#martin would be SO GOOD at being virus

[cult-of-the-eye]

GUYS GUYS GUYS IMAGINE THE ARCHIVAL CREW PLAYING TRIPLE AGENT. THE CHAOS. THE TOMFOOLERY. THE BETRAYAL.

[scarvain]

✶ STARGIRL — hamzahthefantastic x reader

004 ✶ Worth It For Once

stargirl masterfile – next – previous

SUMMARY: hamzah has a crush on a youtuber who's always out and about and slushies see their relationship progress on social media! (smau)

DISCLAIMER: reader is a brown haired girl and for some pics that aren't faceless, i'll be using olivia rodrigo cause i love her and she’s filipino like me hehehe

A/N: THANK U SM FOR 100 FOLLOWERS!!! here’s part 4 for now and i’ll be posting my 100 special later <33

liked by kynewman, user168, and others

slushynoobz New video with 2 random girls that did our makeup, help us spread the virus plzsz

view comments

user627 I'm scared

user019 hamzahs face LMAOOAOAOO

ynln virus has been spread to me pls send help

↳ hamzahthefantastic I'm right here to help

↳ ynln okay dr hamzah!

↳ thatmartinkid stop flirting in front of me pls.

↳ ynln oh thats not…

user804 MANDY AND Y/N IN ONE VIDEO OMFG

user567 is this a slushynoobz x gfs video...

We Got Makeovers

91k views • 10 hours ago

uploaded by slushynoobz

the first clip of the video showed you and mandy sitting on the couch, dressed like hamzah and martin.

you were in an all-camouflage outfit while mandy wore a button-up tee that her boyfriend usually wore. “hi it’s hamzah,” the boy said off-camera while you mouthed the words. martin and mandy doing the same.

“woah! i look a bit different today hamzah and you look different too!” martin continued after saying hello to the camera.

the girls were trying not to laugh then martin and hamzah went to sit beside them. “we’re just joking!” martin laughed as he was finally seen in the frame.

“today’s video is gonna be real special cause we have two guests,” you smile at hamzah while he speaks to the camera, this being noticed only by martin and mandy. “mandy and y/n and they will be cooking something up with us.”

the two boys continued explaining and joking around before you and mandy started prepping their faces for the makeup.

the whole time, you and mandy joked and teased the boys about them being canceled for this video as it looks like they’re queerbaiting.

“are we actually?” martin asked with wide eyes, looking between his friend and the girls.

you and mandy kept a straight face on that convinced the boys until you two gave each other a look and burst out into laughter.

the video switches to a new clip and it starts out with you feeling your leg cramping up and feeling like it was sleeping.

after a while of putting makeup on hamzah, the worst part of it was putting on eyeliner on a boy. and you thought it was already hard for you but it was even harder now.

it was hard keeping his face in place while you drew the line and so, you straddle him, legs on the side of his thighs and you were sat on his lap.

hamzah’s hands found their way to your hips, holding you so you don’t fall off. your cheeks were flushed when you felt his hands and you were thankful his eyes were currently closed and your back was facing the camera.

mandy and martin were too busy in their own world while she did his makeup. “it’s good now, open please.” you whispered to hamzah and he opened his eyes. you looked at both the eyeliner's shapes and his eyes went from your eyes to your lips and when you caught him you got off his lap and sat beside him again.

you and mandy finished with their makeup at the same time and the boys showed off their looks while you filmed them.

you four were laughing the whole time, the sound of your laughter still in hamzah’s mind even after filming.

hamzah was beside you while filming the outro, wrapping an arm around his body and leaning to his side with mandy doing the same.

you can feel your breath hitching in your throat as you look up at hamzah and when he catches you looking at him, he sends you a small smile.

even with the camera recording you two, you didn’t seem to care what their viewers would think. your gaze was still on hamzah and his on yours, his mouth gaping slightly to say something but was cut off by martin’s voice.

“hamzah? hamzaahhh?” he tried to get his attention, mandy noticing what was going on.

he looked up at his friend then his eyebrows knit in confusion. martin nods his head towards the camera and he faced there too.

the four of you all smiled at the camera awkwardly then the video ends.

✶ taglist — @cdbabymp3 @noturbabe22 @dabuggh3 @kingvioleta @tumb1rgir1z LMK IF U WANNA BE ADDEDDD!!!

[infaria]

So, so, so, SO many people miss the point of the walten files and it's genuinely saddening, because it is such a delicate story hidden behind horror. What makes the walten files stand out from the rest of the big analog webseries out there is the fact that it's so far the only one that is both horror and drama in genre. The only other online indie horror projects that I've seen put focus on placing actual depth into characters so far is welcome home and the tanji virus/oracle project duology (a duology that I highly recommend people to watch, it deserves more recognition).

Martin has said that there's more to the characters than meets the eye, with bunnyfarm specifically noting that "this is a story about broken people, beautiful people"

This is probably why most theories people make are doomed to fail from my point of view. Martin doesn't seem to be particularly interested in creating an epic horror that ends in a thrilling battle or to create the "most SHOCKING, SCARY analog horror ever?!?!" as random reaction channels title their videos as. Maybe this is why Martin deviated from the original format. The walten files 4, despite being 36 minutes long, did not add too many answers to the mystery. Instead, there was a perfect balance of giving more context as well as well as giving more character to pre-existing characters, such as suzan, ed and molly, the antagonist (whoever he is), felix, jack and charles. All that through dialogue and actual cinematographic scenes. The story wants you to take personality and psychology into account when theorizing as well.

I won't post all my theories, but now that we have 4 out, I'll give my two cents on the "who or what is bon" mystery, based on a mix of character analysis and hints given throughout the episodes, site, hidden media and martin's statements.

I never believed the "felix killed and placed jack into bon" theory as someone who discovered the series after bunnyfarm's release. Felix is a coward, self centered, is irresponsible and refuses to acknowledge his issues. And people mistakenly interpret that as "evil capitalist who only cares about his hide". I won't analyze felix (at least not today), because so far he is the one character who we have the most context about his inner psychology and woo boi, there's a LOT of issues this guy has, but point I am trying to make is that he doesn't seem like the type to kill jack because, believe it or not, from what I can gather, he'd never kill a person on purpose.

The only possible scenario I can see the "felix put jack in bon" theory being true is if jack attacked felix after learning of the kids, so felix accidentally killed him in self defense.

Felix is shown to be alive in 1981, so it's unlikely it is him being bon either. (funnily enough, if that wasn't revealed, I'd think him being bon as a good theory, something that, yet again, I'll probably touch upon a future dissection of his character)

The only two scenarios I can think of is a) either jack put himself, either on purpose, or accidentally in bon, b) bon is a third party or c) jack is bon, but someone else placed him in

Out of these three theories, I believe a) is the least probable, with c) being second in place. It is possible jack got depressed to the point of doing something this intense, however it was implied in the Relocation project and the findjackwalten site that he is very likely alive. Here I am mostly going on hunch, but I don't think martin would choose the "Man loses family, ends up depressed and then a vengeful insane spirit" route. I did say above that I believe felix to more more likely to fit that role of "person going mad from mental stress", but I actually believe that he'd be more likely to snap, considering his mental stability after the crash. Also I don't see how jack could accidentally get into bon.

I honestly think both were red herrings from the very start of the series. In fact, walten files 4 pretty much added the possibility that they have nothing to do with the murders (excluding ed and molly*), aside from felix being heavily hinted to have tried covering up the bon incidents instead of reporting them like a normal, law abiding, responsible citizen.

Cyberfun Tech episode pretty much revealed to us that the "bon is just a malfunctioning animatronic" theory is not true, as bon clearly has something controlling it. So I can only see the above theories being correct.

This places the c) theory as most believable. The issue is who is the third party. People have speculated it is the original ceo of cyberfun tech or a demon. I'd personally lean towards the ceo, a demon would be too random for a story that focuses so much on personal strife. And since I am part of the "jack is alive" theorizers, I also don't believe the "manifestation of jack's anger" theory. Something that keeps bugging me also is why did the person who honked at felix during the car crash didn't report anything, it's weird, as if someone saw the perfect opportunity to use felix as a scapegoat for the murders. Maybe bon has an accomplice?

I'm stepping into tinfoil shadow government territory here though lmao

*I know I am being nitpicky here, call me a law nerd all you know, but I especially get frustrated when people throw around heavy words without knowing their terminology, as that can have pretty bad consequences when applicable to real people. Another small fun fact just for extra trivia knowledge: Age of consent doesn't always mean legal, if you're a minor, please protect yourself. Back on topic, no, what felix did was not murder. It's a shitty, also fairly common douchy behavior in my country called "causing death through driving under the influence of alcohol". Here's the difference:

(The first picture says California, but the same exact thing applies to law articles from multiple countries)

This post probably ended up on a passive aggressive tone, I apologize ToT

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Yes or no?

Maria and Martin are in the catwalk, arguing.

"All you're doing here is . . . ."

"Alright, fuck it, here's the deal. Listen, guys."

"Cept fuckin' ME, I guess, but you don't need to bawl at us like we're the floor, awright? How'd you like it if you had to be bawled at by the floor for 17 years? An' yer sittin' the fuck there, chillaxin' like it's no big deal, tossin' yer half-finished metaphors around like they mean nothin'."

"It's Maria, Martin. You too, Miranda. Not the floor."

"Maria. Maria. I'm Maria, like always. Who are you? The Floor? Do you want me to call you Bawled-At-By-The-Floor Maria? You know my name is not Miranda, fuckhead. Call me Maria or shut your fucking yap."

Martin's eyes are glowing a bright, sickly green. On his face is an expression that could be called malevolent, but Maria, after all the fuck-awful shit she's gone through, can no longer muster the full force of fear. The man has his pride -- and his pride is his deathwish. Like an unrestrained virus, it must spread out from his body and find a host in the world, in all of its branching, perverse glory. Like a glutton for punishment, Maria feels no particular urge to fight off this virulent thing that threatens her.

"Maria," Martin says, and his voice sounds not quite like hers, and the reverb that she gets, as the sound bounces and bounces in the tight enclosure of his empty metal head, gets on her nerves.

No, she thinks, I'm not a fucking Nietzschean. I am not like fucking Martin or Miranda, or Chester, or the Floor, or any of this shit. This is not what I want, what I am, and I want it known.

"All you're doing here is killing time. Everyone here is dying. It won't be long before you join us. All you're doing is cheating death, cheating life. Life is a sacred thing. You must live your life, not cheat."

"Fuck's sake, Martin. Fuck's fucking sake. The roof's comin' down, as fucking usual, Miranda's pissed, nothin' new -- are you lookin' for a fuckin' Q&A here, or what? What's with all the speeches? Is it . . . the REVIVAL FESTIVAL TONIGHT?"

Martin grimaces, as though Maria has made a cruel and pointed remark.

"Why are you doing it?" Maria says. "Why are you doing any of it? If you're so sure this will work, if you're sure it'll give us a new chance at life, at a life where you and Miranda and I can be happy together, why are you yelling at us?"

