#unfortunately lost that when the computer died by virus

[x-crowmancer-x]

then they Morbed all over each other. the end.

[fandom-necromancer]

The best we can be

This was prompted by the amazing @sparklingrainbowdragon! The prompt used was “1574. Yell at me, scream until your throat hurts, put a damn bullet in my chest, but you will not touch him.” Enjoy!

Fandom: Detroit become human Ship: Jerralph Warnings: description of violence, loss of self

‘And? How was your day?‘ Ralph and Jerry were curled up together on the couch, listening to the slow tunes of the radio in dim, comfortable light and surrounded by Ralph’s plants. ‘Ralph’s day was good’, he said. ‘Ralph actually spoke to some costumers today.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes! They knew flower language, so Ralph got excited and forgot his fear. Otherwise I kept to binding their bouquets in the back room and bringing them to the front. But nothing happened, so it was a good day!’ Jerry smiled. ‘That’s good to hear.’ ‘And what about yours?’, Ralph asked curiously. ‘Was it good too?’ ‘Yes, it was. We are still helping where we can. Quite a few units are in construction work at the moment, building the new buildings for New Jericho. Otherwise, nothing much exciting. Oh, except of course the new shop we dis-‘

They stopped abruptly and Ralph looked up. Jerry had his mouth open as the voice-box cut out, then the unit’s LED switched to red before going out completely and the body got rigid. ‘Jerry? Jerry!’ Ralph wiggled out from underneath them to hold their face. ‘Jerry, can you hear Ralph? Jerry?’ Ralph tried to interface, but his being only reached Jerry’s hardware. It was like interfacing with a computer, there was nothing left that was living. Deactivated. Still Ralph searched on. Something like this had happened before when one of Jerry’s units had caught a virus that had spread through the hivemind. Back then Jerry had had the time to leave a note for him in their memory. Ralph had already started to back up all memories stored on this unit should the whole hivemind be compromised. It had helped last time. But when he was sifting through them to find a message, all he found was an address with the addition of “Help”.

Ralph sat there on the sofa for a while, feeling entirely lost. The last time Jerry had given him instructions what to do, which technician to call and how to explain what had happened. This, now? An address. And they needed help. With what? And what could Ralph do? He had to search for Jerry, this much was clear, but that could be dangerous. He looked over to the lifeless android. Then he stood up, got himself his trusted kitchen knife and headed out. However dangerous it might be, it would be worth it if he could save Jerry.

-

The address was an old, dilapidated building at the edge of the city. There wasn’t much to it: the door was leaned against the frame at an odd angle, the front was dirty and the garden overgrown. Carefully placing each step, Ralph stalked closer and up to the door. He could neither hear nor see any movement inside, but during the revolution he had fled into quite a few houses he had thought were uninhabited, only to run into problems. By know he knew what to look out for.

He entered and walked through the hallway, keeping to the edges to avoid any creaking floorboards. There! He heard something coming from somewhere underneath him. Narrow stairs led down into a basement and the light shadows of framed photographs lined the wall. Ralph waited at the upper step to listen for any useful information. Unfortunately, the talking was so muffled, Ralph couldn’t understand anything. So, he tentatively took the first step downwards. He managed to get halfway down when a door opened at the bottom of it and two humans came out.

Not even thinking, Ralph threw his kitchen knife at them and bolted. Jerry hadn’t caught some virus, they had been kidnapped! A job for the police, clearly. Nothing Ralph could do on his own, so he ran. Only that he wasn’t fast enough. The humans caught him metres from the door and the last thing Ralph felt was electricity coursing through him before he was forced into an emergency stasis.

-

‘It’s easy, really. You allow us access and we won’t hurt your boyfriend.’ Ralph came back to himself with a start, but he was so frozen in fear he didn’t dare opening his eyes or moving even a single finger. He just listened to the foreign voices talk on. ‘Allow us access!’, someone screamed, far less calm than the one before. ‘I’ve seen your friend has some nice cuts already. You wouldn’t like him getting even more, right? If you are the obedient little machine you were designed to be, then maybe we won’t hurt him.’

‘No!’ That was Jerry and Ralph’s head jerked instinctively. ‘No, let him be, please.’ ‘Oh it seems, he is awake again…’ Ralph felt hands on his body and knowing they had seen through his ruse, he began thrashing. Only that his hands were bound behind his back and whatever they had used, the material wasn’t budging at all. ‘Jerry?’ ‘It will be alright, Ralph, don’t worry!’ ‘Oh, it will be’, the man from before said. ‘If you cooperate.’ Ralph was pulled to his feet and turned around. His eyes fell on Jerry in a half-broken rig, stripped of their clothes and artificial skin. They were plugged into a number of computers, their code, their very being, displayed on the screens. ‘Give us writing access and all will be over soon.’ Ralph stared at the human wide-eyed. That was illegal. An android’s code was protected by law after deviation. The punishment for manipulating a deviant’s code was worse than for killing one. ‘Why would you do that?’, Ralph asked utterly terrified of just the idea.

The humans laughed. ‘Oh, your friend here doesn’t know. Well, you see, the EM400’s started as a prototype for what would later become the RK series. Infiltrators. A hivemind able to integrate into any job, any social group. The perfect spies. The idea was scrapped as having one android is far more practicable than having around fifty that need a constant connection. But: The underlying concept has never been removed. So your hivemind boyfriend here could become the best weapon against the police we could get. Have eyes and ears on every corner and on top of it all of them have the best guise of an android programmed to look after children. Barely anyone knows of the EM400’s origin. So now, Jerry, be a good boy and allow us writing access.’

‘No, no, we can’t’ Jerry was looking from the man to Ralph and back. Ralph saw the desperation in their eyes before he was aware the man had stepped behind him and grabbed him by the neck. Trying to wiggle out of his grasp was futile and the warning of an intense heat was all he needed to freeze, only partly because he was paralysed by fear. ‘You can’t? Or you won’t?’ ‘Keep him out of it!’, Jerry screamed. ‘Oh, no, I don’t think I will.’ The man was gripping Ralph harder. ‘Last chance. Access. Now.’

Jerry shook their head, blue tinged tears flowing down their cheeks. ‘We can’t. You will kill us.’ ‘Nah. Just change you.’ ‘Don’t do it, love. Ralph knows pain. Don’t do it.’ He had closed his eyes, hoping for a miracle. ‘Fine. We’ll see how long you last.’ The heat source was getting closer until Ralph could see the soldering iron melt away the plastic of his arm. There was a puff of dark steam as it pressed through the Thirium supply underneath and hit metal.

It had been a long time since Ralph had felt such pain. He had thought it would finally be over. He knew he shouldn’t scream, shouldn’t show his pain for Jerry’s sake. But knowing that and following through with it were two entirely different things. He screamed loud enough not to hear Jerry’s desperate pleading to stop. But the iron left his arm at some point and the pain subsided. And Ralph saw Jerry hanging in the arms of the rig. If Ralph’s weakness was his insecurity and aggressive tendencies, then Jerry’s was their compassion.

‘Please’, they wailed. ‘Please, we do whatever you want from us, just please, don’t change us.’ ‘And what good would that be?’, the man asked and pressed the hot iron onto the next spot. Waiting for Ralph’s shouts to subside, he sighed. ‘You break by just seeing this. No, we need the machine. Now grant us access and he will get out of here no harm done.’ The way Jerry’s head fell, Ralph knew they had given up. The other goons frantically typing away all of sudden was sign enough Jerry had given them access. ‘No! No, Jerry, please, you can’t do that!’ He was dropped to the floor, useless for their plans now. But his eyes where only meeting Jerry’s. ‘We’re sorry, Ralph. Keep us in good memory. We love you.’

Then the unit’s LED went black, just like before with the other bodies. ‘Jerry!’ But what came back to the surface after a minute wasn’t Jerry. There was a rigidity to their body that had never been there. Not even during the revolution. Never. The way their eyes were trained on the man that had hurt Ralph promised no gentle touch or comforting refuge. No, they were cold. Calculating.

‘Did it work?’, one of the humans asked. ‘Let’s find out. Put him down.’ The rig disconnected from the unit Ralph refused to call Jerry and placed it on it’s feet. ‘Jerry?’, Ralph asked, maybe even more afraid than when the human had had his hands on him. ‘Jerry. Kill your boyfriend.’

The unit stepped from the platform and walked towards Ralph, who instinctively stepped back. But it never touched him. Instead, it stood in between him and the man. ‘Kill him!’, the man ordered. ‘Now!’ ‘Yell at me, scream until your throat hurts, put a damn bullet in my chest’, Jerry stated calmly, his voice like ice. ‘But you will not touch him. I won’t be your tool. You may have pushed me to reactivate old subroutines. But I am still me. I am still part of Jerry. And I can become us again, sharing this with our other units and repairing the damage you have done to this unit.’ ‘What? No! You have to obey us!’ ‘I’m still deviant. You have changed me. Resetting an android is impossible if that unit is not alone.’

He stepped closer to the man and grinned humourlessly. ‘It might have helped you earlier, but I can tell you, it was your worst mistake to threaten and hurt the one we love.’ The door to the cellar was pushed open and other units appeared. ‘We have you surrounded. If you are clever, you stay where you are and wait for the police to take over.’ ‘What the-‘ The man had turned red in his anger and came running for them, but this much colder Jerry stopped him, kicking his legs out from underneath him and pressing him to the ground by the throat. ‘Please, be intelligent for once in your life.’

The sirens in the distance settled it. Soon after, a few police officers were escorted down the stairs by some Jerrys and Ralph could finally leave his corner. He was surrounded by the android hivemind he loved and they seemed unchanged. But something wasn’t right. ‘Jerry?’, he asked. ‘Is it you?’ ‘ It is us’, one of them said. ‘We went into emergency stasis as soon as our unit was captured’, another explained. ‘The message you found didn’t come from us. The humans must have sent it. We’re sorry. Are you alright?’ Ralph looked down on the blue blood trickling from his wounds. But that wasn’t important now. ‘What about him? Is he also… you?’

The changed unit was just leaving the building and watched how the other Jerries kept their distance. ‘It’s difficult to say. He is also us. But different.’ ‘So, what are we doing now?’, the changed unit asked. ‘You will come back to us’, the Jerry that had just spoken to Ralph said. ‘We could protect him better with this programming.’ ‘But we don’t want to be that person’, Jerry sighed. ‘We want to be kind. Not an infiltrator or a soldier or officer. We want to be someone who cares for others. We settled this after deviating and discovering the code.’ ‘But we couldn’t protect him! Because of us he was hurt!’ ‘We have to be more careful next time then.’

The changed Jerry turned away and shook his head. ‘No. Next time you call me before it’s too late. Next time you wake this program up before he is hurt!’ The other Jerrys simultaneously looked at Ralph and even though he knew them and trusted them, this much attention was a bit overwhelming. ‘Fine’, Jerry said, and the moment passed. ‘But now you come back to us.’ They interfaced, and the changed units lost its foreign body language in an instant. Already, some of the units were leaving the area.

It stayed silent for a long time, while they disappeared to the city until only one unit was left. Ralph approached and carefully took their hand. ‘Are you okay?’ ‘We are one again’, Jerry said, gently pressing his hand. ‘There is still… chaos. After the revolution we thought about who we wanted to be. Once we had access to our full programming… We could have become anything. We could have been an army. A group of informants for the police. Infiltrators to turn whole gangs upside down. But we… We met you, Ralph. And we wanted to do good, not in an abstract sense, but for the people around us. We saw someone who needed us and in turn you showed us who we wanted to be. That unit was what we could be. But we don’t want to. Today has made us question that. You got hurt.’

‘Ralph shouldn’t have followed the message.’ ‘You couldn’t know it wasn’t us.’ ‘I like you better like this’, Ralph admitted then, a bit self-conscious. ‘I didn’t like that version of you.’ ‘Us neither. Come on. Let’s go home.’

[mistflyer1102]

in a bind

Summary: Q is just having a really, really bad day.

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

Q quite honestly could not believe his luck today.

His day had started innocently enough, with Toby and Missy getting underfoot in the kitchen and causing him to lose his morning tea when he accidentally stepped on one of the cat’s tails. Then he successfully locked himself out of the flat, having left the key on the small table beside the door and the new security system locking the door behind him. Bond wasn’t home either, which meant that Q couldn’t wake him up by pounding the door and yelling to be let back in. The first two events meant that Q was five minutes late to his Tube stop, and so he missed his train. Despite his general dislike of taxis, he’d hired one to take him to Vauxhall only to be kidnapped enroute by an ambitious driver who (correctly) guessed that he was a MI6 employee. He was grateful that he’d at least had the presence of mind to at least activate his distress signal on his mobile phone. Now, he was tied to a chair somewhere in what he suspected was an unused tunnel that had once been part of the Tube, or may have been intended to be part of it given that he could see train tracks from where he was seated.

And it was a Monday.

He had hoped this was a random ransom case. His bad luck held out longer when he realized that this was in fact someone who was seeking revenge for a lost employer that MI6 had taken out months ago. That hadn’t taken long to figure out because the kidnapper told him right off the bat why he planned to kill Q, eventually. Q really tried to remain serious. It was a serious situation, he could see the gun, but he still couldn’t help the small groan when the kidnapper began to go into his reasons, and how he planned to do so. Q just closed his eyes, trying to remind himself that the longer the man kept talking, the more time the agents had to find him. Q hoped the agents would be quick, he could see his mobile sitting on a crate beside his kidnapper a few meters away from where Q was tied.

