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writingwithcolor · 4 years ago

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Do small hints of a character’s Jewishness work, or do more harm than good?

@oatily asked:

I’m writing a HP fanfic and the mc has a Jewish friend. He’s really politically active, the one who radicalizes mc on stuff like the oppression of werewolves, the slave labor of house elves etc. Generally really smart passionate guy. I grew up atheist and pretty much completely outside of religion. I think I would need to take multiple college courses to fully understand any religion, but I still want to provide good rep. I’ve read a lot of Shira’s blog, but are there any subtle ways to include his faith without having an in depth understanding of the religion? Or should I just not mention his faith at all if I do not completely understanding the details of Judaism? I’m willing to put in the time to research ,and I already have quite a bit, but I think it would take me years and many classes before I felt proficient in my understanding. I guess my question is: Is it enough to put in small hints like the character eats kosher and goes home for Jewish holidays or does only mentioning these surface level things do more harm than good?

WWC NOTE: this question was answered to fill a gap in coding questions around Jewish characters, and it just so happened to be about HP fic. We at WWC, including specifically the Jewish team, do not condone the TERF-ness (or racism, anti-semitism, transphobia, or fatphobia) of JKR. We hope that the principles we used to answer this post will be useful for writers of other fandoms and for original fiction as well.

Mentioning surface level things is fine if they’re the right surface level things.

For example, someone who “goes home for Chanukah” is clearly only going home because that’s when the Christian-rooted school calendar says there’s a holiday, but if someone went home for new year’s (Rosh Hashanah) or Yom Kippur in the fall, or for their family’s Passover seder in the spring, that would feel accurate.

One way you could make sure that your surface level mentions are the right details to add rather than subtract verisimilitude, is to trade beta-readings with a Jewish friend and ask specifically for suggestions of places in the story where the little mentions would make sense. For example, if they’re in a history class and the teacher is talking about a particular time in history when we weren’t allowed in England, the kid might chuckle aside to his friend “my ancestors weren’t even allowed here that year.”

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_England

(Or less depressing, “oh hey, that’s the same year my folks came here from Russia/Germany/whatever”)

Kids in that series are also sometimes around the right age to become b’nei mitzvah, or to have had that just happen, so “and now on top of all these spells I have to learn my Torah portion?” or to mention some amusing incident that happened at his bar mitzvah reception if it was a couple of years ago, that’s another way to throw in a casual reference. If the kid is magic-born maybe the kiddush cup or fancy pen or whatever that his parents gave him for his bar mitzvah has magic properties. Come to think of it, going home over the weekend for his little sister’s bat mitzvah would be another good thing to work in, speaking of that age.

--Shira

How does the character's faith shape his passion for social justice?

Hello 😊 I love the sound of your activist Jewish character and the fact that the character’s existence actually addresses some of the problems with the source material.

The word you’re looking for is Tikkun Olam, an important Jewish middah (value) that translates to ‘healing the world’. One way to include the character’s faith in the story is to lean into how it shapes his passion for social justice:

· Does he have a particular rabbi or other spiritual leader who is his Tikkun Olam inspo? For example, my brother is Orthodox and vegan, and he loves to quote Rav Kook, a 19th/20thC rabbi and advocate for environmental justice and animal rights, as they exist in Jewish thought.

· Does he have a chavruta (Torah study buddy) and is he learning something that supports his views on discrimination?

· Were his ancestors activists at key moments in Jewish or world history?

As for other aspects of Jewish identity, there is actually already a fanfic about this, so I would recommend starting there. Again, not sharing this in support of JKR’s views – see below – but the fandom belongs to the fans, not the author.

- Shoshi

What does the character do on Saturdays?

I think the key to a lot of other questions about this character is going to be, “What does he do on Saturdays?” That is to say, what denomination is this kid from and how observant is he personally? This may only directly come into play if you’re specifically writing a scene stated to occur on a Saturday, but it’ll inform what mentions of Jewishness even make sense for his character. So let’s think through Jewish life at Hogwarts for a moment:

Denomination:

Are there enough Jewish students that they have a weekly visiting rabbi holding services on campus? Do Jewish students go off-campus to services at Temple Beth Anakim or Congregation Adath Kesem (Reform and Orthodox respectively) in Hogsmeade (I just made them up)? If so, an Orthodox or Masorti group of kids might go to Hogsmeade before dinner Friday and not come back until Saturday night, and thus be missing from action that took place in between, while a Reform group might only be away from Hoqwarts for an hour and a half Friday evening. Or he might choose not to go at all, either because he’s from a secular or non-observant family, or because he’s not comfortable in services for reasons of his own, or because the plot needs him around, in which case maybe pretending to be sick to get out of going to services without raising attention could give him some rounded characterization.

Observance:

As ever a quick reminder that denominational affiliation and personal observance are related but not 1-1 correlated. A character who regularly attends Orthodox or Masorti services might not personally have a problem writing, using money, or doing other activities that observant Jews typically avoid on Shabbat, or they might do them but have Feelings about it, or they might scrupulously avoid them. A character who regularly attends Reform services may not have an inner conflict about doing these things on Shabbat, but they might be sick and tired of being judged by more observant Jews about it--or they might be more personally observant and have to defend that practice around other Reform students.

Now, I’m not saying you have to include a detailed examination of your character’s inner feelings around their Shabbat observance in order to have them pop into the plot, say “Hi, house elves should have rights, see ya later,” but knowing the answer to this will help you come up with what does fit in your plot as far as what’s actually Jewish about your Jewish character.

You offered some beginning thoughts about this, but here are some additional quick questions about Jewish life at Hogwarts:

Does your character keep kosher? Where does kosher food at Hogwarts come from? Does the castle kitchen have a separate kitchen where specially-trained house elves prepare meals for the Jewish students? Is it apparated in from outside? Is it the same, better, or worse than the non-kosher alternatives? If he doesn’t keep kosher, does he have feelings about it? Does he joke about kashrut while eating a cheeseburger (have house elves heard of cheeseburgers?) or does he eat his black bean burger on a separate plate while wishing it tasted as good as your main character’s cheeseburger smells?

Shira mentioned b’nai mitzvah; If your story takes place in year 1, 2, or 3, your Jewish character is not only learning the difference between leviOsa and levioSA, they’re also learning how to decode and pronounce a not-insignificant portion of Hebrew scripture, as well as chant it according to a pre-medieval system of musical notation. Who are they studying with, and when do they practice? If they’re older, then did your main character come to their Jewish friend’s bar mitzvah? Why or why not?

Shoshi mentioned continuing Jewish education and connection: aside from the technical study, how does your character study Jewish history and culture, that he can draw on it to power his progressive politics? A chavruta would be another Jewish student they meet with specifically to study Jewish text, while a Jewish professor might be a role model or may be teaching them extra subjects on the side.

Ultimately, though, what hints you drop that reveal your character’s Jewishness are going to get easier to figure out when you can be confident answering what does your character do on Saturdays.

- Meir

#Asks #jewish #coding #Jewish coding #religion coding

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birdtown-if · 3 years ago

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Third Update (26/12/21)

Because the last update was very, very short, and I wrote a whole lot today, I'll include the detailed version of the second update and then a bit more ! I'm going tiny font for this one since it's quite lengthy. If you'd like to read it, go ahead. 💕

I finished writing the prologue, and learned a lot about coding. I spent the whole day today fixing some of the many coding mistakes I had made— at first it felt like I was giving one step forward and three backwards, but that's just how learning how to code feels.

Cerberus-writes's template for Twine games was a lifesaver. My edited version of it looks basic, yes, but it looks clean and it makes me so proud. I'll keep on editing the appearance of the game as I learn! But it's a wonderful place to start, with such a beautiful base. Thanks so much for the template. <3

The personality attributes for MC are all set. At first I planned a four-personalities system, but it ended up being reduced to three. They are a lot of fun to write, and I hope you'll get to love them as much as I do once the demo is out.

In the prologue there is a brief mention of the ROs, so that the players get to know them before meeting them. The info comes from a very 'distinguished' source, but that doesn't mean it will all be the truth. She's a bit... biased. 👑

I've worked on the other character customization aspects too; the backstory, appearance and personality for MC will all be set in the prologue. I tried not to rush it. Hopefully it worked. While the backgrounds have been set, the 'ability' selection (the controversial one) hasn't happened yet, but I'll probably add it to the prologue before I start scouting for beta testers.

Or maybe I'll just write it in the first chapter. We'll see.

Someone makes an appearance, but I shouldn't talk about them yet. I can't wait to start scouting for beta testers, because I want you all to read the prologue asap, but at the same time I have to edit some stuff so I'll take my time to make it as great as it can be.

As for the ROs, they haven't had much focus in the prologue since they don't truly make an appearance (they are mentioned, yes, but that's about it). You can still earn points with them, though, but if you miss them, you won't be missing a lot, so don't worry.

Yesterday (yes, the 25th) I spent the whole day coding. I'm not kidding. I must have gotten hit by a rush of writer inspiration or something, because I was dead set on learning how to code the basic stuff and I completely changed the default design of the game (thanks again, cerberus! <3) and added all kinds of things. Cycle links, regular links, colored buttons, etc. Yes they are basic, yes I'm proud regardless.

It may not seem like much, but it was a lot of fun, and it took a whole day of my time, so I'm happy with the result. Now, onto my advances in the first chapter! I drafted the detailed version of the first few scenes so that I'd know what to do with them once I got to actually write them. I've gotten started with Oliver's scene, and then I have Diana and Catherine's left.

For Oliver I have the first time meeting MC scene with failed-mage!MC and warrior's-kid!MC. I have gotten started with thief!MC's scene variation. While they all are quite different, they have more or less the same opportunities to gain points with Oliver. I tried to even them out. You can also lose points by choosing bad options, so that's nice. That feature works just fine.

Then I have to write the three versions for Diana and three for Catherine. Wish me luck, because I'm so unmotivated, I started revising the prologue. Again.

(it's always good to double-check, but still)

So that's it for my progress this month!

#I've had this sitting in my drafts for THREE DAYS #smh #update!

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mkstrigidae · 4 years ago

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from the ask meme abt writing, i have a few questions about your writing process! how do you stay organized with so many pov’s in AWPH? i always wonder what writing app/site fic writers use (word, google docs, etc.), and if it’s not too much, could you show a screenshot of how that looks?

Hi friend! :) I am terribly sorry it’s taken me a while to answer this- life has gotten in the way

Oof- so the answer to that question ‘how do you stay organized’ is probably ‘I don’t’, but I’ll do my best. (this ended up long and fairly disorganized)

About APWH POVs:

For the different POVs, there isn’t really a process I have to choose whose POV is used for what scene- I’d probably be more stern about it if were writing a novel, but because it’s fanfiction, I kind of just go with whatever feels right at the time. There is one thing that’s absolutely deliberate, though- I’ve never written a scene from Petyr’s POV, because he’s the exception to narrative omniscience.

There have been a few instances where I’ve had to switch whose POV i was writing from as I went along, or after I finished a scene- Meeting Jon Arryn is an example from the most recent chapter. Initially, it was from Sansa’s point of view, but Sansa overthinks everything and so it kept going off in all sorts of weird directions and I couldn’t pin it down. Once I started writing as Robin, it got much easier.

The single most difficult thing about keeping all the different characters straight is remembering who knows certain things, and who doesn’t know certain things.

Take this, for example. The two characters closest to omniscience are Oberyn and Sansa, but where Oberyn knows Baelish’s history and can understand certain aspects of his motivation because of years of working on the case and studying him (in addition to a hefty understanding of human psychology), Sansa isn’t always completely aware of how important certain pieces of evidence are, or how relevant certain things are to Petyr’s motivations. The two of them understand Baelish more than anyone else, but in drastically different ways. The biggest thing is that Oberyn is aware of Petyr’s relationship with Catelyn, and how he feels about her, whereas Sansa has no idea about that, and still doesn’t really understand why Baelish took her in the first place (although she’s been doing a repeat speedrun through the five stages of grief throughout the entire thing, poor kid).

But there are basic facts of the story, and then there’s the ‘who knows what’ aspect of it. Someone broke into the Stark’s home in White Harbor and stole Sansa from her bed- this is a fact. But only a few people know who it was that broke in or how it was done. An assassin was hired to kill Petyr Baelish at the airport and failed. The Lannisters know who the assassin is, but Oberyn and Daemon don’t yet.

There are lots of complicated relationships among the characters too- Jon knows more about Robb than any of the rest of them, except maybe Rhae, who only ever shows vulnerability to Willas and Marg, and so the rest of us don’t really get to see her soft side. Arya’s relationship with Catelyn is extremely complicated, and as such, she has a lot of baggage going into meeting Sansa that Sansa has no idea about. Lyanna is aware of what’s generally going on politically, and is working on several important stories that could provide some insight to Oberyn, but they haven’t talked about politics too much recently, because Oberyn’s too busy with the investigation and Lyanna’s busy with her job. There are secrets that Robb has been keeping for an extremely long time, and secrets that Sansa’s keeping without even realizing it. There are a lot of things that were odd or abnormal or red flags in Sansa’s childhood that she doesn’t even realize are odd, because she has no other frame of reference.

In terms of keeping the other stuff straight, I have a page at the beginning of the APWH Master Document (it’s so long dear god), that basically has character names, ages, locations, and time zones written down. I’ve tried making like, character info compilations, but I’m not very good at updating them so I stopped that (although I found a particularly funny bit about the targs in one that’s sampled below).

Generally, I think it’s more important to understand how your characters react to certain situations and their most basic personality traits and values, rather than just having a long list of stats on them, so that tends to be my approach. If I’m worried that I’m about to write something that conflicts with a previous plot point, generally, I’ll go back and skim the story for mentions of them to double check- I’ve reread APWH so frequently that I am genuinely sick of the first five chapters, haha.

Unfortunately, a lot of it tends to just be that I have an extremely good long-term memory for details. The trade-off is a god-awful short-term memory, though. It’s partially the ADHD. I’m on the verge of trying to keep things straight with an excel doc, tho.

The timeline is one of the trickier aspects, so I tend to scribble them out anytime I’m thinking about when and where certain events happened. Generally, I use Sansa’s abduction as year zero, because I do not understand how years work in Westeros and have elected to just use my own- here’s a sample of one I scribbled down the other day when I was trying to figure something out.

(Sorry about the post it notes- those are covering some spoilers! ;D)

About my writing process:

It is…. Not as streamlined of a process as I would like, haha. Generally, I go by chapter. I kind of have a rough idea of what I want to happen in each chapter, and generally that evolves as the story does.

For each chapter, I kind of just bullet point out some things that I want to have happen, and then try my hand at writing some of them. Some of my best ideas happen after this process, though, like the scene where Robb and Sansa find out that Baelish moved them out of the city while Robb was in town to avoid a confrontation. But I have those bullet points, and usually rough chapter titles and rough summaries before the chapters start. (Some things blacked out because of spoilers ;D)

I think that if I waited until I was inspired to sit down and write, then APWH would maybe be done by like, 2070, so I usually kind of sit down and just start writing- some of it is good, some scenes I discard completely, and usually, once I hit on something that works, the plot flows where I want it to.

I generally know how I want the chapters to start, based on how the previous chapter ends (My writing time for them usually overlaps bc it’s a natural continuation). Once I figure out roughly how I want the chapter to end, though, the whole thing starts coming together, and it’s easier for me to figure out what doesn’t belong in the middle, and what might be missing.

I started using one master document on word, because I swear to god I did not intend for this story to turn into the behemoth that it is, and that lasted for about twelve chapters before I realized that the damn thing was 368 pages of tiny font (I don’t double space my lines when I write bc I like seeing as much of it as I can). So I’ve switched to individual word docs for each chapter as of chapter 13, and used google docs to share the chapter with the wonderful @nowmywatch-begins who was kind enough to beta read the thing and remove the excess of commas I tend to use. I use color coded highlighting to indicate different things- turquoise means I want to go back and rework something, green means I need to check to make sure something doesn’t conflict with something I wrote previously, yellow is for sections that I might not want in that chapter and might need to move, etc. Anything I end up discarding goes in a section at the end of that chapter labeled ‘outtakes’. I used to have a lot of trouble rewriting things because I hated to get rid of them, so this circumvents that particular issue. I get to keep what I wrote, while still improving the story by being willing to throw out certain parts.

I write out of order frequently so I keep a separate document called ‘APWH- Bits and Pieces’ that I use whenever I’m doing something like that- it acts as sort of a holding tank for these scenes until I feel like they fit in the story. I also just keep random notes in there, questions that I think need answering, random sentences that just come to me, ideas I’ve jotted down when an idea sparks, etc. There’s a lot of stream of consciousness kind of stuff because I tend to process ideas by writing them down, and so I have stuff like ‘okay so what if Lysa did X and Petyr was here and does Sansa have a college scholarship???? Is the Braavosi prison in the northwest or the south? Why is Westeros still a monarchy? do the tabloids follow the royal family like in britain???’

Like, I have the ending for APWH written, but it’s fairly disjointed, and i think I’ll be able to flesh it out more as the story goes along. I like having a general idea of where I’m going with my writing, but I also will modify those ideas frequently as I go- sometimes the characters really do write the story for you.

