#ALSO HER LAST NAME IS LITERALLY DIETRICH?

[ocdsaraberry]

Everytime someone writing a fic has Noel mention The Blue Angel and calls it a French film I lose years of my life

[percontaion-points]

Edible Delectables chapters 5 & 6

Click to see the rest of the snark & image descripitons

Chapter 5

Minutes later, Jason parked at his apartment complex. He loved his apartment, or rather, townhouse. When he first graduated, Jason had considered buying a house, not really liking the idea of living above or below possibly noisy neighbors. However, he also knew there would be times when he wouldn’t be able to keep up maintenance on a house, and being a resident he didn’t earn enough to hire people to take care of those things for him. So instead he settled on a townhome, which he purchased as an investment. He only had one attached neighbor, an elderly woman named Emma, who loved to cook for him in return for the occasional check-up or prescription for her arthritis, along with minor handy man work when he had the time. 

It’s like the author has completely and utterly zero concept of the idea of “Was telling us about your sandwich really necessary to the progression of the story?” 

While mixing up the cake batter, Kara decided to follow through on her plans to bake thank you cupcakes for Dr. Dietrich.

I’m not saying that Jason doesn’t deserve “thank you cupcakes”. All I’m saying is that it’s a little weird that Jason gets cupcakes, and not the unnamed doctor who actually removed her appendix. 

Oh but he’s not a LOVE INTEREST so it doesn’t matter. 

"Dating a patient, Jason?"

The second Jason passed off Kara’s care to another doctor, she was no longer his patient. Plus, I don’t think that she’s anybody's patient after she was discharged from the hospital. 

"I will," he replied, nodding his head and grabbing the file he needed as he left the reception area.

Chapter 5 summary: The chapter opens with Jason wanting to visit Kara one last time before she got discharged in the morning, but his shift in the ER kept him too busy. By the time he got off, it was late at night, so he decided to go home to sleep. And then the author had to tell us all about his home, despite the fact that it was literally never brought up again. 

Kara is discharged from the hospital, and Eric and Eva come to pick her up. We then skip over two weeks, where Kara is slowly getting back into the groove of being a bakery owner. She decides that she wants to make Jason cupcakes as a thank you (but fuck the other medical staff who also helped her, I guess. No cupcakes for them!), so she makes cupcakes with stethoscopes on them. 

At the hospital, the nurse is in no hurry to page Jason. When he does show up, Kara is kind of embarrassed with how everybody is looking at them. They go into… I guess one of the doctor’s lounges? Where he eats one of her cupcakes and asks how she’s doing after her surgery. Before she goes, he asks for her number, so she gives it to him. 

After Kara leaves, Jason goes out to the front desk again, where the nurse there asks if he’s dating a patient, which is strictly against hospital policy. When Jason says no, she asks if he wants to “relieve some stress”. Jason is like “It’s also not good to date your coworkers.” and leaves. 

Chapter 6

Then I'll bake you more. ;) Kara replied. That means she's awake…

FUCKING USE THE GODDAMNED ENTER KEY. 

Kara did not say “that means she’s awake”. JFC. 

He waited a few seconds until he heard her disconnect, then looked at the display. They’d been talking for ten minutes.

How? They literally didn’t even say anything!

He grabbed the shirt out of his closet, then pulled boxers and his jeans from his dresser and quickly got dressed.

THANK YOU FOR EXPLAINING TO US THAT HE WAS WEARING GODDAMNED BOXERS. 

Some things are better left unsaid/implied, JFC. 

"So my friend was staying the night, and my parents were out. There was a bottle of wine in the refrigerator.”

Your parents sound like wonderful people who should never have been investigated for child abuse nor neglect. /sarcasm

"We agreed to a long distance relationship. I was going to move back to Seattle to go to college, along with her and our friends," he continued, "so I remained faithful, while she toured the State of Washington," he finished sarcastically. 

Kara's mouth dropped open in shock, her eyes wide, "She cheated?" 

Jason gave a humorless chuckle, "That would be putting it lightly." He took another drink and looked intently at the table in front of him. 

"That ... that's ... I don't know what to say," Kara finished lamely. She shrugged, bewildered by the thought. 

Jason just laughed. "It sucked," he agreed, laughing again, this time with more feeling. “But we were young; it was a ridiculous notion to believe it would have worked out anyway.”

I’m not saying that Kate and Jason would have worked out in the long run. But holy shit, she literally didn’t even give them a chance to see if it would have worked. 

It makes me wonder exactly how long she waited before she spread her legs. Did Jason’s family even lock up the house before she was prowling for dick? Or did she at least wait until they’d left the state?

"And reconnecting," Jason added with a wink.

Chapter 6 summary: The next day, after Jason gets off from his ER shift, he wants to call Kara but knows that it’s kind of late. He sends her a text, and when she responds almost immediately, he calls her. The next day, he makes a dinner reservation for a nicer place before he calls and asks her to dinner. 

After hanging up, he then calls Jamie to ask what he should wear. And then we’re subjected to an entire goddamned page of him getting ready. A FUCKING PAGE. 

At the restaurant, Kara can’t stop going on about how “perfect” Jason is. This takes up a page of its own. The narration veers us through a random story of how Kara got drunk with a friend when she was 12, but that’s literally not important, so don’t worry about it.

Jason then brings up how they went to high school together. Kara says that she remembers him, and tells him about how all of the girls were interested in him, despite him not dating. This leads to him telling her about Cheating Kate, which naturally makes Kara a little sympathetic. 

In turn, Jason asks who Kara’s first time was with. He’s surprised when she says somebody that they went to high school with. Kara explains that he hadn’t exactly been interested in her while they were in high school, but things were kind of different in university, even though it was only a year apart. 

[reversecreek]

hi it’s me... clicks across the linoleum of the dash wearing high heels w a spray tan like i’m a member of jersey shore suddenly..... best summary of willa is that she got moira rose as her #1 chara on a What Character Are You Most Like personality test out of thousands of options.... says so much. u can find her pinterest here n her playlist here 😋 like this or hmu fr plots!!

* ashley moore, cis female + she/her  | you know willa deneurve, right? they’re twenty-four, and they’ve lived in irving for, like, most of her life, on and off? well, their spotify wrapped says they listened to watch me by the pom poms like, a million times this year, which makes sense ‘cause they’ve got that whole sticking gold stars over old polaroids until you can barely see faces, dressing as marie antoinette at your high school prom & delivering fake laughter to a bratz doll you’re pretending is a talkshow host thing going on. i just checked and their birthday is august 1st, so they’re a leo, which is unsurprising, all things considered. ( nai, 24, gmt, she/her )

HISTORY:

willa ws born to honestly like….. the perfect family not to honk my own tit bt……………. they were jst rly quite wholesome. her mum celeste was this larger than life person who could never b contained by the four walls of any room she was in. she hd the presence of a gold glitter chess piece on an otherwise mundane wooden board. her dad marlon used to always joke that he had absolutely NO idea how he landed her bc he was just this like. rly average guy by all accounts n purposes….. blended into the sea in high skl……. had a few close friends but was never rly Notable or made a proper impression anywhere…… he always retold it as him coasting thru life until he met her in college. kind of like he’d been half awake before. they just Clicked n no-one cld believe she’d chosen him bt she was jst. completely head over heels n didn’t care what anyone had to say bc that was That

willa always very much took after celeste…… there’s this one quote i remember reading that goes vaguely like “my mom and i would sit and listen to leonard cohen and joni mitchell lyrics together. from a young age i remember her being like "i’m playing this song and when it’s done i want u to tell me what’s happening in it” n she would give me a fake glass of wine when i was 8 and i would listen and b like. i think there was an affair.” which so much summarises their dynamic…… she ws just so like. dramatic n fun n always encouraged that in willa too. her mum was like. everything she aspired to be…… got scouted by a modelling agency in college n shot one campaign before blowing it off simply bc she was bored. starred lead in a play. spent a few weeks travelling asia selling handmade candles shaped like koi fish or curled up foxes or elegantly stretched hands. dated a parisian movie star during a break she and her father took n was featured in tabloids on his arm at the premiere. sm fun n exotic stories willa literally cldn’t get enough. whenever she’d tell them to willa as a kid her dad wld roll his eyes like ohhhhh here she goes again but it’d all b playful n he’d smile bc he honestly cldn’t get enough either. the stuff dreams are made of luv (lizzie mcguire stans rise)

(car accident & death tw) so u know when ur walking down a flight of stairs n then out of nowhere u miss a step n u get that lurch in ur stomach like ur in free fall? yeah. i won’t go into it too much but one night they were driving back from getting frozen yogurt and then suddenly they weren’t. she doesn’t rly remember much about it except for completely ignoring the doctors trying to give her the news and just saying “dad chose pecan. who chooses pecan?” n repeating that over n over n over until it didn’t rly register in her ears as english any more.

willa was uprooted from irving at 11 to go n live w her aunt in NY. this was like. a huge adjustment honestly….. her aunt blanche hd always been a little unconventional bt extremely glamorous. she lived in an old defunct theatre she’d bought out n came from a lot of money. willa’s mum’s side of the family hd always been well off bt celeste opted to live a little more Ordinarily shall we say after settling whereas blanche ws jst balls to the walls dripping w eccentric excess…. wld say she was never naked bc she ws always wearing black opium by yves saint laurent…… probably the living embodiment of la vie boheme….. she’d been admitted a yr early to a rly prestigious parisian design school n is an AMAZING seamstress. a corset she stitched a broadway star into got commissioned fr an actress’ red carpet walk at an indie film festival. rly just lived such a life rich w lots of stories n lots of talent too…… had that star quality essence tht her mum had n that was smthn willa found quite comforting everything considered.

(grief tw) u would think maybe a situation like this (one involving so much sudden change) wld cause a kid of tht age to withdraw into her shell bt willa only came out of her shell MORE. she coped w her situation by spinning it into a celebrity origin story inside her head. the tear jerker tale someone tells during their x factor audition to get the judges rooting for them. mentally streamlining things. repackaging all that hurt as a surefire ticket to success bc it had to be useful for something right? there had to b a point to it right? willa decided the point was she’s a star. KFHSGKFHGFKHGKJSFHG. get it girl….. she ws literally just like ok well clearly i’m destined to be famous n i’m the main character of this story. this story called earth. it’s all about me.

rly heavily immersed herself in her high skl theatre scene……. loved experimenting w fashion n literally wore the most outlandish things like. she treated the hallways like her milan f/w debut every new school yr…… a lot of the things she wore were actual like. costumes frm her aunt’s collection…… she has a multi-story closet u have to climb ladders to reach things in like a very rustic library…. it rly wasn’t uncommon for willa to turn up one day corsetted like a pirate with billowing sleeves or sporting the baby blue gingham of a swedish milk maid. it’s like she literally jst…… became a role. always. every day. the world ws her stage. the cameras were always rolling. her aunt only encouraged this tbh n honestly? icon. we love to see it. willa partied a bunch n rly lived a lax lifestyle where responsibility was concerned…. her aunt ws her best friend…… made rly gd friends with performers in the drag club scene n loved the glitz of that….. lots of wild nights turned grossly bright mornings

snagged an agent fresh into her first yr of college (she gt accepted to a pretty competitive theatre program at [redacted] in NY bc i haven’t looked into what that wld be yet <3 i’m merely a helpless british lass <3) n booked a few commercials n things….. when i say willa wld enter audition rooms like she owned the place i’m rly not exaggerating…. once she turned up to a casting call for MEN n just walked right to the front of the line scraping a random chair along the way n then took a seat w her legs crossed popping a bubble in her gum as they all glared at her like wtf is literally going on who are u. she received several complaints n she was just like “ur all acting so jealous of me….”

i feel like she got a pretty big role in a theatre production in her last yr at school. haven’t decided what yet. maybe smthn rocky horror or even mimi in rent. this was meant to b some like huge moment for willa like yes girl finally making it ur on ur way this is what u wanted n she WAS happy abt it but once it was wrapped she jst had this strange like Huh feeling in her chest……. n a la celeste w all her exciting stories was just like well i’ve done that so what’s next? i think she’d graduate n then jst suddenly decide to move to irving in a fit of impulse. to all her college friends she’d be like “ugh a beach retreat is so necessary honestly the city is sooooooooo toxic this place cld literally enlarge my pores if i wasn’t so rigorous with my skincare routine” bt like 🤔 what u seeking girl? results pending.

SO basically i feel like she finally moved back to irving little over a yr ago. she hd a brief stint starring on a reality tv show tht filmed in one of the larger beach houses where her dog gained a handful of fan accounts dedicated to him……. u maybe will see why in the first bullet point of her personality section………… FKGHKSHFGGKFSHKHG. honestly she ws received pretty well too (mostly bc she’s so fking dramatic n like a caricature of a person) bt it wasn’t anything to warrant actual Fame (despite what willa herself might think). she’s mostly jst like. chilling honestly. accepting scripts n flying out fr auditions still. she’ll nab the occasional part bt she’s looking for that One Thing that rly feels like her big moment….. otherwise i cn just imagine her treating irving like a little dollhouse compared to the roaring mansion of NYC n having fun playing around in it. strikes a pose w a hand on my hip…. and now to personality.

PERSONALITY:

got a very large n lithe greyhound n named him marlene dietrich bc she was a black n white hollywood starlet famously known for her affairs n “bedroom eyes”. willa was like ugh. icon status instantly. didn’t rly foresee the responsibilities tht came w owning a dog tht loves exercise n complains abt him being like “ugh he wants to run soooooooooo much 🙄 like where are u literally going”. having said tht loves him dearly n he can often be seen wearing little clothes. a baby’s bonnet. a quilted leather waistcoat. a custom dog boa. he’s very glamorous. willa calls him a gay icon despite no evidence to support this theory. she also says he can sniff out evil in ppl so she brings him sometimes when she’s first introduced to a friend’s new bf n if his nose quivers a certain way she’s like “marlene has spoken. it’s done”. her friends r like omg? what’s done? willa gets up n walks away without elaborating. marlene’s little paws clicking along the floor w attitude.

literally dressed as marie antoinette for her high skl prom even tho there was no theme pertaining to this. jst loves the spotlight. can fake cry and WILL to get out of a parking ticket or teach someone to watch their tone or even simply for the theatrics of it all. the Most dramatic………….. rly fits being an actress like when people find out what she does it’s very like oh that makes sense.

says she doesn’t get hangovers. she’s just like “i revoked that it doesn’t happen to me”. alludes tht this is bc she’s an all powerful deity that was Chosen to be Blessed bt really she’s jst great at bouncing back n acting fine even w a blistering headache. it’s about believing the performance so much that u even convince urself.

has an extremely elevated sense of self importance bc this is kind of the equivalent of several layers of bubble wrap to cushion her frm the world. strives to b extraordinary bc ordinary honestly feels like a death sentence n there’s nothing she’d want to b seen as less. despite this weight she puts on that she rly doesn’t tend to let ppl’s opinions affect fr the most part like she’s quite firmly set in this I’m Literally The Most Gorgeous And Beautiful Angel Star Creature To Walk This Narsty Little Earth view

probably an incredibly big fan of dramatic short lived love affairs. she wants the glamour of it all. the scandal. the randomly breaking up w someone in a public place n sliding on sunglasses after delivering the words over a freshly ordered coffee (tht she’ll leave without drinking bc that’s star power babey she waits fr no man or no hot beverage)…….. has no preference gets w any n all regardless of gender……… romanticises things so they hv a better spin or story in her head n doesn’t rly take things seriously like jst has fun in her fantasy world…. she’s like ugh chuck i know u wanted to marry me but i’m a beautiful bird in a cage n u literally need to undo the latch n set me free……. the guy’s like……. my name’s chase n we’ve only been on two dates….. willa’s like…… please don’t take this so hard i can tell ur besides urself but people r starting to stare……. gets up n leaves. no-one was staring. chase is confused n honestly probably semi concerned fr her welfare.

always has to b the hottest n most glamorous person in a grocery store…. probably goes to them when she doesn’t even need anything jst holding a basket nonchalantly over her forearm glancing over at a cashier in her wizard of oz corset seamed interpretation on a dorothy dress thinking he wants me soooo bad it’s not even funny….. seduces him over the check out counter jst for him to ask her to come back to his so she can lean back scandalised n cry “IS THAT THE KIND OF WOMAN U THINK I AM, PAUL?! YOU’RE A GHASTLY LITTLE MAN, YOU ARE….” with all the gusto of a telenovela. attracts the shocked glances of all surrounding elderly.

speaks fluent french. probably on her brief stint on tht reality show i mentioned earlier was like “ugh can you believe Deneurve of this guy?” n in her head was like this catchphrase is sensational it’ll catch on fast the twittersphere is abt to implode but it didn’t become a thing except for in a small isolated community. despite this she’s like “yeah it went viral….. go figure. just another day in the life.”

honestly like a lot of fun bt also a huge handful at the same time. keeps her real Serious emotions in a locked box bt is always overflowing w melodramatics n rly giving her all at the drop of a hat where Performing is concerned. probably Loves parties n sees them as another form of production in which she wants to b the lead. rly just. loves herself. except does she? 🤔 lifts my hand up like rihanna n winks. find out next time. lucky by britney plays as i slowly disintegrate in spiderman rp…..

WANTED CONNECTIONS

unrequited flame: willa burns thru people like matches. bright n fast. honestly i feel like she struggles to take romance seriously so it cld be fun to play around with someone who’s been singed by that in the past…. mayb they hd actual feelings whereas willa was just messing around n having fun…. living la vida loca so to speak…….. we can discuss a time frame or specifics to expand upon this but. sexy angst perhaps.

those she knew from childhood: willa moved to NY at 11 n i feel like it was very sudden n soon after the accident. maybe she didn’t even say goodbye. maybe they were rly close n all of a sudden she didn’t show up to school the next day n when they rode past her house on their bike the sign said sold and that was that. honestly very dramatic of her even at a young age. we love a disappearing act. houdini who?

acting rival: honestly jst feel like this cld be funny. willa’s so dramatic she’d be like i literally want them dead they’re a despicable little gremlin fr trying to steal my spotlight. cld be as simple as having auditioned a few times fr the same parts or something.

childhood sweetheart: i think it cld be rly cute n sad if there was someone that kind of echoed the dynamic her mum n dad had except she was the celeste n they were the marlon…. (open to any gender)…….. so like. willa was always very larger than life commanding attention in a room n they were more to the sidelines but they just kind of got each other n brought out the best in one another. added angst to the fact tht willa wld maybe want to avoid them as much as possible now bc it dredges up feelings she doesn’t want to confront where her parents r concerned n also in a way any possibility of them winding up together feels like sellotaping an expiration date to both of their foreheads in willa’s brain

someone who was either a fan of or also on the reality show willa was: i imagine it like a reinvention of the hills honestly except based in these irving beach houses…. probably didn’t run that long bt there was a bunch of drama on it mostly staged…… maybe they were willa’s love interest bt it was all fake fr the cameras…… it wasn’t like. a huge deal n didn’t rly catch flight so much where popularity’s concerned bt. cld be fun to play with <3

patti frands: jogs in high knees to translate that into party friends as i adjust my spectacles. willa’s very sociable bt she’s also like kind of full of herself n obnoxious so do with that what u will. KFHGKSHGKGHFSKG. she knows hw to have a gd time tho like growing up she was rly into the gay club scene n the drag scene in NY so like. let’s hear it fr the gays who know how to do it right <3

someone equally over the top: i luv the idea of willa having someone who just like runs with made up scenarios n roles she makes up on the spot n them hanging out is like a 24/7 improv session tht they reel random surrounding strangers just fr the fun thrill

the other woman: willa is quite detached n selfish so she wld easily be the other woman in a relationship n not care about it n this cld make for good spice <3

[guigz1-coldwar]

'Moment of truth' : New chapter for "Redemption in a Spirit in a Cold War" is out !

