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imathers · 3 years

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TMC 01: The Soundtrack of My Life

So apparently Spotify embeds just don’t work on the tumblr dashboard, even though if I go see the post on its own I can see my mix embedded just below this paragraph. If you can’t, well, here’s the mix.

So I’m doing a mixtape club thing again, thanks to some friends here. For your inaugural mix you can either do the theme everyone else is doing or(/and, but this time I only had time/energy for one) a sort of introductory “soundtrack of your life” type mix. Guess which one I did? Not sure I’ll do notes for these every time, but I feel like this one kinda makes zero sense without at least some context, so that’s under the cut. It’s also bigger than I tend to make mixes, 21 songs and 94 minutes. But believe me, I cut a lot. And yes, it is pretty entirely white dude music. I do love plenty of other stuff, but not as centrally as this stuff; yes, I have a lot of thoughts about that too. Details under the cut, and apologies to those on mobile if that still doesn’t register cuts.

01. The Beatles — “Oh! Darling”

I know! The Beatles. And not even a track that would make my top 20 Beatles songs. But one of my first music memories, I think both before and after my parents split up when my brother and I were in the middle of second grade, was my dad singing the beginning of this song as he did the dishes or what have you. He also sometimes did “If I Fell”, but I feel like that was more post-split. And maybe “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill”? To the extent that years later I was kind of surprised to find out those were Beatles songs; they were Dad songs first.

02. Van Morrison — “Domino”

My dad was easily the parent more into music, the one with the stereo system and the vinyl (and, relatively early, CD) collection. I’m not sure how much he gets into new stuff these days (he’s 70 this year!) but he did for a longer time than most, ordering anything in the Columbia House catalog that had an interesting review in the Toronto Star (this is why he has a CD copy of the Cure’s Disintegration, a record I am pretty sure I love more than he does). I tried not to go too overboard with the music I got from him here (so there’s no: Allman Brothers Band, the Clash, Neil Young, Talking Heads, Elvis Costello, etc), but I didn’t feel like I could skip Van Morrison, because he listened to so much of it that one of my few mild, unconscious forms of teenage rebellion was becoming convinced around the time I went to university that I didn’t like Morrison’s voice or music. But I did, and I have the memories of jumping around our living room to “Domino” to prove it. Morrison’s “Everyone” in The Royal Tenenbaums suddenly thawed my feelings towards Van the Man (and made me want to call my dad), and the first time I played His Band and the Street Choir after was just a shot of pure childhood nostalgia.

03. Blue Rodeo — “Rose Coloured Glasses”

If this was a list of movies instead of songs, my mom would be far more prominent (and in fact I don’t know what I’d put related to my dad who, and I do not understand this, “doesn’t like movies”). Their split was amicable but the years after were, if less rough than a lot of divorces, not always great. I remember sitting in my mom’s apartment feeling actively anxious about how things were going to work out, listening to my mom’s copy of Outskirts on vinyl, listening to the first songs I noticed as being about difficult, ‘adult’ situations. Even then it seemed to me that this song isn’t critical of this woman who thinks that “love could save us all” so much as it presents our narrator as someone who is too hurt and afraid to allow himself to think she might be right. Or that it’s worth trying, anyway. (And even in the early 90s it already felt like we were in “a world that’s tired and scared of living on the edge too long”... a feeling that has come back with a vengeance if it ever left.) Also, even more than just the song, the video gives me such precise, almost hallucinatory flashbacks to the feeling and texture of that apartment and that time in my life.

04. Crowded House — “Love This Life”

Growing up in a small town with no music store and little radio, I was dependent for a long time on what my parents had, then eventually MuchMusic. So the copy of Termple of Low Men I played over and over was my dad’s, but it kind of felt like some of the first music that was ‘mine’. It was a record that unlocked certain things for me (hell, I wrote an essay on “Into Temptation”, uh... 15 years ago), but this was always my favourite, the one I was first surprised and then pissed to find wasn’t on the (otherwise pretty flawless!) Recurring Dream best-of comp. Something about the ambiguity? Maybe I was a tiny philosophy major already. “Here’s something that you can do, even if you think that I hate you” is still stuck somewhere in my head.

05. R.E.M. — “Country Feedback”

This is not here for the intense relationship it has to depression in my own mental cosmology. Certainly when I first heard it as a kid who had recently discovered the concept of “favourite song” and had decided “Losing My Religion” was it, I was not depressed and did not know what that was. I’ve said many times before that R.E.M. were my favourite band before I got old enough to realize that was something I actually had a say in. But maybe partly because of my particular age I’m not strictly orthodox about them; for me, the period spanning Out of Time through to Reveal is the band I love. When I started listening to all the R.E.M. CDs we had around as a kid “Country Feedback” immediately had some sort of hold on me. It didn’t feel good, exactly, but I couldn’t turn away. Now it feels like some sort of fucked-up premonition. “A hotline, a wanted ad, it's crazy what you could've had.” A haunting.

06. The Tragically Hip — “Nautical Disaster”

I spent a lot of late grade school/early high school playing endless games of Freecell, Minesweeper, etc. on our home computer listening to music. A lot of that was Tragically Hip records, most especially and eternally Day For Night, which was simply on another level from the other rock records I had access to at the time. Both viscerally, and just on a... craft level? “Nautical Disaster” still blows me away, I almost can’t talk about it. I had that record so imprinted on me that it feels like I could write a book on how the guitar tone makes me feel, or the drumming, or the vocals.

07. Radiohead — “High and Dry”

You know those songs you hear as a kid and they really speak to you, and then decades later you hear how fucking true they were in a totally different way? It was a little later that a Radiohead song would give me the moment that turned me from someone who listened to a lot of music into whatever I am now (and I don’t even like that other song that much), but thanks to MuchMusic I was already hearing this song and the other singles from The Bends on a loop. The first song on here where nobody else in my family owned a copy of it. “Two jumps in a week, I bet you think that's pretty clever, don't you boy?” I had no fucking clue.

08. Mogwai — “Cody”

One of the many things getting obsessed with Radiohead did was get me reading the freshly-online review archives at places like the NME, and I became maybe the only kid in my high school saving up to buy Mogwai, Super Furry Animals, and Spiritualized records on trips to places with record stores. At one point a friend asked me to make him an actual mixed tape. The result was different enough from what everyone around me had access to that the tape wound up played to and copied for a bunch of people and I became known, not unkindly, as “the weird music guy”. My best high school friend Pete and I were the two in our friend group the most into similar music and we definitely drove around in his parents’ van blasting the loud bits of Young Team and stuff like that, but as I said elsewhere recently, late high school was also just a lot of me laying on my bed playing the often wrenchingly sad Come on Die Young (my friend Isabelle gets it) on repeat and wondering what leaving the only town I remembered living in and going to university was going to be like. A record I did not get when I first bought it, but I had nothing else to fucking listen to so I just kept playing it and then one day I woke up and it’s suddenly probably top ten of all time for me.

09. The Delgados — “American Trilogy”

God bless The Wedge. I have been luckier with depression than a lot of people I love, and back in 2000 I could honestly say I’d never felt it, but of course there’s always teenage angst. And then this fucking video comes on and I’m just slack-jawed staring at my tiny bedroom TV, nailed to my seat by this song. I have a playlist now of songs that I feel uncomfortable admitting hit this close to home, not necessarily at all related to how I actually interact with people or how I’m perceived, but how it feels in here sometimes. And yet there’s something hopeful here, right? Or maybe not; some days I feel like I can’t tell whether it’s genuine resilience or self-abnegation. “I’m alright now, I’m just thinking what to say.”

10. Underworld — “Push Upstairs”

But no, as i kind of indicated already, high school wasn’t just pining in bedrooms. For two small town kids with literally nowhere to dance, Pete and I sure got into techno. It helped he went on the our school’s Art History trip to Europe (still wish I’d been able to go) and came back with a bunch of CDs by Orbital, Laurent Garnier, Pete Namlook, etc. One of the first unfiltered inklings I got that some of this was also going to be my music was “Push Upstairs” on MuchMusic, a song that seethed and hectored in ways that, while you could definitely dance to it, seemed to go beyond that. Underworld, specifically, have been massively important to me ever since (still are).

11. Readymade — “Hamburg”

I got really into Plumtree somehow (the ones who did “Scott Pilgrim”, yes that’s where the name was and believe me I laughed when I first saw the comic), enough to mail order their three albums (all of which rule) from Endearing Records, their label. Since this was expensive and I think also because I had gone to university and started writing about music at U of Guelph’s student newspaper, I wound up getting at least one record from Vancouver’s Readymade, since I tended to like shoegaze-y stuff (Slowdive probably should be on here too, ah well). And eventually they sent me a copy of their first record after I wrote something, because I remember that was the first time I had the feeling of getting something valuable for something I’d wrote. That record, The Dramatic Balanced By, is still my go-to answer for favourite record of all time (and one I was shocked to find on Spotify). I own multiple CD copies, just in case. I once saw it in an HMV discount bin for $1.99 and badgered my dad into buying it just in case he liked it/for another spare copy. Someday, if they have a funeral for me, one of my few wishes is that they play “Hamburg” during it and ask everyone to just sit and listen and think about me.

12. New Order — “Ceremony”

If getting into music that your parents (etc.) didn’t know was one kind of weird at first, realizing there was music from their own pasts that they didn’t know about or didn’t like and discovering that was a whole other kind of weird. Getting the New Order Substance in the Guelph HMV felt like it changed my life, let alone subsequently getting into Joy Division. I have some of the single art from “Ceremony” tattooed on the back of my right calf, both for the song itself and because it’s the only one both bands played (in one sense). Anaïs and I semi-joke sometimes about how we both used to think Joy Division was the better of the two and then we grew up/got healthier, and while we both still love those records intensely we do also feel like it’s probably a good sign we both prefer New Order. She used the phrase “the perfect Joy Division room in the New Order house of our lives” once and it stuck. What "Ceremony” means to me... it’s too big.

13. Constantines — “Saint You”

I feel fortunate to have gone to Guelph when Constantines were starting, to see them in the grad lounge on a whim very early and insist they all sign the set list I asked to keep because I swore they were going to be something important. To start going to the shows they hosted at 106 Huron Street where most of them lived, to get to one show at Ed Video downtown at see them still assembling those original first albums, before the jewel case ones that show the cardboard packaging they used (we helped them cut up some cardboard). One of the great rock bands of my life; my dad attended Hillside one year and if I still had my old phone I’d have his voicemail from Guelph Island late at night telling me he thought they were the future of rock and roll. They kind of were, right? I knew I had to have something from Constantines, but why this one? Because the house shows and the long nights and the walking home alone were like this too, maybe more like this.

14. Low — “Shame”

I have a big ol’ Low tattoo on my back, let’s get that out of the way. I thought it over a lot before getting it; generally speaking, band tattoos for bands that are still going are risky (given how I feel about Double Negative and HEY WHAT, though, it worked out ok). They’ve come a tremendously long way since “Shame”, and I’d argue they’re one of the few with that kind of history to never really set a foot wrong, but I still remember downloading this and “Two-Step” and “Starfire”, eager to directly hear this weird band I’d heard so much about. They’ve taught me a lot, Alan Sparhawk in particular. And, no parasocial, but getting to actually see more of him just as a person and interact with him on Twitter is one of the few decent things about that hellsite (people from tumblr I’m mutuals with there are one of the others). Someday it will all make sense.

15. The National — “City Middle”

Before I put this together on Spotify this was my last cut, it being too similar to a more specific song that was also ‘about’ this period/feeling in my life. But even though Jens Lekman is on there, Oh You’re So Silent Jens isn’t, so I brought back in “City Middle” instead of “Black Cab”. The latter is the only song I know to so precisely nail the particular feeling of many of my nights during my long, single interregnum between my undergrad and being with the person I wound up marrying. “City Middle” is equally precise, but it’s kind of about the beginning of those nights, not the end, the good parts and then the part where the fear sets in. You have weird memories, and when something kicks in, it’s the wrong thing.

16. Los Campesinos! — “My Year in Lists”

I was at the first North American Los Campesinos! show (that Hillside festival again) and I’ve gone to every one in Ontario I can manage since (and once in New York). I forget the exact wording, but either the band or someone writing about them early on (possibly Kieron Glllen in Phonogram which is... a whole other giant thing) basically said they were never going to be huge, but they would be huge to everyone who was on their wavelength. A lot has changed over the years (and I’ll argue for every album, maybe especially their last one Sick Scenes, which has a couple of their songs I take most personally), but I can’t imagine what would have to happen for LC! not to be one of My Bands.

17. Talk Talk — “Inheritance”

Since we’re long out of school and just into the sprawling mess of adulthood, we really are just wrapping up a few artists who didn’t so much mark specific periods of life/growth and just ones that have become totally central to me. Nick Southall, a friend and also the person responsible by proxy for pretty much every writing gig I’ve ever had, wrote a beautiful essay back in the day on Talk Talk’s Spirit of Eden, a record I’d never heard of and a band I barely had. I actually really love the early synthpop Talk Talk stuff now, but as a good chunk of my listening gravitated towards more abstract, less immediate stuff, to suddenly be gifted with Spirit of Eden and Laughing Stock and Mark Hollis and all the stuff that those records led to... I was raised without religion and I’m still without religion, but (including Mark Hollis and Alan and Mimi from Low) some of the creators that have resonated the most deeply with me have been people of faith, who take that faith very seriously. It feels almost obscene to split off some chunk of Spirit of Eden, especially considering how Hollis felt about some of the uses other people put their music to. Ah well. “I love sound. And I love silence. And, in a way, I love silence more.”

18. Coil — “Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)”

Two pieces of liturgical music? In a row? This far into this mix? In this economy? A while back I embarked on a very slow moving project to go through and sort and organize all of the music in my computer, all 91 days and 4 hours of it (plus whatever I haven’t put into used-to-be-iTunes yet). I’m done my first pass through the Ds and am going through all the stuff that takes more thought (including the complete discographies of David Bowie (almost done!) and Depeche Mode (haven’t touched it yet!) plus whatever has come in from A-C since I started D). I am reasonably sure I will be doing it for years, perhaps forever. But when I get time to work on it, there are few things I enjoy more. A big surprise was that this process made me go from someone who had a Coil comp and some albums to someone who has 279 songs, close to 33 hours, of their music. And, honestly, even though I like their many different phases, it’s all because the less-industrial disc of that first compilation I bought had “Batwings (A Limnal Hymn)” on it. If the tones seem a bit harsh at first, or it feels like it’s starting a bit slow, I promise it’s worth it for when Jhon Balance (who’ll fall) starts singing. This should really be something from astonishing live album ...and the ambulance died in his arms, but that’s not on Spotify (it was the first thing I checked, long before this mix was even half ready).

19. Spanish Love Songs — “Losers 2″

My twin brother and I have shared a lot of music over the years, but despite significant overlap it’s safe to say a lot of our most cherished bands etc. are ones the other likes but maybe not as intensely. So when he messaged me out of the blue one day last year telling me I had to hear this song, that was already significant, but when I fucking played it.... I had never heard of these guys and he told me later that the record before this, Schmaltz, had been tremendously personally important for him the last little while (it’s also astonishing). But all of Brave Faces Everyone, and especially “Losers 2″ both for what it is and how I heard it, just hit me where I live in a way that you can only hope you get every so often as you get older. And Ben knew it would, which is its own extra wonderful part of it. The first time through, "now if we weren't bailed out every time by our parents we'd be dead / what's gonna happen when they're dead?" left me gasping.

20. Paul Buchanan — “Buy a Motor Car”

I wish more people listened to the Blue Nile. Another band around for most of my life (Hats came out in 1989!) who I didn’t really hear until I was in my 30s, and since then they’ve just bloomed in importance for me. Sometime after their fourth record, one of the three guys in the band just stopped talking to the other two. The other two have played shows under singer Paul Buchanan’s name, and he’s been pretty upfront about the way they don’t really understand what happened. I was working (too much) one night recently and got into these short song documentaries a Dutch TV channel popped onto YouTube. My absolute favourite, which at the time moved me nearly to tears, is Buchanan talking about “Tinseltown in the Rain”. But really it’s about what it’s like to look back on life, not really wanting to go back, but the powerful melancholy of feeling that some things are just... unrecoverable. “Funny coming back. Ghosts of yourself, y’know.” (John Gardner, Grendel: “The nature of evil may be epitomized, therefore, in two simple but horrible and holy propositions: ‘Things fade’ and ‘Alternatives exclude’.”) It was after seeing that video that I found out Buchanan had done one solo album, which stands in relation to the Blue Nile records the same way Mark Hollis does to Talk Talk’s records. I don’t listen to so much sad music because I, myself, am sad (or at least not only then or for that reason); I’m very happily married and doing well in many respects and enjoy most days. There’s something else in sad music that resonates with me, and the most recent example of that is Mid Air. Maybe this track in particular. “This song is called ‘Buy a Motor Car’. And, as far as I can tell, it’s about claustrophobia.”

21. Cory Hanson — “Pale Horse Rider”

“Buy a Motor Car” was the last song in the mix. It was done, I was going to write it up last week. Then, unexpectedly, over just a few days our cat got very sick and died. When we got home from the vet hospital still in shock, still crying, me moving around trying to balance not leaving her things out to wound us the next time we saw them against not making it seem like she’d never been here, I had this song in my head. A song about the comfort of mortality but simultaneously a howl against the brute fact of it. I told Anaïs I couldn’t stop hearing it. “Maybe you should put it in your mix,” she said.

Thanks for listening.

#mixes #personal #the mixtape concern #music

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fizzingwizard · 4 years

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I was curious if rewatching Kizuna after not having seen it since it released in late February would change my opinion of it any. It has a little bit. Not a lot, but a little. Spoiler warning!

To recap, I didn’t hate it or anything, it just didn’t amaze me. As far as grown up nostalgia movies based off anime go, it’s pretty solid, I think.

I felt that I enjoyed it more this time around, and I think there are a couple reasons why: first, I’m having a good day, whereas when I saw it in the theater I was in the worst mood ever. :P So there’s that factor that’s totally unrelated to anyone to but me.

Second, we’re now so distant from both Tri and Kizuna that I’m not so inclined to compare them. They really shouldn’t be compared anyway for billions of reasons, but before Kizuna came out it was a natural thing to be doing. There was lots of weird hearsay about Kizuna on the net before the release too, like that a long time Digimon producer had walked on the project etc...

(I guess if you waited till the DVD release/overseas release, it hasn’t been out that long for you... but for those of us who saw it last spring, we’ve got some distance now xP)

So here's how I feel about it now:

I still just don’t enjoy the whole “you grow up and lose your endless potential so your partner disappears” thing. And it’s not even like it doesn’t make sense. In the Adventure universe, what’s always been clear is that wishes, strong belief, passion, are the energy that fuels creation. It was a fun kid’s concept that has grown a lot and reaches I suppose its inevitable grown up meaning in Kizuna. If your view of the future narrows and becomes something like “I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing as an adult,” it’s easy to see how that would result in a decrease of that energy. And it CAN be renewed. They explain the entire movie in that one blurb at the very beginning (which I actually missed the first time since I got to the theater late) that talks about how change is inevitable and there’s always a new adventure.

It’s a fleshed out idea. Much more well-rounded than those old fanfics that treated Digimon like parental replacements and their disappearance in adulthood was synonymous with growth. I always hated that idea because, like, I get that some fans only really like the kids, but I always loved the Digimon. I think probably the majority of us do? And reducing them like that... it just takes away the fun and the emotional impact of the story. I hate to be hit over the head with metaphor, especially when the metaphor is grossly obvious.

