#they may in fact be very understanding. the hogs i mean. the wild ones

[sergle]

about how long do you need to be the owner of a shop before dealing with customer service emails / help requests No Longer Feels like being surrounded by a pack of feral hogs. I don't have this problem I'm asking for a friend

[lorei-writes]

Match-Up #31

Hi I’m Ana and I’m new at this, if it’s wrong don’t do it. Sorry for my poor english and and I forgot the pet peeves

Ah, hello, Ana @a6r6o6k! I hope you’ll have plenty fun in the fandom :D And don’t worry, it’ll be all good. The match-making shall begin! >:3

*5 positive qualities: 📍I think I’m intelligent (but I don’t really know) 📍 I’m curious: so I like to know the why of the things 📍Loyal: even if I like to see and have other options I always want to keep with the same people 📍I like to help, I’m studying psychology to understand people and help them: if I can help being a psychologist GREAT, if I need to do something else it’s also GREAT. 📍I’m adventurous if I have the security

To begin with, let’s consider intelligence and curiosity together. As per usual in such situations, I’d dare look more so towards the rather intellectual suitors who could match such characteristics - perhaps leaning a bit more towards the encouraging ones, the ones who simply challenge the people around them to think more.

Nobunaga (+2) Mitsuhide (+2) Mitsunari (+1) Masamune (+1) Shingen (+2) Sasuke (+2)

Now, loyalty! Hmm... The way you describe it... I suppose it could be understood either as a sign of investing in relationships, even despite some differences... Although I do think some could take it as choosing to stay in relationship at the expense of your ideals. Let’s see how those two approaches balance out.

Nobunaga (+1) Mitsuhide (-1) Hideyoshi (+1) Mitsunari (+1) Ieyasu (-1) Masamune (-1) Kenshin (+1) Shingen (+1)

Ah, helping others! Oh love, with psychology... I mean, hm, how do I put it? Please, do not become a therapist for all of our Ikemen, because gash, that’s a real threat with how sad most of them is ;-; But, that aside, I think most suitors would understand the drive to help others very well... Although some perhaps a tiny bit more than others.

Hideyoshi (+1) Ieyasu (+1) Kenshin (+1) Shingen (+1)

Adventurous, if provided with enough support? Ha, that brings some suitors to mind! (I picked those who are less likely to suddenly prank their partner with something potentially dangerous, even if just for laughs).

Mitsuhide (+1) Masamune (+1) Kenshin (+1)

*5 negative qualities: 📍Picky eater (I can’t eat thing with certain textures like snails, or things very bitter or acid) 📍I’m very pessimistic, sometimes realistic but more pessimistic: I don’t have depression, but there is history of depression in my family. 📍Easily distracted: I have ADD (Attentive Deficit Disorder), so I have the concentration time spam of a fish, even e with the things I like, if I have to use all my attention I can, but if not usually I doing 5 things at the same time. 📍I very disorganised: I think it comes with the ADD but I don’t know 📍I don’t have the knowledge of the social clues, so I’m very talkative sometimes and very silent other times.

Picky eater? Oh, there should be some suitors who could either understand that, or who could try to remedy that... Although the latter option may come with a bit of a rocky start, haha.

Mitsuhide (+1) Hideyoshi (+1) Mitsunari (+1) Masamune (+1)

Hmm... So you say you tend to lean more so towards pessimism? I suppose suitors who would amplify that could be a bad choice... But perhaps those that have more of a soothing, grounding aura?

Mitsuhide (+1) Hideyoshi (-1) Mitsunari (+1) Ieyasu (-1) Masamune (+1) Kenshin (-1)

To be honest, I can think of only one character that would be annoyed by deficits of attention. Same with lack of understanding of social situations and such (also, I can high-five you on that).

Ieyasu (-2)

As for being disorganized... I think it could prove troublesome when in relationship with some suitors who also share this characteristic.

Hideyoshi (+1) Mitsunari (-1)

1st Summary

Mitsuhide (+4) Shingen (+4) Nobunaga (+3) Hideyoshi (+3) Mitsunari (+3) Masamune (+3) Kenshin (+2) Sasuke (+2) Ieyasu (-3)

*5 likes: 📍Read: everything (fantasy, culture, history...). Knowledge is power. 📍I would like to travel to learn language to understand people 📍Sweet things: I love sweet things 📍Animals: I wanted to be a veterinarian but I couldn’t enter in the University 📍Listening and observe people

Points distributed for likes:

Nobunaga (+3) - he would agree with such views on knowledge, sweet things, travel Mitsuhide (+3) - views on knowledge, travel, observing people Mitsunari (+1) - reading Ieyasu (+2) - views on knowledge, animals (veterinary in particular) Masamune (+1) - travel Shingen (+3) - views on knowledge, sweets, observing people Sasuke (+3) - observing people, reading, travel

* 5 dislikes: 📍I have a big scar in the side of the chest, combined with a hunched back and two breast of different size it makes me uncomfortable, so my body. 📍Get my freedom limited 📍Have to stay still 📍Just do things because the people talk 📍I have fear to be alone, like not psychically, but emotionally

A break from match-up. Oh love, we all have our imperfections, and what you mentioned in the first point are perfectly human traits. Breasts generally are of a different size, and it can vary a lot - and which is bigger can even change depending on the point in time of your menstrual cycle. Scars tell stories of what we went through and what makes us ourselves. We all have some, smaller, bigger ones, but they are there... And, lastly, as a person who used to have very bad posture (somewhat hunched back and some more): you may want to look into whether it could potentially cause some complications later on. Of course, it may not be a concern, but you know. Caring about your body is very important.

So, with that, some extra points, specifically for suitors who know how to cheer on their lover and who cherish them openly.

Mitsuhide (+1) Masamune (+1) Shingen (+1)

Points distributed for dislikes:

Nobunaga (-2) - limited freedom, emotionally aloof at times Ieyasu (-1) - may give the aura that you have to do something, because he says so, or because somebody says so, some norm says so Masamune (-1) - emotionally aloof at times Kenshin (-2) - emotionally aloof at times, limited freedom Shingen (-1) - emotionally aloof at times

2nd Summary

Mitsuhide (+8) Shingen (+7) Nobunaga (+4) Mitsunari (+4) Masamune (+4) Hideyoshi (+3) Sasuke (+5) Ieyasu (-2)

Only characters with positive value by their names will be considered in the final stages of the match-up.

* Relationship dealbreakers: 📍I don’t think I have any relationship dealbreakers except the mentioned in the pet peeves(it would be my first relationship), but I would not like be cheated without a reason (you don’t trust me so you don’t tell me the plan, okay; you don’t tell me all the information to tease me, okay; you just lie to me to hurt me, not okay) 📍Okey, may be I have 1 or 2 dealbreakers: I don’t stand people that treats others like garbage just because (if the other did something okay, but just because no) 📍Being ignored 📍People that is very possessive physically and emotionally: I need to talk and touch my friends. 📍People that believe that just because I can’t do things: like “you’re a woman you can’t fight” or “you can’t show so much skin”... 📍People that assume things: I like to be asked. 📍People that touch me without permission: if is a bet or a game I can, but without permission I can’t.

Oh, so I should consider pet peeves as dealbreakers?

* Up to 3 pet peeves: dealbreakers v.2 📍Poor hygiene 📍Be cheated 📍Constant criticism

Nobunaga (+4) & Masamune (+4) - too touchy, may not ask for permission first, they do struggle with the idea of consent at first Hideyoshi (+3) - may initially assume some things

* 3 Wild Cards: 📍I’m very naive and believe what people say so... if someone says “I don’t like/love you” in the real life I would believe them. 📍I think that I’m like a cat: I want a home base to return but I want to have the freedom to explore my environment. I want to have someone to return but with freedom to leave 📍My type of love is Words of affirmation

Mitsuhide & Shingen (-1) - they may use this sort of naivety and say such things, although they’d most likely have a good reason for it (hence not cross out for meeting a dealbreaker)

*Most disliked characters: 📍Kennyo: I don’t like that he is trying to kill me. 📍Ranmaru: I see him like a little brother 📍Mitsunari: the same as Ranmaru 📍Motonari: sorry Motonari, you’re very hot but the chains and necklaces are out of fashion

Mitsunari (+4)

Final Results

Mitsuhide (+7) Shingen (+6) Sasuke (+5)

Mitsuhide

Confessed first: You, although he didn’t realise you truly did mean it and weren’t just playing a role.

Makes tea in the morning: Mitsuhide. Having learnt of your problems with focus, he decided to make sure you’d at least eat something in the morning too - it made him realise how he worried others, so to say.

Hogs blankets at night: There’s no hogging blankets involved. He always has a spare blanket on hand. Sometimes you wonder whether there’s an infinity of blankets hidden around... Although, quite honestly, he is just more likely to go in for a hug if you did steal one from him.

Is the little spoon: On most days, you.

Possible points for conflict: Given his line of work, it happens sometimes that he has to pretend, to say things he does not mean. At times he may forget of how literally you take his words as well.

Free time ideas: Strolling through the town, visiting the marketplace, playing with his pet fox (Chimaki), just resting in the gardens of his manor.

Favourite date spot: The quiet and cosy teashop in the town.

A secret you share: He adores how literal you can be, but sometimes... Sometimes it causes for you to overwork yourself, or get otherwise hurt. Whenever such things happen, he gently urges you to stay inside while he lies on your behalf.

His favourite thing about you: How open you are. He fell for you, which means everything that you are, but he is still amazed by the fact that you dare be so direct and trusting. In his mind, it is a sign of a strong heart.

His message to you: “What is it, little mouse?” ”You’re not convinced you deserve so much?” ”My, my... Then let me prove to you how gorgeous you are. After all, you’re the only one I dare want.”

[stranger-who-writes-fiction]

Ya know what these self-indulgent Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow posts need? Self-indulgent banner art, that’s what.

Spoilers for issue #4!

Let’s start this off right with CREATOR CREDITS. Issue 4 of Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is titled “Restraint, Endurance, and Passion.” Written by Tom King, Art by Bilquis Evely, Colors by Matheus Lopes, Letters by Clayton Cowles, and Edited by Brittany Holzherr. (w/ Assist. Editor: Bixie Mathieu & Senior Editor Mike Cotton)

THE STORY: 

Right, so this? This issue? Best one yet.

Also the bleakest of the bunch thus far; even though we don’t always see the brutality of the space pirates that Kara and Ruthye are following, there’s...the suggestion of it. The aftermath. And how Kara responds to it.

Okay, getting a little ahead of myself. BASIC PLOT SUMMARY: Ruthye and Kara continue their pursuit of Krem, who has taken up with Barbond’s Brigands.

The Brigands basically just. Murder and terrorize people, for profit.

Each planet they visit brings new horrors, as well as people who need Supergirl’s help.

And help she does.

KARA-CTERIZATION:

I yell a lot about the art on this book, and have, in fact, openly admitted that I’m primarily here for Evely and Lopes.

Well, that wily son-of-a-gun King went and wrote some of the best ‘Super’ stuff I’ve ever read and dang it, dang it, now I gotta yell about the words too. XD

Specifically, I wanna yell (in a good way!) about some words that occur towards the very end of the book.

Kara and Ruthye have Seen Some Things; things like genocide and mass grave sites and horrible violence, and upon reaching a planet where peaceful monks were slaughtered, Kara’s had enough, and needs to leave because if she screams, she’ll destroy what little is left of the monks’ monastery.

Here’s the text in full, because my gosh. It’s so good:

“What I write next I write based on my observations in those long-ago days at the side of the greatest warrior in the history of this august reality we all call home. It is important to note that my assertions do not rely on anything Supergirl said. It was not a subject we ever discussed or even approached, but nonetheless I believe it to be as true as the turning of worlds. You see, what is not well understood about the daughter of Krypton is that her power was not one of action but one of restraint, endurance, and passion. She did not choose to fire a beam from her eyes, or have breath of ice, or run faster than a speeding bullet. Or any of her other well-documented miracles. No, she held back her heat vision to look you in the face. She warmed her breath to converse with you. She slowed herself to walk by your side. Ever moment of every day, she suppressed the forces churning inside of her. All of the energy of a dead world that strained against her many barriers, eternally demanded to be released. I believe this effort hurt her. I believe she lived her life in pain. But I reiterate again, for I think it important enough to repeat--These beliefs are based on my time at her side, watching her as she moved through strife and sorrow. If you were to have asked her, I have little doubt she would have claimed that such as assertion was absurd. She would say she felt fine and well and then she’d as you if you needed any help.”

A long chunk of words, I know (this comic is DENSE!) but like. This is it. This is one of the defining attributes of the Supers--all that raw power at their disposal and they choose to help people, to be kind, to suppress that power for the benefit and safety of others.

HNNNNNNNG.

Hope, Help, and Compassion for All.

Whole lotta folks claimed at the outset of this book that King did not understand Kara, that he was a bad fit. And that may be so, I suppose--there’s a whole other discussion about like. The violence and swearing and ‘does that belong in a Supergirl book?’ But the characterization? Getting that Kara and Clark are just good people? 

King gets it. He got it in Superman: Up in the Sky and he gets it here, in Woman of Tomorrow.

Other things King gets! Kara is stubborn! Kara is passionate! Kara is going to fix things, even if the effort of doing so hurts her, physically, emotionally, and mentally!

(Fuuuuuuun fact for the crowd saying that Woman of Tomorrow is vastly superior to the CW show: TV Kara is ALSO all of those things! King isn’t pulling this stuff out of thin air. It’s almost like...gosh. I don’t know! Both the show and Tom King are pulling from the character’s comic history, or something!!!! HOW NOVEL.) 

Like, seriously. There’s a lot of overlap. Stop pitting Karas against each other!

Anyways!

I promised art, so here is art!

Oh, right, forgot to mention, Kara literally THROWS HERSELF INTO THE SUN to express her grief and anger, so as to not cause that unnecessary destruction. She gives new meaning to the phrase: Set yourself on fire to keep someone else warm. 

More art yelling: GOTTDAMN, the way Evely draws Kara just colliding with the surface of the sun and then the way Kara’s hair like...becomes the flames...

I am FEELING FEELINGS. HOW DARE.

Also, props to King and Cowles; King for deciding to have that initial scream, Cowles for the way the letters burst forth from the point of impact on the sun, and then back to King who decided that it would just be...devastating silent screaming from Kara, for the remainder of the scene. 

Back to the characterization, I just wanted to highlight something I mentioned...earlier on, I think? In these posts? But haven’t brought up recently, and that is how this book has not once brought up Zor-El, and I think Superman only got a quick mention in issue 2.

Honestly, I think that’s gotta be some kind of record.

It’s so refreshing. Not because I think there should never be mentions of Clark, or anything--I love that boy--but because so much of modern Supergirl comic drama is mined from the same like, angsting over her place compared to Clark, or her crazy sometimes-a-supervillain dad. 

There is no Clark and Kara drama here, no manufactured friction, because it’s just. A cool Supergirl story! 

Gonna keep going, but let’s do it with some more...

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRTTTTTTTTT!!!!

Once again, Mat Lopes is all over the dang place with his palettes, it’s marvelous.

Each new planet gives Evely the opportunity to go hog wild on the worldbuilding and design, and similarly! Each new locale is an opportunity for Lopes to set the tone with colors. Like, here, towards the beginning of the book, we’ve got a planet bathed in this warm, pale yellow/orange light. 

(Quick note: “Sure, yeah, I get it. We all have our duties. And it’s mine as a neighbor to do what I can to help you with yours. Please.” A+ Kara content. We love to see it. And then locating the remains of the alien’s daughter, so that they can go visit the grave site and have some emotional closure???? It’s just. So. Touching.)

Anyways, back to colors.

Like!!!! LOOK AT THAT JUMP. From the soft, almost pastoral feel of the delicate oranges and yellows to HARD GREEN, PINK, AND PURPLE. (Difficult colors to pull off in print, I might add.) 

(This is also an interesting scene, character-wise, because I think it helps re-contextualize some earlier stuff with Kara. Like, I’m mostly thinking that incident on the bus, where she was swearing at the passengers as the space dragon was about to destroy them. Here, we see Kara kind of...goad this alien woman into releasing her pent up emotions by yelling at her/getting her to fight, and you can clearly see at the end of it that Kara did not mean the things she said, because check this out:

She goes and gives her a hug once the woman is able to finally cry.

It’s not ‘Kara is being mean, Kara is swearing at her’, it’s, ‘Kara has an unorthodox solution to a problem, and she’s gonna FIX that problem, NO MATTER WHAT.’

Circling back to the bus thing--again, that could be an instance of ‘unorthodox approach to a weird situation that Kara is going to handle because lives are at stake.’)

But also, DIG THAT KIRBY KRACKLE, BAY-BEEEEE!

And a little Strange Adventures easter egg! The Pykkts! 

(I think those guys are unique to the Black Label series, rather than deep Adam Strange lore, but don’t quote me on that.)

Moving on to YET ANOTHER PALETTE, one I’ve dubbed, ‘Treasure Planet Purple/Grey’

Love Ruthye’s snoozing against the door, waiting for Kara.

Also, just as striking as the colors of the environment, are the colors used on Kara. 

If you compare this page with the previous one, Kara’s eyes are a paler shade of blue, and the red-rimmed look on her eyes here is not as intense as the red-rimmed look we saw back in issue one, when she was confronting Krem. 

All of which to say! There’s a pale, haunted quality to both the linework and the colors. Like. We know Kara has Seen Some Things. But she’s shoving all that stuff down to protect Ruthye, to save Krypto, and to stop these monsters, and you get all of that WITH COLORS AND LINES ON A PAGE.

I love it, I love it so much.

OTHER BOOKS WISH THEY HAD THIS LEVEL OF CHARACTER ACTING, I TELL YA! THEY WISH THEY HAD THIS BEAUTIFUL ALCHEMY OF INKER, COLORIST, AND WRITER WORKING IN SUCH TIGHT TANDEM!

Ahem. XD

Alright, last bit of art, lest I just. Post the whole issue in here. (Which I’m honestly always tempted to do but Strong Feelings about Piracy hold me back.)

JUST HECKIN’ LOOK AT THAT BLUE, MAN. JUST LOOK AT IT. S’BEAUTIFUL.

And more stunning character acting from Evely. Like. Bottom middle panel. The expression, the tilt of her head and the shadows on her eyes...

*insert silent flailing here*

Oh, also, KRYPTO LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVESSSS (for now). 

I’m never right about these things, so I’m glad the one time I’ve correctly read a thing is when it involves Krypto not, ya know. Being dead. XD

Also absolutely love that Kara’s instinct is to send Ruthye home to protect her--once more leaning into that whole, ‘I’m going to protect you, even at great cost to myself’, though of course we know that she can’t send her home, not here, not now, just halfway through our journey. 

