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krummholz-go · 5 months

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Doubt is the Essence of Faith - Questions, Prayer, and Crowley’s Relationship to the Divine

In the novel A Prayer for Owen Meany we meet a flawed pastor named Lewis Merrill who is suffering a crisis of faith. He believes that God has turned away from him due to his sinful thoughts and actions and that he is not worthy of forgiveness. As he silently wrestles with his personal demons, he preaches the most optimistic version of his belief to his congregation: doubt is the essence of faith, and not faith’s opposite.

In Good Omens, we see a similar theme play out throughout the series. While many angels and demons blindly order others or follow orders on the perceived will of the Almighty, it is those who question and who are open to questions who are ultimately closest to God. Let’s delve into the relationship between doubt and the divine, and particularly how Crowley fits into it.

God’s Presence in Good Omens

What do our characters know about God in Good Omens? For a world replete with angels, demons, heaven, hell, Satan, miracles, and nuns, there is comparatively little representation of God as experienced by the characters. (I am not counting the 4th-wall breaking narration from God in Season 1 since that is an audience-only view.) The characters of Good Omens see and hear very little from God, and the status quo is that God is distant, unreachable, unknowable - ineffible. As Crowley says, “There is just God, moving in mysterious ways and not talking to any of us.”

We only know of two instances where the characters hear from God: God speaks to Aziraphale when he leaves the Garden of Eden, and God speaks to Job at the end of his trials. The Metatron claims to be a conduit to God and to speak with Their voice: “To speak to me is to speak to God. I am the voice of the Almighty.” But the Metatron is not necessarily a reliable narrator, and even Aziraphale questions his claim by categorizing him more as a spokesperson. From an audience perspective, the more we see of the Metatron and his manipulative ways, especially when he is underscored by sinister music, the more it seems like he really speaks for himself.

Are You There, God? It's Me, Crowley

If God isn’t generally speaking to our characters, the reverse is also true. Communication is a two-way street and the characters in Good Omens rarely reach out to God. Prayer is conspicuously absent. Angels do not pray, nor do humans who come face-to-face with immortal supernatural beings. The Them, Anathema, Newt, Shadwell, Madame Tracy, the shopkeepers, Maggie, and Nina - not one of them engages in prayer when confronted with a glimpse into a world beyond their mortal sphere or even when facing Armageddon. We do not even see the Satanic nuns, a full on religious order, engaging in prayer to their dark lord and master.

While Aziraphale does not precisely engage in prayer, he does at least try to talk to God in Season 1 when he takes his concerns about Armageddon “all the way to the top.” The whole thing feels rather technical, however - more like a celestial phone call than a cry from his soul to the Almighty. When Aziraphale connects to heaven the exchange feels bureaucratic, beginning with him lodging a complaint about the conduct of Michael and the other angels. He is unable to reach God directly and at the end of the conversation, the Metatron “leaves the line open,” again more like a phone call than a prayer.

There are, however, three characters we see who engage in more traditional prayer. Job is the first character (chronologically speaking) we see speaking to God. Job is “literally God’s favorite human,” so it is unsurprising that he would commune directly. In his case it is unclear if he is actively engaging in prayer or simply receiving messages from God, but given that God starts off by saying “Job, if you have questions for me, I have questions for you,” it seems likely that Job is actively praying.

Jesus is the second character who prays. We briefly see him praying as he is nailed to the cross, entreating the heavens, “Father, please, you have to forgive them.” Again, this is unsurprising - Jesus is the son of God, has a direct relationship with Them, and is traditionally depicted as praying for the forgiveness of humanity while on the cross.

The third character who engages in prayer is… Crowley. In Season 1, Crowley turns his eyes heavenward and directly implores God not to destroy humanity: “Great Plan? God, you listening? Show me a Great Plan. Okay, I know you’re testing them, you said you were going to be testing them. You shouldn’t test them to destruction. Not to the end of the world.”

Crowley’s prayer is noteworthy when compared to what we see from Job and Jesus. For starters, it is significantly more substantial. By Crowley’s generally reticent standards it’s almost a monologue. It is also significant because instead of simply beseeching God, Crowley first questions God, then makes a demand, then suggests an alternative to what he believes God’s plan to be. Out of everyone we see speaking to God, Crowley has the most interaction and is also the one who approaches Them most like an equal.

In a second small example of prayer, Crowley says a quick “oh, God” under his breath in the confession scene after Aziraphale makes his heartbreakingly naive statement: “If I’m in charge, I can make a difference.” Here Crowley is subconsciously reaching out to God in his deepest moment of need, readying himself to try to salvage the future he sees going off the rails. He is the only main character we ever see directly reach out to God in distress.

Dangerous Questions

The characters within Good Omens share a common conviction that God is not to be challenged or questioned. In Season 1, Aziraphale is repeatedly told not to challenge God’s will via the Great Plan - after all, the war is to be won, not to be avoided. In Season 2 at the creation of the universe we see Aziraphale cautioning Crowley not to ask questions or make suggestions because it could get him into trouble. The baseline assumption is that doubting or questioning God can remove you from Their grace. Even Crowley believes that he was cast away from God because he asked too many questions. “That’s just how it started for me,” he tells Aziraphale in Job’s cellar as Aziraphale begins to question his blind loyalty to a God that would kill children. “See you in hell!”

It is also made clear that the angels and demons in charge of heaven and hell are not personally a fan of questions. In Season 2 we see the Metatron brooking no challenges from the archangels and sneering at Crowley’s history of “always asking damn fool questions.” In hell, Shax’s response to Eric’s repeated challenges and questions at the kick-off before the bookshop attack is to destroy him. Both heaven and hell are in the business of control - they give orders and expect obedience. Asking or answering questions only undermines their position of authority and control. But fallen angels, angels, and even the Metatron are not God and do not necessarily share God’s perspective.

Divine Questions

All evidence we have indicates that God actually loves questions. They sound delighted that Job has questions for Them, and They are definitely in the business of asking questions of the mortals They speak to. In fact, almost every statement we hear God make is in the form of a question. When They speak to Aziraphale, They say:

“Where is the flaming sword I gave you, Aziraphale, to guard the gate of Eden?”

And Their conversation with Job is almost entirely made up of questions:

“Do you know how I created the Earth? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth, Job? Were you there when all the morning stars sang together and all the Angels shouted for joy? Do you know the rules of the Heavens? Did you set the constellations in the sky? Can you send lightening bolts and get them to report back to you? Did you give wings to peacocks, Job, or teach the ostrich to run?”

And interestingly enough, God is not the only divine entity to communicate through questions. When Satan appears at the end of Season 1, his dialogue is also almost entirely made up of questions:

“Where is my son? You? You’re my rebellious son? Come here. What? What did you say?

(As a fascinating side note, when asked a question about God in Good Omens on Tumblr, Neil Gaiman responded entirely with questions: “Does God know everything in this universe? Does God act on what God sees? Does God tolerate the behavior of her creatures?”)

In each of these examples we see that far from God being averse to questions, the act of questioning is integral to the divine. It is part of the process that God engages in when trying to make a connection. Job, as God’s favorite, is tacitly given permission to ask questions. Blind obedience is apparently not what is demanded - some measure of doubt, of questioning, is required to arrive at a sincere faith and relationship with God.

Crowley’s Relationship to the Divine

So how does Crowley fit into this? Crowley is a questioner at heart. From the beginning we see him asking hard questions. Standing on the wall of the Garden of Eden he immediately doubts the foundational actions he and Aziraphale have taken: “It’d be funny if we both got it wrong, eh? If I did the good thing and you did the bad one?” At Noah’s ark he peppers Aziraphale with questions about God’s intent, at the crucifixion he wonders what Jesus did to get everyone so upset, in King Arthur’s time he questions the value of what he and Aziraphale are doing as they cancel each other out, and on and on. Throughout this questioning he has little patience with the idea that the answers are unknowable. “Are you going to say ‘ineffable?’” he asks Aziraphale, witheringly, as he watches the Ark be loaded.

When it comes to his relationship with God, it’s clear that Crowley has many unresolved issues, particularly around the trauma of his fall and his separation from God's love. As many other people smarter than me have pointed out, his entire approach to plant care is simply a replay of his own trauma: identifying a flaw in a plant, expressing his personal disappointment in his role as houseplant God, holding it up as an example to its friends, destroying it/casting it out of its home, and threatening the remaining plants with the same fate if they don’t grow better. The bookshop fire is also experienced by him as a replay of his fall - the loss of someone he loves deeply, the fire itself, and even a physical fall when he is shot by a jet of water - that leads him to immediately get drunk and remember what it felt like to do a “million light-year freestyle dive into a pool of burning sulfur.” Crowley relives his trauma over and over.

As a result of this unresolved trauma, Crowley can have difficulty acknowledging the reality of his fall and his status as a demon. Sometimes he downplays the fall itself (“I didn’t really fall, I just, you know, sauntered vaguely downwards”) as well as his responsibility for it (“I just hung around the wrong people;” “All I ever did was ask questions”). From our first introduction to him he does not behave as other demons do, responding to a ritualistic demonic greeting of “All hail Satan” with an unenthusiastic, “Uh, hi, guys.” He deliberately distances himself from hell by describing himself as “going along with hell as far as he can.” And perhaps most significantly he sets himself apart from other demons with his love for the earth, its creatures, its people, and all the lovely, clever things they invent.

Just as Crowley has never fully embraced and integrated his transformation into a demon, he has also never fully abandoned his subconscious associations as a former angel. When we first meet him as an angel in heaven at the start of Season 2, we learn that he is architecting the universe by creating nebulas, stars, and proto-planets and see the pride and love he holds for his creations. When things get tough on Earth and Armageddon approaches, his immediate thought is to return to the vast reaches of space to see Alpha Centauri or one of the nebulae he helped build, the last place where he felt a part of creation rather than of destruction. Similarly, when Aziraphale forces Crowley into action at the airbase in Season 1, Crowley’s primal instinct is to stop time and transport himself, Aziraphale, and Adam to a place that looks remarkably like the featureless white of heaven. In a callback to his previous life as an angel, he then uses the crank from the Bentley to restart time the same way he used a crank to start the engine of the star factory (perhaps even the same crank). He is even still sensitive to blasphemy, chiding Aziraphale for saying “oh my God!” and is clearly awed by and envious of the sight of Job speaking with God. “Just to be able to ask the question,” he says, wistfully.

All of these interactions indicate that Crowley is not at peace with his current station, continuing to straddle a space in between angel and demon while wrestling with his past trauma. While there are times that Crowley leans hard into being a demon, he has many unresolved issues and doubts regarding his past life as an angel, the reality and meaning of his fall, and exactly what kind of demon he is now.

The Divinity of Doubt

So where does all this lead us as we enter Season 3? Crowley’s willingness to engage in direct prayer shows he is still subconsciously close to God. More than that, his propensity to constantly ask questions mirrors God’s behavior even more than God’s special favorites, Job and Jesus. Rather than being distanced from God by a tendency to ask questions, the available evidence points to questioning as being integral to a divine connection.

If anyone is to make a direct connection with God in Season 3, I predict it will be Crowley. His doubting, questioning nature is likely to be critical to the healing of his past trauma and the completion of his character arc. I would not be surprised to see Crowley get the opportunity “just to be able to ask the question” of God even if no direct answers are forthcoming. If doubt is the essence of faith, Crowley is well situated to to recover his - whatever that looks like for him - through the course of the final season.

#good omens #crowley #good omens 2 #good omens meta #gomens #essay #long reads #good omens season 2 #good omens s2

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sixty-silver-wishes · 8 months

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The Repugnant Retrospective: Reading A Series of Unfortunate Events, over ten years later

(Note: For the sake of clarity, "Daniel Handler" will here be used to refer to the author of the books, while "Lemony Snicket" will be used to refer to the narrator character.)

I must have been in fourth or fifth grade the first time I picked up The Bad Beginning, the first book in A Series of Unfortunate Events, which contains thirteen books in all. In those days, I was a big fan of Guardians of Ga'Hoole and Percy Jackson, and read voraciously- to the delight of some of my teachers, and to the chagrin of others, who would prefer I not be reading a book for my own amusement during a lesson on mathematics. All thirteen books were in the school library, which I still look back on with fondness. It was a cozy little place- as libraries often are- that left me with plenty of memories, from going with my friends to the annual Scholastic book fair, to the unshakeable guilt of having to purchase a book on prehistoric animals because I'd checked it out and lost it, only to find it at home after the fact. I think I began reading A Series of Unfortunate Events after I finished the Ga'Hoole series, and although it was nothing like anything I had read before, I was hooked.

The phrase on paper here refers to an explanation of the basic concept of something, as opposed to experiencing it in practice. To witness an idea on paper does not necessarily mean it must be written on paper, as it could be written on the internet, or tapped out in Morse code, or spray-painted on the back of an unsuspecting associate while he waits in an abandoned bounce house for a secret message via carrier pigeon. However, it is true that reading an idea on paper may produce a very different effect than reading it in practice, whether or not paper is involved at all.

On paper, A Series of Unfortunate Events is about three children experiencing miserable things, over and over again, and ultimately culminates in an ending that is left ambiguous- a word which here means that the fates of the main characters are left unclear. When I first read them, I was used to stories involving magic, and enormous battles, and falling in love, mostly clear lines between good and evil, and an ending where there are no more secrets, because everything gets resolved. None of these things are bad to have in a story, of course, but a story does not need to have all- or any- of them to be good. Such is the case with A Series of Unfortunate Events. On paper, the series may not have appealed to me, due to the things I was used to reading at that age. But in practice, I couldn't put them down. I can remember feeling a sense of pride at figuring out the mysteries and understanding the literary references I could glean at my tender age. I can remember laughing uproariously at some parts (especially the Volunteers Fighting Disease song and the antics of Carmelita Spats), as well as feeling a dreadful pit grow in my stomach at others- which, of course, is a feeling that is typically better avoided than not. A pit in your stomach, after all, may mean you have uncovered a devastating secret, or had your heart broken, or have a nasty parasite gnawing at the lining of your digestive organs, and will need to see a doctor to extract it and seal the pit back up. Or, as was my case, it may mean an honest exploration of a truth about the world that you, at your young age, had some idea about, but had been sheltered from, and were finally seeing it laid out in a way that was simple and profound and shattering and enlightening all at once.