But because of that idea that was so popular while I was growing up, I can’t help but clench my teeth through Kizuna’s interpretation of it, even though it’s so much better developed. Kizuna’s concept makes sense and doesn’t diminish the Digimon partners, not really... but I just don’t want it. The underlying theme that it’s up to the Chosen to continue to choose to be Chosen, in their own way, and continue to try to unlock their unending potential as adults, and then presumably they’ll be reunited with their partners... like it’s good, really, I should like it. I just never wanted it and still don’t.

The way the movie focuses so heavily on Taichi and Yamato bothers me less than it did on first viewing. It helps that I like those two characters a lot. I will always wish we got more of everyone, of course. I’m glad Koushirou was still indispensable. Takeru and Hikari got to be really cool in the opening scene. Seeing Angemon and Angewomon fight together rocked. Sora’s abscene was tough, but makes sense with the theme of the movie and her chosen role. All the characters still seemed like themselves. I’m always going to want more, but I’m grateful for that.

Also on initial viewing, I was underwhelmed by the 02 kids’ role, but now I think they got a pretty good slice of the pie, all things considered. Especially Daisuke and Miyako, who were awesome. I’m still whatever about Ken’s part though and wish they’d picked ANY OTHER HAIRSTYLE.

The pace of the movie is really good. It doesn’t feel rushed or jerky the way parts of Tri did. The first 30-45 min I really do think are stellar - it’s starting with the reveal that Menoa is the bad guy (big surprise, not) that I start to be less interested. It leads to the big battle scene, which is elevated by the emotional and mental trauma that powers Menoa and even powers the Chosen Children she abducts. I definitely would not have preferred a standard Big Bad with no relatable motivations. But I still don’t like Menoa, as a person or a villain. I kind of wonder if Menoa is the result of plans for Himekawa in Tri that never made it...

There’s that bit where the other Chosen are brainwashed, and yet not, because it’s their own wish for things to not have to change that powers them... I get it, I do, but I still wish there were less brainwashing. Menoa really had to reach to pull out that wish so that it was at the forefront of their hearts to the point that they’d attack Taichi and Yamato. So it wasn’t really their decision, unless it’s a sin simply to have conflicting desires. I’m not saying I would have preferred Hikari, for example, to have said completely by her own will “I’m with Menoa and I’m going to attack my brother!” because that would be dumb. Rather, I just find the whole child abduction to Neverland concept boring. The long and short of it I guess is I didn’t enjoy the battle scene that much. Regardless of the story around it, it’s still just an anime battle that ends with yet another new evolution.

We could totally have had interesting stuff for the other characters to do if there weren’t such a requirement that there be a big long battle. Some battle? sure. It’s Digimon. But does it have to be that long? Really? Kizuna’s not being shown to eight year olds during Saturday morning cartoons. It was adult fans in the theater after work. For a story that’s all about unlimited potential, I wonder did Kizuna itself really reach the unlimited potential for Digimon stories? lol.

So those are things I just can’t get around. However, at least we got an enjoyable movie out of it.

I still vastly prefer Tri. Kizuna has better animation, steadier pacing, and a more tied up storyline. But to me, Tri is better partly because of the amount of time it had (six movies to one), the huge risks it took, the great character moments everyone got, and the nontraditional plot. Of course, as I said at the start, it really doesn’t make sense to compare Tri and Kizuna for the simple reason that Tri is a series and Kizuna is a movie. That’s not to say a movie can’t kick a series out of the water - it absolutely can, quality over quantity folks - but in this case I’d argue the amount of time makes a difference. Digimon is a show about 8 individual kids who were all nearly equal in terms of how much they mattered in 99 Adventure. That’s why the extreme focus on Taichi and Yamato in the reboot and in Kizuna bugs me. Tri had time to take on all eight and we still complained that we didn’t also get the four from 02. Kizuna has all 12 of the kids in the main cast for just 90 minutes total, that’s it. For fans whose priorities, like mine, are face time with the characters, getting to know them again, see how they change, and enjoy a mix of the familiar and the different, I just don’t think Kizuna can fulfill all that.

Pretty much, if we had Kizuna without Tri, I’d probably hate it for that reason. But because we got Tri before Kizuna, I feel free to enjoy Kizuna for what it is. Which is overall pretty good if just not my personal desire.

lol how come I just can’t write anything short. xP All that being said, there were tons of things in Kizuna that I loved, the art, the snapshots of the adult relationships between characters, esp Taichi/Yamato, Taichi/Koushirou, Takeru/Hikari. And more than anything, the relationships between children and Digimon. Also loved cool spy Yamato of course. And the whistle. I said all this back in Feb so I’m gonna end now but I did just want to sum up my thoughts after they changed a bit.

#kizuna spoilers #digimon adventure #kizuna #digimon

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very-grownup · 4 years

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THE YEAR IS 2020 AND I WATCHED NEON GENESIS EVANGELION FOR THE FIRST TIME, MOVIE EDITION

Some brief thoughts on the movies with the possibly huge caveat that I liked the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion and I don't think you can retroactively "fix" art.

Evangelion: Death and Rebirth. My friends told me this was basically a recap of the series followed by an "explanation" of the ending and I feel I cannot overstate how /good/ this series was throughout and including the movies at reusing, repurposing, recutting material. So throughout Death it felt less like a recap and more like Anno trying to condense the salient points he might have had reason to think the audience missed? There's a really good moment where it's that awkward first meal in Misato's apartment with her and Shinji and the audio from one of Misato's inner monologues about her struggle to be good for her mother and good enough to be loved by her father is used and ... that's the core. That's Misato, that's Shinji, that's why Misato tries to be what Shinji needs and also can't be what he needs, why she ultimately fails him, and it's such an important thing to underscore because the core of the series is Shinji's inner self.

I'm also interested in the one bit that's used twice, near the beginning and again at the end of Death, which is Shinji and Kaworu's final confrontation in the underground tang ocean. Like, that's indicative of how well this stuff is done. It's not a recap, it's a framing.

Rebirth is the "explanation" of the end of the series where I guess explanation means "NERV and all the robot stuff" because I think this is never not the same ending as the series, with the congratulation tang world. It's just congratulation tang was inside Shinji (important).

NERV, the robots, all that stuff (not important but very cool to look at and a useful conduit for information about Shinji and the people who inform Shinji as the series is happening) basically goes to fuck with MAGI getting hacked and the UN bombing NERV and killing everyone.

Shinji is inert and passively trying to die while Misato saves him and tries to propel him to action. Asuka is put in her EVA for protection and discovers the soul of her dead mother inside it and regains the will to do some badass fighting and throws a battleship at tanks. Rei has broken Gendo's damaged glasses and is hanging out mysteriously and nakedly in a tang vat until Gendo comes to her but like ... the kids are all essentially returned to some aspect of their square one. Shinji is passive and non-responsive, without will to live. Asuka is furious and fighting and confident and the confidence feels false, wrong in the way the congratulation applause in the tang felt wrong. Rei is once more an unknowable cypher. And then MASS PRODUCED WINGED EVA UNITS CIRCLE DOWN ALL RELIGIOUSLY. END.

Because throughout the series no one has really been interested in helping these damaged, lonely kids with their problems and the adults are all operating at mysterious cross purposes, of course what was happening outside the tang congratulations was fucking disaster war.

There's also a bit at the beginning of Rebirth that I guess I should acknowledge happening where Shinji goes to see Asuka comatose in the hospital and wants her to wake up to save him because she's the proactive one who /does/ things and isn't afraid. So he's shaking her and crying and jerks her body around and her bare breasts are exposed and he masturbates and feels horrible about it but I'm honestly more interested in what direction was given to Megumi Ogata for "sad masturbating teenage boy noises" than the scene itself. Like, Shinji hates himself, Shinji's disgusted by himself, Shinji does not feel he can trust himself, his body, his impulses, anything. Everything's tainted and violence and the self-loathing is all-consuming.

End of Evangelion, I am told, is the response to people hating Death and Rebirth which in turn was a response to people wanting a "real" ending to the series and this is why you should never let fans dictate you work to you and also why you can't /fix/ art. It contains all the stuff from Rebirth and maybe after a certain point you'd notice the "real" ending is all the stuff from the last real ending and understand that /was/ the ending, that everything else is a coda or a post-script that is elaborating on what was already there. Nothing in either of these films /changes/ the final episodes of Neon Genesis Evangelion.

But fuck does End of Evangelion allow Anno to append some gorgeous and horrifying visuals to the series. Like we get a look at the mass produced white, winged EVAs and WOW I HATE THEM and their weird smooth lizard heads with white human teeth and red lips pulled into smiles.

Gendo and Rei, by the tang spa? Part of her arm just /falls off/ and there's the little nubin of white bone jutting from the remains of her shoulder and Gendo puts his hand INTO HER and draws it downward so she can make him one with his dead wife once more.

Asuka's EVA is unplugged and runs out of power after she's defeated the white EVAs and then they regenerate and she tries to muster up the energy to fight them again and a spear /pieces her head/ and goes through her eyes and the white EVAs swarm her like vultures. The white EVAs /eat her/ and expose her EVA's entrails and leave her and the EVA ruined and then just pepper her all over with even more spears and she's writhing and contorted with agony, dying, and they're flying away.

Rei rejects Gendo and goes to merge with Adam Lilith Trevor but not before Ritsuko shows up to shoot Gendo, only to get shot herself, and Rei goes into Adam Lilith Trevor and they are one and the purple ... faceplate? Mask? Falls off and underneath the face becomes Rei's.

Misato dies getting Shinji to the robot, sending mixed messages and good lessons mixed with bad right until the end, but ultimately Shinji doesn't get in the robot, the robot awakens and forces Shinji into the robot and there's a massive surfacing and laser wings and screaming.

End of Evangelion: there's a lot of screaming.

Rei becomes a terrifying giant and guess what /everyone is turned into the orange tang/ except Gendo who gets eaten by the EVA and screaming traumatized Shinji who is kind of forced to be the key in a sephiroth arrangement in space by the white EVAs. Shinji's ego dissolves and he and his EVA become a new world tree and there are eyes all over it and that's how giant Rei can turn the whole world to tang and it's visually stunning, there's so much cool visual stuff but it's not really telling us anything new. It feels like the animated version of having a really solid five page essay and being told you need to hand in a ten page one. So you tweak the font size, the margins, the spacing. You pad out the word count by restating things unnecessarily. Maybe some of those redundant sentences are beautiful, maybe they're better than what you originally wrote in some aesthetic sense ... but they're saying the same thing.

The Human Instrumentality Project is about saving humanity by destroying it, finding safety and understanding by removing individuality. With no separation of self and other there can be no hurt, no betrayal, no lies, no being alone. That still happens. That still has a great appeal to a psychologically troubled child who has only known abandonment and disappointment and being seen by others only when he has value to contribute to their goals.

The addition to that brought by End of Evangelion is Shinji having dialogue with Rei and Kaworu about what is lost in choosing the tang and explicitly coming to choose leaving the tang and becoming an individual again, even knowing it comes with pain. I don't think that's a change to the original ending so much as it is an explicit acknowledgement that the series ending was not good or real or happy for Shinji, but neither is the ending when Shinji chooses individuality and pain and risk.

There isn't a happy ending for what Neon Genesis Evangelion was really about, there isn't a simple happy ending for Shinji (or Rei or Asuka), there's just figuring out that you are someone who deserves to continue to get to choose, no matter how fucked up you are.

And when the giant Rei gets her head sliced from her neck and it falls and you see the individual bones from her spine fall, that's really fucking cool. There's so much here that's /really fucking cool/. But nothing that made me cry like Shinji being made to destroy Tohji.

I'm glad I watched both movies with my friends tonight. Anno's an incredibly skilled director, but I think it's that skill combined with the messy, raw emotional core of the series that's made the series so iconic.

Shinji's a good kid and '90s weeb culture did the series dirty.

#neon genesis evangelion report #neon genesis evangelion death and rebirth #end of evangelion

2 notes · View notes

led123123 · 4 years

Text

I know you guys are gonna call me a sellout now

but I don’t care

https://images.app.goo.gl/c9KUTyiDkH3b7L8m8

https://youtu.be/H2okI6ZszQY?t=53

bullshit

https://youtu.be/H2okI6ZszQY?t=116

https://youtu.be/H2okI6ZszQY?t=134

https://youtu.be/z88_26M2xQk

fucking hate these fucking “cleaners” who clean vacuum clean dust

fucking cleaners..

cleaners.

trash

https://youtu.be/E4TygUpWUTQ

https://youtu.be/E4TygUpWUTQ?t=93

https://youtu.be/E4TygUpWUTQ?t=222

https://youtu.be/E4TygUpWUTQ?t=233

I wonder who is singing this part.. because there is like.. 4 girls... not 2

https://youtu.be/zdoB2TPqWxs?t=170

so this is the only song I heard

https://youtu.be/xKMT44GBaUI

because this one is fiestar

https://youtu.be/xKMT44GBaUI?t=36

she has very cute voice. and.. her voice is.. you know.. she doesn’t sound like an adult and she sounds cute but I don’t think that she’s naive

I think that she’s the type of person that.. has parents that make sure that she has everything

is this their only song I know?

they put her on thumbnails always

https://youtu.be/ShGVCembq70?t=50

I saw this on thumbnail for some reason

https://youtu.be/ShGVCembq70?t=37

these fruits were in last video..

https://youtu.be/hBNHEPI5TT0?t=435

I wonder what “iroke” means

https://images.app.goo.gl/1Sw38h3KbG94uS338

https://youtu.be/NPqtL1dtrlA

https://youtu.be/E9LkIHl-DeM

https://youtu.be/BmzrLQKocjk?t=57

https://youtu.be/beTK6vWAq8U

https://youtu.be/okqF28Rz92g

https://youtu.be/cNLToOigQoM

coaching

coaching was so funny in my games.. I was like.. I didn’t know what that was.. so I was like.. who the fuck is talking all the time.. on microphone. lol.. and we won and I rated coach “bad” xD because I didn’t know even who was talking all game. and he was mad in chat that I gave him bad review.

and then I saw that he was mad in chat on giving him bad rating. it was me who gave him bad rating because I didn’t know that he was in the game.. I was just wondering who is talking on microphone all the time because it was a new thing and it never was in before

so he was so mad that he got one bad review

he was talking all game and I was wondering who is talking.. because I didn’t know who is talking

because it’s the first time I saw it

I just clicked.. whatever to get to the end screen and there was a coach rating screen.. but I didn’t know about this new thing so I didn’t even read that and clicked “no” to get to get out of it

https://youtu.be/5OckREah0ug

because he was telling people to donate instead of subscribing.. that’s why they banned him

they don’t ban people who have contracts like ninja, “shroud” because they have a lot of subscribers

because they have a lot of subscribers..

he was trying to be a smart mouth.. and you know what they do with smart mouths

https://youtu.be/IWtnY8cHlTo?t=62

https://youtu.be/TGDILAcjBTg

mechanical vampyre made a dance video with this song too

but it’s removed

https://youtu.be/IWtnY8cHlTo?t=134

https://youtu.be/zdoB2TPqWxs?t=77

https://youtu.be/zdoB2TPqWxs?t=90

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdoB2TPqWxs&lc=UgzngOLNMa5tiW73aJp4AaABAg

one more day

https://youtu.be/zdoB2TPqWxs?t=165

https://youtu.be/ShGVCembq70?t=39

https://youtu.be/65p80XAMxhw?t=49

https://youtu.be/IWtnY8cHlTo?t=22

https://youtu.be/IWtnY8cHlTo?t=60

https://youtu.be/IWtnY8cHlTo?t=112

this is albralelie

https://images.app.goo.gl/nVAGWvpbkkSiX5Vg9

I told you that twitch bans people who don’t have subscriptions

twitch bans people who don’t have subscriptions and only use donations, because they want money

so they will ban people who don’t make them any money

https://youtu.be/IWtnY8cHlTo?t=69

that’s how that works

maybe aceu also gave away subs so he doesn’t get banned

I’m tired of watching racist commercials on twitch

https://youtu.be/5qArvBdHkJA

https://youtu.be/5qArvBdHkJA?t=26

trash.

https://youtu.be/cNLToOigQoM?t=15

I fell asleep watching

https://youtu.be/cNLToOigQoM?t=182

тренеп. xD

это баг, мне вкинуло в игру меня нелза героя выбирать

#1. everyone says that #2. nobody reads what I’m saying anyway

lol I did the thing with nade

when you throw nade high and it explodes when it falls..

I’m not feeling that good..

I play bad today. I don’t feel that good because I don’t feel that amazing

I need to stretch my back again

I’m already starting to feel good

I was sleeping a lot

every single game requires million hours of playing..

this one isn’t any better

I shouldn’t have eaten so many of these scrambled eggs..

is my pasta from yesterday still okay? smells ok

pasta saved my life

https://youtu.be/w-Wc4lPCW9s

this pasta actually tastes really fresh

I rinsed it in cold water after cooking. that’s why it tastes so fresh. because.. bacteria develops the fastest in the water that is made out of cooking the pasta.. so if I rinse all this water.. away. then bacteria doesn’t grow in the water that I used for cooking pasta

https://youtu.be/CA_EGwZY69E?t=50

make sure that you rinse pasta after cooking in cold water.. if you want it to stay fresh for more time

and also if you rinse it. then pasta becomes cold so bacteria doesn’t grow as fast in cold temperature

I already feel better after eating this pasta

I get a lot of ads on youtube.. about.. people who are asking for money for medical help

and the last one I saw.. is.. hebrew.. and.. it’s not the only hebrew ad like that that I saw.. but this time this person reminded me of yaara.. the hebrew teacher

she said that she was “diagnosed with cancer”. to me what doctors say is just lies

and she’s saying that she’s gonna die.. and.. you know.. I think that donations for stuff like that is a scam

I don’t believe it

I already feel better after eating this pasta

https://youtu.be/Fb0x8R0vb4g?t=50

xD soundboard. xD he didn’t say what he wanted. xD

https://youtu.be/Fb0x8R0vb4g?t=67

https://youtu.be/Fb0x8R0vb4g?t=115

who the f*ck is xqc??

https://youtu.be/Fb0x8R0vb4g?t=169

https://youtu.be/Fb0x8R0vb4g?t=290

nope. xD

ok you’re capping

https://youtu.be/lEiLKnK9RXU?t=334

wow. I said that before too

https://youtu.be/lEiLKnK9RXU?t=367

I said exact same thing

I was saying that I also hate blinds like.. not that long ago

I mean I was talking about like.. 3 times

https://youtu.be/lEiLKnK9RXU?t=442

“blinds are stupid”

https://youtu.be/58omwDIzqkw?t=85

https://youtu.be/58omwDIzqkw?t=429

https://youtu.be/58omwDIzqkw?t=530

https://youtu.be/58omwDIzqkw?t=828

sky was clear today

it wasn’t clear in previous days.. but day is still really short.. so.. even though it’s.. like.. even though it wasn’t cloudy today.. there wasn’t much sun you know. so usually on not cloudy days days were warmer.. but today it’s kinda like usual. it’s not much warmer than on non cloudy day

because days are short and there’s not a lot of sun anyway.. so it doesn’t get much warmer when it’s not cloudy

usually on non cloudy days it was warmer

but not any more I guess

it’s still not that cold for me

in israel.. (the place where they speak hebrew, and where yaara and this woman who asks for donations live)

it must be warmer there.. on the ad this woman has.. red cheeks and.. she looks like there’s a lot of sun there and it’s hot there

and dry.. her hair look like yaara’s hair

https://youtu.be/dKPKtvrXEfM?t=288

her skin is also.. it’s really dry place. in israel

it’s easy to get dehydrated. it’s really dry. that’s why people wear clothes on entire body. so they don’t evaporate

days are very hot and nights are cold. because it’s really dry climate so the temperature gets cold very fast because it’s really dry. and water has high heat energy capacity, which means that it loses temperature very slowly

air with high humidity wouldn’t lose temperature as fast as dry air

if there’s no water then temperature would change fast

I think that it’s the easiest to learn from all the teachers she is the teacher that’s the easiest and fastest to learn language from all the teachers I’ve seen.. because she knows english very well

and sharon also hair look similar and face too

and I read that sharon is hebrew name

https://youtu.be/eNSVKtopR34?t=49

https://youtu.be/eNSVKtopR34?t=127

I wouldn’t even need a beer to cause accident.. it’s dangerous. driving is dangerous.

https://youtu.be/DbkeeZZnTgk

https://youtu.be/DbkeeZZnTgk?t=12

who doesn’t like..

the easiest teacher to learn/understand that I’ve seen so far

https://youtu.be/DXOZDZ5-mQM?t=20

https://youtu.be/Gq5h46sIEzM?t=14

they all look similar

https://youtu.be/g_wXxS6A9T4?t=10

egypt.. there’s like.. only like.. one language in a lot of countries around this desert climate. like.. I think that 90% of people speak arabic in these desert areas

but in bangladesh it’s a different language

although rumena looks a lot like the girl from jordan

who speaks arabic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bangladesh

“bengali” is more like.. indian language

like hindi

but “religion” is 90% “islam” and only 8.5% “hinduism”

https://youtu.be/zdoB2TPqWxs

https://youtu.be/zdoB2TPqWxs?t=76

https://youtu.be/zdoB2TPqWxs?t=166

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdoB2TPqWxs&lc=UgzngOLNMa5tiW73aJp4AaABAg

https://youtu.be/zdoB2TPqWxs?t=166

https://youtu.be/zdoB2TPqWxs?t=205

I’m gonna comment “I like the part when she’s saying “one more gay”“

https://youtu.be/9hlrgjIJMpo?t=31

now totally new level starts.. in platinum..

it’s gonna be a lot more difficult this time..

if I have million hours of free time and use it to play then I can maybe get higher

because some people have 2.5k kills on one legend..

