"'We could only have one child,'' David said quietly. "We thought about adopting, but we decided in the end to just focus on making Shane the best person we could. I think we did an okay job of it.
Ilya smiled at the understatement.
"We couldn't be prouder of the man he's become,' David continued. "I don't have any Stanley Cup rings, but I have Shane.''
Chapter 39, The Long Game
....
It's Christmas of 1988.
There's one more present under the tree, and Yuna's eyes are dancing as she hands it to David. He opens it to find the tiniest pair of shoes he's ever seen.
"No. Really?" He's dizzy.
"Really," Yuna grins, and her eyes are shining with tears, and David loves that face more than anything. He hopes their baby looks just like her.
.....
It's a bitterly cold day in February of 1989 when David puts the shoes away. He pushes down all the anger of it's not fair, why us, why our baby. Yuna needs him.
The doctor had said you're young, you can try again.
.....
In the spring of 1990 the flowers are blooming to life and Yuna's belly is starting to look rounder. David looks around the empty bedroom in their Ottawa house and thinks green might be nice, something that works for a boy or a girl, a nice cheerful shade. Next week he'll buy the paint.
The call from the hospital comes before he gets the chance. When he looks at the doctor's scrubs he thinks green is the ugliest colour on earth.
.....
They don't talk about it. Not when the leaves are changing colour and the nurse offers them congratulations. Not at Christmas or New Year's as they turn the calendar over to 1991. It's Valentines Day before David gets the courage to touch the rounded swell of his wife's body and he cries when whoever is inside touches him back. It doesn't matter that they don't have a name or a face yet, he loves them so much it hurts.
.....
On a Friday morning in May, David holds his son for the first time. His face is scrunched and blotchy red and angry. He's the most perfect thing anyone has ever laid eyes on.
He watches Yuna sing and rock him near the nursery window at home, her face glowing. He thinks the yellow paint was definitely the right choice for their sunshine, their only sunshine.
.....
Shane is a chubby baby (they laugh themselves sick when the baby shoes don't even fit on his fat little biscuit feet) but by the time he turns two he has leaned out into a little boy, they think maybe they are ready to try again. David imagines a girl this time, introducing Shane to his baby sister. Melissa sounds pretty. The baby name book had said it meant honeybee and doesn't that just fit perfectly amidst sunshine and flowers and springtime?
.....
It never happens.
Shane is an only child at four and five and six and he's becoming something special on the ice, all the coaches say so. David thinks that they have no idea what they're talking about when they say that because Shane Hollander has always been special from the time he kicked and rolled inside his mother, before he ever knew what cold was.
If he's all they get, they will make sure he knows he is everything.
.....
Sometimes David wants to take Shane by the shoulders and apologize to him for making him think he has to be everything. You don't have to try so hard to be perfect for us, he wants to say. You're perfect to us because you're you, you're ours, don't you know how we prayed and hoped and waited just for you to exist, don't you know that's enough?
Much, much later as he waves to him (to them) in late evening sunshine, he sees Shane relax behind the windshield with a loving hand on the back of his neck. David feels something inside of him loosen.
.....
On Shaneâs wedding day, David embraces both his sons and dances with his wife and my god, if this is all he ever gets in life, no man has ever been so lucky.
.....
"Are you ready?" Shane is smiling and his eyes are shiny. Ilya looks much the same.
David is dizzy. But he nods and holds his hands out. Shane places the baby in his arms and oh, she's so tiny. He forgot how tiny they start out.
Her little knit hat is yellow.
"Hey there, honeybee," he murmurs, and his voice is foggy with unshed tears. "I'm your grandpa."
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i tried making a contrapuntal poem for hollanov, which can be read 3 ways: shaneâs side alone, ilyaâs side alone, or both sides together. inspired by the long game.
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I was debating wether or not to post this here but I guess I have to start somewhere âïžđ€š here is my heated rivalry fanart for everyone who enjoyed the show as much asIĂ did
Go to my Instagram to see all my work â€ïž @/roperodibujo
The brilliance of creation goes to @mewsthumbring and kindly tagged by @ae-azile.
