#(because i always get to thinking about what Perry's adoption day was like from his perspective which obviously involves...

[woulddieforperrytheplatypus]

How the fuck did Perry's lair come to be? Like OWCA had no freaking idea that the Flynn-Fletchers would be adopting a secret agent until they'd already adopted one, so did they have to somehow build a whole lair and seven million secret entrances while the family was living there? Did they somehow send the family on vacation just to get them out of the house to build the lair? Wouldn't that have raised questions from the neighbors? Or does every house in Danville — and, likewise, every house in every city that OWCA operates from — have a secret agents' lair underneath it? I just have so many questions about the semantics of OWCA like how the actual fuck does this work

[teddyduchampsglasses]

I’m gonna be doing one of these for each of the Dead Poets, so don’t worry. So, the first person I’m gonna be starting with is, of course:

What It Would Be Like Dating Neil Perry

By the way, I tried my best to make this as gender neutral as possible. For example, for the last thing written, it mentions something about children. So if you’re a female, just imagine that you would give birth to the children, and if you’re a male or anything else, just imagine that you would adopt them :)

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Neil would be so horribly nervous to ask you out, he would end up actually having to sheepishly approach you and ask twice because the first time, he would totally fold under presser. He would walk up to you, with all his courage, and as soon as your eyes met, he would stutter out a stupid question that wasn’t even what he originally came to ask. Probably something like “I-I like your shirt, where did you get it?” And it would be like the school uniform or something?

Anyway, his second attempt would be successful, he would not mess up his words or compliment a random piece of your clothing. He would offer for you to go catch a play with him. Obviously. Which you would happily agree to and he would have to clarify like 20 times to make sure he really heard you accept his offer.

And from then on, Neil was possibly the best boyfriend you could ever ask for.

Often, your dates would consist of going to plays, simple study dates or going to a library together. After these said dates, he would love going on night walks, no matter in the snow, rain or heat. If it was snowing, he would give you his jacket and if it was raining, he would hold an umbrella over the two of you, making sure you were more covered then he was. He would always have a little gift for you too, usually it was flowers or one of his sweaters. But either way, he always had a gift to offer.

He’s not too clingy in public, sure, he loves holding your hand and giving you little kisses, but that’s about it. All though, when it’s just you two hanging out, there isn’t a moment that he’s away from you. He’s either always holding you or your hand, or cuddling and playing with your hair.

Studying together is always actually really successful. You both work extremely good together, a fact most teachers don’t want to believe. Hard workers or not, you both are able to bring out the ability to focus and not rush your work in one another. Most of the time, you just study in Neil and Todd’s room but some times, you like to go to a near by coffee shop and quietly work there. Neil usually gets a coffee, you get some sort of pastry and seeing Neil wearing glasses is like the high light of your day.

Neil is a huge fan of seeing you in his sweaters. He doesn’t care if he gives you all of them, he will gladly give them all away to you just to see how happy you get. They always smell amazing, by the way, and the only time he ever takes them back is if his smell is slowly wearing off of it. And that’s just so he can wear them all the time, just to bring the smell back, and then he politely returns them.

It’s rare if he calls you by your actual name, often he just calls you “Darling”. It’s simple, sweet and that’s what makes him love it so much. It kinda makes him feel like you guys are married.

The two of you love sneaking out late at night, after everyone else has gone to sleep, you both grab a blanket and some comfy clothes just to go out and watch the stars together. And that’s one of Neils favorite times to hold you and play with your hair.

Neil would be very nervous to speak up if anything ever upset him. He dosent want to make you feel bad and he feels so horrible when he tells you he’s upset. But the only reason he does speak up is because he always tells you that if somethings upsetting you, that you shouldn’t keep it a secret. So basically, he dosent want to be a hypocrite. And he also thinks that the most mature way to fix things is to talk stuff out in a respectful and orderly fashion.

Something cute Neil always does is, often times, you’ll be extremely exhausted from all the work you do and all the different activities you take part in, so he’ll find you absolutely passed out, sitting at your dorm room desk. And everytime he comes across you like this, he’ll carefully take off your glasses (if you wear any), he’ll put away all your books and homework and wrap a blanket around you. All while trying his best not to wake you.

When your upset, it dosent matter if you’re sick, upset with him or something totally different, he always feels horrible. He’ll try his best to cuddle you, kiss you and show as much affection as possible. The first time you ever got upset with him was actually the first time he admitted that he loved you.

And finally, something he would only do for you, something thats so unlike him, he would stick up to his father for you.

One night, it was your first time meeting his parents, it was actually your idea and Neil couldn’t be more nervous. He kept telling you that he was sure his parents would absolutely be amazed by you but there was always something in his eyes that said other wise. Anyway, it had gone great, he introduced you to his mother and his father. All though you already had a hatred for his father, after everything you had heard about him, you tried to give him a chance. But that didn’t last for long. Half way through dinner, Mr. Perry asked you what you wanted to do with your life, and when you answered him truthfully and honestly, he was not impressed. He kept saying stuff like “well you should just stay at home” or “all you need to worry about is taking care of my sons children” (if that’s what you want to do with your life, I’m not trying to shame you, I just think that’s something Neils dad would say.) And as soon as Mr. Perry’s hurtful words excaped his mouth, Neil stood up and just went off. He yelled at his father about how you could be anything you wanted, that he wasn’t gonna be tying you down or holding you back, that all he wanted was what’s best for you and just to see you happy. You had never seen his father look so mad in his life.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

That took absolutely forever, but anyway, I’m gonna be working on a Todd one next so if you’re a Todd simp, stay tuned :) 

[bohemian-barbie]

Like Father, Like Son

A/N: this was a request from the lovely @terry-perry I’m sorry it’s on the shorter side my dear but I hope you like it!😄

Chris walked up to Brayden’s room and knocked on the door before walking in “hey bud, dinner’s in five”. Brayden looked up from his laptop and rubbed his eyes “‘kay” “Brady, you okay?” He sighed “yeah. I mean I guess. Can I ask you something?”

Chris nodded his head “sure” he walked further in the room and sat on Brayden’s bed “what’s up?” “When you and mom started dating, did she ever have an issue with you traveling? I mean like outside of work; did she ever get upset when you traveled for fun?”

Chris thought for a moment “when your mom and I started dating at that point in my life I had only been traveling for work or on family vacations. Other than that I never left the house but no your mom never really had any issues with that. Why do you ask?”

Brayden threw his head back and groaned “just..’cause. Did you ever feel like mom tried enveloping you? Like adopting your life in anyway?” Chris raised an eyebrow “is Wendy trying to envelop you?” Brayden’s head shot up “no! I mean, what makes you say that?” Chris sighed “why don’t you try telling me what’s really going on Brady?”

Brayden just looked defeated “I don’t know what to do dad. Wendy’s mad at me for traveling so much and then she gets more mad at me when I tell her she can’t come with me because I want to do my own thing. She constantly wants to be up my butt and I love her but I want to do my own thing and I don’t know why she can’t just do her own thing. I like my space and I don’t want to stop traveling because I don’t like being in one place for too long and I’m just confused and frustrated and-“ he finally stopped to take a breath “just exhausted I guess”.

Chris nodded with a look of understanding “wow your mom was right when she said you were exactly like me. Maybe space from Wendy to figure out what you really want wouldn’t be a bad thing”. Brayden rolled his eyes “yeah Wendy suggested we take a break”

Chris stood “Look buddy I can’t tell you what to do but at the end of the day Brady you have to do what’s right for you. You’re only twenty years old. This isn’t the time to make fast and hard decisions, this is the time to make mistakes. Take the wrong train and get stuck somewhere. Fall in love. A lot. This is your time to change your mind and change it again, because nothing's permanent. So make as many mistakes as you can. That way, someday when someone asks what you want, you won't have to guess. You’ll know.”

Brayden nodded his head, processing his fathers words “thanks dad.” Chris walked over and ruffled Brayden’s hair “always buddy. Come downstairs when you’re ready”. With that Chris left and Brayden threw his head back again and stared at the ceiling ‘yeah, he’s got a lot to think about’ he thought.

[anchorandrope]

arguments of those who believe in bbg

“louis would never involve a minor” “he wouldn’t lie to us”

this gives me impotence because clearly they don’t understand that louis and harry didn’t want to have a babygate, why the hell they would want to have one? do you think that one day the two of them got up and said “oh i want to use a woman and a baby to hide my sexuality of course because it's okay to do it and clearly i don't want to come out of the closet”? it’s OBVIOUS that they were forced to do it. besides, following this logic, they lied to us with their beards and used women to cover up their relationship because they wanted to, hahaha you can see that they don’t understand anything about contracts and they use the word “they wouldn’t lie to us” when it suits them.

“the music industry is bad but not that bad”

this is literally a joke, how the hell are you going to consider yourself a larrie and think that “the industry is not that bad”? being larrie you should know perfectly that the music industry is capable of doing what they did to harry and louis and much more, for the music industry it’s never too much. there are thousands of cases where they did the same or worse things but of course, it’s not that bad!

“it’s disrespectful to doubt his paternity” “it’s wrong to think that he is not his son”

this is like ??? i never understood why is “disrespectful” to doubt the paternity of someone like, pulling out the louis case, if i see that a family where everyone has blue eyes and are blond (parents, grandparents, uncles, etc) and a baby is born with brown eyes and brown hair clearly i’m going to think or is adopted or the woman cheated on the man, and it’s not that i’m a disrespectful for realizing that something doesn’t fit, i simply have reasons to think what i think. in the case of louis we doubt his paternity because we have reasons to do so and that doesn’t make us disrespectful?) i will never understand the “disrespectful” behind doubting about something (on any subject).

“freddie is louis’s copy”

this is one is funny because they have the same face hahaha oh.... literally, the kid is photoshopped 😐 the amount of evidence that they photoshop him are countless and it’s not necessary to be an expert in photoshop or genetic to realize it. besides, whenever you say that they photoshop him, they come out with the genetics and clearly they don’t know how it works because i get traits from my parents, i don’t have the same face haha, they are two very different things and yes, there are people who have faces very similar to the one of their parents but it’s not common nor does it occur in all circumstances. to add, not just any blond kid with blue eyes is exacltly like louis :)

“it’s impossible to fake a pregnancy”

false, it is very possible. faking a pregnancy is neither impossible nor difficult (as we can see), there are many cases where it’s suspected that the pregnancy of a celebrity is false (not exclusively due to the issue of closeting but because maybe the woman is infertile and doesn’t want to say it) so it’s very possible haha.

“stop talking about this, what will freddie think when he grows up and see that everyone said that his father was not his father”

the truth is, i would be more concerned about what the minor is going to think when he grows up and sees that his family used him to put in the closet a couple and earn money for that. let’s put it like this: you prefer to believe that the kid is “going to feel bad” because of seen teenagers analyzing their father's life and supporting briana’s family and running the risk that if you are wrong you were supporting people who used a minor to earn money or you prefer not to defend that family and in the case that you were wrong, the worst that will happen is that the kid will “feel bad” for seeing that they said that his father was not his father? in one case you support abusers and in the other you “make the child feel bad”... no possibility is nice but which one do they prefer?

“in that photo you can’t see her belly because of the angle”

wow i just found out that if i take a picture at a certain angle, an 8-month-old belly disappears! tremendous, why dieting if with just one angle i can lose 7 pounds? consistency please.

“briana stole photos of other pregnant women because she had a lot of pressure”

mm how weird that a stranger has so much “pressure” to steal photos right? katy perry is a thousand times more famous than she, therefore she had more pressure and we didn’t see her stealing photos of other pregnant woman😐

“louis hates you”

this one is sad because it makes me sick that people think that louis is capable of hating one of his fans, whatever the thought they has😩 the truth is, i know him well enough to say for sure that he would never hate one of his fans. it’s also funny because a grown man hating teenagers for how they think is quite a failure and clearly louis isn’t a failure nor does he have enough free time to hate us lol.

“get yourself a dad” “you need a dad”

hahahaha this is one of my favorites, not only because it will always be funny that when someone is stupid they blame men for their paternal absence so the fact that they use it as an insult in itself it is funny but it’s even more funny because those of us who don't believe in babygate seem to know what paternal love is because it was very easy for us to realize that louis is not a loving or attentive “father” so it seems to me that those who lack a father are those who believe he is one😬

“deactivate” “weirdo” “kill yourself” “psychopath” etc

i don’t like these ones due to the fact that i find it horrible to insult in that way just for thinking differently, although they make me laugh because the only thing that shows is that they don’t have a single argument to contradict us since if they did they would not resort to insults.

when you send them a masterpost and they reply with “to much text”

this is funny because it’s synonymous of “i know you’re right that’s why i don’t want to read it because if i read it i know i‘m going to think differently and i’m going to look stupid and i don't want to” so when they tell you this is when you're doing it right.

the truth is that the “arguments” that twarries use are practically nil because they never told me other one that isn’t one of these so once again they show that they have no way to justify their timelines.

—————————————————

argumentos de lxs que creen en el bbg

“louis no involucraría a un menor” “el no nos mentiría”

esta da una bronca porque claramente no entienden que louis y harry no querían tener un babygate, como mierda van a querer tener uno? que se piensan que un dia los dos se levantaron y dijeron “uy que ganas de usar a una mujer y a un bebe para ocultar mi sexualidad claro porque esta re bien hacerlo y claramente yo no quiero salir de closet”?? es OBVIO que los obligaron a hacerlo. aparte siguiendo esta lógica ellos nos mientieron con las barbas y usaron mujeres para tapar su relación porque querían jajaja se nota que no entiende nada de contratos y usan el “no nos mentirían” cuando les conviene.

“la industria de la musica es mala pero tampoco tanto”

esta es un chiste literalmente, como mierda te vas considerar larrie y pensar que “la industria no es tan mala”?? siendo larrie deberías conocer a la perfección que la industria de la musica es capaz de hacer lo que le hizo a harry y a louis y mucho mas, para la industria de la musica nunca es demasiado. hay miles de casos donde hicieron cosas igual o peores pero claro, no es mala!!

“es irrespetuoso dudar de su paternidad” “esta mal pensar que no es su hijo”

esta es como ??? nunca entendí lo “irrespetuoso” de dudar de la paternidad de alguien tipo, sacando el caso de louis, si yo veo que una famila donde todos tienen ojos azules y son rubios (padres, abuelos, tios, etc) y sale un bebe con ojos y pelo marrón claramente voy a pensar o es adoptado o la mujer cuerneó al tipo y no es que soy una irrespetuosa de mierda por darme cuenta que algo no encaja, simplemente tengo razones para pensar lo que pienso. en el caso de louis nosotrxs dudamos de su paternidad porque tenemos razones para hacerlo y eso no nos hace unas irrespetuosas de mierda?) nunca voy a enteder lo “irrespetuoso” detras de dudar sobre algo (sobre ningun tema).

