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jellybeanium124 · 28 days

Note

Hi, Australian Jew here.

Sending this anonymously because I'm not openly Jewish on Tumblr, however I am considering doing so in the short-term.

I'm sorry to bother you but I wanted to ask you a few questions, if you're open to it (feel free to ignore this if so). Just so you know, I'm asking the same questions of the Jewish bloggers I follow who post regularly - both those who blog about the current Israel/Palestine situation, and those who identify as Jewish but post mainly fandom/other content.

Do you or have you receive/d abuse for being Jewish, or for your stance on the war? If so, how often? How do you respond to any hateful messages? Do you post them publicly or answer them privately? How much would you say your mental health is/has been affected by any messages, or by the content you see on your feed? Have you developed any strategies for handling social media during this time?

Thank you for reading. :-)

I've received maybe half a dozen antisemitic hate anons since 10/7. I wanna say maybe 2 or 3 between june 7, 2020 (when I created this blog) and oct 7, 2023. I think I've posted the hate anons publicly once or twice, but after that I just screenshotted, blocked them, and sent them to one of my jewish friends for mocking. honestly they didn't bother me that much. a lot of them were low effort. nobody even threatened to kill me. the terfs put more effort into harassing me and I'm not even trans. frankly the antisemites need to step up their game.

while the messages haven't hurt me... yeah... the war in general has affected me. I've lost a lot of faith in the strength of my relationships with goyim. several of them have left me. every time I post about the war I'm certain I'm going to lose another friend, and that hurts. it's been a little nerve-wracking discussing it with my irl goyische friends, but to my massive relief all of them are normal about the situation. however, about a month ago, me and a friend of 15 years got into a small tiff about it, and when they went radio silent all day, visions of them hating me filled my head and I had to send a super annoying socially anxious text to make sure they don't hate me now. thank gd they do not. I love them deeply and want them to be in my life for as long as we live. we still have to come up with a gender-neutral alternative to aunt/uncle for my kids to call them someday. if they decided to cut me off that would've been the last straw for a mental breakdown, actually.

sometimes it gets really tough to see this stuff on my dash. I've gotten better at just filtering out all the blocked posts that pass me by. to be perfectly, 100% honest with you, if tumblr didn't allow me to block content so thoroughly and I had to see every single post about the war put onto my dash... I would've left tumblr months ago. or just unfollowed 95% of the people I follow. I could not handle that. I'm sorry. this war did upset me enough to the point where I decided to take a two-day break from tumblr (I... have a problem... you all know how much time I spend here...). I've lost a close friend on tumblr of several years that made me cry. as for other social media? I only look at two people's instagram stories these days. one of my friends, who posts her outfits daily and basically nothing else, and con o'neill. I don't trust anyone else not to put stuff that will upset me in front of my eyes. I've unfollowed a couple of people on instagram because I can't block stuff as thoroughly there. I'm also just... not on ig that much.

the past several months have also made me deeply disillusioned with the state of the left. why should I care about unrelated leftist movements when I know all of my comrades there would turn on me in a millisecond if they knew that I thought israel should keep existing even though it's done horrible things? it's turned me off of activism... seeing these "pro-palestine" protests quickly turn into "harass jews" protests and the way these college students discuss these issues, fetishizing palestinian pain and not knowing a single thing about it, is just... it makes it all feel so fake and hollow. these privileged college kids are comparing themselves to gazans and I'm supposed to believe they actually care about gazans and don't just want to feel like righteous heroes? these people verbally and physically harass jews and I'm supposed to believe they're the good guys? I don't like feeling this way. I wish I didn't feel this way. but right now the only political action I give a shit about is voting. I'm gonna vote. I'm always gonna vote. but why on earth would I get involved with people who say "punch nazis" until nazis are on their side and increase their numbers then suddenly it's all "uwu nazis are hard to get rid of 🥺?"

I understand why you're hiding your jewishness. I've started hiding it too. I stopped wearing my magen david on october 13th. I recently had my first paid film gig (yay for that at least), and whenever I was telling a story that involved my jewishness in some way, I bent the truth to go around that tidbit and told no one. someone asked if I was irish. I answered I was eastern european. a year ago I would've said I was jewish without a second thought.

I'm tired. I want the war to end. I want there to be a peace deal. I want innocent civilians to stop dying and be safe.

I don't think I'm brave, or anything. I'm a safe lil american thousands of miles away. I don't know what palestinians and israelis are living through right now. my pain is a single molecule of sand compared to the pain people actually affected by this war have gone through. all I want is for people to listen to us. I don't speak up to be brave, I speak up because knowing a jew is the only inoculation against the hatred spreading through the pro-palestine movement. because if you know me, then jews aren't foreign. noa's a jew. noa's my friend. noa likes billy joel. noa writes silly incorrect quote posts. noa's a person. she's not some scary unknown. she's my friend.

I wish people still wanted to be my friend.

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raven-at-the-writing-desk · 4 years

Text

Diary of the Writing Raven; Birds of a Feather

For the 1100+ follower milestone, here is the next part of the cursed raven’s story!

This time, we revisit entries in Miss Raven’s diary. A familiar face assumes prominence on the stage--what role will he play in this story of ours?

Part 1 l Part 2 l Part 3 l Part 4

Day 47

I feel like I am being watched.

Uncle says I am just nervous and excited from the ceremony yesterday.

I am not so sure.

Day 48

I ran into that weirdo again today.

The weirdo is named Rook Hunt. He also calls himself the Hunter of Love...? I do not understand what that means.

He said that he will not be fooled again by Mon-sure Mastermind’s tricks again. He said he knows I am a bird, and he will chase me to the ends of Twisted Wonderland to see me in flight.

...Scary.

He shouts many strange words and chases me around. I managed to narrowly miss him by diving into the bushes. He was distracted by some students with animal ears--and I was able to run all the way home safely.

I suppose it is good to be curious, but...Mister Rook is too curious...!!

Why couldn’t I have run into Mister Jade instead?

Day 51

Uwaaah, I saw a very pretty upperclassman today! He had golden hair, violet at the ends.

The pretty upperclassman snapped at Mister Rook and told him to stop scaring me.

I am thankful, but...it seems like that upperclassman was scanning me all over. Judging me silently. I wanted to disappear into my clothes.

Before we part, he tells me that my ponytails are not symmetrical. He adjusts it for me and sends me off.

Mister Rook’s friends are strange people, too.

Day 56

Another run-in with Mister Rook. They seem to happen every day now, though they are not always...eventful.

He says I am too formal, and that I can just call him “Rook”.

He would not stop pestering me until I agreed.

He gave me a toothy grin when I, at last, relented.

What a troublesome man.

Day 57

Ever since I tried Flounder’s Blue, I have been sampling new foods and drinks.

Today, I got a cup of caw-fee.

Silly me, though...I tripped and spilled it all over a Savanaclaw student. He was so angry. He threatened to gobble me up.

I was trembling and sobbing when the Savanaclaw student yelped. Rook had a tight grip on his trail and kept tugging it, saying weird things until he scurried off.

I thank him.

Day 60

It feels like I see Rook around every corner. He does not always approach--sometimes, he is just content with watching from a distance, or he gives a small wave.

Jade has noticed too.

He asks if Rook makes me feel unsafe..

Rather than feel unsafe, I am a little curious as to why Rook is...well, Rook. He is certainly an odd fellow, but when I think back to a few days ago, I can’t help but think he has a good heart.

I do not think he means any harm.

So I tell Jade I am fine.

Day 66

Rook smelled funny today.

He says there was an accident in the Science Club, so he will reek of tomato and basil for a few days. That hunting trip he was planning is cancelled; the smell will alert too many animals of his presence.

I tell him that he reminds me of the pasta served at the Mostro Lounge, and he laughs.

How he is able to stay so cheery is a wonder to me--but it is not a bad thing, I suppose.

Day 72

Rook tells me of a carny-vale in the nearby town, and says I must experience it for myself. I was curious, so I followed.

There are so many bright sounds and sights. It smells like something fried and sweet.

We ride the spinning tea cups and the carousel. They make me feel like I’m flying once more.

I’m no good at any of the game booths, but Rook is. He has impeccable aim and strength. The game booth runners cry and beg him to not run them out of business.

Rook just smiles and asks them for their best prizes. He has no use for most of them, so he dumps his prizes onto me with a part on the head.

My arms are too full to hold any food, so Rook helps feed me. He stuffs funnel cake, cotton candy, and candied apple into my mouth.

The last thing we do for the day is the ferris wheel. We go up and up against the sunset.

In the dying light of day, I realize something.

Rook has very pretty eyes, too.

Day 80

The pretty upperclassman came up and introduced himself.

Vil Schoenheit, Pomefiore’s dorm leader.

The queen.

He remarks that my pigtails are not asymmetrical today, and that I am a fast learner.

“You must be, little Shetland potato,” Vil comments, “if you are to deal with my huntsman.”

Day 84

...Rook was carrying a Pomefiore boy over his shoulder, like a sack of potatoes.

He says that it’s his job to capture runaways, in service of his queen.

...I wonder how much he gets paid to do this?

Day 85

I told Rook about my hiking trip with Jade!

He seemed very interested, listening intently and nodding while I spoke.

Rook says that he, too, is a fan of the great outdoors, and that we should go on a camping trip together sometime.

I look forward to it.

Day 90

Today is the promised camping trip with Rook.

The weather is getting chillier, so he reminds me to dress warm. He will take care of the rest of the preparations. After all, he has had much more experience with these sorts of things.

I’m still cold, even when I show up in three layers. Rook tuts and throws his jacket over me, despite my protests.

He guides me through the forest, pointing out tiny things I would not have noticed on my own. That bunny’s burrow, those squirrels storing nuts for the upcoming winter, the rustle of the leaves, the trickle of water, how the sunlight filters through the trees...

Rook has such a poetic way of speaking.

He reminds me of a prince in a fairy tale.

Day 94

Rook told me that he has noticed that my speech has improved. He is proud, puffing up like a proud father. He spouts some nonsense about how “mon petit oiseau” (he helped me with the spelling) is becoming such a refined young lady.

I told him that his own manner of speech is far prettier than mine.

Rook just laughed and offered to help me improve more and more, if I wish.

I should pay a visit to Pomefiore, he said, and the queen will welcome me with open arms.

Day 95

Pomefiore is...beautiful. Violet tapestries, crimson curtains, and gold decorations dripping from every available crevice. And everyone is just as beautiful as their surroundings, skin like glass and eyes set in jewel-colored shadows.

I expected nothing less of the oldest dormitory at Night Raven College. The castle is steeped in years of history.

I was offered tea and a three tiered stand of snacks. Vil introduced me to a boy named Epel, who squirmed in his seat with discomfort.

He made us hold our tea cups all funny and barked at us to exchange words. Rook stands at his queen’s side and just...smiles at us as we suffer.

After that, Vil shepherded us to a large table, where two sets of cutlery were laid out.

I’m drilled for hours on end, until I can differentiate the several different variants of spoons, forks, and knives. Epel, too.

I am told to return every few days, to join Epel for his lessons. “It would do him some good to have someone to go through the motions with,” Vil insists. “It gives him some much needed...’encouragement’.”

More lessons for me.

...Somehow, I feel like Rook has me caught in a snare.

Day 100

Vil quips that we are learning ballroom dancing today.

I do not see the practical use of such a skill, but he will not take no for an answer.

Epel and I mutter apologies as we link hands and step on each other’s feet. Then the queen has us take turns spinning around with Rook.

He is very graceful on his feet--far more than myself or Epel. I’m nervous when my turn comes up, but Rook reassures me that it will be fine.

His arms form a cage to keep me from stumbling.

He clicks his tongue and says I need more practice.

Day 102

We focused on the arts today. Vil was busy with modeling (?) and told us that Rook would be our instructor. He says that the arts are his best subject, so please leave everything to him.

Rook shows us fruit bowls and pictures of scenery (he says he took the photographs himself)! Then he sets out canvases and paint sets and tells us to follow his lead.

His voice is a soft murmur as he beats his paintbrush against a blank canvas, breathing color into an otherwise lifeless world.

I do my best to do as he says.

Rook glances over--and he tells me, through a blinding smile, that my painting needs some work.

I have to agree.

Day 110

Epel is with friends today.

Rook takes this opportunity to grant me a language and writing lesson. He knows that I like writing, so now is as good of a time as any.

Rook hovers over me at a desk and suggests ways to make my writing sound...fancier.

I practice writing sentences like...

You are the light of my life, the lark’s birdsong in the still morning.

You are as lovely as the petals of a rose, lush and delicate and breathtakingly beautiful.

You are the moon and the starlight, twinkling in the depths of the darkness and guiding me to salvation.

I ask him what the point of these phrases were--and Rook answers, “For when you wish to woo whomever has captured your heart!” He makes it sound so easy.

He teaches me a few basic phrases of his flowery language, too.

I tell him merci.

Day 117

The queen puts books on my head and tells me to walk without dropping any of them.

Rook holds my hand and helps me keep balance.

It is warm, and comforting and supportive, just like Jade’s.

Then Vil whips out a pair of odd shoes, with stick-like things instead of a flat sole. He calls them heels and urges me to put them on.

I fall on my face, and Rook has to help me up.

On my second attempt, he catches me. He tells me I have the grace of a newborn fawn--that is to say, none at all.

Still, I feel safe in his arms.

Day 133

It is cold, and snowy.

Rook drags me outside anyway. He says exercise will do my frail little body some good.

But...no matter what I activity I do, I am miserable at it. Snowshoeing, ice skating, sledding. I am horrible at all of them, and more.

We settle for building a snowman.

I try to make it look cute.

Day 140

The cruise ship is boring. The beach is boring. It’s mostly older folks like Uncle sipping on tropical drinks and sunbathing.

I wish I had someone to talk to.

Of course, Jade would be nice and set my heart at ease...but Rook would be able to make even something as mundane as this fun.

I can already hear him shouting in my head about the clear blue waters, and the amber sunlight, and the snow white sand.

Look at me, I’m beginning to speak nonsense.

Well, nonsense it may be, but it is interesting nevertheless.

Rook is...interesting.

Day 149

There are lots of seagulls here.

...They remind me of Rook.

I am not quite sure why.

Maybe it is the incessant cawing.

Though...that is charming, in its own unique way.

Day 155

Rook brought back a souvenir from his home land--a bright blue feather on a beaded necklace. He says it is similar to the one the young prince of his country wears.

It turns out, he is from the Afterglow Savannah! What a surprise; I thought he would be from the Land of Pyroxene.

He regales me with stories of his adventures, of the many hunts he embarked on and his trophies.

His eyes are like emeralds, shining with excitement.

Day 167

I saw a play with Rook.

It told the story of two lovers whose families detested one another. The actors all speak quite frivolously, just like Rook. I can see why he would like this kind of thing.

My favorite part...it was the balcony scene.

The male lead cannot stand to be apart from the female lead, and so he sneaks into her garden at night. He summons her to the balcony and makes a vow that he will, no matter what, find a way to be with her.

...The play ends with death.

I cried a little, and Rook let me lean against his shoulder until I stopped.

Day 170

I penned a little story based on the play.

This one has a happy ending.

I want to put some hope into the world.

Day 185 (Continued)

I asked Rook if he was excited for Valentine’s Day, if he was expecting any gifts.

He gave me a mysterious smile in response and said, “Ah, that is for me to know and for you to find out, mon petit oiseau.”

I wonder what he means by that.

Day 186 (Continued)

I will give Rook some chocolate, too!

As thanks for being my friend.

Day 197 (Continued)

I made little heart-shaped bon-bons for Rook.

Perfect for the Hunter of Love.

Day 198 (Continued)

I want to curl up and die, diary.

Rook saw me crying today, under the shade of the great apple tree that towers in the school courtyard.

He asked me what was wrong, a concerned look on his face.

I snapped at him, told him to leave me be.

...But rather than bombard me with questions or annoy me with overly embellished words...

...Rook sat next to me silently. He held my hand until I stopped crying.

Then I spilled everything. I don’t know why I did. I...I guess I wanted someone to know of my story.

Starting with my arrival at Night Raven College. Ending with Jade’s betrayal.

I told Rook the tale through my tears and disgusting sobbing. It was absolutely pathetic, but...he listened patiently.

When I finished, he told me something.

“Mon petit oiseau, I would never lie to you.”

And I believe him.

Day 200

I cried again.

Stupid Leeches.

Day 202

I am scared of Jade.

I say as much to Rook.

He makes a joke about sharpening a harpoon and going eel hunting.

