If there are a million good things in this world soup is one of them

If there are a hundred good things in this world soup is one of them

If there is one good thing in this world, it's soup

If there are no good things in this world soup doesn't exist anymore

Geography, sustainability, etc etc

Despite popular demand to the contrary, I have returned, with a goal to achieve only the most utter of victories. Conquering this damn assignment whilst being passive aggressive to ideas I find unfeasible at the same time.

On todays schedule we first have up to the chopping block for prompt examination, Hydrogen Fuel Cells. For once, an idea that I have both initially heard of, and did not have a strongly negative opinion of from the onset.

A bit more of a deep dive is always scholarly (and required for me to feel like I've done my due diligence). Unusually, this didn't leave me immediately thinking it was the worst and most uniquely foolish invention conceived by a human mind.

Let's keep to that positive streak by thinking about the positives of hydrogen fuel cells. For one, they're not fossil fuel, gas guzzling nightmare apocalypse machines. This may be literally rock bottom in terms of bars to clear, but it's still a step up compared to 85% of vehicles sold last year.

Secondly, they produce zero air pollutants! Which is honestly quite good, as personally I don't like breathing in an unknown and potentially toxic soup of chemicals and letting it marinate in my ole respiratory system.

Thirdly, hydrogen is pretty damn efficient as a fuel source, pulling roughly 70 MPGe (that's miles per gasoline gallon equivalent)

However, this is where I'm going to pivot away from being positive and cheery because such relentless optimism has no place on my record, and thus, let's dive into the issues.

The first issue is some that the keen-eyed amongst you may have been able to note already. These are Hydrogen Fuel Cells. Now, for those unaware, hydrogen is the first element on the periodic table, and is also absurdly flammable. Quite famously so, in fact.

(Pictured above, the Hindenburg descending in flames, picture captured by Sam Shere, 1937)

So, understandably, there is some safety concerns about putting hydrogen into our little boxes which we cram ourselves into, and then hurdle down roads at 40mph. Especially because people have a habit of crashing said metal boxes quite spectacularly.

In the interest of fairness though, I will note that cars tend to be pretty hilariously dangerous anyway as gasoline tends to also be very damn flammable and explosive at the best of times anyway.

The next issue, is the question of my most beloved of subjects, infrastructure. Much like gasoline, one needs infrastructure to fill up their little mobile deathmachines with enough juice to keep it moving, and this requires a place for one to fill up the tanks, and the places and equipment to refine the hydrogen, which might be on sight, but equally so could be offsite and if it's offsite you need to transport it onsite and so on and so forth. But incentives and funding from whatever your local monopoly on violence is likely the response to this particular issue, even if most these days focus on electric cars

Now, one thing that is also pretty important to note is that all of this is expensive. Building and refitting production lines to make hydrogen fuel cell cars, and the fuel cells themselves, and to build the infrastructure and all that lovely stuff. I find this the least compelling argument personally, as money is last on the list of things that matters in the face of the climate crisis.

So, here we are, the conclusion. Are Hydrogen Fuel Cells the future? Are they economical? Are they going to violently explode? The answer to all of these is probably not, but make your own opinions, don't just trust me, do your reading, look into it, come back and call me an idiot who knows nothing, I encourage it

See yah later folks, and remember, if you think you're about to solve the energy crisis, ask yourself if your new power source is as efficient, safe and cool as nuclear power.

Christine Yee

1. Name, Year, Major Christine Yee, 4th year Microbiology major, GDB & Human Development double minor

2. If you could eat a meal for the rest of your life, what would it be and why? I’d eat soup noodles!! Soup noodles are so versatile and you can literally eat some variation of it at any meal.

3. What do you think is the NUMBER ONE most important thing in a relationship or friendship? I think it would be something along the lines of effort. Making relationships and friendships work is a continual choice made by both parties and it definitely takes effort to make those choices and to decide to put time into the relationship/friendship.

4. What is the best advice someone has given to you? Describe the situation if possible. The best advice I’ve heard that I can actively recall is actually from The Office (: “There are always a million reasons not to do something.”

5. What are three things on your bucket list? Travel to Australia, attend a lantern festival, and adopt or foster a pet.

6. If you were famous, what would you want to be famous for? I think I’d want to be famous for something that I invent. I’d be famous and a genius :’)

7. If you could swap lives with someone for a day, who would it be and why? I would probably swap lives with my younger self from before the age of 5, assuming that I get to retain my current 21 year old consciousness. I want to be able to experience my family dynamic and living situation during that time in my life since children don’t remember anything before the age of 5.

8. If you could create a whole new subject to be taught in school, what would it be? Life Skillz 101. Gotta learn how to adult :’)

9. What do people constantly misunderstand about you? I think people can misunderstand my willingness to give my time or my indifference toward something as being someone who is easily pushed over. I feel that I’ve definitely been much better about saying no and setting boundaries since coming to college, but I do my best to also treat everyone with kindness and respect and I worry at times that it comes off as me being unable to stand up for myself.

10. What is something you regret doing or not doing? Would you change it if given the opportunity? Why or why not? I very much regret the way that I’ve interacted with and treated some people in my life. My mom first noticed and told me early on in high school that I don’t seem to deal with stress as well as I initially appear to. She pointed out that when I’m stressed I tend to seal myself off to others, seemingly dropping social aspects of my life, and ultimately pushing away people who are important to me. I never really realized the truth in her words (moms are always right btw, so listen to your mother!!), until I relatively recently ruined relationships with people who I value through a lack of interaction and general care for our relationship. In a sense, in times of stress where I’ve felt the pressures of school, extracurriculars, family, COVID, and life in general, I’ve neglected and in turn damaged relationships with people that I actually do very much care about. 

If given the opportunity, I would no doubt change what happened. I think change in a positive direction could only bring about good to relationships where doubt and apprehension were previously introduced. Being able to change what happened would definitely help the nature of the relationship today. On the flip side, I also understand this situation as a learning opportunity and wouldn’t want to change the valuable lessons that I’ve learned from it. I’ve learned much more about myself and I think if anything that’s the first step to change because as we all know, we can’t go back in time (unfortunately).

Exhausted - Hange x Reader

Word Count: 1.1k

Sometimes Hange just needs reminding that they're still human, a human who needs the basic necessities, and so much love.

!WARNING!

Spoilers for S4; takes place after Zeke is brought back and before the entire wine and Nicolo smashing it onto Falco debacle.

A/n: So before I start I just want to say that, I should post more fucking Attack on Titan, it's literally on my list of fandoms I write for but there isn't a single fanfic or headcanon or scenario on my page about it, and also I hope you guys enjoy this I know it's not my normal MHA or Haikyuu posts but unless I grow this blog bigger I'm planning on putting other fandoms in here too. Also, Hange uses they/them pronouns

🖤❤️🖤

“Hange san,” Your soft voice resonated through the dark room, on your hands carried a tray with warm soup, bread, and water. Hopeful that your workaholic lover would finally rest a bit and eat.

Hange looked back to the opened door, their stressed face softening a little bit seeing you walking in. “Y/n.” Their voice hoarse and scratchy, it was quite obvious they hadn’t been drinking at all since you came in last.

You walked over to them, smiling warmly feeling slight pity for the shape they were in. They looked completely worn out and exhausted, no doubt because of the stacks and stacks of work they had to go through since becoming Commander. Giving a soft peck on their forehead after putting down the tray of food, you walked through the closed window and slowly opened it.

Fortunately, it was close to dawn, so the sunlight streaming in wasn’t completely blinding in the dark room. “Sweetheart it's too bright.” Yet Hange still complained, rubbing their sleep-deprived eyes.

You huffed, feigning annoyance, only to walk back over to Hange and envelop them in a hug. They nestled themself closer to the crook of your neck, finding comfort in the familiar smell of you. “Shouldn’t you be resting right now?”

It was late workdays like these that made you truly worried about the health of your lover. No matter how much Hange disregards their basic human needs, they’re still human in the end. They need sleep, food, water, proper hygiene, and human interactions other than meetings.

“You know, these are the times I kinda miss Moblit the most.” You chuckled, trying to make light of the entire tense atmosphere, “Cause even Eren knows no matter how much I love you, I won’t have the goddamn patience to force you to shower. I don’t know how Levi or Moblit ever did it, to be honest.”

Henge let out a soft laugh, pulling away from the hug slightly to look at your eyes. “Moblit did it with a lot of alcohol, and I don’t know how the fuck Levi did it. I’m almost certain his disgusting blend of tea has some kind of alcohol in it.” Hange remarked.

From their voice, you can hear a hint of the playfulness they had once before. Before everything happened, before the burden of the title, ‘Commander’ was laid on them.

The both of you looked into each other’s eyes for a while, it was a silent comforting moment that was so rare to be experienced by the both of you. So rare in fact, that right now you couldn’t help but relish at the feeling.

That is before you quickly remembered the warm soup you brought over for Hange, “The soup’s going to get cold, better eat it now or I’ll eat it.”

For the first time in a very long time, Hange let out a hearty laugh, one that sounds exactly like how she used to sound before they found out about every secret the world outside the walls had to offer them.

“You’re starting to sound like Sasha.” Hange paused for a moment, you figured it was them trying to find the right words without sounding insensitive, “Did you get possessed by her dead spirit or something?”

Finally, Hange took bites of the soup you brought, it was probably their first meal in the day. “I wish. Maybe that way I can bring that poor cook some sort of solace.”

Hange seems to stop for a moment.

“Do you think this war is worth it?”

The question popped out of nowhere. Even though the two of you would talk about the state of Eldia quite frequently, there was an almost silent agreement not to talk about unsettling stuff when the two of you were together. Since it was rare to see each other outside of work activities, even rarer to find time together alone where the two of you can just relax.

But you realized this question had probably been weighing on your lover’s mind for quite some time, maybe that was why they swamped themselves with work all the time. Trying to forget how shitty this world was actually.

You tried not to think much about it and answered what came into your mind.

“There’s nothing else we can do about it.”

Hange simply nodded and continued eating the soup you brought in. Their face as always slightly hardened, the spark you saw years before almost completely gone now. The spark created from finding new discoveries about the titans and the sparks created from finding out new inventions from outside the walls brought in by Yelena.

It was sad to see it all completely disappear.

“That was the best meal I’ve ever had.”

You stopped blanking out for just a second and saw that Hange finished literally everything. Not a single speck of bread or a single drop of the soup nor the water was left. You grinned, they must’ve been starving if this is what they did with some shabby soup and stale bread from yesterday.

“Love, please sleep.”

You were literally ready to beg on your knees to Hange just so they’d rest a little bit. The eye bags underneath their eyes were getting darker and their eyes looked so ready to close and immediately sleep. To the point where you feel like even blinking would make Hange fall asleep.

Hange smiled at your request.

They realized they were being really terrible to both you and themselves. By them not taking care of their body and their mental health, they were also hurting you. The last thing Hange wants to do is hurt you, so they did what seemed the most natural to them.

They made themselves comfortable at a small couch near a bookshelf and motioned you to sit beside them. Which obviously you did.

Taking a book from the bookshelf beside the sofa, Hange cuddled closer to your figure and opened the book, fully intending to read it.

“I’ll stop working and read this book whilst cuddling with you ok?”

At this point, any kind of activity that wasn’t physical and work was enough rest for Hange so you begrudgingly agreed.

You followed Hange’s rapid reading speed across the pages, and slowly noticing they were getting slower. Of course, it was still 1 page per minute but they were repeating certain paragraphs or looking back to the previous pages for context.

Not long after, Hange stopped opening the next page. You snuck a glance beside you and saw the most precious thing you’d ever see in your entire life. Hange snuggled up against you, eyes underneath their glasses peacefully closed, softly snoring.

They looked so comfortable, so comfortable that you couldn’t resist but to lean to them and drift gently to sleep as well.

Not forgetting to give a small peck on her forehead, “Good night love.”

Completely not caring that it was probably nearing 5am at this point and the both of you would probably have to be awake by noon.

You tried pushing that thought away, focusing on the fact that finally, finally, finally, your lover has been working themselves to the brink of madness. Could finally rest.

🖤❤️🖤

The recent video by You All Write perfectly illustrates how broken the Staff is, with ideas like a Maiden raider or even making a portal to inside the Vaults. There is literally no possible way Salem can lose right now unless the plot dumbs her down and bends over backwards for the heroes.

I gave the video a watch after receiving this ask and yeah, it's a good summary of the many ways this should be game over for the heroes. The reality though is that it's going to come down to who is already a hero and who is already a villain. We have confirmation from the Volume 9 commentary that the group just cheated while using the Staff. They're allowed to do that because they're the heroes. Salem, who is the villain, will not be allowed to do that. It's a terrible way to write your story, but given that RT has already made the Staff too OP and are, by their own admission, unable to come up with ways for the heroes to win despite those limitations... the hero-villain divide is all that's left.

This is especially clear to me now because we've already seen them ignore one of You All Write's possibilities. They lay out that, with the Staff, Salem can just create an endless army to attack Vacuo with... but she already had an endless army. Salem had a seemingly endless grimm pool and over a thousand years to amass forces. She brought that pool with her during the attack. She herself is immortal. Yet what actually happens once she arrives? Her current army is conveniently just small enough for the Atlas soldiers to keep at bay, she only uses the grimm soup to create a handful of soldiers to take out the Atlas shields, and she herself never leaves the whale, despite the fact that Salem could easily act as a one person army, destroying everything in her way with magic and reforming as she goes. The fact that the show has already ignored three unbeatable resources just shows that her latest unbeatable acquisition, the Staff, will be ignored as well.

Putting Salem's personal power aside though, looking back it strikes me how easy it would be to solve this hero-villain divide: just emphasize the Relic's connection to the God of Light. Light, who created the Relics, has been in an endless war with his brother's inventions. Darkness, the creator of the grimm, grimm pools, and now connected to Salem, was equally eager to wipe out humanity. We could have easily had a situation where that war functions as Remnant's natural order, whether the Gods are still around or not, meaning that Light's creations are intrinsically against Darkness' creations. The Relics are against Salem and all her grimm-related subordinates, so when the heroes use them, they're inclined to bend their rules as much as possible in an effort to assist (Jinn letting Ruby stop time, Ambrosius "getting creative") once they learn that the heroes are fighting Salem. That's the important bit. In contrast, when summoned by those who they know are Salem's subordinates, the Relics do their best to withhold information — in as much as they're able. Do away with Jinn's strange dislike of Ozpin since he should be the one they're most eager to help. Lean into their individual personalities and have Ruby talking with them about the war, each of them offering to help in whatever way they can. Show us the distaste they experience when someone like Cinder, bearing a grimm arm, summons them and the push-pull between their two natures: wanting to assist Light's creations, but being unable to refuse a question or request if it's appropriately framed. (Also, have Ozpin hide the Staff rather than the Crown because are you really telling me the Relic that shows a single vision of the future is more dangerous than the Staff that can create almost anything without a limit on the number of times it's used??) As it stands, the Relic's willingness to let the heroes cheat comes across as laziness on the writers' part. We couldn't figure out how the heroes could circumvent this limitation, so we just had a god-like creature hand-wave it away. With a bit of tweaking though, that willingness to bend the rules (within reason) could be a character trait for the heroes to exploit; an example of them coming together to overcome a great challenge. Make it about motivations and alliances, not an inability to work around self-imposed rules.

Because yeah, otherwise we're left with the fact that Salem should absolutely win with the Staff, quite easily... but obviously won't. Which is a major problem for the show. It always surprises me how often other fans fail to see this, insisting that the rules will severely limit Salem, despite them failing to limit the heroes. Ever since the finale that "Giant rock over Vacuo" possibility has been going around — a silly example meant to demonstrate precisely how screwed the good guys should be — and I've long lost track of the number of times I've seen some version of, "That's so stupid. Salem can't just make a giant rock! This, that, and the other rule prevents it"... despite the fact that Ambrosius has already allowed a giant object to crush an entire Kingdom: Atlas. Despite the fact that Ambrosius has already recreated a naturally occurring substance upon request: fire. How the show says the Staff should work vs. how the Staff actually works is right there, front and center, yet many viewers are so immersed in the idea that the heroes are actually creative geniuses that they simply assume there must be an explanation for why they can do something that Salem can't, regardless of the evidence. The writers themselves have finally admitted to the shoddy "solutions" of these hurdles. The group cheated. That's it, but due to the nature of the show, Salem won't be allowed to cheat too.

