#the 10 year old I work with likes American Dad more than Family Guy

[reasoningdaily]

elda Morgan had a happy life in Washington, D.C. She was married, had three children and had a wonderful husband who allowed her to stay home with the children. It was a dream come true until that knock on the door.

“It was a Saturday morning. I’ll never forget it. It was the police. They had a warrant for my husband’s arrest. He went peacefully and that was as shocking as the police at my door. He was an accountant and made bad decisions with someone else’s money,” she told The Final Call.

“He got five to 10 years for embezzlement. It was the worst times of our lives. I was a stay-at-home mom, happy to take my children back and forth to school. My husband’s incarceration dramatically reduced our income. I had to get a job. We had to move from our house into an apartment. I had to get social services, food from the church down the street and clothes from the thrift store.”

One of the rarely considered horrors of mass incarceration is how it strips wealth from already economically marginalized families and widens the racial wealth gap. The United States has more people locked up per capita than most countries in the world, according to the Sentencing Project. Mass incarceration creates financial burdens on families.

A recent report by the Center for American Progress (CAP) documented a link between criminal-justice interactions and household wealth. The report found:

· Households with a currently or previously incarcerated family member have about 50 percent less wealth than households not affected by incarceration, on average.

· Households with criminal legal interactions face more obstacles to saving and end up deeper in debt.

· Households affected by incarceration have fewer chances for longer-term wealth building.

“America’s failed experiment with mass incarceration and overcriminalization has now bared long-term consequences detrimental to the economy as a whole, as it has become a significant driver of poverty and racial equality,” said Akua Amaning, director of Criminal Justice Reform at CAP.

“There is not just a single fix. In order to dramatically reduce the footprint of mass incarceration, begin to close America’s racial wealth gap and reform the nation’s broken criminal legal system, a comprehensive set of policy changes must be embraced by policymakers and actors in the criminal justice system.” 

Finding employment opportunities when released from incarceration is also a challenge. Joel Caston went to jail for murder when he was 18. He was incarcerated for 27 years and underwent a transformation. He changed his life, became a mentor and was educated. When he was released, he looked forward to starting over.

“I am a middle-aged guy. I’m a dad, I’m a grandfather—I have two grandchildren. I have gray hair at my temples. I don’t think like that 18-year-old guy that once had a mindset that I completely reject. I have changed. I am deeply remorseful. … I have a proven track record of rehabilitation and demonstrated remorse. Individuals like myself, they deserve an opportunity to present a colorful argument of why they deserve their freedom,” he said when he was released.

However, the opportunity to begin anew is easier said than done. 

“A criminal history prevents an individual from advancing forward in the workspace, in the labor market. You’re relegated to blue-collar work that doesn’t require you to have any specialized skills,” Mr. Caston, now a D.C. mentor, author and activist, told The Final Call. “Mass incarceration has created a caste system that is a pipeline for manual labor. I am not demeaning or speaking ill about blue-collar workers. However, we can’t venture into new dimensions,” he explained.

“We have to answer, ‘have you ever been convicted of a felony’?  Once you say ‘yes,’ they say, ‘provide information.’ Whatever you provide, they say, ‘give us explanation.’ When you give an explanation, they say, ‘we can’t hire you.’”

The Prison Policy Initiative is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization that produces cutting–edge research to expose the broader harm of mass criminalization. Their research found that formerly incarcerated people are unemployed at a rate of over 27 percent—higher than the total U.S. unemployment rate during any historical period, including the Great Depression.

“Our estimate of the unemployment rate establishes that formerly incarcerated people want to work, but face structural barriers to securing employment, particularly within the period immediately following release. For those who are Black or Hispanic—especially women— status as ‘formerly incarcerated’ reduces their employment chances even more,” according to the Prison Policy Initiative.

“This perpetual labor market punishment creates a counterproductive system of release and poverty, hurting everyone involved: employers, the taxpayers, and certainly formerly incarcerated people looking to break the cycle.”

The report explained that incarceration has long-term, far-reaching negative consequences for the entire household’s chances at building wealth. Stable employment with opportunities for upward mobility makes all the difference in families’ experiences. 

The Papillion Foundation was formed in direct response to the mass incarceration of millions of men and women in jails and prisons throughout the United States. Their research found that ex-offenders face:

* states that allow employers to terminate employment of

employees found to have had a prior conviction;

* states that allow employers to deny jobs to people who were simply arrested but never convicted;

* states that allow employers to deny jobs to anyone with a criminal record, regardless of how long ago or the individual’s work history and personal circumstances;

* states that ban some or all people with convictions from being eligible for federally funded public assistance and food stamps.

According to CAP, an estimated 70 million to 100 million Americans—roughly one in three U.S. adults—have an incarceration, conviction, or arrest record, which is a direct consequence of decades of mass incarceration and overcriminalization. Their analysis found that nearly half of the U.S. children now have at least one parent with such a record. 

The CAP report concluded that America’s failed criminal legal policies disproportionately harmed Black and Hispanic individuals, families, and communities. Mass incarceration has become an underappreciated driver of the racial wealth gap in America.

 Before Chicago’s Cedric 3X Cal was incarcerated, he liked numbers and money. He wanted to be an accountant. Incarceration changed that. When he was released in 2020 after 28 years, finding a job was difficult.

“For a year straight, I was getting hired and fired,” he told The Final Call. “Every time they did a background check. I got fired. I would do good on the next interview and get hired. Days later, ‘I’m sorry, we can’t use you.’” 

“To even do Door Dash I had to use an agency because you can’t have a problematic background to do Door Dash or Uber, none of that stuff. I used an agency to get a job delivering. I delivered to a warehouse and they hired me. I’ve been working there for two years.”

Mr. Cal is now married with a family. Employment is crucial. Since being hired, he learned valuable skills and became a certified welder. Despite the challenges, he continues to persevere.

The Nation of Islam’s Prison Reform Ministry has a documented history of redeeming and teaching incarcerated individuals through the Teachings of the Most Honorable Elijah Muhammad and transforming them into model inmates and productive citizens upon their release.

The Honorable Minister Louis Farrakhan has pointed out that America’s prisons are not meant to reform but that the proven track record of the NOI Prison Reform Ministry can help in rehabilitating and training those who were incarcerated so they can earn a living and support their families which greatly reduces the problem of recidivism.

“When you look at what the Muslims are doing with our prison program, in the midst of you, here again you see a torchlight,” Minister Farrakhan wrote in his book, “A Torchlight for America.”

“Muslims are relatively crime free, and our rate of recidivism is lower than in the main. We respect law and order. Since so many of the inmates are our people, why not let us reform them and help to save some of the taxpayer’s money. Why not let us handle the inmates and lessen the taxpayer’s burden. We can handle the inmates for less than what America is paying now.  And better, we can reform our people and make them productive members of society,” he wrote.

But the challenges remain for those who genuinely desire to become assets to their families and communities upon release.

The Center for American Progress report found that Black and Hispanic households with a currently or previously incarcerated family member experience greater financial insecurity than White households affected by incarceration. For example, 29.2 percent of Black households and 26.3 percent of Hispanic households with a currently or previously incarcerated family member could not pay all their bills in 2019. For their White counterparts, the share was 19.1 percent.

“Even when my husband came home, he couldn’t get a job as an accountant,” Mrs. Morgan said. “We suffered for a long time until I could get a better job. Everywhere he went, it was one no after another. They say you paid your debt to society but you keep paying and paying.”

Mr. Caston believes the answer to these problems is expungement. 

“We need to have records sealed and criminal histories expunged for incarcerated or formerly incarcerated (individuals) to advance forward. Otherwise, we are literally in the caste system mass incarceration has created,” he said. 

The American Bar Association found that nearly nine in 10 employers, four in five landlords, and three in five colleges use background checks to screen for applicants’ criminal records, and one study found that more than 45,000 federal and state statutes and regulations impose disqualifications or disadvantages on individuals with a conviction. 

Expungement removes arrests and/or convictions from a person’s criminal record entirely as if they never happened. Even a court or prosecutor cannot view a person’s expunged record. However, sealing a person’s criminal record, in contrast, removes it from public view, but it can still be accessed through a court order.

A growing number of states are adopting “clean slate” laws to automatically expunge and seal records. This is being done due to the many barriers that prevent eligible individuals from clearing their records when filing a petition is required. Ten states including California, New York and Pennsylvania have clean slate legislation that creates an automatic and automated process for expunging or sealing certain eligible criminal records.

[foureversblog]

Which Classic '50s Movie Couple are you and Your Significant Other.

Shonda Rhimes shouldn't be dating anybody as of 2022. Shonda is a 52-yr-old woman. Pop Smoke’s hasn’t had a girlfriend since 2022. Pop, who's 22 years outdated, is a younger man with plenty of potential Pop Smoke had a lot of earlier relationships, in keeping with CelebsCouples. David Conrad just isn't dating anybody as of 2022. David is a 54-yr-previous man. If the man you’re dating doesn’t have any buddies in any respect, this should be seen as a crimson flag, particularly if he expects to spend all of his free time with you. Whatever it's, we know there's one family that stands out as your absolute favorite, and it is time for us to get to the underside of who it is. Why can't I've a guy who's somewhere in the middle? Using the identical logic, will probably be easy to inform should you favor a Ford Ranger to a Chevy S-10 just by seeing what sort of guy will get your motor revving.

You may be a type of guys who truly goes for women that they get along with best and would even reasonably cling out with them more than your guy buddies. Watch out who you're taking recommendation from. I attempt to take revenge. I attempt to stick with the times. You may try to interrupt your patterns and begin hanging out with a unique form of girl, nevertheless it in all probability is not going to happen. None. נערות ליווי בתל אביב Maybe you're with someone that is irresponsible and parties a lot, and also you break up together with her, or she with you, then you wind up with somebody with the very same issues the subsequent time you get a girlfriend. Get me house protected! I don't actually get the enchantment, but whatever. I get just a little frazzled sometimes. No, not even just a little. It does take me a little while to heat as much as new folks.

While a person arrested for misdemeanor shoplifting, could sit in jail for weeks as a result of they cannot give you a couple of hundred bucks for bail. I grow to be a lot more extroverted after I've had a number of drinks. There are a couple of geniuses in my household. Are you extra introverted or extroverted? More prefer it runs from our household. Which animated household speaks to you like no other? We don't like double dates. We'd eat spaghetti and use the strands to kiss, like Lady and the Tramp. I obtained a name from a pleasant lady named Amy that told me that i must come in to the workplace and cross a background test. I'm about as extroverted as they come. And it's also price recognizing how they paved the way in which for the entire Animation Domination block that has seen shows like "King of the Hill" and "American Dad" come and go as well as present favorites "Bob's Burgers" and "Family Guy." These shows have proven cartoons aren't simply for youths, and a few of the most effective comedy in Tv historical past can be present in animation. But which one is the perfect one?

Jahan Yousaf’s boyfriends: Previous to Casey Deidrick, she had at the least one relationship. Fernando Colunga’s girlfriends: Prior to Blanca Soto, he had at the least six relationships. Your life-style and the expectations you've got for intimate relationships will get us pointed in a basic path. Maybe you're with somebody that is irresponsible and parties an excessive amount of, and you break up along with her, or she with you, then you definitely wind up with somebody with the exact same points the following time you get a girlfriend. But what happens to those Bachelors who break up with their high choose after the show? Yeah, but who cares? Well, yeah, how may I not be? Well, everybody is aware of me. Or possibly you're in a scenario where you retain dating women who prefer to take care of you, that be sure to eat nicely, and that you are getting up to go to work on time. Or you might be a type of guys who retains chasing after women who are incredibly good-looking, though you don't have anything in frequent with them. Finding out who's dating Logan Lang is comparatively easy, but conserving track of his flings, hookups, and breakups is tougher.

[sephirpog]

Fred: Only true Family Guy fans that only Peter Griffin could come up with such stupidity.

[toomanystoriessolittletime]

Pedro Pascal’s Characters

updated: 09/10/2021

Fic Ratings (read warnings in fic for details):

(G) General Audiences

(M) Mature

(E) Explicit: only suitable for adults

-> fake dating Drabbles with all the dude’s  <-

Home (M)

It’s been a long day year for Javi and all he wants is to go home.

Leave the light on (G)

Sleeping with the lights out seemed like a thing all the people do. So you told him how you struggled with it, after you almost fell asleep at a stake out he made sure you would feel safe from now on. 

switch (E)

When your new hot neighbor turned out to be no other than Javier Peña, the Agent that would join one of your Departments with you as his Superior, things should get a little more complicated. But somehow they didn’t…

Missing you (G)

A gala from the American embassy in Bogota lets you finally run in the man who you left without saying goodbye almost two years ago.

mix up (E)

A mix-up with the building's laundry was all it took to get what you always secretly wanted.

late night calls (E)

It all started with a phone call to the DEA office to tell Javier about the surgery of his father. You had insisted to take care of him after Chucho told you about the surgery. That you would fall in love with his son you had never met before? Just as surprising to you as it was to Javier. 

Night shift (E)

Meeting Javier during one of your nightshifts at the hospital turned into falling in love with him. But working different shifts can be challenging, yet you somehow make it work.

Whiskey, Cigarettes and Condoms (E)

You are working in a shop and your most interesting customer is the hot guy who buys XL Condoms every single week. Until he stopped.

Don't you want me (M)

6 years passed since Javier made the one decision he wished he could take back. What happens when he meets the one woman he ever truly loved?

Decisions (G)

You find your boyfriend cheating with one of your friends after getting home from work and call the person you always call when shit hits the fan.

Drabbles:

answering machine (G)

It's been two years since you heard Javier's voice. That didn't mean you weren't talking to him.

-> inevitable (series; M->E)

All your life you thought that there was no way the prophecy would come true. That was until you answered a distress call from a certain Mandalorian.

firsts (G)

Din knew it was the best for the kid to go with the Jedi. But on his way back to… he didn’t really know where, there was only one person he would allow to see how sad he really was. 

saved (G)

Being saved during a battle by a Mandalorian might have been faith for Alana and her little daughter Leila. 

my girl (E)

A Mandalorian crashing into your backyard and ruining your business might have been the best thing that ever happened to you.

Watch me (E)

You try to tease the Mandalorian after taking a skinny dip in the lake. He’s not having it.

drabbles:

one day (M)

One day you would get Din out of his armor to swim with you. Today you succeeded... partially

Happiness (G)

Din finds happiness. And his son finds his old armor.

prompts:

" I know we're not together but I might die today so I'm going to kiss you just in case there is no later" (G)

thots:

Din been jealous (E)

The baker’s daughter (E)

Mydra never thought she would end up in the local brothel, but after her father died, and she was too young to take over his business as the local baker, she found herself agreeing to what was proposed to her. So she lived at the local brothel, watching the girls and boys work, observing, until one day she finally would be ready to let one man be her first. That she would form somewhat of a friendship with the Prince of Dorne was as surprising to her as it was to him.

My flower (E)

Falling for the Prince of Dorne after he took you in, letting you work as his maid, was not something you (or him) planned. But when he found you sleeping in his bed, wearing his cloak, you were about to find out that maybe it wasn't just you who had fallen in love.

One step ahead (E)

When you took the job you knew that he might be there. Breaking up with him because of your ego was a mistake. But you were here to do your job. Weren’t you?

Drabbles:

caught (E)

It was a hot day in Sunspear. With the Martell family gone for travels, you wanted to sneak into the royal pool to cool down. Never thinking that maybe you weren't as alone as you thought.

and then the world stopped (E) Part 1 Part 2

Vic wasn’t unhappy when she moved with her husband to Washington D.C. She was happily married, had a new job as a teacher and was trying to get pregnant. But after a year of trying still nothing has happened. She didn’t know that just one accident of the nanny of one of the children in her class was about to change her whole life.

two lives (M)

Dave never planned to cheat on his wife. He never planned to fall in love with another woman. He never planned to live two separate lives. And he never planned to be attending the funeral of the love of his life after their mission went wrong.

second chance (G) (sequel to two lives)

7 months passed since Dave found out the woman he loved didn't die. Would she ever remember him?

disobedience (E)

Working as the babysitter for Dave York’s daughters came with all kinds of benefits. You didn’t mean to become one of those people. The typical cliche of the babysitter sleeping with the father of the kids you were watching but there was something about him you couldn’t stop thinking about. This is also how you found yourself at the only place he told you to not ever visit him, wearing nothing but a coat. The CIA offices.

private show (E)

Monica was struggling to give her two daughters everything they deserved. When Dave York walks into the Diner she worked in one night and offers her a job at his strip club, things begin to change…

Dance the night away (E)

He didn’t look like he could dance Salsa. But oh how wrong you were...

strictly professional (E)

AU: You were tired of handling your boss' affairs. Not because that wasn't part of your job. No. Because you wanted to be his affair. His only affair. And you had a plan for how to get there. Even if it meant blackmailing your boss Dave York.

unusual love(rs) (E)

When your husband Frankie proposed seeing other people while he’s gone for work you were hesitant at first. Until you found just how much he liked the idea of you with another man…

-> love(rs) (E)

Frankie is home and he hasn’t stopped thinking about the video you sent him. Now he wants to watch live. And participate.

found (G)

Dave and you had been friends for 20 years. You watched him get married to another woman and become a Dad, ignoring the constant heartbreak it was causing you cause you were in love with him. Four months after his death you receive a postcard with cordinates. What would you find?

to die for (G)

The man who broke your heart comes back to protect you from the man you were falling in love with.

one wish granted (G)

You could have wished that the man you had loved all your life finally would love you back. It was him granting the wishes after all. Instead, you wished you had never met him. That you really didn’t remember him maybe was the punishment Max deserved most.

