First day of lectures today. I was supposed to be starting with History of Church and Theology: Contemporary Period at 9.00, but got an email sent at 7:46 saying that it was cancelled (along with tomorrow's and both of next week's), because the professor is in India. I can't help but feel that maybe he might have known that would be happening more than 75 minutes before the lecture, by which point I'd already left the flat, but it gave me a couple of extra hours in the library, so I'm not really complaining.
Following that was Coptic II, with my favourite prof. The first half was talking about the practicalities of what the semester was going to look like, including asking for thoughts on what texts we'd like to read. There were a whole two students, so unless it turns out to be too difficult for relative beginners, then we should get to look at "The Investiture of the Archangel Michael", an apocryphal text which covers some of the same ground as Paradise Lost, which was one of my requests.
In the afternoon we had Christian Social and Political Ethics, which was reasonably interesting, although I'm actually hoping that I'm going to be allowed to swap that module for a Hebrew/Midrash one that I'm a lot more excited about. I'm not sure when I'll find out though, so until I do I'll be going to lectures for both. Afterwards I was doing some reading related to that first lecture, which talks about the necessity of social and relational ties for human beings and humanity to flourish. From time to time it used the phrase "mutual flourishing" and I kept having to remind myself that this was a book chapter written in a Roman Catholic milieu, and therefore it had nothing to do with the very specific way that phrase is used in Anglican ecclesial politics...
Riona: Okay, I've almost finished this fic; the end is in sight! Now I just need you guys to— Chris and Robert: Destroy our relationship, right? Riona: NO
It took some wrestling to deal with the damage the characters (in true Goes Wrong fashion) insisted on doing, but I managed to get the fic finished in the end!
Title: Middle Ground Fandom:The Goes Wrong Show Rating: 14 Pairing: Robert/Chris Wordcount: 3,900 Summary: Robert is in love. Chris isn't. They sleep together anyway. This is probably a great idea.
While the Super Bowl yesterday was a blowout victory for the Seattle Seahawks over the New England Patriots, for many, the real performance was with Bad Bunny’s Apple Music Super Bowl Halftime Show.
Affectionately called the “Benito Bowl” by many, it was both a musical extravaganza and a history lesson about Puerto Rico. As Wonkette’s resident Puerto Rican writer, I’m gonna dive into all the meanings and politics in Bad Bunny’s artistic performance.
But first, a brief moment to gaze on my amazing fit yesterday, before we get serious:
Bad Bunny began his performance by invoking the sugarcane fields of Puerto Rico and the jíbaros, the sugarcane farmers and symbols of Puerto Rico’s resilience as he performed “Tití Me Preguntó” (Auntie asked me).
Bad Bunny, wearing an all-white jersey with number 64 (perhaps a subtle nod to Puerto Rico’s first peaceful transfer of power under its constitution in 1964) and his mother’s surname of Ocasio (respect to his matriarch) while holding a football “high and tight” (best position to not fumble), then moved on to a coco frio stand, which invokes a desire to maintain our traditions, in spite of the US importing brands and conglomerates to our island.
Benito continued his tour of Puerto Rican iconography, like old men playing dominoes, getting a piragua (flavored shaved ice like a snowcone), handing the football to a nail salon worker and her customer, before ducking under two boxers’ gloves (while giving some love to Los Angeles favorite Villa’s Tacos).
Then, while performing a song about his many girlfriends, and despite his fear of commitment, Bad Bunny got a box from a Puerto Rican gold and jewelry vendor. Upon opening it and seeing an engagement ring, he immediately refused “the call to marriage” and handed the ring to a fellow Puerto Rican to propose to his girlfriend.
He moved on to a “party de marquesina” (carport party) taking place on a recreation of the “casita” (little house) that was the centerpiece of Bad Bunny’s No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí (“I don’t want to leave here”) concert residency in Puerto Rico.
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As he performed on the casita’s roof we got some quick cameos from his famous Latino friends, like rapper Cardi B, singer Karol G and actors Pedro Pascal and Jessica Alba. Fellow actor and honorary Puerto Rican Jon Hamm (AKA Juan Jamón) was not in the casita this time, but was dancing (adorably badly) on the sidelines.
As Bad Bunny performed “Yo Perreo Sola,” “Safaera” and ”Voy A Llevarte Pa’ PR,” the physical and metaphorical roof caved in and dropped him into your living room. He kicked the door open, and ventured bafck into the halftime show. Shaking the dirt off his shoulder (perhaps a nod to a song by Roc Nation CEO and rapper Jay-Z, who chooses NFL’s halftime performer), Bad Bunny gave some love to the marginalized parts of lthe Latin community, like Afro-Latinos and the LGBTQ community, as he performed ”EoO.”