“freddie es la copia de louis”

esta da risa porque tienen la misma cara jajaj oh.... literalmente, al pibe lo photoshopean 😐 la cantidad de pruebas de que lo photoshopean son incontables y no es necesario ser un experto del photoshop ni de genetica para darse cuenta. aparte, siempre que decis que lo photoshopean salen con la genética y claramente no saben como funciona porque yo saco rasgos de mis padres, no tengo la misma cara jajja son dos cosas muuy distintas y si, si hay gente que tiene la cara muy parecida a la de sus padres pero no es comun ni se da en todas las circunstancias. para agregar, no cualquier pibe rubio de ojos celestes es igual a louis :)

“es imposible fingir un embarazo”

falso, es muy posible. fingir un embarazo no es ni imposible ni difícil (como podemos ver), hay muchos casos donde se sospecha que el embarazon de una celebridad es falso (no exclusivamente por el tema de closeting sino de que por ahi la mujer es infertil y no lo quiere decir) asi que muy posible es jaja.

“dejen de hablar de esto, que va a pensar freddie cuando sea grande y vea que todos decían que su papá no era su papá”

la verdad yo me preocuparía mas en que va a pensar el nene cuando crezca y vea que su familia lo usó para enclosetar una pareja y ganar plata por eso😳 vamos a ponerlo asi: prefieren creer que el nene se “va a poner mal” porque vea a unxs adolescentes analizando la vida de su papá y apoyar a la familia de briana y correr el riesgo de que si estas mal estuviste apoyando a personas que usaron un menor para ganar plata o preferís no defender a esa familia y en el caso de que estes mal lo peor que va a pasar es que el nene se “ponga mal” por ver que decían que su papá no era su papá? en un caso apoyas a abuzadores y en el otro “haces sentir mal” al menor... ningúna posibilidad es linda pero cual prefieren?

“en esa foto no se le ve la panza por el ángulo”

wow me acabo de enterar que si me saco una foto en cierto angulo se me va a una panza de 8 meses! tremendo, para que hacer dieta si con solo un ángulo ya puedo bajar 7 kilos? coherencia por favor.

“briana robó fotos de otras embarazadas porque tenía mucha presión”

mm que raro que una desconocida tenga tanta “presión” como para robar fotos no? katy perry es mil veces mas famosa que ella por ende tenía mas presión y no la vimos robando fotos de embarazadas 😐

“louis te odia”

esta es triste porque me da pena que haya gente que piense que louis es capaz de odiar a una de sus fans sea el pensamiento que tenga😩 la verdad lo conozco lo suficiente como para decir segura que el jamas odiaría a una de sus fans. también es gracioso porque que un hombre adulto este odiando adolescentes por como piensan es bastante fracasado y claramente louis no es fracasado ni esta tan al pedo como para odiarnos lol.

“conseguite un papá” “te falta un papá”

jajajajaj esta es una de mis favoritas, no solo porque siempre va a ser gracioso que cuando alguien es boludo culpen a los hombres por su ausencia paterna asi que lo usen como insulto ya de por si es gracioso pero es aún mas gracioso porque se ve que las que no creemos en el babygate sabemos lo que es el amor paterno porque se nos dio muy facil darnos cuenta que louis no es un “padre” amoroso ni atento asi que me parece que a las que les falta un padre es a las que creen que lo es😬

“desactiva” “down” “mogólica” “inválida” “matate” “droppealo” etc

estos no me gustan por el hecho de que me parece horrible insultar de esa manera solo por pensar distinto, aunque me dan risa porque lo único que demuestra es que no tienen un solo argumento para contradecirmos ya que si los tuvieran no recurririan a los insultos.

cuando les mandas un masterpost y te ponen “mucho texto”

esta es graciosa porque es sinonimo de “se que tenes razon por eso no lo quiero leer porque si lo leo se que voy a pensar distinto y voy a quedar como una estupida y no quiero” asi que cuando te dicen eso es que estas haciendo las cosas bien.

la verdad los “argumentos” que usan las twarries son prácticamente nulos porque nunca me dijieron uno que no sea uno de estos asi que una vez mas demuestran que no tienen manera de justificar sus timelines.

[rllymilerlly]

...you already know who I want to ask for😂

Yes of course I do lmaooooo

For those who don’t know: Phineas and Isabella

GENERAL

Rate the Ship -  

Awful | Ew | No pics pls | I’m not comfortable | Alright | I like it! | Got Pics? | Let’s do it! | Why is this not getting more attention?! | The OTP to rule all other OTPs

How long will they last? - forever obviously

How quickly did/will they fall in love? - As we know they liked each other for a very long time and then got together right before they went to college. But I think it wouldn’t be until the 2nd semester of their first year of college that they drop the L word (maybe during their first summer together as a couple). They definitely love each other longer than that (they’ve always loved each other in some sort of way) but I always think they’d take their time with everything because “we have forever”

How was their first kiss? - The first kiss they had that they remembered was amazing and sweet

WEDDING

Who proposed? - I go back and forth on one hand I wanna say it was for sure Phineas, but I could also see Isabella doing it too

Who is the best man/men? - Ferb was Phineas’s best man obviously. With Buford and Baljeet being groomsmen. And of course Perry is the ring bearer

Who is the braid’s maid(s)? - the fireside girls were Isabellas bridesmaids and Gretchen was her he maid of honor. (I also think Candace would be a bridesmaid).

Who did the most planning? - They both equally planned, but it was Candace who planned it the most.

Who stressed the most? - You’d think it’d be Isabella, but shes actually really calm throughout the planning process. Phineas on the other hand is a bumble of nerves because everything has to be perfect for Isabella in his eyes. (Even tho to Isa marrying Phineas is already more than enough for her)

How fancy was the ceremony? - They had the biggest craziest wedding outta all their friends. But that was mostly the reception part. The actual ceremony itself was very private and intimate with only their family and closest friends. Though it did have its own Phineas Flynn flare to it still.

CHILDREN

How many children will they have naturally? - I think they’d have 1 or 2 kids, but they’d be the last of their friend group to have kids.

How many children will they adopt? - they don’t adopt any kids but they do rescue a lot of animals.

Who gets stuck with the most diapers? - Phineas does and he definitely tries to build a contraption to easily change diapers.

Who is the stricter parent? - Isabella is because Phineas has no self control and will cave with anything

Who stops the kid(s) from doing dangerous stunts after school? - Isabella because like I said before Phineas has no self control. And is probably the one encouraging the “dangerous” stunt.

Who remembers to pack the lunch(es)? - Phineas does!

Who is the more loved parent? - they are equally loved

Who is more likely to attend the PTA meetings?- They both probably would. I think they would be really into the community.

Who cried the most at graduation? - They both were crying but Isabella definitely cried longer

Who is more likely to bail the child(ren) out of trouble with the law? - Isabella

COOKING

Who does the most cooking? - Phineas does because I like to think he gets it from his momma

Who is the most picky in their food choice? - Neither are particularly picky but if anyone it’d be Phineas

Who does the grocery shopping? - They go together! And they turn it into a game usually

How often do they bake desserts? - Practically daily just like Phineas’s mom does.

Are they more of a meat lover or a salad eater? - They love meat but they also love a good salad too

Who is more likely to surprise the other(s) with an anniversary dinner? - Phineas would on occasion because he knows Isabella would rather do something small and sweet than big and extravagant. (And on the other hand Isabella had also made big giant creations with the help of Ferb for Phineas)

Who is more likely to suggest going out? - They both love going out, they’re very social butterflies

Who is more likely to burn the house down accidently while cooking? - Phineas because he tried to use some fancy contraption

CHORES

Who cleans the room? - They both do their fair share

Who is really against chores? - Neither are, they make it into a giant game

Who cleans up after the pets? - Phineas cleans up after Perry most of the time.

Who is more likely to sweep everything under the rug? - Probably their kid(s)

Who stresses the most when guests are coming over? - Neither do. They are both really big social butterflies and know how to entertain. Though Isabella might get a little stressed here and there if there’s someone really important.

Who found a dollar between the couch cushions while cleaning? - Phineas probably, I just see him having that kind of luck.

MISC

Who takes the longer showers/baths? - Isabella has a nice long nightly routine.

Who takes the dog out for a walk? - They both take Perry on daily walks towards the evening and talk about their days.

How often do they decorate the room/house for the holidays? - they go big with decor every holiday, no matter how small.

What are their goals for the relationship? - to spend the rest of their lives together.

Who is most likely to sleep till noon? - Isabella if either of them. But that’s very very rare.

Who plays the most pranks? - Isabella does and it’s more of things that make Phineas laugh than actual pranks

[cupiiid]

//March 27th 1967//

Chris heard the door close from her place on the floor. "Babe, I'm home!" Ginny's cheery voice bounced from the doorway. She heard the clatter of keys and the dropping of a bag. it all she could think about was how much of a disaster her day had been. First, she'd been late to the office because her train had been late, then she realised she'd forgotten her lunch and finally, the asshole higher-ups had humiliated her again because she was a woman. If was bullshit! She was better than half the fuckers there.

"Honey?" Chris was snapped out of her thoughts by the sound of her lover's voice searching for her.

"'M in here, Gin," she whined from the floor of their living room. Before she knew it, Ginny was standing over her, a confused look on her face, tilting he'd head in that adorable way she did that made her look a lot like a puppy, a habit she'd adopted from Neil.

"What're you doing down there, love?" Chris groaned again and put her hands over her eyes. She felt Ginny sit down next to her and pull her head into her lap, gently stroking her hair.

"Rough day?" She asked gently. Chris nodded, not removing her hands from her face. "D'you wanna talk about it." Chris sighed.

"It's just been a bunch of shit honestly." She removed her hands to get a look at Ginny, resting them on her stomach instead. She saw her lover's face harden.

"Is it those squares from the office again? If they've messed with you again, I'll kill them myself." Chris huffed a laugh at her lover's antics.

"It's just the normal stuff, no need to get involved." Ginny gave an irritated sigh.

"It's not fine, Chris. They're treating you like shit for no reason. Your writing is incredible! Why does it matter that you're a woman?" Chris smiled up at her, the other woman didn't notice, too caught up in her antics. "It's such bullshit! Do you think Todd would have to go through shit like that? No. You've worked just as hard as he has and and people still don't take you seriously." Chris hummed and traced Ginny's lips with her fingers.

"Todd still has to deal with a lot of shit. Being a woman just isn't one of them." Ginny frowned.

"Yeah, that's true. Still sucks though. I hate having to watch people belittle you. You're the most amazing person I've ever met." Chris grinned and sat up, facing her lover. She took the brunette's face in her hands.

"Look, it sucks. I'm not going to tell you it doesn't. Everyday, I wish it wasn't like this and that I'd be respected by everyone but that's just the way it is." Ginny was about to cut in but she didn't let her. "But, that doesn't mean I'm going to stop fighting. I've earned my place here. Plus, I have you and Todd and Neil and Charlie and while I'd love outside approval, the only real approval I need is you guys'." Ginny's hands came up and over her own, smiling proudly.

"I love you. I love you so much." Chris leaned forward and met her in a dizzying kiss, trying to communicate the pure love and adoration she had for the woman in front of her.

"I love you too." She whispered into her lips. "I love you more than anything." Ginny's lips traveled down her throat and for a while, she didn't think of work (or anything other than Ginny for that matter) at all.

Some while later, the two of them sat of the couch together, watching the Andy Griffith Show. It was a nice evening, it was sprinkling lightly outside and the cool weather made Chris feel better. Around five thirty, Ginny checked her watch.

"Shit," she muttered. Chris pressed a kiss to her jaw.

"What's wrong, love?"

"Todd's out late tonight, meeting with someone about his book or something and I don't think he left Neil anything to eat." Chris snickered. Neil, as lovely as he was, couldn't cook for shit. If they left him to his own devices, he'd end up with burnt mac and cheese and half the kitchen blacked with soot.

"Should we invite him over for dinner then?" Ginny looked at her.

"Are you sure? We can just relax with the two of us if you're not up to it."

"Have him over, he is your husband after all." Ginny huffed before speaking.

"You know that's only a technicality, Noel!" She said before playfully hitting Chris on the shoulder as she laughed. Once their laughter died down, Ginny pressed her lips go Chris' in a silent thank you.

It was true. Earlier that year, all four of them had a wedding ceremony. First, a hurried one at a cheap chapel where Neil and Ginny exchanged vows (trying their hardest to make the other laugh) before Chris and Todd did the same thing (also making up total bullshit). Then, after that trainwreck, once they were legally married to avoid suspicion, the four met their friends in Chris and Ginny's living room for a real (and very much illegal) wedding.

Neil and Todd went first, Charlie as Neil's best man and Jeff as Todd's while Knox 'officiated' the rest of them crowded around in the way too small room and cheered once they kissed at the end.

Ginny and Chris were second. It's still the happiest day of her life. Even though she's legally married to Todd, the look on Ginny's face when she read her vows and the hollering and champagne and cake made everything worth it. Cameron was her own best man, Charlie's partner, Alex, being Ginny's (those two had made fast friends and they were overjoyed to be Ginny's best person)

They were luckier than most. They had managed to find a house for people like them in New York, two buildings connected by a basement door. Chris and Ginny lived in one with Neil and Todd in the other, creating an allusion of two straight couples living next to each other instead of the truth, one person from each household being able to switch quickly if necessary. She wouldn't give up this little life if hers for the world.

Chris got up to start making the pasta as Ginny ran to go fetch Neil. As the water was boiling, the two brunette's trailed into the kitchen, Neil carrying a bottle. He smiled brightly when he saw her.

"Chris! Thank you for having me over." He pressed a kiss to her cheek before passing the bottle to Ginny and leaning against their dining table. "I brought some wine as a way to thank you." He smiled his classic Neil Perry grin as Ginny examined the label.

"Neil," she snorted, reading the label. "this is grape juice." Chris burst out laughing as Neil hurried over and took the bottle from Ginny.

"No, no, I could've sworn this was wine." The two women laughed at Neil's fumbling.

"Jesus Perry, you get one role without me and you become a mess!" It was true, for one of the first times in their careers, Neil had gotten a rather large role without her. Shortly after, Ginny had managed to snag an equally impressive part in another show but it still felt weird not seeing them together.

Neil grinned and rolled his eyes. "Well, it'll have to do."

Neil sat at the dining table as they worked on the spaghetti, not trusting him to help after what happened last time. Once the dish was done, the three of them migrated to the living room with their plates and glasses of grape juice.

They squished on the couch that was really only made for two (there was another couch plus a couple of arm chairs but that couch had the best view of the television and none of them were going to give that up) and watched some sappy soap opera that was playing while laughing at the characters and talking about their days.

"...and then Lizzie stepped on my toes again!" The girls wheezed, almost falling off the couch in the process. "It's not funny! This is the seventh time it's happened!" Ginny wiped tears from her eyes.

"Like you didn't do that when I taught you how to dance, you hypocrite!" Neil waved his hand around wildly.

"Yeah- when I was seventeen!" The hysterics dies down after a while and they all sat in a comfortable silence.

"Do you remember when I taught you to dance so you could impress Todd at the Welton-Henley dance in highschool? The one Chris snuck into." Neil nodded along knowingly. Chris looked at them shocked.

"That's what you two were up to?" She asked. Neil nodded.

"Yep. And if didn't even work." He sighed. Chris looked at him indignantly.

