#only these 5 cause they got the most votes in their groups on twitter

[bezzygom]

I did one on twitter so now:

[whiteqnn]

Pairing: Corpse Husband x Fem! Reader

Summary: Sean invites one of his good friends - Y/N - to play with him and the group. She has a lot of fun with them, but at the same time is too oblivious, too nice, and too pure to notice that one particular Among Us player has taken a liking to her the moment he heard her voice...

Notes: Hello everyone! This is the very first time I’m publishing something bigger in here, I’m honestly still figuring out how Tumblr works, even though I’ve had this account for quite some time now 😅. That being said, please don’t expect anything super impressive. I tried my best though just so you know. 🥺

A/N- It didn’t turn out as I expected, but I really hope at least some of you find it enjoyable :(

Y/C/N - your channel name

part 2

part 3 

part 4 

part 5 

PURE [1]

“Did you guys find anybody?” Felix asked, as the number of players still showed just 7 of them. They could just start now, but the game would be way more fun with a full lobby. 

“Yeah, Lily’s joining. I just texted her the code, so she should be here at any moment.” Sykkuno replied after receiving a text message from the said girl. “Oh, and Corpse also said he’d be joining soon.” 

“Great. Anyone else?”

 “I think Jack was also bringing someone, right?” Dave asked.

“Huh? Oh yeah, I have one coming, she’ll join us in a few” the asked man replied at the same moment Lily’s character appeared in the lobby. 

“Who you’re bringing Jack?” 

“Y/N” he said, causing Felix to gasp in shock and yell into his mic:

“How the fuck did you manage to convince her? I’ve been bugging her about this game for the past week and she always had some excuse!” 

“What can I say, my charm is irresistible” Jack replied nonchalantly, causing everyone in the lobby to laugh at his fake deep voice.

The number of participants changed to 9, as a little black astronaut with horns on his helmet appeared in the lobby. 

“Corpse, you’re here!” Rae’s character ran up to the man, circling him excitedly. 

“Hey man!”

“What’s up, Corpse?”

“Hello everyone” his deep voice sounded out “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“All good man, we’re still waiting for one person.” Felix reassured him “Sean, why is she not here yet? Are you sure you’ve sent her the right code?”

“Of course I am!” he all but shouted at Felix “And about that, she just texted me to give her a few more minutes and that we should start without her.”

“We can just wait, right?” Lily offered, earning a few hums of approval from the others.

“I think it might take a little longer than a few minutes, she has some problems with her microphone.”

“Who are you guys talking about?” Corpse asked, completely unaware of who Jack was referring to.

“Wait, Jack, you mean Y/N from Y/C/N?” Sykkuno asked suddenly, only then realizing why this name sounded familiar

“Yeah, the one and only” Jack replied, a smile evident in his voice.

“Oh my god, I love her videos!” Rae exclaimed at that “She’s so funny and sweet!”

“Yeah! Her new video is so freaking cute, I wish she’d upload more often.” Poki agreed. 

“Right?” Jack said, clearly very proud of his friend. “But don’t let that sweet demeanor fool you guys cause she’s one of the best players I’ve encountered in this game.”

“That’s true, she’s a secret big brain genius” Toast confirmed, making Pewdiepie gasp once again. 

“wHAT??YOU TWO PLAYED WITH HER?!” Felix’s offended voice boomed through everyone’s headphones “HOW DARE YOU. HOW COULD YOU NOT INVITE ME?!” 

“That’s for not inviting me to your latest Cringe episode!” Jack was quick to respond, making others in the lobby laugh at their mini fight. 

“Oh, so that’s where I recognized her from!” Sykkuno nearly shouted when he finally put two and two together. “I can’t wait to meet her, she seems like a really nice person.”

“She is! When she got impostor for the first time she refused to kill me” Toast explained, earning himself a couple of Aww’s from his friends. “So we just ran around the emergency button until I called the meeting and voted her off.”

“Yeah, only to be her first victim in the next game.” Jack all but giggled, clearly very amused at the memory of Y/N going into a full berserk mode. No one except for him and Toast knew how good she really was at this game... 

“She’s basically the wolf in sheep’s skin” Felix concluded with a chuckle “Very soft wolf, however.”

“She’s like the complete opposite of Corpse, both in voice and personality” Jack suddenly said, making Felix laugh wholeheartedly at something only two of them understood at the moment. 

“I don’t know how should I take that” Corpse admitted with a chuckle. He remained silent for most of the conversation since he didn’t really know who the guys were talking about. But he would lie if he said he wasn’t intrigued by this girl at least in the slightest. Although he heard about her channel, he hasn’t seen any of her videos, so he didn’t really know what to expect. But hearing what gamers like Sean and Felix said about her, he knew he’s not gonna be disappointed once the girl joins them in the game. 

“Imagine Corpse and Y/N talking.” Felix said suddenly with a seemingly very amused voice.

“Imagine Corpse and Y/N both being Impostors” Toast said, which resulted in many of them shouting over each other at how crazy that would be. 

“Alright, now that you mention this I start fearing the moment two of them meet” Jack confessed with loud laughter following the sentence. Corpse chuckled deeply under his breath, at the same time glancing at the questions his audience was asking him in his stream. He could hardly read any, as there were quite a lot of people asking, so all he saw was just a bunch of comments moving at the speed of light in his chat. He wouldn't say it out loud, but he was slightly nervous, seeing the growing number of people watching his stream. It was still a rather new thing to him, and he feared he'd say something inappropriate, or just make a complete idiot out of himself. 

"At least no one can see me..." he mumbled under his breath after muting his microphone. 

"Oh! Y/N just texted me! She's joining the call right now!" 

"Fuck yeah!" Felix shouted excitedly "Just so you know Jack, I won't forget that you two played without me."

"Uh-oh. Is that a threat? Are you threatening me now?" 

"It's a warning" Felix replied, receiving a series of gasps from other players. "If I get impostor, you're the first one on my list."

"Okay, everyone heard that! You know who to vote off when I'm dead!" 

"It's so cool to play with someone new, I wonder if she's as good as you guys depict her" Sykkuno spoke up, but before anyone could answer his question, a new character popped up in the lobby.

*** 

"Hi everyone! I’m sorry I left you just like that, but this stream would be completely useless without me being able to answer your questions. Fortunately it wasn’t anything serious, I just had to readjust my mic and go through the settings to find what was wrong. Took some time, but here I am now!” Y/N chirped into her microphone, smiling apologetically at her webcam. At the moments like this, she really appreciated how supportive her audience was. No one was hating on her when she had to get off the stream for a couple of minutes, and everyone was just so understanding that it made her heart melt. Perhaps her audience wasn’t very big, but it felt almost like a second family to her. 

“Anyway, as you already know from my twitter, today I’ll be playing Among Us with my friends and their friends! I can’t wait if I’m being honest, last time I played this game was so much fun, and there was only a few of us.” she admitted with a genuine smile on her face. “Let’s just text Sean now so we can get into the lobby...”

Y/N: Ready to play with you guys ^^

Jackaboy: Great! You got that mic fixed already? 

Y/N: Yes, everything is fine. I’m sorry you had to wait so long.

Jackaboy: It’s all good kiddo, no worries. I’ll call you and send you the code in a sec. 

Y/N: Perfect, thank you Sean :)

Jackaboy: Btw, everyone can’t wait to meet you ;-)Y/N stared at the screen for a moment, only now, seconds before joining the group, realizing how nervous she felt. From Sean’s tweets she saw earlier, she figured that the lobby was right now full of many famous streamers, those she wouldn’t even compare herself to. It’s not that she thought of herself very low, but... being among such youtube celebrities like them made her panic a little bit. She didn’t want to look like a complete fool amongst them. 

Playing or recording with Sean and Felix was something else because she knew those guys for years (and yet still sometimes found herself thinking how lucky she got to be able to call them her friends). She felt good in their company, not worrying about choosing the right words. But amongst the rest of the players, she knew only Toast and talked with Rae maybe once in her life... 

What if the rest won’t like her? 

Y/N cleared her throat, realizing that she was still staring at her phone like hypnotized and her audience was already asking her what’s going on. She quickly typed in the code Sean had texted her and readjusted her headphones, before joining the discord chat.

“THERE SHE IS” screamed Sean, making her grin from ear to ear, hearing how excited he was “Little wonderchild!”

“I think you meant little TRAITOR” Felix corrected him with a scoff. A silence settled in the lobby as everyone was waiting for Y/N to speak up.

“Um... hello everyone..” she said softly, almost inaudibly, a sudden wave of shyness taking over her. “I’m Y/N” 

“Oh, you were right about that Corpse thing!” replied another, also very soft and very sweet voice, and Y/N saw the image of someone named Lily pop up. “It’s like the exact opposite!” 

“See? Told ya. Everyone, meet Y/N/N, the little angel from Y/C/N.” 

“Hey Y/N!”

“Hi there!”

“Hey, what’s up?”

“H-Hi, so great to meet you, Y/N!” a very friendly sounding voice said, and a little lime astronaut with the name Sykkuno above it started running around her. “Can’t wait to play with you!”

“That’s so nice, thank you” she replied with a wide smile on her face, moving around his character as well. “I can’t wait to play with you too, actually with all you guys. It’s so great to be here with you.”

“Jack I swear she’s the cutest little thing I’ve ever heard. Where the hell did you find her?!” Poki all but yelled at the man, making Y/N giggle to herself and in-process loosen up a little bit. They all seemed like someone she’d happily be friends with. 

“Or rather, where do you get one?” someone else commented, making them all burst into laughter, Y/N included. 

“Guys, what did I say about that sweet demeanor...” Jack said after calming down from his fit “Don’t put your guard down just because she sounds like that!”

“Wait- what did you tell them about me?” Y/N asked confused, the tone of her voice making him laugh even more “Jack!”

“Don’t worry, only the good stuff” a very deep, low voice spoke up, leaving her taken aback for a moment. Her eyes widened slightly and she glanced at the name of that person, reading out CORPSE. Now that’s something she didn’t expect... 

“Corpse, mind your manners! You didn’t even introduce yourself!” 

“Oh, shit- yeah, sorry. Um, I’m Corpse, it’s very nice to meet you Y/N” he replied right after, making her lip corners curl up into a smile. 

“Nice to meet you too Corpse, you have a really pleasant voice.” she spoke sweetly, completely unaware of the chaos that was taking place in her stream chat. She didn’t even think of it the way her audience did, she just simply spoke up her mind, and being an incredibly nice person - turned it into a compliment.

“Oh- wow. I mean, thank you so much. I love your voice too, it’s really sweet” he replied, nervously chuckling at the end, before muting his mic. It was, however, enough for Felix and Sean to start teasing him, as the two immediately screamed:

“SIIIMP!!!”

“It’s the voice Felix, I told you he’d fall into her trap!” 

“Wait- he was just being nice, guys! Stop making fun of him” Y/N immediately defended the man, trying to speak up over the hysterical laughter of the other players. 

“Oh my god, but what if they both get impostors and they both pull the voice cards on us?!” Rae managed to yell through all the noise, making Y/N even more confused.

“Wait, what? What do you mean? I don’t understand.” 

“Don’t worry Y/N, that’s how I feel all the time around them.” Sykkuno seemed to be the only one who heard her question, as the rest continued their gabbing without giving her as much as a glance. 

“Alright, let’s start the game maybe. I might have a few old scores to settle” Toast cleared his throat theatrically, his astronaut coming face to face with Y/N’s. 

“Oh, you mean me? I thought I already apologized!” she replied frantically. “You gave me no choice Toast, I didn’t even want to kill you in the first place...”

“BUT YOU DID. IN THE VERY FIRST ROUND” 

“I’m sorry!” 

“Alright, enough! Toast, just don’t kill her right away, okay? Let her run around the map, fearing for her life for a moment.” Y/N gasped upon hearing Jack’s words, clearly sensing the smirk behind his voice. 

“Wha- Jack?! Since when are you against me?!” 

“Don’t worry Y/N, I won’t let them hurt you. You haven’t played with us yet, I’ll protect you.” 

“Oh, thank you so much Sykkuno! I’ll protect you too!” 

“Great. Another one simping...” was Felix’s last words, before the game began. 

Y/N sighed in relief upon seeing the word crewmate forming on her screen, but at the same time feared Toast’s inevitable revenge. She thought they'd already buried the hatchet, but it seemed that he was desperate to make her pay for the last time they played together. 

“Aw, Sykkuno was serious” she mumbled with a smile, when his lime astronaut started circling her white one, so she would follow him. “Okay, let’s do some tasks.”

They both made their way towards the medbay, Sykkuno patiently waiting nearby as she did the scan, then Y/N waiting for him to do the same. The moment his little character stepped towards her, a meeting was called by none other than Felix.

“What happened?” Rae asked.

“I called the meeting because I’m afraid of Jack” he responded, causing everyone to laugh. “Seriously though! Dude’s been following me around the whole time.”

“I was just making sure nobody kills you.”

“Yeah don’t go all Sykkuno on me!” Felix screamed, making the call erupt into even more laughter. 

“Alright, are we skipping?” 

“Yeah.”

“Guys, my life is in danger!” Felix wouldn’t give up. “Come on, show some support! Y/N? You played with him, you know his techniques!” 

“Sorry Felix” Y/N giggled, clicking the skip button. 

When the next round began, Sykkuno was quick to join Y/N on her way towards admin, where they both found Poki doing the upload. They did the card swipe and left her there, when the lights suddenly went off.

“Uh-oh. Let’s head the opposite direction, Sykkuno” the girl murmured, dancing around his character and heading towards Comms instead of going to Electrical. It was the easiest way to die, after all. 

Once they entered the room and waited for someone to fix the lights, Y/N could see another figure appear in the same location. She couldn’t recognize whose character it was, but upon seeing the horns on the helmet she smiled to herself.

“Hey there, Corpse” she said, walking up to the black astronaut, who was standing still in the same place as if he was just watching her and Sykkuno run around Comms instead of doing their tasks. 

They stood like that for a couple of seconds until Corpse turned around and ran away, and that’s when the first body was reported. 

“Oh no, Jack!” 

“Poor guy. He’s gonna haunt us now.”

“Where’s the body?” 

“Navigation” replied Rae, who was the one to find Sean’s green astronauts’ body “Didn’t see anyone around, but I’m pretty sure someone just vented right in front of my eyes...”

“Any suspicions?” Toast asked.

“Um, not really sure, it was the exact same moment the lights went off. I was doing tasks with Jack and then he just died. I only saw the vent close, nothing or no one else.”

“Okay, where are you guys right now?” 

“I’m in admin with Dave, we only passed Poki when we got there.” Lily’s voice sounded out, quickly being joined by Poki’s explanation.

“Yeah, I was finishing the upload when you guys came in, Y/N and Sykkuno saw it”

“Did you see her?” Toast asked, addressing his question towards the white and lime astronauts. 

“Yes, we were doing the card swipe before going to Comms. Corpse joined us for a moment and then left.”

“Yeah, I was on my way to fix the lights when I stumbled upon them in Comms, the body was reported the exact moment I left.”

“Can someone confirm this? I mean, did someone see you besides the two of them?” Toast continued his questioning. 

“I think I only saw Felix in Medbay.”

“Hmm, so no one really knows where you were this whole time. You could easily lure Jack into Navigation and kill him there. Is that what you did, Corpse?”

“Woah, that’s some serious accusation” Corpse replied in his usual, low and calm voice. “Where were you Toast? You seem the only one who still doesn’t have an alibi”

“Neither does Felix.” Y/N spoke innocently, and the mentioned man quickly started his explanation.

“Okay, I was with Jack at the beginning but he clearly can’t confirm this since someone snapped his fucking neck. We’ve split up in O2 after doing our tasks and then he must’ve gone with Rae. I just wandered around the map, escaping from the death.”

“Hmm, so not only were you one of the last people to see him alive, but you also admit to not doing your tasks” Y/N said, trying her best to keep her voice steady and stop herself from laughing. She was sure Sykkuno was doing the same thing, they both refused to do any tasks after the lights went off, after all.

“Yeah, but does that already makes me an Imposter? I’m just scared for my life, that’s all.”

“Y/N has some good logic, but I’m not really sure it’s Pewds. I mean, I saw him in Medbay and he really seemed to be just jogging around.” Corpse said, his voice almost immediately doing its magic, as people more or less willingly agreed to skip this round as well. 

“I think it’s Felix. I mean, I haven’t played with him yet, but I have this feeling that he’s just acting.” Y/N said to her chat after muting herself. She went towards Weapons to do another task, seeing Sykkuno’s little character follow her once again, but the doors were suddenly locked and his lime astronaut remained in Cafeteria. “Oh no, Sykkuno” she sighed with a pout on her face, deciding against waiting for him and risking getting her neck snapped. She finished her task in Weapons and moved towards another location, when suddenly Corpse appeared in front of her, coming right out of nowhere. 

“Oh- Corpse, you scared me to death” Y/N breathed a laugh, watching as his character stood still for a couple of seconds, before circling around her white astronaut. Y/N nodded her head with a smile, even though he couldn’t see her, and followed him in Shields, where they found Poki’s dead body. 

“The body is in Shields” Y/N replied right after reporting the body, only to gasp in shock when she realized more than one person was killed. Red crosses decorated not only Poki’s name but were also visible next to Dave and Lily. 

“What the hell?!” Felix all but yelled into his mic, obviously shocked just like everyone else who was still alive. 

“Now that’s... a lot of bodies” Sykkuno mumbled under his breath. 

“Alright, who’s in Shields? Y/N, you said you found the body there, which one?”

“Poki’s, Corpse was there with me” her reply was followed by his short and low hum. 

“Sykkuno, where are you? I didn’t see you anywhere since the last round.” Felix asked, clearly accusing the lime astronaut of being a murderer. 

