#since like 90% was made in february

[enigma2meagain]

🚨🚨 URGENT! Congress trying to pass anti-LGBT bill under the guise of “child safety”!

UPDATE 09/05/2023:

Well well well, if it isn’t the consequences of her bigotry

So Marsha Blackburn, in her infinite wisdom, decided to admit in an interview with the bigoted Family Policy Alliance that the Kids Online Safety Act is a GIANT anti-transgender bill (or at the least, it’s so poorly written that it makes targeting transgender people easier). Naturally, after this blunder, she and Blumenthal are trying to do damage control. But WE have the videos, and people’s responses to this open confession in the links below:

Alejandro Caraballo’s Tweet with the Video.

Erin Reed’s followup article

Attempts at damage control commented on by Ari Drennen

PinkNews’ article about it.

Beacon Broadside Article

Mashable Article

So with all that in mind, please make way to the Bad Internet Bills website to tell your Senators that you STRONGLY advise them to drop their support/refuse to support this awful bill in light of this, or that their re-election chances will drop considerably.

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UPDATE 02/14/2023: Richard Blumenthal is a lying snake who’s trying to get both KOSA and EARN IT Act back into law.

He persistently continues to ignore all of the backlash against these bills, the criticisms and highlighting the serious flaws of the bill by numerous human rights and LGBTQ organizations, and it’s telling that there seems to be no one who opposed the bill at the hearings today.

Fortunately, there are those are speaking up against it, such as Evan Greer from Fight For The Future.

Keep your eyes and ears open. We will be hearing more about these bills as time goes on.

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UPDATE 01/30/2023: Well, Chuck Schumer has chosen to backstab human rights and pro- LGBTQ communities, as well as the internet by trying to fast-track KOSA. The time table is as follows:

REINTRODUCTION OF THE BILL IN FEBRUARY

HOLDING MARKUPS IN MARCH

And holding a floor vote in JUNE

https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/1620088145554579456

KEEP IN MIND, this was the man who blocked legitimately good anti-Big Tech bills like AICOA on the pretense they would be “too much”, but was perfectly fine with the travesty of KOSA.

This man is in Big Tech’s pockets, because only they can afford to pay the fines that such a restrictive pro-censorship bill would enforce. The only people this bill helps are the exact people it claims to stop, while LGBTQ people have to pay the price for the greed of the corrupt congressmen and women.

All of the relevant links are still below, but I will be updated this as we go.

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UPDATE 01/17/2023: Nothing has happened yet, but there have been rumblings of our “favorite” Senator Blumenthal talking about trying to push KOSA in again. I’ll mostly be keeping an eye on things for now, and you guys should too on Twitter, Facebook, and other social media and news outlets.

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UPDATE 12/20/2022: KOSA BILL HAS NOT BEEN INCLUDED IN THE FINAL OMNIBUS BILL! WE DID IT!

https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/1605261800479547392

That being said, this is very much a reprieve, since Blumenthal and Blackburn, and their cohorts have made it clear they intend to get this bill back into Congress next year. But WE DID IT. We managed to get this bill stopped from being added in the omnibus bill.

I want to thank all of you who helped to reblog this post, signed the various petitions and the open letter, and especially if you went and called your Senators. Without your effort, this might have turned out VERY differently!

Thank you all, and I hope the rest of this year is a pleasant one!

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So, this is a particularly long post, but it’s an absolutely IMPORTANT ONE. PLEASE REBLOG! LIKING IS USELESS!

UPDATE 12/14/2022: Two weeks ago, 90+ human rights, LGBT, and tech orgs signed onto an open letter telling Senators NOT to pass this bill. in response, over 230 orgs led by the American Psychological Association signed a letter urging senators to push this bill forward.

An updated version of the bill has been pushed forward by Senators Blumenthal and Blackburn, who claim to have changed the bill in response to feedback, but insight by the likes of Evan Greer and Ari Cohn have made it clear that the changes are superficial at best, and arguably fail to properly address the problems of the original bill.

https://twitter.com/evan_greer/status/1603139423071309825

We got blindsided by this, and we REALLY need your help!

Further explanation HERE: https://www.tumblr.com/fullhalalalchemist/703545300138262528/urgent

POST ON SOCIAL MEDIA like Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, etc. about your opposition to this! The more voices speaking out the better, and we can’t do this alone!

The Hashtags are:

#KOSA

 #STOPKOSA

 #KidsOnlineSafetyAct

“Kids Online Safety Act” (no hashtag and quotes, just the regular words)

And PLEASE call your Senators at (202-224-3121).

ESPECIALLY CALL THESE THREE, SINCE THEY ARE THE MAJOR PEOPLE WHO COULD END UP PUTTING THE BILL INTO THE OMNIBUS/MUST PASS SPENDING BILL:

Maria Cantwell (202) 224-3441

Chuck Schumer (202) 224-6542

Nancy Pelosi (202) 225-4965

LINKTREE WITH ALL INFO HERE: https://linktr.ee/stopkosa

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ORIGINAL POST:

In a particularly scummy move, the Kids Online Safety Act is going to be put into the must pass end of year spending bill: www.axios.com/…

The two laws best positioned to get rolled into big year-end legislative packages, according to advocates and lawmakers, are:

The Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), which would require platforms to guard kids from harmful content using new features and safeguards and to make privacy settings "on" by default for children. The law also mandates privacy audits and  more transparency about privacy policies.

At first glance, the bill doesn’t sound bad, since it’s about helping “protect children” online. But like every “protect the children” type law, this would censor the internet of anything “harmful” to children aka any LGBT, NSFW, or whatever the Right doesn’t like, force everyone to upload their govt ID’s to even access anything online, and surveil everyone else. Gutting everyone’s privacy in an era where we see massive state violence and encroaching fascism globally. This is not only pushed by the same people (Senator Richard Blumenthal and Marsha Blackburn) who created the awful EARN IT Act, but also has many of the same flaws, such as pro-censorship, anti LGBT resources and content, and pro-mass surveillance.

But the biggest problem, as Mike Stabile has pointed out, is HOW the mechanism to which this works: The State Attorney General.

This addition would allow states like Texas and Florida to sue companies for having LGBTQ+ content, along with sex education resources, incentivizing these platforms to ban that content. To be more specific, the bill allows the state attorney general to sue if they believe that platforms do not protect minors from a list of harms that includes politicized terms like "grooming" which, as we've seen can include any sort of LGBTQ information, entertainment or literature.

RuPaul on TikTok?

A clip on transgender youth on Facebook?

A gay character in a Disney movie?

Suicide hotlines for gay youth?

Cue a suit from Texas or Florida targeting the entire web.

And the problem is that given the current political climate and the cruel behavior of a number of GOP aligned political groups in positions of power, this only ends up making things RIPE for abuse and mass censorship (since companies will probably end up choosing to acquiesce to their demands rather than risk being subject to liability) not to mention the damage this would cause to children who might need resources regarding LGBT or sex education.

Furthermore, the definition of “sexually exploitative material”, “grooming”, and “child porn” has been used in the past year to target transgender people, drag queens, and the wider LGBTQ+ community by likening their very existence as sexually violent. Yet another way this bill’s language will be used to target a community that is already facing violence. Every night, Fox News blasts a story on “sexualization of children '' to fear-monger around the LGBT community. One needs to not look any further than the right-wing ecosystem to see how KOSA would easily be weaponized.

This article by Mike Masnick on Techdirt also goes further into KOSA and its adjacent bills.

To make matters even worse, on top of the usual suspects of NCOSE ( They used to be called Morality in Media, and are a far right group disguised as an anti sex trafficking org infamous for being religious assholes who HATE anything to do with sex or LGBT) supporting this travesty of a bill, it’s been revealed that the Senate leader is claiming there’s no opposition.

This is literally giving the fascists a dangerous tool to abuse, all for the sake of political brownie points against ‘Big Tech’. A tool that far right groups like the Heritage Foundation have OPENLY stated will abuse to silence LGBTQ+ or sex-ed content for youth everywhere if it passes.

The ONLY way this works is by making sure who is and isn’t a minor is to have some form of age-verification scheme. And the only way to do that is through a third party like ID.me which has recently come under scrutiny for, you guessed it, data leaks. So everyone who accesses anything online will be forced to upload their govt IDs. How is this protecting anyone’s privacy?

With all that said, what can we do?

Well, the same thing we did for the EARN IT Act; we make a LOT of noise, and get the word out.

If you have read all of the above and want to fight this, sign this open letter against KOSA.

And PLEASE call your Senators at (202-224-3121).

ESPECIALLY CALL THESE THREE, SINCE THEY ARE THE MAJOR PEOPLE WHO COULD END UP PUTTING THE BILL INTO THE }OMNIBUS:

Maria Cantwell (202) 224-3441

Chuck Schumer (202) 224-6542

Nancy Pelosi (202) 225-4965

There is a call script with phone numbers here.

Fax them, email them. Tell them they MUST oppose this bill. CONTACT any major human rights, LGBT, and cybersecurity related organizations aligned and let them know about this bill, and the harm it can cause to LGBT rights and children! If you need more information on KOSA, we have a LINKTREE HERE.

EMPHASIZE THE HARM TO CHILDREN WHEN YOU CONTACT PEOPLE, SINCE THEY’RE TRYING TO CLAIM THAT THIS WILL HELP PROTECT CHILDREN’S PRIVACY, WHEN IT DOES THE EXACT OPPOSITE.

There’s also a Petition by the Electronic Frontier Foundation  and from Fight For the Future.

[babybells123]

Regarding the original outline + some thoughts on Jon & Sansa… 

This is a long one. Buckle up.

If there is one thing I have picked up on in the ASOIAF fandom, it’s the knee-jerk negative reaction towards any theory/parallel/connection between Jon and Sansa. This was exacerbated by the show, of course but even now - five years later, there is an insane amount of vitriol that my brain is unable to comprehend. And here’s the rub; the infamous 1993 outline is the irony of it all. 

In a fandom that is a-okay with *certain* incest ships (r.e D@enerys x Jon, D@emon x Rh@enyra, Jon x Aria), as well as blatantly pedophilic ships (Sansa x S@ndor, Sansa x Littlefinger, Sansa x Tyrio*), how is Jon x Sansa the worst of them all? I’m going to pin it down to audience engagement with the show, particularly around the later seasons when Jon + Sansa reunite and people began to ‘ship’ them. So many believe that is how the ship took off, and thus it is mere crack - but there are posts tracking back to 2012/2013 theorising the possibility of Jon x Sansa. Was it spurred by the show? Certainly! But it does not take away from the fact that people were making valid arguments and essays before the general fandom was even comprehending a Jon and Sansa reunion on screen. And people were open to discussing/debating it with general civility (a far cry from today). 

I’m 90% certain people weren’t criticising those who began to believe in Jon x Aria when the outline was leaked…(though there were most definitely shippers before). But we never see the same level of vitriol towards Jon x Aria shippers, which is strange. 

In any case, let’s talk about said outline, some of the key points - and how I believe GRRM made the switch from Jon x Aria to Jon x Sansa. I’ll be drawing from GRRM’s past works, interviews, art, and his personal life - as well as other potential literary influences. I'll be linking metas along the way, but without further ado - let's go.

In October 1993, GRRM wrote a pitch outline for a publishing company. It was three pages long and conveyed alongside the first thirteen chapters of AGOT (170 pages). The three paged letter was leaked on twitter in February 2014, though there were multiple aspects parts blacked out. Keep in mind though, this may not be the *only* outline that exists. There are multiple outlines that have never been publicly released (and will likely remain that way). 

But let’s just focus on the 1993 outline, since we’re privy to the details. The thirteen chapters attached to the outline did *not* yet have a Sansa POV, and that’s because in this outline, she wasn’t listed as a key character.

The key characters were; Bran, Jon, Tyrion, D@enerys, and Aria.  

The first thirteen chapters were; Prologue; Bran I, Catelyn I, D@enerys I, Eddard I, Jon I, Catelyn II, Aria I, Bran II, Tyrion I, Jon II, D@enerys II, Eddard II, Tyrion II. 

I’ve seen people claim that Sansa isn’t an important character since she wasn’t listed as a key character, but they conveniently leave out the fact that a) her chapters were not yet written, b)she was given an entirely different more passive storyline in this outline, c) she dies, d) this was far far before GRRM fleshed out his characters entirely - Sansa took on a life of her own and she became her own solid complex character with an arc in 4 out of 5 of the books; 25 chapters. 

In fact, since the books have been published GRRM has regarded Sansa and the Starks as a main character as well;

Collider: In creating this world, did you start out with one family and then branch off into the rest of the world?

GRRM: Well, the Starks are certainly the centre of the story, when it begins. It all begins at Winterfell, with occasional cuts to Daenerys across the ocean, because there was no way I could get her into Winterfell. But, we bring all the characters together at Winterfell, and they’re all there for a while before they start to go their separate ways ... .But, the Starks are the centre of the book and, to a lesser extent, the Lannisters. They are still the major players. 

Collider: When you went into this, did you intentionally take the children, put them in an adult setting and force them to be in very adult and complex situations?

GRRM: Yeah, the children were always at the heart of this. The Stark children, in particular, were always very central. Bran is the first viewpoint character that we meet, and then we meet Jon and Sansa and Arya and the rest of them. It was always my intention to do that.” 

Collider report.

May 2016 - Balticon. 

(…) George said he was “pissed” that the outline was posted in the office building and that someone took photos and shared them. He said it was a letter for him and the publisher only. He was very firm when telling this and it showed on his face.

He then said that he is not good with writing outlines, making book deadlines, and that often in outlines he was “making shit up”, and “characters changed along the way”.

He went straight from talking about the references in the actual books, to the “differences” in the outline from then to now. He did say that he still knows who sits the iron throne and the end game of the main 5, but also included Sansa, but did not give any details (for obvious reasons).

[question if he is still going with the 1991 ending]

“Yes, I mean, I did partly joke when I said I don’t know where I was going. I know the broad strokes, and I’ve known the broad strokes since 1991. I know who’s going to be on the Iron Throne. I know who’s gonna win some of the battles, I know the major characters, who’s gonna die and how they’re gonna die, and who’s gonna get married and all that. The major characters. 

….

“So a lot of the minor characters I’m still discovering along the way. But the mains-”

[question if he knows Arya’s and Jon’s fates]

“Tyrion, Arya, Jon, Sansa, you know, all of the Stark kids, and the major Lannisters, yeah.”

Balticon report:

“Ah, how innocent I was… little did that guy in the picture imagine that he would be spending most of the next two decades in the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros with Tyrion, Daenerys, Arya, Sansa, Jon Snow, Bran, and all the rest.”

GRRM's live journal:

So Sansa has clearly developed into an important character from GRRM’s words, and the key-characters argument can cease, because It’s very tiring to dispel that when the characters and story took on a life of its own. (I mean, Jaime was meant to remain a villain, but he was clearly given somewhat of a redemption arc in the main series).

I paraphrased what was written here for this whole section, so go check out the longer post!

