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#voted best place to work in 2020
mossspond · 1 year
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Goudy's auto and body 2020
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reasonsforhope · 3 months
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"Colorado is poised to be the first state to to expand automatic voter registration to Native American reservations, thanks to a new registration system.
Tribal members have the right to vote in elections, from the local to the national level, just like other U.S. citizens. But actually casting a ballot has been an uphill battle for many tribal residents, including those here in Colorado. Even after obtaining official U.S. citizenship a century ago, Native Americans’ ability to vote has been consistently ignored or actively undermined. In recent decades, unequal access to in-person voting, early voting and election funding on tribal lands has been a particular issue...
Working with Colorado tribes, state lawmakers passed a set of election reforms earlier this year to expand voting access for Native Americans. Those reforms include the nation’s first automatic voter registration program of its kind for Native Americans. The program will cover both of the federally-recognized Native American reservations in the state—the Southern Ute Indian Tribe and the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, and will allow the tribes’ governments to submit lists of members to be registered through the Secretary of State Jena Griswold’s office.
Griswold said the new registration system could make a big difference for Colorado's tribal communities.
"Seeing registration rates and turnout rates being much, much lower on tribal lands is a big problem that we want to solve,” Griswold said. “I personally believe automatic voter registration is one of the best ways to register voters in the state of Colorado, and all of our data shows how highly effective it is.”
Colorado is one of more than two dozen states that have automatic voter registration systems, but Colorado is the only state so far to extend its system to cover Native American reservations. When Colorado rolled out its system for the first time in 2020, about 250,000 people were added to the state’s voter rolls within the first year.
Now, [Secretary of State] Griswold hopes the new registration program will have a similar effect on tribal lands in the state. She wants to see the program in place in time for the 2024 election. For now, tribal leadership is reviewing the plan and providing feedback on it.
“It will not take us much time to register people once we start receiving data,” Griswold told KUNC. “But I think there's a couple of logistics to still work through.”
Measures to keep tribal members' information confidential were added recently at the request of the Southern Ute tribe, and lawmakers have also increased the number of on-reservation vote centers available for early voting and on Election Day.
This year’s election reforms also build on a slew of changes in recent years. For example, in 2019 Colorado lawmakers guaranteed in-person voting centers on tribal lands and loosened address requirements for voters."
-via GoodGoodGood, December 15, 2023
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zjpg · 7 months
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just a girl
'45 years'
m.list - next
[2019]
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liked by pierregasly and 5,429,584 others
addilynleblanc many happy tears have been shed recently. sosososo freaking grateful for all of this, getting to make history has been the goal since the beginning. i won't let anyone down. thank you to my new family @/redbullracing
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user1 YESSSS BITCHHHHHH
user2 Men really can't have anything to ourselves anymore😒😒 -> user1 women couldn't have anything to ourselves and we were forced to fight for our right to be able to own houses, work, vote, etc. so stfu. -> liked by charles_leclerc and addilynleblanc
f1 Welcome to Formula 1 Addilyn! -> liked by addilynleblanc
redbullracing We are excited to have you! -> addilynleblanc ❤️💙
user3 this is honestly a big deal in f1
user4 Growing up around brothers and being in a 'manly sport' myself I can tell you it takes a lot of strength just to be apart of the sport. I can't wait to see you on the track Ms. LeBlanc!
christianhorner Happy to have you on our team! -> addilynleblanc happy to be here!
maxverstappen1 Welcome to Red Bull! -> liked by addilynleblanc
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[2020 - pre-season testing]
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liked by nolanleblanc and 303,246 others
f1 Pre-season testing has begun😎 #F1 #F1testing
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user1 Excited to see LeBlanc on in the Red Bull!
user2 So ready for race day🥲
redbullracing Our happy place
nolanleblanc 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻 -> user3 NOLANNNNN -> user4 supportive brother yessir!!!!
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liked by charles_leclerc and 1,394,292 others
addilynleblanc my moms called me so many times already...
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lori.rynold.leblanc I'm just a worried mom sweetheart
louisjuliusleblanc She called me just to talk about you for 2 hours yesterday. Be grateful.
user1 the leblanc family >>>
danielricciardo I see my shoes!!! -> addilynleblanc ispy with my little eye -> user2 a curly headed cutie i could turn into my wife -> user3 wait that mean forever ever nevermind
user4 red bull already got this girl decked out in their gear😭 -> addilynleblanc free clothes!!!
user5 Say what you want about Addilyn, but she definitely has one of the best personalities on the grid! -> user6 Personality doesn't get you a WDC -> user7 neither does your crabby ass attitude, chill out.
claire.newbet i miss u gorgeous! -> addilynleblanc i miss u more :(
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callmewrinkles3 · 1 year
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Exclusive: Part Two From The Excerpts of Daniel Ricciardo’s Autobiography.
The Perth News, July 2035.
The former Formula One Champion talks about his wife, his family, and gives insights into his personal life like never before.
I know that everyone who reads this is more interested in my life and racing than in me praising my wife, but here’s the thing. She is my life. Her and our kids are my entire universe.
I’ve done some of the coolest things possible in my life. I’ve spent most of my adult life racing, I’ve driven the fastest cars in the world. I’ve sat into the ones that my heroes drove and driven them around the same racetracks they did. I went to hell and clawed my way back with Emma at my side and won a championship, but I can tell you that I’ve never felt as happy as the day I got to hold my kids for the first time. I’ve never been as proud as the day my wife brought our kids into the world and our family got a little bit bigger. But that’s a story for later. I’m going to tell you all about how much I love my kids in a few chapters, but before I do I need you to understand that they’re as amazing as their mother.
As I’ve been told countless times, everyone knows that we love each other. We’re the parents who are always holding hands at the school events, the ones that Lulu cringes about and tells her friends that “mama and dad keep kissing”. But the world doesn’t know everything that Em has done. They don’t know the things she’s sacrificed for me - her privacy, her solitude, her ability to walk down the street alone. That’s why I need to tell the world how wonderful she is. That’s why there’s some things you should know about my wife.
She is the coolest. Nobody in the world is as cool as her, not even me. She doesn’t believe in God, but she does believe in the power of Taylor Swift to solve world problems. She loves art, history, museums, and castles. And she brings me to a new one no matter where we are in the world. She loves crime shows and knows so much about true crime it’s almost scary. She can tell you which episode of Criminal Minds you’re watching from a single frame, and I can confirm that Penny wasn’t named after Penelope Garcia, but we did think about doing that.
She loves shiny things and Legos, and still says her best Christmas present was a Lego flower set we spent Christmas 2020 making together. She’d rather eat homemade food than dine at a Michelin Star restaurant, and she’s the sole reason we don’t have breakfast for dinner every day. She is the sweetest, strongest, most loving woman in the world. She is the most patient person I know. When we became parents we promised we wouldn’t yell at our kids, and our kids have never heard her raise her voice in anger. I know they never will.
She’s so smart and bright and I call her a genius at least once a day because it’s true. I wasn't going to mention this because it's not my place to say, but Em said I can. She's autistic. We found out after we got married, and a lot of things just slipped into place about her and our relationship. It's not a bad thing. It's not a negative. Her brain just works differently to mine, and she sees things I never would. It's one of the things I love her for, not in spite of it. But it's part of why the rumours and crap said about her hurt so much. Her brain picks up the patterns that everyone else misses and without her I would have been completely blindsided in Hungary in 2022. She was the first one to realise there was a chance for a seat in 2023.
She’s loyal beyond comprehension. She will never spill a secret if you ask her to keep it. She lights up a room as soon as she walks in. She’s so funny it’s unbelievable even though she insists she’s not. She gives the best hugs (as voted by our family) and kisses (as voted by me) in the world. She loves crocheting things and used to travel around the world with yarn and her hooks to make stuffed animals. Each one of our kids has a blanket that she made, and she made one big enough for me.
Every single thing she’s achieved in life is because she worked so fucking hard for it. Em has built herself up from the ashes more times than any person should, and more times than anyone I know could. She rebuilt us and me brick by brick when any other person would have walked away and nobody would have blamed them. And then she’s the reason we built up our family of five and she’s the one who keeps our family going. She’s the heart and soul of this family. She loves being a mum, and she was made to be one. She loves our kids - and somehow me because I’m a lucky, lucky man - more than anything or anyone in the world. She deserves everything in this world and the day we got together I made it my job to make it possible.
She’s the sweetest woman in the world and she couldn’t hurt a fly even if she tried. She’s selfless to a painful degree and trying to explain she can be selfish felt impossible. She still isn’t. She’s the kind of person who remembers everyone’s birthdays and has cards and a cake. She asks how everyone is because she really worries. She’ll stay sitting listening to you ramble for hours, even if it’s about things that she has no interest in or doesn’t understand because she knows it means something to you. She let me talk about wine, I made it my mission to create one that she’d drink and I did it.
Emma Ricciardo is the woman who puts everyone else first. She’s been willing to do things that make her life worse in so many ways because she thinks it’ll be easier for other people. She puts her wants and needs behind everyone else’s, and no matter what she still does. It’s just one of the reasons I always put her first in life because she won’t put herself first. You know the thing on flights, put your own mask on before helping others? Emmy doesn’t do that. She helps everyone else first.
She makes the hard days easier. During the worst time in our lives when I could barely get out of bed to go to work she was the one who made the noise go away. She’d wrap me in her arms because it was the one place I felt I wasn’t tearing myself apart. She drove me to and from the McLaren MTC and waited around Woking for me because she knew I needed her. She’s the only person who could ever quiet that overactive, anxious voice in my head. She still is.
And on top of that she’s fucking gorgeous. I know I’m biased, but have you seen her? She’s beautiful inside and out and Milo is so lucky he looks like his Mama. Don’t get me wrong, our girls are beautiful because they look like me but Milo got to take after Em and I love that we have her mini me too. She’s this tiny little British crazy woman who can verbally kick anyone’s ass but smiles like a child when songs she likes come on the radio. She grins at me and I forget what I was saying. I can’t count how many times I forgot what I was talking about during an interview in the paddock. I know there’s YouTube compilations of me losing my train of thought, and I can confirm any of them after mid 2018 were because I saw her.
I can’t count the amount of times my brain went blank and I stopped listening to whatever anyone was asking me, simply because I saw her passing by. She would walk anywhere in my eyesight with Blake and Michael and I could recognise her no matter how far away she was. And then my brain turned into a mess of rainbows, hearts, and glitter. That’s how terribly in love with her I am. She grins and her nose wrinkles and I remember seeing her in that kitchen and wanting to kiss her. It’s how she got her instagram username, I started calling her Wrinkles that night.
I seriously don’t know how I got so lucky. I’ve tried working out how but in the nearly twenty years since we met I still don’t know. Somehow the strongest and most beautiful woman in the world agreed to marry me and call me her husband and let me call her my wife and my baby mama, and I still don’t understand it. She loves me and more than that she likes me, and how cool is that?
I could go on for this entire book to talk about all the things I love about her but I’ll keep most of that to myself to get to the point. There’s a really small circle of people who are lucky to be liked by her. You should feel lucky if Emmy calls you her friend. But there’s this even tinier circle of people who Em actually loves, and if you’re in that one you can call yourself a blessed cunt. If you’re in that very closed circle you know exactly what I’m talking about, and you also know that there’s absolutely nothing that woman won’t do to protect the people she loves.