“I was... doing the wires in electrical, Toast was there for a moment as well.”

“Yeah but I was only searching for the body, so I saw you maybe for a second” Toast replied, building even more suspicions around Sykkuno.

“But- guys, you know I wouldn’t kill two people in one round, let alone four of them.”

“No one says you did that, I only mentioned that you were nowhere to be seen. You could’ve been sabotaging the map for the other Impostor” Felix said nonchalantly.

“Guys, I-”

“It’s him! It must be him!” Rae shouted through her mic. 

“Sykkuno is 100% innocent, I can vouch for him” Y/N’s voice sounded out in everyone’s headphones “We were together since the start of the game and he didn’t kill me, even though he had quite a number of chances to do so.”

“Weren’t you with Corpse this time?” Felix asked suspiciously.

“I was! But at the beginning, I was with Sykkuno, until someone locked him in Cafeteria. That’s when we split up.”

“And you haven’t seen him ever since?”

“Well, no, but-”

“Then I can assure you it was only a matter of time before he’d stab you in the back” Toast concluded, making Sykkuno gasp in confusion.

“Wha- No, I would never do that! Y/N is our guest, I was just making sure she was okay!”

“Sykkuno, simping won’t save your life right now” 

“Wha- I- Guys!” he tried to stutter out some logical explanation “Y/N, don’t believe them!”

“I don’t, I know you’re innocent! C’mon guys, he wouldn’t do it!” 

“Yeah yeah, let’s kick him out. Corpse, who are you voting?” Toast asked, and Y/N could see the I voted sign next to his character. 

“I kinda feel like Felix tries to shift the blame onto Sykkuno. He didn’t even tell his location, and was already throwing accusations on someone else.” Corpse replied after a moment, making the smile widen on Y/N’s face. Someone was finally on her side! 

“That’s because he can’t even explain himself!” Felix exclaimed, voting as well. 

“Besides, I’m pretty sure if it wasn’t for whoever locked that door, Y/N would be dead as well!” 

“No, I told you I-!”

“Guys, we have ten seconds to vote. Rae?” 

“I think it’s him as well. He was acting suspiciously since we started this round. I vote Sykkuno”

“But..!” 

“No, Sykkuno...” Y/N whispered with a pout on her lips, when she saw the number of people who voted for her lime friend. 

Sykkuno was ejected. 

“Alright, I’m pretty sure it’s Felix. I saw Rae multiple times and she didn’t kill me, Toast also doesn’t act very Impostor like, but maybe that’s just one of his strategies... Corpse is with me again, I don’t think that’s him, I mean, he followed me around last round, but still didn’t do anything, and even vouched for me and Sykkuno when we were both clearly chilling in comms. It can’t be him... right?” 

 Dead body reported.

 “I just saw Corpse kill Toast, then vent!” Rae’s voice blared through Y/N’s headphones, as she looked in shock at the red cross next to Toast’s name. If not him, then..?

“What?” the accused man asked calmly “That’s a self-report, she’s trying to frame me. You guys can’t possibly believe her.”

“I believe her. I saw you enter the Electrical with Toast, then he’s suddenly dead” Felix said. 

“That’s because she vented in there and killed him.”

“No! I swear, Y/N/N you have to believe me!” she directed her words towards the girl who remained silent during their discussion, processing her accusations over and over in her head. “I was fixing the wires, Toast was doing another task, and then boom! I see Corpse snapping his neck!”

“How could you see that if the lights were off?” Y/N suddenly asked, making Rae cut her own sentence off “No one went to fix them, they were off the entire round.”

Silence. 

“It’s Rae, it must be her” Corpse couldn’t help but laugh wholeheartedly at how small was the mistake which completely blew Rae’s cover. “We’re voting Rae, right Y/N?”

“No! Guys, I mean, let me explain, I-!”

Rae was ejected. 

“Now that was something I didn’t expect. I would’ve never thought it was her, I even suspected that Sykkuno might really have been the other Impostor, but now... It’s just me, Corpse, and Felix. I’m clear, clearly, so it must be one of them. And since Corpse protected me for the past few rounds, there’s no other option than...”

Her eyes suddenly widened when the realization hit her, and she quickly turned around to speed towards the emergency button. Fortunately, no one was around to stop her from calling the meeting.

“Felix.” Y/N started, trying to contain her excitement and sound seriously “Where were you when Sean was killed?”

Neither Corpse of Felix said a word, as it was probably the last question they expected her to ask. Felix cleared his throat, however, and finally replied:

“Y/N, that was literally the beginning of a game. How am I supposed to remember what I did then?”

“Well” she said nonchalantly “I, for example, clearly remember the things you said even when we were in the lobby.”

“What are you implying?” 

“Wasn’t it you, who told everyone that Sean was your number one if you get Impostor?” she asked with a wicked smile on her face. Felix was dumbfounded, he obviously didn’t expect her to pull that card on him, hell, he didn’t even know how she knew about it since she wasn’t even in the call at the time. 

“FELIX” Corpse suddenly broke the silence, simultaneously breaking the said man from his train of thoughts. 

“Okay, first of all- YOU WEREN’T EVEN IN THE CALL WHEN I SAID THAT” he yelled through his mic, making both Y/N and Corpse laugh, as it only confirmed their suspicions. 

“See? You only proved my point.” 

“Oh, fuck’s sake- I was just joking okay?!” he tried to defend himself, but hearing how he couldn’t even contain his own laughter anymore, it was clear he already accepted the defeat. “It wasn’t serious, god damn it!” 

“You know what to do, Y/N” Corpse’s voice asked through her headphones, and surely, she knew exactly what to do.

“C’mon Y/N, that’s not fair! At least let me explain myself!” 

“Bye Felix” she said in an overly dramatic tone before Corpse voted as well. 

Soon enough, the sign VICTORY could be seen on her screen, which made her squeak and joy. This game was really fun, even though she was so scared of being killed first. 

“I knew it! I knew you would figure out it’s him! That son of a bitch who murdered me!” Jack basically yelled out, clearly very happy about the result. 

“Y/N, seriously now, how did you know I’ve said that?” Felix asked without even hiding his surprised tone.

“Let’s just say I might’ve stolen some of your viewers, Felix” she admitted, winking at her webcam, a new wave of comments landing on her chat. “Thanks guys!” 

“Okay, that is rude and not fair!” 

“It helped me win, so I’ve got nothing else to say” Y/N grinned from ear to ear, before muting herself for a moment to finally answer some of the questions from her chat, while the rest took a quick break to eat something or go to the bathroom.

She was halfway through telling the story of how she met Sean when she noticed she got a message from a private discord chat. 

CORPSE: That was really impressive :)

Y/N smiled to herself upon seeing his text and quickly typed out the answer. 

Y/N: Thanks!! I wouldn’t have done that without you though, you stood up for me and Sykkuno and all

Y/N: Also, thanks for protecting me from being murdered ^^

CORPSE: No problem, I knew you were innocent right away. 

CORPSE: Anyway, good game, Sean was right saying that you’re one of the best players

She couldn’t help the blush that arose on her cheeks, it was very sweet of him to say that, even though she didn’t actually do much except for exposing Felix. 

Y/N: I wasn’t an Impostor though, so you didn’t really see much :)

She watched the three dots beside his name, that signaled he was still texting. The chat was completely forgotten, but people seemed to quickly notice that small, shy smile on her lips, and the pink tint decoring her cheeks.

CORPSE: Okay, now I’m intrigued... 

Y/N: Maybe we’ll both be Impostors one day ^^

CORPSE: Can’t wait for that to happen.

Soon enough, they returned to the lobby to begin another game. Y/N glanced at her chat for a second, and the moment she returned her eyes to the game, her jaw basically dropped. 

IMPOSTOR was written in bold letters in the middle of the red screen, right above her name.

Corpse’s little character was standing beside her. 

[reading-writing-revolution]

Heather Cox Richardson

October 4, 2021 (Monday)

“hello literally everyone,” the official account of Twitter tweeted this afternoon, after Facebook and its affiliated platforms Instagram and WhatsApp went dark at about 11:40 this morning. The Facebook outage lasted for more than six hours and appears to have been caused by an internal error. But the void caused by the absence of the internet giant illustrated its power at a time when the use of that power has come under scrutiny.

In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal began to publish a series of investigative stories based on documents provided by a whistle-blower.

The “Facebook Files” explore how the company has “whitelisted” high-profile users, exempting them from the rules that put limits on ordinary users. Another article reveals that researchers showed Facebook executives evidence that Instagram damages teenage girls by pushing an ideal body image and that they flagged the increasing use of the site by drug smugglers, human traffickers, and other criminals; their discoveries went unaddressed.

Concerned about declining engagement with their material, Facebook allegedly privileged polarizing material that engaged people by preying on their emotions. It appeared to have encouraged the extremism that led to the January 6 insurrection, lowering restrictions against disinformation quickly after the 2020 election.

Last night, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen revealed herself to be the source of the documents. She is concerned, she says, that Facebook consistently looks to maximize profits even if it means ignoring disinformation. Her lawyers have filed at least eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees companies and financial markets. Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said it was “ludicrous” to blame Facebook for the events of January 6. Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg have not commented.

Lawmakers have repeatedly asked Facebook to produce documents for their scrutiny and to testify about the social media platform’s public safeguards. Tomorrow, Haugen will testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security about the effects of social media on teenagers. Her lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, told Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima of the Washington Post that Haugen’s information is important because “Big Tech is at an inflection point…. It touches every aspect of our lives—whether it’s individuals personally or democratic institutions globally. With such far-reaching consequences, transparency is critical to oversight, and lawful whistleblowing is a critical component of oversight and holding companies accountable.”

Amidst the outrage over the Facebook revelations, technology reporter Kevin Roose at the New York Times suggested that the company’s aggressive attempts to court engagement reveal weakness, rather than strength, as younger users have fled to TikTok and other sites and Facebook has become the domain of older Americans. He notes that Facebook’s researchers foresee a drop of 45% in daily use in the next two years, suggesting that the company is desperate either to retain users or to create new ones.

While the technology Facebook represents is new, the concerns it raises echo public discussion of late nineteenth century industrialization, which was also the product of new technologies. At stake then was whether the concentration of economic power in a few hands would destroy our democracy by giving some rich men far more power than the other men in the country. How could the nation both preserve the right of individuals to build industries and preserve the concept of the common good in the face of technology that permitted unprecedented accumulations of wealth?

While money is certainly at stake in the issue of Facebook’s power today, the more pressing issue for our country is whether social media giants will destroy our democracy through their ability to spread disinformation that sows division and turns us against one another.

When we began to grapple with the excesses of industrialism, lots of people thought the whole system needed to be taken apart—by violence if necessary—while others hoped to save the benefits the technology brought without letting it destroy the country. Americans eventually solved the problems that industrialization raised for democracy by reining in the Wild West mentality of the early industrialists, protecting the basic rights of workers, and regulating business practices.

The leaked Facebook documents suggest there are places where the disinformation at Facebook could be reined in as the overreaches of industrialization were. When Zuckerberg tried to promote coronavirus vaccines on the site, anti-vaxxers undermined his efforts. But one document showed that “out of nearly 150,000 posters in Facebook Groups disabled for Covid misinformation, 5% were producing half of all posts, and around 1,400 users were responsible for inviting half the groups’ new members.” Researchers concluded: “We found, like many problems at FB, this is a head-heavy problem with a relatively few number of actors creating a large percentage of the content and growth.”

“I don’t hate Facebook,” Haugen wrote in a final message to her colleagues at the company. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”

While most Americans were busy watching Facebook crash—the falling stock took between $5 billion and $7 billion of Zuckerberg’s net worth—drama in Washington, D.C., was an even bigger deal.

Los Angeles Times reporter Sarah D. Wire noted that the rioters who broke into the Capitol on January 6 ran more than 100 feet past 15 reinforced windows, “making a beeline” to four windows that had been left unreinforced in a renovation of the building between 2017 and 2019. They found the four windows, located in a recessed part of the building, Wire wrote, “by sheer luck, real-time trial and error, or advance knowledge by rioters.”

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will likely look into this oddity.

The committee has begun to take testimony from cooperative witnesses. Observers expect fireworks on Thursday when former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, longtime Trump aide Dan Scavino, Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Trump appointee Kash Patel must hand over documents. Trump has vowed to fight the release of any information to the committee. Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) says the committee will make criminal referrals for anyone ignoring a subpoena.

Finally, today, the debt ceiling fight got even hotter. While Congress passed a continuing resolution to fund the government through December 3, the issue of the debt ceiling, which stops the government from borrowing money Congress has already spent, remains unresolved. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the government will be unable to pay its obligations after October 18, and warns that a default, which has never before happened, would be catastrophic.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) insists the Democrats must raise the debt ceiling themselves, although the Republicans raised it three times under former president Trump and added $7.8 trillion to the debt, which now stands at $28 trillion. But when Democrats tried to pass a measure to raise the ceiling, Republicans filibustered it. As Greg Sargent points out in the Washington Post, McConnell is trying to force the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered. Since they get only one chance to pass such a bill this year, this would force them to dump their infrastructure bill.

McConnell is holding the nation hostage to keep the Democrats from passing a very popular bill, and today, Biden called him on it. McConnell complained that congressional Democrats were “sleepwalking toward significant and avoidable danger,” prompting Biden to demand that Republicans “stop playing Russian roulette with the U.S. economy.... Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, but threatening to use their power to prevent us from doing our job—saving the economy from a catastrophic event—I think, quite frankly, is hypocritical, dangerous and disgraceful. Their obstruction and irresponsibility knows absolutely no bounds.”

When asked if he could guarantee we would not default on our debts, Biden said, “No, I can’t…. That’s up to Mitch McConnell.” If McConnell doesn’t blink and the Republicans continue to filibuster Democrats’ attempts to save the economy, there will be enormous pressure on the Democrats to break the filibuster.

Meanwhile, every day this drags on, Congress does not pass the Freedom to Vote Act.

[dontmeantobepoliticalbut]

Trump & the Military

(This was shamelessly copy/pasted from OP on Reddit (u/myusernameiscool1234, thanks dude!) because it needs to be spread and I wanted to update a tad, add links and reformat it so it's easier to follow. I'm sure I'm missing stuff, so feel free to add to it and I'll try to update accordingly. Please Share!)

On Military Service

• Trump dodged the draft 5 times, 4 for college and 1 by having a doctor diagnose him with bone spurs.

• Trump said having unprotected sex was his own personal Vietnam (1998)

• Trump said “I felt that I was in the military in the true sense because I dealt with those people” because he went to a military-style academy and that he has “more training militarily than a lot of the guys that go into the military”. (2015 biography)

• Trump accepted a Purple Heart from a fan at one of his rallies and said: “I always wanted to get the Purple Heart. This was much easier.” (Aug 2, 2016)

• ⁠No Trump in America has ever served in the military; this spans 5 generations, and every branch of the family tree. In fact, the reason his grandfather immigrated to America was to avoid military service

• Trump made his 2nd wife, Marla Maples, sign a prenup that would have cut off all child support if Tiffany joined the military (reported on June 4th, 2019)

Use & Treatment of Military

• He sent commandos into an ambush due to a lack of intel, and sends contractors to pick them up, resulting in a commando being left behind, tortured, and executed. (Trump approved the mission because Bannon told him Obama didn’t have the guts to do it) (Oct 4, 2017)

• He forgot the aforementioned fallen soldier’s name during a call to his pregnant widow, then attacked her the next day (Oct 23-24, 2017)

• He urged Florida to not count deployed military votes (Nov 12, 2018)

• He used troops as a political prop by sending them on a phantom mission to the border and made them miss Thanksgiving with their families (Oct-Dec, 2018).

• He stopped using troops as a political prop immediately after the election. However, the troops remained in muddy camps on the border (Nov 7, 2018).

• He called troops on Thanksgiving and told them he’s most thankful for himself (Thanksgiving, 2018)

• He fired service members living with HIV just before the 2018 holidays (Dec 19, 2018-present)

• He finally visited troops 2 years after taking office, but only after 154 vacation days at his properties (Dec 26, 2018)

• Trump lied to deployed troops that he gave them a 10% raise. He didn’t give them a 10% raise (Dec 26, 2018). He initially tried to give the military a raise that was lower than the standard living adjustment. This was before Congress told him that idea wasn’t going to work. Then after giving them the raise that Congress made him, he lied about it pretending that it was larger than Obama’s. It wasn’t.

• He revealed a covert Seal Team 5 deployment , including names and faces, on Twitter during his visit to Iraq. Endangering both the operatives and their families. (Dec 26, 2018)

• He refused to sign his party’s funding bill, which shut down the government, and forced a branch of the military (see below) to go without pay. This branch of military was forced to work without pay, otherwise they would be AWOL. However, his appointees got a $ 10,000 pay raise (Dec 22, 2018 – Jan 25, 2019)

• He didn’t pay the Coast Guard, forcing service members to rely on food pantries (Jan 23, 2019)

• He denied female troops access to birth control to limit sexual activity (on-going. Published Jan 18, 2019)

• He banned service members from serving based on gender identity (Jan 22, 2019)

• He diverted military housing funds to pay for border wall (Feb 15, 2019). A judge subsequently denied this. In July 2019, SCOTUS ruled that Trump could in fact divert military housing funds to pay for his wall.

• Trump pardoned war criminals (May, 2019)

• In May 2019, Trump turned away US military from his Memorial Day speech because they were from the destroyer USS John S. McCain. Trump initially ordered the USS John McCain out of sight during his visit to Japan (May 15, 2019) which led to the ship’s name subsequently being covered. (May 27, 2019)

• In June 2019, Trump sent troops to the border to paint the fence for a better “aesthetic appearance” (June 7, 2019)

• Trump demanded US military chiefs stand next to him at 4th of July parade (reported July 2, 2019)

• Trump made the U.S. Navy Blue Angels violate ethics rules by having them fly at his July 4th political campaign (July 4, 2019)

• On July 31, 2019, Trump ordered the Navy rescind medals to prosecutors who were prosecuting war criminals.

