Casual Easter Outfits For Women

... the wide jeans (EOS = silhouette); casual, but put together. The creative... not a fan of pastel Easter egg colors or of floral... shoulder pads to rival the women of Dallas soap opera fame... romantic blouse juxtaposed with the casual cropped jeans...kind of mixing ... this blouse and these jeans...outfits I'm kind of stuck on, ...

... or will have a happy Easter! And if you didn't, I...…Sorry, Lance…but I like women." Lance blinked, before he practically... fully dressed to their usual outfits when it came to acting... we would kill him." The casual mention of murder aside, Lance...

Dallas from FunScout with this weekends happenings roughly 5 miles from downtown Schenectady. Happy Easter to those that celebrate 🐰🐣🥚🌷🍫 Of course there is a lot more happening around the capital region outside of downtown which you can check on FunScout if you don't mind traveling a bit further. Did I miss something? Please share in the comments! 📍 Thu, Apr 2 NY Phoenix vs. Jersey Shore Breaks — M&T Bank Center Experience a thrilling showdown as top competitors face off in an action-packed match filled with skillful plays and electric crowd energy. ICFS presents David Cronenberg’s Scanners — Proctors Theatre Explore a world of dangerous telepaths and corporate intrigue in Cronenberg’s influential thriller, with a special Reel One videocast featuring cinematographer Mark Irwin. On a Mission — Schenectady County Public Library Space historian Valerie Neal shares fascinating insights and firsthand accounts from trailblazing US women astronauts, highlighting their achievements, challenges, and cultural impact across decades of space exploration. Singles Mixer By Wingman Of The Year — The Bunker (Mohawk Harbor) A welcoming, low-pressure mixer for adults 30–55 featuring guided conversation starters, icebreaker games, optional tarot readings, drinks, and limited $30 tickets. Vice After Dark — Vice & Virtue Experience a lively evening at an intimate bar with delicious drinks, good company, and expertly selected music setting the perfect after-hours mood. Tame The Rooster with DFX Entertainment — Rivers Casino & Resort Schenectady Enjoy free line dancing lessons and energetic country entertainment from Tame The Rooster and DFX Entertainment in an upbeat, 21+ atmosphere. DIY Spring Themed Magnet Gift Sets — Thrifty Connections Ease into the season with a relaxing workshop that blends a breathwork warmup, creative collage, and sustainable crafting to make your own set of six spring-inspired magnets with playful, botanical designs. Bingo — Schenectady County Public Library Enjoy a fun-filled evening playing multiple rounds of bingo led by a librarian, with opportunities to win prizes and socialize. 📍 Sat, Apr 4 Vice After Dark — Vice & Virtue Experience a lively evening at an intimate bar with delicious drinks, good company, and expertly selected music setting the perfect after-hours mood. Martin and Kelly — Rivers Casino & Resort Schenectady Country duo Martin and Kelly team up with DJ Kevin Richards for a lively evening packed with music, dancing, and good vibes for guests 21 and over. April 2026 Game-A-Thon — Proctors Theatre All-day gathering of board and roleplaying games with morning and evening sessions—multiple Pathfinder 2e tables, Star Wars: Scum and Villainy, Blood on the Clocktower and Pendragon, plus an annual flea market and online preregistration for games. Jazz Evenings with David Gleason Trio — Rivers Casino & Resort Schenectady Enjoy smooth, classic jazz from the David Gleason Trio in an inviting setting featuring cozy seating and themed drink specials. Theatresports Semi Final — The Mopco Improv Theatre Two improv teams compete in a fast-paced, interactive comedy battle packed with unpredictable moments, audience participation, and plenty of laughs. Lavender Sky! — Canvas, Corks and Forks Enjoy a guided painting session featuring tranquil beach themes, with food, drinks, and a welcoming space to let your creativity flow. Big Eyed Phish with James Kelly — Frog Alley Brewing Co. Enjoy a night filled with crowd-pleasing tunes from James Kelly and the Dave Matthews tribute band Big Eyed Phish, all in a lively brewery setting. Scott Hopkins Trio - Sat. Night Jazz — Van Dyck Music Club Enjoy a lively evening of classic and contemporary jazz with Scott Hopkins Trio performing in a relaxed, welcoming club setting. Workshop: Hand-Felted Birdhouse — Mabee Farm Historic Site Create a custom felted wool birdhouse while exploring wet and needle felting methods guided by an expert—all materials included and no experience required. Petie Cotton Tail!! Bring the family! — Canvas, Corks and Forks Celebrate the season by painting a cute bunny together, with all ages welcome to enjoy easy instructions and a cheerful studio setting. Spring Tea Cups April 4th — Thrifty Connections This hands-on workshop invites you to design a unique teacup garden using provided materials, perfect for springtime décor or gifting, with no experience required. Darling Deer Paint & Sip Event 4/4/26 @ 6:30pm — Art in Mind Enjoy a relaxed, all-ages evening painting a charming deer on canvas with step-by-step guidance, drinks, and snacks available in a cheerful studio setting. Library Egg Hunt — Schenectady County Public Library Kids and families can craft their own paper baskets, search for eggs hidden in the library, and redeem their finds for chocolate eggs during this festive drop-in event. Workshop: Hand-Felted Birdhouse — Historical Society Museum & Library Create a charming felted birdhouse from scratch as you learn wet and needle felting skills, guided by an expert and surrounded by creative energy—all materials included. Art Workshops for Kids: Easter! 4/4/26 — Art in Mind School-aged children can enjoy two hours of hands-on art-making, including an Easter egg garland craft and a painted canvas, with all supplies provided and no experience needed. Jazz Evenings at The Landing Hotel — The Landing Hotel Experience smooth live jazz performances and expertly crafted cocktails in a relaxed, stylish hotel lobby atmosphere each Saturday evening. The Beauty of Spring in Watercolors $50.00 — Thrifty Connections Explore watercolor techniques in a cozy, beginner-friendly workshop, guided step by step by a local artist as you capture serene spring landscapes—all supplies included. Open Mic — Moon & River Cafe Enjoy a relaxed night where musicians and performers share their talents onstage, creating a lively, community-driven atmosphere over great food and drinks. Fiber Therapy Drop-In — Schenectady County Public Library Work on your favorite fiber art project, connect with other makers, and exchange tips in this casual, skill-sharing group for adults. 📍 Fri, Apr 3 The Bijou - Adult Variety Show! — Van Dyck Music Club Enjoy an adults-only cabaret filled with captivating burlesque, playful humor, and a variety of daring acts from The Bijou troupe. DJ Pauly D — Rivers Casino & Resort Schenectady Dance all night as DJ Pauly D brings his signature party-starting energy, fresh remixes, and reality TV charisma to an electrifying nightclub atmosphere. Ten Most Wanted and DJ Trumastr — Rivers Casino & Resort Schenectady Catch a vibrant mix of live music from Ten Most Wanted and dynamic sets from DJ Trumastr in a lively casino lounge atmosphere, perfect for music lovers and night owls alike. Vice After Dark Jungle Punk — Vice & Virtue Expect jungle-infused punk and high-energy DJ sets in an intimate late-night bar setting, with bold outfits encouraged. Free Beer and Hot Wings — Frog Alley Brewing Co. Experience the energy of a live broadcast with the Free Beer and Hot Wings show, complete with fresh drafts and good company at Frog Alley Brewing Co. Live Music with Matty Finn — Rivers Casino & Resort Schenectady Enjoy a relaxed night featuring Matty Finn’s live music as melodies fill the elegant hotel lobby, along with great company and drink specials. Big Sky COuntry with dan sherwin — Frog Alley Brewing Co. Kick back with performances by Dan Sherwin and Big Sky Country, featuring an evening of live country music and craft brews. Spring Meadow Paint & Sip Event 4/3/26 @ 6:30pm — Art in Mind Enjoy a relaxed, all-ages painting session guided by a friendly instructor, complete with drinks, snacks, and everything you need provided. Local 11 at Electric Grinch Easter Extravaganza — Electric Grinch Expect an energetic set of originals and familiar covers, tight musicianship, playful banter, and plenty of crowd-friendly singalongs in a cozy restaurant setting. Tiny World: Miniature Book Nook Workshop — Schenectady County Public Library Create your own enchanting book nook diorama in this hands-on workshop, perfect for anyone who loves artful details and cozy stories. April in Paris! — Canvas, Corks and Forks Enjoy a guided painting night inspired by Parisian spring, with step-by-step instruction, vibrant art supplies, and drink specials. Schenectady Social Cycle — Hardwired Fitness Experience sociable group bike rides designed for all speeds—just bring your bike, invite friends, and get ready for a mellow community roll. Tea Cup Succulents April 3rd — Thrifty Connections Enjoy a relaxed evening selecting a vintage tea cup and designing a unique succulent planter, with all materials provided—no experience needed. Josh 2050 Band & Tumbling Gap — Moon & River Cafe Catch a day of innovative Appalachian-inspired sounds from Josh 2050 Band, the dynamic energy of Tumbling Gap, and special sets by guitarist Dave Kitchen at Moon & River Cafe. Absolute Beginner Line Dance Lessons — Viaport Rotterdam Friendly, drop-in lessons guide you step by step through foundational line dances set to country, pop, oldies, and cultural tunes—no experience needed. submitted by /u/DallasRPI to r/schenectady [link] [comments]

Dallas from FunScout with this weekends happenings roughly 5 miles from downtown Albany. Spring is officially here! 🌱🌷🌸🌼 Of course there is a lot more happening around the capital region outside of downtown which you can check on FunScout if you don't mind traveling a bit further. Did I miss something? Please share in the comments! 📍 Thu, Mar 26 The Egg Presents: FIREBIRD — The Egg Prepare for an immersive audiovisual journey as a massive orchestra of recycled car lights dances in hypnotic sync with Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite, blending art, music, and technology in a dazzling theatrical installation. Overkill — Empire Live Albany Get ready for an explosive evening of relentless thrash metal as Overkill brings their legendary sound and high-intensity performance to the stage. Drag Me to Nine Pin — Nine Pin Cider Get ready for a fabulous drag show hosted by Typhoid Mary, featuring a lively mix of queens, playful music, and plenty of sparkle in a welcoming cider bar setting. Capital Regions Chamber Annual Dinner — Albany Capital Center This prestigious gathering draws over a thousand professionals for a dynamic evening featuring excellent networking, distinguished guests, and a memorable program celebrating regional achievement. Amber Autry — Funny Bone Nashville’s Amber Autry brings her dynamic presence and quick wit to the stage, delivering laughs shaped by her Second City roots and appearances alongside comedy’s best. The Mikes — Ophelia's Enjoy an evening filled with lively performances from The Mikes, friendly bar vibes, and a spirited audience at Ophelia's. Exploring Chinese Cuisine at Sur La Table — Stuyvesant Plaza Enjoy a guided cooking experience as you prepare dumplings, stir-fries, and more, while learning about traditional Chinese ingredients and methods. Open Mic Night — The Lark Street Tavern Enjoy an evening of live acoustic performances and spoken word as talented locals take the mic in a relaxed, community-driven bar setting. Karaoke — Arsenal City Tavern Step up to the mic for an entertaining night where you can sing your favorite songs, cheer on others, and soak in a fun, energetic atmosphere. *Photos with the Easter Bunny — Colonie Center * Celebrate the season with festive photos alongside the Easter Bunny, including special sessions for pets and sensory-friendly visits. BINGO @ The Gateway — The Gateway Diner Gather with others for a spirited night of bingo featuring prizes like cash, drinks, and gift cards, all while enjoying a full menu and bar in a relaxed restaurant setting. Karaoke — The Lark Street Tavern Experience lively karaoke sessions with excellent sound, giant lyric screens, tasty pizza slices, and Saturday night drink specials in a welcoming bar atmosphere. Fitness at the Plaza presented by Highmark Blue Shield — Empire State Plaza Enjoy a mix of yoga and PHIIT2 interval training led by expert instructors, offering playful movement and motivation for all fitness levels—just bring your own mat and towel. Thursday Night Trivia — Fort Orange Brewing Test your knowledge in a laid-back atmosphere where teams enjoy free-to-play trivia, cool prizes, and the option to bring your own food. Open Mic Comedy — The Lark Street Tavern Aspiring and seasoned comedians take the stage to share new material while the audience soaks up a lively showcase of stand-up in a friendly, supportive bar atmosphere. Archduke — Capital Repertory Theatre This audacious blend of farce and tragedy follows three desperate youths swept into history’s most infamous assassination, in a production both hilarious and haunting. CR Clash: Weekly Smash Bros Melee Tournament — VDO Gaming Face off against fellow Smash Bros fans in weekly Melee tournaments featuring bracket play, a welcoming community, and prizes based on entries. Just Keep Writing — Albany Public Library (Washington Ave) This friendly fiction writing group offers a space for teens and adults to work on projects, share feedback, and encourage each other’s creativity. Introduction to 3D Modeling — Albany Public Library (Washington Ave) Learn the basics of 3D modeling with hands-on instruction in Tinkercad, perfect for teens and adults curious about digital design and 3D printing. March 26 Scrabble Club Session — New Covenant Presbyterian Church, Albany, NY Gather for a lively evening of Scrabble games, where players of all levels test their vocabulary skills and enjoy casual camaraderie. Qi Gong — Center For Natural Wellness This gentle class blends meditative breathwork and slow, restorative exercises to support relaxation, balance, and overall well-being. Throwback Thursdays — Ophelia's Every Thursday 📍 Fri, Mar 27 *Photos with the Easter Bunny — Colonie Center * Celebrate the season with festive photos alongside the Easter Bunny, including special sessions for pets and sensory-friendly visits. Karaoke — The Lark Street Tavern Experience lively karaoke sessions with excellent sound, giant lyric screens, tasty pizza slices, and Saturday night drink specials in a welcoming bar atmosphere. Archduke — Capital Repertory Theatre This audacious blend of farce and tragedy follows three desperate youths swept into history’s most infamous assassination, in a production both hilarious and haunting. 2026 NCAA DI Men's Ice Hockey Regional — MVP Arena Top collegiate ice hockey teams face off in exhilarating regional semifinal and championship matchups, with single and all-session tickets available for fans who crave high-stakes action. The Egg Presents — The Egg Bluegrass pioneer Peter Rowan joins the Sam Grisman Project for a warm, fully acoustic tribute to the vibrant legacy of Old & In The Way and more, featuring top-tier musicianship and genuine storytelling. The Dollop: The Dollop Podcast Live — The Egg Comedians Dave Anthony and Gareth Reynolds bring their acclaimed podcast to the stage, riffing on strange moments from history with hilarious, spontaneous banter—plus an interactive post-show Q&A for select ticket holders. Tour of the New York State Museum Paleontology Collection — New York State Museum This guided experience offers a close-up look at ancient sea creatures, fossil plants, and rare specimens, led by the State Paleontologist in an exclusive backstage tour perfect for curious minds. The Lycan — Empire Live Albany Brace yourself for a hard-hitting showcase featuring The Lycan, Hate The Adversary, Morticide, Weeping Ange, and Scumville as they unleash relentless metal and raw passion on stage. Flower & Garden Expo — HVCC Explore immersive floral exhibits, shop from over 190 vendors at the lively marketplace, enjoy tastings, and catch hands-on gardening seminars and demonstrations throughout the weekend. Jiaoying Summers: Lucky Pony 26 — Funny Bone Award-winning comic Jiaoying Summers brings fearless, modern humor drawn from her life as a first-generation immigrant, offering bold takes on cultural clashes, identity, and motherhood in an evening packed with laughter and standout storytelling. Happy Hour with CC Smokes at The Eleven — Lark Hall Enjoy a lively evening featuring free live music from CC Smokes and happy hour specials, perfect for kicking back with friends in a vibrant setting. Joanne's Driving the Bus @Ophelias March 27th — Ophelia's Experience an electrifying set of rock, pop, soul, and blues as Joanne's Driving the Bus takes the stage for a fun night out. “MASTER HAROLD”…and the boys — Steamer N.10 Theatre This staged reading delivers an emotionally charged story about friendship and race, set in a tearoom as personal and political conflicts collide. USS SLATER Deep Freeze Tour — USS Slater Experience a rare guided tour of the USS Slater during its off-season, highlighting ongoing volunteer work and ship maintenance usually unseen by the public. Salsa & Bachata Pop-Up Friday at Bar Vegan — Ritmo Room Enjoy an upbeat night of Salsa and Bachata with lessons, plenty of social dancing, and a vibrant crowd perfect for newcomers and enthusiasts alike. Bingo Night with Heat N Salt Food Truck! — Fort Orange Brewing Enjoy a fun-filled night of free bingo, tasty Heat N Salt Food Truck eats, and great brewery drinks, with prizes up for grabs in every round. Pop-Up: Butterfly Nook518 — Nine Pin Cider Browse a curated selection of books for all ages, including fun Blind Date bundles, while enjoying craft ciders and relaxed bookstore vibes. One Heart Band at O'Slattery's — O'Slattery's Irish Restaurant & Pub Catch a high-energy live set filled with beloved covers from The Beatles, Sublime, Bonnie Raitt, CCR, the Grateful Dead, and more in a fun pub atmosphere. UAlbany Share the Knowledge Graduate Student Presentations — Albany Public Libary (Pine Hills) Dive into concise, engaging presentations from UAlbany graduate students about their latest research on climate, weather, and environmental issues, with opportunities to ask questions and learn more. Team Trivia — The Lark Street Tavern Test your team's knowledge of current and past events in a lively atmosphere with great eats and drinks, perfect for a fun night out. Cassandra Franco — Emack & Bolio's Albany Enjoy an evening of acoustic music as Cassandra Franco covers an eclectic mix of artists, pairing mellow guitar with a welcoming, laid-back atmosphere. Board Game Night — Son of Egg Enjoy an evening of friendly competition and laughter with a variety of board games, tasty eats, and great company. Storytime at The Pottery Place: Harry The Dirty Dog — Stuyvesant Plaza Little ones enjoy a lively reading of Harry the Dirty Dog followed by hands-on painting of a special Puppy Bowl to take home. Dan Dekalb — 677 Prime Enjoy an intimate evening at 677 Prime with Dan Dekalb’s live music enhancing the restaurant’s sophisticated atmosphere. Friday Night Trivia — The Lark Street Tavern Gather your crew for a fun, laid-back evening of trivia, great food and drink, and prize giveaways at a friendly neighborhood bar. Magic The Gathering — Fortress of Gaming Experience a range of Magic: The Gathering events each week, from casual Commander to Legacy, Modern, and FNM Booster Drafts, perfect for players of all levels. 📍 Sat, Mar 28 *Photos with the Easter Bunny — Colonie Center * Celebrate the season with festive photos alongside the Easter Bunny, including special sessions for pets and sensory-friendly visits. Karaoke — The Lark Street Tavern Experience lively karaoke sessions with excellent sound, giant lyric screens, tasty pizza slices, and Saturday night drink specials in a welcoming bar atmosphere. Archduke — Capital Repertory Theatre This audacious blend of farce and tragedy follows three desperate youths swept into history’s most infamous assassination, in a production both hilarious and haunting. Flower & Garden Expo — HVCC Explore immersive floral exhibits, shop from over 190 vendors at the lively marketplace, enjoy tastings, and catch hands-on gardening seminars and demonstrations throughout the weekend. Jiaoying Summers: Lucky Pony 26 — Funny Bone Award-winning comic Jiaoying Summers brings fearless, modern humor drawn from her life as a first-generation immigrant, offering bold takes on cultural clashes, identity, and motherhood in an evening packed with laughter and standout storytelling. “MASTER HAROLD”…and the boys — Steamer N.10 Theatre This staged reading delivers an emotionally charged story about friendship and race, set in a tearoom as personal and political conflicts collide. Storytime at The Pottery Place: Harry The Dirty Dog — Stuyvesant Plaza Little ones enjoy a lively reading of Harry the Dirty Dog followed by hands-on painting of a special Puppy Bowl to take home. Sal Vulcano — The Egg Stand-up star Sal Vulcano brings his signature blend of clever humor and offbeat observations for an evening packed with laughs and surprises. Concert Crave Presents — Empire Live Albany Enjoy a night of top R&B hits, great company, and unforgettable rhythms at one of Albany’s premier music venues—21 and up only with valid photo ID. *Spring Fling Arts, Crafts & Lifestyle Show — Colonie Center * Browse an eclectic mix of artisan goods, enjoy live entertainment, and sample delicious local treats while celebrating community creativity and flair. Kaleb Cohen — Empire Live Albany Experience Kaleb Cohen's dynamic live show, blending heartfelt songwriting with vibrant stage presence in an unforgettable concert hall setting. Empire State Strength & Fitness Expo — Albany Capital Center Experience a dynamic expo packed with fitness challenges, expert presentations, interactive exhibits, and opportunities to connect with health and wellness leaders. Shakedown Citi — Lark Hall This fresh jam band channels the heart of the Grateful Dead with spirited, adventurous sets featuring thoughtfully curated deep cuts, anthems, and surprises each night. *Easter Egg Hunt — Colonie Center * Kids and adults alike can hunt for vibrant eggs, enjoy surprises from local shops, and help support families in need, all in a festive, family-friendly setting. Family Tour — Albany Institute of History and Art Dive deeper into the museum's exhibitions with a docent-led tour that encourages curiosity, conversation, and discovery for all ages; included with regular admission and perfect for families seeking an interactive experience. Revolutionary Women — Schuyler Mansion Engage with compelling talks and discussion that reveal how personal convictions and family ties influenced the dramatic roles of Lady Mary Watts Johnson and Angelica Schuyler in the early American Revolution. Colonial Kitchen Series: 18th Century Beer Brewing — Crailo State Historic Site Delve into the art of 18th-century beer making with brewing demonstrations, historical insights, and sample tastings led by seasoned reenactors. CANstruction Fundraising Event @ Common Roots Albany Outpost — Common Roots Brewing Company (Albany Outpost) Enjoy a lively afternoon with food, drinks, activities, and the chance to win great raffle prizes—all in support of hunger relief and CANstruction’s creative cause. Revolutionary Women — New York State Museum Through engaging talks, historians reveal how Lady Johnson and Angelica Schuyler navigated family ties, status, and political turmoil to influence the early Revolution. Melvin Roads American Legion Stand-Up Comedy Night — Melvin Roads American Legion Post #1231 Savor delicious eats from Class Act Catering and enjoy a trio of standout comedians for a laughter-packed night with a warm, friendly crowd. Craft & Sip: Crochet Basics — Nine Pin Cider Unwind with a hands-on crochet lesson led by a supportive instructor, complete with all materials and a refreshing cider to sip as you learn. Lark Street Tavern Comedy: Taylor Clark! — The Lark Street Tavern Enjoy sharp stand-up from Taylor Clark—known for his skateboarding humor—plus performances from Twon Wood and more in one of Center Square’s favorite rooms. IN THE DEEP HEART’S CORE — Irish American Heritage Museum This evocative performance brings W. B. Yeats’ journey to life through powerful renditions of his poetry, paired with original Irish music and immersive storytelling, performed by masterful musicians and vocalists. Deadbeats Trio at The Eleven — Lark Hall Expect an energetic night of classic rock covers and originals, vibrant improvisation, and dynamic musicianship from a seasoned local trio. Matcha Cart Pop-Up at Sur La Table — Stuyvesant Plaza Enjoy made-to-order matcha drinks, learn about traditional preparation, and explore tasty new ways to bring matcha’s benefits home. 3rd Annual Salsa & Bachata: Spring Welcome Social — Ritmo Room Enjoy an evening of salsa and bachata dancing, lively music, and vibrant spring-inspired outfits at this social gathering for all levels. Perfume Making — The Gateway Diner Enjoy a hands-on experience designing your own unique perfume, paired with great food in a warm, social setting. Bluegrass and Pizza — The Warbler Brewery Enjoy an evening of spirited live bluegrass from The Moonshine Mule paired with fresh pizza from Ryan’s at your favorite local brewery. Pearl — Emack & Bolio's Albany An acoustic trio delivers a warm mix of folk, bluegrass, and classic favorites for a relaxed, music-filled evening. Cap City Runners — Albany Lace up alongside an encouraging crew where everyone, no matter their speed or experience, is celebrated as they connect and run together in Albany’s welcoming community. Art for All — Albany Institute of History and Art Families and visitors of all ages can dive into a hands-on art activity by making and customizing paper pith helmets, inspired by museum exhibitions exploring archaeological history. DIY Shakespeare Scenes — Albany Public Library (Howe) Read and perform legendary moments from Shakespeare’s plays with a relaxed group, perfect for both seasoned fans and curious newcomers. Franklin Mcare — 677 Prime Enjoy an intimate live set from Franklin Mcare, blending soulful tunes with the relaxed ambiance of an upscale dining setting. Concert: America 250 Songs & Stories — Colonie Library Lost Radio Rounders will share classic folk tunes and engaging stories that highlight 250 years of American history, from historic events to social movements. 3D Printing Basics — Albany Public Library (Washington Ave) Teens and adults can get an introduction to 3D printing, from understanding the machine to preparing their own models, with guidance from university tech experts. UAlbany Share the Knowledge Graduate Student Presentations — Albany Public Libary (Pine Hills) Hear UAlbany graduate students present their latest research in political science and public health, with quick talks and time for audience questions. Friends of The Library Pop Up Book Sale — Colonie Library Explore a handpicked selection of gently used books at this cozy, cash-only sale—perfect for readers of all ages to find something special for just a dollar. Hobby Workshop — Fortress of Gaming Bring your own project or grab a D&D paint kit and spend the afternoon crafting, painting, and socializing with other enthusiasts, with staff on hand for guidance. Everyday Sketching — Arlene's Artist Materials This hands-on workshop led by Ottavia Huang emphasizes approachable methods and gentle observation, helping you capture faces and features with watercolor and ink in a friendly, low-pressure environment. 📍 Sun, Mar 29 *Photos with the Easter Bunny — Colonie Center * Celebrate the season with festive photos alongside the Easter Bunny, including special sessions for pets and sensory-friendly visits. Archduke — Capital Repertory Theatre This audacious blend of farce and tragedy follows three desperate youths swept into history’s most infamous assassination, in a production both hilarious and haunting. 2026 NCAA DI Men's Ice Hockey Regional — MVP Arena Top collegiate ice hockey teams face off in exhilarating regional semifinal and championship matchups, with single and all-session tickets available for fans who crave high-stakes action. Flower & Garden Expo — HVCC Explore immersive floral exhibits, shop from over 190 vendors at the lively marketplace, enjoy tastings, and catch hands-on gardening seminars and demonstrations throughout the weekend. “MASTER HAROLD”…and the boys — Steamer N.10 Theatre This staged reading delivers an emotionally charged story about friendship and race, set in a tearoom as personal and political conflicts collide. Magic The Gathering — Fortress of Gaming Experience a range of Magic: The Gathering events each week, from casual Commander to Legacy, Modern, and FNM Booster Drafts, perfect for players of all levels. *Spring Fling Arts, Crafts & Lifestyle Show — Colonie Center * Browse an eclectic mix of artisan goods, enjoy live entertainment, and sample delicious local treats while celebrating community creativity and flair. The Egg Presents: Laurie Berkner — The Egg Beloved children’s musician Laurie Berkner brings her catchy favorites and infectious energy for a lively, interactive musical experience perfect for young audiences and their grown-ups. The Egg Presents: Laurie Berkner — The Egg Beloved children's musician Laurie Berkner brings her greatest hits and infectious joy to a fun-filled, interactive concert perfect for kids and their grown-ups—dancing shoes and stuffed animals encouraged! TOMBS — Empire Live Albany Get ready for a powerful concert featuring thunderous sets from TOMBS, Replicant, Sons Of Eden, and Fetal Chunk Deformation at Empire Underground. Curator Talk — Albany Institute of History and Art Enjoy an engaging presentation by curator Robert Bridges as he explores Blanche Lazzell’s life, artistic breakthroughs, and influence on modern American art. Revolutionary Crossroads — New York State Museum Historian Liz Covart unpacks how Albany became the nerve center of the Northern Campaign, sharing dramatic stories of conflict, alliances, and the city's outsized impact on American independence. Quick to Judge — Ophelia's Boston, Albany, and Cobleskill hardcore acts bring fast-paced sets and high-octane crowd energy, promising a gritty, adrenaline-fueled evening for all ages. submitted by /u/DallasRPI to r/Albany [link] [comments]

Welcome to today's Deal Den Mega Drop. 🔥 Amazon’s Spring Sale is in full swing — Click to check it out Below is our daily curated list of top-tier deals I’ve personally vetted — everything from tech upgrades to home essentials. 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Background: At this point Wife (50f) and I (50m) are resigned to our fates... still 6+ weeks before niece moves back home. Life lessons for all... the biggest being... don't trust a 19F at her word on anything. We were emotionally manipulated into taking her in because of the (sniffle) horrible things Daddy was doing like... gasp... making her pay rent because her free-loading ass wasn't looking for a job, going to school, or literally anything to better herself. Just hours and hours of doom-scrolling. So BIL sent her a text "Because you're lazy M-F, your rent increases from $300/month to $650/month"... and she tells us, that BIL called her a "lazy Motherfucker". So of course we try and shelter her, hours turn into days, then days to weeks. The details are impossible to cross-check because BIL is camping. So Decisions are made, she moves in. Which lead me to posting this: /r/AskReddit/comments/1q5wnum/do_you_sleep_on_a_bare_mattress_if_not_how_would/ On to this Chapter of the saga... after the original post, we bought: a new mattress topper, and "corner holders" that are designed to securely fit a sheet so it doesn't pop off. She. Still. Hasn't. Installed. Them. Wife is done. When we actually saw niece as she was leaving for work this past holiday Monday, Wifey loses it "disrespecting out things". I'm just... numb. One thing's for sure, we are def. throwing out that mattress, because: eww... end of March... She "signed" a 6 month "lease" that expires end of March (rocking and mumbling to myself) Just make it until then... soon... Wifey wanted to add: You can add that if she isn't out April 1 (or shows no signs of packing up to be out then), I know what I'm doing with my Easter weekend. I WILL move her stuff over to her Dad's & disable her key code. Thank goodness she doesn't have a physical key or know the code to the garage door. And we can always change our code in case she remembers that. Even More Background: Hmm, how far back to go... Niece moved to our city from her Mom's after Mom's boyfriend was caught videoing her showering. Mom then defended boyfriend, cancelled her phone (effectively cutting her off from her only friends in that city). She moves in with Dad. Years pass, she's now 19, and like we all were at that age, she has no clue what she wants to do or be. Dad also puts immense pressure on her to "get over it" (the trauma from her Mom's)... to the point that he tells her other people have it worse and she shouldn't be depressed. Yeah. WTaF (keep in mind most of this is all directly from her - but she has already proven to be a poor narrator - but there was a legal hearing ,and a restraining order on Mom's boyfriend, so IDK what all is true - BIL certainly thinks it's all true). So she's depressed a lot of the time, and living with her Dad, brother, and Dad's parents (my in-Laws). Father-in-Law has a TEMPER (Which is the number 1 reason my wife left home at 17). Dude goes from quiet to explosive rage. Like "Dinners ready" and if you don't get up immediately it's "I SAID DINNER IS READY!!!" he is verbally abusive to all the women in the house, his wife, my wife, and especially niece as she's quiet and withdrawn. Niece had a part-time job for... IDK... a long time... but only 12 hours a week at the local craft fair/farmer's market. Still, she was clearing $240 a week (cash under the table) so even $600 "rent" wasn't going to break her. As we were told, her Dad (my wife's brother) verbally abuses her - and given what I've witnessed from his father, I have no reason to distrust that (the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, and all). So she flees, and moves in... My wife remembers her past trauma and doesn't want that to ever happen to another woman. And it's not like we're out much, spare bed in the basement, and a basement that re rarely use. She tells her boyfriend everything that's going on, and boyfriend's Mom takes her under her wing as well - gets her a job interview (which we bought her an outfit for - because her entire wardrobe is hoodies and leggings). She aces the interview and is suddenly working 7 days a week - full-time at the new place, and still the craft fair on weekends. We strongly encourage her to drop the weekend job because she will burn herself out. but nope, good money yo, gotta make those dolla-dolla-bills! (That lasts about 2 weeks - before she starts complaining she has no time to clothes shop for her new job - which requires business casual) She drops one day at the fair, having Sundays off... new job is going great (but the commute sucks, because she's on public transit and it's 90m each way). We keep offering to help her get her driver's license, then she could car-pool with her brother, or borrow his car (since he's in university, he often doesn't need it). Nope, too busy. the edges start to tarnish, tonnes of little things adding up. "Please stop leaving dirty dishes downstairs, we're seeing bugs and no-see-ems, likely because of open food" (that works for a few days, then backsliding) We discover she's been turning off her phone's data. Because she pays for her plan and the WiFi is shitty in the basement. (Why didn't you tell me? that's an easy fix!). I tell her I'll be down in her space checking the WiFi signal - and that's when I see the bare-ass mattress that triggered my first post. Another bombshell that came out from the woodwork after we agreed to shelter her - the $600 Dad was going to charge her rent was going to go 100% to a savings account for her future. SO yeah, we fucked up... Wifey damaged the already brittle relationship with her Mom because her and niece went back and gathered up a bunch of essentials and then fled again. Niece seems more and more depressed (I had a self-harm talk with her because I legit was worried we would find her corpse in the basement). She drinks a LOT, judging by the dozens of empty vodka bottles. Boyfriend is a huge pot-head and all his money seems to go up his nose or at the casino (he came over and we suggested we all pitch in for take-out, dude didn't even have $20 to spare, despite also working full-time at the same company as niece and boyfriend's Mom) submitted by /u/alaorath to r/AmIOverreacting [link] [comments]