Paris (G)

Maxwell Lord left after everything that happened with the Dreamstone. But a little part of you hoped you would see him again.

changes (G)

On your way to your last day at work before you start a new job you almost got ran over by a dog (and a boy). Thankfully a handsome stranger is there to help.

Neighbors (M)

After breaking up with your fiancé you find yourself moving back in with your brother and his daughter just outside of the city. Marcus Moreno is his neighbor and he really does take his neighborly duties to heart. Including taking care of mowing the lawn when your brother had to leave for work for a while.

Yes, Mr. Moreno (M)

With Missy moving out of the house to go to college Marcus felt more alone than ever before. When he met his daughters college roommate at a diner in the middle of the night he made a decision Missy could never find out about

-> Yes, Mr Moreno - The first time (E)

Marcus takes Alice home. She stays the night.

Going back home Masterlist (series)

Claire never thought she would be back in the town she grew up in. But after her fiancé broke off their engagement, leaving her 5 months pregnant and alone she found herself calling Frankie Morales in the middle of the night, one of her childhood friends who insisted that she booked the next flight out. Trying to fix her life with a little help from her friends she would find out soon that going back would be the best decision she ever made.

Distraction (G)

Meeting a single Dad on the plane back to the states was maybe just the distraction you needed to get over your fear of flying. 

Nap Time (E)

Sometimes you and Frankie just need to have some alone time when the kids are napping.

Drabbles

Guy’s night (M)

You let Frankie decide how he wants to end his guy's night...

throwback (G)

Teenage you had bn head over heels for Frankie Morales. What happens when when your best friend takes you out on a double bind date almost 20 years later and your date is no other than Frankie?

Friday's at Frankie's (G)

After a week gone for work you come home to Frankie and his daughter

drabble about Frankie taking care of you when you have cramps

-> Sunday Morning (M)

You wake up in Frankie’s arms on rare quiet Sunday morning.

prompts:

you're sick, and we can't kiss, and it's , fkn, torture (M)

Max Says... (E)

Max remembered your aniversary and planned a trip to New York City. You gifted him the one thing he always wanted. Allowing him to use his mind control on you.

[steve0discusses]

Yugioh Season Zero: The Yo-Yo Crimes of Jounouchi Pt 1

It’s been a while since I visited the many times Yugi should have gone to jail, AKA season Zero, and I’m excited to visit it again.

If you just got here, this is Season Zero, which is very different vibe and a different direction plotwise than the other seasons and you can read the season zero recaps from the start in chrono order here: https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yuugi%20muto/chrono

So be warned, this is a 90′s anime, and it will do 90′s anime things, and I expect y’all reading this aren’t like 12.

Like I said in an earlier post, I wrote this out fully when I was going through the symptoms from my second dose--which PS, is worth it--but those symptoms knocked me out for 10 days. I was kind of a space cadet, and yo, I made some mistakes. Including writing this post out in full and then not clicking “save” on this post and then not realizing I had done that until several days later.

So long story short, I don’t remember what I originally wrote here, but lets all assume it was weird, and didn’t make sense and wasn’t funny. We’ll just assume this was for the best that it was deleted forever.

So this episode is about 2 things: Yo-yos and Jounouchi. Both get used as a tool for violence, and both need to get just a little bit cursed by Yugi to scale it the hell back. So, understandably, we start off this episode with Jounouchi, who has eagerly identified with this off brand yo-yo he apparently got out of a dumpster for being just a huge ass defect.

(more Yo-Yo crimes under the cut)

I see you dodging copyright infringement, Yugioh. Eireboy.

Also whenever I read “Eireboy” I do it in my mind in the same pacing and vocal tones that Pegasus uses to say “Kaiba boy.” Something about it’s conjunction to Yugioh, I see anything with “boy” at the end of it, and it’s voiced by a weird guy with one eye.

So I wrote these caps under the influence of my second dose, just assuming y’all understand the life I lived, but I realized writing this episode...traveling bands of yo-yo performers that go to your school and shill yo-yos with yo-yo shows in the hopes that it will get you so obsessed with yo-yos that you will not join a gang and do drugs and have sex may be just an American thing.

So when I saw a yo-yo episode I was like “Tight! Clearly, the yo-yo clowns have come to town!” and I assumed everyone in this class would be draped in yo-yos, because I just assumed that at some point at School you will get MAD OBSESSED with yo-yos for about 2 weeks.

But in this episode, everyone was like “Jounouchi, why are you playing with a random yo-yo?” and it didn’t occur to me until typing this out just now: only Jounouchi is doing this. He did this unprompted, without the encouragement of a bunch of middle aged performers doing tricks to techno music.

So instead, I have to think of Jounouchi as Ralphie in this scenario, and he just got a official Red Ryder, carbine action, 200-shot, range model air rifle, with a compass in the stock and this thing that tells time for Christmas, but he’s gonna shoot his eye out.

Because yo-yos in this episode are basically guns.

...Kind of like a duel deck was also just a gun...

...or the wands in Harry Potter...

...which honestly...I’ve probably said this before but where I’m from, we just use straight up guns in these elaborate analogies because we freakin have to make the point crystal clear. The moment Ralphie finally got his hands on a bb-gun, he very nearly shot his eye out and broke his glasses. And that scene will haunt me until my dying day...

...but fine, we can use yo-yos, I guess it works, although to me, yo-yo’s are just teachers hoping you’ll become such a dork that no gang will accept you (and then in this universe, it does the opposite? So freakin weird).

The beginning of this episode is Jounouchi trying do his best to impress with his skills, but in actuality, getting very close to clubbing Anzu with a yo-yo. And, while Anzu is the strongest person in Yugioh in the later seasons, I feel like Season Zero Anzu is another level. It’s a serious tempt of fate that Jounouchi is doing, so Honda wisely cuts him off from doing any more of that so she won’t end up strangling yet another person in broad daylight in the middle of school.

Remember your yo-yo safety, children.

Straight up, Honda’s version of yo-yo safety is to just Never Use a Yo-Yo and that’s the most gun safety thing ever that they’ve slipped into this Yugioh Episode. I almost expected Yuugi to pull a “well, actually, I use a hunting yo-yo to get enough venison to feed my family.” But youknow, he lives in a city, so while Yugioh is pretty weird and Yuugi has to worry about a lot of things--he doesn’t have to worry about that.

This is actually foreshadowing, which I only realized in hind sight, mostly because I just can’t associate a Yo-yo with crime. Joey knowing how to use a yo-yo was foreshadowing that he was absolutely part of this gang in a past life.

Yeah that one went completely over my head the first time and the second time and it really wasn’t until just now that I finally caught it. Hoo boy, sometimes I wonder why y’all let me analyze this show.

Jounouchi decides to confront the yo-yo bandits and everyone else is like “Silly Jounouchi, he’s not gonna do that. That would be stupid.” And...in S0, they don’t know him well enough yet to know that he really is that much of a well meaning dumbass.

I think a S1-5 Yugi would have been sprinting out the door to keep Joey from killing himself (again), but Season Zero Yuugi had hope that Jounouchi would just naturally tucker out and fall asleep or something.

And he was so wrong.

Anzu’s “New Tricks” line was from the dub itself and man that’s a good line. I love Anzu’s sass in Zero.

So, Honda decides to help them find Jounouchi so all of them together could give Jounouchi an intervention for skipping school. This is the same Honda that once skipped school to babysit a tomagachi and said it was because of “Maternity leave,” but don’t worry about the hypocrisy, because from this episode we learned that Jounouchi needs a very short leash.

So this episode is a great Jounouchi episode to explain stuff that still hasn’t been explained in 5 seasons of Yugioh. In S1-5, we don’t get much about his home life other than his Mom left and his Sister lives far away and is like sickly as hell. We know nothing else. But this is the episode where we finally get to find out why Yuugi and his Grandfather decided to basically adopt him from S1 onward.

Yugioh is tackling some pretty heavy territory, but I respect the show for not trying to magically change Jounouchi’s parents like they did to Dartz. Instead, the crew decide to reach out and try to find their friend who clearly didn’t go home last night (and won’t be going back for a while), by checking every alleyway in Domino.

Fun fact Yuugi drops this episode, Domino is one of the biggest cities on Earth. This makes the Battle City Tournament even more crazy when you realize Kaiba shut down several blocks but, it also makes a tiny bit more sense how we have so many Millennium items in one place. (Yet...it still doesn’t explain Bakura and Joey’s accent.) And, I guess if your city is just extra large, you get an extra large warehouse district, too.

Speaking of, they eventually find Jounouchi at his new (but also old) crime antics mugging some random stranger next to this Game store that I just realized was cropped so it looks like it says “GANG.”

Say hello to our crime clown. He’s sort of like a discount joker, and that beanie is...man it is green.

I forget this green exists sometimes, but Season Zero has it as one of their prime colors. Good ol’ Retro Kaiba green.

I’m a little tempted to swatch Season Zero a bit and figure out their full color scheme--it’s really saturated, which is interesting when you compare it to the later seasons which are a lot more muted since...the 00′s were like that, they greyed a lot of colors out. But I’ll do it later if I do, maybe another post for another day.

Jounouchi and Honda, before they moved to the school with Yuugi in it, used to go to the same school and up until now I just assumed they were close friends. But apparently they were a lot more distant than that. I’m sure they met up several times as Jounouchi destroyed stuff and Honda came along in his volunteer janitor outfit to put the stuff the hell back, and maybe that’s how they got to know eachother better?

But basically, Jounouchi was the freakin worst, and Jounouchi’s best friend was Hirotani--this 45 year old 15 year old with the blue pony and turquoise fade--and Honda has SO MUCH hot goss to say about it.

I really get the gist that Honda may not have liked anyone else at his old school, like at all. Like maybe Honda likes cleaning up trash so much because his school was just trash top to bottom.

As is tradition, Yuugi got his tar beat in by Hirotani. Another concussion to add to his list of issues to tell his future therapist that lives in that puzzle he wears around his neck.

I still expect him to do a double cross, but it seems they wanted to keep it a relatable and more realistic fall-out, where Jounouchi has just bounced on them without even a goodbye. He and his Dad had a bad fight, and Jounouchi was like “well so long to all of this and everyone that has anything to do with it.”

In later seasons, Joey is the one trying to save other people. He’s saving his Sister, he’s saving Mai, he’s saving Yugi, but in this season Jounouchi’s friends had to save Jounouchi from himself a few times now.

I like this depth to his character, I’ll be honest. I can understand why S1-5 don’t touch on it, and I don’t think it’s because they didn’t want to have an abusive Dad storyline, because they did that several times over with Seto Kaiba (man the Dad situation in Yugioh is DIRE.) Instead they probably just felt like Season Zero already did it, so why do it again?

It’s just a shame that it wasn’t talked about in the other seasons. Joey makes a lot more sense to me now because we get to see why Jounouchi is so hard set on saving people. S4 Mai Valentine, who ditched everyone and joined a gang? That’s basically a Joey move, and that was why Joey Wheeler was all over that.

Really would have added a lot to that particular arc if the show...actually talked about Joey’s history at all rather than assume I would have watched something that was never released in the States. Instead...it just looked a lot like he had only romantic motivations, which may not have been what they were going for.

Speaking of romantic, check out this sunset. Like the sun is exploding for some reason--just a wild sunset you only see for a still frame before a commercial break.

As Joey, youknow, takes on an entire rival gang single-handedly.

Hey guys, I lived near a pretty big city most of my life and I have been on a roof...once. Just the one time when I was doing an internship in SF with a painter and we needed to take a reference photo of his painting for a gallery (and it was hella sketch, and we weren’t exactly allowed up there). Who are all these people giving teens Roof Access? It’s so hard to get! Even if you live in an apartment of a tall building, I can count on zero of my fingers the amount of times I was allowed on that roof. But TV shows and movies--they freakin love roof gardens and roof hangouts and roof fights.

Am I missing out?? How did y’all get on the ROOF? I know I’m on S5 of Yugioh now and I have seen a lot of roof stuff, but like...is this normal for everyone else? I know there’s schools that have roof sport--that’s common in the city everywhere--but that’s like...specialized roofs with 30 ft chainlink fencing and really good supports to your body doesn’t fall straight through it when you jump too much. The hell is using their normal ass roof?

This gang should have their legs swinging halfway into the floor below them, is all I’m saying, if my roof couldn’t handle our solar heating, then a normal ass roof cannot support a gang fight.

But it does look really, really cool.

Anyway, Anzu does some offscreen snooping and finds out where the crime hangs out, and suggests that we step right into crime zone and just yank Jounouchi out of there. Which is something you would only do and say if you were Anzu and cannot fear death.

If it were Jay’s it would be with an ‘s. That’s how you do a plural Jay. But it’s the 90′s, so we put a “z” on the end of everything that should have been an “s” and that’s how you get the...

I mean, thank you, dubbers, for not saying “Jizz” but for reals...that be Jizz.

Please don’t flag me, Tumblr. (which, PS, I think they turned off the flagbot, Tumblr hasn’t flagged me in forever and I’m so thankful. Mods are asleep, we can talk about anime again)

So even though Honda decided that he was fed up with Jounouchi and didn’t want to save his ass, he decided to give it another go but complete with some new sash. He also did this without telling any of the others, who just kinda spectated him for a little while.

Honestly, if they weren’t laughing at him, I wouldn’t have known that this sash was any weirder than any of his other sashes. I don’t know really know what a school uniform should look like. It’s a shame, I feel like this series has a lot of jokes and puns probably soaring right over my head.

A little bit embarrased he was caught being vulnerable, Honda decides to give us a little more context to why he ever decided to give Jounouchi the time of day in the first place.

They had PE class once, and Honda apparently loves the hell out of PE. Jounouchi ran really fast in a straight line that one time, and that is why he’s trustworthy friend material. He just needs to stop joining gangs, and he’ll be solid.

I have no idea if the fandub put that in there or if that was native to the show, but Miho legit stans Honda/Jounouchi and acts as if she’s off to write some fanfiction about it. Honestly if she did, it would make her so much more interesting of a character.

And so, until next time, we shall have to wait and see exactly what Yami Yuugi is going to do with a freakin Yo-yo and I’m sure it’s all sorts of real effed up. Excited to get there, honestly. A shame it had to happen on the part that isn’t dubbed yet, but I’ve done these subbed before, it’ll be fine!