• On ⁠October 8th, 2019, Trump plans to withdraw from Open Skies treaty giving Russia the ability to target our military aircraft.

Attacks on Service Members

• Trump said he doesn’t consider POWs heroes because they were caught. Says he "prefers people who were not caught" (July 18, 2015)

• He said he knows more about ISIS than American generals (Oct 2016)

• Trump attacks Gold Star families including: Myeshia Johnson — a gold star widow and the Khan family—gold star parents (2016-present)

• He called a retired general a ‘dog’ with a ‘big, dumb mouth’ (Jan 1, 2019)

• Well documented dislike of Sen. John McCain, going back to his statement on POWs (see above) and leading up to McCain’s passing. On March 20, 2019, Trump complained that deceased war hero, Sen. John McCain, didn’t thank him for his funeral.

• Trump started his D-Day commemoration speech by attacking a private citizen (Bette Midler, of all people) (reported on June 4th, 2019)

• Trump used his D-Day interview at a cemetery commemorating fallen US soldiers to attack Robert Muller, former FBI special counsel and a Vietnam veteran (June 6, 2019)

• Children of deployed US troops will no longer get automatic American citizenship if born overseas during deployment. This includes US troops posted abroad for years at a time (August 28, 2019)

• After he pleading with superiors in a letter asking to offload most of the sailors on the ship in order to allow for social distancing and sanitizing the USS Theodore Roosevelt, Trump attacks Capt. Crozier calling his letter “terrible” and "not appropriate” leading the Secretary of the Navy to remove Capt. Crozier from his post. 114 of 4,000 sailors on the ship had already tested po sitive for COVID-19. (April 3, 2020)

• On June 24, 2020, the White House ends the National Guard's deployments to assist the American people during the COVID-19 pandemic, the day before thousands of National Guard members would qualify for early retirement and education benefits under the Post-9/11 GI bill.

Immigrants in the military

• He deported veterans (2017-present)

• He ordered the discharge of active-duty immigrant troops with good records (2017-present)

• Trump doubled the rejection rate for veterans requesting family deportation protections (July 5, 2018)

• Trump deported active-duty spouses (11,800 military families face this problem as of April 2018).

• Trump deported a spouse of fallen Army soldier killed in Afghanistan, leaving their daughter parentless. The US has since overturned this as of April 16, 2019.

• In July 2019, Trump denied a United States Marine of 6 years entry into the United States for his scheduled citizenship interview (Reported July 17, 2019)

Treatment of Veterans

• For a decade, Trump sought to kick veterans off of Fifth Avenue because he found them unsightly nuisances outside of Trump Tower. Being quoted as saying, “While disabled veterans should be given every opportunity to earn a living, is it fair to do so to the detriment of the city as a whole or its tax paying citizens and businesses?” in 1991.

• Trump sent funds raised from a January 2016 veterans’ benefit to the Donald J Trump Foundation instead of veteran’s charities (Jan, 2016). The foundation has since been ordered shut because of fraud and Trump to pay $2 million in damages as of November 2019.

• The controversy surrounding wether or not he said vets get PTSD because they "aren’t strong" (Oct 3, 2016)

• He blocked a veteran group on Twitter (June 2017)

• Trump changed the GI Bill through his Forever GI Act.

• Trump changing the GI Bill caused the VA to miss veteran benefits, including housing allowances and forced many veterans to run out of food and rent. “You can count on us to serve, but we can’t count on the VA to make a deadline,” one veteran said. (reported October 7, 2018)

• While in Europe commemorating the end of WWI, he didn’t attend the ceremony at a US cemetery due to the rain – but other world leaders went anyway (Nov 10, 2018)

• He got three Mar-a-Lago guests to run the VA (unknown start – present, made well-known in 2018)

• He increased privatization of the VA, leading to longer waits and higher taxpayer cost (2018)

• He tried to slash disability and unemployment benefits for Veterans to $0, and eliminate the unemployability extrascheduler rating (Dec 17, 2018)

• He canceled an Arlington Cemetery visit on Veterans Day due to light rain (Nov 12, 2018)

• He tried to deport a marine vet who is a U.S.-born citizen (Jan 16, 2019). He deported countless other veterans (2017-present)

• When a man was caught swindling veterans’ pensions for high-interest “cash advances,” Trump’s Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fined him $1. As a reminder, the Trump administration’s goal was to dismantle the CFPB, installing Mick Mulvaney as the director, who publicly stated the bureau should be disbanded. (Jan 26, 2019)

• Trump purged 200,000 veterans’ healthcare applications (due to known administrative errors within VA’s enrollment process and enrollment system) (reported on May 13, 2019)

• On August 2, 2019, Trump requisitioned military retirement funds towards the border wall.

[fandom-sheep]

MCC 18 SEP 21

Yellow Yacks and Cyan Coyotes with a little Aqua Axolotls. Part 1/1

The only reason I didn’t forget MCC was because I got the notification for Eret.

I have Wilbur on my TV. I’m going to watch Eret on my phone. And I’ll have Tommy on my iPad probably.

Wilbur throwing a tantrum and saying he won’t play.

I feel like a true Gen Z member with my multiple screens of minecraft.

I’m only just getting the Wilbur notification.

I love watching everyone run around before MCC and scale things.

Griefing the thumbnail. 😂

Wilbur just causes problems on purpose when it comes to group photos doesn’t he.

He just loves finding ways to cause problems.

Wilbur got a coconut!?!

I didn’t mean to type the question mark originally. But I am a bit confused.

Wilbur just stocking up on coconuts

True friendship is a quote book. I have several.

Baby banana boo.

Wait. I heard the word tumblr

Scott what did you do with tumblr?

I’m scared. Only Eret permitted on tumblr.

I remember watching hole in the wall as a tv show as a kid.

Wilbur’s glasses that don’t do anything.

There are September discounts for subbing?

Neato.

The conversations in my work discord are something else.

Not surprised that Wilbur is going for top swearer of MCC

But my residents are going to walk by my door and judge me.

Alright I apparently wasn’t signed in to twitch on my iPad and it took me entirely too long to learn to remember it.

Tommy looks like he’s really concentrating. Oh wait never mind.

Wow the yaks are in first currently. I might be cheering for a winning team for once.

Alright I have my iPad split screen between Tommy and the MCC website.

Everyone break the elevator!

In the game, not in the building I work. I don’t want that paperwork.

Stick together and place many block.

I’ve been in Wilburs position. “I’ll be captain” “yeah let’s let Wilbur be captain”

Not a single POV I have up is synced. But that’s life.

Oh not starting out strong.

Just keep going. Ignore the falling people just like ranboo last time.

We are at the absolute bottom for this game.

Where’s a bag of popcorn or something?

“Stay down there. That’s how I won that one time” -Ranboo

Down they go.

They didn’t have anywhere to run.

Second round!

Oh that wasn’t their best idea. It was fun seeing Erets POV of that.

Go Teams.

Turning down the volume on yellow yacks to listen to aqua axolotls.

Aqua please. You have so much potential.

Nope.

Switching audio again.

Yellow back at the bottom.

Ranboo ranboo ranboo ranboo

Down he goes. 😂 the timing of that was funny.

Please. Don’t die

Wilbur. Scott. Please.

Scott uncovering the creeper.

Their plan is literally just sit and be.

To be fair that’s my plan for everything I do.

Oh cobwebs are smart.

I’m eating very salty Chick-fil-A chips and need water.

We are still doing ok. Wow.

Cobwebs man. The real MVP.

They are still in 10th

COBWEBS!!! And Wilbur standing on the edge of a block.

THEY WON THAT?!?!!!!

It moved them from last to eight. But still. Wow.

Holy cow. How did that happen.

I always forget what the acronym game is.

Oh yeah. Wilbur snuck and found this. I remember.

Go team!

Oh the website updates faster than the game. But we’re starting off decent.

I’m going to have to take back that statement aren’t I?

Go go go go

Fly fly fly fly

Build build build build

Go Wilbur!

Rafter strat.

Wilbur found the rafters and everyone else loved it.

Blocking his own jump. 😂

I really should do the inside joke chair emoji thing for laughing. But I don’t care.

Tiktok is nice. Depends on the side you are on, but it’s nice.

We are doing halfway decent. I’m proud of us.

Wilbur is struggling and I think he might cry.

Not bad. I don’t think.

Power sweater.

This game in MCC has rainbow road vibes

I’ll have to make that it’s own post since I feel that’ll be popular ish.

Holy cow we hit first on the website!! How?

Ranboo sweet one.

They said no peaking to Wilbur.

Wilbur making them block stuff off and the like is so funny.

Run yaks run!

I missed the moment Wilbur just mentioned. Oh well I’m sure I’ll see the clip.

First last first.

Hey 4th overall. Look at em.

Wilbur switching to full screen to show us his M&Ms.

Let me balance my water bottle on the bedpost above my head. No way this could possibly go wrong in multiple ways.

Double coins. Gorgeous.

Chickens are being sniped.

What’s going to work? TEAM WORK!

I don’t think I have ever watched a game of grid runners in my life?

Alright game should start any second because it started on the website.

Alright stream is delayed about 13 seconds.

Go teams go!

Wilbur just sniping targets.

We’re doing ok.

All this dirt.

Go go go

We’re completing things first.

Cake!

Wilbur got in!

Now they eat

Oh but they are falling.

Oh wow the painting is complicated. My friends and I would fail to communicate so fast.

Is this lever thing just find the button but complicated?

Go you got the levers!

Items grab!

My friends and I would seriously struggle unless I was allowed the lead. But I would lead us off a cliff.

Everyone get ready to go in as soon as the cake is done.

Exit! You guys are so close! Please!

Woohoo!

Go Ranboo! Go Scott!

Come on guys. Come on. Good communication.

I think I like watching Wilbur with MCC because he had a similar strategy to what I would do.

Wilbur why did you try to act cool!!!

They keep saying they are miles ahead but not according to that scoreboard.

You placed 3rd. Good job y’all.

I’m excited for bonuses.

They have another minute until the others run out of time.

Good soup.

Oh wow. Ranboo and Wilbur really are always totgehe.

We are doing well. I see the board changing on the website so much.

Where will they land.

Looks like 2nd or 3rd

Fourth overall. Not bad.

Lap time is logical.

Audience vote?

Look at me redownloading twitter.

Can you not see how others have voted on twitter?

Oh there it is. It only showed mine for a sec there.

Battle box looks close. I voted ace race.

Oh it all looks close right now.

Long break my beloved.

I don’t have time to start my laundry but still. My beloved.

Game 5/8 so MCC won’t be too much longer.

I look up and Wilbur is shaking his ass at George. I’m not surprised.

Phil and Sneeg judging Wilbur.

Wilbur twerking on Phil and Sneeg joining.

Poor Phil.

Wilbur just having visited so many random places with so many random words just gathered.

Oh wow parkour tag is low. But so is sands.

Oh wow it was a tie. Between Sands and Parkour

“Wilbur is Sand Daddy” -Scott and then all the agreement noises.

Sands of Time is my favorite practical game

Maybe because Wilbur is really good at it. And Ranboo had been trained by him.

This is just good.

I swear Sand daddy is going to kill me during this.

I am just going to pass away.

My stream delay though.

Wilbur who says he stays very quiet as he makes circus music noises.

Minecraft Rhinos. Because I can’t spell their real name.

I don’t quite understand sand of time. But I like watching. It’s like college football.

I am missing the only college football game I care about for MCC.

Go Team.

No blue yet.

All the mobs.

“You better not die” sung to the tune of Santa clause is coming yo town. -Wilbur

Keep it up guys.

Oh no. They lost the key.

Oh good they found the key.

You can tell Wilbur had a musicians brain. He just hears something vaguely lyrical and starts singing a song.

Gotta promote your band whenever you can I guess.

I listened to the last Ep for like an hour and a half yesterday while I went about my day.

I wonder how we’re doing?

Only a few seconds.

I could warm a heating pad in the amount fo time they have left.

Ranboo doing these puzzles so amazingly.

Quit caring about what others think. Just do your thing.

I swear the sand daddy thing.

I love the cage of shame for not tracking your sand.

I zoned out. Red cyan orange?

We’re almost 15 minutes into sands.

I want to play Minecraft on my iPad right now.

Wait the website updated. We were 6th?

Yikes. I thought they did better.

3rd overall though!

Wait what was that about most influential improv thingy? Good for them.

Build mart!

Oh Ace Race. Wilbur calling Ace Race his girlfriend now.

I want to see the enemies to lovers fan fictions of Ace race and Wilbur.

Oh wait I can do that. I can verbally tell one like I have others in the past.

I’m excited to watch this.

Wilbur flirt with the race.

I’m not mentally prepared for this.

Everyone just joined because they don’t want to miss Wilbur x Ace Race.

Oh no. He’s not doing so well.

Oh Wilbur is giving us more.

Complicated history…

Whispering to Ace Race and Solidarity.

You’ve got it Wilbur.

Keep on talking. Keep your brain busy while you play.

Mommmm Wilbur is flirting with Ace Race again!

He’s whispering though so I can’t quite hear it and will have to find a clip channel that added subtitles.

Oh teams are changing on the website.

“What are you doing in my women Philza?” -Wilbur

“I will end your bloodline which is canonically also me.” -Wilbur

I can not track all the quotes from this. That’s beyond my abilities.

Wilbur did halfway decent, but it still uncomfortable.

Ace Race is a person now. Also the fact that Wilbur compliments Ace Race so much.

Sally v. Ace Race.

I want to find that fanart now.

Scott honey. Confirmed cannon is everyone fancies the fish.

4th. Not bad.

We’re still talking Ace Race x Wilbur

Build mart! My dearest buildmart!

I miss them sliding around in the sleds.

Grab da flowers!

We’re in 1st at the minute.

Come on yaks!

No coyotes!

Hurry hurry hurry.

Work discord going it’s thing again.

Oh we’re dropping fast.

Move the redstone! Thank you

Alright back on top. Keep it up.

Nevermind.

I love the way the build spaces for the different teams work.

Who is the person on the build?

Oh first again? Nevermind.

Oh we popped up to second. We’re so behind. Come on.

Duck!

Good soup energy. Now all I can think is the bi wide energy song.

Time is running out.

Yeah we aren’t catching up to first. Just hold second.

Where is granite?

Game over.

Third overall now. Not bad. Last game time they can possibly pull it into dodge bolt.

I need to go get a picture with the President of the university for a game with my work.

Good Soup.

I’m sitting here making popcat noises while waiting.

Game time! Go team! Survive!

Wait where did the steamer go? I wasn’t paying attention.

He’s back.

He’s swearing for his points on the swearing list.

Is pee a soup? No. I don’t think it’s think enough under normal circumstances.

Karl is apparently swearing according to Twitter. Good for him. He deserves to swear some as a treat.

Everyone running and leaving shubble.

Oh good they are all together.

Just keep running.

4th so far.

Cars. Beep beep.

Ranboo breath child.

Calling Wilbur like some kind of golden retriever.

Bow boy

Scott is leader now. Because otherwise they are arguing.

We are playing the don’t die strategy.

Come on team.

Did I put my cut in this post? I did.

Ranboo having stolen the airdrop. And he has a thing!

Oh the boarder is right behind them.

They are fighting Dream?

Nice Will.

We’re in fourth.

Boarder is right there.

Sapnap? Nope.

Pink attack and they book it.

Oh no. There goes Wilbur.

Is it just Scott?

Scott vs the world.

Just Organe and pink. They came third.

GO ORANGE!

Please. Please let us do it.

Overall third. Pink overtook yellow.

Sadness.

Ranboo has achieved: Found Hated Game

Ranboo has been hit by Survival games so many times now.

If they had just lasted a tiny bit longer they would have come second.

Cheering Orange I suppose.

I have no skill at picking winner POVs.

I have 3 teams I was at least kinda watching. And none of them are in dodgebolt.

Gosh can hear Ranboo tweaking.

Wow. Yellow yaks just as a team twerking.

What is Wilbur chewing on? Wilbur don’t chew on things that probably aren’t meant to be chewed on.

I can hear the band outside of my window. I think my campuses football game is starting.

The drum line practiced outside my window all the beginning of the semester so it’s fun seeing them march to the stadium.

Oh and there are the cheerleaders.

Oh right I was watching MCC! Who’s winning?

Come on Orange. So close.

Wait I looked out my window. Why is the band walking back to where they were?

Along the sidewalk?

I thought it was game time for a minute.

Oh dodgebolt could go either way.

Distracted by Jesus.

Grian! You got this!

Nice Grian.

Oh Grian has a chance!

Oh!

Oh!

It’s so close!

Ooo ooo!

I’m so invested.

I SEE THE CONFETTI IN THE SITE! But I don’t want to miss the shot.

Come on Grian.

I know you do it. But you’ve got this

YESSSSS

Woo hoo!!

That was a good MCC. Now to do the chores and homework I originally planned to do today.

That was a nice stream.

Scott is separating Ranboo and Wilbur?

Please. Scott.

Don’t separate the beings.

You know. Twitter needs to politely bully Scott into keeping Ranboo and Will together.

Oop and that’s Wilbur done. That was fun.

See y’all next time!

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

October 4, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

“hello literally everyone,” the official account of Twitter tweeted this afternoon, after Facebook and its affiliated platforms Instagram and WhatsApp went dark at about 11:40 this morning. The Facebook outage lasted for more than six hours and appears to have been caused by an internal error. But the void caused by the absence of the internet giant illustrated its power at a time when the use of that power has come under scrutiny.

