#that’s like hundreds of hours of tv and I’m actually employed now)

[poebrey]

I told myself I would try to at least start VOY before lower decks season 4 came out and now here I am in a voyager tribute episode missing all of the references

[words-writ-in-starlight]

where's the essay op

Okay so bayonets.  I don't know why I ever pretend that I want to talk about anything but military history and battlefield medicine.  I checked all my sources in the waiting room of a doctor's office so you're just going to have to trust me because they are Gone.  I’m pretty sure this can all be found on a few Wiki dives, though.

First of all, to recap, let me clarify a common misconception.  The triangular bayonet was NOT outlawed in the 1949 Geneva Convention, nor any future revisions—as it was originally a musket weapon, it was fading out of use by World War II and the subsequent Convention.  However, you'll notice that I opted to use to word "violates" rather than "were banned by," which is a fine semantical hair to split and, I suppose, debatable.  Most bayonets were not explicitly banned in the GC, in that there is not an article in the GC saying you can't use them.  However there IS an article in the GC, adopted from the earlier 1899 Hague Regulations, stating that it is prohibited to "employ weapons...of a nature to cause superfluous injury or unnecessary suffering" (originally part of Article 23 of the HR, now Article 35 of the GC, expanded in 1977).  Personally, as someone who knows a lot about how a lot of weapons impact the human body, I think that is a more expansive statement than most people would expect, and should be treated accordingly.  Regrettably I do not work for the UN.

Point is, triangular blades specifically are known to cause wounds that are difficult to heal, highly prone to infection, and extremely likely to never fully recover, while also having a relatively low mortality rate.  This is because the axes of a triangular wound, which is shaped sort of like a Y, make it very hard to stitch closed, and very easy for any "twisting" of the blade to create a large hole with ragged edges that's functionally impossible to stitch closed.  As an added bonus, because of the way scar tissue forms, it's possible for one "line" of a triangular wound to pull open other parts of the puncture while the scar tissue forms and pulls on the skin.  Even by standards in the 1700s, triangular bayonet wounds were phenomenally likely to infect and consistently difficult to repair, and modern medicine has made only limited improvements on that situation.  As such, cases have been made that certain types of bayonet/triangular blades in general are therefore in violation of this article, despite not being explicitly banned.

(Side note: yes, the American military violates the GC on the regular.  The American police violate the GC.  I am excruciatingly aware.  The GC is interesting reading generally, but especially if you're an American and you ever feel like being appalled for a few hours.)

Anyway, with that covered again, let's actually talk about the development of triangular bayonets, which might've been out of use by the time of the GC but DEFINITELY violated that article in a big way for a good two centuries prior and are also a fascinating insight into the fact that humanity, as a whole, is really determined to do things in the dumbest way possible.

The first thing you have to understand about bayonets is that they were originally invented as a way to integrate pikes with guns, not knives or even swords.  When arquebuses and muskets were first invented, you were lucky to get a rate of fire around one round per minute, and you still had to protect your army while they were reloading their clunky black powder guns.  Therefore, most infantries between like...the invention of the gun and the late 1600s were comprised of soldiers equipped with muskets, and also soldiers equipped with pikes (a type of spear).  The idea of a bayonet was "what if we put a pike and a musket TOGETHER and then we could give everyone THAT and have way more guns in our army because we don't need pikemen anymore." Which makes sense when you think about it.

What makes less sense is that the initial effort at bayonets was something called a plug bayonet.  You'll never fucking guess what these geniuses (first record is Chinese infantry around-abouts 1600, popular use of plug bayonets recorded in Europe around the 1630s) figured out for their first try at a bayonet.  Here's a hint!  There's not a lot of places on a gun where you can "plug in" a sword. 

Obviously plug bayonets did not exactly catch on as a fantastic solution, because these guns were either a gun OR a short spear and neither was especially good at their jobs.  A bunch of battles hinged on this problem. Which brings us to the end of the 1600s, when English forces in Scotland got absolutely obliterated by a bunch of Highlanders in 1689 because the English were so busy trying to fix their bayonets that the Highlanders literally just charged them, fired one volley, and cut them down with swords and axes. The English took that one very personally (which, you know what, fair, it was a humiliating defeat, especially since the Highlanders had been using that tactic very successfully for a while) and started developing better bayonets.

This is where we get to socket bayonets, AKA what you would probably recognize as a bayonet from a period TV series or a museum.  Socket bayonets have a metal sleeve that gets attached around the barrel of a gun (in this case a musket), so that you can still theoretically use the damn gun while it's attached.  There were problems with the development of socket bayonets (notably, it took a while to figure out how to keep them from falling off the gun during battle), but overall they worked much better and armies started getting rid of pikemen. This was also when bayonets were shortened to a little over a foot, which isn't really important but made them much easier to maneuver.  Socket bayonets were the European order of the day by the early 1700s, and mostly came in three flavors: single edge (like a knife), double edge (like a sword), and spike (like a...spike).  There were pros and cons to all of these (single edge wasn't great for stabbing, spike was ONLY good for stabbing, and double edge was kind of okay at stabbing and kind of okay at slashing), but most importantly, both single and double edged bayonets were fragile.  The heads of polearms were shaped on patterns other than "sword on a stick" for a reason, and it's because "sword on a stick" is not very sturdy.

Triangular bayonets were the solution to this problem.  Triangular bayonets are basically a single piece of metal creased long-ways, with both edges sharpened and the top fluted to form a third edge at the crease.  This makes a much more resilient weapon than a flat blade, because a twisting motion doesn’t risk snapping the blade in the middle.  It also means that now you have three edges, and human nature is to figure “more knife better.”

And don’t get me wrong, as a weapon of war, the triangular bayonet was a great one.  It was introduced in the 1710s and then got used regularly to maim and terrify through the start of the 1900s.  In fact, the triangular bayonet worked so well that it only began to get phased out of use when the style of war itself started to change dramatically during the World Wars.  When warfare was focused on pitched battle (your old school “two armies enter, one army leaves” kind of warfare), the emphasis of a bayonet was on extending the reach of a gun.  A bayonet lets a soldier have a weapon for closer range combat, where a gun—especially a long gun like a musket—is not as effective.  So when you had two armies on the field and a bayonet was first and foremost a way to keep the enemy at least gun-length away, longer bayonets were better.  

But World War I was the advent of trench warfare, which was a terrible idea and also meant that a long weapon, like a gun with an extra foot and a half of sword on top, was much, MUCH harder to work with.  Either fighting took place in no man’s land, where you probably weren’t going to get close enough to use a bayonet anyway, or in a trench, where a weapon as long as you were tall was just impossible to work with.  

(If you know anything about WWI, you’re probably asking me about bayonet charges right now, specifically the concept of “going over the top.”  Contrary to every media representation of WWI ever, “going over the top” of a trench faded out of use pretty quickly.  It was a type of bayonet charge where the soldiers in ONE trench fixed their bayonets and tried to charge no man’s land in an effort to reach the OTHER trench, but it was basically never effective because no man’s land was often heavily trapped and strafed with gunfire and mortar shells.  Also, it was the kind of battle tactic that military history books talk about with phrases like “total annihilation of whole attacking battalions,” so that’s the kind of mortality rate we’re talking about here.  The Battle of the Somme featured a good number of bayonet charges by the British, for context, so people learned and started using other tactics.)

So, since bayonets were only useful in trenches, suddenly everyone was scrambling to shorten bayonets and guns so that their soldiers could get ANYTHING DONE.  And THEN soldiers started admitting that they were literally taking their bayonets off their guns and using them as knives instead, because for trench fighting that was way more useful, and so everyone just decided fuck it, let’s just make bayonet-knives, which is why WWI weapons with bayonets usually look, very literally, like someone duct taped a short knife to the front of a gun.  This was the start of the decline of the triangular bayonet, a full two hundred years after it hit the battlefield, which is a frankly spectacular run for any weapon since the invention of the gun.  Triangular bayonets held on, here and there, through part of WWII, but they were almost entirely gone by the time of the Geneva Convention being ratified in 1949.  However, spike or knife bayonets are still issued to many armies as a weapon of last resort to this day, although they aren’t often used in actual attacks.  Now we have bigger, worse weapons for actual attacks.

 TL;DR, the development of bayonets went like this:

“What if we put a pike ON a gun?  …oh wait, you still want to use the gun?  Sucks to be you, I guess.”

“What if we put a sword on the gun instead?  Then we could put it somewhere where we can still use the gun!  Good luck keeping it on there, though.”

“What if we actually made something designed to get put on a gun and stab people effectively?  Like, what if we designed something with that purpose in mind?  Perhaps?” SMASH CUT TWO CENTURIES

“Well if you’re just gonna take your bayonet off and stab someone with it anyway, can we just go back to giving you knives, then?”

And now you’re caught up on all the dubiously successful ways we’ve tried to mutilate people with a knife-gun.

[thedoctorcried]

Runaway - Part Six

~Masterlist~

Concept: Hazel Richards is a twenty-year-old woman living in London. When she meets a mysterious time-travelling alien known only as the Hunter, she’s thrust into a world of wonder she could only have imagined.

Warnings: swearing, follows S1 of Doctor Who.

As the TARDIS materialised, Hazel smiled. "So how long have I been gone?" she asked as they stepped out onto the Powell Estate.

"About twelve hours," the Hunter replied, having decided to keep her look with the beanie and the trenchcoat.

Hazel nodded. "Right, I shouldn't be too long. I just want to see Jace."

The Hunter raised an eyebrow. "What're you going to tell him?"

"Oh, that I've been to the year 5 billion and only been gone twelve hours," Hazel replied sarcastically. "No, I'll just tell him I spent the night at Shazia's. See you later. And don't you disappear." The Hunter saluted with her metal hand, smiling as Hazel ran off to her flat.

As the Time Lady turned around, intending to find a wall or something to sit on, she noticed an old poster stuck to a concrete lamppost. She read it, and her eyes widened. Immediately, she started sprinting up to the flat.

***

"I'm back!" Hazel called as she let herself into the flat, depositing her keys in the bowl as usual. "I was with Shazia. She was all upset again. Are you in?" She smiled as she saw Jason come out of the kitchen with a mug of tea and stop still, his eyes wide. "So, what's been going on? How've you been?" She blinked when Jace didn't move. "What? What's that face for? It's not the first time I've stayed out all night."

Jason dropped his mug, and it smashed on the floor. "It's you," he whispered, his voice haunted.

Hazel frowned, confused. "Of course it's me."

"Oh my God. It's you. Oh my God." Jason ran forwards to hug her tight, and Hazel saw a variety of missing person posters on the table over his shoulder.

The Hunter burst through the door. "I'm so sorry, Hazel! It's not twelve hours, it's twelve months. You've been gone a whole year!"

***

Later, Jason's shock had given way to anger, and Hazel was curled up in an armchair trying to calm him down. "The hours I've sat here, days and weeks and months, all on my own. I thought you were dead, and where were you? Travelling. What the hell does that mean, travelling? That's no sort of answer." Jason snorted derisively. "Travelling."

"That's what I was doing," Hazel protested.

Jason raised an eyebrow. "When your passport's still in the drawer? It's just one lie after another."

Hazel sighed. "I meant to phone, J, I really did. I just... forgot." She winced at Jason's expression.

"What, for a year? You forgot for a year? And I am left sitting here. I just don't believe you. Why won't you tell me where you've been?" he pleaded.

"Actually, it's my fault," the Hunter confessed. "I sort of employed Hazel as my companion."

"When you say companion...?" Jason trailed, his eyes wide.

"Not in the way you're thinking," the Hunter assured him.

"Then what is it?" he demanded. "Because you, you waltz in here all charm and smiles, and the next thing I know, she vanishes off the face of the Earth! How old are you, then? Thirty? Thirty five? What, did you find her on the internet?"

"No, I just -"

Jason cut her off, cornering her against the wall she was leaning against. "That's my sister! I thought she was dead, because of you!"

The Hunter's eyes narrowed. "If there is one thing you can believe about me, it's that the last thing I would do is leave you with a dead sibling." With ease, she pushed Jason away, and marched out, heading for the roof.

***

Later, Jason and Hazel were sitting in the kitchen over a couple mugs of tea. "Did you think about me at all?" Jason asked, frowning.

"I did," Hazel assured him. "All the time, but -"

"One phone call," Jason cut her off. "Just to know that you were alive."

"I'm sorry. I really am," Hazel sighed, leaning her head against his shoulder.

Jason put his arm around her. "Do you know, what terrifies me is that you still can't say. What happened to you, Haze? What can be so bad that you can't tell me, sweetheart? Where were you?"

***

Hazel sighed as she joined the Hunter on the roof. "I can't tell him. I can't even begin. He's never going to forgive me. And I missed a year. Was it good?"

"Middling," the Hunter shrugged.

"Ugh."

The Hunter raised an eyebrow. "Well, if it's this much trouble, are you going to stay here now?" There was a hint of sadness in her eyes that Hazel picked up on.

"No, definitely not. But I can't do that to him again," she stated.

"Well, he's not coming with us."

Hazel snorted. "No chance."

"I don't do families," the Hunter said quietly.

"He squared up to you!" Hazel cried in an attempt to change the subject.

"Nine hundred years of time and space, and I've never been threatened by someone's brother," the Hunter shook her head.

"Your face!"

"I was scared for my life!" the Hunter joked, smiling.

"You're so gay," Hazel sighed.

"Well, yes," the Hunter agreed easily.

Hazel nodded. "Okay... When you say nine hundred years?"

"That's my age," the Hunter clarified.

"You're nine hundred years old," Hazel raised an eyebrow.

"Yeah."

Hazel blew out a breath. "Jace was right. That is one hell of an age gap." The Hunter laughed, and Hazel sighed. "Every conversation with you just goes mental. There's no one else I can talk to. I've seen all that stuff up there, the size of it, and I can't say a word. Aliens and spaceships and things, and I'm like the only person on planet Earth who knows they exist."

A deep foghorn-like noise interrupted her, and a huge spaceship passed overhead, trailing black smoke. It was heading for the city, and smashed through a few faces of Big Ben before swallow-diving the Thames. The Hunter and Hazel watched as a plume of black smoke rose into the air on the horizon. "Only person on planet Earth, huh?" the Hunter asked cheekily.

"Oh, that's just not fair," Hazel pouted, before following her friend as she ran off down the fire escape.

***

"It's blocked off," the Hunter sighed as they got as far as they could, to where the army had put barriers across the roads.