"Are you kidding?!? You should have seen him, he was all over you when you danced with Ginny. We couldn't stop looking at you two all night." Neil blushed before realising her words.

"Wait- we? You were looking at Gin?" Now it was Chris' turn to flush as she felt Ginny's eyes on her.

"Well... yeah. That's what got Todd and I bonding in the first place. Both of our pining for two hopeless theatre kids." She was met with two sharp 'hey!'s.

After Neil had left, they got into their bed and Ginny circled her arms around Chris' waist, resting her head on the nape of her neck. Chris hummed in content. "Was what you said earlier true? About watching me that dance?" Chris laughed and placed her hands on top of Ginny's.

"Of course. I couldn't take my eyes off you. I drank so much spiked punch just to get away from the feeling really." She felt a soft press of lips to her neck.

"I love you, Chris. I love you so much I don't even know how to describe it." Chris turned in her arms to face her lover.

"You're such a sap." She said lightly, tracing her face with her fingers. Ginny closed her eyes and reveled in the feeling. "I love you too. So much." A smile tugged on the brunette's lips.

Chris' life wasn't perfect by any means. She was living as a lesbian with a secret lover in 1967 and trying to make her way as a journalist in a male dominated industry while misogyny ran rampant without consequence. It would always be hard, at least to a degree, but right here, in bed with the person she loved more than anything in this world, all was good.

[thedragonemperess]

Monoschmirtz Headcanons

Because why not?

This started some time after Doof left the academy

When Charlene joins Heinz’s life, they break up, because he didn’t know who to choose and their relationship was a secret to begin with

After they divorce, they cross paths again and try to give it another try

But continue to keep their relationship a secret since they’re on opposite side of the law 

(And life in a way)

There have been many close calls with other employees and agents

Carl knows because Double M talked about him a lot, and Doof wouldn’t stop pestering him about meeting him

After meeting, Carl almost had a heart attack

But he has since adopted Doctor D as a second father and vice versa

Vanessa met Francis shortly afterwards

And took a real liking to him, basically adopting him as a second father

(They each get jealous of the other for how much their respective kid likes the other from time to time)

They’re just one big dysfunctional family

Perry finds out eventually due to observations he’s made while kicking Doctor D’s butt

And pretends not to know because he doesn’t want them to panic

There’s constant bickering between them, but it’s always in a playful manner

“That’s because he’s not officially an employee” “You don’t pay him?” “He gets college credit” “Are you sure you’re not the villain?”

Doof is well aware of Francis using his inventions against him and other scientists, but doesn’t care, because it’s just business

And he loves him

While Double M is well aware that he is actually really smart, and honestly feels bad about always wrecking his plans

But he’s always assured it’s okay and that makes the rest/next day of work a little bit easier for him

They learn a lot about the other through the other’s kid

“I like men with titles” “You know he doesn’t have a doctorate, right? “What?!” “It’s fake” “Are you serious?!” “He bought the certificate for $15″

“.........I’m sure he wouldn’t do this” “He probably would” “He’s not that petty” “He decided that it was a good idea to wear two eye patches because O.W.C.A. had to team up with S.H.I.E.L.D. and Nick Fury intimidated him” “That’s.....actually really funny”

Eventually Perry lets Doof know that he knows about their relationship, and he kinda joins the family as well

They’re just a cute gay couple that despite their differences, love each other deeply and take care of their kids and platypus together because that’s all both of them really want

Whaddo you think?

@ginnyweatherby

[woulddieforperrytheplatypus]

Phineas's line "imagine how much fun we can have together now that we know you're a secret agent" makes me wonder what the show would be like if everyone knew about Perry's identity from the start and how different it would be... maybe it would be like Kim Possible...

I will admit that I don't think I've seen Kim Possible since I was, like, seven (?) so I don't really remember anything about it, but this idea is giving me Thoughts™ and I would like to yell about them to the void so here we go!

First of all, Linda still has absolutely no idea. When Carl told them at the animal shelter, Linda didn't hear a word he said because she was too busy looking for a pen to sign the adoption papers. The only one who knows she doesn't know is Perry, and he doesn't try to hide it on purpose but it just so happens that he's always in pet mode when she's around.

Second, Perry is definitely still a pet platypus. He will still walk around on all fours or take naps curled up in a little sunny spot by the window. I firmly believe that he wasn't faking being a pet in the show, and he wouldn't stop just because almost everyone knows.

But because everyone knows that he's a secret agent, he can play games with the kids. He doesn't know a damn thing about inventing, but he can follow a blueprint pretty well (I'm making this assumption entirely from him fixing the dull-and-boring-inator from Phineas and Ferb Interrupted) and he's always willing to help the boys out when he's around (mostly because he doesn't want them to get hurt and he's the closest thing to adult supervision they have).

Headcanon that Perry rarely gets to see the finished products. He'll excuse himself halfway through the day, and Phineas is always like "Aw, we'll miss you! Stay safe! We can ________ with you when you get back!" and then the invention disappears every single time right before Perry gets home. All the kids pick up on this pattern but it never occurs to them that the same thing is going to happen the next day and they're always equally as surprised when the invention disappears.

Question time for anyone with ideas: Does Perry know that he's the reason the inventions disappear every day? And if so, does he do it on purpose? Why? Or does he try to avoid hitting the inventions and just fails miserably every time? Or does it just not even occur to him that he's the reason the inventions always disappear?

And then when Perry comes home the kids always feel bad that Perry missed their invention for the day, so they take an hour or two to do something more laid-back with him (after snacks, of course). Sometimes they play video games or Skiddleywhiffers or Monopoly (and Buford is always very upset when he plays Monopoly with him and he's always so damn good. Why is a platypus good at Monopoly? Platypuses don't even spend money!), and Perry is very content to just hang out with his kids :,)

[theyscreamjade]

His Promise

Izuku MidoriyaXReader

I wrote this in a matter of a few minutes after listening to a song that made me almost cry. After losing a few family memeber’s recenently, It’s been pretty hard. This one is shorter than what I usually write but I like it. 

Disclaimer: Death, Angst. 

-------------------------------

‘Perhaps the mourners learn to look to the blue sky by day, and to the stars by night, and to think that the dead are there, and not in graves’ - Charles Dickens

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

You stared into his eyes, the future husband you were going to marry. The one to replace the one you once loved with all your heart. You tried to smile but..you couldn’t deny your feelings anymore.

“Do you take him to be your lawfully wedding husband, To have and to hold, Cherish in sickness and in health, until death do you part?” The priest asked you as you stared at your groom. The day was gloomy, dark, rainy and so depressing. Your mind screamed yes while your heart screeched no. The grip you had on your flowers became tight as that feeling you thought had with your boyfriend was never true.

“No...I-I can’t.” You said, dropping the flowers at his feet. Your feet rushed towards the double doors of the church. “Y/N! Y/N! Wait!” He screamed behind you before you ran away. Your shoes clicked against the wet sidewalk while your heart raced.

Your mind was set to go to where he was, you needed to see him. You needed to tell him just how much you loved him. He’s your everything. Your feet lead you through the cherry blossom trees where you two first met after graduating from U.A. His adorable face forming a smile as he shyly introduced himself to you, blushing softly.

You leaned against the corner of a street, panting as tears started to stream out. Rows of umbrellas passed you as the mission you had on your head burned in your mind. Your heart burned to see him through you were exhausted. You took a minute to scan where you were before running off again.

You passed by a house, the very first home you two brought after a year of dating. He preferred homes due to the fact he lived in an apartment for nearly all his life and how he wanted to be close to headquarters just in case they needed him.

You remember seeing him get dressed, the scars that covered his body yet he always had a smile on his face.

“Why do you do it?! Why do you risk your life like this?!” You screamed as the memory fogged your head.

“I do what I have to as the number one hero, I always wanted to be just like him!” He screamed back.

“YOU’LL END UP LIKE HIM! L-L-Like all of them!” You cried back, taking him back as he stared in shock at your words. You, of course knew about one for all and about the people who received it before. You knew about their fates.

“I-I don’t want you to leave me Izuku...I-I don’t know if I could ever go on without you.” You confessed as he wrapped his arms around your body, pulling you into a tight hug.

“I’m sorry...I’ll be more careful. I promise I’ll never leave you.” He replied as your feet came to a holt at an entrance.

Tears began to stream down your cheeks as your breathing became more difficult to see him. “You promised!” You screamed in agony, dropping to your knees in front of the tombstone. Presents and gifts surrounded it as fans scattered thank you’s for his services.

“You promised you wouldn’t leave me! YOU SAID YOU WOULDN’T!!” You screamed while sobbing, hugging yourself.

The hard raining began to cease as felt a soft grip on your shoulder. Your eyes snapped open, looking at the tombstone as sunshine started to peek from the clouds. The wind blew softly, dropping a cherry blossom on your lap, making you smile through your tears.

“Excuse me?..” a voice asked, making you break focus with Deku. A small child who looked extremely similar to Deku looked at you. He smelled terrible, dirt-covered his body as he looked at you. “Are you okay?” He asked as you chuckled in astonishment. This poor child was asking you if you were okay even though he looked god awful. You noticed the makeshift fabric Deku doll in his hand before you smiled.

“I’m okay...I’m just fine.” You said before you hesitated at the question. “Where're your parents, kid?” You asked as he shrugged. “They left and never came back..” he explained bluntly while you crooked your head. “Well...Are you hungry?” You asked as his eyes lit up, showing how green they were which made your heart mend a bit. You slowly grab his hand, leading him away from the graveyard to your new destiny.

Through the glow of the sunlight, Izuku leaned against his tombstone, watching you with a soft smile on his cheeks while holding that very cherry blossom in his hands.

He couldn’t help but smile at what he was seeing. The one thing he couldn’t do while he was alive but dreamt to see one day. Just to see you two made him smile. It seemed as if destiny was on your side because you ended up adopting the child who you named ‘Deku’ after your love.

Deku, who was actually four at the time he was adopted and left under your care admired his fallen father/hero whom he could’ve had. In memory of him, Deku suggested for a wind chime which he’d respond to everytime it rung in the wind.

Deku became the motivation you need to keep going and to keep pushing even though Izuku wasn’t physically alive , but he still lingered

In the heart of little Deku.

[hcrnimoore]

task 001. who do you love?

for @embersrpg

at first it was only juli on this list, but then it grew and grew and i came to the conclusion that despite perri’s cold exterior (and her own perception of herself as someone unfeeling and incapable of caring), she cares quite a bit more than she likes to admit or to let on. unfortunately this probably means i’ve set her up for a lot of weaknesses haha whoops.

so without further ado: juli blueshade / flax gallocreek / zizania wheatfall / sandor hornimoore

part i. juli blueshade

beloved son.

Perri never sleeps well during Games season.

She never really sleeps well in general, but the restless nights are bad when she’s training tributes, worse since she started taking care of Juli. The nightmares are always the same — their faces morphing into one another's before they become Juli’s, staring up at her with pleading eyes. She must have witnessed him killed for over a hundred times now, like some sick game of spin-the-wheel where he gets to experience every death that her tributes died, every death she could not prevent, every death on her hands.

She wakes with a splitting headache.

The hologram screen in her room springs to life. “Good morning, mama,” Juli’s beaming face fills her vision, and immediately Perri’s heart floods with relief, racing heartbeat slowly calming. Still alive. It had only just been recently that Juli started calling her that. (Before that, she'd been too scared, too unqualified to allow him to call her that. It was always 'Auntie' instead.)

“Good morning,” she greets back, rubbing sleep out of her eyes. If she wasn’t staying at the Training Centre, she would have given him his usual morning hug. “Are you ready to go to school?”

At the question Juli scowls. “Nooooo,” he whines, giving Perri his best pout. He should have grown out of this petulance by now, but Perri is biased — it's endearing still. “I don’t like school. But I made you breakfast!” At this he holds out a bowl of cereal and milk. “See?”

Gods above, Perri loves him, but the small hints of rebellion he’s been displaying lately ages her ten years every time they happen. It’s cute, sure, but if this keeps up as he gets older she knows she can’t keep him safe. Not since she mostly retreated from the social scene at the Capitol to raise him. “That’s so sweet of you,” she smiles, keeping her fears to herself for the time being. Maybe when he was older she would tell him. “I’ll eat your breakfast, and you get dressed for school, alright?”

Juli nods eagerly. “Promise!” he holds up a pinky finger.

“Promise,” Perri echoes back, holding up a pinky finger of her own before his hologram flickers shut.

Back to another day of training.

part ii. flax gallocreek

fellow district 9 mentor.

Perri often wonders if Flax made the better choice.

Flax is a man of few attachments. He returned from his Games bitter (as one should be), keeping a sort of disdainful distance from his family ever since. Perhaps that was what people would call a smart decision. By pushing his family away, Flax keeps them safe. Doesn't marry the man he's always been sweet on, even though he'd promised to be together if Flax makes it back alive. Perri suspects some of it has to do with the fact that Flax had returned from the Games with a temper that he detests, a side of him that he doesn't want to show people he genuinely cares about.

In the end, Flax is probably right. They worked together as mentors, bonded over an unspoken shared weight of being responsible for so many deaths. They'd shared a bed before, once or twice, when Perri was still going through her destructively cynical phase, but they quickly figured out that it was more like pressing down on an open wound than any sort of healing. Flax's kindness has always been brutal; he'd broken things off by telling Perri that seeing her just reminded him of the dead.

Still, it's strange thing. Attachments. Perri had always thought of herself as cold and stand-offish, but recent revelations had shown her that she did have the capacity to care for others, after all. Flax might have been opposed to her caring about him, but she did, in some strange way of hers.

She hopes he doesn't mind.

part iii. zizania wheatfall

fellow district 9 victor; not a mentor.

Zizania is always the earliest to wake in the house. It's difficult to call it 'early', considering she has never slept well ever since she returned from the Games and it was more likely that she hadn't slept at all in the first place. She has a house of her own, but whenever Perri (and often Juli in tow) return to District 9 on the weekends, she stays over at their residence instead, citing the silent loneliness of living on her own.

Which is why Perri is up at five in the morning making pancakes.

There's a resilience in Zizania that Perri almost envies. That's why she's so determined to protect her from the duties of being a mentor for just a bit longer, why Perri treats her like a little sister more than a fellow victor. She’s happy to bear the burden of it all if it means that Zizania can have some semblance of normalcy for just a bit longer.

Footsteps from the stairs signals Zizania's arrival, and Perri turns to greet her. 'You shouldn't have,' Zizania gestures. 'I'm the guest.'

"And I'm the host," she replies, pushing a pancake off onto another plate with a spatula. The pancake-making had ulterior motives (Perri couldn’t sleep at all) but she wasn’t about to admit it "Zi. It's the least I can do for you for watching Juli while I'm gone."

Zizania shoots her a disgruntled look, but it comes off as warmer than she probably intended. 'Thank you.' In a motion of practiced ease, Perri slides the plate across the countertop while Zizania pulls out a set of cutlery from a drawer. She’s been over so many times that she knows where everything is, and Perri’s almost tempted to tell her to move in entirely. 'It smells lovely, as always.'