This is probably not very organized, and waaaaay longer than you wanted, but I hope this answers your question!!! Thank you for the ask! :)

#APWH #APWH spoilers #my writing process #this is a long ass essay of me rambling #my writing process is abhorrent I am sorry #I am not an organized person here #Anonymous #ask answers

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shadows-echoes · 6 years ago

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Look me in my Eyes (Tell me Everything's not Fine)

Pairing: Aaron Warner x reader

Prompt: the hero shows up at the villain’s doorstep one night. They’re shivering, bleeding, scared. There’s also a slightly dazed look in their eyes– they were drugged [...]. Looking up at the villain, swaying slightly as they’re close to passing out, they mumble “…didn’t know where else to go…” then collapse into the villain’s arms. (I’ve modified the prompt a tiny bit, but that’s the gist of it)

Word Count: 5.5k (self-control, who?)

Warnings: nothing outside of stuff mentioned in the prompt itself, and a swear word or two.

A/N: yeahh... You can blame @pandemoniumambassador for this fic. She’s a hype master and was, for some reason, willing to beta this?? So like,,, please go love her??? She’s awesome and puts up with a lot from me tbh.

The side of your fist hits the smooth white front of the wooden door so harshly that the skin over your bones threatens to bruise. Not that you notice. Or care.

You keep knocking— if you can call it that, that is. It’s more like pounding. Hammering. You’re hammering your fist against the door in the hope that it will open— in a desperate, sloppy, chaotic last-ditch hope that it will open right now.

“Leila!” You shout at the nearly invisible seam between the door and doorframe as if that would somehow help your voice carry— as if that would get you inside faster. “Leila, please! It’s me, Y/N.”

The words are loud. Too loud. Far, far too loud in your otherwise silent surroundings. They echo around your skull, ringing, bouncing around with an alarming intensity that’s dimming, dimming, dimming as your head fills up with fog.

The amped-up sedative in your bloodstream is affecting you more rapidly than you had initially thought— than you had wanted to believe.

Once you had slipped away from your make-shift guards and back into the real world, you ran. You ran at a flat-out sprint for as long as you could maintain, lungs bursting at the seams, heart thundering in your ears, deafening, and a taste of copper in the back of your mouth. You ran as fast as you possibly could with tar in your veins, lead in your limbs, and blood seeping from your skin and into your clothes. You ran, and this place, these few disgustingly, unnervingly pristine blocks that lay untouched by the havoc which now wrecked the world, was the first landmark you recognized.

You had intended on running right past these houses and into the more desolated wooded areas not far from here until you found a safe spot to hide away in until the drug wore off, but your legs had different ideas. Your feet led you here, to a house you had only been in a handful of times a lifetime ago, to a house you remember a kind woman once living in.

You don’t know if she will remember you.

Or if she still lives here.

Or, granted she is still here, if she’ll even take you in-

No.

No, she’s home. She still lives here. She has to.

The street is coated in darkness over your shoulder, illuminated only by the few-and-far-between stars peeking through the dark, cloudy sky. The porch you’re on is dark, too, but the faint light seeping through the cracks between the window curtains acts as a beacon—a spotlight broadcasting your location to the entire world, to anyone left in it who’s interested enough to look.

You’re not so foolish as to believe you lost them, they’re too good for that and you’re far too disoriented, but you would like to think you bought yourself a few minutes of time at the very least.

It’s hard to tell though.

The trees lining the front yards across the street are entirely blurry now, blending into their suburban background of white picket fences far too well for your liking.

The stinging sensation in your right forearm and left leg have practically numbed altogether, and the strain in your muscles and lungs may as well be gone too. It is all still there, you know that, but the feeling of it is becoming inaccessible to you.

You can’t smell anything either, not even the blood staining your clothes.

And your hearing…

You don’t know how much longer you have until you pass out. What little of a head-start you might have had is gone now though, you do know that much for sure.

“Please!” you try again, and it sounds slurred. “I didn’t have anywhere else to-”

The door is wrenched open so swiftly that in one second you’re staring at the increasingly blurry grains of wood, and in the next you’re staring at someone’s chin.

A part of you wants to ask Leila when and how she had grown half of a foot taller than you remembered her being, but by the time your brain catches up and your eyes see the face looking back at you, you’re already stumbling backwards.

No.

No,

No.

Not him.

Shock courses through your veins and panic rifles through your brain, setting off every alarm bell still functioning. Confusion follows in its wake, and it all adds to the ugly mix of out-of-breath panting and the drugged tissues of your body which have turned to concrete. Immobile.

The subtle details of his expression are blurred and cast in a slight shadow due to the warm yellow light streaming past him from inside the house. From what you can tell though, Warner does not look happy. Not that you blame him though, considering that the last time you saw each other was when you shot him and then jumped out of a window after Juliette and Adam.

It had been quite the string of coincidences, really, that day.

Your hate for the Reestablishment and the fact that you never wanted to be a soldier in the first place led to two different outcomes. The first was a thick and colorful record detailing your insubordination and other “offenses” against your superiors which had been amassing since the very start of your training.

The second was your plan to desert.

Unfortunately, planning to successfully run away from a military base was less easy than you had hoped. It took time to collect some provisions, find a way off base, find someplace to go after you left...

You did it though, meticulously put together a plan to desert which was as foolproof as it was ever going to get. Except, days before it was to all take place, your plan fell apart due to an event which would have led to increased security, harsher superiors, stricter orders, and even less freedom than you were already granted.

Though your carefully crafted hopes for your future were viciously ripped from you mere days before they could take place, a different opportunity had been thrown directly into your hands and you had been physically unable to let it slide through your fingers like your original plan.

That day you happened to be inside the main building when a code seven alarm went off. You heard shouting from one of the rooms, went to investigate, and lo and behold you found an open window with “escape” written all over it, perfect for you to climb through and into freedom.

The only trouble was that between you and it stood three other people.

Juliette.

Adam.

And Warner.

You read the scene you walked in on quickly enough—it wasn't difficult considering the weapon Warner had been aiming at the other two, the two with interlocked hands and an open window at their backs.

The rest was history—a blur of actions and reactions you hardly had time to think through or decipher.

You stopped desperately seeking a way out of the life of a soldier you had been forced into—stopped looking for a chance to leave and an exit through which to run; you found one, and you were leaving.

A hand that wasn't your own had aimed your gun at the back of Warner’s head while a voice not dissimilar to yours told an incredulous Adam to grab Warner’s weapon. Keeping Warner in your sight, you then backed towards the window with Juliette and Adam at behind you.

Warner had not been particularly pleased. In fact, he mentioned some rather violent consequences and, when you failed back down, he lunged for your gun.

You pulled the trigger.

The few people currently looking for you might be bad, but this… Him… Warner… This might be worse. This is out of the hands of pissed off, blood-hungry citizens, and into the hands of the ruthless Chief Commander and Regent of Sector Forty-Five.

The one you shot as you looked him in the eyes.

Run.

Run, your mind screams at you.

Run as fast as you can while you can and don’t look back until you’re dead, otherwise you will be.

But you can’t run.

The floor shackles itself your feet, locking you in place even as the porch starts swaying before your eyes.

You think you manage to take a single stumbling step backwards. You assume you must have, at least, for the cold, smooth railing of the porch materializes beneath your hand and keeps you upright— keeps you standing as a tide of vertigo brushes over you.

Another few steps backwards and you would be down the stairs and on the front lawn. That’s the direction you want to go. Out. Away. Far away from the tall, imposing, deadly figure slowly stepping out of the doorway to approach you.

But your legs refuse to move even more insistently than they had a few moments ago, cooperating even less than they had. Traitors. They would get you killed.

Warner says your name.

He says something else too, something that sounds like a question. You can’t make it out—the sounds you hear don’t sound like words, but a chain of syllables strung together in an odd tone that’s even less decipherable than the sounds themselves.

Technically, you knew Warner could be here.

You knew, somewhere deep, deep down in the recesses of your mind that there was the tiniest, smallest, fraction of a possibility…

But surely, surely, you thought, your luck could not possibly be that bad.

You were wrong.

Darkness encroaches your vision, blurring and blocking out your surroundings one by one in a dull, unnervingly subtle wave.

The eyes looking back at you are the last things to fade out of focus.

They’re green eyes. So, so green.

Not the green of hatred or even the green of authority with that familiar fire always, always burning just below the surface.

But the green of a young boy you once knew in a lifetime before the world ended.

Green bleeds into black.

The first thing you notice when you wake is the pounding in your head— an amalgamation of the dull pain residing there and your own thudding heartbeat mixing together.

The next thing you notice is that you’re still alive, and –you open your eyes— unrestrained.

The fog which consumed your mind is gone now. You can acutely feel its absence in the clarity of your thoughts— in the clarity of your confusion, but… But tendrils of it still remain, a sheer film of murkiness lingering ever so slightly over your mind.

“Oh, good. You’re finally awake.”

Your head snaps towards the voice.

And your eyes…

Your eyes find Warner.

Warner.

Right.

Shit.

He sits at a small table in the corner of the room and holds your heavy, undoubtedly confused and startled gaze with ease. His left arm is in a sling. In his right hand he holds a data-pad which he sets down on the table without looking away from you. The device now sits a few inches away from the sleek black gun also on the table. Both remain within easy reach for him.

You swallow.

Your head spins as you sit up and as you try to understand why you’re not dead yet, why Warner hadn’t killed you immediately and on sight. Why, instead of bringing you back to the compound and throwing you in a cell, he brought you into what you think is the spare bedroom in Leila’s house and waited for you to wake up.

You know it must boil down to information, it always does, but still… It’s odd.

It’s a shame you’re unwilling to divulge anything serious though, anything at all that he might be interested in. A real shame, considering said information is probably all that’s kept you alive as of late.

Warner observes you in silence and with shrewd eyes, like he’s reading a book with a lot of unfamiliar jargon but reading through it all the same. The look puts you on edge, as it is likely supposed to do.

“I’m not going to tell you anything, you know.” It’s a hedged warning, a cautious one, but a warning all the same.

“But you haven’t even heard my questions yet,” Warner replies in a tone all too pleasant.

You shift atop the covers of the bed, more than thoroughly uncomfortable, and pain threads up your arm as you do.

Oddly enough, the three people who had grabbed you yesterday only hurt you enough subdue you. One of them had recognized you as a solider and they planned to interrogate you for information and—wow.

Wow. You really just traded one interrogation for another, didn’t you?

You really are that unlucky. Damn.

Regardless, after telling them that you had deserted they spent the next few hours arguing about what to do with you. One option they discussed involved taking you to the “others” –whoever they were— and the other few options they contemplated all ended rather bloodily for you.

Needless to say, you did not sit idly by while they so candidly discussed your apparently ever-shortening future. As luck –or your lack of it– would have it, however, you ran into one of them after slipping your restraints and she shot you up with a syringe half full of a goddamn sedative before you managed to get away from her. You want to blame it on said sedative for your clumsiness, but in your hurry to escape you jumped a fence rather poorly, managing to snag both your forearm and your calf on two different pieces of exposed, jagged metal.

Both injuries had bled a fair amount at the time. Now, they’re no longer bleeding. Now, white gauze spotted with dried blood peeks out at you through the blood-stained tears in your clothes.

You stare at the bandage on your forearm, blinking at it slowly as though it would answer your questions if you only looked long enough.

Why?

Why would he do that?

Why on Earth would he put in the two minutes of effort to help you –in any way, let alone medically– if he planned on killing you at some point anyway? Why-

You don’t understand this— what kind of game he’s playing.

And… And he’s not giving you any clues, even unintentionally.

You don’t have any superpowers, not like the ones you have heard rumours of, ones whispered about in hushed tones filled with awe or brushed off with a scowl, and you certainly don’t have any abilities like Juliette’s.

As it turns out, however, you do have exceptionally good hearing.

So that’s what you do now, in need of any kind of additional information available, you listen. You quiet the world inside your head, still the questions on your tongue, move past the noise of your own body, of Warner’s, of the idle sounds of shifting fabric and measured exhalations of breath, and you listen.

The sounds which greet you do little and less to placate your worries.

The house itself is alive.

Alive and humming with the sound of electricity buzzing in the rubber-wrapped wires behind the walls and the water flowing in the pipes beneath the floor under your feet, with the low thrum of the refrigerator in the kitchen downstairs and the roaring of the furnace in the basement tick, tick, ticking away the seconds until it turns off again.

The building is alive with the signs of life and inhabitation.

It’s also empty.

Not abandoned, empty.

Unoccupied.

Save for you and Warner.

“Where’s Leila?”

Out of all the questions dancing around your brain, you’re unsure why that one makes it past your lips.

You also have no clue what you had been thinking last night –for you assume it was last night given the early morning light streaming through the window a few feet from Warner— aside from the fact that you hadn’t been thinking. Sure, why not show up on a woman's doorstep, begging for help, despite the fact you hadn’t seen her in years and— oh, yeah, you shot her son less than a week ago.

Yeah. That was bound to go well.

Fuck.

“Not here,” Warner answers crisply. “Who were you running from last night?”

The question hangs in the air, suspended by silence.

There’s a high likelihood Warner already knows about the group who grabbed you for you assume he must get at least some reports about civil unrest, but on the off-chance he doesn’t…

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, right?

Despite how they so plainly discussed different ways to pry information out of you and other things you would rather not think about, you’re hesitant to blow the whistle on them— not when they are one of two groups willing to speak out, to do something about the Reestablishment. Hell, you might have helped them had they not been so… rough.

Well, rough and hateful.

Apparently, they had heard rumours about the resistance— about Omega Point, about how it housed people with abilities which might help to take down the Reestablishment. They hadn’t been fans of that, even using some artfully constructed and colorful language to describe the “freaks” there too.

“Where are Juliette and Kent?”

With any luck? Far away from here.

At the time, you had thought that you were rather smart, that the one bonus of your surprise escape –as opposed to the one you had planned– was that Warner would be focussed on trying to find three missing people as opposed to just one. Both Adam and you needed to take care of some personal business –though neither of you asked or wanted to know what the other’s was– and you both thought your odds were better if you split up into two groups. Besides, they didn’t trust you and you didn’t particularly trust them– not with your life, anyway.

Though the three of you knew that Juliette would probably be Warner’s top priority, you were not overly worried about either her or, by extension, Adam. No matter how terrified she seemed or how… oddly kind the few words she had spoken to you were, she could, after all, kill someone with a single touch.

After going your separate ways a few days ago and a few quick pitstops on your end, you had been en route to… Well, you’re not entirely sure where. You’ve heard rumours– a lot of rumours about where Omega Point is supposedly located and you’ve narrowed it down to a general area. That’s where you had been going yesterday before you got jumped.

You’re not sure where Juliette and Adam had intended on going –it’s best that way– but you can only assume they had made it there safely if Warner still hasn’t found them.

“Is whatever happened to you happening to her?”

His voice is harsher now. Stern. It’s less like the pleasant tone he began this conversation with and more like the one he uses to command the entirety of Sector Forty-Five.

His patience must have run out.

“Why do you care?” you counter, snapping out the reply before you can stop yourself. Then… Then you see it. You see his fingers curling together, tightening, and a muscle in his jaw clenching. You know the response is not due to anger either, at least not entirely. So, for some reason you don’t want to think about, you end up relenting after a quiet sigh. “Not that I’m aware of.”

The answer seems to appease him, but only for a moment. Without missing a beat or even chewing over the only answer you’ve given him, he asks the one question you least expect.

“Why didn’t you kill me?”

You gape. “What?”

Asking if you heard someone correctly has not really been an issue for you, not when you have the ability to hear the blood being pumped through a person’s veins and the grinding of their teeth, but… but that…

You had been mentally psyching yourself up for an interrogation– for roughly asked questions about the resistance and their numbers, about the extent of the dissent among his soldiers and troops, more about Adam and Juliette– especially about Juliette. Not-

“I was point-blank when you shot me in the shoulder,” he continues, seemingly oblivious to the now thundering rate of your heart and the rising emotions in your throat. “It would have been a clean shot, an easy kill. Yet you decided not to kill me. Why?”

“I missed.” The blatant lie thoughtlessly, stupidly, carelessly slips past your lips in a small voice that isn’t your own.

And Warner… Warner only smiles.

He smiles.

He smiles like your two meager words are best things he’s heard all month, like he’s suddenly enjoying this. Like talking about how easily you could have killed him but didn’t is amusing to him.

To make matters worse, it’s not a cruel smile of barbed wire and rusted nails. In fact, it’s almost… nice. It actually looks good on him. More than good, unfortunately. But it is wicked, a pleased display of a mind full of cutting knowledge locked behind an array of sharp white teeth and soft lips.

“The worst of my soldiers would have been incapable of missing a shot like that,” he says, “and I have seen you shoot, love. You have some of the best marks of all the soldiers within Sector Forty-Five. Do you honestly expect me to believe that you missed?”

The surety with which he speaks turns your blood into ice, makes it congeal and crystalize in your veins. It blooms enough apprehension and fear inside your chest that you can’t even correct him over the sobriquet he uses– though you’re sure your expression shows enough of your displeasure to make your feelings on it obvious.

You’ve seen more emotion in Warner in the last ten seconds than you have in the last ten years and you don’t know how to handle that- how to deal with the odd assortment of unorganized facts and small, peculiar details you’ve been handed.

The emotion contouring his features makes him look ten years younger too. It reminds you that Warner is, in fact, your age.

You had become so acclimatized to his blank expression cross-referenced with the occasional scowl and sharp commands that you became convinced the kind boy you once knew was long dead— that Supreme Commander Anderson had slowly, torturously killed him over the years and replaced him with Warner.