[natromanxoff]

Queen live at Elland Road in Leeds, UK - May 29, 1982 (Part-2)

Fan Stories

“We got a coach from my home town (about 2 hours from memory) and drank an ocean of lager on the way, by the time we got there we needed the toilet so badly we could have exploded! We got into the stadium and waited for the first band of the day. Soon enough a not very well known (to me) American band came on called Heart. They weren't bad but did nothing for me. Then came The Teardrop Explodes who tried and who I reckoned did quite well despite the flying bottles of liquid being hurled at them from the crowd. After them was Joan Jett complete with Blackhearts who got the crowd going with "I Love Rock'n'Roll" mainly because Brian appeared at the side of the stage with his daughter to have a look. Eventually after a long wait the stage lights dimmed and a strange cranking sound started up and then you were suddenly aware of the drum beat to Flash thumping out and spotlights chasing around the stadium. This went on for a minute or so and the excitement was unbearable. All of a sudden in an explosion of smoke, lights, guitars, drums... Brian, John and Roger are there blasting out the opening part of The Hero. Seconds later in a gleaming white leather jacket out runs Freddie and it begins... A moment I will never forget along with many others from Queen shows since and before it. I can't say which show was my favourite as I loved them all but that moment WAS Queen, the sheer power, the anticipation, the fantastic musical ability and above all else the way they gave people what they crave more than anything... wonderful memories.” - whiteman

“29th May 1982 - a really nice warm day. We only lived a few miles away so walked down to Elland Road - I can't believe it - Queen live in my home town at the home of the greatest football team in the country (well maybe not now!). Got to the ground early and were allowed in by security, such a relaxed atmosphere. Saw band's soundcheck - great! So hot sun, never went behind stadium roofs. Got best suntan I have ever had! Heard Teardrop Explodes - not bad. Then you are aware of the beat of flash thumping out around the stadium, the smoke rises and bang - they are on! The greatest gig I have ever seen from the greatest live band in history. God bless you, Brian, Roger and John. Rest in peace, Freddie - we will never forget.” - Michael Quine

“This was my second ever gig, the first being Rory Gallagher the year before (I am sure I once read that Rory was one of Brian May's favourite guitarists). Anyway, being only 14 and not yet in the habit of getting off my face at gigs,I can remember that day very clearly. I am convinced I saw someone throw a hamburger at Julian Cope (Teardrop Explodes were going down like a lead balloon), and just as Julian was opening his gob to sing, he CAUGHT IT IN HIS MOUTH. A huge cheer went up, then they stomped off. Somebody, possibly Queen's manager, came on and told everbody to behave. I also remember a fan getting on stage and Freddie expertly rolling him off the stage. I didnt like the Hot Space album much but was chuffed they were still a hard rock band. I bought the next edition of Kerrang mag and the write up of the gig said STUNNING. Great memory.” - Edwin

“I was 15 years old in 1982 when I attended my first ever concert. Fortunately for me, it was QUEEN's show at Leeds AFC ground in the North of England. I remember when my ticket arrived in the post, possibly 2-3 months before the concert, as was often the case in those days. I stuck my ticket on a cork notice board in my bedroom and could barely contain my excitement over the coming weeks. Every morning, I would wake up and look at the yellow ticket, wishing the days away. I imagined everything that could go wrong would. Queen would cancel the gig, I would break my leg, the family pet would die on the morning of the concert and it would be too insensitive of me to go, the transport wouldn't turn up or would break down, there would be a pile up on the motorway, I'd lose my ticket en route, etc, etc. As it turned out, May 29th 1982 was a hot and sunny day, perfect weather for an outdoor gig. I was CRAZY about Queen and had been since the age of 9 but I really didn't know what to expect on that day. Myself and three friends took a coach organised by my Dad's company from Lancashire across the M62 motorway to Leeds. Our excitement began to really take a hold when we arrived at the football ground and we followed the droves of people towards the turnstiles. To me, this was something on a really big scale and I could already hear the hum of the crowd inside. Not really believing that we were actually about to witness a Queen concert, we found our seats on the West Stand, offering a great view of the stage. I remember marvelling at Queen's new lighting rig and the equipment that adorned the stage, shining in the afternoon sunshine. The ground was almost full at this point and the pitch was heaving with people. The atmosphere was relaxed as people bathed in the sunshine. I remember two guys climbing the fence from the stand and attempting to get a better spot by running into the crowd and losing themselves on the pitch. Their efforts were in vain however as they were quickly located and ejected back into the stand by two security guards. We bought some black Hot Space tour shirts (I wore mine with pride until it literally fell apart) and a programme from a vendor inside the ground and waited for the first band to take the stage. A guy near us shouted and punched his way through Heart's set and then left just as they vacated the stage. Obviously not a Queen fan! The Teardrop Explodes suffered at the hands of the Queen congregation and found themselves battling against a shower of bottles and assorted missiles. Other than that, I don't really remember much about the support bands. I think that Bow Wow Wow were billed to play (an odd choice) but I can't recall if they actually turned up. No matter, we were about to witness what is still one of the best gigs I have ever attended.

As the dusk descended upon us, the giant floodlights were extinguished one by one and the memory of the roar that followed still sends shivers down my spine. Dry ice drifted across the heads of the crowd on the pitch as the intro tape of Flash thumped out of the PA and the strange 'grating' noises added to the recording created a foreboding atmosphere. Two of our party were on the pitch and to this day remember their chests thumping in unison to the powerful rhythm. A sea of hands clapped in perfect time to the beat. To me, this was already an amazing experience. And then the big moment. Freddie, resplendent in dazzling white made his entrance to The Hero and the blaze of the lights. An apt number to start with. Before he had even sung a note, the audience were locked tightly in the palm of his hand. Such an entrance, such a showman. "You're a F***in amazing crowd", he exclaimed after the first rush. The beginning of the gig is, in truth, my strongest memory of the show itself. In particular, the "Flash!!!" vocals cutting through the night air with so much volume. I recall being shocked at the sheer power of Queen's performance and the clarity of the huge sound they harnessed. Morgan Fisher's keyboards during 'Action This Day' sounded bright and hypnotic. Freddie's intro to Fat Bottomed Girls caused quite a response too; "the bigger the t*t the better it is!". I also remember the follow spots darting wildly over the crowd during 'Tie Your Mother Down' and everybody going crazy. Oddly enough (and this is something I still swear by to this day), I was in a Maths lesson at school the following Monday and I swear I had a flashback of this and could actually 'hear' the music being re-played in my head. It was a weird moment and life was never quite the same again. We talked endlessly about our experience for months to come and one of my biggest regrets is not jumping on a train to attend the filmed Milton Keynes show a week later. Having been to so many gigs since, I can honestly say that there is nobody who has been able to top Queen live; I was lucky enough to see the band five times between 1982 and 1986, including Wembley Stadium and their last show at Knebworth. I think that my personal favourite was their performance at the NEC in Birmingham on 'The Works' tour in 1984. People were literally stood there with open mouths, unable to believe how good they were. Leeds is definitely up there too. I recall Brian May stating that he thought it was one of their best performances ever. I can't argue with that Mr May. I've often wondered if an audience shot cine film or even just photographs exist from the Leeds gig. It would be a dream come true to see my memories come to life again.” - Keith Lambert

“I can't believe it was 30 years ago that I attended my first ever gig at Elland Rd Leeds in 1982. I was 17 years old at the time, I was into Queen when I first heard seven seas of rhye, which was so different to all the other stuff around at the time. I'd heard them live on tv, and had Live Killers. Also I used to buy bootleg cassettes of all of their tours from 74 onwards. But nothing could prepare me for that day. They should have played this gig at Old Trafford Manchester, my home town, so I was gutted when the residents opposed it. Tickets were very easy to come by, believe it or not, cos Queen were not seen as a relevant band at that time. Also touring the Hot Space album didn't seem to excite anybody. So, Billy no mates had to go on his own, haha. My memory is a bit hazy, but I will try my best. I got to the ground about 1pm, and was lucky enough to have a pitch ticket. I got right to the front, well about 10 yards from the stage, slightly off centre and to the right. If I told you I never moved from that spot all day and never spoke to anyone, would you believe me? One of the reasons for this is the rivalry between Manchester and Leeds, also I was only a kid, haha. Not sure who was first on, probably Teardrop Explodes, Julian Cope, I remember while they were throwing bottles at him, picked one up and started hitting himself with it and stretching his arms out saying he was an Argentinian bomber or something. It was during the Falklands war, remember. Then Heart came on, not really my cup of tea, and I had a lie down on the tarpaulin and tried to go to sleep. Then Joan Jett, who was better than the rest, but not really exciting. During the band changes, I remember the roadies polishing Roger's drum kit and climbing up ropes and those threepronged lights, which before I saw them move I thought they were cameras. Queen took ages to come on. From my recollection and I might be wrong, they didn't come on until 10pm and went off around Midnight. I heard later that they got fined so much per minute for being late on stage but they wanted to wait until it was dark for the lighting rig to take effect. If you watch the Bowl DVD you will notice it was light when they came on stage there. But that was being filmed by Channel 4. But it was absolutely pitch black when they came on stage at Leeds. Then the floodlights went off, smoke started to appear and strange noises started, which I can't describe, sorry. Then Flash's Theme started, it was loud, very, very loud. I knew they were supposed to be loud and this was the part that scared me. The ground was thumping, the bass just pumping away. The these 'cameras' flicked into life, with men on them. The intro seemed to last for a very long time. Then BANG Brian appears with the first chord of The Hero and a flash of the biggest white light I've ever seen and will never forget and the absolute loudest noise I have ever heard just hit me. The intro was quite in comparrision to this. When I play Live at the Bowl, I tend to repeat the intro and The Hero, virtually every time, because it was definitely a life changing experience for me at that moment, just incredible. Then Freddie appeared in brilliant white again, I was that close, I swear His hair seemed blue because of the mass of white lights. His voice, so loud, so clear, honestly, I can't describe that moment properly. I heard Freddie swear, saw Roger spitting, quite a lot, over his drum kit and onto the stage, I was bewildered.

When they did Play The Game and also Somebody To Love, when Freddie was doing the intros for them and it will sound strange to those that weren't there, but I didn't know what the songs were. I thought they was new unreleased songs. The reason was they was so loud, It kind of deafened you and then kind of sunk in what they were about to play. Then the rest of the gig flew by and I was singing my head off. Everyone was, but you could only hear Queen. Again my memory may be wrong, but I read afterwards that Queen had paid for residents to move out of their homes for the day. These houses were monitored and they said that the sound was like Concorde flying 10 feet over your head... Yep I will buy that. For all that and for all the bad things said about it, The Works tour, which I went to all the 4 origional England gigs they had planned, was the best tour they ever did. The set list was fantastic and the lighting rig was incredible. Not as loud, I also add. I also saw them in Manchester, 86. They had to be off stage by 10pm and noise levels had to be adhered to. I was too far awy to see them and the screens didn't come on because it was too light. Also I couldn't here them properly. I've watched the mMagic Tour gigs on DVD etc, but for me, that was the poorest tour they ever did. So that's it, hopefully some of you can confirm my bad memory, or say I'm wrong. Hopefully not bored you all. But it was the greatest musical experience I ever witnessed and I am proud I was there.” - Paul Wakefield

Part-1

(x)

[okay-victoria]

Random Personal Rant

For anyone somehow here not from the original thread, this started off me getting asked what finishing school is and me getting shit off my chest that is only mildly relevant about how I could both be of the social class that gets sent to finishing school and grows up on welfare.

With an understanding that in many parts of the world it wouldn't qualify as so, as far as the US goes, my dad is from what counts as a very old money family from Baltimore & Philadelphia. Both his siblings went to college and one now owns a major hedge fund, and his sister is married to a C-level executive at a huge conglomerate. His parents went to college. His grandparents went to college. All eight of his great grandparents went to college. My dad...did not go to college. He was not about that life, and while I don't mean it as an insult, when I say his primary occupation until I was ~5 was a drummer in a mediocre band I mean that he opened for a lot of great acts, and if you lived in the Boston to Atlanta area in the 80s you may have heard him play, but he was never a huge national name. But he wasn't an amateur band playing for free at some random local gig either.

My mom grew up on a chicken farm in a Mennonite family in Pennsylvania but also completely rejected her heritage and became a model, sort of like my father, of mediocre status. Not Giselle Bundchen, but had national contracts and if you have a Graco ad/box from 1990-1993 you might see both me and her on it. They met because my mom's friends placed bets, one each, on who could sleep with a member of their favorite local band first and my mom picked my dad and...my mom was actually supposed to go be a model in Tokyo and found out she was pregnant with me and couldn't go 😂

So, after my parents had two kids back to back with a third on the way and determined they needed lifestyles more in line with having three children, they became much poorer than they originally were because my mom stopped working and my dad, with a barely-passed-high-school education but needing a true "day job" worked day labor in construction. My dad's father was too proud to give us money/help if my dad didn't beg for it; despite having eventually four young children my dad never did so we ended up on all the state assistance programs one could imagine. My grandma jokes that dinners at my parents house were BYOC - bring your own chair, because we didn't own any.

My mother and paternal grandmother had no such pride issues and I live in eternal gratitude that my welfare childhood was not as crappy as it should have been because my grandmother would have my mom accompany her on grocery runs and buy us food without my father or grandfather knowing, and every Christmas and birthday my grandparents/godparents could give us the one big ticket gift all the kids wanted that year. But, on the other side, I once got stung by a bee inside my mouth because my brother threw a hairbrush through a cracked window at me and broke it and we couldn't afford to fix it for about two years and a hornet got in one day and rested himself in my coke can (my parents were the very American type that fed me coca-cola in baby bottles at age 8 when I was jealous of my younger siblings lol).

It is hard not to believe in "toxic masculinity" when two men warring over dumbass pride issues would rather their children/grandchildren go without food than suck it up and decide 'help' isn't the worst word in the English language, and you know you've only been saved by two women who came from totally different backgrounds and entirely disapproved of each other but reached out the hand to shake when it came down to toddlers getting the short end of the don't-bend-the-knee stick. It wasn't that either of the men were bad people, I loved them both and got along great with both, but on a societal level I feel they were socialized in a very fucked up way if that was the end result, as both claimed "male pride" in these instances [my dad took multiple thousands of dollars I'd saved from working during college from me during the 2008-2010 financial crisis and didn't tell me and that was the reason I was given for why I hadn't been informed/asked, because it would be too emotionally difficult for an adult man to ask a young woman. My graduation present was them repaying me 1/3 of the money they'd taken from me without asking because I'd like, trusted them when it had been in a joint account that was a holdover from when I was <18 and couldn't have my own bank account].

While in some ways my parents on the surface achieved the American dream of going from nothing to a bunch of money, the real factor in play was that my dad's father was the bank. My parents had no credit and couldn't get real loans. My dad worked construction and during the two major periods that flipping houses was very lucrative, he never had to get an actual loan or pay actual interest, he just had to ask his father to pay out cash and then repay him at a flat 2% interest rate that didn't even accrue over time, just...whenever you are ready, repay the value of the loan + 2%. Because my father was doing something productive, in these instances, my grandfather was happy to pay, because it wasn't giving away money, it was loaning it. I had a very weird situation of mostly being poor but like also getting taken to the "big donors" events at the Kennedy Center and my grandparents regularly buying me a dress as a child worth more than my mom's wedding dress and also needing to pretend I fit in with these people.

And look. When I say "these people"...honestly, by and large, most wealthy people, whether inherited or not, are not the assholes you want to imagine. Most of them are extremely nice. Most of them are generous when it comes to the less fortunate who are in their personal sphere of being. Most of them are just really out of touch. The 100% kindest of all of them that I know once relayed to me that she thought people would be happier if once a year they did what she did...go to the airport with a purse packed full of absolute necessities, buy a one way ticket to the most appealing destination on the flight board, buy your clothes and book your accommodations after you'd arrived, and come back after you felt you'd 'centered' yourself. She didn't understand why there were so many unhappy people who weren't taking this very obvious route to being happier. I didn't quite know how to explain that saying "most" people couldn't afford to do that either financially or from a job/career angle didn't even cover it, as "most" sounds like 70% instead of 99.7%.

I was both my parents eldest son and eldest daughter in the worst combination possible. I was the eldest son because I was the most stereotypically male of all my siblings, in everything from desire to physically fight the battles I was given to dislike of shopping/fashion to lack of emotional connection to my relationships, so I can now fix your average household plumbing/drywall/electrical issue better than most "city" guys I interact with and remain less clingy to them in the process. I was also very much the oldest daughter from a responsibility perspective, I managed our household and from age 10 - 24 managed the finances of our family business, my mom almost died giving birth to my youngest brother after a ruptured uterus that should never have happened in the first place if we had adequate insurance to get her a non-emergency C-section (I was just past 9 years old at the time) and I was informally withdrawn from school for two years to take care of the family when she couldn't because there is no paid parental leave in the US and we got double-fucked by the medical industry because she got a bad "mesh" put in and then had to have a further surgery to repair that which we also had to pay for and didn't have the money to win a lawsuit over.

I don't know quite how to put this, but in the deepest fuck you of the universe, my rich-immigrant-ggggg grandfather's money led to him owning banks, insurance companies, etc, and the family cashed out in a big way when their ownership was bought by and merged with what is now Cigna, one of the biggest US healthcare insurers, and my nuclear family specifically got screwed by the American health insurance industry, but anyway, we were the people selected for that karmic comeuppance so if you want to feel schadenfreude at my expense, I'll allow it without begrudging the sentiment, my family might have fucked up your family’s life too, not just their own.

I got up twice a night to feed my brother because my dad had to sleep unmolested in my room to get to work and my mom was too weak to carry my brother or even hold him against her while she nursed so I had to hold him up to her. Adjusting to living in a city and hearing lots of random noises all the time was not easy when I'd had mom sound instincts from age 9.