When I tell you that, what I really mean is she will become lethal. If you mess with the people who she loves, Em turns into a different person who will rain destruction on you. I always say that she turns into Mama Badger, and she calls me a silly and kisses my nose, but it’s true. It’s very rare and I’ve seen it a few times since I met her, but the worst was the last time she publicly turned into Mama Badger. Why?
Because she gets mad when you mess with anyone in that very small circle of people she loves. But guess what happens when someone messes with and publicly betrays the one she loves the most in the world?
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smallsdotcom · 1 year
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[ . . . ] ARMY FANDOM BREAKDOWN
while main BTS stans refer to themselves as ARMY and are often viewed to stanning all eight members, there are however several solo stans or fans who bias one member more than the others. Y/N has referred to her fans as GRLANDRITES. this comes from a combination of her stage name GRLZILLA + ALEXANDRITE, a gem that is labeled as one of the ugliest in the worlds.
NICKNAMES : uglies, little shits, gems, worms
LIGHTSTICK : ARMY BOMB
GRLANDRITES EMOJI : 🪱
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OO. FAN DEMOGRAPHICS
AGE RANGE : while ARMY come in all ages, your fans are mostly in the age range of early teens to late 30s.
GENDER : when you originally debuted in 2013, bighit had it so you were geared to bring male k-pop stans into the fandoms. and up until around 2016, most of your fans were male. beginning at around 2018 you have gained a plethora of more female and nonbinary / genderqueer fans. this spike has remained constant in recent years from 2020-2022 and while you still have male fans, your female fans have outnumbered them.
REGIONS : you are most popular in east asia, north america, oceania, and europe. your largest fanbases are found in korea, america, japan, england, france, germany, australia, new zealand, and scotland.
OTHER FANDOMS THEY ARE CLOSE TO : ixluvs ( exile her ) revluvs ( red velvet ) moas ( tomorrow by together ) engene ( enhypen ) fearnot ( le sserafim ) carats ( seventeen )
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OO. FAN REPUTATION
ANTISOCIAL : it’s a known fact that you are antisocial. it’s often seen during interviews and when how very rarely you are seen out when in korea. this trait is often shared with a number of your stans as many have voiced that the reason why they stan you is because of how you don’t talk much in interviews, always avoiding talking on red carpets, and how you don’t leave your home.
COMPETITIVE : this is trait shared with the rest of the ARMY fandom. GRLANDRITES are often competitive when it comes to voting for you specifically especially in the BEST FEMALE category. it’s not often you get placed into that category so when you do, your stans work harder than the devil himself to make sure you win.
OBSERVANT : your stans have became observant when BTS started becoming extremely popular. this trait is often used when they watch videos of you during interviews. some of your longer stans mostly have this trait as they can tell by your body language if someone is making you uncomfortable or not.
CREATIVE : GRLANDRITES are probably some of the most creative people you will ever meet. they have been known to create several different types of art works and projects dedicated to you. when GRLHOOD was released, one specific stan did a whole series of painting dedicated to the mixtape. you found out about this and even bought the pieces and they can still be seen hanging up in your apartment today.
HUMOROUS : your stans love making jokes. especially at your expense. they are the ones who started the “disappointed y/n look” meme back in 2018. if you do something meme worthy, they are the first ones to turn it into either a meme or sound on tiktok.
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OO. FAN FAVORITES
ANTHEMS : i doll, girl in the mirror, dead man runnin’
FAVORITE ALBUMS : grlhood, wings, most beautiful moments in life pt.2, love yourself: her
FAVORITE ERAS : i need u, run, spring day, fake love, on
FAVORITE TITLE TRACKS : i need u, fake love, idol, on, run bts
FAVORITE B SIDES : borderline, egoist, dead man runnin’, pied piper, save me, left right, breathe, dracula, whalien 52
FAVORITE COVERS : come back home ( seo taiji and boys ) speechless ( aladdin ) paradise lost ( gain ) watermelon sugar ( harry styles ) talk ( khalid )
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OO. FAN TRIVIA
GRLANDRITES do not get along with jungkook stans for some reason and can always been seen fighting with them on twitter
their nickname “worm” comes from when some fans asked you if you would still love them even if they were worms and you just replied with “but you guys are already worms, aren’t you?”
GRLANDRITES have a good relationship with exile her’s fandom, IXLUVS.
a notable moment for GRLANDRITES was when one of your long time stans since debut was getting married and her fiancé had invited you. you flew back to korea just to attend the wedding and even sang as a song that you had written just for the couple.
in 2017, a fan bought you a star and named it GRLZILLA. you then bought a star that looked to be right next to yours in 2019 and named it GRLANDRITE.
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barilleon · 1 year
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Holding A Mini-Con Online For Your Friends, or How To Learn A Lot of TTRPGs at Once
In November of 2020, nobody I knew was leaving their house to go eat turkeys with their family. We wanted to protect the ones we loved, but that left us with a whole lot of nothing to do where usually there was... something. Thus, the TRPG (Tabletop fRiendsgiving Potluck Games) was born!
You can do something like this too! Because chances are, your friends all know at least one game system to teach it to everyone else. And some of these systems don't take long to prep or run at all. In this post, I'll talk about how we do it and why it's a great idea if you and your friends are looking to learn more ttrpgs.
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I have a private Discord Server called the Demonweb Shitpit, which is where I playtest everything I self publish. It's a very chill, invitation-only place that is reserved for friends. It doesn't have a code of conduct or anything like that; this isn't a community I'm managing. It's just a perpetual virtual house party. I wanted to wake up and head to the virtual fridge for breakfast and find two people standing in the virtual kitchen yelling about probability distribution, and that's what the Shitpit is. During the early days of the Pandemic, I really wanted to make life easier for everyone at that party.
The rules of the potluck are simple: everyone brings a game (or an event, like hosting a talk or panel) to play. That's what a potluck is. We've done this for three years now, and it is always a blast. I've played so many games I never would have otherwise: If It Hadn't Been for Cotton-Eyed Joe. Kids on Brooms. Blue Rose. Big Motherfucking Crab Truckers.
Here's how we do it:
Gather a group of interested people in one place. Discord works the best, because it has A/V built in for running games. You could also probably use a Facebook Event page or similar if you wanted.
Figure out a time people are available. You can set this over a long weekend (our first year, it was Thanksgiving Weekend) or on certain days of the week over the course of a month (One year it was "weekends during November).
Let everybody bring something to the Potluck. This doesn't necessarily mean that every one of these games is going to happen. You always need more players than you do games. But it is a potluck, and volunteering is part of the price.
Gather this information using a Google Form or similar: what are you bringing, what do people need to participate, when would you be available to facilitate, etc.
Get everyone to vote on which things they are most interested in trying out. Now you know which things are popular and which things might not shake out.
Make a calendar (Google Calendar or a Notion Database work great) of events and let people sign up for them. I usually let people sign up via informal poll on Discord:
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After that, we make threads in the Discord channel for each game, and the folks running or facilitating coordinate things like how to prep for the game, safety tools, and content warnings.
Usually at the end of a potluck session, where I'd normally do something like Stars and Wishes, we have a talkback session. We talk about the system moreso than the session itself, give our impressions on it, and highlight moments or mechanics we really liked. It helps with learning a system if you can name one or two things you liked about it after the session is over.
What Games To Bring?
You are probably not going to want to bring a big, involved game with big, involved character creation to the potluck. If you really want to, check to see if the game has a quickstart with premade characters and simplified rules. Also, since you are introducing a game to folks who likely have never played it, multiply your estimated time to run the session by 1.5 at least. GMless games work really well, especially if there is little to no character creation, or character creation is an explicit part of play.
If you're going to run a potluck with your friends but need a starting point for games to bring, here's a quick list of games that might work well:
i'm sorry did you say street magic - worldbuilding, GMless fun
Stealing the Throne - you make your characters *during* play, which means you get to play right away
The Ground Itself - worldbuilding and GMless, a delight
Everyone Is John - VERY simple to learn!
Cozy Town - The best Stardewlike in my opinion
Paranormal Inc - GMless mystery game, where you draw clues and build the story together!
Heart: Quickstart - Dungeon Crawling, Underground City, premade characters
Orbital Blues Quickstart - Premade characters, You're Poor And In Space, Easy to Read & Run
Why Are We Doing This?
Our Potluck is one of the events I look forward to every year, and it's so easy and fun to get started. Also, if you're the kind of person who needs to play something in order to get a good feel for it, this is a really good opportunity. And scheduling to run a game for your friends is a great motivator to learn it. My friends and I are all in this together, and I don't want to let them down, so I prepare a kickass session and show up to their sessions. BOOM, now my horizons have expanded exponentially.
Including the talkback or any space to reflect on the game helps cement in our minds what we liked and didn't like about a system. And in future design conversations, we now have a shared vocabulary of all the Potluck games we've played together. When we talk about something, I'll go, "Remember that time in Blue Rose when you looked around and saw the set pieces?" and the folks who were playing will know what I mean and know what I'm getting at, and what experiences I'm trying to capture in our new project.
It's also just fun! Make fun memories with your friends and step out of your comfort zones. That's what it's all about baby!
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fritti13-blog · 1 year
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After a near death experience, Divinity Gray finds herself with the mysterious ability to heal with a touch and, because the world isn't always a good place, finds herself in danger from those that would like to take advantage of her gift.  After the suspicious deaths of her parents, the older brother she barely knows, Marine Sgt. Zach Grey, becomes her guardian. Their lives are forever changed as they have to go on the run to keep Divinity out of the hands of an evil cabal.  Along the way there will be great peril, but there will also be friends and family.  
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Divinity is the award winning creator owned comic by Barb Kaalberg.  Voted 'Best New Independent Comic' at its debut in 2020, issue #3 is now out:  Divinity's healing power is what everyone wants. With Divinity in the hands of an unscrupulous foe, Zach fights for his life and gets help from an unexpected friend while the infamous Mr. E. reveals a deeper conspiracy at work. Will Divinity cave to demands to use her skills? Will Zach escape his pursuers?
Find the book here: Silverline-Fall-Frenzy
You can buy separately or with the other books (and original art) offered.  Support women creators!  Repost, please!
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spookyboywhump · 2 months
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I can relate to the frustration, but assuming this is about politics, I don't think "lesser of two evils" is a deep moral statement people believe in on a philosophical level, but just a way to cope with begrudgingly voting for a party that's the obvious choice given the only realistic alternative. It's a roundabout way of signaling how bad the implied "greater evil" is, and it pops up every election season, only to die down, since it's rooted in pragmatism rather than some serious moral shit. When (progressive) people in the US vote, don't they do it with an understanding that at the end of the day they'll either have to live under a government led by the "war crimes and some welfare here and there" party or the "50x the war crimes and also we need to start killing as many trans people as possible" party? Even in terms of foreign policy alone, there is not a single thing on the republican agenda that wouldn't be like, at least ten times worse (unless someone's idea of "good" is just maximizing the amount of brown people that die). And domestically? Holy shit. I don't want to spiral down into a rant on how fucked the mind of an average conservative lawmaker is, but we both know that for some marginalized people democratic rule vs. republican rule is literally life vs. death.
Just to be clear I ain’t trying to start an argument or nothing this is just my opinion on shit going on in the world.