Anyway, love the ideas for a Maiden radar DBZ style, or an army of mindless Pennys. I'd forgotten that Cinder had Penny's schematics back in Volume 3, so yeah, there's no reason why Ambrosius can't re-create a version of her without a soul, the same way he created the portals from Whitley's Atlas blueprints, or "got creative" with Penny's human body. I mean, it would be an absolute mess for the story and would add insult onto an already insulting death, but I won't pretend that the horror lover in me isn't interested in the idea of a mindless clone of a friend coming after the heroes. Basically, a version of the hack plotline that we never got: Penny — or in this case "Penny" — functioning as an actual threat they have to take down, all while dealing with the emotional fallout of that. No more "Then she falls unconscious, then the Hound knocks her out, then the group easily captures her, then Jaune staves off the virus, then Penny is fixed." This is a combat show, so let the heroes fight. Penny's arc is, frankly, already ruined imo. Might as well let Salem get creative, show how cruel she is as the Big Bad, and lean into the horror aspects of RWBY. Their endings aside, I still think the Apathy and the Hound have been the most successful additions lately.

Blurring the Line.

As a new Space Jam film beams down to Earth, Kambole Campbell argues that a commitment to silliness and a sincere love for the medium is what it takes to make a great live-action/animation hybrid.

The live-action and animation hybrid movie is something of a dicey prospect. It’s tricky to create believable interaction between what’s real and what’s drawn, puppeteered or rendered—and blending the live and the animated has so far resulted in wild swings in quality. It is a highly specific and technically demanding niche, one with only a select few major hits, though plenty of cult oddities. So what makes a good live-action/animation hybrid?

To borrow words from Hayao Miyazaki, “live action is becoming part of that whole soup called animation”. Characters distinct from the humans they interact with, but rendered as though they were real creatures (or ghosts), are everywhere lately; in Paddington, in Scooby Doo, in David Lowery’s (wonderful) update of Pete’s Dragon.

The original ‘Pete’s Dragon’ (1977) alongside the 2016 remake.

Lowery’s dragon is realized with highly realistic lighting and visual-effects work. By comparison, the cartoon-like characters in the 1977 Pete’s Dragon—along with other films listed in Louise’s handy compendium of Disney’s live-action animation—are far more exaggerated. That said, there’s still the occasional holdout for the classical version of these crossovers: this year’s Tom and Jerry replicating the look of 2D through 3D/CGI animation, specifically harkens back to the shorts of the 1940s and ’50s.

One type of live-action/animation hybrid focuses on seamless immersion, the other is interested in exploring the seams themselves. Elf (2003) uses the aberration of stop-motion animals to represent the eponymous character as a fish out of water. Ninjababy, a Letterboxd favorite from this year’s SXSW Festival, employs an animated doodle as a representation of the protagonist’s state of mind while she processes her unplanned pregnancy.

Meanwhile, every Muppets film ever literally tears at the seams until we’re in stitches, but, for the sake of simplicity, puppets are not invited to this particular party. What we are concerned with here is the overlap between hand-drawn animation and live-action scenes (with honorable mentions of equally valid stop-motion work), and the ways in which these hybrids have moved from whimsical confections to nod-and-wink blockbusters across a century of cinema.

Betty Boop and Koko the clown in a 1938 instalment of the Fleischer brothers’ ‘Out of the Inkwell’ series.

Early crossovers often involve animators playing with their characters, in scenarios such as the inventive Out of the Inkwell series of shorts from Rotoscope inventor Max Fleischer and his director brother Dave. Things get even more interactive mid-century, when Gene Kelly holds hands with Jerry Mouse in Anchors Aweigh.

The 1960s and ’70s deliver ever more delightful family fare involving human actors entering cartoon worlds, notably in the Robert Stevenson-directed Mary Poppins and Bedknobs and Broomsticks, and Chuck Jones’ puntastic The Phantom Tollbooth.

Jerry and Gene dance off their worries in ‘Anchors Aweigh’ (1945).

Mary Poppins is one of the highest-rated live-action/animation hybrids on Letterboxd for good reason. Its sense of control in how it engages with its animated creations makes it—still!—an incredibly engaging watch. It is simply far less evil than the singin’, dancin’ glorification of slavery in Disney’s Song of the South (1946), and far more engaging than Victory Through Air Power (1943), a war-propaganda film about the benefits of long-range bombing in the fight against Hitler. The studio’s The Reluctant Dragon (1941) also serves a propagandistic function, as a behind-the-scenes studio tour made when the studio’s animators were striking.

By comparison, Mary Poppins’ excursions into the painted world—replicated in Rob Marshall’s belated, underrated 2018 sequel, Mary Poppins Returns—are full of magical whimsicality. “Films have added the gimmick of making animation and live characters interact countless times, but paradoxically none as pristine-looking as this creation,” writes Edgar in this review. “This is a visual landmark, a watershed… the effect of making everything float magically, to the detail of when a drawing should appear in front or the back of [Dick] Van Dyke is a creation beyond my comprehension.” (For Van Dyke, who played dual roles as Bert and Mr Dawes Senior, the experience sparked a lifelong love of animation and visual effects.)

Julie Andrews, Dick Van Dyke and penguins, in ‘Mary Poppins’ (1964).

Generally speaking, and the Mary Poppins sequel aside, more contemporary efforts seek to subvert this feeling of harmony and control, instead embracing the chaos of two worlds colliding, the cartoons there to shock rather than sing. Henry Selick’s frequently nightmarish James and the Giant Peach (1996) leans into this crossover as something uncanny and macabre by combining live action with stop motion, as its young protagonist eats his way into another world, meeting mechanical sharks and man-eating rhinos. Sally Jane Black describes it as “riding the Burton-esque wave of mid-’90s mall goth trends and blending with the differently demonic Dahl story”.

Science-classroom staple Osmosis Jones (2001) finds that within the human body, the internal organs serve as cities full of drawn white-blood-cell cops. The late Stephen Hillenburg’s The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (2004) turns its real-life humans into living cartoons themselves, particularly in a bonkers sequence featuring David Hasselhoff basically turning into a speedboat.

David Hasselhoff picks up speed in ‘The Spongebob Squarepants Movie’ (2004).

The absurdity behind the collision of the drawn and the real is never better embodied than in another of our highest-rated live/animated hybrids. Released in 1988, Robert Zemeckis’ Who Framed Roger Rabbit shows off a deep understanding—narratively and aesthetically—of the material that it’s parodying, seeking out the impeccable craftsmanship of legends such as director of animation Richard Williams (1993’s The Thief and the Cobbler), and his close collaborator Roy Naisbitt. The forced perspectives of Naisbitt’s mind-bending layouts provide much of the rocket fuel driving the film’s madcap cartoon opening.

Distributed by Walt Disney Pictures, Roger Rabbit utilizes the Disney stable of characters as well as the Looney Tunes cast to harken back to America’s golden age of animation. It continues a familiar scenario where the ’toons themselves are autonomous actors (as also seen in Friz Freleng’s 1940 short You Ought to Be in Pictures, in which Daffy Duck convinces Porky Pig to try his acting luck in the big studios).

Daffy Duck plots his rise up the acting ranks in ‘You Ought to Be in Pictures’ (1940).

Through this conceit, Zemeckis is able to celebrate the craft of animation, while pastiching both Chinatown, the noir genre, and the mercenary nature of the film industry (“the best part is… they work for peanuts!” a studio exec says of the cast of Fantasia). As Eddie Valiant, Bob Hoskins’ skepticism and disdain towards “toons” is a giant parody of Disney’s more traditional approach to matching humans and drawings.

Adult audiences are catered for with plenty of euphemistic humor and in-jokes about the history of the medium. It’s both hilarious (“they… dropped a piano on him,” one character solemnly notes of his son) and just the beginning of Hollywood toying with feature-length stories in which people co-exist with cartoons, rather than dipping in and out of fantasy sequences. It’s not just about how the cartoons appear on the screen, but how the human world reacts to them, and Zemeckis gets a lot of mileage out of applying ’toon lunacy to our world.

Bob Hoskins in ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit?’ (1988).

The groundbreaking optical effects and compositing are excellent (and Hoskins’ amazing performance should also be credited for holding all of it together), but what makes Roger Rabbit such a hit is that sense of controlled chaos and a clever tonal weaving of violence and noirish seediness (“I’m not bad… I’m just drawn that way”) through the cartoony feel. And it is simply very, very funny.

It could be said that, with Roger Rabbit, Zemeckis unlocked the formula for how to modernize the live-action and animation hybrid, by leaning into a winking parody of what came before. It worked so perfectly well that it helped kickstart the ‘Disney renaissance' era of animation. Roger Rabbit has influenced every well-known live-action/animation hybrid produced since, proving that there is success and fun to be had by completely upending Mary Poppins-esque quirks. Even Disney’s delightful 2007 rom-com Enchanted makes comedy out of the idea of cartoons crossing that boundary.

When a cartoon character meets real-world obstacles.

Even when done well, though, hybrids are not an automatic hit. Sitting at a 2.8-star average, Joe Dante’s stealthily great Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) is considered by the righteous to be the superior live-action/animated Looney Tunes hybrid, harkening back to the world of Chuck Jones and Frank Tashlin. SilentDawn states that the film deserves the nostalgic reverence reserved for Space Jam: “From gag to gag, set piece to set piece, Back in Action is utterly bonkers in its logic-free plotting and the constant manipulation of busy frames.”

With its Tinseltown parody, Back in Action pulls from the same bag of tricks as Roger Rabbit; here, the Looney Tunes characters are famous, self-entitled actors. Dante cranks the meta comedy up to eleven, opening the film with Matthew Lillard being accosted by Shaggy for his performance in the aforementioned Scooby Doo movie (and early on throwing in backhanded jokes about the practice of films like itself as one character yells, “I was brought in to leverage your synergy!”).

Daffy Duck with more non-stop banter in ‘Looney Tunes: Back in Action’ (2003).

Back in Action is even more technically complex than Roger Rabbit, seamlessly bringing Looney Tunes physics and visual language into the real world. Don’t forget that Dante had been here before, when he had Anthony banish Ethel into a cartoon-populated television show in his segment of Twilight Zone: The Movie. Another key to this seamlessness is star Brendan Fraser, at the height of his powers here as “Brendan Fraser’s stunt double”.

Like Hoskins before him, Fraser brings a wholehearted commitment to playing the fed-up straight man amidst cartoon zaniness. Fraser also brought that dedication to Henry Selick's Monkeybone (2001), a Roger Rabbit-inspired sex comedy that deploys a combo of stop-motion animation and live acting in a premise amusingly close to that of 1992’s Cool World (but more on that cult anomaly shortly). A commercial flop, Back in Action was the last cinematic outing for the Looney Tunes for some time.

Nowadays, when we think of live-action animation, it’s hard not to jump straight to an image of Michael Jordan’s arm stretching to do a half-court dunk to save the Looney Tunes from slavery. There’s not a lot that can be fully rationalized about the 1996 box-office smash, Space Jam. It is a bewildering cartoon advert for Michael Jordan’s baseball career, dreamed up off the back of his basketball retirement, while also mashing together different American icons. Never forget that the soundtrack—one that, according to Benjamin, “makes you have to throw ass”—includes a song with B-Real, Coolio, Method Man and LL Cool J.

Michael Jordan and teammates in ‘Space Jam’ (1996).

Space Jam is a film inherently born to sell something, predicated on the existing success of a Nike commercial rather than any obvious passion for experimentation. But its pure strangeness, a growing nostalgia for the nineties, and meticulous compositing work from visual-effects supervisor Ed Jones and the film’s animation team (a number of whom also worked on both Roger Rabbit and Back in Action), have all kept it in the cultural memory.

The films is backwards, writes Jesse, in that it wants to distance itself from the very cartoons it leverages: “This really almost feels like a follow-up to Looney Tunes: Back in Action, rather than a predecessor, because it feels like someone watched the later movie, decided these Looney Tunes characters were a problem, and asked someone to make sure they were as secondary as possible.” That attempt to place all the agency in Jordan’s hands was a point of contention for Chuck Jones, the legendary Warner Bros cartoonist. He hated the film, stating that Bugs would never ask for help and would have dealt with the aliens in seven minutes.

Space Jam has its moments, however. Guy proclaims “there is nothing that Deadpool as a character will ever have to offer that isn’t done infinitely better by a good Bugs Bunny bit”. For some, its problems are a bit more straightforward, for others it’s a matter of safety in sport. But the overriding sentiments surrounding the film point to a sort of morbid fascination with the brazenness of its concept.

Holli Would (voiced by Kim Basinger) and Frank Harris (Brad Pitt) blur the lines in ‘Cool World’ (1992).

Existing in the same demented… space… as Space Jam, Paramount Pictures bought the idea for Cool World from Ralph Bakshi as it sought to have its own Roger Rabbit. While Brad Pitt described it as “Roger Rabbit on acid” ahead of release, Cool World itself looks like a nightmare version of Toontown. The film was universally panned at the time, caught awkwardly between being far too adult for children but too lacking in any real substance for adults (there’s something of a connective thread between Jessica Rabbit, Lola Bunny and Holli Would).

Ralph Bakshi’s risqué and calamitously horny formal experiment builds on the animator’s fascination with the relationship between the medium and the human body. Of course, he would go from the immensely detailed rotoscoping of Fire and Ice (1983) to clashing hand-drawn characters with real ones, something he had already touched upon in the seventies with Heavy Traffic and Coonskin, whose animated characters were drawn into real locations. But no one besides Bakshi quite knew what to do with the perverse concept of Brad Pitt as a noir detective trying to stop Gabriel Byrne’s cartoonist from having sex with a character that he drew—an animated Kim Basinger.

Jack Deebs (Gabriel Byrne) attempts to cross over to Hollie Would in ‘Cool World’ (1992).

Cool World’s awkwardness can be attributed to stilted interactions between Byrne, Pitt and the animated world, as well as studio meddling. Producer Frank Mancuso Jr (who was on the film due to his father running Paramount) demanded that the film be reworked into something PG-rated, against Bakshi’s wishes (he envisioned an R-rated horror), and the script was rewritten in secret. It went badly, so much so that Bakshi eventually punched Mancuso Jr in the face.

While Cool World averages two stars on Letterboxd, there are some enthusiastic holdouts. There are the people impressed by the insanity of it all, those who just love them a horny toon, and then there is Andrew, a five-star Cool World fan: “On the surface, it’s a Lovecraftian horror with Betty Boop as the villain, featuring a more impressive cityscape than Blade Runner and Dick Tracy combined, and multidimensional effects that make In the Mouth of Madness look like trash. The true star, however, proves to be the condensed surplus of unrelated gags clogging the arteries of the screen—in every corner is some of the silliest cel animation that will likely ever be created.”

There are even those who enjoy its “clear response to Who Framed Roger Rabbit”, with David writing that “the film presents a similar concept through the lens of the darkly comic, perverted world of the underground cartoonists”, though also noting that without Bakshi’s original script, the film is “a series of half steps and never really commits like it could”. Cool World feels both completely deranged and strangely low-energy, caught between different ideas as to how best to mix the two mediums. But it did give us a David Bowie jam.

‘Space Jam: A New Legacy’ is in cinemas and on HBO Max now.

Craft is of course important, but generally speaking, maybe nowadays a commitment to silliness and a sincere love for the medium’s history is the thing that makes successful live-action/animation hybrids click. It’s an idea that doesn’t lend itself to being too cool, or even entirely palatable. The trick is to be as fully dotty as Mary Poppins, or steer into the gaucheness of the concept, à la Roger Rabbit and Looney Tunes: Back in Action.

It’s quite a tightrope to walk between good meta-comedy and a parade of references to intellectual property. The winningest strategy is to weave the characters into the tapestry of the plot and let the gags grow from there, rather than hoping their very inclusion is its own reward. Wait, you said what is coming out this week?

Related content

Rootfish Jones’s list of cartoons people are horny for

The 100 Sequences that Shaped Animation: the companion list to the Vulture story

Jose Moreno’s list of every animated film made from 1888 to the present

Follow Kambole on Letterboxd

Okay so here are five Wilford headcanons/ficlets. A bit long, below the fold:

1. His “real” name isn’t Joseph Wilford. Wilford invented - or, perhaps, stole - this name, many years ago, to hide his true origins. If anybody ever asked him about his youth, he would invent some compelling tale, gradually adding details that were more and more outrageous, just to see how much the person listening was willing to believe. Soon he realized, the longer he could string someone along, the more useful they proved to be in the future. 

To this day, Ruth still believes that he was raised by penguins after his family died in a shipwreck off the Falkland Islands. “Little known fact,” Wilford told her, “Penguins are excellent parents. And they have better table manners than most people you’ll ever meet.” He nudged his head towards Melanie, who was eating sushi with her hands, wiping her fingers on her jumpsuit. Melanie: “Huh?” 

2. Wilford LOVES pierogis topped with butter, sauerkraut and pepper. Pierogis are his comfort food. His Ukrainian neighbor in Sheffield used to make them, and while she cooked, she’d regale him with stories about her absent husband, who, she confided, was KGB. Pre-Wilford Wilford sat transfixed as she told tales of statecraft and espionage with gusto, her wooden spoon zooming and stabbing with every robust gesticulation. It was only later, when crafting his own identity, that Wilford realized - of course - she’d made it all up. 