Then, a few weeks ago, you saw a brief, momentary, flickering crack in his façade, there and gone again in a moment. It made you remember the little boy with pale green eyes who took you out of the very house you now sit in, away from the wrath of his father which your short temper would have surely evoked. You had disliked Warner then, in that moment and with your young, righteous heart from keeping you from yelling in all your rage at his obnoxious, horrible, insulting father.

It was only later that you had come to realize the boy’s actions for the unnecessary kindness that it was. Though you never figured out how he had known you were seconds away from talking back rather sharply to his father, you were glad he had. He might have just saved your life.

That hadn’t been the only time you had met that summer, for you had seen each other a handful of times, but it had been the first– and the notable.

Warner is calm. You know that with certainty because you can hear his heartbeat: strong, steady, regular. He’s not the slightest bit ruffled or stressed. You suppose having a gun at one’s side helps with that.

In lieu of an answer you can’t give and don’t know how to provide, you keep listening.

To him.

To the house.

To the yard beyond the barely open window.

To wind filtering through the leaves of nearby trees, carrying whispers of halved-sentences.

Of voices.

It’s not Warner’s voice, though Warner is saying something to you. You can hear him in the back of your head speaking clear, understandable words, but you’re not listening to him anymore.

No, you’re listening to the other voices, ones you recognize.

Angling your ear towards the window, you strain your hearing to its full extent, cursing whatever remnants of sedative still lingering in you for making this more difficult than it usually is.

A quick debate in sharp tones, that’s all you’re able to pick up.

Then a click.

A distinct click that is all too familiar, one that doesn’t need any explanation.

You know the sound that will soon follow it too.

“Get down.”

“Excuse me?”

You don’t repeat the softly spoken words, not that there’s time to reiterate anyway. A sleeve is already being dragged against the coarse shingles below it, flesh is readjusting– tightening over a piece of hard, military-grade plastic.

You’re up and across the room before you even realize you’re moving– before you know what you’re doing– before you recognize your hands pushing at Warner’s shoulders.

By the time the two of you hit the ground, he’s somehow already switched positions and has you pinned you to the floor, no doubt assuming you’re trying to attack him.

But you’re not trying to attack him. You’re not even trying to fight him.

A half second later, you hear the sound you had been expecting. It’s rather difficult not to though, the bullet fractures the window panes in an explosion of glass before embedding itself in the wall above your heads with a soft thump.

You can feel Warner freeze at the sound, the sudden rigidity of his muscles.

You press yourself into the floor as two more bullets are fired, wishing for all the world that you could slip between the cracks of wood and rematerialize on the floor below.

Warner shifts as well. Closer.

Between the screaming of your heart and the ringing in your ears, a fleeting thought crosses your mind that you’re being covered. That Warner is covering you. Then the thought is gone– as it should be. He’s just trying to get closer to the ground.

He turns his head slightly to the side, towards you, and you wait, half frozen as you hold the calculating eyes which bore into you.

This time, when he asks who is shooting, you have no qualms about telling him.

This time, you answer without hesitating.

Because this time it feels different.

It is different.

“Civilians,” you state. “Third-party; hate the resistance but hate the Reestablishment even more.”

“How did you know they were here? How do I know you’re not with them?”

The words have a funny pitch and sound as though you’re listening to them through a pool of water. You’ve come to expect that part, the temporary and partial loss of hearing after listening to something particularly loud, but it’s still disconcerting to experience—to live a life listening to the uproarious, never-ending, screaming cacophony of the world and then have it just… vanish.

Needless to say, you became quite good at reading lips within the first few weeks of living on the military base of Sector Forty-Five.

You scoff at the words you see, and half hear, his lips saying. Or maybe you laugh, you’re not too sure which. “Narcissistic much? They were after me, I think you just became a big bonus though.”

Friend or foe? Enemy or ally?

Truth or lie? Deception or misperception?

The questions storming through his eyes and over his hardening features are obvious.

Warner pushes himself higher off of the ground, off of you, and you don’t need the full extent of your hearing to know what a bad idea it is.

Your hand, of its own accord, latches onto his elbow as you hiss at him to wait.

But it’s too late.

The warning is unnecessary.

The gunshot which follows his slight movement is sufficient warning.

Warner ducks down again.

Idiot.

What was he thinking?

God, what were you thinking? Trying to warn him? Pushing him out of the way? Coming back to this house in the first place?

Your own thoughts and feelings are so disorganized that it’s hopeless to sort through them, but when Warner looks at you there is such a mix of surprise and confusion– suspicion and intrigue in his eyes that whatever traction you might have had over your own feelings is immediately lost.

“They’re shooting at both of us,” you state.

The reminder, whether for him or for you or for both, works.

A long moment passes– a moment in which the ringing still in your ears quiets enough for you to hear the hearts, yours and his, crackling like thunderstorms and the intentionally slow breaths being forced into and out of two sets of lungs to try and counteract the rapid beating.

Warner nods, a fractional dip of his chin.

He looks over his shoulder, his good one, at the now glassless window, then at the door half-way across the room, his eyes calculating angles and distances as they trace a path to escape.

You listen, extending your hearing as far as it will currently go, examining the spaces around you and the roof next door for any tell-tale signs of dangerous activity to be careful of.

When Warner’s gaze again meets your own, it is you who nods this time.

The two of you crawl as close to the door as you can without being seen, and another shot rings out as you dash across the remaining distance and into the hallway.

Warner had snagged the gun from the table before leaving the room and now holds it extended in front of him, keeping a watchful eye on both you and the rest of the house as you silently make your way downstairs.

You could tell him that the house is still empty, that this isn’t some kind of ambush, but you don’t. You could also tell him that the shooter and his friend scampered off of the roof they had been perching on after failing to shoot either of you, that they’re now out of your hearing range entirely, gone, but you don’t. It would only lead to too many questions and fewer chances of your own escape– something which you still have every intention of doing.

So when his wary and watchful attention habitually leaves you to scan the next room, it’s easier than you expect to trip him up and pry the gun from his hand.

You aim it at his chest.

“Well, this seems oddly reminiscent, doesn’t it, love?”

Outwardly, Warner is as calm as ever, his face a pleasant and blank mask. The mask is too tight, though, its edges plainly visible and showing the frustration underneath. You know he’s ready to risk a bullet and fight if need be, but he also does not look particularly surprised. He just looks… wry and nearly disappointed.

“I won’t go back to being a soldier,” you say, “and certainly not for the Reestablishment.”

You’re not sure if the words are a warning or an explanation, but either way he does not heed them.

Warner steps towards you.

A bullet pierces the floor in front of him in a miniature explosion of splinters. You wince at the sound and from the pain it causes, but it’s worth it. Warner stops advancing.

His expression is grim, eyes narrowing. “You won’t kill me.”

It’s a hard statement, nothing remotely close to a question, and you wonder how such conviction came to be.

There were a handful of times you thought you would be able to kill Warner if given the chance, that you could stomach doing it given all of the horror he’s allowed, but then things changed. The boy you once knew made a reappearance, surfaced for a few heartbeats too long, and changed everything.

Shooting to impair him is one thing, but...

You swallow– swallow the self-doubt, the curiosity, the regret, the pain, the nostalgia, the rage, the despair– and hope that your actions today don’t royally screw up future events, that this day won’t haunt you for the rest of your life no matter how short that ends up being.

“You’re right,” you admit, “and please don’t make me regret that, Aaron.”

Warner stiffens at the name, at his name. He freezes as if he hadn’t heard it in years, as if you had summoned up an ancient ghost and just carved out his heart as a sacrifice.

He makes no move to stop you as you slowly back out of the room, never taking your eyes off him for fear of snapping him out of whatever daze of memories he’s found himself in.

You walk backwards out of the house.

Out of the yard.

Then you turn, running, sprinting as fast as feet will carry you all the way to Omega Point.

#aaron warner x reader #aaron warner #shatter me #restore me #unravel me #defy me #ignite me #juliette ferrars #adam kent #shatter me fanfiction #shatter me fanfic #fanfic #fics #fanfiction #writing

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cindylouwho-2 · 6 years ago

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RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, December 2019

Welcome to my latest summary of recent news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & ecommerce! This covers articles I came across since the October report, although some may be older than that.

I am also missing a lot here, but pared it down somewhat to make more readable. The lead up to the holiday shopping season was a lot crazier than I expected 🙃

Given the time of year, please do not expect another report until January. However, I will do brief posts of important news/blog posts in the interim as needed.

There are going to be big changes to this report coming in 2020. Have any suggestions or feedback? Leave a comment below, email me through my website, or send me a message on Twitter.

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

You are going to need to add Etsy’s tax ID to customs forms on New Zealand orders as of Dec. 1. Etsy’s ID is: 122-669-18.

FTC issues huge fines for selling fake likes & followers on social media, and for posting fake reviews online. “The [likes and followers] case could pave the way for further legal action on the same grounds, using the Devumi case as precedent. Indeed, shortly after the initial finding by the NY Attorney General, Facebook announced that it was moving ahead with legal action against several providers which it had found to be dealing in fake social media engagement.”

Everyone should read this article, if only to learn what not to do: Using “priming” to convert more buyers/users is a crucial marketing tactic.”Priming works by using associations made in our subconscious, and are almost always unnoticeable to the subject.” Example: “During a study, researchers approached customers in an electronics store, who’d entered to buy a new laptop.Half of the customers were asked what their memory needs were, and the other half were asked what their processor needs were...The group who were asked about memory, bought computers with higher memory and the group who were asked about processor speed, bought computers with much higher processor speeds.”

Etsy removed the word “Bugs” from the Bugs forum, & admits they will only will be monitoring it from 9-5 Etsy time (ET) Monday to Friday. They won’t be replying, but expect “hundreds of sellers” to do that job for them, unpaid. If you have an issue, you will now need to email through the Contact page, use the new 24 hour live chat, or phone them. [Note the parts they aren’t mentioning - Support is taking over a week to reply to emails right now, live chat will only be able to help with the simplest of questions (e.g., how do I change my email address?) & it is possible to spend over an hour on hold when you phone. You could spend quite a bit of money on long distance fees, especially if you are in a country that doesn’t have its own phone number, all for something you used to be able to get for free in the forum, sometimes on the same day. This is Etsy’s definition of “major improvements”.]

Check out this proposed US legislation, which wants large internet companies [yes, Etsy fits their definition] to reveal their algorithms & offer visitors a version with no “filter bubble.” You might not like Etsy search now, but I can guarantee it would become impossible if they removed all of the algorithm factors. [This editorial is a bit over the top, but does cover some of the key questions.]

ETSY NEWS

Items have been disappearing from a small number of Etsy searches since July, & Etsy still won’t tell us what is going on. If you discover you are affected, please let me know.

There have been a few threads on Etsy sending threatening emails about shops being below Etsy’s customer service expectations, often for just a few bad feedbacks or cases, which has shocked many long time sellers (even though they have been sending them for years; it appears they have decreased the number of “problems” you need to have to get an email.) Without announcing anything, Etsy released a page of “seller service level standards” that can help explain what they are looking for, namely cases & 1-2 star reviews, as well as the exact formula they use. I started a discussion thread here, & in case Etsy deletes comments in the thread, here is the dashboard showing your score. (Some people cannot make that link work; Etsy says only shops that received a warning can see it.) My blog post is here.

I summarized the 3rd quarter report here, and Etsy summarized it here. The stock market is not happy with management at the moment, with Morgan Stanley this past week stating that they expected Etsy’s 4th quarter to be worse than originally predicted, due to state sales tax laws and Etsy’s reduction in its Google Shopping ad buying. Note Etsy removed the “priority placement” for US free shipping about a week after the 3rd Q report, without any announcement, probably due to the blowback about it reducing first page conversions. (They didn’t announce anything; it just disappeared.)

Cyber Week traffic on Etsy was more than double what they saw on the average summer day.

They did a Q & A thread on the new stats, which wasn’t particularly useful. They admitted they intentionally removed the keyword & other data prior to November 2017 because “older data periods are less comparable to current stats”. [I believe that is code for “we’re too cheap to pay for the storage; investors need their payouts.”] They did finally add YOY comparisons back in a few weeks ago.

Etsy has again changed a few category & attribute options, including more baby stuff.

They did a holiday gift shopping promotion where people could call Etsy & get suggestions for gifts on Nov. 5. All gifts shipped free, so non-free shipping shops were not included. “It could also be a case study for personalization efforts to come from the long-running handmade marketplace.”

You’ve probably already noticed that Convos are now called Messages, but here is the announcement with the details just in case.

Etsy ran an Etsy search critique thread on November 13; the thread wasn't particularly useful, as almost all the staff who do the critiques aren’t experts in search. Basically, they say to use all of your tags, avoid repeating words in tags & titles, have 3-4 short phrases in your title, use commas in your titles (”Buyer research shows that using commas instead of dashes helps titles appear more clean and readable”), offer free shipping, and use all of your photos. The big takeaway for me was - they think we all have unlimited photography budgets, models, and time to do different modelled photos for every listing (including at the beach! LOL), photos of each of our different pieces in progress, photos of us working, & photos of each type of packaging. Needless to say, none of those things are bad if you have gobs of time or the money to pay someone to do all of that. But if you are like me and are a one-person business, live in a small condo, don’t have the strength to take photos all day, don’t have an abundance of people to model when I am taking photos (i.e., people I know have real jobs & aren’t around when I work on photos), and don’t have anyone to take photos of me making things, then this is pretty laughable. I wouldn't even consider doing all of this for my 5 best selling listings, never mind all 430+. YMMV. [The repeated mentions of process photos makes me worry they will be requiring those for everyone at some point …but I am sure I am just being paranoid.] One notable error was telling someone to use “color” (the US spelling) instead of “colour” (the proper English spelling) because the shop’s language settings were US English - Etsy currently treats these both the same, so there is no issue at the moment. Are they trying to give us a hint about something?

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

Introducing BERT: Google’s new technology to help organic search process natural language better. This isn’t likely a change you can optimize for, but it should help searchers get more relevant results for complicated queries. “Here is an example of Google showing a more relevant featured snippet for the query “Parking on a hill with no curb”. In the past, a query like this would confuse Google’s systems. Google said, “We placed too much importance on the word “curb” and ignored the word “no”, not understanding how critical that word was to appropriately responding to this query. So we’d return results for parking on a hill with a curb.” Moz’s Whiteborad Friday covered the basics. [warning - some bits are advanced. Just skip those if you need to.] A study said BERT still isn’t very good at understanding “not” and other negatives. The NY Times may be one of the sites that is affected.

If you were disappointed when keyword research tool Keywords Everywhere became a paid tool, a new alternative has been released. Note that Keyword Surfer is still in beta. I’m going to try it for a bit and write up a short report if I think it is worth using. (The traffic estimates are way off, as in almost 10 times too low, for the sites I have info on.) If you try it, let me know what you think!

While we are on the topic, here’s 13 keyword research errors you don’t want to make. Short takeaways - not every high volume keyword phrase will work for your specific product, don't ignore long tail, and make sure you look at the search results for any keyword before you decide to use it.

Here’s another keyword and topic research tool that compiles questions people search along with a relationship tree so you can see how ideas are connected.

More common SEO problems with ecommerce sites.

If you code your own website, check out the new Google instructions on writing your organic search snippets. Note this is supposedly only about display & not about ranking.

Improve your Instagram traffic with 8 SEO tips for your profile and posts.

Which is better for SEO - Squarespace or WordPress? The results are likely skewed by the fact that “platforms like Wix and Squarespace tend to attract less SEO-savvy people than WordPress.” They agree with what I have been saying for a while: if you know what you're doing, Squarespace sites can rank just fine.

Excellent tips on how good SEO also helps you comply with US disability access laws.

The latest on Google updates - there was apparently one around November 7. This one may have hit affiliate websites more than other types.

The Wall Street Journal wrote an article claiming Google manipulated search results to favour its interests & those of its advertisers, including eBay. [The original article is behind a paywall; the link is in that news coverage.] However, many in the SEO community - most of whom are not usually reluctant to criticize Google when they are behaving poorly - feel the article is way off base, & demonstrates a fundamental lack of knowledge of how Google works. Barry Schwartz of Search Engine Land & Search Engine Roundtable even did interviews with t WSJ staff for the article, and was amazed at how much they got wrong. “Even a basic understanding of the difference between organic listings (the free search results) and the paid listings (the ads in the search results) eluded them…[Glenn] Gabe told us that not only were his conversations with the paper off-the-record but also that he was misquoted”

CONTENT MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails)

Here’s something I don’t see discussed much: using templates (& other consistent branding) in your social media, blog and website posts.

Content hubs are a very useful way to increase your search engine traffic for a core topic while providing a landing page for social media, ads etc.

Good primer here for beginning social media marketing for your business. You’ll need to do more research depending on your target market and what platform/s you choose, but it is definitely a good overview of getting started.

If you think influencer marketing is right for your business, here are 10 places you can find influencers to work with.

Your email subject lines can change the open rates; here are 19 tips to make them more clickable.

Instagram started testing hiding “likes” on posts in the US as of November 11th, & then announced plans to try it out globally. A study on previous tests showed that there may be some effect on influencer engagement.

Facebook has introduced its own payment system, currently in the US only, for limited situations only at the moment.

Reddit is an often overlooked social media platform to use for business but the traffic is strong, so check out these tips on asking it work for your business. [infographic]

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

Pay for online ads (outside of Etsy) but don’t know what negative keywords are? Here’s how to use them with Google.