ERRRRRRGH, so mad we’re not getting twelve issues of this! CURSE YOU, POOR SUPERGIRL TRADE SALES! CURSE YOOOOOOU!

That said, King’s pacing? Has been phenomenal. I feel like Strange Adventures and even Mr. Miracle kinda...I’m not gonna say dragged, that’s not quite right. But it is more build up, I guess. Takes a while to get to the payoff.

Here, I think King is pushing things steadily along as he doesn’t have the benefit of an additional four issues, so he has to get to the point, so to speak. Keeps everything moving.

SOME FINAL, MISC. STUFF:

I’ve sort of glossed over the darker stuff from this issue, and I just wanna note that like. This is a book that features a bad guy getting stoned (in the death sentence way, not the drug way) on panel. Like. I can’t recommend this to children.

I can’t even really recommend it to some other Supergirl fans, because I know that the King elements will be too off-putting. 

It never feels like the book is going too far, though. At least in like an...exploitative way? If that makes sense?

The violence is handled with discretion, I guess is what I’m trying to convey. This could very easily tip over into like, gross shock factor territory, if not handled well, but I think the creative team pulls it off.

...Still wouldn’t hand this book to kids, though. XD

As mentioned, we’re halfway through this series! Can’t wait to see where it goes--every time I think I have this book figured out, it surprises me. So, like. Bring on the Dinosaur planet! With no sunlight! I wanna see how Lopes handles THAT. XD

(But Oh, OooooOOooh, we gotta wait until NOVEMBER.)

(Hhhnnnnng!)

(Then again, maybe that’s good; we’ve got the TV show in the meantime, and then once it ends we can pick right up with new Supergirl content just a few weeks later.)

(...Aw. Made myself a little sad, thinking about the TV show coming to an end.)

:C

So as not to end on that sad note, here once again is tiny, smushed Kara:

Give ‘em the ol razzle dazzle.

[jurassicsunsets]

Ediacaran weirdos, AKA Pancake Pals

This week’s post is a slight digression from our ongoing series about animal diversity, because it features a group of mysterious fossils that may not even be animals!

I hope you’re in the mood for pancakes.

(Image: A reconstruction of  an underwater Ediacaran environment, prominently featuring Dickinsonia and several Charnia along with other ediacaran weirdos. [Source])

In order to understand these weirdos, we’re going to have to take a trip way, way, back. Back before the dinosaurs, or before the first land animals, or before the first fish, or even before they started making sliced bread. A time called the Ediacaran period, when life was good, sediments stayed where they ought to be without nasty creatures crawling about in them, and pancakes roamed the seas looking for a meal.

Many of you are probably familiar with the Cambrian Explosion, which occurred about 530-540 million years ago in the Cambrian period and records the appearance of hard-bodied animal groups in the fossil record. This event really deserves its own post, or series of posts, but it’s important to remember that this event is not placed at the actual first appearance of these organisms, but rather their first appearance in the fossil record. It’s got to do with hard body parts being hip and trendy in the mid-Cambrian, and thus a bunch of animal groups all suddenly seeming to appear at once. 

Key word, seeming. These animal groups all had to come from somewhere. Many groups appear in the fossil record around the same time in the Cambrian, fully formed, and so their ancestors must have lived previously. These ancestors just didn’t have very hard body parts, so we don’t easily find fossils of them. (There are several proposed reasons why animals all suddenly started making hard parts at the same time, but I won’t go into it here.)

(Image: A bunch of Cambrian animals, including trilobites, Wiwaxia, and early chordates. [Source])

We’re currently living in the Phanerozoic Eon, or the age of visible life. In fact pretty much every fossil organism you can think of, from Australopithecus to T. rex to trilobites to trees, has lived in the Phanerozoic. It started 542 million years ago with the Cambrian period, just before the Cambrian Explosion, and it’s marked by the first appearance of the burrows of priapulids, AKA Penis Worms. Yes, we live in the eon of the penis worm, but what’s more important is that these burrows are maybe the earliest examples of any life form actually digging into the sediment and mixing it up, a process called bioturbation.

Prior to the Cambrian, there are practically no examples of any creatures bioturbating the sediment*, which means it was pretty much fair game for microbes to go hog wild. Because nothing could get to them. 

*Okay, there are some examples. But these burrows all seem to be very simple, not very deep, and pretty much just up-and-down. Not much wriggling around going on.

This formed a unique type of sediments called microbial mats or microbially-bound sediments, in which the sediments are bound together into a sort of carpet that’s resistant to being disturbed. This sets the stage for preservation of very soft-bodied creatures, and what’s more, they’re being preserved in sand rather than in much finer-grained deposits that are usually the only things that can preserve any fine details. It’s a type of preservation that’s almost unheard of in the phanerozoic.

So, with that in mind, let’s imagine ourselves in the Ediacaran! The world has just stopped being an ice planet, and you are a horrible little rangeomorph.

What’s a rangeomorph?

Good question!

Just kidding. That’s not the end of the post, but it might as well be, because the answer to “what are these ediacaran weirdos” is “we just don’t know”. They don’t really clearly resemble any living animals.

(Image: a fossil of Dickinsonia. It’s approximately oval-shaped, and looks quilted. [Source])

Like, we really don’t know. The closest we have to knowing is that some bio-geo-chemical data has indicated preservation of fossil cholesterols, which narrows it down to “they are animals, or fungi, or something that’s a close relative of animals and fungi”. They’ve been suggested to be sponges, or cnidarians (jellyfish and friends), or bilaterians, or even giant placozoans, or a TON of other things. My personal favourite idea is that they’re giant single-celled organisms similar to modern monothalameans, and that they’re not animals or fungi but rather their own little group (Many of these quilted weirdos have been grouped together in a group called petalonamae, which is sometimes called vendozoa; they’re pretttty much the same thing).

So, without further ado, here’s a little who’s-who of some of the more well-known ediacaran weirdos! I’ve already shown you Dickinsonia, the classic little pancake whom we all love. Like many of these vendozoans, it comes from Australia. The very largest get up to 1.4m long! More typically, though, they’re on the order of a few centimetres. Sometimes they’re very long, but they’re never very thick, and they have a weird “quilted” appearance. 

(Image: Glide symmetry in a fossil of Charnia and in cartoon leaves.)

Although Dickinsonia appears to be symmetrical at first glance, that’s not quite true. Rather than being truly symmetrical, it has what’s called glide symmetry—i.e. the body segments are mirrored and then moved forward a little, so it’s not precisely symmetrical. This is pretty common for vendozoans. 

(Image: A group of Charnia, frond-like quilted organisms that stand up, looking a bit like feathers. Image by Nobu Tamura [Source])

Another significant group of ediacaran weirdos are the rangeomorphs, of which the most famous is Charnia. It maintains the quilted appearance of Dickinsonia, but stands straight up, with a sort of anchor-point holding it to the ground. Charnia fronds are typically about 10-20cm long, but some specimens that are over 2m long have been reported. 

(Image: Swartpuntia, a rangeomorph that looks like three Charnia clipped through each other badly. Image by @alphynix​—go follow them if you’re not already, they do great art!)

Other rangeomorphs, like Swartpuntia, have between three and six-fold symmetry, and so look more like a lemon-juicer. It also has a name that’s very fun to say. 

Swartpuntia and other rangeomorphs are pretty significant in that they represent possibly the earliest tiered ecosystems of non-microscoping life forms! While things like Dickinsonia were crawling around on the ground, rangeomorphs were taking advantage of different resources by growing tall and frondy.

(Image: A fossil of Spriggina, a flattened, elongate, vaguely phallic impression fossil. [Source])

There’s also Spriggina, which—surprise!—has been a source of debate as to what it is. It’s variously been proposed to be a worm, a trilobite relative, or a vendozoan. It has glide symmetry, though, so I’m grouping it with vendozoans here. 

One thing all these vendozoans have in common, besides glide symmetry and being impressions on rocks, is that there’s very little apparent internal structure. Whether this is solely an artefact of preservation is up for debate, but there is not clearly a mouth, or gut cavity, or reproductive organs, or anything like that. It’s assumed they fed by osmosis, either by moving along the seafloor feeding on microbes in the sediment (if they were flat like Dickinsonia), or by consuming floating microbes (if they were frondy, like Charnia). It’s also assumed they reproduced asexually via fission or budding.

Whatever the vendozoans were, their time was not short lived. Between the first and last of these ediacaran weirdos, almost 70 million years passed. That’s more time than between us and T. rex! During that time they survived an ice age, but they didn’t survive the start of the Cambrian. No definite vendozoan fossils are known from the phanerozoic, and it’s pretty widely thought that the start of more intense bioturbation probably destroyed the microbial mats they relied on. So these days we have to make our own pancakes.

[ankewehner]

Livetweet of accidentally getting into fairyland...

Best twitter thread ever?

https://twitter.com/NeolithicSheep/status/1330548523721515013 Shepherd: Oh hey Ursula, do you have the number for those people who take out invasive plants still?

Ursula: Probably somewhere, yeah. They said they didn’t usually work on such small properties, though, and I don’t know if I’ve got an infestation worth their time.

Shepherd: Ok but what if I say "kudzu" to you, can we throw enough money at them to make it worth their time.

Ursula: If you say “kudzu” to me, I will panic, scream, and come running to Dogskull with a flamethrower.

Shepherd: Ok well I suggest driving but maybe pack up the flamethrower. Ursula: OH MY GOD YOU FOUND KUDZU OH GOD WHERE IS IT ARE YOU SURE IT ISN’T JUST WILD GRAPE

Shepherd: YES I KNOW WHAT WILD GRAPE LOOKS LIKE THANK YOU anyway I was walking Beamer this morning after the deer ate breakfast and the white deer was walking down toward the back of the property, you know that low tucked away part? And I thought, well, we'll just trail after her at a polite distance and if I'm lucky I'll find some of her fur caught on a bush! Wouldn't that be great! So we kept going past the big ass fucking oak trees that make, like, that weird arch? And there's kudzu.

Ursula: What big oak trees?! There’s no big oak trees back there! It’s all pine!

Shepherd: Yeah you know, the two really big motherfuckers that look like English oak. They're like, way the fuck back there.

Ursula: There are no English oak on Dogskull. Are you sure you weren’t trespassing on the Freemason’s property?

Shepherd: No they're closer to the front I think? Who's next door to them? Also I thought Dog Skull was 7 acres? Because I should be off it and hitting the road by now.

Ursula: Next door to them is the people with the trailer on its side. Do you see any trailers lying on their sides?

Shepherd: A lot of oak trees, a little bit of kudzu, zero trailers in any orientation. Some birds and squirrels. Oh hey Beamer found a nice pond.

Ursula: Okay, this is important. Do the oak trees still have leaves on them?

Shepherd: Yeah but so does the one up front. Oh wait. These are, uh, still green. Like summer green.

Ursula: Right. Okay. This could be a problem. Give me a couple minutes, we have to take trash to the dump and then I’ll look some stuff up. Meanwhile, DON’T EAT ANYTHING.

Shepherd: You mean in case it's poisonous, right? Like THEORETICALLY if I didn't see this tweet until just now and HYPOTHETICALLY I found an apple tree and ate an apple, that would be fine?

Ursula: ...that would not be fine.

Shepherd: Beamer didn't want any, which was weird I thought.

Ursula: INDUCE VOMITING! INDUCE VOMITING!

Shepherd: He didn't eat anything! I'm not going to gag my dog for not eating an apple!

Ursula: Not the dog! Induce vomiting in yourself! Every chunk of that apple needs to come out before you digest it!

Shepherd: FINE. I have puked it up. It was a really good apple, too.

Ursula: Oh thank god. Whew. Okay. The alternative was that you were gonna need a cold iron enema and I wasn’t sure how to do that on short notice.

Shepherd: Oh hey fun fact, "cold iron" is just, like, iron. It's not a special kind or anything!

Ursula: Do you have any on you right now? Beamer’s collar or tags or anything?

Shepherd: Collar hardware is all aluminum these days, otherwise it rusts. Let me pat down my pockets. Syringe of dewormer? Is that helpful?

Shepherd: Anyway I don't want to alarm you but uh. I can't find the trail I followed? So you and Kevin will need to go over tonight and give the boys [i.e. oxen] a hay bale and the goats and sheep two.

Ursula: No! I am scared of cows! We have to get you out of there! Look, I have a bunch of Llewelyn books from my teenage pagan days. I’m sure Scott Cunningham or Silver Ravenwolf covered this somewhere.

Shepherd: Scott Cunningham seems like a really drastic measure just because you're afraid of some cows. But sooner or later I'm going to run out of cigarettes so sure, why not. Oh!! The boys' bow pins are in my pocket, I was going to sand them today and oil them! They're very definitely iron!

Ursula: That’s good! That’s very good! If anyone tries to talk to you, keep hold of those! Now let’s see...do you consider yourself a “solitary practitioner?”

Shepherd: Ursula I'm an ornamental hermit, you don't get much more solitary. Also so far the only person who tried to talk to me was a frog.

Ursula: ...what did the frog say?

Shepherd: "SMOKING KILLS." I tossed it back in the pond.

Ursula: *rubs forehead*

Shepherd: Fucking frogs are all alike, I'm telling you.

Ursula: I really wish these authors had spent less time on “why Wicca isn’t Satanism” and more time on “what to do when you’ve strayed into the fae realms.” I mean, I understand it was the political climate of the time...

Shepherd: I feel like nobody really covers that last one anymore. You have 4 hours until the cows want dinner.

Ursula: Silver Ravenwolf suggests making your magical working space more inviting with stencils? These books spend a surprising amount of time on interior decorating as a vital part of ritual magick. I never noticed that when I was fifteen.

Shepherd: Yeah me neither honestly. It's remarkably unhelpful when you're stuck in faerie and your collie is getting bored. Shepherd: So you want me to... Build a magical working space and stencil it?

Ursula: I can’t actually see how that would help matters. Maybe I should check the Foxfire books instead.

Shepherd: I... Don't remember them having anything relevant, but I might be wrong?

Ursula: They have everything. Ooh, this one is about how to scald the bristles off a hog!

Shepherd: A) I already know how to do that and B) I do not have a hog, sufficient firewood, or a hog scrubbing brush here. FOCUS, URSULA. FOCUS.

Ursula: Sorry, the ADHD meds haven’t kicked in yet today...uh...let’s see...avoid whippoorwills, if you see any?

Shepherd: I do that already, otherwise they steal your toenails.

Ursula: If you harvest apples, leave one on the tree or it attracts the Devil.

Shepherd: You told me not to eat the apples! Am I allowed to eat the apples now??

Ursula: No! These are hypothetical apples! NO EATING! I tried to look up deer in the Foxfire books and there’s a story about somebody’s grandpa wrestling a buck in a mill dam and drowning it, but I don’t see the relevance here. I mean, Grandpa does sound like a badass, though.

Shepherd: I feel like I shouldn't wrestle deer here. What if I try telling Beamer to find his sheep? 

Ursula: Well, research has hit a small snag. I tried googling for the foxfire books and kudzu, in case there was something about fae kudzu portals, right? But it turns out your Twitter is the third hit. Shep, we may BE the experts.

Shepherd: Uh oh. OK. In that case, you and Kevin go over to Dog Skull. Hitch up Cole and Cannon and take them back to the oak trees. Put a logging chain around one and yell real loud "LET SHEPHERD OUT OR WE START PULLING"

Ursula: Oh hell no! I read tree law Reddit! I know how this ends! Do you want us to get sued by Freemasons?! 

Shepherd: I DON'T THINK THE FREEMASONS ARE THE PROBLEM HERE, URSULA

Ursula: I DON’T TRUST THEM WITH THEIR LITTLE LEVELS AND SHEEPSKINS AND WEIRDLY OCULAR PYRAMIDS Also if you see a pyramid with an eye on it, don’t eat it’s either.

Ursula: Okay. Never mind the Freemasons. I wrote a book about this once, I think. White animals, scary fae, random magic deer. It was set in Finland, so you may need to fashion some umlauts, though.

Shepherd: I've got my chore knife, I can carve so many umlauts. Do I just put them in trees until I get back?

Ursula: First of all, are you wearing pants?

Shepherd: YES I'M WEARING PANTS YOU WEIRDO

Ursula: t’s a legitimate question! I mean, I’m not wearing pants.

Now Shep, this is very important. You have to take off your pants.

Also your shoes, your hoodie, and probably Beamer’s collar.

Shepherd: Ursula. Why are we getting naked.

Ursula: To break the misdirection spell! Put your clothes on backwards!

And possibly inside out? Shit, there’s a bunch of different sources. I don’t know if they have to be inside out, but definitely backwards.

Uh...let’s see...hmm, backwards definitely. Inside out might be for leshy. Leshies? Leshys? What’s the plural form, do you think?

If you happen to see any giggling green hairy dudes, ask them what the plural form of their name is. That’s gonna bug me.

Shepherd: Beamer's collar doesn't have a backwards! I'll turn it inside out. And my clothes backwards and inside out, got it. 

Shepherd: There's just, like, frogs. And squirrels. I can hear music though! There might be a dance party, I could go ask about green hairy dudes?

Ursula: STAY AWAY FROM THE MUSIC unless it’s the Freemasons I guess 

Shepherd: No it's more folk music. The Freemasons play, like, Michael Jackson. 

ANYWAY clothes are backwards and inside out. Beamer's collar is backwards and just to be thorough I tied the rope end of his leash to his collar instead of using the clip, so his leash is backwards too. He's pulling me away from the pond! 

Ursula: Tell him to go find his sheep! 

Shepherd: I have so instructed him! Hopefully there's not, like, the faerie equivalent of really good sheep here. Hey do you want me to grab you an apple 

Ursula: No, they don’t come true from seed, but if you can cut me a decent slightly whippy twig with a few leaves, I might be able to root that sucker. 

Shepherd: ...you want me to pause a collie on a mission while I test the whippiness of twigs?? 

I HEAR MOOING. I SEE PINE TREES. 

Ursula: GO TOWARD THE MOOING

Shepherd: THERE'S THE OLD RUSTED OUT METAL THING! I'm back! On uh the opposite side of the property from the one I left from.

Also there's a goddamned chorus frog calling. 

Ursula: Yeah, they do that.

Ursula: THANK GOD THE KUDZU IS ON THE OTHER SIDE OF THE PORTAL

...oh, and you’re back, that’s good too. Very pleased.

Shepherd: Anyway you don't have to feed the boys. Unless you want to?

Ursula: There is no situation where I will WANT to feed your giant-ass death bovines.

