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eroticcannibal · 3 years

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Common myths and misconceptions about home education

So in case anyone has somehow missed it, I have recently become a Big supporter of home education in a very lefty way, which has meant I have had to challenge a lot of views I have previously held about home education and that I know a lot of other lefties hold too. I am of the opinion that embracing home education, not as a last resort, but as the primary form of education for as many children as possible, is a vital part of achieving the required shifts in society needed to meet the goals of most leftists. So I am taking it on myself to convince you all that it is a very good thing, and also to clear up some misconceptions people have about home education that may make them feel they are unable to do it.

(A note, I am from the UK and shall be using UK terminology and specifics regarding law, policy and other such things will be from a UK perspective. I shall be using the term home education, as that is the legal term in the UK and is distinct from home schooling, which is the term for what school children have been doing during the pandemic.)

And I would also like to extend a quick thanks to Education Otherwise and the mods at Home education and your local authority for teaching me A LOT.

Have any questions about anything I’ve not covered here? Just let me know!

1. “Home education is illegal.”

- Sadly, home education is illegal or restricted to the point of inaccessibility in most of the world. From the research I have done, it seems that only the US and the UK have reasonable laws around home education (if I am using a very broad definition of reasonable, it is still not great). I do hope I can change this section soon, and I would *heavily* encourage people to campaign for the right to home educate post pandemic, perhaps cite any benefits learning at home has provided to children, perhaps???

2. “Home education is a tool used by religious fundamentalists to brainwash children!”

- This is a view many hold, and for good reason. For many of us, when we think of home education, we think of christian fundamentalists in the deep south of America, pulling their children out of school to avoid the liberal agenda. The truth is, anything can be used as a tool of indoctrination. This can happen in home education, and it can happen and has happened in schools too. In my own communities we have had instances of schools being a site of religious radicalization of children. The reality is this is far too complex and deep an issue to be solved by deeming any particular form of education as “bad”. I am not an expert on how best to deal with such issues, but I do feel that things like outreach and building a healthy community with otherwise more isolated religious groups would be a better way to address these issues.

3. “You need to have x qualification to home educate.”

- Again, a reasonable view to hold, given that state run and private education does require educators to hold certain qualifications, but in practice it quickly becomes evident the same does not necessarily have to apply with home education. Educational qualifications are very much focused on delivering an education in a classroom, which is a far cry from home education. During our home education of our child, my partner, who is a qualified SEN TA, has struggled far more than I have with educating our SEN child, despite the fact I hold no qualifications.

We live in amazing times when it comes to education. There are many things that parents and communities have to teach a child, and there are many things a child can teach to themself if given the tools to do so. You can even learn together! Their are endless resources available, books and games and documentaries, and even home education groups and private tutors if you feel that is the right fit for your child. You don’t need a piece of paper for your child to spend a day with their nose buried in a book, or to help the neighbor with his vegetable patch, or to cuddle up on the sofa while watching Planet Earth.

4. “You are required to follow the national curriculum.”

- This does vary by country (that allows home education). As a general rule, the stricter a country is about who can home educate, the stricter they are about what must be taught. In the UK, you are not required to follow the national curriculum. Education must be “efficient” and suited to the child’s “age, aptitude and ability”, and LAs do require that english and maths are covered. Other than that, you are allowed to tailor the content of education to the child and their interests. We have recently dropped geography for now and are only just picking up history again. It has also given us the freedom to focus on areas our child needs that would not be covered in mainstream education, such as anxiety management, trauma processing, self care and hygiene.

5. “Home education looks like school/is just filling out workbooks/etc”

- The thing you will always hear from experienced home educators when you begin home education is “home education doesn’t need to be school at home”. Much like you can tailor the content of the learning to the child, you can also tailor the delivery to the child. Some child need structure, timetable, instructions. Some need freedom and to bounce between topics. Some need to have an hour learning maths and only maths, some need to go dig up your garden “for science”. Some want to learn every day, some will need extended breaks.

Learning happens all the time, from the moment they wake to the moment they sleep. As an example, at home we have some workbooks, as both me and my child have ADHD and need someone to go “ok learn this” rather than us having to work out for ourselves what we need to cover for core subjects like english and maths. For the rest of most days my child is left to their own devices to binge youtube and netflix and work on their art. We try and go for a woodland walk every few days, where we have Deep Discussions about all kinds of topics, and we are also working on growing edible plants and baking cakes from around the world. We are more hands-off at the moment, due to the current bout of anxiety, but when that settles again we will get back to history themed crafts and STEM activities. Post-pandemic, we will be signing our kid up for swimming classes and “after school” clubs, and looking at sending them down to my mum for the home ed groups where she lives, like the forest school. A lot of home education outside of a pandemic is in groups and community based, or will make use of libraries and museums and other public learning opportunities. Frequently very little will happen at home.

In fact many home educators will advise new families to “deschool” for a while before jumping in to learning. This is a period where you “get school out of your system”, and just exist. Learning does not have to be intentional, you will be surprised how much you can achieve by just having fun.

6. “Home education is expensive.”

- It can be, ask my bank account. However, it is perfectly possible to deliver a quality education with little to no money. I’m not saying it’s easy, but it’s doable. Their are many online resources for free (check out oak academy), and libraries have plenty available too. Even paid resources can be very cheap if you know where to look. (psst, if your kid thrives with worksheets and powerpoints, get yourself a twinkl subscription, download everything you need for a year then cancel it.)

(This does not apply to exams. Get saving!)

7. “Home educated children are not properly socialised.”

- This is only really true during the pandemic. The rest of the time, home educated children are free to socialise whenever they want, with whoever they want, in whatever setting they choose. Socialisation while home educating is in the opinions of many of a higher quality, as they are not limited to groups of a similar age and background. Many home educating families form groups for their children to socialise together too. For ND children especially, socialising while home educated can be far less stressful and far more fulfilling than in school.

8. “Home educated children won’t get qualifications.”

- Just plain not true. Arranging qualifications can be costly and time consuming, but it is possible and regularly done. Some children may return to school or college to access exams for free, and I have heard of a handful of cases where individuals were able to secure prestigious university places without any qualifications. Home education also allows for more freedom with how exams and qualifications are approached, for example, many home educated children will pick one GCSE to focus on at a time, rather than covering numerous topics over 2 years and having exams for all of them at once like children in school will.

9. “Home education is a safeguarding risk/is used to cover up abuse/home educated children are not seen.”

- In the UK at least, home education is not considered a safeguarding risk, no matter what authorities may tell you, nor are home educated “not seen”. They still visit medical professionals, they still engage with their communities.

Now I shall add the relevant paper here should I find it again, but the idea that home education is used to cover up abuse to a statistically significant degree, or that home educated children are at more risk of abuse, is false. Home educating families do face a significantly higher risk of social services involvement than other families, but far less abuse is found in comparison to other families. It is also worth considering, when talking about social services involvement, that many families pursue home education due to failures by schools regarding a child’s vulnerabilities. In most cases, especially the Big Ones, where a home educated child is abused, the child was already known to authorities as a victim of abuse, therefore home educating did nothing to hide said abuse.

Children are also routinely abused in schools, which is another common reason for home educating.

10. “Home education has to be monitored or approved.”

- Depends on the country, I know in Japan home education is monitored by schools, however in the UK, monitoring is not lawful. Local authorities may make informal enquiries to ensure a suitable education is being facilitated (keep EVERYTHING in writing and please go straight to “home education and your local authority” group on FB for advice, you WILL need it!). In England, if your child is in mainstream education, you can deregister at will, from a special school will require LA approval. In Scotland deregistering requires LA approval. (Again, head to the aforementioned group for advice).

11. “You can’t work/get an education while home educating”

- It is hard to balance work, education and educating your child, but it is possible, people do it every day. Obviously, having at least one parent free to educate unhindered at all times is an ideal situation, but in the real world it often does not work that way. Parents may have to home educate regardless of their other commitments if a child truly needs to escape the school system. Many parents work or learn from home, and sometimes it is even possible to combine these activities with home education. Professional artists and crafters can pass down their skills while working, distance learners can invite their children to sit in on lectures. The really great thing about home education is it is flexible. Do you have a whole day of meetings? Let the kid play minecraft all day! Going to be in the office all day? Drop the kid off at the local forest school or something else they can do all day. Drop them with the grandparents to help with the gardening!

12. “Home educated are behind/achieve less than school children.”

- Their is no evidence that home education is of a lower quality than school education. Many children are home educated specifically because the school environment was detrimental to their education, and thrive with home education. Plenty of children are able to learn more simply by having 1-to-1 attention, without the distraction of an entire class. And others may well be “behind”, and are educated at home because of their specific needs that mean they will never thrive in an academic setting, so they are allowed to focus on learning skills that will allow them to live independently.

#word of god #home education

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not-close-to-straight · 4 years

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100% Professional (Seven)

MASTERLIST

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The first few weeks after the cancelled date with Wade, Peter checked his phone at least once every ten minutes out of both hope and habit and every time it was only Gwen texting some bullshit or Harry demanding he come over and watch something, or even occasionally Flash who was working on reaching out to people again.

It was never Wade though, and it took most of Peter’s self control to not text over and over and try to establish some sort of conversation, some sort of connection, some sort of anything resembling the camaraderie they had found and lost so unexpectedly.

The next few weeks were filled with appointment after appointment, Peter filling his book full in an effort to distract himself from how badly he missed Wade. He worked double shifts for the Bugle, booked massage appointments as early as seven am and as late as ten pm and the few minutes he had of downtime were spent sleeping.

“I said be his friend, not become a hermit!” Gwen smacked Peter with a magazine before flopping onto his couch and shoving her feet into his lap. “Foot rub please, I spent eighteen hours marching outside Hammer Tech yesterday and my feet are killing me.”

“What did Hammer Tech do this time?” Peter sent off a confirmation email for an appointment later that week and began rubbing at Gwen’s feet. “And holy crap, eighteen hours? Gwen--”

“Flash had a bad day.” Gwen’s blue eyes dimmed in sadness. “Threw something at me when I let myself into the apartment and then later called me crying from the hospital. He checked himself in because he doesn’t think he’s okay and he won’t let me come see him. So eighteen hours at a protest was about the only thing I could handle.”

“Sorry, honey.” Peter murmured. “I get it.”

“Yeah, except you’re being smart about dealing with your broken heart.” Gwen scoffed. “You’re actually making money while distracting yourself. I’m walking through my shoes and probably giving myself knee problems.”

“You’re making a difference, I’m saving for a trip to the Caribbean.” Peter shrugged. “It’s sort of the same thing, right?”

“It’s not the same thing at all.” Gwen snapped her magazine open and sighed. “So no word from your Special Forces Wonder Boy?”

“Nothing.” Peter shot a look at his phone. “You think I did the right thing, texting him?”

“I think it’s too late to care either way.” she answered promptly. “You sent it, it’s done. He will either text you or he won’t. Whether it was the right thing or not, you won’t know until he answers, and even then? Just because he answers doesn’t mean it was the right thing. You just don’t know, Pete and I don’t know either.”

And then in a softer tone than Peter had ever heard, “Don’t think I know much about anything these days.”

“Well you know you want to take down Hammer Tech.” Peter comforted and Gwen switched gears immediately, pumping her first into the air and exclaiming, “I think I’m getting close to being slapped with a restraining order! Fun stuff, right?”

“Right.” Peter shook his head with an exasperated grin, and then stole one more look at his dark phone. “Whatever you say, Gwen.”

***************

“So I got asked out on a date a couple months ago.” Wade stared down at his clasped hands and forced the words out slow and steady. “Actually, I should back up. I ended up um… making friends with someone over the last few months. He kept joking about asking me out and then he finally did and I sort of uh--”

He stopped, swallowed, and someone in the group murmured something encouraging. “I uh-- well I freaked out. Worked myself into a panic attack and said some pretty stupid things about not wanting to be-- to be his project--” a ripple of understanding from everyone gathered. “--and that was that.”

“Alright.” Sam Wilson, former paratrooper, veteran, certified counselor and probably one of the best people Wade had ever met, clicked his pen a few times as he looked down at his notes. “So when you say that was that, what do you mean? Did you tell him not to call anymore? Did you tell him to leave you alone? Or did he get mad and walk away?”

It took a moment, but Wade answered, “He didn’t get mad. He just left.”

“Sometimes that’s worse.” a woman spoke up from Wade’s left, the skirt of her dress pulled all the way to the floor to hide her prosthesis. “Sometimes when they just leave instead of arguing to keep you, it feels worse.”

“Okay, but I think we can all agree that it’s better to have our boundaries respected and left alone, than trod over in a well meaning but usually terrible attempt to make us comfortable, right?” Sam said calmly. “Wade, would you have rather your friend have stayed and tried to argue with you?”

“...no…” Wade hesitated. “No, I think it would have made everything worse. I was basically ready to hyperventilate and I guess him being calm-- I can’t say it helped, but it's probably better that he left. I don't respond real well to people pushing my comfort levels."

“I remember.” Sam smiled a little, but didn’t bring up how Wade had freaked out at the first group therapy a month ago and snapped a chair over his knee before storming out. “So how do you feel about the cancelled date now that it's been a few weeks?”

“...empty.” Wade dropped his head again, and the guy sitting next to him put a friendly, if not cautious hand on his shoulder. “I just feel empty. Not relieved the pressure is gone, not breathing easier cos I don’t have to think about being presentable in public or keeping my shit together long enough for a date.”

He waited a beat and then added in a very small voice, “I just feel empty. Like I missed the one and only chance I’m gonna get to find love.”

“I hear that.” Someone else spoke up and it made Wade feel less on the spot to know he wasn’t the only one going through this. “It’s been months since I got asked out, and last time it happened, I turned them down and they were real nice about, promised to call and ask again, but then they never did. They never tried to connect with me again. At the time I was relieved, but now it just feels like that was my one shot to be normal again and I blew it. Lost my chance."

“Here’s the thing about normal.” Sam cleared his throat and gentled his tone. “This is normal, guys. Me not being able to fly anymore after losing Riley, that’s normal. Tasha having an issue with the dark? Normal. Wade, your days of modeling buck ass naked for the annual edition of Special Forces Uncovered are over--” Wade and another ex Special Forces guy managed a laugh and Sam grinned.

“-- those days are gone and now your new normal includes wearing specific materials that don’t hurt your skin, and that's fine. What we all have going on right now? This is normal. The past is the past, this is now and this is normal and it’s gonna be hard to move forward if we’re stuck thinking about what used to be.”

“There are some people who look at us and see our trauma and see a fix-it, a project.” Sam said truthfully. “And there will be others who will realize that our normal is a lot more difficult than their normal and not want to deal with it. But not everyone will be like that. Someone will think our normal is perfectly fine, perfectly doable and those are the people we should hold on to.”

Group therapy let out close to an hour later and Sam stopped Wade before he left, asking, “You seem like you’re doing a lot better Wade, how’s things outside of here?”

“Bout the same.” Wade put his beanie on and slid into gloves, trying to cover as much skin as possible for the dozen or so blocks he had to walk to his place. “I’m getting out to see a massage therapist now instead of having one come to my house, I’m walking to and from therapy instead of hiding in a cab-- same old, same old.”

“And the friend who asked you out?” Sam prompted. “Do you still talk to him? Didn’t want to ask in group in case it was too emotional but I wanted to check anyway.”

“I don’t talk to him.” Wade blew out a deep breath. “I uh-- I didn’t delete his number but he might have deleted mine, and I think I’d actually lose my mind if I texted him and got one of those stupid ‘new phone, who dis’ texts back.”

“Alright, first of all, we’re all adults here and I think we stopped texting that bullshit after college.” Sam joked and Wade smiled a little. “Second of all, just based on what you’ve told me about the guy, I highly doubt he’s lost your number. I think you’ve made some great steps towards personal healing lately, and if you think you can handle it, a little closure on that whole deal might not be the worst.”

“I’ll think about it.” Wade zipped his coat clear up to his neck. “Thanks Sam.”

“Take it easy, Wade.”

****************

From Wade: Heya Pete, it’s Wade.

From Wade: Could I see you on Tuesday?

From Peter: YES

From Peter: I mean, yes. Sure. Absolutely. Is this a purely professional thing?

From Wade: I was hoping it could be more of a friends thing.

From Peter: I can’t wait.

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SAY SOMETHING ABOUT THE CHAPTER!

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@ships-galore @ceealaina @izziebladez @cwar1864 @hausoffro @tonystarkisanangel @multishippinglife @girlnic @iam93percentstardust @paranormalmoonlight5 @igotloki @moosette05 @wayward-student-philosopher @kaz-brekkers-gloves @atomicfandombomb @1fuckingshitup69 @agentlokii @livewire28 @tulipsnbigcats @kimstark @alex-stark-rogers @bibbarnes @heeeyitskay @goindownshipping @quietgayguy @nanita90a @justaniche

@chiby-chan @thanossucks @i-am-worth-it-25 @dan4thefam

#ncts fics #spideypool #peter parker #wade wilson #sam wilson

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macattackp · 4 years

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Lies Chronically Ill/Injured People Tell Themselves:

1. I Am a Burden Who Only Takes From Others and Can Never Give Back

We all have things that we feel we SHOULD be able to provide. As a guy, it KILLS me that I can’t do things like shovel the driveway, help carry heavy items, or have a job that could make me a breadwinner for someone.

Don’t undersell what you do bring though! For one thing, chronically ill/injured people tend to be masters of empathy, not to mention we get pretty knowledgeable on the medical system. If you aren’t... don’t fret over it! If you can’t do something, then don’t! Focus on what you CAN do instead!

2. I Am Undeserving of Love Because Who Would Take on a Burden Like Me?

This one is another huge struggle for a lot of people. I know as a guy, I feel the added pressure of being worthless if I can’t provide financially for a girl. (No matter how progressive people may be, this progressiveness tends to vanish when their daughters’ well being are concerned), but I know just as many girls who say the same things.

“How can someone love me when I just am stuck in bed all day?” “Why would someone choose me if I could never have kids?” “Who would choose a spouse who may not be able to have sex?”

Look. I’ll be honest, I have no wise advice on this one as to find someone who is willing to support you on your struggles. Nor can I be dense and say “You’re just misreading people!” because let’s admit it... our lives are tough and there are many who would choose not to join us.... what I can say though... is I have had friends who had chronic illnesses. Some could never have sex. Some would require tons of medical expenses. Some were missing limbs or body parts. One was even pretty much guaranteed to die before she turned 30.... And they ended up getting married, and loved, and supported. I don’t know what the future holds for you, but I do know it IS possible! So don’t put yourself down or give up hope!

3. I Have to Work Harder to Keep Up With Everyone or Else I Will be a Failure!

This world has a main road, but that main road has a lot of cracks... and there are probably more people in this world who have fallen through the cracks, than walk on the main road. But we feel like everyone in this world is on the main road because once people fall through the cracks they tend to be overlooked even though there are so many of them.

It is not fair, nor is it doable to be expected to keep up with others when you are carrying a different burden. We have the Paralympics for a reason. Would you ask a man with one leg to race against the Olympic sprinters? Would you ask someone carrying a massive boulder to outrun someone without one?

And in all honesty, it is not always as cut and dry as “Accept you’ll get 4th or 5th place.” Our world tends to try to put us on rails. We make everything systematic and anything that doesn’t fit within our metrics is considered broken. We often judge people more by their process than their results! But the way laid out by others as the “Right way” isn’t always the only or even the best way!

Learn how YOUR body works! I was a horrible student in school until I finally gave up relying on teachers and just studied the way I enjoyed it. I figured at that point “As long as I pass, what else matters.” but had the added surprise when I jumped from a 60′s-70′s student at best to my lowest grade being a 94! It doesn’t always work out this well, but your body is yours. No one else can tell you how it works. Learn from what people have done in the past but look for the way YOU work best! When you look back you realize, none of the biggest world changers really ever lived their lives by the book anyways!

4. I Have To Get Better So I Can Have a Life!

To an extent, this makes sense. Without energy, or finances, and with a schedule stuffed to the gills with doctors appointments meaning you can never go far from home... it is hard to feel like there is really much you can do... but... at the same time....

YOU ARE ALIVE NOW!

You may not have the finances to do what you want. You may not have the social life that you enjoy. You may not have an overabundance of time or energy... But you are alive RIGHT now! You are allowed to live!