Decades later, “KGB” became a common bit of color he’d toss around in dinner party conversations, grinning ear-to-ear as the particularly stupid echelons of high society scooped it up, eyes wide as they gasped in scandal. 

3. Wilford HATES airplanes. He’s deathly afraid of heights, although he hides it well when necessary. He built a train empire specifically so that he’d never have to take a “projectile death tube” anywhere, ever again. And besides, aerospace guys are pricks and he enjoyed driving them out of business. 

On this subject, Melanie entirely agreed. “Fuck airplanes,” she’d say after a particularly good day, clinking her beer against his glass of scotch. “Fuck airplanes,” Wilford would echo in return. 

“We should put that below the logo, you know,” Melanie suggested. “Like a slogan. Wilford Industries--” 

“Fuck Airplanes,” Wilford finished the sentence, laughing, a hand on her shoulder. He gave an affectionate squeeze. “Bloody right.” 

4. Wilford’s favorite scientist is Nikola Tesla. He has a vast collection of Tesla memorabilia, and bought many of his original sketches and prototypes at auction. He built Wilford headquarters in Colorado Springs and Niagara Falls, as an homage to “the master.” For Halloween, Wilford consistently dressed as Tesla, complete with mustache and pigeon.  

When Elon Musk named his electric car after Nikola Tesla, Wilford had a meltdown and tried to sue. “For what?” Lilah Folger asked, confused. “How should I bloody know?” Wilford raged in reply. “You’re the lawyer! Figure it out! Slander! Indecency! Being a grimey little prick!” 

Lilah tried her best, but it was the only lawsuit Wilford ever lost.

5. Wilford would constantly go off about how much he hated children, didn’t see the point of them, was too busy/selfish/interesting to ever waste his time with procreation, but the truth is, he’s sterile and he hates it. Only Audrey knows the secret, because he let it slip one night while particularly inebriated. Everything he’s done in his life, from building a global empire to plastering his name all over the train, to building an engine that would literally *never* stop, was motivated, at least in part, by a desire to leave a lasting legacy.

When Melanie had Alex, Wilford found himself particularly bitter, and Melanie teased that he was jealous of the baby taking so much of her attention. What she didn’t realize was that Wilford’s jealousy was primarily directed towards her, not little Alex. 

“It must be intoxicating, having complete ownership over another human being,” Wilford mused. “I mean, she’s completely yours, isn’t she?”

“Parents don’t own their children, Joseph. You’re thinking of slavery.” 

“Legal definitions aside, that girl came from you. She’s helpless, utterly at your mercy, depends on you for everything. But, rather than resent the tyranny, the little thing loves you for it. Devotion without question. Without merit.”  

“I like to think I merit it.” 

“Doesn’t matter. That’s my point. You could be the worst parent in the world, and she’d love you anyway.” Wilford chuckled. “Evolution. What a trip.” 

“Speaking of trips.” Melanie frowned as he rolled a joint. Not his first of the day, she could tell.  

“Now, now. You’re not my mother.” 

“It’s making you melancholy. It’s not fun, Joseph.” 

“Oh, just let me wallow, will you? If you’re not going to join in...” 

With a sigh, Melanie left him alone, resigned to the fact that Alex was destined to become a permanent wedge. And she wasn’t wrong. Over the years, Wilford seemed intent on proving his point, spoiling the girl at every turn, showering her  with attention and gifts, deftly positioning Melanie as the bad guy who was always saying no. No, you can’t eat ice cream for every meal. No, you can’t keep a show pony in the backyard. No, you can’t stay up all night watching Duck Soup with uncle Joseph. 

“What are you so cross about?” Wilford would tease. “You’ll see. Come tomorrow, she’ll love you anyway.”

This lasted until one day, Melanie did something so awful, so unforgivable, so against nature and everything a mother should be, that Wilford was positive, the spell was finally broken...

For the ask meme: burning bright, anything about the parts at the table with the Nein. You write their banter so well!

FIC SPOILERS BELOW!

Burning Bright on AO3

The entire dinner scene hit me like a bolt of lightning while I was working on this fic. It started with Beau’s outburst, and then Veth’s willful denial and subsequent fit, and I built the two scenes around that.

Diving into particulars….

“Uhm,” he said, intelligently, but quickly recovered and flashed his friends a smile. “It is most impressive. Certainly a step up from a tiny hut.”

A direct reference to the name of the spell. Originally it was Leomund’s tiny hut. I have no clue why in 5e Wizards decided to 86 the attribution names on so many spells like Otiluke’s resilient sphere and Tasha’s hideous laughter. Things like that always made me curious about the (what I assume were) PCs the spells were named after. I had thought maybe it was because the characters who diegetically invented them were specific to one setting, but in that case I don’t know why Bigby’s hand is still Bigby’s but Evard’s black tentacles are no longer Evard’s. I don’t like it. As an aside, Widowgast’s Nascent Nein-Sided Tower is, mechanically speaking, Mordenkainen’s Magnificent Mansion. Anyway. Moving on!

It was delectable that Caleb wanted to impress him.

This boy hungry and not just for soup

Flustered, Essek tried to fend them off, but it was Caleb that did him in. It was always Caleb. The human took a large roll from his own plate, broke it in half, and offered one of these parts to Essek, who tried his best not to choke.

“You need to keep your strength up, ja?” Caleb implored him quietly.

The steady hand that accepted was a point of pride because it very much wanted to quake. The Kryn weren’t bread people, but...did he have any idea what this gesture would mean in Rosohna? Any inkling at all?

This is another one of those places where I delight in playing to cultural differences. What I’d had in mind for what that gesture—breaking food into two pieces and offering half to someone—WOULD mean in Rosohna was a bit nebulous, as I like to keep the reader guessing a bit and let their imagination fill in the blanks; but my rough idea was that it’s a courting gesture that signifies “I can and will provide for you, even if it means less for me.” An expression of selfless caregiving and an offer of partnership. Not wholly unlike a bird bringing food to a prospective mate.

And actually it’s a little bit funny coming from Caleb, who has fuck-all to his name but his name, when Essek is a rich bitch who answers directly to the Bright Queen.

Not that he was about to say it out loud, but he was a quick convert to this whole bread thing. To say that it won him over would be an understatement. That seemed to be a recurring theme here.

I imagine if I’d grown up never really eating bread and was introduced to it in adulthood I’d be like “Where have you BEEN all my life?!” But also: the bread is friendship, the bread is the Mighty Nein, the bread is communion in the spirit of sharing rather than politics and appearances and power plays—things he thought he was fine without until they were foisted upon him.

Somewhere in the course of the multiple conversations going on at one time, Jester got an Idea, as she was prone to doing. He became increasingly aware of her talking about kissing, of all things, and this culminated in her shouting above the din, cheeks flushed purple though he hadn’t seen her touch any wine: “I have an idea you guys! Why don’t we all go around and say how many people we’ve kissed?”

Jester is the most wonderfully convenient deus ex machina if you ever need to insert an awkward or embarrassing conversation among the Mighty Nein, because this is exactly the sort of shit she would do.

Jester leaped up and slammed her hands onto the table. “Caduceus you’ve never been kissed?! That’s so sad!”

The firbolg was unfazed. He merely shrugged and said, “It hasn’t come up and I haven’t gone looking. Not something I’ve ever thought about, really.”

Jester’s tail lashed back and forth behind her like an overstimulated cat. “Do you want me to kiss you?”

Fjord went a bit wild-eyed at this. Caduceus smiled gently and said, “No thank you.”

Three things about this part:

1) Jester’s tail doesn’t get NEARLY enough mention in fic! If I’m playing (or writing) a character with a tail you can be damn sure you’re gonna know what it’s doing! Makes me wanna play a tabaxi tbqh.

2) Cad’s “No thank you” is the sum total of his sexuality, lol. Jester was raised in a pretty highly sexualized setting, didn’t really get out much before she fled Nicodranas, and can be pretty naïve, so she doesn’t really get the whole aroace thing; but it never crosses Cad’s mind that this would be “abnormal“ or ”sad” in any way—it causes him no distress, as it shouldn’t. This is yet another “Same planet, different worlds” moment.

3) Fjord is physically restraining himself from yelling “JESTER WHAT THE FUCK” lmao

Veth kept picking at it. “So you’re um. You know. Into the fellas?”

Beau snorted. “I could’a told you that months ago.”

“Yeah you could’a!” Veth pouted with a self-conscious curl to her shoulders.

I saw a comment on Tiktok that said Veth was being borderline homophobic, but that wasn’t my intent! It’s just that she inherited a certain blind spot for male queerness from her player, and as hard as she’d been trying to encourage Caleb to hook back up with his female ex, it never occurred to her that he had a male ex, too—and given that they’ve been so close for so long, she’s feeling pretty self-conscious about the fact that she never figured out that Caleb is bisexual in all that time, as well as kind of upset that no one—Caleb especially—told her. She’s having a moment of “Why didn’t I know this? Did you think it was going to change things between us? Did I make you feel unsafe?” And also a little bit of “Okay well, now I have to get him to hook up with TWO people AT ONCE because my boy deserves threesomes 😤”

Jester went goggle-eyed at him. “You’ve only been with one person?” she exclaimed. “But you’re like a hundred years old! And very handsome. I would have thought you’d get like, all the ladies.”

Ladies. Right.

Veth might not be the only one with a certain blind spot.

Beau gave her a funny look, snorting. “I dunno, he seems like the kinda guy who turns down those offers left and right.”

..…But Beau’s got his number, for more than one reason. She’s got super gaydar, for one, and has him pegged as the type who’s very choosy about his partners (also mind you, this was before demi!Essek was canonized by WoG, so I was still rolling with my hc that Essek got around when he felt like it).

The uproar was instantaneous. Everyone—almost everyone—started talking or shouting at once. Beau’s voice rang out among the din with, “HOLY SHIT ESSEK FUCKS.” Strangely pleased with himself, he downed the rest of his wine in one gulp and spent the next few minutes fending off increasingly prying, personal questions until the Nein grew bored with his lack of answers and someone changed the subject.

There it is, the line that spawned two entire scenes!

He was not a war mage, but he was experienced and wily, and he was damned good at what he did, and as long as there was breath left in his body, the Mighty Nein would not fall here.

Joke’s on me, motherfucker literally has the War Caster feat -_-

But like in my defense, that’s just what it’s called in the book. The feat just means that you have either the training or experience to cast well during a fight, which I see as not necessarily the same thing as a war mage, which was my way of saying an arcane caster who is a soldier.

Veth stared at her blankly as if willing herself not to understand. “Caleb? With who?”

She breathed steadily. “...Essek. Caleb and Essek.”

Beside her, Jester squealed and brought her fists to her face.

Veth was less enthused. “WHAT.”

Beau’s mental commentary here is dead on. Veth still doesn’t really trust Essek at this point and has been pretty vocal about that…despite being the one to declare him part of the Mighty Nein? Eh, she’s allowed to have complicated feelings on the guy, all things considered. But I find it kind of comical and very Veth (and very Sam) for her to be all full of zest for trying to get Caleb back together with the frigging Volstrucker who is actively working for his abuser and worst enemy but balk at him hooking up with Essek.

Jester “explained” in a delighted yell: “Caleb and Essek are gonna fuuuuuuck!”

I don’t know, is this too unsubtle to call foreshadowing? The line flowed naturally in the dialogue, but it’s also letting the reader know exactly what they’re in for next, lol.

“...He’s going to break that little elf twink, you know,” Veth said, sounding distant. Seemed she was having some difficulty processing. Not too surprising, considering how adamant she was about wanting their wizard to hook back up with his old flame, the fucking Volstrucker. “We’ve all seen his dick.”

This was 100% taken from Sam’s little throwaway line “It’s above-average” but it turned out to serve two purposes other than reminding the reader that all of these people have seen Caleb naked:

1) It’s yet another thing Veth thinks she understands about him but doesn’t. Caleb’s a top like Dalmatians are purple and if you disagree then I respect your right to be incorrect ;)

2) That said, it is, in fact, foreshadowing for the sequel, in which Essek experiences a great deal of frustration. (I haven’t touched the damn thing in weeks, feels like; I’ve been too busy with work, being exhausted from work, and being in a tizzy about my upcoming surgery.)

Fjord blurted out, “I’ll join you.”

Poor Fjord has had such an uncomfortable night!

Hoo boy that was a lot. Thanks for the ask, this was really fun!! And sorry it took so long; I work Saturday nights and things got really busy for a bit there.

Session 22: Five-Dimensional Man-Go

This is a session I’ve been looking forward to for quite some time. I get to introduce three of my favorite characters in the entire campaign. 

In the real world it’s been a while, but this was the session we officially welcomed a new chaos goblin player to the table. And damn, am I glad we did.

Valeria goes to Hoeska’s armor smiths for some upgrades, and accidentally kicks off a goth fashion montage. Her new armor has gorgeous black detailing with purple rose accents, accessorized with a brand-new Shusva-skin bag with matching claw clasp. Gral picks up a fancy Shusva-leather cloak and belt. Shoshana, realizing that a vampire’s castle is basically a Hot Topic, gets some fishnet arm warmers to accompany her fang necklace. We also get some healing potions and hope they aren’t made from lost souls or anything.

Valeria resummons Aethis, who pops back into existence in a burst of glitter that’s entirely incongruous with the local grim aesthetic. Apparently celestial gators are only mildly inconvenienced by fatalities.

As we hitch up the horses to get back on the road, we find out Ser Boris is also preparing to head out. “Woods full of many nasty creatures. Must keep hunting! Maybe I find way down to Barroch, I have heard monsters are attacking workers there.”

Gral perks up at the name of his people’s capitol. “I’m sure the orcs will treat you well. What kind of monsters are they dealing with?”

“Wolves, bears, maybe werewolf? I will find out when I get there! Cursebreakers do not have much of working relationship with orcs, so info is scattered. That is why I must investigate!”

While he heads south into orc territory, we’re gonna go north toward Sturmhearst to look into all the Key nonsense Professor Bjork told us is goin’ down. It’ll be a long trip; it’s on the coast, and we’re well into the heartland of the wood. As we get closer, we’re gonna have to look for new maps, too – the patchwork of safe zones and Curse disasters changes rapidly, and the roads that were passable a month ago might be deathtraps today.

We trek for several blessedly uneventful days. One night, in a region where a sizable number of halflings have settled, we have the fortune of seeing an inn on the horizon as night starts to fall. A sign proclaims the Fusilier’s Rest, a combination winery and inn located on a lush vineyard. Valeria’s kind of suspicious of anything too plant-based right now, but the rest of us totally want a winery tour.

We hitch up our wagon next to a post labeled Valet Parking. Aethis parks themself in the stables. Looking at the place, with its rather low doorframe and quaintly painted décor, we suspect Demish wine snootery instead of weird plant cults.

We duck through the door and take in the scene. It’s on the upscale end of totally normal, with locals sitting around eating and a huge pot of Demish onion soup bubbling on the hearth. The old halfling bartender is wearing pieces of a worn but well-cared-for blue-and-gold uniform. Two polished old pistols hang within reach on the wall, along with a pristine old Fusille musket in a place of honor behind the bar. Shiny medals in a handmade case are proudly displayed atop the bar.

As is D&D protocol, we look around for any notably wacky characters. We find them in the corner: an old man with unkempt white hair and multi-lensed, colorful glasses, engrossed in a game of Man-go against a young human doctor. We know he’s a doctor, because he’s got a stubby-beaked Sturmhearst mask pushed up to expose a tired but friendly face. His coat might once have been a lab coat, but it’s since been patched and sutured together so many times that it’s probably done a full ship-of-Theseus. His right arm is in a makeshift sling, and he’s nursing a small glass of Kevan vodka; probably the closest thing they have to rotgut moonshine in a wine-snob place like this.

We’re like, neat. Let’s eat soup.

Valeria orders a local vineyard wine and chats with the bartender about it. “The man who runs it is a madman; he thinks he can grow good wine grapes in Valdia. But he pays my sister well, she does her best.”

“Oh, don’t listen to René, his sister does marvelous work! No halfling will admit that wine grown outside Demionde will be more than spoiled grape juice,” teases one of the local barflies.

Gral asks Valeria who’s winning the Man-go game. The old man is rambling pleasantly, barely paying attention, and he is absolutely crushing the young doctor. The doctor looks like he’s totally aware he’s being taken to the cleaners, but he’s gonna let the old guy have his fun. As the game draws to a close, the younger man smiles ruefully and hands over a few coins. Meanwhile, the old fella, his eyes magnified to mismatched sizes by his funky glasses, spots our most conspicuous party member.

“Kyr! How’s the wine?” he calls, beckoning her over.

“Quite good actually!” Valeria chirps. “Was that the Kiloni maneuver?”