Also, what have we learned about following the white doe into the woods?

Shepherd: She knows where the really good apples are? 

Also my boys are tiny!!

Ursula: ...I’m gonna go take a nap.

[thanksjro]

More Than Meets the Eye #19- Ambulon and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day

We got a major reveal at the end of last issue, and now it’s time to put the rest of the pieces together so we can finally understand the mystery that is the Ultra Magnus situation.

So back when Magnus’ seemingly lifeless body stole a shuttle, fucked off into space and landed on the moon, Tyrest was there to greet him.

And by “greet him”, I mean punch through the windshield and carry him bridal style, as if he weighed no more than a baby bird, into his moon base.

Pharma did his thing with his crazy new hands, Magnus was saved, and he woke up shortly after his lifesaving operation. Then Tyrest punched Magnus in the face, because fuck the healing process. He’s an engineer, not a doctor, he doesn’t deal with the SOUL and FEELINGS or anything like that.

In the here and now, Rodimus is still trying to comprehend the fact that his SIC isn’t dead, and is also actually another, much smaller guy with a mustache. Minimus Ambus attempts to explain just what the hell is going on, and we get back to our flashback.

After some good old-fashioned face violence, Tyrest showed Magnus around the place, specifically the terminal he’d set up for his on-the-fly, real-time law amending. With how many war crimes the Cybertronian race has committed in the last several million years, I’m sure it was needed.

Dang, wonder who pissed off Big Brother.

Magnus is more concerned about how it is exactly he isn’t dead right now, and also why his boss looks like a swiss cheese party platter.

Turns out that Tyrest isn’t actually mad at Magnus, just disappointed. He went and read his diary while the operation was happening, and in the 18 months that the Knight Quest has been running, Tyrest has deemed the work done to be unsatisfactory. Instead of arresting criminals, Magnus had been handling infractions so minor, most people wouldn’t have even noticed them. Tyrest doesn’t know where he went wrong.

Well, Tyrest, it was probably the anxiety that manifested itself as OCD, because you picked someone without factoring what the end of the war might do to them. Magnus needs structure to flourish, and if he cannot find it, he will make it himself. I mean, look at all this:

No wonder he was struggling on the chaos engine that is the Lost Light.

Still, Tyrest wants nothing to do with someone who’s cracked under the pressure (lack of pressure?) and the deal was that Magnus only got to be Magnus if he did what Tyrest wanted. Tyrest divests him with the literal push of a button.

Good grief, he’s naked!

As Minimus Ambus mourns over the loss of his stature, both literal and position-wise, we get back to the present, in a double-page spread no less, as Minimus tells everyone about the storied history of the Magnus Armor. Ultra Magnus was originally an actual person, but then he died, and Tyrest was kind of bummed out about that, so he decided to make up a lie (lying, while perhaps morally dubious is not illegal, so he’s allowed to do that) that Magnus faked his death, and then built the armor. There were at least a few wearers of the armor prior to Minimus, some of who were even known by the other crew members. Whenever someone got offed, their hand would spasm and press a recall button in their palm, which would bring the Magnus Armor, and the dead body inside, back to Tyrest.

You can tell he’s still real shaken up about losing the Magnus Armor, because he’s truncating his words. Poor guy.

Minimus asks what exactly happened after he got stabbed, seeing as he was too busy dying to really pay attention to the Overlord plot. Rodimus tells him it’s been handled. Brainstorm jumps in, wanting to know about the other things on Minimus’ resume, which leads into Minimus revealing the fact that he is a Point One Percenter, and something known as a Load Bearer. Load Bearers circumvent that niggling little issue that we saw presented in the “Shadowplay” arc, where spark strain due to not being able to handle a different frame type would outright kill you. Minimus doesn’t have that problem.

Tailgate wants to know how exactly it is that Minimus isn’t dead, seeing as he was clearly on his way out prior to his grand theft auto. Tailgate may have a personal interest in that sort of information, what with still being terminal and all.

Everyone’s real handsy this issue.

Minimus lets Tailgate know that Tyrest’s medical equipment is off the hook, and we get a reminder that Tailgate’s got basically a day left to live. Harsh, Roberts.

Back in Minimus’ flashback, Tyrest sort-of apologizes for punching him in the face, and laments on the loss of one of his greatest Enforcers of the Tyrest Accord.

Oh, so you DID know that this was a possibility, and instead of ordering your subordinate to go make that follow-up appointment with the only therapist on Cybertron- which, while being borderline sectioning, would have at least kept Minimus from sending emails to Rodimus about how he was spiraling- you just let it happen. The Vector Sigma pulse wave went all over the galaxy, there’s zero possibility you didn’t hear about the end of the war before Magnus loaded up on the Lost Light and didn’t call for a year and a half.

Anyway, so Tyrest’s got a new Enforcer lined up, seeing as he’s going to retire the Magnus Armor after all the shenanigans Minimus got dragged through while wearing it. Let’s see what we’re working with.

I thought we were supposed to have separation of church and state, what the hell?

In the present, Rodimus has questions, mainly about why there are so many people in this prison cell. Minimus admits that he asked to be put in here, to try and prove Rodimus and friends’ innocence on the charge of harboring a criminal, by recording their conversation and proving that they had no idea what SKIDS deal was.

Yep, Skids did a bad, and Tyrest wants him in jail.

Minimus also drops the bomb that everyone else in this cell is going to get he death penalty for that whole “crimes against creation” thing. I mean, all Tyrest has to do is wait for a little while and Tailgate will be dealt with, no sweat.

Minimus pulls a device out of his hip compartment, uses it to disrupt the electro-bars of the cell (it’s cool, he was an undercover cop for this whole thing and can therefore break out of prison without it being a crime), and goes to have a chat with his boss about all the weird new stuff he’s shoved into the Autobot Code in the last year and a half. Rodimus doesn’t really want him to leave, but there’s no time for that, because the cell just got a little more full.

Uh oh, Swerve’s badge has gone missing again. Rung, why don’t you slap yours on his crotch, that way Minimus won’t try to murder him when he gets back?

While this is happening, Whirl and Cyclonus are standing on the rim of a smelting pool, absolutely not having a dick measuring contest.

Luna 1 said Bi Rights.

There’s a structure built over the pool that looks an awful lot like living quarters, but is probably actually a prison that violates the Geneva convention. Whirl suggests they find some weapons and go hog-wild, but Cyclonus is more concerned about finding something. When Whirl asks what in the hell he could possibly be looking for in this sort of crisis, Cyclonus turns into a moody teenager.

Well, at least he’s respecting Tailgate’s wish to keep his looming demise under wraps. Not that Cyclonus tells anyone anything anyway.

Over in the Luna 1 medibay, Ratchet is being subjected to having his very fucking soul threatened with a paring knife. Pharma’s having what probably an inappropriate amount of fun, especially since he’s realized that Ratchet took his goddamn hands after the shitshow that was Delphi.

It turns out that every single piece of tech that Ultra Magnus ever repossessed is floating around on Luna 1, even the stuff that really ought to have been destroyed. This is why they were able to save Magnus from certain death at the start of the issue. Somehow I’m not surprised that Tyrest kept all those toys for himself. Corruption of an authority figure? In my Cybertronian Justice System? It’s more likely than you think.

Some of the little art quirks in MTMTE are added in by Milne- see Brainstorm holding any handgun ever if you’d like an example- but I know for a FACT that Pharma humping Ratchet’s headless body was specified by Roberts.

Ratchet, unimpressed and likely mildly queasy by the display going on before him, proposes that Pharma’s afraid of failure, which is why he hasn’t taken his hands back. Pharma disagrees, and a wager is set to see who the better doctor is- winner gets to keep the hands.

Over with the fly boys, alarms are going off in a deserted building, as Whirl struggles to open a door with his claws. Cyclonus takes over on door duty, and asks why Whirl hasn’t gotten his shit fixed yet.

Whirl’s worried that if he gets help for his trauma, he’s going to lose a huge part of himself as a person, and then where will he be? Of course, he says it in a much more Whirly fashion, full of vitriolic self-blame, but reading between the lines is fun. Whirl fires the “let’s get into each other’s personal issues even though both of us hate talking about ourselves and also each other” missile right back at Cyclonus. He wants to know about Cyclonus’ facial situation.

Cyclonus doesn’t like this question.

Then he gets stabbed with a sword.

Back with the docs, it’s apparently much later, as Ratchet’s just woken up from surgery and has a body again. He gets up from the operating table and finds that Pharma’s gone ahead with setting up their gentleman’s wager.

First Aid seems less than pleased with the current situation. Ambulon’s arms are long as hell in this panel, and he doesn’t seem entirely present in the moment. Maybe he’s practicing Rungian Re-Experience Therapy.

Pharma wants to cut both of the boys in half to see who can put the pieces together back the fastest. Ratchet tries to deescalate the situation, because he’s usually pretty good at it, but Pharma’s set on using his chainsaw attachment on someone today.

Ratchet attempts to console his coworkers, saying that their Springer-on-Pova treatment be over soon, and they’ll get a nice lollipop at the end for being such brave little robots.

Then Pharma cuts Ambulon in half, in a way that Ratchet hadn’t accounted for.

We’re gonna need a little more than some bandaids and a kiss to make it feel better for this one. It’s amazing what censorship laws will let you get away with when the blood isn’t red.

Speaking of blood, Cyclonus is more or less okay with being stabbed, because Whirl did him a solid and chopped his assailant in half- lengthways- with a super sweet sword he found in the armory they just opened up. Cyclonus pulls the blade out of his midriff and we finally find out what happened to the Circle of Light.

Back in the prison cell, Perceptor’s been given the job of doctor, even though Rung, Swerve, and Chromedome are all here and at least somewhat closer to being general practice doctors than our science sniper.

Seems like Swerve filled everyone in on the situation on the Lost Light off-panel, which is good, because they’ve been in the dark up to this point.

Chromedome hypothesizes that the reason Skids is a wanted man has to do with that mysterious gun he was holding when he fell out of the sky all the way back in issue #2. This is the point where Skids wakes up from his stabbing and admits that this is probably what happened, even though he still has no recollection of ever stealing the gun or even it existing up until he entered the story, but he apologizes for the trouble anyway.

Shh.  Someone’s coming down the corridor. It’s Star Saber, and he’s brought yet another prisoner to stuff in this cell.

And there’s something else. Can you hear it?

Is… is that music?

Are those the beginning synth riffs of “Tainted Love" by Soft Cell?

Over with Minimus, we’re treated to a taste of Tyrest’s personal brand of disinterest, then get a quick run-down of the birds and the bees. The forging process is a little more convoluted than originally implied, needing Primus to send out a pulse wave through Vector Sigma in order for the Hot Spots to be ignited.

Then the pulse waves started to slow down, Nova Prime had a little freak out, and cold construction was invented to prevent the Cybertronian race from becoming an endangered species.

Minimus of course knows all of this, because he, like basically half of the cast of MTMTE, is old as shit. What he DOESN’T know is that cold construction isn’t managed the way that anyone thought that it was, because there was a government coverup going on about the whole thing. You don’t splice sparks to make a new one, you use the Matrix to create new life.

I know, it’s crazy.

Tyrest was on the team that fiddled around with the Matrix until it started spitting out robot zygotes, and he’s now convinced that they bled the Matrix dry. Nobody tell him what happened to the thing after the war ended.

Wait. If the pulse waves have stopped, and the Matrix is busted beyond repair, doesn’t that mean they can’t make any more Transformers? Once they finish up on their stockpile of sparks, that’s it. No more. The Transformers are a protected species now, we’ve got to treat them like giant pandas.

One of his team members stole the Matrix and hid it in the black market, so its strange, mystical baby powers could never be used again. Except someone obviously found it later on, because we have half of it on the Lost Light. Minimus isn’t sure why any of this is actually relevant to the current situation, or why Tyrest feels guilty about pulling a Eugenesis Fulcrum and finding out where babies come from.

Tyrest is convinced that by draining the Matrix, his team somehow corrupted it, and all the sparks made by this corrupted Matrix are straying further and further from Primus. This is why Rodimus and friends have been charged with crimes against creation- some of their party were created in a way that predisposes them to crime. Or so Tyrest thinks.

I thought we were supposed to have separation of church and state, what the hell? This is still the same guy who was appointed as Chief Justice by the space pope because of his levelheadedness, right?

Yes, actually, but this sudden flip in priorities and personality has been induced by the guilt he felt during the Aequitas trials. Tyrest turned to self harm to deal with the weight of it all, and one day tried to go for what in most species would have been a suicide, by drilling with his drill fingers into the spot between his eyes. Instead, he most likely gave himself a lobotomy and became a religious zealot, fully believing that the gods are real, and he can go visit them by using his super-cool space portal.

Outside the moon base, Whirl and Cyclonus have freed the Circle of Light, and everyone’s ready to kick some ass. Both the fly boys have found themselves a Great Sword to play with, further cementing Cyclonus as our replacement Drift. Rodimus will be so thrilled.

Dai Atlas, the leader of the Circle of Light, tells our boys that there used to be a lot more of his group, but a lot of folks ended up being used to build Legislators.

Hm. I’m sure that’ll never be brought up again, and won’t paint future events in a much darker light. Nope. Absolutely not.

Cyclonus thinks that they need to get a move on, because if that sort of horrific shit can happen to the Circle of Light, it can also happen to Tailgate and the others. He does specifically name Tailgate in his dialogue, but it’s not like he actually cares about the guy, right? Feelings are for nerds.

Then the Legislators show up and it’s party time.

Wonder how that’s going to work out for you, Whirl.

Back with Tyrest, it’s revealed that Tyrest’s plan has a small snag- only people completely absolved of their guilt can go to Cyberutopia to hang out with Primus and the gang, and Tyrest is feeling awful guilty. Not about his weird space-eugenics thing, but about inventing cold construction. Now, how in the world is he going to handle this?

By committing a genocide.

Minimus is, understandably, not a fan of this plan. Tyrest had anticipated that the Universal Killswitch wouldn’t be universally appreciated, and has some of the new law come into play.

And that’s a series wrap on Minimus Ambus! Let’s give him a hand, folks!

[kingofthewilderwest]

Do you think Mabel gets too much hate? I noticed when a female character acts selfish she gets hated on but when a male character does the same it’s praised

We’re free to love or hate any character with or without reason. That said, I feel sad seeing Mabel hate and agree Mabel receives too much hate. I feel like the rhetoric claiming she’s unforgivably selfish is skewed. I think people have decent criticisms regarding Mabel’s character and how she’s presented. However, I don’t think they sufficiently describe the full picture.

Anecdotally, I don’t think this is a case of sweeping sexism because Ford also receives more criticism than I think warranted. My perspective on how much hate each character proportionately receives could be incomplete, though.

But anyway. Let’s talk Mabel.

First though: please don’t try to debate this with me. If you don’t like my opinion, no worries. That’s chill. I’m just not interested in using my recreation time debating this. Thanks! :) However, if you want further clarifications, analyses, case studies, etc. I’m happy to talk more, because this is NOWHERE close to exhausting my thoughts on this topic.

Mabel’s Selfishness: The General Critique

I think everyday anti-Mabel criticism tends to use points like:

When other characters act selfishly, they’re called out and the narrative punishes them. But when Mabel wants something, she gets it, and it’s a reward (The Deep End, The Time Traveler’s Pig, Escape from Reality).

Mabel never learns how to give up something important and deal with that loss. Even when she lets something go, it’s not something that would have been good in her life. For instance, her failed puppet performance is “dodging a bullet” rather than losing something meaningful, since Gabe’s just a puppet kisser. In the end, she doesn’t have to live with sacrifice (Boyz Crazy, Sock Opera).

Mabel even selfishly causes the apocalypse by giving Bill the rift. She’s never held responsible for that (Dipper and Mabel vs the Future).

The narrative reinforces that Mabel is a good person even when she’s not (The Last Mabelcorn).

People particularly look at Mabel in S2 over S1; many claim that’s when her character began to feel selfish and insufferable. 

This isn’t everything, but I have tried to characterize the rhetoric fairly based upon what I’ve seen.

I find these discussion points understandable. Mabel can be self-focused and sometimes ignores others’ feelings. Alex Hirsch admitted in DVD commentaries that he focused on Dipper learning lessons because he put himself in Dipper’s shoes. And some of Alex’s writing intentions could’ve been clearer, like instances where the twins resolve conflicting desires. We could talk about how the show could be improved or the character is legitimately not-selfless.

At the same time, I think how fandom uses these talking points isn’t 100% fair to Mabel’s character or the show’s full narrative. 

I want to point out that Mabel hate for her selfishness covers two fronts: one claim that Mabel is selfish, and another claim that the surrounding plot doesn’t handle her selfishness satisfactorily. I think there’s fair constructive criticism when it comes to narrative framing (even if I disagree), but I don’t think the same dialogue is good rationale against Mabel’s personality. At times I see the two concepts conflated. The narrative may annoy you if you think selfishness isn’t addressed in plot, and contribute to you disliking the character, but claiming “Mabel is selfish” because of that is flawed logic. 

In this analysis, I’ll cover both fronts. I’ll tackle the four points I mentioned above and explain why I find them too harsh. I’m not going to cover all my thoughts (yes, my original draft was longer!!), but I will argue:

Mabel reverses her selfishness - and that’s the big choice sealing the climax of multiple episodes. She doesn’t get off “consequence free” either (Boyz Crazy, Sock Opera)

Mabel sacrifices for others. The narrative does show that Dipper and Mabel meet in the middle, not that Dipper feels guilty enough to ameliorate his sister’s wishes (Sock Opera, Escape from Reality)

Mabel giving the rift to “Blendin” mirrors Dipper offering a puppet to Bill. Both twins are emotionally compromised and believe they’re making a harmless deal with an inconsequential item. Neither would’ve made these choices in calmer circumstances. Sock Opera doesn’t have Dipper deal with his culpability; relax up on Mabel (Sock Opera, Dipper and Mabel vs the Future)

Mabel’s selfishness is addressed, handled, and resolved. The moral of The Last Mabelcorn isn’t defending Mabel’s goodness; it’s Mabel embracing imperfection. Mabel learns she’s a bad person and changes her perspective of herself multiple times in canon (The Last Mabelcorn, Lost Legends)

I could also have talked about how selfishness isn’t required to be resolved in her character arc, all the times Mabel does nice things for others, how she doesn’t always obnoxiously hog the spotlight, and other things, but I want to cap the length of this essay.

So let’s begin.

Can Mabel learn from selfishness if she’s consequence-free and never handles meaningful loss?

