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newsfrom-theworld · 5 months

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BRANDS TO BOYCOTT

1 Consumer boycott goals:

Let's start by boycotting these brands that are directly involved in Israeli apartheid

'' BIG THREE''

Mc Donald: gives free meals to Israeli soldiers

Disney ( sadly, Disney was my childhood): declared support for Israel by pledging $2 million

Starbucks: sued his union over its pro-Palestine positions

Siemens

Siemens (Germany) is the prime contractor of the Euro-Asia Interconnector, an Israel-EU undersea power cable that is expected to connect illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories to Europe. Siemens brand appliances are sold all over the world.

PUMA

PUMA (Germany) sponsors the Israel Football Federation, which governs teams in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Carrefour

Carrefour (France) is a facilitator of genocide. Carrefour-Israel supported Israeli soldiers who took part in the genocide of Palestinians in Gaza with gifts of personal parcels. In 2022 it entered into a partnership with the Israeli company Electra Consumer Products and its subsidiary Yenot Bitan, both of which were involved in serious violations against the Palestinian people.

AXA

When Russia invaded Ukraine, the insurance giant AXA (France) took targeted measures against it. Yet as Israel, a 75-year-old regime of colonialism and apartheid, wages a genocidal war on Gaza, AXA continues to invest in Israeli banks that finance war crimes and the theft of Palestinian land and natural resources.

Hewlett Packard Inc (HP Inc)

HP Inc (USA) provides services to the offices of the genocide leaders, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Finance Minister Smotrich.

SodaStream

SodaStream is actively complicit in Israel's policy of displacing Israel's indigenous Bedouin-Palestinian citizens in the Naqab (Negev) and has a long history of racial discrimination against Palestinian workers.

Ahava cosmetics

Ahava have their production site, visitor center and main store in an illegal Israeli settlement in the occupied Palestinian territories.

D/MAX

RE/MAX (USA) markets and sells property in illegal Israeli settlements built on stolen Palestinian land, thus enabling Israeli colonization of the occupied West Bank.

2 Divestment objectives:

Elbit Systems

Elbit Systems is the largest apartheid Israeli arms company. It “field tests” its weapons against the Palestinians, including in Israel's ongoing genocidal war against the Palestinians in Gaza. In addition to building killer drones, Elbit produces surveillance technology for the apartheid wall, checkpoints and fence in Gaza, enabling apartheid. The US and EU use Elbit technology to militarize their borders, violating the rights of refugees and indigenous peoples.

HD Hyundai/Volvo/CAT/JCB machinery

by HD Hyundai (South Korea), Volvo (Sweden/China), CAT (United States) and JCB (United Kingdom) have been used by Israel in the ethnic cleansing and forced displacement of Palestinians through the destruction of their homes, farms and commercial activities, as well as the construction of illegal settlements on stolen land, a war crime under international law.

Barclays

Barclays Bank (UK) holds more than £1 billion in shares and provides more than £3 billion in loans and subscriptions to nine companies whose weapons, components and military technology have been used in Israel's armed violence against Palestinians.

CAF

The Basque transport company CAF builds and provides maintenance services to the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR), a tram line serving illegal Israeli settlements in Jerusalem. The CAF benefits from Israel's war crimes on stolen Palestinian lands.

Chevron

The US fossil fuel multinational Chevron is the main international company extracting gas claimed by Israeli apartheid in the eastern Mediterranean. Chevron generates billions in revenue, bolstering Israel's war chest and apartheid system and exacerbating the climate crisis.

HikVision

Amnesty International has documented high-resolution CCTV cameras made by Chinese company Hikvision installed in residential areas and mounted on Israeli military infrastructure for surveillance of Palestinians. Some of these models, according to Hikvision marketing, can connect to external facial recognition software.

TKH Security

Amnesty International has identified cameras from the Dutch company TKH Security used by Israel for surveillance of Palestinians. TKH supplies the Israeli police with surveillance technology used to enforce apartheid.

Other brands:

Zara

Zara's latest marketing campaign uses corpses in plastic wrapping, and warzone aesthetics, mocking the genocide by israel in Gaza. In a previous incident Joey Schwebel, a Canadian-Israeli dual national and chairman of israel's Zara franchisee Trimera, hosted the convicted terrorist Itamar Ben-Gvir at his home in the lead-up to the Israeli elections. Zara did not made a statement distancing themselves from this association and allowed this ad campaign to run.

Adidas

Adidas uses isr@eli manufacturer, Delta Galil, to manufacture its underwear range.

Prada:

Prada Beauty is a partnership with L'Oreal, which is a 'warm friend of Isr@el'.

Louis Vuitton:

The owner of Louis Vuitton's parent company, LVMH, Bernard Arnault invests hundreds of millions in Isr@eli companies

Dior:

The owner of Dior's parent company, LVMH, Bernard Arnault invests hundreds of millions in Isr@eli companies

Caterpillar:

Caterpillar bulldozers have been used in the demolition of Palestinian homes. The D9 bulldozer was specifically designed for the IOF.

American Eagle:

American Eagle posted an image of the Isr@eli Flag on their flagship billboard in Times Square showing their support for the apartheid state.

Fenty Beauty by Rihanna:

The owner of Fenty's parent company, LVMH, Bernard Arnault invests hundreds of millions in Isr@eli companies

Eurovision:

Eurovision is allowing israel to compete this year despite the genocide theyre comitting and they will use this opportunity to spread propaganda

Donna Italia

Sources:

BDS

this site

this specifical post on Twitter ( X )

if i discover news brands i will edit the post

And Always

Free Palestine, now and always.

437 notes · View notes

sanzaibian · 2 months

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I turns off my phone angrily. I have barely touched down to Pudong International Airport, and now I have to call my Shanghai agent about how I’m going to be late, and that “China Eastern”, that company full of crooks, doesn’t even want to compensate my $4200 business class ticket for being 2 hours late.

“Allô ? C’est Julien, je suis enfin arrivé à Shanghai. (Hello ? It’s Julien, I’ve finally touched down at Shanghai.)” I say to my local correspondent, the one responsible for dragging me here.

- Enfin ! Ça fait une heure qu’on vous attend ! (Finally ! We’ve been waiting for you for a whole hour !)

- C’est pas ma faute ! Le vol a eu deux heures de retard à cause de soi-disants ‘vents forts’ vers la Mongolie… et ces escrocs ne veulent rien me rembourser… typique… (It’s not my fault ! The flight was two hours late due to so-called ‘powerful winds’ around Mongolia… and those crooks don’t want to reimburse me… typical…)” I answer, annoyed.

- Bon, de l’Aéroport de 浦東 (Pudong) jusqu’ici… pff… je vais devoir leur dire de revenir cet après-midi… (So, from 浦東 (Pudong) Airport to here… ugh… I need to ask them to come back this afternoon…)” He says, similarly annoyed, though seemingly flaunting his perfect pronunciation in Chinese.

- Ne râle pas sur moi, j’ai rien fait ! Je savais que j’aurais dû prendre Air France, ils n’auraient pas eu de retard comme ces asiates… (Don’t dump it on me, I did nothing ! I knew I should have gone for Air France, they wouldn’t be late like those chinks…)

- Roh… (Ugh…)” He sighs a while. “Je vais m’occuper de tout. Juste… viens aussi vite que possible. (I’ll manage. Just… come here as soon as you can.)”

I turn off the phone. As if I would waste a minute of my life… I’m Julien Blanc, and my time is money, just like the saying goes. As the heir of a multi-million dollars worth banking company, I have investments left right and center, and can’t let the next golden goose escape me.

Recently, a well-known investor, Pierre Zhang, let me know of a promising startup here in Shanghai. While at first I was understandingly skeptical, after all chinks are known for their plagiarism, I did check the project and found it to be unique, and even viable.

While I do know that Pierre Zhang is half one of them, so he does take their side much more than a regular person would, this time he saw a good opportunity. And it will be botched due to an incapable company that spouted nonsense about “strong winds” or something and was late as a result.

Angrily, I stomp in the giant airport halls, guiding myself thanks to my impeccable English – though, just don’t listen to the pronunciation. I’m stopped multiple times for security checks, and I do swear on them a couple of times, but they deserved it for wasting my time even more.

However, as I was striding in the main hall in order to find the metro station, seeing more and more of those chink hooligans, one of them shoves me to the side. He’s wearing a mask like the pussy he is, as well as a ridiculous oversized hoodie, some laughable jewelry and undistinguished sweatpants.

He’s left as soon as I turn around, meaning I can’t berate him. Youth these days are really insufferable. Where I grew up, on the Saint-Louis island in Paris, we weren’t even half as rude as today’s kids.

Scoffing, I continue rushing to the metro, though I kind of feel dizzy. Did he give me a disease or something ? When I reach the metro shoot, I see a barrier with policemen. Apparently they’re scanning for the coronavirus – they’re still doing that ? – by checking our temperature.

I go in the barrier, confident that I’ll pass the test, when suddenly, my path is blocked.

“Sorry, sir, please come with me.” Said a policewoman in her heavily accented English.

- What are you doing ! Let me go, I did nothing wrong !” I protest with a similarly accented English.

The policewoman doesn’t answer me and leads me to a small room in the airport. There, I see a bunch of other people with masks, waiting on seats. Showing me a mask, the policewoman explain :

“You may be sick. Take a mask and wait. - I’m going to be late ! Nothing’s wrong with me, just let me leave !” I say, though I don’t notice my accent shifting a little.

- Wear it or face consequences.” The policewoman insists, dangling the mask in front of my eyes. I sigh.

- Okay, but make it quick. I’ll wear 一只 (one).”

