let me tell you how this works.

training has always been a part of human civilization. but the modern version of training (challenging gym leaders, earning badges, then challenging leagues and national conferences) first started becoming popular in the 1950′s after WWII. ever since then, i think it’s safe to assume that in the pokémon world, training is the #1 worldwide hobby/occupation for people ages 10 - 18. this did NOT happen on accident. league champions in conjunction with governments and pokémon-centered merchandising companies such as poké mart, inc. billed it to parents as a fun and rewarding activity where you could learn how to be independent, intelligent and quick-thinking--not to mention earn some cash for yourself and your family on the side. they ran countless advertising campaigns depicting happy trainers with their pokémon, urging kids to start their journeys with tantalizing images of victory in grand arenas. governments in america and western europe even billed training as a patriotic symbol of independence from communist rule, because communist-ruled countries (except for china) did not establish proper leagues until after the soviet union fell. due to a cultural shift encouraged by the Powers That Be, pokémon training became the most prevalent sport worldwide.

it wasn’t until the early 1970′s that world corporations figured out that there could be something to be gained from all this. with rising prosperity across the globe, they needed a way to make sure that they could maintain a solid “underclass” to do all the dirty work that nobody else wanted to do--while also making sure that pokémon-related companies turned a profit. they realized that in training lay their answer. the system that resulted from their collaboration with world governments creates a vicious cycle that goes as follows.

kids from poor families are told to quit school and train at age ten. they are thrust into a life of constant fight and constant struggle, just to earn a few more scraps of cash to send home. anxious families are promised that their children can still continue their educations via trainer schools, and that they can still have a path to college if that’s what they so desire--the most commonly found and most expensive scholarships in the world are reserved exclusively for trainers. however, given the rigors of training, 90% of trainers are unable to maintain consistent schooling of ANY LEVEL while they pursue a training career. of the 10% that can maintain consistent schooling, a further 90% of trainer school-educated children are unprepared for college, and roughly that amount of trainer school-educated students drop out of college once they attempt it. without a college degree, they are locked out of higher-paying jobs and forced to continue in unskilled labor, perhaps continue as trainers in the hopes that one day they can afford school. instead of getting angry at the system, however, many people are so focused on the day-to-day concern of trying to better their lives (and of potentially trying to achieve their training dreams) than trying to take down what holds them in chains. and so the cycle of poverty perpetuates.

They Use Training For A Reason

and that reason is fairly simple. 

nobody has childhood dreams about working one’s way up from fry cook to manager at mcdonald’s. nobody has childhood dreams of becoming the world’s fastest-cleaning janitor, or becoming employee of the month five times in a row as a cashier. everybody, however, has childhood dreams about “being the very best, like no one ever was.” pokémon training has an emotional appeal due to its glorious veneer, an appeal that can motivate even the most stubborn people to drop out of school even when there’s no pragmatic reason to drop out of school in the first place. you just don’t get that out of cleaning toilets. you never will.

now, one can argue that the people at the top could have just relied on the natural tendency of capitalism to keep the poor at the bottom while the rich get richer. but they didn’t trust that it could stay that way on its own, and so this system was born as a guarantor of their greed.

So What About Rich and Middle-Class Trainers?

the richer your family is, the more likely you are to “make it big” as a trainer, and obtain the dreams that are promised to impoverished children all over the world. rich families have the advantage of giving their children tutors to improve their battling craft, enrolling them in expensive elite trainer schools, getting them interviews with media outlets in order to increase their visibility. the children of rich and even some middle-class families don’t have to worry about where their next meal is going to come from, or even where their next pokémon is going to come from--many well-off trainers have never caught a pokémon in their lives, instead buying them from expensive breeders. society also tends to look at the rich trainers and use them as examples of people who “made it,” and shame poor trainers without those advantages for not being able to do the same.