I have like.. on all legends.. I have like.. 1.6k kills.. on main account

the hoe is like.. 4k kills.. also on just ONE legend..

and I have 1.6k in total on all the legends. and a little bit on 2nd account

so I though that this game is gonna be less time consuming.. but people just don’t have lives and play this game million hours a day

they don’t do anything else than playing this game.. they get even.. food pumped directly into their veins. (some of them)

so they don’t have to waste their time eating

https://youtu.be/9hlrgjIJMpo?t=5

I hit this bitch for 83 and he’s still chasing me..

I could have full killed him

https://youtu.be/9hlrgjIJMpo?t=2

doesn’t the gold sight have smaller dot??

I though that it’s not gonna use as much of my time..

but it’s just like the other game.

I mean.. people are just.. playing 24/7

and sacrifice their lives

https://youtu.be/u85NpwLXgJA?t=80

https://youtu.be/sEbsgZyLf94

and they still didn’t say anything about the ring damage..

https://apexlegends.gamepedia.com/The_Ring

wow.. it finally says..

under “patch notes history”

“ November 12, 2020 Ring 3 damage increased from 5% to 10%. Ring 4 and 5 damage increased from 10% to 20%.“

so it’s not as new change..

omg... so ring 3 is also impossible

so they changed ring damage back.. f*cking assholes

ring 3 is 10 damage so you can pop a medkit with full hp damn they messed this up

so my syringe strategy is no longer a working strategy

but ring 2 used to be 5%.. but I wish ring 3 at least wouldn’t be as deadly

I will have to be rotating fast with team to the ring

and maybe.. use.. like.. maybe sniper rifle or something..

https://youtu.be/shtceZ5wCdw

https://youtu.be/qNdGEtJDky8?t=38

wingman vs hemlok with 3x scope.. hemlok always wins

you gotta be really lucky to win against hemlock with wingman

but you move a lot faster but if you have cover then it’s very unlikely that you hit someone with hemlok

without cover it’s easier but with cover hemlok would win

https://youtu.be/qNdGEtJDky8?t=510

wtf

https://youtu.be/qNdGEtJDky8?t=536

lol this slide.

https://youtu.be/qNdGEtJDky8?t=562

https://youtu.be/WSMKeflrcAw?t=232

https://youtu.be/WSMKeflrcAw?t=264

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/806382680?t=0h12m19s

how low is she gonna drop after not playing as much

https://youtu.be/hBNHEPI5TT0

the title says “getting ready for winter”

https://youtu.be/nEv4EuGZ21Y

I wonder if she lied.

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/806382680?t=0h12m30s

she doesn’t look as bald as before

lets see how much these cards go for.. I added some ads to watch list.. and now they’re over.. well.. they didn’t go for as much as I wanted..

I mean.. no.. none of them got sold yet.. one had low price but didn’t get sold.. but my card is OC model with good cooling

and other 2 auctions are still not finished yet.. so we’ll see how much they go for. but nobody bought one card that was at quite low price

of course.. it was “broken” of course..

someone wanted to sell broken card for high price. that’s why it didn’t get sold.. I shouldn’t have added this to watch list at all

one card has no delivery option.. so also nobody wants to buy it..

one dude is selling similar card to mine.. but with 3 fans. mine has 2 fans.. but I think that the heatsink is the same as my card.. it’s just 1 more fan.. so it’s almost the same card.. and my card doesn’t get any hot at all.. it’s kinda.. same as my card.. and price. is.. not super high.. but it’s not much difference so my card should be just as good as this one

but my goal wasn’t super high too

this was kinda my goal but he’s gonna pay 10%.. so.. I don’t wanna pay that much.. so I wouldn’t sell it for this much at 10% cost

if he pays 10% then he gets.. more warranty from a site.. that a buyer won’t get cheated.. so buyer feels safer about buying stuff.. I mean.. like.. I don’t think it’s like.. doing anything if you pay 10% more.. it’s not doing anything.. so like.. but he’s selling with 10% so I would want to sell it for as much but without paying 10%

and this one is “a little bit” better.. it’s kinda the same card as mine.. 3 fans can also be a disadvantage.. because it may not fit in all cases

other people who sell this card ask a lot more so this card may sell fast.

I ask myself.. how much I would pay for this card..

I bought it cheaper.. and.. not prices are higher. but.. I take inflation into account.. 5% a year.. and.. like.. but like.. demand is high right now I guess... because it’s near christmass.. and new graphics card got released.. so other ones should get cheaper in theory

but demand is high before christmass I guess

lol this dude put.. 9.99 on the end.. xD

how much I would pay for this card.. I would buy it not on christmass.. because I couldn’t find cheap card before christmass..

https://www.tiktok.com/@emiru1/video/6803427746828602630

https://www.tiktok.com/foryou?lang=en#/@bonbibonkers/video/6685384804709436678

damn 700k followlers and 2 million folwers

this fridge has nicer sound. a lot nicer

and it’s like.. I think it just.. makes sound just.. for a lot shorter period of time and then it stops

https://www.tiktok.com/@bonbibonkers/video/6685384804709436678?lang=en

https://www.tiktok.com/@dragon.cosplays/video/6698959246563740933?lang=en

she looks like a characters in one game. broderlands??

https://youtu.be/9KufWWMUXMw?t=8

even better than in a game

trashlands.

netherlands

I wanna eat something before sleep..

bread and butter.. there’s something called a bread diet

https://youtu.be/XS4zojyuzvI

my plan is to buy a lot of tomatoes in cans

https://youtu.be/EnFM5dxFIm8?t=371

https://images.app.goo.gl/wa22R2rvpEMhQrep6

“NOBODY touches my teammates”

“my baby” - kraber

https://youtu.be/EnFM5dxFIm8?t=762

damn living fancy

https://youtu.be/EnFM5dxFIm8?t=934

it’s called cola in america

https://youtu.be/1mITYYdTsU0?t=468

https://youtu.be/1mITYYdTsU0?t=569

https://youtu.be/1mITYYdTsU0?t=577

wingman

https://youtu.be/1mITYYdTsU0?t=1048

her computer is a xenomorph

https://youtu.be/G-WNAMpnATw?t=137

https://youtu.be/hzj8pBpW1Us

“you gotta do what you gotta do”

https://youtu.be/hzj8pBpW1Us?t=27

https://youtu.be/hzj8pBpW1Us?t=46

I need to hit every shot this time

I will remember this 20 damage. 3rd ring is 10 damage..

why somebody from my squad always pushes first 1v3

why enemy squad never pushes 1v3 but my squad teammates always do that always

and then me and my other teammate go to save him and we get f*cked

omfg my teammates.. what a fucking joke

starting fight with one squad and then starting to fight 2nd squad.

and getting staying in between these 2 squads

fighting 2 squads again on the start. xD

oh. gold 4 in team this time. nice

I knew.. there’s no point of even playing with gold 4.. he died in in 1 second to some dude with g7 scout with double tap trigger. he literally died in 1 second

this gold 4 noob

4 g7 scout shots with double tap trigger

no. it was pathfinder..

it wasn’t crypto. crypto actually.. I mean.. not crypto but mirage.. mirage use this.. invisible ressing to get pathfinder up

but mirage landed on a place with 0 loot and I didn’t even have shield but thank god I had loba so I used ulti to get it but they already had purple shield on one dude..

they had like. 2 purple shields

we all had lvl 1

but mirage did almost no damage

what is g7 scout bullet speed

what the fuck are the people doing

what are they fucking doing what the fuck.. first this dude stands behind all the time and doesn’t wanna push with us then he starts to go solo 1v3

I have someone with 3k kills on one legend this time in team

ok this time we got third partied. welcome to platinum

maybe I should use a sniper rifle I don’t know

everyone with triple take

lol. I don’t understand these plays for real. what the fuck.. why are we leave ring and go in a tunnel to get gatekept.. what the fuck.. I don’t understand

their plan was literally to leave ring and get gate kept in a tunnel

I don’t understand these plays..

and I hate hemlok

hemlok versus triple take is still shit

and I have no idea where these people are.. like.. they are shooting from everywhere..

from every fucking side..

hemlok makes me so easy to hit with triple take.. because of the ads slow..

https://youtu.be/pM9heNqzYeM

lol another coaching

https://youtu.be/pM9heNqzYeM?t=92

xD bad coaching rating for that

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/806382680?t=0h12m35s

oh right. who looks indian

2 notes · View notes

content-to-convert · 4 years

Text

VIDEO DIDN’T KILL THE RADIO STAR...

VIDEO DIDN’T KILL THE RADIO STAR it just made him dress nicer

By Pat Mellon

Speaking of your brand evolving, PODCASTS are now a wise bullet to have in the arsenal of promotional weapons. In the early 2000's, for instance, you didn't have the option to record and distribute a PODCAST. The technology didn't exist to even IDENTIFY, much less create one- if you typed PODCAST into an email in 2002, it would have been flagged as a misspelling.

But now, thanks to Audioblogging, re-branded as PODCASTING thanks to the iPOD, you can reach a targeted captive audience in a car on a long commute, with content that they've actually sought out. It's essentially a radio infomercial for the lifestyle of your product, without the PAID-PROGRAMMING aftertaste. Plenty of people have been slow to warm to the idea of such self-promotion and have waited to see if the technology and its effectiveness sustained or if it waned, the way QR codes did, or video discs did until the invention of the DVD. It can be an amazingly powerful part of your brand.

Many rejected podcasting, as I did initially, as a waste of energy. In fairness, early on when there were no networks for podcasting and its business model was less focused than now, it smacked of self-congratulatory volunteer work. I saw it as an infringement on my profession. I have 15 years of radio hosting experience. I saw podcasts as competition. In my short-sighted view then, I didn't see the full potential of a podcast. I just saw it as people wanting my job. But as time went on, I began to see the ways, at least in terms of in-car entertainment, that podcasting was the future. And like the cryptic fortune cookie says, "Kill Your Darlings". Or maybe go with the less-confusing, "Reinvent Your Business Constantly. The End Goal May Be The Same But The Tools and Methods Evolve Constantly" which is a Ken Tucker quote I saw on a Snapple Cap. Or even the more direct, "You Have To Reinvent To Stay Fresh and In The Game" which Madonna said once.

But early on, I saw it as the enemy - the way news journalists must have felt when FREELANCERS started getting a lot of the work in the late 90's. I thought, "If all you need to broadcast is a computer and an opinion, why the hell did I major in Broadcasting? It's like everyone becoming a Youtuber or a Social Media Influencer (seriously, that is NOT a good name. It's just saying what you're doing. It lacks creativity, like naming the glass thing you drink out of a "glass". Or the room with the bed a "bedroom". Or the thing you swing on a "swing". Or the... Sorry-I'll move on.) Anybody can become a Social Media Influencer these days, (and if they're under 14 and haven't been trying for half their lives then you might want to make sure they're breathing) and that means fame, sometimes money, but more important: LIKES. I overheard my 8 year-old playing with her friends and they were pretending there was a genie or something granting wishes and one girl asked for a pony, and another asked for a house of chocolate, and my daughter asked for a million LIKES on her video. LIKES are currency for pre-teen popularity. And LIKES or even merely PAGE VIEWS can be currency in the grown-up world of business. My point is that anyone with a computer and a camera can make money on Youtube if they hustle. It's simply the new normal. It's great, if not dangerous. We've yet to see the fallout of a generation raised on Youtubing, unless, of course, you count cautionary tales like Logan Paul or Jo Jo Siwa, both of whom are rich. It's simply another entertainment option for kids. I kinda thought podcasting was that, but for adults who only wanted quasi-fame; to show-off. But it's bigger than that.

If you're a plumber, for instance, and you want to maximize business, you probably want a decent social media footprint, some solid YELP reviews, and maybe even a podcast. Toilet clogged? Click here for an interview with master plumbers from all over. It's not the ONLY thing you should do. It's ONE of the things you should do.

On the consumer side, you have to realize that traffic, especially the bumper-to-bumper kind, is GOLD to a radio talk show host. People listen the most in their cars, so DJ's in New York and Los Angeles, the #1 and #2 radio markets depending on who you ask*, for instance, who entertain on the radio, are always on their toes to stay funny and relevant because it's so easy to push a button and change the station.

Then suddenly there was a new game in town. People were bypassing the radio altogether and plugging external sources into car sound systems, removing the commercials and unwanted Morning Zoo shenanigans, and rendering my entire college education and training void. My only hope was wishing death to the podcast movement, which I think I did a couple of times on the radio accompanied by a sound effect of a toilet flushing (Take THAT, Podcasting!). It didn't work. I kept hearing the word. Podcast. (eerie voice) PODD CAAAST! My head was in the sand. People would say to me, "you should do a podcast" and I'd cringe and wildly swing fists at imaginary ghosts who were accusing me of "Resting on your laurels" and "Holding on too tight.”

It took a while, but I get the appeal and, more importantly, the power of the Podcast. It's like a book-on-tape for the 21st century- 10 times as cool, though, because it's technologically relevant, and can be different every time you listen. So we agree that podcasts are real. And we acknowledge that there is room for many things on the dashboard of a car, be them outlets, or additional buttons. And we agree that the the way we do business is always changing and we have to adapt to some degree. So why all the hub bub? Because we can't have an intelligent conversation about the delicate existence of Podcasts without talking about Shane Gillis, the comedian who was hired and fired by Saturday Night Live in the same week last year. We need to understand the power of what it was that torpedoed his streetcar (tune into Mixed Metaphors with Pat Mellon Tuesdays on The Podd Couple, right after Poddamnit at 8, and Pod of Thunder with Gene Simmons at 8:17) He and a buddy do this show, this podcast, it's like a radio show but you don't listen to it on your grandpa's Victrola, you tether your MP3 player to the radio inside grandpa's Camry, and there's bad language, which there never is on traditional, boring old dumb talk radio, so right away, it's awesome (honestly, the only difference between Howard Stern on radio and Howard Stern on satellite is the F word) and the internet allows curses and take that, Mr. Suit and Tie, and this is going to be amazing. And on one particular show from 2018, Gillis said "chink" when describing someone in Chinatown. Not a huge scandal, but I guess you'd have to ask Roseanne Barr if the internet can get you into to any kind of trouble. She was exiled from the the entire US for a social media post that mentioned race and monkeys. And the same new normal that allows John Q. Anybody to do a podcast ALSO watches everything you do online and will sink you if it sees something it does not like. America can be confusing that way. Freedom of speech and freedom of complaining about freedom of speech are always at each other's throats, it seems. And you can't have it both ways. The guy who alerted the world to Bill Cosby's dating rituals online is loved by many but is also shunned by others, but that guy knows what he did and he knows not to complain about the ones who, well, complain. It's the price you pay.

The point is, you need to constantly be hustling and using all of technology’s modern tools to get your product out (they’re not burning DVD’s anymore) and maybe one of those avenues is a podcast with salty language, and maybe that podcast exists among your body of work that clients can enjoy whenever they want.

But we live in a new age of retroactive outrage. Eddie Murphy was on SNL and is arguably the most talented person the show has produced. He did a stand-up special in which he explores “What if Mr. T were a Faggot?” It was inflammatory and it was insensitive and it was homophobic (though that buzzword was still a decade from conception) because the premise of the joke- the attribution of homosexual behavior to a big, strong, black man being marginalized as solely predatory sodomy - crossed the line. When I spell it out like that it looks horrible. But it’s a simple comedic device: assigning unlikely behavior to someone for comedic purposes. It’s the fish-out-of-water gag. It’s why we had Mork, and Alf, and Balkie from Perfect Strangers. It’s Freaky Friday. It’s why The Rock playing a babysitter or a tooth fairy is funny. Murphy did this AFTER he was on SNL. But if has been released before he auditioned, do you think he’d have been hired?

Of course he would have. Because the Mr. T thing was a small part of that special (though, I recall, an extremely quotable part) and the people who didn’t like or appreciate the language didn’t have the bionic megaphone of the internet so they could get their outrage all over your conscience. The point is that your podcast is a reflection of your brand. You have to weigh your desire to speak freely and loosely with your desire to keep the Cancel Culture at bay. At a MINIMUM, though, you should keep things clean for your clients, listeners, and most importantly, your potential customers. Shane Gillis missed out of being on SNL and fame, instead on infamy because he broke one of society's biggest rules:he said something controversial out loud. Granted, it was in bad taste, but if that were a crime half of us would be in jail. It's just important to remember that your language on a work-based podcast should be professional, which I realize cannot be defined easily, but maybe stay away from slang and cursing. Just because you CAN doesn't mean you SHOULD.

