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chryza · 3 months

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you keep mentioning making money off of games like hsr but how? im dying to know

All right I'll make a proper post about this lmfao. May I present

The Invalid's Guide to Making Money Off Mobile Games

(Please note I'm using my affiliate links, so if you click through and join up I will get rewarded at no cost to you.)

The primary way that I make money is through Swagbucks. (I also use Inbox Dollars, but I tend to use Swagbucks more for different deals. They're both owned by the same parent company.) Swagbucks is a survey website, but they also offer affiliate deals with mobile games. For proof that I'm not grifting, here is my profile.

Each swagbuck (SB) is a penny, so 100 is a dollar, 1000 is 10 dollars. As you can see as of posting this, I've earned 121, 297 SB or $1,212.97 since I started in January. I play various mobile games for a few hours every day, but I took a break for about a month and a half since I was getting burned out. I cash out to Paypal usually, but you can get a bunch of different gift cards, it's nice to be able to directly get people gift cards for their birthdays through the website.

There are a ton of different offers to choose from, from various sponsors of varying levels of credibility. They'll offer to complete different checkpoints within the game for SB within a certain amount of time.

When I'm looking for an offer to start, I'm looking for a few things in particular. The amount on offer has to be worth my time. Usually, I'm looking for offers in the $40-$150 range. Anything above that is likely to have a catch, require massive amounts of in-app purchases to complete, or is downright impossible. I always consult the swagbucks reddit to check out offers beforehand, so I don't waste my time. I also consider the time investment I'm putting in. Usually 1000 levels of a puzzle game for $35 is the minimum I'm looking for. For idle games, I'm looking more in the $50 minimum range.

This is one of the offers I'm currently working on. (the game is Klondike, for $110 total offer)

Typically with an offer in this range, I know I'm going to make a few purchases. I always try to go for stamina boosters on the cheap. I've spent about $5 so far and I'm only a week into this and already about 1/3 of the way done. I log in multiple times a day since I am, as I've stated, disabled, so I have the freedom to do so. If you do not have the ability to be so on top of things, I recommend looking at the second to last goal point, and making that your target.

Other offers are like this

(This is Ant Legion, a game I've played before). As you can see the amount on offer is significantly higher. $340 to be exact, though keep an eye out for things like "purchase X"--typically those are 1:1 rebates, so you get a boost for free. With these types of games, you're going to be making substantially more in-app purchases. When I try this offer, I'm going to budget about $40-$50 so that I'm still making a profit of about $285. Understand that there is risk involved--if I spend that money and I *don't* make it all the way to 31 in time, I'm SOL.

Swagbucks also offers gambling games. Just stay away from those. I did one and spent about $70 to make a profit of about $150, but none of it was from the app itself. They're predatory and meant to funnel in-app purchases, though again, check the reddit. There might be a couple that are legit.

Typically with Swagbucks, I like to be doing 3 offers at a time--two idle games, and one puzzle game. I'll check my idle games throughout the day to make progress, and sit and binge the puzzle games to get to the level checkpoints (Usually about 1000 levels, which isn't as bad as it sounds.)

Before I get into the next section, this is very important, please listen to me.

If you cash out for more than the minimum threshold for taxation in your country, you will owe taxes on the money you make.

You'll need to do research for your individual situation. For USAmericans, the threshold is $600. I budget about 10% of that to go into taxes, and I have a spreadsheet with receipts for in-app purchases which qualify as business expenses in this case. Here is the SB page for more info.

Next, I've just started using Mistplay after being bombarded with ads about it. generally, I like it. I'm also not saying that it's possible to double-dip SB and Mistplay rewards, because I would not do that because it's against terms and conditions, but it might be possible (though I definitely don't recommend it).

Mistplay works differently in that it offers 'units' for playing games for a certain amount of time. I've earned about 500 units in a day playing mobile games for a few hours, and minimum cash out starts at $5 for 1800 units. Overall it's a nice system that allows me to make money on more "fun" games that I'd otherwise be playing anyway without making money, such as for instance, Honkai: Star Rail which I'm planning on starting tonight. And if you do join Mistplay, this is my recruit link ;).

Overall tips:

be prepared to watch ads. I have my shit set up on multiple devices, I have a phone and a tablet with different games on each and I usually have ads going on on one screen while I'm playing merge what the fuck ever on the other. That's how they're making the money to give to you, pussy up etc.

It does take some dedication to rack up big numbers. I consider myself on a fairly relaxed grind and usually play mobile games for about four hours a day. You can try out your limits and whatnot

RESEARCH. you can download a game and test it outside of the SB tracking to try it out, or check out the subreddit. Mucho helpful information.

IF YOU DO AN OFFER and it DOES NOT TRACK CORRECTLY do not panic. Complete the offer to the best of your ability, take screenshots, and use the SB help center to request your missing SB credit. They usually get back to me within a business day with my shit in pending.

It's a slow crawl to victory. You'll be like "i am not making fucking ANYTHING." and then the next week you'll be like. pending for $100. Be patient.

Check out the other shit on the SB and Inbox Dollars websites. I occasionally do surveys for over a dollar (though I use Forthright for surveys because overall it pays better for my time.)

Good luck gamers!

And. Please don't like. blow me up about this being a scam or whatever? I see people press x to doubt but the proof is in my bank account. Or well. My medical provider's bank account now because I've been using the money to slowly pay off bills.

#asked and answered #making money #long post #swagbucks

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beardeddetectivepaper · 3 months

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Hi my name is Susan, I have created this fundraiser to help my husbands cousin Farah. Farah sent me a message below to share with you all letting you know about her current situation.

"Hello, I am Farah. I want to tell you about my suffering from the beginning of the war from October 7th until today. We spent the first week in Gaza. During this short period, we were subjected to many threats of evacuation due to the bombing that took place near us. After that, we were displaced on October 13th to the south of Gaza, specifically in the Khan Yunis area. We were displaced in a place affiliated with UNRWA for a period of 3 months. We slept in a large number of people, 12 people, in a place 3 meters by 3 meters on a mat on the ground. There were no mattresses or headrests (pillows). We suffered from a lack of drinking water and pollution in the place, and overcrowding and crowding to use the bathroom. We waited an hour until we could use the bathroom.

We also suffered from the lack of meat or chicken, and all we ate was canned. Our children suffered from the lack of food for them, such as milk and eggs. We also suffered from the high prices of diapers and their lack of availability, to the point that the price of a pack of diapers ranged from $50 to $70. Despite the fact that it was a place affiliated with UNRWA, we were subjected to a siege for 10 days, and the Israeli army bombed the barracks and fired live bullets at the place. The place was evacuated..

After that, we were displaced to the central area in Al-Zawaida specifically, and until now the bombing is ongoing and we are suffering from the lack of water and electricity and the lack of use of the Internet. To be able to use the Internet, we have to walk a distance of 20 minutes and we buy Internet cards that last for hours for money and we charge our mobile phones with money... We are suffering from high prices and there are no necessities of life and no source of income and we are suffering from the presence of insects in the tents and the hot weather and eating canned food that has caused us diseases. Until now, the army has bombed areas near where we are in Al-Zawaida and we are suffering from hearing the sounds of explosions and clashes day and night. When we get sick and the children get sick, there is no treatment for us, no medicines, no hospitals, and my nephews and I suffer from skin allergies, toothaches, etc., and the scorching sun rays have caused us skin burns.

We also suffer from transportation and its high cost. We have started riding a cart pulled by an animal. People have started putting vegetable oil in their cars as fuel instead of gasoline and diesel, and this pollutes the air. Also, using firewood to cook food due to the lack of gas causes cancer, asthma, and difficulty breathing. Please donate to help my family survive war and get our basic needs. We hope for you all to help us. Thank you."

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callmeengels · 27 days

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HELP THE FARH FAMILY EVACUATE FROM GAZA!

£1,883 raised of £50,000 goal

Vetted by @apollos-olives here

The story of Farah and her family, in her own words:

Hello everybody.

Until now, the army has bombed areas near where we are in Al-Zawaida and we are suffering from hearing the sounds of explosions and clashes day and night. When we get sick and the children get sick, there is no treatment for us, no medicines, no hospitals, and my nephews and I suffer from skin allergies, toothaches, etc., and the scorching sun rays have caused us skin burns.

Tagging for reach (dm me if you want out): @daegu-based-terrorist @determinate-negation @daily-click-reminders @decolonize-the-everything @daegu-based-terrorist @txttletale @palipunk @plaidos @heritageposts @maowives @notchainedtotrauma @komsomolka @charlott2n @patricia-taxxon @comicaurora @anneemay @aristotels @chexcastro @appsa @afro-elf @tittyinfinity @estrogenesisevangelion @feluka @kropotkindersurprise @karlmarxmaybe @bloglikeanegyptian @butchniqabi @butchmartyr @buttonpoetry @canidae-dyke @clementine-kesh @lesbutcher @soon-palestine @rgrectangle @sayruq @cutejessieemerald @schoolhater @fairuzfan @read-marx-and-lenin @rebecca-levin-art @transmutationisms @transhuman-priestess @mushroomjar @nabulsi @neptunerings @newsfrom-theworld @newsfromstolenland

#vetted

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void-writing · 2 years

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One Batfam and Danny interaction that just came to me:

Danny, pointing fingers: How come that you can control those powers already?! It took me months not to clip through the walls!!

Whether or not said Batfam member really has as much control over their new, Danny-given powers as Danny at first believes is a different matter. XD It's about his outrage.

Hahaha lol.

I haven't gone into power shenanigans yet (that'll probably be an extra story somewhere down the line) but my thinking is that the Bats had a fairly easy time with their powers because 1) superpowers aren't that unusual in the DCU, so they have not only real live points of reference but people they can turn to with questions, and 2) they really only have to deal with 1 power whereas Danny was dealing with 3+ simultaneously.

Of course, I haven't shown it yet but like Danny, the Batfam's new powers are largely stuck in the "on" position if they aren't passive, and even then there's something of an adjustment period.

Dick floats if he's not mindful of it and now frequently hovers over his bed when he's sleeping, The Exorcist style. He kind of just lets himself do it when he's alone or in the company of other Bats or heroes, so it's not too much of an issue so long as he's not seen doing it in pubic as a civilian.

Jason is going to have a hard time getting needles through his skin now, so he better be careful about exposure to airborne chemical weapons. And also getting yearly vaccines.

Tim's astral projection doesn't necessarily mean that he's fully resting. The energy is more split between his astral form and his physical body, so the longer he spends in astral form, the less restful his sleep is. Also, the activation of his power depends on how tired he is when he goes to bed. If he's exhausted enough, he'll just sleep normally and not project at all.

Damian definitely melts a few things in his hands when he's not careful (canon seems to portray ecto-blasts as heat-based attacks, so I'm going to roll with that even though Danny is definitely more ice-affiliated).

Cass slips into the shadows a little too easily sometimes.

Steph sometimes ends up blocking herself with her own shields.

Barbara has to be mindful of what her new telekinesis grabs onto and from what direction it's coming from.

Kate is fortunate that her duplicates can't make duplicates, otherwise she'd have a harder time hiding it.

Duke definitely underestimates his own strength for a while after the abrupt buff. He may not have super-durability, which would enable him to punch through things or crush them without hurting himself, but he does keep accidentally pushing and pulling things too hard. Doors are tricky for him for a bit XD

Bruce regularly keeps blinking out of the visible spectrum, if not the entire detectable spectrum all together. Basically, his power has two settings: plain vanilla invisible (where he's just not detectable on a visible light spectrum), and Super Invisibility (where he just plain stops being detectable period). He can only maintain Super Invisibility for a few minutes continuously before it starts to wear him out (and you can bet that every time he uses it, Clark is sending him a "you good?" text or just straight up calling him to make sure he's okay XD). Of course, his power wants to be "on" all the time, so he has to be mindful of keeping himself within the visible spectrum, lest he just blip out of peoples' perception for a while.

And a note on Alfred's power: He's not going to "de-age" past his prime. I'm putting his age in CiM at around late 70's, early 80's. What his new power is doing is walking his physical body back towards the top of the "physical aptitude" curve, so he'll look like late 50's, early 60's instead of his actual age, but it won't go further than that. And most importantly, he'll feel like he's in his 50's again too :)

To note, when I say "Alfred is immortal now" I mostly mean that he doesn't age anymore. He can still be killed or fall ill, but time no longer wears on him like it used to (and really, as far as CiM is concerned, time was the only real threat to Alfred''s continued presence, so functionally, he is immortal now lol).

One thing that I do plan on writing later is that Jason and Duke spar a lot both for training and for fun because their powers kind of balance each other. Jason can take Duke's hits and Duke can wrestle Jason on fairly equal standing.

But we will be seeing Danny's reaction to the Batfam's swanky new powers fairly soon :)

#void answers #change in management #dc x dp #dc #danny phantom #batman #i recently read 'Batman and The Signal' and i loved jason and duke's dynamic in it #jason was the tough love older brother for duke but you could tell they were pals

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secretgamergirl · 1 year

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All the seriously queer stuff in the back half of Sailor Moon

In case it wasn't obvious when I released a little mini-RPG a few months ago where you basically play as the villains, I've been gradually making my way through the entire run of Sailor Moon for the past year or so. Specifically I'm watching the 2014 Viz dub that covers all 200 episodes, trying to be as faithful as they can with it. It's been a really interesting experience, since I absolutely watched the old DiC dub back in the day, saw a fansub of one of the movies around the same time, and heard plenty of things about the missing seasons (particularly the infamous "cousins" thing from the Cloverway dub) over the years, and now I have all the context. And the context gets really shockingly overtly queer, turns out!

So first, let's just all get on the same page with the English language localizations of Sailor Moon over the years. Back in the 90s, Sailor Moon aired… well everywhere, with the English language version being a dub from DiC, which I will go to my grave defending as probably the best dub of anything I can think of. Fantastic casting all around, changes to the soundtrack that were actually for the better (keeping all the melodies but recording new versions that… aren't optimized to sound show-perfect when recreated by the cheapest sound generators one can shove in a toy, plus some original songs shoved into a few episodes). They did make some edits/cuts, but pretty minor ones, especially compared to the complete reworkings most anime of the era went through when coming to American TV, and I'm still not used to Luna not being prissy and British here.

That dub only lasted up through the second season. Past that, there was a dub of seasons 3 and 4 from Cloverway, which had some really questionable performances, and is where the infamous "they're cousins" bit came in. This also aired on TV in some places, but didn't have nearly the same omnipresent distribution as the DiC seasons (… and now I'm feeling old as I ponder whether to explain how local TV affiliates did their own thing back in the broadcast days). Then in the early 2000s there was a DVD release from Pioneer with cut/uncut versions of everything, apparently, which may or may not have recycled those dubs. I don't really have the energy to track that down, specifically. Anyway all the rights expired, gathered dust forever, then Viz picked it up and did this new faithful localization, and it took me about a decade to spot it on a streaming service.

So we've got 5 seasons, 200 episodes total, and a hell of a lot of formulaic structuring here. Every season (or half a season) we've got some main villain with an evil plan we may or may not get any details on, and some small number of underlings who then take their 5-10 episode long turns pursuing their goal in a way that inevitably generates monsters of the week, and meanwhile every season we have another conflict on the good guy side where someone is trying to locate some special person and ignoring the 50 or so obvious signs which main cast member it is while the audience gets frustrated. Oh and each individual episode has the same rigid structure of everyone getting caught up in some wacky teen trend, then there's a monster, they transform and fight a bit to no real end, then Sailor Moon gets around to using a finisher because that's literally the only thing actually capable of ending a fight. Honestly it's less "formulaic TV writing" and more like some sort of daily meditation. No way in hell I'd be able to sit through all of it if I had to look at the screen the whole time. This is background viewing while I work. Oh and I'm assuming everyone has at least enough passing familiarity to understand that if I say the name of a planet I'm talking about a teenage girl who's the reincarnation of some sorta magical girl/sentai squad member.