hold on, one might say. won’t well-off children have the same difficulty as their lower-income peers in staying in school? won’t they drop out of school to train, just like said peers? well, the powers that be have already thought that through. in all private schools, there are training and coordinating teams that meet after school for 2-2.5 hours a day mondays through fridays, similar to teams of other sports. also like teams of other sports, they hold practice sessions and compete regionally + nationally--each individual student has a ranking in the competition, but all students’ individual performances contribute to the overall ranking of their school. such programs also exist in public schools in low-income neighborhoods, but their quality is far below the programs found in private schools; also, full-time training is usually a financially more realistic option for low-income students than joining a school team because most school tournaments don’t give money to winners. moreover, going to school with a full stomach and a guaranteed roof over your head is very different from going to school with economic anxieties on your shoulders. a key difference between the two is that in the former, one battles for pleasure, not for cash, and if one loses cash, one can easily replace it; in the latter, one’s win-loss ratio can make a big difference in one’s day-to-day life. in addition, those of the lower middle class usually find themselves facing the same pressures as poor people during training--which means that the system used to keep poor people poor is also used to widen the gap between the poor and the rich.

government bigwigs and corporate fat cats know these truths. in fact, they bank on them. they run cartoons where children are told to “be the very best, like no one ever was.” they constantly uplift the rare cases of the people who made it from rags to riches, dangling the everlasting promise that you, too, could be like them. they drop propaganda leaflets into suffering neighborhoods telling them that you can have a better life if only you take up your poké ball and take up the fight. they do this with the full knowledge that training is not a sustainable solution for these children, but that it would benefit them to keep these children in training. and then they turn around and victim-blame the poor trainers who inevitably fail to reach the goals they were promised--calling them “lazy” and “unmotivated” when really, they are victims of a system that was rigged against them from the beginning.

you will not be the very best.

you will only ever be a pawn in somebody else’s long game.

Dishonorable Mention: Unovamerica

because it’s not a true worldbuilding post from me without a little shitting on the country that we liberals love to hate.

the united states is known for its dislike of free healthcare, but there is one brand of free healthcare that it has mysteriously never disliked: that provided to trainers. human healthcare from pokémon centers is completely free, but only if you are a registered trainer--many children become trainers purely because they can’t afford healthcare any other way. this practice has been adopted in many other parts of the world, but america started it first. pokémon centers in the u.s. are particularly notorious for enforcing the “free healthcare for trainers only” rule: they have been known to turn away the seriously ill, seriously injured and even the dying because they couldn’t present a valid trainer ID. in addition, to ensure that registered trainers are actually training and not just “mooching off the system,” the u.s. and countries adopting its system have a “fight per month” rule: if you don’t get a new badge or participate in a new tournament at least once every month, your access to free healthcare in pokémon centers is revoked.

many american states and non-american countries offer free and comprehensive healthcare for the families of traveling trainers as well--training is the ONLY low-income job where you can get this sort of treatment. most notably, trainer healthcare disregards preexisting conditions, which prevents many people from receiving the care they need via insurance. the government does this on purpose to funnel people into training, which not only achieves their goal of keeping kids uneducated and complacent but also makes sure that poké mart, inc. can always turn a profit--poké mart, inc., an american company, is actually a main player in the global conspiracy because the more trainers there are, the more money it makes off its monopoly on trainer goods. and so far, it’s been working. up in washington, the poké mart lobbyists have really been doing their job, and the healthcare system of an entire nation is suffering because of it.

there is no challenge to this system anywhere in the united states. conservatives use trainer’s healthcare to pander to undecided voters and demonstrate that they do have a “good” healthcare plan that “works.” liberal politicians also support trainer’s healthcare unquestioningly, believing falsely that this mechanism to funnel people into a profession with a lack of education is an innocent step in the right direction to universal healthcare for all. for reasons of political pragmatism, both sides are complicit in the rotten healthcare system that pins a basic human right to your willingness to enter a certain field.

the vigilante justice involved in some trainer journeys also actively upholds america’s system of police brutality and mass incarceration. propaganda encouraging trainers to fight crime often depicts black and brown people as the criminals. trainers’ victims in the u.s. usually end up in jail, subject to the very system that most trainers claim to be working outside or against. many vigilante trainers also use the same techniques of police brutality against unarmed black & brown victims that police often do themselves. lastly, in the u.s., fighting a racist cop is one of the fastest ways to get yourself deplatformed as a trainer: no matter how justified you are, if you do so your career is done.

oh, and do you want to know which country’s elected leaders had the idea for this entire system to actually become a thing?

if you’re reading this post, you’re probably sitting in it.

