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johannesviii · 4 years ago

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Top 10 Personal Favorite Hit Songs from 2020

You know, when I finished my latest list and realised every decade had the same pattern and that we were slowly going towards a series of great years for pop, I didn’t realise how good that year would be.

What’s at the top? Am I boringly predictable because I already said I loved that song all the way back in January 2020? Let’s find out.

Disclaimers:

Keep in mind I’m using both the year-end top 100 lists from the US and from France while making these top 10 things. There’s songs in English that charted in my country way higher than they did in their home countries, or even earlier or later, so that might get surprising at times.

Of course there will probably be stuff in French somewhere on this post. We suck. I know. It’s my list. Deal with it.

My musical tastes have always been terrible and I’m not a critic, just a listener and an idiot.

I have sound to color synesthesia which justifies nothing but might explain why I have trouble describing some songs in other terms than visual ones.

So. Uh. How was your 2020?

Mine was actually surprisingly good, considering. I’m lucky enough to have a job that I can partially do from home, and I was extremely paranoid from the get-go and nobody got sick under this roof so far. Turns out I’m even better at my job from home and I got permission to work from home one day per week even after the health crisis is over! My first name was also finally officially approved and I can’t tell you how happy I feel about that. I almost feel bad to have had such a good year considering the circumstances. I feel like an asshole just because I’m happy, haha.

The only frustrating part was that I was supposed to see Hatari in concert in Paris in early April which, as you can guess, was cancelled. I’m not too mad about it though, since their tour was called “Europe will crumble” and the message saying the tour was cancelled started with “since Europe is actually crumbling due to Covid-19″ and that’s hysterical.

Good or interesting albums that came out in 2020 now, let’s see.

Nightwish released Human/Nature, which was a huge letdown compared to their previous album, but I will relisten to it at some point to make sure I wasn’t just in a bad mood that day.

The Birthday Massacre released Diamonds, which might be their weakest album since their debut, but contained some real gems (I listened to The Last Goodbye on a loop, it floored me. Flashback and Enter are also very good).

The 1975 released Notes On A Conditional Form, and let’s be real, it’s a f█cking mess. You could cut half the tracks and end up with an excellent album, but as it is it’s like, yes, a collection of notes ; however there’s some truely excellent shit on it (see unelligible songs).

Thanks to a friend on a discord server I was exposed to Dorian Electra’s music and I haven’t been quite the same ever since. I’m so happy to be alive to see other enbies making such great music with an insanely good aesthetic surrounding it and asking so many interesting questions about gender. Also the arc the ‘gentleman’ character goes through over the course of the entire tracklist of the 2020 My Agenda album is absolutely hilarious, don’t @ me.

I also discovered 100 Gecs this year. Why are most of you guys saying it’s unlistenable garbage. It’s just as abrasive and over the top as industrial music is, but with none of the edginess or drama. I love it. What the hell. But yeah Tree of Clues was released this year. Good.

Speaking of industrial, in March 2020 Nine Inch Nails were like “hey remember when we released Ghosts I-IV a decade ago entirely for free and how amazing that was? Well we’re all in lockdown and bored as hell so here’s Ghosts V-VI and it’s also free. Enjoy” and I f█cking died instantly. And it’s even better than I-IV. What the hell was that year

Jonsi released Shiver. It’s strange and highly experimental. I’m pretty sure it’s a good thing I was into hyperpop this year, otherwise going from his previous material straight to this album would have been brutal.

Yadda yadda yadda After Hours by the Weeknd good yadda yadda.

I’ve joked about that already but if you had told me in 2019 that 2020 would have fires, a pandemic, riots, monoliths appearing and disappearing, and also a super good Machine Gun Kelly album, guess which part I would have found the most ridiculous. But yeah uh. Tickets to my Downfall good

So uh this year I tried to listen to some hyperpop and liked it a lot, and I also dipped my toes timidly into screamo and listened to Svalbard, who released When I Die this year, and the entire album was a very beautiful, very intricately decorated punch to the face. It sounds like God Is An Astronaut except with a shit ton of yelling. I love it. Open Wound is my favorite track on it.

But no, despite all of this, my album of the year was from a band I had never even heard about before that year, called Spanish Love Songs. The album is titled Brave Faces Everyone and it’s line after line after line of extremely relatable generational angst but yelled with complete sincerity and it’s so propulsive and energetic you can’t help but feel both exhausted and ready to fight the entire universe. I don’t know how it works, but it’s incredible. The entire album is wonderfully brutal, so it’s kind of difficult to pick my favorite songs on it, but Beachfront Property and the title track stand out.

Unelligible songs, now, and there’s, uh, quite a few of them too so I’m also gonna use bullet points. Good lord this post is gonna be long.

First, let me say I have literally no idea why Midnight Sky by Miley Cyrus wasn’t a bigger hit. It’s not on the year-end US top 100 and it feels extremely wrong. Would have made it to #4 on this list otherwise.

I still entertain the vague hope that stuff from Machine Gun Kelly will chart higher in 2021 but I doubt it will happen so I might as well tackle it now and say that Bloody Valentine and especially Forget Me Too are both excellent and that it’s a shame radios aren’t playing them more often.

Heaven by the late Avicii featuring Coldplay should have charted in 2019 and still didn’t chart in 2020 and that’s a real shame.

If the world was a bit less unfair, Lovesick Girls by Blackpink would have been a hit rather than the awful Ice Cream.

One day I will stop complaining about my bafflement concerning the lack of mainstream pop charts success of The 1975. Today is not that day. I just love how they keep making songs about extremely awkward relationships full of weird details, and I haven’t grown tired of that yet. So yeah If You’re Too Shy is about a guy who’s crush is asking him to get naked on Skype in his hotel room and he’s, uh, not too sure about that idea.

And Me & You Together is about a guy who never finds the right moment to tell his best friend he’s in love with her, and he manages to do so at the end and it’s cute as hell. My fave part is “I'm sorry that I'm kinda queer / It's not as weird as it appears / It's 'cause my body doesn't stop me (Stop me) / Oh, it's okay, lots of people think I'm gay / But we're friends, so it's cool, why would it not be?”. Relatable as f█ck.

And now for an international hit that should have been bigger in the US and/or in my country but wasn’t: Head & Heart by Joel Corry and MNEK.

I’ve heard Nos Célébrations by Indochine extremely often on French radio for months now so I was very surprised to see that it didn’t crack the local year-end list. What happened.

I can finally hear the appeal of Bring Me The Horizon. It took me ages. And also Death Stranding. The song Ludens isn’t in the game per say, but it’s among the ones you can pick to broadcast briefly when people drive by your constructions, and long story short it's been living rent-free in my head for months now.

Phew.

It’s time for a round of Honorable Mentions for elligible songs, containing a couple of guilty pleasures, which is saying something considering the kind of shit I put on some of my previous lists.

Ne Reviens Pas (Gradur et Heuss l’Enfoiré) - Heuss is a French artist that kept baffling me while making my lists for the previous years, and I was like “??? ok, that’s it then, I guess I’m getting too old to get what teenagers find funny”. This one worked for me, though. And the music video doesn’t hurt. Really dumb and really fun.

Adore You (Harry Styles) - Perfectly good little pop song, very pleasant to listen to, never outstayed its welcome for me.

Mood (24kGoldn) - This doesn’t sound like a very good relationship, my dude, but that’s still a super pleasant song.

WAP (Cardi B & Megan Thee Stallion) - This song is absolutely hilarious and I will hear no argument from any of you.

Control (Zoe Wees) - Was clearly a hit here. Should have been even bigger though. What a powerful but comfy voice. If I had better taste it would be on the list.

Hot Girl Bummer (Blackbear) - I. Uh. Listen. I keep saying I have bad taste and nobody believes me. Do you believe me now. But yeah. “F█ck you, and you, and you~, I hate your friends and they hate me too” is gonna pop in my head every single time someone is being a jerk anywhere near me now. It’s been happening all year already. Someone trashed my documents at work? Someone isn’t wearing a mask in public? That guy has filled his car with rolls of toilet paper? Brain goes “F█ck you, and you, and you~”. Every. Single. Time.

Come & Go (Juice WRLD & Marshmello ) - Damn, that’s a pretty good little song. I’ve seen plenty of people saying it’s ruined by the drop, but may I remind you I’m the person who loves Blue by Eiffel 65 with all my heart. If the song was ramping up consistently until the end instead of ending like that, it would have made the list, definitely.

And now, the actual list. This one actually feels pretty solid, I genuinely like everything on it, there’s no filler here for once.

10 - The Box (Roddy Rich)

US: #3 / FR: #23

Now this is a weird case, because for the longest time I couldn’t figure out why this song was so popular and I was completely neutral about it. Then, one morning in September, my mental jukebox (which always, always puts a song on a loop in my head when I wake up) decided to play it. And I was like oh wow?? I never noticed the atmosphere in that song before? It’s so great. And that hook too. Let’s listen to it.

So yeah, I don’t know what happened. It just clicked one day and everything fell into place, I guess.

9 - Alane (Wes & Robin Shulz)

US: Not on the list / FR: #93

Come on. You can’t do a remake of one of my previous #1 songs and let it chart in 2020. That’s cheating. Even with this subpar drop, I have to put it on the list, now.

I’ve already said my piece about the original, so I’m just going to send you back to my 1997 list.

8 - Kings and Queens (Ava Max)

US: Not on the list / FR: #76

[BBC documentary voice] After Lady Gaga decided to make piano balads and left her musical niche vacant, Ava Max quickly took her place as the top predator pop diva. Even after Lady Gaga was re-introduced to her natural habitat in 2020, she still hasn’t fully recovered in Europe, where Ava Max still reigns supreme on the charts -

(tldr I think it’s hilarious that this isn’t on the US Billboard while Lady Gaga isn’t on the French year-end top 100)

7 - Roses (Saint Jhn & Imanbek)

US: #19 / FR: #3

What an earworm. It doesn’t even bother trying to have an intro or an outro, so it loops almost perfectly. It’s like entering a party that started long before you arrived, and it will go on long after you leave it to go back home. Kind of hypnotic in a way.

And yes, my mental jukebox was very fond of using it to wake me up this year, so this is another song that’s here almost solely because of that.

6 - Physical (Dua Lipa)

US: Not on the list / FR: #69 (hehehe)

“Hey I’m not that old” says the guy who’s definitely a sucker for this kind of retro throwback that was so popular this year. Oh well.

I don’t have anything interesting to say about this one, though. Apart from the fact that everyone seems to have a different fave song on that album. Guess that’s quality for you.

5 - Rain on Me (Lady Gaga & Ariana Grande)

US: #48 / FR: Not on the list

That is far from being Lady Gaga’s best song, but it was a joy to listen to everytime it was on the radio anyway. Also Ariana Grande has surprisingly good chemistry with Gaga! This year was full of strange duets mostly made for commercial reasons, and this one isn’t an exception, but unlike a lot of them, it really, really works.

4 - Dynamite (BTS)

US: #38 / FR: Not on the list

I’m still not 100% sold on k-pop even if a ton of it sounds super good, but come on. Even if some bits of this song (especially the beginning of the second chorus) sound a bit like they were made on autopilot, it still sounds just as happy and fun several months after I first heard it and I never got tired of it. That’s quality. You hear it and you can’t help but tap your feet and smile.

Actually, I’m sure there’s people somewhere that don’t smile when they hear this song. And they must be avoided at all costs.

3 - Godzilla (Eminem ft Juice WRLD)

US: #62 / FR: Not on the list

What are you doing so high on this list, old man. Why are you still here in the year 2020. I thought we left you in the previous decade. Who gave you the right.

I’m gonna tell you who did, and it’s actually Juice WRLD. Because that chorus is incredible, and like a lot of people I’m pissed off because the guy died super young and this shit shouldn’t happen to anybody. No, his early material wasn’t great, but I’m sorry I’m gonna say it again: have you heard this damn chorus? It’s suspenseful and dark, it’s got this lowkey menacing quality, it’s an earworm and a half, and it’s more convincing in like six lines than Eminem’s own flexing is in the entire song.

The beat is extremely good as well, and the flow, obviously, impressive. The weakest link is Eminem’s writing, which is as usual full of puns and weird wordplay, except here a lot of it isn’t great, and that last ultra fast part at the end is technically impressive but it also drives the song up a cliff and stops it dead in its tracks once it’s over. But frankly the lines fly by so fast it’s difficult to be too annoyed by them.

Can I sincerely put this extremely flawed song so high on my list? A better question would be “did I spend hours trying to learn how to sing this shit without choking on my own spit?”. The answer is yes. To both.

2 - Heartless (The Weeknd)

US: #28 / FR: Not on the list

I’ve said it on my 2015 and 2016 lists already, but just for the record I’ll say it again: it took me ages to like The Weeknd, mostly because I found most of his songs fairly boring, or disliked the lyrics, or both. Also I never really liked the general vibe of his “sexy” songs like The Hills, they felt dark but in an unpleasant creepy way. Felt like miserable hedonism, if that makes sense.

So, because I’m a person with extremely consistent and logical tastes, here’s the exact same shit he was making before, except that this time I absolutely adore it.

What is he doing differently that makes the whole After Hours album click for me whereas almost all of his previous material failed to do so? Is it the energy? Is it the reverb? Is it the fact that the narrator sounds properly unhinged and, frankly, scared to be spiralling out of control? Why are the colors so beautiful yet full of anxiety? Why is that bridge so fantastic? How can you make your voice look like a glowstick in the dark?

I give up. I have no clue. At least I’m done talking about-

Oh.

1 - Blinding Lights (The Weeknd)

US: #1 / FR: #1 (listen sometimes something’s just that good, ok)

Surprise. Or not.

Wow, look at that, Johannes has put this year’s number one pop song at number one on their personal playlist. The audacity. The edge. What a hot take.

I discovered that song when it first came out at the end of 2019 and I adored it instantly. And I was so scared it wouldn’t be a hit. Which means I’m a f█cking dumbass considering it ended up breaking all sorts of records in 2020. But what can I say, overplay can be a blessing when you love a song that much.

Like every single song I put at number one on one of my lists, I will draw this one at some point and you will understand how incredibly satisfying it is to listen to a song called Blinding Lights, talking about city lights looking blurry when you’re driving at night, while looking itself like a bunch of blurry city lights passing by super fast. Perfect in every way.

Also it sounds exactly like A-ha, and that never hurts.

See you next year! Pretty sure it will be even better music-wise.

#Johannes’ bad not good pretty terrible music lists #music #long post #eye contact tw

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sunsetinmyvein · 4 years ago

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CLOSED (for now)

All right, all right, ALL RIGHT. PEOPLE. For the first time, I am taking requestsssss (so, let’s see if this goes well or not lol). @aphxsia‘s taking requests, @dot-writes is taking requests, everyone is taking them and I just felt a tad left out, y’know? I’ve chopped up a bunch of other prompt lists to throw together this lovely prompt list below at the suggestion of Dot. My general idea is: send me a character, and one prompt from the “dialogue” side as well as one prompt from the “context” side (or more if you have more that fit together in an idea, I suppose. But I need one of each to get a VibeTM) and Iiiiii’ll do my best to make it work within a character x OFC/Reader sorta thing. Oh, and send me an album era for added flair, if you’d like. Deets below the cut.

I’ll write for:

- The boys of Fall Out Boy

- The boys of Panic! At the Disco (we’re talkin’ Ryan and Jon days)

- The boys of The 1975

- And, if you’re incredibly ambitious, also willing to give Alex Gaskarth of All Time Low a whirl

Rules:

- Can’t do smut (sorry, it’s just awkward and clunky for me to write and nobody wants that)

- Won’t write characters under 18

- Won’t write slash

- I just kind of reserve the right to be like “I dunno what to do with this, sorry” (But I’ve curated this prompt list, so I should be okay lol)

- I’ll get around to them when I get around to them - I’ll be writing them around The Radio Station being posted as well, so you won’t be starved for content.

Dialogue:

· “You’re not in love with them, are you?”

· “I could literally strangle you right now and no one would stop me.”

· “It’s not as bad as it looks.” - “You’re not very convincing.”

· “You need to relax.” - “Relaxing is for the weak.”

· “How long has it been since you’ve slept?” - “A week?”

· “How the fuck are you still alive?” - “It’s a special talent of mine.”

· “Can you please just listen to me for once?”

· “I think this is a bad idea.” - “You think all of my plans are bad ideas.”

· “You should really listen to me more.”

· “Do I even want to know?”

· “You have the cutest smile I’ve ever seen.”

· “Just take care of yourself, okay?”

· “Please don’t use cheesy pickup lines on me.”

· “I like it when you’re romantic.”

· “I’m going to be pissed if we get murdered.”

· “How could I resist?”

· “I’m sorry, I don’t speak dumbass.” - “Real mature.”

· “You’re worth every scratch.”

· “I could name about 110 things I love about you.” - “That’s oddly specific.”

· “We can raise hell together.”

· “Partners?”

· “Don’t get too cocky now.”

· “Fuck me.” - “Really?” - “No.”

· “I can’t tell if you’re being sarcastic.”

· “Do you trust me?” - “Should I?”

· “Do you have any idea on how frustrating you can really be?”

· “I really, really want to kiss you right now.”

· “I think we got off on the wrong foot.” - “You think so?”

· “I don’t think that cancels out.” - “It does in my book.”

· “You’re being dramatic.” - “I’m not being shit!”

