#like imagine the hilarity of him trying to use a computer
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i feel like ghost rider fans are really underselling the comedic potential of the rider's supernatural ride alongs being confused by modern tech
#eli died in the 90s right?#like imagine the hilarity of him trying to use a computer#robbie pulls up nascar clips on yt and its like serial killer spirit cocomelon#angr#all new ghost rider#soda speaks#soda reads comics#marvel#gr
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This idea flopped in my old blog, but I wanna bring it back because the idea fascinates me, and I think it could be really interesting!
So, major three story cross over here with Stranger Things, Free Guy and Spree (2020)
(Tiny warning, I’ve never seen Spree, I just read the synopsis on Wikipedia, so forgive me if Kurt is OOC)
Imagine Steve, Keys and Kurt being triplets though! Steve’s the oldest, Keys is the middle child and Kurt is the baby of the family. I just think they would just be such an interesting trio. Steve, the popular jock. His parents favor him the most at first, with Keys and Kurt being in his shadow. At least, for a while before Steve realizes that the person he’s becoming is Bullshit. So, he changes. He cuts the toxic people out of his life and actually becomes a babysitter for a bunch of rascals??
Then Keys becomes the favorite of their parents. He’s smart, and they use that to impress the people around them. Well, until Keys says he’s getting into video game development. Then they promptly drop him, because they wanted someone to run the company. Someone to skyrocket it into the future, but Keys is just like “No??” They try again when he effectively becomes successful in his endeavors, but he’s sick and tired of working under their thumb, so he refuses again.
Kurt, oh Kurt, he’s just waiting for his parents to finally see him, but they completely skip over him. Despite looking like his brothers, despite their own encouragement, Kurt just…gets missed a lot. He’s the shadow in the room. The third, Forgotten triplet that people think is just a little off. Too socially awkward to be charming like Steve, not smart enough to do anything for the company like Keys, so it leads him to some dark places.
Can you imagine the chaos of their stories happening at the same time though? Like, Steve comes home one day, beaten and bruised. Keys is just like “What the fuck-“ Then you just have Steve spilling everything to him. The monsters, the Russians, fucking Vecna. (Keys, who I can see being at least DND aware, just looks at him funny before treating his wounds) Bet, Keys gets roped into everything and you just have the hilarity of the party mistaking one for the other all the time. This is when Keys spills that he may, or may not have created artificial life. Cue excitement from Dustin, and subsequent gripping from Steve because of course Henderson likes his brother more. (He doesn’t But Dustin still thinks Keys is cool as shit)
Kurt has been doing…something during everything. Obviously Steve and Kurt tell him about what’s happening, and of course Kurt is jealous. Why did they get all the adventures, all the thrill and he’s left behind? He tries to join in, but Steve knows how fragile Kurt is. How he already is going through a lot mentally, so he says no. “I don’t wish this on anybody man.” Steve explains, hand on his shoulder. “Keys is coming with because computer stuff can be like, useful you know? Just stay here, don’t tell mom and dad.”
Everything changes when Kurt comes home one day, bloodied up. Obviously Steve and Keys are freaked, asking him what happened. Kurt just shrugs, eyes vacant, and dead. “Saw one of those…dog things. Tried to attack me. I killed it.” Then he’s just shuffling up stairs to clean up, but there’s a dread in both of their stomachs. Steve knows what a demo-dog attack looks like, Key’s just got done listening to a police report about a missing person last seen using Spree.
#obviously#because I need too#imagine being the one they all have a crush on 🤭#thebunspeaks#thethornbush#I dunno why this idea interests me so much#I just think their personalities would contrast in such an interesting way#plus I can see Kurt teaming up with Vecna ngl#he hears about him trying to rebuild a new world and Kurt is like “sign me the fuck up’ unaware that it could mean death#plus just the horror of finding out your twin brother murdered somebody makes such great conflict :D#Keys and Steve just side eyeing each other as the realization slowly dawns on them#Steve insists that it must be Vecna’s doing#Keys is more skeptical but still wishing that’s what it was#I dunno I feel like Keys and Kurt were close when they were kids#with Steve being the golden child they just were in the background together#then things changed when Keys got their parents attention#then suddenly Steve and Kurt have a better understanding and are closer#leaving Keys alone#steve harrington#walter keys mckey#kurt kunkle#stranger things#free guy#spree 2020#cross over#stranger things crossover
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@bluebellthesponge
Honestly Patrick being goofy little bar tender is so cute! I can also see him being an ice cream truck man too! He gets some ice cream on his breaks :)
Sandy would definitely be an engineer.
Spongebob is a tough one. I've been thinking about it for a bit. Fry cook isn't enough to sustain yourself unless there is some sort of universal income keeping him afloat. Then again, Bikini Bottom was designed to be a 1950s/60s bubble. Back then a factory job was enough to sustain yourself, so spongey has a chance.
Even if not, his parents are pretty well off. I can imagine them helping him out a bit. They were more than happy to buy him a car when he got his license in No Free Rides.
But for modern era spongey, I can see him having a little YouTube channel where he makes cooking/bubble blowing tutorials? Or records his jellyfishing adventures? In the show Gary does help spongebob pay his bills. If Gary was a person instead of a pet, then he'd be SB's roommate and they'd own the house together. Or spongebob probably might rent some rooms of his house for extra income. His house is HUGE after all.
Mr Krabs would still be owner of the Krusty Krab. But Plankton DEFINITELY needs a side job to keep the chum bucket open. I think its a money laundering scheme. He probably earns income via nefarious schemes. Or, he's actually a malewife and Karen brings home the bacon. She'd probably be a computer programmer or something lol
Idk why I see Fred being a banker. Does he have an actual job in SB? I can't recall.
Larry would still own his gym.
As for Slappyyyyyy. I always imagined in SB universe, he's actually the inventor of the whirly brains toy and he's just living off the royalties. Actually very wealthy 👀 like in an Addams family kind of way.
But irl, I'd like to imagine he's a librarian. A creepy librarian 👀 because he was carrying a bigass book in Stair Wars and Peter Lorre irl was noted for his love of reading. I can see Slappy enjoying creepy books but always siding with the antagonists or loving tragic endings. I remember this scene from the 60s Addams family show where Wednesday was so distressed about a book where the prince kills the dragon to save the princess. The terrible prince killed a poor defenseless dragon😔 yeah I can see Slappy reacting the same way xD
But besides creepy librarian, I can see him also managing cemetaries. Like the people who clean and maintains them. Anything creepy is up his alley.
You know in that dream that prompted all this, that weird ask was actually about Slappy. Someone suggested he'd be a midwife which is such a hilarous thought, I know I'd never suggest that. Not because he's male but because I wouldn't trust him around a tube of toothpaste, he'd definitely eat it. What would you think he'd do to a baby? Probably steal it's organs to use as a test for infant sized whirly brains! xD
I think what prompted that dream was trying to get ontop of this blog and organize it + one of my friend telling me she wanted to change her studies. Mishmashed in my brain and got this cursed dream/thought.
But hey! It makes for a fun discussion idea.
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Safety Last! (1923)
Safety Last! is approaching its centennial. Its influence and fandom are so big I know you've seen references to it somewhere. If you haven't had the delight to sit down and view it in full, you don't know what you're missing. I can’t remember the last time I laughed this hard and this loud. It’s a masterpiece of physical comedy.
Harold Lloyd (played by Harold Lloyd) has moved to the big city and wants to impress his visiting girlfriend (Mildred Davis) by making her believe he's the manager at the textile shop where he works. His efforts lead to a series of inventive and increasingly amusing gags featuring mistaken identities, Harold outsmarting or tricking everyone around him and impressive stunts.
I’ve seen stories where someone pretends to be their own boss to impress someone and even if you combine them all, they pale in comparison to the hilarity of Safety Last!. Harold is continuously using his sharp wits to get himself out of a jam, only to land into another. Anyone else would have quickly been exposed as a hack once the girlfriend shows up at the office. This guy is too smart, too fast on his feet and too inventive. A scene where he devises a way to avoid ever meeting his landlady will leave you floored from the sheer imagination and effort put into the stunt. Its 73-minute running time blitzes by like it's nothing.
There’s something pure about the comedy found in Safety Last! because everything is for real. They didn’t have computers to green-screen stuntmen onto locations and everything was shot on actual film. It was expensive to reshoot anything. Every stunt had to be practiced until it could be performed impeccably and what was shown had to be something worth seeing. During every second, Lloyd delivers. This film is like a great martial arts action movie. It's physical comedy boiled down until you have only what is absolutely necessary. The dialogue (through title cards) is kept at the barest of minimums. Everything you need to know is told through cinematography, facial expressions and body movement. Nothing stands in the way between the situation and your funny bone.
You have no idea, but you’ve seen this movie imitated and ripped off time and time again. That guy with the glasses hanging off the hands of a clock while traffic zooms beneath his feet? It's from Safety Last!. You would think the innumerable homages would lessen the impact of the real thing, but that’s not the case at all. If anything, it makes the movie that much funnier because you’ve seen people try and imitate this movie by adding their twists, and none hold up to the original. It’s so full of surprises, so clever and so universal I can't think of a single second in the entire thing that isn’t wonderful. To watch Safety Last! is to discover a new favorite. (On Blu-ray, May 21, 2015)
#SAfetyLast!#movies#films#reviews#MovieReviews#FilmReviews#FilmCriticism#FredC.Newmeyer#SamTaylor#HalRoach#TimWhelan#HaroldLloyd#1923Movies#1923Films
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00Q fic rec list
So, those are my favorite 00Q fics and I thought I might make a list of them ! Most of these include pining and emotional constipation on some level.
The favorites
Sigh No More, by dhampir72
rating : T
words : 20K
Bond wants nothing more than for someone, just once, to be waiting for him at the airport when he returns home.
My favorite. The characterization is beautiful and gives depth to a damaged, vulnerable James Bond. “Do you want me to arrange a car for you?” Q asks. “I want you to come get me,” Bond says. [...] Q says: “Okay.”
come a lily, come a lilac, by pdameron
rating : T
warning : AU - flower shop
words : 8K
"Most people just pick whatever flower they think is prettiest. It doesn’t require a lot of input from me.”
The man walks up to Q, leaning against the counter between them. “Well then, what can I do to get your input?”
(In which Q runs a flower shop, and his newest regular is almost definitely a spy.)
This fic features all the good tropes : violent mutual pining, misunderstandings, mild angst, fluff, humor. The characterizations and banter are excellent. pdameron is my favorite 00Q writer, you should read everything they’ve written.