"We're miles from the centre," Hazel frowned, standing on her tiptoes to try and see over. "The city must be gridlocked. The whole of London must be closing down."

The Hunter grinned. "I know. I can't believe I'm here to see this. This is fantastic!"

Hazel narrowed her eyes. "Did you know this was going to happen?"

"Nope."

"Did you recognise the ship?" she asked.

"Nope."

"Do you know why it crashed?" she tried.

"Nope."

Hazel rolled her eyes. "Oh, I'm so glad I've got you."

"I bet you are. This is what I travel for, Haze," the Hunter enthused, spreading her arms. "To see history happening right in front of us."

"Well, let's go and see it," Hazel shrugged. "Never mind the traffic, we've got the TARDIS."

The Hunter made a face. "Better not. They've already got one spaceship in the middle of London. I don't want to shove another one on top."

"Yeah, but yours looks like a big blue box," Hazel pointed out. "No one's going to notice."

"You'd be surprised," the Hunter told her. "Emergency like this, there'll be all kinds of people watching. Trust me. The TARDIS stays where she is."

Hazel sighed. "So history's happening and we're stuck here."

"Yes, we are," the Hunter smiled.

"Well, we could always do what everybody else does. We could watch it on TV," Hazel suggested.

***

Hazel smirked as she watched the Hunter flicking through the channels, sipping at a coffee Jason had grudgingly made her. The Time Lady rolled her eyes as people started turning up and chatting, practically drowning out the TV. "Oi, I'm trying to listen!" She watched as specialists were brought in, but frowned when the channel switched to Blue Peter. The toddler that had pressed the button grinned up at her from her lap, and she rolled her eyes, taking the remote and switching it back. "Go on," the Hunter muttered, seeing the body had been brought to Albion Hospital, with members of the army arriving.

Eventually, having seen all she needed, the Hunter deposited the toddler with his mother and went for the balcony exit of the flat. Hazel followed her out. "And where do you think you're going?" she asked, crossing her arms and raising her eyebrows.

The Hunter turned to look at her, leaning against the railings. "Nowhere. It's just a bit human in there for me. History just happened and they're talking about where you can buy dodgy top-up cards for half price. I'm off on a wander, that's all."

Hazel raised her eyebrows higher. "Right. There's a spaceship on the Thames and you're just wandering."

"All right," the Hunter sighed. "I just want to check something out. You don't need me. Go and celebrate history. Spend some time with Jace."

"Promise you won't disappear?" Hazel asked.

"Tell you what." The Hunter reached down into her pocket and withdrew a golden key on a matching chain, similar to the silver one around her own neck. "TARDIS key. It's about time you had one." She handed it over, smiling, before setting off towards the TARDIS herself. "See you later."

***

Back in the flat, Jason was proposing a toast. "Here's to the Martians!"

"The Martians!" everyone cheered, except Hazel, who rolled her eyes. The door opened, and she looked over, hoping to see the Hunter, but froze when she saw Mike, who's eyes widened at the sight of her.

"I was going to come and see you," Hazel tried as the room went silent.

"Someone owes Mikey an apology," Shazia raised her eyebrows.

"I'm sorry," Hazel apologised immediately, but Shazia shook her head.

"Not you."

Jason made a face as everyone looked at him. "Well, it's not my fault. Be fair. What was I supposed to think?"

***

The party had started back up again in the living room while Mike, Jason, and Hazel had retreated to the kitchen, Mike shutting all the doors and the serving hatch. "You disappear, who do they turn to? Your boyfriend. Five times I was taken in for questioning. Five times. No evidence. Course, there couldn't be, could there? And then I get him, your brother, whispering around the estate, pointing the finger. Stuff through my letterbox, and all cause of you."

Hazel frowned at him. "Mikey, you're not my boyfriend. I don't know where you got that from, cause it weren't me. Besides, I didn't think I'd be gone so long."

"And I waited for you, Hazel. Twelve months, waiting for you and the Hunter to come back."

Jason held up a hand to stop him. "Hold on, you knew about the Hunter? Why didn't you tell me?"

Mike nodded. "Yeah, yeah. Why not, Hazel? Huh? How could I tell him where you went?"

"Tell me now," Jason ordered, looking worried.

"I might as well, cause you're stuck here," Mike gloated. "The Hunter's gone. Just now. That box thing just faded away."

Hazel rolled her eyes. "Shut it, pikey."

"She's left you," he goaded. "Some girlfriend she turned out to be."

The girl ran out of the flats, coming to where the TARDIS had been, with Mike and Jason following her. "She wouldn't just go, she promised me."

"Oh, she's dumped you, Hazel!" Mike taunted. "Sailed off into space. How does it feel, huh? Now you're left behind with the rest of us Earthlings. Get used to it."

"She would have said," Hazel stated, nodding confidently.

"What are you two going on about?" Jason asked as he caught up with them. "What's going on? What's this Hunter done now?"

Mike laughed. "She's vamoosed."

Hazel growled. "She's not, because she gave me this." She showed him the golden key on its chain around her neck. "She's not my girlfriend, Mike. She's better than that. She's much more important than -" She cut herself off as the TARDIS key started to glow, the ship herself beginning to materialise a few feet away. "I said so!" Hazel's eyes widened when she saw Jason staring at the TARDIS in shock. "Jace! Jace, go inside. J, don't stand there, just go inside. Just, Jace, go. Oh, blimey."

The TARDIS fully materialised, and Hazel ran inside while Mike and Jason stared for a moment before following her.

The Hunter smiled when she saw Hazel come over to her. "All right, so I went and had a look. The whole crash landing's a fake. I thought so. Just too perfect. I mean, hitting Big Ben? Come on. So I thought let's go and have a look -"

Hazel cut her off, wincing. "Jace and Mike are here."

"Oh, that's just what I need," the Hunter rolled her eyes. "Don't you dare make this place domestic."

Mike stalked over, clearly annoyed. "You ruined my life, Hunter. They thought she was dead. I was a murder suspect because of you."

The Hunter looked over his shoulder at Hazel meaningfully. "For future reference, this is what I call domestic."

"I bet you don't even remember my name," Mike snorted.

"Spike," the Hunter replied confidently.

"It's Mike."

"No, it's Spike."

"I think I know my own name," Mike raised an eyebrow.

The Hunter snorted. "You think  you know your own name? How stupid are you?"

Hazel followed Jason out as he ran off, overwhelmed. "Jace, don't! Don't go anywhere. Don't start a fight! J, it's not like that. She's not. I'll be up in a minute. Hold on!" She went back into the TARDIS. "That was a real spaceship."

"Yep," the Hunter agreed.

"So it's all a pack of lies? What is it, then? Are they invading?" Hazel asked.

"Funny way to invade, putting the world on red alert," Mike pointed out sullenly.

"Good point, could be a little more cheerful," the Hunter evaluated. "So, what're they up to?"

***

"So, what're you doing down there?" Mike asked, peering down at the Hunter as she meddled with the circuits down in the grating.

The Hunter sighed. "Spike."

"Mike," he corrected.

"Spike. If I were to tell you what I was doing to the controls of my frankly magnificent time ship, would you even begin to understand?" the Hunter raised an eyebrow.

"I suppose not," Mike admitted.

"Well, piss off, then," the Time Lady snapped, going back to her tinkering.

Mike rolled his eyes, going over to Hazel, who was leaning against the console. "Some friend you've got."

"She's winding you up," Hazel told him. "I am sorry."

"Okay." Mike didn't look convinced.

"I am, though."

The man sighed. "Every day, I looked. On every street corner, wherever I went, looking for a blue box for a whole year."

"It's only been a few days for me, maybe a week," Hazel confessed. "I don't know. It's, it's hard to tell inside this thing, but I swear it's just a few days since I left you lot."

Mike raised an eyebrow. "Not enough time to miss me, then?"

Hazel swallowed, uncomfortable. "I missed all of you."

"I missed you," Mike admitted.

"So, er, in twelve months, have you been seeing anyone?" she asked.

"No," Mike replied.

"Oh," Hazel nodded, edging away from him a bit.

"Mainly because everyone thinks I murdered you," Mike shrugged.

"Right."

"So, now that you've come back, are you going to stay?" he questioned.

Hazel's eyes widened. "I can't," she blurted.

"What do you mean, you can't?" Mike frowned, glaring a little.

The Hunter hauled herself up out of the grating to push between them, to get to the monitor. "Usually, one means almost exactly what one says, Spikey."

Mike glared at her. "Excuse me, this was a private conversation!"

"I know, I heard," the Hunter replied nonchalantly. "Anyway, I patched in the radar, looped it back twelve hours so we can follow the flight of that spaceship. Here we go." She held out her metal hand, and a lever just out of her reach flicked down. "Hold on, come on." She moved slightly out of the way so that Hazel could see, sneakily nudging Mike further away from her.

"Is that the spaceship?" Hazel asked, pointing to a small dot moving towards Earth on the radar image.

"Exactly. That's the spaceship on its way to Earth, see?" The Time Lady followed it with her metal index finger. "Except, hold on..." She turned a dial telekinetically, and the image rewinded. "See? The spaceship did a slingshot round the Earth before it landed."

"What does that mean?" Hazel wondered.

"It means it came from Earth in the first place. It went up and came back down." The Hunter sighed, thinking hard. "Whoever those aliens are, they haven't just arrived, they've been here for a while. The question is, what have they been doing?"

***

Later, the Hunter was sprawled on the jump seat, trying to concentrate on figuring out who these aliens were and what they were doing. Mike was rather hindering her progress as he kept channel-hopping on the monitor, providing a fluctuating level of noise that didn't help the Hunter's concentration in the slightest. Hazel had gone further into the TARDIS to get some peace and quiet so she could call Jason. "How many channels do you get?" Mike questioned.

"All the basic packages," the Hunter replied, opening her eyes in annoyance. She looked up a little as Hazel reentered, not looking too much happier than she had when talking to Mike.

"You get the sports channels?"

The Hunter rolled her eyes. "Yes, I get the football." She blinked, recognising someone on the news. "Hold on, I know that lot. UNIT. United Nations Intelligence Taskforce. Good people."

"How do you know them?" Hazel asked quietly, and Mike scowled as he noticed the Hunter's gaze soften as soon as it hit her.

"Cause she's worked for them," he stated, smirking at her raised eyebrows. "Oh yeah, don't think I sat on my backside for twelve months, Hunter. I read up on you. You look deep enough on the Internet or in the history books, and there's her name, followed by a list of the dead."

The Hunter gave him a weird look. "Oh, yeah, that's nice, Spike. Always good to know I'm being stalked."

Hazel smirked a little. "If you know them, why don't you go and help?"

"They wouldn't recognise me," the Hunter explained. "I've changed a lot since the old days. Besides, the world's on a knife-edge. There's aliens out there and fake aliens. We want to keep this alien out of the mix. I'm going undercover, and I'd better keep the TARDIS out of sight." She thought for a minute, putting on her trenchcoat and a pair of fingerless gloves to cover most of her metal hand. "Spike, you've got a car. You can do some driving."

Mike scowled, but didn't bother correcting her. "Where to?"

"The roads are clearing. Let's go and have a look at that spaceship," the Hunter decided. They walked outside, right into a helicopter spotlight, and she winced. "Or not." Mickey ran off.

"Do not move! Step away from the box and raise your hands above your heads!"

Hazel and the Hunter raised their hands warily, and the human flinched as Jason came running out the flat, only to be held back by a couple of soldiers. "Haze! Hazel!"

The Hunter smirked, looking right up at the soldier carrying a megaphone. "Take me to your leader," she called.

***

Hazel looking around the well-furnished police car in surprise. "Wow, this is a bit posh. If I knew it was going to be like this, being arrested, I would have done it years ago," she joked.

The Hunter shook her head, pulling her beanie snugly around her ears. "We're not being arrested, we're being escorted."

"Where to?" Hazel wondered, frowning.

"Where'd you think?" the Hunter raised her eyebrows. "Downing Street."

Hazel's eyes widened. "You're kidding."

"I'm not," the Hunter assured her.

"10 Downing Street?"

"That's the one."

"Oh my God. I'm going to 10 Downing Street? How come?" Hazel asked.

The Hunter winced. "I hate to say it, but Mike was right. Over the years, Apollo and I have visited this planet a lot of times, and we've been noticed."

"Now they need you?" Hazel inquired, deciding not to touch on the mention of the Time Lady's brother.

"Like it said on the news: they're gathering experts in alien knowledge. And who's the biggest expert of the lot?" the Hunter asked smugly.

"Patrick Moore?" Hazel teased.

"Apart from him," the Hunter rolled her eyes.

"Oh, don't you just love it," Hazel laughed.

"I'm telling you, me and Moorsy, we were like that," the Hunter exclaimed, crossing her fingers. She frowned for a moment. "Who's the Prime Minister now?"

Hazel snorted. "How should I know? I missed a year."

***

"Oh my God," the human girl whispered as they entered 10 Downing Street, giggling in excitement.

"Ladies and gentlemen, can we convene?" a man was saying. "Quick as we can, please. It's this way on the right, and can I remind you ID cards are to be worn at all times." He handed one to the Hunter as they approached, and the Time Lady noticed his ID named him as Indra Ganesh. "Here's your ID card. I'm sorry, your companion doesn't have clearance."

The Hunter narrowed her eyes. "I don't go anywhere without her."

"You're the code nine, not her," Ganesh stated. "I'm sorry, Hunter. It is the Hunter, isn't it? She'll have to stay outside."

"She's staying with me," the Hunter insisted.

Ganesh sighed. "Look, even I don't have clearance to go in there. I can't let her in, and that's a fact."

"It's all right," Hazel shook her head. "You go."

"Sure?" the Hunter raised an eyebrow, not wanting to leave her alone.

Another woman bustled up to them. "Excuse me. Are you the Hunter?"

"Not now," Ganesh scowled. "We're busy. Can't you go home?"

"I just need a word in private," the woman pleaded.

"You haven't got clearance," Ganesh told her. "Just leave it." He turned to the Hunter. "What about the Doctor? Is he coming?"

The Hunter's face clouded over, and she ignored the question, speaking instead to her companion. "I'll be out as soon as I can. Don't start a fight." She hugged Hazel, then went into the conference room.

Ganesh turned to Hazel. "I'm going to have to leave you with security."