· “Take a break.” - “I don’t need it.” - “You look like a fucking zombie.”

· “Then we’ll leave. Just you and me.”

· “Do you need help? - “No… yes.”

· “I hate you.” - “I love you too.”

· “You have something in your hair, umm… Do you want me to get it out?”

· “It’s nice that your voice was the first thing I heard today.”

· “No, like…. It’s just, I can’t believe you’re actually wearing my clothes.”

· “Would it be too cliche if we matched clothes a little?”

· “My friends get so annoyed by how much I talk about how sometimes.”

· “Wanna, like– I mean, if you’re not busy… We could get lunch? Or even just coffee if you don’t have a lot of time?”

· “Quit smiling at me, I can’t stop messing up my sentences when you look at me like that.”

· “What are you smiling about?”

· “What’s in it for me?”

· “Could you say that again?” “Were you not listening?” “No I was, I just like hearing your voice.”

· “You’re an idiot.” “But you love me.”

· “Is that my shirt?” “You mean our shirt?”

· “You come here often?” “Well considering I work here, yes.”

· “Are you blushing?”

· “Your hair is really soft.”

· “You’re really warm.”

· “You owe me.” “Fine, whatever you like.”

· “I love you.” “Tell me that when you’re sober.”

· “I wasn’t lying when I told you that I loved you.”

· “It’s pouring rain why are you here?”

· “Is that blood?” “Yes, but that doesn’t matter right now, what does matter is-” “You are literally bleeding.”

· “Cheers, I’ll drink to that.” “You drink to everything.” “Cheers!”

· “Why is there a deer in the room?”

· “Is that vodka? At 7 in the morning?”

· “Wake me up when it’s over.”

· “Why is arson always your first answer?”

· “Are you flirting with me?”

· “Are they really ‘just a friend’?”

· “Is there a reason you never say my first name?”

· “Shh… listen… that’s the sound of me falling in love with you.”

· “I have to tell you something really important and if I don’t tell you now, I won’t get the chance.”

· “Whatever he’s saying, he’s lying!”

· “I play a mean air guitar, if that’s what you’re asking.”

· “I thought you knew?”

· “We can, y’know, go together? If that’s a thing you’d like.”

Context:

· I remembered it was Valentine’s Day late on my way from work and the only place still open was McDonald’s, is bringing you a cheeseburger acceptable?

· I accidentally punched you in the face when I was too overexcited about something

· The library’s pretty empty save for you and me and, OH that couple making out loudly in the shelves somewhere

· You’re overdue on this book and I want it so I’m tracking you the fuck down

· You give me a different fake name every time you come into this coffee shop and I just want to know your real name because you’re cute but here I am scrawling “batman” onto your stupid cappuccino

· We live in the same block of flats but haven’t ever talked and Sunday morning we were both doing the walk of shame and had to stand in the lift together

· “My shower’s broken but I’ve got a date tonight could I possibly use your shower please?” “Oh sure (neighbour that I’ve been crushing on for the past six months) of course you can use my shower to get ready for your date (fuck fuck fuck)”

· You’ve got a date tonight and you asked for advice on what to wear but I’m so in love with you and damn you look good in the outfit I picked out for you

· It’s my high school reunion and I need a hot date so I can rub it in the faces of the people who hated me

· There’s a person who won’t stop bugging me will you pretend to be my partner so that they’ll fuck off?

· I wanted to go on the Ferris wheel but there has to be two people to a cart come on random person let’s go – oh, wait, are we stuck at the top? Fuck

· It started to snow and I’m the only one of our friends who would go outside with you – I soon found out why none of the others would go out in the snow with you when you shoved a handful of snow down my back and declared snow war

· It’s nowhere near Christmas it’s literally still November would you calm down about Christmas wait no why are you getting the tree out – no, stop, please stop

· You were waving at your friend behind me but I got confused and waved back at you and now I’m dying of embarrassment but you think it’s cute

· I’m a waiter at this wedding and you’re a drunk guest who will not stop hitting on me please I’m trying to work no I can’t dance with you omg let me find you some water

· You’re pretending to be your friend’s lover for the sake of the friend’s family. But, I’m their sibling. And I know you’re not dating.

· You had an assigned seat next to them at a wedding for a mutual friend.

· You accidentally sprayed them with yogurt when you opened the lid the wrong way.

· They mistook your bowling ball for theirs in the shared ball return.

· They caught you when you slipped on ice and nearly fell over.

· Accidentally stepping on their heel in a crowded room.

· Tripping while getting into your seat in the theatre and spilling your popcorn on them.

· Accidentally opening a door on their face.

· They cover the small amount of change you are short on for a purchase.

· They see your ice cream drop to the ground and buy you a new one.

· You walk out of a dressing room asking if the outfit suits you, but it’s not your friend waiting outside the room like you thought.

· Sharing an umbrella at a bus stop as it rains.

· You help catch their dog when the leash slips from their hand.

· Texting the incorrect number but continuing the conversation.

· Getting paired up on an amusement park that requires even numbered riders.

· A friend of a friend needs a place to crash because they got evicted

· You’re so sunburnt you can’t even more, do you need help?

· I admit that sleeping on the beach wasn’t the smartest idea but someone buried me in sand please help me

· I met you last night when you were drunkenly patting my dog in my backyard at 3am and when I asked you what the hell you were doing, you slurred something about dogs being great and then you threw up on my feet. Fifteen minutes later you were passed out on my couch so that’s why you’re here right now. What the fuck is your name.

· I always see you eat breakfast on the train and you always offer me some

· I’m waiting for the train and the only open seat is on a bench next to you. Okay, sure, I’ll sit down next to the very cute person and I JUST SPILLED MY DRINK ALL OVER YOU I’M SO SORRY.

· I don’t know you, but I fall asleep on the train every ride home and you always wake me up because we have the same stop, but we’ve never actually talked. Then one day you’re the one falling asleep and I got so excited for my comeuppance I made us get off at the wrong stop.

· My cat steals underwear and I come home to find you chasing my cat to get your underwear back.

· We’re always making stupid bets like ‘bet you can’t drink this whole bottle of BBQ sauce’ but then you did and now you’re sick and I feel really bad. Let me look after you

· Did you actually just blue shell me on our date you fucker

· I beat you at Mario Kart and now I’ve been banished to the couch for the night

· I’m calling to cancel our date because I’m actually in the ER right now, sorry. I mean… sure? I guess you can come down here but- okay…

· I asked a staff member and they said you’ve been coming to the pound every day to play with the dog I’m taking home today and that’s why you’re getting weirdly emotional

· It’s my turn to open up the café today and you were sleeping under one of the tables when I came in, and I don’t know what to say so I’m just awkwardly sweeping around you

· I’m drunk on public transport and you’re high and we both keep looking at each other knowingly.

· You’re mowing your lawn at 5am and that is completely unacceptable and I’m going over to your house to yell at you about how unacceptable that is.

· It’s like 3am and my roommate locked me out of the house and I forgot my keys and I’m really drunk and please take pity on me and let me crash at your place for the night o’neighbour of mine

· We decided it would be fun to go camping and now it’s raining and we can’t figure out how to set up the tent.

· I know it’s probably poor taste to ask you out during your relative’s funeral but I don’t know if I’ll ever see you again, so…

· It’s raining. I’m walking home in this downpour and have no umbrella. I’ve taken shelter on a random porch in the hopes that the rain will let up, but the door behind me had just opened

· You’ve got a big, lush pool and I overheard you say you were going out of town, so I snuck over to use it but you came home early

· You’re having a BBQ in your backyard and it smelled really good so I crashed the party

· Not trying to make a scene here, but you took the last pool floatie and I want it

· This is a big beach, why do you have to build that sandcastle right next to me?

· You tried to grab the exact Halloween costume I want and it’s the last one and I want it.

· I pranked the wrong person on accident, I’m so sorry I thought this was my friend’s car.

· We just wanted to do one of these awful, fake ghost hunting shows but now shit is happening and we don’t know what to do.

· I tried to take a shortcut and ended up stuck in this damn fence and you just happen to pass by and after poking fun at me for a million years you finally help me.

· Two strangers locked inside the store at 3am together.

· I accidentally broke your nose in a moshpit, sorry.

· You’re the bastard who keeps parking in my spot so I retaliated by keying your car and you caught me

· This is a long plane ride. You’re stuck next to me, and apparently afraid of flying.

#Posting this now because I am impatient #even though I probably won't have time to work on any until Sunday #hoping that I don't get overloaded with prompts and then stare at them blankly with no ideas #if I do #sorry in advance #definitely not mildly nervous about taking requests for the first time #dunno what you're talking about #sunsetinmyvein prompts #sunsetinmyvein requests #sunsetinmyvein

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shahidiwrites · 4 years ago

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CONFETTI RANKING NO ONE ASKED FOR <3 But firstly can I just say their team literally said so what girl group era are yall taking inspo from? And little mix literally just said yes <3 UISDJOKOISADJ THE I N F L U E N C E S ON THIS ALBUM AHHHHHHHH i think it also sucks that c**** definitely took a toll on the album and i honestly think it was supposed to be released sooner BUT nevertheless it’s here now and i was sO PLEASED AND IM SO PROUD OF THESE GIRLS living their past life having all the fun with this album so let us go!!

1. Confetti. A powerful feel good song. Like this is THE Bad bitch anthem, like I can’t wait to be driving at night with my girlies blasting this. IT’S SO FUCKING GOOD. I love when the instrumental strips away on jade’s verse and it’s just the snaps BEAUTIFUL. Some of the melodies in here were definitely a shout out to girl groups like cherish and destiny’s child and holy fuck it WORKED. T H A T BRIDGE. LIKE. UGH. Vocally it’s a lot more stripped back than the rest of the album, and yet it’s still my favorite?? I think that speaks so much to Little Mix’s musicality. They don’t need insane vocals (even though they DEFINITELY HAVE THEM) to make a good song, like they know what works and they prove it every single time.

2. Sweet Melody. This song is so fucking clever. I know everyone has already talked about the way the instrumental literally follows the words, but IT’S SO CLEVER I’M MENTIONING IT AGAIN. Jade’s verse will forever be my favorite. She really set up the story with her verse. I love how the first part of the chorus is literally a sweet melody before it goes into the edgier chorus UGH SO GOOD. Not to mention this video gave us the first choreo heavy music video since fucking Salute ad that is a blessing in and of itself.

3. Happiness. “Remember I, I was mine. Before I was yours.” Honestly what else do you need? That line was so fucking iconic. The melody is so fucking beautiful, the nod to past girl groups was very strong in this one. It’s a different sound for them but at the same time extremely them??? I love the lyrical content SO MUCH. it’s such a feel good powerful song. The bridge of perrie belting and then the beautiful quick breakdown before they go back into the chorus ugh so fucking good.

4. If You Want My Love. This song punched me in the face the second it started with Jade and didn’t stop until the fucking end. This was SUCH a spot on nod to past girl groups and they fucking nailed it. The chorus gives me CHILLS every time. It literally DEMANDS your attention in the same way the lyrical content is demanding to be treated right. The bridge had me meltING. PERRIES BUILD UP BELT?? Reminded me of About the boy which iconic we love growth. The melody is so fucking good AND THE ACAPELLA AT THE END??? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING??? so damn good. Everyone say thank you little mix.

5. Rendezvous. Honestly this top five is literally nothing but non-skippable B O P S. The fucking sway sample is ICONIC. It’s giving such motivate vibes and we all know how much of a banger that one is. Trying to imagine the choreo to this song is physically paining me and i’m so fucking pumped to see IT. I love how they have been consistently taking ownership of their bodies and flipping the gender expectations around. “i ain’t trying to fall in love with you” JUST ICONIC. Also reminds me of bloodline by ariana grande and also FUCKING ICONIC.

6. My Love Won’t Let You Down. This song needs to be longer. It’s so fucking beautiful. The lyrical content had me crying by the first line. It reminded me a lot of don’t worry by the 1975 but a lot more personal, it’s a very pointed song so it hits so differently than the 1975 one does for me. But holy shit it’s so beautiful, they have all grown vocally so much. “We can sit at the edge of your bed, tell me all of the fears in your head, and i’ll sing you your favorite song” This REALLY got to me bc idk it just felt like they were speaking to their fans i that moment and I know that alone can mean so much to so many people. It really did for me.

7. A Mess (Happy 4 U). I was not expecting them to start so deep, i literally felt like i was being let in on a secret it was so cute. And then the slip into that head voice, it was so airy and so pretty. And the drums in the background were very reminiscent of nothing feels like you which was a GREAT trip down memory lane for me. I also just love the message behind the song and the lyrical content is cute. AND THE FUCKING D R O P. U G H. THE FACT THAT THIS SONG ISNT HIGHER SHOULD SPEAK VOLUMES AS TO HOW GOOD I THINK THE OTHER SONGS ARE.

8. Holiday. WHY DOES THE FANDOM HATE THIS SONG SO MUCH??? IT’S SO GOOD. THE PRE-CHORUS ALONE !!!! EYE!!! It’s really upsetting to me and my homegirls why Holiday gets so much slander. The music video..... anyway the S O N G. It’s so good. So fun. A tune.

9. Nothing But My Feelings. Idk what this trend is of singing complete FILTH to the cutest little melodies but i’m here for it. This song took me by surprise tbh but i loved every second of it??? ESPECIALLY, the cute little adverbs in the background holy shit. They’re so much fun. And little mix + trap influenced is probably my new favorite thing so i need them to continue doing trap influence for my own sanity.

10. Not A Pop Song. I’m glad the girlies get to sing their truth at LAST. I also love the melody in this song and the “not a pop song” harmonies in the background near the end. I do think the verses are too short but i love leigh’s prechorus so much i’ll let the verses be shorter so i can get to her sooner. Also perrie kILLED that bridge are we surprised? no not at all.

11. Break Up Song. idc man this songs still slaps lmao. IT’S CUTE. But i’ve heard it enough it can’t compete with the new bbies on the album, but that intro gets me hype every time. And I still have fun dancing to it months later, but i’ve had it so long it’s been celebrated enough.

12. Breathe. I just feel like the verses were so much prettier than the chorus, like the lyrical content is so beautiful. Maybe it’s the instrumental??? But i think it would have been so much prettier had the chorus not been so intentionally choppy. The verses alone tho almost saved this song for me and made me put it higher but there’s just so many better songs on the album so it is here.

13. Gloves up.... is this controversial? There’s just a real disconnect between??? everything??? it sounds like three different songs tbh?? I love the lyrical content and the breakdown in the pre-chrous and jesy’s pause before perrie’s power vocals come in, but the instrumental is just kind of all over the place to me. idk maybe subconsciously i was comparing it to salute because that’s the writer they wrote it with but idk just not for meeee

#little mix #confetti #lm6

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gumnut-logic · 5 years ago

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Fanfic Asks 2

This one is for @hedwigstalons who asked for A F L Q along with @fictivekaleidoscope , @willow-salix , @coffee-and-lenna and @janetm74 who all asked for Q. You guys are so kind to me ::hugs you lots::

-o-o-o-

A. What was the first fandom you wrote for?

Star Trek: TOS…I’m a Trekkie from way back. Discovered it in 1986 through books in my school library (it wasn’t on TV and hadn’t been since 1975 of which I had the vaguest of memories…and yes, I’m old :P ). I wrote my first fanfic as a teenager, by hand in a notebook. It was submitted to the local club printed fanzine (which I still have lying around here somewhere along with a stack of classic printed zines). Looking back, it had a strong concept behind it, but it was horribly written. I do not have an electronic copy, though sometime ago I thought to re-write it, but never got around to it. You can find my second ever fanfic, written when I was eighteen on FF.net – Goodbye, Spock – it was a movie tag, written in early 1991.

F. How long have you been writing fanfic?

Hmm, I think I’ve given that massive number away in the last question :D Yeah, since I was about eighteen, possibly a little earlier. ::does the math:: Okay, that number is scary. Next year it will be thirty years since my first fanfic ::headdesk:: but having said that, I didn’t really start writing until the internet arrived with my first computer and maturity gave me the ability to finish things (sometimes). I really jumped in with Stargate SG-1 fandom in 2003. From that point on I wrote continuously until I had children in 2008. Then I stopped and didn’t really start up again until July 2018 when TAG hit me like a ton of bricks. The last two years have been amazing and I have learnt so much.

Oh, and if anyone ever says writing fanfic is wasting time or will never get you anywhere, writing fanfic and participating in fandom has done wonders for introvert little me:

Led to me getting my job – writing is a skill that can get you many places

Taught me how to blog and how to manage a blog – valuable skills in or out of business

Teaches you multiple online tools – chat, publishing and other multimedia applications – you’d be surprised how many people are not comfortable using many online tools. I use my experience every day on the library floor.

Allowed an introvert to reach out and learn how to converse and gain confidence in conversation – online interactions has many advantages

Is excellent for mental health…and equally unhealthy if you’re not careful – which leads to learning about yourself and managing conflict (unfortunately…which is why I have zero tolerance for fandom wank and will not participate in or create nastiness – I’m here for fun and to hopefully make things more fun, not miserable)

I’ve learnt to type. My first novel length fic was 75,000 words long and hand written before being typed into the computer – let’s just say that that three months back in 2003 finally enabled me to break the touch type barrier :D Which is a skill that I use every day.

If some one does say you’re wasting your time, they obviously have no idea what they are talking about – ignore them. As long as you’re balancing your fic writing with life in general, things are okay (I got addicted at one point and things were not okay, so don’t do that).