Ordinary Numbers, by Bootsnblossom, Kyptaria
rating : T
warning : AU - different first meeting, AU - Q is not Q yet
words : 44K
More than anything, Mike Taylor wanted to be ordinary. Being a genius, he learned early in life, meant people expected too much. A career at the MI6 Help Desk seemed the perfect way to guarantee a lifetime of obscurity, until he got a very unusual tech support call.
Excellent plot and detailed writing. Such a worthy and satisfying read.
Ulysses, by girlbookwrm
rating : T
words : 89K
“Paperwork for the new head of Q-Branch,” Tanner said.“Of course.” The words were like glass in his throat. Smoke inhalation was a bitch. His brain felt slow and foggy, like it was full of smoke too. “Who shall I take them to?”M lifted one white brow. “They’re for you, Quartermaster.”Bond and Q are drawn together by names, work, and a certain Aston Martin. In which Q is kidnapped once, Bond is poisoned twice, and Eve is a badass on at least three occasions. AKA that time I tripped and wrote 80,000 words of 00Q.All titles unapologetically stolen from Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
This also features all the good tropes imaginable. Like, everything you need. Delicious read. Brillant writing. Dialogues and narration were clever. Beginning is Skyfall and Spectre rewrite but don’t let that deter you, it only lasts for 2 chapters or so and it’s well done.
Long-ride / slow-burn
Lay it down, by damphir72
rating : M
words : 81K
Bond and Q agreed: their relationship was nothing more than physical. Until it suddenly isn't.
sick fic. Bond takes care of Q. Similar to Where You Are, with such dedication and softness and love.
Nodus Tollens, by Only_1_Truth
rating : T
words : 88K
Nodus Tollens: the realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore
Q's life at the technical help department of MI6 was decently quiet and paid reasonably well - it even gave him vacation time, although he rarely used it. So when Q was finally coaxed to leave work for a bit and relax, he thought that Paris might be fun.
Of course, that was before the gunfight, witnessing a shooting, and being kidnapped by a strange, blue-eyed gunman named James Bond.
Yours, J, by swtalmnd
rating : E
words : 39K
Bond sends letters. Q is vexed. Q-branch starts a betting pool. There are an appalling amount of sweets. Also, 002 is a bit of an arse.
haven’t finished this one yet but recing it because it’s GOOD. pining hell “He was the one person James Bond didn’t want to seduce”. urhhh
Quriosity, by dr_girlfriend
rating : E
words : 79K
COMPLETE! Bond finds himself increasingly curious about his enigmatic Quartermaster.
Excerpt:
"Your prior hotel is no longer secure, I will direct you to a new location. Your luggage has already been transferred. A field agent and medic from the Diréction Générale de la Sécurité d'État will be waiting at the side entrance. I have cleared them both personally." In contrast to his crisp dry English, Q's pronunciation of the French words was fluid and flawless, the throaty tone of the fricatives sending a surprising jolt of awareness straight to Bond's cock — all the more remarkable given his degree of blood loss.
"You're wasted on Q-branch, you have the voice for a phone-sex call-in line." The words slipped out of Bond's mouth without forethought, although he had plenty of time to think in the sudden pause that came afterward and stretched on for endless moments. Bond hadn't realized until now how Q was always there, with an immediate reply. In all their banter Q had never before been at a loss for words. Ever.
classic. very in character : the banter, the dynamics. good tropes.
Humor
Dramatic Arts, by scioscribe
rating : T
warnings : none
words : 2,9K
In which Spectre is actually Bond's poorly written attempt at falsifying a mission report. Q wants a flight simulator, Eve wants more lines, and M wants a drink. Everybody's a critic.
So If You Give, by TheCatOnTheMoon
rating : T
words : 6,1K
Bond gives Q things because of reasons. Q thinks that Bond completely misses the point.
Hilarous. MI6 works like B99. Q is everyone’s darling.
some guys just can’t hold their arsenic, by pdameron
rating : T
words : 5,8K
“Motherfucking - goddamn - fucking shit!”
“Good lord, Q,” Bond says from behind him with no small amount of amusement. “One would think you’d never been in a quarantine before.”
a lot of pining and them being dumb. hilarous dialogues. the writer writes WELL.
By no Ordinary Means of Communication, by laughtershock
rating : E
words : 7,9K
Q can’t help but wonder how, exactly, his life has come to this (The one where Bond discovers post-it notes, Q discovers how not to talk about feelings, and together, they fight crime make things far more complicated than necessary.)
this is here because I love the sex scene in it : Q gets plugged for a meeting.
million dollar question, by skylights
rating : G
words : 5K
Q doesn’t bend for anything and Q certainly doesn’t break for anyone, especially when it comes to stubborn double-ohs intent on making Q’s life hell, so when Q wakes up on a Saturday morning to 12 new texts from Bond and the incessant ringing of his flat’s doorbell, Q makes sure to bring a gun to answer the door.
“Delivery for one…Quabik Quadree?”
Q feels the weight of the Glock 19 in the pocket of his dressing gown and sincerely wonders whether to shoot the delivery man or himself.
(or, that fic where everyone wants to know Q's name and stupid things happen in the process)
Fluff
A modest proposal, by Tokyo_the_Glaive
rating : T
words : 3,3K
Or, five times Bond asked Q to marry him, and one time Q beat him to the punchline.
there’s love to be had, by pdameron
rating : T
words : 1,2K
“I won’t begrudge you your happy ending, Bond. If you want to ride off into the sunset, MI6 won’t stop you,” Mallory says. “But I will say this. If you do walk away, take care with what you leave behind.”
(In which Bond has a bit of an epiphany on the bridge and finds that he can't leave MI6 just yet.)
I don’t take your pleasure for granted, by CatchClaws
rating : M
words : 6,2K
Q tries to talk himself out of having a crush on James Bond. Bond makes that rather difficult.
In which Bond reads sci-fi books. Well written. Banter is delightful.
please stay, by pinknamjoon
rating : T
words : 2,7K
Bond keeps flirting with Q while he's on missions, both over the comms and through surveillance cameras, and Q is extremely flustered.
Name on my skin, by the runawaypen
rating : G
warning : SOULMATES !!
words : 900
Everyone has the name of their soulmate written on their skin. And Q can't help but feel excited to learn that the James Bond written on his wrist is one 007.
It's a shame James doesn't know Q's real name. Things could have been simpler.
Angst (with happy ending. always)
Remember me, by Jen (ConsultingWriters)
rating : T
words : 5,6K
Bond has lost his memory. Q has lost his love.
"What have I forgotten?” Bond asked; Q watched him, trying to find the James he knew.
“Nothing that you won’t work out on your own, if it’s really important,” Q said carefully, before returning every fraction of his attention to the computer in front of him.
dying noises
Loneliness is a disease, by fairyjimjam
rating : T
words : 9,5K
Q stands up, nearly breathless, and ventures towards the lift. Bond is back. He's back. Back. Back Back Back-
"I need a car."
Q stops in his tracks. He's not back. No of course he isn't.
Q's chest hurts.
"Have fun at an automobile shop then," is what slips out of his mouth.
Q is absolutely miserable after Bond’s left and Bond is clueless. Sad pining hell. What’s new. Ending is dubious though.
just like old times (please, don’t ever change), by Rosslyn
rating : T
words : 5,1K
Sometimes when Q is alone in his workshop and there is an experiment that needs to be supervised and he can’t go home and he can’t sleep, he watches Bond’s vitals.
canon
as permanent as stone cathedrals, by pdameron
rating : T
words : 6,0K
Q has been in love for two years, six months, and twelve days when James Bond walks away, leaving him with a bleeding head and a broken heart on a dark and noisy London bridge.
If you didn’t get the hint, yes, go and read everything this author has ever written.
Bittersweet, by dr_girlfriend
rating : M
words : 14K
The first time Bond flirted with Q, it was purely out of self-defense.
The second time Bond flirted with Q was largely manipulation.
The third time Bond flirted with Q, he just wanted to feel something.
The fourth time Bond flirted with Q was out of sheer boredom.
Somehow, flirting with Q became something of a habit for Bond.
And then, it became something else.
features rejection hmm delicious. ‘Those who love to pursue fleeting forms of pleasure, in the end find only leaves and bitter berries in their hands’
Missed chances, by cherrygoldlove
rating : G
words : 2,7K
Eve leaned across Q's desk.”
Bond has someone!”
Q's eyebrow lifted as he sent her a quick look from above his glasses.
“He has someone every thirty minutes.” He returned his gaze to the screen and continued to type;
“No, not like that! He has someone long term, they're dating!”
misunderstandings, jealous Q, fake relationship, angstish, heartbreak, pining what more ?
Favours, by dhampir72
Rating : T
Words : 6,1K
James Bond never looks at Q unless he wants something.
it’s not angst but idk where to put this. pining.
Omega verse
The two fics below are mpreg-free, don’t feature any consent issues and are full of pining. Alpha!Bond and Omega!Q
A Matter of Convenience, by junetangerine (culuyetille)
rating : E
words : 19K
‘twas why the whole thing had been sanctioned in the first place: minimal disturbance of the status quo, just a blip in their routine, no consequences. So what if the Quartermaster had had an untimely, dangerous heat and 007 had been the one assigned to see him through it. Both of them knew better than to let anything come of it. (Alpha/Omega dynamics)
Light omega fic. This is the only omegaverse fic you need to read. Wonderful !
Where you are, by dhampir72
rating : E
warning : WIP 5/7 chapters BUT chapter 5 can be considered as a satisfying ending.
words : 44K
An Omega unable to create life is a creature to be pitied, or at least, that is what society says. Q is fine with it, really. He had never wanted children anyway...and settling down with a mate never truly sounded appealing. So he’s fine with it: being alone, bearing no children. It’s fine.Until it isn’t.
Angsty omega fic. Q is diseased, Bond takes care of him with such dedication and softness and selfless love. I cried. (no tragic ending)
Porn without plot
Gloria in excelsis, by feelslikefire
rating : E
warning : barebacking
words : 3,8K
Q has a dirty secret; Bond has an attraction and now he's got the excuse to act on it. Smut featuring glory hole(s).
glory hole
Resource sharing, by rsadelle
rating : E
Warning : dom/sub, Bond/Q/Trevelyan threesome, double-penetration
words : 3,4K
Q experiences what it means when James says he and Alec share everything.