Hubspot continues their massive rush of “ultimate guides” with everything you wanted to know about Amazon ads.

Facebook now allows you to have different text in the same ads, which can be adjusted for different groups of users.

Amazon is predicted to continue cutting into Google’s online ad dominance through 2021; Google currently has 73% of money spent on online ads in the US.

If you are interested in long term brand building in your advertising, you might be interested in this article, where Adidas admits it was ignoring brand ads & pushing instant returns for too long.

Just in time for the holidays, Google Merchant Center rolled out a bunch of upgrades.

Buying TV ad time is losing popularity; it will be less than 25% of all advertising spend in just a few years, while digital spending is now over 50%.

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING

Facebook changed how they count page impressions.

Everything you want to know about the Google Search Console. Oh, and also everything you want to know about the Google Search Console. Which one do you like best? [If you have your own website or freestanding blog and are not using the Console, you probably should be reading both of those. Seriously, just set the darn thing up, then learn how to use it later.]

Also, the Console now features a speed report, and has changed how they send you messages.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Trend alert: many struggling or failed retailers sell clothing. “This sector is saturated with supply and is arguably over-stored.” … “For younger shoppers, as they choose which apparel brands do get their attention, sustainability and other cultural issues are often at the forefront.”

US sellers can now get discounted UPS rates through Shippo.

A bug is keeping suspended Amazon sellers from being reinstated.

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

Don’t use these common customer service lines. ...“there are studies that support the use of positive language in customer service. Instead of focusing on what you can’t do for a customer, focus on what you can do. No one likes to be told no.”

Another article on the psychology of colour; beware that some of this is a bit simplistic, as there are always exceptions.

Holiday shopping will push further into December this year, with half starting around Cyber Monday (Dec. 2). 62% of “high spenders” (over $2100 spent on the holidays) will shop on their smart phones. 25% of respondents to this survey said they already started shopping in September. It turns out most people want gift cards, among other stats. Nearly half of US shoppers are more likely to shop with companies that are socially responsible. Mobile shopping is expected to beat desktop shopping for the first time this season. And yes, most Americans expect to add to their credit card debt before January, men more than women.

US retail sales fell 0.3% in September; online sales fell the same amount.

MISCELLANEOUS (including humour)

Trend alert - apparently Generation Z is not big on makeup, and it is affecting large companies’ profits.

Google’s co-founders hand the parent company Alphabet over to the current CEO. They still work for Google and will focus most of their time there.

Google Webmaster spokesperson John Mueller tackles the controversial question - is a hot dog a sandwich? [humour]

#SEO #search engine optimization #search engine marketing #EtsyNews #etsy #analytics #stats #statistics #Social media #contentmarketing #content marketing #Ecommerce #smallbiz #CindyLouWho2NewsUpdates

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dokidokiliteraturegirls · 7 years ago

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Hello everyone! Yui here, with today’s special feature, DDLitG Behind the Scenes: What’s the deal with Ako?

In this special update we’ll talk about her character in general, design, her place in the story, and more! So get comfortable in your seat, get yourself some good snacks, and let’s delve into the background of DDLitG’s 1st-ish original character~

Who is Ako?

Ako, formerly known as “female student”, was originally one of the many NPCs used by the game’s engine to fill its world with nondescript background characters, so as to make it feel less empty. However, Sayori took a special interest in her, and decided to befriend her, following the steps of a young MC who befriended Sayori in a similar situation and ended up saving her life. This would in turn allow Ako to grow as a character beyond her 1 line of coding and get her own sprites, as well as being able to interact with the world. She would later go on to fall in love with Sayori and shenanigans ensue.

Ako was created with the purpose of telling the story of the Friendship arc.

Designing Ako.

Let me make one thing clear: I’m not a character designer. I don’t know jack about it besides the very basics. But I did try to make someone who looked mildly original and, most importantly, different from the other girls.

Originally, she was going to be the image of a shy, fragile girl who Sayori befriended out of pity, more than anything. Based on this initial idea, I made this beta Ako design on one of my copybooks when I should’ve been working:

As you can see, her very first sprite was the one where she’s shyly looking away to avoid eye contact (and to seem annoying, but more on that later). I was happy with the pose but not with her face, as it looked super unoriginal. She resembled Ochako Uraraka from My Hero Academia a bit too much, so I tried to change her hair to make her stand out more. Here is her second iteration:

This time, I felt like I cranked it up too much to the other side. Now she stood out TOO much. Her hair felt like it came more from a protagonist than someone who’s supposed to be a background character. I adopted a new philosophy after seeing this result: she had to look as bland as possible. She had to be the kind of character you see all the time in the background of an anime - those simple, unassuming designs you’d never look twice at because you’re too focused on the protagonists with candy-coloured hair. In DDLitG’s canon she’s a filler NPC brought to the forefront, and her design had to reflect that more than my desire to make her look “cool”.

With this in mind, we come to Ako v0.3

As you can see, this is much closer to her current design. But this was still a sketch (even the drawing above is very much unfinished). As you can see, I got closer to her 0.1 version with the hair, but changed the eyes to make them look more unique, giving her that more neutral, “nothing” expression. Having finally found some ground I was comfortable with, I redefined her design a little further, gave her some more details around the hair and clothes, adjusted the proportions of her body (because apparently I draw heads huge), and made her finalized design.

I was happy.

What’s with this sassy... monochrome child?

If there’s one constant to be found in the pictures above, is that she was always meant to be black and white. There are plenty of reasons, which I’ll list because, honestly, there are a lot.

1. I didn’t want to look her like the rest of the cast at fucking all. She is an OC introduced in a story with already established characters made by a much more talented writer. She’s an outsider, someone who doesn’t belong with this cast of colorful characters, and I wanted readers to be able to tell that at first glance. No, she’s not like the other girls. They don’t belong in the same place. She is not a member of the original DDLC cast, and it shows.

2. I know I can’t draw as well as Satchely, so trying to copy DDLC’s art style would just end up looking awkward and wrong. I had no choice but to do my own thing. And if I’m doing my own thing, why not take it all the way? I already gave myself artistic freedom, I might as well go crazy with it~

3. I just adore characters in a fictional universe that look different from the rest of the cast or have some strange design choice for literally no reason. Like Krillin from Dragonball, with his eyes that make him look like he belongs in an entirely different manga...

...or even Jotaro Kujo, whose hat merges with his hair because why not!

I live for dumb crap like that.

4. A huuuuuge inspiration for me while writing (besides my own uninteresting life) is music. Many times I listen to a specific track or imagine situations with specific background music to make them seem more real, and be able to better portray the feelings of a scene when writing [For example, I listened to My Chemical Romance’s Welcome to the Black Parade a lot while writing Monika’s Death].

Ako’s creation was no exception. Her appearance was partially based on the cover for not only one of my favorite Vocaloid albums of all time, but one of my favorite albums period: Wowaka’s glorious Unhappy Refrain.

I’ve been writing stuff based on this album alone for years because it’s just so damn striking to me. The picture of the faceless schoolgirl falling into the unseen abyss, the background uninterested characters that imply they are used to seeing fellow girls suffer, the distorted world they live in, the album’s way to explore teenage depression, the freaking name of the album, EVERYTHING! IT’S SUCH A GOOD EXPLORATION OF THE DIFFICULT LIFE TEENS FACE THAT OFTEN GOES UNNOTICED!! AAAAAAHHHH IT’S SO GOOD.

5. Ako was also based on a previous design I made for another character meant for an original visual novel I was writing and I’m probably never going to finish, who was also going to be monochromatic to reference this album (in that context it made more sense though cuz every character was a musical reference).

This character, in turn, was based on Monoko from Yume Nikki, which is more obvious because of her crying eye and extra arm.

So basically at this point it would’ve been weird if I hadn’t made her monochromatic.

Naming Ako

This was one of the most difficult parts, ngl.

As I mentioned, Ako was originally going to be a fragile, shy girl. Based on this, her original name during the design face was Moromi, which is one more letter than “Moroi”, which Google translate promises me means “Brittle” or “Fragile” in Japanese.

However, after the philosophy change that happened during her conceptual stage, “Fragility” was no longer at the core of her character, as it was now “Nothingness/Blandness”. Because of this, I changed her name to “Ako”.

Many people have submitted their interpretations of the name, ranging from its meaning “To teach/to learn”, and “To yearn for”, which all fit better than the original tbh.

The intended meaning is for “Ako” to be read as “A-Ko”, which is a way by which Japenese media often refers to filler characters, as it translates to “Girl A”.

Examples of this can be seen in Super Danganronpa 2, where a character in a videogame is called “A-Ko” to hide their identity...

...and in a movie called “Project A-ko”, which was a parody of the anime tropes from the time, so they gave the protagonist the most generic name ever. The antagonist and side character, by the way, are called “B-Ko” and “C-Ko” respectively. This movie is fucking awesome.

This name also made sense in the context of the story, because we already had a character named “Student A”, so this goes to show that the game just gave Ako the default name it had stored for female NPCs.

Blinded Ako, or How I Learned to Convey Emotion Through Ahegao

When I came up with Ako, she was meant to have most of her character revolving around her infatuation with Sayori. She was, after all, written in the story with the purpose of falling in love with her, and nothing else. Her character, personality, likes/dislikes, and hobbies came afterwards. As the story progressed, however, I decided that she should have a personality separate from just being in love with another character. So to separate the actions she committed under the influence of her passion, I did a little design change in the middle of the arc: Blinded Ako.

In this version, Ako has been literally blinded by love and stops being rational. This is represented by the hearts covering her eyes, and clouding her judgement. This was done not only with the purpose of representing she was past her breaking point, but also to differentiate the Ako that makes mistakes with the Ako that was introduced in the beginning of the arc. Almost so as to make them two different characters, so when she is reintroduced as a regular character after Friendship, readers could think “oh, she’s not going to do dumb stuff again, she’s not blinded by love anymore.”

Many people compared the above panel with “ahegao”, a trope in hentai manga where a character does a silly face to represent them breaking from enjoying themselves so much. This was done partially on purpose. The main idea was to represent Ako being blinded by her infatuation for Sayori, not to equate her sate of being with anything sexual. It DID end up looking more hentai-esque than I expected though, as, well, Ako is in black and white, and the heart eyes are also a trope in ahegao. And she’s sweating. And she’s saying that she’s about to break....

.....

....well at least I drove my point home.

Ako’s musical influences

Above I mentioned how music was a big part of my inspiration, and how I listened to Welcome to the Black Parade while writing Monika’s Death, so the question in no one’s mind is: what music did Yui use as inspiration for Ako’s character and the arc? 🤔

Well, hypothetical reader, the answer is that since Ako was meant to be bland and flavour-free, her original depiction is not based on a song or anything. Her desperation towards Sayori and Blinded Ako, though, are based on TRONICBOX’s 80′s style remix of Ariana Grande’s Into You. And yes, this 80′s remix in specific. Not the original song. I highly encourage you to give it a listen and pay attention to the lyrics if you want an insight into how Ako was feeling during her breaking point.

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Also, as a side note, no one has asked me this, but I imagine Ako’s voice to sound like the vocals of Panty and Stocking’s ending, Fallen Angel. It’s a truly beautiful song, and once again, I highly encourage you to give it a listen and pay attention tot he lyrics if you want an insight in Ako’s current feelings towards Sayori.

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Ako’s reception

This is more something personal than an explanation of the character, but it’s something I want to share nonetheless.

Remember when I said Ako was meant to be annoying? Yeah... xD

When I decided to add a new character I did so under the idea that everyone was going to hate her, because it’s a purposefully boring OC made by some insane person with the sole purpose of being added to an already interesting and loved cast of characters just to fuck everything up.

The first scene I ever wrote for Ako was the part where Monika asked if she had hurt Sayori, and she said “Not intentionally...” while looking away, which is why her first sprite ever was in that position. She was meant to make people feel frustrated over this girl just looking away from her problems and avoiding responsibility, while also telling Monika to her face that she had done something bad to Sayori. Readers were expected to hate her. That’s why in the beginning she says she doesn’t like literature, to assure you that she’s not joining the literature club. That’s why there’s a scene where she gets punched in the face. That’s why she looks so extremely out of place.

YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO DISLIKE HER!! omg I’m still surprised at how warm the reception was, you guys are just too nice for me~ ❤️

Because of the unexpected reception I had to change some parts of the arc, which were originally going to be much crueler towards her [I even questioned adding the punch at all, but it was an important part of Monika’s development so I felt it]. I also established her as a recurring character in spite of her dislike of literature, and did my best to make her less hate-able than she was originally going to be, even cutting some planned lines of dialogue that made her pretty irredeemable. Looking back, I am glad I did those changes, we ended up with a well-liked and pretty nice girl because of it~

Final thoughts

The introduction of Ako and writing Friendship in general was a very intense experience for me. It was very difficult to balance Ako as being both relevant to the story and moving the plot forward, but not make her the sole focus of everything and have her obscure everyone else, because OCs in established pieces of media tend to do that.

This arc also got a LOT of mixed reviews, some people liking it, some hating everything I did. This made me really question what I was doing and at many points even regret I was writing Friendship at all. At a certain point I lost almost 50 followers in a single update.

I also had trouble writing some parts because they were too sad. And that’s not my style! I like writing happy people being good friends, damn it, not everyone crying and hating each other.

But when all is said and done, I’m happy I wrote both Friendship and Ako into the story. I’ve received many wonderful, supportive messages telling me how much readers enjoyed it. Even some people saying they had been in a similar situation to the one depicted in the story, and were glad to see a story that showed a positive outcome.

Will I write more OCs into DDLitG?

Meh, who knows. I love writing more original stuff and expanding the world of DDLitG, but I also feel like if I introduce yet another OC, people will crucify me and hate me for flooding the story with too much stuff that’s irrelevant to the DDLC they’re used to. That being said, writing this blog is my first, and very possibly last chance to expose my stories to such a large audience. And seeing people like what you do not only because you’re riding the coattails of a recognizable brand, but because they like what you do with it, makes me pretty darn happy. Being completely honest, I’d like to add another character. But just one. And only if it’s something that will push both the story and the girls’ character arcs forward. Not just adding OCs for the sake of it.

Thanks for sticking until the end of this BTS, and I hope you found it an enjoyable read, or at the very least I made you a little bit less bored~ ❤️

Next time, in DDLitG Behind the scenes: What’s the deal with The Perfect Yuri?

#ddlitg behind the scenes #updated version!

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ardenttheories · 6 years ago

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Thoughts on JuJus? They seem to be able to make players (oftentimes, players with the related aspect to their effects) embody aspects act as a kick-starter or booster to a player's abilities- (Jane with the trickster-mode JuJu, spreading it by "creating" it, Lil Cal as a JuJu and taking control and angering Gamzee, the Retcon JuJu (as stated by Rose as a JuJu in epilogue) that John touches to gain his retcon powers and would that mean horrorterrors may be JuJus as well? (by grim-darking players)

I just did a little bit of reading on JuJus, and from what I can tell, they’re ultimately just… weird as all fuck.

Before I get into the meat of it:

Having not read too far into the comic, I wasn’t aware of the circumstances surrounding the Ultimate Treasure (the white SBURB house JuJu). It can only be used twice; it was used one by Caliborn to trap one version of the Beta Kids inside (who have yet to come back out); Vriska believes the JuJu contains warriors who are capable of destroying Caliborn; because Caliborn used it to aid him, it is now destined to destroy him.

So, reading the comic to its end, as it turns out, is absolutely vital to understanding the Epilogue - because it looks like this JuJu is the vital plot hole that hasn’t been filled. John’s going to have to go back into canon, get the four trapped Beta Kids out of the JuJu, and take down Caliborn with their help. More on that later, maybe.

As for my general thoughts on the JuJus themselves…

There’s a lot more items in canon that are considered JuJus than you’ve mentioned here, and that makes trying to figure this out a bit more complicated. Just based on the wikia - which is pretty comprehensive, and always the best place to start when you’re researching Homestuck stuff - the main JuJus are these:

Lil Cal (or potentially just his eyes)

The Suckers (one red, one green, belonging to Caliborn and Calliope respectively)

The Treasure (representative of the story’s narrative)

The Chess Set (belonging to Calliope and Caliborn; theorised by Meenah)

The Felt’s Effigies (back in the Intermission; the white plush things with hats on them)

The Felts’ items (back in the Intermission, incl. Die’s pins and dolls, Eggs’ timer, Biscuits’ oven)

Lil Cal’s a tricky one, because he doesn’t adhere to any set JuJu rules (since he appears in multiple places at once in some scenes, and because he’s often in every universe at once, though in some cases it technically shouldn’t happen) and because he’s a container for several souls (which both change him drastically, and make it hard to figure out how much of him is his actual JuJu powers and how much is the souls).

I think the importance of Cal in relation to Aspects is to look at who he predominantly preys upon: Heart and Rage players. Specifically destructive Heart and Rage players (as the vessels for his actions). For as much as he fucks around with everyone else, there’s still that ongoing theory that Cal controls both Bro and Gamzee by kickstarting their abilities by twisting them into something rancid (turning Dirk’s desire to make his friends stronger into Bro’s outright abuse, and being one of the main reasons for Gamzee’s Bardic Splits across most universes; it almost always begins in the presence of Lil Cal, or once Gamzee has looked into his eyes). There’s a definite connection to Heart (in the fact that his eyes are almost always referenced; the gateway to the Soul, which Heart embodies) and Rage (which seems to be what he causes in other people), perhaps related to his mixup of souls, or entirely due to himself. It might just be that it’s easier to prey upon destructive Heart and Rage players.