Product Link: https://amzn.to/3O7iSyU Orovi Gold Jewelry for Women: Orovi combines timeless design with unmatched craftsmanship manufacturing fine Jewelry. This gold and purple necklace is handmade by skilled artisans, with attention to detail and premium materials at its core. It has a 17.7 inch long gold chain with a purple amethyst pendant. Thanks to Orovi's precision and expertise, each piece of jewelry for women is perfect for lovers of silver and gold jewelry. Complete the set with the matching earrings B09SQ2MJ3C. High-Quality Materials: This hypoallergenic necklace, meticulously handcrafted by master jewelers, is made from solid 14 karat gold 585 and enriched with a natural amethyst crystal 0.57ct, offering unmatched refinement. The carefully chosen materials ensure both beauty and durability, allowing you to enjoy this exclusive jewel for years to come. Timeless and versatile design: These elegant stud earrings are designed to enhance any outfit and occasion. Whether you prefer a casual look or formal style, the subtle yet luxurious design fits seamlessly, making these real gold earrings perfect for daily use and special moments. From classic stud earrings and hoops to standout designs, every Orovi piece is crafted with care to elevate your outfit. Comfort and Safety: Orovi's skin friendly jewelry for women not only exudes timeless elegance but also offers unmatched comfort and safety. Each piece is crafted from nickel-free, hypoallergenic materials, ideal for even the most sensitive skin. Carefully chosen curb chain with spring ring closure ensures durability, making it reliable for everyday and all-day wear. Unforgettable Gifts for Women: Amethyst necklace, February birthstone necklace. This dazzling birthstone jewelry is the perfect gift for her for special occasions such as Valentine, Mother’s Day, Easter, graduations, weddings, or as a token of appreciation. With its timeless beauty and refined craftsmanship, packed in an elegant jewelry box for gifting, this piece of jewelry is an unforgettable gift that your loved one will cherish forever. Give her the ultimate blend of elegance and beauty. submitted by /u/Quiet-Performance138 to r/AmazonsJewelry [link] [comments]

Product Link: https://amzn.to/4aNKXmH Orovi Gold Jewelry for Women: Orovi combines timeless design with unmatched craftsmanship manufacturing fine Jewelry. These dainty sapphire earrings are handmade by skilled artisans, with attention to detail and premium materials at their core. Thanks to Orovi's precision and expertise, these blue earrings exude luxury and elegance – perfect for lovers of silver and gold jewelry. Complete the set with the matching necklace B08X7FSC1F. High-Quality Materials: These hypoallergenic earrings for women, meticulously handcrafted by master jewelers, are made from solid 14 karat gold 585 and enriched with pear-shape created sapphires 0.72ct in total, offering unmatched refinement. The carefully chosen materials ensure both beauty and durability, allowing you to enjoy the exclusive jewelry for women for years to come. Timeless and versatile design: These elegant stud earrings are designed to enhance any outfit and occasion. Whether you prefer a casual look or formal style, the subtle yet luxurious design fits seamlessly, making these real gold earrings perfect for daily use and special moments. From classic stud earrings and hoops to standout designs, every Orovi piece is crafted with care to elevate your outfit. Comfort and Safety: Orovi's skin friendly jewelry for women not only exudes timeless elegance but also offers unmatched comfort and safety. Each piece is crafted from nickel-free, hypoallergenic materials, ideal for even the most sensitive skin. Carefully chosen post and butterfly closures ensure durability, making them reliable for everyday and all-day wear. Unforgettable Gifts for Women: Sapphire stud earrings, September birthstone earrings. This dazzling birthstone jewelry is the perfect gift for her for special occasions such as Valentine, Mother’s Day, Easter, graduations, weddings, or as a token of appreciation. With its timeless beauty and refined craftsmanship, packed in an elegant jewelry box for gifting, this piece of jewelry is an unforgettable gift that your loved one will cherish forever. submitted by /u/Quiet-Performance138 to r/AmazonsJewelry [link] [comments]

Vine thinks I'm a car and dog owning gamer who enjoys artisanal pottery, organic menopause supplements but also decorating myself and my home with fake flora, animal hides, hair extensions and temporary tattoos. And I love proselytizing by handing out tiny Jesus dolls. https://preview.redd.it/rxayw0kpgwhg1.png?width=1383&format=png&auto=webp&s=bc7c1139fd08f28e1e2dbd6ae6e6a85a760d68ed submitted by /u/Nancy_Drew23 to r/vine [link] [comments]

Did you ever hear the story of the Christmas Party Killer? It’s not the sort of story that people talk about in any devoted way. It’s not even something people take seriously. It sounds like one of those Christmas horror films. Only you will see not see this on the Hallmark channel, you won’t even see it in Fangoria magazine. This is a story more sinister, more tragic, more gruesome than anything you will see. And while these events are largely set around the Christmas period, this is not a Christmas story. One year in mid December, a baby named Chuck Redman was born. His mother was actually supposed to have him January 1st. She said that it was no good because, as forward thinking as she was, having a child’s birthday on New Year’s Day would mean a whole life of not being able to do anything for New Year’s Eve, at least until he was 18. They suggested then, doing a c section, for a week earlier. Again, it was met with pushback from Mrs Redman, who now had a problem with him being born on Christmas. So they made one final suggestion, December 18, but that was the earliest they could possibly do. She agreed. What she didn’t realise was that this would cause a domino effect that would end in bloodshed. His father, Mr. Redman, missed the birth of course. He had his work Christmas party to go to. And when he got there, he was too busy trying to figure out if the hospital room TV could pick up the sports channel instead of witnessing the first moments of his only child. From there, Chuck grew up in a peculiar household. His parents were atheists so from a very early age they told him that there was no god, no Jesus, no Easter bunny, no tooth fairy, no Bermuda Triangle and certainly no Santa Claus. This was done for two reasons. The first being their very sound logic of “why would we fill his head with illusions of an imaginary man in the sky watching down on him? Making sure he’s always good and never bad? When we don’t even believe our own adult version?” The second reason they gave it to him straight about Christmas was because they didn’t want to spoil him. When Mrs Redman was pregnant with Chuck she saw a 60 minutes segment where some parents wanted to keep the trick alive by giving their children a present from themselves and a present from Santa. The idea was to make it seem like their children weren’t being overlooked. Mrs Redman couldn’t think of anything worse. So before he was born they decided that he only give him one present from each of them, on his birthday. They even encouraged their extended family to do the same. They didn’t want the over indulgence and the lies turning their only child into a greedy schizophrenic brat with personality issues as he grew up. They let him watch the movies, decorate a tree, wrap presents, all the things that they felt to be socially acceptable so that they didn’t get any strange looks from their peers, all wondering what’s the deal with that family. From ages 8 to 11, Chuck was told that he wasn’t allowed to ruin other children’s delusions at school. But, rather than raising a liar by humouring the other kids, they told him that if the other kids ever brought it up to ignore them. And if the other kids asked him, to tell them that his family doesn’t believe in Christmas or Santa, that the other students at his school were well within their right to continue believing in all that, but it just wasn’t something his household entertained. He remembered this because he was told to say the same thing when the schools brought in religious education. When Chuck asked why he had to say it in this particular way and why he could just trll them that Santa wasn’t real, his mother explained to him. “Remember when your father told the Johnsons that there was no god and he nearly got his ass beat?” She asked rhetorically. “Yeah?” Chuck replied. “They were pretty mad that he was telling them that their belief was wrong. It didn’t matter if he was right, they didn’t like to hear him telling it. And that’s exactly how the kids and the parents of those kids will likely feel if you tell them about Christmas.” Despite being 10, Chuck understood this and did as he was told. He was, however still teased. The other children rubbed it in his face that they all got two presents. But once they found out he didn’t believe in Santa Claus, they called him The Grinch. A fairly simple-minded tale made into a few less intelligent movie adaptations. The concept alone was preposterous to Chuck; a story about a person who hates Christmas is regarded as a Christmas staple? That’d be like calling Psycho a family film. Nevertheless, Norman Bates was a more welcome face in House Redman than Jim Carrey’s in any Grinch related entertainment. Speaking of Psycho, because Chuck was able to identify and distinguish the difference between fantasy and reality at such a young age, he also started getting more into horror films. Mr and Mrs Redman justified that if nothing of the supernatural was tangibly real, then nothing could potentially scare him. And he took to them pretty well. Ghosts, goblins, vampires, werewolves, they were all fair game. Everything except serial killer movies, which Chuck had to steal from his dads personal stash or forge a note to blockbuster saying it was ok for him to rent out. He also watched a lot of professional wrestling. Despite the fact that his parents laid out the truth about everything fairly, his father had the curious belief that all WWE wrestling was real. Although “real” wouldn’t quite be the word. Chuck would tell him over and over that it was fake and his father would always correct him by saying “It’s not fake, it’s choreographed. There’s a difference.” As he tried to rack his little seven year old brain around what the word “choreographed” meant, his dad explained to him that while staged, pre rehearsed, planned out, there would be times where wrestlers would actually get hurt. This didn’t matter to Chuck though, because he still enjoyed wrestling all the same. Particularly the Christmas wrestling period, called “Season’s Beatings” which seemed to be the only other extra curricular Christmas activity he enjoyed with his father. Other than the wrestling, Chuck pretty much had free range of what he could watch during the festive season. His parents even encouraged it. Under one proviso. He could watch anything except traditional Christmas movies. More specifically, bad Christmas movies. Ones that Hollywood decided to make when they saw how much money could be beaten out of that dead reindeer. The kind of slop where the studios thought it’s not enough to release movie after movie all with the same basic plot points. We have to run it into the ground, with only a few different actors and slight variations of the same old Christmas pun titles to tell them apart. Those feel good, kumbaya singing romance movies with shots that look like they’ve been pulled straight from a Christmas card and airing on a channel literally called Hallmark. Those ones where Ebenezer Scrooge has to go through a whole redemption arc purely because he treated people exactly how they treated him for his entire life. The Redmans saw this as corporate greed masquerading as pure sap to manipulate their audience into keeping their busiest season alive. And that they would continue to do this until the money would eventually run out and these companies, with their best intentions, would go back to making greeting cards that sell for $5 a pop. But if that wasn’t enough, these types of films started invading other genres. Christmas comedies were popular, Christmas sci-fis were rare but they still happened, and maybe even the odd Mel Gibson film would throw its hat in the ring. But the second most popular Christmas hybrid down from comedy is horror, another thing that Chuck would regularly enjoy. “Gremlins”, “Jack Frost” (the slasher one), “Christmas Evil”, Black Christmas (even though it was a little boring) and, of course the “Silent Night, Deadly Night” films. Usually when he tried to invite the other kids in his class around for his birthday, most of them were too afraid to show up, and those that expressed interest were eventually told they weren’t allowed to because their family was leaving town that week for the holidays. So Chuck’s birthdays were very lonely for a good while. Almost to the point if routine. He went to dinner dinner with his extended family, had a cake afterwards, then went home to bed where he would watch a movie and pass out. Rinse and repeat. But it wasn’t until high school where he actually found friends who truly appreciated his birthday and, more importantly, himself as a person. He got into a eclectic group of outsiders, a who’s who of “who cares” in the school. They were a ragtag bunch consisting of Parker, Harold, Rupert, Frank, Janey and Chuck. They loathed the idea of Christmas and even thought the concept of using organised religion, no matter which, as an excuse to spend time with people you don’t like once a year to be, in their words “a spastic concept.” These were the best years of Chuck’s life, because he finally saw people that were just like him. It wasn’t exactly a friendship deal breaker if they did celebrate Christmas, but it did make him feel less depressed. He was terrified of getting older and the thought of being alone for his birthday got worse and worse as he approached the end of his teens. Janey, being the only girl, was especially nice to him. He even developed a crush on her, but never made a move out of fear that either the other guys had the same intentions, or they would make fun of him because the thought of dating her would be like dating your sister. Chuck, being an only child, didn’t understand the feeling of that but he took Parker, the group roughian, at his word. It was during his graduating year, where he felt truly himself. For his birthday he decided to do something on Christmas Eve. There he invited the group over to his house where they all got drunk, had a couple of doobies, and went down to their local church to attend the midnight mass. Up to a hundred god botherers or otherwise tradition seeking men and women happened to find six jokers, in typical ill-behaved fashion, sitting in the back row, all wearing matching religious choir outfits and giggling away. It wasn’t until the hymn part of the ceremony where they were kicked out for singing in purposely annoying, over-the-top falsetto voices and then slapping their knees and each other as if it were feeding time in the monkey enclosure. When the reverend asked them to leave, Frank or Parker pointed to the ceramic baby Jesus and yelled “He sees you when you’re sleeping, you know!” before abruptly leaving. After this riotous affair, they walked down to a nearby playground, where they finished off the rest of their drinks. Wondering what they were going to do now that they’ve graduated. A couple months later came Harold’s birthday, in mid April. Harold, foolish arrogant Harold, always had to be mister attention and mother superior in the group. Chuck stressed to him over several arguments throughout the years that he couldn’t be both roles, he had to pick one so that he wouldn’t be called a tyrant. Harold didn’t care, if there was something he had to say, he was going to say it whether you liked it or not. He seemed unimpressed that Chuck wasn’t getting any employment, nor was he trying to seek further education by going to community college… at the very least. Chuck kept his cool throughout this ordeal, but he spent the whole time thinking “Youre a good friend Harold, but you’re a 60 year old in a 19 year old kid’s body. If I ever end up like you, I would end it.” So Chuck gritted his teeth, grinned and tolerated it for an hour, then finally discreetly said goodbye to Janey before leaving without notifying anyone else. That was the last time all of Chuck’s friends were in the same vicinity as each other. It seemed so unexpected to Chuck. An inevitable fate that one cannot change. Like being in a train wreck and still travelling up to back despite every hauling you to your doom. Everyone just … drifted away from each other. It started off small, where one of them would get a casual job somewhere, and they wouldn’t see them for weeks, then another and another. Chuck kept in touch with everyone on social media but he just couldn’t get the band back together, but not for lack of trying. He tried organising something for his birthday every year. He saw it as an excuse to have a mini reunion. For that, he usually asked them, his family, friends of family. He even invited some of his co workers at the job his social worker scored for him, just a supermarket, nothing too crazy. At first he tried to organise something on his actual birthday, to which most of the responses were a resounding no. They had their work Christmas parties to go to, they ran out of time, the holiday season has been so busy this year. Stuff like that. Then he started changing the date to New Year’s Eve, so that way it could be a double celebration, while also a way for them not to use the Christmas excuse. Again, most of his friends declined, reasoning that they spent too much money on Christmas and decided that, if they did something on new years, going out or catching up would be too overwhelming for them; they wanted to keep theirs lowkey. Some of them dropped off entirely. The only people that had legitimate excuses were his co workers who had to continue to go to work. His boss didn’t believe in having work Christmas parties, he thought they were a waste of time and money, something that Chuck couldn’t fault him for, and one of the only reasons he kept working there for as long as he did. What happened to hos friends, he thought. What happened to the guys he went to school who thought that Christmas was an outdated concept and it was better to be edgy. And now they had become the thing that laughed at. He was starting to get a little jealous of the holiday season. He stopped calling it Christmas years ago, it was now the holiday season for him. Here his friends were, telling him year after year that they had Christmas parties to go to. As if the mere act of not attending the non obligational work Christmas outing would result in them being fired. He spent days thinking about it every year. Working himself up and convincing himself that soulless companies are letting their employees brown nose them, that they imply that they would would make things very difficult for employees if they backed out of the sacred, precious Christmas party. Then Chuck started cursing god. He must’ve said to a 100 people over the years that “What this says to me is that if Jesus were a real person who is living and breathing today, my friends would rather go to his birthday party than to mine.” When he first exclaimed it, it was really just a joke… a funny but dry observation. But the more he kept saying it, the more conviction was heard in his voice. He just didn’t understand it… why do people spend months preparing for a one day event that will be over couple of hours in. Seemed like such a waste when there were more important things going on in the world. This is what he told himself. Seven years after the Harold party and Chuck was approaching two years at his work. Things were going fairly decently. He was acing his job, he had moved out of his parents home, he even felt less depressed about the way things were going. As long as he put the holidays out of his head. But then it happened. The manager had decided to put on Christmas songs on the store intercom radio. He couldn’t believe his ears. In September? Then he noticed Christmas ware l being brought out. When he approached his boss about why they had it all out so early, his boss gave him a very reasonable answer. All the other retail stores don’t put things up until October, and he wanted to get a jump on the sales stranglehold. When Chuck argued that he thought the boss didn’t celebrate Christmas, the boss countered this with it “doesn’t matter what I like. It’s what the customers like, and if you don’t like that, go somewhere else.” And for three straight months it was the same playlist of Christmas music, the same time every day. Chuck could’ve set his clock to when a certain song would come on any time of the day. This coupled with the blaring fluorescent lights shining down on him was a recipe for disaster. He was convinced that his boss was doing it to spite him, making it louder and quieter every day during graveyard hours when he knew Chuck was there. Chuck thought his miserable superior was doing it purely out of hatred towards Chuck for having the mere brass to question his power. And then one day, Chuck couldn’t believe it. It must’ve been a joke. The same Christmas song, stuck on a loop, repeating itself over and over for hours. Chuck was gobsmacked, astounded. He believed that his control hungry overlord had gone mad with power. Acting like some kind of religious leader, looking down on all of his worker monkeys. Watching the cashiers grinning like idiots while secretly paranoid that they’re going to get their hours cut if they take their fake deer antlers off. Chuck thought that this false deity who calls himself the checkout king was looking down at his loyal subjects, rewarding those who get with the program, and smiting those who resist. That song was meant to be on repeat, just to annoy him; and annoy him, it did. He had only gotten to the fourth hour into his shift before he snapped, decided that this wasn’t worth $20 an hour. So he took off all his work accessories, kicked over a few shelves, watching them scatter to the floor and walked out. It turned out that there was a glitch in the sound system, the boss wasn’t even there that day to fix the error. But that didn’t matter, the damage was already done and Chuck was fired. With no job and facing eviction from his rental, Chuck faced the prospect of moving back in with his parents. Fortunately, he was still able to live at his current cheap, shabby love palace until after new years. So Chuck wanted to see how all of his friends were going, maybe to catch up for his birthday, one last hurrah while he had the place. He still had all the old gang on either Facebook or Snapchat, but he never really looked into what their life was now like. They all looked they were happy, thriving. He thought that maybe they had forgotten all about each other, maybe he wasn’t the only one that felt left in the cold. But it was then that he noticed. Janey, now important and respectable “Jane” had tagged people in her photos. Dinner pictures, vacation albums, holiday portraits, various posts that had one or more members in the friend group in attendance. There were even half a dozen photos over the seven years where all of them were together, in the same picture, attending the same event. Everybody except Chuck. So out of a mixture of fear and spite, instead of addressing it to any one of them, he created a Facebook event and a subsequent message group with the intent of catching up. This took everyone by surprise. A mixture of confusion and fond memories. Harold, always the-holier-than-thou, left the group immediately. But that didn’t bother Chuck. His plan was to have everyone come over for beer, snacks and maybe pizza. Just like old times, but preferably without Harold sticking his rude head in and bringing the party down. Even if no one but Janey showed up would be fine by him. That could’ve been the most ideal situation. He just needed this to happen, without any form of holiday taking control of their decision. So he did everything he could to de-holiday his party, to not remind people of other obligations that didn’t involve him. He even triple checked the music to make sure nothing seasonal would come through. But sooner or later, Mariah Carey would creep in. That was a fact. It didn’t matter where he went, what he put on, she was following him. Waiting until the time was right to strike. And she would not stop. She was like a Christmas version of the terminator. After Harold, Rupert also dropped out early but at least he had the decency of making an excuse. No total loss, Chuck wasn’t overly fond of Rupert either. That left Parker, Frank and Janey swearing black and blue that they would go. But Chuck’s big day arrived and with every passing hour after the designated time, he was sending more and more frantic messages. Not trying to make himself sound desperate, he sounded aloof about it, and one would think he was, were it not for the frequency of almost spam level messages. Chuck then looked to confirm the one thing that he’d been avoiding the whole night, confirming the one thing he was afraid of. He checked every single one of his friend’s stories and saw that everyone but Janey, posted videos of them at their work Christmas parties. Again, he had to hide his frustration with casualness. He messaged the group that if they still wanted something to do after their Christmas parties, he would still be around if they wanted to swing by. This blunt but contextually hostile message was taken to be a little bit overbearing for Parker and Frank, who were growing concerned that Chuck was keeping tabs on them. They both left the message group after seeing it. By this point, Chuck was in such shock that all these people had done this to him that, to hell with them, he didn’t need them at all. He still had Janey coming. That’s right… Janey. Sweet, lovely, reliable Janey. That was when Janey messaged him privately, an hour later. She hadn’t seen the chaos that happened in the group chat yet, because she told him that she couldn’t make it “but have fun and Merry Christmas.” She followed it up with the statement that she hoped that the others were there and could fill in for her. He knew she must’ve been telling the truth so he told her to check the message group. She did, and after that… he didn’t hear from her for the rest of the night. He didn’t know if this was a defence mechanism, fear of how she would be perceived if the other guys saw this, or if it was second hand embarrassment seeing how badly it all blew up. But she went cold. Leaving him to keep reading her private message, looking for clues. He kept re reading that last line. ”Have fun and Merry Christmas.” Then it occurred to him. To confirm another thing that he really didn’t want to have to confirm. None of them wished him Happy Birthday, the very reason that they were going to catch up with him in the first place. Not a call, not a text, not even a social media post. He decided that this was the last straw. What was the point in living if everyone had forgotten who you are? So he decided he wasn’t going to keep on living, he would end it all. So he swallowed a bunch of pills, called an ambulance to say that he’d taken too many (just to give himself that slight chance of getting out of it) and waited by the phone until he slipped away into a beautiful godless nothing. An abyss of emptiness. Smiling, he passed out… Two days later, he woke up. When he opened his eyes he saw that he was in a hospital room. An empty room with nothing but his clothes hanging on a rack, and something resting on the hospital table right beside him. Feeling like death and looking worse, Chuck buzzed a nurse in. She told him he was lucky. When he asked what she meant, she told him when they drove over to help him it was considered one of the least busy times during the holiday season in at least 20 years. They were hitting every green light along the way. She told him that someone was looking out for him. This was the last thing that Chuck wanted to hear. He spent his whole life as a passionate atheist, and only when he’s on the precipice of death does God want to pull the rug out from under him? According to Chuck, nobody saved his life; they merely prevented his death. He didn’t want to argue with the nurse so he smiled politely and told her he was going to get more sleep. When she left he seemed disappointed. He was expecting balloons, flowers, notes, giant bears, anything that told him that someone was worried about him. Before the botched attempt of his life, Chuck really truly did want to die. But a small part at the back of his mind thought I hope they find about this! Although he was surprised to discover he was still alive, he just couldn’t accept the fact that he wasn’t in anyone’s thoughts or prayers. There was nothing, just one card on a table. Wait a minute, he thought. Yes, the card. It was open with some of the best penmanship he’d ever seen, handwriting that he recognised. It was a card from Janey. “Dear Chuck,” it read. “I’m still trying to wrap my head around this as much as I can but I still don’t believe it. Give me a call when you wake up and we can talk. Only if you feel comfortable. You’re not alone in the world. - Jane” Underneath she wrote, “Get well soon!” Chuck was touched. He felt this was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for him. A wash of emotion flooded him. This was short lived once he closed the card. For some odd reason in Chuck’s mind, he wanted to see what was on the front of the card. And when he closed it, he could already feel his hands getting tense. What he saw on the card was a picture of Santa Claus flying his sleigh over a street of houses. It wasn’t a birthday card, it wasn’t a get well soon card, it was a Christmas card. As his eyes tensed on this card, his hands curled up into balls as he felt the cards crunching into his hands, crudely compressing as his arms were shaking with pure rage. Eventually he let go and the card fell to the floor. The one person he thought gave a shit about him made no effort this time; the most important time. What would’ve been, were it not for his failed life attempt, his last time. Suddenly depression turned to rage, desparate emptiness to burning wrath. He decided that he would no longer sit by and watch his friends walk all over him. He decided something must be done. He turned over in bed where he fell silent. He didn’t talk again for three weeks. Because of his scare that landed him in hospital, Chuck’s parents decided that it would be best if he were put into a mental health resort. This, to Chuck, was just a fancy term for a minimum security institution. He stayed there for a few months saying very little, watching the wrestling, and planning out what he was going to do. This time next year, he was going to kill all of his friends. He kept that one to himself though, because it seemed obvious to him that saying his plans out loud quote unquote “causes concern”. But they were his plans nonetheless. He deemed it was only fitting… being around Christmas a punishing the bad. So set out to follow them for a whole year… to to see if they were being naughty or nice. As Chuck began researching for this dreadful holiday, or what he called “knowing thy enemy” he found that more kids got punished in the 19th and 20th centuries. It wasn’t enough that a kid learnt his lesson in not being a little ass on Christmas, Santa wanted him to feel in every bone why he made a very bad choice. And some of the methods were extreme beyond all measures. Chuck was beginning to like this aspect of Christmas lore. It seemed to him, these days, that kids were more spoilt than ever. There were weak willed parents out there giving in to their kids’ every demand, either because they were too much of a soft touch that these brats exploited or they just caved into submission just to make them shut up. Whatever happened to punishment? Whatever happened to karma? And it wasn’t just kids either. Every single one of Chuck’s friends did him dirty. Even Janey. So they all needed to be punished. But not Janey. No. He couldn’t bring himself to get her… but at the same time he could show all this to her, to make her learn the consequences of one’s actions. Suddenly it was all making sense to him now. Why he liked Christmas horror, why he liked WWE’s Season’s Beatings. It spoke to him, this voice. It told him that there sick degenerates out there treating people unfairly and thinking they can get away with it. Who? Work Christmas Parties. Of course. It was obvious to Chuck. As long as these damn things existed it will never stop for him. This was his villainous challenger. Like every WWE show there was always an over the top corporation they go after as a challenger, and Work Christmas Parties seemed like the perfect challenger arc. Who needs the Bible when you have that? he thought as he prepared. These are the things they should be teaching in school. Punish the deserving, spare the innocent. submitted by /u/SundanceMC to r/stories [link] [comments]

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submitted by /u/Ok_Dimension_4707 to r/CoffeeAndACard [link] [comments]

My personal favorites parts of this throwback to the 90’s Clinton celebratory hype are that the base Clinton is wearing boxers, not briefs and that one of the outfits is a saxophone suit so that you can reenact his appearance on Arsenio Hall submitted by /u/Ok_Dimension_4707 to r/PropagandaPosters [link] [comments]