"It's all right," that woman butted in again, making Hazel smile at her persistence. "I'll look after her. Let me be of some use." She started walking down a corridor with Hazel. "Walk with me. Just keep walking. That's right. Don't look round. Harriet Jones, MP Flydale North." She stopped in a clear corridor. "This friend of yours, she's an expert, is that right? She knows about aliens?"

Hazel narrowed her eyes. "Why do you want to know?" Harriet promptly burst into tears.

***

The Hunter started scanning the prepared papers as soon as she sat down, ignoring everyone else.

"Now, ladies and gentlemen, if I could have your attention, please," General Asquith began. "As you can see from the summaries in front of you, the ship had one porcine occupant."

Standing up, the Hunter interrupted him. "Of course, the really interesting bit happened three days ago, filed away under Any Other Business. The North Sea. A satellite detected a signal, a little blip of radiation, at one hundred fathoms, like there's something down there. You were just about to investigate and the next thing you know, this happens. Spaceships, pigs, massive diversion. From what?"

***

Harriet had lead Hazel to the Cabinet Room, still crying. "They turned the body into a suit. A disguise for the thing inside!"

"It's all right," Hazel told her. "I believe you. It's, it's alien. They must have some serious technology behind this. If we could find it, maybe we could use it." She started opening cupboards, looking for anything alien-looking, when a man's body fell out of one, almost hitting her. "Oh my God!" Is that the -?!"

Ganesh sighed as he saw Harriet through the doorway, and marched in. "Harriet, for God's sake. This has gone beyond a joke. You cannot just wander." His eyes widened as he saw the corpse. "Oh my God! That's the Prime Minister!"

***

"If aliens fake an alien crash and an alien pilot, what do they get?" the Hunter theorised. "Us. They get us. It's not a diversion, it's a trap."

***

A plump blonde woman appeared in the doorway. Harriet and Ganesh recognised her as Margaret Blaine. "Oh! Has someone been naughty?" she asked.

"That's impossible," Ganesh protested. "He left this afternoon. The Prime Minister left Downing Street. He was driven away!"

Margaret smiled innocently. "And who told you that, hmm? Me." She reached up to her hairline, and started to unzip her forehead.

***

"This is all about us," the Hunter realised. "Alien experts. The only people with knowledge how to fight them gathered together in one room." She rolled her eyes as the leader of the meeting, Green, farted. "Excuse me, do you mind not farting while I'm saving the world?"

Green smirked. "Would you rather silent but deadly?"

General Asquith removed his cap and unzipped his forehead. The room filled with a blue light, and the Hunter struggled to see as an alien wriggled out of the skin suit. As the blue light faded away, she saw an eight foot tall green creature with huge black eyes in small baby-like faces. "We are the Slitheen."

