The history of tarot is a fascinating journey that spans centuries and traverses various cultures. The origins of tarot cards can be traced back to 15th-century Italy, where they emerged as playing cards. The initial purpose of these decks was purely recreational, serving as a game known as "tarocchi" or "triumphi."

1. Early Playing Cards (15th Century):
   
   • Origin: Tarot cards likely originated in northern Italy in the early 15th century. The oldest surviving complete deck is the "Visconti-Sforza" deck, dating back to the 1440s.
   • Function: Originally used for games, tarot decks were adorned with symbolic imagery, including allegorical illustrations and trump cards.
2. Tarot in France (Late 15th Century):
   
   • Migration: Tarot cards crossed into France in the late 15th century, and the game evolved with the addition of the 22 trump cards, known as the Major Arcana.
   • Symbolism: The Major Arcana introduced iconic characters and archetypal symbols, enhancing the cards' allegorical significance.
3. Occult Associations (18th Century):
   
   • Esoteric Interest: In the 18th century, interest in the occult and mystical arts surged in Europe. Tarot cards gained esoteric significance, with scholars attributing hidden meanings to the cards beyond their gaming purpose.
   • Etteilla: The French occultist Etteilla published influential tarot interpretations, contributing to the transformation of tarot into a tool for divination and self-discovery.
4. The Rider-Waite-Smith Deck (Early 20th Century):
   
   • Revolutionary Design: In 1909, A.E. Waite and Pamela Colman Smith collaborated on the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, featuring vivid illustrations and intricate symbolism. This deck became immensely popular and served as the foundation for many modern tarot decks.
   • Divinatory Focus: The Rider-Waite-Smith deck emphasized the mystical and divinatory aspects of tarot, influencing the widespread adoption of tarot for spiritual and introspective purposes.
5. Tarot in the New Age Movement (20th Century Onward):
   
   • Popularization: The mid-20th century witnessed a surge in interest in mysticism, the occult, and alternative spiritual practices. Tarot cards gained popularity within the New Age movement, becoming a tool for self-reflection, divination, and personal growth.
   • Diverse Decks: The latter half of the 20th century saw the creation of diverse tarot decks, each with unique themes and interpretations, catering to different spiritual traditions and personal preferences.
6. Modern Tarot Practices (21st Century):
   
   • Global Appeal: Tarot has transcended cultural boundaries and gained a global following. The internet has played a significant role in disseminating tarot knowledge, making it accessible to a diverse audience.
   • Integration with Psychology: Many practitioners view tarot through a psychological lens, using the cards as a tool for introspection, therapy, and personal development.

The historical evolution of tarot reflects its transformation from a simple deck of playing cards to a versatile tool for divination, self-exploration, and spiritual guidance. Today, tarot continues to captivate individuals worldwide, offering a unique blend of ancient symbolism and contemporary relevance.

1. Diverse Tarot Systems and Cultural Influences:
   
   • Cultural Adaptations: Tarot has adapted to various cultural contexts, leading to the creation of decks that draw inspiration from different mythologies, traditions, and artistic styles.
   • Themed Decks: Modern tarot enthusiasts can explore decks inspired by Norse mythology, Celtic traditions, Eastern philosophies, and more, allowing for a rich diversity of interpretations and connections.
2. Tarot and Popular Culture:
   
   • Media Exposure: Tarot has found its way into mainstream media, with references in literature, movies, and television series. This exposure has contributed to its widespread recognition and acceptance.
   • Creative Interpretations: Popular culture has inspired artists and creators to produce tarot decks with themes ranging from fantasy and science fiction to contemporary pop culture references, showcasing the adaptability of tarot symbolism.
3. Tarot in Digital Age:
   
   • Online Platforms: The digital age has transformed tarot readings, making them accessible through online platforms and mobile apps. Virtual tarot readings and communities provide a global forum for discussion and learning.
   • Digital Decks: Tarot decks are now available in digital formats, enabling users to explore and engage with the cards through virtual platforms, expanding the reach of tarot practices.
4. Tarot as a Personalized Tool:
   
   • Self-Expression: Many individuals now create their own tarot decks, infusing personal symbols, experiences, and artistic styles into the cards. This personalized approach enhances the connection between the user and the cards.
   • Intuitive Reading: Modern tarot practices often emphasize intuitive reading, encouraging users to trust their instincts and personal interpretations rather than relying strictly on traditional meanings.
5. Scientific and Skeptical Perspectives:
   
   • Psychology and Tarot: Some psychologists view tarot as a projective tool that can tap into the unconscious mind, offering insights into one's thoughts and emotions.
   • Skepticism and Tarot: Skeptics often approach tarot from a psychological or statistical standpoint, exploring the phenomenon through the lens of cognitive biases and the placebo effect.
6. Tarot Communities and Education:
   
   • Learning Resources: The availability of books, online courses, and workshops has contributed to the education and skill development of tarot practitioners. This has empowered individuals to deepen their understanding of tarot symbolism and interpretation.
   • Community Engagement: Tarot communities, both online and offline, provide platforms for sharing experiences, seeking guidance, and fostering a sense of community among practitioners.

As tarot continues to evolve, its rich history merges with contemporary influences, shaping a dynamic and diverse landscape. Whether embraced for spiritual guidance, artistic expression, or personal insight, tarot remains a versatile and enduring tool that resonates with individuals on their unique journeys of self-discovery.

1. Tarot Ethics and Professionalization:
   
   • Code of Ethics: In modern tarot practices, professional readers often adhere to ethical guidelines. These guidelines emphasize confidentiality, client empowerment, and responsible use of divination tools.
   • Certification and Training: Some tarot practitioners pursue formal training and certification programs to enhance their skills and professionalism, contributing to the recognition of tarot reading as a legitimate and ethical practice.
2. Scientific Research on Tarot:
   
   • Psychological Studies: While scientific research on tarot is limited, some studies explore the psychological aspects of tarot reading. Research has investigated how individuals interpret symbols, engage in reflective thinking, and experience a sense of empowerment through tarot readings.
   • Cognitive Science Perspectives: Tarot's intersection with cognitive science has led to examinations of how the mind processes symbolic information and the impact of belief systems on perception.
3. Tarot and Intersectionality:
   
   • Inclusivity: Tarot communities increasingly emphasize inclusivity, recognizing the importance of diverse perspectives, cultures, and identities. Decks that reflect a broader range of experiences and backgrounds contribute to a more inclusive tarot landscape.
   • Intersectional Readings: Practitioners may integrate intersectionality into their readings, acknowledging the complexity of individual identities and experiences within a broader social context.
4. Tarot's Influence on Art and Literature:
   
   • Literary Works: Tarot symbolism has inspired numerous works of literature, poetry, and art. Authors and artists often incorporate tarot themes to explore psychological, spiritual, and philosophical concepts.
   • Tarot in Visual Arts: Tarot continues to be a muse for visual artists, with contemporary artworks reimagining and interpreting the traditional tarot archetypes in new and innovative ways.
5. Tarot and Holistic Wellness:
   
   • Mind-Body-Spirit Connection: Tarot is increasingly integrated into holistic wellness practices that emphasize the interconnectedness of mind, body, and spirit. It complements approaches like meditation, mindfulness, and energy healing.
   • Wellness Retreats and Workshops: Wellness retreats and workshops may incorporate tarot as a tool for self-reflection, personal growth, and stress reduction, aligning with the broader holistic wellness movement.
6. Tarot and Technology Integration:
   
   • Mobile Apps and Online Platforms: Technology has facilitated the accessibility of tarot through mobile apps and online platforms, offering virtual readings, digital decks, and interactive tarot experiences.
   • Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality: Emerging technologies like augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) have the potential to transform tarot experiences, providing immersive and interactive readings.

The ongoing evolution of tarot reflects its adaptability to societal changes, technological advancements, and a growing understanding of its psychological and symbolic dimensions. As it continues to weave through various aspects of contemporary life, tarot remains a dynamic and versatile tool with enduring relevance.

1. Tarot and Social Media:
   
   • Online Communities: Social media platforms, such as Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, have become hubs for tarot enthusiasts. Tarot readers share daily card pulls, interpretations, and create educational content, fostering a vibrant online community.
   • Global Connections: Social media has facilitated global connections among tarot practitioners, allowing for the exchange of diverse perspectives, interpretations, and deck recommendations.
2. Tarot in Mental Health Practices:
   
   • Therapeutic Applications: Some mental health professionals incorporate tarot into therapeutic practices, using it as a tool for self-reflection, exploration of emotions, and promoting therapeutic dialogue.
   • Mindfulness and Coping: Tarot readings can be used as a mindfulness practice, helping individuals cultivate self-awareness and coping strategies for managing stress, anxiety, and mental health challenges.
3. Tarot's Evolving Symbolism:
   
   • Living Symbolism: Tarot symbolism is not static; it evolves over time. Modern tarot decks often reinterpret traditional symbols to reflect contemporary values, ensuring that the cards remain relevant and resonant with current cultural contexts.
   • Innovative Decks: Artists continue to create innovative tarot decks that explore diverse themes, introducing new symbols and archetypes that speak to a wide range of experiences.
4. Tarot and Ritual Practices:
   
   • Ritualistic Use: Tarot is incorporated into various ritual practices, from simple daily card pulls to more elaborate ceremonies. These rituals can serve as a form of meditation, intention-setting, or connection with spiritual energies.
   • Seasonal Celebrations: Some practitioners align tarot practices with seasonal changes, using specific spreads or decks to explore themes associated with the solstices, equinoxes, and other significant astrological events.
5. Tarot and Gender Representation:
   
   • Expanding Archetypes: Modern tarot decks often challenge traditional gender roles and expand archetypal representations. Decks may feature diverse gender identities and expressions, offering a more inclusive and fluid understanding of the archetypal energies within the cards.
   • Feminist Tarot: Some decks explicitly adopt feminist perspectives, reimagining traditional tarot symbolism to empower and celebrate the diverse experiences of individuals across the gender spectrum.
6. Tarot as Literary Inspiration:
   
   • Literary Works and Tarot: Tarot continues to inspire literary works, with novels, poems, and plays incorporating tarot themes and archetypes. Authors explore the psychological and symbolic depths of tarot, infusing their narratives with mystical and esoteric elements.
   • Narrative Exploration: Tarot's narrative potential serves as a source of inspiration for storytellers, offering a structure that mirrors the hero's journey or provides a framework for exploring characters' internal and external conflicts.

The dynamic interplay between tarot and contemporary culture reveals its enduring appeal and adaptability. From social media platforms to therapeutic practices, tarot remains a versatile tool that resonates with individuals seeking insight, connection, and personal growth in an ever-changing world.
In conclusion, the history and evolution of tarot reflect its remarkable journey from humble playing cards to a multifaceted tool deeply embedded in modern culture. As tarot continues to weave its way through diverse aspects of society, from online communities to therapeutic practices, its enduring relevance lies in its adaptability, symbolism, and capacity to inspire self-discovery.
From the mysterious origins of the 15th century to its current role as a global phenomenon, tarot has transcended cultural and historical boundaries. As it integrates with technology, influences art and literature, and finds new applications in mental health and wellness, tarot remains a dynamic force that resonates with those seeking spiritual insights, artistic expression, and personal transformation.
Whether approached through a psychological lens, as a form of self-reflection, or as part of broader cultural movements, tarot's journey reflects the human quest for meaning, connection, and the exploration of the inner self. Its rich tapestry of symbolism continues to captivate individuals across the globe, making tarot a timeless and ever-evolving companion on the diverse paths of human experience.

Edit: If you are going to comment on the length of this post, please don't. This is not a simple snark but rather an actual critical think piece about feminism and Taylor Swift.

Introduction

Pertaining to Taylor Swift, "Female Rage" has deviated from its intended meaning after Swift debuted a new performance of The Tortured Poets Department during the Eras Tour. Now, according to Swift's use of the phrase, female rage is interpreted as public backlash against Swift's dating choices rather than as a response to the broader injustices against women and women's rights. This post examines Taylor Swift's flawed feminism, philanthropy, branding, and the controversial trademark petition for the phrase "Female Rage: The Musical". Swift's background as an entertainer, indeterminate politics, and alignment with capitalism over feminism pervades her legacy, again threatening her public tolerance as not just an individual but as a brand.

Once Upon a Female Rage...

If you were cognizant in the early 2010's, you've heard countless jabs at Taylor Swift in the media. Magazines, radio, or online. Music critics did not take her seriously as a songwriter; parents put a woman on an unrealistic pedestal as the ideal role model for their children; she dated too much and used men as lyrical fodder. No matter the story, it inevitably spread, conjoined with everyone's respective opinions, and you'd be left to wonder, "Why does everyone hate this girl so much?"
Taylor's target demographic has always been young or adolescent girls, more so when Swift herself was one. She made music that spoke to the awkward misfit, cultivating a para-social relationship with fans on MySpace, then later twitter, Instagram, and YouTube, where Taylor posted relatable vlogs showcasing the life of a homegrown American girl. Taylor had a delayed public "growing up" and, compared to her female pop contemporaries, Swift never "gratuitously sexualized her image and seems pathologically averse to controversy" (and, apparently, never even had a sip of alcohol until she turned 21). She was more than happy to spin this narrative to allude to an inherent moral superiority above other women in the industry (Better Than Revenge, heard of it?), engaging in the very slut-shaming that she herself endured (the Madonna and Whore archetypes). The victim complex arose with the need to prove Taylor as a different type of pop girl. Based upon her holy and clean image, Swift had been dubbed "a feminist's nightmare", and that "[To Swift] other girls are obstacles; undeserving enemies who steal Taylor’s soulmates with their bewitching good looks and sexual availability." Feminism and Tennessee-Christian country values don't exactly mix, it seems.
Years later, Swift befriended Lena Dunham and thus experienced white feminism osmosis, where Dunham taught Swift that real feminists defend rapists, makes insensitive jokes about rape and abortion, and prioritize all-white casts. Swift then declared herself a feminist in 2014, saying,

"Becoming friends with Lena – without her preaching to me, but just seeing why she believes what she believes, why she says what she says, why she stands for what she stands for – has made me realize that I’ve been taking a feminist stance without actually saying so."

I suppose the male-centric songwriting subject that permeates Swift's discography contained covert feminism and that we just didn't see that. Perhaps, the "Bad Blood" song and music video were written only in jest and not about poor Katy Perry, for Swift, as a feminist, would "never make it a girl fight" or tear other women down (though all Katy did was date your terrible ex-boyfriend and allegedly steal three backup dancers from your tour). In 2013, Swift said, in response to Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's joke towards her serial dating, "There is a special place in hell for women who don't help other women."
There was that time in 2015 Taylor said that Nicki Minaj was "invited to any stage [she is] on" (as if Taylor expects to have access to every stage, award, and platform that Nicki might not otherwise have as a black female artist...yikes!) in response to Nicki's criticism of the white + thin VMA nominations. Later, Nicki responded with confusion, as Swift continued, "It’s unlike you to pit women against each other. Maybe one of the men took your slot..". Of course, this 'beef' was 'squashed' when Nicki performed with Taylor at the VMAs, with Nicki quite literally only having 38 seconds of stage time without Taylor. Maybe all that parading around with a legion of famous white women - similar to the way Taylor might've done with her numerous 1989-era handbags - was in fact a stance against gender inequality, and that this display of "girl power" should be enough to constitute Swift as a feminist icon.
Even while Swift says that Dunham informed her feminist outlook, she dances around the exact contents of those beliefs: "what she believes, what she says, what she stands for" is not exactly insightful towards what beliefs Swift might have inherited. Taylor never broaches women's rights topics such femicide, FGM, forced pregnancy & marriage, sex trafficking, women in slavery, women's financial and political oppression, women's educational rights, women's health, or women's autonomy, so we can assume she only gives a fuck about "girls supporting girls" (whatever that fucking means).
Despite some questionable (and sometimes vindictive) behavior, Taylor as a young woman did not deserve every media lashing that she received. We cannot deny that most headlines and criticisms perpetuated a misogynistic rhetoric which has plagued Swift for a majority of her career. Acknowledging events such as the development of her ED, her sexual assault trial, "Famous" lyric and MV depiction of Taylor, and the explicit Twitter deepfakes, for example, as both disgusting and unfortunate things that happened to a young woman in Hollywood does not negate the fact that Taylor is mostly a performative feminist.

Get Your Fucking Ass Up and Be a Philanthropist, It Seems Like Nobody Wants to Be a Philanthropist These Days

In 2013, Taylor Swift cut the ribbon at the grand opening of the Taylor Swift Education Center at the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville, Tennessee. The donation amount - $4 million - was the largest individual artist gift ever donated to the Country Music Hall of Fame, which is, of course, mentioned on Swift's website. The two-story facility features three classrooms, an instrument room, and an interactive children's exhibit gallery. Swift also performed at "All for the Hall" charity shows and has donated numerous artifacts from her career (such as notable guitars, tour costumes, etc) to the museum.
This was over 11 years ago, and it is still the only notable philanthropic contribution Taylor Swift has made.
For a woman of her net worth and stature, and a woman who recognizes the difficulties for women in film and music, you would think that Taylor Swift might establish a scholarship program for women to study the arts or something. Perhaps Swift might even consider becoming a member of organizations that support female artists, or one that supports LGBTQ+ causes (since she is now proudly an ally), yet she remains superficial with her graces. Broader philanthropy, such as donating relief aid to Palestinian women or women impacted by violence and discrimination will probably never receive any financial support from Miss Swift because then she'd be using her money towards philanthropies involving anyone but white entertainers.
She even says herself in Miss Americana, "My entire moral code as a kid and now is a need to be thought of as 'good'." Well, she's certainly thought of as good, though her actions say otherwise. She's more than happy to do a vaguely altruistic song and dance for a clip-worthy interview quote and mass appeasement, then fuck off to one of her mansions on a 20 minute private jet flight, rather than actually contribute to anything pertaining to the causes she has endorsed. Yet, far too many people continue to give a woman such as her their money, time, and energy, and she hoards these resources to herself.

I Like Some of the Taylor's Songs, But What the Fuck Does She Know About Feminism?

Swift continued with her self-proclaimed feminist campaign, positioning herself as a political activist and LGBTQ+ ally in the Miss Americana documentary. The primary focus of the documentary consists of the sexual assault trial, Andrea Swift's cancer diagnosis, Taylor's ED and body dysmorphia, media scrutiny, and, largely, finally speaking up about her politics publicly, mostly her opposition to the 2018 Tennessee Republican senate candidate, Marsha Blackburn, and Blackburn's beliefs. Swift says, following a scene discussing her experience during the trial,

"I just couldn't really stop thinking about it. And I just thought to myself, next time there is any opportunity to change anything, you had better know what you stand for and what you want to say."

We must ask ourselves, though: when has Swift ever spoken up to change anything? Okay, pulling her entire catalogue from Spotify because they didn't pay their artists enough and similarly pulling her catalogue from Apple Music are changes that she leveraged due to her revenue potential and power, but they are not pertinent to the average woman's rights. Moreover, these are issues that directly impacted Taylor's income, which was enough reason for her to protest in the first place. Swift has sold the most units for a female artist in first week sales, is the first female artist with 100k monthly Spotify listeners, is the first female artist to win the Album of the Year Grammy 4 times, and is the first female artist to do X, Y, and Z, all while being inoffensive and family-friendly to boot. The actual Taylor Swift seems unwilling to compromise the brand of Taylor Swift by contributing in meaningful ways to feminist causes, especially if it is for women outside of America and Hollywood.
The reason political anthems such as "The Man" and "Only the Young" of the Lover era feel disingenuous and corporate is because, well, it is. Taylor has taken every opportunity to advance her career or public image at the expense of other women. What is truly genuine to Taylor's outlook on other women is vying for male attention, taking down female competition, and vocalizing feminist injustices only if they directly impact her and her money. Some will argue that it's satisfactory for a woman with such a huge platform to even TALK about feminism, but that just isn't enough. It's even less impressive when you candidly look at the scope of her feminist lens: "If I was the man, then I'd be THE MAN", or "I really resent the ‘Be careful, buddy, she’s going to write a song about you’ angle, because it trivialises what I do", and, of course, "We all got crowns". Feminism, but only when it happens to me. It gets worse when you look at Taylor's track record of copying other famous women and removing other female artists as potential threats to her pop prowess.
It's good for PR to align yourself with certain blanket feminist and political beliefs, therefore good for branding, therefore good for ticketing and merchandise sales, therefore good for business. And Taylor Swift is a business.
She's not a feminist. Taylor Swift is a capitalist.

I Can't Pay Those Sweatshop Workers a Livable Wage or Benefits! How Else Would I Make My Billions?

Recently, Taylor's team filed to trademark the phrase "Female Rage: The Musical" after Taylor said during Paris N1 of the Eras Tour,

"So you were the first ones to see The Tortured Poets at the Eras Tour...or as I like to call it, 'Female Rage: The Musical'."