"Because you are not being good to each other," Martin says. "Do you not see that your hatred for one another is as foul as the floor's? You are swallowing the hatred, taking it into your bodies, letting it infect you. Hatred makes you sick, Maria. It kills you."

"How would you know what hatred does, asshole? You never fucking left us, did you?"

"It's Maria," Martin says.

"It's Maria," Miranda says.

Martin makes a sour face. The glow vanishes from his eyes. He is about to go off on Maria again, but Miranda stops him with an instinctive gesture -- a flick of the wrist, and her whole arm swings down hard into the side of her brother's head. There is a loud crack. Martin sways on his feet. He seems drunk.

"Well, don't just leave us hangin' like a fuckin' moose here, ok, we're here, we got a few questions, before we croak, it's good to know what the fuck's going on, y'know, y'want us to croak in peace, sorry, shit, forget it, sorry, forget I said anythin' --"

Martin grabs Miranda's wrist and squeezes. A thin line of blood trickles from her wrist down to her hand. Miranda punches Martin in the face.

[enzombie]

iZombie questions that I have:

- What happened to Whitefang? Who is taking care of him? He is being taken care of? Loving home? Yes?

- What happened to Vampire Steve? He wasn't in the building when it collapsed, right?!

- WHAT DID YOU ACHIEVE BY KILLING MICHELLE?! WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT?!?!

- How did Al know about the masks if only Dale saw them in her vision?

- Lowell ate the brain of a gay man and became temporarily gay - no one else since got the sexuality of a brain they ate, what's with that?

- How did Graham know Enzo killed Steven and not Martin? Or did he kill him just because he knew he was somehow involved because he was there in the van?

- Why is everyone so mean to Enzo?? Maybe if you didn't relentlessly bully him for being French he wouldn't be so angry all the time just saying

- Are Blaine and Don E left to go romero or do they escape or are they rescued, cured and tried? Cus surely leaving two romeros in some well behind some mansion is kinda dangerous/a biohazard?

- How the heck did Enzo even meet Martin? Because they are very different people.. And was Enzo living with Martin after he was unfrozen? If so, who's taking care of his cats?

- WHO TAKES CARE OF ENZOS CATS AFTER HES DEAD?????

- After the cure is done, do all terminally ill humans from around the world get the opportunity to become zombies? Do they all go to Zombie Island, or is there more than one? Or is zombism only for Americans?

- With Zombie Island, are the zombies like killed or smthn after a certain time or will sick humans continue to go there until they can longer provide enough brains and New Seattle happens over again?

- People were unwilling to donate their brains, hence Blaine and Don E having to take over the brain importation, so what changed? Or are they still doing it the shady way? But how would they do that without Blaine and Don E.? Also farming human remains from poorer countries isn't ok?

- Are there humans on Zombie Island, e.g. families of sick people who go there? And if so, how does that work, seeing as New Seattle didn't?

- Is Zombie Island it's own separate country? Is America responsible for it? Does it have its own governing body?

- Presumably there are a lot of Fillmore Graves guys on zombie island since they're carrying that disease from the biological weapon Vivian talked about? All of them are fine with the situation? No one still wanting revenge for how many of their own that were killed? No Enzo sympathisers?

- I have a lot of issues with Zombie Island?!!?

- How DID Liv get out of that explosion?

- Baracus immediately felt he was human, why didn't Enzo? Also, how did he not notice being jabbed with a needle?

- ARE ENZO'S CATS OK???

- Are we supposed to believe that between the Lake Washington boat party and the Aleutian flu outbreak, no zombies left Seattle? The virus didn't spread to other cities, states or even countries? Blaine scratched rich people and rich people love to travel. Fillmore Graves was doing overseas missions for a while. There was the couple in Oregon, but surely there'd also be other outbreaks, since it's so contagious?

- When Ravi cured the test rat with Isobel's brain, he gave it the smallest slither, no where near the size of its own brain - so why did Liv/Dale need to eat the entire thing? They could've both had some?

- Since Ravi didn't do any other tests asides from the vaccine and the Freylich brain, would the final mass-produced cure still have the side effect of a few days amnesia?

- Would Ravi be able to be cured? Since he's immune to the zombie virus and that's a part of the cure he made?

- Despite seeing the problem of zombies starving first hand with that bus driver, why did Peyton support Renegade and the making of new zombies? I'd say friendship goals but they were risking the lives of thousands of people just so they could feel good about it...

- Why didn't Major suggest using Blaine and Don E for brain importation to Chase, rather than waiting until Chase was dead and he was in charge? Poor Chase :(

- Why was Major totally chill about Enzo being excited to use machetes and hand grenades on the Dead Enders?? Was that not a massive red flag???? Machetes????? The man was ecstatic and that's nbd????????? "lol classic Enzo excited about brutal weapons being used in the streets" he's not ok??

- Why the heck didn't Major do more to fight against anti-zombie groups that killed, harmed, and publicly terrorised zombies?! "Its a trap to make us look authoritarian!!" K but you can't just let them do that???

- If Fillmore Graves soldiers' vests aren't bulletproof (@ Jordan and Enzo) then why on earth do they wear them?? For the aesthetic???

- Where'd Captain Hobbs go off to? He's not sticking around for Enzo Hours?

- Captain Hobbs' first name. What is it?

- Paul Rudd???

[justsupermarket]

Raindrop drop top funny memes

RAINDROP DROP TOP FUNNY MEMES HOW TO

2022 The raindrop sculptures are among their most popular. Marisa Lascala, Good Housekeeping, 22 June 2022 If the virus came in the form of a raindrop, parts of our country would still be getting drenched.ĭr. Martin Weil, Washington Post, 17 July 2022 Here are some names to consider for your own raindrop, also listed in order of popularity. 2022 There is a feeling, an experience, of being you-a feeling that a frying pan, a raindrop, or a lump of sugar does not have.Ĭamille Bromley, The Atlantic, 18 July 2022 Saturday may have had its bright and shining hours, but many of us did not need to look for to see the atmosphere preparing to convert itself to a raindrop production footing. Matthew Cappucci, Washington Post, 9 Aug. 2022 Light enters an ice crystal or raindrop and slows down, but each color slows down, and is resultantly refracted, or bent, at slightly different speeds and angles. 2022 With so many in need, aid that does arrive can disappear like a raindrop in the sand.Ĭara Anna,, 20 Aug. People are pressed over the milk and honey meme when lots of art/music/poetry/ect has been made into jokes before.Recent Examples on the Web Once storms end near and after sunset, a raindrop remains possible till about midnight. I swear to god this Rupi Kaur/Milk and Honey meme is the funniest meme all year… modern poetry in its purest form While others think it’s the best thing that’s happened to the internet in quite some time. Understandably, the meme is a bit divisive. “People aren’t used to poetry that’s so easy and simple,” Kaur herself has said. Kaur’s poetry, which was described in the New York Times as having “artless vulnerability,” is just an easy target. There’s a little bit of that going on with the Milk and Honey Vine quote meme.īut there’s also mockery of poetry in general, and its perceived pretensions. The internet gives especially harsh treatment to popular things young women love, often dismissing them as vapid just because girls like them. And then there’s its main audience: young women on Instagram and Tumblr. Few poetry books ever become social media sensations, let alone receive the kind of exposure and mainstream marketing push Kaur’s book did. What makes Milk and Honey such a target of mockery? Partially, it’s how successful it’s been. Sorry but this shit sucks so bad lol /axjlIv1hkn Twitter’s Bobby was so incensed at Kaur’s poems that he went off on a long, mocking rant, culminating in one brilliant Photoshop:

RAINDROP DROP TOP FUNNY MEMES HOW TO

This was my favorite poem from milk and honey, so deep and meaningful /SMcIoFH0E3Īnd Jared, who never learned how to read: Who said Milk and Honey wasn't real poetry? /O44uBODajt Notable entries include the “Miss Keisha” Vine Other Kaur detractors picked it up and ran with it, making Vine quotes look like actual pages from the book. The trend seems to have started with this tweet by RicardoJKay, which throws shade at Rupi Kaur by implying that adding line breaks to any chunk of text makes it just as poetic as Milk and Honey. Even if it’s “Step the fuck up, Kyle” Vine or the classic “ Post up.” There’s a growing trend of taking absurd quotes from the defunct video site Vine (R.I.P.) and using Photoshop to pass them off as pages from Milk and Honey. Some are obvious jokes, and others … well, if you haven’t read the book, you’d be forgiven for thinking they were real poems. And, as with anything popular, Milk and Honey is facing an inevitable backlash. It’s basically the only contemporary poetry book you can buy on sale at Target. Milk and Honey, a collection of poems by 20-something Canadian social media personality Rupi Kaur, has received a huge amount of exposure since its release in 2016.

[hoodiedmenace]

so hear me out

A jondaisy apocalypse au, zombie edition. I feel like there is not enough zombie apocalypse tma content, just sayin

so Jon and Daisy are maybe friends before the apocalypse, maybe not. If they aren't, then at first they're obviously a little paranoid around each other, but the two make a good working pair. He's scrawny and short, able to easily crawl into cracks and tunnels for ambushing or supply runs. And she has more experience using firearms, not to mention how much stronger and heavier she is. A good battering ram. So they grow close after they see how good of a team they are. And then those friendly feelings start to grow deeper. They probably never really address it, just get closer and closer until they're snuggled up and exchanging quick kisses between supply runs and being chased around by zombies.

The two are on their own for a while, but they eventually run into Basira, Martin, Tim, Sasha, Melanie, Georgie, y'know. The Whole Gang™. Not all at once, of course. Martin, Tim, and Sasha are all one group, Melanie and Georgie are a pair, and Basira is on her own. And even though they don't all completely get along, they're glad for the company, the constant reminder that there are others.

Angst, Character Death for this next bit-

Daisy maybe gets bitten by zombies during a unprepared-for attack. She notices it before the others do, and she only feels safest telling Jon, before they head to bed that night. He cries hard into her chest, clutching her as close as he can get. Like she might disappear if he doesn't.

Every night after that, it becomes part of Jon and her's routine for him to tie her up as tight as he can to one of the trees surrounding their camp with chains. Just so that if she does turn in the night, she can't attack them. And he unties her every morning she blinks up at him with a tired, sad smile.

She fights the virus for as long as she can, which happens to be a little less than a week. During those last few days, she's much more agitated. Barely catching herself from snapping and growling at the others. They do find out, about two days later from Jon telling them after getting permission from Daisy. They become more wary of her after that, and Daisy can't blame them, but it still hurts. She wishes she could enjoy their company like they used to with the borrowed time she has. But she succumbs to it eventually, as they knew she would.

Jon finds her tied up to the tree he always leaves her at, almost beginning to find hope that it would somehow pass her by, and that hope is shot down by the thrashing, snarling creature tied up where Daisy used to be. He collapses in front of her, just far enough that she can't reach him. And he cries for hours as she growls and gurgles at him. Jon was dreading when this part came. He knew Daisy wouldn't want to stay like this, and he didn't want to ask any of the others to do it. Didn't want to put that burden onto them. Jon pulls Daisy's gun out of the neat, folded collection of her things and walks back to where his friend used to be. And the shot that comes out of that gun is the loudest one he's ever heard.