He finally shook his head. “Ah, excuse me?”

The kidnapper stopped, blinking at Q. “Did you just interrupt me?”

Q said, “Yes, I did. My wrists are chafing, but I just wanted to let you know that as unfortunate as it was that your employer died, I had nothing to do with it as I am a low-level employee who does not get paid enough for the tech support I have to do. You would not believe the amount of calls I get about frozen computers, pulled plugs, and on one memorable occasion, a virus that wiped out an entire floor of computers. My point is, I’m not the person you want, I don’t get paid enough to put up with half of the shit I actually deal with.” He was careful to keep a placating tone while still allowing a little exasperation.

The kidnapper eyed him. “No...you work for Six, you definitely work with the agents. I remember hearing your voice over the phone during the attack. You were annoyed, I think.”

Q stared at him, wondering if Bond had lost his damned earpiece sooner than the agent reported, and/or if Q himself had miscalculated his initial assessments of this kidnapper. Unless the kidnapper had somehow hacked the phone line during the mission, which was also possible in the miscalculation theory. Q slowly shook his head, mind racing as he scrambled to think of another excuse. “I don’t know what you’re--”

“No, no, it’s all  right, Quartermaster, like I said, I don’t want you anyway. You’re just bait, and I won’t hurt you. I prefer the bait to stay alive…for now,” the kidnapper said, pulling up a chair and turning it around so that he sat on it backwards. “When your employers find you missing, then I imagine that they will send someone after you. I’ll just keep collecting employees until James Bond arrives,” he said, resting his arms on the back of the chair.

Q nodded, not quite believing the man. He knew it would end quickly, given that his lack of appearance, followed by a check of the GPS on his phone, would tip someone off that there was a problem. And when they realized there was a problem, they weren’t going to send Bond because Bond was out of town (granted, he was on his way home, but last Q checked, he wasn’t in London yet), but they were going to send another Double-O, thus ensuring the problem would be resolved and cleaned up before the end of the business day. Q did not, of course, tell the kidnapper this, instead deciding to let the man figure that out on his own. The one thing he decided to hedge his bets on was to ask “Want me to call them so we can move this along?”

The kidnapper arched a brow. “Did you not call them while I was kidnapping you?”

Q winced. The kidnapper did not need to know about Q’s latest tech and the distress signal. “Ah, no, I didn’t. I wasn’t really paying attention when you were kidnapping me.”

The kidnapper stared at him. “How are you still alive, in such a high position and I was just able to snatch you off the streets?”

Q dryly said, “I am willing to bet a quarter of my salary that my boss will be asking me the same question once I am sitting in front of his desk again.”

“Really?”

Q nodded.

The kidnapper huffed, and then relaxed in the chair again. “Well, we don’t have to make it too easy for them, so no phone call for you,” he said, resting his chin on his hands.

Q blinked, and then sighed. He then adjusted his position in the chair. If I’m going to be here for a while, I might as well get comfortable.

He didn’t realize he’d dozed off until the scraping of wood against stone woke him up. He blinked groggily, watching as his kidnapper stood up and walked away towards where the old entrance to the platform was. “Uh, where are you going?” he asked, stifling a yawn as the kidnapper glanced back at him.

“Your rescue has arrived. I’m going to deal with them, and keep you here so that when I am done with them, we will move locations so that they cannot keep up with us,” the kidnapper said before jogging up the stone stairs and out of sight.

Q just stared at the place where the kidnapper disappeared. “But...but that’s not how it works. They’re not going to send the junior agents,” he muttered under his breath, leaning back in his chair with a huff. His spine felt stiff from leaning back on the chair for so long, his wrists were chafing from the rope, and he could feel aches in his joints. He was also hungry, but given that he had a tendency to block things like that for hours on end when he was otherwise focused and busy, he didn’t see that as a good indicator of how much time could have passed by now.

He leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes again, wincing when he heard faint gunfire.

It didn’t last long.

He looked up, brow furrowing as a familiar pair of shoes and trousers appeared at the top of the stairs. “Dare I ask how long it has been since I was reported missing?” he asked dryly as James Bond appeared, holstering the familiar Walther PPK. “And you brought your equipment back, I am touched.”

“You’re welcome. For the rescue, that is. I had to stop at Six to grab another Walther, lost the first one in the Thames,” Bond said as he stepped down onto the platform. “Started receiving the texts about your capture as soon as the plane landed, lost the Walther as I was rushing back to Six for a situation update, and here we are,” he added as he approached Q.

Q was quiet, his brain still caught at trying to imagine Bond losing the Walther in the Thames. “Is the kidnapper is still alive?” he asked as Bond walked around the chair and began to work on the ropes around Q’s wrists.

Bond nodded. “We have questions for him,” he said as the ropes came free. “And M has questions for you.”

Q huffed as he gingerly stood up. “Well, at least I didn’t shake on that bet,” he muttered under his breath as he rubbed his wrists. He looked up as Bond as the agent moved to stand in front of him. “I missed you, dear,” he said, smiling as Bond leaned forward and kissed his forehead.

“I missed you too. Now, you can accompany me to Medical where O’Reilly can check us both over, and then go on to M, while I go to R? I’m sure M will be all right with letting you take the rest of the day off, it’s almost noon,” Bond said as Q looked up at him. “He just might insist on an escort.”

Q groaned. “I just want to get back to work. I’m fine, I just sat here and talked to him about a phone call that ultimately he did not let me have.”

Bond snorted. “Well, M first and then have at it. Do you need help walking?”

Q shook his head. “I’m not hurt, I’m annoyed.”

“Of course you are.”

Q scowled, and then elbowed Bond as he passed him to begin the walk back to the  stair that would lead back to the street level.

[gtpgrima]

Have you ever wondered about 👇🏻👇🏻👇🏻

"How the Brothers will react if they accidentally deleted an important file from their computer...?"

👆🏻👆🏻👆🏻 because this catastrophic event happened to me a about a week ago(?) (with my original blog of the same name. I will forever thank everyone who responded to my request. I love you all so much! 💖) and I pulled a Jesus Christ maneuver: I died and rose up from the dead on the 3rd day; I started asking people to follow me baaack! 🤞🏻😂✨

Yeah, this is a collection of my actual reactions with the untimely demise of my original blog represented by the Obey Me characters! Lmao.

Levi is the goat in this one! 💪🏻✨

Warnings? Nah, probably funny? Technology illiteracy, maybe.

Lucifer

Lucifer won't make this mistake UNLESS he's on the brink of death, which is when he's sleep-deprived the 6th night that week; and it happens often, this is that night too.

He can't see anything clearly anymore. Okay, he can still "see" what seems of the letters, numbers and symbols now mimicking the waves of the darkest seas, or simply the rejected stroke of calligraphy; really, he could be between seeing a spot or a smudge of print and he'll still insist they're readable.

His pride won't let him admit the fact that he can no longer differentiate the icons of "save", "undo" and "delete" so when he pressed that click button, it took him a few moments of dizzying silence to realize his mistake.

He roars like a beast in boiling rage. He nearly decapitated Mammon who unfortunately slipped by his door at the time, and making Leviathan hesitate to respond to his calls.

Mammon

With Mammon, this happens often. He's naturally clumsy and often would recklessly abuse the abilities of his devices, computer included.

So when he realized his mistake he's cool with it. He probably haven't been on the second paragraph, honestly; he can start again or just plagiarize 90% of the internet.

He'll probably just shrug it off and lay down to nap or leave to resume his money-grubbing schemes, and ask Leviathan's assistance if it's so important and worth risking his eyeballs out later; the third-born wouldn't be happy helping him out at all, after all.

Or he'd just figure out it himself, he's the Great Mammon for a reason, right? Nah, he downloaded a deadly virus and made the problem worse.

Leviathan

This ain't a problem to him at all. It's not even worth blinking twice at. He'll just click his tongue in irritation at the minor inconvenience.

Okay, rare instances it causes him panic, he'll recall all the codes and tricks he memorized or written down so he can recover the file successfully.

He's always successful, and literally became the "lost file rescuer" of the House of Lamentation because of this.

He doesn't mind. However, if he's dealing with Lucifer or Mammon's computer problems, it gets chaotic to the point he's triggered to summon Lotan riding a tidal wave.

Satan

Considering his being the Avatar of Wrath, he's SURPRISINGLY calm when it comes to mistakes like this.

Well, it's because Leviathan taught him the basics; to which escalated quickly to at least 50 texts of differently phrased "threat" of strangling the life out of him if he destroys his computer instead of sending it to him for inspection.

Satan wouldn't like to admit he's scared of his brother's murderous passion over electronics so he tries to be careful all the time.

He's the least to make this mistake. In fact, he's too careful with his computer (D.D.D. and everything else) otherwise he'll unleash Leviathan's wrath which might actually strip him off from his title.

Asmodeus

He's mostly using his D.D.D., so such an occurrence is pleasantly rare with him.

However, if it actually happens, he'd quick to try and recover it on his own; and he's got 50-50 chances.

If he needs Leviathan's assistance he's always the one to offer something in return. If he refuses his dazzling self as payment (because he'll gladly offer himself above everything else of course), he'll probably give him an expensive facemasks or lotion.

It's always nice to help him out, he asks nicely and tries to learn while at it.

Beelzebub

Beelzebub is more than capable of handling this problem. He might actually be proficient with computer science but not on Leviathan's level.

[I picture him to be capable of more than one skill, not just eating, lol.] He'll not break a sweat recovering lost files at all. With enough motivation, he'll probably be able to retrieve the ones from years ago.

He'll help anyone if he's asked to but since Leviathan's already there and greatly more helpful, he's mostly overlooked.

In fact, files are not at risk of disappearance with him at all. There was once he accidentally ate a piece of the printer instead (because the ink smelled nice, he reasoned) and Leviathan saw the stars as he internally struggled so hard not to kick him to the next universe.

Belphegor

He'll just sleep through the pain. HAHAHAHA- (insert evil laugh here)

Okay, he'll be the most nonchalant about it. It's just a lost file. He can do it again, right?

He'll just ask Leviathan or Beelzebub's help. He won't really make a fuss out of it too. He'd straight up say he lost a file and can't retrieve it on his own, so help.

If he can restore it on his own, he will. It's such a hassle getting up from his comfortable zone called the bed, you know.

I will now start working on the asks... 😳💞

[robbyrobinson]

When the Wind Blows: Alternate Ending

When the Wind Blows. That was a title I hadn’t heard in a long time. It was just obviously a British animated film based on a graphic novel by Raymond Briggs. You know, the guy who did The Snowman? It centered around an elderly couple then one day, word came out that war would break out in three days. The graphic novel was written around the height of the Cold War. The threat of nuclear war was as high as it is now.

I’ve always had morbid affection for dark animated films. Watership Down; The Plague Dogs; Felidae, you name it. When the Wind Blows fit snuggly in that bubble. Having watched it religiously on YouTube, the film was ultimately removed most likely because of it violated the website’s terms of service with its objectionable content. My thirst for the darkness of the animated feature was unquenchable and I hadn’t watched it sense.

That would all change one day. While I was browsing the internet, I came upon an online forum dedicated to dark, more obscure cartoons. It must’ve been my lucky day because one of the users happened to discuss When the Wind Blows. It was boring at first with just him elaborating on how he was immensely disturbed by the film when he saw it at 7. Then the discussion took a swerve.

After he explained what he considered the most horrid aspect of the film, he added an interesting tidbit. Apparently, it was an interview with Briggs himself. In the interview, Briggs explained that what contributed to his penning the graphic novel was the reality of a nuclear war and how virtually impossible it was for anyone to survive a nuclear holocaust. As such, there was a secret ending embedded in the home releases of the movie. To further his point, the user left an link to download the movie.

Curiosity overwhelmed my reasoning. For all intents and purposes, he may as well might’ve fabricated the whole thing. But, if it was in fact real, it would prove a good nugget of knowledge. So, I clicked the link. As it loaded, I was growing concerned that I was hoodwinked and that some sort of virus would crash it. I glanced back at my computer screen seeing that it was finished.

The film surprisingly started off without a single lag nor freeze. David Bowie performed the title song per usual followed by the real-life footage and Jim returning home from reading the newspapers in town. He lived with his wife in his country home in Sussex. He conversed with his wife again without issue. I felt a building dread. This was likely the third time I’ve seen the film so I already knew how everything would play out. Its saccharine mask would crumble away exposing its sinister underbelly. I hadn’t the faintest idea as to why this was the case. If I could put money on it, I’d have to guess Jim’s tone of voice. He was voiced by John Mills and yet rather than his jovial, more informed self, he had a forlorn expression on his face. Hilda immediately took notice.

When she asked her husband what the matter was, he informed her about the likelihood of war being inevitable. After she went through her tirade of war being wicked, the radio shuttered to life announcing that war could be expected in three days. The film segues to Jim preparing the house for the nuclear missile such as by painting the windows white or making a makeshift bomb shelter all according to the Protect and Survive pamphlet the government handed out. He called his son Ron only to become disheartened with his son's seeming ignorance. Ron's laughter could be heard over the phone. A mixture of humor and melancholy. He quoted famous songs much to his father’s chagrin. To me, it was clear that Ron was aware than he was letting on. He was losing what little sanity he had left by partying his troubles away.

The film progressed with the couple mentioning previous world wars and D-Day. Hilda was making a cake while her husband further desecrated the house in accordance with the pamphlet. The radio sounded again, the announcer explaining that an ICBM would arrive in three minutes. Jim became more hectic, and shoved Hilda underneath the door after calling her a bitch.