*Rules: We all know the gif search on this website/app is a farce. So letâs have a laugh! Pick 5 shows or characters, type them into the gif search bar, and then pick the first gif that comes up in the results.*
Bed Friend
Lol, it was from a "10 Fave QL Leads" post
Thamepo
Yes, we know you want to get fucked through the couch, po
Pluribus
Ok was this actually the first one? No, but it's funny and no one can stop me
Make Some Noise
Crucially, the answer is "it's pride, bitch"
What We Do in the Shadows
4 for 5, other than getting a "this is too mature for little ole grown ass adult you" message for searching"knot"
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i'm going to say something insane. i think the overall pronounced fandom cultural slide away from complex plotty violent work and towards kidfic and coffee shops AUs and cozy domestic romcoms is a symptom of fascism.
Reblogging this for the term "neopastoralism", because I think that's fantastic.
Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.
However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.
The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.
The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.
I've made this observation before, but there's a distinct and strong correlation between "wanting simplistic, saccharine, and morally binary media" and "authoritarianism". It's not a 1 to 1, which is where a lot of people seem to misunderstand things; it's not "If you like fluff, you're a jackbooted authoritarian." Very much not. This is a pattern that grows up out of thousands--hundreds of thousands--of individual interactions, out of culture, out of a shift of perspectives on what is seen as the norm and what is seen as outrageous.
Individual people liking cutesy fluff? Not a problem. Thousands of people insisting that fluff is the only acceptable option and if you dare make them think and consider, you're the problem?
That's a Problem.
It's the shifting of norms in culture, and fandom is not an isolated bubble--it's a representative of larger trends. And the trend right now in our larger culture, especially in America, is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism that has gone past "creeping" and is now "prancing", "dancing", "galloping", or dare I say goosestepping. Of course that's going to have an impact on the cultural scenes, including fandom!
And there's a correlation in societies that want saccharine fluff and their own authoritarianism. I can point to numerous examples--Victorian England with the censored stories for children. The USSR with an entire kitschy style of stories and art. The USA before the rise of Trump with Thomas Kinkaid's art. And that's just scratching the surface.
The main point in bringing this up is to be aware of the trend, not to take it as a personal attack for enjoying fluffy stories.
And I think the way to keep this from pendulum-swinging into âfluffy stories badâ (because we know this does happen with any observation of problematic trendsâsee: feminist critiques of objectification turning into puritanical sex-negativity, critiques of appropriation turning into enforcing cultural âpurityâ, etc) is to shift the focus from the presence of this kind of fiction to the proportional absence of the alternative.
Obviously, the presence is easier to spotâyou can actually see something that is present, but you canât directly see something thatâs absentâso it makes sense that this is the first piece of evidence in building this critique, but the critical thing that makes this an issue is the absence of engagement with challenging works, not actually the engagement with unchallenging ones.
Positive emotions and things that make us feel safe and cared for are as important a part of the human experience as for the negative. And safety-seeking can be as much a response to the rise of fascism to get away from it as an indication of people falling into it. We just canât only have the safe, unchallenging stuff. Because it is that censorship and cutting out of fundamental parts of human experience that feeds into the social conservatism & puritanism of authoritarianism.
And I think the way to keep this from pendulum-swinging into âfluffy stories badâ (because we know this does happen with any observation of problematic trendsâsee: feminist critiques of objectification turning into puritanical sex-negativity, critiques of appropriation turning into enforcing cultural âpurityâ, etc) is to shift the focus from the presence of this kind of fiction to the proportional absence of the alternative.
This whole thread is incredible and you're encouraged to read it all and share it. But if you read nothing else after the opening, let it be the above.
Nothing will ever beat that shot of Ilya heading towards the door to let Shane into his house in Boston. Like:
- Shoulders. Back. Arms. đ«Ș (Yeah this is the horny balloon emoji again for those who can't see.)
- Fixing the hair? Soooo casual. So nonchalant. Doesn't care at all.
- Imagine answering the door shirtless in October and that just being a casual choice you're making with no alterior motive at all. Happened to my best good friend Ilya Rozanov
- The Rick Owens haunt the narrative
- Moles.
- Literally he is serving and for what. Shane walks in the door like "Wattup you know who built this place" and has to be redirected like a distracted dog.