Season 1 has pretty gay vibes in places, but MOSTLY there's plausible deniability for all of it. We spend about half the season just establishing the characters of Moon Mercury and Mars, then quickly bringing in Jupiter and playing it up like a big shocking reveal for Venus. There's also a bunch of relationship drama between Moon, Tuxedo Mask, and the guy who runs the local arcade that she has a crush on and spends a while thinking is actually Tuxedo Mask instead of his actual identity of uh… a college-aged guy we're saying is the destined love interest of this 14-year old girl he's frankly pretty abusive towards. So, a lot of straight nonsense there. Meanwhile the evil queen's got these 4 generals, two of them are plainly dating, and no matter how you slice it, that's pretty overtly queer, but there's a valid argument to have over how we actually should slice it.

I was aware at the time that the DiC dub just ran with Zoicite here being a woman, making this a straight relationship, and I kinda figured they did a bit of tweaking and editing to hide that this was actually one of those bishonen types who were popular at the time who happened to be gay. Honestly though, watching it through a modern lens, it is REALLY hard to not just see a woman here, even when we're throwing he/him pronouns around. Like, if I'm handling a new dub, I'm just going to say Zoicite is a trans girl, who I'm at least headcanoning as being out for years, on HRT, and at that point where she can put on a suit designed for a man and nah that's a woman wearing a suit. Kinda just wraps around and makes me appreciate the old dub's handling more than the new one.

Season 2 (or R) doesn't really give us anything to work with, if I'm honest. There's probably some gals-being-pals energy amongst the main cast here and there. That's kind of always low-key present, especially with Jupiter, who has the whole big tough girl who wears long skirts thing sorta gay energy, and I want to say she ends up going to a dance with Mercury somewhere early on because one of them can't find a date otherwise.

But, we've got this filler arc with two dark elves in a tree who just kinda both hit on everyone of the opposite gender while the main cast sits in a holding pattern, then we get a proper villain squad not really getting enough spotlight time to have much of anything going on, and this whole weird thing where Moon and Mask's annoying toddler comes back from the future to… brainwash Moon's parents into thinking she's their daughter, and then she gets turned into an evil adult, and there's this whole bit about her having some sort of grim reaper/time guardian as a nanny (this is Pluto, the outer planets really have different things going on)… but again, mostly straight/cis flavored nonsense.

Then suddenly here comes season 3 (or S, pronounced "Super" which makes things real confusing), from a director who would later go on to create Utena, and in addition to just being the single best season of the series for a number of other reasons, everyone is canonically into girls now! It's shockingly overt about establishing that too, and reiterating the point several times.

It all gets started with Uranus and Neptune showing up. We kind of have this three faction conflict this season, where there's a proper main villain and squad of monster making minions, but then there's also this overtly queer power couple whose goal is basically to check out the "pure hearts" monsters of the week keep ripping out of people because they need to check them for these three macguffins they need to… reform the holy grail of all things to give to their leader they're too oblivious to know is actually Moon.

More importantly though, aside from making it abundantly clear that these two are banging every night, they have this very open relationship where Neptune is more than cool with Uranus hooking up with any given girl she's inclined to, and/or grabbing gals for threeways. And like, this isn't me taking a broad interpretation of things, it's weird how directly they just come out and say this. The other thing we have going on is that Uranus is just, like, the butchest of the butch.

Literally everyone just assumes she's a guy when they first meet, and quite a few people go into serious denial when corrected on the matter. And she kinda tends to react to all the misgendering with the sort of bemused nonchalance that makes it pretty easy to read her as actually being nonbinary. I swear there's an episode where she clarifies she's not a guy with that particular sort of emphasis suggesting that doesn't necessarily narrow things down to just "girl," too. And apparently Crystal actually DOES bite the bullet and flat out state she's nonbinary (or at least "both male and female"). That's cool, but there is no way in hell I'm going to sit through Crystal.

Anyway, point is, everybody wants to hook up with Uranus. Everyone. There's a whole episode where the power couple straight up takes Jupiter out on a date, the rest start gossiping about her being out on a date with two girls, everyone starts off shocked, then someone clarifies who it's with and everyone's like "oh, well yeah then I'd take them up on that too," with a little extra push back from Mars before she gets called out as trying to stay in the closet when she's clearly got a stash of photos of hot girls in suits.

This of course really makes me wonder about that Cloverleaf dub and why they went with that whole "cousins" thing to avoid addressing the overt queerness here, instead of taking the same approach DiC did of just making Uranus a guy. This would technically introduce the problem of having a guy in a miniskirt for fight scenes, but, eh, that'd be easier to edit around than you'd think. Uranus generally enters a fight scene pre-transformed firing an attack off from offscreen, arguing with the core cast a little, and leaving. Attacks are stock animation you can drop in anywhere, so that much is easy enough to chop out or replace with Neptune's attack. I don't know how one would even begin to cut around all the overt gay stuff though.

Nothing especially queer going on with the evil side of things. The villains are kind of amazing but too career oriented for relationships. I guess just for the sake of giving full context for the seasons most people haven't seen and fill in the obvious hole in the roster I can mention the eventual deal that the little goth girl Chibi-Usa spends the season hanging out with turns out to be the main villain's daughter, Sailor Saturn, and kind of the antichrist? Like I said, the outer planets aren't just cast expansions, they really have their own stuff going on. She also dies and reincarnates, doing so the long way where she sits the next season out being just a baby, which once again begs the question of whether when everyone dies at the end of the first season they just kinda magically come back to life with missing memories just as a temporary thing for a filler arc to play with or they really dd all reincarnate and have new families a decade and change later. Weird that that never got firmly pinned down.

Anyway though season 4 (AKA Super S, which is pronounced "Supers" and now you see why I prefer just numbers)… sucks and you should skip it. No sense of stakes, no real character work, non-threatening villain, shockingly dull monster designs, no outer planets, an ending that just drags on for what feels like forever and has no payoff. The only things it has in its favor are the inherent absurdity that people are wondering if Chibi-Usa is like full-on dating Pegasus (yes, the horse) and Fish's Eye.

So we have two different miniboss squads this season, the latter of which is a quartet of permanent-child acrobats working for the impressively titled if boring in practice Dead Moon Circus, preceded by three animals-turned-into-humans-by-a-witch with a weird What-you-originally-were's Eye naming scheme. Two of them are just dull slutty guys, but Fish's Eye is plainly and overtly a trans woman, and gets something of an arc about being willing to give up her own humanity for the greater good. It's a shame she's stuck in the practically unwatchable season, but at least she's on the REALLY short list of major villains who gets to have a happy ending. Usually even when someone has a nice redemption arc with the power of love and friendship they still get bumped off by another villain.

Different localizations have done different things with her. Some go "crossdressing gay guy" some just say she's a woman and leave her transness out of it. The 2014 localizaton is pretty unambiguous about though, so, that's really nice. Casting could be better, but still.

Then finally we come to season 5 (Sailor Stars), which I think is even more queer than season 3 was, which is really saying something, and was also directed by someone who would go on to helm another girly show with a serious case of The Genders, Ouran High School Host Club. Structurally it's a bit weird, because the first few episodes are just straight up taking a mulligan on the terrible finale of season 4, this time with the outers in (Saturn hyper-ages back to her standard 10 or whatever and gets a bunch of inexplicable knowledge and memories which is cool but never really paid off), the main villain doing something, and as a shocking rarity for the series, this whole mini-arc where characters are broken into pairs of one inner one outer and get to bounce off each other in a way the series frustratingly usually never does.

More importantly though, at least for this post's purposes, basically the first scene of the season is Uranus and Neptune having a flirty exchange ending with something along the lines of "let's save the pillow talk for when we're actually in bed together later tonight," which sort of sets the tone for just how blatantly these two are talking about their extremely active sex life in no uncertain terms, out in public. Some of the other characters are a bit weirded out by their complete lack of filter, but hey whatever.

The real proper start of the season though has our core cast finally starting high school, once again reminding us that everyone is at LEAST 4 years younger than everything about their designs, interests, and handling of responsibilities would indicate. This also reminds us how deeply creepy the Moon/Tuxedo Mask relationship is, but fortunately he hops a plain to America and is straight up out this season, and as an added bonus Chibi-Moon finally goes back to the future. Before you get too excited she IS shortly replaced with an even younger, barely verbal new mystery gremlin called Chibi-Chibi whose existence nobody can account for, but at least she's actually cute and not akin to the baby from Dinosaurs. More importantly though, as the girls enter high school they end up in a class with the titular Sailor Stars, AKA The Three Lights, AKA Fighter Maker and Healer, a popular boy band who are also a new mysterious set of Sailors with what I assume are intentionally quite confusing gender shenanigans in play.

Normally, they are hot lanky boys, boastful about their masculinity to the point of it bordering on misogyny, but also super super femme, with earings, hair down to their ankles, and very noticeably female VAs in both Japanese and English. Then when there's a fight they're very plainly hot lanky girls in bikinis and one of them has an attack shouting "Star Gentle Uterus!" before hitting a monster with a glob of liquid to a disgusted reaction. And their transformation sequences (and bikinis, and some shirtless scenes) make it absolutely crystal clear that yeah there is some magical reconfiguring of their bodies when making the switch. The show pointedly avoids elaborating on what the deal is past that in terms of which they form they started with/feel more comfortable in/why they switch it up/etc. which would normally frustrate me as one of those Schroedinger's Queer Rep situations, but I very much get the impression that we're going for intentional confusion and ambiguity in service to a general message that if you're into someone you shouldn't have hangups about their gender or what it says about your own sexuality and just kind of accept your feelings and them as a person and I am pretty OK with that.

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The cast is too. Mercury Mars Jupiter Venus and for good measure Luna all kinda spent the entire season fixating on how to hook up with any/all of The Three Lights, meanwhile at basically any moment there isn't a fight scene or some plot exposition happening, Fighter is VERY ACTIVELY pursuing Moon in a sexual fashion, with pretty overtly stated tension before damn near every commercial break over whether this is going to be the scene where Sailor Moon gets absolutely railed by this maybe-genderfluid pop star from another world. And I have to just say as a brief aside that while we obviously never go there, I kinda wish we did? Tuxedo Mask is WAY too old to be dating someone Moon's age, even if we do the thing where we just add 4 to everyone's stated age. Plus he kinda treats her like absolute garbage for the whole show, and even when they're in a more wholesome mode the whole thing feels toxic and messed up. Meanwhile Fighter here is literally the same age, clearly into her, and beyond the one character flaw, an actual decent person. Though again, really damn forward. Still beats the hell out of the guy in college dating a middle schooler, and kinda flirting with his own prepubescent future-daughter.

There's also this huge confrontational thing between Fighter and Uranus, where it's slightly unclear if Uranus is being protective of Moon, violently jealous because Neptune is totally and surprisingly overtly open to hooking up with anyone from this boy band too, or just kinda trying to defend her position as the hot androgynous badass who swept into town with the intent of hooking up with every girl in the zip code eventually. Meanwhile Fighter thinks Uranus is a kind of toxic macho dude and really questions the whole "she's not a guy" thing, which is, you know, interesting. Pluto never really weighs in on this because… Pluto kinda lives outside of time and space and has maybe 8 minutes of real screen time in the entirety of the show.

Past that, we've got a bunch of other gay stuff too! We're back to cranking the general queer energy of the core cast up past the point of plausible deniability with regards to each other and a random girl trying to pass along a love letter with some confusion as to who it's for. It also bears mention that when the full deal of the new characters and their gender flipping comes to light, Jupiter makes an active point of making it clear that she is still 100% down and like, hey, I already knew you were the least conflicted of the bunch about how bi you all are, but I appreciate the active refutation of transphobia is still cool. We've got an honestly adorable pair of villains where one is frankly such a bimbo she's completely incapable of doing the evil general thing on her own or preparing her own food, and her hyper-competent girlfriend helping her out while also having to come up with cover stories because they're supposed to be pitted against each other. They'd definitely get a nice happy ending in one of the even numbered seasons, especially once it's made clear that they're very much being coerced into the evil stuff/taking things down from the inside, but… yeah this season ends up going super dark.

I don't want to totally get into how absolutely pitch dark the big 8-part series finale gets and spoil the hell out of it since if it wasn't clear, the odd numbered seasons are all really good stuff you should watch on your own, plus this one has a bunch of genuine twists, but I have to get into some of it in my mission of explaining how gay it all is. Consider yourself warned.

As happens kind of a lot in Sailor Moon finales, the bulk of the season 1 cast gets killed off once the main villain steps in to start getting her hands dirty, but here it's early enough on in the arc for Moon to really process it and give it the weight that maybe it'll actually stick this time. In particular of course she's worked up about Tuxedo Mask turning out to have died off camera at the start of the season (the impression to that point being that he's too distracted with a trip to America to check his messages or maybe just straight up ghosted her), but then almost as broken up over losing Mars, because yeah, those two in particular actually end up with a surprising amount of low key romantic tension between them by the end of things.

Then once it's time to get the outer planets off the table, all four of them end up in a no-win situation against the villain, who does that villain thing of of offering them a choice of just being killed and having their souls ripped out to be made into new stars (this is kind of her whole thing, see), OR if anyone's up for it, they can switch sides, still get their souls ripped out to be made into stars, but given funky magic bracelets that allow them to stay alive, just, you know, corrupted by evil and acting as her new villain squad. It's actually established right before the last one gets vaporized that all her original henchgals are in fact the Sailors of other planets she forced into the same deal just before the last one gets vaporized for failure, making it that much tragic in retrospect that the cute competence-disparity couple didn't make it.

Anyway, Uranus and Neptune actually take the deal. Like, zero hesitation. Part of it is eventually explained as Uranus having enough faith that she's too into her girlfriend to be fully corrupted and might get a chance to sucker punch the villain with her own soul extractors (which she IS it just doesn't work), and failing that Moon'll probably swing some kinda deus machina (which is an admittedly safe bet, honestly). But another part of it really is just "yeah screw it, if I still get to be with my girlfriend I'll take being evil over being dead" and they really do go through with it and promptly murder their oldest friend and a very young girl. Don't let anyone tell you Sailor Moon is one of those power of love and friendship always triumphs sorta shows. I don't know that the power of love and friendship even ties the scoreboard if we tally things up over the whole series. Oh and the final final final showdown has a nude Sailor Moon with angel wings just trying to hug it out with the main villain, which I guess could also maybe be read as a bit queer.

So yeah. Sailor Moon. When you don't have a puritanical edit, it's queer as hell. Everyone's bi or non-binary-and-sapphic. Several different flavors of trans rep. Goes out on a note of not getting hung up on gender. All of this in a roughly 30 year old series now, aimed at young impressionable girls. … actually for that matter it's also a show aimed at girls with really powerfully horny monster girl designs all over the place. Possibly relevant.

Oh yeah, and maybe consider throwing me some money via Patreon? I can't actually cover next month's rent as things stand.