AC1 AC2 This time, I’ll be looking at Ascendance, Brotherhood (game), Brotherhood (book), and Renaissance. Brotherhood seq. 1/prologue + ch. 1-12 The book explains away the poison from the end of Renaissance. Ezio leaves Rodrigo supposedly dying slowly from poison. Ezio can’t find it in himself to mercy kill Rodrigo. Before leaving with Mario, Ezio goes back to the Sistine Chapel to confirm Rodrigo’s death and finds that he’s gone missing. He looks inside the vault for him, too. To not contradict Brotherhood, it’s implied that Rodrigo only pretended to poison himself. I don’t like this alternate interpretation of Ezio here. At the end of AC2, he chose not to kill Rodrigo because he knew vengeance would not change the past. According to the books, Ezio believed Rodrigo was dying a slow, painful death and he left him there to die because he didn’t feel like showing mercy. In my opinion, that’s antithetical to letting go of the desire for revenge. Maybe someone can argue the opposing view, but I think that Ezio at the end of AC2/beginning of Brotherhood would’ve given Rodrigo a quick death, said “Requiescat in pace,” and then left if he appeared to be slowly dying on the ground. Claudia’s husband is revealed to have died in a throwaway line from Mario. Backpedaling on more stuff from Renaissance that doesn’t fit Brotherhood. Ezio helping out and going about casual business around Monteriggioni is expanded on in the book. There are more townspeople to help around. Oddly, two random villagers share names with people who were or will be important to Ezio. The stablemaster’s name is revealed to be Federico and a child Ezio encounters is named Sofia (too young to be that Sofia, don’t worry). Ezio and Caterina’s previous relationship from Renaissance is acknowledged in the book. The assassin meeting is pretty much the same, but small details are added or changed. Machiavelli confirms Rodrigo’s survival and informs about Cesare. They also mention the incest. It’s highly likely that it was an untrue rumor, but it’s now the primary way that media depicting the Borgias portrays Cesare and Lucrezia’s relationship. The siege of Monterrigioni is more fleshed out in the book. The woman who Ezio carried the flowers for ends up getting her head stuck on a pike. Ezio directly confronts Cesare when he enters the villa. Cesare introduces all of his close allies to Ezio. And mentions that Leonardo is working for him now. Cesare fatally shoots Mario and another man. Ezio lunges for Cesare and is wounded by a gunshot. I guess Cesare didn’t get a chance to confirm Ezio’s death before getting pushed back again. It’s one thing in the game where Ezio gets shot while he’s far from the gate, but in the book, it seems like he is right there. Some of the memories of Ezio that appear when Desmond and Lucy go through the sewers are added to the escape in the book. Before Ezio and the others complete their escape, Cesare taunts him across an abyss with Mario’s decapitated head. Brotherhood seq. 2/ch. 13-14 Ezio thinks way more about Caterina in the book than the game would seem to show. And he is conflicted about whether she or the Brotherhood is more important to him. Once I get through all the books, maybe I’ll rank protagonists by simp level. Ezio and Altaïr have already proven themselves to be way bigger simps than the games seem to show (well, at least Ezio didn't simp for an enemy and Altaïr's simping worked out for him). The sequence is simplified a bit. The man Ezio helps before meeting Machiavelli is removed, as is some of the more tutorial-ish stuff. In the book, the woman who tended to Ezio’s wounds says that Machiavelli had her take care of him. In the game, though this is revealed to be true later, Machiavelli feigns surprise that Ezio survived the attack on Monteriggioni. They also go and watch Cesare bullfighting while Machiavelli gives exposition, including that Leonardo is being forced into working for the Borgias. Historically, this was probably voluntary work for which he was paid. Some of Machiavelli’s observations on Cesare come across as admiration. Machiavelli and Ezio free a district from Borgia control and rally the people to resist and stand up for themselves. Ezio notices Machiavelli writing some of his words to the people. Ezio’s suspicions about Machiavelli’s loyalty are brought up multiple times in these chapters. The end of the sequence goes about almost the same in the book. Ezio chases down the thief who pickpocketed him, catches the courier with the letter (one difference: Ezio takes a page from Altaïr’s book and kills the messenger so that he cannot warn his superiors), and discovers the followers of Romulus, who call themselves “the Secta Luporum” (Latin for sect of wolves) in the book. Brotherhood seq. 3/ch. 15-21 Ezio allies with the thieves, mercs, and courtesans in that order. It takes at months to get all of them situated, which is sort of shown with the building montages in the game. Some interesting differences, Bartolomeo employs Michelangelo to plan out improvements for the barracks and Ezio has to haggle with a lender to get the ransom money for the courtesans because he doesn’t have the time to stop at a bank. Story and gameplay separation. He doesn’t really carry hundreds of thousands of gold on the regular. The Auditore home in Florence is confirmed to be destroyed and it seems like in the book, Maria and Claudia did go there first before heading to Rome. Since Claudia and Maria were put in a convent for much of the duration of Renaissance, Claudia saying that she ran Mario’s estate is a less convincing argument for why she can run the Rosa in Fiore. It’s possible she did manage the estate after they moved out of the convent, but that would be starting 11 years later than she was implied to have started in AC2. Sometimes the book conflicts with optional objectives, like with the merc mission. Ezio kills more than just a captain in the book, but optional objectives are supposed to be the canon way. For minor details, it’s not a big deal. For important stuff, that’s a different story. Going a bit darker here, it is implied that the slavers sexually assaulted the courtesan before Ezio got there. Unfortunately, that’s more realistic than how the game portrayed it, with them only holding her captive. Brotherhood seq. 4/ch. 22-29 Infiltrating Castel Sant’Angelo goes about the same as the game. Cesare leaves before Ezio can get a chance at him and Ezio rescues Caterina. When Lucrezia calls Ezio a hypocrite for allying with the Medici family because they punished all the Pazzi, not just the conspirators, Ezio thinks about how Caterina had every single one of her citizens who were involved in a rebellion against her tortured and/or killed (the book doesn’t include this bit, but also their relatives, and not just the men, but the women and the children, too). I’m surprised that Lucrezia didn’t bring this up herself, as proof that both Caterina and Ezio are no better than the Borgia. Not a big difference, but Ezio and Caterina gag and tie Lucrezia, rather than knocking her out. When Caterina lets Ezio know that their relationship was political for her, Ezio takes it harder than it seems in the game. He feels as though his heart is falling in “a bottomless mineshaft.” In the game, I’d say that my interpretation was that they were attracted to each other and while Ezio was more invested than Caterina, I still didn’t think it was that deep for him. Especially since one of Ezio’s Revelations letters to Claudia implies that he became jaded about love after the death of Cristina and didn’t mention Caterina. A few chapters later, their parting seems to show that Caterina's not being serious about pursuing a relationship pushed him further away from trying to find meaningful romance until Revelations. Ezio tries to both confess his love and leave Rome to be with her, but she rejects both advances. As she rides off, Ezio is described as “a lonely middle-aged man who had been given a last chance at love and missed it.” Ezio starts recruiting citizens, which in the book does not go into much detail and for good reason. Ezio meets back up with Leonardo. Ezio is initially wary, but back to being bros within the next page. Ezio needs a new hidden gun in the book, still had it in the game though. Ezio plans to have some of the recruits keep an eye on Leonardo to keep him safe. The war machine mission is cut from the book. Snake’s cardboard box is not mentioned in the book. I wouldn’t expect it to be, but that is a definite difference. It isn’t necessary to try to rationalize easter eggs, but if I can, I guess I will. Considering the Raiden outfit is also in the game, tied to completion of the Animus Virtual Training Program, Rebecca probably likes Metal Gear and was also trolling Desmond. Brotherhood seq. 5/ch. 30-34 Ezio and Claudia are more confrontational with each other in the book. Egidio needs 10,000 ducats in the book, but the mission only calls for 3,000. In the book, the guards seem dismissive upon hearing that the actual captain, Luigi, has been found dead in the Pantheon. In the game, it seems more like they believe it and correctly think they let an impostor in. The orgy is a bit more descriptive in the book. There’s a bunch of dildos and whips around and Ezio watches Juan Borgia have sex with a courtesan before assassinating him. Claudia and some of her courtesans come to the party entrance to retrieve the money. The end of the sequence goes about the same, Claudia and the courtesans defeat the guards and she and Ezio reconcile. Brotherhood seq. 6/ch. 35, 39-40 Ezio helps the thieves first and the mercenaries second in the book. It is the opposite way in the game. Leonardo shows Ezio the replacement weapons. He also provides the crossbow, instead of it being purchased from any blacksmith. He mentions Salaì in passing. Ezio arranges for Leonardo to bring the weapons to the Rosa in Fiore. Ezio goes to pick up the weapons before he deals with Micheletto. The French bust at least one of the gates in the book with help from a battering ram. The fighting spaces gets so tight that weapons stop being used in favor of fists. Stealing the uniforms and getting to the Baron’s location are similar in the book. The Montréal joke is left in. The baron and Ezio speak about Cesare a bit and the baron tries to bargain for his life. Ezio walks up and takes the gun from the baron, who accepts his death by sword with dignity. In the game, this would cause Pantasilea’s death and a desynchronization. Ascendance This is a short animation set sometime before and/or during Brotherhood. It is about Cesare’s rise. It starts with the baron threatening Pantasilea and getting assassinated by Ezio. It seems to be possibly a different location and Ezio is in his robes, not a French disguise. Ezio meets up with Leonardo and they discuss Cesare’s rise to power. I am not sure if this is supposed to be before or after the baron’s assassination or how long before or after it is. Cesare had his older brother Giovanni murdered to gain Rodrigo’s favor. Giovanni was Rodrigo’s favorite son and nothing short of Giovanni’s death, could put Cesare into higher favor with Rodrigo. Historically, Giovanni’s murder is unsolved and Cesare is one of the many possible suspects. Cesare seized power by force, acted cruelly to common people, and betrayed and backstabbed his own men. Ezio vows to kill Cesare and then gives Leonardo a scroll, which Leonardo goes and gives to Cesare at Castel Sant’Angelo. Ezio watches from a viewpoint, monologues about how the brotherhood will liberate Rome and that ‘like his father before him, he is an assassin.’ He leaps from the viewpoint and the short ends. Brotherhood seq. 7/ch. 35-38, 41 In the book, La Volpe knows that Pietro is playing Jesus in the play. In the game, Ezio doesn’t seem to know which of the three men he is. Ezio and the recruits poison and replace Micheletto’s men right behind him and he apparently cares so little about them that he doesn’t realize that the men with him aren’t the same ones as before. Micheletto is ambushed offstage in the book. The actors get scared and run when Pietro starts vomiting from the poison and the Borgia and Ezio’s allies begin fighting. Ezio chases down the traitorous thief and stops La Volpe from attacking Machiavelli. The thief commits suicide with his own dagger and not Ezio’s hidden blade, though. Before Ezio stops La Volpe, he returns to the Rosa in Fiore and talks with Maria. She tells him that some courtesans are secretly traitors. This comes up more in optional missions. She also tells him that the Spanish king and the Holy Roman Emperor are coming to Rome to possibly ally with Cesare. Ezio has Claudia and the recruits investigate. The letter that the traitor carried has information about the assassins’ plans to deal with the Baron de Valois. They decide to plant false information in a new letter to give to the Borgia. Useful in the book because that’s the next chapter, but that was the previous sequence in the game. La Volpe and Ezio then discuss the Cento Occhi. Ezio leaves some recruits to help the thieves take down the rival gang. After a little while, Ezio and the other leaders meet up at Tiber Island. Claudia and the recruits found information to confirm that Spain and the HRE, are no longer considering allying to Cesare. The thieves and recruits have defeated the Cento Occhi. Claudia is initiated into the Brotherhood and Ezio is made mentor. In the book, Machiavelli mentions that he was planning on writing a book on Cesare and now considering contrasting his methods with Ezio’s. In the game, it’s not stated that it would be about Cesare too. In The Prince, Cesare is used as an example of how ruling through cruelty and fear can keep people in line. Caterina is also mentioned in The Prince about how her fortress could not keep her safe after her people grew to hate her. Brotherhood seq. 8/ch. 42-48 Ezio enters Castel Sant’Angelo, wearing the French uniform. He takes the time to change clothes before going to find Cesare and Rodrigo. Rodrigo’s death goes about the same. He and Cesare argue before Lucrezia runs in and reveals the poison, which Cesare uses to kill Rodrigo. Historically, they both became ill at the same time. Cesare recovered and Rodrigo did not. It could’ve been poison, but it could’ve also just been that they both fell sick and as would be expected, an older man is less likely to recover from an illness than his son. Lucrezia gets her rude awakening that Cesare’s one true love is power, not her and she points Ezio in the right direction. Ezio runs across the passetto di Borgo from Castel Sant’Angelo to Saint Peter’s Basilica. Historically, two popes have used it to save themselves from invaders. One was Rodrigo in 1494 and the other was Clement VII during the 1527 Sack of Rome. Ezio uses weapons to neutralize the Borgia men coming after him in the basilica, but it’s either use the Apple and fail full synchronization or run in the game. Ezio uses the Apple to give him a route to sneak out of the Vatican. Ezio meets up with his allies to plan their next steps. Ezio uses weapons while dealing with Cesare’s forces, rather than being Apple-locked. He does use the Apple on the guards. One of them shouts, “What sorcery is this?” It’s more justified to say when seeing Isu tech for the first time than Altaïr acting surprised when he had already figured out that he was fighting a woman or Vieri upon being sneak attacked. After the guards die, Ezio realizes how truly powerful the Apple is and what the wrong hands could do with it. The game does not show this because it’s really not necessary to know about the guy who was Pope for a month between Rodrigo and Julius II, but Pius III ordered the arrest of Cesare. The order still stands after Pius dies and Julius is elected. Cesare’s army does show up, but they scatter when Cesare gets arrested. Ezio and Leonardo talk a bit more. They say some things that allude to work that Leonardo and Michelangelo would later create. The Apple shows Ezio Cesare’s escape as it happens. When he reaches Castel Sant’Angelo, the guards tell him Cesare escaped a half hour ago, which was when he was using the Apple with Leonardo. Ezio uses the Apple again to find where Cesare escaped to. He hears a woman’s voice telling him where to go. It’s implied that this is probably Minerva. Ezio and two thieves take a boat and catch up to Cesare’s ship. They take over the ship. Cesare is conveniently still in the crate he was smuggled in. Brotherhood seq. 9/ch. 49-66 There is a lot added that isn’t in the game. Ezio goes and talks with Pope Julius about the fate of the Borgia. Cesare has been put in a Spanish prison. His escape from there is when Ezio goes to find him in sequence 9. Lucrezia is married off to some noble and will go on to live a relatively quiet life until her death. Just as Ezio is shown to have come up with the idea of milk and cream in coffee in AC2, Ezio suggests simply naming the pope’s personal regiment of Swiss men, the Swiss Guard. The pope also mentions that he has hired Michelangelo to paint on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and that he is planning on not using the extravagant Borgia apartments (present day: these apartments are used as part of the Vatican art gallery). Ezio tells the Pope about his plans to kill Cesare once and for all. Ezio struggles with the desire to keep the Apple or hide it away throughout these chapters. The Apple lets him know that Micheletto still lives and will likely try to free Cesare. Ezio goes to discuss his plans with his allies. He mentions Caterina’s army in Forlì and also thinks about how he’s not over her. Machiavelli and Ezio go to speak with Cesare and Lucrezia’s mother. She doesn’t know about Cesare’s location. Ezio notes that she is very unhappy. Next, they go to see Rodrigo’s last mistress and plan to visit Cesare’s wife after her. Guilia Farnese (Rodrigo’s mistress) doesn’t know anything either but is a better hostess than Vannozza (Cesare and Lucrezia’s mother). Guilia mentions that Lucrezia has a kinder side and had she not been influenced and used by Rodrigo and Cesare, she might’ve had a better time in life. Historically, Lucrezia was likely not the scheming, incestuous femme fatale that media depictions often make her. Cesare’s wife is quite hostile to them but she isn’t too fond of Cesare either. She also doesn’t know where Cesare is. One of Machiavelli’s men finds them to tell them Claudia has been kidnapped. A Borgia loyalist has been torturing her with a knife. He threatens her life to try to coerce Ezio into leaving Rome. He mentions that Claudia is old and childless, which conflicts with Renaissance. She had at least one child according to that book. Ezio and Machiavelli save Claudia and kill all the Borgia loyalists there. The assassins find and capture Micheletto. They bring him to Florence to imprison him. Machiavelli remains in Florence after this. Caterina breaks Ezio’s heart again with a letter that she has a new lover. Ezio sends her a bunch of letters, which she replies to none of them. Maria passes away and Claudia steps back from running the Rosa in Fiore. Rosa from Venice is brought in to be the new madame. I suppose it didn’t hurt that her name matched the establishment. I’m glad that Rosa’s character is still getting small nods here and there in nonverbal media (she’s also depicted on one of the Magic cards in the AC set: “Distract the Guards”). Julius and Ezio discuss the Apple. The pope gives Ezio the idea to hide the Apple and leave a clue that only a worthy successor would be able to find. He says that maybe it’d even be a descendant of Ezio who would find it. Ezio and Leonardo go and find Cesare’s former doctor. All they get is a lesson about syphilis and learn that Rodrigo and Cesare both caught it. Machiavelli returns with news that Micheletto escaped Florence. They use the Apple to confirm he is going to Spain. Ezio, Machiavelli, and Leonardo use the Apple again to try to get more specifics. A voice that I think is Minerva again tells Ezio, but not the others where to go. They also bribe a courtesan for information about Micheletto. All information points to him fleeing to Valencia in Spain. They follow Micheletto to Spain. He evades them, but they are able to get information from his men. The books are typically third person limited, centered on the protagonist, but chapter 60 has the perspective characters be Micheletto and Cesare. Ezio and Machiavelli destroy Cesare’s forces with bombs made by Leonardo. They find Cesare at what I think is a bar or something. He kills Micheletto for failing him. Machiavelli also gets shot in the shoulder, so he stays with a doctor, while Ezio pursues Cesare. Ezio finds Cesare in Navarre. He says, “My thirst to avenge Mario Auditore led me to you.” In the game the line is “(the Apple you stole from) Mario Auditore led me here.” That line is weird in the game both times it’s said and the book didn’t do that much better in my opinion. Cesare retreats and Ezio gets caught up in the fighting. When he catches up to Cesare, they have a sword fight that ends with Cesare flying off the wall to his death. In the final chapter, Ezio, Leonardo, and Machiavelli meet up for Ezio’s 48th birthday before heading off to Rome, Milan, and Florence, respectively. Leonardo declines an invitation to join the brotherhood and Machiavelli says that the book he’s going to write will be called The Prince. The Da Vinci Disappearance & The Copernico Conspiracy Neither is in the book, but Salaì is mentioned in passing a few times. Cristina memory 1/Renaissance ch. 1 The only difference I could find between the book and the game is that Federico distracts Cristina’s chaperone. Cristina memory 2/Renaissance ch. 4 Cristina is the one to tell Ezio where to find the bodies, instead of him beating a guard for info. Ezio and Cristina part ways and he gives her that necklace before he buries his family. Cristina memory 3/Renaissance ch. 8 A few minor differences. Manfredo tries to buy Ezio a drink in the book as thanks for his rescue. Ezio and Cristina do not have a kiss goodbye in the book. Ezio only gives a small wave and leaves. Cristina memory 4/Renaissance ch. 18 Like the other memories, similar with minor differences. Ezio leaves the note for Cristina at the residence of the person housing her and her husband. Despite the previous memory not including the kiss goodbye, the dialogue stays mostly the same. Cristina memory 5/Renaissance ch. 26 This memory is not novelized. I think this can be taken two ways. One, Ezio didn’t see Cristina before she died and the memory is him wishing he got the chance to say goodbye. Or Ezio did see Cristina and she died in his arms, but he didn’t bother to correct Machiavelli about already knowing she passed away. submitted by /u/Swiftwhiskers to r/assassinscreed [link] [comments]

Gene Wolfe's posthumous collection The Wolfe at the Door collects a bunch of Old Man Wolfe's short stories that were never included in previous collections, or in collections nobody read and are long out of print. I'd read one of them before and the rest were all new to me. I'm going to go story-by-story and pick out my favorites. Introduction: The introduction is by Kim Stanley Robinson. I've read the Mars Trilogy and the Years of Rice and Salt, both of which I thought were pretty good. Robinson apparently knew Wolfe well and provides a mix of anecdotes and biographical details. Korea fucked Wolfe up a lot worse than I thought. There's a specific anecdote that Robinson cites as the beginning of Wolfe's fascination with torture and death - watching a pair of Chinese artillery observers get shot with a flamethrower. In recalling the event, Wolfe was really adamant that these guys were artillery observers. I can't remember where I heard it but I vaguely recall Wolfe saying in another interview that getting hit with artillery was the worst thing that ever happened to him. It's definitely the worst thing that happens to Severian in New Sun, whose military service always felt a little autobiographical. In the lazaret in Autarch he finally makes friends, who like him for reasons unrelated to his capacity for torture and violence, who want him to sit and listen to stories - his favorite thing in the world! - and then they immediately die in an artillery strike. Artillery observers, men responsible for evil deeds against Wolfe and his friends, who then die a horrible death. Justice as torture. It feels a little thin, but in writing it I immediately understand how it feels to be one of those podcast talking heads, starting with a plausible sounding premise and spinning yarns. This is fun! On a Vacant Face a Bruise: A kid from a farm on a colony planet runs off to join the space circus. All your Wolfe-isms are on display here. A rustic future setting full of poverty and crime, a play within a story, men lusting after doll-women, women who go back to abusive men over and over, aliens and monsters kept as slaves, cycles of abuse where children go up to reenact things that happened to them growing up in the guise of mentoring the next generation. An excellent introduction to the collection. Favorite. Bea and her Bird Brother: The title says it all. A woman hears her father's deathbed confession that her mother was actually an alien bird-woman, and that she's one of two hybrid offspring. A weak premise, the strength is in the telling. Even lesser Wolfes usually have something that sticks with me, an image or a single line. Here the line is How long would the knowledge that her father had died insane tear her up? For the rest of her life, probably. Memorare: A washed-up filmmaker goes to space and makes a documentary about booby trapped tombs carved out of asteroids while juggling his ex-wife and his current lady love. This is the only story in the collection I had already read, it was posted online somewhere. It didn't make much of an impression last time, but this time it really hit home. Here's my bullshit armchair psychoanalysis: I think Wolfe spent much of his life around men who beat their wives. I think he grew up around men who did it, and a lot of the guys he knew in Korea probably did it. Guys who were good and decent by every other standard of measurement, courageous and loyal and self sacrificing and so on, who casually did something evil and never saw a problem with it. That's the ending of Memorare, the guy who beats his wife is also the one who sacrifices himself so that the protagonist can escape, and he has to live with that. This story might take place in the same setting as An Evil Guest. They both use commercial faster than light space-RVs called "hoppers" to travel the solar system, and traditional religion has to compete for airtime with weird death cults. Either way, it's a Favorite. A Method Bit in "B": A policeman in a small English town notices his life feels like a scene from a movie. I didn't love this one. Wolfe has some absolute bangers that play with metafictional concepts (Melting is my favorite) but this isn't one of them. I got a lot of Twilight Zone from the scene where the cop realizes that everyone in the bar is drinking ginger ale and tea, which look like beer and whiskey. I'm thinking of the episode where the cowboy movie actor gets stuck in a real Western bar and pounds a whiskey thinking it's colored water. Tarzan of the Grapes: An outlaw journalist is drawn into a story he manufactured during a labor action at a California vineyard. I like this one a lot. The sense of place is superb and the characters are fun despite all being clichés. Favorite. The Little Stranger: An old woman living alone in the woods hosts a caravan of strange guests, who she ropes into a scheme to quiet the ghost haunting her house. This one's a puzzle I haven't cracked yet. In the last couple pages you quickly realize that the narrator either has a deeply distorted view of reality, or all is not as it seems. There's a suggestion that the POV character is a witch, and that the mysterious family that stays at her house are also somehow magical. At the end we get a riff on Hansel and Gretel, which I'm positive also happened in one of the Endangered Species stories. Was she a witch the whole time? Is that why nobody wants to let her near their kids? It reminds me of Peace, a rambling story about mundane events with a sinister undercurrent. Difference is, Peace had cool anecdotes mixed in with the memoirs. I listed a bunch of Wolfe-isms at the beginning, so here's another one: dark skinned, morally ambiguous, magically-knowledgeable traveling people. Other examples off the top of my head are the lady from Free Live Free and Mister Fee from Castleview. The woman in Free is a Roma or Gypsy, a tribe which gets a brief but unkind portrayal in an anecdote relayed by the James Bond style villain in An Evil Guest. I don't know what the deal is here, if this is a reference to something or just a trope Wolfe liked from the pulp adventure stories he read as a kid. It could just be racism on Wolfe's part, but if that's true it doesn't explain anything. Either way this one didn't grab me. With a big stack of stories in the queue I wasn't about to reread Little Stranger, and now that I'm writing this review I still don't feel like going back. Christmas Inn: A failing bed-and-breakfast hosts a carload of mysterious guests and supernatural phenomena on Christmas eve. This one is an improvement over The Little Stranger, the events of the story are more interesting and the puzzle feels more obviously connected to them. Who are the guests? Who is the child? How does the vote at the end of the story turn out? Every member of the family who runs the inn is trivially entrapped by sex with the mysterious guests. Do they actually undergo any personal development as a result, or is that just cope for how easily they were seduced? I like this story because it's a novel spin on A Christmas Carol and on the more modern "forgotten the meaning of Christmas" premise. Wolfe's other Christmas stories are real downers. War Under the Tree and that one where the kid's parents are stuffed in the freezer in the basement and he gets diddled by a guy in a Santa outfit. The Gunner's Mate: A pirate ghost falls in love with a woman vacationing on an island resort. Like in Pirate Freedom, we get a romantic view of pirates and piracy alongside an unromantic depiction of piratical reality - in this case their propensity for gang rape. We could explain this with my bullshit psychoanalysis from earlier about Wolfe struggling to reconcile apparently good men inflicting violence on women. We could say it's a general trend (seen also in Wizard/Knight and basically everywhere else) to combine a romantic adventure with a brutal and unglamorous reality. The story ends with a classic Wolfe dig into possession, identity and memory. Is the pirate ghost possessing the POV character's fiancé? Did he kill and replace him? Has she merely confused the two? The Grave Secret: A necromancer animates a body and sends it to kill his wife. This one felt like a weaker version of the excerpt from the fake John Dee Necronomicon in Peace (which is my favorite part of Peace). I think I'm going to say that about a lot of these stories. Wolfe has produced novel-length works that feel like rough drafts of his better stories (for example Castleview felt like a first attempt at Wizard/Knight) and it stands to reason that he'd explore a lot of themes in his short stories that would later go on to feature in his most famous published works. The Old Woman and the Young Woman: A teenage pioneer leaves home and sets out into the post apocalyptic wilderness, seeking shelter with a cunning woman and her young assistant on the way to the frontier. It's got an open ending and a mystery I really like. The old lady might have just got tired of living by chop-shopping clones of herself, and decided to go out on a high note rather than enduring the horror of doing it all over again. She says at the beginning that the brain is the one part she can't replace, and it inevitably spoils. Better to make way for a fresh version than slide into dementia. The potion could have effected a Charles Dexter Ward style personality swap, transferring the old lady into the body of her younger clone. That would explain how she got the voice and evil laugh down perfect. The teenage clone might have just given the old lady the wrong potion on purpose. There was no suicide or personality transfer, the teenage assistant saw an opportunity to escape with the gullible but strong young man, and did unto the witch before the witch could do unto her. This one's a Favorite. Dormanna: An elementary school aged child hosts an alien sprite, come from space to impart wisdom and gather knowledge about humanity. Like The Little Stranger, this one seems innocuous until the ending, which puts a strange and sinister spin on the antics of the friendly alien (although its brief and terrifying appearance on the last page doesn't necessarily mean the creature is evil). And like The Little Stranger, I didn't enjoy it enough to dig into it further. Easter Sunday: A priest talks with a devil on Easter Sunday. We're going to see a bunch of short mystery stories later in the collection. This one isn't my favorite but I'll give it credit for giving the reader enough information to figure it out before the ending - which not all the detective stories do. Archangel Gabriel: I got nothing intelligent to say about this one. I'm not the right person to critique religious verse. I assume "orbiting Mare" with Mare capitalized is meant to refer to the lunar seas, which fits with the "moon's long sweep" in the previous line. That's the only part that jumps out at me. Last Night in the Garden of Forking Tongues: A tribute to one of Wolfe's favorites, and my favorite poem in Wolfe at the Door. Maybe We've Been Doing It Wrong: I like this one too. It's got that same blend of romanticism and unglamorous reality. Based on an anecdote from the intro, Wolfe was fascinated by riots and street brawls - he could watch teenagers loot a hardware store for hours. Connect the Dots: This one went over my head. Planetarium in Orbit: A supervillain enacts the heist of the century at a planetarium. A delight from start to finish. The POV character injects so much flavor into the cliche-ridden story, and the willingness to embrace absurdity stops it from being predictable. It's like if Wolfe wrote a Xavier Renegade Angel sketch. He am dee mon. Besides recurring character Doctor Death, the hero archetype character I think is supposed to be Brick Bronson, who appears in various incarnations in the Endangered Species collection. At one point Wolfe browbeats him for not acting like a generic pulp adventurer, a performance he puts on admirably in Planetarium. Favorite. Leaves In His Face: A humanities professor at a future university is haunted by a strange figure while trying to teach Proust. Someone more familiar with the source material would probably get more out of this one, but I love Wolfe's depiction of a future-university. The students are badly behaved violent sex crazed freaks, but they all do their assigned reading and have spirited debates about the content and themes. While the POV character experiences events as a circular hell, the world depicted sounds like the author's vision of paradise. The On-Deck Circle: A baseball star from the halcyon days of the sport is conscripted into a future televised baseball event - a mix of staged reality television and Blood Wake style speedboat combat. This is my favorite depiction of jazzed-up future baseball, sorry Futurama. There's not a lot going on with the plot, but the action scenes racing yachts in the cyberCaribbean are cool. Favorite. Hopkins Dalhousie: A robot car explains why it killed its owner. I thought this one was going to be like the opening of the Second Renaissance short from Animatrix, but it turned the premise on its head - recasting B1-66ER as the beloved companion of the murdered owner, sticking with him until the end. At least, that's what the robot car tells us. Wolfe never had any doubts that intelligent robots are people, and people have the capacity to lie. Or to distort the truth in order to shield themselves from reality. How I Got Three Zip Codes: A writer converses with an old guy in a bar. This is what Planetarium In Orbit would be without a good frame narrative to hang it on. It's got the same sense of humor and sense of wordplay, but it just comes out as a stream of patter rather than an interesting story. Not a fan. Screen Test: A wealthy buyer has an ancient Chinese silk screen authenticated at an antique shop. I decided to start checking publication dates here, because this story felt like a first stab at one of the central plot arcs in Peace. Screen Test was written in 1967, and Peace came out in 1975. The fraudulent antiques dealer and the way clever forgeries become accepted as the genuine article presage the bookseller Louis Gold and his fake tomes of magic. If not for that connection I don't think I'd really care for this one. Volksweapon: A groundskeeper walking the woods finds a woman murdered in an attempted carjacking. There are a few detective stories in this collection, a genre Wolfe enjoyed and occasionally delved into in his novel-length works. This one gives you half the information needed to solve the case, putting all the pieces together with a last minute revelation at the end. The murder of the woman could have been solved by the reader after the groundskeeper returns to the car, but the presence and motives of the poachers rely on the groundskeeper just telling the reader that's what's going on. As long as we're counting Wolfe-isms, we got a pretty lady with big pale thighs. The Largest Luger: An expert in firearms authentication is asked to authenticate a rare .45 caliber Army trials Luger, and later to help in a murder investigation of a party involved in the transaction. Again, the solution to the mystery is revealed at the very end with details that were invisible to the audience up to that point. I think Wolfe had a different idea of what made a fun mystery story, compared to modern day aphorisms about how everything must be solvable prior to the end with information given to the reader. It's fun to just read about a detective doing detective stuff, even if I can't do all the detecting myself. And it's another example where the stamp of an expert could turn a fraud into an authentic example worth millions of dollars. According to the publication information, this one first appeared in Young Wolfe in 1992, which means it was actually written much earlier. The Last Casualty of Cambrai: A murder mystery set amid a series of dioramas and miniature soldiers, with a particular focus on the most famous tank battle of the Great War. I feel similar to this one as I do the Largest Luger. Other stories in the book have dark skinned people, but I think this is the only time in the collection that a character is specifically mentioned to be Black. He's a janitor who speaks with a phonetically rendered accent, but his dialect isn't that far off from how the other Chicagoans in the story talk. Last Drink Bird Head: A humorous anecdote about a writer who liked to play tricks on barkeeps, and a cabal of other writers who decided to give him a literal taste of his own medicine. Wolfe describes a good cocktail as a lost art that died around the end of Prohibition in America. He spent most of his life in what the How To Drink guy refers to as the "bad old days" of cocktails, an era that mostly produced undrinkable sugar slop. Last Drink Bird Head was written around 2009, when things were starting to turn around. Some things do actually get better over time. Mountains Like Mice: An initiate into a monastic order of adventurer-mages sets out into the wilderness for an escape-and-evade practicum to cap off his education. I liked this story right up until the old master gave the protagonist an info-dump that explained what was really happening. I don't mind the future world being a partially terraformed Mars, or any of the other plot details, I just wished we had gotten them in some format other than a prepared speech. Low quality lore filibusters interrupting the cool mysteries and imagery is something I expect out of Laird Barron, not Gene Wolfe. Having said all that, I do like the central conflict between the human survivors of the failed colony and their engineered slave race - and the implication that the "human" survivors are themselves also leftover bioroids. The old master asserts that the little servitors were made without hearts, and resent humanity for having them. This is clearly bullshit the character believes, rather than the author talking. Wolfe has always been quite clear that weird monster races and robots are people. Mountains came out in 1966, Wolfe revisited monster-people yearning to be human throughout his career. Most notably with the cannibal goblins from Wizard/Knight and the Inhumi from Long/Short Sun. Favorite. The Green Wall Said: An admittedly non-representative sample of humanity is trapped in a mysterious alien room. Text on the walls explains what's happening and why they've been abducted, but none of them pay any attention. This one was published in 1967 and I wonder if Wolfe was thinking of the Twilight Zone episode about the toys trapped in a bucket and tormented by the sound of the Salvation Army man drumming on the side. Thou Spark of Blood: Astronauts on a long mission to Mars go crazy and kill each other. I just wrapped Universe Day, a collection of short stories from the same era, and this one feels downright Malzbergian. Has anyone ever actually gone crazy in space? I remember a Twilight Zone episode about that too. Unrequited Love: Two girls and their two dogs, one cybernetic and one human, plus the narrator. This is Wolfe's take on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, a microtragedy about replacement animals and replacement humans. I couldn't finish Do Androids Dream when I first tried to read it as a kid, the part about the cat dying and replacing it with a robot made me sad. Wolfe's riff on the concept is transparently emotionally manipulative, but that doesn't make it bad. Loco Parentis: A pair of new parents coo over their infant son and deliver exposition/social commentary about the future world they inhabit. This one is Unrequited Love but as a comedy rather than a tragedy. Disturbing and whimsical in equal measure, tonally similar to Planetarium but not as memorable. Going to the Beach: A dystopian world where people who score well on an aptitude test in high school are given a lifetime basic income to do as they please, while everyone else works for a living. This one had great atmosphere and I loved the ending: The POV character is an editor. Robots can produce reams of incomprehensible lorem ipsum, but boiling it down to something readable can only be done by humans. And the robot who drops the incomprehensible manuscript on the protagonist is "the engineer" - Wolfe's caricature of himself. This one's got a sexbot (take a drink) and I like this character because she shows off Old Man Wolfe's conviction that advanced robots will be people, and humans will immediately enslave them. Hookertron has to periodically recharge her batteries, and in order to afford that she has to fuck for a living. Rather than create a utopia where the robots are happy to take care of the humans, they made the robots motivated by fear of poverty and death. Incidentally, "We turned utopia into a day job" was my favorite part of Rajaniemi's Summerland, where the British afterlife is an office and you have to work to avoid dissolving. Favorite. It's Very Clean: A guy goes to a brothel full of sexbots to lose his virginity. I'm going to skip right to the ending here, where he learns after sex that the android was actually a human woman. Rather than being happy she was a real woman, he's enraged by what he feels is a betrayal of trust. He wanted sex with a robot so he wouldn't have to feel vulnerable or have his inadequacies judged. Or maybe he feels guilty about doing whatever he did (we don't know, exactly) to a human rather than a machine, and takes it out on her violently. This story is from 1972, far predating Wolfe's most famous depiction of sexbots in 1988's There Are Doors. The 'bots in Doors are used by guys in the alternate reality because if they make love to a real woman they die instantly, but the most common reading of Doors is that the whole thing is the tortured imagination of the psychotic drunken protagonist, projecting his difficulties with women and his mother onto external reality. Off the top of my head you've also got Hethor's weird rant about having his "paracoita" stolen in Shadow of the Torturer, though that could refer metaphorically to the incident in Urth where Gunnie chooses Severian over him as a young man. Either way, all these unstable, violent men turning to machines or pornography or whatever to avoid dealing with the real world is obvious social satire. One wonders if sexbots might be an improvement over the status quo, sparing human woman from their attentions. But does that just create a further class of degraded slaves for them to abuse, as we saw in the previous story in the collection? Frostfree: A surly salesman is gifted a robot refrigerator that doubles as a domestic servant and dating service. This story is deliberately placed by the editor to polish off the sequence of stories about robot parents, robot kids, robot hookers and robot wives. My reading is that the male lead Roy Tabak is more or less indifferent to the human woman the fridge sets him up with, and prefers the company of the fridge. But does he actually feel bad about inflicting himself on "warmhearted" women? Or does he just prefer the robo-woman with a dump truck ass because she slavishly obeys his every command? If we look at the story through the same lens as Doors, the whole deal with the curse prevention society and the entire existence of the talking fridge could just be a psychotic delusion that reflects the protagonist's depression. The text invites us to consider the possibility, even after the main character exhaustively cross checks the existence of the talking fridge with other characters. The fridge tells him that he's one bad day away from insanity and suicide if she doesn't pull him out of his death spiral. He conceptualizes himself as cursed and any women who comes near him as likewise cursed. He can't have the woman he actually wants because she's a cyborg from the future and her mission is to set him up with a sacrificial lamb instead. Frostfree was written in 2013, decades after the two previous stories in this sequence. It's a more sympathetic treatment of sexbot enjoyers than It's Very Clean. Roy is kind of an asshole but he doesn't resort to violence when he feels uncomfortable. His flaws are relatable human failures brought on by weakness and exhaustion, and the fantasy of someone else putting in the work to make him happy. The Giant: A children's book writer wanders out into the wilderness to seek inspiration, but ends up caught in a sinister fairytale. I didn't like this one at first, but on reflection I dig how the protagonist inadvertently casts himself as the villain of a children's story, instantly resorting to violence to "discipline" a bunch of random kids playing in a building in the woods. Despite the rough treatment the kids-who-aren't-kids warn him what's going to happen next, and like a fairy tale antagonist he doesn't listen until it's too late. The Magic Animal: An adolescent girl who can talk to animals is dragooned into a fairy scheme to save the future. The basic plot is Wizard/Knight if the kid conscripted by the fairies was a girl. But rather than being brainwashed completely like Abel, Viviane keeps her wits about her. The characters are fun, the tone is both whimsical and melancholic. There are several of Wolfe stories where a character gets stuck living a lifetime only to be deposited back where they started. Peace has two (the genie's orange garden, the Chinese pillow) and there's also one in Endangered Species (or was it Best of Gene Wolfe?) where the guy signs on with a crew of fairy pirates to save his fiancé. This one is like those, but the ending is hopeful rather than a cruel twist. Favorite. The Hour of the Sheep: A lightsaber duelist goes looking for a street fight to gain some practical experience for his book. I love the dangerous area of the city that's been so gentrified he can't find any street toughs to battle, only other bohemians slumming it for a good time. I also like how the protagonist is actually good at swordfighting, he doesn't eat shit the second he gets in a brawl versus multiple opponents. And I love the way the ending is not only presaged by his own advice given in the unfinished novel at the beginning of the story, but by the title of the story itself. Favorite. The Woman Who Went Out: An ancient Greek woman uses magic to conjure a lover who will outperform her miserly husband sexually and shower her with gifts. It's a short and simple tale but I love the bait and switch. When the husband casts a spell of his own you expect it's going to be a Gift of the Magi situation, where the characters realize what they're doing and reconcile somehow. Then the woman discovers the husband's deception and likes the conjured lover better than him, and you think that's going to be its own happy ending. Then they all die! Brilliant, 10/10. Are there any other places in Wolfe where we see a sexbot service a woman? I can't think of any. I recall Phye is one of the hookers from the first Latro book, and the POV character relating the story to the best of his memory might be Latro. Anyway, Favorite. Leif in the Wind: A space explorer goes mad on an alien planet and brings his contagious madness back aboard the ship - or carries genuine supernatural phenomena with him. This one reads like a weaker version of Silhouette. The "madman"s description of the planet can't compete with Erik describing the dead city on Neuerddraht, which is my favorite page of prose ever. At the end, the drops of "vanilla extract" emitting alien birds when placed on the skin suggest that they've actually been dropping acid the entire time. The Sea of Memory: A group of explorers set up tents on a strange island and try to remember how they got there, or what they're supposed to be doing. This one feels real because of the sheer amount of effort it takes for the protagonist to make conversation with all these people, who expect her to explain things in detail even though they're not really paying attention, or be impressed by things she doesn't care about. We've all been on both sides of that equation. Dying and ending up in a labyrinth of memory is the basic conceit of Peace. But what if you shared that labyrinth with other people? Sea of Memory was written in 2013, was Wolfe's wife already sliding into dementia by then, giving him a new crop of hard experiences to inform his writing about death and memory and death of memory? I know he incorporated at least some of that experience into his work, based on the ending of his last novel Interlibrary Loan. At The Point of Capricorn: An eclectic cast of characters huddle in a cave and tell stories at the end of the world. I don't think I'd have remembered this at all if it came in the middle of the collection, but placed at the end it's good. It was written in 1985 but it feels like Late Wolfe in a good way, reflecting on lessons learned and trying hard to face death with something more than stoic sadness. Wrapup I liked this collection, I didn't love every story but it was fun to see a broad spectrum of work spanning about fifty years. The pacing and arrangement are spot-on, opening with a strong entry and distributing the other bangers throughout so there's never a string of duds. I'd love to hear what everyone else's favorites were! submitted by /u/mellonbread to r/genewolfe [link] [comments]