Write that book you always wanted! Learn a new language! Cook yourself a big meal! You may tell yourself “BUT I HAVE SO MUCH OTHER STUFF I SHOULD BE FOCUSING ON INSTEAD!”

Look! That stuff will be there whether you focus on it 24/7 or 12/5! Don’t let it get out of hand, but if you aren’t going to be able to solve it by worrying about it more then don’t! Spend your time doing things that will revitalize you, help you grow, and give you some interesting stories to tell once this is all over!

5. I Am Not Allowed to Be Happy or Have Fun Until I Am Better!

This one is a tough one as it ties into our impostor syndrome. That horrible feeling that we get every time we start to enjoy ourselves or smile in public of “Oh no! What if people assume I’ve been faking this whole time?!?!?!”

You are allowed to laugh. You are allowed to smile. You are allowed to have good things happen to you. Yeesh, there is no time in life that it is more important to have happy moments than through hardships!

Being happy or enjoying yourself from time to time through hardships isn’t a sign that your hardships were never that hard. It is a sign that you are fighting forward. That you aren’t letting this take over your life. And plus, as human beings we NEED hope and happiness... we die both mentally and physically without it

6. There is No Future After This

This is one that I personally struggle with... if we count the 6 years of trauma as a kid that originally gave me PTSD, and these last 7+ years of pushing as hard as I can only to fail harder and harder (including these last 2.5 years that have been giving me a whole new layer of trauma on top of my previous trauma) I’m reaching the point where more than half my life has been going through miserable, destructive times where I lose most things that matter to me and find myself alone at the start again in a dark place. It is hard... honestly... Anyone who follows my account and sees my tagless venting posts know that there are more than enough times I question why I even try anymore when I don’t even know what’s left of me...

But there was a movie I watched a while ago... another cheesy hallmark movie, but it was a good one as far as hallmark movies go. I remember they had this one line in it that really stuck with me.

“I’ve lost everything 3-4 times now! It’s the perfect place to start!”

Now I’m not as optimistic as that ambitious old man from the movie was... but I do know this.... You never know what life can hold. The same way you can lose everything that matters to you in a year, I’ve seen people gain more than they ever thought possible in a week. Not to say we are all about to win the lottery or by some miracle wake up completely healed of all afflictions... but I do believe that if it was possible to have things go this bad, it is also possible for things to go much better.

And let’s admit it. You might be thinking “Oh! But I’m not strong enough to make it happen!” and you’d be right... you aren’t. But honestly who is? We live in a world where tons of people succeed or fail... and very few I can say “earned it.”

Life IS unfair, but if it wasn’t, we’d all be dead! What we really get upset about is that it seems to be more unfair in some peoples’ favour than our own. But life is tough. The fact that any of us live is a miracle in itself. Don’t limit what the future holds for you based on what you feel you’re able to do. You aren’t a static person, and this world doesn’t rise or fall on your shoulders either! (even though it feels like that most mornings). Give it your best with what you’ve got every day, and realize even if each day feels like a year, this is still only a season of life. Personally I want to fight and survive long enough to see a day where this all seems like it was worth it!

7. I Will Never Be Self Sufficient!

The lie in this one isn’t that you will be self sufficient! The lie is that people assume ANYONE is self sufficient!

Look. Do you see people growing their own food? Even if they do, do they grow their own fertilizer? Even if they do, did they build their house from scratch, their car, their fridge, do all their electrical work, never once look up anything on the internet?!?!?! No!

We are NOT a self sufficient species. From the minute we are born we NEED people just to stay alive let alone to succeed! So you have to rely on people in a way you don’t see others needing to rely on people! Does an electrician complain that he needs to call someone to fix the backed up pipes when the plumber doesn’t??? No! That would be stupid! And to try and fix it on his own would be stupider!

You are ALLOWED to rely on others. You are ALLOWED to ask for help. This doesn’t make you any less of a person! This makes you human!

8. I’m Not Worth It . . .

This is something I struggled with even before I realized just how much was stacked against me from the start... I remember one time, someone very precious to me sat down in front of me and for 15 minutes she said nothing else but “YOU ARE WORTHY!” She repeated it over and over again in different ways, not letting me talk and refusing to say anything else until I finally just accepted that I maybe was. Times change, and she may not be around to say that anymore, but those words still stick with me, and that moment still pops in my head every time I am feeling really down on myself like a planted warrior to fight against my internal self doubt...

There are many things in our lives that make us feel worthless.... “I messed up and hurt them.” “I have a lot of health concerns.” “I am not attractive.” “I have a perverted mind.” “I don’t fit with what society says I should be.” “My parents/people who I care about said I wasn’t good enough.” The list goes on... but YOU ARE WORTHY!

“But I don’t deserve to be happy!” YOU DO!

“But I don’t deserve anyone to put up with me.” YOU DO!

“But I don’t deserve a happy life” YOU DO!

“But I don’t deserve a second chance.” YOU DO!

Whatever you’re worried about

Whatever is bugging you

Whatever lies are bouncing around in your head right now saying you should just disappear and stop being a bother to others

YOU

ARE

WORTHY!

Don’t let anyone or anything tell you otherwise, LEAST of all yourself!

I don’t know who you are. I don’t know what you’re going through. I don’t know what you’ve done or haven’t done.... but I can tell you this right now. You are a one of a kind beautiful life. You are allowed to exist in this world, you are allowed to flourish, you are allowed to enjoy your time with it and interact with others. What’s more, you aren’t just put up with, you are NEEDED! Because there is only one of you out there, and this world needs you. Treat yourself well, and let yourself know just how valuable you are. You are you, and that is beautiful!

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patchwork-panda · 4 years

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If A Moment is All We Are (5.1/?)

This chapter is REALLY long so I split the text ver into 2 parts for Tumblr.

AO3 link: here

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Story type: Romance/Drama/comedy

Pairing: Dazai x OC/reader (Dazai is endgame, fic is long-running and will also feature Kunikida x OC)

OC (Kusunoki Kyou) and Ability are based off of "The Story of Your Life," written by Ted Chiang, aka the basis of the Amy Adams movie "Arrival."

Rating: M for Blood/violence/themes of depression, anxiety, suicide TW: The second half of this story will deal more heavily with themes of suicide, depression/anxiety. *No major character death will occur*

Story follows OC as she joins the ADA, partners up with the detectives to solve various cases around Yokohama and develops feelings for Kunikida and Dazai (Dazai endgame).

Written for those who want an immersive ADA experience :)

Updates every Sunday evening around 6pm PST

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It wasn’t always like this.

Okay, maybe it was.

For as far back as I could remember, the visions had always been random, random events I would see of the future. If I was in physical contact with someone, the visions would be from their future. If I wasn’t, then the visions would be from my own life. Sometimes when I was really stressed, the visions of my future would actually come in the form of a dream, like in manga or novels.

Perhaps that was the best way to explain how The Story of Your Life worked; it was like taking out a book, keeping a finger against the pages and flipping until that finger finally caught on a single page. Then, flip open that page and read the first paragraph that jumps out; the book was the person’s life and the paragraph was the event, a single scene from that person’s future that I bore witness to.

The visions didn’t always show me death, blood and despair.

In fact, the very first vision I had was that of a puppy—a cute little thing my friend Kiko gifted me at my fifth birthday party. I must’ve seemed shockingly unsurprised (and possibly rude) to Kiko and her parents, but I couldn’t bring myself to explain that I’d seen her giving me this puppy half a year ago.

In retrospect, the puppy vision had been great. Sure, it took some of the fun out of a surprise gift but it was still a vision about a puppy. Honestly, if my visions were nothing more than glorified versions of baby animal videos, I’d be perfectly fine with that.

Maybe then, I wouldn’t be left with this overwhelming fear of my own Ability.

I used to be able to touch people, shake their hands, and hold them. In the beginning, “The Story of Your Life” only activated with a prolonged touch...

At first, “prolonged” meant more than ten seconds. That meant getting to play tag in kindergarten, going over to friends’ houses and having sleepovers. Normal stuff. My life didn’t even change all that much when ten seconds shrank to seven some time around middle school; I was able to play contact sports and go out on shopping trips without incident. Seven seconds became five halfway through high school. Again, no need to make lifestyle changes. I could still hold hands with friends, so long as it didn’t go on for too long and I was still able to have my first kiss without seeing even a hint of my boyfriend’s future.

And then, college. Five seconds was no longer doable. It became three at best and just before I’d become a shut-in, even an instantaneous touch was enough to trigger my Ability. By then, however, I’d gotten pretty used to having the visions, so I remained relatively unbothered when I’d see a vision of the barista breaking up with his girlfriend when I got my morning coffee. In other words, managing my Ability was no big deal.

Or so I thought.

About six months ago, my visions went from being an occasional distraction to a panic-inducing nightmare. I still wasn’t sure why...

Maybe it was just luck of the draw. I’d only seen good things, mostly, for the first ten-plus years at least: faraway cities, weddings, and graduations. Every once in a while there would be a failed exam or a lost wallet but overall nothing too out of the ordinary for an otherwise regular teenager to see.

Maybe it was just a sign of the times. As I got older, so did the people around me, so the more likely it was that they were entering that phase of their lives where things could start to go south. Or perhaps their previous lives were just catching up to them.

Or maybe, it was karma finally catching up to me. I’d be lying if I said that I’d never used my Ability for personal gain before. There were a few exams I managed to ace with the help of a well-timed touch of the hand and a few pitfalls I’d managed to avoid through a combination of sheer luck and a decently fast reflex. Perhaps six months ago, whatever granted me this power finally decided that I had a good run and it needed to end in the worst way possible...

And it all happened so quickly.

I never had much control over my visions to begin with and they never really bothered me before but suddenly, they were invading every part of my life—and with each vision I saw, the accuracy increased. My dreams became more vivid than ever; I would see things that had yet to occur and before I moved out, my college roommate would wake up in the middle of the night to the sound of my screams. I started passing out in the middle of class if someone so much as tapped my bare shoulder and when I came to again, it would be a minute before I remembered where I was and what I was doing. I was starting to consider seeking some kind of help until one day, I finally saw my first death.

It was horrible. I was at dinner with friends on a group date and I hit it off with one of the guys. He wanted to take me to the movies that weekend, and being relatively new to college and Yokohama in general, I agreed. Then, smiling, he’d held my hand just a millisecond too long and I saw it: him getting hit by a car while crossing the street.

I tried not to think about it too hard. Sometimes the vision were wrong. There were times when they’d been off by just a fraction of a second and because of that, I still had hope. Maybe there was a chance that things could change last minute, either by a miracle or by someone’s sheer force of will. But as time passed, my anxiety grew. He was running late and I didn’t like it. Finally, I spotted him at the intersection and, frantic, I waved him down just as the “walk” sign lit up and he started crossing the street.

That’s when it happened.

A single black vehicle, no license plate, ran a red... and ran into him.

I would remember seeing his body flying into the air for the rest of the semester.

After that, I started taking an alternate route to class, just to avoid going anywhere near the part of campus where he’d died. It wasn’t that people were whispering behind my back or accusing me of having a part of it—I just couldn’t handle the memory.

That was the first death.

The first.

It was as if some kind of floodgate had been opened. I had never seen death before that day but after...? Death became all I saw. I briefly shook hands with a foreign exchange student and immediately saw an image of a middle-aged woman lying in a hospital wing. The woman had been the student’s mother and I heard she died a week later. I could not have been responsible for the cancer that claimed her life but I spent weeks feeling guilty about it anyway. There was another incident where I accidentally, and literally, bumped into my English teacher on the way to class. I saw his brother being hit by a bus downtown. His death was announced a month later, on the morning news. When I saw it, I broke down in the middle of the cafeteria and my friend Eri had to take me home.

And it just kept happening.

I became afraid to touch people. I began wearing longer layers during the summer months and started keeping to myself. When even a brush of the hand or bumping into people on public transit could trigger a vision, I started wearing gloves. I got a lot of stares on the subway for wearing itchy winter gloves in the subtropical heat and the knitted fabric made gripping the overhead handholds difficult so I ended up changing to disposable nitrile instead. I got less stares for that but unfortunately, I eventually had to give up public transit entirely when I got squished between two tourists and had a panic attack in the middle of the car.

But giving up public transportation put me in a tough spot. My dorm was pretty far from campus and I didn’t know how to drive. If I really wanted to, I could walk but that would take far too long and make for far too many chances to see another person’s death. And I really didn’t want to ask anyone for a ride because that would just mean more questions and more explanations I wasn’t willing to give.

And yet somehow, I managed to make it work for a time, waking up early to go to class, avoiding hangouts in-between classes and running back to my dorm as soon as I got a chance. But I was still attending classes with lots of people in a crowded lecture hall and living with roommates in a dormitory building. Ultimately, the stress of trying to avoid people while also trying to keep up with increasingly difficult classes caused me to start having nightmares. They were frequent and they were bad. And I knew that these were all things that would someday happen to me: me and a friend being held hostage in an abandoned apartment building, a woman in a suit and sunglasses pointing two machine guns directly at my face, a man didn’t recognize growing steadily colder in my arms as I screamed for him not to leave me...

That following morning, I woke up sobbing—crying as if I wished I was the one who had died instead. When my roommate tried to comfort me, I jerked away out of instinct and immediately realized I’d made a mistake.

And that was it.

I couldn’t it take any more.

About a week later, I left the dorm and found myself a tiny studio apartment, one that I could still afford on my shoestring budget and more importantly, one where I could live completely alone.

Soon after, I dropped out of college and became a shut-in. In true shut-in fashion, I shunned all contact from classmates and friends in case someone came to visit and decide they needed to barge in because they couldn’t—shouldn’t—do such a thing. My apartment had become both my sanctuary and my jail. So long as nothing changed around me, none of the horrible visions would come to pass.

Thankfully, a month into my new lifestyle, the nightmares stopped.

So long as nobody came near me, I wouldn’t have to witness another death with my waking eyes...

I still remembered the night I decided to stop going to class. It was the same night I looked out the windows and saw my own reflection, touched my fingers to my face and pulled them away, confirming that it was indeed blood and not salt tears that dripped down my cheeks. I started avoiding mirrors from that day on and threw myself fully into watching anime, joining fandoms and drawing commissions, anything to distract myself from the invasive, self-destructive thoughts that grew stronger whenever I looked into a reflection of my own eyes.

Yes... Staying was the only solution. If I never stepped out of the apartment again, the world would be spared the sight of my hollow eyes and bloody tears... And I—I would be spared the curse of witnessing things I should never have seen to begin with.

***

“So you’ve been holed up in your apartment for the last six months doing...”

Kunikida frowned, tapping his pen against his chin.

“What exactly? Rent in Yokohama isn’t cheap. How have you been supporting yourself?”

“Commissions,” I explained. “I started watching a lot of anime and playing video games and fans pay good money for drawings of their favorite characters, original characters or even pictures of themselves in a stylized form.”

Summing up my Ability meant practically telling these two my entire life story, not just recalling the events of this morning, and I had to commend the detectives’ patience for sitting through what I would’ve considered a pretty long-winded explanation. Now I was even telling them how I’d stretched my budget and supplemented my allowance.

I held out my hand.

“If I could have some paper and something to write with, I could show you, if you like...?”

Dazai immediately ripped Kunikida’s notebook and pen out of his hands. Ignoring his partner’s protests, he held them out to me and, throwing his arm out to keep Kunikida from taking back his own things, sat back to watch me draw. Within seconds, a coarse outline appeared on the pages, followed by facial features: eyes, nose, hair—a minute later, I handed back Kunikida’s notebook, a quick, rudimentary pen sketch of each detective on its two open pages.

As one, they leaned in to stare at it.

“This is pretty good,” Kunikida said, looking up at me. He squinted down at the page, tracing the lines with his fingers, mumbling, “Does my hair really look like that?”

“It is... isn’t it?” Dazai agreed, rubbing his chin.

As Kunikida puzzled over the drawing, a mischievous glint appeared in Dazai’s dark eyes.

“Kusunoki-san... Have you ever considered a career as a sketch artist?”

At once, Kunikida shot him a warning look.

“Don’t even think about it, Dazai,” he growled, “Making decisions without the President’s approval—”

“I’m not making a decision, only a suggestion,” Dazai declared. “And what’s wrong with a good suggestion?”

“Dazai...”

Ignoring Kunikida entirely, he turned to me.

“Really, I don’t know how we survived like this for so long. We’re a detective agency, one of the best in the city and yet, we don’t have a sketch artist... It’s a shame, don’t you agree, Kusunoki-san? What do you think? Interested in a change of career?”

“Wait... are you asking me to join you?” I asked warily, looking from one detective to the other. “Why would you want someone like me? I can’t fight. I don’t even know how to shoot a gun.”

“I’m asking you,” Dazai said pointedly, “if you would be interested in becoming a sketch artist. I mean, it just so happens that we are in dire need of one—(“No one said that!” Kunikida roared)—and you happen to have the exact skill set we are looking for! Not to mention you’re an Ability User... Just think of all the people you could help.”

“I don’t know,” I mumbled, looking away, “Wouldn’t someone like me be more of a burden than an asset? I can’t even control my Ability, much less use it to help people—”

“But what if you could control it?”

I froze. Having had no control of my Ability for my entire life, the possibility hadn’t even occurred to me...

“There’s a way?” I asked, looking back up just as Dazai’s grin turned into a triumphant smirk. “How?”

“I could tell you,” he drawled, his smirk growing even wider, “But it’s a closely guarded secret. You’d have to join us if you want to find out... Of course, I’d be more than happy to vouch for you if you’d like to apply—”

“Dazai—!! You—!”

Kunikida was on his feet.

“We can’t just offer a job to every stray Ability User we rescue from the Port Mafia! Atsushi was one thing but—”

“Oh my, so you’d be perfectly fine sending a nice girl like her back into the jaws of the Port Mafia? Really, I thought better of you, Kunikiiiiiida-kun—”

“That’s not what I said!”

“So you agree, we should take her in?”

Kunikida’s face was in his hands.

“Look, it’s not that I don’t want to help, but it’s not our decision to make! And besides, she’s clearly been through enough, what makes you think she would agree to—”

“I’ll do it.”

Kunikida’s mouth dropped open. He looked stunned.

“You will—? Wait, no, I never said I agreed—”

“Let me apply,” I said, looking him firmly in the eyes. “I want to help people. I’ve always wanted to. Isn’t that what you do here at the Agency? Use your special Abilities to make their lives better?”

“That’s true,” Kunikida admitted, folding his arms over his chest, “But this can be a dangerous job. Especially for a non-combatant. You almost died today! Why do you want to help people so bad? In fact, let me ask you...”

His eyes flashed from behind his glasses, his expression fierce.

“Why did you go so far for a neighbor with whom you weren’t particularly close?”

I glared right back.

“I had to save her.”

“But it sounds like you already did, when you pulled her off the sidewalk—”

“That’s not good enough!” I burst out, startling Kunikida. “How could I say I saved her, truly saved her, if I knew she was going to die in a week and I did nothing to stop it?”

My hands clenched into fists.

“That doesn’t count. Saving someone means seeing it through to the end, to fully committing yourself and doing what’s right! Isn’t that what you did for me? What both of you did to bring me here today?”

Kunikida was struck dumb. Stuffing his hands into his pockets, Dazai got to his feet.

“I think it’s about time I take Kusunoki-san back to her apartment,” he said, making his way to the door, his long tanned trench coat swishing elegantly as he moved.

He patted Kunikida on the shoulder.

“I’ll let you think about what we should tell the President later.”

Kunikida instantly flushed an angry, embarrassed pink.

“Dazai, you—”

Ignoring his partner, Dazai called out to me.

“Kusunoki-san? I won’t be taking you back to your original apartment tonight. We’ll be going to one of the Agency’s safe houses instead. After everything that’s happened, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Port Mafia had staked out your building and had someone ready and waiting for you at home. And if you’re wondering, Yamazaki-san is on her way to her nephew’s place in Nagano, so you won’t need to worry about her.”

“But what about my things?” I asked, “What am I gonna tell the landlord?”

“It’s already been taken care of,” Dazai replied, opening the door for me. “Shall we?”

#dazai x oc #dazai x reader #bungou stray dogs #osamu dazai #doppo kunikida #fanfiction

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tslasvegas · 4 years

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Episode 8: “On the upside we got the numbers.” - Andrew (who is then voted out by those numbers)

It’s always a sad and unfortunate thing when a player needs to leave a game for personal reasons. I’m wishing Kevin all the best!