All that being said, I couldn't stop reading them, despite the warnings not to read them on the back of every book. The only one I didn't finish was The End, because I had to return it to the library before I could reach the end of The End, although this was not the end of my experiences with A Series of Unfortunate Events, and just a few days ago, I had reached the beginning of The End once again, and finally read The End from beginning to end. As the years went by, I completely forgot some parts of A Series of Unfortunate Events, and others refused to leave my mind. But while I would not experience another word of an Unfortunate Events book for over ten years, A Series of Unfortunate Events was constantly following me in some way or another, like three mysterious initials, or an unblinking pair of eyes in the night, or a particularly pesky neighbor I have had to move across the sea three times to get away from, but still keeps sending me telegrams in code. I was not done with the series, nor was it done with me.

When I was in middle school, through a completely different set of events altogether that would take another long post to chronicle, I decided I wanted to be a writer. I took to keeping notebooks where I wrote down my own stories, and even managed to finish a few. By the time I reached college, I was equipped with a love of history and classic literature, and majored in Creative Writing. I continued to read, and took a course on Arthurian literature- taught by a brilliant scholar whose work, I would find out a few years later, is cited on the Unfortunate Events Wikipedia page. (I also took a miserable course on English grammar that would have made even Aunt Josephine weep, and is better not elaborated on.) But also while in college, I began intensively researching a certain historical figure whose name you may already know. Like the fictional Snicket, I was researching someone whose life was full of mysteries, many of which have still gone unsolved. This person, like all people, made a number of morally ambiguous decisions, although whether or not some of these decisions were made for good reason is up for debate. One could even say that his life could also be summarized as "a series of unfortunate events," despite how prodigious, erudite, and altruistic he was- words which here mean the Soviet composer and pianist Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich- whose work, I would later learn, Daniel Handler listened to while writing A Series of Unfortunate Events. I became acquainted with, among other authors, the works of Nikolai Gogol, Franz Kafka, Kurt Vonnegut, and J.D. Salinger- whose writing styles echo in both Handler's work and my own. And of course, while I did not pick up on the reference in the books and forgot about it entirely, last year, I had been introduced to a little German flick called The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, which of course, had absolutely no impact on me whatsoever. (If you know anything about me, you will immediately be aware that this is a blatant lie, and that nothing I say should ever be trusted.) I began working at a store that sells Puttanesca sauce and a great variety of horseradish condiments. And all the while, I, like everyone else in the world, was experiencing my own series of unfortunate events, both personal and political.

All that is to say, if I enjoyed A Series of Unfortunate Events as a young child, you can imagine what I thought of it as an adult- older, wiser, and more well-versed in things like classic literature and world politics. Most nights, I listened to the books on audio while drawing- because just as Violet needs to tie her hair up in a ribbon and Klaus needs to polish his glasses to focus on their areas of expertise, I must have something long and often thought-provoking to listen to. As I said, there was a lot I didn't remember about the books- and it wasn't just plot details and characters.

For instance, while I can’t say I remembered it the first time, when I read the first book, it really left an impression on me when Count Olaf slapped Klaus across the face, and how much the book dwelt on it. From a narrative perspective, that slap was a threshold being crossed- a sign that the Baudelaires were no longer in a safe and predictable environment, and were living with someone actively hostile towards them. But from an emotional perspective, it really struck a chord to see Klaus continue to think about it throughout the first book, processing his first encounter with abuse. There was a bittersweetness to watching the orphans grow up and learn self-reliance, and the cynicism and misfortune of the books was well-balanced with witty humor, satirical commentary, and a constant sense of hope- something, of course, that I also appreciate about Shostakovich's works.

A Series of Unfortunate Events has a great deal to say about evil, and the nature of oppression. As a kid, I don't think I realized just how awful Count Olaf was. Of course, I knew he was a terrible villain trying to make these kids miserable in any way he could, but as an adult, I could see that Count Olaf was more than that. He harassed Violet in a borderline sexual manner, just to make her and her siblings feel weak. He delighted in burning books and murdering brilliant people, so there would be less knowledge and nobility in the world. And perhaps most impactfully, we see his rise and fall over the course of the series, as for all his treachery and the pain he brings the orphans, he ultimately finds himself powerless due to his own actions, as well as the inevitable dissolution of his own troupe.

Seeing Olaf's theatre troupe gradually leave him one by one, along with the various schisms that shape the series, brought a distinctly political understanding to A Series of Unfortunate Events that I did not have as a child. It brought to mind real-life tools of oppression and ignorance, and how they are doomed to fail because of their tendencies to devour themselves in their desire to harm and ostracize others. There's an interesting situation with the carnival "freaks," who demonstrate how the oppressed can become oppressors themselves through a desire for power over their situations- and how quickly oppression turns on itself, as Olaf's troupe finds themselves being called "freaks" as they seek to exploit the carnival freaks for their own gain. The audience just wants violence, and it doesn't matter who it's against, as long as they have someone to ridicule. We also see how inaction is just as harmful as active oppression- Mr. Poe is just as responsible for putting the Baudelaires in bad situations as Olaf, and even well-meaning adults like Aunt Josephine, Hector, and Jerome Squalor endanger the orphans because they're too scared or too content in their ignorance to protect them. The colony of islanders put themselves and the entire world at risk because they refuse the apples that would have easily cured them of the fungus they were infected with, too content to follow their leader instead of "rocking the boat." With all the ignorance and malice surrounding them, the orphans instead must learn self-reliance, even with the few allies they do have.

A Series of Unfortunate Events is especially mature when it handles the topic of morality. Characters are often shown to be morally gray, even those who are initially introduced as "good" or "evil." I found Fiona to be an especially fascinating character, as she exemplifies this moral struggle, although I feel the way she's described in the narration unfairly contradicts her character. On one hand, it acknowledges that she makes similar decisions to the Baudelaires as a foil to them- both have had to make morally dubious decisions on account of their siblings- but the narration will repeatedly refer to her as "treacherous" or blame her for "breaking Klaus' heart," although we find out she regretted her actions and, if anything, betrayed Count Olaf more than she did the Baudelaires. But regarding gray areas, Count Olaf, by the end, performs an act of nobility out of love, and the Baudelaires are constantly shown coming to terms with their own moral struggles as they fight to survive and find justice- although as the series progresses, "justice" becomes more and more of an absurd concept as corruption is found everywhere- although justice still persists, and as long as there is evil in the world, there will always be people "noble enough" to fight it. It was especially gratifying to see Justice Strauss and Jerome Squalor come back in book 12 to apologize for their inaction, and to help the Baudelaires against Count Olaf, in a moment that, however brief, challenged the previously-established cynicism of the series and demonstrated that people don't have to stay complacent, and that it's never too late to take action against ignorance.

Handler masterfully presents the plethora of philosophical and harrowing concepts that the series deals with to his young audience through his storytelling, which- like Salinger- sometimes distances itself tangentially to allow the audience to process the heavier moments, relating the Baudelaires' experiences to things the readers may have experienced or read in order to help them understand them. It's an incredibly adult way of delivering a children's story, particularly one that's more mature than most. As I first read the books as a child, and then read them as an adult, I can appreciate this maturity more, although being older than the characters allows me to look at the books from a different perspective. Violet and Klaus, from the beginning to the end of the series, are respectively 14-16 and 12-14, and while as a kid, I admired them and thought they were so brilliant and mature, as an adult, there's a sort of horror in realizing just how young they are. Sunny goes from being an infant to a toddler, but her extreme intelligence and emotional maturity for her age still makes her character more fantastical and less grounded than her siblings at times.

I found the series to hold up remarkably well for the most part, except for in a few areas. The most glaring issue, although I won't dwell too much on it, is the transphobia regarding the "henchperson of indeterminate gender." While, to my understanding, this is remedied in the Netflix series (which I have not seen), it was still uncomfortable to see this character frequently dehumanized by both the story and the other characters, even if they played a relatively minor role. At times, it felt contradictory to the story's themes, as the narrative would explicitly discourage discrimination against people who are "different" (book six even defines the word "xenophobia"), but also portrays an androgynous character as inhuman. It's entirely possible that Handler was not aware of trans issues at the time he wrote the books, but this element nonetheless prevents them from aging as well as they could have.

The other issue I had with the series is that sometimes, plot elements almost seem forced within the narrative. While the orphans, of course, face plenty of misfortune, the solutions to many of their problems are often practically handed to them by the narrative. For example, when Klaus and Sunny need to figure out an anagram, they just so happen to be hiding in a closet full of alphabet soup, which they conveniently use to solve it. The wasabi that Sunny finds in the Gorgonian Grotto just so happens to be the cure to the medusoid mycelium, and it works instantly. Klaus, in an especially infuriating moment, cracks a code with an elaborately-worded phrase summarizing the central theme of Anna Karenina, and the specific words that he uses just so happen to be correct, despite the fact that there are countless ways the same idea could potentially be phrased. While the orphans all have their own specific interests- Klaus likes to read, Violet likes to invent, and Sunny likes to bite things, and later cook- they can seem underdeveloped at times because they're so heavily characterized by these interests, which they very frequently rely on. There's a moment in book four where Violet has to research hypnosis in order to save Klaus, and I really liked the idea of them having to take on each other's interests to help each other. However, for the most part, the Baudelaires tend to stick to their specific strengths, which usually allow them to solve any problem, so they don't often need to branch out.

Overall, despite its few faults, I enjoyed A Series of Unfortunate Events, probably even more now than I did when I was a kid. Each book was beautifully written, and I loved the slow reveal of plot elements, as well as the gradual descent into its philosophical themes. Being more well-read and experienced at my age than I was at nine or ten, I was able to appreciate the books far more. The humor, storytelling, and themes still largely hold up, and it was fascinating to return to a piece of media that left such a strong impression on me at a young age, and would continue to leave an impression on me the older I got. I would definitely encourage anyone to read them, especially if, like me, you also read them as a child. Perhaps you may not want to read such a long tale of misery and woe being inflicted time and again on three (mostly) innocent children, and as Ishmael would say, I won't force you to. These books, while written for a young audience, can be very emotionally heavy, and may not be for everyone. But there's a lot of truth to them, and like the most miserable late quartets of Dmitri Shostakovich, I found them a great comfort because of just how real they are thematically. Perhaps later on in life, I'll encounter even more experiences that will make me appreciate the series even more than I do now, just as I did growing up long after I first read them. Maybe then, I'll have to read them again, and as I'll watch the Baudelaires grow for the third time, reflect on how much I've grown as well. But for the time being, I'll conclude this retrospective, which has already dragged on for long enough, as I've finally reached the end- at least for now.

#a series of unfortunate events #asoue #long post #analysis #literature #book analysis #retrospective

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thefirstknife · 6 months

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wait, Mara & Eris destroyed a Pyramid?

Maybe! Sort of!

I have a long ass post with several other connecting posts because I've been obsessed with this for a long time, but all of that is from before WQ released. Initially, I speculated that the Pyramid in question would be the Pyramid in the throne world (because it's conveniently damaged in the middle), and we had nothing but vague images of it being there. But outside the speculation which turned out wrong/unconnected, the rest of the post explains everything from the Witch Queen Collector's Edition and how it relates to Sjur in great detail.

In short, back in the Forsaken year, there was a lore tab in which Fenchurch has a vision of Mara and Eris confronting/damaging an unknown vessel. It was hard to say at the time, but when I read this post-Shadowkeep, it was really obvious that it was a Pyramid ship so that gave me fuel to connect that vision with a dream Sjur Eido had, also released in the Forsaken year in which she saw Mara and another woman destroying a "great black triangle."

At the time I believed that this was talking about some future event, something that will happen in a future season or expansion. However, WQ CE had a multi-page chapter dedicated solely to clarifying this in which Fenchurch sends a report to tell Ikora that he has spoken to Eris about his vision and that Eris confirmed this event has already happened. As a matter of fact, he only had a vision because Eris sent a message documenting this event, embedded in a shard of the Pyramid, for it to be found by someone in case she dies.

At some point after Forsaken, but before Shadowkeep, Mara and Eris (with the help of Elsie, the Nine, Rasputin and even Failsafe) discovered an early arrival of a single Pyramid ship to the edge of the system. They went there to meet it, in the orbit of the dwarf planet Eris. At some point, Mara went into orbit of the Pyramid and possibly entered it; this is unclear. Eris could not tell exactly what happened, except that Mara came in contact with the vessel and then died. Eris went to pick Mara up from her throne world and then the duo landed on the dwarf planet where they found a lot of debris, apparently from the Pyramid ship. Eris was wounded so Mara helped with the wounds. Eris also picked up one of the debris pieces and embedded a message to it, then sent the fragment to the Moon with her Hive shenanigans. The fragment was eventually picked up by Fenchurch.

We don't know exactly what the debris was and what Mara did with the Pyramid, but the description of the fragment was matching Pyramid material and I used that to identify it as Pyramid material, before WQ CE. So the debris on the dwarf planet should be Pyramid debris. It's however unclear if Mara did damage that caused that debris or not. On the other hand, both the vision from Fenchurch and Sjur's dream (a little embellished, as dreams tend to be) are describing the same event. So the event during which Sjur is "close to figuring her way out" has already happened. Whether Mara destroyed (or damaged) a Pyramid or not.

Which is why I believe that the conditions for her return have already been fulfilled. Obviously, being "close" to finding her way out is relative; "close" could've meant weeks or it could mean years. We don't know where Sjur is and how exactly she died, and she described it as being trapped in a maze.

It could also be that there will be another instance of Mara and Eris attacking a Pyramid ship in the future (Sjur's dream also mentions Crow being present). In that case, the conditions for her return have not happened yet. But until we see something of the sort happening, this is the best match for Sjur's dream and confirmed as real, via Fenchurch, meaning that her dream was not just nonsense.

Honestly, if anything like Mara, Eris and possibly Crow destroying a Pyramid might happen, we only have Season of the Wish left for that to occur so it's now or never (ofc depending on what happens to the Pyramid ships post TFS). If Sjur's dream is not the event described above, then it would have to happen next season, so either way Sjur-Eido-Returns believers are awake and ready. I will definitely understand if it doesn't happen and everyone should be ready for it not to happen, but we have a chance now so we're eagerly waiting to see if something happens.

#destiny 2 #mara #eris #sjur #pyramid #fenchurch #lore vibing #long post #ask #this is the shortest i could do. lmao #my original posts from back in the day have extra information #unfortunately we didn't get to learn more in WQ as i initially speculated #but the whole event and its connection to sjur's dream has fascinated me and remains one of the mysteries #it's currently the best explanation for that dream (with the exception of crow. hell. crow didn't even exist when sjur had the dream so)#so either the dream is the event described by fenchurch (conditions for sjur's return are met)...#or the dream has to happen. SOON. (which would also set the conditions for sjur's return)

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aita-blorbos · 11 months

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AITA for not contacting my sibling after they thought i died?