Anti-Mabel Argument: Circumstances don’t adversely affect Mabel. This means she never has to sacrifice for her brother like Dipper does for her. For instance, in Sock Opera, Mabel sees that Gabe is a weirdo over-obsessed with puppets. Her failed puppet performance was “dodging a bullet” rather than losing something meaningful, so she doesn’t learn true self-sacrificial love. Mabel never learns how to give something important up and deal without it. So, she never changes.

Boyz Crazy not only is an episode where the climax is Mabel learning to act against her selfish desires, but it’s got an explicit apology in dialogue. “I’m sorry I went bonkers,” she tells Candy and Grenda. “A catchy song made me realize that you were right. Can you ever forgive me?”

While Mabel has to learn this lesson again in later episodes, it’s to note: most GF characters are fairly static, and Dipper also has to learn multiple times not to hit on Wendy. Character progress doesn’t happen all at once. And in the next episode I’ll talk about, not only does Mabel confront her selfishness, but it’s the last time she lets her boy chasing impact Dipper. It ends after this.

I’m talking Sock Opera.

Mabel’s sacrifice in Sock Opera is big. She doesn’t get off “consequence free.” She decides to sabotage her performance before knowing Gabe’s a weirdo. Mabel is fully willing to lose her most viable romance option… for Dipper. She realizes her brother would be willing to give something up for her, and she’s going to reciprocate by giving up something big for him. 

Mabel might’ve dodged the bullet of dating Gabe, but she still gives up something big and will feel it. Sure, she makes the puppet show to impress Gabe. But she’s also entertaining a full audience. She can feel the people booing her, see them storming out and leaving. Mabel is someone who wants everyone happy, so much that seeing everyone happy except Robbie puts her in Crisis Mode. I don’t know about you, but just because I saw some guy kissing puppets, I wouldn’t think, “Yay! I had a happy outcome to this play ordeal!”

Mabel VERY much says, in the dialogue, that her brother would give up something big for her. And that’s what her Big Choice comes down to. Every episode climax in Gravity Falls comes down to The Big Choice. Here, Mabel’s Big Choice… is to sacrificially watch her hard work burst into literal flames.

Mabel apologizes to her brother, “I’m sorry, Dipper. I spent all week obsessing over a dumb guy. But the dumb guy I should have cared about was you.”

In following episodes, Mabel does put Dipper in mind. She gets momentarily distracted by crushes in The Love God, but that’s in a quest to solve her own mistake - a mistake that came from trying to make everyone, from Robbie to Thompson to Dipper, happy. She wants to include Dipper, from the Ducktective finale to her birthday party planning mission. And if you’re focusing on how she teases Dipper, why aren’t you also targeting Stan, who makes the same action without change?

Mabel Hate rhetoric focuses on how Bill was “right” in Sock Opera and she still acts selfishly in the same patterns after that episode. But, the climax is Mabel resisting Bill and demonstrating self-sacrifice, and that arguably does influence her character afterwards. It’s one step in an incomplete process. She might not be ready to handle Dipper separating off with Ford, but that’s because her arc still isn’t completed.

We do see Mabel dealing with meaningful loss like the collapse of her puppet show. She does show sacrificial love for her brother. And, as I’ll talk about more, she continues to grapple with and grow in selflessness through later decisions like Escape Through Reality.

Does Mabel ever realize she’s a bad person?

Anti-Mabel Argument: Narrative reinforces Mabel is a good person even when she’s not. Alex Hirsch wrote with rose-tinted bias because Mabel represents Alex’s twin sister. The Last Mabelcorn showcases that. Instead of Mabel learning she’s a bad person who can’t receive a unicorn’s blessing… the unicorn’s criticisms against Mabel get nullified – the creature’s lying about Mabel’s impure heart. Mabel got affirmed for who she was rather than dealing with her imperfection.

First off: if you haven’t watched the DVD commentary for The Last Mabelcorn, you should. It’s a wild story how this episode got made. Alex Hirsch trashed the script of an entire episode 48 hours before it was due. He crunched to write a new episode - by himself - from scratch. So yeah. A few lines of final dialogue could’ve been tweaked to improve the message, but the fact he wrote as successful an episode as he did in that short of time is incredible. And the message of The Last Mabelcorn is there:

Mabel learns she’s an *IMPERFECT* person. She embraces being imperfect instead of groveling for impossible perfection and meaningless approval.

Maybe that’s not the “Mabel learns selflessness!” episode you wanted, but this is a fascinating lesson, and one I don’t see touted tons in media. I love it.

Mabel spends the episode attempting to be pure of heart through kind deeds. Wendy tells Mabel they should solve their problem the dirty way. Mabel keeps refusing until the unicorns anger her. This is the moment of triumph: she punches a unicorn. Mabel forsakes the route of “pure” good deeds to do what she first considered dirty. That’s the hero moment, dudes! 

Mabel says the unicorns are “worse” than her, not that she’s good and they’re bad. Mabel comes out of the adventure declaring, “Today I learned morality is relative.” That’s because the episode’s climactic Big Choice isn’t about Mabel accepting she’s a “pure” person; it’s about Mabel accepting she can make “impure” choices.

Ford is the person at the end who tries to tell Mabel she’s good. But Mabel contradicts what he says with that “morality is relative” quote. What she takes away is that she’s imperfect, she can make non-sparkly-decisions, and that’s okay. She’s become more aware of herself and her flaws, but also accepts she can make choices others might shake their heads at. 

So. Ford and Wendy might’ve called Mabel “a good person” in key parts of the episode, which is why I say Alex (not in a time crunch) could’ve considered tweaking lines to make the point clearer. But I don’t think the episode depicts Mabel as a selfish jerk who never learns her flaws.

And frankly? If I had to choose between a standard “you’re not perfect” episode and this? I’d MUCH rather have this, where characters learn lessons, but we also get the show’s humorous, slightly subversive, slightly truthful “anti-morality.” That’s a Gravity Falls thing, after all. (For other anti-morality examples: Stan saying Summerween is about celebrating “pure evil,” Mabel deciding it’s good to lie so Stan doesn’t get arrested, Mabel deciding being an asshole to employees is productive, etc.)

So yes, Mabel realizes she’s a bad person, even if it’s not in the way you expected. And that’s still not the end of her character arc. 

Does Mabel ever sacrifice for others Dipper?

Argument: Mabel only agrees to leave her bubble after Dipper promises to drop Ford’s apprenticeship. This apprenticeship would have been huge for Dipper. But all Mabel “sacrifices” is leaving a fake world she’s hiding in, goofing around instead of helping people in literal Armageddon. 

Much of Mabel and Dipper’s relationship is about how they’re opposites. We repeatedly see the best place for both of them is the middle. Alex Hirsch talks about this tons. Whether it’s perfectly implemented is a debate for another day. I do think these concepts can be seen even in episodes like Escape From Reality where there’s been criticism of narrative execution.

I’ve seen people say Mabel “gets her way” because Dipper turns down Ford’s apprenticeship when he sees it makes her sad. Hirsch has said in commentaries Dipper was making a mistake wanting the apprenticeship. Mabel wants to avoid growing up while Dipper wants to grow up too fast.

We don’t have to take Hirsch’s word-of-god for it: the story does show that Dipper was erring with the apprenticeship. Ford intends well, but his bias against siblinghood means he’s polluting Dipper’s values. He suggests that Dipper staying with Mabel is “suffocating.” He suggests that Dipper is “greater” and should be doing something with it. “Dipper, can you honestly tell me you never felt like you were meant for something more?” And later: “Listen to me, Dipper: this town is a magnet for things that are special. And that includes you and me. It brought both of us here for a purpose! Stay here with me, Dipper. Become my apprentice. Don’t let anyone hold you [back].”

When Mabel and Dipper make resolutions in Mabel Land, Dipper says he’ll drop the apprenticeship. This emotionally touches Mabel. But being emotionally touched doesn’t mean that’s WHY she makes amends with her brother. Instead, Mabel reassures him that he can take the apprenticeship if he wants. She leaves the choice up to him and is willing to let him live in another state during their teen years. She finds his needs and desires important.

And honestly? It’s Dipper himself who realizes the apprenticeship is bogus; it’s not because Mabel is forcing her brother to change. “Mabel, I thought you were living a fantasy, but look at me! I actually thought I was gonna stay here and be Ford’s apprentice. Spend my entire teens cooped up in a basement with a lab coat? How ridiculous is that?” He sheds the idea because he realizes it’s a bad one, not because he’s ameliorating someone too selfish to accept her brother leaving her.

It’s also to note Mabel Land tempts everyone. Calling only Mabel selfish when everyone else gets pulled in… seems incorrect. Bill considers it a diabolical, inescapable prison. People like Soos, Wendy, and Dipper who know it’s a prison get drawn to Mabel Land’s temptations. Heck, Dipper gets tempted with an old vice. He might have grown more mature, but that doesn’t mean he can’t trip occasionally (we can apply the same understanding to Mabel and “selfishness,” by the way - someone can both grow and keep tripping). Mabel, meanwhile, wants to use the bubble to help and comfort her visiting friends (which is, for the record, not selfish) and thinks reality should be avoided because both her and Dipper’s lives have been adversely affected. Dipper’s pain is important, too. Mabel has been in this prison longer than Soos, Wendy, and Dipper, and the prison was designed for her - ergo she’s going to be more manipulated by it. Lots of her actions are avoidance tactics because she’s scared of growing up, yes. The court trial is a lot, yes. But we should bear in mind that this is a child scared of growing up and feeling the burn of conflict with her brother. Emotional and psychological context is important. We all get vulnerable. Do our lowest lows define our entire personality?

When Dipper and Mabel make their compromise, both reject temptations. Dipper rejects a bad apprenticeship; Mabel rejects a bad reality. They offer each other solutions where they don’t get what they originally want. They meet in the middle, and this is the best way for both to move forward in the aging process. They’re both satisfied and confident with their choice. It’s not Dipper giving up everything for Mabel, ameliorating her because she’s sad. It’s about the twins learning they can make it through life together, through thick and thin.

Potentially muddled thematic framing does not erase the resolution the twins make. It does not erase that Mabel’s depicted as someone willing to give up major things for her brother.

Okay. But that rift thing. How can you excuse the APOCALYPSE??? JUST TO HAVE MORE SUMMER!?!

The point is that Mabel is emotionally compromised and outmanipulated.

She’s a terrified twelve year old going through a Very Rough Day. She’s terrified about the future, she’s learned bad news after bad news, and she’s afraid her life as she knows it will be wrenched apart. It feels like everything she loves - from her best friends to her brother - will be distanced from her. 

Would you have handled this well as a kid? Adults have issues with this, too.

When she meets “Blendin,” she’s told that trading one inconsequential item will save her future. It’s self-focused, but it’s important to understand: she wouldn’t have made this choice in calmer emotional states.

Compare this to Dipper making a deal with Bill in Sock Opera. The twins literally make the same mistake for the same reasons, duped by the same villain.

Dipper: Decides to give Bill one of Mabel’s belongings, a puppet, without her knowledge. Mabel: Decides to give Bill one of Dipper’s backpack items without his knowledge. 

Dipper: Irritated with Mabel because she isn’t helping unlock the laptop.Mabel: Frustrated with Dipper because it feels like he’s abandoning her to be “special” with Ford. 

Dipper: This is an inconsequential bargain. Bill is just unlocking the laptop. He’s just taking a sock puppet - Mabel has plenty of those.Mabel: Nothing bad will happen. Just a few more weeks of summer. And she’s giving an item Ford allegedly won’t notice is missing.

Dipper: The laptop counter is ticking. Only a matter of minutes before the data gets erased.Mabel: Summer is ending in a week. Separation from Dipper is imminent. 

Dipper: Not thinking clearly due to sleep deprivation.Mabel: Not thinking clearly, emotionally compromised from a walloping bad day.

Hirsch and company have confirmed that only this combination of factors convinced Dipper to make a deal with a demon. Mabel wouldn’t have shook “Blendin’s” hand in less severe circumstances. It’s ironic that, in Sock Opera and Dipper and Mabel vs the Future, rhetoric attacks Mabel in both episodes.

So yes, Mabel gave Bill the rift. But yes, Dipper jeopardized the town’s safety by letting Bill into his body.

I know that, at this point, people might argue there’s a narrative difference. Dipper learned from his mistake but Mabel didn’t. However, I disagree. There wasn’t dialogue in Sock Opera where Dipper explicitly confronts his transgression and works it out with Mabel on screen. Same thing with Mabel and the rift. I know fans wanted it addressed that Mabel started the apocalypse… and frankly I would’ve enjoyed that too… but it doesn’t make Mabel’s writing as a character suddenly, “OH NO SELFISH SELFISH! AND THE NARRATIVE IS LETTING HER GET AWAY WITH BEING SELFISH!”

It’s no different than how writing handles Dipper in Sock Opera. And again, give a terrified kid a break instead of calling a large emotional low “irrevocably selfish.”

By the time Take Back the Falls comes around, Mabel encourages everyone to work together to fight Bill. Mabel risks her life to save the town and her family. Mabel works together with Dipper and puts the people she loves first.

Lost Legends: Fixing remaining narrative holes

After S2 ended, Mabel’s selfishness is head on tackled. That’s the ENTIRE point of Don’t Dimension It in Lost Legends. I suspect Alex Hirsch read Mabel criticism and intentionally reacted through Lost Legends. In this story, Mabel acts out of self-focused energy and doesn’t realize her actions have negative consequences to others. It puts the Pines family in an interdimensional conundrum. Once Mabel runs into other Mabels from other dimensions, she comes to terms that she’s self-absorbed and needs to be attuned to how others feel. Mabel realizes she put everyone in this mess. She apologizes to her family and resolves to be better.

It’s great.

I’ve still seen people criticize it. And that’s where I think Mabel hate rhetoric definitely goes too far. I suspect there’s bias in how people responded to that comic. By the time Lost Legends came out, criticisms for selfish Mabel were rampant and people were set in their perspectives, so seeing a character arc about Mabel’s selfishness got unfairly nitpicky responses. 

I’ve seen people say things like, “Well, she only learns when she interacts with herself, not with others!” But that’s a cool way of presenting story! Mabel sees herself in a literal mirror and takes away truth. Sometimes we don’t see our flaws until it’s right in our faces. This is Mabel’s in-the-face moment. The “I’m selfish” revelation doesn’t have to be with Dipper to be relevant toward how she treats Dipper. She takes away the full lesson she’s self-absorbed and needs to fix that. She immediately makes sure to talk to Dipper about becoming a better person. She owns responsibility toward how she’s treated her brother - and mentions the entire summer as the scope of her fault.

“I’m sorry for being selfish this summer,” the comic ends. “I guess it took me dealing with myself to realize what you put up with. It’s time for us to start some new adventures! And this time I won’t always hog the spotlight.”

There are other criticisms about Lost Legends, which I feel boil down to “I don’t know, still doesn’t satisfy me, not enough.” It makes me wonder what would get people satisfied. Does every possible angle of how someone could learn selfishness have to be covered thoroughly? No franchise can cover that scope. Isn’t there still lots of takeaway with Mabel? Don’t Dimension It alone is an episode’s worth of material, the same amount of content which most fans deemed enough to wrap up Dipper getting over Wendy, Pacifica being a brat, and Gideon being creepy on Mabel.

Mabel’s selfishness gets addressed, multiple times, and gets a final-final resolution in the comics.

Final Thoughts

I think it’s an interesting point you make, anon friend, that male characters get praised while women get condemned. I haven’t talked about gender aspects or other selfishly-acting male characters like Stanley (whose selfishness people perceive as lovable). I said earlier I don’t think it’s rampant fandom sexism, but there still could be a point there. Maybe you’re right it’s a factor. It wouldn’t be the first time gender perception’s done that.

I think there’s also point to be made that Dipper is the protagonist. Mabel’s a deuteragonist. It’s more common to write life lessons for the protagonist. That’s fine. Dipper learning more lessons than Mabel and Dipper giving up a little more than Mabel is a result of being a protagonist, not narrative excusing Mabel for her flaws or letting her waltz around scott free.

So yeah. I think Mabel’s gotten too much criticism for that flaw. Constructive criticism is almost always interesting in fandom dialogue, but rampant hate movements make me sad. Talking about how narrative structure could’ve been improved I find cool; pinning it on the character’s humanity bothers me. I think lots of the dialogue turns into criticizing Mabel unfairly as a person, and given as other GF characters have glaring flaws, it feels imbalanced and uncomfortable that SHE gets disproportionate attacks. 

This is Mabel we’re talking about. Mabel Pines, who’s SO selfish she tries to rescue Mermando when that means she’ll never see him again. Mabel Pines, who’s SO selfish she knits everyone sweaters during the Apocalypse. Mabel Pines, who’s SO selfish she calls out Dipper when he’s leading on Candy. Mabel Pines, who risks her life in multiple daring moves to save the town, parachuting through the sky into the demon’s lair… acting as a decoy to distract Bill Cipher… and more. Mabel Pines, who spends an entire episode trying to make everyone happy, down to Robbie, whom everyone else didn’t care enough about (but Mabel did!!!). Mabel Pines, who encourages Soos to date women and find a romantic connection he’s satisfied with. Mabel Pines, who fights in Globnar and risks her life, just so Soos can have a happy birthday and forget about his dad. Mabel Pines, who decides it’s better to be friends with her enemy Pacifica than fight petty battles. Mabel Pines, whose love for her brother helps even the thirty year rift between Stan and Ford mend. Mabel, who couldn’t give up on Stan and found a way to restore his memories when all others thought it lost. Mabel. Fucking. Pines!

[alo-piss-trancy]

Ok hi, I didn't wanna say anything, but please don't write knifeplay/bloodplay for Yuri. I def don't wanna spoil anything, but it's learned on a certain route that Yuri has a s*lf h*rm problem (I'll leave it at that).

You honestly seem like you're not trying to be a jerk with this ask, so I'm going to do my best to answer this as politely as possible without compromising my personal beliefs on the matter. This is going to be long and a little serious, but please note I'm not attacking you or trying to start a debate. I'm just laying all my thoughts on this down at once so I make myself clear, because a short answer would leave a lot of nuance out.

I understand what you're trying to do here. For the record though, I also considered that a pretty massive spoiler and I did not appreciate that at all. Even if you all think you're 'helping', don't do that again. Y/uri was pretty much the only character I'd managed to avoid most spoilers on and you killed the surprise for me. This game is already so full of fluffy 'filler' in the beginning that I don't have a ton of big plot points to look forward to in each route.