"Moment of truth"

Chapter Summary : While Yirina is having a stop with Park as they were on their way to London, she can finally have an answer......

To read it on AO3, click here !

Words : +4000

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I never thought that the day I will come back to West-Berlin that something will send me away from the place again and hopefully, it was an better place than Cuba. With Park, I had to go with her to meet an SAS soldier at Hereford in England that wanted to meet us to talk about Stone himself despite that before, all the ex-coworkers of Stone didn't want to talk about him and his services inside the organization and to be honest about it, I didn't expect at all that this particular soldier was the one who described Stone.....John Price Sr. .

He mainly talked to me about Stone as Park had to pick up an call from Woods and she wasn't so willing to know something that she already know about. I could see that she was still angry about importants details including the fact that Harry Stone is considered as an hero for the british people and despited by everyone who knows about his true identity & motives...that's mean every single counter-espionages organizations in the West. Everyone knows about him and even with that, there's nothing that they can do to ruin his 'good' reputation.

Price allowed me to discover more about who was Park's brother : William Elijah Park, a SAS soldier that was under the command of Price himself...killed by Stone, like Park said to me, in 1973 because William was given informations on Stone by someone from inside Perseus but also because of the rivalry Stone & William got after an accident in 1972....before Price gave me an picture of Park and her brother....an picture that I prefered to give her back before we left the place and by surprise, we're going back to London instead of taking the plane back to West-Berlin.

Park decided to take the wheels as we had at least 3 hours of driving from Hereford to arrive in London and during 1 hour and 30 minutes, we didn't talk too much except to know if the other was well as we were both in our respectives thoughts : she was maybe still trying to get over the fact that she was given an picture she never saw and me....I was still asking myself questions about Portnova's status but also about Zasha's one.

"Someone is tired, I seen." I said as I just saw Park yawning, putting her right hand in front of her mouth, the other hand still on the steering wheel while driving on the road.

"Yeah....I didn't sleep so much last night." She defended herself, sounding very low as she put her hand back on the steering wheel. "I had some troubles to get to sleep properly." She added, getting her eyes focused back on the road.

"You think that you can handle the rest of the drive or you want me to do it ?" I asked to her as I could see her narrowing her eyes, getting too tired.

"Do you know where's the road to London ?" She asked me back in a curious tone, redressing myself on my seat.

"Of course, follow the road signs and if the numbers get low, we're in the good direction." I exclaimed, looking outside, seeing one of the road signs saying that we were getting soon to Oxford.....before I yawned too.

"You still sure to drive ?" She raised an eyebrow to me, giving me a litle glare.

"Guess that we have to stop somewhere then." I proposed as it was the only thing to do now and she nodded, looking at the road signs.

"We're near Oxford." She whispered before looking at me briefly. "I know a place near the city where we could have a normal sleep."

"You seems to know everything around here." I scoffed about that and she looked at me with her left eye that could see 'did you really said this ?'

"Yirina, I used to study at Oxford !" She said, proud of it before smiling at me. "Of course, I know the place well." She added as she started to drive with the car, leaving the highway we were on, apparently, getting to an small town near Oxford called Farmoor.

"What's this place ?" I asked as we were arriving five minutes after we left the highway, seeing an sort of big lake on my left through the car window.

"Farmoor Reservoir." She replied before she, with the car, entered a very small parking with an big view on the lake, it was just us and no one else. "Sometimes, during my studies back in the old days, I used to hang out in there." She then stopped the car engine.

"You want us to sleep in here ?" I questioned her, looking around as I was very curious to sleep in that type of place in the middle of nowhere.

"Why not ?" She said back before I sniffed in approval to her, admiring the place around.

"Looks very charming in here." I exclaimed, looking back at her, who started to remove her jacket to put above her chest as I do the same too....some sort of blanket for ourselves. "Okay, can I ask you something ?"

"Yes ?" She breathed, looking at me.

"Tell me something that even me....I don't know about you." It was something little that I wanted to ask to her, looking at her very curiously. "Anything." She laughed at me gently before looking outside, thinkful.

"When I was an kid, I used to have an pony, doing horse riding." She said like that, making my eyes go wide about it. "It was something that I liked to do for an long time until I stopped when I entered the Oxford University." She looked at me, biting an part of her lips to me, wondering what was my reaction and frankly, I never thought that she had something like that.

"Wow, that's cool." I whispered as I could see that she wanted now to know something about me too. "You want to know something too ?" She nodded, causing me to search through my memories I have relived in my head. "Okay." I took a deep breath, having found something I had relived the second day we were in West Germany, looking at my left hand, especially the burned mark I had. "I did my coming out to Perseus as he tried to find me an 'good husband'....literally on his face."

"Really ?" Park had her hand on her face, her arm put against the seat to look at me.

"Yeah, I could still remember his jaw dropped when I told him that, he left my office right away." I laughed before I looked away, feeling suddenly sad. "He never really approved of it and said that he will heal me....guess that didn't work." I laughed again, trying to break the sad mood at the end.

"You do as you want to do, Yiri." Park affirmed, putting her hand on my shoulder, making me smile. "We don't give an fuck if people said that it's not something to do, we need to stay proud of our own status."  She got closer to me, getting our foreheads against each other "And I know that I'm proud of you." She pulled me for an kiss.

"I love you, Park." I whispered, taking some air before getting back into the kiss, reinforcing it with my hands before I broke the kiss again. "I think that we should sleep now."

"Yeah, you're right." We withdrawed from each other as we both getting comfy in our seats, looking at each other. "Good night, Yiri."

"Good night, Park." I whispered as I finally found closing my eyes, seeing Park also closing hers too slowly, feeling my body getting to sleep....this place was very nice to see....it was like an night under the stars of England....

I opened my eyes again finding myself into an stopped car in the front passenger seat and by looking outside the car.....it was the Spandau Prison in West-Berlin, the car was parked in the parking's prison....the day I have maybe helped Zasha escape from it....finally....after all these times, I can see it. At the driving seat, there was Dietrich, tapping nervously on the steering wheel, awaiting for something to happen or someone to come. We were both dressed with casual clothes....more like MI6 agents to say.

My feet was trembling about what was going to happen maybe in a few minutes before I took something out of my pocket : a fake MI6 credentials with an false name on it : Julie McKnight as Dietrich got one out too : he was named 'Daniel Folson.' . It was just the two of us in the car and like the plan told, we had to infiltrate ourselves in the prison and get Zasha out and MY plan was to get Zasha out alive from the the city before Perseus can do a thing about.

"You speak well the british accent, Grigoriev ?" Dietrich asked me, turning around to look at me as my eyes was on my fake credentials.

"Why're you asking ?" I started, confused. "I wouldn't be here if I didn't....because you can't speak the accent, I presume ?" I asked back to him who looked away.

"Pfff....of course, I can talk like those tea drinkers." He affirmed as I redressed myself on my seat, my back against the door

"Really ? Show me then." I looked at him seriously, awaiting for him to speak with the british accent before he snorted away, seeing me as ridiculous.

"We don't have time for this." He exclaimed, almost sounding angry as he continued to tap nervously with his hands on the wheel. "And accent or not, it's not an problem."

"Think what you think, Dietrich." I whispered, looking at the prison front door.

"You have an problem ?" He asked me and I looked at him, seriously again.

"Yeah, with people like you." I poked at him before someone suddenly appear at Dietrich window. It was an british guard, probably the one that was associated to Perseus who start to knock at the window to get Dietrich attention as he open the door.

"You're the two that need to get Krypto out ?" The guard asked us and we nodded with me keeping an straight face to the two.

"Can you tell us about the plan ?" Dietrich questioned him, curious.

"First and before getting to the room where Krypto is detained, we had to put an explosive charge in the boiler room for an distraction in case of something bad." The guard replied, looking around him in case someone was watching us. "I'm going to lead you there before I let you alone to get to Krypto and then, you're out of here with them."

"Fine, let's do this." Dietrich looked at me with an neutral face as we prepared our credentials to strap them on our jackets before taking some stolen silenced M1911 with us under the jacket, me removing the silencer and putting it away, knowing that the risk of getting frisked is high....a risk that Dietrich doesn't seem to acknowledge. "It's gonna be an breaking day."

We got out of the car like if it was normal as the guard was awaiting for us from away, not breaking our cover. I took a deep breath as we started to walk to get to the front door of the administrative building of the prison, exactly where Zasha was detained. The guard faked to greet us for the first time before we entered the building, acting like perfect MI6 agents and then, first problem that was obligated to have : a checkpoint that we have to pass with guards frisking everyone.

Even with our MI6 credentials, we have to get ourselves frisked by the guards and to faciliate their task, I removed my own M1911 on the counter of the guards security post before getting frisked by another guard. Dietrich was looking nervous as he removed his silenced gun and put it on the same counter, making the guards look at him suspiciously.

"Silenced gun ?" The guard behind the counter asked, looking at the gun and back at him as we,me & Dietrich were both frisked. "Any reasons why ?"

"Can't explain, I must have forget to remove it from the last operation we just had." Dietrich replied, sounding stressed in his voice.

"Don't worry, he's just an dumbass." I faked an laugh to the guard behind the counter who laughed back at Dietrich, he was looking almost angered but forced to smile.

"Good one !" The guard behind the counter pointed at me, laughing before getting serious again. "You can go, your guns will stay here until you leave the place." The other guards finished to frisk, letting us free to pass, without our guns as the Perseus guard gestured us to follow him to the boiler room that was at a few hallways from the room where Zasha was. Once we entered far enough in the boiler room, I could see the angered face of Dietrich.

"You must be stupid to do this, Grigoriev." He poked at me, still angry about what I did as we arrived just next to the place we wanted to put the charges.

"You are the stupid one." I called him back as we were almost caught by his fault. "You didn't remove your silencer from your gun."

"Okay, kids." The Perseus guard put himself between me & Dietrich "We have things to do than breaking each others necks about something that you just passed." He then looked at us as we were getting our temper down. "Good ?" We nodded.

"Let me place the charge then." Dietrich started to move away from me as the guard showed him where he has hidden the explosives as me....I was thinking of something, I needed to dispose of these guys.

Who's saying that they could try to act immediately after we got to Zasha as the guard was the only one armed and he could give his gun to Dietrich to do the job. So, I had to neutralize those guys and better, kill them here now ! I looked behind me at the entrance of the boiler room that was closed before looking back at the two, trying to set the charge up with the guard up and Dietrich almost sit. I took a deep breath, viewing the situation and then, it was time for me to act against them.

I approached the guard from behind and in an second, I grabbed him, putting my arms around his neck, causing him to fall back before I brutally break his neck in half, killing him instantly as Dietrich started to react. As I stepped back to avoid an punch that he tried to give, he managed to get his hands on the dead guard baton, now trying to give me strikes with it but I was avoiding each one of them, making them land on the walls or on the boiler machines.

Finally, I was able to grab his right arm where he was using the baton before I nudged it with all my might, breaking his arm and causing him to scream silently. I then managed to grab him by the collar and to throw him on a table that was near by, his head not on it.

"You traitor !" He spoke up, almost loudly as I was still holding him by his neck "You betrayed Perseus."

"Did I ?" I asked him. "I wasn't going to let him kill my friend."

"All of this....for Krypto !" He whispered to himself, trying to look away from me.

"For the last fucking time...." I started, getting myself ready to put him out of his misery, my head closer to him. "Their name is Zasha Smirnov !" I then used my right feet to strike him on his face, causing to break his neck more harder than the guard.

I removed my hands from him now that I just killed without remorse two Perseus agent in the middle of an western-controlled prison. I took again an breath, leaving the bodies in here as I started to walk away from the room, just alone. I stepped out of it, now going into the direction of the room where Zasha was detained in here. No one in here was getting suspicious of me, not even wondering where was the second MI6 agent that was with me.

I arrived near the room where Zasha was that was watched by two guards and the two stepped away when I showed them my credentials, apparently acknowledging that the MI6 wanted to be talk with. They opened the door, revealing Zasha themselves, not hurt at all and handcuffed on a chair.

"Yir....." They started as I entered the room before I put my index finger in front of my mouth, gesturing them to stop.

"Julie McKnight, MI6." I showed them my credentials, knowning that I was acting now and they nodded in approval. "We heard that you wanted to talk to us ?" They nodded again. "Guards." I called them as the door was still open.

"Yes, miss ?" One of the guards said, looking at me.

"Can you please detach them from their handcuffs ?" I asked the guard. "They are needed to be interrogate somewhere else."

"Understood." The guard replied as he started to move to get next to Zasha, taking the keys from his belt to detach Zasha from their handcuffs.

"What's your name ?" I fainted to ask to Zasha.

"Hmm...Smirnov, miss McKnight." They responded in a worried voice, fake one too as they were finally free.

"Good, stay next to me then." I ordered them as I moved next to them before walking away together from the room, the guard following us behind and taking back his post. "Don't stress, Zed." I whispered to them once we were no longer in the same hallway as the guards and they nodded again.

We arrived in the checkpoint again, the guard giving me back my gun, wondering why my 'colleague' wasn't here for me and I had to explain that he lost his way to get to the toilets, making the guard laugh again before he finally let us free to go outside with Zasha at my side, keeping an eye on them as we stepped out outside to get back to the car I used with Dietrich. I installed myself inside the car at the driver seat as Zasha got next to me but I wasn't starting the engine, looking mixed.

"Zed." I started, looking at them. "Do you realize where did you put yourself to ?" I asked, keeping my cool as I put my hands on the steering wheels

"Listen, I'm sorry, okay ?" They were confused at their own actions, looking at me.

"What's got into you ? You literally left me, Portnova & even Beans behind." I exclaimed, slowly raising my voice. "I know that Dedov was maybe sick but you could have wait one more day !"

"I know, it's just.....the stress....the scare I got since Dede left." They proclaimed at me, losing their words in the process.

"You got lucky that it was me that was behind that door and not Stitch." I said as I looked outside to see an car arriving in the parking. "Perseus called me from your apartment, knowing that I will come to your place to see how've been doing....Portnova was there too when he told me what you have done."

"I'm sorry." They repeated in a sad voice as I was holding back my own tears from my face, not wanting to get angry against Zasha. "Yirina, I'm sorry." I could feel their hands on my shoulder as I was still looking outside, seeing the two persons from that car getting out .....Park....Garrett....they were there that day......

"Zed, don't do this thing again." I pleaded to them, putting my hand on their shoulder. "Let's get out of here before we got problems." I then finally started the car's engine and drove off just before the alarm was getting heard from the street, with us getting away.

I thought it was the end of it but there were something wrong in that memory.....something that was just going to happen soon.....I was still driving with Zasha to get to a safe place out of the city before I looked in the mirror, seeing an suspicious van that has been following us since we have left the prison.

"Shit, we're been followed." I exclaimed, my eyes back on the road after checking the mirror.

"Why are we followed ?" Zasha asked, worried.

"Zed.....Perseus never wanted you to stay alive, he wanted to kill you at the moment we were going to transfer you back to Russia." I replied in a low voice. "I killed two Perseus agent in that prison and they surely want to know why it's only me & you in that car."

"But....you have something planned for that, right ?" They tried to not look behind the car as I was making some quick glares to the mirror, I shook my head,

"Listen, you need to stay focused and act like if you don't know." I ordered them as, with the car, I entered an sort of wasteland just outside of the city to park the car. "Trust me, Zasha." I added before I stopped the car, taking a deep breath as I saw the van enter the wasteland as well. "Stay here." I ordered them again before I stepped out of the car. I could see Hans, getting out of the van with two armed men, accompanying him.

"Grigoriev !" Hans almost shouted. "Where's Dietrich ?"

"He got himself arrested after he tried to break into an office." I replied, lying to him as I prepared my hands on my waist, ready. "Guy wasn't an genius after all."

"Don't talk about him like that." He exclaimed before looking behind me, seeing Zasha in the car. "Hey, Kryto, get your fucking ass....." He wanted to continue but in me, I felt the rage to still hear that name and then, I acted now, drawing the M1911 I was using to shoot 2 bullets in each guy behind Hans before shooting the last 3 remaining bullets in Hans, wounding him critically, hitting him in the shoulders and the chest.

"Zed !" I moved my head, keeping an eye on the van in case someone was hidden before I realized that it was just Hans and the guy I just shot down that were here. "You can come out." I suggested and the door opened as I removed my gun back into my jacket.

"You killed them.....like you did to those guys in Ukraine." They expressed, referring to another event like this.

"I had no choice, those people only deserved death." I looked back at Zasha, looking almost relieved to have done this. "Listen, I need to go back to Russia to get Portnova & Beans out." I added as I handed them the car keys. "Since Perseus will think that you're dead, you're free now."

"You remember where we are needing to join together in London ?" I nodded to them....but I couldn't know it right now. "Yirina, there's something that I want you to give to Portnova." They put their hands in their pocket, revealing an letter......the same letter that I retrieved in my old box back to Belikov place an month ago..... "Can you give this to her ?"

"I'll try my best to do it." I whispered before I took the letter in hand, putting it into my pocket as I heard Hans groaning. "Just die for fuck sake !" I yelled to him as I moved to grab one of the dead guy gun to shoot all of its mag on Hans wounded body, killing him.

"Yirina." I could hear Zasha's voice behind me, putting their hand on my shoulder. "Please, come back with my Yiri....come back for me and Dedov." They added before they decided to kiss me on the left cheek, making me grin a little about it.

"Zed..." I breathed before I do the same : kissing them on their cheek too and then, I put my arms around them to hug them, wanting them to feel secured and alive to have been saved by me, I just wanted their safety "Please, live your life and be free." I added with an smile before I let them walk to the driver's door of the car, seeing an smile on their face as they opened the door of the car.....