I learned to drive the fall my youngest bro was born because my mom couldn't and I had to get my middle brother to preschool and go the grocery store on my own. While I hold absolutely no ill will towards my father or grandfather for this and given that about 1/3 of my paternal family either has an autism diagnosis or should, I fully feel the struggles they both went through to be communicated with, my father wouldn't ask for help, and my grandmother that lived 20 minutes away couldn't give enough help because my grandfather refused to do a single dish on his own as that was outside their "marriage contract" type agreement and she couldn't ever stay with us overnight when there wasn't a clearly-communicated need, so they let the burden fall on a 9 - 11 year old child and that really shaped a lot of my life in both good and bad ways. My youngest brother is 22, and we have only just climbed out of the medical debt his birth left us with between my dad's life insurance and my oldest brother and I paying for the extra cost of out-of-state college tuition.

The irony of all of this is that because my father died before his father, when my grandmother dies, my siblings and I will all inherit enough money (as a non-blood relative my mom, despite keeping her vows to part at death and not having remarried in eight years, is cut out entirely) to make this a non-issue, but my grandfather couldn't conscience spotting his unluckiest child some money in the end of days to pay for my youngest two brothers' education and take that worry off my father as he was dying. The day before he died I had to hold him down in bed to keep him from trying to climb in his truck to go to work because he was so anxious about trying to provide for us in spite of his father having fuck you money, because his father didn't think it was fair to the other siblings (who, at the time, still owned a major hedge fund and were married to a C-level executive of a huge conglomerate). A day and a half later I went back to my job because at the time I was then the sole provider for the family and didn't want to risk asking for the standard week's bereavement leave when I knew I was capable of showing up at work the next day and was fresh out of college so hadn't built up a reputation yet.

My father worked the day each of us was born, so I suppose it is only fair and he smiled at the choice. In spite of what it may seem, I gave a baller and very heartfelt speech at his funeral to all his rich friends that over and above everything, he'd taught us how to be happy with our own lives no matter what, and multiple of them emailed my mom in the aftermath to say they'd reassessed their relationship with their children in light of it, although...tbh I kind of doubt that lasted and they probably changed nothing 😅. The last good talk I had with him, two weeks before he died [his liver was going and it sent toxins to his brain that de-personed him after that and he no longer recognized me as his daughter, but as his sister], I reassured him that though we would all be sad he'd gone, we'd live on just fine without him because that's how he'd raised us, and according to my mom that was what gave him the final bit of peace he needed. Although honestly, I don't think I will ever see the strength in another human again that it took my grandmother to sit next to him and stroke his hand and tell him to close his eyes and imagine he was happy on a beach and die, for God's sake, because he was unaware and in pain and just prolonging it for our sake by then.

That type of obsession my grandfather had with assessing his children and grandchildren on the basis of economic productivity and a very black and white idea of "fair" is one you don't easily forget, I promise you. My hedge fund uncle is currently positioning himself to screw us out of our inheritance because of janky writing in the will and I'm doing my fuck all best to gain the wherewithal to go toe-to-toe with this cold motherfucker in court as the oldest and representative member of my happily much nicer and softer younger brothers who I want to remain that way not because I even care that much about the money, I know what bills affect your credit first and what you can put off paying and all of us have good enough career prospects to do our own thing, but just because I want to give the middle finger to a man that was a multi-millionaire and drew lines on his milk and orange juice bottles when I came over so he knew if I drank what my parents couldn't afford when I was approximately six. Anyway, ask me why I support major reforms in wealth taxation. I don't care who it goes to, just not that guy, you feel?

Having expendable income was very exciting for a bit after I started working but once I got to the hateable point of assessing my annual bonus and internally complaining that I'd spent the money I should have spent on a Sauternes cellar to drop five digits on bedset materials (to be fair they are drop dead gorgeous, very comfy and the factory pays a living wage for people to handmake the sheets/duvets/pillows to people in San Francisco, which is not cheap, so maybe I did more good than harm with that), I two seconds later nodded to myself and went "the government needs to confiscate more money from me". The narrative is always that the "undeserving" will use it for dumb things they don't need like iPhones or refrigerators...?...but like...I could also have gone to Bed Bath and Beyond and bought a very nice sheet/comforter set for at most a tenth of what I paid so am I really spending it responsibly either....?....who is going to get more joy out of this misspent money....?....not me, that is for sure, I probably would have had more fun going to BBB and laying on all the demo beds and buying something there.

My lifelong dream, which may become possible if/when I do have something of an inheritance, is to provide food security for one of the many towns in the US were most residents don't have it. It's the thing I remember the most distinctly over the years. I never could quite believe it when I got to the point that I could just...pay to eat at a restaurant. One of the most disappointed my mother has ever been in me is when I was twenty five and confessed I actually had no idea how much a gallon of milk cost in a city grocery store besides that it was probably between $1 and $5, because I didn't have to know. For now I make a weekly drop off of my excess produce to a mom group I met under somewhat weird circumstances but I was walking through the cut-through that went through the low-income housing back to my apartment at like 2 AM on a Saturday and these moms were out there partying and smoking weed with their kids all strapped in strollers around or the older ones watched by a rotating member of the group and I felt very safe and like these moms had a very good vibe of both living their own lives [seriously for mental health parents but in most cases specifically mothers need to be able to keep up relationships with people their age] but keeping their children safe and accounted for while doing so and trying their fuckin' best against all the odds to figure out how to make that happen when life had dealt them a shit hand.

...anyway, looping way back to the original question of what finishing school is, when I was almost done with middle school my dad had built a legit construction business that then very quickly took off because we lived in a commutable zip code to the now-rich-in-their-own-right people he went to high school with who trusted him to redo their homes. We eventually moved to that zip code but I stayed and commuted back to my old high school. But, i was a pretty wild kid which my father appreciated for a long while because I would follow him around on jobs and enjoy doing physical labor, but once I was mid-puberty and also he had to maybe show me to his high school friends that did not fly.

I snapped - not broke, snapped - my left thumb and my parents had to trap me like a wild animal to get me to go the hospital. Then I got a deep cut that partially injured a tendon in my leg and at eleven I tried to beat the shit out of my dad to prevent him from picking me up to strap me in the car and go to the hopsital. Next I got a deep splinter due to my eternal-barefoot tendencies and it wouldn't come out so got infected and I refused to go to the doctor [another weird back story but I was minorly sexually assaulted [[to be clear, not raped or anything big traumatic]] when I was eight and had to stay in hospital for a week and my parents couldn't be with me all the time so I have a permanent heebie-jeebie about going to the hospital, not true anxiety, I will go if I know I need to and I don't breathe heavy or anything, and I'm actually not permanently weirded out by sex or anything, just doctors in hospitals specifically I kind of unconsciously try to justify not needing to the extent I can rationalize it] and my dad was tired of my antics so he was like "fine if you don't go I will slice your foot in half with a Swiss Army knife to get it out" and I called his bluff and laid down on the floor, stuck my foot on his lap, and he didn't really know what to do when a barely fourteen year old girl called his bluff so my brothers watched in fascinated but horrified awe as I got my foot sliced open spectacularly so that the infection/splinter could come out and I didn't even make a sound out of spite despite it being quite painful to my recollection almost twenty years later.

They saw me cry from pain exactly one time when while trying to break up a fight between all three of them (it was over ice cream) I got pushed and my ankle got dislocated and what actually made me cry was snapping it back in place and they realized it was not a joke. These dumb assholes that I love have ragged on me for "skipping" chores the day after I was in the hospital because the day before that I had to spend 18 hours running Thanksgiving as a good sub-hostess like I didn't have a serious infection that needed treating and couldn't rest because none of them were up to any task beyond peeling potatoes.

After the Swiss Army knife incident, my dad's discussion of sending me to finishing school became real, which I knew when my mom made me take a walk with her and talked about it. Finishing school is like...etiquette school....? In ye olden day when finishing high school was not the norm for anyone, wealthy men finished high school and wealthy women often went to "finishing" school to have a combined education on being a proper lady but also being able to hold a decent conversation with your presumably-educated husband, so it wasn't entirely etiquette non-academic. It was more just like "what a rich man wants in a wife" school, which was sort of household management and knowing enough about cleaning/cooking to correct the staff if they fucked up, how to be a polite hostess, and how to not entirely bore him when you were alone together and had done your five minutes of sex or whatever so actually had to have a conversation. In modern times it has obviously expanded to be less bleak.

I said miss me with that, I can be a girl on my own, so I went full throttle into the girliest sport they offer in high school and ever since have gained the inestimable advantage of knowing how to also use femininity to my advantage, which I am very grateful to my parents for making me learn. It would be great if we lived in a world where that didn't count, but it did/still does, and they really set me up to operate in all the worlds.

It is weird for me to tell the story to Internet strangers because it's one of those things that makes your parents sound terrible and abusive in the general tone of the Internet nowadays, and while I support gender nonconforming children I don't remember my childhood or parents that way. But, I feel like the bits and pieces of my life I've given don't always make a ton of sense together without the context, so here it is, and in the end, I think a number of parts of it are areas where you can probably understand where it makes me have the opinions I do when I write.

Anyhoo, this makes my life sound far worse than it is, I actually have a great life and I am not unhappy with it at all and feel I was on the whole blessed with many more turns of luck than unluck, so, please, do not take this as a depressed artist rant, it is more like a rant of a very energetic person who rants about a lot of things all the time and didn’t need to come out but just did because the question was asked and the time was right with my life being in a bit of flux to think about how I got where I am and where I want to go and why.

Always remember no matter what problems it seems like I have, if I didn’t solve them on my 2 year round the world traveling hiatus I took from working, it’s my own fault, I definitely had the time and money to solve them and just chose not to.

[finitepeace]

fics i read this week:

 I read some bucky x natasha fics: 

Head Is Not My Home by taralkariel

Summary: The Black Widow is a legend. Legends aren't made cheap.

Shaken by the events of Civil War, Natasha Romanoff goes back to familiar ground to hide. To hide and remember how she became the Black Widow. How Natalia Romanova would do anything to save her father-figure. How she was one of 28 ballerinas with the Bolshoi - no, one of 28 Black Widow agents with the Red Room. How the only thing that made her feel human was a man with a metal arm.

(A story to show what really happened in the comics Red Room and how it could fit into the MCU)

19k words in 12 chapters, not rated (maybe T&up?), bucky nat up to IW, i think.  it’s not very dark themed <3,

tell me baby, do you recognize me? by xocean

Summary: "You're a liar." Natasha is shaking. "You're a heartless, lonely, lying murderer."

He doesn't even blink. "We both are."

The Winter Soldier's game is up, and Steve's not letting him go this time. Enter the only person who doesn't want a part in this shitfest: Natasha Romanov.

Or, as James Buchanan Barnes remembers her: Natalia Romanova.

63k words in 10 chapters (from 11), angst.

 and an IronDad x SpiderSon fic: 

This B.S. Better Be Worth It by losingmymindtonight 💙

Summary: Originally, Tony's plan had been to just surprise Peter with the fact that he would be on campus for a semester.

He’d never actually expected Peter to sign up for his class.

7k words in 4 chapters, tony acting like a dad (and awesome professor)

 as usual, the rest are Stony fics:  

American Dream by NobodysBloodyPrincess

Summary: Tony is trying, but try as he might he just can’t find the silver lining of this particular disaster.

After all, what happiness could possibly be derived from the knowledge that the perfect little girl in his arms is now motherless? What relief could be drawn, when his boyfriend of ten years, the love of his life really, is probably, currently, right at this moment in the arms of ‘Peggy’ his new fiancé?

13k words, no powers au, tony-centric, stevetony has broken up and tony adopts a kid, steve is depicted a bit insensitive (idk what the word, like unable to read the room?) here. 

Where Our Restless Monsters Sleep by Mizzy 💙

Summary: Years after Tony Stark saved the universe, the Avengers realize there’s a major problem: his body has gone missing. And he isn’t the only one. Fallen heroes all over the galaxy have had their graves pillaged.

An old foe is stealing the bodies of fallen warriors, but for what nefarious reason? There’s only one solution. To find out why it’s happening, Steve’s gotta die.

He probably shouldn’t be so eager to do that.

233k words in 12 chapters, post endgame resurrections (?), gladiator trope, lots of action scenes, and THERE’S MORGAN x STEVE INTERACTIONS!!!!! 

The Culling of the Stars by dirigibleplumbing

Summary: Tony dies saving Steve's life on the courthouse steps. Now Steve is left with the fallout of their Civil War, expected to take charge and preserve Tony's legacy. He doesn't know how he can do it alone—not when he can't stop thinking about Tony, or keep track of the days, or even feel.

9k words, comic book’s civil war not MCU’s, angst but gnidne yppah 

Together, Always by Sapphic_Futurist 💙

Summary: He swallows hard, a prickle of tears in his eyes because this is his husband.

This is Tony Stark and Steve’s husband, and Steve gets to have this. He gets to have this for the rest of his goddamn life.

30k words in 3 chapters, embodiment of stony’s “together” T_T, read the tags if you want to be spoiled lol if not then enjoy! (and I don’t regret not reading the tags tbh) 

And I'd Buy A Big House Where We Both Could Live by shinkonokokoro

Summary: Missing: Tony Stark, billionaire businessman, heir to Stark Industries, reward: none

Only Steve didn't know that when he picked up the waterlogged unconscious man from the bank of a river.

59k words in 29 chapters, non-power au, kid clint and peter as steve’s brothers

i stole the keys to this guy by kellifer_fic

Summary: Where it was Nick Fury's idea, but he didn't mean it like that

6k words, fake dating into real dating 

Home Is Where the Time Machine Is by Wordsplat 💙

Summary:Steve and Tony's daughter accidentally falls back in time, and learns that impossible time travel phone calls can and will be made just to ground you, big brothers are awful snitches, and parents used to date other people. The past blows.

23k words in 5 chapters, domestic, stony being married 

don't know why it took me so long to see by goodmorningbeloved (3799steps)

Summary: “Oh, watch this,” Natasha says, propping her chin against her knuckles and turning a sweet gaze on him. “Tony, what’s it like dating a superhero?”

Tony bristles in irritation. “We’re not dating,” he snaps. “Captain America probably thinks he can get into anyone’s pants just ‘cause he’s got a mask, costume, and reputation, but not me, buddy. That shield? Gotta be overcompensating for something.” He adds, a bit petulantly, “Oh, and all that blue? Definitely more Steve’s color than his.”

- In which Tony is a genius in all matters except recognizing his boyfriend past a mask.

11k words, tony being peacefully oblivious while the whole world isn’t. 

I Started a Joke by Naferty

Summary "Tony?"

"Who the hell is Tony?"

102k words in 11 chapters, tony is the winter soldier 

Take Two  by Wordsplat 💙

Summary: Steve loses his memory but he gets the feeling he's lost a lot more. Who exactly is Tony Stark to him and why won't he come out of the basement?

24k words, i just love it. 

Sunrise Over the End of the World by Sapphic_Futurist

Summary: When Dr. Strange arrives at an Accords Committee Meeting and warns of the coming of an alien megalomaniac set on destroying the world, the Rogues are pardoned and Tony finds himself exactly where he never wanted to be. Back at the Compound with Steve, who still can't take a hint and won't leave him alone.

--

In which Tony is broken and Steve finds redemption.

35k in 11 chapters, explicit, civil war fix-it up to infinity war 

Far Away And Long Ago by Ragdoll (Keshka) 💙

Summary: Steve steps into the past and discovers that hope held on a pedestal is as insubstantial as smoke. Then he sees Tony. And that's when things get complicated.

Full summary contained within.

18k in 4 chapters, mature, seems like abandoned WIP :( endgame fix-it au when steve returns the stones... 

Something More Than What They Are series by  Sapphic_Futurist

An exploration of love, denial and propensity for change.

38k in 4 works, explicit, Steve and Tony are married during the civil war madness but seems like their love is not enough to stop it from happening or reconciling T_T 

the marks you choose to leave behind by masterlokisev159

Summary: The Stane faction has been around for many years, long before Tony was bitten. And since he was forced, his life has been nothing short of misery and pain; a prison he will never escape. As a low member of the faction, his only hope at survival is to remain a loyal pet to Ezekiel. So when Ezekiel mentions the growing threat of the Avengers of the Undead, and the dreaded Captain, Tony is adamant to step up and do what he can. It’s also his last chance to see the outside world before he’s bonded to Whitney forever.

But what he finds instead is an unlikely companion with golden eyes. A strange werewolf by the name of Steve.