"Thank you all for wearing your ID cards. They'll help to identify the bodies," Green smiled sweetly. He pressed a remote activation switch, and the ID cards emitted electric shocks to their wearers, including the Hunter, who fell to her knees, biting back a scream of pain.

~~~

If you enjoyed, please like and/or reblog, and if you can spare anything to donate to my Kofi, I’d be incredibly grateful! Thanks for reading :)

[raendown]

Gonna just do a bunch of these all at once. 

Quarantine Questionnaire tagged by @a-boy-named-mike

Are you staying home from work/school? From my one job, yes. I do go in to help sort the load for the route we purchased though since that’s an essential service and occasionally I actually go on the route so I’m in and out of stores all night. 

What movies have you watched recently? The Shape of Water, Constantine, Chicken Run, Incredibles 2, Hot Fuzz, Get Out, Shaun of the Dead.

What shows are you watching? Just finished re-watching The Good Place and desperately need the next season like right now. Also need more B99 to hit Canadian Netflix.

Are you a homebody? Yiss.

What music are you listening to? Nothing at the moment.

What are you reading? I have yet to finish An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green becuse i keep getting distracted by fanfiction.

What are you doing for self-care? Trying to eat more veggies. Trying.

20 Questions tagged by @jadeisluck

Name: Rae

Nickname: Newest one is “The Boss” because fiance keeps telling everyone I’m the real boss of our company. 

Zodiac: Sagittarius 

Language: English

Favorite Season: Autumn

Favorite Flowers: White calla lilies 

Favorite Scent: I don’t really have one

Favorite Color: Emerald green

Animal: Wolves

Favorite Fictional Character: Senju Tobirama, Hermione Granger, Tony Stark

Coffee/Tea/Hot Chocolate: Tea, although Hotty Choccy is a close second

Average Sleep: Anywhere between 5-10 hours depending on if i have the next day off and where the moon aligns with the stars and if my cat feels like being a massive dick.

Dogs/Cats: Cats 4 lyfe

Blankets: Right now I have three blankets on my bed but I throw more on or take some off as the seasons change.

Dream Trip: Ireland or Scotland to explore the coasts, a world tour visiting all the most amazing libraries, The Sword and The Stone which is a blacksmith in CA who forges weapons from anime and TV shows and video games.

Blog Established: October 2016

Random Fact: My gotdamn foot is itchy again for the love of Yevon if it doesn’t stop itching I’m cutting the bloody thing off. >:( 

Get To Know Me Tagged by @yee-boii Some of these questions will have the same answers as above

Name: Rae

Gender: Binary Female

Star Sign: Sagittarius 

Height: 5'7″

Sexuality: Bisexual

Hogwarts House: Officially sorted in to Gryffindor, identify somewhere between there and Ravenclaw

Favorite Animal: Wolves

Average Hours of Sleep: Anywhere between 5-10

Current Time: 2:53am. Life is hard for a sleepy bitch when you have to flip your sleep schedule to go to work. -.-

Dogs or Cats: Cats cats cats cats!

Blankets you Sleep With: Three plus the sheets.

Dream Job: At this point I don’t even know. I do not dream of being employed. 

When I Made This Blog: 2016 so about a hundred years ago.

Followers: 2650. I swear I meant to do a raffle celebration at 2500 but I had so much going on. I wanna get to this collaboration I’ve promised to do and then hopefully I have some energy. if y’all got ideas for a raffle I’ve got open ears. I had a plan but I am more than willing to change it if the idea is good enough. 

Why I Made a Tumblr: Legit just to dive head first in to the Naruto fandom. No one I know irl watches the show. 

Reason For URL: It’s a pun on my name and the phrasal verb “rain down”.

Fanfic Authors Tag Game tagged by @malakia215

AO3 name: raendown

Fandoms: Naruto

Number of fics: 395. Although if you break the Soulmate Story Collection in to separate stories then it would actually be 602 and that’s still not including all the little ficlets on tumblr that never got cross-posted. This also does not include all the stories I wrote under a different name for other fandoms back in the day.

1. Fic I spent the most time on: War in Times of Peace

2. Fic I spent the least time on: If we’re talking raw time then probably Breathe which is less than 200 words so it took me no time at all. 

3. Longest fic: WITOP is the longest continuous one. 

4. Shortest fic: Breathe at 173 although there are shorter ones that never got cross-posted. 

5. Most hits: The SSC.

6. Most kudos: The SSC again.

7. Most comment threads: Once again...the SSC. I should have just disqualified it. xD

8. Favourite fic I wrote: God that’s hard to choose. Right now WITOP is like my CHILD but there are so many others that I love too.

9. Fic you want to rewrite/expand on: Not so much a story as a couple of series. I really want to write the next installment of the Amends to the Dead series as well as the next part of my Super Idiots series. 

10. Share a bit of a WIP or a story idea you’re planning on: I have a MadaTobi that I may or may not finish set in a modern au. Tobirama adopted Kagami as a baby and he later meets Madara, his son’s biological uncle who never even knew the child have been put up for adoption. They slowly integrate their lives - all for the sake of the child of course - and fall in love along the way. 

Here’s a little excerpt: 

“I am not obsessed, Izuna. Don’t you want to know too?” 

“Duh,” his brother’s voice crackled in his ear. Damn the poor reception here. “But we’ve basically exhausted all our options. We don’t have the right to demand information from the adoption agency.”

“Well I’m not giving up,” he exclaimed, pressing his pen in to the papers so hard he nearly left a hole instead of his signature. 

“You never do; you’re as stubborn as a goat,” Izuna said. Madara scowled as though his brother might feel his ire through the phone connection and cower in repentance. Unlikely, but a man could hope. 

“I’m hanging up on you.”

[tdotsspot]

2020.....

Wow, it’s been almost TWO years since I've posted anything on here. I’ve thought about it from time to time, but never sat to actually say anything. I just looked at my last two posts....so funny. This is why I'll probably always keep this....just to look back, see where I was, who I was.

But back to 2020 bc HONESTLY this year is the one to go. down. in the mother. fucking. books. 

2019 was literally the best year of my life. It was the year I did the most traveling, the year I made the most money...it was like, perfect until the end. I went to Puerto Rico and St Thomas....Atlanta, Boston of course, MARTHA’S VINEYARD FINALLY and even though I've been there 100 times, this was the absolute best. Of course having Dameo was a plus, getting to show him my childhood summers, but Unc let me use the Mercedes which I legit fell in love with, we met Danny Glover which was crazy, I got the brass ring on my first try lol, and we had a lot of good food. LA, was amazing, I miss it so much....NY.....I feel like I’m missing a city, oh yes, dc! That was a fun drunk night.

Late November for Britt’s bday we all went out and that was the first time I was ever real life drunk around his fam, but it was so much fun. The next week....nana passed. It was sad, weird....I hadn’t lost someone in a really long time, and I was there to see some of her last lucid moments. We definitely got closer over the last two years or so since I visited her a good amount, and it made me more sad than I thought. I’m glad I got to have those moments with her, it was cool to get a grandmother again. Made me miss nanny a lot though...

A few weeks later, we found out I was pregnant! It was planned, we were excited although tbh I was kind of freaking out. A baby??? Like a whole ass human? No more weed, liquor, or runny eggs??? HOW SWAY! I don’t think I was ready yet, and a few weeks after that, RIGHT before Christmas, RIGHT before we were going to tell the family, I had a miscarriage. Goodness, I really wasn’t ready for that, at all. Obviously it’s common, but I never thought I’d have one....I was healthy, in a healthy relationship....happy....how the hell did this happen? Unfortunately we already told our moms at that time, partially to help cheer ang, and I knew my mom would be hype as well. I knew it was early, but I told some close friends as well. The pain I felt from that, I just didn't really expect. It was, really sad....I delayed our trip to Boston twice because I really just couldn’t bring myself to leave the bed and sit on a train for 6 hours. I almost canceled altogether but KNOWING NOW THAT THE FUCKING WORLD WAS GOING TO SHUT DOWN, I'm really glad we still went. It was reassuring to get my hugs from my mom, cry it out with her, and see the fam. Except Kendall was such a douche that visit *rolls eyes*. I did get to go see the friends pop up which LEGIT made my whole holiday. As such a huge fan, it was AMAZING, simply, amazing, and I got to enjoy it with my two older cousins and of course, the Dame. 

So that brings us to the new year of 2020. 2020 the year I think EVERYONE thought was going to be amazing, and maybe it will be. Maybe everything that’s going on albeit sad, overwhelming, insane....is in fact the year we all really needed. The Amazon was on fire, forever and as someone who truly cares about global warming that was super stressful. We almost had WWIII thanks to good old Trump, but boy oh boy....that was just the tip of the iceberg. A few weeks later AGAIN, I call my dr telling them I still haven’t gotten my period, my boobs hurt, and wtf is going on? She tells me to take another pregnancy test, which I thought was a joke because I JUST had a miscarriage weeks before, and yes we had sex, but we were ‘careful’. COME TO FIND OUT, my ass is pregnant again. I was, very confused...a little upset because I was planning on waiting a bit before trying for real again. I mean we just dealt with so much loss between nana and the miscarriage, I hadn’t even fully processed what my body just went through. I remember angrily buying the test because, those shits aren’t cheap.....peeing with the door open with Dame downstairs, (not at ALL romantic like the first time I told him) and looking down like....wait. “WHAT THE FUCK” about 3 times was said, I explained to dame this indeed does say I’m pregnant, but how?? 

30 minutes later, the world finds out Kobe Bryant died. There were a lot of emotions that day for sure. Even though I wasn’t a die hard Kobe fan or anything, for some reason this one really made me sad. Maybe because I was currently listening to a book his personal coach wrote; relentless....which is REALLY fucking good.

A week later, I'm confirmed via bloodwork that I am indeed pregnant and it’s time for take two! I didn't get excited until I passed my first trimester, just in case...but now at almost 26 weeks, I’m really excited to meet her. My babygirl! It’s still wild to know I’m about to be a mom, but I’m really pumped for both of us and I know we’ll make great parents. 

Ah yes, the mid march, covid 19 hits America. I was supposed to go on a three city tour to the west coast which I was very much looking forward to, before the world stopped. In fact, it was that very weekend, right after we had our ultrasound, the first and only visit Dame was allowed to come in, that everything stopped. A week or so later, a mid level of depression kicked in for me, which lasted about a month. I couldn’t believe that after WEEKS of puking and being dead ass tired, I was finally ready to work again, but I was Essentially unemployed. The west coast gig was a cute check, I had multiple events coming up that got canceled....weddings that got postponed, and all I could think about was I’m about to have a kid with no money. I went almost two entire months without making ANY money....luckily unemployment kicked in and I got a couple of grants I applied for because I really don’t know what I would’ve done. My mom of course was in my corner, and Dame would start working from home, but still fully employed so at least we wouldn’t be homeless. I knew there were hundreds of thousands of people in my boat, if not worse but I couldn’t help but be consumed with not making any money, and my 2020 year essentially being wiped out. 

Again, this was supposed to be MY year. Be a parent, make a lot of money, and I felt like I just fell flat on my face, in mud, and was suffocating. 

America’s approach to covid was trash, more and more people died...I was worried about my mom and aunts as they're older and more susceptible. This is the longest I've gone without seeing my mom, but thanks to technology! We literally FaceTime every day. 

I almost forgot! Red literally almost died. He got attacked by a pit that lives up the street and it was one of the scariest things I ever dealt with. We just came back from a cute little drive, it was absolutely beautiful out, and I just remember parking, letting him out for a walk, looking at a dog running but I couldn’t tell if it was on a leash or not. I then realized nope, this bitch is not on a leash, crossing the street, and watching it whip its head at me and red and sprinting across the street to attack him. I was absolutely terrified. My baby red, is literally getting mangled by a fucking pit by the neck. I’m also pregnant and scared the pit is going to attack me, that my stress is going to cause another miscarriage, and that I’m probably going to watch red die in front of my eyes. I completely blacked out on the woman who was sloppily running to get her dog off of him. Had it been a minute more, max, he would’ve been dead. I still picture it sometimes and it legit makes me so sad, but luckily he pulled through after about a week of healing, and a huge bloody abscess that needed to be drained. 

THEN about a month ago now, George Floyd was killed on tape by a cop and it changed the world. Between Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Abery dying and being cooped up for months in the house, major cities went up in flames, literally. It was a revolution that Is still happening which has caused corporate America to shove ‘black lives matter’ down our throats like black people just popped up, shown privileged ass white people who refuse to try and understand, racist fucks that just hate us so much....and the list goes on.

That’s been our year so far! and it about to get shut down again because because aren't taking covid seriously. 

Pregnancy has been really interesting though....not at all like what they show on tv and the movies. I’ve been emotional as hell crying over my body  changing....constipated af to the point where I now celebrate any time I shit, hella uncomfortable....but I know when we see her face it will indeed all be worth it. Doing this back to back though like Dame envisions....I don’t know man lol. We shall see. She's due in about 3.5 months. Check in before then....

Tdot, out. 

[alarawriting]

Inktober #26: Dark

My name’s Mike London, and I hunt vampires, and that’s why I don’t love the darkness anymore.

Yeah, I know, I know. At this point you’re probably thinking “do we really have time to unpack all that?”, but the thing you’re getting hung up on is vampires, because vampires aren’t real. How could creatures who are technically dead survive only on blood, and if they were running around turning people into vampires every time they drank blood, why isn’t the world overrun with vampires? How could anyone function if they burst into flames when exposed to sunlight, why wouldn’t they show up on mirrors, does that mean they don’t show up on cameras, so on and so forth.

Okay, so most of the myths are wrong. You can see a vampire in a mirror… unless the vampire is positioned to see into your eyes, or their reflection. Vampires are stronger than humans but not by much – you know about that hysterical strength “mom lifts car off child” thing humans can do in extreme circumstances? They can do it all the time, because their bodies are constantly resetting to a perfect state based on what they were like at the moment of undeath, plus their self-image, with bodies that are perfectly healed except for anything that’s part of the self-image, like a scar that they’ve grown to identify with or a piercing. They’re faster than most humans, but they still have human muscles, so we’re talking Usain Bolt, not the Flash, or even a cheetah. They do burst into flames when exposed to strong ultraviolet light, a condition I can kind of sympathize with myself. And they aren’t created when a vampire drinks your blood, but when you drink a vampire’s, when your own blood levels are very low. As soon as a person has more vampiric blood than human blood in their system, boom, vampire.

They have only one really magical superpower, aside from the fact that they’re alive when they shouldn’t be, and it explains all the others that humans believe they have. If they can look into your eyes, and hold your gaze, they can control your mind. Make you think they’re invisible, make you think they just exploded into a hundred bats, make you compelled to do what they say.

It doesn’t work on me, because I’m an albino. And that’s why, despite the fact that all I ever wanted was to write programs, I am stuck hunting vampires as a side hustle. I’m still physically weaker and slower than they are, and while I see better in the dark than you do, I don’t see as well as they do. In light without UV components, such as standard indoor lighting, my vision’s more impaired than theirs, and a lot more than yours. But they can’t mesmerize me, and frankly, your average vampire has gotten so used to being able to mesmerize humans, it’s crippling for them to run into a human where it doesn’t work.

You probably haven’t got the vaguest idea why being an albino protects me. Maybe you have some notion that albinos have weird superpowers, since frankly in fiction we almost always do. You probably don’t know exactly how my disabilities work – in movies and TV, albinos never get to play albinos, it’s always white men in makeup.

Albinos have bad vision. Lack of pigment in the retina when we’re developing gives us vision problems that can’t be corrected with glasses. It’s like we have fewer pixels to see the world than you do, so everything’s going to be fuzzy no matter how strong the prescription lenses are. And a side effect of bad vision from birth is something called rhythmatic nystagmus, where our eyes go back and forth like an old DVD using pan-and-scan to show a movie on old-school near-square CRT televisions. (Old technology’s a hobby of mine.) I don’t have any conscious control or even awareness of it; I couldn’t stop my eyes from moving like that if I tried, short of closing them. My brain does post-processing on the moving image to make it look to me like my eyes aren’t moving, combining multiple snapshots from different angles into a single image. It means my ability to see a moving object is crap even if it’s close enough that I should be able to see it otherwise, but in theory it lets me see more detail than I would otherwise.

The thing is, there’s a reason the legends all have the vampires going “Look into my eyes”. They need to be able to make and sustain eye contact, the kind where you stare into each other’s eyes, and they can’t do that with eyes that are moving constantly. It’s not that I can’t see their eyes, because for me things don’t look like they’re going back and forth while my eyes move. It’s that they can’t look into mine.

I found this out the hard way last year. I was working at a big financial company, and I was behind schedule on the software I was building for them, and they had security rules that didn’t allow me to work from home. The boss used to say not to stay after hours, but I figured this was the kind of thing bosses say to make the company sound friendly and accommodating but is actually a control freak thing intended to benefit the morning people, which I have never been one of. I can’t drive – the state won’t give me a license, with my eyes – and I have chronic insomnia and equally chronic problems with waking up in the morning, making it impossible for me to rideshare with any of my co-workers. So I generally have an intermittently employed friend of mine who shares my apartment drive me places, and this means I’m usually late to work. If I can’t stay late and I can’t bring work home, I fall behind on my projects. Also, I do my best work late at night when there are no distractions. So I was in the habit of going to the bathroom with all of my stuff around 5:30 and then coming out at 6 after my boss had left. I could sit on the toilet with my laptop and continue to work, answering emails and setting Outlook to send them at 8 am in the morning the next day to make it look like I work normal hours, and then when I came out I could get back to the serious programming work, because my boss wasn’t a programmer and had no idea how to check the timestamps of my build check-ins.