In mid-September, the Wall Street Journal began to publish a series of investigative stories based on documents provided by a whistle-blower.

The “Facebook Files” explore how the company has “whitelisted” high-profile users, exempting them from the rules that put limits on ordinary users. Another article reveals that researchers showed Facebook executives evidence that Instagram damages teenage girls by pushing an ideal body image and that they flagged the increasing use of the site by drug smugglers, human traffickers, and other criminals; their discoveries went unaddressed.

Concerned about declining engagement with their material, Facebook allegedly privileged polarizing material that engaged people by preying on their emotions. It appeared to have encouraged the extremism that led to the January 6 insurrection, lowering restrictions against disinformation quickly after the 2020 election.

Last night, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, former Facebook employee Frances Haugen revealed herself to be the source of the documents. She is concerned, she says, that Facebook consistently looks to maximize profits even if it means ignoring disinformation. Her lawyers have filed at least eight complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which oversees companies and financial markets. Facebook’s vice president of global affairs, Nick Clegg, said it was “ludicrous” to blame Facebook for the events of January 6. Chief executive officer Mark Zuckerberg and chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg have not commented.

Lawmakers have repeatedly asked Facebook to produce documents for their scrutiny and to testify about the social media platform’s public safeguards. Tomorrow, Haugen will testify before the Senate Subcommittee on Consumer Protection, Product Safety, and Data Security about the effects of social media on teenagers. Her lawyer, Andrew Bakaj, told Cat Zakrzewski and Cristiano Lima of the Washington Post that Haugen’s information is important because “Big Tech is at an inflection point…. It touches every aspect of our lives—whether it’s individuals personally or democratic institutions globally. With such far-reaching consequences, transparency is critical to oversight, and lawful whistleblowing is a critical component of oversight and holding companies accountable.”

Amidst the outrage over the Facebook revelations, technology reporter Kevin Roose at the New York Times suggested that the company’s aggressive attempts to court engagement reveal weakness, rather than strength, as younger users have fled to TikTok and other sites and Facebook has become the domain of older Americans. He notes that Facebook’s researchers foresee a drop of 45% in daily use in the next two years, suggesting that the company is desperate either to retain users or to create new ones.

While the technology Facebook represents is new, the concerns it raises echo public discussion of late nineteenth century industrialization, which was also the product of new technologies. At stake then was whether the concentration of economic power in a few hands would destroy our democracy by giving some rich men far more power than the other men in the country. How could the nation both preserve the right of individuals to build industries and preserve the concept of the common good in the face of technology that permitted unprecedented accumulations of wealth?

While money is certainly at stake in the issue of Facebook’s power today, the more pressing issue for our country is whether social media giants will destroy our democracy through their ability to spread disinformation that sows division and turns us against one another.

When we began to grapple with the excesses of industrialism, lots of people thought the whole system needed to be taken apart—by violence if necessary—while others hoped to save the benefits the technology brought without letting it destroy the country. Americans eventually solved the problems that industrialization raised for democracy by reining in the Wild West mentality of the early industrialists, protecting the basic rights of workers, and regulating business practices.

The leaked Facebook documents suggest there are places where the disinformation at Facebook could be reined in as the overreaches of industrialization were. When Zuckerberg tried to promote coronavirus vaccines on the site, anti-vaxxers undermined his efforts. But one document showed that “out of nearly 150,000 posters in Facebook Groups disabled for Covid misinformation, 5% were producing half of all posts, and around 1,400 users were responsible for inviting half the groups’ new members.” Researchers concluded: “We found, like many problems at FB, this is a head-heavy problem with a relatively few number of actors creating a large percentage of the content and growth.”

“I don’t hate Facebook,” Haugen wrote in a final message to her colleagues at the company. “I love Facebook. I want to save it.”

While most Americans were busy watching Facebook crash—the falling stock took between $5 billion and $7 billion of Zuckerberg’s net worth—drama in Washington, D.C., was an even bigger deal.

Los Angeles Times reporter Sarah D. Wire noted that the rioters who broke into the Capitol on January 6 ran more than 100 feet past 15 reinforced windows, “making a beeline” to four windows that had been left unreinforced in a renovation of the building between 2017 and 2019. They found the four windows, located in a recessed part of the building, Wire wrote, “by sheer luck, real-time trial and error, or advance knowledge by rioters.”

The Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol will likely look into this oddity.

The committee has begun to take testimony from cooperative witnesses. Observers expect fireworks on Thursday when former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, longtime Trump aide Dan Scavino, Trump adviser Steve Bannon, and Trump appointee Kash Patel must hand over documents. Trump has vowed to fight the release of any information to the committee. Chair Bennie Thompson (D-MS) says the committee will make criminal referrals for anyone ignoring a subpoena.

Finally, today, the debt ceiling fight got even hotter. While Congress passed a continuing resolution to fund the government through December 3, the issue of the debt ceiling, which stops the government from borrowing money Congress has already spent, remains unresolved. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen says the government will be unable to pay its obligations after October 18, and warns that a default, which has never before happened, would be catastrophic.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) insists the Democrats must raise the debt ceiling themselves, although the Republicans raised it three times under former president Trump and added $7.8 trillion to the debt, which now stands at $28 trillion. But when Democrats tried to pass a measure to raise the ceiling, Republicans filibustered it. As Greg Sargent points out in the Washington Post, McConnell is trying to force the Democrats to raise the debt ceiling through reconciliation, which cannot be filibustered. Since they get only one chance to pass such a bill this year, this would force them to dump their infrastructure bill.

McConnell is holding the nation hostage to keep the Democrats from passing a very popular bill, and today, Biden called him on it. McConnell complained that congressional Democrats were “sleepwalking toward significant and avoidable danger,” prompting Biden to demand that Republicans “stop playing Russian roulette with the U.S. economy.... Not only are Republicans refusing to do their job, but threatening to use their power to prevent us from doing our job—saving the economy from a catastrophic event—I think, quite frankly, is hypocritical, dangerous and disgraceful. Their obstruction and irresponsibility knows absolutely no bounds.”

When asked if he could guarantee we would not default on our debts, Biden said, “No, I can’t…. That’s up to Mitch McConnell.” If McConnell doesn’t blink and the Republicans continue to filibuster Democrats’ attempts to save the economy, there will be enormous pressure on the Democrats to break the filibuster.

Meanwhile, every day this drags on, Congress does not pass the Freedom to Vote Act.

—

Notes:

https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2021/10/protecting%20kids%20online:%20testimony%20from%20a%20facebook%20whistleblower

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/03/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-revealed/

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-facebook-files-11631713039

https://apnews.com/article/facebook-whatsapp-instagram-outage-8b9d3862ed957029e545182a595fdce1

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/03/technology/whistle-blower-facebook-frances-haugen.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-whistleblower-frances-haugen-says-she-wants-to-fix-the-company-not-harm-it-11633304122

https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2021/10/04/facebook-instagram-down-outage/

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/04/technology/facebook-files.html

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-mark-zuckerberg-vaccinated-11631880296

https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2021-10-04/jan-6-rioters-exploited-little-known-capitol-weak-spots-a-handful-of-unreinforced-windows

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/01/bennie-thompson-jan-6-panel-subpoena-514940

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/10/04/jan-6-panel-trump-collision-514979

https://www.washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021/10/04/biden-schumer-debt-ceiling/

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[tarantulas4davey]

before my fixation slips to the ice skating au here are some more (shitty) youtuber au hcs:

since al cant call people motherfuckers in among us he starts calling people oedipus and the first time he did davey fucking lost it

the first clip of al to appear on races channel was of him throwing a kitchen knife into the bullseye of a great value brand dartboard

al is the second best imposter in their group, just barely behind davey

race is the second worst, just barely ahead of spot

pre face reveal when al cameod in one of races videos race would do little animations for als facial expressions like lixian does in markipliers vidoes

al films a prank video with race as his victim by setting up one of those light up cloud celings hes always wanted while race was away for a weekend and he was so happy when he got home

when they filmed a video of reacting to fan made comps, al made the mistake of letting race choose which ones they watch. at first it was going good but the last one they watched was "proving al wrong for ___ minutes" and so inthe video, thered be a clip where he called himself ugly and then immediately after there would be a clip of him being cute or like hed call himself stupid and then itd be a clip of him doing some incredible impostering and al was so embarrassed he really did live up to his nickname

skdhjd THANK YOU (also if you ask about the ice skating au i WILL give backstory cause so little of anything is actually explained in the fic itself ngl)

ok ✨let’s do this✨

- holy shit i can’t believe i didn’t think of this i LOVE THIS ONE CJSHHDBD. also they FINALLY figured out proximity chat and davey was imposter with the haunting bug so albert was floating near him and he called him oedipus and davey literally got sussed and voted out cause he couldn’t stop crying with laughter. albert was VERY smug

- i- honestly yeah that’s pretty in character ngl. it’s on race’s second channel and it’s a 5 second clip at the end of a VERY OLD video at this point and it took forever for anyone to realize it was albert even later when he publically knew race. like this clip is from highschool and someone’s like ‘WAIT we could’ve found al y e a r s ago kdhdhdh’

- oh definitely. he’s got one of those voices that barely changes when he lies and nobody really knows his tells, but he gets imposter more than anyone else they play with so if he’s even a little sus he’ll get voted out just in case. davey has a similar playing style to toast, so he’s a fantastic imposter but he’s better as detective. albert’s style is more like corpse, he will literally kill someone and self report and everyone will just believe he didn’t do it. if albert and davey are the imposter duo then the rest of the lobby has ZERO chance, they’ll kill everyone before anybody even hits a report button.

- once again, completely correct. race has the opposite thing as albert, he rarely gets imposter and when he does everyone in the lobby can tell he’s lying almost immediately. he only ever gets imposter wins if he’s paired with someone like albert or davey. as for spot, he’s just wayyyyy to aggressive and gets caught everytime except stack kills. they both are confused with how to use vents and it’s completely nonsensical. once they were the imposter duo and spot killed someone right in front of like 4 people and got voted out, then nobody else died via imposter (jack got voted out for yelling speed run, and al got voted out ‘just in case’ even though we all know albert is not this much of a fool) for 3 full rounds (called by using the emergency button) cause race was too scared of getting caught. he got voted out cause davey caught him misclicking and jumping in a vent

- i have literally nothing to add here it’s perfect as is

- all of al’s “pranks” on race are just him doing shit race wants but won’t ask for.

al: *makes race dinner* get pranked

- it started out fine cause it was just the ‘red ranting about butterfly knives but it’s just the most quotable parts’ comp and a few cute or funny ones (particularly a ‘red replacing swear words with niche references’ comp) and then they got to this one and albert is just slowly getting more and more red (also cause this was made by a simp there’s a clip of al going “i’m not even hot shut up” and then it’s just several slomo clips of him doing shit that made twitter go insane. specifically one of him sparring for kickboxing without a shirt on, thank you for that one race.)

can you tell that i’ve watched a lot of along us recently?? cause i now know how the game actually works beyond me being fucking GOD AWFUL at it for the 10 games i played total

thank you for the hcs!!!! they’re fantastic as always ✨✨✨

[patriotsnet]

Why Do Republicans Lie About Everything

New Post has been published on https://www.patriotsnet.com/why-do-republicans-lie-about-everything/

Why Do Republicans Lie About Everything

Which Came First: Republican Hate Or Gop Misinformation

Do Honest Republicans Still Exist?

Hate is a great motivator. All political parties have used it to get out the vote. Generally, those who seek elected office shape information in a way that helps a certain voting block hate their opponent. Thats how we elect people in America. That is a sad reality we just have to accept in order to fix it. Hope doesnt fix it.

Whats unique and new about negative politics in the post-Obama era is that we have this thing called the Internet and dare I acknowledge itSocial Media. ;Social media has completely isolated the Republican Party base. The Internet and social media have created hard-edged, isolated buckets of information where facts dont matteragreement;and emotion matter. For republicans, agreement with their own bias is considered fact, whereas disagreement is a lie they literally transform reality to support their own opinion: the Post-Truth Era. In order to maintain that alternate reality, they have to hate those who dont agree, otherwise their reality bubble starts to break apart.

This is the case on both sides of the aisle, but the hardliners have taken it to a new level, which is why they seem to hate everything. Theyre even taught to hate things that help them like the ACA, unions, and public education.

Social media and 1000 cable channels dont increase the information we receive they focus the information and repeat it 1000 times more often. Anything can become the truth when its repeated enough times.

The Big Lie Is Gop Gospel

Cheney is not alone in suffering consequences for challenging Trumps allegations.

Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, who defended the states counting process against Trumps attempts to interfere with it, was stripped of his voting power on the State Election Board as part of Georgias new voting restrictions law.

In a special House election in Texas held on in early May, the Trump-critical Republican in the race Michael Wood got 3 percent of the vote.

In January, Michigan Republicans removed Aaron van Langevelde, a GOP attorney who broke with the party to certify Bidens victory in Michigan, from his post on the states Board of State Canvassers.

At the Utah Republican Partys convention this weekend, Sen. Mitt Romney perhaps the GOPs leading Trump critic was booed and called a traitor.

At the same time, Republicans who have embraced falsehoods about the election have been elevated.

Rep. Elise Stefanik , who appears likely to replace Cheney in the No. 3 spot, backed Trumps anti-election efforts to the hilt. Most egregiously, she falsely asserted that there were 140,000 illegal votes in Georgias Fulton County alone which would amount to more than 25 percent of all the votes in the entire Democratic-leaning county. The breakout Republican stars in the House of Representatives, Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert , both egged on the January Stop the Steal rally that culminated in the attack on Capitol Hill.

Why Do Conservatives Soak Up Lies

The evidence that conservatives crave lies is abundant.

Conservatives loved George W. Bush’s and Dick Cheney’s lies about “Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction” — loved them so much, that the researchers who wrote “‘There Must Be a Reason’: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification” surveyed 49 conservative Republicans, during October 2004, who admitted that they still believed Saddam Hussein had caused the 9/11 attacks, and these researchers found that 48 of those 49 extreme conservatives were entirely impervious to the overwhelming factual evidence that was provided to them by the presenters contradicting this false belief they held. Then, a showed that when Republicans were offered the official 2004 Duelfer report that had concluded Iraq hadn’t possessed any weapons of mass destruction for years before the United States invaded it in 2003, the percentage of Republicans who believed that Iraq did have WMD immediately prior to the invasion shot up, instead of going down . Even all of the exposés that had already been published about Bush’s faked WMD “proofs” didn’t persuade Republican voters that they’d simply been deceived by the people they trusted and supported. They didn’t resent it at all; they just asked for more, from those same discredited liars.

So: why do conservatives sop up lies, on topic after topic?

They do it because, if they didn’t, they couldn’t be themselves; they couldn’t be conservatives. Lie-lovers is whom they are. It’s their identity.

———-

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The Gop Elite Gave Us This Party

This dire outcome was not inevitable: The best evidence we have suggests that the rise of the Big Lie is the direct result of strategic choices by Republican leaders.

A new paper by Dan Hopkins, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, analyzes data from a panel survey, which looks at roughly the same group of people over time, running between 2007 and 2020. The survey asked people to rate the fairness of the US electoral system on a scale of 1 to 5, and tracked the changes over time.

What they found was a striking consistency: Support for the American system is both high and reasonably stable when assessed via this measure, Hopkins writes. Though there are some fluctuations, with partisans evaluating the system as somewhat less fair when the other party is in power, generally theyre small.

Hopkinss last survey wave was in October 2020 which means the results dont reflect the false allegations lobbed in the aftermath of Bidens victory. The stability documented here was very likely shattered by Trumps post-election actions, Hopkins concludes.

Other data confirm this supposition. A report from the Voter Study Group analyzed Pew surveys, conducted after every presidential election since 2004, on whether voters thought their vote was counted fairly. You see the same general stability documented in Hopkinss paper, with a majority of voters in both parties saying they were very confident their vote was counted accurately in every year except 2020:

Republicans Have A Good Reason Not To Want To Investigate Jan 6: Theyre To Blame

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Our nations preeminent bipartisanship fetishistsJoe Manchin, Susan Collins, and Lisa Murkowskiare deeply disappointed that they cant get Republicans to back an investigation into the January 6 attack on Capitol Hill. Indeed, they seem outright baffled that their efforts at compromise have fallen short on plans for a bipartisan panel. There is no excuse for any Republican to vote against this commission since Democrats have agreed to everything they asked for, Manchin said in an angry statement on Twitter. It would be so much better if we had an independent outside commission, Collins, a moderate Republican, told reporters Thursday. Is that really what this is about, one election cycle after another? added Murkowski, blasting Mitch McConnells anticipated filibuster. Or are we going to acknowledge that as a country that is based on these principles of democracy that we hold so dear, and one of those is that we have free and fair elections.

I kind of want that to endure beyond just one election cycle, the Alaska moderate Republican told reporters.

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More Great Stories FromVanity Fair

Recommended Reading: Did Trump Really Say Republicans Are Stupid

In 2009 Republicans Predicted That The Economic Stimulus Package Would Only Make The Recession Worse And Cause More Unemployment

The results show they couldn’t have been more wrong. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 ended the recession after only a few months. Although 750,000 people were losing their jobs each month when Obama took office, after the Recovery Act was passed the rate of job loss immediately decreased each month and within a year the economy showed positive job growth.

Considering the severity of the 2008 economic collapse and the total opposition by Republicans to do anything at all to stimulate the economy, it is remarkable that the US economy recovered as quickly as it did.

Looking at the rate of job loss and job creation, its easy to see that the stimulus of 2009 was highly successful in stopping the job losses and turning the economy around.