#sailor moon #queer #gay #lesbian #trans #nonbinary #genderfluid #positive representation #for real though it's really messed up that Sailor Aluminum Siren and Sailor Iron Crow in particular stay dead they deserved better #Youtube

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ronnie-wood · 1 year

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posting a 2008 ronnie interview here bc why not viva la information

full article under the cut! this was around 2008 when he was 61 and had an art exhibition, based on artworks he made in his studio in ireland

it's a REALLY interesting interview, and i'm glad i saved it a long time ago :D

a warning for discussions of alcoholism though! u__u i sort of understand bc some of his drinking was motivated by grief when he was young, his girlfriend got killed when he was traveling to a gig

Originally from the Financial Times: Lunch with FT: Ronnie Wood July 19, 2008 1:45 am by Rob Blackhurst Keith Richards once said, “If you are going to get wasted, then get wasted elegantly.” At 61, his fellow Stones guitarist, Ronnie Wood, embodies this louche creed. As he arrives in the reception of Dublin’s elegant Shelbourne Hotel for lunch, cutting a path through huddles of overly nourished politicians and businessmen, he’s dressed in the same size of super-skinny jeans, 28 waist, that he’s been wearing for the past 30 years, a pair of space boots that may once have belonged on an alligator’s back and a tight black shirt undone to the chest: the fruits of a trip to Prada before his daughter Leah’s wedding last month. But, even from 50 paces, it’s the luxuriant crow-black head of hair, flecked with only the tiniest hint of grey, that really marks him out as a Rolling Stone. As he greets me with a warm handshake and naughty, liquorice eyes, he says: “I don’t dye it either.” Alluding to his equally thin bandmates, he adds: “We’re all the same build, as well. It’s a good thing I didn’t join Fleetwood Mac.” We take our place in a booth in the newly refurbished Saddle Room, which is all mirrors and velvet and upholstered in a garish shade that might be described as boudoir gold. Wood squints uncomfortably. “Christ, it looks like Rod Stewart’s trousers,” he says.

The Shelbourne is Wood’s favourite Dublin haunt. “I’ve a good old affiliation with this hotel,” he says. “When we played the Point Depot five years ago we were based here. It was like the Stones coming home to my town.” Wood has lived in Dublin on and off since the early 1990s, when he bought a second home in the southern suburb of Sandymount, searching for a sanctuary for his art and music, and shelter from the British exchequer. He transformed the cow byre into recording studios and the stables into a personal pub called “Yer Father’s Yacht”. It seems a dangerous place for a fitfully recovering alcoholic like Wood; there are 20 more pubs within a square mile of his front door. He looks at the menu reluctantly: “I’m not really hungry at all,” he says. Eventually we opt for 12 oysters from County Clare followed by the seafood platter to share. Nothing stronger than caffeine is ordered, though Wood is going through another well-publicised bout of heavy drinking. “A friend came over last night – I hadn’t seen him for years. We had a few drinks. It ended up being seven in the morning.”

Though he has been woken up for the interview only an hour earlier, Wood is lucid and charming, especially when an espresso arrives to kick-start the conversation. I mention his latest art exhibition, Ireland Studio, a six-week show at his Scream gallery in Mayfair. The exhibition features paintings and pen-and-inks produced – mostly through the night – at his Irish pile over the past 10 years. Free of tour commitments – this year the Stones are on sabbatical after two and a half years on the road – he has been able to spend more time in Ireland with his two Great Danes.

Wood’s interest in art dates back to the early 1960s, when he was a student at Ealing Art College, but he took it up commercially for “grocery money” in the mid-1980s when he had blown a considerable portion of his Stones money on a cocktail of drugs and comically disastrous managers. He flicks through a pile of prints of the front garden of the Priory Clinic, where he has been a regular in-patient; moonscapes from the west of Ireland at night; and horses racing on the Irish turf. Sir Peter Blake and Lucian Freud are among fans of his art: “He [Freud] told Mick [Jagger] that he loves my landscapes. That’s a compliment, from the greatest living artist.” Tracey Emin is a friend: “She’s like my aunt. She rings me up every day to ask how I’m doing.” He pauses and confides mischievously: “Tracey thinks she can draw.”

Most of his collectors are Stones fans in the US: “The leading cancer-curing doctor in Florida – much to his wife’s chagrin – spends most of his money on my paintings. She says: ‘Oh, please don’t sell the house and buy another Ronnie painting!’ Though his portrait of the Stones in a Jacobean interior, “Beggars’ Banquet”, sold in 2005 to a private collector for $1m, he is pricing his Irish landscapes at between £10,000 and £50,000. Deals, he makes clear, can be struck.

Wood has become a kind of official portraitist to the court of celebrity over the past decade – ever since Andrew Lloyd Webber commissioned him to paint the famous patrons of the restaurant The Ivy in the early noughties. Now a Ronnie Wood sitting has become as much a signifier of the upper reaches of stardom as a Hello! wedding deal. His waiting list includes the Stones-mad French president, Nicolas Sarkozy: “I met him and Gordon Brown and he was desperately trying to put me on the phone with Carla Bruni. There are all these people like Scorsese, Clinton, Beckham...” but he trails off, as if bored of the fame whirligig: “I’m trying to get away from the commissions so that I can do what I want,” he says. “This new exhibition is more the stuff that I want to do – landscapes, dogs, horses.” The plate of oysters arrives. Wood is a fan of their nutritional properties. “They’ve got everything you need – all the vitamins and minerals. They keep the zinc up,” he says with a mock leer. Discussion moves to his other day job. I ask whether age has calmed Richards who, Wood recalled in his autobiography, used to hold an arsenal of guns and knives that would be drawn during band frictions. “It’s still on the verge, you know,” he deadpans. “Murder is still quite an easy option. You have to be on your toes all the time.” Nevertheless, Wood is more appreciated now by his fellow Stones than he was when he left the Faces to join them in 1975. For years, as a latecomer who joined when the band had already made their fortune, he had to negotiate his fee on a rising scale for every tour and album. “There was a 17-year apprenticeship,” he says. “Charlie and Bill stood up for me. Nice of them to do that, because they could have carried on looking the other way. I’m part of the empire, finally.” In spite of the Strolling Bones jibes, he thinks the Stones have never sounded better in their 45-year history than they did on the final dates of their tour at the O2 arena last August. He says there’s “talk in the air” of another tour next year.

It must feel odd, I say, to go from playing in front of a crowd of a million in Rio to sitting at home. He becomes melancholic. “I’m more lost when I’m not on tour. I’m in a bit of a muddle at nine o’clock – ‘Where’s the stage?’ On tour there are people directing and supervising you. And then when you finish it’s like, ‘Sit down and watch TV.’ Sometimes I get so bored I think I’ll have a drink. I don’t mean any harm but I just go off the rails.” He points out, however, that he did manage to catch himself last month when he checked in for treatment ahead of his daughter Leah’s wedding so that he didn’t miss the big day. A torrent of alcohol runs through Wood’s life. His account of his upbringing in a council house in Middlesex, the third son of “water gypsies” who had left their barges for dry land, sounds like a preparatory school for a career in rock ‘n’ roll. His father, Archie, played in a 24-piece harmonica band that toured the racetracks of England. At home, there were weekend singalongs around the piano that got so boisterous that a crack appeared in the middle of the house. When the family lawn was dug up 1,700 Guinness bottles were discovered. This may sound impossibly romantic, but his relationship with drink turned darker when, while he was still a teenager, his girlfriend was killed travelling to one of his first gigs: “When Stephanie got killed I sort of drowned my sorrows,” he tells me, “and I suppose I’ve never looked back since.” Does he worry about his own health? He’s dismissive: “Here I am at 61 and I’ve never felt better. I’ve never had a cleaner bill of health. I was just in the Mayr Clinic in Austria. They said, ‘We want to use you as an example of how we want people to end up.’ They said I had the body of a 40-year-old.”

As our seafood platter arrives, Wood dips straight into the crab claws. “These are really cool. I don’t know which sauce you put on them.” As he plumps for the shallots and vinegar, the conversation turns to Jimi Hendrix, with whom he shared a flat for six months in the late 1960s. “He didn’t think he was any good as a singer. I used to say, ‘Don’t worry about that voice.’ He used to obliterate real life by being stoned all the time – and he couldn’t handle it. He didn’t realise how good he was.” His last memory of seeing Hendrix alive, the night before he died in 1970, is haunting. “He was leaving Ronnie Scott’s [jazz club]. He had his arm around a girl and he looked really sad. I went out after him and said, ‘Jimi, you didn’t say goodnight.’”

I try to lighten the mood by asking about the Wood clan – who all seem to have found jobs in the family business. He married Jo, a former model, 23 years ago after splitting with his first wife Krissie, another model. Jo is on the Stones payroll as his dresser and assistant on tour, in between running her organic beauty products business. His stepson Jamie is his manager, and his youngest son Tyrone is curating Wood’s latest exhibition at Scream.

The “Little Red Rooster” ringtone on Wood’s phone sounds. He seems agitated. The call brings news, he says, of The Sun door-stepping his home in Kingston, south-west London. A few days after our lunch I realise that he had been given news that the paper was about to write a story about how during the week of our meeting, he was holed up with a young Russian waitress. Whatever domestic earthquakes are going on in the background, he returns quickly to conviviality, suggesting we finish lunch with a drink elsewhere. Though he is great company, it’s something of a relief when his PR appears to steer him to his next engagement and saves me from making the decision. As we leave the hotel, the kitchen staff lift their ladles and knives in salute, out on the street car horns honk, and Wood poses for an endless round of photos with passers-by, loving every second of it. “That’s always been a big problem with me,” he says with a grin that fades to exasperation: “I find it hard to get old and hard to say no.”

‘Ireland Studio’ is at Scream, 34 Bruton Street, London W1 until August 17; www.screamlondon.com The Saddle Room The Shelbourne Hotel, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2 12 x Clare Atlantic oysters €33.00 1 x Seafood platter €44.00 3 x Espresso 13.50 Total €90.50

#the rolling stones #ronnie wood #the rolling stones fandom #classic rock fandom #upload

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rainbowywitch · 10 days

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‏Hello, can you please reblog or publish a post for my campaign? Due to the weakness of donations, they pass slowly as ice. I hope you can help me. A small amount like $10 will be more than useful to help me and my family. Thank you for everything💔🙏

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Right now, donated money is being used to help us survive this war. Food is very expensive and my family has to pay rent for the land that our tent is on. However, I want to save up enough money to evacuate my family to a safer place where we can rebuild our lives. I dream of returning to university to finish my computer science degree. I want to provide a better life for my family than is possible in Gaza. My family and I have many dreams we would like to fulfill after this war. We are grateful to everyone who donated and helps us during this time of suffering. Thank you for reading. Hello everybody. "Hello, I am Farah. I want to tell you about my suffering from the beginning of the war from October 7th until today. We spent the first week in Gaza. During this short period, we were subjected to many threats of evacuation due to the bombing that took place near us. After that, we were displaced on October 13th to the south of Gaza, specifically in the Khan Yunis area. We were displaced in a place affiliated with UNRWA for a period of 3 months. We slept in a large number of people, 12 people, in a place 3 meters by 3 meters on a mat on the ground. There were no mattresses or headrests (pillows). We suffered from a lack of drinking water and pollution in the place, and overcrowding and crowding to use the bathroom. We waited an hour until we could use the bathroom. We also suffered from the lack of meat or chicken, and all we ate was canned. Our children suffered from the lack of food for them, such as milk and eggs. We also suffered from the high prices of diapers and their lack of availability, to the point that the price of a pack of diapers ranged from $50 to $70. Despite the fact that it was a place affiliated with UNRWA, we were subjected to a siege for 10 days, and the Israeli army bombed the barracks and fired live bullets at the place. The place was evacuated.. Until now, the army has bombed areas near where we are in Al-Zawaida and we are suffering from hearing the sounds of explosions and clashes day and night. When we get sick and the children get sick, there is no treatment for us, no medicines, no hospitals, and my nephews and I suffer from skin allergies, toothaches, etc., and the scorching sun rays have caused us skin burns. We also suffer from transportation and its high cost. We have started riding a cart pulled by an animal. People have started putting vegetable oil in their cars as fuel instead of gasoline and diesel, and this pollutes the air. Also, using firewood to cook food due to the lack of gas causes cancer, asthma, and difficulty breathing.

#palestine #free palestine #gaza #free gaza

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multiproduct-review · 1 year

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childeapologist · 2 years

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wuts ur twitch?? : 0

You can find my twitch here

Thank you for asking 🥺🥺🥺

#lovely anons<3 #not to get all emo in the tags but i've been feeling so worthless lately like all my content creation efforts are for nothing #I'll see an online friend that doesnt really have a large following start streaming and they have 50 followers a week later #when it took me MONTHS to get the 50 for affiliate #and ive been streaming for years now and am stagnated at 200 followers #idk what i am doing wrong #and seeing others get affiliated so easily definitely makes me feel some resentment #like how

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oddsnendsfanfics · 3 years

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Unraveling in the Sheets

Genre: Fan Fiction

Pairing: Henry Cavill/OFC

Warnings: Language, Sexual Content, NSFW

Rating: M

Length: Short Story

Disclaimer: a strict work of fiction, I own nothing except the original characters and the plot line. In no way am I affiliated to any of it.

A/N: Spoiler Alert, there is smut. Be warned. It's there.

Also, I am no longer doing tags on posts. Since my list exceeds the tag limit. Please feel free to join the chat in place of the tag list.

Henry Cavill Master List

“How did you do it though?” Gliding the car into a free parking space, Henry glanced at Nell in the passenger's seat.

“How did I do what?” Eyeing him curiously, she tried to hide her gloating smile. She could be a terrible winner, even if she wasn't the winner, she had came ahead of Henry.

“You know what I mean, Nelly.”

He looked so silly, his new mustache curling when he laughed or smiled. Nell had to admit, if any man could wear the 'stache Henry did it well.

“Oh, you mean how did I suddenly leave your ass behind and finish nearly 50 positions ahead?” She laughed, crinkling her nose. “I told you, I've been working hard for this. Besides, you're too big. You move slower than I do. It's that simple. Maybe next year, you will finish ahead of me.”

“You're impossible.” Unbuckling his seat belt, Henry hurried to get out of the car and around to the other side, before Nell could open her own door. Nearly there, he frowned when she opened the door, stepping out of the Aston Martin. “You were supposed to let me open that.”

“I am supposed to do a lot of things that I do not.” Nell grabbed her hand bag. “I'll let you open the door, next time. You big dork.”

Henry was always the gentleman, even when Nell would rather rip his eyes out than speak to him in a civil manner. Not that she ever felt the former much, but on the rare occasion. Sometimes that's how things went for ex-lovers. The mid May air was growing cool, leaving a few goosebumps on Nell's exposed arms. She had expected to be back before now, which is why she'd left her sweater in the hotel.

“Well, happy late birthday. It was nice having dinner with your family. I've missed them.”

“They've missed you, too. I could tell that dad was happy you came along. He hasn't talked that much during a dinner since the last time you came over.” Henry smiled fondly. "I'm glad that you came, Nelly." Hands in his pockets, Henry sauntered along beside Nell. Approaching the main entrance, he held the door allowing her to enter.

When he'd invited her for the weekend, he wasn't confident that she would come. Wrapped up in work, Nell didn't take too much time away from Dublin these days.

"It was a nice break from work." Tucking a piece of hair behind her ear, Nell bit her bottom lip. "I know that you are busy, but do you have a few minutes to talk?"

"I always have time to talk with you." Scanning the hotel lobby, Henry tried to find a spot for them to sit and chat privately. "Should we have a seat at the bar?"

"We could, but I would really like to change. Do you mind coming up with me? We can just talk in the room. It's probably more comfortable anyway."

"Is this about the wild boy?"

"Isn't it always?"

Laughing, Henry pushed the call button for the elevator. Their son was truly something else. One day he would surely take over the world; Henry could see that coming from the day he was born. To say Ivan was Henry's pride and joy would be a massive understatement. He lived for their son. This weekend having Ivan, and Nell, in Jersey had been fantastic. A short glimpse of what life could have been. The ding of the elevator brought Henry back from his brief fantasy.

He and Nell had split up several years ago, there wasn't much chance she would feel the same as he did. Lost in the thoughts of happy little family. Allowing Nell to step onto the elevator first, Henry stood silently with his hands clasped in front of him.

“So, Ivan has been doing well in school?” He may as well get this under way.

“Define doing well,” Nell snickered. “I get a call nearly every day from his teacher. The woman is impossible, but knowing our son, he isn't making it easy for her.”