It turned out it wasn’t corporate bullcrap after all. It was vampires. Vampires would come into the building to hold meetings on some kind of irregular schedule that meant something to them. I’d been working late for almost two weeks when they showed up, mesmerized my housemate and nearly ate both of us, and I had to kill a few of them with the combination of a steak knife from the kitchen and the cheap bamboo chopsticks I have a few hundred of in my drawer because I’m always getting Chinese takeout for lunch. See, you can’t actually stab a chopstick into a vampire’s heart – it’s too fragile – but stabbing with a regular knife only takes them out of commission for the two minutes or so it takes them to heal. But if you then stick a wooden chopstick in the wound, it prevents them from regenerating, and bamboo is apparently wood for vampire-killing purposes.

Also, I had a black light in my laptop bag, suitable for detecting whether my cats have peed on my laptop bag before I take it to work because they’ve done it so many times I’ve gotten desensitized to the smell of cat pee, and while I don’t like looking at UV light – my eyes have zero protection from it, so it’s painful – it’s a lot worse for vampires, whose skin will burn from very tiny amounts of UV exposure and can actually set on fire. And it’s just astonishing how often vampires will stand there trying to mesmerize you while you walk up to them and stab them in the heart, because they just can’t comprehend “human who cannot be mesmerized”.

And now that I know vampires exist and that I’m immune to their most powerful weapon… well, shit. I’m kind of stuck. I don’t actually know any other albinos, or anyone else with rhythmic nystagmus, and for normal people, wearing the kind of dark glasses that make it so the vampires can’t see your eyes will completely prevent you from seeing anything in the kind of darkness vampires like. I’m the only one I know who can do this. And they don’t kill humans constantly – they don’t need to – but they spread disease (they can’t get blood-borne illnesses but they can sure carry them) and they tend to pick on weaker humans to begin with, people who have less resistance to the bad effects of losing a lot of blood, because if chronically ill people seem sick and lethargic everyone assumes it’s their illness and not vampires attacking them. They’re like humanoid rats, in other words. If you had a well-behaved pet one who never harmed humans and only drank from volunteers, that one would be fine. But the rest of them are vermin.

Now, the best time to kill vampires is during the day, when they’re sleeping. Vampires know this. You are not going to find them when they’re sleeping, and if you did, you’d have to fight your way through their security guards, who are human, and do not know they’re protecting vampires, and really don’t deserve to have to deal with people trying to kill them. Also, being security guards, they are better at mayhem than I am; I’m an IT guy. So, lucky me, I have to go after them at night, when they have all the advantages except one: they expect to be able to mesmerize me, and they can’t.

Nighttime used to be my time. No bright sun glaring in my face and giving me a sunburn. Everyone around me having such poor vision from it being dark that my bad eyesight isn’t a disadvantage anymore, and when it’s dark enough, my eyesight gets better than theirs because my eyes collect every single photon that hits them, no filters. I’d walk around at night, or crank up my stereo and write code until 4 am.

But every time it’s dark, now, I know: they’re out there. They’re hunting. Feeding. And if I don’t track them down and get rid of them, people might die.

And that’s why I can’t love the darkness anymore.

[stillness-in-green]

Salt-Sweet Curse (6/?)

More of the mermaid AU as brainstormed by @codenamesazanka!  New party member!  New party member!  If mermaids are real, then...?

They had headed deep into the countryside, city turning into town turning into village.  Shigaraki had clammed up again after the big sharing session, poor thing.  Poor cagey thing.  

'He helped me get away the first time,’ was all he’d been willing to say beforehand about how he knew the person they were looking for.  They were named Sako, apparently, and Shigaraki hadn’t known where they lived but had known where to go to find out.  

And when to get there. The when part had been important, for reasons he’d refused to explain.  

When they’d abandoned the car off the road and hiked through the mountains for something like two hours, that had been weird.  When they’d found the river and Shigaraki had set to stripping and packing up his clothes, that had been suspicious.  She’d followed along dutifully, curiosity a flame ready to set her whole body alight.

And okay, she might not have believed him if he’d told her, but at least a squidge of warning might have been in order, Toga thought as she gawped from beneath the shadow of the bridge at the procession overhead.  

Floating flames and gray wraiths; towering red-skinned oni and dancing little children twirling paper umbrellas with drawings of eyes that winked and blinked; chattering tengu and kitsune swapping jugs of sake that warmed her cheeks just to smell them, and white-skinned women trailing cold that tipped her wet hair in frost.  

It was the Night Parade, the hundred demon march, and all right, if mermaids were real, then it stood to reason this could be too, but to see it, spinning and flickering before her eyes with a vividness that cloth paintings and cheap TV effects could never hope to match, that was so far removed from absent conjecture that her whole life might as well have just changed genres.

How Shigaraki knew about this, how he even planned to spot his friend, much less catch his attention…

She was going to have a lot of questions to ask when the parade was over, that was certain.  For now, she heeded the warnings of bedtime stories and kept her mouth shut. 

At least until Shigaraki came up with a stone in his hand and started scanning the crowd.

Toga clapped a hand over her mouth to muffle her alarmed squeak and dropped down to the surface of the water.   

"Calm down," he told her in an undertone as she grabbed at his wrist, "it's barely a pebble."  His eyes narrowed, beginning to track along the bridge, and, despite her hissed protests, he palmed the stone into his free hand.

She sucked in a breath and went under.

From below, the river’s surface diffused the parade into an arc of gold across midnight blue. Shigaraki’s tail glimmered in the light, ethereal silver, his translucent fins periodically curling through the water to keep him upright.  Toga propelled herself downwards to the riverbed and tucked herself into the uneven rocks, eyes wide as she stared up through the murky waters at the waving ribbons of light.

--   --   --            --   --   --            --   --   --

Some while later, she perched halfway out of the water on a stone outcropping, staring at the spirit that had slowed his pace in the parade more and more until he’d finally dropped out of the back and been left behind.  He dressed like a man going to a party (in fairness, assuming the parade counted, he had been), a flashy red dress shirt and black double-breasted vest, fancy gloves, and a fancier top hat flagged with a cream-colored feather worn over short auburn hair.  A blank white mask covered his face but did nothing at all to dampen his personality.

His hands moved, constantly—a radical change after the weeks she’d spent with Shigaraki, who moved like he was being charged money for every extraneous gesture.  Sako gesticulated.  He pattered like a showman and he could barely sit still, hopping up to pace along the shoreline or re-enact some past event, crouching down next to them as suddenly as he’d spring up and move away.

“Good heavens, it’s been—what, eighty years since I’ve seen you last?”  He had a nice voice, a theatrical baritone, indulgent in its cadences and rhythms.  “And over a century before that.  You never come to the south anymore.  I suppose I know why, of course, but still, it’s a shame to see so little of you.  And you’re so thin; I know you don’t need to eat, but don’t you humans still find it pleasurable at least?  Enjoying yourself a little won’t put you on his level, you know.”

Shigaraki, who lay stretched out on the bank with his head cupped in one hand and the air of a student watching a classroom clock count down towards the last bell, snorted but otherwise remained silent.  

“And you have a companion now, I see!”  Sako turned to her and Toga blinked to suddenly see her own face—eyes still caramel dark from her last meal—instead of the mask.  She-he smiled, lean and mischievous, and spun in place, back to the mask by the time he’d completed the turn.  “Your name, young miss?”

Toga grinned even as her heart fluttered.  The Night Parade was one thing, and had somehow passed them by without incident, but actually having a youkai’s direct attention was another.  Was there a right answer?  One that he’d lash out at her for, with scissors or sword or some other weapon?  But then, if he did attack her, she’d be justified in counter-attacking and he certainly looked physical enough to bleed.

“Toga Himiko,” she chirped, one hand inching towards her purse.  “It’s nice to meet you!  How long have you known Shikkun, Sako-san?”  

“Shikkun, is it?” he asked, reeling back in exaggerated delight.  “Shigaraki, can it be you’ve made a friend at last?”

“I didn’t come to introduce her.”  Shigaraki rolled his eyes.  His lip curled up as he went on, “He’s got my scent again.  I need you to throw him off.”

Sako sobered.  He raised one hand to his chin—or the lower edge of his mask, anyway—finally going still.  

“That gets trickier every time.  Do you know, he had an onmyouji in his employ the last time?”

“And how would I know that?”  Shigaraki looked away, out over the water.  Annoyance tightened his mouth, and—guilt, maybe?  The night just kept getting more interesting.

“By visiting, perhaps?” Sako shot back, a sudden sharpness to his tone.  “The man’s spiritual sense couldn’t have been that high if he didn’t sense something off about his employer—”

“Or money buys a lot of ignorance,” Shigaraki muttered, equally scathing.

“—but his charms were still quite difficult to evade.”

“But you managed though, right?” Toga interjected.  She beamed when they both looked at her, Sako tilting his head, Shigaraki hiding a smirk in his lank hair.  “You escaped from a real onmyouji!  That’s so cool!”

“Young Toga, you flatter me.”  Sako pressed one gloved hand over his heart.  “A tactic certain others in the vicinity could stand to try, might I add?”

Toga giggled as Shigaraki rolled his eyes again.  

“Are you gonna help or not? Because we need to keep moving if not; you know the south’s his home territory.”  

“Do you have any other options?  I’m genuinely curious.  And I know how lying looks on your face, so don’t try it.”  Sako spun in place again, and Toga nearly applauded to see Shigaraki’s face with such a foreign expression of playful mischief.  

“You’re still the only noppera-bou I’m on speaking terms with,” the real thing said, tone flat.  Noppera-bou, so that was it.  Well, that made sense.  And answered the question about what Sako’s face looked like under the mask.

“And you with such a winning disposition,” Shiga-sako quipped, turning away and back again, mask returned.  “But I do hate to leave friends in the lurch.”  

“So you’ll help?” Toga piped up, her heartbeat beginning to pick up with the prospect of new adventures.

“It does an old spirit like me good to get out into the world now and again,” he conceded.  “Meet new people, get new faces…  Yes, I suppose I can help a little.”

“Yay!” Toga cheered, letting the excited peal ring out long and loud enough to cover Shigaraki’s muttered, “Finally.”

[redorblue]

Alias Grace, by Margaret Atwood

I know both the TV version and the book version, but since I try to be a serious book blog every now and then, I’ll talk about the book (although they’re pretty similar, which is what happens when you let a writer actually weigh in with script, set design etc. - you get a show that’s true to the source material. Revolutionary.). Just one thing about the show: I loved both versions of the story, but honestly, I’m even more impressed by the show because it’s so much harder to show ambiguity on screen where everything you see is a deliberate choice. In a book, it’s normally much easier to leave things out without being too obvious about it - details in the background, thought processes, facial expressions and the like. It also depends on what kind of narrator the author chooses, but generally if the narrator doesn’t pick something up, that’s just bad luck for us readers, a gap we’ll have to fill ourselves. On screen, if you don’t want to skip scenes all the time (which is not an option for this book, you’d have to skip a lot) you have to show some things, at least; the actor has to have some kind of facial expression, there need to be a few props in the room, that kind of thing. Ergo, not much room for ambiguity, which is what this story is all about. But it worked, and it’s great, and now I’m gonna shut up about the show and talk about the book.

The book needs ambiguity because it revolves around an unsolved question: did Grace Marks, an immigrant maid from Ireland, help kill her boss and his housekeeper, or was it a simple case of wrong place, wrong time? After spending 6 hours watching the TV show and another 8 reading the book, I’m no closer to an answer than I was before. The fact that this was discussed during a real life murder trial doesn’t help either - it was mostly public sentiment rather than proof that led to the historic Grace Marks spending decades in jail. I know some people find open endings unsatisfying, and on some level I get that, but some part in me that loves to suffer has a thing for open endings, so this is perfect for me.

The book has two narrative strings: The first is about the efforts of a charity group to get Grace out of jail, which is why they hire a doctor in the up-and-coming medical discipline of psychology to examine her, and the second is Grace’s own account of her life story as told to said psychologist. This is one of the things I like about how Grace’s story is handled: she’s allowed to tell it herself (in a fictionalization of what is known about the real Grace Mark’s life, but that’s as close as we’ll ever get to her own voice). That’s especially important because as much as she’s been stripped of agency since the moment she was born - as the eldest child in a big, poor family, as a maid who exists at the pleasure of her boss, as a prisoner on a life sentence, as an object of public demonization and fetishization - at least in her own narrative she’s the one who gets to decide the what, when and how. It would be naive to assume that this radically turns her life around (spoiler: it doesn’t, she spends another decade in jail after the interval with the psychologist), and it certainly doesn’t improve her material living conditions, but it’s more power than she’s had for most of her life. The one positive thing I can say about the psychologist is that he listens to her relatively free of bias.That means that she gets to decide which part of her she wants him to see, to make him see her as a fully formed human being with hopes and fears and contradictions instead of the stereotypes she’s been carrying with her all her life: the dirty immigrant - the lowly servant to do with as you wish - the secret whore with the pretty face - the devious murderess - the helpless, blameless, defenseless maiden. Take your pick. It’s not much in the way of agency, and yet it’s everything.

The thing is, I can’t even blame those people around her who think she’s the victim of a terrible mistake of the jury. For most of the book, I believed it myself, completely. You understand pretty early on that she was involved in some kind of crime, although the details are revealed much later, and from the way that Grace is presented, and especially the way she presents herself, it feels so wrong to think of her as a criminal, a perpetrator. It makes you overlook certain clues in her interior monologue that suggest that she’s not as innocent and naive as she seems. So after the key scene when she’s hypnotized and made to talk about the murders (that is, when she’s stripped of her agency to shape her own narrative once again) I was so confused that I was ready to believe pretty much anything.

There are three explanations on offer: 1. She’s faking her amnesia concerning the murders because she doesn’t want to get hanged, which makes her guilty. 2. She’s possessed by the angry spirit of her friend Mary who passed away because of a fatal abortion and wants to take revenge on the world and especially rich men who sexually exploit their female employees, which makes her innocent. 3. She has a dissociative identity disorder and one of her selves did commit the murders, which makes her... complicated. Now while the book is full of superstitions, I do recognize that option 2 is very unlikely (although I kinda like the thought of a revengeful she-ghost punishing exploitative people for their behaviour). But between 1 and 3... I honestly couldn’t decide. Grace’s mind is so highly structured and she’s so self-possessed that I wouldn’t think it beyond her capabilities as an actress to fake it, especially since she does have violent thoughts sometimes (and with reason). It’s a real dilemma, but in the end I think the book is trying get a message across: that sometimes it’s incredibly hard to stick to “innocent until proven guilty”, and it needs a lot of conviction and belief in principles to not bend under the weight of assumptions, wherever they may lean. This is a case where there is no easy answer, which makes it all the more important to hold on to a principle such as this, because in the end you might just throw an innocent person into jail for decades. It’s not elegant, it certainly doesn’t feel good, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

But the book also shows something else. It shows how men, and rich people, and especially rich men can/could get away with almost anything. Time and again, the book demonstrates how the female servants (almost all the women, and almost all the servants in this book) are screwed over by their masters. Grace’s friend Mary dies from having an abortion after her master’s son gave her a ring and then proceeded to get her pregnant, but instead of punishing the man, the whole thing gets hushed up and Mary ends up with all the blame. Grace herself gets chased out of the house when said son switches his attention to her and ends up at the house of another rich man who lusts after her. The housekeeper of said man was equally forced to take a position with him because she had an illegitimate baby and nobody else would take her in - which makes me feel that this man likes to employ women who have no place else to go and no way to refuse him when he comes onto them. Granted, the housekeeper seems to like being his lover, but it’s obvious that she still suffers from the power imbalance between them. It goes on and on. Even the rich characters that are somewhat likeable, like the psychologist and the family who tries to get Grace out of prison, seem to be completely unconscious of the hundred little ways in which they make the lives of their servants miserable every day. The only one who develops a bit of an understanding of what it’s like to be a servant is the psychologist who reflects on how he made a mess of things when he was a kid and how hard the servants at his house must have had it (and honestly, I’m not sure he even counts, he has a huge crush on Grace, or an idealized version of her, and that doesn’t really make his epiphany a redeeming quality). The rest live on, tearing their dresses and staining their pants in blissful ignorance. Which shows that it’s imperative to let people who normally don’t get a voice tell their own story (and listen openmindedly!), because otherwise it’s all too easy to forget that they, too, are human beings.

[lesbianuravity]

A RIOTT, A BARON, and a GRAVE!

When you get the opportunity to interview a superstar from WWE, you jump on the opportunity. When you get the chance to photograph and interview three WWE Superstars, you get on the phone and book one of your best photographers and writers and have them fly 3,000 miles across the country to find their way backstage at the Staples Center in Los Angeles…and that’s exactly what we did!So, from the safety of your homesit back and get “personal” with Ruby Riott, Baron Corbin and Corey Graves.