After a traumatic experience, I (?? (midtwenties?), NB) ended up escaping my kidnappers, along with the other people there who I now consider family (?? (similar ages) NB, F, M). All of us had amnesia at this point. After a while of running, I remembered enough to get to the home I shared with another person in the group, and we were able to recover some money and resources. However, due to the trauma and being on the run from our kidnappers, we quickly fled and used those resources to get a new place of living elsewhere.

Only two of us have any legal documentation (which we are scared to use due to our kidnappers having significant power and resources, which could be used to track us down if we do use them) so we have been taking odd jobs to make ends meet. Our memories still are foggy and unclear, if they're even there. In an attempt to deal with some trauma surrounding cameras and livestreams and filming, as well as possibly make some extra money, some of us (including myself) began to stream online. We don't have a large community or anything, but we did get lucky and have a few regular viewers.

One of those viewers apparently likes true crime, and recognized me from my missing persons case (which i was unaware existed). They tried to ask me about it, but I had no idea what they were talking about and became distressed and ended the stream.

They found that suspicious, and sent a link to the VOD as well as the stream to my twin (same age as me, NB), who I was only vaguely aware of, and who i have been avoiding due to the trauma, as well as the amnesia making me unsure if they would even want to see me. My twin followed the link and then began to try and message me, saying that they just want to talk. I have been ignoring these messages, due to having anxiety attacks at the thought of them, but I am starting to feel like that might be an Asshole move. We are each other's only living close relatives, as I understand it, and I am keeping them from that. AITA?

EDIT: Sorry for all the background, but I thought it was important info to explain why I am so weird. Also, I can't give more info about the kidnapping thing, and honestly what I have shared kinda scares me enough, they have a lot of resources and it would be really recognizable...

#aita #am i the asshole #kidnapping #tw kidnapping #unreality

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celticcrossanon · 1 year

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Forgive my ignorance. What is the difference between Queen and Queen Consort. What is going to be Camilla’s proper title after the coronation. I’m also hearing Regent referred to. And, what was the title KC originally promised Canilla!would be held at. Thank you !!!!

Hi Nonny,

There are two types of Queen.

The Queen Regnant is a monarch in her won right. She has the royal blood and she is the ruler of the kingdom. The title given to this person is Queen <firstname>. Examples are Queen Elizabeth II, Queen Victoria, Queen Anne, Queen Elizabeth I.

The Queen Consort is the legally married wife of the King. She is not a monarch in her own right. She has no royal blood and is queen because she is married to the king. The title given to this person is Queen <firstname>. Examples are Queen Mary (wife of George V), Queen Alexandra (wife of Edward VII), and Queen Elizabeth (the wife of George VI, later known as the Queen Mother).

As you can see, whether the person in question is a Queen Regnant (monarch in her own right) or Queen Consort (wife of the king), they are called Queen <firstname>. There is no distinction between Consort or Regnant in the title, it is simply Queen.

It is confusing, especially when you are going from a Queen Regnant to a Queen Consort or vice versa.

The tile that King Charles promised would be given to Camilla was Princess Consort. No such title exists. Charles promised that he would look into the law of creating such a title, but that never happened and the title was never created. Her Late Majesty expressed a wish that Camilla would be known as Queen Consort, and so Camilla is being crowned as Queen Consort, the wife of the King, and she will be called Queen Camilla.

More about this under the cut:

The Princess Consort title is something that Charles promised the people as recently as 2019, from memory, with Clarence House saying that there were no plans to change the promised title of Princess Consort to anything else. However, a royal reporter has revealed that Camilla told her she would be Queen, not Princess, quite a few years ago, and gossip says that Charles nagged his terminally ill mother every day for over six months before she released her wish that Camilla would be Queen Consort in her Platinum Jubilee message.

The Princess Consort title was meant to pacify two concerns in the general public AFAIK: the outrage over Charles marrying his mistress who was instrumental in the breakdown of his marriage to Diana, and concerns over Camilla's status as a divorced woman with a living spouse and how that affected her marriage to the future head of the Church of England. It is still not clear what Camilla's status is under Church law. Legally (civil law) she is married to King Charles, but the status under Canon law (church law) is unclear, as the Church of England accepts that divorced people may remarry in certain circumstances and not in all cases AFAIK (see https://www.churchofengland.org/life-events/your-church-wedding/just-engaged/marriage-after-divorce). The fact that Charles and Camilla had a civil marriage service and a church blessing, and not a religious service in church, raised questions about whether they are legally married in church law, or is the Head of the Church of England (Charles) crowning his mistress as Queen Consort without being married to her according to canon law (church law)?

There are a lot of feelings around the title and the subsequent elevation of Camilla to Queen Consort. My own opinion is that I don't care what Camilla is called but I am upset at the lies told by Charles (saying one thing in public when he never meant to carry it out in private).

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the-final-sif · 2 years

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Hello! I saw this TikTok, and most of it wasn’t worth anything, but in this screenshot, Amanda says that the evidence is “already in the courtroom” and is now documented, has it been long enough for that to happen? I don’t know timelines of court cases or anything, and all we know is that she went to the police.

Okay, so I'm going to respond to this to say a lot of things.

PEOPLE ON THE INTERNET CAN LIE TO YOU.

A tik tok from some random person claiming they spoke to Amanda and showing dms should be taken with a heavy grain of salt. Much like I am not willing to take Amanda's screen recordings at face value, I am not willing to take other people's screen recordings at face value.

With that understanding, let's assume that this tik tok is real for the sake of argument.

The person who sent these dms is an asshole. This is not acceptable behavior. If you don't trust Amanda or her claims, if you don't think she's offered sufficient evidence, that is your right to an opinion. She has made an extreme claim (sexting and nude photos exchanged), and has yet to provide proof for it (even if I do not think it is fair to dismiss her claims at this time without further evidence).

HOWEVER, just because you don't trust her claims, does NOT give anyone the right to harass her. If you're on the fence about believing someone's claims, it can be acceptable to politely and in a non-accusatory manner, message them to request more information. But the accusatory tone of those messages isn't helping anyone, and is entirely inappropriate. I strongly disapprove of people who sent harassing messages to Dream over this, and I strongly disapprove of anyone sending harassing messages to Amanda over this. We do not know which of them is in the wrong, and both parties deserve respect, a chance to make their case, and the benefit of the doubt.

Just treat people with respect.

Alright, all of that aside, let me get to your actual question: "the proof is in the court room now documented".

I don't know exactly when this was taken, but the answer is almost certainly not to my knowledge. The only think that I think she would've been able to do in this time period is go to the police, file a report, and maybe make a copy of the messages that she had (although I'm unclear on what she even said she had, because she said that Dream somehow deleted their chats? I'm still awaiting clarification on what she meant there). She might've downloaded a copy of her own snapchat history and provided that to the police, although AFAIK for any kind of criminal case, they would need to actually get logs from Snapchat itself to prevent any arguments about tampering.

Technically speaking, none of that is admitted into a courtroom. It's been recorded by police at best. There certainly hasn't been enough time for any evidence to have been gathered from other sources. As far as we know, there isn't even a court case or criminal charges or anything filed outside of maybe a police report.

That being said, I don't think that means that Amanda is lying per se. I think she was just trying to say she had filed a police report. It's easy to mix up those terms.

So basically, doesn't mean anything has changed. If the police report becomes public record, then we might get some clarity on what evidence she was able to provide and what her specific claims are. That's all assuming this screen recording is even accurate in the first place.

#dream discourse #discourse #sif speaks #sif answers

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nowis-scales · 7 months

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Do you prefer Three Houses or Engage?

Whew, okay. I am happy to answer your question, but please be prepared for me to talk a lot, because I have a lot to say on this topic.

I haven’t played all of the routes of Three Houses. At this point in time, I’ve played Verdant Wind and Crimson Flower. As for Engage, I’ve played all of it (though my playthrough posts sure make it look the other way around, heh). From this perspective, it might seem like there is a possibility for a bit of bias here or there. And while I agree that that could be true…

In this specific case, however, I don’t think it matters. I greatly prefer Engage over 3H.

Now, I should start off by pointing out that some of the stuff I say is going to be hyperbolic. I’m at a point where I’m quite jaded with 3H and many of its fans. There’s only so much discourse and disrespect a girl can take before she becomes a little disenchanted with the subject in question. That being said, though… honestly, none of that stuff affects my overall view. It’s mostly just about the way I might be delivering the message.

The thing to understand about me is though I love video games, if it’s a video game with a story as a major point, it automatically becomes the most important part. I enjoyed both 3H and Engage, but… the best way I know how to put why I would choose Engage over 3H is that while both have their share of writing problems, 3H’s bother me that much more.

To me, it just seems like Koei Tecmo and IntSys had this wide scope for 3H and couldn’t narrow down on what they were doing. And yeah, stones in a glass house comin’ from a Fates fan, I hear the people — but for all that 3H gets called this morally grey masterpiece, half the time it just seems like the “grey morality” comes from the fact that they couldn’t agree whether or not EdeIgard was in the wrong. In developer interviews, Kusakihara of IntSys, calls her the villain. Her route is referred to as one where you bulldoze everyone else to get what you want. It’s not exactly flattering, yet that same interview also states her popularity with the creative team. In my playthrough posts of CF, I know I mentioned to the point of annoyance that she rarely, if ever, faces a proper consequence or sacrifice for what she wants. And in Hopes it only seemed to get worse, with the developer interviews there actually confirming that she is actively happier than she ever was in Houses… Even her ending in Azure Gleam, which is sexist and disgusting, can be read as being in her favour, because how can you accuse her of anything anymore? She looks like a grown woman, but she’s mentally a freshly teenage girl! No more consequences! It feels like they’re just constantly flip flopping between “oh she’s right” or “oh she’s wrong”, which is not something you want from a perpetrator of conflict in the narrative. One minute they’re saying she’s villainous, and the next there’s a convenient & unclear excuse that tries to make her a good person for doing it. If something doesn’t favour whatever the devs wanted to highlight in that moment, it just gets unceremoniously swept under the rug. The Agarthans are proof enough of that. That’s not grey morality, that’s just being indecisive and, quite frankly, the opposite of impartial in Koei’s case.

That’s another problem that gets me about 3H’s story. I hate, hate their supposed “worldbuilding” trick where they just throw out minor details about like, a country’s problem with sexism or a group of people like the Almyrans or the Dagdans and just… never elaborate. I’m particularly interested in the Nabateans and the sexism of Adrestia myself, but are those points that ever get elaborated on? No, because it’s time to talk about crests and the crest system, which could have been an interesting look at classism if the concept actually stood up under scrutiny. It is very difficult for me to believe that there is some specific-to-Fodlan classism issue going on when Crests don’t determine whether you become or stay noble. Byleth is not immediately noble once it’s acknowledged that they have one, and Constance’s house fell in spite of it. Considering the possible marriage option for Ingrid in her paralogue, being nobility is not even the only way to ensure success in society. And all this is without even acknowledging the ridiculousness of the idea that the Nabateans would want to perpetuate a system that was actively soaked in the blood of their own. It just feels like, rather than engaging more clearly with how the crest system would actually work and subsequently be attacked, it just becomes this abstract thing that all other interesting thoughts get sucked into, without any concept that it’s real aside from EdeIgard and Sylvain mentioning it. I don’t feel passionately about it, it’s just kind of something that’s there. It could have been interesting to execute, but the way they went about it just doesn’t make it seem real to me — so, again, any attempt at a morally grey conflict there is lost on me.

And then there’s the problem with tell don’t show. I’ve seen people saying that Engage has this too… but 3H is god awful for this. The whole time I was playing Engage, I just remember thinking how much I loved how naturally emotional everything was. When you fight Hortensia again in the Solmic castle, the fact that she’s crying that she just wants her family back is sad. It’s natural. You don’t feel like the game is holding your hand, trying to make you to feel upset on Hortensia’s behalf. You don’t need to be told that Hortensia is trying so hard to be independent and strong and leaderly. You can just hear it in the way that she instead whimpers about how nobody will give her what she wants. You can tell that she’s angry that she cannot emulate her father or Ivy, and that she can’t get Ivy to do the things she wants her to do when it should have been so easy in theory. The way she reacts to the situation laid out before her shows us that yes, Hortensia has been through a lot the last little while and is getting to a breaking point where we might be able to help her. It’s what makes it that much more cruel when Zephia mind controls her to rip her away from us. 3H’s kind of pale in comparison at times, really.

The best way I know how to explain how 3H kinda flops at this is to continue picking on EdeIgard a little (sorry). I’ve rambled about it before, but presumably in an effort to show the legitimacy of EdeIgard’s suffering at the hands of the Agarthans in Crimson Flower, they put in this scene where she sees a rat and gets scared. The implication is supposed to be that there were numerous rats in the dungeon where she was kept when she was being experimented on, and that she now has a trauma response to them. However, when you actually get to the scene, her reaction is obscenely unrealistic — because it’s about being cute. This is a trauma response she’s supposed to be having, and Byleth can tease her about it. When responding to the stimulus of the rat, she doesn’t even respond with intense fear or anything symptomatic of the actual mental illness she would probably have. She just screams, and then tries to act like it didn’t happen, but of course she gets all blushy about it. It is entirely ingenuine, and I can’t just bring myself to emotionally invest if they only know how to give characters subdued, acceptable reactions or have them just tell me that something made them sad or scared. Just hearing that this character has had a sad life — and, conveniently, almost all of them have had a sad life — doesn’t make me feel emotionally connected to them. Representing the more human parts of that struggle does.

Bottom line, I shouldn’t feel like the game is holding up an “APPLAUSE” style sign that says “BE SAD” whenever the characters talk about things that have happened to them.

These are three big things that I just feel really tamper with my enjoyment of 3H to its fullest extent. The game just makes me feel too micromanaged, like it doesn’t trust me to be smart enough to pick up on the things it wants to say. For all that people say it’s the best story FE’s done in years, I would actually disagree on that. It’s the characters and the lore that carry this game. The story is just not that well-organized, nor is it willing to give you any sort of space.

That being said, I do not dislike 3H! At the moment I am… admittedly incredibly sick of it, but I don’t dislike it. There are plenty of things that it manages to do well! Like I just said, I think the lore is really interesting. The Nabateans in particular have always been a subject of interest for me, because there’s something so intriguing to me about them sort of being a parallel being to humanity, but still being so viciously discriminated against. The conflict between Duscur and Faerghus was also pretty attention-catching, and while I’m not super crazy about how the Insurrection of the Seven is portrayed, I do like that this is a kind of political conflict that they would confront.