35k, general, vampire tony/werewolf steve, based on earth-666 

La La Love by Wordsplat

Summary: "To be perfectly clear, Tony always knew that Stephanie Rogers was the best thing that would ever happen to him."

4k words, teen up and audiences, female Steve, highschool au, awkward tony

Meet Your Heroes by Wordsplat

Summary:Tony gets rescued by a highly concerned, very handsy Captain America. This is confusing for a number of reasons.

4k words, identity porn AU, 

Hashtag Finally by Wordsplat 💙

Summary: Tony doesn't ever actually ask the Avengers to move into his house, steal his wifi, eat all his food, and become the best family he's ever known. They do it anyway.

15k, teen&up, domestic avengers a.k.a. tower life, hyperactive Clint lol, super cute, everyone are stony supporters

Thanks For the Memories by Wordsplat

Summary: When Tony is sent crashing-all too literally-into the 1940's by an alternate-universe Loki's spell, neither Tony nor Steve are prepared for the consequences.

9k words, time travel au, secret pining 

[be-the-creature-fan]

My list of Questions I would ask the Kratt Brothers if I had the opportunity to interview the both of them. (Its a dream of mine)

My actual interview questions are beyond the read more. (Questions for Both is in Black, Questions for Martin is in Blue and Questions for Chris is in Green.)

So without further a do.....

1. What are your earliest childhood memories?

2. How does it feel to be the oldest?

3. How does it feel to be the youngest?

4. What are some of your favorite childhood memories?

5. Any major injuries or near death experiences as a kid?

6. Were you guys always close as kids or was until you guys were adults that you became close.

7. What was life like in the late 60s/70s

8. What was your guys favorite TV show, Movie and Song or Songs as a kid and what about now?

9. Any funny stories that your parents would constantly remind you of that you don't personally remember but is always good for a laugh?

10. How much did you enjoy school, were you a good student or not so much?

11. What's a talent that you have?

12. I heard that your father owned a Harmonica factory while watching a Mr. Rogers documentary that featured the factory in an episode. Have you worked at the factory? and if you have how was it?

13. Did you see the Space Shuttle Challenger explosion? And if so what was your reaction?

14. What's are your favorite sport teams?

15. How was it like growing up with sisters?

16. Would you ever have your sisters cameo in Wild Kratts if you could?

17. On a scale from 1-10 how would you rate your high school experience?

18. Were you always interested in having a job that involves animals or did you have other interests?

19. What's your favorite Christmas Movie/Special

20. Can you please translate what your seinor quote thing means? (Especially the Mamm do you have a dog?)

21. How did it feel to be the first one out of your siblings to go to college?

22. How did it feel when Martin went to college?

23. Any funny stories from when you worked at the Duke Lemur Center?

24. What was it like when you guys created your first ever video back in 1989 also any funny stories or close calls?

25. How did it feel when you got your first couple of rejection letters and what made you continue to pursue your dream?

26. How was business school?

27. How was your washing dishes job at Charlton?

28. When PBS Kids finally accepted your show Kratts Creatures,what was your reaction?

29. How was working on Kratts Creatures? Any funny stories or close calls?

30. Do you keep in contact with the person who played Allison and Ttark or any of the crew who worked on the show?

31. How was working on Zaboomafoo? Keep in contact with coworkers and crew who worked on the show?

32. How did you guys meet your wives? And what was the moment that made you know that they were the one?

33. How did you propose to your wives and how was the wedding?

34. What was the most memorable night of your lives? (wink, wink, nudge, nudge) (I would probably skip this question)

35. How did you react when you first found out you would become a dad? and how did your wives tell you?

36. How did it feel to go from working on Zaboomafoo to Be the Creature how was the shift from kids show to more of an adult show?

37. How would you rate working on Be the Creature? (my personal favorite show)

38. What had to be a low point in your life?

39. What year did you thought up of Wild Kratts? And what was the creative process for that?

40. Which people inspired Aviva, Koki, Jimmy, Zach, Donita, Dabio, Gormond, Paisley and Rex?

41. Where were you during 9/11? (I'm trying to ask people I know that were alive during 9/11 because most Americans alive during 9/11 never forgets where they were at.)

42. Who's the 3rd camera man in Be The Creature?

43. Would you ever make a biography about your adventures? (Please do)

44. What are your Favorite activities to do with your family?

45. Will you ever make another adult show like Be The Creature?

46. Have you ever participated in a Zaboomafoo or Wild Kratts drinking game or would you?

47. What's your Biggest pet peeve?

48. Who's actually the most organized?

49. What are your Hobbies?

50. What is something you wish you could do but can't no matter how hard you try?

51. What's your favorite book?

52. How does it feel to have a cartoon plush of yourself? Is it weird?

53. What's your reaction to receiving art from fans of your shows?

54. What is the most memorable fan encounters you ever had?

55. What country have you not visited that you really want to go to?

56. What is your favorite country that you have visited? (They better say Peru)

57. What's your favorite video game?/ If you played Super Smash Bros (The Nintendo video game) what's your main?

58. What do you do when your not working on Wild Kratts?

59. What was your best year and your worst year and why?

60. How was it like raising your kids when they were kids compared to when they were in their teens?

61. Do or did you watch Kratts Creatures, Zaboomafoo, Be the Creature and Wild Kratts with your family?

62. Do you like being recognized in public?

63. How often are you recognized by people?

64. Have you ever been in a fist fight? if so tell me the story.

65. Have you gone through a mid life crisis?

66. Where are your Disco outfit that you wore in Kratts Creatures and Zaboomafoo?

67. What was your reaction when Jovian the Lemer died?

68. What's a funny or a close call story of your time camping in Vermont as kids?

69. What's your number 1 Karaoke song?

70. Does pineapple belong on pizza?

71. Why has Jimmy not been given a CPS and will you give him one? (That Sea otter episode was a cruel joke)

72. WHY IS KOKI'S CPS ORANGE AND NOT RED OR YELLOW?!?!? (JIMMY'S CPS SHOULD HAVE BEEN ORANGE)

73. What's your favorite animal? (I want to know what the next episodes will be)

74. Fruit with chocolate yes or no and why?

75. Whats your most embarrassing moment that keeps you up at night?

76. What was up with your hair back in highschool?

77. Why was your hair so curly in highschool and when did it stop being curly?

78. What was your oh crap I'm getting old moment?

79. Have you seen the movie Grease from 1978 and did you like it?

80. What song represents you the best?

81. What animal represents you the most?

82. What's your favorite Theme Song?

83. How is working with Pure West? ( the guy who wrote the theme songs for BTC and Wild Kratts and maybe Zaboomafoo?)

84. Whats your Favorite sport to play?

85. What's your favorite sport to watch

86. What Fad that you lived through was the most Fun and which one did you absolutely lothe?

87. What's a little known fact about yourself?

88. Who's the bossy one?

89. Do you remember what your reaction was when your parents told you that your having a baby brother?

90. How many times did Martin pull the Because I'm older than you card?

91. What was something that you struggled with for a long time but finally over came it?

92. What is something that you are still struggling with?

93. What are your greatest strengths?

94. If you could give advice to your past self what would it be?

95. If you found a new species what would you name it?

96. What is something that you crossed off your bucket list?

97. What is something that you still want to cross off?

98. If you had a time machine what year would you go to?

99. Who do you admire/look up to?

100. What are you looking forward to most in the future/ what are your future predictions for wildlife?

If anyone knows how to send these to the Kratt Brothers that would be Great :)

I will come up with more questions in the future but this is it for now.

[fourthwallhateclub]

Help me

Description: Emma is with Phoenix when she is kidnapped, can Bravo set aside their emotions in time to save her, or will they be too late...

A/N: I wrote some things like this over on Ao3 under “FourthWallHateClub”, this will eventually have a second part but with my ADHD I don’t know when that will happen 🙃 please feel free to send feedback on the fix, I know it’s shit but I live for shit so 🤭

@rebelreblogs

Emma's POV

Darkness... Floating... Silence... My eyes fluttered open and started to adjust to the light... where was I? The door slammed open,

"You're awake!" Was that... was that an Afghan accent? Then it all came back to hit me like a freight train...

48 hours before hand

"Sup Dalton." I said.

"Shut it Hayes." He said pissed off.

I turned to Mac with a questioning look, "Who pissed in his coffee?"

Mac smirked, "Don't take it personally, he's not pissed with you, he's pissed with Maddie. He was on his way to a football game with one of our old delta buddies when he got the call."

"It's..." I glanced at my watch, "1300 hours?"

"We we're gonna have a few beers!" Dalton groaned.

'More than a few.' I mouthed to Mac, he just coughed to stifle his laugh.

Matty walked in, tapping the glass creating a privacy screen, and clicked a button bringing an image up on screen. "Amir-Botzwat-Asharu."

"10 of clubs..." I breathed out in disbelief.

"International arms dealer, drug trafficker-"

"and grade-A prick." Jack stated matter-of-factly.

Mac snorted, "You can say that again."

"The guys been evading Phoenix since it was OPS, us personally for years, why are we concerned about him now?" I wondered.

"What's this got to do with us, CIA took over the case, why now?" Jack asked.

"If you’d let me talk, you’d know,” Matty said sarcastically, “He recently kidnapped and murdered an American. Phoenix have had him on our radar for a while now as you’re aware but the higher ups refused to green light the op to take him out, saying CIA had it handled. That all went to hell when their undercover agent was exposed, they shot him and put a bounty on everybody CIA affiliated."She said.

"We're on their SOS list Matty, we outrank some shitty little 'bounty' list." I said.

"Regardless, you, Dalton and MacGyver leave for the Middle East at 1600 this afternoon so you arrive at night, get your affairs in order because the big men upstairs say you don't leave till the jobs is done. You'll be properly briefed on the plane, but there are more pressing issues, you guys have up to date parachute qualifications right?"

"I don't like where this is going..." Jack mused.

"Me either..." Mac agreed.

"As much as I hate agreeing with you two shmucks, me three..." I said.

"Well whether you like it or not your jumping from that plane, there's no where for it to land where you'll keep your cover. Unless you want to walk 13 miles to where you'll be staying?" She challenged.

"WE'LL JUMP!!" We said in unison.

She smirked, "That's what I thought."

"Okay... where exactly are we going in the Middle East, and where are we staying?" I asked.

"You are going to Afghanistan."

"Fucking Trashcanistan?!? You've got to be kidding." Jack screeched.

Ah Dalton and his hatred for that place... he would get along with Uncle Sonny, man has a fear of bloody everything...

"SHIT!!" I yelled.

All heads snapped to me, "What's wrong Hayes?"

"Um... where exactly would we be staying?" I asked biting my lip.

"Navy base in J-"

I laughed nervously, "Would that be in J-Bad by any chance?"

"Yes, why?" Matty asked.

"We have a little problem..." I mumbled.

"And what would that be..." She mused, raising an eyebrow.

"My uh- my family was spun-up there a few weeks ago." I said.

"What do you mean Em?" Mac asked.

"I mean my family, is Bravo team. They are currently in the Middle East, and are stationed in J-Bad for the foreseeable future. What do we do?"

"I'm assuming that they were not among the people you told about your job?" Matty asked.

"No ma'am. Mac, Dalton, Bozer and Riley are the only ones who know..." I answered.

"You arrive at night anyway, you cover your tracks and stay as hidden as possible, don't talk to anyone and stay away from the sailors. Nobody is to know what you're doing there or who you are... to them you three are Black Rose, Hunter, and Eagle." Matty said.

"Yes ma'am."

"Well... get out of here."

We didn't need to be told twice, we were running out the door and to the squad room.

"What the fuck do I do?!?" I yelled as we entered the room.

"Want a hug?" Mac asked opening his arms. I nodded and walked into him tucking myself into his figure, "You'll be ok."

Jack's POV

"Wait! Is your dad the Jason Hayes, like Bravo 1, the legend?!?" I screeched.

"Uh- yeah.." Emma said pushing away from Mac and scratching her head.

"That explains a lot..."

"What do you mean?" She was confused.

"I mean, having worked with your father, I see where you get it from."

She laughed, "You are so old."

I gasped, "You mean we are so old. Mac and I worked together in the Army."

“No. You? You're old enough to be my dad. Mac? Is old enough to be my big brother." She laughed.

"Yeah, and we'll protect you like it too." I said hugging her shoulder.

"You won't have to do anything if my family spots me. I'll be on the first plane out of there and back home, complete with a tracker and navy seal protection detail. They'll never let me out of their fucking sight." She grumbled.

"You'll be ok. Let's get ready to rak out." I said.

"You're right."

I walked into my office and grabbed my rucksack and duffel. I met them back in the main room.

"List it Hayes."

She groaned, "Why???"

I smirked, "We're acting like the older brother and dad we are."

She rolled her eyes but spoke anyway, "I made sure my camping gear, fatigues and survival gear was in my bergan, along with Guns, ammo, knife and spare phones," we looked at her weirdly, "What? I'm sick of Mac breaking my shit. Dalton and I spend way to much fucking time at the Genius Bar creating new and inventive covers to explain what Mac does as is."

Mac raised his hands, "You got me."

She smirked, "I know I do, anyway, I grabbed my go-bag, passport and fake ID's."

"What's in your go-bag." I quizzed.

"Toiletries, Clothes, Cash, Raincoat, Matches, Lighter, Laptop, Flashlight, MRE's, water purification tablets, rope, duct tape, whistle, batteries, knife, and First aid kit. Why do we keep doing this?"

"Good, and we do it because we care." Mac said kissing her head.

“Ugh! Let's go." We headed out to Mac's truck and dumped our stuff in the back. She hopped in the back and we drove to Mac's place.

"Bozer!" Mac called.

"Sup guys." He said bro hugging Mac.

"We're heading out, I need you to take care of some stuff for us." Mac asked.

"Yeah ok, let me grab some paper." He said.

We walked into the kitchen and told him what we needed, Mac didn't need to worry because he lived with Bozer, so Em went first, "My rent is due first of the month, it auto pays but I need you to check on the seventh if I have mail just in case it didn't go through. I need mail collected on the 7th, 14th 21st, and 28th. Plants need to be watered but that can be done when you grab my mail, if anything happens there is a contact sheet folded in the draw of my desk, it'll tell you who to call, in what order. You good with that?"

"All good Em." He said with a smile.

"Thanks Boz."

"Your welcome, Jack anything you need." He questioned.

"I live next to Emma so same as her just no plants to water, if you could check on my place when you water Emma's plants that would be great, and there is a contact list in the box on top of the CD rack."

"Cool, I got it."

“Thanks Boz." Mac said walking back into the room with his bag.

"It's all cool man." He said.

We walked to the door before he called out, "Be safe, I want you back in one piece."

"We'll try Boz."

~Time skip brought to you by Sonny’s Bam-Bam~

We'd been briefed and where currently in our hammocks grabbing what sleep we could before we hit the ground running.

"Drop zone is up in 35."

"Let's go kids." I commanded with a laugh.

We packed up our hammocks and pulled on our jump suits. I strapped my duffel to the bottom of my bergan and grabbed my chute. Strapping my Bergan to my back I pulled the parachute over the top. I walked over to the ramp and waited for Mac and Em to join me.

"2 minutes to the drop zone"

"Ready ladies." I yelled over.

"We're coming." Mac laughed.

We attached to the central line and clipped in, we watched as the light turned on and the ramp lowered,

"5...4...3...2...1..."

The light turned green and we jumped. My drill instructors voice went through my head. Breathing Dalton... in for 2... hold for 4... out for 3... parachute in 3, 2, 1. Pull the cord. Release the parachute. Move your body vertical. Feet pointed down. Legs slightly apart. Hit the deck in 3...2...1. Land crouched. Bend knees and run forward 20 yards. Unclip and pull.

Emma and Mac landed next to me and we packed up our chutes.

"Base is roughly 1 click 228 degrees north east." I said.

"Comms up?" Mac asked.

"Yeah they are." Matty answered.

"Good." I said. "Let's go."

We moved our bergans to our fronts and held our duffel bags. We broke out into a jog eager to get out of the heat. Arriving at the 'base' we were met with our assigned CIA handler.

"Agent Jayden Riggs." He said offering his hand.

I shook it, "I'm Eagle, this is Hunter and she's Black Rose."

"Real names?" He asked.

"That's need to know." Emma answered.

“What do you mean, I'm your handler?"

"Look Riggs, we don't like spooks ok. We work alone, off our own intel. It's important our identities remain a secret." She answered shortly, that's my Hayes.

"Alright then, let's get you set up in cabins, Black Rose, you'll be separated from the men." He said as he started walking away.

"What?" I said.

"Gender sensitivity. Men and women are separated." He said like it was obvious.