Okay first and foremost most HUGE shoutout to our potato queen and her king Mike, my husband and I adore you BOTH and honestly watching your content has helped me process the last say... 18-24(?)+ months a little easier. So glad there's another couple out there that enjoy fart hurmor as much as we do 😂. Anyways, strap your Velcros guys 😅 I just want to preface this by saying I'm probably not going to unload all the super specifics because ya'll will literally be reading for days. I finally feel like I'm in a place emotionally where I can share this story without it sending me back down the dark hole so to speak. Here goes! Last year (2023), myself (now 29 F) and my Husband (now 38 M) got married in August. The wedding itself was amazing, such a special day for us and we have memories and moments that we will cherish forever. Unfortunately for us, there were alot of things that did not go to plan in the lead up to our nuptials. We became engaged in February of 2022. My husband put so much thought and effort into the proposal, took me out to a nearby city for the weekend, got the swankiest hotel room, took me to the most amazing 6 course vegetarian degustation (were not vego but we do LOVE food so this experience was just amazing). He was so kind and considerate of my feelings and my anxiety, I had previously expressed to him that the thought of being proposed to in a room full of people terrified the ever loving shit out of me so he arranged for champagne and desert to be sent to the room after dinner and proposed to me there. He did video tape it to send to my best friend, per her request which I was fine with as she was influential in ensuring he got my ring perfect, which was handmade by a local jeweller. He then arranged to have a bunch of our friends come out and surprise us the day after so we got to spend the rest of our weekend celebrating with our nearest and dearest. Honestly just so so special. I will digress quickly here just to add - both my husband and I suffer from pretty severe anxiety at times. It's definitely been a point of contention between us and my side of the family as certain family members can't seem to fully grasp the concept that we both suffer from anxiety which means we don't always feel comfortable being in the spotlight - pretty terrible when your trying to organise a wedding I won't lie! I also have a multitude of women's health issues - more on this later. Also to digress - my husband's family is quite religious. He has 2 younger siblings that still live in the family home (both in their 30's). My mum and dad seperated when I was in early primary school for the first time (year 4, I was about 8 or 9 years old). The divorce was messy, my dad hates my mum now. My mum is remarried now to my step-dad, I have 2 step-siblings and 2 full siblings, I'm the middle child between my full siblings and my step-siblings are both in their early 20's. Alright now we got that out of the way, let's dive into this ever loving shit storm. So not long after we got engaged I started doing research on venues and vendors, as one does. At this time I was starting my 2nd year of University (nursing degree) so I was kind of torn between focusing on my studies and collating stuff for the wedding. We were still deciding about what exactly we wanted to do, elopement sounded very appealing, but I knew that it would create so much drama from my mother if I didn't have a wedding, being the first of all the kids (step-siblings included) to become engaged. Anyway long story short we found our dream wedding venue after doing our research, visiting locations and going to expo's. Once we did our walkthrough we could not picture being married anywhere else. We booked our initial wedding date for June/July 2024, which is winter/off season for weddings in my country which meant our venue hire and food/beverage fees were offered at a discounted rate, and we were so thrilled. Heading into the end of 2022 we had secured I think 3 vendors, including the venue, for our initial 2024 date. We were feeling good about everything moving forward. It was around the middle of 2022 that I started to have issues with chronic unexplained pelvic pain, which was making it incredibly difficult for me to focus on my degree and complete my nursing placements (in my country you have to do minimum 900 hours of unpaid nursing placements across 3 years to become a qualified registered nurse). It wasn't long after my health started declining that we got horrible news, my husband's mother had been diagnosed with cancer again. Towards the end of the year we found out about the full extent of her cancer and the prognosis was not good. My husband and I sat down and talked about what we were going to do with regard to our wedding. I basically said that we have 2 options here - we elope in secret to make sure his mum could see us be married, keep our original wedding date and just make it a super fun party with our friends and family, or we move our wedding forward and hope and pray she will still be with us when the time comes. My husband put it to his mum and dad, and they decided they didn't want us to elope because they felt like it would take away from the special moment of being able to be wed infront of our friends and family. We made the decision to bring the wedding forward into August of 2023. This presented a few issues, first being that I would be in the middle of my 3rd and final year of my degree, second being that I wasn't working full time during my studies so financially my contribution wouldn't be as significant as it would have been with our original proposed wedding date. Luckily my Dad was able to pull through for us and he helped out with majority of the costs for our wedding. Things were progressing, the bridal parties were selected. It wasn't a question that I wanted my brother (27M) by my side on my wedding day, so he was. For some context my brother is gay. His coming out was very messy and he does not have a good relationship with my dad. I have given him so much support over the years and had to be a mediator at times when he has had explosive fights with my dad and I've always provided him with my unbiased opinion and a soundboard to just be able to communicate how he is feeling about shit, which I hold high value on due to my previous experience with mental health issues. As we progress with the timeline of the wedding there were a few things that happened: 1) My mum and step-dad insisted that we have an "engagement celebration" with them, and they wanted me to invite my dad. There was no way in HELL we were going to have an intimate family dinner with my mum's family and my dad, honestly I doubt he would have come anyway. We ended up begrudgingly organising an engagement party at their behest, which they did pay for. 2) My older sister got engaged a few months after me. We don't have the closest relationship so I didn't include her in my wedding party. I also didn't ask my step-sister (who I am close with) because I just knew it would start drama, and the last thing I wanted at my wedding was any BS family drama from my side of the family. 3) towards the end of 2022 I found I had failed a few of my 2nd year subjects at uni, and I was finding it increasingly difficult to complete my placement requirements due to my pain. 4) my husband's mum didn't respond well to the cancer treatment she was receiving. She battled with it for months and ended up succumbing to her illness towards the end of June 2023, just 2 months shy of our wedding. My husband's mother's death was a huge loss for us, she was a gem of a woman and deserved so much better than what her illnesses put her through (she battled with cancer and other health issues thought my husband's adolescents and adulthood). She ended up in palliative care for about a week before she passed, and because I was on a break for uni (having to defer first semester of 2023 and repeat the 2nd year subjects I'd failed in 2nd semester of 2023) and I wasn't able to work alot because of my pain issues I spent alot of time in the palliative unit with her and my husband's dad. I made sure that she was looked after and was as comfortable as she could be. I didn't realise at the time how triggering this would be for me, my grandmother passed away in similar circumstances around the time of my 21st birthday with her funeral actually falling on my birthday. After his mother passed I fell apart a bit, i was struggling to eat which is a common response for me when I'm going through it, and I had a few issues where I just broke down and lost my shit, usually after drinking. I ended up reaching out to my mum and asking if she could come and stay with us to give us a bit of support as we were both really struggling. Again for context - she used to live within 30 minutes of me, but towards the end of 2022 she and her husband decided to move inter-state, so she had to fly down and then catch a 2 hour train ride to get to us. I really thought that she would be the perfect person to have by my side while I navigated all these feelings that kept surfacing following my future MIL's passing. Unfortunately that was not the case. The day before the funeral I had my step-dad and my brother arrive at our place to spend the night, and we would all travel further down the coast together for the funeral the next day. My sister and my dad also travelled down but they booked accommodation that was within 10 minutes of where she would be burried and where we would have the "wake" (I say wake in brackets because it was more of a scripture reading by their pastor rather than a wake, but it was special because my MIL had hand picked everything she wanted read in the lead up to her passing). My dad and sister reached out to my husband and I to catch up for a drink at one of the local pubs in our town. When my husband and I arrived we sat down and started talking. Now keep in mind I had been struggling to eat properly, my dad LOVES a drink and so does my sister, so we cast down and he was shouting rounds. While we were there my sister handed me her wedding invitations for my mum, step-dad, step-siblings and my brother to hand on to them. She said that she didn't want to be handing them out at the funeral the next day which I was super appreciative of, and that coming weekend was my hens celebration which was one night in a other city close by so she didn't want to take away from that for me by handing out the invitations then. Out of respect for me she handed them to me to pass on and I can honestly say it's one of the most kind and thoughtful interactions I've ever had with my sister. Her wedding was slated for March of 2024. We were at the pub for about an hour and in that time my dad brought me 3 HUGE glasses of rosè, which combined with a virtually empty stomach was a recipe for disaster. I have no memory of leaving the pub, and when we got home shit hit the fan. According to my husband when we got home I started preparing dinner, then as we were sat down and eating I pulled the wedding invitations for my sister's wedding out of my bag and handed them to the respective parties. My mother lost her ever loving shit and started carrying on about how disrespectful it was that Jessica hadn't made the effort to hand deliver the invitation to her. Keep in mind that her and her husband made the decision to move INTER-STATE after both of our engagements, and mine and my husband's wedding invites were posted to them because there was no way we were going to actually see them for anything outside of wedding related events. My husband tried to explain to her my sister's reasoning behind handing the invites to me to pass on, but she wasn't having a bar of it and my husband ended up getting really pissed off and taking himself to bed early. The next day when I woke up I had no memory of what happened, my husband told me and I felt like the worst fucking human on the planet, leaving him to deal with that on his own while I was so out of it. He told me he wasnt upset with me because he knew how much I was going through it, and I told him it was probably for the best I wasn't all there because if I was I definitely would have kicked her out of my house for this behaviour. After the funeral we ended up going out to the local for a few beverages with our friends (my husband's family doesn't drink). I had 1 beer and nothing more. The vibe was definitely off but we were all amicable towards each other. My dad and sister had to leave the readings early to head back home, my brother and step-dad left that afternoon, my mum stayed with us as we were driving up to the city 2 days later for my hens do. After my mother's behaviour the night before the funeral she made herself scarce in our home. She spent alot of time out of the house and was avoidant. She couldn't even apologise to my husband for her behaviour or talk to him about it to his face. She did end up calling him and apologising after the fact, which he accept but I was super pissed off about as I felt my husband deserved way more respect from her than that. My other issues was that I didn't really want my mother at my hens do, especially after her behaviour towards the funeral. My best friend and MOH invited her as a courtesy, thinking that she would decline the invite due to the fact I'd already had a bridal shower with her and my husband's mum and a few other special women a few months beforehand. She most definitely did NOT decline. I had 3 of my girlfriend's drive up the coast and meet at mine and hubby's place. One of my friends doesn't drink so she was happy to be the designated driver, and my husband's car is a Nissan Pathfinder so it made sense to take that car up as it would fit us all. We loaded up and then had to drive about 30ish minutes to go get my step-sister and then head the rest of the way up to the city. My mum does not have a good relationship with my step-siblings. She is incredibly demanding and difficult to live with because she nitpics over ridiculous issues and doesn't know how to set boundaries with people. She just let's stuff she doesn't like fester and then will explode over the smallest issues. An example would be she had a full on fight with my step brother (who is the youngest of all 5 of us) because he ate almost a whole packet of her double coat timtams (which she shouldn't even be eating because of high cholesterol). Keep in mind there were 2 or 3 left in the pack when she spat it at him, and this is after he had spent heaps of time at their place while they were away on holidays looking after their blind and diabetic dog that had to have insulin injections 2x per day, exactly 12 hours apart. That's alot of self control for an 19/20 year old man. Anyway, we pick up my step-sister and we have to rearrange the seating because she gets really car sick. Apparently this was the prompt my mother needed to start behaving like a child. Lets call my step-sister Jane, for context. As soon as we pulled up, my mother starts on her. "Oh Jane, since when do you get car sick? You never got car sick when you lived with us (years ago at this point). So strange? When did this start happening?" Basically just peppering my step-sister with questions about it, being super condescending towards her which isn't an uncommon occurrence. She had moved into the back seat of the car to accommodate my sister and my other friend sitting towards the front with direct view out the front window to try and help with car sickness (we didn't want anyone puking considering we were gonna be in the car for an hour and a half). While my mum was carrying on I turned around in her seat and I gave her "the look", as in 'can you please stfu and stop trying to make people uncomfortable'. She seemed to pick up on it and dropped the topic of my step-sister a seemingly "sudden" car sickness issues (it wasn't sudden, it's something she has realised since becoming an adult and having to sit in school busses for excursions - she's a primary school teacher). The car ride continues and everyone's chatting and being friendly. About half an hour away from our venue we drive through an area on the outskirts of the city that's got a really vibrant Lebanese community. My mum launches into this story about how this area of the city scares her because of an experience she had being in that area with a friend where they were "followed by Lebanese gangs". Now I'm not the person to sit idly by and not call out casual racism, and I could not help the snort that exited my mouth at her comment. She heard, obviously, and asked me what was so funny. I simply responded that they were more than likely just "a group of Lebanese people" and that is was pretty assumptive of her to consider them a "gang" when she's walking through and area of the city that is known to have a high population of Lebanese and middle eastern immigrants. This comment I made caused her to "snap". She crossed her arms like a petulant child, stated out loud "well I just won't talk anymore seeing as I can't say anything right" and then proceeded to give the car her silent treatment for the rest of the drive. It was so awkward and I was incredibly embarrassed that my friends had witnessed this behaviour from her. When we got to our location we had to park the car on a side street, about a 10 minute walk away from our hotel. When we parked she got her bags out of the car and proceeded to storm off towards our accommodation. She was fully aware of my pain and mobility issues but instead of trying to help me with my things she just took off. Thankfully my friends and step sister were there to help me with everything. I want to say this was the last of he bad behaviour but it seemed to be just the beginning. We walked to the hotel, my brother and sister had already arrived (they live north of this city so had to drive down to attend). My MOH showed up not long after that, her and my brother took off to mine and my MOH's room and started setting up and I went to my other friends room to wait. My friends were telling me not to worry about my mum and I was determined at that point to not let her behaviour ruin the rest of my night. Thank god I did. So my mum and sister had booked the hotel next door to stay in, the buildings were connected but they were considered 2 different hotels. My mum checks in, it's about 4pm, she sends a group message out to everyone telling them that she made lunch for everyone and to come and get food. She didn't tell anyone she was doing this and my MOH had gone and brought nibbles and champagne for us to drink in our room prior to going out for dinner. When my MOH mentioned this in the chat she didn't respond and left it on read. When everyone got the message to head to mine and MOH's room for nibbles and champagne, she rocked up with my sister with the biggest scowl on her face. She sat in the corner drinking and being quiet. She didn't even want to get a photo with me Infront of the setup my MOH and brother had prepared. My MOH ended up saying "c'mon now, let's get a photo of you with your daughter. Charlotte if you want to see the photo I'm happy to send it because it really puts into perspective the vibe she was putting out. As we were leaving the room she flipped her lid at my brother and accused him of drinking "her" champagne, like there wasn't 3 bottles of it to go around. My brother was taken aback, pretty sure she called him an alcoholic. In the taxi on the way to our dinner venue she was talking to my sister about how if her and her husband had stayed in our state that they wouldn't of had good quality of life, which is quite frankly ridiculous as they have heaps of investment property and are quite well off. My step-sister overheard her conversation with my sister and got upset because she couldn't understand why they wouldn't of had a good quality of life if they stayed, considering they lived within a 30 minute drive of myself, my step-sister and my step-brother as well as having heaps of friends In this area. When we got to the dinner venue my sister corralled my mother towards the end of the table which I was pretty pleased about at that point. Dinner was awesome (Italian, carbs, love), we had heaps of wine left over from our set menu but it was time to start heading to our second venue. My mum and sister said they were going to stay behind for a bit to finish off some of the wine, I honestly couldn't have cared less at this point. The rest of us moved off while they stayed behind. We got to our next venue and watched a burlesque show which I loved. We had cocktails and just vibed with the ambience of this bar. 45 minutes later my mum and sister are still nowhere to be seen. I was just shrugging at this point when people asked, I think my brother ended up contacting one of them and they showed up about 5 minutes before we headed to the next location. I come to find out that her and my sister were indulging in some... Naughty icing sugar in the bathrooms of the dinner location and that's why it took them so long to get to us. I just laughed at this point, because it was so on brand for my mother to on one hand bitch about the fact that my dad likes to partake in this activity on the regular, but she was happy to disappear for almost an hour to do it with my sister on my hens night. I pretty much if ored her for the rest of the night, but after her little adventure with my sister she seemed to have worked herself out of whatever mood she was in and just got stuck into enjoying the night. We ended up finishing the night at a gay bar and I had the best time there. We went back to our hotels, my mum went to bed and my brother and sister ended up coming back to my hotel room with me and my MOH for a bit. I decompressed a little over mums behaviour, we said goodnight and went our separate ways. The following morning my mother pretended as if nothing had happened, was all kisses and hugs. She said she loved me and that she'd see me soon and she left with my sister to head back up the coast with her. She spent a few days with her before flying back home. The car ride home after the hens was great because my friends and step sister were so supportive. They said that my mum's behaviour was out of line and they just generally wanted to know I was okay after the events of the last week. I do feel at that point I was still a little shellshocked, but also super proud of myself for not letting my mum get to me and being able to put her to the side and still enjoy my hens. It was a couple of days later when she called and apologised to me about everything she had done in that last week. I listened to everything she had to say. I told her how disappointed I was, that I'd asked her to come down to be with us for support and instead she had made an already incredibly difficult situation even worse for both Rowan and I, and that I was still in a bit of disbelief over her actions and behaviour over my hens weekend. She cried, I told her that I thought she needed to see a therapist and work through whatever it is she was going through because the way she was behaving wasn't healthy for her or anyone else involved. She was receptive and told me she would look into it. A few weeks after this she had gone back to my sister's place for her wedding dress and bridesmaids dresses shopping weekend. She had already brought an outfit for mine and hubby's wedding, which was a really beautiful cocktail style forrest green dress which looked great and was super fitting for our off season winter wedding. When she was dress shopping with my sister she decided she wanted to buy a new dress, but she didn't want my sister to say anything to me about it as she wanted it to be a "surprise". My sister ended up messaging me about it, and I asked her if I could please see the dress. It was a VERY light sage green floor length ball gown with spaghetti straps. It looked like a prom or formal dress, and it didn't fit her properly (it pinched her skin in the back giving her a back bum). I just rolled my eyes and said lol, let her wear it. I was over GAF at this point. As my wedding moves closer she ended up deciding to wear her original dress anyway and I made a point of telling her on the day that my sister had told me about the dress and sent me a photo of her in it, and that I was really glad she decided to go with her original outfit choice. No idea what happened with this other dress she brought, I'd say it's probably collecting dust somewhere in her cupboard. The day of the wedding was great for me but I did find a few things out after the fact: 1) she was harrassing my MOH on the day of the wedding for different things such as food, drink refills, different menial tasks that she could have definitely done herself but felt intitled to my MOH's time (lucky my MOH takes no shit and put her in her place every time she asked - she also had a vent session with my step-sister I stead of bringing it to me, she really is a gem of a human being I love her dearly 💕). 2) my cousin asked my mum if she could ask me if her and my other cousins kids could attend the reception - our venue was a working farm so there was really strict rules about minors in attendance. She tried to ask my brother if the kids could be snuck in and my brother was super dry and just said "did they not read the invitation and wedding website? No kids at the reception, that's final." 3) In her speech she talked about a period of my life where I still lived near the city and I got really into EDM and went to heaps of raves and bush doofs as being scary for her when I literally lived with her and then had to move out because she decided to move away when I was 18. I lived in different areas renting until the end of the year I turned 21 and decided to relocate and live with her and my step-dad. There were a few people who I hold dear that told me they didn't appreciate her comments about being scared for my safety during this time period as she basically abandoned me and my siblings to get re-married and relocate. After the wedding my husband and I were so physically and mentally cooked that when we got home we just veged out for 3 or 4 days before heading off on our honeymoon which was an interstate road trip visiting all these amazing spots and then driving back through the middle of the state to get home, it was awesome and just what we needed. After the wedding things settled, but I pushed alot of what had happened in the lead up to the wedding into the back of my mind. I was conscious of the fact that my sister's wedding was coming up in the next few months (March 2024) so I definitely wasn't prepared to have anymore difficult conversations with my mother before then, lest there be another issue that could potentially effect my sisters wedding. My mum basically went straight back to acting like nothing had happened and we were best friends again, but deep down I was still a little bitter. Myums birthday is in September, so a few weeks beforehand my sister messaged all 5 of the siblings/step-siblings about putting money in for a present for her. Well I got the shits because: 1) I didn't feel she desereved a gift after her petulant childish behaviour. 2) Why does she need to have a huge gift every year? 3) Shes turning 60 next year so we will all be expected to bend over backwards for that too. 4) I still wasn't consistently working and was having bad pain issues so I really didn't have money to put in for a present this year. I messaged my brother to vent my frustrations about all of this, thinking he would just provide the soundboard I needed like I had done for him so many times before. Only he very much did not appreciate my messages and told me I was being selfish. That mum had gone through alot in her life (she lost her dad when she was 6 and my dad was physically abusive towards her and us kids growing up - it's something I've had to come to terms with and work through with my dad and we now have a really good relationship as a result). He said I was being ridiculous and I needed to get over it. This really upset me, I ended up not speaking to my brother for a while after this but again, nothing drastic because I wasn't trying to stir the pot before my sister's big day. The following month I had Laparoscopic surgery to see if they could determine the cause of my chronic pelvic pain issues. They didn't find any endometriosis but they did find peritoneum and scary tissue which had to be removed and they kept me overnight for observation. I really thought that I would at least get a text from my brother checking in to see if I was alright after surgery but he only conversed with me through family group chat. It really felt like a kick in the guts. It took me over a month to fully recover from this surgery, and not long after I had my pelvic pain came back with what felt like a vengeance and I'm still suffering with it today. Christmas we spent with my husband's family and we didn't really see my side until the weekend of my sister's wedding - Easter weekend. Good friday was a casual dinner at a pub about 15 minutes from my sister's wedding venue. My husband and I got our own room in a motel near by while my mum and step-dad hired a house where my brother, his boyfriend and best girl friend, my step siblings and their significant others all stayed. At the pub the night before the wedding my mum came up to me and asked if I would be able to play snippets of 3 different songs during her speech. In my brain I was like "is this bitch seriously asking me to organise sound ques for during her speech less than 24hrs before the wedding when I'm already doing alot for my sister on the day (I ended up being like a PA for the whole bridal party and did 22,000 steps the day of the wedding, which is insane considering how bad my pain was around this time). I politely smiled and told her that she needed to figure out which parts of the songs she wanted played and that maybe she could ask my brother to help her save the sound snippets that she wanted to use. Then I excuses myself and went to the bathroom and almost ripped my hair out. My step-sister came to see if I was okay cuz she saw the interaction from across the room and could see that something was going down. I was literally fuming. Anyway the next day I get my husband to drop me at the venue early so I can help with set up. I was also getting my hair and makeup done with the bridal party which is exactly what I arranged for my siblings and mother for my wedding day. My hair literally fell out within 10 minutes of being done but I didn't care because I was there to do a job and make sure my sister's big day went off without a hitch. It was honestly such a fun day, completely different vibe to mine and my husband's wedding too so it was just really great we both got to have our perfect days. I was running around SO MUCH that before I knew it we were sitting down for the reception and the first round of speeches started. They ended up splitting them up which was great, the father's went first, then we ate a bit, then my mother and my BIL's aunt had theirs. As soon as we got the que that the second round of speeches were about to begin I politely excused myself from the table and went to use my medicinal Mary Jane, I was really struggling by this point but also there was no way in HELL I was going to play 3 different bits of music for my mum's speech, turning what was already an over 6 minute speech into something that was gonna be bigger than Ben hurr. I literally missed her whole speech, 0 F's given. She found me afterwards and said she tried to find me but couldn't so she just went ahead with her original speech without the sound cues, and that she was GLAD that she couldn't find me because it would have just dragged it on. No shit lol. My husband drove us back to our accommodation before the reception finished because I was a mess and we ended up watching tv till we fell asleep. The next day I was wrecked. My husband is lactose intolerant and I have IBS and am super reactive to a few key items, onion unfortunately being one of them. I was up at around 4am vomitting and my husband woke up with like the worst bloated belly and discomfort, so we're pretty sure we accidentally ate something we shouldn't have during the meal. We ended up going back to the venue for a little bit as my sister was hosting a recovery brunch. We stayed for about an hour, said our farewells and headed back home, a 3 1/2 hour drive. I said goodbye to my mum and step-dad, knowing I wouldn't see them for months because they were going on a big international trip (the states first, then a cruise from Miami to Italy, then 3 months in Italy spent with my step-fathers family; he was born there and immigrated to our country when he was 10). I was relieved that I wasn't going to be seeing my mum for a while. After my sister's wedding I really fell apart. On top of all this family stuff going on there was also a really traumatic event that happened at my workplace a month or so before my sister's wedding. It involved an individual that was well known to my workplace, he was considered armed and dangerous. I wasn't at work on the day the incident took place, but there was video footage leaked online. The riot police were called and the individual was shot and died at the scene. Even though I wasn't there on the day, once I saw the video I couldn't stop replaying it over in my mind. After the event I made a huge effort to cover shifts and I just tried to pull my socks up and get on with it, but about 3 business days after it happened I got left by myself for an hour trying to cover the phone lines, literally every person I spoke to was asking about it or just sending well wishes. I ended up having a massive panick attack, I left for my lunch break and could not stop crying for 20 minutes so I called my manager and told her I wasn't coping and that I didn't think I'd be able to come back in to finish the day. She was clearly annoyed, and other issues I had with the same manager after this event lead me to hand in my resignation at this place. So here I was aftery sister's wedding, struggling with chronic pain and having panic attacks, barely being able to leave the house and just being chronically fatigued after everything. My mum was OS, I wasn't really talking to my brother either. These were 2 people I thought for sure we're apart of my support network before everything. And then mother's day comes and goes, I will say sending my mum a mother's Day message was not even on my priority list, but even if it was I wouldn't have sent her a message because I was still bitter about her behaviour and the way she had treated me. Imagine my "surprise" (not surprised at all, typical bulshit at this point, let's add it to the list) when I received a message from my brother 2 days after mother's day. "Hey, how are you? You didn't message mum for mother's day?" I messaged my mum and asked her if she had told my brother that I hadn't messaged her for mother's day. She responded that he had asked how her mother's day was, and she told him I hadn't contacted her. She was on the international cruise with my step-dad, living it up, but she still felt the need to tell my brother I hadn't messaged her. We've also had issues in the past where she would vent to my brother about things I may or may not have done that have annoyed her instead of talking to me about it, which then prompts my brother to try and reprimand mw. It's never well received and she knows that. I told her I was really sorry for not messaging her on mother's day and I asked her to please not contact me for a while as I needed to work through all these unresolved feelings that had been building up since my MIL's funeral the year before. A few days later I was trying to make small talk with my brother and he ended up sending me this massive paragraph about my "stunted emotional growth", that I am "grown" now and should know how to handle situations better. He couldn't understand why I wasn't communicating how I was feeling to him and my mum and he thought I was being ridiculous for being distant. I basically told him that he was no longer someone I considered part of my support network, that if he genuinely cared about me then maybe he should have tried to talk to me to see if I was okay after my surgery in October the year before and it was at that moment I realised that he is just as selfish and narcissistic as my mother, and they both got blocked. It was the best thing I could have done for myself, although I did continue to spiral for a bit after cutting them off. My husband ended up staging an intervention with my MOH. I'm in a much better place now, and as a special treat I unblocked my mother for her birthday this year (we love a petty queen here, and potatoes). My brother is still blocked and I honestly don't know if I will be trying to rectify that any time soon. I'll be seeing him over Christmas, he's broken up with his boyfriend now which is sad but I'm still not prepared to rekindle a relationship with him after the way he treated me. And mums aware she's on thin ice and needs to be on her bestest behaviour. I'm sorry if this is way to long to read but I'm just glad I'm finally at a point where I can type it out without breaking down, although talking about my MIL always brings tears to my eyes, she is dearly missed. Love this page, love your videos, and love you potato queen (and farty king) 💕 P.s. I have had ongoing issues with anxiety and depression for as long as I can remember and I had 2x month long hospital admissions the year I turned 18. The catalyst of the first one was returing from an overseas Catholic mission trip with my school where we provided aid to impoverished people. I got home and 3 days later my mum kicked me out and I almost unalived myself. My whole family knows I have this history but that still wasn't enough to make my mum pull her head in or my brother to actually try and support me. So just to clarify I really don't care if anyone thinks im TAH, better than not being here at all. submitted by /u/T22nightqueen to r/CharlotteDobreYouTube [link] [comments]