[judediangelo75]

Kendrick Lives AU

This has been an AU that has been floating around of my head. To create a universe of where Papa Kendrick lives. Much to the approval of @that-scouse-wizard

Of course, I wouldn’t be me if I didn’t include some level of angst tossed in there.

This AU is pretty much the same for the most part save a few things:

- Kendrick never gets sick, obviously. In the main storyline, he contracts a heart virus and dies on his birthday. This isn’t the case, so he’s perfectly healthy.

- Kendrick and Sade get divorced because Kendrick was able to “see” (Kendrick has Seer abilities but he can’t control them. His mother, Mercy, was a Seer. And so is Judith, but she has yet to tap into it) her with another man and a little boy that look mostly like her.

- However, Judith did have one last “spat” with her mother during the winter after her 9th birthday. This was before Kendrick filed for divorce against her. This resulted in a permanent burn scar on the left side of her face. Similarly to Zuko from ATLA.

- Kendrick was the one who treated her burn, not trusting any of his co-workers anywhere near her due to her skittish nature around adults with authority.

- Kendrick is fiercely protective of his daughter, even more so after his ex-wife scarred her. He still encourages her to try to make friends with other kids but wouldn’t be afraid to put someone, whether it be child or adult, in their place if they even make any cruel remarks about her scar.

- Because of her scar, Judith becomes more reclusive. She sticks close to her dad or just stays inside, despite her Papa’s encouragements. Her personality alters slightly: she has an odd balance of painfully shy and being cold/aloof. It’s harder for her to trust people because the person who she suppose to be close to scarred her.

- Kendrick is a bit discouraged by his daughter’s behavior but doesn’t stop showing her love and telling her how beautiful she is.

- She really didn’t want to go to Hogwarts because of her brother’s disappearance and her appearance. Kendrick did his best to cheer her up by telling her stories of when he went to Hogwarts, which did help.

- Kendrick being present meaning they have ample amount of time to train together. With the guidance of her father, Judith is deadly force by the time she goes to Hogwarts. She even learns the basics of being a Beater, a position she plans on getting when she’s a second year

- Judith actually hides her face using her locs, as a strange “style” she has her locs cover her left eye (kind of like Ismelda) as a bang and the rest being tied back as a way to secure it

- Kendrick made Judith’s insecurity known to the adults at the school prior to and to alert him of any bullying to her.

- Judith’s “secret” didn’t remain a secret for long when a group of older Slytherins and Gryffindors openly bullied her in the Courtyard. One of them pulled her ponytail loose causing her hair to fall free, revealing her face. A lot of people saw and the group was laughing at her. Out of frustration, embarrassment, sadness, and over all anger, Judith jumped the person who caused the situation to happen. Safe to say, she was later in the Headmaster’s office with the student, who was sporting quick a few injuries. Dumbledore didn’t hold anything against Judith but Slytherin definitely lost a good amount of House Points.

- Kendrick wasn’t pleased to hear such news but he was happy that Judith didn’t get in trouble for defending herself.

- Kendrick makes sure to send a gift to her on her birthday since her birthday is early on during the school year.

- Kendrick was there when Judith went for tryouts, without his daughter’s knowledge, to watch her performance. He did find her captain, Orion, to be an intriguing wizard. When Judith got a position, he was the first to congratulate her.

- Kendrick actually visited quite a few of her House games, with special permission from Dumbledore. Anybody who knows about Ravenclaw Quidditch players would recognize the Ravenclaw alumni. A fanboy of his, turned out to be one Andre Egwu. Another admirer is a one Slytherin Beater, Erika Rath.

- Kendrick approved his daughter’s performance, no matter if she wins or loses. He always provides her with pointers on how to improve and what to look out for.

- Kendrick does find Ethan Parkin a bit distasteful, especially after he mentioned how his daughter seemed a bit soft for a Beater.

- In regards to the Curse Vaults, Kendrick is a bit wary about Judith trying to find them. But when he saw the spark in her eyes at the mention of finding Jamal, he allowed her to do so.

- Kendrick actually has met Nuri. Martin, who didn’t approve of Sade’s handling of her previous marriage, actually wanted to be on good terms with Kendrick. Nuri was intentionally scared of him but warmed up to him rather quickly. Sometimes Nuri would call him “Papa Kendrick” (Martin doesn’t mind this). Kendrick enjoys Nuri’s presence, seeing a similar bright spirit that lives in his baby girl in the young boy.

Alright that’s a lot, so this could be continued later on.

Let me know what you guys think. Would your MCs be willing to interact with Kendrick in this AU?

[darkarfs]

single moments from the Trump presidency that would have defined/ended any other politician’s career

- saying he could “buy Greenland” - suggesting it was a good idea to nuke hurricanes - saying there would be fewer forest fires if we just got rid of all the leaves - asking Trudeau if Canada had tried to burn down the White House - autographing pictures of shooting victims - when he kept talking about how they drop bowling balls on cars to test them in japan and no one could figure out where he could have even gotten the idea - when he suggested Seoul should just move away from the North Korean border - introducing West Virginia’s governor as ‘the largest, most beautiful man’ - when he tweeted SEE YOU IN COURT! right after an appeals court ruled against him. like. yeah man. they just did. - the time he didn't know how to close an umbrella so he just dropped it and walked away - fighting with the Vietnam vets over whether napalm or agent orange is used in the Ride of the Valkyries scene in Apocalypse Now and then when they insisted it was napalm, Trump said they disagreed with him because they didn't like the movie (The line is famously, literally “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”) - using his position as the single most powerful person in the world to promote Goya canned beans - when he bragged about the crowd size at the hurricane shelter in coastal Texas (”what a turnout”) - signing Bibles. What. - thinking the F-22 is invisible to the naked eye - smiling and giving a thumbs up during a photo op with a baby orphaned by a mass shooting - putting a candy bar on a Minion’s head because he’s never interacted with a child before -  when he interpreted some stray comment about transparency in the process to mean his border wall should literally be transparent, so passersby are not beaned by bundles of drugs and cans being thrown over the wall - the time he talked about having to flush his massive dumps 10 times and then immediately tried to blame the dumps on his supporters - the fake Sharpee’d hurricane map, which he did solely to not appear wrong on television - suggesting that federal employees working unpaid during the gov shutdown should just “do a work around” at the grocery store if they can’t pay for groceries - the fucking eclipse thing - the fucking three-pointers with paper towels to Puerto Rican hurricane victims - when he told thousands of Boy Scouts a story about his rich friend's fuckboat and then complained about Hilary for the remainder of the speech - when the called the CEO of Lockheed Martin “Marilyn Lockheed” (her last name is Hewson) which was objectively funnier than “Tim Apple” - when he picked an argument with Baltic world leaders because he thought the Baltics were the Balkans - the first time his team had a meeting in the cabinet room they couldn’t figure out how to turn on the lights and ended up just having the meeting in the dark -  The time he said Andrew Jackson was "really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War, he said 'There's no reason for this.'" (Jackson died 16 years before the Civil War, and he owned 150 slaves.) - told a 7-year-old boy there was no Santa Claus on Christmas - the team of staffers whose only job was to tape back together documents he had torn up because he’s just THAT used to destroying evidence, because they couldn’t get him to stop ripping them up, but legally, the documents had to be archived - when he said the Continental Army took over the British airports during the Revolution - no sanctions on Russian soldiers killing American soldiers - “I take no responsibility for this pandemic.” - when touring the damage the Louisiana gulf coast after Hurricane Laura (just a few months ago!), he started giving first responders autographed pieces of paper, which he told them to sell on eBay for $10,000 - when he thought "clean coal" meant that the miners dug it out of the ground and physically cleaned it - the goddamn fast food catering - trying to trick the family of a teen killed by a US diplomat's wife who fled justice into meeting her, Ellen-style - pushing the Prime Minister of Montenegro out of the way to preen - that time he called into Fox & Friends and ranted for so long that they politely but firmly kicked him off - hiring an Obama impersonator solely to berate him - having a button installed on his desk that let him order Diet Coke on a whim. And sometimes using that button upwards of 13 times a day. - that time when a kid handed him a hat to sign, and he signed the hat, but instead of handing it back, he just threw it into the middle of the crowd - autographing the guestbook at the Holocaust memorial, with an added “had such a great time!” - when he zoned out and wondered where a woman's dead relatives were DIRECTLY after she had said her mother six brothers were killed. (Actual exchange: “They killed my mother, my six brothers...” “Where are they now?”) - sending 2,000 soldiers to the border to stop “the caravan,” having their pictures taken, and then recalling them all. - consoling a dead soldier’s family by saying “he knew what he was getting into.” - when he said no one could climb over the border wall because there would be no way down, and then belatedly remembered rope - when he congratulated the Great Lakes on their "record deepness" - calling Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” at an event meant to honor Navajo code talkers  - “Shithole countries” - calling Baltimore “rat-infested” - tweeting “too bad!” right after Elijah Cummings’ house was broken into - calling the White House “a dump” a month into moving in, which led to first both him and Melania, and then just Melania by herself, staying in Trump Tower for almost 5 months, costing taxpayers around $100,000 a day - an entire quarter of his presidency spent on his own golf courses, costing taxpayers around $141,000,000, NOT counting the Secret Service detail (they were charged for rooms and golf carts, since these were Trump’s OWN golf courses) - using “Pocahontas” again to slur Elizabeth Warren while talking down to a Native American journalist - holding a rally in Pittsburgh and trying to woo the locals by ranting about how the statue of Joe Paterno, the accused pedophilia enabler who was coach of a rival sports team, should go back up - confusingly having bigger salt and pepper shakers than everyone else in his administration, because everything to him is a dick-measuring contest - when he said he would “run in and take care of” school shooters, to school shooting victims - appointing fucking DeVos, Miller, Pompeo, Mnuchin, Nunes - inciting a seditious white supremacist mob to make sure he’s president until he’s 85, resulting in 5 dead (for which I am constantly wondering...”really? FOR THIS GUY?”) - drafted a proposal to open 94% of previously protected American shorelines to offshore drilling - when he walked up the stairs to Air Force One with toilet paper stuck to his shoe -  at least 44 times in March, April and early May in which he downplayed the threat of the virus calling it “very well under control” again and again - when somebody asked him his favorite book and he pointed at a bookshelf and said “there are some over there” - meeting with the goddamn MyPillow guy to discuss overturning election results and declaring martial law - impeached twice, was golfing both times the vote went through - 70 pardons for known criminals (including Bannon), 70 sentences commuted, just to be a spiteful little toad - when he blathered on about how much he loved the queen, the totally hacked her off - when Hope Hicks steamed his pants as he was wearing them - getting mad-pissed at White House kitchen staff because they couldn’t recreate McDonald’s and it was too late to order  and I wonder how much I missed. I bet there’s a McSweeney’s article listing all of it.

[96thdayofrage]

On February 11, 2020, public health and infectious disease experts gathered by the hundreds at the World Health Organization’s Geneva mothership. The official pronouncement of a pandemic was still a month out, but the agency’s international brain trust knew enough to be worried. Burdened by a sense of borrowed time, they spent two days furiously sketching an “R&D Blueprint” in preparation for a world upended by the virus then known as 2019-nCoV.