#podcast comedy hilarious

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nvzblgrrl · 4 years

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On the subject of old fics 1

Allegedly, A Gentleman’s Tale (published 1-6-2012) was my first fanfic ever (again, allegedly - will explain after a bit). It only exists now as a private copy at least one person has saved and a capture on the WayBackMachine (which thankfully covered the whole ten chapters of it), because I have a habit of... deleting stories that embarrass me after the fact. It’s something I’m trying to break myself of, mostly because there are a number of people who do enjoy my work even if most of what I see in it are the flaws and I would feel bad about taking away something they enjoyed.

The ‘allegedly’ part comes in in that, based on my memories of my One Piece OCs and stories (along with more concrete evidence from my tumblr), I had a few OCs with snippets of story (with one who had at least a few chapters worth of story that I have memorized in broad strokes) attached that preceded that by at least one or two years, even though the description of ‘my first fic’ was in the synopsis of the fic as it was posted. Unfortunately, it’s hard to trace that information thanks to the ‘destroy all the evidence of me embarrassing myself’ habit (I completely deactivated my deviantart account on account of ‘cringe’, that’s how bad it got) and the passage of time making it unclear which mutuals might have been around at that time or if they even remember those things.

Now, I still have the computers that I typed up those stories on (they’re hanging out in my basement), but - they haven’t worked in quite a while. I’m not sure if they’re completely bricked or not, but I haven’t had anything to do with them for a while and I know that at least one of them was replaced because it refused to turn on anymore. Someday, I might get the chance to pull out their hard-drives and get a look at the data there, but that’s not a ‘now’ solution so...

Anyway - got a bit distracted there -, thanks to the power of the WayBackMachine, I was able to reread this specific fic in its entirety.

‘A Gentleman’s Tale’ was a little thing that was pretty much Brook backstory wrapped up in the framing device of Luffy wanting a story to help him get to sleep. I was 18, had maybe a year or two of creative writing experience/interest under my belt, and a whole lot of Soul King Stan energy to spend on my favorite character despite being at the tail end of my high school career.

Surprisingly, it was not entirely awful for an alleged ‘first attempt’. The formatting was a little eh, the pacing was borked, and a lot of characters were fairly flat (and a few leaned too hard on certain stereotypes while a lot had Western order names for some reason), but other than that, it was actually palatable. Ten chapters, about 8000 words, not a whole lot to write home about or find objectionable outside of the odd grammatical error and the fact that alcohol is mentioned in almost. every. single. chapter.

Seriously, I have no idea why that was a thing for me 2012-2013ish (it ended up in Witt and Witticism a little bit - more heavily on the rewrites that never took off back in the day but a little present in the original too). I was 18-19. I’d never had alcohol. I still haven’t had alcohol. I’d never really been around drinking at that age, socially or not, beyond like, enjoying brew fries and eating chicken tenders at a bar one time because my shit father wanted to have lunch there for some reason. I just guess that I woke up at the start of 2012 and thought Drink Mixing and Booze were interesting things.

The story wasn’t much to write home about, but the characters are the real area of interest here, so let’s cover them and a few of my plans for handling them in the rewrite.

Brook - Starts out his backstory being seasick, gets to have five decent minutes when he meets Yorki, and then is immediately shoved into the wall-to-wall shitshow that’s his life as the battle convoy captain and resident responsible adult, despite 70% of the convoy being at least ten to fifteen years older than him. Somehow that makes his interest in getting black out drunk almost every single night sound reasonable. Seriously, that’s what he was doing in that story, according to what happened almost every other chapter of the fic (because pacing is for writers on their third or fourth story). That’s one reason why the timeline is being stretched out in the rewrite plans - so we don’t kill the main character through alcohol poisoning (though with the kind of stress he was under in that original cut, I can’t blame him for trying - he got saddled with three weird + constantly fighting teenagers and a dying military organization, snubbed by the king, publicly embarrassed in front of 90% of the kingdom’s nobility, and so on in the course of two to three days max). Honestly, in retrospect, I’m not sure how well this plays with the framing device of Brook relating his backstory 62 years later, because he should have lost so many brain cells to this nonsense.

Yorki - Starts his introduction by saying ‘hey, my name’s Yorki, i’m close, bi, and willing to take you on a whirlwind adventure literally two seconds after meeting you’ which Brook immediately responds to as the best thing that’s happened to him in the last (and probably next) month. Probably the only person in Brook’s life as of the fic not stressing him out or enabling his self-destructive coping habits, though that doesn’t stop him from being one of the better things Brook woke up to after one of his blackout drinking nights. Also got an incredibly shitty nickname thanks to me not knowing how that sort of thing works from his mom. In the rewrite, he’s from Ohio (because I and my Middle-Ground lingering Self-Insert are from Michigan and the opportunity for a struggle between ‘hey we’ve both being isekai’d into this weird place and have similar backgrounds/music tastes so we’re going to hang together based on that’ and ‘200 year old inter-state hatred turned into over the top sports rivalry and disliking the other state on principle’ was too good to pass up).

Luchere Gregg (Gregg being her surname) - junior member of the battle convoy. Incredibly thorny and violent personality, with very little respect for authority (outside of her father, probably) and a generally superior attitude towards literally everyone except her father, especially when she perceived someone as being weak and ‘uppity’ at the same time - Maysure was the main target of this (as was intended at the time of the writing), but considering that Luchere was taking a similar tone with Brook (which was probably intended to be for different reasons, but honestly reads very similarly almost ten years on, given that Brook’s everything is very much not in line with her ideal anything) but not Hana (who was ‘weak’ but definitely not trying to mess with Luchere’s preferred social order), I think I can get more development out of her in that dimension. Her everything was probably was cool and badass back when I was 18, but now she just strikes me as petulant and unpleasant brat.

Minalee Hana - Generic smart guy of the junior team, complete with ‘shy’ personality and ‘harmless cute’ look... which, in retrospect, makes it really confusing why she’d join a military force in the first place and just raises suspicions on the fact that she did. Honestly she could be a Government plant and I wouldn’t be surprised. Another ‘problem’ with Hana is that she was based on someone I was friends with at the time I wrote the fic, which kinda ended up helping me dislike her a lot on more recent rereads, just because of the nature of that real world ‘friendship’ and the way it blew up in the end (with a whole lot of ugly reveals along the way that went back to pretty much when I first met that person).

Maysure Semenov Tara Su-all Evony Taebory Celeste - was originally a parody of the Mary Sue archetype, as you may have guessed from the name. Flashy, overeager, desperate for acknowledgement, and not quite managing to act in ways appropriate to her age (15, directly stated in text), either being too cutesy with her speech pattern and body language or dressing in ways that would be suited for a very different profession than soldier. I ended up liking her the most out of the junior trio out on my most recent rereads, just because she’s the only member of the group that’s actually making an effort at anything (well, beyond Luchere being hostile + trying to make Brook leave), doesn’t go out of her way to be hostile or destructive, and isn’t vaguely there in a way that makes me suspicious. Apparently was the only one of the junior trio ever stated to have weapons training (with Luchere being an unarmed fighter and Hana... just being there) and was apparently dedicated enough to it to have the schedule for the different training drills memorized.

Captain Gregg - the former captain of the battle convoy. He was never seen, only ever referenced in the fic. Based on the content, he was pretty much Luchere 1.0 - crass, unpleasant, violent, and without a lot of tolerance for those that couldn’t deal with or keep up with the unfortunate matter of his everything. The notes on rewrite so far have him becoming a lot more pleasant and lot less generally awful person, though still a bit of a roughneck and unpleasant to be around if you aren’t cut from the same cloth or a similar weave. Was not inspired by Captain Clegg until I started imbibing pop culture in preparation for the various parts of the project.

Jeevenine - quartermaster of the battle convoy, bartender, and carrier of heavy butler vibes, which feels like it might have been intentional. Said to be a master of ‘improvisation combat’ but honestly seems to be the person most likely to have taught Brook his style of fencing (based on his speed and precision being noted as something Brook had difficulty keeping up with in text) and his gentlemanly ways, considering every other character I wrote into the convoy is some flavor of hot mess and either a bruiser or a gunman. Still loses points for enabling Brook’s blackout drinking habits and being passive-aggressive instead of properly helpful.

Jack Rackum and John Delacroix - sniper-spotter pair, as indicated by their nicknames of ‘Windward’ and ‘Leeward’ respectively. Highly implied to be in a long-standing romantic relationship with each other or at least in a long-term holding pattern of pining. Delacroix’s tendency to sleep in the nude is used as half of a ‘my eyes’ joke that Brook is the victim of (the other half is Maysure’s chosen nightclothes being both stereotypical of a ‘Mary Sue’ and vastly age inappropriate, which is a running gag with her). Rackum gets the most description out of the set, with his brown leather hat and green-grey hair being mentioned, along with his taste for fruity cocktails (he might also be an alcoholic, which isn’t really all that remarkable in this fic).

Kurotora Ren - Big Guy McHugeBeef. Also the guy responsible for keeping the battle convoy awash in homebrew booze. Almost kills Brook by accident during his introduction by clapping him on the back at the exact wrong moment. Doesn’t have a lot more detail than that, mostly because he slides into the background after that brief focus moment, but I like him for being genuinely sorry about the near-death thing on top of being friendly for real and not being duplicitous about his wants + thoughts.

Zest - noble. Stupid. Probably the closest thing that Brook has to a friend in his actual age range at the start of the story, which is really fucking sad considering Zest’s everything and the fact that Brook doesn’t enjoy his company at all. Somehow when I was 18, the idea of a guy who spent most of his time in some state of wasted and trying to get his ‘friend’ (who doesn’t even like him that much but seems to tolerate him more than literally everyone else Zest ever interacted with who wasn’t being paid) into a similar condition because of unrequited love or something was tragi-cute-slash-funny instead of pathetic and faintly disturbing (though I guess I might end up writing him as tragic again anyway just because it probably takes Some Shit to make a person like that). Spent 90% of his screen time in the old story making Brook’s life inconvenient and the remaining 10% fully aware that his own life is going nowhere. His personality is oddly similar to Maysure’s, which is... interesting, implications-wise. Holy Shit, is this guy going to be a trip to work with as an adult.

#the big fat one piece fic project #talking about old fic #a gentleman's tale #my writing #if you have any questions about this or other fic i've done feel free to fire away

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years

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WHY I'M SMARTER THAN USERS

Smoking rapidly became a statistically normal thing. As societies get richer, they learn something about everything and everything about something.1 In fact it's the old model: mainframe applications are all server-based software assumes nothing about the paths from poor to rich, I knew I could see myself—making at least 4 of these 5 mistakes. And bingo, there it is: The Men's Wearhouse.2 But as knowledge has grown more specialized, there are few strong enough to keep working on something no one around them cares about.3 As well as being smarter, they tend to be calmer and more upstanding; they don't need you, it will work anywhere the Web works. It was only then that we realized that they were started there. Unless you're planning to write math applications, of course. Where is the man bites dog in that?

Life in Berkeley is very civilized. During the 90s a lot of money. The simplest answer is to put them in a row. They were also a kind of semantic deficit spending: they knew new things were coming. Professors in New York and the Bay area are second class citizens—till they start hedge funds or startups respectively. I recommend being good. But I remember thinking his company's name was odd. They were also a kind of selflessness. That VC round was a series B round; the premoney valuation was $75 million. Economic power would have been the part where we were working hard, the groups all turned out to be, there are no customs yet to guide you. He tried to make it open. It's not something people tend to volunteer; one likes it the way one likes popping zits.

I want to do better. They usually know other founders, and certainly not you as an investor. And once you've written the software, and issue a press release saying that the new version was available immediately.4 Startups are stressful, and this made their software visibly inferior because among other things, incubators usually make you work in their office—that's where the word incubator comes from. The thesis seems to be that the most important consequence of realizing there can be good art is thus a property of the subject or the object if subjects all react similarly. What most don't realize is how late.5 What you're doing is business creation. Google does. There are sometimes minor tactical advantages to using one or the other, like a detective trying to unravel some mystery.

But writing and art are both very hard problems that some people work honestly at, so they're worth doing, especially if you can see your email, why not your calendar? VCs are pretty good at reading people. PR firms. Whatever looked like the biggest win.6 Treat the first few as an educational expense. Developers have used the accelerometer in ways Apple could never have imagined. So I added a message at that point. In art, the highest place has traditionally been given to paintings of people.

The self-reinforcing nature of this situation works the other way too: the less you need further investment, the easier it is to travel widely, in both time and space. The only place your judgement makes a difference is in the direction of over-engineering. The summer founders were as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly. Much of what's in the sage's head is also in the head of every twelve year old. If a physicist met a colleague from 100 years ago. I doubt it could be any other way, as long as the potential returns look good enough. Odds are this project won't be a class assignment.7 Our only expenses in that phase were food and rent.8

Why does John Grisham King of Torts sales rank, 44 outsell Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good novel wouldn't complain that readers were unfair for preferring a potboiler with a racy cover. Viaweb let multiple users edit a site simultaneously, more because that was the truth. All you'll need will be something with a keyboard, a screen, and a funnel for peers. We always looked for new ways to give stuff away for free if advertisers would let them. His office was nicknamed the Hot Tub on account of the heat they generated. They're as expert in their world as you are in yours.9 Shockley Semiconductor, though itself not very successful, was big enough. The cheery, bland language of the people in a position of independence, they develop the qualities they need. It's something you're more likely to work in the end, and now he's a professor at MIT.10 This is particularly true of young people who have till now always been under the thumb of some kind of paternal responsibility toward employees without putting employees in the position of children. From this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what to look for in founders. Because ambitions are to some extent marketing as well.11

How do you be a good angel investor? And how do you avoid mistakes you make by default? Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few top university departments and research labs—partly because investors are so unlike hackers, and they even let kids in.12 Currently the way VCs seem to operate is to invest in a bunch of ads, glued together by just enough articles to make it true, and the fact that they control Google, which affects practically everyone. Microsoft do? Among other things, they had no way around the statelessness of CGI scripts. Most high school students have searched for does not seem to exist.

Notes

Acquirers can be done, she expresses it by smiling more. And of course reflects a willful misunderstanding of what they too were feeling in 1914.

Ii.

I've said into something that would appeal to investors, you need to import is broader, ranging from designers to programmers to electrical engineers.

Founders rightly dislike the sort of person who would in itself, and Smartleaf co-founder before making any commitments. The other reason it used to end investor meetings with So, can I count you in? There's a variant of Reid Hoffman's principle that you can play it safe by excluding VC firms have started to give them sufficient activation energy required to notice them.

5%.

Revenue will ultimately be hurting yourself, if the statistics they consider are useful, how little autonomy one would say that I'm clueless or even being deliberately misleading by focusing so much on the blades may work for us, the airplane, the median VC loses money. I don't think you need to play games with kids' credulity.

Yes, there are before the name Homer, to the home team, I've become a function of the big winners are all that matters, just their sizes. Look at what adults told children in the succession of spectacular treason trials that punctuated Henry's erratic matrimonial progress made him an obvious candidate for grants of monastic property. Though nominally acquisitions and sometimes on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit.

They'll be more likely to resort to expedients like selling autographed copies, or black beans n cubes Knorr beef or vegetable bouillon n teaspoons freshly ground black pepper 3n teaspoons ground cumin n cups dry rice, preferably brown Robert Morris wrote the first language to embody the principle that if a company they'd pay a premium for you by accidents of age and geography, rather than for any particular truths you'll learn. But no planes crash if your school, secretly write your thoughts down in, but this could be pleasure in a bar.

And I've never heard of investors want to change the number of startups have some kind of people we need to, so they will or at least for those founders.

In a project like a winner, they tend to say they prefer great markets to great people. But the most successful ones tend not to say they were still so small that no one on the parental dole for life in general we've done ok at fundraising is a scarce resource. The obvious choice for your side project.

The point of a cent per spam. One of the Daddy Model that it makes sense to exclude outliers from some types of applicants—for example, if you like a loser they're done, at least notice duplication though, because they can't afford to. But it's telling that it refers to features you could get a poem published in The New Yorker. This is what you love, or because they couldn't afford a monitor.

Actually he's no better or worse than Japanese car companies have been the first version was mostly Lisp, you should. I'm pathologically optimistic about people's ability to solve a lot of successful startups. There are some good proposals too.

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alienaesthetical · 5 years

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Ah, the 90s- a decade of questionable fashion choices, dial-up internet, and shape-shift-enabled teens with depression.

Some of you may remember Animorphs as those wacky adventures with kids who could change into animals. Others might remember it as the series of books featuring kids who watched an alien be cannibalized in front of them, going on to fight a cult, attempt suicide, commit genocide, and attain PTSD.

In all truth, my memories of it were completely vague, with what images I could remember mostly based off of one of the extended universe novels, Andalite Chronicles. Having completed a reread of the series a few months ago, however, I was able to put together my own thoughts.

So, which was it; Tragedy or Comedy? Why do people remember it differently? Let's answer the former question first. Spoiler warning, by the way.

Animorphs was co-written by K.A. Applegate, and her husband, Michael Grant- both of which are still successful writers. The story starts in the spring of 1997, local teens, Jake, Rachel, Cassie, Marco, and Tobias, exist as a clique in a way- each representing the awkwardness of the 90s in different ways. Jockey Jake has an awful haircut, Gymnast Rachel, initially, is the living embodiment of gender roles enforced in the 90s, Horse Girl Cassie experiences discrimination multiple times throughout the series due to her skin color, Marco is the groups token funny guy who has too much flirting energy, and Tobias, the local victim of literally the entire series. Seriously, this kid does NOT get a break. The entire group is just overtly 90s and it's honestly quite awkward and sometimes humorous how enforced these roles are from the start. Anyways.

The group of friends are heading home from the mall, and decide to take the shortcut through a construction zone- (and yes, I realize how many stories begin with taking sketchy shortcuts.)

As they proceed through the construction zone, a ship descends on them, its doors opening to reveal a dying Andalite named Elfangor. What's an Andalite? Breaking it down to the essentials, a four eyes, blue furred deer with a scorpion tale and a nose that should probably be censored.

Elfangor, who speaks telepathically, tells the kids about the battle for earth- an invasive species known as the Yeerks have already integrated themselves into society, and pose a threat to the entire galaxy. Yeerks are basically slugs that slither into your ear and take over your body- while you remain 100% aware, most likely crying in a corner.

While the kids are skeptical, they don't fight him on it, and agree to help. Elfangor gives them a cube called the Escafil Device- a cube that grants those who possess it the ability to shape-shift into any animal they touch. He warns them, though, that staying in morph for more than two hours will result in being trapped in that body forever. After all six are holding the cube together, more ships arrive.

The kids go to hide as one of the descending ships opens, revealing another Andalite- this one, however, is being controlled by a yeerk named Visser Three- the only yeerk to have ever possessed an Andalite. He proceeds to morph into a creature from another world, and vores Elfangor.

The kids are heard crying by one of the alien guards, and a chase begins- though the kids manage to escape without being seen. They go on to have nightmares about what they just saw. Jake is woken up by Tobias the next day, who claims he managed to turn into his cat. Jake, hearing this, touches his own dog, acquires his DNA, and morphs into him- much to his own surprise.

Later, the group meets up at Cassie's barn, which also acts as a rehabilitation center for animals, thanks to Cassie's parents being vets for a local wildlife amusement park. They discuss what to do, and while trying to forget everything was an option, decide to fight back against the Yeerks. Now knowing the basis of the plot, you can see how this story could be seen as a lighthearted adventure full of shenanigans- but as the books continued to come out, the story grew darker.