She smiles. "It's the only thing I know how to cook, after all."

part iii. sandor hornimoore

adoptive sibling.

"I suppose it would be strange to tell you happy birthday."

Perri pauses mid-step. She left for the Games and came back with a kill count and a bad habit of pacing and scratching the back of her wrist when she's nervous.  "Oh," she answers at last. Her voice comes out suspiciously light, though mostly because she's still too numb to feel anything. She has a big house now, in Victors' Village. It's also move-in day, and it's her birthday. "It is."

Sandor looks at her a bit funny, and she doesn't meet their gaze. Perri knows it'll be there, that strange mixture of sympathy and cautiousness. She doesn't want to see it, not from them.

"Well, happy birthday." They barrel on anyway. She supposes it's one thing she's always liked about them: their unfailing honesty. Having grown up together as siblings-but-not-quite, with the adults at the Children's Home more or less hands-off when it came to the children's upbringings, the older ones were in charge of imparting the unkindness of the world on the younger ones. It's why she chose Sandor to come to her new house with her, so it wouldn't be so lonely. "I got you a gift. Besides moving into your house, that is."

That did the trick — a bickering exchange so familiar she couldn't help but retort. "You are so stingy," she answers automatically. "Your generosity is noted."

Sandor snorts. "Hey, someone has to keep your ego in check. I thought fourteen year olds were supposed to be mature."

"I didn't think I would get to turn fourteen." All the wind rushes out of her as soon as she says so, and Perri doesn't breathe in the ensuing silence.

But finally Sandor makes the first move. "Here it is." They toss a tightly wrapped package at her, and she catches it on reflex. "Don't open it until I've left the room."

Still smarting from the exchange, Perri can only nod in appreciation.

(Later, she opens it in her obnoxiously large and empty bedroom to reveal a hand-carved whistle. Carefully, preciously, she wraps it back up and places it into the drawer of her bedside table. She doesn't think she can bear to use it.)

[tabloidtoc]

National Enquirer, November 9

You can buy a copy of this issue for your very own at my eBay store: https://www.ebay.com/str/bradentonbooks

Cover: Duchess Kate sets the record straight on Prince Harry and Meghan Markle 

Page 2: Ben Affleck is wasting away and friends fear he’s taking his new health regimen too far as the six-foot-four star usually weighs 208 pounds but has shriveled to a spindly 165 -- a nutritionist put him on a sensible meal plan but he’s altered it with his own fantastical ideas such as he won’t go near bread and he’s ditched pasta and he’ll eat cantaloupe and blueberries one day and nuts and seeds the next and he’ll only drink boiled water and green tea for 24 hours then break his fast with a small bowl of quinoa -- instead of pumping iron he does exercises using his own body weight like ten-minute planks -- Ben thinks he looks great but his pals fear he’s traded one addiction for another

Page 3: Love-hungry Katie Holmes is thrilled to have a new man in her life but she’s breaking the bank to keep him happy because Katie is picking up the tab wherever she goes with Emilio Vitolo Jr. because it helps her feel she’s in full control of the relationship but Emilio may be taking advantage of Katie’s generosity because Katie has been showering him with designer clothes and jewelry and even paying for a personal trainer to whip him into shape -- Katie enjoys giving her guy things he can appreciate because he’s made her so happy but she may go broke doing it and it’s not like he doesn’t have any money; he’s worth a cool $1.5 million himself

Page 4: CNN rocked by sex scandal -- Jeffrey Toobin’s sleazy sex scandal has rocked CNN but it’s just the latest in a string of scandals at the network 

Page 5: Axed Fox News anchor Ed Henry fought back against his co-worker’s rape charges in a blockbuster lawsuit by handing the court explicit selfies and texts in an attempt to prove their tryst was consensual 

Page 6: Ryan Seacrest is downplaying his latest shocking absence from Live with Kelly and Ryan but the TV dynamo is battling a mystery illness that may force him to sign off for good -- the co-host who is a well known as a workaholic skipped out on the daytime show for the third time this year and used the coronavirus pandemic as his excuse -- Ryan was suffering badly from flu-like symptoms on the weekend before his absences but came back negative for coronavirus however doctors remain baffled by Ryan’s ongoing battles with exhaustion and weight loss and stroke-like symptoms, disgraced perv Bill Cosby’s latest mug shot shows he’s a shriveled shadow of his former self and the fallen funnyman flashed a maniacal grin while refusing to look into the camera in the picture snapped behind bars in September and he’s unshaven and his hair is ratty

Page 7: Lizzo has embarked on a radical vegan diet and extreme exercise program to save her life -- doctor warned the 350-pound singer that her daily intake of 5000 calories a day was a dangerous path to self-destruction and she needed to change her life or lose it and Lizzo finally got the message and is committed to this program but it’s been a living hell for her 

Page 8: After surviving a fiery crash at the Daytona 500 NASCAR hero Ryan Newman is locked in an ugly $50 million divorce showdown with his estranged wife -- Ryan and Kristina Newman split in 2019 after she was caught having an affair with another man and paying her love $450,000 and now Ryan’s lawyers are trying to freeze Kristina who was once referred to as the First Lady of NASCAR out of his fortune -- court papers reveal the two split in July 2019 when Kristina went to live with her boyfriend U.S. Army Captain Joe Schwankhaus who is the Chief Operations Officer of Kristina’s company VRX USA 

Page 9: Ellen DeGeneres debuted a high-flying pompadour hairstyle on her new talk show but the makeover still doesn’t get to the root of her recent problems and although her hair may be rising her show’s ratings are falling 

Page 10: Hot Shots -- pregnant Kelly Rowland, Andy Cohen took his son Benjamin for a stroll in NYC, Will Smith held court in L.A. while shooting King Richard a biopic about the dad of tennis greats Venus Williams and Serena Williams, Angela Bassett caught a drive-in screening of One Night in Miami in L.A. 

Page 11: Grieving Lisa Marie Presley has broken her silence over the suicide of her beloved only son Benjamin Keough saying her heart and soul went with him sharing her heartbreak on what would have been Ben’s 28th birthday and she added she’s dedicating herself to raising Ben’s twin half-sisters and actress sister Riley Keough, Chaka Khan refuses to duo with Ariana Grande again saying she’s not gonna do a song with no heifer -- Chaka and Ariana worked together in 2019 for the Charlie’s Angels soundtrack

Page 12: Straight Shuter -- DWTS pro Emma Slater kept a handle on her coffee while steering her e-bike (picture), it pays to be Brad Pitt’s girlfriend as his new squeeze Nicole Poturalski has doubled her modeling fees, dancing siblings Derek Hough and Julianne Hough are out of step over her sloppy personal life and his hot new judging career because these two were supposed to be the next Donny and Marie Osmond but his solo career is exploding while hers is falling apart, Madonna has always been a big believer in astrology but now she won’t even meet with people if it’s not written in the stars and she’s spending a fortune to have an army of people read her charts 

Page 13: Losing his beloved son to cancer has sparked new fears for fragile Robert Redford because Robert has struggled with his own health over the years and losing his son to bile-duct cancer is extremely worrying; he’s already frail and this has friends fearing the worst, Jeff Bridges is confident he’ll win his battle with lymphoma by coupling medical care with a strict vegan diet and chanting and spiritual healing techniques

Page 14: Convicted wife killer Scott Peterson may soon walk out of prison and grisly photos lawyers say could set him free -- following years of appeals California’s Supreme Court overturned Scott’s death penalty and now another appeal is forcing a lower court to reexamine his conviction for murdering seven months pregnant wife Laci Peterson and their unborn son Conner -- if Scott gets a retrial his legal team will be allowed to introduce new evidence including crime scene pictures that Scott’s former defense attorney said suggests Laci’s disappearance was an abduction by a satanic cult 

Page 15: Former child star Zachery Ty Bryan of Home Improvement was jailed overnight and released on $8500 bail following his bust for a fight with a galpal at an apartment complex in Eugene in Oregon -- the drama comes on the heels of Zachery’s split from wife Carly Matros the mom of his four kids

Page 16: Ryan Reynolds can’t wait to film a new rom-com with close pal Sandra Bullock but it’s causing tension with wife Blake Lively even though Blake trusts Ryan and would never forbid him from taking this part but the idea of him getting cozy with Sandra again still makes her uneasy -- now Ryan and Sandra are signed up to do The Lost City of D and despite Sandra’s denials they ever had a romance Ryan is gushing about them getting back together 

Page 17: Isolated and overlooked Today show host Hoda Kotb is being bullied off the morning show because of tepid ratings and the absence of former sidekick Kathie Lee Gifford and Mean Girls treatment by co-hosts Savannah Guthrie and Jenna Bush Hager have pushed the disillusioned anchor closer to the door -- Hoda recently filled out paperwork to adopt a third child and she’s clearly putting more emphasis on family than her career and it sends the signal she isn’t happy with her role and is not thinking of Today as her top priority, trainwreck Matthew Perry is holed up in his new Pacific Palisades beach pad  pounding out an explosive tell-all and his former Friends are quaking about what secrets he may reveal -- Matthew wants to rush the book out while interest in the Friends reunion special which was postponed by the COVID-19 pandemic remains high -- he knows an uncensored account of his time on Friends and his drug issues would be a bestseller and he intends to blow the lid off his on-set romances and address rumors he and Jennifer Aniston were more than friends 

Page 18: American Life -- her tall tale: I have the longest legs in the world 

Page 19: Jessica Simpson has been flaunting her body after dumping a shocking 100 pounds but buddies worry the drastic drop in size isn’t natural and suspect she’s been taking diet pills again and they’re worried this could escalate into a big issue

Page 20: Devastated Reese Witherspoon was hit with a depressing double whammy -- the death of her dog Pepper from cancer and the delay of her long-awaited sequel Legally Blonde 3, Hollywood Hookups -- John Cena and Shay Shariatzadeh wed, Ashley Hebert and J.P. Rosenbaum split, Cardi B and Offset on again

Page 21: Bruce Willis is back in another Die Hard but this time it’s a commercial for Advance Auto Parts and Die Hard batteries and it’s a clear statement on the state of his career that Bruce has to revisit his amazing past to make a fast buck in the present, Giada De Laurentiis has been given the green light to get married by her 12-year-old daughter Jade -- Giada has dated TV producer Shane Farley for five years and he’s been living with mother and daughter for five months during the pandemic lockdown which gave Jade a firsthand look at what it would be like to have a new daddy and Shane’s passed the test with flying colors 

Page 22: Cover Story -- Prince William’s heartsick wife Kate Middleton is breaking her silence about the royal family’s tumultuous bitter break with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle to set the record straight and save Britain’s monarchy and she’s tired of all the rumors and lies and backbiting and after all the drama and negativity she wants to get the truth out there and end this unprecedented crisis that’s endangering the monarchy’s survival -- friends are trying to convince Kate to do an official sit-down TV interview about what really happened between once-inseparable William and Harry and how Harry and Meghan tore the family apart even before they moved to America but Kate is resisting because she fears that could backfire like Princess Diana’s TV tell-all about her marriage to Prince Charles 25 years ago -- Kate had to turn the other cheek often after Meghan joined the family and she offered to help Meghan adjust to royal life from the start but Meghan rebuffed her and Kate in tired of Meghan painting her as the bad guy especially when it was Meghan’s antics that tore the family apart -- Kate also is upset that Harry and Meghan are portraying themselves as victims of a world that’s against them while she and William take on a phenomenal workload to cover the responsibilities the Sussexes left and losing precious time with their own three children and it’s hard not to be bitter but Kate is trying to take the high road and forgive Meghan and move forward

Page 26: With their marriage hanging by a thread Tori Spelling fears Dean McDermott will cheat on her again while filming a new TV show in Canada for six months; Tori wanted to bring their 5 children to Canada with him but Dean put her off saying it would be too distracting -- she’s been a jittery mess and he can’t stand to look at her and he only took this job because they need the money, Melanie Griffith is frustrated with Chris Martin and wants him to put a ring on her daughter Dakota Johnson’s finger -- the couple have been dating since 2017 and Melanie’s fed up with waiting for Chris to pop the question -- Melanie began to lose her patience after the couple reunited following a split last June when Chris won Dakota back with promises to settle down 

Page 28: COVID Vaccines: What you need to know

Page 32: Miley Cyrus claimed she once spotted a spaceship over Hollywood and even locked eyes with an alien but she also admits she’d bought weed wax from a guy in a van in front of a taco shop, whiny Kris Jenner is blaming social media for killing off Keeping Up with the Kardashians after it helped the reality TV clan make a mint

Page 34: Ozzy Osbourne is terrified a doll has cursed him -- Ozzy told son Jack Osbourne on their Osbournes Want to Believe show that Robert the doll was responsible for his recent bad luck and failing health, Tom Cruise and his Mission: Impossible 7 team caused chaos at an Italian hospital by filming there during the COVID-19 pandemic -- Tom and his crew including 100 security staffers plus trucks and other equipment descended on the Policlinico Umberto I in Rome for a week and legions of fans also flocked to the filming creating even more commotion in the streets outside the hospital and adding to the bedlam the production commandeered an elevator drawing criticism as hospital staff were treating 140 coronavirus patients with 12 in intensive care -- filming was done in an administrative section of the hospital but still sparked an official protest as well as complaints from trade union members

Page 36: Health Watch 

Page 38: Superhero screen pals of Chris Pratt rushed to rescue the actor’s reputation after he was mercilessly dragged into a silly social media meme when a Twitter user posted pictures of Chris Pratt and Chris Pine and Chris Hemsworth and Chris Evans captioned with the instruction one has to go but a flood of responses slammed Pratt as the worst Chris causing his Marvel co-stars to prop him up such as Zoe Saldana and Robert Downey Jr. and Mark Ruffalo and Jeremy Renner and Guardians of the Galaxy director James Gunn and Chris Pratt’s wife Katherine Schwarzenegger also bashed the social media bullies, Matthew McConaughey kept saying alright alright alright to making romantic comedies until the day he was so fed up he turned down $14.5 million to do another one -- Matthew revealed in his memoir that he didn’t mind making a string of mindless rom-coms because their paychecks rented the houses on the beach he ran shirtless on but he eventually wanted to try something else so he turned down a big payday so he could get more serious 

Page 42: Red Carpet -- Drew Barrymore 

Page 47: Odd List

[surveys-at-your-service]

Survey #421

“hunted by hundreds and never to be caught  /  descent to wander, bring terror and take 'em all beyond”