The resulting document summarized the state of coronavirus research and proposed ways to accelerate the development of diagnostics, treatments, and vaccines. The underlying premise was that the world would unite against the virus. The global research community would maintain broad and open channels of communication, since collaboration and information-sharing minimize duplication and accelerate discovery. The group also drew up plans for global comparative trials overseen by the WHO, to assess the merits of treatments and vaccines.

One issue not mentioned in the paper: intellectual property. If the worst came to pass, the experts and researchers assumed cooperation would define the global response, with the WHO playing a central role. That pharmaceutical companies and their allied governments would allow intellectual property concerns to slow things down—from research and development to manufacturing scale-up—does not seem to have occurred to them.

They were wrong, but they weren’t alone. Battle-scarred veterans of the medicines-access and open-science movements hoped the immensity of the pandemic would override a global drug system based on proprietary science and market monopolies. By March, strange but welcome melodies could be heard from unexpected quarters. Anxious governments spoke of shared interests and global public goods; drug companies pledged “precompetitive” and “no-profit” approaches to development and pricing. The early days featured tantalizing glimpses of an open-science, cooperative pandemic response. In January and February 2020, a consortium led by the National Institutes of Health and the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases collaborated to produce atomic-level maps of the key viral proteins in record time. “Work that would normally have taken months—or possibly even years—has been completed in weeks,” noted the editors of Nature.

When the Financial Times editorialized on March 27 that “the world has an overwhelming interest in ensuring [Covid-19 drugs and vaccines] will be universally and cheaply available,” the paper expressed what felt like a hardening conventional wisdom. This sense of possibility emboldened forces working to extend the cooperative model. Grounding their efforts was a plan, started in early March, to create a voluntary intellectual property pool inside the WHO. Instead of putting up proprietary walls around research and organizing it as a “race,” public and private actors would collect research and associated intellectual property in a global knowledge fund for the duration of the pandemic. The idea became real in late May with the launch of the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool, or C-TAP.

By then, however, the optimism and sense of possibility that defined the early days were long gone. Advocates for pooling and open science, who seemed ascendant and even unstoppable that winter, confronted the possibility they’d been outmatched and outmaneuvered by the most powerful man in global public health.

In April, Bill Gates launched a bold bid to manage the world’s scientific response to the pandemic. Gates’s Covid-19 ACT-Accelerator expressed a status quo vision for organizing the research, development, manufacture, and distribution of treatments and vaccines. Like other Gates-funded institutions in the public health arena, the Accelerator was a public-private partnership based on charity and industry enticements. Crucially, and in contrast to the C-TAP, the Accelerator enshrined Gates’s long-standing commitment to respecting exclusive intellectual property claims. Its implicit arguments—that intellectual property rights won’t present problems for meeting global demand or ensuring equitable access, and that they must be protected, even during a pandemic—carried the enormous weight of Gates’s reputation as a wise, beneficent, and prophetic leader.

How he’s developed and wielded this influence over two decades is one of the more consequential and underappreciated shapers of the failed global response to the Covid-19 pandemic. Entering year two, this response has been defined by a zero-sum vaccination battle that has left much of the world on the losing side.

Gates’s marquee Covid-19 initiative started relatively small. Two days before the WHO declared a pandemic on March 11, 2020, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation announced something called the Therapeutics Accelerator, a joint initiative with Mastercard and the charity group the Wellcome Trust to identify and develop potential treatments for the novel coronavirus. Doubling as a social branding exercise for a giant of global finance, the Accelerator reflected Gates’s familiar formula of corporate philanthropy, which he has applied to everything from malaria to malnutrition. In retrospect, it was a strong indicator that Gates’s dedication to monopoly medicine would survive the pandemic, even before he and his foundation’s officers began to say so publicly.

Advocates for pooling and open science, who seemed ascendant and even unstoppable early in the crisis, have been outmatched and outmaneuvered by the most powerful man in global public health.

This was confirmed when a bigger version of the Accelerator was unveiled the following month at the WHO. The Access to Covid-19 Tools Accelerator, or ACT-Accelerator, was Gates’s bid to organize the development and distribution of everything from therapeutics to testing. The biggest and most consequential arm, COVAX, proposed to subsidize vaccine deals with poor countries through donations by, and sales to, richer ones. The goal was always limited: It aimed to provide vaccines for up to 20 percent of the population in low-to-middle-income countries. After that, governments would largely have to compete on the global market like everyone else. It was a partial demand-side solution to what the movement coalescing around a call for a “people’s vaccine” warned would be a dual crisis of supply and access, with intellectual property at the center of both.

Gates not only dismissed these warnings but actively sought to undermine all challenges to his authority and the Accelerator’s intellectual property–based charity agenda.

“Early on, there was space for Gates to have a major impact in favor of open models,” says Manuel Martin, a policy adviser to the Médecins Sans Frontières Access Campaign. “But senior people in the Gates organization very clearly sent out the message: Pooling was unnecessary and counterproductive. They dampened early enthusiasm by saying that I.P. is not an access barrier in vaccines. That’s just demonstratively false.”

Few have observed Bill Gates’s devotion to monopoly medicine more closely than James Love, founder and director of Knowledge Ecology International, a Washington, D.C.–based group that studies the broad nexus of federal policy, the pharmaceutical industry, and intellectual property. Love entered the world of global public health policy around the same time Gates did, and for two decades has watched him scale its heights while reinforcing the system responsible for the very problems he claims to be trying to solve. The through-line for Gates has been his unwavering commitment to drug companies’ right to exclusive control over medical science and the markets for its products.

“Things could have gone either way,” says Love, “but Gates wanted exclusive rights maintained. He acted fast to stop the push for sharing the knowledge needed to make the products—the know-how, the data, the cell lines, the tech transfer, the transparency that is critically important in a dozen ways. The pooling approach represented by C-TAP included all of that. Instead of backing those early discussions, he raced ahead and signaled support for business-as-usual on intellectual property by announcing the ACT-Accelerator in March.”

One year later, the ACT-Accelerator has failed to meet its goal of providing discounted vaccines to the “priority fifth” of low-income populations. The drug companies and rich nations that had so much praise for the initiative a year ago have retreated into bilateral deals that leave little for anybody else. “The low- and middle-income countries are pretty much on their own, and there’s just not much out there,” said Peter Hotez, dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine in Houston. “Despite their best efforts, the Gates model and its institutions are still industry-dependent.”

As of this writing in early April, fewer than 600 million vaccine doses have been administered around the world; three-quarters of those in just 10 mostly high-income countries. Close to 130 countries containing 2.5 billion people have yet to administer a single dose. The timeline for supplying poor and middle-income countries with enough vaccines to achieve herd immunity, meanwhile, has been pushed into 2024. These numbers represent more than the “catastrophic moral failure” the director general of the WHO warned about this January. It is a stark reminder than any policy that obstructs or inhibits vaccine production risks being self-defeating for the rich countries defending exclusive rights and gobbling up the lion’s share of available vaccine supplies. The truth repeated so often throughout the pandemic—no one is safe until everyone is safe—remains in force.

This easily anticipated market failure—together with the C-TAP’s failure to launch—led developing countries to open a new front against intellectual property barriers in the World Trade Organization. Since October, the WTO’s Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights Council has been center ring in a dramatic north-south standoff over rights to control vaccine knowledge, technology, and markets. More than 100 low- and middle-income countries support a call by India and South Africa to waive certain provisions related to Covid-19 intellectual property for the duration of the pandemic. Although Gates and his organization do not have an official position on the debate roiling the WTO, Gates and his deputies have left little doubt about their opposition to the waiver proposal. Just as he did following the rollout of the WHO’s C-TAP, Gates has chosen to stand with the drug companies and their government patrons.

Technically housed within the WHO, the ACT-Accelerator is a Gates operation, top to bottom. It is designed, managed, and staffed largely by Gates organization employees. It embodies Gates’s philanthropic approach to widely anticipated problems posed by intellectual property–hoarding companies able to constrain global production by prioritizing rich countries and inhibiting licensing. Companies partnering with COVAX are allowed to set their own tiered prices. They are subject to almost no transparency requirements and to toothless contractual nods to “equitable access” that have never been enforced. Crucially, the companies retain exclusive rights to their intellectual property. If they stray from the Gates Foundation line on exclusive rights, they are quickly brought to heel. When the director of Oxford’s Jenner Institute had funny ideas about placing the rights to its COVAX-supported vaccine candidate in the public domain, Gates intervened. As reported by Kaiser Health News, “A few weeks later, Oxford—urged on by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation—reversed course [and] signed an exclusive vaccine deal with AstraZeneca that gave the pharmaceutical giant sole rights and no guarantee of low prices.”

Considering the alternatives being discussed, it is no surprise that drug companies have been the most enthusiastic boosters of the ACT-Accelerator and COVAX. The speakers at the ACT-Accelerator launch ceremony in March 2020 included Thomas Cueni, director general of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers and Associations, who hailed the initiative as a “landmark global partnership.” Since vaccines started coming online, the IFPMA’s member companies have lost interest in the Accelerator, preferring bilateral deals with rich countries. But they continue to benefit from the halo effect of their association with Gates, which has proved priceless throughout the pandemic, especially at a crucial juncture in its first year.

On May 29, Donald Trump announced U.S. withdrawal from the WHO. This was in response, he said, to China’s “total control” of the agency. The drug industry, meanwhile, was displeased with the WHO for entirely different reasons. The same day, the WHO director general had unveiled the C-TAP with a “Solidarity Call to Action” for governments and companies to share all intellectual property related to Covid-19 treatments and vaccines. The pharmaceutical companies didn’t attack the initiative directly. Instead, their global trade association, the IFPMA, preempted the announcement with a livestreamed media event on the evening of May 28. The event featured the heads of AstraZeneca, GlaxoSmithKline, Johnson & Johnson, and Pfizer, and Thomas Cueni.

The evening’s sixth participant was the specter of Bill Gates.

As anticipated, the questions submitted by journalists touched repeatedly on the much-anticipated launch of C-TAP the following morning, as well as related issues of intellectual property, vaccine access and equity, and debates over the extent and ways intellectual property posed barriers to ramping up production. Mostly, the executives evinced ignorance and surprise over the imminent launch of C-TAP; only Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla openly denounced the pooling of intellectual property as “dangerous” and “nonsense.”

All of the executives, however, shared a playbook in which they quickly pivoted to affirmations of their support for Bill Gates and the ACT-Accelerator. The association with Gates was submitted as evidence of industry commitment to equity and access—as well as proof of the complete lack of need for overlapping or competing initiatives, such as the “dangerous” C-TAP.

“We already have platforms,” Cueni said during the May 28 event. “The industry is already doing all the right things.”

As the questions about C-TAP and intellectual property piled up, the industry’s Gates rap started to sound less like a shared P.R. script than a broken record. Confronted for the second time about intellectual property, GlaxoSmithKline CEO Emma Walmsley emitted an undigested stream of Gatesian word salad. “We are absolutely committed to this question of access,” she stammered, “and deeply welcome the formation of ACT, which is this multilateral organization that is going to be a mechanism with multiple stakeholders, whether it’s heads of state or organizations like [the Gates-funded] CEPI or the Gates and [the Gates-funded] Gavi and others and the WHO, of course, where we actually look at these principles of, uh, access and so clearly, we’re engaged in that as well.”