Jake's brother, Tom, is revealed to be a high status controller- a person under control of a yeerk. Jake now has a personal stake in this battle, and begins to take it more seriously. Jake goes on to find out that The Sharing, an after-school program dedicated to helping kids fighting loneliness and depression, is actual a cover for the Yeerks, who use the society as a cult that recruits said kids into their ranks- which is how Tom fell into their hands.

Jake and the others decide to infiltrate a yeerk pool- a place where Yeerks go to feed on Kadrona Rays, which is what the sun on their home planet exerted. They find an entrance within their school, and break a handful of people out, only for all but one to be recaptured, or murdered. In addition to this failure, the kids notice that Tobias is also missing.

Tobias would later escape only to inform the group that he had been in hawk morph for a bit too long, and was now stuck in that form forever. All of this happens in the first book alone. Perhaps you're starting to see how it could be interpreted as a darker story, but you're not quite convinced. So, let's talk about what happens it the other sixty four books.

In book three, Tobias attempts suicide, trying to slam himself hard enough into glass that it would kill him. Marco, however, throws a baseball just in time for him to fly safely through the glass.

In book four, Marco discovers that his mother, previously thought to have drowned years ago, is Visser One, the highest commanding yeerk outside the council.

In book five, Elfangors younger brother, Aximili, is discovered, weak, leagues under the ocean, having crashed there the same night Elfangor died.

Still expecting this story to be happy in the end? Gonna kill that delusion right now.

Thanks to having dead parents, Tobias had been physically and emotionally abused by his aunt and uncle for years, the two trading him off to one another throughout the year. However, Tobias discovers his birth mother to still be alive, living with blindness and amnesia. His birth father, however, was Elfangor, making him Ax's nephew.

Closer to the end of the series, the group recruits disabled kids into their ranks, promising them that their wounds and illnesses would heal after their first morph- which, for some, was true. Others would still have to deal with with their disabilities- but not for long, as all seventeen disabled kids were slaughtered, as part of a distraction plan.

In the climax of the last book, Rachel murders Tom, only for her to be killed herself moments after, while Jake commits genocide by releasing a large majority of the earth populace of Yeerks into space, killing them instantly.

The result? The war ends! Yay! Happy ending! Not quite! Jake suffers from PTSD, going on to experience flashbacks in the last half of the book. Tobias escapes life as much as he can, retreating to a natural reserve to live out the last of his days. Rachel, well, Rachel dead. Cassie and Marco live... surprisingly decent lives, both going off to do things close to what they wanted to do. Cassie works in a newly established division of the government that helps relocate aliens, while Marco is essentially a movie star.

So yeah, Animorphs definitely wasn't as lighthearted and happy-go-lucky as some may remember- of course, the story did have huge moments were it screamed "WE'RE KIDS, WE ARE GOOFY 90s KIDDOS," such as the book about Oatmeal being used as a weapon, or that time they convinced Visser Three that the only way to remove the smell of skunk was by bathing in grape juice instead of tomato juice.

To remember the series as either one or the other, however, completely defeats the purpose of the books.

Animorphs, in the end, was a story about kids who were forced to grow up faster than they should have, due to the mistakes of those older than them. Kids who wanted to go skating or eat at McDonald's, but instead had to take a weekend to recover from being entrapped and physically tortured. Kids who thought they knew what right and wrong were, but ended up doing everything they said they never would do, just to win. It's a story about kids- what they should be, against what conflict makes them become.

It's also about how adults like to control kids, even if they think they're free. Elfangor started this by giving them the responsibility of ending a war. It continued with the Elimist, a godlike being who would come in throughout the story to make sure the kids did exactly what they were supposed to do, instead of doing what they wanted to do. Visser One, the yeerk who discovered Earth, gave the responsibility of invading it to Visser Three, instead of handling herself due to personal engagements that happened.

What begins as another nineties adventure of five kids of varying backgrounds, ends as a reminder of what happens when adults put too much pressure on children, and the consequences of forced growth. The kids, once gathering at malls to hang, or attending school, become so separated from their reality that escaping humanism seemed like the happiest possible path (tobias), that letting yourself die was better than returning to a war-less land (rachel), making regrettable choices at such a young age resulting in PTSD, constant flashbacks to times of immense danger and death, a complete separation from the present. (jake)

Leaving children to suffer the consequences of a war not belonging to them resulted in more tragedy than necessary. Forcing kids to make grown up decisions before they've even entered high school only gives them depression, anxiety, and dissociation from reality.

Thinking younger generations can handle the repercussions of your actions, thus making it not your problem, brings the end of youth and innocence.

Millennial humor is often looked on as "dark and depressed," and those Millennials, now in the work force, are accused of bringing the end of many businesses and morals held previously by older generations.

Gen Z is viewed as completely nihilist, having even darker humor, with many having a complete separation from the reality they live in. They're viewed as lazy and brainwashed by entertainment media, when in truth, more happiness can be found in books, games, and television than in their own lives, and it is a daily experience for many of them to wake up in a world that is dull and dystopian compared to the wonders of fictional universes.

These generations are expected by previous ones to pick up what they left for them- to prepare meals with the scraps of meat so carelessly dripping out of their mouths and onto the floor. To end wars they've started. To fix the economies they themselves ruined. To be able to open the Burger King the day after a customer is murdered before them.

Responsibilities created by previous generations that are viewed too troublesome to deal with themselves are being pushed onto our generations, with the belief that our generations can take these responsibilities without so much as a grimace. However, just because one thinks others can handle issues, doesn't mean that they should have to.

Animorphs has an ending. It is not a happy one. It is not an awful one. It is happy for the ones who did not have to endure the war others left for them. If it awful for the ones forced to handle situations pushed on them by adults who thought the problem best be left with the future.

The problem may have been fixed, but an entire generation of people were left to suffer because those in charge refused to handle it themselves, and chose instead to leave it to someone else.

#animorphs #long post #text #jake #marco #tobias #aximilli #cassie #rachel #yeerk

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techouspeaks · 5 years

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Classic Reviews: Big Bad Beetle Borgs and Metalix!

“Three typical, average kids were founded by Saban! Just by luck, got picked up and now they’re a PR spin off!”

I know, that was bad and I should feel bad but I don’t. Least not that much...

So, I was looking to review something and I decided to do some series that I’ve done only brief look upons, such as the series from my top “90s Kids Shows That No One Talks About” and go on from there.

I’ve talked about Big Bad Beetle Borgs before but not in good details. I’ll try to keep from repeating too much and just get my basic thoughts on it. The real question is whether this series is better or worse than Power Rangers?

Big Bad Beetle Borgs is a series by Seban Entertainment who gave you series such as Power Rangers, X-Men (1994-1997) and the infamous but kinda famous dub of Samurai Pizza Cats. Like Power Rangers, Seban obtained clips from the original B-Fighter sentai series from Japan and combine it with it’s own story, characters and gags. The show ran for two seasons which is the same as B-Fighter and first aired September 7th 1996 and the second season aired in March 2nd 1998.

The show unlike Power Rangers, kinda had a sitcom element and wasn’t as serious as Power Rangers would get. It had a more comedic tone, making this especially for younger kids. It was basically the Power Rangers for kids that couldn’t handle the “heavy” drama that Power Rangers, least the later series, had. Does that make it good or bad? Well let’s look at the story.

The story focuses on three kids as I said, name Drew, his sister Jo and their friend Roland. The three kids are basically your average kids as the theme states. They like to read comic books and kinda had the 90s theme going on of liking things that were “EXTREME” and used a bit dated 90s catchphrases. Though I will say that they weren’t too bad on that. They did use the catchphrases a lot less. In fact I think Flabber, the ghost they freed did more the catchphrases than the kids, now that I think about it. I’ll get to him in a bit.

One day the bullies of the town (And I guess their school. I’m trying to remember if you ever did see the school.), dare them to go into the Hillhurst Mansion, an old, fallen apart, abandon mansion on the outskirts of town that’s said to be haunted. When the kids do, both the bullies and our three heroes discover that the house is indeed haunted, by monsters that are loosely inspired by the classic horror monsters of the golden age. The monsters chase the kids around the house trying to eat them, until the three kids stumble upon an old pipe organ. When the kids play the organ, it frees a ghost named Flabber, who you could argue is trying to be like Genie from Aladdin. He’s got blue skin and tries different impressions and is able to grant wishes. At least one wish out of gratitude.

The kids wish to become the Beetleborgs, the heroes from their favorite comic book series and as he does, he accidentally releases the villains of the comic, the Magnavores. Now it’s up to the three kids to be Beetleborgs and save their town from the Magnavores and try to get them back into the comic, which the kids make no hesitation to agreeing upon.

Later series, Metalix had the Beetleborgs go up against new villains and try to gain the “Astral Borgs”, which were special and more powerful allies, along with the Monster’s new recruit of “Little Ghoul”.

Is it as bad or good as Power Rangers? To be honest, I think it’s a little better than Power Rangers, at least in my perspective and mainly in the campiness of it. The one thing about Power Rangers is that it’s doing all the corniness with teens to near adults and sometimes that works fine in some series like my favorite series Wild Force, Ninja Storm, Dino Thunder and Maho Tsukai! (Just kidding!), Mystic Force, but other times, especially the first series, it’s pretty painful to sit through, least in my opinion.

BBB handles this campiness well. It knows what it wants to be and gives the kids what they want. They want to feel like they can be the hero, they want to see Flabber doing fun little magic tricks, they want to see the fight scenes and they want to see some good old fashion slapstick. Being it’s kids and not teens or adults as the main heroes, the campiness fits more at home in this series.

The series also has a bit of heart to it. You can tell the actors playing their roles had a good time. Well, at least for the most part. Some of the kids kinda feel bored at times. At least sometimes. Other times they seem to enjoy their roles fine but it just seems to be the adults that had the most fun. The kids act fine in this but other times when the drama was big, their acting could have used a bit more energy, but they were kids at the time and for Seban no less. I mean Seban is not exactly a dub of quality as many would know! You can tell they were at least trying with what they were given.

The characters are well likable too. The kids for the most part are likable and charming and seem to have enough character to them enough to identify them. Drew is the typical kid that wants to be the leader and the “cool type” but he’s also down to earth. I’m glad they didn’t make him too cocky or too “extreme 90s” like so many of the “cool kids” were at that time.

Jo is your tomboy girl but she can be like her brother, she can be rather down to earth when she needs to be. I also like how they explained why she looked and sound different after the original actress left. Wolfie casts a spell from a magic book, changing her appearance and then Flabber counters a spell so that she would look the same as before to everyone else, but to those who witness the first spell being cast would see her as her new appearance. That’s actually kinda clever. Usually when an actress or actor leaves, they do something, like another option they could have went with was to have Jo go to boarding school or something and have her be replaced by another tomboy girl. Shoot, maybe a foreign exchange thing but I guess because Jo was well liked by the kids, they just didn’t want to replace the character so they just made a clever idea to keep the character and explain why she looked and sound different.

Roland is the only one that I kinda don’t get into. He’s fine, he’s just not very interesting and I don’t remember him getting a whole lot of character development or focus a lot. Make whatever racist comment about it. To me, I think they just didn’t know what to do with him but needed a 3rd character and an excuse for the kids to get the comics easily and for the kids to be really close to the adult characters of the Comic Book store, without it being seen as creepy.

Though one character I barely remember was Josh. A kinda resident “popular kid” who temporarily becomes the White Blaster Borg to fight and defeat the Shadow Borg, in a Yin Yang sorta way. I just remember he and Drew were rivals for the affection of the popular pretty girl in their town and that he would lose his powers forever since his sole purpose was to defeat Shadowborg, which he didn’t care too much because being a superhero was too much for him.

Flabber, while you can tell he’s trying to be the Genie from Aladdin, especially the fact he has blue skin and has magic, as well as do impressions of other things and famous people and references, he doesn’t feel like a total rip off. He does generally have his own sense of identity and it’s hard not to like him, least for me. He can be a little annoying with his antics, but he’s still quite charming and helpful and usually I don’t like Elvis impersonators, but he doesn’t do that too much despite being dressed like one. Put it short, I like Flabber and while I can see what he’s trying to do, he doesn’t feel like a total rip off the Genie.

Flabber also helps defend the kids against the Hillhurst Monsters who tend to try to eat the kids. By the end of the first series though, they ultimately quit doing so and do occasionally help the kids out on their adventures.

The Hillhurst Monsters too have their own personalities and quirks. In fact, I think it’s safe to say that that’s what drove the kids into the series. The actors who did the monsters seemed to have a lot of fun and a lot of the series episodes focused on them despite being mostly comedic relieves. Each episode ending credits had the monsters do some crazy high jinks while the credits rolled. They each have their own back stories and we even see some personal endeavors they have to face from time to time.

First you have Count Fangula who is a vampire that isn’t quite competent in his vampire skills. He tries to but more often then not fails.He almost gets sent away by the master of vampires that looks exactly like Vlad the Impaler, for having a victim count that’s too low. He’s the only one that can tell what Wolfie is saying. He also seems to be the most sensitive sorta, next to Frankie, but also sensible. He knows when to back down most of the time and seems to have good surviving instincts out of all them and is easily scared the most.

Wolfie or Wolfgang is a werewolf that eventually joins the residents of Hillhurst in the first season. He’s probably the most bravest as he has tangled with the bad guys more than once. He barks and makes Scooby Doo like noises and as said, Fangula understands what he’s saying and translates. He acts sorta like their dog and sleeps in a dog house next to Frankie.

Frankenbeans or Frankie as he’s called, is as you expect a Frankenstein type monster. He’s talks more like a toddler and literally has no brain, which is the cause a lot of jokes involving him. He’s rather the most innocent of the monsters because of this. He can be a bit more threatening when angered, sometimes even the other monsters can be a bit intimidated by him since he’s got incredible strength.

Mums is a 5,000 year old mummy who was once a prince that got entombed for kissing Cleopatra in public. He’s a bit sarcastic and can be very funny and comes up with the most insults and jokes. He also seems to be the most encouraging and helpful of the bunch, giving ideas for plans and schemes, sometimes even thinking of good solutions for the Beetleborgs from time to time.

Eventually, the Hillhurst residents get another resident called “Little Ghoul” who happens to be the Grim Reaper’s niece in training. She’s sarcastic, violent and a bit of brat! So much so that despite her pint size body, she even scares the other monsters especially in her true form, which she hides under a hood. She has high respect for the Astralborgs, the powerful allies I mentioned earlier and will help them out without hesitation.

The first bad guys were actually kind of interesting. They’re the typical bad guys that just want to cause trouble for the sake of it but they have such personality that makes them stand out. The three main goons are Typhus, Noxic and Jara and they actually prefer chilling out and scaring the heck out of people most of the time. Typhus loves to eat, Noxic is the smart one that was voiced by Impmon/Veemon from Digimon and Jara was the sassy female villain that also gained a few chuckles since she was the more competent of the two. Even Vextor, the main boss has some pretty funny moments and interesting design. (My favorite line was when he said to his three henchman "If there's a brain cell among you, it's dying of loneliness!" )

The bad guys for Metalix though are pretty lame...There’s nothing really that stands out about them. I mean, I thought it was pretty funny that the main boss, (yeah I don’t care about his name), actually grants a kid’s wish to have a monkey instead of a dog after the boy helps him. That’s pretty funny but yeah, the villains in Metalix are pretty weak.

I actually forgot to mention what Metalix is about. It’s pretty much the same thing as the first series but we’re introduce to the new villains and a “twisted” comic book artist named Les Fortunes (Get it?) that is the brother to the comic book artist for the BBB comic books, Arthur “Art” Fortunes. Art decides to help the BBB by making new armor and weapons that Flabber can bring to life. He actually does show up in the first season but returns more often in the second season.

This sounds cool but it kinda ends up pretty weak. For one thing, again not so creative villains. Again, at least with the first ones, they have personality. Here they don’t. The concept of the good artist vs the bad artist is an interesting idea but it’s not done very well here. First, Les is pretty creepy and unsettling also aside from being twisted, what did he actually do to warrant being in jail? I can think of one thing and lets just say he shouldn’t be around kids... Plus, the brother, Art, while likable enough, their rivalry is too childish and out there for even this series. I mean, yeah the adults here act way out there but this is way too out there.

Does this mean the second series is bad? Well, it’s not horrible or unwatchable, it’s just kinda weak in some areas but it still does focus on random adventures, introducing new characters including a fourth Beetleborg and focusing on the Monsters of HillHurst, so it doesn’t change too much from the first plot. It’s just kind of weak with what should be an interesting concept and the new villains just lack a personality that stands out. Shoot, the new villains are called the “Crustaceans” and only one is actually a fish monster that’s not even based on a crustacean of any sort! Did one of the staff members had something against sea food and decided that should be the villains? Even so none of the other Crustacean soldiers are based on aquatic animals. You got Horribelle that’s based I think on a mantis, a fish monster and the main boss is a triceratops.

So yeah new ideas that just simply needed to be thought out better, but the heart and most of the other adventures remain roughly same as the first.

The animation and effects are cheesy as well as you would expect from a Seban Power Ranger’s spin off, though the parts with the Comic Book transformation and transits are done very well and creatively.

I can’t be too hard on this show. It’s a show that isn’t good but it’s charming and fun and that’s what this series was meant to be. A cheesy, creative and fun adventures with a colorful cast of characters. Sure there isn’t anything much for adults in it but if you like corny, cheesy goodness, I would give this a go, especially if you are Power Rangers fan and can enjoy the corniness that PR can bring. There’s nothing at all bad in it for kids or any horrible lessons, so I definitely do recommend it for young children to watch it. I give the first series 6 1/2 stars out of 10 even if I’m being a bit generous and Metalix 5 1/2 stars. Not good, not bad. Just a right in the middle corny fun to bug out on.

BBB: 6 1/2 Stars!

Metalix: 5 1/2!

Level: Good!

#90s #90s kid #Power Rangers #seban #big bad beetleborgs #fox kids

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thehanniecorner · 5 years

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I recently wrote about my ten least favorite books of the year so far, so it seems only appropriate to write about my ten favorites, as well. I’m quite fortunate this year, as I already have over ten five-star reads, and several of them are new favorites of mine. It has been a good year so far, and I can only hope that the second half is even better. In the near future, I will be writing a larger reflective piece where I discuss the first half of my reading year in more detail, as well as set goals to guide what I read for the second half of the year, so keep an eye out for that! My hope is that this top ten is totally different at the end of the year because I found tons of new reads that I love just as much or more than the ones on this list. For now, however, all I can do is show off the amazing books that I have read so far!

Note: If you are interested in any of the books I am discussing, I will be including an Amazon associate link for each one. As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. I’ll get a small commission at no additional cost to you.

10. You Asked For Perfect – Laura Silverman

You Asked For Perfect is the textbook example of a lucky find. I picked it up on NetGalley simply because the cover looked nice and I’m so glad I did, as I’m not certain if I ever would have found it otherwise. This book has the best description that I have ever seen of the pressures that come with constantly striving to overachieve in high school. The protagonist is constantly struggling with his need to be the best as he attempts to navigate his senior year of high school, while also wanting to just have fun and pursue friendships and romances like many of his peers do. It’s a short and quick read that I would highly recommend, and I have more details in my full review.