In summary, apparently I’m old, been writing forever and have found it a very valuable exercise which will no doubt lead me even further into interesting places.

L. What is your favorite fic idea that you don’t think you’ll ever write?

I tend to write most things or forget them. There was that random fanfic idea I posted a few days back. It’s a cool idea, but I don’t have time at the moment. ::opens ups fic planning book::

Ideas sitting, not yet started, but might be:

Eos gets hacked by the Hood and injures two brothers before John realises it and saves her.

Episode tag to 3.21 that explores the Mechanic

Alan’s Vlog: I have a note for the next story that I haven’t yet written.

The Kermadec sequel

A fic idea I had the other day inspired by a news article – that one might actually get written at some point.

A sequel to V. T. Green (which apparently is my most popular fic) – which I had a concept for, but haven’t written down, by the looks of it. Oops.

A sequel to Bo where Virg gets buried in an avalanche – this one was started.

Eh, I have lots of ideas, most get lost in the mess that exists in my head. Sometimes I write a note down, but then I forget what the note means. I usually have to grab the inspiration when it strikes.

Q. If you could pick one fic of yours to rewrite, which would it be?

Love and Sacrifice – I wrote that fic out of order and smushed it together and it shows. It is also full of technical holes. The plotline sucks because I wanted a certain scene and forced it. But it is such an integral piece of the series that I can’t alter it much. The whole of Warm Rain was written in bits. I usually write in order and that experiment shows that I’m not great at writing out of sequence. Most of the fics work okay, but Love and Sacrifice, while having some good scenes in it, is poorly constructed.

A Little Distraction and a Little Too Much Attention suffers from self-indulgence. Virgil wasn’t supposed to get hurt – I should have stopped at A Little Distraction, but apparently, I can’t help myself and the results weren’t great.

Two fics instead of one…there are more, but I’m not supposed to publicly criticise my fics – I do enough of that in my own head :D

-o-o-o-

EDIT: @weirdburketeer reminded me of something I meant to list but forgot regarding the above reasons why writing fanfic is not a waste of time.

The friendships! My goodness, how did I miss that? I flew to Sydney to meet a good fanfic writing friend in both 2004 and 2005, another friend flew all the way from Chicago (as part of a business trip) to Australia and made a special trip to Adelaide, just to meet up with me. It was frickin’ amazing!

And this fandom....I have met some absolutely amazing people here. You guys have influenced me like you wouldn’t believe. As I have said on many occasions, this fandom is just amazing ::drags you all into a massive group hug:: And yes, I have some fantastic friendships forming here ::loves you guys to bits::

#thunderbirds are go #thunderbirds #star trek #writing #fanfiction

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linebreaker · 6 years ago

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Starlight

Also on AO3.

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“So, this is it,” Crowley said, gesturing with a wide sweep of his arm as the flat door snicked shut behind them. The latch was firmly reconnected and he hinges undamaged.

Thanks for that, Adam Young, he thought with a lift of his eyebrow. I hope you also cleaned up the mess-that-was-Ligur in my sitting room.

The corner of Aziraphale’s mouth tilted up. “You know I’ve been to your flat before?” His face was smudged with dirt, his hair in disarray, and he looked soft and beautifully relieved. Crowley’s heart gave a squeeze.

“Have you?” he asked faintly, trying to recall.

Aziraphale hummed an affirmation, but folded his hands behind his back and started a slow self-guided tour. Crowley watched him retreat, then he removed his glasses and carefully tucked them into an inner pocket of his jacket. Running a thumb along his lapel found singed edges there, small curls of thread and fabric yielding beneath his fingers. A glance in the nearby mirror confirmed a smoky face and hair, but he had neither the energy nor the inclination to miracle himself clean at the moment. He followed after Aziraphale.

Crowley found him in his sitting room, examining his extravagant chair. The angel was running a finger over the ornate crest at the top, expression curious. He looked over as Crowley entered.

“I’d actually managed to forget about this monstrosity,” he said with a smirk.

“Rude,” Crowley uttered half-heartedly.

“You have dramatic tastes, my dear.”

“Well, I take that as a compliment,” Crowley said, his voice gone all haughty with mock disdain.

Aziraphale huffed out a laugh, ducking his head briefly. When he looked back up, his eyes were bright and his smile was curling like a small, secret thing across his face. “I would expect nothing less.”

Crowley’s heart throbbed.

He scoffed, then made his way over to his sun room. Relief suffused his chest as he stepped through the rotating door and stood in the warm air, surrounded by his plants. Drawing in a deep breath, he was able to smell the damp potting soil, the fertilizer, and the subtle electric charge of fear.

He bared his teeth in a grin. “Hello, dearies! Hope no one’s been misbehaving while I’ve been gone.”

The plants all rippled with apprehension.

“Oh, leave them be!” Aziraphale called through the doorway. His footsteps told Crowley that he was moving in his direction.

“Ngh. He’s no fun,” Crowley told the nearby mammy croton conspiratorially. Its glossy, variegated leaves trembled once, then went still.

Crowley heard Aziraphale join him in the room and glanced over his shoulder. There was a planter of hanging epipremnum aureum in the windowsill, and the angel had one of its bright green tendrils twined around his finger like a tiny snake. “They’re all looking quite lovely,” he said. “What’s this one called again?”

“Devil’s ivy.”

Aziraphale laughed and gave the leaves a gentle stroke before disentangling himself. He turned back to Crowley with a smile. “Of course.”

Crowley regarded him across the short distance, tension thrumming beneath his skin like static electricity. Aziraphale just watched him, his edges made soft in the low light.

“When were you here last?” Crowley finally asked, genuinely befuddled.

“Oh, I’d say it was back in . . .” Aziraphale trailed off as he considered, clasping his hands before him. His forehead wrinkled and his foot tapped an erratic pattern on Crowley’s stone floor. “Well, um—Oh! It must have been around 1990, I believe? Tim Berners-Lee.”

The fog in Crowley’s mind cleared somewhat, his mouth turning up in a grin. “Right! The world wide web. I think we both took credit for that, didn’t we?”

“Indeed, we did,” Aziraphale said with a fond smile.

“Why don’t I remember that better? It wasn’t that long ago.”

“Ah, that was probably to do with the bottles of 1975 Vintage Port that we celebrated with,” Aziraphale admitted, his smile a little sheepish.

“Oh, yeah.”

They lapsed into silence. Crowley let himself drift on not-so-distant memories—the caramel-sweet tang of the port and Aziraphale’s too-kind smile. The soft rustle of his plants was all around him. His angel was here, warm and real and alive. The Armageddon had, somehow, slipped by them.

He felt safe.

Crowley wasn’t sure how long he stood there before Aziraphale’s gentle voice broke through his reverie. He sounded hesitant as he said, “You seemed rather upset.”

“Hm? Uh, well,” he said, stammering a little. “I can’t really remember, but I thought we had been celebrating. Sorry if I was a bit maudlin at the time. I think Tiananmen Square stuck with me longer than—”

Aziraphale hastily interrupted him, flapping his hands at him. “No, no, my dear. I, um—Well, I meant earlier today. In the bar.”

Crowley blinked. “Oh.”

“Yes.” Aziraphale clasped his hands together and twiddled his thumbs against one another. “I was just—um. Just curious, I suppose.”

They stared at one another. Crowley could feel his heart pounding in his throat and he swallowed compulsively. “Yeah. I was a little upset.” He tilted his head and lifted one shoulder in a shrug. “I’d lost my best friend.”

Aziraphale gave him a wobbly smile and said in a hushed voice, “You didn’t lose me, dear.” Crowley’s stomach flipped.

There was an anxious energy clattering along his ribs and squeezing the air from his lungs. “I—uh,” he stammered, his throat clicking as he gulped. His voice sounded faint and raspy, even to his own ears. “I thought the—the fire in your bookshop. I thought it was Infernal. I thought you . . .”

I thought you were gone for good.

The smile slipped from Aziraphale’s face, horror creeping into his eyes. “Oh, my dear—”

“Do you know that I helped create the stars?” Crowley asked suddenly and Aziraphale blinked. “I can’t remember if I ever told you that?”

“No,” he said faintly. A lovely little crease formed between his brows.

“Yeah. Back when I was an angel, I helped to create galaxies—formed them in my hands.” Crowley’s fingers twitched in muscle memory, recalling the millennia he’d spent holding the beating hearts of stars between his palms. Through the dark window behind Aziraphale, the night sky called to him.

Aziraphale’s face was puzzled, but he said in a small voice, “You did a beautiful job.” A tiny smile pulled at Crowley’s mouth, warmth suffusing him.

“You know, I can feel it,” he murmured, glancing away, “when a star I created dies. It sort of—um.”

Aziraphale remained silent as he struggled to come up with the words to describe the feeling—the weight of his chest caving in, collapsing in on itself, the darkness rushing in to fill the void where light had once been.

“The sky will eat them up or—or snuff them out and they’re just gone forever and I—I get this ringing in my ears and this sort of hollow feeling right here—” He pressed his palm against the center of his chest. “—and I can’t breathe and . . . It’s just this crushing loneliness. Like the universe is pulling the stardust out of my bones.”

Crowley looked at Aziraphale and said, “That’s what it felt like, sitting in your bookshop today. Like I’d lost one of my stars.”

The angel’s breath came shuddering out of him, his mouth hanging open and eyes wide. “Oh,” he murmured, his fingers curling loosely against the front of his waistcoat.

Oh.

The silence that followed was excruciating. Crowley wished the floor would open up and swallow him. His whole body was burning in mortification, skin prickling.

“Yeah. Oh,” he muttered. He folded his arms and looked away, shoulders hunched up. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, angel, I’m just gonna go drown myself in the bathtub—”

A hand gripped his elbow then, tight enough to hurt. Startled, Crowley turned to find that Aziraphale had crossed the short distance between them. He was close enough for Crowley to see the painter’s strokes of hazel in the otherwise blue-gray canvases of his eyes. They reminded him of far-off nebulas.

“My dear,” Aziraphale whispered, awed and exultant. Then he leaned in and kissed him.

It was uncoordinated and brief, a gentle slide of lips against his, but Crowley’s heart lit up like a newborn star, light pouring out from between the spaces in his ribs. Six-thousand years of friendship and affection and desire flared in his chest, igniting the gently burning hope that was there. He felt warm and bright. For a brief moment, he felt angelic.

Aziraphale eventually pulled back, pressing a gentle kiss to the corner of his mouth and bumping their noses together. Crowley swayed forward, his center of gravity shot.

He let out a breathless, “Oh,” and Aziraphale huffed a laugh, warmth radiating from his eyes.

“Yes. Oh.”

Crowley brought his hands up to grip at Aziraphale’s coat, grounding himself. His fingers shook as they curled into the lapels, dark smudges of soot staining the fabric there. “Not too fast for you?” he asked, his heart thundering.

Aziraphale’s hands were a comforting weight as they came up and settled over his own, his thumbs stroking across Crowley’s knuckles. Pleasant little jolts were running up and down his arms at the sensation. Aziraphale leaned in, pressing their foreheads together.

“Let’s just set our own pace,” he murmured, his words soft and bright like the future stretching out before them. Like starlight.

#good omens #good omens fic #fic #ficlet #fanfiction #good omens fanfiction #ineffable husbands #crowley #aziraphale #my fic

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ruelmp4 · 5 years ago

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party part 1

Concept: It’s all fun and games at a party with Coco until things go down hill and the last person you would expect is there to save you.

Enjoy ((:

*Just a warning at the beginning. There IS a near-rape experience in this, so if that bothers you, feel free to skip this story. This one is a little longer than normal but I got really into this one and wrote a lot. I hope you guys like it!*

You stood in front of the mirror, spinning on your toes, watching the sequins sparkle on your mini dress, as "Somebody Else" by The 1975 played in the background through Coco's speaker. The sun was setting through the huge window of her room and hit the dress perfectly. You couldn't wait to see them in the light of the crazy party haze. Tonight you and your best friend Coco were going to the first party of the summer together and you couldn't wait.

You had just flown in from (wherever you're from) to see her for the first half of summer since you hadn't seen her in almost a year. Her family had been nice enough to let you stay at their house so you didn't have to stay in a hotel. This also meant you would be staying with her brother Ruel. You have had a small crush on him since you first met Coco on the beach a couple of years ago when you were visiting with your family. He was the kindest boy you had ever met and you fell. But as you became closer with Coco, the weirder it got for you to like him so slowly you began to leave that crush under the surface and never told anyone. You instantly became friends with her and her whole family and visited them every time you flew over. Ever since then, you guys have been together every summer in Australia.

"Daaaammnn girl! You lookin' good!" Coco exclaims as she walks in from her bathroom. "All the boys there tonight won't be able to keep their eyes off of you!" She wiggles her eyebrows as you laugh along with her, slightly blushing at her words. You had never been one to be boy crazy and go to parties to hook up with a ton of guys, you were just crazy about one boy that didn't even like you back.

"But hey look at you!! You popped off too girl!" You smile looking down at her short, matte red dress that fits her perfectly.

"And where do you guys think you're going dressed like that?" You hear an angry voice grit out from the doorway of the room. You look up to see Ruel, his eyebrows drawn together in anger, looking down at your dress.

"We're going to a party and we're gonna look great, get drunk, and hook up with boys." Coco states before grabbing your wrist and dragging you into her bathroom. "If you have a problem with that, I guess you're just gonna have to deal with it. Now if you will excuse us, we are gonna finish getting ready." And with that she slammed the bathroom door, leaving Ruel by himself to stomp away angrily.

She then looks down at you rolling her eyes at her brother's idiotic behavior and asks, "What are we going to do with him?" You laugh and shrug your shoulders. You honestly don't know why he got so mad at you for wanting to go out to a party. What was it to him? Of anything he should be happy for you going out and hanging out with new people to be friends with.

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

The clock read 8:40 pm as you and Coco finally finished up getting ready and decided to head over to the party now. It was being held at a huge beach house about 20 minutes away so you guys needed to leave soon. As you walked down the stairs and into the kitchen, her parents and sister Sylvie, were nowhere to be seen, except for Ruel. And a girl?

"Hey, Coco! Y/N." He greets smiling and standing up from the couch, pulling the girl up with him. "This is Charlotte, my date for the party tonight and we were wondering if we could catch a ride with you guys?" His date? A small flare of jealously sparked in you as you looked at their intertwined hands and the way she looked up at him so lovingly. Since when did Ruel have a girlfriend? No. Y/N! Snap out of it! He's not yours and never will be. The best thing you can do is be happy for them.

"Y/N?" Coco asks again, looking over at you. Your head snaps up. "Yeah, yeah! Of course!"

Coco gives you a weird look but soon shakes it off. "You bitches ready to go? It's time to parrttaaayyy!!"

The whole ride there you can't help but sit there quietly, pondering what is going on and why you were feeling this way. You were over him. But why were you so effected by this 'Charlotte girl'.

You guys finally arrived at the huge house, colorful lights were dancing through the house and through the windows and the music could be heard halfway down the street. You could feel the boom of the bass on the car as you went to grab the handle but Coco locked it before you could get out. "You guys go ahead, I need to talk to Y/N real quick." They nod getting out of the car and heading inside.

"Y/N I need you to look me dead in the eye and tell me what's wrong. I know you are not one to sit so quietly in the car and not turn up to the music I play. We wouldn't be friends if you didn't." You chuckle knowing she was 100 percent right. You always screamed the lyrics to songs in the car no matter who was there or what song it was.

"Coco I- I can't. It's nothing," Your fingers twiddle nervously together as you mess with the rings on your fingers. It's a bad habit that you picked up whenever you're anxious about something and Coco looked down noticing your fiddling.

"It's obviously nothing if you seem so upset right before we are about to go have the night of our lives! I can't party without my partner in crime!" She sighs reclining her seat into a laying position before saying, "We are not leaving this car until you tell me what's wrong. Even if it takes all night for you to tell me."

We sat there in silence for a while before Coco spoke up in a comforting voice, "You love him don't you?"

You go to protest and deny what she said but she stops you. She grabs your hands and gives them a little squeeze. "Y/N I know. I've known since the day the two of you met. I can tell that the two of you are meant to be. I can see it in your faces whenever you are around each other. And honestly, I've shipped it since the beginning," She winks at me, smiling softly.

"It's so hard Coco. It's so hard loving someone who will never love you back. To love someone who only sees you as a friend of his sisters. To love someone that is already taken. Ever since I saw him on the beach that day, that tall lanky boy with tacky blue and yellow swim shorts on that was so nice to me; I've loved him. I try to tell myself that I don't but I think deep down there is that love for him that I've had since the beginning." I rant on and on to her, pouring out what I had kept put off at the bottom of my heart for the past couple of years. You sigh, messing with the ring on your middle finger. "But I guess he really wasn't even interested at all now that he has Charlotte."

Coco rolls her eyes. "My brother is a dick for not seeing you as the most beautiful girl in the world. You are my best friend and I will always be there for you in every decision that you make whether it's my brother or someone else; I will always support you. Always."

You smile and reach over to give her a hug. She rubs your back as tears silently roll down your cheeks from all the emotions you are feeling at this moment.

"Now. Wipe those tears. And you know what? Fuck that. We are going to go in there and forget all about Ruel. We are gonna all night and do exactly what we told him earlier. We're gonna look great, get drunk, and hook up with boys." She exclaims as the two of you get out of the car and head into the party.