#00Q#james bond#quartermaster#Q#in honor of#bond 25#00Q fics#00Q fic rec#00Q fanfiction#recommendation#the reason why there's not enough dhampir72 fics in this list is because i haven't read them all yet
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tagged by: @fixaidea and @looney-unicorn
rules: answer 21 questions and then tag 21 however many people you’d like who you want to know better
nickname: There used to be another R. at my workplace, and I resultingly got nicknamed ‘Pliny’ by a former classicist co-worker.
sign: Gemini
height: maybe it’s 5’ 8”, maybe I have forgotten?.
last movie i saw: NT Livestream of “Small Island”! SO good, I’m still bouncing off the walls with excitement, such an amazing adaptation. It’s coming to the US on 12th July and if you like: complicated people! Wit and hilarity! Slow-burn marriage-of-convenience-enemies-to-friends-to-lovers! Visual storytelling! Getting INTO IT with Britain’s history of racism and the way it blights the lives of those who inflict as well as those who suffer under it! Windrush generation getting the job done! Childbirth scene on stage! Acting! You should watch. I also found out that pliny-mum gave French lessons to Alexander Bustamante’s niece.
last thing i googled: “pet hair carpet cleaner”. The thrilling life I lead. I spent all day yesterday trying to clean the flat and I think it now looks worse, if that were even possible
favorite musician: Tori Amos; my sixteen year old self reigns supreme still but also I do always find new things to love in her work
song stuck in my head: text message god up in the sky/oh if you love me won’t you please reply/can’t you see that it’s only me/your dirty computer
other blogs: plinitry, canieatyourletter, humanrightsupdates. I try to separate my personality out to make sense.
do i get asks: yes! I usually answer them 7-8 months later but I’m very grateful
blogs following: I follow more/less blogs depending on my dashboard overwhelm. If I unfollow you it is not personal!! I am probably checking your blog by manually typing in the address every week instead.
amount of sleep: please give me 8 hours when possible, frequently less.
lucky number: 7
what i’m wearing: £8 charity shop floral dress with “MAINE NEW ENGLAND” tag. I need pyjamas but then I would have to move
dream job: I think I definitely at one point summed this up from my childhood perspective as a guy with a fixed bayonet who absolves the sins of furries, aka finrod. Also my actual facts day job as a medical secretary we’re getting a fish tank so: what more do I need.
dream trip: I can’t decide, I want to go literally everywhere all the time.
favorite food: right now I’m imagining myself eating a plaintain taco but this answer subject to change.
play any instruments: piano! I am VERY out of practice
languages: English, Latin, Ancient Greek, “”””French””” (3 horribly mispronounced words of)
random fact: I once met Terry Pratchett at an event and was so anxious I tried to chew through the rim of my wine glass. I asked him something about Vorbis from Small Gods but I’ve forgotten….what it was? He was lovely.
describe yourself as aesthetic things: an ms paint comic of a wombat; a pile of hastily arranged quilts; rose’s lime cordial; 14 empty biros, a battered upright piano, the smell of archival quality museum storage boxes.
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MVP Recap
Ok, guys.....sorry this is late but I 100% waited until today to do this because #1 It’s faster to type it on the computer than on the phone and #2 I’m now getting paid to do this. (Who’s the real winner here). Also....I can post this with a fancy page break so it doesn’t hog everyone’s feed. But before the break....have a pic......
(As per my now usual.....I will post about my experience more than the dances, because you can find those online or will be seeing them yourselves.)
To start off the day, I finally got to meet My Girl and it was AMAZING! We met at her hotel then went to dinner. As we predicted, the girls were instant besties and so were we. (I love it when a plan comes together). When we got to dinner the girls sat with My Girl and I sat with her hysterical mom, Nonna. We had good food and good conversation and it was really nice to have a meal with “my people” and discuss DWTS the entire time. The best part, however, was Nonna telling me no less than 7 times “I don’t like-ah that Maks. He’s a jerk”. (read that in a thick Italian accent).
(Abbie killed it with this selfie)
After dinner, we found our way to the theater. I was no help, of course, because I don’t do downtown even though I’ve lived here for 34 of my 38 years. As we were looking for parking we saw the buses straight ahead, lining both sides of the street. We saw Ivan outside smoking (wtf dude) and JT. Once we parked, moved the car to a different spot, and took selfies, we made our way to the theater. As we were walking up we saw a guy with big girly hair standing by Val’s bus talking on the phone. We were all like “OMG....is that Val?!?!”. The girls and I started booking it and got closer, that wasn’t Val but OMG HOLY CRAP he was right there in front of us!! We attempted to approach him and the worlds grumpiest security guard stopped us in our tracks.
(Seriously.....look at her looking at me like I’m gonna rush him or something! Trust me when I say she plays a theme throughout the night and imagine that face any time I mention “Bitchy Security Guard” or “BSG”.)
Well.....Val didn’t take too kindly to his fans being treated that way and told us to come take pics but that we had to do it quick because he needed to get inside to get ready. I have to say....much like Brandon, pictures do not do this man justice. He is really really really good looking in person. I mean REALLY. Gahdamn, Valentin.
(Notice the guy in the red flannel who is NOT Maks and will not be Maks at any point in the evening no matter how many times we thought he was)
Y’all be proud of Abbie.....she was given strict instructions of things she was banned from saying (I hate Jenna because she STOLE you from me.....and You used to be my favorite but now you’ve been replaced because Jenna STOLE YOU). Girl handled herself like the sane fangirl we all knew she could be and didn’t even cry.
(Notice the death grip she has on him)
She showed him her purse and “may” have scared him a tad. He went “Whoa!”
(She keeps shirtless Val in the center.....because Mama ain’t raising no fool)
After we met Val.....and I failed to remember that I was lugging his book around in my damn purse and forgot to get it signed (I win at life, I swear), we were told exactly where we were allowed to stand and if we so much as took a deep breath, BSG reminded us that we weren’t allowed to move from that spot. Then she would sigh and roll her eyes at us. We tried to see other cast but it was getting chilly and windy (scroll back up and look at the chick’s pony in the pic of BSG) and it was getting closer to show time so they were all inside. Before we left we did get to see Katie the Nanny taking Shai from the venue to the bus. He is freakin adorable! His little curls and his little wave to his adoring fans were on point! I do not have a picture of this because #1 It happened super quick and #2 It’s not my baby and that’s kindof weird and intrusive and BSG was still side eying us and I’m pretty sure she would have taken my phone and deleted all the pics or something in retaliation. She was seriously bitchy and hated her job.
We got inside the venue and hit the merch stand. We all got our shirts (to my surprise, Abs picked the white tour tee instead of the Team Val tee). We found our way upstairs, got drinks, and found our seats. They were pretty decent seats except for we had to sit forward to see the very front of the stage if they laid down (a few times) and couldn’t see them picking the people out of the audience. The show was, of course, amazing. In my opinion, it was better than the DWTS show. Those Chmerkovskiy’s can dance!!!! I’ve heard that Peta is amazing live, but that doesn’t do her justice. She truly is the queen and literally commands the stage when she’s on it. There were moments of great group numbers, moments of hilarity (the dad dance and the stripper section), and gut wrenching serious moments. It really does tell a story through dance and we all loved it. What you probably don’t see in the YouTube videos of the dad dance is Kiki has twins. Abs is still laughing about those twins and when the baby sneezes and Maks yells “It got in my eye!”. During the Chippen Val/Magic Maks section they pull up the lady out of the audience. Let me tell you.....that lady was living her best life. She was so funny! Throughout the show we were annoyed by the group behind us. There were about 8 or 10 of them and they talked the entire show. I’m not talking quiet respectful whispers.....these bitches were straight up chit chatting. I did giggle at one point because the oldest of them was totally Team Nonna. They were doing their first talking section and this chick pipes up with “I’ve always hated Maks.....he’s such an arrogant jackass”. During the super emotional break up section....it was so quiet in there you could hear a pin drop. I had been annoyed the entire show, but at this point I started to get a little concerned that because it was so quiet in there (that section is riveting) that Maks and Peta would actually hear these bitches trying each others wine in an attempt to figure out which one had the tastiest. Seriously y’all.....they were SO LOUD! At this point, I turned around and said “PLEASE stop talking!”. They shushed to heated whispers through the rest of the show but if one of us so much as looked at each other they’d say “NO TALKING!”. At the end of the show they got up and left during the final bows (seriously the rudest group of drunk bitches ever). I booked it out after the show to pee. Abs didn’t have to so she went to stand outside of the bathroom to wait for the rest of our group. I hear “That’s HER!” and look over and these bitches were WAITING for me to come out of the theater! They start yelling “We are at a concert!!! Talking is expected in this type of situation! And you were rude too!!!” (of note....no one ever said they were rude) Abs is looking at me with huge eyes and I was like “Wait...how was I rude! You know what...never mind....Abbie get over here!”. I drug her into the bathroom still completely appalled at their behavior. Be proud that I was an adult and didn’t engage. Once all of our group was done, and these bitches are still standing there waiting, we just kind of grabbed the girls put our heads down and booked it out of there.
We got outside and went to stand by the buses again. BSG was still manning her post and was quite possibly in an even worse mood than before. She seriously hates fans. She should probably look into different employment. Thankfully we had a different security guard posted to our standing area. He was funny and nice and roughly the size of a mountain range. He didn’t seem to be that huge of a guy but he had a chest and shoulders that somehow blocked the entire sidewalk. He also must know us (is our picture up in these venues or something) because dude kept a super close eye on Abs. She must have looked shifty to him. He’s a smart man and I wish I would have taken a pic with him. We stood there and stood there and stood there some more. We had met Val, but wanted to talk to him again (because my damn book) and Makayla really wanted to meet Peta. My goal was to meet Val (for Abs of course....ha) and meet either Maks or Peta to personally give them Shai’s hat. Peta came out loaded down with bags and went to the bus. She came back out and headed our way to go into a different door (probably to get food, they all went in there) and said she’d come back. While we were waiting, we saw quite a few of the dancers coming out. Ivan was standing there talking to a crew member and since no one else would pipe up I yelled his name. He waved and I asked for a picture. He was super nice and came over (Mt. Everest was amused by this).
After meeting him, both girls (and the rest of the small crown of about 15-20) were oohing and aahing over how good he smelled and I realized that my damn sinuses are still acting up and I didn’t smell anything. I thought back to meeting Val (when both girls had the same reaction) and I thought my lack of smelling him was just because we caught him before the show and he wasn’t freshly showered.....apparently my inconspicuous deep breaths when I was standing with him were just fail. I’m super salty about this. Seriously.....I may not ever be ok with the fact that I didn’t smell Val. Shortly after we met Ivan, we saw Emily standing there. She also came over when I got her attention and asked for a picture. Mt. Everest was again amused by me while the others were plotting how they could always manage to be by me at bus meets because I not only recognized everyone by name, but was brave enough to call them over.