The Aria in the original outline: 

*NOTE: I am blacking out her actual names in case the wrong people find this post. None of this anti her, please keep that in mind.*

Five central characters will make it through all three volumes, [...] The five key players are Tyrion Lannister, D@enerys Targaryen, and three of the children of Winterfell, Aria, Bran, and the bastard Jon Snow. 

Joffrey will not be sympathetic and Ned [what appears to say] will be accused of treason, but before he is taken he will help his wife and his daughter Aria escape back to Winterfell.

Tyrion Lannister, meanwhile, will befriend both Sansa and her sister Aria, while growing more and more disenchanted with his own family.

When Winterfell burns, Catelyn Stark will be forced to flee north with her son Bran and her daughter Aria. Wounded by Lannister riders, they will seek refuge at the Wall, but the men of the Night's Watch give up their families when they take the black, and Jon and Benjen will not be able to help, to Jon's anguish. It will lead to a bitter estrangement between Jon and Bran. 

Aria will be more forgiving ... until she realises, with terror, that she has fallen in love with Jon, who is not only her half-brother but a man of the Night's Watch, sworn to celibacy. Their passion will continue to torment Jon and Aria throughout the trilogy, until the secret of Jon's true parentage is finally revealed in the last book.

Abandoned by the Night's Watch, Catelyn and her children will find their only hope of safety lies even further north, beyond the Wall, where they fall into the hands of Mance Rayder, the King-beyond-the-Wall, and get a dreadful glimpse of the inhuman others as they attack the wilding encampment. Bran's magic, Aria's sword Needle, and the savagery of their direwolves will help them survive, but their mother Catelyn will die at the hands of the others.

Exiled, Tyrion will change sides, making common cause with the surviving Starks to bring his brother down, and falling helplessly in love with Aria Stark while he's at it. His passion is, alas, unreciprocated, but no less intense for that, and it will lead to a deadly rivalry between Tyrion and Jon Snow

Observations:

Exactly how old is Aria? Is she a warrior princess who cries at songs like her aunt? Does she enjoy/yearn for romance? Is she a stunningly beautiful maiden rivalling that of Cersei? How close were she and Jon? Did they have a good sibling relationship? Or were they distant? Does she look physically different to Jon? Does she have red hair? 

The Sansa of the Original Outline:

‘Each of the contending families will learn it has a member of dubious loyalty in its midst. Sansa Stark, wed to Joffrey Baratheon, will bear him a son, the heir to the throne, and when the crunch comes she will choose her husband and child over her parents and siblings, a choice she will later bitterly rue.’ 

Tyrion Lannister, meanwhile, will befriend both Sansa and her sister Aria, while growing more and more disenchanted with his own family.

Jaime Lannister will follow Joffrey on the throne of the Seven Kingdoms, by the simple expedient of killing everyone ahead of him in the line of succession and blaming his brother Tyrion for the murders. 

More observations:

How old is Sansa? Is she 16? 17? She’s conveyed as a less important character in this outline - why? Queen of the Seven Kingdoms? She dies? Jaime kills her? What is her relationship with Aria like? Are/were they close? Or was Sansa initially meant to be a two-tone villain who betrayed her family? Is she overwhelmingly beautiful? Or is she the plainer sister? 

It’s quite clear that both ASOIAF Aria and ASOIAF Sansa are entirely different characters to their outlined counterparts. 

In the outline, Tyrion sacks and burns Winterfell. In ASOIAF, It’s Theon and later Ramsay who does this. In the outline, it’s Bran, Aria, and Catelyn who go beyond the Wall. In ASOIAF, it’s Bran, Meera, and Jojen (and Hodor). There are a couple of other changes made here, but there seems a pattern where certain acts *still* occur in the main series, they’re just given to different characters (which makes sense, as GRRM grows organically with his characters.)

So, when we take into account the fact of ASOIAF Sansa being considered a main/key character, her marriage to Tyrion, and the possibility of her being the first to reunite with Jon - perhaps GRRM did keep a Stark x Snow romance - but gave it to a different sister. 

In the 2016 Balticon report, GRRM stated he wished that ‘some past things didn’t have such strong foreshadowing and that newer things had stronger foreshadowing.’ You can make a case for J0nrya foreshadowing in the first book, but I’d argue that ACOK/ASOS is where the Jon/Sansa clues and foreshadowing is rife. (and there are certainly Jon/Sansa clues in the first book as well.) 

Now to circle back. The Aria of this outline doesn’t have a personality - none of the characters do, really. We don’t know how old she is. Is she a teenager? Is she close in age to Jon? We know she has her needle, so can infer she is a fighter and spirited, but is there a soft romantic side to her? Does she cry at songs like her aunt Lyanna? Does she yearn for love? Is she immensely beautiful? For a narrative like this? It'd be likely if Jon and Tyrion are fighting to the death over her, sort of like gallant knights fighting each other to win the heart of a fair maiden (very romantic and idealistic, mirroring the songs and the stories).

(This is how I am certainly inferring such a scene would have gone).

The ASOIAF Aria we know and love took on a life of her own. She’s described as plain looking (some envision her to be more beautiful than characters like D@ny, Cersei, and Sansa though). - But just quickly on that matter, Aria is indeed compared to Lyanna in looks and spirit, though Lyanna’s beauty was described as wild and implied as non-conventional; different perspectives have different opinions on her. For example, Cersei, Jaime, Devan, the Maester who wrote the WOIAF don’t consider her anything special. Whereas Ned, Robert, and Rhaegar do. So it’s one of those instances where you aren’t exactly sure. In any case, Aria's looks aren't a driving factor in her arc, and I don’t see ASOIAF Tyrion (as creepy as he is) suddenly falling in love with her due to mere attraction because presently, Aria is all knobbly knees and elbows, stick thin, a child, not a maiden, who will still be a pre-teen at the end of the series, if there is no massive time jump.

SHE'S JUST A BABY.

But then, Tyrion did lust after Sansa, so there’s that… however ….

Sansa’s beauty is a driving force in her narrative arc. She is objectified for her beauty. Preyed upon because of her beauty; in many ways it causes her to suffer. It’s largely why LF is grossly infatuated with her - she’s beautiful like Catelyn. Tyrion is attracted to Sansa and wishes to bed her, the H0und intends to rape her during the Blackwater battle, he also comments on her breasts growing, Joffrey sexually humiliates her in court, Ser Dontos has a pervy infatuation with her, Cersei despises Sansa because she is younger, more beautiful etc which she views as a threat.

So, beauty is pertinent to Sansa’s narrative, and it isn’t vain or shallow to say so because it’s a large part as to why she suffers. And her physical beauty is meant to compliment her indulgence in romantic idealism; knights, chivalry, courtly love, beautiful appearances thus equating to good people. It also contributes to perceptions of Sansa; nothing more than a pretty, stupid girl with naive dreams. 

So back to ASOIAF Aria: Her arc largely surrounds nature & nature, mercy, war trauma and survival, friendship, belonging, and family. For the majority of the story, she is a traumatised 10 year old travelling through a war torn country, witness to awful horrors, forced to assume multiple identities, until she goes to Braavos and begins her faceless man arc. But this is obviously not her endgame - she is going to go home eventually, that is quite clear.

You can argue she had a little crush on Gendry (as a 10 year old would) (and perhaps something may happen with him when she is older, I think GRRM has played with it.) But other than that, romance is not a central part of Aria's arc insofar. For outline Aria it was, but current ASOIAF Aria is on a completely different tangent all together.

(and that poor poor child is suffering immensely while this is all occurring).  Currently, she has no time for/interest in it. She hasn’t been involved in betrothals/marriages, or had men lusting after her (save ‘Mercy’ and people men making brutalising sexual comments towards her). She disguises herself as a boy for a good chunk of the story as it is safer to travel.

No, I’m not trying to reduce any sexual trauma/objectification she suffers, she’s a little girl for heaven’s sake - I’m merely stating that what she is going through is in some ways similar and different to what Sansa is going through. (Who currently is in a in a very Lolita type situation with LF and men sexually intimidating/abusing her has been a key part of her arc - as I said, she suffers significantly due to her beauty. She is something to possess, she isn't real or tangible, she is a beautiful maid with a vast claim to the North.)

Anyway, ASOIAF Aria finds songs and romance ‘stupid.’ 

“Sansa would have shed a tear for true love, but Arya just thought it was stupid.” (Arya VIII ASOS) 

 (but that doesn’t mean she won’t encounter it later in life, it just means that at this point of the story, she isn’t interested/likely won't encounter some epic grand romance that outline Aria was likely destined for. (And she’s 11 for god’s sake!).

‘But Sansa was dreaming of love at that age!’

Sansa has been a romantic idealistic dreamer since she was a little girl. She adored those stories and is the literal embodiment of the mediaeval pre-raphaelite maiden depicted in art. It’s central to her story arc, to her qualities, and how she functions/copes with things around her. “Life is not a song.” Is so fundamental to that.

So to reiterate ASOIAF Aria is a completely different character to outline Aria- for all we know OG Aria was 15 years old, very beautiful to the point of men duelling over her, (just as depicted in art above) likely a romantic heroine, had consistent memory lapses that would cause her to “realise in terror, she had fallen for Jon,” and based off of GRRM’s past works - was probably a redhead. 

“But OG Aria has a sword named needle!”

Indeed, but as I stated, we don’t know anything else about her beyond that. Many have theorised that D@ny and Jon are the epic romance of the series, but it’s clear from this particular outline that GRRM intended for it to be Aria and Jon as the epic major romance of the series. That would mean Aria would have to be a somewhat romantically-inclined character, for this development to appear natural and not forced. Based on her current ASOIAF arc, it doesn’t track for her character to make a sudden 180. Her softness and vulnerable moments come from thinking of her family and home. Insofar, this isn’t equated to yearning for love, romance, children, as Sansa has done from the beginning of the series.

Now, we know GRRM is a self-proclaimed romantic, and ASOIAF Sansa exists very much as a deconstruction of romanticism. 

“He said he is a romantic, in the classical sense. He said the trouble with being a romantic is that from a very early age you keep having your face smashed into the harshness of reality. That things aren’t always fair, bad things happen to good people, etc. he said it’s a realistic world, so romantics are burned quite often. This theme of romantic idealism conflicting with harsh reality is something he finds very dramatic and compelling, and he weaves it into his work.” (2005 interview).

Sansa is arguably, the embodiment of this dismantling. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that love isn’t real, or that it doesn’t deserve to exist in a gritty world such as Westeros. There were many couples who had good, happy marriages, even after war and loss and trauma. For example, apart from the Jon Snow situation, Ned and Catelyn had a remarkably healthy relationship. So it is possible - the takeaway from the series is not that hoping is meaningless, dreams are meaningless, love is meaningless. More so that it is complicated, and it must coexist alongside all the chaos in order to achieve a sort of

equilibrium. A literal ‘Dream of Spring’ a hope for happiness, rather than happiness itself. It tracks with the bittersweet conclusion to the series ; it is a grimdark story, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’ll be a grimdark ending where everyone good and noble dies and wishes/dreams/innate desires remain unfulfilled. 

In fact, I argue that a lot of them will come true - but at what cost? It’ll be at the cost of loss and grief, of suffering upon suffering, but what’s inherently more powerful, what’s more subversive is having those characters persist and rebuild, regenerate, create a new world where love and chaos undoubtedly exist alongside each other, but just because there is chaos, that does not mean the love is miniscule or cancels out entirely. 

Because if all these characters have the most unsatisfying, awful conclusions known to man, well - what was the point of everything? What was the point of their journeys? This isn’t a nihilistic story, and it won’t have a nihilistic ending like everyone assumes. It’s far more difficult for an author to craft such an ending, balancing things out whilst acknowledging all the loss and still holding out hope for a better future to come. That brighter days will arrive. That winter will end, and spring will be on the horizon.

“We may lose our heads, it’s true. But what if we prevail?” (Davos I ADWD). 

And that right there, sums it up perfectly. 

So you need characters like Sansa, characters like Brienne, D@ny, (you know what let’s just add all the Stark children of the series to the list, because every single character arc is about remaining resilient and prevailing in some way or another). 

But it’s Sansa who exists as the meta character that embodies/indulges in all those romantic ideals that GRRM is intent on exploring - it thus makes perfect sense for it to be her that experiences the romance arc. Many people think she’ll end up with the H0und, or Harry the douchebag, because it’s a part of her growing up, maturing, learning from her negative biases etc etc but she shouldn’t have to be with abusive or douchy men to learn that. She’s already learned and suffered enough. 

“It is my claim they want. No one will ever marry me for love.”

And how utterly heartbreaking that she has resigned to think this, with her arc only mid-way. But importantly, just a few chapters later she enters the garden of undisputed beauty and equates the snow landing on her face with romantic kisses, she dreams of innocence and winterfell, despite lamenting how she doesn’t belong in such a pure world, she steps out into it all the same. And she builds her home in the snow, content and for once - she’s the child she is, the child she is yearning to be.

So Sansa falling in love with Jon makes sense on a characteristic level. It’s something she never would have considered as a sheltered child, not just because he’s her bastard half brother but because he just didn’t exist in her idea of how the world works. He didn’t fit in with her idea of knights, and courtly love and chivalry. He wasn’t a gallant golden prince, he was dark, sulky and brooding. He existed on the parameters of her life, and she was comfortable with that distant association - but she still loved him, and he her. 

Falling in love with Jon would equate to a dismantling of these previous prejudices  she held; he’s utterly unconventional, the opposite of what she has shown attraction to (despite her first ‘love’ being Waymar Royce, who resembles Jon strikingly). The man she never really considered beyond courtesy and some scarce, fond memories - to be the one who restores her faith in men, in love, in dreams. 

“Realising with terror that she has fallen in love with Jon… their passion will continue to torment them.” 

tracks with Sansa’s characterisation particularly, her memory lapses, her clouded judgement, and inability to interpret things correctly (and something as confusing as this would certainly cause her to have some cognitive dissonance going on).

Not to mention caution around well… men. Because who would ever marry her for love? Who would ever take her for true? Love her without expectations and judgement? It’s Jon. Who has been there since the very beginning, who has been a silent unconscious hero, the answer to her prayers, who embodies all those romantic and knightly ideals she has so desperately wanted - despite her being unaware. Who has advocated for her claim - above everyone else.

“No one will ever marry me for love.” And that infamous Jon chapter follows. Jon who is never quite far from Sansa’s suitors. Jon, who has a similar dream of rebuilding Winterfell, of having children named after lost siblings, who wants to woo a girl by giving her a rose and loving beneath the heart tree - the heart of Winterfell. Who would undeniably want to have that beautiful soul-nourishing love he never received as a child, that he believes is perpetually unavailable to him. 

Above all,  they just fit together. It fits with GRRM’s William Faulkner-esque “the human heart in conflict with itself".” And this is a perfectly subversive way of  encapsulating that Jon confusing brotherly love and affection with romance, struggling with the shame of it all - especially post-resurrection, the religious disillusionment that would occur, the notion of Jon being loved by the kind of girl he believed he never had the right to, who his deeply romantic heart is yearned for. (There is a reason GRRM let us know how badly Jon yearns for domesticity, Winterfell love, children, and a wife. He associates his love for Ygritte with her singing, her hair, her smile. He dreams of her tending to him with gentle hands) The simple yet meaningful things that have been denied to him because of his bastardry. And god, what better way to torment these two than by having them fall for each other - realising they fit each other so perfectly, yet tormented by their familial relation. Until, as the outline puts, the parentage is revealed. 