Now, I realise this is a very delicate topic and incredibly triggering to some people, especially with those two things combined. I am 100% willing to tag it with just about any variation needed to ensure you or others affected can blacklist/block it and never have to see a word of it in the future. I'd also be happy to go back and tag that original text post I made if needed. I mean that. You all are welcome to ask me to tag things anytime, and so long as you're polite about it I'm perfectly willing to oblige to the best of my ability in future posts! If I occasionally forget, just toss me a light reminder and I'll jump into editing and add it in.

That said, I want to make it clear that I am very firmly against censorship. I'm willing to take all necessary precautions to ensure people can curate their experiences on this blog and AO3, but at the end of the day I can still post whatever fictional stuff I choose to. As can anyone else. Same goes for more formally published media.

Now, it's entirely possible I would have gotten to that part of the game and decided 'oh dang, I'm not so enthused about that fic idea anymore...'. My whims and ideas change frequently, and what you mentioned is a heavy topic with a lot to unpack and process. It's also entirely possible that future plot would only provide more fuel.

Fyi, when I originally mentioned the knifeplay I was actually thinking a lot more along the lines of her doing it to the protagonist, not the reverse. But for the record, if I did choose to write it with focus on Y/uri, I would still be well within my rights to.

This next part of my answer is going to address some heavy topics, this is your warning!!!

Sometimes people's kinks are a way to take a thing that is personally scary or upsetting to them and find a way to reverse it. To find pleasure or power or get used to the idea of the awful thing in a safe, controlled fashion. I'm not going to go into the full details on this because there's plenty of explanation and research elsewhere already written up, as well as an excellent book on the subject, and I'm not turning this blog into a discourse debate. But I needed to mention it for my point.

There are plenty of stories that could be explored with Y/uri in this context. Did she have this kink before the self harm events started and it was completely unrelated, or did she develop it afterwards? How did she discover it beforehand? If developed afterwards, did it start out as another way of harming mixed with pleasure in a self-destructive way, often done sloppily and without proper technique? Or was it strictly used as almost exposure therapy to deal with those urges and thoughts in a safer, more contained scenario, maybe even allowing the partner she trusted to wield the knife to prove their bond/reinforce that she can be loved without being hurt deeply, that she is worthy of affection and trust and loyalty. Maybe this finally helps give Y/uri a tool to embrace her 'weirdness' without harming herself and others. Or, what if she thinks it can be a useful tool and is sure she's ready, but partway through the scene she gets triggered or has flashbacks... how does she deal with it? How does her partner? Can it be overcome with effort, research, and taking things slowly, or does she realize this kink is actually completely off the table for her?

What if she has this kink and is excited to try it, but her partner isn't? How does she take that rejection? Or do her poor social skills mean she skipped negotiation to begin with and attempted it in the middle of a vanilla session? Would her partner freak out or even get mad, or try to swallow their fear and let her do it so they don't hurt/offend her, even at the cost of their own comfort?

This topic also opens a ton of potential plots for darkfic, but I'll refrain from discussing that out of respect for you and others.

So as you can see, there's much more to explore than 'Knife=Hot'. I believe those discussions and ideas are necessary and provide important fuel for thought when explored fictionally, especially since mainstream media doesn't cover a lot of them.

~~~

I feel I should take a second to clarify knifeplay for those who may be unaware. It doesn't always equate to actual cutting/drawing blood. That can be an aspect, but usually only by those far more experienced and, you know, actually into that. A lot of participants don't actually go that far. Mostly, it's either about the physical sensation of the knife touching you at all, or the adrenaline/controlled fear and intimate trust of a partner bringing an object like that so close/teasing you with it.

In fact, it's frequently advised in those circles (especially to newcomers) to use a dull butterknife instead, because it simulates the same feelings of metal on skin/can dig in a little without any real risk of cutting/drawing blood. Even if one chooses to use a different knife, it's still pretty common to dull the blade, or some people even substitute with a closed pair of scissors (combined with the partner blindfolded, you can't really tell it apart from the real thing).

These versions of knifeplay are well controlled and ultimately pretty harmless, so long as both parties know what they're doing and stay alert. And more experienced players with sharper knives are even more cautious/have studied extensively to know where/how deep to go without risking scarring/serious injury.

Remember the golden rules of kink: Safe. Sane. Consensual.

With those in place, it is not nearly the same as self harm. Just as controlled, consensual, well-negotiated BDSM with safewords, respected boundaries and a trusted partner is never in the same league as abuse.

~~~

Now that that's out of the way, back to my point:

There's no perfect representation or narrative for everyone, in any group (be that gender/sexuality/triggered by certain things, etc). Every human being is different, everyone interprets media differently, and everyone takes away different elements from stories.

What one person in a particular group may find cathartic, relateable, or painful but necessary food for thought, another may find completely repulsive, personally hurtful, offensive, something they can't stand to hear. And guess what? Both of those can be true at the same time. One side is not immediately right over the other.

There are queer characters or interpretations of them in fics that I vehemently despise, might even find hurtful or sickening and think 'how can anyone create this, it's insufferable! People in 'my group' aren't like that, it's a horrible representation. I can't relate to it at all!' But you know what? Other people can and do, may find comfort in those exact narratives and experiences, may heal their pain instead of inflicting more. And that's great. It's what they needed or wanted and if I don't like it, I click away and do my best to avoid it.

There are specific tropes and narrative themes I personally cannot get through without being triggered into anxiety attacks or dragged back to bad times and places in my life. Sometimes I see them tackled in ways that are hurtful or seem insensitive to me. But I recognise that for someone else, it's exactly what they needed to see to get through that or come to terms with it, or see a way they wish that thing could play out. I would never dream of telling those people they aren't allowed to enjoy it, OR telling the creator of that piece of media or a tv show 'Hey ummm please don't use this plot because it turns me into a human wreck for a week'. Because it's not remotely my place to do so. They can create whatever they want, they have no responsibility towards me or my well being. A few might be kind enough to include a warning at the beginning of that episode or in the description, but they are in no way required to. It's up to me to curate my experience and try to keep my guard up/research what might have those tropes, and in the rare occasions I get blindsided, yeah, it hurts like hell. I struggle, I might even backslide a bit. But I just have to try my best to deal with it and make a note to be more careful next time. Because you can't control the world around you, not even the online world, and you have absolutely no right to. The only right you have is to protect yourself without infringing on other people's boundaries/rights.

And there's also another important point. There doesn't have to be a big important point or explanation for why a creator creates something, or why consumers can enjoy that creation! If someone wants to create a plotline with all of my triggers used in the most 'insensitive', 'wrong', pointless ways possible, strictly for Entertainment or pure kink material instead of some deep dissection of the issues involved? They can go hog wild!!! They are 100% allowed to do so on this earth, and I can't (and wouldn't want to) do a thing to stop them.

One person can read a kink fic and it hits a very emotional theme for them/they think it explores a deep topic well. Another person can read that same fic and get nothing out of it except their rocks off. Both of those readers are completely equal and 'allowed' to enjoy that fic. Both reasons are completely valid reasons for why the creator was 'allowed' to post/create that fic in the first place. Nobody needs permission, nobody has to answer to anybody except themselves. Period. This extends to any topic, any type of fic.

Yes, even for things I find absolutely abhorrent and insensitive and don't understand/want to read ever. I may resent everything about its existence, but I will defend to death the creator's right to make it exist in the first place.

It only affects me if I let it affect me. If someone's making content I despise or am upset by and can't handle, I can choose to ignore or avoid them, blacklist those tags, I can block them and move on with my day. I can do anything within my own bubble, but the second I consider going into their bubble and saying they can't make that thing, I am in the wrong. Because I'm not respecting their space and rights.

If someone makes cookies with ingredients I'm highly allergic to, pastes the ingredient warnings all over the box where I read them, and I still eat one, would anyone cheer me on for blaming them when I have a reaction? Would anyone think it was remotely okay of me to start calling up every bakery in town and saying they weren't allowed to bake those cookies EVER, because some people somewhere might be allergic?

No. They'd tell me I was crossing the line, because I'm infringing on other people's boundaries and lives. I'm expecting everybody else to take responsibility for something that, while horrible and painful, was my fault for touching.

Now, if someone sets out unlabelled cookies not realizing I'm allergic to something in them, and I eat it and have a reaction, that sucks. It's an awful experience. But is it the baker's fault? As long as they didn't do it maliciously, not really. They can be advised politely to label it in the future, and I can do my best to remember to ask/be more cautious next time I come across something I'm unsure of, but they're still allowed to bake those cookies for themselves and others.