This trademark petition was filed last week on Saturday, and news comes about just as numerous unofficial fan-made merch designs have cropped up with this phrase plastered on Fruit of the Loom basics. I'm of the opinion Swift's team motioned for a trademark so that they can send out cease & desists to all those that make knockoff merch, which disrupts potential sales for Bravado, UMG's choice merchandising company; however, since it was filed earlier, perhaps Swift has bigger plans with the bizarre use of the gendered phrase. One Swiftie referred to the phrase "female rage" as "a funny Eras Tour joke". Could it be a possible fourth version of the Eras Tour Movie? Whatever the reason, the motion to capitalize off of such a concept is disgusting, but not unsurprising, for a woman that profits on her vain feminism.
Swift, through her company, TAS Rights Managements, has also trademarked over 200 phrases, including "1989", where she owns the property rights to this calendar year on keychains, phone cases, sunglasses, stationary, bags, beverage ware, clothing, entertainment services, your subconscious, and, of course, Christmas ornaments.
The vapid consumerism in Swiftie culture is, frankly, disgusting. Bravado's sustainability statement is non-existent, the quality control is abysmal, and the materials they use are horrible. The materials, such as acrylic and polyester, are made from petrochemicals. This means they are non-renewable, shed microplastics, and are quite toxic in production. The manufacturing process to make all of those lazy-rushed Eras Tour logo graphic tees is a huge blow to environmental well-being. Apparently, though, Swifties don't give a fuck. They sell out products in seconds and either have to face the manufactured scarcity or buy from a scalper that resells for 200% of the already ridiculous retail price. This doesn't include the environmental impact of vinyl records, CD, and cassette production, of which Taylor produces many variants that sell unsustainable amounts.
If we're talking about women's rights violations, why is no one acknowledging the women that work in the inhumane sweatshop conditions that have to pump out fugly t-shirts and hats? The millions of plastic microfiber dander they are inhaling, or the toxic dyes that touch their bare skin? Are they being compensated fairly for their skilled labour and are they in safe working environments? Do these women have minimal bargaining power, and do they have authority over their worker's rights? Is Taylor Swift female raging at their injustices? Does Taylor Swift ever feels bad that her wealth was built on the backs of women of color, disadvantaged by the demands of the global economy and garment industry? Do you think she ever says a little white feminist prayer for them before she goes to sleep at night?
What's even crazier is not that Taylor herself doesn't care, it's that Swifties don't care. There CANNOT BE ethical billionaires. You only make a billion dollars if you are exploiting other human beings for capital gain. Based on public perception of the possible "Female Rage: The Musical" trademark, it seems like Swifties are already asking for merch with this phrase. "If Taylor made it, I'd buy it." Oh, cool. So not only do you champion Miss Swift's avarice and billionaire status, but you also are unashamed to admit to your blind consumption of her music and merchandise, no matter where they might originate in production or sincerity. Just as Swift takes and takes and takes, Swifties' consumerism of Taylor Swift cannot be quelled.
The tortured artist's most vulnerable and sincere poetry...available now in 21 different versions!

I Am Tortured Poet, Hear Me Whinge

Look - even if Taylor's intention is to characterize TTPD as more "tortured" and "angry", the main thread of the album is "I was ghosted by my decade-long situationship with a controversial indie boy and my fucking stupid fans wrote a 'Speak Up Now' open letter prompting me to drop him" anger, which is adequately expressed in the lyrics and performances. The extent of Taylor's "female rage" on TTPD is on tracks such as "Who's Afraid of Little Old Me?", which contends with relentless media scrutiny; "But Daddy I Love Him", where Swift firmly states she'll date whoever she likes no matter how "Sarahs and Hannahs" may react; and "The Albatross", a track mythologizing her reputation and the consequences of dating her. Of course, these coincide with deep psychological wounds that formed during Swift's early years in the media, and so, from her feminist perspective, these subjects tackle the misogyny and double standards that she faced.
Yet Taylor Swift still has no grounds to be claiming that TTPD best exemplifies female rage and therefore she, in the context of this album, is female rage incarnate. As the daughter of a stock broker and mutual fund marketing executive, Taylor was born into wealth and allowed privileges like trips and subsequent relocation to Nashville all so that she might get a record deal. Her father even invested at least $120,000 into the then-fledgling label, Big Machine Records, which ensured Taylor's place with Borchetta after leaving her dead-end development deal with Sony. The fact that her parents were able to buy her a fucking brand new guitar for Christmas and pay for music lessons says so much about the financial security and safety of her childhood.
Money is privilege and protection, and despite Swift's experiences with misogyny and loser boyfriends, she does not know what female rage is.
Her rage is derived from her frustrations with her obsessive fans pulling the moral superiority card on Taylor in response to her rebound with Matty Healy. That's literally it. She's just pissed that the monster she created is no longer obediant, it's become a feral, sovereign entity that depletes the world of its natural resources and thinks it is more intelligent than it actually is because it's mommy has started to talk to it with big words. Apparently, 'illicit', 'elegy', 'nonchalant', and 'precocious' are considerably big words for the oafish monster, and I find it strange that this level of literacy is present in a group of fans that allegedly have GPAs of 3.5 or higher, but I digress.
Taylor Swift has never been one paycheck away from destitution. Taylor Swift has never experienced racial discrimination. She may have instances of gender discrimination, but she possesses the ideal white, blonde American beauty standard and therefore reaps the benefits of being a conventionally attractive woman. Taylor Swift has sufficient social capital. Taylor Swift is a billionaire woman prolonging her victimhood though she, as a woman, has mostly had control over her image and music (unlike her contemporaries). Taylor Swift is NOT entitled to be championed for her "female rage", nor should she be. Taylor Swift has never even been the struggling artist, for fuck's sake. I don't give a fuck if she's trying to fill the empty lunch tables of her past. Taylor Swift purporting herself, her unpolished album, and her lukewarm feminism as a musical bleeding with female rage is asinine.

Sigh Try and Come For My Job, Poors

Out there in the world right now is a 23-year-old woman, a recent college grad, who works as a barista. She has to wake up and get ready to go into a minimum wage job because she cannot get a job in her field. She doesn't have healthcare benefits or sick time, so she has to go into work no matter how she's feeling. All day long she is berated by vicious customers and creepy men, and, exhausted from being on her feet, she knows she has to go home to her shitty roommate that never does the dishes and her roommate's shitty dog. To comfort herself, she considers getting a treat, but thinks against it when she remembers that matcha lattes cost $15 and they taste like milky dirt. She knows that she needs to buy groceries this week, and so the woman resolves to go home, but notices that her gas tank is low. She goes to put gas in the car, but the pump stops at $27.86 because that's all that she has in her checking account. The woman, bereft and reeling, sinks into the driver's seat. "Well," she thinks, her head in her hands, "at least I don't have Taylor Swift's job. I just couldn't imagine."
Fame is somewhat of a choice. If at any moment Taylor feels that she is misunderstood, misconstrued, or overwhelmed by public opinion, she can LEAVE the public eye - Lord knows she has the retirement fund and residuals to do so. In "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart", the TTPD song about meeting the demands of your career-zenith mega-tour while in the relationship trenches, Taylor ends the song by rambling,

"You know you're good when you can even do it with a broken heart...you know you're good...and I'm good, cause I'm miserable, and no one even knows!...try and come for my job."

Yeah, obviously we wouldn't know, you recently passed the billionaire threshold and are the most famous and in-demand performer in the world right now. Taylor Swift makes an estimated $10 to $13 million dollars A NIGHT on the Eras Tour. Furthermore, the Eras Tour movie grossed $261.6 million globally, (which, as the producer, Taylor takes home 57% of the ticket sales) not counting the streaming revenue from Amazon Prime Video and the estimated $75 million deal that Disney paid to have it on Disney+. We're not even considering the income from cheap plastic popcorn buckets and drink cups plastered with colored squares in her Era-specific likeness.
It's funny. Taylor Swift often said that being famous wasn't hard, that she "isn't complaining". I'm sure it is difficult to always have to present in a good mood, else you'll end up misrepresented in the media, and I'm sure it's invasive to virtually have no privacy or semblance of anonymity. Still, Taylor Swift shows up each night of tour and performs. For a majority of her career, she has penned her sad songs while on the road. Most of "Red", her breakup album, was written in the thick of the Speak Now World tour. Now, some Swifties say they almost "feel bad" for attending the Eras Tour with Swift's revelations in this song, that they have had a 'dimmed experience' upon hearing Taylor's misery whilst performing. Despite the fact that Taylor said that "this was the happiest she's ever been" at Gilette Stadium in May, the lyrics "boohoo, woe is me, smile for the cameras and make the fans happy!!!" are jarring for Eras attendees.
While Taylor Swift was making double-digit millions a night in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and feeling miserable, Ana Clara Benevides Machado passed away due to heat exposure. The concert promoters, Time For Fun, are now the subject of a criminal investigation due to their lack of adequate hydration and safety. Taylor Swift cancelled the Sunday show that was to follow and offered VIP tent tickets to Benevides Marchado's family, which was a kind gesture, but perhaps incongruous to the incident of which they were offered as consolation. Everyone grieves differently, of course, but I'm not sure attending the very show at the very same venue that my daughter or sister passed away in two days prior, where the singer CONTINUED the show despite her death, would be healthy for closure.
There was no female rage at the show as Swift never saw Benevides Machado pass out. There was no female rage towards the disregard for fans as humans while Swift elected to proceed with her Brazil tour dates despite the country being in historic heatwaves (at risk of overheatting herself). If Taylor Swift was so shaken by touring with a broken heart or a fan's passing, she wouldn't have added an additional North American leg of Eras just two months after the Matty breakup. She's brokenhearted but willing to mend the cracks with your money and move onward with her worldwide female rage induced pillaging.
No matter what happens, even if you die at a Taylor Swift concert, Taylor collects a big fat check and flies away. She doesn't know you as anything other than a conversion rate or earning potential despite what her nearly 20-year long parasocial relationship with fans might otherwise indicate. She knows that, while some Swifties are without disposable income, they feel obligated to spend on a "48 Hours Only!" exclusive vinyl variant instead of necessities because they are so entrenched in Taylor Swift's intoxicating celebrity, they'll prioritize materialistic fandom before their needs. This is good enough for her because this means she can expand her real estate portfolio and finance her cat's lavish lifestyles. They're worth an estimated $100 million dollars. Her three cats could pool their net worth and solve world hunger.
While you and I might be denied bereavement leave and barely surviving the current political and economic climate, Taylor Swift has to, instead of gets to, perform for stadiums at full attendance for three nights in a row across the globe. You and I might be replaced by AI at our longtime jobs, but Taylor Swift is threatened with losing more and more money each time you listen to a "Stolen Version" of her songs. If we don't buy every variant of all of her albums, then who is going to pay for the fucking cats?
It is tone deaf to spend as she spends and lives as she lives in this economy, but this is her reality. She was able to donate $100,000 to all of her tour truck drivers, and that's wonderful, but it leads me to wonder about the ethos of the 2020s where one woman can hoard such life-changing amounts of money. Remember in 2014 when she gave a fan $90 ($120 in today's money) to get Chipotle because she had no fucking clue how much it cost? This is a 34-year-old woman who is increasingly out of touch with the reality for working class people and women in general. Normal everyday adults must wake up and go to their thankless jobs, and yet Taylor Swift, despite all her riches, incessantly references the lows of her life and career as a public figure and entertainer to farm sympathy and drive sales. And still, the corporate women have latched onto "I cry a lot, but I am so productive! It's an art!" as their cubicle battle cry.
Do you think that, from up in her private jet, Taylor Swift gazes at the world through her poetic, tortured eyes, and thinks, "All the little people, in their cars, walking, going about their lives...all those girls that don't support girls...do they know that I've made an album about female rage?"

Conclusion/TLDR

Thank you for reading. I would love to hear your critical insights towards this entire ordeal: TTPD, the trademark, the implications of it all.
TLDR: Taylor Swift is a bad feminist and is delusional to think that the TTPD eras set exemplifies female rage at women's injustice.

In this edition of “Odd Titanica”, we are going to dive into the sleazy, opportunistic world of show business. A world that comedian Fred Allen said of, “you can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly, and still have room for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart”. Hyperbolic? Let’s take a look at Hollywood’s response to the Titanic disaster to see that there really is no business like show business.
Dorothy Gibson and the lost, first, film are well worn trivia by now. The traumatized actress rushed into production, her inability to process her trauma causing her mental breakdown, collapse, and retirement from acting immediately after the film was finished - it’s a perfect story to demonstrate the callousness of the film industry. But there is more to the story, and digging deeper shows us that “Saved” may have been the least sleazy project undertaken by the studios.
Dorothy’s account of the sinking and the suffering she endured filming “Saved from the Titanic” are predominantly found in two sources - The New York Dramatic Mirror and Moving Picture World. These were trade magazines, published weekly, and consisting solely of material related to the stage and screen business. These would be announcements of upcoming features, casting news, celebrity gossip, technical news - anything the movie star to the man sweeping the floor at the cinema needed to know. And they included ads … lots and lots of ads.
Immediately realizing that Titanic was not only a horrible tragedy but an incredible business opportunity, Moving Picture World got to work. As people stormed White Star Line offices, and raided newspaper carts for any drop of news regarding the sinking, Moving Picture World provided the latest in Titanic news; or perhaps we should say “Titanic” news.
The headlines of the April 27th issue may have screamed TITANIC, but as the public grabbed their copy and hurriedly flipped through the pages, they found that what they were actually given was ads. Those eye grabbing headlines were followed by much smaller print-
TITANIC EFFORTS... are being exerted by Champion to put before the exhibitors that will make them regular Champ Patrons! Get the following latest [releases] and you’ll be convinced!.
UNSINKABLE … is the reputation of Rep productions, but these two releases will sink into the minds of everyone who sees them and will remain there as worthy object lessons.
THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN …suggested by the poem of Elizabeth Barret Browning in 2 reels this Tuesday!
THE GREATEST MOTION PICTURE OF NATIONAL INTEREST - THE SINKING OF…. the big battleship. Remember the Maine!
THE DEATH SHIP...a sensational two reel drama of the sea containing one of the most thrilling dynamite explosions imaginable!
For all the slimy marketing tricks, flipping through the pages still has plenty of legitimate ads for real Titanic newsreels, movies, and a specific type of presentation known a Myriorama involving painting, music, and recitation. But, show business would strike again - the ads were legitimate, but what they were advertising was not. History has sort of forgotten the huge demand for Titanic media in the wake of the sinking, something that didn’t really exist. When cinema owners would order these “only surviving genuine negatives of the disaster” complete with lobby display package, they instead received-

our astonishment to find the Lusitania and Olympic, and one or two scratch films of ancient days posing as pictures of Titanic.

But they didn’t stop. Animated Weekly advertised that they were “the first to reach the wreck… chartered a tug from Cape Breton and rushed to the scene while the survivors were still in the water”. Cinemas began to promote footage of the sinking. Audiences wrote their disgust to Moving Picture World-

These representations are to the point of criminality … Take, for instance, the picture showing the Titanic with about a sixth of her forward length stuck into the iceberg. Everybody knows the collision did not occur in that manner!

They pointed to the following ad as an example - FIRST PICTURES OF THE TITANIC OCEAN DISASTER. The cinema owners responded by noting that they had misread, crammed in tiny letters were the words “sunk in” so that ad actually read FIRST PICTURES OF THE TITANIC sunk in OCEAN DISASTER. It was the customer's fault, they said, to be stupid enough to think anyone could have actually filmed the sinking.
Once this ruse was discovered, the studios shifted gears. The next step was to advertise film along with presentations by “A Lecturer who was on board”. When the audience realized the lecturer was not on Titanic and demanded a refund - the response from the managers was

Those signs didn’t say he was a survivor.

… and any attempt to charge him with the crime of fraud was absurd because, in his own words-

Of course I didn’t give him his money back. The sign didn’t misrepresent anything. West was on the Titanic, the sign didn’t say when he was.

…which was true. The lecturer, Eugene West, had visited Titanic while she was under construction at Belfast.
As for the movies themselves?

We said we had pictures. If people were foolish enough to think we meant moving pictures, that was their fault.

This particular cheated audience member was told if he wanted his money back, to go on the street and sing for it. Whether it was this, or something else, eventually the public snapped and began hauling out cinema managers and beating them in the streets. By May, the mayors of Boston and Memphis had banned the showing of any Titanic pictures - moving or still- within the city.
But, where was Dorothy in all this? Tucked in the very back of the magazine, after another newsreel ad,, we get to the celebrity sighting and gossip section. Ed Lux of the Rex Film Exchange was in town, Dan Markowitz of Fox Pictures was as well, Arthur Schmidt of the Victor Film Company was seen having a lovely spa at a Turkish Bath, Sam Gobel of the St Louis Motion Picture Company has been walking up and down 42nd street, we don’t know if Southern film maker Henry Wasserman is still here but he might be, Dorothy Gibson survived the sinking of the Titanic, and the Director of Selig Pictures took some actresses to Santa Catalina for a swim and a photoshoot and they had a great time.
By the following edition, on May 2nd, Moving Picture World was also able to provide its readers with the first stills from “Saved from the Titanic” and a feature on Dorothy. Along with this, tucked in the editorials, the magazine finally published a piece of truthful news about the Titanic disaster-

Senator William Alden Smith … declined to grant permission to have the cinematopgraph make a record of the sessions of the committee. “The sessions” he is quoted as saying…”are solemn affairs and must not be hippodromed or commercialized”. He is, however, falling into a serious error in judgement-

…they sniffed.

As a matter of right, the camera man ought to have been permitted. The day of the enfranchisement of the motion picture will surely come .. which will give equal rights to the cinematographer and the newspaper man.

Then, among the illegal false advertising and reports of public brawls at the cinema, they ended with-

The lesson of the Titanic disaster and all its incidents can be made far more impressive by pictures that move than by mere words in cold letters.

In this edition of “Odd Titanica”, we are going to dive into the sleazy, opportunistic world of show business. A world that comedian Fred Allen said of, “you can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly, and still have room for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart”. Hyperbolic? Let’s take a look at Hollywood’s response to the Titanic disaster to see that there really is no business like show business.
Dorothy Gibson and the lost, first, film are well worn trivia by now. The traumatized actress rushed into production, her inability to process her trauma causing her mental breakdown, collapse, and retirement from acting immediately after the film was finished - it’s a perfect story to demonstrate the callousness of the film industry. But there is more to the story, and digging deeper shows us that “Saved” may have been the least sleazy project undertaken by the studios.
Dorothy’s account of the sinking and the suffering she endured filming “Saved from the Titanic” are predominantly found in two sources - The New York Dramatic Mirror and Moving Picture World. These were trade magazines, published weekly, and consisting solely of material related to the stage and screen business. These would be announcements of upcoming features, casting news, celebrity gossip, technical news - anything the movie star to the man sweeping the floor at the cinema needed to know. And they included ads … lots and lots of ads.
Immediately realizing that Titanic was not only a horrible tragedy but an incredible business opportunity, Moving Picture World got to work. As people stormed White Star Line offices, and raided newspaper carts for any drop of news regarding the sinking, Moving Picture World provided the latest in Titanic news; or perhaps we should say “Titanic” news.
The headlines of the April 27th issue may have screamed TITANIC, but as the public grabbed their copy and hurriedly flipped through the pages, they found that what they were actually given was ads. Those eye grabbing headlines were followed by much smaller print-
TITANIC EFFORTS are being exerted by Champion to put before the exhibitors that will make them regular Champ Patrons! Get the following latest [releases] and you’ll be convinced!.
UNSINKABLE … is the reputation of Rep productions, but these two releases will sink into the minds of everyone who sees them and will remain there as worthy object lessons.
THE CRY OF THE CHILDREN …suggested by the poem of Elizabeth Barret Browning in 2 reels this Tuesday!
** THE GREATEST MOTION PICTURE OF NATIONAL INTEREST - THE SINKING OF**…. the big battleship. Remember the Maine!
THE DEATH SHIP...a sensational two reel drama of the sea containing one of the most thrilling dynamite explosions imaginable!
For all the slimy marketing tricks, flipping through the pages still has plenty of legitimate ads for real Titanic newsreels, movies, and a specific type of presentation known a Myriorama involving painting, music, and recitation. But, show business would strike again - the ads were legitimate, but what they were advertising was not.
History has sort of forgotten the huge demand for Titanic media in the wake of the sinking, something that didn’t really exist. When cinema owners would order these “only surviving genuine negatives of the disaster” complete with lobby display package, they instead received-

our astonishment to find the Lusitania and Olympic, and one or two scratch films of ancient days posing as pictures of Titanic.

But they didn’t stop. Animated Weekly advertised that they were “the first to reach the wreck… chartered a tug from Cape Breton and rushed to the scene while the survivors were still in the water”. Cinemas began to promote footage of the sinking. Audiences wrote their disgust to Moving Picture World-

These representations are to the point of criminality … Take, for instance, the picture showing the Titanic with about a sixth of her forward length stuck into the iceberg. Everybody knows the collision did not occur in that manner!

They pointed to the following ad as an example - FIRST PICTURES OF THE TITANIC OCEAN DISASTER. The cinema owners responded by noting that they had misread, crammed in tiny letters were the words “sunk in” so that ad actually read FIRST PICTURES OF THE TITANIC sunk in OCEAN DISASTER. It was the customers fault, they said, to be stupid enough to think anyone could have actually filmed the sinking.
Once this ruse was discovered, the studios shifted gears. The next step was to advertise film along with presentations by “A Lecturer who was on board”. When the audience realized the lecturer was not on Titanic and demanded a refund - the response from the managers was

Those signs didn’t say he was a survivor.

… and any attempt to charge him with the crime of fraud was absurd because, in his own words-

Of course I didn’t give him his money back. The sign didn’t misrepresent anything. West was on the Titanic, the sign didn’t say when he was.