I Haven’t Even Told You The Worst Part

nowadays trainers are told that they can make a difference by being trainers. that they can use their strength to do justice in the world. commercial after commercial shows young kids beating up on criminals, encouraging youth to become vigilantes in a similar vein--to get out there and start changing the world in front of them. what those kids don’t know is that this promise of being able to enforce justice is also, in some sense, a lie.

training can deal with certain types of crime. training beats up team grunts and kills pedophiles. hell, sometimes training even takes down entire evil teams. but training will never be able to fix ITSELF--no amount of battling can ever undo the insidious system that has made itself as much a part of a trainer’s existence as potions and poké balls. training will also never solve modern slavery, the climate crisis, income inequality, police brutality and mass incarceration. the people at the top know this. they know that with everybody’s eyes fixed on pokémon training, nobody will focus on the greater issues plaguing the world today, and that this is exactly how they want things to be.

essentially, trainers are told that they are the arbiters of justice as part of a mechanism to prevent them from solving some of the greatest injustices in the world.

vigilante justice, the thing most dear to many trainers, the very thing that makes modern training what it is--has been transformed into yet another tool for world governments and corporations to keep trainers under control.

So Where Do Leagues Fit In All This?

i pose this question because i hc them as the ultimate vigilantes. the people who are supposed to keep this sort of shit under control. people who, collectively, have the strength to take down an unjust government. theoretically, they should have been able to solve this problem with training a long time ago by unseating those in power and finding real solutions for the kids involved.

however.

you can’t solve a problem if you don’t know that it’s a problem in the first place.

that’s right. this entire system of keeping poor kids (and tbh kids in general) under government and corporate control is so insidious and well-hidden that the very people who are sworn not to let this kind of thing happen are sometimes the ones most responsible for holding it up. leagues are just as guilty as the governments they are supposed to oppose of encouraging kids to take up training, using the same rhetoric and techniques that the higher-ups also use. some leagues are even straight-up complicit with governments (see: the american, prussian and chinese leagues) in attempting to funnel kids into the training system. even wallace, social justice advocate that he is, was not aware of the system he unwittingly perpetuated until recently--and even then, he is not only exploitatively held up as one of the examples of somebody who “made it,” he thinks the training system is just a byproduct of capitalism rather than something that has been encouraged on purpose. granted, leagues around the world have also created programs to help struggling trainers with food, shelter, tutoring. but honestly, the people on top let it happen because these programs are ultimately just a band-aid on a gash that cuts down to the bone.

IN CONCLUSION

if you care about your education, you shouldn’t be a trainer.

if you wish to pursue a dream that you can actually fulfill, you shouldn’t be a trainer.

if you don’t want to sell your soul to capitalism, you shouldn’t be a trainer.

in the pokémon world, a world built on pokémon training, you shouldn’t be a trainer.

[studylei]

11 Questions Tag

Rules: answer 11 questions, make 11 of your own, and tag another 11 people.

Ahhh @meemtea thanks for the tag! I haven’t been very active so I really didn’t expect to get tagged in anything. It was a nice surprise :D

1. Favorite stationery object you have discovered in the last year?

I actually don’t have a lot of stationary, just black/blue pens, standard neon highlighters, and a few mildliners. I guess it would be the the midliners because I technically got them less than a year ago. I love how soft they look, especially doing cursive with them!

2. Go to comfort drink?

If I could always have any drink I wanted, it would be bubble tea or watermelon juice. But what I usually have on-hand is this Asian yogurt drink called ADGai.