"Yirina, we're going to do this....we're going to bring Perseus down !"

[nanasarea]

tags (tyyy @bumblebeenct ily)

tagging (even tho I think like most of you have done this haha): @mjlkau @hyuckiecore @flirtyhyuck @lucas-wongs @stayinzencity @jaemallow @mikailo666 @neocitybynight @jisvnq 

A.  it’s time to love yourself! choose your 5 (or so) favorite works you created in the past year (fics, art, edits, etc.) and link them below to reflect on the amazing things you brought into the world in 2020. tag as many writers/artists/etc. as you want so we can spread the love and link each other’s awesome works!-

1.  Time Travel Agent (my longest and one of my fave fics so far) 

Prompt: renjun failed math and now instead of being 25, you’re 15 and stuck in a timeline without him

this is by far my fave fic I've ever written, it combines my two loves, its not only a Renjun fic, its a FIVE!RENJUN, it was so fun to write and I'm v really proud of it overall haha

2.  Marathon 

Prompt: Park Jisung  was good at running track, but he was also good at running his mouth, and through your mind. 

purely because track!jisung lives in my head rent free 

3.  [23:29] (jisung) and [14:12] (renjun)

mainly because I remember the exact moment when these ideas came to me and I remember screaming

4.  M’lady + M’lady ii

Prompt:  In which you and chenle become the superhero defenders of your town 

yes because I shall die with my Chenle Agreste agenda, Chenle Noir is my weakness and if its not yours, how. (plus it was so fun to write)

5. the whole as your best friend series ( Jaemin / Jisung / Renjun / Haechan / Chenle )

because I'm sad and want them as my best friends plus they were really fun to write 

B. you’re starring in a movie with the last person you saved in your camera roll and the last song you listened to is the title. who/what is it? (which @lucas-wongs also tagged me in tyyy ily)

Okay we been knew tho???

C. 10 Song Shuffle Game you can usually tell a lot about a person by the type of music they listen to! put your favorite playlist on shuffle and list the first 10 songs. then tag 10 people! no skipping!

Why Don't We Go There-One Direction

My Axe-Insane Clown Posse

Blood // Water -Grandson

Looking At Me-Sabrina Carpenter

Talk Too Much-COIN

505 - Arctic Monkeys

Babylon-5SOS

Hayloft - Mother Mother

Now Or Never - Julie and The Phantoms cast

We Young- NCT DREAM

D. Various songs tag

a song that's your serotonin booster: Temporary Fix - One Direction

a song to which you can literally feel a heartache: Unsaid Emily - Julie and the phantom cast

your current repeat song: Pierre- Ryn Weaver

a song you wish you'd never forget: too many I can't choose

a nostalgic song: Hey Stephen - Taylor Swift

a song from cd/album you have: Dunk Shot - NCT DREAM

a song from your favourite group/band: We Go Up - NCT DREAM

a song from your favourite soloist: ‘tis the damn season - Taylor Swift

a song from your favourite album: Something Great - One Direction

three songs with the same name: Replay - SHINee, Iyaz, Lady Gaga (I'm unoriginal and its not even 9am so I'm gonna leave replay haha)

a song starting with the first letter of your name: Maniac - Conan Gray

E. About Me!

Were you named after someone? Yes, marlene dietrich, and her real name is my middle name so its doubled haha 

Last time you cried? probably yesterday but idk why

Kids? One day, sure, but until then, I shall just continue being a mom to my friends haha

Do you use sarcasm a lot? Unintentionally yes

First thing you notice about people? Hair and clothes probably

Eye colour? Brown

Scary movie or Happy Ending? Happy, I can't handle scary movies

Any special talents? Being extremely average at everything I do :)

Where were you born? Slovenia 

Hobbies? Drawing/painting, writing (lyrics and lit), jewellery making and crying

Pets? I have a dog named after Baekhyun (his name is Baek)

What sports do you play / have played? Haha I can't sport 

Favourite subject at school? none? probably English tho just because its usually a free period for me haha plus me and my friends sit together in this like square/circle and its really fun

Dream Job? I wish I knew too, I want like 101 jobs, I want to be a shop owner (jewellery and gifts or witchcraft), kindergarten teacher, music producer, interior designer,.....

F. Top 5 Songs Recently

Blood//Water - grandson

Temporary Fix - One Direction

Potential Break Up Song - Aly & AJ

Work It - NCT U

no body no crime - Taylor Swift

:)))))))))))

[entamewitchlulu]

so i did a reading challenge this year and i wanna talk about what i read

transcription under the cut

i did Popsugar 2019 and wanna talk about what i read:  Book Reccs and Anti-Reccs 

1.) Becoming a Movie in 2019: Umbrella Academy (vol 1) by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

4/5. A fascinating take on superpowers, dysfunctional families, and the apocalypse. Can get pretty gory, confusing here and there and you have to pay close attention to panels for lore, but overall an entertaining romp.

2.) Makes you Feel Nostalgic: Circles in the Stream by Rachel Roberts

4/5. Middle grade novel about the magic of music, belief, and of course, friendship. Definitely written for kids, and has some unfortunately clumsy Native rep, but overall an absolute joy to dive into once again.

3.) Written by a Musician: Umbrella Academy (vol 2) by Gerard Way and Gabriel Ba

4/5. Ramps up the confusion to ridiculous degrees with some absolutely bonkers, unexplained arcs, but still fun to watch this dysfunctional family do its dysfunctional thing.

4.) You Think Should be Turned into a movie: All That Glitters by Rachel Roberts

4/5. Continuation of Circles in the Stream, but with more unicorns, more rainbows, and more fae, which makes it automatically even better than the first.

5.) With At Least 1 Mil. Ratings on Goodreads: 1984 by George Orwell   

1/5. I understand why it's important and all but wasn't prepared for some of the more graphic scenes and the overall hopelessness of the message.  Would not recommend or read again.

6.) W/ a Plant in the title or cover: The secret of Dreadwillow carse by Brian farrey

5/5. A fantasy world where everyone is always happy, save for one girl and the princess, who set out to solve the mystery of their kingdom. Poignant and great for kids and adults.

7.) Reread of a favorite: Cry of the Wolf by Rachel Roberts

4/5. Yet another installment in the Avalon: Web of Magic series, which clearly I am obsessed with.  Please just read them.

8.) About a Hobby: Welcome to the Writer's Life by Paulette Perhach

5/5. A welcome kick in the pants, chock full of great advice told without condescension, and full of hope and inspiration for writers both new and old.

9.) Meant to read in 2018: The Poet x by Elizabeth Acevedo  

4/5. Absolutely beautiful coming of age novel told in verse.  Do yourself a favor and listen to the audiobook version.

10.) w/ "pop," "sugar," or "challenge" in the title: Black Sugar by Miguel Bonnefoy

2/5. I think maybe I just don't understand this genre.  Or maybe the translation was weird. I was confused.  

11.) w/ An Item of Clothing or Accessory on the cover: Our dreams at Dusk by Yuhki Kamatani

4/5. It had a lot more slurs/homophobia than I was prepared for, but otherwise is a very touching, relatable collection of queer characters living in a heteronormative world.

12.) Inspired by Mythology or Folklore: Ravenous by MarcyKate Connolly

3/5. A girl goes on an impossible quest to save her brother from a child-eating witch. Really wanted to like it more because I loved the first one, Monstrous, but it dragged a little.

13.) Published Posthumously: The Islands of Chaldea by Diana Wynne Jones

3/5. I adore Diana Wynne Jones, but this one was missing some of the magic of her other books. Not sure if it was because it had to be finished by someone else, or if I just grew out of her stories.

14.) Set in Space: Binti by Nnedi Okorafor

4/5. Powerfully written story of a girl straddling tradition and innovation, who wields power through mathematical magic, surviving on a spaceship alone with a dangerous alien occupation after everyone else has been killed.

15.) By 2 Female Authors: Burn for Burn by Jenny Han and Siobhan Vivian

2/5. Ostensibly a story about a revenge pact in a small island town, but leaves far too many dangling threads to attempt alluring you to the sequel.

16.) W/ A Title containing "salty," "bitter," "Sweet," or "Spicy": The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith  

3/5. It's okay but I literally just never know what anyone means at any time. Are they being reticent on purpose or do i just not understand communication

17.) Set in scandinavia: Vinland Saga by Makoto Yukimura

2/5. Technically and historically accurate and well made, but the story itself is not my cup of tea.  Very gory.

18.) Takes Place in a Single Day: Long WAy Down by Jason Reynolds

4/5. A boy goes to avenge his murdered brother, but ghostly passengers join him on the elevator ride down. Stunning and powerful character-driven analysis.

19.) Debut Novel: Nimona by Noelle Stevenson

4/5. Charming and then surprisingly heart-breaking comic about Nimona, a shapeshifter who wants to become a villain's minion. Really love the villain/hero dynamic going on in the background, along with the dysfunctional found family.

20.) Published in 2019: The Book of Pride by Mason Funk  

4/5. A collection of interviews with the movers, shakers, and pioneers of the queer and LGBTQ+ community.  An absolutely essential work for community members and allies alike.

21.) Featuring an extinct/imaginary creature: Phoebe and her Unicorn by Dana Simpson

4/5. Incredibly charming, Calvin and Hobbes-esque collection of comics featuring the adventures of Phoebe and her unicorn best friend.

22.) Recced by a celebrity you admire: The Emerald Circus by Jane Yolen

2/5. Recced by my fave author Brandon Sanderson. An unfortunately disappointing anthology proving that any story can be made uninteresting by telling the wrong section of it.

23.) With "Love" in the Title: Book Love by Debbie Tung

4/5. One of those relatable webcomics, only this one I felt super hard almost the entire time.  Books are awesome and libraries rule.

24.) Featuring an amateur detective: Nancy Drew: Palace of Wisdom by Kelly Thompson

4/5. REALLY love this modern take on Nancy Drew, coming back home to her roots to solve a brand new mystery. Diverse cast and lovely artwork, though definitely more adult.

25.) About a family: Amulet by Kabu Kibuishi

4/5. Excellent, top tier graphic novel about a sister and brother who have to go rescue their mother with a mysterious magic stone. LOVE that the mom gets to be involved in the adventure for once.

26.) by an author from asia, Africa, or s. America: Girls' Last tour by Tsukumizu

4/5. Somehow both light-hearted and melancholy. Two girls travel about an empty, post-apocalyptic world, and muse about life and their next meal.

27.) w/ a Zodiac or astrology term in title: Drawing down the moon by margot adler

3/5. A good starting place for anyone interested in the Neo Pagan movement, but didn't really give me what I was personally looking for.

28.) you see someone reading in a tv show or movie: The Promised NEverland by Kaiu Shirai

4/5. I don't watch TV or movies where people read books so i think reading an adaptation of a TV series after watching the series counts. Anyway it was good but beware racist caricatures

29.) A retelling of a classic: Meg, Jo, Beth, and Amy by Rey Terciero

5/5. We can stop the Little Women reboots and retellings now, this is the only one we need. In fact, we can toss out the original too, this is the only one necessary.

30.) w/ a question in the title: So I'm a spider, so what? by Asahiro Kakashi

4/5. Cute art despite the subject matter, and a surprisingly enthralling take on the isekai genre. Love the doubling down on the video game skills.

31.) Set in a college or university campus: Moonstruck (vol 2) by Grace Ellis

2/5. An incredibly cute, beautiful, and fascinating world of modern magic and creatures, but unfortunately falls apart at the plot and pacing.

32.) About someone with a superpower: Moonstruck (vol 1) by Grace Ellis

4/5. Though nearly as messy plot-wise as its sequel, the first volume is overwhelmingly charming in a way that overpowers the more confusing plot elements.

33.) told from multiple povs: The Long way to a Small, Angry Planet by becky Chambers

4/5. Told almost in a serial format, like watching a miniseries, a group of found-family spaceship crew members make the long journey to their biggest job ever.

34.) Includes a wedding: We Set the dark on fire by Tehlor kay mejia

4/5. Timely and poignant, a girl tumbles into both love and resistance after becoming one of two wives to one of the most powerful men in the country.

35.) by an author w/ alliterative name: The only harmless great Thing by brooke bolander

3/5. Much deeper than I can currently comprehend.  Beautifully written, but difficult to parse.

36.) A ghost story: Her body and other parties by Carmen Maria Machado

4/5.  It counts because one of the stories in it has ghosts. A sometimes difficult collection of surrealist, feminist, queer short stories.

37.) W/ a 2 word title: Good omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

4/5. Charming, touching, and comical, probably the best take on the apocalypse to date. Also excellent ruminations on religion and purpose.

38.) based on a true story: The faithful Spy by John Hendrix

4/5. Brilliantly crafted graphic biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and his assistance in fighting back against Nazi Germany.

39.) Revolving around a puzzle or game: the Crossover by Kwame alexander

4/5. The verse didn't always hit right with me, but the story is a sweet, melancholy one about family, loss, and moving on.

40.) previous popsugar prompt (animal in title): The last unicorn by peter s. Beagle

5/5. Absolutely one of my all-time favorite books, it manages to perfectly combine anachronism and comedy with lyricism, melancholy, and ethereal beauty.

41.) Cli-fi: Tokyo Mew Mew by Mia ikumi and Reiko Yoshida

4/5. Shut up it counts

42.) Choose-your-own-adventure: My Lady's choosing by Kitty curran

3/5. Cute in concept, a bit underwhelming in execution. Honestly, just play an otome.

43.) "Own Voices": Home by Nnedi Okorafor

3/5. The storytelling style was definitely not my style; while the first book was slow, too, it felt more purposeful. I found my attention wandering during this installment.

44.) During the season it's set in: Pumpkinheads by rainbow rowell

3/5. Cute art, but precious little substance.  The concept simply wasn't for me in the first place.

45.) LITRPG: My next life as a villainess: All routes lead to doom! by Hidaka nami

5/5. An absolute insta-fave! Charming art, endearing characters, an incredible premise, and so much sweet wholesome fluff it'll give you cavities.

46.) No chapters: The field guide to dumb birds of north america by matt kracht

3/5. It started out super strong, but the joke started to wear thin at a little past the halfway point.

47.) 2 books with the same title: Unfollow by Megan Phelps-Roger

4/5. A brave and enduring personal story of growing up in and eventually leaving the Westboro Baptist Church. Really called to me to act with grace and kindness even more in the future.

48.) 2 books with the same title: unfollow by rob williams and michael dowling

1/5. How many times do you think we can make Battle Royale again before someone notices

49.) That has inspired a common phrase or idiom: THe Outsiders by S.E. Hinton

4/5. Definitely good and deserves it's praise as something that pretty much revolutionized and created an entire demographic of literature.

50.) Set in an abbey, cloister, Monastery, convent, or vicarage: Murder at the vicarage by agatha christie

3/5. I just cannot. physically keep up with all of these characters or find the energy to read between the lines.

ok that's all i got, what did y'all read and like this year?  (oh god it’s gonna be 2020)

[brightwaterforarainyday]

@grotesque-rotten-puppet   (I hope you don’t mind me tagging you in these)

Answers to some very important questions pt. 2: Mazrah Sulein:

On a scale of “is occasionally forced to bathe” to “Instagram model with sponsors to hoe for” how involved is your OC’s Skincare routine?

Mazrah’s high charisma and familiarity with corporate and corporate security culture mean she’s almost always the one in charge of impersonating security guards/negotiating with the Johnson for higher pay/just about any interaction that doesn’t involve shooting things, so she has to be at least a bit more aware of her appearance than other members of her team. On the other hand, anything too flashy is going to make her stand out more than she would like to, so she usually just sticks to a middle ground of respectable but plain, unless a particular run requires a certain “look”. Also like, she has better things to spend time and money on. Like guns. And cool jackets.

What are your OC’s food preferences (flavors/textures/spiciness/calories/ when and how they eat) and how did they get that way?

Any kind of food that could be described as “hearty”: potatoes, soup, sausage, many pastas, that kind of stuff. It’s like a hug that you eat! Food and eating also have a lot of social connotations for Maz, which plays into her preferences quite a bit. Meals are one of the few times she gets to spend time with her team mates outside of “work”, and the trust inherent in the act of sharing food makes it a good way for the team to bond and grow closer. I feel like that might be a thing in the larger Shadowrunner community as well, as a profession where suspicion and paranoia are survival mechanisms and the price of misplaced trust is so, so high, sharing a genuine sit-down meal with others is a Big Deal.

She’s also a fan of street food for similar reasons, it’s like the Shadowrunner equivalent of having someone prepare a meal for you, with all (or, well, some of) the connotations of care and hospitality that comes with that.

What’s something pointless/petty/unimportant that IRRATIONALLY ANNOYS THE HELL out of your OC?

No one ever returns spoons to the safehouse kitchen and they’ve spent entirely too much money on replacing them already.

What’s your OC’s response to being asked for money by a homeless person?

She runs a quick risk/reward calculation that goes something like this:

Pros:

Homeless people see a lot of shit and can be a great source of information. Getting friendly with them has some strategic advantages.

Maz spent some time on the streets herself before she found a Runner squad who would take her, so she knows it’s rough.

Fellow lowlifes gotta stick together if they wanna stick it to The Man. Or, you know, survive.

Cons:

Money is always tight and earning more usually involves getting shot at.

She almost always decides to give them something, maybe ask their name too, get to know them a bit. Networking is an important part of any job, Shadowrunning included.

Does your OC get lost easily? What do they do when they do get lost?

On one hand, she has virtually constant access to the power of Future!Google Maps. On the other, sometimes Future!Google Maps is unavailable or unreliable. If she ever does find herself lost, she’ll look for: A) some kind of prominent landmark she can orient herself relative to, B) a public transit station or hub that will likely have a map, or C) someone who looks like they could give her directions.

What would STOP your OC from Doing The Right Thing in a tense situation?

“Messing with these people who hate my guts/view me as a disposable asset/are actively trying to kill me would be hilarious right now.” 

That or just plain old spite.

Realistically, could your OC (in their normal circumstances- i.e. at their own house/battlecamp/spaceship etc.) keep a small child alive for a week if they had to?  A Dog?  A Houseplant? A rock with a  smiley face painted on?

I mean, the secret hideout of a bunch of professional criminals probably isn’t the best place for a kid to hang out, but safehouses are, by definition, safe (supposedly).  Also, she has a lot of experience keeping her idiot boyfriends alive in similar circumstances, and a kid can’t be that much harder.

If your OC had to take the S.A.T. tomorrow with one night to prep, how would they do?  both emotionally and academically.