Now, if I deliberately baked cookies with an ingredient that people are very frequently allergic to (ex. peanuts) and set it out in a crowded buffet without a warning label, that's a jerk move. That's intentionally trying to cause harm to others. But simply baking that flavour of cookies still isn't a crime or harmful by itself.

~~~

I'll be honest, I'm running out of steam and I think I've said most of what I have to say, so I'll wrap it up. I want to reiterate that I'm not ripping into you with this long answer, anon! I understand why you sent me what you did and I'm trying not to come off as harsh. I'm happy to go back and tag things and will tag anything else similar in the future!!! But at the end of the day, regardless of whether I personally end up writing that fic or not, or even want to after I get to that plot, I don't agree with telling anyone they can't/shouldn't write it at all. I wanted to try and explain my viewpoint thoroughly, and I hope you can respect that, just as I'll respect and try to accommodate you and other followers. This is the only time I'll really get up on a soapbox like this, and I have no interest in debating these things on my blog further, but it is a topic I've been passionate about all my life so I'm afraid I'm not budging on it.

[marveloussupernerd]

Hey! I was wondering if you would match me with a character from Mystic Messenger and Marvel? I have no gender preference so go hog wild. My form is pinned to my blog so I hope it wont be too inconvenient for you. I just find that humans have a tendency to be more complicated than 500 characters so it is difficult to accurately represent myself within those limitations. Thank you in advance, dear!

No problem!! Sorry this took a while but I hope you like it!!!!

Mysme

I ship you with 707!

I just finally reached the clarity that his real name is a spoiler for ppl that like they get upset if they find out so uh, I’m correcting that now lmaoo

Well you’re about as tall as him

Until you wear your boots

Then you’re taller

I know sometimes that bruises men’s egos but it literally does not affect him at all

Except when you’re walking too fast he whines that you need to slow down because your legs are longer than his

The first time he saw your resting face it kinda freaked him out

What did he do wrong? The two of you were just watching tv. Did you not like the way he had his arm around you?

Now that he knows that’s just how you look he doesn’t worry about it

He teases Yoosung by using it to his advantage

“Yoosung I think you pissed her off. Oh my goodness! Didn’t you know!? She can’t stand the color purple. Gives her bad memories. You’ve probably scarred her for life”

And then Yoosung is apologizing to you and you have no idea why

It’s Seven’s way of messing with both of you

The first time he tried to make his move by putting his arm around you and you flinched, he almost cried

No literally

He just... he hadn’t realized it was a thing to dislike it like that

Respects it so much

But he wants hugs so bad :( someone needs to hug this poor boy

So when you eventually invite him over and cuddle up to him during a very late movie night?

His heart jumps in his chest

He tries to tell you that you don’t have to!! He understands how it makes you feel weird and it’s okay; he likes you so so much and respects you a lot

But secretly he looks forward to whenever you want to cuddle with him; the rarity of it makes it even more special

707 is the king of witty comebacks

The first time the RFA sees the two of you bantering with each other they think you’re fighting? Because you’re both so passionate about being better and wittier than the other

You laugh about their confused faces later that night

He’s an over the top flirt too

Tries to woo you with ridiculous romantic gestures

He’s literally a theater kid too you cannot convince me otherwise I was a theater kid as well so I know

Literally every romantic gesture in a romcom? He does it

Of course he expects a reaction out of you but. You. Never. Budge.

Not even after he stole the microphone during the latest RFA party to confess to you that he was carrying your child

Which made NO SENSE

He’s not allowed microphones anymore. Or stages.

When you tell him you’re asexual he’s so respectful (as always)

You literally don’t have to do anything like that if you don’t want to

He’s more than happy with your cute lil domesticated life together

Okay this is off topic but I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO TRY AERIAL SILKS

When he first sees your bruises he FLIPS

did someone hurt you? Who? He’ll hack into their computer, give them hell

The first time he sees you perform... wow

YOU’RE SO COOL AND GRACEFUL AND ELEGANT

he wants to try it and literally begs on hands and knees for you to teach him

He’s bad at it. Learns he’s afraid of heights too

But he tries to watch you perform as often as possible

Noticed you don’t give out compliments often

So it’s his job to come up with a creative new compliment to give you every single day

It ranges anywhere from “I like your shirt” to “you’re so beautiful” to “I admire that you’re able to parallel park my babies.”

Please help him with procrastination

You literally will not hang out with him if he has work to do

He pouts and whines, but ultimately gets his work done

You’ve really helped out his work and his work schedule

He literally hates parties and clubs and bars

Much prefers taking you out at night to look at the stars

If you’ll let him, he’ll drive you to a secluded place in the mountains so that you can see them better

After reassuring you 800 times that he isn’t gonna murder you (you weren’t worried, but he was afraid you thought he would)

He likes to watch murder mystery movies with you

It’s really just a contest to find out who guesses it right first

But after he kept losing he changed it to how ridiculous of a motive he could describe and how close to correct it may be

“She said she has a twin right? Well her eye color is different from her photos. How do we know they didn’t grab the twin on accident? Or the twin isn’t pretending to be her or something”

HOW could he have guessed that

Sigh this is rlly inspired by me bc I did this exact thing and guessed the plot twist

Overall, he’s just really respectful of you. Drinks respect women juice 24/7. Loves complimenting you and spending time with you and never letting you forget how amazing you are.

Marvel

I ship you with Loki!

The Seven one was kinda easy

Prob because there aren’t that many mystic messenger characters

But BOY I struggled here

Until I thought of Loki, I hadn’t even considered him at first (my sister brought him up, as she helps me come up with who to match ppl with)

And YES

He was first drawn to you by how elegantly you carried yourself

Most Midgardians just kind of, slouched through the day

But you stood with impeccable posture, resting most of the weight on your toes. He thought you were some form of royalty at first

And then he saw you perform hoo boy

Okay first of all he definitely had no idea what was happening for a majority of the show

But he kinda liked you and so when you invited him to go he was THERE

Couldn’t stop complimenting you. He thought you were elegant before oh wow

He’s literally not intimidated by you at all, think of all the people he’s had to meet and BS he’s had to deal with

You’re touch-adverse? That’s fine by him

Honestly he doesn’t like cuddling or anything like that himself. Blame it on his childhood or something idc

He will throw insults right back at you. In fact, he usually doesn’t hold back

Okay they’re never inherently mean but I don’t know they may be kinda questionable

He wouldn’t insult you if he knew you couldn’t handle it

He is NOT very flirty

And by that I mean he will not flirt. Like he just cannot

He still gets lowkey pouty when you flirt with other people, but he can’t blame you. It’s not like he does a good job showering you with that sort of attention and compliments himself

But he does give you attention in other ways

He likes to sit with you, watching as you bake or write or something. He finds it very relaxing

In those moments, that’s when he lets the compliments run wild, talking about how you’re so talented and he likes how you look when you’re concentrated

These moments are the softest he gets. He doesn’t like showing this vulnerable side around anyone else

HAHA can you PLEASE go knife throwing together

You’re both very competitive about it

You know that scene from brave where she shoots her arrow THROUGH another arrow!?

That’s all I can picture but with knives

Homeboy is doing 0 archery with you 0 horseback riding he doesn’t trust those disgusting creatures and archery makes him think of dealing with Clint

He makes fun of you when you see a moth

Like does not let it go

“I thought you weren’t afraid of anything. You’re afraid of this little creature? It doesn’t even know up from down,” he chuckles, pointing at the moth flying around and hitting walls recklessly

Needless to say though he takes care of it for you

He throws an Asgardian party just so he can show you off

Thor’s girlfriend was very unimpressive but you!? You’re so charming to everyone

He really just wants to brag about it to his brother, and you know this full well and let him do so

Y’all like to read together before bed

By reading together I mean sitting on the same couch reading your own books

When you yelp when you’re surprised???

What happened to your poker face?

As much as he wants to find different opportunities to jump out at you and make you squeal, he refrains himself from doing so

It makes the moments when you do freak out much more entertaining

I’d say you’ve very on par with Loki; you have a lot of things in common and a similar approach to life in general

[wdentollaston-blog]

best reptile resources online1

You see, we must teach our children that God's Word is the FINAL authority for everything, We must train them to believe and understand that it requires a childlike faith in the One Who loves them, and saved them from an eternity in hell. These Scriptures helped me...

Assuredly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God as a little child will by no means enter it. - Luke 18:17 (NKJV)

We need to trust and believe. It is as simple as that. Yes, the world will try to sway us and yes, they will mock us. However, God IS, WAS and ALWAYS shall be, and one day every knee will bow before Him. Until then, we must choose to take Him at His Word and be light in this world.

Timothy, guard what God has entrusted to you. Avoid godless, foolish discussions with those who oppose you with their so-called knowledge. Some people have wandered from the faith by following such foolishness. May God's grace be with you all. - 1 Timothy 6:20-21 (NLT)

Getting into long winded discussions over the topics should also be avoided. They are VERY dangerous! Either we believe God's Word is Truth, or we do not. We cannot pick and choose the portions we want to believe and discard the rest.

Inasmuch as we refute arguments and theories and reasonings and every proud and lofty thing that sets itself up best reptile resources online  against the true knowledge of God; and we lead every thought and purpose away captive into the obedience of Christ. - 2 Corinthians 10:5 (amp)

3. Adaptation over Evolved. God did not make a reptile that decided to "evolve" into a bird one day. And, whales did not decide they did not want to live in the ocean anymore, and "evolve" into cows. I do not care how many millions and billions of years need to be believed for this to even be considered. It is simply hog wash! He made reptiles reptiles and birds birds. Any changes are not into completely new species, there are only adaptations to their environment-not evolution and complete 180′s! It is VERY clear in the Word of God:

And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds: livestock, creeping things, and [wild] beasts of the earth according to their kinds. And it was so. And God made the [wild] beasts of the earth according to their kinds, and domestic animals according to their kinds, and everything that creeps upon the earth according to its kind. And God saw that it was good (fitting, pleasant) and He approved it. - Genesis 1:24-25 (amp)

4. Have the Right Resources. If you want your kids to understand Creation and be well educated in the facts, the right resources will be required. There are tons of Creation Science resources for parents. A couple that I use are; The Creation Interpretation by Catie Frates. She is an educated and respected Creation scientist and this book is written in a very easy to understand format. I love it and use it often. She also has another resource that I got when my oldest daughter took a homeschool science class with her. It is a workbook made just for kids called; Creation Science for Kids. It is very hands on and fun for kids.

Do your own search. Just type in Creation Science resources for homeschoolers, parents, kids, etc. You can probably find a ton of free resources that way as well.

5. Make it a Lifestyle. You really need to pay attention. If you are watching a nature show, train your children to find the lies. This will help them recognize truth over false statements. Any time my kids watch something and/or hear billions of billions of years or evolution, they quickly say, "That's a lie!" God Created the universe in SIX days!" or, "Nope, the earth is only a few thousand years old! Not billions!" or, "Nope, GOD made them that way, they did not evolve!" They get it and they catch it, even when I miss it! Sometimes it is quite subtle!

It is also good to talk about how creative God is and what a beautiful world HE Created. Always bring it back to the Lord.

6. God not Mother Nature. In recent years, I hear a lot about "mother nature" and how she is responsible for things in the natural world. Um, no. That is another lie. GOD Created all things in nature, not anyone or anything else.

When a natural disaster happens it is not "mother nature" OR God punishing everyone (although I am sure there are some cases of judgement). It is the weather system that is in place that was Created by God and sometimes storms come. Sometimes they cause a lot of sadness and turmoil. However, it is part of life in a sinful world. Man CHOSE to sin and with it came death, sadness, chaos and pain. The good news is that Jesus overcame sin at the Cross and we can spend eternity in Heaven with the Creator of all things.

7. Make it Fun. Kids learn better when it's fun. There are many ways you can come up against the lie of evolution in a fun way. A few ideas...

Big Bang Theory Lie. Take a bucket of blocks and have your child dump them out on the floor, then place them all back in the bucket and repeat about 3-5 times. Ask them if they think a perfect castle will just happen if they dump the bucket enough. They are sure to laugh at the sheer silliness of the idea.

Billions of Years Theory Lie. If the earth was as old as evolutionists believe, it would have frozen long ago. Earth is in a giant freezer (space). The core is hot, but billions of years passing, makes me think it would not be so hot anymore. Thousands...yes. Billions...um no. A great experiment is to boil a couple eggs and put one in the freezer and one at room temperature until cool. Then, peel both and cut in half. Touch the yolks and determine if they cooled at the same rate or not. Earth is very hot inside and is spinning through ice cold space. What would you determine? Thousands or billions of years? (This idea came from the Creation Science for Kids workbook by Catie Frates.

[paigenotblank]

also hannah and hardy, because i gotta know

Ask and ye shall receive (oh boy, this one got long):

who hogs the duvet - This has a two part answer. When they first get together, and Hardy is at the stage of the relationship where he is too afraid to fart in bed for fear of scaring her off and he honestly cannot believe that Hannah is even in his bed, then it is Hannah who hogs the covers. He lays so still and anxious and praying that he won’t have another heart attack because Hannah Fucking Baxter is laying next to him. The longer they are together and the more comfortable he becomes in their relationship, the more easily sleep comes to him. Until finally one day, he’s like a freakin’ snoring log, and he wraps himself up in the blankets and poor Hannah hasn’t got a chance at recovering any of them. She just shrugs though and cuddles into his back to keep warm.

who texts/rings to check how their day is going - Look, Hardy would forget his head if it wasn’t attached to his body, especially when he is deep in an investigation. Hannah understands though and send him emojis and silly little texts throughout the day and a reminder to eat lunch. Hardy pretends to be annoyed, but he secretly loves it.

who’s the most creative when it comes to gifts - Hannah has a natural affinity for just finding the right gift for the right person for the right occasion. She doesn’t spend a lot of time thinking about it, but it’s always perfect. Hardy spends more time worrying and debating and really, really tries to be creative. More often than not he puts off buying things until the very last minute because he just cannot decide and then he scrambles to find an open shop and ultimately shows up with wine, flowers, chocolates, and a sheepish expression. There was that one time he surprised Hannah with a trip to the Maldives, though, that completely caught her off guard. (He noticed a pink bikini in her things, asked Miller the next morning where she thought a romantic beach destination might be, and voilà, one of the easiest…most romantic gifts of his life.)

who gets up first in the morning - Hardy. He often goes into work early and Hannah likes to snuggle in the warm spot he leaves behind.

who suggests new things in bed - Hannah. There is literally no other way to answer this question.

who cries at movies - Hardy. He is a soft boi wrapped in a prickly exterior, but give him Judy Hopps pinning a badge onto new police academy graduate, Nick Wilde, and he’s a blubbering mess.

who gives unprompted massages - At the beginning of their relationship, it was always Hannah. She’s sensuous and tactile. But over time, Hardy grows used to the touching and being touched in return and eventually he can give as good as he gets.

who fusses over the other when they’re sick - Bless Hardy, he tries. Hannah is not a good patient. Let’s be real though, he is not either - the only difference is that Hannah doesn’t put up with his shit. “You don’t want the soup I heated up, fine. Die for all I care!” (She cares and he eats the soup.) Hannah, on the other hand, threw the mug of tea he brought her after finding out he microwaved it. She apologized, but he did always use the kettle to make her tea going forward.

who gets jealous easiest - Hardy is a always in a constant state of quiet jealousy. It takes a very long time and a lot of shagging to get him to a point where he isn’t afraid she is going to leave him. So, he does a lot of grin and baring it. He draws the line at someone touching her though. The first time it happens and he pushes someone up against a wall for groping her without her consent, she is so turned on, she drags him from the bar to the loo and fucks him (or lets him fuck her) against the door to the ladies.

who has the most embarrassing taste in music - Hannah. She listens to anything and everything. She sings off key and dances like a dork to make Hardy laugh. But she also has the best taste in music, and often uses it to set the mood at home.

who collects something unusual - Hannah. Have you seen her collection of sex toys? And while she may have gotten rid of a lot of things when they moved in together, her collection is still extensive.

who takes the longest to get ready - Have you met Hardy? Have you seen how he dresses? Okay, to be fair it used to take him a long time to decide what to wear when he was trying to impress Hannah at the beginning of their relationship. It didn’t take him very long to shower, shave and dress though. Hannah, on the other hand, has a routine™ that she keeps to almost every day. It is designed to slay, and slay she does.

who is the most tidy and organised - Hannah, it’s a throwback to when she needed to keep Hannah and Belle separate. She had a lot of personal rules for herself, and while many have been relaxed, that energy still comes out in how she keeps her things.

who gets most excited about the holidays - Hardy dreads the holidays because it almost always means more work for him. Inevitably some idiot does something stupid after over-indulging in eggnog and his time with his family is cut short. He does love having Daisy visit though. Hannah loves getting to spend the time with Alec and Daisy, but dreads having to visit her own family. If her mother doesn’t stop asking when she and Alec are going to have children of their own, she might just scream.

who is the big spoon/little spoon - At the beginning of the night, Alec starts off as the big spoon, but at some point during the night, they switch, and Alec wakes up most mornings with Hannah’s breasts pressed up against his back.

who gets most competitive when playing games and/or sports - Hardy doesn’t like to lose, either at work or at play, but he was unprepared for how all in Hannah goes when she decides she is going to win at something. It is easiest to just get out of her way.

who starts the most arguments - Hannah is very opinionated and isn’t afraid to tell Hardy when he’s being a pillock. Though when he is being particularly hard-headed, her favorite insult to lob at him is, “Miller is right, you are a knob!” After he has a chance to cool down, he reflects on what he’s done and will apologize if she has a point. If he stands by his actions, he usually ends up yelling at her as to why he acted like a knob (usually its because he loves his daughter or his friends or her) and then she throws herself at him and they have angry sex or make-up sex and by the time they’re done, neither remembers that they even had an argument.

who suggests that they buy a pet - Hardy thinks that Hannah might like the company during the day, so he suggests it, but Hannah really doesn’t want the responsibility of making sure an animal stays alive. She’s perfectly happy to flit about town as the desire strikes her or to go to the beach or when she’s missing Alec something fierce break out the toys she still has and take naughty pictures which she send to his mobile.

what couple traditions they have - they are a non-traditional couple and as such don’t put much stock in things that other couples might find important. Hardy tries to get home from work early on their anniversary, but it doesn’t always happen and it’s not a big deal to either of them. He will take her out for a nice dinner to celebrate, though sometimes it’s a week after the fact. Hannah tries to keep their sex life spicy and Hardy will go along with almost anything she throws at him. If she want to be blindfolded and have hot wax dripped on her, count him in. If she wants to play with handcuffs and riding crops and vibrators, well, ok if it makes her happy. If she gets drunk one night and orders a strap-on because “it’s hilarious, Alec,” he’ll let her peg him as long as Daisy’s not visiting at the time. And actually, he finds he enjoys it more than he expected he would, so she reserves it for use on special occasions. He comes to the realization that all those things he thought he was doing for her, she was doing for him, and so it really was all about them. And they are stronger for it.

what tv shows they watch together - Alec hates TV. He hates the news, he has reporters, he thinks those singing shows are shite. But the minute that he finds out Hannah’s book is being made into a TV show, he is mentally rearranging his schedule so that he is always home to watch it with her.

what other couple they hang out with - Miller and this bloke that Hannah introduced her to - he’s a screenwriter on her new show - divorces with two little mites of his own; also, Bambi and Byron come to visit twice a year.

how they spend time together as a couple - they do a lot of cuddling at home and shagging. They stroll along the river behind their chalet and sneak snogs along the way. They go to Miller’s for dinner and backyard bbqs in the summer. They go dancing, though Hardy hates it, Hannah can usually get him to at least join her on the dance floor for a few songs (as long as they’re slow and he can hold her close). Hannah adores going to wine and painting events, she can’t paint worth a damn and usually gives up on the still life before she finishes her first glass. There was that one time she decided straight away to paint Hardy in the buff, the instructor was scandalized by how large she’s made his cock (Hannah insists it’s to scale, Hardy refuses to discuss it). She hung it over their bed.

who made the first move - Hannah. Hardy nearly passed out when they first spoke. Ok, he may have been having a cardiac event, but Hannah got him to hospital, pretended to be his wife, and then when he gained consciousness berated him for not taking care of himself which scared the bejesus out of her as he collapse in front of her. In the end, he decided staying under the care of the doctor was better than checking himself out and having to deal with an angry Hannah. But as you can see, it all turned out all right for Alec.

who brings flowers home - Alec is the king of flowers (and wine and chocolate). Hannah never lets him live it down after Miller told her that story. But she still shags him silly whenever he comes home with them for her.

who is the best cook - Hannah. She tries and can usually follow a recipe. Alec thought microwaving tea was acceptable behavior.

Send me a ship and I’ll tell you who…

[joannaofportugal]

JOANNA DE BRAGANZA / / CHALLENGE 004 

eleven tests completed & eleven explainations wrote out. 

SOUL TYPE TEST | the sage

A Sage soul is one whose role in life is collective expression, communicating big ideas with as many as possible. Natural extraverts, playful expression is fundamental to the Sage’s nature, though they are more adept at entertaining an audience than in coming up with original ideas. They are born attention-seekers, very much at home in front of an audience, taking centre stage. The bigger the audience the better, but any audience will do. The natural goal of any Sage is to express the highs and lows of life for all to see, sharing lifes lessons in an appealing way to create shared understanding. All soul types can manifest positively or negatively in any given moment, as the individual chooses. When manifesting negatively, Sages lapse into ORATION, i.e. hogging the spotlight, loving the sound of their own voice. The positive manifestation is COMMUNICATION, being on the same wavelength as the audience. Famous Sages include Mae West, Oscar Wilde, Bill Clinton, Jim Carrey