INKED: You are one of the most tattooed personalities in WWE, when did you get your first tattoo? COREY GRAVES: I was 15 years old and my parents used it as a bargaining tool to get my grades up. It worked I got straight A’s and a tattoo right on the outside of my calf. It’s a cross, and I have known at least 10 different people that have the exact same one.

How was your transition from Superstar to commentator? It was tough, but I had no choice. If I wanted to survive here I had to make my way and fully embrace it. It was a long and difficult transition, but now I love it, and I can’t think of doing anything else.

What is your favorite part about hosting WWE Superstar Ink? I love getting to hear the back stories about the tattoos from the guys and ladies on the show. I love the tattoo industry and I have spent a lot of my time in that world and it’s always interesting to find out the meaning behind why people get the tattoos they get.

You worked in a tattoo shop. Were you a wrestler during that time? Yes, I was a wrestler during that time. I worked in a tattoo shop as a piercer for about seven years to support my wrestling habit. It was a great job, and the people I met during that time are some of my best friends to this day.

Describe your personality in three words. Eclectic, sarcastic and nonsensical. How do your fans motivate you? I try to never lose sight that I was once a fan. I followed this dream to be a superstar and that’s why I am still in this business— because I love it. I try to be respectful and to never forget what makes me a fan. Do you feel like you’re living your dream? Yes, 100 percent. I am employed by WWE and I love WWE. Hopefully one day I will be the voice of WWE, and I feel like I am this generation’s voice of WWE.

How was the transition from commentator on NXT to being a commentator on Raw and SmackDown? NXT prepared me tremendously for Monday Night Raw, but the main difference is that you are live. The live element is really exciting to me because what people don’t realize is Raw and SmackDown change constantly during the day. We can have a meeting at the beginning of the day and by the time we go on the air the show can be completely different.

So, tell me what really motivates you professionally. I’ve been in the sports entertainment industry for more than half of my life. Being in WWE is so great, and I love that I have finally settled into a role that I am good at. Now, I just want to go down in history as one of the greats: like Bobby Heenan, or Jessie “The Body” Ventura or Gorilla Monsoon.

How do you define success? In my personal life, I have a beautiful wife and three amazing children, and we have a beautiful home and life together. As far as my career, I have succeeded because I never think of myself as successful. I keep grinding so I can keep getting better and keep evolving. I never want to settle.

What’s next for Corey Graves? I would love to try something outside of WWE in the entertainment world. I’m not exactly sure what that entails but it could be hosting a show or doing stand-up comedy or being in a movie. I never got into this business to be famous, but I really enjoy entertaining and the entertainment business. ———————————————————————————————————

INKED: When did your love for wrestling begin? BARON CORBIN: Believe it or not, tattoos kind of drew me in to wrestling because as a kid in Kansas City where I’m from, wrestling has such a rich history. Me and my dad would go to shows at Memorial Hall, and we would watch wrestling on TV. I was exposed to guys that were big and athletic like Bam Bam Bigelow. He had flames tattooed on his head and I thought he was just awesome and the definition of a tough guy.

You mentioned your father as a big influencer. Tell me about that. He definitely was. My dad was an iron worker, he was tough as nails. He pushed me to be the best. I always tell the story about when I was in a karate tournament and I took 4th place. They gave me a trophy and he told me people in 4th place didn’t get a trophy and he tossed it out the car window [laughing]. He helped me become very mentally tough and he pushed me to be the best person and athlete I can be.

When did know you wanted to be a professional wrestler? Definitely as a kid. At my dad’s funeral, we told the story about my mom coming home and my dad and I were having a wrestling match and the house was shaking. She said she could see it from outside. We had these big living room brawls with my brother and my dad and it was the best time ever.

Who were some of your heros in the ring when you were growing up? It goes back to Bam Bam Bigelow and Big Boss Man, and just these big guys who could really move.

When did you start getting tattoos? When I was 18 I got my very first tattoo. It’s a horrible tattoo, it’s a Japanese or Chinese symbol for strength with two weird Celtic knots. I keep thinking I’m going to get it covered up with a big back piece or something but in that moment, it stirred the pot and I just kept getting covered. Then I got a giant dragon on my thigh, and a giant tree on the back of my leg, then I started getting my chest done and then I got portraits of my grandfather and my dad. My mom hates every single one of them.

Are there any tattoos inspired by your wrestling career? Yes. The one I just got, actually. I got lobo on the back of my head/ear area and it means “wolf” in Spanish. My wife is Spanish, and I want my children to speak Spanish, and I am the Lone Wolf in WWE. Corey Graves actually gave me that name. My character rides the line of that darker world and I have a bunch of horror movie tattoos, as well as Jack the Ripper.

Tell us about Liars Club. Liars Club is my clothing line. And I have a couple of tattoo artists that help me with designs. It’s about that vibe of even though our appearance may not be acceptable we can still take over the world.

What’s next for Baron Corbin? WWE Championship all the way. That’s why I came to WWE, I want to be the WWE Champion, and I feel like everybody should want that, and if they don’t they don’t belong here. ——————————————————————————————————— INKED: You were not the high school girl jock, correct? RUBY RIOTT: I wasn’t very good at most sports growing up. I wasn’t into cheerleading or volleyball or track. I was mostly into theater. Although I am very athletic, I think the reason I didn’t play sports in high school was because there were so many rules.

Music played a big part in your life as an adolescent. Can you tell us about that? I struggled with a bit of an identity crisis when I was young. I came from a broken home because my parents divorced when I was young. So, music became my outlet and my escape. How does music influence your life today? It’s a huge part of my life, it’s part of my creative process on a daily basis. I am constantly listening to music and I have a few songs that I listen to before every match that really put me in the mind space that I need to be in.You took your name in WWE from the band Rancid’s “Ruby Soho.” What other elements of punk rock do you bring in the ring with you? Pretty much everything. My entrance is very UK punk-based. Our Riott Squad T-shirts are influenced by a Sex Pistols album. What do the fans mean to you? They are the reason I strive to do my best each time I get in the ring. SO many amazing female Superstars have come before me blazing the trail, and I feel like it’s my responsibility to show girls who may not necessarily fit in or don’t feel like they belong that they don’t have to change.Who are some of the female superstars you looked up to when you first got into the game? When I was younger I used to watch Lita and Molly Holly and Jazz. All three of them in their own way were my favorites. I was drawn to them because they were trailblazers. They looked different, they acted different, and I was hooked. You worked so hard to get to this point. Are you living your dream right now? One hundred percent, every day! I never want to take this for granted. Being able to wake up every day and have a career that I don’t even consider to be work is such a blessing. Where did you get your first tattoo? I got my first tattoo at this small hole-in-the wall tattoo shop in Mishawaka, Indiana. It’s the music notes to “What a Wonderful World’ by Louis Armstrong. It’s not very well done, but it has so much meaning because my dad used to sing that song to me when I was very young. When did your love for tattoos begin? It was around the same time that I discovered punk rock and fell in love with music. Tattoos were another way for me to express myself. I remember the first time I saw Kat Von D; I saw how much amazing artwork she had all over her body, and I knew it was something that I could relate to and wanted to get into. How many tattoos do you have? I believe I have about 26. I think! A lot of them are blended together so it may be more than that. Probably over 40 hours of work due to some of the detail. What’s next for Ruby Riott? One day I will become SmackDown Women’s Champion, and one day I will be in the grandest stage of all: WrestleMania. 

[socialjusticeartshare]

First She Was Separated From Her Family, Now She’s Separated From School

A refugee child, once separated from her mother at the border by Trump, now struggles with online school.

Every weekday morning, a 12-year-old refugee named Génnezys logs into her seventh grade online classroom. She sits at a tiny table in a corner of her cluttered living room. Before logging in, she tapes her phone to a chair and dials my number on FaceTime. Once we’re connected, I peer into the screen of a laptop lent to her by her public middle school. For hours, I observe coronavirus pandemic-era education for Génnezys and about 20 other children of multiple races, nationalities, and economic circumstances. What I see is both heroic and tragic.

Génnezys is one of the thousands of immigrant children who were torn from their parents in 2018 by the Trump administration’s “zero tolerance” family separation policy at the U.S.-Mexico border. I wrote about the desperate efforts of Cruz, her incarcerated mother, to find her 10-year-old daughter. They were reunited after about six weeks. Cruz later borrowed $6,000 from a friend for a coyote to smuggle her three-year-old daughter into the U.S. The child was detained for a few days then released to Cruz.

I asked Génnezys to invent a pseudonym to protect her family from U.S. government reprisal, and she came up with a fanciful one based on the Spanish pronunciation — HEH-neh-sees — of the first book in the Old Testament.

Today the family resides in a small Southern city. Cruz works as a janitor, earning a bit less than $10 an hour. They live in a small apartment with one bedroom, which Cruz and the girls share with her boyfriend. He is also an immigrant, and he pays half the rent. He’s employed in construction, and he leaves for work very early in the morning. Cruz goes to work after taking her four-year-old daughter, whom I’ll call Bety, by bus to a daycare center. With school strictly online now because of Covid-19, Génnezys stays in the apartment all by herself from 7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., often supervising an 8-year-old girl who has her own school computer with headphones. This child’s Latina immigrant mother works, too, so Génnezys acts as babysitter. Before online school started in September, she worried intensely that being without an adult in the home would be lonely and scary. I live hundreds of miles away, so I volunteered to sit with her via FaceTime. She says that she feels much better when I’m with her.

During the first two days of remote school, the teachers, all young or middle-aged white women, cycled though a dither of confusion and kind but mostly fruitless efforts to actually see and hear their students. One problem was that the online platforms were glitchy. The class links often crashed, leaving the students, including Génnezys, with blank screens. But by week’s end, the kinks were worked out — yet the students remained silent phantoms.

“Know that I see you. I hear you. I’m with you,” one young teacher intoned to the kids right after introducing herself. They had names like Hassan, Rasheeda, Yennifer, and Travis. “Black Lives Matter,” the teacher added. She was met by silence from her new students, and she could not see their reactions either. She asked them to turn on their mics and cameras, but getting them to comply was harder than pulling their teeth. “What did you do all summer? How did you deal with Covid? Talk about your family!”

A boy with an Arabic name turned on his mic just long enough to say that he had a baby sister. Indeed, the loud wailing of an infant could be heard. The teacher skipped a beat, then the boy’s mic went dead. No other students turned on their microphones. Not even Génnezys, who had earlier proved she was not shy. When the teacher mispronounced her name on the first day of school, Génnezys politely but firmly corrected her. She is a brilliant girl who knew no English whatsoever two years ago yet speaks it almost perfectly now, and who scrolls through the internet on her own initiative for details about the accident that crippled Frida Kahlo.

Though she has defended her name and sometimes has been the only student to answer her teachers’ questions about math, Génnezys remains strenuously silent about most of the details of her life. The family all got sick in late May, with many days of fever, coughing, muscle aches, nausea, dizziness, and diarrhea, as well as loss of appetite, taste, and smell. They recovered, but Cruz is suffering now from hair loss — a condition just recently recognized as a complication of Covid-19.

When Cruz got sick, she was employed in housekeeping at an upscale chain hotel. She said she fell ill after being ordered to enter and clean a room occupied by a woman who was coughing. She was not given PPE for the job.

Cruz estimates that in her building complex of a few dozen apartments, about 20 other people came down with Covid-19. “No one died, but some were carried off to hospitals in ambulances,” she said, adding that all were immigrants from Latin America.

Latinos comprise fewer than one in five residents in the county. But they make up about half of the people in Cruz’s census tract, while just across a main thoroughfare almost everyone is white and owns a house.  In Cruz’s tract, many of the Latinos live in cramped little rental apartments.

During the outbreak and their own illnesses, Cruz and her children were never tested for Covid-19. Nor did she contact me, though she instructed her preteen daughter to call me for help if she took a turn for the worse. The family just stuck it out, but Cruz was fired by the hotel because of her sickness and missed work. She got the janitorial job just as soon as she felt better. She couldn’t self-quarantine: She had rent to pay, kids to feed. None of this is something Génnezys wants to talk about in online seventh grade.

She doesn’t turn on her camera either.

It’s hard to know exactly why the students as a group refuse to show themselves to their teachers or to each other. Middle school is the empire of peer pressure — pressure not to stand out, even in normal times, when rows of children are looking at and breathing with each other, along with a teacher in a real room. But the kids’ reluctance now seems at least partly due to how dispirited and disconnected their virtual classrooms feel. Génnesyz’s teachers practically stand on their heads coaxing interactions with the students, but the teachers’ energy seems TV-ish, abstract.

The kids are alone. They have no books. The only class that resembles normal school is math. As in times past, the teacher writes figures on a board and explains what they mean. The other classes are a mishmash of hyperactive YouTube science videos with men who speak too fast, and a woman with a white coat and test tubes performing experiments — work the students normally would be absorbed with in a classroom lab, but which they can only stare at now from afar, wall-eyed. An art class features hip-hop music, whose teaching intention is muddled, and digital choose-and-drag stickers and emojis. Strange, sci-fi cartoon people in Génnezys’s American History class purport to recount the high points of the antebellum human bondage, the Civil War, and the Black Codes. After that lesson, I asked Génnezys if she understood what a slave was. She still didn’t know — though she did remember the cartoon guy saying that a man named Frederick Douglass had been forcibly separated from his mother. She knew what that meant, from firsthand experience, but didn’t mention it in class. With me, she minimized her experience. She’d learned that Frederick Douglass was an infant when he was taken. “But, um, I was 10 when it happened,” she said. “I was a big kid, not a little kid.”

One teacher conducted a lesson about why students should participate in small- group, online “breakout” chat rooms. “Because they help us get to know each other?” said Génnezys, daring to speak.

“Very good! Thank you for that, Génnezys!” chimed the teacher, saying all the syllables correctly. Then she warned the students that they must use “appropriate language” in the chat rooms, and that their language was being watched.

This teacher also held a “correct answer” contest, with her pupils silently checking T’s and F’s on their screens. “True or false: If you fight at a school bus stop, you will be punished as severely as if you’d fought a school. True! Right, Brian! Brian gets a point! He’s pulling ahead of Corinne! Next question. True or false: If you touch the private body part of someone else at school, whether on purpose or by accident, you will be punished the same, either way. Yay, Corinne! She’s back in play!”

But there are no school bus stops now. There are no “someone else”s at school.

Génnezys has another reason not to turn on her camera: She is ashamed of her clothes. She fits a girl’s 14 now, but her wardrobe dates from a year ago, when she was size 10 and 12. Her shirts are too tight for her rapidly developing body. In the morning she puts on her mother’s dresses. They are several sizes too large.

Read Our Complete CoverageThe War on Immigrants

Cruz can’t afford to take her daughter shopping. She just lost another week of work, and wages, due to Covid-19. Two co-workers at her janitorial job tested positive and one is in the hospital. Because Cruz worked closely with both infected women, she was quarantined for 14 days. She had no proof that she had already contracted Covid-19. She had to stay home, along with Bety, who ran around the apartment laughing, yelling, and rifling Génnezys’s little desk while her sister tried to pay attention to online class.

An employee from the county health department came by to deliver some onions and pieces of fruit. Cruz finally got a negative test result but still had to finish the quarantine. Génnezys did not tell her teachers what was happening.

Génnezys also avoids the camera because of what Cruz calls “her obsession.” On the second day of school, a teacher asked, “What is your favorite thing to do?” Amid the mass silence, Génnezys activated her mic and bravely answered: “Play with slime,” she said.

“Slime?” said the teacher, nonplussed.

“Yeah. Slime.”

“Ah. OK. Yeah. Slime. Well, that sounds relaxing!”

“Yeah. It is.”

“Slime” is a faddish kid product that’s been around since the 1970s. Back then, it was valued by boys for its gross-out appeal. Now it’s prettier, smells nice, and is all the rage among preteen and teen girls. Many make it from a home recipe involving glue, borax, food coloring, and plastic beads from craft stores like Michael’s.

Génnezys was already into slime by age 10, back in Central America. Cruz’s partner there, an extremely violent man who was neither of the girls’ fathers, was terrorizing and assaulting Cruz and the children, threatening them with death. The girls witnessed the violence. Cruz made plans to hide Bety with her sister and flee to the U.S. with Génnezys. Meanwhile, Génnezys discovered slime. “In my country,” she remembered, “it was called moco,” which is Spanish for snot. She pushed it, pulled it, rolled and wrapped it, over and over and over. It calmed her, Cruz remembers.

After a grueling trip north, including a stay in a filthy, crowded stash house, things got worse at the border when the Trump administration took Génnezys from Cruz and shipped her 2,000 miles away to a child detention center. There, she was warehoused with mostly older Central American girls who’d come to the U.S. by themselves, pregnant or already with babies.