Maz has taken her fair share of standardized tests courtesy of the Ares Macrotechnology owned and run primary school she went to, so she would be familiar with the concept, at least. That was a long time ago however, and she hasn’t had any formal education since she started running the shadows as a rebellious teenager (or the Orc equivalent of a teenager anyway). The difference in the speed at which Orc and Human children mature probably makes school complicated too, come to think of it.

Tests like the S.A.T are also a pretty major aspect of the kind of life and culture she was specifically running away from when she decided to become a Shadowrunner, so I imagine the amount of anger and resentment she would feel along with the stress would be significant.

So, academically: probably not great. Emotionally: also probably not great.

What would cause your OC to chose to do something petty/pointlessly cruel?

Mazrah has a lot of very deep-seated anger and resentment towards people in positions of power and authority, especially if that power comes with the kind of wealth that being on the board of directors of a company or megacorp provides. (She owns more than one “Eat the Rich” t shirt, incidentally) Given the opportunity, she would find the sight of one of those people in pain to be extremely satisfying.

But.

Although she’d be slow to admit it, the quasi-military upbringing she had under Ares left her with an above-average sense of things like duty, and honor, and justice, and all those other things organizations of that kind claim to uphold. Some of that manifests in the code of honor she -- and most other street samurai --follow. This code is the primary thing -- besides all the chrome -- that sets a street sam apart from you’re run-of-the-mill tough guy with a gun, and she takes it very seriously. More importantly, it specifically forbids her from taking lethal action against, or allowing someone else to take lethal  action against anyone who is unarmed, unaware of her, or otherwise defenseless. It’s a bit fuzzier on the subject of just like, regular old pain and fear however, though I imagine those are also discouraged.

So... which one of those two opposing forces wins out in the end isn’t going to be simple, or certain, and would be extremely dependent on the context of the specific situation in question.

On a scale of “Complete and Justified nervous breakdown” to “Conquer The Entire Galaxy and become an Immortal God-Emperor”, how well would your OC handle being abducted by Aliens?

You know, aliens aren’t that much of a stretch from orcs and dragons and magic an all the other bizarre things that happen every day in the Sixth World. So I think her reaction would be something along the lines of “Ok I guess we’re doing this now, sure. Life is weird enough already this might as well happen. I would very much like to go home now, though.”

But also, can you imagine how much literally any intel or object from that encounter would sell for?

What song is 100% guaranteed to get your OC beyond turnt and will be sung loudly and embarrassingly, either in public or the shower?

“I Knew Prufrock Before He Got Famous”, “Out of Breath”, and “Love Ire & Song” by Frank Turner all fall under this category.

She aslo definitely sings along to any MESSERKAMF! songs that happen to come on as loud as possible and with just the most enthusiasm, just to annoy/embarrass Dietrich.

What perfectly-normal-to-them-thing does your OC do that confuses/pisses off/terrifies their neighbors?

She possesses both a very unpredictable schedule and an electric guitar she spends a considerable amount of time practicing, possibly the most aggravating combination of traits a neighbor and/or housemate can have.

Under what circumstances would your OC appear naked in public?

 Mazrah has been known to, as they say, “party hard”, on occasion.

How strong or weak is your OC’s Impulse control? What’s the worst thing that happened because of their Impulsivity or inability to be so?

It’s gotten better since she’s started finding herself in more and more leadership positions in the teams she runs with and the extra responsibility that comes with that, but she’s still a pretty big adrenaline junkie. There are probably a few Lone Star security squads that could have gone unprovoked or avoided entirely with someone a bit less impulsive at the helm. She’s done some pretty buckwild parkour stunts too, but so far all of them have ended well.

EDIT: I'm a god damn idiot for forgetting my own character's backstory: Hands down the single most impulsive thing Mazrah has done is running away from home to become a Shadowrunner as an idiot teenager.

How does your OC sabotage themselves?

The tension between the desire for and benefits of close relationships between people like team mates, neighbors, that one street doc who always patches them up after a run, and the inherently mercenary and transitory nature of those relationships, and the risks they bring, is a confusing, ever-shifting balance, and Mazrah is usually overcompensating in one direction or the other at any given time. Either closing herself off to any kind of really meaningful connection or becoming too involved with and concerned about the people around her and getting hurt as a result.

What’s your OC smell like?  no, not that “Vanilla and Anxiety” evocative stuff, realistically.  Body odor? what have they been touching all day? When was thier last shower? Did they put on any kind of artificial scent?

Leather conditioner and gun oil, generally. If she’s not out on a run or partying she’s at the safehouse taking care of her gear. She buys soap and hair stuff that smells like sandalwood whenever the option is available, so she’s got that nice like, warm, almost-cinnamon-but-different smell underneath all that too.

[murderballadeer]

2, 4, 5, 8, 13, 15, 22 & 24

Hello!

2 – Favourite actor(s) Since there was no option for actresses, I’m assuming this is “actor” in the gender-neutral sense, so here goes: Katharine Hepburn (of course), James Cagney, Spencer Tracy, Carole Lombard, Audrey Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, Ingrid Bergman (I’ve literally seen like 2 of her movies but she’s awesome), Judy Garland, Humphrey Bogart, Fred Astaire, Marlene Dietrich, Myrna Loy, Miriam Hopkins, Danny Kaye, Gregory Peck.

4 – Favourite director(s) Billy Wilder, Frank Capra, George Cukor, Alfred Hitchcock.

5 – How often do you go see movies in theatres? Honestly like once every or two. The last time I remember going to the movies was to see Hidden Figures, and that was like 18 months ago.

8 – Spell your first, middle, and last name out in movie titles I’m gonna skip the last name because I don’t feel comfortable giving that information online, but we can do just Lucie Esperanza, can’t we?

Lady Eve, The

Unfaithfully Yours 

Casablanca

It’s a Wonderful Life

Easy Living

Easter Parade

Singin’ in the Rain

Philadelphia Story, The

E there’s something wrong with my brain I can’t find another one)

Rear Window

Arsenic and Old Lace

Ninotchka

Ziegfeld Girl

Apartment, The

13 – Movie(s) you remember as part of your childhood All those Barbie movies and also Singin’ in the Rain.

15 – Prizes of your movie collection If you ask my sister, she’ll say that it’s the box set of all eight Harry Potter movies. According to me, it’s a DVD of My Man Godfrey that’s in decent shape.

22 – Last movie you saw Ball of Fire (1941). (it was amazing by the way)

24 – Movies you think you probably should’ve seen but haven’t for whatever reason. Gilda (which I actually rented a copy of so I’m gonna watch it) and Key Largo.

Thank you!

(ask game)

[sisterbliss007]

Translation Die Zeit interview Christoph Waltz

Hey everyone,

I have been also working (together with the support of @makamu-a-tumbling​), on the translation of Die Zeit man interview from last year. I’ve finally finished it, as it was quite a long and difficult interview to translate. I apologize for uploading it so late but hope you enjoy it! (As said it was quite difficult and if anyone finds any mistakes and/or has questions please let me know!:) I still have the original scans of the interview in German as well for those interested).

I am a “Traditionalist”

The actor Christoph Waltz and his remarkable way to happiness Actor Christoph Waltz lives in Los Angeles. We have met up with him in his chosen homeland. The timing is special as Waltz is standing right before his 60th birthday. He aims towards balance, talks about the strong and weak characters he played during his career and the decisions he made that made him a happy man.

On a spring morning, Actor Christoph Waltz is standing in the elevator of the Barclay hotel in Los Angeles, when an old man enters the lift. The Barclay isn’t used as a hotel anymore, and now serves as a sort of retirement home for Downtown LA, which also can be rented for photo and film shoots. The old man recognizes Waltz immediately and addresses him, questioning, where Waltz originally is from. "From Austria" he answers. "I was there during the War!" the man tells him. Waltz goes on, looks at the man with a skeptical look and asks:" The War was a long time ago, when were you there?"-"In the sixties!"- "In the sixties?"-Small pause-"Oh," Waltz says "do you mean Vietnam?"-"Ah yes, right, Vietnam!" the old man says.

An hour later Christoph Waltz is sitting in a restaurant close to the Barclay hotel, and can only laugh about the encounter in the elevator. The striking chin outstretched, like you would recognize from his movies. Peter Lindbergh photographed him today for DIE ZEIT magazine MANN, while both of them walked through Downtown (LA), Waltz in front (of him), (and) Lindberg with the camera behind him. At one moment, a Mexican construction worker recognizes him, and winks and shouts to him: "The Latinos love you man!" He shows his famous Christoph Waltz grin, of which you can never be sure if he really is happy or if he is hiding something; he winks back. When later a woman on the street asks him for an autograph, he signs (the autograph). When she also asks for a picture, he briefly lays his hand on her arm and tells her, smiling but firm, in perfect English: "You know what, I would prefer if we didn't take one. I've been photographed the whole day. Maybe on another occasion."- 'I understand that" the women says, at the same time perplexed and pleased, even though she didn’t get a picture, she wishes him a good day and walks on. "You see," Waltz says, when the women is out of earshot, "when you are friendly here, people understand.”

Christoph Waltz lives in Los Angeles, and loves it here. He loves going to the opera, and he has seen the whole Ring (cycle) from Wagner here, the Mannheim production. He can't really agree with the general criticism of European, mostly German actors, on the shallowness and misconstrued image (of LA). "Of course, there are more foolish people here then with us (in Europe). But there is more of everything here. Therefore, more silly people as well.”

In the restaurant he orders a cappuccino and a croissant. Even in this everyday moment he uses his speech as an instrument: "Do you want something to drink?” The waiter asks. And Waltz answers, back stretched straight, the menu like a script in his hands: "Absouuuuuutely. I'll have a cappuccino for the moment. And a croissant or something of that kind would be great." Then, you understand the luck, Quentin Tarantino must feel when he hears Waltz speaking his lines: "The way, Christoph Waltz speaks my dialogue, the ways he sings it, he is saying it like poetry."  In Tarantino's Western Django Unchained, Waltz played the German dentist and bounty hunter Dr. Shultz, and the detail that he comes from Düsseldorf, has everything to do with the fact that, according to Tarantino: "It just sounds so good, the way he speaks the word Düsseldorf."

His love for words was something that he developed very early on during his school time. "I have had six years of Latin and a nice Latin teacher, Elfriede Fiela, who was more interested in the mater itself and not being a teacher as such. That, she carried on to her students. "I find it regrettable that Latin is being labeled as a dead language, and usually…“ He makes a grant gesture, "…I get asked where they then, still speak Latin.” Again the Christoph Waltz grin. "My answer is: in your head.” He smiles.

A former classmate from Vienna, journalist Axel Meister also remembers his love for speech. "Waltz always shone with his ingenious linguistics". At his 'Feier zur Matura', the Austrian Arbitur (the party at the end of your college school years), Waltz gave the closing speech, which contained a subtle sense of deeper meaning.

"I love words" Waltz once told the London Times. Does he have favorite words? "Fiammiferi" he says without having to think about it, matches in Italian. "Or maybe even better: Uova strapazzate!" That is Italian for scrambled eggs. Waltz sneezes every syllable, while he is talking. Can he speak Italian well?  "Totally not." And again ‘The Grin’. Then he speaks better in English, as he already from the late seventies on, while he lived in New York for a while, started refining it. He is proud of that, and you can also see that during his American Late-Show appearances. "I am someone else when I am talking English" he says. "And at that, I am not a mere translator. If you ask me for a specific English word, that I use all the time, then I don't have a clue.” How does the English speaking Christoph Waltz distinguish himself from the German speaking one? "I don't analyze it, as I would be just halfway translating it. It is really pleasant that I don't have to translate. English is like an additional way of expression.” Those who have seen the (late night) show(s), the way he is telling the American public Austrian stories, and then hear him tell in LA, how well the English language suits him, understand: it is also a mask. During those regular appearances, in this chosen homeland (the USA),  Christoph Waltz can be the persona 'Christoph Waltz'; the two-time Oscar winner from the far away Europe, who holds something exotic to the American spectators, matched with a twitch of diabolic enjoyment. It is an extraordinary role. It is the role of his life, of which he has waited so long- in vain- for.

Christoph Walt was born on the 4th of October 1956 in a Viennese theater family. His grandfather (which I think should be his grandmother right?) was a famous actor at the renowned Burgtheater, his German father Johannes Waltz was stage builder, his Austrian mother Elisabeth Urbancic costume designer. At the beginning, Christoph didn't want to be an actor. "It didn't interest me. Even now it doesn’t really interest me. But when it does (interest me), then totally". He did attend the famous Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna, but actually he wanted to do film, if possible in the US. As a youngster Christoph Waltz met Senta Berger, who just came back from Hollywood, and who was a friend of the family, and often visited. The glamour excited him. So, at the end of the seventies, he goes to New York, and enrolls into the Lee Strasberg institute, while he works as a waiter. Full of hope, he meets up with the legendary agent Paul Kohner, who worked with Marlene Dietrich. But, he (Paul Kohner) warns him: does he really wants to play roles in which he has to yell "Heil Hitler!" all the time? Waltz returns to Europe, goes into theater, in Switzerland and Germany, and also works for TV meanwhile becoming more and more miserable. His American dream did not come true, and in contrast, (he) experiences a German nightmare: He must play supporting parts in krimi series, just so he can act. This is how the eighties and nineties play out for him. In an episode of the krimiseries Der Alte, he shoots the commissioner; played by Siegfried Lowitz, "that was maybe culturally-wise a heroic deed" he says and laughs. Only rarely he can shine: in 1996 as Roy Black in a TV-movie about the tragic life of the shlager- singer. Waltz receives multiple awards, but the problems stays. The director Peter Keglevic, who wants him for bigger roles, is being held back by producers and directors. "On and on again he hears: no, no not Waltz, for minor quirky parts yes, but not for the main character.”

(He takes) Another piece of the croissant, and a sip of the water. "There is a certain narrow-mindedness which you cannot fight against (the literal translation would be for which no powder exist to fight it). And in some cultures, this is more the case than in others." He says:" In Germany, there is a precise distinction between E and U. E for Ernst (seriousness) and U for Unterhaltung (pleasure). E can't really be U and U definitely can't be E. It always ends in lecturing. Even in schools they understand now that only lecturing does not work, so why would you then do it in movies or on TV?" In the nineties, Waltz often sits at the Munich Shumann's bar, when he has to be there to be another rogue in a ZDF-krimi. He then tells his friends at the bar about (his) German TV (experience): "They really can't do anything with me." "In hindsight, one can recollect these miserable times (without feeling worse)", he says, "but it was mostly frustrating. They weren’t all like that, Reinhard Schwabenitzky and Peter Keglevic, those directors, did always believe in me." He doesn't name any other people.

Wailing did not help, he must work, moreover for his family. Waltz becomes a father early, when he is 24. During his time in New York, he meets his later wife Jackie, a dancer from Brooklyn. With her, he has three children, who now are adults. The family mostly lives in London, as a compromise between New York and Germany. "At that moment, I played parts just to survive, and now I find it honorable. I bit my way through something for a long time that I didn't want to bite through. That was a significant experience. It shows you that as an actor, you have to pay attention to not switch your life with the part you’re playing." "For a life,…" He says, while emphasizing the word life. "…a smaller part can be of a bigger significance than a big part." At the absolute low point of his career, when he hadn't worked for a year, his wife tries to give sincere advice: “You have so many talents; you can do something else then being an actor”. When you speak to Christoph Waltz about this advice, decades later, there is still a glimmer in his eyes, in the sense of: "How can you so wrongly asses me?" "I never thought about doing anything else. I know too much about it. To master a specific matter, you have to do it for twenty years. Hence, older actors are the most interesting. Of course it is interesting; to see a newcomer arrive, but then at least twenty years must pass before it really becomes sensational."

Christoph Walt's first marriage has now ended. A while back, he met the German costume designer Judith Holste, during shooting, with whom he has a daughter. In the beginning, he went back and forth between Berlin and the US. "But the journey was always stressy." Now, the family lives in LA.

After decades of biting trough and suffering, along comes a meeting between two men in the spring of 2008 in Berlin, both which are tattered because of different reasons. Christoph Waltz is still dragging him through German TV, while the American director Quentin Tarantino, Hollywood-prodigy in the nineties, has several problems. His last movie was a flop and for his next production Inglourious Basterds he is still desperately looking for someone to play the part of the antagonist Hans Landa. He already had hundred others read the part, Leonardo Dicaprio also wants to do it, but for Tarantino it doesn't fit. The director fluctuates between knowing that he had written one of the most interesting parts of his life, and the fear, that the part of the multilingual Hans Landa is unplayable. Then the meeting with Christoph Waltz comes, who plays the part of Landa as it he is Landa himself. Very precisely (literately translated it would mean sleepwalking-ly precise) Waltz switches between English, German, French and Italian. His former love for languages, developed during his school time in Vienna, helps him to fulfill his American dream. Shortly after the reading, Tarantino calls him, who is staying in Tuscany at that time. "Christoph, you're my man."-"If you say so, Quentin, I am."

Christoph Waltz also exceeds on set, and shines next to Hollywood stars such as Brad Pitt. Today he says that that shoot saved him. "For me it was about the confirmation that I could do it. Not in vanity, but to confirm for myself that I wasn't going mad." Mad in the sense of: "Look, German TV, German cinema, I didn't just imagine it, I can really do it”. “What would become of him without Inglourious Basterds?” "No idea." Did he ever think about it? "Luckily not." After shooting the movie with Tarantino, but before the world premiere at the Cannes film festival in 2009, Alexander Gorkow, reporter for the Süddeutschen Zeitung, meets him in a Berlin café. Opposite the reporters sits a sad, insecure man. "Who knows if I will be in the movie" Waltz tells him "Quentin is re-cutting everything." He stays in. And how. For the role of Hans Landa, Christoph Waltz wins his first Oscar in 2010. Still in Cannes, in the car to the premier, one of the producers tells him: "Enjoy it. These are the last moments of your old life".

This afternoon, in his new life in Los Angeles, Christoph Waltz notices that his cappuccino didn’t come. When the waiter re-approaches the table and asks if he can bring anything else, your reporter orders a double espresso. Waltz first orders another cappuccino, to be changed at the last moment: “A double espresso as well, please.” The waiter motionless takes this in, and murmurs a “Great.” The first cappuccino which he didn’t bring, totally forgotten. That, then still innervates Waltz. And therefore he puts, in a friendly way, this hard “fact” in front of the waiter: “So I am really happy you forgot the first cappuccino.”

Lack of courtesy, bad behavior and no sense of etiquette, puts Waltz off and he doesn’t care if he offends anyone else. In 2007, while attending the Bambi awards show (German television price show) the Jordan Queen Rania also gave away a price. When she entered the stage, Waltz is the only of 800 guests which stood up. “When a queen enters a room, I don’t have to make any decision” he says “I stand up.” He adds after a small pause: “That kind of negligence, doesn’t only hurt the Queen, but the people that stay seated. That was a painful affair for me”.