Which do you prefer, donut holes, jelly filled donuts or normal donuts? Normal donuts. When you get old, are you going to make a will? I mean probably. Ever made your own definition for something on Urban Dictionary? No. What do you call your grandparents? "Grammy" and "Grampa." Do you like weddings? Not especially because I'm a bitter fuck. Do you want to live in a dorm in college? I never wanted to, so I never did. Have you ever had your tonsils taken out? No. Are you single/taken/crushing/confused? Single/confused. Is your best friend single? Yes. Is your first real best friend still there for you? I mean we have one another on Facebook, but that's the extent of it. Do you still care for your first love? Very much. I hope he's doing okay since his mother passed. What color is your blanket? Navy with black swirls. Are you listening to music right now? Yes. I am obseeeeeessed with Alissa White-Gluz's cover of Powerwolf's "Demons Are a Girl's Best Friend." Have you ever felt as if you lost your one true love? I feel like that all the time. But I should add that I don't believe there is JUST ONE person designed for you. There are way, way too many people on this earth to have just a single, perfect match. Which do you like better: Bowser, Mario, Luigi, or Princess Peach? Well I mean I always picked Luigi in Mario Kart, so I got a bias, ha ha. How many tattoos do you have? Six. Plenty, PLENTY more to come, though. Would you ever consider getting a mohawk? No. What do you like to do most in your free time? Do random shit on the computer. What’s your work title? Unemployed. Do you pay rent? I don't. What was the reason behind the last time you wore a bandage? I cut my finger opening up a cup of yogurt. Yes, I'm serious. What music artist have you listened to a lot lately? Powerwolf, lately. And Motionless In White. Who is taller, you or your best friend? Me. When was the first time you ever listened to your favorite music artist? Well, as a little kid, Mom would play some Ozzy in the car occasionally, and I actually loved "Perry Mason" so much that I would ask for her to play it. Growing up I'd obviously heard "Crazy Train" through random things, but I never truly listened to him until I got into middle school and went through my mother's CD case, discovering new music as I got into rock and metal. Do/did your siblings cause trouble? Nah, not really. If your siblings are old enough, what do they do for work? I honestly don't remember my half-siblings' positions, but my immediate younger sister is a children's social worker, and my older sis is a mammographer. Have you ever been jealous of your siblings? Jealous, no. Envious, extremely. They know what the hell they're doing with their lives and making shit happen. Do you still live with your parent/s or do you live alone/with a partner? I live with my mother. What feeling do you have the most difficulty in expressing? Jealousy. How do you think you would handle yourself in a crisis situation? Freeze up and probably die lol. Does any particular season make you happier than others? Why/why not? Yes, autumn. It's not hot as fuck, the air always feels so fresh to me, and I love the many colors of fall. It's just... chill. Can you adapt to change easily? Any examples? FUCK. NO. Do you see yourself as worthy of love? Why/why not? This answer can change from "yes, because I'm a good human" to "fuck no because I'm worthless" in 0.5 seconds. Do you think you are competitive? Do you really dislike losing? Not in general, but I can be in some areas. What would you be famous for? Fuck if I know. If you had to, would you rather dye your hair red or black? Red. I loved my hair when it actually took red dye well. What do you typically do on Easter Day? Go to my older sister's house. Have you ever viewed the moon through a telescope? No. Do you normally finish one book before starting another? Always. If you were given the chance to be immortal, would you take it? Heeeeeell no. Would you pierce your nipples for $100? Almost certainly yes; I mean that's $100 for something I can just take out if I don't like it. Have you ever dated someone who had a child? No. Would you ever consider adoption? Even if I wanted a child, no. I know I would need either the blood connection or for the child to be my partner's that I truly love. Do you tend to go for guys/girls with certain eye/hair colors? No, I really don't care how you look on the outside. Do you know anyone who plays guitar? Yes. Do you live within an hour of the ocean? More like two hours. What are you currently sitting/laying on? My bed. Have you ever dated a friend of one of your siblings? No. Did you have an imaginary friend as a child? An imaginary wolf, yeah. Which parent do you look most like? My mom, I think. Ever failed a test? Yes. That's all I did in algebra during my last college attempt. Do you have any friends who are famous? No. Your most recent ex breaks down and tells you they love you, what do you do? Well I know she loves me as a friend, but idk if she still does romantically, but either way, I'd tell her I love her too and ask if I can do anything for her. You and your last ex: who should hate who? Neither of us. We have a perfectly fine relationship. Do you believe you pick who you fall in love with? Definitely not. Last thing you ate? I had a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast. Are you obsessed with someone? *discreetly eyes Markiplier* If you had to write a brief message on a dollar bill that many people would eventually see as the currency circulates, what message would you write? I'd have to think longer on this, but definitely something about not putting so much worth into the money and not allowing greed to rule the individual. What serves as the greatest motivation for you in your daily life? The hope for a happy, prosperous future. If you were a multimillionaire, what do you believe you would be doing at this very moment? Well, it's morning and this is my prime time to really just chill and do my first scope of the Internet, so I'd probably be in a beautiful house in the woods of the mountains by a beautiful waterfall. I'd have the windows down to listen to nature, make sure via AC if necessary that it's cool... Damn, that sounds nice. If you could have a cookie jar full of anything you wanted, except money or cookies, what would it be full of? Hm. Perhaps a very motivational quote that I'd draw each day, kind of like fortune cookies, but actually good and applicable, ha ha. If someone were looking for you in a bookstore, in what section would they be most likely to find you? YA or fiction. If your ex came up to you and asked you to take them back, what would you say? Anyone but Jason or Sara would be an automatic "no." Jason would have to really prove himself. Sara, I'd be willing, but would ask her if that's what she really wants given our positions right now. Do you think Ke$ha is annoying? I don't know anything about her personally. I actually liked her music back in the day, even when I was all about metal. Last time you were hit on? No idea. Do you ever write in pencil any more? I always do if I have that option. I don't like that you can't erase with a pen. If you HAD to get a piercing (not ears) what would you get? At this current time, my right nostril again. What do you wish you had more knowledge about? Politics. Would you ever get someone's name tattooed on you? Noooo. Do you have a lot of scars? Yes. I scar very easily. Have you ever had stitches? Twice. Have you ever dealt with a divorce or parents fighting or any kind of abuse at home? Before my parents divorced, there was a lot of fighting. Do you remember the person you first kissed? Of course I do. Have you ever kissed someone you weren’t dating? No. Who was the last person you fell asleep with? Sara. Have you ever listened to music you hated just to fit in? "Hated," no. I just tried to get into bands that I just couldn't, but didn't hate. Ever been called babe? Yeah. What is your favorite Pop-Tart flavor? Chocolate sundae. Have you ever made your parents cry? Yeah, sadly. Do you wear glasses? Yeah. And yet I'm still blind with 'em. Have you ever made out with somebody on a bed? Yeah. Are you tan? Most definitely not. How did you meet the last person you texted? She kinda like, gave birth to me. Next big event? My nephew's fifth birthday. Ugh, how is he getting that old. Do you think you have to be skinny in order to be beautiful? Fuck off, no. There are some gorgeous/attractive plus-sized people. Have you ever made out on a couch? Yes. Has the last person you kissed ever seen you cry? Oh god, she witnessed me sob once. Would you ever get gauged ears? I want very small gauges in my bottom earlobe piercings. What is your favorite sushi? Ew. Have you ever been in a school talent show? What for? Noooo sir. What were you like at 17? Oh god... so sad and yet so happily, madly in love at the same time. I both love and hate that era. Tell us about your worst date. Haven't really had a bad one. I had one with Tyler that was an adventure that most would consider awful (flat tire, had to walk in the whipping wind), but I had fun, ha ha. What should be illegal that isn’t already? I dunno. What’s the song you most wish you had written? Probably John Lennon's "Imagine." What is the worst break up you have experienced? Y'ALL KNOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW. Do your parents wish you were more successful? Oh, I am CERTAIN they do. They'd never admit it, I'm sure, but I know I'm disappointing. I had so much promise in school. Has a significant other called you unattractive before? WOW, no. Has a significant other ever called you by the wrong name? omg no Have you ever caught someone doing something bad? Cheating on their bf, yes. Has a dentist ever screwed up on anything when working on you? No, I don't think so. What is the worst birthday you have ever had? My 16th. I felt very, very unloved. I don't even like going into it. Have you ever been spit on by a llama? No. Have you ever locked yourself out of your car/house? The house, yes. With my elderly dog with arthritis, in the middle of winter after a good snow. I was freezing, sitting on the front porch and eventually crying. My phone was inside so I couldn't reach my mom, who was at work. As night came, I finally broke and went down the street knocking on my neighbors' doors, and probably the worst fucking one opened. With a gun in his hand. He was apparently an ex-sheriff, and he clearly didn't trust me. He was kind enough to let Teddy, who was incontinent and marked territory, inside (thank fuck he didn't pee in the guy's house), and he gave me a jacket, but Christ, we played 20 goddamn questions to see if I was legit, I'm assuming. I was beyond thankful when Mom finally got there when I used his phone to call her. And as it turned out? The door wasn't even fucking locked, our old dog just jammed the hell outta it by jumping. I was so, so pissed.

[path-of-my-childhood]

Taylor Swift: ‘I was literally about to break’

By: Laura Snapes for The Guardian Date: August 24th 2019

Taylor Swift’s Nashville apartment is an Etsy fever dream, a 365-days-a-year Christmas shop, pure teenage girl id. You enter through a vestibule clad in blue velvet and covered in gilt frames bursting with fake flowers. The ceiling is painted like the night sky. Above a koi pond in the living area, a narrow staircase spirals six feet up towards a giant, pillow-lagged birdcage that probably has the best view in the city. Later, Swift will tell me she needs metaphors “to understand anything that happens to me”, and the birdcage defies you not to interpret it as a pointed comment on the contradictions of stardom.

Swift, wearing pale jeans and dip-dyed shirt, her sandy hair tied in a blue scrunchie, leads the way up the staircase to show me the view. The decor hasn’t changed since she bought this place in 2009, when she was 19. “All of these high rises are new since then,” she says, gesturing at the squat glass structures and cranes. Meanwhile her oven is still covered in stickers, more teenage diary than adult appliance.

Now 29, she has spent much of the past three years living quietly in London with her boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn, making the penthouse a kind of time capsule, a monument to youthful naivety given an unlimited budget – the years when she sang about Romeo and Juliet and wore ballgowns to awards shows; before she moved to New York and honed her slick, self-mythologising pop.

It is mid-August. This is Swift’s first UK interview in more than three years, and she seems nervous: neither presidential nor goofy (her usual defaults), but quick with a tongue-out “ugh” of regret or frustration as she picks at her glittery purple nails. We climb down from the birdcage to sit by the pond, and when the conversation turns to 2016, the year the wheels came off for her, Swift stiffens as if driving over a mile of speed bumps. After a series of bruising public spats (with Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj) in 2015, there was a high-profile standoff with Kanye West. The news that she was in a relationship with actor Tom Hiddleston, which leaked soon after, was widely dismissed as a diversionary tactic. Meanwhile, Swift went to court to prosecute a sexual assault claim, and faced a furious backlash when she failed to endorse a candidate in the 2016 presidential election, allowing the alt-right to adopt her as their “Aryan princess”.

Her critics assumed she cared only about the bottom line. The reality, Swift says, is that she was totally broken. “Every domino fell,” she says bitterly. “It became really terrifying for anyone to even know where I was. And I felt completely incapable of doing or saying anything publicly, at all. Even about my music. I always said I wouldn’t talk about what was happening personally, because that was a personal time.” She won’t get into specifics. “I just need some things that are mine,” she despairs. “Just some things.”

A year later, in 2017, Swift released her album Reputation, half high-camp heel turn, drawing on hip-hop and vaudeville (the brilliantly hammy Look What You Made Me Do), half stunned appreciation that her nascent relationship with Alwyn had weathered the storm (the soft, sensual pop of songs Delicate and Dress).

Her new album, Lover, her seventh, was released yesterday. It’s much lighter than Reputation: Swift likens writing it to feeling like “I could take a full deep breath again”. Much of it is about Alwyn: the Galway Girl-ish track London Boy lists their favourite city haunts and her newfound appreciation of watching rugby in the pub with his uni mates; on the ruminative Afterglow, she asks him to forgive her anxious tendency to assume the worst.

While she has always written about relationships, they were either teenage fantasy or a postmortem on a high-profile breakup, with exes such as Jake Gyllenhaal and Harry Styles. But she and Alwyn have seldom been pictured together, and their relationship is the only other thing she won’t talk about. “I’ve learned that if I do, people think it’s up for discussion, and our relationship isn’t up for discussion,” she says, laughing after I attempt a stealthy angle. “If you and I were having a glass of wine right now, we’d be talking about it – but it’s just that it goes out into the world. That’s where the boundary is, and that’s where my life has become manageable. I really want to keep it feeling manageable.”

Instead, she has swapped personal disclosure for activism. Last August, Swift broke her political silence to endorse Democratic Tennessee candidate Phil Bredesen in the November 2018 senate race. Vote.org reported an unprecedented spike in voting registration after Swift’s Instagram post, while Donald Trump responded that he liked her music “about 25% less now”.

Meanwhile, her recent single You Need To Calm Down admonished homophobes and namechecked US LGBTQ rights organisation Glaad (which then saw increased donations). Swift filled her video with cameos from queer stars such as Ellen DeGeneres and Queen singer Adam Lambert, and capped it with a call to sign her petition in support of the Equality Act, which if passed would prohibit gender- and sexuality-based discrimination in the US. A video of Polish LGBTQ fans miming the track in defiance of their government’s homophobic agenda went viral. But Swift was accused of “queerbaiting” and bandwagon-jumping. You can see how she might find it hard to work out what, exactly, people want from her.

***

It was girlhood that made Swift a multimillionaire. When country music’s gatekeepers swore that housewives were the only women interested in the genre, she proved them wrong. Her self-titled debut marked the longest stay on the Billboard 200 by any album released in the decade. A potentially cloying image – corkscrew curls, lyrics thick on “daddy” and down-home values – were undercut by the fact she was evidently, endearingly, a bit of a freak, an unusual combination of intensity and artlessness. Also, she was really, really good at what she did, and not just for a teenager: her entirely self-written third album, 2010’s Speak Now, is unmatched in its devastatingly withering dismissals of awful men.

As a teenager, Swift was obsessed with VH1’s Behind The Music, the series devoted to the rise and fall of great musicians. She would forensically rewatch episodes, trying to pinpoint the moment a career went wrong. I ask her to imagine she’s watching the episode about herself and do the same thing: where was her misstep? “Oh my God,” she says, drawing a deep breath and letting her lips vibrate as she exhales. “I mean, that’s so depressing!” She thinks back and tries to deflect. “What I remember is that [the show] was always like, ‘Then we started fighting in the tour bus and then the drummer quit and the guitarist was like, “You’re not paying me enough.”’’’

But that’s not what she used to say. In interviews into her early 20s, Swift often observed that an artist fails when they lose their self-awareness, as if repeating the fact would work like an insurance against succumbing to the same fate. But did she make that mistake herself? She squeezes her nose and blows to clear a ringing in her ears before answering. “I definitely think that sometimes you don’t realise how you’re being perceived,” she says. “Pop music can feel like it’s The Hunger Games, and like we’re gladiators. And you can really lose focus of the fact that that’s how it feels because that’s how a lot of stan [fan] Twitter and tabloids and blogs make it seem – the overanalysing of everything makes it feel really intense.”

She describes the way she burned bridges in 2016 as a kind of obliviousness. “I didn’t realise it was like a classic overthrow of someone in power – where you didn’t realise the whispers behind your back, you didn’t realise the chain reaction of events that was going to make everything fall apart at the exact, perfect time for it to fall apart.”