...At least, I think it is a joke.

Day 215

Rook now greets me as soon as my classes let out. His smile and laugh are reassuring to see.

He makes sure I get home safely, and without being accosted.

I cannot say merci enough.

Day 227

...It is ironic.

The man I once ran from is now the one I willingly go to for shelter, and the man I once went to for shelter is now the one I run from.

What a strange reversal of fortune.

Day 228

I feel eyes on me again.

...Leeches, most likely.

Day 230

Tomorrow is another day.

I will stay at Rook’s side.

It is the only place I feel safe beyond Uncle’s attic.

Day 231

I can trust him.

I can trust Rook.

He will tell an ugly truth right off the bat.

He values honesty, integrity--like me.

And birds of a feather must flock together.

#Rook Hunt #Jade Leech #Dire Crowley #Epel Felmier #Vil Schoenheit #twst #disney twisted wonderland #twisted wonderland #angst #PLEASE STOP READING A PERSON'S DIARY #Tale of the Cursed Raven #Raven Crowley #twst oc #twisted wonderland oc

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fashiontrendyclub · 4 years

Text

Nine change makers in the Netherlands making fashion more sustainable

The fashion industry is the second biggest polluter on the planet, responsible for around 10% of all global carbon emissions and tarnished by a reputation for sweatshops – but it doesn’t have to be this way. DutchNews.nl shines a light on nine innovators in the Netherlands helping to make the sector more sustainable. Consumers in the Netherlands discard about 210 tons of unwanted clothing and textiles each year, two-thirds of which is incinerated; while the Dutch fashion industry has an annual surplus of around 21.5 million items of unsold clothing, often produced by poorly treated workers and not built to last. Each garment produced has an average carbon footprint of 20kg. Changing practices in the clothing industry is crucial to meeting the country’s emission targets and improving the industry’s human rights record. Here are nine change makers in the Netherlands leading the way. Loop.a life Knitwear brand Loop.a life has abandoned the wasteful model of regularly changing, seasonal collections and focuses instead on creating long-lasting essentials for men and women. The cotton and wool garments are created from recycled knitwear and denim using an entirely circular, closed-loop process. Removing the need to cultivate the raw materials saves around 500 litres of water per sweater for wool and between 5000 and 15,000 litres for cotton. Founded in 2016 by Ellen Mensink, Loop.a life were the first Dutch company to use 100% recycled yarn, most of it sourced in the Netherlands. Similar colours are carefully selected and combined with industrial waste and Eucalyptus wood fibres, which means no dye is needed. Arch & Hook It’s not just textiles that the fashion industry wastes. When garments are transported from factories to stores and hung on branded hangers, the plastic placeholders are discarded, condemning an estimated 85 billion single-use hangers to landfill each year. Since 2015, Amsterdam-based Arch & Hook has sought to change this by producing high-quality hangers made from sustainable materials. Previous collections have included bespoke hangers for clients such as Karen Millen and Harrods made out of FSC® certified wood, and last year, supported by Roland Mouret and the British Fashion Council, the company launched BLUE®, the first ever hanger made of upcycled ocean bound thermoplastic. ‘At Arch & Hook, we strongly believe that we are in the early stages of a new industrial revolution,’ says CEO and founder Sjoerd Fauser. ‘Cleaning up what humanity has caused is crucial before eliminating plastics entirely.’ Amsterdam-based &Wider Examining the whole chain of production is crucial to making fashion more ethical. Amsterdam-based &Wider has been helping businesses bridge the data gap on working conditions in the clothing industry since 2014 by providing actionable results to drive material improvements in workers’ lives and in the businesses that employ them. Through their online platform, buyers and employers can gather anonymous data direct from workers, and use this information to implement changes in labour practices along the supply chain. ‘The fashion industry cannot work ethically without hearing from workers themselves,’ spokesperson Sesihle Manzini told DutchNews.nl. ‘The design of our system allows us to hear from vulnerable workers: those who we often hear about, but rarely hear from.’ MUD jeans Mud, a natural, endlessly recycled material, inspired the name behind this sustainable jeans company headquartered in Laren. Founded in 2013 by industry-insider Bert van Son, who had seen first-hand the unethical practices in the sector, MUD has taken a different tack by producing garments made from up to 40% recycled materials and coloured with Cradle2Cradle dyes. 95% of the water used is recycled through reverse osmosis, reducing water use to about one third of the industry standard. Clients can rent or buy jeans, repairs are free, and they can get reductions on loans or purchases by cashing in any brand of old jeans with at least 96% cotton content. The Fabricant Thanks to Amsterdam-based digital fashion house The Fabricant, the digital dress is now a fact – and sold last year for $9500. The assertion that the clothes with the least environmental impact are those which do not exist is hard to argue with – even if it requires a total rethinking of how we promote fashion. The Fabricant specialises in 3D fashion design and animation, offering an alternative to physical concepts such as runway shows, sample sizes and photo shoots. The potential to try clothes on our digital selves, or create a digital advertising campaign can only cut carbon costs. United Wardrobe Founded in 2014 by three students from Wageningen with a mission to make second-hand clothing the buyer’s default, this online marketplace has over 4 million subscribers. From its headquarters in Utrecht, United Wardrobe has now opened its doors to France, Germany and Belgium, allowing users to buy and sell everything from designer shoes to onesies for newborns. ‘People are way more conscious than six years ago,’ co-founder Thijs Verheul told DutchNews.nl. ‘We have already people of age 12 selling and buying secondhand clothes, not because it is cheap for them, but really because they love the sustainable factor.’ Renoon ‘I was so fed up with opening dozens of windows in my browser to find sustainable alternatives that matched my style,’ says Iris Skrami, who co-founded Renoon to fill a gap in the market for a curated one-stop online shop for eco-minded style seekers. The app and website, which launched in 2019, feature new and pre-owned items with emerging brands such as Fisch and PANGAIA listed alongside established designers such as Stella McCartney and Filippa K. ‘There are so many brands and products already in the market that we should have easier access to,’ says Skrami. Fast Feet Grinded Fast Feet Grinded are urban miners, seeking out wasted resources that gain new value when repurposed. In this case it’s our discarded trainers. Globally, an estimated 12 billion pairs of trainers are produced each year, of which at least 90% will end up in landfill. The Limburg-based company employs workers with a distance from the labour market to upcycle rubber, foam and fibre from unwanted trainers to make spongy surfaces for playgrounds, athletics tracks and sports fields – or materials for new trainers. This contribution to a more circular economy in sportswear has attracted partnerships with brands such as Decathlon, ASICS and Intersport. RE LOVE FASHION by RE LOVE Foundation Three-year-old creative agency RE LOVE FASHION is an anomaly in the sector: its mission is to reduce consumption. Fronted by the striking blue-haired Antoinette van den Berg, a trend-forecaster and stylist known in fashion circles as the Lady in Blu, the Amsterdam agency is forging a new path in a polluting industry by promoting what she describes as ‘joyful alternatives to enjoy fashion: reuse, retouch, restyle, repair and repeat’. ‘If we really want to reduce the pollution of the fashion industry, the most effective solution is to consume fewer new clothes,’ she told DutchNews.nl. ‘How nice is it to wear something that you know didn’t pollute?’ Source Read the full article

#Fashion #MakersinTheNetherlands #MakingFashionMoreSustainable

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awkward-toshinori · 5 years

Note

Hey Yo, can I get all 200 asks for the ask meme thing? Please and thank you!

Absolutely

200: My crush’s name is:

Horia

199: I was born in:

Romania

198: I am really:

friendly and trustworthy

197: My cellphone company is:

Digi

196: My eye color is:

Aqua Blue

195: My shoe size is:

7,5

194: My ring size is:

20?? hell if i know tbh

193: My height is:

5′7

192: I am allergic to:

nothing

191: My 1st car was:

I can’t drive yet!!

190: My 1st job was:

No jobs yikes :c

189: Last book you read:

Sword of Destiny!!

188: My bed is:

messy and full of plushies

187: My pet:

no pets but ahh my baby plant

186: My best friend:

I’ve got tons of them and I’m pretty sure they know themselves

185: My favorite shampoo is:

ah I don’t really have any preferences

184: Xbox or ps3:

*big gasp* ps3

183: Piggy banks are:

They’re superb but I would feel so bad about wrecking one

182: In my pockets:

Glasses tissues

181: On my calendar:

uh there’s nothing noted yet

180: Marriage is:

Something quiet amazing and lovely, at least from my point

179: Spongebob can:

aww man I don’t watch spongebob

178: My mom:

is shorther than me, that’s for sure

177: The last three songs I bought were?

I didn’t buy any songs but I did buy albums and the last three I bought I suppose were Aenima by tool, Portrait of An American Familly by Marilyn Manson and Slipknot by Slipknot, I think

176: Last YouTube video watched:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4q9UafsiQ6k

175: How many cousins do you have?

2 or 3 I think

174: Do you have any siblings?

Yes, one

173: Are your parents divorced?

nope

172: Are you taller than your mom?

yes B)

171: Do you play an instrument?

Not yet but I’m planning on getting a bass so

170: What did you do yesterday?

I went to a cool concert

169: Love at first sight:

not rlly

168: Luck:

nope

167: Fate:

also no

166: Yourself:

no *oops doopsie I’m sorry*

165: Aliens:

yes

164: Heaven:

nah

163: Hell:

162: God:

nopety

161: Horoscopes:

not really

160: Soul mates:

hmm a bit

159: Ghosts:

158: Gay Marriage:

157: War:

not really

156: Orbs:

not really :/

155: Magic:

no but I find it interesting154: Hugs or Kisses:

hugs

153: Drunk or High:

I personally wouldn’t go for any of those but drunk ig

152: Phone or Online:

online

151: Red heads or Black haired:

black haired

150: Blondes or Brunettes:

ah, blondes

149: Hot or cold:

cold

148: Summer or winter:

winter

147: Autumn or Spring:

spring

146: Chocolate or vanilla:

vanilla

145: Night or Day:

night

144: Oranges or Apples:

oranges

143: Curly or Straight hair:

straight

142: McDonalds or Burger King:

McDonalds

141: White Chocolate or Milk Chocolate:

White Chocolate

140: Mac or PC:

139: Flip flops or high heals:

flip flops

138: Ugly and rich OR sweet and poor:

sweet and poor tbh

137: Coke or Pepsi:

coke

136: Hillary or Obama:

Obama??!!

135: Burried or cremated:

cremated

134: Singing or Dancing:

singing

133: Coach or Chanel:

coach

132: Kat McPhee or Taylor Hicks:

I uh, none

131: Small town or Big city:

big city

130: Wal-Mart or Target:

I had never went to one though Wal-Mart

129: Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler:

Adam Sandler

128: Manicure or Pedicure:

Manicure

127: East Coast or West Coast:

East Coast

126: Your Birthday or Christmas:

Christmas

125: Chocolate or Flowers:

flowers

124: Disney or Six Flags:

disney

123: Yankees or Red Sox:

Yankees

122: War:

I uh personally don’t agree with them and uh dunno

121: George Bush:

Don’t have one yet

120: Gay Marriage:

I find it lovely but too sad it’s not legal here so

119: The presidential election:

Quiet stinky as in no good choices

118: Abortion:

See this topic rips itself in two, if it’s intentionally done I personally think it’s the worst thing to do but that someone can do whatever they want, it’s their body after all, though if it happens and it’s not intended just, big sad react

117: MySpace:

I don’t have an opinion on it

116: Reality TV:

I don’t really watch it nor like it

115: Parents:

I would’ve appreciated if my parents showed me more support and love but not that I have anything against our type of relationship at the moment so

114: Back stabbers:

I totally not like them so I choose to cut contact with them

113: Ebay:

It’s fine till now

112: Facebook:

I’m not a big fan of Facebook

111: Work:

If it’s something I love, it makes me feel good but if it’s not it kind of brings a feeling of uneasy and frustration to me

110: My Neighbors:

They’re chill, the baby and the puppy are my favorites

109: Gas Prices:

kinda shitty here

108: Designer Clothes:

They can design what they want however they want, this is not really a topic of interest for me

107: College:

I can’t wait to get to it ngl

106: Sports:

Not one of my interests but they do look fun

105: My family:

I tolerate them easily but yeah I love them

104: The future:

Other than that I’m scared as hell regarding the future? nah

103: Hugged someone:

Eh!! Today!!

102: Last time you ate:

7 hours ago??

101: Saw someone I haven’t seen in awhile:

Oh last week I think

100: Cried in front of someone:

U H, yesterday

99: Went to a movie theater:

last thursday

98: Took a vacation:

last Christmas

97: Swam in a pool:

last summer

96: Changed a diaper:

never tbh

95: Got my nails done:

OH, it’s been ages since I’ve done that

94: Went to a wedding:

4 years ago

93: Broke a bone:

never nyehehe B)

92: Got a peircing:

I don’t have any but planning on getting some

91: Broke the law:

never

90: Texted:

minutes ago

89: Who makes you laugh the most:

tbh, my friends

88: Something I will really miss when I leave home is:

my stuff but mostly my baby plant

87: The last movie I saw:

Captain MArvel

86: The thing that I’m looking forward to the most:

finishing high school

85: The thing im not looking forward to:

Missing upcoming opportunities

84: People call me:

Satana(I have the perferct explanation)

83: The most difficult thing to do is:

talk in servers or groups tbh

82: I have gotten a speeding ticket:

Oh I’d feel terrible and embarassed tbh

81: My zodiac sign is:

LEo

80: The first person i talked to today was:

my boyfriend

79: First time you had a crush:

in 5th grade

78: The one person who i can’t hide things from:

My boyfriend.. because he knows when something’s up with me or if something’s not good

77: Last time someone said something you were thinking:

hmmm weeks ago I think

76: Right now I am talking to:

@angelwings-234

75: What are you going to do when you grow up:

be a programmer

74: I have/will get a job:

I hope to get one as a programmer in the future (though hell If I know what exactly yet)

73: Tomorrow:

I’ll probably hope for school to end faster just so I can nap

72: Today:

I haven’t done much tbh

71: Next Summer:

Will be so busy and I’m so not up to it

70: Next Weekend:

I’ll be going to a cool ass contest

69: I have these pets:

I have a baby plant!!!

68: The worst sound in the world:

static noise

67: The person that makes me cry the most is:

myself?? sounds a bit edgy

66: People that make you happy:

all the close friends in my life and some artists along with stuff I enjoy a lot

65: Last time I cried:

yesterday

64: My friends are:

There are too many to list them but luv them all

63: My computer is:

full of games that I’m probably not going to finish in the following 2 months

62: My School:

kinda sucks when it comes to students

61: My Car:

does not exist yet

60: I lose all respect for people who:

who are rude and big mean bags of shit?? I could detail this but dunno

59: The movie I cried at was:

Interstellar

58: Your hair color is:

blonde

57: TV shows you watch:

SOA, Gotham when my bf watches it and I don’t really like TV shows though I have some on my waiting list

56: Favorite web site:

https://www.pbinfo.ro/

55: Your dream vacation:

just, somewhere around a forest, it’d be quiet lovely ngl

54: The worst pain I was ever in was:

tooth pain

53: How do you like your steak cooked:

a bit raw tbh

52: My room is:

ass messy as me

51: My favorite celebrity is:

uhhh Corey Taylor

50: Where would you like to be:

Right now?? At my bf, if it wouldn’t bother him..

49: Do you want children:

ABsolutely

48: Ever been in love:

still am ig

47: Who’s your best friend:

I have too many but love them all so much

46: More guy friends or girl friends:

I have more guy friends apparently

45: One thing that makes you feel great is:

achieving something

44: One person that you wish you could see right now:

All of my best-friends tbh

43: Do you have a 5 year plan:

I do

42: Have you made a list of things to do before you die:

Not yet and I doubt I’d do it

41: Have you pre-named your children:

me and my bf came up with some names but who knows

40: Last person I got mad at:

My bf i think

39: I would like to move to:

another city in my country, a much bigger one

38: I wish I was a professional:

artist

37: Candy:

Haribo

36: Vehicle:

Renault or Dacia

35: President:

don’t really have one

34: State visited:

I haven’t been to any at all

33: Cellphone provider:

Digi

32: Athlete:

I don;t have one yikes

31: Actor:

Hmm Benicio Del Toro

30: Actress:

I like some but I don’t have a favorite one

29: Singer:

Peter Steele, his voice is simply, lovely

28: Band:

Ohhh anon Tool and Cargo atm

27: Clothing store:

I don’t have a fav one

26: Grocery store:

any??