After seeing so many people say “I know he’s committing genocide and I don’t like it either but you HAVE to vote for Biden, you HAVE to vote for the lesser of two evils” I cannot take it anymore. After seeing people yell “four more years” over people protesting an actual genocide I cannot take it anymore. I am tired of Biden being treated like he can do no wrong, and any wrong he does do should be ignored simply because “Trump Worse™️”.
I have reached the point where I don’t give a shit who wins the presidency, I care about pretty much everything under that down to small local elections. It ain’t really that I’m one of those people who thinks voting Doesn’t Work, I think it can, I think people need to worry about more than just who becomes president though. I think both candidates are evil, and I want the people who represent me and my state to be there when they’re committing evil to speak out against it. I want smaller politicians who actually have to listen to the people voting for them to run in the best interests of those like me and I want them in power in whatever office they’re running for. I think people put all their effort into the presidential candidates and ignore other elections that can still make change, even just in their home town.
I personally however cannot put my support behind this bastard after watching all this. I am tired of watching people defend him, when he wants to bypass all this shit to send weapons to Israel it’s whatever, but when it comes to Roe v Wade being overturned, when it comes to states trying to criminalize transgender people existing at all, when it comes to kids in cages, suddenly he’s “doing his best” and he “doesn’t actually have that much power”. I find this to be a somewhat selfish take given the severity of things in Gaza and other places but all that money he’s sending to Israel could work fucking miracles for those vulnerable minority populations here. Everything I was told to fear would happen in 2016 has happened since 2020. Everything we were told would be fixed in 2020 was swept under the rug and any criticisms of it were met with “Oh, so you’d rather have Trump as president???”.
I’m a mixed Mexican transgender man. I live in Texas. I’m capable of bearing children. I am becoming more disabled by the day since October of 2023. And I don’t trust neither presidential candidate to protect me and those like me, I don’t trust neither one as far as I could throw them. I know people are gonna vote for Biden anyway, I can’t realistically tell people what to do and who to vote for, but I do think we have a responsibility to hold him accountable, we should speak up against war crimes, as long as he’s saying the US stands with Israel, we need to be shouting that we sure as fuck do not. We cannot continue to let this fear of trump hypothetically becoming president make us feel like we have to look the other way when this president is currently, actively helping to commit genocide.
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rubythecrimsonwriter · 8 months
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ATC rewrite part 1 outline
The vote was 6-2 in favor of sharing, not counting my vote, so it's under a readmore for those who want to wait until I've finished the first chapter.
My outlines vary from story to story and they're usually quite odd, and take more of a condensed story format than a traditional outline with the bullet points and such. This truly is an outline. It reads like a story. I've embellished on parts that I currently have, glossed over the parts that I don't but know they need to be there.
For those who are new, or followed me from Flipping Legacies and never realized I wrote for other fandoms: Percy Jackson was my first fandom. I started All Together, Cousins in 2013, wrote about 80K words for it in two years, got burned out big time for Percy Jackson stuff. Technically speaking I updated it in 2018, but I'd completely lost the plot of it and relied on subplots and characters to keep it moving and it just. Wasn't fun. And around the time I started Flipping Legacies (in 2020) I'd also taken a look at ATC and kind of. Winced. You can tell a 15 year old wrote it. Happy ten year anniversary, old friend, the fic that haunts me in the night--I'm finally back.
I love the premise of it, but it's kind of like a 1940s house. The walls are cracking, the wiring needs to be updated, the plumbing needs to not be lead. It needs some work. A lot of work. And here's the start of it.
🗲
Thalia’s ten and Jason’s two when she snatches him out of Hera’s grasp, threatens a goddess with grievous bodily harm and bloody revenge schemes and runs like the proverbial bat out of hell. She tires quickly. It’s winter. They’re two Big Three demigods. Cops are not kind to homeless people, shelters are not kind to kids, and the system is even crueler.
Luke Castellan is a blessing, and she thanks Hermes every damn day for him. He’s great at getting out of tight spots, talented with a sword, gentle with her brother, and willing to fight her over what’s best.
He’s been on his own for three years now. He knows what he’s doing a lot better than Thalia does, in terms of actual survival. They bunk down in one of his old hiding spots and gear up and she’s so exhausted that she falls asleep almost immediately, Jason sprawled across her chest.
Never again. She’ll never again let Hera get that close. The sight of her brother in that woman’s arms will haunt her for the rest of her life.
She urges Luke to move faster, the next day, to get them farther away from the Wolf House, and they have a screaming match about I want to be as far away from this place as possible and Let’s not fucking pass out about it, that does nobody any good! and also What if she tries to take him again and Well they’re gods, it’s not like physical distance means anything to them.
Jason isn’t happy about the loud noise of a fourteen year old boy and a daughter of thunder going at it. That’s finally what gets them to shut up. Every demigod she’s ever met has backed down immediately after watching her zap her surroundings when she gets frustrated.
Luke has rubber soles, a steel spine, and a golden heart. How lucky is she, that he’s the full range of conductivity?
The positive and the ground, and together they can move mountains—or make sure that one little boy is safe and happy as is possible for a son of Jupiter.
🗲
Thalia’s twelve and Jason’s just turned four when Luke goes into a cursed mansion and never comes out again.
She straps Jason to her chest and circles the burned out husk of the mansion for any sign, any clue, any remnant of her friend and partner in raising both Jason and hell. She searches the house, then starts working her way out steadily until its more than a mile from the mansion in all directions and she has to admit defeat.
Luke is gone. Luke is dead. He wanted to see his future and Thalia wishes futilely that she had argued more with him about it.
She clings to Jason and weeps bitter tears. Then she pulls herself together and marches on. Anywhere but here. Tennessee, she’s heard, is hot and muggy this time of year, but Thalia feels like she’ll never be warm again.
Meanwhile, Luke has the shield of aegis, a lot more issues with the gods, a golf club, and a blonde little girl terrified of spiders.
🗲
Thalia’s just turned thirteen and Jason’s still four when she snaps her gum obnoxiously and says to the cashier who asked her why she’s not in school, “I’m seventeen, I have a half day before I go to work, and he’s four, dipshit. Now pack it up, I haven’t got all day.”
Her heart thuds in her ears, but Disinterested Teenager is the name of the game, and she’s the godsdamn master of it. Thick eyeliner, chunky mascara, and fake piercings do the rest to convince them. They’ve played this game a thousand times.
Three Big Three kids in a corner store is too much temptation for the monsters, though, and that’s how she meets Sally Fucking Jackson, who’s clear-sighted in every sense of the word.
🗲
Sally is a badass—not a word that Thalia applies to just anyone. Thalia also can’t stand to be around her for too long, because the woman has sacrificed everything to try and raise her son safely.
Seeing herself reflected—mother and son, sister and brother, who would kill or die or be abused to keep him safe and happy and well—is an ache like the cold. And she wishes Beryl had tried.
Is it a crime, to wish that she’d had herself or a Sally to protect her? Thalia thinks not, but it hurts much worse than stealing. She giggles at Jason and Percy arguing over cookies, swiftly removes Jason from Percy when it becomes clear that two small, angry Big Three children wreak havoc on indoor plumbing and HVAC systems, and high tails it out of there with Jason in tow when Sally offers them a place to stay.
Luke survived two years with her and Jason. Sally has her own son to think about living for.
Her eyes burn. She takes a deep breath and marches on.
🗲
Thalia’s fifteen and Jason’s seven and Thalia needs all her fingers to count how many issues she’s got going on currently.
It’s the middle of summer and it’s hotter than Hades’s asscrack, so she thought, “oh hey, it’s not like we’re not already nomadic, let’s go north for the summer and see Yellowstone and such.”
Yellowstone was great. Grizzly bears hate everything pretty equally, but avoid Thalia and Jason like the plague. That means that grizzly bears will happily maul a monster and leave them be. Thalia would like to stay here forever, please and thank you.
But then there was the fucking Fury that chased them to (not quite) hell and back, and Thalia packed them up and ran so far that they wound up in the mountains before they stopped for breath, and then hung out with the Hyperborean giants for a while. Hot Furies and freezing Hyperborean giants don’t mix well, apparently. And then Thalia figured, well, if she was already on the mountains, might as well see what the West Coast has to offer them.
The Fury caught up to them right as they were crossing the Nevada/California border, and Thalia just wants to say that it’s completely ridiculous how hot Nevada is. No place needs to be that hot during the day and that cold at night. A week later and they’ve run so far west that Thalia can taste the salt from the ocean in the air.
They’re out of places for them to run.
Thalia has silver plated hunting knives, handles wrapped with shredded old tires and fabric cushioning the edges. She’s blasted the Fury back with lightning so many times her hair is permanently standing on end and her fingers tingle.
There’s a girl in a purple shirt on the edges of the fight. Her mouth is dropped open like she can’t believe what she’s seeing.
Thalia has a few other things to worry about.
Then the girl comes back with more people in purple shirts and—and they’re armed. Armed with things that can actually hurt a monster.
The Fury shrieks and dives at them and the girl shouts, “Turtle formation!” and shields close around them on all sides.
What Thalia wouldn’t give for a shield. Or a proper weapon.
The Fury rakes its claws across the shields, clambers all over them like a really big, really weird looking lizard, and then almost gets skewered by a sword that pokes itself between a minuscule crack between the shields.
Thalia braces herself between Jason and the Fury, waiting for it to realize that there’s easier prey. Jason, weaponless, hugs her from behind and buries his face in her back.
She breathes deeply. She shivers in spite of the hot air—
A cold wind from the east. The Fury rises, sees them in the open, launches—
There’s a tendril that feels like lightning, a hot line of power. Her gut clenches. Jason shudders so hard he almost yanks her off her feet. The sky goes from blue to black and raging in an instant, and the thunderbolt that comes from the sky is as thick around as Thalia is, blinding and deafening everyone in the vicinity. The Fury vanishes in the lightning’s blaze, naught but golden dust and ash on the ground.
Thalia almost passes out. Her ears are ringing and she can barely see.
The girl in the purple shirt is very tall, Thalia thinks, before she realizes her knees have buckled under her and that the girl is probably a normal height. She’s saying something that Thalia can’t hear, but she can hear Jason yelling something indistinctly. She gropes around behind her, grabbing him.
“He’s my brother,” she says, loudly enough that she feels her own chest rumble. She might be too loud, but she’s guessing otherwise with how useless her own ears are. “He’s annoying but he’s my brother, don’t kill him.”
Jason socks her in the shoulder, so at least someone can hear something.
The girl says something, looking at Thalia. She thinks that the word take was somewhere in there, but reading lips has never been her forte. “You’re not taking him,” she says loudly. “I threatened to destroy Olympus the last time someone tried taking him from me, and I’m still not joking about that.”
“You did what,” was clearly audible, so that must have been screamed in her ear.
“Oh yes,” Thalia says with probably more satisfaction than is wise, considering Jason shaking her and the girl in the purple shirt looking at her with wide eyes. Her vision swims, but it’s been five years and the vicious satisfaction has not yet dimmed. “Dearly beloathed stepmother tried stealing you from mom. I fried her ass, grabbed you, told her if she tried that again I’d do my damnedest to bring Olympus to its knees, and ran. Haven’t seen her in five years.”
The girl, wide-eyed, brings both index fingers together parallel, and clearly says, “Both.”