In fact, the fact that this game does try to confront the more political side of things is another thing I like about it. Whether it does this well all the time is a different situation entirely, but just the fact that they decided to put this in is something I enjoy. One thing I know that I instantly enjoyed about Persona 5 that was also reflected in 3H was the way it brought up how the socio-political issues were affecting the society that everyone was living in. Each country had its own individual problems, with Adrestians struggling with sexism & classism, the Faerghans with their unstable government and newly developed tendency toward anti-Duscurian racism, and the Leicester Alliance with its imbalance/disagreement between people and the doubt surrounding its new leaders. To have these things helps us better understand what the characters are going through, as well as the causes for a war. It also makes the world feel more alive, because now we know what kinds of things each group is up against. It develops them. I’m still not a fan of how sometimes these things are just brought up and dropped in favour of one thing or the other, but there is often enough thought in them to make it most of the way, and that most of the way is awesome.

As for the characters, they have to confront a recruitment mechanic that completely throws their motives out the window at times just to conform to a specific narrative… and they still turned out pretty good, so that really speaks to how great they are! There is a lot of detail to put into each character’s life, and for the most part, the devs took care to make sure that everyone had a tie to someone. If they didn’t, then that felt intentional in some way. Relationships in particular really humanize characters, and I feel like 3H took that into account. I know I said it eons ago, but I’m still so delighted that we know about Maya Kiersten. Other FE games don’t tend to give these minor characters that a main character loves a name, but here we are, getting all kinds of details about her. Same goes for Holst and Rodrigue. It’s fun, and I really like that this happens. It also intrigues me that some of these characters aren’t total angels, and have their ugly sides as well. I need to put this in big bold lettering, but I do not condone the racism of Hilda or Ingrid. However, I do think that it’s an interesting addition to each of their characters. With the ways they are otherwise portrayed, it is possible that you could get too rosy of an image of the two girls. Their own racism undercuts that, it makes them feel more realistic, because bigoted people aren’t all one-note. They can seem otherwise kind and dependable, and still not be able to separate their head from their ass when it comes to being considerate of others. It fleshes them out. Details like this do add a little more to them, even if I wish they would actually explore them more in the context of the world as well. Racism that doesn’t get improved or worked upon is just racism for realism’s sake, and why should people who experience irl racism have to deal with that? They’re very aware of what the real world looks like, thank you.

The thing about 3H in comparison to Engage is that it just trips so many more times. I didn’t know what it was about Engage that just caught me, but once it had me, it had me. The emotional influence was definitely part of it, which I already mentioned, but I think another thing that I just liked in comparison was the fact that it didn’t try as hard as 3H did for some of that stuff. Thematically yes, Engage is more straightforward and doesn’t pile on the angst quite the same. It’s lighter and doesn’t take itself painfully seriously. Nonetheless, the stuff it does try to do comes out beautifully. It (for the most part — we need to have a whole other post about Alcryst) knows when to make you laugh, when to make you feel sad, and when to instill feelings of suspense or hope. It cares deeply about its characters and seeing them to the end of their journey. I never felt like I didn’t know the thesis of the game, and I almost never felt like there was a moment where I really wished they would just tell that part of the story differently. The whole thing just felt very carefully put together to me, and made for a better impression overall because there were no conflicting accounts of what was meant to go on based on the writer at the moment. I could tell that the game trusted me to draw my own conclusions. It made for a much more fun experience, because I love finding these small things woven in by the developers and mining them out like little gems. That’s part of the reason why I love Fates so much. While everyone else is complaining about how awful it is, I get to be searching for and finding all of these amazing parts that just got totally missed. I love stuff like that.

The worldbuilding in Engage is also something that I feel was a lot stronger. Things don’t just drop off. Tensions between Brodia and Elusia, for example, constantly inform the way the characters approach situations. Even conversations that are supposed to be silly, like that of Étie and Goldmary, are informed by that tension. Characters don’t forgive and forget everything that happened to them in relation to their societies just because they’re working together now. Citrinne doesn’t forgive Yunaka for her assassinations right away, she remains suspicious of her for a long time. When Ivy plays a part in the summoning of the Fell Dragon and ends up being part of the reason why Morion was killed, Alcryst holds a grudge against her — even though Ivy was part of the solution for the rest of the group, and even though Ivy herself turns out not to be a Fell Dragon worshipper at all. Things like these are constantly informing the plot and the characters. They don’t just disappear when it is inconvenient for them to exist. This is just one of many examples, but it really made the conflict feel like it was distinct, and thus was more meaningful when they came together.

I also just generally feel like the cultures in Engage ended up being more unique as well. I’ve played the entirety of Crimson Flower and Verdant Wind, as well as about 8 chapters of Azure Moon, and I’m not sure I could do as much to show how the cultures vary as much as I could with Engage. However, to give credit where credit is due, one could argue that the cultures of the Alliance, the Empire, and the Kingdom are less distinct than Elusia, Solm, Lythos, and Brodia because 3H’s conflicts need to build up to the final concept of uniting Fodlan. Nonetheless, the whole point of the nations breaking up from being just Adrestia is at least partially because the cultures are too different, and even if they weren’t… This would still just be more proof of my point that EdeIgard gets stuff weighted towards her. Therefore, I kinda prefer to think that it is not as much of a deliberate choice because the purposeful interpretation is straight up glorifying the imperialism element of the game. It’s just different in the case of Engage, where the differences and similarities are there with much more explicit purpose. The peace of Firene is played quite like the freedom of Solm, for example. Both nations have this seemingly leisurely thing that they value above all else, and it’s something that they know must make them seem overly gentle or carefree to outsiders. Nonetheless, once you start to spend time with characters like Céline and Timerra, it becomes clear just how viciously they fight to protect their people’s right to having those things in their lives. And this, of course, isn’t the only similarity, nor is it the only difference. If you need to see more of what I mean, emblemxeno made a great post on this that might help fill in some more gaps. It’s stuff like this that makes me prefer the way Engage executes its worldbuilding, because you can feel the way the countries influence each other, as well as the things that come innately from themselves. It’s not quite the same as Fodlan’s sort-of similar cultures. The ideas from each place don’t bounce off each other quite the same, so I find they’re not as entertaining to observe.

I could probably keep going on for awhile longer, but the answer to this ask is like… probably way more than you bargained for when you initially sent it, so I might leave it off at that. Any further, more specific questions can always be sent at a later date! I’m certainly not opposed to getting more asks after all ;)

At the very least, hopefully I was able to shed some light on my opinions on the contrasts between 3H and Engage, and why each one either does or doesn’t work better for me. Thanks for taking the time to ask!

#3H spoilers #fire emblem engage spoilers #fodlan fault-finding #shut up about del

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wildwren · 2 years

Text

!!! Spoilers for 1899 !!!

Whoops, I’ve got some more rambling, unhinged 1899 meta to share, this time about character arcs and fatal flaws. Sorry in advance.

So, thinking about Singleton’s speech in Episode 7:

“Every time, they make the same mistakes. And every time, they die. Because they can’t get rid of their emotions. But that’s what makes them weak. It’s human nature’s ultimate flaw. One shouldn’t base a choice on love, anger, hate. They’re just silly feelings that cloud the mind.”

So, there’s a lot of different ways to interpret what’s going on in the simulation, and how involved Singleton, Maura, Daniel, Elliot, Ciaran, etc. are in its execution. For the purposes of this meta, and given the implications of the quote above, I am going to be working off the idea that the simulation is a test of sorts — one that can, hypothetically, be passed, if the characters make the right choices. In this case, the “right” choices are presumably logical decisions unaffected by their own emotions. However, they are continuously failing to overcome their traumas, their desires, their clouded minds: “Every time, they make the same mistakes. And every time, they die.”

If the simulation is a test of sorts, then it’s one the characters are being set up to fail. They have all been given some sort of motivating instruction that pushes them into the drama — a letter or document that gives them the need to get on that ship, but which also embeds them with painful memories and strong emotional impulses — my brother lives in Brooklyn, the doctor who could save my life is in New York, the person I killed is in Hong Kong or Spain, the man who betrayed me is in that cabin, etc. etc. Additionally, we know at least some of them are being actively triggered, forced to re-live these traumas. Their fatal mistakes aren’t really failures, just human responses to emotional pain.

So: what are their mistakes? How is the simulation testing them and how are they failing? And what does this reveal about the characters and their relationships?

A couple other notes: for the purpose of this, I’m going to be focusing more on the secondary characters. The primaries: Daniel, Maura, Elliot, (and to a lesser extent, Eyk) have more mobility within the simulation — they are crawling around in tunnels in its understructure while everyone else is mostly just acting it out. For this reason, they are a little more complicated to grapple with, so I’m going to just set them to the side for now.

It’s also unclear to me which beats in the disaster we see unfold are designed into the simulation and which are hacks executed by Daniel. How different is this loop from the ones before it? (“We’ve never gotten this far before”). Is Daniel a worm in the apple or just part of it? I don't think I can answer that question, so for the purpose of this meta, I’m going to assume that things are supposed to go wrong in the simulation, and that Daniel is sometimes altering the simulation’s design and sometimes just triggering its beats so he can move through the story more efficiently. I’m not going to spend a lot of energy trying to determine which is which.

OKAY WOOF, damn you showrunners for making me word vomit about sci-fi babble when all I want to do is talk about CHARACTERS.

So, I think the first big test point of the simulation comes when the coordinates are received from the Prometheus. Eyk is immediately drawn in by this message and changes course to hunt it down, thereby triggering the rest of the events that lead to the failed loop. Of course, Maura is also hunting the Prometheus, and it perhaps its their mutual (and mutually supporting) motivation that triggers the disaster. Still, Eyk has more power in the ship’s structure, and he lets his own trauma, his desire to hunt down his own ghosts, and perhaps his allegiance to Maura motivate his decision — at the expense of the interests of everyone else on that ship.

Eyk’s obsession with the Prometheus, in combination with the death of Ada, the mystery of the Boy, and the spreading “plague” on the ship, eventually leads to the mutiny. The mutiny is another big moment where we can see character motivations and triggers play out, on both sides of the conflict, and for this reason can be viewed as a test point that the characters are “failing”. Franz is an interesting character, because he isn’t really presented as one of our mains, and he doesn’t appear to be in one of the pods in the final scene, nor do we have evidence that he’s receiving trauma triggers like most of the others. Despite this, he survives long into into the disaster and makes many pivotal choices which drive forward the narrative. Namely, showing Ada’s body to Tove, arming the steerage passengers (thereby enabling the mutiny) and eventually, dying to save Tove. I’m interested in that dynamic, but don’t really have more to say than that he seems to be emotionally motivated by Tove and eventually fails the simulation in part because of some allegiance he has to her.

It’s easy to frame the characters who side with Eyk as being more “good” or “just,” but their actions also contribute towards escalating the conflict to deadly levels. Here too, the characters are being motivated by their own personal dramas. Throughout the entire mutiny, Jérôme is being triggered by his traumatic memories with Lucien — another time when someone claimed power and status by force and tossed him aside as collateral — and he’s not willing to let that happen again. It’s less about Eyk or the Boy then about getting to re-do this painful moment and achieve a just end this time. Ramiro warns Eyk, but one gets this sense this is at least partly motivated by his desire to punish Ángel for Ángel’s mistreatment of him. Olek — oh, Olek — seems to me to simply have a self-sacrificial nature. We don’t really have the context on this, as we never see the full scope of his trauma memory, but whatever happened seems to be motivating him to invest his care in others at the expense of his own interests. This will also be his ultimate “failure.”

The character who most pivotally escalates the violence on the side of the mutineers is Krester. His choice to tell Iben about the boy and to support her search for him seems to come from a self-hatred he cannot unlearn — the idea that he’s being punished for his own nature and must try to negate it. This self-destruction is consummated when he is one of the first to throw himself overboard during the calling,which is, I think, another test of the simulation — which characters are motivated enough to resist it and which are not? Who “fails” the call?

(Again, I mean “failing” in the logic of the simulation — their failures are that they are humans who are not allowed to move on from their pain. This is a rigged test.)

Our notable characters who fall victim to the calling are Krester, Yuk Je, Iben (she needs to be tied up but is clearly in zombie-mode) and Virginia, who only escapes in the knick of time because of Daniel’s override. Krester, as discussed above, is perhaps susceptible because of his own self-resentment. We know that Yuk Je never wanted to be on the ship in the first place, that she was dragged unwillingly by her daughter and regretted it vocally ever since. Iben is clearly susceptible to all sorts of callings, benevolent or not, and Virginia is fascinating, because her failure here seems to be her own isolation. Aside from her oppressive dynamic with Ling Yi and Yuk Je, she is quite solitary in the narrative. She prefers to control and manipulate those around her rather than getting close to them or relying on them for support. She clearly resisted the call for a while but ultimately fell prey simply because she had no one to tie her up. She was alone! This fatal flaw continues after she touches the virus and conceals the way it’s corrupting her presence in the simulation.

By the time the storm comes around, the characters are left scrambling to save whatever individuals they can, even at the expense of the so-called “greater good.” Olek is the poster boy of this: he abandons the ship’s wheel to protect Ling Yi, and he succeeds, but at the cost of his own life and perhaps others. Anker falls prey to his own fatal flaw — his inability to walk away from Iben — and they die together. Lucien has spent the narrative pushing everyone away from him, driven by paranoia over his illness and his own deceits. But even so, Jérôme and Clémence futilely work try to save him, leaving the furnaces to do so. Ángel and Ramiro are able to set aside their conflict and trade honest affection, but not in time to save Ángel or turn the course on any other part of the disaster.

Of course, we know it’s all useless: the simulation has already been deemed a failure, there’s nothing they can do either way, and therein lies the tragedy. They’ve actually overcome so much. They’ve set aside some of their own pain to better help each other. But this emotional catharsis was never the point! The simulation isn’t requiring them to heal their trauma, it’s requiring them to be inhuman!

The biggest question that remains for me is what distinguishes the final survivors of the simulation: Jérôme, Clémence, Virginia, Ramiro, Ling Yi, and Tove. (And Maura, of course). By episode 8, the simulation is so corrupted that it’s hard to say how similar this is to previous runs re: final survivors. Did the same group make it to the end in the previous loop? What wiped them out in that simulation? How did Daniel’s hacks give them an advantage this time around? *massive shrugging gesture* Hey I never promised to have coherent theories here, I just wanted to ramble about characters!

Anyway, there are obviously a lot more “test points” to pull out from the story, nor did I touch on every character, but this already took me fucking days to write as is,,,, so. I hope it was interesting! I’d loveeee to hear peoples’ thoughts, piggy-backs, counter ideas, etc.

#1899 #1899 spoilers #1899 meta #my meta #putting on my clown costume for this one #this is a genuinely obnoxious thing to write im sorry #but perhaps i can know some peace now

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ranubd · 8 months

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I would like to know what your boundaries are when it comes to interacting with you.

are you ok with requests or questions that don’t have to do with your works

are you ok with receiving headcanons that are not relevant to or may contradict with what you already have

how many asks are you comfortable with receiving at one time.