I squint my eyes. How did I say ‘one’ ? It feels incorrect, have I accidentally used French ‘un’ ?

I take the mask and wear it, still squinting. I still feel dizzy, so I guess the policewoman must have been right ? I take my phone out, wanting to send a quick message to Pierre about me being late, but something seems wrong.

When I look on my phone, there’s a weird app named 抖音 that has been installed. I don’t remember doing that. In fact, why is there even a Chinese app on my phone !

I click on it, and suddenly, videos start playing. I squint my eyes as I look at the videos of ch… Chinese people doing a variety of things. First it’s a video of a cat rubbing on someone, and that guy exclaimed “它真的是只饥渴死的猫啊！”, with then the woman filming answering, with a hurried tone “快摸它啊，你干嘛在那儿等呗？真冷啊。”. Even though I don’t understand a word that is said, I can guess that the woman is telling the guy to go rub the cat.

It’s funnier than I expected. Turns out the Chinese have more humor than I thought. Then, another video comes on, showing a guy, looking just like that punk from earlier, saying “穿这种衣服，我干嘛不会感丢人哎？(… these clothes… … lose face ?)”, and the camera pans out to a woman in a cockroach outfit. The punk continues “你已经三十岁了，为什么还在卖这种衣服了？(… thirty years old, why still buy… ?)”, the woman answers “你现在我穿什么你都要管吗？(You... right now what I wear… your business ?)”. The punk then comes back into frame, with the woman on the left, asking “没有情侣版吗？哪只手我该牵啊？(There isn’t a couple’s version ? Which hand should I hold ?). Then, the woman shows a tendril, and they hold hands like that. I smile, finding it way funnier than it should.

I don’t really notice how I understand more and more what’s on 抖音 (Douyin), though I do let myself grow limp on the waiting room chair. I guess I don’t have much regards anymore for how I look, after all I’m waiting for a coronavirus test. Nobody’s going to comment on my posture !

The next video shows three guys running, with the caption 三人跑步时能干什么 (What can three people do while running together ?), and I see how their hair bop up and down. I’ve been shaving myself bald for quite a few years, ever since I was balding too much for me to bother with hair, but seeing these guys like that makes me a bit nostalgic of that time.

Seeing them doing stupider and stupider stuff, and smiling more and more as they show bungee jumping, doing pull-ups, playing games, stir-frying and even boxing, I feel a bit weird. Like I can kind of relate, in my youth I also did crazy things, and it would absolutely be something I would have done with my friends. I scratch my head, feeling it tingle, as I continue watching the next video, not even realizing my squinting is less and less strenuous.

The videos continue trickling in, every one more humorous than the last, and I catch myself chuckling out loud multiple times. By now, I understand everything very clearly, and when a doctor comes to do a coronavirus test, I don’t even blink when he addresses me in Chinese :

“少年，请跟我进走。(Young man, please enter with me.)

- Yes, 先生。(Yes, sir.)” I answer, mixing English and Chinese.

Everything is confused as he takes me to a machine, my thoughts mixing French, English and Chinese. Even my clothes feel… less tight than they used to. Almost as if they were melting and becoming glue.

I take place in the machine and he activates it. I feel as if things become clearer while I’m in. Like, for example, why was I stressed just now ? I don’t have anything important to do right now. And why languages are mixed ? I guess it’s because it’s cooler to mix in English…

The machine stops, and I leave it, scratching my straight hair. Had I ? … no, of course not, it’s my facial hair that I shave…

The doctor hands me my piercings.

“Euh, attendez, 先生，有什么不对了…… (Er, wait, sir, there’s something that’s not right.)” I ask, mixing French and Chinese. I really feel like something is not right.

- 什么发生过了？会跟我谈一谈。(What happened ? You can discuss it with me.)

- 我……有个奇怪的感受。Est-ce que 您找到了种疾病吗？(I… have a weird feeling. Did you find some kind of disease ?)

- 没有。但是您不舒服的话我肯定会给您扑热息痛。(I didn’t. However, if you don’t feel good, I can give you some paracetamol.)” He answers me, with a helpful look.

- 该好了。Merci. (It should be good. Thank you.)”

I take the pill he gives me, and put my piercings back on as I go back in the terminal. As I walk, I feel very comfy, as if everything was alright. I look down on my large oversized hoodie with its colorful prints. I feel like I’m in my youth once again… huh, it’s so weird to say that when I’m only... 23 years old !

Suddenly, I get a phone call from a weird contact I don’t remember having, someone named 张皮尔 (Zhang Pi’er/Pierre). I accept the call :

“喂。是谁？(Hello. Who’s there ?)” I ask, with a perfect accent.

- Julien ? Pourquoi tu parles chinois ? (Julien ? Why do you speak Chinese ?)” He groans, then switches to Chinese. “是我问您是谁。是您的电话吗？(I’m the one asking you who you are. Is it your phone ?)

- 当然是。我是个富二代，为啥要偷手机啊？(Of course. I have a trust fund, why would I steal a phone ?)” I slur, my speech becoming more and more relaxed.

- 嗯……那您是谁啊？您认不认识Julien Blanc ? (Ugh… So who are you ? Do you know Julien Blanc ?)

- 是白炬亮。那你到底是谁啊？(I’m Bai Juliang. And now can you tell me who you are ?)

- 是张皮尔……嗯……听我说一下。你有没有多钱会投资？我认为了Julien Blanc要投资新项目，但你还会投资一下。有没有兴趣？(I’m Pierre Zhang… ugh… Listen. Do you have a lot of money to invest ? I thought Julien Blanc would come and invest in a new project, but you can still invest. Are you interested ?)”

I think for a while. It could be great to have some money coming from another place than my parents’ company… plus, I don’t want to have to join it, or risk being cut off from my money…

However, there’s time, I’m still young, and there’s no rush right now… Plus, having work is, like, a lot of work, and I don’t want to work… But I have an idea.

“张先生，你想不想跟我投资？我给了你钱币，你给了我专业，收入分两半。感觉好吗？(Mr. Zhang, do you want to invest with me ? I give you the funds, you give me the expertise, and we divide the profits in half. Do you like that ?)”

After a while, he answers :

“感觉好了。(I think it’s good.)”

#male transformation #male tf #white to asian #daddy to twink #racial tf #twink tf #twinkification #age reduction #mental change #reality change #transformation #tf story

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mightyflamethrower · 8 months

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“Name me a single objective we’ve ever set out to accomplish that we’ve failed on. Name me one, in all of our history. Not one!”

-President Joe Biden, August 16, 2023

Joe Biden in one of his now accustomed angry “get off my grass” moods dared the press to find just one of his policies/objectives that has not worked. Silence followed.

Perhaps it was polite to say nothing, given even the media knows almost every enacted Biden policy has failed.

Here is a summation of what he should instead apologize for.

Biden in late summer 2021 sought a 20th anniversary celebration of 9/11 and the 2001 subsequent invasion of Afghanistan. He wished to be the landmark president that yanked everyone out of Afghanistan after 20 years in country. But the result was the greatest military humiliation of the United States since the flight from Vietnam in 1975.

Consider the ripples of Biden’s disaster. U.S. deterrence was crippled worldwide. China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea almost immediately began to bluster or return to their chronic harassment of U.S. and allied ships and planes. We left thousands of allied Afghans to face Taliban retribution, along with some Western contractors.

Biden abandoned a $1 billion embassy, and a $300 million remodeled Bagram airbase strategically located not far from China and Russia, and easily defensible. Perhaps $50 billion in U.S. weaponry and supplies were abandoned and now find their way into the international terrorist mart.

All our pride flags, our multimillion gender studies programs at Kabul University, and our George Floyd murals did not just come to naught, but were replaced by the Taliban’s anti-homosexual campaigns, burkas, and detestation of any trace of American popular culture.

Vladimir Putin sized up the skedaddle. He collated it with Biden’s unhinged quip that he would not get too excited if Putin just staged a “minor” invasion of Ukraine. He remembered Biden’s earlier request to Putin to modulate Russian hacking to exempt a few humanitarian American institutions. Then Russia concluded of our shaky Commander-in-Chief that he either did not care or could do nothing about another Russian invasion.

The result so far is more than 500,000 dead and wounded in the war, a Verdun-stand-off along with fortified lines, the steady depletion of our munitions and weapon stocks, and a new China/Russia/Iran/North Korean axis, with wink and nod assistance from NATO Turkey.

Biden blew up the Abraham accords, nudged Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States over to the dark side of Iran, China, and Russia. He humiliated the U.S. on the eve of the midterms by callously begging the likes of Iran, Venezuela, Russia, and Saudi Arabia to pump more oil that he had damned as unclean at home and cut back its production. In Bidenomics, instead of producing oil, the president begs autocracies to export it to us at high prices while he drains the nation’s strategic petroleum reserve for short-term political advantage.

Biden deliberately alienated Israel by openly interfering in its domestic politics. He pursued the crackpot Iran Deal while his special Iranian envoy was removed for disclosing classified information.

No one can explain why Biden ignored the Chinese balloon espionage caper, kept mum about the engineered Covid virus that escaped the Wuhan lab, said not a word about a Chinese biolab discovered in rural California, and had his envoys either bow before Chinese leaders or take their insults in silence—other than he is either cognitively challenged or leveraged by his decade-long grifting partnership with his son Hunter.

Yet another Biden’s legacy will be erasing the southern border and with it, U.S. immigration law. Over seven million aliens simply crossed into the U.S. illegally with Biden’s tacit sanction—without audits, background checks, vaccinations, and COVID testing, much less English fluency, skills, or high-school diplomas.