Republicans Predicted That We Would Find Iraqs Weapons Of Mass Destruction Even Though Un Weapons Inspectors Said That Those Weapons Didn’t Exist

The Bush administration continued to insist that WMDs would be found, even when the CIA said some of the evidence was questionable. As we all know, the WMDs predicted by the Bush administration did not exist, and Saddam Hussein had not resumed his nuclear weapons program as they claimed. Ultimately, both President Bush and Vice President Cheney had to admit that there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

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Republicans Said President Obama Would Raise Taxes Sky High

It never happened. Income taxes for over 95% of Americans remained the same or lower than they were before Obama was elected. The only people whose income taxes increased were those who make more than $400,000 per year, and their taxes rose only 3%. For most Americans, taxes are still lower now than they were under Reagan.

In 1993 When The Brady Law And The Assault Weapons Ban Were Passed Republicans Predicted Increasing Rates Of Crime And Murder

Republicans Are Lying To Themselves About Trump’s Toxicity

Thankfully, just the opposite happened. While the rate of violent crime had increased steadily from the 1970s into the 1990s, it suddenly began to drop after 1993 and continued to decline for more than ten years. What could have happened in 1993 to precipitate such a sudden and prolonged drop in crime? Thats the year Congress passed the Assault Weapons Ban and the Brady Law, which mandated background checks and a waiting period to buy a gun.

Despite Republican predictions to the contrary, the Brady Law and the Assault Weapons Ban were followed by the most dramatic reduction in violent crime since the FBI started keeping statistics. The graphs below, based on the actual numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime Reports website, show how the rates of murder and violent crime in the US dropped suddenly after the 1993 Brady Law and Assault Weapons Ban were passed.

These charts show the rate of murder and violent crime over 35 years based on numbers from the FBI Uniform Crime reports.

Recommended Reading: How Many Republicans Voted For Obamacare In The Senate

Here Are A Few More Things Republicans Have Been Wrong About:

Republicans said that Obamacare would have death panels to decide who would live and who would die. Wrong. No such death panels were ever proposed and nothing of the kind ever happened.

They said the 2009 laws to improve automobile fuel efficiency standards would kill the US auto industry. Wrong. The new standards were followed by a resurgence of the US auto industry enabling them to hire back tens of thousands of workers.

They said environmental protection laws requiring companies to clean up their pollution would create an undue burden and kill businesses. Nope, it never happened.

They said Ebola would spread across the country because President Obama allowed American Ebola patients to be treated in the US. The outbreak never happened. Only three people contracted Ebola in the US and all three survived.

They said President Obama would open our borders to illegal immigrants. Wow, were they wrong about that. Under Obama, we set new records for most illegal immigrants stopped at the border and sent home.

They said Obama would drive up the Federal budget deficit. That didn’t happen. Obama cut the $1.4 trillion deficit he inherited by two-thirds.

While someone could no doubt find instances where Democrats engage in over-the-top rhetoric, nothing compares to the consistently false and erroneous claims made by the GOP in recent years. When a political party has been so dismally wrong about nearly everything over the past 30 years, that party should lose all credibility.

‘nothing There’: More Republicans Are Calling Out Trump’s Election Lies

WASHINGTON The more we learn about Donald Trumps baseless, false and discredited claims about the 2020 election, the more baseless, false and discredited those claims have become.

Just consider the revelations over the past week from Republicans:

In Michigan, a GOP-led investigation by its state Senate concluded that it found no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud in Michigans prosecution of the 2020 election.

Regarding Arizona, a report co-authored by former Kentucky Secretary of State Trey Grayson criticized the so-called audit of the election results in that state, saying it does not meet the standards of a proper election recount or audit, and that its being conducted by an inexperienced, unqualified contractor.

And over the weekend, ABCs Jon Karl writing for the Atlantic had former Trump Attorney General Bill Barr debunking Trumps claims about the 2020 election results. If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there, Barr said. It was all bullsh!#.

Predictably, Trump lashed out at those GOP findings.

Michigan State Senators Mike Shirkey and Ed McBroom are doing everything possible to stop Voter Audits in order to hide the truth about November 3rd, the former president said in a statement, which even included those state senators phone numbers.

Even Bill Barr doesnt buy them.

Read Also: Who Won The House Republicans Or Democrats

Get Ready For Another Possible Crisis Like 2020

This is not the first time that Republicans have declared a Democratic president somehow illegitimate. They impeached Bill Clinton on flimsy grounds, after previously accusing him of crimes ranging up to murder; there was a widespread campaign to label Barack Obama an unlawful foreign-born president . These campaigns were effective: A 2019 poll found that 56 percent of Republicans still believed that Obama was born in Kenya.

Nor is this the first time Republican elites have ginned up suspicion of voter fraud for political purposes. After Republicans won a series of statehouse elections in 2010, they spent the next few years falsely claiming that voter fraud was a serious threat in order to pass voter ID laws that were nakedly designed to suppress the vote among Democratic-leaning minority groups. Research has found that, even prior to Trump, this convinced Republicans that voter fraud was a real problem when its exceptionally rare.

These earlier campaigns laid the intellectual groundwork for 2020. Republicans were already primed to believe elected Democrats were somehow illegitimate and to believe in widespread fraud in the American electoral system. Trumps innovation claiming that an entire presidential election result was fraudulent was pushing on an open door.

Paying Lower Taxes Hurts Taxpayers

Less revenue means fewer handouts. Thats bad news for Democrats who lie obsessively year after year about how tax revenue never gets the job done in distressed communities because we still arent spending enough.

Why is it that even when the party is in power, when Democrats call the shots every single year like they do in Illinois, the poor stay right where they are most valuable in poverty?

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Times Republicans Were Wrong

It’s no secret that politicians tend to use exaggerated political rhetoric to get people to vote for them. In recent decades, Republicans have repeatedly made very ominous predictions about the horrors that will result from Democratic policies while painting a rosy picture of what will result from Republican policies. Now we have the luxury of looking back over the years to examine those predictions and policies. Below, you will find twenty-one examples of times Republicans were blatantly wrong.

Most Republicans Said That President Obama Should Be Impeached Because Of The 2012 Attack On The Us Consulate In Benghazi

Their own investigations, however, proved them wrong. Every Congressional inquiry, including those by the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee, concluded that the Obama administration did nothing wrong regarding Benghazi, that there was no stand down order given, and that neither the President nor anyone in his administration lied about it. Each and every Republican investigation has reached this same conclusion, but Republicans continue to exploit this tragedy for political gain.

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Truth Matters Which Is Why I’m Telling It

I take comfort in knowing that I am doing the moral thing by telling the truth to my constituents.;I also;happen to believe;telling the truth;about;the 2020 election;is good politically.

If Republicans;become the party of the Big;Lie if we encourage this madness much longer we;will lose credibility with;the majority of;Americans on issues where I believe we have better ideas.;We will do;lasting damage to our republic.

True Republicans would never dream of wasting taxpayer money to hire an unknown cybersecurity firm with no elections auditing experience to audit an election that has;already been audited.;This is what the Arizona Senate is doing with their Cyber Ninja audit.

True Republicans would not;stand idly by while auditors paid with taxpayer dollars;chased;insane rumors that ballots were flown in from South Korea to change the outcome of the presidential race, or;that;secret watermarks;on the ballots;revealed by UV lights;would;expose fraud;once and for all.

This is what the Arizona Senate is doing with their Cyber Ninja audit.

Lies Damned Lies And The Truth About Joe Biden

Saagar Enjeti: Media Lets Biden SHAMELESSLY LIE About Hunter Bidens Business Dealings

Joe BidenKentucky state lawmakers vote to scrap school mask mandate Arkansas governor pushes back against Biden’s vaccine mandate RNC vows to sue over Biden vaccine, testing mandate MORE. I know him, said the House Speaker authoritatively, and that was that.

Does Bidens record warrant such confidence? Not really. In fact, Biden has a long history of lying about himself, about his past and about events that never took place.

Democrats want the 2020 campaign to be a referendum on President Trump. Fine, but if this is to be a contest of characters, it is only appropriate that Joe Bidens history of fabrication and deceit often intended to bolster his intellectual credentials also be fair game.

Over the past year, Biden thundered that the Obama administration didnt lock people up in cages. He also claimed that, Immediately, the moment started, I came out against it. And I was always labeled one of the most liberal members of Congress. Politicos rating of all three assertions? False.

No one should be surprised. Lest we forget

A video is making the rounds in which Biden boasts at a 1987 rally, “I went to law school on a full academic scholarship ended up in the top half of my class.”

Biden also maintained that he “graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school” and was the outstanding student in the political science department.

That commentary holds up well, as today more than ever Biden blunders into conversational crevasses, with no way out.

Also Check: Who Created Social Security Democrats Or Republicans

[tbr-agency]

Got7′s fans summarize 7 moments that made them fall in love more with JYPE’s exclusive bodyguards.

In March of 2019, JYP Entertainment announced that they had teamed up with the law enforcement group which is now a well-known agency as MMG Agency.

At first, MMG Agency’s team was supposed to be guarding JYP Entertainment boy group, GOT7.  But after a few months, JYP Entertainment had MMG Agency’s team working for JYPE artists, after seeing excellence services by the bodyguards.

Then in early 2020, JYP Entertainment had introduced MMG Agency’s team which now are called as MMG Units and the one that is working closely with JYPE artists are The Bloody Roses.

It gained massive attention from JYPE fans, especially Got7 fans.

Now these are the 7 moments of Got7′s bodyguard and Got7 themselves that got fans fangirling.

1. Got7′s Mark and his bodyguard,

We all know that Dispatch exposed Mark and his bodyguard in September of 2019. Though Got7′s Mark hasn’t written any letter to the fans nor JYP Entertainment confirming their relationship, Ahgases was sure that these two are a couple after seeing the times when they hang out together. 

With the pictures that were exposed by Dispatch, we could tell that Mark really loves his bodyguard and seeing how happy he looks with her in the pictures, his bodyguard now called maybe-girlfriend since both the company and Mark hasn’t confirmed the relationship, she really makes him happy. 

There were a few rare times that she would be in Mark’s instagram story and one memorable ones when they were out for lunch. The couple were dressed in casual and the caption was “Accompany her for lunch,” then zooming onto his order of food and her face.

Fans noticed that she was wearing a NIS jacket and fans found out that all Got7’s bodyguards were now working with NIS.

2. Got7′s JB’s bodyguard being shy and pouty with his bodyguard,

Fans were amazed on how Got7’s Jb looks whenever he is with his bodyguard. On stage and with his members, Jb sometimes had that serious leader moment but if he is with his bodyguard, it turns out that he is the opposite.

Jb would always seem to have that shy and pouty look whenever he is with his bodyguard. He would always stick by her side whenever they were in an airport. Fans have captured moments when Jb would hold onto her shoulders in a moment when fans were crowding them.

Fansites have also captured times when Jb would frown and pout towards his bodyguard when she was walking away from him. It was said from one of his fansites that he was begging his bodyguard to buy 3 bottles of strawberry milk but his bodyguard would jokingly ask him to buy by himself causing the leader to pout and frown.

Fans find this funny and cute since they get to see this side of Jb other than seeing his cute side when he is with his own members. 

Ahgases knew that Jb really cared for his bodyguard when he posted an instagram story of her in her uniform. Fans figured out from his bodyguard’s agency website that his bodyguard graduated from CIA University.

3. Got7′s Jackson being clingy with his bodyguard,

Ahgases voted these two to have the cutest relationship between an idol and a bodyguard. We all know there were moments where Got7′s Jackson would spot to be clingy with his own members so it is no surprise when fans saw how clingy Jackson is with his own bodyguard.

Fansites would capture moments when Jackson was linking arms with his bodyguard with another member which is either Bambam or Yugyeom linking the other arm of Jackson’s bodyguard. Fans find it hilarious as the face shows how his bodyguard is feeling with just how the way she expressed herself. 

Fansites captured the frown she had on her face as she looked at both members but as soon as Jackson looked at her, she would raise an eyebrow and Jackson would innocently look at her.

Another moment was when on the way to MusicBank, Jackson was spotted to meet with his bodyguard in the carpark area and it seems that his bodyguard was carrying a bag that had his belongings. Fans captured a moment when Jackson had a poker face as he was holding onto his bodyguard wrist, dragging her into the building while waving towards fansites with a thin-line smile.

4. Got7′s Jinyoung moments with his beautiful bodyguard,

Fans voted these two to be the most good looking idol-bodyguard. We all know how Got7′s Jinyoung looks like when he is serious, we have seen him conversing with the other members and in dramas - when he is being serious.

Fansites captured moments of Jinyoung and his bodyguard having a serious discussion right outside JYP Entertainment's new headquarters. Though fans were curious on what both of them were talking about, some fans were amazed on how beautiful Jinyoung’s bodyguard looked up-close in pictures.

Some fans were looking up-close on Jinyoung's look, leaning against the glass window of JYPE headquarters, frowning with folded arms while staring at his bodyguard who was explaining rather seriously.

Fansites also captured moments when his bodyguard was with Jinyoung on one fine morning. From the picture, it looks like Jinyoung was grabbing a cup of coffee with his bodyguard as they walk side-by-side - somehow not minding the cameras, instead Jinyoung waved towards the fan sites and told them to be careful.

What made fans adore his bodyguard  is that for the first time, they were allowed to take pictures of Jinyoung - with the permission of Jinyoung himself looking casual as he was wearing a snapback and black shades.

5. Got7′s Youngjae’s bodyguard stops staff from being harsh towards fans during fan-signs

We all know that Got7′s Youngjae is an angel and a sunshine to his fans and it was no surprise that his bodyguard has the same traits as him. The difference is it seems that his bodyguard is more badass and more straight-forward when it comes to confronting people, not that Youngjae isn’t straight-forward - we have moments when Youngjae confronts sasaengs.

Youngjae’s bodyguard was seen to have an argument with the staff that in-charge of the fansign that day. To cut time, the staff forced fans to hurry interacting with the Got7 members. Got7 being angels ignored the staff and continued the fan-sign with their own pace but this made staff to be more harsh towards the fans.

The staff could have spoken in polite words but it seems he was being and fans could see some of the members frowning and turning towards the staff. This was when Youngjae’s bodyguard stepped in with her hands in her leather jacket - watching the scene then finally spoke her words.

“You know, since you are forcing them to hurry up and have 2 minutes talk with Got7, might as well turn this originally-to-be-fansign to be a high-touch right? You got to at least give the fans 5 minutes. That was too short. I counted it as 2 minutes for one fan, dude.”

The members were trying not to smile nor chuckle - hearing how straightforward Youngjae’s bodyguard is. Youngjae could only smile widely as he silently nodded towards his bodyguard. 

All fans were thankful for Youngjae’s bodyguard that day.

6. Got7′s Bambam giving words of encouragement to his bodyguard and posting a picture of his bodyguard on twitter,

Fans admired these two as they were seen to have an idol-bodyguard relationship as best friends. We all know Got7′s Bambam has a group chat with the 97 liners and Bambam reveals that his childhood friend is BlackPink Lisa.

Fans were happy that he made friends with his own bodyguard and her team. Fans could tell they were close since Bambam posted a tweet and a picture of his bodyguard - not to mention that it was somehow an unglam picture of his bodyguard.

“Cheer up and be confident! Good luck on your final exam and come back to Korea asap! We can have some mango sticky rice and toast with the other hyungs as soon as you arrive here!”

It seems that he posted a picture of his bodyguard who looks like she isn’t aware that the picture was being taken. 

Fans figured out that his bodyguards’ team were studying abroad since Bambam mentioned her to come back and fans found out that Bambam’s bodyguard and the rest of the member’s bodyguard were in Virginia, the state where they attended university.

7. Got7′s Yugyeom was seen with his bodyguard in public libraries looking pouty,

It was revealed by fans that he was having a private time since there was no manager with him, instead he was with his bodyguard. We all are not surprised that Got7′s Yugyeom reads since his own members have posted pictures of the maknae reading a book - with captions that were obviously teasing the tall maknae.

Fans captured pictures of Yugyeom walking behind his bodyguard while quietly whining and somehow wanting his bodyguard’s attention as she was looking at books. It seems that the tall maknae was being whiny and pouty that day.

Fans said that they could hear him saying “Can we just order it online?” “You read this kind of book? It looks scary!” “Oh! I didn’t know libraries have these kinds of books!” 

Fans were shocked to see that Yugyeom’s bodyguard were into law and science since the books were obviously related to those subjects but they weren’t too surprised since Got7’s bodyguards were all working under the law enforcements.

Fans also stated that Yugyeom in the end was so engrossed with how his bodyguard explained to him with each book he picked up and asked her. Now we all get to know that Yugyeom’s bodyguard is a book-worm.

So Ahgases wasn't too surprised if all of them were considered as close friends since the bodyguards are all revealed to have different personalities.

Which idol-bodyguard do you think has the cutest friendship/relationship?

masterlist : Got7 Bodyguard Au

[bobbystompy]

91 Quotes I Enjoyed From 2020

Below are my favorite quotes from 2020. Though most occurred throughout the year, some took place before but were encountered during.

1) “You don’t have to be new to make new.” - Rick Rubin

2) “He put the beat on and go to sleep then wake up with a verse.” - The Lox

3) “Every opinion is bad.” - Blink-155

4)

(via Twitter)

5) “At the start of every disaster movie, there’s a scientist being ignored.”

6) “Be brave enough to suck at something new.”