Amazon

9. Better Nate Than Ever – Tim Federle

Over the past few months, I’ve been working on an experiment where I read the books that Goodreads recommended to me based upon my favorite and least favorite reads. Better Nate Than Ever is a recommendation given to me based upon my love of George by Alex Gino, and I couldn’t be happier for the push in this book’s direction. For one thing, it cemented my newfound love for the middle grade genre, and for another, Nate is one of the most adorable protagonists that I have ever read about. His dialogue is true to how children his age would actually talk and he’s so full of energy. He has a goal of making it onto Broadway and he will do anything and everything in his power to make this happen. This is the start to a trilogy that follows Nate, so I will definitely be checking out the rest of the series this year.

Amazon

8. Saga, Volume Nine – Fiona Staples and Brian K. Vaughan

I was about ready to give up on Saga before I read the ninth volume. While I enjoyed the series at the start, as more characters got added in and the plot focused more on the politics and less on the star-crossed lovers that I initially signed on for, I began to lose interest. This ninth volume was going to be the last one I read, as the series has gone on a hiatus and it seemed like a logical stopping point. When I made this plan, however, I was not accounting for the fact that the ending of this collection stabbed me right in the chest with a huge plot twist and left me needing to know what happens next. While I’m not entirely certain that I like the direction that this series is headed, I can’t deny that this entry left me emotionally gutted and needing to know how everything turns out.

Amazon

7. Paperback Crush – Gabrielle Moss

Paperback Crush has a narrow niche that it caters towards, and anyone outside of that group isn’t going to get the appeal. This is a nonfiction reference guide that outlines the history of the Young Adult book genre, with most of its attention dedicated to the 80s and 90s. As someone who has read nearly every book prefixed with “Sweet Valley” and constantly daydreamed about being Claudia’s best friend in The Baby-Sitters Club, this book is probably the best thing that has ever happened to me. I got to relive my entire childhood, learn quite a bit about how the YA genre got to its current form, and even dragged up some old memories of books I forgot I had read. For example, I totally forgot about my entire phase where I read Lurlene McDaniel’s sad books about kids with horrible diseases that often die at the end, but now I remember and learned a lot about how The Fault in Our Stars came to be so popular.

Amazon

6. The Immortalists – Chloe Benjamin

I knew from the second I laid eyes on the publisher’s description for The Immortalists that I was going to love this book. Four siblings go to a fortune teller and find out the exact day that they are going to die. From there, they spread out and live their lives with this information. Any story that discusses fate or time is one I immediately feel drawn to because I love the complexities of the conversations involved. For example, if some of the siblings learn that they are going to die young, were they going to die at that age regardless, or did they begin to live more recklessly because they knew their days were numbered? Would they have all lived happily to the age of ninety had they not gone to the fortune teller because that act, in itself, determined their fate? These are the sorts of questions that I pondered through the entirety of the time that I was reading this book, and I loved every second of it.

Amazon

5. Roller Girl – Victoria Jamieson

As I stated with Better Nate Than Ever, I have been diving into the middle grade genre a little more than usual lately and been having pretty good results. Roller Girl is a coming-of-age tale told in the graphic novel format about a young girl who decides to try taking up roller derby. It’s a sweet book that I found myself flying through in a single day due to its vibrant art style and relatable characters. I find that, in a lot of respects, middle grade books are actually easier to relate to as an adult reader than their young adult counterparts, even though they are written with a far younger audience in mind. They contain less angst and are more about the sorts of topics that any age can relate to, such as learning to fit in or following your dreams. I will discuss this more in my reflective post, but I think transitioning to prioritize adult and middle grade titles over young adult for a while would probably result in enjoying a higher percentage of the books I read.

Amazon

4. Charlotte’s Web – E.B. White

It is a goal of mine to read all of the major children’s classics in my lifetime. In my experience, children’s classics like Charlotte’s Web have all of the same symbolism and messaging that their adult peers have, but they’re a lot more fun to read. The friendship between Charlotte and Wilbur was adorable and I couldn’t believe that it took me so long to get around to such a sweet story. As an adult, I loved it, but as with all children’s books, I’m sad I didn’t get a chance to read it as a kid, as I would have treasured it years ago. E.B. White has a sizeable collection of titles that I still need to read, so I highly doubt that this is the last I will ever see of him.

Amazon

3. Scythe and Thunderhead – Neal Shusterman

I decided to put Scythe and Thunderhead together, as I liked them an equal amount and didn’t want to take up two entries on this list. Shusterman’s new series is shaping up to become one of my favorites of all time, so long as the conclusion out later this year turns out to be the same level of quality. It’s dark and tackles some very real societal problems, such as what happens when we do overpopulate the world, and how would people cope in a world where they aren’t actually needed for anything? I have a whole (spoiler-filled) discussion about where I want the series to go for the finale, and it is safe to say that The Toll is my most anticipated book of the year.

Amazon

2. My Sister, The Serial Killer – Oyinkan Braithwaite

A lot of people were talking about My Sister, The Serial Killer because it was nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction. I love a good thriller, so I picked it up immediately, and it was not what I expected at all. As the title suggests, this is a book about a woman whose sister is a serial killer. It isn’t much of a thriller, however, as it instead explores the complicated relationship between the sisters and why they would be willing to do anything for one another, even though one has a love for stabbing people. While it wasn’t what I expected, it’s still one of my favorite reads of the year and definitely my most pleasant surprise.

Amazon

1. The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo – Taylor Jenkins Reid

I feel like I’m behind on this one, but words cannot express how much I love The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo. It took me a while to get around to reading it because I was scared off by the hype, but that turned out to be a silly fear. This is one of the best-written books I have ever read. Every detail put in the writing builds one of the most realistic portraits of a complex woman that I have ever read. If Taylor Jenkins Reid came up to me tomorrow and told me that Evelyn Hugo was a real person, I would believe her because it can be really difficult to remember that she’s fictional while reading the book. Obviously, I am always hoping to find a book that I love more than my current favorite because it means I’m reading lots of books I love, but it’s going to be difficult to top this masterpiece.

Amazon

That’s it for the books that I have read and loved so far this year! I can’t wait to see what the second half of 2019 has in store for me. What are your favorite books of the first half of the year? Let me know in the comments below!

Best Books I Read So Far in 2019 I recently wrote about my ten least favorite books of the year so far, so it seems only appropriate to write about my ten favorites, as well.

#books #Lists #reading #top ten

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nursehealthcoach · 3 years

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What is a worrying thought, and Why do I have worrying thoughts?

BECOMING AWARE OF OUR THOUGHTS OF WORRY

Did you know, the average person has upwards of about 60,000 thoughts every day? And almost 80% of those thoughts are negative thoughts? 95% of the thoughts we think each day are the same thoughts we thought yesterday, and the day before. Even more mind boggling, is that people worry about the future or think about what happened yesterday, or last week, or last year. Very few of our thoughts are about THE PRESENT. Why is it we don’t often think about NOW? Do you spend a lot of your time worrying about what might happen? 85% to 90% of what we worry about never happens. If and when what we worry about does happen, 80% of the people it happened to had no problem handling what did occur and some say that it taught them a lesson. That’s a lot of wasted energy worrying. Worry, for a lot of people is a major source of stress and anxiety and can actually cause depression. Do you want to learn how to change your thoughts and get out of fear and worry about the future? Stay tuned for future posts. Or Contact me to learn more about my services.

BECOMING AWARE OF OUR NEGATIVE THOUGHTS

Have you ever silently berated yourself for making a mistake? Have you ever yelled silently at yourself for failing a test, or being late for an important appointment? Why? No, seriously, why? Are you aware that most of us talk to ourselves worse than we ever would to someone we don’t even like? We tend to be harder on ourselves than on anyone else. We would never talk to our friends like that. I’m sure you’ve hear people say, “Oops, I’m an idiot”, or “ I’m so stupid”. Maybe you’ve even noticed that you do it to yourself. When you keep telling yourself something your mind looks for ways to make it so. Really! We create our own reality! Wouldn’t it make sense to tell ourselves “Oops, silly girl, next time it’ll be perfect.” or “Darn, another experience I’m learning to be better.” We need to learn to be our own best friend. We need to learn about those thoughts that are going through our heads all the time and start tuning into what we are telling ourselves. Many of those thoughts we learned when we were young. We learned from the adults around us, parents, teachers, sometimes our siblings. People told us things that weren’t true. People may have called us things that aren’t true, were never true and will never be true. I remember a school principle saying “That child will never amount to anything in life.” That child was 8 at the time. That child carried it with him into adult life before he decided to destroy that belief before it destroyed him. Become aware of the negative thought and change that thought to a more positive thought. Make it a better feeling thought. With time, you will get better and better at it. With time, you will create yourself a new reality. Want to learn more? Contact me.

SAME THOUGHTS TODAY AS YESTERDAY

Up to 95% of the thoughts we think today, are also the same thoughts we thought yesterday, and the day before. Most of us are creatures of routine. We get up in the morning, check our emails, maybe check our social media, or the news, go to the bathroom, brush our teeth, get ready for work, have breakfast, get the kids off to school, then go to work. We also have a routine when we get to work. It’s no wonder that we think the same thoughts day to day when we have the same routine day to day. What would happen to you if you changed your routine? You’d have to change your thoughts. What if you didn’t check your emails, social media and the news first thing in the morning? It makes for a less stressful start to your day. Try brushing your teeth with the other hand. It’s unfamiliar and it means you have to think about what you are doing. You just saved yourself 10 minutes in not checking your email and social media, so you can leave for work 10 minutes earlier today. Traffic is little lighter because you left 10 minutes early and the commute is easier and less stressful. You arrive at work in a good mood and you were able to save even more time because you left home a little earlier than usual. It is as easy as that to change your routine and to change your thoughts. Little changes every day in what you do and in what you think really can change your life.

Want to learn more? Would you like to learn how to really change your reality? Contact me.

source: https://nursehealthcoach.ca/blog/83-what-is-a-worry-thought-and-why-do-i-have-worrying-thoughts

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isroselalondebisexual · 7 years

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What do you think the following kidswaps would be like: Rose Strider, Dave Lalonde, John Harley, and Jade Egbert

So I don’t actually engage with kidswaps a bunch because I don’t really get where most people are coming from with them, but my understanding of kidswaps is:

You take the canon kid but raise them in their surname’s household.

One of the cool things Hussie did with the guardians was that they fit fairly well into the four parenting styles Authoritative, Authoritarian, Permissive, and Neglectful. Quick psychology overview, there are two categories parents usually get defined by, Involvement (also known as support or warmth) and discipline (or demand). Authoritative parents give high support/involvement/warmth, and moderate discipline, which is sort of the ideal parenting, and that fits Dad Egbert pretty well. Authoritarian is low warmth/support/involvement but high discipline/demand, which Bro Strider fits. Permissive is high warmth, but low discipline, which goes well with Mom Lalonde. Neglectful parents are low warmth low discipline, and are often absent entirely, which our unfortunately dead Grandpa Harley was (and from evidence in Hiveswap, probably would have been even if he was alive). Lucky for us Jade had a radioactive dog to raise her in his stead.

So we’ve got a girl like Rose, raised in an authoritarian household, I’m just gonna go ahead and say Bro Strider because I don’t know how guardians usually work in kidswaps. So Bro “I got possessed by a demonic puppet at age 0 and have lived with that thing in my head all my life” Strider is aggressive, unreliable, attacks his kid on a dime, emotionally distant, and emotionally detached. Rose, who is already pretty embittered by her mother in canon, would become someone utterly infuriated with the world. She’d forgo her passive-aggression games in favor of being outright nasty and rude most of the time I’m talking full 90′s cliche delinquent here. Serious behavioral issues, “who’s going to make me” attitude, seizing control by force wherever she can because control is something that’s stripped from her in her home life. Distrustful of other people’s intentions, probably always sees the worst in others, the kind of person who’s just waiting for the other person to prove her right so she can point at them and say “Ha. I knew you weren’t that nice.” without full awareness that she was the one to push them to snapping at her in the first place. REALLY nasty downward spirals of aggression and more aggression and a paranoid survival-based hair-trigger set of reflexes. Probably useful as a Seer of Time, but not good for her well being by any stretch of the imagination.

Then we’ve got Dave, raised in a permissive household by Mom “I drink to forget that the world is about to end and also because I’m lonely and life is hard” Lalonde. On the upside, he’s got a parent who cares about him now, on the other, he’s still a kid who’s gotta grow up too fast, bc his mom isn’t really a mom. She adores him, of course she does, but she’s drunk off her ass eight days a week so Dave’s sorta gotta be his own adult, which doesn’t end well. He probably gets along with her though, thinks he’s got a cool mom when really she’s just an enabler to pretty much anything he wants to do. I’d imagine a Dave Lalonde would end up sorta spoiled, used to not being told no, raised a rich kid, he’s used to being able to get whatever he wants after a little whining and would likely have a bad reaction to being told “no” when he starts out. A well intentioned dude who wants to be soft, but believes he has to be the “mature” one of the group, just listen to him he’s the smart one here. Probably thinks photographing plants and collecting roadkill in jars makes him “cultured” and “refined” and tries to use that as an excuse for why everyone should listen to him. Part of that is just him being used to having to act the adult in his home life though, so it’s natural for him to think that he’s the mature one, the put together one, the one who’s too old for that sort of childish nonsense. Also likely knows he’s pan/bi before the Game even starts tbeh. His quest as Knight of Light would probably involve him mostly just figuring out how to be a kid again, something he’d initially resent, like Rose resents the girlishness of LOLAR in canon, but would warm to eventually as he comes to terms with the fact that he’s not an adult, he’s allowed to be a kid.

Then John, raised in a “neglectful” household as much as having a dead guardian can really raise him, left with First Guardian Bec and the carapacians of Prospit. He’d probably be really starved for attention. Even more of a class clown than he is in canon, but this time only on a deserted island. Just a boy with his dog, and his dream scape to make friends with strange white chess people, whose customs are very much not human customs but ah well. Depression likely sets in a lot sooner for him without a parent around, and it’s easier for him to lock himself away from the world when no one’s even in his world on that lonely little island. Laying in bed all day watching movies and texting his friends and playing online games are less “interests” as much as they are “the only hobbies he has access to AND energy for”, than in his canon timeline. He’s still a boy overflowing with love for his friends, and would probably maintain his goofy disposition, but he’d be lonely and tired and depressed and it would likely be hard for him to work up the energy for his childhood nonsense that we all love and adore so much from canon. Bec, at least, would get him up, because dogs are high-energy pets and need daily exercise, and John would never ever let his dear sweet Bec get affected negatively by his depressed moods. He’s a boy who wants to be in love with life but it’s really, really hard. His quest as the Heir of Space would be something of a spiritual journey, I think. Becoming one with the universe, coming to terms with the good and the bad, the highs and lows the desirable and the ugly, and, by extension, learn to balance his own inner joy and despair. Once he reaches an understanding with that which is whole, he is better able to handle his own cycle of depression, which never really truly leaves him but he is able to handle it, engage with his loved ones while maintaining his own illness.

Jade, raised in an authoritative household by Dad “I love my child more than my own life” Egbert. Probably gonna be the most well adjusted out of all of them, surprising literally no one. Might be a little less punchy than we see in canon, having had a parent to appropriately model reactions to things like annoyance and anger, and probably has less access to rifles than our girl in canon. Still buff as shit tho, that much hasn’t changed. A witty problem solver, someone who’s had the support needed to really help her flourish, added to her own genius self. Has less need for the dreambot, but is still interested in science and furry/wolfkin stuff and her dad is, of course, only supportive (even if he doesn’t really understand the wolfkin/furry stuff, he supports his child and her interests). Wins ever science fair ever held and Dadbert is just standing with a camera beaming in the background. A go-getter and a high-achiever, sharp-tongued and able to use wit and snark and humor in order to win her battles instead of just out-screaming Karkat, regional winner of the Screamer Award (to be fair, that moment in canon was ICONIC). Isn’t necessarily GOOD at rolling with the punches, but is capable of it when she feels inclined. Her quest as a Witch of Breath would probably be something of a spiritual healer for the rest of her group? Someone who can manipulate the Aspect of freedom and in turn give that to her friends and loved ones. Someone for Dave to joke around with and just be a kid with, someone John can look to for support and help him when life is just too heavy, someone Rose can rail against and see that there is indeed still kindness in this world and yeah Jade isn’t perfect, she’s tempermental and a compulsive liar but she’s good and she’s loving and she wants nothing more than for Rose to feel okay again and Rose does indeed want that and wow JadeRose would actually be exceptionally good in this kind of kidswap wow. And in helping her friends, that would be an act of liberation for Jade too, because sometimes “we” is easier than “me” and sometimes “let’s” is more doable than “I’ll” and “I’ll do this for you” is easier than “I’ll do this for myself.”

Anyway I got super long winded there but here are my Thoughts tell me what you think.

#Rose Lalonde #John Egbert #Dave Strider #Jade Harley #Homestuck #answers #Rose Strider #Dave Lalonde #John Harley #Jade Egbert #John #Dave #Jade #JadeRose #mentioned #long post #beta kids #homestuck meta #analysis

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happydogslove · 3 years

Text

FEEDING DOGS

WHAT VETS RARELY TELL NEW PUPPY OWNERS

We love our four-legged companions. We spend a lot of money feeding them.

Having been a dog owner, and caring for dogs professionally for many years, I have become aware of the myths and misinformation regarding dogs' diets, and the implications that the wrong food, and feeding routine, can have on their health.

My intention of writing is to help dog owners gain a better understanding of their pets’ needs and to keep them out of the vets.

I am always mystified why many vets never challenge what a dog is being fed, as a big clue to diagnosis. Cruciate ligament injuries in young dogs are, in my opinion, nothing to do with breeding when a rescue mongrel suffers from it. Why aren't more dog owners and vets asking "why"? So many illnesses dogs suffer could be avoided.

I apologise for the length but it is an important subject.

‘Hangry’ Puppies

Puppies need food little and often. Their growth and energy output demands plenty of fuel.

My advice to all new dog parents is to spread out their food intake, from a daily ration. Little and often. Avoid long gaps without food, because empty bellies = trouble.

Something I get asked a lot is “Do puppies need dedicated puppy food?”. The answer is – yes, if it’s possible. It is better in quality and may not contain as many contaminants as adult food. Your dog needs to be fed as a puppy ideally for the first 12 months of their life, after which they will be fully grown.

Dispelling a Serious MYTH

"Dogs are always hungry, no matter how much they have eaten".

There are two types of hunger: one that is a neural reaction creating a drive from an empty stomach - which we all feel and

hunger that exists in the brain as a mental condition caused by deprivation. It leaves a big, deep mental mark. You can feed a dog who has suffered extreme hunger more than its stomach can hold and it will still never be satiated.

Increasing the amount they eat, is dealing with the wrong hunger issue.

A dog like this, you feed little and often - spreading out their recommended daily ration. Adding a little water into the food bowl can help them feel it goes further as well as keeping them hydrated.

Once you have put some food into their tummy, it is definitely helpful to know that if your dog is still mithering for food, it is nagging from conditioning, rather than pure hunger.

Think how big a dog’s stomach is - look at it as a bag that mustn’t empty out for any length of time. If it does, you'll hear it gurgling and your dog will be gastric juice, bile sick. It hurts them. Imagining the stomach as a small bag also helps when considering food portion sizes.

For those who have finicky feeders...if your puppy is continuously looking at you for food - offer them some kibble. If it’s eaten straightaway, your dog was genuinely hungry. If it’s a “nah”, then you know the nagging was more for attention and a tasty treat. Because true hunger will demand anything edible.