Welp. I don't wanna say that this sucks, but this sucks. My closest ally walked from the game, and I hope he's ok. I really hope everything is ok with him. But now, I'm a green in a world of pinks. What my pink friends don't realize though, is I have a Safety Without Power advantage. Nobody knows about it. So if we lose, they cannibalize themselves, and that will be a sight to see. But I'd like to keep my advantage for as long as possible. But if we lose, that'll be a fun tribal council. I can only hope it's a double tribal. Now this - this is a redemption arc.

If a merge at 13 is next, then we are done! ugh.

MERGE HAPPENS

We merged!! And I only had to attend a single tribal council in the premerge with 8 eliminations. That’s wild! We’re sitting here in merge with 7 OG Palazzo, 3 OG Bellagio and 3 OG Luxor. If Palazzo sticks together, we’d have the majority whichever way you look at it. However, I don’t imagine that group is going to stick together very long. Joey wants to get myself and Jaiden into single digits. I’d love to help get Jake into single digits as well. And I’d also like to get Livingston to at least 6th place. Honestly a group of that 5 sounds like a pretty good idea, and I might pitch it to Joey later today. And now we’re doing mastermind! A game I love but rarely ever win. I usually come close and I’m hoping this time around I can snag a win and be safe this first tribal. Nothing is scarier than the merge round of the game. Anything at all can happen. There’s still some idols and extra votes floating around, maybe some steal a votes too. There’s also that safety without power and the legacy advantage, which may be able to be played this round? Exciting things are brewing im sure.

We made the merge!!

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So OG Palazzo must be tight. Good thing Steph and Joey are still reaching out. But I don't know if we can build up a resistance with the non-OGPalazzo. I mean, in theory, it can happen. 6 of us, with a steal a vote. But so much has happened voting on opposite sides, I don't know if it is doable. We can try. Better to go out blazing at 13th, than just waiting for your turn to be voted out before F7.

I MADE IT TO MERGE AGAIN... okay I feel good about my surroundings, as well as the people I’m next to. OG Palazzo wants to go all the way to Final 7, but I know that ain’t gonna happen, cause I’m turning on them as fast as humanly possible. I need others to see that I’m a strengthener to their games, and now that its every player for themselves, I think I can grab some allies and make shit happen. I have a Legacy Advantage, and I’m just trying to get to 6.

I’m sad I lost all my chips. On the upside we got the numbers

MERGE BITCH

Ok but for serious I don't have much to say so I'm just going to do an assessment of everyone on the tribe. Andrew - I thought I was gonna like Andrew bc I thought he was c*te then I find out he likes The Sims so there was something easy for us to talk about!! But then... come to find out. He's not really interested in talking I guess. So I'm just going to leave him alone and not carry on a conversation. Ben - WHY is Ben still here. I'm so annoyed. Ben tries so hard to be my ally but I don't trust him that much. Before the merge, he pitched a plan to pool our coins (meaning: I had to send him all of mine) so that I could spin the wheel and avoid going bankrupt. Then he said we're a final two. I was like,,, no thanks. I feel like he's going to blow up his game at some point, but I just gotta pretend better to be on his side. Idk how to do that exactly... Jake - Jake has been THE biggest surprise of the merge to be honest. I actually really like Jake. He's a little "irritating" I guess, but more in the sense that he is just pretty bro-y and that's not my energy. I respect Jake's desire to be great in Tumblr Survivor, we have that in common here. I think right now, Jake and I are as close as you can get to working together without actually being a legitimate alliance. I want to see where this takes us because he's a cool guy and I really feel bad for talking shit about him before the merge. Jeff - Part of me likes Jeff, but part of me views him as the enemy simply because he's part of the "Palazzo 7". I want to try and work on Jeff because maybe he and I see things the same way? I don't think this game is strictly "seven strong" like Joey perpetuates, I'll get to that in a minute though. Anyways, I want to see how things go with Jeff cuz he seems like a cool dude and I'm definitely a meninist and want to be his bitch! Joey - I hate that I'm in a position where I both know Joey is vital for my game right now, but also that I can't stand his strategy. I like him as a person, let's make that very clear for the post-season - I just don't subscribe to his idea that there's a seven person alliance (which btw includes him according to numbers???) running the show. I will definitely feel Joey out some more before I make any decision to attach myself to him fully or throw him to the wolves. John - THREAT. I'm on high alert for John and kinda trying to maintain a safe, social-distancing-approved level of space between us. I think that John is definitely running things at least in one or two circles and I don't want him to turn that target around on me. I also can't let him know that I'm onto him. John is probably playing it where everybody just likes him and includes him in plans, but in the event that he is pulling strings, that's where the issues start. Kailyn - I don't really care for Kailyn anymore tbh. I kinda think Kailyn is playing a good under the radar game and I think it's in a lot of people's benefit to send her off to the jury sooner rather than later. I have no read on who she's close with though so that's the danger. Probably John? But who knows. Keegan - I also am surprised that I like Keegan as much as I do. He seemed a little bit too smart for his own good? But he's actually rather nice. He flops like I do but I think he's a danger if I'm not careful. I'll keep on this guy and hopefully he doesn't target me <3 I'd rather work with Keegan than against him especially now.

Livingston - WOW I thought I'd like Livingston but goddamn this guy is BORING. Not only does he not message back, but he has nothing interesting to provide to a conversation. If he was the first person to go this round I wouldn't really be upset oop Pat - We talked a lot about drag race. We played an org together and I remember now that Pat was fucking IRRELEVANT so I'm surprised to see this new energy. Who are you and what did you do with the real Pat? Stephanie - I don't really like Stephanie's strategy either, she's just too damn likable and kind of floats on by, I wish she had left last time instead of Rachael because then it's likely Rachael gets the boot soon. But we'll see what happens. I just hope that me voting for her isn't going to kill our relationship and we can work together at some point, at least until she gets voted out. Xavier - I have a hard time reading Xavier. I think I'm calmed down from feeling threatened by him. I trust Xavier enough to not go and screw up a vote again, but does he trust me? Don't really know. I want to work with Xavier at least for a couple votes but I know that he and Ben aren't on good terms and Ben is a vote that I need right now :/ The issue I have with Xavier is that he is positioning himself to kinda be a doormat just doing whatever people want and not necessarily.. taking control of how people look at him I guess. He sticks out for being the "dad" on the tribe and doesn't bring a lot of his own personality to conversation - it's just really basic strategy. I don't know anything about him that I didn't have to go fucking find out about him on his public YouTube. Insert clown emoji here. Anyways, overall I feel okay about my chances on this tribe... So far. I honestly don't see myself playing a winning game right now - BUT it's final thirteen and there is a lot of time to turn that around for myself. I feel good in comparison to my previous Tumblr Survivor seasons because there hasn't been a vote where I've completely made myself stand out like a sore thumb. My head is in a good place to finish out this game strong, just gotta put the pedal to the metal and work shit out. Maybe win a couple challenges! Whatever twists are ahead... I'm not prepared. But I am going to walk away from this season for the better, one way or another. Eight people down, twelve left to go.

Well, I came close to winning but unfortunately didn't. Kailyn won immunity and we had a twist where we all had to choose between two buttons. Aaaaand Kailyn now has immunity this tribal and next tribal. Lovely. After the challenge, Andrew immediately threw out Jake's name, which was worrying but I think Jeff and I have managed to sway things towards Ben. Which is a little scary, since it's highly possible he has an idol or advantage (though he did play an idol on himself at the Rachael boot. So maybe not?) Now, the question is going to become: how do Livingston and myself navigate these next few tribals with Jake? We need to keep him safe and the target off his back. There's also Joey and Jaiden who I definitely want to keep working with moving forward. I think I'm in a decent spot. I really don't see Jaiden or Jake keeping their mouth shut if my name comes up. I think I've managed to build enough of a bond with them that they won't target me. My concern is definitely Ben being a little sneak, as well as Kailyn and Xavier, who really don't talk at all. John... can also be kinda sneaky and he also has been super quiet. However, when all is said and done, I just want a single digit placement. I don't care what happens before/after that, just please let me get there.

My first merge in 3 seasons of Tumblr Survivor, finally! It would be awesome if the tyrannical force of pink wasn’t here. Right now I’m practically a sitting duck. I’ve made connections with Jaiden and Joey who I just met, I’m hoping they’d watch my back. Ben and I are great friends from outside the game, we’re called the Jew-O Duo, for obvious reasons. I’m in a duo with Jeff called Jeff Squared, a duo with Pat called The Best Men, a trio with Liv and Keegan (that’s super dangerous cause I know they’re friends), and me John and Xavier are the Luxor Losers. I should feel protected - but I don’t. I need to keep working socially and hope that I can scoot by a couple more rounds. I wanna buddy up with Steph and Kailyn, I have no interest in working with Andrew after he flat out told me he wasn’t turning on Pink. It could be me tonight. We’ll just have to see.

....five seconds later

No. No no no no no no no. I'm sick of Andrew trying to get me out, and then going after my allies instead. I can't just sit here and let him walk all over me the entire game. He has been wishy washy and fake with me since I met him. I'm not gonna play a game of what ifs, I'm taking a gamble and gonna get his own tribe to flip on him. I've got enough information from Jeff, Pat, and Liv to spin into a lie. I know Andrew said my name - but Jeff and Keegan changed it to Ben, so if I tell Keegan that Andrew blamed him on my name coming up I think I can flip him. I can try to get John, Ben, and Xavier, Keegan can get Liv and Joey, that's 7. If it blows up in my face - Oh well. This is season 99! We're high rolling now.

Had a nice long conversation with Jake this morning. Andrew has been throwing my name under the bus for some reason? Well Andrew, better watch out because I’m driving that bus and swerving it at you. OG Palazzo is... not my favourite. Honestly I’m okay if it dies tonight. Jake, Livingston, Ben, Joey, Jaiden and myself can definitely switch things up. I imagine we can get John and Xavier on board as well, maybe even Kailyn. I was perfectly okay riding the pink wave for a few rounds, but Andrew you just had to go and mess that up. Why? For what reason? Hoping it’s you tonight. xoxo Gossip Girl

I feel good about tribal, rip Andrew I guess, but I'm nervous as hell for some reason that it could be me. It would be perfect because I don't even see it coming... :/

I don't know what happened, but there seems to be a "merging" of tribal lines. Which is good for me. The vote is going Andrew with 9. And the 4 are voting Ben. Or everyone is playing everyone. I am just happy I am not one of the options BUT I was told that Steph and I are being mentioned by people as a tight 2. Well, they're right, but I didn't want that to come out.

Andrew is being his paranoid self. And rightfully so. Unless I’m getting completely bamboozled, the vote should between 7 and 9 votes for Andrew, and between 6 and 4 votes for Ben. Fingers crossed this goes off without a hitch

Okay so premerge wasn’t too hard tbh. Just making friendships with my og palazzo. I just hope that every week people see someone else as less important to their game. I have a long mental game for this and I am prepared to take this game week by week and adjust to everything that comes. I just pray that I make it through this week and even if I lose Andrew I don’t mind tbh because then I have an idol to myself. I’m obsessed with Livingston tbh he’s so funny and I like a good amount of the people I didn’t get a chance to meet premerge so I think there’s good room to move about

After last tribal I honestly want Ben gone. He’s kind of rude and frustrating. OG Pallazzo has the numbers so in theory we should be set but who knows? 🤷🏼‍♀️

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hopevalley · 5 years

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hopelesswonderer5218 replied to your post: S6E2: Phone Rings & Heartstrings (Episode...

The episode was better then I thought. Abigail still bugs me a lot. There’s no way she could run a cafe and be mayor and be mom. No one now could do it let alone back then. I’m wondering if lee and Rosemary will have a baby? Lee wants kids but she doesn’t and she’s such a strong person it would be out of character for her to give in. She has changed a lot but there’s nothing wrong with her not wanting children and I think it’s cool to show that too. But it’s hallmark so they probably will.

The episode was pretty decent. Fun at times. Which was definitely more than I expected going into it!

I think most people here on Tumblr will agree with you about Abigail. If she’s doing those three huge things, something’s gotta give, and we have to assume it’s the café. (So much for Abigail doing “all” the work, huh.)

As far as Lee and Rosemary go, I honestly don’t know what to think. Something about the emotion in that preview made me feel super uncertain. I thought for a moment that maybe it’s one of those “I don’t want kids but gosh he’d be such a good dad I feel bad for depriving him of that; will he hate me for it later? Resent me?” kinds of things.

(Not to get too personal, but my husband and I went through something like that, and it’s one of those things that never really goes away.)

It’s worth noting that Rosemary’s probably toward the end of her safe childbearing years (and that’s stretchin’ it in this time period), so it could be one of those “now or never” decisions that’s terribly exhausting and stressful. I mean, she likes spending time with Jack Junior, but she’s generally a selfish person and maybe does realize that about herself.

Having a child isn’t something for selfish people, and by that I don’t mean “you’re selfish if you don’t have kids” because that is a disgusting lie and it’s NOT TRUE.

But. If you’d rather be able to do what you want when you want to, without worrying about anybody else overmuch: maybe parenthood isn’t for you. Children aren’t trinkets meant to be shown off in public and discarded/ignored at home. Having a child just to show it off, or just to procreate with no real interest or passion for children or parenting? Now THAT is selfish!

I think Rosemary could be caught in that thing where sometimes kids sound really good to her! She can picture having them and it’s great in those daydreams, but then she thinks about how much work they are, and how tired she’d be, and how she couldn’t do anything she wanted to do anymore, and how 99% of the work would be on her (because of the time period, because Lee is a workaholic, because she doesn’t work), so she feels vaguely stuck—maybe even incapable of making a choice.

But then it’s possible she decided to try for one kid, because she could maybe handle just one. Because one is a doable number, and she wants Lee to have that. But maybe she miscarries it. Or she can’t get pregnant even though they’re actually trying. Or she hits early menopause. It could be interesting to have a plot where she mourns having the ability to choose taken away from her. Maybe she didn’t really want kids that bad, but she still wants to be able to choose that--to say “no children.” But if she finds out she can’t have kids (because they always blamed the woman in those days; but it could be Lee, and I know he’d bring that up so it could be a really good storyline for them; he’d support the HECK out of her), she doesn’t get to make that call; she doesn’t get a choice.

Anyway, whatever Lee and Rosemary get, I hope it’s a long and very involved, overarching-for-several-episodes kind of plot. Please give us more than a one-and-done storyline for them. They deserve better.

#tw: miscarriage #answered mail #hopelesswonderer5218

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dancerstudying · 5 years

Text

first semester: grades + some thoughts

hi friends! so, I just finished my first semester of college (aka university to those of you not in the US). after a week of finals and lots of stress, I’m now at home, safely ensconced in the couch doing as little as possible. however, final grades were due today, so I thought I’d take a moment to run through what my grades were and kind of reflect on them. I wanted to do this both bc I thought it could give people a better idea of the transition b/t high school and college grades-wise, and also as a record for myself.

a note/disclaimer:

if you don’t want to know what my grades were, you don’t have to read this! I’m not trying to brag and I don’t want this to be something to compare yourself to! everyone is on their own path and has their own definition of success -- a bad grade for me might be a great one for you, and vise versa.

also, this will probably get pretty long. grab a snack.

some background about grades in the US

grades are given on a scale from A to F, with A being the best and F being a fail (we skip E tho idk why). grades are based on a combo of exams, quizzes, assignments, and essays, with the specific percentage/which of these counts determined by the professor. this varies from school to school or even from class to class but generally the scale is

A: >93.3%

A-: 90-93.3%

B+: 86.7-89.9%

B: 83.4-86.6%

B-: 80-83.3%

ok I’m tired of typing things out but you get the point. this pattern continues in the 70s for C and the 60s for D. usually anything below a 60 is an F (fail) but again this can depend. some classes are graded on a curve, where the grade boundaries are moved either up or down so that the majority of students get a B-/C+, which is supposed to be the average. this prevents grade inflation and also helps you out if the class is very difficult and test averages are in the 50s or 60s (pretty common for classes like organic chemistry).

some background about my grades in high school

I feel like this info is important for context and also to give an idea of the academic level I generally operate at (okay that sounds v pretentious). anyway, it’s pretty generally expected that you can expect to see a drop in your grades from high school to college. this differs based on a ton of things, but almost everyone experiences it so it’s totally normal and to be expected! anyway, I went to a fairly competitive and well-ranked public (government funded) high school, and I grew up in a well-educated university town, so I felt I was pretty prepared for college. I took mostly AP/honors courses and ended with a 3.95 GPA (unweighted) when I graduated. basically, I was almost a straight A student with a few Bs in there (thanks to pre-calc and AP Spanish).

I’m now at a fairly selective school, though not anything close to the Ivy League -- I think the acceptance rate for my class was 17-18%. of course, selectivity is not a great indicator of how difficult classes are, as many selective schools (particularly Ivy Leagues) have rampant grade inflation.

my majors are neuroscience and dance and I’m on a pre-med track.

anyway, let’s get down to the nitty gritty: my grades this semester.

early modern England (3 credit hours): A-

I took this course because I placed out of introductory writing but still needed a writing-intensive course and it seemed interesting enough. honestly, it was much more difficult than I expected. I consider myself a fairly good writer, but the professor I had for this course was a tough grader for papers. I did manage to get an A on my final paper which was a victory. after easily getting all As in writing and history classes in high school, an A- is a little hard to accept. however, I worked really hard in this class and am honestly satisfied with my grade as I know most people do not do as well in this class. it was also a 2000 (sophomore level) class, so I was definitely being challenged.

intensive ballet IV (3 credit hours): B+

so, this is my lowest grade. at first, I was really disappointed by it, but it is a 4000 level course (mostly juniors and seniors) and we’re graded based partially on skill, so I have to accept it and move on and just hope to do better next semester as I’m taking ballet IV again. I know I could have worked harder in this class so I’m not going to complain about it, just learn from it and try to improve.

intro to cell & molecular biology (3 credit hours): A

this is probably what I’m proudest of. this class is known for being a true weed-out course for pre-meds and most people just hope to pass, but I got an A! it feels especially good because I know I worked hard for it and didn’t just skate by on natural intelligence. I also hadn’t taken biology since freshman year of high school so there was a steep learning curve. I didn’t just do well, I honestly learned so much and doing well in this class confirmed for me that pre-med is the right choice.

general chemistry I - lecture (3 credit hours): A-

I have such a complicated relationship with chemistry, and honestly, I’m really glad I’m done with this class. I hate to blame professors but sometimes you just get a really bad one and this was one of those cases. his lectures were extremely disorganized and he didn’t explain things clearly at all. it’s partially my fault that I didn’t get an A, though, as I definitely could have put more time and thought into studying, especially for the final. it was just so hard to stay motivated when I could barely follow lectures. I have to take gen chem II next semester but thank god I have a different professor.

general chemistry I - lab (1 credit hour): A

not much to say about this one. I’m happy to have gotten an A since it really intimidated me at first -- lab in college is way more serious than in high school. I learned how to write a proper lab report which is an important skill as a science major.

honors colloquium (1.5 credit hours): A

I loved this class soooo freaking much. everyone in the honors program has to take a first year seminar and I chose one about modernism and if it’s still relevant to the contemporary world. it was also a discussion based class which I love and I got to write my final paper on literally any topic I wanted and how it was related to modernism (mine was about the modernist search for identity in The Handmaid’s Tale, and I’m so proud of that paper, especially considering I wrote it the day it was due). anyway, not a super hard class, but still proud of that A.

urban sociology (3 credit hours): A

another class which I loved. I found it kind of easy as it was mostly memorization of concepts and theorists and I have a good memory, but I did put more effort in than I would have to an “easy” class in high school, and was rewarded by getting 100% on the final! would highly recommend sociology to literally anyone -- I’m taking another sociology class next semester and am considering a minor in it.

dance company (1 credit hour): A

this is like, not a real grade because dance company isn’t even a real class -- it’s just on my schedule so I can get credit for performing in the fall dance show. I’m pretty sure everyone who shows up to rehearsals and performances gets an A. regardless, I’m happy for the boost to my GPA.

so that’s it! overall, I ended with a 3.7925 GPA. I have to confess that it is slightly lower than I would have liked, but I’m overall happy with my efforts considering this was my first semester of college. my class load next semester is a little bit lighter, both in terms of credits and in terms of difficulty of classes, so that will hopefully make things a little more manageable. I have to have a 3.6 by the end of this year and a 3.8 by the end of sophomore year to stay in the honors program, and considering I’m almost at a 3.8 now I think it’s completely doable.