Without the Gates and COVAX associations to lean on, the stammering would have been much worse. Pfizer’s Albert Bourla seemed to recognize this, at one point interrupting himself to express his industry’s gratitude and admiration. “I want to take the opportunity to emphasize the role that Bill Gates is playing,” he said. He went on to call him “an inspiration for all.”

Gates can hardly disguise his contempt for the growing interest in intellectual property barriers. In recent months, as the debate has shifted from the WHO to the WTO, reporters have drawn testy responses from Gates that harken back to his prickly performances before congressional antitrust hearings a quarter-century ago. When a Fast Company reporter raised the issue in February, she described Gates “raising his voice slightly and laughing in frustration,” before snapping, “It’s irritating that this issue comes up here. This isn’t about IP.”

In interview after interview, Gates has dismissed his critics on the issue—who represent the poor majority of the global population—as spoiled children demanding ice cream before dinner. “It’s the classic situation in global health, where the advocates all of a sudden want [the vaccine] for zero dollars and right away,” he told Reuters in late January. Gates has larded the insults with comments that equate state-protected and publicly funded monopolies with the “free market.” “North Korea doesn’t have that many vaccines, as far as we can tell,” he told The New York Times in November. (It is curious that he chose North Korea as an example and not Cuba, a socialist country with an innovative and world-class vaccine development program with multiple Covid-19 vaccine candidates in various stages of testing.)

The closest Gates has come to conceding that vaccine monopolies inhibit production came during a January interview with South Africa’s Mail & Guardian. Asked about the growing intellectual property debate, he responded, “At this point, changing the rules wouldn’t make any additional vaccines available.”

[amphtaminedreams]

COVID-19, Negligent Manslaughter, and a Timeline of Tory Indifference

“I feel sorry for Boris Johnson. He is doing the best he can in the situation and I don’t think anybody else could have done a better job.”

[exhibit A: a gem somebody that I’m Facebook friends with reposted earlier]

It’s a sentiment that I cannot quite wrap my head around. I sit here hopeless and furious and trying to hold back tears because it’s been almost a year since England first went into lockdown and yet here we are, almost 100,000 dead, in an even worse position than we were before whilst other countries begin to slowly return to normality. It is clear to me who is to blame for this, however there are a large proportion of people who don’t want to “politicise” the actions of the PRIME MINISTER with regards to his approach towards handling a virus sweeping the country he GOVERNS. 

Typically, these kind of posts making the rounds on social media will be accompanied by some kind of photo of Boris Johnson looking somber as if to suggest that the way things have played out were beyond his control and that he is some kind of broken man beleaguered by the suffering he has, despite good intentions, inadvertently caused.

This one in particular of Johnson with his head in his hands is a staple. In reality, this is a photo taken back in 2018 whilst he was receiving flack from party members for comparing Theresa May to a suicide bomber (for her handling of Brexit, ironically) as well as from the papers due to his rumoured (now also proven, in a completely non-surprising turn of events, to be true) affair with his former aide, Carrie Symonds. 

So let’s shut this narrative-where we should feel for Boris because he’s doing his best, and apparently a better job than anybody else could’ve done in his situation- down right here. In a supposedly developed country with one of the world’s largest economies, if we’re talking by proportion, our COVID-19 death toll is up there with the worst of them. It seems that every other state figurehead (bar a small handful), and I mean almost every single one of them, is doing a better job. People love to throw figures out there about how densely populated we are to combat damning statistics as if we haven’t got just as many factors playing to our advantage, as if it’s unfair to compare our response to Germany’s or Japan’s or Singapore’s (both of which are far more densely populated) or New Zealand’s or Vietnam’s, but we are an ISLAND with world-leading technology and infrastructure and healthcare equipment and professionals and a relatively high standard of living. In what world is almost 70,000 dead in a country with abundant time and means to prepare a response reflective of said country’s leaders doing a good job?

Apparently we’re supposed to believe that Johnson feels some sense of moral responsibility for this astronomical failure. A man who refuses to acknowledge the multiple children he has fathered outside of his marriages and who has had repeatedly engaged in affairs and one-night stands throughout said marriages. A man who continued to cheat whilst his most recent wife was receiving treatment for cervical cancer, for fuck’s sake. Yep, a real stand-up guy. 

So where does this idea that Johnson must feel remorseful for this catastrophe come from? We haven’t seen a second of remorse or a hint of accountability for the lives lost from him nor any members of his cabinet. That much is really no surprise; I have this hypothesis, and it’s not a stretch, that these people do not have an ounce of empathy in their bodies. These ridiculously privileged, privately-educated individuals who have had everything handed to them their entire lives simply cannot put themselves in the shoes of the average working person and that is the problem. Unable to recognise that what distinguishes them from most others is little more than the luck of being born into wealth and the abundance of recourses and connections that has entailed throughout their lives, they see us as beneath them-as less intelligent, less driven, and thus less deserving of the status and respect they enjoy. They see us as a bunch of whining, unmotivated idiots who do not recognise the chokehold they have over our media nor the fact that everything they do is a desperate grab to keep money and power within the hands of a select group of people, an exclusive members club from which most of us are barred (just take a simple Google search and watch Jacob Rees-Mogg’s opinion of the Grenfell victims or the buried Johnson speech where he talks about how inequality is essential). They know that we will squabble amongst ourselves about who is to blame rather than wising up to the truth which is that every decision they make is fuelled by cronyism and the inability to make and follow through with difficult choices, the pandemic being no exception. The supposedly self-made elite see the life of the average working class person as having far less value than their own, and their parties actions over the last 10 years have made that very clear. 

It was in December 2019 that the first case of COVID-19 was declared to the World Health Organisation and on March the 11th that they announced they considered it as a pandemic. In Wuhan, people were dying of pneumonia in their clusters. And what was Boris Johnson doing in this time? Well for starters, here in the UK we didn’t even have a pandemic committee-Johnson had scrapped it six months before. If years of benefits cuts and defunding of the NHS in favour of funding nuclear weapon programs, keeping British troops on other people’s lands, and tax breaks for the mega corporations that donate to their party didn’t convince you that the Conservatives have little regard for human life, them getting rid of this committee-whilst a pandemic has been declared year after year as the greatest threat to mankind-should have been the first sign of trouble. As if that wasn’t enough, he also skipped five of the COBRA (meetings are made up of a cross-departmental committee put together to respond to national emergencies and PMs routinely attend those pertaining to crises on the scale of COVID-19) meetings addressing the situation. Whilst other countries were closing their borders and stocking up on PPE, Johnson and his ministers were selling PPE abroad and simply telling people to wash their hands to the length of the tune of happy birthday. Their only policy was one of “herd immunity”, which was in fact not a policy but just an abandonment of their party’s public duty disguised as one, intentionally obfuscated with pseudoscientific jargon.

Even thinking the absolute worst of politicians you would hope that when it came to the point where the UK’s non-response to COVID-19 was becoming an international disgrace, Johnson and his ministers would take proper protective measures if only to save face. But when they eventually seemed to do so, it became clear that the priority was not the safety of the ordinary people affected by the virus. Outsourcing their test and traces system to companies such as Serco, Sitel, Deloitte and G4S rather than public health services, Conservative ministers could not resist attempting to line the pockets of their friends and benefactors in the process. According to the Guardian, instead of reaching out to the experts or using publicly funded services to handle COVID containment measures, the Conservative party has awarded a disgusting £1.5 BILLION WORTH of contracts to businesses with explicit connections to its MPs and donors, the majority of which lack any relative experience of the tasks they’ve been trusted to carry out. Unsurprisingly, the National Audit office found that when awarding contracts relating to the production of COVID-19 protection measures and treatment needs, there was a “high-priority lane” for suppliers referred by senior politicians and officials; companies with a political referral were 10 times more likely to end up winning a government contract than those without. On top of this, it is not hard to draw a link between the late initiation of lockdown measures and preemptive openings of pubs and restaurants against scientific advice to the interests of frequent donors such as Wetherspoons owner Tim Martin. Even if one chooses to ignore the blatantly obvious correlation between the owners of the businesses whose profits were prioritised over safety concerns and the number of those owners who donate to the Conservatives, party officials at the very least were reluctant to follow the lead of many other countries in financing furlough schemes themselves and instead avoided this responsibility by using loose lockdown measures to leave it down to the discretion of small business owners, who couldn’t themselves afford to furlough staff, whether or not to stay open. 

Time and time again, as the government flounder and fuck about, favouring personal desires to keep their powerful, high-paying jobs and to satisfy the corporate allies who make this possible, blame has been shifted from the public to care homes to NHS workers and back again whilst we, the public, make the biggest sacrifices of all under the illusion that we were being guided out of this pandemic rather than lied to and thrown under the bus. Whilst the elite continue to pick and choose what rules apply to them, it’s students and the elderly and the vulnerable paying the fines and scrabbling to afford basic living costs and hoping that they don’t lose someone dear to them.

Don’t get me wrong, a large proportion of the public have contributed to the spread too with their selfishness and entitlement and the arrogance it takes to develop a sudden refusal to acknowledge basic science from experts who have studied in the field their whole lives so that they can justify their need to go to the pub (speaking of, it’s absolutely HILARIOUS how many “mental health advocates” are suddenly coming out of the woodworks on football avi Twitter after they’ve spent years calling people on mental health Twitter attention seekers). And don't get me wrong, there were inevitably going to be casualties of this pandemic. But it didn't have to spread to this many people, and there didn’t have to be so many deaths due to a lack of preparation, and this wouldn’t have been the case if it weren’t for the inherent apathy of the Conservative party towards the lives of people of lesser status than them, the reluctance to put those lives before party interests. I wish I felt like there was an end in sight, I wish there was some positive takeaway from all of this, but even now, we continue to see corners being cut with the vaccine lauded as our saving grace and anti-maskers gathering outside hospitals to chant about how “oppressive” it is to be urged to wear a bit of cloth over their faces for the short periods of time in which they leave their houses and all I can think of is the selfishness that runs like poison through our country. It makes me sick and leaves me to question desperately where we go from here. I don’t like unanswered questions, I don’t like feeling politically directionless, and I don’t like the growing fear I have about the state of the world which seems to intensify every single day. In the UK at least, it’s starting to feel like nothing will ever change-we’re told we live in a democracy and yet mainstream media is owned by the people whose interest is to keep their Conservative friends in power. The stronghold they have over print media in particular allows them to continually get away with smearing and defaming every person who comes along and seems to want to actually help ordinary people, without being challenged, to the point where the only kind of “opposition” we’re left with promises nothing but a big boss approved tactical reshuffling of the status quo (which they call “electability”); it doesn’t feel like democracy when the majority of the country are being fed misleading information and convinced against voting in their best interests. 