“Yes, or a variant I picked up somewhere! The Killam maneuver…kilometer…kilowatt? Something of the sort.”

Valeria very much wants to play him, and the old guy’s defeated opponent is happy to trade her his spot. The young man’s propped up leg hits the ground with a suspiciously loud clunk as he vacates his chair for her.

The old man peers up at her, bright-eyed even behind multiple layers of glass. “So what brings a Knight of the Rose here?”

“We’re headed to Sturmhearst, actually!”

“I see! I’ve heard the roads between here and there are pretty tricky to travel, you know.”

“No kidding. Do you have an updated map?”

He snaps his fingers. “No, but I just came from there! I’ve got an old map and I can easily update it for you kids. René is on night watch, I’ll leave it with him so you don’t have to stay up waiting for me to finish it. I know a route that’ll get you there lickety-split and safe as trousers! Now let me guess, you played at the clubs in Aurentium? You have the look about you.”

“Not the clubs, precisely…”

“Ah! Street rules, then!”

Valeria, who played Man-go against literally everyone who would have her, shrugs. “Maybe?”

“René, we’ll need some cups and a dumb hat!” the old man calls.

The young doctor wanders over to the bar and gets a refill, settling down next to Shoshana. “Hey, wanna bet on their game? The old guy’s pretty sharp.”

Shoshana laughs. “Oh, my friend is definitely gonna lose. I’ll put a silver on her, though, out of loyalty.”

It’s an odd game to spectate. Valeria falls behind early on; an insight check shows he’s not cheating, he’s just VERY good. Oh, and also Valeria’s assuming an entirely different set of house rules than this guy, and it’s tripping her up. Wait, are we doing street style, or dock style? Anyway, Valeria’s wearing the dumb hat now. At one point they both spit on the board.

“Y’know, I’ve never seen anyone from Sturmhearst take the mask off,” Shoshana says to her new drinking buddy, watching the game with confusion.

“On the clock, it’d be a safety hazard! But off the clock, eh, it’s fine. Some people get more elitist than me about it, I’m a hometown Valdian through and through.”

(You’re from Joisey, I’m from Joisey! What exit?)

“I haven’t actually been to the university since the Curse started, but I’m heading back to research some stuff I found out up in the Grammelsmarsh swamps. Some real disconcerting stuff regarding undead, and the like. The locals refer to it as the Wailing Wight.”

Shoshana gives him a once-over, rolling a decent Perception. He’s scruffy, though that could mostly be from hard travel, and definitely looks like he’s had a rough time of it. His arm’s in a sling and the little exposed skin Shoshana can see has more than its share of nicks and scars. His gait when he walked over was slightly uneven, one leg making a suspiciously heavy thunk against the wooden floor. Over his shoulder, he’s carrying a long, heavy case sealed with tar for waterproofing.

Hold up. She points to the case. “Do you have an alive guy in there?”

“…Uh.”

“You hesitated, and that’s not great.”

“Uh…no. No, I do not have an alive guy in here,” he says awkwardly.

“Okay, because the last time there was a weird bag, there was a whole-ass dude in there, and it turned into a whole thing.”

“N-no, no no no, there’s no person in the case,” he protests, not quite meeting Shoshana’s judgy cat eyes. He definitely doesn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea, even though the case has started gently twitching.

Meanwhile, old Man-Go man has proved himself quite fluent in Draco-Aquilian, though with an unmistakable mammalian accent. Gral butts into the lively conversation when it winds back to Valdian. “It seems like you’re rather well traveled. What is your profession?”

“Oh, y’know, I go here and there. I’ve been around. There’s so much to see out there!”

Valeria smiles. “I can’t fault you there. Anything in particular you’re looking for?

“I go wherever the winds take me, mostly,” he says, as if Cursewood travel isn’t the most dangerous hobby since they invented pyromancer cookoffs.

Valeria, impressively, only loses the game by a little. The old man jovially shakes her hand and promises to go get started on that map to Sturmhearst for us, springing to his feet with surprising deftness for his age and bustling up toward his room.

Gral and Shoshana, meanwhile, are busy makin’ friends with the doctor guy. “What swamp were you fighting undead in?”

“The Grammelsmarsh? It’s downriver of Mornheim.”

“Ohhh! We heard some, uh, adventurers did a purifying ritual on the river. It might help your situation?”

“That’s great, but…I dunno. Once you mix in swamp gas, things get a lot more interesting.”

“The explosions kind of interesting?”

“…Sometimes.”

The players have noticed that our doctor friend here is, like…not an NPC, there’s another guy at the table (the same player as Isadora! :D), so we start sizing each other up as travel companions.

“You seem like a pretty decent guy,” Gral says, immediately insight checking.

“I mean, you guys seem on the up-and-up too?”

Shoshana winks at him. “Well, I’m not that up-and-up but these two are very diplomatic and important.”

“If you’re also headed up to Sturmhearst, it might make sense for us to travel together? I’m not very quiet,” he admits, knocking on his knee with a clang, “but if you-“

“Hello!” Valeria, hearing clanking, has clanked over loudly to join. “Kyr Valeria Argent, at your service!”

“Uh, hi! I’m Vigdor. I’m a doctor! I mean, you knew that, with the, uh-“ He points to his bird mask. “If you need any balms or salves – I mean, I’m mostly a surgeon, but I know some herbology.”

Is that so! We chat about Dr. Ulmus and Dr. Kjeller. Everyone loves Dr Kjeller!

“I’ve heard of Dr. Kjeller! I haven’t met the guy, but he’s the leading expert on troll physiology. Getting him to come lecture hasn’t worked out so far.”

We ask René the innkeeper about any local threats. Apparently this town’s gotten lucky; the biggest threats recently have just been bandits and one overaggressive badger.

“Oh yeah, one of my cats fought one of those, it went badly,” Shoshana remembers. “For the badger, I mean. I have weird cats.”

(The inn also has cat. His name is Jean Clawed.)

Eventually we all head upstairs. As the night bears on, the girls fall asleep, presumably after painting each other’s toe claws and gossiping. Gral’s still awake, practicing his lute in the rare luxury of a single room, when he pauses. Something doesn’t sound right.

Putting his lute aside, he listens cautiously at the window and feels a deep dread grow in his stomach. The faint scent of ozone drifts in the air. The crickets and night birds have gone dead silent, and in the unsettling quiet he can hear the terrible growling, piping sound he’s heard twice before: once in a house in a hole, and once as Bullbreaker’s expedition faced its destruction.

With great urgency and no volume control, Gral sends a Message to a sleeping Shoshana: “RED ALERT, KEY SHIT’S HERE.” Shoshana wakes up and kicks Valeria.

Gral then sends a Message to our new friend Vigdor, more calmly. “If you have weapons, get them now. Something is happening, it’s going to be dangerous.”

The early warning lets Vigdor and Valeria armor up, Shoshana helping Valeria buckle on the heavy pieces in a hurry. Meanwhile, Gral sprints downstairs, casting Mirror Image as he goes.

René the innkeeper is cleaning his fusille with practiced precision, humming an old marching song. Gral can hear something moving in the kitchen behind the old halfling, so he pops another stealthy Message cantrip. “This is the orc from earlier. I think something bad is in the kitchen – I’ve heard that noise before. Hold on tight to that musket, I’m going in.”

“The back door is locked, I would have heard someone come in,” the old soldier whispers back.

“These things don’t use doors,” Gral hisses.

A 17 Persuasion convinces René, who loads a bullet into his musket. “Where are those friends of yours?”

A heavy clank from upstairs answers that question, as Vigdor and Valeria thud toward the stairs. Gral scopes out the room and sees, on the bar, a big leather map case. The map from the Man-Go guy! Then he peers into the kitchen and, yup, that’s a fleshhound, all right.

Everyone else upstairs bursts into the hall just as a second fleshhound emerges into existence next to them. Shoshana, without hesitation, hits it with a gout of flame. Its strange ethereal flesh solidifies for a moment, but then it shakes itself and charges forward, its displacement energy restored.

Meanwhile, the one downstairs doesn’t aim for Gral or René, trying to run past them. Gral plays a discordant note on his lute, using his Minor Key at the opposite frequency to its vibration and preventing it from displacing, before he strikes. A spectral, scarred orc swings a warhammer down on the creature, Thrice-Burned’s ghost getting some payback as Gral’s blade strikes true.

René takes a shot with his musket and crit-fails, understandably freaked out by the writhing mass of teleporting tentacles, the wild shot careening directly into Gral. Luckily, it only pops a Mirror Image, but everyone upstairs hears a frustrated yell of “NO. FRIEND! ME FRIEND!”

Vigdor dashes past Valeria to the stairs, his previously-motionless arm reaching out of its sling to slap her on the armor with a resounding clash of metal. A silver Jotunn rune glows through the cloth of his sleeve, and she feels Protection from Good and Evil snap into place over her. She takes the cue and stabs the hound, rose vines bursting from her trident and stabbing their long thorns into its oddly flickering flesh.

The pupils on the Eyegis snap to the space behind the beast. Our normal eyes see nothing, but the Key-aligned shield’s eyes see a magical gate, faintly connected to the hound.

As a member of the Order of the Rose, Valeria’s trained to deal with fiendish incursions. This isn’t a portal to the Hells, but she thinks it might get closed similarly. As she charges forward to deal with it, everything seems to move twice as fast as it should: the Key’s spatial distortion has made certain areas the opposite of difficult terrain, where you can move double your speed. Nyoom!

Shoshana zaps it with lightning and heads downstairs to help Gral, who’s being slapped by tentacles. The zapped one flees toward the portal, but Valeria Sentinels and stabs it to death. The downstairs hound gets its tentacles into the real Gral.

Vigdor moves to Gral’s aid, ripping away the last of his sling and clamping a large circular blade to his forearm. With the pull of a ripcord, it loudly whirs into motion. As the Buzzing Butcher slams into the displacer hound with a gory squelch, he asks about sneak attack, like a rogue!

A very, very loud rogue.

Gral breaks away from the hound’s tentacles and looks around. Through the windows, more fleshhounds have appeared outside. The space outside is warped – leaving this inn is going to be very difficult while all this nonsense is going on. The lights of the vineyard seem miles away.

However, Gral realizes, the hound responded to the sound of his lute. And when he used his Minor Key he caught a glimpse of the portal it came through. He begins to play again, using the Minor Key to try to take control of it. The GM allows him to burn a 3rd level spell slot for a colossal roll of 33. He moves the portal inside a wall, to temporarily block anything coming through.

René takes a shot at the remaining hound and misses.

Valeria, upstairs, draws her chained sword and spends a 1st level slot to try to close the portal, the same way paladins close Infernal gateways. The chains of Rack extend from the sword and stitch the portal shut.

(Gral and Valeria each gain inspiration for using Portal Trixx!)

A Thing Occurs at initiative 0, and we hear strange piping coming from the stables. We’re kind of occupied, so we trust Aethis to bite anything that bothers the horses.

Shoshana sprints down the stairs and to the bar. Aw, there’s another flesh hound coming in from the kitchen. Her Chill Touch misses, and the new monster slaps Gral.

Vigdor nyooms through a Zoom, which makes some Really Weird doppler effects happen with his clanky leg and his buzzy arm. He slides across the bar like an action hero and slams his saw down, missing the hound and showering the room in a hail of splinters.

Valeria is still upstairs, and it is LOUD downstairs. She’s gonna dash to get the heck down there and rejoin the festivities.

Gral Phantasmal Forces the new fleshhound, and in its mind, horrible liquid tendrils emerge from the soup pot and constrict around it. The soup rises to the defense of the Fusilier’s Rest!

René gets his wits about him and takes a pistol shot at the nearer fleshhound, tagging it with a bullet and keeping it in place. “GET OUT OF MY HOUSE. OUR POLICY IS NO PETS! I will not make an exception for you, you do NOT seem particularly polite!”

The fleshhound grabs the map case off the bar and starts to run for it. René hits it with the butt of his rifle. The second hound can’t attack Vigdor since it’s too busy convincing itself soup isn’t dangerous, so Vigdor’s free to draw his pistol and unload a Sneak Attack bullet into the fleeing hound’s back.

René reloads his musket. It’s been a long time since he’s done it under fire, but the Royal Fusilier Corps of Demionde does not half-ass their training.

The portal the hound’s heading for bisects a wall now, so it might be hard for the hound to get through.  Before it can worry about that, though, it comes face to face with Valeria, who’s ready to rumble. She kills it, dropping the map to the ground, and skitters through the Zoomy Zone to try to trident the second hound. It displaces out of the way.

Gral seizes control of another portal, and this time decides to use it to see what’s going on. He tries to hop out to the stables, where that weird noise is coming from. He enters a weird nether space full of the flickering bodies of fleshhounds, writhing and blinking, which the DM calls the Threshold. Gral accepts psychic damage to see what’s going on, and the patterns become clearer as the Key takes hold temporarily in his brain. These portals all connect to each other and the Threshold at the same time. Whatever’s out in the stables, making that eerie piping noise, is tied to the portals – it can’t fully exist in our realm. So if you close all the portals, it’ll force that thing to leave; if you drive it away, the portals will close. Either way, the Key’s influence on this place will fade.

Oh, and that thing out in the stables? It’s the Lurke r again.

Gral’s old enemy wrests control of the portal back from Gral, who stumbles back out into the inn, reeling from the sudden whammy of Key taint.

Shosha shoots lightning at the nearest hound, which retaliates by leaping through her, disrupting her matter with its own. It’s a highly unpleasant experience. A new hound jumps out of the portal next to Valeria. As Vigdor, Shoshana, and René all attack, Gral shuts another portal with his lute’s magic. “Guys, there’s something horrible in the stables!” he shouts. “If we bust enough portals it’ll go away!”

The Lurker continues to make mysterious dice rolls, but apparently it’s rolling poorly, so we don’t quite find out what it’s up to. It peers through one of the last few portals, only visible to Gral and the Eyegis. It’s hard to get a good look at, fifth-dimensional as it is, but it’s weirdly humanoid, actually? It’s surrounded by floating lanterns and holding some sort of pipe or flute.

(The DM notes that Jean Clawed is awake and doesn’t see why any of this is his business. He’s capable of using the portals; he’s not Key tainted, that’s just how cats are.)

We exchange blows with the remaining hounds, Chromatic Orbs flying and chainsaws buzzing. René bayonets a hound to death, for the honor of all NPCs.

Gral powerslides on his knees across the Zoomy Zone, playing a complicated riff, woobling himself right through the fireplace into the kitchen. He spends another level 3 spell slot to get the portal to dance itself shut. “And that was Through the Fire and Flames!”

René reloads his gun. Shoshana blasts the hound with fire, so Vigdor’s action goes off and he chainsaws it to death, the body and spine getting caught in the spinning chain. FATALITY.

The searing light of Shoshana’s fire casts sharp shadows on the walls of the inn, which begin to writhe and re-form, swirling together into a lithe, snarling feline shape that springs toward the Lurker. It pounces with an odd, broken yowl that’s incredibly familiar – although Valeria and Gral have only ever heard it once, from underneath an overturned laundry basket.

Vigdor, who’s never met a flesh-hound OR a cursecat before, makes an arcana check to figure out what in the seven hells is going on. It seems some sort of entity is thinning the barriers between realities? Its very essence seems to be intermingled with portal; it cannot fully leave the portal or exist in this realm. Like a malevolent, sentient pair of curtains.

He’s like okay, curtains sound like something I can chainsaw. It’s curtains for you, see? (Fun fact: if he rolls 21 or higher on attack roll with chainsaw, he gets sneak attack regardless of other circumstances. Because it’s a goddamn CHAINSAW.)

The Lurker turns its attention directly on us, or at least to the enormous hissing cat hellbent on ruining its day. Gral, still strumming furiously, realizes the Lurker’s only got a couple of portals left. He’s closed a portal already; he’s gonna try to close all of them for good. The DM imposes disadvantage and a brutal pile of psychic damage, but Gral is unphased, hitting a power chord that shakes the entire inn.

The Lurker screeches and reaches for him, the space around Gral beginning to warp, but it’s too late, the portal slamming shut against it. The Zoomy Zones vanish; the portals close, the strange atmosphere fades. The road looks to be the size it was before instead of an endless stretch of packed earth; the vineyard is once again an easy ten-minute walk away.

His big solo complete, Gral sways and collapses unconscious. Valeria runs over and Lays On Hands so he doesn’t die, while Vigdor starts casting Mending on the destroyed bar furniture. Shoshana, meanwhile, just stares dumbstruck at the place where a huge spectral cat is dissipating into shadowy smoke.

“…Schmendrick?”

René is holding himself together, but he’s an old man and it’s been a while since he fought this much. He took a bit of damage; Valeria pat pats him some HP. “Thank you, Kyr. I…I need to check on my other guests. The old man with the Man-Go game, we must find out if he lives.”