“I was like that in school. Right up until the day I left.” Henry shrugged. The elevator gently bumping to a stop, he stepped forward to hold the door for Nell.

Muttering a thank you, Nell dug for her key card, leading the way down the hall. She loved this hotel, it was the only one she stayed in, if she could help it, while visiting the Island. A great view of the water on one side, the other dazzling with a fantastic look out into the city. The first time she'd ever been to Jersey, she had stayed in the hotel and fell in love with the charm. There were days when that felt like a life time ago.

Opening the door, Nell paused to allow Henry in. “Have a seat. Anywhere you'd like. Sorry it's kind of a mess. I'm going to change.”

The hotel room was anything but a mess, minus the few sketch books that Nell had dropped on the bed. Always working. Henry took a seat on the edge of the king sized bed, casually glancing at the colour coded notes and designs that Nell had in one of the open sketch books. Costumes. A few notes detailed leather armor and Viking era clothing. She'd done well for herself, since he'd met her. The same shy costume apprentice hiding out on set of The Tudors, was now helping drive forward the details of Vikings.

In the bathroom, Nell pulled off her dress. The fabric had became clingy after a while and she needed to be more relaxed. Running shorts and a tshirt would do the trick. Sighing at her reflection, she bit her bottom lip glancing down at her top. The worn coral Nike tshirt was her favourite, it was showing the love and wear in a few spots. Perhaps she should have picked something less frumpy? She was a busy, single mom she didn't have to look the part. Ah fuck, who cared. Henry certainly wouldn't.

He was here to discuss their son, not flirt with her until she gave in to that smile. Or got lost in his eyes, those gorgeous blue eyes – the left with the flecks of brown. His charm alone was enough to make anyone weak in the knees. Damn it, she needed to get over it. He had moved on. She needed to do the same.

Blowing out a breath, Nell reached for the door, pausing when she heard Henry talking. His tone told her that he was speaking to Ivan. Quietly slipping out of the bathroom, she smiled.

“Hold on, just a sec.” He pushed the screen of his phone, allowing the speaker to connect. “Alright, wild boy. Say goodnight to your mum.”

“Mum, momma, mum.” Ivan's voice filled the room. “I love you.”

“I love you, too, Ivan. Are you being a good boy?”

“Uh huh. I love you. Good night.”

“Good night, wild boy. I love you.”

“Night dad.”

“Good night, I love you. I'm going to be back soon, you go to bed and I will see you first thing in the morning.”

“Okay. Oh, dad, can Kal sleep in my room tonight?” Ivan was fond of the large black and white American Akita. Henry laughed.

“Of course he can. You and Kal go to bed, now.”

“Okay, bye.” A little too quickly, Ivan hung up the phone. Henry laughed at the eagerness, he would talk to his mother when he got back to the house. Making sure that Ivan and his dog had gone to bed as they were told, with no fuss.

"Can you believe he is growing this fast? My god where has that time gone?" Henry rubbed his hands against his face. His mustache and subtle stubble scratching his palms.

"Time is a cruel mistress." Rubbing her hands on her shorts, Nell stood. "Drink? I have a bottle of Johnnie Walker."

"Of course you do." Smirking, Henry shifted on the side of the bed. “I had a look at some of these designs, by the way. They're magnificent. My god, Nell, you are so talented.”

“You're saying that to be nice,”

Shaking his head, Henry accepted the glass, resting it on his knee. “No, I am saying it because its true. You are one of the most talented costumers that I had ever met. Are you enjoying the job?”

“I love it.” Nell smiled, leaning against the large wooden desk in the corner. “The work is great, the people are amazing, and Ivan is really enjoying it. I'm glad we went.”

“Good, that's good. He talks about it, a lot. He really seems to love being there. I'm glad. Once things settle, I am going to try and come visit. I kind of miss it, Dublin.”

“You should.” She smiled fighting the urge to scoff and roll her eyes. Henry was always busy. He'd make it to Dublin, when Hell froze over. “So, how is work coming on this new character.”

“I can't say much, but I can say that I will be happy when I can shave.” He rubbed the mustache expertly. “It's not as bad as some of the beards that I've had to grow, but it's not my favourite look.”

“You look good with a beard. I know you hate them, but you do.”

Leaning forward to set his glass on the bedside table, Henry licked the whiskey off of his lips. “I'm glad to have that compliment.”

“Sure.” Nell nodded, tipping her glass to finish the drink. “Another?”

“Uh, I'm good.” Henry motioned to his glass. Rubbing his hands across his jeans, he furrowed his brow. “I've been thinking, since I am fairly busy the next few months, what if I keep Ivan for a few extra days? Once you leave, I will take him back to London with me, until I have to go.”

Shifting on the bed, her face warm from the second glass of whiskey, Nell sniffled and cleared her throat. “What about school?”

“What about it? He isn't going to miss much, is he? They're nearly finished up and I don't know how long it will be, until I see him. Possibly not until Christmas.”

All he wanted was to spend a little time with his son, was that so hard? His next move would have to be calculated, Nell had been known to stat arguments over less. If Henry wanted to avoid a shouting match, he would have to go about this carefully. Reaching for his glass, he downed the remaining contents in one large gulp. Sighing.

“I want to hang out with him a little. It wouldn't be more than three days extra. Then you get some time alone, as well. Nell, I know that you need a bit of a break. You work so hard and take care of Ivan, please.”

“If you want to, then I suppose I can't really say no. What kind of mother would I be, if I didn't let you see him?”

“Don't say things like that, please.” Henry reached out, his hand taking hers. Gently stroking the back of her hand with his thumb. “You are a wonderful mum. You know that.”

“Sometimes, I feel like I could do better. I really do.” Nell shrugged, allowing Henry to continue holding her hand.

“All parents feel that way, I am sure. I know that I feel like that, all the time. I guess it's natural, always wanting to do better, to be better, for our children.”

There he went again. There were times when Nell could not stand to be near him, other times she wanted to be as close as possible. Damn it. Watching him talk about Ivan and the few extras days they would be together, Henry's eyes lit up. His smile broad and the enthusiasm in his voice was one that dictated proud father. Nell nodded, only because she felt it was appropriate to the conversation.

Henry continued to chatter about how he wanted to take Ivan to a new exhibit at the Natural History Museum, in London. Leave it to the father and son, finding a day at the museum to be high on the list of fun. Nell sighed, continuing to half listen, half gaze at Henry in awe. One thing she loved – well love could be a strong word – adored? Enjoyed? About Henry was how much he loved Ivan.

Mid sentence about some Sir David Attenborough documentary that he'd watched with Ivan; Nell couldn't help it any longer. Leaning in, without warning, she grabbed Henry's face turning it to her and kissing him. Lips connecting, she stopped and jumped back as if hit by an electric shock.

Clearing his throat, Henry rubbed the back of his neck, but not pulling back. “I didn't know that the National Geographic was that exciting.”

“I'm sorry.” Hiding her face in her hands, Nell shook her head. Oh that had been a mistake. She had absolutely no right. None. Henry was crazy, if he didn't get up right now and walk out. If he was angry, then she deserved that.

Blushing, Nell shook her head. “Henry, I shouldn't have.”

“I'm certainly not going to complain.” He shrugged, leaning in his arm sliding around her shoulder. Nell glanced up, getting the nerves to look at him. Oh she had fucked up. “Next time, I would like some warning though.”

“Warning? Next time?”

“Hmm, yes. Kind of like this, close your eyes.” Henry instructed pulling her closer and kissing her. Nell sighed her body melting against him. She loved the way his lips felt on hers. Soft, with a slight force.

Straddling his waist, her arms wrapped around his neck, Nell's fingers laced together. Her lips leaving his, tracing along his jaw, nearing the sweet spot below his ear. A slight nip and he was an unraveling mess. Henry nuzzled his face into her hair, she smelled amazing. Comforting and warm. A groan erupted from deep in his throat, as predicted she had gone straight for that spot.

“Nell, Nell,” Henry cleared his throat, holding her at arm's length, “Janelle, stop.” Looking for any sort of sign that she truly felt that this wasn't a good idea, he sucked in a breath. “Are you sure about this? Because if we continue, I won't stop until...”

“I am.” She nodded firmly, “I don't want you to stop. I don't want to stop. Oh god, Henry. Please.”

“I need to know that you truly, absolutely want to do this.”

“If you don't stop talking and bend me over, I am going to kick you out and do this myself. Please, stop talking. If I didn't want this, I wouldn't have started it.”

A deep rumbling laugh followed, Henry rolled his eyes. God, she was something else. Who was he to deny a gorgeous woman what she wanted? Would this come back to haunt him? Probably. Did he care? Not much. Come morning they would once again go their separate ways, but that didn't matter right now. Right now, he could pretend that he had everything he wanted. And what he wanted was her.

Pulling her to him, Henry kissed her hard. Nell moaned, the force of the kiss was nearly dizzying. Arms around his neck, she rubbed her body against his, trying to grasp the friction that was created when she started to grind herself against his thighs.

“Henry,”

“Hold on, you need patience.” He brushed a bit of hair out of her face, “all in good time.”

Nell squealed when he stood, her legs desperately scrambling to hold onto him. In a futile attempt she huffed, when he let her go, standing in front of him pouting. Unbuttoning his shirt, Henry smirked giving her a heated stare. “Well, are you going to get on the bed or make me do all the work? Shorts off.”

Sliding the mesh shorts down her ass and along her legs, Nell made a bit of a show letting them pool at her feet. Stepping out, as slowly as possible, while lifting the old tshirt from her body. Allowing it to go where it would, as she dropped it. Sitting back on the bed, she could feel her heart in her throat and her stomach where her heart should be.

“Lie back.” Henry instructed, kneeling at the edge of the bed. Arms around her thighs, guiding her to him, he studied her for a moment. She was trembling as his fingers slid across her thighs, positioning her in just the right way.

“Oh god, Hen-Henry.” Nell's mouth was suddenly dry and her voice hoarse. His hot breath between her legs was tormenting her, in unimaginable ways. In anticipation she bucked her hips forward, trying to clench her thighs. Holding her knees with his shoulders, Henry chuckled.

“Eager.”

“Please.”

“You are...” He lingered, kissing the inside of her leg. “Gorgeous. Look at you.” He brushed his thumb against her. Nell whimpered trying to push further. “Hold on, hold on.”

“Why are you teasing me?”

“Because I want to enjoy the view, for a moment.” He shrugged, her legs lifting gently. A hand on her lower abdomen, as if holding her in place, he used the other to gently tease and trace along her calf. Without warning, his lips attached to the most sensitive part of her body with his mustache adding an extra sensation, Nell bucked her hips hard, shoving his face further between her thighs.

Nell's head was swimming, it had been a while since she'd felt this good from such an act. Sure, she'd had the odd date here and there, semi-serious relationships, but nobody could do this the way Henry could. He was a fucking magician, she was certain of it. Humming against her mound, Henry couldn't hide the laughter in his eyes, when she began to squirm and wiggle against his face. She was desperate and he was going to prolong this as much as he could.

Sucking her clit, his tongue generously lapping at her, he thoroughly enjoyed the show. Pushing his head as far down as she could, Nell was nearly in tears each time he leaned in, his mustache tickling in just the right way. Oh god, she gasped trying hard to find release. Henry was cunning, backing off at the right moments.

“Henry,” She whined, threading her fingers through his hair. “Don't tease me, I really need you to finish.”

“Stop being so impatient.” He was teasingly stern. Pushing her hands away, he locked his fingers with hers, holding them at her side. Lifting his head, he smirked, kissing up her body ending with another dizzying kiss. Nell sucked on his tongue, freeing her hands from his, she tugged him closer, pulling at fistfuls of hair.

Cleaning herself from his tongue and lips, she sighed. “I'm going to need more than that.”

“You're sure?” Henry paused, holding his weight on his forearms, resting above her. His jeans still on, he could feel the strain against the denim.

“Jeans, off.” She demanded, sitting up to watch. Shivering against the slight chill, her breasts on display giving him the perfect view of her erect nipples. Nell blushed under his gaze. She was not the tight, toned, and perky body she once was. She wasn't out of shape, by any means, but compared to Henry...

“You are gorgeous.” Henry complimented, his jeans on the floor, boxers being pushed down to join them. Stepping out of his pants, he stood at the side of the bed, in all his glory.

Nell licked her lips, reaching out to take him in her hand. Hissing under her touch, Henry involuntarily bucked his hips forward into her hand. Rubbing the head, Nell intently watched Henry while she leaned in taking him fully in her mouth.

“Fuck, Nelly.”

“Hmm,” She hummed, sliding her head back along his length. Hand wrapped around him, stroking in place of her mouth. Bobbing her head back down, she swirled her tongue around the base. He nearly choked her the first time she'd ever gone down on him. Oh how long ago that felt.

Dragging her tongue against his length, she felt her core tighten, with each moan Henry gave. His slight salty taste mixed with the aftertaste of the Johnnie Walker, Nell inhaled deeply through her nose, hollowing her cheeks around him. Gripping the back of her head, Henry tried to not force her too hard, as he began to guide her movement.

Happy to go along with what he needed to feel good, Nell allowed him control over her guidance. Her finger nails grazing the back of his thighs, she mentally checked the small victory when he threw his hips forward at the sensation of her wrapped around him and her nails on his skin.

“Good girl,” Henry mumbled, his head lulling back, his chest rising rapidly. “Keep it up, just like that. Oh shit,”

Nell's chest swelled a little, she could still make him feel good, even after all of this time apart. That was not something she would take lightly, even if this shouldn't be happening. Oh fuck, who cared? They were two consenting adults. Henry's legs quivered, his hands unsteady stroking the back of her head.

“Nell,”

“Hmm?” She glanced up at him. His face soft and his jaw slack, she could feel him tightening. The perfect time to stop her actions. “Not yet,” She smirked, wiping her hand across her chin, drool gone. “Fair is fair.”

“Jesus,” Henry grumbled. He had been so fucking close, the knot in the pit of his stomach clenched Slowing his breathing, he took a moment to think of anything else. Laundry? Running? How much longer until he had to renew his passport?

“Henry?”

“Yeah?” He snapped his head to look at Nell.

“Are we going to stand here all night, or...” She shrugged, a devious smirk on her face. Laying back on the bed, she curled her finger beckoning him to her.

“You're still sure about this?” Henry asked. His eyes on her, waiting to see if she had any hint of doubt or hesitation.

“I don't have a condom, but I'm clean. It's not like I'm getting pregnant, so....” If she were to get pregnant, there was going to be on hell of a hefty lawsuit against that surgeon.

“You're sure? I know that I'm...but I don't have.”

“if you don't want to, then I understand.”

“I do, though, but...”

Nell shook her head. “No buts. If you want me, then I'm yours.”

“Fuck, you're making this hard.”

Giggling, Nell glance down. “I think we're beyond things being hard.”

His body betraying him, Henry cleared his throat, she certainly had a point. Fuck it. What did they have to lose? Unless this, some how, came back to bite them. No, no he had to stop that. Give in, enjoy what was happening. It had been too long since he'd been able to watch her in such bliss. Bliss that he was responsible for.

“You're sure?”

Nell nodded siting up, opening her arms, “Come here.”

On the edge of the bed, Henry sighed, his large frame leaning into her. Nell held him for a moment, stroking his hair, the feel of his warmth against her sent shivers through her spine. Pushing him back on the bed, she bit her bottom lip, waiting for the go ahead. Henry gave her a slight nod, adjusting himself on the bed to get comfortable. Straddling his hips, Nell lifted herself to slowly take him.

Sheathing him inch by inch, Nell groaned at the fullness. This was her favourite part, taking him to the end, feeling him stretch her. Rocking her hips forward, she countered the motion sliding them back in the same tantalizing pace. Henry held her hips, pushing his up to meet her. Nell squeaked and giggled. She loved the way he hit all the right spots.