Oh. Taking them both. That was fine. Nothing short of Tartarus could hold them captive together.
“That’s fine,” Thalia agrees, and immediately passes the fuck out.
🗲
Thalia wakes up with Jason on her right, looking like he’d been slapped with a live flounder while she was out, a blond man with a circular shield in front of them, and a pounding headache.
“Thals,” Jason whispers. “Can you hear me yet?”
She nods, moving her hand enough that he can feel it.
“Is there a monster that imitates dead people?”
What.
The blond in front of them—shielding them, in the most literal sense of the word—glances back just long enough to check on them and it’s long enough to see his profile and what the fuck.
“Luke?” she breathes, propping herself up on an elbow.
“What in the gods be damned Hades are you doing in California?” Luke hisses. “This place is like monster central, don’t you know better?”
“We didn’t exactly have much of a choice in the matter,” Thalia says dryly. “What are you doing alive?”
He glances back at them again, a crooked grin on his face. “You know me,” he says. “Always escaping by the skin of my teeth. Can we have this conversation later, without weird, culty demigods trying to grab you guys?”
Thalia looks up at the swirling clouds above them. She hates to admit it, but— “I don’t think I can walk.”
“Oh for—“ Luke exclaims. “Jason, buddy, hold this.” He unlatches the shield from his arm and passes it off to her brother. “You can terrify us with it later, until then, just keep pointing it at the purple people.” Then he reaches down and scoops her up with a huff of air. “You need to eat more,” Luke tells her as an aside. “Jason, north and east. I’ll follow.”
“Sorry I just spent the last two weeks fighting off a fucking Fury,” Thalia says sarcastically. “I shall endeavor to take a break and eat a hamburger every six to eight hours as my body demands—except wait, no, I can’t, because I have a literal demon from hell that wants to kill me because I had the audacity to be born.”
“You couldn’t have fried it before today?” Luke asks.
“You think I didn’t fry it like fifty times?” Thalia says. “You know, I know we’ve been apart for a couple of years because I thought you were dead, but I didn’t realize my temper was forgettable.”
Jason’s giggling in front of them.
“It’s really not,” Luke says, grinning. He looks back, even though Thalia can clearly see the purple people, as he called them, not following them. He sobers. “I looked for you.”
“I looked for your body,” Thalia says.
“I’m sorry.”
“Be sorrier.”
“Hey, who’s carrying who?”
“I fried a Fury. When you fry a Fury and don’t pass out, then you can talk.”
“Uh-huh,” he says. He sounds unimpressed, but she looks, and there’s both amusement and awe in his eyes. “I’ll take that under consideration. But really. I’m sorry. I knew that when I couldn’t find you, you’d think I was dead and I didn’t do more to let you know otherwise.”
Thalia wrestles with her temper and her hurt. “So why didn’t you?”
Luke shakes his head. “The explosion? Was my fault. It was the only way I could see myself getting out alive.”
Thalia remembers the old house suddenly exploding, going up like someone lit an entire matchbox on fire with Greek fire. There’s a certain shade of lime green that she hates to this day, and it’s entirely because of that.
“I got literally blown out of the house, managed to land in a dumpster and not on the metal roof next to it,” Luke continues. “Badly injured, vaguely flash fried, I’d broken my leg on the way out. I laid in the dumpster with some ambrosia trying get myself to heal for at least a day.”
Yikes. Big Yikes.
“By the time I managed to hobble out of the dumpster, our camp was gone. I went to the city to get some mortal bandages, trying not to burn myself out on ambrosia, and I went down an alleyway. There was a weird noise, and I wanted to investigate before I tried bunking down there for the night, and the next thing I know, there’s this little girl trying to take my kneecaps out with a hammer.”
Luke shakes his head, grinning to himself. “Her name’s Annabeth, she’s a daughter of Athena. She’s eight.”
What were the odds? Probably basically zero.
“What?” Thalia says.
“Yeah,” Luke agrees. “Nuts, right? Pretty sure either Hermes or Athena—or both—were keeping her safe. I convinced her I wasn’t a monster and got her to travel with me. She’s strong, so it was tough while I healed.”
“And then, like six months later, Clarisse found us,” Luke says. “Daughter of Ares, also really strong. The three of us racked up almost as many as the three of us did.”
Thalia winces.
Luke goes quiet. “There’s a camp, in New York,” he says slowly, “specifically built to handle and protect demigods.”
Thalia lifts her head.
“They send out satyrs to try and find demigods before—well, before we get overrun by monsters. And the three of us, roaming around the New England area with a horde of monsters on our tails? It was enough to attract some attention, especially when we were in New York City. Clarisse...she didn’t make it. But Annabeth did.”
Thalia couldn’t breathe.
“She’s safe, back at camp.”
“What are you not saying?” Thalia demanded. “That’d be the first thing out of your mouth. Why would we not be safe?”
“There’s a pact that your dad made, way back after World War II,” Luke says. “No more kids from the Big Three. The crack that you made, about having the audacity of being born? He broke his oath. But he’s immortal, so you pay the price.”
Luke twitches a bit, so Thalia holds her breath until she doesn’t have enough air to be mad.
“The campers there haven’t seen a child of the Big Three ever. Chiron, the centaur who runs the place, hasn’t seen a child of the Big Three since World War II. You guys die too fast. And, even worse, there’s a prophecy about one turning sixteen and potentially destroying the world.”
“Luke,” Thalia says, very calmly. “I need you to put me down.”
Luke sets her on the ground with gratifying speed.
Thalia draws her hunting blades and stabbed them into the ground and made ladders of electricity between them to try and not send off stray pieces of lightning to everyone else around her.
Thalia rests her head against the humming pommels. “Two years ago, Jason and I were in a corner store in New York when monsters attacked.”
Luke stills.
“I’d kicked butt not an hour prior, but it turns out that three Big Three kids is too tantalizing a prospect.”
Luke gasps. “How—“
“Poseidon had a son with a badass woman,” Thalia laughs hollowly. “His taste in women is impeccable, I’ll give him that. Percy’s eight. Him and Jason almost blew out the plumbing in the building arguing over a cookie, so I knew we couldn’t stay.”
“You—I’ve never heard you describe someone as badass, much less a mortal,” Luke says.
Thalia—sighs. “Yeah. She’s sacrificed damn near everything to keep him safe. I can respect that.”
She hauls in a deep breath and forces herself standing. She sways, her vision swims a little, but worlds better than earlier. She pulls her knives out of the ground, cleans off the dirt, and sheathes them. Luke stands behind her, to the left, arms hovering.
Gods, she’s missed him.
“I’ve missed you,” she says. Like a phantom limb.
“I’m so glad you’re still okay,” Luke says.
🗲
Luke goes back to Camp Half-Blood, quest unfulfilled, and brings Annabeth out of the borders. Chiron and Grover come with them, and it’s a very nervous daughter and son of the sky god that they meet.
“Annabeth, Clarisse, Grover, the first bunch I ran herd on,” Luke says fondly, ruffling Jason’s hair. He pats the tree next to him. “Thalia, Jason, this is Clarisse, Annabeth, Grover, and Chiron.”
Annabeth scowls at Jason first, then Thalia. “I’m coming with you,” she announces.
Grover let out a quiet sound of horror. Which, fair. Cute kid, but Thalia had enough work with Jason, and she refuses to endanger a third strong demigod again.
“Um, no,” Luke says firmly, but gently. “You’re not coming with us.”
“You’re not coming with Jason and I, either,” Thalia says, cutting that off at the trunk.
Luke whirls around. “I just—“
“We had to watch you die once already,” Thalia says icily. Annabeth goes white. “Forgive me for not wanting to repeat the experience, with no guarantee that you’d appear out of nowhere three years later.” She tucks her brother closer to her. She softens, just a bit. “We’ll visit,” she promises.
“You would not stay?” Chiron asks.
Thalia glances at the demigods on the other side of the barrier. “Stay in one place that’s constantly watched by the gods. We’d be dead on the inside of a month. Thanks for the offer, but no thanks.”
She sees the brief look of confusion on Chiron’s face and immediately glares at Luke. “You didn’t tell them?”
“It’s none of their business if you’re not going to stay anyway,” Luke says practically. “Annie knows. Clarisse didn’t. I’m pretty sure all they can smell is that you’re strong demigods, not your parentage.”
Thalia eyes them dubiously. “Thalia, daughter of Zeus,” she introduces herself shortly. “And my full-blooded brother, Jason. I’m fifteen and I threatened Hera with the end of Olympus five years ago if she tried taking him from me. I suddenly see why she took my threat seriously.”
Grover chokes on a laugh. Annabeth kicks him in the shin and scrutinizes Thalia. “The gods are better than the other options,” she says seriously. “But kicking them probably wouldn’t hurt. Much.”
Thalia grins at her. She looks at Luke. “You’re right, I like her.”
“So I can come with you,” Annabeth says confidently.
“No,” Thalia says. “But, even if me kicking them doesn’t work next year, I have a mission for you.”
Luke frowns at her in askance.
“In like, four to seven years, Beth, this will be very important, so listen carefully,” Thalia says slowly. “There will be a boy who comes to camp, probably beat to Hades and back and probably grieving. I need you to befriend him.”
Annabeth looks puzzled. Chiron looks politely confused. Grover looks utterly befuddled. Luke looks like she’d slapped him with a hagfish and then offered him some sunflowers: astonished, disgusted, and delighted, all at the same time. Jason starts laughing.
“Thals,” Luke says, obviously trying not to laugh.
Annabeth looks at Luke and then back at Thalia. “It would be a prank on them?”
“It would be a kick in the face,” Thalia corrects. “He’s nice. Perhaps a little slow on the uptake sometimes, but he respects the women in his life.”
She considers this. “Four to seven years? I’d be twelve to fifteen?”
Thalia nods.
“Okay,” Annabeth decides. “If I don’t like him I can kick him though, right?”
“He’d probably deserve it,” Thalia agrees. “But don’t do it if he doesn’t deserve it.”
🗲
Thalia’s fifteen and Jason’s eight and they’re in Tennessee when an old dude named Fred approaches them. “That wasn’t very nice to set them up like that. Funny, though.”
Thalia glances to the side and sees the golden sunshine yellow of his iris. “They have a habit of setting us up to fulfill their rivalries. I’m just breaking the cycle.”
Jason peers around her from the other side to see who she’s talking to. He seems puzzled at who the stranger is, but cautiously says, “Hey, cousin.”
A hilariously safe bet.
Apollo seems to thinks so, too, because he guffaws once before he says hi back.
“But seriously, the kid’s got enough problems, you want to add to his list?” Apollo says.
“Luke was the best thing that ever happened to me, short of Jason,” Thalia says. “Someone who will argue with him rather than agreeing to everything will do them both a world of good.” She pauses. “I’m not the child of the prophecy. Am I.”
It’s not a question.
“You could be,” Apollo says finally. “Basically any time after you turn sixteen. But while some Old things are stirring, none of them are close to waking. There’s nothing happening that would aid you in Olympus’s fall, and nothing that would topple it that you’d be able to preserve.”
He pauses. “Between you and me?”
“And Jason,” Thalia says.
“And Jason,” Apollo agrees. “Prophecies can be fulfilled in a lot of odd ways. Ideas, you know, last beyond a mortal lifetime. Maybe you preemptively introducing that troublemaking pair will destroy an idea that Olympus holds sacred. Some things need to be changed, otherwise it will spell our end.”