That is the old Viennese school. Vienna is and stays his ‘city’, wherever he is living at the moment. His father died when he was very young, Christoph Waltz was seven. What kind of memories does he have of his father? “We have to make a distinction between conscious and unconscious memories. For the unconscious ones I can’t really speak and for the conscious ones I don’t want to”. Here again, Waltz precisely formulates and clearly borders all the lines. “This was always important for me. Seeing all the demarcation points in my live, even as a kid.” He still remembers saying to his school mates: “That is none of your business”. Later on, as an actor, he really understood: “that it is important to make up your own mind about, and decide for yourself, what is private and public”.

To define your own life, and don’t let others define you, was something that he needed. “I wanted this from the beginning, already at school, no, actually already before going to school. I always had this questions of “Where am I?”, “Where are the others?, “How is it positioned?”, “Do I have to agree?”. He always saw himself as separated from the others. Is he a good friend? He thinks for a long time about this question, and for the first time during the conversation, there is a long pause. “I can be a good friend, but I am not automatically one. For all the stability, there also needs to be certain dynamic aspect within a friendship.” He tells about his neighbor, who was really outraged because the tree from Waltz’s property was too high. “Sometimes there are serious storms here, and then the trees move around pretty hard”. What did he tell the neighbor? “Be happy that they move. If they don’t move around, they will break down”. This is also his outlook on friendships, you need to keep on moving, and that is important. He has two best friends, maybe three, not more. Then he takes back on the tree. “I have to admit that now, I did cut the tree, as it became a bit too eerie for me as well.” How would you describe yourself to people that don’t know you? “Totally not, I am not a describer. I recently had a talk about this topic with a befriended director, that an experience is much more important than a description. ”What do you mean?” “To go to the cinema, and experience it all, even when it is not a pleasant one: That is the whole reason why I go to the cinema.” Christoph Waltz has therefore drawn the conclusion –for himself- that he does not speak about his character during the interviews for a movie. “The portrayal of a subject is more important that that subject itself” he rages. “The curator puts himself before the artist, the director puts himself in front of his writer, the painter is standing before his painting and the actor is more important than his character.” He shakes his head. Would he describe himself as conservative? “Gustav Mahler said that: “Tradition is keeping the fire burning and not worshiping the ashes”. When the tradition is genuine, then I am a ‘Traditionalist’.” The great moments in art enthrall him, he just does not want to interpret them. He raves about an essay of Susan Sontags, who has been writing against (this kind of) Interpretation, but without any success. “I am not against the intellectualizing, I am against de-sensualizing. It is all about the experience, in cinema and in theater.” Once, Christoph Waltz was a spectator at the Viennese Burgtheater and saw Otto Sander, an experience which he will never forget. “He was sitting on a cardboard prop of a rock and was telling what the play is about. It is about Oedipus. You saw him and you forgot everything around him. You forgot that the production was from Peter Stein. That Bruna Ganz played with him. That the set design was from Anseln Kiefer. You only saw and heard what he played and said. You could experience what the person goes through, and could identify with his suffering. That is how it should be.”

Christoph Waltz’s hair is longer now, then how we knew him before, and his sharp face features are now even more outspoken. Like most other famous actors, he is small, and when questioned about his height, he answers: “1m72, 1m73” (67.7-68.1 inch) as if every centimeter makes a difference. Two years ago the art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi painted Christoph Waltz for a TV documentary. At a sitting in an old ballroom in Berlin, Beltracchi complains: “You are so slim, darn!” Waltz had reacted to that by outstretching his stomach. The painter then noted different features of his face: “One eye sits higher than the other”. And: “The nose is also not simple”. Waltz reacted to that with his dry humor: “To whom are you saying this, I am having it (the nose)”. After winning the Oscar, the first German speaking one since Maximilian Schell in 1962, a lot of people, colleagues and directors, were happy for him. But here and there comments were heard, also from Til Schweiger. On one hand he congratulated him while on the other, said that this kind of luck, playing a role in such a big movie, which was exactly cut out for him, will not happen again. Unless if Waltz would get another such part.

And exactly that happened again. A couple of years later Quentin Tarantino writes the part of bad-ass dentist Dr. King Shultz in his western Django Unchained for his friend Christoph Waltz. And in 2013 he wins his second Oscar. Since then, the (Oscar) title is adherent to the name of Christoph Waltz. Wherever he shows himself, and is introduced, he is “the two time Oscar winner, Christoph Waltz”.

When he was young, the legendary theater actor Wolgang Reichmann, then already 70 years old, told him that he, in his whole life played three big parts. Waltz was startled. Only three in his whole life? Today he knows how realistic that was. Christoph Waltz emphasizes this multiple times during this day in Los Angeles, that for him, it is all about not standing still. “I can’t sit on that for the rest of my life, I want to keep on working!” He knows, that the Oscars help him with letting the lesser parts pass. There are also flops. “Of course there are bad movies. For my profession, one rule applies: as long as the movie makes enough money, then a flop will not be judged as a failure”. If it happens with three, four movies after another, then it can go quickly. Therefore, Christoph Waltz plays in blockbusters, they also pay very well, he does think that strategic. He tells, that now on set, he can better handle critique than thirty years ago. “Earlier, I would start arguing with the director, and in the end it is was all about who won. Often that was contra-productive.” Nowadays he can listen to critique, and doesn’t react to each of the comments. He learned that, that listing to critique can help. That was also the case when he worked with director Roman Polanski, while filming the Yasmina Rezas play Carnage. Waltz plays, beside Kate Winslet, a cynical lawyer, constantly on his phone, while they are discussing why their son hurt the boy of the other family. It was a showy role, equally funny and brutal.

The first day of filming, he tells, was a real catastrophe: “During the lunch break, Polanski comes to me and says: “Christoph what you’re doing is not funny”. A pretty clear statement. “I understood what Polanski was trying to say. He is a clever and experienced director. He later told me that he knows what he can say, at each moment, during each part of filming. “It was the best and most efficient director’s comment that I ever got”. What Polanski went on to tell him, he doesn’t want give away, (is this) professional secrecy? When Waltz arrives at 8 o’clock sharp, at the morning of our photo shoot, he is making a call, (and goes on to) apologize, pointing to his phone, to say “important”. When he goes back and forth in the hotel lobby while on his mobile, you automatically think about the lawyer in Carnage. About a year ago HIS James Bond came in the cinema. More specifically: THE James Bond wherein he is playing the antagonist Blofeld. Even the announcement that he would play in the new James Bond was greeted with joy under Bond fans. Who, if not Waltz, would follow in the film tradition of German speaking villains, after Gert Fröbe, Curd Jürgens and Klaus-Maria Brandauer. Financially Spectre is a success: it gains 880 million, only one James Bond movie was more successful. And still Christoph Waltz is not happy- with himself, with the result- “I can’t really pretend that I really succeeded at playing Blofeld. It had everything that it needed and all (the requisites) were checked, but it wasn’t what I aspired at”. He already noticed it when filming began, but at the time it was already too late. “An actor can only be really great, when all the possibilities are open.” He doesn’t want to say more about it but what he actually means is this: The chemistry between him and Sam Mendes wasn’t what he wanted it to be.

How does someone survive the PR-spectacle which is a James Bond movie? “I already survived worse”. And he adds: “There is a hint of excessiveness. I understand that with the premier you want to invite lots of guests. But should it really be at the Royal Albert Hall? With that you don’t really do it any good. It is still a movie, and it should stay a movie. The next premier will probably be a national holiday, and this time it was already a couple of days before one. What is so bad about a premiere cinema such as the Odeon in Leicester Square?”

His Blofeld stayed alive at the end of Spectre, would there thus be a next story with Christoph Waltz?” “That I don’t know, nobody knows. Not one word was said about that, except in the press. We don’t even know which studio will produce the next movie, if Daniel Craig will go on.” That also falls on the category of “keep on working”.

And making plans. He wants to direct, and is in the process of making a movie, even has the finances in place as well as filled all the parts with actors, but even in Hollywood an American dream can turn into a nightmare. “It is all very much like an unordered kindergarten” he says and keeps on explaining: “It is not completely dead, but at the moment it is in a condition where people only can say: “Has everyone lost their mind?!” “One of the producers, which wants to finance a big part of the movie, is blocking everything, while it is not arranged yet how big his part in the production is. After six months of work: it is still not moving on. Two actresses-from the Oscar winning category-have said yes, a first class camera man as well, everyone is ready-but at the moment nothing is moving. Then I rather not make it, film history will go on even without my directing contribution.” If you ask Christoph Waltz, who he would like to play in a movie, he answers “Muhammed Ali. I find him one of the great artists of the 20th century, a performance artist, who pays everything with cash and not on credit.” “What do mean with that?” “How he moves, he doesn’t lose his grace, his humor, all under physical treat. How he works through every defeat as an experience. When I think about him, a get a feeling of happiness. There is nothing more beautiful than his fights, even when he gets a hit.” In the eyes of Christoph Waltz, Muhammed Ali was the perfect actor, because he played like it wasn’t all a game. And because even his defeats were made part of his career.

On the 4th of October Christoph Waltz will be 60. When we mention it, he doesn’t move an inch. Will he throw a big party? He looks at his opponent like he is offended. He isn’t someone who likes to celebrate big? “Yes” He says and grins, ”That is how you can formulate it” (The sass is on here). How will he then celebrate his birthday?  “Let’s first presume that I will indeed turn 60. So, on my birthday at 1 pm I get the feeling, it would be nice to celebrate tonight. Then I start calling around and see who has the time. When they don’t have the time they are not there and when they do have the time they come. Those are still the best parties.”

He didn’t even imagine what it would be like to turn 60, when a woman around her thirties comes to the table, interrupts and says: “Hello” just to add one more thing: “You’re my favorite actor”. Then she moves away and leaves a smiling actor behind at the table. It bodes well with him, to life here in the capital city of film.

Christoph Waltz, the late movie star, is a man, who has fulfilled his dreams when he was already older, after lots of defeats and doubts. “It is a good thing that everything happened later in my career. All the success it is not only due to my own account”. He grins again: “I don’t want to life my life, believing that I have to suffer in order for my success to happen” Why not? “That is a protestant view, but I grew up catholic” Is he religious? “No, not since my youth”.

Only now and then he still remembers his old life, the former ‘survivor camp’. When the toaster in his kitchen doesn’t function anymore, he still thinks about how to fix it. His wife Judith then has to say to him, to throw the old toaster away; “Buy a new one” she says to her husband, ”You won two Oscars for heaven’s sake”.

[dispensemiracles]

8 PEOPLE I’D LIKE TO GET TO KNOW BETTER (PLEASE REPOST, NOT REBLOG)

TAGGED BY: @perpetual-calendar  Ryo pointed at me through the screen and said Y O U so I’m taking it sjdij

TAGGING: its free meme-estate

1 ( NAME / ALIAS ): Isabella 

2 ( BIRTHDAY ): March 9th

3 ( ZODIAC SIGN ): lol

4 ( HEIGHT ): 5′6 / 167 cm

5 ( HOBBIES ): Reading, writing, sleeping, letting video games snatch my ass in between- rn I’m still reading The Wise Man’s Fear by Patrick Rothfuss bc its 1100+ pgs before I can get to my other books but its amazing, Kvothe has already become an influence on Nozomi after I finished Name of the Wind

6 ( FAVOURITE COLOUR(S) ): Blue

7 ( FAVOURITE BOOKS ): I have a lot so to avoid getting too repetitive heres some favs I’ve never mentioned before as far as I can remember 

Fiction

Animal Farm - George Orwell

I Am Legend - Richard Matheson

Tbh anything by Shirley Jackson I love her brand of horror it explores the evil within the mundane and human nature’s response to the mundanely surreal

Watchmen - Alan Moore (one of the only comics formally considered literature and for good reason)

American Gods - Neil Gaiman

Brave New World - Aldous Huxley

Black Beauty - Anna Sewell 

Catch-22 - Joseph Heller

The Hobbit - J.R.R. Tolkien

& ofc

Name of the Wind - Patrick Rothfuss 

Also what I’ve read of Asimov’s short fiction like I, Robot though I have to go back to it, another sci-fi I want to read is The Fifth Season which got a Hugo Award and after a friend showed me the first page I felt why, it was very powerful

-

Non Fiction

The Longest Day - Cornelius Ryan

The Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors - James D. Hornfischer 

Ship of Ghosts - James D. Hornfischer

The Blond Knight of Germany -  Trevor J. Constable & Raymond F. Toliver

Samurai!! - Saburo Sakai, Fred Saito, and Martin Caidin 

Helmet For My Pillow - Robert Leckie 

The White Rose of Stalingrad - Bill Yenne

The Star of Africa - Colin D. Heaton & Anne-Marie Lewis 

8 ( LAST SONG LISTENED TO ): Is it bad I’m more a fan of Lale Anderson’s rendition of Lili Marlene than I am Marlene Dietrich’s 

9 ( LAST FILM WATCHED ): Annihilation dir. Alex Garland which not only scared the fuck out of me and triggered my anxiety hardcore, I now wanna read the book material its based on 

10 ( INSPIRATION FOR MUSE ): Taking lots of inspo from Joseph Joestar, jokes abt Nozomi being Joseph Joestar, figured I’d try it since at the time I knew someone who was largely considered the de facto best Nozomi in rp- though I’ve long surpassed them

12 ( MEANING BEHIND YOUR URL ): literally this   (bc spiritofajoestar wasn’t available so i took that for the next best thing)

[clownfuckery]

A Monster for a Mate - Prologue

PENNYWISE X OC

A/N: This multi-chapter fic is inspired by the post Thoughts on Deadlights by @hello-helianthus.  There will be many references to The Dark Tower and Stephen King’s multiverse.  Rated M for strong sexual content (yes, there will be smut), violence, language, gore and horror.  

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“You can love a monster, it can even love you back, but that doesn’t change its nature” – Eliza Crewe

“Something new had happened. For the first time in forever, something new… and there had been pain, pain, great roaring pain… and for one moment there had also been fear, because…all living things must abide by the laws of the shape they inhabit.  For the first time, It realized that perhaps Its ability to change Its shape might work against It as well as for It.  There had never been pain before, there had never been fear before, and for a moment It had thought It might die - oh Its head had been filled with a great white silver pain, and it had roared and mewled and bellowed… Suppose there was Another?  Suppose… suppose… Now they were coming again, and while everything had gone much as It had foreseen, something It had not foreseen had returned: that maddening, galling fear… So, another new thing, if you please: for the first time in Its never-ending history, It needed to make a plan; for the first time It found Itself afraid simply to take what It wanted from Derry, Its private game-preserve…” -Stephen King, It

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1.

A Walk Among the Ruins

Penobscot
 County D E R R Y
 Maine

I can feel the butterflies fluttering in my stomach as I look up at the sign marking the city limits.  For a moment I wonder how long the somewhat faded and dusty plaque has stood at the edge of the town, like a faithful watchman who has become frozen at his post with the passing of time, becoming rooted to the ground into which he is placed.  I see it as a symbol of what I became since losing that part of me that was human, for I too stand frozen in time, and today will be the day when I finally enter into my first slumber.

Today, I reunite with him.

It.

The clown lies waiting for me deep underground, two years into his hibernation.  I remained behind, promising to join him on the other side of sleep when my time came to go Todash.  For two years I have waited for the bells to chime, wandering the streets of the place made after his image.  I miss him, terribly, hearing his childish high-pitched laughter in the wind and catching glimpses of him peeking from behind trees and hiding in the underbrush.  At night, as I lay curled in the darkened and decaying rooms of the Neibolt house I can almost feel him, the rustle of white silver silk shattering the stillness as I imagine a large, gloved, ghostly hand reaching out to caress my cheek.  

It finally happened in the wee hours when I came to sit on the grassy patch beneath the town sign as was my daily ritual.  Every morning at exactly 3 a.m. I leave the relative safety of Neibolt and walk the deserted streets to the same spot, watching the black and straight line of Route 7 until the sun rises and the first trucks carrying the fruits of local farms come rolling into town.  I had just settled on the grass, resting my head against the steel beams, when I felt my ears become inflamed and I registered the distant ringing.  It grew and grew, and as I sat in the darkness looking into the trees for the source of the sound, I finally realized that the jingling came from within my chest.  My call had finally come, and as I felt a yawn form in my throat, I shouted with joy.  

Now here I stand, dusting off my jeans and reaching for the handle of my old and torn suitcase, my sole companion and the only link I have left to a past I can no longer remember.  The LV pattern is faded and the once rich brown leather is now a sickly yellow, but inside are the items I carried when I set foot on this town two years ago.  There are also a wrinkled receipt from the Derry Townhouse and a driver’s license from Vermont which reads:

Name: Luseres Dietrich Born: November 6, 1989 Blood Type: AB

I begin to make my way back into town, and as Route 7 becomes Witcham Street with its rows of quaint houses surrounded by white picket fences, dawn is just breaking.  In the distance I can hear the revving of machinery as early working crews continue the prolonged work of restoring the center of town.  Soon, Derry will not only be rebuilt, but revamped into an urban complex, rivaling the likes of Bangor.  I make my way down West Brodway, turn left on Kansas Street, and finally enter Neibolt Street just as the sun rises in the East.  It is sure to be a beautiful summer day in New England, I realize as I am bathed in golden light, but none of it matters.  My legs are becoming heavier with each step, my shoulders weigh me down, and I find myself blinking just a tad longer.  

I stop in front of the old abandoned house, Pennywise’s home, and remember the few days I spent trapped inside its walls.  My flesh went stiff with fear at the exotic horrors found in its shifting halls and chambers of unimaginable terrors, I screamed until my throat felt raw, but it was also there where I left my humanity behind and rose unafraid, finally embracing that part of myself which until then I refused to accept.  It was deep beneath that old, charred and blackened house where my fate was joined with his.

I let out a sigh of relief and continue on, disappearing into the trees at the end of the lane.  Here the earth slopes downward, and I carefully pull my suitcase behind me as I skillfully climb down into the Barrens below.  As I enter the clearing, the first trains of the day whistle as they chug on the bridge above en route to the sea.  I now carry the suitcase over my head as I maneuver through the wetlands, stepping over stones and splashing in the shallow waters of the Kenduskeag.  As I finally reach the edge of the Barrens, I look back one last time at the cliffs that mark the western edge of town.  It will be twenty-five years before I set eyes, hungry eyes, upon that rock face once more.  