Do I believe they will act on their feelings pre-parentage reveal? No. It’ll likely exist in the subtext, in private thoughts and actions. Angst, guilt. Again, the stuff that GRRM loves - the human heart is in conflict with itself. 

Much like Lord Byron’s ‘The Bride of Abydos.” Where half-siblings fall in love with each other until they realise they are actually cousins. Lord Byron, who was famously in love with his half sister Augusta, who was a stranger to him for a good portion of his life until they properly got to know each other and fell in love. (Who does that sound like?’)

And if you’re wondering how Jon and Sansa could possibly connect to Lord Byron, well there is a ‘Byron the Beautiful’ in Alayne II AFFC, and Alayne I TWOW. GRRM has further instilled characters by the name of “Manfred” which is in reference to Lord Byron’s infamous work of the same name. (I urge you to check out all of Cappy's Byron metas, they are fantastic.

And, Jon has been called a “Brooding, Byronic, romantic heroine whom all the girls love.” GRRM knows what Byronic is inferring - he isn’t daft, he’s a writer - he reads other works and takes influence and sprinkles in so many things. 

A Byronic character involves:

. . romantic melancholy, guilt for secret sin, pride, defiance, restlessness, alienation, revenge, remorse, moodiness, and such noble virtues as honor, altruism, courage, and pure love for a gentle woman. (Poetry Foundation, Lord Byron)

“GRRM: I was always intensely Romantic, even when I was too young to understand what that meant. But Romanticism has its dark side, as any Romantic soon discovers… which is where the melancholy comes in, I suppose. I don’t know if this is a matter of artistic influences so much as it is of temperament. But there’s always been something in the twilight that moves me, and a sunset speaks to me in a way that no sunrise ever has.”

Infinity plus:

And isn’t that exactly what he would be exploring with Jon and Sansa? It isn’t a conventional romance by any means. It could never exist normally until Jon’s parentage is revealed. And that is the tormented nature of it, that is the “bittersweetness” of it - it is rooted in realism, yes - and that to me, is Sansa receiving her true love, countering that no one would ever marry her for love. The gods will grant it to her, - but it’s wrapped up in this darker, morally ambiguous thing that is confusing for her, even though Jon would be her dream come true - he isn’t this neat little courtly golden package, but he embodies all those ideals more than any man she’s actually met. 

It’s subversive to what both the characters and the readers expect, and it’s just a brilliant plot twist that screams unpredictability whilst fitting together like a perfect puzzle. It creates internal conflict and evokes those themes that GRRM loves to explore. By giving the ‘heroes’ of the series a motif such as incest is extremely bold; because it challenges the reader greatly. Some people don’t want Jon to end up with Sansa because it contradicts the image that they have of him in his head - the heroic male who will save the world with his heroic counterpart and together they shall rule the seven kingdoms. To embrace his father’s family, claim a dragon, fulfil the prophecy, be the third head of the dragon, reject his stark-ness. Very predictable. Done to death a thousand times over, and yet - it is what the general audience wants/expects. It’s what the dudebros who call him the ‘GOAT’ want, it’s what the Targ stans want, it’s what the show watchers wanted - but what does Jon want? 

“Yet he could not let the wildlings breach the Wall, to threaten Winterfell and the north, the barrowlands and the Rills, White Harbor and the Stony Shore, even the Neck. For eight thousand years the men of House Stark had lived and died to protect their people against such ravagers and reavers . . . and bastard-born or no, the same blood ran in his veins. Bran and Rickon are still at Winterfell besides. Maester Luwin, Ser Rodrik, Old Nan, Farlen the kennelmaster, Mikken at his forge and Gage by his ovens . . . everyone I ever knew, everyone I ever loved.” (Jon II ASOS). 

“I would need to steal her if I wanted her love, but she might give me children. I might someday hold a son of my own blood in my arms. A son was something Jon Snow had never dared dream of, since he decided to live his life on the Wall. I could name him Robb. Val would want to keep her sister's son, but we could foster him at Winterfell, and Gilly's boy as well. Sam would never need to tell his lie. We'd find a place for Gilly too, and Sam could come visit her once a year or so. Mance's son and Craster's would grow up brothers, as I once did with Robb.

"He wanted it, Jon knew then. He wanted it as much as he had ever wanted anything. I have always wanted it, he thought, guiltily. May the gods forgive me. It was a hunger inside him, sharp as a dragonglass blade.” (Jon XII ASOS). 

“Red eyes, Jon realised, but not like Melisandre's. He had a weirwood's eyes. Red eyes, red mouth, white fur. Blood and bone, like a heart tree. He belongs to the old gods, this one. And he alone of all the direwolves was white. Six pups they'd found in the late summer snows, him and Robb; five that were grey and black and brown, for the five Starks, and one white, as white as Snow.”

He had his answer then." (Jon XII ASOS)

“He was the blood of Winterfell, a man of the Night's Watch. I will not father a bastard, he told her. I will not. I will not. "You know nothing, Jon Snow," she whispered.” (Jon VI ASOS)

“Ygritte answered for him. "His name is Jon Snow. He is Eddard Stark's blood, of Winterfell." (Jon VIII ACOK)

"Then you must do what needs be done," Qhorin Halfhand said. "You are the blood of Winterfell and a man of the Night's Watch." (Jon VI ASOS). 

“You can't be the Lord of Winterfell, you're bastard-born, he heard Robb say again. And the stone kings were growling at him with granite tongues. You do not belong here. This is not your place. When Jon closed his eyes he saw the heart tree, with its pale limbs, red leaves, and solemn face. The weirwood was the heart of Winterfell, Lord Eddard always said . . . but to save the castle Jon would have to tear that heart up by its ancient roots, and feed it to the red woman's hungry fire god. I have no right, he thought. Winterfell belongs to the old gods.” (Jon XII ASOS) 

“He sat on the bench and buried his head in his hands. Why am I so angry? he asked himself, but it was a stupid question. Lord of Winterfell. I could be the Lord of Winterfell. My father's heir.” (Jon XII ASOS).

“If I could show her Winterfell . . . give her a flower from the glass gardens, feast her in the Great Hall, and show her the stone kings on their thrones. We could bathe in the hot pools, and love beneath the heart tree while the old gods watched over us.” (Jon V ASOS). 

“If he must perish, let it be with a sword in his hand, fighting his father's killers. He was no true Stark, had never been one … but he could die like one. Let them say that Eddard Stark had fathered four sons, not three.” (Jon IX AGOT).

Look, at the end of the day - we don't know how the story will go, but based off of Jon’s character arc? His thoughts? His actions? His relationships with his siblings? The fact that he has warged into a magical beast directly associated with Starks? The North? The Old Gods? The weir wood trees? I think that instead of GRRM having Jon go down the conventional disadvantaged male hero finding out he is a secret prince and thus becoming King and a proper Targ, GRRM will subvert expectations (much to audience displeasure) and do the opposite.

Learning of his true identity will just cause more angst and a major identity crisis. The one thing Jon finds real and solid, that no one can take from him - is that he is Ned Stark’s son. He raised him. Perhaps they don’t share a direct blood link. But that doesn’t matter, what matters is that he was raised by him, loved by him. So instead of choosing his father’s family; embracing the secret prince persona and fighting for the throne - he’ll choose his mother’s family. And I think that is beautifully conclusive.

But back to Jon and Sansa. GRRM is given the opportunity to explore the sort of impact this incest motif has on fundamentally good people. And I think this is what he originally intended to do with Jon and Aria.

Yes, we have Jaime and Cersei, but this is real sibling incest and rife with toxic narcissism, possession etc. We have the T@rgaryens, which are messy beyond belief and practice it due to blood purity. 

But Jon and Sansa clearly differ from the rest, and that is because they exist partly as foils as to what we previously have seen. Similar to Jonnel x Sansa. By intentionally refraining from the development of a properly-close sibling relationship, making Jon and Sansa fundamental opposites visually, and associating them with entirely different cultures (yet writing their core personas as the same, their dreams compatible, their thought process and idealism similar).

GRRM manages to pave the way into such a romance that comes as a shock to the characters, the narrative, and readers themselves. Because no one, absolutely no one would see it coming, and the people who have been privy to the theory - immediately dismiss it - and become quite angry when it is brought up. Like I said earlier, a knee-jerk reaction. 

To quote this brilliant meta right here:

‘Whether Jon and Sansa fall in love is up to the author and his intended exploration of literary/mythic themes that his predecessors have deployed. He is not writing from (or for) the moral values of show watchers and book readers, or their anecdotal hopes for how things “should be.” He’s writing a narrative that breaks away from conventional storytelling and what we expect from such characters.’

…

‘ I don’t believe the author is giving up completely on the romantic dream. He has made Sansa more cautious, converted her dreams into mere prayers, and has forced her to examine her assumptions, but he’s not turning her into the H0und, who is too pessimistic and fatalistic as a suitor. Sandor’s assertion that all knights are killers makes fantasy so small, it’s eliminated. I think he is setting Sansa on a path where her dreams do die, and her life becomes about as romantic as that smokestack in Cleveland - until they start to come alive again when she travels North to the Wall.’

'That cold, hard reality is still present in the fact that they are brother and sister, but once Jon’s parentage is revealed, this will change. Like an inverted Cinderella (clock striking 12), the reality will become fantasy again. But it’s still inladen with this bitter reality of their relations. So taking this into account, I believe Jon and Sansa could happen because there is no other couple in the series with which GRRM can explore his fascination with fantasy becoming “smaller,” but not completely shrinking altogether. There are no two better characters who represent these ideas, who have the same quietly domestic desires - who do not (at the moment) actively lust for power and cause it to blind them.'

So in essence, Jon and Sansa exist as the subversion of romance. In a twisted, loving sort of way that is morally conflicting to the characters and audiences (for a time). That has existed between the lines, subtly and implicitly. That the audience gives absolutely no thought, because why would they? And if they do, they are abhorred by it - but I’d argue this is the entire point. But not for the reasons you think, not because of the incest - or J0nerys would disgust them.

From the moment he started the series, GRRM has employed incest as a major motif that impacts both the narrative and the characters - the causes the war, that contributes to T@rgaryen values, legacy etc, that propels aspects of narcissism and vitriol for characters like Cersei. It’s really really interesting stuff, as uncomfortable as it is - there are no other works that explore it so messily and beautifully with such nuance. 

I believe people seriously underestimate GRRM’s use of omission and subtext. Seriously, just because something is not explicitly stated, doesn’t mean it isn’t there. Unfortunately fans have such a surface level reading of the text, that they are unable to peel back the layers and get to its core. They don’t consider literary influences, or art, or the Romantic movement or anything. They claim they want a complex story that is subversive, yet they cheer for the three-headed dragon theory and all the most predictable plot points that have been absolutely done to death. But then they turn up their noses at anything that goes against the grain, or insinuates otherwise.  

R + L = J is a great example of existence within the subtext, yet nobody denies that it is there. No one is called crazy or delusional for it. Ned never thinks of Jon’s true parentage despite harbouring that secret for years, because it is buried deep in his subconscious.

And much to the audience’s surprise (and dismay I'm sure) that is how Jon and Sansa will manifest. This is the human heart in conflict with Jon and Sansa, but not just them - the readers as well. It’s pointing to us, asking us how we’ll possibly handle it. We’re meant to feel this conflict of emotions - anguish and torment and yet hope for something ineffable - just like the characters.

To be able to evoke that as a writer is one of the most impressive feats I can think of - and for the majority of it to exist at this point, in a subconscious limbo?  How utterly complex and painful and raw and intelligent but oh so very brilliant. Perhaps one of the most compelling things to come out of this entire series, if only the general audience was open to such discussions. But alas, we must contend with the community we have, and hope for a dream of spring to come upon us. 

[apeekintothepantry]

Happy Pokémon Day! February 27th is the anniversary of the first two Pokémon games’ release in Japan, and it’s a minor holiday in my house, as a fun excuse to make Pokémon inspired food, watch some Pokémon shows or movies (we’re going to watch Netflix’s new Pokémon Concierge this year!), and get excited about upcoming games and releases. This year, we’re making a Pokémon Sword and Shield inspired burger-steak curry and I’m making a dessert from the Pokémon Cookbook by Victoria Rosenthal. It’s one of my favorite fandom cookbooks – all the recipes are vegetarian or vegan, to get around the awkward question of where does the meat in the Pokémon universe come from?

But that’s not all we’re making! Ever since Nicki and Isabel were released, I’ve been dying to do a post about them and Pokémon’s infamous “Jelly Filled Doughnuts”, better – and more accurately! – known as onigiri.

Pokémon was released in the United States in 1998 via two Gameboy games: Pokémon Red and Pokémon Blue. The games quickly caught on to be one of the biggest pop culture phenomenon of the late 90’s and early 00’s, and as a kid at the heart of this explosion, I can’t overstate how much of a big deal it was. One of the great things about Pokémon – and probably why it has such lasting, widespread appeal – is that there are so many ways to interact with the franchise, and the marketing doesn’t skew hugely towards one gender or the other. Cool, tough Pokémon like Charizard got pretty similar billing to cute, pink Pokémon like Jigglypuff, and there were so many options for potential favorites that it was easy for any kid to find some creature to attach themselves to.

One of my petty complaints with Nicki and Isabel’s collection and books is the almost complete lack of mention of Pokémon and other anime that was really popular among kids in 1999. I know AG probably didn’t want to shell out for licensing deals with Nintendo or The Pokémon Company, but their stories just don’t feel accurate without discussing their prized binder of Pokémon cards or begging their parents to take them to see the Pokémon movie in theaters. Maybe the authors were just a little too old to get caught up in Pokémania?

I’ve also always thought its close overlap with the Beanie Babies crazy helped get millennial children like me very into the “gotta catch ‘em all” aspect of the franchise. Is this why I’m such a crazy toy collector as an adult? Who knows.

The Pokémon anime was one of the main ways kids like me got hooked on the franchise, because not everyone was allowed to have a Gameboy of their own (me), and not everyone liked video games, but even if you didn’t like video games, the cartoon might appeal to you. Although it was far from the first Japanese cartoon to air on US television, Pokémon was one of if not the first truly mainstream favorites of the 1990’s. 4Kids, the company in charge of dubbing the show into English, decided that American kids wouldn’t understand or be open to certain aspects of the show that reflected its Japanese roots, and so made a lot of strange choices in rewriting the script. One of the most notorious was deciding Brock’s rice balls were actually jelly filled doughnuts:

Onigiri – also known as omusubi or nigirimeshi – are balls of rice with a variety of fillings inside. They’re often compared to sandwiches, as an easy, quick, cheap meal or snack that combines carbs and other ingredients. While the concept of taking a rice ball and stuffing it full of other tasty treats goes way back to ancient Japan, the triangle shape became popular in the 1980’s thanks to a new machine that automated the filling process. Further developments over the last 40 years have created unique ways to prepackage onigiri without making the nori wrapping sticky. The ones we made were an attempt at recreating the “Hawaiian” (spam and pineapple) rice balls from our favorite food hall back in DC. One of my favorite pandemic indulgences was getting take out from the food hall, which often included a sampler of some of my favorite onigiri, and I haven’t been able to find anything close to similar where we are now. One of the many reasons I’m excited to move!