I think it was at this point that My Girl’s girl was attempting to convince her mom that they should come to Jax to do all tours with me and Abs.......I don’t think she was successful. Lol. At some point in this process, we saw JT a few more times. I really wanted to get a pic with him. I yelled his name and he threw a half hearted wave, then looked over and said “Oh Hey” and waved harder. He did not come over for a picture. He must actually have recognized me....he was like “Yep...that’s a nope all day long, that bitch is cray”. He has since been relieved of his best friend duties....but it’s ok because Nicole and Alyssa (Serge’s gf) have agreed that they are better choices anyways.
Finally.....the queen emerged and came right over to our group. She is strikingly beautiful in person and so so so tiny. She could probably share clothes with Abs! I gave her a hug and told her I had made a gift for Shai for his morning inspections. She laughed and then peeked in the bag. She awe’d and thought it was adorable! (Totally winning at life here).
She chit chatted with our group for a bit and talked about how they had had to adjust and reblock that day because the stage was a tight squeeze (which explains all the rehearsal stories) and lamented the weird lights outside that went from normal to pink to red (which is why the pics are kindof weird). Abs asked where Maks was and she laughed and said she had no idea and that she hadn’t seen him since bows. As she left she thanked me again for the hat and said she’d post it on insta. I’m really hoping he’ll wear it (toddlers are iffy on hats....and all things really) but I’m pretty sure she’ll post it some how if he won’t wear it.
(Of note....I could smell her.....she smells like a girl.....flowery lotion. It makes me more salty)
We waited a bit longer and still no sign of Maks or Val. It was getting late and even more chilly and windy and we decided to call it quits at 11. The time came and after me having to snap at Abs (she is a determined fangirl), we made our exit with the agreement that one of the remaining group would watch us until we got to the corner and they’d yell Maks’ name real loud so we could come running back. Mt. Everest thought this was hysterical and kept waving to us while we walked off looking back every 5 seconds. We made our way back to the hotel, I was again no help because while I can confidently get myself home from downtown....the hotel was on the other side of the river and I had no idea how to get there. The girls were passed out approx 37 seconds into the drive home. When we got there Nonna popped out of the van and looked down and saw her shirt button was undone. She goes “Oh look at me, all naked!” I died. She is the best and I might steal her. We sadly said our goodbyes and Abs and I headed home. After I got home (about 11:45) I went to check and saw @loveisstatic was the lone hold out and got to meet Maks. I bet she really got the wrath of BSG for waiting so long. (Girl...you gotta vouch for me on BSG....she was serious!) All in all, we had the absolute best time and I can’t wait to do it again.....next year.....after my wallet stops crying.
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101 kinks!! 21,24,44,90,95 (all in one if you can please!) w/ Bucky :') thanks lovely!!!!
PROMPTS: daddy kink, dom/sub, humiliation, spanking, underage (I’m not gonna do this one) [from this list]1,677 words; You become bored at Natasha’s birthday party and begin breaking rules left and right. Bucky decides you need to be punished in front of the entire party (18+, features Natasha Romanoff, hope you don’t mind! Rest of the story under the cut - if it doesn’t work, try it on a computer or on Ao3)
Party Punishment
All of Bucky’s friends - The Avengers - knew. They knew you were Bucky’s little princess. Most of them were into the ‘lifestyle’ in some way or another too. Steve and Sam both served Natasha, while Wanda occasionally entertained Steve’s more dominant streak. They accepted the relationship you and Bucky had forged, kinks and all.
But that didn’t stop your initial hesitation. He was no longer ‘Bucky’. He was ‘daddy’. And you had to address him as such, regardless of who you found yourselves in the company of, lest you be punished as Bucky deemed appropriate. Your cheeks turned a deeper shade of crimson every time you uttered the word ‘daddy’.
There were other rules for you to follow, too. Bucky had a say in what you wore, how much alcohol you drank and your bed time. You were to politely address each of Bucky’s friends and only speak when spoken to. You even wore a thin, silver ‘collar’ at Bucky’s request. At times it was a comfort. Your fingers looping themselves subconsciously under the metal when he was away on missions, reminding you of who you belonged to. Other times, especially in public, it was a slight form of humiliation. He, of course, held on to the key so you couldn’t take it off without permission.
There were benefits to your arrangement too. You particularly enjoyed seeing a softer side to Bucky. He couldn’t say no to you when you asked for snuggles and he was always on board with spending entire afternoons making blanket forts with you. Not the mention him frequently coming home with stuffed animals for your collection. Your favourite was a penguin who you had named Percy. Bucky was also fiercely protective over you.
Life without the burden of decision making was strangely freeing but you were still getting used to all that it entailed.
That was no more apparent than on Natasha’s birthday, when most of the gang had assembled in the common room of the compound for some good old fashioned hilarity. You sat on Bucky’s lap, growing increasingly bored with your surroundings. Nervous and fidgety, the tales being passed around the room were lost on you; being at a party was no fun if you were still relatively sober. Bucky could sense your disinterest. It was 8PM.
“What’s wrong, princess?” he asked.
“I’m so bored, Bucky,” you pouted.
He sighed. “I think someone needs to remember her rules.”
You rolled your eyes, testing him. It didn’t go unnoticed by him, but he opted not to say anything. He made a mental note of it though, giving you a stern look in return.
“Can I go to my room please, daddy? I’ll give you something extra special later if you let me,” you bargained, winking at him.
Bucky’s expression softened. “Ok, princess,” he said, kissing your cheek, “I’ll be up at eleven to tuck you in. Would you like that?”
You nodded, smiling sweetly.
“Off you go,” Bucky said as you slid off his lap and left the room.
The trip from the common room to your ground floor bedroom brought you past the kitchen which lay empty and unguarded, with an obscene amount of alcohol laid out on the kitchen table for the taking. There was rum, vodka, tequila, beer and all manner of wines and liqueurs. You tried to convince yourself that Bucky wouldn’t notice if you snuck two or three beers to your room, after all, you weren’t completely irresponsible. And that wouldn’t get you wasted. Even if it did, you told yourself you would be able to feign sobriety when Bucky came to tuck you in. You left the kitchen with three beers.
Eleven o’clock came around sooner than you expected it to. When Bucky arrived, you were busy draining your third beer of the night. Your spirits had been lifted and you were dancing on your own in the centre of your room to Taylor Swift, in nothing but the pale pink lingerie Bucky had given you to wear earlier on in the evening. He watched as you flailed along to the tune of ‘Shake It Off’.
You flung yourself around in a circle, stopping dead as the figure in your doorway caught you off guard. You shot him a saccharine smile.
Bucky was unimpressed. He folded his arms, raising an eyebrow. He was awaiting an explanation for the beer in your hand and the two empties on your nightstand.
Instead, you wandered over to him dizzily, wrapping your arms around him. “Missed you, daddy,” you mumbled, looking up at him.
His arms dropped to his sides. “I think someone’s forgotten all her rules tonight,” he sighed, sounding disappointed, “what are we gonna do about that, hm?”
At a loss for words, you pouted, hugging him tighter.
“I think someone needs a little punishment to help her remember,” he said, taking you by your shoulders and prying you off him. He turned and started back down the hallway towards the common room, “come with me princess.”
Struggling to match Bucky’s brisk pace, you had to run to catch up with him. He was already inside the common room and sitting back in his spot on one of the plush sofas when you arrived. He patted the space next to him and you sat down. Clad in just your underwear now, you felt exposed.
The change in Bucky’s demeanour hadn’t gone unnoticed by Natasha. No longer was she invested in the story Sam was enthralling Steve and Wanda with. Instead, her eyes darted between you and Bucky. “What’s up with you two?” she piped up from across the room. Suddenly everyone fell silent.
“This one’s being difficult tonight,” he explained, his expression turning dark. You flushed under everyone’s collective gaze as he continued: “found her drinking in her room. She’s not remembering any of her rules. Figured I’d teach her a lesson.”
“She looks like she could do with a spanking,” Natasha suggested, “I’m sure we’d all be happy to watch.”
Your opened your mouth to protest this, of course you knew better than to question Bucky or any of his friends. Especially not Natasha. You were at the bottom of the pile, after all. She was queen in the compound. Bucky swiftly cut you off.
“Since it’s your birthday, Nat, you’re more than welcome to participate,” he laughed.
Natasha smirked, “what did you have in mind?”
“Well I’ll leave that up to you, call it a birthday present from me to you,” he said, the sadistic humour still apparent in his voice.
You had no idea what Bucky meant by this but it made your stomach churn. You always imagined Natasha to be infinitely more sadistic than Bucky and you prayed, desperately, that she wouldn’t be the one administering your punishment.
“I’m happy to watch right now,” she said, settling back into her chair.
The shame washed over you as Bucky instructed you to stand up in front of everyone and remove your remaining clothing. Your arms fumbled to cover yourself as every pair of eyes in the room bore into you. You swore you could hear Natasha’s quiet drawl, “she’s so adorable, I’d love a little plaything like her.”
Bucky instructed you to bend over his knee. You did so. Held in place by Bucky’s left arm around your waist, you were glad of the restraint; you were quivering so profusely with anticipation that you could well have ended up in a puddle on the floor. Even though you couldn’t see everyone’s eyes on your bare behind, which was now lewdly on display, you could certainly feel them.
Bucky’s touch was feather light as it caressed the soft, exposed mounds of your behind. It was warm, reassuring, even. Just enough to give your nerves a brief reprieve before his hand came down, cracking loudly against your skin and forcing the air from your lungs.
You gripped the edge of the sofa as he peppered swats over the back of your thighs and your bottom, colouring the skin pink in large handprints.
As always, you mentally kept score of how many swipes Bucky had landed. At this point, you had counted twenty already. Your cheeks matched the colour of your rear, but there were no tears yet.
“How are you doing, princess?” Bucky asked, taking a brief moment to massage the reddened skin.
“I’m ok, daddy,” you nodded.
The extra level of humiliation at having all of Bucky’s friends watch your punishment had quite an effect on you. The evidence was beginning to coat the insides of your thighs as Bucky continued to spank you with increasing severity.
You began to squirm against his grip, trying to find some relief for the ache between your legs.
“She’s enjoying this far too much,” you heard Sam remark around swat number forty.
“Her pretty little pussy’s getting so wet for us,” Natasha purred as she moved over, next to Bucky, to get a better view.