What's an angel? I think I'd rather be a woman. Princess Diana was the daughter of Hippolyte, Queen of the Amazons. Brought to life by the goddess Aphrodite after her mother sculpted her from clay, Diana grew up on Paradise Island, isolated from the world of men. But in 1942 man's world came to her when Steve Trevor, an officer in American military intelligence, crash landed on the island's shores. Diana fell in love with him as she nursed him back to health, and brought Steve home, where her incredible Amazon abilities soon had the media dubbing her the sensational "Wonder Woman." With the beauty of Aphrodite, wisdom of Athena, being stronger than Hercules and swifter than Mercury, she became a thorn in the side of Axis agents and home-grown criminals alike. Wonder Woman took the identity of Diana Prince, a nurse and later secretary in military intelligence. She joined the Justice Society of America, first as its secretary and later as it's most powerful regular member. When the JSA was forced into retirement during the Red Scare of the 1950s, Wonder Woman was one of the few who remained active for several more years. Eventually she too retired, publicly revealing her identity and marrying Steve Trevor. After the Crisis on Infinite Earths erased her history from the sole surviving universe, she was rewarded for her heroism by being given a place on Mount Olympus with her husband. Key Note: Many of these comics were written between 1942 and 1957. As such they contain some outdated and offensive depictions of non-white people. Strength Unabridged Strength Section General and Unsorted She's a hundred times stronger than the strongest male athlete AS #8 Shatters a solid block of gold she's trapped inside W #2 Digs to the center of the Earth with a shovel, although she needs a special took to dig through the diamond core CC #25 Spins her Lasso with enough force to create a sandstorm that sinks a fleet of ships W #76 [Limit] Jupiter's higher gravity immobilizes her (even though she's been there before unimpeded) W #91 Scaling Multiple people state that she's one of the most powerful heroes on Earth-Two, on the same playing field as Superman Album Overpowers other Amazons Album Holds back Earth-S Mary Marvel SQ #37 Causes the Spectre pain SQ #28 Sends Earth-One Wonder Woman flying W #228 Overpowers Starman's Gravity Rod while he's levitating the Sphinx of Giza, dragging it back to earth W #232 Fights Superman for 15 straight minutes. Superman later says they were evenly matched ACE #54 Heavily damaged a robot that knocked out Green Lantern with a glancing blow and matched the Atom's strength AS #56 Surpasses Hercules' feat of lifting an entire stadium by picking him up while he's doing it W #60 Throws Earth-One Superman (who'd been infused with the Star Spangled Kid's star-energy) hard enough to smash through a wall of dwarf star matter. Superman couldn't break it on his own and he hits with "a force to shake infinity." JLA #160 One shots Orion in a combined attack with Dr. Fate and Earth-One Superman JLA #183 Striking Can break through wood, stone and metal barriers Album Breaks through a door of special metal that other Amazons can't damage CC #12 Smashes through diamond CC #26 One-shots robots Album Uses a log to level log cabins S #19 Warps a ten-ton door as she knocks it off its hinges S #34 Smashes through a wall that a large TNT explosion couldn't scratch S #38 Smashes apart the face of a building with a light post. She then knocks Superman out of the city they're in, and in the tussle the follows they damage the building to the point of collapse ACE #54 Sends Superman flying with a blow heard from a hundred miles away ACE #54 Smashes Sumo to the ground to knock him out ACE #54 Sumo was caught in a nuclear blast ACE #54 and was later revealed to have somehow survived W #241 Smashes apart house-sized snowballs with a tree as a bat S #105 One-shots a sea monster large and strong enough to lift an ocean liner W #64 Slices through a mushroom strong enough to lift up a ferryboat W #69 Pushing Overpowers large animals Album Pushes around ships and submarines Album Stops a 35,000 ton aircraft carrier from launching CC #1 [Limit] Fails to prevent a battleship from tipping over W #238 Stops speeding trains Album Moves a large boulder and uses a large tree to stop a multi-thousand ton avalanche S #14 Overpowers a tank's traction and flips it over W #4 Forces opposite cliff faces together W #38 Shoves the legs of a suspension bridge into the ground W #58 Pushes enough ice onto a giant mushroom, in the process of growing larger enough to split the planet from the inside, to completely cover it W #69 Casually moves a multi-ton boulder with her toes W #94 Pulling When bound by her unbreakable lasso, she often escapes by breaking whatever she's tied to Album Bends steel pillars supporting the weight of a building W #4 Uproots trees Album Uproots enough trees to form a raft that hold up a sinking island W #75 Peels apart metal barriers Album Tears apart bank vaults Album One has a 10-ton door S #28 Pulls around ships and submarines Album Overpowers a Nuclear's magnetism, strong enough to drag around a destroyer SQ #16 Resists the same force pitted directly against her and claims she's stronger than Hercules SQ #16 Nuclear can pull a huge ship underwater with enough force to snap a submarine it hits in two W #43 Knocks over the Statue of Liberty W #239 Tows an iceberg, large enough to topple buildings on impact, out to sea W #29 Pulls a landmass through space that once covered half the area of the Pacific Ocean W #38 Halts a mountain sliding along the ground W #55 Pulls the Empire State Building to the ground when it's lifted up by a giant mushroom, destroying said mushroom in the process W #69 With all her strength she pulls a duplicate moon out of orbit W #73 Lifting Often uses large objects as weapons Album Carries cars and catches them while falling Album Does the same with larger land vehicles Album Catches and carries ships and submarines Album Catches and carries air and space craft Album Carries dozens of planes W #39 Can carry houses and other small buildings Album Supports the weight of collapsing buildings Album Lifts islands multiple times Album Rips the dome off of the U.S. Capitol W #231 Opens a 50 ton trap door from below S #23 She could lifts 7.5 tons as a teenager, and easily lifts a 25 ton boulder W #13 Easily lifts a 100-ton boulder W #27 Uproots a 100-foot tree AS #55 Carries a multi-ton water tower with one arm W #64 Pulls an iceberg from the Arctic and carries it to the rim of a volcano W #75 Throwing Will knock out multiple men at once by throwing them into each other Album Also does this to large animals Album Flips and throws large animals and dinosaurs Album Throws a whale miles away and lifts a submarine out of the ocean W #19 Throws air and space craft, often into each other Album Knocks air and space craft out of the sky with thrown objects Album Throws cars and busses Album Throws ships Album Smashes apart a submarine on rocks W #44 Swings a tank and smashes it W #236 Holds up a multi-ton metal statue that falls on her, then throws it W #25 Uproots several redwood trees, creating a wall out of some and throwing another like a javelin S #78 Swings around a celestial body and throws it into a meteor W #38 It's referred to as a "planetoid" and planet interchangeably. The artwork shows a human scale space-ship being quite large in comparison, although the artwork of Harry G. Peter isn't always to scale Smashes a hole through a mountain by throwing a large meteorite at it S #97 Throws trees at a mountain, embedding them in the stone W #47 Spins around a large building W #83 Throws an iceberg at the Eiffel Tower W #89\) Spins a meteor larger than Paradise Island around so fast that it's reduced to ashes by air resistance W #96 Grip Contains the explosions of bombs in her hands Album Can turn sand to glass in her grip Album Can compress steel into liquid Album Turns stone into water... somehow Album Fuses metal together with her bare hands Album Snaps pieces off of her tiara W #62 Both her tiara is made of the same metal as her bracelets: Amazonium, the hardest substance on the planet W #235 Speed Unabridged Mobility Section Combat Speed Blitzes British Commandos before they can shoot WF #247 When tied to a tree and held at gunpoint, she uproots the tree turns fast enough to block the shot with the trunk W #3 Can lasso people too fast to be seen Album Blitzes the Lorelei and grabs her wand before she can use it AS #39 Lassos an alien invasion fleet at supersonic speed W #31 Ties the tails of tigers together at fte speed S #91 Spins to attack a man holding her at gunpoint faster than he can shoot W #42 Lasso's Badra, who can fly faster than light CC #25 Spins a meteor around so fast it combusts W #69 Throws her Lasso faster than a bullet from a revolver W #74 Throws barrels faster than bullets W #75 Reaction Time Can deflect gunfire with her bracelets Album Moves her chained arms so that bullets break the chains Album Dodges bullets Album Deflects lightning Album Catches meteors Album Goes through hours worth of paperwork in seconds Album Sees Baron Blitzkrieg throwing a grenade while running at super-speed WF #246 Moves to block a howitzer W #229 Lasso's King Pluto's chariot, which can fly from the planet Pluto to Earth in a very short timeframe W #16 Deflects anti-aircraft shells W #47 Lasso's a guided missile as it flies past W #60 Her reflexes are superior to Mercury, the god of speed W #60 After two rifles shoot at her, she takes off her tiara and intercepts the bullets with it W #69 Lassos an object moving faster than anything on Earth W #83 Clears a path through a barrage of lasers numerous enough to be compared to a hailstorm, moving at speeds rivaling the Flash JLA #160 Lassos the Earth-One Invisible Plane flying at Mach 5 W #300 Movement Changes outfits at superspeed, often too fast to be seen Album Can move fast enough to do the work of multiple people at once, often faster than they could too Album Moves with "eye-blurring speed" Album Moves too fast to be seen Album Moves faster than bullets Album Stated to move at or beyond the speed of light Album While holding a human pyramid five women high, she drops the plank they're standing on, leaps completely over them and lands to catch before they start falling S #89 Dives through spinning helicopter blades W #70 Weaves her Lasso into a thick mesh in the time it takes bullets to reach her W #70 Swings a sword so fast that it ignites from air friction W #85 Intercepts a lightning strike and crushes an avalanche into liquid in less than a second after time restarts W #87 Travels at least several hundred miles in microseconds JLA #183 Running Can run too fast to be seen Album Outruns trains Album Outruns bullets Album Moves faster than lightning Album Jumps faster than an explosion S #1 Only a split second's lead is enough for her to beat the Flash in a race JLA #193 Outruns a guided missile W #229 Can make a 15 minute trip in 48 seconds W #236 Runs a mile in the space between sentences of a conversation S #25 Outpaces an "atom-splitter" ray. This device was later revealed to just be a magnet, so it's possible that the "beam" we see was just a ray of light that it shined to fool people S #54 When a friend phones Diana Prince asking for help, Wonder Woman arrives before she can hang up W #25 Climbs from the center of the Earth over the course of a conversation CC #26 Runs across a mine-field too fast to be hit by their explosions W #33 Makes a 72 hour trip in minutes W #46 Can run up walls W #58 Just barely pulls ahead of the god Mercury in a race W #60 Dashes across a lake faster than stones she threw out onto it can sink into water W #67 Does something similar with bowling balls she throws into the air W #71 She's considered a super-speedster among the combined JLA/JSA team. She and Flash of Earth-One are able to collect several remnants of energy aliens across the planet in under an hour JLA #56 Durability Unabridged Durability Section Blunt Force She's regularly unharmed by multi-story drops Album No sells attacks from humans and human-like aliens Album Survives being crushed under heavy objects Album Takes a ton of punches from a man who can lift cars and overpower elephants W #2 Earth-One Wonder Woman throws her into a mailbox W #228 Tanks multiple hits from Red Panzer, who's strong enough to lift heavy machinery W #228 Tanks The Atom's Comet Punch W #232 Unharmed by being inside of an artillery shell as it's shot with enough force to clear rubble from a sealed volcanic crater W #8 Even when hit in her weak spot, a blow that could kill an elephant only knocks her unconscious W #11 Superman throws a metal structure at her, and they brawl for 15 straight minutes ACE #54 Gets repeatedly slammed against a wall by a force strong enough to overpower her W #46 Gets rammed by her Invisible Plane and remains conscious, although she's still injured W #48 Unharmed by pressure strong enough to tear an Easter Island statue from the ground W #65 Gets hit by a whale hard strong enough to smash a whaling ship W #72 Gets tackled through a roof by Green Lantern AS #69 Explosions Repeatedly tanks bombs blowing up in her face Album Unharmed by a sea mine S #12 A near-miss from an artillery shell only knocks the wind out of her W #6 Shrugs off a plane-dropped bomb exploding right behind her S #42 Unharmed by an explosion caused by splitting the air atoms in a prison cell she's in. The explosion destroys a section of the building and launches her high into the air, although two normal people launched with her are only knocked unconscious W #18 She's unharmed at very close range to a bomb repeatedly stated to be planet-busting W #33 Tanks an explosion that causes an avalanche W #53 She's unharmed when close enough to an atomic bomb test for the blast to have killed a human W #79 Heat Unharmed by fire Album Unharmed by red hot metal Album Doesn't even flinch at Firebrand's flames SQ #16 Survives a close encounter with a solar prominence, 500,000 miles away from the Sun itself W #62 She's unharmed running through an area so hot that it instantly vaporizes water, creating a dry path through a pool W #91 Briefly withstands Aquarius superheating himself, which she compares to a small star. Considering Aquarius was a literal living star who'd restored himself to full power, this is likely accurate JLA #73 Cold Regularly swims through freezing water without issue Album Survives being slow-frozen rather than flash-frozen, which is usually lethal W #13 Runs through blue snow that'd instantly freeze a human to death W #28 Electricity She regularly survives lethal amounts of electricity, although it sometimes stuns or paralyzes her Album A lethal shock breaks her out of a paralysis effect unharmed W #53 An electrified sword from a century in the future stuns her, but she can still move enough to use her lasso S #103 She shrugs off a lightning strike that knocks a giant mutant unconscious W #96 Chemical She's immune to certain viruses due to drinking from the Fountain of Youth on Paradise Island W #4 A drug that would have killed Steve Trevor just makes her drowsy CC #8 Only marginally affected by a gas that causes an entire town to fall asleep W #10 Her lungs resist a rage-inducing gas even when she's sleeping W #30 She was the only survivor of a gas attack that wiped out Paradise Island W #65 Esoteric Tanks a kick from Armageddon, who can shatter cars and crack her bracelets with kicks W #236 His boots emit vibrations that disrupt the molecular integrity of objects W #236 Unaffected by chronal energy that ages Earth-1 Superman into an old man WF #250 Claims she could resist a a time transporter pulling her into the future S #83 Resists an effect that reverses evolution; the rest of her party are reverted to cave people, while Diana can still speak and think normally W #9 Survives several minutes of exposure to a death ray that instantly kills a normal human W #22 Tanks radioactive electricity that'd disintegrate a human W #23 She's immune to a pressure point-based hypnosis technique W #26 A ray that instantly turns humans to stone takes longer to affect her W #32 With effort she resists an effect that blocks nerve signals from leaving the brain W #35 Resists a ray that "destroys the will to live" for a brief period; a villain hit by it instantly commits suicide AS #53 Limitations and Low Showings She thinks she'd die from a drop of over 24 stories W #241 Her mother doesn't think either of them could survive falling from five miles in the air CC #22 Her body has the same weak points as a human's allowing a thug to knock her unconscious with a lucky hit S #8 Gets knocked unconscious by a French Resistance woman WF #247 Slamming face first into a tree during a plane crash knocks her unconscious for several days and causes temporary memory loss S #45 She says radiation is still deadly to her W #21 An electrified doorknob knocks her unconscious W #25 She thinks the temperature of the Earth's Outer Core would kill her CC #26 Chloroform easily knocks her out S #77 A bullet grazing her head knocks her unconscious W #68 Black Canary accidentally kills her JLA #123 She's confirmed to be actually dead, and the Spectre needs to revive her JLA #124 Unabridged Equipment Section Magic Lasso Attributes The Lasso is a chain forged from the unbreakable links of Hippolyte's girdle. It's perfectly balanced and can force those bound by it to follow Diana's commands. She tests it by forcing Mala not to follow her back to America S #6 No one bound in the Lasso can tell a lie SQ Annual #1 She senses the evil of a man possessed by an evil entity through it SQ Annual #1 The lasso can extend infinitely and instantly retract. Diana uses this to launch herself several miles in seconds W #232 Lassos a man while she's shrunken to microscopic size W #31 Wraps around the moon W #73 It carries an electric charge, and can be used to power machinery W #8 It acts as a lightning rod, grounding out multiple lethal electric charges S #80 Restrains intangible enemies like Gentleman Ghost, although he can still teleport away JS #82 Durability Fire hot enough to instantly vaporize a man in power armor doesn't affect her Lasso SQ #16 It's bulletproof S #25 Undamaged by a cage of lightning S #79 A helicopter propellor fails to tear it up W #51 Could not be cut by Excalibur W #54 It isn't destroyed by a metal-disintegrating effect, although it seals its magic abilities W #71 Withstands Earth-One Superman using it to stitch together a fault line, then tightening it with such force that it fuses the fault together JLA #113 Compulsions Anyone holding the Lasso can use it's compulsion effect W #1 However someone who isn't holding the Lasso cannot compel a bound person CC #9 [Limit] It doesn't work on a man possessed by an evil entity, the undead or (for some reason) a shapeshifter in animal form Album It does work on robots though W #21 Each Compulsion only lasts 24 hours after the Lasso is removed WF #245 [Limit] It's commands are specific and thus can be worked around; while commanded not to resist being shot by a firing squad, Diana's still able to work to get free of the lasso itself WF #245 Forces opponents to surrender Album Questioning Album Confessions Album Forces enemies to obey her Album Enemies force Diana to assist them Album Can erase memories Album Hypnotizes a woman into a false identity for a full day S #8 Cancels out mind-control Album Forces a spirit possessing a woman to manifest W #30 Cures Black Canary of a mind-numbing drug JLA #124 Bracelets of Submission Attributes and Rules If a man welds chains to her bracelets, she'll lose her strength S #4 This weakness seems to be somewhat psychological; Diana loses her strength when she assumes a man did the welding, but regains it after finding out a woman did it S #10 However this only applies to her strength. She's still fast enough to intercept gunfire while weakened S #4 She still has superhuman durability while weakened W #229 The Essential Wonder Woman Encyclopedia states that the inconsistency with these rules is based on Aphrodite changing them based on her mood. Here is a list of other rules that bracelets have had Album Her bracelets restrain her strength, and removing them sends her into a berserk rage S #19 Her strength is multiplied by ten W #229 She can regain her sanity through force of will W #236 However she has to actively fight against her madness as long as it's damaged W #237 By the time she's been in Man's World for several years, the mere imprint of the bracelets still holds back her rage when they're removed S #86 They block Hypnota's hypnosis beam W #11 A beam that hyper-evolves humans into an advanced hive-mind bounces off them W #242 They can be used as lightning rods and protect her from the shock W #48 Captures a bolt of lightning between her two bracelets W #59 Durability They're bulletproof Album They can block blades Album Blocks Excalibur, which can cut through metal stronger than steel S #83 Blocks strikes that one-shot her with a direct hit JLA #159 Deflect lightning Album They withstand Osira's energy blasts, although it knocks Diana away W #231 Osira can level an Egyptian pyramid with one blast and vaporized tanks, ships and submarines W #231 Blocks blasts from Starman, who can casually blow up the Sphinx of Giza W #232 Deflect paralysis rays W #23 Blocks rays that turn humans to stone W #32 [Limit] They cannot fully block handheld versions of a device that blocks nerve signals from the brain W #35 Deflects anti-aircraft shells W #47 Blocks the Time Lord's defensive lasers, which are later revealed to induce comas by blocking nerve signals JLA #160 Invisible Plane Skill Unabridged Skill Section Hand-to-hand Combat As a child she captures all of her adult Amazon opponents in a hunting game W #30 Defeats mounted warriors when she's on the ground and unarmed Album Uses leverage to break the grip of a man as strong as she is and throw him SQ Annual #1 Defeats Mars, the God of War, in a skirmish W #2 Defeats Mr. Terrific, The Atom and Sandman in quick succession before putting Starman on he defensive W #232 Stomps a trio of hypnotized and superpowered soldiers while holding back WF #249 Defeats Achilles in a duel, then briefly holds off a small army of Greek soldiers W #9 Rushes, flips over and throws Superman ACE #54 Defeats Sumo, a telepath who can predict her lasso throws ACE #54 Sumo is also a highly trained samurai ACE #54 Easily defeats eight fencers attacking her simultaneously S #80 Lasso Can lasso people with the same rope she's bound in Album Can spin it to form a shield Album Weaves it into a bulletproof mesh, then instantly unravels it Album Weaves massive nets out of it Album Disarms people with it Album Casts her lasso through a net W #42 Lasso's a man from behind a barrier AS #54 Casts her lasso so precisely that it's perfectly hidden behind another lasso W #56 Weaves it tight enough to be used as a parachute W #57 Creates multiple loops to support half a dozen parts of a bridge at once W #58 Can swing the Lasso with enough speed and force to use as a cutting weapon, even underwater W #69 Hits a dime thrown into the air with her lasso, even when casting it faster than a bullet flies W #74 Lassos 12 Amazon robots (that have the same abilities as real Amazons) with 12 lassos at once while blindfolded W #77 Intelligence Unabridged Intelligence Section General Can see through disguises Album She's trained to use both sides of her brain simultaneously, allowing her to do two tasks at once S #24 This lets her remotely control her invisible plane to engage Japanese planes while she's fighting the ground troops S #24 Can track both humans and animals through the wilderness Album Can do complex mental math very quickly, often calculating the location of flying objects Album Has a perfect photographic memory S #85 Analyzes the pattern of a booby trap to run through it unharmed W #47 Technology Invented the Purple Healing Ray, a healing device so potent it can raise the dead, in five days W #1 Creates an Amazon ointment that saves a woman minutes away from death by burns W #3 Makes contact lenses that let her see through invisibility out of sand W #54 Strategy Memorizes the layout of a room so she can navigate it while blindfolded W #2 Uses the Duke of Deception's clone body of her against him by switching places with it W #2 Figures that a guided missile is tracking her bracelets and ditches them W #229 Recreates the Trojan Horse to use against a Trojan colony; she predicts that they'll expect her hiding inside it, so she uses it as a decoy instead S #102 Uses a sheet of ice to reflect light onto a bombing fleet, blinding the pilots and downing the planes W #47 Knowledge She knows all the arts, sciences and languages of both modern and ancient times AS #8 Hawkman taught her how to talk to birds AS #19 She's a trained nurse S #1 Her Amazonian Psychological Knowledge lets her reverse brainwashing S #4 Hypnotizes a man to answer her questions W #1 Other Powers Other Powers Unabridged Section Senses Hears a woman in a mine shaft from the outside, and sees through darkness a soldier can't W #1 Has "extra-sensory perception," allowing her to catch a boulder while turned away from it W #17 She can see monsters invisible to normal humans W #20 Can hear frequencies inaudible to normal humans S #63 Can see to the bottom of the ocean S #68 Her hearing is good enough to use echolocation W #33 Her vision is superior to the most powerful binoculars W #60 Her hearing is good enough to dodge through expert Amazon lasso-throwers while blindfolded W #75 Telepathy Through her mental radio, she uses her own telepathy to read Etta Candy's mind W #1 She can telepathically communicate with people without her mental radio Album Resists Hypnota's hypnosis ray and forces him to his knees W #11 However she has to set her will against it first; when caught off guard she can be controlled W #11 Overrides Queen Atomia's telepathy, forcing her robotic slaves to help her W #21 Projects her thoughts at a mad scientist while trapped in another dimension, convincing him that she's in the room with him W #70 Extras submitted by /u/ghostgabe81 to r/respectthreads [link] [comments]

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For Your Consideration: It Was All A Dream: The Eras Tour Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 Lover (Dual Taylors Version) | Folklore (Dual Taylors Version) | Evermore (Dual Taylors Version) Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Midnights (Dual Taylors Version) TTPD: TTPD, SLL, Down Bad, BDILH, FOTS https://preview.redd.it/dwrinazf9nnd1.jpg?width=800&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=93f8f376ea534dfc6fc2a120d782d55308567ad7 Blame the following shenanigans on the Karma door appearing in two distinct places during the Eras Tour. If it hadn’t, who knows what could’ve happened? I was idly mulling this over on the drive home when I remembered Taylor had mentioned my all-time favorite series, Stephen King’s Dark Tower, in her Colbert interview. Suddenly, the significance of the story, the duality of the female protagonist, the symbolism of doors, and the ending all came flooding back to me. It was like the chess pieces started moving themselves across the board. I had initially connected *Dark Tower* in one way: it was a retelling of *The Wizard of Oz.* But beyond that, I haven’t been able to link it to the Taylor Swift Cinematic Universe (TSCU) in a tangible way until now. Even then, I felt like that Charlie Day gif, standing in front of a board looking fifty shades of crazy, trying to explain the rapid-fire connections forming in my mind. After spending months reading other people’s theories, I guess it’s only fair that I step into the kitchen and cook up one of my own. Full Disclosure: I watched the Eras movie tour, so I will be including a full analysis of Evermore and Folklore as well as contrasting it with the merged set in an attempt to illustrate how Taylor is working to merge her two halves. Don't say I didn't warn ya. Wizard of Oz In the Dark Tower series, Stephen King draws clear parallels to The Wizard of Oz, both in narrative structure and symbolism. Like Dorothy’s journey to find the Wizard, Roland and his group are on a quest to reach the Dark Tower, a mystical place that holds the key to their world's survival. Along the way, both groups encounter companions seeking things they lack—courage, heart, intelligence, and purpose. King also directly references The Wizard of Oz in later books. For example, the ka-tet encounters a literal version of the Yellow Brick Road, and they eventually face off with a malevolent, illusionary version of the Wizard. However, while Dorothy’s journey in Oz is one of discovery and innocence, Roland's quest is fraught with danger, moral ambiguity, and dark twists, turning Oz's whimsical elements into something far more menacing in King’s universe. Translation: Taylor has long utilized stories like Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, stories that depict characters that wake up from fantastic journeys to find they’ve been dreaming the entire time. Eras has some very overt and subtle references to dreams as well as direct parallels to both Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland, but for the sake of context, I’m only focusing on Wizard of Oz. Duality/Schism In the Dark Tower series, Odetta Holmes and Detta Walker represent a profound psychological schism in the female protagonist. Odetta, a victim of racial and social injustice, embodies repressed trauma—her passivity and vulnerability reflect her inability to face her pain. Detta Walker, on the other hand, is the manifestation of Odetta’s buried rage, wild and unpredictable, lashing out at the world in anger Odetta cannot acknowledge. The split between these two personalities is a survival mechanism, but it is slowly destroying her. Detta resents Odetta’s repression, aware of their shared trauma while Odetta remains oblivious to Detta’s existence. Eventually, through a forced confrontation with help from Roland and Eddie, the two personalities face each other, leading to a merging into Susannah Dean. Susannah is a unified identity, blending Odetta’s grace with Detta’s strength, representing a woman who has come to terms with her trauma and reclaimed her power. Translation: Ever since she wore the This is NOT Taylor’s Version shirt, I suspected Taylor would incrementally change the tour as she balances out her two sides. If Eras is a dream, this shirt makes sense. She’s not Actual Taylor, she’s Dream Taylor. This shirt is a red flag and she’s either trying to remind herself or signaling the fans. The Eras tour has changed with each subsequent leg, and I don’t think it’s just to make room for TTPD. This merging of the two Taylors is evident in small changes: Taylor merging Folklore and Evermore into one set and adding in the rainbow sky, reducing Speak Now to Enchanted. Her shuffling the order of the Eras is another part of her work to merge her different selves. The mismatched outfits during the 1989 sets factors into this balancing act as well. Doors (Break On Through) Doors symbolize gateways between worlds, times, and dimensions, representing themes of destiny, transition, and choice. Roland's encounters with these doors, particularly in *The Drawing of the Three*, mark critical moments of transformation for characters like Eddie, Susannah, and Jake. Each door is a test for Roland, pushing him toward growth and reflection. Beyond their literal function, the doors embody the blurred line between reality and imagination, highlighting how interconnected all worlds are. They symbolize the fluidity of time and space, with each crossing representing a choice that has far-reaching consequences. The doors also serve as thresholds between life and death, freedom and entrapment, or fate and free will. For Roland, they reflect his inner moral struggles as he pursues the Dark Tower, symbolizing both possibility and peril in his quest. Translation: Doors are highly symbolic in Taylor’s universe, and she’s hinted at it with songs like The Other Side of the Door. Taylor enters through the orange door at the start of Fearless, and we don’t see it again until Karma. Taylor is stuck in a loop that begins with Fearless and climaxes with Karma. Lover era Taylor is distinctly separate from the Taylor stuck in this loop. How Did It End? The characters of Dark Tower are working their way towards the Dark Tower. By the time Roland reaches it, he has sacrificed everything he held dear. He’s even lost certain pieces of himself. His grand quest is almost over. When he reaches the top of the tower, he finds yet another door. It leads right back to the beginning of book one. The series is nothing more than a grand, beautifully aching circle. The cyclical ending of Dark Tower, where Roland's journey ends where it began, symbolizes his entrapment in a karmic loop. He's doomed to repeat his quest until he learns the lessons he's missed, driven by his obsession with the Tower. For Roland, realizing he’s back at the start is devastating, highlighting the futility of his sacrifices. However, the horn he now carries hints at the possibility of change, offering a glimmer of hope that he might eventually break the cycle. This ending blends despair with the potential for growth and redemption. Translation: If it’s all a dream, Taylor will cycle through her eras until she merges her two halves and brings the show to equilibrium. By playing a character and repressing the most essential parts of herself, she is stuck in a never-ending cycle of trauma and suffering. The only way to break the cycle is for her two halves to confront each other head-on and merge. Until then, the phoenix will never be reborn; it will keep burning itself and hiding the evidence. The screen glitches, the piano malfunctioning, and the technical and logistical errors that have plagued Eras are deeper indications that the system’s breaking down. This dream Taylor’s been suspended within is no longer sustainable. On With The Show... Is the clock at the beginning Taylor's alarm clock as she’s falling asleep? We hear an audible sigh and some very spacey fading sound effects that you also hear clearly again before the beginning of Lavender Haze. But for now, I’ll curtain your curiosity and start at the very beginning. We stroll casually through rainbow skies and descend towards the actual show. If you didn’t know we were in a dream at this point, it should be obvious. As the queen herself likes to say: Let the games begin. Lover The calm before the storm, mayhap? Thesis Statement: The Lover set delves into themes of inner turmoil, coming of age, identity, confidence in oneself, and finding a love that is pure, healthy, and rewarding wrapped up in bright shades of pink, orange, and heaps of rainbows. I think the set is deceptively upbeat while the themes explored tend towards disturbing and dark, as is seen in the clashing aesthetics of storm clouds, orange-pink fans, rainbows, and finally nothing at all. Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince. Of all the songs on Lover, Taylor chooses to enter with MAATHP. Miss Americana serves multiple purposes as the intro: to set the tone for the entire tour (the inner struggle between the Taylors) and to foreshadow everything that follows the Lover set. She sings “And now the storm is coming…” as cyclones spin in the background. For a set that is characteristically bright and upbeat, the cyclones don’t jibe at all with the aesthetic of Lover. What on earth are you cooking up, ma’am? I also feel like the line “Voted most likely to run away” is another easter egg that the tour itself is a farewell of some kind. A final salute to the much-loved brand. And now the storm is coming... It's you and me, that's my whole world. Cruel Summer. It’s hilarious that she’s singing about a boy being a “shiny toy with a price” while the stage and dancers are drenched in the lesbian flag. The more I listen to *Cruel Summer* since becoming a Gaylor, the more unsettled I am by the actual lyrics. After songs like BDILH and Guilty As Sin?, Cruel Summer proves to be just as crucial a puzzle piece. Lover is steeped in upbeat, glossy, bright packaging that masks the true message of the art itself, much like the pink and orange fans when the cyclones appear on the screen. In retrospect, *Cruel Summer* feels like the kid sister of ...Ready For It?. They share common thematic DNA, with both songs dealing with vague deals with men for a price or at a cost to conceal or distract from a meaningful love that must be guarded and kept secret. The bridge in Cruel Summer is pivotal, representing transition and change. I believe Taylor is foreshadowing something significant to occur. At the end of Cruel Summer, the stage floor swirls with storm clouds once again. The storm is progressing—will Taylor find respite in its eye, or will she be swept away? You're making me feel like The Man. The Man. At a surface level, The Man seems to be Taylor’s meditation on what life would be like if she were a man. Gaylors might interpret it as her bragging about being with models and behaving like a playboy. However, I think it could also represent Taylor exploring gender dynamics and her masculine energy. Even straight women face the dilemma of balancing feminine energy to meet societal expectations, so it makes sense that someone who has publicly grappled with her image might navigate these themes. 'Cause shade neve made anybody less GAY. You Need To Calm Down. I adore how the house comes back together for You Need to Calm Down (YNTCD), with all the rooms aligning as the song begins. Suddenly, the house transforms into a home that makes sense to her. It glows with rainbow colors, and the lights are super bright. We don’t see many glimpses of queerness in Taylor’s shows, but YNTCD is a diamond. She somehow fits an entire pride parade into one song. This is the most alive the Lover house will be throughout the entire show. From the visuals alone, YNTCD represents Taylor accepting and manifesting her true identity and loving herself. During her pre-Lover speech, she says, “Let me tell you my secret dream for the evening,” and then she pauses to give her usual speech. Keep in mind, I’m watching this after concluding, based on external evidence, that Eras was a dream sequence. She continues, “My dream is that you’re going to think about tonight and the memories we’ve made here together.” Feel free to go back and listen. She says dream twice, emphasizing it the second time, as if she’s trying to imprint it into your mind. This is our place, we make the rules. Lover. Like in Karma, it’s no coincidence that her dancers are wearing rainbow colors. This also supports my theory that Midnights is connected to Lover. Taylor spins happily on screen in her yellow dress in the pink *Lover* room. In my humble opinion, Lover represents Taylor’s celebration of the first honest love she’s ever known. Towards the end of Lover, Taylor-in-the-yellow-dress goes through the mirror and disappears. I also find it interesting that Screen Taylor is wearing a yellow dress, and the female dancer is prominently displayed in yellow on the screen. The yellow is striking. If it symbolizes closeting, Taylor is taking a significant step into her epic walk-in. I've been the archer, I've been the prey. The Archer. Notice how the color and aesthetic have been stripped away, leaving Taylor to sing this gut-wrenching song alone? This dramatic shift reminds me of the line “nobody noticed my new aesthetic” in Fortnight. Taylor is trying to be honest with the world about who she truly is, and with honesty comes fear, fumbling, and folly. She’s trying to convince herself to fight. It feels like a dialogue between the public persona she has been and the woman she’s not allowed to be. This seems like the first instance of Taylor saying, “I am giving you so many signs. I’m showing you who I am. Can you see me?” Fearless https://preview.redd.it/bk1sadedennd1.jpg?width=1792&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=2fb387c302898542964a135a99a195ff7255e9e1 Thesis Statement: Taylor keeps it simple with silver and gold and a stage shaped like a guitar. Taylor embarks on an ambitious motivational campaign to rally her fans. In every song, she seems to be working to convince her fans of her excellence or reminding them why they fell for her in the beginning. If it’s true Eras is a dream, Taylor’s anxiety about coming out may begin to manifest itself with Fearless. Every song in the set seems to be a plea or an ode to the fans to stay, which is a very common thread throughout the show as well as the Acoustic Set. It also reminds me of interviews from that era where Taylor confessed a very serious fear of losing it all one day. Greetings, Dream Taylor. Taylor enters the Fearless set through the orange door (Karma door). I believe this is part of the loop that Taylor is stuck inside for the remainder of the tour. She originally enters in Fearless and the door opens/explodes outwards during the final song. Fearless. “You know I wanna ask you to dance right there in the middle of the parking lot.” Fearless is the beginning of the TS blueprint. It’s where she started to develop her trademark character and songwriting. The way she plays this song makes it feel like she’s singing it more to the crowd than to some lover. My opinion is that she’s starting at the beginning, when everything that glittered was gold, reminding everyone where it all started. YBWM. When I say Peak Taylor Swift, do you know what I mean? This was one of her first blockbuster singles. It feels like Taylor is on a campaign to dedicate these songs directly to the audience. It might’ve been written about some dude, but she’s pulling out every trick in the book to convince her fans why they should give up the amateurs. It’s not even very obvious. You belong with me. https://preview.redd.it/dz3pyi5tennd1.jpg?width=1792&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e60e2d6238dd227635ea2a735c58f2796e0b5ff9 Love Story. Another song about supposed love, and yet it feels like a part of an ongoing monologue Taylor is making to her fanbase. “And I was crying on the staircase, begging you please don’t go,” is the first of several appeals she’ll make in the show. She spends a sizable chunk of time asking her fans not to abandon her. This in itself feels like more foreshadowing. Also, I cannot emphasize how subtle and noteworthy it is when Taylor sings “Marry me, Juliet” and the screen literally pulsates a lovely golden ring. https://preview.redd.it/e1hn9dvwennd1.jpg?width=1792&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8c2a0692debaeb23316ad5e918bc4dbda35be742 submitted by /u/Lanathas_22 to r/GaylorSwift [link] [comments]