7) “Comedy is the only job you can have where you can use everything you know” - Robin Williams via Dave Chappelle

8) “What’s the worst swear word where you live?” - Josiah Hughes

9) “Cookies are a really great way to get everybody to like you for a short period of time” - YSAC

10) “The worst dancer at a wedding is the one who’s not dancing.” - John Mulaney

11) “I never saw the end of the tunnel. I only saw myself running out of one." - Kobe Bryant

12) "A good movie begins as you're walking out of the theater" - Ethan Hawke

13) “When I was young and starting in cinema, there was a saying that I carved deep into my heart which is, 'The most personal is the most creative.’ That quote was from our great Martin Scorsese.” - Bong Joon-ho

14) “Run to the rescue with love, and peace will follow” - River Phoenix via Joaquin Phoenix

15) “Thank you -- I will drink until next morning.” - Bong Joon-ho

16) “Men will bury their emotions for decades and then take it all out on children tubing while they drive the boat.” - @krauter_

17) “They help you with the dumb face stuff, but they don’t tell you how to fix it” - Adam (Nate’s friend), on having older sisters

18) “We all had our connections, but it’s not the details themselves that matter, it’s the feeling behind them. There are a million coming-of-age tales. Lady Bird’s secret sauce is how deeply its creator gave a shit. The older I get, the less I care about anything but the sense of a filmmaker’s personal connection to the material. It doesn’t matter what it’s about, what genre it is, or whether it’s genre at all. I only really care that it feels like something the filmmaker had to tell me, and that it was that filmmaker in particular who had to tell it. It has to answer the ‘why are you telling me this’ question, and not just why are you telling me, but why are you telling me.

Lady Bird is a movie that feels like only Greta Gerwig could’ve made. And it’s only because it’s so specific to her that it can be so meaningful to so many people.” - Vince Mancini

19) "I have cast some lonely votes, fought some lonely fights, mounted some lonely campaigns. But I do not feel lonely now.” - Bernie Sanders

20) “Ever hear a Beatles song you haven’t heard before?”

21) “Drinking is an emotional thing. It joggles you out of the standardism of everyday life, out of everything being the same. It yanks you out of your body and your mind and throws you against the wall. I have the feeling that drinking is a form of suicide where you're allowed to return to life and begin all over the next day. It's like killing yourself, and then you're reborn. I guess I've lived about ten or fifteen thousand lives now.” - Charles Bukowski

22) “You shouldn’t have to hear a band to know if they’re good or not” - Josiah Hughes

23) “I was raised by OGs.  Some of you were raised by IG.  I understand.” - Ice-T

* * *

[Here is where I note the line of demarcation that was the COVID-19 pandemic hitting the US, pushed forward by Tom Hanks’ announcement, the NBA and NCAA shutting down, and, then, the nation itself.]

* * *

24) “There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.” - Vladimir Lenin

25) "Taken together, this is a massive failure in leadership that stems from a massive defect in character. Trump is such a habitual liar that he is incapable of being honest, even when being honest would serve his interests. He is so impulsive, shortsighted, and undisciplined that he is unable to plan or even think beyond the moment. He is such a divisive and polarizing figure that he long ago lost the ability to unite the nation under any circumstances and for any cause. And he is so narcissistic and unreflective that he is completely incapable of learning from his mistakes. The president’s disordered personality makes him as ill-equipped to deal with a crisis as any president has ever been. With few exceptions, what Trump has said is not just useless; it is downright injurious." - Peter Wehner

26) "Epidemics have a way of revealing underlying truths about the societies they impact." - Anne Applebaum

27) “A funny thing about quarantining is hearing your partner in full work mode for the first time. Like, I’m married to a ‘let’s circle back’ guy — who knew?” - Laura Norkin

28) 

(Jojo Rabbit)

29) “The world ends when you're dead. Until then, you got more punishment in store. - Deadwood: The Movie

30) “All bleeding stops eventually.” - Deadwood: The Movie

31) “Our Father, which art in heaven… / Let him fucking stay there” - Deadwood: The Movie

32) “It’s like a power outage, but we still have power” - Ryen Russillo, on the pandemic

33) “Whenever Sox baseball returns, it’ll be weird to not have Farmer on the call any more. The relationship between a fan and longtime announcer is always built in the little moments. One afternoon, he’s the soundtrack as you clean the garage. On another night, he’s your bookmark for the game as you stand in line for churros or walk down the ramps at Sox Park to try for better seats in the 100 level. A voice like Farmer’s becomes so familiar that you only really notice when it’s no longer there.” - Kevin Kaduk, on the passing of Ed Farmer

34) 

(via Twitter)

35) “In my songs, I try to look through someone else’s eyes, and I want to give the audience a feeling more than a message” - John Prine

36) “Observe everything. Admire nothing.” - Generation Kill

37) “Trump, by that definition, has always been a wartime president -- always willing to sacrifice people he doesn’t know to things he only sort of cares about” - David Roth

38) "Whenever they speak Michael Jordan, they should speak Scottie Pippen." - Michael Jordan

39) "Fiction is a bridge to the truth that journalism can't reach." - Hunter S. Thompson

40) “Airlines sending me “we’re in this together” emails. When my suitcase was 52 pounds I was on my own.” - Mike Dentale

41) “Sometimes you can be the worst source of your own story” - Ryen Russillo

42) “Family is not necessarily blood, but instead who you would bleed for.”

43)

(via Twitter)

44) "This is the deal that Jordan made, knowingly or unknowingly — that he would trade everything he had for everything he wanted. And then, when he won all those things, he found that he had nothing but that.” - David Roth

45) “I’m brand loyal, but the brand doesn’t matter” - Caitie Miller, on why she doesn’t like generic peanut butter

46) “NOBODY shitposts Gene Hackman!!” - Mark Dehlinger

47) “When a man concludes that any stick is good enough to beat his foe with—that is when he picks up a boomerang.” - G.K. Chesterton

48) “You can be appalled forever, but shocked only once.” - Jeff Weiss, on early Eminem

49) “Whether I’m pessimistic or optimistic, the fight’s the same” - David Simon

50) “Freedom can never be completely won, but it can be lost.” - Bernard Simon

51) “Racism in America is like dust in the air. It seems invisible — even if you’re choking on it — until you let the sun in. Then you see it’s everywhere. As long as we keep shining that light, we have a chance of cleaning it wherever it lands.” -Kareem Abdul Jabbar

52) “In a racist society, it is not enough to be non-racist -- we must be anti-racist.” - Angela Davis

53) “Start as close to the end as possible” - Kurt Vonnegut, on creative writing

54) “You can’t stay woke all the time — that’s insomnia.” - Dr. Cornel West

55) “No, I get it. I’ve dated a lot of Geminis.”

56) “The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” - John Krakauer, Into The Wild (via Tyler Keller)

57) "I couldn't show them my For You because it's pretty much just lesbian stuff and depression memes" - Maggie Loesch, on showing TikTok to her coworkers

58) "It's 1 a.m. in Slovakia and I've already had one bottle of wine and I don't know how long this press conference will go, so good luck to me." - Marian Hossa, following his NHL Hall of Fame announcement

59) “All I want in life is to go on an Anguilla group trip” - Mandy Gilkes

60) “You miss old friends when you don’t see them, but you miss them more when you do.” - Chuck Klosterman

61) “The only way to appreciate the present is to pretend it’s already the past.” - Chuck Klosterman

62) Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth, oh, never mind You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth Until they've faded, but trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back At photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now How much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked

(”Everybody's Free [To Wear Sunscreen]”)

Second time that essay’s been quoted on this list.

64) "I mean, it's just human nature to suck up to the people above you, crap on those beneath you, and undercut your equals” - Brian, Family Guy

65) “You never quit a job. You quit a manager.” - Brian Bedford

66) “All the pictures in my house are of people I’m not friends with” - Tracy Cunningham

67) “In order to leave something behind, you have to leave.” - Dr. Herman, Grey’s Anatomy

68) 

(via Twitter)

69) “You can obsess about death if you don’t have to obsess about dying.” - Brendan Kelly via “White Noise”

70) “If it’s right to do, it’s wrong to wait.” - Andy, doorman 

71)

72) “When I'm sometimes asked when will there be enough [women on the Supreme Court] and I say, 'When there are nine,' people are shocked. But there'd been nine men, and nobody's ever raised a question about that.” - Ruth Bader Ginsburg

73) "America is mostly people who’ve never left their state saying we have the best country in the world." - Billy Wayne Davis

74) “A writer is someone who knows at least 80% of their writing sucks.” - Gabe Hudson

75) 

(via Twitter)

76) “You’re dead twice” - Brendan Kelly

77) “Perfect is the enemy of good” - Voltaire (via Zach Lowe)

78) “I don’t want to be a savior, I want to be a mirror.” - Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

79) “I get bad Twitter FOMO but not real life FOMO. That just goes to show I need to get off the Internet.” - Josh Thomas

80) “Is there anything you love in life that you engage with seriously that you don't also engage with humor?" - Sam Sutherland, on his relationship with Blink-182

81) “My favorite genre of music is my friends' bands" - Josiah Hughes

82) “Let’s fall in love like both our parents aren’t divorced.”

83) “Seabiscuit may be the only earthling that was on both sides of the stamp.” - Brendan Kelly

84) “There’s no shame in coming in second, except in, like, wars.” - Family Guy

85) “I feel like I experience writer’s block 100% of the time, and when I do write, I have impostor syndrome.” - Phoebe Bridgers

86) “We teach based on what we most need to learn.” - psychologist on Grey’s Anatomy

87) “Having too many choices is the leading cause of stress” - Grey’s Anatomy

88) “I think we've all gravely underestimated the extent to which this year has changed all of us, permanently” - Kelli Maria Korducki

89) 

(via Twitter)

90) “I wonder if people understand why they don’t have polio” - Sandra E. Garcia

91) “Ending songs is terrible, so let’s keep singing” - Dave Hernandez

[dimpledsarcasm]

Election Night - A reminder

Friendly reminder (with links!)

This is a president that has:

been impeached for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress, the 3rd president in US history to be impeached 

Articles of Impeachment Against Donald John Trump: https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/hres755/BILLS-116hres755enr.pdf

How did he get away with it? https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/feb/05/how-donald-trump-got-acquitted-after-impeachment

has 26 counts of sexual misconduct against him https://www.businessinsider.com/women-accused-trump-sexual-misconduct-list-2017-12 

And consistently shows misogynistic behaviour (refer to his twitter, or literally the hundreds of compilation videos online, or the ads run by his own party against him: https://lincolnproject.us/video/mirror/)

“avoided paying federal income tax in 10 of the 15 years preceding his election. In 2016, he paid $750 in federal income tax, less than one night’s stay in a suite at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, D.C.” (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/three-interpretations-of-trumps-tax-records/616570/) 

The full report by the NY Times: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/09/27/us/donald-trump-taxes.html

has arguably led the worst response to the novel Coronavirus pandemic on the global stage, which has caused 1.2 million deaths to date, however he continues to play down the threat of the virus 

Timeline of intel conveyed to the president and how he’s conveyed it to Americans: https://doggett.house.gov/media-center/blog-posts/timeline-trump-s-coronavirus-responses

An other timeline: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/04/15/835011346/a-timeline-of-coronavirus-comments-from-president-trump-and-who

doesn’t believe in climate change and has very little regard for the environment

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/2017/03/how-trump-is-changing-science-environment/

Openly racist (I’m not linking anything, just look at his twitter) 

but he did say to a white supremacist group to 'stand back and stand by’ (https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/proud-boys-trump-debate-1.5744467)

A huge hypocrite 

Ex: consistently denied vaccine efficacy and pushed the narrative that it causes autism, now views a vaccine as the cure to COVID-19, while I admit personal growth and education can shift someone’s views on a topic, considering his determination to steadily ignore scientific evidence up until a couple months ago and his consistent efforts to undermine his public health officials, I would argue that this is entirely politically motivated —> https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/09/health/trump-vaccines.html

is a well of misinformation 

Some of his most damaging claims include his insistence on the effectiveness of unproven coronavirus treatments, for instance the use of hydroxychloroquine or the antiviral cocktail manufactured by Regeneron: https://www.ctvnews.ca/world/trump-hails-experimental-treatment-for-his-virus-recovery-1.5136141

has weakened trust in political institutions by threatening the very foundations of democracy via tactics such as voter suppression and misinformation: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/5/21499009/harvard-berkman-klein-center-paper-voting-misinformation-trump-tweets-media-framing 

not a team player (this is the nicest way I can put this)

again I look to his response to covid, simply because of how disastrous it’s been; he has undermined science and scientific institutions and subverts his own administration, holding gatherings without the use of social-distancing and mask and in Nevada, flaunted that state authorities failed to stop him https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02800-9

If this person showed up to a job interview, would you hire them? Would you let them babysit your children? If the answer is no, or if you hesitate in saying yes, why are you letting them run a country?

If you voted him in. Shame on you.

I can respect republican views, although they significantly differ from my own, I can understand and debate these points without hesitancy, we can talk about the pros and cons of different legislation and policies, etc. However, this election is not about supporting a political party anymore, this is about deliberately placing an abomination in office and making a mockery of the United States of America. The world believes you to be clowns and maybe that’s because you are.

Even if Biden wins based off of absentee ballots, the fact that this election has been so close, the fact that there is so much support for Mr. Donald J Trump and that we are seeing a repeat of 2016 voter distribution, makes me absolutely lose faith in the American People. WAKE UP.

PS: to all my babes struggling in the US and trying to grasp what is happening in your country, know that my thoughts lie with you, I am distraught at American news so I can only imagine what it feels like for it to be your national news.

[rowanthewizard]

Let us take a moment, in these dark times, to laugh at how out of touch JK Rowling is.

This tweet: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269389298664701952?s=20

No one is saying sex isn’t real. Sex is a medical construct, the same as blood type. Your doctor is the only one who really needs to know it. If some rando on the street walked up to you and asked what your blood type was that would be real fucking weird. Same if some rando walked up and demanded to know you’re chromosomes. It’s kinda weird.

Gender is a social construct, which also means it’s real but not intrinsic to humanity. It’s just something society came up with to help organize. Seeing as reproduction isn’t nearly as crucial and surviving is a lot easier now, the construct of having the population that has to carry children and nurse them separate from the part that doesn’t have to do that isn’t really necessary anymore. It’s like an old filing system, still usable, and many people still love it and are attached, but it isn’t wrong for some people to start using the newest model.

Tweet: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269401983095648259?s=20

You... you wrote a series... you wrote a series where you called every woman a witch...

Also I call myself way worse words than bitch. I can’t speak for anyone else but bitch and cunt have lost all effect on me. Like, thanks for the giant red flag Mr uncreative, I’ll be leaving now. Has anyone heard the word ‘feminazi’ used in the last, what, 4 years? It seems to have died with gamergate.

Tweet: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269406094595588096?s=20

“The idea that women like me, who’ve been empathetic to trans people for decades”

Hahahahahahahahahahaha! Tell that to Rita Skeeter! Did you even read the books you wrote??????

Article: https://www.jkrowling.com/opinions/j-k-rowling-writes-about-her-reasons-for-speaking-out-on-sex-and-gender-issues/

“accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline“

Stop listening to Twitter! It’s a dumpster fire! Twitter is not real life!

“I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.“

I don’t know if this is a joke or not. But I really hope someone composted them. The image of someone chucking all 7 books onto a compost pile is fucking gold. Can the next brand boycott be a composting one? I want to see angry fanboys fucking composting their nikes! I can’t stop giggling, it’s like 1am.

“because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender”

I don’t have a joke for this one. She never says what she thinks gender is, so I have no concept of why this would be a bad thing seeing as she’s been conflating the two in every post.

“The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.”

ThInK oF tHe ChIlDrEn!!!!!!

“The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it”

People being mean to you on twitter is not an affront to your freedom of speech. Freedom of speech protects you from the government not the internet. Why is this such a hard concept?

“I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition ........ Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.”

... do you think transphobia is easier than homophobia???? You’re more likely to face a hate crime if you’re not cis than if you’re not straight.(both are high, but non-cis is higher per capita than non-straight)  https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2019/06/28/anti-gay-hate-crimes-rise-fbi-says-and-they-likely-undercount/1582614001/

“Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.”

Now, is this 5 close friends realizing at the same time that they are all binary trans people, because that would be statistically weird. Or, is this a group of children where one of them realized strict gender performances are kind of pointless and a pain, explained it to their friends, and they didn’t have the words to describe it other than ‘trans’. The second scenario sounds much more likely.

“The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves.”

Well that’s simplistic, but even so google the suicide rates. It’s that simple. They are very fucking high. All this takes is one google search. Also, you don’t have to medically transition right away. Puberty blockers won’t hurt you, and buying a teenager a binder or a packer really isn’t that hard. Some trans people never medically transition.

“When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’”

Maybe... that’s cause... you know... you’re human. There’s not much different between male and female. one chromosome, three hormone differences, and like four genes. That’s it. That’s not really enough to make differently functioning brains. The only differences are learned ones.

“As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s”

Yes you did. There were plenty of trans men in the 80s. Trans women were the ones who led Stonewall! A nonbinary person is the hero of a Babylonian(?Sumerian?) myth that’s several thousand years old! This is not a new thing! Pick up a book!

“A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law.”

What country are you living in cause it’s not England! I follow a trans youtuber and he started sobbing when he got the sex on his birth certificate changed to male because it had taken years and he had had to jump through so many hoops. It’s not even legal to change a many documents in several US states.

“We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced.”

Ah yes, gaining the right to vote doesn’t hold a candle to the evil trans women who want to *checks notes* live peacefully. Doctors diagnosing women with hysteria and giving them lobotomies is nothing against people wanting to go about their day!

“Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now.”

I remember the day when my father sold me off to my husband for 20 goats, 5 cattle, and a magnificent draft horse!

“None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people;”

...Sure... they just “don’t agree with the lifestyle” don’t they?

Anyway, I read her entire essay. There’s nothing interesting in it. I dug through the poop to find the gold nuggets for you. That rest of it is just the standard “But predators in the little girls room, think about the children” shit we’ve heard for years. I also recognized a lot of conservative talking points and gotchas which surprised me for a moment, but after thinking about the two positions it made sense.