Even as a kid, I wasn’t convinced the food in the anime was fried dough with fruit jelly inside, because they sure look like rice. I also think 4Kids didn’t anticipate that Pokémon’s widespread popularity would inspire many of its fans – including me – to become absolutely obsessed with Japanese food and culture. I would’ve been more excited if they’d just been straight with me and shown more Japanese food on the show, and then probably begged my parents to make it or take me to a restaurant that made it. While I can’t confidently cite numbers of how many other people were first exposed to Japanese culture and food through Pokémon and franchises like it, I do think it’s a bit of a missed opportunity to highlight how things like this exposed kids like Nicki and Isabel to parts of a culture outside their own!

[klissblog]

Is Teruhashi based off of the author's wife? Part 1

Saiki K published in 2010 in one short chapter, and was serialized from May 2012 to February 2018 (chapter 1-279).

Kokomi appeared in 2012. Her attitude at the beginning of chapter 5 was narcissistic. She flirted with the new transferred boys in chapters 18 and 66

And now I want to focus on the year 2014 since the author started to be a big fan of dempagumi.INC. He tweeted that he went to the first idol concert in November 2014.

His coworker/assistant who helped drawing Saiki k. manga (三原すばる/Mihara Subaru) drew this manga panel, and he was the one who made the author a big fan of Dempagumi (his wife is an idol in this group) in 2014.

I 2014, his wife's hairstyle appeared in chapter 87. Kokomi could sing in chapter 90. Kusuo admited that he was a tsundere in chapter 92.

Chapter 101. Kokominzu. Um... Being Otaku can affect to manga. His wife also has a fan club.

Chapter 114 Saiko appeared. He was the man of Kokomi's dream, but the author made Kokomi more loyal to Kusuo and stopped flirting with a new boy.

In 2016, there was a turning point. Kusuo was more open to Kokomi and respects her feelings. He got rid of the guys in the mixer (Chapter 182). He bought her a present (Chapter 204). Kusuo said offu with his own mouth to Kokomi (Chapter 214). He praised Kokomi we are invisible (Chapter 218)

In the same year, the author did draw his wife as Aiura Mikoto, and Aizawa Risa as Kokomi (chapter 219) and he tweeted it on 7 nov 2016. Does this prove that Risa is kokomi to the author?

Yumemi posted this picture and got the comment that she was Nendou (because of her height). If it is because of the height, I can arrange their heights in order.

Boy cosplay: Yumemi is 170cm (Nendou 191cm) > Mogami 162cm (Saiki 167cm) > Fujisaki 157cm (Kaidou 159cm)

Girl Cosplay: Furukawa 165cm (Mikoto 166cm) > Aizawa 159 (Kokomi 164cm) > Naruse 160cm (Chiyo 156cm)

There was a comment that said "As I thought, Aso sensei is a big fan of Risa-chan, aren't you? " (because he drew her as Kokomi and we all know that Kokomi is his favorite female character). The author didn't reply/answer the comment.

However, the queen came and claimed her crown! The author's wife (Furukawa-san) wrote on her twitter that "it is ok to offu" the same day the author tweeted that drawing. We all know there is one character who wants to hear offu. So who is the real kokomi?

I guess 2016 was the year they were bf/gf. That's why it's a turning point for Kusuo. I mean I wouldn't care if a big fan of mine likes or married another woman, but I do care if someone thinks my boyfriend likes another woman. Both of them couldn't say it out loud because his wife is an idol (must be secret).

In December 2018, the author proposed to his wife on Saiki animation S3 ep 1

Chapter 265 and S3ep1

In manga

1st choice「はしもと かんな と けっこん」→ married to Hashimoto Kanna (she starred as Kokomi in live action).

2nd choice 「よしおかりほ と けっこん」→ married to Yoshioka Riho (the actress).

3rd choice 「ガッキーとけっこん」 → married to Gakki (Aragaki Yui: not relate to Saiki k).

But in anime s.3 ep.1 (Netflix doesn’t translate the texts in anime.), Asō sensei changed 

no. 2 to「かやの あい と けっこん」married to Kayano Ai (Kokomi’s voice in anime)

no.3 to でんぱぐみのだれか(とけっこん) → Married someone in Dempagumi(.inc). 

He grouped his wife with Kokomi in animation. I guess his wife likes Kokomi or he sees his wife beautiful as kokomi. Anyways, he is so sweet to do a marriage proposal on anime and this'll alway be on Saiki k anime forever .

18 september 2019 The author announed that he and Furukawan-san would get married (one day before his wife birthday, 19 sep), and they had got married in november 2019 (the same month they met each other.

His coworker (三原すばる/Mihara Subaru) wrote on the manga panel, the result of being an otaku for 5 years (from 2014 to 2019). Congratulations on marriage!

So, it is Furukawa-san that the author likes from the beginning, and Furukawa-san was Mikoto in that drawing because of the height. One thing we should know about the author that he likes to trick the readers. The same as he tricked us about Aiura´s soulmate which is Toritsuka.

In my opinion, Kokomi wasn't based off the author's wife in the beginning (because they didn’t met each other from start of Saiki k. (2012), but they met each other before half of saiki k. manga 2014). Kokomi is his type and she looks similar to his wife. So, he likes his wife from the first day. The author changed Kokomi to be more nicer: not narcissistic and loyal: stop fooling around. She is beautiful, has fanclub and talented like his wife (a little based off his wife), but not a 100% like his wife because some personalities of his wife are taken to the other characters. His wife had a lack of communication at school and dislikes insects (that's kusuo character from 2012). She is a gamer. She likes ramen (Umm, it's nendou character from 2012).

The question: Doesn´t Kusuo end up with Kokomi if the author and his wife haven't met? 

Answer: I would think that Kokomi’s still narcissistic and would chase after him until the end without Kusuo showing that he liked her or not. Being aroace, I guess. 

But the author planned from the beginning that they have same birthday month and he sent them together (Kokomi asked for a decent boy and saw kusuo on her birthday, his father asked God for a nice girlfriend for his son and Kokomi appeared). The ending would be the same that kusuo chooses kokomi in chapter 279 (He doesn´t make a 100% clear and the readers have to interpret the ending). 

The picture from animation released in 2019, the year that they had got married or manga chapter 281 released in 2018, the year that the author proposed his wife. He made kusuo and Kokomi canon (Saiki likes Teruhashi in the last scene). The picture shows Kusuo startled when he heard someone called Kokomi. He didn't react anything to other friends, only reacted to Kokomi. He smiles after her words and quickly grabs glasses (save the world and grant Kokomi´s wish). Kusuo said he liked trouble which refered to Kokomi (chapter 181). Both of them like each other. The end ଘ(੭◌ˊᵕˋ)੭* ੈ♡❤️🎉‧₊˚

Chapter 181 and Reawakened ep. 6

Chapter 181 kokomi admited she liked kusuo and Reawakened ep. 6 (Chapter 281) kusuo said he liked trouble, kokomi. Ironically, he referenced/linked this romantic couple (SaiTeru) 100 chapters apart. The same as 100 chapters apart for this couple: Mikoto met Reita for the first time in chapter 173 and Reita has pink hair in chapter 73. With the pun of the characters’ names and this reference, this author is literally brilliant!

I'm not sure if the author changed Kokomi’s personality to be nicer after knowing his wife and made Kusuo´s heart swayed for kokomi the same timeline of their relationship on purpose or he did plan about this, even he didn´t meet his wife. Edit The author made terusai happened the same timeline of theirs relationship after I saw he referred himself as saiki and Kokomi as his wife in chapter 115. See extra: is Teruhashi is based off of the author’s wife? I am so sure that the author is so sweet. He even changed the storyline that Kokomi is (a little) based off his wife and saiki is a tsundere. The author saw his wife beautiful like kokomi (miss perfect in his eyes) and that’s why he grouped Kokomi and his wife in a marriage proposal. Kokomi and his wife has effort (this is definitely his type). The most important is his wife wanted to be Kokomi. “It’s ok to offu”. The author will do everything for his wife and it seems to me that his wife likes kokomi and is SaiTeru. Kokomi is favoured by the author God. Both of them are SaiTeru.

I like to think that the author say this to his wife 

«I couldn´t have done it without her. With your powers and mine, we can´t fail. We´re invicible.»

[mysticstronomy]

WHERE DO COSMIC RAYS COME FROM??

Blog#374

Saturday, February 10th, 2024.

Welcome back,

Earth is under constant bombardment by cosmic rays, showers of high-energy particles that blast our planet from all directions at near light speed.

While this might sound like the precursor to a sci-fi alien invasion, it is a real phenomenon that scientists have been aware of for over a century.

Despite their dramatic description, cosmic rays are actually pretty ordinary — they pass through our planet so regularly that during an average night's sleep, a person will have around a million cosmic rays traveling through their body, according to the University of Birmingham in the U.K.

Despite their ubiquity, cosmic rays still present scientific mysteries. While slow-energy cosmic rays that strike Earth are known to originate from the sun, others with higher energies stream into the solar system from deep space.

The origins of these extrasolar cosmic rays are lesser known, with suspect sources including black holes and the supernova explosions that mark the deaths of massive stars.

Cosmic rays "have been detected here on Earth for more than 100 years now. Yet, their origin remains largely unknown," Julia Tjus, a professor of physics and astronomy at Ruhr University in Germany, told Space.com via email.

"These tiny particles reach energies that go far beyond what we can reach here on Earth. We are trying to solve a riddle that is by now more than 100 years old and put together the pieces slowly but steadily."

Cosmic rays are streams of high-energy particles that hit Earth's atmosphere at near light speed. They were discovered in the 1900s, and the term "cosmic rays" was coined by physicist Robert Millikan in 1925.

Since then, scientists have determined that trillions of cosmic rays hit Earth every day, but the vast majority are blocked by the planet's magnetosphere and atmosphere.

Over 90% of cosmic rays are hydrogen nuclei  ( single protons), 9% are the atomic nuclei of helium, and 1% are the nuclei of heavy elements up to iron, according to the University of Chicago. These are called "hadronic particles" because they are composed of hadrons, like protons and neutrons, which are made up of fundamental particles called quarks.

"There are also electrons and positrons [the antiparticles of electrons] coming to us in cosmic rays but in smaller numbers than the hadronic particles. These are often called cosmic-ray electrons," Tjus said. "Sometimes, people also include the neutral high-energy particles  —  photons and neutrinos  —  in the term cosmic rays, but in most definitions, these are kept separately."

Originally published on www.space.com

COMING UP!!

(Wednesday, February 14th, 2024)

"HOW IS OUR UNIVERSE EXPANDING RAPIDLY??"

[houkagokappa]

I'm in a weird mood to watch anything, but I had to watch the finale of Yuuki Bakuhatsu Bang Bravern before the twitter spoilers got to me.

It was a fun series, made with a lot of love, but I have to bring up this one tweet I've been unable to forget ever since I saw it back in February, of how much potential this show would have to keep going for what seems like forever (like they did in the 90's), with all sorts of silly episodic adventures. While I loved watching it, I can't let go of that idea.

I'm genuinely so sad modern series, especially original series, are so short-lived. Suisei no Majo got 24 episodes compared to the 50-something other Gundam series seem to get. Ikuhara's shows have gone from 3-cours to 2-cours to 1-cour to 1-cour minus an episode compared to the last. And while there are amazing 1-cour series out there, these shows I mentioned all have large casts with complex characters who would benefit from more screen time and some down time as well. Bang Bravern had to rush a lot of things, and while it's not a huge complaint of mine, I guess I'm leaving this series thinking "wow that was entertaining, but can you imagine what more it could've been?"

[poppetsisters]

So, what/how do you think and feel about the FF suit that Joseph was wearing in that video message for D23?

I'M GLAD YOU ASKED BECAUSE I WAS GONNA MAKE A POST ABOUT IT!

My gut reaction was that I got a little scared. The combination of white AND black with the base colour reminded me a lot of Professor Impossible from Venture Bros, especially when leaked set pictures of Vanessa Kirby seemingly show her in a black skirt/shorts/it's hard to tell

But let me start from the top. I'm gonna recount a few points in my Valentines Day video but time has given me more thoughts.

Let's start with the Logo on the suit, which is best rendered in the Title graphic. It's such a nice, elegant logo, smooth curves with subtle accent lines. the way the line crosses into itself on the 4 makes it look like a star. It's not sharp like the teaser logo we got (and was used on MoM Reed) but friendlier, bouncier, while still keeping a strong structure.

The colour scheme itself was a surprise to me when I first saw it back in February. Instead of any traditional colour combination, we're getting white on azure, this is a combination I've only ever seen on season 1 of the 90s cartoon.

Unlike my reaction to that show, the choice of colours looked way better than I expected. The blue really pops with the white, and (as I'm sure was intentional) gives them a fun astronaut aesthetic. Honestly, it's such a relief after so many dull grey militaristic MCU costumes that we're finally getting something based on 60s NASA instead.

These suits also look very comfy. I know the actors are for sure gonna have a different opinion on that, but they look snug on the actor's body, not needing any muscle suit underneath to portray strength. I don't know what material the suits made out of, but it gives off something that allows for stretch and warmth, like a sweater. Great choice.

Now let's look at the elements itself. The Logo is clear and readable, something I was nervous about with previous suits having their logo too small. It's centred on a good part of the suit, maybe I would've raised it higher but then it'd be intersecting with the brim, so I'm not gonna be fussy about it.

The brim itself is much wider than I was expecting, and the turtleneck isn't too large, which is nice since you don't want to make the actors have a double chin.

The biggest departure from traditional suits is the white from the collar extending Spider-Man like down the arms. It seems a little odd that a detail like that doesn't connect to the gloves, leaving a blue gap between that and the entrance to the glove. It reminds me of a symmetrical version of the Jim Lee suits from 1997. I'm trying to find a precedent for this design decision in 60s NASA era space suits, but I can't find any. Aesthetically, it feel unnecessary, but maybe they want to call attention to the arms in the design for some reason. Maybe it's something to do with his fire form.

The gloves however being starkly white on the outside and black on the inside do hold a precedent. Some space suits, indeed most practical gloves, use a different material for the inside of the hand to aid in grip. I believe that's what's happening here. The gloves appear to have that same strap that Carlos Pacheco introduced in 2001.

Since we don't get a good shot of the legs, my final notes are on the belt. A friend of mine commented that Johnny has a camera on his belt, but I think the reference is to the Belt-Buckle Solenoid, the micro-beam key that unlocks the elevator to the Fantastic Four's residence. This is a really cool detail to put into the belt, and it's silver colour blends nicely with the while so it doesn't interfere with the colour or shape language.