I hope this was useful to those of you who are starting college soon. obviously this differs from school to school and especially if you’re not in the US, but in general you can expect a slight dip in your grades. it shouldn’t be anything dramatic if you can keep organized and on top of things, but there are a lot of transitions associated with starting college so don’t feel badly if things don’t go according to plan! you have time to make up for it, and med schools/law schools/grad schools know that grades your first semester of freshman year are not necessarily fully reflective of your abilities and will likely pay more attention to your grades later on.

thanks for reading this whole rambling thing! also, I might make a separate post about differences in grades between high school and college (how things are weighted, harshness of grading, etc.) so let me know if you’d find that helpful!

#study #studyblr #studyspo #university #college #grades

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far-away-stars · 6 years

Note

Can I ask all for Tenja or Ezio (or both c;) for the NPC asks? -v-

Hi, yes, I did both kitties, which mean it took me too long and got tired of trying to make any sense halfway through it, so sorry if it doesn’t make any sense or it’s just lame here and there. :’D

Tenja Rel

1. Would they be recruitable?

As a new Jedi in training, yes, I pretty much think so. Sith is harder since he’s quite individualistic and has a pretty possessi-ehm, protective brother.

2. Would they be a class specific character? (ie. Imperial Agent only. Republic character only)

Probably Jedi specific. Either Consular or Knight both.

3. When would you recruit them? Vanilla story? an Expac? Post KOTET?

I think vanilla would be good, learning “peacefully” on the field the ways of Jedi.

4. Where would you recruit them from?

Probably directly from the Temple on Tython, going to pick him up for a mission you were assigned for by some of the higher-ups.

5. What would their recruitment mission be?

He wouldn’t really need one, since, simply put, he doesn't really have a choice, I’ll assume whatever missions the characters made so far in name of the Republic and jedi were enough as a vote of trust for the Council. If we are talking some sort of loyalty mission … maybe he asks you to accompany him on some sort of travel to Voss? To get some help for his blindness. Not to cure it, but to stop the phantom pains probably, or the general headaches from using the Force to “see” while not being yet fully used to it. It may also lead to a dream-travel adventure of sorts (with some comments of his regarding how he can somehow “see” you now.)

6.What would be their original recruitment outfit?

Visas Marr in an all-black dye.

7. Would there be a character they don’t like? Would that cause you to choose sides?

Well. There would be issues if he somehow came into contact with his brother, Di’taqt, so any sort-of public alliance with the Sith would probably be problematic.

8. Are they romancable? Why/why not?

They are, but it’s probably not one of the easiest shells to break. He didn’t really allowed himself love for the sake of it, I mean, his last wife blinded him in a fit of rage. Also, well, he doesn’t mind sex at all, because it what he was used to as a Sith and wasn’t going to go chaste just for the sake of old ass Jedi traditions, so there’s that. But, well. He doesn’t think love has a change to turn out well. He can be proved wrong, if one is willing to try.

9. What would they say if you clicked on them?

“I’m listening.” “What do you have in store for us today, my friend?” “At your service.” “I do wonder if it’s a wise idea.” “Mhnn, gossip. I like it.” “No one suspects the blind man.”

10. Do they know any other in game characters? (ie. trained under Satele Shan during the civil war. Knew Talos before he went to Hoth)

Aside from his brother and general Sith acquaintances I don’t think so.

11. What weapon(s) would they have?

His lightsaber, standard force-sensitive equipment. His sly charm.

12. Are they better as a tank, healer or DPS?

Essentially DPS but he can manage a decent amount of healing, at least for himself. His specialty consists in entropic redistribution of the Force, basically siphoning life force from his enemies to himself, wasting away his enemies while healing and strengthening himself.

13. What gifts do they Love? Like? What would they say when you gave them a gift?

Weapon and Trophy, probably. Doesn't mind Luxury and Courting either. - “Well. Someone will certainly find a use to it.” “Appreciated.” “For me? I’m honored.” “I.. thank you, my friend. It’s truly wonderful.”

14. What would they say if you sent them away/changed them out?

“I’ll be there when you need me.” “Good rest to you.” “Oh, you wound me, leaving so soon.” “I dare you to find company as good as mine, my friend.”

15. What do they say when they heal you? What do they say when they are attacking?

“Hush, hush. Better already, is it?” “Don’t die on me, my friend, I don’t need that kind of stress in my life.” “Fresh air and the the kiss of life.” - “Tut-tut, I’ll show how it’s done.” “Let it go. It will hurt less if you don’t fight it.” “You are lacking finesse. Not that it will matter for longer still.” “Do us a favor. Don’t get up.”

16. What’s their idle chatter like? Do they talk a lot (when you arrive on each planet) or do they suddenly say something in some strange places?

They certainly like to say something at each planet, idle stuff, less prone to start random conversations if unprompted.

17. What letters would they send post vanilla class story/SOR/KOTFE

Romance :

He would probably be so frustrated trying to write one, or think of a gift, but, yeah, letters are not his forte. He wouldn’t know what to write, how to explain, how to express what he feels. Not the full story of his life on paper would be enough to try to begin to put into words how he feels to this day next to them.

He will try to prove it, to show it, to make it spoken in a language he hopes the character will understand, but, no. Not in a letter. He will write invisible patterns on their skin, he will smile his gratitude and hold his hopes in their arms with them. And hope they understand.

Also he would have to dictate it to a holo-transcriptor and yeah, no.

18. If they are recruitable in vanilla story, where are they during KOTFE/TET? What are/were they doing?

Probably still with the Jedi. He didn’t have much choice, he couldn’t really go back to the Empire, and it’s not as if they were faring any better Tho I bet he was one of the most frustrated ones after the deal with Zakuul, very bitter. He may have left at a certain point to join some resistance’s group, if anything not to feel so useless.

Lucretyiio

1. Would they be recruitable?

Buy him food and he’s yours, honestly.

2. Would they be a class specific character? (ie. Imperial Agent only. Republic character only)

No, not really. He usually strays away from force sensitives and isn’t overly fond of the Empire, but well, he doesn’t judge people from covers. Or tries at least,

3. When would you recruit them? Vanilla story? an Expac? Post KOTET?

He’s pretty freestyle. He constantly asks for rides. Anytime would work.

4. Where would you recruit them from?

A Cantina. Could be anywhere from Coruscant, to Tatooine, to Nar Shadda.

5. What would their recruitment mission be?

Help him take down or stop some violent gang making business around probably, or something of the sort.

6.What would be their original recruitment outfit?

Canderous Ordo armor.

7. Would there be a character they don’t like? Would that cause you to choose sides?

Honestly.. Not really. There’s a lot of things he doesn’t like, but it’s not about choosing sides, not really, it’s about engaging ourselves to be the best we can possibly be. He doesn’t actually wants to shun or isolate people. He won't be comfortable or agree with everyone, but he wants to believe it’s doable while offering the chance to be united.

Honestly, like, yeah, he will vocally disagree to a lot of stuff if it involves violence, abuse and all that stuff. But he will stay as long as he believes in the cause. Being open about his opinions is also one of the ways he hopes will help changing things for the best and influence people with new ideas.

8. Are they romancable? Why/why not?

Yes, very. He’s so flirty. He just happens to become a mess if you flirt back. You may have to pick him up on a spoon. But he’ll sing all the love ballads to you.

9. What would they say if you clicked on them?

“Never wondered : why Banthas? No, like, that’s it. That’s the question. I can’t figure them out, mate.” “Why nothing rhymes with “Saresh”?” “Bada-mba-dababum mate, ya feel me?” “I. Need. Ice Cream.” “Oh shit, forgot the safety on the blaster.” “I’m here all day folks.” “No, man, you are the sidekick.”

10. Do they know any other in game characters? (ie. trained under Satele Shan during the civil war. Knew Talos before he went to Hoth)

Nope, don’t think so.

11. What weapon(s) would they have?

His brazen and melodious singing voice. His halliksete, if smashed on someone’s head. A blaster that he mostly knows how to use. Also smoke grenades. Because he often needs a diversion from when he needs to quickly disappear.

12. Are they better as a tank, healer or DPS?

He can damage things alright. Mostly willingly. I wouldn’t really trust him for anything else.

13. What gifts do they Love? Like? What would they say when you gave them a gift?

Underworld Good and Courting are his faves. Luxury and Cultural Artefact can work out. - “Hey, yeah, cool. What is it?” “Fancy ass cool, man!” “Fuck. Thanks.” “*sobbing*”

14. What would they say if you sent them away/changed them out?

“Hey, be back soon for another show.” “Yeeees, party time!” “No, yeah, of course I can be left to my own devices. No dangers. Ah.” “I’ll be back when you need me!”

15. What do they say when they heal you? What do they say when they are attacking?

“Hey. Wanna me to kiss it better?” “I’m trying!” “Hey, all better, Am I the best or am I the best?” “Oh fuck man that must have hurt.” - “Aaaand perfect strike for local handsome!” “Yes, that was… totally what I meant to do!” “Oh fuck that hurt.” “In your BEHIND, dude.”

16. What’s their idle chatter like? Do they talk a lot (when you arrive on each planet) or do they suddenly say something in some strange places?

He talks a lot. Don’t even get me started.

17. What letters would they send post vanilla class story/SOR/KOTFE

One of his letters, both romance and not-romance (tho romance’s content are slightly different) is the messy drafts of a song he’s trying to compose about the character. It’s some sort of epic tale, or brash cantina chant, or something more private. It’s a mess, with all his annotations. It’s very sincere. He says he never managed to finish it, and maybe it’s because he doesn’t want it to finish. Never.

18. If they are recruitable in vanilla story, where are they during KOTFE/TET? What are/were they doing?

Helping refugees. He started off really angry, blazen songs about Zakuul and how they all had to fight. Then… he just wanted to help people.

#oc : Tenja Rel #ask : Tenja Rel #oc : Lucretyiio #ask : Lucretyiio #thank you for the ask! <3 #hunting-for-beasts

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journeysintowebcomics · 6 years

Text

Worm Liveblog #68

UPDATE 68: Chess Metaphors and All That

Last time the Undersiders had gone to the meeting to discuss the Slaughterhouse Nine’s presence in Brockton Bay, but Hookwolf played dirty, painting the Undersiders and the Travelers as opportunists jerkasses who were taking over the city, taking advantage of the crisis. Ignored by everyone including Coil, all they could do was go away. Let’s continue.

Well as expected, nobody among the Undersiders is happy. Grue has been cursing all the way back to the shore. The Travelers were already at the shore, ready to leave. Will they confer before parting? They may want to talk about how Coil, uh, ‘bent us over and fucked us’, as Grue so succinctly put it. Quite the poet, Grue is.

“I dunno,” Tattletale answered. “That might have been the only way for him to play things, with the way his power and operations work.”

Eh, I’d be more willing to believe that if it wasn’t for Coil’s surprise when the Undersiders tried to reject the proposal and wanted to stay. It seemed like he really hadn’t expected it. Despite his power and operations, he’s not some sort of omniscient person, there are things he won’t see coming.

You know, I wonder how many moles Coil has in different organizations and stuff. Trainwreck and...uh...that kid from the Wards are the ones I’m aware of that are alive right now. No idea who else may be a mole. Could he have one in the Protectorate? That would be rather cool, in some twisted way.

Doesn’t it make sense that he’d assist us by being one himself? I get the impression he likes the control it affords him and the amount of information he can get this way.

And now he can control how much information you get about this topic. Well, surely he knows Tattletale will be able to get more through her cleverness and her power, but he’ll still try to give them only the information he thinks they should have. Knowing Worm and how badly things go, they’ll miss that little vital information that’d save them so much trouble, and that’ll fuel one or two arcs. If that happens, then I bet it’ll be something related to Jack Slash – he’s the big target here!

To avoid being left in the dark, the Travelers sent Genesis to spy on the meeting with a subtler form, and so did the Undersiders by leaving Imp behind – although that was unintentional. They didn’t notice she wasn’t with them until they were at the shore. Her power is both a blessing and a curse! The problem they have with Imp staying behind is that they don’t have a perfect guarantee Imp can spy and stay unnoticed.

Personally I think it’ll be okay. By sheer odds it’s possible someone among them will notice Imp, but even if someone does notice her, she won’t stay in their awareness. I remember a couple arcs ago Skitter was having problems remembering Imp’s presence, even after knowing Imp was around. I see no reason for something similar to happen here, if she’s discovered.

Of course, nobody in the Undersiders follow my train of thought, because mine has the benefit of being the reader of this story and therefore I’m privy to Skitter’s point of view which allowed me to think all that stuff, so...yeah, they’re rather worried! So much Grue tells Skitter to send bugs to make sure Imp will be okay.

“The bugs,” he said, “I could have told Genesis to stick around while you scouted, wait, no. Why send Imp if you have the bugs?”

They didn’t send her on purpose. She sure as heck stayed behind on purpose, that I’m sure about, but it wasn’t like everyone else knew except maybe Tattletale. Anyway, what he means here is that why didn’t Skitter use bugs instead of Imp to spy.

Riiiight, I don’t think Skitter had described before how her bugs’ senses felt. It’s so different to how humans use their senses.

It’s all black and white blotches, high-pitched squeals and bass throbs.

No wonder she can’t understand the bugs’ senses, and why touch is the only one that works. Even if their size is...much tinier than herself, in general the touch should be more or less the same, right? And now that she knows it’s possible for her brain to process the bugs’ complete information, she’ll try to improve her powers. Nice!

Since they have to wait for Imp and Genesis to return, why not to return to Ballistic’s HQ and discuss what they know? Maybe the Travelers will tell them Crawler paid a visit to Coil’s underground hideout. Unlikely, but I’m not ruling it out. Regent starts by informing he was visited, and that it was his sister who came to see him. Armsmaster was another, which is already public information.

“The, uh, sixth member of the Travelers is the next recruit, I guess,” Trickster admitted. “Crawler hit Coil’s place.”

Close enough. No details, but this is enough. All the Undersiders have to know is that Crawler hit Coil’s place. That’s it. Hookwolf is included in the list, and thanks to how bad Faultline’s crew looked, they guess they were another target. That leaves three candidates still unknown. No way they’ll find out Panacea was visited, Heckpuppy is keeping this as a secret but maybe someone will guess, and Purity...hm. Well if someone will find out, it’ll be at the meeting.

Nope, nobody guessed anything. Waiting time. Waiting without masks. They’re all together in the same situation, the pariahs of Brockton Bay.

“I was under the impression that the Slaughterhouse Nine were pretty much unbeatable.”

Not really. Honestly, it’s kind of surprising how beatable they are – individually, for the most part. The whole thing about having to look for new members proves it. Hatchet Face, the one that sounds kind of invincible thanks to its power disabling skill, died. All things considered it’s kind of amazing Jack Slash is still alive. He must be rather shrewd to stay alive for so long, with the entire world’s parahumans against him, so to say.

The only plan right now is that confronting them head on won’t work. Well, yeah, that’s a given.

Thing is, Dinah told us that our odds against these bastards aren’t good. Our chances of winning are pretty low, and it’s pretty damn likely we’ll get killed if we confront them head on.

Even if there’s a moment where the odds aren’t too bad, surely it’ll be a fleeting moment, available for such a short amount of time it’s impossible they’ll know in time they can do something. The task of killing Jack Slash looks pretty difficult...although now I’m curious what Dinah would say if she was asked what are the odds Theo will succeed at Jack’s challenge. If only that could be asked, but alas, nobody can do that. Unless...unless Purity tells everyone at the meeting about it and Coil gets curious enough to ask. Would she? I’m not sure. Even if she did, I doubt Coil would put all their hopes in some kid’s luck in something that’ll take place in like two years.

I had barely finished that train of thought when this meeting takes a turn to directions I’m not sure where they’re going. Trickster is connecting a computer so Noelle – the gal in the vault – can talk to everyone here. Ah, could it be they’re going to show who Crawler was coming for? I don’t think we even have a description of her! Or what her power is. It must be powerful in its own way if it got the attention of the Slaughterhouse Nine.

Trickster pressed a button on the keyboard and then turned to us, “Tattletale. I’ll be as quick as I can. Coil promised he’d get you to help us, but he’s taken his time introducing you to our group. The cynic in me suspects there’s a reason, and the pessimist in me says that reason is that he’s already figured out what you’re going to tell us, and it isn’t going to be pretty.

I doubt Coil saw this coming too. Yeah, Trickster isn’t an idiot, and I’m sure even a blind person could know Coil’s hiding a thousand secrets. That said, if the reason why Coil isn’t doing anything is because he knows something the Travelers and/or Noelle won’t want to hear, well, then it must be something big, because the Travelers’ willingness to help relies on this, if I remember correctly. What’s up with this, Coil?

Once Tattletale is told to lie and pretend like she’s working on...whatever Coil should have told her to do, the connection is established. The physical description of Noelle does show she’s ill, and raises the possibility she’s being drugged – likely possibility. She’s kept in a vault; drugs can be another way to keep her subdued for who knows what reason. Must be pretty awful if Coil’s keeping her in a vault.

The lies go smoothly enough. Tattletale manages to be reassuring and says it’s...doable. Did she deduce what she’s supposed to be looking for? Wouldn’t be surprised if she did! Trickster cuts the conversation once he judged Tattletale had lied enough, and changes topics back to the theme of this arc. Slaughterhouse Nine, how to deal with them?

Wait, does she knows Crawler wanted to see her? That may be important for her to know.

“We need our old field commander’s brain on the Slaughterhouse Nine sitch.”

“A distraction would be nice,” Noelle smiled for the first time.

Field commander. She used to be the leader of their group? I wondered if I could dig up any information about her if I hunted far enough back.

Unlikely they’ll tell anything about Noelle, given the secrecy about her. But hey, Skitter, maybe you’ll have to rescue two people from Coil’s clutches instead of just one. It depends on what’s up with Noelle and why she’s in a vault, but if you can defeat Coil, then surely you can help Noelle with whatever she needs.

To illustrate how much power each member of the Slaughterhouse Nine has, Trickster uses chess metaphors.

“The way I see it, their leader is like the king in chess. More raw power than a pawn, but in the end, he’s simultaneously the second weakest piece in the game and the one everything hinges on. We take him down without getting massacred in the process, I think we win.”

How much range does Jack’s knives have, again? A lot, you say? A very powerful king piece, then. Anyway, while he’s the objective and all that, I’m starting to think his death may not stop anything. Bonesaw exists, she can do stuff with dying parahumans, and it seems she’s a devout follower of Jack. She could keep him alive with some disturbing surgery. Maybe getting rid of Bonesaw is necessary too.

“Right. Siberian’s like the queen. She’s fast, mobile, one of the strongest physically, and the bitch of the matter is, she can’t be taken off the board, and she can’t be contained. A special queen, if you will. Physically she’s an unstoppable force and an immovable object any time she wants to be.”

It’s like someone glued the queen piece to the board and attached turrets to the head of the piece. You can’t expect an even match when she exists. Curse her invincibility power. Heckpuppy fidgets when the Siberian is mentioned, Skitter doesn’t seem to interpret it in any specific way.

“Then there’s Crawler, who visited us the other night. Maybe not as fast or agile as Siberian, and he can be contained, but he can’t be taken off the board. A special rook.”

...you know what? Aegis is someone I thought was pretty much invincible thanks to his regeneration power, and how any injuries, no matter how bad they were, could be healed rather quickly, yet he died. Crawler doesn’t work exactly the same, but maybe there’s a way to circumvent his regeneration power too? Also stop making up special pieces, Trickster, you’re reminding me of my middle school classmates when they played chess.

“Shatterbird and Burnscar are like bishops. They’ve got mobility, reach, and they can bury you damn fast if you don’t have the right kind of cover.”

Burnscar seems a good place to start, when it’s about a confrontation. She seems somewhat agreeable as long as she’s not so upset she makes more and more fires. Shatterbird...yeah, no. Stay away from her. Her power is as versatile as Skitter’s, and it’d take very specific places to fight her without she having any glass around her. No way she’d let herself be trapped anywhere.

“What about Mannequin? Another rook?” I asked.