25: TV show:

Sons Of Anarchy

24: Movie:

The Alien trilogy

23: Website:

Twitter I think

22: Animal:

Cat

21: Theme park:

I don’t really have one

20: Holiday:

Christmas

19: Sport to watch:

ski jumping

18: Sport to play:

Volleyball I think

17: Magazine:

Don’t have one

16: Book:

The Shinning

15: Day of the week:

Saturdays

14: Beach:

Don’t really like beaches

13: Concert attended:

Truda’s concert for moment but I suppose Disturbing’s going ro replace it or maybe Cannibal Corpse, who knows

12: Thing to cook:

Pudding

11: Food:

Noodles or cremeschnitte

10: Restaurant:

One called Anna

9: Radio station:

don’t have one

8: Yankee candle scent:

dreamy summer nights

7: Perfume:

men’s one are my favorite, gotta admit it

6: Flower:

ORchids

5: Color:

purple and black

4: Talk show host:

don’t have one

3: Comedian:

A romanian one, can’t remember his name

2: Dog breed:

German Shepherd, American Eskimo, Border Collie, Golden Retriever, Siberian HUsky there are too many I can’t choose only one

1: Did you answer all these truthfully?

yes I did it oh god

14 notes · View notes

theliberaltony · 5 years

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

One of the many reasons I think New England is great1 is that its elections are conducted — and its results are reported — at the city/town level, not the county level. That lets psephologists like me study them in greater detail, and one election I’m particularly interested in is the just-concluded 2018 U.S. Senate race in Massachusetts.

For Sen. Elizabeth Warren, the race was little more than a tune-up for the 2020 presidential campaign she is now gearing up for2; she breezed to re-election by 24 points (although it was arguably an underwhelming performance given the state’s blue hue). But we can look at who voted for Warren in 2018 for clues as to who might vote for her in 2020 — both in the primary and, if she gets there, in the general election.

This isn’t as simple as just looking at which areas Warren won — because partisanship predicted the 2018 election results so well, all that would tell us is that she does well in the most Democratic places. Instead, you have to look at how Warren performed relative to other Democrats. Since she is vying to succeed Hillary Clinton as the Democratic presidential nominee, I used Clinton’s 2016 general-election performance as my point of comparison. If Warren did better than Clinton in a given town, it suggests that its voters were more enthusiastic about her than they were about Clinton. If Clinton did better than Warren, it indicates that those voters were relatively cool toward the state’s senior senator.

I calculated the difference between Warren’s and Clinton’s vote shares for all 351 cities and towns in Massachusetts as well as the 255 voting precincts in the city of Boston. Armed with demographic statistics about each of those jurisdictions (plus my knowledge as a Massachusetts native), I spent a few days looking for patterns in the data. Here’s what I found.

1. She’s weak in elite suburbs

One clear trend is that Warren underperformed in extremely wealthy, highly college-educated communities. In 2013, The Washington Post conducted a nationwide analysis that identified the wealthiest and most educated zip codes in the U.S., labeled “Super Zips” (building upon an earlier analysis by political scientist Charles Murray). Modifying the Post’s Super Zip calculations to look only at Massachusetts,3 I identified the state’s 12 upper-crustiest cities and towns. The list is a veritable where’s-where of elite Boston suburbs — and Warren did worse than Clinton in all 12.

Warren underwhelmed in ‘Super Zips’

How Hillary Clinton (in the 2016 presidential race) and Elizabeth Warren (in the 2018 Senate race) performed in the 12 wealthiest and best-educated communities in Massachusetts

Vote Share City/Town Median Income* % with Bachelor’s Clinton Warren Diff. Wellesley $177k 82.7% 71% 64% -7% Weston 197 82.4 66 60 -6 Medfield 154 72.5 59 55 -4 Dover 204 82.7 57 54 -3 Needham 142 74.6 70 68 -3 Sherborn 171 82.9 67 64 -3 Winchester 152 75.5 63 61 -2 Sudbury 171 78.5 69 66 -2 Wayland 167 82.6 72 70 -2 Andover 143 73.7 58 57 -2 Lexington 162 81.6 77 75 -2 Carlisle 171 84.7 69 68 -1 Statewide 74 42.1 60 60 0

*By household

Communities qualified as Super Zips if they scored at least a 95 in our calculation, which averaged each community’s percentile in education with its percentile in income to get a score from 0 to 100.

Sources: 2013-2017 American Community Survey, Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth

Although I’d like to include some of the more well-to-do sections of Boston in this list, no income or education data is available for individual precincts within Boston. To get at least a rough sense of how those neighborhoods voted, however, we can use past election results — specifically, the precinct’s margin shift from 2012 to 2016 presidential results — to find likely Super Zips within the city. (As has been thoroughly documented here and elsewhere, affluent, well-educated Mitt Romney voters flocked to Clinton in 2016.) Seven of the eight precincts that shifted the most toward Clinton are in Beacon Hill or the Back Bay, two of Boston’s poshest neighborhoods.4 Warren lagged behind Clinton in these precincts by anywhere from 2 points to 9 points, confirming our statewide findings.

Of course, after Clinton won upper-class areas by eye-popping margins in 2016, some reversion to the mean is expected. However, it also makes sense that Warren would be unpopular among wealthy voters, given her career-long crusade against big business. It certainly appears that social and economic elites are not part of Warren’s base.

2. She could win back Obama-Trump voters

So where are the voters who love Warren? Here are the 10 cities and towns where she outran Clinton by the biggest margin:

Places that swung toward Trump still like Warren

The 10 Massachusetts cities and towns where Elizabeth Warren (in the 2018 Senate race) outperformed Hillary Clinton (in the 2016 presidential race) by the highest margin

Vote Share City/Town Median Income % with Bachelor’s 2012 vs. 2016 Margin Shift Clinton Warren Diff. Hawley $66k 39.6% R+12 51% 67% +16% Middlefield 75 26.0 R+30 51 67 +15 Cummington 53 43.2 R+11 60 72 +12 Wendell 43 45.9 R+13 69 81 +12 Sandisfield 69 37.3 R+17 53 64 +11 Peru 69 24.5 R+30 50 60 +11 Otis 70 32.5 R+19 47 57 +10 Leverett 87 64.9 R+3 77 87 +10 Tyringham 86 49.3 D+11 69 78 +9 North Adams 39 24.5 R+20 64 73 +9 Statewide 74 42.1 D+4 60 60 0

*By household

Sources: 2013-2017 American Community Survey, Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth

They have a lot in common. They are all small towns in Western Massachusetts. With a few exceptions, they have incomes lower than the statewide average. Most of them have fewer college graduates than average as well. And Trump improved upon Romney’s margin in all but one of them.

Just like other white,5 blue-collar areas in the rest of the country, Western Massachusetts broke with longstanding Democratic tradition in the 2016 election. Warren’s ability to match or even exceed President Obama’s 2012 performance in these areas suggests that she might be the right candidate to persuade Obama-Trump voters to once again vote Democratic in the 2020 general election. In addition, a majority of Democrats in most of these towns — some of which are fairly bohemian — voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic primary. That’s a pretty good indication that Warren may also find a primary base among economically struggling communities that could be receptive to her populist message.

3. Young people seem to like her

Young people generally make up a small share of the electorate, so it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions about how they might feel about Warren based on Massachusetts election results. So let’s stick to what we know: Warren exhibited moderate strength in Massachusetts’s 10 youngest municipalities.6

Warren’s youth movement

How Elizabeth Warren (in the 2018 Senate race) performed compared with Hillary Clinton (in the 2016 presidential race) in the 10 youngest communities in Massachusetts

Vote Share City/Town Median Age Clinton Warren Diff. Amherst 21.4 83% 89% +6% Sunderland 31.3 71 76 +5 Aquinnah 25.6 82 86 +4 Somerville 31.5 83 87 +4 Williamstown 29.9 81 84 +3 Cambridge 30.4 88 91 +3 Springfield 32.9 74 75 +1 Boston 32.0 81 81 0 Lawrence 31.4 82 81 -1 Wenham 24.7 56 54 -3 Statewide 39.4 60 60 0

Sources: 2013-2017 American Community Survey, Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth

In six of them, Warren outran Clinton by 3 points or more, and in three of the other four, more than half the population is nonwhite, which is likely far more important in explaining the communities’ electoral preferences than age is. (The 10th town, Wenham, is an easily-explained-away exception: It’s an elite suburb that appears on the list mostly because a local college7 drops its median age.) Although the sample size is small, this does suggest Warren has a natural constituency in and around college towns, based on her overperformance in places like Amherst8 (+6 points), Cambridge9 (+3 points) and Williamstown10 (+3 points). The Boston precincts where Warren outpaced Clinton the most were also disproportionately located in the city’s Allston and Brighton neighborhoods, which stretch from Boston College to Boston University; as of the last Census, more than half the population there was between the ages of 20 and 34.

4. Nonwhite voters are a wild card

There’s one demographic variable we haven’t mentioned yet, and it’s a big one in a Democratic primary: race. Both the places where Warren did especially well and the places where she did especially poorly were overwhelmingly white.11 How did Warren’s vote share compare with Clinton’s in Massachusetts’s predominantly nonwhite communities (yes, they do exist)? Overall, the differences were minimal, implying that Warren is no better, nor any worse, at wooing these voters than Clinton was.

Warren does OK in diverse places

How Elizabeth Warren (in the 2018 Senate race) performed compared with Hillary Clinton (in the 2016 presidential race) in the 12 Massachusetts communities where less than half the population is white

Share of Population Vote Share City/Town White Hispanic Black Asian Clinton Warren Diff. Aquinnah* 40% 0% 0% 1% 82% 86% +4% Everett 46 23 19 6 67 69 +2 Malden 47 9 16 24 70 72 +2 Lowell 49 20 7 21 64 65 +1 Springfield 33 44 19 2 74 75 +1 Lynn 38 39 12 8 67 67 +1 Randolph 36 8 38 12 75 76 +1 Boston 45 19 23 9 81 81 0 Holyoke 43 51 3 2 70 70 0 Brockton 37 11 39 2 71 71 0 Chelsea 22 66 6 3 79 79 0 Lawrence 16 79 2 2 82 81 -1 Statewide 73 11 7 6 60 60 0

*42 percent of Aquinnah residents are Native American.

Sources: 2013-2017 American Community Survey, Massachusetts secretary of the commonwealth

We can take a closer look at how Warren performed among Hispanic, black and Asian voters specifically by zooming in to the precinct level in Boston, whose neighborhoods remain fairly segregated by race.12 This data reveals that Warren may hold special appeal among nonwhite voters after all — specifically, Hispanic voters. Warren did between 1 and 6 points better than Clinton in all 10 Boston precincts where, as of 2010, at least 50 percent of residents were Hispanic. At the same time, the precinct data also seems to confirm that black voters are truly agnostic about Warren. On average, Warren did only 1 point better than Clinton in Boston’s 56 majority-black precincts, with very little precinct-by-precinct deviation. It was hard to arrive at a conclusion about Asian voters; Boston had no majority-Asian precincts in 2010. The three precincts where Asians constituted a plurality of the population differed dramatically from one another. In one, Warren did 2 points better than Clinton; in the other two, Warren did 4 and 10 points worse.13

People of color cast about 40 percent of all votes in the 2016 Democratic primary, so anyone who hopes to be the party’s 2020 nominee must win a healthy share of nonwhite voters. On the plus side for Warren, it’s a good sign that her 2018 performance among these voters wasn’t actively bad, given that Sanders (whose natural constituencies overlap with Warren’s) struggled so much to win minority voters in the 2016 primary; indeed, her campaign managers ought to find her recent performance with Hispanic voters downright encouraging. But on the other hand, Warren has also shown no particular knack for connecting with black and Asian voters. She has plenty of other strengths as a candidate — including her ideology and fundraising ability — but fostering more of a base among nonwhite voters could give her the complete package.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nathaniel Rakich

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newstfionline · 3 years

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Wednesday, October 6, 2021

UNICEF: Battered by pandemic, kids need mental health help (AP) Governments must pour more money and resources into preserving the mental well-being of children and adolescents, the U.N.’s child protection agency urged in a report Tuesday that sounded alarms about blows to mental health from the COVID-19 pandemic that hit poor and vulnerable children particularly hard. The United Nations Children’s Fund said its “State of the World’s Children” study is its most comprehensive look so far this century at the mental health of children and adolescents globally. The coronavirus crisis, forcing school closures that upended the lives of children and adolescents, has thrust the issue of their mental well-being to the fore. UNICEF said it may take years to fully measure the extent of the pandemic’s impact on young people’s mental health. Psychiatrists quickly saw signs of distress, with children and adolescents seeking help for suicidal thoughts, anxiety, eating disorders and other difficulties as lockdowns and switching to remote learning severed them from friends and routines and as COVID-19 killed parents and grandparents. “With nationwide lockdowns and pandemic-related movement restrictions, children have spent indelible years of their lives away from family, friends, classrooms, play—key elements of childhood itself,” said UNICEF’s executive director, Henrietta Fore. “The impact is significant, and it is just the tip of the iceberg.”

COVID vaccine mandate takes effect for NYC teachers, staff (AP) A COVID-19 vaccination requirement for teachers and other staff members took effect in New York City’s sprawling public school system Monday in a key test of the employee vaccination mandates now being rolled out across the country. Mayor Bill de Blasio said 95% of the city’s roughly 148,000 public school staffers had received at least one vaccine dose as of Monday morning, including 96% of teachers and 99% of principals. The mayor had warned that unvaccinated school employees would be placed on unpaid leave and not be allowed to work this week. The city planned to bring in substitutes where needed. Schools Chancellor Meisha Ross Porter said she did not know exactly how many employees had declined the shots and been put on leave.

California pipeline may have been hooked by ship’s anchor (AP) The pipeline that leaked tens of thousands of gallons of oil into the water off Southern California was split open and apparently dragged more than 100 feet along the ocean floor, possibly by a ship’s anchor, officials said Tuesday. The segment of the pipe that was dragged was three-quarters of a mile (1.2 kilometers) long, and the gash was over a foot (30 centimeters) wide, the Coast Guard said. Preliminary reports suggest the failure may have been “caused by an anchor that hooked the pipeline, causing a partial tear,” federal transportation investigators said. The break in the line occurred about 5 miles offshore at a depth of about 98 feet (30 meters) beneath the surface.

Just gone (NYT) They lie in clandestine graves strewn across the desert, mingled in communal pits, or hacked to pieces and scattered on desiccated hillsides. Buried without a name, often all that’s left once their bodies are gone are the empty casings of a person: a bloodied sweatshirt, a frilly top, a tattered dress. All over Mexico, mothers wander under the scorching sun, poking at the earth and hoping for a scrap that points toward their missing son or daughter. For most, the answers never come. Mexico is nearing a grim milestone: 100,000 disappeared people, according to Mexico’s National Search Commission, which keeps a record that goes back to 1964. In a country wracked by a drug war without end, death can feel pervasive. Murder rates climb inexorably, now topping 30,000 a year. But disappearance can be the cruelest blow. It deprives families of a body to mourn, of answers—even of the simple certainty, and the consolation, of death.

Afghanistan unraveling (Washington Post) Amman Nasir, 18, used to make steel safes in a workshop on contract with the U.S. Army. Now the American forces are gone, the workshop is locked and Nasir, along with all 15 other employees, is jobless. “Every family is facing the same crisis,” said Nasir, who had piled some blankets from home on a sidewalk, hoping someone would buy them. “People are not as afraid as they were when the Taliban first came. The problem now is our empty stomachs.” Across the Afghan capital, evidence of the country’s fast-unraveling economy is everywhere—from the angry crowds of unpaid government workers waiting outside banks that have run out of cash, to the tent camp of war-displaced families that has taken over the main city park, to the jumbled piles of household goods that have sprouted on corners and vacant lots. In a matter of weeks, several cascading events—the final withdrawal of U.S. troops, the mass surrender of Afghan forces, the collapse of the national government and takeover by Taliban militants, and a chaotic mass evacuation punctuated by a deadly airport bombing—have brought the Afghan economy to an abrupt and perilous standstill.