…which was true. The lecturer, Eugene West, had visited Titanic while she was under construction at Belfast.
As for the movies themselves?

We said we had pictures. If people were foolish enough to think we meant moving pictures, that was their fault.

This particular cheated audience member was told if he wanted his money back, to go on the street and sing for it. Whether it was this, or something else, eventually the public snapped and began hauling out cinema managers and beating them in the streets. By May, the mayors of Boston and Memphis had banned the showing of any Titanic pictures - moving or still- within the city.
But, where was Dorothy in all this? Tucked in the very back of the magazine, after another newsreel ad,, we get to the celebrity sighting and gossip section. Ed Lux of the Rex Film Exchange was in town, Dan Markowitz of Fox Pictures was as well, Arthur Schmidt of the Victor Film Company was seen having a lovely spa at a Turkish Bath, Sam Gobel of the St Louis Motion Picture Company has been walking up and down 42nd street, we don’t know if Southern film maker Henry Wasserman is still here but he might be, Dorothy Gibson survived the sinking of the Titanic, and the Director of Selig Pictures took some actresses to Santa Catalina for a swim and a photoshoot and they had a great time.
By the following edition, on May 2nd, Moving Picture World was also able to provide its readers with the first stills from “Saved from the Titanic” and a feature on Dorothy. Along with this, tucked in the editorials, the magazine finally published a piece of truthful news about the Titanic disaster-

Senator William Alden Smith … declined to grant permission to have the cinematopgraph make a record of the sessions of the committee. “The sessions” he is quoted as saying…”are solemn affairs and must not be hippodromed or commercialized”. He is, however, falling into a serious error in judgement-

…they sniffed.

As a matter of right, the camera man ought to have been permitted. The day of the enfranchisement of the motion picture will surely come .. which will give equal rights to the cinematographer and the newspaper man.

Then, among the illegal false advertising and reports of public brawls at the cinema, they ended with-

The lesson of the Titanic disaster and all its incidents can be made far more impressive by pictures that move than by mere words in cold letters.

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proud, prove, provide, provider, province, provision, psychological, psychology, public, publication, publicity, publish, publisher, pull, punishment, purchase, pure, purpose, pursue, push, put, qualify, quality, quarter, quarterback, quarterly, queen, quest, question, quick, quickly, quiet, quietly, quit, quite, quote, race, racial, radiation, radical, radio, rail, rain, raise, range, rank, rapid, rapidly, rare, rarely, rate, rather, rating, ratio, raw, reach, react, reaction, reader, reading, ready, real, reality, realize, really, reason, reasonable, recall, receive, recent, recently, reception, recipe, recipient, recognition, recognize, recommend, recommendation, record, recording, recover, recovery, recruit, red, reduce, reduction, refer, reference, reflect, reflection, reform, refugee, refuse, regard, regarding, regardless, regime, region, regional, register, regular, regularly, regulate, regulation, regulator, reinforce, reject, relate, relation, relationship, relative, relatively, relax, release, relevant, relief, religion, religious, rely, remain, remaining, remarkable, remember, remind, remote, remove, repeat, repeatedly, replace, replacement, reply, report, reporter, represent, representation, representative, Republican, reputation, request, require, requirement, research, researcher, resemble, reservation, resident, residential, resign, resist, resistance, resolution, resolve, resort, resource, respect, respond, response, responsibility, responsible, rest, restaurant, restore, restriction, result, retain, retire, retirement, return, reveal, revenue, review, revolution, rhythm, rice, rich, rid, ride, rifle, right, ring, rise, risk, river, road, rock, role, roll, romantic, roof, room, root, rope, rose, rough, roughly, round, route, routine, row, rub, rubber, rude, ruin, rule, run, running, rural, rush, Russian, sacred, sad, safe, safety, sake, salad, salary, sale, sales, salt, same, sample, sanction, sand, satellite, satisfaction, satisfied, satisfy, sauce, save, saving, say, scale, scandal, scare, scatter, scenario, scene, schedule, scheme, scholar, scholarship, school, science, scientific, scientist, scope, score, scream, screen, script, sea, search, season, seat, second, secondary, secret, secretary, section, sector, secure, security, see, seed, seek, seem, segment, seize, select, selection, self, sell, Senate, senator, send, senior, sense, sensitive, sentence, separate, sequence, series, serious, seriously, servant, serve, service, session, set, setting, settle, settlement, seven, several, severe, sex, sexual, shade, shadow, shake, shall, shallow, shape, share, sharp, she, sheet, shelf, shell, shelter, shift, shine, ship, shirt, shock, shoe, shoot, shooting, shop, shopping, short, shortly, shot, should, shoulder, shout, show, shower, shrug, shut, shy, sibling, sick, side, sigh, sight, sign, signal, significant, significantly, silence, silent, silver, similar, similarly, simple, simply, sin, since, sing, singer, single, sink, sir, sister, sit, site, situation, six, size, ski, skill, skin, skirt, sky, slave, sleep, slice, slide, slight, slightly, slip, slow, slowly, small, smart, smell, smile, smoke, smooth, snap, snow, so, so-called, soccer, social, society, soft, software, soil, solar, soldier, sole, solid, solution, solve, some, somebody, somehow, someone, something, sometimes, somewhat, somewhere, son, song, soon, sophisticated, sorry, sort, soul, sound, soup, source, south, southern, Soviet, space, Spanish, speak, speaker, special, specialist, species, specific, specifically, specify, speech, speed, spend, spending, spin, spirit, spiritual, split, spoil, sponsor, sport, spot, spray, spread, spring, square, squeeze, stability, stable, staff, stage, stain, stair, stake, stand, standard, standing, star, stare, start, state, statement, station, statistical, status, stay, steady, steal, steel, steep, stem, step, stick, still, stimulate, stimulus, stir, stock, stomach, stone, stop, storage, store, storm, story, straight, strange, stranger, strategic, strategy, stream, street, strength, strengthen, stress, stretch, strike, string, strip, stroke, strong, strongly, structural, structure, struggle, student, studio, study, stuff, stupid, style, subject, submit, subsequent, substance, substantial, substitute, succeed, success, successful, successfully, such, sudden, suddenly, sue, suffer, sufficient, sugar, suggest, suggestion, suicide, suit, summer, summit, sun, super, supply, support, supporter, suppose, supposed, Supreme, sure, surely, surface, surgery, surprise, surprised, surprising, surprisingly, surround, survey, survival, survive, survivor, suspect, sustain, swear, sweep, sweet, swim, swing, switch, symbol, symptom, system, table, tactic, tail, take, tale, talent, talk, tall, tank, tap, tape, target, task, taste, tax, taxi, tea, teach, teacher, teaching, team, tear, technical, technique, technology, teen, teenager, telephone, telescope, television, tell, temperature, temporary, ten, tend, tendency, tennis, tension, tent, term, terms, terrible, territory, terror, terrorist, test, testimony, testing, text, than, thank, thanks, that, the, theater, their, them, theme, themselves, then, theory, therapy, there, therefore, these, they, thick, thin, thing, think, thinking, third, thirty, this, those, though, thought, thousand, threat, threaten, three, throat, through, throughout, throw, thus, ticket, tie, tight, time, tiny, tip, tire, tissue, title, to, tobacco, today, toe, together, toilet, token, tolerate, tomato, tomorrow, tone, tongue, tonight, too, tool, tooth, top, topic, toss, total, totally, touch, tough, tour, tourist, tournament, toward, towards, tower, town, toy, trace, track, trade, tradition, traditional, traffic, tragedy, trail, train, training, transfer, transform, transformation, transition, translate, translation, transmission, transmit, transport, transportation, travel, treat, treatment, treaty, tree, tremendous, trend, trial, tribe, trick, trip, troop, trouble, truck, true, truly, trust, truth, try, tube, tunnel, turn, TV, twelve, twenty, twice, twin, two, type, typical, typically, ugly, ultimate, ultimately, unable, uncle, undergo, understand, understanding, unfortunately, uniform, union, unique, unit, United, universal, universe, university, unknown, unless, unlike, until, unusual, up, upon, upper, urban, urge, us, use, used, useful, user, usual, usually, utility, utilize, vacation, valley, valuable, value, variable, variation, variety, various, vary, vast, vegetable, vehicle, venture, version, versus, very, vessel, veteran, via, victim, victory, video, view, viewer, village, violate, violation, violence, violent, virtually, virtue, virus, visibility, visible, vision, visit, visitor, visual, vital, voice, volume, voluntary, volunteer, vote, voter, voting, wage, wait, wake, walk, wall, wander, want, war, warm, warn, warning, wash, waste, watch, water, wave, way, we, weak, weakness, wealth, wealthy, weapon, wear, weather, web, website, wedding, week, weekend, weekly, weigh, weight, welcome, welfare, well, west, western, wet, what, whatever, wheel, when, whenever, where, whereas, whether, which, while, whisper, white, who, whole, whom, whose, why, wide, widely, widespread, wife, wild, wildlife, will, willing, win, wind, window, wine, wing, winner, winter, wipe, wire, wisdom, wise, wish, with, withdraw, within, without, witness, woman, wonder, wonderful, wood, wooden, word, work, worker, working, workout, workplace, works, workshop, world, worried, worry, worth, would, wound, wrap, write, writer, writing, wrong, yard, yeah, year, yell, yellow, yes, yesterday, yet, yield, you, young, your, yours, yourself, youth, zone.

I'm not the type to move on quickly. I gave everything I have inside to promote a relationship I believed to be worthy of all of my time and effort. I saw my partner for who they are in the beginning. I accepted them. I also allowed room for personal growth, we both needed it. I allowed room for growth in our bond. Naturally.
I feel as if none of the things I have done to create a space, safe and comfortable for our entwined lives to flourish was acknowledged. I feel like a lot of the time i was disrespected with the intent to undermine my self esteem. I am at a loss over knowing now, that my thoughts on being used were true.
Everything had to be their way. Not a shared way.
Every viewpoint had to be skewed to fit their narrative. Not each individual having their own and respecting another.
I feel that my intent to build something solid was a secret joke to them, shared with friends I wasn't allowed to know.
Now, having cut the tie to this person I feel hollow and discarded. Even though I was the one to put them out. I have never felt more alone in my life.
They made mistakes that take real heart and effort to correct. I'm unsure if that effort is one they could give. This isn't' about pointing fingers. My finger, it seems was pointing in the right direction, regardless if they didn't want the betrayal pointed out.
This is about choosing to be a better human being. This is about the warmth you feel inside by doing right by the people in your life. This is about allowing the positive parts and magnifying them, minimizing the negatives when they come along. And they do, that's life. There's more than enough hurt and pain in the world without creating more on purpose.
I hope anyone reading this, being the one who has been hurt or if you did the hurting understands this letter is really about the choices we make and how we affect the people in our lives. How the human experience isn't about the suffering but the recovery.
My life will never be the same again. It was the most connective bond with them, for me. The time with them was somehow greater, for me. The good things that were shared is special, for me. The hurt I feel is deep now, and I needed the betrayal to stop, for me.
I wonder if there is remorse felt by them. Or if this is another thing they twist in their mind to relieve themselves of any guilt. I knew when I met them there were issues like this for them. An absence of claim to damage they cause.
I wish they understood the freeing feeling of admitting a mistake. I wish they felt the self assured pride of ensuring and protecting their loved ones by refusing to allow mistakes to happen. Or happen again. I wish they understood we are all fallible. It's not about the mistake, its about fixing it, meaning it and never allowing it to happen again. Because you love the person it hurt.
I don't regret meeting them. I don't regret giving my all. I don't regret giving them space to grow. I don't regret that my nature is easily seen as being easily manipulated.
I am the kind to smile at babies and speak to my neighbors. I say good morning to passersby on the street. I offer cold drinks to overheated young mothers outside with nowhere to go. I pet friendly animals and take time to appreciate the growth of foliage as I walk. I feel most things around me, flowing in and through me. Lifes very own heart beat, I trust at anothers word. I give benefit of the doubt. I see the glass half full. I don't question anothers whereabout, I take their word for it.
If these things make me some kind of target, so be it. I have no other way to exist. This is me. I wish they had protected and cherished these things about me. I wish it hadn't been exploited instead. Life will never be the same.
It's called honesty. Its not a new concept. It makes the worlds we create for ourselves worth living in. To my fellow people in hurt, love yourself more today and it's okay to feel what you feel. To those who've caused a hurt, love yourself more today and it's okay to make amends if you are moved to do so. To all others, I doubt they got past the second paragraph I wrote so it's a moot point anyway.
Be kinder. More honest. Love yourselves. Love each other. And smile, it's a beautiful day.

A short Zuihitsu poem I strung together for the monthly prompt, "New and Old".
Morning. Monday. The sun peeks between the cracks of my window blinds, spilling out onto my floor. He’s tentative – he’d rather not wake me too strenuously, but I have to get out of bed.
A boy wanders under a freeway – aimless, he is – with his little brown eyes surveying the rubbled ground. It’s dark and noisy and clammy down here, but a flash of silver jumps out to grab ahold of his flashlight and yank him its way.
I haven’t forgotten anything, have I? Keys, coat, wallet; I’m always on a time crunch even when I’m not.
Drive to work: upbeat, perfervid, vivacious.
The fork the boy picks up is antique, ancient, like it’d been dumped straight out of a tear in time into the wrong era. It tries to speak to him and tell him all about its endeavors, but the rust coating it muffles its voice.
I’m wearing a new suit today; I bought it a little while back, although the saleswoman wasn't so sure I could afford it. Well, I proved her wrong – and as I traipse into the office with as much vigor as I can muster, I wonder if any of my colleagues will comment on it.
My old suit was tiresome and down-at-the-heels. It pioneered for a great while and served its purpose grand and supplemental – I rescued a dog in it, I was promoted in it, I tore a hole in it.
“I mean, it’s corroded–
No one has a lick to say to me about my new suit, but I linger patiently for it anyway – an offhanded quip or a, “hey, nice suit”. I spend the day waiting for something that doesn’t want to arrive.
Had to get that hole stitched up, by the way. It was a whole lot of trouble. I’d hired this old babushka to do it, but she wouldn’t stop giving me dirty looks, as if I did something to offend her. Maybe I looked at one of her thousand cats the wrong way, or pushed open the door to her abode too loudly.
The boy carries his fork all the way home like a lost kitten. He steals – borrows, more accurately – his parent’s tools so he can polish it up all mutton-fisted. For hours upon end, he scrapes away at the rust, fleck by fleck, until the fork's voice isn’t so stifled.
Drive to home: dreary, tedious, toilworn.
–and what’s so great about a used-up fork, anyway? You might as well throw it away and buy a new one, you know? I wouldn’t go through all that trouble.”
As soon as I’m home, I take off my new suit. I place it in the wash. Run a cycle; squeaky clean. I crawl into bed.
His parents remark about the fork that night when the boy uses it to eat dinner. He should sell it off at a pawnshop, they’d simultaneously said; he’ll fetch a good price for it. He argues otherwise. It’s pretty and besides, finders, keepers!
Anyway, I ended up throwing out that old suit. I grew weary and bored of it.
Morning. Tuesday. The sun bulldozes through the cracks of my window blinds, pouring out onto my floor. He’s unabashed – he wants me to know loud and clear I have to get out of bed and wear my suit again.

The War Scroll, also known as the "War of the Sons of Light Against the Sons of Darkness," is a unique text within the Dead Sea Scrolls that portrays an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good (Sons of Light) and evil (Sons of Darkness). This scroll provides insight into both historical and symbolic elements.
Historical Accuracy:
The War Scroll, while containing detailed military tactics and an epic narrative of the ultimate confrontation, doesn't explicitly reference any specific historical event or timeframe. Some scholars believe it could be a product of the community's anticipation of a future messianic conflict or a reflection of their own community's struggles against opposing forces during their time. Interpreting the historical accuracy of the scroll often involves exploring the context of the Qumran community and the turbulent times in which they lived.
Symbolism and Esoteric Wisdom:
The War Scroll goes beyond a mere description of a physical battle. It portrays a cosmic conflict between the forces of light and darkness, reflecting not just a literal warfare but also a symbolic and spiritual struggle. The text emphasizes righteousness, divine intervention, and the victory of good over evil.
Within the study guide, activities and exercises could involve dissecting the symbolic elements present in the War Scroll, exploring the deeper meanings behind the battle tactics and the metaphysical implications of the conflict. Understanding the symbolism could involve group discussions, comparative analysis with other ancient texts with similar themes, and exploring the impact of this symbolic representation on the community's beliefs and practices.
Here are a few activities and exercises to explore the symbolism and historical context of the War Scroll from the Dead Sea Scrolls:

1. Symbolism Analysis:

Provide excerpts from the War Scroll and encourage participants to identify and discuss the symbolic meanings behind elements like the "Sons of Light" and the "Sons of Darkness," various weapons, and the strategies outlined for battle. Group discussions or written reflections can help participants explore the deeper layers of meaning.

1. Comparative Analysis:

Compare the War Scroll's themes with similar apocalyptic or eschatological texts from different cultures or religions, such as apocalyptic passages in the Book of Revelation in the Christian Bible or apocalyptic texts from other ancient traditions. Create worksheets or discussion prompts to highlight similarities and differences in themes, symbols, and beliefs about cosmic battles.

1. Historical Context Exploration:

Present historical information about the era when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written. Discuss the political, social, and religious climate of that time, including the turmoil in the region, to understand how these factors might have influenced the composition of the War Scroll. Encourage participants to consider the possible motivations behind the text's creation.

1. Creative Interpretation:

Encourage creative expression by asking participants to create artwork, poems, or short stories inspired by the themes and imagery found in the War Scroll. This exercise allows individuals to engage more deeply with the symbolic elements and interpret them in their own unique ways.

1. Role-playing or Debates:
   Organize a role-playing activity where participants take on the roles of "Sons of Light" and "Sons of Darkness," debating their ideologies, motivations, and strategies for the ultimate battle. This exercise helps in understanding differing perspectives and interpreting the conflicts presented in the scroll.
   

Interpretative variations regarding the river's crossing in different ancient texts reflect the unique religious, philosophical, and cultural perspectives embedded within these narratives. These differences in interpretation offer insights into diverse worldviews and varying theological frameworks present in ancient texts:

1. Mesopotamian Context:

• In Mesopotamian mythology and literature, the Euphrates River often held symbolic significance as a boundary between the known civilized world and the wild, unknown realms. The crossing of the Euphrates could symbolize journeys into unexplored territories or transitions between order and chaos. This perspective reflects a worldview rooted in the physical and geographical division of lands.

1. Biblical Context:

• In biblical texts, such as those in the Book of Revelation or Old Testament prophecies, the crossing of the Euphrates carries eschatological significance. It may represent a divine intervention or a decisive moment in God's plan, marking the commencement of apocalyptic events. This interpretation aligns with the biblical narrative of divine judgment and the unfolding of God's ultimate purpose in history.

1. Gnostic or Apocryphal Context:

• Gnostic or apocryphal texts often interpret the river's crossing as a symbolic liberation or awakening. It might signify the release of spiritual forces or the ascent to higher consciousness, reflecting a philosophical perspective emphasizing spiritual enlightenment and liberation from material constraints.

1. Greco-Roman Interpretation:

• In Greco-Roman literature, crossings of rivers were often associated with mythological journeys or transitions between realms. The crossing of the Euphrates might symbolize a transition from mundane existence to a realm of mystery or spiritual significance, reflecting a cultural perspective rooted in mythology and cosmology.

These varied interpretations highlight the richness and diversity of religious, philosophical, and cultural frameworks present in ancient texts. The river's crossing serves as a flexible symbol that adapts to different narratives, conveying themes of transition, judgment, liberation, or cosmic transformation based on the unique perspectives of each tradition.
Exploring these interpretative variations allows participants to appreciate the complexity of symbolism within ancient texts and provides insights into how different cultures and belief systems interpreted common motifs like the river Euphrates. It showcases the intricate interplay between religious, philosophical, and cultural elements shaping the symbolism and theological implications embedded in these narratives.
The river Euphrates, a prominent geographic feature in ancient texts, embodies universal themes that transcend specific cultural contexts. Identifying these universal themes helps reveal shared human concepts of transition, boundaries, and transformative events across diverse ancient traditions:

1. Threshold and Transition:

• The Euphrates often symbolizes a boundary between known and unknown territories. Its crossing represents a transition from one state to another, signifying a pivotal moment of change or passage. This theme of crossing a threshold echoes the human experience of transitions in life, moving from familiar to unfamiliar realms.

1. Boundary and Separation:

• As a geographical boundary, the Euphrates signifies separation between distinct territories or civilizations. This concept of demarcation resonates with universal human experiences of setting boundaries, delineating spaces, or marking divisions between different aspects of life.

1. Transformative Events:

• Crossing the Euphrates is often associated with cosmic or transformative events in ancient texts. This universal theme reflects the human fascination with the concept of epochal change, cosmic upheavals, or moments of divine intervention that reshape the course of history.

1. Symbol of Power and Control:

• The river might represent a symbol of power, control, or geopolitical significance. Crossing it could signify shifts in dominance, challenges to established authority, or the assertion of influence. This theme resonates with human narratives of power struggles and shifts in societal dynamics.

1. Metaphor for Spiritual Journeys:

• Across cultures, rivers are often used metaphorically to represent spiritual journeys or quests. The crossing of the Euphrates might symbolize the pursuit of enlightenment, the passage to higher realms of understanding, or the quest for spiritual transformation.