"Yeah no, she stays with us. We don't care about gender sensitivity." Mac said before I could, reel in the big brother before you get yourself in trouble Mac.

"It's protoco-"

I cut him off, "Screw protocol, Black Rose stays with us."

"Of course." He relented.

He led us to a cabin as a humvee pulled up, out climbed 6 men and a dog, all in fatigues, before I could see anything else Emma pushed us into the cabin and slammed the door shut behind us as we collapsed onto the floor.

"What was that??"

"That! Was my family." She helped us up.

Jason's POV

We were on night patrol in a neighbouring town to J-bad, we'd been out for 6 hours and it was 0300. I decided it was time to head back.

"Let's move out."

We walked back to the humvee and climbed in. We'd been driving for about 15 minutes when we saw three figures drop from the sky.

"What the hell is that?" Sonny asked.

"I'll find out." I said keying my comms, "Havoc base this is Bravo 1, we've got three parachute jumpers coming towards base."

"Copy that Bravo 1, I'll find out." Blackburn answered, a few minutes later he keyed his coms again, "Stand down, their friendlies."

"What do you mean their 'friendlies'?"

"I'll find out."

I rolled my eyes, cryptic much. We watched as they landed about 5 clicks ahead of us and packed their chutes away, then started running towards base.

"We're not far out now. We'll talk when we get in." I said.

We got to the base gate and rolled through, getting out I saw three figures standing outside a cabin glance at us before one pushed the others into the cabin and slammed the door. Weird. After we dumped our gear in the shed. We walked into the team room where Eric and Mandy were waiting.

"Who were they?" I asked.

"Apparently they work for some government agency, they're following a lead on a case." Mandy said.

"Which agency?" Brock asked.

"I don't know guys. I don't know..." Eric said.

"Why did they jump Eric? Why not just land on the airstrip?" I quizzed.

"Apparently they're meant to be discreet. Nobody was supposed to know they're here." Mandy said.

"Well they did a crap job of that." Ray said.

"Actually Ray, you guys weren't meant to be out tonight, had base been on routine nobody would have seen them come in." Eric spoke.

"Well that's creepy." Clay said.

"What do we know about these guys Mandy?" I asked.

"Two guys, one girl actually." She stated hint of amusement in her tone.

"A girl?!?" Sonny yelled.

"What? Don't think women can do the same jobs as men? Or are you just worried she's going to outshine you." Lisa interrogated.

"No but if she gets snatched we'll be the ones collecting her." He grumbled.

"So? If she's snatched it's going to be for bad intel, and unfair conditions. Not because she's a woman." Lisa challenged.

"Enough! What do we know about them?" I yelled.

"Their handler couldn't tell me much, mainly because he didn't know a great deal. However, their code names are Black-Rose, Hunter and Eagle. Their handler doesn't know their real names and I suspect that's by design." Mandy spoke.

"Ok. First off those why do those code names ring a bell, Second what do we know about the organisation they work for?" Clay asked.

"Honestly? Nothing. None of my bosses know who or what they are and the further up I went the more I was told to stop digging." Mandy said.

"So what do we do?" Trent asked.

"We stay away. We don't talk to them, not only for your safety but for theirs too. You see them walking you say nothing, although I suspect given all the trouble they went to so they weren't seen while getting here, we won't be seeing an awful lot of them." Eric mused.

"Alright then." I said clapping my hands, "We need to sleep." I turned to Eric, "I trust if you find anymore information that could be of use you'll speak to us?"

"Of course." Eric said nodding curtly before walking out of the room.

[famosoentrescalles]

In conversation with Arón Piper

The young Spanish German singer and actor presents us with five songs produced by artists such as Mygal, Iseekarlo, Tweak or Miqui Brightside and features the collaborations of Jesse Báez and Polimá Westcoast, two of the artists with the most personality and relevance on the Latin American scene. , thus consolidating itself as one of the Spanish artists with the most international projection for this 2021.

“Nieve”, the title track of the EP, is accompanied by a visual piece in the form of a video clip shot by Tomás Peña with Manson and produced by CANADA. It shows us a life full of excesses in which success and fame generate a negative emotional weight in the artist, causing him a huge loneliness in the purest Malick style, also with an excellent photography direction by Albert Gay, who makes it the best music video of the singer so far.

The artwork created by the artist Cataln Ignasi Monreal, portraying the musician who, after achieving more than 25 million reproductions on digital platforms, presents his best work so far to show that this is only the beginning.

The whole EP has already more than 10M plays on digital platforms.

Tell our readers who you are in your own words.

I'm a chill guy, insecure and afraid of the world. I've been fighting for what I want and I got fame from one day to another so I'm trying to process it all now. I'm grateful everyday for what's happening to me and I'm now and lucky, so I'm trying to have a good and healthy relationship with my life, trying to keep doing good and most important, being a normal guy.

What is your first memory of acting and music?

First thing I remember as an actor is saying to my father: “Dad, I'd love be an acotr and I want to do it right now” I was 12 years old and he looked for some short films for me on the internet, trying to match my profile with some castings and that's where it all started.

In music I think the first thing I remember is when I was 10 years old, I used to note my songs over Eminem songs, showing them to my best friend Sam when we met.

Among all the roles you have played so far, which one embodies your personality the most?

I'm trying to give a big part of myself in each character I play. If I dont do it I just feel that the characters get empty, so that's why I want to feel they all represent me. The one I enjoyed the most is “El Desorden Que Dejas”, at least by now.

What gives you confidence?

My close friends, my family, my team... Since I'm famous the confindece looks mistrusted, so you gotta learn how to deal with it.

What is the most daring thing you did recently and tell us something that is not on your resume?

Going to La Resistencia (Spanish TV Show) for example .I've had never been on a TV interview with public, so I was quite scared but it wasn't such a big deal at the end.

Something I dont have in my CV? That I keep it for myself, I try to not show too much of my private life, if I dont then I wont have anything else for me hahaha.

What is your personal motto?

Take care of life and life will take care of you.

What are your upcoming projects for this year among the new season of Elite?

I'm focused on music now and doing casting, looking for some interesting projects as an acotr. It's been some time already without acting and I'm pretty excited to do it again. I've got some projects but I expect to have some more.

Why acting and why music? What inspired you to embark on a career in this industry?

Always acting. It's been hard for me to deal with my emotions and that's because I feel like everything affects me pretty much. It's a fight between my way to adapt to things and how I get affected by everything that surrounds me. Being an actor saved me from that because it's a different way to express deeper emotions.

My career as musician is pretty similar, but with music I can express my own feelings.

With work you have traveled a lot. What are some of the favourite places you have seen and been to so far and why?

Travelling is the most beautiful thing in the world. It opens your mind and makes you disconnect from your routine and your hometown. My best trip by the moment is Mexico, the longest I've done and the one I enjoyed the most.

What is your biggest outtake from last year?

The loss of my privacy, no doubts, and losing confidence in people who doesnt know me and judge you, doesnt mind if good or bad.

As the theme of our Spring & Summer season is ELEMENTS and it is about sustainability, nature. Tell us about your perspective on sustainability and environment.

It's something that worries me a lot and I'd love to get more involved with it. Most important thing right now is our land, earth, the world... and it's all getting too fuck up.

Tell us about your recently released debut EP.

It's something that feels old for me now, but I guess it'll always happen the same. From the moment you start working on it until you release it, feels like ages. But I'm very happy with how it's working and with the position it gives me as a musician. Best is still to come.

[anntoldst0ries]

Meet my MC

A/N: When I first started playing OH, I had no idea how much I’m gonna love this book... which is why my MC got the first name that crossed my mind. 

When I wrote my first fic, the name stayed because I didn’t know if I’d be able to produce anything more than an incoherent mess.

But as MC evolved in my head, I understood that her name doesn’t fit who she is as a person... and it took me a while to find something that truly resonated with me. I won’t be changing this in my previous fics (at least not now). So, without further ado, please meet Dr Noelle Sky Valentine:

Noelle Sky Valentine was born on the 13th June in London, UK, where her family resided at the time. She is half-English (after her mother) and half-American (after her father) and holds dual citizenship. When asked about this, she always says ‘Amglish’, to which people usually respond: ‘Glish? Which country are you from?’

Friends and family call her ‘Elle’. Her parents found out about the pregnancy in early December and lived in France at the time - that’s how they came up with the name ‘Noelle’ which means ‘Christmas’ in French. Since they both love Christmas, this was a perfect fit.

When Elle was 3 years old, her family moved to San Francisco.

Her dad, Joseph, is a composer. Her mother, Melanie, is a lawyer specialising in media & intellectual property law.

Elle has an older brother, Nick, who is a musician like their dad.

When she was in high school, her parents got divorced and her mum moved back to London. Elle and Nick stayed in SF with Joe, as they didn’t want to leave their schools and friends.

Her mom wed again, her dad has a new partner as well. She adores her dad's new partner, Ava. As her mum lives in London and she doesn’t visit too often, Elle didn’t really have a chance to get to know Grant. But he seems like a good guy.

She was always very musical and loved watching her dad work. The first place she’d go to after school would be his studio. Joe taught both her and Nick to play piano, her brother also plays guitar and cello.

Not many people know that Elle formed a band with her high school friends, which they called ‘Valentine’s Day’. She was also the lead singer.

Elle is totally a daddy’s girl, she’s always had a fantastic relationship with her father.

When Elle was 10, her best friend passed away due to a rare illness, that medicine was not capable of treating effectively at the time. This traumatic experience resulted in her developing an interest in science after she came to terms with what has happened.

In high school, Elle still wasn’t sure about what she wanted to do with her life.

One day, she was doing research on the illness that took her friend from her. That’s when she came across ‘Diagnostics principles’ - a book written by Ethan Ramsey.

She has then read every single thing published by Dr Ramsey and decided to apply to medical school.

Noelle graduated from Johns Hopkins Medical School, top of her class. She applied there for 3 reasons: the possibility of living in a different state, being more independent and most importantly - her medical hero, Ethan Ramsey, graduated from JHMS as well. If she wanted to be as good as him, she had to learn from the best like he did.

On her graduation day, her dad was so proud that he sobbed all the time. He also composed a song especially for this day, which he called “La Merveille” (wonder, miracle).

Elle is convinced she must have been a nymph in her previous life, as she’s always mystically drawn to forests, they are her favourite places and she’s got a million pictures from the woods on her phone.

She can neither confirm nor deny that she is in a relationship with her boss (due to it being or not being unethical).

Tag list 💜 💜 💜 : @genevievemd​ | @terrm9 | @poudredevie | @starrystarrytrouble | @whippedforethanfreakingramsey | @mercury84choices | @maurine07 | @gryffindordaughterofathena | @jamespotterthefirst | @justanotherrookie | @lucy-268 | @aarisa-frost | @caseyvalentineramsey | @brooks-eden | @iemcpbchoices | @lovingramsey | @red-rookie | @qrkowna | @queencarb | @oldminniemcg | @tsrookie | @catchinglikekerosene | @ohchoices | @the-pale-goddess | @schnitzelbutterfingers | @openheartthot​ | @tenaciousdeputydreamfriend​

[thequeendesi]

Hi!

So,

In the past three days

I’ve gained close to 20 extra friends!! 🥰🥰

Welcome to the family!

I’m currently working on reuploading my guidelist and fixing my masterlist!

Requests are always open unless said otherwise!

Some stuff to know about me just so you’re more familiar with me

* I’m a 19 year old bisexual. Born May 30, 2002, my big three is Gemini sun, Aquarius Moon, Sag Rising (I’d post my chart if anyones curious)

* My pronouns are she/they.

* I struggle w multiple different mental disorders, and am willing to write fics pertaining with those! ( weirdly enough it’s a form of therapy for me )

* I’m in college, currently I’m getting my Associates in Science, and I’m on the fence on transferring and getting my Bach in Social Work

* I’m biracial! I like to joke and say “my mom drew me and my dad colored me” ( my dads white and my mom is African-German-American )

* backpacking off of the German comment, I have dual citizenship! I was born in Germany!

* I shaved my head back in March to better treat my curls and to give it a rest from dying it (but trust me, my dye jobs were SO cute

* I started writing ( fics, short stories, character back stories, actual stories ) when I was about 10-11

* I have ocs!!

* I’ve been drawing since around the same time too

* I fully welcome questions about my self and my life!!

* I write fics, multiple parters, head canons, blurbs, angst, fluff, polyam,

* the things I’m not going to do is

Violent depictions of rape ( I am a rape victim and it can trigger, pls be mindful of things of that nature. I can write ab the aftermath, ptsd, healing from that. But the act of itself, absolutely not. If I get a request to write a rape scene, I will block you

Sex! I’m not going to write sex scenes! Especially not with minors. The closest I’ve come to with doing those was the NSFW alphabet with Jay and Carlos from descendants ( I was 17 when I wrote those and I’m still uncomfortable lookin back on it ).

INCEST. I won’t go into why that’s a no

Minor x Adult relationships! ( I am a victim of grooming, and I won’t write grooming point blank period ) I CAN write age gaps. A two year age gap is the furthest extent you can get out of me in topic of minors. However, if you wanted a Bruno from Encanto fic where he’s 50 and you’re 23-26, I can and will write it!

Violent depictions of gore!! Believe me, I love killing characters as much as the next guy. But, gore and talking about being eviscerated is a hard no. Broken hand with bone showing? A stab wound? Maybe. But that’s probably the furthest you’ll get out of me. 

But other than that! I welcome it all!!

Remember, I love you guys all and I love writing and putting my work out for y’all.

Also, requesters, if off anon, get cute nicknames!!

Alright <3 byesies!

[supernaturalnovelsandmore]

Supernatural Novel: Heart of the Dragon

Welcome to my not-quite review of the fourth Supernatural novel, Heart of the Dragon.

Author: Keith R.A. DeCandido

Timeline: Set after Episode 5.08 Changing Channels

Location: San Francisco, California (Chinatown)

Synopsis: An old foe has come back to terrorize San Francisco, but what is the connection between the Campbells, John Winchester and Sam and Dean? Read to find out!

Warning: Spoilers abound!

Oh, where do I start? Heart of the Dragon has a very different feel to it, one that I'm not entirely on board with. Basically, it's a flashback book that spends the first third on Samuel, Deanna, and Mary Campbell, the second third on John Winchester and the last quarter on Sam and Dean. In fact, out of 28 chapters, Sam and Dean were only featured in about 7 of them. It leaves the book feeling hollow and me, a little meh. But, there are some additional insights into the Winchester family history which I'll try and parse out.

One more thought, I'm glad this is the last book from this particular author. Once again he has utilized a culture/race to tell the story, and not well. When the story is in 1969, he utilizes the world Orientals to explain Japanese and Chinese characters. He might have been trying to use the wording of the day, and that's fine if it's in dialogue, but to use it as a descriptor is problematic, at best. He also plays up multiple stereotypes from the Chinese mob to the Japanese Samurai. I'm hoping this book is the Route 666 of the novels and that they can only get better.

I decided to sort my thoughts within the different timelines, so here we go:

1969: Samuel, Deanna, and Mary Campbell

We open with the family hunting a vampire and Samuel using 15-year-old Mary as willing bait. It turns out to be a nest, but they quickly dispatch them without casualties. Deanna appears to be quite the hunter in her own right (her skill with a Claymore outstanding.) Within this hunt we learn a few things about Mary and the Campbell family.

The Campbells have a strong link to their Scottish heritage.

Samuel hates Christmas

Mary is willful, annoying, and disrespectful, but an amazing hunter who was raised practically from birth to how to hunt and defend herself. (Sam parallels, perhaps?)

Mary learned about monsters at 11 when she saw her parents dispatch an avenging spirit.

Samuel hates the idea of Mary hanging out with any boys, though she has a particular fondness for a John Winchester who works as a local auto-mechanic.

Samuel owns a dry-cleaning business and Deanna substitute teaches to help maintain some kind of income.

Mary often wondered about having a normal life, but would dismiss it knowing she couldn't have that and still know monsters are out there. (Seems like a combination of Sam and Dean here).

Other than that, the hunt they go to San Francisco for seems fairly perfunctory. They do a bunch of research, talk to a few locals. Samuel dons his FBI agent schtick, they locate the source of the problem, and quickly dispatch it. There's nothing too dramatic there, just a lot of backstory.

1989: John Winchester

There's a bit more insight here because now we're getting some insight into Dad John, as well as 6-year-old Sam and 10-year-old Dean. I'll touch on a few points.

Leaving his boys with others: We open with John returning to his kids whom he left at Bobby's while he took care of a hunt. He left them long enough that they were enrolled in school and he planned on keeping them there for the fall semester. He felt bad about using Bobby's hospitality for so long.