Are there other things that you want us to know about fan interaction that I didn’t think to ask about

OK I AM NOW RESPONDING TO THIS THE SECOND TIME BECAUSE TUMBLR DECIDED TO BE A BITCH AND GOD UGHHHHHHHHHH OMG >:((((((.... SIGH

Hi, thank you for asking about my boundaries, and to anyone reading this, I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to look at this! :)

I am super okay with any questions you have about anything. I might not come with the correct answer to these questions, BUT I'll try to answer them either way! However if some questions are uncomfortable for me to answer, I can't put my finger on what such questions would be expect for like, NSFW stuff, I'm really not comfortable with that on my blog so please keep NSFW material/questions/requests to yourself. :)

With requests, if we are now talking art requests etc, then I'll gladly draw most stuff!! I tend to only enjoy drawing stuff I'm fixated on, so if I'm going through a overwhelming time or something due to my undiagnosed and therefore unmedicated ADHD I will probably not be drawing your requests. :(( BUT I'LL GET BACK TO THEM AFTER THE OVERWHELMING PERIODS!! (At least I'll try to.)

I would like to add on this that when I'm in artblock, I sometimes will just draw anything... So I may make a post asking for people to send me their OCs and so on so that I can get the creative juices flowing!! :D

You are again free to send me any of your headcanons even if they contradict mine, because if anything, I can add on to my own HC by yours. 🤭🤭 However, if you do send me headcanons, try to mostly just keep yourself to Hermitcraft/Life Series headcanons or anything related to that because if it isn't about that I really won't have anything to respond to your headcanons. Hard to care if I don't know anything about the topic, yk?

I'm fine with any amount of asks. If you as a singular person have many questions that you feel won't all fit into one asks, then send them as individual asks, I don't mind!! :D

I try to answer asks as fast as I can, but sometimes it may take some time as I do go to school. And sometimes, LIKE YESTERDAY, I may have burnout or I may be over stimulated. If that is the case, I will not be active at all on social media, so don't take it personal if it takes a while for your ask(s) to be answered.

I would like people who view this blog to know that I most likely have ADHD, I'm mentioning this because it's something so recent and it is affecting me quite a lot.

I draw stuff when I feel like it, I genuinely cannot draw unless I get that certain flow going, it's a little hard to explain... But I haven't been working on the comic because I know it's better for me not to force myself to work on it because if I did that, I would risk losing interest in it completely, and that's something no one here wants. :(( So please do try to be patient with me, I may be academically smart, but I'm still a little slow. <33

I HOPE THIS ANSWERS ALL YOUR QUESTIONS!! If there is still something for you, the person reading this, that was left unclear or you didn't get a good or direct answer to, then send an ask to me or send me a message and I'll try to clarify myself. :)))

Also with ibispaints new animating tool... i might be going a little... Nuts... Hehe. AAAAAA 😝😝😝 Not saying anything but, like, well I'll just leave a few very very very fast doodles here.

Steady steady... Pum pum pudum dum dum..

#grian #gtws #desert duo #hermitcraft #ranubd #boundaries #coughs #HI :)#i really like talking in the tags #and YOU seem to enjoy to read the tags #so how is your day #good?#splendid!!#mine was so fun too #i had sm energy today cant wait to work on this ibispaintx thjngy #also its exam week...#heha #aaaaa #YUM.

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skyboxeye · 7 months

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Capturing the ambience of Sneak King

This tasty title challenges players with stealthily handing out burgers across crowded rural, suburban, and urban environments.

(Not) Extracting Xbox sounds

The Sneak King ISO runs on both the original Xbox and the Xbox 360. This was achieved by including two sets of files on disc, each targeting a respective version: XBP archives and XEN archives respectively.

I didn't make any progress in extracting the contents of a XBP. EkszBox-ABX claims to recognize them as WMA containers as of v1.6, but ultimately extraction and playback didn't work in v2.10-Beta. I will say that while this program is powerful, I have found it a bit buggy/unintuitive in the past. It's also unclear the XBP format I read about is applied here, or if it's just a coincidental use of the same file extension.

I moved on from EkszBox-ABX, and tried unpackers and Winamp plugins on aluigi's site. Finally I tried DragonUnpacker and Game Extractor to no avail. I also tried the XEN QuickBMS script (see below), suspecting that the archive formats might be identical. but it failed.

I suspected that the XBP archives I was interested in were used to contain either WMA or Xbox ADPCM sound assets. I tried simply renaming to WMA; standard media programs still couldn't play them afterwards. I couldn't importing the WMA into Audacity as the format isn't supported there. Finally, I tried using vgmstream to interpret the file with the XBOX codec, but couldn't get usable output.

There is supposedly a home media center project for the original Xbox which may or may not support these files called XBMC4Xbox. This Wiki page has a bunch of info but I personally only found dead-ends.

Extracting Xbox 360 sounds

It's tempting to look further into the XBPs, since they boast bigger file sizes than the corresponding XENs in some cases. However I was reaching the limits of my skills. And besides, I've found little correlation b/t original Xbox audio file sizes and quality in the past - for example, with Riddick Butcher Bay.

We can use a QuickBMS script to extract King's ambient XEN archives and get the WAV(s) inside. This script was posted on the now-defunct XeNTaX forum, now accessible through the Wayback Machine.

This WAV file is in WMA1 or WMA2 format, decodable with vgmstream:

codec = WMA1 interleave = 0x0 channels = 2 sample_rate = 44100 start_offset = 0x00 num_samples = data_size

If you're interested in the sound effects found in each level's XEN archive, use this:

codec = XMA1 interleave = 0x0 channels = 1 sample_rate = 44100 start_offset = 0x00 num_samples = data_size

Some of these sound effects are seemingly ambient sounds, like birds and dogs in the Cul-de-Sac or distant chainsaws on Saw Mill. That said, I've never actually heard them play in-game.

Capturing footage

The Xbox 360 version offers the best visuals and should be used for capturing footage.

(Not) Hiding the HUD

We can try to hide the HUD (read on) or simply crop it out of our captures.

It should be possible to extract the XEN archives relevant to the HUD, modify or remove any relevant textures, and then repackage the archive using the BMS script above. However I couldn't get this working, due to the implementation details of the script - the QuickBMS error message suggests its something about MEMORY_FILE.

Regardless, I couldn't determine what format the textures are in. I was able to get signal using raw pixel viewers that suggests they are probably mipmapped. They are likely in some 360-specific texture format that requires its own toolchain (i.e. not Photoshop) to edit. Unlike some emulators, Xenia doesn't offer its own texture modding capabilities.

There are apparently developer commands in the Burger King games to hide the HUD, but these are disabled in retail.

Hiding the King

To avoid capturing the player-character you can hide the King somewhere that borders an obstacle or the level's edge, and then swing the camera such that the King isn't rendered. First-person mode unfortunately adds its own UI overlay so we don't want to use that (unless we can figure out replacing textures - see above).

Loading screens

In addition to each area's background tracks, there are short (~5 second) ambient loops that play over loading screens for Saw Mill (logging_am_loop_01) and Cul-de-Sac (suburb_am_loop_01). Loading assets seemingly exist for the other levels (const_amb_loop_01 and urban_am_loop_01) but I never heard them in-game.

Notes and curiosities

The game has four named ambient tracks: sawmill, construction, urban, and suburban. Of these, only urban plays on the expected level (Downtown). Meanwhile construction plays on Saw Mill, sawmill plays on Cul-de-Sac, and suburban plays on Construction Site.

#sneak king #burger king #ambience #modding

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single-malt-scotch · 1 year

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A long analysis of Boogey kills and Cured messages

just random technical thoughts about life series lol ignore me. unless you want to hear about all this data i gathered about Boogeyman Cure messages.

unsure if grian or anyone else has talked more about the technical side of life series. as i have vaguely heard it does seem this is like, reaching out to commission folk to work on a new variation and code it, which makes sense. additionally in the opening of one season (LL i think) there was an assumed moderator hanging out there for a moment. while i am sure grian has some commands to do things, probably send out a boogeyman command if it breaks, i feel i also recall times where mods likely did a thing instead of grian due to the wording. its unconfirmed iirc if the mods actually hang around the entire time and as their names dont seem to be on the tab, but im not convinced that means they arent there in some form.

but i am thinking about this because i notice how some of the Boogeyman cure messages come... kind of late? at first when i was watching and i saw some deaths that were like "<player> died to Lava" "<player> died to Fall damage" or like, all the TNT traps set after theyre gone that im not even sure how they could be tracked back to the player (ive been trying to figure out how to track player IDs for my own thing and it is not possible to track things like that). i was thinking "huh. i wonder how the system knows it was a boogey kill, when the message doesnt say "<player> burned to death while fighting <;player>" "<player> hit the ground too hard whilst trying to escape <player>"? basically i am pretty sure, its manual in those cases.

rest under the cut bc this is long lol.

listen idk why i am thinking about this but i am. i notice these random details, like keep inventory being on the moment i saw joel's POV. i noticed the pretty delayed cure message/lack of 1+ hour message for Martyn, but the immediate 1+ hour message for Scott.. of course this is complicated to actually do math for because of cuts (and LL2 has only just started so we can't refer to death made without player names).

cuz you know at first i was like. oh it probably sees the player who killed them and sends out a cure message, knowing that player is the boogeyman and made a kill. and yes there is a chance some messages are just delayed in the system, but i still am left very sure with all the moments where names arent tied at all and players arent even around for it, that it must be manual.

cuz like. seeing those messages that dont specify that they were involved i was like.... hm. no there isnt really a way to do that automatically. there isnt any proof for it that the player killed that player if the message doesn't involve them. thinking about this fact now, i would have to go and see how every boogey cure message appeared in LL itself.... but even so its hard to time things as people cut a bit.

what i am saying is, with the delay on cure messages and the mixed death messages that dont make me think the coding would deal with this- i think the mods could be hanging around to determine some of these complex scenarios where it would be totally unclear otherwise, and send out a cute message manually. or potentially grian but id have to comb through how he acts each time it happens.

The LL2 deaths

Scott got the 1+ hour received message immediately. while there was a cut to the Cured message, it took 69 seconds since the kill to gain that. There was no cut between that final blow he made and the 1+ hour message, i went through frame by frame. it faded in the moment he got the kill.

However, Martn did not get the +1 hour message right after he made his kill, despite the death message stating that he killed BigB in some form. We didn't see Martynh's 1+ hour message at all but he does cut a lot so this is hard to determine.

sadly due to no Bdubs POV, we don't know what his messages looked like.

this seems like, unimportant i know lol. its not a huge deal. but i enjoy the technical side of things and often wish we had more insight to how it works. especially makes me wonder about the fan made adaptions of the Life series too, if the death message thing is a problem and not always possible to be done automatically. but im having a hard time being convinced there isnt some moderator involvement with this after seeing some of this, unless there really is some strange delay on receiving messages. but my own knowledge of coding and minecraft doesnt have me sure that those deaths are traceable at all.

The LL1 deaths

BUT WE ARENT DONE YET.... I AM GOING THROUGH LL1 RIGHT NOW.

depressingly multiple people seem to have lost episodes so... thats a shame, and i cannot track what happened as i dont have their POV.

Scar killed Mumbo and the death message included him. Was cured right after. Makes sense.

Ren killed Skizz by making him fall and was not in the death message and he did NOT get the cure message right after. Ren cut so its hard to say exactly when his message arrived and we never see it pop up. I cannot time it.

More proof of the immediate cure message for direct kills comes from BigB to Cleo, Joel to Scott, Etho to Mumbo, Etho to Scar etc etc... pretty much every direct death that was caused by a player, in the chat messages it seems.

Scott kills Impulse but the message is that he falls, and also does not have his name. Scott makes a few short cuts here but even with those, it took 94 seconds for the Cured message to appear.

Jimmy kills lizzie in a similar way- falls into lava but the death message does not include him as expected. While possibly unrelated he does type in chat "cure me baby!"* and additionally he does make a cut, so this may easily muddy the results but even so, i will still note it took 22 seconds from the kill to where he got the cure message in his video. His video is likely the most misleading just because Scott did leave so much time for his to appear- but at the same time Jimmy did not move too much from where he was either.

Martyn kills tango and the message does not include Martyn's name, as its indirect again. Thank god Martyn didnt cut. It took 83 seconds for the message to appear, and he also had typed a message saying he got a boogey kill.

Up to this point, I hadn't considered whether or not they were sending messages saying "i did the boogey kill", especially for these scenarios where the kills were indirect. Onto the last notable one-

Pearl kills Ren by TNT, another indirect kill. No cuts here, and it takes 73 seconds for the Cure message to arrive, a bit after Pearl also makes a message confirming her boogey kill.

*regarding Jimmy i eventually come to conclusion this isnt a coincidence. it seems these messages are typed on purpose for them to get Cured.

Conclusion

The timing is all random once we get to the indirect kills. Too me, it definitely seems like the game is coded to detect those messages that include players killing players, but otherwise those indirect kills do not. However i am not also sure that someone like Grian is sending out the manual cures-- that would include... going and seeing if he cuts, or if there is some kind of pause while he does it off screen.

idk why i did this. autism moment.

#trafficblr #limited life spoilers

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mysticalspiders · 2 years

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How much did Art’s telegram cost?

I hate to disagree with someone in the dracula daily community but I have been mulling over @jonathomas-harker’s post about the cost of Arthur’s telegram to Quincy for months. As someone fascinated with the value of money in different time periods 75 dollars in todays money to send a telegram just seemed a bit to high. For sure, telegrams were fairly new and not used by the average person to the extent as letters (as that post lays out very well!) but telegrams were still accessible to the average person in the case of an emergency and 75 dollars to send a quick message just felt too high. And by the 1890s the cost to send a telegram was dropping as the technology was improved.

So I went on an investigative mission myself.

Small caveat to say that the idea of inflation breaks down the father from modern times you are. However, dracula daily has shown that the 1890s are relatively modern (S.P.C.A.? Cameras?) and since we are only looking for a ballpark and this is well into the industrial era inflation is fairly good for an estimate.

I ended up with Art’s telegram costing around 10 pounds in todays money.

Here is how I broke it down:

1. I first started by figuring out how much a telegram would cost in the 1890s (an exact date wouldn’t actually be useful given how little information there is on this and the fact that the exact year dracula is set is relatively unclear). Thank you to @jonathomas-harker for pointing me toward this site which said that in 1885 (that is as close as we are going to get) 12 words costs 6 pence and each additional word is a 1/2 pence. Art’s telegram was 15 words so 7 1/2 pence in 1885.