3. Favorite book/book series of all time?

Jsdfojsdfijsfd this is so hard to choose. It’s actually been a while since I sat down and read books in a row thanks to fanfiction, but... The Young Elites (the first book in the series) by Marie Lu comes to mind. I couldn’t stop rereading it, and I love the premise, style, world, all of it :D

4. One country you would like to learn more about?

Hmm... China? I lowkey want to learn a lot more about the history and culture through the different dynasties. I’m not really focusing on it now though. Maybe I’ll drag myself to watch a historical c-drama sometime and I’ll be motivated to do some research...

5. Biggest non-study/school related goal you are (or want to start) working towards?

I don’t know if this is the biggest goal, but I’ve been writing a novel in many drafts and versions for about seven years now. I really love the world and characters -- they’ve grown up with me -- and it’s my goal over the next years or even decades to keep writing and eventually finish something that I’m really, really proud of :D

6. Weirdest social interaction?

Just two days ago I was at a hotel carrying a huge watermelon from the car to the hotel room on the 4th floor. This middle-aged guy, my sister, and I were waiting for the elevator and he joked that we should drop the watermelon from the hotel roof. I responded like, “That would be watermelon cruelty. I actually made an entire website dedicated to a watermelon rebellion to stop that,” which was supposed to be a joke but it sounded more like a threat, whoops. (I do have this website, by the way.) So I don’t know, that was pretty weird.

7. How do you feel about cheese?

I’ve never really liked cheese. Except for parmesan; parmesan is good.

8. Are your favorite season and most productive season the same?

My favorite season is spring, and my most productive season is fall, so nope!

9. Something you are the most proud of that you have accomplished so far (big or small)?

This is very small, but a few years ago, I taught my sister how to count “thirteen, fourteen, fifteen” instead of “firteen, firteen, fifteen.” That was cool! (And mind-numbing.)

10. If you could live in any fictional universe and make one major change to anything in it at any point: what universe would it be and what would you change?

AVATAR: THE LAST AIRBENDER. HANDS DOWN. I THINK I WOULD SELL MY SOUL TO TRAVEL THERE. Ba Sing Se, Republic City in Korra era, the Northern Water Tribe, Kyoshi Island, Ember Island, any of the air nomad temples pre-war... I would actually sell my soul xD

11. Do you have any body modifications (tattoos, piercings, etc.) if so what and why? If not, would you get/do you want any?

I don’t have any. Maybe I’ll get my ears pierced at some point? But I’ve never really wanted to wear earrings, so maybe not.

MY QUESTIONS (ahh, these were so good, I feel like I have to live up to them):

1. What was your favorite online/board game as a kid?

2. If you were given the power to jump back to any point in your life and relive those months and years, basically writing over the past but keeping your current memories as a guide, would you do it? What point would you jump back to if you could only use the power once? If you could use it whenever you wanted, how often would you use it, if at all?

3. Rain or shine?

4. Do you struggle with procrastination?

5. Have you ever been to a grandparent’s home? If so, describe the aesthetic there. If not, describe your ideal aesthetic for a home where you grow old.

6. What’s your opinion on mousepads?

7. If you could only take classes in one academic subject for the rest of this year, which would you choose? Math, science, history, language, or arts?

8. Are you an early bird or a night owl? What do you like to do in the small hours of the night/morning that’s not studying?

9. What’s the last song you listened to?

10. Are you afraid of rollercoasters or heights?

11. If you had a life span of 1000 years, most of it being in your prime, how would you spend it?

Tagging: @boredomblossom @poeticpaper @langlangland @stationery @messy-slytherin @aristohtle @emsstudyblrrr @aesthetic-and-study @jupiterinstudyland @hope-and-sleep @sunsetstudiesx

[expatimes]

From Basel to Beeple: How will the art world fare post-pandemic?

From Basel to Beeple: How will the art world fare post-pandemic?

The hubbub that descends each summer on a sleek exhibition hall in Basel, where collectors snap up art and hunt for hot-ticket new talent, is likely to be replaced this year by lines of socially distanced Swiss waiting for COVID-19 vaccines.

The Herzog & de Meuron building usually hosts one of the world’s biggest art fairs in June, but last year’s event was cancelled due to the coronavirus pandemic and this year’s has been moved to September. The adjoining congress centre, meanwhile, has been turned into a vaccination hub.