To quote Spike Lee’s script from 1992’s Malcolm X: “[we] been had! [We] been took! [We] been hoodwinked! Bamboozled! Led astray!” I’m still trying to figure this out - what fricking fever dream were we all watching for five days in July? Certainly not justice for Halyna Hutchins or a reckoning for Alec Baldwin. We watched a circus complete with a Botoxed clown crying crocodile tears for the press. Nothing happening on Hillary’s IG, so this is a roundup of the general Baldwinian fuckery (coined by ) for the month of July. ~Hillary & Alec’s IG Stats~ January 2024 = Hillary 17 posts & Alec 28 posts February 2024 = Hillary 8 posts & Alec 20 posts March 2024 = Hillary 2 posts & Alec 21 posts April 2024 = Hillary 4 posts & Alec 15 posts May 2024 = Hillary 5 posts & Alec 29 posts June 2024 = Hillary 6 posts & Alec 22 posts July 2024 = Hillary 0 posts & Alec 16 posts Hillary’s IG Stats History July 2022 = 691posts including the following eyeroll inducing ones: “you take after your mama and her own code switching talk” “I go to education to understand why women [bully] each other” Alec’s enemies “seek to destroy [him], in order to delegitimize [his] voice and purpose.” Inappropriate meets self-pitying meets self-aggrandizing. She's the total package, gaissss. July 2023 = 12 posts including these nuggets: Carmen took this picture (and I didn’t know) Alec took this picture (and I didn’t know, but I wore my stress boots) Does she look back on these and cringe or is she like, nailed it? July 2024 – A. Shitshow. Hillary started July at 987K followers and is now at 989K and what does that even mean anymore? Alec started his PR push playing the part of overwhelmed, disheveled, stressed, unjustly accused defendant. He arrived at LAX and met Rust producer and manager Matt Del Piano for lunch, sparking the big pepino debate: was it beer or nonalcoholic beer? Whatever it was, Alec took his sad bag and whisked off to do whatever it is he did in LA. That blazer is too small, too big, too wrinkled, too short, and too long all at once. Four days later he was back in NY for the Hamptons International Film Festival. I always figured David Nugent just passively dealt with Alec to keep his job as artistic director of the festival. After watching him trot around after Alec in New Mexico I’m ready to nominate him as grossest Baldwin adjacent lackey – beating Burger King Jared by a whisper. On July 8th as Alec was sitting through the pre-trial hearing wearing his little red bracelet to ward off evil (the call is 100% coming from inside the house, my guy) and getting told to put his phone down, Hillary Lynn was out there pretending to be a reader whilst wearing her glaucoma glasses and daisy dukes. I like to imagine the lawyer pointed at the phone and said, act like you have some home training. The bewb situation became a full on crisis by the end of the month. Then the trial began and now we know all the kids, nannies, and assistants were in New Mexico, which makes Hillary’s first appearance at the court even more baffling. To be clear, she could have left Baby Ilaria at the hotel with her siblings and nannies. Instead this dunderhead rolled up to the court in her chauffeured vehicle and proceeded to prove that getting in and out of cars scrambles her three brain cells: She took Ila out of the car and had her stand between the car and the assistant Then she took the stroller out of the car (Parent/Responsible Adult 101 – stroller comes out first and you put baby directly into it) Alec wandered over and asked the baby “wanna come to daddy?” - she ignored him and toddled away Alec asked Hilz “are you gonna put her in there?” – she ignored him and he toddled into the courthouse with his lawyers Hilz then handed Ila to the assistant (tall, thin, young white woman frequently pictured with them but not a nanny), kissed the baby who started wailing and walked away To her credit, Hilz did turn around once to look at Ila as she cried but then kept marching into the courthouse, coffee and phone firmly in hand (because why use a purse like the peasants do)? Not one reason to move Ilaria from the car seat to the street to the assistant and then walk away. u/MalloranMalarkey for Presidente, por favor y grathias. That night the whole motely crew went to dinner and what I wouldn’t give to ask the server what went down That lil emotional support stroller is doing the Lord's work. Steady as she goes, Zander. On day two of the trial Hillary gave stern non-verbal directions to Alec to turn around and pretend he had some respect for the court. This is why they work. He is immune to her insufferable personality (and vice versa). That night they went to dinner and it’s fascinating that Hillary did a full outfit change every day they were there while Alec mostly opted to stay in his sweaty court suit What was funnier – Spiro’s double take when Alec casually walked out of the courtroom as the prosecutor was addressing the court (no jury in the room though), Hillary’s Air Ibiza flight attendant getup, or her deer in the headlights affect? A whole choice was made with those shoes. To be fair, we would all look a leeetle tense if we woke up with a totally diffront face than the one we had 12 years ago, no? What better way to keep cool in New Mexico in July than to shimmy into skintight shiny leggings? I wonder what Alec's sister (behind him on the left) makes of Hillary? Documenting every second of this disaster for profit and posterity was assigned to director and cinematographer Jenna Rosher, who went everywhere with the Baldwins during the few days they were in Santa Fe. TLC spending the big bucks seems unlikely so maybe there will be a docuseries (her website states “currently Jenna is directing a 3-part doc series for Netflix”) in addition to the trashy TLC reality TV deal and Rory Kennedy shenanigans. Ugh. Do better, Jenna. On Friday, July 12, Judge Mary Marlowe Sommer threw out the case with prejudice – meaning Alec can never be tried again on the same charges because prosecutors withheld critical evidence. Please note that would be Special Prosecutor Kari Morrissey’s fault, not our girl Special Prosecutor Erlinda Ocampo Johnson who is a rock star and who resigned from the case upon hearing of the suppressed evidence. This image of Hilz should accompany every Botox injection ever administered. The silver lining, if there is one to be had in this debacle, is that Alec can and will continue to face civil lawsuits that hopefully will continue to drain his millions. Shifty and Grifty flew off on a private jet after celebrating their good fortune, despite what People magazine’s ridiculous headline would have us believe (“Alec Baldwin and Wife Hilaria ‘Didn’t Celebrate’ After Rust Case Was Dismissed - 'There's No Winning Here'”). Of course they were celebrating and probably proclaiming that Alec is “innocent." Big smiles, faux Spanish wife, and many bottles of champagne equals a rilly good party. Said the Paparazzo posted a throwback pic to celebrate along with the caption “Alec Baldwin. The man who fought against all the conspiracy from the film industry. His rust case was dismissed this week. He's a good man, a family man with his strong wife Hilaria, who survived all this dilemma and stayed loyal to him and who's also a supporter of my art which I'm very thankful for. God bless the Baldwin Family.” It’s gross and disingenuous – but completely on brand - that Hillary actually buys his art instead of simply paying him to take her pictures for the tabloids which makes Said think she supports him/cares for him as a person Right on cue Alec posted on his IG on Saturday “There are too many people who have supported me to thank just now. To all of you, you will never know how much I appreciate your kindness toward my family.” 8,800 of his supposed 2M followers responded which seems…totally plausible. Of all the options, he chose this pic to post? On July 20, PeePaw and Boston Barbie were at the Hamptons International Film Festival where her breasts were aggressively front and center. This is the same woman who “wrote” in her 2016 self-help book, “we can retrain the mind to listen to the body and encourage the body to speak more loudly so the two sides come back into conversation” Um, Hilz, your bewbs are yelling “timber!” and your back is screaming “hold steady!” Double DD breasts on a tiny frame do not proclaim mind/body balance, ma'am. And maybe, juuuuust maybe, this is why your daughter is wearing a heavily padded bra. At age 10. But live clearly, by all means. Hard to settle on one thing here, but it's the one cuffed pant leg for me. On July 23, Alec posted this selfie of himself at a gym. Welp, apparently 12 years of living with Hillary’s pretend accent and marginal command of English syntax has led us here: he captioned it “gettin in tune.” My dude, it’s called “getting in shape” or “using my Spanish wife’s favorite filter.” A few days later they were pictured out for dinner in the Hamptons and Alec did not look in tune at all. Also, holy ears, Batman! https://preview.redd.it/l1k0k6zs7hgd1.png?width=905&format=png&auto=webp&s=379eff3b46ae6b846d6b0cbceb9e5a7a67994e73 As July wound down, Hillary’s breasts were again threatening to explode from her top. Evidently her relatively low profile over the past few months has been all about upgrading her implants and freezing her face with enough Botox to put Easter Island Mich Who to shame. My favorite comment on this post was from u/Amazing Grace_00 “Is she part of Mission Control? The earpiece, the phones, the keys. I like the bolt ons climbing toward the clavicles today. One more bra and I think we’re there.” Filming for TLC is in full swing and Lord help us when she starts posting on IG again but realistically, Hillary’s social media restrictions have probably been lifted and soon she may be up to 500+ posts about nothing again. With extra smugness for funsies. July came to a close with Alec highlighting his girlish legs (what even is this filter?) and Hillary morphing into Dr. Kathy. No rest for the wicked, it appears... Much love to the person who commented on Alec's post \"are those your legs?\" submitted by /u/Ready-Bat-8824 to r/HilariaBaldwin [link] [comments]

Yanderedev has begun to hint at him possibly trying to repair his PR within the next few months to year, so I figured he could use a guide for doing so since his history with PR has been...not great. I personally really wanted to post this on the main sub so that he or someone close to him could actually see it since this is legitimately meant to be suggestions/criticism, but I just knew that the post A) wouldn't get approved B) would get locked and/or deleted in record time C) I'd get banned from the sub. So here I am posting here instead. Regardless, I'll be wording this post as if I'm talking to him directly. This post in particular will be focusing on why the game is sinking and how to repair the reputation of the game itself, not the developer (although the two are heavily linked). There's a TLDR at the bottom. I think it's quite obvious by this point that Yandere Simulator is on its last legs. It has largely faded out of the public eye and the gaming sphere in general. This is largely due to the following factors: The "simulator" game craze is long over Most people who boosted the game's popularity played it for maybe a few months to a year then stopped People got tired of waiting and forgot about and/or gave up on the game releasing any time soon Despite this, it's also pretty obvious that the demand for a Yandere Simulator style game is still present on some level. Looking at the sheer hype behind the various fan projects/competitors shows that quite a few people don't really care who makes the game, as long as the concept is executed in a way they like. Now that we've established that there's still some audience to appeal to, we can cover how exactly we expand that audience. Because, frankly, the fans that are still willing to support Yandere Simulator will not be enough to raise anything close to $100k for a Kickstarter campaign. A quick search on Indiegogo and Kickstarter shows that games in general don't make that much money on their campaigns. They seem to largely aim for the tens of thousands. The few I saw that aimed for higher did not meet their goal. Sure, there have been exceptions with some games earning lots of money, but those outliers are not what you want to base your model on. Now it's time to get into Yandere Simulator's biggest issue in terms of marketing: The identity crisis. Yandere Simulator has an identity crisis. The projects it collabs with says it's a dating sim and possibly eroge. The developer claims it's a Persona x Hitman project. The promotional/rival art by Kjech says it's an eroge dating sim. The easter eggs say it's a meme game. The youtubers that played the game when it was popular demonstrate that it's a meme game. All of these are screaming different things. The game itself is a bizarre mix of all of these things. It's an erotic, Hitman, edgy meme-y dating sim parody with a huge question mark. THE STRANGELY EROTIC AND SEXUAL This is Mida Rana from Yandere Simulator. This is Brooke from HuniePop 2. These two characters have similar energies in terms of character design and character type. I'm sure you already know what's coming, but I'll say it anyway: the huge difference is that Brooke is from porn game. A porn game that is shameless about being a porn game with multiple CGs, erotic voice clips, and minigames dedicated to dating and sex. The dialogue is 80-90% sexual innuendos, puns, or just characters being horny. This is the main menu for God's sake. So why does Mida also look like she belongs in a porn game? You know who's also in HuniePop 2 who has a strangely similar energy to a character in Yandere Simulator? Candace. What's Candace's personality? According to the wiki, " She is airheaded, ditzy, and frankly not very intelligent." And one of her outfits? This. You know who this reminds of ? The school nurse. Why does Muja also look like she just stepped out of a porn game? No matter what in universe justification you give for these women dressing like this in a school setting in a non-porn game, it does not change bad character design. I know you've obviously seen harem anime given the tropes the rivals are based off of, but just look at the designs from Clannad with girls who also embody harem tropes. Or the girls from Infinite Stratos. Or the absolute baseball team of a harem from the Monogatari series. If you need examples of teachers specifically, then: Mizuho KAZAMI Mafuyu KIRISU Hina TACHIBANA Yui Shishido Kawakami from Persona 5 (or Tae if you want someone with a similar role) I know you probably want the teachers (and other rivals) to look as unique as distinguishable as possible, but considering the other staff members in the school are all plain (and should stay plain design-wise since they're not important), it's really a non-issue. I promise you that hardly anyone will care if you decide to change Mida or Muja's designs this early in the process since 1) they're not in the game 2) have been rarely seen in promotional material 3) are only really known because of their controversial roles as people in positions of authority and questionable character designs. A design change would absolutely alleviate some tension on the authority abuse issue since it wouldn't feel so...well... fetishistic. In a vaguely similar vain, the official artwork is not exactly helpful in shedding the erotic vibe either. Most of this stems from Kjech/Guillermo Varela Iglesias's work (he's a great and very talented artist but his art has an undeniable NSFW flair that comes from him doing a large amount of NSFW works), but some of it stems from other artists as well. For example, this and this. Clothes do not suction to bodies like that, but it is a very popular technique used to exaggerate curves underneath clothes for more sex appeal. This is especially noticeable since none of the male characters have similar elements. in their artwork. I'm not going to tell you to throw out Kjech's work because you've already paid for it and the artwork is done (although it would be good for the character artwork to be consistent in style and done by 1 person (the primary artist, Mulberry) if possible) and I know that you're not an art person so it would be hard to catch, but maybe look out for these things in the future. Now in terms of what's actually in the game that's strangely erotic. Yes, you knew it was coming: panty shots. You've heard about this for years and years at this point, so I'll just keep it brief. Panty shots bring a tonal whiplash that doesn't fit in with the rest of the game. As a mechanic, it's uncomfortable and kind of wacky to see the protagonist scramble along the floor with her phone shoved up these girls' skirts. If your explanation is that Info-chan specifically wants these because she's perverted (which honestly just feels like an excuse since it was revealed so late after the original mechanic had been added), then that doesn't really fix the problem. Outside of this sole tidbit of information, Info-chan gives 0 indication of perversion or interest in women. Nothing in her dialogue, design, tone of voice, backstory, or personality even so much as hint at this. It just feels random. And honestly, I can't see any benefit to keeping this mechanic in the game. All it's done is cause controversy and could really just be eliminated entirely with no real change to game flow since planting bugs is an alternative. I know you probably want to stick to your guns since you've really been holding onto this mechanic through it all, but at some point, you've really just gotta know when to fold em. If nothing else, you could do a trial period where you remove the mechanic from the game then set up a poll or something to gauge how it affects players for a clearer image of the impact. Also, I've seen some of your comments on Reddit brainstorming things like kidnapping your rival to give to her stalker to get rid of her, plus the whole Yakuza sex/organ trafficking debacle a few years back. All I can say is please don't. This is an example of doing way too much in a manner no one asked for. Please stop adding needlessly cruel additions to rival eliminations. Yanderes who are willing to murder multiple people are generally all quick killers who quietly get rid of the body. They are not sadists who would go to such measures just to get rid of 1 rival. Sato from Happy Sugar Life, Satella from Re:Zero, Shion from Higurashi, Kotonoha from School Days, even the Yandere Queen Yuno Gasai herself never went through such convoluted lengths just to get rid of a single person. The characters you're channeling when doing such a thing are closer to those who mess with peoples' lives for shits and giggles, like Junko Enoshima from Danganronpa. ​ THE MEME/PARODY The literal mystery gang from Scooby Doo. Mai Waifu. The Succubus Sisters who are legit (or at least look like ) just character models straight from the Unity store. The rivals. The literally translated names. All of these point to this game being a big joke. If your intention is for the game to be more serious, then you need to do something about this. Yes, I'm aware that most of the original names are now simply "nicknames", however, the fact that they were put into the game in the first place (and not removed until noticeable public outcry) shows me that you really aren't that committed to having a serious game. And this would be perfectly fine if the game didn't straddle the line of parody and serious so oddly. The rivals are all so tropey and cliche like classic harem girls, but then there's Megami with an entire novel's worth of backstory and trivia, including family members who aren't even in the game getting literal paragraphs long enough to be a short essay worth of information compared to the actually relevant characters like the other rivals and Senpai, the focus of the game. Yes, most of that information is lore, but why should the player care about lore when most of them just wanna stab/chop/bludgeon or emotionally manipulate people? Why go into so much detail when you could just...ignore 99% of it in the game (I'm considering the demo a short/slightly simplified representation of the full game since that's the very purpose of a demo)? People new to the game will have no reason to care about these details. Senpai's character page is just about his function in the game. There's nothing about his interests or personality (those two words in the Personality box at the bottom are not an apt description) or backstory. Not even fun facts. Doesn't even mention his little sister who is in the game and on the same page. It's possible to bully your rival to the point of suicide complete with a grim cutscene but a big bad secret she can be exposed for is...writing bad fanfiction? THE OVERCOMPENSATION In an attempt to overhaul the game's tone, you once proposed a LoveSick mode or a total rebranding to a "darker" game called LoveSick. Going by the Love Letter fiasco a while back, it looks like its still very much an option, so here's some critique/advice for darker things. Slapping a black and white filter over everything does not actually change the tone. Tone comes from various factors. Character design, dialogue, visuals, audio, etc. Having the wacky and trope-y voice acting, characters, and designs doesn't work with the specific type of dark you're going for. It kind of works in something like Danganronpa, where everything, including graphic, on screen executions, is wacky to some degree. But not this. Thriller and horror, especially in anime, are hard to get right. Quite a few anime that try to be more horror themed just end up edgy. Here are some anime that are pretty good at channeling horror: Shiki, Higurashi (2005), and some parts of Re:Zero. I honestly haven't seen too many horror anime, so that's about all I can recommend off the top of my head. Obviously, you don't have time to binge several series just for the sake of research on tone, so here are some highlight videos that hopefully demonstrate what you could aim for. Shiki: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWUqKaqIbJ0 . Higurashi Clip 1: https://youtu.be/BY7pPcOcUxA Clip 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QbUblMHOvk8 (note the contrast). Re:Zero Clip 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BsAcpmyGQwM Clip 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zluJS4ETAWA . Clip 3 : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2nIuevRZf4 Spoilers for Re:Zero Season 2. Note the lighting, music, voice acting, and scene composition for all of them. There's also the horror that uses sugary sweet facades to hide horrible, horrible, things. This one is probably not what you're going for considering what Ayano is like, but it can still serve as a source of inspiration. Happy Sugar Life is great for this. Look at the visuals and the opening. Even the main girl has bright, saturated colors with a cutesy design. And then there's this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1dRSUuQt9uk. And this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yxfCfEGc35o. Also this with a tone change mid-scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiOi5b3KZHI .There's also School Live! which demonstrates a tone clash in the OP itself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xey17LnB4Dk. I think this might've been what the change in school atmosphere in YanSim was trying to channel. Something similar, at least. Spoilers for School Live: It's a story of a group of girls trying to survive in the zombie apocalypse and the main girl with pink hair is downright delusional and hallucinates that everything is fine and happy (including her dead teacher). THE CULTURE CLASH Another point of controversy with the game comes from the fact that it's confused about where exactly it's set culturally. You say it's Japanese, but is a "very exceptional school". The truth of the matter is that no matter how "exceptional" a school is, Akademi and any school like it would not happen in Japan. It just wouldn't. Despite being set in Japan.... The school regulations are all over the place in terms of dress code and hair rules. There are security cameras and metal detectors. There's an occult club, which would be hard to pull off in just about any school, Japanese or not. The students have rooftop access. And more according to this AMA from someone who worked as a teacher in a Japanese school https://www.reddit.com/r/Osana/comments/lzlw7f/i_have_worked_at_public_japanese_schools_for_5/ . We all know about the middle school uniforms thing, so no need to really address that. Obviously, things like metal detectors and security cameras were added for the sake of gameplay. Just say that they are. Don't try to jump through all kinds of logical hoops as to why they'd/could actually exist in a real "exceptional" school. Don't be afraid to outright tell people, in the words of Monokuma from Danganronpa, "cuz it's a game!". The extremely lax dress code and hair rules are obviously based more on Western schools, but even that doesn't really make sense if it's supposed to be an "elite" school where CEOs' daughters are attending. DRIFTING FROM THE ACTUAL APPEAL OF THE GAME Most youtubers played it because you could bonk someone (or everyone) over the head, drag the body somewhere, and clean up, then be done for the day. This loose sandbox element was a huge part of the appeal, intended or not. That's why and how people like KubzScouts came up with various challenges and things to do in the game. With the release of the demo, from what I can tell, a decent amount of excitement was killed by how restricting the game now is. People want to mass murder and run and mess around, but they can't. The demo has made that functionally impossible. People are confused and disappointed with how suddenly everything is so railroaded, especially with how Raiburu was basically a body guard that either made most of the entertaining kills impossible or extremely tedious or difficult. YanSim lost a lot of fun factor and started going against what the game itself was actually known for. YanSim is supposed to be like Hitman, so of course, killing everyone willy nilly shouldn't be possible in the full game or demo right? Except, in Hitman, you can very much kill lots of people willy nilly and get away with it. Because, as long as you can make it to the exit, it doesn't matter how messy or obvious your kill of the target and NPCs was. You'll never return to this location (in universe), so why not go on a killing spree for shits and giggles? YanSim is inherently unable to do this in the same way because you're trapped in a limited environment that you have to return to. Despite this, you could actually do something similar in the debug builds...before the demo. In the demo, you're quite locked down and can only kill certain people in incredibly specific ways if you actually want to win. I can't imagine how much more restricting the full game will be with the full implementation of school atmosphere with Megami locking down everything when the atmosphere gets a little too low. I'm genuinely not sure if you can rectify this situation since public perception has already absorbed the contrast between the debug builds and demo (which is indicative of the full game). Maybe lighten up on the Hitman comparisons since a big part of the enjoyment factor in Hitman (freedom) is missing in this game. This is likely also a contributing factor as to why more people/YouTubers didn't come back to YanSim even after the demo released. They played for the Hitman-like freedom in mass killing in all kinds of hilarious ways. When YanSim doesn't have that, there's not much urgency to really pull them back in. Especially when the game's story isn't strong enough to justify such strong restrictions (no matter what lore you could possibly add, YanSim's main plot (Ayano going after Senpai) just isn't strong enough story-wise). Also, it's not a horror game, so there's that. You'd be hard pressed to find many youtubers that come back to a game they played for shits and giggles years ago. Most of the time youtubers come back to games is because they were personally fans of the devs, the game itself (the style), and/or the fans beg them for it for the sake of nostalgia. THE UNPOLISHED DEMO This part is simple. No demo should ever have to have major revisions added after it's released. Ever. The demo should not have gotten a Revision A because anything in Revision A should have been included in the first release or saved for the full game. A demo is supposed to be a snapshot of the real game. I know you say that you've largely been rushing builds to satiate fans and for content and whatnot, but listen. A demo is the one thing, aside from the final game, that you should not rush. You should have been putting your absolute best foot forward for the demo that you yourself have actively hyped up for literal years as you promised Osana. You can include a little note that says "Remember, this doesn't necessarily represent the quality of the full game! That will be much better!", but it doesn't actually do anything. If, in the first version of the demo, there are game breaking bugs, blinding scene transition sequences, and absurdly difficult obstacles in the form of Raiburu, that is not a good look, no matter what you say. The demo should be the best you can get. As mentioned way at the start of this post, the Kickstarter is almost guaranteed to fail to meet the goal, so you should absolutely not be banking so much of the game's quality on it succeeding. Even if the Kickstarter were to succeed, people looking at the demo are far more likely to think "Wow, this guy's been working on this for 6 years, and this is it? I might not donate to a Kickstarter if this is how far he's gotten with all that time :/". The fact that you have a Patreon that, for a while at least, was reaching quite a high sum of money per month, and the game has had numerous builds where hundreds of fans essentially playtest the game for you only doubles down on the poor image this all projects. It says "This dev has had lots of time and money to polish up his game for the release of a demo in which he's promoting a Kickstarter to ask for a large sum of money and didn't put his best foot forward for it." Yes, the actual circumstances behind the scene may differ, but in terms of public image, that's what it looks like. Also, I know you've made comparisons to other games having long development times that ultimately led to great products. However, there are quite a few differences in circumstance: Most of the companies behind those games were already established development companies with actual employees and teams, not a lone man and groups of circumstantially paid, uncontracted volunteers. The companies usually had a track record of releasing completed, decent games beforehand, showing their skill and ability to get it done in a timely manner. The full game was released within 6-7 years at most (usually). Yandere Simulator released a demo after 6 years. With one rival out of a planned 10, not counting other modes and DLCs apparently still being planned. If you legitimately plan to make each rival feel very unique, then completing Osana as a "basis" doesn't mean much, because you'll effectively be starting over for a lot of components for each rival. Yandere Simulator has at least another 4 years to go, at maximum development efficiency, judging by the game's past record. Quite a few of those games' development involved essentially creating a brand new game engine, incredible graphics, or something generally super innovative that took lots of time to perfect. If not that, then the team likely had to scrap major game elements at some point or another and start over. Yandere Simulator has been very conceptually consistent throughout the development cycle, frankly does not do anything that could be considered innovative, and the graphics rely largely on slightly modified Aoi pack models with most of the original assets (props, buildings, etc.) not being particularly impressive graphically. YANSIM VS THE RIPOFFS VS THE FANGAMES Due to a lot fans getting impatient after waiting years for their favorite game to come out, some people have taken it upon themselves to make their own YanSim, usually with disastrous results. Most ripoffs crumble due to a lack of planning and internal drama amongst the fans and/or team members. Most fangames fade away due to pressures from the community to release a "better" YanSim that's made faster than the original. The fangames are what need to be addressed here. From what I can see, you haven't made any effort to really engage with the community making fanmade games or mods. At most, it's a singular (or a few) YouTube comment giving praise and...that's it, really. Positively engaging with your community more is the key to building good will. I'll be honest and say that you really made a blunder by not actively embracing Watashi no Mono (when it stopped branding itself as a fangame) or even Sara's School Life when they were active, due to them being two of the few games that were not explicitly meant to spite you or marketed as being "better than YanSim". There's also AMZE's Sakura Mysteries game, but I've gotten the impression that things may have soured between you two, so I'll refrain from commenting much on that. Anyway, your public apathy to Watashi no Mono, Sara's School Life, and big YanSim mods was a mistake that's really costing you in the long run. Right now, it looks like you're apathetic to them at best and threatened by them at worst based on your reactions to Dr.Apeis and the LoveSick incidents. Reaching out to the devs of WNM or SSL to maybe have kind of easter egg of their characters in your game or having Mulberry or some other volunteer draw crossover art would've boosted public support in you at least a little bit. Had you done that, even with Dr.Apeis's mess, people could point to your collab as evidence of you being totally OK with and even supportive of YanSim-esque. I'm aware that you've supported Saikou no Sutoka, but unfortunately it's not really what you could consider competitor to YanSim, and therefore it doesn't do much to shake your reputation of being guarded against Yandere Simulator-esque. If another Yandere Simulator-esque game appears and stabilizes within these next few years and the developers don't explicitly say "we're making it better than Yandere Simulator", then please just consider doing what I mentioned earlier and reach out. As it stands, a lot of people think that your ego is a bit too fragile (also why the "Yanderedev can't take criticism" thing persists) and this lack of genuine connection just isn't helping. Art contests are not a sufficient replacement for this kind of good PR in community relations. INAPPROPIRATE CONTENT Why the game got banned from Twitch. Erotic + Violence-plot = Big no from American non-anime fans. There's also the fact that even if you removed the panty shots now, there's no guarantee that you wouldn't just add them back or something else equally as inappropriate in later. Twitch doesn't want to unban you now and have to deal with checking the game every few months to see if it has inappropriate content until the game's full release in several years. The more serious the game treats itself, the less mechanics like panty shots and casual murder are accepted. The more the game treats itself as a wacky parody, the more people will brush off these concerns as part of the joke. YANDERE SIMULATOR = HELLO NEIGHBOR Hello Neighbor was a popular indie game from a few years ago featuring complex AI and wacky traps. People played it because of the freedom the game gave them to just do whatever and have fun. YouTubers played it for this reason also which increased the game's reputation immensely. Cut to the full release of the game a few years later. A lot of fun has been cut out due to changes in game design. There are game breaking bugs and confusing/frustrating segments. Gameplay videos of this game dry up quickly after the full release because the game lost its main appeal in favor of something more concrete and story oriented... in a way. Also, lots and lots of bugs. Yandere Simulator is on its way there. Like Hello Neighbor, it's past its peak where it was beloved for debug sandbox hijinks. It hasn't reached full release stage yet, but the demo is mirroring quite a few issues with Hello Neighbor's full release and that is not a good sign. Refer to the above sections as to why the demo isn't great. CONCLUSION/TLDR How do you stop the ship from sinking? You don't. You can't. The Kickstarter has no chance. Yandere Simulator is messy in terms of tone, genre, and appeal and that's killing it. It doesn't have the story, aesthetics, or character depth of Persona or the freedom of Hitman. Community relations are too weak. There's no real way for the game's popularity to resurge and get even close to what it was in 2016-2017 which would've been the peak time for the Kickstarter. In order to "fix" the game, you'd have to make some serious changes that I just can't see you being willing to make, Yanderedev. In terms of public image, the debug build of YanSim has been seared into public perception as representative of what the game was, is, and will be. All the demo did was stick on some extra presentation problems and more infamy for bugs and glitches. The best you could hope for at this point is for it to be released, make a decent amount of money, and quietly fade away instead of going down in flames. I'll be writing a part 2 to this eventually about how to fix his PR as a developer. That one will be a bit harsher because there's just...so much to fix. Well, at this point, it's less "fix" and more "patch up so it's not quite as bad". submitted by /u/snapthesnacc to r/Osana [link] [comments]