Here’s that chain reaction in full. With her 2014 album 1989 (the year she was born), Swift transcended country stardom, becoming as ubiquitous as Beyoncé. For the first time she vocally embraced feminism, something she had rejected in her teens; but, after a while, it seemed to amount to not much more than a lot of pictures of her hanging out with her “squad”, a bevy of supermodels, musicians and Lena Dunham. The squad very much did not include her former friend Katy Perry, whom Swift targeted in her song Bad Blood, as part of what seemed like a painfully overblown dispute about some backing dancers. Then, when Nicki Minaj tweeted that MTV’s 2015 Video Music awards had rewarded white women at the expense of women of colour, multiple-nominee Swift took it personally, responding: “Maybe one of the men took your slot.” For someone prone to talking about the haters, she quickly became her own worst enemy.

Her old adversary Kanye West resurfaced in February 2016. In 2009, West had invaded Swift’s stage at the MTV VMAs to protest against her victory over Beyoncé in the female video of the year category. It remains the peak of interest in Swift on Google Trends, and the conflict between them has become such a cornerstone of celebrity journalism that it’s hard to remember it lay dormant for nearly seven years – until West released his song Famous. “I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex,” he rapped. “Why? I made that bitch famous.” The video depicted a Swift mannequin naked in bed with men including Trump.

Swift loudly condemned both; although she had discussed the track with West, she said she had never agreed to the “bitch” lyric or the video. West’s wife, Kim Kardashian, released a heavily edited clip that showed Swift at least agreeing to the “sex” line on the phone with West, if not the “bitch” part. Swift pleaded the technicality, but it made no difference: when Kardashian went on Twitter to describe her as a snake, the comparison stuck and the singer found herself very publicly “cancelled” – the incident taken as “proof” of Swift’s insincerity. So she went away.

Swift says she stopped trying to explain herself, even though she “definitely” could have. As she worked on Reputation, she was also writing “a think-piece a day that I knew I would never publish: the stuff I would say, and the different facets of the situation that nobody knew”. If she could exonerate herself, why didn’t she? She leans forward. “Here’s why,” she says conspiratorially. “Because when people are in a hate frenzy and they find something to mutually hate together, it bonds them. And anything you say is in an echo chamber of mockery.”

She compares that year to being hit by a tidal wave. “You can either stand there and let the wave crash into you, and you can try as hard as you can to fight something that’s more powerful and bigger than you,” she says. “Or you can dive under the water, hold your breath, wait for it to pass and while you’re down there, try to learn something. Why was I in that part of the ocean? There were clearly signs that said: Rip tide! Undertow! Don’t swim! There are no lifeguards!” She’s on a roll. “Why was I there? Why was I trusting people I trusted? Why was I letting people into my life the way I was letting them in? What was I doing that caused this?”

After the incident with Minaj, her critics started pointing out a narrative of “white victimhood” in Swift’s career. Speaking slowly and carefully, she says she came to understand “a lot about how my privilege allowed me to not have to learn about white privilege. I didn’t know about it as a kid, and that is privilege itself, you know? And that’s something that I’m still trying to educate myself on every day. How can I see where people are coming from, and understand the pain that comes with the history of our world?”

She also accepts some responsibility for her overexposure, and for some of the tabloid drama. If she didn’t wish a friend happy birthday on Instagram, there would be reports about severed friendships, even if they had celebrated together. “Because we didn’t post about it, it didn’t happen – and I realised I had done that,” she says. “I created an expectation that everything in my life that happened, people would see.”

But she also says she couldn’t win. “I’m kinda used to being gaslit by now,” she drawls wearily. “And I think it happens to women so often that, as we get older and see how the world works, we’re able to see through what is gaslighting. So I’m able to look at 1989 and go – KITTIES!” She breaks off as an assistant walks in with Swift’s three beloved cats, stars of her Instagram feed, back from the vet before they fly to England this week. Benjamin, Olivia and Meredith haughtily circle our feet (they are scared of the koi) as Swift resumes her train of thought, back to the release of 1989 and the subsequent fallout. “Oh my God, they were mad at me for smiling a lot and quote-unquote acting fake. And then they were mad at me that I was upset and bitter and kicking back.” The rules kept changing.

***

Swift’s new album comes with printed excerpts from her diaries. On 29 August 2016, she wrote in her girlish, bubble writing: “This summer is the apocalypse.” As the incident with West and Kardashian unfolded, she was preparing for her court case against radio DJ David Mueller, who was fired in 2013 after Swift reported him for putting his hand up her dress at a meet-and–greet event. He sued her for defamation; she countersued for sexual assault.

“Having dealt with a few of them, narcissists basically subscribe to a belief system that they should be able to do and say whatever the hell they want, whenever the hell they want to,” Swift says now, talking at full pelt. “And if we – as anyone else in the world, but specifically women – react to that, well, we’re not allowed to. We’re not allowed to have a reaction to their actions.”

In summer 2016 she was in legal depositions, practising her testimony. “You’re supposed to be really polite to everyone,” she says. But by the time she got to court in August 2017, “something snapped, I think”. She laughs. Her testimony was sharp and uncompromising. She refused to allow Mueller’s lawyers to blame her or her security guards; when asked if she could see the incident, Swift said no, because “my ass is in the back of my body”. It was a brilliant, rude defence.

“You’re supposed to behave yourself in court and say ‘rear end’,” she says with mock politesse. “The other lawyer was saying, ‘When did he touch your backside?’ And I was like, ‘ASS! Call it what it is!’” She claps between each word. But despite the acclaim for her testimony and eventual victory (she asked for one symbolic dollar), she still felt belittled. It was two months prior to the beginning of the #MeToo movement. “Even this case was literally twisted so hard that people were calling it the ‘butt-grab case’. They were saying I sued him because there’s this narrative that I want to sue everyone. That was one of the reasons why the summer was the apocalypse.”

She never wanted the assault to be made public. Have there been other instances she has dealt with privately? “Actually, no,” she says soberly. “I’m really lucky that it hadn’t happened to me before. But that was one of the reasons it was so traumatising. I just didn’t know that could happen. It was really brazen, in front of seven people.” She has since had security cameras installed at every meet-and-greet she does, deliberately pointed at her lower half. “If something happens again, we can prove it with video footage from every angle,” she says.

The allegations about Harvey Weinstein came out soon after she won her case. The film producer had asked her to write a song for the romantic comedy One Chance, which earned her second Golden Globe nomination. Weinstein also got her a supporting role in the 2014 sci-fi movie The Giver, and attended the launch party for 1989. But she says they were never alone together.

“He’d call my management and be like, ‘Does she have a song for this film?’ And I’d be like, ‘Here it is,’” she says dispassionately. “And then I’d be at the Golden Globes. I absolutely never hung out. And I would get a vibe – I would never vouch for him. I believe women who come forward, I believe victims who come forward, I believe men who come forward.” Swift inhales, flustered. She says Weinstein never propositioned her. “If you listen to the stories, he picked people who were vulnerable, in his opinion. It seemed like it was a power thing. So, to me, that doesn’t say anything – that I wasn’t in that situation.”

Meanwhile, Donald Trump was more than nine months into his presidency, and still Swift had not taken a position. But the idea that a pop star could ever have impeded his path to the White House seemed increasingly naive. In hindsight, the demand that Swift speak up looks less about politics and more about her identity (white, rich, powerful) and a moralistic need for her to redeem herself – as if nobody else had ever acted on a vindictive instinct, or blundered publicly.

But she resisted what might have been an easy return to public favour. Although Reputation contained softer love songs, it was better known for its brittle, vengeful side (see This Is Why We Can’t Have Nice Things). She describes that side of the album now as a “bit of a persona”, and its hip-hop-influenced production as “a complete defence mechanism”. Personally, I thought she had never been more relatable, trashing the contract of pious relatability that traps young women in the public eye.

***

It was the assault trial, and watching the rights of LGBTQ friends be eroded, that finally politicised her, Swift says. “The things that happen to you in your life are what develop your political opinions. I was living in this Obama eight-year paradise of, you go, you cast your vote, the person you vote for wins, everyone’s happy!” she says. “This whole thing, the last three, four years, it completely blindsided a lot of us, me included.”

She recently said she was “dismayed” when a friend pointed out that her position on gay rights wasn’t obvious (what if she had a gay son, he asked), hence this summer’s course correction with the single You Need To Calm Down (“You’re comin’ at my friends like a missile/Why are you mad?/When you could be GLAAD?”). Didn’t she feel equally dismayed that her politics weren’t clear? “I did,” she insists, “and I hate to admit this, but I felt that I wasn’t educated enough on it. Because I hadn’t actively tried to learn about politics in a way that I felt was necessary for me, making statements that go out to hundreds of millions of people.”

She explains her inner conflict. “I come from country music. The number one thing they absolutely drill into you as a country artist, and you can ask any other country artist this, is ‘Don’t be like the Dixie Chicks!’” In 2003, the Texan country trio denounced the Iraq war, saying they were “ashamed” to share a home state with George W Bush. There was a boycott, and an event where a bulldozer crushed their CDs. “I watched country music snuff that candle out. The most amazing group we had, just because they talked about politics. And they were getting death threats. They were made such an example that basically every country artist that came after that, every label tells you, ‘Just do not get involved, no matter what.’

“And then, you know, if there was a time for me to get involved…” Swift pauses. “The worst part of the timing of what happened in 2016 was I felt completely voiceless. I just felt like, oh God, who would want me? Honestly.” She would otherwise have endorsed Hillary Clinton? “Of course,” she says sincerely. “I just felt completely, ugh, just useless. And maybe even like a hindrance.”

I suggest that, thinking selfishly, her coming out for Clinton might have made people like her. “I wasn’t thinking like that,” she stresses. “I was just trying to protect my mental health – not read the news very much, go cast my vote, tell people to vote. I just knew what I could handle and I knew what I couldn’t. I was literally about to break. For a while.” Did she seek therapy? “That stuff I just really wanna keep personal, if that’s OK,” she says.

She resists blaming anyone else for her political silence. Her emergence as a Democrat came after she left Big Machine, the label she signed to at 15. (They are now at loggerheads after label head Scott Borchetta sold the company, and the rights to Swift’s first six albums, to Kanye West’s manager, Scooter Braun.) Had Borchetta ever advised her against speaking out? She exhales. “It was just me and my life, and also doing a lot of self-reflection about how I did feel really remorseful for not saying anything. I wanted to try and help in any way that I could, the next time I got a chance. I didn’t help, I didn’t feel capable of it – and as soon as I can, I’m going to.”

Swift was once known for throwing extravagant 4 July parties at her Rhode Island mansion. The Instagram posts from these star-studded events – at which guests wore matching stars-and-stripes bikinis and onesies – probably supported a significant chunk of the celebrity news industry GDP. But in 2017, they stopped. “The horror!” wrote Cosmopolitan, citing “reasons that remain a mystery” for their disappearance. It wasn’t “squad” strife or the unavailability of matching cozzies that brought the parties to an end, but Swift’s disillusionment with her country, she says.

There is a smart song about this on the new album – the track that should have been the first single, instead of the cartoonish ME!. Miss Americana And The Heartbreak Prince is a forlorn, gothic ballad in the vein of Lana Del Rey that uses high-school imagery to dismantle American nationalism: “The whole school is rolling fake dice/You play stupid games/You win stupid prizes,” she sings with disdain. “Boys will be boys then/Where are the wise men?”

As an ambitious 11-year-old, she worked out that singing the national anthem at sports games was the quickest way to get in front of a large audience. When did she start feeling conflicted about what America stands for? She gives another emphatic ugh. “It was the fact that all the dirtiest tricks in the book were used and it worked,” she says. “The thing I can’t get over right now is gaslighting the American public into being like” – she adopts a sanctimonious tone – “‘If you hate the president, you hate America.’ We’re a democracy – at least, we’re supposed to be – where you’re allowed to disagree, dissent, debate.” She doesn’t use Trump’s name. “I really think that he thinks this is an autocracy.”

As we speak, Tennessee lawmakers are trying to impose a near-total ban on abortion. Swift has staunchly defended her “Tennessee values” in recent months. What’s her position? “I mean, obviously, I’m pro-choice, and I just can’t believe this is happening,” she says. She looks close to tears. “I can’t believe we’re here. It’s really shocking and awful. And I just wanna do everything I can for 2020. I wanna figure out exactly how I can help, what are the most effective ways to help. ’Cause this is just…” She sighs again. “This is not it.”

***

It is easy to forget that the point of all this is that a teenage Taylor Swiftwanted to write love songs. Nemeses and negativity are now so entrenched in her public persona that it’s hard to know how she can get back to that, though she seems to want to. At the end of Daylight, the new album’s dreamy final song, there’s a spoken-word section: “I want to be defined by the things that I love,” she says as the music fades. “Not the things that I hate, not the things I’m afraid of, the things that haunt me in the middle of the night.” As well as the songs written for Alwyn, there is one for her mother, who recently experienced a cancer relapse: “You make the best of a bad deal/I just pretend it isn’t real,” Swift sings, backed by the Dixie Chicks.

How does writing about her personal life work if she’s setting clearer boundaries? “It actually made me feel more free,” she says. “I’ve always had this habit of never really going into detail about exactly what situation inspired what thing, but even more so now.” This is only half true: in the past, Swift wasn’t shy of a level of detail that invited fans to figure out specific truths about her relationships. And when I tell her that Lover feels a more emotionally guarded album, she bristles. “I know the difference between making art and living your life like a reality star,” she says. “And then even if it’s hard for other people to grasp, my definition is really clear.”

Even so, Swift begins Lover by addressing an adversary, opening with a song called I Forgot That You Existed (“it isn’t love, it isn’t hate, it’s just indifference”), presumably aimed at Kanye West, a track that slightly defeats its premise by existing. But it sweeps aside old dramas to confront Swift’s real nemesis, herself. “I never grew up/It’s getting so old,” she laments on The Archer.

She has had to learn not to pre-empt disaster, nor to run from it. Her life has been defined by relationships, friendships and business relationships that started and ended very publicly (though she and Perry are friends again). At the same time, the rules around celebrity engagement have evolved beyond recognition in her 15 years of fame. Rather than trying to adapt to them, she’s now asking herself: “How do you learn to maintain? How do you learn not to have these phantom disasters in your head that you play out, and how do you stop yourself from sabotage – because the panic mechanism in your brain is telling you that something must go wrong.” For her, this is what growing up is. “You can’t just make cut-and-dry decisions in life. A lot of things are a negotiation and a grey area and a dance of how to figure it out.”

And so this time, Swift is sticking around. In December she will turn 30, marking the point after which more than half her life will have been lived in public. She’ll start her new decade with a stronger self-preservationist streak, and a looser grip (as well as a cameo in Cats). “You can’t micromanage life, it turns out,” she says, drily.

When Swift finally answered my question about the moment she would choose in the VH1 Behind The Music episode about herself, the one where her career turned, she said she hoped it wouldn’t focus on her “apocalypse” summer of 2016. “Maybe this is wishful thinking,” she said, “but I’d like to think it would be in a couple of years.” It’s funny to hear her hope that the worst is still to come while sitting in her fairytale living room, the cats pacing: a pragmatist at odds with her romantic monument to teenage dreams. But it sounds something like perspective.