The entrance to the spillway tunnel opens up before me, like the gaping mouth of a creature from the Prim, gasping for breath on the shores of some parallel world.  The water that once spilled from the Canal now trickles into the improved underground tunnels built by Derry Public Works.  These old drainpipes are dry now, dark sepulchral mazes that are abandoned to the elements.  My boots make a clickety-sound that thumps along to the humming of the suitcase wheels dragging across the cement.  I bid farewell to the world as the light streaming from outside fades when I make a turn into a narrower tunnel.  I’m soon enveloped in darkness, every now and then broken by thin streams of sunlight that push their way through the cracks above.  Further and further in I go, and soon the tunnels open into the center of the old sewer system.  Pipes begin to emerge from the thick walls, broken and caved in.  

It is into one of these that I climb, squeezing through an opening large enough in the debris.  I haul my suitcase in and continue hunched over, once again winding left and right, guided by instinct.  Something buried deep in these manmade catacombs is calling to me, and I feel warmth rising in my chest as the deadlight I carry within begins to gleam.  Finally, I reach the collapsed entryway of what I’ve come to call home.  I slide through the cracks of a huge slab of concrete that blocks it off from the rest of the world, and I spill inside.

Pennywise’s Tower.

I fight back tears as I look upon its destruction.  Both the enormous collection of mementos from his past hunts and the circus wagon in which I spent many a moment lost in rapture now lie crushed beneath a small mountain of debris.  The tower collapsed into itself on that horrible day in May when I made the ultimate sacrifice to ensure the survival of the monster to whom I am bound.  Instinctively I look down at my hands and for a moment I can see the small bundle of pale white skin and vibrant eyes look up at me in complete trust as I hand her over to be devoured by her dying father. The tears finally flow for I can no longer contain them.  

“There will be more, I promise” I had pleaded with urgency, literally pushing the humanoid infant who was now crying loudly into his deteriorating hands.  He had mewled, bellowed and roared against it, recoiled from the idea, but as my own skin began to crumble he lunged for her, unhinging his jaws and swallowing her whole.  

I didn’t even look away.

I place my suitcase down and make my way to the edge of the only well that has remained intact. I throw my legs over the ladder and begin my descent into total darkness.  I can feel my vision adjusting the lower I go, my green irises morphing into amber.  My chest now glows brighter as my deadlight senses the nearness of its mate:  Pennywise is in the nest.  When I reach the bottom I eagerly climb into the claustrophic tunnel dug by him centuries ago.  Exhaustion threatens to crush my bones as I crawl the last few hundred yards, and then at last, I am home.

The nest becomes dimly light by the glow emanating from my chest, and I rush over to him.

“Penny, I’m here” I call out, but he remains unmoving.  Of course, he can’t hear me, he is no longer in this world.  His deadlight does not glow.  The avatar remains, but It is in the Todash darkness.  Through now heavy eyelids I look upon Its most favored form, and I feel a surge of warmth and love wash over me.  The clown is curled into a ball, almost cat-like, with an arm hiding his face.  I lovingly run my fingers through his fine tufts of hair, reveling in their silky quality.

“January embers” I whisper, and for some reason the words feel as though they carry a significant weight.

Feeling the last threads of consciousness become severed, I lay down next to him and press my body to his.  As my eyes slowly close I hope that I dream of my past.  Please let me remember, just let me remember, are the last words that go through my mind as I slip into slumber and go Todash.

2.

Together Again

My eyes open and I see that I stand at the edge of a dense coniferous forest.  Powdery snow blankets the ground like ash.  It drifts gently in the breeze, and I place my hand out to catch the flakes.  They immediately disintegrate when they come in contact with my skin, but instead of melting, they evaporate back into the air, floating upwards to a starless sky.  A sense of dread grips me as I look up at the black expanse that envelopes me completely.  There is only darkness above me as well as behind me.  What if I’m lost?  What if I drifted into the Prim?  What if Pe…

Just then, the faint sounds of calliope music drift towards me in the breeze and I turn back to the forest.  The snow clears and I begin to make out the pointed tops of large tents somewhere behind the trees.  Lights flicker, and after sparks explode right above me, a large sign I hadn’t noticed comes to life and the name PENNYWISE lights up the darkness.  The ground shifts beneath me and a path lined with flickering lights opens up before me. 

“Of course.  What else would it be?” I chuckle and enter the fairground that becomes alive the moment I set foot inside.  Rides gear on, the carousel lights up and begins to go round and round.  Tents open up on either side of me, their shelves lined with antique toys to be won.  The carnival music blasts from all sides, like a hymn of joy that announces my arrival.  Jack-in-the-boxes spin on their own and pop open, with tiny versions of Pennywise bursting up and laughing that deliciously devious cackle of his.  As I finally reach the merry-go-round, my eyes go wide with amazement.

There are shadows inside.  Small black masses with somewhat human shapes ride the carousel horses, some sit in the chariots, and some just stand and take hold of the bars.  As I look around me I notice more of them, walking slowly through the fair, some stopping at the attractions, others standing at the contest stalls.  The more I notice them, the more there seem to be.  They come in all shapes and sizes, some barely reaching my knee while others tower above me, but they all float happily through the carnival.  

Suddenly, the unmistakable voice of Pennywise comes booming out from above.

“Step right up, children, step right up!  Come near, come close!  You’ll laugh, you’ll cry! You’ll cheer, you’ll die!  Introducing Pennywise, the Dancing Clown!  Woo ah ha ha ha ha ha ha!” 

A traveling stage opens and inside is a life size marionette of Pennywise himself.  The wooden puppet breaks into a jig, kicking its legs outward to the tempo of the music.  The shadows roaming the fair begin to slink toward the stage, and as I now stand alone, I take notice of the largest tent in the grounds, pitched away from all the attractions.  As I look, one of its curtains lifts on its own, beckoning me to enter.  A different kind of music drifts from inside, soft, somber notes that are wrung from a wind instrument, and in a trance, I make my way towards it.

My breath catches in my throat when I step over the threshold.  There, with his back turned towards me, is Pennywise.  His head hangs low and his body sways as he plays the concertina.  Though I cannot see it, I know his eyes are closed, reveling in every note, every sigh of sorrow that spills form the bellows of the instrument.  

I watch him in silence and awe as he fills the tent with the most melancholic and serene of songs.  It is a song that speaks of the sorrow of two lovers separated by distance and time.  When it ends, I swallow the lump in my throat, understanding that in his own way, Pennywise is voicing the emptiness he has felt without me near.

“So… this is how they really float” I manage to choke out.

His arms drop by his sides and the concertina falls to the floor.  He turns, and my chest swells when his two sulfurous eyes lock into mine.  I can see relief and worry combined inside their yellow depths, but their sparkle returns the moment his lips part into an ear-splitting smile.  In a breath I close the distance, my arms wrapping around his neck as his hands cup my face.  

“My little songbird, I thought you’d never get here”

End of Prologue

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CLICK HERE FOR THE NEXT CHAPTER

[expertdigitalmarketingthing-blog]

Best Top 10 Digital Marketing Tips To Help Grow Your Business

  The twentieth century has become a time of rapid development both advanced technologies and methods to control human consciousness. These fancy tendencies that people didn’t even think about came true when еpatage and eccentricity became the main feature of advertisement in the twentieth century. In this essay, I tried to implement an analysis of the greatest advertisement tricks in the course of these hundred years. Scope of DIGITAL MARKETING for Business | Career Opportunities and Salary in DIGITAL MARKETING     1) When Red Bull Company appeared on the market, Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Labatt, and Molson already occupied the branch of energy and tonic drinks. Although these drinks were not energy ones, advertising applied to their toning effect, improving well-being, etc. Marketer Dietrich Mateshnitz realized that to stand up in line with veterans, using standard tactics of promotion and similar advertising is literally impossible. Then he suggested the following plan; he reduced the size of cans and used the form of "battery" and the last but not the least solution he promoted was to double the price. Thus, Red Bull advertising campaign was relatively cheap. He also used special places at the shops to keep their drinks. This tradition exists today since all energy drinks have their own place at every shop. The only costly proposal of Mateshnitz was the free distribution of Red Bull drinks at the universities. By the way, it is still exercised by the companies that like to invest in various students’ events. The fact that students preferred to mix energy with alcohol, getting a cocktail Vodka Red Bull, wasn’t highlighted. The result of this marketing idea was the completely independent positioning of the energy drink, the creation of its own branch, different from other drinks. How successful it was, you can judge with the number of energy drinks sold. 2) Swedish company IKEA started promoting their product on the USA market, built shopping centers, delivered products etc. People looked at their furniture without buying it. Marketers were in a panic until one of them noticed that the furniture of other manufacturers in the USA is much larger in size. It turned out that the houses of Americans are much larger than Swedish houses and apartments. Since then, in the USA, IKEA furniture has been manufacturing according to other standards. 3) The first truly provocative advertisement, now called a teaser, belongs to Camel. How else could the tobacco company surprise smoking America? It seemed that there is nothing they can do beat their rivals. However, once in the USA strange sign "Camels" appeared on the advertisement boards. After some time, they were replaced by no less intriguing ads "Camels is coming". And the day before the appearance of cigarettes on the market, ads again changed, finally inflating the human curiosity. Now the sign was: "Tomorrow there will be more camels in the city than in both Africa and Asia!" And the day the sales of Camel cigarettes began, the last announcement removed by "Cigarette" Camel "already in your city!" Americans laughed at such a finale of intrigue and tried a new interesting brand of cigarettes. 4) How to increase sales significantly? Easily! So did marketers Alka-Seltzer, deliberately introducing into advertisement a story about a person that drinks not one but two tablets to get rid of a hangover. It happened in 1960, since that day in the advertisement of chewing gum or drugs, they take a double dose. 5) Pepsi managed to survive the severe period of the great American depression due to two brilliant ideas. The first idea was that they competed on prices, selling drinks in a container twice as large as Coca-Cola, but the cost of one bottle was the same for both companies. The second idea was realized in an easy, but very well remembered musical accompaniment of the advertising campaign. The lyrics of the song "This drink is for you!" has been stick to the memory of Americans for three decades. Pepsi still sells a large amount of its beverage at a price similar to Coca-Cola. The volume of a can of Coca-Cola is 0.5 liters, and Pepsi is 0.66 liters. 6) Absolut Vodka, which was promoted to the market in 1879 as "Absolutely pure vodka", will soon be celebrated 150 years since the days of the foundation. The opportunity for such pathetic PR was the newest way to rectify an alcoholic beverage. Given the widespread low quality of handicraft produced alcohol, Vodka Absolute instantly became popular and remained propagated even today. 7) In the early nineties in the former Soviet Union, the products of all Western companies were an unthinkable innovation with colorful covers and bright tapes. Sinkers bar appeared on the market and caused sock during the reconstruction period. This bar is promised to replace the whole dinner. However, former Soviet society got used to their own meal and it was hard to beat this market. So, the company focused on the younger generation and succeed. 8) “We think about you!” This slogan provided Tefal with an indisputable reputation at the market. Teflon coated pans were initially positioned as a relatively cheap product because experts in all the commercials ads emphasized that we can fry in their frying pans without oil. However, people didn’t want to believe in this myth and continue frying with oil but using Tefal frying pans since they were comfortable in use. So, Tefal quickly shifted the strategy from frying without oil to the most comfortable frying pans in the world. 9) Caramel rapidly melts in your hands, especially when it comes to children's hands. Moms who were forced to wash children's clothes were the target audience for the world's first caramel on a stick called Chupa-Chups. You might not know but the design of the Chupa-Chups logo was developed by the great Salvador Dali, and the idea of ​​inserting a stick (then it was a wooden one) in caramel belongs to Enrique Bernat. This ball on the stick continues to please children with its taste even today. 10) The design of a modern cigarette pack in most cases includes a flip top. This "hood" was invented by Marlboro marketers. As the result, it became difficult to take the cigarette without taking the whole pack from the pocket. This was the main goal of developers of the new design since they want to see which brand is smoked the most because with a previous design it was impossible. Flip-top quickly spread to other cigarette manufacturers, significantly having increased sales of the most popular brands. See More Related Articles   Top 18 Instagram Marketing Tips To Grow Your Brand in 2018 Powerful Twitter Marketing Strategy You Can Implement in 2018 Top 9 Linkedin Marketing Tips for Business to be in 2018 Top 15 Facebook Marketing Strategy and Tips You Need To Known A Practical Guide: How to Make Money from Social Media in 2018 YouTube Ideas That You Can Use For Brand Building 6 Ways to Get More Instagram Followers and Grow Your Brand   Author Bio   The author’s name is Melisa Marzett and she did her best so you could get acquainted with the most peculiar advertisement tricks for the last hundred years. If you want to enjoy other paper of her, she is working on http://bigpaperwriter.com as a freelance writer. Visit her blog or order the paper with a very good discount. As far as you might have understood, she is really good Read the full article

[tuckinpodcast-blog]

EPISODE 2: THE HAYS CODE AND OTHER BAD IDEAS.

LISTEN: SOUNDLCOUD / ITUNES / GOOGLE PLAY (coming soon!)

NOTES: minimal note-shuffling, I promise. Google Play is reviewing the podcast as we speak, so we should be up soon!

SOURCES: listed at end of transcript

TRANSCRIPT:

Hi! I'm Jack, and this is Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. This week's episode is titled 'The Hays Code and Other Bad Ideas'. This is gonna be a long episode, but it's a really important one, because it lays down the basis for a lot of our future discussions.

Let's start off with the basics. The Hays Code came about in 1930 but it wasn't really enforced until 1934. Basically, what happened was way back in 1915, the Supreme Court heard a case called “Mutual Film Corp. V. Industrial Commission of Ohio”, and voted 9-0 that free speech didn't extend to films. The courts kind of reasoned that, as a form of mass media, movies could literally be used “for evil”, and for some reason this decision also applied to circuses? I don't know, not entirely relevant, but I thought it was a weird aside. The decision by the court was what drove the studios to more closely regulate their content, and the decision was eventually overturned in 1952 with the hearing of the “Joseph Burstyn Inc. V. Wilson”, also known as the “Miracle Decision” because of the short film “The Miracle” that the case was heard over, and it really kind of marked a decline in movie censorship in the US, but by this time, the damage had already been done.

So, what was the Hays Code?

The Hays Code was basically the theaters and the studios agreeing to self-censor in order to avoid losing money from religious-led boycotts or local governments refusing to show so called “immoral” films. As I've mentioned, times were kinda tough in Depression era Hollywood, and a lot of studios went under or cut their contract stars to save money or try to cut costs somehow. The Code is actually called “The Motion Picture Production Code”, but it's known as the Hays Code after William H. Hays, who was the head of the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, and it's basically the racist grandfather of the MPAA ratings system we all known and love today.

How does this come back to queer history? Thanks for asking, all six of my followers on SoundCloud! Let me read the entire section of the Hays Code pertaining to what it calls “impure love”:

“In the case of impure love, the love which society has always regarded as wrong and which has been banned by divine law, the following are important:

Impure love must not be presented as attractive or beautiful.

It must not be the subject of comedy or farce, or treated as material for laughter.

It must not be presented in such a way to arouse passion or morbid curiosity on the part of the audience.

It must not be made to seem right and permissible.

It must not be detailed in method or manner.

I've included a link to a copy of a Hays Code pamphlet and the transcript of it that I just read from so you can go check out the kind of stuff it talks about. And it talks about a lot. No interracial marriage or romance, no adultery, no white slavery. No boobs, no disrespecting the American flag, no dissing the clergy. It's kind of intense, and it explains some of the weird wholesomeness and out-of-left-field endings you get with a lot of the movies from the 30's and 40's.

Now, there were, obviously, stereotypes and stigma around being queer before the Hays Code, but it really cemented this feeling of “othering” – extending beyond queer people as well.

Pre-code, you had a lot of movies that used drag or gender role reversal for laughs. In 1915, Charlie Chaplin dressed in drag for his movie A Woman, and so did Fatty Arbuckle in Miss Fatty. Early films used the “sissy” or “pansy” stereotype – you know, and you've seen it today, the flamboyant, effeminate gay man who had no real humanity to speak of but was only there for a laugh. It was kind of the beginning of that stereotype, and even if it wasn't harmful – and still is – it wasn't as overtly hateful as some of the things we'll see later on.

I've done a lot of digging into what was going on with pre-code lesbians, and I found some movie titles and a few references, but not a lot. Lesbians weren't shown nearly as much as their gay “pansy” counterparts – but if they were shown, they were butch crossdressers for the audience to laugh at, or they were weirdo older spinsters who were dead by the end of the movie – huge surprise, right? Some notable portrayals of lesbians, overt or implied, include Louise Brooks in the 1929 German film Pandora's Box, this is one where the romantic relationship is implied. There's Marlene Dietrich in Morocco in 1930 – and we're gonna talk about in detail in a later episode. There's a girl-on-girl dance scene in 1932's Sign of the Cross, and a butch lesbian in 1933's Women They Talk About. And of course, there's Greta Garbo kissing another woman in Queen Christina in 1933. Of course, it's kind of difficult to find these references, so I want to point out that people have been dismissing lesbians and women who love women as just 'gals bein' pals' for a really, really long time.

After the Hays Code, a lot of this overt sexuality got swept under the rug and buried in subtext. Culturally, you're looking at a time – again, going back to what we talked about with masculine panic – when men are looking at homosexuality as a direct attack on their masculinity. During the Depression, men were already feeling emasculated because they were losing their jobs and they couldn't afford to take care of their families. They're looking at effeminate men and masculine women, and they start to freak out even more. So even though pre-code movies were using shock value – things like queer people or prostitution and violence – to get butts into seats and boost ticket sales, there was still this pervasive anxiety from men getting scared about their masculinity, and from religious groups that were worried about the effects of on-screen sinning on polite society.

The Code essentially killed the pansy, and buried queer people in hints and subtext. So in the 1930's and 40's, if you were queer in a movie, you were either really vaguely defined like Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon, who is explicitly gay in the source material, or you're a villain, also like Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon. Censorship evolved a little to say, basically, you can show perversion of almost any kind, but you can't show it in a positive light. And this sort of gels with the feelings of the time. You have characters running around committing crimes because of their sexuality, because back then people thought that being gay drove you insane as well as being a sin. People thought of being gay as being a disease or a defect and police were running around raiding gay bars and harassing women dressed in men's clothing, and it's really not a great time to be queer.

In 1948, Hitchcock's Rope comes out, and he's very obviously skirting the censors with the two antagonists. It's very thinly veiled that they're in a romantic relationship, but they're also still murderers. But that kind of moves us along into the 50's, when that 'Miracle Decision' has the courts saying that, no, films are protected by the first amendment and they're an art form, and this is really when censorship in film starts to decline. This is also about the time that its ruled that the studios can't own the movie theaters that distribute their films, so the monopoly on the film industry is broken up and the power of the old studios is drastically reduced.