Training his boys: "John knew his boys would need to be able to defend themselves against whatever was out there - he'd already started that process with Dean... Dean was a crack shot with John's M1911 and could load the shotgun with iron rounds and fire them off in one smooth motion. Eventually he'd need to train Sammy too. But not yet."

Loving his boys: When he arrives at Bobby's, Sam runs out to meet him and wraps his arms around John's legs as he walks in. Sam also tattles on Dean for eating the last donut.

There are also some fun moments between young Sam and Dean, mostly sibling bickering.

Dean and Sam enjoy playing hide-and-seek among Bobby's car on the weekends and Sam enjoys going to school during the week. Dean, not so much.

Sam proudly shares that he's doing 3rd grade work in 1st grade and then teases Dean about also doing 3rd grade work even though he's in 5th grade (Dean then sticks his tongue out at Sam and says "Screw you, Sammy.") At this John calls them out and both boys are chagrined.

Later on, when John calls Bobby for more information, we find Dean holding a pen out of Sam's reach and teasing him with it.

Of course, that call means we also get this heartbreaking line moment from Dean, who wants to talk to his Dad, but can't before John hangs up. Bobby tries to explain: "'Sorry, Dean, he, uh, was on his way out the door. But he told me to tell you both to behave yourselves and do what I tell you. And that he loves you.' Dean: 'Did he really say that?'"

When Bobby presents the next case, John is torn between wanting to spend time with his kids, but going after something that could cause people to burn spontaneously, in the hopes that it might lead him to the demon who killed Mary. I think the book did a good job of capturing John's struggle between revenge and caring for his boys. He's not the abusive, neglectful father people tend to think he is. He's someone struggling to make things right.

"John didn't answer at first. Instead, he looked over at Sam and Dean in the dining room, playing that oh-so-common game of 'I touched you last.'

Christmas was coming up and he did want to spend it with the boys..."

Finally, when John returns and Bobby and the boys meet him at the airport, we get some additional insight into 10-year-old Dean's thoughts regarding his father and his place in the family.

"Waiting there in the airport, he understood how important it was for Dad to be away so much - more than Sammy ever could. Sammy hadn't really known Mom, since he was just a baby when she died. Dean couldn't imagine that his baby brother would ever truly understand what had happened to her.

If he was honest with himself, he didn't really understand it, either. There were some days - though he'd never admit this to anyone - when he couldn't even remember what she looked like.

Some kind of monster had killed Mom, and Dad wouldn't rest until he found that monster and killed it. Along the way, he'd kill any other monsters who tried to kill other people's moms...

Dad still fought the bad guys and saved people, but he also cared about his sons.

Because Dad was a hero, and that was what heroes did."

2009 - Sam and Dean

There isn't much to write about here, because they weren't featured in the book. I will just add a couple of notes.

Dean recognizes Samuel Campbell in a newspaper article about the killings. (He'd already been sent back in time and met his grandfather).

It's seems reasonable to Sam that Mary and her parents were hunters. What freaks him out is that he and Dean were named after their grandparents and John never told them.

Sam's been a nerd about the American Interstate system since he was 10 and loved poring over maps.

Sam feels more guilt from trusting Ruby over Dean than starting the apocalypse.

Final notes:

This book introduces Castiel who brings the case to the boys attention. We get the same stuff in here that you see on screen, he has issues with personal space, comes and goes at will, and Bobby's still mad at him for not being able to heal his paralysis. He's only there for a few pages, and then disappears again.

Bobby gets a bit more screen time, as a pseudo-dad to young Sam and Dean, and later as their resource when researching the case and it's history. Favorite quote: "As he went into the fridge for butter to spread onto the pan, Bobby decided it was the entire Winchester family that was making him bald."

We briefly get Hurt Sam who is punched repeatedly by a hulk of a man, but with no lasting consequences and very little caring Dean.

We find out at the end that Zachariah orchestrated the whole thing by planting the idea in Castiel's head.

So, like I said at the beginning, not my favorite, but hopefully I was able to share some of the more interesting parts. Read at your own risk!

[livinglikearoyal]

K-drama Recommendations (May 2020)

Here is part two of my Kdrama recommendations, since my first one had such a positive response and I had a couple people ask for more. All of the dramas on this list can be found on Netflix US as of posting. These are all dramas I have watched since my last post in November...I have described why ten of them are amazing and listed a handful of others that are worth a shot as well. (I watch too much Netflix...my goodness)

These aren’t in any order based on how much I liked them; they are ordered based on the order I watched them. The ones listed in the honorable mentions list are dramas that either had a somewhat similar storyline to one of the ten that are explained or I just couldn’t find the words to describe them! Obviously, everyone has different tastes and perspectives when it comes to dramas...this is just my take! 

I am always looking for new dramas to watch! Send your suggestions and/or thoughts my way!

Suits (law, witty, drama)

Summary: Go Yeonwoo is a man wrapped up in some shady business, just trying to get by. When a deal goes bad, he finds himself seeking safety by blending in with the many applicants trying to join the top law firm in Korea, Kang & Ham. Although he isn’t a law student, his photographic memory and previous experience taking assessments for law students helps him impress the company’s ace: Attorney Choi. Go (illegally) becomes Choi’s apprentice and the series follows them as they figure out how they work together, how to save their company, and how to not get caught. Based on the American series of the same name. 

Why I liked it: I watched the American version of Suits as soon as it came out and followed it for several seasons. This Korean version is much more my speed. The storyline is complicated enough to keep your attention but not so complicated to make you stop watching. They took the key components of the American series and made them better: more realistic, less focused on sex appeal and more on the storyline, and you could really connect with the characters. It really hits on the ideas of integrity, truth, and empathy.

The K2 (action, romantic, political)

Summary: Kim Jeha is on the run in France. While trying to elude his captors, he runs into a woman in a white dressing gown and she begs for his help because she is also on the run. He is hesitant but ends up helping her escape her captor’s hold in the subway. She runs but is captured again on the street and he doesn’t help her a second time. Flash forward several years: Jeha is now appointed as bodyguard for the wife of a presidential candidate (she is terrifyingly powerful) and he is assigned to watch over the candidate’s illegitimate daughter, Anna. Anna is the girl from the subway. The series follows Jeha as he seeks revenge for all of the false accusations that have marred his past while also protecting Anna from the political corruption and previous trauma she has encountered. 

Why I liked it: This one took a second to get into. The way that the storyline is introduced is purposely chaotic. Once I got to the second or third episode, I really got into it. Each character is well developed: There were so many characters in this storyline and I empathized with most of them. Each character has their own motives and reasons behind their actions; they don’t do something just to fit their role as the “good guy” or “bad guy”. The dynamic between Jeha and Anna definitely had me yelling at my screen several times. The corruption and complications that come along with power is portrayed in such a powerful way. It is a show where you think you have it figured out but you don’t and as soon as you give up and stop trying to guess, something predictable happens. It keeps you on your feet while making you fall in love with its characters. 

Inheritors (romantic, teenage angst, social issues)

Summary: Kim Tan is in California after essentially being kicked out of Korea by his family, especially his older brother. One day he sees Cha Eunsang arguing with her sister after Eunsang traveled to the U.S. to see her only to find out that her sister lied and she has been using all of the money that their mother has sent for things less legal than an education. Tan sees that Eunsang is alone so he offers for her to stay at his home mansion. His fiancee (arranged) shows up and is not pleased to see Eunsang in the house so she does all she can to kick her out. Eunsang eventually returns to Korea to be with her mother, who has now moved into a mansion as their housekeeper. Tan also returns to try to smooth over his relationship with his family and he has to return to his old high school, where he  had previously set the standard for how privileged students rule the roost. His friend turned enemy is now the “alpha male”. The series follows Tan and Eunsang mostly; showing their varying perspectives on attending the same school but coming from completely different backgrounds and financial situations.. Even comparing Tan’s perspectives from his other “inheritor” peers or himself several years prior is really interesting.  It also shows their very different relationships with their families

Why I liked it: This show started out soooo cheesy. I remember commenting to my friend that I was watching this with-- I felt like I was watching a crossover between “Saved by the Bell” and a daytime soap opera. The American characters at the beginning are so stereotypical it was funny to see. Once the storyline got past the first few episodes and they were back in Korea, it really increased in quality-- both visually and written. This is another one that really allows you to connect to so many of the characters. I was constantly wanting to jump through my screen and just give the characters a hug (social distancing may have contributed a little too…).  By the end of it, you have nearly 10 or more characters that you are invested in and you really want to see them succeed. The ending can be a little frustrating if you are the type of person that wants everything (all the minor storylines) to be wrapped up in a little bow. The ending closes out the main storyline well but leaves the others very open ended. I will always be on the lookout for a sequel/spin off. Also, Eunsang is a girl that will tell it like it is...she doesn’t take BS from anyone...unless she wants to. She isn’t the stereotypical damsel in distress. Also...that “Love is the Moment” song will forever play in my head during ANY romantic scene in ANY show from now on. 

My Secret Romance (romantic, work place drama, comedy)

Summary: Jin Wook is a rich man getting ready to inherit the family company. The only thing standing in his way is the fact that his father doesn’t want him to take over until he is married. And the fact that he doesn’t take proper care of himself nutritionally, causing him to pass out. The company has recently hired a brand new dietitian, Yoo Mi, and Jin Wook’s assistant assigns her with the task of providing three healthy meals for their very picky boss. Yoo Mi, being brand new, is learning to be the head of a very opinionated kitchen staff while struggling to make food that is worth eating. Once Jin Wook and Yoo Mi meet, they realize that this isn’t their first encounter. As the series progresses, the two work on figuring out how to work together after their first meeting, what they feel for each other (especially considering that Jin Wook is expected to marry another woman), and how to work through their interesting family dynamics. 

Why I liked it: This is a show that really shows the effect of emotional baggage. Neither of the main characters have a “simple life” and it plays into their interactions daily. It is a cute show, an easy watch, nothing too complicated but definitely heartfelt. It is a good illustration of the different ways that people care for those around them too. There are definitely several complications that come along and they are realistic and well thought out. 

Tomorrow, With You (time travel, emotional, romantic)

Summary: Yoo Sojoon is the CEO of a very successful real estate firm. He ends up saving photographer Song Marin from being hit in an intersection and begins to try to get to know her. Little does she know, that Sojoon has been able to time travel using the subway ever since he narrowly avoided being in a major accident in that same subway tunnel. Sojoon is interested in Song Marin because he wants to save her, being encouraged by his mentor, a man that is also able to time travel in the same way as Sojoon. Sojoon encounters the many issues that come along with time travel and does all that he can to avoid the heartbreak that he sees when he travels to the future. 

Why I liked it: This one was interesting. All of the characters storylines are so tangled together and there are times when you can’t tell if we are seeing past Sojoon, present Sojoon, or future Sojoon. It feels like we are in that time travel web right along with them. It is definitely a heartfelt story that will have you in your feelings while making you think. Life is complicated, with and without time travel, and this shows that. 

Itaewon Class (Social issues, workplace politics, vengeance, family)

Summary: Park Saeroyi is a teenager that gets kicked out of his new school after punching the school bully and refusing to apologize. His father has recently purchased a building and is working to make his own restaurant after being let go from his position (the bully’s dad was his boss). As Mr. Park was making a delivery, he is a victim of a hit and run and passes away. Saeroyi finds out that the bully was the one driving the other car and attacks him, landing Saeroyi in prison for several years. Upon release, Saeroyi sets out to begin his plan to take revenge on the bully and his family for all that they have done. Saeroyi’s goal: Become the #1 restaurant business, overthrowing that family’s company. The show follows Saeroyi as he puts his plan into action and tries to go from the bottom of the totem pole to the top. 

Why I liked it: I loved this drama! I’m not sure whether it was the storyline, the diverse characters, or the main character himself. The irony of so many things had me falling in love with Saeroyi’s plan and Saeroyi’s character was so...wholesome. I definitely yelled at my screen several times, especially during the last handful of episodes. The characters (at least those that work closely with Saeroyi) are so easy to love. Even those that aren’t the easiest to love, you still root for them. Now, the bad guys are the bad guys and they stay bad but you can see their motivations...not always making the pill any easier to swallow. It is definitely a drama I would recommend to everyone, whether they like foreign dramas or not. The storyline is good, the acting is wonderful, and it tugs at your heartstrings. 

My Holo Love (action, romance, emotional, sci-fi)

Summary: Soyeon has lived a very solitary life due the fact that she has a face blindness disorder where she can’t recognize the differences in individual’s faces. This all stems from a childhood trauma. By chance (or not), she ends up with a pair of high tech prototype glasses that allows her to interact with the AI program that is installed, named Holo. He is meant to be a sort of personal assistant and only the person wearing the glasses can see and hear him. Holo helps Soyeon throughout her daily life, explaining who people are as they walk up to Soyeon so she can identify them and taking on the role of love coach. They become quite attached to each other, emotionally. They both realize the limits though, considering one is a human and one is a hologram. Holo is the spitting image of his creator, Nan Do...a man that the world thinks is dead. He is not. There are many people looking for him and his glasses. This causes him to become well acquainted with Soyeon.

Why I liked it: This one is cute. It is relatively short too...only 12 or so episodes compared to other series that have 20+. It was really interesting to see Soyeon’s relationship with Holo vs. Nando, but a good sort of interesting. The pacing was good and I really became invested in these three main characters. The ending is bittersweet (leaning more toward the sweet side) and how they get there is complicated, sometimes messy, but very intriguing. Definitely a good show to watch if you are wanting to watch something a little out of the ordinary while also seeing most kdrama troupes represented. 

Chocolate (medical, romantic, angst, tearjerker)

Summary: The show begins in a small restaurant on the pier of a tiny town. Lee Kang’s mother is the owner and he loves helping around the business and watching her make the meals. He sees a young girl outside that is alone and hungry. He puts his skills to use (mind you, he is young...like 10 years old), and makes a full spread for this girl. He promises to make her a chocolate dessert later on if she returns. He makes it, but she never comes back (it was out of her hands). Fast forward to when these kids are adults. Lee Kang was taken in by his father’s family (who disproved of his mother) and groomed to become the top neurosurgeon at the family’s hospital. The young girl, Moon Chayoung, is now a chef and dating Kang’s best friend. They encounter each other another time in Greece when Kang searches for her to come back to Korea to make a final meal for his best friend who has failing health.  Kang and Chayoung end up in a car accident that changes both of their futures and makes everything even more complicated but also provides some reminders about what is really important. 

Why I liked it: Good lord, did I cry with this one! Nearly every episode had me in tears: both happy and sad. It is so sweet and sad. Just...ahhh. It is bittersweet like dark chocolate. Even looking back at the episode summaries on Netflix has me feeling some kind of way. I texted my friend after nearly episode just to vent about why I was crying. These characters are so relatable and my heart broke for them so many times while also celebrating for them. The cast is amazing and the storyline really makes you think about what you have and how you should value those around you while you have them around. I will definitely rewatch this when I need to be lost in my emotions. This is a drama that I don’t know why more people aren’t talking about it. I absolutely loved it.

Crash Landing on You (realistic drama, romantic)

Summary: Yun Seri, a South Korean heiress, find herself stuck in a tree on the north side of the Korean DMZ after a paragliding incident and a freak tornado. Ri Jeong Hyeok finds her and hides her in his home, with the help of his troop of North Korean soldiers. He is not a fan of hers and is looking for ways to get her back to South Korea without raising suspicion. His fiance returns from being abroad after years and throws a wrench in the plan as he had been introducing Seri as his fiance to decrease the suspicion of the neighbors. Seri is getting used to life in North Korea. Several issues arise as they try to get Seri back to the south and these complications bring them even closer together. 

Why I liked it: This one is sweet. Nothing too emotional or heart wrenching. It is interesting to see how they portray the differences between the two countries and how important our relationships with others are, no matter what the government is like. The storyline isn’t rushed or forced and I really appreciated that. It seemed like events unfolded naturally. The characters are loveable and you find yourself wanting to be a part of their “squad”. Some characters redeem themselves, others don’t. Some characters get the ending they deserve, others don’t. The ending isn’t exactly what the viewer (or at least what I) hoped for, but it is more of a realistic ending and I appreciate that. 