- He is trying to be so cool and casual and nonchalant. He's so chill and cool and nonchalant in fact that he breaks a personal fucking record for how long it takes him to get Shane's legs around him. (42 seconds. I counted.)
- Starting to think that Shane has Doritos at the Cottage because he's being fully sublimated into it by Ilya's shoulder to waist ratio. Like it is that serious.
- He's literally prowling I do not know what else to say. Shane should feel fucking hunted the minute that door opens and all he does is go "Okay đ„°" like he never. Stood. A. Chance.
Ilya making his own challenge to see how quickly he can get Shane's legs around him, knees on the floor, or clothes off after Shane enters a new location. Standard hotel rooms any more, unless they're only noteworthy when designed particularly badly. It's a secondary challenge for Ilya to learn just enough about architecture so that he can book the most challenging places for vacations without learning enough to really understand or care about any of it. Ilya's only regret is that he can not gloat about breaking a record to Shane.
One thing that worries me about the use of AI is whether or not it can worsen people's dementia and alzheimer's in the future. When my grandmother was first diagnosed, we got her math activity books. Now, my grandmother never had a formal education, but we did our best to keep her sharp, get her to do math and writing activity books, sudokus, playing board games that required some level of strategizing with her. Her family is prone to alzheimer's and dementia (both her siblings had it and deteriorated very very very quickly, which yeah, scares the shit out of me being her granddaughter) but she was the one whose mind lasted the longest, she only passed away two years ago, at 88, ten whole years after her initial diagnosis and sure, she had forgotten things, recipes and where she put her glasses and appointments, but she never forgot any of us, ten whole years in, she still remembered us. Now, this may have been luck, but doctors always said the constant mental work + companionship + medicine helped her a lot. So I'm thinking, these people who are now relying on AI for everything, from email-writing to thinking what's for dinner to casual conversations, I've even seen people rely on it to calculate what time they should leave their house if they need to be at a place at a specific time and their commute lasts X number of minutes. As if that's not... the simplest math operation possible? You shouldn't even need a calculator for that!!! Idk I don't know how long it'll take us to see the effects of this + exposure to brain-rotting short form content that is completely meaningless + people addicted to right-wing conspiracy style media. Idk I'm very worried. Please, read, read complicated books! Take up a book on philosophy and try to decipher it and make your own opinions on it, please buy a maths activity book and relearn how to do math, please get a hobby that involves lots of thinking and concentrating. PLEASE!!!
As a neurologist, Iâll give you the pretty name for it: cognitive reserve.
The way I explain it to my patients is that our neurons donât regenerate. They make connections with each other and thatâs it. If you donât use your brain, they make fewer connections and, if one of them dies, youâre gonna miss it, because that was the only one that knew how to do X. Now, if each one of them has many, many connections, you wonât notice the difference when one of them dies. The others pick up the slack.
As of 2024, 45% of dementia risk factors are modifiable. Relevant to this conversation, 5% for less education and 5% for social isolation.
We absolutely are going to see the reflection of this, but itâs gonna take decades and itâll be too late. So, for the love of your brain, pretend that itâs a muscle and make it work. People complain about âwhen am I ever gonna use this maths formula in my life?â Youâre not. Youâre teaching your brain to think logically. Those sinapses will be there for when you need to figure out your weekâs schedule. English classes taught me how to interpret data and how to convey it in this text so itâs clear and you understand what Iâm saying, not because I needed to justify why the curtain is blue.
Make your brain know how to do different things. Logic games, puzzles, taking care of a garden even if small, planning a churchâs event or birthday, learn a new instrument, learn a few words in another language, look at a calendar every day, do some manual labor if possible. Do not, I repeat, do not let your brain get rid of sinapses by letting AI do everything. Your brain uses 20% of your bodyâs energy â do you really think itâs going to maintain connexions that arenât in use?
Most cases of Alzheimerâs are sporadic, meaning no family history. Family history of a first-degree relative with Alzheimerâs starting before they were 80yo increases your risk in 2-3x on average.
TLDR: Yes. From the knowledge we have today, AI will increase the number and severity of dementia cases.
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