You writhed as her outstretched hand pawed at your glistening pussy for a moment, desperate for more.
She was only teasing you. You whined when she withdrew her slender fingers and Bucky continued to dole out brutal smacks to your rear.
Between the pain, the desperation and the embarrassment, this was when the tears started. Bucky eased up at exactly the right moment, his hits becoming less frequent.
“You gonna be a good girl, princess?” he asked, the familiar warmth returning to his tone.
You quickly dried your tears and whined, “I promise I’ll be a good girl, daddy.”
“No more drinking?” he pressed, his fingers dipping towards your dripping core as your punishment came to an end.
“No more drinking, daddy,” you choked, squirming when you felt his fingers zero in on your clit.
“Good girl,” he praised, “why don’t you wish Nat a happy birthday now, while daddy makes you feel good.”
You turned around to see Natasha eyeing you. Her legs were spread invitingly as her hand worked lazily between them. You looked at Bucky again.
He nodded, “go ahead, princess, daddy’s got you.”
MASTERLIST
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imagine yoongi as your cat familiar.
-- i immediately thought of sam riley in maleficent.
a black cat, how predictable.
needless to say this was not what you had in mind when you summoned a demon companion.
yeah, you got a demon in cat form.
it takes you a while to realise that’s what he is though, at first you just thought you’d botched the summoning and went on with your day.
but now this cat has been chilling in your garden for a week and it keeps trying to get in and it doesn’t have a collar or anything.
also instead of shooing when you tell it to the cat just gives you the ugliest look and that should be possible for a cat to be so expressive???
eventually you let him in though because he’s not going anywhere and it’s cold and he’s probably hungry.
and you think, fuck it, if you’re gonna be a witch you might as well have a black cat, right? why not
so you take him to the vet to make sure he’s healthy and vaccinated and he almost scratches their eyes out.
but other than that he’s a pretty chill cat, sleeps all day, pitter-patters around the house all night. lowkey loves to cuddle.
you name him suga.
he doesn’t go out much? but likes to follow you around when you go out.
or anywhere else for that matter.
but not in an obvious way like he’s not always on your heels.
tsundere cat.
most of the time he acts like he doesn’t even know you exist.
but he keeps turning up wherever you are.
included, but not limited to, on the bus, inside the library, bathhouses, at the dentist, the supermarket, and your mom’s house ?????
basically anywhere except church.
eventually you just start talking to him because it feels,,,,,,, natural.
like i said, he’s very expressive, and a lot of the time you almost feel like he’s really understanding you and to a certain degree giving you answers.
you’re starting to suspect him because honestly some of the shit this kitty gets into should be impossible.
like he once put out a fire ????? just casually spilled some water and saved your life and your house from burning down ??
keeps “accidentally” knocking your things over and has saved you from making some pretty bad magic mistakes that way.
eventually he just gets enough of your clueless ass and pulls up a wikipedia page on witches’ familiars for you to find the next time you use the computer.
it’s kinda embarrassing it took you this long to find out.
you try to communicate directly with him after that but he won’t have his sleep interrupted, refuses to “meow once for yes and twice for no”, and leaves you no other choice than to look for spells to make him talk.
bad idea.
yoongi has been a cat for a veeery long time, he’s grown quite comfortable and then you have to come and make him human.
a very naked human, in desperate need of a wash and a haircut.
he doesn’t like being without fur and bundles up nice and cosy immediately in his usual spot on the couch.
but also hasn’t had a bath in this form in probably centuries so he agrees to have one but you have to promise to turn him back or at least make his human form optional.
let’s not forget this also puts you in a very awkward position, trying to think of all the things you have said or done in front of yoongi when you thought he was just a cat.
things are kinda tense, to say the least.
but for the next few weeks you experiment with spells and potions in hopes of making things right again, or at least better.
after a while it becomes apparent that you are hopeless at this and yoongi helps you out reluctantly.
also because he’s having some real trouble getting used to his human form, not able to balance like before without his tail.
hilarity ensues when you work your way through a wide variety of failed attempts.
yoongi’s personal favourite being the one where he has cat ears, whiskers, and a tail, but is otherwise human.
he stays that way for a while. it’s,,,,,,,,,,,,, fine. or whatever.
also he doesn’t fit on the couch anymore, so he shares your bed, but that’s fine because he’s usually up at night.
except for when he isn’t. like in the very early mornings.
and as you gradually warm up to each other and things get less awkward, you just kind of slip into this comfortable intimacy.
and when you finally find the right potion for yoongi to shift between forms at will, things between you get easy, and playful, and flirtatious.
before you know it he’s sharing your bed all hours of the day and even night if you know what i mean wink wonk.
in the end, with yoongi’s watchful presence and sarcastic guidance you’ll grow to be an accomplished witch some day.
in the meantime you can set the house on fire and he’ll find a way to put it out, turn him into a frog and he might even forgive you some day.
in the end he’s more of a partner than a companion.
anyway, nsfw under the cut.
you tried to make him wear a collar once, innocently enough just so people wouldn’t think he was a stray cat, but you somehow ended up wearing it yourself.
that rough tongue tho.
and his deep, rumbling purrs.
and the way he brushes past you affectionately, just like he would in his cat form, except he mutters dirty things in your ear when you’re trying to concentrate on something.
or just straight up fucking you while you’re trying to do something and insisting that you stay on task.
loves it when you really dig your nails into his back and shoulders, or when you pull his hair, and will go to great lengths to illicit that reaction.
yoongi has a lot to teach you about magical sex ok
both literally and figuratively.
and he’s a patient, confident, generous teacher. with a side of snark.
and if you’re struggling to master a spell he will gladly provide incentive, teasing you and promising to reward you with his fingers, his cock, his mouth, anything you want when you finally get it right.
but he also loves to deny you and will keep you on edge all day if he feels like it, he loves playing games with you like that.
on the other hand, if you make him chase you prepare for the most ferocious fucking of your life :’)
#kpop smut#bts smut#yoongi smut#suga smut#yoongi#catboy!yoongi#catboy!bts#kpop imagines#kpop scenarios#kpop reactions#bts imagines#bts scenarios#bts reactions#yoongi imagines#yoongi scenarios#suga imagines#suga scenarios#suga
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Dealing with distractions
“In the event you find yourself distracted, focus!” There is a certain hilarity in that statement, if one allows it to congeal in between the ears. If you are distracted, how do you know you are distracted, since distraction has got you trapped in its realm?
To illustrate that point, let me tell you a real happenstance that occurred recently. On a clear day when the blue was all blue and not a spot of moisture hung in the air, I decided to get three more instrument approaches under my belt to keep the currency in my proficiency, current. Tagged with a copilot (of many thousand hours in various Air Force jets and large aluminum-bodied airliners) sitting beside me, I donned the “foggles” and off we went, severing the surly bonds.
Instrument skills quickly atrophy.
It was immediately apparent to anyone inside the aircraft, and probably those on the ground looking up, that I was a bit rusty. It took all of 10 minutes to clear those phugoid oscillations that were human-induced and had nothing to do with aircraft aerodynamics or forces of nature. The lesson was quite stark: the moment practice ceases, and the effort becomes an object of striving, it becomes subject to unhealthy distortions. Hence, constant practice makes imagination the object of cognition, where one can foresee the immediate future to a related input, rather than constantly trying to catch up and overshoot.
As time would have it, the yaw damping finally and reluctantly happened and the non-turbulent air we were voluntarily bucking in became non-turbulent. My safety pilot let out a soft sigh, and I heard it loud and clear. No words needed to be said.
But that was not going to be the end of it. I had requested the RNAV approach to Runway 31 into ACY and that had been granted by ATC. Vectoring a long downwind over water was not my favorite thing, especially at 2000 feet, but the controller had control. My safety pilot, probably seeing my struggle, suggested I use the flight director to make it easier on myself. Hmm… he must really think I stink at this instrument thing, I thought.
So, I pressed the FD button on the Garmin box and the command bars dutifully popped up on the primary flight display. I protested that using FD is akin to cheating. But, I thought, since the rust was defining itself in large patches, why not? I surmised that flying the flight director would make it easier on me and might impress him a bit. I figured the sharper sense of discomfort would quickly interweave with the bliss of past expertise and render my inadequacy moot. The sense of this relatedness was short-lived, however.
I had the command bar pegged to the FD and was sailing along towards the final approach fix. I dutifully pulled the manifold pressure to 18 inches, RPM was at 2400, and the airspeed slowed to a comfortable soft drone. The aircraft steadily hurtled along the quiet path and I started feeling on top of my game again as the multi-function display peeled away the blue water behind and dragged in the green below us. Everything seemed whole again. My currency had aligned itself with proficiency.
The final approach fix came and I kept flying the flight director, enamored and comforted by the ease of automation. Another mile went by and I realized that I had failed to put the gear down at the final approach fix. Oops. So I did. I heard a distinct throat clearing from across the aisle. Damn, I thought, this was a terrible exercise in progress. I needed to fix this quick.
Mumbling my displeasure at my own actions, I resolved to be more precise. That expanding idea. The resilient thought. The continuous play of motion in a three-dimensional universe made all the more real the initial collapse of action. The desire to fix what had been broken ceased upon my nerves and now my multiple thousand hours melted away and I felt I was back in training. A certain drift of scent that emanates from failure hit me square in my nostrils and I realized that the glide path indicator had drifted down to the lower end, in accordance with a required missed approach. Damn! Tracing across over the expansive countryside at race-car speeds without the object of arriving the destination in airline fashion was getting worse by the minute.
“It’s a missed approach!” I croaked.
Flight directors are very helpful, but only if you push the right buttons!
“Yes,” is all my copilot said as I flew over the runway at 1500 feet.
What happened? It was all I could think about. Common sense and reason eventually unveiled causality, as they did.
First let me quarry the marble out of this flight and sculpt a phoenix from it.
Distraction was the all-encompassing natural beast that had membered itself to my mental capacities. The suggestion of using the flight director, when pushed by itself, will register stability in the pitch and roll mode only for the current flight path according to Garmin. If I had pushed other buttons, as I should have done when flying the autopilot—namely the approach mode button—then the FD would have taken me through the vertical descent as well. Automation has its, “If This Then That” moments and linearity of thought and action is what the black boxes seek from the pilot in conducting their affairs. None were apparent here, cobbled together in a ball of a single fixated distraction.