We then got an appearance by Puerto Rico’s national animal, the coquí frog, before moving on to “Monaco,” featuring the juxtaposition of classical violins with the sugarcane fields.
Bad Bunny here addressed the crowd directly in Spanish, and here is the translation if you didn’t learn Spanish in the four months he gave you:
"My name is Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, and if I'm here today at Super Bowl 60, it's because I never, ever stopped believing in myself. You should also believe in yourself. You're worth more than you think. Trust me."
After performing Monaco, there was a now-confirmed-real wedding on a stage adorned with a lookout post symbolizing the Spanish fort El Morro in Old San Juan, where we were greeted by a surprise performance from Lady Gaga!
Wearing a light blue dress, a red “Flor de Maga” (Thespesia grandiflora, Puerto Rico’s national flower and the only true “Maga”), and dripping with white beads, she was the embodiment of Puerto Rico’s original flag (more on this later). Gaga sang a salsa rendition of the duet ”Die With a Smile”she originally did with fellow Puerto Rican Bruno Mars.
Viewers didn’t see this, but Super Bowl attendees captured footage of Bad Bunny taking a second to dance to Lady Gaga, an artist whose music he’s praised as helping him through troubling times.
Bad Bunny then joined Gaga on stage to dance and sing “BAILE INoLVIDABLE.” The camera panned the Puerto Rican wedding reception:
Next up, after taking a trust fall onto fellow boricuas, came “NUEVAYoL.” In this song Bad Bunny is giving love to the New York Puerto Rican community (Nuyoricans) as he sings about spending magical summers there. The scene features bodegas (with “we accept EBT signs”), barbershops, and restaurants like you’d see in Brooklyn or Washington Heights before getting a drink from Toñita — a Brooklyn icon whose Caribbean Social Club, the last surviving Puerto Rican social club, has anchored the community for decades. (And that was the owner who served him a shot.)
Bad Bunny then handed a Grammy to an actor representing his past child self, who was watching his future dreams come true on TV.
Now, the two most politically powerful songs of the night.
First, a surprise appearance by Ricky Martin on “Lo Que Le Pasó a Hawaii” (“What happened to Hawaii.”) The song is about not wanting our culture, history, and paradise to be taken by greed and gentrification, and what happened to Hawaii when it became a state is an example deeply felt by puertorriqueños. Sung by Ricky Martin, it’s powerful. Martin himself had to assimilate multiple times through his career — be it MENUDO or his 1990s English pop crossover or his decades of being a closeted gay man — to succeed globally. His lamentation for Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and himself personally resonates because (as he recently wrote to Bad Bunny) he made those sacrifices so artists like Benito didn’t have to.
Martin’s performance was “interrupted” by power lines blowing up as Bad Bunny performed “El Apagón” (The Blackout), a critique of the fragile (and neglectful) power situation that’s plagued the island since Hurricane Maria. Despite the loss of literal power, Benito rose to show that even darkness can’t stop the light of Puerto Rico. As he sang of how everyone “wants to be Latinos but they are missing sazón (seasoning), batteries (energy), and reggaeton (the rhythm),” he invited everyone to join if they embrace this (unlike bigots who hate this only to put on stereotype costumes to eat guac and get drunk on Cinco de Mayo).
Benito waved the original Puerto Rico flag, with its light blue, which was made illegal by 1948’s Ley de la Mordaza (Gag Law). Waving this flag, until the law was repealed in 1957, was seen as an act of revolution, as the law allowed police and national guardsmen to enter anyone’s home without a warrant and search and seize all property, regardless of probable cause. It is why many Puerto Ricans everywhere display the flag so prominently to this day.
When the law was repealed, the United States changed the shade of blue to royal blue, to more closely match the blue on the US flag. So flying the lighter blue flag is both a sign of pride and defiance against a colonial power that tried to erase our identity.
Bad Bunny began his grand finale performing “CAFé CON RON” (Coffee with Rum). As he descended the power lines, Benito yelled “God Bless America!” and proceeded to name all the countries that entails: Puerto Rico, Chile, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Canada, Nicaragua, Honduras, Cuba, Jamaica, Haiti, Dominican Republic and more, with a banner that said “The only thing stronger than hate is love” behind the parade of flags.
He revealed the inscription on his football — “Together We Are America,” a rallying cry uniting the entire contiguous American continent and Caribbean —then spiked it for emphasis.
As Bad Bunny left the stage while performing “DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS,” a song about appreciating all the moments of love and joy you can while you can, I was moved to tears.