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

When you guys arrive inside, everything is 10 times louder and all you could smell was alcohol and sweat, as people drank and danced together. More like grinding on each other. Coco grabbed your hand and drug you through the crowd as she tried to find some of her friends. You finally reached a group who had just bought shots and was begging us to join in on the fun. You downed them with a sour look on our faces but almost instantly relaxing me. This is exactly what you need right now.

You were about 3 drinks in, noo maybe 4. Yeah, 4. No, wait scratch that. No 8!! Ehh who knows. All you know is that you can make decisions for yourself still. You felt so free as your body moved to the beat of the music, dancing the night away next to some of the most fun people in the world. Who cares about Ruel! Fuck him you are doing fine without him!!

"I'm gonna go get another drink. Do any of you want another?" You asked the girls, who you guess were too busy dancing to listen to me. Oh well. Their loss. You turn away to go and find the kitchen, squeezing past people before you finally find it. Bending down to find another cup in the cupboard, you feel someone come up behind you and put their hands on your waist. Thinking it was Coco you shouted, "Heyyyy I still have to find a guy tonightttt! What about you?"

"I'm down if you're down baby girl," a rough, manly voice said against your neck, his breath tickling your ear as his hands began to run up and down your torso. That is definitely not Coco. You spin around to come face to face with a guy around the same age as Coco, maybe a little older, and definitely not your type. He had the basic 'frat boy look' with flowy blonde hair and blue eyes. His eyed filled with lust and breath that smelled of too many Bud Lights. You tried to push past him after telling him that you were sorry and thought he was someone else. You could guess that he didn't like that answer because before you knew it, he was grabbing your wrist and pulling you back into his grip.

"Don't be such a tease babyyy. I know you want to. Look you're hot, I'm hot. Let's fuck." His hands were now holding your wrists to the edge of the counter and began to push his hips into yours.

No no no. You were supposed to drink the night away and party with your friends. Not actually hook up with random guys no matter how mad you were about the Ruel and Charlotte situation. "First of all, that was an awful pick-up line and secondly I'm sorry but I'm not comfortable doing that kind of stuff with anyone tonight."

He just shook his head and chuckled. "Come on sweet thing! You were just saying you wanted to get laid tonight and I'm the perfect option here. Quite frankly the best." He stated cockily and started to kiss your neck. His lips were wet and slobbery against your neck, and as you tried to struggle it seemed that his grip only got tighter on you.

And before you knew it, his hand began to grab at the bottom of your dress, trying to pull it up. There was nothing you could do. You were completely defenseless against this guy and there was no one around to save you. It wasn't until they hit your lips, that you realized you were crying. Quiet sobs left your body as he gripped the waistband of your underwear, pulling them down your legs. No this was not happening. You are not going to let this frat boy fuckboy take your virginity and especially not like this. So you did what any girl should do when in this situation. You screamed. You screamed out for help. You screamed out for Coco. You screamed out for my friends. And you screamed out for the person I hated most that night. You screamed out for Ruel.

********************

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sadheartsongs · 6 years ago

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the 1975 • a brief inquiry into online relationships

• the 1975: step into your skin, i’d rather jump in your bones. // it’s a lovely tradition that they start every one of their records with a self-titled song. which also happens to be the intro of their live shows. a few seconds that always (kinda) sum up the whole record.

• give yourself a try: like friends don’t lie and it all tastes the same in the dark. when your vinyl and coffee collection is a sign of the times. // the first song of that record that came out. the typical the 1975 sound, which feels like coming home but it sounds new and unknown as well. the lyrics are pretty personal pretty dark. i think we all have a lot we’d love to tell out 16-year olds... but we never told ourselves back then that it’s actually worth giving it a try, right? ‘and what would you say to your younger self? growing a beart’s quite hard and whiskey never starts to taste nice....’

• tootimetootimetootime: i swear that i only called her one time, maybe it was two times? i don’t think it was three times, can’t be more than four times. // there are so many things about this song, ohmygod. first of all the fact that they incuded ‘me too’ in the title. and have you even lived if you didn’t catch yourself at 3am in the morning singing the lyrics? the third release of this record and probably the most catchy one. i don’t even need to listen to this song to have an earworm again, haha. and i love how matty said in an interview that this song 'is not necessarily all autobiographical..’ good! and later he said he doesn’t care if tis song is gonna be a hit he only wants us fans to listen. well i guess both things are happening.

• how to draw / petrichor: love yourself like someone you love. don’t take one of my advice // ugh ‘love yourself like someone you love’ is one of the best advices i ever heard but what do i know. at the first listen i didn’t like the song that much, i don’t know. maybe it have to grow on me. but my electro-clubbing-loving heart instantly fell for the beat of this song. this is something i’d like to dance under neon lights with a drink in my hand and not caring about anything at all. oh, and ‘don’t let the internet ruin all of your time’ is another very good advice. surround yourself with good vibes only, online, too.

• love it if we made it: oh fuck your feelings, truth is only hearsay. we’re just left to decay. modernity has failed us. // this is my favorite the 1975 song ever. EVER. okay i said this with ‘somebody else’ from the last record and ‘chocolate’ from the first one buuuut whatever. i just love everything about this song. the beat the lyrics the whole vibe. how it sounds like an old song from the ninetees or something and still so new at the same time. this is the kind of song you need to turn up as loud as possible and it’s still not loud enough. there are references to lil peep and kanye. and i love the ‘modernity has failed us’ line so so much. i think if i’d have to describe this record, the whole band in just one song i’d choose this. sure there are a lot which also would be perfect for this cause but you know. fuck i’m dying to hear this live. announce european tour dates, pretty please. ugh.

matty said about this one at beats one radio: ‘it’s quite outward and it’s me kind of looking out. it’s an interesting one because there’s not a lot of context in a lot of the things that I say in that it’s direct quotes of people or their headlines I’ve read (...) it’s very objective though, this song. i think that’s one of the things i suppose i get to hide behind. a lot of the stuff that you could be upset about in the song, I never said in the first place. ‘

• be my mistake: i shouldn’t have called cause we shouldn’t speak. you do make me hard but she makes me weak // this is supposed to be about guilt and being with someone else to get over / forget the one you actually want i guess. maybe it’s about addiction. the mistake you make over and over again even though you know it’s so wrong. but sometimes you need to make mistakes to realize what you really want and need. this has kinda a therapeutic thing. i love the acoustic vibe of the song. it doesn’t need much to glow.

• sincerity is scary: why can’t we be friends if we are lovers? cause it always ends with us hating each other. // the fourth song that came out of this, the slowest one and a very deep one, again. i admit it had to grow on me, too. don’t know, the slow songs always take some time on me. ‘if i believe you’ from the last record still does. anyway. i’d love to listen to this at church. you know, the acoustic. that would sound breathtaking. ‘and irony is okay, i suppose, culture is to blame. you try and mask your pain in the most postmodern way.’ this is the most accurate description of the way everyone just put a facade on them which makes others feel like they’re okay nowadays ever. no one would survive without irony but why is everyone so scared of eing real for once?

• i like america & america likes me: i’m scared of dying. no gun required. my skin is desire, so fired. // maybe you wouldn’t expect a political song about gun usuage in america between all those songs and maybe that’s exact what we need at this point. matty said that this song is an hommage on the soundcloud rap - which is pretty big in america i guess - and he first wanted to release it (without or) just mumble lyrics but combining this with lyrics about the biggest problem america have - perfect. i guess this is one of the things that makes this band so special. every song has a deeper meaning, there’s not a single one which only fills a void. i‘m not a big fan of the soundcloud rap stuff and i’m still not friends with that song but it fits in the whole pretty good.

• the man who married a robot: you can tell me anything. i’m your best friend. anything you say to me will stay strictly between you and the internet // the whole song - which isn’t particulary a song - is spoken by the male version of siri. a monologue about a lonely man whose only friend is the internet. he lives in a lonely house. in a lonely world. it sounds so sad but this is actually more real than we can imagine i guess. there are a lot of lonely people in the world who sit alone at home daily with no one to talk. i’m pretty sure it won’t take long until the first human actually marries a robot, haha. this sounds so weird but you know the world we live in is so weird and nothing is impossible anymore... matty said he likes the idea of the next decade being about robots. sounds interesting, count me in.

• inside your mind: maybe you are dreaming that you’re in love with me. the only option left is look and see. // ‘it’s just the idea of sometimes wanting to know what your partner is thinking so much that you want to smash their head open to look.’ this song is inspired by the movie ‘gone girl’ (i love that movie! if you’ve seen it it makes sense i think) and this whole thing, the thought, the metaphor of this... is kinda morbid but i like that kind of stuff so... the slow beat of this song makes the whole thing even more intense. like you can almost feel the voice, the whole song crawling into you. wow. just wow.

• it’s not living (if it’s not with you): all i do is sit and drink without you. if i choose than i lose. distract my brain from the terrible news. it’s not living if it’s not without you. // what sounds like a love thing at first - you know, the whole ‘oh my god i can’t live without you’- thing... - is actually about mattys heroine addiction. drug addictions are maybe the even biggerl ove than a person ever could be, sadly. the vibe of the song is so happy and positive like you want to listen to it on a sunny day and sing along and if you listen to the lyrics it’s the complete opposite. he was in rehab for severe weeks and seems to be clean ever since. thank god.

i love how he tries to put the whole thing into songs - like he did on every record - and being open about it. everyone of us has their own truth and sooner or later we need to talk about it i guess.. it helps to see people as they really are. which is important. ‘the problem I have now is that this is my truth, and I feel like I can’t negotiate properly with the world if I can’t tell the truth.’

• surrounded by heads and bodies: she wears it like a dress, a post-traumatic mess // another one about his time in rehab. or better, about a girl he met there and instantly had a connection with. the title is inspired by a book and i guess that’s pretty much how you feel while being in rehab. but i have to admit when i read the title i kinda expected more from this song. shame on me, i know.

• mine: when people said it was raining all the time i see sunshine ‘cause i know that you are mine // god this line is one of the most beautiful love confessions ever, i’d cry if someone said something like this to me. the song has a pretty jazz vibe. this is something different. a song you’d like to hear in a old jazz bar in downtown new york with a huge glass of wine in one hand and the hand of your loved one in the other. (and i want to see matty in a suit performing this, haha.) nothing you can hear on repeat, but if you listen to it it gets you completely. completely smiling. and a bit sad.

• i couldn’t be more in love: maybe i’ll rely on all the things that made it right because i’d give you all the years of my life // another big song. with a slow and deep vibe which could be played in the movies. though it’s not a love song, according to matty. ‘it’s about what happens when people don’t care anymore.’ he sang the vocals the day before he went to rehab. it would’ve came out better after but this is what makes this song so special. it’s not perfect, the voice sounds so vunerable. hurt. hopeless. a song that physically hurts you when you listen to it but you just can’t stop.

• i always wanna die (sometimes): your memories are sceneries for things you said but never really meant // fuck, fuuuuuuuuck. this song always gets me no matter how many times i already listened to this it always feels like the first time. it also sounds like a song which exists since a a long time, like a song you’ve always known. another big one. a cinematic vibe. it’s a summary of the daily online life. the perfect last song for this album.

i’m following them since such a long time, i guess it was when ‘chocolate’ came out. wish it was earlier. and it makes me so happy to see how far they’ve come and how this whole thing grew bigger and bigger with each album. how many memories are made with the songs over the years. saw them live a few times - always mindblowing. you know i see a lot of concerts of famous bands and small indie ones and this and that but they have that kind of live show which leaves you kinda speechless, so many colors and lighs and beautiful effects and the songs and damn, this wasn’t what i wanted to say when i started the sentence haha. what i actually wanted to say was, that this album, even if you’re not listen to them that much (if someone is doing this) will make you feel like coming home after a long day when you sit down on your couch and pour the wine in the glass. they have their own kind of sound. probably nothing that hasn’t existed before but if you hear the songs you instantly know it’s a 1975 song. this album will make you smile and cry an sing along an think about your life and buy concert tickets because you NEED to see this live for at least once in your lifetie, i promise you. if you’re searching for a good soundtrack for your life, try the 1975.

#the 1975 #a brief inquiry into online relationships #review #alum #music #blog #personal #thoughts #matty healy #a lot of text #blabla #sadheartsongs

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citrinesunset · 6 years ago

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Dark Phoenix thoughts

I saw Dark Phoenix! I wasn’t sure if/when I was going to get a chance, but I managed it. And have some spoiler-y thoughts.

Overall, I thought it was pretty good. There were some things that I think could have been done better, but it came together better than I feared it would considering the reshoots and the fact that I question how invested Fox was in the franchise at this point.

I will say I’m sad to see the franchise ending. I only got into this fandom a couple years ago, and am sad that I missed a lot of its heyday. So I’m definitely not ready for the possibility of activity dying down, and I hope that doesn’t happen for a while yet. I’ve also really enjoyed this series, and am not sure whether I’ll be as into a rebooted series or not.

Anyway, my thoughts are a little jumbled and I probably haven’t processed the movie much, but....

Things I enjoyed/mostly enjoyed

- Charles’ 1975 hair. Yes, this is shallow, but I have tried to imagine what his hair looked like after DoFP, when he presumably still had it long but hopefully washed it more, and now I have an answer.

- I really liked the musical score.

- I really liked a lot of Charles’ scenes with young Jean. Charles as a teacher/mentor to young people has always been one of my favorite parts of him.

- I’ve enjoyed how Sophie Turner plays Jean. I thought her interpretation was interesting back in Apocalypse, and I think she did a good job here. I like this version of Jean a lot.

- Raven in the alternate timeline movies has been kind of hit or miss for me, but I thought her connection to Jean in this movie worked great. She was the perfect character to express concerns about how Charles had treated Jean, and I feel like the framework of setting her up as a mentor figure and hero in Apocalypse helps a lot in Dark Phoenix.

- I liked the interpretation of Genosha, and am curious about how and when it got started. I like to imagine it was a compromise reached after Apocalypse, and that the government was like, “Well, we can’t ignore that this guy is a terrorist who threatened to assassinate the president on live television, even if it was Nixon. But he apparently helped defeat this Apocalypse guy, and if we arrest him now it might look bad. Maybe if we give him some land, he’ll go away.” That said, Genosha did look very small. How many mutants could really live there?

- I really liked Jean going to Erik for help. I also found Erik ultimately defending and protecting the human military guys from her attack interesting. That’s not something Erik would have cared much about in the past, I don’t think, and it speaks to him becoming more moderate over time or perhaps valuing the peace that he’s been able to create on Genosha.

- I love the hints of concern that Erik shows about Charles and his team. First asking Jean whose blood is on her shirt, and then the anticipatory look on his face when he sees the jet. I think he was expecting Charles when he saw the plane.

- The first appearance of the Magneto helmet made me happy, because of course. Though, I’m kind of amused by all the different versions of that helmet Erik has had. Does he make them himself? Does he decorate and customize them?

- So...I don’t think Erik pulling up the subway train and pulling it behind him made much sense, but I am 100% here for Erik making needlessly grandiose gestures because it looks cool, because that is very on-brand.

- I liked the parallel between Jean assisting Charles telepathically when he was unconscious at the end of Apocalypse and Charles connecting with her and encouraging her when she was unconscious.

- The phoenix effects were great.

- I liked the conclusion Jean got, and that while she still sacrificed herself, it felt like an active, strategic choice on her part. And I liked that it ended on an ambiguously hopeful note for her. I also like that this movie, while it did address things like Charles lying to her, did have the Phoenix Force be an external entity as well (as opposed to just a part of her own personality like Last Stand did).

- I love it when Erik offers chess as an ice breaker (it was a nice callback to DofP), and I absolutely loved his final scene with Charles.

Things I didn’t care for

- I wish the relationships between some of the characters had been fleshed out a little more. I felt this movie did a great job overall of centering things on Jean, but so much of Jean’s conflict depended on her relationships to other characters, and I would have liked to see the stakes raised more by seeing more of her relationship with Scott and her friendships with the other team members. Also, were Hank and Raven supposed to have been in a relationship at this point, or were they teammates with a side of pining? Because I feel like it could have been read either way, and I think that context is important.

- I didn’t buy that Raven’s death would be enough to motivate Erik to kill Jean, especially after telling Jean about how killing and vengeance had never brought him peace. I can fully believe that Erik liked and respected Raven a lot, but most of the interaction we’ve seen between them in the alternate timeline films involved things like him turning down her advances and trying to kill her for the greater good. It’s not like they had a great love story or even seemed to spend much time together.

- The Mystique makeup looks really bad compared to what it used to look like. The first time I saw Raven in one of the trailers, I thought it looked like good but not professional-level cosplay, or like she was Mystique’s cousin from some direct-to-DVD spin-off movie. I can understand why Jennifer Lawrence may have disliked the time and work that went into the more detailed makeup from earlier movies, and if there were health/safety/comfort considerations, I respect that. But it was a really noticeable difference that made it seem like they didn’t make much effort.

- Quicksilver being awkwardly sidelined was annoying and obvious, and dammit, I wanted Erik to find out he has a son. Also, we didn’t get to find out what music Peter likes these days!

- I didn’t like what I saw as an implication at the end that Charles had retired because he failed. But more on that below...