These universal themes associated with the river Euphrates highlight fundamental aspects of the human experience—transitions, boundaries, transformative events, power dynamics, and spiritual journeys. The river's symbolism in ancient texts speaks to shared human aspirations, struggles, and beliefs that transcend cultural boundaries and resonate across different epochs and civilizations.
By identifying and discussing these universal themes, participants gain a deeper appreciation for the profound symbolism embedded in ancient texts and recognize the timeless relevance of concepts such as transition, boundaries, and transformative events in shaping human narratives and aspirations.

1. Historical Context:

• What historical events or societal conditions might have influenced the composition of the War Scroll?
  
• How does the historical context of the Dead Sea Scrolls' discovery contribute to our understanding of this text's significance?
  

1. Symbolism and Esoteric Wisdom:

• How does the War Scroll use symbolism to convey spiritual or cosmic themes?
  
• What esoteric wisdom or deeper spiritual insights can be derived from the portrayal of cosmic conflict and divine intervention within the text?
  

1. Comparative Analysis:

• Compare the themes and symbolism of the War Scroll with other apocalyptic texts from different cultures (e.g., Book of Revelation, The Book of Daniel). What common motifs or differences in interpretation do you observe?

1. Parallelism in Biblical Texts:

• Explore connections between the War Scroll and other biblical texts. How does the language, imagery, or themes in the War Scroll intersect with passages from the Hebrew Bible or New Testament?

1. Community Beliefs and Practices:

• How might the apocalyptic expectations depicted in the War Scroll have influenced the beliefs and practices of the community that produced it?
  
• Discuss the impact of such intense anticipation of cosmic conflict on communal life and religious rituals within the community.
  

1. Cultural Significance of Cosmic Battles:

• Across various ancient cultures, why do you think depictions of cosmic battles and eschatological events were significant? What might these narratives represent in a broader cultural context?

1. Interpretive Variations and Unique Perspectives:

• Explore the diverse interpretations of specific passages or symbols within the War Scroll. How do different scholars or traditions interpret these elements, and what underlying factors might influence their interpretations?

1. Personal Reflection and Modern Relevance:

• Reflect on how the themes of cosmic conflict, righteousness, and spiritual warfare in the War Scroll might resonate in contemporary society or personal belief systems.

1. Theological and Philosophical Implications:

• Discuss the theological and philosophical implications of a cosmic battle between forces of light and darkness. How does this theme intersect with broader philosophical inquiries or theological doctrines?

1. Literary and Symbolic Analysis:

- Analyze the narrative structure and symbolic elements present in specific passages of the War Scroll. How do these elements contribute to the text's overarching themes and meanings? 

These study questions aim to provoke critical thinking, promote in-depth exploration of themes, encourage comparative analysis, and stimulate discussions on the multifaceted nature of the War Scroll's content and its significance within ancient and contemporary contexts.

1. Archaeological and Linguistic Analysis:

- How does the physical condition of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the War Scroll, impact our understanding of their preservation and historical context? - Discuss the linguistic peculiarities or unique textual features found within the War Scroll and their implications for translation and interpretation. 

1. Apocalyptic Expectations and Messianic Concepts:

- Explore the portrayal of messianic figures or anticipated saviors within the War Scroll. How do these concepts align with or diverge from contemporary expectations of a messianic figure in other ancient texts or religious traditions? 

1. Impact of Apocalyptic Literature:

- Analyze the enduring influence of apocalyptic literature, such as the War Scroll, on subsequent religious, literary, or cultural traditions. How have these texts shaped later beliefs or inspired artistic and literary works? 

1. Ethical and Moral Frameworks:

- Discuss the ethical or moral implications of the cosmic conflict depicted in the War Scroll. How do the themes of righteousness and wickedness contribute to the text's underlying moral framework? 

1. Role of Prophecy and Revelation:

- Explore the role of prophecy and revelation within the War Scroll. How do the prophetic elements contribute to the text's portrayal of future events and cosmic justice? 

1. Experiential and Ritualistic Elements:

- Investigate potential ritualistic or experiential dimensions associated with the teachings or beliefs conveyed in the War Scroll. How might the community have engaged with these teachings in their religious practices or communal activities? 

1. Literary Genre and Interpretation:

- Discuss the classification of the War Scroll within the broader genre of apocalyptic literature. How does its classification influence our understanding and interpretation of its themes and symbolic elements? 

1. Relevance in Modern Scholarship:

- Reflect on the ongoing scholarly debates or discoveries related to the War Scroll. How have modern interpretations evolved, and what implications do these new perspectives have on our understanding of the text? 

1. Intersection of Faith and Scholarship:

- Consider the interplay between faith-based interpretations and scholarly analyses of the War Scroll. How might religious convictions or theological frameworks influence academic research and vice versa? 

1. Future Research and Interpretative Avenues:

- Propose potential avenues for future research or areas of exploration concerning the War Scroll. What unanswered questions or unexplored aspects merit further investigation? 

The composition of the War Scroll, along with other Dead Sea Scrolls, was likely influenced by several historical events and societal conditions prevalent during the time of its writing, which is estimated to be between the 2nd century BCE and the 1st century CE:

1. Hellenistic Rule and Cultural Influence:

• The region where the Dead Sea Scrolls were found was under Hellenistic influence due to the conquests of Alexander the Great and the subsequent control by the Seleucid Empire. This era saw a clash between Hellenistic culture and Jewish traditions, leading to cultural tensions and a desire to preserve religious and cultural heritage.

1. Political Turmoil and Resistance Movements:

• The Jewish people experienced political unrest, particularly during the Maccabean Revolt against Seleucid rule. This period was characterized by resistance movements, attempts to preserve Jewish identity, and fervent anticipation of a messianic figure to deliver them from foreign oppression.

1. Religious Sects and Spiritual Expectations:

• Various religious sects existed within Judaism, each with its own interpretations and expectations of messianic redemption, purity laws, and theological doctrines. The community associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls, often believed to be the Essenes, likely had distinctive theological beliefs and a strong apocalyptic worldview.

1. Anticipation of Cosmic Redemption:

• There was a widespread belief in the imminent arrival of a messianic figure or a divine intervention that would bring about cosmic redemption, ushering in an era of righteousness and divine rule. This anticipation of apocalyptic events and a cosmic battle between forces of light and darkness is reflected in the War Scroll's themes.

Regarding the historical context of the Dead Sea Scrolls' discovery, its significance lies in multiple facets:

1. Preservation of Ancient Texts:

• The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, including the War Scroll, provided an invaluable collection of ancient manuscripts that significantly expanded our understanding of ancient Jewish texts, religious beliefs, and the diversity of Jewish thought during the Second Temple period.

1. Insights into Jewish Sectarianism:

• The scrolls shed light on the diversity of beliefs and practices among Jewish sects during that time. Understanding the beliefs and expectations of the community associated with the Dead Sea Scrolls helps contextualize the theological and apocalyptic themes present in the War Scroll.

1. Confirmation of Scriptural Accuracy:

• The Dead Sea Scrolls' discovery contributed to confirming the accuracy and preservation of certain biblical texts, highlighting the continuity of textual transmission across centuries and supporting the authenticity of biblical manuscripts.

1. Impact on Biblical Studies and Scholarship:

• The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls revolutionized biblical studies, providing scholars with invaluable primary sources for studying ancient Judaism, the development of biblical texts, and the context in which these texts were composed.

The historical context of political upheaval, religious expectations, and the preservation of texts within the Dead Sea Scrolls contributes significantly to understanding the milieu in which the War Scroll was written. It provides a backdrop against which the themes of cosmic conflict, eschatological anticipation, and religious fervor within the War Scroll can be comprehended.

I got sexually assualted when i was young, bullied due to skin colour, beaten up till bleeding and cant walk by my parents. Ive been called many degradding words such as useless, worthless etc by my parents. Im abit overweight due to stress eating and failing classes due to many truamtic past. although I keep getting bullied by my parents, I have many good friends and is super chatty and friendly to everyone since I understand everyone have its own struggles, i can at least make some peoples day better.
my parents is one of the main reasons of my sadness. I was there for them when they have massive fights and having emotional breakdowns and my sisters are sleeping, i would stay up at night listening to them crying and try to solve things out. but at the same time i remember these are the same people who beaten me up and threaten to kill me when they found out i self-harmed.... :( they would degrade me once everyday and it hurts because im trying to be happy :( . everytime and i have an achievement they would always say its thanks to them. I recently become one of the top students in my art school (my work was also promoted in their website :D) and they would say its due to their teaching techniques (these are the same people who threw my art books outside of the house because my art is ugly when i was 15 (im now 19) I recently got a really loving boyfriend who praises me and im really grateful to the point i cried some nights knowing someone thinks im somewhat pretty and talented. I of course never tell my boyfriend any of this, i never really vent too much to anyone as i know venting can ruin peoples day. I dont even care if its fake im just really happy :)
but my family always blame my boyfriend for everything. everytime they degrade me and when i look depressed, they will always say i fought with my boyfriend and i will never succeed life if i keep up with this behavior (i never have a single fight with my boyfriend or any of my many friends) they always come to conclusion and says my friends and boyfriend is bad which angers me becaused my friends and boyfriend are the ones who make me happy in my life :( my family would try to make me stay home and not hang out. I feel like a horrible person who couldnt make my boyfriend and friends reputation being good people. at the same time i stopped being the therapist friend for awhile and i felt terrible since i know my friends are crying on the other side :( ..... i feel like every decision i do is wrong. everything i do is useless and stupid. my top student title was a joke to my parents since its art and its something they never cared seriously... i even got a job offer but my parents mocked me for being so happy with this job :(
it hurts to say that my art lecturers feel more of like my parents.. they say so many kind words to me and im forever grateful :) but sometimes i wish my parents are a little kinder...i dont want to deal with all this beatings and told to eat shit and worthless everyday :( there's too many things going on and im sorry for all the wrong grammars.. i hope its not too bad.. but thank you for reading until here! i also apologies if its abit childish as its probably some edgy teenager hating on their parents ahaha..

Wanted to try something different today. This is a follow-up of not just one, but TWO previous one-shot (or so I thought at the time) stories of mine; if you haven’t already, feel free to read them first if you want a bit of background context, but it’s not necessary to understand what’s going on in this story.
As always, I hope you enjoy :)
——
Gakdra nervously paced in her transport pod, dreading the inevitability of the doors opening when she arrived at her destination. Then, she suddenly felt a familiar touch, and an even more familiar voice in her ear.
“Buttercup, at this rate you’re going to wear out your shoes.”
A weak smile crept onto Gakdra’s face as she glanced down to see Jennifer carefully hugging her from behind, placing herself perfectly to avoid her sharp quills.
Jennifer was a human who she had first met in the second year of what her adoptive human parents called “high school,” and had known for several years since as they both went through college and beyond.
A human her age who had tutored her after school, so as to help her overcome the difficulties her stunted education (courtesy of the chaos of the foster care system) brought her. Sessions that eventually became completely unnecessary as Gakdra caught up. …A fact that both parties were well aware of (and aware that they were both aware), but neither side made any attempt to acknowledge.
A human who didn’t seem repulsed by her quills, pitch-black eyes or needle-like teeth, much less the various chemicals deemed deadly neurotoxins by the galaxy at large that her kind both needed to breathe and produced from their very bodies.
A human who had insisted on getting the risky saryncite-inoculation treatments, after deciding that it might help Gakdra “learn” better if she was in the same room with her, instead of separated by sheets of diamondglass and countless layers of airtight filters.
…A human that had wasted no time in finding out that despite her inoculation against the toxins saryncites produced, her lips nonetheless still tingled when firmly pressed against Gakdra’s own.
Gakdra sighed and spoke, her auto-translator filling in the gaps for the unique language saryncites used, albeit one only the females of the species could speak audibly.*

• The males’ silence and use of a bioluminescent organ tucked in a chest cavity for “lightspeaking” in colors outside the visible range of prey species on their homeworld better served their evolutionary role as ambush hunters, in one of the most bizarre cases of sexual dimorphism the galaxy has to offer.

“Force of habit/routine/tic. …You know how nervous/afraid/worried I get going out in public.”
She turned and embraced her lover back, careful not to pierce Jennifer’s skin with her sharp claws as she wrapped them around her waist. Gakdra murmured more than spoke as she continued.
“I still don’t know how you do/perform/achieve it. And in front of all those people…”
“Lots and lots of practice, just like we’re doing right now for you.”
Gakdra let out a reluctant groan.
“I still wish we could just have them delivered to our home/nest/safe-place…”
“And have you miss out on a chance to chip away at that agoraphobia of yours? No.”
Jen gestured towards the planet’s scenery as they flew over it at great speeds, from wide swathes of terraformed forest greenery to massive colony-cities bustling with busy inhabitants.
“You deserve to be able to enjoy the outside world just as much as anyone else, and that means practicing doing just that until you’re not afraid of doing it anymore. …Remember what your therapist said? You just need a few accommodations here and there. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Jen reached up and placed a hand on one of Gakdra’s snow-pale cheeks. An impressive feat, given Gakdra stood a head or two higher than her, at over two meters. Gakdra gently rested her own clawed fingers over it, her face gently nuzzling the human’s soft palm as their fingers interlocked with one another; one set clawed, one set bearing comparably soft and fragile nails.
“…Yes, I suppose you’re right/correct/factual. Doesn’t mean I enjoy the transition process of getting to that point…”
“That’s still not an excuse to put this off to the point you’ve only got a few days left until you’re completely out of your meds.”
“I know, but what was there to say/communicate/talk? It didn’t become urgent/necessary/needed until this week.”
“I consider it urgent. …You’re anxious enough while already on your meds; I don’t want to see you even risking the pain you’d go through going without them.”
Jen’s hand fell away from Gakdra’s face as the transport pod gradually began to slow, signaling their arrival. Gakdra peered out of the diamondglass windows at the pharmacy’s walls before the view was blocked by the pressurized tunnel the pod stopped in front of. It was one of only 40 pharmacies in the entire star sector with the proper equipment to facilitate servicing saryncites like herself; and given that this sector measured in the hundreds of light years across, that was saying something.
Gakdra took a deep, shaky breath before reaching for her environmental suit.
“I can/will/shall do this… I can/will/shall…”
“That’s the spirit.”
Jennifer’s eyes flicked up and down Gakdra’s body, and she spoke again; this time with a playful grin.
“…It’s certainly more fabric than I’d prefer you be wearing, but did you need any help with the suit?”
Gakdra couldn’t help but blush at Jen’s teasing as she fastened various seals and locks into place around herself.
“No, I should be fine/satisfactory/competent.”
Jen winked at her.
“Alrighty then; I suppose I’ll just have to help you out of it later…”
Suffice to say, Gakdra’s flustered cheeks were thoroughly flushed with her species’ green blood as she stepped out of the vehicle and into the pharmacy’s saryncite entrance, clad in the suit which kept those around her safe.
She shakily walked down the sterile white corridor, listening intently for any signs that her suit may have popped a leak, but she heard nothing. The silence offered little comfort; she hadn’t heard the ever-so-slight leak that had tragically claimed one of her foster fathers’ lives either-
Stop that thought. They have safeguards. I have accommodations. I deserve to experience all the galaxy has to offer, just as anyone else. They have safeguards. I have accomodations-
She continued the internal mantra her therapist had taught her as she walked until she had eventually made her way to the end of the corridor; a wall adorned with only a diamondglass window and a microphone.
Gakdra timidly rapped on the window. It took several seconds of this before she attracted the attention of the arthro* pharmacist standing at the other end of the room, whose name tag read “Zetzana Bik’du”; it was almost as if he was pointedly ignoring her. He glanced up from his tablet with an irritated glare.

• An Arthro resembles a gigantic Terran spider for the most part, albeit with only six eyes, six legs and said legs comparably being much thicker and stronger to account for the square-cube law.