The performance and this song in particular conveyed the feelings of being in diaspora. As a Puerto Rican who moved to the US when I was 10, DtMF hits hard, as it distills the homesick feeling I’ve experienced since then in a way even I couldn’t verbalize. Like someone reached into the core of my soul and reawakened the sadness I repressed to survive in the States.
Thank you for joining us in this journey through this transcendent performance, and I hope you now understand how important this was for all Boricuas like me.
1. Requisite superbowl posting: I moved to Patriots territory as an adult, and that means that I find the constant chatter about them annoying and thus wanted them to lose and would've found it extremely funny if they'd scored zero points overall. They did score some points in the end, but they sure lost terribly anyway!
I have also now seen the only part worth seeing, which is the halftime show, which was very good! It just also made me think about how...
brief bit about USA PoliticsThere's this oddity to watching it and going "this looks like, and feels like it's for, the community I live in" (the town I live in is if not outright majority Hispanic/Latinx very close to it, and majority Puerto Rican within that), when it also feels like a political statement to have a Puerto Rican performer as the star and for him to sing in Spanish, celebrating that heritage, as a contrast to the constant background noise about ICE in Minnesota (and elsewhere; that's just the main area making national news, not the only place ICE is hunting).
I don't know that I have any coherent thoughts about that. Just, well. USA politics sure are something, and The Big Football Game is a platform for them.
2. Talked to my dad on the phone yesterday for almost two hours. Got the Family Update from him, which is about what I expected: my mom is stressed, my grandmother is doing better, my twin is As He's Been with a lead on Doing More Stuff Actually, which is good.
It's interesting talking to my dad because it's very. Well. I talk to him and I see patterns of behavior that I exhibit manifest in him, in much the same way and for much the same reason. And I'm just like. Well, I sure am your child in some very specific ways, aren't I. It's never going to be one-to-one, of course, but it's... still nice to see.
3. It is perhaps going to start being NOT HORRIBLY COLD in a day or two, with the metric of "not terribly cold" being "highs consistently above freezing", which is still cold but a lot more tolerable than the month of ARCTIC FROST we've been having. It means snow might slowly start melting! And that leaving for work at the coldest point in the day is going to be less "oh god I hate being outside even if it's only for a minute or two".
4. in the continued vibe of "ah yes actually share bits of this as I write it", this is still mostly set-up!
I'm a bit, I could name the trading company something less on-the-nose about them being shitty, but consider: nah. That's something relatively easy to change later, and there is an island chain that'll eventually be relevant anyway, so...
“The Southern Chain Trading Company.” Ames didn’t see any change in expression on Vesta’s face, but her beard hid some of the subtleties. “I haven’t heard of them before, and was hoping you had.”
“Southern Chain.” Vesta frowned. “They’re… new here. If I thought you had any interest in business, I wouldn’t tell you more for free, but most of what I hear is that they’re building themselves up right now. They’ve only recently established a business house in Anaxa—they came up from the south, from Rakorran or Recharron or something like that—and are mostly trading southward, but they’ve bought a few things from Yscor—we’ve better prices for certain goods, even accounting for shipping down the river.”
Ames nodded thoughtfully. “That would explain why they sent me a letter.”
Vesta looked at him, dark eyes glinting under furrowed brows. Slowly, she said, “If they offer you something, don’t accept unless it’s more than Rhei would give you. I don't think they know the northern coast well enough to give you a good deal, and I know you don’t want to leave.”
“I know.” Ames inclined his head in half a bow. “I want to hear their offer. I doubt I’ll accept it.”
Theme Prompt: #290 - Princess Title: new royalty Fandom: Hazbin Hotel Rating/Warnings: N/A Bonus: Yes Word Count: 895 Summary: Human AU! Alastor has a plan to get under Vox's skin.
Title: Night of San Lorenzo Fandom: Viola come il mare (for tagging - category: tv) Author:veronyxk84 Characters/Pairing: Viola Vitale/Francesco Demir Rating: PG-13 Warnings: none Word count: 300 (Ellipsus) Spoilers/Setting: Set post-S1. Summary: Viola and Francesco are waiting for a meteor shower. Disclaimer:This is a work of fiction created for fun and no profit has been made. All rights belong to the respective owners.
A/N: In Italy, the “Night of San Lorenzo” (August 10th) is traditionally associated with shooting stars. It’s the peak of the Perseid meteor shower and a popular night for making wishes.
Some of of thoughts are echoed by The Liberal Redneck, here.
The whole thing about Jeffrey Epstein maybe having an influence on Gamergate and /pol/, here.