Biden’s only immigration accomplishment was to render the entire illegal sanctuary city movement a cruel joke. Given the flood, mostly rich urban and vacation home dwellers made it very clear that while they fully support millions swarming into poor Latino communities of southern Texas and Arizona, they do not want any illegal aliens fouling their carefully cultivated nests.

Biden is mum about the 100,000 fentanyl deaths from cartel-imported and Chinese-supplied drugs across his open border. He seems to like the idea that Mexican President Obrador periodically mouths off, ordering his vast expatriate community to vote Democratic and against Trump.

Despite all the pseudo-blue collar dissimulation about Old Joe Biden from Scranton, he has little empathy for the working classes. Indeed, he derides them as chumps and dregs, urges miners to learn coding as the world covets their coal, and studiously avoids getting anywhere near the toxic mess in East Palestine, Ohio, or so far the moonscape on Maui.

Bidenomics is a synonym for printing up to $6 billion dollars at precisely the time post-Covid consumer demand was soaring, while previously dormant supply chains were months behind rebooting production and transportation. Biden is on track to increase the national debt more than any one-term president.

In Biden’s weird logic, if he raised the price of energy, gasoline, and key food staples 20-30 percent since his inauguration without a commensurate rise in wages, and then saw the worst inflation in 40 years occasionally decline from record highs one month to the next, then he “beat inflation.”

But the reason why more than 60 percent of the nation has no confidence in Bidenomics is because it destroyed their household budgets. Gas is nearly twice what it was in January 2021. Interest rates have about tripled. Key staple foods are often twice as costly—meat, vegetables, and fruits especially.

Biden has ended through his weaponized Attorney General Merrick Garland the age-old American commitment to equal justice under the law. The FBI, DOJ, CIA, and IRS are hopelessly politically compromised. Many of their bureaucrats serve as retrieval agents for lost Biden family incriminating laptops, diaries, and guns. In sum, Biden criminalized opposing political views.

Biden has unleashed the administrative state for the first time in history to destroy the Republican primary front runner and his likely opponent. His legacy will be the corruption of U.S. jurisprudence and the obliteration of the American reputation for transparent permanent government that should be always above politics, bribery, and corruption.

If in the future, an on-the-make conservative prosecutor in West Virginia, Utah, or Mississippi wishes to make a national name, then he has ample precedent to indict a Democrat President for receiving bad legal advice, questioning the integrity of an election, or using social media to express doubt that the new non-Election-Day balloting was on the up-and-up, or supposedly overvaluing his real estate.

The Biden family’s decade-long family grifting will likely expose Joe Biden as the first president in U.S. history who fitted precisely the Constitution’s definition of impeachment and removal—given his “high crimes and misdemeanors” appear “bribery”-related. If further evidence shows he altered U.S. foreign policy in accordance with the wishes from his benefactors in Ukraine, China, or Romania, then he committed constitutionally-defined “treason” as well.

Defunding the police, and pandemics of exempted looting, shoplifting, smashing, and grabbing, and carjacking merit no administrative attention. Nor does the ongoing systematic destruction of our blue bicoastal cities, Los Angeles, New York, Portland, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. All that, along with the disasters in East Palestine or Maui are out of sight, out of mind from a day at the beach at Biden’s mysteriously purchased nearly 6,000 square-foot beachfront mansion.

Biden ran on Barack Obama-like 2004 rhetoric (“Well, I say to them tonight, there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America).”

And like Obama, he used that ecumenical sophistry to gain office only to divide further the U.S. No sooner than he was elected, we began hearing from the great unifier eerie screaming harangues about “semi-fascists” and “ultra-MAGA” dangerous zealots, replete with red-and black Phantom of the Opera backdrops.

What followed the unifying rhetoric was often amnesties and exemptions for violent offenders during the 120 days of rioting, looting, killing, and attacks on police officers in summer 2020. In contrast, his administration lied when it alleged that numerous officers had died at the hands of the January 6 rioters. In addition, the Biden administration mandated long-term incarceration of many who committed no illegal act other than acting like buffoons and “illegally parading.”

The message was exemptions for torching a federal courthouse, a police precinct, or historic church or attempting to break into the White House grounds to get a president and his family—but long prison terms for wearing cow horns, a fur vest, and trespassing peacefully like a lost fool in the Capitol.

Finally, Biden’s most glaring failure was simply being unpresidential. He snaps at reporters, and shouts at importune times. He can no longer read off a big-print teleprompter. Even before a global audience, he cannot kick his lifelong creepy habit of turkey-gobbling on children necks, blowing into their ears and hair of young girls, and squeezing women far too long and far too hard.

His frailty redefined American presidential campaigning as basement seclusion and outsourcing propaganda to the media. And his disabilities only intensified during his presidency. Biden begins his day late and quits early. He has recalibrated the presidency as a 5-hour, 3-day a week job.

If Trump was the great exaggerator, Biden is our foremost liar. Little in his biography can be fully believed. He lies about everything from his train rides to the death of his son to his relationship with Biden-family foreign collaborators, to vaccinations to the economy. Anytime Biden mentions places visited, miles flown, or rails ridden, he is likely lying.

Biden continues with impunity because the media feels that a mentally challenged fabulist is preferable to Donald Trump and so contextualizes or ignores his falsehoods. Never has a U.S. president fallen and stumbled or gotten lost on stage so frequently—or been a single small trip away from incapacity.

So, yes, Biden’s initiatives have succeeded only in the sense of becoming successfully enacted—and therefore nearly destroying the country.

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inkedroplets · 7 months

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Supercorptober 2023 Day 4: Money

Read here on AO3

"Isn't that romantic?"

"What is?" Kara asked, so focused on her article that she didn’t look up from her computer until Nia gave her a little nudge on her shoulder.

"That," Nia said, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. She pointed surreptitiously to the man who had just stepped out of the elevator holding a modest bouquet of both white and red roses. He walked with purpose towards the desk cluster reserved for CatCo's revolving door of interns, his sights trained on the brunette whom Kara had seen earlier in the day being taught the ins and outs of the copier with a look of deep concentration on her face.

He did his best to hide the flowers behind his back before he approached for all the good that it did him because it seemed that she had caught a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye before he could surprise her.

She goggled at him, clearly not expecting the visit but when he produced the flowers from behind his back a little shyly, she beamed at him and leaped out of her chair with enough force to nearly bowl him over.

“That is sweet,” Kara said. She smiled, feeling happy for them even though she didn’t know them. “And who knows," Kara said and glanced towards Andrea's office. "If she snags the junior reporter job he might be delivering flowers to her very own office someday."

Maybe,” Nia said, but Kara could tell from her voice that she believed such an outcome was a long shot. A fair assessment considering how picky Andrea could be. And with only one open junior reporter position up for grabs it meant that competition would be nothing short of intense. “He’d probably want to spring for a bigger bouquet for just such an occasion. Nia smiled and snuck one more look at the happy couple before she glanced back towards Andrea’s office. “I should get back to work before Andrea comes out and makes an example out of me in front of the interns.” She rapped her knuckles on the side of Kara’s desk and set off back to her own

“He could always fill her office with flowers,” Kara suggested before Nia got too far away that she had to raise her voice. She did so almost absentmindedly, her focus had already shifted back to her article.

"Now that would be romantic,” Nia said as she kept walking. “But I don’t want to even think about how expensive that would be,” she called over her shoulder.

Would it be romantic? The answer seemed obvious but still, Kara found herself pondering the question intently while she tried to return to work. As if she didn't like the very obvious answer staring her in the face. Of course, it would be romantic.

So my office is overflowing with flowers…

That much was obvious. If a single bouquet was romantic, surely several dozen more than even that would be considered romantic. Looking at it in such an overly logical (and paradoxically illogical) way, Kara couldn't help but think of Brainy, believing he might try and break down the problem in a similar fashion.

But as distracting as the question was, it was Nia’s last comment that Kara found herself dwelling on long after she had left work. How expensive was it to fill an office with flowers? It sounded like the kind of esoteric problem you might see crop up on a particularly finicky math test. Because it wasn’t just the sheer quantity of flowers that would factor in, as well. There was also the unusualness of the request to consider. Not many flower shops would even be able to fulfill such a request, no matter how much they might like to.

She puzzled over the question while she ate dinner alone. Leftover takeout from her favorite Chinese place. As she chewed she made a couple of rough estimates. Tried to recall just how many flowers there had been in her office that day… She remembered that stepping into her office had momentarily taken her breath away. It had been like stepping into a fairytale and how she had never even tried to count them. It would have felt too much like trying to figure out how a magic trick was done. It would rob it of something essential, something beautiful.

Had she really never asked herself that before? It felt strange to think that it had only just now occurred to her. Both the enormity of the gesture and how much something like that must have cost. Maybe because she hadn’t wanted to?

She speared a potsticker on the end of her chopsticks and chewed it without really tasting it. It wasn’t just the flowers though. There was the little matter of CatCo itself… What did it mean when your best friend bought you a company? But she already knew what it meant. A part of her had always known. It might have been the utter shock she had felt upon first hearing the news that had kept her from realizing it. Maybe it was Lena’s insistence that her buying CatCo was merely a business decision that she fully intended to make the most of even when Kara could see in her eyes it was so much more than that. Or maybe it was the simple fact that she was too afraid of what it might mean.

She had come within a hair's breadth of finally admitting it when Lena had sold CatCo to Andrea. When Lena had freely confessed just why she had bought the company. But then things hadn’t gone crashing down around them soon after that and the truth staring her in the face had been all too easy to ignore.

