#seems like helen made it into the new universe

[r0semultiverse]

The Magnus Protocol 8 – Running on Empty memes

Credit me if you repost any of these.

[literary-illuminati]

Book Review 43 - Even Though I Knew The End by C. L. Polk

Oh this was fun. Never would have heard of it if it hadn’t been nominated for a Hugo, and devoured it in the course of a computer-less Sunday afternoon. It wasn’t exactly reaching for the stars, but it knew what it was about and it executed it well; there’s a real virtue to that. Also I adore slightly cheesy but self-serious noir and the early 20th century really is the ideal setting for classical urban fantasy.

The story follows Helen, a private investigator and warlock in 1930s Chicago. Ten years prior to the story, she sold her soul to a demon to resurrect her younger brother from a car crash that would have otherwise killed her entire family – for her trouble, she was cast out from the magical brotherhood training her as a mystic and forced to make a living as a cut-rate diviner and gumshoe in Chicago. The plot kicks off three days before the deal comes due and her soul’s forfeit, and she takes one last consulting job to add a bit more to the nest egg she’ll be leaving for her girlfriend Edith when she’s torn from the mortal coil. And then, of course, she finds out that a) her employer is a demon, b) the case she’s consulting on is someone ritually murdering other poor souls who’ve made deals, days before they come due, and c) if she solves it she’ll get her soul back, along with enough money to make to San Francisco with Edith and start a new life free and clear.

So this is not a book that sets out to surprise the reader. The storytelling is efficient and the foreshadowing is reasonably honest – you can guess just about every twist well ahead of time with even the slightest bit of effort. I’d say the book isn’t trying to break any new ground, but actually it’s the only example I can think off hand of this sort of genre emulation period piece that both has a queer protagonist and doesn’t either elide or edit out the homophobia of the their environment, so there is that. Anyway, ‘genre emulation’ is the right term I think – snappy, tightly written noir plot that doesn’t outlast its welcome (this was absolutely a novella-sized story).

I really don’t know the author or their work well enough to know how intentional it is, but the ending very much felt like a comment on the whole Bury Your Gays/Tragic Lesbian trope. Essentially, Edith gets herself heroically sacrificed saving Helen’s life in the climactic showdown. Then, once the dust has settled and Marlow (her demonic client) has given Helen her soul back she…immediately sells it again to bring her back. Better ten years of Californian bliss with her true love then an eternity in heaven (and besides, that brother she’d saved the first time had just killed an angel, so someone’s going to need to keep him company in hell). The book’s title is in no way subtle or metaphorical, it is a line of the protagonist’s internal monologue.

The story’s universe is a folk-Christian one, and it is absolutely imperative that when reading it you don’t poke at the underlying metaphysics at all. Angels and demons are real and magicians are the distant descendants of Nephilim and some of the Grigori still haunt the earth, and we have it on good authority that God doesn’t actually care about being gay and everyone seems very frightened of the idea of summoning the Archangel Michael to earth, but start asking any followup questions about angels and world events during the Roosevelt Administration and you’re ruin the story for yourself. Just don’t worry about it.

As a final note, I really did love Marlowe – or properly, she’s one of my favorite types of demons in these sorts of stories. Epitome of high class beauty, lives in a palatial penthouse waited upon handed and foot by layers of servants, eats the best food and wears the best clothes and has the best lovers, even a generous employer and creditor as long as you do what she wants and give her what she’s owed. The sort of demon who seems like falling out of heaven was worth it, and one you can imagine actually convincing someone to sell their soul. She’s fun!

[forasecondtherewedwon]

seven degrees east - chapter one

Fandom: Masters of the Air Pairings: Gale x Bucky; Nash x Helen; more tbd Rating: T (may change) Chapter: 1 / ? Word Count: 3798

Summary: It's 1996. Soundgarden's on the radio, Charles and Diana are headed for divorce, and seven American PhD candidates are studying literature at the University of Thorpe Abbotts in Norfolk, England. Between taking Prof. Harding's summer class and obsessing over their favourite authors, the boys will kick asses when they must, and fall in love if they can.

Spring was about to fall headlong into summer and Bubbles had decided Princess Di was the woman for him. They were all in love with her. Tabloid magazine photos of Diana in black and lavender—torn with care along the crease—decorated the walls of their dorms, overlapping posters for Superunknown and Crimson Tide, pieces they’d had published in the literary journal, and mundane scraps of paper elevated by their status as vessels for the phone numbers of girls they’d met at parties. Naturally, their Princess took supremacy, especially as they expected imminent, official news of her divorce from Charles. Lucky Bubbles.

It was mid-June 1996. They spent their days horny and sunburnt from laying out on the school’s big English lawn. These long stretches of apparent leisure were punctuated by the summer course in which they were all enrolled: “Thoreau’s Walden,” taught by Professor Harding. He was transparently attempting to instill in them a sense of self-reliance alongside an understanding of transcendentalist thought. The class wasn’t mandatory—the rest of their cohort would rejoin them in September—but their small group comprised a brotherhood of dedicated scholars. (Dedicated to having fewer courses to take come fall semester.)

Bubbles was their Great American Novel man, obsessed with Faulkner’s long sentences and Steinbeck’s long books. Crosby envied and lionized his best friend’s focus, but had come to accept that he was irresistibly drawn to the lower-brow, femme-fatale charm of Chandler and Hammett’s hard-boiled novels. Robert “Rosie” Rosenthal was their resident 19th-centuryist, plotting the spread of both his dissertation and his mustache on the fertile—if possibly cursed—intellectual ground of Edgar Allan Poe. Herbert Nash was Rosie’s chronological compatriot. Though he’d begun the doctoral program with a proposed focus on the works of Mark Twain, he had a literary wandering eye for anything that struck him as romantic. In the face of Nash’s flakiness, Curt fought (sometimes physically) for the pure pleasure of reading, but then he was often under the hedonistic, lunar-like sway of Oscar Wilde—a deviation (guided, he claimed, by his Irish heritage) from the later, hedonistic influence of his preferred poison: the Beat Generation.

If their ragtag band of chronic dogear-ers had a leader, it should’ve been Jack Kidd. Kidd was an upper year student, nearly finished with his PhD (unless his PhD finished with him first). He was secretive, perpetually put-upon, and capable of delivering heart-shattering criticism in a tone that made it sound like mercy. In short, he was everything they longed to be. When asked about the subject of his dissertation, he would drop his face into his hands with all the enthusiasm and surrender to gravity of a bridge suicide. In lieu of possessing the middle-aged-divorcé jadedness that seemed to come naturally to Kidd despite his being only 29, the seven younger candidates had taken up smoking the preceding November.

Because they did need a leader to make sure they did things like readings and laundry and correcting their posture after hours spent curled over, under, and around the library’s long oak tables, they had Bucky. And they had Buck, because it was smart to have a backup. “Bucky” was really John, and “Buck” was Gale, and when any of the other five called them out on being pretentious fucks, they would both grin and offer no correction. While John directed his furrowed brow at Lost Generation titans like Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald, Gale was dreamily engrossed in a fin-de-siècle love affair with Henry James. At any given time, at least three of them (including John) were waiting for the pair to realize that who they were actually head over heels for was each other.

They were all students at Thorpe Abbotts—the Norfolk satellite campus of the Connecticut university. They knew people studying Goethe and Voltaire, Tolstoy and Shakespeare and García Márquez, seriously, they did. They just happened to be a collection of Americans reading Americans. In England. For one reason and another, they’d decided to study overseas, intrigued by the allure of matched tuition fees, rainy reading weather, and the proximity to older and fancier universities, which were fun to visit if they were looking to instigate a winnable fight against other easily-provoked academics.

That particular evening, they descended upon a bar favoured by students from the University of East Anglia. John and Rosie had both offered to drive. To decide who’d had to go with John (concealed as who’d wanted to go with John), Crosby had flipped a coin—well, a double-sided Batman pog he’d produced with minor embarrassment after fishing around in his pocket for a coin. As a result, Gale and Curt tumbled from John’s Wrangler (Gale from the passenger’s seat, Curt from the bench in the rear) looking half-drunk already from John’s weaving, lead-footed panache behind the wheel. Rosie pulled up smoothly, with no complaints from Bubbles, who might not have complained even if they’d slid into the parking lot on their roof, Crosby, whose motion sickness had not been triggered, or Nash, who’d ironed a shirt for this outing in hopes of meeting a nice girl. The rest had openly teased him, then tried not to feel self-conscious about their own attire.

“You look like Hugh Grant,” John leveled at Nash when he saw him sweeping his hair back as they made for the bar.

“Thanks.”

“Wasn’t a compliment.”

Fortunately for Nash, he was impervious to most insults. John knew this and took it as licence to tease him all the more.

“Ladies love Hugh Grant,” Nash reasoned.

“Don’t say ladies,” Curt whined. “Fuck’s wrong with you?”

“The thing Hugh Grant has going for him is he’s British,” John explained.

“And he’s a movie star,” Gale offered, nonpartisan.

“Stellar addition, Buck: and he’s a movie star.” He turned back to Nash. “You’re non-movie-star, American Hugh Grant. Capisce?”

“Don’t say capisce.” Curt took out his frustration on the loose chunk of asphalt he booted across the parking lot.

“Ah, don’t listen to him, Nash,” Rosie instructed, slinging an arm around Nash’s neck and hauling him close so his steps stuttered and skipped.

“You look good, Nash,” Gale said.

“Like a real gentleman.”

“Too bad he’s just Nash disguised as a gentleman,” John lamented with a grin.

Nash cracked a telling smile.

“Whaddaya think, Croz?” John demanded. He looked around and found Crosby and Bubbles trailing them, laughing about something that was part of their own conversation. “Croz! Nash in disguise! This some kinda hard-boiled, sleazy villain shit?”

Crosby shrugged.

“Nash is Nash.”

“Nash is Nash,” Bubbles agreed, and then they were all saying it, speaking over one another, until their voices dropped into sync and it turned into a chant as they shoved into the warmth of the bar.

They fell into a booth together, then forced Crosby and Bubbles back out to get the first round since neither of them had driven and even if you tried to send one without the other, they’d both go anyway, as though attached by a tether. They returned with pitchers.

“Croz got carded,” Bubbles gleefully announced, handing out glasses from the stack in his hand.

Everyone awwwed. Crosby erupted in a flaming blush.

“Don’t worry about it, Croz,” Gale told him. Crosby nodded gratefully, but then Gale tacked on, “When I was your age—”

Crosby’s protestation that they were the same age had Rosie laughing until he had tears in his eyes. He tilted sideways into Nash, who did his best to scoot away.

“I love you Rosie, but I will slash your fucking tires if you wrinkle my shirt.”

This just made Rosie laugh harder.

“You alright to drive back?” John checked with Gale, leaning in to speak quietly below the hilarity.

“I gotcha, man.”

John nudged Crosby out of the booth a second time and came back with a pitcher of water for Gale, who’d smoke weed and cigarettes with the rest of them but drew the line at carbonation. Crosby’s hand hesitated between the pitchers of beer and water.

“I’ll drive,” Rosie assured him, brushing away Crosby’s wordless offer with a wave of his hand.

Crosby looked relieved to be let off the hook. He poured himself a beer.

John pointed at Rosie.

“You’re too damn self-sacrificing.”

“Maybe you’re too sac-selfrificing,” Curt countered, making John twist to face him with an expression of extreme indignation.

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You wanna take this outside?” John squared his shoulders. Even though it was all in play, Gale held out his hand, palm down, suggesting they chill out a little. They’d been bounced from this bar before.

“Might as well stay put,” Curt said. “If I knock you on your ass while you’re already sittin’ down, you got less far to fall.”

John smacked the brim of Curt’s ballcap down over his eyes and they broke into a scuffle in the booth, legs scrabbling beneath the table, Curt giggling wildly as he jerked away from John’s hands while protesting that he couldn’t see. Crosby, sitting on Curt’s other side, attempted to right his hat, but ended up having to dodge Curt’s elbow instead.

“Bets?” Rosie asked.

“What’s on the table?” Bubbles wondered. Somebody’s knee slammed the actual table from underneath and Bubbles’ hand shot out to steady his glass. “Figuratively.”

“Losers have to format the winners’ essay citations.”

“That’s not ba—”

Crosby saw Gale whack the back of his hand into Bubbles’ chest to shut him up, but it was too late. Rosie was grinning.

“And type up their essay.”

They groaned. Bubbles, Nash, and Crosby shook their heads, bowing out, but Gale stuck out his hand for Rosie to shake.