[thelittlesttimelord]

The Littlest Timelord: The Fall of the Eleventh Chapter 14

TITLE: The Littlest Timelord: The Fall of the Eleventh Chapter 14 PAIRING: No Pairing RATING: T CHAPTER: 14/? SUMMARY: Elise Smith is now a teenaged Timelord. In addition to losing the Ponds, the fields of Trenzalore are calling. But first they have to figure out exactly who Clara Oswald is.

The Doctor settled into life with the Ponds well enough. He and Elise took walks every day and just talked about things that were on her mind. It felt nice to spend time with him.

Right now he was sitting with Amy and Rory eating fish fingers and custard as they watched some reality television. “If I had a restaurant, this'd be all I'd serve,” the Doctor told them.

Amy scoffed. “Yeah, right. You running a restaurant.”

“I've run restaurants. Who do you think invented the Yorkshire pudding?”

Rory laughed, but stopped when he saw the serious look on the Doctor’s face. “You didn't.”

“Pudding, yet savory. Sound familiar?”

The next morning, the Doctor was playing on the Wii again. His favorite game involved hitting a ball with a racquet.

Elise didn’t see the appeal.

“Oh, yes! Second set, Doctor! Ha ha! Oh, if Fred Perry could see me now, eh? He'd probably ask for his shorts back. Third set decider, come on, then.”

Suddenly, the cube that was sitting on the side table started floating.

It flew in front of the Doctor. “Out of the way, dear, I'm trying to…”

The cube didn’t do anything. It just hovered there.

“Whatever you are, this planet, these people, are precious to me. And I will defend them to my last breath.”

The cube only hovered.

“Is that all you can do, hover? I had a metal dog could do that.”

A little metal tube came out of the cube.

“Oh, that’s clever. What's that?”

It fired an energy bolt.

The Doctor dodged and it hit a vase. The Doctor and Elise scrambled out of the living room.

Well so much for domesticity.

The cube started flipping through images on the TV.

“You really have woken up.”

Rory came running in from the kitchen. “Doctor! Hi. Uh, the cube in there, it just opened.”

Amy came running down the stairs. “The cube upstairs just spiked me and took my pulse!”

“Ha! Really? Mine fired laser bolts and now it's surfing the net,” the Doctor told them. He grabbed his jacket and put it on as Brian came inside the house.

“You're never going to believe this. My cube just moved. It rattled.”

Rory’s phone started ringing and he answered.

The Doctor laughed and ran back into the living room.

“Hello? Okay, I'm on my way.” He hung up. “I have to get to work. They need all the help they can get.”

“Let me come, help out,” Brian said.

“Take your dad to work night, brilliant!” He turned to Amy. “Okay, are you going to be all right here?”

Amy kissed him on the cheek. “Keep away from the cubes.”

“Right.” Rory and Brian left.

The Doctor was looking down at his psychic paper with a smile.

“What are you grinning about?” Amy asked.

“We're wanted at the Tower of London.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

Amy, Elise, and the Doctor got out of the car and were greeted by Kate.

“Every cube across the whole world activated at the same moment.”

“Now we're in business. You sent me a message to my psychic paper. You know what? I'm almost impressed.”

“Secret base beneath the Tower. Hope we're not here because we know too much,” Amy joked.

“Yes, I've got officers trained in beheading. Also ravens of death,” Kate said, sarcastically.

“I like her,” Amy told the Doctor.

The Doctor knew another redhead would like Kate.

They entered an area with small rooms containing cubes.

“There are fifty being monitored, and more coming in all the time. I don't know how useful it is. Every cube is behaving individually. There's no meaningful pattern. Some respond to proximity. Some create mood swings,” Kate said.

There was a women crying in one of the rooms.

Amy pointed to one of the cubes. “Er, what's this one?”

“Try the door,” Kate told her.

Amy opened the door and an extremely annoying song (that once again Elise didn’t recognize) started playing.

The Doctor put his fingers in his ears.

“On a loop!” Kate yelled over the music.

Amy quickly shut the door.

They walked over to a bay of computer screens.

“This is the latest,” Kate said.

“Oh dear. Systems breach at the Pentagon, China, every African nation, the Middle East,” the Doctor listed off.

“I've got governments screaming for explanations and no idea what to tell them. I'm lost, Doctor. We all are.”

“Don't despair, Kate. Your dad never did.”

Kate looked over at him and the Doctor smiled.

“Kate Stewart, heading up UNIT, changing the way they work. How could you not be? Why did you drop Lethbridge?”

“I didn't want any favors. Though he guided me, even to the end. Science leads, he always told me. Said he'd learned that from an old friend.”

Elise could hear the fondness in her voice when she spoke about her father. Elise shifted closer to Doctor and put her head on his shoulder.

“We don't let him down. We don't let this planet down.”

A monitor started beeping.

“They've stopped. The cubes, across the world, they just shut down,” the guy who was monitoring the screens said.

“Active for forty seven minutes, and then they just die?” Kate asked.

“Not dead. Dormant, maybe,” the Doctor said.

“Then why shut down?” Amy asked.

“I don't know. I don't know,” the Doctor said, “I need to think. I need some air. Who has an underground base? Terrible ventilation.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Amy, Elise, and the Doctor sat out by the river Thames.

“The moment they arrived, I should have made sure they were collected and burned. That is what I should have done,” the Doctor said.

“How? Nobody would have listened,” Amy told him.

“You're thinking of stopping, aren't you? You and Rory.”

“No. I mean, we haven't made a decision.”

“But you're considering it.”

“Maybe. I don't know. We don't know. Well, our lives have changed so much. But there was a time, there were years, when I couldn't live without you. When just the whole everyday thing would drive me crazy. But since you dropped us back here, since you gave us this house, you know, we've built a life. I don't know if I can have both.”

“Why?”

“Because they pull at each other. Because they pull at me, and because the traveling is starting to feel like running away.”

“That's not what it is.”

“Oh, come on. Look at you, four days in a lounge and you go crazy.”

“I'm not running away. But this is one corner of one country in one continent on one planet that's a corner of a galaxy that's a corner of a universe that is forever growing and shrinking and creating and destroying and never remaining the same for a single millisecond. And there is so much, so much to see, Amy. Because it goes so fast. I'm not running away from things, I am running to them before they flare and fade forever. And it's all right. Our lives won't run the same. They can't. One day, soon maybe, you'll stop. I've known for a while.”

Just like Elise would eventually stop once she met him. The one she was always meant to be with.

“Then why do you keep coming back for us?”

“Because you were the first. The first face this face saw.” He turned to look at Elise. “Besides you of course.” He kissed her forehead and turned back to Amy. “And you're seared onto my hearts, Amelia Pond. You always will be. I'm running to you, and Rory, before you fade from me.”

Both Amy and Elise put their heads on his shoulders. His girls.

“Don't be nice to me. I don't want you to be nice to me,” Amy told him.

“Yeah, you do, Pond, and you always get what you want.” An idea hit the Doctor. “They got what they wanted.”

“What? Who did?”

The Doctor smacked himself in the face. “The cubes. That's why they stopped. Come on.”

*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

They ran back inside and found Kate.

“Kate? Before they shut down, they scanned everything, from your medical limits to your military response patterns,” the Doctor told her.

The power suddenly went out.

“They made a complete assessment of Planet Earth and its inhabitants. That's what the surge of activity was. Problem with the power?”

“Not possible. We've got back-ups.”

“Hmm.”

They ventured into the room containing the cubes.

“Doctor? Look!” Amy said.

All the cubes were showing the number seven.

“Why do they all say seven?” Kate asked.

“Seven. Seven, what's important about seven? Seven Wonders of the World, seven streams of the River Ota, seven sides of a cube,” the Doctor said.

“A cube has six sides,” Amy corrected.

“Not if you count the inside.”

The number changed to six.

“It has to be a countdown,” the Doctor said.

“Not in minutes,” Kate told him.

“Why would it be minutes? Kate, we have to get humanity away from those cubes. God knows what they'll do if they hit zero. Get the information out any way you can. News channels, websites, radio, text messages. People have to know that the cubes are dangerous.”

“Okay, but why is this starting now? I mean, the cubes arrived months ago. Why wait this long?” Amy asked.

“Because they're clever. Allow people enough time to collect them, take them into their homes, their lives. Humans, the great early adopters. And then, wham! Profile every inch of Earth's existence.”

“Discover how best to attack us,” Kate said, realizing what was going on.

“Get that information out any way you can. Go!”

“Right.”

The Doctor ran over to the bay of computers. “Every cube was activated. There must be signals, energy fluctuations on a colossal scale, there must be some trace. There can't not be.”

He turned to Elise, Amy, and Kate. “We need to think of all the variables, all the possibilities, okay? Go, go, go, go, go!”

They were running out of time. The numbers on the cubes changed to four.

[woulddieforperrytheplatypus]

I’m sure you’ve answered this before, but why do you like “Night of the Living Pharmacists” so much? I don’t know your profile says you like me and it kinda freaks me out so just curious.

I actually haven’t answered this before, which is why when I saw this in my inbox, I stared at it for a few minutes and exit my browser because wow, where do I even begin with this one? This is going to be an unnecessarily long post, but because I am a kind and benevolent blogger, I’ll put a Keep Reading here so y’all don’t have to scroll through five years of excited rambling from yours truly.

Honestly, off the top of my head, I don’t really know why Night of the Living Pharmacists resonated with me. I just know that the first time I watched it, probably about 10 hours into a Phineas and Ferb binge on Disney+ because that’s basically my life at this point -- I was absolutely captivated from the beginning. I thought about it for a couple days, and I came up with a couple reasons.

First of all, I love Candace and Vanessa’s friendship. Candace goes Full Lesbian™ from the moment she sees Vanessa at the store until she realizes they’re actually surrounded by dumbasses. I love that she has no problem taking charge in the presence of these “cool older girls,” and even calls them out for kinda being idiots. And, to be honest, what’s better than Candace and Vanessa bonding over the fact that weird shit happens to them all the time while they’re dealing with even weirder shit? 

The other big thing I like is Perry’s part in all this. He’s basically in the background the whole time, but he’s arguably the most important player in the game.  I’m such a sucker for Perry protecting the boys (I’m looking at you, at2d), and seeing him standing on a rooftop with his binoculars, knowing damn well that the whole city is in danger but giving no fucks about anyone but his boys warms my heart every time. 

Part of the reason it took me a week to respond to this ask though is that I watch Phineas and Ferb on the treadmill everyday, and notlp was coming up in the rotation, so I figured I might as well watch it again before I answered this for a scene or two to reference in my answer, right? Except I realized as I was watching it that a lot of my favorite jokes in the series are in this episode, so, once again, welcome to gifapalooza!

I don’t even have a description for this like Buford hears that they’re making a rubberization ray and his first thought it...

Bonus: Phineas’s reaction

And then there’s Perry looking like he stepped straight out of club penguin

This might be my favorite trap? He’s a fucking disco ball? They’re doing the fucking disco? How can you not love it?

They have a pillowfight? Is this not the cutest thing you’ve ever seen?

The songs are all really good but the “Who’s that Guy?” one and the “Lots of Me!” remix are my shit. Look how happy he is!

I just love how chill she is like I know this is fairly normal for a Doofenshmirtz but she’s like “huh, weird” and moves on with her life

Also, Stacy’s whole plotline is fucking hilarious but this part takes the cake

These dudes talking about how the whole zombie pharmacist thing doesn’t make any sense were funniest the first time but it feels like the whole joke goes on too long and it gets boring UNTIL the line “are you insinuating that my clothes are alive?” and that never fails to make me laugh

This might be my favorite joke in the whole thing just because of the cut from “LOTS OF ME” to “LESS OF ME” 

Perry’s face when Heinz says it’s his first time flying a helicopter has major Drusselstein Driving Test Waltz vibes and tbh I can’t blame him

Candace: ah shit zombies -_-

Perry, always two steps ahead:

I’m still bitter that the only times Phineas and Heinz get to bond over building are the Other-Dimensionator that kinda gets glossed over for the sake of the actual plot and this scene that happens during a musical montage but this part’s pretty good I’m not even gonna lie

Also I was too lazy to gif these ones but these are also funny:

“OW! THIS IS HOT! Did that just come out of the oven?” “Well, my hands are metal!”

“It’s a callback to something I didn’t even hear!! IN YOUR FACE, LOGIC!” (and the fact that he makes another callback to something he didn’t even hear later in the episode which makes it a callback to what he didn’t hear and a callback to this callback makes it even better)

“Was is worth the time it took to make the scale model?” 

Heinz calling the zombies “pharmacist freaks” after complaining for the millionth time that people assumed he was a pharmacist

Okay, you get the point. It’s a funny fucking episode. But I think what sets it apart from the rest of the show is it manages to stay really funny while also keeping the stakes really high, and I think that’s why it’s my favorite. And, to illustrate my point, here’s my absolute favorite part of the episode, and this one’s not one of the funny parts (except “I used to be Carl” that was funny but shhhh)

I think it’s pretty freaking obvious throughout the show that Perry is always two seconds away from strangling Monogram, and that OWCA pisses him off to no end. But it’s still his home. It’s been his home presumably his entire life -- since before the Flynn-Fletchers adopted him and everything. It’s been around since long before he was born, and you have to assume he’d always thought it would outlive him by centuries. If anything went wrong, OWCA would be there, no matter what. He just watched the downfall of his entire organization in the midst of a literal apocalypse.

But it gets worse. OWCA has withstood years and years of fighting evil and poor management. it was probably stronger than anything else. If OWCA couldn’t withstand the zombie apocalypse, what were the odds that Perry could? What were the odds that the kids could? He had to be petrified, and I’m sure anyone else would have given up, but he doesn’t. He sets out looking for Phineas and Ferb, determined to help them make it through this if it’s the last thing he does. 

[cabiba]

https://kortina.nyc/essays/kinky-labor-supply-and-the-attention-tax/

Kinky (S1) vs classical (S0) labor supply curve.

Over the past few decades, labor force participation has sharply dropped for men ages 20-34. Theories about the root cause range from indolence, to a lack of skills and training, to offshoring, to (perhaps most interestingly) the increasing attractiveness and availability of leisure and media entertainment. In this essay, we propose that the drop in labor participation rate of young men is a result of a combination of factors: (i) a decrease in cost of access to media entertainment leisure, (ii) increases in both the availability and (iii) quality media entertainment leisure, and (iv) a decrease in the marginal signalling utility of (conspicuous) consumption goods for all but the highest earners.

At the macro level, this results in sub-optimal production, as firms are unable to satisfy their demand for labor via the usual mechanism of increasing wages. If you believe that economic productivity and growth are good, this presents a challenge when attempting to design stimulus policy, because subsidies or increases to the minimum wage would yield the same non-result as firms increasing wages. We discuss the potential efficacy of the somewhat radical idea of a tax on human attention or time spent consuming entertainment media as a way to stimulate productivity.