But what was stopping her now? When things between them had never been better? The answer came to Kara at once. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. Save for however long it would take her to fly to Lena's penthouse and maybe a few stops along the way…

Kara shouldn't have been surprised that Lena's penthouse was empty when she flew past. Not when Lena spent most of her nights working well into the night. Usually that would have bothered her. But not tonight. Tonight it felt right. It offered a kind of harmony that they might look back on fondly…

She touched down on the balcony and realized that she was already smiling when she saw Lena sitting at her desk. Whatever she was working on had her full attention and it allowed Kara to cross the balcony without Lena noticing. She knocked twice and when Lena looked up from her work she did so with a knowing smile on her face.

"How did you know it was me?" Kara asked when Lena opened the balcony door.

"I had a feeling," Lena said, stepping aside to let Kara inside. "And the list of people I know that can enter through my balcony starts and ends with you. Is everything okay?"

"Everything's great. I just hope I'm not interrupting you."

Lena shook her head and it was only then that Kara realized she had taken off her heels, the difference in their heights a little more noticeable. "I was just about ready to call it a night." She waved a hand at her computer. "I could work through the morning and I'd still have plenty of work left to do. Might as well get a few hours of sleep before I do it all over again." she joked.

"You shouldn't work so late," Kara insisted.

"Look who's talking," Lena said but nodded a bit apologetically. "I'll take a day off soon," she promised. "We can do brunch," she suggested with a smile. "My treat."

"It's always your treat," Kara said and knew that there would be no better opening than now. "And even when it's not you always know how to distract me when the waiter comes by with our bill so that you can grab it first. How do you do that?"

Lena grinned. "You're not the only one with superpowers," she joked.

"You spend too much on me," Kara said softly.

"Well, you do eat a lot," Lena said, still grinning although it started to fade when she saw that Kara hadn't joined her.

"You filled my office with flowers," Kara said. "I have no idea how much that must have cost you. I still remember how magical it looked. It was like stepping into the Land of Oz. So much color. It's one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me, Lena."

"Kara..." Lena said, starting to blush. "You already thanked me for that ages ago. You don't have to do it again."

"I want to. You... You bought CatCo for me." She pursed her lips, feeling a tightness in her throat. "I never... I never really thanked you properly for that. How could I ever thank you for something like that?"

"Kara," Lena said, a little sternly, her cheeks now aflame. "It was n—"

"Don't say it was nothing," Kara pleaded. She shook her head and brushed at her eyes. Please don't say that. Don't try and diminish it when it means the world to me."

Lena nodded slowly and Kara could hear her heart beating a little faster, nearly keeping time with her own. "CatCo was important to you," Lena explained. "And I..." She took a breath and let it out slowly, looking everywhere but back at Kara. "I just like when you're happy," she said softly.

"I know," Kara murmured. "I feel the same way."

"Is that what you came all the over here to talk to me about?" Lena asked, and Kara could feel her trying to inject a little levity back into their conversation.

"Not exactly. Can you close your eyes for a second? Just one," Kara said, holding up her index finger to hammer home the point.

For a moment, Kara saw the polite curiosity on Lena's face and wondered if she might try and ask what for but when their eyes met, a small smile pulled at Lena's mouth and she shut her eyes.

"You can open them now," Kara said, looking the tiniest bit windswept.

"Oh my God..." There was a sharp intake of breath and Lena reached for Kara's arm as if she suddenly needed it to keep her balance. But when she clasped her wrist it was with a featherlight touch. "Kara, how did you?" she began to say but fell silent before she could finish her question. "It's beautiful," she said a little while later after she had taken in every inch of her office as if trying to commit it to memory, and for all Kara knew she was. "Like magic," she said and looked at Kara sideways and even that was enough to make Kara blush a little.

I bet it does look like magic, Kara thought. When Lena had closed her eyes her office had looked as it almost always did, fastidiously neat, the kind of mental image one might think up when imagining an office in a sprawling high-rise. When she opened them again her office was bursting with plumerias. Sprays of color in delicate shades of pink and white, vibrant yellow and blue as well as deep red and orange. And she still had one last trick up her sleeve... She reached behind her back in an obvious way to draw Lena's eye and pulled a bouquet from behind her back that she offered to Lena a bit timidly considering she had just filled her office with flowers.

#supercorptober2023 #supercorptober #my writing

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snailsdraw · 1 year

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[Start ID:

3 pages of HLVRAI doodles of the team celebrating Chinese New Year.

Tommy contemplates a big bottle of Orange Fanta in a supermarket aisle. His attention gets drawn to Benrey when he hears him call out "Tommy!" excitedly. Benrey holds out his precious find - a pair of orange-patterned socks - and grins: "nice, eh?"

Separate Scenario: Halfway through new year spring cleaning, Tommy whips out his phone, hit by sudden inspiration to look up rabbit-themed new year phrases fitting for the Rabbit Year. Meanwhile, Benrey, who is on dusting duty, finds a spider and promptly eats it. The house is decorated with Chinese New Year decorations, including a potted Pussy Willow plant, small lanterns atop the shoe cabinet, and a chinese "fu" (good fortune) wall hanging decor with a bunny face on it.

Separate Scenario: The Science Team, who were invited to celebrate the new year, lounge in Tommy's living room. Tommy's Golden Retriever, Sunkist, watches as Joshua, Gordon's son, hangs himself over the edge of the couch gleefully, his shirt riding up over his belly. Gordon keeps hold of one of his son's ankles to keep him from falling off while he chats with Bubby, the old man standing behind the couch with his weight leaned into the side of it and a hand on his hip. Benrey, wearing his orange-patterned socks, is slumped over half of the couch with a leg hanging over the back of the couch and the other over the armrest. The back of his head is pressed up against Gordon's back like a headrest as he snacks away at the chocolate coins from a plastic bowl on the coffee table next him. Apart from chocolate, there is also a container of pineapple tarts, a prosperity tray of goodies, and a couple of mandarin oranges on the table. Meanwhile, Darnold shows off a new potion in a test tube to Dr Coomer, who studies it curiously. Sasha, Darnold's Spore Launcher, sits politely in a front-facing baby carrier worn across Darnold's chest. As Tommy looks at his friends, he is hit with a sudden realisation. Wait, did I prepare enough? he panicks internally, thinking about the single red packet he'd prepared for Joshua, the only kid of the bunch. Per tradition, red packets are usually gifted to single family members and children. All of his friends are unmarried.

End ID.]

Chinese New Year (Eve) be upon ye. Happy CNY to celebrating folks and everyone else :O!!

#self indulgent cny doodles babey #not sure if the orange fanta thing is universal but eh #tommy got benrey to buy a new set of the same clothes so he'd at least be wearing new clothes #hlvrai #hlvrai tommy #hlvrai benrey #hlvrai gordon #hlvrai joshua #hlvrai bubby #hlvrai coomer #hlvrai darnold #hlvrai sunkist #cny #snail's art #id

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zzzzzestforlife · 1 month

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Software Engineer Diaries: Project Completion Day 🎊👩‍💻🎊

after much struggle, my second project ever coordinated in my short career is now complete!! 🚀 (give or take a few items, but i need to think of this as finished NOW or else i will lose all the sanity i have left)

❤️ breathwork meditation

👩‍💻👩‍💻 fight with the same last two lines of code for basically the whole day until it finally deploys successfully + document all the struggles so that it will be easier for others in the future

👩‍💻 send success metrics for my manager to report to the Big Boss Manager

👩‍💻 got our mascot intern to represent the team at company-wide meeting and demo the project

👩‍💻 internal testing meeting

👩‍💻 organize + plan remaining tasks to officially close out the project for good

🥰🥰🥰 physiotherapy exercises + leg day pt. 3 + went for a walk

🧠 lo-fi + study!!

❤️ journal

📝📝 Chinese lessons

🦷 the reward for my hard work today is a visit to my dentist, lol

💌: i skipped two meals today because i was so frustrated and rushing to meet our deadlines, but from now on (or at least until my next project) i want to remind myself that i do not code for life or death situations like these engineers do 💀

bonus: how to code in Korean (a totally unserious step-by-step guide with pictures)

step 1 (left): whisper 제발 (please) under your breath while it runs, step 2 (right): whisper 좆됐어 (it's fucked) under your breath when it fails, step 3: repeat until step 2 no longer occurs 🐰

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dawndelion-winery · 2 years

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And Suddenly I See

Realising they're in love

Ft. Diluc, Childe, Scaramouche, Ayato

Diluc:

It's something about the way his gaze flits over to you even while he's working

His hand naturally gravitates towards yours when he walks with you

He thinks he must be going insane

What other reason could there be for the unsettling feeling he has around you

It almost actually drives him insane because he can't quite figure out what sort of dread it was

He was so certain he enjoyed your company, like a refreshing glass of fresh grape juice

Yet there he was, as nervous as he was excited to see you

He feels foolish, avoiding you like a criminal evading capture

It took him back to when he was a kid with Kaeya and they'd sneak around, ducking behind walls when someone Kaeya fancied walked by

It was like stepping into sunlight for him

He honestly felt like a fool, holding his face in his hand as the other propped him up against a table

He was sure you'd noticed his avoidance, in which case, he supposed an apology dinner was in order

No doubt begrudgingly invites Kaeya because he's nervous to see you alone only for Kaeya to bail at the last minute with nothing but a note saying "good luck on your date"

Childe:

Given his proximity with the Tsaritsa, it's not hard to believe that he finds love both sacred and omnipresent

So he's been affectionate right off the bat once you'd established that you were friends

His situation was a lot like a math question to which you knew the answer to but couldn't quite get the working right

It was just so natural to him to shower you with his affection that he'd never really stopped to think about it

Until Zhongli brought you up when they went for drinks

Childe was more than happy to talk about you, his tales ranging from fond memories you shared to his favourite things about you

The more he spoke, the wider he smiled, he was practically glowing

There's this Chinese saying, "恍然大悟", meaning "to suddenly see the light of things", and that's exactly how it was for him

After ages of unwittingly pining for you, he'd finally come to a realisation, and he embraced it with open arms

Scaramouche:

He probably knew he was falling from the very start

And he did everything he could to stop it

He'd pick at even the littlest imperfections you displayed, hoping it's change his mind - his heart - somehow

After all, if he managed to convince himself that you weren't deserving of his affection, surely the feeling would stop bugging him, right?