The art world is reeling from the impact of lockdowns, travel bans and social distancing, and fairs like Art Basel suffered more than most. The business of buying and selling art is having to adapt to limit the damage.

Global art sales fell 22 percent in 2020 to $50.1bn, UBS and Art Basel’s Global Art Market Report published on Tuesday showed, the steepest market drop since the financial crisis of 2007-2008.

But the picture was uneven, as buying by the ultra-wealthy, notably from Asia, held up.

In contrast to the 2007-2009 financial crisis, when many of the world’s rich lost money, the super-rich have become richer during the pandemic as financial stimulus and volatile markets served to increase their fortunes.

Big auction houses, led by Sotheby’s and Christie’s, were already used to telephone bidding and online sales, and so could pivot relatively easily to appeal to cash-rich clients.

Both reported an overall dip but saw record online activity and resilience among Asian buyers, while pre-pandemic trends of interest in Black, female and living artists were reinforced.

This year, they hope to build on that, capitalising on an influx of young collectors who have found the online world more accessible than old-style auction rooms, and as more traditional buyers yearn to return to the real world.

People wait in the registration area at the Impfzentrum Basel Stadt vaccination centre at the Congress Center of the Messe Basel fairground in Basel, Switzerland

“There is enormous pent-up demand for experiences and even spending, once there’s a bit more stability and predictability,” Sotheby’s Chief Executive Charles Stewart told Reuters news agency.

“We have the potential for just the biggest boom for a period of time, assuming that we get to a place where people are comfortable leaving their house.”

Beeple

For Christie’s, 2021 has seen spectacular confirmation of the potential to create wealth from the virtual world as it hosted a record-breaking $70m digital artwork sale this month.

In an online auction held over 14 days, bids on the work by US artist Beeple started at $100 and accelerated dramatically, with 22 million visitors tuning in for the final minutes of bidding.

Christie’s plans to follow up on the success with further sales of non-fungible tokens (NFTs), or artworks that exist only in digital form.

More people appear to be willing to purchase artworks online without seeing the real thing first.

“What we have observed is the simple behavioural truth that collectors are more willing than ever before to buy from an image,” said Rachel Lehmann, co-founder of Lehmann Maupin, which has galleries around the world.

Visitors take a picture in front of the installation ‘Plastic Tree’ by Cameroonian artist Pascale Marthine Tayou at the Art Unlimited exhibition at the Art Basel fair in Basel, Switzerland in 2015

But she added that the digital space presented a challenge for artists and artworks that don’t translate well into an online image.

Winner takes all

For German artist ANTOINETTE, lockdown was not all bad: the cancellation of public events allowed her an extended stay in the east German castle of Merseburg, where she was working.

Using only pencils, she is creating intricate drawings on five-metre-high panels that form part of a multi-year project on European cultural identity entitled “ALTAR of Europe”.

Socially-distanced locals can watch her work through the windows, and ANTOINETTE said they had become her network.

“I’ve come to feel like a part of the community,” the artist told Reuters news agency.

But if she is fulfilled artistically, financially her situation is perilous, as commissions such as portraits have dried up during the pandemic.

Smaller galleries are also struggling, experts say, because the pandemic has accelerated the concentration of the art world into fewer hands – very wealthy buyers and high-profile and established sellers.

“Compared to the last recession, when everybody’s wealth went down, in this one billionaire wealth has really risen,” art economist Clare McAndrew, who authored the Art Market report, said.

“These things are good for art sales … But it does bring us back to our old problem of the infrastructure being very top heavy and kind of winner takes all.”

A poster promotes the exhibition ‘Building Castles in the Sky’ of artist Banksy at a building of the Messe Basel fairground at the Messeplatz square in Basel, Switzerland

The UBS and Art Basel report found fairs accounted for 43 percent of art dealers’ sales in 2019 but only 22 percent in 2020, just under half of which were generated by digital events.

“The digital world is concentrating buying on what is fashionable and through the big galleries that employ more than 100 people,” said James Mayor, who has run the Mayor Gallery in London since taking it over from his father in 1973.