Total dependence on automation without careful monitoring-with-expectation is like tranquilizing oneself with certitudes of hope. Imagination as cognition means to look at the forecast future from any action undertaken. A cluttered mind fails to register intentions akin to throwing pebbles in a stormy sea. Distractions clutter the mind and simple but necessary actions go unheeded.
Looking at accidents and incidents related to approach and landing distractions,
72% are acts of omission
63% are acts of crew lack of coordination
52% are due to loss of situational awareness
45% are due to slow reaction
All of these were in force at that RNAV approach I detailed above. All of them!
And factors related to such events are:
Communications in 50-68%
Head down activity 22%
Response to anticipated activity or situation 14-19%
Again, all these factors were also at play in the above scenario. My total abdication of authority to the use of the FD without the anticipated need for additional inputs caused the missed approach.
How could it have been better?
Sterile cockpit technique and not heeding to the use of FD during the vectoring phase without briefing myself.
Using a checklist for the type of approach.
Monitoring and scanning all data rather than fixation only on the FD.
Number 3 is of importance since our brains function to the laws of recency. We are asked to repeat instructions to ATC to ensure a) we heard the correct instructions and b) we remember to input the instructions correctly in the black boxes. The short term memory lasts in the short term memory banks for 15-18 seconds. Repeating the instructions fortifies them for a bit longer. Otherwise we resort to “Say again.” In this case the suggestion to use the flight director at the last minute was the culprit that brought the entire universe of thoughtful actions to a halt.
We must remember that the human mind is filled with disquieting gaps of the daily life that fill in constant distractions. Achieving the purpose at hand requires clarity of mind and focus. To keep distractions at bay, secure a sterile cockpit and use checklists to bring back the required focus.
To illustrate the dangers of said distractions, here are a few facts and real-life examples:
A study found that children using cell phones are 43% more likely to be hit by a vehicle while crossing the street than children who are not using cell phones.
A 25% increase in pedestrian injuries among 16- to 19-year-olds over the last few years is being attributed to the increase in cell phone use.
Statistics show that texting and driving is three to four times more dangerous than operating under the influence of alcohol or drugs.
Two Northwest Airlines pilots flew 150 miles past their destination at Minneapolis while going over schedules using their laptop computers.
A Teterboro tower controller, during a Piper’s departure, was “engaged in a bantering personal phone call about a dead cat while directing traffic.”
A phone conversation was implicated in the Hudson midair collision between a tour helicopter and a Piper Lance that killed nine people.
A few thoughts to keep in mind:
Conversation is a powerful distracter… keep it to a minimum.
“Head-down tasks” during flying are distracting, especially in IFR conditions.
Defer all non-critical activities.
Consider any interruption as a “red flag.”
The post Dealing with distractions appeared first on Air Facts Journal.
from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/04/dealing-with-distractions/
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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews
I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger.
The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.
Tricia Marcella Cimera
is a Midwestern poet with a worldview. Look for her work in these diverse places: Anti-Heroin Chic, Buddhist Poetry Review, The Ekphrastic Review, Foliate Oak, Failed Haiku, I Am Not A Silent Poet, Mad Swirl, Silver Birch Press, Wild Plum and elsewhere. She has two micro collections, THE SEA AND A RIVER and BOXBOROUGH POEMS, on the Origami Poems Project website. Tricia believes there’s no place like her own backyard and has traveled the world. She lives with her husband and family of animals in Illinois, in a town called St. Charles, near a river named Fox, with a Poetry Box is in her front yard.
Link to THE FOX POETRY BOX, my public art installation:
https://www.facebook.com/FoxPoetryBox
The Interview
1. When and why did you start writing poetry?
Before writing, there was reading. When I learned how to read (my mother told me that I was convinced it would be too hard to learn; I was a tiny defeatist), another life began for me. A life of imagination. I fell madly in love with reading. And through reading I found poetry. It entered into the portal of my child mind in various forms such as the great Dr. Seuss. When I was nine I wrote my first poem that came whooshing out spontaneously after a dinner with my parents and some business associates of my father. One of the wives told us about her grown daughter being killed in a car accident. This hit me so hard; after dinner, I sat down and wrote this little poem about grief. Everyone seemed kind of astounded; the woman who had lost her daughter just wept. My mother kept that poem for years but it was lost somewhere in time as we moved around. Poetry then lay dormant in me for a while but returned when I was in high school where I wrote and submitted things to the school literary journal. It went away yet again but returned full force when I was in my 30s and discovered a local writer’s class at the college. Along with the class came a professor who encouraged me in a way that every poet should be in their life. And that meant all the world to me – and my poems.
2. How aware are and were you of the dominating presence of older poets traditional and contemporary?
Aware and intimidated at first. But with poetry, there are many masters and many forms. I try and learn from older poets but it’s imperative I listen to my own voice.
2.1. Who were you intimidated by?
I would say that initially every great poet intimidated me. People like Ezra Pound, for example. What did it all mean? Poets like Emily Dickinson, Jane Kenyon, Leonard Cohen showed me that simple language coupled with deep ideas was something to strive for. That was poetry too! Again, there are many forms to choose from – that was freeing to me. MY voice is a form in and of itself.
3. What is your daily writing routine?
I have no daily routine of actual writing. Poems are always showing up and percolating throughout the day in my head, I let them gain form, which can take days. Once I begin putting a poem to paper (computer screen), it generally goes quickly. I’m a fast reviser. I’m a big proponent of revising; I think it’s necessary to advocate for the poem, not the ego. I know there’s a school of thought when it comes to organic outpouring of words to create a poem. I think a poem deserves to be worked on and lived with. It makes it no less gritty or tough if that’s what you’re going for.
4. What motivates you to write?
My imagination, my specific experiences, the world, every art form there is, history, living and dead human beings and animals, the act of remembering – all of it motivates my writing. Anything and everything can be a poem. Once I understood this, a door opened. You really can’t close that particular door once it flies open.
5. What is your work ethic?
I don’t make a living through my writing so my ‘work ethic’ is fluid and not terribly militant. Once a poem is begun, however, I feel committed to it and will revise/polish/finish quickly or revisit it as much as necessary until it feels right. There are those poems, however, that just don’t work. I don’t entirely abandon them but they are left to. . .sit there, waiting for a line to be used, an idea to be shaped . Getting back to revision, I suppose that speaks to a work ethic. As mentioned before, the poem should be served, not the initial delight in creating it.
6. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?
Great question! The books and stories of my childhood are forever of my beating heart. I still have one of the first books I received for my 6th birthday – “Hamish Meets Bumpy Mackenzie” by Frances Bowen. The Narnia Chronicles by C.S. Lewis truly saved my life when my mother was hospitalized for depression (when I was ten). I return to my childhood books again and again. “Half Magic” by Edward Eager still entrances me and makes me laugh. I can’t imagine abandoning any of these fantastic books and their writers. They are written so well and never talk down to anyone, except maybe those without an imagination. I believe in magic and hope and weirdness and underdogs because of the books of my youth. Of all the books I’ve read in my life, they mean the most to me.
7. Whom of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?
I have many favorite writers but I always cite Joyce Carol Oates and Larry McMurtry as two of my most favorite novelists because they both have such amazing bodies of work. Everyone calls JCO prolific – because she IS! She can do it all (gothic, current social mores, retellings of Marilyn Monroe or JonBenet Ramsey, young adult, short stories, etc.) and with such intelligence and depth. She has revisited certain themes in her work for years; dark and psycho-sexual are her trademarks. As for Larry McMurtry, no one can write a woman like he can. He has created the most marvelous woman characters. McMurtry is known for his westerns (Lonesome Dove), yet I haven’t read them! Because I love his other books so much; I’ve got time. He makes you fall in love with his people and suddenly, shockingly, someone will die. I’ve literally let out screams and then cried. Oh, McMurtry, how could you. I have to mention Donna Tartt as well – The Secret History is the most amazing book. I just reread it for the billionth time. It reminds me so much of Brideshead Revisited; the college students dreamily and beautifully moving through life in a particular time. Now I realize I haven’t even mentioned poets! So many – Mark Doty, Sharon Olds, Raymond Carver. . .and always, always, always Leonard Cohen. Poetry is alive and well. The social justice poetry in America right now is just sizzling. The times are right for it. It’s exciting to read poetry and to write poetry these days.
7.1. Why Leonard Cohen?
Leonard Cohen is the finest. His poems are so relatable and understandable, yet they are not simple in the least bit. He references a LOT. He tells us that we as humans encompass everything. And he says that with sadness and with hilarity. I know I’m speaking of Mr. Cohen in the present tense but he lives on, he’s the Master. I’ve written three poems that he appears in and two of them are especially dear to me; I’m grateful that he shows up. Anyone reading this – go read Leonard Cohen! And listen to him as well. The songs, the voice. . .
8. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?
Writing is the thing I do best, creative-wise. I wish I could paint or play an instrument or sing (I sing with gusto but not well). So I write.
9. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”
I would advise to Read, Write and Revise. How can you write if you don’t have a love of reading? And when you write, revise! Just a little revision goes a long way.
10. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.
Poems are always percolating in my mind but the writing projects I have in my life right now are really about other poets. I maintain and curate a poetry box in my front yard where I display the work of living guest poets, dead poets, as well as songs, art, etc. My poetry box is called The Fox Poetry Box. Passer-bys happen upon it during walks; it’s a concrete and organic small literary billboard. And it has an electronic life as well – the box has its own Facebook page. In conjunction with The Fox Poetry Box, I created The Tom Park Poetry Prize which was just announced. It’s named for a most marvelous cat that my husband and I had the privilege of knowing for a year and a half before he recently passed on. Tom Park was, as I wrote in the prize announcement, a profile in Courage, Character and Compassion. Entries are open until April 15th. Long live Tom Park! And poetry!
Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Tricia Marcella Cimera Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. 1,650 more words
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PREGNANCY IS APOCALYPTIC, or it can be. There’s something both utterly mundane and completely shocking about bringing another human being into the world, and the process of adjusting to a new life — in both senses of the phrase — is challenging for many mothers, whether they admit it or not. Of course, many start out as tender, maternal people and experience few significant personality changes. But for others, the birth of a baby is the destruction of one way of life, one way of being, and the start of another. It’s a complete shift in worldview, a remaking of identity, a transformation that ripples out from the personal to the social and political. Meanwhile, for babies, their mothers or caregivers are their entire world, a governing force that controls all aspects of life. But what if suddenly women were giving birth to babies that emerged as some regressed, earlier form of human? Society as we know it would surely collapse.