Valeria accompanies him upstairs. Rack’s glowing rose vines are still visible, stitching the portal shut; it’s healing more quickly than Valeria’s used to seeing. The door to the old man’s room swings open under Valeria’s cautious knock. The bed is unmade but empty, and the old man’s luggage is gone. The only things left are a generous tip on the counter and his odd multicolored glasses.

As Vigdor steps outside to clean viscera off his chainsaw, Gral scopes out the stables. There’s evidence of disturbed earth around the grounds, but nothing conclusive. Aethis seems to be unbothered.

We reconvene without much to show for our investigation. But we have one last clue: Why were the hounds so interested in the old man’s map? We spread it out on one of the bar tables and crowd around. It’s a map of Valdia, but the path it shows us to take to Sturmhearst makes No Sense. It’s not even contiguous! It tells us to start here and wander north, and then the line cuts off next to some scribbled equations, the route picking up again elsewhere, where he’s drawn a symbol we don’t recognize – and so on, in strange and nonsensical disconnected paths.

Shoshana, on a hunch, puts on the multicolored glasses the old man left behind. Like 3D glasses, they reveal the hidden image. Through the kaleidoscopic lenses, she can see remnants of the Key’s influence all around the inn; the fading Zoomy Zones and closing portals light up in ultraviolet. The map, meanwhile, has gained an entirely new dimension, like a layer of holographs. NOW the shortcuts make sense – they route through other dimensions along the z-axis, with additional symbols and labels giving helpful hints.

To be honest, it does look like a much faster route. And one of the notes says it leads to the “Drowned City” – hey, isn’t that where Bullbreaker ended up? But we’re all rightfully wary of hopping right back into another flesh-hound portal disaster.

We now have the Extradimensional Map and the Stranger’s Glasses.

Oh! The map has a note for us: “Happy Journeys to a fellow master of the game. Your friend, T.T.”

We immediately rifle through our notes and realize he may have been Professor Trevor Twombly, Headmaster of Sturmhearst. Vigdor, did you know that guy?!

Vigdor didn’t recognize him. Maybe the guy looked like Twombly, if you squint? There were a lot of old men at Sturmhearst, and they wear masks most of the time? Also he had distracting glasses? So, like…maybe?

As we bicker, Vigdor snags the glasses off the table and heads to his room, opening up his case and taking a look. The lenses don’t reveal anything new about the object inside.

Unfortunately, the poor rogue didn’t bother to stealth. “Whatcha doin’ in here?” says Valeria, who followed shortly behind.

“Um, just looking at my leg, seeing if anything is weird-“

Valeria immediately checks Vigdor’s lower limbs for wounds. “I can help! An extra pair of hands can always-”

“No, no! I think I’m okay! Really!” he protests. He glances into the case again, clearly torn, and sighs. “Let me explain.”

He lifts a whole human leg out of the case, kicking and twitching.

“This is my leg, and I’m taking it to Sturmhearst. I’m not sure if it’s wholly mine anymore.”

Through his torn pants, Valeria can see a clunky clockwork leg to match his buzz-saw arm.

One player immediately yells “FULL METAL ALCHEMIST.” Another player says it again, in a slightly different voice.

Dr. Vigdor Gavril has joined the party!

Could I request the #10 Valentine's Day prompt + Tony/Pepper, please?

Take me Flying

Despitethe last minute arrangements – which was really just a matter of texting hisnew (his new new) PA and letting her know he needed a good table somewhere thatnight – dinner was wonderful, as usual.

Tony’s new PA was not as good asPepper had been. But no one ever would be. And at least she wasn’t “NatalieRushman” who had, in fact, both literally and figuratively stabbed him in theback. And she was able to get him a good table at Daniel on almost no notice.So, she’d earned her ridiculous salary, once again.

Pepper looked up at him over squabsoup. “You have really had Happy carrying this around for eight years.”

“It’s always been you,” Tony said,and that was true. He was never going to want anyone else. When he’d been inAfghanistan he’d heard her calling his name. Everything after that wasinevitable.

“I can’t decide if you’re romanticor pathetic,” she said, poking her spoon at him. “This is really excellent, youshould at least pretend to eat something that doesn’t come in a paper wrapper.”

“I’m a basic man, Pepper,” Tonysaid. “I have basic tastes, and cheeseburgers are amazing.”

“Absolutely, Tony. You’re as basicas Ugg Boots and Pumpkin Spice Lattes.”

“I don’t even know what you justsaid.”

“You’re proving my point here,”Pepper said. She gave him that look of hers until he put something in his mouthand started chewing. Food was food, really. Fuel. Tony had – much like sleepand rest and business meetings – often resented the basic needs of his humanbody. It took time away from inventing and thinking and changing the world.What he liked about dining out was atmosphere and watching Pepper enjoyherself. 

“Besides,” Tony said, “you did sayyes, so it was a good return on investment.”

“I said yes because I can’t imagineinflicting you on the rest of the world,” Pepper teased.

“Truly, you’re a charitable woman,Pep, and I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

“You don’t have to find out,”Pepper said.

They’d had their spats and theirfights, and Pepper had almost left him entirely because she had too muchanxiety about seeing him brought home in a box. It would happen one day, Tonyknew. He wasn’t capable of actually retiring any more than Barton was.

The world was going to need heroessome day. Tony couldn’t quite restrain himself from glancing upward, knowing,somewhere, out there, was an army that thought the Earth looked like aparticularly tasty morsel.

But Pepper had come to theconclusion that she was going to mourn him someday anyway. She might as welllove him while she had the time. Ephemeral.

All love was, in the end, afleeting moment of joy. It would endure for a lifetime, which was all any ofthem had.

“You looked lovely,” Tony offered.“And very surprised.”

“Oh, I’m surprised, all right,”Pepper said. “I’m surprised you let the kid get away. High school, Tony?Really? You were in your senior year at MIT when you were his age. It’s shortsighted.”

“I grew up too fast – or maybe tooslowly, depending on how you look at it – and I am still a hot mess. If hewants to take his time, ease into adulthood, I’m not going to push him. Thedoors are all still open for him, whichever way he wants to go.” And Tony wouldkeep upgrading his suit on the sly, and keep an eye on the kid, and he knew fora fact as soon as the Avengers needed Parker, the kid would be there. In themeanwhile, let him have a life, if he could. If there was time.

“He’s a good kid,” Pepper said.

“The best,” Tony agreed. “So, whenare we going to get married, do you think? Summer weddings are nice. Outdoors.I’m picturing like a beach in Maui somewhere.”

“We’ll have to set up some sort ofdecoy date,” Pepper said. “The press are already crazy.”

The waiter came and took away theempty plates, setting up for the next course. They did their jobs so well thatmost people didn’t even notice them, but Tony did, giving out a quick smile anda thank you.

“All right,” Tony said. “But still,when, do you think?”

“At least six months,” Pepper said.“It’ll take that long just to make sure I have the perfect dress.”

“Pepper, I can probably throwenough money at it to have the perfect dress tomorrow.”

“Tony, nine women cannot have ababy in a month,” Pepper said, slightly exasperated, the way she always was.But then, she cared what she looked like, and she always looked good. No matterwhat anyone said, beauty was not effortless. But that’s what Tony had peoplefor. He rarely cared what the suits looked like, just so long as they lookedgood. Other people could worry about that. He paid them well enough to do so.

“So, day after tomorrow?”

They were still debating the dateand how long it would take to have the perfect wedding arranged when thedessert course came and went. Tony really was all for just giving a guy in thecourthouse some cash and getting it on with. The wedding wasn’t the importantthing; it was finding the person he wanted to spend the rest of his life with,and getting started on that process right away. But if pomp and ceremony wouldmake Pepper happy, he’d do that, too. Memories were important, right?

But dinner was over and Happyushered them into the backseat of the limo. Tony didn’t really like otherpeople driving, but Pepper preferred to use time in the car to unwind, whichmeant she wanted Tony in the back seat, with her. This time, however, shetapped the privacy screen, which went up immediately.

“What’s–” Tony started to ask, butshe hiked up her skirt to show off pale thighs, and straddled his lap. 

“We just got engaged, Tony, I thinkyou might have guessed what comes after that,” Pepper said.

“Oh, okay, yeah, that’s an idea, wecan certainly do that.” His hands went to her hips, pushing the skirt up evenhigher to see– “What are you wearing?”

Pepper unbuttoned her blouse,showing off the delicate silver and blue matching bra. “What, this old thing?”

Tony laughed. “I have never seenthis before and you know it,” he scolded. The silver panels were all buttransparent, and he knew about ladies’ underwear to know that it would becompletely sheer when wet. He licked over one nipple to verify that theory andshe put her arms around his head, holding him in place while the skin beneathhis questing tongue tightened. “It’s a good color for you. I approve.”

“Do you?” Pepper leaned back alittle and Tony continued to explore down the length of her body, nuzzling ather ribs, her belly, dipping his tongue into her navel. “I seem to have seen asimilar color scheme recently.”

“It’s almost ready,” Tony promised.“And then, we’ll go flying.” The Rescue armor– it was a good color for her.Tony had considered pink initially until Pepper had told him point blank thatshe didn’t want to look like those ridiculous pink tool sets that craftsmanoverpriced for women.

“Take me flying now,” she told him,leaning all the way back on the bench.

“Yes, ma’am.” And Tony got to work,doing just that.

Working through antisemitism in Holy Week, post 2

cw: violent antisemitism in history

The article below is the most helpful I’ve found so far in my search for information on how to confront the antisemitism of Holy Week. It’s by Amy-Jill Levine, who is Jewish herself and is the Professor of New Testament Studies and Judaism Studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School. 

The article’s simple list of “options” we have for how we approach all the anti-Jewish sentiment that permeates the New Testament is much appreciated, because I’ve felt directionless! I’ve felt like there are “no options,” that this whole thing is too overwhelming, too complex for anyone to get a handle on -- now there are options, and some of them are actually good options!

I’m pasting most of the article below -- “Holy Week and the Hatred of the Jews: Avoiding Anti-Judaism at Easter”

_______

‘ Jesus of Nazareth, charged by the Roman authorities with sedition, dies on a Roman cross. But Jews - the collective, all Jews - become known as “Christ-killers."

Still haunting, the legacy of that charge becomes acute during Holy Week, when pastors and priests who speak about the death of Jesus have to talk about "the Jews."

Every year, the same difficulty surfaces: how can a gospel of love be proclaimed, if that same gospel is heard to promote hatred of Jesus's own people?

The charge against "the Jews" permeates the pages of the New Testament.

In the Gospel of Matthew, Pilate literally washes his hands while "all the people" - all the Jewish people - clamour for Jesus's death: "Let him be crucified ... His blood be on us and on our children!" (Matthew 27:23, 27).

John's Gospel identifies the Jews as "from your father the devil" (John 8:44) and blames them for backing Pilate into a corner and forcing him to kill an innocent man.

In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter charges "the entire house of Israel" (Acts 2:36) with crucifying Jesus and so having "killed the Author of life" (Acts 3:14-15). Paul then bluntly refers to "the Jews, who killed the Lord Jesus" (1 Thessalonians 2:14-15).

Perhaps this vilification was inevitable. Jesus's followers could not understand how the vast majority of Jews could not accept their belief in him as the Messiah.

The majority of Jews, in turn, saw no sign of the Messianic age having dawned: no general resurrection of the dead; no ingathering of the exiles to Zion; no end to death, war, disease, or poverty. What was self-evident to one group was incomprehensible to other. Incomprehension turned to mistrust, and mistrust, on both sides, turned to vilification.

Today, interfaith conversation, in which Jews and Christians learn to appreciate their common roots and better understand the reasons for the gradual and often painful separation, can reverse the process. Official (and unofficial) church statements facilitate healing as well:  Nostra Aetate , the 1965 declaration of Vatican II, proclaimed that all Jews at all times should not be held responsible for Jesus's death, and Pope Benedict XVI, in the second volume of his Jesus of Nazareth , strongly reiterated the point. Christians from many (but not all) other branches of the tradition, generally agree.

But we still have to deal with our pasts, and with our Scriptures. Every time the Passion narratives are read, the threat of anti-Judaism reappears.

There is no catch-all for resolving the problems in the New Testament - or in Tanakh/the Old Testament, for that matter; we all have difficult texts in our canons. But there are strategies. Here are six, in order of usefulness.

Excision The first option is excision: take a pair of scissors to the offending passages - or, in today's parlance, hit the delete key. Howard Thurman recounts hearing from his grandmother how the plantation minister always preached, "Slaves, be obedient to your masters ..." and how she determined that if she ever learned to read, she would never read that part of the Bible. The story has morphed into the common sermon illustration that Thurman's grandmother, once both freed and literate, took a scissors to the text. Had I suffered what Thurman's grandmother suffered, I may well have taken the same approach. However, the destruction of a text considered sacred seems to me extreme. To erase offending texts is to erase memories of both the victims of those texts and those who struggled against them. Moreover, if we each design our own canons, we eliminate community. A variant on the excision approach is to claim that Paul or Jesus never made the problematic comment and therefore, we can ignore them. For example, scholars commonly argue that Paul did not write 1 Thessalonians 2:14b-16 - it is inconsistent with his positive comments about Jews (such as, "They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises ... as regards election they are beloved ... for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable" [Romans 9:4-5; 11:28b-29]). The offensive passage can also be removed from the letter without harming the rhetorical flow. Similarly, many scholars argue that Jesus's invectives in the Gospels stem not from the man from Nazareth, but from the later church in competition with local synagogues. Comforting as such arguments may be, they are based on hypothesis, not fact. Paul may well have changed his mind; Jesus would not be the first Jew critical of fellow Jews. Moreover, Christian proclamation is not based on some scholarly construct of an original text or a "historical Jesus" apart from the Gospels. It is based in the words of the Bible as interpreted by the faithful community. Therefore, Christians must deal with those words.

Retranslate The second option is to retranslate - or, bowdlerize. For example, some "progressive" translations read John's Gospel as condemning not "Jews" but "Judeans" or "Jewish leaders" or "religious leaders" or simply "leaders." Such translations are well-meaning, and at least "Judean" is legitimate translation of the Greek term Ioudaioi. But to replace the New Testament's "Jews" by other terms is to have a judenrein text, a text "purified" of Jews. Such bowdlerizing obscures part of the reason why Jews have been persecuted over 2,000 years, divorces Jews not only from Jesus and his earliest followers, and even serves to de-legitimate the relationship of Jews today from the land of Israel. Hence, politically correct translations are not necessarily biblically faithful ones.

Romanticize The theological answer to the question ‘Who killed Jesus?’ is not ‘the Jews’ but humanity. This is an excellent place to begin. The problem, however, is that those who see themselves as ‘Jews’ on Good Friday then see themselves as redeemed "Christians" on Sunday morning. The Jews, by not accepting Jesus as Lord and Saviour, remain in their guilt. The same romantic approach today is best exemplified in the celebration of the Passover seder in churches, usually on Holy Thursday. ...Baptizing Jewish symbols in Christian terms is not a strong move in interfaith sensitivity. Nor do Christian seders remove the problem. To the contrary, the performance serves to absolve the congregation: how could they be anti-Jewish if they are doing something so Jewish as having a Passover seder?

Allegorize The fourth option is to allegorize: to say that the text really doesn't mean what it says. For example, we take Matthew's blood-cry (27:15) not as a self-curse, but as a plea for redemption: the people are ironically asking to be redeemed by Jesus's blood. While this approach redeems the verse theologically, it also suggests that the Jewish crowd wanted and needed this redemption, so that Judaism apart from the Christian message is ineffective. The move turns Jews into crypto-Christians.

Historicize The fifth approach, the darling of the academy, provides historical rationale and often justification, for the problematic statements. For example, we claim that Matthew is a Jew writing for a Jewish community; therefore his words cannot be anti-Jewish - as if Jews cannot be anti-Jewish, which is a silly idea. Also complicating this view: we know neither who wrote the Gospels, which were originally transmitted anonymously, nor the community to which they are addressed. It is a dirty little secret in biblical studies: we determine, based on the contents of the Gospels, both author and audience. Then we interpret the text on the basis of our reconstruction. This is a circular argument. Similarly, we note the historical unlikelihood of "all the people" saying, "his blood be on us and on our children" - that all of us Jews would say the same thing, ever, is a tad unlikely. Then, we see how Matthew understands the destruction of Jerusalem, witnessed by the "children," to be punishment for the Jews' refusal to acknowledge Jesus as Lord. Therefore, so the argument goes, since the people never said the line, we can ignore it. But the line remains in the text; ignoring it is not an option. Another variation on the historicizing approach is to claim that the anti-Jewish language is reactionary: invective would be quite natural from the pen of those excommunicated from the synagogue. The problem here is, first, that we have no evidence, other than John's attestation (John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2) of synagogues tossing people out. If some synagogues did expel Jesus's followers, we should ask why. Because they wanted to replace Torah with Jesus? Because they were seen as compromising monotheism? Because they told synagogue members that unless they worshiped Jesus they would go to hell? Because they put the community in danger, given Roman distrust of the new messianic movement? Because they cherished their own traditions, which they found completely fulfilling? Any of these would be quite good reasons, and would likely result in censoring in my synagogue today. Finally, if we define this polemic as reactionary, again we blame the Jews for the problem. Finding history behind the text can help. But we cannot be secure with the history we posit, and when all the historical work is said and done, we still have to address what the New Testament actually says.