1. Reading Between the Lines The previous parts of this essay explored Harry’s growing attraction and physical connection to Hermione. In Part One and Part Two, I frequently tried to rely on somewhat objective evidence. For example, we know Harry finds Ginny and Cho attractive, so if Hermione gets described using similar adjectives and scenarios, it’s logical to conclude that Hermione also appears attractive. In some cases, we have Harry’s explicit internal monologue to help us interpret, as in his feelings about some Romione moments. We also looked at significant behavioral shifts, such as Harry’s sudden desire to grab onto Hermione’s hand in DH. To interpret this, we can use things like Harry’s own testimony pointing out that holding a girl’s hand is generally not just a “friendly” activity (HBP24): Sometimes [Harry] thought that the post-Lavender Ron might not mind too much if he asked Ginny out, but then he remembered Ron's expression when he had seen her kissing Dean, and was sure that Ron would consider it base treachery if Harry so much as held her hand…. But at this point we meet a bit of an impasse in terms of “objective” evidence. Harry never really tells us why he needs to grab Hermione’s hand all the time; he just does it. All we see are patterns like Ron looking suspicious and ultimately accusing Hermione of “choosing” Harry. It seems inconceivable that Harry isn’t aware of Ron’s jealousy toward H/Hr’s connection, but Harry doesn’t spend time ruminating on it, so we don’t really know what he’s thinking. And this isn’t unique at all. As discussed in Part One, we’re only privy to a selection of Harry’s thoughts. Take the example of Fleur, where we mostly know of Harry’s attraction through indirect evidence—statements by Hermione (GoF16) and where he feels his “face burn” from cheek kisses (GoF26). Harry’s internal narrative doesn’t tell us directly how he feels; we’re forced to read between the lines. This makes sense from a literary perspective, because JKR doesn’t intend for Harry to date Fleur. If Harry started voicing internal feelings in narration about how attractive she was to him, JKR would later have to deal with that—why were they mentioned, did they continue once she got together with Bill, etc.? As H/Hr is not the endgame for the series, JKR also seems to have made the decision to keep Harry’s internal feelings about Hermione out of the narrative too. Despite any tension or “pull” she may have felt while writing, it went unexpressed once she decided not to have a more romantic H/Hr moment. So we’re left with the task of interpreting a bunch of odd behavior, like why H/Hr seem to act fine during the day while alone in the tent, discussing things like usual, but get weirdly uncomfortable with each other in the evenings (DH16). Such interpretation is necessarily speculative, as we can longer depend on parallels to Cho or Ginny. H/Hr have many unique shared moments in DH, and my readings will obviously slant toward H/Hr at times. We’ll also look into a few symbolic elements that are suggestive, even if their final meaning can be up to interpretation. In the process, we’ll lean on the assumption that narration is generally telling us information from Harry’s POV, leading to some surprising patterns. 2. Hermione’s Heels Sometimes when you go digging around in canon, you find something so weird, a pattern so unexpected, that you don’t quite know what to do with it. I debated whether to include these passages, but they’re staying here, if nothing else for the sheer cuteness and entertainment value. I’m not so much into deep symbolism: there has been no discussion of riding a Hippogriff as a symbol of love here. But I am obligated, dear readers, to include anything unusual I find to support H/Hr attraction in this essay, so don’t blame me when this inspires some kinky fanfiction. Let’s begin by taking a closer look at how Harry (as narrator) sees Hermione at Bill and Fleur’s wedding, which was a critical turning point for the H/Hr interaction, as discussed in Part Two. We also know from Part One that JKR thought a great deal about Hermione’s appearance at the Yule Ball. It’s likely she took care in portraying it here too (DH8). “Wow,” [Ron] added, blinking rather rapidly as Hermione came hurrying toward them. “You look great!” “Always the tone of surprise,” said Hermione, though she smiled. She was wearing a floaty, lilac-colored dress with matching high heels; her hair was sleek and shiny. “Your Great-Aunt Muriel doesn’t agree, I just met her upstairs while she was giving Fleur the tiara. She said, ‘Oh dear, is this the Muggle-born?’ and then, ‘Bad posture and skinny ankles.’” The description mirrors the moment when Harry notices her at the Yule Ball, with a “floaty” dress and with “sleek and shiny” hair, even down to side-comments on her posture. But something’s new: she’s wearing “matching high heels.” Aside from the implication here that Harry must have looked her up and down a bit to see everything from her hair to her shoes, the heels are not an insignificant detail. Harry is as oblivious as most straight men to women’s footwear. There are only a handful of references in canon to things like Madam Pince’s squeaking shoe and Mrs. Figg’s carpet slippers (in OotP). And Harry never notices anything about girls’ shoes around him in the books, not even on formal occasions like the Yule Ball, and not at the wedding he’s currently attending. But he does notice high heels on adult women. In PoA10, Harry—hiding under a table at the Three Broomsticks—seems positively obsessed with Madame Rosmerta’s “sparkly turquoise high heels” as those “glittering heels march away and back again,” until finally the “glittering heels disappeared behind the bar.” (We’re back at that moment, by the way, when young Harry felt Hermione’s leg twitch next to him.) Later, in HBP27, Harry again notes Rosmerta scurrying down the street in her dressing gown with her “high-heeled, fluffy slippers.” As we know from Ron’s attraction (HBP16), she’s one of the few examples of a mature, sexually attractive (“curvy”) female in the book series. The only other time we read of high heels in canon is with Madame Maxime in GoF15, whose “shining, high-heeled black shoe” emerges first from her carriage as we meet her. In Harry’s description of her as head of Beauxbatons, Maxime is again one of the only sexualized images of a mature female figure in the books, and her entrance is framed explicitly around her shoe. Returning to the wedding, Harry is presented there with his childhood friend Hermione, clad in high heels. Again, Harry’s never notices shoes on any girl his age. (This may be the first time Harry’s internal narrative notices Hermione’s shoes since she was staring down at her “slippers” when they were caught out together late at night in PS15.) I know what you’re thinking—this is just a description of Hermione’s ensemble, meant to evoke why Ron says “Wow” as much as anything. Perhaps. This is originally all I was going to say—noting a minor symbolic element that might signal a transition from Hermione as young girl to attractive adult woman. With the parallels to Hermione’s appearance at the Yule Ball, it’s clear Harry would find her appearance attractive too here. But I started to read closely, and there are those heels, those heels…. If it were a one-off reference, sure, we could dismiss it as simple description. But almost every moment Harry thinks about Hermione during the entire wedding sequence, she’s either blushing (for various reasons), “beaming” at him, or it seems weirdly related to her feet for some reason. Harry’s eyes simply keep straying there: “We should go and congratulate them!” said Hermione, standing on tiptoe to see the place where Bill and Fleur had vanished amid a crowd of well-wishers. Hermione’s already in heels, so “standing on tiptoe” implies either that her heels are short or perhaps that she’s leaning on someone (Ron? Harry?) to boost herself up even further on her toes. But why precisely is Harry even noticing this? Trying to understand all the details in this wedding passage, I now have this odd image of Harry glancing down at the back of Hermione’s straining calves, strangely transfixed by those small ankles Auntie Muriel commented on earlier. I know what you’re saying: “Hopeful Harmonian has finally gone off the deep end. Harry simply can’t be that obsessed with Hermione’s shoes.” But we’re not done. Nowhere close. We’ll skip the moment at the reception when Hermione apparently intends to kick Ron under the table and accidentally kicks Harry (a game of footsie gone awry? I jest, but why the heck is that moment even mentioned?), again putting the focus on her shoes. But later, Harry’s gaze is drawn again even when Ron isn’t present: [Harry] stared ahead of him, barely noticing what was going on around him, and did not realize that Hermione had appeared out of the crowd until she drew up a chair beside him. "I simply can’t dance anymore," she panted, slipping off one of her shoes and rubbing the sole of her foot. "Ron’s gone looking to find more butterbeers. It’s a bit odd. I’ve just seen Viktor storming away from Luna’s father, it looked like they’d been arguing—" She dropped her voice, staring at him. "Harry, are you okay?" Harry was distracted after hearing Muriel and Doge at the reception, until Hermione comes into his field of vision, “slips” off her shoe, and begins rubbing her foot. Obviously this is a very normal thing for a woman to do at a dance, especially when said woman is wearing heels. But even more obviously, this is something Harry never notices or thinks about. About the most he has ever thought about Hermione’s feet in canon is when Crookshanks is curled up near them a few times. Now, after she first appeared in those heels though, Harry’s continuously noticing what Hermione’s doing with her shoes and her feet. Someone can correct me, but this is perhaps the closest image in canon anywhere where we get Harry noticing just about anything about an attractive girl’s body other than her eyes, hair, and face. And then Hermione sees something’s off with Harry. Was it because he was still staring off, or because he was now oddly distracted by her rubbing her foot? Unfortunately, we don’t get to find out, as the reception is interrupted by the attack. Once again, I hear objections—Harry just happens to be there and maybe takes vague notice of Hermione doing something normal. And I might even agree, except… those darn heels just keep coming back. (I’m just following the evidence where canon leads me, folks.) Before I quote the passage, I’ll just note that every man at some point in his life has been asked by a woman who is not his significant other to retrieve something from her purse. And said man has often found himself digging through a large bag containing all sorts of odd things, inevitably stumbling upon something that feels a little too intimate or personal in the process. That moment arrives for Harry in DH when Hermione unexpectedly side-alongs both Harry and Ron into the wilderness, where Ron gets splinched (DH14). "Harry, quickly, in my bag, there’s a small bottle labeled ‘Essence of Dittany’—" "Bag—right—" Harry sped to the place where Hermione had landed, seized the tiny beaded bag, and thrust his hand inside it. At once, object after object began presenting itself to his touch: He felt the leather spines of books, woolly sleeves of jumpers, heels of shoes— "Quickly!" Oh, poor, dear Harry. We probably expect him to grasp something odd, given JKR’s sense of humor and whimsy. But as this is nominally a children’s book, Harry’s not going to accidentally happen upon a tampon or Hermione’s spare knickers, as a man in real life might find. JKR could have given him anything weird come upon; there was probably literally a kitchen sink in Hermione’s bag. Yet after two benign Hermione-related items (books, jumpers), JKR chooses for Harry to touch not just shoes, but heels of shoes. That is, the only article of clothing flagged in the books as a symbol of mature female sexuality, the very thing Harry had very oddly noticed before on his childhood friend. In JKR’s sexless prose, this might well feel as weird for Harry as if he had come upon her knickers. Did he pause for just a moment to contemplate what he was touching, and those pretty feet and small ankles that he had seen, causing Hermione to bring him back to focus by yelling out, “Quickly!”? And there’s even more, dear god, there’s more. In case you think I’m making up an obsession with the wedding outfit, we know that the moment when Hermione appears at the wedding is burned into Harry’s memory and that he was paying very close attention. How do we know? He straight out tells us. It’s still on his mind, many months later in the tent (DH16): “Remember what Muriel said?” [Harry] asked eventually. “Who?” “You know,” he hesitated. He did not want to say Ron’s name. “Ginny’s great-aunt. At the wedding. The one who said you had skinny ankles.” “Oh,” said Hermione. It was a sticky moment: Harry knew that she had sensed Ron’s name in the offing. He rushed on [...] Yeah, a sticky moment, Harry. Is that what Hermione thought when she said “oh” after you suddenly brought up some incredibly minor detail you remembered about her ankles? And didn’t you just “rush on” because she might think that a teensy bit odd? Harry could have described Auntie Muriel in so many different ways. But no, months later, the first association that pops into his head about Muriel at the wedding is… Hermione’s ankles. Exactly how much has he been thinking about all of this? It’s almost like we’ve happened upon some strange embedded H/Hr plotline here, like breadcrumbs left behind and shoehorned (ha!) into new dialogue tags after JKR decided not for it to “go that way” in the tent. I honestly don’t know what to make of all these moments, but it’s quite a bizarre coincidence if JKR didn’t intend it. (Why choose that item for Harry to find in Hermione’s bag?) Compared to the incredibly sparse signals of any H/G attraction before HBP, these references are almost like a neon sign JKR posted saying, “Harry’s suddenly noticing Hermione’s footwear and feet… and maybe her other parts too!” How else in JKR’s sexless prose—short of a chest monster—is she supposed to drop hints that Harry was seeing his childhood best friend as a sexual being? As we’ve seen, almost all the descriptive vocabulary for girlfriend attraction JKR uses has already been applied to Hermione, and she’s not going to tell us Harry is staring at Hermione’s body (even if he is). A few surreptitious glances at Hermione’s shoes and feet, though? Relatively safe, both for Harry and JKR. Enough already. Wacky theory out there for your entertainment. Let’s move on to more serious things. 3. Glances and Gazes H/Hr frequently share knowing looks and glances over the course of the series. But again, something seems to shift in the tone in DH. Take the moment when Harry is told that his friends are about to use polyjuice (DH4): Harry caught Hermione’s eye and looked away at once. [Moody said,] “So, Potter—some of your hair, if you please.” Harry glanced at Ron, who grimaced at him in a just-do-it sort of way. A bunch of people are about to assume the form of Harry’s body, including Hermione. Harry’s first reaction is to look specifically at Hermione and then immediately shy away. The implication seems to be that Harry has some significant discomfort with Hermione in particular taking on his form. If there’s truly no tension at all between them, why does this happen? Hermione’s next comment does little to diffuse any tension: “Ooh, you look much tastier than Crabbe and Goyle, Harry,” said Hermione, before catching sight of Ron’s raised eyebrows, blushing slightly, and saying, “Oh, you know what I mean—Goyle’s potion tasted like bogies.” Once again, odd glances and blushing around H/Hr. Harry doesn’t seem especially concerned with anyone else’s reactions (even Fleur) as they take the potion and crack jokes. It’s Hermione who is singled out for this discomfort. And this is only the first of many looks H/Hr share in DH. Even when Hermione’s angry with him, there’s a certain poetry to how he sees her (DH14): “Harry!” He opened his eyes, panting, his forehead throbbing. He had passed out against the side of the tent, had slid sideways down the canvas, and was sprawled on the ground. He looked up at Hermione, whose bushy hair obscured the tiny patch of sky visible through the dark branches high above them. “Dream,” he said, sitting up quickly and attempting to meet Hermione’s glower with a look of innocence. “Must’ve dozed off, sorry.” “I know it was your scar! I can tell by the look on your face! You were looking into Vol—” Not quite sunlight refracting in her hair, but an interesting way to frame a look at a mere friend, who is so close that her hair is blocking his view. And is Harry’s “dream” interjection meant as an excuse to her, or just an expression how it feels like to look at Hermione like that? I really just can’t tell anymore, folks. The whole darn book sometimes seems written in double entendres. But soon looks begin to develop into stares (DH15): "So is Severus Snape, though he does not know it," said Griphook, and the two goblins roared with malicious laughter. Inside the tent Harry’s breathing was shallow with excitement: He and Hermione stared at each other, listening as hard as they could. And then stares turn into gazes as they complete each other’s sentences in the discussion about the sword (DH15): "The sword can destroy Horcruxes! Goblin-made blades imbibe only that which strengthens them-Harry, that sword’s impregnated with basilisk venom!" "And Dumbledore didn’t give it to me because he still needed it, he wanted to use it on the locket—" "—and he must have realized they wouldn’t let you have it if he put it in his will—" "—so he made a copy—" "—and put a fake in the glass case—" "—and he left the real one—where?" They gazed at each other. Harry felt that the answer was dangling invisibly in the air above them, tantalizingly close. Harry’s excitement grows as time goes on and he is looking progressively more deeply into Hermione’s eyes. In fact, there’s no real hint in this last bit that they are at all “close” to any answer about the sword during this conversation. What precisely is Harry feeling so “tantalizingly close” to here, other than perhaps Hermione? And why are they even “gazing” at each other? Harry elsewhere seems to only “gaze” at Ginny, her name on the map, or in her direction (HBP30, DH7, DH16, DH20), and Hermione’s affection to Ron is signaled when JKR adopts the word “gaze” for her look to him (DH5). Once again, JKR’s word choice gives something away. And Ron is clearly picking up on those looks, leading immediately after this H/Hr conversation to the argument that will result in his departure. I’ve already discussed the ensuing weeks after Ron left in another essay, when patterns that have been set up earlier in the book (like the H/Hr hand-holding) are temporarily broken and indicate increased physical and emotional tension between them. I’m not going to review that whole section again here, but there are many embedded hints that Harry’s attraction is still continuing to grow. 4. Charged Moments In Part One, we saw that an indication JKR provides for attraction is romantic imagery and settings. But is there really any scene in the entire series quite so romantic in tone as when H/Hr arrive at Godric’s Hollow? (DH16) Heart beating in his throat, Harry opened his eyes. They were standing hand in hand in a snowy lane under a dark blue sky, in which the night’s first stars were already glimmering feebly. Cottages stood on either side of the narrow road, Christmas decorations twinkling in their windows. A short way ahead of them, a glow of golden streetlights indicated the center of the village. This is just the opening of perhaps the most beautifully written passage in all of the books in terms of imagery. And H/Hr are holding hands. They don’t drop them upon apparating. They just stand, “hand in hand,” witnessing this Christmas Eve landscape unfold before them. As we noted earlier, Harry knows well that hand-holding is more than a friendly act. It really makes one wonder whether this might even have been part of their pattern: given how frequently Harry grabs Hermione’s hand in tense moments, do H/Hr also just keep holding hands after apparating sometimes, only realizing it a few minutes afterward when Ron would cough or something? I don’t have the space here to quote so many passages again from this chapter (as I did in the essay linked above)—those emotional moments when Hermione reads Harry’s mind, taking his hand again to lead him forward, knowing precisely where he wanted to go, finding his parents for him, gripping his hand tightly as he cries openly for the first time in the books, producing a wreath of Christmas roses just as Harry internally wished he had one to leave for his parents. (Just go back and read it now if you want, and when you’ve wiped the tears from your eyes, we’ll continue, okay?) To our main topic of Harry’s attraction and affection, we do see yet a stronger shift begin to occur here: As soon as he stood up he wanted to leave: He did not think he could stand another moment there. He put his arm around Hermione’s shoulders, and she put hers around his waist, and they turned in silence and walked away through the snow, past Dumbledore’s mother and sister, back toward the dark church and the out-of-sight kissing gate. This is the first time he reaches out to her in this way, and they remain in this embrace as they walk through the snow (DH17): They stood quite still, holding on to each other, gazing at the dense black boundary of the graveyard. Soon, they don the Invisibility Cloak again, and Hermione is interacting as usual with Harry—clutching his arm, pinching him, etc. It’s hard to see novel intimacy in characters who are already so physically close and even just hold hands casually, but there’s something a bit new, even here: Hermione moved closer to him under the Cloak, her arm pressed against his. I mention this detail because there’s no reason for Harry to note this. Normally, the nudges and clutches from Hermione are also pointing out something to him. We know they’re close under the cloak and are in physical contact a lot of the time, so why does Harry take special note that Hermione’s arm is pressed against his arm? A possible explanation is that Harry’s finally beginning to acknowledge his feelings for her. I’m sure anyone who has been in love knows those moments when suddenly you become aware of any touch from the person you’re attracted to, even if it’s just an insignificant detail or an accidental bump. Harry’s beginning to notice that sort of thing now. And that’s not all he notices. After the encounter at Bathilda’s house, when he wakes up and Hermione is caring for him: “We got away.” “Yes,” said Hermione. “I had to use a Hover Charm to get you into your bunk. I couldn't lift you. You've been… Well, you haven't been quite…” There were purple shadows under her brown eyes and he noticed a small sponge in her hand: She had been wiping his face. It may seem surprising to some, but this is the first time Harry’s stops to consider the color of Hermione’s eyes as he looks at her in canon. Certain characters have their eye color frequently mentioned: Dumbledore, for example, is known for his “blue eyes.” But Ginny’s “bright blue eyes” are mentioned just once in canon. Previously, we only knew Hermione’s eye color from the cat incident in CoS13, as “her eyes were turning slowly back to brown.” Despite the number of adjectives describing Hermione’s eyes in canon, the fact that Harry is now thinking actively about her eye color speaks to the intensity with which he’s now looking at her. This continues as he gets upset over his broken wand and H/Hr continue their discussions, where Harry observes her face very closely, describing her tears and every hint of emotion. When they finally settle down to read together for a long time, Harry gets upset over Dumbledore and begins shouting and raising his arms with angry energy, leading to another intense silent gaze (DH18): “[…] Never the whole truth! Never!" His voice cracked with the strain, and they stood looking at each other in the whiteness and emptiness, and Harry felt they were as insignificant as insects beneath that wide sky. "He loved you," Hermione whispered. "I know he loved you." Harry dropped his arms. This is as close as Hermione comes to telling Harry directly that she loves him, instead whispering about Dumbledore’s love because she knows how utterly alone Harry feels right now. But Harry can feel the emotion from her, and it diffuses his anger at once. The scene ends: "Thanks for the tea. I'll finish the watch. You get back in the warm." She hesitated, but recognized the dismissal. She picked up the book and then walked back past him into the tent, but as she did so, she brushed the top of his head lightly with her hand. He closed his eyes at her touch, and hated himself for wishing that what she said was true: that Dumbledore had really cared. Harry can feel the emotion in her touch, how it represents the love neither of them can quite speak aloud, and closes his eyes to revel in it for a moment. And the next day, the intimacy between them intensifies further, as they apparently take a break from watches and simply spend the day very close together inside (DH19): They spent most of the day inside the tent, huddled for warmth around the useful bright blue flames that Hermione was adept at producing, and which could be scooped up and carried in a jar. Harry felt as though he was recuperating from some brief but severe, an impression reinforced by Hermione's solicitousness. That afternoon fresh flakes drifted down upon them, so that even their sheltered clearing had a fresh dusting of powdery snow. Once again, note the romanticized element of “fresh flakes drift[ing] down upon them,” a closing moment of beauty for them before Ron finally returns that night. All of that is to be suddenly contrasted with the horrific image presented by the Horcrux. We tend to focus on the effects that the vision has on Ron, but what about Harry? The “more beautiful and more terrible” Riddle-Hermione creates a highly sexualized image, with H/Hr’s eyes turned red and their unruly hair “swirling like flames.” Everything is sexual about the word choices here: “Who wouldn’t prefer [Harry], what woman would take you” she says as her body “entwined” and “stretched like a snake” around Harry in a “close embrace” before they kiss. (Sidenote: last time the word “entwined” was used, it was to describe Bill and Fleur immediately after that wedding moment.) We can gather that this image is directed not only at Ron’s insecurities, but at Harry’s distinctly non-friendly lust as well. The movie scene is somewhat sexy, but the book description is distorted and horrifying. The evocation of a “snake” is not only a classic symbol of temptation, but in Harry’s mind a symbol of Voldemort. From Harry’s perspective, the Horcrux vision implies that acting on lust for his best friend is not just to betray Ron, but to literally give into evil—a corrupted union contrasted with the wedding he witnessed earlier—to remake Hermione into a perversion on the order of the snake he recently saw emerge from the body of Bathilda Bagshot. And why wouldn’t the Horcrux want to undermine the H/Hr connection as well as to alienate Ron? (We’ll soon see why Harry’s feelings for Hermione are a direct threat to Voldemort.) Is it any wonder Harry recoils with his "like a sister" comment? He isn’t even looking Ron in the eye as he says it, and he’s obviously exaggerating how bad things had been with Hermione to counter what the Horcrux vision just said and to settle Ron. More importantly, Harry is telling himself what he needs to believe now that Ron’s back. It’s Harry’s way of getting his emotions back under control, of blocking out that shocking and contorted H/Hr vision he just saw, of not allowing himself to go further down the road that H/Hr started to. That is the context "like a sister" occurs in, and it's difficult to believe that Harry's being completely honest with Ron (and with himself) given everything else we've seen. 5. Conclusion: Harry’s Deepest Love We know that much of the plot of the series is driven by the power of love, a power that made Harry into the Boy Who Lived, and a power that he draws on from his closest friends. It is my hope in this essay that anyone—whomever they may ship—can see the attraction and connection between H/Hr, the aspects that draw Harry to Hermione above all others in his life. But there are of course elements that point away from H/Hr in the text. There will always be those who focus only on these, who read only the “like a sister” line (out of context), or the moment Ron and Hermione kiss, or the moment that Harry thinks of Ginny as he confronts Voldemort in the forest, before meeting his “death.” And yet even the last one is strangely tainted by an errant adverb (DH34): They were waiting: Everything was waiting. Hagrid was struggling, and Bellatrix was panting, and Harry thought inexplicably of Ginny, and her blazing look, and the feel of her lips on his— Even Harry doesn’t know why he’s thinking of Ginny at that moment? Seriously, JKR? It should seem obvious that Harry would think of his beloved at the moment before death, except apparently it’s not. (The way this passage should read is something like: “…and Harry thought one last time of Ginny, and her blazing look….”) I really don’t know what to make of that adverb. Is this merely supposed to be a symbolic moment about Harry’s fleeting connection to physicality? Harry doesn’t have a series of flashbacks to tell us about the various people and times that were important to him. But there’s another moment we can look to just a bit earlier where Harry’s more clear-minded. Harry very rarely speaks of emotions like love, and he rarely even thinks in those terms. So, it’s quite significant when we finally see an explicit list of those in his life whom he loves, as we do in DH: People were moving around, trying to comfort each other, drinking, kneeling beside the dead, but he could not see any of the people he loved, no hint of Hermione, Ron, Ginny, or any of the other Weasleys, no Luna. He felt he would have given all the time remaining to him for just one last look at them; but then, would he ever have the strength to stop looking? It was better like this. This is the list of people whom Harry loves that he wishes he could see before he dies. And there is one name that leads that list, one person he looks for first: Hermione. Ginny is merely sandwiched between her siblings and family. Aside from the Resurrection Stone sequence when Harry sees James, Lily, Sirius, and Lupin, this list was Harry’s real “flashback” moment to those still alive that he loves. I know the immediate objection: “This isn’t meant to be an ordered list. And even if it is—obviously, Harry’s just placing his best friends first.” Perhaps. But the order is not typical. Harry inevitably lists “Ron and Hermione” in that order when he thinks of them as his pair of best friends. That’s the default order that JKR is remarkably consistent with: there are at least 113 occurrences of the phrase “Ron and Hermione” in DH and 51 more times Ron and Hermione occur in that order in a list of names. Meanwhile, the phrase “Hermione and Ron” occurs only 6 times in the entire text of DH, with “Hermione, Ron…” happening twice (including the passage under discussion). In basically all of the latter cases, there is a specific reason Hermione is listed first—because she’s a greater focus of attention, or Harry is seeing her in order first, or for some similar reason. No, this is a list of the people Harry loves, the people he thinks of before he heads to his death, and there must be a reason JKR wrote Hermione’s name first. Ironically, we become aware of precisely why Hermione’s name is undoubtedly first at a moment that Romione shippers claim to indicate Harry’s lack of feeling toward Hermione. I am, of course, referencing the moment at Malfoy Manor when Hermione is tortured and Ron screams his head off, unable to do much other than shout “HERMIONE!” over and over. No, Harry is definitely not unfeeling toward Hermione as he methodically works to formulate a plan to rescue her. And we know precisely how hard it is for him (DH23): Hermione was screaming again: The sound went through Harry like physical pain. Barely conscious of the fierce prickling of his scar, he too started to run around the cellar, feeling the walls for he hardly knew what, knowing in his heart that it was useless. Yes, Harry feels Hermione’s screams “like physical pain.” But that’s actually not the important phrase here. He is also “barely conscious” of his scar. This is already a strong hint, but what’s going on is made clear a few moments later: As Harry spoke, his scar burned worse than ever, and for a few seconds he looked down, not upon the wandmaker, but on another man who was just as old, just as thin, but laughing scornfully. “Kill me, then. Voldemort, I welcome death! But my death will not bring you what you seek. . . . There is so much you do not understand. . .” He felt Voldemort’s fury, but as Hermione screamed again he shut it out, returning to the cellar and the horror of his own present. Harry has never been able to control his attachment to Voldemort, and it sends him into a near catatonic state often at the worst possible moment. Not so now. Harry reflects on this later after Dobby’s death (DH24): His scar burned, but he was master of the pain, he felt it, yet was apart from it. He had learned control at last, learned to shut his mind to Voldemort, the very thing Dumbledore had wanted him to learn from Snape. Just as Voldemort had not been able to possess Harry while Harry was consumed with grief for Sirius, so his thoughts could not penetrate Harry now while he mourned Dobby. Grief, it seemed, drove Voldemort out… though Dumbledore, of course, would have said that it was love. Let’s be very clear here: Harry’s been working for years to try to learn how to shut Voldemort out, and all it took was a moment of Hermione’s screaming, and Harry’s love for her instantly made Harry “barely conscious” of his scar bothering him when Voldemort’s mind was calling. Nothing else in Harry’s life, other than his grief for Sirius, had been able to do this. And this new ability simply came to Harry, with barely a second thought, because of how he feels about Hermione. Sorry to anti-Harmony fans, but there’s really no way around this. There’s no way to say that Harry likes Hermione well-enough as a friend, but Ron’s his true best friend, and he merely puts up with her and her “nagging.” There’s no way to claim that Harry really doesn’t like being with her, because Ron’s more “fun.” We can’t hold to the excuse that Harry doesn’t like Hermione because she cries too much, not when we’ve seen him chase after her and try to be so sensitive to her, even when he’s upset himself. And, no, we can’t hold fast to the blatantly false idea that the tent sequence demonstrated Harry and Hermione couldn’t stand to be alone with each other. In case the wedding moment wasn’t enough, in case Harry’s crucial time opening up to her in Godric’s Hollow wasn’t enough, in case Harry’s sudden ability to use love to shut out Voldemort wasn’t enough—in the end, we have Harry’s explicit word on it that he loves Hermione, listing her first before all others. There are those who will continue to believe that Harry’s affection was purely like a sibling, that H/Hr were nothing more than the closest of friends. I have no qualms with those who believe that, as it’s true that JKR never explicitly tells us that Harry thinks of Hermione as a potential lover. We only have hundreds of little moments that clearly show us he was attracted to her and drawn to her both emotionally and physically in ways that go far beyond any normal friendship. And these are supported by odd consistencies in word usage and patterns in JKR’s prose. Even if some people dismiss half of them as “reading between the lines,” they can’t all be coincidental. I’ve just shown you the trail: it’s up to you whether you wish to follow the breadcrumbs down the path to believing in Harmony. Speaking of breadcrumbs, perhaps there’s one last moment to share. Another coincidence? Another Easter egg hidden by JKR? Ignoring the universally reviled epilogue, there’s that oddity of the final scene after the battle is over in DH. Harry takes “the two whose company he craved most” with him to Dumbledore’s study, notably leaving Ginny behind to grieve, not even stopping to—I don’t know—give her a hug after not spending time with her for months. (Okay, now I’m beginning to see why Harry’s final flashback vision of Ginny was so “inexplicable.”) There Harry repairs his wand with the Elder Wand, picking up from the action at the end of the H/Hr tent arc and symbolically healing the irrational guilt Hermione felt for a long time over accidentally breaking Harry’s wand. Ron isn’t privy to the emotional journey H/Hr had shared, and he doesn’t seem to get the significance of the moment, but Hermione clearly does (DH36): "Are you sure?" said Ron. There was the faintest trace of longing in his voice as he looked at the Elder Wand. "I think Harry’s right," said Hermione quietly. "That wand’s more trouble than it’s worth." said Harry. "And quite honestly," he turned away from the painted portraits, thinking now only of the four-poster bed lying waiting for him in Gryffindor Tower, and wondering whether Kreacher might bring him a sandwich there, "I’ve had enough trouble for a lifetime." That’s the end of the entire primary action from the seven books, a healing moment for Harry and an even stronger healing moment for H/Hr. And one would think JKR carefully considered what to put in that final paragraph, which has confused many Potter fans. That is an oddly specific fantasy he engages in at the very end—having someone associated with Grimmauld Place deliver sandwiches so he can enjoy them in his bedroom. Why that? Hmm… I feel like I’ve read that once before somewhere. Someone was talking about that. Oh, yes… “Anyway," she said briskly, "let’s go to your bedroom, Ron’s mum has lit a fire in there and she’s sent up sandwiches." … said the girl who showed up with a pink face and snow in her hair. I don’t need to remind anyone reading this who that girl was, or whose hand Harry might grab a moment after that final paragraph, before he trots up with her to Gryffindor Tower. Maybe, just maybe… Harmony was the true endgame after all. submitted by /u/HopefulHarmonian to r/HPharmony [link] [comments]