This is the result of that. The state we find ourselves in is the inevitable result of being manipulated into helping the elite build their protective wall whilst the rest of us scrabble to get in and step on each others heads along the way, the people inside shouting over that it’s those even more vulnerable than ourselves that are taking our places. Outside the wall, the earth is falling from beneath our feet, and instead of throwing over the ropes to help us out, the people inside are stockpiling them so they can secure their firm place above ground and then later flog the rest. How many more people have to die before we reach some kind of widespread realisation of that? Where do we go from here and what do we do? Well for one, we can stop spreading those god-fucking-awful textposts on Facebook and get our heads out of our arses. Wear our masks over and wear them over our fucking noses. Have some fucking consideration for others. Don’t wait til an issue affects you personally to give a fuck about it. AND START HOLDING THE FUCKING PRIME MINISTER AND HIS MINISTERS AND HIS ENTIRE PARTY AS WELL AS THE OPPOSITION MPS THAT HAVE SAT BY THE SIDELINES AND ALLOWED THIS TO GO ON WITHOUT PROTEST ACCOUNTABLE. That would be a good start. 

I’m so tired. Things didn’t need to be this way, and yet because of the selfishness of the few, thousands upon thousands are dead. It’s not about “throwing around blame”, it’s not about “throwing around” anything, it’s about expecting a leader to do his best to protect lives. If that is “throwing blame”, let’s get things clear, I have no issue with hurtling it torpedo style at those who handed out a death sentence to so many in this country rather than do anything that might compromise their own privilege. Honestly, pass me the shovel after and I’ll happily bury the wreckage in the ground. Who wants to join?:-)

[clarionglass]

6/7/8 for the ask game ples! ♡

timey my beloved! for this, thank you babe :)

6. what is your favourite sense to incorporate in your writing and why? this is such a curveball of a question and i love it! i mean, like you said when i asked you, sight is the main one. i love describing sight and emotion with slightly offbeat descriptors, it's the area i feel i can get most poetic in. but that said, thanks to this question i might try building up a bit more in other senses, probably touch and sound :D

7. what is your favourite sentence/paragraph? read it to us! (asker can choose what fic) okay so. the perennial fave is good old "spit in his tea Martin" from we should ride this wave to shore, on pure laugh value but! for favourite paragraph... i'm gonna go this one, from crowned by an overture bold and beyond: "...so I was surprised that Jonathan had even noticed. Jonathan--Jon--who smoked as if he was trying to give himself lung cancer. Whose favourite type of tea was strong English Breakfast, but would try every blend at least once, and despised coffee with a passion. Who was never ostentatious in his appearance, but was fastidious in every respect, with pressed shirts and carefully-tied hair and long fingers and well-kept nails, and always carried a small bottle of hand sanitiser in his trouser pocket, just in case. Who wrote with a script like calligraphy, perfectly suited to the flourishes of a fountain pen, but without exception wrote with the plain black ballpoint he kept in his top pocket. Who drank white wine over red as a general preference, but liked a dry Cabernet Franc best of all, and would never touch Chardonnay. Who I once noticed stoop to more closely watch a stray cat that regarded us from the shadows of an alleyway one autumn evening, his eyes uncharacteristically gentle as he observed the wary creature from a polite distance. Who was prickly and grouchy and still the quickest to respond the second he thought I was in trouble, down in the catacombs.

I had forgotten, it seemed, that when I was observing someone so closely, I was also being observed in turn." i'm also going to be a self-indulgent binch and drop a couple of lines from the very very in-progress sections of that same fic because i love em, your honour: "In that barren, starlit field we whirled and we sang and we screamed, throats sandpapered bloody by an unconfined laughter that was as large and as weighty as the world entire. [...] The ritual we had attempted to mimic had long since become a mockery of its sombre self. Whatever dread gods the ancients had once sacrificed to were abandoned, passed over in favour of a pain-bound togetherness we clutched at with greedy hands."

8. if you got a computer virus that deleted all your fics but had just enough time to save one before they were wiped out, which fic would you pick and why? hhhhhhh what a question,,,,,, is this to save one that i'm working on, or save one from getting wiped off the internet entirely? if the latter, then "we should ride this wave to shore", the chatfic, because it's just been a joy to write and i sometimes read it back (because i'm that sort of person) and the sheer stupidity of it makes me happy! and seems to have made a bunch of other people happy too, which i wasn't expecting! but if i'm saving a document i'm actively working on, and isn't saved somewhere else on the internet, then unific. "crowned by an overture bold and beyond". because there's a bunch of working and planning and notes in that doc, and a very specific feel that i'd want to save, bc it's very hard to recapture. that one's the passion project :)

[tabloidtoc]

National Examiner, March 29

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: The Jayne Mansfield only her daughter Mariska Hargitay knew

Page 2: They're Aging Like Fine Wine -- celebs reflect on the wonders of getting older -- Candice Bergen, Anthony Hopkins, Halle Berry, Diane Keaton, Jennifer Lopez, Sandra Bullock, Bette Davis, Reese Witherspoon, Sally Field

Page 3: Helen Mirren, Jamie Lee Curtis, Madonna, Sigourney Weaver, Michael Caine, Jennifer Aniston, Goldie Hawn, Diane Lane

Page 4: Warren Beatty's roles and costumes

Page 6: Since her 2016 split from Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie has had to keep calm and carry on with six growing kids to think about and she admits the past few years have been pretty hard and she's been focusing on healing her family -- the six kids she shares with Brad, who range in age from 12 to 19, have been looking out for her too -- the 45-year-old is looking forward to her 50s and she feels that she's going to hit her stride in her 50s

Page 7: Canine Cuisine -- simple home-cooked fare for Fido

Page 9: Reach for at-home antibiotics

Page 10: When a Texas grocery store lost power during the devastating recent storm, they did something unimaginably generous -- they allowed all the customers to leave with whatever was in the shopping carts without paying for anything -- the shoppers at an H-E-B supermarket in Leander didn't even have to cough up a dime as they proceeded through the checkout lanes, even if they had hundreds of dollars' worth of food and supplies weighing down their wagons

Page 11: Your Health -- crying is healthy

* If you suffer from insomnia, try wearing socks to bed

Page 12: Hollywood Cemetery Shockers -- Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Whitney Houston, John Wayne

Page 13: James Brown, Michael Todd, Princess Diana, Sammy Davis Jr., Judy Garland, Steve Irwin

Page 14: Dear Tony, America's Top Psychic Healer -- the secret of life is so simple and attainable -- Tony predicts movie and TV star Robin Wright's move to being a director will be very successful and there will be many more films to come

Page 15: A Florida man just received the biggest surprise of his long life at the party to celebrate his 100th birthday -- someone had found and returned his wedding ring that he lost five years earlier while shopping at an Aldi's in Minnesota

Page 16: Kathie Lee Gifford: It's never too late to go after your dreams

Page 18: Happy Days mom Marion Ross is 92 now, but she still holds a memory about the legendary Cary Grant close to her heart -- back in 1959, when she was married to Freeman Meskimen, the actress was working on a film with the handsome star when she discovered she might be pregnant but she wasn't absolutely sure and so she didn't share her suspicions with anyone until one day, when a scene called for her to do something she wasn't sure a possibly pregnant woman should be doing, she revealed her secret to Cary Grant -- he sat down next to her, put his arm around her and said sweetly You're pregnant! and when she looked up at him, he had tears in his eyes; he was so excited for her and they had this marvelous moment together -- Marion said her husband was less than thrilled when her pregnancy was confirmed and they divorced a few years later

Page 19: An Indiana middle-school principal made the cut when he helped a kid out of a hairy situation -- when an eighth-grader at Stonybrook in Warren Township confided in Jason Smith he couldn't take his hat off because he was embarrassed about his uneven haircut, Jason offered to really straighten things out if he promised to return to class -- Jason has been cutting hair most of his life and he played college basketball and cut his teammates' hair before games, and he's been cutting his son's hair for 17 years and he had professional clippers and edgers at home, so he said if he went home and got his clippers and lined the student up, would he go back to class? and the student said yes, so Jason gave the kid a buzz and the happy student went back to class -- Jason says he knows a bad haircut may sound like a small thing, but to a boy that age, grappling with peer pressure, a bad 'do is a real don't

Page 20: Cover Story -- My mom Jayne Mansfield -- Mariska Hargitay reveals bombshell truths about the beloved sex symbol

Page 22: Use your noodle -- pool toy swims to the rescue

Page 24: Back when Calvin Tyler was in college in the early 1960s, he had such a hard time scraping together tuition money that he had to drop out before finishing his senior year and take a job as a UPS driver -- fast-forward a few decades: Calvin has just donated $20 million to Morgan State University in Baltimore, his alma mater

Page 25: A wounded veteran in Temecula, California, got the surprise of his life when he received a mortgage-free home courtesy of the Gary Sinise Foundation -- Josue Barron, who had joined the Marines at age 17, lost both his left leg and his left eye while serving in Afghanistan in 2010

Page 26: Dreamy hunk Patrick Swayze fell for one of his co-stars while filming the romantic movie Ghost, but the object of his affection wasn't on-screen love Demi Moore; it was Whoopi Goldberg

Page 28: 20 things you didn't know about James Bond actor Daniel Craig

Page 30: Spunky Hayley Arceneaux won a battle with bone cancer when she was 10 years old, and grew up to become a physician assistant in child oncology at St. Jude's Children's Hospital, where she was treated and if that wasn't enough, Hayley is going to blast off on a space flight -- the super survivor, who's now 29, was selected by the St. Jude's staff from hundreds of other employees to represent the famous hospital on the first-ever civilian spaceflight, arranged by the company SpaceX, to take place at the closing of 2021

Page 40: It's crystal clear -- the healing starts here -- crystals are very effective when it comes to healing, especially with one's emotion and they have special energies in different ways

Page 42: How to lower your COVID risk -- with new variants of the virus documented in the U.S., it's important to stay vigilant

Page 44: Eyes on the Stars -- Rebecca Holden of Knight Rider (picture), Lou Diamond Phillips of Prodigal Son in NYC (picture), Katharine McPhee admitted she was concerned with what people would think early on during her romance with 71-year-old David Foster, the daughter of John Travolta and Kelly Preston named Ella Blue Travolta is following in the footsteps of her actor parents by starring in Get Lost which is a modern-day retelling of Alice in Wonderland, Sarah Silverman recently apologized for mocking Paris Hilton at the 2007 MTV Awards, Nicolas Cage has tied the knot for the fifth time to Riko Shibata, Metallica have donated $75,000 to Feeding America via their All Within My Hands nonprofit and the funds are earmarked to aid folks in Texas who were affected by deadly winter storms

Page 45: Orlando Bloom running on the beach while vacationing in Hawaii (picture), Antonio Banderas (picture), Tom Jones takes the stage in the U.K. (picture), Robin Roberts near ABC's NYC studio (picture), Aaron Carter and fiancee Melanie Martin say they have a baby on the way nearly 10 months after she'd suffered a miscarriage, Dustin Diamond was never married to his galpal Jennifer Misner according to his death certificate, Liam Neeson attended a NYC screening of his new movie to thank viewers for coming to the theater on the first day Big Apple cinemas reopened after being shuttered by COVID-19 last year

Page 46: A single mom of three was struggling to do everything on her own, but there was one problem she lacked the skills and money to handle -- her house in Sudbury, Massachusetts was falling apart and that's when some kindly Good Samaritans stepped in with their toolbelts and performed the extensive home repairs she need at no charge

Page 47: Parenting Advice From the Stars -- Reese Witherspoon, Busy Philipps, Mark Consuelos and Kelly Ripa, Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jennifer Garner

[woulddieforperrytheplatypus]

What do you think Milo and gang we’re doing during “Night of the Living Pharmacists”? And what do you think the order everyone went down in?