‘Everyone here hated the Americans’: Rural Afghans live with the Taliban and a painful U.S. legacy (Washington Post) The white flags flutter in the apple orchards of this serene hamlet ringed by oatmeal-colored mountains. They mark the precise spots where U.S. airstrikes killed Afghans. In the village center lies the destroyed shell of a building that once housed shops; down the road is a mangled, rusted car. There are white flags there, too. Together, they’re reminders of the legacy the United States has left in many rural areas across Afghanistan. “Everyone here hated the Americans,” said Zabiullah Haideri, 30. His shop was shattered by an airstrike in 2019 that killed 12 villagers. “They murdered civilians and committed atrocities.” In Kabul and other Afghan cities, the United States will be remembered for enabling two decades of progress in women’s rights, an independent media and other freedoms. But in the nation’s hinterlands, the main battlegrounds of America’s longest war, Afghans view the United States primarily through the prism of conflict, brutality and death. Here in Wardak province, the U.S. military, the CIA and the ruthless Afghan militias they armed and trained fought the Taliban for years. Trapped in the crossfire were villagers and farmers. Many became casualties of U.S. counterterrorism operations, drone strikes and gun battles.

China’s Taiwan Flights Stoke Tensions (Foreign Policy) China’s military planes have been busy over the last few days flying sorties into Taiwan’s air defense identification zone in a seemingly escalating pattern. On Friday, 38 planes flew into the area—a new record. On Saturday, 39 planes. And on Monday another record: 56 planes in a 24-hour period. Responding to a U.S. statement that the moves were both “provocative” and “destabilizing,” China’s foreign ministry accused the United States of creating its own tensions through its arms sales to Taiwan and by sending U.S. navy ships through the Taiwan strait. So what is China up to? To understand the scale what is going on the waters near Taiwan, the first thing to understand is that an air defense identification zone, or ADIZ, is not the same as national airspace. An ADIZ is like a buffer zone that extends beyond the 12 nautical mile extension from national borders that are considered sovereign air space under international law. Flying into an ADIZ isn’t provocative in and of itself, but the frequency with which China has been doing it has raised fears that the flights could be a prelude to an invasion of the island Beijing claims as its own territory. “All that they’re doing is ratcheting up numbers. They’re not, in my view, doing anything that is fundamentally different from what they have been doing in the recent past,” Bonnie Glaser, a cross-strait relations expert at the German Marshall Fund told Foreign Policy. Glaser noted that outside of military training, the flights serve three purposes: they tire out Taiwan’s air force pilots who must constantly scramble to intercept, they demoralize the Taiwanese population while stoking nationalism at home, and they send a message of deterrence to the United States. “All of this diplomatic, military and economic coercion is really aimed at inducing this sense of psychological despair, among the [Taiwanese] people that China is just so powerful that they just give up,” Glaser said. “I think over time that is a goal that they seek to achieve—they would prefer to win without fighting.”

Australia won’t welcome international tourists until 2022 (AP) International tourists won’t be welcomed back to Australia until next year, with the return of skilled migrants and students given higher priority, the prime minister said on Tuesday. Last week Prime Minister Scott Morrison outlined plans to allow vaccinated citizens and permanent residents to fly overseas from November for the first time since an extraordinarily tough travel ban took effect in March last year. But Morrison on Tuesday said that after Australians, the next priority would be skilled migrants and international students entering Australia before tourists. Australian immigration has been at its lowest since World War II because of pandemic restrictions. The pandemic has also had a disastrous effect on Australian universities that rely heavily on fees paid by international students. The education sector fears that students will enroll in other countries unless Australia opens its border to them soon.

War crimes and crimes against humanity committed in Libya, U.N. finds (Washington Post) U.N. investigators say they have found evidence of crimes against humanity and war crimes perpetrated in Libya in recent years, including violence against civilians on the part of foreign mercenaries and human rights violations in prisons. “Our investigations have established that all parties to the conflicts, including third States, foreign fighters and mercenaries, have violated international humanitarian law, in particular the principles of proportionality and distinction, and some have also committed war crimes,” Mohamed Auajjar, chair of the fact-finding mission, said in a statement. The report found that the violence, including attacks on hospitals and schools, has dramatically affected economic, social and cultural rights in Libya. It also documented the recruitment and participation of children in hostilities, as well as the disappearance and extrajudicial killings of prominent women. The report also said airstrikes have killed dozens of families, civilians have been maimed and killed by anti-personnel mines left by mercenaries in residential areas, and health-related facilities have been destroyed. In Libyan prisons, the mission said, detainees were tortured on a daily basis and deprived of family visits. Militias and the state used arbitrary detention in secret prisons and unbearable detention conditions against “anyone perceived to be a threat to their interests or views,” Tracy Robinson, another mission member, said in a statement. The violence is committed “on such a scale and with such a level of organization” that it may also amount to crimes against humanity, she said.

Facebook Outage (1440/AP) Facebook and its associated platforms, including Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger, suffered a widespread outage yesterday, affecting users worldwide and lasting six hours. The issues also extended to the company’s internal systems, with employees unable to access emails or open office doors with keycards. The outage was a headache for many casual users but far more serious for the millions of people worldwide who rely on the social media sites to run their businesses or communicate with relatives, fellow parents, teachers or neighbors. Around the world, the breakdown at WhatsApp left many at a loss. In Brazil, the messaging service is by far the most widely used app in the country, installed on 99% of smartphones, according to tech pollster Mobile Time. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians in their homeland and abroad fretted over the WhatsApp outage. Many of the country’s more than 11 million people depend it to alert one another about gang violence in particular neighborhoods or to talk to relatives in the U.S. about money transfers and other important matters. Haitian migrants traveling to the U.S. rely on it to find each other or share key information such as safe places to sleep. In rebel-held Syria, where the telecommunication infrastructure has been disrupted by war, residents and emergency workers rely mostly on internet communication. Naser AlMuhawish, a Turkey-based Syrian doctor who monitors coronavirus cases in rebel-held territory in Syria, said WhatsApp is the main communication method used with over 500 workers in the field.

Going Gray (E&E News) A new study from Arizona State University and the city of Phoenix found that painting their streets gray over the black asphalt has had a remarkable cooling effect, with sunrise temperatures dropping an average of 2.4 degrees and on average, overall road surface temperatures dropping 10.5- to 12-degree-Fahrenheit. Phoenix can see its road temperatures hit 180 degrees on a particularly hot day.

#headlines #news

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covid19updater · 3 years

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COVID19 Updates: 08/18/2021

World: Actress Sally Kirkland After Moderna Vaccine: In My 79 Years, I’ve Never Experienced This Level of Pain LINK

California: The Lambda COVID variant is in California: 5 things you should know LINK

Alabama: Alabama has “negative” ICU beds free as U.S. hospitals struggle with surge of cases

US: More than 1,000 COVID-19 deaths recorded as US returns to April levels LINK

India: COVID-19 Vaccine for Children Will Be Available In India By September, Says Director of ICMR-NIV LINK

UK: Scotland: Side point: Schools went back in Scotland on Monday, 16 Aug Nightclubs opened 9th Aug. Cases reported: 2021-08-18,2531 2021-08-17,1815 2021-08-16,1567 2021-08-15,1498 2021-08-14,1383 2021-08-13,1542 2021-08-12,1525 2021-08-11,1498 2021-08-10,1032 2021-08-09,851 Highly vaccinated, approx 75% double-pricked.

China: The Chinese mainland Tuesday reported six new locally transmitted #COVID19 cases in Jiangsu Province, the National Health Commission said on Wednesday.

World: WHO & @Unitaid express concern over @Roche's warning of a global shortage of tocilizumab, a WHO-recommended IL6 inhibitor for use as a treatment for severe #COVID19.

Tennessee: In West Tennessee, a class of second graders at Riverwood Elementary in Cordova were sent home yesterday with a letter about the death of their teacher, 31-year-old Ashley Leatherwood. Family and friends say she contracted #COVID19 in the classroom. #GetVaccinatedNow #WearAMask

Texas: Despite urgent cries from families, Plano ISD is not taking any new action to prevent COVID-19 in schools. LINK

Montana: The Blackfeet Nation has implemented a mask mandate and the tribe’s offices are closed to the public. This comes as Montana experiences increased spread of COVID-19. Please mask up on Blackfeet land.

US: U.S. COVID update: Nearly 177K new cases, including Florida backlog, and 1,316 new deaths - New cases: 176,787 - Average: 138,396 (+2,813) - In hospital: 88,481 (+3,742) - In ICU: 21,914 (+1,047) - New deaths: 1,316

Texas: #COVID19 outbreaks in rural #Texas districts signal a troubled back-to-school season LINK

US: WASHINGTON (AP) — US health officials recommend COVID-19 booster shots for all Americans to boost their defenses amid delta variant.

UK: United Kingdom Daily Coronavirus (COVID-19) Report · Wednesday 18th August. 33,904 new cases (people positive) reported, giving a total of 6,355,887. 111 new deaths reported, giving a total of 131,260.

World: How SARS-CoV-2 Evades And Suppresses The Immune System (Part 4) LINK

Alaska: Anchorage ICUs at capacity as a surge of COVID-19 patients has hospitals under stress and scrambling LINK

Israel: In less than a month #Israel may no longer be able to hide the very obvious about the #covidvaccine despite booster doses, #lockdowns and suppression of V data. Leaked yesterday - 95% of deaths in the #vaccinated and a huge jump from June.

Israel: Israel: in high cases areas, only classrooms in which over 70 % of students are either vaccinated, recovered or pass a positive serological test for antibodies will be allowed to meet in person. Classrooms that fall below that level will be required to switch to home learning. LINK

Texas: The new Texas COVID-19 surge could be worse than anything the state has seen yet Last week in San Antonio, 26 minutes went by with no ambulances available to respond to 911 calls from the city’s 1.5 million residents. LINK

US: Booster doses of Covid-19 vaccine will be offered to Americans beginning September 20, pending CDC and FDA approval, US health officials say LINK

US: There's concerning evidence of waning vaccine effectiveness over time and against delta; the risk of severe infection increasing among those vaccinated early and those with at-risk conditions.

US: CDC DIRECTOR *WALENSKY: VACCINE EFFECTIVENESS FALLING IN NURSING HOMES. WALENSKY SAYS OVERALL VACCINE EFFECTIVENESS IS DECREASED FOR THE DELTA VARIANT

World: Various people have been raising the variant AY.3 as a potential problem. So here is a quick thread on what we are seeing here (and internationally). TLDR: Definitely the first clear sign of potentially worrying variant here in a while. First what is AY.3? It's a subtype of Delta and is most prevalent in the US where it is about 9% of their cases. Very early results from India suggest that it is more immune evasive than "original" Delta. In the US, AY.3 has also increased rapidly, but alongside Delta so it's hard to say if it's outcompeting Delta or just outcompeting previous variants.

NYC: *DE BLASIO SAYS 'DOESN'T ANTICIPATE' NYC SCHOOL VACCINE MANDATE

Michigan: Grand Rapids and Traverse City regions are at "substantial" increases in new cases of #COVID19. The rest of the state's regions are classified as "high" numbers of new cases.

World: Why is Delta so much more contagious than prior #SARSCoV2 variants? It achieves membrane fusion far more efficiently and faster LINK

Mississippi: Mississippi eighth grader dies of COVID-19 amid escalating mask battle LINK

France: France reports 2,054 people in intensive care units for covid-19, up by 111 ICU tally above the 2,000 limit for the first time since June 14

South Carolina: As Delta Spreads Through South Carolina, A Troubling Rise In Breakthrough Cases LINK

New York: Today's update on the numbers: Total COVID hospitalizations are at 1,888. Of the 156,128 tests reported yesterday, 4,737 were positive (3.03% of total). Sadly, there were 20 fatalities.

Colorado: COVID-19 vaccine mandate issued for Colorado prison workers, other state employees LINK

Israel: Israel is now requiring anyone over the age of three to show proof of vaccination or a negative Covid-19 test before entering many indoor spaces, as it tackles a sharp rise in infections. LINK

Nevada: The Las Vegas Raiders are the first NFL team to require all fans attending home games to be vaccinated against COVID.

France: People refusing to get Covid-19 vaccines in France are paying hundreds for fake health passes in an online black market that has flourished since the government imposed mandates for them to enter cafes, intercity trains and other public places;

Singapore: Singapore court sentenced Brit Ben Glynn to 6 weeks in prison, for repeated breaching covid protocols. Found guilty on 4 charges for: failing to wear a mask on train in May & his July court appearance; causing a public nuisance; & use of threatening words to public servants;

Texas: Five regions of Texas have zero open ICU beds LINK

Alabama: Alabama is out of ICU beds amid a COVID-19 surge, with some patients being treated on gurneys in hallways, hospitals chief says LINK

Afghanistan: JUST IN - Former Afghanistan President Ashraf Ghani reportedly hospitalized in Abu Dhabi, UAE.

NYC: Restaurants in NYC sue the Mayor over his vaccine mandate.

US: The Biden administration will move to require that nursing home staff are vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition for those facilities to continue receiving federal Medicare and Medicaid funding. LINK

Israel: Israeli congressman in hospital with covid, Fully vaccinated 47-year old, not yet boosted, describes his experience LINK

Florida: BREAKING: 3,055 students in Florida's Palm Beach County Schools have been forced to quarantine due to #COVID19 since classes began 7 days ago. There are now 608 confirmed student COVID-19 cases out of 167,000 students enrolled.

World: Significant reduction in humoral immunity among healthcare workers and nursing home residents 6 months after COVID-19 BNT162b2 mRNA vaccination LINK

Israel: Pfizer COVID vaccine 83% effective after third shot - Maccabi LINK

US: UPDATE: J&J BOOSTER PENDING—People who received Johnson & Johnson vaccines may need boosters, too, says @Surgeon_General Vivek Murthy. The CDC will have more information about additional J&J shots in **coming weeks**

US: The Biden admin will cover of 100% of states' emergency COVID costs. LINK

Alabama: WaPo: An Alabama doctor watched patients reject the coronavirus vaccine. Now he’s refusing to treat them. “'Dr. Valentine will no longer see patients that are not vaccinated against covid-19,' the sign reads." LINK

US: The COVID-19 Forecast Hub at UMass Amherst, which is utilized by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, predicts new COVID-19 hospitalizations could reach 32,000 a day as soon as Sept. 13. LINK

South Africa: ⁦@USAfricaLive⁩ BrkNEWS: South Africa hit by 14,728 new COVID-19 cases — within 24 hours ⁦@MLKmandelachebe⁩ ⁦@WHO LINK

Alabama: JUST IN: Alabama now at NEGATIVE 29 ICU beds, according to the Alabama Hospital Association.

US: BREAKING: Number of Americans hospitalized with COVID-19 tops 90,000

Kentucky: More Kentuckians currently in ICU battling COVID than ever before during pandemic LINK

Washington: BREAKING: K-12 school teachers and staff must be vaccinated in WA by Oct. 18 or face losing their jobs. The applies to public, private, and charter schools. @GovInslee is live on #KOMONews right now

Canada: 553 new cases of #COVID19 in B.C., as the rolling average increases slightly, but may be beginning to plateau. Active cases up to 5,580 (highest since May 13), hospitalizations down to 107 but ICU cases to 53, one new death.

World: Researchers find that COVID-19 patients who only suffered mild infections can be plagued with life-altering and sometimes debilitating cognitive issues LINK

Australia: Sydney Children's Hospital Network is currently looking after SEVEN HUNDRED kids with #COVID19 Still fortunately vast majority as outpatients, but expecting more to become unwell as time goes on

Hong Kong: Hong Kong’s granting of quarantine exemption to Nicole Kidman following her arrival from Australia last week has sparked outrage among residents who face some of the world’s toughest pandemic restrictions. LINK

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ruminativerabbi · 6 years

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Guns and Cars

Yes, of course, when I looked at the pictures of the innocents gunned down in the high school in Santa Fe, Texas, last Friday, I felt some combination of anger and deep sadness. What kind of person could look at portraits of murdered children and not feel both those emotions welling up from deep within? And yet it’s also true that the incident itself independent of the victims—the actual scenario of a young person getting a gun somewhere, entering a school (in this case his own high school), and opening fire on whomever has the misfortune to be standing in his line of fire—the actual incident itself amazed me in precisely the opposite way: by failing to stir up the level of outrage that even I myself think any normal person should bring to his or her contemplation of an event like last week’s bloodbath at Santa Fe High. It’s just become so…so what? So routine, so almost ordinary, so weirdly and eerily banal? The sad truth is that it’s not even that easy after all these incidents for me to remember clearly which shooter attacked which school.