The only thing that trips that up, however, is his clear connection to Time. Cal hates Dave - it’s one of the more on-the-nose things in Homestuck - likely because he’s a Time player, and one that uses Exploits to Protect his session. Dave’s one of the main reasons the Beta session doesn’t end in immediate failure, after all - and although that benefits Lord English for his creation, I would harry a guess to say that he’s probably not very happy that someone could beat him at his own game. Cal is clearly intrinsically connected to LE (in part due to his connection to Doc Scratch), and I think that might be why he’s so important to Caliborn. All requirements to make LE aside, Cal is as much a harbinger of LE’s will as anything else (and often Ends doomed timelines through the use of Gamzee). It would be suffice to say that his temporal fuckery is what gives him such a destructive connection to our redblooded cherub, and why he’s so vital to make LE in the first place.

So, in the case of Cal, I’d think probably! The connection to Cal as a Heart/Rage/Time-based JuJu seems to have an ongoing effect on the players he preys upon or ends up most empowered over, as well as over his general abilities and how being in his control effects them.

The Sucker JuJus are still something I don’t fully understand. They’re seemingly harmless when divided, but united provide the irresistible urge to go buckwild and tip anyone who licks them firmly into the Sweets theory of creative writing - all the fun fluff that has no meaning on the plot, but is still enjoyable to read. I’d question why this is the effect of two JuJus representative of Time and Space, unless the implication is that Time and Space together allow for metaverse effects, but I somewhat doubt that.

Regardless, Jane definitely creates it, but I’d almost say it’s to the detriment of her and her friends. Life is about Growth, too - and Trickstermode actively stalls their character Growth while they’re stuck in it. They’re too hyped out of their minds to go under any meaningful developments until they’re out of it. Which could perhaps be seen as a Maid defining what Growth is? It’s because of Trickstermode that Dirk breaks up with Jake, and a lot of his development and mellowing out follows after this moment of being confronted with his Emotions (actively standing up for them, being Emotional, rather than trying to be Rational and Logical; it’s what stops him from so fervently Ghosting Mind).

So… depending on how you read Classpects, I think there is an argument here for the combined Sucker JuJu to have an effect on Jane’s Life powers - something that kickstarts her, although to an initially negative effect. It’d be interesting to see what would’ve happened if Jake had figured out the code first - they only had one half of the code each, after all - and whether or not it had to be Jane to make the JuJu work to begin with. Or, even, if it would’ve worked with anyone, but had different effects.

The Chess Set we just don’t know enough on. I admittedly don’t feel entirely confident commenting on it.

The Felts’ items, though, are easy enough to figure out. The Leprechauns are Lord English’s minions, and therefore associated with Time. Deeply imbued with time, even. The fact that their JuJus are always Time related is just entirely logical here; even if they’re not explicitly Time players, they’re the handymen of the literal Lord of Time. It wouldn’t make sense for them to be unable to use something to do with Time considering their entire existence revolves around Caliborn, his session, and his eventual rise to power as Lord English. So, the Felt having JuJus intrinsically related to Time that then amplifies what seems like their already Time-related abilities (if we take someone like Trace as an example)? Perfectly suits this theory.

I already spoke a bit about the Treasure, so I won’t go too into detail about it here, but I think it’s interesting that Vriska, the Thief of Light, is the only one capable of finding it. The literal canon-changing JuJu is found by the one character whose purpose is to Steal Canonicity and Importance? Iconic.

It thus makes sense as to why John can use it, and why his abilities so thoroughly fuck up the timelines. The JuJu is entirely Light-based - it’s a literal plot hole, a portal into Canon that completely ignores all laws of Time and Space and Paradoxes - and provides whoever uses it with a boost to their Aspect in a Light-based fashion. It’s like a more even influencer. John’s Aspect allows him to be Free; therefore, the Treasure gives him the ability to be Free from Canon. It amps up his powers to completely meta levels, though thankfully keeps him within the general influence of the story. This, when I think about it, is why John has to be the one to use the Treasure, and why he’s the one who has to take the burden of all the Retcon abilities. Since, as you say, JuJus tend to influence the Aspect of the person using it by amping up their powers (although, as we’ve already seen, other JuJus tend to naturally end up in the hands of players who have Aspects that already align with what they’re meant to do), for the purpose of changing the Timeline without the restrictions of Time and Space, it had to be a Breath player. Someone who perfectly embodies Breath - perfectly embodies Freedom and Disconnect - could be the only person capable of using the JuJu to its best ability.

This probably means that, had someone else used it, they would’ve done so to drastically different effects. Still usable, but definitely not beneficial to the situation they were in.

So, to bring a very long story short:

Lil Cal, a JuJu that tends to most predominantly exude Time, Rage, and Heart, often ends up in the hands of Time, Rage, and Heart players, and amps up their respective abilities (though to drastically negative consequences).

The Sucker JuJus are a bit weirder, being both Time and Space together, and representative of Light - but combine all that into one moment that allows for Life to continue the Growth of the character. Would it have worked for anyone else? Maybe. But it’s interesting that it’s our Life player who ends up creating it, considering our Hope player was just as likely to make it as her.

The Felt’s JuJus are just obvious in and of themselves; Time JuJus that amplify the powers of Time-related minions, and provide Time-related powers to characters that aren’t Time-based (though to their detriment; looking at The Midnight Crew here).

The Treasure is entirely Light-based, and gives whoever uses it an incredible Light-based boost to their pre-existing Aspect and power set. In our instance, that means John, as the Heir of Breath, is capable of being Free from Canon and the restraints of Canonical Lore regarding Time and Space when creating the new Timeline.

To wrap it all up, then - no, I don’t think the Horror Terrors are JuJus. Though they’re perfectly imbued with Void, I think they fail to meet a lot of the requirements that make JuJus what they are. The Horror Terrors are something similar, but completely separate; incredibly powerful and definitely only attuned to Void-based powers (of which grimdark is only one), but more living and real than JuJus. Feferi’s able to talk to them, after all, and reasons with them to make the Dream Bubbles - and her Lusus is definitely a Herror Terror, which proves for a fact that they’re creatures rather than things.

#ardenttheories #long post//#homestuck analysis #anonymous #sburb meta

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sciencography · 6 years ago

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Long overdue update!!

At long last the much promised and oft delayed blog post update that I've been promising off and on for MONTHS. Going to cover a huge range of topics here, therefore nothing that I cover will get extensive depth or attention. Will cover the App Store status, nControl, chimeraTV, electraTV, uicache / ldrestart recent changes / snafu, DalesDeadBug update, cycripter and any known issues that are occuring with any of the above. Will also include a link to a handy tutorial for saving OTA blobs for the 4K AppleTV, just in case we find a way to make them useful!

Saving 4K OTA blobs covered by idownloadblog:

nitoTV App Store

This is several months behind schedule, and at this point its pretty much entirely my fault. I still need to do some payment processing work on the amazon front regarding declined cards / failed payments, etc. Im going to be looking into this immediately after i finish writing this post.

If you hadn't noticed the new nito.tv website launched at the same time chimera(TV) did. You may have also noticed a beta code for people to help beta test it before i finally launch it, there is no way to get this code yet, not until i finish the payment work I mentioned above. Off the top of my head, this is the only thing holding us back anymore.

nControl

Obviously nControl was released a few months ago, to resoundingly positive response (thank you!) It's available on chariz repo for 10$ and is currently my only source of income, so all purchases are greatly appreciated! If you need any additional details about nControl in general I kindly redirect you to the exhaustively documented wiki page that I maintain on the subject: https://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/nControl

The tvOS version is only available through patreon and i'd actually prefer that people no longer go that route, patreon makes it WAY too much effort to get the money they owe you so I massively regret doing that in the first place, just didn't want to launch iOS and tvOS separetely and honestly thought the store would wrap up shortly thereafter.

chimeraTV

For the first time (potentially ever) the tvOS jailbreak was released in tandem with the iOS version of the Electra Teams *OS 12 jailbreak. This was a momentus occasion and was a large source of me being delayed from focusing on completing the nitoTV App Store. Its a rock solid jailbreak (especially with latest release) and I'm quite proud to maintain the tvOS version of it. It covers 12.0 - > 12.1.1 on tvOS, this is due to the fact the Apple staggers version numbers between iOS and tvOS for some unknown and maddening reason. For instance (12.1.2 on iOS == 12.1.1 on tvOS). It drives me just as mad as it does the rest of you, but it's been like that since the beginning of ARM based AppleTVs (send gen +) So I doubt it will ever change.

Candidly it was a bit of a challenge to get AppleBetas awesome UI to cooperate on tvOS but i'm glad iIforced myself to use the same code as much as possible (lots of ifdefs), since its written in Swift you can imagine the fight I put up to avoid using the same code base for the UI stuff. Eventually I acquiesced (yes I do make concessions!)

electraTV

Wow it's really been a long time since i've updated this blog (sorry!) electraTV was released several months before chimera (well the initial versions were, the 11.4.1 iteration wasn't THAT long ago) The electra jailbreak covers ALL versions of 11 (11.0->11.4.1) In its latest jailbreakd2 based iteration it is incredibly stable and reliable. Not much else to say about it!

uicache / ldrestart changes

I wasted most of last week fighting against issues with ldrestart. If you aren't familiar with ldrestart it is responsible for running after jailbreaking or loading any new Tweaks to make sure anything they may inject into gets restarted. With the older version of jailbreakd (in backr00m & versions of electraTV that supported 11.2.1->11.3, but not 11.4.1) couldn't handle the speed at which all the daemons get reloaded by ldrestart, this would lead to a lockup that would result in the system eventually rebooting (after being locked up for several minutes).

ldrestart has actually always been an issue, even when i used a kpp bypass in greeng0blin (Im fairly certain thats accurate!) So as a workaround i used to 'killall -9 backboardd' That would respring enough different things (PineBoard, HeadBoard et al) that i would be sufficient for the things i most commonly injected. Obviously this is a hacky stopgap, and uicache used to also kill a variety of other processes to cover them as well (lsd, appstored, etc) to help cover things like DalesDeadBug.

After coolstar re-wrote uikitools (including uicache) i decided it was probably a good time for me to take a look at uicache again. If you want to know how much of a hassle and challenge uicache was in the earlier days (pre APFS) read some of the older posts on this blog. It's history is covered ad naeuseum.

Since we no longer need to load from /var/mobile/Applications, a lot of the extra hurdles in uicache have ceased to be necessary, essentially all that is really needed is [[LSApplicationWorkspace defaultWorkspace] _LSPrivateRebuildApplicationDatabasesForSystemApps:YES internal:YES user:NO]; + tweak to force App states to return TRUE for isEnabled.

In the course of thinning down uicache I decided it'd be a good time to try and get ldrestart working on tvOS. After battling with it off an on all last week I came up with something that appeared to work pretty consistently on tvOS 12. Instead of being thorough and testing on 10.2.2->11.4.1 as well I hastily released it. This lead some people to get stuck in respring loops / lockups that eventually restarted the device. This was due to the fact that uicache:restart in postinst scripts would trigger ldrestart instead of uicache in nitoTV.

In the older version of uicache there was an issue that existed once our new apps were loaded in the UI, a respring was never "required" but if it didn't occur all applications would exhibit weird behavior where they wouldnt launch, or wouldnt exit once launched, etc, to "fix" that I made it always kill backboardd as a compromise. Since this was also no longer necessary I made uicache killing backboardd "optional" by appending -r. Lack of forsite here, the old nitoTV wouldn't know backboardd wouldn't respring anymore, nor to run ldrestart when finish:restart was received, this lead to people getting stuck with a red progress indicator forever when trying to update to latest (at the time) version of nitoTV.

Due to the depth and gravity of the issue I sidelined getting ldrestart working in backr00m (one of the only places it has show stopping issues still) I reverted to uicache always respringing until I have time to revisit the issue.

In conjunction with deciding I was pouring too much time into this issue Chimera 1.0.6 was released the other night with massive stability improvements. Libtakeover & related injection was stripped out into inject_criticald which provided massively stability improvements for the jailbreak, this made focusing on getting that out a few hours after the iOS release a very high priority.

The big takeaway from all of this:

* uicache run by itself (no arguments) is sufficient to gets apps loaded / removed after installing them into /Applications.

* ldrestart is part of uikittools on tvOS now and should be safe to run on latest electraTV release and chimeraTV release, but won't work at all on backr00m.

if you have installed a tweak and it doesnt seem to be working, try running ldrestart, it should help.

sleepy/wake

Part of the uicache update came the addition of 'sleepy' and 'wake' binaries. Use them from the command line to sleep or wake your AppleTV.

DalesDeadBug

This was recently updated to spoof newer versions, if you can't seem to get it working after installing it, prime candidate to run ldrestart after installing or making changes to that don't seem to be propogating. It works to get SteamLink installed on tvOS 10.2.2, but crashes immediately, not sure if im going to be able to fix it. It won't be possible to make that a priority (I looked into it briefly, thats the best I can do for now).

If you need more info on what DalesDeadBug does, please read the wiki page: https://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/DalesDeadBug

Cycripter

If you didn't notice, yesterday I decided to take one more brief detour to rectify a glaring deficiency in recent jailbreaks, inability to use cycript. I might have my differences with saurik recently, but this is still one of the most amazing projects he ever undertook and gifted to us.

cycripter / CycriptLoader.dylib have been updated and open sourced to make it easier to use cycript on iOS or tvOS. All details necessary can be viewed on the wiki and the git.nito.tv repo.

More Details: https://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/Cycript

Known Issues

I havent kept a very exhaustive list of these, so I'm only going to cover two that I can think of right now.

* Infuse doesn't work on chimeraTV.

Try launching infuse before running the jailbreak (so if you are currently in a jailbroken state, reboot first)

if you run the jailbreak after Infuse has already been open it will work. I don't think it is necessarily any jailbreak detection, but it may be some kind of a protecetion from code injection, im honestly not sure.

* Music app doesn't work

Try updating to the latest version of chimeraTV on https://chimera.sh it didn't work in the prior version for me either, but after the latest install it started working.

Wrap-up

That's it for now, my core focus after this post is going to be to wrap up work on my long delayed tvOS App Store. I really hope to get it wrapped up this week or next. Stay tuned! And if you made it down this far, thanks!!

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phoenixyfriend · 8 years ago

Text

Trans Headcanons for Team Voltron

A few people expressed interest, so here we go! I was mostly musing on some plot ideas for a fic, and then realized that I just... really like the fact that I have enough trans headcanons to actually be able to play around with who feels which way about the concept of gender, body dysphoria, and presentation, since IRL not all trans people have the same approach to these things. Most of this is from a conversation with @firebirdeternal, my usual beta.

Some things to keep in mind: I am not trans, I just like diverse headcanons. @firebirdeternal is nb. I don’t always headcanon a character the same way from one universe to the next. I will almost always headcanon Pidge, Hunk, and Coran as trans. The others more just... happen as I write. Sometimes they are, sometimes they aren’t, depending on which fic it is and what my brain decided was a good idea.

Anyway, I’m sticking this under a Read More because Lance, Matt, and Keith all have multiple paragraphs for their sections and the post got... long.

Hunk is uncomfortable with sexual situations and anything below the belt, but strangely ambivalent about his chest. He’s fine going around without binder so long as he’s wearing a shirt, but super unwilling to do anything involving taking off his pants unless he’s either completely alone or in a medical situation where the medical professional in question doesn’t say cissexist things or try to talk about his genitalia for no reason. On HRT by the time he’s at the Garrison and looking into surgical options to figure out what he’s most comfortable with, but hasn’t actually gotten any yet.

Pidge doesn't super mind being mistaken for a boy, and frequently wears boyish clothes, but there's a lot of gender euphoria for her in stuff like sundresses and long hair. She likes being a girl, but isn’t super bothered by people thinking she’s a dude so long as it really is just a mistake (or her being undercover), and they correct themselves afterwards. She’s also interested in transitioning hormonally and with surgery, and was on puberty blockers before Voltron happened. (Altean medical technology means a safe and nearly painless vaginoplasty, breast prostheses, etc. and Pidge has no hangups at that point.)

Coran transitioned literally centuries ago and is comfortable in his own body, but only due to the fact that Altean surgeries meant he could definitely get the body he WANTED when he wanted it. He had some fairly strong dysphoria before that. He’s pretty solidly a dude though, and hasn’t had the kind of internal debates that Pidge and Lance get since he was very, very young.

Lance's relationship with gender is kind of tenuous. He settled on identifying as a dude a few years ago, but actually likes his vagina and wants a pregnancy at some point (because Lance loves the idea of having kids and is down with being the one to carry them), and has admitted to considering identifying as nb because he still sometimes likes the IDEA of dressing up and being viewed as a woman for a night? He’s a dude. He identifies as a boy/man (he’s at the age where either word works and it doesn’t really matter), but. You know. He’s got some interests that people would consider feminine and he still sometimes looks at women and goes “Huh, I wouldn’t mind looking like that for a day”

firebirdeternal See, I've kind of headcanoned Lance as being very fluid except for one thing, he really doesn't like chest based intimacy with himself. Like that's the one thing that does actually bother him, and it isn't a rational thing for him.