2. For context in 1890 pre decimilization there are 240 pence in a pound. (thanks to @silenthunteruk for this correction!)

3. To make sure that I had the most accurate math possible I then tried to figure out what 1 pound in 1890 (for connivance) would be in pounds in 2022.

I used this website but I checked a few others and all gave me around the same number.

1 pound in 1890 is 142 pounds in 2022.

4. 1 pound (1890) is 142 pounds (2022) so 1 pence is 0.59 pounds today.

5. So if 1 pence is 0.59 pounds 7.5 pence would be

4.5 pounds for Art’s telegram.

This is still fairly expensive for sending the modern equivalent of a thumbs up (with unnecessary words no less!) but not ridiculous especially if you are the only son Lord Godalming.

6. For context a letter would have cost around 1 pence or 1/2 a pound so this still costs about 10 times as much as a letter would have cost!

(7. for those of us who want this in dollars 4.5 pounds is around 5.5 dollars.)

#dracula daily #arthur holmwood #no hate towards anyone elses calculations!#the math can be very complicated and information hard to find and relatively dubious #there is so much guesstimating here #i just have had this saved as a project for months and finally wanted to come up with my own estimate!

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greatgreenwelshadventures · 3 months

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Habitat Wales Grant

(Our latest reply to our ongoing application)

Thank you for the letter regarding the updates and for the extension of the contract deadline. Our local farmers union office has been completely overwhelmed with queries from anxious members and we have been unable to take advice on this yet.

We appreciate that change is necessary and that implementing a new scheme will always come with its challenges; however the management of information has been absolutely shambolic. We respectfully and constructively offer the following feedback:

There seems to be a complete lack of understanding of what it takes to manage land half way up a mountain in North Wales. We have around 40 acres of valuable habitat (peat bog and upland heath) that we sensitively manage and conserve on a voluntary basis, and we planted over 1000 trees well before the 10% of land as trees idea was a 'thing'. We really don't need advice from well meaning politicians on how to minimise our impact and live in partnership with the land.

This leaves us with only 20 acres used for small farming practices. How on earth should we be penalised for not complying on the 1/3 of our land when 2/3 does comply if indeed this is actually about habitat, the environment and mitigating climate change?

On our application, we removed the parcels of land which are the only livestock grazing because we have no option but to supplementary feed in winter. Please do take a visit when half the farm is under water if you have any other suggestions (bring waders). We also need to chain harrow and roll when we get the very small window of weather and ground conditions opportunity. This is based on local knowledge and experience not an arbitrary date in the calendar. We are working on organic / biodynamic farming permaculture. Muck spreading is an essential component of that.

As a result, we unchecked the land parcels on which we could not meet the conditions (which we were able to do on our original application), only to be subsequently advised that the offer was on a whole farm basis. Your office amended our application without our consent and selected those land parcels we had omitted, then advised us it was too late for us to make changes (changing it back for the above valid reasons).

It is very difficult for us to understand how the restrictions are designed to improve habitat without altogether making farming impossible for many responsible land custodians.

We will take advice and decide whether or not the contract is possible for us to sign but certainly will not be accepting it and then notifying you via SAF if we are unclear on whether or not penalties would apply, which despite many years dealing with nationwide contracts, we are not.

We would appreciate a review of cases such as ours where it would be more appropriate to assign the scheme conditions to select parcels of land provided that this meets a certain percentage of the land overall (in our case 70% compliant habitat already exists). Otherwise many rural smallholders running sustainable and closed loop farms will be forced to give up in favour of the mass commercial monoculture environment and local community harming farms, which would be counterproductive to the published scheme outcomes, surely?

We wholeheartedly support the farmers that will be protesting against the current changes and sadly cannot join them since as it is just the two of us and we cannot be away from the land or animals. And please note that it has taken numerous attempts to reply as we kept receiving error messages on the site wasting the best part of a preciously dry morning.

Additionally, while you sit in your warm, dry offices, pouring over your satellite and drone images of our farm and the surrounding land, in order that you can remove a few more rocks or gorse bushes from our BPS claim; please note just how many abandoned mountain small holdings together with their now derelict farmhouses surround us.

Indeed we are the only such remaining property on this part of the mountain which is actually still farming.

There is a reason for that. The land and weather conditions here, particularly in winter can only be described as tough and harsh.

Aside from the sometimes inhospitable weather, there are also constant pressures in terms of the massive hikes in the cost of hard feed, fodder and energy costs.

It is an exceptionally hard life basically, and you are making it harder. Tipping over into impossible.

That is why farmers (in Wales) are protesting.

Saying that it is about farmers being anti change or resistant to tree planting woefully misses the point.

That is why the Welsh government will need to rethink this proposed policy. Because in its current form it is not viable for actual farmers!

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688199 · 11 months

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A Cheeky Angel: What does being a man mean?

exploring the theme and message of this underrated gem

okay so im not exactly new to this series, been about a year since i first watched the anime. i'm now just done with my second reread of the manga, so i would like to share whatever comes to mind.

i would like to start this off saying that i don't think many people see beyond what meets the eye. i've seen others say that this series is sexist and misogynistic, etc etc. but i don't think that's the case at all. in fact, it's the complete opposite. how so? let's start from the beginning (apologies for being messy i'm never good at organizing my thoughts lol) (contains spoilers)

cheeky angel revolves around our main character, megumi amatsuka, a beautiful angelic girl who believes she was once a boy. hence she is determined to return to her previous state with the help of her best friend, miki. she meets a thug who falls heads over heels with her after she's the first to beat him up, then save him when he was in a pinch. soon, a strange group forms around megumi, called the megu-dan, with a goal to protect her, as well as find the magic book.

this series is one of, if not the only series which i feel handles the shallow and cringe "gender swap" troupe very well by using it to explore important themes, such as: what is masculinity?

the reason megumi wants to become a boy in the first place, is because society around her constantly pushes that "boy = strong, girl = weak". she ends up hurting genzo (recap: he saves her from glass shards) and those around her because "she is a girl". not only that, megumi feels frustrated that she is unable to help miki escape her fate. this thought of "i am a girl, therefore i will never be able to do it" hence becomes the cause of her insecurity, and is whar holds her back from her true potential.

now the genie, what does he do? imo he's hella clever. by altering memories to make her believe she was once a boy, megumi is no longer bounded by this thought, and hence is able to do what she wants fearlessly. at the end she also says to the genie that her wish was granted. what wish? to be able to protect others. like how she managed to save her friends time and time again.

"being a man" represents courage, justice, and this wish. thus this becomes her ideal, as well as many of the other characters, in their own unique ways.

it is megumi's "manliness" which causes every character to be drawn towards her, people who need to learn this "manliness". genzo, who is the toxic, shallow personification of "being a man". kobayashi, whose hesitance stops him from achieving his dream. fujiki and yasuda, who believes they amount to nothing but the stereotypes they live by. throughout the series though, you can see them overcome these obstacles, with megumi serving as the catalyst.

then what is "being a woman"? this one is a bit more unclear, but from how i see it, megumi represents "being a woman", and "being a woman" represents freedom. the way megumi does things her own way and how she wants it, a stark contrast to miki and others around her who are bound to stereotypes and expectations. yet at the same time, it's ironic, because "being a woman" is what holds megumi down. thus this leads to her identity crisis. at first glance it might seem megumi is just worried about her physical appearance but in truth it is about whether she wants to have her wish, or remain free as she is.

however, at the end of the series, she learns to accept herself as who she is, no longer needing the idea that "she used to be a man" to spur her actions. thus the comment by miki: "she seems more manly now, and more feminine too". because the conflict she battled for so long is finally over, she is now both "a man" and "a woman", someone who can protect others, as they want to.

the overall message of the series is: you don't have to be a man, to "be a man", just be yourself

(i will go in depth with other characters in future posts and explain how they tie into this message and theme. also, just post whatever i think about the series.)

(ive seen some people say this is an lgbtq series about gender. though the similarities, i would like to disagree. it’s really just about “being you, as you are”. this is why i don’t enjoy people putting labels on the characters, like saying megumi is trans, miki is lesbian, kobayashi is bisexual, etc etc. headcanons are fine, sure, but claiming them canon like what some people do, nah. the whole point of the series is that people are not bound to words, ideas, stereotypes and traditions. assigning them a label, defeats the purpose)

#cheeky angel #manga analysis #megumi amatsuka #man amongst men

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anamericangirl · 2 years

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Aug. 19, 2015: In Boston, after he and his brother beat a sleeping homeless man of Mexican descent with a metal pole, Steven Leader, 30, told police "Donald Trump was right, all these illegals need to be deported." The victim, however, was not in the United States illegally. The brothers, who are white, ultimately pleaded guilty to several assault-related charges and were each sentenced to at least two years in prison.

Dec. 5, 2015: After Penn State University student Nicholas Tavella, 19, was charged with "ethnic intimidation" and other crimes for threatening to "put a bullet" in a young Indian man on campus, his attorney argued in court that Tavella was just motivated by "a love of country," not "hate." "Donald Trump is running for President of the United States saying that, 'We've got to check people out more closely,'" Tavella's attorney argued in his defense. Tavella, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to ethnic intimidation and was sentenced to up to two years in prison.

April 28, 2016: When FBI agents arrested 61-year-old John Martin Roos in White City, Oregon, for threatening federal officials, including then-President Barack Obama, they found several pipe bombs and guns in his home. In the three months before his arrest, Roos posted at least 34 messages to Twitter about Trump, repeatedly threatening African Americans, Muslims, Mexican immigrants and the "liberal media," and in court documents, prosecutors noted that the avowed Trump supporter posted this threatening message to Facebook a month earlier: "The establishment is trying to steal the election from Trump. ... Obama is already on a kill list ... Your [name] can be there too." Roos, who is white, has since pleaded guilty to possessing an unregistered explosive device and posting internet threats against federal officials. He was sentenced to more than five years in prison.

June 3, 2016: After 54-year-old Henry Slapnik attacked his African-American neighbors with a knife in Cleveland, he told police "Donald Trump will fix them because they are scared of Donald Trump," according to police reports. Slapnik, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to "ethnic intimidation" and other charges. It's unclear what sentence he received.

Aug. 16, 2016: In Olympia, Washington, 32-year-old Daniel Rowe attacked a white woman and a black man with a knife after seeing them kiss on a popular street. When police arrived on the scene, Rowe professed to being "a white supremacist" and said "he planned on heading down to the next Donald Trump rally and stomping out more of the Black Lives Matter group," according to court documents filed in the case. Rowe, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to charges of assault and malicious harassment, and he was sentenced to more than four years in prison.

Sept. 1, 2016: The then-chief of the Bordentown, New Jersey, police department, Frank Nucera, allegedly assaulted an African American teenager who was handcuffed. Federal prosecutors said the attack was part of Nucera's "intense racial animus," noting in federal court that "within hours" of the assault, Nucera was secretly recorded saying "Donald Trump is the last hope for white people." The 60-year-old Nucera, who is white, was indicted by a federal grand jury on three charges, including committing a federal hate crime and lying to the FBI about the alleged assault. He was convicted of lying to the FBI, but a jury deadloc

Oct. 10, 2016: Police in Albany, New York, arrested 55-year-old Todd Warnken for threatening an African-American woman at a local grocery store “because of her race,” according to a police report. Warnken allegedly told the victim, “Trump is going to win, and if you don’t like it I’m gonna beat your ass you n----r,” the police report said. He ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge in the case and completed a local “restorative justice program,” allowing the charges against him to be dismissed, according to the district attorney’s office.

Oct. 13, 2016: After the FBI arrested three white Kansas men for plotting to bomb an apartment complex in Garden City, Kansas, where many Somali immigrants lived, one of the men's attorneys insisted to a federal judge that the plot was "self-defensive" because the three men believed "that if Donald Trump won the election, President Obama would not recognize the validity of those results, that he would declare martial law, and that at that point militias all over the country would have to step in." Then, after a federal grand jury convicted 47-year-old Patrick Stein and the two other men of conspiracy-related charges, Stein's attorney argued for a lighter sentence based on "the backdrop" of Stein's actions: Trump had become "the voice of a lost and ignored white, working-class set of voters" like Stein, and the "climate" at the time could propel someone like Stein to "go to 11," attorney Jim Pratt said in court. Stein and his two accomplices were each sentenced to at least 25 years in prison.

Nov. 3, 2016: In Tampa, Florida, David Howard threatened to burn down the house next to his "simply because" it was being purchased by a Muslim family, according to the Justice Department. He later said under oath that while he harbored a years-long dislike for Muslims, the circumstances around the home sale were "the match that lit the wick." He cited Trump's warnings about immigrants from majority-Muslim countries. "[With] the fact that the president wants these six countries vetted, everybody vetted before they come over, there's a concern about Muslims," Howard said. Howard, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to a federal civil rights violation, and the 59-year-old was sentenced to eight months in prison.

Nov. 10, 2016: A 23-year-old man from High Springs, Florida, allegedly assaulted an unsuspecting Hispanic man who was cleaning a parking lot outside of a local food store. "[H]e was suddenly struck in the back of the head," a police report said of the victim. "[The victim] asked the suspect why he hit him, to which the suspect replied, 'This is for Donald Trump.' The suspect then grabbed [the victim] by the jacket and proceeded to strike him several more times," according to the report. Surveillance video of the incident "completely corroborated [the victim's] account of events," police said. The suspect was arrested on battery charges, but the case was dropped after the victim decided not to pursue the matter, police said. Efforts by ABC News to reach the victim for further explanation were not successful.

Nov. 12, 2016: In Grand Rapids, Michigan, while attacking a cab driver from East Africa, 23-year-old Jacob Holtzlander shouted racial epithets and repeatedly yelled the word, "Trump," according to law enforcement records. Holtzlander, who is white, ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of ethnic intimidation, and he was sentenced to 30 days in jail.

Nov. 16, 2016: Police in San Antonio, Texas, arrested 32-year-old Dusty Paul Lacombe after he and a companion assaulted a black man at a convenience store. According to a police report, Lacombe “stepped out of a vehicle and walked to the [victim] and stated he was a Trump supporter and swung at him several times.” The victim “was punched in the face several times,” the police report said. When police arrived, Lacombe – who “smelled strongly of alcohol” – “stated something about Trump and admitted to fighting with [the victim],” the police report noted. Lacombe was charged with misdemeanor assault and ultimately received “deferred adjudication,” which is akin to probation. Lacombe ultimately pleaded “no contest” to the charge and was granted “deferred adjudication” with a $450 fine.