“You can touch me, don't be shy.” Nell winked, lifting her arms and crossing them above her head, allowing him a full view of her breasts. “Go on.” She encouraged.

His large hands cupping her breasts, Henry softly rolled her hardening nipples between his fingers, giving on a slight flick when she moved herself up on his length. Close to letting him slide out, she moved back down, her ass grinding against him.

The way her body moved against his was mesmerizing. Massaging her supple skin, from her breasts down her sides, one hand settling on her ass and the other on her hip. Henry loved the shape, even if she had changed a little since having Ivan. God she was stunning.

Hastening her pace, Nell rocked back and forth, up and down. Henry closed his eyes feeling every bit of movement, each clench. Taking in the sounds of her breathing, mixed with his, her small moans not going unnoticed.

“Henry,” She whispered, biting her bottom lip, leaning forward to touch her lips against his. “Please,”

Without having to be asked twice, he moved swiftly, turning them over to pin her beneath him. Nell sighed and stretched her arms over her head, the pull of her muscles caused another shiver. Her head now against the pillow, she reached, tracing the lines of his face with her fingertip.

“I don't know that I can be as slow as you were.” Henry nipped her finger. Holding back on his desire to pound her into the bed.

“Then don't.” Nell batted her eye lashes at him.

Somehow that was all he needed, that tiny bit of permission. Picking up the pace, Henry grunted. Nell moaned drawing her knees upward, allowing him an even better vantage to this position. As if the pent up emotions from the last few years, hours, minutes had been released the couple were lost in the sensation of skin on skin. The feeling of sparks and electricity coursing through them. Connecting them.

“Fuck, Janelle.” Henry hissed, his arm locked into position on either side of her head, keeping him from tumbling on top of her.

“Henry,” She squealed splaying her hands against his chest, tugging at the soft hairs. “Oh god. Please, don't stop. My god, oh fuck.”

“You are fucking amazing. Fuck, look at you.” Kissing her roughly, he sighed, steadying his pace. His hips slapping hers, Nell shook slightly her soft sobs of pleasure were enough to send him to an end.

Shaking with pleasure, Nell gasped trying to bring herself down from the high. Henry moaned, his head back and chest heaving. It had been a while since he had felt that good. Nell laid with her legs hooked around his thighs, no desire to move. Collapsing with his head on her chest, Henry allowed his body to rest. Sweaty and sticky, they laid tangled together. Neither one wanting to break the feeling.

Dosing in and out, Nell was the first to move. Her body growing heavy with Henry still on top of her. She needed to move, before seizing up. Pushing his head to the side, she giggled and kissed the tip of her nose when he lazily looked up.

“I need to pee,”

“Hmph.” Henry nodded, slowly rolling over. Allowing her to escape. Laying flat on the bed, while she scurried off to the bathroom, Henry pushed himself up off of the bed. He should be getting back to his parents, back to Ivan.

All thoughts of moving were squashed, when Nell came back, climbing in beside him. Her clothes still on the floor. Her body was comforting against his. “Hi,” she whispered, sliding in under his arm.

“Nell?” Henry laid with his arm around her shoulder.

“Huh?” Nell grunted, her face buried in his chest.

“I should head back.”

“If you want to. You can stay, I don't mind.” Nell yawned. Her eyes closing.

“Okay, but only for a little while.” Henry agreed, closing his eyes. In a few minutes, he would get up, shower, and head back.

With a start, Henry woke, a loud banging noise rattling him. Looking around the dark room, he squinted to find the source of the noise. Hearing someone whispering at a distance, Henry laid in bed, listening. Against him, Nell stirred, but didn't wake. Someone in the hall was talking, no doubt they had been the source of the banging. He had fell asleep, Nell wrapped against him.

Looking at his watch, Henry frowned. 4am. If he left right now, he could be back before anybody woke. If he left now, he risked Kal barking and waking the house. If he waited, he would risk walking in and having to explain himself to one or more person. Of course he could tell them that he'd ran into some old friends, had some drinks and stayed on a sofa somewhere. Too drunk to drive.

Shifting in bed, Nell sighed, her arm around his waist she snuggled in closer. She was content, who was Henry to try and disturb her sleep? He would wait an hour or two, before he made his departure. So what if he waltzed in, being faced by one of his brothers, or even his mother. He was an adult, if he wanted to stay out all night enjoying the company of a fantastic woman, then he would do just that.

Kissing the top of Nell's head, Henry smiled, sinking down further into the covers, closing his eyes.

Tag List Chat

#henry cavill #henry cavill fanfiction #henry cavill smut #oddsnendshenryfics

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prorevenge · 4 years

Text

Better check your facts, because people KNOW people.

Had to post this one...it isn't petty, it isn't regular, and it ruined a guys journalistic career.

The internet has evolved quite a lot over the years. Some people may remember usenet groups, I know I do, used to have a lot of fun reading them. Kind of similar in a way to today's reddit in a way...no matter what the subject was, someone would have a usenet newsgroup for it. But unlike todays reddit, it was strictly text. You could download images, but they would take forever to download, and could often be across several different messages...just one of the messages missing, and you wouldn't get the image. Things then improved, download speeds slowly got faster, and then there was IRC that came about. IRC saw the same thing...there was chatroom for anything and everything...and if there wasn't, you could clearly create it. If you were to try to watch a video over the internet back then, it could take you a couple of hours to download a music video...you get the idea. This is important for the context of the story.

I was a writer on a couple of wrestling newsletters during the mid to late 90's. We only published our newsletters online...you could have it emailed to you, or go to a website to read it (think we hosted on geocities or tripod). Both wrestling newsletters were independent of each other, and I used different nicknames on each. One was more a review and preview newsletter, where we would post reviews of the most recent shows/events, talk about current feuds, and talk about what we may think will happen in the next big event.

The other newsletter, was a news and rumours newsletter, with a few fun puzzles/competitions thrown in to keep things interesting. At the time, you had a few big name wrestling news and rumours websites, and a handful of small ones...I was a writer on one of the small ones. Sometimes we would get news and rumours from the big name websites, giving them credit where appropriate. Sometimes, we would hear things from people in the business...everyone had their sources of information. And sometimes we would make an educated guess on possible scenarios, based on current trends in the industry. It did get a bit cut-throat at times, with some newsletters claiming that they broke the news first, when it had already been published in other newsletters first. And you would even have some newsletters devote all of their time trying to rubbish the other newsletters for publishing false and misleading information. It was rumours...we did not always get it right.

Through a couple of readers of my first wrestling newsletter, I learned of a huge surprise in the works for one organisation, which could potentially lead to something happening at a big event coming up. I won't mention the surprise, but it involved a person from another sport. No other wrestling newsletter had reported it, so I included it as a rumour on the second wrestling newsletter. I was instantly rubbished by one of the major wrestling newsletters at the time, publishing a clearly nonsense rumour that would never happen...only for that very same newsletter to publish the exact same rumour two or three days later, and claim to be the first ones to publish it. This sort of stuff happened all the time, it did not bother me at all.

Anyway, I happened to have a few wrestlers who actually read my first newsletter...no big names as such, but a couple of lesser known wrestlers in the big organisations. I knew who they were, but refused to reveal their identities back then, and refuse to reveal them now. One of them let me know of an unknown fact from a major match a couple of years earlier (it was to do with an injury that happened during a part of the match). This fact had never been published anywhere else at the time. I mentioned that I wrote for another wrestling newsletter, that dealt with news and rumours, and asked if I could repeat the information. The wrestler said sure, but not to credit him. So I go ahead and publish the rumour.

Straight away I had another of the smaller wrestling newsletters say that it was nonsense. They said that it was impossible for the match to have continued, had the injury happened. They then started a smear campaign on the second newsletter, I was getting spam emails constantly, virus attempts originating from the competition, the competition even went so far as claiming that they had the full story of my wife of 10 years working as a hooker (don't ask, they were trying to find anything to smear me with). There was more sinister and disgusting stuff, but I won't write it here. Why it got so personal, I do not know, but the funny thing was that at the time, I was a 22 year old single university student, and if I had a wife of 10 years who was working as a hooker, I would have had to marry her when I was 12. But his smear campaign was working, our readership dropped by nearly 50%. It was time to get some revenge, although I had no idea just how far the revenge would end up reaching.

Firstly, I approached one of the bigger wrestling newsletters. They would often run ads at the bottom or rear of their newsletters, for "affiliated" newsletters. I organised a new affiliation with them, removing an affiliation they had with the competition. Small potatoes. I started promoting the second newsletter heavily on usenet, in some of the wrestling groups...which ultimately led to an increase in our email subscription base, greater than what it was before his smear campaign. This negated any effect that his smear campaign had...but I was hungry for more. I wanted to shove it where the sun don't shine, so I contacted those wrestlers who read my first newsletter. I explained the situation to them, and they were happy to help out. It took a couple of weeks, but eventually I was able to post a link to a 15 second video (hosted on a geocities webpage, as well as on a wrestling usenet group), where the wrestler at the centre of the injury rumour not only confirmed it, but gave a shoutout to my second newsletter. While it validated me and my information, it still didn't shut the other guy up.

Finally, a break. While the guy used an alias for his newsletter, he did actually mention his name a couple of times, and where in the US he attended university. Using this information, I was able to get a friend in the US to do some searching for me (attended that very same university), and discovered that the guy had actually completed a journalism degree several years earlier. Further research indicated that he was now working as a reporter for a regional newspaper in the US. His wrestling newsletter must just be a hobby. So I decided to send all of the information I had, his smear campaign etc, to the newspaper office. I don't know what, if anything, it would do...but it was worth a shot. About a month later, I got an email back from the newspaper, thanking me for the information. They discovered that he was using the newspaper's system to run the wrestling newsletter, which was against their policy, so they fired him. And because the newspaper was part of a chain of regional newspapers across the US, he was going to struggle to find another journalism job. The newsletter got shut down as well, because without the newspaper's system to run it, the guy had no way of continuing with the newsletter.

Side note...I ended up finishing with my newsletters not long after anyway. The first newsletter, as I was just a writer for it, I finished up with it when the owner of the newsletter decided to close it down (he didn't have the time to devote to it due to work commitments). The second one, I started off as just a writer/contributor, then took over their competitions, then eventually took over the whole newsletter (original owner didn't want to do it anymore). But in the end, I was finishing up at university, I had to move on with my career, so I closed it down.

(source) story by (/u/ZeroPenguinParty)

#prorevenge #by /u/ZeroPenguinParty #pro revenge #revenge stories #pro revenge stories #pro #revenge #last10

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hypnofur1 · 4 years

Text

Out For Delivery in Dallas

By Hypnofur

Mid February 2021

The irony was, none of the three beings in this tale had lived in Dallas for more than a month. Brittany and Timothy Cosgrove had just purchased their expensive condo on the North side of Dallas in January. Carlos Torres had been living in El Paso Texas for a very long time, and had just recently come to the Dallas area.

None of them, actually no one in all of Texas, expected the winter blast they got in mid February. The entire state was a disaster. Texans just didn’t know how to handle winter weather. Brittany and Timothy had just moved here from Indianapolis, so to them, this wasn’t even that bad a winter storm. However, agreeing to the purchase of matching his and her’s Corvettes was part of the Brittany’s compromise to get her husband to agree to move to Dallas. Brittany had just gotten a job with one of the DFW area’s top hospitals as their chief nutritionist. More importantly, she had struck a deal with the ABC affiliate to be their on air Nutrition expert. Brittany’s ultimate goal was to parlay her beauty, and nutrition expertise, into a gig on the national scene. Good Morning America or something.

Timothy knew this, and he loved Brittany very much. He would have moved to Dallas without the Corvette deal, as he knew it was a much bigger media market than Indy. However, he was an attorney, and it was in his DNA to negotiate. Thus, the two corvettes. He of course didn’t know it was going to snow here in Texas, thus, he didn’t really care much that his luxury condo was on one of the few hills in Dallas. Corvettes did not go up hill in the snow very well.

It was about 6:00 when Brittany forced Timothy to watch the #freebrittany documentary with her on FX. She was always fascinated with Brittany Spears, due to them having the same name and being about the same age. Timothy agreed to watch it, as he had been hogging the TV with sports for a few days now. By the time the show was over, it was like 7:30, and both were starving.

Each of the young urban professionals scanned their phones for some place that would deliver. But between the weather and power outages all around, there were no good restaurants that were options. The only place open was a McDonalds two blocks away.

“No way!” Brittany laughed. “Tim, I haven’t been to a McDonalds in like 11 years. I’m not starting tonight. I’ll starve first thanks.”

“OK, but I don’t want to. Come with me, you can at least get a salad. They have those.” Tim negotiated.

“Do you know what is in those???” Brittany said, then stopped herself. She had learned a while ago that people didn’t like when she annoyingly listed all of the bad ingredients in food. “Argh, ok. I’ll take a walk with you there.” She relented with a smile.

Once there, she remembered how much she loved Orange Soda. Tim smiled, but didn’t tease her about it. She appreciated that. She actually hated being teased. She snuggled up to him as they walked out of the McDonalds and headed back to their condo through the snowy mess.

Carlos was also very hungry on this winter night. He was miserable, he absolutely hated the cold. Born in Mexico, and then spending a tremendous amount of time in El Paso, he had never had to deal with cold and snow like this. He wished he was back in Mexico this evening. Carlos’ move to Dallas wasn’t based on career advancement though, it was based on Covid-19 vaccinations. More specifically, the blood of humans who had been vaccinated.

This past year had been the worst of Carlos’ 209 on this earth. The last 150 in El Paso had been wonderful. Feeding on the blood of Mexican immigrants who crossed the border with little identification. Knowing that the secretive nature of the illegal immigrant community would stop any real deep inquisitions into mysterious deaths. It was also nice and warm. It was the perfect place for the vampire.

However, Covid-19 changed all that. Feasting on the blood of a human with Covid made him incredibly sick, for weeks at a time. Over and over everytime he bit someone with the disease. He eventually learned how to smell Covid, but only in humans that had it bad. He, like everyone else, couldn’t detect it in the asymptomatic. Therefore, also like everyone else, he was very pleased when the vaccines started coming out. Much to his pleasure, he could smell the chemicals in vaccinated humans’ blood. He could detect who was vaccinated, and who was not.

That’s why he migrated up to Dallas. People in El Paso were getting the vaccine, but it was largely the elderly. Elderly blood didn’t taste nearly as good as the blood of those in their prime. The large medical community in Dallas meant lots of people in their 20’s and 30’s who had gotten the vaccine as part of the “first responder” roll out.

Brittany and Timothy had both received their shots (both doses) in Indianapolis. Brittany got it because she worked for a hospital, and she was able to get Timothy in because of her connections. As he approached the young urban couple, Carlos could smell the Moderna in them. He had quickly come to love that scent. His mood, which had been quite dour due to the snow and ice and cold, was quickly improving. He thought he’d have a very hard time finding food tonight, but here it was being delivered right to him.

Brittany and Timothy saw the short, somewhat rotund Mexican man approaching them as they were still laughing about McDonalds. Brittany had actually gotten a refill of Orange Soda before they left. They laughed as they joked about cameras seeing them and her soda getting reported to ABC. Carlos was really caught off guard by this weather, and was wearing what would be considered “summer clothes”.

“Look at this poor guy” Timothy said to his wife. While he was a very aggressive, very greedy corporate attorney, he was also very kind and generous. That is one of the reasons Brittany loved him with her whole heart and soul.

“Are you ok my friend?” Timothy asked the man as he and his wife slowly came to a stop on the icy hill to greet the stranger who was coming up it.

“Actually, I’m very hungry and I hate the cold.” the man answered back. Neither Brittany or Timothy immediately noticed that unlike them, when he spoke, there was no steam coming from his mouth on this frigid evening.