[phroyd]

There are still a few things in public life that you cannot fake. You can fake photographs and you can fake news. You can fake conviction and you can fake emotions. You can fake a Twitter-petition and you can fake Facebook outrage. But you cannot fake an almighty crowd.

The numbers attending Saturday’s march for a second “people’s vote” on Brexit will no doubt be contested. The organisers claimed more than a million people were out; detractors inevitably argued a few thousand fewer. But make no mistake, for anyone who travelled to it, and shuffled along among it and who tried to find their way home after it, the Put it to the People march represented a formidable sea of humanity, and a powerful strength of feeling.

And let no one tell you that this was just a London crowd. By 10.30 at Speaker’s Corner there were people arriving for the high noon rendezvous from all corners of the country and beyond. Groups draped in the saltires of Scotland and the dragons of Wales. Anna Soubry MP was among the earliest arrivals, walking cheerfully down Park Lane through the gathering crowds with her daughter (“my security for the day”) having been forced to stay away from her home last night after death threats.

Meanwhile phones were alive with feeds and photos of people making their way from Newport and Newcastle, Carlisle and Canterbury. An entire train had been booked from Bristol, rattling along Brunel’s Great Western Railway into Paddington. There were overnight coaches from Inverness, dawn starts from Cornwall.

Some had gone more than the extra mile. Ed Sides, 63, had walked here from his home in Swansea over the past couple of weeks. I’d spoken to him on the penultimate leg of his journey, along the Grand Union Canal. “If I didn’t do something I felt I would regret it for the rest of my life,” he said, voicing the sentiment of many. Sides had tried to make the theme of his quest “walking and talking”: “When you talk to ardent Leavers and you meet them on the street, or by a riverbank where they are fishing or whatever, you find you can have a proper conversation,” he said. “And that’s something we all need to do in the coming days.”

Like many of the marchers, he felt that if nothing else walking had been a good way of avoiding the stress and frustrations of watching the news. “I thought, if I am sitting at home on Twitter for the next three weeks I am going to go insane.”

That feeling was shared by those expats who had flown in from the continent who, having been denied a vote in the first referendum, were now facing the climax of three years of painful uncertainty. Rebecca MacKian, 52, who has lived in Turin for the past 15 years, joined up with 20 others from the “British in Italy” group to be here.

“If no-deal happens then the next morning we will become what the Italian government now calls an ‘illegal resident’,” she said, a status that will affect everything about her life from driving a car to continuing to run her training business. “We have literally been working every day – 1,000 days – with each other to try to get some clarity on all of it. I never thought I would become addicted to Parliament TV, but I have.”

Jason Harris, 47, had got up at 2am to be here with his 14-year-old son Oran. They lived on the frontline of backstop territory in South Armagh, Northern Ireland, three miles from the border. Harris, a landscape designer who works on both sides of the border every week, also felt he had to be here rather than shouting at the television. “It is clear that either no deal or her deal will leave things in Northern Ireland up in the air for years,” he said. “I fear we will spend the next decades just trying to get back the freedoms we have given away.”

Like many on the march his priority had changed in the past week or so, with the options narrowing and the cliff-edge looming, and the online petition torevoke article 50 climbing towards 5 million signatures. “Revoke would now be number one, number two people’s vote,” he said. That idea had travelled in this crowd. Variations of the three Rs populated signs and banners: revoke, remain and reform.

There have been many attempts to divide the respective Leave and Remain tribes since the referendum – into somewheres and nowheres, populists and globalists, gammons and snowflakes.

One of the simplest distinctions, however, has always seemed to come down to that division between those who relish the idea of being cheek-by-jowl with people unlike themselves, and those who feel threatened by that idea. As the tide of protesters inched its way along Piccadilly toward Trafalgar Square it looked like an above-ground exhibition of what most Londoners experience below ground every day: the tolerant sharing of space with others. The people who had come to demonstrate voiced, above all, a conviction, to borrow that telling phrase from Jo Cox, “that we have more in common than that which divides us”. (Cox, it goes without saying, would have loved this event. Her killer would have loathed it.)

There had been suggestions that the march would be met by counter-demonstrations, but there were none in evidence. As the crowd first massed, with its blue and gold EU flags, I heard one or two shouts of “traitors” from those driving by. These “patriots” would have done well to talk to Brigadier Stephen Goodall, who led the “Veterans For EU” group.

Goodall will be 97 in June. He had travelled up from his home in Devon with four generations of his family including his great-granddaughter. During the war he helped to pull survivors out of the rubble of the Coventry bombing. He served in India and Burma and was awarded the Military Cross in 1945 for bravery behind enemy lines.

I had spoken to the brigadier the day before the march about his reasons for coming. “It was an easy decision,” he said. “There is not much time left for me to do anything and I just feel if we can even at this late stage get people thinking sensibly, then it will be worthwhile.” His great anxiety, as a former controller of the Slimbridge Wildlife Trust, was that our fractured politics would deflect us from the co-operative spirit required to combat climate change. “One thing that I always bear in mind from when we were in Malaya in the 1950s,” he said, “was this imperative that governance was first about reaching hearts and minds. We need politicians who think first of people,” he said, “not about their investments in the City of London.”

Goodall was pushed in his wheelchair near the head of the march, along with a brass band. It was impossible watching that sight not to make some comparisons with those few stubborn souls on the ill-fated “March to Leave”, moved to trudge along lonely hard-shoulders by Nigel Farage, only to find that he had turned up for the photo opportunity and left them to fend for themselves. Farage, alive to BBC requirements for “balance”, had returned to preach on Saturday to his handful of leaderless foot soldiers at a pub car park in Linby, Nottinghamshire: “You are the 17.4 million,” he told a crowd of 150.

As the thousands upon thousands flowed down towards Parliament Square there was, contrarily, a spirit that the Brexiters have failed over the past three years ever to begin to convey: that of creative optimism. You saw it in the 100 and more tango dancers led by Matthew Cooper, who had met in growing numbers on each of the past three protest marches, aged between 20 and 80. And in the improvised speeches on freedom given by an Emmeline Pankhurst lookalike under the statue of the suffragette. And even in the bloke flogging Donald Trump toilet rolls from a shopping trolley to stockpile should the rationing begin.

There was a very droll Britishness in the spirit that tempered any edges of anger from the many younger voices on the march. There were lots more students’ union buses than on previous marches, and among them plenty who had lost their faith in the Labour leadership to solve the crisis and deliver on its conference commitment to campaign for a second referendum.

Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen. Get outside.

That brief marchers’ favourite “Oooh Jeremy Corbyn” had been replaced for several sections of this crowd by a more plaintive “Where’s Jeremy Corbyn?” The answer, perversely, was that the Labour leader was canvassing in Morecambe Bay – about as far from this event as it was symbolically possible to go.

Only one of Labour’s frontbench felt able to lend his voice to this event. Tom Watson, breaking ranks, was given something of a hero’s welcome on the speakers’ stage alongside some of those others who have emerged from the sorry parliamentary process with heads held high: Soubry, Jess Phillips, Dominic Grieve, David Lammy, Caroline Lucas; and some of those from beyond the Commons who have best articulated the cause of returning to the people to find a way through the current impasse: Michael Heseltine and Nicola Sturgeon.

Their collective message served as a reminder that when the prime minister stands up again this week and claims to speak for “the people” with her unloved deal and her fingernails-down-the-blackboard phrases about delivering Brexit, she will not speak for the million individuals who filled the wide streets and squares of the capital yesterday, or for the millions more across the country who were with them in spirit.

Watching the crowd I was reminded of a book I reviewed for this paper not long after those electoral convulsions of 2016 here and across the Atlantic. The book, On Tyranny, by the Yale historian Timothy Snyder, was a little survival guide against the digital forces of populism and the brutalist politics they promoted. Snyder called above all for a “corporeal politics” in response, for voting with paper ballots that can be counted and recounted; for face-to-face conversation, and for marching rather than online petitioning: “Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on a screen. Get outside. Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.”

Those who did this on Saturday will no doubt be told in the coming days, as Britain determines the kind of country it will become, that they were wasting their time and effort. But this march mattered in the simple and fundamental way that mass marches always matter: as a reminder to those who make decisions in their name that democracy is not a settled state, but a shifting expression of collective will. As one little girl’s sign had it: “The people are STILL speaking”.

Phroyd

[transcendent-paras]

Basic Info on My Paracosm

Don’t interact if you are not a MaDDer or an immersive daydreamer

I’m using paracosm lightly cause it’s like... mirrored thisverse? mirrored and slightly to the left with my paras added in, you know? I went from having paracosms with whole galaxies and gods and languages to thisverse 2.0.

Background/About Me: I'm a closeted trans male. Recently I’ve been hyperfocusing on music - specifically "alternative" music like punk, metalcore, rock, emo, etc  as well as kpop - and it's affected my paracosm. My current paracosm is a Trans punk rock band focusing on one band named Transcendent, and has Incorporated many of the bands I listen to into it. 

Original Paras: 

Parame - Michè Valentino: Lead singer, Pianist, Song writer. Trans male in his 20s, adopted by a family in the UK and has two older brothers. His middle brother is highkey based off  the kpop group *XO’s (to avoid this coming up in the tags) leader Su*o, and he is also in a band very similar to *XO. Michè fell in love with one of *XO’s members but because of the large age gap it was unrequited. Eventually Michè went to study abroad and moved to New York city and met his best friend and later boyfriend Ashley Nolans. Shortly after high school Ashley and Michè moved in together.

Ashley Nolans: Backing vocalist and screams/growls, Lead guitarist. A year older than Michè, he is a former myspace & later instagram drag king when he saw a drag queen at a mall. Slowly he realized he identified as a trans male instead of a drag king. His family was supportive of his whole journey and let him do what he felt comfortable doing, though they did manage his myspace since he was very young. Michè moved to Ashley’s high school and they were in the same music class. Ashley took Michè to his first pride parade. Ashley is slightly insecure that Michè will leave him for the *XO member he had a crush on, but Ashley never brings it up or lashes out/acts on it.

Nikki Archer: Bass Guitarist, Composer. Nikki is agender and has always identified as such even with out knowing anything about gender identities as a child. Their uncle took them to many rock and punk concerts growing up, and bought them their first bass for their 13th birthday, that Nikki still has but has retired it so it doesn’t get damaged on tour. Nikki’s uncle is the most understanding member of the family about their gender, but their parents try to be accepting and not ignorant. Nikki and Emilynn were Vice President and President of their high school’s LGBT Club. Though they went to the same school as Ashley they never met him and graduated before Michè started going there. Nikki and Emilynn dated for a while in high school but decided they were better as close platonic friends.

Emilynn Kay: Drummer, Leader. Emilynn is the oldest member, 5 years older than Michè and is a trans woman. She grew up in the south originally and not only had to deal with racism as a poc, but didn’t even dream of coming out to anyone besides her parents. Eventually her parents decided it would be best for her if they moved. When they moved up to New York she was able to dress the way she wanted and easily took her gender in stride. Of course she had harsher comments and bullying than white trans kids or cis black kids at her school she never changed who she was to fit in. She did percussion in the marching band and acted in theater often. She naturally took on a motherly role to other LGBT kids in the school, especially but not limited to younger trans kids, and they voted for her to be president of the club. She met Michè and Ashley at a pride parade very nervous to admit to being trans and she took them under her wing. When she realized she had a group of trans friends who all were into the same type of music and could play instruments she suggested forming a band.

Alexandria Woods: Rhythm Guitarist, Violinist, Newest Member. Alexandria realized at the start of high school she identified more feminine than masculine and after research felt Demi-girl described her the most. Her friends in high school helped her express herself while remaining closeted, especially from her parents. Her family were for the most part very kind and she got along with them on every issue except for gender. Meanwhile Alexandria also had a youtube channel that she posted guitar and violin covers on, gaining a respectable fan base on various platforms. Michè discovered her when she did a cover of a Transcendent song and he followed her on twitter. One day when she was 16, a cousin discovered one of her skirts in her closet and outted her to her parents, getting her kicked out and they have not spoken since. Alexandria made a tweet that she would have to put a pause on covers until she could find a place to live, and Michè swooped in asking if she need a place to live. After living with Michè and Ashley for a while, the band had a meeting and agreed that Alexandria would be a perfect fit in the band. The fans and later the members joke that Alexandria is Michè and Ashley’s daughter. Fans immediately loved Alexandria as a member of the band, especially since many of them had know of her in vlogs with the band and members retweeting her covers often.

Celebrity paras (censored so it doesnt show in tumblrs search results, if you cant figure out the * feel free to pm me or ask me off anon!): 

*XO: Originally in a past paracosm they were as themselves and a slightly different parame was just friends with them, but over time i latched onto the leader Su*o and started to see him as a brother figure. Not wanting to do culture appropriation I warped them from kpop to western music and made it so Michè was adopted by Su*o’s family. Nearly everything about them is the same including names and achievements, past members, and music. Because I actually know Korean there is no language barrier in music so it doesn’t bother me that they are supposed to be a uk based band and they sing in korean in thisverse, but in paracosm it is ‘in english’. The member that Michè is in love with is Ch****ol

Bl*ck Veil Br*d*s: Ashley and Michè bonded over a love for the band, and later got Emilynn and Nikki into them. Transcendent went from playing basement shows to being signed under Republic Records and it’s subsidiary Lava records, the same labels as B*B. Since they do a similar style music under the same label they crossed paths a few times in company, at warped tour, and eventually Transcendent did a few opening sets for B*B. They became close, and have talked about doing some sort of collaboration. 

P*l*y* R*y*l*: Alexandria really looked up to them, and was beyond ecstatic meeting them backstage at warped tour. The two bands have hung out a few times and they are very supportive of each other on social media. 

Other bands here and there that show up occasionally: P**rc* the v**l, f*ll*ng in r*v*rs* (michè has gotten into verbal arguments with r*nn*e a few times but they don’t hate eachother), my ch*****l romance, as ** is, sh*n*e (kpop).

Transcendent’s Music: 

Respect Existence - First album: Overall theme of the album is celebrating differences and who you are, with elements of punk rock, speed metal, and experimental rock. Usually when daydreaming about this era I listen to B*B’s album Set The World on Fire and P*V’s Collide With The Sky which is sort of the instrumental vibe I picture this album being. After this was released they were sighed under lava records

Who came first - Album: cover album dedicated to bands that influenced Transcendent’s music style. First album with Alexandria. Most recent album, and brought them further into the limelight, being a more recognizable alternative band. 

I’m Not Okay (originally by m*r)

Misery Business (originally by param***)

But It’s Better If You Do (originally by p!*td)

I Don’t Care (originally by f*b)

21 Guns (originally by gr**n d*y)

Bulls In The Bronx (originally by p*v) 

If You Can’t Hang (originally by s*s)

Don’t Feel Quite Right (originally by p*l*y* r*y*l*)

The Drug In Me Is You (originally by f*r)

10 Miles Wide (originally by es****e the f**e)

Can You Feel My Heart (originally by b**h)

The Legacy (originally by b*b)

Expect Resistance - Upcoming album: companion piece to Respect Existence (not a repackage album). Not only does it celebrate your differences but also a call to action to be unapologetically you and to ‘form a resistance’ against those who hold you back. I usually listen to B*B’s album vale and Agai*** me!’s song teenage anarchist when thinking about this time. My paras are trying to see if they can get any collaborations with different artists, Michè especially wants to have his brother on one of the songs.

[560970caic1819-blog]

Hollywood: Whitewashing; A Never Ending Epidemic

In the early 20th century, the glamorous world of Hollywood so prominently displayed racism on their big screens. 1915 saw the birth of the film “The Birth of a Nation”, in which we saw the Klu Klux Klan heroically save society from the enemies, also known as people of colour; or white people using ‘blackface’ in this instance. Modern day Hollywood do not shine such a positive light on the KKK however, as can be shown in the 2018 hit “BlacKkKlansman” which is a biographical comedy-drama that displays a black man (yes, a black man played by an actual black man rather than a white man partaking in ‘blackface’) infiltrating and arresting KKK members for their hatred. Yet, this is not to say that ‘whitewashing’ does not exist in Hollywood today, it is often just portrayed much more discretely.

The term ‘whitewashing’ has been coined more recently, its definition being ‘the entertainment industry’s attempt at making ethnic characters more appealing to the white, money-spending masses by making exotic characters less ethnic and more “white”’. The race issue in Hollywood is not simply black vs. white, what it is usually assumed to be, it’s much more white vs. any other ethnicity. Chloe Bennet, formally known as Chloe Wang is an Asian-American actress paving her way to fame in Hollywood. Bennet changed her surname in order to ensure her success. After the emergence of her name change, some accused her of not staying true to her culture, to which she quickly clapped back stating “changing my last name doesn’t change the fact that my BLOOD is half Chinese, that I lived in China, speak Mandarin or that I was culturally raised both American and Chinese… It means I had to pay my rent, and Hollywood is racist and wouldn’t cast me with a last name that made them uncomfortable”. Bennet’s bold statement that ‘Hollywood is racist’ is backed up by her saying “the first audition I went on after I changed my name, I got booked” in a 2016 Daily Beast article.

There are many examples of whitewashing in notable Hollywood films. Whitewashing is often more visible when the film is based upon a novel, as many authors tend to include characters of all different ethnicities yet casting directors chose all-American white actors to star in the roles. Angelia Jolie has been known for taking whitewashed roles, from her starring role in “A Mighty Heart” to “Wanted”, where her character was written as an African-American in the original comic book series, who was actually inspired by Halle Berry. It has also come to light that characters’ names have been changed from books to film adaptations in order to fit the ethnicity of the actor; David Slade’s comic book adaptation “30 Days of Night” cast Josh Hartnett as Alaskan Sheriff ‘Eben Olemaun’, however, the characters last name was soon changed to ‘Oleson’ in order to accommodate Hartnett’s casting.