Admit the problem We come finally to our sixth option: admit to the problem and deal with it. There are many ways congregations can address the difficult texts. Put a note in service bulletins to explain the harm the texts have caused. Read the problematic texts silently, or in a whisper. Have Jews today give testimony about how they have been hurt by the texts. Those who proclaim the problematic verses from the pulpit might imagine a Jewish child sitting in the front pew and take heed: don't say anything that would hurt this child, and don't say anything that would cause a member of the congregation to hurt this child. Better still: educate the next generation, so that when they hear the problematic words proclaimed, they have multiple contexts - theological, historical, ethical - by which to understand them. Christians, hearing the Gospels during Holy Week, should no more hear a message of hatred of Jews than Jews, reading the Book of Esther on Purim, should hate Persians, or celebrating the seder and reliving the time when "we were slaves in Egypt," should hate Egyptians. We choose how to read. After two thousand years of enmity, Jews and Christians today can recover and even celebrate our common past, locate Jesus and his earliest followers within rather than over and against Judaism, and live into the time when, as both synagogue and church proclaim, we can love G-d and our neighbour.’

Have you ever felt a baby kick? I saw and that was scary enough, no thx

What color pants/shorts are you wearing? brown/beige, Dave bought those sweatpants for me/us

Have you ever heard of Leonard Cohen? of course, Nat loves him

What are you usually doing at midnight? lay in my bed, probably listen to music or chat with M.

What is the worst thing you’ve ever done when you were really angry? ugh... Are there any pills you take on a daily basis? If so, what? not currently

Do you like the smell of coconuts? meh

What is the heaviest you think you can lift? depends 

Have you ever walked on a pier at the beach? yes

How about under one? also?

Do you ever talk to yourself or think deep thoughts while on the toilet? lmfao

Do you ever sing to yourself? lmfao x2

What is a sound that relaxes you? clock ticking :x

If you could have a sea creature as a pet, what would you want? octopus

How about a farm animal? chicken but I won’t

What is a song that you hate to admit you like? many

Do you ever use Urban Dictionary? very rarely

Do you find the definitions on there to be generally funny or stupid? both

What comes to your mind when you hear the word ‘transformation’? turning into animal XD

What was something you regularly played with as a child? lots of stuff

What part of your body have you had the most problems with in your life? heart, teeth, brain, skin, hair and belly

Do a lot of people check you out when you’re in public? pfft, nobody does

What is a good name for a turtle? mine was called BOB from Bob the builder 

Can you imitate any accents well?  sorta

What makes a good kisser a good kisser? dunno, not saliva for sure, yuk

Do you ever eat with your eyes closed and just focus on the taste? probably tried that before, I don’t remember

What do you dislike most about where you live right now? home, parents, town, country or smth else?

Are you watching your weight? not recently

Have you ever become really good friends with someone you found online? I have, we’re no longer friends tho

Do you have a drunk uncle? had

Do you hear weird noises in your house at night? not really, usually not

What is something you do that is generally more like something the opposite sex does? ask Nat :P

What is the girliest thing you do, if you’re a girl? *shrug*

What is the coolest tattoo you’ve ever seen? moon and sun with faces on knees <3

Have you ever created anything artistic that you’re proud of? If so, what? don’t like to show off but plenty

What is everyone else in your house doing right now? mom is in the bathroom ^^” her phone is calling but I won’t pick up

Give me your brief definition of love. it’s complicated

What is the most beautiful part of the human body, male or female? hmm...

Do you like having your ear nibbled on? it’s a weird feeling

Look down. What do you see? notes What is a subject that makes you uncomfortable? uh oh...

What is a subject you can talk on and on about and not get sick of it? it seems that dreams, OSDD/DID, my book, illnesses/diseases (those I literally got sick of lol) lately

Has anyone ever walked in on you naked? yup

How do you feel now about the first person you ever dated? funny that you mentioned that today! I met my pre-school bf in the store, last days I often see him, we say HI and wave like kids to each other since middle school when he became less VIP if you know what I mean, I don’t feel anything, I definitely wouldn’t date him now, sorry, but he is not a bad guy

What is something that needs to be invented? cure/medicine 

What always makes you burp? my IBS and GERD so all kinds of food can and not just food

What are you doing tomorrow? I plan to meet with my gf

When was the last time you were in pain? Did you take a painkiller? constantly, more or less

What was the last question that someone else asked you? I believe that my mom asked me about best time to make soup?

Does your father have any hobbies? What are they? cross stitching and reading mostly

What did the last face mask you wore look like? not applicable

Is there a specific song that you always request at parties? What is it? I don’t request songs :o

What was the last thing someone said or did, that made you chuckle? K. said he doesn’t like kpop

Who was the last relative you visited? I didn’t visit relatives for months

Do you own a hairdryer? What color is it? black and silver

Did you say ‘goodnight’ to anyone last night? mhm

Does anyone ever comment on the appearance of your handwriting? that it’s ugly...

How old were you in 1997? 5

When you hear songs about love, does it make you think of anyone? obvi

What were you doing an hour ago? eating?

Has anything fallen out of your pocket at any time recently? almost

Did anything disturb your sleep at all last night? oh well...

What kind(s) of Facebook groups are you active in, if any? just one

Do you enjoy any herbal or fruit teas? What kinds? used to

Are you currently wearing anything grey? yasss

Is anyone in your family currently pregnant? luckily not

Do you have any specific plans for this weekend? my dad’s working so I stay home

What’s the farthest you’ve chased an ice cream truck? we don’t have ice cream trucks in here

Did you get the ice cream? -

You can only bring back only one species out of extinction. What is it? moa, dodo or mammoths

Do you feel tempted to draw everywhere when you have a Sharpie? wtf

Did you see the trailer for “The Human Centipede”? hell no

Isn’t it ridiculously disgusting? that’s why I didn’t watch it

Should we stop the oil spill by filling the pipes with PlayDoh? wait what?...

Still have your baby shoes? doubt it

Do you act on impulse? very rarely

Survey #271

“some of those who work forces are the same that burn crosses.”

Do you cook on the stove at all, or just microwave? I just use the microwave. I'm scared of the stove lmao. Do you ever debate religion with your friends? Bruuuh no. I am so disinterested in debating about something that to me ultimately doesn't matter yet humanity has made so serious. Whatever happens after we die, happens, there's that. Just be a decent human being and go out knowing you did your best to make the world better than when you entered it. Do you keep your shampoo in the shower or someplace else? In the shower. Something your mother said or did that shocked you: Like... recently? Or in my entire life? I dunno about recently, but I guess the most shocking to me was when she vehemently called my sister something I won't repeat. Did your mom go to college? She was before the cancer. Ready to graduate, too, but that didn't go as planned thanks to, y'know, cancer. Which food do you think you have the most cans of in your cupboard? Good question, no clue. I don't really pay attention to the canned foods. Maybe fruits? Do you save fortunes from fortune cookies? No. Are you offended when Christmas is spelled Xmas? Nah. Where do you put your keys when you come home? In my purse. Describe your favorite mug or glass to drink from? I don't have one. That I use, anyway. Sara gave me a Markiplier quote one that's a Holy Item on my shelf and instead of holding a beverage holds All My Love. Your bad habit that you love the most: UGH I hate how much I love soda. Invent a pop tart flavor: STORY TIME!!!! As a kid, there was this contest to design a type and you won like... a fucking huge supply of the newest flavor, which was at the time that wild berry whatever thing. My sister and I made one that I think I recall being pink with heart sprinkles and strawberry flavored, and we won. Guess who fucking hates the wild berry flavor now lmao. Okay but anyway if I was to invent one now... is there a BLUE raspberry flavor? Cuz a bitch loves blue raspberry flavored everything. Do you name your pets after tv/movie/book characters: Sometimes. I don't currently have a pet that is, though. Are you proud of yourself for what you've accomplished? The few things I actually have, sure? I'm more ashamed of what I haven't. Do you own any sexy lingerie? Nooooo no one would want to see me in that, least of all myself lmao. Have you ever caught a bouquet of flowers at a wedding before? No. Has a horse ever neighed at you before? Uhhh I don't think so? Do you prefer ice cream or sorbet? Ice cream. Have you gotten your pets spayed? My cat is. That's like... the only pet we ever have fixed, sadly. My parents/Mom (depending on time period) could just never afford it. The only real reason we managed to get Roman neutered was because our sister directed us to a cheap on-the-go business where it was like... only $45, and Roman was marking the house badly so it was pretty urgent. Would you ever take in a stray animal? HA, that is the STORY of my family with cats. At this current time, most likely not. We don't need another pet right now, nevermind one of a mysterious background with my mom being sick. When is payday? N/A Have you ever walked on a runway before? No. How long is your workday? N/A Is there a walkway or a pathway to your front door? No. What is your favorite color? What is your least favorite color? Pink is superior to all colors. I'm really not a puke-green fan, but I mean... is anyone? What color dominates your wardrobe? Everything is B L A C K. What color are your eyes? Grayish blue. Are you colorblind, or do you know anyone who is? I'm not, but Jason's brother is colorblind to I think red and blue? Do you prefer color photos or black-and white? It greatly depends on the composition and subject matter of the photograph. I find great beauty in both. If I had to pick though, color usually appeals to me more. Are you one of those people who can taste, feel, or smell colors? No. Have you ever seen a double rainbow before? Yes. Do you enjoy coloring? It tends to be my least-favorite part of the art process because that's where I always fuck shit up. Do you know anyone who is racist? Oh my, PLENTY. Welcome to the South. Are your nails painted any color(s) right now? They never are. Can you lift more than 100lbs? I probably CAN, but it would be very hard. What's your opinion on incest? It's fucking repulsive. Morally and negative from a scientific standpoint, anyway. Do you have a favorite color for cats? Orange. What video games did you play when you were younger? I was a massive gamer as a kid, teenager too, so I could put a hell of a lot here. But, I'll just imagine you're referring to when I was quite young. The Spyro games (save for Skylanders) were my LIFE, I loved Nintendogs, the Crash Bandicoot trilogy, lots of games that were based on movies (like Madagascar and Finding Nemo are two I really enjoyed), uhhh... OH! And absolutely weird, but I loved hunting games. Like, I had a whooole lot, despite hating real life hunting even as a child. I think it was because I got to see wild animals, plus it could be calming to wander and scary, too, when things like wolves found you. Oh, and then there were fishing games, too. LOOK I just love(d) games. Would you ever get a tramp stamp? I hate that nickname. Having a tattoo literally anywhere does not equate you to a stereotype. Yes, because I want to be heavily tattooed anyway. Did you cry when Michael Jackson died? No. Not that I didn't care at all, I just wasn't a giant fan. What's the ugliest species of animal? Lmao how mean. The blobfish immediately comes to mind, though. Looks like a ball of mucus shaped into an old man's face. Are you embarrassed about any songs on your iPod? I used to be, now it's just like whatever. I like what I like. What do you use to listen to music on the computer? YouTube. Do people know a lot about you? Places on the Internet sure do lmao. I try to be much more private now online to a degree, depending on where. Irl, no. I'm too easily embarrassed/afraid of being judged for what makes me, me. Who was the last person you slept beside? Sara. Do you like Metallica? They're one of my all-time favorites and I trust NOBODY who claims to hate them. What's your favorite kind of soup? I'm not a fan of soup. What’s your best friend's favorite band? Her all-time favorite is Pink Floyd. Who was the last person you took a picture with? Ummm idr. Do you play Guitar Hero? Not really anymore, but I fuckin slayed that shit back in the day. Whose house did you last visit? My older sister's. Who was the last person to come to your house? My younger sister. What time do you usually eat dinner? Anywhere between 5:30 to like... 7:00 or so. Have you ever searched your own house on Google Earth? Not this current one, no. Does it bother you when people have a loose grip on hugs? No? Some people don't like hugs. Are you looking forward to next year? I don't know. Is covid gonna be history by then? It depends on a lot of things. What have you done so far this summer? *blink blink blink* What's your favorite punk band? Honestly, I don't even really separate bands by genres now because I don't know. There's so so many, plenty overlap, etc. etc, and people - especially those who enjoy rock/metal stuff, I've found - get all snobbish and "WELL ACTUALLY" when you "misgenre" or whatever. Which is better: cold or hot weather? COLD. FUCK hot weather. Anything above ~75*F is disgusting. Is photography something you enjoy? I'm an aspiring photographer so like- What’s the best flavor snow cone? I haven't had a legit snow cone in years... but we have a place called Pelican's Snowballs, which is really just like... snow cones in a cup? They are A M A Z I N G and strawberry is to die for. When driving, are you a speed demon or do you drive like your grandmother? I don't drive because I'm terrified to. Have you ever met someone who just had you at hello? No. Bet you were expecting "Jason," but no, I was weirded out that a stranger just comes up to me in the hall on the way to class and starts talking to me. Have you ever written poetry? Yeah. Do you have any addictions? Technology, ugh. And soda, rip. When was the last time you just laid and looked at the stars? Laid, many years ago one summer when Jason and I were just lying on the trampoline while my dad was grilling. What song reminds you of an ex? A lot. What color eyeliner do you prefer? Black. What was the last thing that you made with your own two hands? Like, made from scratch? Hell if I know. What’s the deepest water you will wade into? Like, shoulder-deep in the ocean. How many blades does your razor have? Three, I think? Highest grade of education you’ve completed? Just one semester of college. Lowest grade you’ve received on a test? Yikes, Fs in college math. He taught in such an abstract way that I failed like... every test, or nearly did. I was too afraid to ask questions continuously. Do you enjoy sitting in the sun or the shade more? There is NO situation where I would rather be in the sun. Do you enjoy going to arcades? Hell yeah. What parades do you like to go to? None. When’s the last time you went on a tirade? I ranted to Mom about the fucking ridiculous anti-maskers that are a big reason this motherfucking pandemic is worsening in America. With my mom being immunocompromised, it is something I take VERY goddamn seriously. It's not a difference in opinion - it's a difference in morality. Do you like to play charades? I loved to as a kid. Now it'd feel weird. Would you ever lead a crusade? I wouldn't want to lead anything. Have your parents ever forbade you from doing something? Aha, so as a kid, I had a game demo disc that showed the preview to Parasite Eve, and my sisters and I would secretly watch it despite it scaring us to where Mom did forbid us to click on it. And all these years later, I've played it and love it... ha ha. Otherwise, my parents have always been pretty open to letting us do stuff, save for things the usual parent doesn't like, like swearing. When’s the last time someone said something degrading to you? A few days back when I got into an argument on Facebook about some asshole teasing their newly-hatched cobra to where it kept striking at the tongs, hood flared and all. Apparently I had no idea what I was talking about, pointing out the snake was clearly stressed out. What’s the last homemade dish you’ve made? I legit haven't cooked a thing since Sara was here and I made her eggs for breakfast. Which was like, a year ago. Do you like lemonade? What flavor(s)? Broooo YES. Pink lemonade is better, but I enjoy just the classic kind, too. Has anyone ever serenaded you before? Fuck this question. Would you like to visit the Everglades? Lemme see them motherfuckin GATORS. Have you ever attended a masquerade ball before? No. Would be dope, though. Have you lost anyone to AIDS? No, thank god. Have you ever been paid for sex? Hell no. Have you ever had a maid in your home before? HUNNY we are too poor for that shit. Do you know how to do different types of braids in hair? No. When’s the last time you wore a Band-aid? Where and why? I have no clue. When was the last time you were afraid? Of what? A family friend was over here a couple days ago and she had this weirdest muscle cramp in her leg that brought her to the floor gasping for like over a minute. I was super scared, and Mom was too, as we had no idea what to do. I almost had to call 911. Crazy woman hasn't gone to the doctor about it, to my knowledge. Would you ever consider growing your hair out to your waist, or longer? NOOOO NO NO. I am probably having short hair for the rest of my life. Is there anywhere in your house that you're scared to be alone in? No. What is your favorite shoe brand? I don't have one. What weird things did you do as a small child? I was just a weird kid in general. I did a lotta stuff that would make people raise a brow. Who puts the most pressure on you in your life? My goddamn self. Do you laugh off embarrassing moments? Hell no, I turn red as a cherry and probably cry once I'm in private. Do you have a favourite actor/actress? If so, who? No. Do you like little kids, or do they annoy you? I feel uncomfortable around them. They're too brutally honest, I feel like every move I make is wrong, and I just generally feel incapable of handling them properly. Do you want a small or a large family when you get older? Well, I don't want any kids, so... Are you a good dancer? If not, do you enjoy dancing anyways? No and no. I'd be embarrassed. Have you ever lied to avoid getting into trouble? Yeah. Have you ever been admitted to the hospital for a long period of time? I'd say two weeks is pretty long, and I was supposed to stay an entire month. I only got out of that by going to court. Do you take a lot of pictures of yourself, or are you camera shy? I HATE being in front of the camera. What are your choice of toppings on a hamburger? And do you prefer gas or charcoal grilling? I just like ketchup, mustard, and pickles, really. A bit of diced onion is fine, too. I prefer gas; I hate the charcoal-y taste. You are chosen to have lunch with the president. the condition is you only get to ask one question. What do you ask? Fuck that, I'd decline going to begin with. What is your concession stand must-have at the movies? Popcorn, of course. Which do you dislike most: pop-up ads or spam email? Pop-up ads. How long was it from ‘the first date’ until the proposal of marriage? How long until the wedding? N/A What topic can put you to sleep quicker than any other? Probably like, wrestling. Golf. Sports in general. How many times did it take you to pass your drivers test? I haven't tried it yet. If you had to have the same topping on your vanilla ice cream for the rest of your life, what topping would you choose? I always just use chocolate syrup. Would you rather be trapped in an elevator, or stuck in traffic? CHRIST, TRAFFIC. Elevators kinda scare me and I'm very scared of being stuck in one. What are you sitting on right now? My bed. Are you listening to anything? Halocene's cover of "Killing In The Name." Have you parents ever hated one of your boyfriends/girlfriends? No. Who was the last person to give you money? I have no idea. Have you ever dreamed of someone you barely know? Actually yeah. Weird as hell. When was the most recent time, if ever, that you felt “impostor syndrome,” or that you felt unqualified to be somewhere? Hm. I suppose when I went to the doctor by myself for my foot. I'd never done an appointment without Mom at all, and I was veeery clueless to a lot of steps, questions, etc. What are some ways that pop culture has helped you learn historic or scientific facts? Some TV shows, I guess. Or games, even. Have you ever had a job in which you felt that you had nothing to do? What was the protocol in that situation (e.g., surfing the web, taking on the job of co-workers, or pretending to work)? If you have not, do you think it would be lucky or unlucky to have such a job? No. I was expected to always be doing something. I'd consider that to be pretty unlucky, as it sounds boring and pointless. Have you ever intimidated or made another person feel legitimately threatened? If not, do you think that you could ever be seen as scary? I don't know. Mom has admitted me yelling has scared her before, though. I can yell pretty fucking loudly. But she herself never felt threatened. And do I think I could be seen as scary? Yes. Especially given my chronic fucking nightmares that almost always involve confrontation. In what ways do you or would you need to be validated by a partner? (For example, liking your posts/talking about you on social media, or perhaps by doting on you with gifts.) I am VERY much a "words of affirmation" person. I NEED reassurance that I'm adequate and sincerely loved. When you are having a hard time emotionally, what are some of the telltale ways that you act out or that your personality reflects your struggles? I become very snappy and more reclusive than usual. I cry really easily. Do you tend to succeed by weaning yourself off of something or by quitting cold turkey? It depends on what it is, but I've generally needed to wean myself off of things when necessary. Is there a specific type of pet breed/size/etc. that you don’t want? Why not? I am very turned off by animal breeds/types that are subject to serious health issues, such as pugs, dachsunds, Persians, spider ball pythons... Just don't fucking breed them. Ironically, some of these are the cutest, but I care far more about the health of the animal. Have you ever lived in a notoriously dangerous area? If not, would it bother you to do so? Yes and yes. Has a friend’s significant other ever interfered with or damaged your friendship? What about a significant other of yours damaging a friendship? I don't believe so, no. What, if anything, is something that you put pressure on yourself about? What do you imagine would happen if you did not live up to this expectation? Getting a job, for Heaven's sake, and actually managing to keep it. I've proven inept in this area so far, so, I've already failed that. :^) If you have been in a serious relationship, have you and your partner ever discussed lifetime plans that clashed? Did you reconcile them or did you break up? If you have not been in a relationship, what are some issues that would be deal-breakers? Jason and I kinda casually talked about kids early in our relationship, at which time I didn't see myself wanting them at all and he did at some point. It didn't really bother either of us, though; it was something we'd figure out if we actually got anywhere. Then he became the only person I could ever imagine myself having kids with. Life's funny.