“You’re on,” he said.

“Who’s your money on?” Rosie asked.

“Who d’you think?” Nash cut in.

It really was silly to ask; Gale took John’s side in everything, always. Crosby was going to point that out, begin recalling supporting evidence, but John started fighting really dirty—his hands dove to Curt’s sides, tickling hard, and Curt hopped back. Crosby bailed out of the booth and stood.

“Maybe they should take it outside,” Bubbles observed, reading Crosby’s concern on his face before he could voice it.

Just then, there was a scoff: “Typical.”

John ceased his attack on Curt as they turned to look with the others. Curt fixed his hat. There were three guys standing there, just past Crosby, who took a step towards the table to show his allegiance. Like most people they encountered off the Thorpe Abbotts campus, the trio were British. They looked about their age, maybe a little younger, and enough sheets to the wind not to mind that there were fewer of them than members of the group they’d accosted.

The pause after that single word seemed to go on and on. None of the seven had a doubt in their mind that it was a criticism of their behaviour—their Americanness. The Brits would expect them to get angry, to fly from their booth and jab their impolite American fingers in their faces, wet American spittle spraying from their mouths as they shouted rude American words. They didn’t know that this was what these particular Americans did for fun. That even now, in the pause, they were just deciding how they wanted this one to go.

“Can we help you?” Gale asked calmly, while his compatriots wordlessly downed their drinks.

“We’re just fine,” one of them replied. “Try helping yourselves.”

Gale glanced around at his friends as though confused.

“Did one of you need help with something?” he asked.

Curt had just poured himself a second beer. He held up a finger, signally for everyone to wait as he took a long swallow. He sighed in satisfaction.

“I actually do need help,” he said, looking not at Gale but at the Brits.

“Want us to teach you to tie your shoes?” a different one taunted.

“Nah,” Curt said, tone dangerously placid to the ears of his friends. “Nah, got that one figured out. I actually got a question for you: loserssaywhat?”

The first one frowned, head cocking slightly.

“What?”

Rosie guffawed, prompting the change in the trio’s expressions: superior to insulted. Angry. But Curt was beaming. He took another swallow of beer before slowly enunciating, “Losers. Say. What.”

And then he burped so loudly that Crosby, recounting the story to Kidd later that night, would swear it shook the walls.

“That wasn’t part of the question,” Curt clarified.

The strangers surged towards the booth and Crosby got in their way, Bubbles and Gale jumping up too to put a wall between them and Curt.

Gale said one word to them, and he said it like an order: “Outside.”

“Fucking right, outside,” was thrown back at him.

The three on their feet watched the Brits out the door, then turned back to the group.

“Who’s holding down the fort?” John asked.

“Not me,” Curt said. He clambered from the booth and started shadow boxing. As he ducked and wove, eyes fixed on an invisible opponent, John spun his hat around, brim at the back.

“Let’s all go,” Nash said from his spot against the wall. “Nobody’s gonna…”

He trailed off as his gaze landed on something beyond their prizefighting trickster, beyond the inseparable Bubbles and Crosby, beyond the deep-running still waters of Gale. There was a girl. A beautiful girl. Thick, dark hair, talking with another girl Nash barely noticed. As he watched, she laughed. She was even more beautiful when she laughed.

“Actually, I’ll stay,” he amended distractedly. He tilted his head to see around Curt as Curt decided to add footwork to his routine. “The rest of you can fuck off.”

Rosie looked where Nash was looking and smirked.

“Ah, no way, buddy. Wouldn’t leave you here all alone!”

“No more than three of us can go,” John declared. “It’s not…”

“Sportsmanlike,” Gale supplied.

John snapped his fingers and agreed, “Sportsmanlike.”

“I guess it’s you three then,” Bubbles deduced glumly, glancing between John, Gale, and Curt.

“Sure is,” John said, considerably more gleeful. He rose and clapped Bubbles on the shoulder. “Hang tight.”

“But—”

“If you go, Croz’ll come too, and we can’t go five-against-three; they’ll think we’re chickenshits.”

“Who cares about their opinion?” Crosby wanted to know.

“Me,” Curt said. He stuck out his lower lip in a pout. “They hurt my feelings.”

Crosby rolled his eyes.

“Get the fuck outta here.”

“Yeah, and do us proud!” Rosie shouted at their backs as Gale, Curt, and John trekked towards the exit. John pumped his fist into the air.

When they’d gone, Rosie smiled slyly at Nash.

“So. Are we calling her over here?”

“What?”

“YO!” Rosie yelped at the top of his lungs.

The girl, her friend, and a dozen other people in the crowded bar turned their heads, searching for the source of the sound.

“What the hell?!” Nash blurted.

Rosie frowned at him.

“You think she’s pretty, right?”

“Duh. Look at her—”

“MY FRIEND THINKS YOU’RE PRETTY! YEAH, YOU! BLUE SHIRT!”

“If I wanted her to think I was a total jackass—” Nash began.

“You’ll get your chance. I just got you started. Wave her over.”

“You ever think there’s a reason you don’t have a girlfriend?”

Nash slid along the seat until he was free of them all, though Crosby did offer an encouraging thumbs-up.

“Watch and learn,” he called over his shoulder. He locked eyes with the girl—the beautiful girl, who was miraculously staring back at him with an expression of amusement rather than scorn—as he headed her way.

—

Outside, the tension was thickening. The Brits should’ve gotten some kind of points for holding their ground, John thought, because they looked nervous now that he, Gale, and Curt were all on their feet, not folded up in that booth. He lifted his chin and squared his shoulders to make himself as big as possible. And he smiled, not as massive as Curt though. That seemed to be pissing them off, maybe making them stay: that Curt was full-on grinning.

“Thorpe Abbott?” the mouthiest of the three asked, like an accusation.

“Abbotts, numb nuts,” Curt corrected.

“What do they grade you with there? Scratch-and-sniff stickers?”

“I wish!” John said. There was a threatening gleam in his eyes.

“You know it doesn’t mean anything when they give you all hundreds right? Your degrees don’t mean shit.”

“It actually does mean something,” Curt said. He suddenly sounded so serious that his friends looked at him from the corner of their eyes. “We go in this special room, ’k? Maybe not so fancy as the rooms at wherever you boys go—”

“East Anglia,” was offered.

Curt nodded.

“Yep, Easy Anglia, whatever. But we go in this room and then—true story—this woman shows up. Like, our dean calls her up to let her know another one of us special boys—”

“Us special American boys,” Gale emphasized.

“—got himself another fuckin’ hundred. Takes her maybe half an hour to show up. And then, guess what, you guys?” Curt looked at the befuddled Brits eagerly. “She blows us.”

Their reaction was a blend of highly skeptical and stunned by the turn Curt’s story had taken. Shit’s sake, Curt, John was thinking. This is gonna be a hell of a fight.

“And, you know, she did mention she had a son,” Curt said measuredly, homing in on the mouthy guy now, “but, damn, you’re her spittin’ fuckin’ image.”

The Brits lunged at them.

—

Nash wanted to ask her to dance, to hold her by the hips and sway along to whatever rhythm she chose. He didn’t care if it didn’t match the beat of the music. He didn’t care that no one else was dancing, or that this wasn’t really a place where people did that. “Helen,” she’d said her name was.

“You read much?” he asked stupidly, but he wanted her to like him more than he’d ever wanted anything in his life. More than anyone in the history of humankind had ever even dreamed their descendants could want. The only thing he could think to talk about was books. Talking about books, he could start to sound smart again, reassemble his brain in the background while most of him got lost in Helen’s eyes.

“Yes.”

Nash loved how she said yes. His heart, thumping happily in his chest loved it. The rush of blood to his groin loved it. The sound of “yes” in her mouth. She was American. He tried not to think how easy it would be, the two of them moving back home after school. Or staying here, a pair of expats. Whatever she’d prefer.

“I’m actually studying creative writing.”

“Where?” he asked, starry-eyed.

Her eyes darted to her friend before returning to his face. The reaction said he was being sort of stupid now, but then her expression shifted to something like guilt. She’d felt bad for thinking it. for writing him off so quickly.

“At the University of East Anglia.”

“Oh. So, like, right nearby.”

“Right nearby,” she confirmed. “Hence…” She glanced around. Hence this bar. Hence. Totally. Nash gave her a smile, weak with adoration.

“Why there?” he asked.

“Kazuo Ishiguro studied there. I admire his work.”

“I loved The Remains of the Day.”

Helen smiled at him. The clouds parted. Probably.

“Me too,” she said. “Are you in the arts as well?”

“English,” he told her. “Thorpe Abbotts. Working on my PhD.”

She was sufficiently engaged now that her friend moved off, giving them space.

“What’s your field?”

“American,” he admitted, and she got it, and she laughed. An American studying Americans in England. He shrugged, embracing her reaction.

“Who do you like?”

You. But she’d meant which authors.

“Twain,” Nash said, “and Hawthorne.”

Helen’s eyes lit up.

“Yes! My greatest influences are second-wave. You know, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem’s exposé on the Playboy Club, obviously…”

“Well, sure,” Nash said, just keeping up as she spoke in an impassioned rush.

“But I love the early feminists too. Hawthorne and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Alcott.”

“Little Women!”

“It’s probably still my favourite novel of all time.”

For the first time, Nash took a careful, calculated pause, and he gave her a look. A Nash look. It was a look that usually communicated let’s get out of here, but this time, he wanted more. He’d worn the shirt.

“I’ve never met anybody who was as much of a Jo as you are,” he said, meaning it.

It was noisy, but he heard Helen’s pleased gasp. That she was actually an Amy was something Helen had not yet admitted to herself, and so Nash’s compliment hit its target with full effect. He watched as her lips parted—to thank him? to kiss him? to say some other unforeseen thing that would change his life even further? make him feel the earth move under his feet? did she like Carole King?—but there was a hard tug on his elbow.

Nash turned to find Bubbles standing there. He was the one person Nash wouldn’t snap at for interrupting, and the others knew that. He’d been sent.

“I am so sorry,” Bubbles said, addressing Helen. He was beginning to slur his S’s. “I gotta steal him back for a minute.”

“I swear my friends don’t speak for me,” Nash said as Bubbles physically dragged him away from the conversation. “I know it’s happened twice now, but they don’t!”

Was it worth it, to be removed from Helen’s side and brought back to the booth? Nash was surprised to feel that it almost was—almost—when his eyes landed on their smiling trio of champions. Gale had a cut on his cheek where a fist must’ve connected, or at least glanced off; John had the dark promise of a bruise below one eye; and Curt didn’t have a scratch on him. Nash laughed, shaking his head.

“What was he tryin’ to say though?” John was asking.

“Mumbling some shit about our hundreds,” Gale replied. “Our ‘bloody hundreds.’”

“Yeah,” Curt said. “But it was after I’d clocked him square in the mouth. That’s why he was lispin’. ‘Bloody hundredth,’ it sounded like.” He chuckled. “Bloody hundredth.”

“To the Bloody Hundredth,” Crosby proposed, raising his beer.

Rosie passed Nash his refilled glass, then lifted his own for the toast.

“Bloody Hundredth,” the rest of them intoned.

“And to Princess Diana,” Bubbles’ voice rang out when the rest of them had a glass to their lips. “Wherever she may be tonight.”

Crosby adopted an expression of deep solemnity, but Rosie ruined it by snorting into his water.

“Alright, men,” John addressed them. “Back into the booth. We got some fuckin’ drinking to do.”

“Spoken like a true Hemingway scholar,” Gale observed.

John gave him an affectionate smile.

“I try.”

[r1-jw-lover]

Caine as John Wick's Mirror: Part 2

Part two?! Really?

Actually, I was quite satisfied with the analysis I previously wrote on Caine, but then I just rewatched the first John Wick movie and now I have even more thoughts to add on the subject matter.

So buckle up because this is going to be another long post.

Tagging @evren-sadwrn, @chaoticgardenbread and @jotunvali02 again. <3

In my last analysis, I have already compared Caine with Cassian due to how similar they function in relation to John within the John Wick universe. This time, let us compare Caine with the next most similar character to him in the John Wick franchise: Marcus.

On the surface level, Caine and Marcus have similar arcs within the movie they appeared in. They are both friends of John Wick who were recruited by the villain to hunt and kill the Baba Yaga but deep down were secretly on John Wick's side.

While Marcus agreed to Viggo's contract out of his own free will whereas Caine was blackmailed and threatened by the Marquis, they would eventually forsake the job given to them and choose to give John a helping hand in a moment of crisis, a decision they were willing to die for.