After spending six weeks with these young women, according to Cruz, 10-year-old Génnezys was using racy language and discussing sex. After she was reunited with her mother, she experienced night terrors and walked in her sleep for three months. She had three sessions with a psychologist. Then, said Cruz, “She entered a new phase of her life: adolescence,” and “she hardly talked about what happened.” Even so, Cruz added, “Two weeks ago, after Génnezys had an eye exam that showed a problem with one of her eyes, she mentioned to me that an older girl in the detention center hit her hard in that eye with a ball. That was two years ago. She’d never told me till now. Sometimes I worry about what’s in her head.”

Outside of her head is slime: jars and jars of it in all colors and textures, from shiny and glistening to rough and frothy. “I love YouTube slime videos,” Génnezys told me. The site has a plethora of young girls extolling their slime collections, as well productions with sexy women’s voices doing ASMR routines, and images of long, manicured fingernails digging languorously into the goo.

“I worry about it,” said Cruz. “It’s such a waste of money. But she would rather have slime, even, than clothes that fit her.”

If Génnezys were to activate her camera for her classmates and teachers, they might see her furiously and endlessly twisting, pulling, and punching her strange doughs as she fidgets at the computer and tries hard to do her schoolwork. A few months ago, Wired magazine interviewed a neuroscientist and psychologist who suggested that people might be gravitating toward slime during the Covid-19 crisis to simulate the feeling of touching actual people.

As a Central American refugee child, Génnezys has been traumatized by murderous violence, forced family separation, poverty, and plague. More and more, however, nonrefugee children in America are joining her in the grief and fear of being apart and alone. How many of these kids are scrunched over their own computers, secretly toying with slime?

“I don’t know,” Génnezys said when I asked her that question. “Maybe I’m the only one. Before the virus, I didn’t play with it in school because school was good. Now, I don’t think I could do school if I didn’t have slime. Without it I’d be dying.

“Dying of what?”

“Boredom.”

Article Source

[mlablockquote633]

writing help

About me

Essay Writer 24

Essay Writer 24 First, you should look at the traits of the writing service at hand. This is why students are confused by a large number of companies that they are presented with. Want to share your personal essay writing discounts? I'm at all times joyful to increase my record with priceless suggestions. They don’t know how to store and nonetheless be safe that they won’t be scammed. However, college students typically have bother figuring out whether or not a service is reliable and protected or not. Students of all academic levels have experienced stress in face of their busy schedules and obligations that they'll’t manage to meet up with. College students are particularly struggling to maintain up with demands of their tutors and professors. They have jobs that help them pay for his or her school and they should do tests, exams and of course, essays. If you're a large tech fan and you employ it for almost all of your activities, you'll probably find essay writing super boring, and also you would possibly wish to find a way to mix know-how with it. Well you don't even want excessive end technology, only a way to contact the blokes that know what they're doing. I assume every of us at least as soon as visited so known as essay banks that promote already written essays for a small price. This is the most harmful and low-cost choice which threatens to have dire consequences for your academic life. Nowadays expertise makes everything easier, so why wouldn't it make essay writing easy as properly? Our writers will want at least three hours to finish it. Your paper will consist of a hundred% non-plagiarized content material. The writer will contemplate your paper requirements, conduct analysis, and create the doc particularly for you. Check writers’ scores, experience and awards to pick essentially the most proficient expert for yourself. Deposit funds into your EssayShark balance in order that a writer can work on your order. We usually are not like all different sites that promise you the most effective, but provide you with providers of students from third world countries with poor data. A professional author will do the be just right for you, and hence you may be ensured that you will get a good grade. Thanks to our critiques, students can order nice papers for the value they're keen to pay. The writers who are qualified for your order will start sending you offers. Your order shall be delivered strictly inside the deadline. Start receiving proposals from our writers inside minutes and chat with them live. We tried our greatest to create a simple hiring course of. Click the button on the principle web page and observe our easy instructions. We bet there's nothing easier than hiring writers at EssayPro. We double-examine all of the assignments for plagiarism and ship you only authentic essays. Look to see if the US primarily based web site presents writer samples and statistics. A good site will offer you the possibility to choose your author, so that you wish to get the most information about them earlier than you select one in your essay. Now if the satellite tv for pc web sites scam is applied, the most straight-ahead one to look out for is the pretend evaluations. One group of writers that owns a number of website domains will make evaluations for all of them and rank them accordingly. However, on the surface, you can't know they aren't any totally different. However, if you take note of some of the tips that we have shared with you and on the information to purchasing an essay, you should be on your method to a profitable cooperation with a service. You may use a few of the tried-and-tested companies from our prime ten record or venture out to find a different one – no matter could be the case, our guides and suggestions will assist you to. Now you could have a fairly good image of what an actual, A-level writing service ought to provide. However should you still want some shopping steering, take a look at a number of the other things you need to take note of. The reply to the question of tips on how to discover the best writing service isn’t a straightforward one.

[mhsn033]

Nasa Mars rover: Meteorite to head home to Red Planet

Image copyright NASA/JPL

Image caption A a part of the Sayh al Uhaymir 008 meteorite which used to be stumbled on in Oman in 1999

A puny chunk of Mars will likely be heading house when the US house company launches its most modern rover mission on Thursday.

Nasa’s Perseverance robotic will lift with it a meteorite that originated on the Red Planet and which, unless now, has been lodged within the series of London’s Natural History Museum (NHM).

The rock’s known properties will act as a calibration target to benchmark the workings of a rover instrument.

It’ll give added self belief to any discoveries the robotic would possibly well presumably create.

This is also in particular necessary if Perseverance stumbles across one thing that hints at the presence of previous lifestyles within the arena – belief to be one of many mission’s wide quests.

“This runt rock’s acquired moderately a lifestyles legend,” explained Prof Caroline Smith, head of Earth sciences collections at the NHM and a member of the Perseverance science group.

“It fashioned about 450 million years ago, acquired blasted off Mars by an asteroid or comet roughly 600,000-700,000 years ago, and then landed on Earth; we invent no longer know precisely when but presumably 1,000 years ago. And now or no longer it is going merit to Mars,” she suggested BBC News.

Media playback is unsupported to your instrument

Media captionProf Caroline Smith: “It provides me a tingling feeling to amass one thing that came from Mars”

Found out within the deserts of Oman in 1999, the meteorite, assuredly known as Sayh al Uhaymir 008, or SaU 008, is a basic fragment of basalt – very related to the form of igneous rock that you just would possibly presumably safe, as an illustration, at Huge’s Causeway in Northern Eire.

It contains hundreds pyroxene, olivine and feldspar minerals. And or no longer it is this properly-studied chemistry, along with the meteorite’s textures, that create it so precious for Perseverance.

The rock has been set up in a housing, along with 9 other kinds of area cloth, on the front of the rover where this is also scanned assuredly by the Sherloc instrument.

Right here’s a tool that contains two imagers and two laser spectroscopes, which together will examine the geology of the rover’s touchdown space – a 40km-wide crater called Jezero.

Satellite tv for computer photos counsel the bowl once held a lake, and scientists put off into consideration it to be belief to be one of many handiest locations on Mars to take a look at out to safe proof of previous microbial exercise – if ever that took keep.

Image copyright PA Media

Image caption Huge’s causeway: The World Heritage space is fabricated from columns of basalt rock

Sherloc will take a look at the local rocks and soil, shopping for signatures of ancient biology.

What scientists invent no longer desire, nonetheless, is to have what they deem is a “eureka moment” supreme to then realise Sherloc had developed some systematic error in its observations.

“We are going to watch at the calibration target within the first 60-90 days and presumably no longer again for six months as a consequence of we deem the instrument is with out a doubt very stable,” mentioned Dr Luther Beegle, Sherloc’s major investigator from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

“But when we open seeing appealing issues on the skin of Mars that we can’t designate within the spectra, then we are going to watch merit to the calibration target to create particular that that the instrument’s working precisely.

“I deem the handiest we’re going so as to invent from a scientific perspective is name what we would call a ‘likely bio-signature’.

“I invent no longer deem we are going to ever be necessarily 100% certain as a consequence of that’s a laborious measurement to create, which is why the sample-return facet of Perseverance is so necessary.”

Image copyright NASA-JPL

Image caption Artwork: The Sherloc instrument is within the turret on the tip of the robotic arm

The rover will kit its most appealing rock samples into puny tubes that will likely be left on the skin of Mars for retrieval and return to Earth by later missions.

Prof Smith is hopeful she’ll get hang of to work on this area cloth, which would possibly well presumably possibly advance merit within the next 10-15 years.

The NHM knowledgeable is on a world panel that can resolve how handiest to address the additional-terrestrial rocks.

“I’m really main the curation middle of attention group,” she suggested BBC News. “By this time subsequent year, we will deserve to have a terribly appropriate idea for the form of making we can need, the types of processes that will likely be occurring in that building, and the plan we are going to really open curating the samples and making them on hand to scientists for take a look at.”

Researchers can have an spectacular better likelihood of confirming lifestyles on Mars if they’ll assess the proof the employ of the full analytical tools on hand in Earth laboratories, as towards appropriate the puny suite of instruments carried by a robotic rover.

Nasa’s Perseverance rover is scheduled to put off off on a United Open Alliance Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral, Florida, actual thru a two-hour window that begins at 07: 50 local time (11: 50 GMT; 12: 50 BST).

The slash of SaU 008 would possibly well presumably possibly simply no longer be the categorical Martian meteorite on board. The rover’s SuperCam instrument can have its have fragment of Mars rock, again to behave as a calibration target.

Image copyright NASA-JSC

Image caption The meteorite is belief to be one of 10 calibration targets to be ancient by Sherloc. Others embody materials that would be ancient within the spacesuits frail by future human explorers of Mars

Jonathan.Amos-INTERNET@bbc.co.uk and apply me on Twitter: @BBCAmos

from WordPress https://ift.tt/3g0OgJj via IFTTT

[easyfoodnetwork]

The Chefs I Used to Admire Aren’t the Leaders We Need Right Now

Big-name chefs need to do more for the employees they laid off

This is Eater Voices, where chefs, restaurateurs, writers, and industry insiders share their perspectives about the food world, tackling a range of topics through the lens of personal experience. First-time writer? Don’t worry, we’ll pair you with an editor to make sure your piece hits the mark. If you want to write an Eater Voices essay, please send us a couple paragraphs explaining what you want to write about and why you are the person to write it to voices@eater.com.

As an amateur cook on my way to becoming a chef, I studied the world-renowned chefs credited with changing restaurant cuisine forever. I’ve read their cookbooks, been to their restaurants, and have even met a few. I’ve been drawn in by the creativity and innovation from chefs like Thomas Keller, Ferran Adrià, René Redzepi, and David Chang, who can transform a raw ingredient into a mindblowing and even iconic dish. But over the past month, I have hit my breaking point with being quiet about the actions, or rather lack of action, high-profile chefs and restaurateurs have taken during this global pandemic. Since the start of the coronavirus crisis, it’s become apparent that awards and accolades don’t translate into common sense and an understanding of optics. From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem these chefs can think beyond their own interests.

In a CNBC interview, Chang described this time first and foremost as “easily the hardest couple weeks of my life.” In a Yahoo Finance interview, Tom Colicchio said he thought that it was a bad idea for restaurants to be open for takeout, considering those restaurants would only be making $5,000 a night. He followed it up with, “But the restaurants are doing this because they’re struggling, I understand the intention, I had the same desire to make sure my staff is kept whole. But it’s just not a good thing to do right now.” These statements reek of privilege. Many chefs at this level have licensing deals with hotels, merchandise, luxury car brand deals, millionaire and/or billionaire investors, and cookbook deals. These owners have so many more assets and opportunities than their staff, but we’re led to believe that it’s a hard world for them right now, not their employees. While $5,000 might not be enough for Colicchio to shoulder the risk of opening for takeout, it’s the only option for so many restaurants, including my own, when closing could mean awful things for the staff.

I feel the need to continually reinvent the wheel to keep my staff employed, while the chefs I’m supposed to look up to as industry leaders are looking at their interests first. On April 15, Keller announced that he, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, and Wolfgang Puck are the chosen men, among an entirely male and mostly white group, to join the White House’s Economic Council for Restaurants, one of the “economic revival industry groups” tasked with figuring out how we are going to come back from this. That same day the Small Business Administration announced that the first round of stimulus money had run out. While big-name chefs and restaurant groups positioned themselves to get the first handouts, small businesses without the attached names, accolades, or connections were left to fight it out for the last pennies. There isn’t a timeline for the next round. By then, hundreds if not thousands more restaurants will have closed.

Laid-off employees are struggling to figure things out while their former bosses are lauded as heroes.

For these big names with industry muscle, the first step should have been to lead the charge in taking care of their employees, not just by offering links to unemployment sites, but by making sure they didn’t stretch themselves so thin when they opened new restaurants every year and conducted $10 million renovations. They could have had a better plan than to use unemployment as a safety net for the employees who bent over backward to push their names and brands forward. They could have used their talents and funds to help organizations and people in need, whether it’s those who are food insecure, their unemployed staff, or anyone else who could use a little extra. Instead, even if they acknowledge feeling sad for the employees they’ve had to lay off, these chefs have elected to partner with the Trump administration and brands to do the absolute minimum for their communities.

Like many other restaurants, Eleven Madison Park launched fundraisers for its laid-off staff, including an auction and a donation account. But it’s an odd look considering concurrent news stories announcing it had received funds from a billion-dollar company. A few weeks after EMP closed, it was transformed into a community kitchen for the nonprofit Rethink, a transformation made possible by an undisclosed amount from American Express. Sure, that sounds great, but if American Express can get the EMP kitchen back up and running with this collaboration, then why can’t it pull out the limitless Black Card to also help the staff members who can’t pay their bills?

Laid-off employees are struggling to figure things out while their former bosses are lauded as heroes. Recently, Keller has led a fight to take on insurance companies for not allowing restaurants to use their business-interruption coverage. While admirable, that doesn’t really do anything to help the employees that the chef has laid off. There is no guarantee that money received from an insurance settlement will put a dishwasher in a better position to buy food or pay rent next week.

The optics of these industry-leading restaurants behaving this way gives me zero hope that they are the future of the industry, and yet these are the voices being tasked with bringing back restaurants. We need to hear from the people who are the actual beating heart of the restaurant industry — not from the few who have managed to amass millions and will continue to do so even as they lay off thousands of employees and their restaurants close. I want to hear more from small businesses and learn what they need to stay open. There are chefs who make amazing food who might not speak English or know how to navigate an Small Business Association loan process. There are people at small restaurants who are still working 12-hour-plus days, seven days a week, who don’t have time to navigate an application or collect paperwork or drive down to the bank while keeping a restaurant moving. There are undocumented employees who can’t even apply for unemployment, but are told they were the heart of the kitchen.

For years I have had to work to have a voice in this industry. I worked my way up from my first job at 15 as a busboy at a Black-Eyed Pea restaurant in Texas to owning my own restaurant, Addo in Seattle. My own small business, with nine employees, is continuing to fight on, despite having to compete with multi-unit operators with endless resources. And as a business owner, I have to compete with these same highly resourced chefs, who seem to be first in line for programs, whether it’s a Small Business Association loan or Paycheck Protection Program protections. I know I won’t be getting the help I need for my restaurant on a local, state, or federal level. The only help I can count on is from my staff and my guests. In the face of all of this we have been busier than ever, hired employees to keep up with demand, and even launched benefits for employees on April 1.

I’ve had people — older chefs and men — reach out to try to stop me from calling out chefs for putting their employees in such peril. Those who want to silence me are people who are okay with what’s been going on in this restaurant system for ages. I have been told how if it weren’t for these chefs, their restaurant suppliers would lose support, charities would go without millions, and so on. I can’t ignore the fact that when we are in a global pandemic, these highly respected chefs seem to be taking what they need in order to protect their brands. But they are not moving fast enough to adequately support their former employees.

I’ve been asked about how things will change when restaurants reopen. We are nowhere close to reopening restaurants safely. Everything in restaurants will change, forever. There are restaurants, like mine, that are still here trying to figure out how to keep things going, adjusting on the fly while having to decide if today is the last day. There are people who haven’t seen a paycheck in a month or two who will have to figure out how to pay rent. There are people on the streets who have even less than before.