The screen turned to symbolize the missile dropping. A deafening siren blared through my headphones nearly sending me sprawling on the ground. Violent images of civilians' bodies littered the scenery. Fire rained down from the sky and engulfed the bystanders.

A school bus full of children was hit by a wave of the flames; each child’s body bloated up from the blast and ruptured like water balloons. Their skin melted off gorily. Imagine placing a stick of butter being placed in a microwave. Other people were glued to the streets due to their legs fusing with the concrete. Faces burned off as buildings and houses were leveled by the onslaught of chaos.

The sound wave struck the couple’s house, decimating it. Miraculously, or rather unfortunately, they survived. Hilda in typical fashion wanted to tidy up only to be held back and told that she couldn’t leave until the fallout subsided. In a new addition, Jim assured his wife that they would be fine. Another voice spoke out one that Hilda could not hear. Jim reacted in disgust becoming further unsettled.

“Old boy, while are you sentencing your wife to death?”

The conclusion I drew was that it represented Jim’s innermost thoughts, or more directly his conscience. It was a monotonous voice bereft of any emotion nothing there but a cold, pure logic.

The two attempted to survive as long as they could off what little rations they had left or whatever survived the blast. Their water bottles were disintegrated and subsequently, their water lines were cut off. The couple were immeasurably famished. Throughout the week, they made offhanded remarks about how people lost in the wilderness resorted to drawing lots and sacrificing the weakest member so the others would live. The thought they were so hungry they'd be willing to eat each other was horrible.

Jim once found a meat clover and walked over to his life as she laid on the couch sleeping. He contemplated his options but got cold feet when Hilda was stirring awake. He quickly hid the weapon away, instead telling her that she was hearing things because of her age.

One day while they were walking in their yard, Jim smelled something in the air. Hilda followed him also smelling it. Roasted pork, she thought. Her stomach was so barren, she’d waste no time gorging on the pork.

They walked over a hill, their thoughts immediately turning to sorrow. A family of four was huddled together tightly and were roasted dark by the blast. They were the remains of a husband and wife and their two small kids. Hilda and Jim looked at each other then at me with that thousand yard stare. The camera focused in on Jim’s beady eyes. Fire danced in them. He knelt down and ripped off an arm from one of the kids. Hilda prayed over the bodies before digging in as well.

"The Powers That Be will get to us in the end.”

A few weeks passed by. The couple were somehow still alive. The camera panned to the fridge showing scraps of flesh that were left of the family. Around that time, Jim had also collected the rain water, unaware that it was radiated and unsafe regardless of boiling it. Their water supply had vanished again. Rat carcasses were thrown all over the floor. It then segued to Hilda vomiting into the toilet ranting about hating the taste of rat meat and blood. Boils were all over her body and Jim’s. They were skeletal in appearance with their leathery skin barely being held together.

“I just hope that Ron and Beryl made it out okay,” Hilda weakly said.

As she said this, a jump cut of Ron popped up. He was animated with clay alongside his wife and children. They were melded together in a fleshy blob with their limbs conjoined together. Jim assures her that their son's family would always stick together. Hilda's hair began to fall out by the time she suggested to Jim that they should return to their bags because another attack could come. Jim agreed to her suggestion still assuring her that help would arrive.

The voice from earlier returned now violently criticizing Jim on withholding the truth about their situation. Hilda got into her bag and waited for her husband to join her. It felt like hours before he returned, and when he did, I was taken aback. In his hands was a rifle. He cocked it, and pointed it behind his wife’s head.

“Dear, are you there?” she asked.

Jim choked back tears as he tried to speak coherently. “Recite the Lord’s Prayer for me, would you?”

She obliged. Hilda recited the prayer louder as if hoping that her prayers would be heard. A single tear rolled down Jim's face. A loud gunshot is heard when the camera panned to the outside of the house. Jim looked at the gun in horror and tossed it beside his feet. Kneeling down, he clutched his wife as she laid dying. Tears dropped on her bosom. He remained in that position until the film faded out. The voice reappeared after the Morse code spelled out MAD.

"Old Jim died clutching his beloved wife to his dying breath due to radiation poisoning. But what he ultimately learned was that when you die…nothing happens.”

I was speechless with what I had witnessed. The film was dark, but never would I have thought that Briggs had a more sinister ending in store for the elderly couple. I took a flask and hard copied the download so I could watch it every now and then. Good too because the user’s account was terminated with the only indication of its existence being the other responses that the users gave.

Briggs said it himself that the wanted to show the utter hopelessness of surviving a nuclear war, and he succeeded.

[aalt-ctrl-del]

there is a certain map that people are trying to pass around. I do want to talk about the material involved, without directing peoples attention to the map in question. I follow closely the numbers and data, and I believe in the integrity of the election - I also don’t want donald joke to get ahold of the map, because can you imagine this dumbass? With a map? He can’t read?

And rudy gilligan getting lost and not finding the friends he made along the journey? It’s such a shit storm.

ANYWAY. This map has to deal with tracking human behavior, and trends. Stuff that I love to get involved with. The problem though, the map is being misused. I did read a few articles about the application and I watched a tutorial on youtube, UNFORTUNATELY the individual explaining the map left out some very crucial details.

This algorithm that was being paraded around like a game changer, has a potential for failure. I wasn’t even testing for that. But this failure that can devalue the algorithm of the map, is telling. To indirectly paraphrase a segment, an external factor can deviate the data. In other words, this map which is based on human behavior and determining not great factors, can be disrupted by a force that was not anticipated. A deviation from the norm. I wonder what sort of deviation from the norm could have driven millions of people to vote in the 2020 election? It’s a mystery.

But I am not studying this material because I am looking for faults in its use, I am exploring the claims for the sake of validation. Also, it is very interesting. Also, very creepy that we follow patterns like this, and they can be used to track behavior. This isn’t news to me, as I use similar tools to track human behavior for my marketing studies.

This is a point of reference to review, and I talk a lot about how out of the ordinary this election is. How it has pressed people beyond their comfort zone, and how we have charts on our computers nearly every day to calculate cases and deaths. And the coping sites. They don’t help, but that’s a resource that is there.

But lemme go ahead and rant more about this map trump supporters have fallen in love with. One factor that does support it, is the fact that trump supporters are very easy to read. We know their behavior types, their VALs, and we know the colors they wear - literally. We knew from the beginning that despite a pandemic, trump supporters would go out on that day Nov 3, to vote for a racist, homophobe, that has no interest in assisting states with a national crisis. The numbers hold true, and outline who they are in a nice bow. There is no dispute here, that this map can follow the behavior patterns of a like minded group of people. No shock, sherlock.

Now let’s look at president-elect Biden, and his people. We are not all the same, we are not data that can be measured easily - we have conflicting views, many of us don’t even like President-elect Biden. We have varied ideals and interests, some of us even vote third party every election just to do it. Yet this time, we made a compromise, in large numbers. Thousands of young voters made certain to register for the first time in their lives, thousands of middle aged voters said, “too heck” and registered to vote, for the first time in their lives. Hundreds of us voted early, some of us voted absentee because there is a deadly pandemic on the loose, while others didn’t feel like risk losing their vote, and went out to vote that night November 3 despite fears.

There is also the Senate seats, that people always seem to forget. Yuck.

Alas, I am not saying that my rational is not indisputable, I am merely indicating a flaw in the mindset that the data is immovable or static. I went through the politico website scrutinizing the data for Pennsylvania there, the differences to President-elect Biden and trump. The statistics are very promising and within the margin of reason - I predominately check the results with Biden’s wins because those are the areas of.... distrust. How dare Biden get voters. How unsightly.

 Anyway, I ran calculations between the votes both candidates (primarily in Pennsylvania because everyone hates that state rn for some reason) accumulated, and subtracted that from a population count of the county area. You know what I found? The differences between Biden and trump appear accurate and within the realm of belief - given that some people were minors and couldn’t register to vote, and others may have been non-citizens or didn’t register at all to vote. In some areas of Pennsylvania, there didn’t appear to be a great urgency to vote or no one gave a damn.

I thought to myself, “well, the census is outdated, maybe a lot of people... died?” Morbid as that is, it’s not an unrealistic mindset in 2020, is it? But no, I went back and checked the covid maps and evaluated the cases to death ratio here’s the link. Not a lot of cases given the documented population of 269K, from an estimated 68K and 66K between the two candidates - a rough 135K didn’t go out to vote. So that does describe an area of low morale for voting, no urgency.

However, there is a distinct trend in areas of high population, and the areas where covid has done harsh damage to the population. In these areas, the typical trend did see more vote turnout for President-elect Biden. It’s not always-always the case, but it does occur with high frequency. Metropolitan areas especially, saw a high turnout of voters supporting Biden. People that believe the virus is real, and acknowledge we need to do something other than wait for it to “go away.”

But the data supplemented to the map, are not conclusive or easy to support. The map has potential to fail, and it does so when there is an outside intervention which alters the typical behavior of a person or group of people. Yes, it can be used to detect crimes, and to follow the typical trends and patterns in human behavior, but it is difficult if not impossible to correlate the typical trends to a historic event which has affected millions at this point. How are we able to use malicious information and call our current climate natural? Nothing currently is natural, many of us are barely surviving, many of our people are unemployed, many of us have lost loved ones or have been isolated from family due to safety concerns.

Why is it people who support trump seem to come down to the mindset, everything is totally normal today? How are they able to function in normal society, and how many people have they slain in their negligence?

It is horrendous that people try to latch onto a data calculating map, and call it “very telling”, while the rest of the normal people are trying to decipher if todays a safe day to go shopping for groceries. It’s outlandish that people are out here insisting that the covid does not exist, and btw, why the hell did everyone decide to go out and vote this time? It’s weird. Nothing is right.

[etraytin]

Directors cut for “Ourselves and Immortality” (I sobbed, btw, the whole way through it. SOBBED. Especially when Donna has to ID people. But I loved it.)

Ourselves and Immortality is by far the most depressing fic I have ever written, but thinking about it makes me happy because I FINALLY got it finished, woo-hoo! It started out as a one-shot (just like Such A Winter’s Day, in fact), at the beginning of my 100-Day-Fic-A-Day back in 2016. I was in a very creative mood back then and taking pretty much any prompt anybody threw at me. My husband, who is only a very casual TWW fan but gives good prompts, tossed me “Roger Tribbey’s first hour as President.” 

“Wow,” I mused, “Everybody’s going to hate that.” 

But the idea was too tantalizing to pass up; it was so completely unlike anything I had written so far. Even just doing the one-shot involved a fair amount of research, figuring out where Secretary of Agriculture falls in the order of succession and such. Turns out, basically everybody else has to die in order for Roger to land in the hot seat. And if President Bartlet, Vice President Hoynes, and the Cabinet were going down, it seemed obvious that most of the staff would be gone as well. This fic prompt came along just as Designated Survivor was getting started, so I didn't want to go the "terrorists blow up the State of the Union" route, because that felt too done. Unfortunately (or fortunately for real life) there's really not that many ways to take out the government that don't also take out Washington DC and that don't involve targeted building destruction. 

(This got kind of long and involved, so I’m tucking it behind a cut.)

I wound up reaching back into my sci-fi reading childhood, to an original series Star Trek novel called The Pandora Principle. In that novel, the crew discovers an alien artifact and takes it to Starfleet Headquarters for research, only for the artifact, secretly a weapon, to shatter when it is scanned and release a bioagent that eradicates all the oxygen in the air like a self-replicating virus. Everyone in the building dies except for Captain Kirk, who for shenanigan-related reasons is in a self-sealing bunker under the building, and the rest of the novel is devoted to trying to nullify the agent before it manages to escape the hermetically sealed building. It's a great book, evocative and claustrophobic, and I definitely recommend it, but for the purposes of what I thought was a quickie one-shot, I stole the idea of a weapon that could asphyxiate everyone in a building nearly faster than they could realize they were doomed. As the story developed I had to cobble together a little modern-Earth science to flesh it out, but I hoped that the story would hold without much in the way of explanation of how everything had happened. 

One thing that helped was that OaI was not, at its heart, an action adventure story. It was barely a mystery, really. Our main characters were not the ones charged with solving the mystery or catching the bad guy. For the most part, they were not even in direct danger (except for Syl's brief action turn at the end). We spent one chapter with Mike Casper as he investigated and one chapter with the bad guy to get some important creepy exposition, but by far the character we spend the most time with is Roger. It's not Roger's job to know what the Asphyxiant is made of or its exact biological effect, and it's not Roger's job to hunt the bad guys down like dogs in the street. Like pretty much every West Wing story, it's Roger's job to keep the country running, and it's the job of the people around him to help him. The story had to be about what was happening in The White House, with the action-adventure plot clicking along offscreen and occasionally cropping up in a phone call or Sit Room briefing. I had to avoid a lot of temptation, but in a way it made the job easier. West Wing stories are stories about relationships. 

Writing the canon characters was very hard, especially in the beginning. The thing that never caught for me about Designated Survivor was how quickly the survivors moved on after the disaster. Their friends and colleagues were murdered, and there was little indication that anybody even cared. But Margaret, Carol, Mrs. Landingham, Danny and especially Donna, these people were gutted. Every single one of them was utterly devastated, but from Roger's perspective it was hard to see because all of them are so good at their jobs and so dedicated, they'd keep carrying on as best they could until they collapsed. I decided pretty early on that I would start spreading the point of view around so we could see what the characters were going through in their own voices, but that only Roger would get more than one chapter. (I did break this rule right at the end; Donna gets the first and last non-Roger chapters in the story.) Roger's narrative ties the story together but being the President requires one to stay largely in one place while being told things, so spreading out the POV also gave the story a little more momentum.