As a result, I found myself understanding easily when I listened to that video clip featuring Paige Curry, a seventeen-year-old student at Santa Fe. “It’s been happening everywhere,” Paige said. And then she added a thought that would have once been incomprehensible other than in a horror movie as the cellos start thrumming in the background. “I’ve always kind of felt,” she said, “like it eventually was going to happen here too.” And then, just to sharpen her point, she added the almost obvious: “I wasn’t surprised,” she said. “I was just scared.”

I get it. I’m sure I’d be scared too if I was present in the same building as an unrestrained shooter. But would I be surprised? I think I personally would be. But, of course, I’m not a high school student, much less one in Texas, to whose entire lifetime these incidents have served as a kind of terrifying, if almost ordinary, background. (Today’s high school seniors were born after the Columbine massacre of April 20, 1999, not before.) I was once a high school student, of course. And there were indeed school shootings across the land during my years at Forest Hills High. But what was absent in my day was the sense of randomness that the shooting incidents of these last years seem almost invariably to feature. There were, to be precise, exactly one dozen documented school shootings during the years I was in high school, seven of which took place in high schools or junior highs. The rest took place in universities or colleges, but the salient detail is that none was random: some, like the famous Kent State incident of 1970, took place in the context of political demonstrations; others were tragic, unintentional accidents; and still others, at least half, were targeted assassinations, usually of teachers or principals by disgruntled students. In other words, in none did a young person simply appear in school with a gun and just start shooting.

The earliest school shooting in the United States actually preceded the founding of the nation itself. It took place in 1764 in Greencastle, Pennsylvania, in the context of the now-long-since-forgotten war called Pontiac’s War in which native tribes banded together to protest British policies towards them. And it was thus, at least in their own minds, as an act of war that four Delaware Indians entered that town’s school building on July 26 of that year and shot to death the school’s principal, one Enoch Brown. Whether Greencastle can count as our country’s first brush with murder at school, or whether the murder of John Davis, the law professor at the University of Virginia who was murdered by one of his students on November 12, 1840, deserves to be considered the first American school shooting, seems to me at least debatable. (I believe the Greencastle incident is the only school shooting, even now, in American history that took place in the context of an actual war. But it seems odd to consider it an American event, given that the United States did not yet even exist.) But the more profound question is not which incident gets the most reasonably to be labelled our first school shooting, but whether we can stem this tide of senseless violence before it becomes even more endemic, even more a part of our national culture, even more inextricably woven into the fabric of our American ethos…and as such something that in the end simply cannot in any practical way be eradicated.

To my way of thinking, this is specifically not a Second Amendment issue and we have done ourselves no service by appearing unable to frame it any other way. Indeed, approaching the question from that vantage point—i.e., by wondering if Americans should or shouldn’t be allowed to bear arms or how that right should or shouldn’t be curtailed with respect to one or another subgroup within the citizenry—that seems to me to be the precisely least productive way to engage with this issue. Instead, this should be a considered a safety issue—and in the context of school shootings, a children’s safety issue—and the question framed, not in terms of the rights of citizens (or specific citizens) to own guns at all or specific kinds of guns, but in terms of the basic right of all citizens, most definitely including children, to be safe from harm as they go about conducting their daily affairs.

We’ve managed this in other areas, after all. In a truly remarkable essay published last November, Nicholas D. Kristoff made the remarkable point that, through a combination of innovation, legislation, and increased awareness on the part of the public, we have managed to reduce the likelihood of an American dying in an automobile accident by an unbelievable 95% since 1921. (To see Kristoff’s essay, click here.) Even more to the point is that we have done so not by prohibiting the use of cars, not by making cars increasingly less powerful with each model year, not by continually raising the age at which young people can get driver’s licenses, not by requiring background checks before permitting a dealer to sell a car to anyone at all, and not by requiring people to acquire government-issued permits to purchase motorized vehicles. Instead, we allowed what we know of cars—and, no less crucially, what we know of the people who drive them—to inspire innovation after innovation intended to diminish the likelihood of an American dying in a car accident.

We all know how this has been accomplished. Seatbelts were introduced in 1950 and eventually made mandatory in all fifty states. Federal safety standards were first imposed on automobile manufacturers in 1968. The national 55 m.p.h. speed limit was imposed on most American highways in 1974. Car safety ratings, giving consumers the opportunity to purchase vehicles based on the degree to which they were considered safe to operate by unbiased experts and not merely the degree to which they were touted as such by their manufacturers, were introduced in 1993. Front-seat airbags became mandatory in 1999. We introduced mandatory reporting of defects by car manufacturers in 2000. And the result? In 1946, there were 9.35 deaths per 100 million miles driven in the United States. In 2016, there were 1.18 deaths per 100 million miles driven. That is a truly amazing statistic, one all Americans should bear in mind as they search for a way to make safe our schools and protect our children. It surely can be done. We just need to figure out how.

As Mount Kilauea continues to erupt in Hawaii, there has apparently been a resurgence of interest in Madame Pele, the traditional Hawaiian goddess of destruction imagined to govern that fiery mountain and to control its lava flow. I doubt most Hawaiians take these beliefs too literally, although there are apparently those who take them very seriously indeed. (Click here to read more.) Nor is the idea of a god or goddess of destruction unfamiliar to me—the Israelites themselves used regularly to flirt with the idea of bringing some version of Mot, the Canaanite god of death and destruction, into the Israelite cult as a kind of sub-deity deemed responsible for destruction and death in the world. The prophets inveighed against that kind of potential deviation from strict monotheism, but I can certainly understand the appeal of explaining away at least some of the terrible things that happen in the world by blaming them on perverse deities intent on bringing mayhem to the world. But when it comes to the scourge of gun violence in our land (and particularly the version directed at children or teenagers in school), it feels ridiculous to blame the situation on malevolent gun gods or on our national ethos, or in describing it as the inevitable consequence of our right to bear arms.

It’s easy to be cynical. I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard people say in the last little while that there simply is no solution, that if Sandy Hook wasn’t enough to rouse Americans to action than nothing ever will be. I suppose there’s something to that. But the dimensions of the problem need to rouse us to action anyway: if you include suicides, there have been more gun deaths in our nation’s history (about 1.4 million) than deaths in all the wars in which our country has participated since the Revolution itself (about 1.3 million, as Shelter Rockers who come to Yizkor all know). In most years, more Nursery-School-aged children die from gunfire than police officers risking their lives in the line of duty. We have created this situation and I simply can’t imagine that we can’t also solve it.

#Gun Control #School Shootings #Santa Fe High School

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fallin-flcwer · 3 years

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Next Generation Connections

Helloooo! Here is a list of current and wanted connections for my muses x

Whitney Mendoza-Cruz (St. Judes)

TAKEN:

Thea, Judah & Tilly: Her siblings. I think she's closest to Judah, but she loves them all more than anything else and will always be there for them even if they aren't all as close as they used to be.

Rowan & Aurora: Childhood friends! Being the children of Chris, Hensley and Soraya, they were all brought up together. Whitney definitely misses them a lot now that they've gone away and tried her best to keep in touch with them whenever she can

Peter R: They're related through Blake being Flo's step-brother, but I don't think they really became friends until he and Aurora started dating. Whenever Peter has some trouble he usually goes to Whitney to vent, and she's always there to listen to him

Dixie: Like Peter R, Dixie and Whitney are step-cousins through Blake. While they do get along well, they can be seen clashing just as much but they always seem to make up by the next time they see each other.

Noah: One of Whitney’s first relationships was with Noah. For him, Whitney was most of his first - first date, first kiss, first time etc. but since Whitney was always more outgoing the relationship eventually fell flat and she ended up breaking up with him. All in all, I think Whitney still cares about him to some extent, and there’s a special place in their hearts for each other.

Young-Mi: Best friend and roommate in St. Judes. With the two of them being very sociable and adventurous they often found themselves in the same group and eventually got closer to the point where they were constantly hanging out doing whatever together.

WANTED:

St. Judes Friends: Whitney's always been a social person but now that her friends have moved away she'd definitely put effort into getting to know people in the uni.

Ex-Flings: Whit is 100% a bruh girl but she definitely went through a short phase where she was continuously hooking up with guys, and getting herself into messy situations and decided that it wasn't for her LMAO.

Exes: Genuine relationships she's had over the course of high school. I think they'd go well for a few months but then after a bit Whitney would get bored if they weren't as outgoing as her LMAO. We can always discuss whether of not they ended on bad terms.

Tilly Mendoza-Cruz (Diamond Bridge)

TAKEN:

Thea, Judah & Whitney: Older siblings. Being the baby of the family, Tilly is easily the most naïve and sheltered out of the four and would've looked up to them all a lot growing up, especially her sisters.

Min-Hyuck: A dancing friend. Although they go to different unis they’ve formed a bond through dancing and kind of have a partner in crime kind of friendship

WANTED:

Roommate/Mum friend: Going straight from living with her family to moving to Diamond Bridge, Tilly would not last a day living alone LMFAO. So maybe a roommate that teaches her basic stuff like how to cook and do laundry, and while they can be annoyed with her sometimes, they tolerate and take pride in teaching her.

Dancing friend(s): Dancers inside and outside of Diamond Bridge that she hangs out with. Maybe there's some where's like a little playful rivalry going on, but generally I don't Tilly would have the heart to wholeheartedly pit herself against other dancers

Dancing student: They don't really have to be a dancer, but I think it'd be cute for Tilly to have a plot where someone sees her dancing, they become friends and now she always teaches them different choreographies. I think she'd really enjoy something like that, since she isn't the one being taught for once

Sylvia Jimenez-Lin (Liberty)

TAKEN:

Jay: Her ex and crush. She left him without telling him the reason after finding out about her illness, but since then she's opened up to him and they've been talking again since then

Lily: Her best friend. They are always there for each other during their highs and lows. I think even now that Sylvia's in New York, they both put effort into facetiming each other and making the most of the time that they have together when they are in the same place

Nicolai: Childhood best friend. Nicolai spent most of his time living with Phoenix and Sylvia, and because of that she grew up knowing the things that went down between him and his dad, and in return Nicolai often treats Sylvia like he's her big brother. Even though they aren't as close as they used to be, Nicolai is still very protective of Syl.

Daisy: Back in high school years, Syl and Daisy used to always bump into each other at the hospital while they were getting check ups on their conditions but never really got to know each other well aside from that. In Liberty, she and Daisy ended up becoming roommates and at some point Sylvia accident grabbed one of Daisy's hospital treatment letters, thinking that it was one of her's.

WANTED:

New friends: I think now that she is out of Violet Springs, and generally has a better outlook on life since her diagnosis, Sylvia will become a lot more social and popular in Liberty. Not like Youi popular but almost there.

First boyfriend: The only guys she would've dated before Jay. I think they would've been pretty young, so maybe they were going really well for a bit but then things kinda slowed down. Eventually they ended up breaking it off, but they've been good friends ever since

Nila Lin (West Ivys)

TAKEN:

Belle: Ex-Best Friends. They used to always be there for each other, going out to parties and getting wasted together, but when Belle's parents divorced and she started going off the rails Nila thought that she was going too far. While Nila tried to get her to tone it down, Belle wanted Nila to follow along with her, leading them to having a massive falling out. I think even now they aren't talking, Nila's always keeping an eye on her from afar

Darcy: Ex-Girlfriend. Darcy is the first girl Nila dated. Prior to that, she had only dated guys and assumed she was straight based off that. Being very young when they were dating, naturally they grew apart and ended on healthy terms.

Nicolas: A close friend of her’s that stuck by her after her friendship with Belle fell apart. He really kept an eye on her and was just really supportive without pushing her to do/say anything and Nila appreciates him for that.

WANTED:

Ex-Boyfriends: Guys she dated short-term prior to her dating Darcy. I don't think she's the kind of person to leave anything on bad terms, especially if they didn't last long

Youi Moon (Liberty)

TAKEN:

Hayi: Older sister. I think both of them are probably the most vicious of the Moon-Kang clan. If you ever mess with one if them you'll have both of them to deal with, plus the boys every now and then. Youi is definitely more bold and vocal, but Hayi definitely plays a role in keeping her tame.

San: Older brother. I think while they give of very different vibes -with San being the weirdo of the family and Youi being the borderline bitchy, popular girl- they very much think the same. Growing up, I think Youi would've been closer to San than she was to Hayi, and even though that's changed over time, she goes to him when she feels more playful, or when (on the rare occasion) she's upset.

Addy, Callie & Bianca: High School best friends. The four of them were part of the popular clique in Gallagher. I think being away from them is kinda bittersweet for Youi. Even though she thinks they were lowkey fake at times, she really does miss them and would love to catch up whenever she has the chance.

Louisa: An unlikely friend while they both come from wealthy families, they never were really part of the same circle since Youi fell into the popular clique while Louisa was more mature, but recently they’ve gotten to know each other and kind of welcome each other to different aspects of their lives, introducing different things to one another Jay: Secret friends with benefits. Currently they’re sleeping together but no one really knows about it since Youi can’t bring herself to be involved with anyone in that way. The relationship on her side is only physical.

Ethan: Since Ethan and Addy broke up Ethan has been hitting on Youi, but she kinda just takes it as him needing a friend to talk to. While she eventually catch on to him flirting, she’s still very touchy about it since she’s still considers Addy a friend, and doesn’t really know how to go about it alongside her situation with Jay.

WANTED:

Liberty Friends: Youi was in the rich, popular clique in Gallagher and in Liberty it isn't any different. I think she falls into that kind of group naturally. and since she doesn't have Callie, Bianca and Addy with her she's kinda become the HBIC in Liberty without realising. She'd definitely want more people around her though

Jihoon Kang (Blossom Bell)

TAKEN:

Hayi: Cousin, Best Friend & Roommate. Between this friendship, Hayi holds 95% of the braincells LMFAO. She is Jihoon's impulse control, and if he didn't have her around he'd probably be wind up in so much trouble. He's definitely picked up a thing or two from Hayi when it comes to being tactical and strategic.

San: Cousin, Best Friend & Groupmate. I think these two are definitely the goofiest in the family. He isn't as close to San as he is to Hayi, but being in the same group has brought them together a lot more, resulting in many chaotic moments happening in their group and at home.

Amelia: Jihoon produces music for Amelia. Their music-making process is really sending tracks back and forth to each other until they reach the final product. Some people probably think that the process they have is inconvenient but he encourages her to release more music, and their little system works for them.

WANTED:

Unrequited Crush/Someone he's unintentionally leading on: A toxic trait that Haneul and all of his sons have in common is that while they are great at communicating with girls, they are incredibly oblivious to their feelings LMAO. I think simply because he's best friends with Hayi, he's used to talking to girls in a casual way, but since they're not his cousin, he isn't afraid to make flirty jokes and stuff like that just for the fun of it. So maybe while they're developing something for him, Jihoon doesn't notice at all.

(NEW) Yohan Kang (Blossom Bell)

TAKEN:

Hayi & San: His cousins. Being more on the quiet, private side he was never really as close to Jiwon's kids as Jihoon was. I think now that he and San are in Blossom Bell together, they've definitely become a lot closer, although he is still lowkey judging him.

Young-Mi: Childhood friends gone unrequited crush. Yohan and Young-Mi were familiar with each other mostly through Elodie and Haneul. Whenever Elodie and Young-Mi went on holiday to South Korea, Haneul always offered them rooms at his house. Yohan and Young-Mi were close, but while she has a crush on him, Yohan only really sees it all as a friendship.

Min-Hyuck: With their father’s being members of Seventeen, although they might not have seen each other all to often, they were often associated with each other. In Blossom Bell, they are now roommates and have gotten a lot closer.

WANTED:

Academy Buddies: While he loves his family, and the fact that a majority of them are in Blossom Bell, he'd definitely try and break away from them and make more friends

Guy Squad: Maybe like a friend group of 3 or 4 guys from different unis that are always seen hanging out and goofing around. Yohan would generally be the mum friend of the group, but he'd definitely feel more free to enjoy himself with this group

(NEW) Joji "Georgie" Heo (Blossom Bell)

TAKEN:

Min-Hyuck: Twin brother. Between the two, Georgie is the more outgoing one. They're both really close and pretty much grew up looking up to their father wanting to become idols. While Minhyuck stayed on that path, Georgie decided that she didn't really want that much attention and became a choreographer instead

WANTED:

Roommates: She goes to Blossom Bell, and I'd love for her to have a roommate. Whether they have a lot in common and get along, or if they have a little clash in personality, it can be developed!!

Friends: Just new friends in general!! Georgie's a social butterfly, so I doubt that having friends in overseas and rival unis would matter to her at all LOL

(NEW) Eric Mendoza (Rosewell)

TAKEN:

Tammy: He and Tammy were in a long-term relationship before he found out that he had a son. In a panic, he broke up with her without saying anything, and while she's still mad a him him, but still wants to know why he did it.