The last point I want to make, speaking of Sue, is that according to this suit reveal and the leaked Susan Storm pictures, it appears that every member of the team gets a distinct costume, and that's probably for the best. My only real desires is that they should all still look like they're on the same team with a unified colour scheme and logo, which is probably a given but I still wanted to point out anyway.

Overall, this costume is leagues better than the 2015 costumes and even the 2005 costumes. They're bold, colourful, proud of their 60s design heritage, and most important of all, fun!

[lavenderwhtever]

erghh technically i JUST made my mushy gushy post about ausmp but GUESS WHAT I have THIS FAN ART that i’ve been working on since MAY 2023 and that’s an awesome excuse to gush a bit more!!

This is the last fanart i’ll post here, and the last piece of art i’ll EVER sign as Lavender. how crazy is that??

aaand here’s the original sketch (which might actually be from february 2023??)

I decided not to add the tulips because. man i think we’re over this.

I said this on twitter but this art was made for over a year!! on and off again, a little work at a time. kind of like area unknown itself.

I’ve loved area unknown from the very very start. I’ve loved these characters since before they were ACTUAL characters. I have 58k aimsey channel points and i live 6 hours behind him. I’ve skipped too much school to catch these streams on time. I’ve zoned out of sooo many math lessons to draw these characters instead. i think 90% of my ibis x paint gallery is just au!guqqie.

I stopped keeping up with the lore about this time last year. Life got busy, yk? And i’d grown up! Area unknown started 2 years ago. I was 14 then. I’m 16 now. I have my driver’s license. I’ve had a job. I have a bank account??? And I’m working on a college essay RIGHT NOW. I really, really feel like i’ve grown up with this server.

I would not be the same person without this server. I wouldn’t be the same artist without it. I wouldn’t be the same writer without it. I wouldn’t be the same.

I won’t watch all of the perspectives this time. I’ll probably never go on twitch again. But if anyone asks, I will gladly give anyone a long, detailed summary of sunshipduo’s entire lore. I’ll probably still draw their characters in my notebooks when i’m bored. I’ll still think of them when certain songs come on. Theoretically, my journey with them is over, but if you look closer, their words line the corners of my heart.

Thanks guys. 🌼🌷💙🧡

@aimseytv @guqqie

[chibrary]

ARTICLE: AS A ROOKIE IN THE SHIFTER CLASS (AT 15 YEARS OF AGE) HE WON THE WINTER CUP… WITH A FEVER! (2022)

source: mattia livraghi, tkart series: karting, 2013

Among the classes of international karting there is one that represents the arrival point in the career of a professional kart driver: KZ. First it was called Formula C, then KZ1, but the name matters little, the essence is that we are talking about the top class, in which super experts race, even at 20-30 years of age. People who have practically nothing more to learn and who by profession demolish the new recruits, the rookies, until these, based on many overtakings and after a lot of competitions, cut their teeth and enter by right, in turn, in this small circle of drivers who are referred to as "the senators". But every now and then, to tell the truth, very rarely, particular rookies appear on the karting scene capable of overturning this practice. As in 2013, when in the opening round of the season, the Winter Cup at the South Garda Karting in Lonato, a teenager from Monte carlo showed up who, despite being physically KO, decided that certain habits ... were not his cup of tea.

It is 17 February 2013 and it is cold, as it should be on a winter Sunday when you are near Brescia, precisely at South Garda Karting in Lonato, for the Winter Cup. KZ was not scheduled for that weekend, so all the top drivers of the premier class poured into KZ2, which had something like 70 entrants. Among these, names that have marked or would go on to mark the history of karting: Davide Forè, Marco Ardigò, Paolo De Conto, Arnaud Kozlinski, Bas Lammers, Anthony Abbasse, Ben Hanley, Patrik Hajek, Roberto Toninelli, Fabian Federer, Yannick de Brabander, Flavio Camponeschi and Rick Dreezen, just to name a few in no particular order. However, there was also a boy from Monte Carlo born in 1997. His name is Charles Leclerc and he had already made himself known globally for his excellent results (above all by winning the 2011 CIK-FIA World Cup in KF3, the junior class of single speed karts at that time) in the other classes in which he competed. After a 2012 in KF2 (the year in which the now famous long-distance bickering with Max Verstappen occured, which we talk about in the article "Editorial - Leclerc vs Verstappen: the true story of the first clash in the days of karting"), his manager and Charles's team manager decided that the time had come for him to gain experience with "the seniors", in KZ and KZ2.

Charles did not hold back. To the contrary: "He was very motivated and eager to start his journey in shifter karts - Marco Lombardi told us, his mechanic in ART Grand Prix, the brand and the team for which Leclerc was racing at the time, also because he always wanted a more performing vehicle. He was thrilled to have the sensation of feeling closer to racing cars”. Leclerc had his first race ever in a shifter kart two weeks before the Winter Cup, in Muro Leccese, on the occasion of the first round of the WSK Master Series, where he finished in sixth position. His team manager Armando Filini, a historical face in karting, as well as one of the best chassis builders in the sector, was not that surprised by the disarming naturalness with which the young driver form Monte Carlo took his first steps in the new class: "I have known him since he was little, because Jules (Bianchi, editor's note) was his mechanic in France in the MINI class and brought him to me in Maranello Kart for his debut in the Junior class. Charles was very smart: he quickly adapted to everything. At any race he participated in, with any type of tyre, there was no need to spend a lot of time studying the track or anything else: he was already racing strongly at 90%, so it was much easier to get good results with him."But it's the difficulties that make certain stories worth telling.

Charles Leclerc heads to the track together with his mechanic Marco Lombardi.

Leclerc talks to Lombardi and Piergiorgio Ballarini, another mechanic who was working with him at the time, while he is leaning on his kart (ART GP - TM Racing), just outside the ART Grand Prix team tent.

Do you think that the Winter Cup, in the rookie class, could represent a fairly intense and arduous challenge? You would be wrong. In fact, another factor complicates things for Leclerc, the absolute co-protagonist of this story: a fever. That's right, Charles Leclerc showed up at the Winter Cup with a 39°C fever. "From the first days it was clear that he was not in great shape and from Friday he was not at all well", admits Lombardi. “He had flu and was physically weak. At the end of the day, after having raced, he was completely down and out”. A physical condition for which most mere mortals would stay in bed to rest, the most daring, perhaps, on the sofa watching TV. Instead, the fifteen-year-old from Monte Carlo was on the bends of a kart track taming a vehicle with a weight/power ratio comparable to that of the best road supercars. But on one condition: "I told him, Lombardi remembers, 'Look, if you have a high fever, at least skip the last free practice session', but he replied with an endless series of 'No'. He wanted to get on the kart and race to the last, regardless of everything". In the end, a short trip to the pharmacy, accompanied by the engineer of the ART Grand Prix, to buy some medicines was a must. But the real therapy for Charles seems to be another, as Lombardi explains: "When driving adrenaline kicked in, it was so intense that it gave the impression that his fever had passed". This allowed the young driver form Monte Carlo to work at it and improve during free practices: “His driving was quite clean. The problem arose when the track was a bit more slippery, like in the early rounds and he, despite this, wanted to see the time, even if the track was 'slow'. He complained if they gave him two tenths, not considering that there were more experienced drivers who knew how to adapt better to those conditions".

Leclerc laughs with Lombardi before entering the track.

Leclerc celebrates, together with Lombardi, the success he achieved, with a fever, at the 2013 Winter Cup.

It goes without saying that when Charles sets the 11th best time in the qualifiers, with his TM Racing powered ART GP, he was anything but satisfied: "He had suffered at the beginning because the track was was not rubberizing quickly and he loved grip", explains Marco. "He was a driver who tended to always keep his foot down, so in the first races in KZ he found himself in difficulty in slippery track conditions: he forced too much and wore the tyres a lot". But Charles does not lose heart: “he was demoralized, continues Lombardi, but he motivated himself as soon as he got back on the kart the following morning. When he was unable to do something, he was even more motivated and in any case it was enough to explain things to him once: he immediately took everything literally and put it into practice". In fact, Charles performed very well in the various heats, winning a second place as the best result and climbing up to eighth place in the general rankings. Thanks to his driving style, more and more effective with an increasingly rubberized track, and to excellent teamwork, Leclerc continued to progress and, as the weekend continued, managed to take fifth position in the pre-final. Marco Lombardi recalls that he “always earned at least one or two positions at the start. It helped to have the driver in front as a reference point, which always pushed him to say: 'I have to go and get him, I have to overtake him". While the performances on the track improved, the same cannot be said of Leclerc’s physical conditions, still with flu and feverish.

In fact, on the day of the final, looking at his face, which was pale and suffering during the parade of the drivers, anything could be predicted except what would actually happen. Charles still managed to stay calm on the starting grid: "I always told him, Marco says, 'You already have a heavy foot, but in the race you have to use your head, especially when overtaking: study your opponent, identify the right moment to pass and be firm. Don't pretend, because if they take advantage of the driver behind and, with him, the group following him, five of them will take you". In short, a fifteen-year-old in a cage of lions: Leclerc dashed from the third row, while the first was occupied by his teammate Ben Hanley and the Birel De Conto standard bearer. “We had more of a chance with Hanley, admits Armando Filini. “With Charles we still didn't have the certainty of the final, we didn't know how he could behave over the duration”. Only a phenomenon can surprise even a long-time karting figure such as Filini, who had already seen it all… But he could not have imagined what he was to witness that day. Ready, go and already the first surprise: the driver from Monte Carlo darted off and, overtaking the entire row in front of him, moved into third position. The spectators were almost stunned seeing that cat-like leap and Armando reveals that it was not only Charles' skill that allows him to do certain things, but also his attitude: "When he had his teammate in front of him, he had to go and get him, even at the cost of trampling over others".

Ever since the traffic lights went out, the race was of an incredible sporting intensity. However, after an excellent start, Leclerc seemed to be in trouble: in fact, he was overtaken first by Ardigò and then by Forè. However, the driver form Monte Carlo maintained an impressive coolness and was not intimidated, even when he happened to miss a gear and risk being "devoured" by those behind him. "It was difficult to give him advice", Armando specifies. "He was very instinctive, so we also let him do his thing a little bit. Especially because he was a youngster and you couldn't think that he already had the mentality of a 30-year-old professional". Charles still asserted himself in the midst of more experienced and titled drivers, so much so that he took back third position towards the middle of the race, thanks to two masterpiece manoeuvers: the first against Forè, the second against Ardigò (two multiple world champions). Leclerc thus found himself in the wake of his teammate, who in turn was staying very close to the leader De Conto, but a few laps from the end Forè tried another attack on the driver from Monte Carlo and went far forwards, hitting Charles. Ardigò took the opportunity to overtake and the young driver of the ART Grand Prix team returned to fourth position, also losing some ground against his rivals in the lead. When the chequered flag was just around the corner, in a situation like this and in a class like KZ, most people would naturally throw in the towel and accept that the gap with the podium was now unbridgeable, especially if they then suffer a "blow" like this as a fifteen year old, in his second experience in the highest class of karting, with a 39°C fever.

The helmet that Leclerc used at the 2013 KZ world championship and with which he became vice world champion. Charles gave it to Lombardi, autographing it and referring to the nickname that Marco gave him: “Sgrintela”, which means “lizard”. The driver for Monte Carlo made a small mistake and wrote "Sgrintera".

Instead, Leclerc still managed to amaze. A few metres to make sure there was no damage and the driver from Monte Carlo went back to pushing himself, without being discouraged: "I had five or six drivers like Leclerc, including Bianchi, Barnicoat, Harvey and Hanley, but in my opinion Charles was the one who was hungrier, he wanted to achieve results as soon as possible”, Armando reveals. "The others had a little patience: they knew they had to learn and were aware that sometimes someone else could simply be faster and therefore there was little to do. On the contrary, he refused this possibility. Even when he knew that drivers from other teams were more incisive on a certain circuit, he had to find something to stay ahead. With this goal, therefore, he tormented everyone: me for the chassis, Franco Drudi of TM Racing for the engines and the telemetry operator. He was obsessed”. And Leclerc proved this determination precisely in the last rounds of that Winter Cup. In fact, the driver from Monte Carlo firstly got back into third position, taking advantage of a spin by Ardigò, caused by a rear-end collision by De Conto. Then, following a contact between De Conto and Hanley for the leadership of the race, he managed to overtake his teammate thanks to an extremely shrewd manoeuver: after receiving a body blow, Hanley was forced to widen and Charles dived right into that space: “It was a crucial moment of the race, he managed to take advantage of it (taking second place behind De Conto, editor's note) without coming into contact with anyone.

However, he then began to have some fears," admits Marco. The driver born in 1997 was one step away from completing an unthinkable feat and it was natural that even he would be a bit insecure: "He kept looking back, watching who was chasing him and I kept signalling him to look forwards" . But in the end Leclerc kept up the pressure and crossed the finish line in second position. The young driver from Monte Carlo let loose his joy, while the spectators started rubbing their eyes to understand if what they had seen was true: "I knew he could do well right from the start, but I honestly wasn't expecting a podium and it surprised me" Lombardi confides. “He didn't expect it either, considering the fever problem too. But he never gave up, he gave 100% to the last. He had gained confidence in seeing himself improve constantly over the course of the weekend and in the final he drove with a knife between his teeth”. A great effort that deserved a great prize. If, in fact, Charles was already enthusiastic about the silver medal and having kept his expert teammate behind him, the icing on the cake came when, after the award ceremony, he learned that De Conto had been given a penalty of five seconds for his manoeuver on Ardigò.

Leclerc thus inherited the victory and was over the moon: "he was really happy and didn't even seem sick anymore" remembers Marco. "It was his first really important race in shifter karts and there were all the drivers participating in the world championship. That Sunday evening, he had so much adrenaline in his body that he wanted to stay and eat with us, but at a certain point his father told him that it was time to go home". As a winner.

[ron-do-i-get-to-sing-my-way]

Sparks Album Seasons (Part 2)

Music That You Can Dance To

Summer. Specifically late August, the screaming synths match that screaming internal voice begging summer to stay.

Interior Design

I lied. I can’t place every album, this one isn’t one of my favourites and it’s hard to place for me :,)

Gratuitous Sax and Senseless Violins

Fall or Winter. It’s cold out and the 90s are here to make you forget about it. So it’s either late fall or January. It’s miserable. But you can almost forget about that because of the impressive wall of sound and intense beats.

Plagiarism

I outta plagiarize my entry for Interior Design, because the is one doesn’t have a strong association (since it’s a mix of songs from many albums).

Balls

Winter. Will fight to the death over this. This is the New Years Album. The let loose, it’s a new year, let’s stay in and dance album. I mean, snowballs? It’s a winter album, trust me

Lil Beethoven

Winter. Bleak November album, past the point where there are beautiful leaves and warm days. Perhaps a bit of snow on the ground but mostly it’s cold and miserable and somehow you’re soaking wet as you trudge back to your studio apartment to live the bohemian life you lead. You’re probably wearing those fingerless gloves and an insufficiently warm Bob Dylan coat.