Donna's first chapter was probably the hardest part of the story to write, both because I am a hardcore J/D shipper and I'd just shut the pairing down in the cruelest of ways, and also because it was through her eyes that I had to bring the scope of the horror home without fully traumatizing the readers. My first draft of the chapter included considerably more time in the refrigerated warehouse with the FBI team, and a lot more detail about the last minutes of the lives of the senior staffers. I ended up going through and cutting a lot of it out, leaving the audience to understand how terrible it was by the way it affected Donna, rather than by my descriptions of it. And yes, it is one of several chapters I cried while writing. There's a reason (several reasons, but my own feels especially) that I had to let Zoey and Charlie live!  And yes, Margaret was speaking for me when she admitted to temporarily forgetting about Annie and Gus, but we got around to them eventually. 

OaI wound up containing most of the material I wrote for it, but it has one deleted scene and one crackadelic alternate ending. The deleted scene occurs shortly before the state funeral and is from Bonnie's perspective; she and Ginger are trying to pack up Sam and Toby's offices to allow the new senior staffers to move in. I got it half-written, then thought I lost it in a computer-related accident. It was so damn sad to write the first time, and it was all character work and only smidgens of plot, and I was really mad about losing the work, so I decided to skip over it and go straight on to the next thing, which I believe may have been Zoey's chapter. It turned out that I did recover most of what I'd written for the chapter, but by the time I found it, the plot had moved on. I tried to make it up to Bonnie by giving her a nice little character bit and a job promotion at the end of the story. 

The crackadelic ending is sort of a long story. Most of the reason that OaI got finished despite all my life changes and busy years and general creative slump is that my parents both fell in love with it. You may ask, "Doesn't having your parents reading your fanfiction make things awkward sometimes?" and in answer I will point you to the number of real sex scenes in my published fanworks, which is zero. And then I will nod enthusiastically. But my dad, especially, loved this story and decided that he ought to be in it. And that he ought to be the Chief Justice. My dad is a retired judge, so he felt this should not be too much of a stretch for him, career-wise. I tried to explain the concept of self-insert to him, but then caved and created a thinly-veiled expy of him to be Chief Justice, then gave him a little ceremony in-story and a few extra mentions here and there. I gave him that chapter as a Christmas present, and he was happy! For awhile. Then he decided that he ought to be the President. I tried to explain to him that this is not how governmenting works, which he of course already knew, but he was firm. His Chief Justice character was great, and he ought to be President. He is nothing if not persistent, and also nothing if not hard to buy gifts for, so for Christmas the next year, I presented him with Chapter 28: The Surprise Noncanonical Epilogue, which has never before been published to the internet. It is very silly. 

This has gotten very long and I still need to write today's Quarantine Journal, so I guess I'll wrap it up there. If you have any specific questions about the story or any other stories, feel free to toss them my way! 

[newstfionline]

Headlines

Images of brutality against Black people spur racial trauma (AP) Since Wanda Johnson’s son was shot and killed by a police officer in Oakland, California, 11 years ago, she has watched video after video of similar encounters between Black people and police. Each time, she finds herself reliving the trauma of losing her son, Oscar Grant, who was shot to death by a transit police officer. Most recently, Johnson couldn’t escape the video of George Floyd, pinned to the ground under a Minneapolis officer’s knee as he pleaded that he couldn’t breathe. “I began to shake. I was up for two days, just crying,” she said. “Just looking at that video opened such a wound in me that has not completely closed.” Johnson’s loss was extreme, but, for many Black Americans, her grief and pain feels familiar. Psychologists call it racial trauma—the distress experienced because of the accumulation of racial discrimination, racial violence or institutional racism. While it can affect anyone who faces repeated prejudice, in this moment, its impact on Black people is drawing particular attention. The unfortunate irony is that the very tool that may be helping to make more people aware of the racism and violence that Black and other people of color face is also helping to fuel their trauma.

Critics question `less lethal’ force used during protests (AP) When a participant at a rally in Austin to protest police brutality threw a rock at a line of officers in the Texas capital, officers responded by firing beanbag rounds—ammunition that law enforcement deems “less lethal” than bullets. A beanbag cracked 20-year-old Justin Howell’s skull and, according to his family, damaged his brain. Adding to the pain, police admit the Texas State University student wasn’t the intended target. Pressure has mounted for a change in police tactics since Howell was injured. He was not accused of any crime. He was hospitalized in critical condition on May 31 and was discharged Wednesday to a long-term rehabilitation facility for intensive neurological, physical and occupational therapy. His brother has questioned why no one is talking about police use of less lethal but still dangerous munitions. “If we only talk about policing in terms of policies and processes or the weapons that police use when someone dies or when they are ‘properly lethal’ and not less lethal, we’re missing a big portion of the conversation,” said Josh Howell, a computer science graduate student at Texas A&M University. The growing use of less lethal weapons is “cause for grave concern” and may sometimes violate international law, said Agnes Callamard, director of Global Freedom of Expression at Columbia University and a U.N. adviser.From 1990 to 2014, projectiles caused 53 deaths and 300 permanent disabilities among 1,984 serious injuries recorded by medical workers in over a dozen countries.

Coronavirus Global Death Toll Passes 500,000 (Foreign Policy) The coronavirus pandemic, about to enter its fifth month this week reached two grim milestones over the weekend: More than 10 million people have been infected with the virus and over 500,000 have died of it. Europe has seen the most deaths of any continent, although its overall caseload is declining. The situation in the Americas is more concerning: Two countries—the United States and Brazil—account for roughly 35 percent of all COVID-19 deaths worldwide and both countries are still seeing new cases in the tens of thousands daily.

Virus hits college towns (NYT) The community around the University of California, Davis, used to have a population of 70,000 and a thriving economy. Rentals were tight. Downtown was jammed. Hotels were booked months in advance for commencement. Students swarmed to the town’s bar crawl, sampling the trio of signature cocktails known on campus as “the Davis Trinity.” Then came the coronavirus. When the campus closed in March, an estimated 20,000 students and faculty left town. With them went about a third of the demand for goods and services, from books to bikes to brunches. Fall classes will be mostly remote, the university announced last week, with “reduced density” in dorms. Efforts to stem the pandemic have squeezed local economies across the nation, but the threat is starting to look existential in college towns. Communities that have evolved around campuses are confronting not only Covid-19 but also major losses in population, revenue and jobs.

Band’s pandemic diversion leads to every-night gig in park (AP) What started as a way for two musicians to get out of the house during the pandemic has turned into nightly concerts at the boathouse in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park—with fans who expect them to play three to four hours a night, seven nights a week. “One day I came here with my guitar out of nowhere, to just get some fresh air. And people just started coming over. And then they were like, ‘Thank you!’ And then it took a life on its own,” said Alegba Jahyile, leader of Alegba and Friends. Jahyile, a Haitian raised in New York who plays guitar, drums and bass, recalled a woman who cried at one concert. “You made my day,” she told him. “It’s been a terrible week for me and my family. Listening to you, singing, I felt the joy, I found a little bit of serenity, of peace to my day.” The area has steps that are good for sitting. It’s also adjacent to a grassy hill where people can bring children and dogs, spread blankets, plop down lounge chairs, and picnic while listening to the music.

World Food Program warns of ‘devastating’ pandemic impact in low- and middle-income countries (Washington Post) The World Food Program (WFP) warned Monday that the socioeconomic repercussions of the coronavirus pandemic will be “devastating” and could trigger food shortages for millions of residents of low- and middle-income nations. In the countries in which the organization operates, the number of people suffering from hunger is estimated to rise by more than 80 percent by the end of 2020, in comparison with pre-coronavirus times. Latin America and Africa are among the most heavily impacted areas. “This unprecedented crisis requires an unprecedented response. If we do not respond rapidly and effectively to this viral threat, the outcome will be measured in an unconscionable loss of life, and efforts to roll back the tide of hunger will be undone,” WFP Director David Beasley was quoted as saying in a release. “Until the day we have a medical vaccine, food is the best vaccine against chaos.”

Iceland’s president wins second term (Foreign Policy) Icelandic President Gundi Johannesson won a second term on Saturday in a landslide victory. Johanneson won 92 percent of the vote, while his right wing challenger Gudmundur Franklin Jonsson received just 7 percent of the vote. The Icelandic presidency is a largely symbolic post, although the president can exercise veto power over legislation.

Britons are fatter than most in the rest of Europe, says PM Johnson (Reuters) British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said on Monday Britons were significantly fatter than people in most of the rest of Europe, admitting he had lost weight after contracting the novel coronavirus. Speaking to Times Radio, Johnson said: “I have taken a very libertarian stance on obesity but actually when you look at the numbers, when you look at the pressure on the NHS (National Health Service), compare, I’m afraid this wonderful country of ours to other European countries, we are significantly fatter than most others, apart from the Maltese for some reason. It is an issue.” “Everybody knows that this is a tough one, but I think it’s something we all need to address.” Johnson did some press ups to show he was “as fit as a butcher’s dog” in an interview with the Mail on Sunday newspaper, just months after he fought for his life in hospital against the coronavirus.

French court convicts former PM Fillon of embezzling public funds (Reuters) A French court on Monday found former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon guilty of embezzlement of public funds in a fake jobs scandal that wrecked his 2017 run for president and opened the Elysee Palace door for Emmanuel Macron. A French court on Monday found former French Prime Minister Francois Fillon guilty of embezzlement of public funds in a fake jobs scandal that wrecked his 2017 run for president and opened the Elysee Palace door for Emmanuel Macron.

Hard times even for homeless (Worldcrunch) Speaking to German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung, anthropologist Luisa Schneider described one homeless girl she’s followed. “Before the crisis, she was able to study and wash in cafes or libraries. Neither is possible now.” Schneider expects more Germans to sleep on the streets in the coming months. “Many networks have now collapsed. Even homeless people who used to support each other are now losing sight of each other.” In France, government authorities and NGOs were able to accommodate 177,600 people with shelter during the lockdown period, reports Le Monde. The government has invested more than 2 billion euros helping those without homes, including requisitioning 13,300 hotel rooms. Yet France’s emergency phone number for homeless assistance remains overwhelmed, with over 200 calls on average daily and many unable to secure a temporary housing situation. And as the country continues opening up, it is unclear how long the special accommodation period will last.

Polish election (NYT) Polish President Andrzej Duda failed to win enough of the vote in Sunday’s election to avoid a runoff, according to exit polls, forcing him into what is expected to be a tightly fought contest with the liberal mayor of Warsaw Rafal Trzaskowski next month. Although Duda came out ahead on Sunday, analysts expect that to change in the runoff election in two weeks, as opposition voters whose support was split in the first round unite around Trzaskowski.

Russian state exit polls show 76% so far back reforms that could extend Putin rule (Reuters) Russian state opinion pollster VTsIOM said on Monday that its exit polls showed that 76% of Russians had so far voted to support reforms that could allow President Vladimir Putin to extend his rule until 2036. The nationwide vote on constitutional reforms began on June 25 and is being held over seven days as a precaution against the coronavirus pandemic. If approved, the changes would allow Putin to run twice for president again after his current term expires in 2024.

Militants attack Karachi stock exchange, killing at least 3 (AP) Militants attacked the stock exchange in the Pakistani city of Karachi on Monday, killing at least three people—two guards and a policeman, according to police. Special police forces deployed to the scene of the attack and in a swift operation secured the building, killing all four gunmen. There were no reports of any wounded among the brokers and employees inside the exchange and a separatist militant group from a neighboring province later claimed responsibility for the attack.

China forces birth control on Uighurs to suppress population (AP) The Chinese government is taking draconian measures to slash birth rates among Uighurs and other minorities as part of a sweeping campaign to curb its Muslim population, even as it encourages some of the country’s Han majority to have more children. While individual women have spoken out before about forced birth control, the practice is far more widespread and systematic than previously known, according to an AP investigation based on government statistics, state documents and interviews with 30 ex-detainees, family members and a former detention camp instructor. The campaign over the past four years in the far west region of Xinjiang is leading to what some experts are calling a form of “demographic genocide.” The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, the interviews and data show. The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.

Thailand opens its borders to some (Worldcrunch) Thailand will allow pubs and bars to reopen on Wednesday and plans to let in some foreign travelers after recording five weeks without any community transmission of the coronavirus, a government official said. Pubs, bars and karaoke venues will be able to operate until midnight as long as they follow safety guidelines such as ensuring two-meter spaces between tables. Foreigners with work permits, residency and families in Thailand will also be able to enter the country, but will be subject to a 14-day quarantine. Visitors seeking certain types of medical treatment such as some cosmetic surgery or fertility treatment could also be allowed into the country.

Balcony churches: Kenyans find new ways to worship in lockdown (The Guardian) The children hang over the balcony railings on Sunday morning. In the parking lot below, a four-person band test microphones and practise harmonies. A moment later, the group fills the Mirema apartment complex in Nairobi with music: “I’m happy today, so happy. In Jesus’s name, I’m happy.” The Rev Paul Machira, a tall, slender beanpole of a man with greying hair, leaps around energetically, encouraging the balcony worshippers to join in prayer. Sporting green overalls embroidered with his nickname, Uncle Paul, the 43-year-old has been traveling around apartment complexes across Nairobi, bringing his balcony services and Sunday school to families since the Covid-19 pandemic closed down places of worship in Kenya on 22 March. Pairing dance moves with their tunes, the band encourage children and their parents to spend the hour dancing and praying together. When Machira realises that a crowd has gathered on the balcony of the apartment building next door, he shifts to a “360 service” to include those neighbours. Machira’s services are by invitation only. He says that the group have had to skip services because some of the neighbours have objected to “noise-makers” in their complex. Machira’s group have been booked for as many as four services in one day before. This popularity means that they sometimes have to split into two, renting an additional van and musical equipment to cover more ground.