Noah: Childhood best friends. He was the first person Eric went to when he found out that he had a son, and in turn Noah helped cover for him until he sorted his secret out with his sister. To this say the only person aside from Moira that knows.

WANTED:

Friends: He was brought up in Violet Springs and was one of those people that can blend into any kind of clique in high school so just friends in general would be nice for him, especially since he's new

#「 ☾ – next gen 」

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bongaboi · 3 years

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Beneath the bling: Lakers championship rings feature many special surprises

By DAVID WHARTON STAFF WRITER JAN. 15, 20215 AM

Coiled snakes and small etchings, like hieroglyphics. Jewels whose exact carat weight holds a secret meaning. You can spot all the clues, if you look closely enough.

The ring that each Lakers player received for winning the 2020 NBA championship is mostly gold and diamonds, glitz and audacity, but there is something subtle lurking beneath the gleam.

The jeweler responsible for the design wanted to document a basketball season unlike any other, a year marked by more than wins and losses. In the space of one — albeit very large — ring, Jason Arasheben has concealed visual references to the death of Kobe Bryant, a global pandemic and social unrest. He calls them his “Easter eggs.”

“We had a lot going on last year,” says Arasheben, who owns the tony Jason of Beverly Hills. “It’s not just how many diamonds you use, it’s how you tell a story.”

Professional sports bling has been a tradition since the early 1920s, when the New York Giants baseball team handed out rings as an alternative to the pocket watch chains, cuff links and engraved tie clips that previously had been given to players.

Simple and stylish was the rule for many years until the New York Yankees went big and brash in the 1970s, igniting an arms race that now has teams in various sports trying to outdo each other — more gold, more gemstones — season after season.

The Lakers will not disclose how much they spent on this latest salvo. With 180 grams of yellow gold and 804 jewels in each, the rings could be worth more than $20,000, setting a new benchmark in extravagance.

If this raises some eyebrows at a time of hardship, team executives believe the players deserve a special gift for persevering through the season. Arasheben wanted to give them a sort of time capsule, an effort not lost on star forward LeBron James.

“It was just a culmination of what we’ve been through,” James told reporters after getting his ring. “So many ups and downs, a lot of adversity.”

And a lot of story to tell.

The helicopter crash that killed Bryant, his 13-year-old daughter Gianna and seven others on Jan. 26, 2020 had the team reeling, struggling to comprehend the loss of an icon who had retired only a few seasons earlier. Before the shock wore off, the coronavirus shutdown brought the NBA to a lurching halt.

By the time games resumed and the Lakers defeated the Miami Heat to win it all in mid-October, there wasn’t much time to make rings for the start of a new season. Team executives called Arasheben. Though best known for such celebrity clients as Drake, Jennifer Lopez and the late Michael Jackson, the 44-year-old jeweler had worked with the Lakers before.

“It made sense because he gets the pulse of this team,” says Linda Rambis, executive director of special projects and confidante to co-owner Jeanie Buss.

A flurry of discussions ensued, ideas flying back and forth.

Some design elements were entirely conventional, starting with a purple-and-gold logo on the face, framed by block letters spelling “World Champions.” The right side, or shank, featured each player’s name and jersey number. The left shank listed the Lakers’ playoff opponents and results of each series. This boilerplate information out of the way, Arasheben set to work on smaller touches with larger meanings.

The purple “L” in the logo was fashioned from 17 amethysts, one for each of the 17 championships in franchise history. They weighed .95 carats, a nod to the 95 days that players had spent inside the “bubble,” a Florida complex where all NBA teams lived and competed when the season resumed. Yellow diamonds in the basketball-shaped background totaled .52 carats, equaling the number of regular-season victories.

“It was like a puzzle,” Arasheben says. “We had to be creative in how we built things in.”

There was room to coil two snakes — an homage to Bryant and his “Black Mamba” nickname — behind the jersey numbers. The shanks, shaped vaguely like basketball hoops, got a mesh background. With each addition, it seemed Arasheben or the team would think of something else.

“How do you recognize all of the challenges we went through last year, and then all the bright spots?” Rambis asks. “It was just us wanting to have all of those elements in the ring.”

The work suited Arasheben, a man with a backstory of his own.

The boy loved to draw, doodling portraits, copying the blueprints his architect father brought home. His parents had a different sort of future in mind, telling him: You’re a good talker. You should be a lawyer.

Pre-law classes at UCLA failed to satisfy Arasheben’s artistic bent; they also put him in debt. A friend told him about wholesale stores in the fashion district, so he pooled his money and drove downtown to buy silver trinkets and brightly colored, plastic butterfly hair clips, cheap stuff he could get for $8 a dozen. Back on campus, fellow students stopped by his table and paid well over cost.

“The very first day,” he recalls, “I did $100 in sales.”

These profits paid off tuition with enough left over to hang out at nightclubs where, as an avid NBA fan, Arasheben recognized players among the regulars. They all seemed to be wearing what he recalls as “over-the-top, monstrous” jewelry, which gave him another idea.

Despite an utter lack of experience in the business, he began sketching ornate chains and bracelets, incorporating names and personal details of certain players. Slipping into the club’s VIP section, he approached them, straining to speak over the pounding music: “I’d love to design jewelry for you. In fact, I happen to have a drawing right here.”

They almost always shooed him off, waving away the paper he held in their face. But in 2002, the late New York Knicks star Anthony Mason took a look and liked what he saw. It was both a defining moment and a problem because Arasheben had no idea what to do next.

Stalking the jewelry district, walking from shop to shop, asking questions, he found someone to make the monogrammed bracelet for $50,000. Not only was the profit margin healthy — he says Mason paid $60,000 — the work was creative. Arasheben networked at the NBA draft and All-Star game, meeting other players.

Forget law school, he thought. I want to get into jewelry.

Most teams rely on such established jewelers as Tiffany or Jostens for their rings, so there was no reason to think Arasheben could break into the business. But while selling custom pieces, he made friends with the Buss family that owned the Lakers. Wrangling a meeting with the late Jerry Buss, he told of starting from nothing, a story that seemed to click with Buss, who had built a fortune in real estate.

“I really had no business making their rings,” Arasheben says. “He gave me a chance.”

Things went smoothly at first; the team liked his design of 14 diamonds and white gold in 2009, evoking the white uniforms that players wore on Sundays to honor broadcaster Chick Hearn. Arasheben satisfied Bryant and guard Derek Fisher, who asked to have each player’s face etched on the shank.

But after years of making a few pieces at a time, it was tough producing a batch of 200 or so for players, staff and others. With sleeping bags strewn across the factory floor, Arasheben and his crew worked around the clock.

“We were taking shifts,” he says. “I think we delivered the last ring 30 minutes before the ceremony.”

The team rehired him in 2010, which led to orders from European soccer teams and the Dodgers when they won the 2017 National League pennant. Arasheben made rings for the Golden State Warriors as they captured three NBA titles in four seasons.

“We knew what we did like and we knew what we didn’t like,” Warriors forward Andre Iguodala says in a team video. “From there, we said ‘Use your imagination.’ ”

After the 2018 championship, some Warriors players wanted a blue face, some preferred white. Arasheben engineered a reversible face with diamonds on one side and sapphires on the other. At the team’s ring ceremony, video shows Iguodala demonstrating the switch to others on the bench, telling them to give the face a twist.

“You’re supposed to?” teammate David West asks.

Coach Steve Kerr tries it and blurts: “Oh my god.”

The 2020 Lakers ring posed a different problem as Arasheben kept adding features. Around the rim, he put tiny etchings of the Larry O’Brien Trophy and jersey numbers for every player on the roster that season, even those waived or assigned to the G League before the playoffs.

The left shank had room for a small NBA logo, featuring the silhouette of former Lakers great Jerry West. On the right, Arasheben fit the team’s mantra that season, “Leave A Legacy,” along with the player name and number and snakes.

Still, he needed more space.

The first championship rings, the ones handed out by the New York Giants in 1922, were relatively simple. Brushed gold, a single diamond, nothing to set the world on fire but the timing was right.

“Pocket watches were going out of fashion,” says John Odell, a curator at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. There was no need for jeweled fobs or watch chains because “no longer was it stylish to show off a little bling across your belly.”

The new trend began with relatively tame signet rings, then graduated to something in the neighborhood of a high school class ring. More size translated into more detail; legendary football coach Vince Lombardi took charge of the design for his Green Bay Packers in the late 1960s and made sure to include a crown from his family crest.

There have been a few small quirks in recent years. After a squirrel bounded across home plate during the 2011 playoffs, the champion St. Louis Cardinals included a tiny image of the rodent. Two years later, the Boston Red Sox — known for their unshaven appearance — stamped a beard on the inside of their rings.

But glitz and bulk have dominated since New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner splashed “NY” in diamonds across the face of a large ring in 1977 and an even bigger one in 1996. The Lakers noted the trend in 2000, engraving “Bling Bling” on their shank. Three years later, the Florida Marlins spent a reported $20,000 each for a design encrusted with hundreds of diamonds.

“Overtly ostentatious,” Odell calls it.

Team owners were spending far more than the modest allowances the NFL and Major League Baseball afforded its winning teams. As weights topped three ounces, the rings had become so large that Jostens suggested wearing them “on your middle finger may be more comfortable in terms of balance.”

Arasheben acknowledges the trend is “getting a little ridiculous. It’s getting to the point where you’re just going to give the players a diamond plate.” But that didn’t slow him down with the Lakers this winter.

“Other manufacturers have tried to outdo us,” he says. “This year, we tried to outdo them one more time.”

There were 71 days between the title-winning game against the Heat and the ceremony the Lakers wanted to hold at their season opener in December. Most of that time was spent on design.

When Arasheben finally ran out of space, he reached back to an old trick with the detachable face. Same solution for a different problem.

“This time,” he says, “we needed to create more real estate.”

A 45-degree twist reveals a secondary face underneath, bearing images of the 12 retired jerseys that hang in Staples Center, including the one with a microphone instead of a number for Hearn. Bryant’s two jerseys — he wore No. 8 and No. 24 during his career — are accentuated in a darker color. As further tribute, a snakeskin texture serves as the background.

This gimmick also left space to reference last spring, when Americans took to the streets, protesting the death of George Floyd.

Pro athletes in basketball, baseball and other sports staged walkouts. James helped form More Than a Vote, an organization that has fought voter suppression and drew more than 42,000 volunteers to work at polling stations for the November election. Arasheben used the underside of the face to etch the word “Unity.”

“We wanted something the players could show their grandchildren,” he says. “Something to remember.”

The rings were handed out at an unusual ceremony last month, the stands empty because of coronavirus restrictions. Players stepped up, one by one, to podiums at midcourt while family members spoke from the videoboard above. “I know this has been a very difficult year for everyone here,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said.

Still, James called it a “pretty cool feeling” to celebrate with teammates, a chance to look back on all they had been through. “So many story lines,” he said.

And only one ring to tell them.

===

David Wharton is a feature sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times.

#2021 #nba #national basketball association #los angeles lakers

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officialotakudome · 3 years

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New Post has been published on Otaku Dome | The Latest News In Anime, Manga, Gaming, And More

New Post has been published on https://otakudome.com/soul-review/

Soul Review

Pixar finds it’s magic again with latest release Soul. Released exclusively to Disney+ in the West the film follows middle school teacher Joe Gardner who aspires to be a professional jazz musician. Upon meeting lifeless soul 22, Joe learns that personal dreams & desires are only part of what makes us alive.

Soul is a 2020 CG animated comedy film, it is produced by Pixar Animation Studios & Walt Disney Pictures, and distributed by Walt Disney Studios. It is available exclusively on Disney+.

Editor’s Note: Near complete to complete spoilers for Soul may be pesentt within this review.

Tina Fey & Jamie Foxx star as 22 (left) & Joe Gardner (right)

Prior to the fallout with the pandemic Soul was cited as one of the films to watch out for. It’s colorful, eye-catching animation and direction quickly attracted would-be moviegoers who were looking forward to having a theatrical experience with the film. Unfortunately as the COVID-19/coronavirus pandemic continued to worsen Soul ended up being one of the many theater release causalities. As WB Pictures announced it’s entire 2021 slate for streaming service HBO Max, Disney may soon be forced to follow suit with Soul being the first film to quickly skip their previous “Premium Access” attempt. Released on Christmas day for the West, those interested in the film are now able to view a film that gives a beautiful take on human existence Disney+ and all you need is your current subscription.

Joe Gardner is an aspiring jazz musician looking to resurge his lost spark.

THE GOOD: In Soul, Joe Gardner is a middle school teacher that’s always in search of his big break. And apparently he’s been at it for awhile as he meets one of his students he taught as a child, (now an adult) named Curley who’s apart of a performing jazz band. Lacking inspiration from his teaching job Joe takes up his former student’s offer to potentially play for the band if he can impress its lead; a saxophonist named Dorothea Williams. Joe’s mother Libba is against Joe chasing his dreams as he now has a stable career as a music teacher. This is mainly due to the fact that Joe’s father (according to Libba), died chasing after the same dream. As Joe celebrates the opportunity at a gig, he suddenly dies after falling through an open manhole. He soon awakes in the “Great Beyond” (stairway to heaven) and attempts to escape, but his efforts land him in the “Great Before” (pre-existence). Here he finds soul counselors who help guide unborn souls to their destined ways of life. Mistaking him as another soul, they have Joe act as a teacher for misguided souls assigning him the literal life challenging 22. 22 is a smart-mouthed know-it-all who always has some kind of sassy comment when it relates to life. 22’s cynicism isn’t exactly her fault, the teachers hired by the soul counselors have been trying to get her ready for birth for millennia, but she always failed to receive her last soul badge. Six soul badges are required for a soul to enter Earth to be born as a human.

22’s missing badge was for “passion” lacking inspiration for something she loves similarly to Joe. As Joe tries to teach her about human culture 22 continues to refute him until she gains a sudden interest in Joe’s own life. After sharing his memories of what makes him feel alive (or so he thought) in the “Zone”, they meet Moonwind; a sign twirler who can enter the Zone at will and attempts to rescue Lost Souls (soul who become consumed by their passions). Moonwind helps guide Joe’s soul back to Earth having earlier been promised 22’s badge. As Joe returns to his body a mishap ends up having him accidentally possessing a cat with 22 possessing his body. While masquerading as Joe, 22 explores his neighborhood with Joe guiding her. She becomes interested in human life for the first time when one of Joe’s promising students gets inspired to continue his class after considering quitting. 22 begins to slowly appreciate the different aspects of human live now having been able to experience them fully. Moonwind offers to help guide Joe’s soul back to his body, but 22 now obsessed with further exploration of humanity refuses and runs off. Gary from the Great Beyond captures Joe and 22’s souls and return them to the Great Before. After an argument 22 leaves and becomes a lost soul. Joe returns to Earth and is able to successfully perform but still feels unfulfilled. He recalls his time with 22 and her joy from her first experiences as human and goes off to find her. After encountering the lost soul 22 Joe tells her that she’s more than good enough to be human and she returns to her former self and decides to live. Joe is given a second chance at life for his work and vows to live life to the fullest.

Sarcastic & arrogant, 22 is searching for a reason to live.

While satirical Soul gives a very serious look at what the “meaning of life” is and it ultimately tells us that; the meaning of life, is basically what we make of it more often that not. Sure there are things that go beyond our control, but we do have the power to choose our destinies to a degree we just need to keep on moving forward until we reach the destination we want to get to. It’s a nice, much needed feel good message especially after that abysmal year most of if not all of the world was forced to deal with in 2020. And honestly a week in and 2021 isn’t all that off to a great start either. This message doesn’t really come until around the latter half of the film so it doesn’t get to the point of feeling preachy. Soul is described as a comedy, but there weren’t many jokes in the film which I thought was the right move for its direction. It keeps it from feeling too kiddish and low-brow. While it’s not exactly adult inherently, there is a certain level of maturity with Soul that gives it a proper “all ages” aesthetic. The characters all have fun, explosive personalities that are perfectly executed by the voice cast. It’s an incredibly fast-paced film and it’s over before you know it, but it’s easy enough to follow that you never seem too bottled down with information to keep. Every purpose and character direction just about is summed up purposely, though there are a couple of blunders that I go into details about below.

Soul is a musically charged philosophical look at human life before,& beyond the grave.