TL;DR, this shit goes way past the victimization of children into possible murder and cannibalism, and my capacity to handle those details is very limited. I'm not one of those "true crime" fans who are capable of consuming this kind stuff as "content," or even thinking of it as such. These are details which should have compelled any other society with even a semi-functioning legal apparatus to completely shut down the people committing these kinds of atrocities. The phrase "under the jail" comes to mind. But apparently, we were not even that functional of society back in 2007-2008, when Epstein got off nearly scott-free from the then-ongoing attempts to prosecute his crimes.
We might be living in a very different world today if our legal system had been able to shut him down in 2007-2008, and pull down every single billionaire or hanger-on connected with him. Trump probably wouldn't be president today, for one. And /pol/ would not have been reopened. Our society has arguably been destroyed because we couldn't manage to put one predatory creep away for good eighteen years ago. But if we weren't able to put one predatory creep away, maybe it was doomed to fail, or already failed.
There were so many slippery slope moments in 2000 that people screamed about, and we were all told to shut up and we were overreacting. This was just one of them. The 2000s just feel like one big slippery slope. And now we've slid into fullblown authoritarian fascism. And it doesn't surprise me at all that it arrived hand-delivered by predator creeps who victimize children.
One sentiment I am seeing a lot in the yotube comments of videos talking about these crimes boils down to, "I don't understand the kind of person who sets out to do these sick, predatory things to people. All I want to do is live my dumb life and work my dumb job and enjoy my dumb little hobbies." And I think that's most of us in the 99%, frankly. Once again, I'm reminded of William Gibson's line about how the extremely wealthy have lost their humanity.
This poem is spillover from the February 3, 2026 Poetry Fishbowl. It was inspired and sponsored by janetmiles. It also fills the "Respect Limits" square in my 2-1-26 card for the Valentines Bingo fest.
"Books That Bite Back"
Some books are easy reading, while others really are not.
There are the vindaloo cookbooks and the guides to growing hot peppers.
There are the essays about ethics and the history books written by losers.
There are the comparative religion texts and the papers on quantum mechanics.
Just like food that commands respect, there are books that bite back.
A/N: This was inspired by halfamoon's own Big Damn Admin cmk418's Day 5 Firefly fic halfamoon.dreamwidth.org/567034.html; mind was too busy writing stories in my head, including this one.
Goddess be with you,
天下無不散之筵席 { There is no such thing as a feast that never ends }
kerk
Current Mood:lonely
Current Location:USS Rattray
Current Music:In This Shirt by The Irrepressibles (fanvid for SKAM France S6)
An Offer Fae Can't Refuse by Lou Wilham was a lot of fun! Sage is back from the dead and back in town. Mal now runs the Faceless Few fae mafia, but Sage is more interested in him than in his former seat at the Court of Families.
This is the first book of Fae of Eventide, set in the same world as Witches of Moondale and Hunters of Ironport (minor mentions so far, but I assume the crossovers will increase in time). If you want to follow the whole story (you don't need to, but you want to), Lou has provided the Reading Order in a practical format.
There is major m/nb, as well as f/f involving a trans woman.
Fandom: Tolkien Rating: T Characters: Sons of Feanor, Elrond, Feanor, Daeron, various others Warnings: n/a Summary: After years in Lórien, Maglor and Maedhros are ready to return to their family and to make something new with their lives--but to move forward, all of Fëanor's sons must decide how, or if, they can ever reconcile with their father. Note: This fic is a direct sequel to High in the Clean Blue Air.
Sidetracks is a collaborative project featuring various essays, videos, reviews, or other Internet content that we want to share. All past and current links for the Sidetracks project can be found in our Sidetracks tag. You can also support Sidetracks and our other work on Patreon.
Like most conservative commentators, Matt Walsh of the Daily Wire spent most of his weekend crying about how terribly un-American it was to have Bad Bunny perform in Spanish at the Super Bowl. Somehow this is very different from when Donald Trump ends his rallies with “Nessun Dorma,” an Italian (i.e. Not English) aria about how an entire city needs to stay up all night in order to figure out the name of a foreign prince so that the princess can get out of marrying him and murder him instead, but I’m not sure how.
However, he did take a break from that, just for a bit, in order to defend Donald Trump’s posting of a racist video depicting the Obamas as apes as being totally insignificant and harmless in comparison to a video in which Democratic Texas Rep. Gene Wu calls for solidarity among non-whites in America. Unsurprising, since he has long been a defender of the “normality” of racist jokes.