Thalia glances at him and quirks a sarcastic smile. “Good thing I’m dyslexic.”
“Yes,” Apollo agrees, completely serious in the face of her joke. “Good thing that you are.”
She covers Jason’s eyes as Apollo goes supernova and they’re left alone in Nashville.
🗲
Jason’s eight and today is Thalia’s birthday, and Sally has taken the four of them out to a restaurant to celebrate when everything…
Well.
Thalia would say when everything goes to shit but it’s really when they reached the proverbial fork in the road. Or perhaps, when everything changes.
It starts with the restaurant’s door chiming open, with a woman’s gracious voice waving off the waitstaff saying, “My party is already here, thank you.” And she walks closer to them, a brown woman in a white business suit with a shirt that shimmers blue and green and purple. Her brown heels clack on the stone pavers that make up the floor.
She stops at their table and slides into the booth next to Thalia.
Across from her, Sally picks up her steak knife in a move that’s undeniably a threat. Thalia fucking loves her.
“Hera,” Thalia says evenly, making a show of going back to her menu. “I know immortals have a screwy sense of time, but I do believe you’ve managed to pick the worst possible time to have a confrontation. Congratulations. That takes some true talent.”
Hera reaches out and snags Sally’s menu that Sally is completely ignoring in favor of glaring metaphorical daggers at the goddess while threatening her with a steak knife. Thalia absently sends a prayer to both Apollo and Hermes. They both cover such a wide variety pack of stuff that one of them should cover badass but also kind and occasionally stupid mortals.
“On the contrary,” Hera says. “I believe this is the perfect time. We are constrained by polite society, so we must at least appear to get along.”
Thalia lowers the menu to look at Hera, and then swing her gaze at Sally. Hera lowers her stolen menu at the long look, and then sees the attempted threat. “Ah. Well. Some of us are constrained by polite society. I see that others don’t apply.”
Thalia takes a deep breath. It feels like it goes deeper than usual, somehow, like her guts have made way for her lungs. And, like magic, Thalia’s water tips over without anyone touching it and spills all over Hera.
Thalia hasn’t got a drop on her.
That—it felt like she did that, not Percy. Percy looks almost as startled as Thalia feels, safely sandwiched in between Sally, the table, and the wall. Hera makes a disgusted noise, taps her fingers along the menu, and the water vanishes. Thalia reaches out and rights the cup slowly.
“Lady, you’re probably the only one in polite society,” Thalia says bluntly. “Say your piece and get out.”
“Very well,” Hera says. “When I tried to take Jason six years ago, you told me that you would destroy Olympus if I succeeded to get him back. Does that still hold?”
“Yes,” Thalia snarls. Her fingers clench the menu in her hands and it feels like she’s holding onto a live wire now.
“Is that the only reason why you would even try?” Hera presses.
“Don’t fuck with me, Hera,” Thalia says. Her voice slides into a lower register that’s meant to be heard over a horde of monsters, but she still only speaks just above a whisper. “I have only ever wanted to be left alone by you people. Leave me and mine be and we won’t have an issue.”
“You and yours being?”
“The people at this table and Luke and his second family—Annabeth, Clarisse, Grover,” Thalia says. “Is that your game? You want to see who you can fuck over without me triggering the prophecy?”
Hera goes silent and Thalia knows she’s hit the nail on the head.
“You listen well, Hera, goddess of marriage,” Thalia says. “If I found out one of my people died because you’re so short sighted and possessive of a husband that has never and will never respect you, I will bring the prophecy down on all our heads, chop you into a gazillion pieces as Zeus did to Kronos, and toss you into Tartarus myself and let you rot with grandfather. If you insist on sharing his mental issues, you can share an unliving space with him as well.”
Hera’s jaw is clenched and her lips pursed together.
“How about,” Thalia continues, “you learn about this novel thing called communication, and possibly divorce. It’s the twenty first century, step mother, aunt, cunt, whatever you’d like me to call you. Women have rights, women have therapists, and women have divorce lawyers. Zeus was around for my childhood, I actually know the decrepit prick. I can’t imagine being around him for three thousand years and not straight up murdering him. If you have an issue with me besides me being born—which, I’ll remind you, I actually had no say in—not kidnapping my brother is a great way to start a conversation.”
Jason chokes on a laugh about reminding the goddess of marriage that she has no say in herself being born. Thalia silently tells him to shut the fuck up before Hera remembers his existence.
“The gods are not allowed—“
“Then it’s a great thing that you’ve never had demigod kids, so you can safely interact with demigods that are not your kids. Which is all of them.”
Thalia pauses. “Goodbye. I’m celebrating surviving to sixteen. You are not invited.” She waved down a server. “Could I get another water? I was really thirsty,” she says guilelessly.
Sally visibly swallows a laugh as Hera rises. Definitely not running from being threatened with more ice water on her suit. Nope. Definitely not.
“Your disrespect,” Hera says severely, “is only matched by your loyalty.”
And then she vanishes.
“Well, that went swimmingly,” Thalia says brightly. “I want lad naa.”
Sally sets down the knife carefully and then rests her head on the table.
🗲
(the mental image is too funny: a pristine business woman, a teenager with the nineties grunge aesthetic, two eight year old boys, and a mom in mom clothing sit down in a Siam restaurant.)
🗲
It’s when Thalia delivers them all safely back to the Jacksons’ apartment that she asks Percy quietly, “The water spilling. Was that—?”
“It wasn’t me,” Percy says uncertainly. “I dunno. It didn’t feel like me.”
“It felt like I did it,” Thalia says. “But that’s not my power.”
“Maybe the air pushed it over,” Jason says.
Thalia pauses. The air is their domain. She doesn’t remember any weird gusts of wind, but she was also very focused on not frying someone and also making sure Hera didn’t do something stupid, like try kidnapping Jason. Again.
“Maybe,” she says. But she doubts it.
🗲
Thalia’s seventeen and Jason is nine when they see the Jacksons again, a whole year and a half later. They celebrate Percy’s tenth birthday in a cabin on Montauk, and while Thalia’s supervising the boys playing in the surf, she can hear...something. In the cabin.
Sally is taking a well-deserved nap, or she’s supposed to be. Instead, she sits on the bed and bows her head over a head of dark, curly hair, attached to a tanned man kneeling in front of her.
Thalia shuts the door again just as quickly and guns it.
Later, she thinks, and wonders—that’s real devotion she saw there. That was I missed you and come with me? and he is beautiful. She naps under the sea of stars, one boy under each arm, and she can rest easy knowing that neither can be stolen away without her knowing immediately.
There’s a shush of displaced sand, and Percy shifts under her arm, and she cracks an eye open. She assumes its Sally, but its Poseidon, who rests a large hand on Percy’s forehead and looks awed and wistful.
He sees that she’s awake, a split second after she’s seen the heartache and longing on his face, and smiles at her ruefully. Thank you, he mouths, and dissolves into a salty sea breeze.
🗲
There’s an entire pack of hellhounds to deal with in the morning. Thalia picks Jason up with one arm and Percy with the other and hurls them both into the shack calling itself a cabin with Sally.
There’s a lot of yelling about her decision, but Percy has never been trained, Sally is a mortal, and Jason is nine. She can do this.
She can do this, right?
She draws her hunting knives and her power up from her gut and they crackle with lightning immediately.
Thalia gives them the run around, around and around and around the beach and over and behind the shack and into the surf. She’s dusted four already, starting to drag a little with the many scrapes and scratches and near misses that she’s acquired, and regrets taking off her leather jacket. She stabs another and somersaults off a dissolving back into the surf.
She hoists herself to her feet, ankle deep in the lapping waves. She sets her jaw, takes a deep breath, and braces herself. Another three. She can do three hellhounds. She’s done three hellhounds before.
Thalia almost has her feet knocked out from under her by the three-foot-high waves. The air has become dim and gray, and smells of ozone. She risks a glance away from the hellhounds to the sky and—
That’s a hurricane.
That’s impossible. Sally checked the forecast before they left for Montauk, there wasn’t a hurricane within a week’s hurricane travel time, and no potentials out in the Atlantic near New York, either.
Did she—?
Thalia checks in with herself and no, she’s not nearly as tired as she would be to make an entire hurricane so she couldn’t have done it but Percy?
Percy’s ten, and in danger, and aware of who he is, and the son of the Stormbringer, and with a distressed son of the sky. They could have done it.
Maybe. Does Jason even know what a hurricane is? Thalia’s steered them away from the eastern and southern coasts during summer and fall for a reason.
The hellhounds attack, and there’s no more time to think about it.
Thalia whirls out of the way of the first, stabbing her knife into its flank on the way by, blasts the second back with a string of lightning, and would have been eaten by the third if a rouge wave hadn’t scooped her up bodily and flung her clear.
Water doesn’t behave like that, Thalia thinks, crashing back into the surf. She sucks in a lungful of seawater, coughs it back up, and staggers to her feet. She goes down on one knee and braces herself when she sees the charging hellhound and lets it impale itself on her knife. It bursts into dust and whirls away on the rising winds.
She rolls to the left, out of the surf, to escape the other two bearing down on her. She jumps, and the wind gives her a boost, and she flips neatly over the first hellhound and stabs downward at the second hellhound’s skull with the full force of her entire self falling through the air and almost beheads the monster. She lands, tucking the knives out to the side and somersaults on the landing through the monster dust and pops back to her feet to see the final hellhound has managed to turn on a dime and is going to flatten her.
It does. One paw lands on her chest, the size of a dinner plate, and bowls her back into the sand. The breath wuffs out of her, and she scrabbles to bring to bear her knives—
The world goes white.
She’s—alive?
Yes. She’s in the water. The white is hundreds of thousands of bubbles in the wave that just tried to crush both her and the hellhound both. She can see the black mass, now, that she assumes is the hellhound, writhing in the waters about four yards off to her left.
Follow the bubbles. The surface is only a few feet above her head, thank you, Poseidon, and she swims up and gasps for air and tries to look around. The sound is choppy, gray and violent with the sudden hurricane whipping everything into a froth.
She’s hundreds of yards from shore.
Thalia swears loudly enough that she’s sure the boys can hear her from here. Lightning flashes overhead to punctuate it.
What happened? Was there a storm surge and then a riptide? She couldn’t have been out for more than a few seconds, if she was out at all!
Teeth sink into her leg and she’s dragged down again.
The hellhound is terrifyingly adept at swimming in the water. Thalia is a good enough swimmer to keep her head above water and get back to dry land, and not much else. Practicing surviving the water more than was absolutely necessary seemed foolish, given that one uncle already hated her guts. She was not about to try to piss off the other one, as well. She’d only let Jason play in the surf if Percy was also there.
Thalia was not above holding his son metaphorically hostage if it meant Poseidon would play nice with her brother.
It makes passes at Thalia in the water, darting in to claw or bite at her and darting away before Thalia can get a good hit in. She’s slow in the water, from both the resistance of the water and from the lack of air.
Out, out, I need to get OUT OF HERE—
There’s something wrong at the surface.
It looks wild from down below, but Thalia needs air and she’s not aware of any monsters that like hanging out in the air in a hurricane, so she swims for the surface.
Oh look, she deadpans to herself. A waterspout. Just what I need.