There's still a censorship code at this point, of course, but it's really loosening up in the mid-50's. The code at that time allowed for hints of queerness as long as it was used for humor or if the person was punished for their “deviance”, which eventually led to 1959's Suddenly, Last Summer, starring big names like Liz Taylor, Katherine Hepburn, and my favorite actor Monty Clift. This movie is a landmark because it has what's considered to be the first movie with a named, explicitly gay character.

Now, that's great and all – but the shitty part comes from the plot. Basically, this guy is murdered violently and his cousin, played by Katharine Hepburn, sees it and goes nuts, so the mom – played by Liz Taylor – tries to bribe Monty Clift's character into giving her niece a lobotomy so that no one finds out that her son was gay. And don't worry, I'm going to talk a lot about Monty in a later episode and we'll talk about what kind of effect the movie had on him as closeted gay man, but this movie basically proved to the public that being a “mama's boy” or being controlled by your mom led to being gay, and it was sort of implied that violent murder was the inevitable fate of gay men, and that they kind of deserved it.

This is sort of a trend, moving into the 60's. You've got a lot of subtext in the 1959 remake of Ben-Hur, a lot of covert themes and implications. But at the same time, audiences aren't so interested in boycotting a film because of religious leaders, and movies with “questionable content” didn't really need production code or religious approval anymore. But even though we've got the code loosening to compete with television and the rise of the indie studio after the break-up of the old studio monopoly, you've still got a lot of queer characters who are miserable and depressed, or suicidal and homicidal. A lot of them are still dead by the time the credits roll.

In 1965, a movie called Inside Daisy Clover comes out, and there's a gay man in it. He isn't miserable or struggling, and he survives the entire movie – but he's never really explicitly named as gay. It's all still buried in subtext. In 1967, we get Marlon Brando and Liz Taylor in Reflections in a Golden Eye, starring Brando as a repressed gay Army major – a role that was supposed to be Monty Clift's, but he turned it down due to his declining health, supposedly. This is kind of an interesting, weird movie about sexual repression, both heterosexual and homosexual, and the violence it can spark. I'm going to talk in detail about this movie when I do my Brando episode, so I'm gonna put a pin in this discussion for now.

The sixties also brought us the beautiful weirdness of Andy Warhol, Kenneth Anger, and other people like them who were giving us fully realized and complex queer characters, but we don't see any movies marketed towards a gay audience until the 1970's. In 1968, the final death knell of the Hays Code came with the introduction of the MPAA rating system we're all familiar with today.

So, why the long history lesson? I wanted to talk about this bit of film history for several reasons.

First of all, chronologically it makes sense in the context of the show. Last week, we talked about noted vampire Rudolph Valentino – I finished American Horror Story: Hotel, by the way – and he died before the Hays Code was even written, a whole year before, to be exact.

Second of all, it's important to talk about all of this to give context to our future discussions about Hays-era movies and about the environment that actors were working in. Next week, we're going to be talking about some ladies I mentioned this week – Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katherine Hepburn, women who's work snapped from pre to post-code, and we're going to pick this thread of queer representation post Hays Code in a few episodes, but for now, you have some background on the subject.

And third of all, and most importantly, now you can look at some of the stereotypes that we still have today and be able to trace them back to their origins. You see these harmful stereotypes all the time, on TV and in the movies. So we have like, Buffalo Bill in Silence of the Lambs, and we can draw a straight line back to Joel Cairo in The Maltese Falcon. None of this is an excuse or anything – it was wrong then and it's wrong now – but now we have context. We can ask Hollywood, “Why haven't you changed? Why do these offensive things still happen?” You know, back in the 1950's, it was playing into toxix masculinity and that same fear of independent women that was driving criticism of Valentino in the 20's. And for whatever reason, we still have caricatures of queer people on screen as well as this same pervasive toxic and performative masculinity. We have a lot of trouble finding fully realized queer characters that don't end up dead or alone, or even still hidden in subtext.

There's this great moment in the last season of True Blood, maybe the only great moment other than Ryan Kwanten and Alexander Skarsgaard's sex scene – when Lafayette lashes out at Jessica after she catches him and her current boyfriend hooking up, and it's so good and sums up what I want to say so well, that I'm going to leave you with it:

“Everybody else in this fucking town is falling in love and getting engaged and having babies! Has it ever occurred to you that Lafayette – that queen that makes all you white heterosexuals laugh and feel good about yourselves – has it fucking ever occurred to you that maybe I want a piece of that happiness too?”

Thank you for listening to Tuck In, We're Rolling: Queer Hollywood Stories. This episode was researched, written and recorded by me, Jack Segreto. You can find a transcript of this episode and all of our episodes, along with some fun facts and photos, on our tumblr, tuckinpodcast.tumblr.com. You can also give us a like on Facebook at facebook.com/tuckinpodcast. We accept messages on both of those platforms, so feel free to shoot us suggestions for future shows and comments. We upload new episodes every Wednesday and you can find us on iTunes, Soundcloud, and now Google Play. Don't forget to rate and subscribe so more people can find us! Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.

SOURCES:

The Motion Picture Production Code (PDF)

The Hays Code - Arts Reformation

From Sissie to Secrecy: The Evolution of the Hays Code

The Hays Code: Censorship, Sexism, and the Code that Built Pop Culture

Homosexuality in Film

Gay and Lesbian Characters in Pre-Code Film

History of Homosexuality in Film (yeah, I got lazy and used Wikipedia. SUE ME, OKAY, I WORK 40+ HOURS A WEEK)

True Blood Wiki: ‘Lost Cause’ Synopsis & Quotes

OKAY BYEEEEEE

[spotlightsaga]

Kevin Cage of @spotlightsaga reviews… Untucked (S09E06) Snatch Game Airdate: April 29, 2017 @wowreport Ratings: 593,000+ on @youtube as of 6/15/17 Score: 8/10

**********SPOILERS BELLW**********

I made a specific contestant a promise I would go ahead and watch Untucked to not only highlight the juxtaposition of my styles of writing when it comes the two totally different series (one competition, one what’s morphed into a show of spirit and sense of community), but also because Drag Race is simply a tough one for me to review. I have a lot of respect for everyone that comes on the show and demonstrates that ‘fire’, and I get caught up in trying to both critique ‘Drag Race’ as the competition style calls for and pad my blunt critiques with humor that can be sometimes taken the wrong way. Last week’s 'Untucked’, I focused heavily on Nina, I recognized a pattern, certain tendencies, withdrawing fro. The group, and a look of the eyes that I know all too well because I myself have battled depression, addiction, dependency, a slew of shit (as most of us have) and had to figure out how to maneuver life without throwing up too many buckets of water on myself when I start to get white hot. It’s not easy, but for some people it is… And sometimes those very people want to say, 'Get over it’, 'Suck it up’, or write you off… Depression, self doubt, all these things that plague us in the cycle of the human condition are not something you can just wipe off the mirror like lipstick… But I see you Queens struggling with that too, so…

We start this 'Untucked’ off with a bit of fun, the same fun we aren’t exactly seeing translate to VH1 on the 'Main Stage’… Then again VH1 was the network that picked Wendy Williams to host the between breaks 'Viewing Party’. Just ask our buddy Jonny McGovern & his friend Erickatoure why that’s not the best move… Better yet just go subscribe to his channel on YouTube. 'Hey Qween’ is literally just waiting for you, calling your name, just sitting on YouTube Red’s digital shelf waiting for you to watch until your eyes turn glossy & red, leaving you pupils dilated to the size of mega saucers… And when you finally emerge from your house everyone will assume your either a tweaker or from Wilton Manors.

Apparently Trinity Taylor, God Bless her Floridian soul, has never seen 'Bad Girls Club’ or been the only white girl in the room… As she has no clue what 'edges’ are. I can’t tell you why this is so damn funny to me, maybe it’s Shea’s earnest and surprisingly highly detailed & accurate attempt at educating Trinity on the matter (This is emerging as Shea’s specialty, not the history and extensive knowledge of edges, but breaking things down in articulate manner that anyone can follow - plus she’s talent personified)… Maybe it’s Valentina’s adorably juvenile delivery of the line she delivers to Trinity explaining to her that she has her own form of edges, 'that black spray stuff you be spraying, DUH!’ But as god as my witness, there are simply no words to describe the laughter this scene inspires!

Trinity still doesn’t get it, she’s 'from the south’ she says we don’t use words like 'Edges’… Tho, again, I’m gonna have to break something down… South Florida and even parts of Central Florida aren’t really the south. Consider us more of the North Caribbean, hell we aren’t even really a part of the United States, thats just what it looks like on the map so everyone including your parents and teachers have told you so. But yeah, 'edges’ are most definitely still a word down here in the 'North Carribean’. Valentina’s adorableness continues… Her Hispanic background leads her to really appreciate Trinity’s astonishing ability to be 'so evil and so nice at the same time’. See, that’s how we do it here in South & Central FL… We love you, but we simply don’t have time to dance around your feelings. We’ll give you the shirt off of our backs then have you lay down in a mud puddle so we can walk over you. I’m kidding, of course. We’d obviously pick you you up and give you a peck on the cheek, dust off the mud and take our fn’ shirt back. It’s just the way the bottom half of Florida works, and that’s why I 'get’ and love Trinity Taylor so very much. Now that we got some proper Florida representation, maybe S10 we can get South Florida’s legendary 'Daisy Deadpetals’ finally on this show! Ru, please?

Enter the tops and the bottoms… Tho Alexis clearly states, 'This top is versatile.’ Told you, Alex, we could have so much fun. Tho for me it’s always much more about the passion and connection than it is about the final act. We’re getting way off topic. Sasha and Alexis go back and forth telling the others how much the judges praised each other… There is a deep respect between the two and though I absolutely loved Sasha’s 'Marlene Dietrich’ and did pad my opinion with a bit of comedy on the 'Main Stage’ review… I do want to set the record straight and say Alexis’s Liza was most definitely a highlight. Seeing the top two sit across from each other with their dignified 'Northern Poise’ is quite the scene… And Alexis’s shape from the side is nothing short of astounding. If the hair was different and the dress were pants, it would be spot on to my favorite Madonna… 'Bedtime Stories’ Madonna, particularly 'Human Nature’. Either way, I love it and for some reason Sasha’s poise is so proper I can’t help but keep rolling the word 'Yankee’ through my head… I don’t know how to interpret that for you, but I have it on pause and can’t stop laughing.

With VH1 taking the show in such a vastly different direction, I can’t say how much I appreciate this 'Untucked’ enough. Alexis, Shea, and Sasha look to immediately focus on Nina who needs a bit of love after the strange exploitation of her depression reared its ugly head the episode before last of 'Drag Race’. It’s clear Nina is feeling a bit better at this point but those kinds of battles are never over. These three obviously are aware of that and I want to show love to all three of them, particularly Shea who goes the extra mile for her and really tries to continue to hammer things back into perspective for Nina. This is the 'Drag Race’ I want to see. People have criticized the show for being too 'best friend race’ as they have with Slice’s RHOT… But we do enough of beating each other down, especially when you are in a high pressure situation constantly trying to squeeze every last drop of creativity that you can for the next challenge and the next and being paraded around on a runway and criticized, by both the judges and the world… I’m happy to see (however you want put this) the brotherly/sisterly… Straight up human empathy shining under the bright stage lights of television.

The bottoms… Peppermint, Cynthia Lee Fontaine, and Farrah Moan speak next. Peppermint is frustrated that she nailed Brittany in a prior challenge, but couldn’t nail Nene Leakes. It’s much different when you are given a character with lines & direction than when you literally have to create one from scratch… Then again, everyone knows 'Snatch Games’ is coming, so they really do need to be prepared. Farrah looks stunning, and is clearly saved by her fantastic runway look, I’m still curious as to who Gigi was or why anyone would care… Then again I’m in my 30’s and an ex-athlete, Ginger Cub who thinks the thicker the better… Im not scouring the internet for makeup tips. Either way, Farrah is just very young for this competition. Bring her back in 5-10 years and she’d be a massive threat. Her talent is there, it just needs a few years of experience before she can really show what she’s made of.

I often find myself very frustrated with Cynthia Lee Fontaine. This is a competition, I want to see the best of the best battle it out. This is Cynthia’s second time on the show and she’s screwing up essential Drag Race portions of the show… But here, she’s just so defeated, but she instantly goes through a horde of emotions within 2 seconds and is all the sudden firing herself back up with her own words, and it melts me. Despite any critiques I give as a judge would in my reviews of the 'Main Stage’, I’m a softie on the inside and nobody does Cynthia like Cynthia Lee Fontaine. I just don’t think a 2nd stent on 'Drag Race’ was in order, but there is something about that fighting spirit Cynthia displays that I feel needs to be seen, not just by this younger generation, but by everyone. Alexis takes note and proposes a toast, “L'chaim”, bitches!

World Of Wonder, come through! If VH1 has the producers focusing on the negative, then WOW always has their own freedom with 'Untucked’ to make up for that… And they do. Our girl Nina needed this video message from her mother, and that soft, loving, and tender look Nina shoots the screen that you can see if you pause the show right at 13:49 is all I needed and wanted for Nina. Keep pushing, girl… And listen to Shea! That’s a true friend, and there aren’t that many of those in the world. Like I keep saying, you can always tell who the strongest men and women in the room are… They are the ones lifting everyone up, instead of tearing them all apart.

Before I close out yet another long-winded love letter to World Of Wonder’s 'Untucked’ and all the contestants in this show… As I’ve explained in the past, I’ve always had an extremely tough time with the gay community. I sold myself at Johnny’s in Ft Lauderdale for years and nearly destroyed myself after my Aunt (who was like my sister) took her own life. My past experiences made it difficult for me to separate sex and shame, I will not point fingers as to why, but I’ve opened up about it in other reviews and will continue to do so as I sort it out as I go along. My critiques for the main stage of 'Drag Race’ are always difficult to navigate. I have a deep respect for the art form and contestants of Drag Race from Jaymes Mansfield to Nina BoNina Brown to Alexis Michelle and everyone in between, but like Trinity Taylor I try to tell it like it is from a loving place. I enjoy writing about the show. I enjoy watching the show. And if I’ve ever offended a contestant or said something that crossed a line or was taken the wrong way, I apologize. I fight to kind of hold onto the gay community in a weird way through this show, because my experiences with said community have been mainly negative in real life… Whether I was selling myself on stage at Johnny’s or Boardwalk… Or being introduced to methamphetamine at an early age.

I write because it’s my passion, and I’m starting to make a nice living at it and turning my dreams into reality. I said something in my last review of 'Drag Race’ and attempted to pad it with humor and the person who it affected respectfully came to me and talked to me about it directly. I appreciate that… And I think we were both able to see where each other were coming from and hopefully a friendship will come of it. But then this morning I wake up to death threats, 'kill yourself’, and a variety of hate speech from a community that I’ve never been able to find that true piece of love and acceptance I needed… One that for some reason is the hardest on me than any other community or subject I write on. I’m not over here crying about it, but all that nastiness will get you blocked real quick. My Spotlight Saga project, which is growing fast, and I’m happy to tell you all is being built into an online magazine slowly but surely - as well as a place where people can share perspectives to open hearts, minds, mouths, and ears, is my baby and I will fight for it till the end of time. There’s nothing in this world that I do half assed, my momma sure of that. So show love, address each other with respect, and fools… Don’t come at me crazy, cuz I’m not throwing the towel in anytime soon.

[chiseler]

JOHN GILBERT: Foolish Love

“In Hollywood’s most glittering days, he glittered the most,” wrote screenwriter Ben Hecht of John Gilbert. “He received ten thousand dollars a week and could keep most of it. He lived in a castle on top of a hill. Thousands of letters poured in daily telling him how wonderful he was…He was as unsnobbish as a happy child. He went wherever he was invited…He drank with carpenters, danced with waitresses and made love with whores and movie queens alike….He was being Jack Gilbert, prince, butterfly, Japanese lantern, and the spirit of romance.” It’s a loving tribute to a lost friend, but one man calling another man a “Japanese lantern” gives the game away a bit. Gilbert was too happy and too puffed-up about all those letters telling him how wonderful he was. He acted and lived at too high a pitch, and then the rug was pulled out from under him.

Born in a trunk and on the road with traveling players, Gilbert paid his dues in many silent features from 1915-1924, often for director Maurice Tourneur and often in unsympathetic parts, though he did snag a good role in a Mary Pickford movie, Heart o’ the Hills (1919). Gilbert had ambitions to be a writer and director, but he found he liked the attention that came with posing for the camera. He was high-strung and excitable, a big drinker who regularly fell madly in love with his co-stars.

Gilbert signed with MGM in 1924, appearing in the first film they released, Victor Sjöström’s He Who Gets Slapped (1924). Though Gilbert has little to do in that Lon Chaney movie, he looks very fetching in his Harlequin tights. As he pitches woo to Norma Shearer, his deep-set eyes flash and stare at her; he seems overeager, but also very eager to please. This was still the age of Rudolph Valentino, when Great Lovers and sheiks were very much appreciated by a large female audience.

The following year saw the release of two films that made Gilbert into a huge star: Erich Von Stroheim’s perverse super-production The Merry Widow and Vidor’s epic war film The Big Parade. In the Von Stroheim film, Gilbert holds himself stiffly when he spots his leading lady Mae Murray, as if his entire body were an erection, but lust turns to love in an instant on his face after she rebuffs his advances. Gilbert knew that film acting is a matter of letting feelings register mainly behind the eyes, and though he sometimes overdid the eye flashing and bulging, at his best he holds the screen with his hot-tempered playacting, his intense alternation between ardency and outrage.

As Jim, an idle rich man’s son who goes to war and falls in love in The Big Parade, Gilbert is more than up to the operatic intensity of his farewell scene with French girl Renée Adorée, and he also sustains the unusually long scenes in both the training section of the film and the later battle sequences, making fresh and original choices everywhere but particularly in the interaction he has with a dying enemy soldier as they wait in a trench together.

Lillian Gish was so impressed with The Big Parade that she asked for the whole creative team behind it for her own first MGM film, Vidor’s La Bohème (1926), where Gilbert bounds around with great confidence and vitality as her lover Rodolphe. This was impressive, but as nothing compared to his role as Leo von Harden (the ideal Gilbert character name!) in Clarence Brown’s Flesh and the Devil (1926), where the title role was played by the young Greta Garbo, who is very much the dominant partner in their heavy-breathing, sex-crazed love scenes. They wallowed in each other both offscreen and on.