Although he always attended Art Basel, he has avoided its digital offerings, which he says are no substitute for the real-life event. Some others agree.

“So far, digital formats have not replaced this as we benefit from face-to-face interaction and the atmosphere of a physical fair,” Stefan von Bartha, director at Basel-based gallery von Bartha, told Reuters news.

It is not just galleries that suffer.

During a normal year, Art Basel’s nearly 100,000 visitors to the city help boost hotel-room occupancy to almost full capacity during the first four days of the fair, or by some 35 percent to 60 percent over average levels over the week, Basel’s tourism office said.

Soul searching

Galleries and advisers interviewed by Reuters news anticipated a recovery in demand for fairs and art tourism post-pandemic.

Art Basel has scheduled a fair in Hong Kong for late May. Other major fairs, including TEFAF and Frieze, have said they expect to proceed with live fairs in some format later this year, complemented by digital participation.

A group of people stands in front of the halls of the Messe Basel fairground designed by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron at the Messeplatz square in Basel, Switzerland

But even before the COVID-19 crisis, some said there were too many fairs, and galleries and collectors say they will be more selective, sticking to the more local focus they have experienced over the last year.

In Hong Kong, galleries report strong business as China made an early recovery from the pandemic and the appetite for contemporary Chinese art grows.

“People have become very used to the extravagance of big fairs and big biennales celebrated in so many major cities,” Leo Xu, senior director at David Zwirner Hong Kong, said. “Honestly, I don’t miss that.”

The gallery, one of Zwirner’s six international locations, managed to increase sales in 2020, Xu said, primarily through outreach to wealthy, tech-savvy Chinese.

Also in Hong Kong, the Villepin gallery, run by former French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin and his son Arthur, opened in March last year at the height of pandemic lockdown and said it had done “very well”.

In New York, gallery owners said there were positives, including a much-needed reassessment that might mean peripheral art fairs disappear, while Art Basel will almost certainly bounce back.

Sean Kelly, who runs a contemporary art gallery in New York, said the loss of art fair revenues has been offset by cost savings from not attending.

“We have to start thinking about the cost of the art fairs and I don’t mean the financial cost. I mean the physical and environmental cost,” he said.

Read full article: https://expatimes.com/?p=19254&feed_id=38665

[violetsystems]

#personal

I’ve been sleeping a lot since I’ve been back.  There is probably a lot to be said with the depression that sets in with jet lag and coming back.  For me, I’ve been to Korea about fifteen times now or something ridiculous like that.  People online always comment how I always end up there during somewhat historic times.  This time was probably the most historic because I got to experience the mood in two different countries.  There is a lot going on back home that misses the point of everything I’m doing.  I should be used to it by now.  But after processing all that has happened since February I feel abnormally low about society at least in America.  None of the drama that people have involved me in to varying degrees has benefited me at all.  Not like it’s my job to go around and be a superhero.  I did watch a lot of Marvel movies on vacation.  I ended up buying a new tv Thursday because I had reached a conclusion.  I’m not going to find anything out there that’s good for me in this city.  If anything it’s going to find me.  And most of the time here it’s trouble.  And it’s become impossible to tell people who never listen to a word you say how much you have to risk by getting involved with the wrong people.  They don’t even understand how or why I fly to Korea all the time.  They don’t know how different it is for me in Japan or how people on the street recognize and nod early in the morning in Shibuya.  Nobody understands to what depth I live my life freely and openly.  Everybody is afraid.  Afraid to speak to me.  Afraid to trust me.  Afraid to admit that I might be right.  And when you travel half way across the ocean by yourself with no friends and come back years later with less in the States, it slowly becomes a painful realization.  There’s no maps for what I do.  There’s no shortage of criticism.  People telling me behind my back what I can and can’t do and expecting me to follow secret orders.  People far richer than I could ever dream to be manipulating me in their boring drama they created for themselves.  People expect me to bow to their every whim and fit into whatever narrative is convenient.  For as much as I’ve been an ally for intersectional diversity, I’ve had to face a lot of the backlash head on by myself.  And people don’t stop because they’re angry and reactionary.  They just lurch in your direction and blame you because you and your perceived privileges still visible.  Maybe that’s why I got so good at hiding in plain sight in the first place.