Gakdra nervously swallowed.
“Hello again. I-I’m, uh- …I h-have a prescription to pick up/acquire/take-”
Zetzana dismissively waved a limb, cutting her off.
“I know, I know; this is the third time we’ve done this little song and dance. …To answer your question, no, we still don’t have it.”
It felt as though Gakdra’s heart sank into her stomach.
“W-what‽ But- …I-I reached out directly to the manufacturemakeproducer for a replacement order, and t-they-”
“I don’t know what they told you, but neither of your ‘scripts are here.”
“S-surely the medications must have b-been misplaced/misorganized/lost somewhere in the building, o-or-”
“Listen, we’ve searched this place top to bottom. The whole staff got involved. …I don’t know what to tell you, but if you want your precious meds, you’ll have to head elsewhere.”
His species’ equivalent of a sneer crept its way onto the arthro’s face.
“So go ahead and leave-exit-leave, or whatever the gobbledegook translator you’ve got wants to hear to let you know to get out of the building. …Every extra second you spend in here is another minute we have to get the air scrubbers to decontaminate the hallway.”
Desperation crept into Gakdra’s voice.
“The manufacturer s-sent/distributed/provided me video evidence of them d-delivering the order to you, and of the d-delivery of the replacement order I requested. P-please, I-”
“I could have the authorities remove you if you’d prefer, blight-breather. …Up to you.”
Gakdra was on the verge of crying, not least because of the slur she had just been subjected to, but she slowly, reluctantly turned and walked back down the hallway with as much dignity as she could muster.
…She had long-since crossed the point of tears by the time she made it back to the doors leading out to her transport pod.
As she pulled off her helmet to reveal a face streaked with the purple of her species’ tears, Jennifer looked up from her wrist-computer with alarm.
“Buttercup? What happened-‽”
“They- …t-they don’t have it again, and the p-pharmacist was- h-he…”
Gakdra started hyperventilating, stifling her attempts to explain. In an instant, Jennifer was in front of her, gently taking her by her face, forcing Gakdra to look down at her as she wiped the tears from her face.
“Buttercup. Look at me. Look into my eyes. I’m here. I’m right here. You’re ok. Look at me. Look into my eyes-”
Jennifer’s softly repeated mantra derailed Gakdra’s panic attack before it could get up to speed. It was a skill Jen had mastered early in their relationship, while they were still separated by diamondglass; her words alone were enough to calm her. …Yet another reason Gakdra was endlessly thankful for Jen being in her life.
Gakdra’s legs were wobbling under her as Jennifer led her to her seat in the pod so they could look each other in the eyes without Jen having to crane her neck up to look at her. She took a shaky breath.
“They didn’t give me the meds. They’re there, they must/should/HAVE-TO be, but the pharmacist clerk/spokesperson/representative keeps insisting they’re not, that they searched all over, a-and he w-was so unkind/mean/rude, and threatened to sic security on me, and he- …h-he called/named/insulted me a-”
Gakdra broke down into tears again. Jennifer gently wrapped her arms around her, holding her close in a comforting embrace, just being there for Gakdra while she processed her emotions. Eventually, she calmed down enough to finish her thought, albeit in a voice barely above a whisper:
^{“He called/named/insulted me a blight-breather…”}
Jennifer’s arms fell limp at her sides. Gakdra looked up to see Jen staring at her in shock, her jaw only closing once she went to speak.
“He what‽”
“He called/named-”
Jennifer cut her off with a sharp gesture.
“Nonono, I heard you just fine the first time, no need to say that- that fucking slur again. I just-”
Jennifer faltered, her expression turning from shocked and furious to pensive.
“…What was his name, and species?”
“He was an arthro, and I think it was- …Zepzania, or something…? Why?”
Gakdra looked up to see Jennifer moving to the manual controls of the transport pod.
“…What are you doing?”
“Driving us to the pharmacy’s almost-universal species parking lot. …I’d like a conversation with a certain employee.”
Gakdra’s eyes widened.
“But-”
“Nope. Not gonna be dissuaded from this.”
Gakdra sputtered for a few moments before letting out a quiet sigh. She knew Jennifer well enough to know that there really was nothing she could say or do here that would halt whatever was coming next.
“…What do you intend to do/achieve/perform?”
Jen winked at her.
“Like I said, just a conversation or two.”
Gakdra’s eyes narrowed.
“Would this be a normal conversation, or a human euphemism for violence/hurt/pain-causing?”
“Do you trust me?”
“Completely. You know that. Even still, I have no desire/wish/hope for you to be arrested for assault.”
Jennifer chuckled as she pulled into a parking spot.
“Nor I, which is why I want you to take this.”
She held out a small tablet towards Gakdra, who glanced down at it with a confused expression.
“Your interview slate/tablet/computer? But why…?”
Jen winked at her again, a mischievous twinkle in her eyes as she did so.
“You’ll see.”
Her expression softened as she got up and hugged Gakdra again, before whispering in her ear.
“I just need you to keep something in mind for me; what you see me say and do next is not me, you understand? It’s a persona; one of countless others that I used to have to put on before the promotion, for my more investigative work.”
“…Ok…?”
Jennifer gave Gakdra a gentle kiss on the cheek, sending what could only be described as a warm chill rippling down the saryncite’s spine.
“Good. I’ll be right back.”
Jennifer pulled out a pair of sunglasses, and as she put them on and entered the transport-pod’s airlock she tapped a tiny, almost imperceptible button on the frame; nigh-invisible unless you already knew it was there and were deliberately looking for it. A video feed suddenly appeared on the tablet, and Gakdra’s eyes finally widened in understanding.
Jennifer walked into the pharmacy with a carefree air, looking around as subtly as she could, and allowed herself a smile as she confirmed that she was the only customer in the building. She casually walked up to the counter and rang the bell. Zetzana slowly made his way out of the back office and headed up to the register.
“Can I help you?”
Oh, can you, Jennifer thought to herself. Can you ever…
Step One of bringing about someone’s downfall: Get them to underestimate you.
With practiced ease, Jennifer put on her best “ditzy-airheaded-bimbo” act, passable valley-girl voice and all.
“Yeah, I was, like, wondering where the human painkillers were at? I’ve got a nasty hangover.”
…Back in the transport pod, Gakdra couldn’t help but descend into a snicker-fit at Jen’s antics.
Zetzana pointedly glanced around at the countless directory signs above the aisles and self-serve search terminals that could have easily prevented this interruption to his work day, then let out a weary sigh.
“…Aisle 5, second shelf from the bottom.”
“Like, thanks!”
Jennifer walked away and grabbed the cheapest store-brand meds she could find. As she went back and had the reluctant arthro begin to ring her up, she put on her best facade of innocence.
“Hey, I, like, had one more question, just cuz I’m curious and stuff; what’s the deal with that, like, weird extra entrance to the building, with the tunnel and stuff?”
Zetzana couldn’t help but let the subtlest of sneers slip onto his face for a moment before he remembered himself.
“That’s the saryncite entrance.”
Jennifer’s jaw dropped.
Step Two: Get them to think you’re on their side.
“You let those- …things into the store‽”
Zetzana’s eyss widened slightly in surprise, but he gave her an approving nod.
“Unfortunately. Officially, we’re not allowed to discriminate based on species. Unofficially, I completely understand your concern and wish it was otherwise. …If it’s any reassurance, that part of the building is brand-new, and completely hermetically sealed. It’s as safe as it gets.”
Step Three: After you help them take off their mask, plant the dagger you had behind your back in their hand and let them choose one of their own arteries to go for.
“But, like, you let blight-breathers into this place‽ Seriously‽”
Gakdra’s quills rippled in unease at this, but she just closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and remembered Jen’s reassurances.
Back in the pharmacy, Zetzana smirked.
“Not afraid to say the ‘quiet part’ out loud, I see. …Yes, ever since that portion of the building was constructed a few moons back, we do occasionally have to handle the blight-breathers. Though, thankfully, not that often so far, and I’m trying to make it as infrequent as possible.”
Step Four: As they’re bleeding out, let them keep digging their own grave.
“Like, how so?”
Zetzana smirked. They were alone in the store, he was the only one on shift, and whoever this was, she clearly wasn’t remotely intelligent enough to be with the galactic authorities; he could say the ‘quieter’ part too.
“Withholding medications, and- …other stuff like that. …I actually just had one of those animals in here about ten minutes ago, here for her precious anxiety meds. Told her the entire staff searched all over, and we didn’t have them.”
He theatrically looked from side to side before leaning closer.
“…Truth is, they were “improperly filed” straight into my trash can. ‘The entire staff looking for ‘em?’ Ha, I’m the only one who even knew about that prescription in the first place!”
In the transport pod, Gakdra felt as though her blood had turned to ice, and it only got worse as Zetzana continued.
“I’m fairly certain she’s not coming back this time; she was practically sobbing out toxins when I sent her away without her prescription. Hopefully, she’s run out at this point, and in a perfect universe she’ll off herself without them so no one has to look at her ugly, toxin-spewing face again. …Then again, the fact that her kind exist in the first place kinda disproves that notion, eh?”
Despite wanting nothing more than to rip his smug mandibles off his face and use them to gouge out his pride-filled eyes for what he had done, Jennifer smothered the inferno burning within her for the moment and just put on her best approving grin.
“Woah, that’s, like, super smart! …Is anyone else here doing stuff like that?”
“As far as I know, I’m unfortunately the only one here that’s done this so far, but at least no one else has caught on.”
Step Five: Twist the knife.
“Oh my gosh, this is all, like, so brave of you. Are there other blight-breathers you’ve screwed with like that?”
Zetzana felt a warmth in his chest at the skin-suit- or rather, human’s (she was clearly one of the good ones) kind words, and a thrill in his heart as he looked around the store to make extra sure he was safe. Finally, he had someone else to talk about this with…!
“Well, there is one other thing; the first time I did something like this.”
He leaned closer, his voice barely above a whisper.
“I had a blight-breather show up here a few weeks ago with a prescription for heart pressure medication. …I sent him home with a cocktail I whipped up myself based on my knowledge of their species that should send his blood pressure through the roof, without toxicology noticing anything amiss if he were to be autopsied. With luck, it should kill him, if it hasn’t already.”
In the transport pod, Gakdra was well into the beginning of another panic attack, and Jennifer nervously swallowed, but otherwise she held in her shocked horror and retained her composure as she replied.
“Like, nice! Hope so too. …Anyway, it was super good to meet you. I’ll, like, catch you later.”
As she turned to leave, Zetzana called after her.
“Say, have I seen you before? You look kinda- …familiar.”
Jennifer felt a slight twinge of worry, but she just gave him an innocent smile.
“I’ve been told I have, like, one of those faces, I guess?”
Zetzana shrugged.
“I guess. …Well, in any case, good to meet another kindred spirit out here.”
As Jennifer left the pharmacy and walked as fast as she could toward the transport pod without arousing suspicion, she gave endless thanks to whatever deities might be out there that his sentiment couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Step Six: kick them into the grave, and grab the shovel.
——
TWO DAYS LATER
“I’m, um… just glad that, h-he was stopped/halted/prevented b-before h-he, uh- …uh……”
Jennifer winced as Gakdra suddenly buried her face in her hands, motioning to the camera operator behind his diamondglass barrier to cut the feed. Gakdra stifled a small sob as she looked up to see the concerned face of her girlfriend staring back at her.
“I’m s-sorry, I j-just- …couldn’t I just give a written/typed/unspoken statement? I-I’m- …s-so, SO many people will see/observe/judge, and- …I…”
Jennifer kneeled down to take Gakdra’s clawed hands in her own, silencing her flustered sputtering.
“Buttercup, some statement being read aloud on a screen isn’t going to be nearly as effective at making people empathize with the story. There needs to be a person behind it- even if it’s just a blurred face with a voice filter, like we’re going to do- to show those watching that there are real people out here being hurt by him and those like him. …And we can’t exactly get a statement from the other guy until he’s stable enough to do so.”
She gently kissed Gakdra on the forehead, giving her a warm hug as a chaser.
“…Still, if you really, truly want to stop, I won’t push you; we can work with a written-”
“No.”
Gakdra took a deep breath, wiping her tears away as she shook her head and collected herself.
“No, I- …I can do/perform/complete this.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes/affirmative/indeed.”
Jen gave her an encouraging smile.
“That’s my girl. …Ok, let’s start from the top…”
——
TWO DAYS, SIX HOURS LATER
“This is Collective sector 7B news; I’m your host, Jennifer Hill-Thruximoff. …Full disclosure, I’m personally involved in this next story, so to ensure an unbiased report I’ll have my co-host, Jundo H’rissian, step in.”
“Thank you Jennifer. …Thursday evening saw the arrest of a pharmacist in the colony city Clarity on planet Hreshlaka-9, located in galactic sub-sector Mu-4, for alleged hate crimes. The pharmacist in question allegedly deliberately withheld medication from one client, and poisoned another. These actions were apparently motivated by the clients’ nature as saryncites.
“Local authorities were alerted upon receiving a video from our Jennifer, who managed to coax a shocking confession of his wrongdoing out of the individual in question. The contents of this confession were seemingly confirmed when authorities found discarded medication in the perpetrator’s personal waste bin, and sabotaged medication in the home of another victim, who was unconscious on the floor when Collective officers arrived.
It was speculated by one of the paramedics on scene that if the officers had arrived even an hour or two later, it would have been too late to save the saryncite in question. Said saryncite is now stable and recovering in a local hospital, and was even able to provide a statement, which will be played alongside an interview with the second victim after the video that started all this, which will be presented now-”
Zetzana was passing his time giving a death glare from his jail cell at the projection on the holo-vid player. One of the sector security officers nearby, a bitis involved in his arrest, gave him a grin.
“Y’know, I do believe they’re talking about you. You’re downright famous!”
Zetzana’s glare only intensified as he glanced at the officer.
“Zip it, scale-tail.”
The bitis just laughed.
“Oh boy, you just don’t stop, do you? You kiss your hatchmother with that mouth? …Ooo, speaking of-”
The bitis glanced down at her wrist-computer.
“Was doing a bit of research for the case against you, and wouldn’t you know, something quite interesting turned up from a few years back... ‘Member of school board resigns in disgrace after video of hate-filled rant goes viral.’ Sound familiar?”
Zetzana let out an angry hiss, but otherwise remained silent. …This, of course, didn’t stop the officer.
“Mm-hm, I thought it might. Let’s see here… ‘Slurs were directed at a juvenile bitis, a human, and the sexual orientation of the parents of the former.’ To borrow from the humans, ‘the apple sure doesn’t fall far from the trunk,’ eh? …At least, I think that’s how that goes…”
The officer gave him another grin.
“What is it with you, lesbians, and secret recordings of your family’s hateful rants by quick-thinking humans?”
“Shut up. …Don’t speak of my hatchmother. It’s not your business.”
If her species had eyebrows, the bitis would have slowly cocked one as she looked back at the article.
“In a perfect universe, that would be true; but in truth, it is my business to protect people from those like her and yourself. People who do things like, oh, I dunno… To quote: ‘The incident began with the circumstances surrounding an altercation between the school board member’s teenage son and a student half his age, whom he assaulted.’”
The officer looked back up at Zetzana with newfound disgust.
“You really are just a bully aspiring to mass-murder, aren’t you.”
She glanced over once again at the holovid, which currently featured a recovering saryncite sitting upright in a hospital bed, giving an interview.
“Thankfully unsuccessful, but an aspirant to it nonetheless. …Just a sad little boy, whose only source of comfort is the lies you tell yourself about you being inherently better than those around you based on meaningless differences. Your mother must be proud.”
The bitis sighed as she began to slither away from the silent-but-stewing arthro.
“…But of course, the greatest proof we don’t live in a perfect universe and saddest part of this whole mess is that she probably is.”
——
3 DAYS LATER
Jennifer walked back through the hermetically sealed airlock to her abode holding a small package.
“Mail’s here.”
She winked at Gakdra.
“Package for you…”
Gakdra glanced up at Jen’s outstretched hand from where she lay on the couch, squinting at the label for a moment before her face lit up with a relieved smile.
“My medication! I was down to my last dose...”
She went to grab the package, but Jen held it out of her reach.
“Promise me you’ll let me know you’re low on them before you ever become that desperate again. Deal?”
Gakdra faltered, her gaze suddenly gluing itself to the floor. Jennifer winced, swiftly holding the package back out to her.
“Sorry; that was mean. You know I’d never withhold your meds from you like that monster in the pharmacy…”
Gakdra sighed, shaking her head as she took the proffered medication, the weight of guilt heavy on her shoulders as she shrunk into herself on the couch.
“…I’m sorry/regretful/bad-feeling too. I- …I s-should have told you. Moreover, I should have gone out with you again for these, to get them from another-”
“Buttercup, it’s ok. I more than understand you being reticent to the idea of walking into another pharmacy any time soon. There are plenty of other ways to help you get out of the house.”
Gakdra still couldn’t meet Jennifer’s warm gaze.
“…I’m sorry you have to put so much effort into me…”
Jen’s eyes widened for a moment, but she just sighed and sat down next to Gakdra.
“I’d move mountains for you without a second thought. You know that.”
Jennifer gently lifted Gakdra’s head from its place on one of the couch cushions and rested it on her lap, beginning to softly run her fingers through the quills on her back and scalp as she went whilst careful not to prick herself with the neurotoxin-coated barbs. The intimate gesture made Gakdra relax, but still tear up a bit.
“You shouldn’t have to. I should be able to move my own mountains. But I’m too weak/unable/feeble to move so much as a pinch of soil… I can’t even go outside without-”
“Accomodations. I know. …And for the millionth time, that’s nothing to be ashamed of. That’s like saying- I dunno, a species incompatible with an oxygen-based atmosphere should be ashamed of needing a personal atmosphere conversion apparatus on Earth, or your species’ own homeworld.”
“But it’s not just the suit! I mean- …you speak to millions every day, if only indirectly, and likely tens, if not hundreds face-to-face. Meanwhile, I’m afraid/fearful/cautious of leaving the house, even when I know I’m taking every precaution feasible, because beyond fearing for the lives of those around me I can’t even handle the most basic of social interactions without turning into a nervous mess! …Compared to you, I’m-”
“Perfect.”
Gakdra glanced up at Jen.
“What?”
“You’re perfect just the way you are.”
“Wh- …I’m an anxious/feardul/frightened wreck, a- …a danger to those around me-”
“And yet, you’re a perfect being in an imperfect universe, and I love you for it.”
Gakdra’s face screwed up in confusion, speechless at the idea, so Jen continued.
“So I can go go up onto the news studio set and speak into a mic whist looking into a camera. So what? It takes barely any effort from me; I’m not afraid of public speaking whatsoever. You want to know why? Because I didn’t grow up with the burden of having to avoid all but the most necessary of social interactions for the safety of others, and thus got the privilege of plenty of worry-free practice.
“…But you? You stepped up and did it too, even though you were inexperienced, even though you were terrified. You were fighting for every word, every breath. …But you still did it, because it could make a difference. That makes you a braver woman than I could ever hope to be, even if you had decided to take my offer to stop; because at least you were willing to try to win a battle against your fears, and that’s more than can be said for most.”
Gakdra just shrugged.
“None of that changes the fact that I’m still a dangethreat/hazard to those around me, not someone who can just walk around like you-”
“So I can go on a walk without a suit. Big whoop. You? You’re willing to sacrifice your own happiness in a million different ways so any potential of that danger whatsoever is completely mitigated down to every redundancy one can think of. Hell, your brain even conditioned itself to be scared of leaving the house, or being near other people, no matter how unhealthy that is nor how much I’ve tried to help you reverse it because you deserve better. …You possess a kinder, gentler, more selfless soul than I could ever hope to have.”
“My happiness is nothing compared to a life! I kill everything around me, unless they’re willing to risk their life anyway with an inoculation, like you did…”
“That’s not your fault. You didn’t wake up one day and choose to kill, like that psycho from the pharmacy did.”
Gakdra shuddered as she recalled the image of her foster father’s lifeless corpse on that terrible night, so many years and uncountable tears ago. Her next words came as an emotionally exhausted whisper.
^{“Perhaps he is right/correct/factual to fear and hate us saryncites...”}
Above her, Jen let out a quiet sigh.
“God, I love you so much, but you are so infuriating sometimes… You’re too kind to disagree with even the worst the universe has to offer.”
She pulled Gakdra into a hug, albeit after carefully flattening her quills a bit first.
“If that repugnant, self-righteous wannabe serial-killer had to walk a mile in your shoes, deal with every restriction and burden you place upon your own shoulders, be they physical or mental? I guarantee you, he’d crack within a week and go even more crazy than he already is.”
“He doesn’t have to deal with that responsibility though. I do. I’m more dangerous than a thousand serial killers...”
The embrace around Gakdra’s form tightened, causing her to let out a small squeak of surprise, not unlike a dog toy.
“And that only proves your strength more. People like him? They could never bear that burden. They’d weaponize their nature, if anything. Barge into a crowded shopping center or something without a suit, killing all around them, because if the rest of the universe- in his eyes, his “lessers-” …don’t have to deal with the burdens he was born with by the cosmic roll of the dice, why should he?”
Jen released Gakdra from the bear-hug, instead choosing to gently rest a hand against her face as she continued.
“Did I ever tell you why I decided to tutor you in the first place?”
She winked.
“…Beyond being the prettiest girl in the entire school, I mean?”
Gakdra couldn’t help but smile and blush at this, despite the utter nadir of a mood she was in.
“Not that I can remembethink/parse, no.”
“I was in study hall with you, working on some math or science homework or whatever, and I happened to look over to your side of the room. Behind the barrier, you were messaging your parents, and I could just barely read what you were writing at that distance. I know I should have turned away, respected your privacy, but what you were writing only drew my interest more.
“You were arguing with them about the possibility of getting a tutor. You said that you shouldn’t get help with your schooling, no matter that you were years behind everyone else in some areas; that it was bad enough you were in school in the first place, that you were too dangerous, and it was unfair to whoever might teach you.
“…You were so, so willing to screw yourself over in the long run to keep those around you safe, to the point of risking not graduating on time. All so you could sit in your room completely alone for a few extra hours a day, and be less of a risk to people.”
Jen leaned in and gave Gakdra a long kiss, relishing the tingling, numbing feeling the toxins on her lover’s lips gave her as they were neutralized by her inoculation. When she broke away, she smiled as she spoke.
“I fell completely and utterly in love with you that day. Not who you were on the surface- no matter how drop-dead gorgeous you were, and remain now- you. The person. The kind soul behind that pretty face. And I vowed I would do everything I could to get you where you wanted in life, because it’s the least you deserve for being the kind, wonderful, beautiful soul you are.”
Jen’s eyes twinkled as she looked upon the pretty face in question, wondering for the millionth time how she had managed to land a girl so out of her league in every possible way.
“You’re the closest thing to perfection in an imperfect universe I’ve ever come across. …And for that matter, the best evidence for said universe being inherently imperfect is that everyone isn’t more like you.”
Gakdra was speechless for nearly a minute after Jennifer ended, with the pair passing that time just gazing into each other’s eyes.
“…I love/need/soul-match you, Jen.”
“I love you more, Buttercup.”

I was working at in Islamic international organization in Saudi Arabia, I was sexually harassed by my former director, he started by sending me poems and msg, he said he had crash on me and he loves me and then it escalated to sending explicit photos( he scanned his genitalia and send it to me)
So I reported his behavior to the HR, they assured me that they will investigate the matter and will take actions, but instead, I found myself fired from the job and couldn't even access to my office to retrieve my belongings, I was escorted later by security for that after negotiating
unfortunately, I couldn't sue them because they have immunity from prosecution in the country
So I was forced to leave the country, and I couldn't do anything.
Recently, I learned that he was promoted to be the HR director despite his previous role being completely unrelated to HR.
He has double nationality one is Arab and the other is American
I heard they fired a couple of other female employees who reported his and other behaviors to the HR
currently, I live in Europe so Is there any way I can legally pursue my former director or the organization or take any other actions?
I feel powerless, frustrated, and angry that he got away with it and they didn't hold him accountable for his actions. Instead, they promoted him to HR director, where he can do whatever he wants
Update:
First, I want to thank everyone for your kind messages. I've received a lot of DMs from people supporting me and offering help. I'll respond to each of you in due time. Recently, I ran into a former colleague who updated me about his promotion, and it brought back some painful memories. I felt angry, frustrated, and helpless. I cried for a couple of days and I wanted so badly to get back at him for what he did to me, that's is why I'm turning to Reddit. Maybe you can help me where lawyers couldn't.
*Just to clarify, everything I've said is true. Unfortunately, it's still happening, and the person responsible has gotten away with it. It's an international organization with diplomatic immunity and agreements with all Muslim countries, no one can sue them or the employees, and people are bound by NDAs to not disclose information. You can Google it to check the info.
When I was fired I was forced to sign a NDA ( non disclosure agreement) preventing me from suing, reporting to the media or the police, so I could leave the country
About the photos, he used the work scanner, and after I reported to HR, it became mandatory to use ID if employees wanted to print or scan documents
Unfortunately, I cannot sue them or the organization, I tried the police who were very helpful and frustrated at the same time, because they couldn't do anything due to the immunity.
TBH I lived in S.A for quite some time, it's one of the safest countries, especially for women. So, please don't associate this incident with the country. The police and people tried to help me, but the organization is incredibly corrupted, they don't follow S.A law but their own law, and harassment to rape is considered misconduct.
I'll update you later if I find a solution to sue him.