Mostly stemmed from his own subconscious fear of not being enough, of being cast aside if you deemed him unneeded, he tries to abandon you before you can do the same to him

And fails, in any case

The harder he tries to stop it, the harder the realisation comes charging at him

He finds himself fawning over your flaws internally, chiding himself when he catches himself slipping

But he can't run forever, and once he's tired, he succumbs in agony, ready to lash out at both you and himself in the case you reject him

But you've never been so cruel to him, and just a little less reluctantly, he finds himself succumbing to the comfort that is your embrace

Ayato:

Ever the scheming mastermind, he fell for you because he wanted to

He didn't believe in love at first sight, but upon meeting you, he figured it might be nice to experience the blissful fall so many speak fondly of

After all, first loves seldom last, surely it couldn't hurt to test the waters with you

You fall first, he makes sure of it. And it's hard not to when he knows every trick in the book, so carefully playing up the traits of his that he notices you fancy most

He knows better than to trick you with blatant falsehoods, so he contents him self with showing you his best side

But just what were you doing, looking at him like he was the first bloom of flowers in the spring?

You may have fallen first, but he falls infinitely harder

There's something so sweet about being the object of your affection, surely it wouldn't hurt to reciprocate, if it means basking in your love for longer

He was a fool to think his first love wouldn't last, and a bigger fool to think he would ever be ready to let you go

Was this the true love he'd heard so much of?

There was only one way to find out, and he was diving in headfirst, finding solace in the unexpected calmness that came with being with you

Taglist[send an ask to be added]: @myluvkeiji @pluvioseprince @aqui-soba @euphoric-author @paradise-creator @favonius-captain @tiredsleep @raincxtter @serenenation @loverofthe-stars @gensimping-for-all @irethepotato @almond-adeptus @mx-kamisato @yuzuricebun @chaosinanutshell @howlantic @codename-hiraeth @andreiling01 @callmemeelah @stunningstratagem @sadlonelybagel

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inthefallofasparrow · 1 year

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This whole 'Chinese spy balloon' thing is frankly bizarre, because either it is just a research balloon that's accidentally gone astray (which seems pretty unlikely) or there's something else going on, because well... everyone can see it, and China knew everyone would be able to see it, so it's clearly not doing a good job at 'espionage'. Which implies they want people to be mad about it, I guess? So, it's some kind of political stunt or a psyop? Also, its not like it's a drone (like the hundreds that the US fly over other countries all the time btw, in order to kill people), otherwise this would be a very different situation. It's not a threat. It's a slow-moving balloon. It might as well have a target on it, so republicans have something to yell about and shoot at, which a lot have indeed been on twitter demanding for. The whole scenario feels farcical, like it's a 'threat' from the '60s. (Those sneaky red commie spies with their flying contraptions, etc.) I can only assume it was deliberately moved into US airspace to cause an international incident, either to distract from something else, to tank those diplomatic talks that were about to happen with China, or just as a test to see how everybody reacted. In a sense, it's a stroke of genius, because anyone who wants to be angry about it, can be; anyone who hates China, can hate them more; Fox News and the republicans have something to scream and pearl clutch about; anyone who wants to blame Biden for it, will do so; the qanon lunatics who think China was/is waiting to invade via the Canadian border are creaming themselves; the government has to weigh its options about what if anything they need to do about it to avoid escalation or setting a precedent, and everyone else is just confused. Which destabilizes everything in a hundred little ways. Truly bizarro clown world.

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usafphantom2 · 3 months

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China warns 'military spotters' who may go to prison for posting photos online

Fernando Valduga By Fernando Valduga 01/21/2024 - 22:32 in Military

In the era of open source intelligence, one of the main ways for Western experts to maintain control over China's armed forces is through the analysis of photos of new People's Liberation Army equipment published online by enthusiasts and amateur photographers.

The publication of photos of military ships or aircraft captured outside the ELP facilities or of commercial flights near sensitive areas has become a common vision in recent years, as China quickly modernized its forces. And "military fans" spread the word to the general population on social networking sites such as Weibo, with hundreds of millions of active users.

But not anymore.

The new Chinese aircraft carrier Fujian, with the model of a J-35 jet on the flight deck.

In a WeChat post in December titled: "This is a legal hobby, but you must be very careful," the Ministry of State Security of China said: "Some individual military enthusiasts seriously endanger national military security by illegally obtaining information about national defense and disclosing it on the Internet."

"Focusing on military airports, ports, national defense and military industrial units, they drove or picked up ferries or planes that pass through designated routes and photographed clandestinely with telezoom lenses or drones," said the post of the highly secret civil espionage agency.

Repeat offenders can be arrested for up to seven years, although "primary or occasional offenders" can only receive a warning, according to the agency, which oversees intelligence and counter-espionage both in China and abroad.

Commercial aircraft that took off from Pudong airport, flies over the Jiangnan shipyard.

The alert comes at a time when Chinese leaders are increasingly focusing on ensuring national security in a number of sectors, especially as tensions with the United States increase.

For example, the agency only launched its social media account at the beginning of this year - dedicated to warning citizens about the risks of exposing China's secrets to the outside world and calling on them to join their fight against espionage.

The case of the new aircraft carrier

According to the spy agency's post, the images posted online can show the progress of the construction of warships or aircraft, while revealing operational and technical details of Chinese military equipment. The post specifically mentioned the new aircraft carrier as an area where safety could be compromised.

China's newest aircraft carrier, the Fujian, has been a frequent target of amateur observers while being prepared at a shipyard in Shanghai. The Jiangnan shipyard, where the works are being carried out, is close to the flight routes of Pudong International Airport, Shanghai.

In November 2023, the Paris-based defense news site Naval News reported that Fujian had begun testing its advanced electromagnetic catapult system, based on videos published on Weibo, apparently taken from a Pudong passenger plane.

“Related images taken from passenger planes have become a common source to track the progress of several important programs (of the ELP Navy),” Naval News reported.

Fujian is certainly a remarkable program for the ELP Navy. The 80,000-ton warship, the largest military ship ever manufactured in China, is considered a rival of the newest U.S. Navy aircraft carriers of the Gerald R Ford class, one of the few other aircraft carriers to use electromagnetic catapults to launch aircraft.

The photos of the alleged catapult test gave Western analysts an idea of how the ELP Navy is progressing in preparing the aircraft carrier for commissioning and active service.

Image of the Fujian catapult tests.

And these images are not the first of Fujian to appear online.

In April 2023, the state broadcaster CCTV announced in a report that in November 2021, Mr. Luo, a "quite renowned" military enthusiast, was sentenced to one year in prison after his arrest by the Shanghai National Security Department for photographing the Fujian aircraft carrier.

Luo used a drone capable of shooting long-range and high-resolution photos, the report said.

Recently, new images on Chinese social networks began to appear with means of censorship.

How the US deals with images

It is not only China that is suspicious of what amateur military observers can do to reveal confidential information.

U.S. law says that the President may designate certain military facilities and equipment as prohibited to image makers.

"It will be illegal to make any photograph, sketch, image, drawing, map or graphic representation of such vital military and naval facilities or equipment," unless due permission is obtained before, states the U.S. Code. Offenders can be arrested for up to one year in prison.

Near the famous Area 51 in Nevada it is possible to see signs that do not authorize photos and the use of drones.

Of course, the military can sometimes use open source intelligence to their advantage, said Carl Schuster, former director of operations of the Joint Intelligence Center of the U.S. Pacific Command.

After photos of a supposed model of China's next-generation stealth fighter appeared online in September, Schuster told CNN that “given the location of the aircraft carrier and the likelihood of operations on the deck being photographed or filmed, the PLA [Navy] can see value in inciting speculation about Fujian's future air wing,” just to give opponents something to think about.

Source: CNN

Tags: ChinaPLAN - People's Liberation Army Navy / People's Liberation Army Navyaircraft carrierspotters

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Fernando Valduga

Aviation photographer and pilot since 1992, he has participated in several events and air operations, such as Cruzex, AirVenture, Dayton Airshow and FIDAE. He has works published in specialized aviation magazines in Brazil and abroad. He uses Canon equipment during his photographic work in the world of aviation.

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loneberry · 9 months

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Baby's First Meditation Retreat

…attention is prayer. —Simone Weil

It would be simpler—the monastic life would be so much simpler. Wake, pray, meditate, do battle with the ego, eat, sleep—live such that everything inessential is stripped away. Why did you come here, I said, I’m tired of living a distracted life, of going through my days in a fog of unawareness.