“Here, why don’t you take my scarf and some money. There is a McDonalds two blocks North. They are open, we just came from there.” Timothy said, handing the man both his expensive scarf, and $50. Brittany had never loved him more. As she watched with love and admiration as her tall, athletic, handsome husband committed a random act of kindness for a hungry, short, poor, sexy Mexican man.

Wait, why do I find that little guy sexy? Brittany suddenly asked herself. What was it about him? She studied him a little more, and as she did, she felt her pussy actually tingle a bit. God, he was hot. She had never been attracted to Hispanic guys before, especially little short fat ones. What the hell was going on? Why was he so fucking sexy? Brittany was suddenly very glad she had put a cute outfit on and decided to look good going to McDonalds.

“Do you live around here?” Carlos asked Timothy.

“Y-yes” Timothy answered, also oddly affected by the stranger as well.

“Do you own your home?” Carlos asked.

“yes” Timothy confirmed again.

Now Carlos’ mood really improved. Humans knew a lot about Vampire lore, but there were some things that they didn’t truly understand. This was very true surrounding some of the rules of being invited into a home. It could only be done by the true owner of the home. Therefore, renters could not invite a vampire in. Also, another little known fact was that a vampire could hypnotically compel his victim to invite him into their home, but only if the victim was not currently in the home. So, that meant while he couldn’t just knock on a door and get someone to invite him in, these two humans that were “out for delivery” fit the bill just perfect.

“Soy tu Maestra” Carlos said to Timothy, who understood perfectly as he stared back deep into the vampire’s eyes. “Invitame a tu casa”

“Please, won’t you come inside?” Timothy asked.

This was enough to wake Brittany from the light sexual trance she was in. She suddenly felt the coolness of her now damp panties. Wait, Tim shouldn’t invite a stranger into their home… “Tim, hold on…” she said.

“Mirame a los ojos” Carlos said to the Irish Scotish Italian American beauty who took French in high school and did not speak a lick of Spanish. Yet, her eyes immediately darted to his. She could almost feel her thoughts being unavoidably pushed aside. Even her concern over this odd situation was fading away, replaced by a growing sexual attraction, and a need to submit… to obey as he said to her, “Soy tu Maestra”

“Lead the way” Carlos directed Timothy. The husband took his wife’s hand and lead the stranger the rest of the way down the snow covered street back to their condo. Brittany continued to look back at Carlos, she couldn’t help it. He was so fascinating, so sexual. She tried to stop herself. She knew she was married, and she had truly never wanted anyone other than Timothy since they met a decade ago. But Carlos, the short, pudgy little Mexican man, was absolutely irresistible.

Carlos asked Timothy to formally invite him in once more as they reached the condo. He of course obliged. Carlos looked around as he stepped inside. First of all, it felt nice to be warm again. He was also glad he had found these two out and about in a neighborhood that actually had power. So much of Texas was in the dark. The condo was very tastefully decorated, and Carlos could quickly tell that the couple had money.

He politely asked Brittany to lock all the doors and close all the blinds, which she did immediately. She was so turned on by him that she didn’t even wonder why he was doing that. When the last of the drapes were pulled closed, he thanked her. They locked eyes. She felt her heart jump and her nipples harden. Her pussy was already soaked. She seductively walked over to him as he embraced her in a long sensual kiss. Carlos was all that mattered to her. Timothy had been forgotten.

However, Timothy had not forgotten her. The sight of his beautiful, beloved wife passionately making out with another man was enough to snap him out of his trance.

“Brittany, stop! Something is fucked up here!” Timothy shouted.

Carlos stopped kissing and glared over at Timothy. Brittany however was still kissing his face as he looked away, lovingly stroking his hair, completely in his thrall. Timothy felt a cold chill as Carlos cast his eyes upon him.

The vampire gently took Brittany’s arms and placed them down by her side as she continued to stare down Timothy, to stare down his prey. Timothy knew his life was in danger. Fight or flight kicked in, but with his wife also in trouble, he couldn’t escape. He had no choice but to fight. He lunged at the much smaller Carlos.

With supernatural quickness and strength, Carlos caught the pouncing Timothy by the neck with his hand. He then lifted him up with one arm, rising his shoes about two feet off the ground. Timothy’s eyes widened at shock as he realized the might of this beast. Carlos angrily threw Timothy over the granite kitchen island, causing him to smash the stools on the other side. With equal quickness, Carlos leapt over the island and feasted on Timothy’s neck. Quickly and efficiently, he drained the attorney of blood and life force. The vampire felt his own strength grow with each ounce.

Brittany’s kiss with Carlos had exchanged some bodily fluids between them. Even some of Carlos’ saliva in her mouth was enough to keep her much deeper under his spell than Timothy had been. However, this was her beloved husband on the ground, being attacked by this stranger. She slowly moved over to the counter and peered over to see what was happening.

“Timothy?” she said quietly, causing Carlos to stop feeding and turn his attention to her.

His mouth showing only trickles of blood (he had spent years learning how to eat cleanly), he rose from his victim. Brittany’s eyes were stuck on her lifeless husband on the kitchen floor. Carlos looked at her as he moved slowly to her. He heard her breathing get quicker as he got closer. She had a look on her, like she was asking him to fuck her right now but did not have the courage to say anything. He had seen that look many times. Slowly, Carlos circled her, getting behind her, grinding his hard cock in his pants along her ass. "He was your husband, but he wasn’t your Master, was he?"

"No." Brittany said softly and immediately Carlos dropped his pants. Brittany was in heat and followed, pulling her skirt down along her knees. Instantly, she was bent over the counter and getting rammed by his vampiric cock in her tight pussy.

"Harder! Fuck me Harder!" Brittany begged him, speaking in a way she never had. "Oh! My! God!" she repeated with every thrust he pushed. Her hands knocking over things on the counter as he thrusted.

"Yesss my slave!" Carlos said, fucking her with all his might, grunting like a wild animal,. Brittany wrapped her arms around his waist encouraging him go even harder.

Carlos turned the married nutritionist around and she quickly stepped out her skirt. He picked her up like she was a feather, Brittany let out a loud yelp, and sat her on his rigid cock as he really started fucking her. Brittany was bouncing on his cock up and down, her shirt pulled up to reveal her tits. Their chests sliding along each other as she rose and fell on his cock.

Brittany looked him dead in the eyes and move in for a passionate sloppy kiss, not noticing or caring about the bits of Timothy’s blood. Carlos kept his fast fucking motion as he returned her kiss. They tongues were dancing and exploring each other's mouths.

Brittany pulled away and kept screaming, "Yassss!! Give it to me! FUCK ME MASTER!"

Carlos pulled her into his cock as he thrusted in, as he lets out some powerful grunts, BAM! Brittany let out whimper and moan as she bounced off his hips, before she could escape the full length of his cock, Carlos pulled her back in again and with even more force. BAM! BAM! BAM

Brittany was beyond her limits, she was dead weight barely able to keep herself on him as she flopped around, obsessively thanking and begging creature who had just killed her husband.

Finally Carlos lifted her off his cock and set her down on her knees. Then aggressively grabbed her head and plunged his cock into her mouth. Brittany had never sucked a cock before, but she quickly got up to speed as she was getting used to her new Master’s cock. It began to slide inside her mouth easily as she began gulping it in with each thrust. Saliva was running down chin and onto her chest.

"Yes my pet!" Carlos screamed, as pulled his glistening cock out her mouth. He held his cock by the base slapping Brittany side to side until...

"Uhhhhnnnggg!" Carlos's wailed, as he shot several thick stream of creamy white cum onto Brittany's face.

Carlos brought Brittany's face back in and immediately, she knew what to do. Her succulent lips instantly wrapped around his cock’s head and began sucking the remaining juices out and around his cock. Carlos knew full well that his essence was going to give him full and utter control of this beautiful woman.

When she was finally finished, he looked down at her. “What do you do for work?” he asked. He noticed his English was much better after consuming Timothy’s blood. Little things like that always intrigued him, even after 150 or more years of being a vampire.

“I’m a nutritionist” she answered him as she lovingly caressed his leg, still on her knees.

Carlos laughed, as he briefly wondered what the nutritional value of a vampire’s cum was. “Where do you work?”

“Baylor Specialty Hospital, here in North Dallas” she answered. Her heart jumped as her Master nodded approvingly.

“Can you get me to the coroner?” he asked, as he began the plan to dispose of Timothy without alerting the authorities. The coroner would become his human slave, just as Brittany would. There was some work ahead of him, but for what began as a cold hungry night, this unexpected delivery had drastically improved Carlos’ outlook here in North Dallas.

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Story at-a-glance

There are 10 steps that every tyrannical government has followed. We are now at step 10. Once the 10th step locks into place, there will be no going back

The 10 steps toward tyranny start with the invocation of a terrifying internal and/or external threat. From 2001 onward, that threat was terrorism, which was used as the justification for stripping us of our liberties

With the declaration of COVID-19 as a global pandemic, we entered step 10, where emergency powers and laws are used to strip remaining freedoms from the people, censorship is enacted and certain kinds of speech is criminalized

We must get involved and fight to enact state legislation that protects against continued erosion of freedom and reestablishes rights and liberties

The Daily Clout platform was created for this purpose. It allows citizens to lobby already drafted, turnkey bills to their legislators

This is the article in full:

Naomi Wolf, a former adviser to the Clinton administration, is a prolific author and Yale University graduate. She also received a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship that allowed her to complete her Ph.D. in English and literature at Oxford University in 2015. Eight years before that, she wrote a book called “The End of America,” which is the topic of this interview. “The End of America” was published in 2007. At the end of this article, you will find a playlist of three videos in which she reads select chapters of the book. You can also download the first and last chapters for free on the publisher’s website, chelseagreen.com.1A Prescient Warning Already in 2007, Wolf warned us of where we were headed. In her book, she points out that would-be tyrants are found on both sides of the political spectrum. We must not get locked into generalizations about political affiliations, because they simply do not give us a truthful picture of who the enemy is. While Wolf and I could be said to be on opposite sides of the political spectrum, Wolf being a long-time progressive while many would view me as a conservative, our views are in perfect alignment when it comes to the issues of protecting American freedom and liberty.We are [now] at Step 10. I've been trying to warn people, tirelessly, as much as I can, that we are at Step 10 and that once Step 10 locks in, there is no going back. ~ Naomi WolfIn “The End of America,” Wolf lays out the 10 steps toward tyranny. These steps have been followed by virtually all would-be tyrants, be they on the political left or right. They were followed in Italy in the '20s, Germany in '30s, East Germany in the '50s, Chile in the '70s and China in the '80s. “They all took the same 10 steps, and they always work,” Wolf says. “I warned people that when you start to see these 10 steps, you have to take action, because there is no way to recover once things go too far without a bloody revolution or a civil war. We are [now] at Step 10. People have said, since I wrote that book in 2007, ‘Tell us when we're at Step 10.’ I've always said, ‘Things are bad, they're getting worse, but there's still hope.’ We're literally at Step 10 now. I've been trying to warn people, tirelessly, as much as I can, that we are at Step 10 and that once Step 10 locks in, there is no going back.”We’re in the Final Step of the Implementation of Tyranny.The 10 steps toward tyranny start with the invocation of a terrifying internal and/or external threat. It may be a real threat or an imagined one, but in all cases, it’s a hyped-up threat. From 2001 onward, that threat was terrorism, which was used as the justification for stripping us of our liberties. Ultimately, that wasn’t effective enough.“There was still freedom in the world. People were not saying, ‘ISIS exists; therefore, I'm going to give up my First Amendment liberties, my Fourth Amendment liberties, my Second Amendment liberties and so on.’ Sadly, this medical crisis — which is now not a pandemic in many states and countries, it's an endemic; it doesn't meet the formal definition of a pandemic — was the perfect excuse for leaders to usher in Step 10,” Wolf says. The last and final step in the implementation of tyranny, Step 10, involves the creation of a surveillance state where citizens are spied upon, and critique of the government is reclassified as dissent and subversive activity. Step 10 The surveillance state is now being rolled out in the form of vaccine passports, while certain kinds of speech are said to be dangerous and freedom of speech is being criminalized. Needless to say, the mainstream press is an important part of this scheme. “The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation have essentially bought up the western press and coerce them, bribe them, into following the party line, brought up by the CDC and so on,” Wolf says.“Toward the end of the steps, which is Step 10, is emergency law, [which is a] subversion of the rule of law, also called martial law. We're here. I'm [in] New York State. We're under emergency law. Every 30 days, I get an email saying that tyrannical Governor Cuomo has extended emergency powers, even though in Columbia County where I live, there are only eight deaths a month with COVID, average age 85, which is older than the average American life span. It's not a pandemic where I live, but I'm living under emergency law, which means the legislature has no power. The governor can do whatever he wants. It’s the same in Massachusetts, same in California — 49 states, all states except Alaska, are technically under emergency law. This is terrifying. You get what you're seeing, which is governors deciding, or the federal government deciding, that you can't assemble, you can't worship, you have no medical choice, the coercion of vaccine passports, your child can't go to school, your young adult can't get a college education if they don't agree to an experimental vaccination. You get suspension of the right to property. You can't run your business — 110,000 restaurants have closed. You get a suspension of freedoms of speech. People are being deplatformed left and right and there are movements in Congress to criminalize what had been First Amendment protected speech. You get the invocation of martial powers and there's no end to it. Literally, with Massachusetts emergency law, I have no rights. I have no ability to lobby the governor. With New York’s emergency law, I have no representative with the power to end emergency measures. The governor has to end emergency measures, [and] he's the one who benefits from them. It's catastrophic. We're seeing a complete takeover of American rights, freedoms and bodies by Big Tech, which is up double digits to triple-digit billions since the pandemic began. China has moved in to … establish its role as the global superpower under the guise of this pandemic, buying up community groups, elected officials and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which are flooding K through 12 education … community groups [and] universities with money to engage in COVID education — which means a strict party line [narrative] that is aimed at destroying what's human about us and what's free. That's it in a nutshell. It's unbelievably terrifying.”What the COVID-19 Passports Are Really AboutWolf was recently interviewed by Fox News’ Steve Hilton (above), in which she warned that mandatory COVID-19 passports will spell the “end of human liberty in the West”:2,3 In essence, they’re a precursor to the social credit system that has already been implemented in China. The vaccine passes have already been rolled out in New York, where Wolf lives. Surveillance is nothing new, of course. We’ve been digitally surveilled for years, through social media platforms, Google and all manner of “smart” technology. Since the early 2000s, Google and Facebook in particular have been data mining online users. These data, then, have been applied to deep learning computers, giving them unprecedented ability to predict the type of messaging triggers that will create the maximum amount of fear — and thus compliance. There’s also every reason to assume that this information has also been shared with people like Bill Gates, who largely controls the World Health Organization. If it wasn’t for the WHO, we would not be in this situation, because it was the central organization with the authority to declare a global pandemic, and keep it in place long past its natural expiration date. They actually changed the definition of “pandemic,” removing the requirement of mass casualties, and if it wasn’t for that, COVID-19 simply would not qualify as a pandemic. The Pandemic Is Hypothetical at BestWolf points out that COVID-19 dashboards, such as Johns Hopkins’ COVID-19 tracking project that mainstream media keep citing, cannot tell us anything about who’s actually getting infected, or who’s dying. We don’t even know if they are showing real or made up data.Wolf, being the CEO of a tech company, builds digital dashboards based on government data, so she knows what she’s talking about. You have to have the raw datasets. Since none of the dashboards provide the raw data, nothing can be verified. “Basically, they can dial up cases, which are positive PCR tests, or dial them down,” she says. So, the entire pandemic narrative is unverified.We do know, however, that the CDC has shifted influenza and pneumonia deaths to COVID-19 deaths, and tens of thousands of Americans die from these conditions every year. When lawmakers in Minnesota audited death records, for example, they found a 40% over-attribution of deaths to COVID-19. Then there’s the PCR test scandal. Not only have laboratories everywhere been using excessively high amplification cycles resulting in staggeringly high false positive rates, but they also do not account for duplicate tests. If you get a positive test, and test once a week until you test negative, each positive test result you obtain is counted as a separate “case.”“We literally can't know if there's been a pandemic, there's so much faulty attribution, inflation of numbers, and so on,” Wolf says. “Those numbers, I can't stress enough, have never been audited ... We have to do a freedom of information request in Britain to take a look at the raw data sets that are being fed into the Office for National Statistics, COVID dashboard. We looked at where the data were flowing from for the Johns Hopkins dashboard, which again, was used by every major university, every major news outlet. One of the data providers was a hedge fund! … I know something else about APIs. It is virtually impossible to, in real time, get hundreds of thousands of reports from hundreds of thousands of doctors, hospitals, CVS and Rite Aid, feeding into a live digital dashboard. I keep asking the developers to show me, ‘How did you do this? It's virtually impossible.’ There's no answer, there's crickets. Literally, we don't know if the dashboards are just dialing up and dialing down infection rates. Everyone's taking for granted that these must be real numbers, but there's no evidence that they are real numbers. I'm willing to stand corrected if there's a FOIA and we see the raw data sets. But right now, it is a hypothetical pandemic.”Collusion by Tech CompaniesTech companies have also engaged in what Wolf likens to criminal collusion. She explains:“In March of last year, for the COVID-19 response project, Zoom, NASDAQ, Nintendo, Microsoft, Amazon — all the people who benefited from the lockdown — coordinated so that wherever you go on the internet, across platform to platform, you see these alerts about COVID-19, warnings about COVID, instructions about COVID, and of course, censorship … if you run afoul of the narrative about COVID. I run a tech company. The question, when you run a tech company, is how do you get people to not do things in the real world, and do things on your platform? That's the business model. If people are gathering in churches, gathering in real school rooms, if they're going for walks together, go on picnics, having dinner parties, going to clubs, that's an opportunity lost to Microsoft and Google and so on. But if they can drive you indoors, terrify you from being around other people, or make it unlawful to be around other people through these emergency powers that restrict assembly [then they can profit] … Digital learning curriculum were turnkey, ready to go. Suddenly, it was like, ‘Oh, kids have to be at home and do distance learning.’ That's a $300 million industry for just one company that creates digital curriculums. They're not going to let go of that. I think we are in a small loop of six tech companies [and] the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, having bought legislators in China, who's up 32% while the economies of the West have crashed, and that's the fight that we have to fight.”The Legalization of Tyranny. Few people realize that dictators such as Mussolini and Hitler came to power in legal working democracies. They became subverted and rules of law were rewritten in such a way as to allow these leaders to legally take over. That's one of the primary dangers we now face in the U.S., because at the end of step 10, the leader obtains the legal authority to become a tyrant.“This is especially true of the National Socialists,” Wolf says. “They kept passing a set of laws called the Enabling Acts that are very much like the laws that are being passed now. They criminalized certain speech, created a surveillance apparatus for citizens … and they did this lawfully. They were elected, and they passed restrictive law after restrictive law. Then, once democracy was fragile enough, it really only took six months for thugs to beat up opposition leaders, union leaders, the outspoken and clergy. After that, everyone was too scared to speak. We're seeing the same thing happen now, but faster. It's very scary that China has created a white paper — the World Economic Forum has it on its website — that maps how biofascism, as I call it — vaccinations, the managing of people's bodies, biometrics and health — is being launched as a way to control civic engagement, governance, private life, assembly and every other aspect of human life, to bring about super-fast totalitarianism. That's why focusing on legislation is something I've been doing with my company DailyClout, very seriously, because if we don't pass laws immediately to make unlawful some of the things we're seeing, there will be no more hope for us.”Using the Legal System to Save the Law. One strategy of totalitarianism that must be fought through legislation is the requirement of vaccine passports. “Once these are launched … people like you and I, Dr. Mercola, will be switched off of society. ‘Oops, my vaccine passport is positive. I guess I can't go food shopping for my family.’ ‘I said something critical of biofascism on Dr. Mercola's show, so now my child can't get into school.’ Just as in Israel, people who are critics are being surveilled [and] marginalized from society. It has turned into a two-tier society. If you choose not to get vaccinated, then you're really in a marginalized minority in an apartheid state. The more we know about these vaccines, the scarier it is to have coercion that is social. It's also illegal. In America, we have the Americans with Disabilities Act. It means it's illegal to even ask me anything about my medical status. You can't ask me if I'm pregnant. You can't ask me if I'm disabled. You can't ask me if I have diabetes or HIV. You cannot ask me anything. By definition, these intrusive measures are unlawful. We have to use the law to save the law, basically. In Michigan, there's an edict from the governor that 2- to 4-year-old children have to be masked. This is child abuse. Science doesn't support it. Unlawful, tyrannical laws are being passed across the country under the guise of emergency measures, and stupid people going along with it, like in Congress, I'm embarrassed to say, because I voted for Biden. We have to fight before we are living in fascist regime where every move is tracked and we're marginalized from society.”The Courts Are Our Last Hope, And They’re Now Under AttackOne area in which “The End of America” excels is helping you understand is that the United States was founded by people who had repressive societies. Their goal was to prevent such a repressive society from emerging again. The founders had to personally reckon with criminalized speech, arbitrary arrest, state sanctioned torture and even murder.So, at great personal sacrifice, they signed the Constitution. Had they lost the Revolutionary War, they would all have been executed, so the stakes could not have been higher. As a result, our founding fathers constructed a carefully balanced system to make sure no tyrant could ever come to power. We’re now facing a scenario that could obliterate that delicate balance, namely the Biden administration’s call to “pack the court,” i.e., add, in this case four, additional Justices to the Supreme Court. We’re now facing a shift in our legal structure that will allow for the legalization of tyrannical reign and “legally” override the carefully constructed governmental balance between the legislative, executive and judicial branched that has previously served to prevent tyranny in the U.S.This three-tier branch, constructed to safeguard our freedoms, is under direct attack, and this is NOT a partisan issue. Not by a longshot, and everyone needs to wake up to this fact. It’s an issue of freedom versus tyranny.“Absolutely,” Wolf says. “Sadly, this is clear. That's why I'm saying progressives have to wake up … I worry very much about the role of China in this, because I think we've seen that some people connected to the Democratic Party have close ties with members of the Chinese Communist Party. That is just established fact. I'm not saying that the tyrants are on the left. In Britain, it's Tories cracking down on liberty, holding the country under house arrest. In Australia it's conservatives, in Canada it's Trudeau, a liberal. This isn't partisan. But in America, we do have to face the fact that this administration is drunk on power and has some bad actors aligned with it, including Silicon Valley. They are crushing conservative voices, kicking them off of public platforms in addition to voices critical of the COVID narrative. They're also moving at warp speed to use their own phrasing about something else to lock in power in a way that is against everything our founders set in place — the most beautiful, delicate system of checks and balances any human beings have ever created; an ideal of people all over the world who want freedom and balanced accountable government. Yeah, packing the Supreme Court is a horrific tampering with some of the last checks and balances that we have … I can't believe I keep saying thank God for the conservatives on the bench. But these days, I have to say it, and I'm ashamed. But thank God, because they were the ones who in California said ‘No, you cannot keep people from assembling to worship. That is a violation of the Constitution.’ They're our last hope. The courts are our last hope. It is catastrophic, and I see other scary movements against accountable democracy that are being put forward by this administration. Among them, President Biden is not saying to the blue states: ‘You have to give up your emergency powers. You have to open up. You can't control people in their homes, you can't force people to have vaccinations and you can't keep people from assembling and worshipping.’ These are all violations of their constitutional liberties. He's not saying that. That's a complete failure of leadership, if not worse. My people have to rise up and face it. Conservatives have to face cleaning up their own houses … What's at stake is everything, and we all have to unite across party lines and save our Constitution and make these people accountable, whatever their party [affiliation].”Urgent Call to Action The good news is, the would-be tyrants have not won yet. That said, we have no time to spare. We have no time to remain idle, hoping it will all just go back to normal on its own. The answer is peaceful mass civil disobedience.“There's hope in mass peaceful civil disobedience … when things are really dire,” Wolf says. “My favorite story is about the singing revolution of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, in which they were under the grip of the Soviet Union, a massive tyrannical monolith. They all decided to just peacefully gather on a highway that extended the length of their three countries and sing. They kept peacefully disrupting business as usual in their cities, making it impossible for work to continue, for traffic to go on. They sat down, they linked arms and they sang. Over time, they just wore down the Soviet Union. That's a beautiful model. Same thing with Dr. Martin Luther King. His was a peaceful revolution of civil disobedience.”This strategy is time-consuming, however, so be prepared to stand your ground for as long as it takes. It can take months, years even, when you have nothing else in your arsenal. Peaceful disobedience is the primary strategy in armed countries as well. As mentioned, we must also rally behind legislation that prevents the alteration of laws that safeguard our freedoms.Join the Five Freedoms Campaign!To that end, Wolf has started the Five Freedoms Campaign, which you can find on her Daily Clout website. The campaign focuses on creating legislation to preserve key freedoms and prevent emergency laws from infringing on our freedom to assembly, worship, protest and engage in business. Legislation is also being crafted to open schools, remove mask mandates and eliminate requirements for vaccine passports.“We've had overwhelmingly high levels of support,” Wolf says. “I hope your followers will also join us. We hired a really distinguished lawyer who is drafting model legislation. She has finished the new vaccine passport bill and we've gotten state legislators in Maine, New Hampshire and Michigan to sponsor to pass that legislation. I'm sending out the request for 47 other state legislatures to adopt this model legislation. Contact me, I'll come out, I'll speak to your legislature. We'll do a rally, we'll do a press conference, as we're doing in Maine on April 27. We've got to pass these bills. Then she's going to work on an omnibus bill to make all five freedoms inviolable so that no one can pass mask mandates as they did in Michigan today. No one can force vaccine passports as they're doing in New York, so that we can get our freedoms back.”Wolf and her team are making this interactive process as easy as possible by posting good model bills on dailyclout.io, and proactively drafting much-needed bills. Many state legislators are not lawyers, and they don't have lawyers at their beck and call. Citizens can now send these model bills to their legislators, knowing that they’ve undergone legal review and are ready to be passed. You can also go even further than that:“You can tell us the bill you want. We can upload a campaign for that bill. We can hire our lawyer to draft a model bill and then you can pass it. What we've been doing is gathering names and zip codes, so that we can add real voters to this piece of model legislation in real states and send it to real state legislators and say, ‘Look, the supporters are all there. All you have to do is pass this.’ It's a fantastic intervention in the political process, restoring real democracy. It's why we founded Daily Clout, but it's beautiful to see hundreds and hundreds of people from all walks of life rushing to give us support and resources, to become members and give us donations, which we appreciate, so that we can keep our lawyer busy creating these draft bills. It's not just for this issue. Once we get our rights and freedoms back, whatever [citizens] want, we can draft a bill for you, and you can [call on your legislators to] pass it.”Limiting Emergency PowersAnother facet that needs to be addressed is governors’ emergency powers. Some states have been locked down under emergency power for more than a year, which is insane, considering we’re not in an emergency and haven’t been for many months. These emergency powers need to be limited in some way, as they are at the heart of all this unlawful behavior. As explained by Wolf: “Emergency law basically suspends the Constitution of the United States. As I've said elsewhere, the Constitution doesn't say all this can be suspended if there's disease. We've been through typhus, cholera, smallpox, HIV, Spanish flu, polio, tuberculosis — disease after disease, without ever having emergency law extended without review month after month. We've had world wars fought without emergency laws. We were attacked on our soil without emergency law being declared in New York state after 9/11. There's no justification for it. It's against everything we believe in. It's unconstitutional.” So, one of the five freedoms Wolf’s campaign focuses on is the restriction of emergency laws. New Hampshire has become the first state to pass a bill that accomplishes this. It reforms emergency law such that the Governor’s emergency powers cannot be indefinitely extended without review by the legislature. They also passed a bill that guarantees freedom of worship, and another bill that ensures emergency law cannot be invoked indefinitely in any future crisis.4“We've now passed along our model ‘No vaccine passport’ bill to the New Hampshire legislators,” Wolf says. “If they can do it in New Hampshire, with our help, with your help, they can do it across the country. But we need to get that model legislation out to every legislature and mobilize that grassroots movement to pass the end of emergency law. I mean, look what's happening in New York State. It's insane. Fourteen state legislators are trying to get Governor Cuomo to end emergency law. But as our laws are written, Governor Cuomo has to be the one to end his own emergency law. There're a huge amount of lobbying that has to happen for these legislators to understand that there are eyes on them, that they're accountable. I'm going to be reporting and … hopefully millions of people will be following and helping to pass these laws to get back our rights.”Daily Clout Empowers Citizens to Lobby for Freedom. To be clear, the Daily Clout is not a lobbying group. YOU are the ones lobbying your legislators. Daily Clout simply provides the needed assistance so that you can do that easily and effectively. “It's such a beautiful effort, because you'd have to come out and say, ‘The people of New Hampshire have no right to pass their own legislation’ in order to oppose an effort like this,” Wolf says. “We're not a special interest. It's just the people. It's the people of New Hampshire, people of Maine, passing their own legislation. I do hear, consistently, that Democrats won't help, that in many states with their democratic majorities, it's going to be difficult if Democrats don't reach across the aisle and add their names. I'm sending out the call to Democrats to support this legislation. I'm going to warn everyone, speaking as a former political consultant, that the party that embraces the restoration of freedom is going to be the party that wins in 2022 and 2024. There's no question about that. This is going to be a winning issue. People know something is terribly wrong, but they don't know what to do. This is a completely unprecedented assault on liberty. With my many years in national politics, I know what to do. This is why we developed Daily Clout. If you show up with a turnkey piece of legislation and some turnkey supporters, that's a very quick fix for a really catastrophic crisis that has a legislative solution. As long as there's still legislatures, we can pass good legislation at the state level. At the federal level, it's going to be harder, because there isn't any balance right now. I'm very inspired there's so many people serving at the state legislature level who are really decent citizens, who are not partisan hacks. People who really ran to help their neighbors and help their communities and who are not wholly owned by China, Big Tech or whatever, and who want to do the right thing. I could be wrong, but in two weeks [since we launched the Daily Clout site] we've already been invited to address state legislators and draft legislation for three, and that's without any marketing budget or anything but platforms like this, where I say it's available. We started Daily Clout because citizens didn't have a platform to be effective at lobbying for their own issues. This is a turnkey platform that does that for them. I designed it that way. I designed it, as a former political consultant, knowing that the way things are set up, ordinary citizens don't have a seat at the table. There is no easy way to engage in civic action.

This makes it easy, makes it digital and people are using it.”How to Use the Daily Clout Site.So, how do you get involved? First, go to dailyclout.io and sign up to become a paying member or free subscriber. You will then receive an email explaining how to use the Five Freedoms Campaign.