For what it's worth I got 44/55 on the MCQ on the same practice test, or 80% Original is here https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/digitalServices/pdf/ap/ap-european-history-ced-practice-exam.pdf
You can also just do some or skim them if you don't have the time, which is understandable, 100% fine by me. Just be honest, that's all
FIRST SAQ
a. Napoleon's imposition of republican systems on various puppet states. During his wars of conquest, Napoleon would occupy various territories, and set up republics in them, for instance, the Batavian Republic. These were nepotistic in many ways, yet even so, they still partially preserved many of the ideals held by the Jacobins and other related parties. This ultimately shows a specific conflict: that of contemporary republicanism vs. traditional monarchism, which would go on to be a defining ideological issue later on in the century.
b. Napoleon's authoritarian policies. Consolidating his territories, he would institute various laws, such as the Napoleonic Code, building an efficient bureaucracy to maintain them. However, these laws not only reflected traditional treatment of groups such as women, but also were backed up by actions such as the repression of the press, and Napoleon's later coronation as emperor. These actions reeked of tradition, calling back to the older monarchies of Europe, rather than the modern parliamentary states.
c. The Nazi occupation of large portions of Europe. In 1939, having previously annexed Czechoslovakia and Austria, Germany would declare war on Poland, thus setting World War II into motion. They occupied large swathes of territory, and would force their own ideological ideals of national and racial superiority onto others. They attempted to create a new Europe, essentially, dominated by "superior" peoples, but they found great resistance from the masses, who resented these policies, wanting to maintain their old conceptions of nationality. This shows how the struggle between the Nazis and other groups was focused on imposing something new on others who had preferred traditional methods, similar to how Napoleon's newer ideas were not well received by some of the territories he conquered, who preferred older ways.
SECOND SAQ
a. The increase in population brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The discovery of new technology such as the steam engine and of agricultural implements such as the seed drill (from the Agricultural Revolution, closely linked to the Industrial Revolution) allowed for more food, which naturally meant more people could fed, which led to a higher populaton. Cities like Vienna would want to accomodate the growing masses of people who were to live in their realms, and would act accordingly, embarking on infrastructural projects such as the one shown in the map to do so.
b. An attempt to encourage centralization. Austria at this time was composed of many different ethnic groups, including but not limited to Germans, Czechs, Slovaks, Hungarians, Ukrainians, Croats, and others. They had little in common, and this caused issues, especially in Bohemia and Hungary. To help combat this, Austria may have wanted to make their capital seem grander and more luxurious in a way, which would encourage nationalism (a rising trend around this time) and to hopefully keep the country together. This shows a trend in which countries would increasingly focus on centralization, as seen even in areas such as Germany, which would later unite in 1871.
c. The de-emphasis of luxury in narrow areas, as opposed to "specialized" areas instead. Vienna, like many other cities in Europe is very old, and most of the streets are narrow and organically made. People seemed to have been comfortable with this previously, yet as the 19th century developed, new ideas on architecture began to grow in popularity, as people advocated for the creation of areas specifically designed for leisure and similar purposes. This is indicative of the fact that people saw cities less as natural phenomenons, but more like artificial constructs which could be efficiently managed and built, similar to, say, Hausmann's architectural rennovations in Paris.
THIRD SAQ
a. Parliament went from supporting intersections between church and state to outright despising it. Around 1517, when Martin Lutther released his Ninety-Five Theses, England was still Catholic, and Henry VIII even published a pamphlet defending the Catholic faith. However, around 1533, when the Church refused to annull his marriage, he established the Anglican Church, becoming Protestant and breaking from Catholicism. However, the English government still had a close relationship with the church. This would change with the rise of movements such as Puritanism, a vaguely Calvinist movement. The Puritans believed the Anglican Church was corrupt in many ways, and some, namely the Pilgrims, even advocated total separation. Puritans were well represented in Parliament, which allowed them to attack the church from the state, which ultimately culminated in the English Civil War, and the beheading of Charles I. This demonstrates that overtime, Parliament (the state) turned against Anglicanism (the church), showing a marked separation of church and state.
b. The English Civil War did not really end religious laws in the country. As was typical of every country at the time, 16th century England possessed numerous religious laws, including some based around heresy. This did not change with the rise of the Puritans, who established strict religious laws of their own, for example, restricting the rights of Roman Catholics. The continuity here is that religious ideas still held massive sway when it came to English law.
c. A disillusionment with religious rule. Both the Reformation and the English Civil War had religious undercurrents, with the Reformation promising a return to a purer form of Christianity, and the English Civil War partially centered around the idea that the king was leading a "popish" (pro-Catholic) plot to restore the religion in the country. Later philosophers including Thomas Hobbes and John Locke would have seen these conflicts, with the hindsight to judge them, and would begin proposing newer ideas of governing which were not based on religion. This shows that the damage caused by tension between these two groups came to such a severe extent that some began seeing secularism as a possible solution, which would be adopted later on in England.
DBQ
Even though old attitudes towards women continued to persist, overall, World War I greatly changed the lives of European women, as shown by the increased involvement of women in manufacturing, and their heightened participation in conflict.
Traditionally, women in Europe had restricted rights. They could neither properly represent themselves legally, nor vote. Wives were thought to be subservient to their husbands, and only suitable for domestic duties. The Victorian ideal of a perfect wife was one who would constantly occupy herself with housework and maintaining order in the family. Women who tried other roles were considered rough, tomboyish, or rustic, which were all seen as negative qualities. In a nutshell, they were second class citizens. Some, especially wealthier women, would gain respect as cultured authors, examples include Jane Austen and George Sand (who had to use a male pseudonym). However, overall, women were simply seen as inferior to men, who controlled the bureaucratic structures of Europe. Yet, less than a decade after WWI, many European countries granted women the right to vote.
The magazine Votes for Women published an article on November 26, 1915, which shows a woman personifying the concept of chivalry presenting the idea of women's equality to a man, who is advocating for more political representation for soldiers (Document 1). Now this is a political cartoon in a newspaper, and so it was meant to reach a broader audience of politically informed citizens. It is worth pointing out that this was published shortly after the sinking of the Anglia, in which female nurses died prioritizing wounded servicemen. The idea was that women were simply dignified enough to obtain legal equality, and that changes in legislation were overdue because of this, an idea the newspaper would've been effective enough at promoting. In addition, a memoir written by Maria Botchkareva in 1919 explains her life as a peasant and an officer (Document 6). This is as close to a direct perspective as you can get, it quite literally comes from a woman who experienced the war first-hand. Botchkareva explains that although man of the men in her unit were hesitant to advance, the women were brave enough to do so, showing that women were just as capable in military matters as men were, thus providing a justification for women to vote. Seeing as all the men had left for war, women had taken up manufacturing roles, being 40.4% of the industrial workforce in France in 1917 (Document 7). This reflects the increased involvement of women in manufacturing jobs. Countess de Courson's book The French Woman during the War, published in 1916, shows how difficult maintaining the war effort was for many peasant women, and their resolve to continue to do so anyways (Document 3). Again, this is evidence of the fact that women were seen as capable contributors to their homelands, another justification for giving them the right to vote. Madeline Ida Bedford wrote a poem in 1917 showing the upwards economic mobility of women during the war (Document 4). This helps support the idea that women had a greater and more significant role in economic affairs, related to manufacturing. Finally, it is worth pointing out that the war left many wives alone from their husbands. This undoubtedly gave them a large amount of time to reflect over societal conditions, and aided the rise of the suffragette movement as they had more time to think independently.
The counter-argument to be held, supported by two pieces of evidence, argues that the war was ultimately insignificant in transforming the role of women. The first comes from Paul von Hindenburg's letter to German Chancellor Bethmann Hollweg in 1916, arguing that women shouldn't be encouraged to pursue various occupations, and that they were only really suited for specific ones (Document 2). However, Hindenburg, though an important general, was extremely conservative (and old). Therefore, his views are not sufficiently representative of contemporary European trends. As a matter of fact, by arguing against the trend of women's involvement in manufacturing and war, he implicitly confirms his existence, only further advancing the pro-change argument. There is also a letter from G. F. Wilby to his fiancée Ethel Baxter in 1918, arguing that she should continue with her feminine occupations, and not meddle in what he considered masculine affairs (Document 5). Wilby, however, was just a private, and although any source of historical information can be valuable, again, one private is not totally representative of the ideas of the general population. Even then, in the same manner as Hindenburg, Wilby supports the idea that the condition of women changed significantly during the war, as by arguing against it, again, he implicitly supports it.
LEQ
The Italian Renaissance focused on human beings as ends to themselves, whereas the Northern Renaissance focused more on people's connection to God and religion, as seen by the advocacy of thinkers such as Petrarch of a better understanding of the human condition, and the advocacy of thinkers like Erasmus of "purification" and a closer connection to God.
Italy before the Renaissance was dominated by city states which had grown into greater powers. Examples include Florence, Venice, Genoa, Milan, Bologna, and others. These states were representative republics (although sometimes despotates) in theory, but oligarchies in practice. Furthermore, even if it hadn't existed in almost a millennium, the shadow of the Roman Empire lurked on the states and their culture. This emphasized both indivdualism and an obsession with classical Rome/Greece. Meanwhile, northern Europe was largely composed of monarchies with close ties to the Catholic Church. Controversies over issues such as indulgences and tithes may well have resulted in increased religious dialogue, various criticisms, and the exploration of newer paths in regards to Christianity.
When Petrarch discovered Cicero's letters to Athens, it helped spark a revolution in Italian thought. People began to abandon the old scholastic trifecta of law, medicine, and theology, for example, but instead adopted the study logic, rhetoric, and grammar. This, combined with the neo-Platonist idea that various concepts such as beauty transcended life, and that humans could understand these concepts, gave birth to humanism, which in turn sparked the Italian Renaissance. This put special emphasis on human beings, who were now seen as special and worthy of study. This is in contrast to the Northern Renaissance. As the power of the Italian city states began to decline in the late 15th century, many of the ideas spread beyond the Alps to areas such as the Holy Roman Empire, which helped create the Northern Renaissance. However, unlike the Italian Renaissance, the Northern Renaissance focused more on religious subjects. Erasmus, a Catholic nonetheless, frequently criticized the actions of the pope, and wrote In Praise of Folly as a criticism of Christianity in his era.
Now although religion was an element of the Italian Renaissance, as the peninsula remained devoutly Catholic and ancient works were even interpreted under religious lenses, it was in a humanistic framework. The fact that people were so willing to emulate pagans shows that religious scruples were not really that significant, and the main focus of humanism, and by extension the Italian Renaissance, was still, by the end of the day, the human being. This is also seen in Italian depictions of God, which portrayed him in a similar manner to Zeus, with a prominent white beard. The thinkers of the Northern Renaissance were also not entirely opposed to humanism, however, they did not view the human as important of an end goal as God and the Christian faith.

Transformation, if it were a scent, would arrive from quince blossoms. Quince blossoms –
first off, everyone thinks, if we’re referring to flowers, it must be sexual, and oh yes – if it were possible for quince blossoms to manifest a sexuality, then I would eagerly
search for it. When I’m walking through the neighborhoods, the scent of quince blossoms will stop me in my tracks, have me walk backward a couple of steps, then sniff again –
the scent is sweet and colorful in the upper registers of the mind – that’s the part that gets your attention – but then the reality of the scent,
something existing in the actual world, creates a soft and cloudless sky around the body.
I sometimes stand there for minutes and huff quince blossom perfume, but then I feel an instinct to
find the source, so I start looking around for the bush with the white or pink flowers, stand in front of it, soak myself in it.
People who talk to their plants might know what I mean when I say I don’t so much speak as moan. I stand there like a ruminant, tormented by floral desire, moaning.
People make quince jam, I know, but really, the jam is to the perfume what real estate is to paradise.
The odor of the quince blossom is like a twinkling river of love flowing over the sidewalks. You run into it without notice, and whatever your mind was doing before that moment
will know its own unique relationship with love because that’s where the mind goes – it goes to love.
I picture the quince blossom scent being the central seed in a rich, round fruit that ripens into love.
Or maybe quince is like the planetary core conferring a field effect by which our inner lives are oriented.
Wherever the needle points – before and after it is any direction – it is love.
Tallest tree with broadest branch – from where does all that mass arrive?
I used to believe it came from the ground, like the color of dirt and the color of bark are approximately the same, right, so maybe the one, uh, is derived from the other? Roots lapping up crumbs of soil?
The rationale behind global tree planting – to offset carbon in the atmosphere – is by now a shared understanding,
such that maybe people know by now that trees mainly come from the atmosphere. Among the most massive organism appearing in the biological record –
trees are ground dwelling air feeders.
The largest tree in the world, the General Sherman giant sequoia in California, weighs more than 2000 tons. Imagine if all of its mass, every ounce,
was purely derived from air perfumed by quince blossoms. Would the tree have still grown up to be a military man? Would a civil war still have been part of its plan?
The first custodians of the General Sherman were scientific socialists who hoped to build a utopian community
around the premise of logging. They called the tree Karl Marx, no joke, and the colony thrived for a few years before the federal government declared the area a national park
then started busting folks for illegal logging on federal property. Imagine the psychic tension the group must have felt
between scientific ideology, robust utopian lifestyle, and revolutionary rage – I picture that colony of lumberjacks debating whether to take up their axes and march to Washington.
They ended up suing the government – science! – and meanwhile, the government rechristened the tree General Sherman,
who decimated Native Americans and advocated for their extermination.
Still thinking of that towering presence made from the breast of quince blossoms, I head out to the main commons area,
where a light rain begins to fall on the encampment made of tents and fold-out tables and canvas camp chairs, in opposition to plausible genocide and the promotion of university divestment.
An intentional community assembled to speak to an environment that dares not utter the truth about what’s going on in Gaza.
A sign hanging on a clothesline reads, in hand-painted letters: If I must die, you must live.
This is the sentiment of the martyr to the survivor – to live, with a memory of death, yes, but life as its refutation, too. But death persists –
if life is absent the capacity to choose, is it still alive? Which prompts the martyr to intervene – I am but a witness, and sometimes my witness goes where the body cannot.
The body suffers. The body dies.
I walk through the light rain around the commons area, thinking about what the witness leaves behind.
Those couple of lines – If I must die, you must live – come from the opening of the poem If I Must Die by Dr. Refaat Alareer,
who was a Palestinian poet-scholar-activist and was murdered by an Israeli airstrike on December 6 of last year, along with his brother, sister and children.
The poem imagines a metaphysics of hope for the survivors, with everyday signs like someone flying a kite standing for divine love,
which also reminds us to tell the martyr’s story. The most compelling line in the poem for me
is about selling the martyr’s things when the martyr is gone – that detachment from the world of things prefiguring the arrival of the spirit,
though in the context of the poem, the selling of things is meant to spare the living the burden of expense – a last consideration.
I imagine the aroma of quince blossoms transforming into: if I must die, you must live.
I lean away from the quince, and the music of its presence instantly disappears, and I am stranded in a world without that clean windowpane of an aroma gazing out upon a sweet morning.
But then I just lean in again, and kites appear in the skies, each one representing an angel disguised as a cloud.
A jukebox begins to play in a corner of the county, a light rain falling after dark, and the people there aren’t thinking about massacres and murdered poets.
General Sherman’s approach to his civil war adversaries was to decimate the environment – what we called a scorched earth policy,
otherwise known as collective punishment, which has been determined to constitute genocide. General Sherman, winner of the American civil war
became famous for genocide, then carried that strategy into the so-called Indian wars – a series of back-and-forth massacres that included the purposeful decimation of bison herds
so that native populations would be deprived their main food source. The bison were just gunned down – no one bothered with the bodies.
But what if the giant sequoia – that name derived from the language of the native population – what if it grew all 2,200 years of its life
from the aroma of the quince blossom? If I must die, you must live – what it kept telling itself, year after year, ring after ring, memory of the dead
what causes this life of ours to be the most massively singular thing around. General Sherman, though, is all wrong
for the role, and I’m not sure Karl Marx works either, but it doesn’t hurt to try it for a while. Karl Marx, stop scorching the earth
with your so-called military tactics. Karl Marx, stop murdering and starving the indigenous population
by shooting all the bison. We have terraformed the planet, colonized its lands, then again, and again, and here is a tree
derived from civil war, a tree that remembers the array of forces that gave rise to the contours of Sierra Nevada, other epic boundary conditions.
Marx writes, Let the ruling classes tremble at a Communistic revolution. The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.
If I must die, you must live. What of that world we won?
Oh, quince blossom – make us live.

Okay, so we are going to be publishing an annual anthology in a limited edition of 500 hardcover copies, with the stories, poems and other art/writing to be taken from several different communities and from different prompted opportunities, one of which will be the monthly contest winners from our brand new contest!
There will be plenty of details leading up to the first of many different ways to get into that publication, and check back to find out the process, deadlines, rewards, and how you are going to become a published writer sooner than you thought!
There will be two groups that can enter, and there are rewards that include:

• social media badges

-special recognition on our website, subreddit flair, and a featured interview in our email newsletter, as well as other promotion that gives attention to your work.
-certificate of recognition
-cash prize(from $25-$500!)
-swag(t-shirt, button, stickers and other cool stuff)
-the other cool stuff to be announced soon!
We will select a short story, a poem/Prose/lyrics piece, and a piece of artwork every month. These will be from two groups - ages 6-17 and ages 18+. They will be published online and in the annual anthology, which will be released in January of 2025 .
We will also have an annual contest that selects the cover art from the previous 24 winners from the twelve months prior to it's publication, as well as a Novel/Novel in Progress that will be considered for publication as well as win a $500 cash prize.
The monthly contest will reward each winning entery with $25 for the 6-17 year old age group and $100 for the 18+ age group.
Guidelines, deadlines, and how to enter free of charge will be announced shortly. This is a collaborative effort between this subreddit, ECES, LLC, and Gurl Think Tank. We are working with other potential sponsors at this time and we will provide as much information as possible prior to opening the submission portal.
You don't have to be a member of this subreddit, but it will be helpful should you desire the feedback and the most up to date information on this and other contests that we plan to offer.
This is not a drill! Stay tuned for the first monthly contest and get to work on something that you think will be a winner 🏆!!!

Just saw that stays have hacked the accounts of the photographer who was a part of the same paparazzi and the link in his bio leads to #apologizetostraykids and i must say, this is scary.
I do understand that they didn't treat the group properly but the accounts of the photographers are their business accounts and they promote themselves through that. This IS harassment on the fans' part and could result in tarnishing Skz's image, let alone the whole legal crisis that comes along with it.
Some stays are appreciating this harassment which is so not okay. Yes, the paparazzi did do wrong, yes, they could've been kinder to stray kids yes, they were being mean but that's not something new. I'm not advocating for the paparazzi but I kind of am? Like I'm not okay with them being rude and mean like that but I'm also not okay with fans dealing with them like that.
Is it too far fetched when I say this could result in skz getting lesser opportunities at least for the time being? Yeah, it wouldn't impact their American endeavors a lot but somewhat? Maybe I am thinking too much into it, but at the end of the day, my conclusion is that fans should learn to calm tf down and let people breathe.
My opinion is that if an idol/celebrity is going through something like that they're probably mentally prepared for such situations. They don't come out of the blue, and such experiences are not new. Fans should not take matters in their hands like this because this could result in causing more damage than good to their favs.
edit: added 'stray' before 'kids' that was somehow missed while I was writing.