For the ship ask, Skimmons??

Thanks for the ask! I love these ladies

who hogs the duvet

Daisy! She’s such a messy sleeper

who texts/rings to check how their day is going

They’re both super busy, but sometimes they text or message to check in

who’s the most creative when it comes to gifts

Daisy! although Jemma’s are always quite well chosen and researched, Daisy’s are much more spontaneous, inventive and unexpected

who gets up first in the morning

by choice? Jemma, no question

who suggests new things in bed

Hm I think they both get their suggestions in. Daisy probably gets the ball rolling into trying-new-stuff territory, but once there, Jemma loves that bandwagon

who cries at movies

Daisy. Jemma does if she’s feeling particularly invested, moody or tired, but for the most part she doesn’t particularly like to have her heart ripped out by fictional characters so she’s only that invested in a handful of things. Daisy and her kickass empathy feel much different but for the most part Daisy loves getting really involved with stuff

who gives unprompted massages

Daisy. Jemma’s not bad at massages either, but she’s not so much into giving unprompted ones, especially since the times when Daisy is most stressed out and in need of a massage she’s probably also going to be most on edge and not wanting to be touched

who fusses over the other when they’re sick

fight fight fight fight omg they are both real bad at looking after themselves when they’re sick but they will crawl over hot coals for the other At All Times

who gets jealous easiest

Daisy I think, she’s got her loneliness issues 3

who has the most embarrassing taste in music

Daisy probably, but she has no shame

who collects something unusual

Jemma and her weird science shit? She probably has little bacteria collections or something hoarded away. Ooh or pressed flowers from England.

And of course Daisy and her polaroid pictures which has been a longstanding headcanon of mine

who takes the longest to get ready

Hmm... Daisy? but to be fair most of that time is just getting out of bed because mornings suck

who is the most tidy and organised

uh Jemma with a magnitude of like a thousand

who gets most excited about the holidays

Daisy, especially now that she has a family to share it with

who is the big spoon/little spoon

Jemma is the big spoon because she likes to feel strong and protective and Daisy likes to be the big spoon because it makes her feel safe! plus it also means extra minutes of sleep bc Jemma can get up without bugging her

who gets most competitive when playing games and/or sports

Jemma was born eating, sleeping and breathing competition but Daisy can play with the best of them, when she wants to. Mostly she just enjoys setting Jemma on people and watching what happens

who starts the most arguments

they definitely don’t have a peraltiago-style scoreboard about this

who suggests that they buy a pet

probably Daisy? I just feel like she’d be more into it

what couple traditions they have

they bring each other comfort food. whenever Jemma is feeling sad Daisy brings her vegetable soup or ratatouille or something, and when Daisy is feeling it Jemma usually stoops to Little Debbie

when they’re unwell they read each other books

what tv shows they watch together

they watch some biology documentaries like Planet Earth and stuff which they both think are neat, and probably the major nerd franchises like Star Wars and Harry Potter

what other couple they hang out with

Fitz and whoever he is with would be a big one, probably also Mack and whoever he is with. 

how they spend time together as a couple

They are often busy working and solving problems, sometimes jogging or walking especially if they have time off and are somewhere interesting, watching movies and cuddling, talking into the deep dark hours of the night

who made the first move

hmm... Jemma. Things like ~first moves~ take a lot of planning, you know :P especially when you’re both useless bisexuals

who brings flowers home

this literally happened in canon so I’ve gotta say Daisy

who is the best cook

they are both trash who let them be functioning humans. I guess they can cook well enough to live but like... it’s not good fam. they mostly just don’t have the time to put in though - if/when they make an effort I’m sure they’d pull off something pretty quality

On the list of America’s irrational fears, Palestine is near the top. This is no small feat for a “country” with no actual territory and a population about the size of South Carolina. Despite its lack of an air force, navy, or any real army to speak of, Palestine has long been considered an existential threat to Israel, a nuclear-armed power with one of the most powerful militaries in the world and the full backing of the United States. Since there’s no military or economic justification for this threat, a more nebulous one had to be invented. Thus, Palestinians are depicted in the media as hot-blooded terrorists, driven by the twin passions of fanatical Islam and a seething hatred for Western culture. So engrained is this belief that the op-ed page of the New York Times can “grapple with questions of [Palestinian] rights” by advocating openly for apartheid, forced expulsion, or worse.

This worldview demands an Olympian feat of mental gymnastics. It can only be maintained so long as most Americans have no firsthand contact with Palestine or Palestinian people. Even the smallest act of cultural exchange is enough to make us start questioning the panic-laced myths we’ve been taught since birth.  

Of course, the best way to discover the truth about Palestine is to visit the country yourself, though most Americans don’t have the free time or financial resources to do so (this is not a coincidence). This means that those of us who are fortunate enough to visit have a responsibility to share what we’ve seen and heard, without lapsing into pre-fabricated narratives, even “sympathetic” ones. We can’t fight untruth by telling untruths from the opposite perspective. What we can do, however, is report what we saw and heard in Palestine. We can try to provide a snapshot of daily life and let people come to their own conclusions.

With this in mind, here’s what I learned during a recent trip to the Holy Land…

The Palestinian doorman of the Palm Hostel in Jerusalem is a large and friendly man who insists his name is Mike. My fiancée and I are skeptical, as we’d expected something a bit more Arabic. We ask him what his friends call him.

“Just Mike,” he says, and taps an L&M cigarette against the wooden desk. He’s sitting in a dark alcove with rough stone floors, nestled halfway up the staircase that leads from the fruit market to the Palm’s small arched doorway.  A pleasant, musty oldness floats in the air. You could imagine Indiana Jones staying here, if he’d lost tenure and gone broke for some reason. To Westerners like us, it seems too exotic to have a doorman named Mike.

Before we can ask him again, though, Mike pounces with a question of his own. “You’re from the States, right?” He speaks English with a thick accent and slow but almost flawless diction, an odd combination that is causing my fiancée some visible confusion, which seems amusing to Mike. I tell him that we’re from Minnesota, a small and boring place in the center-north of the USA. His grin gets bigger, which makes me self-conscious, so I also explain that Minnesota has no mountains or sea, and the winters are very cold.

“Yeah, I know,” says Mike. “I lived in El Paso for thirty years. Border cop, K9 unit. It was a nice place. Had a couple kids there.” Now it’s my turn to gawk, and I start to race through all the possible scams he might be trying to pull. Mike seems to guess what I’m thinking. “Really. I even learned some Spanish.” He scrunches his brow in mock concentration and clamps a hairy hand over his forehead. “Hola. ¿Como estás?Una cerveza, por favor.”  He opens his eyes and laughs. “Welcome to Jerusalem, guys. Damascus Gate is that way. Enjoy.”

I don’t know why I’m so surprised he knows a handful of Taco Bellisms, or why this convinces me of his honesty. However, now it’s impossible to walk away. We have too many questions. The first one: Why’d he return to Jerusalem? Mike looks down at his cigarette, smoldering into a fine grey tail of ash. He flicks it against a stone and a bright red ember blazes to life.

“This is my home. I had to.”

Later, as we sip sweet Turkish coffee outside a rug shop in the Old City, it occurs to me that Mike was the first Palestinian person I’d ever spoken with face-to-face. His life story seemed unusual, but I have no idea what’s “usual” when it comes to Palestinian lives. I’d never thought about them before, to be honest. The world has an infinite number of stories, and the days are not as long as I’d like. It’s not like I’d chosen to ignore Palestine. I just hadn’t chosen to be interested in it.

Which was odd, because Palestine has been all over the news since I was a kid. There isn’t a single specific story I recall, just a murky soup of words and phrases, like “fragile peace talks” and “two-state solution” and “violent demonstrations.” They all swirl together, settling under the stock image of a bombed-out warzone as the headlines mumbled something about Hamas or Hezbollah or the Palestinian Authority. I remember reading about rockets and settlements, refugees and suicide bombers, non-binding resolutions and vetoed Security Council decisions. Not a single detail had stuck. I could feign awareness of some important-sounding events—the Balfour Declaration, the Oslo Accords, the Camp David Summit—but I couldn’t say what decade they happened, or who was involved, or what was decided.

For years, I’d been under the impression that I knew enough about Palestine to be uninterested in what was happening there. This isn’t to say I felt any particular animosity toward the Palestinians. But it’s impossible to fight for every cause, no matter how righteous, if only for reasons of time. Every minute you spend feeding the hungry is a minute you’re not visiting the sick. Life is a zero sum game more often than we’d like to believe.

As we headed toward the Via Dolorosa, the road that Jesus walked on the way to his crucifixion, I began to feel uneasy. The Israeli police (indistinguishable from soldiers except for the patches on their uniforms) who stood guard at every corner still smiled at us, and they were still apologetic when they forbade us from walking down streets that were “for Muslims only, unfortunately.” Their English was excellent. Many of them were women. They were young and diverse and photogenic, a recruiter’s dream team. But all I could see were their bulletproof vests and submachine guns. Above every ancient stone arch bristled a nest of surveillance cameras. Only a few hours ago, I’d been able to block all that from my sight, leaving me free to enjoy the giddy sensation of strolling through the holiest city on earth.

The road ended at the Lion’s Gate. Just as we approached it, a battered Toyota came rattling through. It screeched to a halt and a squad of Israeli police surrounded the car. All four doors opened and out stepped a Palestinian family. The driver was a young man in his 20s, with short black hair cut in the style of Ronaldo, the famous Real Madrid footballer. When the police told him to turn around and face the wall, he did so without a word. It was obvious this was a daily ritual. The policeman who frisked him looked as bored as it’s possible to look when patting down another man’s genitals. Soon it was over, and the family got back in their car. One of the policemen pulled out his phone and started texting.

If I’d made a video of the search (which I didn’t) and showed it to you with the volume off, you probably wouldn’t find it very interesting. The Israeli police didn’t hurt the man, and he barely made eye contact with them. There were no outrageous racial slurs or savage beatings. The only thing you’d see is a group of people in camouflage battle gear standing around a small white sedan, with a middle-aged woman and a couple of young girls off to the right. Unless you have hawk-like eyesight and an exceptional knowledge of obscure uniform insignias, I doubt you’d be able to tell “which side” any of the participants might be on. All you could say for sure is that the police wanted to search the family’s bodies and belongings, and the family looked very unhappy about it, but the police had guns and cameras, and that settled things. It’s interesting what conclusions different people might draw from a scene like that.

Later that night, after we get back to the Palm, I tell Mike about what we saw. He asks what we’d thought. “It was fucked up,” we say.

Mike sighs. “You should see Bethlehem.”    

Jerusalem is so close to Bethlehem that you barely have time to wonder why all the billboards that advertise luxury condos use English instead of Arabic as the second language before you arrive at the wall.

The wall is the most hideous structure I’ve ever seen. It’s a huge, groaning monument to death. Tall grey rectangles bite into the earth like iron teeth, horribly bare, cold, sterile, a towering monstrosity. The wall makes the air taste like poison.

We’re in the car of Mike’s cousin Harun, who is Palestinian, but his car has Israeli plates so we aren’t searched at the checkpoint. We inch past the concrete barriers and armored trucks. Harun holds his identity pass out the window, a soldier waves us through, and a few seconds later we’re in Bethlehem, a short drive from where Jesus Christ was born. It feels like entering prison. I don’t say prison in the sense of an ugly and depressing place you’d prefer not to visit. I say prison in the literal sense: a fortified enclosure where human beings are kept against their will by heavily armed guards who will shoot them if they try to leave. This is what modern life is like in Bethlehem, birthplace of our Lord and Savior.

Looking at the wall from the Israeli side breaks your heart because of its naked ugliness. On the Palestinian side, the unending slabs of concrete have been decorated with slogans, signs, and graffiti, which break your heart for different reasons. One of the hardest parts is reading the sumud series. These are short stories written on plain white posters, plastered to the wall about 10 feet up. Each story comes from a Palestinian woman or girl, and most are written in English, because the only people who read these stories are tourists.

One in particular catches my eye, by a woman named Antoinette:

All my life was in Jerusalem! I was there daily: I worked there at a school as a volunteer and all my friends live there. I used to belong to the Anglican Church in Jerusalem and was a volunteer there. I arranged the flowers and was active with the other women. I rented a flat but I was not allowed to stay because I do not have a Jerusalem ID card. Now I cannot go to Jerusalem: the wall separates me from my church, from my life. We are imprisoned here in Bethlehem. All my relationships with Jerusalem are dead. I am a dying woman.