There are people of all ages dying who won’t get to see what happens when restaurants do finally come back. So who really cares about what the well-regarded chef with a TV show to promote has to say about his vision for the future? These chefs will be fine and are well positioned to come back to their proper place in the spotlight. That’s how things will finally get back to normal — for them.

Eric Rivera is the chef and owner of Addo in Seattle. Vance Lump is an illustrator in the Pacific Northwest.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2yCCJPR https://ift.tt/3cEAABI

Big-name chefs need to do more for the employees they laid off

This is Eater Voices, where chefs, restaurateurs, writers, and industry insiders share their perspectives about the food world, tackling a range of topics through the lens of personal experience. First-time writer? Don’t worry, we’ll pair you with an editor to make sure your piece hits the mark. If you want to write an Eater Voices essay, please send us a couple paragraphs explaining what you want to write about and why you are the person to write it to voices@eater.com.

As an amateur cook on my way to becoming a chef, I studied the world-renowned chefs credited with changing restaurant cuisine forever. I’ve read their cookbooks, been to their restaurants, and have even met a few. I’ve been drawn in by the creativity and innovation from chefs like Thomas Keller, Ferran Adrià, René Redzepi, and David Chang, who can transform a raw ingredient into a mindblowing and even iconic dish. But over the past month, I have hit my breaking point with being quiet about the actions, or rather lack of action, high-profile chefs and restaurateurs have taken during this global pandemic. Since the start of the coronavirus crisis, it’s become apparent that awards and accolades don’t translate into common sense and an understanding of optics. From what I’ve seen, it doesn’t seem these chefs can think beyond their own interests.

In a CNBC interview, Chang described this time first and foremost as “easily the hardest couple weeks of my life.” In a Yahoo Finance interview, Tom Colicchio said he thought that it was a bad idea for restaurants to be open for takeout, considering those restaurants would only be making $5,000 a night. He followed it up with, “But the restaurants are doing this because they’re struggling, I understand the intention, I had the same desire to make sure my staff is kept whole. But it’s just not a good thing to do right now.” These statements reek of privilege. Many chefs at this level have licensing deals with hotels, merchandise, luxury car brand deals, millionaire and/or billionaire investors, and cookbook deals. These owners have so many more assets and opportunities than their staff, but we’re led to believe that it’s a hard world for them right now, not their employees. While $5,000 might not be enough for Colicchio to shoulder the risk of opening for takeout, it’s the only option for so many restaurants, including my own, when closing could mean awful things for the staff.

I feel the need to continually reinvent the wheel to keep my staff employed, while the chefs I’m supposed to look up to as industry leaders are looking at their interests first. On April 15, Keller announced that he, Jean-Georges Vongerichten, Daniel Boulud, and Wolfgang Puck are the chosen men, among an entirely male and mostly white group, to join the White House’s Economic Council for Restaurants, one of the “economic revival industry groups” tasked with figuring out how we are going to come back from this. That same day the Small Business Administration announced that the first round of stimulus money had run out. While big-name chefs and restaurant groups positioned themselves to get the first handouts, small businesses without the attached names, accolades, or connections were left to fight it out for the last pennies. There isn’t a timeline for the next round. By then, hundreds if not thousands more restaurants will have closed.

Laid-off employees are struggling to figure things out while their former bosses are lauded as heroes.

For these big names with industry muscle, the first step should have been to lead the charge in taking care of their employees, not just by offering links to unemployment sites, but by making sure they didn’t stretch themselves so thin when they opened new restaurants every year and conducted $10 million renovations. They could have had a better plan than to use unemployment as a safety net for the employees who bent over backward to push their names and brands forward. They could have used their talents and funds to help organizations and people in need, whether it’s those who are food insecure, their unemployed staff, or anyone else who could use a little extra. Instead, even if they acknowledge feeling sad for the employees they’ve had to lay off, these chefs have elected to partner with the Trump administration and brands to do the absolute minimum for their communities.

Like many other restaurants, Eleven Madison Park launched fundraisers for its laid-off staff, including an auction and a donation account. But it’s an odd look considering concurrent news stories announcing it had received funds from a billion-dollar company. A few weeks after EMP closed, it was transformed into a community kitchen for the nonprofit Rethink, a transformation made possible by an undisclosed amount from American Express. Sure, that sounds great, but if American Express can get the EMP kitchen back up and running with this collaboration, then why can’t it pull out the limitless Black Card to also help the staff members who can’t pay their bills?

Laid-off employees are struggling to figure things out while their former bosses are lauded as heroes. Recently, Keller has led a fight to take on insurance companies for not allowing restaurants to use their business-interruption coverage. While admirable, that doesn’t really do anything to help the employees that the chef has laid off. There is no guarantee that money received from an insurance settlement will put a dishwasher in a better position to buy food or pay rent next week.

The optics of these industry-leading restaurants behaving this way gives me zero hope that they are the future of the industry, and yet these are the voices being tasked with bringing back restaurants. We need to hear from the people who are the actual beating heart of the restaurant industry — not from the few who have managed to amass millions and will continue to do so even as they lay off thousands of employees and their restaurants close. I want to hear more from small businesses and learn what they need to stay open. There are chefs who make amazing food who might not speak English or know how to navigate an Small Business Association loan process. There are people at small restaurants who are still working 12-hour-plus days, seven days a week, who don’t have time to navigate an application or collect paperwork or drive down to the bank while keeping a restaurant moving. There are undocumented employees who can’t even apply for unemployment, but are told they were the heart of the kitchen.

For years I have had to work to have a voice in this industry. I worked my way up from my first job at 15 as a busboy at a Black-Eyed Pea restaurant in Texas to owning my own restaurant, Addo in Seattle. My own small business, with nine employees, is continuing to fight on, despite having to compete with multi-unit operators with endless resources. And as a business owner, I have to compete with these same highly resourced chefs, who seem to be first in line for programs, whether it’s a Small Business Association loan or Paycheck Protection Program protections. I know I won’t be getting the help I need for my restaurant on a local, state, or federal level. The only help I can count on is from my staff and my guests. In the face of all of this we have been busier than ever, hired employees to keep up with demand, and even launched benefits for employees on April 1.

I’ve had people — older chefs and men — reach out to try to stop me from calling out chefs for putting their employees in such peril. Those who want to silence me are people who are okay with what’s been going on in this restaurant system for ages. I have been told how if it weren’t for these chefs, their restaurant suppliers would lose support, charities would go without millions, and so on. I can’t ignore the fact that when we are in a global pandemic, these highly respected chefs seem to be taking what they need in order to protect their brands. But they are not moving fast enough to adequately support their former employees.

I’ve been asked about how things will change when restaurants reopen. We are nowhere close to reopening restaurants safely. Everything in restaurants will change, forever. There are restaurants, like mine, that are still here trying to figure out how to keep things going, adjusting on the fly while having to decide if today is the last day. There are people who haven’t seen a paycheck in a month or two who will have to figure out how to pay rent. There are people on the streets who have even less than before.

There are people of all ages dying who won’t get to see what happens when restaurants do finally come back. So who really cares about what the well-regarded chef with a TV show to promote has to say about his vision for the future? These chefs will be fine and are well positioned to come back to their proper place in the spotlight. That’s how things will finally get back to normal — for them.

Eric Rivera is the chef and owner of Addo in Seattle. Vance Lump is an illustrator in the Pacific Northwest.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/2yCCJPR via Blogger https://ift.tt/2Kuhke3

[mirandalinportfolio]

VICE: Face Shapes and Blood Types: Wading into the World of Online Dating in China

The Mandarin term shengnu literally means “leftover woman.” It was coined to describe China’s growing crop of middle-class women who, thanks to new educational and economic opportunities, have been able to rise to unprecedented ranks within Chinese society—at the expense of their love lives. Nearing (or, heaven forbid, passing) the age of 30, these women find themselves materially successful but romantically unattached.

As a female in her mid-20s, living in China with a graduate degree and no significant other, I’ve been particularly sensitive to the term’s use. But while local media and gossipy mothers often use it derisively, my leftover sisters and I have come to embrace it as a badge of honor worn by independent women who know what they want and are unwilling to settle.

We shengnu are in dual position of being supposedly desperate, but in actuality having all kinds of men to choose from. In 2003, Gong Haiyan, a single coed from Shanghai, started the online date site Jiayuan.com (“Beautiful Destiny”) because she was frustrated by the lack of legitimate dating options she found around her. The bare-bones website she initially sketched out has since grown into China’s largest online-dating website, with over 56 million registered users, more than OKCupid and PlentyOfFish combined.

Like Gong Haiyan, I have, in my years in China, had little luck on the traditional meat market, so I decided to see if her internet service, and a few others like it, could be a better matchmaker for me.

Signing up for an account on Jiayuan or any of China’s other big-three dating services starts like most sites: cheesy screenname, recently created email account, vaguely accurate description of age and looks. But just like democracy, dating in China has developed distinct Asian characteristics. Your blood type, face shape, and willingness to have your future in-laws live with you are treated as basic information (O-positive, duck-egg-shaped, to be discussed when the time comes, for the record).

My profile photo also proved to be a sticking point. It was rejected three times, initially because I chose some abstract avatar, then because not enough of my face was visible. “Show the world who you really are,” the site moderator urged. Although that struck me as contrary to everything the internet stands for, I submitted my passport photo and was passed to the next phase.

While most of your profile’s essentials can be filled out with the help of a drop-down menu, the final stage requires a personalized self-introduction. A provided example on Zhenai.com (“Precious Love”) is instructive as to what kind of women the service is appealing to:

Before, in order to focus on my studies, my mom didn’t let me date. Now, because of work, I don’t have time to date. As time passed, I suddenly discovered I’d already become one of the “shengnu.”Actually my demands for my other half aren’t that high. He doesn’t have to be that handsome, or that wealthy, but he must be motivated, responsible, obedient, and that’s about all. I have great hopes and visions for my future, but I hope to accomplish them with the person I love….

It was flattering but not altogether too surprising that within minutes of activating my profile, my inbox was flooded with messages. The first came from a 26-year-old, O-type (hurray our children, or rather our child, will be a universal donor!), triangle-faced man named “Poisonsc…” But as I browsed through his profile, alarm bells quickly went off. He was a private entrepreneur. He listed his monthly income as 3-5,000 renmindi per month (equal to about $480-800 dollars, an average white-collar salary). He didn’t own a car or a house yet. No wonder he was single.

With the growing numerical disparity and social parity between sexes, women know that not just anyone will do anymore. Owning a car and home are standard expectations before marriage. A candidate’s appeal rises if he has a five-figure monthly salary and stable career (state-owned corporations are best), but falls if that means he has to work overtime and thus won’t be around to whisk his partner off on romantic dates. Modern China’s romance with materialism was epitomized on the popular TV dating game show “Are You The One”, when one contestant famously claimed she’d rather cry in the back of a BMW than smile on a bicycle.

Baihe.com (meaning “Lily”, but also literally “Hundred Matches”) makes it easy to weed out the scrubs. Users can sort users by age, height, education, and income. Though IRL I’d like to think I’ve never judged any person by such narrow criteria, I decided if I was going to date in China, I had to do it with a Chinese mindset. So clicking the obvious choice, I browsed on.

The top hit was a block-headed 30-year-old with a lush head of hair named Heavy. The self-described “Chairman-looking” home-owner had posted half a dozen photos of him frolicking on an exotic beach. He clearly had the right salary-to-free-time ratio.

Like nearly every male profile I browsed, though, Heavy had almost no demands of his partner. He wanted someone between 24-28 years old, 140-175 cm tall, preferably ethnically Han. But income, education, and housing situation—factors that can make or break a man's prospects—were all listed as “no preference.”

Despite the cold rationalism that seems to surround these sites, all these sites still cling to the sweet romantic notions. It's about finding your other half. Each user, before finalizing their profile, must check off a box affirming their good moral character and honest intention to search for a spouse on the site, NOT a one-night stand. Bang With Friends, this most certainly is not.

But while sites try to ensure pureness of heart, there's no escaping the internet's inherent ability to con, especially in a country that trades on its ability to mass produce fake Chanel purses and pirated DVDs.

When I began my online search, the Chinese Lunar New Year was fast approaching. It’s a time when virtually everyone in the country returns home, gathers with their loved ones, and is ruthlessly interrogated about their personal lives. Accordingly, internet message boards light up with ads seeking and offering rental girlfriends and boyfriends. Taobao, China’s version of eBay, for a while banned the search term altogether.

“Busy at work, no time to consider relationships,” reads a typical message. “Can anyone help me cope with the parental pressure?”

Though joke and scam posts are rampant, I decided to respond to one that at least sounded thorough. User 19760923b was a 32-year-old male, Master’s degree, 180 cm, 75 kg, “probably considered good looking” seeking a 25- to 30-year-old female for an eight day "rental" to northeastern China.

“I’m just a regular office worker, not anyone rich, so anyone looking to get rich or become a mistress please don’t apply. If you’re too ugly or too fat, it will tip my parents off, so sorry, you won’t be considered.” What a charmer.

19760923b promised the rental wouldn’t be required to sleep in the same room or perform any kissing and fondling, though she “must be willing to hold hands.” He offered 300-800 Renminbi per day, negotiable. The deal also included train tickets to and from Beijing. If necessary, he’d be willing to also accompany his rental girlfriend to her hometown.

Using a mix of my latent Chinese class skills and Google Translate, I wrote a brief note expressing my desire to fake it. Within a couple of hours, I received an email: “Thank you for your reply, but I don’t think you will be a good match to bring home.” Even to play a sham girlfriend, the rejection felt real.

But my heartbreak was soon eased. A bounty of new "flirts" and "winks" were waiting in my inbox. One man in particular, using the name “Single-Minded,” had sent 13 messages in a span of 35 minutes. Though back home such over-eagerness would be ruthlessly mocked over a round of drinks with girlfriends, in China, it felt reassuringly sincere.

“Your subtle smile makes my heart jump,” cooed his first message. “I love to smile too. I hope we can smile together. Can I get to know you more?”

Mousing through his profile, I learned he was university educated, a car and home owner, and employed in finance by a Fortune 500 company. I was already imagining my mother’s approving nod.

In his next note, he waxed even more poetic: “In the whole world, who knows how many millions of people pass us by, but fate made me stop and look at your photo. I hope you will look back at me.”

His clear, unobstructed profile photo showed an athletically built man in his early 30s, with hair gelled into the snow cone swirl common among aspiring C-Pop stars. He was also wearing what looked like a lumpy holiday sweater knit by his grandmother. A sign of filial piety, I hoped.

As I clicked to respond, a screen flashed open offering me a series of ready-made responses. There was the generic, “Thank you for your interest. Please tell me more: ^.^” Or the flirtier, “If you read my message, write back so I know you reciprocate O(n_n)O.” Or the straightforward rejection: “Thank you for your interest. I don’t think our circumstances are a fit. Good luck, hope you find your soulmate.” I wondered if 19760923b had copied his response from here.

But as I considered what level of emoticon flirtation to use, I realized Single-Minded’s messages had also been computer generated. A row of tabs suggested dozens of opening lines, categorized from "funny" to "cute." Worst of all, my Single-Minded suitor had chosen from the "standard" section. He didn’t even use a creative scripted response!

Outraged, I aired my sense of betrayal to a male Chinese friend. Far from sharing my indignation, though, he bashfully confessed that at the age of 25 and just entering his first official relationship, he too had used a move learned from an American teen soap. How else, he asked, were young people, sheltered by overprotective parents since birth and often right through their adult lives, supposed to know how to hit on girls?

If, as they say, Chariman Mao abolished arranged marriages in 1951 after his own unhappy experience with the practice during his first marriage, the system that’s replaced it hasn’t made finding a genuine connection any easier for Chinese men and women. In the end, I got rejected for the role of a rental girlfriend, used an algorithm to pick out men by their income and blood type (which I later discovered in Asia is associated with certain personality types similar to zodiac signs; type-Os are ambitious, self-confident, and recommended to eat extra poultry and fish), got wooed by a succession of swirly-haired men with scripts, and continue to be harassed by all three dating companies trying to sell me additional matchmaking services. But I am still no closer than before to finding my soulmate.

And probably even further from finding a one-night stand.

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/yv5987/face-shapes-and-blood-types-wading-into-the-world-of-online-dating-in-china