Hurricanes spawn tornadoes frequently, this should not be a shock. But she needed a way out, and a waterspout would, in fact, get her out of the water, and also probably slice her to pieces.
Hmm.
She dives back under the waves, gets whirled around a couple times by a wave cycle, and finally spots the hellhound. It sees her about the same time.
Thalia, thinking, what the HELL am I doing? swims towards the waterspout. She swims as fast as she can towards the waterspout that’s probably only thirty feet away, but feels like a mile.
The hellhound is on her before she can believe it, and she grabs it by the chest fur, ducking under the dangerous teeth, hauls herself close, and swings around, hoping that her own momentum would do what she hoped. It did, it reversed them, so that the hellhound was closer to the surface than she was, and then Thalia braced both feet against its chest and blasted it back with a plume of bubbles.
My superpower, Thalia thinks, amused, bubbles.
Straight into the vortex it goes, and up, and up—
Thalia surfaces ten feet away, swimming backwards, and watches the hellhound get sucked more than thirty feet up before it dissolves into golden dust. She breathes out a sigh of relief. The waterspout dissolves just as quickly as it formed.
Can’t believe that worked, she thinks, and starts swimming to shore.
There’s a lot of yelling. And nobody can agree on who made the hurricane, or the waterspout, or the weird waves, but they’re all tired as Hades.
🗲
Thalia is eighteen and Jason is eleven and the world almost ended. It’s June 24th, mere days before Jason turns twelve, three days after Percy pulled some seriously stupid stunts for a month and then vanished again, and Thalia found out that he, Annabeth, and Grover found Zeus’s zappy wand and returned it in the nick of time before all out war broke out.
She and Jason storm Camp Half-Blood. There’s a lot of yelling involved, and some blood, and some swords stuck in places they should not be stuck. Luke pulls her off to the side and she has both hands wrapped around the edges of his breastplate because otherwise they’ll shake and she’s whispering, “What the fuck, Luke. He’s twelve. Why—How—?” over and over again into his collarbone.
“Thals,” he says, chuckling, wrapping her in a hug. “Those three are going to take over the world, and the world will be gladder for it.”
“They shouldn’t have to,” she says.
“I think world domination would be a self-directed and mostly accidental task, actually,” Luke says thoughtfully, and its such a ludicrous statement that Thalia falls into hysterical laughter.
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Coalition Pinned Post: About Us, How to Join, Important Links.
What is the Coalition?
This is the home of the Homestuck Fanauthor Coalition, a discord-based writing club for fanauthors of all things Homestuck! Any current or aspiring author of Homestuck fanfic is encouraged to join, with the caveat that they understand this is a place for those who have a commitment to bolstering creativity in the Homestuck fandom. We provide a space for brainstorming, proofreading, beta-reading, co-writing, and all other forms of collaboration you can think of! We uplift each-other's works and encourage each-other to keep creating. We are mostly AO3-based authors, but several of us also write MSPFAs, and a few of us even write fangames! So whatever your homestuck writing project, you can find a place among us.
As part of this, we have two AO3 Collections.
Homestuck FanAuthor Coalition Fic and Recommendations is broken into two sub-collections: Our Stuff, which attempts to catalog ever member's works, and Our Recommendations, through which we suggest fic we've read to each-other, mostly written by those not in the Coalition.
Homestuck Fanauthor Coalition Writing Competitions is where we host our competition fics! We all vote together on a prompt, then write our works anonymously, submitting them to a hidden subcollection. Once the works are due, they are revealed, and everyone (not just the participants) gets to read the fics. We then vote on a series of "best in" genres, leave a compliment, and try to guess the identity of the author. At the end, everyone gets a digital medal! It's good fun.
Our Identities, with Ao3 & Tumblr links [below the cut for length]:
Since it's pretty darn hard for the layman to find at a glance, here is our member list. We'll try to keep this up-to-date. This section is under construction, members will likely want to edit their blurbs.
@thegoodthebadthealternative @madam-melon-meow / Madam_Melon_Meow on Ao3: the founder of the Coalition, M^3 has been a Homestuck fan since 2014, but only started writing fic herself in 2023, alongside her fiance Celery! It is her firm belief that fanfic is the lifeblood of fandom, and she wanted to create a space where authors and editors could meet on equal footing, rather than gather in servers dedicated to one author's fanfic, or servers generally dedicated to Homestuck itself. She saw an empty niche and decided to fill it.
@thegoodthebadthealternative @arealpeople / sarcasticcelery on Ao3: an admin of the Coalition, Celery has been in fandom since late 2018, and was 75% through Homestuck proper when the epilogues came out, so he had an interesting introduction to the community. He is of the opinion that no work of media should be left deconstructed, and that all art should be shared- especially the ugly stuff. He hopes the coalition will facilitate this in the rich seedbed that is Homestuck.
@taglineguerrillawriter @orangestorapples / orangestorapples on Ao3: Orange is one of the bot wranglers for the Coalition discord, and they started writing fic WAAAAAAY back in 2015 on WATTPAD of all things! (I know, they're old 💀) They didn't join the homestuck fandom until 2019. Orange shares the same belief as M^3, about fanfic being an important facet of keeping fandom alive, and come hell or high water they're gonna contribute.
@myusernameisstolen / Liyuna_Bass on Ao3: Author of the pretentiously-titled Skaian Pantheon, Liy first read Homestuck in 2020 due to being fed up with oblique and apparently nonsensical references to the comic in seemingly unrelated circumstances, and has since been forever changed as a person. They started writing a self-indulgent fic about Karkat doing ectobiology in early 2023, and have gone on a rapid and unending spiral into shameless insanity as a result. They read other people's analysis of their work with narcissistically delirious glee, despite not knowing how the hell they got an audience by writing solely for themself.
@unda-dsk / Unda on Ao3: They/them. Writing homestuck stuff since 2014 but properly committed to it with my first big work MC Escher That's My Favourite MC, and currently working on the multi-art work in the same universe: EMC2. Currently getting into art, music, animation and more, as well as writing far too many words. Has zero concept of doing things in moderation, is a rainbow menace.
rko on Ao3:
@thegodshavehorns @wmb-salticidae / Callmesalticidae on Ao3:
@thegodshavehorns @shadow-wasser / shadow_wasserson on Ao3 / Shadow Wasserson on FFN : Shadow has written fanfiction since 2004, first read Homestuck in 2013, and has been co-writing *The Gods Have Horns* since 2015. Gen. Darkfic. Plotting.
@askaniritual / tasteoflemons on Ao3:
@classpectpokerap / EtchJetty on Ao3: Cowriter of the fanventure Nepetaquest 2022 and author of A Bunch Of Shit On Ao3 And Also Mspfa, EtchJetty has been most recently occupied writing Pesterquest Rewritten (@pesterquestrewritten on Tumblr). catch her stuff whenever she makes More Things!!!
@flaringk / FlaringK on Ao3:
mostlycyanide on Ao3:
optimisticDuelist (lasciviousWildheart) on Ao3:
tHunkdt on Ao3:
@ocean-stars-mspfa @horsesbones / GlubbyGlub on MSPFA / timaeusTestifying & HorseFingers on Ao3: Ocean Man first read Homestuck in 2011. Terminally ill about Dirk Strider. Squiddle obsession. Favorite type of fanfictions to write are cognitohazards; peruse at your own risk.
Astralic on Ao3:
@diddleydont / Diddleydont on Ao3:
@disgustedorite :
@manifestmerlin / ManifestMerlin on Ao3:
@meowloudly15 @the-hs-etaverse / meowloudly15 on Ao3: meowloudly15 first started writing fanfiction in 2018. She first read Homestuck in 2019. Her favorite fic subgenres to write about include Women's Wrongs, throwaway lines and characters taken far too seriously, highly self-indulgent meta BS, absurdism (both flavors), and Apocalypse Yuri.
@greg-is-cool / gregiscool on MSPFA / gregiscool on Ao3:
Legacy Members [list of former members. assume they left the server in good will, and we are still proud to promote their works]:
pending.
Appearing in our header image [left to right]:
@myusernameisstolen, @greg-is-cool, tHunkdt, @taglineguerrillawriter, @arealpeople, @madam-melon-meow, Bre, rko, @unda-dsk, @shadow-wasser
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A Nebraska Republican state senator argued Wednesday for a six-week abortion ban by claiming there are too many foreigners living in the state, invoking a racist conspiracy theory.
Since Roe v. Wade was overturned, abortion is allowed in Nebraska up to 21 weeks and six days of pregnancy. But on Wednesday, the Senate began debating a bill that would ban abortion after six weeks, before many people even know they are pregnant.
Senator Steve Erdman decided that the best argument in favor of the ban was the “great replacement theory,” which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a “racist conspiracy narrative [that] falsely asserts there is an active, ongoing, and covert effort to replace white populations in current white-majority countries.”
“Our state population has not grown except by those foreigners who have moved here or refugees who have been placed here,” Erdman told the chamber.
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Erdman also said that all of the aborted fetuses “could be working and filling some of those positions that we have vacancies.”
Erdman’s argument delivers a nice one-two punch of racism and misogyny. First, he thinks that abortions should be banned to force more white people to have babies. But it’s actually people of color who are hardest hit by abortion restrictions. Not all states report the racial and ethnic data of people who get abortions, but those that do found a disproportionately high number of people of color seek the procedure.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that in 2020, in 29 states and Washington, D.C., 39.2% of people who got an abortion were Black. Hispanic people made up 21.1% of people who got an abortion, and other non-white ethnicities made up 7%.
What’s more, if Erdman is actually worried about increasing the labor force, he definitely shouldn’t be banning abortions. Abortion gives people better control over their own lives and allows them more opportunities to join the workforce and move upward economically. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen warned the Senate Banking Committee in May last year, a month before the Dobbs ruling, that “eliminating the right of women to make decisions about when and whether to have children would have very damaging effects on the economy and would set women back decades.”
Six-week abortion bans are being considered across the country, including in Florida, which just passed such a bill on Thursday by a vote of 70-40, mainly along party lines. It now goes to Governor Ron DeSantis, who is expected to sign it into law.
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I love el salvador because its proof that you can literally just disregard left wing ideology completely, do the exact opposite of what (((they))) say we can't/arent allowed to do, and the end result is objective improvement lol based president bukakke is /ourguy/
lol
>>Despite Bukele presenting his administration as “populist” he is anything but a political outsider or a champion of “the people.” After getting kicked out of the then-ruling Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN) for allegedly assaulting a female party official, Bukele, a former advertising executive, joined the Grand Alliance for National Unity (GANA) whose founding members came from the aforementioned Nationalist Republican Alliance (ARENA). Furthermore, Bukele’s rise to power took place during an election in which nearly 50% of eligible Salvadoran voters abstained. It’s even possible that Bukele was appointed in response to the FMLN government’s friendlier relationship with China. For example, in exchange for breaking ties with Taiwan and recognizing Beijing as the official capitol of China, FLMN received $150 million and a donation of 3,000 tons of rice from the Chinese Communist Party. Likewise, during the Trump administration’s 2019 attempt to oust Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro on behalf of the neoliberal reactionary Juan Guaido, the FMLN took the side of the Chavistas.