Hello Young Lovers

Late winter/Spring. Still kind of chilly out, very early spring (like February). I mean, lovers, bunnies, it makes sense.

Exotic Creatures of the Deep

Spring. This is the May album, I can’t explain it but it is. Slightly jaunty music, almost like if Lil Beethoven wasn’t a depressed struggling artist.

Ingmar Bergman

Winter. Guess what, we’re back to struggling artist except this time you’ve made it past Christmas and the fun holidays and now you’re sad again.

FFS

Summer. If you thought Introducing wasn’t the album of the summer, then this one is. Driving beats, fun melodies, this one is summer.

Hippopotamus

Summer. Another summer album! July, except you’re not at the beach, you’re blaring this by the pool at some country club and all of the rich people are staring at you. Someone’s maybe alerting security because they realized that you don’t actually have a membership there but it’s okay, because you do have Sparks’ groundbreaking album, Hippopotamus.

A Steady Drip, Drip, Drip

Summer. I consider this one to be a summer album too, more June. Except for Left Out in the Cold, which BOTHERS ME BECAUSE ITS A WINTER SONG.

Annette

Spring. I feel like this is spring only because I got obsessed with the soundtrack a few Marches ago and well… Spring!

The Girl is Crying in her Latte

Winter/Spring. Another sort of February album. The more I listen to it (and Interior Design), I sort of hear a connection between the two? Am I crazy? Some songs sound very synthy like Interior.

[stxrshxpxd]

spring

part one

pairing: 90s professor hugh grant x reader

word count: 3k

warnings: student x teacher, smut

prompt: reader and mr. grant slowly recover from the horror that was the end of last semester, but they can’t seem to keep their hands off each other

requested by several people <3

February.

The first few weeks of the semester I had sat nearly all the way at the back for Mr. Grant’s classes, not said a word in discussions and felt partly relieved he hadn’t addressed me directly. The other part of me wallowed in deep sadness and agony at the fact that we hadn’t exchanged a single word in a month.

He stood at his desk like always in a pale grey button up and his arms crossed over his chest. He let his eyes scan the class and quickly panned over me, to which my heart jumped and I sank down a bit in my seat. I hated that I still had dreams about him every other night and still wanted his hands on me more than ever. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He had actually done everything right. Which made it all worse. There was nothing I could cling onto for a reason to hate him.

Class ended sooner than I had expected and I hurried to gather my things and head towards the door, but Professor Grant stopped me with a soft uttering of my name.

“Would you mind staying back for just a little while?”

Stiff and caught off guard, I nodded and we awkwardly watched the last few students exit.

“I know you knew the answer to the Oscar Wilde question,” he stated gently with a sympathetic look and his head tilted down slightly.

“Okay,” I shrugged stiffly and hugged my books closely to my chest.

“Okay,” he mimicked and sighed.

“Listen, I’m really sorry about what happened last semester. I should absolutely not have let that happen…” His arms were crossed again rather anxiously and his eyes visibly upset. “We have to find a way to work through this though. You’re an absolutely brilliant student, but I’m afraid if you don’t speak in class that’s going to affect your grade.”

I blinked back at him and my gaze rested on his wide shoulders momentarily.

“I understand that.”

March.

It was Thursday and the sun had gone down nearly five hours earlier. I had been sitting in my dorm since the end of the school day with my nose shoved in one book or another, and I felt like I was going insane.

Already after a few minutes’ walk I was feeling better. However, my steps slowed as I wandered past a crowded pub to my left, letting my eyes sorrowfully scan all the little groups of people bathing in the warm light inside, talking and laughing. Sometimes I would get little spurts of confidence and I’d tell myself I could stomp inside a pub alone and get a drink if I wanted. Who the hell would care? But then I never did.

Just as I went to carry on down the street I spotted Professor Grant at the bar, also alone. In shock I watched his long fingers walk along the edge of his pint as he stared down into the half finished beer, wavy locks hanging around his glasses. I guess now I wouldn’t be alone if I were to go in.

“Hey,” I said carefully as I reached him by the bar. He didn’t hear me, so I repeated it louder and made him stare up at me.

“Y/N,” Mr. Grant exhaled and swallowed, almost nervously. His gaze traveled all the way down and up my body as I cautiously sat on the stool beside him.

“What are you doing h-“

“Can I get anything for you, love?” the loud barman interrupted his question with a wide smile beaming at me. I turned him down instantly, saying I was okay for now, anxious to make him go away.

“I’m- I was just on a walk.” I shrugged and looked around the stacked shelves behind the bar. “I’ve been studying all night, and I felt like I was losing my mind… I just saw you, and… thought I’d go in… I don’t know,” I mumbled once the barman was at the other end of the counter again. My professor continued to stare back at me, his pale eyes glassy with intoxication and tongue licking the corner of his mouth. There was a definite air of anxiety coming off him.

I went to ask him something but he quickly jabbed in with a tortured statement before I could get any words out.

“I don’t trust myself to be drunk with you,” he grumbled and shook his head and looked down again, beginning to slide off his bar stool.

“Why?” I asked, knowing why.

I took a good long look at his body while he struggled to find an answer; his broad shoulders clad in a knitted sweater and the few rings on his large hands and his long legs in blue denim. I thought I hadn’t ever seen him in jeans before.

“I’ll see you Monday,” Professor Grant muttered at last and hurried to make his exit, avoiding my eye contact. I was left alone at the bar, defeated and contemplating finishing his beer. Fifteen minutes later I was back in my dorm.

April.

“This is brilliant, Y/N,” Mr. Grant gushed without greeting me. He was holding up my latest essay as he took the last few steps towards me and sat on the edge of the table beside me. It was midday and the library was crowded and struggling to stay silent.

“I mean, really, the connections you make between 19th century and current day society are incredible.”

I smiled at his enthusiasm and my chest simmered with warmth, but I was afraid to answer him. Ever since that night in the pub that was all I could think about when I looked at him. Even in bright daylight it felt like his drunk eyes were looking at me through dim lighting when we spoke. And we had spoken quite a bit lately. Things had somehow gone back to what they used to be, Mr. Grant seeming to have forgotten the memory of the pub night. But it was all obviously a front.

“I have to run, but,” he stood up and leaned in a barely noticeable amount, placing my marked essay in front of me. “This is great stuff. You’re brilliant,” he finished rather lightheartedly and friendly, but his hand squeezed my shoulder gently and it felt like his fingertips lingered when he pulled away and walked off again. I watched his broad back and long legs march out of the library, his brown waves of hair bouncing softly around his head as always. The cloud of his scent dissipated soon and my shoulder molded back into its untouched state, as I began to look through his marks and comments to the sound of my pounding heart.

May.

Towards the end of the year it seemed Professor Grant was getting more and more relaxed in a couple areas. He had stopped blushing and darting his eyes away whenever I caught him looking at me, which was still quite often. Instead he would flex his jaw and take his sweet time looking down while exhaling deeply. I suppose he was getting comfortable with the idea of soon not being my teacher anymore.

I could almost hear his thoughts today as it was the first hot day of the year and I had opted for a skirt that ended at the middle of my thighs and a thin cardigan. He seemed to be hoping that my top button might pop open from his adamant stare which he had resumed now. I was praying for the same thing as my eyes trailed down his buttoned shirt from where I sat just two rows back in the classroom.

Mr. Grant gazed away again, but only for a minute, seemingly pondering something. I tried to force my head back down to continue scribbling notes about Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, but seconds later Grant cleared his throat.

“I need to go get some books. Um… Y/N, would you mind helping me carry them?”

I snapped my head up and studied the way he was standing now, leaned over his desk with his arms straight and hands pressing into the wooden surface. Maybe my delusions were getting the best of me but I thought that definitely couldn’t have been a random pick of a student. I nodded and slid out of my seat, silently following him while my hands toyed nervously with my necklace.

The hallways were quiet and echoed with our steps as I walked next to my professor, all the while expecting him to say something. He didn’t until we were in the crowded storage room and he began stacking textbooks on my extended arms.

“Do you have any plans for the summer?” Grant asked and simultaneously made a quick grimace to comment on the heat in the tight space we’d found ourselves in.

“Work a bit, see my family… I don’t know… Read.”

“I’ll give you a reading list, don’t worry,” he said and winked. I smiled and prayed he couldn’t see my blushing cheeks in the dusky light. He let a moment pass of silence.

“I expect you’ll have a summer fling or two.”

His tone was lighthearted but investigative. I couldn’t help but scoff with laughter.

“I don’t think any guy has looked my way since starting uni.”

“I’m looking your way right now,” he joked and lowered his head to my level, inching his face closer to mine and locking in eye contact with me with a playful grin. My cheeks burned now.

“I’m looking at your eyes, your hair, your nose, your chin…”

Excitement and nerves bubbled and spilled over inside me, mixed with confusion and slight anger. He had spent so long fighting our chemistry and attraction and keeping me at an arm's length. Now all of a sudden he was charmingly playing around with me in a dark storage room. I couldn’t figure him out and it drove me mad.

“Especially looking at your arms,” Mr. Grant laughed sympathetically and looked down at my embrace of the huge stack of books. “Very strong arms.” His fingers touched my tensed bicep and all my feelings of anger left in an instant. We silently made eye contact for a few long seconds as his hand stayed put and the playful smile faded from his lips.

“Don’t stress. No boys here are good enough for you anyway.”

I couldn’t tell who was leaning in but somehow his face neared mine and I watched him close his eyes. I did the same and then I felt his lips softly against mine. There was so much more time to cherish our kiss this time around. No one was pulling away for a good long while, me still convulsively hugging the textbooks to my chest with aching arms. Soon, though, Professor Grant grabbed a hold of a bunch of them and tried to help me place them on the empty shelf space behind me while not breaking the kiss. They all slipped and crashed to the floor instead with a loud noise that echoed quickly around the room, making us both jump and laugh and stop kissing for a second. But he hurried back to me and firmly pressed me against the uncomfortably uneven surface behind me, his fingers clawing into my sides.

“Professor,” I breathed with a whimper into his desperate kisses as a sharp shelf corner dug into my back. He answered with a deep hum and I felt his smirk grow.

“I love it when you call me that,” he breathed back, his hands having found my bare skin under my cardigan. My heart was making my rib cage rattle as his teeth softly trapped my bottom lip and his hand cupped the underside of my breast. I couldn’t help but let a small moan out.

“And that’s a lovely sound, darling, do it again,” he whispered eagerly, his lips now below my ear sucking a harsh mark into my thin skin. I continued to whine and moan as I tugged at his shirt, pulling it out of his belted trousers and impatiently tearing the first few buttons open. He quickly took over and his skilled fingers rid his body of the shirt within seconds.

“Wait,” I breathed and pushed him off of me but kept him within reach. I had to take a good look at his body when I had finally gotten him topless. The thick stripes of light from the small windows coated his softly defined stomach and his chest heaved with his sharp breaths.

“Oh my god,” I muttered, tormented by his beauty, and my hands roamed down his shoulders and arms and to his narrow waist and hips. Beginning to fall back into his space, I kissed his collarbones. Mr. Grant smiled smugly at my surrender to his body but he protested and held me back.

“I want to see you too.”

I allowed him to hold me back and mindfully open the buttons down my front as I tried to control my breathing. His eyes fell on my nearly exposed breasts as he pushed my sleeves, along with my bra straps down my shoulders.

“You’re even more gorgeous than I imagined,” he mumbled and my insides fluttered at the thought of him imagining me naked.

“Have you been imagining undressing me, professor?” I taunted, wanting to hear him say it. He unclasped my bra and let it fall to the floor between us and nodded with his eyes intensely staring into mine.

“Couldn’t get the image out of my head of your body on mine.”

He leaned down and I felt his lips lock around my nipple and his hair tickle my bare skin.

“Your tight pussy around my cock,” he added in a low whisper and I whimpered again at the thought, and the sudden feeling of his large hand coating my damp underwear under my skirt.

“Fuck,” I exhaled onto his brown locks at him rubbing circles around my clit.

“Do I make you this wet, hm?” Mr. Grant asked and began kneeling in front of me, looking up into my eyes again. I shoved my hands into his soft hair and nodded.

“Yes, professor.”

He lifted my skirt up and connected his lips with my wet underwear, leaving precious kisses and listening closely to my whimpers. They only grew louder when his finger hooked into my pants and pulled them to the side, hurrying to reattach his lips and tongue.

“God, that feels so good,” I whined and combed my fingers through his fluffy hair, tightening my fist around the roots and making him groan at the slight pain.

“Yeah?” Professor Grant spurred me on. “Do you want my cock inside you, darling?”

“Yes, please.”

Him coming back up to kiss me again, I tasted myself on his lips. I couldn’t ponder on that for too long though as his body was pressed against me again and I felt his hard on between my thighs. Instantly I rushed to get his belt off.

His breaths hit my face sharply as his clothing dropped to the floor and he ran his tip along my wetness, making me moan in desperation.

Holding one of my already weak legs up to his hip, he pushed most of his length inside me and smiled darkly at the loud whimper that poured out of me in response.

“I know, I know, my love,” Mr. Grant muttered reassuringly, capturing the side of my head in his large palm and kissing my lips sweetly as he thrusted deeper.

“You’re doing so well, taking me so deep.”

I couldn’t think of any words to say back. My mind was a haze and my body a trembling mess as his hips slammed against mine at a faster pace now.

“You feel incredible,” he breathed into my ear and I continued to pant and moan into his. “Do you want to come on my cock, hm?”

He had begun rubbing my clit with his thumb. I couldn’t believe how good he was making me feel and all I could do was nod and cling onto his sturdy shoulders.

“Yes, yes, yes!” I whined and breathed into his neck and he kissed mine back. He sank his teeth into my skin slightly and the pain instantly pushed me over my edge, making my thighs shake and body twitch as he continued to stretch me out with deep thrusts.

“That’s it… So good for me,” Grant breathed and groaned at the feeling of me clenching around him. “Fuck!”

Just as his pounding was beginning to make me ache, he pulled out quickly and I watched in complete awe as he came over my chest and stomach. A string of moans and curses ripped from his throat, soon to be replaced by only his heavy breathing.

He caught the drops running down my breasts and belly with his fingers and thumb and for a second he was unsure where to go from there, at which I grabbed his wrist and guided his hand up to my mouth. I sucked his sticky fingers clean as I stared at his bright eyes and blushing cheeks, and his smirk grew again.

“You drive me crazy, Y/N,” Mr. Grant sighed with a slanted smile and he pulled his trousers up again. I blushed and bent down to get my cardigan off the floor. When I came back up he gave me another kiss, long and sweet and with his hand softly on my lower back.

“I’m afraid I might not be as strong after that,” I mumbled and we both chuckled breathily as we stared at the messy pile of books around our feet.

Mr. Grant gazed away and rubbed the back of his neck, his eyes hopping between notebooks and binders on the shelf to his left. I wasn’t sure if he felt regret or guilt or embarrassment. But he looked back at me after a moment and gave me a soft smile.