“I’d peg him a knight. He’s more close range, but he’ll catch you from an oblique angle, maybe slip past whatever defences you think you have.”

Do the ventilation tubes count as an oblique angle? He wasn’t being very stealthy back then!

Since Regent knows Cherish, he should be able to assign a fitting piece for her.

“My sister. I don’t know if you could call her a third bishop or a knight. Long range on her power, gets stronger as she gets closer. Affects your emotions and as far as I’m aware, there’s no way to defend against it or to take cover. If she decides she wants to hurt you or make you hurt yourself, she can find you and she’ll make it happen.”

And very spiteful, to boot. Spite is a powerful incentive to make stuff happen. I’d say she’s a knight, because she not only has long range, she also is clever enough to bypass natural defenses such as Hatchet Face’s nullifying power. And also because I refuse to imagine a third bishop. This really is back to my middle school chess matches, geez.

There’s no clear way on how to counter Cherish. There’s a vague plan about using Skitter’s own ranged power to attack her, but...I don’t really think it’ll work. By virtue of being on the Slaughterhouse Nine, Cherish needs to die, and I don’t think Skitter will start killing, no matter how much of a threat they are. Pluck eyes out, yes, murder, no.

Bonesaw is the last one who needs a piece assigned, but there’s none that fit. Allow me to give you a comparison, then! How about she’s the player! She’s not a mastermind or anything like that – yet – but she has some fearsome skills. She’ll fuse together a few chess pieces and make a monstrosity that can’t even stand up on the board. Hah! Okay, no, in a more serious comparison, she could move mere pawns to the other end of the board and turn them into a better piece. She also would try hard to keep Jack Slash safe, and he’s the king so...so yeah, the player may be a good enough equivalent!

On the side of the Undersiders and everyone else there are lots of pieces, with no cooperation with each other. So it’s like there are six or so different players on this side of the board, eh? They all have powers they can use well, and I’m sure with cooperation and skill they could do something good by using their combined expertise against their enemies when the time comes, but that’s a bit too much of a tall order. I don’t think the Travelers trust the Undersiders much, and there’s also Heckpuppy, who’s still hiding she was another person who was almost recruited. That shows lack of trust, or it could be a fierce independence that doesn’t want to yield to teamwork. It could be both.

“We know in advance, pretty much for a fact, that if any of us, Undersider or Traveler, try to fight these bastards, we’re going to lose, and we’ll lose hard.”

“Tattletale say that?” Noelle asked.

“Coil did,” Trickster answered.

Then there’s no room for argument. What I wonder is if there will ever be a chance to fight them. I mean...yeah! I as a reader can say there’s a 100% chance there is! Because no way the main characters won’t have an intense fight versus the current big villains of the story. But I’m curious what Dinah would say regarding the odds. Would she announce very high odds the Undersiders will fight the Slaughterhouse Nine at some point? Or would she say it’s very, very small odds and therefore when it happens it’ll be a surprise for the characters? I think any of those options would work!

It seems Noelle doesn’t know anything about Dinah. Not surprising Coil didn’t tell his other prisoner – even if she’s a willing prisoner to some extent – about Dinah.

The scenario Noelle puts is rather...dire. Their enemies are cheating, so either the Undersiders and Travelers Dream Team -- from now on called the Dream Team for convenience – cheat back, or don’t play the way they want you to play. The second option is their choice. This will require some discussion, starting with defining what they want from their journey to Brockton Bay.

They want a ninth member, that’s clear already. They want to kill people and have fun, which is...well that’s to be expected, that’s what the Slaughterhouse Nine are known for. They want to be the predators, so...

“They want to be the predators, we make them prey,” Noelle said. She was looking more animated again.

Iiiii don’t have the slightest idea how that will be possible, especially if only the Dream Team works on this.

The suggestion, following the chess metaphor this chapter has been centered on, is to change the game. I missed the part as to what equivalent non-metaphorical action should be made, unfortunately. Trickster suggests changing to Go, but that’s more fitting for the conquest of the city. Noelle, though...

“Shogi?” Noelle suggested.

Shogi. I got her meaning almost immediately, and I wasn’t alone. Tattletale, the Travelers and I all looked at Regent.

Ah, I get it. I’m not knowledgeable about shogi, but if I remember correctly, you can use captured pieces as yours in some circumstances. Are they insinuating they’ll try to convince some of the Slaughterhouse Nine members to betray the group and work with the Dream Team? That’s...extremely risky. And maybe possible, but there won’t be many that’ll even consider it. Let’s see...

I’d say Burnscar is the one with the biggest odds of leaving the group. Aaaand...that’s it. I can’t think of anyone else. I suppose that it’s possible Cherish is another one who maybe could consider it, but she has her own plans and I doubt she’d leave them aside unless they’re doomed to fail, and it’ll be a while before it fails – because I’m sure it won’t work, it just will be some time before that particular plotline is done with.

My assessment of what shogi meant was kind of correct, just that instead of convincing and appealing to them to betray, they’ll use Regent’s power. Ah. Of course, how could I forget that. Jack and Bonesaw are targets everyone else will protect, the Siberian won’t work, Crawler and Mannequin are hard to contain, and Cherish is Regent’s sister, so that leaves Burnscar and Shatterbird. Well! It’d be great if they could control Shatterbird!

Genesis over there at Coil’s headquarters is waking up, and that means the meeting Hookwolf organized is over. Neat! Maybe next chapter they’ll say what everyone discussed over there. Better pick up Imp!

Trickster stays behind, Sundancer and Ballistic will accompany the Undersiders to pick up Imp. They coo over the ball of fluff Heckpuppy brought, and wonder why she had to bring it. The reply was that she brought him along because she had to get him used to her presence. That’s enough for Tattletale to realize what exactly the pup is, but there are more important matters to be worried about now.

Four of the Slaughterhouse Nine were stepping through the entrance of the parking garage.

...okay! This...happened sooner than I expected! It’s Jack, Bonesaw, the Siberian and Cherish. Are they coming to check on their two potential recruits? That’ll have to be seen next chapter! Which will be...now! Onwards!

“This is not an exit. Kudos for the reference,” Tattletale said.

It flew right over my head. I don’t have the slightest idea what the reference was.

Since fighting the Slaughterhouse Nine, even if they’re four members won’t work due to the Siberian’s invincible presence here, Skitter tries to think of alternatives. Fighting’s not an option, but maybe, she thinks, maybe they could run away through clever use of insects and Grue’s darkness.

“What’s this?” Cherish asked, cutting off my train of thought. “Someone thinks she’s had a clever idea. A bit of hope and inspiration there.”

Okay, that’s clever of her, to deduce Skitter had potentially thought of something, based on the feelings of hope. Why would someone feel hope when facing the Slaughterhouse Nine? That must be her reasoning, I suppose.

Cherish, this isn’t the time to get pretentiously poetic, geez. Just point at Skitter and say ‘that one’ instead of saying an entire paragraph of smug nonsense. Jack has more patience than me, or maybe he likes when other Slaughterhouse Nine members ramble about their potential targets, and tells Skitter to not dare to do anything…foolish.

“The same goes for the rest of you, but I’m sure you know that. One or two of you could kill me right now, I’m sure, but you’d die horribly for your trouble, and I doubt any of you are that suicidal.”

Did he know about the role he was going to play in the end of the world? It might change his stance and self-assuredness.

He sure is lucky nobody here would be willing to put their own life in jeopardy to try to save the world. Or maaaaaaybe someone would if there was a guaranteed chance they’d succeed. Jack doesn’t seem to suspect at all he’ll end the world, I don’t know him that well yet, but I think if he knew, he’d be proud of that. I mean, unless he has standards of some sort and doesn’t want to end the world and everything’s an accident waiting to happen, which I doubt.

The reason why they’re here is because they want to say hi to the potential recruits. Aha, thought so. That’s why the Siberian and Cherish are here. Bonesaw tagged along because she wants to meet the possible new members of her family. Ah…she’s supposed to be around fifteen years old or so, right? Her behavior is quite unsettling. I think it’s because it’s befitting of someone younger. If that was intentional, which I think it is, then well done, Mr. Wildbow.

Ah, right, the tests. They’re here to give the candidates the tests. Bonesaw is saying she wants to be original – no doing the same she did with past candidates – and fair. Iiiii will take the part about fairness with some reluctance. Somehow I can’t take that seriously.

The cat’s out of the bag! Or maybe it’s the dog that’s out of the bag, as nonsensical as that is. Bonesaw wastes no time in outright saying who exactly are the candidates they came to visit.

I felt a chill. All at once, Bitch’s presence behind me felt ominous. She’d been picked by the Nine, and even when asked, she hadn’t said a thing about it. Why?

I wouldn’t blame them for thinking Heckpuppy is considering to join them. I still think maybe she won’t, but there’s reasons for everyone else to feel uneasy.

I’m completely unsurprised Jack knew they were planning to kill them. The entire group must be used to that, right? And although they’re ruthless killers, they’re not stupid. They wouldn’t crash Hookwolf’s meeting for...what? One person over there? Since I think Labyrinth isn’t over there Hookwolf would be the only candidate around? Leaving that aside, at least this is a chance to find out more about the tests! This will be interesting!

Mannequin always asks candidates to alter themselves in a way that costs them something. Siberian waits until half the candidates have been discarded and then hunts the remainder.

‘Costs them something’ is a bit of a vague thing. Does that mean the candidate can pick by themselves what they’ll lose? And Mannequin judges if it was a worthy loss, perhaps? The Siberian is...well it’s rather straightforward. She’s an invincible attacker who can’t be stopped. She’ll catch the prey at some point and that can’t end well, can it.

“And if we fail?” Regent asked, “We die?”

“No, no,” Jack smiled. “Nobody passes every test, and the punishment for failing a test is up to the individual who assigned it. Sometimes death, yes. Sometimes something different. But it’s always worse.”

Sounds to me like if you fail the Siberian’s test you die. That’s the one test nobody can allow themselves to fail! Not that...failing any other would have good results...

Also! I dread to know what test Cherish’s going to make her brother go through. She’s having way too much fun ruining him. She’ll take the chance and pummel him into the ground metaphorically, I bet.

Regent asks what Cherish had to do in her tests, and says it’s just idle curiosity. Well then! I’m curious too! I hope they do answer that question!

They are! Alright! This will give an idea of what kind of thing to expect from them, what kind of experiences Regent and Heckpuppy will go through. I don’t think they can get help during them, but perhaps they can prepare? Anyway! Onwards! Reading bit by bit because it’s of a lot of interest.

She killed Hatchet Face. Crawler took that as his test completed in advance, didn’t think of her as worth his time.

Crawler sounds like a hella passive-aggressive guy. Not exactly what I expected from the mutated regenerator that’s likely to not even be human anymore.

Little Bonesaw, for her test, designed a parasite that would stay in her system for forty-eight hours and strip her of her powers for as long as it remained.

So...that means Bonesaw is likely to use her powers to engineer something to use in her test. The possibilities are virtually limitless, in that case.

There’s something so gross about the thought of drinking blood...

Siberian went after her, starting on day two of Bonesaw’s parasitic infection. Three days and three nights of cat and mouse. To her credit, she did very well. It came down to a hair. Another ten minutes and Siberian might have caught her a third time.

That’s much longer than I thought it’d be! How do you hide for such a long time from somebody who’s pretty much guaranteed to catch you? Well, looks like there’s a limit of three attempts and that’s a bit better, but not that much. It’s more fun for the Siberian and more tension for the person being tested.

“Shatterbird likes the psychological tests, and she was in a hell of a mood after Cherish nominated herself for the team. Our Cherie didn’t have five minutes to rest before Shatterbird drove her into a room and sealed her in. No food, no light, barely any water. The room was empty, but for one glass shard. Always edging towards her, ready to prick, cut, slice and stab the second she stopped, the moment she tried to rest.”

...he says it’s psychological. Everything’s making it sound like it’s an endurance test, what with the shard following her and trying to catch her, but it’s my opinion that maybe the trick in this test is that there’s no glass shard. Cherish couldn’t see anything because there’s no light, and unless it’s going so fast it’s impossible to dodge it she wouldn’t hear it. I think it’s possible there wasn’t any danger all along, and Shatterbird pretty much forced Cherish to move constantly for a long while, always afraid she’d get stabbed anytime, never knowing where the glass may be coming from. That may be the point of that test.

Also, guess that confirms part of the reason why so many hate Cherish so much is because she was so arrogant as to force herself into the group, eh? Nobody invited her and that’s what’s ticking them off so much!

I shivered. Jack hadn’t said how long that lasted, but after three days and three nights without sleep, even a few hours like that would have been nightmarish.

What, did the Siberian never sleep either? Anyway, I don’t think there’ll be confirmation or anything, but it sounds to me like Shatterbird’s test was meant to last at the very least a couple days. Days of pure panic and frantically moving around with very little water and nourishment. It’s almost admirable Cherish is still sane.

There was a clue there, too. Credit to Regent for getting Jack to let it slip. Shatterbird had more offensive range than Cherish, if she was able to trap the girl and use the shard without getting affected in retaliation. It wasn’t much, but it was a tidbit of information, a piece for the puzzle.

Well that’s if there really was a piece of glass, but it doesn’t hurt to be careful and suppose she has quite a lot of range.

Burnscar’s test, she failed. Afraid I’m not spoiling that one. Doesn’t have the same impact if you know it’s coming.

I don’t have the slightest idea of what it could be. Maybe it was fire-related? But yeah, I can’t imagine what Burnscar’s test was – or what its punishment was. Guess I’ll know for sure once she gives her test to Regent and/or Heckpuppy. Hey, what if that’s the best chance to capture and use her for the possible plan of having a puppet among them? Could be worth a try!

Mannequin and Jack’s tests were left. It was already mentioned Mannequin wants the candidates to modify themselves in some way, but it was never mentioned Cherish had anything strange on herself, back when she met Regent. I wonder what could it be...

It’s a tattoo. It may not sound impressive in concept, but that’s because what’s awful about the tattoo is what it represents. Before that, right, there’s this:

“She told the artists to make it so ugly she’d want to kill them. If she didn’t, she promised to kill their loved ones and then kill them. Took six artists in total. Inspired.”

Wow, that’s...really cruel to everyone involved, Cherish included. She knew Mannequin wouldn’t tolerate it being half-assed, obviously, but she seriously made sure it’d be so horrible she’d hate it. Not horrible in terms of quality, of course, because the quality is amazing, the epithets surrounding the body of the tattoo are embossed and everything – painful process, I bet. It’s horrible in terms of concept. I can only imagine how unwillingly having that on you must feel. Good decision to put it on the back, at least. She won’t have to look at it.

It’d have been difficult to make a more harrowing experience, but Jack thinks he managed to do it. He makes her turn around and there on her front there’s another tattoo just as grotesque and awful as the one on her back. Well...he’s right. It must have been hard to do it once, and then she had to do it again.

“I made her do the other six tests all over again.”

Okay, I think for once I feel sorry for her.

“I even brought back Hatchet Face for Crawler’s test again!” Bonesaw grinned. “No surprise attack that time. That was one of the three tests she failed in round two, I was so proud of him!”

She failed three tests? Let’s see...can’t have been Bonesaw’s, because the parasite would have taken away her powers. Can’t be the Siberian’s because Cherish is alive right now. Can’t be Mannequin or Jack’s because, well, obvious reasons. That means she failed Shatterbird’s test? Somehow? I suppose the lose condition would be that the shard reached her? Maybe there was a shard, after all. And she must have failed Burnscar’s test again, so it’s not something that you can do better by trying again.

Seeing Cherish’s shoulders draw together, her expression darken as memories came to mind, the ugly tattoos that guaranteed she would never be able to leave this behind and get a completely fresh start, never have a boy look at her body and just be hungry for her… I had to look away. I knew she was the worst sort of person, I just didn’t know how much of that came before the tests.

Well...she must have been a rather messed up person in the first place, what with wanting to get herself into the Slaughterhouse Nine and plot to make them gradually fall under her thrall, but these tests sure didn’t help make her any better.

“Well, sis,” Regent said, “I thought you were running headlong into a fate worse than death. I stand corrected. You’re already there, and you did it to yourself.”

I hope she feels her plans are worth it, because otherwise she shot her own foot with a gun of the highest caliber possible. After all this either she tries to go all the way through with her plans, without reconsidering at all, or she breaks apart because of everything she did to herself just for nothing. Either way Cherish is likely to not end well at all.

Tattletale, true to her usual role in these confrontations, starts attempting her usual manipulations, taunting Cherish about her inability to get rid of anyone, hiding behind the Slaughterhouse Nine to do the hard work. Eh. Maybe she’s trying to get a grip on how much influence she already has on them. Jack doesn’t seem particularly interested, though, he does want to hear why Cherish is relying on them so much, even for something as simple as this. Cherish doesn’t take it well.

“Fuck that. You’re getting predictable, old man. You want to keep things amusing for yourself, you know you’re as smart as anyone else in the room, so you take the hard road so it won’t be too easy. Why not have Siberian eat her? Can’t you imagine the looks on her friend’s faces when they can’t do a thing to save her? I bet it’d light a fire under their asses, rev them up for the tests. Maybe they’ll even throw themselves headlong into it, to spare the rest.”

“Now who’s trying something?” Tattletale asked. “She’s trying to manipulate you.”

No kidding she’s trying to manipulate them, that was painfully transparent. They’d have to be really dense to not notice it, and Jack is definitely not dense. No wonder she has to use her emotion manipulation powers to make others do what she wants, because she’d be downright awful at manipulating them otherwise.

Hoh! Just a moment later Tattletale decides to reveal Cherish’s plan. I thought it’d be like an arc or two before that was revealed to them!

“Do you know she’s playing a long con? She’s setting you guys up, using her power to pull your strings and make you attached to her. Half a year to a year, she’ll probably have you wrapped around her little finger,” a slow smile spread across Tattletale’s face.

There we go, it’s out in the open. I doubt they’ll take kindly to such manipulations, and simply killing her won’t be enough. Heck, I doubt it’ll happen here. Something for an interlude, perhaps?

I was still wondering if it’d be for an interlude when something else happens...to Tattletale, that is. Skitter just got blood splashed on her, and I doubt Grue would be screaming ‘you bastard!’ if he had gutted Cherish right in front of them. I’m almost afraid of scrolling down a bit because whatever happened to Tattletale is bound to be unpleasant. I doubt she’s dead, but it’ll be bad nonetheless.

Jack cut from the edge of the mouth all the way to the back of her face, where the bones of the jaw connect, I think. Can be pretty bad, depending on how deep the cut was. If it tore the muscle, which I think is likely...well this is going to need a lot of medical attention. Mere stitches won’t solve this.

To stop any potential retaliation, the Siberian stands in front of Jack while he monologues about how he was looking forward to Cherish’s plans falling apart.

“Bonesaw and I even had a plan in mind. I wanted to see what she did, how she worked around Siberian’s immunity to her power… then the safeguards Bonesaw implanted in us would have kicked in and released us from her thrall, and oh, the look on her face. To have seen that would have been so very worth all the trouble. And that girl just spoiled it all.”

You know, I bet they let her join the Slaughterhouse Nine just for that, just to see her despair. All of them even had safeguards. So this is why Jack was so upset, Tattletale ruined everything. I don’t know why it never crossed my mind Jack would see right through Cherish and take measures already.

Cherish is as good as dead. Or worse. My bet is that Bonesaw has plans already.

While Jack does all that, Skitter focuses on trying to aid Tattletale, without much success. It’s too much blood, Jack idly remarks she’ll die of blood loss before anyone can do anything. I certainly hope not! It’d be very out of the blue for one of the Undersiders to die right now. It would be a bad attempt to manipulate emotions in the reader, just as bad as Cherish’s manipulation attempts are. She’s not going to die.

Right, the purpose of Jack and pals coming to see the candidates was to warn them there were some measures the Slaughterhouse Nine would take to ensure the, uh, heroes they contacted will cooperate. It’s biological warfare. Courtesy of Bonesaw, most likely. Panacea’s not going to be in condition to help with this.

The warnings are that they should stick to bottled water for the time being. Since that means rainwater and the such isn’t an option, I suppose it’ll be airborne yet...transmittable only through liquids? Like the virus, germ or whatever needs water in order to be activated? The other warning is that Shatterbird will do what Shatterbird does, and make all glass and sand explode. Little more than half an hour for that. Skitter panics, immediately thinking she has to go warn everyone in her territory. I hope she’s not too far from there. Also a good thing she has a cellphone to call her dad with, right?