Jan. 3, 2017: In Chicago, four young African-Americans -- sisters Brittany and Tanishia Covington, Jordan Hill and Tesfaye Cooper -- tied up a white, mentally disabled man and assaulted him, forcing him to recite the phrases "F--k Donald Trump" and "F--k white people" while they broadcast the attack online. Each of them ultimately pleaded guilty to committing a hate crime and other charges, and three of them were sentenced to several years in prison.

Jan. 25, 2017: At JFK International Airport in New York, a female Delta employee, wearing a hijab in accordance with her Muslim faith, was "physically and verbally" attacked by 57-year-old Robin Rhodes of Worcester, Mass., "for no apparent reason," prosecutors said at the time. When the victim asked Brown what she did to him, he replied: "You did nothing, but ... [Expletive] Islam. [Expletive] ISIS. Trump is here now. He will get rid of all of you." Rhodes ultimately pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of "menacing," and he was sentenced to probation.

Feb. 19, 2017: After 35-year-old Gerald Wallace called a mosque in Miami Gardens, Florida, and threatened to "shoot all y'all," he told the FBI and police that he made the call because he "got angry" from a local TV news report about a terrorist act. At a rally in Florida the day before, Trump falsely claimed that Muslim refugees had just launched a terrorist attack in Sweden.

Feb. 23, 2017: Kevin Seymour and his partner Kevin price were riding their bicycles in Key West, Florida, when a man on a moped, 30-year-old Brandon Davis of North Carolina, hurled anti-gay slurs at them and "intentionally" ran into Seymour's bike, shouting, "You live in Trump country now," according to police reports and Davis' attorney. Davis ultimately pleaded guilty to a charge of battery evidencing prejudice, but in court, he expressed remorse and was sentenced to four years of probation.

May 3, 2017: In South Padre Island, Texas, 35-year-old Alexander Jennes Downing of Waterford, Connecticut, was captured on cellphone video taunting and aggressively approaching a Muslim family, repeatedly shouting, "Donald Trump will stop you!" and other Trump-related remarks. Police arrested downing, of Waterford, Connecticut, for public intoxication. It's unclear what came of the charge.

May 11, 2017: Authorities arrested Steven Martan of Tucson, Arizona, after he left three threatening messages at the office Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz. In one message, he told McSally he was going to "blow your brains out," and in another he told her that her "days are numbered." He later told FBI agents "that he was venting frustrations with Congresswoman McSally's congressional votes in support of the President of the United States," according to charging documents. Martan's attorney, Walter Goncalves Jr., later told a judge that Martan had "an alcohol problem" and left the messages "after becoming intoxicated" and "greatly upset" by news that McSally "agreed with decisions by President Donald Trump." Martan, 58, has since pleaded guilty to three counts of retaliating against a federal official and was sentenced to more than one year in prison.

May 23, 2017: George Jarjour and his brother, Sam Jarjour, were getting gas at a station in Bellevue, Washington, when 56-year-old Kenneth Sjarpe started yelling at them to “go back to your country,” according to a police report. Sjarpe then drove his truck toward the brothers, rolled down his window, and declared, “F--k you, you Muslims,” and “I’ll f---ing kill you,” the police report stated. When police officers interviewed Sjarpe the next day, according to the report, he “became animated and his voice got louder as he started talking about how he hated those people… [particularly] Iranians, Indians and Middle Easterners.” And, the report recounted, “He said he supports Trump in keeping them out.” A week later, Sjarpe threatened another man at a local business, yelling, “I hate foreigners,” according to a police report. He was arrested days later. Sjarpe ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of malicious harassment and was sentenced to six months behind bars.

Oct. 22, 2017: A 44-year-old California man threatened to kill Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., for her frequent criticism of Trump and her promise to "take out" the president. Anthony Scott Lloyd left a voicemail at the congresswoman's Washington office, declaring: "If you continue to make threats towards the president, you're going to wind up dead, Maxine. Cause we'll kill you." After pleading guilty to one count of threatening a U.S. official, Lloyd asked the judge for leniency, saying he suffered from addiction-inducing mental illness and became "far too immersed in listening to polarizing political commentators and engaging in heated political debates online." His lawyer put it this way to the judge: "Mr. Lloyd was a voracious consumer of political news online, on television and on radio … [that are] commonly viewed as 'right wing,' unconditionally supportive of President Trump, and fiercely critical of anyone who opposed President Trump's policies." The judge sentenced Lloyd to six months of house arrest and three years of probation.

Feb. 21, 2018: A federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., indicted a former U.S. diplomat – William Patrick Syring, 60, of Arlington, Virginia – on several counts for threatening employees of the Arab American Institute. He had previously served nearly a year in prison for threats he made in emails and voicemails to the same organization in 2006, but soon after serving his time he began emailing the organization again. In January 2017, a week after Trump was inaugurated, Syring sent one email saying: "It's time for ethnic cleansing of Arabs in America. Elections have consequences. President Trump will cleanse America of [AAI President James] Zogby … and all Arab American terrorists." Within months, he began sending particularly “charged” rhetoric that constituted “a true threat” – and emails like the one from January 2017 reflect the type of language that was “part and parcel of” his threats, prosecutors said in court documents. In May 2019, a federal jury convicted Syring on all 14 counts against him, including seven hate-crime charges and seven interstate-threat charges. He was sentenced to five years in prison.

March 1, 2018: The FBI arrested 24-year-old Daniel Frisiello of Beverly, Massachusetts, for sending envelopes with white powder to at least five politically-charged locations around the country. One of those envelopes was addressed to “Donald Trump Jr.” in New York, and it included a typed letter stating, “You are an awful, awful person, I am surprised that your father lets you speak on TV.” Trump Jr.’s then-wife received and then opened the letter. The FBI ultimately determined Frisiello was responsible for a rash of threatening letters sent to various public servants since 2015. In 2016, Frisiello sent white powder to Trump’s family in what federal authorities called “a bid to persuade [Trump] to drop out of the presidential race.” Frisiello then sent white powder to Trump Jr. in early 2018 “because of the victim’s connection with his father,” federal authorities said. Frisiello ultimately pleaded guilty to 13 federal counts of mailing a threat. He was sentenced to five years’ probation, including one year of home confinement, after even prosecutors acknowledged there were “unique circumstances concerning Mr. Frisiello’s mental and emotional conditions,” as they said in court documents.

April 6, 2018: The FBI arrested 38-year-old Christopher Michael McGowan of Roanoke, Virginia, for allegedly posting a series of Twitter threats against Rep. Bob Goodlatte, R-Va., over several months. In one posting in December 2017, McGowan wrote to Goodlatte: "I threatened to kill you if you help Trump violate the constitution," according to charging documents. In another alleged post, the self-described Army veteran wrote: "If Trump tries to fire [special counsel Robert] Mueller I WILL make an attempt to execute a citizens arrest against [Goodlatte] and I will kill him if he resist." In subsequent statements to police, he said he drinks too much, was "hoping to get someone's attention over his concerns about the current status of our country," and did not actually intend to harm Goodlatte, court documents recount. A federal grand jury has indicted McGowan on one count of transmitting a threat over state lines, and it's unclear if he has entered a plea as he awaits trial.

June 8, 2018: Federal authorities arrested Nicholas Bukoski of Anne Arundel County, Maryland, for threatening to kill Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vermont, and Sen. Kamala Harris, D-California. “You wouldn’t want to be caught off guard when I use my second amendment protected firearms to rid the world of you,” Bukowski wrote to Sanders via Instagram on March, 24, 2018. Two minutes later, he wrote to Harris saying he will “make sure you and your radical lefty friends never get back in power … because you won’t make it to see that day.” At a mental treatment facility shortly after his arrest, he said, “He was watching the news and social media, which made him want to send the threats. He stated that he was frustrated with liberals and he is very supportive of the current president,” court documents signed by Bukoski recount. Other court documents describe Bukoski’s criminal past unrelated to politics, including a series of arsons he committed in 2017 and early 2018 and an armed robbery he committed in January 2018. In the most recent case involving threats to lawmakers, he ultimately pleaded guilty to one count of transmitting interstate threats and was sentenced to six months in prison.

July 6, 2018: Martin Astrof, 75, approached a volunteer at the campaign office of Rep. Lee Zeldin, R-N.Y., in Suffolk County, New York, and "state[d] he was going to kill supporters of U.S. congressman Lee Zeldin and President Donald Trump," according to charging documents. Astrof was arrested and ultimately pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment. He was sentenced to one year of probation.

August 2018: After the Boston Globe called on news outlets around the country to resist what it called "Trump's assault on journalism," the Boston Globe received more than a dozen threatening phone calls. "You are the enemy of the people," the alleged caller, 68-year-old Robert Chain of Encino, California, told a Boston Globe employee on Aug. 22. "As long as you keep attacking the President, the duly elected President of the United States ... I will continue to threat[en], harass, and annoy the Boston Globe." A week later, authorities arrested Chain on threat-related charges. After a hearing in his case, he told reporters, "America was saved when Donald J. Trump was elected president." Chain has pleaded guilty to seven threat-related charges.

Oct. 4, 2018: The Polk County Sheriff's Office in Florida arrested 53-year-old James Patrick of Winter Haven, Florida, for allegedly threatening "to kill Democratic office holders, members of their families and members of both local and federal law enforcement agencies," according to a police report. In messages posted online, Patrick detailed a "plan" for his attacks, which he said he would launch if then-nominee Brett Kavanaugh was not confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, the police report said. Seeking Patrick's release from jail after his arrest, Patrick's attorney, Terri Stewart, told a judge that her client's "rantings" were akin to comments from "a certain high-ranking official" -- Trump. The president had "threatened the North Korean people -- to blow them all up. It was on Twitter," Stewart said, according to the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. Patrick has been charged with making a written threat to kill or injure, and he has pleaded not guilty.

Late October 2018: Over the course of a week, Florida man Cesar Sayoc allegedly mailed at least 15 potential bombs to prominent critics of Trump and members of the media. Sayoc had been living in a van plastered with pro-Trump stickers, and he had posted several pro-Trump messages on social media. Federal prosecutors have accused him of "domestic terrorism," and Sayoc has since pleaded guilty to 65 counts, including use of a weapon of mass destruction. He was sentenced to 20 years in prison. "We believe the president's rhetoric contributed to Mr. Sayoc's behavior," Sayoc's attorney told the judge at sentencing.

Oct. 21, 2018: While Bruce M. Alexander of Tampa, Florida, was flying on a Southwest Airlines flight from Houston, Texas, to Albuquerque, New Mexico, he assaulted a woman by “reaching around the seat” in front of him and “offensively touching” her, he acknowledged in court documents. When federal authorities then arrested him, he “stated that the President of the United States says it’s ok to grab women by their private parts,” an FBI agent wrote in court documents. Alexander ultimately pleaded guilty to a federal misdemeanor count of simple assault and was sentenced to two days behind bars.

Nov. 3, 2018: Police in Tucson, Arizona, arrested 42-year-old Daniel Brito of Rockville, Maryland, on a robbery charge after he allegedly stole a Tucson man’s “Make America Great Again” hat and punched the victim several times. When a police officer responded to the scene, Brito told the officer, “I saw this guy with a Trump hat walk by and think about, ‘You know what, f--k him,” according to a police report. Brito later told two other officers that he believed the victim was a “Neo-nazi Jew hater” because the victim supported Trump, another police report said.

Dec. 4, 2018: Michael Brogan, 51, of Brooklyn, New York, left a voicemail at an unidentified U.S. Senator's office in Washington insisting, "I'm going to put a bullet in ya. … You and your constant lambasting of President Trump. Oh, reproductive rights, reproductive rights." He later told an FBI agent that before leaving the voicemail he became "very angry" by "an internet video of the Senator, including the Senator's criticism of the President of the United States as well as the Senator's views on reproductive rights." "The threats were made to discourage the Senator from criticizing the President," the Justice Department said in a later press release. Brogan has since pleaded guilty to one count of threatening a U.S. official, and he is awaiting sentencing.

Jan. 17, 2019: Stephen Taubert of Syracuse, New York, was arrested by the U.S. Capitol Police for threatening to kill Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif., and for threatening to "hang" former President Barack Obama. Taubert used "overtly bigoted, hateful language" in his threats, according to federal prosecutors. On July 20, 2018, Taubert called the congresswoman's Los Angeles office to say he would find her at public events and kill her and her entire staff. In a letter to the judge just days before Taubert's trial began, his defense attorney, Courtenay McKeon, noted: "During that time period, Congresswoman Waters was embroiled in a public feud with the Trump administration. … On June 25, 2018, in response to Congresswoman Waters' public statements, President Trump tweeted: 'Congresswoman Maxine Waters, an extraordinarily low IQ person, has … just called for harm to supporters … of the Make America Great Again movement. Be careful what you wish for Max!'" As McKeon insisted to the judge: "This context is relevant to the case." A federal jury ultimately convicted Taubert on three federal charges, including retaliating against a federal official and making a threat over state lines. He was sentenced to nearly four years in prison.

Jan. 22, 2019: David Boileau of Holiday, Florida, was arrested by the Pasco County Sheriff's Office for allegedly burglarizing an Iraqi family's home and "going through" their mailbox, according to a police report. After officers arrived at the home, Boileau "made several statements of his dislike for people of Middle Eastern descent," the report said. "He also stated if he doesn't get rid of them, Trump will handle it." The police report noted that a day before, Boileau threw screws at a vehicle outside the family's house. On that day, Boileau allegedly told police, "We'll get rid of them one way or another." Boileau, 58, has since pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of trespassing, and he was sentenced to 90 days in jail.

Feb. 15, 2019: The FBI in Maryland arrested a Marine veteran and U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant, Christopher Paul Hasson, who they said was stockpiling weapons and "espoused" racist and anti-immigrant views for years as he sought to "murder innocent civilians on a scale rarely seen in this country." In court documents, prosecutors said the 49-year-old "domestic terrorist" compiled a "hit list" of prominent Democrats. Two months later, while seeking Hasson's release from jail before trial, his public defender, Elizabeth Oyer, told a federal judge: "This looks like the sort of list that our commander-in-chief might have compiled while watching Fox News in the morning. … Is it legitimately frustrating that offensive language and ideology has now become part of our national vocabulary? Yes, it is very frustrating. But … it is hard to differentiate it from the random musings of someone like Donald Trump who uses similar epithets in his everyday language and tweets." Hasson ultimately pleaded guilty to federal weapons-related charges, and he was sentenced to more than 13 years in federal prison.