“Come on then,” he sighed with a chuckle and covered his beautiful back and arms with his shirt again before reaching for the textbooks.

[tuliptiger]

Hello again! House/life update.

I am in a much better place mentally but really rather the same financially. I am currently laid off for a month seasonally since I'm still not a permanent employee. I have something in the works I'm hoping plays out so that I have a permanent position and worst case scenario I go back to work May 6th as a temp for 6 more months. I have side jobs and unemployment lined up in the mean time.

Anyway though! On to the house. Disappointing news but honest news in terms of the first contractor we hired. We still haven't gotten money back from him.

Recap: my mom and I fired him because he lied to us, charged tools on our account we up front said not to do, built a shoddy excuse of a foundation and frame for my house that we eventually had to pay our current contractor to demolish because it was so bad. It was for all definitions a different house the original contractor built. He used the wrong framing type for the blueprint and didn't even use framing nails to the city code. He wasn't even on site for 90% of the build and seemingly subcontracted it out which we didn't know.

In addition my mom is...not the best person to work with and makes a lot of mistakes. She's not a critical thinker on a lot of things. I made the mistake of asking her to help me buy land and build a house in the pursuit of escaping my generational poverty. I made the second mistake of asking her to take on individual responsibilities and not step in when the red flags started coming up.

I left her in charge of getting the money back from the OG contractor since she had all contact with him and she was originally the one who found him. That went as well as anyone could guess and she's, in summary, procrastinated doing any proper paperwork for attorneys or the contract board. I keep pushing her and she always says she'll get to it this day or that day or hits a dead end and then it goes nowhere.

This would not be a big issue but we're talking more than $20,000 he did in damages and $1,000 he directly stole from us like straight up $1,000 we handed him to do work he never did. The donations everyone has been sending in slowly are very much appreciated and remind me to keep fighting for this.

At this point I just want to get the house done so I can be done with the contractors and done with my mother. I don't want to be in this situation anymore and it's been dragged out for 3 years now. I've added pictures of where the house is at now and most of it having been done in January and February.

As the electric was finished and passed inspection I'm waiting in the HVAC and plumbing as the last things professionals must do before I can finish the house. I've started putting in flooring and the wood stove was just delivered so things are still moving.

The donations haven't covered anything large from the build but it has covered smaller things (I've used it for nails, locks for the doors, etc.) and given me strength to continue. Motivation from strangers, acquaintances and friends to not just walk away and to keep my head in the right space. I've emotionally and mentally been in a better place since I initially made the gofundme which has helped.

Anyway I've been meaning to make this for awhile and I'm sorry for the delay. I've been working my full time job before I was laid off, my side gigs, working on the house, still living out of my car and trying to work with my mother. I appreciate everyone who's been invested in this, shared it and donated. More updates will come in the future and thank you all again.

[a-solitary-sea-rover-backup]

Underwater Urban Legends: Jacques Cousteau's Secret Discovery?

(Carthago vol. 3, “Le Monstre de Djibouti”, by Christophe Bec and Milan Jovanovic, 2013)

When I first got interested in ocean creatures as a little girl in the late 90s, we had several oversized white-covered books about Jacques Cousteau's ocean expeditions around the house that my parents let me page through, even though the text was way too small for me to read. A little later on, I read the Cousteau Society's young readers' magazine Dolphin Log/Cousteau Kids every month at the library, especially the selections from Dominique Serafini's comic book adaptations of the Calypso crew's adventures.

As an adult who's still interested in marine science, I've read several of Cousteau's books, and seen some of his documentaries. In 2019, I even got to hear his grandson Fabien speak at an event at the American Museum of Natural History.

Across film, TV, literature, comics, and even music, the Cousteau family’s underwater adventures are pretty well-documented. But one persistent bit of sea-folklore I've come across in various forms and places is an urban legend that at least one adventure wasn't. Somewhere in the world, these stories say, Captain Cousteau saw (or heard) something underwater that was so shocking that he kept it a secret from the world. (Except, presumably, from whoever is repeating the story.)

Could there be any truth behind this fantastic story? What was this "secret discovery"? And where and when did all of this happen? Like most urban legends, there are a lot of conflicting accounts and not a lot of proof.

I'd love to see a site like Skeptoid do a deep dive (heheh) into this story someday, but since they haven't yet, my research is below the cut.

A Secret Discovery?

It's alleged that after a submarine expedition, undersea explorer Jacques Cousteau said, "The world isn't ready for what's down there." (How Stuff Works)

As a reader and a writer, I have to say, this is an excellent pitch for a story. A world-famous explorer who witnessed all kinds of undersea wonders and environmental tragedies choosing to keep a remarkable discovery a secret for some unknown reason? Wouldn't you read that book? I'd read that book!

In fact, I did read that book! The French comic Carthago, first published in 2007 and translated into English in 2014, features a character based on Cousteau named Major Bertrand, a famous ocean explorer who made a discovery so shocking that he not only kept it a secret, but retired and lived the rest of his life onshore afterwards. The actual scene shown in flashback is a beat-by-beat retelling of the "Red Sea Monster" version of the story we'll discuss below. According to an interview with the comic's writer Christophe Bec, that scene (and the comic itself) were inspired by an article in the French paranormal magazine Le Monde de l'un découverte (The World of the Unknown) published in February-March 2001. That article is in French here.

Here are the broad outlines of the story as I've seen it in various places online:

Cousteau surfaces, shaken from a dive, OR

The Calypso crew recover either a shark cage that has been destroyed OR

An underwater camera or hydrophone that has recorded something

Cousteau says some variation on "The world is not ready for what I have seen"

Cousteau orders any film or audio recordings of the incident (taken by either divers, underwater equipment, or film crew aboard the ship) to be either destroyed or suppressed and hidden away in a safe

(Some accounts have people saying they actually saw the incident happen on TV, which is unlikely as I don't think any of Cousteau's documentaries were live broadcasts.)

Cousteau is so shaken by what he saw that he never returns to the site of the incident

The Red Sea Monster

The most famous and detailed version of the story, and the one Carthago adapts, sets the action in the Gulf of Tadjoura off the coast of Djibouti, near where the Red Sea meets the Indian Ocean. Investigating legends of a sea monster in a cove called the Ghoubbet al-Kharab, or Gulf of the Demons, Cousteau's team lowered a camel carcass within a shark cage. When the cage was raised, it had been badly damaged, perhaps even destroyed.

[The Ghoubbet al-Kharab is the little inland bit at left almost cut off from the sea x]

The article in Le Monde de l'un découverte says this incident happened sometime before 26 June 1995, when the secret was revealed by a writer(?) named Stéphane Swirog, and that it had also been discussed on French TV in 1987. (I cannot find any information about a “Stéphane Swirog” online except in reprints of this story, although there is apparently an MMA fighter with that name. Is this one of those hoax articles with backwards names where “Goriws” sound like something hilarious in French that’s lost on me?)

This is a plausible part of the world to set this story, because Cousteau very famously did explore the Red Sea several times! A lot of his film The Silent World was filmed there, and his Conshelf underwater habitat was on the floor of the Red Sea off Sudan. In 2004, Cousteau's son Jean-Michel and grandchildren Fabien and Céline returned to these sites fifty years later for a new documentary you can watch here.

And we know Jacques Cousteau actually DID explore the coast of Djibouti in 1967-68! In his book Life and Death in a Coral Sea (1971), he says that when docked there, his crew, err, heard a strange story...

...we decided to visit the Goubet, a famous gulf of the Red Sea. Before leaving Djibouti that morning, one of our crew had by chance asked a local Arab diver about the Goubet. "Ah, sir," the man had replied, "it is a most extraordinary place. It is bottomless, and it is inhabited by monsters so large that they can drag down lines attached to 200-liter cans. Moreover, in 1963, Commandant Cousteau went there with Fredéric Dumas and his best divers, and they were so terrified by what they saw that they ran away." Naturally, we were eager to see the place in which, according to local gossip, we had earned so ignominious a reputation. I must report, however, that the Goubet was a disappointment. It is an inland sea or gulf that connects with the Red Sea by a narrow pass in which there is a very strong current, running up to seven knots. The surrounding area is very beautiful, and very wild, being dominated by volcanic mountains bare of foliage and marked in shades of red, yellow, and black. Once in the Goubet itself, we lowered the diving saucer to a depth of over six hundred feet without catching sight of even a small monster. The divers then suited up and went down also, but they saw nothing more remarkable than some very large sea urchins. There seemed to be very few fish of any kind. It is my guess that the "Goubet monster" of Arab legend was originally a manta ray, seen by some shepherd from a hill top. Manta rays are plentiful in this area, and it must happen occasionally that they wander into the Goubet and – because the inlet is so narrow and because mantas are not the most intelligent of beasts – have trouble finding their way out again. (Page 42)

(This is one of those "white-covered books" I still own a copy of!)

That's right, this story is so old it was told TO Cousteau in the late 1960s! It's the only version of the story he seems to have actually heard and commented on, and it was to deny the monster story.

It strikes me that two of the fearsome feats attributed to the Red Sea Monster— pulling air-filled cans/barrels underwater and destroying a shark cage— are things the shark in Jaws also does. While Peter Benchley’s novel came out in 1974, several years later, he did research sharks when writing it, so I wonder if “pulling barrels underwater” was just a bit of shark lore that was going around in the late 60s.

(At least the way it’s shown in the 1975 movie, the MythBusters showed a great white shark is strong enough to briefly pull barrel floats underwater but not to hold them there.)

The more embellished 2001 article post-dates Jaws and may be inspired by the cage-destruction scene in the film.

The Depths of Lake Tahoe

Apparently, years ago, Cousteau went scuba diving in Lake Tahoe. He emerged from the water shaken, but not with cold. He said, “The world is not ready for what I have seen.” (Jennifer Skene, “Rumors and Truth in Lake Tahoe”)

Another common account of the “secret discovery” story says that it didn’t happen at sea at all, but rather in the depths of landlocked Lake Tahoe, on the California-Nevada border. This is the version of the story most commonly associated with the “the world isn’t ready” quote. The Lake Tahoe version usually keeps things vague, speculating that perhaps Cousteau saw local legendary lake monster Tahoe Tessie OR a layer of hundreds of perfectly-preserved bodies of Chinese railroad workers or mafia victims floating eerily in mid-waters, OR some other mysterious thing too horrific to describe.

[Unspeakable horrors such as dinky maps found on Bing]

Both Tessie and the well-preserved bodies are urban legends seen discussed elsewhere without the Cousteau connection. Other legends speculate that the lake hides sharks, mermaids, an underground tunnel to Pyramid Lake, a crashed WWII bomber, and a fortune in gold bullion. Just your ISO standard set of underwater legends, really.

However, unlike the Red Sea, there is no evidence that Jacques Cousteau ever visited Lake Tahoe, let alone dove there!

According to other explorers who have explored the lake’s depths, the cold, clear waters do provide eerie visibility to the shipwrecks and sunken trees found there. While people have died in and around the lake and bodies are sometimes found, the more sensational claims of uncanny preservation and bodies eerily floating in mid-water, never rising or sinking, do not fit with Lake Tahoe’s known physical conditions.

The Screams of Hell

Indeed, the French diver Jacques Cousteau was swimming over Cuba some years ago, and he heard screaming noises at the bottom of the ocean. ... And Jacques Cousteau was so shaken up by what he had heard in the seas off Cuba, he never swam there again. ... He heard what he believed to be screaming, shouting, people being tortured, just as the Bible teaches. ("Ex-Catholics for Christ")

Yet another version of the story says that Cousteau heard the sounds of agonized screaming underwater, either while diving himself or recorded on a hydrophone, and possibly considered them the screams of souls in hell. These versions of the story tend to be vaguer, not always naming a time or place when this happened. (That version put it in Cuba, another in Greece, others vaguely “somewhere in the Bermuda Triangle”.)

That's probably because this version is just an adaptation of another, more well-known urban legend about Soviet geologists digging into hell and recording screams that has been repeated in various places since the 1980s. (You can see some of the problems with that story at the site linked.)

(Cousteau did explore Cuba’s waters in the mid-1980s as seen in the documentary, Cuba: Waters of Destiny. You won’t hear any screams from Hell in that documentary, but there is a guest appearance from Fidel Castro!)

Another religion-related urban legend about Jacques Cousteau is that he converted to Islam after discovering the Quran was correct about the mixing of the waters of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. This isn't true, either. In some places I'd seen this repeated in the same context as an equally-untrue claim that Neil Armstrong converted to Islam after hearing the call to prayer on the moon, and misremembered this as a claim Cousteau had heard the call to prayer underwater for a less-disturbing twist on the idea that the secret discovery was something heard underwater rather than seen, but as far as I can tell, that isn't the case.

Bells in Random Order

Do you know Jacques Cousteau? Well, they said on the radio That he hears bells in random order Deep beneath the perfect water ("Perfect Water")

The Blue Öyster Cult song "Perfect Water" has the lyrics above, which may be a reference to the "secret discovery" legend and specifically the above idea that it was a mysterious sound heard underwater. The band is known for having many references to legends, conspiracy theories, and the supernatural in other songs. "Perfect Water" was on the album Club Ninja, released in December 1985, post-dating Life and Death in a Coral Sea but predating the most famous accounts of the “Well to Hell” story. I can't find any other sources talking about Cousteau and mysterious bells.

This website instead thinks the lyrics are referring to Cousteau's actual descriptions of walruses as making sounds similar to bells in his writings and films. You can hear a walrus making a bell sound here.

Ask Me Anything

During an AMA session on Reddit in 2018, Fabien Cousteau (FCNomad) was asked about three different versions of this story (Djibouti, Lake Tahoe, and Fort Peck Reservoir in Montana.) He seemed most familiar with the Lake Tahoe version.

sotpsean: Hello, Mr Cousteau! It's an honour. When I was a child, family lived in Djibouti, Africa,(my father was a French Foreign Legionnaire). There was a local legend about a "sea monster" living in Lac Goubet. I've heard that your Grandfather might have investigated Lac Goubet in search of this "monster". Locals have thought it to be a prehistoric shark cut off from the sea. I've always wondered if someone might be able to shed light on this subject. Have you heard of this? Thanks for doing this AMA! FCNomad: Great to chat with you. French foreign legion? Serious stuff. There are legends of "sea monsters" in every body of water out there. Until we explore them we will not know for sure ;-) Lets go see! [x]

-

HulkVomit: Why did your grandfather never want to dive in Ft Peck Reservoir again? Would you ever come dive in it? Account-002: I am also REALLY curious about this. My Dad thought it was because if the siltyness of the water, combined with a possible encounter with multiple giant catfish/paddlefish that put him off. FCNomad: That does seem plausible and potentially sound due to the potential risks. He was focussed on filmmaking and if you can't see anything its hard to tell a visual story… [x]

-

TeddysGhost: Hi there, I live at Lake Tahoe and it is a common story around here that your grandfather went into the lake once and when he emerged he warned people that the world isn't ready to see what's down there? What do.you know about that story? Is there even a shred of legitimacy and if so what did he see? FCNomad: Ive heard this rumor as well. We were supposed to investigate on a new TV series but we never got the chance… [x]

Conclusions

...yeah, all versions of this story sound pretty fake to me. Sorry.