Things that can’t be easily classified one way or another

- I was really on-board with the idea of this movie exploring Charles’ flaws and hubris, but I’m not sure how I feel about the way this was approached. I found the idea that mutants were cautiously accepted but on very conditional terms interesting, as well as Charles’ awareness that he was being strategic in order to hold onto that public support. And I thought that him lying to Jean because he felt it was best, but ultimately realizing that he was wrong and accepting responsibility for that, felt in-character. But I also didn’t feel like the movie really explored the link between Charles lying and Jean going Dark Phoenix, and on the surface, those two things didn’t feel very related. You could argue that without the emotional shock of learning that her father was alive, Jean might have remained on a more even keel while they figured out what was going on, but I think it would have made more sense if Charles had messed with Jean’s powers in a way that affected her ability to keep control after becoming Phoenix (and if he had, that wasn’t clear to me). But I feel like that would have conflicted with his encouragement of Jean unleashing her power in Apocalypse. I think Charles was right to accept some responsibility, but I would have liked to have seen more reconciliation between him and the other characters and would have liked to see more of his reasoning for retiring.

- I didn’t find the aliens all that interesting, but I didn’t really mind that. I felt they served a purpose by providing some external conflict and helping explain what the Phoenix Force was, but they didn’t distract from the meat of the story about Jean too much. I felt it was a better approach than Last Stand, where they tried to use too many storylines that did deserve to be fleshed out more.

- I found it interesting that Hank can apparently switch to Beast form on command now at a second’s notice. I wonder if he can change back on command, too.

Shippy thoughts

My top X-Men ships are Charles/Hank, Charles/Erik, Erik/Hank, and Jean/Erik, roughly in that order.

- I was hoping for more Charles/Hank fodder than there was. I loved the early scene of them watching the news together, but they get very little screentime otherwise, and their fight didn’t give me as many C/H feelings as I was hoping it would. I also don’t like knowing if they ended things on good terms or not.

- The last scene between Charles and Erik is shippy and glorious. Chess as a flirtation device! Smiles! A kind of proposal! 10/10

- I am always on-board with an angsty, unlikely team-up between Hank and Erik, but the movie didn’t deliver on this front as much as I was hoping.

- Jean going to Erik was certainly satisfying, and I can’t be disappointed even if she didn’t stay long. I’m sure I’ll be able to come up with fic scenarios based on it all the same.

#xmen #xmdp #xmdp spoilers

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outerspacehippiehay · 6 years ago

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Answer all of those aesthetic questions. If you don't have that determination answer your favorite ones!

Thanks bestie I need this right niow, just like you did flower crown: when did you last sing to yourself? Now, listening to This is Gospel rnfairy lights: if a crystal ball could tell you the truth about anything, what would you want to know? Oh God....Who am I destined to be with... daisies: what is the greatest accomplishment of your life? Um...I’m 22 my greatest accomplishment is getting out of bed for work.1975: what is the first happy memory that comes to mind, recent or otherwise?

matte: if you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living? I need to really think...No. I wouldn’t because whatever reason I’m going to die was since I had no knowledge. If i start acting all crazy and rebellious I could die sooner.black nail polish: do you have a bucket list? if so, what are the top three things? It’s not real but I can come up with three. One: Travel to a different country. Two: Learn to love myself Three: Make a difference.pantone: describe a person close to your life in detail. I’m not rreally a close person but if I were to choose anyone it would be my best friend. She and I have been friends for oh so long and I go to her for everything. She likes to dye her hair but its naturally a beautiful chestnut brown that flows off her shoulders by an inch. Her eyes are not even a normal color either. They are yellow like a cat with a tint of auburn to add soft tones of a sunset sky. In the middle bottom of her squishable face are some plump creamy pink lips. Sorta jealous since mine are so thin ughmoodboard: do you feel you had a happy childhood? HAHAHAHAHA what is that? Because I had to question my own sanity when I went over friends houses and seeing the difference between brothers and sisters and asking myself what happens between my sister and I isn’t normal? This doesnt happen to others?stars: when did you last cry in front of another person? Today...In a restaurant... I AM NOT A CRY BABYplants: pick a person to stargaze with you and explain why you picked them. Yeah my best friend @stranded-ali3nconverse: would you ever have a deep conversation with a stranger and open up to them? This i struggle with man because I need counseling and yet I don’t wanna go to a stranger and open up to them. So... NO!lace: when was your last 3am conversation with someone, and who were they to you? Probably Andrew seeing as he’s my only friend up that late xD but its always a great conversation. Thanks brother!!!handwriting: if you were about to die, and you could only say one more sentence to one person, what would you say and to whom? WHY SO DEEP? “Thank you mom, thank you for everything and I love you and my brother with all my heart and forever will be with you” cactus: what is your opinion on brown eyes? Did you read the description of my best friends eyes? I believe my boyfriend has brown eyes. So they cute.sunrise: pick a quote and describe what it means to you personally. “This isn’t even my final form” I heard it from a friend and discovered it was from Dragon Ball Z but I fell in love with it. I am me but I’m still changing I’m still growing. You haven’t even seen what I can fully do yet. All such empowering thoughts.oil paints: what would you title the autobiography of your life so far? “Sad Stoned and Stupid.overalls: what would you do with one billion dollars? Buy my mother, brother and I the ranch we have our eyes on.combat boots: are you a very forgiving person? do you like being this way? Yes I can be very forgiving in situations however in rare cases I may not forgive ever, No I don’t like it because obviously people walk all over me for it.winged eyeliner: write a hundred word letter to your twelve year old self. Right now on this? Ugh no thanks. 12 year old me stay away from brad, joe, and miranda i dont give a fuck it’s your sister just do it! Stand up for yourself. Put your foot down and keep saying No. pastel: would you describe yourself as more punk or pastel? Pastel with dash of punktattoos: how do you feel about tattoos and piercings? explain. Well I love them and have one sooooooo, I do because it is a form of art. That you can show off like in museums except they are on your body. piercings: do you wear a lot of makeup? why/why not? Depends on the day but mostly I wear makeup to feel prettier to myself. I hide my dark circles and my pimples as if no one else deals with them. bands: talk about a song/band/lyric that has affected your life in some way. All music has effected me. Mostly in a positive way. If I had to choose one it would be Evanescence, As an alternative kid I would listen to them because I related to the deepness from her lyrics and loved the classical sound with inspiring lyrics. Helped me feel less alone in this huge world full of mirrors.messy bun: the world is listening. pick one sentence you would tell them. “Just be nice and considerate and NEW ENGLAND USE YOUR GOD DAMN BLINKERS”cry baby: list the concerts you have been to and talk about how they make you feel. Alan Jackson as a child it was my first one and it was great. I went with my dad and thats all I really remember except for they had 5oclock somewhere buttons i wanted. I went to Shinedown with my step dad and I wasnt supposed to go it was my mom that was but she gave her ticket up for me. Thanks mom that really was an amazing acoustic concert filled with personal and raw emotions. grunge: who in the world would you most like to receive a letter from and what would you want it to say?A letter? No one does that anymore. But if I wanted to recieve one it would be from Chris and that he changed his ways has a steady job and is taking care of his child. No more gang shit and actually making hs life better and all cause I stopped talking to him did it slap him in the face. So he wanted to thank me for that.space: do you have a desk/workspace and how is it organised/not organised? I have an area for work yes and usually it’s not organized because of other so I organize it because I can’t stand a mess at work. white bed sheets: what is your night time routine? Get high and then sleep.old books: what’s one thing you don’t want your parents to know? I don’t want my dad to know I like girls... I don’t wanna see his reaction. My mom.. probably who I had sex with.beaches: if you had to dye your hair how would you dye/style it and why? Ouff! I want black hair!!!! But I know it kills it! I do enjoy my curls but I’d defrizz them and probably go to a deep dark maroon color.eyes: pick five people to go on an excursion with you. who would you pick and where would you go/what would you do? I’m too high and drunk for this question NEXT11:11: name three wishes and why you wish for them. I feel like the letter one is a wish sooo two. I wish my mom happiness she deserves it. Three I had natural beauty.painting: what is the best halloween costume you have ever put together? if none, make one up. I mean I put together a decent Alice in Wonderland costume seeing as I won best costume for it. lightning: what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done while drunk or high? I really don’t do anything too bad. I guess peeing in my garbage so I wouldn’t need to leave my bedroom?thunder: what’s one thing you would never do for one million dollars? Kill someonestorms: you on only listen to one song for the rest of your life, or only see one person for the rest of your life. which and why? One song. Freaky Friday by Lil Dicky.. It always make me smile because it’s so funny! Also I need people more than music as odd as it is to admit. I can’t choose one person. love: have you ever fallen in love? describe what it feels like to realise you’re in love. Yes I have and I don’t wanna go there because he don’t love me back and that is all I wanna talk about.clouds: if you’re a boy, would you ever rock black nail polish? if you’re a girl, would you ever rock really really short hair?coffee: what’s your starbucks order, and who would you trust to order for you, if anyone? I don’t go often but I love that dragonfruit tea they had/have?? And anyone it’s a pretty simple order if you can’t get it right then you are really stupid.marble: what is the most important thing to you in your life right now? My mom and brother.fin.

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nomadsuggestions · 7 years ago

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Tag Game

//I was tagged by the lovely @spideyboisuggestions, so I’m stealing their questions. Also, all mod answers are gonna be in italics

Rules: Answer 30 questions and tag 20 blogs you’d like to know better!

Nicknames: Stevie, Punk, Captain isn’t really a nickname but oh well, Steve, Big Guy //Lo, Loki, Lokan, Logna(pronounced like the end of balogna), Baby Bear(this is my father because he doesn’t understand what twinks are all my fave characters as a kid were bears(Funshine Bear, Winnie The Pooh, Big Bear In The Big Blue House, Baloo, Fozzie, etc.)

Gender: I think I’m a trans man but mod can’t keep my story straight(to be fair, I couldn’t keep it straight either ;) ) //Genderfluid, but my default is male so they/them and he/him pronouns work for me most days. They/them will always work though.

Zodiac: I’m a *looks up zodiac signs* cancer? I’m not sure I like that... But hey, Sam does tease me about being crabby *ba-dum-tsh* //Capricorn, but if I had born on time I’d be a Sagittarius-Capricorn cusp

Height: 6′2″, nowadays //5′7″, I’m a tiny bitch

Time: Not sure what timezone we’re in at the moment but it looks like late morning? //4:20am ayeeee

Favorite bands/solo artists: I really love some of these newer bands, but Sam’s got me pretty hooked on Marvin Gaye. Nat plays a lot of stuff from Judas Priest, though, I gotta say I didn’t expect to love them as much as I do //AJR, A Great Big World, Bastille, Janelle Monáe, Home Free, Panic! At The Disco, and The 1975 for the most part

Song stuck in my head: Wanda was playing some remix of Bad At Love by Halsey on repeat earlier and now I’ve been humming it for hours //I keep bouncing between Boys by Charlie XCX and Recuerdame from Coco(the spanish version is better you can fight me on that)

Last movie I saw: I think it was Moonlight. Nat picked up a copy when we were in France last. We turned on the english subtitles for the others, and I’m not ashamed to say I cried more than once. //I think it was Doctor Strange with my buddies online, because they trapped me into it by reminding me about Chiwetel Ejiofor being fine as hell and Mads Mikkelson’s pretty geode eyes. I can’t stand Benedict Cumberbatch but I like Strange so it’s a love-hate relationship with that movie

Last show I watched: I think it was some random cartoon in Turkey, I couldn’t understand it but it was cute //Lmao it was Death Note because my weeb friend was offended I had never seen it. And now I’m attached to yet another dead fictional character lmao(I’m talking about L btw Light can choke)

Last thing I googled: I think it was “how to set up a video call” like two years ago //”finn wittrock” because I’m talking to a buddy about people who could play Gambit other than Taylor Kitsch and Channing Tatum

Other blogs: //just my main, @dmitri-logan

Do you get asks: Not so much since I turned anon off but I do get them and I love them! //I sometimes get asks on my main but not super often

Why I chose my username: Mostly because mod is a nerd and “likes my nomad run in the comics” or whatever that is supposed to me //I’m gonna stan Steve Rogers till my dying day, and I’m an AnCom(anarcho-communist) and Steve’s time as Nomad is basically his AnCom phase lmao)

Following: I just followed everyone on that Suggestion Blog masterpost because I apparently want to see the same post 10 million times over on my dash //Also a bunch of Check, Please!, Marvel, DC, and social justice blogs. Oh! And Kingsman

Average amount of sleep: Sleep? I don’t know about sleep, it’s summertime! Oh, Bucky called me. //Owner of the worst sleep schedule ever right here! I go between 16-30 hours without sleeping and then crash for 12-18 hours, and then repeat

Lucky number: 4, 18, and 10 //2, 22, and 4!

What I’m wearing: A t-shirt and my uniform pants //A longsleeve classic Marvel shirt, purple plaid pajama pants(say that 5 times fast), and teal slipper socks because even in my pjs I’m a confusing gay mess

Dream job: In another life, I probably would’ve been some kind of social worker? I’d say artist but I draw to relax, not to make money. //I’d love to be a cosmetologist or a baker, but neither of those are super sustainable careers. Maybe one day!

Dream trip: I’d like to take a trip back to the countrysides in France someday, but I’d also like to see Bucky enjoying the sun and ocean, maybe at a beach somewhere in Cote d’Ivoire of Morocco //Dream trip is prob a summer convention tour, if I ever had the money

Favorite food: My Ma’s beef stew, hands down. //This one chicken salad sandwich I had from a gelatto shop at Union Station when I went to DC in 8th grade. I almost cried when I looked them up a couple years later and found out they had to close down because they couldn’t afford the increased rent

Play an instrument: I tried to learn how to play the piano when I was a kid, but never had the hand-eye coordination or the ear for it. I’d like to try and learn again //I can somewhat play the piano and I was taught how to play keyboard percussion instruments in middle school band

Nationality: I’m American, but my parents were both first generation immigrants from Ireland //Sadly, I’m also American.

Favorite songs: There’s this one song my Ma used to sing a lot, and Bing Crosby did a version of it before I went under that I really loved. Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral //The Show Must Go On by Queen is a big fave of mine and is guaranteed to make me cry. Also I unironically love Ashes by Celine Dion okay fight me it’s an amazing song.

Tagging: @lokisuggestion @thor-suggestion @newrocketsuggestions @trans-peter-quill @whitewolfsuggestion @skinnystevesuggestion @steverogersuggestions @othercaptainamericasuggestion @ladylokisuggestions @jotun-loki-suggestions @gwenstacysuggestion @lady-sif-suggestions @lokisuggestionz @shurisuggestions @agentcartersuggestion @magneto-suggestion @kidlokisuggestions @kamala-khan-suggestions @godofstoriessuggestion @billykaplanwiccansuggestion

#sorry if you've already been tagged #tag game

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spamzineglasgow · 5 years ago

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(HOT TAKE) Notes on a Conditional Form by The 1975, part 1

In the first instalment of a two part dialogic HOT TAKE of The 1975′s latest album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit, 2020), Maria Sledmere writes to musician and critic Scott Morrison with meditations on the controversial motormouth and prince of sincerity that is Matty Healy, the poetics of wrongness, millennial digression and what it means to play and compose from the middle.

Dear Scott,

> So we have agreed to write something on The 1975’s fourth studio album, Notes on a Conditional Form (Dirty Hit/Polydor). I have been traipsing around the various necropoli of Glasgow on my state-sanctioned walks this week, listening to the long meandering 80-minute world of it, disentangling my headphones from the overgrown ferns, caught between the living and dead. Can you have a long world, a sprawling fantasia, when ‘the world’ feels increasingly shortened, small, boiled down to its ‘essentials’? Let’s go around the world in 80 minutes, the band seem to say, take this short-circuit to the infinite with me. I like that; I don’t even need a boat, just a half-arsed WiFi connection and a will to download. I’m really excited to be talking with you, writing you both about this; it’s an honour to connect our thoughts. I want writing right now to feel a bit like listening, so I write this listening. When my friend Katy slid into my DMs on a Monday morning with ‘omg the 1975 album starts with greta?????????’ and then ‘what on earth is the genre of this album ?!’ I just knew it had to happen, this writing-listening, because I was equally alarmed and charmed by the cognitive dissonance of that fall from Greta’s soft, yet urgent call to rebel (‘The 1975’), into ‘People’ with its parodic refrain of post-punk hedonism that would eat Fat White Family on a Dadaesque meal-deal platter ‘WELL, GIRLS, FOOD, GEAR [...] Yeah, woo, yeah, that’s right’. Scott, you and I went to see The 1975 play at the Hydro on the 1st of March, my last gig before lockdown. I’d been up all night drinking straight gin and doing cartwheels and crying on my friend’s carpet, and the sleeplessness made everything all the more lush and intense. Those slogans, the theatrical backdrops, the dancers, the lights, the travellator! Everything so EXTRA, what a JOURNEY. And well, it would be rude of me not to invite you to contribute to this conversation, as a thank you for the ticket but also because of your fortunate (and probably unusual) positioning as both a classically trained musician (with a fine-tuned listening ear) and fervent fan of the band (readers, Scott messaged me with pictures of pre-ordered vinyl to prove it).