Lance's gender is a complicated thing that he's mostly just given up on trying to untangle. He tells people he's a dude and stays fairly solid on that unless he super trusts someone, because a lot of people have tried to dictate his gender FOR him when he explains the details. He doesn’t actually think it’s that big of a deal? Hell, even when he considers “would it make more sense to identify as genderfluid or bigender or something,” it’s usually with about the same level of seriousness as picking out which color boxers he wants to put on after a shower, or what flavor his Frappuccino of the day is going to be, because he’s comfortable in his own skin at this point and as far as he’s concerned, that’s all that matters?

It’s just that other people keep trying to tell him that it’s a big deal and that is Very Tiring.

firebirdeternal I like that a lot. Sticking to the label you know people will at least SEE rather than get into the complexities of how you really feel, at least with people you don't trust yet.

Since I mentioned it for the others: he got top surgery but isn’t interested in anything else.

Relevant: I know a trans guy who occasionally dresses in drag (mostly 1700s dresses because he's a history nerd, or...well, some old thing like that), and I like to think that Lance, even as a trans dude, would probably still dress in drag sometimes, because clothing isn't inherently gendered (fuck you, Victorians) and also GLITTER IS FUN AND SO IS DANCING and anyway, Lance would definitely still be down for crossplay and RuPaul’s Drag Race levels of Extra and wearing dresses even when he’s firmly sure that he’s a dude because it’s just a pretty outfit.

Keith's dysphoria kind of... oscillates? I don't headcanon him as trans often, but when I do I usually headcanon him as an "out of sight, out of mind" person. If he's wearing a binder and pants, then he doesn't have to think about it. If he isn't, then it's really a flip of the coin.

firebirdeternalyeah, he seems very much like: The less he has to think about it the happier he is. I can honestly see a scene where Keith has a mild breakdown because he has to get a new binder and it gives him Bad Sensory Issues because of something different about the fabric.

(NOTE: Both firebirdeternal and I headcanon Keith as autistic, since...well. There’s evidence for it in canon, and we like to project.)

This affects his approach to sex. If he's having a high dysphoria day, then he doesn't really want to be on the receiving end of anything? He's perfectly happy pleasuring his partner most of the time, but not... actually touching himself or being touched Like That. On the other hand, sometimes the dysphoria is barely there and anything goes. Definitely interested in HRT but not super comfortable with the idea of any kind of surgery, even with Altean medical tech.

firebirdeternal Yeah, up and down days, basically. I just... I love the trans Coran headcanon so much, especially when paired with any number of trans paladin ones, because I can just see him being such a good Space Dad to the kids. Like, even with the differences in Culture he'd be So There for them.

I only recently started playing around with trans Matt headcanons, and I think he's kind of similar to Pidge in that he's mostly about the gender EUphoria, and he got top surgery before Kerberos and doesn't really care about below the belt. I think the best way to put it for Matt is that he's trans but ranks that fact lower on his list of Important Identities than the others (save for Lance) do.

firebirdeternal He likes feeling like a Cool Guy Anime Protagonist honestly.

He's trans, and open about it, but it's not a thing he really thinks warrants much attention or discussion or even self-reflection? He'd rather play video games and gush over his little sister's coding.

EXCEPT FOR THE PUNS.

Matt is all about the queer jokes.

firebirdeternal Oh god he loves them. HC that Matt came out of the closet at like 12 with a joke because the opening his mom gave him was TOO GOOD to be ignored, and after a split second his mom and dad were just giggling up a storm and hugging him. Pidge too.

Colleen already had suspicions but her first reaction was a snort and a facepalm. "So THAT'S how you've chosen to come out."

firebirdeternal All this followed by GRATUITOUS AMOUNTS OF REASSURANCE. Pidge is like "Matt come out again, mom baked brownies for like three weeks the last time you did"

"I already told her I was bi and trans, there's nothing LEFT."

(I've also played around with Matt being intersex but I'm not comfortable delving much deeper into that, especially on a public platform, until I've done some more research on intersex representation and common issues so I know I’m not doing anything offensive with the headcanon.)

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stone-man-warrior · 4 years ago

Text

February 16, 2021: 4:11 pm:

===============================================

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1361794122777038850

I am trying to access my email so I post the photo’s of weather in southern Oregon I just took a moment ago, but the terror army has plagued me with dreaded “Spinning Curser” and the email won‘t open at Yahoo.com.

Just makes a blank white page:

I accessed, here is one of the photos taken few minutes ago:

Looking south west, sunny, partly cloudy, cold:

now they hijacked the phone, but I was able to send this one before that happened. The bastards want for you to believe the Oregon is experiencing harsh weather, and in the mountains there may be some snow fall today, but not in the valley areas of Southern Oregon:

Looking south west at about 4:15 pm today, 2-16-2021:

4:40 pm:

I finally was able to show you photo’s taken thirty minutes ago, the terror bastards at Centuryink don‘t want be sending photo’s to my email, and they don’t like what I say here online at all, so, they hijack everything I do, while keeping me held captive inside my house. There are terror bastards out front making sure I don’t go anywhere right now.

Looking north west:

Looking north east:

I want to tell you about that house there again.

I started to build that house in 2004. All work had to stop in 2006.

It’s all permitted, the work you can see there is all inspected and signed off by building inspectors, there is an approved and brand new septic system there is installed, approved, signed off, never used in association with that house, and was installed before the foundation for the house was poured. I have money, and I have had nothing but time to complete that house, I have experience, and I know how to build to build things.

What I don’t have is freedom.

Whenever I go inside of my own house there, one I build, and paid for, designed and want to live in, whenever I go in there, when I come out, there are terror soldiers there at the door waiting for me to come out. If I don’t lock the door when I go in there, the terror soldiers go in behind me, and attack me inside of that incomplete house. That white you see around the outside is the undersiding vapor barrier wrap, it’s been there since 2006 uncovered, and I have all of the siding that goes on the house. The siding has rotted, I’ll have to buy more if national security send US Military to stop the terror so I can complete my house.

I have all of the wood flooring too, but that also rotted since 2006. I’ll have to buy more if the freedom to enjoy it ever returns to Oregon.

There is about $15,000 dollars worth or materials that all rotted outside, stuff I had purchased to build the house. But terror soldiers gained strength and increased in number, killed all of the Oregon population, and took over the whole state of Oregon, so, I had to stop the work, stop trying to finish the house or else I would be dead. They tried to kill me all over that house so many times, that I decided to just lock it up and forget about it so that I can stay alive.

It’s been locked completely since 2008. I have only gone in there enough to know that when I do, there are people waiting to kill me when I come back out of it. So, I don‘t even go in there anymore unless I really need to get something from there to save my life, and even then, it’s risky just to quickly go in and come back out again.

no one will send any help.

====================

Why did ABC news include Oregon on a list of Southern states experiencing deadly weather where the power company is shutting the power off, to take advantage of a Ivanka Trump Oportunity Zone where the weather is blamed as the lineman cuts the power with an App on an iPhone.

===============

5:16 pm:

True story:

I explained about that incomplete house a few different times in the past on this account, and I mentioned the “undersiding vapor barrier”.

I told of a lot of terrorism, and some national security personnel were sent to investigate, and the local sheriff directed those people to Monroe’s instead of to my house.

The sheriff made arrangements about some of the details I had mentioned in the explanation of the incomplete house, so, Monroe’s put an old dog house near their pond, and, they laid some black roofing vapor barrier on the ground near their pond also, and some other items.

When the national security people showed up, at the wrong place, at Monroe’s, I heard the conversation when the question was asked about: “where is that house you were talking about online?”

Monroe’s pointed out that old dog house they they had put near the pond. Jeff says: “I built it myself, but the dog died, so, we put his house here by the pond to remember him with”.

“Right” said the national security officer as the poison gas started to take affect.

“Then where is the vapor barrier you mentioned?”

Then Sandy Monroe said: “It’s right here, I am standing on it”

She was standing on some roofing felt that had been laid on the ground like carpet.

The national security people had been fooled by the Sheriff, who sent them to Monroe’s, who fooled them some more, and Chartrand from 376 pretending to be a Oregon State Police escorting the national security people, killed the national security people. Then, a team of imposters went to the HQ where those guys had come from, and killed everyone there at the national security HQ.

I don‘t know what particular agency was sent and was interested in the Vapor Barrier, or the house, but what they were supposed to find was that house pictured above, not a dog house.

About one month ago, Monroe’s removed that old dog house from the pond area, and now there is a great big rock where that dog house was for a long time. The vapor barrier felt was still on the ground around the pond there the last time I looked not long ago,

But now, there is a dog house out front of 445 Jackpine, and, there, the same kind of thing was done before, with same dog house, and the same terror bastards who are there now. So, that means nothing is going to change, because he US national security are going to be fooled again, that is why ABC news included Oregon on that list of southern states, I responded to that the very same way, with photo’s. The Centurylink terror cell in association with Google will use a photo “Mask” to put a photo of a dog house over top of the one I showed there, a two story incomplete home.

US national security insists on being fooled, They simply refuse to do their own research, will not do their jobs, national security will not have any other way, they will only accept being fooled all of the time, it’s as though they were trained to be fooled, and only know how to be very good fools.

They keep trusting the local authorities, cannot read what I am telling them, won’t see that I am giving them all of the information necessary to stay alive, to stay safe, to solve and stop 90% of all of the terrorism on earth forever.

They don‘t want to do that, they are trained, professional fools.

===============================================

Local Conditions:

Cold, about 35 degrees F, I did not read the thermometer. Absence of wind, partly cloudy.

I went to the mailboxes at dusk today, just now returned, a five minute walk, about 1600 feet round-trip.

One terror soldier’s nitrous oxide tank ignited at Chartrand 376 Jackpine terror cell, or, from the place known as “Car Bridge” in the back yard at Monroe terror cell. The terror soldier launched towards the south, went far, assuming a 5″ or even maybe a 6 inch nitrous tank given the sound and distance of the southbound launch, terror soldier is in orbit.

The only noteable observation that can be associated to terror communications for further fooling federal fools nearby is a gate. There is an enclosed, fenced in marijuana growing pen at Monroe’s, it can be seen in some of the photo’s I have posted before. That has a chained link fence style gate attached usually, but today there is an “enormous gaping hole” where the gate was, and the gate that is supposed to be there, is leaning against the perimeter of the enclosure.

They will use that as a cover for internet search I did early this morning.

I don‘t like the new people at 445. I know basically who they are and why they were sent there to 445 Jackpine, they have been there before, moved in, at a time before the Bell terror cell moved in about 8 or nine years ago, then moved out after only staying about one month or so. The people at 445 are special assassins associated to Google, and to United States Postal Service Portland Oregon HQ, and I suspect they are from an area called “The Dalles” Oregon, perhaps “Lebanon Oregon“ near Salem, best guess is there are people from both areas there at 445 Jackpine.

Reminder: US Postal Service is hijacked nation wide. That happened in the early 1970′s, the terrorism that is done through USPS is old, established, and they have become very good at what they do, are well connected at the highest leadership to terror operatives globally.

United States Postal Service is known as “The Stork”.

All of the news stories that feature an FBI agent by the name of “Peter Strzok” and his girlfriend “Lisa Page” are all coded stories about events that were taking place at the time the stories were first presented on Twitter, and that first presentation was ten years before the time that the stories about them were shown nationally on Twitter from “US Congressional Hearings”. The original presentation of those hearings was done on Beta Twitter in Oregon only, separate from anything seen in the rest of USA, at a time before Twitter was released to the public for use as a “Social Media Platform”. It’s a “Social Mass Murder Platform” where “Time Warp Terror” is so complex, so unbelievable, that no one is interested in hearing any stories of truth about it.

The Peter Strzok name was developed to use as a placeholder to say news and updates about something that was happening with “The Stork”, United Stated Postal Service. “The Stork” is reference to a service they do, a service where one terror cell, serves other terror cells. Child Trafficking of kidnapped US Citizen Children is the service, where the children are “Delivered by the Stork” to Seventh Day Adventist nannies where “Home Schooling” is said to be done. Many children, or, just one, either way, the children are kidnapped, mothers are used as slaves mostly, fathers are killed, or are used as “Specimens” for the terror surgeons to perform experimental amputation and plastic surgery on them, where they become “partners” if they are selected to and are kept as pets by SAG members, or, are killed at the close of the experiments performed on them.

“Lisa Page” inclusion in all of that, is about “Making a blank page” for part of the desired outcome that those fake hearings were about. When you put the parts of that puzzle together, you can see that “The Steel Dossier” is about the surgical procedures, Strzok is about the Stork, and Lisa Page is about removing any exposed knowledge about that stuff. Those are only three small parts to the bigger puzzle, includes James Comey, and that is best described as “Mini-Me” from the stupid movie the idea came from. That whole movie is communication about the same things as the Congressional Hearings were about, and that part of the puzzle will only be seen when you consider that the first, original presentation of those hearings happened on Beta Twitter, ten years before anyone saw them outside of Beta Twitter.

You need to understand that the terror take over of USA with use of Twitter to say the marching orders, and with Time Warp Terror pre-recorded news presentations, includes a lot of “Damage Control Presentations”, some are very specific, such as is the case with the “Comey, Strzok, Page, Steel Dossier Congressional Hearings” were specific to damage control associated with US Postal Service terror that was made public, and the kidnapping they do at USPS, and the experimental surgery centers such as the one in Medford called The Pleasure Dome, the one that was built by Bill Gates in around 1989 - 1994 or so, and they built a housing tract neighborhood on top of the underground secret experimental laboratory where humans are surgically changed to the whims of a SAG Member who specifies details such as arm length, placement of hands, breasts, which direction the victims knees or ankles will bend, and facial features, such as nose size, number of eyes, and more. The procedures are horrible beyond imagination.

(this font style is not my doing, others are controlling the font, I can’t change it back to normal, so, I am going to stop saying truth because clearly, no help has come, and Centurylink and Google terror operatives are still in control of the internet, preventing the help from finding me so I could be more helpful in person.

I left the people at 445 Jackpine a small token of my interests in them.

Speculation is the small gift I left there for them.

====================================

7:16 PM:

Russian Interference is a command order. It means: “We need to make Russian Mother of all Hoaxes size, history changing, Mandella Effect style, major lies to cover the kidnapping, surgeries and where they are done, and to protect the USPS pirate ship”

=====================================

7:24 pm:

Alph symbols play in here with that font change the bastards are doing to me.

nsa needs to learn to see shapes, at least part of the time.

When you see a tweet from a major news outlet or government account, where there is a text sentence that is so complex, that the author of the tweet was able to expane a whole bunch of information, way more than is usually seen in a tweet, with a single sentence, or maybe two of them, that activity means “Dodacagon” or “Dodehedron“ ... twelve sided object. could be any kind of poly-faceted shape, means “complexity” and is a statement about a concept where a Triangular Prizm is the strongest of all shapes, is the simplest form of a three dimensional shape, has only four sides, is nearly indestructible.

The way to foul up investigations is sometimes a old lawyers trick, where the mandatory “discovery” that that each lawyer must present to the other in a court case, is flooded with “way too much information”. The lawyer only needs to send a copy of phone bill as the discovery, instead, he sends the entire contents of the Library at Alexandria, in a truck, with forklifts to move the discovery into the courtroom, in large wooden crates, on pallets.

The opposing attorney needs to find the phone bill in there somewhere.

That attorney just became a dodehedron in a world controlled by Triangular Prisms.

Shapes are important, Alpha-shapes.

For instance:

H = Structure; Strength

U = a Magnet; Opposing Forces; Polar Opposites

A = A Jet; Wings; Flight

W = Double; Twin; Duplicate

E = Three; Trinity; Father, Son, Holy Spirit + Vatican (the connecting I is the pirate ship)

I = One; E Pluribus Unum (is sometimes said with a “Y” “Y Pluribus Unum”)

So, Hauwai is more than it appears to be. Is not a Chinese electronic manufacturer, is a Vatican powered Hong Kong British/SAG/Hollywood electronics manufacturer of high tech gadgets and gizmo;s that are way ahead of their time because the schematics come from the hijacked US Patent Office, and those products are developed by terror manufacturers, while keeping the new technology secret. Terror has all the latest tech, US national security has old tech.

H = Structure; Strength

T = A Cross, has no heaven, only the hell portion below the horizontal member is there. ( “t” has a heaven and a hell portion)

M = Trinity turned vertical w/built in Flying V

L = Ell. The cut made by the Flying V

Put HTML together after you learn who Bill Gates really is, and after you accept that Google is the Vatican, and then you will see much better how fucked everyone is while Twitter is still tweeting.

Hyper Text Markup Language, indeed.

=============================

8:26 pm:

Yesterday I saw something that looked like good news. Today, that observation turned back into bad news.

It’s about the forced air heating unit. The one I keep explaining about where the Honeywell thermostat I was roped into buying has secret remote control operation, and the terror bastards around here all have the iPhone App that can change the way the heating system operates.

Yesterday, I looked at the outdoor compressor, and there was no ice build up around it for the first time in many weeks. The weather outdoors has not changed much, the weather is not the reason the ice went away.

I looked at it again today, and the ice is caked thick around the outdoor compressor again, just exactly the way it’s been doing this winter, The thing would work correctly if the Honeywell thermostat was not a secret terrorist remote control tool for hurting US Citizens, and yesterday and for about a 24 hour period, the heater was working normally.

now, I am noticing that the outdoor compressor turns on, and begins to operate each time I use the restroom to take a piss. I don’t even have to turn on the lightswitch, just the sound of the urine hitting the water in the toilet turns the outdoor compressor on, and it starts to operate. The thing shuts down shortly after I leave the restroom, and the house stays cold while the electric bill indicates that I am using electricity for a heating unit that actually works the way it’s supposed to.