Gilbert had it all now: the best films, the best directors, the best wine, women and song. Not many stars can match that run of movies from The Merry Widow to The Big Parade to La Bohème to Flesh and the Devil. But Gilbert was a complainer, and he was always criticizing his roles and his films in interviews, which enraged MGM boss Louis B. Mayer. Stories differ on just why Mayer hated Gilbert so much, though Gilbert’s increasingly high salary and his constant biting of the hand that fed him were likely reasons enough. A widely repeated story by Vidor’s wife Eleanor Boardman about Gilbert physically attacking Mayer after Garbo jilted him at the altar seems to be false, or at least highly questionable.

Gilbert was safe for a while longer, playing a sexy antihero in Tod Browning’s The Show (1927) and re-teaming with Garbo in Edmund Goulding’s Love (1927), where he is at his most electrically confident with his increasingly remote leading lady. Garbo does sometimes make Gilbert seem crude by comparison in Love, but who doesn’t seem crude next to her? He had staring contests with Joan Crawford in Twelve Miles Out (1927) and Four Walls (1928) and was seemingly impressed by the self-destructive sexual magnetism of Jeanne Eagels in Man, Woman and Sin (1927). In A Woman of Affairs (1928), Gilbert willingly played a stiff prig, damping down his John Gilbert-ness for the sake of the story, a vestige of the company spirit from his early silent days.

And then sound came in. Gilbert made Redemption (1930), but it was held back and His Glorious Night (1929) was released first. The legend has been that Gilbert’s high voice ruined his film career, backed up by the persistent rumor that Mayer ordered the MGM sound engineer to turn up the treble on Gilbert’s scenes. One moment in His Glorious Night became infamous, and it can sometimes be seen in documentaries on the period: Gilbert repeatedly cries, “I love you, I love you” to his leading lady (Catherine Dale Owen), which supposedly embarrassed audiences and made them laugh.

Gilbert did not have a high or squeaky voice, which became the widely repeated untrue story about him. What he did have in his first talkies, unfortunately, was a nervous voice. Though it was basically a baritone, it was a jumpy, pinched, sometimes nasal baritone. His voice revealed something about his own insecurity, and this left him open to ridicule, first with Norma Shearer in the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet in The Hollywood Review of 1929 and then especially in Redemption, a gloomy career killer of a film set in Russia where Gilbert and Eleanor Boardman are cringe-worthily stilted in their dialogue scenes. The problem here was the way that he talked, not so much the sound of his voice.

In the next six talking films he made on his MGM contract, Gilbert completely fixed all of his initial vocal problems, but it seems to have been of no use. He was being paid a princely $250,000 a picture on his old contract, and he refused to negotiate down, which drove Mayer crazy. He butched it up very entertainingly with Wallace Beery in the lively Way for a Sailor (1930) and made the most of The Phantom of Paris (1931), a clever Gaston Leroux story where he actually deliberately pitches his voice higher when his character wears a disguise, as if he wanted to show off his new vocal flexibility. But his high salary meant that his talkies couldn’t afford the type of female star he had played with in the silents, and he gradually lost his audience.

He was also losing roles to John Barrymore and Clark Gable, whose bluff and hearty voice was as secure as granite by comparison, but he made one last-ditch effort to get his career back on track with Downstairs (1932), a little corker of Pre-Code nastiness that he provided the story for. As a manipulative servant who contemptuously presents himself as a sexual object for women, Gilbert puts all of his own anger and skill and talent into his role. He loved playing unsympathetic but charismatic characters, and this film lets him go all the way with that. Downstairs is a revelation, but it was ahead of its time, something that might have been a hit in the 1960s. Not many noticed it in 1932.

Floundering without work or contract, Gilbert was excited and grateful when his old partner in love Garbo insisted that he play opposite her in Queen Christina (1933), but that seeming rescue did him no real favors. He seems very uncomfortable as a Spanish ambassador, scared literally stiff as his co-star acts rings around him, seemingly out of his time and element. Worse, he got in trouble when he argued with the studio about how their first love scene should be played. Gilbert never moved past the more relaxed period of 1915-1925 when everybody helped out and pitched in. He was temperamentally unsuited to the large studio era, and he could not shake off the air of failure that had seeped into his press and his own life.

Speaking in 1933, Gilbert referenced a press article that had been titled, “Is John Gilbert Through?” He thought that the question was its own answer. “Another editor wrote that, after seeing and hearing me in His Glorious Night, he felt as though he had just had news that his dearest friend had been stricken with a malignant and incurable disease,” Gilbert said mournfully. Another newspaper referred to him as having been “once regarded as the ‘great lover’ of the screen—that is to say, in the year B.G. (Before Gable).”

In his final film The Captain Hates the Sea (1935), which was made for Columbia, Gilbert had arrived at that sad place where he was such a drunk that he could only play a drunk. Many things did Gilbert in before he died of heart failure in 1936, hoping to make a comeback with his lover Marlene Dietrich in Desire (1936). Though he could be immature, he was smart enough to realize that some of his downfall had been his own doing. He is one of the more tragic examples of a star taking their own publicity to heart, first for the thrill of the praise and then for the confirmation of all gnawing doubts of self-worth.

by Dan Callahan

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Scorpions Quotes

Official Website: Scorpions Quotes

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• A king who feared wasps once decreed that they were abolished. As it happened, they did him no harm. But he was eventually stung to death by scorpions. – Idries Shah • A male scorpion is stabbed to death after mating. In chess, the powerful queen often does the same to the king without giving him the satisfaction of a lover. – Gregor Piatigorsky • A society driven mainly by selfish individualism has all the potential for sustainability of a collection of angry scorpions in a bottle. – David Ehrenfeld • An untrampled scorpion troubles no one. – Paolo Bacigalupi

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Scorpio', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_scorpio').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_scorpio img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Christ wants not nibblers of the possible, but grabbers of the impossible, by faith in the omnipotence, fidelity, and wisdom of the Almighty Saviour Who gave the command. Is there a wall in our path? By our God we will leap over it! Are there lions and scorpions in our way? We will trample them under our feet! Does a mountain bar our progress? Saying, ‘Be thou cast into the sea,’ we will march on. Soldiers of Jesus! Never surrender! – Charles Studd • Do you know the story of the scorpion and the frog? You know, the frog agrees to carry the scorpion across the river, because the scorpion promises not to sting him. And then the scorpion stings the frog, half way across the river. The drowning frog asks him why he did it, when they’ll both drown, and the scorpion says that he’s a scorpion, and it’s his nature to sting. – Gregory David Roberts • Duane Allman was one of the best there ever was … when you listen to him, you are hearing a truly gifted individual giving his all to the music, and there is nothing better than that. Duane played music the same way that he rode his motorcycle and drove his car .. he was a daredevil, just triple Scorpio, God’s-on-my-side wide open… that was part of the romance and I loved Duane. I have nothing but admiration for him – Richard Betts • Each of us as he receives his private trouncings at the hands of fate is kept in good heart by hearing of the moth in his brother’s parachute and the scorpion in his neighbor’s underwear. – N. F. Simpson • Envy is one of the scorpions of the mind, often having little to do with the objective, external world. – Bonnie Friedman • Envy, if surrounded on all sides by the brightness of another’s prosperity, like the scorpion confined within a circle of fire, will sting itself to death. – Charles Caleb Colton • God has allowed some magical reversal to occur, so that you see the scorpion pit as an object of desire, and all the beautiful expanse around it as dangerous and swarming with snakes. – Rumi • I am a Scorpio, and playing the seductress appeals to me. There are a lot of women throughout film history, like Marlene Dietrich or Mae West – those are the women I was always attracted to. The bad girls. – Chloe Sevigny • I can bear scorpion’s stings, tread fields of fire, in frozen gulfs of cold eternal lie, be tossed aloft through tracts of endless void, but cannot live in shame. – Joanna Baillie • I can only hope he’s an Aries and not a Scorpio. – Candace Bushnell • I could fall in love with a cruel desert that kills without passion, a canyon full of scorpions, one thousand blinding arctic storms, a century sealed in a cave, a river of molten salt flowing down my throat. But never with you. – Henry Rollins • I give you five minutes to spare your blushes. here is the little bronze key that opens the ebony caskets on the mantle piece in the Louise-Phillipe room. In one of the caskets you will find a scorpion, in the other, a grasshopper, both very cleverly imitated in Japanese bronze: they will say yes or no for you. If you turn the scorpion round, that will mean to me, when I return that you have said yes. The grasshopper will mean no… The grasshopper, be careful of the grass hopper! A grasshopper does not only turn: it hops! It hops! And it hops jolly high! – Gaston Leroux • I have snakes, three sharks, moray eels, piranhas, five scorpions and a bird spider. All of them are predators. They are dangerous but it’s cool to have strong and powerful pets. – Tracy Morgan • I kept having dreams all night. I thought they were touching me with their fingers. But dreams don’t have fingers, they have fists, so it must have been scorpions. – Roberto Bolano • I love people, studying people. That’s the Scorpio part of me. We are natural detectives; we like to find things out. – James Van Praagh • I must brave the interior of the most tawdry and literally trumpery tower of them all … the Trump Taj Mahal. For taking the name of the priceless mausoleum of Agra, one of the beauties and wonders of the world, for that alone Donald Trump should be stripped naked and whipped with scorpions along the boardwalk.- It is as if a giant toad has raped a butterfly. – Stephen Fry • I stopped watching for ridicule, the scorpion’s tail hidden in his words. He said what he meant; he was puzzled if you did not. Some people might have mistaken this for simplicity. But is it not a sort of genius to cut always to the heart? – Madeline Miller • I think making a pretense of civility toward Eric Alterman is like making a pretense of civility to a scorpion. – John Podhoretz • I used to have 30 different species of tarantulas, as well as two Australian scorpions that are considered the deadliest in the world. If stung by one, a person would die in 30 minutes. But when I had kids I had to get rid of them, of course. Those were intense! – Jonathan Davis • I will now make a scorpion appear in Osama bin Laden’s pants – David Copperfield • If it is not strong upon your heart to practice what you read, to what end do you read? To increase your own condemnation? If your light and knowledge be not turned into practice, the more knowing a man you are, the more miserable a man you will be in the day of recompense; your light and knowledge will more torment you than all the devils in hell. Your knowledge will be that rod that will eternally lash you, and that scorpion that will forever bite you, and that worm that will everlastingly gnaw you; therefore read, and labor to know that you may do–or else you are undone forever. – Thomas Brooks • If you are in a band like my brother, Rudolf, who is in the Scorpions, then you have a kind of umbrella and you cover each other. You have five people to discuss things with and you are all in the same boat, and therefore make much wiser choices. – Michael Schenker • I’m a Scorpio, and Scorpios eat themselves out and burn themselves up like me. – Vivien Leigh • I’m a Scorpio, and who knows if there is any validity to it, but I’m very emotional. I have high highs and low lows. – Chely Wright • It is a sin to follow your horoscope because only God knows the future and He won’t tell us. Also, we can tell horoscopes are false because according to astrology, Christ would have been a Capricorn, and Capricorn people are cold, ambitious and attracted to Scorpio and Virgo, and we know that Christ was warm, loving, and not attracted to anybody. – Christopher Durang • It wont be long now it wont be long man is making deserts of the earth it wont be long now before man will have used it up so that nothing but ants and centipedes and scorpions can find a living on it. – Don Marquis • Many centuries ago, Oriental thinkers recognized that the mind is a constant mover and that it is next to impossible to stop it altogether. But one can learn to manage it by skillful use of the handle of control. They compared the mind to a jumping monkey. To intensify the image, they added that the monkey was maddened; then someone got him drunk; and finally, a scorpion bit him. – Ervin Seale • Mark my words, nothing smells worse than burned scorpion. – Rick Riordan • Music has always helped my films. In ‘The Curse Of The Jade Scorpion,’ you can hear ‘Sunrise’ by Glenn Miller, an idol of my childhood, in the surprise ending. I like mixing comedy with suspense and action. – Woody Allen • My birth sign is Scorpio and they eat themselves up and burn themselves out. I swing between happiness and misery. I am part prude and part nonconformist. I say what I think and I don’t pretend and I am prepared to accept the consequences of my actions. – Vivien Leigh • My mother only said: Thank God the scorpion picked on me and spared my children. – Nissim Ezekiel • My name is Zia Rashid.” She tilted her head as if listening. Right on cue, the entire building rumbled. Dust sprinkled from the ceiling, and the slithering sounds of scorpion doubled in volume behind us. “And right now,” Zia continued, sounding a bit disappointed, “I must save your miserable lives. – Rick Riordan • My office is in a building in midtown Chicago. It’s an older building, and not in the best of shape, especially since there was that problem with the elevator last year. I don’t care what anyone says, that wasn’t my fault. when a giant scorpion the size of an Irish wolfhound is tearing its way through the roof of your elevator car, you get real willing to take desperate measures. – Jim Butcher • O, full of scorpions is my mind! – William Shakespeare • Old Japanese saying, live scorpion in pants makes life interesting. – Will Hobbs • Once I was chased by the king of all scorpions. I have the most notorious animal stories. – Rachel Hunter • Please nothing, she’s a vicious piranha. She looks all cute and cuddly, then she opens that mouth and lets loose so much venom she could double as a nest of scorpions. (Leo) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • Poverty is a scorpion; it stings the poor and it also stings the men with high conscience who feel sad about the poverty; the rest is immune to it! – Mehmet Murat Ildan • Remorse, the fatal egg by pleasure laid, In every bosom where her nest is made, Hatched by the beams of truth, denies him rest, And proves a raging scorpion in his breast. – William Cowper • Scorpions are quite ruthless, you know. That is why Artemis bid one of them to kill her foe Orion. And as a reward she set the scorpion on up in the sky. I’m not ruthless. I merely do whatever it takes to achive my goals That’s not ruthless? – Lisa Kleypas • So do the dark in soul expire, Or live like scorpion girt by fire; So writhes the mind remorse hath riven, Unfit for earth, undoom’d for heaven, Darkness above, despair beneath, Around it flame, within it death. – Lord Byron • Some learned writers . . . have compared a Scorpion to an Epigram . . . because as the sting of the Scorpion lyeth in the tayl, so the force and virtue of an epigram is in the conclusion. – Edward Topsell • Surrounded by the flames of jealousy, the jealous one winds up, like the scorpion, turning the poisoned sting against himself. – Friedrich Nietzsche • Tell me what it’s like. The race.” “What it’s like is a battle. A mess of horses and men and blood. The fastest and strongest of what is left from two weeks of preparation on the sand. It’s the surf in your face, the deadly magic of November on your skin, the Scorpio drums in the place of your heartbeat. It’s speed, if you’re lucky. It’s life and it’s death or it’s both, and there’s nothing like it. – Maggie Stiefvater • That’s one of my greatest strengths. I’m a Scorpio rising – we’re very decisive. I’m very good at cutting things off that don’t feel right. – June Diane Raphael • That’s the problem with them fables, they’re putting animals together that wouldn’t meet. I don’t know where a scorpion is knockin’ around with a frog. – Karl Pilkington • The canyon country does not always inspire love. To many it appears barren, hostile, repellent – a fearsome mostly waterless land of rock and heat, sand dunes and quicksand, cactus, thornbrush, scorpion, rattlesnake, and agaraphobic distances. To those who see our land in that manner, the best reply is, yes, you are right, it is a dangerous and terrible place. Enter at your own risk. Carry water. Avoid the noonday sun. Try to ignore the vultures. Pray frequently. – Edward Abbey • The mind of guilt is full of scorpions. – William Shakespeare • The only thing worse than fighting a giant scorpion was fighting a giant scorpion who was trying to protect her young. – Suzanne Collins • The Scorpion connects with the Serpent through the Dragon. – Dion Fortune • There are three big things going for The Scorpio Races: first, it is set on a beautiful but wild island in the middle of the cold Atlantic Ocean. That would’ve seduced me as a teen reader. Second, It is full of beautiful but killer horses being trained for a dangerous race. Actually, that would’ve seduced me as a teen reader as well. At third it involves a very repressed love story with a very Mr. Darcy-like love interest. – Maggie Stiefvater • There is poison in the fang of the serpent, in the mouth of the fly and in the sting of a scorpion; but the wicked man is saturated with it. – Chanakya • To ruminate upon evils, to make critical notes upon injuries, and be too acute in their apprehensions, is to add unto our own tortures, to feather the arrows of our enemies, to lash ourselves with the scorpions of our foes, and to resolve to sleep no more. – Thomas Browne • Ultimately, however, as the Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter pointed out, a powerful bureaucratic class is in the same relation to commerce as was the scorpion in Aesop to the dog on whose back he crossed the river. They will destroy commerce and establish socialism, even if it kills them, because that is their nature. – John Derbyshire • Unless you are here: this garden refuses to exist. Pink dragonflies fall from the air and become scorpions scratching blood out of rocks. The rainbows that dangle upon this mist: shatter. Like the smile of a child separated from his mother’s milk for the very first time. –from poem Blood and Blossoms – Aberjhani • We learned that lesson very well, especially in the eighties, that terrorists cannot be used as a political card, you cannot put it in your pocket, because it’s like a scorpion; it will bite you someday. – Bashar al-Assad • We may anticipate a state of affairs in which two Great Powers will each be in a position to put an end to the civilization and life of the other, though not without risking its own. We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life. – J. Robert Oppenheimer • We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life. – J. Robert Oppenheimer • We want the National Intelligence, we want the Police, we want the Scorpions, any other institutions, the tax people, and so on, the totality of these bodies, to get together. – Thabo Mbeki • What I’m attempting to do is to show people that if I can spend some time with very dangerous spiders and snakes and scorpions, then maybe they’ll feel different about the spiders and snakes they find around their areas. I don’t need people to keep them as pets. I just like them to be respectful and see that everything in nature has its place. – Dominic Monaghan • When I write “paradise” I mean not only apple trees and golden women but also scorpions and tarantulas and flies, rattlesnakes and Gila monsters, sandstorms, volcanoes and earthquakes, bacteria and bear, cactus, yucca, bladderweed, ocotillo and mesquite, flash floods and quicksand, and yes – disease and death and the rotting of flesh. – Edward Abbey • Where most people looked forward to the weekend to go out and yie one on, my idea of a good time was to figure out a Scorpions song. – Warren DeMartini • Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions and the branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, teases, corrodes, undermines. – Edwin Percy Whipple • Woman is the gate of the devil, the road to iniquity, the sting of the scorpion, in a word, a dangerous species. – St. Jerome • You catch a fairly young field-vole and flay it… We take the skin, when Venus stands in the sign of the scorpion, and combust the skin… Now take the ash, which you got this way, and pepper it out on the fields. – Rudolf Steiner • You have to remember the police used to raid and arrest the audience for seeing Scorpio Rising (1964), or Jack Smith movies. Wouldn’t that be exciting today, if you see went to the movie and everyone at the IFC was arrested in a paddy wagon and taken away? – John Waters [clickbank-storefront-bestselling]

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