(The sad and tragic part of it is that only one survived and got to live out his happy ending and the other was punished for it and died.)

The more I think about it though, the more I feel this is where the similarities end.

For one, Marcus looked way older than John, likely closer to Viggo in age. Even so, he hadn't retired from the business, and was living quite comfortably in a large apartment in New York alone. (It's almost as if Marcus is an alternate version of John if he didn't choose to marry Helen and had continued to live on his life as an assassin.)

By comparison, John was retired, and while he had a large bungalow in the New York suburbs to live in, the large wide empty spaces of his home seemed to amplify how lonely John felt after losing Helen.

Marcus: How're you holding up? John: I kept asking why her. Marcus: There's no rhyme or reason to this life. It's days like today scattered among the rest.

As much as his comforting words were sound, Marcus was content with his own life, and John clearly wasn't. On top of the implication that Marcus didn't have any family whatsoever, you can see why John immediately questioned Marcus about his intentions of visiting him after Helen's funeral right after the quoted dialogue above.

John was too drowned in his grieving for his wife's passing at the time that no one's condolences, not even Marcus (the person who Viggo claimed John was close with), could truly comfort him.

Because John wasn't done grieving while he was alive, when Iosef killed Daisy, John went on a rampage to avenge his dog. When Santino burned down his house, John shot him on Continental grounds, the supposedly safest haven in the criminal underworld. When John sacrificed his ring finger to the Elder, he rebelled against the High Table's forces head on alongside the New York Continental.

You know what finally made John Wick stop running, accept his death and find his peace?

It was when Caine comes into the picture.

For the first time in a long time, John had found someone who's similar in age as him and in a position similar to him mentally and emotionally-speaking, more so than anyone else in the franchise.

Just like John, Caine was also retired. He was discontent with his life, and he was lonely, due to the sheer fact that Caine wasn't allowed to get close to his daughter.

Despite being on opposite sides, John and Caine were equally caged by a strong sense of helplessness internally. (Where John acted upon it with defiant rage, Caine responded with palpable fear.) That's why we're rooting for both of them to get their unconditional freedom, and why the sunrise duel is so important not just for plot reasons.

Unlike Marcus, Caine had an innocent family member at stake, and because John intimately knew how it felt to lose a loved one, he ultimately sacrificed his life so to prevent Caine from having to experience the same grief John had painstakingly gone through for four entire films.

And that's something John was finally willing to die for.

(It's unfortunate that within the same movie John had unknowingly created another John Wick in Akira, but that is an entirely different story altogether.)

[dollsome-does-tumblr]

okay. having been made aware that most people dislike more characters than me, i need to try to do this. who are tv characters i don't like??? who? who??

boat guy on ted lasso. a concept and not a person. a concept designed to torment me and crush all my dreams. an avatar for all my dead dreams. if he'd actually become more of a character, like as a series regular or something, i would have probably grown to like him, because i'm weak. but in our reality, i can hate him forever.

jack from lost i always really hated, and i still do, but in a way where i almost like him because i hate him so much??? like, it's hilarious and special to me how much he sucks, and how consistently, always. jears forever.

jess mariano, but that's just because gg fandom has driven me crazy over the past 20 years in that regard, hyping him up so much, and i'm a hateful crone. technically he is fine.

christopher hayden is pretty bad. yeah, i think i can say with confidence i dislike christopher hayden.

extremely ashamed to report that i have sort of developed an occasional soft spot for dean forrester in my old age. awful! i'm not proud, okay! but i'm being honest.

i do hate rupert from ted lasso. but like. i don't think i get a prize for that one. that's an extremely easy dude to hate.

oh. i lowkey kinda hate nigel from cbs ghosts. i apologize, but i do. i think isaac could do better. i wish he would go for the australian stripper dinosaur enthusiast from the most recent episode. wouldn't it be hilarious if they decided to kill that lap dancer so he could become isaac's new boyfriend? i should write this show. it would be stunning and universally beloved and full of murders just to expand the friend group.

this has really gotten away from me.

wait!!!!! helene from killing eve! was that her name? i really didn't like her! she bugged! to me, she had too much screentime! (the actress seems very cool though, no offense to her.)

i am kind of bothered by joel mchale's character in animal control specifically because he's so identical to jeff winger in mannerisms that i just feel like jeff winger abandoned his greendale family and started a new life as an animal control man in seattle. i don't like this feeling. i just want to scream, "go back to greendale, jeff! i know frank isn't your real name!!!!" at the screen every second. does this count as disliking a character?

BOAT GUY 😡

[cetaitlaverite]

Why All This Music?

Masters of the Air - Rosie Rosenthal x OC

masterlist is linked here <333

32. God and the Law

Another year and the war was still going. 1945. It seemed so strange. Freddie had been with the WAAFs since 1939. She’d been out of university for six years, almost.

The new year always made her solemn. Another year without Daniel. In only two months he would have been dead for a full four years. It felt like so much longer than that, like a lifetime. Freddie had been so much a different person back then, for better or for worse.

Thorpe Abbotts kept on running exactly as it had been for as long as Freddie had been there - longer, probably, since she’d started the war elsewhere. Pilots went out and came back. American Red Cross girls handed out doughnuts and coffee - Helen still saved some for Freddie when she could. Freddie took Meatball for his daily morning walk with his flash new collar and lead, gifted to him by Rosie this Christmas - Meatball seemed pleased with no longer having to wear his old leather harness every time Freddie wanted to take him somewhere.

Freddie drew up manipulation plans and helped Croz with his flight paths. Whenever any of the bombers went out she sat in the designated Operation Corona wireless operators’ room in the tower and worked for hours on end to convince German fighter pilots away from American bombers. And when the crews came back, if Rosie had been among them she would wait outside the interrogation room for him, always anticipating the smile he gave her when he laid eyes on her with bated breath and sweaty palms.

Over Christmas, Paddy had proposed to Jem. The two of them had telephoned on Boxing Day to share the news. They couldn’t actually get married, of course, but they could wear rings. And tonight was their wedding night. Hosted in the wireless operators’ hut, Amy was Paddy’s maid of honour and Freddie and Millie were splitting the role between them to be Jem’s. Cecelia, apparently, had worked out what was going on between Jem and Paddy a while ago and she’d memorised the wedding vows for them so she could officiate.

Freddie and Millie stood to Jem’s left, opposite Amy on Paddy’s right, while Cecelia read aloud wedding vows and had Jem and Paddy repeat them after her. Freddie, Millie, and Amy were all in tears. Freddie resented that it couldn’t be more special for them, that they only had a small window of opportunity while the other girls were out at the officers’ club and that they couldn’t decorate and that they couldn’t wear pretty wedding dresses and only had their uniforms. But Jem and Paddy didn’t seem to mind. Their eyes were locked firmly on each other - had been, in fact, since Jem had entered the room and been walked down the ‘aisle’ between the two rows of beds with Freddie and Millie on either side of her. When she and Paddy looked at each other, the rest of the world fell away. When they kissed to seal the deal, they were both smiling wide.

They had a little party to celebrate, with stolen alcohol and music they took turns singing in place of a record player. And when Jem and Paddy left to go on their night-long honeymoon in Freddie’s office - because they deserved at least some privacy on their wedding night - Jem pulled Freddie and Millie aside with tears in her eyes, a flush in her cheeks, her smile so wide it must have been hurting.

“I love you both,” she said, taking one of each of their hands and squeezing. “So, so much. Thank you for being here and walking me down the aisle and - and - and Fred, thank you for letting us use your office!”

Freddie laughed. “You’re welcome. Just don’t touch any of my files, please! And if you’re going to use the desk, wipe it down after!”

Jem winked. “We’ll wipe down the entire room, Fred, don’t you worry.”

Millie laughed. “I should hope you’d find cause to! It’s your wedding night!”

As Jem and Paddy met back up again and left the hut hand in hand, grinning at each other and over their shoulders as the remaining girls cheered them out, Freddie felt her heart clench. It was so lovely, she thought. They hadn’t had much but they hadn’t needed much, and it was the happiest wedding she’d ever been to.

Millie linked their elbows together as she guided Freddie to sit on her bed. “Thinking about your future wedding, Fred?”

Freddie glanced at her and laughed. “Why? Are you thinking about yours?”

“I’m always thinking about mine,” Millie replied breezily. “It’s what keeps me going.”

“I can’t believe you haven’t let the poor man propose yet,” Freddie said. She laughed when Millie scowled.

“One, pot kettle. Two, I don’t care how long I have to wait, that man will get down on one knee in front of me and give me a proper proposal. I’ve only been dreaming about it since I was a little girl!”

“I’m sure Brady would absolutely love to be able to get down on one knee in front of you right now, Mils, but he is stuck in a prisoner of war camp,” Freddie reasoned.

Millie scoffed. “Yes, for now. But once the war’s out we’ll be spending forever together, and I want forever to start with a ring and a proper proposal, the way my mum always told me it should.”

Freddie shrugged. “Fair enough.”

“I hope I get married next,” Cecelia interjected, coming to sit down on her bed, beside Millie’s. Freddie’s old bed.

Amy came to sit beside her, raising both eyebrows. “Your fella still not proposed, Cecelia?”

Cecelia rolled her eyes. “Not yet, but we only get to see each other once a month.”

“I’d be worried if I was you -”

“If I were you I’d be more focused on finding someone at all,” Cecelia retorted.

Freddie couldn’t help but snort. “Amy, some people like to take their time with these things. It’s a big deal, getting married! But you’ll find someone soon, I’m sure of it.”

“If you don’t marry Rosie soon, Fred, I’m snapping him up for myself,” Amy answered her.

Freddie laughed, because even though she knew Amy had a big crush on Rosie, she also knew that Amy had a big crush on everyone, and she’d never, ever actually do it. She wouldn’t be able to, anyway. If Rosie was marrying anyone Freddie knew it was her. She had a sneaking suspicion he might have already bought a ring and was wondering whether he might be waiting for Valentine’s Day to pop the question.

If he did, she thought, as the conversation raged on around her and she thought back to the pure, unbridled joy of Jem and Paddy’s wedding, she’d say yes. A wedding on base - in the chapel, maybe, unless Rosie wanted a Jewish ceremony. Could they do a Jewish ceremony on base? Or maybe they could go to the village church if he didn’t mind how they did it. She could buy a pretty white dress in the village and flowers from the florist. Maybe her parents could even drive over for the occasion.

Freddie had butterflies in her stomach just thinking about it. Rosie, waiting at the end of the aisle in his dress uniform, his curls perfectly placed, Croz standing beside him as his best man. Her father giving her away, Millie and Jem her maids of honour waiting at the altar for her. Two rings on her ring finger instead of none, and a ring on Rosie’s to declare to every woman who laid eyes on him that he was firmly and irrevocably off the market, forever promised to Freddie, just as she was promised to him.

Freddie’s head was in the clouds for the next few days, thinking about her hypothetical future wedding. Rosie hadn’t even proposed yet but she was hopeful. She went to bed every night hoping that it might be the next morning. When February arrived, she became almost certain she only had to wait until Valentine’s Day. Two weeks, that was all, and she’d be engaged to the most wonderful man on earth, and she’d rush him down the aisle as soon as possible so she could switch her last name and tie their souls together. For the rest of her life she wanted to be tied to him. There was no way anything could come between them if they were firmly tied together, in the eyes of god and the law.

Freddie was daydreaming about it all again as she filtered out of the tower along with all of the other Operation Corona wireless operators. The rest of the girls were grinning; it had been their most successful mission yet. The fighters had barely gone anywhere near their boys. Freddie’s change in tactic had worked like magic.

“Can we host a party tonight, ma’am?” Anneliese asked Freddie, bouncing around on the balls of her feet in her excitement. She was hurrying to keep pace beside Freddie with the way she kept veering out of her course with her bouncing.

Freddie laughed. “If you want to organise it, yes, Anneliese, we can host.” Her attention was only half-focused on the conversation, the rest of her already anticipating waiting outside of interrogation for Rosie to come out. He would have landed about half an hour ago, by her reckoning.

Anneliese cheered her success and hurried to tell Jana and start preparations. Freddie smiled to herself, checking to make sure none of the other girls wanted to speak to her before hurrying on her way to wait outside of interrogation for Rosie.

It was cold today, Freddie realised as she stood there waiting. Colder than it had been yesterday. Colder, even, than this morning, it felt like. Maybe a long-sleeved wedding dress? She tugged at the sleeves of her jacket, willing them to cover her hands as well as her arms, and then pulled the lapels closer together. Crossing one leg over the other as she leaned back against the wall, she sighed, and her breath plumed out white in front of her.