“I always tell people, the day Latino, African American, Asian and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor, is the day we start winning,” Rep. Wu explained. “Because we are the majority in this country now. We have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone, and make things fair. But the problem is our communities are divided. They’re completely divided.”
What? “Do what is needed for everyone and make things fair?” What kind of talk is that? Has Rep. Wu not thought about how that would affect people like Matt Walsh, who prefer things to be unfair? Who benefit from that unfairness? You want to just take that away from him? Have you not considered his feelings?
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Naturally, Walsh determined that the “same oppressor” Wu spoke about was “the entire white race” and not, you know, people like Matt Walsh in particular.
“So I’m supposed to be outrage [sic] about an Obama monkey meme while Democrat elected officials are labeling the entire white race ‘oppressors’ and openly plotting to conquer and subjugate us? Trump can post all the memes he wants. I really don’t care at all,” he wrote, posting the entirely inoffensive video clip. Because “make things fair” obviously means “subjugate Matt Walsh.”
It is practically a trope at this point that the reason people like Walsh fear equality is that they are afraid those who have been oppressed will turn around and do the same things to those who oppressed them, but it used to be rare for them to be so open about that.
Walsh went on, naturally, to rant about how, actually, white people are the most oppressed people in the whole United States.
“If he said this about black people, Jews, or literally any other group, it would be the biggest story in the country and he’d be forced to resign by the end of the week,” he tweeted. “And we all know it. Anti-whiteism is the most prevalent and destructive bigotry in America and it’s not close.”
Curiously enough, the only form this particular kind of bigotry seems to take is standing up against bigotry and racism from people like Matt Walsh.
He then retweeted a post from one Hunter Ash, the social media manager for Keeper, an AI matchmaking startup recently profiled in The New York Times, who tweeted, “I am a single issue voter for ‘not this’. This issue - anti-Whiteness, mass immigration, race communism, they’re all the same thing - overrides everything else. We are under attack and have been for decades. We can have debates about tax policy once the enemy is defeated.”
“Race communism” is, we can assume, what they are calling equality now? It’s bad for people to be treated equally regardless of skin color because … that’s communism? That’s certainly a take.
He also retweeted another post from fellow wingnut Will Chamberlain, reading “Hey [Senator Katie Britt] you’ve been pretty quiet about this - but you certainly had a lot to say about a mistaken video clip from the President.”
Yes, why does no one have the courage to stand up and say, “I am one of the oppressors this guy is talking about, and this hurts my feelings?”
One of his other retweets on the subject, from The Blaze host and columnist Auron MacIntyre, called for “congressional hearings” into “anti-whiteness.”
Then, Walsh tweeted, “There are a lot of ‘conservative’ Evangelical leaders and commentators who will bravely and somberly stand up against perceived anti-black racism or antisemitism on the Right but have never said one single word in entire their lives about the totally pervasive and mainstream anti-white racism on the Left. Total frauds. All of them.”
Unsurprisingly, Walsh was not the only one with this particular take, though he was the most famous. In the AskTrumpSupporters subreddit, a good place to go if you want to pull your hair out, a good number of MAGA devotees shared his sentiments.
“He made what could be considered a racist joke about a couple who exorcised [sic] more power then [sic] almost anyone else in human history,” wrote one user. “The equivalent would be if some black republican during reconstruction period had called some notoriously advocate for slavery who served as a senate majority leader before the war ‘a small dick cracker.’ Barack Obama is piece of shit and so is his wife and if anyone on this earth deserves to be made fun of its the people who do the most harm and exorcise (sic) the most power. You dont (sic) get to be immune from mockery just because your (sic) black.”
The point here is not that these people think they are legitimately oppressed. They may very well think that, because they are stupid, but the point is that they want to use this imaginary oppression to make things like what Trump posted socially acceptable, to eliminate DEI programs, and to reinforce a hierarchy with themselves at the top. Matt Walsh has not been shy about this and certainly has not been shy about his desire for “White Anglo-Saxon culture” to dominate in this country.
There is a reason why you will never find anyone who isn’t an actual white supremacist complaining about the terrible mass oppression of white people, and that is because it does not exist.
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The Closest of All (5960 words) by regshoe Chapters: 1/1 Fandom: The Fifth Form at St. Dominic's - Talbot Baines Reed Rating: Teen And Up Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Oliver Greenfield/Horace Wraysford Characters: Stephen Greenfield, Horace Wraysford, Oliver Greenfield Additional Tags: POV Outsider, 5+1 Things, Siblings Summary:
Oliver, Wraysford and Stephen, over months and years.
(Or, five times Stephen was oblivious and one time he wasn't.)
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