THE BAD: Honestly throughout my viewing of Soul I can’t say there was much I didn’t like about the film, but there were a couple. My main grip is that it seems as though the film may have gone through a couple of re-writes throughout it’s development and it becomes a bit obvious during it’s run. Allow me to explain there’s a character named Paul who’s introduced during the barbershop scene. Paul is described as being Joe’s rival, but they only use him for about a maximum of three scenes. 22 even unintentionally insults Paul by stating that he insults Joe because he’s jealous and it hits him deep. I really think Paul originally had a much bigger role in he film, but his story eventually carried over to 22’s. Her turning into a lost soul & Paul’s short interaction with Gary also hints at this possible original story plan. For whatever reason instead of cutting Paul completely they kept him in the film leaving some slight confusion in the process.

Soul wants us to learn that “the meaning of life” is exactly what we make o it.

OVERALL THOUGHTS: Soul is a beautifully animated film that brings Pixar back to form not felt since the release of it’s earlier films. Sequels are nice and all, but Soul proves that it doesn’t hurt to experiment more with original projects even if they end up being one offs. The film does have small story issues that may confuse those that pay too close attention, but it’s a complete film well worth a Disney+ sub if even for a month or so. Otaku Dome gives Soul a 95 out of 100.

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clevercatchphrase · 6 years

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2017 in review, and goals for 2018

If I had to describe 2017 in one word it would be... monotonous. Sure, there were plenty of ups and downs, but for the most part, especially the latter 6 months, I just felt like I was going through the motions, holding my nose to the grind stone, doing work and paying off student loans. 2017 blew by me, and I remember thinking each month passed by with unusal quickness. There's a strange sense of disociation with that, like I wasn't really connected to reality for most of the year, and instead watched it pass me by from a seperate temporal window. In a weird way it may have been a bit of a godsend as well. I hear 2017 was hard for a lot of people, but feeling so disonnected from the year may have protected me and cushioned the blow in a sense.

I lost a family member this year in early june. I knew it was coming ever since january as I hated having to watch them deteriorate and get worse and worse until they finally passed. The three months leading up to it and the three months after were particularly hard and left me feeling unable to write or draw or do anything productive. I still miss them terribly. I always will. But I hope I won't let it immobilize me as much this year as it did last year.

Anyway, Let's review my goals for last year and see what I've accomplished. I’ve a lot to say, so for brevity’s sake I’ve put it all under the cut.

GOALS FOR 2017 1) Finish my 50 billion fan fictions so I can get back to drawing Ah ha ha ha ha ha ha. HAHAHAHAHA. The depression I got halfway through the year throughly put a halt on this. I haven't even finished one of the fics I've started in 2016. I got close, seeing as i participated in NaNoWriMo this year to try and force myself to finish, but I still need to revise and edit all that I've written and the motivation is non existant. GOD, I have so many stories too, all of them still undertale fan fiction because I'm still not over that game. I'll list them all when I share my goals for this year later below. 2)Draw in 2 pages of my sketch book each week so I'll finish a sketch book in a year. I was SO CLOSE with this one! I filled out 95 pages! But you know what i discovered in august? I realized that my 100 page sketch book.... was actually 150 pages! Oh well! I drew more this year than I thought i would! Just because i didn't hit 100 pages, doesn't mean I didn't accomplish something! 3) Finish 14 out of the remaining 27 lessons on my duolingo course I went fucking above and beyond with this one. I hit this goal back in may, and then I completely finished up the danish duolingo course by november. I also passed my 1095 day streak which translates to doing duolingo daily for OVER 3 YEARS STRAIGHT. I still practice daily to build my vocabulary, and I know I can't speak it for the life of me, or follow along with fast speakers, but give me a few minutes and I can probably read it for you. Funny how that works, where I can understand danish if it's written out, but ask me to translate from english to danish and I struggle like a butterfly in a tumble dryer. 4) Become passibly fluent in ASL I have this box of 600 ASL flash cards, and this year I practiced two of them a day until I got through the entire box. I certainly learned a bunch of new words but I wouldn't say I was fluent yet. I certainly don't know all the grammar rules yet. I HAVE been able to sign with people at my job, though I do rely heavily on fingerspelling still. Most everyone I talked with seemed to know I was trying and they seemed really excited that I could understand them if they were patient with me. I put more of my focus on Danish last year, but now that I'm done with Danish, maybe I can focust more on ASL. My sister told me about this site similar to duolingo called "memrise" that actually has an ASL course, so you can bet I'll be looking into that. 5) Read the entire dictionary I did this! I kept two spiral note books and wrote down any words I thought were cool or interesting! I haven't gone back and re-read the words I wrote down, but maybe I will this year! It was exhausting. It was weird. I still can't believe I spent about 200 hours last year doing this. 6) Read one new book every month Much like my sketch book goal, I almost completed this one. I kept it up every month until October, and then I just... stopped. I read more than I thought this year, though I ended up usually waiting until the last week of each month to read, and I also cheated by counting the dictionary as one of the things I read (hey, it's a book, ain't it?) I also re-read old books that I know I like, so not entirely 10 new books were read this year. Reading 1 new book a month isn't one of my goals this year, but I hope to read more new stuff reguardless, 7) Actually use the tutorials and references I reblog Seeing as I barely did any digitial art this year, I can't say I did this one. 8) Do more art streams I think my goal was to stream once a month. I clearly didn't do this. I DID stream in 2017, I just didn't tell anyone. Idk why, I just... went live for people to see but didn't let anyone know I did. I also only streamed like... twice? sigh... So... out of the 8 goals I set, I would say I accomplished close to half. I read the dictionary, I finished my danish language course (which I'm counting as two completed goals) and combining the "read 1 new book a month" and "draw 100 pages in a sketch book" I'll count that as one completed goal. I went through all my ASL cards, though I'm not fluent, OH! I also wanted to pay off 6k loan that I had. I want to count this one as a success because I DID FUCKING PAY OVER 6 THOUSAND DOLLARS IN LOANS THIS YEAR. I got a surprise loan I had no idea about in june that was 1500 dollars, which threw me off. I managed to pay it off in 2 months, BUT IF THAT LOAN HAD NEVER EXISTED I TOTALLY WOULD HAVE FINISHED PAYING OFF THE 6K ONE. I've got a little over a thousand left to pay on the 6k loan now, which I will complete by the end of January. I'm so close to being under 10k in debt... GOALS FOR 2018 1)Go from being 5 figures in student loan debt down to 4 figures in debt (pay off 2 out of 4 loans) If everything goes according to Keikaku I'll achieve this by the end of June. This has to factor in things like updating my car registration in april, oil changes, tune ups, tire rotation, gas and food expenses, but as long as I don't get fired I should be fine! 2) Stretch Daily Not exercise. I never exercise. But it would be nice to increase my flexibility. 3) STOP TOUCHING YOUR GODDAMN FACE/ find an effective acne treatment I also want to try washing my face daily. Im fucking 25. I shouldn't have this many pimples. 4) Do another song comic I made A lyrictale for Undertale at the end of 2015 in ten days. I want to make another. I already have it scripted, now I just need to do it. 5) Do at least one art stream a month. Hey, maybe I can stream the next song comic I do. Sure, it'd spoil the song and story for everyone, but doesn't that sound fun? 6)Practice ASL I just started looking into Memrise and their ASL courses. They actually have A LOT, AND! THEY HAVE SIGN LANGUAGE COURSES FOR OTHER COUNTRIES! This year is gonna be fun. (Also, the only reason I want to learn ASL because of Undertale. I'll let you figure out how they are connected) 7) Sew 4 stuffed animals I started sewwing a Hobbes plush in the middle of last year. His body is finished. I just never did the head. The other three stuffed animals I want to make I will keep a secret because I love to keep people guessing. 8) Make two AMVs There are two songs I want to put to Avatar; The Last Airbender, and Avatar; The Legend of Korra. I have about half the footage... I just... need to rewatch the shows and put the clips together. Hey, maybe after I find all the clips I can do a stream of that as well. 9) Last but not least, finish my many, MANY Undertale Fan Fics. a. You Monster (34 out of 37 chapters are written, but only 29 are posted) b. Finish the "Of Two Minds" series (it's explicit don't look) c. Color Theory (A chasriel one shot) d. Something Left Behind (Terrible AU Idea #647) e. Let's Get Real (Self insert, joke, parody thing that will also be explicit) f. Game Day! (something about soccer games with Mettaton along the same vain as Field Trip!) g. Would You Like Fries With That (Nicepants because there's not enough of it in the world) h. Science Fair! (something with Undyne and school projects along the same vain as Field Trip!) i. One that is so horribly dark and fucked that I won't even describe it here. Welp! Those are my goals for 2018! What are your goals for 2018? Whatever they are, I wish you success and improvement, health and wealth! Stay safe this year! I love you all~

#new year's resolutions #long post

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tsgneworleanslouisiana · 4 years

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The Local: Kelly Boudreaux, Co-owner of Free to Be Power Yoga

I discovered heated yoga approximately four years ago when I was in a challenging stage of my life professionally and personally. What I loved about the practice was the rhytmatic nature; the ability to really lose yourself in the flow while knowing you were challenging yourself physically, mentally and spiritually. I fell out of touch with the practice until a friend encouraged me to visit Free to Be Power Yoga, and I was hooked, mainly by the community they have created. I feel some people are still intimidated by the thought of heated yoga, especially in New Orleans, so I asked Kelly Boudreaux, co-owner of Free To Be Power Yoga (pictured left), to help demystify the process in an effort that you’ll consider joining for one class (with TSG!) or 40 Days to a Personal Revolution.

The Inspiration

As the co-owner of Free To Be Power Yoga, a yoga community born in New Orleans with three locations offering heated power vinyasa yoga classes and rich experiences, I am asked a lot why anyone should practice yoga in a hot room, especially in New Orleans. First, let me give a brief description of power vinyasa yoga.

Power Vinyasa Yoga is a rigorous, powerful and vibrant form of yoga where students flow from one pose to the next while connecting their breathing to their movements. This type of yoga is taught in a heated room which adds a layer of rigor and vitality. It incorporates strength, flexibility, balance, cardio and physical and mental stamina all in one session. Baron Baptiste, the founder of this form of yoga, describes this practice as, “The perfect blend of sweat and serenity.”

The Passion

Janae Holmes, my fellow co-owner, and I have a deep passion for yoga and sharing it with the New Orleans. We create a rich experience every time our clients walk in the doors and on to their mat. Our goal is to wake them up to the life they are living right now and experience freedom in their whole life.

The Experience

Allow me to take you there....

Sweat is dripping down my nose and gently onto the Manduka sweat towel that is on top of my mat. My focus is on the wall in front of me as I stand in Eagle pose, a balancing pose where my arms are wrapped around each other in front of my face and I am standing on one leg. I hear my breath start to build into the rhythmic yoga breath that happens when things start to intensify and I am getting in the zone.

The heat panels above that are set to 95 degrees invite the sweat to release from my pores. I see a trickle running down my arm and drop to my mat. I am literally leaving everything on my mat. I feel worked and at the same time powerful. This is heated Power Vinyasa Yoga at it’s best.

Still standing on one leg in Eagle pose, I feel every emotion that could possibly come up. I feel joy to be alive and frustration that I am being held for so damn long in this pose. I feel powerful to have made it more than halfway through in a 95 degree room with 50+% humidity and I feel exhausted ready to quit and walk out. One second I feel present and connected, and the next second my thoughts move to the dinner I am going out for that night. I am 100% in the practice of yoga. This practice in the heat creates the realistic experience of what life is. There is ebb and flow of thoughts and sensations. I am just standing in the emotions, non-reactive, fully awake. Standing in this heat on my mat is the best practice for my life.

The Benefits

Let’s now demystify the intentional heat added to this style of yoga. Here are 7 common benefits that have been reported for Power Vinyasa in a heated room.

Increases your heart rate. The heat in a hot yoga studio will make your heart pump way faster. It needs to push more blood toward the skin in an effort to keep you feeling cool. This builds physical and mental stamina.

Reduces Stress. The added heat is known to make you focus on your breath more. And breathing deeper is key to relaxation and stress relief.

Increases Flexibility. Heated Power Vinyasa warms the muscles which allows them to release more deeply into the pose.

Good for your skin. You will sweat in hot yoga. The sweat pulls the toxins out of your pores. It is an all-natural way to cleanse and detoxify your pores, leaving you with a natural glow.

Improves Overall Physical Fitness. Heated Power Vinyasa Yoga can help you improve your overall physical fitness on and off the mat. It increases your range of motion, stretches tight muscles and tendons, and strengthens your body overall.

Wake up to your life. This is probably my favorite reason. This practice, with the added heat, will allow all types of sensations and feelings arise. But you will learn to focus and calm your mind without letting the strand of sweat steal your attention. You will learn to stay present and wake up to what is happening in that moment.

Compliments the New Orleans Lifestyle. There is always something going on socially in New Orleans whether it is Mardi Gras, Jazz Fest, Saints games or a new restaurant popping up. The heated power vinyasa yoga compliments this lifestyle by allowing you to come as you are and sweat out whatever is not serving you. Think that last piece of King of Cake.

Join Our Community

Are you intrigued? You're invited to experience heated yoga with The Scout Guide New Orleans and Free to Be! Join Taylor Morgan, Editor + Owner, The Scout Guide New Orleans and Janae Holmes and myself, Co-owners, Free To Be Power Yoga, for a complimentary heated yoga class on Wednesday, March 4th at 7 pm at our new location Downtown. Sweat. Meet friends. Enrich your whole life. And be sure to register here.

Consider The Challenge

Taylor mentioned our 40 days program, and I am doing everything in my power to convince her. She’s toying with the idea, and I think you should too. 40 Days To Personal Revolution is a commitment to YOU and we are here to support you through it! For 40 days, you will practice yoga, meditate, journal and practice mindful eating habits. You will have nutrition and personal discovery support from our Free to Be Team. In addition, your 40 Days Krewe (the other participants and the Free To Be teachers and staff) will support and motivate you to stay on your path of growth and personal transformation. We'll all be your accountabili-buddies! Why 40 days? This is often considered the amount of time it takes to break a habit and build a new way of being, doing and living! For more information and to sign up, visit our website here.

And if you’re not ready for that kind of commitment, we invite you to indulge in our introductory special.

I have since decided to commit myself to 40 days to a Personal Revolution. What I know I need to do is transform myself, and I know I can find a community to hold me accountable in Free To Be. I hope you’ll consider joining me in this journey.

TELL THEM SCOUT SENT YOU!

—TAYLOR

Lead photo by Sara Essex Bradley, venue photo by Katie Sikora

#Learn #Heated #Yoga #Baptiste #Power #Vinyasa #40 days #Free to Be #Kelly Boudreaux #Janae Holmes #Metairie #Uptown #Downtown #The Scout Guide #New Orleans #Recommendations #Community

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ashesofeternity · 7 years

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tagged by @heartoverblade, ay thanks for the tag koji

1. Real name :

2. Nickname(s) : Teb

3. Fav. color: This oscillates a lot, but I guess the most constant one would be indigo

4. Male or female : Male

5. Nursery/Kindergarten : Shit, I don’t remember, but it was like, half here half in Japan.

6. Primary School : Here in Brazil it was in a place called Third Millenium College (college doesn’t mean that in here), that had a crazy director and I think it’s closed down by now lmao, but there one or two years were in Japan too, brazilian schools though.

7. Secondary : Saint Germain College (saying school sounds wrong but just take it to mean school alkçsdfjlksdf). Good name because if you go google that you’ll find like 7 just here in São Paulo lmao.