“Come on, Rosie,” she mumbled. “It’s freezing out here.” The toe of her left shoe began a steady tapping against the ground.

Up ahead, Millie and Jem rounded the corner. They had their heads bowed together, deep in conversation, though as Freddie called their names Millie stopped talking mid-sentence, her head snapping up to meet Freddie’s eyes. “Fred,” she said, as though utterly shocked to see her there.

“Mils,” Freddie greeted as she and Jem approached. She laughed. “Why do you look so surprised? I wait for Rosie here every time he comes back.”

Jem shot a hasty glance at Millie. “Can we talk about something in your office, Fred?”

Freddie’s heart leapt at the same time as it stuttered. This was it, she thought, an anticipatory heat flooding her cheeks. Her proposal. Valentine’s Day wasn’t for a little while yet but then again maybe they could get married on Valentine’s Day. She clasped her hands together, trying to be subtle about running a finger over the empty space on her ring finger. It wouldn’t be empty for much longer.

“Fred,” Millie said, her eyes flicking between Freddie and the door to the interrogation room behind her. “Please.”

Freddie’s eyebrows furrowed. If Rosie was going to propose, why was he going to do it in her office? For privacy, maybe? But she wanted to see him now, wanted him to do it now. She didn’t care who was around to see.

Freddie gave a quick shake of her head and pretended ignorance to their plan. “Can it wait until after I’ve seen Rosie? I just want to make sure he’s okay, it won’t take long.”

“I’d really prefer if we went now,” Jem insisted.

Millie nodded. “It’s urgent.” For the first time, Freddie noticed that her face was completely pale. Usually there was a rosy hue to her, her cheeks always just a little bit flushed and matching the strawberry blonde of her hair, but right now she may as well have been a ghost. All of the colour had drained out of her face.

Freddie stood up straighter. “Is someone in trouble?” she wondered tentatively. She was just caught off guard enough to push away from the wall and begin following Millie and Jem to her office. She glanced back over her shoulder at the door to interrogation, as though expecting Rosie to appear from behind it, and sighed. “Will this take long? I don’t want Rosie to worry if he comes out and I’m not there.”

“It’s urgent, Fred,” Millie repeated, in place of any real explanation. And as though to prove her point, she took a gentle hold of one of Freddie’s wrists and started to hurry their progress towards her office.

Freddie’s eyes sought Jem. She was clearly fighting to avoid having to look at Freddie.

“You’re kind of scaring me,” Freddie said, looking between the two of them. The excited fluttering of her heart was turning heavy, anticipation turning to dread. “Is everyone okay?” She swallowed hard. “It’s not one of the girls, is it?”

“Fred,” Jem asserted, “please just wait until we get to your office.”

“Is someone pregnant?” Freddie gasped. “It’s not Emma and her RAF chap, is it? I told her that if she was going to do it before marriage she needed to be careful -”

“Freddie!” Millie exclaimed. She stopped walking and turned to face her, the set of her shoulders stern. “We’ll tell you when we get into your office.”

Freddie frowned, shrinking into herself. “You’re scaring me,” she said softly. “I’m just trying to get some sort of reassurance that it’s not as bad as I’m worrying that it is.”

“Please just wait,” Jem pleaded, taking one of Freddie’s hands in both of her own. “Please, Fred. Please just wait until we get to your office.”

Looking between Millie and Jem, Freddie felt her heart start to pound. Her blood was rushing in her ears. There was a sick feeling settling low in her stomach. Whatever had happened, it was clearly just as bad as, if not worse than, she was worrying it was.

“Okay,” Freddie relented in a small voice. She sounded to her own ears like a little girl. She let Millie and Jem lead the way, each carrying one of her hands in theirs, and was grateful, because now she wasn’t really seeing where she was going. Now she was stuck in the nausea filling her body.

Meatball was waiting patiently for them in Freddie’s office, lying curled up in his bed as opposed to spread out on the couch. He perked up when he saw them come in, sat up and wagged his tail and sat quietly as Freddie stroked him and kissed his head. 

Freddie sat down on the leather couch at Millie and Jem’s insistence. There was an ache in the back of her throat and she didn’t even know what she was preparing to cry over yet. 

It wasn’t Rosie, at the very least. Because she’d kept the fighters away entirely today. And she would know if it was Rosie. She’d thought the same about Daniel but she would know this time. She would know if it was Rosie.

Jem sat down beside Freddie, closer than she usually would, and kept hold of her hand. Millie paced before them a few times as she battled with herself over something. Finally, abruptly, she turned to face them.

“Fred,” Millie began, in a gentle voice but a firm one, too, “I know you’re going to hate me for telling you this but I need you to understand that I couldn’t let anyone else do it, okay?”

“Okay,” Freddie mumbled, eyebrows furrowed, heart pounding in her ears. All of the sound in the room was muffled. It all looked blurry, almost, like she had forgotten to put on her glasses, but she didn’t need glasses. She felt like a little girl being disciplined by her parents.

“Fred,” Millie said again, inhaling a deep breath. She faltered at the last moment and crouched down in front of Freddie, resting both hands on Freddie’s knees. “Fred, he’s gone down,” she admitted all in one breath. “Rosie’s gone down.”

“What?” Freddie asked. The rushing in her ears was so loud she may as well have been standing outside in the midst of a hurricane. 

“Rosie’s fort caught fire,” Millie said, louder this time. “Someone said they saw ‘chutes but they only counted seven and someone was keeping it flying straight. He thought -” Millie choked but quickly regained composure. “He thought Rosie was probably trying to get them out of Berlin and across Russian lines, so he stayed behind. But then it exploded and he’s not sure if - if -”

“No,” Freddie said.

“He’s not sure if Rosie got out,” Millie finished at last. There were tears in her eyes. Her cheeks were blotchy. She was looking at Freddie like it was taking everything in her not to lunge for the door and flee the scene.

All Freddie could do was stare at her. “Rosie’s…”

Millie nodded.

“You think he’s…”

Again, Millie nodded.

Freddie shook her head. “He’s not dead.”

“He might not be,” Jem reasoned. “He might have gotten out and they just didn’t see the ‘chute because the fort was so close to the ground. Or maybe they didn’t see him because of the fire.”

“Jem,” Millie said quietly, lowly, turning to look at her, “I don’t think that’s helpful.”

“You mean you don’t think it’s helpful to give me false hope,” Freddie deduced. “You’ve already decided he’s dead.”

Millie sat back and clasped both hands over her eyes. “I don’t know what to think,” she confessed, her voice choked. “I just don’t want to make this harder for you than it already is.”

And Freddie knew, then, that Rosie was dead. Because Millie wouldn’t try to force her to believe it if there was any single part of her which thought she may be wrong.

Freddie stood up suddenly. She wasn’t sure what to do with her body. She had all these limbs which were just hanging off of her, waiting for instructions, and they felt like dead weight. 

Her hands were shaking, she vaguely registered, as she started towards her desk. They’d been shaking when Daniel had gone down, too. When she’d been pulled into an office to be told that her boyfriend had been shot down and killed in a mission over Germany. History repeating itself. The same now as it had been then.

And this was always going to happen, Freddie realised. It was why she was so reluctant to get to know Rosie at the start. She had always known it was going to come to this. She’d brought him home with her and showed him pictures of Daniel, showed him how she would pay tribute to his memory when he inevitably went down and she was forced to move on. This had been fated since the beginning, predesigned from before they had ever even met. Freddie, returning home after a while away, greeted with a man who saw right through her the instant their eyes met, a pilot who was going to make her fall in love with him before crashing out of the sky.

It was always going to happen this way.

Freddie collapsed at once. Her legs just couldn’t hold her anymore. And distantly she thought she heard some sort of wailing, some sort of desperate, deranged scream, and she pitied whoever was making that sound because it sounded exactly as she felt.

“Rosie,” that voice kept screaming, over and over again.

Freddie clutched her shaking hands against her heart. 

“Rosie, Rosie, my Rosie. My darling. My love. My Rosie.”

“Shh,” Millie was cooing as she took Freddie into her arms and started to rock her gently back and forth. “Shh, Fred, shh.”

The wailing continued, drowning out her reassurances.

It took Freddie’s voice cracking, her throat dry and sore, to get her to stop. And the screaming, she realised with a sudden clarity, was hers. Had been hers. Where once there was catastrophic noise there was now quiet - heavy, wheezing breaths and ragged sobs.

Freddie vomited before anyone could preempt it, even herself. All over the floor, some of it on her lap, she threw up again and again and again, then coughed up saliva and threw up some more. 

Jem left her side to find something to help - a bowl or something to clean it up, Freddie didn’t care, she barely even noticed.

Millie rubbed her back with one hand, holding back her hair in a makeshift ponytail with the other, and whispered that she was there and she wasn’t going anywhere and that she’d stay as long as Freddie wanted her.

When Jem returned there came a reprieve. Freddie collapsed back into Millie, breathing heavily, her face contorted into a fixed, permanent sob. Millie smoothed her hair away from her sweat-sticky face and rubbed her back, murmuring to her that she was safe, while Jem cleaned up the mess and put a bowl beside her in case she needed to throw up again.

And she did. Freddie threw up for the better part of two hours, sobbing in whatever breaks she got from the nausea, wailing whenever she thought about how the rest of the day, the week, her life, was going to look without Rosie at its centre. She threw up until she started coughing up blood, until her body wasn’t strong enough to support itself anymore, until, finally, her own tragedy knocked her unconscious. Until her body decided for her that she wasn’t capable of living in the waking world anymore and let her find peace in the sleeping one.

[stripysockstumb]

TMP EP 1

.Gewn, Alice, Lena (boss), teddy (just got another job), colin (IT), and sam

.FREDY, search engine for looking for incidents

.Already mentioned ‘dolls watching’ and ‘dolls, human skin’ the Stranger????

.The universe that the entities got pulled through to??

.MARTIN VOICE/Alex (NORIS)

.FREDY started reading out certain statements in different voices around a year ago

.There are 3 voices

.Alice has named them NORRIS, CHESTER, AUGUSTUS

.NORIS and CHESTER are the most common

.Assuming this is the statement format

.Statement 1: checking in red by NORIS

.Statement reading less robotic voice, more Martin

.Could be the Burried?? Cemetery mentioned

.The Stranger? Dead dude skin/ voice

.Defo the stranger

.Taken over the dead husbands body, ‘it’

.Statement ends

.The enitites sound the same

.Partial reanimation crossreference

.Gewn seems to have a LOT of experience, sus

.Gwen and Lena in office

.Audio interference and different audio quality

.Interference by the eye???????

.Giving Elias

.Manipulation 10000

.Gwen wants Lenas job

.Lena warning Gwen about trying to take her job because of what it ‘entailes’ sus

.Colin is defo hiding something, kinda a scary dude, could be an avatar, he is trying to fix the system eg.FREDY

.Is this recorded through security cameras????? The audio keeps being different

.Also recorded by the pc cameras??

.No one realy likes colin

.Alice and Sam know eachother from uni, she got him the job

.Introducing the idea that everyone who works there has had an ‘encounter’ which leads them there

.JONNNNNN/john/ CHESTER

.YES YES YES YES YES I MISSED HIS ANOYING VOICE OMG

.Statement, Magnus Institute Ruins

.Statement made on April 10th 2022 3.31pm

.Manchester???? Not our version of the institute

.No pictures of it suprise suprise

.‘Realy weird place’ yeah no shit honey

.No pictures are uploading (just like the ‘real’ statements, they wouldnt be able to be uploaded onto the computer), she is realy paranoid after going there

.Was a fire about 20 years ago (so in 2000 ish)

.‘Got a realy cool vibe’ offices, old furnishings, the feeling that ‘doors would randomly shut even through most of the doorframes are empty’ ALRIGHT HELEN CHILL

.No old papers????? All files gone????? SUSPICIOUS Old graffiti???

.Symbols on the walls, stains, from a ritual??? Could be an alternate universe Institute where the Desolation managed to complete their ritual??

.The photos have disappeared off her phone

.She found an empty box with symbols on it, picture wont upload or format

.‘Photographic distortion’

.Getting threats from random people on the internet about the box she took

.Anonymous dms coming in

.‘Image removed by moderator’ she finally managed to upload a photo of the symbols at 2.01am but it was taken down

.‘Canaries should stay above ground’ the mod of the chat is incredibly sus

.People saying the picture was ‘gross’ before it was taken down????