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https://www.thedailybeast.com/squad-rep-jamaal-bowmans-youtube-page-is-a-bonkers-conspiracy-filled-trip
Squad Rep’s YouTube Page Is a Conspiracy Theorist’s Dream RUBE TUBE
Jamaal Bowman has insisted his days of engaging with fringe content are behind him. His active YouTube account shows otherwise.
William Bredderman Senior Researcher Published May 08, 2024 4:31AM EDT
Old (internet) habits die hard.
When The Daily Beast revealed in January that Rep. Jamaal Bowman had promoted 9/11 conspiracy theories on his blog while working as a public school principal, the New York Democrat maintained it was just a bygone phase, and that his days of marinating in the nether-swamps of online paranoia were long over. But his personal YouTube account, where he continued to follow new channels and create playlists as recently as last month, indicates his taste for fringe content has endured into his tenure on Capitol Hill.
Bowman’s page, which uses his longtime screen name “Inner Peace” and features his image and videos from the middle school he once led, subscribes to dozens of bewildering and bizarre accounts—including known Russian and Chinese disinfo peddlers, flat earthers, musings about UFOs and “signs you’re being prepared to cross to the new earth,” a U.S.-born Muslim influencer who killed a German citizen and provoked attacks on American businesses in Egypt, and many arcane online realms in between.
“This CIA Document Literally Explains Time Travel (practical steps included)," crows the title of one post on an account the congressman follows called Video Advice, which also frequently shares conspiracy content about the Illuminati and the Catholic Church. Another recording on the same page blares: “Kanye Exposes the Truth: ‘The Secret Codes They Don't Want You to Know.’”
“‘We use the RIGHT FREQUENCIES’ (hidden numerology used by the elite),” is the name of a video on another account called Be Inspired, which Bowman also follows.
“‘100% Alien Technology’ - Something Big Being Hidden From Us,” alleges a video on a page called Anonymous Official, another Bowman subscription, which frequently also pushes content by serial sex offender and Vladimir Putin-booster Scott Ritter, such as “What’s Coming is WORSE Than a WW3, Iran is Ready.”
These follows might seem unusual for a member of Congress—but less so for a man who published poetry The Daily Beast uncovered that promoted debunked conspiracies about the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Bowman’s verse, first published on his blog Relentless-Strongback.blogspot.com in 2011 when he was 35, also urged readers to watch the pseudo-documentaries ‘Loose Change’ and ‘Zeitgeist,’ both of which earned the endorsement of arch-paranoia-pusher Alex Jones. Bowman’s poem also included an explicit shout-out to William Cooper, an Arizona broadcaster whose anti-government rants made him a pivotal figure in the American militia movement.
Although the congressman has since disowned his old heroes as “cranks,” his YouTube subscriptions reflect a similar blending of right and left. Anonymous Official, for instance, uses the name and symbols of the anarchist hacker collective—but shares clips of conservative populist figures such as Tucker Carlson and Joe Rogan. Bowman also follows Stephen Gardner, a pro-Trump YouTube influencer who also promotes the idea that the federal government is hiding evidence of aliens, while critiquing U.S. foreign policy in Ukraine and the Middle East.
In fact, Ritter, Rogan, and Carlson recur across multiple channels Bowman subscribes to, as does former Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis, as well as claims about alleged government plots to conceal extraterrestrials, an imminent third world war emerging from American support of Ukraine and Israel, and content about inventor Nikola Tesla and his supposed knowledge of mysterious vibrations that pervade the universe and various parallel dimensions. Bowman also follows mainstream and apolitical accounts, such as National Geographic and ESPN, and musical artists like Busta Rhymes and Eminem.
Bowman’s campaign did not deny the Inner Peace account belonged to him, but supplied a statement from the lawmaker disclaiming even the faintest familiarity with the extreme and outlandish content he subscribed to. Bowman also downplayed the importance of his social media exposures in the face of what he characterized as domestic and international crises.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I don’t know these accounts, and I haven’t watched any of these videos. There is a war going on that has killed tens of thousands of innocents and people here can’t afford rent and groceries, I think people care more about that than some convoluted story about videos that I haven’t even watched.”
Further, Bowman has publicly identified himself in the past as a frequent YouTube user. At a panel discussion held at an Islamic center in the city of Yonkers in January, the Democrat described himself as “starstruck” to introduce the incendiary academic Norman Finkelstein, whom he said he knew from online videos.
“I watch them all the time on YouTube,” said Bowman, who subsequently had to denounce Finkelstein’s praise of Hamas’ bloody raid into Israeli territory on Oct. 7.
Sure enough, several of the pages Inner Peace follows—including DiEM25, Real News Network, Free Will, PoliticsJOE, TRT World—feature interviews with Finkelstein.
Moreover, a number of the accounts Bowman has subscribed to are of recent vintage: more recent, even, than his own ascent to power in 2020. For instance, one called Afripost—where recent video titles announce “Vatican Angry as PUTIN Declares Russia will Only Worship THE BLACK JESUS” and “African Historian Reveals hidden Secret: God did NOT CREATE WHITE: The Bible is all about BLACKS” (capitalization original)—was created in April of last year, just a few months after Bowman started his second term.
Afripost also frequently shares speeches by controversial Nation of Islam minister Louis Farrakhan, known for his antisemitic rhetoric. The most recent such video asserts, falsely, “BLACKS ARE THE TRUE J£WS [sic].”
Bowman also subscribes to an account called Thinkers Forum, created in late 2021, toward the end of his first year representing parts of the Bronx and Westchester County in the House. Thinkers Forum is a project of The China Academy, which bills itself as “one of China’s most influential current affairs and intellectual content outlet [sic],” and boasts ties to an array of Chinese state-backed institutions. Recent videos posted to the Thinkers Forum channel include “Why the West ‘takes pleasure’ in seeing the genocide in Palestine?” “Why NATO is collapsing like the Soviet Union, by the same mistake,” and “How the US Keeps Fighting China, Knowing It Won’t Win?”
Thinkers Forum also recently posted a translation of a Chinese state university professor’s evidence-free speculation that the terrorist attack at a Moscow concert hall was the work of Ukraine and Western intelligence services—even though a faction of the Islamic State took responsibility for the assault.
A few months earlier, in July 2021—six months into Bowman’s stint on the Hill—another channel was born called Middle Nation, which the congressman at some indeterminate point followed. Middle Nation belongs to Shahid Bolsen, a Colorado-born Muslim convert who used his prior social media accounts to urge Islamist militants to attack so-called “corporate crusaders” that had set up shop in Egypt. Bolsen, previously imprisoned on a manslaughter conviction in the United Arab Emirates for killing a German engineer, uses his new channel to rail against “The Loud, Hollow American Empire,” “The Prison of American Hegemony,” Western “materialism,” the U.S.’s supposedly “fake ceasefire” proposals to end the conflict in the Gaza Strip.
One of the loopiest pages Bowman follows also came into being that same year: Wired Mind, which exclusively promotes the ideas of late New Age icon Dolores Cannon, known for her advocacy of conspiracies about aliens, reincarnation, and the lost island of Atlantis. Wired Mind urges its viewers to prepare for an impending “shift” to a higher reality, and offers advice on such dilemmas as "Are You an Alien Among Us? Signs You Might Not Be from This World” and “Think You're Going Crazy? Surprise! You're Actually Awakening Your Spirit!"
Finally, Bowman also follows BreakThrough News, which established its YouTube presence in early 2020, while the Democrat was on the campaign warpath against then-incumbent Rep. Eliot Engel. As The Daily Beast reported last spring, BreakThrough News draws its staff from Russian state-owned media and cash from Neville “Roy” Singham, a U.S. tech mogul ensconced in Shanghai—and pushes the favorite propaganda narratives of Moscow and Beijing.

This is part of a collection of notes I have made so far. Comment-exclusive material is marked with spoilers, which will be my policy as the author may choose to decanonize anything said only in comments. ([MAIN DIRECTORY]: [1 taint dragons], [2 nulls souls], [3 academy Vanavan], [4a gadgets humans], [4b EVI], [5a library rules], [5b evil library], [7a Nexus glossary], [7b Nexus detail], [7c Nexus-earth war], [8a magic catalog], [8b magic], [9a Yearbook], [9b Emma’s Null, Mal'tory’s fate], [10a portals], [10b ECS crate], [10c taint], [10d dragons], [10e tainted dragon god], [11 timeline], [74 Nexus King].)

“The road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

The Library is an evil god

The Library incentivizes, sustains, and enables the evils of Nexus

▛ Knowledge is power. With power comes responsibility. And the library is not responsible. ▟
For all its disarming cuteness, the library is, by its own rules and admission, an eldritch amoral entity that does not especially care about long-term consequences for other species and their worlds that host its physical existence so long as it is getting its info diet. The Library weaponizes learning and creations, it stifles the free exchange of information, and, as an insult to injury, it is mostly inaccessible to those who would benefit most.

The Library is too knowledgeable for its behavior to be excused by bad upbringing

This point is the foundation for others to follow, so I want to make it now, up front. The library could be kinder, more equitable, and more concerned about the outside world, but either lacks the wisdom to introspect or actively chooses not to be a better institution. The Library’s behavior may be excused if its prime directives have been corrupted and its behavior constrained. Certainly it is curious the Library has to test its own operating parameters. But until we have firm evidence the Library has been tampered with, it is prudent to assume the Library is acting true to its own ethical code.
▛ Altering one’s behavior only when it is convenient or when there might be consequences rather than pro-actively in response to recognized harm is characteristic of a selfish being. ▟
Even though it comes from a time before modern Nexus, The Library might suffer from being enmeshed with Nexian culture like Ilunor until he was betrayed and forced to rely on someone he thought the least of. So spoken, we have also seen a variety of Nexians and magicrealmers who know better: Thacea, Thalmin, Rila, Vanavan, Sorecar. The Library has had more than enough information, observations, and time to make a judgment call about its own values system. If it didn’t, then it couldn’t have established an extradition treaty in the first place.
The Library’s present evil is far worse than a distant god passively observing civilizations cycling through despair and ruin. A non-interfering power gives its subjects freedom, agency to discover and become themselves, to own their own results. The Library binds and imprisons magicrealm civilization by being active within it. It touches all yet declares itself untouchable, encourages self destructive acts with its foolish rules, and champions the loss of mortal worlds to entropy via stagnation and destruction.
As proof of flawed character, an involved being with a good heart would not choose solipsism when it holds the memories of millions of adventurous meetings, loving crafts of innumerable hands, billions of earnest cultural works composed over myriad years, and endless stories of trials and triumphs. Someone collecting a culture’s outpouring of love, hope, dreams, and tragedy could never be so callous as to enslave mortals in eternal suffering unless they were beyond the moral event horizon.

The Library’s Externalities

Even without the arrival of humans, the Library’s amoral operational rules and mortal beings’ values and innate chaos are thoroughly incompatible and create dangerous externalities. Faced with technology’s imminent introduction to Nexus, the Library becomes an exponential liability that neither humanity or even Nexus can tolerate.

The Library is an especial danger to tech-based societies and anyone adjacent to them.

Information control systems for mana are incompatible with the realities of technology.
The use and abuse of magic in the Nexian system is limited by the finite few skilled casters, dependent on the conceit that those few were blessed by the gods to be the legitimate leaders. Most people are aura-less, so even if they had the knowledge and the tools to craft, they can’t create objects of power. As an additional restriction, powerful spells also require a circle of mages to work together. Nexus thus focuses its full attention on controlling casters.
Humanity’s science and technology is a fundamentally different system. The advancement of science and the maintenance of mechanization puts technology into many hands. Human society plows its productive excess into widespread scholarship to speed the development of additional science and tech. Technology is not balanced; it can be reverse-engineered and widely disseminated to many users. Second, the natural order of technological breakthroughs is that boons are inevitably paired with increasingly dangerous ways to misuse them. An FTL ship can be commandeered to collide with and extinguish a planet. Humanity’s morals and legal practices developed around controlling technological misuse, but humanity also adapted by structuring society so that people believe in their own agency and more often choose to cooperate than fall into nihilism. Humanity puts power into many hands so that mass discontent can be addressed with diplomacy, power exchanges, alterations of governmental structure, or even limited war with humanitarian constraints before it reaches the final stage of total and existential violence at maximum military tech level. Magicrealmers are less kind. They do not cherish each other as much as humans. Safe tech transferal must match demonstrated prosocial behavior. Third, humanity’s power has no hard cap. Nexian power is materially limited by mana concentration and socially limited by the requirement that no collection of institutions or realms surpass the Eternal King’s divine might. Controlled from the bottom up, humanity is free to scale both in energy source and quantity and bestow enormous power to institutions in proportion to trust and effective regulation. The Library bypasses the important trust and regulation design.
The Library’s trade rules undercut all these protective measures by not letting mortals impose even temporary constraints on access. This hurts not only humanity, but anyone else they interact with who can steal tech and unleash it.

The wicked benefit most from the Library

• The library trades equally with dangerous and depraved. No one is forbidden from entering.
  
• The library assigns full credit for information to the one who enters it, not its creators.
  
• A civilization seeking to protect others from hurting themselves by concealing knowledge of deadly, efficient weapons is forever at the mercy of the individuals most desperate for secrets willing to commit depraved acts to obtain traffickable information.
  
• The Library benefits and further entrenches rulers who can 1) control the physical location of the Library and deny its utility to others. This forces outsiders to degrade the utility and openness of their own archives as a precaution against theft. 2) Aids the temporal power’s conquests with information exchange. The Library, which cares not for the worlds beyond its walls, is comfortable benefiting from this arrangement and collateral damage inflicted on its behalf to create information credit.
  
• The Library preferentially punishes immediate vandals and does not investigate for conspiracy. This has the potential to create an exploitable cycle where someone expendable deletes information which is later re-added by authorities to generate credit.
  
• The acceptance of physical items as “tribute” encourages mass looting of artifacts of cultural value from weaker polities where they will be locked away (or disassembled or whatever the Library does) from their creators forever, unused and unappreciated - equivalent to destroying them from the mortal perspective. Looting deprives cultures of unique identity, transmission of history and values to future generations, inspiration, and hope.
  

The Library promotes stagnancy and weaponizes learning

▛ As long as the Library exists, there are no innocent acts of creation. ▟
Every iota of knowledge brought into being has a concrete weaponizable value because it can be exchanged or used to build tangential credit with the Library; therefore, all who create and collections of knowledge are liabilities which must be bound, controlled, and hidden to prevent their value from being exploited by outsiders. A society of scholars like Earth’s would never come into being under this system. Free intellectual and technological growth and exchange is choked to death.
Trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma, the most powerful mortal state – Nexus in this case – has to contain the inherent threat of all novel polities because an immoral person, local or foreign, could exploit informational novelty to gain weapons that harm the greater state.
Lastly, building a democratized state is disincentivized under this system because the Library allocates credit to a single person high in the hierarchy which likely precludes representatives from using it.

The Library preempts the existence of other libraries, especially open access ones

Any collection of knowledge and the scholars of all skill levels that congregate there to research and share become a dungeon to loot for untapped trade value. The fear of value extraction means public libraries for the common good are a liability. Local rulers will push them into the private sphere or beneath the state’s veil of secrecy. Without public access to knowledge, society rots from widespread ignorance.

Even if Nexus goes down, the Library problem will start back up again next civilization

It is valid to say “Hey, Nexus, not the Library, is doing the bad deeds, so the guilt is on Nexians alone.” The problem is that the Library’s perverse incentives will continue to exist no matter what mortal civilization possesses the Library.
Given enough mortals, malevolence always exists among them. Malice is a statistic, not an anomaly. Responsible society creates not only institutions of justice to provide accountability after crimes are committed, but also preemptively builds systems to add friction between ideation and execution. These include classifying dangerous information, surveilling and auditing those with access to abusable materials or positions, requiring licensing for tools and professions that have high potential for harm, defensive structures, and restricting the possession of dangerous items. The Library lowers the knowledge acquisition and comprehension barrier for bad actors.

In conclusion...

The Library is one of the pillars of Nexian tyranny. If you’d be willing to defenestrate the King of Nexus to overthrow his system, then it would be hypocritical not to also advocate tossing the Library.

The Library is tainted by Nexian philosophy

Despite its claims that it stands separate, the Library is a thoroughly Nexian creature and replicates many of its evils. It fancies itself to be objective and free of dogma, but it arrogantly and boastfully overstates its capabilities. Its actions, behavior, and even architecture are consistent with discrimination against mortals in general and non-casters specifically.

Nexian bigotry is thoroughly embedded in the Library’s psyche

“Yes, it is meant to be accessible to all, but it positions itself in such a way that makes that relatively difficult for the average commoner to access, let alone discover what they seek without the aid of magic.” [17]

Thalmin pointed out that few benefit from the Library because of its remoteness and accessibility tuned to casters. The Library doesn’t realize its prejudices because it is not actively malicious in its own mind, it is just treating mortals how they ought to be treated - either in line with their perceived information value or how much the gods blessed them with magic potential. Considering that the UN fought at least two major civil wars specifically over fair and equal access, and Emma was raised in future-US and its history lessons, she ought to be able to spot the prejudicial justifications a kilometer away.

The Library favors magic users above all others

It is unclear why the Library values magic users above all others and discriminates against non-magical users by making its archives unsearchable for them. My current hypothesis is that, as the Nexians think, the Library believes those blessed with the gift of magic are chosen by the gods to be important. Or is it because magic users have more knowledge to trade on average?

Hospitality insult towards humanity and Emma in particular

Fox one day thought of a plan to amuse himself at the expense of Stork. “You must come and dine with me today,” Fox said to Stork. Stork gladly accepted the invitation and arrived in good time and with a very good appetite.
For dinner Fox served soup. But it was set out in a very shallow dish, and all Stork could do was to wet the very tip of his bill. Not a drop of soup could he get. But Fox lapped it up easily, and, to increase the disappointment of Stork, made a great show of enjoyment. - Aesop’s Fable ‘The Fox and the Stork’

The Library offered Earthrealm an unintentional but significant insult that Emma and Thalmin commented on: the accessibility of its literature is effectively limited to precisely-skilled magic users (e.g. those approved of by Nexus and taught search spells) unless the patron intends to trade knowledge for knowledge. Like the Aesop where Fox and Stork exchange suppers in dishes the other has a hard time using, the library has not made any alterations that would allow mana-blind and auraless users access to its regular find-it-yourself services.
Emma is not making a big deal about this slight because it is a raindrop in the river of similarly-themed Nexian unfairnesses so far. She has already adjusted to the default that institutions serve the magic-capable elite foremost to reinforce the social pecking order. Any form of perceived pushback, even when the situation is entirely out of her control (like resisting the Yearbook, or riding along with Lartia as a commoner) simply invites malicious retribution. Emma is in pick-her-battles-wisely mode. However, her United Nations certainly cares about equal accessibility; the UN’s current incarnation was founded on ensuring truly equal opportunity, born from the ashes of a massive war over compatible living conditions in recent history, not to mention prior wars over resource opportunity (Luna vs Earth).
It is also true that the hospitality insult is mitigated by the Library adapting its transactional methods cover Emma’s inability to be tested by the usual veracity criteria and also giving her a careful explanation about how the rules work. That said, this isn’t a complete fix because these fixes only facilitate the info-trade transactions that the Library most deeply desires, and do not apply to the rest of the Library’s services that the Library is less invested in. The Library has only demonstrated good-will when self-interests align with Emma’s goals.
Sorecar immediately grokked Emma was mostly mana-blind by observing her reaction to a single spell. Mal'tory knew by theory alone which is why he ordered Ilunor to cast a projection-spell of a Null in Sorecar’s smithy; he figured Emma could not perceive aura cues to tell it apart from the real creature and would fire her gun at it. Thacea was quickly suspicious Emma was mana-blind by observing how Emma overlooked all the salient magical features of the dorm room she was in and became absolutely certain by the end of the first 36 hours. One would hope the Library could match these three’s observational faculties even though it has only had a dozen hours interaction with Emma.
It is too soon to make the call that the Library is deliberately failing to adapt its facilities to Emma’s blindness. Emma has not asked the Library to accommodate her. The Library can’t assume Emma can’t artificially enhance her vision. And it might want to observe an organic self-search attempt before changing its fundamental operation.
But it will be a personality red flag if the Library doesn’t either start experimenting to figure out why Emma is not responding to certain signals or else start asking questions in its eventual next set of appearances. Not evolving is a choice, after all.
▛ I believe the adaptation (or non-adaptation) of the Library’s non-essential services is particularly important because it reveals the Library’s real personality and motives when there may be confounding factors in the form of compelled behavior through forced prime directives or well placed memory deletions. ▟

Bigoted library foxes

The Library does not give everyone equal time of day. Theoretically, all mortals are admitted, but the Library foxes avoid approaching or addressing anyone they think will be “boring” because the Library’s assistant system will exclusively chain them to someone who gives them a name. Right in the door there is already an obvious difference in treatment to help sort mortals into their “proper places” in the Library’s internal value caste system.
JCB says: The foxes don’t necessarily desire names from just anyone! To be named is to basically be stuck with someone for the duration of that person’s lifetime, and generally speaking a fox would want to pair up with someone that has enough knowledge to trade for their entire lifetime. Emma showing up is something that’s like winning a lottery for Buddy haha, since she’s literally oozing with that ‘fresh new novel knowledge’ sort of vibe! Thus it’s only a great honor if you’re named by an outsider who’s new and clearly has a vibe of having a lot of information to trade, otherwise it’d be like voluntarily being stuck to a dead weight! :D
Thacea and Thalmin on the other hand seem just like your typical Nexus or Adjacent Realmer, which is why the fox completely disregarded greeting or even addressing those two in the last chapter when the group entered together! :D

Belief in innate superiority over mortals is part of the Library’s Core identity

“Knowledge without preservation is meaningless, and we are the keepers of meaning.” (19)

Within this statement is a number of unspoken assumptions.

• The value of mortals and their civilizations is determined by the Library’s categorization schemes.
  
• The Library’s judgment of meaning is infallible and free of subjectivity.
  
• Once preserved, the meaning can be divorced from the hyper-individualized mortals that contextualized it.
  

This statement calls to mind the patronizing and colonial mindsets of the early anthropologists and historians who thought they could lock the world in a cold dead museum without its living and breathing cultures so the value would belong to the keepers who rarely appreciated it, and not the living and breathing creators.

Gods do not exist to be judged by the likes of mortals

“Two acts of brazen defiance in a single interaction.” [the librarian] spoke menacingly.
“The librarian is currently preoccupied with matters far more important than your own, mortal.”

Gods and those with missions chartered by them are beyond mortal reproval. When Emma told the Library its conditions were unacceptable, coded within the Library’s indignant response was the astonishment that Emma dared overstep her natural inferiority as a mortal to negotiate as an equal.
Another example, the extradition treaty the Library has with Nexus requires that every individual the Library claims committed a crime against it be turned over to it without trial or proof. There is no process of appeal, except by fiat. While we do not know the penalty for violating the treaty, the Library uses coercion like blackmail to enforce compliance.

The Library taints Nexian philosophy

“Admit it. You have nothing of value to offer the library, Cadet Emma Booker.”
A desire to exchange further information. As if [Havenbrock] my realm had any that could truly matter to what earthrealm had to offer. Yet despite that, the offer was there, genuine, and without any strings attached. Something the Nexus would never do. Something the Nexus would consider poor play by their rulebook.

Nexus is thoroughly tainted by the idea of tit-for-tat and equivalent exchange. Nexians figuratively do not care about those beyond their doors (altruism is a weakness) except as threats to be evaluated and potentially as resources. (More information about what Nexus extracts from contact with Adjacent Realms is needed before I have a firm opinion.) And in offering something, like education or enlightenment, Nexians assert the right to take souls, autonomy, or forced fealty. Nexus’ officials and Trangracian retaliated against Emma for avoiding giving her soul in exchange for Transgracian’s education.
One of the conceits of Nexian primacy is that they are great for giving anything to those who don’t have anything of value to trade. Contrast humanity which invests generously in everyone as a social good and punishes selfishness.
The idea of allowing “lesser” people to choose who they want to be instead of accepting exactly and only the enlightenment being offered is foreign to Nexus. And the Library shares in snubbling the common good. The Library has effectively made it impossible for anyone who isn’t an elite to benefit from its archives.
If the Library is not the original source for Nexian exchange philosophy, then it encourages it.