That is the central, wonderful premise of Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God. As the novel opens, we’re devolving, though it’s not a straight or linear path backward. After all, as the narrator, 32-year-old mother-to-be Cedar Hawk Songmaker, points out, evolution was intuited from many different pieces of evidence, and it’s been known to push species sideways as much as it has forward. Additionally, our devolution, as Erdrich imagines it, is not merely biological, it’s political and social, as well. But what the reader might expect to be a dark and brooding story is instead frequently flush with knowing hilarity. The novel promises to be both apocalyptic and dystopian, but it takes its time getting there. The literary mixes with the colloquial, as in Erdrich’s other fiction (Love Medicine, The Round House), but the colloquial has the edge. Structured as letters written by a mother to her unborn child during a critical point in history, the novel is among the author’s most accessible works of fiction.
Cedar is the letter-writing mother whose contemporary, slightly forced humor colors the novel. She’s a Native or part-Native woman adopted by white Minneapolis progressives Sera and Glen. She notes, “Although I’ve seen Sera eat a gas-station hot dog once, and many years ago Glen had an affair with a Retro Vinyl Record Shop clerk that nearly tore the family apart, they are happily married vegans.” Throughout, Erdrich mocks Sera and Glen for being the sort of people who congratulate themselves for “how good their track record is on political idiocies and wars and natural disasters.” They see political trouble coming, and they are right. Since evolution is going backward, the government is taking an intrusive interest in pregnant women and the condition of their babies.
When Cedar describes her childhood as an adoptee, she notes, “I was rare, maybe part wild, I was the star of my Waldorf grade school.” Once she went to college with other indigenous people, however, she became ordinary. Unlike the other indigenous students, she had no struggles and stopped going to class. She explains, “I’d been a snowflake. Without my specialness, I melted.”
As the novel begins, Sera gives Cedar a letter from her biological mother, an Ojibwe woman named Mary Potts. Cedar learns that her Native family has “no special powers or connections with healing spirits or sacred animals,” and is, in fact, bourgeois. One set of relatives even owns a Superpumper gas station. Pissed off, Cedar thinks, “Who are the Potts to suddenly decide to be my parents? Worse, who are they to have destroyed the romantic imaginary Native parents I’ve invented from earliest childhood, the handsome ones with long, both-sided braids, who died in some vague and suitably spiritual Native way […]?”
Still, because of her pregnancy — the baby is due on a date of symbolic importance: December 25 — she drives out to meet her birth mother, who goes by “Sweetie.” As she approaches the reservation, Cedar is welcomed by a huge sign that reads “Future Home of the Living God,” and once inside she meets Sweetie’s boyfriend Eddy, an endearing writer. Like several others in the novel, he’s reminiscent of an E. L. Doctorow character — artless and naïve, or self-deluded, yet also weirdly knowledgeable. He “doesn’t have the modern sort of depression” that can be “treated with selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors,” and he has written a manuscript that’s more than 3,000 pages long.
Eddy likes theorizing about the world, and he’s the first person to whom Cedar discloses her pregnancy. When Cedar asks him what he thinks is going to happen, the following exchange takes place.
“Indians have been adapting since before 1492 so I guess we’ll keep adapting.”
“But the world is going to pieces.”
“It is always going to pieces.”
“This is different.”
“It is always different. We’ll adapt.”
After meeting her biological family, which includes her drug-addict half-sister Little Mary and her wise Native grandmother Mary, Cedar returns home to the father of her unborn baby, Phil, and hints of dystopia start emerging. Looking at Cedar’s ultrasound, her OB-GYN notes that every part of the fetus is perfect. He tells Cedar she should leave, and though she’s initially confused by the warning, it turns out that the government is searching for any pregnant women carrying babies that are not devolving.
Once Cedar’s pregnancy starts to show, she cannot go out, even to shop for food. She becomes confined to the house and has to construct a secret food cache in the basement. Her progressive parents disappear from their house, and fake people with fake smiles and gentle voices move into it. She cries over all the “wonderful, normal times” that she’s eaten crackers and cheese with parents or friends. The government is taken over by the Church of the New Constitution, which conducts surveillance through her computer. It turns on by itself and says, “Hello dear, this is Mother. How are you tonight? I am worried. We don’t seem to be communicating very well.”
It’s end times.
Reading the first 50 pages, with all their satire and humor, I was humming R.E.M.’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine).” But as the novel progressed, I came to understand that it would be grimmer than other dystopian novels I’d read and, because of its recognizable ordinariness at the outset, more terrifying.
Indeed, events grow steadily more horrifying and visceral — in one memorable scene, Cedar is forced to crush and kill rats to keep them from swarming a stillborn baby. But as the action grows more intense, the government’s will becomes increasingly baroque, simultaneously over- and under-explained. Why are people trying to escape to California? Why is the government targeting Minneapolis? Why are the news anchors all white? How does Mother appear in computers in which the power has died? These questions need not be answered, of course, and the supernatural elements in the basic premise provide Erdrich some freedom. But the way in which these questions are raised and then just as quickly dropped feels rushed rather than intense and mysterious.
Somehow, in a fortuitous blast of pregnancy hormones, Cedar remains optimistic through the darkest of times. But Future Home fully conveys the intensity of pregnancy during an apocalypse — if it can feel harrowing for an individual mother in normal circumstances, how much more earth-shattering must it be when you’re carrying one of the last fully evolved humans? The conceit of a mother writing to her unborn child is well executed, and the nature of impending motherhood is handled with care and accuracy. Cedar notes, “I don’t know why it is given to us to be so mortal and to feel so much. It is a cruel trick and glorious.” This spirit of looking at the world as a source of amazement, as being pregnant with possibility, rather than with sorrow or wistfulness, permeates the book. The tone shifts from frank and satiric to philosophical and tender but rarely sinks into the deeply melancholic voice that we’ve come to expect from the genre.
Designing a fully realized dystopia that speaks to the present moment is an ambitious and challenging feat of world building. Although the novel is slow to move into a dystopian register, the newly oppressive governmental institutions Erdrich fashions for Future Home make sense. The reader can easily imagine how our current government, which is already obsessed with controlling women’s reproductive systems, would become even more intrusive when there is a premium on “normal” babies.
The immediate comparison is to Margaret Atwood’s similarly hellish masterwork The Handmaid’s Tale, but the two novels have quite different political viewpoints. Given the Trump Era rise in reactionary conservatism, Atwood’s storytelling may seem eerily of-the-moment to those watching the Hulu television show based on the novel. However, the novel was published in 1985 — it was Atwood’s insightful response to what was happening politically during a decade that was crucial to the advance of the Christian right. Catholic right-to-life organizations had made Roe v. Wade a significant political issue by 1976, former Southern Baptist minister Pat Robertson was calling abortion a “theological matter,” and it was taken up as a pet cause by Evangelicals who came together to form the Moral Majority. Atwood’s novel simply takes the Moral Majority and pushes its beliefs to their logical end: a violent theocracy. She plainly modeled Serena Joy after pro-life conservative icon Phyllis Schlafly, who said in 1977, “Women find their greatest fulfillment at home with the family.”
The Handmaid’s Tale has an elegiac atmosphere, a longing for a yesteryear in which secular democracy, rather than theocracy, was the social norm. In Atwood’s dystopia are the seeds of a utopia. The novel sets as its ideal a time prior to the seizing of political power by Evangelical fanatics. It’s unforgettable partly because the narrator, the handmaid Offred, turns ordinary secular details like shampoo into objects of visionary poetry imbued with a loss and sorrow that pervades the entire work. This poetry of the everyday is shared by notable contemporary dystopian novels such as Laura van den Berg’s Find Me (2015), which touches on the search for a mother, and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), as well as arthouse films such as Lars von Trier’s Melancholia (2011). Everything social and political that is frightening in Atwood’s universe is intensified through lovely references to the utterly banal. Look at what you could lose, her novel seems to say.
Future Home shares the intensity of Handmaid’s Tale but doesn’t dissolve into melancholy. It cannot be read as an elegy for a lost world the way Atwood’s novel can. Cedar’s moral and religious worldview is different from that of the more liberal narrator of The Handmaid’s Tale. For instance, Cedar writes a Catholic newsletter, and this is in line with the book’s choice to treat her unborn fetus as a person, a potential recipient of all her letters. Perhaps Erdrich’s approach to what is dystopian arises from her different starting point — our existing world is not a utopia, and Erdrich will not pretend that it is.
Unlike Atwood, Erdrich uses banal imagery — particularly food and pregnancy, but also snot and technology — to generate a surreal sensation. She evokes the feeling of crazy end times by showing how institutions have gone completely haywire even as most sensory objects are experienced and sought after in the same way. In one scene, for example, Cedar is out getting a Subway sandwich when she sees the police seize a pregnant woman and her husband off the street, leaving their child to be swallowed up by a crowd. Cedar writes, “This is how the world ends, I think, everything crazy yet people doing normal things.” Erdrich captures the flavor of our Trumpian reality perfectly.
Future Home also shares literary DNA with P. D. James’s reproduction-focused dystopian novel The Children of Men (1992), though the latter is set in England. James uses fertility issues as a launch pad for concerns about totalitarianism. In the novel, the last baby was born in 1995, and by 2021 humans are on the brink of extinction. The narrator’s cousin is the Warden of England, and his critics view him as a despot. He’s a paternalistic force who purportedly acts out of concern for order but actually seeks to retain and enforce power. A subplot about a baby’s paternity echoes and reinforces the larger plot’s commentary on the rise of a tyrant, which is rendered authentic through James’s use of real history and politics — heretofore run by men, by fathers — to inform her narrative.
Instead of a masculine-centered totalitarianism that can be read as paternalism run amok, Erdrich imagines the government of Future Home as a creepy mother. As it acts to control the reproduction of Cedar and other pregnant women, the government explicitly projects itself as “Mother” — soft, maternal, concerned. But it’s a mother that desires control, a mother who may seem nurturing and progressive but is really just as autocratic as a traditional father figure. Where James’s paternity subplot clarifies her vision of totalitarianism, Erdrich’s government-as-creepy-mother framework muddles hers. It feels like a literary attack on a progressive vision of government, especially when juxtaposed with the lightly mocking satire directed at Cedar’s progressive, white, adoptive parents.