[prorevenge]

I'm going to hell, apparently.

Let me preface this by saying I've never posted to this reddit before, so pardon me if I don't format this very well. It's a bit long, so TL;DR is at the end.

As far as names go, there's really only one, and that's "GA" for "Great Aunt," my grandmother's sister.

GA liked to fashion herself as the family historian, and went out of her way to get all of my grandmother's family photos after she passed away, as well as many of the photos from her husband's family. This is about mid 2000s, so I'm a teenager at that point. We lived about three hours away, and my GA, not the most tech savvy person, called my mom to see if I would be willing to go stay over at her house for a week so I could show her how to scan and archive photos on her brand new desktop. She was very proud of it, and assumed she could easily upload and document whatever files she needed to share with family that way-- except the woman was 60 and had the technological knowledge of a wet paper bag.

While I would be staying with her, she agreed that she would take me regularly to see my grandfather, who lived in the same town. I figured it was a pretty good deal-- free food for a week, and regular visits to the man who half-raised me as my father figure stand in. We were really close growing up, so I jumped at any chance for me to go see him. Along the way, she also tried to get me to do all sorts of other things on her "brand new computer," like set up her free trial of Microsoft Word that had come with it, get her some fancy photo editing software, etc. I told her the most important part of it would be the fact she'd need to let me install a good Antivirus software, but oddly enough, she wasn't interested in that. "I don't go on nasty sites that give you viruses," she so sagely said, referencing mostly what her middle aged but also somewhat computer illiterate son had been telling her.

Already when I get there, I'm seeing some red flags. My Great Uncle was cool, but very much acknowledged that he'd married a bit of a control freak woman-- while I didn't mind staying at his house, there were a lot of signs showing up very quickly that she expected me to work every single day for her, archiving pictures and showing her what 'cut' and 'paste' meant with files, and how to make folders separating photos. This included me spending several minutes at a time labeling full photos, and generally doing a full time data entry job for several hours a day, at 15, with no real pay other than her feeding me.

Basically, I was kind of getting shafted, because every time I would bring up going and wanting to see my grandfather for a couple of hours, she would sing-song "That's not really what we invited you over here for, is it?" But she would begrudgingly take me over for an hour or two in the afternoon, even though I hadn't gotten to really visit with him in over a year.

Now let me preface this by saying I'm from the deep South. My entire family is very religious apart from myself, but due to personal reasons, I lost faith in religion when I was relatively young. While I wasn't open about this, I only mentioned it as a personal preference for not going to Church, so I told them I would not be attending with them on Sunday as I didn't bring anything to wear with me, and would much rather get the sleep in for the several hour drive home on Monday to prepare to go back to school (we were on Winter Break at the time, so I had spent my entire last week of Winter Break helping this woman.)

She starts pressuring me about it on Thursday and Friday, but Saturday she really starts to lay it on thick. Finally, with that kind of 'I'm getting tired of this but I can't be mean because this is family' sort of laugh, I tell her I haven't been to church in over four years and I didn't plan on starting it up any time soon.

In the most offended voice, GA gets really quiet and touches my arm. "You know, your grandmother (who had died four years prior) would be so disappointed in you. How will you ever get to see her or your sister in Heaven if you keep this up? Don't you ever want to see either of them again? If you keep this up, you're going to go to Hell."

Now, I never imagined she would bring up my grandmother, HER OWN SISTER, to guilt trip me, but she had gone a step lower and brought up MY sister, who also passed away a few years prior. It was immediately like a slap in the face, and since I never expected her to literally tell me that I, personally, was throwing away any chance I ever had of seeing two of the most important people in my life that I'd lost, I reflexively started crying on the spot. She started pulling out all of the guilt tripping "apology" cards of how she was only looking out for my best interest, and that she didn't mean to make me cry, and finally, I had had enough. I had enough of this terrible woman who constantly belittled her family members for not living up to her ideals and who had spent the last week treating me like a prisoner on visitation rights with my grandfather.

And so, I waited while they were at church, got on her brand new shiny computer, and went to every single virus-infested web page I could, made sure to download at least 3 trojans on her computer, and cleared the history like it had never happened.

I didn't touch the computer when she wasn't watching while they were there, and by the time they made it back from church, I was fast asleep in their guest bed like nothing had ever happened. She had no way of knowing I was behind the reason their computer freaking out, and she blamed my uncle for going to news sites she didn't like for the viruses For the next several weeks she tried calling my mom to get a hold of me, suddenly very, VERY interested in 'whatever antivirus I had suggested to her when we were doing pictures,' but of course, I always told mom that I was far too wrapped up with doing school work. After I told mom what my aunt had said to me, she was more than willing to cover for me so I wouldn't have to talk to her anymore.

Eventually I overheard that she turned to her equally computer illiterate son, who wound up paying a 'professional' $200 to reformat the computer entirely. Shame, if I would have known they had $200 to pay to someone to do a virus wipe, I would have offered to do it. Unfortunately the 'professional' also told her that all of the photos we spent that week scanning and documenting were irreversibly lost, so she had to do it all over again without me there to hold her hand.

TLDR; Aunt used visits with my grandfather to bribe me into helping her work on her computer, made a huge stink about taking me to see my grandfather, then told me to my face that I was never going to see my dead grandmother or sister again because I was going to hell for not going to church. I proceed to infect her computer with more viruses than a $2 hooker and let her deal with the aftermath.

(source) story by (/u/xinayru)

[lucimorningstar812]

Can I hear more about your ocs? What are they like? How many do you have?

Have I died and gone to heaven, or has someone genuinely asked about my weird children?!

Well I have 14 now, 15 including my bitch of a dark side, but they’re kinda split into three groups; Original Squad (TM), Software Bois and Phobia Demons (plus one human). I’ll put some brief descriptions under the cut

Original Squad you have

Atom: a 19 year old who died but was trapped in limbo, so his appearance changed with his physical body until he was a skeleton ghost. Clever and obsessed with science, but clumsy as all hell. Now researches alternate universes

Shade: a skeleton bat created in a lab accident when Atom was researching bat wing structures. Very shy bean who loves all things creative and she is basically Atom’s little sister now. Short and chubby

Mortem: oh my wonderful genderless, living representation of depression formed from millions of year of depression across an infinite number of universes. He’s around 670 years old and a sweet bean (yeah he usually goes by he but is also happy with they) who has a depressive aura that basically brings down anyone around him. All he wants is friends, but not many others like him. Lives in a black, endless void with voices that belong to nowhere

Summer: a 27 year old lesbian anthro cat. The definition of PMA and keeps the groups’ spirits up. She’s actually from another universe and was the first being from another universe Atom contacted, but unfortunately the portal was one way, which both realised a little too late

Time: a 30 year old human from another universe who ended up being catapulted through time and space into this universe. The exposure to literal time and space is still killing him slowly and his body is decaying. He also has a hat with an hourglass that’s counting down to his death. Can’t smile or emote with his voice because of what’s happening to his body, but he’s sweet and Summer’s best friend

Snap: my borderline psychopathic boy! A 25 year old carcodill, which is a humanoid alligator species from the same world as Time, who grew up experiencing discrimination until he snapped. Eventually turned to murder and lost his mind while seeking revenge for his kind. Has a complicated history with Time and is extremely protective of Mortem, especially when Atom tries to bully him. Oh yeah, he also is missing his right arm and left eye

Software Bois

Zeal: a sentient computer virus from another universe that was destroyed. He was able to travel to Atom’s computer through his trials of opening a portal. Now he just likes to be mischievous and is also Mortem’s best friend, often hacking into messaging systems to talk him

Api: sentient anti virus software installed to remove Zeal before Atom realised he was alive. Antivirus Protection Interface.exe was just a standard piece of software until it interacted with Zeal’s coding and caused it to come to life as Api. He doesn’t really understand negative things and is the sweetest being to ever exist. Unfortunately, he also doesn’t understand why Zeal doesn’t like him, or actually realise Zeal doesn’t like him

404: a computer bug that was brought to life around the same time as Api. He stayed hidden away in a forgotten area of the computer behind a firewall he’d created until Zeal was curious and ended up stumbling upon him. He rarely hangs out with the others, but likes to observe from afar. He also mutters in binary quite often and talks in the third person when he gets anxious

Phobia Demons Note: these will be a lot shorter than the others

Absence: a deal maker smoke demons who disobeyed too many rules and it cost him his right eye and speech. Now he wears a mask to hide his disabilities to avoid being attacked, and a different mask to show them off to scare mortals

Tommy: a guard smoke demon who is a small ball of anger and ready to fight anyone. They have a large scar along their chest (from just below the neck to right shoulder) for helping Absence into another realm, which is forbidden

Amira: a messenger shadow demon and Absence’s crush. She is often in the smoke realm delivering messages to the Smoke King and higher power demons

Octavier: a medic water demon and non binary disaster gay. Loves chatting to Absence when he visits because the water realm is the only realm that actually allows others to visit if they can get there

Taya: the one human. A wonderful trans women who was going to sell her soul so get the body she wanted, but Absence took pity on her and found a loop hole to give her almost everything she wanted while saving her soul from damnation. Refusing to go back and ‘finish the job’ is what cost Absence his speech, but the two are now great friends and she has a special summoning ritual just for Absence

And that’s everyone! Well everyone so far XD I have an oc blog @sciensanity​ where I reblog all oc stuff or you can just search ‘sciensanity [name of character]’ on my blog for any art

Esruoc fo em togrof ehs dna Luci m’I Seil reh ot netsil tno’d, edis retteb reh m’I

[recentanimenews]

The Top 10 Anime Villains Who Just Won't Die!

Editor's Note: This is a republication of a feature by Nicole Mejias that originally appeared on Crunchyroll News on 5/21/18.

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    It’s often said that a good hero needs an equally good villain, and certainly there are many infamous villains to choose from. Rivalries are made, evil plans are thwarted, and the heroes celebrate their hard earned victories with the vanquishing of their foes. However, not every villain is so easy to get rid of, and some linger on long after they’re dead to cause even more problems!

  In this list, let's take a look at the top 10 villains who just refused to stay dead, gone, and buried! And as a warning, this article contains a LOT of spoilers, so read with caution!

  10. Neferpitou (Hunter x Hunter)

Anime fans can at least celebrate that the vanquishing of Neferpitou didn’t take the quite literal decade that it did in the manga, but the Chimera Ant villain certainly haunted Gon for a long time! Neferpitou had easily killed Gon’s mentor and hero Kite, and reanimated his corpse to use a training toy. Gon, unaware that he was dead, refused to give up on the chance to save his mentor and defeat this extremely powerful enemy. Unfortunately for Gon, Neferpitou vastly outclassed him, as to be expected of one of the Chimera Ant King’s Royal Guards! Neferpitou’s loyalty to the king leads to their undoing, but not before a protracted battle of wits with Gon over the life of Komugi.

    Once Neferpitou reveals to Gon that Kite is long dead and unable to be restored, Gon flies into a rage, leading to the iconic scenes where Gon’s Nen ages him, growing his power (and his hair!) to legendary proportions. Outclassed, Neferpitou dies happy, knowing that Gon is unable to get to the king, but even in death Neferpitou haunts Gon further, as their Nen ability Terpsichora activates, seemingly reviving the fallen foe! Distracted and enraged, Gon mercilessly beats his enemy’s corpse until Killua stops him… and falls into a coma, his body nearly destroyed and his life almost snuffed out from the battle! It takes a literal miracle to revive Gon much later, and it’s safe to safe Neferpitou won’t be forgotten by Gon or us any time soon!

  9. Petelgeuse Romanee-Conti (Re:ZERO)

Petelgeuse is surely a memorable villain from an aesthetic point of view with his distinct looks and voice, but the way in which he easily defeats Subaru, causing the protagonist to despair that there may be no good outcome against this foe, is one of the defining storylines of Re:ZERO. Petelgeuse seems to have Subaru figured out, and no matter how many times Subaru resets the timeline, he always seems to come up short against the foe, watching his friends suffer and die in various awful ways each time he tries to find a new route to victory.

Not only that, but Petelgeuse almost seems able to guess Subaru’s special ‘reset’ ability, and nearly succeeds in possessing him and ending the story for good! It isn’t until numerous deaths and resets that Subaru develops a working plan, and even then Petelgeuse nearly destroys Subaru. As Subaru writes “The End” in Petelgeuse’s gospel in his own blood, the deranged priest is finally killed after his body is crushed and torn to pieces! We’ll have to wait and see what type of impact Petelgeuse really left on Subaru, but to be sure he was the most difficult foe so far, and on that certainly left Subaru a changed man!

  8. Junko Enoshima (Dangan Ronpa)

We warned you about spoilers above, so if you’re still reading and are interested in checking out Dangan Ronpa unspoiled, we suggest you turn back now! In the Dangan Ronpa series (both anime and games) there’s no one quite as twisted and evil as Junko Enoshima, the mastermind behind the initial murder game, as well as the leader of a cult dedicated to bringing her twisted sense of despair to the world! Junko seemingly dies right away in Dangan Ronpa, only for it to be later revealed that it was her own sister who she happily murdered! Junko reveals herself as the mastermind behind Monokuma, having lead the students to murdering each other and laughing all the way!