For however much of a nightmare I’ve lived daily dealing with people in America, I have other experiences that give me hope.  Those are mostly in Asia.  At this point, I’m ready to tell anyone to fuck off in their face if they have an opinion about it.  And I don’t think anyone would blame me.  I get included in communities that people tend to be segregated from.  Footwork embedded me in the Black community, my block embedded me in the Mexican community, and my work, travels and volunteer work makes everyone think I’m weird for knowing so much about Korea.  On every single front, some one has a hot take about my colonialist instincts or my cis hetero patriarchal needs.  There is no shortage every day of some asshole with an opinion about how I breathe.  I’m very careful of being reactionary because this is America.  And in America yes it’s true you can say and think whatever you want.  But if you cross a line, people start to know.  You can’t lie forever.  You can’t snort coke in the bathroom with your rich friends and talk about my life forever either.  I can sit in my house and watch marvel movies on my 55 inch tv and read comic books for a pretty long time.  I can take a flight overseas for two weeks and still get paid vacation.  I make sacrifices.  I quit drinking and medicating anxiety with alcohol almost two years ago now.  It was hard to deal with then.  It’s harder to deal with now that everyone wants you to be the villain.  After dealing with the crushing realization that people will manipulate you into being the hero just to see the chance for you to fall.  That identity is not a reaction.  It’s something that evolves over time.  And sometimes those identities as free as they are start to clash.  I don’t care what anybody identifies as.  I accept people as long as they accept there’s a larger struggle out there.  A global struggle.  From all my travels in South Korea, Japan and even mainland China, I know first hand it is far more conservative than it is back home in Chicago.  That people haven’t even begun to gain the mainstream acceptance and support from their governments for being different.  I don’t particularly like seeing it reel backwards myself back home.  But it is with no help from the people who are the first to point the finger.  Those same people who are never around when it comes to the heavy lifting of community building.

People want to return to this sense of tribalism in America.  A lawless kind of freedom where everything is possible including the worst kind of shit.  A place where you need a gun because you can’t trust anybody.  Where you go to sleep afraid of death every night.  I don’t roll particularly with anybody here anymore back home.  I don’t surround myself with bullshit.  I used to feel guilt.  Like I needed to do more.  And I did more for years.  And it was met with the worst kind of reception.  What the fuck was it I thought I was doing trying to help?  Why hadn’t I proved myself to the important people?  Years later these people turn on you in their moments of anarchy.  They want somebody to throw under the bus.  I rewatched Fury Road on the plane back.  I almost couldn’t it was so bleak and familiar.  If you have money in America you are fine.  I can sit in my apartment and wait it out.  I’ve spent years trying to reach a sort of normalcy and legitimacy.  One that still back home people talk shit about.  To this very fucking day.  After all these blog entries and stupid stories to you.  People in Chicago have the nerve to treat me the same old way year after year.  Like nothing changed.  Liked nobody made mistakes with me.  Like nobody broke my heart and shredded it to pieces.  Like I tried to walk away from it but on my own dollars, dreams, and as if my life depended on it.  My freedom to be me doesn’t matter to people here unless they can control it or profit off of it.  I think this is a truism for all of us.  Why don’t all the good deeds and history matter to anyone out here?  It isn’t part of a narrative where they win everything.  It isn’t part of an order where they can keep you in check if you uncover something shitty or out of line.  I’ve seen more than enough of society these last months.  I’ve written more than enough too.  I know that everyone just acts like it doesn’t happen.  That no justice actually exists in this kind of stupid McDonald’s Anarchy happy meal.  That people literally waste their freedom on selfishness.  They mock and bury people trying to protect it.  And I’ve been that person for so long in this city that that dream has died completely.  Just how deeply hurt I am by this realization isn’t something to process on a Friday night.  I’d rather just sit in my kitchen and be glad I can afford to shut the door on it once and for all.  I don’t know what’s next but it sure isn’t the Road Warrior <3 Tim