There is a conceptual basis for Erdrich’s decision to make her intrusive government maternal and solicitous, or falsely nurturing. As the linguist George Lakoff has pointed out in multiple books, including Moral Politics (1996), we tend to understand nation metaphorically as family. Traditionally, the left and right wings in this country have held ideological worldviews that can be understood as two different family models. Within this framework, progressives are identified with a nurturant parent model in which empathy is crucial and children become self-reliant with the help of caregivers, often mothers. In contrast, conservatives subscribe to a strict father model, which positions the father of a traditional nuclear family as the primary protector of children and sole authority devising rules of behavior and providing enforcement. Thus, one group sees the role of government as nurturing and supporting its citizens while the other sees it as an enforcer of rules and order, nothing more.
The text of Future Home drives toward the idea that a nurturing, progressive vision of government could and would lead to an abuse of control just as the strict father model does. This may, as an abstraction or in a historical vacuum, be true. Humans of any gender have within them the capacity to abuse whatever power they get. However, our real-world experience shows that most of what we know about how abuse of power plays out corresponds to a right-wing, authoritarian, strict father worldview (think Nazi Germany). The Children of Men gets this exactly right. The nurturant parent model, on the other hand, has only ever partially been implemented in the United States through programs such as Social Security. It simply doesn’t, by its very definition, correspond with the idea of brute governmental force.
Moreover, Erdrich’s political intentions for the novel as expressed in her author’s note are precisely the opposite of what her text suggests. She started writing the novel in 2002 in response to what she saw as a regressive political moment — the false intelligence that went into justifying the war in Iraq and President George W. Bush’s reinstatement of the global gag rule. She revisited the novel in 2016 after Trump was elected, when it appeared that we’d circled back to the politics of 2002, only worse. In the note, she points to deaths from unsafe abortions and the newly reimposed global gag rule, writing, “I only have to look at photographs of white men in dark suits deciding crucial issues of women’s health to know the timing is right” for publication of Future Home.
But the political concepts in Future Home are not fleshed out enough to comment effectively on our current moment. The symbolic connection between mothers and power that Erdrich wants to make is handled much more thoughtfully by Octavia Butler in her strikingly prophetic 1998 novel Parable of the Talents. In Talents, a demagogue president takes control of the country by promising that he’ll make America great again. A group of his Christian Crusaders are kidnapping the children of heathens and raping women, though he formally distances himself from them. The novel’s protagonist Lauren Olamina, a cult leader whose daughter has been kidnapped by the Crusaders, desires power and influence, too. However, she’s a black woman, not a representative of the established white-nationalist government, and she’s not given to offering up fake nostalgia in an effort to gather followers. Instead, she creates her own religion by seeking out like-minded followers through conversation and discussion — in other words, she’s nurturing.
But in the end, Olamina’s daughter Larkin, who may have been brainwashed, perceives her mother as being just as frightening as the totalitarian president. Through Larkin we receive the truth that power-seekers are always, regardless of gender, capable of manipulation and abuse. This, I think, is the truth Erdrich is working toward in Future Home. But Butler’s Afrofuturist version speaks more directly to our times. Olamina is never in a position to wield the brute, oppressive force of the government — she never has the power to create apocalyptic conditions the way Future Home’s Creepy Mother regime does. She may offer a form of salvation, but it is not to be had on this Earth.
Future Home is a departure from the lush intimacy of Erdrich’s Love Medicine and the dark, unforgettable storytelling of The Round House. As a gifted author’s flawed, experimental foray into dystopian fiction, it illustrates an important distinction between dystopian writing that arises from dreams and fantasy and that which arises from observation. At Future Home’s core is a fantasy about the visceral relationship between mothers and their babies, and between humans and Mother Earth. Dreams are inexorably personal, private, and idiosyncratic. They arise more from how we feel about things than from what those things might mean apart from our feelings about them and so fall outside the shared public sphere of the political. Erdrich’s dream-like approach to dystopian fiction contrasts with that taken by Atwood, James, and Butler, who were articulating shared visions rather than private ones, those they’d extrapolated from tangible situations that could be observed by anybody in our world who was interested in looking.
In the later part of the novel, Erdrich alludes to a famous Bertolt Brecht quote: “In the dark times, will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times.” In the scene, Eddy says, “Humans have always been superfluous troublemakers […] But at least we’ve got good songs.” Cedar points out that not everyone has good songs, and notes, “Mother — you know that Mother — has no song.” Eddy replies, “People sick for power have no song. But your baby is going to have a song.” Future Home functions like a song about the dark times, a blues hymn about how surreal life under Trump feels to progressives. But it’s not really a song about the specifics of our dark times. Rather, it’s a beautifully written, if imperfect, thought experiment that pushes the boundaries of reproduction-focused dystopian fiction. We may be in a historical moment that feels brutish and regressive, but it could, Erdrich suggests, be even worse.
¤
Anita Felicelli has contributed essays and reviews to The New York Times (Modern Love), San Francisco Chronicle, Salon, and The Rumpus. Her short stories have been published in The Normal School, Joyland, Kweli Journal, Eckleburg, Strangelet Journal, and The Stockholm Review.
The post Louise Erdrich’s Dystopian Dreams in “Future Home of the Living God” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.
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Harrisburg Police Investigating Curious Attempted Robbery Report
Top Free Car Games
Car games will always be extremely popular. This isnt hard to see, as our culture and world as a whole has an obsession with beautiful cars, and racing them. If you dont own an exotic, muscle, or classic car of your own, whats better than racing one online?
All ages of people love car racing games. Imagine driving a Ferrari on an acclaimed track, in a race with other drivers. How about drag racing in a muscle car, doing a burn out before the starting light turns green? Go again, and try to shave off a second of two of your time.
If you have a need for speed, love the sound of a purring or roaring engine, and crave the competition of racing, car games are made for you. You may find that you are spending hours in front of the computer screen with an adrenaline rush. If you have conquered one race, it is likely you will want to find another one. Choose from parking games, rallies, desert races, Formula 1 challenges, NASCAR tracks, and specific routes from around the world. Race in the daytime or nighttime, with rain, snow or sunshine. Compete against one or more drivers, with or without traffic or police.
Street racing car games are favorites. This is probably because the actual sport is illegal, and who can afford a genuine street car? With an online racing game, you may choose your type of car, then add parts, upgrades, wheels, paint, graphics, you name it. You will have a custom made car to race in. Whats even better is that you wont get a ticket or go to jail for racing. Pimp My Ride is an online car game. Freegear, Drivers Ed GT, Ultimate Street Car racer, Winter Drift game, and Rough Roads are a few others.
How do these racing games sound to you? Mountain Rescue Driver 2, Neon Race, Downhill Derby, Ultimate Formula Racing, City Drifters, Offroad Madness, or Street Wheels 2. From the comfort and convenience of your own home computer, you can play any of these free car games. Whether you love old cars, new cars, exotic cars, rally cars, or street racers, you wont be disappointed with an online racing game. Go ahead. Punch the accelerator, and go as fast as you desire in your Maserati, Porsche, or McLaren. Check out the latest car games, or play an old favorite tonight.
Top Free Car Games
Road bikes or racing bikes are created to go as fast as possible while confident of the rider's cover. They are mostly featured as skeletons of bicycles, but there isn't any a rationale why it looks so naked. This is because everything is toned down in order to save weight and improve aerodynamics, which important if well-developed to go as fast as purchase. These two factors will help give more performance. There are many gears for the racing bikes, but might clustered together so how the biker can make immediately which gear added with for the occasion. Its riding position is hunched over obtainable less resistance to the wind. Some will favor drop handlebars, which will cost the rider to hunch over great deal more. The tires are very thin and really high pressured, and error on a dent can puncture it.
Chris is winning over my heart with his hilarity. He comments how everyone grabbed props, "but no one went for your heels." Drew describes the expensive vacation event as a "hodgepodge of tomfoolery." The pageant coach keeps telling Ben his desire to a ribbon dance is "a strong choice." Overall, the guys are playing with it and perhaps more likeable because today.
Which a person rather have protecting your your home or property? Why would you cut cost to protect lives essential to some? Real security will set you back. There is actually definitely an old saying; "You get what you paid for".
After their talk, they came up to us and took us by the arms. They led us to a police car games. Spurgeon North, the Donaldsonville police chief, is at the driver's seat along with a disgusted look on his face.
My house. When I got to there, I notified the firemen that running barefoot was my house, and they told me that my hubby was right. That was good, but the nightmare was not even over.
Joey tells Jacob to allow him go away. Ryan catches up to these people. Ryan tells him that he has got to do what's excellent for Joey. The cops start to appear. Joey asks Jacob to permit him to go. Ryan moves as part of. He goes behind the shed and just finds Joey but Jacob is absent. Ryan takes Joey to law enforcement.
Editing is incessantly misleading, but seems that something dramatic happens and Des cries. Appears as if you have a fight between Bryden and Chris, but is actually why confusing and seemingly impossible because not merely be like Bambi as well as the Snuggle detergent bear getting into a deal with the problem.
Top Free Car Games
Car games will always be extremely popular. This isnt hard to see, as our culture and world as a whole has an obsession with beautiful cars, and racing them. If you dont own an exotic, muscle, or classic car of your own, whats better than racing one online?
All ages of people love car racing games. Imagine driving a Ferrari on an acclaimed track, in a race with other drivers. How about drag racing in a muscle car, doing a burn out before the starting light turns green? Go again, and try to shave off a second of two of your time.
If you have a need for speed, love the sound of a purring or roaring engine, and crave the competition of racing, car games are made for you. You may find that you are spending hours in front of the computer screen with an adrenaline rush. If you have conquered one race, it is likely you will want to find another one. Choose from parking games, rallies, desert races, Formula 1 challenges, NASCAR tracks, and specific routes from around the world. Race in the daytime or nighttime, with rain, snow or sunshine. Compete against one or more drivers, with or without traffic or police.
Street racing car games are favorites. This is probably because the actual sport is illegal, and who can afford a genuine street car? With an online racing game, you may choose your type of car, then add parts, upgrades, wheels, paint, graphics, you name it. You will have a custom made car to race in. Whats even better is that you wont get a ticket or go to jail for racing. Pimp My Ride is an online car game. Freegear, Drivers Ed GT, Ultimate Street Car racer, Winter Drift game, and Rough Roads are a few others.
How do these racing games sound to you? Mountain Rescue Driver 2, Neon Race, Downhill Derby, Ultimate Formula Racing, City Drifters, Offroad Madness, or Street Wheels 2. From the comfort and convenience of your own home computer, you can play any of these free car games. Whether you love old cars, new cars, exotic cars, rally cars, or street racers, you wont be disappointed with an online racing game. Go ahead. Punch the accelerator, and go as fast as you desire in your Maserati, Porsche, or McLaren. Check out the latest car games, or play an old favorite tonight.
Top Free Car Games
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