Cinderella and the Four Knights (angst, romantic, dramedy)

Summary: Hawon is a high school student that is working multiple jobs. Her step-family is nasty toward her and her father is on the road most of the time. She shows her spunk when she speaks up against some men at a club that are jerks when she delivers food. Hyunmin is one of three heirs for his family’s business and fortune. He sees Hawon’s spunk and offers her a fair amount of money for her to play the role of his fiancee at his grandfather’s latest marriage ceremony. She doesn’t realize what she is in for. When she stands up for herself at the wedding, she grabs the grandfather’s attention. He ends up hiring her to live with his four grandsons to “whip them into shape” and gives her missions to complete, essentially trying to get the grandsons to interact with each other as they each live their own separate lives and don’t like each other.  Hyunmin is the eldest cousin and is the “arrogant playboy”. Jiwoon is the middle cousin and is the most withdrawn; he was an orphan and was thrown into this affluent role overnight...leading him to portray himself as wild and rebellious. Seowoo is the youngest cousin and he is a popular singer and is a sweetheart. The fourth knight is the secretary of Chairman Kang, Lee Yoonsung, and he is the bodyguard for Hawon and the three cousins. 

Why I liked it: This one is complicated in the best way possible. It definitely hits on many of the stereotypical Kdrama troupes. You fall in love with all of the the main characters, even the chairman (a role that typically is the bad guy). The relationships are complicated, the characters are lovable, and the main female character has a backbone. Throughout the show, I couldn’t decide which “knight” I wanted Hawon to end up with. The writers did a great job at portraying each of the characters in an equal but unique light to allow the viewers to see them for who they are. The storyline is complicated but simple at the same time. I will definitely rewatch “Cinderella and the Four Knights” again. 

Honorable Mentions: 

Cheese in the Trap

Man to Man

Because this is my First Love

The Lies Within

The Bride of Haebaek

The Legend of the Blue Sea

[coffeebeannate]

Nate Watches Things: A Saga

Or in this case, one thing. One thing that was far too long of a thing, but such a bizarre venture that I felt rather compelled to put an actual review of said thing together.

Why? Because I can and because others HAVE to experience this..this journey. A nice lil journey called Die Pfeiler der Macht/ A Dangerous Fortune. And I watched it solely because Luca looks cute in Victorian clothes, and I was intrigued by the gifs.

Curiosity has always been such a great human motivator, eh?

And..guys. I just. I don’t know what the 3-4 hours (it’s two movies, and I took a couple days to watch it) WERE, exactly, but they were..a thing? I know that it’s based on a book by Ken Follett and that this production is German. Despite being based in England. 

Oh, and Luca’s character Mickey Miranda, is uh, Spanish. Make of that what you will.

So the summary is this:

A shocking secret behind a young boys death leads to three generations of treachery in this breathtaking saga of love, power and revenge, set amid the wealth and decadence of Victorian England.

And no it does not do this thing justice whatsoever.

Review under the cut. It’s too long *again, two movies here*, and I took far too many screencaps of this absolute wtfery, and uh, it’s probably better suited for a real-time live blog but nah. You can have this instead.

Some images under the cut are NSFW because nefarious boning is a key point in this..thing.

SPOILERS. So many spoilers. This thing is a spoiler fest. The caps have a very obvious Luca bias, I know why we’re here everyone. Hehe. There’s also some triggering stuff in this thing, so be warned there too.

BEHOLD:

So, a point I want to make is that the costuming in this movie is LEGIT. If absolutely nothing else works? Note that the costuming absolutely does.

The opening credits are very nice, Luca’s very pretty, this cap serves purely to showcase that because I’m a very serious man doing a very serious review.

Pretty.

So the beginning is..confusing. We have a girl, Maisie Robinson. (Around 10-13 here?) Her father is very poor and it’s her and her two siblings. He works for a man who is part of our main characters, the Pilasters?  and they run this bank. The head of the bank commits suicide, since they’re having financial troubles and he cannot repay his workers. He pens a note to his young son *under 12 at this point*, Hugh. 

Hugh never finds out about this letter, but anyway. At the moment, it’s 1866. Maisie’s father was one of those employees. Destitute, he leaves Maisie to..raise her siblings, and goes to America.

We never hear from this man again.

Hugh goes to live with his aunt (Augusta/Augustina?), uncle Joseph, and cousins, Edward and Clara.

THEN IT’S 1877 (we jump ten years)

Maisie’s two siblings have died, and she has a daughter, Rachel now. Who is also dying. This movie is very keen on people dying. I’d also like to point out that there is like, endless plots all happening alongside one another, and it took me until mid-way into part two to even really grasp what the main plot is.

The movie has a LOT of bank talk as well. I cannot express this earnestly enough, there is SO MUCH bank chatter. SO MUCH. This thing does not have to be as long as it is but again, bank stuff.

Anyway, the one plot is that Maisie is from the poor area, she’s had a horrible life and has struggled from day one. She’s in a constant battle with Hugh, and they argue a lot. A lot. (They like each other, they met as kids, but they’re from very different worlds. Hugh has money, she doesn’t, but Hugh has suffered as well and basically it’s your normal class struggle social commentary thing).

Maisie and Hugh in 1866, as kids, after Maisie’s father left for America. This is the funeral for Hugh’s father. So that’s the theme I mean.

Anywho.

Back in 1877, this is Samuel *left*, Joseph *middle* and Edward. The Pilaster’s get marched into work like they’re freaking army Captain’s and not just rich ass bankers. Imagine saluting your CEO. At work. Outside of the military. WHERE IS THIS A THING? Maybe this was a thing in Victorian England I have no clue I’ve certainly never come across it in my studies. Ffs.

Anyway.

So while all this is going on, there’s this man that wants to marry Maisie. 

And his name is,

(That’s Rachel, Maisie’s daughter). Anyway, Solly here loves Maisie and wants to marry her. But Maisie loves Hugh, and neither of them realize this yet. Solly is a himbo and we mostly like him, but stay tuned because that doesn’t stick. Sorta. Depends on how-

Nevermind I’ll just keep going.

ANYWAY, more plot.

Here’s Edward again, doing drugs, being gay, and overall..useless. Edward is..Edward is kind of like a person who would make an interesting wall decoration. Fun enough to look at, but utterly freaking hopeless, and useless, and so dumb. Just so dumb. This character is given the substance of ash fault. Kinda like, only vaguely solid enough to be entertaining. Kinda.

I don’t know guys, BUT LOOK!

It’s his good old pal Mickey! And he’s slapped Edward awake out of his drug coma (okay he grabs his face and shakes him rather than slapping but given how much slapping happens in the rest of this movie I think I can be forgiven) and he has PLOTS.

Mostly it’s his dads plot, but it’s a plot. A very devious scheme and he needs our favourite wallpapers assistance!

(Sorry Edward, but it’s true)

So keeping in mind that the ‘theme’ of this movie is bone-and-soul crushing sadness paired with periods of intense chaos and insanity that  you never see coming, our plots continue to thicken.

What Mickey means here, is that Edward’s family denied Mickey’s father what he wanted *weapons deal*, and beat the crap out of Mickey in a carriage. But that’s fine that’s fine Mickey is not deterred! BECAUSE.

*sigh*

So.

OK.

This scene.

Remember what I said about how this movie goes from being incredibly boring to so off the walls bonkers without actually WARNING YOU that it is going to do this? Yeah.

Edward, you see, really does not ‘do’ women. He’s gay. He’s extremely gay. Edward’s mother wants him to marry Florence Stalworthy for idk rich people reasons.

So..Mickey. Uh. Mickey’s solution is..this.

What is this, you ask??

Fuck if I know.

Anyway, no, uhm. This is a brothel. So (not) pictured here (I can’t post the scene on tumblr guys we have a ban) is Edward on a couch across from mask-and-feathers MIckey and this tied down woman, with another woman who is not tied down. And this is Mickey..showing Edward..how to.have sex with women. Apparently. Sort of. His lesson falls very flat. It is not a good scene, Mickey’s ‘instructions’ get increasingly louder, and he at one point makes this noise that sounds like a Joker laugh.

It is...it’s something.

(Also note there’s some extremely uncomfortable, misogynistic name-calling on Mickey’s part here..so yeah).

Oh, and it doesn’t convince Edward. At all. IMAGINE.

Around all this time, the Hugh/Maisie/Solly plot is also ongoing. And that also encompasses bar fighting (bare knuckles boxing and wrestling I think? And gambling)

Hugh has gambling debt we’ll get back to this. (He’s also obsessed with getting Russian bonds into the bank, again, the banking plot losses me a LOT)

So meanwhile, Mickey meets up with Edward’s mother.

But why Edward’s mother, you ask??

Well. *sigh*. Something I didn’t mention earlier is that Mickey likes Ed’s mum. A lot. A lot a lot. Mickey wants to take that woman to town and then some, is a very basic way of me putting it and-

Fuck it. Mickey wants to bang Ed’s mum. BADLY.

(She’s not opposed either, at all)

So their little scheme here is that Ed’s mum wants Ed to take control of the bank, but with the father-in-law alive, that’s not going to happen. So they’re plotting to take down the next person in charge who would succeed said father in law, (Samuel) who is in a relationship with the secretary mentioned above, Michael.

Yes, another GODDAMNED PLOT.

(Samuel is fairly unpleasant like all of these people, so I don’t feel that bad for him. He also kinda treats Michael like garbage, and is called out for this by Joseph later in the movie)

So the scheme here is to get rid of the father-in-law, and get Ed married. Cake walk!

(Also, while ALL THIS is going on, Mickey’s got his own mini-plot about doing these things for his father, the weapons and stuff but we don’t actually find out about the main goal of that whole thing till the end, you’ll see)

Oh, and since we’ve not had a good dose of ‘WHAT THE FUCK’ lately, Solly proposes to Maisie with an honest-to-god Alice in Wonderland party.

Yeah.

Meet the Mad Hatter! He’s a guide, he says nothing. Other people are in costume too, but you know-I have enough caps as it is.

So anyway, Maisie and Solly get engaged, Maisie and Hugh meet up at some point and bang instead. 

And while that’s happening, Edward is convinced by Mickey to marry Florence.

So he does.

Lookit this shit faced smug ass grin.

(Also ahead is Samuel again, and Hugh)

BUT THEN the bank finds out about Hugh’s gambling debts. So he leaves. Taking his cousin Clara (Edward’s teenage sister-at her insistence) to the USA. And just like Maisie’s dad, another man abandons her for the States.

So the father in law is still alive, so! 

It’s murder time.

Perfect wedding time event yeah?

So Mickey murders the father-in-law. (He jumps on him, suffocates him with a pillow, gets caught by Augusta and then they do this..weird ‘tensely make the bed thing’)

Murdered.

And then, exactly five seconds or so later..

Nothing like some murder pre-boning with the dead guy two feet away amiright?

Anyway at this point I was just:

And yelling at my ceiling. Not pictured.

I was a Hannibal fan and I STILL went !?!?!?

END PART ONE.

Part two starts out in 1912, and then cuts back to 1882. So in this messy timeline, note it has been six years since part one. And Hugh is married now to Nora, an American singer, and Clara is older and pregnant. (Father is never determined, but he’s a married man and that’s why Clara didn’t stay)

SO the three of them are returning home. Maisie and Solly have a son, David, and Maisie is depressed and distant, so Solly is the one who spends all the time with David. He’s shown as a legit good dad and it’s quite cute watching them.

(The kids Hugh’s, btw, he and Maisie both know this, Hugh does not, it’s revealed dramatically later but we still have so many plots)

Edward and Florence are childless. Edward doesn’t sleep with her. Everyone knows this.

(At this point I kept asking myself when this would end, I cannot stress how LONG this thing feels at times)

So Hugh and Nora meet up with Maisie and Solly, and they chat and there’s more love plots, more bank plots and a masquerade party where at some point Maisie thinks a little girl at the party is Rachel (who died in the end of part one, sorry!) and there’s a fire and Maisie and Hugh make out and Nora and Solly are both upset and it’s a whole thing.

Samuel now does something of a side business that’s unspecified with Michael, and pregnant Clara is being persued by the only man who might be a good match for her (she’s not keen on getting married. But he’s also..really old.) PLOTS.

And Mickey and Augusta are..still a thing. And Edward being chlidless is becoming an issue. So what is the solution dear friends??

*BANGS HEAD INTO A WALL*

Why the fuck not.

Absolutely flawless! Eddie will NEVER notice.

SO with this plan in motion, Mickey sets out to seduce Florence, Eddie’s neglected wife. He starts in a church, and I have to admit, this one line he gives is quite funny.

“I don’t go to church.”

Cannot begin to imagine why.

Also, around this time is when we get the infamous scene about how he fcked the wives of the three men and then made the guys suck his dick one by one. I didn’t cap that since it’s in gif form, but yeah.

Hugh and Solly and Nora and Maisie are still having their love issues. And there is still bank stuff as all this is going down.

But while on his Florence quest, we see Mickey beat up a guy who was abusing a small boy, and Florence see’s him do this as well and:

He looks so baffled. 

‘Me? GOOD? I really don’t think so.”

She’s also holding a baby, and he gives the infant this face:

“Eugh, what is that?”

He also finds her in church again at some point and comes alongside her like this:

”Sup? Whatcha prayin’ about?”

Anyway, while doing all this, he’s still having some issues. He needs Eddie’s signature for a bank transfer (for his father, his father’s plot is STILL a THING) and so it is time to seduce someone ELSE. This time it’s Edward. This won’t be hard. Edward wants him so bad you could probably see it from fucking space.

Mickey is well aware of this.(I don’t think it’s one sided either, he looks at Edward all wide eyed half the time, but he’s so manipulative it’s hard to judge).

Actually me right now tbh.

So that’s this followed by the infamous gif set.

Edward takes him up on it.

‘Come along my dear there’s nefarious boning to be done’.

Absolutely vital screencap below (which is the most we get anyway and I didn’t cap the line about the freaking signature because fuck plots over nice images okay)

Vital

Anyway Edward gives him the bloody signature. And then Mickey goes along to talk to Augusta. But at this point Mickey is very much beginning to unravel. His goal seems to be more centralized to finishing whatever long ass convoluted job his father has been making him do for the last six years (possibly more tbh) and he’s sort of done with everything.

And Edward see’s this exchange. Le. Oof.

SO! IN BETWEEN ALL THIS. There’s some party where there’s drama and then basically Nora..willing gives up Hugh so he can be with Maisie and Solly just..I don’t even know, single dad for life and all. Edward knows that his family has basically been doing shit all around him, and Mickey STILL seduces Florence. He has her meet him outside that night at two am and they get together, but when he’s with her he kinda has these doubts but she wants him anyway so they bang.

Yeesh.

AFTER that there’s Edward again, because Edward knows shit is up, Mickey goes to a room to grab a bag and see’s Edward there. He tells Edward goodbye, but Edward pulls a gun. Mickey just...drops the bag, tells him to shoot. Edward doesn’t, instead he turns the gun on himself and then Mickey shoots himself in a chair.

Yeah.

DEATH! SADNESS! REMEMBER-THIS MOVIE LOVES DEAD PEOPLE~!

At some point in all this, Augusta goes to her daughter, Clara, apologies for being an absolutely evil mother for her entire life and then the movie sort of begins to wrap up.

Maisie and David were going to leave for the States together, but David wants to stay with Solly, who well DID raise him despite him being Hugh’s kid. So Maisie and Hugh are alone and David lives with Solly and the Pilaster bank has discovered the ACTUAL FREAKING PLOT OF MICKEY’S DAD AND THE ENTIRE BACKGROUND THING. Which was this:

THIS DIDN’T NEED TO BE ALMOST FOUR HOURS, GERMANY.

SO Hugh lets the mob inside. We don’t see what happens after that, but Augusta comes in to tell Joseph Edward shot himself.

Lots of sadness.

So the movie ends in 1912, with David and Hugh meeting up. David never saw Maisie again *she’s deceased now, as is Solly.* they talk, there is some moral lesson or something about love. The goddamned end.

OOF.

SO overall?

I don’t know.

It’s a movie. It has a script and plot and..it was put on screen? The costumes are legitimately amazing. They might be the best thing about this thing. But it REALLY feels like Ken really wanted to make a movie about banking, noticed that’d be boring and tried to make it spicy.

It’s so bizarre. So depressing. So many people are horrible. So many bad things happen. So much slapping, so much weirdness. There’s nothing happy in this thing. Not one. The so called ‘good’-ish ending falls flat amongst a sea of depression and I re-iterate, IT DOES NOT HAVE TO BE SO LONG.

I distinctly recall lots of clock watching at times, wondering how I could POSSIBLY have more to go. It then goes so completely off the rails that you just don’t know what is happening and it’s just WEIRD.

At times that weirdness makes it fun, but overall it’s really not great. I probably would never rewatch it, and I can say that it’s an uh, experience in movie-watching.

A good one? I don’t know. But an experience, none the less.