Feb. 15, 2019: Police in Falmouth, Massachusetts, arrested 41-year-old Rosiane Santos after she "verbally assault[ed]" a man for wearing a "Make America Great Again" hat in a Mexican restaurant and then "violently push[ed] his head down," according to police reports. Apparently intoxicated, "she stated that [the victim] was a 'motherf----r' for supporting Trump," one of the responding officers wrote. "She also stated that he shouldn't be allowed in a Mexican restaurant with that." Santos was in the United States unlawfully, federal authorities said. Police arrested her on charges of "simple assault" and disorderly conduct. She has since admitted in local court that there are "sufficient facts" to warrant charges, and she has been placed on a form of probation.

Feb. 25, 2019: An 18-year-old student at Edmond Santa Fe High School in Edmond, Oklahoma, was captured on cellphone video "confronting a younger classmate who [was] wearing a 'Make America Great Again' hat and carrying a 'Trump' flag," according to a press release from the local school system. "The [older] student then proceeds to grab the flag and knock the hat off of his classmate's head." The 18-year-old student was charged in local court with assault and battery, according to Edmond City Attorney Steve Murdock. The student has since pleaded guilty and was placed on probation, Murdock added.

March 16, 2019: Anthony Comello, 24, of Staten Island, New York, was taken into custody for allegedly killing Francesco "Franky Boy" Cali, the reputed head of the infamous Gambino crime family. It marked the first mob boss murder in New York in 30 years, law enforcement officials told ABC News the murder may have stemmed from Comello's romantic relationship with a Cali family member. Court documents since filed in state court by Comello's defense attorney, Robert Gottlieb, said Comello suffers from mental defect and was a believer in the "conspiratorial fringe right-wing political group" QAnon. In addition, Gottlieb wrote: "Beginning with the election of President Trump in November 2016, Anthony Comello's family began to notice changes to his personality. … Mr. Comello became certain that he was enjoying the protection of President Trump himself, and that he had the president's full support. Mr. Comello grew to believe that several well-known politicians and celebrities were actually members of the Deep State, and were actively trying to bring about the destruction of America." Comello has been charged with one count of murder and two counts of criminal possession of a weapon. His trial is pending, and he has pleaded not guilty.

April 5, 2019: The FBI arrested a 55-year-old man from upstate New York for allegedly threatening to kill Rep. Ilhan Omar, D-Minn., one of the first two Muslim women elected to the U.S. Congress. She is an outspoken critic of Trump, and Trump has frequently launched public attacks against her and three other female lawmakers of color. Two weeks before his arrest, Patrick Carlineo Jr. allegedly called Omar's office in Washington labeling the congresswoman a "terrorist" and declaring: "I'll put a bullet in her f----ing skull." When an FBI agent then traced the call to Carlineo and interviewed him, Carlineo "stated that he was a patriot, that he loves the President, and that he hates radical Muslims in our government," according to the FBI agent's summary of the interview. Federal prosecutors charged Carlineo with threatening to assault and murder a United States official. He has since pleaded guilty to the charge and was sentenced to one year in prison.

April 13, 2019: 27-year-old Jovan Crawford, of Gaithersburg, Maryland, and 25-year-old Scott Roberson Washington, D.C., assaulted and robbed a black man wearing a red "Make America Great Again" hat while walking through his suburban Maryland neighborhood. Before punching and kicking him, "The two suspects harassed [the victim] about the hat and asked why he was wearing it. [The victim] told them he has his own beliefs and views," according to charging documents filed after their arrest by Montgomery County, Maryland, police. Crawford later received a text message noting that, "They jumped some trump supporter," the charging documents said. Crawford and Roberson have since pleaded guilty to assault charges. They were each sentenced to at least one year in prison.

April 18, 2019: The FBI arrested John Joseph Kless of Tamarac, Florida, for calling the Washington offices of three prominent Democrats and threatening to kill each of them. At his home, authorities found a loaded handgun in a backpack, an AR-15 rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition. In later pleading guilty to one charge of transmitting threats over state lines, Kless admitted that in a threatening voicemail targeting Rep. Rashida Tlaib, D-Mich., he stated: "You won't f---ing tell Americans what to say, and you definitely don't tell our president, Donald Trump, what to say." Tlaib, a vocal critic of Trump, was scheduled to speak in Florida four days later. Kless was awaiting sentencing. In a letter to the federal judge, he said he "made a very big mistake," never meant to hurt anyone, and "was way out of line with my language and attitude." Kless was sentenced to one year behind bars.

April 24, 2019: The FBI arrested 30-year-old Matthew Haviland of North Kingstown, Rhode Island, for allegedly sending a series of violent and threatening emails to a college professor in Massachusetts who publicly expressed support for abortion rights and strongly criticized Trump. In one of 28 emails sent to the professor on March 10, 2019, Haviland allegedly called the professor "pure evil" and said "all Democrats must be eradicated," insisting the country now has "a president who's taking our country in a place of more freedom rather than less." In another email the same day, Haviland allegedly wrote the professor: "I will rip every limb from your body and … I will kill every member of your family." According to court documents, Haviland's longtime friend later told the FBI that "within the last year, Haviland's views regarding abortion and politics have become more extreme … at least in part because of the way the news media portrays President Trump." Haviland has since pleaded guilty to charges of cyberstalking and transmitting a threat in interstate commerce. He is awaiting sentencing.

June 5, 2019: The FBI arrested a Utah man for allegedly calling the U.S. Capitol more than 2,000 times over several months and threatening to kill Democratic lawmakers, whom he said were "trying to destroy Trump's presidency." "I am going to take up my second amendment right, and shoot you liberals in the head," 54-year-old Scott Brian Haven allegedly stated in one of the calls on Oct. 18, 2018, according to charging documents. When an FBI agent later interviewed Haven, he "explained the phone calls were made during periods of frustration with the way Democrats were treating President Trump," the charging documents said. The FBI visit, however, didn't stop Haven from making more threats, including: On March 21, 2019, he called an unidentified U.S. senator's office to say that if Democrats refer to Trump as Hitler again he will shoot them, and two days later he called an unidentified congressman's office to say he "was going to take [the congressman] out … because he is trying to remove a duly elected President." A federal grand jury has since charged Haven with one count of transmitting a threat over state lines. Haven has since pleaded guilty to one count of transmitting a threat over state lines. He was sentenced to time served.

Aug. 3, 2019: A gunman opened fire at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, killing 22 people and injuring 24 others. The FBI labeled the massacre an act of "domestic terrorism," and police determined that the alleged shooter, 21-year-old Patrick Crusius, posted a lengthy anti-immigrant diatribe online before the attack. "We attribute that manifesto directly to him," according to El Paso police chief Greg Allen. Describing the coming assault as "a response to the Hispanic invasion of Texas," the screed's writer said "the media" would "blame Trump's rhetoric" for the attack but insisted his anti-immigrant views "predate Trump" -- an apparent acknowledgement that at least some of his views align with some of Trump's public statements. The writer began his online essay by stating that he generally "support[s]" the previous writings of the man who killed 51 Muslim worshippers in New Zealand earlier this year. In that case, the shooter in New Zealand said he absolutely did not support Trump as "a policy maker and leader" -- but "[a]s a symbol of renewed white identity and common purpose? Sure." Crusius has been charged with capital murder by the state of Texas.

Aug. 16, 2019: The FBI arrested Eric Lin, 35, of Clarksburg, Maryland, for sending threatening and hate-filled messages over Facebook vowing to kill a Miami-area woman and “all Hispanics in Miami and other places,” as the Justice Department described it. Over two months, the woman received 150 pages’ worth of messages from Lin, the FBI said. In June 2019, Lin allegedly wrote: “In 3 short years your entire Race your entire culture will perish only then after I kill your [epithet] family will I permit you to Die by Hanging on Metal Wire.” A month later, on July 19, 2019, he allegedly wrote: “I Thank God everday President Donald John Trump is President and that he will launch a Racial War and Crusade to keep the n----rs, S---s, and Muslims and any dangerous non-White or Ethnically or Culturally Foreign group ‘In Line.’” On his Facebook account, Lin says he "Studied at Trump University," and he repeatedly praises Trump for, among other things, “fomenting racial hatred” and “Making Racism Ok Again.” At the same time, a few of his posts seem to praise Democrats and minorities. In January, Lin pleaded guilty to one count of transmitting a threatening communication. He has yet to be sentenced.

Aug. 21, 2019: Nathan Semans of Humphreys County, Tennessee, was arrested by state law enforcement for allegedly emailing a threat to a local TV station that demanded the station broadcast a certain story. “Look if you don’t run story I’m going to state capital to blow someone’s brains out,” the email stated. The email then added in part: “I don’t look good at the moment cause the tyranny of what trump did … I’m sick of this nonsense and bologna hanging around that trumps [sic] the perfect American, hallelujah against Trump.” Semans has been charged with one count of making terrorist threats, and his trial is pending. It’s unclear if he has entered an initial plea.

Oct. 7, 2019: A woman driving in Moorhead, Minnesota, called police after 27-year-old Joseph Schumacher of North Dakota allegedly rolled down his window and “began yelling at the female expressing his dislike for the political bumper sticker [she] had displayed on her car,” according to police reports. Schumacher then allegedly pointed to the “Trump Pence” bumper sticker on his own vehicle “and further expressed his difference in national political views” before “brandishing a pistol” inside his vehicle, police said. Schumacher was ultimately arrested on three misdemeanor charges, including disorderly conduct that could “reasonably arouse alarm.” He ultimately pleaded guilty to the disorderly conduct charge and a “gross misdemeanor” charge of carrying a weapon without a permit. He was sentenced to a year behind bars.

Oct. 25, 2019: The FBI arrested Jan Peter Meister of Tucson, Arizona, for threatening to kill House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff, D-California. Three weeks earlier, he left a voicemail at Schiff’s office in Washington, D.C, promising to “blow your brains out.” According to court documents filed in the case, Meister told FBI agents that “he strongly dislikes the Democrats, and feels they are to blame for the country's political issues.” In other court documents, Meister’s attorney, Bradley Roach, noted that the charge his client ultimately accepted “involves threats of injury of death against a political figure who figures very prominently in the ongoing impeachment of President Trump.” Meister has pleaded guilty to one count of threatening a U.S. official. A plea agreement with prosecutors calls for Meister to be sentenced to time already served.

Oct. 26, 2019: During a Collier County fair in Florida, a teenage girl allegedly assaulted a man dressed as Trump. “While standing in line [with my wife and stepdaughter] waiting our turn to go in to the haunted house exhibit, [she] … walked over to me and punched me in my left jaw. She laughed and ran back to her place in line,” the man told police, according a police report of the incident. The unidentified girl’s “sole motivation was to strike ‘Trump,’” and a video of the incident was posted on social media, the police report added. The girl was issued a civil citation and ordered to appear in court, according to the Collier County sheriff’s office.

Nov. 1, 2019: Clifton Blackwell, 61, of Milwaukee was arrested by local police after allegedly throwing acid on a Peruvian-American’s face and accusing him of being inside the United States illegally. Before attacking the victim outside of a Mexican restaurant, Blackwell allegedly asked the victim “Why you invade my country?” and “Why don’t you respect my laws?” The attack was captured on video by surveillance cameras, and the victim suffered second-degree burns on his face and neck. When police then searched Blackwell’s home, they found gun parts and “three letters addressed to President Donald Trump,” a police report noted. And when police interviewed an employee at a grocery store frequented by Blackwell, the employee told police that Blackwell “many times talked about his political support for President Trump,” according to a police report. “She stated she was even warned by the security guard James to not talk about political issued when [Blackwell] is in the store because of how he acts.” Blackwell was charged with first-degree reckless injury during a hate crime. He pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Nov. 6, 2019: Lawrence K. Garcia of the Albuquerque, New Mexico, area was arrested by the FBI for allegedly threatening to kill local law enforcement and bomb a U.S. bank’s offices. In a phone call to the bank, Garcia said, “If Donald J. Trump doesn’t step down by my birthday, the day after, we shall declare war against the devil. … [S]o Donald J. Trump you are going to bow to the American people,” according to charging documents filed in the case. A federal grand jury indicted Garcia on one count of communicating a threat over state lines, but he has a history of mental illness and a federal judge later determined he “is not presently competent to stand trial.” Garcia was placed into federal custody to receive treatment.

Feb. 11, 2020: Patrick Bradley, 34, of Windham, N.H., was arrested by local police for allegedly assaulting a pro-Trump teenager on the day of New Hampshire’s primary election for presidential nominees. According to police, “Bradley had exited the voting polls located inside Windham High School and was walking by a TRUMP campaign tent occupied by several campaign supporters / workers. As he passed by the tent Bradley slapped [the] 15-year old juvenile across the face. He then assaulted two other adults who attempted to intercede. Bradley was also accused of throwing TRUMP campaign signs and attempting to knock over the aforementioned tent.” Bradley was charged with three misdemeanor counts of simple assault and one count of disorderly conduct. He has pleaded not guilty and is awaiting trial.

Feb. 19, 2020: The FBI arrested Salvatore Lippa II, 57, of upstate New York for allegedly threatening to kill Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York, the top Democrat in the Senate, and Rep. Adam Schiff, D-California, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee. In late January, he left a voicemail at Schiff’s office in Washington, D.C., calling Schiff a “scumbag” and threatening to “put a bullet in your [expletive] forehead,” according to charging documents. Two weeks later, he allegedly left a voicemail at Schumer’s office in Albany, New York, saying “somebody wants to assassinate you.” When federal authorities confronted Lippa, he “admitted that he made the threatening calls because he was upset about the impeachment proceedings” targeting Trump. Lippa has been charged with threatening to kill a U.S. official and is currently engaged in plea negotiations with the government, according to court records.

April 30, 2020: A Pennsylvania man who fled Cuba nearly two decades ago, Alazo Alexander, allegedly opened fire on the Cuban embassy in Washington, D.C. When police officers first arrested Alexander, he was holding an American flag and yelling nonsensical statements, according to charging documents filed in the case. He had also unsuccessfully tried to burn a Cuban flag that had several phrases written on it, including, “Trump 2020.” After his arrest, Alexander told authorities he had heard voices in his head and believed certain Cubans were trying to kill him, so he “wanted to get them before they got him,” the charging documents said. His wife later told authorities that Garcia was previously diagnosed with a delusional disorder. Garcia has been charged with three firearms-related offenses, including one count of using a deadly weapon to attack a foreign official. It’s unclear if he’s entered an initial plea.

January 6th, 2021

No way in hell am I reading this entire thing but the fact that you started with a crime committed by some random guys and are trying to blame Trump for it because he holds a very common position on illegal immigration that neither promotes or encourages violence because some crazy person allegedly used it as a justification for beating someone up and ended with January 6 as if it was some incredibly horrible ordeal that Trump is somehow responsible for because he encouraged people to protest peacefully implies this entire message is bullshit you're trying to blame on Trump that he actually has nothing to do with.

#anon #answered #long post

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