============

8:45 pm:

Real terror scenario:

The local authorities are terror operatives.

They control a delicate situation.

There are federal agents who are aware of reports of terrotism

The federal agents contact the local authorities to make contact with the source of the report about real terrorism.

The local authorities arrange a stand-in actor terror operative to portray the person who made the report about real terrorism.

The real terrorism report includes that the person who made the report is held in captivity by the terrorists that are reported in the report made by the captive report maker.

The people holding the report maker captive include the local authorities who were contacted by the federal agents.

The Federal agents request that the local authorities ask the report maker some identifying questions.

The local authorities send the stand-in actor to go the where the report maker is held captive, to use nitrous oxide, medazolam, other surgical grade anesthetic gasses, to poison the report maker, then ask the requested questions, and record the answers provided by the report maker held in captivity and was subjected to surgical anesthetics, and recorded when questioned.

The stand-in transferes the recording to the local authority who is part of the terrorism that was reported by the report maker who answered the questions honestly when asked while under influence of anesthetic gasses, which are also part of the terrorism reported to the federal agents.

The local authority plays the recorded tape made by the stand-in who asked the identifying questions for the federal agents who recieved the report from the person who is held in captivity by terrorists, that include the local authorities.

The federal agents are satisfied that they spoke with the correct person, who is still held captive by the terrorists reported about.

After that, the one who made the report and is still held captive is out of the loop, does not know what happens next, is held captive by terrorists armed with poison gas, that includes the local authorities are the terrorists holding the person captive.

The Federal agents are satisfied.

The person who is held captive, remains held captive by the local authorities, who are in charge of a delicate situation.

The local authorities simply await the next group of federal agents who are interested in asking some identifying questions from the person who made the report.

For twenty four years.

The local authorities are part of the terrorism reported, one of their primary functions is to deal with calls made in response to reports of terrorism, and to spin whatever details were revealed, into some other direction. They can and do use the county jail for such cover, where they installed an email system that can be used by the so called jailed prisoners, but there are no jailed prisoners, instead, there are actors, who are a terror cell that works under direction of the local authorities at the sheriffs office. They can claim the the person who made the report about terrorism did that with use of the email system that was installed inside of the jail. That way when the federal agents call, asking about the terror report, the local authority terror operative just does his job as he always has, as a trained specialist who handles incoming calls from federal agents who’s job is to follow up on reports of terrorism. They are told the person making the report is inside the jail, that makes the identifying question session easy for the local authority terror special operative to explain how the recording was made to identify the person who made the report about terrorism, which includes that the person making the report is held captive. All the federal agents hear is the person agrees that he is held captive, and the assume that captivity is inside of the jail, but that is not the kind of captivity that is being done. The captivity is real, is all explained in the report made by the one who needs the help. But the federal agents insist on being fooled all of the time, so, they believe what the local authorities tell them, they don‘t do their jobs, won‘t read the report, they love Twitter, and they don‘t do national security work when the work requires that they do their own research to learn truth. The federal agents are trained to fail, instructed about how to be the best fools they can be.

USA is hijacked as that continues, endlessly, with thousands of terror operatives installed at local authority levels of government all over the nation, such that there is no possible way for any citizen ever to contact federal national security i effort to report what they know about real terrorism. Those local authority level operatives are all Screen Actor Guild graduates of acting school, it’s their job to deceive others.

Actors are people who’s pay increases along with their skills of deception. That is how academy awards are won, with deceptive acting skills. no one ever won an Oscar for being themselves when the role required acting like a cop.

============

9:57 am:

January 22, 2021: 3:20 am:

That entry is next in the lineup when I view my Tumblr account.

The view shows today’s entry, this one I am writing in, then, scroll down and I see that other one from last month. I started that one early in the morning, could not sleep, something else was on my mind, so I wrote something, I did not write the whole thing at that hour, it was only started at the time.

So, I feel as though someone somewhere wants me to make comment about that particular entry,

I don‘t know what more there is to say, If you want to me to expand on that, why not interview me in person?

I can say more about everything contained in all nearly 900 entries here on this Tumblr account but there has never been any one interested in knowing more, so, what could possibly be expanded on without an interview?

Why not send US Military?

The whole state of Oregon, all of the millions of US Citizens are all dead, or some are held captive, there are no more US Citizens in Oregon.

There are no more US national Guard servicemen.

All of the US national guard bases are occupied by Canadian terror soldiers who are wearing US Guard uniforms. The commanding officers are not Guard officers, they are all actors who’s primary job is to do lesion work when other, real US Military tries to make contact with the bases. They are trained actors who’s job is to deceive others.

The entire west coast of USA is in the same kind of condition as Oregon is in, all hijacked, citizens all turned into erosion abatement, sprayed onto the roadsides. What part of that is not clear?

Let’s be more clear:

The terror army set up shop at the Walmart in the early part of the 2000′s. They pretended to do a asbestos construction removal project there. They set up a giant size modified commercial grade chipper/shredder with big hopper on it for large material, such as human being Walmart shoppers. They captured the people, put them into the shredder, turned them into liquid, added water, and some seeds, then that material was sprayed onto the road sides. Oregon government paid the contractors to do that work as Erosion Abatement.

At the places where the “Red Hydroseed” was sprayed, *liquefied US Citizen Walmart shoppers) there was a mesh material laid onto the surface of the roadsides first. It was put there for two reasons. One is to keep the erosion abatement seeds in place to grow, so it won‘t wash away, was a practical application. The other reason is that the people who are doing this mass murdering are religious Christian Cult freaks, so, that mesh serves as “crosses” to mark the millions of graves. The mesh is composed of thousands of crossed strands of fabric, so, to the terror army, that stuff served as the cross on the grave because of the crossed fabric strings.

I’ll go ahead and re-read the January 22, 2021 entry again, but I already glanced at it, it looks like it’s the way I wrote it.

There is no one telling me to do this, it’s just that the Tumbly time line is out of sequential order and I don‘t know why. That, and I did send a request for help to the White House the other day, so, maybe someone is interested, is trying to reach me in ways they are able to.

OK? right now, I have food burning on the stove, and food is difficult to get, so I am to finish with that before i do the re-read.

=================================

10:38 pm:

Ok, I looked at the January 22, 2021: 3:20 am post.

I was mistaken about how much of that was written in the early morning, I kept doing terror decoding work until about 5:00 am that morning, I started a separate post later after getting some sleep. There are two January 22 posts.

I do recall waking up with something I felt important enough to try to decode, what that early morning post is about, leads to Ann Wilson and Roger Waters are the real acting US Presidential persons, who are the ones who are really in charge, in favor of Canadian interests in Quebec, and British interests at House of Lords in UK.

That morning I spent some time working out some terror commands that were presented on Twitter that day, and I had been thinking about, so, I wrote some things down the same way I do everyday to try to get some help to come to Oregon by explaining why the help is necessary, all of that, just so I can get some help to stop these people around me from trying to kill me every day.

So, Ann Wilson and others, such as Roger Waters, are people I have know personally all of my life, but still, no one cares about what I know or don’t know, everyone loves Corona Virus too much, they all want to get the required COVID 19 Smart Phone and become terror soldier pirates for the Vatican/SAG/Britain/Canada, to help to kill any one is does not want the required COVID Smart Phone ,,, and basically, that is COVID, either you sign up as a terror pirate, use the fucking phone for spying on everyone, or, they will kill you, and everyone is in love with that so much they don‘t even want any freedom anymore.

So, I don‘t have any thing further to add to the January 22 entry. What you see is me doing terror decode work early in the morning, just like every other post on this account. There is nothing special about that one, so, I don‘t know why it was put out of order for me to see like that.

I did not do a great job of explaining what I found. If you want a great explanation, come to talk to me in person, and send US Military so that the terror army does not kill us both when the interview takes place.

===========================================

11:04 pm:

I’ll make some additional comments about last nights walk to the maibox when Dietrick terror cell from 601 Jackpine drove by with a trailer in the white Ford pick-up truck, the one with the yellow lights on the rearview mirrors.

There was a “Runner” alongside the truck as I reached the end of my driveway. A “Runner” is a swordsman who runs alongside a vehicle to take out a marked victim on an ambush by using the vehicle as a cover while the victim is on the way to be at an expected location, such as the moment when I walk to the mailbox and get to the place where the driveway ends, and the road begins.

There, the Runner broke from the cover of the Dietricks vehicle, and I already knew there was some terror soldiers there, one female had burst by the time the runner broke from cover and attacked with the sword. I was positioned at the best place to maintain my own safety, and to meet the Runner head on. As the Runner approached, I defended, grabbed the sword, turned in around, and ran the sword through the Runner, who retreated into the manzanita tree at the corner where my driveway meets the road at Jackpine. I went to the mailbox, I observed the assholes at 445 who were assisting in the ambush. I saw that the Runner had crawled out to the middle of Jackpine, then, the Runner’s nitrous oxide tank ignited, from my Bic Lighter about 100 feet away. The Runner launched from the roadway, to nearby the Offensive Monroe Surveillance Travel Trailer, maybe landed on the roof of that trailer.

I went home.

There was a female inside my house.

I defended against the female.

Best memory I have is I used my personal fingernail clippers, two of them, to defend, and the terror soldier’s head was removed by about 90%, left dangling, and I escorted her to the door, and she walked out with head dangling.

I wrote what I wrote about “Local Conditions” and while that was being done, that asshole across the street at 445 was interfering with my words as I was writing and I was angry for having to defend myself all of the time without ever any one who is willing to help.

And that is what happened.

=====================

February 17, 2021: 12:00 am:

The magic numbers here are the “Total Seats in the U.S. House of Representatives”

I don‘t have the answers, and there are no people who are asking any questions, but if questions were asked that were based on knowledge that can be gained by studying this Tumblr account, then, those answered questions would reveal much about California, the people who live in Hollywood, their goals, and would even explain the truth about the Titsie Fly, (Teensie Fly) and the real reason California built a fence around it, in the form of “Agricultural Checkpoints”. Further study would show the reason they are called “Check Points” (grocery checker terror).

That House of Representatives number is a magic number. It does not require much thought to see that more, is better, for select people who want to have their way at the expense of others.

https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_population#:~:text=List%20of%20U.S.%20states%20by%20population%20%20,%20%2019,378,102%20%208%20more%20rows

About 40 million people in CA is what that says is the population.

Washington State rounds to about 8 million.

Oregon comes in at about 4 million people inhabit the state.

Add those up:

52 million people, roughly.

Quick research suggests that Adolf Hitler’s extermination of people was around 11 million people.

Ok, so, that means in the three west coast states of California, Oregon, and Washington State, five times the number of people have been killed as a result of the British/Vatican/SAG mass murder fest over the past fifty years, than were reportedly exterminated by nazi’s.

That is only three US states.

The populations in the three states mentioned are all derived of a murdered US Citizen, is not going to be easy to calculate, because in California, the population there is composed of many fifth generation terror family members, who technically are US Citizens because they were born in USA, after their grand parents and great grand parents murdered the people who’s family names are being used by those fifth generation terror family cell members, Oregon is third generation. I don’t have necessary information about Washington state to know how long the place has been hijacked.

What’s more, is not going to be very popular to say, but the history told about the nazi exterminations is part of the Russian Mother of all Hoaxes. It’s part true, part Gnosis. The stories told were hijacked, modified, sprinkled with bullshit in order to serve the needs of the British, so they can use those details of the past, as fodder for a shell language to say commands that are contemporary mass murder information, updates, and orders to terror cells around the world.

The Diary of Ann Frank was false.

It was a tool used to get USA involved in the war in Europe, or, it was part of an excuse to say that USA involvement was a humanitarian effort when it will show that none of it was a humanitarian effort at all.

It’s easier to see that the Pearl Harbor attack was fake than to see that US involvement in WWII in Europe was something other than what we are told it was. The best evidence I can see about the outcome of WWII is the presence of Israel, it’s very existence and the reasons we are told it exists. The truth about is going to show that Israel is there to take over the middle eastern parts of Eurasia. Israel to that region is a lot like the Monroe terror cell is to my house, an ever present threat in range to watch, listen, and attack with help from other surrounding terror cells.

But that is not why I put the link to the Wikipedia page about populations, that was put there to get some attention to that House of Representatives number, and to think about why that number is important for like minded groups of people to control.

=======

2-17-2021: 12:42 am:

I suspect there will be a result to what I wrote above there about the Diary of Ann Frank, it happened before, they might do it again.

Joe Biden‘s terror team will do a code name for this account, they will say it’s Code name is “Diary of Ann Frank”, then, someone will see that one sentence there that says I believe that the diary is false, then, that will be used to close out any further investigations, because the code name is Diary of Ann Frank.

That is the way real terrorism is done, with stupid shit by stupid people who refuse to do their own research. Joe Biden and his fetish for little red headed girls will win. That’s the reason Joe is president, as long as he has access to what he wants, he won‘t be doing anything to stop terrorism, so, to stop terrorism, first you have to make sure that Joe Biden does not get near any little girls, no matter what color hair they have.

===============================

Fred Meyer is trending on Twitter:

That’s Kroger Family of Brands.

https://twitter.com/Oregonian/status/1361916778318815234

Information I have is that the Grants Pass Fred Meyer always has thrown away more produce and other perishables than they sell.

Fred Meyer is famous for the highest of high quality fruits and vegetables they carry there, and it’s that high quality produce that is the reason why the Screen Actor Guild members who come to Grants Pass on SAGClubMed heroin mass murder Junket fest, shop at the Fred Meyer stores.

They demand the best, Kroger supplies them with what they want in between fixes, and baby killings.

It’s the Ralph’s Markets that you need to have a closer look at for learning about the roots of the terrorism. The Ralph’s Market on the corner of Roscoe Blvd and Topanga Canyon Blvd was hijacked in about 1972, so was the one next to Taft High School nearby Ventura Blvd at the same time.

There at the Roscoe store, they installed turnstiles at the exit, no one could bring a shopping cart out of the store, everyone had to make a lot trips to the car and back, then, people started to park their cars there at the entrance, and that is where many shoppers disappeared to, they were kidnapped by the people who were in the cars at parked at the entrance, when the turnstiles prevented the carts from leaving the store. Then, the fire marshal showed up, and the terrorists in the cars at the front entrance killed the fire marshal, stole the fire trucks he brought with him, and they took over all of he fire stations in the Valley. After that, the new Fire Marshal went around to all of the schools, to do “fire inspections” they killed all of the students except the ones they wanted to keep.

Kroger Foods Family of Brands.

Cast of Friends:

Searchable data base of the worlds most notorious mass murderers has been right at your fingertips since the day it was put there. IMdB.com.

Round them all up. Take them to Easter Island, drop them off.

https://www.imdb.com/

==========================

These two tweets below are really big news:

The one about Un & Un means “one + one = two”

It means media is worried about the current level of math being done by global security personnel.

https://twitter.com/BBCWorld/status/1361884606811820032

This one spells out the level of math being done by global security personnel.

Boris explains that he has received some phone calls from people who know how to do math. He seems exited about it.

That’s good news, let’s make sure Boris gets more and more excited about math class in next few days. He should be ecstatic by the time the fourth year geometry collage students begin to call.

https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1361755852001148939

Symantec at Centurylink/Google terror consortium is fucking with me again:

That, and suddenly the whole house smells like a bin filled with dirty socks from a girls locker room.

Geometry lesson:

Earth is a sphere.

This next part is about cylinder shapes:

youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lLo1LM7uJyo

A Trans Lux Presentation.

===================

February 17, 2021: 2:17 am:

This is a heads up to investigative persons:

The tweet below and others like it, says: “Dick’s see chicks”

It means there is a big call for SAG Schwagg service. Investigative persons will be inundated, surrounded by armies of pretty girls, everywhere they look.

Patty Gurdy will be around every corner, with an interesting instrument, the likes of which they have never seen before.

Also on Twitter now is a lot of small children in the photography (1 + 1 = another) it’s about math and getting screwed, is a double edge sword, covers both ends of the terror, the investigative people and the subjects of the investigations.

There is even some tweets about Harry Dunn, and he is the poster child for “Grade A Human Skin“ used on Twitter, usually it’s a “leather” kind of human skin grade, but this time it looks more like the schwagg variety of skin.

https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1361940602783416324

Steer clear of Patty Gurdy’s.

no army on earth can defend against a small platoon of Patty Gurdy’s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pyIXR3s8OtY

youtube

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antojai · 8 years ago

Text

What is Antojai energy healing?

Antojai, and the cravings of life

Reiki & Antojai.

Universal life energy & the Craving energies of life.

It's pretty powerful stuff.

Speed mini-lesson:

The conscious and subconscious are similar to the master drives running your computer. Your brain & mind would be the actual interface you normally would interact with.

Similarly, You can go within the subconscious like you would a terminal to delete, rewrite, and retrieve individual files.

The subconscious is an active realm similar to a ever-changing labyrinth. It is constantly aware of itself, its surroundings, and the conscious.

If has the ability to change to protect itself if needed.