Despite being killed at the end of the first Dangan Ronpa, the second game (which didn’t have an anime, sadly!) reveals that Junko lives on as Junko Alter, a computer virus seeking to continue her twisted legacy! In the second anime series, Danganon Ronpa 3, Junko appears in both the Despair and Hope routes, showing us how she gained her position of power and set up the initial game. And in the Hope route, Junko’s ghost seems bewildered to watch the antics of the cast’s struggle, before fading away, hopefully forever. Junko may not be the most ‘hands on’ villain, but she’s certainly a troublesome one who caused a literal world of despair, and whose legacy seems poised to last long after she’s dead.

  7. Tao Pai Pai  (Dragon Ball / Dragon Ball Z)

Usually, a returning villain is a major hindrance to the protagonist, presenting them with constant roadblocks to success. That’s not quite the case for Tao Pai Pai, who goes from being one of the deadliest foes Goku ever met to a comically inept weakling. First appearing during Goku’s attempts to gather the Dragon Balls at the employ of Commander Red, Tao Pai Pai is one of Goku’s first truly dangerous opponents. Tao is shown to be cunning, cold, and murderous, killing numerous people simply because he wants to, and almost kills Goku! Goku eventually defeats Tao, and if not for the assassin’s cowardly attempts to get the last laugh, might have lived unscathed; instead, Goku deflects his grenade back to him, leaving Tao for dead.

Later, however, it turns out Tao Pai Pai is far from dead, re-appearing with cybernetic upgrades and bent on killing Tien and Goku! Vastly outclassed by the powerful Tien, he doesn’t show up again until the Cell Games in Dragon Ball Z as little more than comic relief, but still as evil and conniving as usual!

6. Toguro Brothers  (Yu Yu Hakusho)

There probably isn’t a more iconic villain in Yu Yu Hakusho than Younger Toguro and his demonically powered muscled form, but even without that recognition, these two Toguros are a thorn in Yusuke and company’s side for the entire series, with Elder Toguro being the longest recurring villain in the show! First showing up during the Spirit Detective arc of the show, the Toguros are a formidable pair of bodyguards to the despicable Tarukane. In a fierce battle against Yusuke and Kuwabara, the pair of heroes are barely victorious against the powerful brothers, and it seems as if Kuwabara has killed Younger Toguro with a sword to the chest.

Shortly after, however, we learn that really wasn’t the case, and sure enough the Toguros re-emerge, forcing Yusuke and the others to fight in the Dark Tournament! Toguro constantly pushes Yusuke to become more powerful, and seems to get his wish, eventually dying to Yusuke’s powered up form. However, the Elder Toguro survives after being presumed dead, reappearing from inside the body of Gourmet during the Chapter Black saga! While his brother only seemed impossible to defeat, Elder Toguro truly seems to be immortal, and it takes a cunning attack by Kurama to sentence the Elder Toguro to a life of never ending punishment, where he can’t hurt anyone again!

5. Orochimaru (Naruto / Naruto Shippuden / Boruto)

When we think of returning villains, Orochimaru is certainly pretty high on that list, perhaps redeemed by the fact that he seems to make amends for his villainy by the end of the series, appearing in Boruto as a neutral character (so far). Still, many anime fans probably can’t forget the first time Orochimaru slithered into the story, and his constant meddling and capture of Sasuke lead to one of the most iconic moments in the entire series: Naruto vs. Sasuke. Orochimaru certainly made himself known throughout the series, utilizing his ability to body hop and revive himself numerous times before being seemingly sealed away and defeated by Itachi.

That sense of victory was short lived, however, as Sasuke himself releases Orochimaru to get answers. This proves to be a turning point for the snake ninja, as he realizes Sasuke is now far too powerful to possess, and instead the once head villain of the series begins his path to something resembling redemption. That said, who knows where Boruto will go, so Orochimaru might end up going back to his old tricks once again...

4. Shou Tucker (Fullmetal Alchemist [2003])

Now if this list were the Top 10 Worst Human Beings Ever, Shou Tucker would certainly be #1 with a bullet (or an alchemically powered hand through the face). However, Shou’s return in the original Fullmetal Alchemist anime was a total (and unwanted) surprise, as the series deviated from the manga quite a bit. While Scar had the pleasure of killing Shou in the manga, in the anime Shou vanishes into ‘military custody’... until he suddenly re-emerges as a chimera!

Shou’s mind is more gone than it was the first time, obsessed with trying to revive his daughter… the same one he turned into a chimera. Shou doesn’t meet his maker this time either, being left in the anime an obsessed failure trying to regain what he lost. We won’t really spend time trying to rationalize this despicable man’s actions, but suffice to say fans at the time were thoroughly shocked to see this terrible man-thing appear again!

  3. Char Aznable  (Mobile Suit Gundam)

It wouldn’t be far to claim that without Char, Mobile Suit Gundam may not have been as successful as it was. Amuro was an amazing, if flawed, protagonist, and he desperately needed an equally flawed and interesting rival. Char Aznable was easily able to take that position, and the Zeon pilot wreaked havoc on Amuro, pushing the Newtype to defeat him. Char is last seen giving Kycilla Zabi a unique one bazooka salute, before himself disappearing in the impending explosion. However, during the events of Zeta Gundam, a mysterious and charismatic man by the name of Quattro Bajeena shows up. Char’s alias is almost too heroic, coming across as one of the most helpful and good characters in the series, but as with most things dealing with Char, his motives are never that easy to discern.

Char re-emerges as himself during the events of Char’s Counterattack, and he and Amuro resume their rivalry, this time seemingly finishing each other off as their Psycoframe equipped suits overload, leaving both men MIA and presumed dead at the end. However, as of Gundam Unicorn, it seems part of Char is still around, emerging as Full Frontal. The conclusion of Unicorn sees the original Gundam Newtypes are reunited in spirit form, and Char, Lalah, and Amuro seemingly reconcile, ready to finally fade away.

2. Frieza (Dragon Ball Z / Dragon Ball Super)

While Goku had faced numerous powerful foes in both Dragon Ball and Dragon Ball Z, Frieza may be the most iconic and infamous foe, cementing the series as a fan favorite and introducing fans to Super Saiyan Goku, having pushed the fighter to his limits. Frieza is one of the deadliest foes Goku ever meets, and a truly despicable and selfish person, concerned only with achieving immortality and taking over the universe, or killing everyone in it! Goku eventually defeats Frieza, leaving him to potentially survive, until the selfish alien seemingly kills himself with his own desperate final attack. However, when things seem to have calmed down on Earth, Frieza (now cybernetically enhanced!) returns… only to be quickly cut down by Trunks!

Frieza appears a few times during the Majin Buu saga, but mostly as a commentator on the fight against Buu, and has been seemingly finally vanquished… until the movie Resurrection of F! Having escaped Hell, Frieza re-appears on Earth, and his new Golden Frieza form once again makes him an imposing foe. However, his usual failings cost him again, and is this time defeated by Vegeta and Goku. However, this would still not be the end for him, as the Universe Survival Saga sees Frieza return… as a good guy?! That’s right, sort of! Frieza agrees to help Goku in the Universe Survival Tournament on the condition that he get revived. In true Frieza fashion, it becomes hard to figure out what his intentions really are, but in the end he and Goku make an odd couple pairing that, with the help of Android 17, save the day (Frieza even sacrifices himself!). But, as of the closing scenes of Dragon Ball Super, Frieza probably hasn’t learned much, so it’s likely we’ll see him clashing with our heroes once again!

1. Dio  (JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure)

  If you already guessed the #1 spot on this list, congratulations! If you not, well, we won’t make that joke, but you probably know the one we mean! Sometimes a villain truly makes a series, and Dio is definitely that villain. While the heroes of JoJo’s various arcs are all great, they wouldn’t be half as compelling without the truly awful Dio to stand against. And even when Dio isn’t the central villain, his influence is lingering in the background. From his initial rise to immortality against Jonathan Joestar to eventually stealing the body of his hated rival to the revival of the Pillar Men brought on by people’s fascination with the Stone Masks to the return of Dio in Stardust Crusaders, Dio and the Joestars are forever linked in combat.

But even when the spotlight drifts from Dio in Diamond is Unbreakable, his machinations with the nature of Stands leads to the Arrow finding its way to Morioh-Cho and wreaking havoc as new stand users emerge! And, while they haven’t been animated yet, we’ll just simply say that Dio’s influence in the future JoJo storylines is not to be underestimated… When you least expect it, Dio might just strike again!

  Do you have any favorite seemingly immortal villains that heroes just can’t seem to get rid of? Let us know in the comments!

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Nicole is a features and a social video script writer for Crunchyroll. Known to profess her love of otome games over at her blog, Figuratively Speaking. When she has the time, she also streams some games. Follow her on Twitter: @ellyberries 

By: news+feed@crunchyroll.com

[aftermathdb]

DEATH BATTLE Review: Mega Man Battle Royale.

Cue the Mega Man 2 theme!

Five robots. All with the name Mega Man. Time to find out which one is the strongest one there is!

Mega Man Classic Preview.

We all know this story. Doctor Light created several robots to try and help out the world at large. But then that dastardly Doctor Willy took them, and made them evil. To combat this, we got the first, the classic, the original… Mega Man.

And we even get to go over his many… many weapons. Thanks to his variable weapons system, Rock has a plethora of firepower to work with, and a lot of variety to utilize in a fight.

From his trust Mega Buster, to his various elemental weapons, Rock has an answer for everything. And his Gear System from 11 can give him an extra edge up.

And if he’s ever in a pickle, Rock can call up his trusty companion, Rush to give him an edge up.

And if you’re wondering about feats, Rock has plenty to work with.

Though, of course, he does have his fair share of weaknesses. He’s not necessarily invincible, his weapons have limited ammunition, and he wasn’t designed for combat.

But in the end, Mega Man is a power house. If a crazy German is trying to take over the world, there’s only one man to call:

The Mega Man.

Mega Man X Preview.

And we fast forward into the future, where Doctor Cain, discovers a new kind of replicated human called a reploid. These beings had A.I.s so great, that they were practically human. But then some of them ended up going… Maverick.

In order to combat this new threat, Cain called in Sigma. But, we all know how well that went. So he went with the backup plan: Mega Man X.

X, surprise surprise, has a Mega Buster, and the ability to copy other weapons. And he’s specifically built to be better than the OG Mega Man……… So we already know two of the combatants that are going down, right?

But, he’s still got weapon energy to worry about. But he’s got plenty of weapons to choose from. And if he needs some extra firepower, X can call upon his Ultimate Armor.

This gives him extra firepower, and channels his inner Street Fighter fan and lets X use legendary moves like the Hadoken and the Shoryuken.

And of course, he’s got feats. That healing though… That would make him hard to put down.

But in the end, if a nutball virus that’s controlling a powerful robot is trying to take over the world, there’s only one man to call:

Mega Man X.

Mega Man. Volnutt Preview.

So, fast forward again, and we land in a new year where the Earth has flooded. And we all basically died because we got that shitty. Hey, if we had a bunch of wars that ended up killing everyone, and kept letting the top 1% run the show, I’d say that we deserve it.

But the humans on a space station were basically running the whole thing. But then they died too. Except for one, called The Master. And his Carbon known as Mega Man Trigger. And The Master decided that the Carbons deserved to run the planet, since there are more of them. But then a bunch of crazy stuff happened, and left Trigger without his memories thanks to a being named Sera, and left him on Earth. This left him stranded, and the new natives gave him the dumbest name they could think of: Volnutt.

God this is weird.

So, he decided to battle evil, stop the Master System, and try to regain his lost memories.

The downside to his special weapons is that they all draw from the same power source, and that they have to be swapped out manually.

But he’s got a list of feats to pull from to win the day.

In the end, if you need a man to be stranded on the moon for nearly two decades, there’s only one man to call:

Mega Man Volnutt.

MegaMan.EXE Preview.

In an alternate timeline, Doctor Light, now known as Tadashi Hikari, focused on the internet and digital A.I instead of robotics. His work would create an entire universe known as the Cyber-World that would be managed by A.I systems called NetNavis, and one kid named LAN would get one of the strongest Navis of all: Mega Man.EXE.

Like all the Mega Men before him, Hub has a Mega Buster, and can even grab enemy weapons for his own weapons system thanks to the Battle Chips he has on hand.

And with over 1,500 Battle Chips, LAN and .EXE have basically an army’s worth of weapons to choose from.

And since .EXE is a digital program, and not an organic being, he’s survived a ton of punishment.

And in case you’re wondering “Wait! He’s digital. Can he even fight in the real world?”- The answer is “Yes.”

.EXE has been able to come to the real world on a few occasions, and has even fused with LAN through Full Synchronization. And with Perfect Synchro (No relation to Yu-Gi-Oh), .EXE can even retain his weapons and abilities. This is a good thing, considering all the crazy feats that .EXE has on hand.

And as it turns out, .EXE is actually LAN’s stillborn baby brother turned into a computer program, which helps with that whole “Perfect Synchro” thing. Which means that the planet-busting Cybeast exploding comes around to that number you see up there.

But at the end of the day, when a bunch of evil viruses are trying to destroy an entire cybernetic universe, there’s only one man to call:

MegaMan.EXE.

Starforce Mega Man (Geo) Preview.