> It seems impossible to begin this dialogue without first addressing the FRAUGHT and oft~problematic question of Matty Healy, the band’s frontman, variously described as ‘the enfant terrible of pop-rock’ and ‘outspoken avatar’ (Sam Sodomsky, Pitchfork), ‘enigmatic deity’ (Douglas Greenwood for i-D), ‘a charismatic thirty-one-year-old’ and ‘scrawny’, rock star ‘archetype’, not to mention ‘avatar of modern authenticity, wit, and flamboyance’ (Carrie Battan, The New Yorker). ‘Divisive motormouth or voice of a generation?’ asks Dorian Lynskey with (fair enough) somewhat tired provocation in The Guardian, as if you could have one without the other, these days. ‘There are’, writes Dan Stubbs for The NME, ‘as many Matty Healys here as there are musical styles’. So far, so postmodern, so elliptical, so everything/yeah/woo/whatever/that’s right. Come to think of it, it makes sense for The 1975 to draft in Greta Thunberg to read her climate speech over the opening eponymous track. Both Matty and Greta, for divergent yet somehow intersecting reasons, suffer the troublesome, universalising label of voice of a generation. Why not join forces to exploit this label, to put out a message? I’ve always thought of pop music as a kind of potential broadcast, a hypnotic, smooth space for desire’s traversal and recalibration. More on that later, maybe. What do you think?

youtube

> You can imagine Matty leaping out of a cryptic, post-internet Cocteau novelette (if not then straight onto James Cordon’s studio desk), emoji streaming from his fingertips like the lightning that Justine wields in Lars von Trier’s film Melancholia (2011); but the terrifying candour of the enfant terrible is also his propensity to wax lyrical on another (bear with my clickhole) YouTube interview about his thoughts on Situationism and the Snapchat generation. It feels relevant to mention cinema right now, if only in passing, because this album is full of cinematic moments: strings and swells worthy of Weyes Blood’s latest paean to the movies, but also a Disneyfication of sentiment clotted and packed between house tracks, ballads and rarefied indie hits. Nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975. Maybe more on that later, also.

> Where do I start though, how to really write about this, how to attain something like necessary distance in the space of a writing-listening? Matty Healy, I suppose, like SPAM’s celebrated authorial mascot, Tom McCarthy, poses the same problem of response: how to write about an artist whose own critical commentary is like an eloquent, overzealous and self-devouring, carnivorous vine of opinion?

> Now, let’s not turn this into a discussion about who wears pinstripes better (we can leave that to readers - these are total Notes from the Watercooler levels of quiche). There seems to be this obsession with pinning (excuse the pun) Matty down to a flat surface of multiples: a moodboard, avatar, placeholder for automatic cancellation. He’s the soft cork you wanna prod your anxieties through and call it identity, you wanna provoke into saying something bizarrely, painfully true about life ‘as it is now’. Healy himself quips self-referentially, ‘a millennial that babyboomers like’. I don’t really know where to start really, not even on Matty; my brain is all over the place and I can’t find a critical place to settle. I’m lost in the fog and the stripes, some stars also; I haven’t even washed my hair for a week. Funnily enough, in 2018 for SPAM’s #7 Prom Date issue I wrote a poem called ‘Just Messing Around’ where the speaker mentions ‘pinning my eye to the right side / of matt healy’s hair all shaved / & serene’ and you don’t really know if it’s the eye that’s shaved or the hair, but both I guess offer different kinds of vision. Every time I google the man, IRL Matty I mean, I am offered a candied proliferation of alluring headlines: ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy opens up on his beef with Imagine Dragons’, ‘The 1975’s Matty Healy savagely destroys Maroon 5 over plagiarism claims’. Perhaps the whole point is to define (or slay?) by negation. Hey, I’ll write another poem. The opening sentence comes from Matty’s recent Guardian interview.

Superstar

I’m not an avocado, not everyone thinks I’m amazing. That’s why they call me the avocado, baby was a song released by Los Campesinos! in 2013, same year as the 1975’s debut. In the am I have been wanting to listen and Andy puts up a meme like ‘The 1975 names their albums stuff like “A Treatise on Epistemological Suffering” and then spends 2 hours singing about how hard it is to be 26’ and I reply being 26 IS epistemological suffering (isn’t that the affirmative dismissal contained in the title, ‘Yeah I Know’) I mean only yesterday I had to ask myself if it’s true you can wish on 11:11 or take zinc to improve your immune system or use an expired provisional license to buy alcohol like why are they even still asking I thought indie had died after that excruciating Hadouken! song called ‘Superstar’ which was all like You don’t like my scene / You don’t like my song / Well, if you Somewhere I’ve done something wrong it seems a delirious, 3-minute scold of the retro infinitude of scarf-wearing cunts with haircuts, and yeah sure kids dressed as emos rapping to rave is not the end of the world, per se, similarly I had to ask myself is there a life in academia is there a wage here or there, like the Talking Heads song And you may ask yourself, well How did I get here? Good thing I turn 27 next month Timothy Morton often uses the refrain, this is not my beautiful house this is not my beautiful wife to refer to those moments you find yourself caught in the irony loop and that’s dark ecology the closer you are the stranger it feels like slice me in half I’ll fall out with more questions you can plant in the soil like a stone or stoner, just one more drag of does it offend you, yeah? will I live and die in a band Matty sings the sweet green meat of my much-too-old -and-such-youthful experience of adding healthy fat to conference dialogue, like ‘Avocado, Baby’ was released on a record called No Blues I believe a large automobile is hurtling towards me now in negative space and the driver is crooning Elvis and reciting my funding conditions and everything feels like there aren’t not still people who believe the new culture of content is a space ‘over there’ and you can still have earnest power ballads about love if you want them =/ to cancel (too many tabs don’t make a tableau but in the future facebook has a paywall) and fame is a drag the pressure we put on the atmosphere, like somewhere you’re alive and still amazing asking wtf I’m reading this novel by Roberto Bolaño set partly in 1975 before we had internet it seems poets got laid a lot that year in Mexico City before I was born to pick up video calls with a spliff in one hand in the splendid, essential heat like a difficult knife in my side you can put me on toast, grind the pepper over me gently and say fucking hell this has taken forever.

> I guess I want or wanted to begin with this question of difficulty that rises when responding to Notes on a Conditional Form. How do you approach an album whose delayed release places it in a position of considerable hype, an album whose world tour and promotion is again delayed by global pandemic, an album shrouded in the ever-shifting controversy of Matty’s persona, an album whose length and sonic variety risks collapse into litanies of zany superlative and necrophilic attempts to revive musical category as vaguely relevant here? As beautiful as it is to catalogue the offbeat Pinegrove vibes of ‘Roadkill’, the shoegaze croons of ‘Then Because She Goes’ and the pop-punk, chord-bright euphoria of ‘Me & You Together Song’, I could keep going and going with this. I could just list and just list this. The album is a generous offering: a tribute to the album as form in an age where attention tapers away on high-streaming playlists set to conditioned, circadian moods curated by the likes of Spotify or Apple Music. The album is a Borgesian plenitude of multiple pathways, multiple timelines, infinite feed, choose your own adventure; a hypertext of cultural reference almost worthy of Manic Street Preachers at their Richey Edwards era of paranoid, intellectual peak; a metamodernist feat of oscillation between irony and sincerity, an extended tract, a drunk millennial ramble, a journey that loops from house party to club basement to the streams of sexuality repressed and expressed encounter...and yet. It is both more and less than these things. In trying to capture Notes on a Conditional Form with some pithy, journalist’s statement, I’m doing it all wrong.

> Sidenote: I recently listened to Rachel Zucker give a 2016 lecture on ‘The Poetics of Wrongness’ as part of the Bagley Wright Lecture Series. She makes a case for wrongness in poetry and critique, rejects the poem of pithy essence, the short, pretty and to the point lyric whose meaning is easily digested in a greetings card, or A Level exam paper, say. ‘Instead of the Fabergé egg of the short lyric, I prefer the aesthetics of intractability and exhausted exhaustedness’, the mistakes, lags or aporia made along the way in one of these long and winding poems. Notes on a Conditional Form is full of what some might deem mistakes, digression, exhaustion; but it is also peppered with the gloss of almost perfect pop ‘hits’ such as ‘Me & You Together Song’ and ‘If You’re Too Shy (Let Me Know)’. A wrong poem should be, ‘ashamed and irreverent’, which feels like a decent description of The 1975’s general orientation towards artistic conception. There is cringe and incongruity, there is by all intents and purposes ‘too much of it’, whatever we mean by ‘it’. And yet, that is its beautiful poetics of wrongness, the sound of wrongness, which ‘prefers the stairs’ to the easy elevator pitch (as Zucker puts it), that ‘prefers a half-finishing crumbling stairwell to nowhere’. I like to think about this 1975 album as a kind of exhausting Escherian scene of shifting, crumbling stairwells, shuffling and reassembling against the glistering backdrop of the internet’s inverse void, where everything, literally everything is translated to a starry excess of 1s and 0s, our collective binary data, the white hot, unreadable howl of our noise. What do you think Scott, would Matty find this image agreeable? Does that matter?

> Pushing dear Matty aside, say what you like, let’s start (again) with the title: Notes on a Conditional Form. Following 2018’s A Brief Inquiry Into Online Relationships, it’s fair to position these records as gestures towards philosophical statements ‘of the times’. Important to recognise the resistance to total or dominating knowledge built into the titles: these are not complete tracts or theses, but rather ‘a brief inquiry’ and ‘notes’. It’s obviously the ancient yet *hip* thing to do in capital-P Philosophy, to put out your statement on aesthetics and ethics, and I think The 1975 are playing with that tradition and its failure. You can imagine if his attention span were different, Matty Healy would’ve already written a PhD thesis on this stuff and published it as drunken bulletins on LiveJournal in 2007. As it stands, we have the smorgasbord sprawl of this eclectic record to get through in this cursèd year of 2020 — it’s not like we have much of anything better to do right now, when everything feels so futile, beyond reason and even the greatest human endeavour. Haha, woo, Yeah :’(((.

> Let’s stay in that conditional space between crying and laughter. Conditional form is interesting as a term, often used in grammar to refer to the ‘unreal past’ because it uses a past tense but does not actually refer to something that literally happened in the past: If I had texted him back, we would probably have gone to the gig that night. There’s something about the conditional as the ur-condition of the internet, the proliferating possibilities it offers and the hauntological strains of what could have been had we chosen x option over y, z, a, b, c, infinity...As millennials, we often make decisions by hedging, always caught in the conditional state of what it is to be. Hovering in the emotional shortcuts provided by dumb yellow icons, the poetics of abstraction. A verb form’s dalliance with uncertain reverb; and so we live our conditional lives.

> To push this further, we can say the internet is, as ever, Matty Healy’s natural habitat. In a recent podcast interview with Conor Oberst for The Face, Healy tells his favourite emo-country hero that ‘my natural environment by the time I started The 1975 was the fucking internet’. So how does that ecosystem play into the music? In a damning review for The Line of Best Fit, Claire Biddles concludes:

The 1975’s first three albums are ideal and distinct worlds to inhabit, each individually cohesive but situated in specific contexts — the anticipation of the small town, profundity in the face of vacuous fame, and the horror and isolation of late capitalism. Perhaps because of its broken genesis, Notes has no such common context, and ends up feeling flat, directionless and inessential, where its forebears felt vital, worthy of devoting a life to. For a band with proven dexterity in deftly capturing the nuances and quick changes of contemporary conversation, it is disheartening to witness them with nearly nothing of note to say.

That description — ‘flat, directionless and inessential’ — is kind of how I experience the internet right now, in the paradox of Web 2.0 becoming utterly essential, somehow, to how I live my life, how I love, how I am with friends. The internet as my ecosystem, my utility, my complete environment, my Imaginary — beyond the mere utility of a WiFi connection. Broken genesis might well describe the childhoods of those of us who grew up online, whose platforms collapsed around them, whose adolescent data was lost in the great ~accidental annihilation of the MySpace servers, whose identities were always already fractured, performed, anonymised or exquisitely personalised, deferred into only the (im)possible keystroke of utterance and trace, the fort-da play of MSN sign-ins. ‘My life is defined by a desire to be outward followed by a fear of being seen’, Matty says in a new short film for Apple Music, released in tandem with the album. The internet requires this chiaroscuro destiny: not to burn always with Baudelaire’s hard and gem-like flame (O to be an IRL flaneur beyond times of lockdown) but to endlessly flicker between the bright green light of presence and the shade of what once was called afk, away from keyboard. To live and burn in the gap between extroversion and introversion, to live in this conditional state of tendency. To express with emoji, send pics, is to both reveal and withhold something else, essential.

> I like albums to feel like worlds; I appreciate Biddles’ evocation of the cohesion experienced in the first three 1975 records. But perhaps it is a kind of violence to assume a world must have cohesion to exist. What is even meant by ‘common context’? What pressure are we putting on a singer, a band, a cultural moment to produce something familiar and harmonious, and to whom, at what scale? What does it mean to be the biggest band in the world...for a bit? How does that work when everything is dissonance, transience, noise, interference; both this and not-this; when life itself is lived as the flat traversal of a millioning existential terrains that seem to collapse into this nowness in which I feel myself sliding forever? Can anyone weigh-in on what it means to make music, art or writing that’s ‘worthy of devoting a life to’, because the gravity and force of that condition for good art, good pop, seduces me so.

> Maybe the point is to always be in the middle, to never quite start to write about The 1975, to find yourself always already writing about this album because this album was always already writing about your life. I have said nobody does the interlude quite like The 1975, but I was being coy, because the hottest twentieth-century philosophical double act, Deleuze and Guattari (haters gonna hate), do the interlude rather nicely. The point of a rhizome being ‘no beginning or end [...] always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo’ as they write in A Thousand Plateaus (1980). I see the musical interlude of a pop record, the instrumental moment without lyric, as a kind of middling gesture that places the listener in that conditional state of presence and absence, a hinge between songs, times and narrative moments. Maybe my favourite moment in A Thousand Plateaus is the statement: ‘RHIZOMATICS = POP ANALYSIS, even if the people have other things to do besides read it, even if the blocks of academic culture or pseudoscien-tificity in it are still too painful or ponderous’. Painful or ponderous might be a fair critique levelled at the enfant terrible vibes of Matty’s lyrics and generic pick’n’mix, but isn’t this tactic a kind of swerving punch at the categorical violence that keeps people out of academia, that keeps academic discourse so often stale in the first place? Unlike most journal articles, let’s face it, pop reaches ‘“the people”’. Perhaps Notes on a Conditional Form is the rhizomatic sprawl of the myriad we need as an alternative to institutional hierarchy, ring-fencing and the language games of academia. Surely the title is a reference to the very ‘pseudoscient-tificity’ D&G mention? I’m gonna quote Richard Scott’s blurb to Colin Herd’s 2019 poetry collection, You Name It here (not least because the indie publishers, Dostoyevsky Wannabe, come straight out of Manchester, home to The 1975, and because Herd’s poetic spirit is pure pop generosity with a platter of theory on the side), because I want to say similar things of this album: ‘Colin Herd’s poems are masterpieces of variousness. They are talismans against Macho demons. They are snatches of theory operating under lavish spills of language’. The good thing about Herd’s poetry and Matty Healy’s lyrics is that the impulse towards romantic or florid expression is always tapered by an interest in the mundane and everyday. Healy is always singing about pissing or buying clothes online or, as on ‘The Birthday Party’, singing about ‘a place I’ve been going’ that seems to consist of the lonely, infinite regress of conversations about seeing friends and watching someone drink kombucha while buying, in the convenient life of rhyme, Ed Ruscha prints.

Ed Ruscher, Cold Beer, Beautiful Girls (2009)

> So what kind of listening does this rhizomatic sprawl demand — does it expand beyond the banal or find a holding space there, a heaven of affect chilled to late-modernity’s crisp perfection? ‘The End (Music For Cars)’ is a luxurious, Hollywood ‘soaring’ moment, all strings and swells, fucking woodwind, and comes as the third track on the album, where normally you’d place it as some kind of penultimate climax, the album’s landscape pan-out or big swelling screen kiss in three-dimensional rotation. The band’s ‘Music For Cars’ era comprises their two most recent records, and you have to take it as a nod to Brian Eno’s 1978 ambient classic Ambient 1: Music for Airports (Matty recently interviewed Eno again for The Face, cool). The thing about cars is you drive around in them, you follow rules but also whims and desires, convictions; you choose to join others or you pursue the selfish acceleration (‘People are afraid to merge on freeways in Los Angeles’ goes the laconic teenage refrain in Bret Easton Ellis’ 1985 debut novel Less Than Zero). You only listen to music half-attentively; you don’t listen close enough to trade in souls. Are we being invited to experience this album as an ambient disruption of figure and ground, presence and absence, here and there, space and place, intimacy and despondency? Driving feels increasingly ‘directionless and inessential’ when the scale effects and obscenities of the anthropocene, of covid and other late-capitalist crises loom in our vision, when the sign systems we used to navigate our lives by seem to shimmer out of focus, or pixelate and deteriorate through endless memetic replication... You can’t help feel like Biddles review kind of misses the point.