In America, Bukele is best known for establishing Bitcoin as Salvadoran legal tender alongside the US dollar. Cryptobros like to portray this as an attempt by a “based” technocrat unpersuaded by “ideology” to get his nation off of fiat currency and away from the control of central banks. This narrative is a total inversion of the truth; In 2020 Bukele sent 40 soldiers into the Legislative Assembly building and forced opposition politicians at gunpoint to approve a loan request of $109 million from the American government for his “Territorial Control Plan.” This plan, using COVID-19 as a pretext, deployed thousands of military personnel to work alongside local police in establishing martial law throughout El Salvador. Bukele’s government insists this led not only to a successful quarantine but a significant reduction in homicides by organized crime. However, the Territorial Control Plan relies on alliances with Salvador’s gangs, as a report by El Faro exposed. “The pandemic was a blessing for Bukele,” Carlos López Bernal, a professor of history at the University of El Salvador, told The Guardian. “He presented an apocalyptic scenario to which the only solution, supposedly, was to give the president everything he asked for. More money and more power.”
In 2021, Bukele’s party “won” a supermajority in El Salvador’s congress, supposedly with 65% of the vote. He then fired five Salvadoran Supreme Court Justices and the attorney general before the Legislative Assembly voted to accept Bitcoin as legal tender. This decision was influenced by Bukele’s close relationship to Strike CEO Jack Mallers, the descendant of Chicago finance royalty and a member of Forbes 30 under 30. According to Slate: “Bukele’s government rolled out a digital crypto wallet in app form, called Chivo (Salvadoran slang for cool), which came preloaded with $30 of Bitcoin to encourage adoption. Many who downloaded it found it confusing and buggy, or that their $30 had already been stolen by identity thieves. A study by economists at the University of Chicago, Penn State and Yale found that of those who managed to access it, most cashed out their $30 and didn’t use Chivo again.”
Towards the start of May, cryptocurrency experienced its worst crash yet. This ongoing crash has already wiped out $400 billion in market capitalization and bankrupted innumerable investors. As Slate notes, “El Salvador is on the verge of defaulting on its debts, which amount to close to 100 percent of its gross domestic product. This is exacerbated by the loss of value of the country’s Bitcoin holdings, which Bukele bragged he would trade with public funds on his phone while in the bathroom. As of now, he has personally cost the Treasury about $40 million—an amount equal to its next foreign debt payment, due to bondholders in June.”
Just before the epic crypto crash, Bukele unveiled plans for a city, “funded by the sale of a Bitcoin bond and powered by geothermal energy from the nearby Conchagua volcano.” Now, the country’s bonds are trading at 40% of their original value. But like any good con artist, cult leader, or multi-level marketing guru, Bukele has doubled down on his Bitcoin “gamble.” In the midst of the crypto crash, El Salvador hosted a “financial inclusion conference” attended by “44 central bankers from developing countries around the world.” This conference was organized by the Alliance for Financial Inclusion, formed in 2008 by central bankers in Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand in “close collaboration” with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. In 2013, Bill Gates spoke at a meeting hosted by the United Nations General Assembly to tout the merits of “digital financial inclusion” via digital payment systems. The invite reads: “Today 2.5 billion adults are excluded from the formal financial services sector. Yet governments, the development community and the private sector make billions of dollars in cash payments to people in emerging economies, many of them poor and financially excluded. Shifting these salaries, pensions, social welfare stipends and emergency relief payments from cash to electronic has the potential to improve the livelihoods of low-income people by advancing financial inclusion and helping people save.
During the upcoming United Nations General Assembly, UNDP, UNCDF and the Better Than Cash Alliance are hosting an event on how partnerships between governments, private sector and development organizations are helping to promote inclusive growth. It will focus on how digital payments can catalyze financial inclusion, and as a result, can be a driver of inclusive growth and development.”
In January 2021 the Bank of International Settlements issued a report stating, “Most central banks are exploring central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), and their work continues apace amid the Covid-19 pandemic. As a whole, central banks are moving into more advanced stages of CBDC engagement, progressing from conceptual research to practical experimentation.” Since 2017, “the share of central banks actively engaging in some form of CBDC work grew by about one third and now stands at 86%.” The BIS report found that 56 central banks are now researching or developing some form of digital currency. 
During the early stages of the pandemic in 2020 programmers well versed in COBOL, a 40 year old programming language, were in high demand. This demand mainly came from state governments, who still use COBOL to dispense unemployment benefits. “Literally, we have systems that are 40-plus-years-old,” New Jersey governor Chris Murphy told CNBC. “There’ll be lots of postmortems. and one of them on our list will be, how did we get here where we literally needed COBOL programmers?” Murphy’s concerns were echoed by Kansas governor Laura Kelly: “So many of our Departments of Labor across the country are still on the COBOL system; you know very, very old technology.” Connecticut, California, New York, and Pennsylvania “still rely on decades-old mainframe systems based on the COBOL language as well.”
If all of this still sounds banal or benign to you, consider the following: PRISM, the massive NSA surveillance machine “exposed” by Islamaphobic Ayn Rand fanboy and descendant of numerous lifelong feds Edward Snowden, is the direct descendant of PROMIS, a tracking software developed by a “former” NSA fed working in the private sector through his firm Inslaw. Inslaw originally developed PROMIS to help the Department of Justice and local law enforcement agencies across America “update” their prehistoric filing systems in the mid-1980s. PROMIS was later stolen by Mossad spies and infamously distributed by Robert Maxwell, father of Ghislaine Maxwell, before making its way back to its homeland. In the meantime, the same NSA that was building PRISM and had produced PROMIS was working on the hash algorithm that made Bitcoin possible. 
------
Covid Imperialism, Crypto Colonialism, and the Real “Great Reset” – Beyond_Lies_The_Wub (wordpress.com)
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reasonsforhope · 5 months
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Do you have any advice for dealing with election anxiety?
I think/hope so!
First, a couple caveats:
I'm from the US, so US perspective, and about US 2024 elections
I know more about politics/follow them more than like, at least 85% of US Americans? But I am not an expert.
Environment/climate news and climate hope are science-based and can be measured/predicted empirically wayyyyy more than politics can, because People
I'm not getting into the trenches around Democrats vs. the Left vs. Liberals vs. Progressives. In this post, we're all in one big venn diagram of mostly interchangeable terms
So, first off, maybe my biggest piece of advice is this: The antidote to anxiety is action.
Find something you can do to help - anything. Anxiety is like fear - it's part of your brain's alarm system. It's part of your brain's mechanism for telling you that you need to do something
So if you listen to that alarm and do something, your brain won't feel the same need to desperately escalate the alarm system
You can look up and sign up for actions, protests, petitions, letter-writing campaigns, phone banking, canvassing, and more for candidates near you at Mobilize.us (no Repubs on here I promise). They also work with Swing Left a lot - a group that helps voters look up and focus on helping the nearest race that is actually competitive (because most of them aren't!)
Again, that's Mobilize.us and Swing Left as two of the best places to find out how and where to help, and sign up to do so
Other than that, I don't have advice specifically so much as I have "some useful and more hopeful ways to think about the coming US election" and to a lesser extent democracy in general
1. The media is going to underreport how well the Left and/or Democrats are doing, basically no matter what.
So, although we can't get cocky about it, this is something absolutely worth remembering when you see just about any polling or predictions about the 2024 elections.
Here's why:
Poling is weird and often inaccurate and skews in a lot of ways and is inherently biased, and it's less accurate the further you are from an election. Also, the electoral college is a huge complication here
This skewing is built into both the interpretation of the poll and the design of the poll itself - how many people do they sample? Demographic spread? Polls try to go for "likely voters," but how well can you predict that, especially as voting rates for young people and marginalized groups are rising, often dramatically?
Right now, those biases are all skewing most to all polls and predictions to the right. Including from basically all pollsters, as well as left-wing media and news outlets.
Now, THAT'S NOT INHERENTLY A BAD THING. It's not because they don't want the Left to win. It's because in 2016, basically all mainstream media, including left-leaning media, said that there was a very low chance Trump was going to win. They said that Hillary Clinton had it in the bag. So they're all correcting for the huge inaccuracy in the 2016 (and 2020 and 2022 tbh) elections
Not only were they catastrophically and humiliatingly wrong about that, they then had to deal with the fact that that very reporting was part of why Clinton lost in 2016 - voters heard she was probably going to win, so they felt safe staying home instead of voting
And then the 2020 election polls were also super wrong, mostly in the other direction
Polling as a field is undergoing a massive shakeup around this, trying to figure out how to not fuck up that badly again, but they haven't figured it out yet, so right now they're skewing things to compensate
That's for the sake of both their own credibility and, you know, the part where just about no one in either left-wing or mainstream media or mainstream polling orgs wants Trump to win
So they're going to underreport Democratic chances on purpose to a) compensate for the bias skewing things toward Democrats in their models, and b) to make sure that they don't accidentally help Trump win again
Sources: x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x
Reasons the Republicans are in more trouble than a lot of people think
Democrats are largely closing ranks hard around Biden, because no matter what they think of Biden, they know a Repub victory would be a thousand times worse
Republicans, however, are absolutely NOT unifying around a candidate. And they're also the ones who go around saying a ton of awful and offensive and wildly untrue things about their opponents. Meaning that the Republican primary is about to get fucking messy, and probably all of their candidates will be tarred in the process
So, basically, the Republican candidates are all going to be busy smearing the fuck out of each other - while Biden mostly doesn't have to deal with that level of negative campaigning against him for months and months
As studies show, in politics, "a negative frame is much more persistent, or “stickier,” than a positive one. If you come at an issue negatively, but are later reminded of the policy's positive aspects, you will still think it's a bust."
Also, Biden is gonna get basically all presidential-race left-wing big-name donor money, while the Right will have that money split a bunch of ways and blow through it hard on infighting, creating a probable funding gap
Trump's campaign contributions are all going to pay his legal fees. Like, to the extent that last month, his main PAC had just $4 million in cash on hand - because they siphoned over $101 million to pay his legal fees (muahahaha)
Sources: x, x, x, x, x, x, x
Other hopeful things to consider
Yes, Trump's indictments and trials are, unfortunately, boosting his numbers among his supporters. However, that's only with the hard right wing - and you can't win a general election with just the far right. He needs to appeal to independent voters and moderate Repubs - and every indictment and trial hurts his chances with them. x, x
In 2022, literally everyone was predicting a "red tsunami." And they were wrong: it never happened. Instead, Democrats picked up a seat in the senate, lost a third or less of the seats in the House that they were expected to, and won a number of statewide races. x, x, x, x, x
DeSantis's decision to go to war with Disney stands to do him a lot of fucking hard. Disney isn't just powerful in general - it's an unbelievably powerful force and employer in DeSantis's home state of Florida. Disney has already pulled a $1 billion project from Florida due to the feud, is responsible for "half" of FL's tourism industry, and and is branding DeSantis as "anti-corporation" and "anti-business" - dangerous charges in the right wing. x, x, x, x, x, x
Abortion is an issue that gets voters to the polls. This is an issue on which politicians are wildly out of step with voters: Numbers change depending on how you break it down, but generally 60% to 70% of Americans think abortion should be legal - which is, in election terms, is a landslide. For years, that momentum has been with Republicans. Well, now it's with us, and so far pro-choice candidates and ballot propositions have done way better than expected. To quote Vox, in 2022, "abortion rights won in all six states with abortion ballot measures, including in red states like Kentucky and Montana that otherwise elected Republican lawmakers." x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x
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wyrmfedgrave · 1 day
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Pic: Trying something new here - a focused overview.