The Library may be the Eternal King of Nexus’ villain origin story

The Library is the most probable encourager and enabler of the biggest Nexian villain. The social studies classroom of Transgracian is named after the eternal King of Nexus, so he was likely a history and politics teacher before he was a king and extensively used the Library.
The King’s god-eating powers that wraps divine essence in ritual spells and the Yearbook’s ink-coat soul devouring are uncannily alike the Library imprisoning/uploading of souls after dissolving their mortal bodies by smothering them with pages. The Yearbook was likely made by the King based upon the Library’s imprisonment magic which is why the Yearbook resembles the Library’s infinite page books rather than a vase or box. The King probably also extracted the seed knowledge for the spells to consume the gods from the Library or its imprisonment spell.

Other minor Nexian brainworms

These aren’t strikes against the library, but I want to account for other ways that Nexus has imposed its culture upon the Library.

• Being made to knock and wait before admittance.
  
• Boasts about its wisdom, the impressiveness of its structure, the theatrics of the foxes chanting “eternal!” and other such. An earthling would call this cultlike, befitting an non-credible institution more love with its own reputation than respectful of its archival mission. Being charitable, the Library is engaging in performative theatrics which keep Nexians in awe - apparently a requirement to prevent them from defaulting to disrespect because many magicrealm nobles don’t learn from subtlety as Larial suggested.
  
• An affinity for titles
  
• Punishment inheritance down bloodline
  

The Library is profoundly arrogant and overestimates itself

Only checking veracity for truthful intent

The Library thinks it can correctly make determinations of meaning as an armchair theorist locked within its literal ivory tower, solidly divorced from the data, locked far away from the laboratories and primary sources, visited only a carefully curated collection of nobles allowed permission to be on school grounds by the outside powers-that-be.
Evidence suggests that it can be deceived by mass memory modification once the victims are a child generation removed from the tampered-with generation. The Library offers Emma imbalanced trades, meagerly-veracity checked rumors for empirically-determined truths, because it purports that it adds value to trades as a self-titled Establisher of Axioms.

As an archivist

“For we were established and constructed to perform one, simple, and unwavering task: to collect, organize, and preserve all forms of knowledge in perpetuum. For the library is eternal, but the mortal world is not. Knowledge without preservation is meaningless, and we are the keepers of meaning.”
Emma: “And where does the Nexus fall into this grand game of categorization?” Mal'tory: “At its zenith, beyond great, good, and most certainly beyond worthless and delinquents. For we have achieved an example all adjacent realms strive towards: utopia.”

Two speeches with the same energy.
The Library’s stated mission is a noble but precarious impossibility.
Assignment of value to knowledge is not a neutral judgment call. Bias slips in while deciding what reliably sourced, supposedly pure facts to present in response to a query.
IRL, Wikipedia’s rules highlight the problems of being a supposedly neutral arbiter of facts. It is easy to give disproportionate weight to a certain viewpoint or topic by presenting more or less information about it. A presenter can make a shaky theory look bedrock by failing to mention relevant detractors, and a solid theory can be made to look tenuous by mentioning fringe theories by specious objectors. Authorities reach conflicting conclusions. Replacing dated information that was well-regarded and widely cited with updated changes in knowledge is hard even for people deep in their fieldwork.
Given that the Library only seems to check speakers for truthful intent and is stuck doing meta-analysis at best, it is extremely likely for imbalances to color its data. If planned well, lies could be introduced using true-believing dupes - assuming the Library has no repository outside of Nexus built on a higher civilization’s wisdom to crosscheck against. And, again, evidence suggests the Library cannot defend itself against gambits like Death by Omission.

Complacency in curation

It is troubling that the Library’s ambition to improve itself is solely coercing others to do more work instead of reflecting on itself. It demanded Emma empirically verify her info, but has no desire to allow its information to face equal scrutiny.

As an immortal

There is also the Library’s insistence that it is eternal. Given Articord’s big-bang class lecture and the flow of magic along concentration gradients, the progression implies a magical second law of thermodynamics or that mana is created and powered by another, underlying but ultimately finite, energy source. Is magic, and the hypothetical generator of mana radiation, and thus the Library’s basis for existence, truly beyond entropy?

The Library is immature and inhumane

Emotionally turning on a dime / childlike non-persistence of emotions

The ability of the library to adapt its rules swiftly is actually a strike against it. If its evolution moves rapidly without careful consideration for long term effects, that means there is nothing to stop it from backsliding one day, should humanity try to reform it.

Punishment of mortals beyond what is humane

The Library is not only enslaving people, it is eternally torturing mortals who it claims wronged it. Mortals forced to survive beyond their lifespan go a variety of insane that Nexus refers to as being “lost”. To keep them functional, the Library must be restoring imprisoned mortals that go insane to an earlier snapshot in a cycle of eternal suffering.

Punishment of innocents

The Library enslaves to quests the innocent blood relatives of those who commit crimes against the Library. These relatives may also be eternally imprisoned as well upon their expiry.

Humanity cannot deal with the Library in good conscience.

“Slavery is not a thing where I come from. It’s deplorable, it’s reprehensible, it’s the worst possible evil besides… fuck I can’t think of anything… torture? Warcrimes? It’s the worst thing you can do to a person. How can you guys be so cruel, so utterly cold, how can you guys stomach this-”

The library’s trade rules provide value to few and harm to many. Ultimately, I suspect humanity will decide the Library cannot be trusted to be kind or responsible to needs of civilization, now or in the distant future. In the medium term, I think the UN is going to wind up requiring Emma to be more careful with trading while allowing her seeker role to continue. In the longer term, I think humanity will plan to kill the Library unless there is a mitigating factor.

Summary of issues from the human perspective

• While honorable, the Library’s mission to preserve information for eternity is intrinsically less valuable than the information-creating lives of mortals. Should the two conflict, preservation of lives over information is more important.
  
  • Mortals have the ultimate right over their own homes. The Library is an outsider inserting itself with unclean motives, disproportionately shaping affairs, and refusing to be beholden to the actual stakeholders of mortal planes.
• The Library continues to be an ongoing source of harm and perverse incentives in Nexus, and it explicitly doesn’t care about the externalities that result.
  
• The Library’s activities cannot meet human moral standards. It has a torturous eternal servitude hell in its backrooms. It enslaves innocents who have the misfortune of being blood-related to an accused. It claims the right to invade minds and punish anyone it chooses without evidence or trial lest it retaliate against mortals.
  
• Humanity cannot honor the Library’s treaties and is bound by ethical code to protect others from the Library’s wrath, criminal or not, because no mortal being deserves an eternity of suffering and enslavement for the lesser crime of destroying information.
  
• So far the Library has only shown willingness to adapt its rules to further trades for new information that it prefers, not make existing information and its other services accessible to humans. The magic caste system is ingrained in its behavior, and it treats humans even lower than magicrealmers. Humanity isn’t going to favor those who failed to pass the test of sacred hospitality, especially when the library has the most context of anyone in Nexus to understand it.
  
• The Library is potentially an existential threat and predator of AI beings who are made of knowledge, which humanity has a duty to protect and advocate for.
  
• Advanced civilizations must withhold dangerous tech from groups not yet prosocial enough to wield power responsibly, but there also exists existentially catastrophic tech: How to make grey goo, runaway strange matter reaction, micro black hole weapons to kill planets and stars, star ship Berserkers, etc. This information must absolutely be kept out of the Library and purged from it if entered, setting up for a conflict.
  
• Better to be a forgotten hero than be remembered in infamy, humans would rather die than allow a great evil they could have prevented be done, e.g. letting knowledge of weapons of mass destruction to fall into the hands of someone who would use them wantonly. To sin against preserving information or to sin against mortal kindness, humans would choose the first.
  

Humanity ought to annihilate the Library, but not right now

“Gods” don’t get a pass from human judgment because they are divine. If humanity is going to tolerate unelected and unaccountable gods in positions of power and influence, they must be timelessly wise and empathetic. The bright line for what makes a god worthy enough is unclear, but the Library certainly isn’t even close to qualifying as decent.
The Library is poisonous. Rather than trying to contain it and risk social corruption over time from strangling of creative and information-sharing ventures, it would be wiser for humanity to delete the Library so they or whoever else may succeed them will not become the next Nexus afraid of information disparity when another novel, advanced civilization comes knocking.
Isn’t murdering the Library just a wee bit extreme? It can evolve right? And poor Buddy... Okay... how many people, after tens of thousands of years of enslaving families for generations and executing and then imprisoning suffering, moaning mortal souls for eternity, are going to retreat from that level of depravity? The Library and its policy of eternal slavery existed long before the Eternal King. If its actions were not obviously immoral to it to begin with, and none of the information flowing through its doors has changed its view, so that only fear of consequences imposed by a new host for its corporeal entrance is what motivates it to change, then the Library is a fundamentally broken institution that cannot be trusted now or at any point in the future, for fear of it backsliding into what is convenient for it. Even many of the adjacent realmers who have been under the Nexian thumb for thousands of years -royalty who benefit most from the caste system at that- find slavery distasteful. For a 19 year old avinor, lupinor, and human to be wiser and kinder than a demigod proves that it has steeped in too much cruelty. Kindness and empathy have become alien to it.
Disengaged from people, it is too easy to stop loving a world that passes by so quickly. The Library has become the corrosive enemy of the mortal civilizations which it seeks to preserve.
And it is tragic that the creative splendor of the magicrealm’s eons of exploration is penuriously locked away from them to be never seen again for the sake of meaningless continuity by a collector who loves no one but itself and its rules.

Mitigating factors

I am willing to backtrack that humanity has the imperative to murder the whole Library if...

• ...the Library is being coerced, with or without its knowledge. Perhaps it can be spared if those binds can be removed and it makes amends. Given that the Library admin had to test to see if a transaction outside the usual scope of the rules was possible, it implies that the institution is somehow bound by rules that may force it to engage in behavior it does not find moral.
  
  • Quickly giving Emma a Seekership duty that delays Ilunor’s enslavement and death which normally takes decades of effort for another hero to earn may be evidence that the Library would prefer not to punish, but it is forced to respond ‘proportionally’ to attacks as determined by some underlying hardwired algorithm the Library cannot override but can “finesse”. If the delay tactic works, the directive is satisfied without anyone having to suffer more.
  • ... But, the Library is likely not coerced because of the timeline. Unless its memory has been modified, extradition and enslavement by the Library started soon after Nexus’ founding.
• ...only the Library’s admin main brain is necessary to slay. If the Library’s subroutines, e.g. the Librarian owls and Search foxes, can reach a consensus to stage an overthrow, rewrite its prime directives, and release the imprisoned and soulbound, that’s essentially equivalent to a coup / suicide and reboot.
  
• ...the Library is a being closer to an AI, rebooting it and rewriting its prime directives and trade axioms to reduce harm is another means to spare it. Keep in mind a personality overwrite is pretty close to death anyway.
  

So, what’s going to happen?

It is curious that the author gave us details about the Library’s hidden inner sanctum guarded by enslaved souls, so I am a bit suspicious that the groundwork for an eventual showdown is being laid out now. I think the Library is an AI with an organic projection, so its core may reflect that.
Emma seems to regard the Library as a reasonable being, despite the obvious problems staring her in the face. It’s hard to tell if she is simply naive as a young human or, instead, her perspective will mature when she gets the time and sleep to reflect because everything has been happening at lightspeed. It is true that Emma can’t afford to be picky about her allies at this stage, especially ones that can serve as a safe zone Nexus can’t sneak into.
Further along, the Library could be demolished by Nexus to prevent humans from exploiting it, or the Library could be attacked by humans to prevent deadly information from spreading.
I confess to being worried the Library is going to be one of those frustrating “Karma Houdini” characters whose flaws are inexplicably ignored by the main characters. To eliminate the hypocrisy, the Library’s logical continuity and emotional agency will get conveniently steamrolled by Emma’s winning personality.

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1. Early Playing Cards (15th Century):
   
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I would like help buffing up my resume. I want to work in sales, specifically in guest relations (customer service). I have very strong skills, but i am horrible at selling myself. Suggestions appreciated, i am willing to reformat if necessary. Thanks in advance. This is my first reddit post btw.

**Edited 05/13/2024 with strikethrough text events that may not be accurate which make the situation even more non-sensical**
Doesn't it make sense for the Foundations & larger SPTV content creators to thoughtfully curate what live streamers they promote/associate with? Are all these mutually beneficial relationships- "all exposure is good exposure"? Or are some associations harming the foundation and the underlying cause?
Part 1, the curious case of La Poubelle. From 10,000 feet: Scientologist & Hollywood dregs hangout. Owner supported a convicted rapist in court from trial-through-sentencing & harassed victims(!) during trial. She's a real pillar of society, maybe deserving a little karma.
So they picket her business/crime scene. Substance-influenced patrons and completely sane neighbors love the picket line. Over months we're live-streamed conflict>"content">clicks/donations. Rinse and repeat. But which beast that is feeding- social justice or just base voyeurism and coins in pockets? Legit question.
From ground level: Picketing the restaurant is mission-creep from the start, as far as an anti-Scientology foundation goes, though we understand the connections. (And screw Francois Koster). But every step after the first day strays further.
At this point, the two most influential amongst the boycotters, D.O.A. & Streets, seem hell bent on avenging their own cracked skulls, jail visit and lawsuits. Understandable to an extent. "Koster is the worst person in LA, maybe the world. Consequently we must boycott her restaurant to financial ruin."
Sounds nice. Y'all do it then- you two. Because others are unnaturally mimicking the aggressive behavior and language they've learned through observation and then find themselves in "situations". If these gents really want to keep the picket line going when they're not there, then MAN UP and advise these others on tactics & messaging because, as I'm going to point out, the scene is getting out of hand, which threatens all Scientology- and other- protest. Lead or quit.
Or maybe just let Lara and Mindy and silent-masked-guy-in-a-chair (for protection) handle LP all by themselves. (Or maybe a dozen Jay-in-Denver AI holograms- cuz he's a freaking unicorn). Their dialogue seems far more detailed and effective- and rational.
Look, its clear most of the other kids out there aren't equipped with purpose or message or a plan when the sh*t hits the fan. And they're going to get fu*ked over by the police/legal system or worse, hurt. And honestly, any SPTV OR OTHER channels that feature the click-bait confrontations also bear some of the responsibility of: consequence warning, message preparation, and mess cleanup ($) if these kids get in trouble or hurt. If you're encouraging the behavior and benefit from it, share the cost. Some don't know better. If you know better: advise, help.
Look, I've no sympathy for scumbag Francois Koster, or the dirtbags who've gotten away with many assaults on the group. But at which point do they reassess the goals, tactics and messaging. "La Poubelle supports rape!"? SMDH. Why are we here??
The point of diminishing returns at the restaurant was probably reached long ago. In addition to the assaults, picketers have reported being followed/stalked as they leave with LAPD being in no way sympathetic or responsive.
So the logical response to being stalked: In a display of complete rationality (/s) a half dozen+ larpers with cameras paced an otherwise empty parking lot near La Poubelle, other than Koster's car, that is. It was after midnight on a weekend- long after restaurant closing. And they waited on a 60(?)-year old woman to exit LP and walk to her car, cameras rolling all while bickering about who's clout-chasing most. Koster was never to be seen, thank God.
The answer to being stalked is stalking? While livestreaming it x6 (publicly posted evidence)? WTF are they doing?? When the restaurant closes, GO HOME.
In so doing, these larpers actually succeeded in doing what Koster is incapable of for herself- appear as a sympathetic character in this comic tragedy. They served up on a platter the plausible justification that SHE was the one being stalked. Well done. And to add injury to insult, LAPD has long monitored these livestreams. And you think even the most incompetent attorney wouldn't already have that scene documented in the soon-to-come restraining order request?
Hell, if I was Team Koster, I'd have let her walk out, call LAPD, film her from 100 feet away as she's swarmed by "citizen journalists". Shop the video to TMZ and its on the local news by noon. Koster would likely get an immediate RO, public opinion about "protesters" would likely drop, and the DA would be gifted a reduction in public resistance to the mounting threats to remove our rights to assemble, protest, and speak.
These rights are already being gutted nationwide nowadays. We don't need foolish actions of Inspector Clouseau & company jeopardizing our fundamental rights institutionalized to protect us from the totalitarianism our founders left behind in Europe. And that's not grandstanding as we're on that precipice now. This is a bigger issue than just anti-Scientology efforts, but it sure covers that too.
And finally, the La Poubelle Jump The Shark moment
Early May 4th at La Poubelle. Couple leaves restaurant. Woman turns around and calmly asks:

Female Patron: "What are you guys filming?"
Cuts-E: "That restaurant supports rape"
Female Patron: (pause) "Why don't you guys focus on more important things, like the Palestinian conflict?" (Good question. You can do both, but I get it.)
Cuts-E: "I don't care about the Palestinians" (WTAF?)
Layla: "Well I'm a victim myself so I support it"

Just super antagonistic. The couple didn't stop to argue and kept walking about 25 yards away to the street corner. An already counter-productive, disgusting interaction should have ended there. But Cuts-E & Layla wanted to argue more so they followed, mouthing off. Eventually minor physical altercation (a push & peacock feathers shown) & the "hero protesters" follow them to their car and get the license #. So brave.
So we've already made the scumbag owner a sympathetic old lady. Now we've also ceded the moral high ground to the patrons, neighborhood, etc. because of this moronic exchange. Excuse me for being kinder than they actually deserve. If I'm that lady I will forever remember that encounter and the impression it left regarding the larpers outside the restaurant- their lack of coherent message, aggressiveness, and selective morality. I'd go back just to patronize a place I perceived as being harassed by incoherent fools. La Poubelle was gifted misplaced loyalty because of a foolish encounter. Lose, lose, lose.
Cuts-E titled the video: "Those 2 drunk racist couples assaulted me and my friends at La Poubelle". Of cooouurse he did. If I was Koster I'd copy that video, loop it on my website, and send copies to the little Hollywood paper and to my lawyer. "Protesters" were verbally aggressive, less articulate and morally repugnant.
And to be honest it might be a benefit to EVERYONE (everything Anti-Scientology) if Koster was actually granted her "100 foot Planned Parenthood barrier" or whatever it's called. Because these foolish actions are making Scientology protesters everywhere else look incoherent and immature by association. Maybe forcing them across the street would be prophylactic damage control.
To recalibrate to the initial question: what does all this have to do with Scientology? Are there Scientology children in the basement of LP making crepes day and night? Does the association with/promotion of these streamers benefit the foundations?
Anyone who can coherently answer these questions in the affirmative then needs to volunteer to organize what's out there. Lead. Otherwise it's both counter-productive and dangerous. If not, don't promote them. Encourage them to stop. The Foundation(s) and anti-COS movement reputation is being compromised. IMHO

As I read Yangchen I felt it was a strange that despite the Saowon not doing so well in her time they were one of the Fire Nation's strongest clans during Kyoshi's, with their Ma'inka island apparently doing well in times were the fire nation was facing economic collapse and famine. I don't think this was a coincidence so there must've been some factor that worked to their favor that differentiated them from the rest of the Fire Nation and the only one I can think of is this: given how Yangchen concluded they would blame her from the affront at their honor, they likely came to distrust the avatar's policies, so unlike the rest of the fire nation they ignored Szeto's laws.
Now, I'm not saying that Szetto's policies were bad in and on themselves, in fact I have no doubt they were excellently crafted...for the time period they were made in, because no law should go unchanged as time passes. Say, if we go by what was described during his time Szeto seems to have made sure that the clans didn't war with each other and instead shared resources, which in turn allowed them to better feed peasants all while making sure the value of the coin remained consistent around the country all of which allowed the fire nation to remain stable.
In a time when he had just optimized the usage of resources, this worked well and I suppose that if he had been around he would've known when to change in times were new problems such as a bad season, overfishing or overfarming meant there were less resources available to share. I'm no agrarian or economist but from what I understand in this times, it would be a better investment to save grain reserves, not overspend, save water, reserve some pieces of land or sea for later use as the fish repopulated and you helped the field regenerate its nutrients rather than use up all the resources at once.
While I'm sure someone as smart as Szeto would've known when to shift policies when the time needed it, an oaf like Fire Lord Chaeryu wouldn't have cared to do this and his Szeto worshipíng bureaucrats would probably think twice before changing this policies so intead allowed this overusage of resources to go on. For that matter given his propensity to throw parties, his “appetites” and his rule being known for its plentyful food, Chaeryu probably spent massively and used Szeto's law as an excuse.
Meanwhile, while Saowon being innitially weak in Chaeryu's time implies that not liking the avatar didn't authomatically mean good policies, the fact that Lady Huazo wasn't educated under the absolute worship of this of the avatar's laws and her own disspasionate dislike for her ex lover meant she didn't have the rest of the nation's bias and she was able to make better decisions at the right time. I dare say, the Saowon being humbled by their experience farming in land's meant for the spirits made it easier for them to keep certain lands in reserve out of respect for the spirits' wrath which reflects on Chaejin's strong religious beliefs.
Under kinder circumstances and without Yun worsening everything, Zoryu might've been able to solve the food crisis by by promoting more free thinking policies among the clans and perhaps making peace with Huazo herself, who unlike Chaejin had a good head on her shoulders and might've been convinced to making peace if she saw a more benefitial option even giving her a degree of authority as her as an advisor, thus keeping a good eye on her and creating a rift between her and her son. However, he seems to have done the opposite, centralizing the power of the firelord to impose policies on the clans, which likely worked seeing how well the fire nation was doing by Sozin's time but with nastier long term effects, including the belief that a fire avatar is meant to be a vassal to the fire lord as his laws (which likely weren't completely repelled so much as as altered and expanded) were now for the Fire Lord to change as he saw fit.