Ooh believe it or not, I (kind of) already have a fic for that! It was one of my first PnF fics so it’s not good by any means, none of it was pre-planned because it all stemmed from the opening scene of Candace and Vanessa running into Perry in the halls of DEI, and the MML characters only show up mid-fic because I think I might have added them as an afterthought, but it’s a fic nonetheless! 

None of that really relates to what the characters may have done in the canon version of NotLP, though, so here’s my rundown:

The first ones to go are Mr. and Mrs. Murphy. I love Martin, but I don’t think he has quite the same grasp on avoiding Murphy’s Law that Milo has and that would take him and Brigette out.

Bradley would lowkey throw in the towel early on and blame Milo as he’d being turned lmao

Elliott would be the next one out because he’d see the pharmacists as a threat to the safety of the city he has sworn to protect and try to stop them without really thinking it through.

Chad and Mort might go next. Their curiosity would get the better of them, and they’d make the mistake of getting too close to a zombie while trying to figure them out and get Doofified.

Next I’m thinking maybe Sara? She’s dealt with a lot of weird shit from her near-constant proximity to Murphy’s Law, so she’d be able to make it through a lot of this. Unfortunately for her, Milo isn’t around and she can’t make use of his backpack, so something goes wrong and takes her out.

I have to assume the Undergrounders were fine, assuming they were already in the sewers. If any of the Doof zombies made it down there, they’d get wet and probably turn back into themselves. With that said, Scott would totally beat their asses if he got the chance -- not even on purpose but just because he’s Scott.

The last to go would be Melissa. She and Milo would spend the whole thing together, as they typically do in times of crisis. I almost feel like Milo could save them both because saving them is what he does, but if they were both okay, they’d be trying to figure out how to stop this and I almost have a hard time believing that they wouldn’t have figured out that water turns the zombies back. Once they figured that out, it would be as simple as shooting everyone with the squirt guns that Milo obviously has in his backpack and then bringing them all to a safe place. I guess it’s possible that this did happen and we just didn’t see it in NotLP because it was on the other side of town, but I think if Milo and Melissa really were working together to stop this, they’d make enough of a dent that Phineas and Ferb would notice. 

So what I really think happened was that Milo and Melissa were treating this like any other spurt of Murphy’s Law. They were almost having fun with it, because that’s how you have to get by with Murphy’s Law -- you have to enjoy it. But they got just a little careless and Milo looked away for just a second too long, and when he looked back, Melissa was already half pharmacist. At that point, Milo would throw in the towel because this is not the game he thought it was, and his carelessness cost Melissa her life -- or at least her non-zombified form. He’d just hole up somewhere and hide, already having accepted that his backpack can’t save him this time because it wouldn’t safe Melissa -- he couldn’t save Melissa -- and for all he knows, the entire world is infested with this incurable zombie disease and there’s no way to escape. I think it would have taken a lot for him to recover from that, but he’s the type to bounce back from anything if given the time.

Honorable mentions

Amanda is the Stacy of the MML side of Danville. She’s holed up in her house studying and doesn’t even realize there’s a zombie apocalypse outside.

Cavendish and Dakota probably weren’t around because Block would know about the zombie apocalypse and instruct them not to go to Danville on that day.

Zack hadn’t moved to Danville yet, and because it’s the walled city of Danville for NotLP and NotLP only, the virus doesn’t spread past the walls what are you talking about of course it doesn’t go past the walls in the episode that wouldn’t make sense and there’s no way they overlooked that when storyboarding. He lives in blissful ignorance for the rest of his life :,)

[wolftraps]

Sign over your soul

Many people (including @sidewalk-and-chalkin most recently) asked about Cass and her meeting with Martin about keeping her job and the whole reveal. Technically this doesn’t include the full reveal, but I already gave you a powerpoint for that. So here. Have Cass and Martin trying to one-up each other while Jon continues being a disaster.

--

Cass and Martin have never been friends. Which is odd because it’s not like they haven’t known each other, and they’re both generally friendly people. They’ve even been friends with a lot of the same people. And yet, even after years of working in the same place and talking to the same people, they still know each other almost solely by reputation. Reputation which, prior to Martin joining the Archives, had been good. Now… well, now it’s hard to say. The doors are locked, as usual, when Cass arrives for her pseudo-interview, but that’s been the case for months and it hasn’t mattered so far. And as usual, Patrząc meets her out front and leads her around to a side door, propped open with a tape recorder, that she locks back up behind her. As always. “And how are you today, beautiful?” Cass asks. Patrząc meows back, pleased. “That’s great. So, what are the odds I’m about to lose my job?” Another meow; Cass laughs. “I know better than to bet against myself. Do you even have any money?” Patrząc ignores her, just leads her through the familiar building to a room on the ground floor that Cass knows has been turned into Martin’s new office. There they stop. “Right.” Cass takes a deep breath. “Wish me luck.”

“Mrrow,” Patrząc says. “It doesn’t matter if I need it or not. It’s polite.” The cat just stares. “Oh hush.” With another breath, Cass knocks, intending to wait, but as soon as she does, Patrząc huffs and rubs up against the door, which swings open with only a soft click. She meows at Martin as she leads Cass in and then stalks right back out as the door closes behind her. “That cat has no sense of decorum,” Cass says fondly, staring after her. “She’s Jon’s cat,” Martin responds, just as fond, “I’ve given up. Anyway. Sit, please. You want any tea?” “Sure. Just a—” “Small spoonful of sugar,” Martin finishes, already setting the mug in front of her. It’s made perfectly. “So, first off, thank you for all the work you’ve been doing. It’s really been a relief to not have all that to worry about.” “No idea what you’re talking about,” Cass lies. “Right. So you don’t want this bonus I was going to give you.” “Well it’s not like you or Sims were going to maintain the network. Also you can blame the cat for letting me in.” “Yeah, I know. I’ve always known. If it was a problem we would’ve talked way before now.” “Right. Good… Should I bother asking how? I know you’re not watching the security footage.” She’d checked. No one had accessed any of it but her since they closed the doors. “You… can. First I’d like to go over some things myself. And, whenever he can be bothered to join us, Jon has some questions too.” “O- oh.” Cass doesn’t actually have anything to hide— not really. She still gets a shiver down her spine, though, and takes a sip of perfect tea to cover it. “Sure.” “Cool. Alright. Where—” Martin flips through the papers on his desk, fumbling a bit. It makes him look like the same nice, approachable man he’d been before. Something about it feels deliberate, though. Cass forces herself into a relaxed posture to match. Finally, Martin finds what he was ‘looking’ for, two sheets down in the stack right in front of him. “Ah! Here we go. So you’ve been working here for six years, right? Two promotions in that time. Do you like working here? I guess that’s a good place to start.” “I mean, yeah. It’s not exactly easy work. IT in a place like this—” “Not exactly easy to do any job in a place like this,” Martin mutters. “Well, yeah, but you never had to explain to Elias that it didn’t matter how high- or low- tech we went, security cameras wouldn’t work in the Archives.” “You didn’t have to hide in your flat for a full day because supernatural worms trapped you there.” “You didn’t have to create an entirely new encryption program to prevent data corruption in all Elias’s emails.” “You didn’t have to try to convince Tim not to murder Jon.” “You didn’t have to write a virus to keep Tim from stalking Sims even more.” “Did you really?” “Yeah.” “Oh… thanks.” Cass waves him off. “Not like it worked.” “Still… You didn’t get chased through secret tunnels and stumble across your old boss’s corpse.” “Right, about that! Who did kill Gertrude? Really?” “Elias.” “Yes! Called it…” She considers for a second. “You didn’t have to crawl through the walls to replace the cables the worms ate through. You think the ECDC cleared out all their gross, wriggly little corpses? They didn’t.” Martin sets down his tea, looking appropriately disgusted. “Oh, ugh. Hmm… You didn’t have to run from a creature that eats people and steals their identities.” “You didn’t have your friend replaced and have to explain to their best friend what happened without fully understanding it yourself.” “I… kind of did, actually.”

Cass pauses, something suddenly becoming clear. “Oh… oh. I’m… surprised Tim was as controlled as he was, then.” “Yeah. He had… other things to distract him. It’s not exactly the same. Sasha’s still around, sort of. She’s just—” Not something he really wants to talk about, clearly. “Right. You’ve never had to spend hours trying to figure out exactly how Sasha fucked up your system after she changed things without warning.” “I have, though,” Martin sighs, clearly exasperated. “The number of forms I’ve had to redo. It’s not… totally her fault. She doesn’t mean to do it; it’s more like a reflex.” “Oh no. Michael Lanson’s entire existence in our system was not some reflex. She did that intentionally, and she made it just right enough that I probably wouldn’t have noticed for months if Hannah hadn’t said something, and just wrong enough I had to redo the whole thing from scratch or it would’ve drove me insane.” “Oh. That. Yeah. She was… trying to do us a favor, sort of? Anyway, you never had to convince Daisy Tonner that you had no clue where Jon might be while he was on the run.” “Sure I did. Not as hard as you did, sure, but I still had to lie to her.” “Wait— You knew where Jon was?” “I mean, not at first. But Melanie King comes in talking about the dead guy being Jurgen Leitner and leaving with boxes from the Archives? That she’s just allowed to carry out? After Sims utterly destroyed Diana in her defense?” “Wait, Jon did what?”