In Cambridge, MA I attended a meditation retreat. I signed up on a whim, out of a vague feeling that I have lost control of my mind. I have been meditating very casually for the last nine years, mostly using the Calm app, listening to Tara Brach recordings, and attending guided meditations while a grad student. I had come to the practice out of desperation, in the midst of a debilitating depression that made me feel perpetually tormented by my thoughts. During that time, I would voraciously read every study I could find on depression treatments and tried basically every treatment modality out there: neurofeedback, ketamine, therapeutic yoga, medication, CBT, DBT, fish oil, an anti-inflammatory diet, psychedelics, and the “treatment” that ultimately saved me: intensive psychoanalysis four days a week. Meditation seemed a particularly promising and low-risk way to manage depression and anxiety—and yes, it did bring me some relief, working as a kind of supplement to the psychoanalysis. Even though I haven’t been as consistent about it as I would have liked, I continued to practice it regularly, usually for about 10-20 minutes a day. Not once have I regretted meditating, though when life gets busy it’s easy to tell yourself that you just don’t have the time to sit and do nothing, even though we seem to somehow always have the time to mindlessly surf the internet.

What is there to say. I’m just so tired of living on autopilot, of not having to face the moment, to face myself. There are a million ways to blot out one’s internal monologue, filling up our days with the background chatter of podcasts or social media.

The recrudescence of my Simone Weil mania has forced me to reflect on attention—that rare quality of mind which is increasingly in short supply. And yet everything is a matter of attention—not because attention can be instrumentalized to achieve one’s goals. No. Attention is the end in itself. Weil: “We have to try to cure our faults by attention and not by will.” It’s in that second-to-second awareness that reverence for the moment blossoms. The fog is lifting. Here is the trembling world, a cloud passing, the dancing light on the pavement as the sun passes through the rustling leaves of the tree. Weil: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.”

I landed in Boston late Friday night and early the next morning was off to the Zen center for the silent two-day retreat. I really did not know what to expect when I signed up. I knew a little about the different schools of Buddhism from studying it in a course as an undergrad. I remember being slightly afraid of “Zen” (or Chan) in particular because it seemed so severe to me. I imagined interminable zazen sessions, without guidance or visualizations; imagined slouching pupils getting whacked with sticks for bad posture or falling asleep. Yet surely if I were to test the Buddhist waters, I should do Zen/Chan since it is a specifically Chinese tradition? My father’s uncle was a Buddhist monk who wandered the mountains of China. I don’t know anything about him, other than his sister (my grandma) was devastated when he died after getting hit by a train. Whether it was suicide or just a manic pixie monk moment, I do not know.

Some meditation retreats are completely secular—they are just like a series of long, guided mindfulness sessions, with the context, rituals, and “religious” dimensions stripped away. This was not really that kind of retreat. There were robes, chants in Korean, elaborate meal rituals, and yes, getting whacked with a stick! Of course it is always possible to opt out of getting hit with the keisaku stick—I thought I would, but in the end I took the whacking almost every time it was offered, partly because it jolted me awake and relieved the tension building up in my body from hours and hours of sitting cross-legged on a cushion. The first couple of times the keisaku whacking was administered, I had to restrain myself from laughing. Oh my God, we’re getting whacked by a Buddhist master! In the orientation the instructor said it was for “tension release” but I did feel that it was something like a ritual of submission to the authority of the teacher, even if it didn’t really hurt. Watching how eagerly D. bowed to receive the stick in the orientation, I wondered if the Zen pupils were secretly sadomasochists.

Constitutionally, I am not a “joiner” and have an aversion to organized religion and anything that emits even a whiff of cult vibes. I’ve always been critical of authority and incapable of following rules, possibly because I didn’t have any growing up. But there was something soothing about how regimented everything was. We performed our actions in sync, chanted about emptiness at 4:30am. The whole experience felt almost militaristic, but a part of me enjoyed the austere, disciplinary atmosphere and the obsessive attention to detail. Not disciplinary in a punitive sense, but disciplinary in the way I imagine Russian classical music training to be: the methodical pursuit of self-mastery (it’s hardly surprising that the Zen master I received instruction from was a classically trained pianist). During the retreat I concluded that more discipline would be good for me.

Most of the retreat consisted of meditating in silence. There was no small talk, no psychobabble, no “now we will get started…”—he just hits the wooden clapper three times, and the sitting session starts. No guidance, no body-scan, no loving-kindness prompts. Just you, seated cross-legged on the cushion in silence, facing the tumult of your chaotic mind, your hands in the Dhyana Mudra position, your eyes half-closed.

It is a profound and difficult experience, having to face your own mind…both utterly banal and deeply disturbing, thoughts flitting from “maybe I should try to find a used bicycle on the OfferUp app” to thoughts of my parents’ mortality. I was warned by the Zen teacher that difficult emotions might bubble up. Thrice I broke out into tears and strained to regain my composure. It began during one of the short breaks, when I was lying on a bench outside looking up at the sky, imagining that a passing cloud was a life appearing briefly before dissipating. It was an unmediated confrontation with the eternal flux of the universe—pure panta rhei.

Weil: “Whatever frightful thing may happen, can we desire that time should stop, that the stars should be stayed in their courses? Time’s violence rends the soul: by the rent eternity enters.” Time’s violence has utterly and completely ripped apart my soul. I wanted to hold onto everyone and everything I love, for the stars to be stayed in their courses, for time to stop, for my parents to live forever. I thought about Mari Ruti’s rapid decline and death, about my recent visit to my older brother in prison, and my trip to my relatives’ assisted living home, where my mother’s cousin has been completely waylaid by the rapid onset of Parkinson’s disease. I thought about my father sitting down in the chair looking out the window at the assisted living home, talking about getting old, how his knees ache now. Time’s violence rends the soul.Will I be strong enough to face the eternal flux, the impermanence of everything I love, with a fierceness that borders on madness, grieving even the eventual death of the Sun? Sitting on the cushion meditating, crying: let go. Will I ever be able to let go with grace? Don’t know. Sink into don’t-know mind. Count the breath. Something passes through me.

What did I see, what did I hear—I heard every exhibit of the Museum of Jurassic Technology: the voice imploring us to follow the chain of flowers into the mysteries of life, the burbling waters of the miniature model of Iguazú Falls, a recording of David Wilson talking about exploding dice, the distant echoes of barks in the bestiary room, the mournful sound of the duduk in Djivan Gasparyan’s “Lovely Spring” playing the Sandaldjian room, Monteverdi’s “Lamento della Ninfa” as I ascend the stairs to the sublime courtyard, Bach’s “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” in the ‘Ecstatic Journey of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky’ exhibit (impossible not to see the levitation scene from Tarkovsky’s Solaris when hearing BWV 639), Mihály Víg’s “Valuska” in The Borzoi Kabinet Theater at the end of the day, and the sound of David’s nyckelharpa reverberating in the garden.

Now the birds of the mind are taking flight.

In, out. In, out. Return to the breath.

The mind opening like a door to the sky

a deep purple flower unfolding in the emptiness.

List everything you see, her feet standing on the lotus.

Clear mind

Don’t know.

(In) 1-2-3-4 (out) 5-6-7-8

Κύριε Ἰησοῦ Χριστέ ἐλέησόν με

The heart

The spherical heart of the manatee

Thoughts and thoughts and thoughts and thoughts

like waves, saturating the swash zone of the mind…

It’s the weekend of the Perseid meteor shower. Eight years ago, Ed and I watched them from the dock of a Maine pond. We had rented an Airbnb from a man with the same name as a dear poet friend of mine, Dana Ward. (I was dreaming of Dana when I woke up this morning.) A week after the Maine trip, I was at the mental hospital. I had forgotten I had a poetry reading. The woman organizing it called, wondering where I was.

Eight years have passed me in the blink of an eye.

Thoughts.

out

In 10-30 second intervals: nothing. Just the space between thoughts.

There were two states of non-self:

one of calm neutrality—just the is-ness of the world.

The other, something more ecstatic:

a mystical amnesia, when you become the contraction and expansion of the breath.

What is there to say about it? In my stead there was a heaving purple cloud floating in a black room.

Then, the “I” coheres again. Head so full of language, thinking about everything I want to write. “I shouldn’t be so attached to my thoughts.” The teacher says in the interview: it’s not about suppression.

Writers are fundamentally hoarders of thoughts. I try to collect each one, as the squirrel does the acorns. In my head I am writing an essay about the antidepressant withdrawals, my astonishment that I did not relapse as David Foster Wallace did when he committed suicide after tapering off his antidepressant. I remember when my thoughts were stuck on the “I want to die” loop, how Ed installed the ad blocker on my internet browser because he was disturbed by the suicide hotline targeted ads. I do not think such thoughts anymore. Maybe it is true—we are not our thoughts. They pass through my mind like water through the sieve. Did Woolf train herself to observe the stream? Too much thinking. I must be doing it wrong. Wrong again—I’m supposed to suspend judgment.

I hear my friend Tim saying, “the mathematics section is the most mystical part of the library.”

Then Weil says, “As soon as we have a point of eternity in the soul, we have nothing more to do but to take care of it, for it will grow of itself like a seed. It is necessary to surround it with an armed guard, waiting in stillness, and to nourish it with the contemplation of numbers…”

Now I’m thinking about the relationship between math and mysticism, about the Indian number theorist Srinivasa Ramanujan, who received, in his dreams, thousands of formulas from the Hindu Goddess Namagiri. Ramanujan: “An equation for me has no meaning unless it expresses a thought of God.”

I remember my poem “Umbra,” in which I reference the French mathematician Alexander Grothendieck’s strange book, La Clef des Songes (‘The Key of Dreams’). As one commenter puts it: “It’s a book about God. Grothendieck’s thesis is simple. We meet God in dreams. But we aren’t ourselves dreaming God, rather God Himself is dreaming us. Or better: according to Grothendieck ‘a Dreamer’ exists, an external force who ‘dreams our dreams’ and at the same time dreams us. And this force can only be God. … he declares, in a little footnote that it’s almost hidden, that mathematics wasn’t ‘created by God’ nor by man, but by an aspect of God’s nature that, unique among his attributes, is accessible to human reason.”