#Declining Labor Participation in Younger Demographics

The overall labor force participation rate in the United States has been declining for the past several decades. The most obvious potential explanation would be an aging population (retirees comprising an increasing percentage of the overall population), but you can see this is not the root cause when you break out the labor force participation rate by age and sex:

Labor Participation Rate via Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Labor participation has been dropping much faster for young men than any other groups. (Interestingly, labor participation has been increasing most rapidly for older demographics, presumably because they must continue working later in life in order to support basic needs and healthcare costs).

In Leisure Luxuries and the Labor Supply of Young Men, Mark Aguiar and Erik Hurst note that:

Despite stagnant wages, declining employment rates, and an increased propensity to live with their parents, younger men report increased happiness during the 2000s. This contrasts sharply with older men, whose satisfaction fell along with their relative earnings. We see the life satisfaction results as indirect evidence that younger men experienced relatively little decline in the consumption and greatly valued their improved leisure options.

Much of young men’s time which in past decades was spent working is now spent playing video games, according to Aguiar and Hurst. Given that reported happiness moved in the opposite direction from wages and employment rate, it would seem there is some preference for this specific type of leisure over the purchasing power sacrificed in the form of foregone wages. But given that leisure activities have always been an alternative to work, we should ask what about video games specifically makes them more compelling than historical leisure activities.

Update: this paper from Gray Kimbrough arguing against the interpretation from Aguiar and Hurst is also worth a read.

#

Decreasing Cost, Increasing Availability, and Increasing Quality of Media Entertainment

Video games are just one example of media entertainment content that has become more a more attractive leisure choice as a result of advances in internet and mobile device technology.

For most of history, media consumption was bounded, like other forms of consumption, by cost – if you wanted more books, movies, music, console video games, etc, you needed money to buy them. Notable exceptions to this pattern were radio and cable television, where you could access programming at all hours of the day for a low fixed cost (or in some cases for free) – but in these cases, limits on the syndication of premium content entailed that not every hour of watching was equally enjoyable, and there were generally still diminishing (enjoyment) returns on each additional hour spent watching.

The digitization of content enabled infinite storage of evergreen content in the cloud and effectively zero marginal distribution cost of content through copying. Enabling on-demand access to all of the content that has ever been produced entailed a huge increase in the supply of good content. This essentially made all of history a viable competitor to people producing new content. Similarly, social media–produced for free, by amateurs–provided another huge influx of new content and more competition for attention.

This increased supply and competition put pressure on professionals creating new content to make it better and cheaper. On top of that, taking a page from the cable TV playbook, internet media distributors gave away content for free, and used advertising subsidies to pay for the small amount of content that was still being professionally produced.

All of these changes benefited the consumer by making more and better content available for free. Today, you can pretty much always spend yet another hour consuming some new and interesting content freely available on the internet, so once you have paid the (quite cheap) cost of access to your ISP or mobile data provider, you no longer require additional wages to pay for additional consumption of media as a leisure activity.

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Decreasing Signalling Utility of Conspicuous Consumption Goods

Before we accept that young men are simply foregoing working in favor of spending more time playing video games or consuming other forms of media entertainment content, we should ask what else they might spend foregone earnings on and why they are not working to fund that spend.

In general there are three types of goods: goods that meet your basic needs, leisure goods (including media goods), and conspicuous consumption goods (those that signal genetic fitness, social status, belonging, etc.). If young men playing video games are not foregoing their basic needs (an assumption we’ll make here), and the cost of media entertainment goods has dramatically fallen, then they must be trading off consumption goods. Next, we argue that this group has decreased consumption because the signaling utility of these goods has decreased.

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What is conspicuous consumption and what does it take to get it?

Historically, the primary purpose of working was to generate enough income to satisfy basic needs. Once those needs were met, an individual had a tradeoff to make between spending their remaining time on work or leisure.

Observing the behavior of the nouveau riche in a post-industrialization society in the late 1800s, Thorstein Veblen introduced the theory of conspicuous consumption - the purchase of goods and services for the sake of signalling social status (vs. the intrinsic function provided by goods that meet basic needs or those that enable leisure).

As living standards improved in the 20th century and individuals had more discretionary income, this behavior expanded to men, women, and children across all economic classes who began to spend more money on goods and services as a sort of social fashion. Implicit in spending more time on work is a preference for conspicuous consumption over leisure.

If you have the money, how do you decide what to consume? Benjamin Schwarz suggested in his review of Elizabeth Currid-Halkett’s The Sum of Small Things: A Theory of the Aspirational Class that:

This process depends on the great extent to which the elite’s consumption is at once devoted to and relies on “cultural capital”—that is, the adoption of values, tastes, and norms through social inculcation and formal education. That cup of Intelligentsia coffee may “only” cost five dollars, but learning about it in the first place depends on prizing the judgment of certain cultural tastemakers (again, say, the New York Times and those right-thinking podcasts), and on possessing a worldview that attaches a particular value and virtue to a particular container of hot liquid. Acquiring that cultural capital is, itself, a rarefied and usually expensive endeavor, because it involves a lengthy and complex process of what the sociologists call cultural and social formation: The peculiar cachet that the educated class attaches to that cup of coffee is far more likely to elude the daughter of an insurance adjuster brought up in Lansing, Kansas (a middle-class suburb of Kansas City), who attended the local high school and Kansas State, than it is the daughter of a screenwriter raised in uber-achieving north-of-Montana-Avenue Santa Monica, who attended the Harvard-Westlake School and Yale. Thus, buying that cup of coffee—or that organic cotton t-shirt, or that subscription to Harper’s—signifies a class identity that the purchase, in turn, reinforces.”

The increased cost in time to acquire the knowledge of what to consume is yet another way that conspicuous consumption is becoming prohibitively more expensive.

The catch with all of this is that the psychological utility sought from conspicuous consumption is relative, not absolute. Sarah Perry sums this up nicely in her book, Every Cradle is a Grave:

More than anything, however, a human utility function is a function of social belonging. That’s the ultimate point not only of income, but of intelligence, beauty, and many other material and non-material goods: they may be traded for social belonging… We want income because we want to be able to get the attention of others. We want a safe social place, primarily—and, of course, we want a better social place than the one we currently occupy.

The implication of this relative sizing up is that there is an ever-rising bar to maintain or improve your social position relative to the people and communities from which you seek affiliation or belonging. This was never easy given the money and time required, but at least it was possible when you sought that social belonging from people and communities that were more geographically constrained.

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How does scale of distribution impact conspicuous consumption?

Consumers are no longer signaling on a local scale, but rather on an internet scale. On the one hand, this amplifies signal, because you can reach likeminded people who aren’t part of your local community, but on the other hand:

The consequent noise of everyone else doing the same thing crowds that signal out.

The people you may be trying to reach may be more preoccupied than ever before given the media dynamics described above playing out.

Together, these changes increase competition for the attention of the people whose attention you’re vying for…

And stoke an arms race in money and time in pursuit of relative conspicuous consumption.

As an example, consider how this increased competition plays out in online dating platforms. On Tinder, the top 20% of men are competing for the top 78% of women. Why? It’s a matter of the breadth of selection. Offline, due to the constraints of physical space and time, any given woman would have a finite set of potential partners to choose from. Online, the selection is much more vast and most women only “like” the most attractive men. The Gini coefficient for the “Tinder economy” is 0.58, which means that it has higher inequality than 95% the world’s national economies – in other words, it’s pretty grim if you’re a man in the bottom 80%.

Update: we got lots of responses about the sample size / validity of this Tinder study, so it’s worth checking out, but also worth noting the argument we present does not hinge upon this study.

We believe that this effect can be extrapolated into most contexts where digital distribution is used for signalling purposes. Yes, you could work more in order to buy more consumption goods, services, and activities and spend more of your free time posting about it online in order to break through, but it’s a grind given the ever-escalating, relative nature of the competition.

Unless the lottery or a new work opportunity vaults you into the top 20% of income earners or you’re fine spending the majority of your time crafting your online image like the Maya Millenials out there, you have little chance of breaking through. And if there is no meaningful signalling utility from the consumption goods, services, and activities you could buy with increased income, why work more than you need to meet your basic needs and fund leisure? Paul Nystrom dubbed consumerism as a “philosophy of futility,” and with the Internet stoking conspicuous consumption into overdrive, more people may be starting to sense that.

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What are the implications of worker preference for leisure over wages?

A common response to a high unemployment rate, low labor force participation, and low economic productivity is the proposal of increasing wages / the minimum wage. This proposal stems from the idea in classical economics that there is a smooth, upward sloping labor supply curve, where each increase in wages yields a corresponding increase in labor supply (because the higher wages entice more people to work or people to work more hours):

Classic labour supply and demand equilibrium

The shape of this curve is a function of the marginal utility of higher income to each worker, which looks like the following:

Marginal utility of higher income, classical.

The assumption here is that each additional dollar of income is increasingly useful to a worker, because it enables the purchase of more basic goods, leisure goods, and consumption goods.

Just as there is a ceiling to the amount of income which can be spent on basic goods (food, shelter, etc), we posit that, given our above discussion, there are now natural ceilings on the amount of income which most workers will spend on leisure goods and conspicuous consumption goods.

First, the ceiling on income useful for purchasing leisure goods is the monthly cost of an ISP or cellular data plan (along with the cost of the hardware used to access the internet).

Second, the ceiling on income useful for conspicuous consumption is effectively zero – until you reach the ‘power threshold’ where you can spend enough to distinguish yourself as part of the top 20% of spenders, which is incredibly high. Every extra dollar of income you earn below this power threshold is effectively useless for the sake of conspicuous consumption, because on a relative basis it’s not enough to out-signal the ‘best.’

We propose, therefore, that the utility of marginal income actually looks like this:

The solid line depicts zero marginal utility of increased income once you have met basic needs and subscription cost of infinite media entertainment, up to the point where you break back into the top 20%.

And, as a result, there is a ‘kinky labor supply curve:’

Firms unable to meet demand for labor due to ceiling on wage elasticity.

The classical labor supply curve would intersect the labor demand curve at (E0), and although the kinky labor supply curve intersects the labor demand curve at (E2), firms can decrease wages from here without decreasing productive output, all the way down to the actual equilibrium point at (E1). This suboptimal equilibrium entails that:

There is lower employment, which is a deadweight loss to the economy (lower overall economic output). There is actually greater demand for labor than can be met, but there’s no way to realize it because marginal increases in wages yield no increase in supply of labor past the equilibrium point (E1).

Wages are lower, which is an effective economic transfer from labor to firms. Firms would actually be willing to pay higher wages to the workers they employ, but because this would not yield more hours of labor, firms do not increase wages, so every hour of labor performed by a worker is paid at a lower wage rate than workers would earn at the classical equilibrium point.

A compounding factor worth noting here is the gig economy and the increase in availability of on-demand work, which helps workers realize a much more continuous distribution of preferences for allocating time across work and leisure (vs their ability to historically do so, which would have been more discrete / discontinuous). The gig economy makes labor supply more elastic at the lower, leftmost portion of the labor supply curve and removes what you might think of as a floor on labor supply that was imposed by the standard forty hour work week. (h/t Sam Lessin for calling our attention to the gig economy as another pressure on labor supply.)

#The Kinky Labor Supply Curve Results in Lower Overall Economic Output

Because the demand for labor exceeds what workers are willing to supply, production and overall economic output are lower when workers prefer media entertainment leisure over wages.

You might argue this is a good thing. People actually prefer to spend their time consuming media over working, and we have achieved the luxury of enabling them to act on this preference. And, when people primarily consume digital media goods, the result is the production and consumption of less physical trash.

On the other hand, you might argue that lower economic output is a bad thing. Historically, economic growth has raised standards of living, increased lifespan, and has generally enabled more stable societies that are more insulated from the volatility of nature (eg, locusts eating an entire season of crops).

If you’re in the camp that thinks lower economic output is bad, the natural follow-up question is what kind of policy changes might counteract this phenomenon.

#Policies for the Leisure State

If firms are unable to generate increases in labor supply by increasing wages, government transfers to workers would be be an equally ineffective solution when workers value leisure time over increased purchasing power. This entails that the possible solution space is probably limited to taxes (and probably does not include, for example, things like wage subsidies or an increased minimum wage).

One potential solution would be to tax the unproductive leisure activities which people prefer over work. This is perhaps not as crazy as it seems, because (i) the true cost of these activities is already distorted from a consumer perspective by the advertisers who subsidize media consumption,and (ii) we already tax income and productivity – if time and money are fungible, you might just pull the idea of income tax ‘above’ the decision of how to spend time, and say that each person is responsible for investing some amount of sweat (in the form of time or money) into the public good.

Of course it would be impossible to gain political support for such a radical idea, especially when people today enjoy leisure time for free. No one would support a policy that required them to buy this time back from the state in the form of a tax.

Since media companies are capitalizing and profiting on a huge amount of attention that might otherwise be spent productively, however, taxing them for the share of the citizenry’s time that they consume could be more sensible and more practical than taxing citizens themselves.

One view of the status quo is that media companies are aggregating human attention and selling it at a discount–far below minimum wage–to advertisers in a massive arbitrage on human capital. So, the state could set the price of an hour of human attention at the minimum wage rate, and charge media companies 12% (the federal income tax rate on minimum wage) of that wage rate for each hour of human attention they consume.

Media companies would respond in one of two ways, because they no doubt earn nowhere close to the amount of profit they would need to pay this tax. They could charge more to advertisers, ending the current price arbitrage on human attention. Or, they could pass the cost on to consumers directly, charging per unit of consumption instead of offering infinite consumption for a fixed price.

#Why limit the attention tax to media companies vs all providers of leisure goods?

It seems a bit odd to single out consumption of digital media as a uniquely taxable leisure activity – why not tax all leisure activities?

What’s attractive about restricting the tax to digital media companies is that (i) they are profiting on the captured attention already and (ii) consumption of digital media is highly measurable. One of the challenges of the attention tax is measurement, and probably one of the reasons we have never considered such a tax viable in the past is the challenge of enforceability – it would be impossible for the state to measure the difference at a per citizen level of a productive unpaid hour (eg, care for a child or elderly person) from a leisure hour (spent reading a physical book).

While today it would still be difficult for the state to account for every hour of each citizen’s time, it would be quite feasible to measure each person’s hours of attention that were definitely spent consuming digital media entertainment. Taxing only these hours would be both practical and meaningful in terms of total percentage of time measured and enforceable in practice.

#Takeaways

While it is fun to explore alternative mechanisms for motivating the labor force if labor supply no longer responds to increases in wages, it is far more likely that lost worker productivity will be made up for with technology (eg, automation via robotics, software, artificial intelligence) that makes remaining workers more productive. While this would lead to a host of other problems (eg, inequality) and almost certainly lead to a welfare state, it is probably more straightforward to implement the necessary technological advances than the attention tax. Furthermore, a welfare state where most people could devote most of their time to the pursuit of leisure seems to be more consistent with preferences revealed by recent trends in labor participation and alternative uses of time.

This essay was co-authored by Andrew Kortina and Namrata Patel.