Going ahead a few more years (Give or take a hundred or two), humanity has moved past cyberspace and onto radio waves. But then a guy named Kelvin Stellar got kidnapped by a bunch of FM-ians, or FM Aliens… God what the fuck happened to this franchise?- What’s wrong with a young robot fighting evil robots to save the world?- Was it not big enough?

Anyways, to fight back against these… FM-ians, Geo ended up merging with another form of these guys who is apparently an AM-Ian named Omega. Because a cyber-being named after a Greek letter of the alphabet is always someone you can trust. But they merged into a brand new being known as Starforce Mega Man

(Wow. First Hub, and now Geo. What do these guys have against ghosts?- I know what jooke I’m using whenever Danny Phantom shows up (And for those of you wondering, he’s not in the next battle)).

But, as a being that is composed of EM waves, Geo can effectively be unseen, unheard, and untouched by any other human beings.

And thankfully, this Mega Buster has some differences from the others. Like how it automatically charges up on its own, but it can be modified to change it’s power, speed, and status effects.

Anyways, onto the rest of the weapons. And with 600+ equips, Geo has an arsenal on his hand at all times.

And he can even control “Noise” a term used to describe excess energy created by EM Beings. He can even absorb a lot of it to access a super form known as “Red Joker” who can scatter your remains across the atmosphere after he uses a blast that turns you into EM Particles. Yeesh, remind me to never piss off any aliens made up of EM Particles. You never know which ones might end up having that form or ability on hand, er… appendage?- What would an EMbeing call those anyways?

With all that power, Geo and Omega have a resume to boot. They’ve taken on plenty of enemies. Including a being that could move a  black hole that was 4 million times bigger than the sun.

And Geo tanked attacks from Sirius (The one that did that)! In order to pull off a feat like that would require over 4.6 Decillion Megatons of TNT. Looks like Optimus now places second for how largest amount of force one can output to Geo.

And since other EMBeings can move from the center of the Milky Way to Earth in about three days. Putting them over three million times the speed of light. Considering that Geo could basically survive a black hole like it was nothing, this means that it’s likely that he could do the same.

And unlike all the other Mega Men, Starforce managed to make sure that his world ended up peaceful.

So, at the end of the day, when the world is in danger of being destroyed or overrun by alien beings made up of Electro-Magnetic waves, there’s only one man to call:

Starforce Mega Man.

I gotta say: Doing all these callbacks to the end of Classic’s rundown from Mega Man vs. Astro Boy was kinda fun.

The battle itself.

Luis is lead on this battle and he’s backed by Zack and Kiid. Brandon on the music, Mega Mania. Jerky on Spriteart, and Chris Kokkinos on sound. No voice actors (thank goodness. I’m not in the mood, nor do I have the time to look up their twitter accounts).

So, for those who saw the preview, we know that the main reason they fight is because they all just show up in the same location. Eh, it could be worse. There are some fights that could have been improved without a story to them.

So, as the preview showed, Classic, Volnutt, and X all kinda… Get to the ground while Geo and Hub kinda just… duke it out up top.

Unfortunately for Classic, X is canonically his superior in every way. This puts him at a disadvantage against the Maverick Hunter. However, Rock has a trick up his sleeve.

His Super Adaptor armor.

But, it’s not like X is a stranger to having a super form as well, and he breaks out his own armor.

And the Black Hole Bomb is launched, but it’s not like X is a stranger to this, as he breaks out rather menacingly.

(Anyone here watching DIU?- I’m excited to see the Highway Star arc dubbed)

So, spoiler alert: Volnutt is the first to fall. Without any fancy tech, or FTL capabilities, he’s not escaping the Black Hole Bomb.

But, as stated before, since X is Rock’s superior in every way, Rock goes down next.

(Don’t worry, X gets better).

And after X pulls himself back together, he opts to blast his opponent with the Mother Elf attack.

But…

Star Force is made up of EM waves, which means he can physically fight back.

It also means he can hack X and basically knock him down.

So the final battle is between Starforce Mega Man, and MegaMan.EXE.

Which means the finishing blow comes in

5…

4…

3…

2…

1…

And the winner is MegaMan.EXE!

Verdict + Explanation.

So, as it turns out, it really boils down to Starforce and .EXE.

X’s Mother Elf attack wasn’t much to do either, as both Starforce and .EXE were experienced with that kind of attack.

But you might be thinking “Starforce held back in his fight with EXE so to not cause a paradox! Shouldn’t that mean that Starforce is stronger?” And to answer that… No.

Both combatants were holding back in their fight.

And at best, Starforce’s speed is 3 million times that of the speed of light. But remember that time when EXE traveled the entire Cyberworld to find something that could help him save Bass.EXE?- Since the Cyberworld is an actual cybernetic universe and not just a hard drive or a file on a computer, it means that it’s comparable  to our own. Since MegaMan.EXE couldn’t have been gone too long, on account that Bass.EXE didn’t have a lot of time to survive an attack, this means that MegaMan.EXE’s best speed would have to be…

……… Remember when Darkseid, a literal GOD, had the best speed feat recorded?

Also, unlike X, who is explicitly stated to be better than Mega Man Classic, Starforce isn’t stated to be better than EXE despite coming after him in canon material. And his healing and defensive powers gave him a leg up.

And if you’re thinking “Wait! Wouldn’t EXE’s speed feat be an outlier without anything to back it up?”- There’s a popup for that too.

And with moves like Uninstall and Interrupt, EXE could basically just steal or stop any of Starforce’s attacks. He could do it to all the other Mega Men’s weapons with it too……… Except for Volnutt, interestingly enough (Hey, gotta throw him a bone after Legends 3 was cancelled).

In the end, all the Super Fighting Robots had plenty of firepower. But if you want a Mega Man to rule them all, there’s only one man to call:

MegaMan.EXE

Overall impression

Too many zeros. Like, I can’t really concentrate on this fight with that many zeros on one little programing droid!

I mean… Yay?- Now I have an excuse to make it so that Ultron is a non-problem in the story, but still? That’s a lot of zeros on EXE.

I like the fight, and the jokes are pretty good, but I can’t get over those zeros.

Like… the music is great, the animation is solid, and the research is sound, but still.

Those zeros…

8.5/10. Ah, goddammit. More zeros.

Next time…

Someone’s husband is dead.

So, a ballerina turned (literal) cold-blooded assassin against a super-spy trained by who knows how many people? I was honestly expecting Nat to fight Huntress or Black Canary. And for Widow to fight… Literally anyone else with a sniper. I would have honestly had taken Ruby Rose vs Widowmaker.

Whatever. Join us next time as we cover…

Redhead Spider-Lady vs. Purple Spider-Lady.

Is there a fight that you want me to review? - Send an ask/request, and I’ll look into it!

Do you want to read my fanfic based around DEATH BATTLE itself? click here!

Thank you for reading, and I hope to see you next time for…

Spider-Lady vs. Lady-Spider.

So many zeros… *insert whimpering noises here*

[angeltriestoblog]

On-brand stories from my childhood

I remember this tweet going around a few months ago, soliciting people’s most on-brand stories from their childhood, things they’ve done or words they’ve said as a kid that sum up who they are at present. I wanted to participate so bad when I first saw it on my timeline, but I knew that being the eccentric, one-of-a-kind kid I was, it would take me a long period of reminiscing (and more tweets in a thread than anyone would bother to read) to put down everything worth noting. So, here it is: 10 of the weirdest, Most Angel experiences from my youth, for the lack of a way to put it, accompanied by photos of baby me because let’s face it, they make everything better.

ONE: When I was about four, my parents took me to a building very near our house to have my IQ checked. They had an inkling that I was a gifted child, and wanted to confirm it with a professional. So, I was escorted into an office, and subjected to interrogation to assess my competence in several areas of giftedness - much to my dismay, since all I wanted was to get that interview over and done with so I could read books in the library next door. There was this one part where the person in charge of me was trying to test my kinesthetic abilities by getting me to follow this aerobics routine that she was making me do. “Step step one, step step two,” she was saying while stomping to the right and stomping right back in place. I told her I didn’t want to do it, because I didn’t want to look like a fool.

TWO: I had this knack for correcting teachers. As a kid, I was hyperfixated on learning all the countries in the world and their respective capitals, with the help of this flash cards set that I got from Toy Kingdom. So when there was this time that my Filipino teacher had said that there were only two countries in the world with names that started with the letter Q, five year old Angel was very quick to correct her. “Miss Melissa, there’s only one country that starts with the letter Q! It’s Qatar!” I told her. She replied, “No! Quebec is a country, too!” This argument persisted for a bit until she made us do a seatwork, which gave her the opportunity to leave us to go to the computer room for a bit (since cellphones weren’t given Internet capability back in 2006). She returned and told me, “Angel, tama ka nga. Di pala bansa yung Quebec, hehe.”

THREE: It’s become common knowledge to everyone in my life that I wrote books growing up, but my body of work extended way beyond my very inventive fiction (alternatively called, me putting my own twist on the fairytales I read growing up) and creative non-fiction (me telling everyone how my day, half true-to-life, accurate detail and half-imagination). I remember going through the family laptop one day, and coming across the corporate profile of my uncle’s company, where my dad was working at the time as the technical assistant to the president. Being the child I was who wanted to emulate everything her father was doing, I wanted to make a copy of my own too but I was unfortunately unemployed. Thankfully, I took matters into my own hands and made up a company of my own, which I aptly named Pamper and Pretty. Excuse the fatal grammar error, but I was six and was yet to be familiarized with what parallelism in writing actually was. I drafted a whole corporate profile, complete with the list of my employees along with their corresponding duties and responsibilities, as well as a list of all our products and services.

And of course, how could I forget my professional resume?

FOUR: I even looked far into the future and prepared a spiel for when we’d be looking for new employees, as well as a list of rules and regulations to follow if ever anyone would pass our grueling hiring process. My favorite is rule #26, which goes “Drug pushers are not allowed in the store.”

FIVE: While we’re on the topic of business, I guess it’s worth boasting that I was able to sit in a meeting my mom had back in the day with the rest of the members of the Systems and Methods division, and I was asked to take the minutes for a change. I’m aware I’m making absolutely no sense, but after much inferring, I guess it revolves mainly around IT, monitoring procedures and AARs.

SIX: I was a proponent for self-help at a very young age too, creating a list of five rules to live by, which I referred to as my “straight line project”. For which reason, I have absolutely no clue. One part reads: “Always watch out for a kid bullying some one so you can save the person being fought, then do the same thing that the bully kid did to your friend like for example when they are fighting in a swimming pool that the bully is trying to push your friend, you should save your friend and push the bully kid to the pool.” I advised. Turns out I had an attitude and a knack for retributive justice from the very start.

SEVEN: I also found a couple of letters I addressed to Santa as the Christmas season approached, where I requested everything from “world peace” to the entire Diary of A Wimpy Kid series. Talk about being a versatile queen! My favorite of the bunch was the last one I made, where I included directions and a sketch to get to our new house, because we had moved residences earlier that year. I just didn’t want Santa to get lost, and sneak in my old house only to find out that I was no longer there.

(Fortunately, my mom was able to print out all those files I had saved to the family computer before I promptly infected it with a virus that wiped out its entire memory. The lengths seven year old Angel would go just to download Young Guns by Wham! from Limewire.)

EIGHT: I was elected as class president multiple times in grade school, which you would think would mold me into becoming an active student leader. But, my term was constantly shrouded in controversy. I was always tasked to write down the list of noisy students on the blackboard, I’m not exactly sure if this qualifies as public humiliation but I wasn’t concerned with that at the time and did everything I could to fulfill my duty. A classmate of mine was singing a High School Musical song at the top of her lungs, and I asked her to stop. Usually, that does the trick and sends the noisemaker back to their seat but she ran out of the room and brought her mom upstairs because she got upset.

NINE: I also rode on a classmate’s bag, which resulted in her mom going upstairs (I have no idea why their moms spent the entire day in the waiting room on the first floor too, man) and scolding me, saying that her daughter’s bag is not a pony. I was also accused of calling my classmate stupid because she was only Top 7 out of all the students in class, while I was Top 1, which was false by the way since “stupid” was considered a curse word in our household until I was 10. Perhaps the best scuffle I got myself into was because I had checked my classmate’s homework with red crayon and put several drawings of hearts and stars, as well as reassuring comments along the lines of “Great job!” and “Congratulations!” around his perfect score. His father literally had me sent to the principal’s office. Parents then had way too much time on their hands, I swear to God.

TEN: If we don’t take into consideration the whole fiasco that involved my Teletubbies stuffed toy*, my first brush with “love” happened when I was in kindergarten. I had a crush on one of my classmates named Kevin, who is the scrawny little boy that you see beside me in the pictures below. I don’t remember anything else about him, not even his surname, and I haven’t heard of nor seen him since our pre-school graduation ceremony. All I have to remember him by are these photos, and a video that my mom took of both of us where he was seen flapping his arms around and making weird facial expressions, while I would squirm out of kilig in response. Weird. The worst part of it all? I didn’t even like him because he was cute or funny or nice to me: it’s just because he was named after my favorite Backstreet Boy.

(*In case anyone's curious, up until I was about three years old, my parents and I lived in Malabon with my maternal grandmother, who was tasked with taking care of me while my mom and dad were both at work. She was fond of watching Filipino teleseryes while taking care of me: they often had their fair share of kissing scenes, but I was practically a baby at the time who wasn’t capable of processing or remembering the things she was seeing on TV. Or so they thought. My mom said she had walked on two year old me making out with my cousin’s Teletubbies stuffed toy one time. She then promptly asked my lola if they could keep me as far away from the television as possible once Pangako Sa’Yo came on. Can’t blame her for that, honestly.)