As Fabien says, almost every body of water has sea and lake monster legends attached to it, because the world’s waters really are mysterious, unpredictable, and dangerous. But over time, your local legendary water monster can become familiar, almost a sort of community mascot.

When reading the archives of The Liberator, a famous anti-slavery newspaper published in Boston in the mid-1800s, I found several articles where the writers referred to the New England sea serpent in these kinds of familiar terms, since to Bostonians it was a “local” monster. They even called it “our American sea serpent”— the children and grandchildren of the Minutemen, still defining their identity as Americans, could boast that England didn’t have such a cool monster.

In modern times, of course, a local monster legend can also be a major tourist attraction. Most of the sites I found repeating the Djibouti and Lake Tahoe versions of the story were… travel sites for Djibouti and Lake Tahoe (especially diving travel sites).

To present your local monster story as “verified” by a famous underwater explorer like Jacques Cousteau makes it sound authentic. It certainly spices things up for people planning their vacations, especially divers. And to say that your local monster scared away a globetrotting adventurer like Cousteau who had faced so many other perils all over the world definitely adds to the “local pride” angle. In Djibouti, a French colony that was having a vote in 1967 about whether to become independent, a story about a local monster scaring away a famous Frenchman may have had an appealing nationalist undertone.

The writer for Le Monde de l'un découverte, however, probably just wanted to tell a rip-roaring sea story. The presumably-French writer, writing for a French magazine, would have been writing for an audience who had grown up following Cousteau’s adventures. Perhaps they combed his writings in search of any mention of sea monsters that could fit in their paranormal magazine, found the passage about Djibouti in Life and Death in a Coral Sea, and created a more sensational version that conveniently left out Cousteau’s own debunking. For an audience who had grown up with Cousteau, what could be more exciting than hearing about one more adventure of their late hero, totally new and unseen, and a discovery so shocking it was being kept secret?

And, like I said, it does make for a great story! No wonder it inspired Christophe Bec to write his own version! And with the decades-long tradition of fictional stories parodying and homaging Jacques Cousteau, I can’t blame you if this piece has inspired you to write your own version of the “secret discovery” story— just please, make it clear that your fiction is fiction.

[fcbarcelonaupdates]

Best game you have been to?

Well, I’ve never been to any Barça games but here’s the most memorable ones that I’ve watched:

FCB femeni: “THE GAME THAT CHANGED WOMENS FOOTBALL” Barcelona vs Real Madrid UWCL quarter final 21/22 (Second Leg - 3-1 aggregate) Historical night - World record assistance in a women’s football match (91.553 people) Frido owning Madrid and being a beast at left back (chefs kiss) Mapi Leon golazo as well. Then we win 8-3 aggregate 😎

“BACK TO BACK CHAMPIONS OF EUROPE” 23/24 UWCL final made me feel like I was witnessing something truly amazing since we have never beaten Lyon - and then winning 2-0 and being back to back champions of Europe???? Like come on now. (I totally didn’t cry when the whistle blew)

FCB men’s: “LA REMONTADA” Barcelona vs PSG 2017 (Second Leg) We don’t ever see a team coming back from a 0-4 situation. The first 20 minutes of the game were SO INTENSE. We were still shaky throughout the match though. Luis Enrique “If they can score 4, we can score 6.” And we DAMN DID. The match ended in a 6-5 aggregate Neymar masterclass during this match. But this might’ve been the match that made him decide to leave Barcelona, he carried Barcelona this game and the next day - everyone was talking about Messi instead of him. Other than that - I cried when I watched it live with my dad.

“ITS MESSIIIIIIIIIII” Barcelona vs Real Madrid 3-2 17/18 season. I really loved this match, any either teams could’ve won. Dirty fouls by Casemiro and Ramos on Messi, red card for Ramos at the 77th minute. Navas with a lot of great saves. Messi left with a bloody nose after a harsh contact with Marcelo’s elbow. Messi scored in the 33rd minute - making it his 499th goal for Barcelona. AND RAKITIC WITH A BEAUTY OF A GOL (chefs kiss) and then James Rodriguez scores to equalize. A throw in for Barca, a great run from Roberto to Andre Gomes and then passes it to Jordi Alba who runs from behind and passes it to a space - waiting for Messi and then at the 90+2’ minute….Messi scores his 500th goal for Barcelona and giving Barcelona the winning goal.

“THE MATCH THAT CHANGED IT ALL” February 16th 1974 - Barcelona 5-0 Real Madrid. Obviously I wasn’t born to even see this but the impact it had on Barcelona fans was incredible.

“After the game... It surprised me. – Asensi remembers – I thought we had done well, because this audience was not used to applauding Barça.” For Mora, that result transcended football: “those of us who were from home knew what that game felt like. Everything was magnified because, if you stop to look, there have been other spectacular results from Barça that have not had that value. This value belonged to a Spain where the dictator was dying, where Madrid always won everything and where we always had potential, but for one reason or another we never achieved anything.”

Asensi summarizes the feeling that that victory generated: “Our people welcomed us as if we were heroes [...] We went to their house, we invaded it and scored 5 for them. And that made the Catalan and Barcelona fans very happy.”

[pupphe-additions]

✬Evie’s Scandals/Drama✬

ITZY Anti?

↝☾Time Frame☽↝ February 12th, 2019-Present ↝☾Public Opinion☽↝ Mixed, mostly negative ↝☾Popularity☽↝ 88% ↝☾Overview☽↝ Ever since their debut Evie has been accused of being an ITZY anti. There has always been a lot of tension between ITZY and Evie when they are together and Evie often avoids topics that involve ITZY. She also skips any ITZY songs that may play during her live streams. Evie has never really talked about or acknowledged the accusations making a lot of people conflicted on the whole situation. A lot of people think it’s because Evie is jealous that ITZY debuted before her and without her. (do yall want me to write an imagine about this?)

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Dating Scandal with Lee Know (SKZ)

↝☾Time Frame☽↝ March 31st, 2020 ↝☾Public Opinion☽↝ Mixed due to the vLive clip. ↝☾Popularity☽↝ 99% ↝☾Overview☽↝ The two have been said to be dating since Evie debuted with Stray Kids but on March 31st, 2020 there was an article written that rumored the two were dating and the same day JYP released a statement assuring they were not together. What sparked it was a short clip from a vLive going absolutely viral where Lee Know ends up pinning Evie to the wall suggestively and telling her to behave.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Dating Scandal with Hyunjin (SKZ)

↝☾Time Frame☽↝ November 21st, 2020 ↝☾Public Opinion☽↝ Positive  ↝☾Popularity☽↝ 100% ↝☾Overview☽↝ These two are often an OTP ship so it isn’t surprising that they eventually had their own dating scandal, especially with how openly affectionate they are with one another. Well shortly after the release of Stray Kids’ Japanese song “FAM” was released it sparked a lot of talk around Evie and Hyunjin maybe being together. Both idols and JYP all came out with statements saying how they are not together. Evie said she’s just a very affectionate person and she just adores Skz so much. Hyunjin said that he adores Evie but they are not in a relationship and asked to respect their privacy when it comes to this sorta stuff.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Dating Scandal with Johnny (NCT)

↝☾Time Frame☽↝ April 8th, 2021 ↝☾Public Opinion☽↝ Mixed, mostly confused as to where it came from. ↝☾Popularity☽↝ 90% ↝☾Overview☽↝ The two’s dating rumor started during the beginning of Evie’s hiatus in 2021 after an article came out claiming the two were allegedly dating. Evie had made a post with a series of selfies the two had taken over the couple years they knew each other and was thanking the older boy for being friends with her for so long. She went on to talk about how much she values and cherishes her friendship with him and a lot of people took it as a relationship post instead of a friendship post, it is still up on her Instagram as she didn’t see the point in taking it down since she hadn’t done anything wrong. Both JYP and SM made statements the next day stating that the idols were not in a relationship.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Dating Scandal with Momo (Twice)

↝☾Time Frame☽↝ September 3rd, 2022 ↝☾Public Opinion☽↝ Negative ↝☾Popularity☽↝ 100% ↝☾Overview☽↝ The two experienced their first true dating rumor in September of 2022 and it was all due them being, what k-netizens deemed as, too touchy and clingy after making a dance video on tiktok together. Their company quickly shut down the rumor and it actually put a bit of a dent in the two’s friendship for a while. Neither of them wanting to be bring hate to their company or groups so for a while they didn’t hang out or talk much but in mid 2023 the two got spotted getting coffee together again so it seems like the friendship is back in full swing

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Dating Scandal with New (The Boyz)

↝☾Time Frame☽↝ February 2nd, 2023 ↝☾Public Opinion☽↝ Shocked, also mixed ↝☾Popularity☽↝ 85% ↝☾Overview☽↝ Their dating rumor started after someone posted photos of the two where they appeared to be on a date. These images were included in an article that alleged the two have been dating for a while. Evie and New confirmed that they were in a relationship with their companies, however they just started dating when this article went out so it wasn’t entirely truthful. The two mutually decided that they should break up after about six months of being together. Evie said she felt like she couldn’t give him the time and affection he needed as she was always busy toward the end of their relationship but she said they are still friends.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Wardrobe Malfunction

↝☾Time Frame☽↝ March 30th, 2023 ↝☾Public Opinion☽↝ Shocked and Slightly Disappointed ↝☾Popularity☽↝ 100% ↝☾Overview☽↝ During Stray Kids’ performance of  ‘Maniac’ on Jimmy Kimmel’s live show Evie had a massive wardrobe malfunction with her shirt where the front of the shirt somehow got untied while she was dancing. She was very professional about it and held onto her chest with one hand as she danced. However, Hyunjin, once he noticed, quickly put his jacket on her to cover her and she quickly buttoned it between dance moves so she could go back to focusing on giving the best performance she possibly could. Although the public was a bit disappointed as this was Evie’s first ever wardrobe malfunction, which happened at something that Evie was looking forward to, they also were pleasantly surprised by how professional and fast acting they were to fix something like that. Evie said she had asked the stylist for a jacket specifically because she didn’t trust the top but they refused and so Evie felt like the stylist was sabotaging her and sabotaging the performance to stir drama. Since then Evie has refused to wear any outfits from that specific stylist and has said that she truly doesn’t care for that stylist's opinion anymore and doesn’t care if she gets fired. Skz also refuse to be styled by that particular stylist and it's rumored that she did in fact get fired after this instance as it wasn't the first time she has willingly dressed Evie semi scandalously. After this Evie was given a lot more control of her outfits.

─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ─── ･ ｡ﾟ☆: .☽ . :☆ﾟ. ───

Dating Scandal with Jisun (fromis_9)

↝☾Time Frame☽↝ December 23rd, 2023 ↝☾Public Opinion☽↝ Mixed, mostly negative ↝☾Popularity☽↝ 75% ↝☾Overview☽↝ The most recent dating scandal Evie has experienced. It was quickly put to rest with a very heartbroken Evie asking to be left alone. She went live on YouTube and begged for everyone to stop making all her encounters with someone a romantic thing. She just wants to make friends and people are scared to be her friend because of the fact so many times people accuse her of being in a relationship. In this live she also said she’d be open if she was in a relationship as she doesn’t like hiding it. She said that she is just tired and to leave her and her friends alone. JYP and Hybe both also released statements saying the pair were just hanging out for the first time as they wanted to become better friends. JYP also asked people to not believe every rumor they see and to let Evie breathe.

[catonator]

Funny heading to a blogpost on videogames that’s some sort of reference

Look, I already used the ctrl+alt+delete quote in a blogpost title. It’s February 2024, and it’s already a very wild year for gaming. We’ve had more layoffs than with the entirety of 2023, games shown off at events seem to be stagnating, interest in the art is waning. Youtube is filled with “modern gaming sucks” doomer blackpill videos. It’s a miserable time.

Is gaming just over?

Well, no. Of course not. The Sonic franchise has lingered for decades despite consistent failure. Games are more resilient than that.

Humanity’s relation to computing is still pretty fresh, and I’d say that despite the size and scale of a lot of it, we’re still going through major growing pains. Concepts like video games, the internet and special effects are still pretty new, despite being around for twice or thrice as long as most of the people reading this have been alive. Internal combustion engine -powered cars were invented in 1808, made mass produced in the 1910s, and even then it took until the 1950s for them to be common enough for the US government to bother designing cities around them. In the present day, many have come to resent the car-centric design mentality, even though the driving (no pun intended) factor behind them was mainly the same as with technology today: scientific and technological progression is unquestionably good, and therefore new and successful ideas should be pushed and relied upon as hard as possible. What could possibly go wrong?!

Video games are far from the only medium which is seeing similar problems. Movies have suffered greatly from a capeshit infestation, in which the abuse of VFX artists is valued over, you know, basics of good filmmaking, and the general public is clearly sick of it. On the internet, we’ve decided that megastructures like Twitter are better than forms of communication we’re good at, and it’s gone horribly wrong. We’re still learning the “do”s, “don’t”s and “who the fuck thought this was a good idea”s of tech.

Games as an artform are as alive as they ever were, but the sheer scale of the operations has grown to a point where nobody can really understand it. The numbers behind playerbases and the money traffic have so many zeroes that you can’t even fathom the number. Even if I used some metaphorical figure, like 20 000 cars. Shockingly, despite how console sales haven’t really increased in numbers (the top selling console of all time is still the PS2), most of the top-grossing games of all time are relatively recent. This implies that the behaviour of consumers has shifted from purchasing a variety of different kinds of games into purchasing fewer games of fewer different kinds. And I don’t think it’s a case of customers deciding to shift over naturally.

In the past decade or so, the gaming industry has decided sensible experiences are a way of the past, and the future is making games for debt and making back the money with horse armour and other garbage the general public doesn’t really want.

But we’ve seen this shit before. In the 90s, 3D was “the future”, and 2D pixel art or hand-drawn art in general seemed to go the way of the dodo for polygons and ““realism””. About a decade later, 2D art would see a resurgence and in some cases overtake the big lads in lasting impact. In the end, people crave personal stories, varying ideas, and interesting ways to tell them. Not much has changed since ancient Greeks, besides that the medium of storytelling has largely shifted from some guy standing on a stage, trying to explain another world, to electronic devices actually showing us the other worlds.

I think as we play out the Icarus stories in real time, we’ll also learn when boundaries are pushed too far, and the scale of the bullshit simply collapses in on itself. When that happens, the public is forced to step back and reevaluate the ways we thought were the future, and what really is better for all of us.

When a storm flattens a forest of dead, decrepit trees, the sun and rain can now reach the ground and cultivate a new generation of different plant life. Once hidden beneath the dead corpses, now able to grow and bloom in a way the old generation never could. You should just keep doing what you think is right. Now’s the time more than ever to be the backbone of a better industry, for many applications of tech, from games to communication. And it’s better, if the backbone comes from the grassroots, and isn’t defined by the megacorporations. Because those cunts will never learn from their failures.