.‘Are those eyes’

.Was potentially a gore pic about eyes

.She was banned from the chat room

.She real dead

.The thread was then locked by the moderator

.Statement ended

.No one has heard of the Magnus Institute except maybe Sam?

.Listening through a phone??

.Sam is thankful for the job, something to focus on? What happened to him

.Gwen is his ex?? Or Alice??

.Alice doesn't believe the cases are real, apparently the pay is good

.‘To new beginnings’

.Colin trying to ‘find’ someone???? He knows something, he could be talking about the voices in the server??

Overall an amazing start to the new show, so many mysteries already and im so so so exited to hear the third voice and see if its Jonah/Elias, also to find out which universe we are in and the timelines matching up with og Magnus Archives!!

[twistedtummies2]

Top 10 Portrayals of Lucy Westenra

When I did my list for Mina Harker, the leading lady in Bram Stoker’s “Dracula,” I said that Mina was intended by Stoker to be the ideal “New Woman”: a strong, willful, intelligent working woman who takes up the charge against the vampire scourge in the story, and proves to be just as capable - if not more capable - than most of the men in the book. However, Mina is not the only other major female character in the story: there is also Lucy Westenra, Mina’s best friend in the original novel. Lucy is intended to be the polar opposite to Mina: if Mina is the strong and proactive female who takes command, Lucy is the young lady of privilege who embodies a wholly different standard. Lucy is richer than Mina is, and has lived a much more sheltered life; she’s essentially a little Victorian princess, always worrying about fashion and her love life. She has no less than three suitors all vying for her attention, and it’s telling that Lucy chooses the man she picks (Arthur Holmwood) largely based on his good looks. It’s therefore no surprise that, when Dracula comes a-calling, Lucy is the first to die: Mina takes charge and is able to survive to the end, but the more passive Lucy is an out-fashion-ideal on its way out, and is destroyed by the vampire accordingly. HOWEVER, what’s most interesting about Lucy is the way Stoker presents her as a character. While all of the above is true, Lucy, in the novel, isn’t depicted as unlikeable. In fact, quite the reverse: Lucy’s three suitors are all friends, and they and she all remain friends after she makes her choice. She doesn’t lord anything over Mina or others in the novel with her privileged status, and while she can seem a bit airheaded, there’s no malice in her heart at all. She’s essentially a pure innocent, an angel on Earth. Lucy is everyone’s favorite person: someone virtually everybody in the novel comes to care about in a very short time. This makes her death, and then her transformation into a vampire, all the more horrifying and tragic: she is a warning of the kind of danger Dracula presents to not only Mina, but to all of England. Once Lucy is turned, she goes from a sweet and tender-hearted little princess to a savage beast who preys on children and seduces men to their doom.

Just like Mina, over the years, different interpretations of Dracula have reinvented Lucy’s character in a number of ways. And, just like Mina, many of them completely change what made the Lucy in the novel who she was. However, her basic role in the story - the woman whose death and change serves as a warning to the other major characters, and spurs the heroes to action - always remains constant. With that said, here are my Top 10 Favorite Portrayals of Lucy Westenra!

10. Carmen Guerrero, from “Spanish Dracula.”

In both of the early Universal films from 1931, Lucy is a very minor character. She only appears briefly in two scenes before being killed by Dracula offscreen. Later, she is seen in her newfound vampiric state; only in the Spanish Dracula version does she actually get killed, however. In the English release, the scene where Van Helsing and Jonathan Harker (or “Juan,” as the Spanish version calls him) was cut for censorship purposes, leaving Lucy’s fate ambiguous. The Spanish version, however, doesn’t mess around: Guerrero’s Lucy isn’t staked onscreen, but the scene with her death is still handled, in a tasteful-for-the time fashion.

9. Frances Dade, from the 1931 Film.

While Carmen Guerrero’s Lucy gets the dubious honor of…you know…actually DYING in the final film, Frances Dade is one of the first people I think of when I think of Lucy as a character, and this is all it really takes to boost her higher. One of the things I love about Dade’s Lucy is her chemistry with Mina: in real-life, Helen Chandler (Mina’s actress) and Frances Dade were actually good friends, and while their time onscreen together is very brief, you do feel that friendship come through, in my opinion. The Lucy in both of these films is actually depicted as being a character with a bit of a dark side: she is entranced at first sight with Dracula, which makes the fact she’s the one he kills off first - transforming her into one of his wraith-like, soulless Brides - rather ironic, in hindsight.

8. Clarabelle Cow, from Disney’s Dracula, Starring Mickey Mouse.

As I said on at least one or two lists past, what I love most about the graphic novel of “Disney’s Dracula” is that you can tell the people who made it really read and understood the original book. There are lots of bits of humor you’ll only understand if you actually read the story. Clarabelle’s casting and depiction as Lucy (or rather, “Clara-Lucia”) is a chief example: just like in the book, Lucy is depicted as being everybody’s favorite person. All of the men are enamored with her, talking about how charming and beautiful and glamorous she is, and even Mina admits to feeling envious of Lucy’s many feminine virtues. This is hilarious contrasted with the fact Lucy is being played by Clarabelle Cow, of all characters, and…well…just look at the page here to get the joke from that point on. XD

7. Sadie Frost, from the 1992 Film.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s somehow-highly-accurate-and-yet-not-remotely-accurate-at-all film version of the story, Lucy is drastically changed in personality. Instead of being a virtuous, angelic girl who is corrupted by Dracula’s evil, Lucy is depicted as already being a bit of a dangerous character from the start. She’s a hormonally-driven young lady who seems to enjoy toying with men’s hearts and wants to sleep with as many hot young studs as possible, and has a somewhat darker, more biting sense of humor. She’s depicted as bisexual, and even tries to “get it on,” as they say, with Mina! She’s not necessarily EVIL, but her ultimate demise and transformation is treated less as “tragic corruption,” and more a sort of “condemnation for her sins”: her sex-seeking ways lead to her becoming a monstrous parody of her former self, as her carnal desires and carnivorous appetites become intermingled.

6. Fiona Lewis, from the 1973 Film.

A somewhat common trope throughout Dracula adaptations and reimaginings is the idea of one of the ladies Dracula targets being the reincarnation of the Count’s long-dead wife, from before he became a vampire. Usually, the woman who gets this treatment is Mina…but in the version that started this trope (as far as I can tell), it was actually Lucy! In the 1973 TV film, made by Dan Curtis, Jack Palance’s Dracula goes after Lucy first as a way of trying to reunite with his bride, believing her to be his long-lost wife (though whether this is true or not is left somewhat ambiguous). I actually like this much better than versions that make Mina the bride, as it makes Dracula’s pontifications on vengeance following Lucy’s death more meaningful, and it makes more sense for him to go after Lucy first in this instance. However, while Lewis plays her role excellently well, I think it’s ultimately the narrative choices I’ve described that make her more memorable than anything else.

5. Jan Francis, from the 1979 Film.

This version of Lucy was actually inspirational to me in writing my own stage version of Dracula, which, again, is something worth noting. It should be noted that, in this movie, Mina and Lucy have their names swapped: the character I’m referring to is called “Mina” in the film, but her actual role in the story is that of Lucy. (Because I guess this movie, and the play that inspired it, just wanted to make things more confusing.) For consistency’s sake, I’ll refer to her as “Lucy,” regardless. Francis’ Lucy is the daughter of Van Helsing, as well as Mina’s best friend, and is depicted - in a manner somewhat more similar to the book - as a more passive, “girlish” character who is frightened of the darkness and has an innocence to her. Much like with Sadie Frost, when she becomes a vampire, these qualities are essentially heightened into a monstrous, nightmarish parody of her former self: she becomes little more than a deranged child, flipping back and forth between a pleading, scared infant and a feral, bloodthirsty animal. Her destruction solidifies the fact that Dracula is, indeed, the villain of the story, even though Frank Langella’s depiction of the Count is one of the more sympathetic interpretations.

4. Rebecca Callard, from the 2006 BBC Radio Version.

Not in costume here, because radio. :P In this adaptation, Lucy is depicted as Mina’s more sheltered sister, rather than her best friend. Aside from that, this version sticks pretty true to the source for her character, with Lucy as the somewhat more childish, naive sibling, whose innocent is corrupted by Dracula’s villainy. Not much else to say; I will state that when she goes into vampire form, it is legitimately disturbing, but that goes for a lot of choices on here.

3. Carol Marsh, from the Hammer Horror Films.

In the first of Hammer’s Dracula series - and the only film in the series actually truly based on the book - Lucy is engaged to Jonathan Harker, instead of Arthur Holmwood. In an equally bizarre change, Arthur (played by Michael Gough) is married to Mina. (Again, I guess this movie just wanted to be confusing.) These changes aside, Marsh has always been one of the first versions of Lucy I think of when I think of the character. When we first meet Lucy, she’s already falling under Dracula’s spell, but the core ideas of the character are still there: dressed in a long, diaphanous gown of the prettiest turquoise, she is - both in visual appearance and her seemingly gentle, sweet demeanor, a perfect angel. The other characters treat her with great care the whole way through…which makes the contrast to her apparent attraction to Dracula, and then later her almost beastly, predatory vampire form all the sharper. I love the different modes Marsh’s Lucy goes through in this film, and as one of the first of Hammer’s many, MANY vampire ladies, she definitely deserves some commendation.

2. Tara Birstwhistle, from Dracula: Pages From a Virgin’s Diary.

Bizarrely enough, arguably one of the most book-accurate versions of Lucy - barring the negligible item of dialogue - is in Guy Maddin’s highly unusual TV film. This combination of Expressionist/Surrealist silent movie and epic dance film reimagines the story by depicting all of the male characters as, to put it bluntly, creeps and jerks. The first half of the film is actually Lucy’s story, as we start off with Dracula’s arrival in London and the whole saga of his corruption of Lucy; it’s not till later that Jonathan and Mina enter the story, so for much of the film, Lucy is our main protagonist. She is depicted in perfect fashion to the novel: a radiant, angelic, innocent young lady who is changed, by Dracula, into a psychotic monster that preys on children and seduces men with her witch-like wiles. The difference here, however, is the way it’s all staged: with all of the men in her life being depicted as awful people, Lucy’s story becomes even more tragic and poignant - the tale of a beautiful and innocent woman destroyed not by a single vampire, but all the men around her.

1. Susan Penhaligon, from the 1977 BBC TV Film.

Much like the aforementioned radio version, this TV film also depicts Mina and Lucy as sisters rather than simply best friends. Once again, Lucy is shown to be the more naive and “girly” of the pair, but with a sort of playful and mischievous quality to her personality. Her youthful, vivacious energy is worth noting, because once Dracula comes to town, Lucy’s transformation is made all the more chilling by the fact she seems to lose all of her vitality with her blood. When she becomes a vampire, she’s depicted as almost being a soulless doll: a sort of living marionette for Dracula to control, whose only REAL desire is simply to feed. Penhaligon’s Lucy has so many different layers to her performance, and her death is honestly shockingly gruesome for the time (most BBC productions of this nature I’ve seen rarely got so gory). An excellent and haunting depiction of Dracula’s first real victim.

[pynkhues]

Why do you think Logan was hard on women, as Shiv said? I'm sure a big part of it is good ol' fashioned misogyny combined with him being generally awful to everybody, but do you think it also has to do with losing Helen and Rose so young?

Oh, gosh, this feels like a question I could probably write a million word answer to, but ultimately, yeah, I do think he’s a misogynist and I do think losing his mother and sister at such a crucial age impacted his relationship to women as a whole.

I also don’t think we can't discount the era he was born into as being crucial in shaping his views on women overall.

I think – prior to the current era of politics with the reversal of things like affirmative action and Roe v Wade – it was pretty normal to view progress as a straight line going up. While that’s shifted recently, I think there is still this tendency to view the past as slowly progressing instead of the absolute swings and roundabouts that it was and is, and I think that idea particularly permeates when it comes to women’s rights. Which makes sense, right? In America, women got the right to vote in 1920, Amelia Earhart became the first woman pilot in 1932, women seriously entered the workforce en masse during WWII between 1941 and 1945, Rosa Parks didn’t give up her seat in 1955, the birth control pill was approved in 1960, JFK signed into law the equal pay act in 1963.

That seems, on paper, like a line going up, but that’s not what reality was.

The reality was that after all those things, women faced extreme backlash, and on top of that, there were these dramatic shifts with established gender roles that shook things up! This was reflected, like most things are, in art.