The racial epidemic in Hollywood is not all based around those that are seen on the big screen, but is also prominent behind the scenes. In 2016, The Washington Post composed a table of the nation’s most celebrated filmmakers, concluding that the group is 89% male and 84% white, with roughly half of those being aged 60 or older. These statics alone prove that white supremacy in Hollywood does exist, despite how many people believe it doesn’t in our day and age. Although recent generations are becoming more and more accepting of ethnic and cultural differences, it can be seen that the older generations are holding us, and Hollywood, back. Israeli-American film director Rod Lurie bumped into an array of Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members in 2016, as he told the Washington Post, and their conversation included their choices for the Oscar nominees for ‘Best Picture’. Lurie quickly brought up F. Gary Gray’s highest-grossing movie from a black director in history; “Straight Outta Compton”, which Lurie himself believed was one of the years best movies. Much to Lurie’s dismay, the members he was speaking to (all white men aged 70 and up), hadn’t voted for it, or hadn’t even seen the film itself. Lurie was quoted saying “the truth is, those academy members will watch movies that deal with the heroism of the African-American community or the history of blacks, like ’12 Years a Slave,’ because that interests them. What doesn’t interest them is the current black experience or black culture. A movie like ‘Straight Outta Compton’ doesn’t stand a chance”. Lurie’s argument depicts an uncultured picture of Hollywood and its most infamous directors, a picture that can easily be painted over with vibrant cultures and acceptance, yet is not. Stephanie Allain, an African-American producer of independent movies in Hollywood and academy member, stated that high-quality films with diverse ideas do exist and are out there for our viewing, however, in todays “monochromatic” Hollywood, executives tend to overlook these movies, or undercut them altogether, Allain further explained that films like F. Gary Gray’s “Straight Outta Compton” is an “anomaly” due to its extraordinary ratings, “it’s not a trend, it’s a one-off”. It seems as though America’s population has grown to be more diverse, but the ‘Hollywood’ industry has been slow to catch-up.

Although racism in Hollywood has seemingly become more discreet in contrast to the 20th century, it hasn’t stopped people from picking up on it and causing an uproar on social media. In 2015, a hashtag known as ‘#OscarSoWhite’ began trending on Twitter after the 2015 Oscar nominations were announced, and not one single person of colour was nominated. However, this did not seem to prompt the academy’s representation of people of colour, as the following year, in 2016, the hashtag re-appeared as yet again only white people were nominated for an Oscar. However, in 2017 it seemed as though the hashtag finally did some justice as several of the 20 acting nominees were from ethnic minority backgrounds, one of the nine films nominated for best picture was Asian, and three of the films told stories of black people with mostly black casts. However, it’s not all sunshine and rainbows for Tinseltown as a University of Southern California study of top-grossing films published around the same time the 2017 Oscar nominations were announced, four that only 5% of the directors were black and a measly 3% were Asian. This same research also found that ‘studio heads’ thought that black directors were best suited to comedies or dramas that featured black casts and were unable to produce blockbuster hits. Reports indicate that white male dominance behind the camera is reflected in white male dominance on screen, so is there really much hope for a diverse Hollywood? Is this the best we are going to get?

The lack of diversity on screen has been attributed to the so-called ‘racial empathy gap’, the idea that the vast majority of white people don’t like ‘black’ movies because they lack the empathy necessary to identify with black characters which “in turn affects their ability to ‘suspend disbelief’ and surrender to the narrative of a black film”. However, this doesn’t explain the lack of diversity behind the scenes; is it really just because the industry believes that black directors cannot create amazing blockbusters? One thing I believe that we can all agree on is that Hollywood needs out with the old and in with the new. 

[blood-orange27]

GG and CP Shit

@talkingtea for everyone to see

I have a theory about CP and GG. I want to preface this by saying it is more than likely a REACH, but eff it, I like to believe in things that are not necessarily true and I LOVE to ship people that might potentially be together in the future even if it never happens. I’m messy bitch that lives for the drama of it all! Also please ignore how much thought and effort was put into this, I was off for a week and got bored/slightly obsessed with TF for a while.

I don’t have an instagram, but from all the screenshots, videos and research all the other Grandice shippers have done I have almost everything I need to posit that GG and CP might be a little more than friendly coworkers and if not now at least at some point in time. But this specifically is all through Instagram posts and a few interviews so bear with me in my analysis of their friendship.

First background evidence: I scrolled through GG’s entire instagram and I noticed that compared to his other relationships (since 2011 anyway) he posts about LA WAY more than any other girl he’s dated. Even his actual long time girlfriend, Hannah, that he was dating when he started the Flash (I think they dated for 4 years), he posted pics of the two of them together maybe 5 or 6 times on his entire Instagram (which might be due to the fact that they broke up and he deleted some photos I know). GG’s photos with Hannah were often way more discreet rather than the constant in-your-face photos he posts with LA.  Especially when you factor in that he didn’t start dating LA until 2016 and then a year later (maybe longer or shorter I’m not sure) they’re engaged?! Now, It could be that GG actually found “the one” and he wanted to jump on the opportunity fast instead of “wasting” another 4 years of his and her life because he’s older now and might think marriage is the most logical step for someone his age, idk. But I mean GG and LA started off hot on Instagram with pics of them together unlike him and Hannah (again maybe she liked her privacy since she was a dancer for Beyonce or didn’t like being shown off), 6but it really puts things in perspective when you consider how in love GG and LA seemed so quickly.

Looking at Hannah’s Instagram the first pic she ever posted of GG was in 2012.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Rd_SqPiBBg/?taken-by=hannahdlaine

Second photo of GG wasn’t until a year later https://www.instagram.com/p/YjcnmCiBO4/?taken-by=hannahdlaine

In the middle of 2013 she seemed really in love with GG here… him not so much, lol jk :P and this was also the last time she posted a picture of GG on her Instagram (unless she deleted some)  https://www.instagram.com/p/bQfJucCBDF/?taken-by=hannahdlaine

From then on she seems to post more about GG’s dogs than him. I think she’s just naturally private about her relationships in general. Also it seems she was too busy being on tour with Beyonce to maintain a relationship based off her posts. But Jett (GG’s dog) seems to be sporadically in her posts through August of 2015 so they were dating at least until then. I think August is where things might have officially ended for the two. More on that in a bit.

As I said GG only posted about her a few times. Hannah and GG in April 2014 https://www.instagram.com/p/mtUohGAVN5/?taken-by=grantgust

The last photo of Hannah on GG’s Instagram  was in June of 2014 so... https://www.instagram.com/p/pZavdmgVKi/?taken-by=grantgust you see where his head was at once the Flash started.

The first pic LA ever posted of her and GG was in April of 2016 with a seemingly innocent caption https://www.instagram.com/p/BEoz5JcC47I/?taken-by=lathoma3 meaning they could have started dating around then or could have just been friends. But if they were dating then that means GG and LA really did get engaged only a year later, wow! LA posted another pic in May 2016 of two pairs of feet with one pair that might have belonged  to GG since he tends to rock Converses and some of the comments thought it was him too https://www.instagram.com/p/BFW5zUTC482/?taken-by=lathoma3 So they possibly knew each other for a little while.

Interestingly, the first picture GG ever posted of him and LA was not until August of 2016 https://www.instagram.com/p/BJJNna5BOvd/?taken-by=grantgust which means they could have started dating earlier but he wanted to wait to post her until he knew it was something serious. However, looking at the caption, you wouldn’t explicitly know they were dating yet unless you followed her. From then on he posts pictures of the two of them, starting off slow with maybe one every few weeks then it becomes quite consistent with him posting pics of them every few days.

Another thing I noticed after they started dating is what some people have pointed out in that GG does not seem to post or interact with CP as much since. But it seems like they were actually interacting more after he met and started dating LA. I used to believed that all the social media interaction and “flirting” you used to see between CP and GG may have caused his relationship with Hannah to end. 12But after going through his Instagram it seems like he was less likely to talk or interact with Candice on Social Media until the end of 2015 and into 2016. Some interviews may prove otherwise but for the most part not really. I’ll explain why.

Looking back: when GG and CP first began the show in 2014 it seemed like all the photos of the two of them were platonic or group shots and he rarely posted just a photo of the two of them. Probably bc he was still in a good relationship with Hannah and was not trying to look thirsty. Most of GG and CP’s 1st pics together are group shots of him and the cast and the captions are friendly but not flirtatious at all. I cannot speak for twitter tho. The only post that seemed mildly spicy during this time was this one and it refers to both CP and DP in June of 2014 https://www.instagram.com/p/o3xg3AgVD4/?taken-by=grantgust and even that was nothing to get excited about. Some people even pointed out that GG was acting weird or distant during the 2015 San Diego Comic Con which might have been due to the fact that his relationship with Hannah was starting to crumble. That’s when things began to change in October of 2015 when GG posted this, calling CP his Bae https://www.instagram.com/p/86yZm8gVK1/?taken-by=grantgust Which seemed a bit flirty even if only for the show and Westallen shippers. I think GG and Hannah were already separated during this time and he wanted to start publicly flirting with Candice. Also if you look at his Holiday pics around the end of 2015, https://www.instagram.com/p/_uRaiXgVJM/?taken-by=grantgust

Hannah is nowhere to be found and usually you bring and show off a partner during the holidays especially if they’ve been together so long. This makes me think they definitely broke up around the end of the summer in 2015.

When 2016 started he was full on macking on Candice because he knew he could do so more now that he was single. As soon as 2016 started GG and CP were flirting A LOT more (possibly to push the WestAllen storyline or maybe they actually just like to flirt). But it seemed to be more blatant in 2016 with Grant posting a pic of them with the smirk emoji in January at the Golden Globes https://www.instagram.com/p/BAZF5jRAVD9/?taken-by=grantgust and notice how the other pics he posted with women at the Golden Globes were captions stating how they were homies but not with CP https://www.instagram.com/p/BAZGTwpgVEa/?taken-by=grantgust

https://www.instagram.com/p/BAZHIBegVFZ/?taken-by=grantgust

Grant posting those tweets about his kissing skills to CP was in June 2016. https://twitter.com/grantgust/status/746735191276675072?lang=en

There is no way of knowing exactly when he started dating LA so I can only go off of his 1st Instagram pic with her in August. But it did seem like when the pics of him and LA became more consistent, the flirting between him and CP slowed down a bit.

Let us examine for a moment Candice’s Instagram pics and see if they align with Grant’s. Starting right off the bat Candice was also in a relationship in 2012 that she showed off a little with a few pics like this https://www.instagram.com/p/OXUGUcRb9M/?taken-by=candicekp but she was still quite private about the whole thing so I’m not sure when this relationship ended. As 2014 starts and she’s casted in the Flash she seems to follow the same procedure as Grant for the most part. Only posting group shots and nothing flirtatious in the slightest (I’m guessing because she was being respectful of GG and Hannah’s relationship) and she may have still been dating the guy from earlier I mentioned, again who really knows. She did post a lot of pics with the Rick Cosnett during this year (Eddie from TF) https://www.instagram.com/p/3AQAEuRb2W/?taken-by=candicekp

So there may have been something between those 2 or it might have just been because they had a lot of intimate scenes together season 1 and got close.The first pic of just the two of them (GG and CP) outside of the show was at the end of 2014 with a behind the scenes shot with no discernable flirtation going on in the caption but the photo looks a little spicy https://www.instagram.com/p/wzwy6zxb1t/?taken-by=candicekp The 1st pic that showed any feign of interest was in early 2015 when she posted a pic of just GG asking fans to vote for him at the KCA’s https://www.instagram.com/p/zjMbz2xb9Z/?taken-by=candicekp which was probably just a friendly gesture.  I know she was single in 2015 bc she posted memes of being single.https://www.instagram.com/p/zGG-wuxb6o/?taken-by=candicekp https://www.instagram.com/p/3kEPySRb6_/?taken-by=candicekp

I’m not sure how long she had been single but if was for a while judging from the posts. The next day however she posts an animated fan art pic https://www.instagram.com/p/zlKdFyRb6t/?taken-by=candicekp of Westallen kissing so again, she could just be her showing appreciation to the fan art and promoting the show, but who knows! A few weeks later she posts just a pic of GG saying he gives the best giggles which is suspicious but not too much https://www.instagram.com/p/z22Rncxb8z/?taken-by=candicekp

However, In May of 2015 she posts a sneaky photo of GG and uses the hashtag #toocute https://www.instagram.com/p/28r2acxbxg/?taken-by=candicekp which seems a little flirty but again he was still with Hannah at the time even if it was falling apart. It seems as GG’s relationship was on the rocks with Hannah he began getting closer to CP.

Then BOOM 2016 starts and she reposts GG’s photo of them at the Golden Globes with a caption of “avec mon ami” (meaning something along the lines of “with my friend”...yeah ok) https://www.instagram.com/p/BAZ_6btxbxh/?taken-by=candicekp  From then on she seems to post more Westallen fan art and some other suggestive photos that make me believe their “friendship” was growing stronger in 2016. Even at the 2016 San Diego Comic Con they had their arms linked in one interview. But it seems as though as the year went on, just as GG started posting their friendship less, so did CP. Which could be due to GG being in the Honeymoon phase of his relationship and investing in LA hard. But we cannot forget this adorable photo he snapped of CP in the Beginning of 2017 https://www.instagram.com/p/BPwcPEgBgx2/?taken-by=grantgust Also SDCC 2017 happened and GG and CP seemed to be quite close during their interviews. There was the “Daddies” comment CP posted on Tom’s Instagram and then GG liked it. There was also FanExpo they did in Vancouver in November 2017 which was great Grandice tea as well since GG kept interacting with CP and Zoe throughout the entire panel.  If anything, I would say 2016 and 2017 were their years of the most flirtatious interaction, so far.

Also around the time GG and LA got engaged in April 2017 GG disabled comments on his Instagram posts from then to August of 2017. If anyone has any evidence of why he chose to do so, I would greatly appreciate it. I think he did it because of all the backlash he might have gotten from fans about the engagement, since it wasn’t to CP LOL! But it was definitely strange to say the least.

*Now I have nothing against LA personally, I actually want to like her because she reps my alma mater, The Ohio State University, constantly, and she may even be from Ohio like me and it kinda makes me happy that GG might have found a nice girl from Ohio. However, after reading multiple threads and accounts about her personality and potentially being racially insensitive or problematic that made me reconsider things (but I did not see explicit PROOF of this so I am still on the fence about it)*

But it is quite strange that GG posts about them like they’ve been together for years. It could also be because they’re still in the Honeymoon phase and that’s when people usually take the most pictures together and want others to know they’re in a relationship. Now they’re engaged and I thought I heard somewhere that the wedding won’t be until next year (I could be wrong tho). This will really put their relationship to the test because wedding planning can make or break a couple in some cases. And since they are long distance most of the time, it could prove fatal for their romance like it did with Hannah. Again this is all speculation and probably means nothing because I don’t know them personally and don’t see all aspects of their relationship on a daily basis. But isn’t it weird that you want to show off someone that much that you haven’t dated that long?? There are theories about it being fake and that’s the only reason I would believe it, because it seems to be a little rushed.

People who think CP and LA don’t like each other seem to forget this pic https://www.instagram.com/p/BehDLHYn2tn/?taken-by=grantgust from Grant in January this year, showing that they can all hang out outside of the show and it not be weird. Although we weren’t there and CP and LA could have been side-eyeing each other the entire time lol, but again not likely and we will never know for sure bc we were not there.

Here is how I think it all went down if you believe that GG and CP ever liked each other, hooked up, dated briefly, etc. GG and Hannah seemed to be in a loving relationship, especially in 2013 which was one year after they supposedly started dating (remember Honeymoon phase). That’s also when Hannah had the most photos of him on her Instagram. In 2014 they were still dating, but as Hannah became more busy with Beyonce and Grant got casted in the Flash, they didn’t get to see each other as much and maybe their relationship suffered or they naturally drifted apart. Seeing as the last pic Grant ever posted of her was in 2014 it seems he had gotten too busy or maybe it was meeting Candice that made him rethink things.  I also believe Hannah doesn’t like to post about her relationships as much as GG does which might be why he likes to post so much with LA since he never really could with Hannah since she was always away and she liked to keep her relationship private. Since they broke up around the end of 2015, it makes sense why he started openly flirting with CP more on Insta, he knew he could and maybe he wanted to be to see if there was something there. Perhaps CP turned him down because she didn’t want to be the rebound since he was just getting out of a long-term relationship, but she didn’t mind a little harmless flirting. LA didn’t care obviously and dated him anyway. If GG and LA really did start dating in early 2016, it looks suspicious for him to be that smitten that quickly after a breakup like that, but what do I know, he could really love the girl. But remember GG didn’t start posting  pics of LA until towards the end of 2016 and during that summer at SDCC he and CP seemed to interact more, were closer in some interviews and were linking arms in one interview and he seemed happier than the previous year. Also it’s weird how close and touchy feely GG was being after he got engaged to LA during the 2017 Comic Con and FanExpo interviews.

REACH ALERT!! All the flirtation in interviews and SM interaction is GG and CP’s way of being together without looking too suspicious and soon GG will realize this and ends things with LA. Or both CP and GG want to be together but want to wait until the Flash ends so it doesn’t interfere with the show’s dynamic if it doesn’t work out. That doesn’t explain why he’s marrying LA tho unfortunately :/

But in all honesty I think in general GG and CP just like to keep their friendship private unless they’re in public which makes it harder to hide. Once again I want to say this is all just speculation and fun. More than likely they’re just friends that sometimes like to play up their relationship in public for the show to keep the viewers interested and ratings up.  Maybe they’re attracted to one another and they just don’t click well as a couple or they don’t want to ruin their friendship bc they know it will affect their interaction on the show.