A week ago, I was telling Alex about Oppenheimer’s mysticism, his proficiency in Sanskrit and intensive study of the Bhagavad Gita, his “feeling for the mystery of the universe that surrounded him almost like a fog.” I watched Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer biopic with Alex—a mathematician/mathematical physicist—and my father—an almost-physicist who immigrated to the U.S. from Taiwan to do a physics PhD in Wyoming but dropped out after his first year to move to NYC to wait tables at a Chinese restaurant. After the film, we watched a documentary about Sir Isaac Newton’s heretical theology and alchemical studies, how he read the Bible as a cryptogram and determined the world will end in 2060.

Could there be a connection between mathematics and the capacity for the divine, between the abstraction of mathematical thinking and the ability to sense the invisible, to see the hidden points that connect disparate realms? Wasn’t Einstein a Spinozist?

Scraps of language jostle around in my mind like a shaking bowl of coins. Stupid thoughts like, “Lacan is to psychoanalysis as Zen is to Buddhism.”

I see myself thinking about the news, about geopolitics and the madness of nation states. China is preparing their population for war, as are we. A kind of nausea overcomes me, as I see the whole nuclear age unfurl before me.

We dwell on whatever we expose ourselves to, the articles we read, the people we see, the people we lurk online, the reflex to compare, to repeat the name of the Other like a mantra.

Everything you think you need, you don’t actually need.

A butterfly has somehow flown into the Dharma room. It flits on the floor in the middle of the room. The teacher scoops it up and brings it outside. She corrects my dreadfully sloppy attempt to perform the meal ritual. I panic because I’ve taken too much food and must eat every last crumb. The pear is not ripe, and it is a torture to eat the whole thing. The pear is not ripe—a Zen lesson! Mastication of the unripe pear, a kind of koan.

There was a short break. I decided to walk around Central Square, without a wallet or phone or headphones.

How can I describe the sense of aliveness I felt in that moment, that alert receptivity, when I looked at the sky and saw the birds of Central Square taking flight above the Greek Orthodox Church? I walked up the stairs—some ceremony is taking place inside. Down the streets, there’s a brunch spot I never knew about in the seven years I lived in this town. There’s the sound of a busker, so sweet, and a flower shop I wandered into. There’s the bus stop I would wait at on my way to psychoanalysis. I cross the street. Emanating from a building on Mass Ave is the rhythmic thud of Latin American music—it must be the music-dance sessions my ethnomusicologist friend told me about years ago.

Before dawn on the second day, we perform 108 prostrations. It turns my legs to Jell-O. When I walk up the stairs to use the bathroom, I have to grasp the banister to drag myself up. A few days later I can still barely walk from the soreness caused by the rapid-fire prostrations. Was there something off about my form? I noticed that the others relied more on their arms to hoist themselves up, while I relied almost exclusively on my legs.

And yet I quite enjoy prostrating myself. Outside of any religious or ritual context, I sometimes find myself spontaneously performing prostrations—to what or whom, I do not know. To the earth? I like to kiss the ground, to give thanks to this marvelous rock on which we all dwell.

The interview with the Zen teacher takes a bizarre turn: she asks me questions about DeSantis, in a ‘liberals-trying-to-commiserate’ kind of way. My hatred of DeSantis is bottomless—I had just flown in from Florida the night before the retreat. Please, anything but a DeSantis koan! She asks me if it annoys me that she has been correcting my attempt to execute the meal ritual. I say, No, I don’t mind being an amateur, and crack a joke about being an adult music learner. When the short interview is over, I return to the silence of the Dharma room.

Sitting in silence for long periods is much harder than it looks. Yet the second day feels easier than the first day, despite being on day three of almost no sleep. Toward the end of the retreat, I stare at a spot on the floor, convinced it is a moving bug. It jiggles and jerks, walks in a circle, but always seems to return to the same spot. I can’t stop observing the bug. At the end of the sit, I lean in to get a closer look only to realize it’s not a bug at all, but a dark spot in the wood flooring.

When the retreat is over, there’s the shock of hearing everyone’s voices, of realizing you had projected otherworldliness on people who are just people in the way you are just a person. We sit in a circle and take turns sharing our experiences. I say, “I came on a whim…because I watched YouTube videos about Buddhism with my dad.” We eat vegan pie at the table. The girlfriend of the man sitting next to me has come to meet him, with roses.

I grab my backpack, put on my Blundstones, and leave the center, in the soft afterglow of the mind’s clearing. What did it feel like: I had no desire to look at my phone. Turning on my phone was almost painful, and yet I needed to call the friend I was staying with. I met up with the religious studies poets, felt more present with others, more natural. We tried to go to the Harvard Film Archive to watch Ozu but were turned away for arriving late. We sat on a rooftop terrace to watch the sunset, with a view of the two spires of Harvard Yard, Memorial Church and Memorial Hall. Sun through the leaves, perceived crisply, as though a layer of mediation had been removed.

#meditation #buddhism #Zen Buddhism #mysticism #chan buddhism #mathematics #Simone Weil #attention

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mariacallous · 6 months

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Political insiders like U.S. Rep. Dean Phillips have been expressing doubts about Joe Biden for years. Yet Biden just keeps winning. Voters have elected him to national office three times in four elections. Those voters also gave him the biggest midterm win for a Democratic president in 60 years. Biden has earned those votes by delivering the strongest domestic leadership since LBJ, and the strongest international leadership since JFK. He is the best candidate we have in 2024, and the only thing holding him back is the doubters in his own party.

The very fact that Biden was able to beat Donald Trump and be sworn into office in a peaceful transfer of power met an important test. Peaceful, you ask? Certainly former President Trump's actions, and those of his mob, were not peaceful. But Biden sailed through all of the calamity with apparent calm, acting as though there was never any question that the Constitution and the rule of law would prevail. He was always confident in us.

The immediate task of the new president was grappling with a nation divided over COVID and the need to provide economic support to families struggling through the pandemic. The American Rescue Plan put billions of dollars into the hands of working-class Americans. The economy boomed, driven by demand from workers and families spending money on necessities. Child poverty dropped by 40%, and American families have seen wages rise at levels not seen since the 1960s. Today, the strength of the American economy is pulling the rest of the world forward, despite the global struggle with inflation.

It is easy already to forget the size and scope of the Biden infrastructure bill, which will modernize American communities and our economy for a generation and more. Roads, bridges, transit, the electrical grid, water infrastructure, broadband — the whole platform for growth in the nation will be built out and create millions of American jobs.

Perhaps most significantly, Biden's so-called Inflation Reduction Act will transform our energy economy and enable America to meet its greenhouse gas reduction goals. This will put us in the driver's seat for pushing other nations to meet their goals. There is no larger threat to our nation and the global economy than rising global temperatures, increased severe weather and the loss of a precious ecological and cultural heritage. The pandemic was a light breeze compared to the impending storm of global climate destruction, and the Inflation Reduction Act was a strategic move to allow us to lead in stopping it.

The Inflation Reduction Act could also be called the Chinese Divestment Act. Not only does the energy policy address our need to transition to renewable energy, but it creates enormous incentives for companies to invest in technology and manufacturing in North America. No other president in our lifetime would offer an American working family $7,000 to buy an electric car made in America. The Inflation Reduction Act is exactly the industrial policy this country has needed for so long.

Just a few years ago, Chinese economic power coupled with Russian weapons of war appeared to be a genuine threat to the American-led international order. Autocrats were rising while traditional Western democratic institutions were in disarray. Some people were comparing America to Weimar Germany and seeing similarities to the weakness of democratic nations in the face of fascism.

Russia's illegal and inhumane invasion of Ukraine came at exactly the wrong time — for Russia and China. Putin threw down an enormous challenge in front of the American-led alliance. We advanced as one against him. Biden worked with Europe to accept major economic pain as a price of confronting Russian aggression. The Biden response to Russian aggression simultaneously revived the democracies' power in the world and reminded us that autocracies are always fundamentally weak.

In just three years, Joe Biden's leadership has revived democracy, defeated a pandemic, raised millions of Americans out of poverty, revitalized American infrastructure, addressed global warming and weakened authoritarian nations. He also keeps winning elections and confounding all his critics. Congressman Phillips: What more do you want?

Ryan Winkler, of Golden Valley, is the former DFL majority leader of the Minnesota House.

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oldschoolvpq · 2 months

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Sometimes you get bored.

Sometimes you really want to mix it up.

Behold, my new Frankentama!

-Japanese New P2 clear yellow front shell & chip (mystery creature Charitchi and Nyatchi raisable instead of Pochitchi)

-P1 purple and pink buttons (neon)

-International P2 screen (bottle and spoon medicine icon)

-Japanese Angel wallpaper (flipped upside-down because it's cooler)

-International clear blue P1 back (keyring)

-Japanese clear pink clock P1 battery cover (why not?)

And just for kicks...

-Chinese P2 packaging (YES they were really sold like that back in the day!)

See: defunct Bandai Trading (Shanghai) Ltd. information on the third line

Back to the toy. The battery pressure isn't amazing, so I'm holding it in place with a piece cut off a Tamagotchi Collection Sofvi package because the sizing is kind of perfect. For some reason the health meter and discipline icons flicker/disappear when the B button is pressed, but it's not unplayable. Buttons are a bit low from wear as well. Things to fix after the inaugural test run! (I also want to put a little tiny UFO sticker on the speaker because hello? Adorable. Just gotta find where the sheet went)

It's a bit of a maniac build parts-wise but I've been dreaming of a US P2 screen/Japanese New P2 chip combo for years. I always thought the medicine bottle was such a cute localization and I'm sad they didn't bring it back for the 20th anniversary remakes/classics. (The Japanese version used the same syringe as P1, so when they did anniversary versions they only needed one screen. As I discovered earlier tonight old screens are not compatible with new chips, and vice-versa.)