A million years ago in my film theory class at university, I actually wrote an essay about this and noir cinema, which as an entire genre is about male impotence post-WWII and female empowerment and this new sense of the unknowability of women which men felt extremely personally in this era. This is, of course, embodied by the iconic femme fatale character trope which dominated cinema in the late ‘40s through ‘50s, and is understood to be a figure born of male anxiety post-WWII (and man, if she isn’t great), but that anxiety came from the lack of social services to help very damaged men navigate their return to cities that had drastically changed since they’d left them.

That era was also dominated by the creation of suburbia, which was built as a social reward for these traumatised men and a trap for newly liberated women. It was about trying to remind men of what they’d seen their friends die for, while telling women where they belonged.

Logan came of age in the midst of that social identity crisis (he would’ve turned 18 in 1956! At the late peek of noir cinema!), a crisis that would only be compound with the Vietnam War that his brother would enlist in, and the sexual revolution. Logan’s life was peppered with male failure and violence, and the mystery and the loss of women, in his father’s death and his uncle’s abuse, even in his brother never making it to the front lines in Vietnam; in his mother’s abandonment, his sister’s death and his aunt’s implied absence.

He collects tokens of masculinity in medals of wars he never fought, and he romanticises the unknowability of women like Marcia and Rhea and Shiv, because it’s what he was taught. It’s the era he grew up in, and Logan, as we saw time and time again, is a character who never quite learns.

So why is he so hard on women? I mean, he is, but I also think he romanticises them to an extent that robs them of their personhood, which feeds back into the era he came of age in. Women then were capable, but unknowable, which made them threatening and emasculating, which is exactly how Logan treats all the women he encounters. They’re femme fatales to him until he can unpick their stitches and figure them out and re-cast them as supporting characters to his own story. He’s a 1950s guy, living in the 2010s, and unfortunately, I don’t think that’s all that rare in real life even now.

[living-a-charmed-life]

More shifting ish quotes

I got a book called “wisdom for our times” and thought i’d share the quotes that made me think of shifting

“Success seems to be largely, a matter of hanging on after others have let go.” - William Feather

“You can have anything you want if you want it desperately enough. You must want it with an exuberance that erupts through the skin and joins the energy that creates the world.” - Sheila Graham

“I was taught that the way of progress is neither swift nor easy.” - Marie Curie

“I long to accomplish a great and noble task, but it is my chief duty to accomplish small tasks as if they were great and noble.” - Helen Keller

“Learn from the past. Do not come to the end of your life only to find you have not lived. For many come to the point of leaving the space of earth and when they gaze back, they see the joy and the beauty that could not be theirs because of the fears they lived.” - Clearwater

“Life is not easy for any of us. But what of that? We must have perseverance and above all confidence in ourselves. We must believe that we are gifted for something, and that this thing, at whatever cost, must be attained.” - Marie Curie

“You can transcend all negativity when you realize that the only power it has over you is your belief in it. As you experience this truth about yourself you are set free.” Eileen Caddy

“I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.” - Anna Freud

“… if you want something very badly, you can achieve it. It may take patience, very hard work, a real struggle, and a long time; but it can be done. That much faith is a prerequisite of any undertaking, artistic or otherwise.” - Margo Jones

“How can you hesitate? Risk! Risk anything! Care no more for the opinion of others, for those voices. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the truth.” - Katherine Mansfield

“We ought to remember that we are not the only ones to find ourselves at an apparent impasse. Just as a kite rises against the wind, even the worst of troubles can strengthen us. As thousands before us have met the identical fate and mastered it, so can we!” - Dr. R. Brasch

“Courage is, with love, the greatest gift. We are, each of us, defeated many times - but if we accept defeat with cheerfulness, and learn from it, and try another way - then we will find fulfilment.” Rosanne Ambrose-Brown

“There are no impossible dreams, just our limited perception of what is possible.” - Beth Mende Conny

“You are everything that is, your thoughts, your life, your dreams come true. You are everything you choose to be. You are as unlimited as the endless universe.” - Shad Helmstetter

“Each second you can be reborn. Each second there can be a new beginning. It is choice. It is your choice.” - Clearwater

“Whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re right!” - Henry Ford

“… victory is often a thing deferred, and rarely at the summit of courage… What is at the summit of courage, I think, is freedom. The freedom that comes with the knowledge that no earthly power can break you; that an unbroken spirit is the only thing you cannot live without; that in the end it is the courage of conviction that moves things, that makes all change possible.” - Paula Giddings

“Shrug off the restraints that you have allowed others to place upon you. You are limitless. There is nothing you cannot achieve. There is no sadness in life that cannot be reversed….” - Clearwater

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” - Theodore Roosevelt

“Our lives are like the course of the sun. At the darkest moment there is promise of daylight.” - London ‘Times’ editorial, December 24, 1984

[ausetkmt]

The first time Karl Ricanek was stopped by police for “driving while Black” was in the summer of 1995. He was twenty-five and had just qualified as an engineer and started work at the US Department of Defense’s Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, Rhode Island, a wealthy town known for its spectacular cliff walks and millionaires’ mansions. That summer, he had bought his first nice car—a two-year-old dark green Infiniti J30T that cost him roughly $30,000 (US).

One evening, on his way back to the place he rented in First Beach, a police car pulled him over. Karl was polite, distant, knowing not to seem combative or aggressive. He knew, too, to keep his hands in visible places and what could happen if he didn’t. It was something he’d been trained to do from a young age.

The cop asked Karl his name, which he told him, even though he didn’t have to. He was well aware that if he wanted to get out of this thing, he had to cooperate. He felt at that moment he had been stripped of any rights, but he knew this was what he—and thousands of others like him—had to live with. This is a nice car, the cop told Karl. How do you afford a fancy car like this?

What do you mean? Karl thought furiously. None of your business how I afford this car. Instead, he said, “Well, I’m an engineer. I work over at the research centre. I bought the car with my wages.”

That wasn’t the last time Karl was pulled over by a cop. In fact, it wasn’t even the last time in Newport. And when friends and colleagues shrugged, telling him that getting stopped and being asked some questions didn’t sound like a big deal, he let it lie. But they had never been stopped simply for “driving while white”; they hadn’t been subjected to the humiliation of being questioned as law-abiding adults, purely based on their visual identity; they didn’t have to justify their presence and their choices to strangers and be afraid for their lives if they resisted.

Karl had never broken the law. He’d worked as hard as anybody else, doing all the things that bright young people were supposed to do in America. So why, he thought, can’t I just be left alone?

Karl grew up with four older siblings in Deanwood, a primarily Black neighbourhood in the northeastern corner of Washington, DC, with a white German father and a Black mother. When he left Washington, DC, at eighteen for college, he had a scholarship to study at North Carolina A&T State University, which graduates the largest numbers of Black engineers in the US. It was where Karl learned to address problems with technical solutions, rather than social ones. He taught himself to emphasize his academic credentials and underplay his background so he would be taken more seriously amongst peers.

After working in Newport, Karl went into academia, at the University of North Carolina, Wilmington. In particular, he was interested in teaching computers to identify faces even better than humans do. His goal seemed simple: first, unpick how humans see faces, and then teach computers how to do it more efficiently.

When he started out back in the ’80s and ’90s, Karl was developing AI technology to help the US Navy’s submarine fleet navigate autonomously. At the time, computer vision was a slow-moving field, in which machines were merely taught to recognize objects rather than people’s identities. The technology was nascent—and pretty terrible. The algorithms he designed were trying to get the machine to say: that’s a bottle, these are glasses, this is a table, these are humans. Each year, they made incremental, single-digit improvements in precision.

Then, a new type of AI known as deep learning emerged—the same discipline that allowed miscreants to generate sexually deviant deepfakes of Helen Mort and Noelle Martin, and the model that underpins ChatGPT. The cutting-edge technology was helped along by an embarrassment of data riches—in this case, millions of photos uploaded to the web that could be used to train new image recognition algorithms.

Deep learning catapulted the small gains Karl was seeing into real progress. All of a sudden, what used to be a 1 percent improvement was now 10 percent each year. It meant software could now be used not just to classify objects but to recognize unique faces.

When Karl first started working on the problem of facial recognition, it wasn’t supposed to be used live on protesters or pedestrians or ordinary people. It was supposed to be a photo analysis tool. From its inception in the ’90s, researchers knew there were biases and inaccuracies in how the algorithms worked. But they hadn’t quite figured out why.

The biometrics community viewed the problems as academic—an interesting computer-vision challenge affecting a prototype still in its infancy. They broadly agreed that the technology wasn’t ready for prime-time use, and they had no plans to profit from it.

As the technology steadily improved, Karl began to develop experimental AI analytics models to spot physical signs of illnesses like cardiovascular disease, Alzheimer’s, or Parkinson’s from a person’s face. For instance, a common symptom of Parkinson’s is frozen or stiff facial expressions, brought on by changes in the face’s muscles. AI technology could be used to analyse these micro muscular changes and detect the onset of disease early. He told me he imagined inventing a mirror that you could look at each morning that would tell you (or notify a trusted person) if you were developing symptoms of degenerative neurological disease. He founded a for-profit company, Lapetus Solutions, which predicted life expectancy through facial analytics, for the insurance market.

His systems were used by law enforcement to identify trafficked children and notorious criminal gangsters such as Whitey Bulger. He even looked into identifying faces of those who had changed genders, by testing his systems on videos of transsexual people undergoing hormonal transitions, an extremely controversial use of the technology. He became fixated on the mysteries locked up in the human face, regardless of any harms or negative consequences.

In the US, it was 9/11 that, quite literally overnight, ramped up the administration’s urgent need for surveillance technologies like face recognition, supercharging investment in and development of these systems. The issue was no longer merely academic, and within a few years, the US government had built vast databases containing the faces and other biometric data of millions of Iraqis, Afghans, and US tourists from around the world. They invested heavily in commercializing biometric research like Karl’s; he received military funding to improve facial recognition algorithms, working on systems to recognize obscured and masked faces, young faces, and faces as they aged. American domestic law enforcement adapted counterterrorism technology, including facial recognition, to police street crime, gang violence, and even civil rights protests.

It became harder for Karl to ignore what AI facial analytics was now being developed for. Yet, during those years, he resisted critique of the social impacts of the powerful technology he was helping create. He rarely sat on ethics or standards boards at his university, because he thought they were bureaucratic and time consuming. He described critics of facial recognition as “social justice warriors” who didn’t have practical experience of building this technology themselves. As far as he was concerned, he was creating tools to help save children and find terrorists, and everything else was just noise.

But it wasn’t that straightforward. Technology companies, both large and small, had access to far more face data and had a commercial imperative to push forward facial recognition. Corporate giants such as Meta and Chinese-owned TikTok, and start-ups like New York–based Clearview AI and Russia’s NTech Labs, own even larger databases of faces than many governments do—and certainly more than researchers like Karl do. And they’re all driven by the same incentive: making money.

These private actors soon uprooted systems from academic institutions like Karl’s and started selling immature facial recognition solutions to law enforcement, intelligence agencies, governments, and private entities around the world. In January 2020, the New York Times published a story about how Clearview AI had taken billions of photos from the web, including sites like LinkedIn and Instagram, to build powerful facial recognition capabilities bought by several police forces around the world.

The technology was being unleashed from Argentina to Alabama with a life of its own, blowing wild like gleeful dandelion seeds taking root at will. In Uganda, Hong Kong, and India, it has been used to stifle political opposition and civil protest. In the US, it was used to track Black Lives Matter protests and Capitol rioters during the uprising in January 2021, and in London to monitor revellers at the annual Afro-Caribbean carnival in Notting Hill.

And it’s not just a law enforcement tool: facial recognition is being used to catch pickpockets and petty thieves. It is deployed at the famous Gordon’s Wine Bar in London, scanning for known troublemakers. It’s even been used to identify dead Russian soldiers in Ukraine. The question whether it was ready for prime-time use has taken on an urgency as it impacts the lives of billions around the world.

Karl knew the technology was not ready for widespread rollout in this way. Indeed, in 2018, Joy Buolamwini, Timnit Gebru, and Deborah Raji—three Black female researchers at Microsoft—had published a study, alongside collaborators, comparing the accuracy of face recognition systems built by IBM, Face++, and Microsoft. They found the error rates for light-skinned men hovered at less than 1 percent, while that figure touched 35 percent for darker-skinned women. Karl knew that New Jersey resident Nijer Parks spent ten days in jail in 2019 and paid several thousand dollars to defend himself against accusations of shoplifting and assault of a police officer in Woodbridge, New Jersey.