Presently, there is a model “no vaccination passports” bill that you can send to your state legislator.There’s also a feature called BillCam, where you can see who your state legislator is by entering your zip code. Daily Clout will also email you links and explain how to find your state legislator. If you provide your name and zip code, which will remain confidential, your state legislator’s contact information will be included in the email.“We're creating a widget right now to attach your name and zip code to the model bills so it goes right to your state legislator, showing that the bill already has support,” Wolf explains. “But in the meantime, you can look up any bill on BillCam. Those are bills that have already been introduced or passed. There are ‘No vaccine passport’ bills, for instance. We're showcasing them on BillCam. It's already set up, so you can just tweet it to the sponsor, tweet it to representative. You can Facebook it to your community. It already goes through social media and you can show support by ‘voting on it’ in the widget on BillCam as you share legislation with your community.”Once you’re a subscriber or member, you’ll get regular updates about happenings around the U.S. and community events. They’re also installing a widget that will allow you to meet with like-minded people in your state who want this legislation passed. Lastly, you can write to Daily Clout and ask them to draft a bill. A lawyer will then be assigned to draft it for you.“Right now, we're focused on the Five Freedoms Campaign, but there is that functionality. You can write a blog and explain the bill that you want. You can send us a video and explain what your issue is, and all of this goes to shining a light on the legislators. They're not used to having a light shone on them. That really does drive outcomes. Those are the steps that you can take,” Wolf says. We’ve already seen how effective this strategy can be, with New Hampshire passing three bills to protect citizens’ freedoms. “I never want to take credit away from legislators working hard to pass bills, but I know that we helped,” Wolf says. “I know that our lawyer has been in close touch with some of those state legislators in New Hampshire and provided language that we pay for, so that those legislators would have a turnkey bill to act on.”Hundreds of people also wrote to New Hampshire’s Governor Christopher Sununu, urging him to lift the mask mandate, which he recently did. Knowing that the Daily Clout would report on the outcome of that campaign, he not only felt the political pressure, but he also knew he had support from his constituents. So, please, use this unprecedented opportunity to get involved, in any capacity that you can. Your freedom, and that of future generations, hinge on our getting involved and fighting for it. Last but not least, to understand where we are and how we got here, I strongly recommend reading “The End of America.” In the video below, Wolf reads select chapters from the book. You can also download the first and last chapters for free on the publisher’s website, chelseagreen.com.5

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thepapercutpost · 3 years

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Women’s Gymnastics Reminds Me of Marvel's Black Widow. That's Not Okay.

July 2021 saw both the long-awaited release of Black Widow and the return of these young women to the Olympics.

“Scarlett Johansson by Gage Skidmore 2 (cropped)“ by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 (left). "Nadia Comaneci #1" by eye2eye is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0 (right).

Last summer, the worldwide COVID-19 pandemic seemed to put everything on hold. With movie theaters shut down, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, in the midst of its longest pause in between theatrical releases, experienced the first of three eventual delays to the release of the film Black Widow, which was originally scheduled for May 2020.

Delays also found one of the biggest sporting events in the world. The 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games had to be postponed. Thousands of athletes who had spent their lives preparing to represent their countries at the Games were forced to put their plans on hold. Among them were several Team USA hopefuls for women’s gymnastics.

July 2021 saw both the long-awaited release of Black Widow and the return of these young women to the Olympics.

In 2016, the Larry Nassar scandal, in which Nassar, a doctor affiliated with USA Gymnastics, was accused and convicted of sexually abusing over 250 women and girls, pulled the curtain back on the realities of elite gymnastics. Soon after Nassar’s abuse came to light, it was revealed that USAG had covered up complaints of sex abuse from hundreds of gymnasts against coaches, gym owners, and staff.

When asked how they thought this behavior was allowed to occur for so long, gymnasts cited the culture of fear and toxicity that permeated the gymnastics community.

From one angle, Nassar was a friendly and trustworthy face in a sea of strict training and harsh discipline. When Béla and Márta Károlyi, husband and wife coaches who defected to the U.S. from Romania in 1981, took over USA Gymnastics, they brought with them a controlling and abusive method of training. In Athlete A, a Netflix documentary centered on the sex abuse scandal, Olympic gymnast Jamie Dantzscher recalls Nassar being “the only nice adult” and that he gave the girls food and candy in secret. Naturally, the gymnasts trusted him and his methods.

And from another angle, the athletes had been conditioned from a young age, in most cases, to doubt their own instincts about their bodies.

You think you’re hungry, you think your ankle hurts, you think that you’re working really hard. But you’re told and you’re screamed at that you’re lazy and you’re fat and there’s nothing wrong with your ankle. So, when a man puts his un-gloved hand into your vagina without asking you, I can only imagine that what you feel is, ‘He’s this great doctor, and I’m lucky to be here, so I’m not going to say anything.’

—Jennifer Sey, USA Gymnastics National Champion, 1986 (Athlete A)

Letting alone the ramifications of coming forward as a gymnast against a well-respected member of the community such as Nassar, many of his victims didn’t speak out because, as a result of being raised in an already abusive system, they were unable to identify his actions as abuse.

In a similar sense, Black Widow depicts a group of women and girls who have undergone rigorous training and have been brainwashed into carrying out the KGB’s missions. The fictional Red Room provides a mirror to the very real world of competitive Gymnastics.

Even before the recent film, Marvel fans were familiar with the Red Room as the program that trained Natasha Romanoff (Scarlett Johansson) and other Russian girls as Black Widows, an elite class of spies and assassins. In Avengers: Age of Ultron, we see a flashback of Natasha’s time as a trainee. One memory is of an intensive ballet lesson, and the scene shows her looking on with her instructor at the studio of young women.

“You’ll break them,” Natasha says to the teacher.

“Only the breakable ones,” is her response.

Other allusions are made to the cruelty of the Widow program. When telling Natasha about the reincarnation of the Red Room, Yelena, her sister (Florence Pugh), says that only about one in twenty girls who Dreykov takes survives the initial stages. To Alexei, the girls’ father (David Harbour), Yelena elaborates on the “involuntary hysterectomy” given to them by the Red Room, a process which removes a woman’s reproductive organs and, as Natasha had mentioned in Age of Ultron, makes her unable to have children.

The brutal training process and forced assault upon women’s bodies, which they were made to believe was normal, should sound familiar.

Johansson said in an interview that the story for Black Widow began to take shape in 2017, when the #MeToo movement was rising to prominence, and is essentially a story about women supporting other women. She wasn’t shy to say the film was inspired by that moment in history, a movement that provided support to and was benefited by the USA Gymnastics scandal.

For Red Room graduates, training is followed by executing missions. The character of Dreykov (Ray Winstone) provides a face to the dark and secretive organization who gives the Widows orders. Although they are highly trained and skilled, they still face danger during these operations.

The same is true of gymnasts at their competitions. Gymnastics is one of the most dangerous sports, especially for girls and young women. Gymnasts experience both acute injuries, which occur after a single landing or other impact, and chronic injuries, which develops over time, usually during the course of frequent practice. They are often expected to compete with their injuries. In the 1996 Olympics, Kerri Strug, part of the American team known as the Magnificent Seven, won the gold for her team in the all-around by landing the final vault on one foot, as she had severely injured the other during her first attempt. The Peacock docuseries Golden: The Journey of USA's Elite Gymnasts reveals that gymnasts continue to compete with injuries today. Team USA’s 2021 all-around women’s gold medalist Suni Lee began the competition season with a broken foot while MyKayla Skinner, silver medalist on vault, began the season still fighting lingering COVID symptoms months after contracting the virus.

Injuries are one of several reasons elite gymnasts today are younger than they were 50 years ago. When Nadia Comaneci from Romania became the first gymnast to earn a perfect score at the Olympics in 1976, she was fourteen years old. From that point on, the standard for Olympic gymnasts became younger and younger. One advantage to training a younger gymnast is that the body is more resilient, and the part of the brain that recognizes the danger in the more difficult moves is not yet fully developed, which results in less of the hesitation that causes some injuries.

But with more malleability comes more potential for abuse. The younger a girl begins to learn gymnastics, the more susceptible she is to mental health issues such as anxiety and eating disorders, both common in athletes across the board, as we are learning during these 2021 Games. There is more opportunity to shape her thinking, and if she is told by coaches that she is not injured or should perform anyway when she is in severe pain, she will be less inclined to get help when something is severely wrong. Dominique Moceanu, Kerri Strug’s teammate in the 1996 Olympics, told BBC in a recent interview regarding being forced to compete with injuries, “I didn't even care about my well-being, to be honest, because no one cared about it ever.”

In Black Widow, Yelena is taken to the Red Room at only six years old, and it is later revealed that Natasha was identified and taken from her birth parents by a KGB program that measured the genetic potential in infants. Like the Károlyis, the Red Room discovered that getting to the girls at an early age made it easier to exploit and mistreat them without raising questions.

In 2016, when the film is set, Natasha and Yelena kill Dreykov and bring an end to the Black Widow program. Although the real-world events of 2016 in USA Gymnastics, and even the conviction of Larry Nassar, didn’t end with the toxic culture of U.S. gymnastics falling from the sky in flames, things are getting better. The 2021 Olympics are coming to a conclusion in Tokyo today, but if we are to learn and grow from recent horrifying history, we must not forget what these Games and decades of competitive gymnastics have taught us.

Among all the abominable similarities elite gymnastics and the Red Room share, there is one beautiful thing they have in common: sisterhood.

Natasha and Yelena set out to protect the young women and girls who have been captured and free them of Dreykov's mind control, having experienced that trauma themselves. In doing so, they revisit and repair their own relationship as sisters.

By all accounts, gymnasts feel a similar kinship with their peers. They bond over their shared experience: the stress of competing, the aches of injuries, long days and nights spent practicing their sport. They support each other, cheering each other on and celebrating each other's accomplishments. The women who came forward about their abuse did so not for themselves but for the sake of other gymnasts. The vulnerablities women face in this world mean that we are also tasked with the responsibility and the privilege of protecting each other.

#opinion #sports #entertainment

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docsnotes · 3 years

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Views on Cancel Culture, Woke-ness, Political Correctness & Other Related Issues From The Perspective of an Irrelevant Nobody: Why People Think it Helps & Why it Does Not. By Bradley “Holliday” Rozier I had hoped this first post would be a lot more light-hearted, but after an article and the related tweets I read yesterday, I had to write and share this. So, it is roughly November 2017, I decided to join Greenpeace because I felt it would be a great way to put my mind and anxiety to good use. Through the connections I made, I ended up with some really good friends and some people who I thought would be a positive asset to my growth and recovery, but ended up not being so. However, we will get to THAT part later. First I want to say, generally speaking, I am against most everything the “Woke” movement is against, I simply feel that, tactically speaking, it could and should be handled differently.I was born September 9, 1984 at 10 something PM at what was then “University of Florida Medical Center”, but is now called “UF Health Shands” (Named so after William Augustine Shands, fun fact, W. Shands was not a Doctor, but a politician) on 8th street in Jacksonville, Florida. I grew up in culturally and ethnically diverse neighborhood on the northside of town called “Highlands” (named so because it is at a slightly higher elevation than most of the rest of the city) as well as various other places (my biological mother moved, A LOT) so, from an early age, I was presented a multitude of other cultures and backgrounds to embrace and learn from. The most important factor in this point is my Grandmother, Geraldine Rozier, and my Aunt, Donna Ogle. Both of whom drilled two very important lessons. Love your neighbor as yourself. (Mark 12:31) Treat others as you want to be treated. (‎Matthew 7:12) Now, as many of you know, I have particular disdain for organized religion, as more often than not I see it bring out the worst in people, if you doubt my words, wait for the next thing I post. Yet, even I can find value in these teachings. These teachings also come into play with the topic at hand and I feel that this was a necessary preface for what may come out as being exceptionally harsh. I need you to understand: this is all coming from a place of love and compassion, though I understand how this may be hard to believe as this is my first blog post. This morning, as I drank my coffee and smoked my first cigarette of the day, I was reading a Revolver article about Glenn Danzig (who is easily one of my favorite musicians). The article was basically him talking about how punk rock could have never have happened in today’s sociopolitical climate. It received A LOT of hate, but the simple fact is, he was right. Think about this: The Ramones, New York Dolls, The Clash and The Sex Pistols all put out songs that were offencive to some people, however, that was kind of the point. In 1976 the Ramones put out their self titled debut, on this album was a song called “Beat on The Brat” the 6 repeated lines from this song involve beating some annoying kid with a baseball bat. On the 1973 self titled New York Dolls debut there is a track called “Looking For A Kiss” which is about pressuring someone to be intimate with the singer. The Clash, in 1977,again with the self titled debut, has a song called “Protex Blue” which is a song shaming a girl for not being “wholesome” enough. Finally, The Sex Pistols, who’s name alone may be enough to get them cancelled these days, finally straying from the “self titled” trend with their 1977 debut album “Never Mind The Bollocks, Here's The Sex Pistols” had a song called “God Save the Queen” which was about anything except saving the Queen. In today’s world, these bands would have been stopped dead in their tracks and with them, almost 50 years of other artists. Which brings me to what led me to start this and with it, I hope, a dialogue.

The reason people THINK that cancel culture, woke-ness and political correctness works is because it makes THEM feel warm and fuzzy inside. They got to “stand up” for the “little guy”. The reality is these people do this for themselves and that is what I am going to illustrate in the next part. The first point I want to make, which I almost didn’t because I didn’t want to seem nationalist, is the Freedom of Speech. Now, this is often something people mention when trying to explain how “America is the greatest nation on earth.” However, this is not strictly an American right, Article 19 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations General Assembly Resolution 217A - 10DEC1948 Code-A/RES/3/217A) which was voted for by 48 Nations, and 8 nations abstained1 states that Freedom of Expression as a fundamental human right. So, I say this with the full certainty that it is absolutely imperative that ALL people should be allowed to express themselves.

My second point, it is insanely important that we teach ourselves that reality is sometimes offensive. The world does not walk on eggshells and people will be insensitive, it is a simple fact. Preparing our children (and ourselves) for this fact is a quintessential part of life. Now, it would be great if everyone was nice and perfectly well mannered all the time. If you prepare your children for a flat tire you should prepare them for hurt feelings, conversely, it is also a useful tool in teaching children how they should behave by showing them how they should not act. Using a negative to teach a positive can be a very effective method.

Third, let’s talk about being “woke” which will bring us back to one of the people I met through my Greenpeace affiliation who was a negative influence on my life. I have no desire to smear this person, so I will simply refer to her by her initials D.H. I met her at a coffee shop where we met to discuss racism in general, but, primarily in Jacksonville. Our introduction was uneventful, but informative for me. Over the next few months, we would communicate multiple times and meet up at multiple events. At one point she would call me “one of the most ‘woke’ white guys she ever met” which, at the time, I took as a great compliment. As time would pass we would start to disagree on certain things, mostly things of basic morality. The final straw was when a mutual “friend” of ours decided that it was morally acceptable to lie to someone who was going through a catastrophic period in her life. She made a comment that I completely agreed with in the general context, however in this exact situation it was incorrect. She said “He didn’t owe her anything”, which is correct, except for the fact that he broke a promise. I was raised that if you give your word, you honor it. So, yes, he owed her his word, if not,at least an answer as to why he broke it (which was all she wanted). I mention this to say the biggest problem/misconception with ”woke culture” and it is simply this: Being “woke” does not make you a good person. I also would like to point out that being “woke” 75% of the time does not undo the 25% that you are an asshole.In conclusion, the idea that “wokeness” and Cancel Culture will fix the problems of our society is absolute garbage. I feel that the only way we can actually fix things is with a dialogue, not by simply throwing people out when they say things that we don’t agree with. Alienation is not fixing anything, in fact, I would argue that it makes things worse. It is better to extend a hand than slam a door. Thank you for taking time out of your busy day to read this, I hope to see you next time.

1- For (48) - Afghanistan, Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Burma, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Egypt, El Salvador, Ethiopia, France, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Iceland, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Liberia, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Nicaragua, Norway, Pakistan, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Philippines, Siam, Sweden, Syria, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay and Venezuela.

Against (0) - Zero

Abstained (8) - Byelorussian SSR, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Saudi Arabia, Ukrainian SSR, South Africa, Soviet Union and Yugoslavia ( artwork is by marisa deroma @marisa_deroma on instagram)

#politically incorrect #cancel culture #woke #politics #law #free speech

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