8. College : São Paulo Technology (Word that’s not university or college help what do I do how do I translate this) - Eastern Zone

9. Hair Color : Black

10. Tall or Short : Tall in here, but average around the world.

11. Sweats or Jeans : it’s too hot for sweatpants but jeans are evil so uh these comfy things that I don’t know how to call sjdkfgk

12. Phone or Camera : Phone

13. Health freak : I’m probably dying but I’ll only go to the doctor once I’m dead

14. Orange or Apple : Uuuuhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh this is... hard... ... ... apple

15. Do you have a crush on someone : not specifically lmao

16. Eat or Drink : CRONCH

17. Piercings : no

18. Pepsi or Coke: coca

19. Been in an airplane : ay

20. Been in a relationship : nope

21. Been in a car accident : nope

22. Been in a fist fight : ...technically I guess

23. First piercing : none

24. Best friend(s): Raf OH I WAS WONDERING WHO I’D TAG IN THIS

25. First award : some best student shit when I was like 8 or something whatever

26. First crush : Grape juice. that tasteless vegetable, “why” are the keywords here for that situation which I barely remember lmao, but it was not cool and I was like uh 7 or 8

27. First word : how the hell would I know

28. Zodiac Sign: leo

29. Last person you texted : mom probably, I only ever text her lmao no one still texts here everyone just uses whatsapp instead

30. Last person you talked to: uhhhhh mom? IDK

31. Last person you watched a movie with : Lily

32. Last food you ate : yakisoba

33. Last movie you watched : Chicago

34. Last song you listened to : Cruachan ~ The Children of Lir

35. Last thing you bought : shit... I’m not... I have... no idea...

37. Fav Food : T U N A (well not really I don’t really have a favourite I love too many types of food for this but)

38. Fav Drink : C O F F E E

39. Fav Bottoms : underwear socks and crocs, my daily outfit

40. Fav Flower : uhhhhhh orchids?

41. Fav Animal : sto t

42. Color/s : HEY

43. Fav Movie : gh I DK I don’t have one that’s a hard fucking question

44. Fav Subject : uh idk the semester’s just started i don’t even remember them all lmao

HAVE YOU EVER:

(Put an X in the brackets if yes) (? when probably but not that I FUCKING REMEMBER)

45. [x] fallen in love with someone.

46. [x]celebrated Halloween.

47. [x] had your heart broken.

48. [x] went over the data on your cell phone.

49. [x] had someone like you

51. [ ¥(人 ᴥ◉‿ ʖs งo ᴥ ==ᴥ◉%人‿ ◉ʖ₩ ͜ ◉ 人‿ ᴥ ◉ᴥʖ) ¥ ] got pregnant.

52. [ ] had an abortion.

53. [x] did something I regret.

54. [?] broke a promise.

55. [x] hid a secret.

56. [?] pretended to be happy.

57. [x] met someone who changed your life.

58. [ ] pretended to be sick.

59. [x] left the country.

60. [?] tried something you normally wouldn’t try and liked it.

61. [ ] cried over the silliest thing.

62. [ ] ran a mile.

63. [ ] went to the beach with your best friend.

64. [x] got into an argument with your friends.

65. [x] disliked someone.

66. [ ] stayed single for 2 years since the first time you had a boyfriend/girlfriend.

CURRENTLY:

67. Eating : paçoca cake

68. Drinking : coffee

69. Listening : Sabaton ~ Resist and Bite

70. Sitting/Laying : Ehhhh laying

71. Plans for today: do the thing with the thing that you breathe, go to bed

72. Waiting for : gacha to be all four again so I can sepnd these 60 quartz aND DEFINITELY ROLL CASTER NERO

YOUR FUTURE:

73. Want kids : yes

74. Want to get married : yes

75. Career : Sell my soul to the system, make a shitton of money, spend it all on the gacha

76. Lips or eyes : eyes

77. Shorter or Taller : uh shor-ter?

78. Romantic or spontaneous : uhhhhhh both?

81. Hook-up or relationship : relationship I guess

82. Looks or personality: uhhhhhh bot h?

HAVE YOU EVER:

83. Lost glasses/contacts : just a part of my glasses, this little pin thing that keeps the right side together so I just fucking taped it because fuck this

84. Snuck out of a house : nope

85. Held a gun/knife for self defense : nope

86. Killed somebody : I hope not

87. Broken someone’s heart : not reaaaaaaaaaally

88. Been in love : wasn’t this already in the

89. Cried when someone died : ...fictional characters

DO YOU BELIEVE IN:

90. Yourself : the only thing I believe in

91. Miracles : nope

92. Love at first sight : nope

93. Heaven : idk probably not

94. Santa Claus: saber alter

95. Aliens: they’re here

96. Ghosts : mm not really

TRUTHFULLY:

97. Is there one person you really want to be with right now : eh nah

98. Do you know who your real friends are : sure

100. Post as 100 truths : I mean, technically not, I redacted that first one, but otherwise

tagging @rafswildridethroughtheinternet @kyuubi-hime @justanothersaberface @kitragnell @sil-heart @blazingpride @unbenchthekench @a-swiss-panda @hazzoitalianfast

#guess why I'm tagging that many people #YES IT'S BECAUSE I HAVE ANOTHER MEME TO ANSWER AND I DAMN RIGHT AIN'T TAGGING ANYONE IN THAT

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cooplagoop · 7 years

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My Hero Academia chapter 1 to 7 review

When the anime adaptation was announced, I decided to check out the manga in order to avoid the infamous “The manga is better!” line. When I first read the first volume, I dropped MHA. By the time the tournament arc was coming to a close in the anime, I had almost forgotten why I despised the first volume. So, I started to read about the Internship arc due to the temptation of the heroes losing. I also decided to attempt a revaluation of the first volume in order to see why exactly did it suck.

Colour me surprised! Something tickled my fancy!

I consider All Might to be an interesting character. In chapter 1 he came off as cynical jerk when he told Deku he couldn’t be a hero since not 20 seconds before he did he had said that he lies to himself on a regular basis. Once he starts training Izuku for UA’s entrance exam, we see that he’s really just a bitter old man, who doesn’t like the new generation of heroes due to their obsession with fame & money. All Might is an interesting spin of the classical goody two shoes hero, who most have seen in some incarnation. Despite being capable enough to lower the crime rate marginally, he can’t change other pro heroes to view their jobs as honors like him, instead of jobs or a means to an end.

Another positive would be the weaknesses our mentor-student duo have. All Might can use his quirk for only 3 hours a day due to a severe injury. Meanwhile, Deku can’t control his new quirk because he used to be quirkless. The assigned limitations are more than welcome as One for All is a very overpowered quirk. Of course, when Deku learned how to activated One for All only in his finger from a metaphor about an egg in a microwave, a shift to the other spectrum of my review is needed.

What grinds my gears:

At the center of MHA’s downsides is Deku quite literally. The narrative superglues itself to Deku to the point that only characters who happen to be around Deku will get screen time. For an example lets use All Might, Ida and Bakugo. The greatest similarity they share is that they didn’t acknowledge Deku at first. After Deku tried to save someone their opinion of Deku changed for the better. Despite the significant affect Deku’s act of kindness had on these characters, none of these characters got the screen time they needed in order to reestablish themselves as better people. I’ll exemplify them in the order of least blatant to most blatant. 1st°: All Might doesn’t know what to do. -Deku tries to save Bakugo- -All Might starts acting more like a hero- -All Might tells Deku he can become a hero & starts training him- Instead of focusing on what the encounter with the Sludge villain meant for All Might, as he intended to make Deku his successor due to this battle alone, we are stuck with Deku or future!Deku (I will never understand this.) narrating the events that took place after the Sludge villain was defeated. Aforementioned narration is 100% insight free for all characters except Deku, which doesn’t help solidify Deku as a worthy successor when All Might was searching for 5 years with no results to speak of. 2nd°: Bakugo is controlled by the Sludge villain. -Deku saves him- -Bakugo doesn’t bully Deku like he used to (he’s more bark than bite)- Will he get more screen time? Will we see what he thinks of Deku after he saved him? Why did he mellow down a bit? How did he score so many point in the entrance exam? Why is he so good at fighting? What kind of training did he do before the entrance exam? Why is he the deuteragonist if all of my previous questions were not answered? 3rd°: Ida ran away from the giant robot -Deku rescues Uraraka from the robot- -Ida starts to question if he would do the same thing Deku did- -before Ida can finish his sentence we cut to Deku- This one was so in your face that right there was when I noticed how narrow MHA’s narrative really is.

What’s the deal with Deku?

The issue I have with Deku is not his personality, but how the narrative treats him. Like I mentioned before Deku hogs the spotlight from other character as if he is the most interesting character to have graced us. When in actuality he is the bare bones protagonist type, whose purpose is to emphasize the complexity of the characters around him. Deku like 95% of protagonists is restricted in the personality traits he has (there’s something about him being a nerd, but when plot stuff is going on he turns into a virtuous hero with no flaws (I think the nerd aspect of his “personality” was added in for pandering)). The worst part is that MHA does use Deku for initiating character development...until the spotlight comes back to Deku & I’m left in the dark about what these characters went through or are still going through in their next scene. What I mean is that it’s teasing me about potentially amazing character writing & then it doesn’t deliver on any of it.

The main reason, which caused me to drop MHA in the first place, was the great obsession MHA has with quirks. I swear that even All for One (the man whose bread & butter is stealing quirks) talks less about quirks than Deku or any other random character in MHA. You could say MHA was addicted to the concept of quirks. I’m not joking here. This addiction was so intense that MHA was no longer about a quirkless boy, who wants to be a hero in a world where the quirkless are looked down upon. It became about a kid with an OP superpower trying to not kill himself with it, while going to the most prestigious hero school in Japan. I don’t understand why they did this. The first page says “Not all men are born equal.”. So, wasn’t MHA trying to prove this first line wrong? Everybody in MHA thinks that quirkless people can’t be heroes, no matter how nice or horrid they are as people (All Might, Midoriya’s mom, Midoriya’s junior high teachers, Bakugo). I know that Deku got his superpower through worthiness unlike everybody else, who got theirs by chance, but what were the chances that All Might’s quirk was transferable? What were the odds that All Might would meet Deku? What were the odds of Deku being the one to walk pass the Sludge villain while going home? What were the chances that All Might didn’t find somebody else to be his apprentice before he met Deku? By this logic Deku also got his quirk through luck. Not to mention that the whole “Deku is worthy” shtick isn’t done that well like I said in 1st°. Furthermore, Deku having a quirk contradicts the moral MHA started out with. “You can be a hero without a quirk.” changed to “You can be a hero if you have a quirk.”. When I first read MHA, I expected it to have a theme of discrimination like the X-men and that was MHA’s main theme. After you-know-what happened the quirkless were unceremoniously shoved into the background. A quirkless hero? No, it doesn’t exsist. Surely our righteous protagonist wouldn’t simply accept One for All without questioning if it’s the right thing to do due to the horrible experiences he had while quirkless? He accepts it. No questions were asked. Maybe we’ll see more quirkless people since every 5th person in the world is quirkless? Check the MHA wiki for the list of quirkless characters. If I’m being frank, this shift in moral is simply rotten to the core. Until I read MHA I thought I knew hypocrisy, but MHA is a level I believed to be an exaggeration.

This post is still valid.(link)

Another major factor in my initial disatisfaction with Vol. 1 was & still is Aizawa’s character. Unlike my annoyance with Deku, my problem with Aizawa lies entirely in his personality. When introduced, Aizawa scolds his students for socializing, taking 8 seconds to shut up & promises to expel the student who places last in a physical test because one of the kids displayed excitement. These actions make him come off as nitpicky to an unfair extent. To top of my great first impression of him, he wants to allow quirk usage in PE, when he himself doesn’t have a quirk which can come in handy in a physical exam. Besides the travesty this ingenious idea represents to the quirkless, it also effects those whose quirks can’t be utilized in a physical exam & don’t even get me started on the property damage. In contrast to All Might Aizawa has a more darwinistic mentality, which is reflected in the quirk evaluation test. To specify, he doesn’t care if the kids are only doing it for fame & money or if they have the traits of a true hero like All Might does. Aizawa is primarily interested in the results to the point where he deems those who fall beneath an unspecified quota to be idealistic half-asses. If you’ve seen either GTO or Assassination Classroom, you may remember that Aizawa’s teaching style is the kind these shows tried to shun & disapproved of in general. Onizuka & Koro-sensei are the antithesis to Aizawa mainly because they genuinely cares about their students. They know that how the kids grow up is more important for them than a test & want them to become better human beings, which both go to great lengths to accomplish. The concept of their students failing them doesn’t exist while Aizawa will fail & scrutinize his students only if they don’t meet his expectations.

Why didn’t Aizawa expel Deku? Remember the only Deku has screen time curse I ranted on and on about? They did it with Aizawa. No insight was given for us to see the person that he is. No defining reason was given on why he expelled 154 students. However, Aizawa is a different case from All Might, Ida & Bakugo in this regard. The primary difference between them is the foundation for their character development. The 3 stooges I mentioned have one a.k.a. experiencing Deku’s heroic deed, but Aizawa doesn’t. Aizawa didn’t experience Deku’s heroism like the three of them & by all means Deku should have been expelled. The only answer I have is that Deku’s plot armor is so strong that it can force Aizawa to break character or Horikoshi wrote himself into a corner with Aizawa.

The gibberish of My Hero Academia This is the part where I express my inter Cinema Sins-wannabe by listing the other things MHA did wrong or didn’t do at all like an explanation. I’m not going to detail why I consider them faults as I can stand them more or less unlike the issues I covered above. However, if you’d like me to expand upon anyone of them, send me the number & I’ll tell you what I meant (The same goes for all other parts of this review). The list is mostly in chronological order.

#1 Why aren’t there any superhero teams? #2 Why aren’t there any quirkless people in Izuku’s junior high? #3 Why is everybody a jerk to Deku? #4 Why didn’t Izuku’s mom lie to him? #5 Why was the Sludge villain waiting for someone to walk by? #6 How did All Might put the Sludge villain in a bottle? #7 Why didn’t All Might lie to Deku? #8 Why did All Might trust Deku with his secret? #9 How is All Might even alive right now? #10 Why did All Might chase the Sludge villain for 3 whole hours? #11 Why is heroism so dependent on quirks? #12 Why couldn’t Mt Lady shrink a bit in order to fight the Sludge villain? #13 Isn’t the firefighting hero the one with an advantageous quirk? #14 How is Deku able to make eye-contact with Bakugo? #15 How did Deku get pass Death Arms? #16 Why didn’t any of the other heroes intervene before Deku was 3 seconds away from certain death? #17 Did All Might kill the Sludge villain? #18 Why is One for All so OP? #19 Why was nothing explained about the Sludge villain or his quirk? #20 Why are they praising Bakugo? #21 Isn’t putting your life in danger due to adrenaline/shock the same as laughing uncontrollably due to adrenaline/shock? #22 Why did they spoil the ending? #23 Why aren’t there any quirkless heroes? #24 Why aren’t any other hero schools besides UA mentioned? #25 How is Midoriya not dead? #26 Why did Bakugo tell Deku to shut up if he started their conversation? #27 How is Deku distracting Ida? #28 Why is MHA willing to risk getting a lawsuit from Nintendo, but doesn’t kill of any of the characters who have screen time? #29 Why is video game logic being used in a school for heroics? #30 Why does this exam sound like something Shigaraki & Stain would design? #31 Why didn’t All Might give Deku his quirk earlier? #32 Why didn’t Uraraka float away from the robot? #33 Who controls the robots? #34 How did Midoriya not faint from his injuries? #35 How was Midoriya still able to think clearly through the pain of his broken limbs? #36 Why didn’t Uraraka look up how to not vomit before the practical exam? #37 Why was Deku able to properly heal from his injuries? #38 Why is everybody so obsessed with quirks? #39 Why is Izuku still training if he knows he didn’t get into UA? #40 Why did Uraraka get less rescue points than Izuku? #41 Why is Deku always paired up with Bakugo (in the story)? #42 If you need to be muscular, so One for All doesn’t kill you, how is All Might still using it? #43 Why did Aizawa have a PE uniform with him? #44 How is UA still in business if they allow teachers to expel students for the most pettiest reasons? #45 Why didn’t Aizawa get fired if he expelled 154 students? #46 Why did class 1B get less powerful students? #47 Why couldn’t All Might find out who was Deku’s homeroom teacher earlier? #48 How does Deku accomplish anything with All Might as his mentor? #49 Why is Aizawa questioning how Deku got into UA? #50 How are Aizawa’s bandages floating? #51 How are quirks activated in general? #52 How can a teacher afford a scarf made out of nanofiber? #53 Why did Deku hang out with Bakugo when they were kids? #54 How did Hagakure & Jiro get into UA? #55 Why did Deku need to use his quirk during Aizawa’s exam? #56 How did Uraraka not know that Deku was an insult? #57 Why are they teaching them normal school subjects?

All in all, I can now finally use this: #Volume1IsHell What? I made reviews for less.

#My Hero Academia #Coop's reading adventures #Volume 1 is hell #At least it gets more mediocre from here on out #Getting even a 5 or 6 isn't a cakewalk #I always felt like Bakugo's character development was odd #like something was missing #I probably may not mention much of Ida & Uraraka until the Tournament arc #I don't know much about art or how to place panels in a manga #so I won't critique it #Maybe I should have tagged this as Coop's salt instead

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