Sylvano Bussoti, Five Pieces for Piano for David Tudor (1959)

> What point would that be though, in a world of rhizomatic overlap and intersecting, middling lines, a direction without seeming end? I love the approximation at work when Biddles writes, ‘with nearly nothing of note to say’, because that seems to be a possibility condition for writing in the age of the internet. To write in a way that is almost less than zero and loop back upon some kind of infinity, yet keep it in 2-step. I think back to Rachel Zucker’s image of the half-finished crumbling stairwell, and feel an amiable sense of approval towards this band who always work between the registers of diary, confession, advertising, provocative sloganeering and faux-didactics, never quite settling in to specifically tell you this particular story. It’s all mess, and it’s awful and delicious, I’m sorry. ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’ is the title of track 13 on the album: that movement between nothing and everything feels like the absolutist, absurdist conditions of ‘truth’ possibility in the Trumpocene/age of so-called ‘post-truth’. ‘Life feels like a lie, I need something to be true’, Healy sings with strained conviction in the song’s opening. But what is at stake in this truth? ‘I never fucked in a car, I was lying’, goes the line, referring back to the dramatic in medias res opening to ‘Love It If We Made It’, notable banger from A Brief Inquiry…: ‘We’re fucking in a car, shooting heroin / Saying controversial things just for the hell of it’. If lying is a pun on telling a mistruth or laying back, practically sexless in a passive state, there’s a deliberate play on apathy, agency and distortion here. It’s something Matty seems snagged on. On ‘I Like America & America Likes Me’ he collapses aesthetic superficiality, capital’s lyric abstraction (‘Oh, what’s a fiver?’) and generalised crisis into this (un)conscious desire for shutdown, expressed in fragmentary bullets of needing-to-know-and-not-know: ‘Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?’ And then that impassioned refrain, processed through vocal distortion as if to enact the difficulty in clarity as overcome somehow by the sheer making of noise: ‘Belief and saying something / And saying something / And saying something’. It’s the endless, driving recursion of our lives online, online.

> Back to ‘The End (Music for Cars)’ which really is the middle of the beginning. It’s weird to listen to songs about driving and lying down in the middle of lockdown, drowning in the bloat of social media, on top of our ongoing climate emergency (yeah, remember that, it’s still happening), where high-carbon travel feels like an exhausted, almost impossible concept. A musician complaining about travelling is an age-old subject for a song, but this feels just as much about living in the in-between times of the internet (remember the sweet naivety of the information superhighway) as much as the great Road, for which Kerouac longed as much as Springsteen, Dylan, or Lana Del Rey. Is Matty Healy homesick though? ‘Get somewhere, change my mind, eh / Get somewhere but don’t find it / I don’t find what I’m looking for’. It’s all ‘(out there)’ as the parenthetical refrain goes, but maybe ‘out there’, outside, is the maddening supplement, as Derrida would say, to our lives online, thus revealing their mutual, entwined dependency. Imagine the M6 but tangled up crazily, zanily, like one of those Sylvano Bussoti scores. It’s not like you’re trying to get home, get back, exactly. It’s not like you can just click back on your browser and erase that trace of the touch that enacts it. That’s the weird-ass sensation of being an ecological being: ‘Wherever you go, there you are’, writes Tim Morton in Being Ecological (2018). We’re all pretty alien, even to ourselves.

> If life feels like a lie, as Matty sings, does it matter anymore whether it is or not? Or, to pose the question differently, how do we feel into, attune to something like ‘truth’, a shared reality or feeling? ‘Out there’ is only a state of ellipsis [...] a vine extended, something for the listener, user, consumer and/or human to cling to — or be strangled by. In the aforementioned Apple Music video, Matty takes away the canvas and presents the frame beneath, in a gesture that is comically overwrought with Duchampian pretention around the state and context of the artwork itself. ‘Sometimes I think what is the point of...it’s not my atheism coming out, it’s just my being human coming out’, he muses. The phrase ‘coming out’, with its connotations of closeting, shame and cocoon-like emergence is intriguing here. In a dehumanising, post-internet world of neoliberalism and its attendant microfascisms, its commodification of all kinds of art, its easythink translation of poetry-to-advertising, what would it mean to come out as human after, or better still, in the middle of all this? It’s significant that he trails off after ‘the point of…’, for surely the point itself (of the art?) would be to find yourself here, there, right in the middle of it all. And then in ‘Nothing Revealed / Everything Denied’, it’s like Matty is calling us back from that epistemological and ontological boiling point of knowing and being, like in singing we could go along, we could feel present and ‘true’ again, even with friction and difference. We gotta take hold, cool ourselves down from the rhetoric and into warm emotion, the smell of paint, erotic vibration of bass, in a manner of speaking.

> What if the mode of inquiry were not to investigate but rather to follow the lines of flight, to riff on this world where narrative arcs and chains are replaced by the multiple possibilities of hallucinatory experience, what Deleuze and Guattari call ‘a continuous, self-vibrating region of intensities whose development avoids any orientation toward a culmination point or external end’? To just desire and trace it. This, Scott, is where you come in (and I finally shut up to listen). There is so much more to write about this album, echo for echo, and I feel like I’ve only begun the tracing which was already beginning: I want to know your thoughts on The 1975 and America, on gender and genre, on bodies and football and friendship, on political engagement, those house beats, on the beautiful, sultry appearance of Phoebe (fucking) Bridgers, on sincerity, on the question of ‘What Should I Say’...It’s been playing on my mind that I will never say what I want to, or should, or would say of this album, but this perhaps is what I would otherwise have said. I give you my notes in conditional form.

Read part 2 of our review in Scott Morrison’s response here.

Notes on a Conditional Form is out now and available to order.

Text: Maria Sledmere

Published: 23/6/20

#review #reviews #music reviews #album review #The 1975 #Matty Healy #Maria Sledmere #music criticism #Scott Morrison

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benditlikebedford · 8 years ago

Text

Halsey && Matty

Okay, so this is going to be long so I’m going to put it under a read more BUT I just want to say that I don’t have sources for most of this because it’s from Halsey’s old tumblr that she deleted and other stuff (screenshots, pictures, etc.) I’ve had saved on my computer for agessss so I don’t remember where I originally got them. But also a lot of this stuff, like the lyric analysis, just came from my own brain and the fact that I’ve seen way too many interviews of the 1975.

SO first things first. Halsey and Matty were friends with benefits (NOT dating... just friends that hooked up a lot) for ?? a period of time. I’m not sure when it started or when it ended but I’m thinking it ended around 2014 based on when they stopped appearing in pictures together.

Halsey has written three songs that I am 100% certain are about Matty, and there’s two others that I think MIGHT be about him but I’m not certain.

Generally speaking, Halsey has said in interviews that Matty was a huge influence on her writing and even helped write some of her songs.

So the first song, and most damning one, is Colors.

“Your little brother never tells you but he loves you so. You said your mother only smiled on her TV show.”

This is obviously about Louis (Matty’s younger brother) who’s lowkey a shithead but I love him so much and Matty’s mum (aka my mum that I WORSHIP) Denise. Denise has had depression and she’s also on a soap so that’s where those lines come from.

“You’re only happy when your sorry head is filled with dope. I hope you make it to the day you’re 28 years old.”

I’m sure you know by now that Matty loves weed. But this was also written long before ILIWYS era so we all know that during that last stretch of touring Matty was just very unhealthy and unhappy and tired. (And I’m so glad that’s no longer the case.) The second part is because he was 25/26ish at the time and loads of famous people die of suicide/drug overdose at/before age 28. Matty gave her a slight dig on twitter on his 28th birthday which I made a post about here lol.

((Less obvious, more of an assumption, but I think the “tearing through the pages and the ink” has to do with the fact that matty’s always on that damn typewriter and typewriters can be very wasteful since if you mess up you have to start completely over hence the tearing through the pages and ink.))

“Everything was grey, his hair, his smoke his dreams and now he’s so devoid of colour he don’t know what it means.”

After the beloved undercut/side shave from circa Girls MV, Matty’s hair actually grew back in grey so that’s that part. His smoke, oh gee, does Matty smoke? I don’t think he does? (lol) And also I’m pretty sure the so devoid of colour thing is about the fact that Halsey was with Matty around the time that everything they did was in black and white.

“You were a vision in the morning when the light came through. I know I’ve only felt religion when I’ve lied with you.”

Later in this post I’m going to talk about the poems that she wrote about Matty on her old tumblr and she LOVES to talk about waking up in the morning with him. Like. LOVES to talk about that. Also y’all should know Matty is always calling sex the closest thing to religion he’s ever felt. (Also? Grammar question, does anyone know the answer? Is it supposed to be lied or laid? I think it’s supposed to be laid.)

“You’ll never be forgiven until your boys are too.”

Matty is extremely reliant on the boys (George, Adam, Ross) he can’t really do anything without them sort of thing here.

Okay now let’s talk about Strange Love. My analysis for this one isn’t as intense as Colors don’t worry haha.

Basically this entire song is about media being fascinated with Matty and how he’s a literal sex god. The whole “Everybody wants to know if we fucked on the bathroom sink, how your hands felt in my hair, etc. etc.” is about people wanting to know about their relationship as he gets more famous.

The most interesting part about this song though is the “We wrote a story in the fog on the window that night, but the ending is the same every damn time.”

Matty, for whatever reason, has a fascination with writing in fog. You see in in both The Sound and in the Somebody Else music videos.

I couldn’t find a gif of the part where Matty writes the rectangle on the car window in Somebody Else but he does it there too.

Halsey also talks about his fog writing obsession in one of her poems aka THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING EVER WRITTEN and we’ll talk about that later don’t worry it’s coming.

The part about “the ending is the same every damn time” is how Halsey wanted their hook ups to end with something more, with a real relationship, but they never did.

So the last one I want to go into detail about is EXTREMELY important and that’s Is There Somewhere.

YALL THE WHOLE ROOM 93 EP IS ABOUT MATTY OKAY

So in the Room 93 Commentary Halsey talks about how the whole album is about a couple (her and Matty) in a hotel room “sharing a moment”. She says that “Is there somewhere you can meet me” was the text message frequently exchanged between her and the person the song is about (Matty) and how basically they always ended up meeting in a hotel room. Some other interview (don’t remember which one sorry guys) she says basically the same thing about the texts BUT she adds a super damning detail about how the texts were exchanged when “this person” (Matty) and her were both on tour and if they ever overlapped they’d send that text.

As for the song itself, it’s just... so obviously about Matty. Some very telling details are “dancing in your tube socks” and the part about his crooked teeth.

NOW THIS PART IS VERY IMPORTANT LIKE !!! PAY ATTENTION

“And I try to refrain but you're stuck in my brain and all I do is cry and complain because second's not the same.“

So right now you’re probably like ?? Halsey was a sidechick ?? Matty was cheating on someone??

NO (okay at least that’s not MY OPINION. Some people think he was cheating on Gemma with Halsey but I don’t have enough proof for that, and considering how crushed Matty was when he broke up with Gemma I really don’t think he would’ve cheated on her. Also I don’t think the timeline adds up (again, based on my research) I think Halsey came after Gemma, sort of as a placeholder for the loneliness he felt. WHICH i’ll talk about later.)

I think Halsey is referring to the fact that she’s second to the 1975. This period of Matty’s life right after the self titled came out and they started working on ILIWYS was HUGE for the band. More likely than not, he was putting most of his time and energy into the band and he wanted to focus on that more than on having a serious relationship. Halsey obviously wanted a serious relationship.

OKAY SO THIS IS WHERE WE GET INTO THE TUMBLR STUFF NOW

Basically Halsey gave herself away big time because she posted this picture on her tumblr and captioned it “93″. Girl.

BUT IT ONLY GETS BETTER FROM HERE. Halsey wrote SO MUCH poetry about him. Way too much for me to put all in this post but like, just for reference here’s two:

This one talks about how much she loves waking up with him in the morning (told yall). and obviously those DAMN CURLS.

and yeah this is also about him lmao matty damn that boy

As for THE MOST BEAUTIFUL THING EVER WRITTEn okay get ready because its a lot its super long but

I lost one here I must’ve deleted it accidentally a long time ago but I don’t know where to find it again :(

EDIT;; HERE’S THE WHOLE THING

okay so

There’s a ton of religious metaphors, which is obviously such a Matty thing I mean, come on. She also mentions his black jeans, his staple back in the day, his socks are mentioned again, as is the whole window fog deal. She talks about drugs, sex, him being a fucking nerd with the way he talks AND the most interesting like “we fight about where the chord change should go” which is about him helping her write music, which she talked about on her tumblr as well (again, the tumblr is deleted and I don’t have a screenshot of that but I remember it) something like “Matty influenced so much of my writing”.

Okay, so the last thing we’re going to talk about now is something I haven’t ever seen anyone else mention but it’s just ?? so obvious to me ??

She’s American (in my educated opinion, this is all guessing) is about Halsey.

So, let’s start with one of the very first lines “Synthetic apparitions of not being lonely”

Y’all come on. This is about one-night stands. It’s something made up (synthetic) that only lasts for a short amount of time (apparition) and they make you feel less lonely, only for one night. Pretty sure this is about Halsey and their “is there somewhere” meetings. ALSO THIS IS WHY I don’t think Matty was dating Gemma at the time because he was LONELY whenever he was with Halsey. Also she said somewhere, I think in the same place where she mentioned Matty influencing her writing that they met up, while they were both on tour, to get rid of loneliness just for the night. (but the way she said it was so much more poetic than me lol)

EDIT;; this is what i was talking about with “simply a friend to fill a king sized bed”

The whole chorus is about how she doesn't see how there’s any issue with their relationship and is focusing on all the superficial aspects (them being socially relevant, his teeth). You can see this in real life as Halsey is at events constantly and the 1975 rarely are.

"She calls on the phone like the old days expecting the world.”

I’m 90% sure this is about Halsey hitting Matty with a “Is there somewhere you can meet me text.” within the last like two-three and he has to be like “We don’t do this anymore.”

Also, as far as I’M aware, Matty was never in a relationship (I.E. hooking up more than once) with someone that was American other than Halsey. Gemma was British and Taylor Swift DIDN’T HAPPEN GUYS.

Also New Americana was her most popular song at the time that ILIWYS was being written so.

THERE YOU GO GUYS. I think that’s everything I’ve got BUT if I think of anything else I’ll make some edits or post something about it. I want to know what you guys think, if you have any thoughts or opinions or anything you want to add so slide into those dm’s or that inbox anytime and I’d love to chat (about this or anything else tbh!)

xoxo valarie

#halsey #matty healy #the 1975 #hopeless fountain kingdom #ashley frangipane

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mrsbluebertgreggleson · 5 years ago

Link

A federal judge raised serious constitutional questions about the Legislature’s crackdown on Amendment 4, saying lawmakers created a “mess” that has left felons afraid to register to vote.

“What we have now is an administrative nightmare,” said U.S. District Judge Robert Hinkle, who is overseeing a challenge to the law by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, during a Tuesday hearing in Tallahassee.

The ACLU asked Hinkle to temporarily stop the law, which requires felons to pay back all court fees, fines and restitution to victims before being allowed to vote. Hinkle is expected to rule on it in the coming weeks.

But Hinkle made clear that the Legislature’s law, which critics have called a “poll tax,” raises constitutional questions that attorneys for Gov. Ron DeSantis, Secretary of State Laurel Lee and county elections supervisors were unable to answer after two days of arguments.

It’s become an administrative nightmare, he said, because of problems created by lawmakers. Even so, he said it was the Legislature that was best suited to fix the law, which he said was preferable to judges like himself trying to fix it.

Amendment 4 was supposed to reverse a 150-year-old racist law and restore the right to vote to most felons in Florida who completed “all terms of sentence, including probation and parole.”

An attorney for those who helped pass Amendment 4 in 2018 had said “all terms” included court fees, fines and restitution, and the state’s GOP-controlled Legislature imposed those terms this year, despite nationwide criticism that their plan would stop poor people from voting.

Hinkle on Tuesday agreed that lawmakers created a system that kept people from voting who couldn’t ever afford to pay back those fees.

And that was a problem, he said, because of a crucial 11th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals ruling from 2005, Johnson v. Bush, which was also a challenge to the state’s Jim Crow-era law preventing felons from voting.

“Access to the franchise cannot be made to depend on an individual’s financial resources,” the opinion states.

Because whatever he decides is almost certain to be appealed, Hinkle told lawyers that the opinion was his “starting point” on whether the Legislature’s law is legal.

He said his view wasn’t radical, noting that eight of the 12 circuit judges signed off on the 2005 ruling.

“These are not judges on the fringe,” he said.

On top of that, Hinkle questioned whether the Legislature’s actions might have run afoul of the 24th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. The amendment states that voting in federal elections “shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or any State by reason of failure to pay any poll tax or other tax.”

Hinkle did not call it a “poll tax.” But he did wonder whether requiring felons to pay court fees constituted an “other tax.”

Court fees are created to subsidize the court system, and judges have no discretion over them, Hinkle noted.

“Why is that not a tax?” he asked lawyers for the state.

They had no good answers.

Attorney Mohammad Jazil represented Lee, who as secretary of state oversees Florida’s elections systems. He said court fees were merely another burden felons had to pay back to society for their actions.

Hinkle seemed unconvinced.

What was apparent after the day and a half of debate is that lawmakers created an almost hopelessly complicated process for felons to restore their rights.

Felons have no easy way to determine if they can vote. Clerks of court are unable to confirm whether some felons have paid back all their fees. And elections supervisors are using voter registration forms that are different from those used by Lee.

Lawmakers now require voters to check one of three boxes when they register: (a) that they’ve never been convicted of a felony; (b) if they have been convicted of a felony, to affirm they’ve had their right to vote restored by the state’s clemency board; (c) if they have been convicted of a felony, to affirm they’ve had their right to vote restored by Amendment 4.

Submitting false information on the form is a third-degree felony, carrying up to five years in prison and a $5,000 fine.