Right before the Slaughterhouse Nine leave, Tattletale makes another effort to try to get their attention. Talking’s not an option, she writes: ‘Deal’. Hm? ‘Game’.

“Tests. If there’s more than half of the candidates left at the end of the tests, we win. You leave with volunteer? You could leave with whoever wants to join. But you leave.”

So...basically if five or more of the candidates survive – including Purity on that count, although maybe she doesn’t count -- the Slaughterhouse Nine get their new member and everyone can leave. That right? I think so. That’s not going to stop the end of the world, really. I’m...not sure what the end result of this will be, but hey, sounds interesting.

Since it’s a challenge, the Slaughterhouse Nine has to get something good out of this, too, even though...well, technically there’s no downside to this. It’s just a change in the routine, it doesn’t hinder them in any way. It’s pretty much a way to pique Jack’s curiosity, I think, that may be the intention here.

“It’s a challenge. A game. Changing the routine. We can do whatever we need to, to keep as many candidates alive as we can. You guys… do what you do. It keeps things interesting.” My eyes fell on Bonesaw, “And maybe it keeps things fair?”

Let’s go with the very likely scenario both Heckpuppy and Regent survive. There’d need to be another three, at least. It’ll be really difficult to help Armsmaster and Panacea, the first because I doubt he’ll listen to Skitter if they even get in contact with him, and they don’t know about Panacea being another candidate. Noelle...that one will have to be left up to the Travelers. I don’t know if anyone would try to help Hookwolf, what after what he did to both the Travelers and the Undersiders. Labyrinth, uh, does her visit count as a nomination? If so, she may need help. Purity’s one they maaaaaaaybe could try to help, but I don’t know how willing she’d be to listen and let them help.

All in all, they may have to limit themselves to help Heckpuppy, Regent and Noelle and hope for the best.

Bonesaw is interested, Jack not so much, but they agree to talk it with the rest of the group. I hope they accept! This can be an interesting plotline, and I can’t wait to see what kind of tests they have planned. This is promising!

Tattletale tells Skitter to get going, to do what she wants to do, and Grue offers to call Coil to get a car. Not enough time for that, all Skitter can do is run and hope she gets in time. She doesn’t waste any time, she starts running and along the way takes out her cellphone to call Dad Hebert.

This phone number is currently out of service. If you would like to leave a message…

Welp. Will she have to decide between her father and all the people in her territory? Most likely not. She can’t call Dad Hebert, but she can call Sierra and Charlotte, right? It’s less likely everyone in the territory will listen to them, but it’s worth a try. It’s not like there’s time for a plan B on that regard. That’s where the chapter ends, with Skitter realizing the urgency of the situation and running as fast as she can.

I’m stopping for today here. Once again Mr. Wildbow is going in directions I didn’t expect. Nice!

Next time: next update

#worm #worm liveblog #liveblog #story liveblog #book liveblog

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healthistip · 3 years

Text

A brand new oral antiviral drug for COVID is being examined in people – can it make a distinction?

Regardless of the effectiveness of vaccines, we nonetheless want medication to deal with COVID. Even individuals who have been double vaccinated stand a small likelihood of getting COVID and ending up reasonably and even severely unwell. There are medication to deal with COVID, however they must be given in hospital.

One promising drug that might enhance issues is molnupiravir, an antiviral that’s shifting into the ultimate levels of testing in people. Researchers are hoping it may be used each to deal with and forestall COVID. Importantly, it may be taken as a capsule – which means individuals wouldn’t must be hospitalised to obtain it.

This drug reduces the power of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID, to duplicate. It really works by mimicking one of many constructing blocks of the virus’s genetic materials. When the virus reproduces, it builds a brand new copy of its RNA, and the drug finally ends up being included into it.

When the virus then reproduces, the molnupiravir causes mutations to build up within the virus’s RNA, which improve each time it replicates. Finally, this causes an “error disaster”, the place extreme mutations cease the virus from having the ability to reproduce altogether, and it dies off.

How effectively does it work?

Thus far, a small trial has seemed on the results of molnupiravir in 202 COVID sufferers (not in hospital) who had began having signs. Members have been randomly allotted to obtain molnupiravir or a placebo, with totally different doses of the antiviral being examined.

The trial’s outcomes have been revealed as a preprint, which means they’re but to be formally reviewed by different scientists. Nonetheless, the trial confirmed that after three days of remedy, infectious SARS-CoV-2 virus was discovered considerably much less usually in members taking 800mg of molnupiravir (2%) in comparison with these taking a placebo (17%).

By day 5, the virus was not detected in any members receiving 400mg or 800mg of molnupiravir, however was nonetheless present in 11% of these taking a placebo. The trial, due to this fact, means that molnupiravir can scale back and eradicate infectious SARS-CoV-2 in sufferers with gentle COVID. Certainly, it’s the truth that molnupiravir quickens the clearance of the virus that means it might be helpful not only for treating COVID but in addition lessening the possibility of it spreading.

Having labored effectively in sufferers with gentle COVID-19, the subsequent query is whether or not molnupiravir may also help those that are severely unwell. faboi/Shutterstock

However to know simply how helpful will probably be, we have to see what occurs in additional trials. Molnupiravir is presently additionally being assessed in newly hospitalised sufferers with COVID, with this examine aiming to search out out if early molnupiravir remedy can scale back the time it takes for sufferers with extreme COVID to clear the virus. No outcomes have been disclosed to date.

A bigger trial, with 1,850 members, is now trying to see if molnupiravir is best than a placebo at stopping critical illness and loss of life in non-hospitalised adults with COVID. And a section 3 trial (the ultimate stage of human testing) is now recruiting members – throughout 17 totally different nations – to see whether or not early molnupiravir remedy of COVID-positive individuals prevents others dwelling in the identical family from getting contaminated. Earlier analysis has already proven molnupiravir can cease SARS-CoV-2 spreading on this method amongst ferrets.

If it performs effectively in these trials, molnupiravir’s affect might be big. Given the severity of sickness that may be attributable to SARS-CoV-2, an efficient antiviral could be a priceless weapon to have within the medical armoury – significantly if molnupiravir continues to be as quick performing because it has to date in testing. Sufferers affected by COVID can grow to be very sick in a short time.

The truth that it’s taken orally can be probably very useful, as this might make it simple to make use of within the early levels of an infection, because it might be self-administered exterior of hospital. Additionally, molnupiravir will be produced in massive portions and doesn’t require chilly transportation. Vaccines and bodily measures to regulate the unfold of the virus would nonetheless be the first ways for managing COVID, however this drug might complement each.

The place did it come from?

Growing antiviral medication notoriously takes a very long time. The truth that molnupiravir is on the market 18 months into the pandemic is as a result of it wasn’t developed particularly for COVID. It’s a broad-spectrum antiviral – which means it will possibly act towards all kinds of viruses. Its growth began again in 2013 at Emory College within the US.

Due to the way it works, molnupiravir is a promising remedy for quite a lot of sicknesses attributable to RNA viruses. Dragana Gordic/Shutterstock

The main target then was on discovering an antiviral drug for the remedy of equine encephalitis virus an infection, a serious risk for human and animal public well being within the Americas. The preliminary antiviral drug in growth was often called EIDD-1931. Broad testing confirmed that it was in a position to inhibit a number of RNA viruses from replicating, together with influenza virus, a number of coronaviruses and respiratory syncytial virus.

Nevertheless, when EIDD-1931 was given orally to monkeys it was rapidly metabolised, lowering its antiviral exercise. To deal with this, scientists created an inactive drug (often called a prodrug) that’s then transformed into the energetic drug within the physique. EIDD-1931’s prodrug is molnupiravir.

Initially, molnupiravir’s builders utilized to the US Meals and Drug Administration for permission to check it in people as a remedy for seasonal influenza. Nevertheless, after COVID emerged, and it was proven to have an impact towards SARS-CoV-2, a request was submitted to check it towards this virus too. Sooner or later, it’s doable that it might be used to deal with quite a lot of totally different illnesses.

Peter Barlow is presently in receipt of funding from the Medical Analysis Council for initiatives unrelated to this piece. He has beforehand obtained funding from the Chief Scientist Workplace (Scotland) on a challenge investigating host defence peptides as therapeutics for rhinovirus an infection (ETM/389). He’s presently chair of the British Society for Immunology Irritation Affinity Group.

Filipa Henderson Sousa doesn’t work for, seek the advice of, personal shares in or obtain funding from any firm or organisation that might profit from this text, and has disclosed no related affiliations past their educational appointment.

#COVID #healthistip #healthistipnew

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naminearuno · 6 years

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Diary Entry #2

January 27, 2018

It’s been 11 days since my last entry and so much has happened. I’m not gonna talk about it in any specific order.

First of all, Lexi’s mom found out about her stick-n-poke tattoos (After they had already faded, too) which led to further investigation and she told her mom that she’s been using Maya’s phone to talk to me. That was obviously a big deal because that’s the way it is with the Lesch’s. So now Lexi is supposed to have to move out on May 3rd, but I doubt they will hold her to that because they want her where they can most easily control her. She went a night without being allowed to sleep in her bed. She was supposed to quit her job, but she still has it for now. She’s still on guard. We’re still talking since it wasn’t really Maya’s phone to begin with and I’m not a fan of Maya anymore… Lexi is doing alright for the most part. Her grade in AP stats is really high and I’m impressed because I’ve heard a lot of crap about that class.

I didn’t go into my sociology class thinking that I would personally get anything out of it. But then we talked about depression. We talked about how as societies rely more on consumer capitalism and individualism increases, so does depression. When people have as much freedom as we do, they can also have excessive hope. That can make people feel even worse when they fail or still pretty awful even if they’re doing fine because they know better is possible. And as we become less and less reliant on others to make decisions for us we can feel more alone and more to blame if our lives don’t work out the way we intend. Basically, he explained that community is extremely important toward mental health. This got me thinking. First of all, it reaffirmed my belief that I should push my children to get involved from a young age. But it also got me thinking… I do believe community is important for mental health. I think that’s why my life got so much better when I joined guard. I don’t want someone telling me how my life is gonna go and who I’m gonna be, because I grew up in an American society after all :P, but it led me to a conclusion… about something I’ve thought about before. Maybe I would be happier if I went to church or another religious institution. I feel like I’m too open to follow a religion the way religious people typically do. I’m too skeptic of accepting a truth with no proof behind it and too open to the possibilities. I do think I might be able to get behind the values a religion preaches without believing in their God and their stories. I think I might enjoy being apart of a community like that… assuming I can find one that is positive. I look at people like Dani and Hannah Beer and I see how happy church makes them. Maybe I could benefit from it, too. Maybe it would help me feel like I belong. Probably not. I’ll feel like an outsider because I don’t believe. But still. It would also be interesting to learn about a religion first hand like that. I don’t know… This will most likely be next year adventure if it happens at all. Next year… When Amber and I are hopefully living in an apartment and transitioning to veganism… And hopefully I see my girlfriend regularly and finally lose my virginity (Lol do I /really/ belong in a church? Probably not…)

I’m not sure what I believe. I believe in something… I identify as Agnostic. I’m sure there is something more than us, whether it is a higher power the way people typically envision a higher power or something completely different we haven’t thought of… Or maybe that we can’t think of because we can’t understand it. I don’t know. I don’t know what happens when we die and I’m scared of the possibilities. I’m scared of everything just stopping and I’m scared of being eternally miserable and I’m scared of being reincarnated as a fly or bee or wasp or an even more messed up human. Humans fear what we don’t know. I don’t know and I am afraid.

Moving on to a lighter topic… I finished Dreamfall Chapters and started playing Remember Me. It’s a really interesting game, but also frustrating.

I also ordered a charger that should be here on Monday and my books better be here Monday because they were supposed to be here last Wednesday.

I’m still trying for straight As though I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t need to review my chem notes EVERY day. Whether I get straight As or not, I’m not overwhelmed by the workload this semester… yet. It all seems doable. I haven’t turned anything in late yet. There aren’t a lot of grades in the gradebook yet, but I only have 100s so far… It will not stay that way lol.

Amber and I have been sticking to our goal of going to the gym at least twice a week. We started the bluecoats training regime yesterday and I’m super excited. We’ve also decided that we’re gonna try to go Mon, Wed, Fri, and Saturday. Friday and Saturday are really good gym days because not a lot of people are there. We have yet to go on a Monday… heheh.

There’s been drama with Drew and his family. His mom has been bashing Jordan on his profile… on public posts. He’s still trying to contact Jordan and even messaged Zoe and accused Jordan of being a pathological liar. Speaking of which… his hickass mom sounds a lot like one of those what with her “degree in law” and her daughters husband that there have been no previous pictures or mention of… Anyway, it’s all been very annoying but also kind of hilarious. I think his mom needs to learn what the definition of “intelligence” is.

I don’t have time for these people to be honest. (Drew and his family). I’m too busy trying to better myself. I’m going to talk about some of my goals, values, and general things I’ve learned:

I now know what it means to invalidate someone’s feelings and why even if those feelings are irrational, that’s not okay. Feelings are real. Calling them “just chemicals in the brain” doesn’t devalue them. Chemicals in your brain are a very real and powerful thing. If you understand anything about science and the human body, you know that chemicals in your brain are responsible for a lot of physical and mental traits. For example, chemicals in your body determine how tall you are. Growth hormone, specifically. It is secreted by the pituitary gland in the brain. Growth hormone deficiency causes dwarfism. That is a very real thing that you can see. It being caused by a chemical in the brain does not make it any less real. Feelings and mental illnesses are also caused by chemicals secreted by the brain. You just can’t always see the effects. Anyway, this is turning into a very different point…. The point I wanted to make is that feelings are real and therefore you cannot just tell a person to ignore them or that they shouldn’t have them. If someone’s feelings are irrational, you still cannot invalidate them. You must first acknowledge them and the fact that they are not something easily controlled (And often times not controllable at all) and then bring in the logic. I.e. “I know you’re angry because your spaghetti’s on the floor,, but Shanaynay didn’t spill it on purpose.” V.S. “Calm down, it’s not like she did it on purpose.”.

There is a thing called emotional intelligence. I’m very lacking in this department, but I have enough regular intelligence to acknowledge and work on it. I really do think I have a mild form of aspergers or something like it, but I’m glad I came to that realization. I’m bad at understanding social cues and piecing things together. I miss out on jokes and sarcasm from time to time because I honestly just don’t get it. Sometimes I stop to think about things for a long time before coming to a realization that feels like an epiphany, but when I go to explain it to someone else it’s something they picked up on without even having to think about it. I have a hard time understanding why it’s not always okay to say things that are true. Hell, I picked honest as my personality trait for that English assignment in Becker’s class Sophomore year. I also have a hard time understanding emotions that I can’t physically feel. Anyway,, I’m glad I realized I have this problem/these problems. It allows me to prevent a lot of issues and explain behaviors of mine that other people don’t understand.

I enjoy intelligent arguments. I also believe they are an essential part of the modern human experience. People who don’t understand how to engage in intelligent arguments make me sad. I almost can’t comprehend how people think that belittling others and using profanity does anything but invalidate their arguments. When you come out and say that you are intelligent, when you attack for something that doesn’t relate to the topic (especially when it’s something they cannot control), and when you use swears/slurs, you decrease the intelligence of your argument. You significantly decrease the chance that anyone who didn’t already agree with you will even hear the point you’re trying to make. Words can hurt. It’s also important to understand opposing arguments. Your argument is much stronger if you show that you understand the opposition, but still think it’s wrong.

Words can significantly impact a person's emotions, mental health, etc. Words can start wars. Words can make people famous. For a lot of people, stringing words together and/or understanding words is their job. Words are one of the main ways we communicate. Words have power. Without them, our societies would be drastically different. Words can get you into all kinds of legal trouble. Words matter. Expression matters. Communication matters. How someone can dismiss words in favor of violence, I will never understand. Violence doesn’t lead to change or understanding. Words can. Words can hurt. Words can heal. They are not insignificant.

That’s not to say that you should be offended by specific words. Words like “fuck” for example. Yes, it’s not a “nice” word and it’s not a word that is socially acceptable in most professional settings. But hearing someone say it on TV or at a restaurant or in any random context that does not require professional language, should not offend you. If it does offend you, that is your problem. If something someone says, whilst not meaning to hurt anyone, bothers you, that is not their problem. They can say whatever they want. If you don’t like it, it is your job to stay away from them, to ignore it, to reflect on why it offends you and whether or not it’s a feeling you want to hold onto. Words matter but the intention behind them matters more.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions. Everyone in America has freedom of speech. These things don’t mean that you can say whatever you want. Saying hurtful things can get you into legal trouble. Cyberbullying, harassment, stalking, libel, and slander can all get you into legal trouble. You do not have the right to go around and be a jerk to people. You just don’t. A good general principle to live by is to do whatever you want as long as it doesn't hurt others.

You don’t have to cottle people. You don’t have to refrain from talking about things because it offends people. But you do have to keep in mind that the platforms you leave your opinions on have rules and guidelines. You do have to keep in mind that saying certain things in a certain way can be illegal. And if you want people to care about your feelings, you should be sure to care about theirs. There is a balance between being yourself/expressing your opinions and trash talking people, harassing people, etc.

I’ve been putting a lot of effort into becoming a better person. I think it’s important to always be reflecting on who you are and working towards positive changes, especially when you’re not happy with who you are as a person. By coming to college and being in the Bears for a Just Community LLC alone, by surrounding myself with new people and opportunities, I am growing more and more each day. I’ve been actively choosing to be better - to be more conscious of others feelings and how what I say and do impacts them, to put more effort into school, to learn, to go to class everyday, to evaluate myself and my choices, to go to the gym, and to be healthier. I feel more productive. I feel like I’m actually living and participating in the college experience; I didn’t feel like that before. I think being productive, bettering myself, and learning are going to make me so much happier. I’m ready to do the whole “New year, new me” cliche right. I want to always be improving.

There is a lot more I could say, but I’ve been working on this entry for a while so I’ll leave it at that.

#diary #journal #dear diary #personal #vent #rant #march

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liliannorman · 4 years

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Here’s how COVID-19 is changing classes this year

With summer vacation over, classes are resuming. But the 2020 school year will be different. With the COVID-19 pandemic still spreading, many people wonder whether it is safe for students and teachers to return to school.

Closing schools entirely isn’t a good idea. Without them, of course, students can miss out on learning math, science, language arts and more. But some also may miss out on breakfast and lunch. Some kids only get to see a doctor or nurse if they’re at school. Schools also teach valuable life skills, such as how to act around others. Kids and teens benefit from the friends they meet up with at school.

Because of that, many groups say it’s important now that students — especially kindergarteners to fifth-graders — return to school in person. Those groups include the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

From buses to low-cost internet: Creative paths to online access

But the decision to open a school to in-person learning isn’t a simple one. School systems around the United States are trying to figure out what is best for kids and their teachers. Some schools are continuing the virtual learning they launched last spring. Others are starting with virtual learning and hope to have kids walking the halls by late fall. Still other schools are letting students in, and parents can choose whether to send their kids and teens.

In every case, school will be different this year. Crowded hallways and cafeterias are things of the past. “I don’t think it would be safe, honestly,” says Beatrice Barilla, 13. Beatrice is starting eighth grade in the Montessori Middle School at W. G. Sanders Middle School in Columbia, S.C. “We can’t go in [the way we] would be normally. That would be a disaster.”

Staying home

In some U.S. communities, many people are infected with the new coronavirus. If some of them go to school and get close to others, the disease could spread. Keeping kids at home is a good way to slow the spread of COVID-19. So many schools will look different because they’ll be empty. Or they’ll be a lot less full because parents have chosen online learning for their children this fall.

Explainer: What is a coronavirus?

Spencer Blosfield, 12, enjoyed virtual learning when COVID-19 hit. “I love to learn in the comfort of my own home, and I don’t want to leave,” he says. He loves computer science and finds it easy to code from home. Spencer will be starting seventh grade in a new school, Davidsen Middle School in Tampa, Fla. Florida is a state with a lot of coronavirus cases. Spencer’s not okay with going to school in person. “The pandemic is getting worse and then they’re sending people in person to school,” he says. “It’s killing a lot of people. It’s scary.” And so his parents have decided Spencer will continue virtual learning this fall.