In 2014, Governor Rick Snyder was accused of criminally mishandling the Flint Water Crisis.
A 2020 Vice article revealed his (& others) corruption & a subsequent cover-up attempt.
In early 2021, Snyder & others were all formally charged for the crisis.
But, late in 2022, a Democratic judge let Snyder off the hook...
His "Reinvention of Michigan" was a "shared sacrifice" of taxing workers's pensions - while abolishing the higher business tax & replacing it with a low, flat rate...
Snyder passed a law to prevent same sex partners (of public workers) from receiving health benefits.
This law was later struck down by a federal judge.
But, he helped pass a bipartisan state tax on online purchases.
Then, Snyder got an anti-union bill - thru both Houses & without public hearings or committee votes!
This made it illegal for union dues to be required for employment.
But, worse, the Employee Free Choice Act can't be repealed via referendum...
President Obama stated that this law was about the "right to work - for less money..."
Snyder made abortion clinics pay for a state license, unnecessarily increasing costs for such facilities.
Worse was to come.
Detroit was declared to be under a financial emergency & was placed under the power of an emergency manager.
This made Detroit part of group of such emergency appointments.
Over half of Michigan's black folks ended up in places where 'their' local government wasn't voted in by the locals...
Then, Snyder helped strike down a bill that affirmed the government's & military's 'right' to lock up anybody - without trial & for as long as wanted.
Perhaps the best of his few 'good' deeds.
He also offered visas to 50,000 immigrant workers - with advanced degrees - to help jumpstart Detroit's economy.
But then, Snyder had Flint's water source changed to the polluted Flint River.
This water was so corrosive that it leached lead out of the old water pipes - poisoning the city's children most!!
Worse, it turned out that Snyder knew about the dangers of the Flint River - 6 months after Flint began using river water - to save money...
So, Flint born Michael Moore called for the governor's arrest & started an online petition.
But, as is usual in such situations, it took a class action lawsuit to finally get things moving.
A state of emergency was finally declared - by Snyder himself.
But, it was, as also usual - too little & too late...
The damage had been done.
And the criminal behind it walked free.
End.
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ruminativerabbi · 2 months
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The Two-State Solution
You would think that by now no amount of hypocrisy on the part of the great world out there could surprise, let alone startle, me at this point. Even I think that! And yet I find myself consistently amazed to find myself amazed at the duplicity of our so-called friends, not to mention the out-and-out phoniness of self-proclaimed allies who insist that they only want the best for the Jewish people or for the State of Israel.
If I had nothing to do for the rest of my life I could begin a list. But since my time is limited, I’ll settle for writing about our “friends” who have suddenly discovered, or rather re-discovered, the “two-state solution” as the cure for all that ails Israel and its neighbors. And they are legion: I’ve lost track of how many different newspaper articles I read this last week alone in which the author breathlessly announces that the reason the entire Arab-Israeli sikhsukh wasn’t resolved long ago has to do with the intransigence of Israelis with respect to the famous “two-state” solution, the compromise invariably touted by such authors as the obvious panacea to all that ails the Middle Eastern world. Here, for example, is a story from Taiwan explaining to readers of the Taipei Times how things would calm down instantly if only Bibi would heed President Biden’s call for a “two-state solution.”
The notion itself of a two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli problem, of course, is as old as the state itself and, in fact, there actually are two states, one Arab and one Jewish on the territory of the old British Mandate of Palestine. Or, rather, there would be had the British not unilaterally sawn the entire kingdom of Jordan, then called Transjordan, off of the mandated territory and offered it to the Hashemites as their own country. So the U.N. was dealing with the part that was left and that, indeed, they voted on November 22, 1947, voted to split down into two nations, a Jewish one and an Arab one.
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The next part, everybody knows. The Jews of the yishuv accepted the plan and declared independence on May 14, 1948. (Our apartment in Jerusalem is actually just half a mile or so from November 22nd Street, a pretty place named specifically in honor of the U.N. decision.) The Arabs of British Palestine, however, did not follow suit and declare their own state. Instead, they went to war and lost, which failure laid the groundwork for the subsequent seventy-five years of hostility towards the Jewish state.
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Whatever the problem really is, it certainly doesn’t have to do with not enough ink having been spilt—or time wasted—trying to work things out. The Madrid Conference of 1991, the Oslo Accords of 1991 and 1993, the Wye Plantation Memorandum of 1998, the Camp David Summit of 2000, the Annapolis Conference of 2007, the John Kerry shuttle diplomacy of 2013, the Trump administration’s “Peace to Prosperity” plan of 2020—all of these were “about” the two-state solution, each in its own way an effort to finesse the details while ignoring the fact that only one party to the dispute seemed even remotely interested in recognizing the other’s right to nationhood.  Nor does the concept lack international sponsors: a quick google of “international leaders in favor of a two-state solution” yields a very impressive list, a list that includes President Biden, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi, German Chancellor Olaf Scholtz, British P.M. Rishi Sunak, French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian P.M. Justin Trudeau, Australian P.M. Anthony Albanese, New Zealand P.M. Christopher Luxon, and, saving the best for last, Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Faisal bin Farhan. They are all on board!
Most impressive of all is that a full 138 nations have alreadyrecognized the State of Palestine, the fact that none of the above efforts to create a viable two-state solution has succeeded waved away as a mere detail hardly worth mentioning.
So, all that being the case, what actually is the problem? Just this week, we were exposed to the current administration’s pique with Israeli P.M. Netanyahu for not being fully enough behind the two-state solution. The L.A. Times had a particularly interesting op-ed piece on the topic (click here). CNN’s piece (click here) was also quite good. And, of course, nothing could ever deter the New York Times from trying to pry some space out between the Biden and Netanyahu administrations, of which only the latest examples appeared in the last few days: Peter Baker’s “Netanyahu Rebuffs U.S. Calls to Start Working Towards Palestinian Statehood,” Thomas Friedman’s “Netanyahu Is Turning Away from Biden,” or Aaron Boxerman’s “Biden Presses Netanyahu On Working Towards Palestinian State.”
So, okay, I get it. The only solution is the two-state one. But why is everybody so irritated with Israel? The Palestinians could solve the problem overnight by declaring their independence, agreeing quickly to exchange ambassadors with the 130+ nations that already recognize their state, and getting down to the gritty business of negotiating safe and secure border with Israel. Bibi would probably not be pleased. But what could he do? The entire world would be on the Palestinians’ side and all it would take was a single unilateral announcement on the part of the Palestinians to get the ball rolling. The presence of Jewish so-called “settler” types in Judah and Samaria would not be a problem unless the State of Palestine intended itself to be totally judenrein—otherwise, why couldn’t those people live on their own land in an independent Palestine if they wanted to? (Most, I think, would not want to. But some surely would.) Nor would the status of Jerusalem itself be an issue: while the Palestinians are in unilateral-proclamation-mode, they could simply declare East Jerusalem to be their capital, then get down to work organizing a workable plan with Israel for policing the city, controlling traffic, and figuring out who picks up whose trash on which days.
Yes, I’m making light of intense issues. But, at the end of the day, why precisely couldn’t this happen? Everybody is happy to be irritated with Bibi, but Israel has demonstrated over and over—including in the context of all the above-listed conferences—that it is ready to negotiate for peace. And declaring independence would assist in Gaza as well: terror organizations like Hamas flourish in the atmosphere of hopelessness and desperation, but that would quickly move into the past if the Palestinians were occupied with nation-building and self-determination instead of endlessly complaining that the world hasn’t given them enough aid. If the Jordanians were big-enough hearted to create a kind of economic union with New Palestine, then there really would be no stopping the peace train. Even the United Nations would be unable to stop the momentum.
But, of course, none of the above has happened or, I fear, ever will happen. It’s much easier for the Biden administration to waste its time trying to bully Bibi into making concessions in the context of theoretical negotiations in which the other side has not given the slightly indication it wishes to participate. Yes, it’s more dramatic to build terror tunnels, murder babies, rape women, and take innocent civilian hostages. But that cannot—and will not—ever lead to statehood for Palestine. What will lead in that direction is the clear indication that the Palestinian leadership is prepared to create a viable Palestinian state and then to live within its borders peacefully and productively.
If the United States wants to defang Iran and lessen the likelihood that the Iranians will lead the world into World War III, it could take no more profound and potentially meaningful step forward than convincing the Palestinians to stop complaining, to take the independence the entire world wishes to offer them seriously, and to get down to the actual business of nation-building. The mullahs will be outraged. But they’ll get over it. And the world will be a safer and better place.
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jocrude · 5 months
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https://archive.li/YUKrn <- paywall-free link
> “The world is falling apart under Biden,” said Spencer Weiss, a 53-year-old electrical substation specialist in Bloomsburg, Pa., who supported Mr. Biden in 2020 but is now backing Mr. Trump, albeit with some reservations. “I would much rather see somebody that I feel can be a positive role-model leader for the country. But at least I think Trump has his wits about him.”
God this is depressing. Feeling compelled to vote for Donald Fucking Trump of all people, a coked-up pussy-grabbing buffoon who's been impeached twice and is currently facing felony charges, because at least he doesn't look like he wandered out of the dementia ward. The deciding issue for Leader Of The Free World is whether they belong in a shut-up-and-eat home.
> nearly twice as many voters said economic issues would determine their 2024 vote compared with social issues, such as abortion or guns. And those economic voters favored Mr. Trump by a landslide 60 percent to 32 percent. The findings come after Mr. Biden’s campaign has run millions of dollars in ads promoting his record, and as the president continues to tour the country to brag about the state of the economy. “Folks, Bidenomics is just another way of saying the American dream!” Mr. Biden declared on Wednesday on a trip to Minnesota. Voters clearly disagree. Only 2 percent of voters said the economy was excellent.
It reminds me of the Hillary campaign all over again. Being completely blind to economic issues, insisting everything is fine when people clearly don't believe that, being so self-assured in your victory that you don't bring anything to the table other than not being the other guy. The Republicans offer the wrong solutions, but the Democrats offer no solutions at all.
> That said, Mr. Trump will be more in the spotlight in 2024, including his criminal trials, a growing presence that could remind voters why they were repelled by him in the first place.
This is how the article ends. That same damned cocksure progressive-liberal smugness, that all they need to do is not be Trump, and that sooner or later you'll realise their innate superiority. The American voter doesn't need reminders. All the media has been doing since 2015 is reminding the American voter of how repulsive Trump is. That's honestly part of why people vote for him, resentment more than anything. Because the democrats just lord their superiority over you from their ivory tower and scoff at you for expecting something more than the privilege of gazing upon its majesty. The American voter seems resigned to the idea that voting won't make their lot better, so all it's good for is wiping that lofty grin off of the liberal's face.
It should be clearer than ever before that electoralism is a blind alley. The US government is the bourgeois dictatorship of bourgeois dictatorships. To anyone still in America I would recommend joining a union, a tenant's union, a socialist political organisation (I'm not too familiar with socialist orgs specific to the US but Freedom Socialist Party seems like the best one), the SRA/John Brown Gun Club, anything to get some fellow working-class comrades to have your back. And read Marx, of course, because understanding the mess we are in is the first step to getting out of it. Nobody is coming to save you. You must save yourself.
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