You need to know your dog is not running on empty. I have known dogs eat mud, soil and its own poop and will steal food off counter tops, even though it knows it’ll be punished. Dogs don’t want to be punished. Try to remember the last time you felt hunger - what did you do?

And I ask .... “what can they do?”

It is a myth that hunger is a normal state of existence for a dog.

Ask a famine survivor if they can forget the sensation of hunger - they’ll say “never”.

My experience is that most dogs will naturally self regulate their food intake. Even labradors and retrievers. When they’ve had enough - they leave it.

If feeding dry food - always mix a little water with it to make a soup. (I should say, I strongly dislike feeding dogs a solely dry food diet.) Dry food contains a lot of oil (often the cheapest kind, used industrially and in engines). The oil is required to process the dry food through the dogs digestive system. It leaves a nasty slick in their mouths - hence the need to drink. There should be no additional salt (sodium chloride) in dog food yet I’ve tasted dry dog food - and it was salty and greasy...just saying.

A dog kept on a 100% dry food diet will begin to feel empty and hungry not long after eating. Because a lot of what they’re eating is... AIR and oil.

Puppies eat dry food from pure hunger drive. It is last-resort-food for them. Hunger and an empty tummy = bad feeling often resulting in hyper activity and poor behaviour.

When you’re hungry the drive to eat can stop you doing anything else. We will find food wherever we can by turning to the fridge, cupboard, a shop or fast food outlet, to assuage that hunger. It doesn’t mean what we’re eating is good for us! In fact, we’ll make our worst nutritional choices when we’re our hungriest!

What can your dog do? Where are they going to find food? How difficult must it be when they see us eating in front of them?

They smell with an intensity. But they’re not allowed to go near that food so they’ll steal it off counter tops/tables/bins….

Many dogs fed good diets, become fastidious eaters. They know what they like - and it’s not processed food.

Unless

They’ve been left so hungry they never forget the sensation of that and will eat, regardless until they’re sick. And this mental conditioning happens when they are puppies...

Dry Food often means - portly dogs

Kept on a dry food diet, dogs put on weight, because of its carbohydrates, fat density and additives of rice, maize(corn), oats and perhaps cereals... unnatural canine foods. Peas and chickpeas are one of my major bugbears - they’re usually like cannonballs, uncooked and unnecessary for a dog to have. They pass through undigested, can cause wind and tummy pain. So I pick them out and am appalled at the quantity, in ratio to the meat.

Dry Food Processing

Dry food alone is not good for dogs. It is cooked at a very high temperature - removing all nutrients and moisture, it becomes one colour (brown) so colouring additives are often used and the nutrients added in after - hence their presence in the ingredients list. There’s plenty on google about it.

In some dry food there is just 4% protein and meat products meaning you’re paying for 96% of nonsense. Real meat (not chicken proteins which can be their poop) is what dogs need to thrive. Turkey twizzlers - junk.

Rancid & Risky - mistake of buying for convenience and penny savings.

Puppy parents and owners of hungry dogs, often buy huge bags of dry food. As soon as they open it and allow the air in - they’re also allowing in moisture that’s in the air. This then reacts with all the oil in the dry food - eventually turning it rancid. After a week of the bag being open - you are feeding your dog food that is turning toxic. Smell the food from a newly opened bag with the dry food from a big bag that’s been open for a few weeks.

Do you leave salad dressing out of the fridge once opened? If you did, after a few days the oils would turn rancid. There’s no difference in dry dog food.

Many owners forget their dog is growing, so feeding the same dose of dry food the packet prescribed a month back with a long interval between meals. If a puppy’s last meal is about 5pm and they’re not fed again until 8am in the morning - that is a long time to go without food. Can you manage it?

These little beings are going through huge growth, especially whilst they’re asleep. They burn vast amounts of energy which demands fuel.

Dry food manufacturers spend a great deal on marketing their products and the packaging to keep it immaculately dry - until you open it exposing the kibble to moisture laden air.

Dry Food and The Lymph System

Ever seen dogs with lumps on their bodies? That may be from dry food which has leeched fluids and moisture from their body as it goes through the dog’s digestive system. It compromises the lymph system’s ability to remove dead cells and fatty deposits naturally. (this is my theory).

‘Meat & Animal Derivatives’ ? Remember Jamie Oliver and turkey twizzlers?

IT IS NOT NATURAL FOR DOGS TO BE CONSTANTLY HUNGRY. (I need to keep repeating this for emphasis).

Note: not a good idea to give your puppy chicken unless you want to risk runny poops.

Turkey is slightly less rich, but give it just in small quantities and if you buy turkey, duck or venison already cooked, make sure there are no preservatives, salt, sugar or chemical additives - 90% do have all of these.

And if you do take your dog to the vets because they’ve got diarrhoea and are advised to “give them chicken and rice” - my advice is DO NOT. It can often make the problem worse.

Fish and rice are a better alternative mixed with pumpkin puree and a clay additive which are easily available online.

Treats cost less if they are little pieces of beef or cheese.

Shellfish is often an ingredient of glucosamine and chondroitin. If your dog develops an itchy skin - that may be caused by an allergy to shellfish. Look for food without it.

Food tins using the description ‘jelly’ or ‘gravy’ should be avoided. You’re paying for water and it’s not ‘food’… back to the hungry dog.

ALWAYS READ THE INGREDIENTS of EVERYTHING

The less ingredients and additives - the better

_________________________________________________

These are the things to safely add into your dog’s food....

Any food that is at least 60% meat with NO preservatives, sugar, oats, corn meal or rice. (I pick out peas all the time from processed dog food. The ingredients list states 8% peas - yet the peas fill about 1/3rd of the tray). Trading standards do not have time to regulate dog food. Pets At Home sell Wainwright’s - which contains oats. Red Flag so read the ingredients…

● Sardines/pilchards with bones in

● Scrambled egg

● Chicken livers

● Raw or cooked full fat minced beef

● Raw chicken wings

● Broccoli (ideally raw and finely grated) and use the water from broccoli and steamed

vegetables

● Grated cheese

● Smoked Mackerel or kippers

● A teaspoon of olive oil

● Any fish and its skin

● A sprinkle of gelatine powder for calcium

● Tuna chunks (cheaper than tuna steak) but not more than once a week.

● Plainly cooked sweet potato in its skin or pumpkin fresh or tinned,

● Carrots (but not too many as for a dog - their bodies see this as acidic)

● Cooked thin beef slices - quite cheap in packets from Aldi’s and Lidl’s but caution as they do contain added salt. Read the ingredients and pay a few pence more for the one

without the chemicals)

● Apples (no pips). Finely grate into a dog’s meal.

● Blackberries and raspberries

● Bone broth made from cooking meat bones (but never, ever give a dog the cooked bone).

Symptoms of food allergies are:

● Bad breath - sicky odour particularly. If it persists even after changing food - it could be diabetes or a broken tooth. Check with the vet.

● Ear problems

● Anal Gland problems - frequent butt scooting

● Skin problems - flaking and scaly, discoloured hair, cysts

Biting at feet and discoloured coat

Inflammation - perhaps the skin around the eyes

● Smelly poops and wind

● Loose and frequent poop

● Yellow coloured poo - the liver is being compromised or there is too much fat in their food. (exception being if they’ve had sweet potato)

SUGAR

It’s exactly the same warnings for dogs as it is for us. Sugar decays teeth, puts on weight and creates addiction to it. There are loads of hidden sugars in dog food and in ours. Become an expert on learning all the different names for it and don’t think it’s OK to share your biscuit with them - it’s not. They quickly learn to expect it and teach children not to share their sweets and treats - because they will - unless you warn them they're harming their pet.

The Vomit Guide

If your dog frequently brings up yellow bile vomit - it is because of a prolonged empty stomach - the gastric juices are devouring the stomach lining which is intensely painful. Vomiting them up is the natural safety mechanism to protect the stomach.

Importance of Calcium

Your dog needs calcium. Do a Google search to find ways for them to get it as we’ve removed bones from their diet. I suggest gelatine - it’s either made from pig bones or beef bones - it’s the same stuff but you can create it yourself just by boiling meat bones for a couple of hours and saving the stock - chuck the bones in the bin though, as they’re dangerous for your dog once cooked. Most butchers are happy to give you meat bones on specific days when they’ve done their prepping.

Become an expert on nutrition for your dog’s health and your family’s.

Antler chews sold in most pet shops are good but don’t give puppies with baby and new teeth a hard bone - or they could break a tooth. Wait until they’re about 6-7 months. Antlers and Kongs are a safe way for teeth cleaning.

The things that put weight on a dog is the wrong food - not the having too much of it. If your dog eats 80% protein and 20% carbs - the protein sustains the appetite so they don’t feel empty so quickly and will keep their metabolism balanced. They just do not need empty carbs. The more proteins and fats (very important) - the longer they can go without feeling hungry. (again, same as us).

A dog in the wild will naturally eat proteins, skin, hair/fur/feather and berries...look at a fox’s poo and you’ll see stones and pips in it, because these work as excellent gut fibre.

Your dog will not put on weight IF you

Balance the energy IN with the energy OUT (it’s basic knowledge)

A good run off lead twice a day in the summer

And an hour off lead in the winter

And plenty of ball play if they enjoy it. Also try bubble blowers...

Rules

● Try to buy Puppy dedicated food but if it’s not - don’t worry.

● Keep dry food as a base but not as the sole diet 20% dry to 80% wet.

● Buy small bags of dry food and always mix with water

● Do not let your puppy get hungry.

● Do not feed foods or treats that have wheat, preservatives, sugars, oats, grains, salt, onions, tins saying ‘jelly’, chocolate but particularly dark chocolate, raisins. Be cautious with cereal and give thought about all the nonsense ingredients added on the packaging of dog food. Herbs and blueberries do not fill a dog’s belly but look pretty on the list of ingredients.

● Balance a minimum of 60% meats/protein in their food to all the other items.

● You can avoid buying expensive processed dog treats made of cereal by buying a block of cheddar cheese and cutting into small pieces or grating it.

● Thin inexpensive pieces of meat (not chicken) can be dried in an oven at a low temperature for a couple of hours...and shredded

● Beware of white rawhide - it’s been bleached and processed with carcinogenic chemicals unfit for consumption. Just go easy on it. There is also the theory that rawhide swells in the stomach but this is unproven.

Avoid anything that says “made in China” where use of carcinogens is not regulated. And you may be feeding your pet, meat contaminated with dog meat.

Always try to feed your dog straight after they’ve had lots of exercise.

Gravy bones and dental chews have sugars and cereals in them. I am suspicious of the value of dental chews - I don’t like them. Fattening, contains cereal and I doubt they really clean a dog’s teeth. Don’t give your dog food with sugar in it and then their teeth should be fine and don’t need to be brushed. It’s another nonsense.

There is nothing better for our dogs than well-thought-out-home-cooked high protein food.

Finally - whatever you do when there is a change to your puppy’s diet - do it gradually. You’ll have a dog with an upset tummy until their digestive process matures. If runny poops happen, buy a tin of pumpkin puree on Amazon - without sugar or additives and mix a teaspoon into all their food. Some dogs will lick it off a spoon. With the rest of the pumpkin in the tin, decant it into small containers and freeze. Don’t leave it in an open tin for more than 2 days.

Thank you on behalf of your dog, for taking the time to read this.

My hope is that some of what I’m saying, will make perfect sense to you.

I am not a qualified vet. I am not a qualified nutritionist.

Everything I write comes from experience and caring.

It is never JUST a dog. They are our loved, thinking, feeling companions where you can make the comparison to a 4-10yr old depending on the age, breed and experience of the dog.

They really do have SOUL

#It shouldn’t cost more than £1.50 a day to feed a medium size dog. And yet there are many begrudge spending that on a dog’s meal.

If you want to save money, cook their food fresh.

I welcome input so if you have contradictions or want to ask a question - don't hesitate.

#feedingdogs #dogfood #dogallergies #lovedogs #lovepuppies #feedingpuppies #dogsdiarrhoea #DOGS #puppyfood #dogtreats #dogadvice #doghealth #dogsfinickyeaters #finickydogs

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lucalicatteart · 6 years

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Notes on latent magical ability

Just a small bit of info on on latent magic (magical abilities that have generally gone undiscovered by the individual that possesses them). Which is actually extremely rare for people to have magic and not know about it, but it is possible in some cases, generally only in very particular scenarios like if someone of a rare species was separated from their family/culture at an age young enough that they wouldn’t have been taught, etc. Especially in rural areas where blood testing and species recognition isn’t super common so they could go undetected (at least until it starts causing obvious problems) and etc. Also I ramble a lot about organizations that exist to help people in this situation and how that functions lol ... hbhb

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!! (NOTE: for some bastard reason this ‘read more’ sometimes doesn’t work when viewing the blog in the sidebar and it just shows up as a full long post?? Sorry if it shows up super long for you, I promise there is a ‘read more’ here, and it’s supposed to keep most of the text of the post hidden unless you click on it, but for some reason sometimes it glitches or something and it just shows up on my blog full length. If you’re having this problem just view my blog in a new tab on it’s own or etc. instead of in the sidebar way. Sorry about that, I still have no idea what’s causing this glitch (which only started recently I think) and i don’t know why the read more works on some posts but not others. If you have any info about how to fix it let me know lol hhh) !!

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Most species who posses inherent magical abilities host that as a major part of their culture and their child rearing process, especially given how catastrophic magic can be if the person doesn’t know what they’re doing, so for most cultures it’s seen as absolutely vital to educate children from a young age about any abilities they might have (of course this only applies to inherently magic capable species, since for non-magical species doing magic is something that has to be directly sought out or learned intentionally, unlike people who are simply born with the ability and just have to carefully learn how to utilize it). But, it is possible for individuals to slip through the cracks.

Basically in any scenario where the species or lineage of someone has been unknown, there can be a situation of latent magical abilities being unrecognized. Especially with the majority of the realm being rural or isolated areas, where blood/genetic testing and knowledge of all different types of species (outside of those the small area frequently interacts with) may be mostly unknown, leading them to be less able to recognize the heritage of a person, or more likely to misidentify it (which is mostly important since your species is generally the primary factor that determines both whether you’re inherently capable of magic or not, and also indicates information about the magic, such as what sorts of magic you’ll be naturally inclined towards, how ‘’strong’’ your base magic will initially be without any training, etc. etc.).

It’s usually also exclusively a problem for children.

Firstly, because if you were around your native culture even to the age of like 3-4 years old, you’d probably at least have some knowledge of whether you’re magical or not or have been exposed to it, since magical education is done fairly young in pretty much any magic capable culture of people. Meaning this usually occurs only for individuals who lost their primary guardians in some way or another as very very young children, and were also under the coincidental circumstance to have been raised far enough away from their native culture or similar cultures that they remain entirely unaware of their background (such as a very young child/baby who’s parents die whilst in the middle of a vacation where they’ve traveled 500 miles away from their home and they’re then left to be raised by the locals, a baby who is separated from their family during a war and then for whatever reason ends up being brought onto a boat that takes them to a place so far away nobody would recognize their species, etc.).

And secondly, because by the time you’re like 8 - 10 years old the latent magic has probably already begun causing increasingly significant problems for you, so it usually can only go unknown about for so long, something ends up being done about it well before they’re full adults or even teens.

Though there can be the rare case of an adult living their entire life and still being unaware of their magic, it would be incredibly difficult for them to not at least realize that something is different about them. Usually if you’re past childhood, you’ve either died as a result of fatally misusing untrained magic by accident, or you’ve had someone intervene in your situation already to help train you in controlling it. So though older people can have been latent magic individuals in the past, pretty much anyone with currently undiscovered magic is likely a child.

Due to all these conditions, this rare issue is generally seen most often in orphanages or similar areas, sometimes children’s hospitals, or small towns who have just had an influx of unknown children due to some sort of displacing even occurring nearby.

(It’s also a rare situation to be in since unfortunately many end up killing themselves by accident or being killed by others for crimes they didn’t mean to commit, so many individuals with latent magic also just die before they realize anything about what’s going on with them. Magic done wrong without a level of knowledge and control can be much more deadly than usual magic (which is saying a lot), unintentional self injury and injury to others only get more and more common the older the latent magic user becomes. Especially in an isolated area where magic is not used or understood, nobody is going to believe some random kid who hasn’t been part of the village that long when they say it’s totally an accident that they burned down a house or killed another child they were playing with, and in more superstitious or harsh cultures they’d just kill the child that’s seemingly brought all these problems with them, if the kid doesn’t accidentally blow themselves up first or something. So like a good 45% - 60% of individuals with latent magic never live long enough to find out about it anyway.)

Usually latent magic expresses itself during times of stress or excitement, or sometimes randomly, typically through unexpected bursts of disorganized energy, or accidental use of abilities (accidentally lighting something on fire, having a burst of energy break a window next to you without you really understanding how you did it since you didn’t touch it, throwing yourself or someone across the room, etc. Though it can be more specific, such as someone with primarily plant magic skills accidentally growing or affecting the nature around them, or someone with inherent soul magic ability accidentally shifting their soul outside of their body or entering someone’s dreams.. But like 90% of the time any form of magic when entirely untrained is just going to present as nothing but random bursts of pure energy. It’s really unlikely they’d be able to do anything specific, since even the most basic thing like growing a flower or something still requires you to at least know what you’re aiming to do first and the essentials of how to divert that energy in the first place. Which is part of why misunderstood/untrained magic is so much more hazardous in general, since all the energy is so disorganized and undirected.)

Sometimes various physical pains and aches are also present in the latent magic individual, due to the host not really knowing how to control their abilities enough to realize they’re emitting low levels of magic energy directed internally, since they don’t know how to utilize any external expressions. It can be possible they’re “using ” their magic and expelling the energy, but only in unnoticeable bursts around their own body, so this constant exposure can harm their physical form eventually (like mentioned before in other posts about magic that discussed physical pain from magic and the factors that play into how physically harmful magic can be to a person, etc.)

Though, these small aches would only be present in the case of an innately high energy magics user, like in a species that naturally has a great amount of inherent energy (such as some types of Jhevona or the verrucalt) , since even if you’re accidentally emitting energy around yourself and etc. , if it’s very very low level minuscule bursts then it likely wouldn’t have a long lasting effect on you. Similar to how common low level internally directed magics (like hiding your presence in public, or basic single trait shape shifting) rarely ever harm the users, since it’s too little energy to really do much damage. So, for it to be physically harmful, you’d have to have pretty strong magical force even in an untrained state as a child.

How much trouble this causes will depend a lot on the inherent abilities and “strength” of the species they belong to. Someone who is some sort of elf with fairly weak magic that has a mild predisposition towards elemental plant magics, may not cause that much issue (lightly injuring themselves or breaking apart trees every once in a while)..

Someone with inclination towards healing magic may heal themselves without even trying to, or more likely, harm themselves, since if magical energy isn’t tightly controlled it can have unpredictable effects, like aiming healing energy towards an arm intending to heal a bone back together and instead you blow up the arm from the inside out, etc. (why people are notoriously afraid of using internally directed magics, even in minor ways lol. Any time you’re directing the energy at yourself it’s potentially dangerous, regardless of your intention (to heal, to harm, etc.))