Hinkle said the options on the form make no sense, and don’t even apply to people who were convicted in other states. Amendment 4 only applies to convictions in Florida state courts. Leon County’s elections supervisor said he was still using the old form because it was less confusing.

Hinkle wondered whether the new form was intended to discourage felons from registering, since they could later discover they still owe fees from some long-ago felony case.

Lawyers for the state again had no good answer. Jazil conceded that the language was “inartfully worded,” and that the secretary of state was considering adding additional check boxes to cover people convicted in other states.

Felons described for Hinkle the byzantine, and sometimes insurmountable, efforts they’ve had to go through to find out if they owe any fines, fees or restitution, or the damages felons must pay as part of their sentence.

No agency in Florida tracks restitution, for example, meaning felons who stopped paying it can’t find out how much they still owe. And while county clerks of court track payment of court fees and fines, they’ve had massive trouble with older cases.

Betty Riddle, 61, has drug-related felony convictions dating to 1975. She testified that the Sarasota County clerk hasn’t been able to dig up her old records to tell her how much, if anything, she owes on cases before 1990. The clerk in Hillsborough County couldn’t produce any records at all from her 1988 case, she said.

A supervisor at the Leon County clerk of court testified the office didn’t even have records about court fees and fines for convictions before 1998.

Other felons said the sources of information were unreliable. Attorneys showed two examples where the Florida Department of Law Enforcement’s criminal database showed felons owed nothing, but county clerk websites showed felons owed thousands of dollars.

The Legislature allowed felons to pay their financial obligations another way: by converting them to community service hours, typically at $10 per hour. But Hinkle scoffed at the idea.

“You’re not going to win on the argument you’ve come up with some alternatives,” Hinkle told lawyers for the state and supervisors. “If you had a $25,000 fine in a drug case, nobody’s going to work that off through community service hours.”

Hinkle said the Legislature could, and probably should, make changes to the law, saying they were “free to adopt provisions more generous to felons than Amendment 4.”

Lawmakers had the chance to do that during this year’s legislative session. State Sen. Jeff Brandes, R-St. Petersburg, advocated for a bill that would allow felons to vote while they paid down their fines and fees.

But in the last week of session, GOP lawmakers instead chose the more restrictive route.

Hinkle said a new law could resolve many issues felons are facing and that action by lawmakers would be better than a judge like himself deciding how the law should be implemented. He set a trial date for April 6, three weeks after the next legislative session ends.

“The Legislature,” he said, “can make it a whole lot easier.”

Article published and updated October 8, 2019, written by Lawrence Mower.

And:

Clifford Tyson wants to help choose America’s next president. But the Florida resident fears his vote might return him to jail.

Tyson, 63, owes court-ordered fines and fees for three felony convictions, one for robbery, two for theft, all decades old. Under a Florida law that went into effect July 1, he must pay those penalties before casting a ballot or risk being prosecuted for voter fraud.

Tyson searched court records, first on his own, then with the help of a nonprofit legal advocacy group. They say that because Florida has no comprehensive system for tracking such fines, the documents don’t make clear what he owes. The records, viewed by Reuters, show potential sums ranging from $846 to a couple thousand dollars related to crimes he committed in the late 1970s and 1990s. Tyson says he won’t risk voting until Florida authorities can tell him for sure.

“Until there is clarity, as much as I want to vote, I won’t do it,” Tyson said.

The Tampa pastor is now a plaintiff in a lawsuit challenging the payments law, which was crafted by Florida’s Republican-controlled legislature and signed by Governor Ron DeSantis, also a Republican. The law came just months after Floridians approved a ballot initiative restoring voting rights to more than 1 million felons who have completed their sentences; that change to the state’s Constitution created a potentially huge new crop of voters in a critical battleground state ahead of the 2020 presidential election.

The lawsuit, filed in June by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Brennan Center for Justice, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Educational Fund, alleges the fees requirement defies the will of Florida voters and amounts to an illegal poll tax on newly enfranchised Florida felons, many of them minorities.

But another argument is shaping up to be central to the plaintiffs’ case: Florida has no consolidated system for determining what felons owe or certifying that they have paid up. It’s a situation that ex-offenders say makes it virtually impossible for them to prove they are eligible to vote.

Those claims are bolstered by state election officials who say they can’t calculate what felons owe, either, according to a Reuters review of 7 depositions, emails and other internal correspondence from voting administrators submitted by plaintiffs’ attorneys as part of the lawsuit.

Florida has no centralized database where records of court-ordered fines and fees - and any payments of those penalties - are stored, election and court officials say. To get that information, felons typically must search documents in courts where they were convicted, be they federal or state, inside or outside Florida. Records have been found to be incomplete, contradictory or missing, plaintiffs’ attorneys say.

With the Feb. 18 deadline to register for the state’s 2020 presidential primary approaching, the issue is taking on urgency. An estimated 436,000 felons have fees to settle before they can vote, according to a study by University of Florida political scientist Daniel Smith, an expert witness for the ACLU. The study was based on court data and Department of Corrections records.

The stakes are high. Florida commands 29 of the 538 electoral votes that are used under the U.S. Electoral College system to select the American president. In Florida and most other states, the candidate who places first in the popular vote – even if just by a hair – wins all the electoral votes. Florida has a history of tight elections and contested outcomes.

Plaintiffs’ attorneys say Florida has shifted all responsibility for compliance with the new payments law to ex-offenders, who risk prosecution if they get it wrong. The state contends the legislature merely implemented the constitutional amendment as it was written on the ballot.

The legislation, known as SB 7066, “sows seeds of confusion,” said Leah Aden, deputy director of litigation at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. “It will chill participation.”

Some of the state’s 67 county elections supervisors - the public servants who ultimately decide which felons get culled from the rolls and which can stay - expressed concern in their depositions and to Reuters about making mistakes that could invite challenges to future election results.

Five testified recently in the lawsuit that they lack the manpower to do detailed searches or have no way of ascertaining for certain whether ex-offenders have met their financial obligations under SB 7066.

They said they are relying on Florida’s Department of State, which manages the state’s elections, to help them determine who is ineligible. That agency is developing a procedure to send counties regularly updated lists of felons on their rolls who have unpaid fines and fees, but it has no timetable as to when it will be ready, said Maria Matthews, the director of the Department of State’s Division of Elections, in a September deposition. Matthews did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

For now, the agency is providing counties only with names of Florida felons who are incarcerated, and thus ineligible to vote, Toshia Brown, chief of the department’s Voter Registration Services, said in an August deposition. Brown did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

An early list sent to Leon County in Florida’s Panhandle region appeared to contain inaccuracies, Deputy Elections Supervisor Christopher Moore said in a July email to his staff, which was viewed by Reuters. Moore’s office researched a June list provided by the Department of State containing 66 names of allegedly incarcerated felons, but could not determine whether felony convictions existed for 24 of them – 36% of the total - emails exchanged between Moore and his staff show.

“This process is not off to a very accurate start and we are playing with people’s eligibility to vote,” Moore said in the July email. Moore told Reuters that subsequent data his office has received from the Department of State has gotten better.

Sarah Revell, a spokeswoman for the agency, said the Department of State reviews information from a variety of sources, makes an initial determination on a voter’s eligibility, then passes that along to county supervisors. She said the agency is working to “improve the accuracy and efficiency of the information,” but said it’s up to those elections supervisors to make the final call.

Some backers of the payments law say the responsibility should be on ex-offenders, not the state, to figure out how to comply with SB 7066.

“If you’re going to register to vote and you’re a former felon, it’s worth double checking to make sure you took care of everything,” said J.C. Martin, chairman of the Polk County Republican Party in central Florida.

A federal judge in the Northern District of Florida has set a Monday hearing on the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction to throw out the fees requirement. A decision could come as early as this month.

NO CENTRALIZED DATABASE

Florida stripped felons of their votes during the Jim Crow era in 1868, a ban that endured 150 years and disproportionately affected black voters. As recently as 2016, more than 1.4 million people with felony convictions were barred from voting in Florida, including one in five African American adults, according to The Sentencing Project, a criminal justice nonprofit, which used state conviction and incarceration records for the study.

In November 2018, nearly 65% of Florida voters approved a constitutional amendment restoring voting rights to felons, except those convicted of murder and sex crimes.

Through the end of July, Florida recorded around 337,000 new voter registrations, 45,000 of them by African Americans. That’s a 22% increase in new black voters compared to the same period in 2015, the year preceding the last presidential election, a Reuters analysis of Florida voting data shows.

The ballot initiative said felons must first complete “all terms of their sentence including parole or probation.” Republican lawmakers interpreted that to include any court costs, fines, fees and restitution to victims imposed at sentencing. In May, they passed a bill requiring repayment as a condition for voting.

DeSantis, the governor, signed it into law in June amid criticism by voting rights advocates that the legislation was intended to suppress potential votes of African Americans, who tend to vote Democratic. DeSantis has dismissed claims that the law is a poll tax.

The state is still discussing ways to centralize data to track payments. Building a consolidated system could take years and cost millions, according to lawmakers and officials who debated the issue before the law’s passage.

“Right now, the system is just a mess,” ACLU attorney Julie Ebenstein said.

Sean Morales-Doyle of the Brennan Center said the group spent weeks trying to track down what Tyson owes, but couldn’t get a clear answer.

For example, Tyson has a 1998 theft conviction in Hillsborough County on Florida’s Gulf Coast. A judgment order on the clerk’s online docket shows he was ordered to pay $661 in costs, fines and fees. But a separate subpage on the website indicates he was ordered to pay $1,066. Still another shows a total of $573. Tyson’s lawyers say no officials have been able to explain the discrepancies.

State Representative Jamie Grant of Tampa, a Republican supporter of SB 7066, said critics of the law are the ones trying to defy the will of the electorate.

“You don’t get to change what the definition and terms are after people vote for it,” Grant said.

Article published October 7, 2019, written by Linda So (link here), article link here.

#voting #florida #institutional racism #politics #elections #classism #the legal system #reuters #links #text post #long post

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littleforestfairy · 8 years ago

Note

Every aesthetic ask :3c

God damn it Shay

flower crown: when did you last sing to yourself?

Yesterday when I was singing a Seventeen song stuck in my head

fairy lights: if a crystal ball could tell you the truth about anything, what would you want to know?

Will I ever meet all of my friends in person???

daisies: what is the greatest accomplishment of your life?

Uuuhhh I’m not really sure?? I can’t really think of any big accomplishments I’ve made yet

1975: what is the first happy memory that comes to mind, recent or otherwise?

Laughing so freaking hard at a ridiculous clip from a Seventeen concert

matte: if you knew that in one year you would die suddenly, would you change anything about the way you are now living?

I guess I would work harder to finish things, put something amazing out into the world to be remembered by

black nail polish: do you have a bucket list? if so, what are the top three things?

1. Become a well known author

2. Meet all my friends in person

3. Go to Japan

pantone: describe a person close to your life in detail.

I’ll do my sister cus I was just talking to her:

She’s incredibly talented at things like knitting and sewing and playing the piano, but it’s sad how much she underestimates her talents because she’s so impatient and wants to already be at a certain level and convinces herself she should be there already with how long she’s been doing it. Her natural personality is pure sarcasm and sass, teasing and poking fun and pointing out dumb questions with sarcastic answers, she has almost no filter, saying what’s on her mind even if it’s probably not the best time to say it, and sometimes she doesn’t even realize she’s doing it because it’s like her default setting. She’s got a hot head sometimes and has a tendency to get easily angered over small things, building up on top of other small things until it’s a big thing she can’t take anymore. She’s also very caring. She’s the oldest and, even though I don’t want her to do it, she has always put others before herself, ensuring that my brother and I were always comforted and taken care of first even when she felt like breaking down. With that she bottles up her emotions too much, convinces herself that her well-being doesn’t need to come first when it comes to my safety. Though I know she’s trying hard to snap out of that mentality, it’s just hard. She can get very excited over the things she loves, not exactly outwardly jumpy or bubbly, but more excited and frustrated rambling for an hour after she’s binged an entire show in 2 days.

I’m gonna stop there cus it’s so long already

moodboard: do you feel you had a happy childhood?

Yeah, I did!! I have loving parents who always did what they could to ensure we were happy, and siblings close in age (well, one being a twin), so we were able to grow up together and never any distance cus of age or anything

stars: when did you last cry in front of another person?

Like last week

plants: pick a person to stargaze with you and explain why you picked them.

Hmmm I pick my lovely friend Mark because I know he loves space and stars and I think he’d really enjoy just hanging out and stargazing

converse: would you ever have a deep conversation with a stranger and open up to them?

Nooooo, I could never ever do that

lace: when was your last 3am conversation with someone, and who were they to you?

A few days ago with Yams!! We were talking about kpop !!

handwriting: if you were about to die, and you could only say one more sentence to one person, what would you say and to whom?

Uuuuhhhhh I have no idea honestly, that’s too much pressure

cactus: what is your opinion on brown eyes?

They’re very nice! And very underappreciated! My sister and dad have very dark brown eyes that they look almost black and they’re super cool

sunrise: pick a quote and describe what it means to you personally.

"When someone leaves your life, those exits are not made equal. Some are beautiful and poetic and satisfying. Others are abrupt and unfair. But most are just unremarkable, unintentional, clumsy." - Griffin McElroy

It was in the last episode of The Stolen Century and it just really resonates with me personally because it is very very true

oil paints: what would you title the autobiography of your life so far?

“I Never Get Anything Done and It’s a Surprise This Got Done”

overalls: what would you do with one billion dollars?

buy a huge house, buy my parents and my sister their dream cars, go meet up with all my friends, go on a huge vacation with my family to Japan or Germany, or both

combat boots: are you a very forgiving person? do you like being this way?

I try to be, I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt. I do like trying to see good in people and find out if they really meant something hurtful. I don’t forgive people who refuse to be sorry though or really hurt me, that’s just too much to ask

winged eyeliner: write a hundred word letter to your twelve year old self.

In a year, you're gonna go through the worst tragedy of your whole life, it's gonna make everything feel like the world is falling apart, but I promise you'll be okay in time, it gets easier and you'll have your family to be beside you. And in a few years, you're gonna meet the bestest friends you've ever had who will become like a second family, and that entire summer when you meet them will be the best summer of your whole life, because you'll spend every day and every night laughing with them and it'll be so freaking amazing.

pastel: would you describe yourself as more punk or pastel?

Definitely pastel!

tattoos: how do you feel about tattoos and piercings? explain.

They’re super cool and while I personally don’t want any tattoos and I have no idea when I’ll even pierce my ears, people should be allowed to do whatever they want to their own bodies, they’re great ways of expressing yourself and showing to the world who you are and what’s important to you and what you love.

piercings: do you wear a lot of makeup? why/why not?

Nope, just not really my thing.

bands: talk about a song/band/lyric that has affected your life in some way.

iiiii dunno, nothing really comes to my mind at the moment

messy bun: the world is listening. pick one sentence you would tell them.

“Why are you listening to me, that’s creepy”

cry baby: list the concerts you have been to and talk about how they make you feel.

I’ve been to no concerts!! Except Cheetah Girls when I was like 9 or 10 or something!

grunge: who in the world would you most like to receive a letter from and what would you want it to say?

I dunno honestly

space: do you have a desk/workspace and how is it organised/not organised?

I do have a desk but I don’t use it rn cus I don’t have a chair. It’s an art desk so my paint and stuff is mostly organized, though there is a bit of a mess that I’ll move whenever I get a chair

white bed sheets: what is your night time routine?

Brush my teeth, get a bottle of water, watch videos until I get sleepy

old books: what’s one thing you don’t want your parents to know?

Uuuhhhhh that I read smut fanfics a LOT

beaches: if you had to dye your hair how would you dye/style it and why?

I would dye it cotton candy pink because it’s a freaking super cute color, but it would require bleaching for my hair and I don’t want that

eyes: pick five people to go on an excursion with you. who would you pick and where would you go/what would you do?

I don’t wanna pick just five I wanna pick all my friends and we’ll all go on a road trip and hit all the touristy spots

11:11: name three wishes and why you wish for them.

I actually do make wishes when it’s 11:11, but tbh I don’t wanna say anything I do or would wish for, cus you’re not supposed to say wishes or they won’t come true !

painting: what is the best halloween costume you have ever put together? if none, make one up.

I didn’t put it together, but my grandma did, and it was a green, white, and pink fairy dress with sheer fabric over it and little flowers on the sheer and it was big on me but it was super cute

lightning: what’s the worst thing you’ve ever done while drunk or high?

I’ve never been drunk or high !

thunder: what’s one thing you would never do for one million dollars?

Kill someone

storms: you on only listen to one song for the rest of your life, or only see one person for the rest of your life. which and why?

Only listen to one song. Because I’ve got too many people important to me and I don’t wanna see just ONE of them for the rest of my life

love: have you ever fallen in love? describe what it feels like to realise you’re in love.

Noooope

clouds: if you’re a boy, would you ever rock black nail polish? if you’re a girl, would you ever rock really really short hair?

I’ve had short hair before and I didn’t like it, I much much prefer long hair

coffee: what’s your starbucks order, and who would you trust to order for you, if anyone?

Usually it’s just strawberries and creme frappucino, which is. just a menu item so I would trust anyone to order it. But when we have the money, I get a banana chocolate chip frappucino and it’s not really that complicated, so I’m sure anyone could order it

marble: what is the most important thing to you in your life right now?

My friends and family !!

#ask #i love u shay but why you do this to me #okay-pie

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