The thirty-three-year-old Black man had been misidentified by a facial recognition system used by the Woodbridge police. The case was dismissed a year later for lack of evidence, and Parks later sued the police for violation of his civil rights.

A year after that, Robert Julian-Borchak Williams, a Detroit resident and father of two, was arrested for a shoplifting crime he did not commit, due to another faulty facial recognition match. The arrest took place in his front garden, in front of his family.

Facial recognition technology also led to the incorrect identification of American-born Amara Majeed as a terrorist involved in Sri Lanka’s Easter Day bombings in 2019. Majeed, a college student at the time, said the misidentification caused her and her family humiliation and pain after her relatives in Sri Lanka saw her face, unexpectedly, amongst a line-up of the accused terrorists on the evening news.

As his worlds started to collide, Karl was forced to reckon with the implications of AI-enabled surveillance—and to question his own role in it, acknowledging it could curtail the freedoms of individuals and communities going about their normal lives. “I think I used to believe that I create technology,” he told me, “and other smart people deal with policy issues. Now I have to ponder and think much deeper about what it is that I’m doing.”

And what he had thought of as technical glitches, such as algorithms working much better on Caucasian and male faces while struggling to correctly identify darker skin tones and female faces, he came to see as much more than that.

“It’s a complicated feeling. As an engineer, as a scientist, I want to build technology to do good,” he told me. “But as a human being and as a Black man, I know people are going to use technology inappropriately. I know my technology might be used against me in some manner or fashion.”

In my decade of covering the technology industry, Karl was one of the only computer scientists to ever express their moral doubts out loud to me. Through him, I glimpsed the fraught relationship that engineers can have with their own creations and the ethical ambiguities they grapple with when their personal and professional instincts collide.

He was also one of the few technologists who comprehended the implicit threats of facial recognition, particularly in policing, in a visceral way.

“The problem that we have is not the algorithms but the humans,” he insisted. When you hear about facial recognition in law enforcement going terribly wrong, it’s because of human errors, he said, referring to the over-policing of African American males and other minorities and the use of unprovoked violence by police officers against Black people like Philando Castile, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor.

He knew the technology was rife with false positives and that humans suffered from confirmation bias. So if a police officer believed someone to be guilty of a crime and the AI system confirmed it, they were likely to target innocents. “And if that person is Black, who cares?” he said.

He admitted to worrying that the inevitable false matches would result in unnecessary gun violence. He was afraid that these problems would compound the social malaise of racial or other types of profiling. Together, humans and AI could end up creating a policing system far more malignant than the one citizens have today.

“It’s the same problem that came out of the Jim Crow era of the ’60s; it was supposed to be separate but equal, which it never was; it was just separate . . . fundamentally, people don’t treat everybody the same. People make laws, and people use algorithms. At the end of the day, the computer doesn’t care.”

Excerpted from Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia. Published by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 2024 by Madhumita Murgia. All rights reserved.

[wizard-irl]

Buyers Beware - Heaven and Earth LLC

If you've read previous posts of mine, I've mentioned this company before. This is a company that exemplifies what to avoid when buying crystals online.

Archive of post.

What is Heaven and Earth LLC?

Heaven and Earth LLC (H&E) was founded in 1986 by Robert Simmons and Kathy Helen Warner. Based in New Zealand, they claim they are the first company to sell moldavite, as well as having sold other tektites. Simmons might be a familiar name to some of you, given that he's written a few books on crystal healing, including The Book of Stones, Stones of the New Consciousness, and The Pocket Book of Stones.

In 1991, in fulfillment of a "prophetic vision" given by their friend Naisha Ahsian (formerly of the Crystalis Institute), they discovered "Azeztulite." Simmons recounts that angelic beings called the Azez told Ahsian about the "imminent arrival" of these stones, and what name to give them when they did.

This, as they say, "began our mission to spread the energies of these stones--the currents of the Nameless Light of the Great Central Sun—to people all over the world." Simmons notes that the Azez "intend for all the Quartz on Earth to ultimately receive the vibration of the Nameless Light of the Great Central Sun--making all of the Quartz into Azeztulite."

"Nameless Light of the Great Central Sun"? What does that mean?

When I Google this phrase, I am led to a couple of sites. The Temple of the Presence says this on the Great Central Sun:

There is only one Goal that should be the focus for the Lightbearers of this planet, and that Goal is the reuniting with the Light of God in the Great Central Sun. For God would have you place your attention upon only one priority, and that is God. You start by affirming the Honor and Glory of your own God Presence. But once you have touched the Heart of your I AM Presence, you will realize that your God Presence gives Obeisance, Honor and Glory to THE ONE - to that Universal Light anchored in the Great Central Sun.

Further digging led me to the Summit Lighthouse encyclopedia, which declared that in 1991, this being, the "Nameless One from out the Great Central Sun," made itself known, which was recorded in Mark and Elizabeth Prophet's The Masters and Their Retreats. The site Ascension Research calls the Great Central Sun:

a Source and a Center of the All-Pervading Presence of the Great "I AM". It is a Point of Integration of the Spirit/Matter Cosmos, and an Central Concentration of God Consciousness and the release of Light and Life and Love to all creation. It is a Nucleus, Heart Center, or White Fire Core of the Cosmos.

"I AM"?

This undoubtedly refers to the "I AM Activity Movement," a spiritual movement based on theosophy. This seems to line up with a line of seven products whose names all contain "I AM." While this may just be them targeting a specific audience, considering references to the Great Central Sun, H&E is likely affiliated with I AM.

Nowhere do they state an affiliation with any religious group, but I AM is prominent in how they frame and market their products.

But do you know what they absolutely love stating? Their trademarks!

Crystals(TM)

The following screencap is what greets you on the front page of their site. Notice a commonality?

Yes, that is the trademark symbol. Yes, you can trademark crystals.

What exactly is a trademark? I went over this in a prior post of mine about crystal trademarks, but the gist of it is: a trademark is anything that identifies a brand. While a copyright is protection for intellectual property, and a patent is protection for an invention, think of of a trademark as a copyright/patent for a brand. Because brands can be identified in a myriad of ways, so too can many things be trademarked.

Here is a pastebin of all crystals I could find that are trademarked by H&E, and for your other crystal naming needs, I have also created a spreadsheet with more than just H&E's trademarks. It also includes "generics" for each trademark listed. The list of H&E's trademarks alone is over seventy items long.

Why are trademarks bad for buying crystals? Money. Trademarks demand higher prices on products that are similar or even worse than the "generics," but they are not the only thing that H&E uses to make you spend more on bad quality crystals.

What Do These Words Mean?

Their flagship product is Azeztulite™, which is applied to various forms of quartz. Let's take a look at what Simmons writes about Azeztulite™, abridged and certain words highlighted:

Holding Azeztulite over the third eye, the currents of the stones are experienced as high-frequency energy that, intuition suggests, must originate in the spiritual realms of Light. [...] I experienced vivid inner imagery and sensations of undulating liquid currents of White Light in my skull. [...] The feeling is somewhat as if consciousness is being sweetly caressed by angelic hands[.] [...] Azeztulite is said to represent the Great Central Sun. In other words, it is said to conduct the currents or light of the Central Sun, the spiritual core of the universe[.] [...] The Liquid Crystal Body Matrix probably resonates more strongly with Azeztulite than any other stone I know. [...] Azeztulite as Quartz and the nuclei of each cell of our bodies both emit light. [...] I mention all of this because the purpose of Azeztulite, as I understand it, is to help us incarnate the human Body of Light. This is the New Body of spiritual Light, and I believe very deeply that this Light Body is to be incarnated at the level of our cells, perhaps through our DNA. [...] Remember, the Azez intend to awaken all the Quartz on Earth, which is most of the Earth's crust, to the currents of the Nameless Light. [...] Like all gestures of true love, the infusion of the Nameless Light is an offer, not a compulsion. [...] It is fitting to see this as a kind of marriage. The Solar Logos [...] is thought of mythological as a male archetypal energy or pattern. The Earth has been viewed almost universality as female, and if we think of Sophia as the Soul of the World, then the fusion of heavenly light with Earthly Matter is a Divine Marriage. Since we humans are integral to the unfolding of this process, we may play the role of the Holy Child, and we would experience within ourselves the ecstasy of the Divine Union.

If you don't trust that I've abridged fairly, I encourage you to check the link for the text in full.

Now is a good time to mention Ahsian again, or Samaya Aster as she goes by now. In 2021, she left the New Age movement and seems to have converted to Messianic Judaism, a form of evangelical Christianity. Within her YouTube channel, she claims she will be sharing spiritual concepts that helped her with facing "the falsity and lies of the New Age movement." Now consider that Azeztulite, H&E's flagship product, was prophecised by Aster, who now believes that the New Age movement is full of lies.

Furthermore, look at the highlighted words. Disregarding that this capitalisation reminds me of YA dystopian novels, do... these words mean anything? As established prior, we know what the "Nameless Light" refers to the Great Central Sun, but can you explain to me any of these other words? Why is "White Light" capitalised? What is the "Liquid Crystal Body Matrix?" And as to the other words, there are plenty of spiritual buzzwords such as "high-frequency" and "third eye," as well as the imagery of angels. These words are pleasant, but vague, allowing the prospective buyer to fill them in with their own hopes and dreams.

Do you think this is a product worth buying, when the prophetess herself would likely deny her prophecy was true? And do you think that this is a product worth buying when the seller not only does not explain the concepts they are selling you on, but do not disclose where these ideas are from? Does this inspire confidence in you that you will be getting the best product?

And if you think I'm cherrypicking, let's run through a few more descriptions:

Master Shamanite™ can be useful for initiating shamanic journeys, and it can help one connect inwardly with power animals and spirit guides. It is a Stone of the Ancestors, aiding in communication with spiritual elders and guides on the other side, as well as loved ones who have passed.

Cinnazez™ is a quickener of consciousness and an awakener of higher awareness. It can stimulate one’s nervous system to actualize latent capacities of clairvoyance, telepathic communication, attunement to heavenly realms, and direct knowledge of Divine truth. It is felt as the solidified essence of the Philosopher’s Stone, and it can help the body open to become a conduit of the Celestial Fire of the Great Central Sun.  

Stellar Beam Calcites are very powerful for stimulating the third eye and crown chakras, and they align these chakras with the higher etheric body, making possible an ascension into higher realms of consciousness. They stimulate remembrance of the individual’s experiences in the pre-birth state of full immersion in Spirit, and they assist in the recollection of past lives. Stellar Beam Calcites can also help one establish contact with extraterrestrial intelligences in meditation or dreams.

It's more of the same things. Words that aren't explained so that you get to fill them in with your hopes and dreams. More appropriation of Hinduism through Westernised chakras, as well as the term "shaman" which they are actively profiting off of based on the trademark of Master Shamanite™. Keep in mind that, as far as I can tell, only Simmons and Warner run the company, and their only apparent affiliation is with I AM.

A lot of their listings claim to be "Azozeo® Super-Activated." This word, Simmons claims, is the "ancient word of invocation" of the Azez. When this word is chanted over Azeztulite™, their "intensity" doubled, the "frequency of their pulsations" was faster, and that they channel energy into the crown chakra and into the Earth. In theory, this means that you too can Azozeo® Super-Activate your own crystals by chanting over your Azeztulite™, but hey, why not spend a bit more to get someone else to do it for you?

You aren't buying the actual crystal when you read these descriptions. You are buying flavour text.

Price Gouging for Profit and Profit

I'm going to check several of their listings and compare them to similar listings on other sites. I will be comparing the price per gram of each listing. I will try my best to find adequate "generics" of each crystal I cover. If they don't overcharge, the prices for the "generics" will be similar per gram, right?

I don't endorse these Etsy sellers. I'm using them for comparison only.

Anandalite™: 1.77$/g, 1.22$/g, 0.40g/$ Druzy quartz: 0.08$/g, 0.16$/g, 0.19$/g

Amazez™: 1.74$/g, 1.81$/g, 2.02$/g Chevron amethyst: 0.17g/$, 0.03-0.04g/$ (24-32oz price used), 0.48$/g

Healerite™: 1.15$/g, 1.13$/g, 1.15$/g Serpentine: 0.21$/g, 0.19$/g, 0.10$/g

Azeztulite™: 1.50$/g, 1.50$/g, 1.49$/g Milky quartz: 0.01$/g, 0.06$/g, 0.25$/g

Just for fun, let's see the prices of their non-trademarked crystals.