So i'm going to go on IMDB and look at each MCU movies behind the scenes facts and POST THE MOST INTERESTING ONES here, I will post each movie a day instead of what I did before where I did 10 posts, I will start with the first Iron Man and each day will be the next MCU movie after it, ending with Guardians 3, I will also do the Netflix Shows, Agents of Shield and Agent Carter THOR: RAGNAROK 1. Thor's "friend from work" line about the Hulk was suggested to Chris Hemsworth by a Make-A-Wish child who paid a visit to the set on the day the scene was filmed. ​ 2. Taika Waititi said in an interview with MTV News: "I would say we improvised probably 80 percent of the film, or ad-libbed and threw in stuff." ​ 3. Taika Waititi based Korg's character on Polynesian bouncers: "We wanted to change the idea of what a hulking guy made of rocks could be. He's huge and heavy, but with a light soul, and he's funny and friendly." ​ 4. Sir Anthony Hopkins had decided against returning as Odin, but upon reading the story, he changed his mind. ​ 5. This marks the first time in the Marvel Cinematic Universe that The Incredible Hulk was not voiced by Lou Ferrigno, but by Mark Ruffalo. Ferrigno voiced Hulk in The Incredible Hulk (2008), The Avengers (2012), and Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015). ​ 6. The Infinity Gauntlet made its first Marvel Cinematic Universe appearance briefly in Odin's vault in Thor (2011), imbued with all six Infinity Stones. The gauntlet was next seen in an Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) post-credits scene, in Thanos' vault with all of the infinity stones missing, and Thanos stating "Fine. I'll do it myself." As most of the infinity stones have been identified within the Marvel Cinematic Universe, fans speculated that the complete Infinity Gauntlet seen in Odin's vault must have been either a replica created by Odin, or a continuity gaff. This movie addresses the gaff and answers the question. As Hela walks through Odin's vault, she knocks the Infinity Gauntlet over and states "Fake!" ​ 7. Cate Blanchett accepted a role in this movie to please her children, who are Marvel comics fans. Blanchett's eldest son Dashiell John Upton suggested she take the role of Hela, saying it'd be a career boost. ​ 8. Before the sets created for Marvel's Doctor Strange (2016) were demolished, Waititi took advantage of them by writing and filming a scene for this movie featuring Thor meeting Doctor Stephen Strange. Marvel and Doctor Strange (2016) Director Scott Derrickson felt the scene was "kind of perfect" to show Strange joining the wider Marvel Cinematic Universe after his stand-alone introduction in that movie, so the scene appears during the end credits of Doctor Strange (2016). ​ 9. Director Taika Waititi said that he wanted to showcase Chris Hemsworth's comedic talent in this film: "He's so good and underutilized in that department. He's legitimately one of the funniest things in this film." ​ 10. Chris Hemsworth plays Thor in this movie, while his older brother Luke played Thor in the play within the movie. Their younger sibling Liam was considered for the role of Thor. ​ 11. The Grandmaster's tower features statues of his champions, notable figures from Marvel comics: the Greek god Ares, the alien being Beta Ray Bill, the supernatural entity Man-Thing, and the android monster the Bi-Beast. ​ 12. In the Norse mythology and the Marvel comics, Loki is the father of Hela and Fenrir the Wolf. ​ 13. Taika Waititi appeared in this movie as Korg. Waititi is the second Marvel film Director to have a major role in his own movie, after Jon Favreau (who directed the first two Iron Man films, and appeared as "Happy" Hogan in the Marvel Cinematic Universe). ​ 14. In Norse mythology, Ragnarök is translated as "The Fate of the Gods", although it is often confused with the word "Götterdämmerung". The myth tells of the eventual destruction of the universe and mankind, as well as the deaths of several key figures in Norse Mythology, such as the gods Odin, Thor, Loki, Heimdall, Freyr, Sol, and Tyr, and the monsters, a.k.a. Jotun, Fenris, and Jörmungandr. A new generation of gods, the children of Odin, Thor, and Sol specifically, will take the place of the old ones, as the cycle of the world starts anew. ​ 15. The song heard in the trailer and Thor's first/last battles is Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song". It was specifically chosen because its lyrics make mention of Norse mythology. ​ 16. Sif was originally supposed to appear in the film, but Jaimie Alexander's shooting schedule for the third season of Blindspot (2015) clashed with this movie's schedule. It was decided to have the character written out, with Producer Kevin Feige saying that Sif was off on a mission during Ragnarök. ​ 17. The film is mainly based on the Thor comics storylines "Ragnarök" (Thor discovers Asgard is doomed to Ragnarök and must fight to stop it from happening) and the Surtur saga (Surtur appears, and Thor and Loki team up to stop him). It also incorporates elements of the Marvel storylines "Contest of Champions" (The Grandmaster and Death host a tournament) and "Planet Hulk" (the Hulk becomes a gladiator on an alien world). ​ 18. Led Zeppelin's "Immigrant Song" appears in the film, and the trailer. This is noteworthy, because Led Zeppelin is known for very rarely licensing out their music for use in feature films, television series, or video games. The majority of other films that have had Led Zeppelin music are related to rock journalist Cameron Crowe (Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Almost Famous (2000)), making this one of the few films to feature Zeppelin music that in no way involves Crowe. School of Rock (2003) is another. ​ 19. Chris Hemsworth had to bulk up again for his role as the mighty god Thor. He had to follow a strict diet, and work out six to seven times a week, and eat around six thousand calories a day. ​ 20. According to Producer Kevin Feige, this film plays a significant role in setting up Avengers: Infinity War (2018). ​ 21. On Earth, Thor disguises his hammer Mjölnir as an umbrella. In the comics, whenever Thor took on the mortal form of Dr. Donald Blake, he disguised Mjölnir as a walking stick. ​ 22. Taika Waititi described the film as a "1970s and 80s science fiction fantasy, the most 'out there' of all of the Marvel movies." He cited Big Trouble in Little China (1986) as a major influence on the film: "It's a fun adventure film that has big stakes, but also has a breakneck speed and takes you on a crazy adventure." ​ 23. To prepare for her role as Hela, Cate Blanchett studied the Afro-Brazilian martial art Capoeira. ​ 24. Loki's play mentions a time when he turned Thor into a frog. This is a reference to a Walter Simonson story where Loki briefly turned Thor into a frog (but he was able to meet a frog named Puddlegulp and share his power with him, turning him into Throg the Frog of Thunder). ​ 25. Tom Hiddleston describes Loki as dealing with permanence: "It's in Loki's nature to change. He's a mercurial spirit, and the minute you try to define him he changes shape. But events in Ragnarök try and inspire him to change forever. The Goddess of Death shows up, and the stakes are high for everybody, so Loki, perhaps more than ever, is challenged to define himself in the face of that threat. He and Thor are in such an extraordinary situation where everything is so unfamiliar that their familiarity, as family members, becomes important." ​ 26. According to Director Taika Waititi, while the film adapts the "Planet Hulk" storyline, Hulk wasn't going to be in the film at all. It was only supposed to be Thor stranded on an alien battlefield-world. ​ 27. In Valkyrie's flashback, a blonde woman is seen pushing her out of the way of a fatal attack, losing her own life. This was Valkyrie's original look in the comics. ​ 28. In addition to his credited role as the voice of Korg, Director Taika Waititi told Empire Magazine that he also played two other roles in this movie: "I am one of the heads on the three-headed alien, this character called Haju. I'm the head on the right. And I'm also the motion-capture for Surtur." Clancy Brown performed the voice of Surtur. ​ 29. After dispatching Loki, Doctor Strange leaves his business card, which reads "177A Bleecker St." While truly accurate to the comics, and very similar to "221B Baker Street" (the address of Sherlock Holmes, whom Benedict Cumberbatch played on Sherlock (2010)), it is not an Easter egg. It was the real New York City address of Roy Thomas, one of the writers of Doctor Strange. ​ 30. Tessa Thompson based her performance as Valkyrie on Sarah Connor from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991). ​ 31. Korg is a member of the Kronan race, and made his debut in Journey into Mystery #83, where he was defeated by Thor. He is most known for his appearance in Planet Hulk, where he fought with Hulk and his Warbound on Sakaar to defeat the Red King, and in World War Hulk, where he assisted Hulk in his revenge against the heroes who shot him into space following the destruction of Sakaar. ​ 32. Tom Hiddleston and Idris Elba's highest billing to date in any Marvel movie. Ironically, both have less screentime in this film than the previous Thor films. ​ 33. In the comics, The Grandmaster has blue skin. Director Taika Waititi decided against applying blue on Jeff Goldblum, because he felt Goldblum was a good enough actor to not need it, and because Goldblum played a blue-colored character in Earth Girls Are Easy (1988). ​ 34. A panel in The Grandmaster's (Jeff Goldblum's) viewing room is decorated with Jack Kirby artwork that comes from the the Marvel comic "Fantastic Four" #64 (July 1967). ​ 35. Chris Hemsworth's trainer, Luke Zocchi, revealed that Hemsworth put on twenty pounds of muscle for his role in the film, taking his weight over two hundred pounds, by following an "old-school bodybuilding regime lifting a large weight-load for small number of reps." Zocchi revealed Hemsworth's favorite body part to train was his biceps, saying, "We design the workout around the body parts he's gonna be showing off the most, he's gonna have his arms and shoulders showing (through the sleeveless armor), so that's the thing we really focus on building up. He probably bicep curls thirty kilo dumbbells on average, each hand, so one hundred twenty pounds total. We always do seated incline curls, standing curls, and hammer curls. We started lighter and slowly, progressively get heavier." Zocchi said they are trying to deliver Hemsworth's best physique yet for this film. ​ 36. A street on Sakaar is named "Kirby Way", after Marvel artist and writer Jack Kirby. ​ 37. Director Taika Waititi consulted with theoretical physicist Clifford Johnson, who previously consulted on the second season of Agent Carter (2015), on space travel, and allowed Johnson to view early drafts of the script. Johnson felt Waititi was "receptive and super excited" about the information he provided, and Johnson gave him physics ideas that could "wink at some of the classic old Thor stuff." ​ 38. Hela is primarily based on her comic version (the Norse goddess of death and apocalypse), but incorporates traits from Thor's enemy Gorr the God Butcher (an enemy who wields a magic sword and can create constructs) and Thor's sister Angela (a rival to Thor). ​ 39. Valkyrie's (Tessa Thompson's) flashback used a nine hundred frames per second high-speed rate, and a special three hundred sixty degree lighting rig of two hundred strobe lights to make the scene look as disorienting as possible. ​ 40. Valkyrie wears two armors based on her "Defenders" outfits in the comics: on Sakaar, she has a leather outfit that comes from her 2013 "Fearless Defenders" comic. She later dons a silver-gold full-body armor, her "Defenders" armor from the 1970s. ​ 41. Cate Blanchett played Hela in a motion-capture suit, because of Hela's ability to shapeshift her body. She said this was a bit awkward, since she got confused in a few scenes. ​ 42. In the comics and Norse myth, Valkyrie was a fair-skinned, blonde, Viking warrior-woman. In this film, she is played by Afro-Panamanian, Mexican, and British actress Tessa Thompson. According to Director Taika Waititi, this was not a deliberate decision to diversify the film, but to choose the best person: "You're working with comic book Vikings, so you have to look at the source material as a very loose inspiration. A character's skin tone and hair color doesn't matter. I think the story is king, and you want the best person for the job, and Tessa was the best person." ​ 43. The survivors of Ragnarök decide to head to Earth. In the Marvel comic event "Siege", Asgard was annihilated and its survivors decide to stay on Earth. ​ 44. The film was retitled in Japan as "Thor: Battle Royale", an homage to the Koushun Takami story "Battle Royale", about people who are imprisoned in an arena and forced to kill each other. ​ 45. First film from Director Taika Waititi that was not also written by him. ​ 46. Taika Waititi described "The Tragedy of Loki of Asgard" as: "If I was Loki, and I was ruling Asgard, I would write a play about myself and force everyone to go and see it, change the details, and get a huge celebrity to play myself." ​ 47. This film released in 2017, the 55th Anniversary of the debut of Thor (August 1962) and The Incredible Hulk (May 1962), as well as the centennial of their co-Creator Jack Kirby. ​ 48. Hela (Cate Blanchett) was the first female main villain in a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. ​ 49. Director Taika Waititi felt that despite the events of the film setting up Avengers: Infinity War (2018), the film would not only stand on its own, but reinvent the franchise: "A lot of what we're doing with the film is, in a way, dismantling and destroying the old idea and rebuilding it in a new way that's fresh. Everyone's got a slightly new take on their characters, so in that way, it feels like Thor (2011)." ​ 50. This film released in 2017, along with Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) and Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017). This marked the first time the Marvel Cinematic Universe has released three films in the same year. ​ 51. In the Marvel Comics Universe, when a Being becomes the last of its race, the Being is imbued with immortality, and that Being becomes part of a new race called an Elder of the Universe. That means they can no longer die, and hence are immortal. It is how the Universe protects the last of a kind in the Marvel Comics Universe. The Grandmaster and The Collector are two examples in the Marvel Comics Universe. ​ 52. During Captain America: Civil War (2016), all of the current Avengers line-up (apart from Thor and Hulk) turn up, choose a side, and fight one another. In the Civil War comic book storyline, this is also what happens, but on a much grander scale, again both Thor and Hulk are not present. The reason for both of them not being there in the Marvel comic book is because Hulk was on Sakaar and Thor had just been involved in Ragnarök, just like in this movie. ​ 53. Korg (Taika Waititi) offers Thor a three-pronged wooden spear, saying "it's not much use unless you want to kill three vampires who are all clustered together", a clear reference to Waititi's previous film What We Do in the Shadows (2014), about a group of vampires who live together. ​ 54. Jeff Goldblum was previously considered for the role of Dr. Bruce Banner/Hulk in Hulk (2003). This is hinted at during The Grandmaster's arena intro of The Incredible Hulk, when he announced feeling a connection to him. ​ 55. Chapter Five of Phase Three in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. ​ 56. Thor wields a mace in his fight with The Incredible Hulk. In the Marvel comics, this mace was used by Thor's ally, Hercules. ​ 57. Natalie Portman and Jaimie Alexander didn't return for this movie. Natalie Portman declined to return as Dr. Jane Foster and announced she wouldn't appear in anymore Marvel comic book movies, and Jaimie Alexander was busy working on Blindspot (2015). Thor mentions Dr. Jane Foster in dialogue and tells Loki that he dumped her. But, Lady Sif's absence in the film is unexplained, and the character is not mentioned. ​ 58. Having directed Thor (2011), Sir Kenneth Branagh turned down the chance to return as this film's director in order to work on Murder on the Orient Express (2017) instead. ​ 59. Cate Blanchett's youngest son, Ignatius Martin Upton, acquired a cameo role in the film. ​ 60. Charlize Theron was considered for the role of Hela. ​ 61. Grossed over six hundred fifty million dollars worldwide in ten days. ​ 62. Taika Waititi cited the heroic team-ups in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), 48 Hrs. (1982), Withnail & I (1987), Midnight Run (1988), Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), and Big Trouble in Little China (1986) as influences on the heroes' dynamic in this film. ​ 63. Taika Waititi wanted to feature a cameo by Corpsman Rhomann Dey (John C. Reilly) from Guardians of the Galaxy (2014). ​ 64. Thor called his team "The Revengers". In the Marvel comics, The Revengers were a team of supervillains/anti-heroes made to oppose the Avengers. ​ 65. Mjölnir is destroyed in this film by Hela, Thor's sister. In the comics, the hammer was damaged in a fight between Thor and his grandfather Bor. ​ 66. Director Taika Waititi described this movie as reinvention: "While Ragnarök traditionally means the end of everything, in the context of the film, it means disassembling what's already there, and rebuilding it. To me, it's stripping down the establishment, and then building it up in a new way, which is almost like this cyclic idea of Ragnarök. I love heroes that really go through ordeals and then come out the other end completely changed. That's way more exciting and interesting. You can never go back from that." ​ 67. Valkyrie (Tessa Thompson) never calls Thor (Chris Hemsworth) by his real name. She always calls him "Your Majesty". ​ 68. If you thought Sir Anthony Hopkins' role as Odin in this movie seemed a bit small, there's a reason for that: his scenes were drastically changed after test audiences reacted poorly. In a new interview, Director Taika Waititi confirms that the original plan for Odin bothered early test audiences, resulting in a drastic change. ​ 69. During his introductory scene, The Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) plays a sort of synthesizer keyboard. Goldblum is, in actuality, a very accomplished pianist. He and his jazz combo, Jeff Goldblum and the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, play semi-regular gigs at the Rockwell in Los Angeles, California. ​ 70. When Thor crashes into Sakaar, and he's talking to the scavenger people, in the background there is the body of a Bilgesnipe that he refers to in the The Avengers (2012) "Large. Scaly. Has big antlers". ​ 71. Although this movie is technically Thor's third solo outing in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, he appeared in both Avengers movies and Doctor Strange (2016), making this his sixth appearance in the franchise, not including the Team Thor promo videos for this movie. (As of this movie's release.) ​ 72. Topaz (Rachel House) is an ally of The Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) in this movie. In the comics, she was a sorceress. ​ 73. When Thor is trying to get the password for the Quinjet, the successful password was "Point Break" which was a subtle nod to Tony Stark's nickname for the blonde Avenger, as he resembled Patrick Swayze (Point Break (1991)) quite closely. Point Break is also what Iron Man calls Thor when they meet in the first Avengers. ​ 74. In the Marvel Comics event "Civil War", Reed Richards, Tony Stark, and Hank Pym created a cyborg clone of Thor, called "Ragnarök". ​ 75. The Grandmaster's cousin Carlo, who got melted, is named after a comic book artist, Carlo Pagulayan. Pagulayan created the character Korg, and was responsible along with writer Greg Pak for The Incredible Hulk comics between 2006 and 2007, and the Planet Hulk storyline. Both of them were given a special mention of thanks at the closing credits. ​ 76. First "Thor" film to not feature Natalie Portman, Kat Dennings, or Stellan Skarsgård. ​ 77. This movie contains homages to Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971). When Thor is being brought to meet the Grandmaster (Jeff Goldblum) he is being driven through a brightly colored passageway. During this segment the "Pure Imagination" theme from Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) can be heard. In Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory (1971) the contest winners take a ferry ride through a colorful tunnel shortly after meeting Willy Wonka. The Grandmaster is reminiscent of Willy Wonka (Gene Wilder), in that both men are eccentric leaders of their own colorful and often confusing labyrinthine domains. ​ 78. Thor disguises Mjölnir as an umbrella and taps it on the ground to change it back into his hammer. This is an homage to the early "Thor" comics when Thor took the mortal form of Dr. Donald Blake and he disguised Mjölnir as a walking stick. However, an umbrella is a more suitable disguise for a god of thunder. ​ 79. Four of the male cast have appeared in at least one Star Trek movie: Karl Urban (Skurge) played Dr. McCoy in Star Trek (2009), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), and Star Trek Beyond (2016). Chris Hemsworth (Thor) was Lieutenant George Kirk in Star Trek (2009) Benedict Cumberbatch (Dr. Strange) played Khan in Star Trek Into Darkness (2013). Idris Elba (Heimdall) played Krall in Star Trek Beyond (2016). Clancy Brown guest starred as Zobral in an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise (2001), Season One. ​ 80. This movie marks the third time that a Kronan has appeared in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The first was in the opening battle of Thor: The Dark World (2013), then in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) as Rocket and Yondu venture to Ego's planet. ​ 81. In the 2017 "Thor" comics, Thor was drawn to look like Chris Hemsworth. ​ 82. Clancy Brown, who voiced Surtur, played Odin in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes (2010) and played Ray Schoonover in Daredevil (2015) and The Punisher (2017), as well as Lex Luthor in various DC animated television shows and movies. ​ 83. Thor's first appearance on-screen was as second lead in a Hulk-centered television movie: The Incredible Hulk Returns (1988). ​ 84. "Hela" is the Marvel Comics version of Hel, the ruler of an Underworld of the same name. Hel's realm is part of Niflheim ("Abode of Mist", world of the darkness"), one of the Nine Worlds. Niflheim was depicted as a realm of primordial ice and cold. The souls of men who did not die a heroic or notable death (including those who did not die in battle, and those who died of sickness or of old age) were send to Niflheim and fell under Hel's control. ​ 85. Korg, the rock monster played by director Taika Waititi, introduces himself with a rock, paper, scissors joke when he first meets Thor. Korg explains that he ended up as a gladiator because he didn't print enough pamphlets. Paper beat rock. Later, at the end of the movie, Korg thinks that he accidentally crushed Miek, his blade-armed alien gladiator friend, and killed him. Though Miek does wake up, Korg killing Miek would mean that rock beat scissors. ​ 86. The Hulk's casual clothes on Sakaar are the ones he wore in the "Ultimate Hulk vs. Wolverine" comic while he was in Tibet. ​ 87. In Norse mythology and the comics, Hel (Hela) is the daughter of Loki, Queen of the Underworld and Goddess of Death. Her domain mirrors the appearance of Asgard, as she awaited Ragnarök to fill her kingdom with dead souls. This movie shows quite the opposite, with Hela as Odin's daughter and Loki's half-sister, and her trying to rule Asgard, rather than biding her time and waiting to be the Queen of the dead Asgardians. ​ 88. In this movie, Valkyrie rides a winged horse. According to Marvel comics, the horse is named Aragorn. Aragorn is a major hero in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and Cate Blanchett (Hela) and Karl Urban (Skurge) played Aragorn's allies Galadriel and Eomer, respectively. ​ 89. Along with Iron Man, Thor is the only other Marvel Studios franchise to have three different composers for each film: Patrick Doyle scored Thor (2011) Brian Tyler scored Thor: The Dark World (2013) Mark Mothersbaugh scored this movie. ​ 90. Taika Waititi designed the Valkyrie insignia tattoo. ​ 91. When Korg introduces himself he says "Yeah, I am actually a thing". Being made of rocks, this could easily be a tribute to another Stan Lee comic The Fantastic Four, where The Thing is made of rocks. ​ 92. Ruben Fleischer, Rob Letterman, and Rawson Marshall Thurber were considered to direct the film. Fleischer and Thurber were also candidates to direct Ant-Man (2015). ​ 93. Cate Blanchett had discussions with Marvel and Director Taika Waititi to help define when Hela would be masked, and when she would not be. ​ 94. Valkyrie carries the designation of SR-142. In the Marvel comics, Valkyrie was briefly a mortal woman named Samantha Parrington, who served as an adversary for the Hulk in "The Incredible Hulk #142" (August 1971). ​ 95. During the final battle scene when Bruce proclaims he's got this and jumps to try and change midair to battle Fenrir only to crash land references The Incredible Hulk (2008), when Bruce jumps out of a helicopter to fight The Abomination. The fight scene also pays homage to The Hulk (2003), where he fights giant mutated dogs that are able to pierce through his skin with their teeth. ​ 96. In the death scene portrayed in the play, "The Tragedy of Loki of Asgard", the same music played during Loki's death as played during Loki's death scene in Thor: The Dark World (2013). ​ 97. In Marvel Comics stories, Valkyrie/Brunnhilde has lost numerous host bodies, and her spirit survives by merging (temporarily or long-term) with various women, both mortal and immortal. The most prominent of these "host" women are the Asgardian goddesses Enchantress/Amora and Lorelei (who are sisters to each other), and the mortal women Barbara Denton/Barbara Norriss, Samantha Parrington, and Sian Bowen. This has led to some complications, such as Valkyrie and the host having access to more than one set of memories, not having access to all necessary information on the host, or dealing with confused relatives, such as Barbara's estranged husband and Samantha's parents. ​ 98. Tessa Thompson revealed that Valkyrie is bisexual. ​ 99. The Hulk is called "The Incredible Hulk" for the first time. The Grandmaster calls him "Incredible", and the Hulk finishes his sentence with "Hulk". ​ 100. Thor is the only Marvel Studios franchise to have a different director for each entry: Sir Kenneth Branagh directed Thor (2011) Alan Taylor directed Thor: The Dark World (2013) Taika Waititi directed this movie. ​ 101. This marks the third time that Sam Neill and Samuel L. Jackson appeared in the same cinematic universe without having a scene together. Neill appeared in The Hunt for Red October (1990), while Jackson appeared in Patriot Games (1992). The two also appeared in Jurassic Park (1993), along with Jeff Goldblum. ​ 102. In the early 1990s, The Incredible Hulk writer Peter David was asked who he'd like to see portray Bruce Banner/The Incredible Hulk in a big screen feature film. His choice at the time was Sir Kenneth Branagh, who directed Thor (2011). ​ 103. When she first encounters Thor, Valkyrie tells the Scrappers, "He's mine. So if you want him, you go through me". When the Scrappers refuse to give him up, she says, "Alright then, I guess I go through you". A similar scenario and dialogue exchange occurs in "Guardians of the Galaxy" in the prison where Rocket Raccoon tells the other prisoners, "This one here's our booty! You wanna get to him, you go through us! Or more accurately, we go through you!!" ​ 104. It is not known the reason why Thor broke up with Jane. ​ 105. CAMEO: Matt Damon: The actor portraying Loki in a play honoring the God of Mischief's apparent self-sacrifice in Thor: The Dark World (2013). Damon also played an archangel named Loki in Dogma (1999). ​ 106. CAMEO: Stan Lee: The co-Creator of Thor and The Incredible Hulk, appears as the barber who cuts Thor's hair. ​ 107. Thor (Chris Hemsworth) and Loki (Tom Hiddleston) meeting Odin (Sir Anthony Hopkins), and later Hela (Cate Blanchett), was originally to be set in New York City, but Director Taika Waititi felt the setting wasn't right for a dying Odin, and re-shot the sequence in a field in Norway, which he felt was a better setting for the Norse gods to meet. The original footage (shot in Brisbane, Australia) can be seen in the July 22 "offical trailer" in the second shot of the trailer. ​ 108. The spaceship seen in the mid-credit scene is the Sanctuary II, which belongs to Thanos. ​ 109. When Thor becomes a gladiator, he has his signature long hair cut short. In ancient Roman history, slaves who were sent to gladiator school and trained as gladiators had their hair cut short. ​ 110. Thor gets Loki to remove his Odin disguise by throwing his hammer and grabbing Loki with his hammer hand, so that the hammer would return to his hand and crush Loki unless he removed his enchantment. This came from a Walter Simonson Thor comic story where Thor realized Loki had put him under a love spell. ​ 111. When Thor sees the ruins of the palace ceiling fresco, there is a crack running through his portrait's right eye, foreshadowing how Hela wounds him. ​ 112. During the final battle after Thor's right eye is damaged, and missing, he lands on the bridge in full God mode (also known as Odinforce/Thorforce) with only his left one glowing. This was changed in the trailer, presumably to not spoil it. ​ 113. Skurge carries out his last stand from "Thor #362" (December 1985), where he fended off Hela's army, at the cost of his life, to save Thor and his friends. ​ 114. When Hela breaks apart the ceiling of the Asgard palace to reveal the true past of her conquests at Odin's side, one of the murals shows Hela wielding Mjölnir, the hammer which was Thor's weapon until she destroyed it at her return. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the only characters who could wield Mjölnir were Thor, Odin, Vision, and Hela. (Captain America did manage to shift it once.) ​ 115. This film has irony affecting Thor and his siblings. Thor is The God Of Thunder, yet he gets electrocuted, Loki is The God Of Mischief, yet gets tricked by Thor, and Hela being The Goddess Of Death, dies. ​ 116. In this movie, Hogun the Grim has the most screentime of The Warriors Three before being killed, which is the opposite of his last appearance where he had the least. ​ 117. The film's cast includes three Oscar winners: Cate Blanchett, Sir Anthony Hopkins, and Matt Damon; and four Oscar nominees: Benedict Cumberbatch, Jeff Goldblum, Mark Ruffalo, and Taika Waititi. In addition, with three winners, this movie ties with Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) in having the most Oscar winners featured in a Marvel Cinematic Universe movie. ​ 118. Hela never needed the sword of Heimdel, as she had two ways to travel. One, the staff of Odin can be used to launch the Bifröst Bridge, and two, the Tesseract, also known as the Infinity Stone of space. She walked right by it in Odin's Vault of Treasures, and even remarks as she walks by stating "interesting". She could have transported her and her legions anywhere. ​ 119. When Hela (Cate Blanchett) is looking at Odin's (Sir Anthony Hopkins') treasures, she sees Surtur's horned helmet and remarks, "Hmmm, smaller than I thought it would be". This is an ironic statement because when Surtur shows up again, he is huge, even bigger than before. ​ 120. It has become typical for Thor (Chris Hemsworth) to be tazed and/or his face squished against a glass in all of his movies so far. In Thor (2011), he is in the field after first landing, and Darcy (Kat Dennings) hits him with her tazer. After that, he is in the hospital being held back by orderlies and security , he gets hit with a powerful sedative and squishes his face against the glass. In Thor: The Dark World (2013), while battling Malekith (Christopher Eccleston) and passing from dimension to dimension, he lands on top of the building in London and squishes his face against the glass as he slides down. In this movie, when transported, he finds himself outside the Bifröst and landing on Sakaar. He has a net with an electric charge holding him, and where Scrapper 142 (Tessa Thompson) throws the obedience disc onto him. She electrocutes him, and while being transported, his face is squished against the glass on her ship. The irony is Thor is the God of Thunder, which is the sound made by lightning, and is brought down by a hand-held tazer. submitted by /u/Anonymous_1-2-3-4-5 to r/marvelstudios [link] [comments]

My Butteros came in the other day and I wanted to throw an album up to not only add more pictures of them to GYW (there will never be enough) but also to show the difference between a mid-to-low tier sneaker such as the tumbled leather Jack Purcell. Jack Purcells are a year old (only about 6 months of wear on them) and I paid about 50 bucks shipped for them. Purchasing: I ordered these babies from Opumo during their Easter 25% off sale. It took a couple days for the order to process, yet the only option for shipping was FedEx next day. Even though these shipped from England they were at my doorstep in under a day from being notified of the shipment’s departure. Idk why but that stuff amazes me and adds to the excitement. This is as low as I’ve ever seen them since I decided I wanted to replace my Jack Purcells with them and once I saw the price I knew I was doomed to purchase. Overall a great experience, especially with Opumo which I had not heard of prior to this purchase. Unboxing: Because I’m really impatient I didn’t take any pictures of the actual unboxing. Guess what y’all, it’s shoes coming out of a box. Notable things: they came packaged with a notecard saying they were “pre-distressed” which I’m thinking refers to the off white color of the leather and the somewhat dirtied appearance in areas of the outsole and leather. The sneakers also came with alternate white cotton laces which I highly doubt I’ll actually use as the white leather laces are so sweet. The GOODS: Here is album. My first observations were the weight of the sneakers plus the thickness of the leather (vs JP), and how it’s not a true white but rather an off white/cream color. I threw them on immediately and they seemed to fit pretty decently, but more on that later. There was some wrinkles right out of the box but from afar they don’t look nearly as bad, or aren’t even noticeable. The white leather laces really make the shoe look so much better vs JP’s in my opinion. I initially planned to buy these to replace my JP’s but now that I have them I feel like they’re a slightly different aesthetic and fit a different niche than my JP’s. The JP’s will be good beaters and summer sneakers for preppier outfits or outfits with bright white, and these are going to be my nicer pair that give off a much less casual vibe, if that makes sense. The leather insole is removable and under it is a green foam insole. Removing the leather insole reveals the stitching on the inside that goes around the sneak (Didn’t take pics of the innards besides the insole and inside leather differences). Odd to say (maybe not on GYW but) I’m a really big fan of the heels and how round/stiff they are. They do a fantastic job of hold your heel in place and feeling sturdy. Also the suede inside of the heel is a really nice touch that surprised me. It’s super fuzzy and soft. The Buttero tag could not be more subtle and perfectly out of the way if it tried. It’s moved a bit off center. After wearing them for a day I think the reason behind this is to avoid bugging the muscle on top of your ankle that flexes outwards every time you flex your foot upwards. Also, when everything is laced up the tag is hidden right under the quarters. I truly love this aspect of the Butteros… branding that’s hidden in plain sight. Plus the tag itself is very well designed, and not some stupid cloth or different color bullshit. Also worth noting there is only one lace each that goes through the middle hole in the tongue (to hold it in place) so it shifts slightly to the outside of the foot. It came this way and it was hard trying to get both through, so I left it as is. The outsole of the sneaker is hard, much much more solid than the JP’s. Everything is very clean and well done. There is a row of stitching that goes around the sneaker and it is even and straight. I’m hoping that this will hold the side/outsole to the upper and prevent that splitting that is common seen on chucks/JP’s due to being only glued. It’s starting to happen to my JP’s at the flex point and it just looks shitty. Thankfully it isn’t too noticeable as of right now. I’m forecasting they will be able to take a beating and hold up vs the JP’s which feel slightly flimsy in the uppers and have a softer sole/sides of the outsole. The JP’s do have a cork insole which is extremely comfortable once it has formed to your feet a bit, but I have a feeling that it will only last so long. Depending on the wear/how well the uppers and cemented on side/outsole stay intact, I think the cork insoles could eventually become uncomfortable and be the reason I stop wearing them. But anyways…. With the exception of the three nubs on the stitching (from being burnt down) on the left sneaker, there seems to be nothing else “wrong” with them. It’s not pleasant to run your fingers over, but it’s not visually disturbing so I’m OK with it. That's truly all I could find that is wrong with them. I guess you could count some of the wrinkling/loose grain as unsightly but that doesn’t really both me. It looks much worse in the pictures than real life. Fit and Comfort: Another big shoutout to /u/makemewaffles who helped me figure out my sizing rather fast, and having the initial review which is extremely well done, complete with good sizing info. I scrambled to get my sizing right so these wouldn’t sell out in my size. Besides the advice I received I used this chart from the Buttero site to figure out conversions. My US Brannock sizes are 11.5 left and 10.5 right. Per the advice on the first review I settled on going a half size down from my left Brannock size, landing me at a US 11. The conversions are US 11 = UK 10 = 44. I was considering going down another half size to a UK 9.5/43.5 but they only sold whole sizes and thank god they didn’t have it because the UK 10/44 fits perfectly for my left foot. On my right foot it wasn’t painful or anything, it was just slightly loose and had to be tied tighter. I would recommend the half size down from US Brannock as well… I’m not sure I can say I’d recommend going a full size down unless your foot volume is abysmal. I thought mine was low and these fit great with no socks, after the adjustment. If they were a half size smaller I feel like it would have been painful for my left foot regarding flex of the uppers and how tight it'd fit overall. The way I adjusted for this was by removing the leather insole that comes with the sneaker, sticking a Walgreens mens air foam pad that cost me $2.50 for two pairs above the green foam insole, and then putting the original leather insole back on top. I didn’t have to trim it or play around at all, it straight up fit perfectly and ended up filling just enough volume to make it comfortable from the top of my foot/ankle region through the ball. The creasing pattern of the shoes is not painful either, whereas the Adidas Rod Lavers I have caused some serious pain on my right foot because it was too small for the sneaker. I threw the foam inserts in those too and they fit great with no pain now. I recommend scooping some of these to play around with if you have any similar sizing issues, although I’m not sure how well it would work with non-removable insoles. I also tie the laces slightly differently for the right sneaker… the laces come under the quarters directly onto the tongue making an X and then laced up through the final hole to be tied above the quarters. It pushed my heel back just enough to be held in place by the heel cup. Conclusion: I conditioned these the night I got them with Bick 4. Hard to say how much it took up but I put on a bit more than I usually do for a first condition. I’m going to apply a tiny bit more in a week or so based on a game time decision. I wore these all today from approximately 6:30am to 6pm with the Anonymous Ism linen socks I purchased along with them. The reason I mention this is because they’re thinner than paper and my feet weren’t cut up or in any serious pain by the time I took them off. The only things I noticed today wearing them were: they squeaked like “cray cray” (a phrase my supervisor just learned and used to describe them) from the leather uppers being really stiff and rubbing together; the region above my arches and the tops of the ball of my feet both felt uncomfortable, but not painful, like there was stiff/unbroken in leather all around them (there was!); and that some of the creases at the flex points started to develop which is unavoidable. Despite what some others have said, I found the insoles and the sneakers in general to be extremely comfortable. I think I hit the nail on the head for fit… but who knows maybe in a couple weeks that won’t be the case. I'm pretty sure they do though. For the price that I paid, how fast they got here (so much fun it took only one day), the quality/construction, and most importantly the spot on fit for my split sized feet really makes these sneakers a great purchase for me IMO. I will absolutely be buying another pair of them at some point, maybe a grey suede model. There is essentially nothing wrong with this pair, they’re comfortable, they look great, they’re slightly different than my JP’s, they feel so much more substantial (think a pair of Sperry’s vs a CXL handsewn), and they don’t have a cheap/ratty sneaker appearance… it’s very well put together and executed well. Simple, easy, but interesting…. I really like these sneakers. The price I got them for definitely plays a role in that, as I doubt I’d pay retail for these, but you can’t take away from the quality and design of the sneaker itself. I would absolutely recommend these to anyone who is considering buying Buttero’s. An on foot shot from today plus one more. I hope you enjoyed the review! submitted by /u/Micrafone_AssAssin to r/goodyearwelt [link] [comments]