When you dive into the subconscious, this labyrinth program 99.8% of the time will represent itself as you, a version of you. It has the ability to change from a conscious interactive mode to a environmental superconscious mode (the labyrinth). The labyrinth is only present when the subconscious-you feels threatened. It takes this form so that whoever is within the subconscious, cannot access vital files your subconscious believes to be necessary for it's existence. It’s not impossible to access, navigate, or manipulate your subconscious. You just need to know the master rules and codes to stay ahead of the game when dealing with it.

Those codes & rules are Antojai, ascended energy healing. It transcends space, time, existence, light, love, the physical, and the metaphysical all at once… or individually.

Research:

In 2016, I discovered and developed the next stage of energy medicine. I ran experiments after having discovered Antojai, and I directly compared this energy medicine to the last discovered energy healing method, Reiki.

For the last two years, I’ve run experiments on men, women (one of them pregnant), children, plants, and animals; and dealt with cases such as extreme depression, anxiety, suicidal tendencies, paranoia, ADHD, PTSD, insomnia, physical pains, fibromyalgia, kidney stones, disassociated personality disorder, and subconscious re-programming. More studies are coming as they finish. All have shown HUGE impacts on wellness. My studies have span over different time presets to fully view the range of Antojai. Both Reiki and Antojai can be practiced via distance healing, but Antojai still maintains the ability to add precision to any subject.

I practiced on subjects unaware of my experiments, and subjects informed about some details. In the end, my discovery of the impact of these healing energies on the human experience was motivating and rewarding. More on my studies as my handbook progresses.

So, here’s the run down on Antojai. Reiki is powerful, but it has a particular limit; it can't reach the deepest portions of the subconscious that perpetuates a negative state. Reiki will help the subconscious, but to a certain degree due to its generalization. In theory reiki heals from the outside in, where Antojai works from the inside out. With Antojai, you directly manipulate the subconscious mind, realms, and beyond. This is awesome for people...lets say that have a serious problem breaking a particular habit. Antojai literally begins to erase the “Glitched data” within the subconscious; and then leaves a free space to add something new, or you can rewrite the habit all together. With it you can pinpoint exact locations of problems not only in the subconscious, but each individual chakra gate. Antojai literally has a key access to the 12 chakra system. So lets say you realize during reiki that the source of the problem lies in the sacral chakra...you can change the frequency of healing to Antojai Sacral, you then manipulate that individual chakra manually for the better. By using Antojai, the Master uses kundalini, medical shamanism, and other master signatures. All which I can get into later as we go along. Reiki in a sense is part of the Antojai set, but Usui used individual symbols to target generalized concepts. The master signature of Antojai is Life, which is slightly different than the Usui layout of Universal life, but stronger in a completely different way. It’s like changing Reiki to only the master "Dai Ko Myo."

In order for someone to use Antojai, the sole requirement is shifting your reality. I personally did this through years of training in other realms, & intense induced transcendental meditations. These meditations were focused on releasing your mind from the concepts of reality. The concepts we are fooled into accepting as law. What does that mean? You need to transcend the concept of time, space, and the physical not like you would reiki. You have to make an internal shift of your definition of those concepts, and others not mentioned here.

Strong Reiki masters are needed because Antojai requires the ability to control, intake, and release high amounts of energy not usual for beta-human physiology. The akashic records indicate that Reiki is the first step to manipulation of other life frequencies. Then would come Antojai, and finally if you master both- you would become an Ascended Master that would be tasked with finding other life frequencies for whatever purpose the universe decides to task you. For instance, after Antojai I found the signature of Water, and by using it you can super shock the body into a high healing state by manipulating the water cells in the body to their purest state. Hence creating a domino effect on the cellular sanctity of the patient, etc.

Another reason why only select masters can use Antojai is because the records have a huge warning label: it's powerful. So much so that it will give you the ability to bend multiple factions of this reality. It has a fail safe to make sure those unworthy of its proper control never learn it. You may hear what I am saying, but the record will not let you comprehend. That's because only those of pure soul can be trusted with such knowledge. I’ve lived my lifestyle under the shamanic code since my childhood. The healer must accustom themselves to using these energies at will. You are essentially evolving as an energetic consciousness, and into a Theta wave physical state. If you are truly one with your control of Reiki, then you are already in a Alpha state. After evolving your metaphysical anatomy to Theta, you then will have the ability to access Delta at will. Theta and Delta waves are what grant my future Antojai Masters the ability to walk between, and within multiple dimensions at once.

You need to look at it as a energetic medical kit to understand the dynamics of Antojai. It has combination codes for all sorts of issues. For example, if you combine the talisman of Sight with the talisman of the Astral, you can instantly make a person see auras, etc. Where Reiki requires a general understanding of energy medicine, Antojai requires extensive knowledge of "energetic prescription codes."

Antojai & Reiki belong to the same set of healing frequencies. I would have never discovered Antojai without Mikao Usui, and his development of Reiki. The first step to human evolution.

The Oath Of Antojai:

Antojai will shift your reality for your better, but you are obligated by a universal contract to use it for the good of humanity BEFORE yourself.

You must never use these for ill-will, or you will lose the ability all together.

You must never teach another who you know can not be trusted to be responsible with such knowledge. There are no excuses to this particular rule because once you become a Master of Antojai, you have accepted your role as a guardian of the frequencies. You are guided by the Ascended, and that power is never wrong in judgment. You will always know who is worthy, and your only reason would be that you willingly opened a can of worms. This rule is not one to be taken lightly as you will have to atone for any chaos generated by any individual you do this with. You assume responsibility for their karma.

Let’s say you teach the worthy, and later they become unworthy; not your problem. This knowledge is to be used to evolve the human consciousness.

You can’t stop pursuing your authentic self, or you will lose it.

It is with your help that we can change perspectives on mental health, and the direction of our world. Thank you for taking the time to read this, and thank you for being the driving force behind change in todays hectic world. Share this with as many people as possible, please.

I am currently training High Energy Reiki Masters interested in the opportunity to learn Antojai. There are 7/10 spaces left for students. Message [email protected] to request a spot.

Master Antojai

Carrasquillo, A. (2017). Antojai Shamanic Wellness

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parrotbeak · 8 years ago

Text

I wrote that Steven Universe-The Simpsons comparison with the decision to not mention the colonial angle. But it’s become difficult to read posts, some critical, some not, relating to any of the Earth-made gems and spot the same indifference that’s interwoven with my life as Indo. Hopefully this post educates a little on what it means (or can mean; I only speak for myself) to be caught in-between. I normally couldn’t care less, but in this one case, don’t interact if anti-crit or non-crit.

The don’t-think-this-is-all short of the Indo experience is that the Dutch way back figured it’d be nifty if the Dutch East Indies had a supply of loyal people with a reason to stay right where they are. Marriages between Dutch men and Indonesian women were motivated in order to produce a new identity of people that’d be invested in serving the DEI because that, the colony holding both roots, was their home. The duality of being Indo plays a role to this day, past the violence of 1940-1949, the unwelcome by the Netherlands to which the arrival of Indos (and Moluccans) was inconvenient as well as never supposed to happen, and the undealt-with trauma that followed when quietly adapting was all there was to do. I’m not going into detail, but for me, having been born decades after the end of the DEI, I miss the place. Rationally and morally that’s ridiculous, but emotionally it promises so many answers I’ll never get. A lot of my life perspectives are based on considerations of what being in-between means. And though I love the Netherlands dearly (culturally), being part Asian also makes me different and alerts me of just how much my country still hasn’t given its DEI history a place.

So, for me the theme of home in colonial and war context is big and SU lines that stand out to me include “I never asked for it to be this way. I never asked to be made!”, “I don't have memories of it, just feelings. I know I can never go back to Homeworld, but it's hard not to have some feelings for where you came from.”, “I've been fighting from the second I broke free of the Earth's crust, because of what YOU did to my colony! Because of what YOU did to my planet!”, “Who knows what they would do to me back home after what I did to Jasper? I can't go back to Homeworld and I can't stay here.” I’m going to go ahead requesting that if the urge comes to throw a “you’re projecting”, don’t, because odds are I know better just how much SU fails at all of this. These quotes are just a selection reminding what the show could've been and that the writers do have an understanding of what they’re pretending to dig into before disingenuously scrambling back to the Status Quo of everybody getting along because nothing has meaning. I could’ve done without them shoving that nonsense out to a worldwide audience.

With “On the Run”, I don’t see a tale of “just” abuse as I get the impression generally is interpreted. What I see is a child stolen from her destroyed heritage who is given nothing to cope with that and forge herself a new identity. The happy resolution of what Pearl in particular has done to her isn’t giving her better access to the story she belongs to, but eradicating her psychological ties to it. Like, I know what it’s like to have to think about this stuff and I can’t imagine external judgement and disassociation would’ve helped me figure things out. And that would've come from my own parent, not an ugly outsider like Pearl, let alone an outsider responsible for the loss. That’s the bizarre part of “On the Run”. It knows there’s an inherent attachment difference between Amethyst and Pearl, but it lies around it because otherwise Pearl can’t be easily forgiven. The rebellion was right, of course, but sometimes in doing the right thing you can’t avoid causing harm and your moral compass is still on display in how you deal with the aftermath of your actions. Although it is insult to injury to me that RPG are conditional freedom fighters. Each one of them was ultimately motivated by own gain. Ruby and Sapphire wanted each other, Pearl wanted Rose, and Rose wanted human men. This isn’t something I fault them for, but it’d be nice if the show was honest about it and acknowledged the current passivity. The only original CG who is pure and operates by ideology and who could’ve pulled off shutting out Amethyst’s ordeal while still not being insensitive is Bismuth. Instead, she gave Amethyst a kind of support Amethyst usually only gives, never receives. She even shared a non-judgy detail what amethysts are like, which we’ve never seen RPG do! How come Bismuth is the one whom we’re supposed to believe is bad?

Where Amethyst has meaning to me in direct likeness, Jasper is a bit more complex, falling into my sympathy through my grandfather and the (violence-induced) personality traits that have been passed on, being mine and also not. Notwithstanding what I judge, I cannot disapprove of Jasper on the whole. I’ve grown up knowing of a man who was overly dedicated to his role as soldier, who couldn’t keep his home, whose successes were of lesser meaning than his non-whiteness, and who in response only became more dedicated. Pride’s funny like that. I’m not against NPD and child soldier interpretations for Jasper, though I don’t share them, but I experience frustration that the nature of her existence in relation to her uncomfortable place in society is not picked up on as a possibility too. I wondered for a while why Lapis’s lack of (consistent) characterization does not stop peeps from acknowledging the potential she has (had) while Jasper gets more of a “either/or” treatment, until I realized that with Lapis too the home angle barely gets talked about. Ditto for Peridot; my main problem with her redemption is that it wasn’t completed. We only got to see how she came to love Earth, not how she disconnected from Homeworld. I’ve only twice seen a post bring that up. Same disregard is reason #~4 I’m not dealing with HBA fans anymore.

I dislike posts that suggest Amethyst owes RPG anything. I dislike posts that pose that Amethyst feels impure for not being a CG by choice. I dislike posts that place Amethyst and Jasper on incompatible ends as if they’re not different expressions of the same duality conflict. I do not tell what to ship or not, but from the above it should be clear that I hold a negative opinion of ships involving any member of the Famethyst with anyone who has proven not to understand (do the people who ship understand?). A particular thing that’s been on my mind with Jasper and Lapis ever since “a lapis terraforms” is the theory -- a miniscule possibility that makes my hair stand on end -- that Lapis was involved with the creation of Beta. Roughly the only reason I want her arc to continue is to have confirmation that that theory is wrong. It needs to be wrong. And on a final matter, trying to put this as delicately as I can: I hope all who have compared Homeworld to Nazi Germany come from a place where they own those words. Because there’s a distinct lack of other (and at times more fitting) comparisons. Like, I’ve only ever seen one person compare Homeworld’s deal to the invasion of the Americas and nothing on any other. Just in general, I’m not comfortable with understanding evil only as an externalized condition.

If possible, I’d like to see some more consideration whenever an Earth-made gem is the topic. A loss like theirs is a bad one, and even if you’d argue SU deals with it horribly in a way that can be ignored, both Amethyst and Jasper have made references to their troubles as a result of the loss. I may as well add, to any (future) writers, a piece of advice. When your worldbuilding requires you to create societal details, keep in mind that life’s stranger than fiction and nothing you can come up with doesn’t have a real-life parallel, sometimes with memory still fresh (there’s nothing colonial in SU that’s new to me) or even ongoing. It’s pointless to tell you to educate yourself because you can’t always do that if you don’t know what to look for (and as I can attest, even with a lead it can be difficult), but you can always be a decent person about what you try to do. If you decide on certain themes, carry them full and sincere instead of suddenly hiding behind claims of intentional naivity. It’s not difficult to think of how a certain event ought to affect each character and either reject the event if it gets in the way of the goal or plan for the outcome.

To end on a constructive note, these are specific things I would’ve liked SU to do instead:

Be clear about the place of imperfect gems in society, including the occurence of beta productions. We’ve got, like, five random sources right now and they’re contradicting and vague at best.

Be clear whether Rose (and any others of the pink court) is from Earth or not. It matters.

It creeps me out how the show refuses to decide whether Amethyst is an adult or a child and pretty much lets it depend on whether it wants Steven alone or not. Especially creepy given that Amethyst is stolen while Steven is the grand heir.

Be thorough on gem names. I never thought that moment where Peridot calls herself “Peridot” instead of her code was a moment for her, because in order to be “Peridot”, no other peridots may be around. No other peridots may share in what she has. That’s not “d’awww!”, that’s horrible. It bugs me with the Ruby Squad that we know them only by names Steven’s given them and I don’t get why we haven’t got a gem yet who chose their own name as a way to reject Homeworld’s identity rules. Only Amethyst’s scene of discovering her code made sense. (Needless to say, this non-commitment to name significance is why the DeMayo/Universe and Steven/Nora deals are laughable at best.)

Any plot necessity for Steven and Amethyst not to ask questions is dealt with by focussing on why they don’t ask questions. Fear of what emotions they might unleash? Fear of conflict between the teller and the not-teller? Fear of losing certainties? Fear of being unable to handle the answer? Fear of having to ask more questions? Or maybe they know the answers they need but not the questions to get at them. Stuff like this is like a sudoku; you have some answers and you know there’s more, but you can’t formulate a means to get those answers without finding the starter points first.

Garnet would’ve never said “For Amethyst to be herself“ in “Bubbled”, because, holy heckles, that’s rich coming from Ms. “We kept Amethyst”.

Going back to “Stronger Than You” after “Earthlings” leaves me with distaste. Jasper vaguely seems to respond to “And I won’t let you hurt my planet!”, a line that ought to hurt and infuriate her from what we know now, but it’s barely noticeable and gets contextually hidden by a closeup slasher smile. Either [my planet] should not be there or Jasper’s response should get focus. Yes, it’s Garnet’s song, but you can’t play over this like that. (I despise how the crewniverse hid an ethnicity context behind a sexuality one.)

Malachite would’ve gotten Sugilite’s deal (and Sugilite something much better). Lapis would’ve fused with the aim to trap the fusion and give the CGs a clean shot, having nothing better to hope for than that Steven would save her from whatever fate would be Jasper’s. But the unexpected happens when the two fuse, Lapis’s knowledge that this one act locks her from her home for good and Jasper’s resurfaced trauma of the loss of her home mixing into a singlemindedness neither could’ve foreseen or can control. Malachite would’ve escaped and periodically resurfaced as a break from the Cluster plotline and something fresh in the gem recovery narrative.

The moment Peridot brings up the plans for the Earth colony in "It Could've Been Great", Amethyst would not respond identical to Garnet and Pearl, but rather with a hint of wonder. She was made for it and it was supposed to be made for her; shameful but her story nonetheless. Peridot becomes the person she tries to get more information from what happened and what things could’ve been like after all this time of RPG proving untrustworthy. That ableist nonsense of “Beta” does not occur.

Amethyst and Jasper “bond” after one or the other figures out the other’s identity, if only by playing into Jasper’s anger. Amethyst later defects (though never betrays), resulting in her own time of learning on HW and later visiting/being sent to the pink station, where her story can overlap with whatever is the equivalent of the abduction arc. Consequences of Amethyst leaving are progress in Garnet’s growth into leadership, major self-reflection by Pearl, probs something like Peridot boosting the ranks (Lapis and Bismuth deserve time to themselves), and, since I want Amethyst and Lars to be BFFs over Purple Puma, for this to be a hit on Lars that later helps Amethyst understand RPG’s choices and for which she’d apologize/make up in the equivalent of “Wanted” or thereafter. It could probably also be incorporated in Lars reflecting on his lost friendship with Ronaldo and the choices he made there.

I’m not sure what I want for Jasper. Her getting corrupted is fine by me, especially if she’d be crucial in developing a healing process, but I really wish SU had handled corruption better. Finding peace with her peers would be nice. I’d also like her being able to empathize with HBA (while not tolerating her actions) in a “I’m not where I’m supposed to be and neither are you” sense.

SU avoids talking about it, but it stands to reason some of HW’s planets were populated. You don’t have an army if you don’t have wars. It’s been my interpretation for a long time that Yellowtail is fully alien, Vidalia possibly part alien, and Onion at least half alien, all survivors or descendents thereof from another colonized planet. And after that odd scene between Topaz and Onion, I like to think Topaz is from that colony and that her encounter on Earth makes her think and spread the anti-colonialism beyond Earth.

#SU critical #History #Cartoons #Colonialism

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