NOTE: reading through the soul type was very on-par with joanna’s very person, i would class her as a YOUNG SAGE who chases fame as nowdays celebraties do. she hogs the spotlight, the loves the sound of her own voice - what else could she be? 

MBTI TEST : entp-a ( the debater )

The Debater personality type is the ultimate devil’s advocate, thriving on the process of shredding arguments and beliefs and letting the ribbons drift in the wind for all to see. Debaters don’t do this because they are trying to achieve some deeper purpose or strategic goal, but for the simple reason that it’s fun. No one loves the process of mental sparring more than Debaters, as it gives them a chance to exercise their effortlessly quick wit, broad accumulated knowledge base, and capacity for connecting disparate ideas to prove their points.

NOTE: i was surprised, i thought her mbti would come out as something a little more dramatic rather than chasing knowledge or logic in it’s most intense form. i’m not too agreeing with the result, but maybe i can use this information to strengthen her person - and i like the ‘devil’s advocate’ side to it. 

CREEPIEST THING ABOUT YOU TEST: your possessiveness is really uncomfortable

It’s obvious to everyone around you that you feel the need to keep everything just the way you like it, and that insistence often borders on obsession. Your persistence, materialism, and sentimentality can prevent you from ever letting things go, and the more you care about them, the more stubbornly you defend your right to own them forever. Sorry to say, but there are some things, like memories and loved ones, you simply can’t own, and trying to stake your claim over them just makes you seem unbalanced and creepy. It probably wouldn’t hurt to quit being such a hoarder, too - none of your guests enjoy trying to find a seat in a room piled high with reminders of everything you refuse to let die.

NOTE: this is quite onbrand but wouldn’t be the creepiest thing to me when it comes to joanna - though she is posessive i don’t agree that it’s overwhelmingly disgusting.. i’d say it’s her rudest, or need to be right all the time.

TEMPERAMENTS TEST: sanguine 23/24 choleric 18/24 melancholic 05/24 phlegmatic 05/24

Your temperament is sanguine. The sanguine temperament is fundamentally spontaneous and pleasure-seeking; sanguine people are sociable and charismatic. They tend to enjoy social gatherings, making new friends and tend to be boisterous. They are usually quite creative and often daydream. However, some alone time is crucial for those of this temperament. Sanguine can also mean sensitive, compassionate and thoughtful. Sanguine personalities generally struggle with following tasks all the way through, are chronically late, and tend to be forgetful and sometimes a little sarcastic. Often, when they pursue a new hobby, they lose interest as soon as it ceases to be engaging or fun. They are very much people persons. They are talkative and not shy. Sanguines generally have an almost shameless nature, certain that what they are doing is right. They have no lack of confidence.

NOTE: this is a much easier answer for me to digest, though joanna isn’t evil she certaily has a rudness that can come across as evil to some people - or perhaps she truly is just a bully. and the last quote, ‘they havae no last of confidence’ is right on the target! though of course, as a young girl there may be bouts of insecurity.. which may evolve into humility or down-right foolery. 

LAWFUL ALIGNMENT TEST: chaotic neutral

A chaotic neutral character follows his whims. He is an individualist first and last. He values his own liberty but doesn't strive to protect others' freedom. He avoids authority, resents restrictions, and challenges traditions. A chaotic neutral character does not intentionally disrupt organizations as part of a campaign of anarchy. To do so, he would have to be motivated either by good (and a desire to liberate others) or evil (and a desire to make those different from himself suffer). A chaotic neutral character may be unpredictable, but his behavior is not totally random. He is not as likely to jump off a bridge as to cross it.

NOTE: in terms of alignment i think this is the safest option to describe joanna, she is no hero but she is no villain either.. she looks out for herself more than anthing else, though most choices come at random and at various paces.

GREEK DIETY TEST: poseidon

He was god of the Sea and other waters; of earthquakes; and of horses. In pre-Olympian Bronze Age Greece, he was venerated as a chief deity at Pylos and Thebes. Poseidon was protector of seafarers, and of many Hellenic cities and colonies. He is noble and powerful, and is recognized as a figure of leadership.

NOTE: like what happened when i took the same quiz for marius, i lost my first results. my first was aphrodite, which i didn’t necessarily agree with - then came poseidon. i’m happier with this result because poseidon was such a crass and awful man who made hell a lot worse than hades ever could’ve - he killed many whilst at sea, and in my opinion, was one of the most powerful gods of greek mythology. 

ENNEAGRAM TEST: type 7 / 7w8 ( the enthusiast )

People of this personality type are essentially concerned that their lives be an exciting adventure. Sevens are future oriented, restless people who are generally convinced that something better is just around the corner. They are quick thinkers who have a great deal of energy and who make lots of plans. They tend to be extroverted, multi-talented, creative and open minded. They are enthusiasts who enjoy the pleasures of the senses and who don't believe in any form of self-denial.

NOTE: she is certainly a pleasure seeker and planner for distraction and i think this is the closest i’d get to describing joanna though i wouldn’t call her creative due to the fact that she has little skill to anything!

SEXUALITY TEST: 40% heterosexual 30% bisexual 20% asexual 10% homosexual

this needs no description though i will write that of course she hasn’t had sex with anyone yet due to her position? it would be wrong for her to do that as a princess and thus has not experimented with anyone either than taking a few kisses from princes and noblemen. also, she has yet to be awoken to the sense that being attracted to girls is normal, so this quiz is entirely random to the point that it’s made for modern day human beings, not ones from 1455. 

POKEMON TEST: flying type

The Flying type is all about the self. You possess traits that are often sought-after: Confidence, self-respect, and bravery radiate from your being. You are a very self-aware individual, and that knowledge can be employed to great use both alone and socially. Remember, however, to not get too big of a head, Flying-type: Your confidence is good, but empathy is better. Often, you may find yourself at the whimsy of society. You are honorable, but also constantly worried about your self-image remaining pristine. If you allow yourself to become too wrapped up in what others think of you, you may become too flighty and scattered for your own good. Remember to relax, and let your spirit soar!

NOTE: though i find it hard to relate joanna to a pokemon the description is pretty good and i can fit joanna into it - though i’d rather see her as a spoilt and messy jigglypuff. 

TEA TYPE: hibiscus tea

You’re a *lot*. But that’s not a bad thing! You’re unafraid to take up space and make your voice heard. You love being the center of attention and are willing to cause a scene to swivel the spotlight toward you. You’ve got a sharp tongue (you’ve probably been called sassy at least once in your life) and you can use that for good or evil. Your tartness might not be for everyone, but those who get you love your larger-than-life presence.

NOTE: once again it’s pretty lose to joanna’s character and i particaly like the line ‘your tartness might not be for everyone’ 

BIG FIVE PERSONALITY: 

of course i wasn’t going to pay for this quiz so i only have a little information to share: OPENNESS 52% CONSIENTIOUSNESS 10% EXTRAVERSION 100% AGREEABLENESS 21% NEUROTICISM 33%

NOTE: extraversion is a funny one, and i really like the look of this type of quiz but alas i’m poor and i’m not gonna spend money on a made up character! 

and as i did with marius i ended up making a birth chat for her, who was born 29th may, 1438 at 17:39am. 

[themirthfulroadrunners]

New Mexico Just off the Turquoise Trail

The first two days of this trip were troublesome, nearly problematic… sorta. We got an early (early!) start, leaving home at 4:45. Traffic wasn’t bad, not even the trucks. Of the 8 construction zones that Google maps identified, which turned into 11-12, none of them slowed us down much. No merging problems, and never below about 60mph. So we arrived at our reserved hotel at about lunch time – much earlier than we usually stop driving. (Exaggeration maybe, and gaining an hour at the New Mexico border did affect our timing. Plus, we had reserved a hotel, due to so many travelers escaping lockdown). But we used the free afternoon to drive a scenic road that was actually more cool than scenic with the find of some awesome old churches. And the location of where Coronado stopped over for 4 days to build a bridge across the Pecos River. We tried to find Pecos Bill. Maybe next time.

The troublesome, nearly problematic parts were in the area of our energy. After the activities of the 2nd day, we were toast. Debbie was so weary as to be sick from it. The hotel bed was heavenly, tho, so good rest was had.

 The morning drive out of our stop (Santa Rosa) was horrific with the truckers. The rudest in the world apparently drive I-40 going west from Santa Rosa and we interacted with many of them. Speaking of Santa Rosa, the California city that was burned up in 2020, is where Wayne moved from in 1979 to return to the land of ancestry (on his dad’s side), Arkansas. Working in the Post Office in Santa Rosa, CA, he saw a ton of misdirected letters that should have gone to New Mexico. Conversely, a lot of Santa Rosa, CA mail that was supposed to go to another address in Santa Rosa, CA, took a side trip to Santa Rosa, NM first.

 Our next hotel in Albuquerque, the city of Debbie’s birth (thanks to the United States Air Force) was touted as a ‘full-service’ facility, which means no free breakfast. Don’t know about you, but for 150 million bucks, we want free waffles! (and yogurt) And we ain’t payin’ no $25 for a hotel breakfast where you can’t even order what you want (free waffles!) Also, now, mind you that this is during the Covid19 Delta-variant-surging-wave, one of the two elevators in a 6-floor hotel is closed. Once while we were on the only operative one, descending from the 5th floor, it stopped at the 3rd where 2 employees and a customer charged in to join us. NO! We scored a strike bowling them down as we clamored over them to get out. WHAT’S A’MATTER WITH PEOPLE? (Besides bein’ knocked out.)

 We got to our house sit and guess what? The promised hot tub doesn’t work, the homeowner had compromised the wiring while tryin’ to electrificate a tree that grows through the deck. After immediately kicking their two dogs (NO, we didn’t), the homeowners pledged that the promised hot tub would be repaired before our house sit was to start. Afraid for their pets’ lives, they did, it was, and a hot tub at 7000’ is sublime. All is well in New Mexico. And even better yet, the owners invited us back before we even unpacked. Now we feel bad for our earlier disappointment.

 Speaking of hot tubs, this trip afforded us the best in terms of stars, satellites, and shooting (falling?) stars. They were awesome.

 New Mexico, which should change its name to Carson State, or Navajo State, seems to have a distinct lack of historic, or cultural, heroes. Coronado, the famed Spanish explorer abused the native Indians (Pueblo, Navajo, Zuni, Apache, Comanche, Ute, Kiowa), and probably more, to the degree that they revolted in 1680. There was blood, followed by bad blood. Coronado was solely interested in exploiting both the people, and their wealth, had he ever found the lost cities of gold. Coronado aside, there were famous trappers and hunters, but none who benefitted the development of the state, or any people groups within. Kit Carson seems to be the singular stand out as far as heroic figures go. (There may be a bunch of indigenous folks, or folks of Spanish ancestry worthy of the acclaim, I don’t know.) Starved for notoriety of some sort (even bad press is better than no press), modern New Mexicans (Carsonians) point to Billy the Kid – almost to the degree of the George Washington slept here hype. While eastern states laud actual heroes: Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, John Paul Jones, Paul Revere, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, General Anthony Wayne (hah!), Ashley McBride (ha-ha!), and the like, New Mexicans extol a murdering punk, a villain. Oh well, even bad publicity …

Despite the obvious lack of historical heroes, New Mexico does not lack for historical enchantment. The sights are spectacular, especially the mountains and even the smaller rock formations. The people are friendly (excepting the murderous Billy). The food is great. Wayne prefers the red chili peppers while Debbie, the green. Wayne likes to actually see the mold in his food.

After a short two-mile hike with a thousand-foot elevation gain, it was time for Sparkly, our glittery black Ford Edge, to finally get his way, a trip up a bona fide Jeep/ATV road/trail. It used to be a road. In fact, we drove it with ease two years ago. A local told us that the monsoons they’ve had washed it away. Sparkly wanted to go fast, so Wayne let him have his head, doubling the recommended 2mph. Sparkly was sometimes difficult to restrain.

 The adventure was worth it, offering a Stephen King Misery experience. A mountain lion crossed the ‘road’ just ahead of us. Wayne stopped and got out of the car to check out where it had headed. (maybe not the most clever of options) Low and behold, (BTW, we loathe and despise cliches, but sometimes it’s better than a sharp stick in the eye) A hundred or so feet down the nearly 90 degree drop-off was a vehicle smashed into a tree. Though there were no obvious signs of a recent departure from the ‘road’, it could have fairly flown over the nearby brush. Or it could have gone over when there was snow cover. Or … anyway, going down to check whether there was a corpse in the vehicle while theoretically possible, didn’t seem very well-advised considering that there might very well be a mountain lion finishing up what might be left and much preferring the live meat presenting himself on a veritable platter – Wayne.

Surprisingly, there was cell service in this remote mountainous area. From a Sandia Mountain trail map handout, we got through to someone who transferred the call to the proper authority. While they appreciated our call, they’d been aware of the vehicle and that it had been there for some time. But how weird, that the mountain lion crossed exactly where we could see the crashed vehicle. What if it wasn’t the same crash that the authority thought they knew about? What if the driver was just then coming to, only to see a mountain lion eating his face? (Limiting Wayne’s Stephen King intake.)

 Another mile down the ‘road’ we saw a mountain lion kitten, though it was barely a kitten, nearly as large as its mother, and almost devoid of kitten colorations and markings. We watched it in awe for some time before thinking to take a photo. You just have to believe us (or not) that the blond blur in the below picture is the kitten.

 Another quarter mile brought us to our promised hike, a trail to what was described as a Cave Man Cave. Unless we’d unknowingly driven across the Atlantic, it is doubtful that cave men had ever seen New Mexico, let alone inhabited this cave. More than likely the occupants, for which sufficient evidence supported the probability, were ancient indigenous people, no doubt using the cave to hide from mountain lions at night. The cave was cool, but there are better in Arkansas.

 A serendipitous hike in the Sandia Mountains showed us a plethora of wildflowers; most were varieties this Arkansas couple do not normally see. But the star of the show was a large mule deer buck who calmly sauntered in the trail behind us when we stopped for a rest (hiking at high altitude is hard, y’all!).

A retracing of a trip up the Turquoise Trail from 2 years ago put us re-hiking a trail in Cerrillos State Park, just south of Santa Fe. Several old mineral mines dot this trail and their history is revealed in very good signage. Passing through Madrid (unlike the one in Spain, this one is pronounced MAA’-drid), we were stopped for several minutes on Hwy 14 due to a ‘special event’ which we could not see. When allowed to pass through the artsy, cutesy town, we saw evidence of a movie being filmed. After exploring Cerrillos, we returned to Madrid for ice cream and got to watch some of the preparations for more filming. We did not get to see the part where the clipboard snaps and someone yells, “ACTION!” but it was enough. This same town was used for some of the scenes in the motorcycle film Wild Hogs and one building still boasts the ‘Diner’ sign that was added only for the film. Sign on the door says they do not serve food there. One can understand the confusion for tourists. We found out the movie being filmed during our trip is titled Robots and is a futuristic comedy starring Shailene Woodley and written by one of the writers on Borat. Cool beans. We ran into the film company yet again a day or two later, this time in a couple of sites in the Sandia Mountains. Whether the finished movie turns out to be good or meh, we’ll be watching it to catch glimpses of the gorgeous New Mexico countryside. New Mexico and Colorado have several movie ranches sprinkled in the very scenic areas.

 15 months, or so, ago we were house-sitting in Durango when paper Closed for Covid signs went up on doors in business-after-business. Here’s one for the whole town.

 While touristing Old Town Albuquerque we suddened upon a shop managed by a very personable guy who gave us a cup of Arabica/piñon coffee. When we house-sat in Sante Fe last year we talked to a State Park Ranger dude who told us all bout people picking piñon nuts. Having marvelously (Debbie word) passed the aroma tests, we bought a box of K-cups of this unique, pinon flavored brew. The personable guy turned out to be the artist, David Behrens (DavidBehrensGallery.com and Facebook.com/DavidBehrensGallery).

 This trip ranks among the best, or at the top of the list: obedient and FUN pets, very clean and comfortable home, fantastic hiking and scenery (despite the photo-compromising smoke), and very gracious hosts who offered us their entire refrigerator! Regarding the smoke, we shouldn’t be too self-centered considering it may be what’s left of someone’s home passing overhead.

Here are more pix from the trip. Enjoy!

[swimmingeaglestarlight]

Sarah Broom The Yellow House

Sarah Broom The Yellow House

Sarah Broom The Yellow House Award

Sarah M Broom The Yellow House

Wild Hog in The Woods Coffee House - Intimate, live performance venue in Madison, WI; Southern Wisconsin Bluegrass Music Association - Promoting Bluegrass music in Southern Wisconsin and beyond; Sam Bayard Collections. Hill Country Tunes - Historic 1944 collection of tunes from Western PA fiddlers, including Sarah Armstrong, compiled by Sam Bayard. Feb 4, 2021 - Explore LINDA's board 'Small farmhouse plans' on Pinterest. See more ideas about house design, farmhouse plans, small farmhouse plans.

Sarah M. Broom was writing long before Hurricane Katrina. What would ultimately become her memoir, The Yellow House, started as a collection of notes and essays on the house she grew up in, her family, her neighbors, and her local community in New Orleans. She began in the late 1990s after leaving home for college, and it eventually became impossible for her to see the work as anything other than a book project: a family portrait and a history of New Orleans, which would explore the larger social narrative of the United States.

‘The Yellow House’ by Sarah M. Broom is an absorbing debut that is both memoir and commentary about her New Orleans East family in a pre and post-Hurricane Katrina world. Broom’s writing style is inviting, filled with facts, and enough descriptive detail to keep me engaged.

Sarah Broom: The Yellow House May 28, 2020 by Michael Schulder • At Home With Authors • 66min If you hope to immerse yourself in our one-hour conversation with Sarah Broom but only have a moment to spare, please sample the first two minutes.

Sarah Broom’s The Yellow House is a memoir that is at once intensely personal and of wide and universal appeal. Broom brings her journalistic experience to bear in order to trace her family’s.

While it’s impossible to underscore Hurricane Katrina’s impact on her family and the city at large, Broom’s hope with The Yellow House is to reveal the ways in which Katrina was no singular catastrophe. “When we boil Katrina down to a weather event, we really miss the point,” Broom told me recently over the phone. “It’s so crucially important for me to put Katrina in context, to situate it as one in a long line of things that are literally baked into the soil of this place.”

Broom recognized these connections, but her aim was not so clear to publishers. “The main complaint was that I needed to choose,” Broom recalled. “That I was either going to write a book about New Orleans or a book about my family, but not both—which was so confounding to me that I couldn’t even process it.” While memoir is often pigeonholed as subjective and emotional, the genre is a genuine entry point for history: Collective historical narratives are drawn from individual experiences. Broom writes in her book, “The facts of the world before me inform, give shape and context to my own life. The Yellow House was witness to our lives. When it fell down, something in me burst. My mother is always saying, Begin as you want to end. But my beginning precedes me.”

Recommended Reading

The Atlantic Creating Podcast Examining Hurricane Katrina, Hosted by Vann Newkirk

The Books Briefing: The New Literature of Burnout

Kate Cray

Recommended Reading

The Atlantic Creating Podcast Examining Hurricane Katrina, Hosted by Vann Newkirk

The Books Briefing: The New Literature of Burnout

Kate Cray

In the book, Broom characterizes the events leading up to her mother’s purchase of the Yellow House in 1961, starting with the development of their New Orleans East neighborhood in the late 1950s. “From the beginning, no one could agree on what to call the place. But namelessness is a form of naming,” she writes. Broom notes that a pamphlet written by a local advertising agency promoting the area’s early development stated, “Here lies the opportunity for the city’s further expansion, toward the complete realization of its destiny.” She then offers periodicals and mayoral speeches that show how the area’s promise never came to pass. This scheme to drain the wetlands and get rich, Broom writes, was “not so different from the founding tale of New Orleans itself.”

Broom’s interest in her family’s neighborhood baffled others. Discovering archival photos of her father and fact-checking locations for a memoir was one thing, but researching the deterioration of residential zoning in New Orleans East to explore systematic disenfranchisement was another. No history had been written of the area; neither academics nor writers considered it essential to do so. After Broom pressed one city-records employee about zoning issues, his superior remarked to Broom, “We don’t have the liberty of going around and examining things the way we think makes sense.” It’s a telling statement, given that Broom’s book is an effort to take otherwise separate narratives and weave them together in order to construct a more expansive perspective on American history.

Before undertaking the creation of a heretofore unwritten social history, Broom returned to her earliest inspirations: her family and neighbors. The youngest of 12 siblings, Broom developed the habit of writing down conversations. This act of note-taking took root out of love, but over time it evolved into the motivation for her work as a writer. “For some reason, I had a very strong sense that everything [my family] said is critically important,” she told me. “I just love how they put words together.” In what could have been a simple exchange about what it was like for her mother to have a 12th child, Broom writes about the delicate nuance of managing the conversation.

When you told Dad you were pregnant again, did he say something?

No.

What did he say?

Nothing.

Not a single word?

Here we go again! You were born in seventy-niyen. They say you were in distress. All them children I had, ain’t none of them ever been in no distress. And you have been in it ever since.

Interviewing her mother required great care and boundaries. As Broom notes in the book, “Mom closes down passageways to memory when something doesn’t make sense or when the thing or person no longer exists, which is possibly the same thing.” Broom told me that she had to work to “move beyond hagiography … not think of her as a mother, but to think of her as just a woman who made a series of choices. I created a physical distance for myself.”

Sarah Broom The Yellow House

A hybrid project, The Yellow House required a lucid and thoughtful structure. “I made no distinction then or now between the house, my family, the street, New Orleans East, New Orleans, America. Those were all the same subject to me,” Broom told me. “And so how I did it structurally, first, I started with a family timeline: ‘In 1914, X happened.’ Then I layered on top of the family timeline the city timeline. Then I layered atop the city timeline, almost like a painting—there’s an actual file where this happens—I layered American history, and then I layered on top of that New Orleans East history. In that way, I could see very clearly the interstices where things met up. And then I could understand the story differently.”

Broom found that the absence of her home and the memories that collected there drove the framework of The Yellow House. “I knew when I started collecting evidence, so to speak, that I was trying to find the architecture of the book,” she said. “I needed to know where the beams were and what was the supporting wall. I literally thought of it as a house because I knew that I was trying to put a lot in it.” Using movement, not unlike sections of a piece of music, Broom found “a structure that felt a little malleable, where within each segment there could be differences in rhythm, and pace, and tone, and overall feeling, so that theoretically you could move the pieces around and still have a story.” The constant motion shares a double meaning with the themes of the book—migration and the threat of gentrification. “The book itself needed to feel and have this sense that this kind of displacement and scattering—inside the city and even now, just with people getting kicked out of neighborhoods and the rent being too high,” Broom said. “The book would contain this feeling that things were moving all over the place and needed to be gathered back together again.”