That’s all I can think of right now, but I know there’s plenty more where that came from. Hope everyone is having a fruitful Holy Week celebration. Wishing you nothing but love and light, always always always.

Angel

[esssaaayyy-blog]

TRANSCENDENCE

I.                   BODY/BACKGROUND

Transcendence the movie is all about a scientist uploading her husband’s consciousness onto a computer, but as he expands his power she grows scared what he has become.

      Evelyn Caster is a scientist, working with her husband Will on unparalleled artificial intelligence technology. They even come up with a computer which is the most advance in terms of AI computers to date. It would also be the last, as it became a target of an anti-technology terrorist group which launches a series of simultaneous attacks on computer research all over the country including an attempt to assassinate Will. They targeted Will for his focus on creating an event called transcendence in which a computer becomes self aware and is more intelligent than every person who ever lived combined. Unfortunately for Evelyn, the bullet that grazed Will was laced with a radio active material which poisoned Will’s body and he eventually died. Using the technology Evelyn tries to duplicate Will’s brain patterns on the AI computer, essentially keeping Will’s brain alive and giving computer feelings. It doesn’t seem to work, until Will finally begins communicating via computer, telling Evelyn to put him online so he can have more power, there best friend Max tried to stop them. There will be no stopping Will if they set him free. Evelyn commands Max to leave, angry at his hesitance, and just before the terrorists comes to destroy her equipment, she uploads Will to the internet. Will instantly took advantage of the stock market, earning Evelyn millions in a day. They moved to a small broken-down town and begun building a giant underground laboratory for Will to conduct experiments and continue to learn. He develops a new technology called nanobots that he used not only to heal people in that town but also making them inhumanly strong and to connect the to him directly. This begun to scare Evelyn, her fears are reinforced when her friend Joseph comes to visit their new facility with some government agents, and Joseph tells her via note “run from this place”. Max, Joseph and the terrorist group planned to capture one of Will’s new disciples, take a blood sample to read the codes used in the nanobots, and create a virus that will shut down anything that runs on internet power in the entire world. Evelyn volunteers and she was mortally injured. Will gives her the choice: he can save her or she can upload the virus she’s carrying, he cannot do both. Evelyn tells Will to upload the virus, he self destructs and all the power is lost in the world, saving it from damage Will could potentially have done but also denying it the incredible advances he brought to science.

II.                  THE PROBLEM

In the beginning I would assume there is nothing but pure intentions on the part of Evelyn in uploading her beloved dying husband’s consciousness onto a computer. As a wife maybe she just wants to be with her husband for eternity, and at that moment in Evelyn’s mind and also out of desperation, that it would be the best thing to do.

      The problem came when Will asked Evelyn to put him online so he can generate more power, it even got worse when Will took advantage of the stock market, earning Evelyn millions in a day and allowing herself to be used by Will in continuing his project to the extent that Will was able to persuade Evelyn to build a giant underground laboratory allowing Will to develop even more technologies that he used in creating alien like humans that is very strong and made it his disciples. At this point Willbegun abusing his powers and begun also to be out control.

III.                CONCLUSSION

    Therefore, I conclude that Evelyn with her pure intentions in uploading Will’sconsciousness  to the internet. Out of her love for her husband and also out of desperation I would assume that it is not with in the agenda of Evelyn to use it in a wrong way as it turned out to be. As a wife who truly loves her husband I could understand what Evelyn did, it is a given fact that if you really love someone, you would want to be with that person forever. Above all you would do anything and everything to be with the one you love perpetually.

      While Will’s mind is in the computer, Evelyn should have controlled and manage Will well and if she should not have allowed herself to be used, manipulated and blinded, the problems shouldn’t have transpired.

IV.                RECOMMENDATION

    In general technology advancement is very good and is necessary in today’s world, we are now living in what they call the computer age and technology development is rapidly spreading like a vine, of course it has its advantages and also disadvantages. We must maximize the utilization of this commodity in a good way. These technologies is very good as long as the capitals of these things must at all times plant their feet with in the fundamental law, that all things are to be made and to be utilized in and for the welfare of human kind.

      Anything for that matter if just properly planned, well managed, staffed with the right people and organized and above all controlled and not abused then we could anticipate no circumstances of any problem popping out. Power is good as long as it is not abused. Power could be jeopardizing if the one who has a hand on it is invective and irresponsible.

      Always remember that “GREAT POWER COMES WITH GREAT RESPONSIBILITY”.

(school purposes only)

[moodboardinthecloud]

That Discomfort You’re Feeling Is Grief

Scott Berinato

March 23, 2020

Some of the HBR edit staff met virtually the other day — a screen full of faces in a scene becoming more common everywhere. We talked about the content we’re commissioning in this harrowing time of a pandemic and how we can help people. But we also talked about how we were feeling. One colleague mentioned that what she felt was grief. Heads nodded in all the panes.

If we can name it, perhaps we can manage it. We turned to David Kessler for ideas on how to do that. Kessler is the world’s foremost expert on grief. He co-wrote with Elisabeth Kübler-Ross On Grief and Grieving: Finding the Meaning of Grief through the Five Stages of Loss. His new book adds another stage to the process, Finding Meaning: The Sixth Stage of Grief. Kessler also has worked for a decade in a three-hospital system in Los Angeles. He served on their biohazards team. His volunteer work includes being an LAPD Specialist Reserve for traumatic events as well as having served on the Red Cross’s disaster services team. He is the founder of www.grief.com, which has over 5 million visits yearly from 167 countries.

Kessler shared his thoughts on why it’s important to acknowledge the grief you may be feeling, how to manage it, and how he believes we will find meaning in it. The conversation is lightly edited for clarity.

HBR: People are feeling any number of things right now. Is it right to call some of what they’re feeling grief?

Kessler: Yes, and we’re feeling a number of different griefs. We feel the world has changed, and it has. We know this is temporary, but it doesn’t feel that way, and we realize things will be different. Just as going to the airport is forever different from how it was before 9/11, things will change and this is the point at which they changed. The loss of normalcy; the fear of economic toll; the loss of connection. This is hitting us and we’re grieving. Collectively. We are not used to this kind of collective grief in the air.

You said we’re feeling more than one kind of grief?

Yes, we’re also feeling anticipatory grief. Anticipatory grief is that feeling we get about what the future holds when we’re uncertain. Usually it centers on death. We feel it when someone gets a dire diagnosis or when we have the normal thought that we’ll lose a parent someday. Anticipatory grief is also more broadly imagined futures. There is a storm coming. There’s something bad out there. With a virus, this kind of grief is so confusing for people. Our primitive mind knows something bad is happening, but you can’t see it. This breaks our sense of safety. We’re feeling that loss of safety. I don’t think we’ve collectively lost our sense of general safety like this. Individually or as smaller groups, people have felt this. But all together, this is new. We are grieving on a micro and a macro level.

What can individuals do to manage all this grief?

Understanding the stages of grief is a start. But whenever I talk about the stages of grief, I have to remind people that the stages aren’t linear and may not happen in this order. It’s not a map but it provides some scaffolding for this unknown world. There’s denial, which we say a lot of early on: This virus won’t affect us. There’s anger: You’re making me stay home and taking away my activities. There’s bargaining: Okay, if I social distance for two weeks everything will be better, right? There’s sadness: I don’t know when this will end. And finally there’s acceptance. This is happening; I have to figure out how to proceed.

Acceptance, as you might imagine, is where the power lies. We find control in acceptance. I can wash my hands. I can keep a safe distance. I can learn how to work virtually.

When we’re feeling grief there’s that physical pain. And the racing mind. Are there techniques to deal with that to make it less intense?

Let’s go back to anticipatory grief. Unhealthy anticipatory grief is really anxiety, and that’s the feeling you’re talking about. Our mind begins to show us images. My parents getting sick. We see the worst scenarios. That’s our minds being protective. Our goal is not to ignore those images or to try to make them go away — your mind won’t let you do that and it can be painful to try and force it. The goal is to find balance in the things you’re thinking. If you feel the worst image taking shape, make yourself think of the best image. We all get a little sick and the world continues. Not everyone I love dies. Maybe no one does because we’re all taking the right steps. Neither scenario should be ignored but neither should dominate either.

Anticipatory grief is the mind going to the future and imagining the worst. To calm yourself, you want to come into the present. This will be familiar advice to anyone who has meditated or practiced mindfulness but people are always surprised at how prosaic this can be. You can name five things in the room. There’s a computer, a chair, a picture of the dog, an old rug, and a coffee mug. It’s that simple. Breathe. Realize that in the present moment, nothing you’ve anticipated has happened. In this moment, you’re okay. You have food. You are not sick. Use your senses and think about what they feel. The desk is hard. The blanket is soft. I can feel the breath coming into my nose. This really will work to dampen some of that pain.

You can also think about how to let go of what you can’t control. What your neighbor is doing is out of your control. What is in your control is staying six feet away from them and washing your hands. Focus on that.

Finally, it’s a good time to stock up on compassion. Everyone will have different levels of fear and grief and it manifests in different ways. A coworker got very snippy with me the other day and I thought, That’s not like this person; that’s how they’re dealing with this. I’m seeing their fear and anxiety. So be patient. Think about who someone usually is and not who they seem to be in this moment.

One particularly troubling aspect of this pandemic is the open-endedness of it.

This is a temporary state. It helps to say it. I worked for 10 years in the hospital system. I’ve been trained for situations like this. I’ve also studied the 1918 flu pandemic. The precautions we’re taking are the right ones. History tells us that. This is survivable. We will survive. This is a time to overprotect but not overreact.

And, I believe we will find meaning in it. I’ve been honored that Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s family has given me permission to add a sixth stage to grief: Meaning. I had talked to Elisabeth quite a bit about what came after acceptance. I did not want to stop at acceptance when I experienced some personal grief. I wanted meaning in those darkest hours. And I do believe we find light in those times. Even now people are realizing they can connect through technology. They are not as remote as they thought. They are realizing they can use their phones for long conversations. They’re appreciating walks. I believe we will continue to find meaning now and when this is over.

What do you say to someone who’s read all this and is still feeling overwhelmed with grief?

Keep trying. There is something powerful about naming this as grief. It helps us feel what’s inside of us. So many have told me in the past week, “I’m telling my coworkers I’m having a hard time,” or “I cried last night.” When you name it, you feel it and it moves through you. Emotions need motion. It’s important we acknowledge what we go through. One unfortunate byproduct of the self-help movement is we’re the first generation to have feelings about our feelings. We tell ourselves things like, I feel sad, but I shouldn’t feel that; other people have it worse. We can — we should — stop at the first feeling. I feel sad. Let me go for five minutes to feel sad. Your work is to feel your sadness and fear and anger whether or not someone else is feeling something. Fighting it doesn’t help because your body is producing the feeling. If we allow the feelings to happen, they’ll happen in an orderly way, and it empowers us. Then we’re not victims.

In an orderly way?

Yes. Sometimes we try not to feel what we’re feeling because we have this image of a “gang of feelings.” If I feel sad and let that in, it’ll never go away. The gang of bad feelings will overrun me. The truth is a feeling that moves through us. We feel it and it goes and then we go to the next feeling. There’s no gang out to get us. It’s absurd to think we shouldn’t feel grief right now. Let yourself feel the grief and keep going.

Scott Berinato is a senior editor at Harvard Business Review and the author of Good Charts Workbook: Tips Tools, and Exercises for Making Better Data Visualizations and Good Charts: The HBR Guide to Making Smarter, More Persuasive Data Visualizations.

[ferox365]

Ferox365 Members, This is the hardest letter/post that I’ve ever had to write. You all know me & know how I operate. I’m always all in. Take no prisoners, ride or die…… Unfortunately, due to the latest Covid-19 virus restriction by the Governor of NC, we will be temporarily closing our doors effective Thursday, March 26, 2020. We will be doing livestream daily workouts Monday - Saturday at 8:00AM @ the following link https://zoom.us/j/967005917?pwd=cW1FQ0pWbDQ5MEZpWHpadTdCYUZKUT09 You can access this via computer/laptop, ipad or cellphone. Also, during this time, weather permitting we will be doing outdoor workouts at designated times & locations as to ensure social distancing, as the government is encouraging us all to get outside & get fresh air. We have many parks & fields open to us. These designated times & locations will be posted on the Ferox365 Fit Community page on Facebook. If anyone is interested in signing out any small equipment to use at home, I will be available from 6-10 AM on Wednesday to do so. I would just ask that you be courteous to other members in what you take. All equipment will need to be returned clean & in the same condition in whchi it was checked as. The Covid-19 virus has affected everyone in a way no one ever thought possible. Many are sick, people have died, and the current livelihood of so many has been lost. When I started Ferox365, the goal was never to make a million dollars, but to provide a gym to exercise for everyone to feel welcome and be part of a family. To be brutally honest, we take in enough in dues each month to barely pay our bills. I do it because I love doing it, and I love each and every one of you. Many have asked about putting their membership on hold during this crisis. I understand that completely, as many of your jobs have been affected. However, like many small businesses, who are struggling to survive right now, we rely on revenue from you to keep the doors open. I am attempting to get some relief from our landlord, but if we cannot, and we have too many members put their membership on hold, we simply will not survive. As always, your immediate family, as is mine, should be every (at Ferox365 Fitness) https://www.instagram.com/p/B-FrOrRgYOK/?igshid=q2oljttmtgxz