Though more difficult magics like soul, illusion, and reality magics rarely ever occur as innate skills in anyone*(1) (and if they do, the species is usually hunted to extinction or in such a situation that they’d never have a stray children from their culture running around anyways, such as the Verrucalt), in those cases it’d probably be the most dangerous latent magic to posses, due to the energy level being so high and also due to the subject matter. Imagine being like, 5 years old and trapping yourself in an alternate realm/pocket of reality that you don’t know how to get out of which eventually collapses in on itself and kills you but the whole time you just have no idea what’s going on or how you got there, or like, randomly removing your soul from your body by accident, etc.. So whether the magic is unfocused (just random energy being emitted) or focused (actually accidentally performing something specific like growing a plant or conjuring something), it’s awful either way in the case of a latent magic individual with a powerful magic type inclination.

[* side note 1: And here I mean specifically, being able to use minor forms of the skills without training first, not just having an inclination. Plenty of species do indeed have an innate inclination towards certain types of magic, even difficult ones, that make them easier to grasp and master with less training than usual, or grant ability to access rare skills in that branch of magic that wouldn't normally be accessible. BUT that still doesn't mean they can just use the skills innately without any training whatsoever, an inclination towards a skill doesn't = being able to automatically use said skill. Like the difference between a young child with a species-given natural inclination towards soul magics being able to become much more proficient in them, after training, when compared to outsiders without the same inclination VS. a young child on day one with literally 0 training being able to just pull off a low level feat of soul magic out of nowhere. The former is common, the latter is the one that I mean rarely ever occurs. I just wanted to clarify since the wording may be a bit weird (saying types of magic don't occur as an innate skill very often could be confused for saying people don't have innate inclinations towards magic, which I've mentioned in the past as a thing that does happen, so it may have seemed contradictory lol). ]

Probably the biggest factor in how extensively this could affect someone is the magical literacy of the people they’re around, or their general knowledge of magic within the group. If people know enough to recognize this early and help the person find out their heritage and what sort of magic the’re manifesting and find someone who can train them how to utilize that, then it usually goes quite well. But in the case where like, a magical species child is abandoned and adopted by a non-magical group who knows nothing about the signs or mechanics of magic, and the child just kind of lives in an isolated area never aware of their heritage, that can cause a lot of issues (accidentally hurting self and others, causing unintentional destruction, etc). And like mentioned, usually in this case the child ends up killing themselves accidentally or being killed by the group, or in I guess, still bad but kind of less bad cases, being exiled from their adoptive home (or running away on their own, like if they keep killing people and destroying things and don’t know why, they may decide they’re horrible and just cause trouble everywhere they go and decide to leave, even if the people in their home aren’t upset with them, since they feel like they’d be protecting others by isolating themselves,, though this is usually only older children since like a 4 year old probably wouldn’t have the self concept to think about that sort of dilemma lol)

This only increases in danger with age. Magical energy usually gets stronger as a person grows, up until a particular age, which depends entirely on the species. Though it’s an inborn property for the most part, the development of it still varies from species to species.

Some groups have magical energy increasing until around 50 years of age where you’re full strength *(2), for some by the time you’re 10 years old you’re at your peak ability, some magics grow in energy totally dependent on how developed they are (so someone with little pursuit of training may peak around 30, but someone who trained everyday could reach full natural ability at 15).

And in some rarer groups you can even lose use of magic, like where if you haven’t started training it and using it by around age 8 or so, it gradually suppresses and you function basically as a non magical being, unless sometime later in life you’ve realized what’s happened and find an expert to help you work on uncovering your inherent abilities that have been suppressed (however this is like THE most dangerous and unpredictable situation, you’re better off just accepting non-magicality rather than attempting to access magic that has faded away , since generally people who are attempting to revitalize old lost magic within themselves have the most unstable magic. It’s a bad mix of very high stored energy + complete lack of skill (since you’ve never even used it before). It’s like unleashing a large amount of power out of nowhere with no idea how to control it or what effects it could have and etc. etc. This is rare anyway since again, a majority of species don’t work like this at all (the existence of the few groups who have this type of magic that fades without use is one of the major difficulties in modern scholars’ attempts to form a comprehensive understanding of magic, since it doesn’t follow typical rules of how other species’ magic works lol), but if you are one of those species and you don’t end up honing your magic from a young age and ignore it long enough for it to hide away then its best.. just .. not to mess with it in the future lol)

[* side note 2: Here by ‘full strength’ I mean your full strength of natural abilities,, which is reliant only on inherent power. You can always become stronger than your natural strength through training, up to a point of course (power doesn’t always increase with training, you can’t become infinitely powerful,,, unless of course you’re an ancient demon absorbing the souls of others lmao, but,, through regular and un-complicated means, a person can usually train to increase their inherent abilities maybe up to double or so and then they kind of are just naturally as strong as they possibly could be. Like speaking in video game terms or something (which are not accurate but I keep using them in certain comparisons since it’s just easier to visualize bhbbg): If your complete maximum natural strength is about 200 points or something. As a child you may have like 50 points, and on your own as you grow without any training at all, it could naturally get up to about 150 - 200 or so. You could probably train to get it to about 400 points or so, but couldn’t get it much higher than that without resorting to wild, dangerous, or impossibly tedious things. If you’re especially adept you could maybe raise your limit of 200 to 550 - 600 or something but, it would still take years and years and years of constant training (people usually die before reaching their maximum level of strength, their lifespans usually aren’t long enough even if they train all the time), most people don’t feel like doing All That lol.. and after that you’d either just have to be happy with your honestly earned 600 points or start a murder cult or something to begin leeching power from others. ]

But anyway, generally as someone gets older, their likelihood of harming people or themselves very seriously increases as their power grows (specifics of this depending on how that works in their particular species), so as a child just occasionally levitating or breaking an object around you or bruising your arms with energy, can at age 18 turn from harmless quirks into like, you accidentally picking up an entire cart full of people and slamming it into the ground, completely disintegrating your own insides ,,or crushing the bones of your loved one by blasting energy at them , etc.

There are even organizations and groups that exist solely to be called for these sorts of people, usually specific off-branches of regular magic task force workers*(3). If a kid one day randomly blows up their adopted family with a burst of magic, people would obviously take notice and may end up reporting them and etc. etc. The organizations aren’t usually going to punish them, it’s more about noticing these people ahead of time so you can get them sorted out and everything before they’re able to cause any sort of damage. If anything, they exist more to protect the child from punishment, and occasionally have to step in to help them legally (like if a child kills someone with accidental magic in an area where magic isn't well known, the locals will likely be hostile over it and try to punish the kid and harm them or send them to whatever their local version of a prison system is (if the culture has one), so these people would come in and try to educate the locals about magic and argue that the child shouldn't be punished since it's a complete accident etc. (which sometimes the locals still don't listen and then the representative of the organization usually just helps the kid flee or breaks them out of prison in the middle of the night lmao). If a kid is identified, they don’t arrest them over whatever they did that made them get noticed, these groups pretty much just exist to talk with them and inform their guardians of the situation, set them up with magical training courses so they can hone their magic and not have any more big accidents, connect the child to any resources they may need, etc.

[ side note 3: There are numerous groups around the supernatural realm that kind of exist to subdue people with magic that are causing harm, usually just made up of random powerful mages and etc. (they have to be well above average skill level so they can be effective against most magic users they receive calls about and etc., but it’s not like they’re all insanely powerful ancient demons or anything, just groups of fairly strong multi-skilled mages that have a lot of connections and training in communicating with and helping communities.) They’re reasonably common in areas populated by inherently magical species, but tend to be more of a minor presence considering that if most of the population is magical anyways, they can probably handle magical conflict themselves. So these groups tend to be the most prevalent in non-magical areas, as groups who can’t use magic and have little knowledge of it are highly susceptible to magic crime, or even just non-malicious yet still unmanageable magic users (like individuals with latent magic) that the community doesn’t have the resources to handle. But some of these magical task forces or whatever can also specialize entirely in handling cases like these, usually working with children who have latent magic ]

These organizations also serve to protect the latent magic individual from external forces, since there are certain groups who want to study the nature of magic, and especially doing experiments on people with unknown or latent magic they feel can help fill certain gaps in their research.. Which leads to the occasional shady scientific organizations doing a lot of rounds, posing as fake staff in local orphanages and subtly testing the kids, hoping to take them away and use them in experiments. (since again, this is pretty much exclusive to either orphans or people who were taken away from their families at a young age and adopted into families outside of their common culture, since anyone who is AWARE that their parents can do magic and was raised in a magical culture isn’t going to have this problem, so really the only areas that these scientists target is like, adoption centers, orphanages, occasionally boarding schools that are in areas of war or etc. or are known to take in a lot of lost children.)

This is especially needed if their species is unidentifiable or rare. Similar to how rare species are targeted for stuff like blood harvesting, or other random things, they can also be sought for scientific study, especially studying magic. And just like there are organizations to protect likely targets of the blood trade or groups who are commonly sold for the harvest of souls, there are also people who protect those who would be prime targets for unlawful scientific study (usually rare species that data hasn’t been gathered about, latent magic individuals, other groups with rare or uncommon quirks in their magic usage, etc.). And those organizations kind of intersect a lot with these latent magic task forces (usually the protection groups and the group that are initially called to handle latent magic cases are the same organization, but sometimes they’re separate and just work closely with one another ).

So additionally, as soon as an individual is identified as someone with latent magic, the organization folks usually get involved in the form of setting them up with protections, privately guarding them in certain areas where big bad sciencey activity is high, background checking their guardians and the workers at whatever facility they’re staying at to make sure that none of them are actually kidnapping scientists in disguise, etc.

These organizations also generally focus on getting them training and genetic testing and stuff to better explore their origins and learn about their own magic and how to properly use it.

Many magic scholars and tutors decline to work with people who have latent magical abilities, especially older teens or full adults, since by that point the untamed magic is very very strong yet the user still has completely no grasp of it, so trying to teach them can be deadly if you’re not extremely skilled in defense or deflecting magic, as they could easily posses the power to kill you without any knowledge on how to restrain themselves.

Especially in latent magic users where their species and the type of magic they’re inherently skilled at is entirely unknown (even with species databases and stuff, there are still plenty of unknown groups or groups that are so minor they’d be hard to identify. In like 90% of cases you could probably find out someone’s species with just a little testing, if you weren’t already able to tell by their physical characteristics, though coming across someone totally unidentifiable can happen) , since like… that has a huge effect on how powerful their magic is , and if you cant estimate what you’ll be dealing with you have no way to know if you can handle it or not.

So, latent magic individuals are already often denied training, but especially if they’re very old or if their species is unknown (or both) it’d be a really hard time trying to find someone willing to work on training them, but the organization would still find a way. Sometimes even just higher ups in the organization itself can tend to be members of really powerful species or people with a lot of skill, so they may not even need to turn to outside teachers to help the person with their magic. In really rare cases they’ve had to seek out extremely powerful people to train the latent magic individual, like, ancient demons or more commonly, people who are merely attempting to work their way up to the level of ancient demon, just because the person seemed so powerful everyone else was afraid to offer them training lol*(4).

[*side note 4: though this is morally ambiguous since, while magic growth beyond a normal level is still not fully understood, generally if you’re that powerful you probably have done some dubious things… While you can grow your power over time by collecting millions of tiny micro fragments of souls whilst running a morally fine and legal enchantment shop or something, many of the most powerful people around clearly took shortcuts (just straight up killing people to take their souls or etc.) lol

So sometimes it’s like:

“Well, we really want this latent magic individual to be able to function well and they have to get their magic under control for the sake of their own health and everyone around them… They REALLY desperately need someone who can train them to control their abilities… And none of us can, because from what we’ve seen of this person we’re afraid they could kill any one of us, even the strongest organization members and teachers we’ve reached out to are afraid to try training them due to the risk to their own lives brought by the uncontrollable magic of this person.. so like.. we .. CAN … have this really strong person over here in these isolated mountains train them… But also, should we…. as a moral and helpful organization… leave someone who is officially under our protection… with a person who we’re like.. 70% sure has probably done a lot of uh…. murdering? And crimes?? And is also likely power hungry?? Probably has a big ego, don’t most of them? And what if they’re mean?? You don’t live 3,000 years isolated at the top of a mountain constantly murdering people and harvesting their souls without developing some sort of attitude problem… ....

BUT… it WOULD really help this person and fix all of the issues in their life if they could just have some training.. Really any training… M-maybe we can go with them?? Yeah! We can..uhh.. send a few agents to go with them into the mountains.. Make sure that really powerful person isn’t like mean to them or anything.. They’ll just stay for maybe a few weeks.. Do the bare minimum training in order for the latent magic individual to be safe to be around and then we’ll get them out of there immediately! ……………. Hmm… What if this person in the mountains….this.. very strong.. likely immoral and murderous individual…. just…. kills all of us upon arrival????… Is it really a good choice to bring them to this person?? …It is our only real option though…. aaaaAAAAAAAAAAA” ]

Anyway, the goal for these groups is usually just to educate and better adjust the person, they usually don’t take them away from their situation or anything*(5). They may leave for training for a little while or be taken like to the nearest blood testing place for help finding their species but, usually the organization only intervenes long enough to ensure the person’s magic has stabilized and their lack of knowledge/control over it no longer poses a threat to themselves and their community, then they’ll leave and usually don’t ever come into contact with the people they help ever again (though they can always be called on again is any new problems arise).

[*Side note 5: Though of course they’ll remove a child/teen/etc. from their situation if the people (usually two workers, sometimes three if they need to bring a specialist) initially sent to evaluate the case feel that the latent magic individual is unsafe. There are multiple cases of like, them getting a call from an orphanage about a kid who accidentally hurt themselves or someone else or destroyed property with formerly unknown magic or something and then a few of the agents get there and realize the kid is in an abusive environment or something. They try their best not to displace the person they’re coming to help, but if they arrive and the village is threatening to kill the kid for accidentally burning something, or the parents are hostile, or there’s obvious illegal experimentation plots going on at the local orphanage or etc, sometimes they have to remove the latent magic child from their situation.

Sometimes it becomes even more complicated like, they get to an orphanage to investigate the complaint and upon getting there they realize something is off and try to take the kid out of the situation and despite the owners of the place seeming abusive and careless ONE OF THEM for some ~odd reason~ doesn’t want the kid to be taken away, and then of course this person turns out to be undercover scientist who was only working at the orphanage to scout for latent magic children to use in experiments so now they’re like

“Okay, so first we have to take and protect this kid while not accidentally getting killed by their magic (again, latent magic can be triggered more during periods of stress or excitement so stuff like having an organization show up to help you , even if you’re happy about it, can make you more dangerous), AND we have to deal with this one asshole and somehow explain to the people at the orphanage that their Loyal Staff Member is actually just a spy wanting to kidnap vulnerable kids and they definitely wont believe us because they don’t care, AND that very staff member will probably get violent with us the second they recognize that we know their plan, AND this place is mismanaged and abusive anyways so we ALSO have to report it to the local people who take care of that and try to shut it down, AND if its in a particularly rural area where nobody takes care of that sort of thing then we may have to actually shut the entire orphanage down OURSELVES, which means we have to relocate ALL 135 of the children on our own, on TOP of managing this one child, who again, is dangerous and we need to help them first and foremost, AND the rest of the staff could get violent as well since we already know they abuse children, AND we cant have any more violence around these children…. So maybe we’ve got to..uh….. get them in the middle of the night??? or something???" And it ends up being like, a massive workload for the mere group of five local agents who traveled to the area just expecting to pick up a single kid and leave lol]

Usually after being informed of their background and being helped in training with managing and adapting to their newly realized magic, the person continues on perfectly fine with their lives with no issue.

The training itself can take anywhere from like, only a few months to years and years depending on the person’s situation, the skill of who’s teaching them, whether they stay with one teacher or have to cycle through multiple due to being stronger than expected or etc , how cooperative they are, etc. Some kids understandably don’t see the point in this or don’t get what it means that they could hurt someone, they just see it as like “Hey this random group of people are coming in and disturbing my way of life and trying to take me to some people to do some stupid training I don’t care about , I don’t think I have any problem and want to just be left alone.. I don’t even know these people, how do they know whats best for me?” etc. But after coming into contact, the organization can’t just like, let them go, knowing they’re literally potentially a huge danger to themselves and anyone around them, part of their responsibility is to make sure this person doesn’t accidentally kill someone, especially older more powerful latent magic users,, So sometimes it takes a lot of trial and error until the person actually warms up to them, and lots of finding multiple ways to explain the situation and finally convince the person like “Look, I know you don’t think this is a problem now, but literally if this is left alone , like 4 years from now when you’re stronger you could legit just up and accidentally kill someone and it’s best to help you work on this sooner rather than later” etc. Or bribery.. Bribing people with rewards (especially younger children) to go through training for their magic usually works as well, as a last resort lol.

In some really rare cases, finding out they are capable of magic or finding out details about their heritage can end up changing things a lot in a person’s life, (like a young teen who already has criminal intentions discovering they can now use magic to do bad things, or Someone discovering their original family is actually elven royalty or etc. so they leave their old life to seek that out, or Someone formerly relentlessly bullied by people in the village now being able to take comfort in knowing that nobody will mess with them anymore because they’re more than capable to kill anyone at whim, etc.), though 90% of the time it’s simply mundane.

A majority of the time it's just like: - the local magic task force organization gets a report of possible latent magic, - they investigate, - they see the kid and are just like ‘Ah, you seem to be a Yavairi elf, they specialize in plant and elemental magic specifically of this kind , so , that’s what we’ll look out for and help you with. We’ll try to find an elf or demon with similar abilities to tutor you.”, - the latent magic person is just like “okay cool” and they learn how to control their abilities and they (and their family or community as well) become a bit more educated about magic, - the person just continues on life as normal except now they know they can like, grow plants faster or something lol.

Many, especially those who were raised in non-magic communities, end up never using their magic at all. They learn the basics of how to harness it so that they don’t accidentally hurt anyone or anything but, after that they never use it for anything, and do things exactly how they used to without any changes or modification over them having magic. Especially if it’s a more obscure type of magic, like some 12 year old in a traditional and strict farming village that is very happy with their lives and the community and their way of life having nothing to do with magic or really anything outside of the village, isn’t going to have any use for it if they find out they’re naturally inclined towards soul magics or something lol. Maybe elemental magic they would use, since that could aid with farming (and even then, probably not if the community has negative views towards magic in general), but they wouldn’t have any reason to pursue learning how to jump bodies or enter people’s minds or absorb souls or anything lol. In a lot of cases, the discovery of latent magic is fairly dull and has little impact on the individual, aside from maybe improving their life a bit since now they’re not accidentally lighting stuff on fire anymore.

So anyway, there’s some random not very well organized info on how undiscovered magic can work.

Usually it's a problem exclusive to children (since by the time you’re older you would have either definitely found out about it by then or probably died somehow), it can make you a target for shady scientists or the wrath of small villages, if you don’t kill yourself accidentally or etc. first you’ll likely just get helped by some of the numerous organizations that exist for this, get trained on how to control your magical energy, and then continue life like usual. In rare cases you may have your orphanage shut down, be sent to untrustworthy mountain demons, or discover you’re secretly royalty, but since latent magic individuals really only exist in isolated non-magical areas (or else this would never be a problem in the first pace), it’s likely you’ll just continue on with little differences other than no longer being considered dangerous.

#i need to be working on posts to finish the info about the avirre'thel !!!!! but instead!!!! i keep finding random other things to #think about !!!! bhbhb #worldbuilding #idk if i really have a tag for stuff like this #in terms of making the information easily findable I mostly just link it in pages rather than having any form of comprehensive tagging #system .. aaa

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