Spencer Blosfield, 12, doesn’t mind virtual learning. He’s spending a lot of time learning to code inside an educational version of the game Minecraft and is excited about learning algebra. April Blosfield

But not everyone prefers virtual learning. Like many kids, Liza Granade, 13, switched to online school in March. They (Liza uses they/them pronouns) didn’t miss carrying all their books around Monrovia Middle School in Huntsville, Ala. But they also felt like they didn’t learn much. “It was really easy work,” Liza says. “Like, 30 minutes to an hour [per day].” There were no tests. And Liza is not sure they learned all they were supposed to. This fall, Liza will be starting eighth grade remotely again. “It’s not really going to change,” they say. “It’s going to be school, but I won’t get to see my friends.”

Keeping kids and teens home may be the safest option in a pandemic. But for some students — such as young children and those with special needs — virtual learning may not work at all.

Amanda Hecht is a special-education teacher in Massachusetts. Her kindergarten through fifth grade students are part of the Springfield public school system. Even one-on-one teaching over Zoom wasn’t great, she found. “I have no tools … like a counter or dice or fraction bars,” she says. “The social interaction is just not there,” she adds. “It’s not the same connection” and the students just “don’t have the same focus.”

Liza Granade, 13, misses their friends and says talking online isn’t the same. But they spent a lot of the spring and summer crafting, sewing and learning how to make strawberry jam. Stephen Granade

In places where there isn’t a lot of coronavirus spread, it’s possible to do in-person classes safely, says Rainu Kaushal. She works at Weill Cornell Medical College in New York City. There, she studies how to make sure people get the healthcare they need in the best way. She recently investigated how other countries have managed in-person schooling during COVID-19. “Something like 20 countries have successfully reopened,” she says. “I think it can be done.” Kaushal published her analysis June 30 on a site called JAMA Health Forum.

The share of a community infected with COVID-19 should be what matters when sending kids to school, she says. “You don’t try to reopen in the middle of the epidemic.” So if your rates are going up, says Kaushal, “that’s not necessarily the time to reopen.” When COVID-19 cases pop up in a school, she says, it might just be time to shut down again.

Successful re-opening, therefore, will require that schools be flexible and make some changes.

Go with the (air)flow

Infected people can spread the coronavirus whenever words and air (and spit) leave their mouths. If healthy people nearby breathe in enough of those viruses in the air, they could get sick, too. Studies in labs have shown the virus can linger in the air for at least three hours.

There are ways to lower the risk, though. So it’s important to mix the air in the classroom with fresh air from outdoors, explains L. James Lo. His research at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Penn., focuses on how air flows through buildings. Mixing dilutes the indoor air, spreading out any virus it may hold. That, in turn, cuts the risk someone will encounter enough virus to make them sick.

Many heating and cooling systems in schools pull in air from outside and mix it with air already in the building. That’s usually good. It takes less energy to heat or cool some new air instead of all the air. Unfortunately, Lo says, in many schools, these systems don’t mix the air well enough to dilute any virus. That would take bringing in a lot more air, and pumping more of it per hour around the building. In most schools, Lo explains, that won’t be easy or affordable.

See all our coverage of the new coronovirus outbreak

A small classroom might be able to install a small, portable air-cleaning unit. For a very large room, he adds, it’s probably is not doable.

Another option is to move classes outside. “Outdoor classes would be ideal. There’s precious little evidence of transmission outside,” says Ed Nardell. He’s a pulmonologist (Pull-mun-OL-uh-gist) — someone who studies the lungs and lung disease — at Harvard Medical School in Boston, Mass.

So this fall, classrooms might get new air filters that weren’t there before. Teachers might open windows and doors to help air move. And classes might be heading outside — as long as the weather is nice.

That’s what the Academy of the Holy Names in Tampa, Fla., has done. Carson Dobrin teaches high school chemistry there. Her school is offering both in-person and online classes. “We have top-of-the-line air filters,” she notes. There are also outdoor classrooms. “We’re going to try to do all eating outside unless it’s pouring,” she says. When kids do need to go indoors, she adds, the school has converted one big room into a giant lunchroom where everyone can eat six feet apart.

To help students socially distance in class, teachers may measure how far apart to place desks. izusek/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Keep your distance

Six feet is a good rule of thumb for reducing the risk of getting infected, and there are ways to make sure people stay that far apart. It’s hard to remember exactly how far six feet is, however. So where kids line up, schools may now put dots on the floor to mark off the distance. Desks also may be placed farther apart than before.

Another way to keep people apart is to put fewer kids in each classroom. “It allows you to do the appropriate social-distancing,” Kaushal explains. If one kid gets infected, only that small class may need to quarantine (stay home to stop COVID-19 from spreading). Other groups of students could still attend the school.

But shrinking class size is going to be extra hard, Dobrin points out. Splitting up classes requires more teachers. Adding to the challenge, many teachers are retiring or leaving because their families have had to move. “We’ve never lost this many people,” she says. With fewer teachers, “class sizes are bigger than we would like.”

Other teachers just don’t feel safe going back to class. Hecht, the special-education teacher, is worried about a COVID-19 outbreak once schools start. “My partner has cystic fibrosis,” she says. “So I’m worried about bringing [COVID-19] home and having him die.” Cystic fibrosis is a disease that causes sticky mucus to build up in the lungs. COVID-19 is particularly deadly for people with this disease.

For now, Hecht can teach from home. She is trying to make sure she won’t have to teach in person until there’s a vaccine to keep everyone safe.

Other simple behaviors could help everyone feel safer in classrooms, Liza says. These could include checking everyone’s temperature when arriving for the day. Schools also could require people to wash their hands and wear masks.

Beatrice Barilla, 13, poses in her costume for a play at the Columbia Children’s Theater in Columbia, S.C. All rehearsals for the play were online, and the actors stayed six feet apart on stage. The play was filmed — no audience required. Rylin Hubbard

Masks can help lessen the spread of the coronavirus. “I feel like if everybody is wearing masks and in small groups and for less time and staying away from each other, that would be safe,” Beatrice says.

Masks are uncomfortable, though. They also can be hard for younger kids to wear. Teachers might need to give kids spaces to take off their masks for a while, Kaushal observes. Shorter school days might be needed, too, so kids can go home and take off their masks.

Many classrooms may have tall pieces of clear plastic between desks and in front of the teacher. Called sneeze guards or partitions, such barriers help limit someone’s exhaled virus from spreading to another. Even small droplets, Lo says, will stick to the barrier’s surface, preventing them from getting inhaled by others.

Some hallways might even become one-direction. That could make it confusing to get to class. But “the idea here is people are next to each other, not facing each other,” Lo explains. The less that people can breathe into each other’s faces, the better.

Among the hardest times to stay apart will be when kids ride a school bus. “Obviously, the safest form of transport would be if the child’s parents could bring them to the school,” notes Tina Tan. She’s a doctor for pediatric infectious diseases — ones that infect kids — at Northwestern University in Chicago, Ill. But many kids can’t get to school unless they ride a bus. Those kids will have to wear masks and won’t be able to sit together.

Squeaky clean

Scientists don’t think most COVID-19 infections come from virus left on things that people touch. The disease more likely spreads through shared air. But the coronavirus can stick to surfaces. So can other germs that make people sick.

People want to do everything they can to keep students and teachers safe. Schools already get cleaned a lot to make sure people don’t spread illness. Now, even more cleaning will necessary. Those partitions? They’re going to need to be kept clean. So will desks, hallways, books and any toys.

The entire classroom should be cleaned daily — desks, chairs, everything, says Kaushal. “I would err on the side of multiple cleanings a day.”

Schools need to keep things as clean as possible to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Rainu Kaushal says it’s best to clean door handles every time they’re used. izusek/iStock/Getty Images Plus

All this will require extra cleaning supplies. And these may cost more now, when cleaning supplies can be hard to find. Not all school districts may have the funds to supply classrooms with what they need. They may turn even more than usual to parents and teachers.

“My district usually does a very good job with cleaning supplies,” says Hecht. But she still sees teachers every year bringing in wipes, tissues and hand sanitizer. There’s never enough.

Another option is to cut off access to things that may be hard to clean. “A lot of schools are closing drinking fountains,” says Kaushal. “That’s a smart choice.”

Kids may need to bring in bottled water. They also will want to bring other supplies. To make sure that their germs stay with them, students shouldn’t share art supplies, pencils or paper, Kaushal says. Sharing is not always a good thing in the time of COVID-19.

Every effort schools take will help. Families can help too. In particular, Tan says, kids should get all their vaccines. There aren’t any yet for COVID-19. But there are for other diseases that can prevent school outbreaks — such as flu, chicken pox and measles. “If schools are seriously considering opening in person, they really need to ensure that their student population is up to date on their immunizations,” Tan says. “You don’t want to have an influenza outbreak on top of a COVID outbreak.”

Virtual learning, distancing, masks, cleaning — schools can’t rely on just one. Each tactic provides one more layer in our defense against COVID-19, Kaushal says. But even with all these measures at schools, kids still leave at the end of the day. If they become exposed outside of school, they could bring COVID-19 back to their teachers or classmates. So it’s extra important for kids and teens to stay home if they don’t feel well. No one wants to be responsible for spreading a disease to their teacher or friends.

Here’s how COVID-19 is changing classes this year published first on https://triviaqaweb.tumblr.com/

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weekendwarriorblog · 4 years

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30 Minute Experiment: Concerts Part 2 #30ME

Okay, let’s do this. Some may remember that I did a #30Me on concerts a week or two ago, and I was pretty mad when I wrote that one, since I had too many pessimistic friends (or “realists,” if you must) who didn’t think we’d be seeing any concerts before next year or even 2022 at the earliest. I basically said that that was crazy talk. Well, today I’m gonna use my 30 minutes to offer solutions on how we can get concerts happening again.... Read on:

Obviously, there are a lot of problems with starting concerts up again right now and not just the social distancing thing and the fact that concerts tend to be pretty crowded and cramped events even in (and especially in) big places like MSG, Jones Beach and Radio City Music Hall. The thought of allowing 3,000 to 15,000 people congregating in one place is just very scary right now, not just for the obvious reasons but also some that maybe people aren’t thinking of. There are even problems with smaller venues like Mercury Lounge which may only hold a couple hundred people but that’s a couple hundred people completely packed together in that space.

So yes, that’s the first issue even if everyone is wearing masks and gloves (and we’ll get into this a bit further down).

The second issue is concerts just by their nature tends to bring people from other areas so if a band were to play only in NYC or one of the bigger theaters on Long Island or in Jersey, you have to expect that people from other regions will want to travel to see these bands. It’s very very common. I hear that some people in Manhattan even go out to BROOKLYN!!!!!! to see concerts... crazy, right? :)

Right now, the numbers are starting to go down in the NYC/NJ/LI region but none of these places are completely out of the woods as people are still being hospitalized and dying, and more people asymptomatic are being tested and discovered to have COVID and immediately quarantined if they’re not in bad enough shape to hospitalize. So yeah, if I was the governor of Jersey or mayor of a city there or on Long Island, I would not want someone potentially with COVID from New York coming there and potentially starting the spread all over again.

Oh, I should probably mention that the reason I picked this topic as today’s #30ME wasn’t just due to my previous one, but also because I spent much of this past weekend watching the PlayOnFest on SongKick’s YouTube page. Just as much as enjoying the bands, I also enjoyed seeing all the young faces of people having fun and dancing and singing along to these bands. One of the concerts was Coldplay in Sao Paulo where they were playing to what must have been 80,000 to 100,000 people. Another one was Green Day in Spain also playing to a huge audience that could have been 20,000 people or more easier. In both cases, these were shows that were massive due to the venues and the popularity of the bands, and part of that success came from the way that the singers of each band was able to interact with the crowd and connect with their fans. While I’ve enjoyed some of the at home concerts quite a bit, there’s only so much you can connect when you can’t cheer and sing along and let the band or musicians know how much you love what they’re doing.

I could go into other reasons why I love going to concerts so much... and if you read any previous #30MEs, you may remember that I went to see the Pixies out in Newark, NJ at a big theater that held maybe 4,000 people maybe 110 days after my stem cell transplant. I would never tell my doctor (or even my brother, who escorted me) that I was doing this, but I had a blast and I didn’t get sick or end up in the hospital again.

Anyway... solutions.

Obviously, it would be hard to tell someone from New Jersey that they can’t go see their favorite band play in New York City or vice versa, but one thing that can be done is limiting the seating at least for the early shows. Some place like Madison Square Garden can easily be set up so that only half to the two thirds of the place can be sold. Bigger bands that usually pack the place would have to contend with playing more less crowded shows and seats can be sold in blocks of two or four or something to that effect. I’m sure the smart computer people at TicketMaster can figure this out. The same can work for Jones Beach and even sporting events.

The problem is that the lines to get in and bathrooms also involve a lot of proximity but bigger venues like Brooklyn Steel already are paying attendants (or maybe they’re not getting paid) to hand people paper towels for tips. But it’s a big bathroom and (maybe it’s because I only go when I arrive and don’t go in between bands or after shows) I rarely see more than three or four people in there. It should be easy enough to limit number of people to the number of stalls and maybe a couple more for urinals. Of course, it would require that venues are much more on top of cleaning up after each patron and you’d have to pay the people who do this GOOD MONEY so they’d want to follow everyone into the stall to wipe things down. I know, it’s not great but it seems like doable.

New York was pretty quick to stop restaurants from allowing patrons but many restaurants (at least the good ones) have enough space between tables that one could have a few guests, maybe less than usual but way more than right now.

What about the general admission venues with floor space where you can’t keep people apart and everyone will want to be up front as close to the band as possible, creating a very intimate and packed and potentially infective situation?

This is where masks and gloves come in. It will be another expense that will probably have to be considered in the ticket prices but venues could have the simplest paper masks available to patrons who show up not wearing masks and then... and get this, cause this is my BIG GENIUS IDEA... bands who regularly have shirts and merch should have official band masks that patrons can buy (right near the door in case they’re not wearing masks already). Or they can take a paper one and then get any of the band’s original designs at the merch place.. Price point might be an issue -- they can’t really be more than $5 -- but honestly if I knew that I could buy an official The Alarm or Ash or The Cure mask that I can wear around to show support my favorite bands (preferably in black), don’t you think I would shell out the money to get one? I mean, you all know how many black concert T-shirts I have, right?

I figured a few weeks ago that if wasn’t able to wash a shirt for the next few months, I probably can still get through it wearing a different shirt every day and never run out.

People really underestimate the passion of music fans for specific artists and groups, and I saw it a lot on the PlayOn Festival YouTube page which was teeming with fans at all hours of the day and night to see their favorite acts. The event raised almost $5 million over the course of 72 hours, which will be matched by Google, so it earned $10 million.,

Some of the richer bands who may want to be generous can even offer to donate a certain percentage of mask sales to first responders and hospitals and other charities which will give people even more reason to buy then.

Bars at concert venues aren’t as big an issue if bartenders are required to wear masks and gloves while on duty.

The big question is when people will be ready to go out to concerts again even with all sorts of safety precautions. I can only speak for myself since I know I’d go to a concert tomorrow if there was one, particularly at the Bowery Ballroom or Mercury or another one where i can walk to without using public transportation.

Some people might want to wait until 2021 or 2022 to see a concert and maybe these are people who don’t regularly go to concerts or are as avid music/band fans as others, but some venue is gonna have to be the first one to say “Okay, we’re opening but you have to buy tickets in advance so we can see how many people might actually show up if we take predetermined safety precautions.”

I certainly don’t want to get a point where we have to carry cards saying that we’ve passed a COVID or immunity test since that just offers a lot of issues if someone buys a ticket for a concert and they find out when they get there they can’t get in cause they’re not one of the “Immune.”

I hope that most of the people who go to see the bands I like are smart enough not to go out if they’re feeling sick but by the time some place opens, maybe there will be an easier way to test people.

Obviously, there is some worry from the venues and bands about liability if one of their concert starts a new outbreak of COVID that can be traced to one of their concerts and sadly, when one buys tickets, there must be some sort of wording saying that the venue isn’t responsible if anyone gets sick. Would that really be that hard and would there be that many sue-happy music fans be unwilling to attend or buy a ticket under those conditions?

Listen, if I was still in a place of risk where I could easily get infected by stuff like after my stem cell transplant, then I sure as hell wouldn’t be going out in public like I did back in 2014, because that’s dangerous even wearing a mask and gloves. Sadly, this means that people at greater risk may want to wait a little longer before going to big concerts or sporting events but those of us who have already gotten and kicked Corona or aren’t at risk? Why not try to figure out a way that bands can go out and interact with their fans live again?

My time is almost running out, so I’m sure this is gonna be another topic of discussion especially as states start figuring out the phases and in which phase larger public gatherings can happen. I know that in NYC it’s gonna be a while and I’m never really that keen on traveling to Jersey or Long Island but if there’s some way of implementing safety measures that can make audiences know that they can go out and congregate and have a good time without spreading COVID and making things as bad as they are now, I’m willing to bet that many of them will do whatever they need to allow for bigger concerts to be a thing again. (I know that I would find it weird being at an MSG concert that’s not completely packed.)

Anyway, my time is up for the day... back tomorrow!

#30ME #30MInuteExperiment #Concerts

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spamzineglasgow · 5 years

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SWAT SIGHT: An Interview with Nasim Luczaj

In this interview, Glasgow-based writer, dj and multidisciplinary artist Nasim Luczaj talks to SPAM editor Maria Sledmere about her recent publication, SWAT SIGHT: a hybrid essay and artist’s book that weaves modalities of lyric, photography and online dialogue to explore Luczaj’s experience of aphantasia and its implications for aesthetics, perception and philosophical enquiry.

Can you explain what aphantasia is, and how did you discover this was something you experienced?

Aphantasia is the inability to form mental imagery. To have aphantasia is to not be able to ‘see in your head’ – not the characters of a book you are reading, not the faces of your loved ones, not a random object you’ve been asked to visualise, not the sheep you may or may not be counting. It seems there is a spectrum in people’s ability to do any of these things. Roughly, those without it have aphantasia, while those who are extremely good at visualising have hyperphantasia. Most people fall somewhere in between. I get something imagelike appear when I’m falling asleep or really really tired, and once in my life I visualised while reading (about the Quidditch World Cup – I saw Viktor Krum flying about the stadium!) – but I had a fever at the time and as soon as I noticed what was going on and got excited about it, I was unable to keep the imaging up. I think I mentioned my imageless way of reading to a friend, probably one of the times we were watching a film (again, probably Harry Potter) and she complained that the character doesn’t look like they’re ‘supposed to’. What did they mean, supposed to? I remember talking to them, shocked at how they claimed to have something like a film unfolding in their head. They were as shocked as I was to find that I didn’t have one, especially since I was a full-on bookworm, and they didn’t understand why I’d ever want to read if it wasn’t a filmlike experience (guess what: I was reading for the words!). I accepted these differences and didn’t think too much about which of us was normal, or whether either of us were not. Then, a couple of years ago, another friend discovered the term and asked me whether I have it – reading my work gave her the feeling I might. I started reading and found out what I have is a rare disorder. I’m still not so sure it is. I don’t think the samples studied so far are big enough for us to come to that kind of conclusion.

Maybe a cheeky question, but what does the SWAT in the title stand for?

Swatting sight is partly a play on catching sight. I can’t do justice to what sight is but trust that I’ve caught something, an angle, a thing among many. It’s also a bit like ‘shot’ in ‘screenshot’ (at first the title was actually going to be SIGHT SWAT), but ‘swat’ is more organic, and invokes a kind of slaughtering of something that’s necessary in order to study it. I wanted a title that sounded nice, compact, yet violent nevertheless, because as I wrote I became aware I was feeling angry at the misjustice being done to people who are called abnormal or disordered without careful consideration. Only writing fully enabled the sensation to emerge out of a plethora of ambivalent strands to my experience. And then the insect-connotations of swatting work nicely with one of the central metaphors I consider in the work, that is, Wittgenstein’s beetle in the box. I guess all of the above considerations, the rational reasons, were hovering somewhere in the background of my choice, but here’s a short and honest answer: it just came to me once I got to the I-need-a-title-stage. And I felt it fit, although – bad pun – I hadn’t seen it coming.