The flowers are what gets me, because my mother also arranges flowers at church. Hers is an Eastern Orthodox congregation in Minneapolis, about 20 minutes by car from my childhood home. That’s about the same distance between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, although there aren’t any military checkpoints or armored cars patrolling the Minnesotan highways. Until today, I would’ve been unable to imagine what that would even look like. The situation here is so unlike anything I’ve ever encountered in real life that all I can think is, “it’s like a bad war movie.” For the Palestinian people who’ve been living under an increasingly brutal military occupation for the last 70 years, an entire lifetime, I can’t begin to guess at the depths of their helpless anger. What did Antoinette think, the first time the soldiers refused to let her pass? What did she say? What would my mother say? There wouldn’t be a goddamned thing she could do, or I could do, or my father or my sisters, or anyone else. We’d all just have to live with it, the soldiers groping us, beating us, mocking us. No wonder Antoinette gave up hope. In her place, would I be any different? We walk in silence for a long time.

We end up in a refugee camp called Aida, where more than 6,000 people live in an area roughly the size of a Super Target. Here, the air is literally poison. Israeli soldiers have fired so much tear gas into the tiny area that 100 percent of residents now suffer from its effects. If they were using the tear gas against, say, ISIS soldiers instead of Palestinian civilians, this would be a war crime, since “asphyxiating, poisonous, or other gases” are banned by the Geneva Protocol. However, such practices are deemed to be acceptable in peacetime, since there’s no chance an unarmed civilian population would be able to retaliate with toxic agents of their own. Without the threat of escalation, chemical warfare is just crowd control.

Before we continue, there are three things you should know about Aida. The first is that there’s no clear dividing line between Aida and Bethlehem, so an unwary pedestrian can easily wander into the refugee camp without realizing it. The second thing is that it doesn’t look like a refugee camp, at least if you’re expecting a refugee camp to be full of emergency trailers, flimsy tents, and flaming barrels of trash. The third thing is that the kids who live there have terrible taste in soccer teams.

We meet the first group as soon as we enter the camp. There are five of them, all teenage boys. One of them is wearing a knockoff Yankees hat. They’re staring at us, and at once I’m very aware of my camera bag’s bulkiness and the blondeness of my fiancée’s hair. A loudspeaker crackles with the cry of the muzzein, and it’s only then that I realize how deeply we Americans have been conditioned to associate the Arabic language with violence and death. The boys exchange a quick burst of words, raising my blood pressure even higher, and cross the street toward us.

“Hello…  what’s your name?” The kid who speaks first is tall and stocky, wearing the same black track jacket and blue jeans favored by 95 percent of the world’s male adolescents. He’s also sporting the Ronaldo haircut, as are several of his friends. Two of the kids start to pull out cigarettes, so I pull out my cigarettes faster and offer the pack to them. Is this a bad, irresponsible thing to do? Sure, and if you’re worried about the long-term health of these kids’ lungs, you should call the American manufacturers who supply Israel with the chemical weapons that are used to poison the air they breathe every day.

I tell the kid my name is Nick, and he shakes my hand. “Nice to meet you. I’m Shadi.” He’s carrying a rolled-up book, as are his friends, so I ask if he’s going to school. “Yeah bro, exams. We have three this week.” His friends laugh, and then engage in a quick tussle for the right of explaining that they’re heading to their math exam now, which is a boring and difficult subject, and I agree that it is, although at least you never have to use most of it after you finish school, a sentiment that earns me daps from Shadi and his friends, and we stand there giggling and smoking on the street corner of the refugee camp, though for a few moments we could be anywhere in the world.

My fiancée and I, both teachers by trade, start to pepper the kids with questions. Shadi says that he has one year left at the nearby high school, which is run by the UN refugee agency that was just stripped of half its funding by Trump. After he finishes, he plans to study at Bethlehem University. The other guys nod with approval, and speak of similar hopes. I ask them who their favorite footballer is, and they all say Ronaldo, at which I spit in disbelief, because everyone knows that Ronaldo sucks and Messi is much better, visca el Barça! Shadi and his friends break into huge grins, since few elements of brotherhood are more universal than talking shit about sports. Seconds later we’re howling with laughter as Shadi’s buddy makes insulting pantomimes about Messi’s diminutive size. A small part of my brain is loudly and repeatedly insisting that everything about this moment of life is batshit lunacy, that there’s no reason why I should be standing in a Palestinian refugee camp, yards away from buildings my country helped bomb into rubble, with my pretty fiancée and expensive camera, talking in English slang with a group of boys whose lungs are scarred with chemicals made in the USA, the exact kind of reckless young ruffians whose slingshots and stones are such a terrifying threat to the fearsome Israeli military, and the craziest thing of all is that here in the refugee camp, surrounded by derelict cars and rusty barbed wire and 6,000 displaced Palestinians,  we are not in danger, at least not from whom you’d think. Here, in the refugee camp, we can joke around with people who speak our language and know our cultural references and actively seek to help us navigate their neighborhood. None of this is to say that Aida is a safe, comfortable, or morally defensible place to put human beings, but only that the people who live there treated us with such overwhelming kindness and decency that I have never been more ashamed at what my country does in my name. I tell Shadi and his friends to take the rest of my cigarettes, but they smile and decline.

“We, uh, have to go now,” says Shadi, as his friends start to walk up the street. “Do you have Facebook?” We do, because everyone does, and as we exchange information, I wish him good luck on his math exam. “No way, bro, I suck at math,” he says. We both laugh, and I pat him on the back.

“Fuck math. But hey, you’re gonna do great, Shadi.”

“Thanks bro. Fuck math.”

I hope he gets every question correct on his exam. I hope he goes to university and wins a scholarship to Oxford. I hope he invents some insanely popular widget and it makes him a billion dollars and he never has to breathe tear gas again.

We continue walking through Aida camp. The buildings are square, ugly, and drab, but the walls are decorated with colorful paintings of fish and butterflies and meadows (along with a somewhat darker array of scenes from the Israeli military occupation). We meet a group of cousins, aged four to 10, all girls, who ask if we can speak English. When we offer them a bag of candy, they take one piece each, and run away yelping when a man limps out the front door of their house. “Thank you,” he says, his face a mask of grave civility. Cars, all bearing green-and-white Palestinian plates instead of the blue-and-yellow Israeli ones, slow down so their drivers can shout “Hello!” We meet another group of kids, boys this time, who grab fistfuls of candy and make playful attempts to unfasten my wristwatch. We make a hasty retreat from this group. The streets are scorched in spots where tear gas canisters exploded.  Narrow strips of pockmarked pavement lead us down steep hills and into winding alleys, and soon we’re lost.

This is how we meet Ahmed. He’s a tall man, about 40 years old, with a small black mustache and arms as thin as a stork’s legs. A yellow sofa leans against the concrete wall of the three-storey apartment building where he lives. Ahmed is sitting there with an elderly couple. He asks if we’d like a cup of tea, and although we’ve been warned about the old “come inside for a cup of tea” scam, we accept his offer. The elderly couple greets us in Arabic, and I try not to notice the large plastic bag of orange liquid peeking out from beneath the old man’s shirt.

While we climb the stairs to Ahmed’s apartment, he tells us that the old people are his parents. “They live here,” he says, pointing to the door on the first floor, “because they don’t walk very good. My mother has problems with her legs, my father is sick from the water.” He traces the pipes with his finger, and we see they’re coated in a thick reddish crust. “Here is the home of my big son,” he says when we reach the second floor. “He has a new baby.” We congratulate him on becoming a grandfather. “And I have a new baby, too! Come, I show you!” One more flight of stairs, and we arrive at Ahmed’s apartment.

It looks remarkably similar to a hundred other apartments we’ve visited. Framed photos of various family members hang on the living room walls, which are painted the same not-quite-white as most living room walls. There’s a beautiful red rug and a small TV. A woman is sitting on the sofa, nursing a baby as she folds socks. “My wife,” says Ahmed.

She speaks a little English too, and says that her name is Nada. She has a pale round face and long black hair. Her eyes are soft, kind, and completely exhausted. Yet if she’s annoyed or embarrassed by our presence, she doesn’t show it. She just hands the baby to Ahmed and goes to make the tea.

“I’m sorry for my house,” says Ahmed, cradling his son like a loaf of bread with legs. “We try to be clean, but…” There’s not so much as a slipper out of place, but I know what he means. “We rent this flat. And my son, and my parents. All rent. Before we have a farm, animals, olive trees, but now, we rent.” I ask about his job. He smiles and shakes his head. “I want a job,” he says, “I love to work. With my hands, with my mind. I love to work. But here, haven’t jobs.” For a second he looks like he’s going to continue this line of thinking, but he stops himself. “I help my wife, that is my job.” Ahmed laughs and passes his baby to my fiancée. “And he, he helps in the home?” She demurs while I protest in mock indignation. I do the dishes every morning before she even wakes up! Still laughing, Ahmed rubs his shins, and again it’s easy to forget we’re sitting in a refugee camp in Jesus’ hometown.

Then the baby wheezes. It’s a dry, scratchy wheeze. Ahmed squirms in his seat, looking embarrassed. The baby begins to cough. My fiancée rubs his back as the coughing turns wet and violent.  Machine gun explosions blast from his tiny lungs. As an asthmatic, I recognize the sound of serious sickness. The baby writhes in my fiancée’s lap, struggling to breathe. He’s gasping and it’s getting worse fast. At moments like these, personal experience tells me that a nebulizer can be the difference between life and death. I don’t insult Ahmed by asking if he has one, because it’s clear that he doesn’t. All I can do is rub the boy’s chest with my finger, a stupid and useless massage. He kicks and stretches as if trying to wiggle away from the unseen demon that’s strangling him.

Nada hurries back with the tea. “I’m sorry,” she says, picking up the baby. She coos to him in Arabic and rubs his back, both of which are comforting but neither of which can relax the inflamed tissues of her infant’s lungs. “My baby…” Unable to find the words in English, she looks to her husband.

Ahmed rubs his cheek. “When she is pregnant, one night the soldiers come. They say the children throw stones. They always throw stones. So the soldiers shoot gas in all the houses. In the windows, over there.” His voice gets quieter. “And she is very sick. When the baby is born, he is sick too.” I ask him if it’s possible to find medicine. “Sometimes yes,” says Ahmed, “but very, very expensive.” For the first time, there’s a note of frustration in his voice. “Everything is expensive here. You see this,” and he picks up a pack of diapers, “it cost me thirty shekels. 10 dollars, almost. And the baby needs so many things. It is impossible to buy. I haven’t money for meat, how can I buy medicine?” He points to a plastic bag with four small pitas. “This is our food. One bread for my two sons, and two breads for my wife. She must make milk for our baby.” When I ask him what he eats, he holds up his cup of tea.

Somehow Nada has soothed the baby out of danger. His breathing is almost normal again, just a quiet raspy crackle. She’s still staring at him, her big brown eyes wide with worry. I don’t know how many times she’s done this before. I don’t know how many times are left before her luck runs out. 

Somehow she’s keeping her baby alive with nothing but the sheer force of her love. I ask to use the toilet so I don’t have to cry in front of her.

(Continue Reading)

Character Meme

@some-cookie-crumbz tagged me in this like an asshole like a week ago (j/k) but I was busy finishing a summer course for college. I gotta pick my favorite characters from 10 different fandumbs so this will be fun.

I’m really inactive on here so the only people I know who may do it are @space-exeggutor, @waytootired, and my horrible husbando @newgroundsguru. I’m doing this in no particular order.

Also this post may contain decades old spoilers so you know read at your own risk, all 5 of you out there in Tumblr land.

Luke Fon Fabre (Tales of the Abyss)

It’s hard not to like a character who causes so many people to drop the game within the first 10 hours because they find him so unbearable - never getting into the meat and potatoes of his character. While I hate that he loses a bit of his asshole-ish ways, but the combination of killing an entire town of people and the big plot twist (he’s a clone, and he’s been alive 7 years) it makes sense. He’s both figuratively and literally a child mentally - as he was raised to be a brat in the sort time he’s been around. Watching Luke strive to become better, come to terms with who he is and his own worth, and just bonding with the rest of the cast really makes it worth while. 

Kuron (then Takashi Shirogane aka Shiro) (Voltron: The Legendary Defender)

Prior to season 3, while I enjoyed Shiro - he really started sticking out to me as a character. Kuron, even though a clone, clearly had some of his own little personality quirks that made him stick out to me more. He was more willing to put his foot down and take charge opposed sort of smiling and taking it. Poor precious clone baby, how I will miss you. You will always be a paladin in my heart. Shiro is second only to his clone - it’s hard not like Shiro the best when it feels like he’s the only character who has had any well rounded character development throughout the series.

Relena Darlian/Peacecraft (Gundam Wing)

Moving away from the clone character trend, but staying with the mech show that’s more melodrama than actual robot fighting - the most hated characters of the early 2000′s that I loved. Much like with Shiro, Relena felt like the only character who had a legitmate arc throughout the series and grew as a person. She starts as a spoiled rich girl, attempts to avenge her adopted father but ultimately decides to take on her biological families ideals, is a political puppet at one point, and then ultimately takes up her adopted father’s role. Did I mention she’s only 15? I’ve always felt bad for the amount of flak she gets, despite all she does throughout the series, because of the “Heeeerro come back and kill me” schtick. Also I was torn between her and Duo but I knew if I said Duo it would be because he was my first husbando.

Vegeta (Dragon Ball)

I actually hated Vegeta growing up, and it wasn’t until high school that I really came to appreciate his character. I like the villain becoming a good guy thing, and that in Vegeta’s case he really still seemed more like the “grey” guy then good guy - like he wasn’t necessarily bad anymore but he wasn’t really good either. I like that in a weird way he surpasses Goku in being more human the longer the series progresses - he genuinely cares for his family’s well being even if he’s a little tsundere about it. I’ll admit too, while Super maybe horrible in certain aspects, I really do appreciate Vegeta of all people sort of becoming a voice of reason among everything that happens within the series. Like, it’s hard to believe the former antagonist is in that role.

Todoroki Shoto (Boku no Hero Academia)

This was a real hard pick because I like a lot of character’s from BnHA and I can think of at least 3 more I could say are my favorite all for different reasons. However I think Todoroki would be my number 1 pick. He’s a character who’s gone through a lot and post the sport’s festival fight with Deku, he’s growing. Todoroki could’ve stayed a quiet, anti-social, sticking to his guns kind of rival like so many shonen do but instead elects to grow. Reconnecting with his mother, not squandering his opportunities to use the resources his father has, and willing to crack the occasional joke - it makes Todoroki a breath of fresh air as one of Deku’s growing list of rivals.

Tadano Hitohito (Komi-san wa Komyushou Desu)

I started reading Komi-san wa Komyushou Desu when it was first getting translations because I thought Komi was so adorable, but as time as gone on Tadano really stole my heart. Tadano is the definite of average - and that’s literal, his whole character is being basically vanilla ice cream in 31 flavors. I never truly understood the concept of moe until this character. He’s just a earnest, hardworking guy who’s willing to help anyone - even people who treat him poorly (which is basically everyone considering his standing with Komi, the class idol). Out of all the smile I want to protect, I want to protect Tadano’s the most.

Tangy (Animal Crossing)

Cute, orange kitty cat. I don’t know what to say, she’s peppy, talks about being a super star and she’s an ORANGE KITTY CAT. She’s just too much, too freaking cute.

Gill (Harvest Moon Tree of Tranquility/Animal Parade)

I was torn between Gill and Ellen from OG Harvest Moon, but elected to go with Gill because I’ve married him so many times. Truthfully, the type A pretty boy types aren’t normally my thing but I made an exception for him. I like to think that the MC and Gill start off as a couple of convenience - Gill wanting that sweet farming bux and the MC wanting to have a political in. It’s stupid but that’s how I like to play Harvest Moon, by inventing soup opera drama in my head.

Matsuno Choromatsu (Osomatsu-san)

Again, I’m not normally into the type A personality but Choromatsu is almost like the pseudo-middle child so I feel for him. Also, I’m a terrible person so I can relate to feeling like your the least piece of shit in a room of crap (i.e. all my coworkers even though I know I’m not even better). Plus I’m otaku trash and I love cute anime girls (opposed to his idol love). In a lot of ways he pales to the other Matsu’s but everyone needs a straight man, and he’s good at it.

Hatsune Miku (Vocaloid)

She’s cute, she can sing, she can dance, and because she’s different depending on who’s writing the song she’s can be easy to relate too. My bedroom is also decked out with like 10-11 Miku figures so she had to go on here somewhere. My dream is to see her live one of these days.

Thanks to anyone who took the time to read my post on characters I enjoy. Even if I don’t know you, feel free to do it yourself. It’s a real head scratcher.