Anyway, time to clean up 😬

#tamagotchi #frankentama #p2 #custom tamagotchi #maniac build #tamacrafty #i break my toys

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catsplain · 1 month

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KWON DONGWOOK's 'THE CLIMAXXX' (2024): K-POP's MOST SHOCKING BODY OF WORK TO DATE, AND WHY IT WAS A LONG TIME COMING.

TW: Mentions of drug abuse, overdose, the COVID-19 pandemic, suicide.

On technicals: The CLIMAXXX is the second full album of fictional south korean rapper and NTCD member Kwon Dongwook, released on February 26th, 2024 under MINDBEND Studios, a subsidiary of MBN Entertainment, his parent company - probably to distanciate the project from NTCD and other Idol acts by the comglomerate as much as possible. It contains 11 tracks and a runtime of 35 minutes. Physical printing included three versions: Death Neon (above), King Tough and Mr. Giggle.

Initially marketed as a high concept album telling the story of 'King Tough', a made up luxurious character going trought an internal journey while driving back home, Kwon Dongwook's second full album caused extreme commotion on it's first day of announcement: from the scandalous first bathc of teasers, the complete broadcast banning on all 11 songs, as well as the attached note from MBN meticulously detailing his schedule for the entirety of the year, which included a one month long tuor exclusively in South Korea in March, followed up by a 6 months long hiatus and eventual military enlistment on the end of the year.

However, a week after The CLIMAXXX's release, Dongwook's upcoming hospitalization into a rehab facility in New Zealand alongside many private medical documents were leaked online - including positive drug tests and two past overdose reports in the last 3 years -, blowing his new musical era completly out of the window, and turning the whole world's attention into the shocking private life of a key integrant of one of the biggest boybands to come off Asia.

With Dongwook's legal and contractual fate still going by undecided and minimaly disclosed, the silence makes the lines between his real life and the album's mythos turn blurry, and might finally answer the question: why was The CLIMAXXX made? An impersonal album that was seen by many as work of excentric creativity now turns into a raw documentation of a man trying to come to terms with his own upcoming artistic, inner personal and physical death.

A long and badly covered up history of impulsivity, ambition and violence circles Dongwook in such a way that the efforts made by his fans, company and family wouldn't ever be enough to contain it for very long. What happens to a nightlife king when his reign comes to an end? That's the one question the narrator King Tough seems desperate to know as the album goes on. What exactly will be his climax, and who will be there to see it?

THE TRACK BY TRACK BREAKDOWN.

01. FREAK | *Title Track

Dongwook quick starts the album with an upbeat yet clear warning: this won't be another Any Song (2020), BTBT (2021) or any sort of easy to dance to hit that became his registered signature as a soloist. With pessimist lyrics counting down to the end of times, King Tought is presented to us a modern Dyonisius, singing: 'It's not a festival / Technically speaking, we're in decadence / This is a message from the god.' Following by the lens of the album's storyline, this is party or, speaking more methaphorically, the state of mind Dongwook's narrator is coming from: one that finds nihilistic enjoyment in debauchary.

FREAK is still by far the most market friendly song on the entire album, despite being the 'noisiest'.

02. Haidilao (feat. BARSCODE and LeeLimo)

Altought LeeLimo and BARSCODE - alter ego of Dongwook's fellow rapper and NTCD college Code Leeyao - take over the majority of Haidilao with a verse each and the chorus, they seem to keep up their lyrics according to the characterization of King Tough as he begins to leave the 'bland guys' behind to leave with his car.

Haidilao, meaning deep fishing, comes from a chinese proverb meaning 'hopeless endeavor': once again keeping the pessimism and emptiness of his lifestyle. The use of fishing imagery can also be a referennce to HILL, a high caliber club Dongwook has been known to frequent with his friends, located in Hongdae: their logo is a fish hiking up a mountain.

03. Kiss The Ring

Kiss The Ring is the first instance in the album where Dongwook seems to almost forget to stay in character, or simply decides to drop it on porpuse: many references to his actual career as a K-Pop Idol start to appear in the song, with him infamously recalling being offered sex by a fan in front of his bandmate Cain - which Cain himself confirmed to be a real instance recently in a now deleted Instagram live.

The song's first euphoric brag lines in the verses soon all disolve into a melancholic melody as Dongwook seems split between finding strenght to keep up the confident and uncaring act of King Tough, while being confronted by the isolation of his own reality while driving: 'Chasing dreams I cannot define / The nauseous rewinds.'

04. SEOUL DRIFT

In Seoul Drift, Dongwook makes a direct parallel between a car ride taken in 2023 - where his album narrator is, timeline wise - and 2021, at the heat of the pandemic, once again clearly mixing in his personal experience.

With the leaking of his private documents, it's been revealed that Dongwook had an opiote overdose on July 2021; giving the post chorus repetition of, 'I'm alive / I'm alive' as he gets a craving for parties and distraction take on another meaning, and resignificating the flashback as a possible PTSD symptom.

05. Shower Song

Shower Song is, undeniably, not a track that can or tries to hide behind the King Tough moniker. In fact, it introduces a new alter ego that only appears on this song: Mr. Giggles, that can be read to represent the celebrity side of Dongwook, the bridge between him as a person and King Tough. Mr. Giggles is the vision on the mirror that guides him trought the avoided act of showering, and reminds him to keep up with the facade of being fine.

The 'Sins of the week' line can be safely assumed to be a reference not only to the consequences of party life, but also to Dongwook's trainee year under New Wave Music and BBC's Boy Of The Week Project, and as consequence, the first arguable jab directed at LOOPiN - the first off the album, but as is believed by many, not the first off his career.

06. Love Drug (feat. LILILIU)

Dongwook opens up the introspect Love Drug by asking who is he and apolozing for it right after, and it's hard to deduce who's speaking: if he's adding another layer to the character King Tough or reminiscing over something exclusive about himself. But not only in lyrics and tone is track six different, the longer it's given attention, it seems to explain the split perspective he adopts on The CLIMAXXX, that at it's core seems to read as a struggle between choosing addiction or connection. In the chorus, whoever's narrating seems to have already made up their mind: 'Love is drug / I don't think you're the right one for me.'

LILILIU, the featured artist, is none other than Air Castle's Li Lihua, a long time friend and labelmate of Dongwook's.

07. Let off steam

Living up to it's name, Let off steam is a vent song filled with repetition delievered with a drunk sounding flow. The song has been quickly associated to be partially, or even entirely about Dongwook's relationship with LOOPiN's J.J given the tongue in cheek 'loop' pre-chorus and the overall regretful sentiment of the track.

Like many people in Dongwook's inner circle, he and Jiahang met while clubbing at HILL in early 2022. Rumors of animosity between Night Child and LOOPiN were growing strong at the time, and the sudden friendship was originally seen as a PR stunt. However, the constant proximity of the duo was perceived as something truly legitimate up util their mysterious falling out on November 11th - which matches the date The CLIMAXXX began production.

08. (Traffic) JAM

(Traffic) JAM is perhaps the clearest song about substance addiction in The CLIMAXXX, seeming to come from a true moment of sobriety of the narrator, ironically enough: when asked by someone to explain 'the drop' that keeps him hooked, he compares the vicious cycle and the adrenaline rush that's associated with getting intoxicated to being unable to get out of a moving car.

At the outro of (Traffic) JAM, Dongwook pleas to have someone by his side to convince him to stop going overboard, someone to make him step on the breaks in front of red lights.

09. Love Is Anaconda (feat. Kael)

In a similar vein to Love Drug, Love Is Anaconda is another track of regret and aversion to sentimentality, but this time more rooted in Dongwook rather than any of his alter egos.

The singer featured on song, Kael, has yet to be identified.

10. FWB

Another The CLIMAXXX song solely attached to a person is FWB - 'Friends With Benefits' -, who describes almost in detail socialite and tech heiress Yang Jiyeon, the oldest friend and nightlife companion Dongwook has to date. The 'Till I go to hell' outro even sees to take direct inspiration from Jiyeon's ankle tattoo, which reads: 'I live like it's a party'.

The pairing met in mid 2020 thought mutual acquaintances. Although Jiyeon has denied ever being in a sexual relationship with Dongwook through the years, the Idol's unwillingness to do the same, as well as his lash posture regarding attacks of fans at the model has been a constant topic of criticism about him.

Differently from any other of Dongwook's solo endeavour, Jiyeon is yet to promote it or talk about it. Given the current situation, is likely she never will.

11. Honey! (feat. HOSUNG)

Dongwook equals both himself and the subjects of his infatuations as something sweet in doses in the closing track of The CLIMAXXX, Honey!, surprisingly featuring IDOLMAKER's Hosung on the last lines, who's still on hiatus.

Extending the vague lyrics of Honey! to a generalization of all the relationships in the narrator's life isn't far fetched - deep down, he's once again aware he's not interested in connections or actual redemption, he just craves to not be alone when he's under the influence. It exposes a pattern of behavior, a clear game of cat and mouse where both the writer and his moniker comes out as the one on top always.

In the end, time is constantly running fast, the high keeps o running low, and King Tough Kwon Dongwook is, for better or worse, stuck staying the same.

#&& ⠀ [ . . . ] we bite and scratch and scream all night ⠀⸻ night child / ntcd .#fictional idol community #fake kpop group #kpop fanfic #kpop oc #kpop addition #:DDDDDDDDD

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