The Yellow House’s destruction, first by the flood and then by the city’s demolition of what remained, and the subsequent diaspora of her family, left Broom with an aching sense of absence. To confront this, she inserted herself more fully into the fabric of the book. As a teenager, she took two unreliable city buses from New Orleans East to the French Quarter to her job as a barista. As a successful adult, Broom returned to the city’s most historic district, a space that depends on the African American service workers who often cannot afford to live within its boundaries. Once behind the counter, Broom was now the local.

She sought to upend the conventional wisdom about this tourist-heavy area at the port of New Orleans, once a site of slave trading but now a fantasy that thrives on hedonistic behavior, southern charm, and decadence. “I’m always trying to make it about me in the French Quarter, about the interactions I’m having and how I’m seeing it specifically so I could turn these very trotted-out ideas on their head,” she told me. “If you’re trying to sort of examine the underbelly of something, you have to be able to move with the discovery and be malleable, so to speak.”

Living in the French Quarter placed Broom squarely in the city’s mythological and cultural heart. Moving from the periphery to the city center, Broom laid claim to a place that she was always made to feel was out of her reach. Too often geographic displacement narrows the comprehensive record of a place, privileging certain people with the final word on what is deemed history. Broom had to return to the city’s gem, home to its greatest pleasures and its greatest shame, to write a story that would reconcile her losses with the losses of others. She expanded the collective understanding of American history in the process.

Sarah M. Broom’s debut book The Yellow Housereads like a multifaceted map, not just of a place but an expanse of time, marking both relationships and absences. Part scrapbook and part oral history, it is an expertly curated museum exhibit of Broom’s family history. It is also a portrait of New Orleans East across the last 100 years.

Broom expertly starts from a time before she was born, enabling her to narrate her own birth and her early years. Through archival research, interviews, and her memories, Broom weaves a story that is wholly hers, without neglecting the lives of the many characters around her, including her mother, siblings, neighbors, and friends.

The memories and family tales recounted range from small, deeply personal moments—rich sensory descriptions of her surroundings on the day she put on her first pair of glasses—to the highly public and politicized. On the fourteenth anniversary of Katrina, Broom’s book not only remembers the disaster, but challenges readers to reckon with social and political structures in New Orleans that predated Katrina by over a century. Of the news coverage of that storm, she writes: “Those of us who were born to New Orleans already knew its underbellies. Storms, of all sorts, were facts of our lives. Those images shown on the news of fellow citizens drowned, abandoned, and calling for help were not news to us, but still further evidence of what we long ago knew.”

Sarah Broom The Yellow House Award

The titular shotgun house in New Orleans East is one of the central characters in the book. Already sinking into the soft earth when Broom’s mother purchased it in 1961, the yellow house on Wilson Street was not in a glamorous enough part of the city to appear on maps, but it was sold with the promise of a bright future. Cleaved in two during the storm, the yellow house lives on in Broom’s search to determine who has a right to the property, raising questions of governance, jurisdiction, and inequality. This book is filled with questions. Most go unanswered, but they provide a thrumming energy. What do we mean when we say home? How does one find home beyond the physical? How do we create these sacred spaces and who do we hold tightly?

The memoir-historiography hybrid is largely successful at creating an intricate narrative of family and place, but the four parts of the book feel disparate. They are written in different modes and the naming conventions of the short chapters are not consistent. At times, these structural elements do not feel precise or intentionally lawless, which distracts from the momentum of the story.

Sarah M Broom The Yellow House

Early in the book, Broom writes what feels like a provocation, part promise and part warning: “When people tell you their stories, they can say whatever they want.” What seems to be an offhand axiom at the beginning of the book turns out to be a central tenet throughout. Her telling of her own story is a testament to what we have to hold onto after forces of nature destroy our lives: family lore, and the moments that hang in our memories.

[rainstormcolors]

Prideshipping for the ship meme (Are you surprised?)

I apologize for thewait! Thank you for your patience! Though to be honest, this exercise is morefor my own sake in building ideas and adding detail to these ships, and ifother people happen to get something out of it, that’s only a bonus. (At somepoint I’ll be answering for Heartshipping too.)

And of course theseare only my interpretations/opinions.

There are two waysPride can be approached: either Seto makes visits to the Netherworld, or Atemthrough some means exists in the modern world. I’ll try to acknowledge thedifferences where appropriate in my answers.

I think Seto makingroutine trips to the Netherworld would be an alright choice for the couple.It’s intriguing how Seto is both so independent as a person and yet so co-dependenton Atem, but I think a long distance relationship would work out well for thetwo. Seto needs space but would understand he has someone who loves, desires,and supports him even as they’re physically apart. Likewise, I think Atem wouldbe satisfied in what they share. I characterize Atem as more calm and at peacepost-canon and I think he’s both loving and independent, and he’d cherish howdeeply Seto feels for him and how they’ve both followed each other from thestart.

-

What they watch during movie dates and what kind ofsnacks they get from concessions.

Again, I don’tthink Seto watches much television or movies. But for some reason, I imagineAtem might really dig documentaries. It’s not just about absorbing informationhe hasn’t yet learned of the modern world. Rather I think he may actually enjoythe act of learning itself, given it’s in an entertaining package. I think he’dlike watching other genres of film too, though more casually. It would takesome time for him to develop his own tastes with it, since he wouldn’t be astired with clichés and tropes as most people.

Seto might bringdownloaded media to Atem in the Netherworld, and they’d sit on the palacerooftop over a candled city and under the deep starry sky, leaning into eachother as a floating panel of light plays the movie. Seto might become bored andbegin making plans for his work, but he’s still sitting there and Atem is restingagainst him and their warmth pools together, and when the film is over Atemasks him to maybe bring some new movies for next time. “Maybe one with moreaction so you don’t get bored.” (Atem noticed.)

-

Which one gets in to a fightwith the other’s parents.                                                                    

If we’re in themodern world, neither one has a living parent. In the Netherworld, there’s allkinds of possibilities to play with here.

If Atem’s fatherwas present in the Netherworld, I think Atem would be close to him. He soclearly carried affection for his father’s memory in the series’ final arc. ButSeto would keep his distance from Aknamkanon.Aside from Seto’s sharply asocial nature, I think he’d feel like he wasencroaching and he’d also feel out of place within that father/son bond.

I consider Atem andYugi to have a brotherly affection for each other, and based on the ending toDSoD, it seems Seto’s warmed a small bit to Yugi. (I’m a sucker for Rivalshipbromance regardless.) I imagine Mokuba would figure out his brother is gay andinvolved with Atem before Seto actually comes out to him, and Mokuba would besupportive.

There’s somethingvery complex going on between Mokuba and Seto and Atem in DSoD (it’s awhirlpool of love, hate, fear, and hope) and there aren’t immediate answershere and the water would need to smooth. Mokuba and Seto already had a complexrelationship; Atem and Seto already had a complex relationship. I can’t reallydistill it so simply. But I think they’d come to an understanding. I think apart of Seto might be ashamed, while Mokuba dearly wants his brother to findsome patch of happiness even if Mokuba carries a splotch of resentment. (Ithink the fandom takes it for granted that even in the anime it’s impliedMokuba and Seto have a strain on their relationship—that doesn’t change thefact they love each other deeply.) I think Mokuba might have mixed feelingstowards Atem initially, even if he keeps them to himself, but there’d be timeto heal and bond.

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What kind of street performance they’d put on to raisemoney if they were stranded somewhere.

Aren’t they bothfamous? They’d sell autographs!

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How they’d be as parents if theyhad-a-kid/someone-forced-a-kid-on-them.

I’ve made it clearI interpret Seto as being keenly uncomfortable at the prospect of fatherhood,due to his history, his Gozaburo-complex, and the issues in his mental health.I see Atem as a character going either way. If his lover doesn’t want children,he’d be happy with not having children. If his lover does want children, he’dbe happy with having children. He could see himself being a good father and hedoesn’t mind children, but children aren’t a goal for him. Having children issomething he’s open to but not actively interested in, is my take on the character.

I’ve brought up thesad circumstance before of how Seto’d be forced into fatherhood, but also howhe’d prove to be a far better father than he had feared. He’d be quiet, softer,a bit distant. He’d have times where he’d lose his temper and have to suddenlyleave the room to calm down, but he would care achingly for that child. He’drub the child’s head gently, help them with their homework, carry them to bedwhen they’ve fallen asleep in the car.

I think Atem wouldprove to be a damn solid parent actually, warm and encouraging yet firm. Thisis in the realm of the mortal world, but maybe he’d take the child out fishingor bring them to museums. Atem might prompt the child to make a drawing forPapa Seto or he’d build colorful Play-Doh sculptures with them. He’d emboldenthem to make friends and put themselves out there. And he’d also be the one totell them to be kind to others, to be fair and use judgement, and scold themwhen they’ve done wrong.

Atem plays theactive firm parent, and Seto the quiet soft parent, but the child is well lovedand the three form a cozy family together.

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Who would cause the most trouble during a camping tripand how.

I would say thecouple isn’t exactly the type to go out camping but then I did just read theaskee’s fic, The Newly Revised Book of the Dead, wherein Atem and Seto spend a decentamount of the story essentially camping. They both strike me as practicalorganized people (maybe not in the emotions department, but in work andhobbies), so I think they’d be able to tackle camping just fine. Though Atemwould enjoy the adventure more than Seto would.

In reality, I thinkthe two would take walks along the river’s edge, watching the beads of lightbob and shimmer on the water and seeing the birds skim the air. They maybriefly hold hands a few times.

Atem might try toconvince Seto to go horseback riding. As a joke, he’d tell Seto the horse’sname is Gingersnap and insist, “You have to say her name if you want to gainher trust.” And Seto would ask, “Why is a horse in Ancient Egypt namedGingersnap?”

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What they would give each other as both a serious giftand a troll gift.

Seto is so cluelessabout gifts, so he’d ask up front what Atem wants for his birthday orChristmas. Atem is a bit more brave with gift-giving, making guesses and givingthings purely for surprise. If in the modern world, he might give Setohardcover books or a framed photograph of the wild ocean or maybe a handsomewatch. And Atem might teasingly buy goofy Duel Monsters memorabilia for theirhome, like a Blue Eyes White Dragon bottle-opener or a stuffed Kuriboh. MaybeAtem leaves the stuffed Kuriboh in Seto’s home office for him to discover, andwhile initially Seto is indifferent, overtime the toy becomes somethingprecious to him and he keeps it nestled beside his pen set.

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Who moves in with them as an unfortunate third wheelroommate.

In the Netherworld,Seto himself is kind of a third wheel to the palace, isn’t he? I feel like he’dact stiff with Set, Mahaad, Mana, all of them. It’d take a while to warm tothem at all.

If Atem and Setoare together in the modern world, Atem’s friends may spend the occasional nightin their home. Yugi and Anzu would be very polite guests, while Jonouchi andHonda would visit Atem but they’d tend not to stay the night.

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How they feel about handholding and sudden kisses in theear-cheek vicinity.

I characterize bothAtem and Seto as private in tenderness and also not touchy-feely to begin with.PDA does not happen with them, and even in private they don’t cling to each other.But they’ll lean into each other when they read and they’ll cuddle in bedtogether, and it’s sweet and warm, and it’s enough to know what they mean toeach other.

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Who’s always snapping photos and who’s pack-rattingclutter.

I don’t thinkeither is taking many photographs. Nor is Seto into collecting small materialgoods. I’ve already mentioned Atem buys silly Duel Monsters merchandise half asa joke, half because he honestly finds it charming. I feel like he might taketo collecting certain knickknacks too, items he finds fascinating or cool.

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Who hogs the bathroom in the morning and who causestoothpaste related drama.

Seto and Atem areboth pampered rich kids, and neither of them cleans toilets. In theNetherworld… how do bathrooms work? Do they have magically running water? Orwill Seto be making a fuss about how barbaric and unhygienic it is, at leastfor the first few visits until he gets over it up?

Atem might be the typeto leave the bathroom door cracked when he uses it and this mildly annoys Seto,and Seto will shut the door if he passes it.

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What their matching costumes were for that one party.

Seto is an assholewho refuses to dress in a costume. This one is kind of stumping me actually,because I don’t think Atem would really care much about dressing up as a pair.They can be the boring killjoys of the party together: that’s their matchingoutfit.

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If I think they’d get married and why or why not.

The answer to thisquestion is very dependent on which version of Prideshipping we go with.

If Atem exists inthe modern world, I don’t think marriage is on either character’s mind. I don’tthink either one is particularly romantically-minded nor do they feel the needto announce their bond in paperwork. What the case might be is one day theyrealize they’re fifty-years-old and have been together for over thirty years,so why not? But the ceremony would be small and short and more just to have iton the record. If anything, it’d be their friends and family who are moreexcited by the news and the ceremony. Maybe Atem would go along with theexcitement and have some elegant decorations strung around the room and foodplatters set out for their sake.

On the other hand,I think the two would marry with more passion, more personal investment, ifSeto was making visits to Atem in the Netherworld. The two have times of beingseparated physically: they want something to signify they’re always together inheart—they want a symbol of it. There’s something possessive here too, likeleaving a mark on each other. The ceremony would be small and quiet, as Setoand Atem are both private people in their tenderness, but it’d be warm andmeaningful.

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Who has over a thousand unread emails in their inbox orfive hundred icons on their computer desktop and how the other reacts to thisgross mismanagement.

Seto is a CEO of amammoth corporation, so I think it’s fair to wager he has a lot of crap on hiscomputer. Atem doesn’t care; Atem only even recognizes like three of thoseicons.

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What their hidden artistic talents are and howappreciative the other is of these talents.

Again, I think Setosketches blueprints for things he doesn’t intend to build, maybe fantasticalthings that can’t be built, as a way of clearing his heart on harder days.Maybe Atem watches him sketch, and he’s watching in silence for a while, and thenhe comments softly, “You’re very good at drawing.”

Maybe one day Atemasks if Seto would try drawing this thing or that. Maybe Seto does draw it forhim.

I imagine Atem as amore athletic type, someone who likes swimming and horseback riding andfishing. I feel like he might try painting or drawing but not have much talentfor it. “You’re much better,” he’d tell Seto.

But Atem is good atswiftly solving problems and thinking on his feet, conjuring creative solutions.It’s a talent Seto has always admired in him.

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What they consider each other’s most attractive qualityand/or their favourite thing about the other.

Atem is like a point of brilliant clarity for Seto, and yet he’salso a symbol of so many spiraling things: the past, hatred, failure, connection,death, passion, and most intensely–most brightly–he represents hope. Atemawoke Seto from his numbness, inspired Seto and gave him the tools he needed tosave himself from despair. Even now, Atem harbors a kind of radiantconfidence and calmness that braces Seto and grants him brightness.

For Atem, Seto validated his existence as his own being, notYugi but a whole other person, a deeply valued rival. What Atem admires in Setonow is his passion, how he refuses to give up the battle until he finds ananswer, how strongly his spirit fights. Seto chased Atem from the start and henever gave up.

[dyedmaxiian]

So I’ve just finished doing ‘Open Season’ again for Nuka World ( I can’t bring myself to do the bad ending bc I suck don’t @ me ), and I’ve come to the realization that WHILE Nuka World is full of raiders, Jamie has varying opinions on them that can determine why Jamie reacts the way he does:

First, lets talk about the gangs as a whole:

THE OPERATORS: Ultimately, the Operators are probably the gang Jamie can tolerate THE MOST. Yes, he still cannot stand them, but Mags is the most clearly level headed of the Gang leaders. She tempers William with her collected demeanor and in his mind, should there EVER be an instance where the Nuka World Raiders have to survive, Mags to him would likely be the easiest one to negotiate with. On the whole their entire vibe does kinda rub him the wrong way, and Lizzie & William don’t exactly sit well with him, so he wouldn’t shed a tear if they ended up wiped out, but from a tactical stand point he figures they’d be the EASIEST to deal with because their motives are telegraphed rather obviously and so Jamie doesn’t really have a problem exploiting those telegraphed desires to keep them from misbehaving. 

THE PACK: He’s not a huge fan of them either, but he figures with the right amount of pressure they’ll behave. To him they’re really just like any other raiders, granted he’s not a fan of the animal cruelty and the slavery is 100% a problem, but in the way of strong personalities, Mason is STRONG, but Jamie has confidence that the leadership in the Minutemen are far stronger and as a result he wouldn’t be above a little aggressive behavior to make sure the Pack continues to follow the rules, otherwise they’re effectively going to be put down. Essentially they’re just in need of a VERY tight leash, which Jamie would have no problem exercising. Ultimately, the Pack is the weakest of the three gangs in his mind and while the Operators would be the easiest to STEER, the Pack would be the easiest to actively control because they seem to answer to STRENGTH. Which isn’t really unlike the Brotherhood in a couple of ways.

THE DISCIPLES: This is the gang that will NEVER be able to survive so long as Jamie lives. If they’re alive, Jamie actively plots to wipe them out. They’re subhuman to him, they don’t have the rights of people, and in a lot of ways Jamie views them as little more than wild animals that need to be euthanized as quickly as humanly possible. They’re basically hungry predators and to Jamie, there’s no worse sin than active craving for cruelty, and so Jamie makes wanton efforts to have them wiped off the face of Nuka World. Canonically if it were up to him, he openly talks about wanting to hog tie them all, douse their entire base in kerosine, and barricade them inside while the whole place burns to the ground. Jamie has no sympathy, care, or really any semblance of empathy for his ‘fellow man’ when it comes to the Disciples, and he RELISHES watching them limp away while they get chased and hunted down like the parasites they are.

Now for the Gang’s LEADERS:

MAGS BLACK: As ironic as it may sound, Mags Black might actually be Jamie’s favorite raider. It’s not necessarily a high bar to set, but she’s the most civilized and collected of all the raider gang leaders, and while he doesn’t condone her actions, when the truth about who she is is investigated by the Sole Survivor, he DOES hint that he at least has some understanding of why she does what she does. It doesn’t mean he agrees with her actions, but of all the gang leaders, she is the ONLY one he can actually understand and to some very small extent relate to. He also admires, though he wouldn’t admit it, how she leads with a calm & civilized demeanor. Raider or not she can to some extent be negotiated with which means in terms of a tactical setting she can be reasoned with and perhaps even manipulated into acting in accordance with the greater interest of the Commonwealth.

WILLIAM BLACK: While some very small shred of dignity is given to Mags from Jamie, the same cannot be said for her brother. To Jamie, William is little more than a trigger happy pawn. He doesn’t think for himself, he doesn’t act for himself. He listens to his sister and that’s ultimately the end of it, and for Jamie there’s little worse than someone who is a blind follower. In fact, Jamie rather enjoys reminding William that he ISN’T anything more than a pawn in Mags’s game of control, and to him the Operators would be fine whether William was or WAS NOT there. In Jamie’s mind, William is little more than an errand boy kept in line by his sister.

LIZZIE WYATH: While Jamie can recognize that Lizzie is a talented chemist, she is despicable to him. She is a PRIME example of everything that’s wrong with the Institute, and most scientists who now inhabit the Commonwealth. She’s using science for gross personal gain, and one that would otherwise violate human rights at their core. Her work is disgraceful to science as a field in his mind and she is the kind of person who should be ‘crucified’ for her actions as a scientist for the sole reason that she’s trying to make hollow headed servants out of everyone around her that isn’t in her gang.

MASON: Mason is honestly viewed as VERY LITTLE of a threat by Jamie. He is the head of a very fragile gang that relies solely on strength and in Jamie’s eyes, as long as Mason is kept in line by someone “stronger and meaner” than him, the Pack won’t ever become a problem. Jamie thinks it’s almost ENDEARING that Mason acts rough and tough to maintain his position, and upon first meeting him if the Sole Survivor doesn’t perform the ‘dominance’ speech check, Jamie will in turn do so. He doesn’t really view Mason as a threat, and ultimately Jamie does believe that so long as SOMEONE is capable of asserting dominance over Mason, then he really isn’t an issue.

NISHA: Unlike most of the Gang leaders, Jamie finds LITTLE TO NO redeeming qualities in Nisha beyond the fact that she’s the one who keeps the disciples in line. Outside of that Nisha is a COCKROACH just like the rest of the raiders to Jamie. She needs to be snuffed out and really her intense desire for blood and death causes Jamie to utterly disdain her, especially because of the fact that she is so fervent on ensuring that the Disciples continue to seek out blood and killing as a means of keeping the gang happy. She’s little more than a rabid animal to Jamie and he has an intense desire to see her die painfully.

DIXIE: Similarly to Nisha, Jamie views Dixie as beyond having any value. She’s psychotic, clearly and Jamie notes that Dixie is the kind of person who reminds him of an animal who is beyond aid and instead must be euthanized. He even at one point muses that should the Sole Survivor decide to kill Dixie that it should be extremely painful as the only way for someone like her to truly die righteously is to have to endure copious amounts of pain so she can truly grasp what her victims have dealt with. If the Disciples are killed, Jamie personally searches for and hunts down Dixie before he ‘handles her’ himself. He doesn’t go into detail about what he actually does, all he states is that he made sure she was BEGGING before she died.

SAVOY: Similarly to how Jamie views William, Savoy to Jamie is little more than an errand boy for Nisha. He doesn’t really care about him one way or another and he’d see him die screaming just like the rest of the Disciples. Ultimately it’s Savoy’s ridiculous loyalty to Nisha that kinda is the nail in the coffin for him in Jamie’s eyes, and Jamie suspects that ultimately being so fiercely loyal to Nisha will end up in his DEATH one day.