I’m interested in the mode of address that opens SWAT SIGHT, which features a sequence of questions. It’s unclear whether the speaker is speaking to the reader, or having a dialogue with herself. So many times in your poetry I get to a point where I think I know what’s happening, but then a few lines come and totally throw me off my assumptions. It’s poetry that keeps you dancing through metaphysics, for sure. Can you talk a bit about how asking questions of yourself, of the world, of the reader, is a process or form of poetics for you—and perhaps to what end?

I guess I’ve always been inquisitive but have felt increasingly answerless. I love the questioning stage, and the addressal that it often entails, for its own sake. I’ve kind of given up on answers, I don’t trust them, don’t feel as comfortable in them as I do in the mode of questioning. What I want to be expressing, in perhaps every piece I ever write, is roughly: wow, all this exists and we don’t really know anything, or if we do we can’t confirm whether we do or fit it into a whole that would really be the whole thing. Answering has never seemed as doable, as satisfying to me, as asking. The best poems distil the poise of a question. It’s a shame questions are often rashly associated with despair.

You recently graduated with a degree in English Literature and Philosophy (congrats!), which I know included elements of creative writing. What do you see as the relation between the two, and how has each fed or diverged from the other?

I used both to access a kind of metaphysical vertigo of not knowing what the hell’s going on, as explained above. At first I approached the ‘content’ of this vertigo as a philosophical one. I think I’ve been able to address similar things to myself in a ‘creative’ way and in a ‘philosophical’ way, but I no longer believe that the hard work of philosophical answers is worth anything to me personally. I’m chasing a connection with a feeling partly composed of not accepting answers. I believe in attentiveness and possibilities for elaborate playfulness that do arise in philosophy and always appreciate willingness to take on difficult and deep questions. But I cannot feel devoted to this field, while I can be attentive, elaborately playful, and ‘deep’ through writing, I hope. It’s easier to find works of literature of this kind than philosophy that is honest about its inability to actually answer as much as it claims to.

Poetry seems a totally embodied thing for you, ‘a pinch in relation to the tongue’. Where do you see the body in your poems? Does poetry need more body?

I don’t see it anywhere, ha! But I try to be in the moment, and poetry can very much be the art of the moment, the linguistic equivalent of some alarming glimpse. I like how you can – though maybe not always should – read a poem in a short unit of time, one in which you have not yet disconnected from the physical motions that brought you to this page, because you haven’t and will not repeat it in quite the same way as when reading gripping prose. If something odd happens in the language, as I like it to, I want to be there to feel it ‘oddening’ the body, for it to all amount to a flash, an enacting of the gut that leaves space for me to feel all of these effects.

It strikes me that a lot of this book is about the possibilities of attunement, for instance: ‘a sense of the circuit run through / worldly activity’. What poets for you manage to supplement, enhance, expose or skew particular senses?

This is hard for me to answer. I read in quite a scattered way and try not to distinguish much between the senses, to read in undistinguished frenzy and love for what’s going on in the words without categorising what’s happening on a ‘sensual’ level. Without having any synesthetic tendencies whatsoever, I still struggle with things that are grouped into categories: 5 senses and then their subdomains, such as types of taste. I’m more than a little obsessed with how anything is partly something else, how things affect one another in a way that makes it unhelpful to present things as belonging to clear-cut types. So I don’t seem to fall into noticing what’s going on on the level of the 5 separate senses, but yes, some poetry and some work in other art forms have indeed enhanced and skewed and supplemented my perception, I think increasingly. They make me notice a word, an object, an emotion I may have neglected. I’ve recently been excited by Nasser Hussain’s airport poems. Hussain wrote a whole collection (SKY WRI TEI NGS) of poems written using only existing airport codes. I’m pretty sure I’m going to see the airport world through them for years to come. More than for a synesthetic image, that’s what I’m looking out for: works that change the structuring of my experience, that alter noticing, that leave me interested in some phenomenon.

This is probably the first poetry book I’ve seen (outside of SPAM!) that replicates the architectures of Facebook discussion, including groups, comment threads and private messages. Without quibbling over the term ‘post-internet’, what do you think happens when these kinds of archives are translated onto the printed page? I’m interested in your decision to reproduce the discussions as screenshots rather than, say, collage select quotes in a more traditional poem. What’s the importance of including the context, the avatars, the reactions?

The only one? That’s surprising! I remember wanting to write a detective novel in chatroom form as a child, and the reader would only have these online conversations to go by and figure the truth out (one of the messagers was guilty). Now I’m quite dedicated to my phone notes, in which I mainly write down dreams, funny things people say, and passing thoughts (without ever making note of which category a note belongs or who is its author). I proudly show them to people when we’re killing time. As they are one of the ways in which I feedback loop with my surroundings, one of the things that shape my cognition, I always wanted to use them in my work, and knew they belonged in SWAT SIGHT as soon as I decided to write it. Then I started messaging people about the fact I’m writing something and wanted to engage them somehow, so I ended up embedding what they say in their own words, partly because of how seriously I treat the beetle in the box problem. I thought that maybe you’ll understand what they’re telling me better than what I tell you they told me, even if you don’t know these people as the reader, and I (think!) I do. I’ll give you exactly what they said and what the context of the words were (by context I mean, in large part, the interface that always affects the way they say it), and you can have fun figuring it out or leave it if it’s not your thing. The chats, forums, websites are a habitat I’m in, the form of communication I am immersed in as I do my thinking, the way I arrive at knowledge, arrangements, humour. They have a massive effect on the way my mind and, I presume, your mind works, for better or for worse, and I want to convey that, even if the craft lies in what the disembodied, timeless-y voice has to say and how. As for screenshotting rather than quoting, I’m also really interested in signs I see in the streets and how they operate linguistically, but that’s also something I’d take a picture of and think of including in a text – something I’m rarely tempted to take out and play with without its context, the pole it’s fitted to, the road it’s next to, the weeds that grow at the bottom of it. The way things are framed is partly responsible for their juice. I really want people to communicate about this in whatever way that is natural to them – so giving this much space to the discussion is a way of counterbalancing the strength of the ‘literary’ voice, of saying: it’s equally important to use language in all sorts of other ways and places.

What was the most surprising thing you encountered within the aphantasia ‘community’ online?

Nothing, really. There’s a divide between people who are genuinely upset about not being able to visualise and those who are extremely affirmative of the way they are, but I expected as much.

I’d love to hear more about your decisions around the book’s design. What’s especially unique, of course, is the palimpsest effect whereby text printed on clear acetate is layered over content printed on white pages. As readers, we can lift the acetate with all its textual clutter to ‘cleaner’ pages underneath. I’m struck in particular with the page of Aphantasia Awareness Group content, lifted to reveal a short passage underneath: ‘research on aphantasia is sparse. my looking into it decorated with a pang. […] what keeps me out and makes me look like this is apparently a lack’. Can you talk a bit more about this lack and how it relates to the play between white space, acetate, page and text?

The lack I’m mostly on about here is a lack of seeing – and then of course there’s a play there. On another page, one full of messages, thanks to the lack in the acetate page I can see the text on paper (as ‘i hope for darkness’ in the passage itself). I can tell myself that I’m missing something, that I don’t have an ability, but it’s not like someone cutting the content of a text box – it’s a reshuffling and change of the relationship of everything else that is giving me this different outcome, and to think of myself as ‘deficient’ is not to think about my cognition as play. Quirks are, to an extent, enabling. The form mimics this. Also emptiness can be good, so I wanted places where a condition for arriving at some sentence is the empty space that allows it to be seen. Sometimes I imagine daydreaming as if it were a film, which apparently people do, and I wonder how that would affect my peace of mind, my mental clutter, my voice. You know the truism: less is more. It’s unverifiable what I’d be up to if my mental processes were different, but I have a feeling that I am gifted with a space that could have been cluttered beyond my control.

I’m also interested in how the book’s design goes some way to dramatising Marshall McLuhan’s point about us directing towards acoustic civilisation, as you put it, civilisation ‘infused with simultaneity’. Lifting a page is a bit like opening or closing a window, and the size of the book replicates that sense of screen. Sometimes light catches the plastic acetate and I’m tricked into thinking someone’s left their iPad on my desk. I also think of screening as in brain-scan. What is the work of ‘screening’ in poetry?

I’ve mentioned this already, but what I like about poetry is containment. I often encounter longer poems with confusion and laziness, at first, which ceases if the work is still at the pitch/intensity of a shorter poem, except, hurrah, longer (as is the work of Anne Carson). Good poetry brings me straight into a space of simultaneity. It gets at something that’s both a detail and sort of everything at once. It makes you look at everything like that. Screening is also a kind of framing. You need something brisk to catch and then place just right on the screen, let it replay.

In a message you include to your mum, you write ‘aphantasia is horizontal again but with a margin that makes it a different kind of rectangle’. For me this speaks, quite beautifully, to the book as a whole. What or where is your sense of geometry in writing, and how does this relate to aphantasia and maybe even the structure of the book?

I love flippability. And maybe it’s in poetry that I get to have a sense of order I’m probably lacking elsewhere. But then most poems are like something that intended to be rectangular and then persists in trailing off. Of course there are all sorts of ways of trailing, many of them elegant. Here I wasn’t really writing poems, but a piece that was self-consciously scattered. Intuitively I picked up the shapes, the widths for each part. Maybe I use a similar intuition to drive and park my car – if you asked me, I’m not actually sure how much or what sort of space I have, I can’t see it, but I can do what I have to do just right. The shapes make or dictate themselves in a similar way.

In being orientated landscape, SWAT SIGHT also has the satisfying feel of a guestbook or ledger. Which feels appropriate, given that you include song lyrics, text conversations, comments, quotes and cross-references from philosophy, poetry (even William Blake is in there!) and what looks like Yahoo! Answers. I see SWAT SIGHT as a kind of experimental archive, or revisionist provocation of the-archive-as-such in the time of social media alongside the ‘traditional’ book. I think within this what you’ve done is quite remarkable: established a vernacular compendium of feedback, testimony and reflection on a condition that is not only rarely heard of but seems (at least until very recently) also to lack research or medical recognition. Do you see SWAT SIGHT as a counter-text to this discursive absence? Who should be reading this book?

Yeah, I guess it’s a form of affirmation – I want to encourage conversation about aphantasia in any way possible, and all sorts seem fit. But I need fun. I need to draw attention in some other way than linking to a BBC article on Facebook, which really doesn’t feel like engagement. I guess I’m also implying: I’m engaged with my environment and its diversity of mediums/registers, even of matter (different kinds of pages, B/W and colour images, shots from classic cinema, scans of my clothes and of plants, memes), as I seek to be engaged with people and their diverse ways of functioning. People work in mysterious ways, like poems – they might ‘work’ for you and one could assume that means there’s something similar about you, you could be part of one book. But it turns out you’re doing (even similar) things really really differently. I want to get some kind of rush from that. As for who should read it – whoever also might get a rush from what I give them.

In this discussion around the book’s holding together of analogue and digital, I was reminded of visual snow: a neurological ‘disorder’ characterised by continuous visual disturbance, often described as miniscule dots that flicker like the noise of a detuned analogue telly. It’s interesting how these conditions ‘glitch’ or interrupt the representations of visual perfection or clarity which culture and technology pushes towards with retina displays, Blu-ray etc. I wonder if you’d come across any other under-studied neurological conditions (especially those of the senses) in your research? Are there any famous poets or musicians who’ve ‘come out’ as aphantasic?

No - I guess that’s the problem with the under-studied! There’s Aldous Huxley, whom I quote in the book. My mum is also an aphantasiac poet. It’s more of a thing that visual artists tend to ‘come out’ with, because it can be counterintuitive and shocking. The conversation comes more naturally than in the case of writing, which doesn’t seem necessarily tied to any traditional sense (one kind of archetypical writer is cut off from the sensual world in a dusty study with just enough lamplight to keep to their lines). An interesting example in the visual domain has resurfaced recently, via the BBC. One of Disney’s most important animators had aphantasia, while his collaborator who worked the identical job was on the opposite end of the visualising spectrum.

Is neurodivergent poetics a term you recognise or identify with? Do you think we’re moving towards recognising the role of neuroscience more in understanding poetry as also a kind of cognitive manifestation or aesthetics?

I’ve never looked into it much. What I’ve been coming to terms with is how much of what I’d consider normal might be identified as ‘divergent’ – it’s interesting that different people might have differing tendencies here, some to distinguish differences and others to widen what the norm might be. I am interested in making people pay attention to difference and to question whether there is not so much of it that it collapses back into a kind of sameness. I guess that’s my poetics. I’m not sure what you mean by ‘cognitive aesthetics’, but the term sparked a thought in me: people find very different kinds of poetry (if any) pleasing, and I wonder about the neurological basis of this. How does a combination of words ‘hit the spot’? If language can get to our emotions even when it’s not someone we are closed to addressing themselves to us specifically, it must do so on the basis of connections that will vary from person to person, and are to do with a multitude of factors, maybe even a kind of genetic memory for the ways their ancestors used language. There’s certainly a lot to investigate and, at the same time, a lot that will resist investigation.

I’m struck by the book’s illumined confusion of paratextual, marginalia, annotation, footnotes or poetic content. At the same time, there’s often a lyric voice weaving through, synthesising things, moving between exemplary media, linking anecdote with theory. There’s a drive towards turning the page, even as each page is also a ‘field’ in its own right. So in a sense I’d say SWAT SIGHT is maybe actually a lyric essay remixed with its paratextual materials. An essay that stages its own research process? What’s the value in this ‘transparency’, did any particular text inspire you to take that risk of reflexivity and assemblage?

Yeah, that’s what I’d say it is. I wanted to write a lyric essay and wasn’t sure how to start. As soon as I did, the voice started pushing me. It had a lot to say and I think it still does. To me of course the voice is the most important part, it’s most akin to my ‘core’ that all the rest branches from, is light that my leaves pick up and comes back to the trunk. But as for all the staging – my voice does that. Another thing I wanted to stage was my need for props, my love for images, designs, the ways of working of different websites, which I find inextricable from my lack of ‘invention’. I look at things out there, I get excited about things out there, and what’s going on in my head is either a tic, or something not quite surfaced, or, at best, that voice of the lyric essay. So the book ends up being my mental process and the world that it takes from, that it reacts to, that it is shocked and moved by and tries, in turn, to shock and move (more feedback loop!).

The whole book, of course, is about ‘vision’. I found that line, ‘to have a song stuck in your head, for some reason, is harder to treat as a metaphor than an image being stuck. […] rain on the trees as jewels. I couldn’t, I can’t’, really emotional. Throughout SWAT SIGHT, you recalibrate what ‘imagination’ is -- in both form and content. How can poetry intervene in what we consider ‘sight’, to be less ocular-centric? Do we need new tropes and metaphors, or more a kind of visual refusal?

I love the phrase ‘visual refusal’! It’s right up my street and I don’t think it’s occurred to me before. Poetry brings awareness to language, and so an awareness of the baggage, the loadedness of any word. If sight has to be visual, and we have words like ‘foresight’, that does subtly hint at how we imagine the future. So maybe we can work on other terms. But I think what is best to do is to remind yourself of your other senses and how much it means to you to smell/taste/hear/feel/pull something sensual from the world, categorised or not. If you pay attention to that, you’ll write differently, thus enhancing others’ attention to those things.

But as you put it, ‘no-one’s looked in anyone else’s box. language doesn’t quite do inner life’. We can’t expect SWAT SIGHT to provide an actual snapshot of the aphantasic experience, any more than we can expect reading Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time to somehow allow us to comprehensively ‘enter’ an autistic mind. I think the fact that you weave personal perspective alongside many other voices and representations (including an art exhibition) makes that clear. I’m interested, then, in what you might want readers to take away from this book in terms of empathy, awareness but also potentially recalibrating their own neurological sensitivities?

I would like us all to be aware of unnamed, unsaid, unprovable diversity. To approach it as a gift, with childish glee, and to know that it cannot be unwrapped. To ask each other questions and listen in to the way we describe each other’s mental processes, and to be aware of the fact that even when we think we agree or disagree there aren’t ‘samples’ of experience we can put next to each other to confirm or disconfirm anything. Also to be aware of the fact that our culture is skewed towards the visual, that it privileges it partly arbitrarily.

Can you talk about the images you chose for SWAT SIGHT, which include a lovely full-colour photo of you lying on a bed of coastal heather, as well as many representations of abstracted or glitched scenes/textures which must’ve taken a toll on your printer’s black ink cartridge. How do you see the relationship between image and text in this work, and are there any other writers who use images in an interesting way who you might’ve taken inspiration from?

The glitchy toner-heavy images are scanned objects from around my room – a top, a leaf, a headline, a daffodil. I really enjoyed their textures, the kind of nightscape of a piece of fabric that barely stands out of the uniform black. I’d achieve the glitches by moving the objects around while they were being scanned just the right amount, at the right time. I was intentionally confusing the printer but not quite in control either. It was both a hectic and repetitive process. It had in it excitement and tediousness – like writing. The images show the world as processed by a kind of system – a printer – thus running parallel to my verbal processing.

In SWAT SIGHT, the relationship between image and text is of course crucial. At first, I was tempted to completely do away with seeing, adornment – to have a kind of unity between sign and signified. Then I started adding the black scanned images as something along the lines of, but never really, illustrations. As soon as I did that, I started craving contrast and thought, to hell with that, I love the visual world and don’t want to be misunderstood as someone who doesn’t, just because I’m making a kind of cultural critique of vision-centricity. I am engaged in the visual world, and this lack of ‘inner’ will not take it away from me, and it does work for my way of perceiving the world, too. The images dispel inner and outer.

I really like W. G. Sebald’s use of photographs as strange hinges on oneiric texts. They complicate the voice by putting pressure on the distance we make for speaker from author, without ever allowing us to identify that voice with the author.

You also run a radio show for subcity, [underthunder]. Can you talk about the ethos behind the show. How important is music to your writing process, and do you think your experience of music has changed or intensified since you recognise your (visual) aphantasia?

At some point I realised that I love contrasting interactions between tones, mediums, textures. I like profound-grumpy-metaphysical things being read out loud and I also like ‘tribal’ energy. I was once editing a poem while listening to some Detroit techno and it struck me that these two things really fit together, that the words are energised, driven, dipped in densely and magnetically. I became increasingly curious about how best to combine these and whether others do it. I started paying attention to uses of language in electronic music, where words have diverse but recognisable, categorisable roles, but are not what you’d call ‘lyrics’. Now my experience of music is changing and intensifying by the day. This happened partly through that discovery, and so through poetry. I felt that it gave me an entry point into music, because I knew I was good at words and started copy-pasting them into other people’s tracks – otherwise I would never have felt entitled to ‘touch’ music. I always feel a bit guilty when I do that copy-pasting, a tad unsatisfied, hungry for something I’ve made from scratch. I’ve not got there at all yet, but it’s poetry that got me to focus on music in its own right. And my being drawn to poetry must stand in some relationship to aphantasia. I think I’m more at ease with oddness, a kind of casual surrealism, because of it, and that’s what often keeps my work going. When I feel I’ve written something good, it’s always because I’ve flexed the world without some specific message or thing in mind.

You write that ‘bliss’ is ‘a current […] i obsess over’. Your website says you are ‘here to make bliss’. What does bliss mean to you, or better still, what’s giving you bliss right now?

I just love the word. I think I fell in love about two years ago, and I’m not sure how, but it happened to me and my mum more or less simultaneously. She also puts that word everywhere; although I don’t know what’s in anyone’s box, including I think the most similar box to mine in this world, it does feel like a shared entity. Bliss is a short word that echoes out, like most poems – present, compact, extending its arm to everyone. A really small thing giving everything else a hug. And it seems like a half-place, a spacious state, not something like ‘joy’ which is much more identifiable with the springing up of some happy hormone, much more bound up with a person and nothing else. ‘Bliss’ is halfway between ‘joy’ and ‘paradise’. It’s something you can have next to you, or visit, or, as my mum says, ‘plug into’.

What’s giving me bliss now? Apricots, speeding tracks up as I DJ, ferry red.

Anything else you’d like to say about the publication, or what you’re currently working on?

I’m working on how to have a lot of time + space. Then full-blown bliss is gonna move in and we’ll split the bills.

SWAT SIGHT is out now. To order a copy, drop an email to nasimluczaj[at]gmail.com.

Images by Nasim Luczaj and Maria Sledmere, all taken from the publication.

Published 8/9/19

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