Amethyst (H&E): 0.58$/g, 0.20$/g, 0.31$/g Amethyst: 0.08-0.09$/g (13-14oz price used), 0.08-0.10$/g (0.75-1lb price used), 0.05-0.08$/g

Fluorite (H&E): 0.58$/g, 0.29$/g, 0.36$/g Fluorite: 0.19$/g, 0.06$/g, 0.08$/g

Malachite (H&E): 2.04$/g, 2.15$/g, 2.00$/g Malachite: 0.56$/g, 0.33$/g, 0.25$/g

So even for their "generic" crystals, they overprice the hell out of them. But perhaps these crystals are pricey because they're ethically sourced. The money spent into sourcing and buying crystals from ethical mines and ethical sellers surely is why they're so expensive, isn't it?

Where Do the Rocks Come From?

As established in a yet another post of mine, an ethical mineral seller will disclose the exact location, including the mine, in which their minerals were mined. This is to assure any buyers that by buying these minerals, they are not contributing to exploitation. A seller that refuses to disclose or obfuscates the origin of their stock is not to be trusted, since you can't confirm if their products are ethical.

H&E does not do this. They don't even do the bare minimum of listing the country most of the time on the listings, leaving the country on pages showing multiple listings for the same type of crystal.

Stellar Beam Calcite: No location listed.

Agni Manitite™: No location listed.

Tibetan Tektites: No location listed outside of name.

Amazez™: "Off the coast of Africa."

Anandalite™: No location listed.

Black Azeztulite™: No location listed.

Azumar™: No location listed.

Beryllonite: No location listed.

Celestine Fluorite: No location listed.

Fairy Stone: No location listed.

Goshenite/Morganite: No location listed.

Malachite: No location listed.

Moldavite: "Czech Republic."

Mystic Merlinite™: No location listed.

Revelation Stone™: No location listed.

If you're buying crystals, and the product is listed as vague as "off the coast of Africa," you should run. Africa is huge. Just on the mainland alone, your crystal could be from Botswana, which has been called a "blueprint for ethical mining in Africa," or it could be from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where children are forced to mine minerals with barely any protection or compensation. Are you willing to risk buying from exploited children, or if not children, exploited people paid barely anything for hard and dangerous work, because you want a low-quality crystal?

H&E doesn't seem to care care about contributing to human and environmental exploitation. They certainly don't care enough about it to have any kind of article about how they assess the ethics of their stock, how they help promote sustainable mining practices by doing business with sustainable mines, or really anything about the ethics of crystal healing. Why bother listing your source mines when your target audience is already sold on DNA activation, shamanic journeys, and angelic crystals from the Great Central Sun? They likely don't know where that terminology comes from, but it sure sounds like it'll activate their chakras to the 7th density. That might be high enough to ask the Azez to Azozeo® Super-Activate some crystals to combat child silicosis in the Congo! Maybe they can trademark those too.

Conclusion

This is an example of a company that I would never trust to give me ethically sourced crystals. Even if they were ethically sourced, their unethical business practices make up for it. A company that describes a crystal like a D&D item, all while obfuscating its origin, is a company that does not have your best interests at heart. They most certainly don't have your spiritual well-being at heart either, considering they prey on it to make you buy wildly overpriced and subpar crystals. They do not care about your spiritual growth beyond how much money they can gain from it.

If you're wondering what a good crystal seller looks like, or even how to pick out the bad ones from a glance, I have a series about crystal ethics and proper sourcing that may be of use to you.

[themosleyreview]

The Mosley Review: Dune: Part Two

I believe that something astronomical is happening before our eyes. Something that is currently defining this generation of cinematic glory and storytelling. There are many other franchises that have fallen to current political views and a lack of vision or respect for the source material. Now I haven't read the source material myself, but from some of my most trusted friends, this new adaptation Frank Herbert's classic novel of the same name, was taken into the hands of a brilliant storyteller and he did not disappoint. There wasn't a moment that I wasn't fully enthralled with the world's that were presented and in all of their dark and sometimes haunting beauty. What I truly loved was the inner workings of the multiple ideals, threats and contingencies at work and how they all are weighed upon a single decision of a character's ascendancy. It may seem like a massive can of worms, but once you see the threads that have been woven, those that are plucking them and those that tried to cut them, its a beautiful dance of politics and freedom that ultimately leads to war. All of this is brought to life by the returning and introduction of new outstanding cast members.

Timothée Chalamet was outstanding this time as the now more experienced and weary Paul Atreides. His portrayal of the classic reluctant hero and destined messiah known as "Muad'Dib", was truly fun to watch. You see him weigh the religious power he could possess against the power of his love for another. Its a fine line to walk and Chalamet delivers. Zendaya was fantastic and had alot more to do as his love interest Chani. Her opposing views of the zealotry of the Fremen really nails home the fact that she wishes to remain free of conflict and made up prophecies. The chemistry between her and Paul has never been stronger and I loved their bond and especially the great challenge their relationship goes through. Rebecca Ferguson was outstanding once again as Lady Jessica and the trials and evolution she goes through was shocking. I loved her openness to absorbing the knowledge of the Fremen and their customs. She truly begins her journey early in the film and it is truly spiritual, painful and cerebral all at once. Josh Brolin returns as the always badass and loyal member of the Atreides Guard, Gurney Halleck. He was one of the main reminders to Paul of the duty to his house and to his royal birthright. His friendship with Paul has never been more emboldend and I couldn't wait to see Gurney dish out his deserved vengeance.

Stellan Skarsgård returns as the head of House Harkonnen, Baron Vladimir Harkonnen and he is as evil and cunning as he was in the first film. He doesn't waste time in putting into motion his multi-tier plans to take Arrakis. The great Dave Bautista returns as his impatient and rage fueled nephew Glossu Rabban Harkonnen. You can see the shock and fear in his eyes once he realizes a real challenge has presented itself. Austin Butler was outstanding as the other nephew, Feyd-Rautha Harkonnen. From his gorgeous gladiatorial introduction to his sinister and animalistic approach to battle, he was a force to be reckoned with and I loved every second of it. I also loved his voice and how it was very similar to Vladimir's. Add's to that familiar tone and somewhat worship. Charlotte Rampling was truly on fire as Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam. Through her, you see all the threads being woven and especially how devious and quickly each action is implemented. Christopher Walken was a great choice as Shaddam IV, the Padishah Emperor of the Known Universe. For the time he was on screen, he brought the gravitas world weariness needed. I liked Florence Pugh as his daughter, Princess Irulan. She gets to witness first hand the plots, lies and betrayals and I liked that she wasn't really for it all.

The magnificent Hans Zimmer returns as the composer and I couldn't imagine these films or the rest of the future films without his earth shattering score. The Harkonnen Arena, Worm Ride and Gurney Battle are just a few of my favorite tracks. The use of silence and no score is brilliantly placed in so many epic moments of the film whether its during an intimate conversation between characters or the climactic knife fight. This film is visually on par with the Part One, but somehow looks even more impressive. I can go on and on about the intricacies of the film and how it made me feel complete, but I'd rather let you experience the magic. This is an absolute MUST SEE IN IMAX to get the full scope and soundscape of the worlds presented. This is definitely one of the best sci fi films of the year and the level of quality that other franchises influenced by it need to step up to. Let me know what you thought of the film or my review in comments below. Thanks for reading!

[chartreuseian]

For the WIP game: I'd like to know about your ideas foe the titanic WIP. Anything with the titanic always seems fun 😊

Eeee! Thank you 😊

I'm actually super excited by it, even if it's ages away from being readable. Though I'm realising the title might be a touch misleading...

So it's part of the whole 'She Had Him At Hello' universe which is my take on Helen and Nikola's relationship from when they met through until he went into hiding.

It starts just as the Carpathia docks in New York and Helen is on the verge of collapse until Nikola finds her (because he follows her scent through the crowd which I find very swoon worthy), and follows them for the next two weeks or so as she learns to live with what happened and he tries to remind himself that she's not dead.

The whole purpose of it is to have this big shift in their relationship because it's the first time they're properly adults and away from everything that made it so hard when they first met. At the moment it is lots of soft, sweet moments interspersed with them both fighting against the terror of losing each other.

It might then push into them exploring New York together, but I haven't thought that far ahead yet, to be honest 😅

[the--helen]

@solomonreznik

Spending the New Year's evening outside of the apartment hadn't been something that Helen had thought might be happening. The most she had expected was to be taken out to the vampire bar in the city. But then on Christmas evening when they had opened the gifts she'd put on the dining table due to the lack of a tree or a plant that might pass as one, he had been angry. And once the neighbors had called for someone to check up on their apartment he had packed her things quickly and taken her out to the car and to the outskirts of the city where there were cabins that seemed mostly empty with the ongoing holidays. Or at least that's what she thought as she couldn't hear much from sitting in their own cabin, having arrived in the middle of the night. The floods had made them run away to the university, but once the rain had settled, they had gone back. He had seemed annoyed that she had had company in the music room, but she was thankful that Ilay had also been there and not just Theodore.

It was quite chilly in the morning, New Year in less than two days away. Helen hadn't eaten since before their first night here, that bottle of water in the university the only thing she'd taken there, so she did feel like she needed to venture to the reception and see if there was at least a vending machine, considering that the sun was out and Alexander couldn't drive back to the city to get her anything. She wouldn't have dared ask him anyway, she was sure. Having put concealer on the bruises over her face, by now mostly yellowing, and covering it with her hair, Helen was wrapped up in a scarf that might help any of the other bruising. "Good morning," she attempted a smile at the person who was sitting in the area of the reception. "I was wondering if there's... uhm, a vending machine or a breakfast option here?"

[whartonists]

1896 Ginger Punch

Happy first anniversary of 1.03 airing! Though I didn’t make anything last week because I was ill (story of my January, unfortunately) I am back this week with a recipe for Ginger Punch, from the 1896 Boston Cooking-School Cook Book, better known simply under its author’s name, The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.

This was, I think it is not too much of an exaggeration to say, the most influential cookbook of the early twentieth century; Farmer is credited with standardizing measurements and introducing the “modern” cookbook format (a list of ingredients in precise measurements, followed by specific instructions for how to create the dish). In reading a bunch of late 19th century cookbooks, as I’ve been doing lately, it’s interesting to note the ways in which these innovations had already started to be implemented by other authors; indeed Farmer’s cookbook was actually a significant update and expansion of the 1884 Mrs. Lincoln’s Boston Cook Book. (Which sports the amazingly straightforward subtitle, What To Do and What Not To Do in Cooking.) But Farmer used this standardized formatting and measurements systematically and lucidly in a way that clearly spoke to American cooks, and it has never gone out of print.

Ginger Punch.

1 quart cold water. 1 cup sugar. 1/2 lb. Canton ginger. 1/2 cup orange juice. 1/2 cup lemon juice.

Chop ginger, add to water and sugar, boil fifteen minutes; add fruit juice, cool, strain, and dilute with crushed ice.

Still much more terse than we’d expect from a modern recipe, but look at those exact measurements! Look at that precise time! It doesn’t give specifics about how to chop the ginger--but also, it doesn’t really matter, since it will be strained out anyway. The detail is selective, but there’s enough of it that the recipe is straightforward to follow.

(Some further ramblings about how I made it below the cut.)

This seemed like way more punch than I wanted (she doesn’t give a serving estimate, though the recipe above this one on the page, for “Fruit Punch II,” ends with the note that “This quantity will serve fifty,” which unnerved me)--so I ended up quartering the recipe. I only got what is in my glass in the photo, though, so while that worked out perfectly for me, only halving it or making up the full recipe wouldn’t have been overwhelming.

Canton ginger is evidently just another name for culinary ginger; I got roughly the proper amount by weighing it on my co-op’s bulk foods scale, and peeled as well as chopped it before boiling it with the water and sugar. The lemon and orange juice I squeezed fresh, though if I’d had open containers of juice for either I’d have just used those; the sugar was regular white sugar. I made crushed ice using the expedient method of putting some ice cubes in a dishtowel and then whacking them with my cast-iron skillet a few times.

I think it is extremely tasty; I cooled it down in the fridge, so it’s extra chilled and very refreshing. It is also very gingery--think ginger beer levels of ginger as opposed to ginger ale. The ice to dilute it was a good call, Ms. Farmer.

(Sources are once again the wonderful Food in the American Gilded Age, edited by Helen Zoe Veit, and this belated obituary by the New York Times, from 2018; the image of the recipe is from a scan of the original 1896 cookbook hosted at the Michigan State University’s Feeding America project, which I can’t recommend highly enough.)