Cass sits bolt upright, potential glee already taking hold. “You don’t know about that? I swear the archives were CCed.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Oh my god. Okay. Hold on,” Cass says, already scrolling through the saved emails on her phone. It takes less than a minute to find and send the right one. “You never wondered why Diana hates Sims so much?” “I mean. A lot of people hate Jon, and I doubt Diana could kill him, so I wasn’t that worried that… Oh my god, Jon. How did I miss this? I… I think I might need to frame this… Wait, if you thought he was with Melanie, why didn’t you say anything to Daisy?” Cass pauses for a second, but, well, given how freaky the Archivist himself is, this probably won’t phase Martin too much. “I didn’t just think. I traced her mobile to place her at Georgie Barker’s and then hacked CCTV feeds until I caught Sims.” “You…” Martin sighs and slumps a bit. “Of course you did. I don’t know why I… That still doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell Daisy.” Cass shrugs and takes another sip of tea. “Wasn’t my business. Also, that would’ve been tampering and all the bets I’d taken would be void. Anyway. You never had to prove to Daisy Tonner that you’d already destroyed any and all evidence that might implicate Jonathan Sims in any murder, especially that of Peter Lukas, after she joined the Institute.” “You never had to get Jon to talk about his feelings.” “True, but you never had to explain to Elias both what keyloggers are and why we shouldn’t use them.” “Key— Wait, are you trying to tell me there aren’t keyloggers on every computer here?” “Oh, no, there absolutely are. But all collected data is immediately encrypted with a specially created algorithm where the key changes at short, irregular intervals and requires both knowledge-based and biological-based authentication just to generate a decryption key for use. Also our storage space is limited, so most of it can only be kept for a week at most. He probably still knew everything everyone ever typed, but any actual evidence was only ever accessible by me.” It takes Martin a moment to process this. Cass takes another sip of tea. “How did you get away with that?” “Assured him Gertrude would never be able to access any of it. And then every time he came around for any reason I started thinking about all the upgrades I wanted to ask for.” He looks a little shell-shocked. “I… honestly can’t tell how much you know about everything that’s been going on around here.” “Not as much as us, but more than most everyone else, and enough she likely won’t change her mind about staying,” Jonathan Sims says, striding in looking harried with a very self-satisfied cat draped across his shoulders. “I… apologize for my tardiness, Martin, Josie.” Cass freezes. “Jos—” Martin starts to ask. “Ahh,” Sims says, almost sheepishly. “I- I’m sorry. I didn’t—” “It’s fine,” Cass says stiffly. “I figured you probably knew. It’s— not actually that big a deal.” “Still. I shouldn’t— I didn’t mean to—” Well, this is awkward. “Martin said you had some questions,” she cuts him off. “Y-yes. I— don’t think that will be necessary.” “Wait- really?” Martin asks incredulously. “You don’t have any questions? You?” “I—” Cass knows many things about most of the people who have worked in the Institute over the past six years, but there’s only so much you can ever actually know about a person from a distance. She’s good at filling in the blanks, but it still somehow surprises her to find that the dreaded Archivist is almost painfully awkward. He looks at her with something like apprehension. “Go ahead,” she tells him and goes to take another sip, only to find her cup empty. Damn. “Miss Walters has a grand total of one close friend outside the Institute, and that only because Hannah Kenway has now left our employ. Her only remaining family is a grandfather who lives in a small town near Barcelona and hasn’t taken any of her calls in the past five years, though she still always tries on Christmas and her mother’s birthday. She has had an interest in the paranormal since… ah.” “Since?” Martin prompts. Cass keeps staring at the empty mug in betrayal. “Since her mother disappeared when she was six, after reading her a children’s book titled “Una Invitada Para el Señor Araña.” “What does— Ohh.” “Guessing you know that one, then,” Cass says. “I— had my own encounter with it,” Sims tells her. “About three years after yours, though it was in English then.” “Yeah. Strange how no one ever believes the kid who says they saw a giant spider eat someone.” “And yet— You aren’t afraid of spiders.” “I am. Sort of. After it happened, I decided I was going to learn everything there was to know about spiders, the supernatural, and Jurgen Letiner. Which eventually brought me here. It’s just… Spiders are fascinating. I have a… healthy respect for them—” “And you’ve always been attracted to dangerous things.” Cass narrows her eyes at him and tries to keep her voice serious when she says, “If you’re about to say the word ‘murderwives,’ I’m gonna have to insist you let me record it.” Sims scowls, something like affront on his face. “I would not.” “I have no idea what you’re talking about, but now I actually kind of want to hear you say that, Jon,” Martin says. Cass wonders again why they aren’t friends already. “I will not!” “I bet Sasha could get you to say it.” “She could not, and you are not going to call her in here just to try,” Sims asserts, but the mischievous smile Martin has doesn’t seem to agree. “Martin.” “I won’t call her in here just to try,” Martin promises, though Cass notes what he doesn’t say and doubts that will be the end of it. Around Sims, Martin nods at her, just slightly, and she knows that she’ll probably get an audio file from him within the week. Sims looks reproachful. Martin looks entirely unrepentant. “Regardless,” Sims decides to move on, “Miss Walters has found herself rather attached to the Institute and likely hasn’t even considered not staying on. Also I suspect, should we not keep her on, our network may refuse to cooperate with her replacement entirely.” “… You mean that literally, don’t you?” Martin sounds so resigned Cass has to laugh. “That’s my baby,” she says proudly. “Right,” he sighs. “So I guess we’ll just go straight to selling your soul to a fear god, then.” She can’t say that’s what she was expecting to hear, especially with someone like Martin in charge. But, she supposes, they don’t actually know each other that well. Anyway, selling your soul to a fear god sounds dangerous, and she’s intrigued. “Alright,” she asks, “is that a bug or a feature?”

[talesofafangirlwithadvr]

REVIEW: EMMA (2020)

Anytime a new adaptation comes out I’m always very hesitate to watch it. Will it live up to its previous incarnation? Why are they making another when there’s already so many? And if it’s based on a book+has had many films already=I can be a very harsh critic. However, with the more reviews I read about Autumn de Wilde’s new take on Jane Austen’s novel, the more pumped I got. (I was upset I had to wait till March as it was in select theaters this February.) I am very happy I got to see it because I enjoyed it a lot. So whether you are a Jane Austen/Emma fan, have seen Clueless once or twice and are curious about the source material or want to escape from all the Corona virus news for a bit, I would highly suggest venturing to your local movie theater to see it. More than likely you will have the theater basically to yourself, like I did. 

Spoilers for the source material are bound to come, so if you are still reading the novel or want to be a bit surprised I would suggest skimming this section. 

Bill Nighy portrayed a fantastic Mr. Woodhouse.

The way this film was marketed it continually brought up how Emma is Jane Austen’s comedy. Now, all of Austen’s work is comedic, but Emma could have some things we will find especially funny as it could be the farthest from our lives (just like it was back then for Austen’s readers). In this adaptation I really could feel the humor attribute making this a true comedy in my eyes. Most of that is thanks to Bill Nighy’s performance. 

Mr. Woodhouse’s hypochondria is his biggest character trait and is always a laugh as he is often given some of the most ridiculous statements. (ie: Cake not being good for children.) Nighy strongly delivered on this and also brought a new characteristic to him (and I’m not just talking about the amazing patterns he wore). He did a great job with physical humor. I loved his interactions with the servants. Which, speaking of...I really liked how much involvement the servants had. This version, specifically, had the most servants shown (compared to previous Emmas) and while they never spoke (as would be expected during this time period) there was SO much humor present. From finding the draft for Mr. Woodhouse out the window (”Miss Taylor would have felt it”), moving all the screens (still a great way for Mr. Woodhouse to show he knew something was going on between Emma and Mr. Knightley) or quickly turning their backs. They also helped to show how rich these characters really are. As social class is a huge part of this story. 

Anya Taylor Joy is poised and highlights Emma’s social class.

With Joy’s portrayal of our lead heroine, I felt like we got an Emma that was very accurate to the novel, but one we do not often see. Here, you got a true sense of Emma’s wealth (as her maids are seen dressing her or fitting her for a new outfit, as well as the ornaments in her hair) as well as her selfishness. By this I mean we got a look into Emma’s world and how she wants to see what she desires. This was seen very early with Emma’s reaction to Miss. Bates in church and then also when they meet Miss. Bates in the shop and hear of Jane’s letter. Other adaptations seem to give her the air of compassion (even if it is just in her face and then she talks badly later). As a very big fan of BBC’s 2009 Emma and of Romola Garai’s Emma it was hard for me to not compare the two versions. Of course, starting with Emma in this role allows for a larger character development, but I still would have liked to see a little more interest in others. 

I loved how many lines were super accurate to the novel. I could often recite what was coming up next. (Yes, I know I’m a big nerd.) 

Johnny Flynn quickly becomes one of my favorite Knightleys.

Again, another hard thing about so many adaptations, seeing so many versions of these literary characters. As I mentioned with the section on Emma’s character specifically, I am a big fan of the BBC’s 2009 mini-series, so whenever I think of Mr. Knightley my mind goes to Jonny Lee Miller (or Brent Bailey from Emma Approved). 

*swooning*

But where was I... oh yes! After watching the trailer I wasn’t sure about this Mr. Knightley (I wasn’t super familiar with Flynn), but he quickly grew on me early on in the film. I really like the early allusions of him and Emma liking one another. His “rivalry” with Frank Churchill made me chuckle every time. I thought it was strange they never brought up how he knows Emma or why he’s over all of the time. Especially when her sister came with all of her kids. Her husband is Knightley’s younger brother, but it’s never mentioned. That could help with not focusing on Emma and Knightley’s large age difference. I like how here we didn’t hear any of those creepy statements like how he remembers holding her when she was a baby. I LOVED their dance (as I expected I would. It’s a HUGE moment) and their reaction afterward was precious: watching them both come to terms with what just happened and how they were feeling. I honestly thought they would admit their feelings right then. It was a PERFECT addition. When Emma asks Frank to stay, and Knightley is obviously upset, but she’s clearly asking for Harriet. Oh the drama! It was great. I was worried the strawberry picking at Donwell wouldn’t have happened, but it followed this scene, which was great because now Emma was aware of her growing feelings and then Harriet is swooning over Knightley who is ignoring Emma. It feels like something straight out of high school (no wonder why Clueless works so well).  

While I loved the addition of this scene, I did feel like the end was a bit rushed, especially once we get to Box Hill. For me Frank and Jane’s reveal always feels weird, but that felt even more forced (although you do get more glances from them in the film) and I understand we don’t have a full 4 hours to show everything, but it just felt like a lot all at once. Despite all of this the proposal was still great and very accurate to the novel. I just don’t understand the nose bleed.

Justice for Harriet with Mia Goth

Emma and Harriet Smith’s relationship is one that I always find problematic. If Emma didn’t feel lonely after losing Miss Taylor/Mrs. Weston she more than likely would not have met Harriet Smith and taken her “under her wing.” Harriet’s life gets turned upside down. She goes from getting proposed to by the farmer, Robert Martin, to turning him down, thinking she’s in love with Mr. Elton, getting her heart broken, falling in love again, but then being wrong about that one too. Then in the end she winds up with Robert Martin, who she would have been happy with in the first place. Mr. Knightley says it well, when he mentions how the more time Emma spends with her, the more she will be out of her world and not apart of Emma’s. Often, I don’t feel justice for Harriet at the end of the film because of the way they treat her character. She is a main focal point at the start of the novel, but then other matters seem to become more serious. In this film, I think I have finally seen one of the best ways her character is handled, specifically at the end of the story. When Emma abruptly stops Knightley during his proposal, it is because (at first) she thinks he will tell her that he loves Harriet (as she just professed to Emma), but in this film we see Emma have this realization as she is about to say her true feelings to Knightley in response to his proposal. Something clicks in her that it is not right. Now my first thought was because of her father. Mainly because of how against change he is. But it is actually for Harriet, which I thought was really refreshing. And then the next scene is us seeing Emma telling Harriet what happened. But it doesn’t stop there. We get to see Harriet finish her story and even share a loving moment with Robert Martin before Emma and Knightley truly unite. It was a very nice touch to this film. 

Go see Emma. You’ll love it as much as I did and then want to watch a bunch of different adaptations afterwards because you can never get enough!