#East Atlanta Love Letter

[tha-wrecka-stow]

[yng-thoughts]

"Ain't been wanting much lately, no 'cause you're my detox."

- 6lack [East Atlanta Love Letter ft. Future]

[gods-ipod]

“Tryna keep myself from going under, I’ve been listening to Young Thugger”

[reigns-devotee]

The Serpents Dare- complete - 🎧ྀི"The news-PND"🎧ྀི

Finished on you - complete - 🎧ྀི"Ballin'- PND"

My Detox - complete - 🎧ྀི"east Atlanta love letter'- 6lack"🎧ྀི

[badescapeartist-blog]

6 - Personal History Collage

I'm posting this after most of my other classmates and can confidently say that visual aesthetics is not one of my strengths. That aside, I am fairly proud of this collage. In just a few disjointed images, I've encompassed a good bit of myself.

Let's get the simple ones out of the way. I like dogs and I have two cats. I have enjoyed video games for as long as I can remember. I grew up in Georgia around trees that are not dissimilar to the ones in the top left. And, of course, I spend a lot of time at my desk studying.

Front and center in the frame, however, is the square of Neiva, Colombia, the city that my mother spent a lot of her childhood in. And although I've never been myself, my mother has been a huge support for me as I study and find my way through life. The plate of food is a traditional Colombian breakfast, my favorite in the world.

Across the bottom is my low-quality attempt at showing that I'm actively working to put myself in a better place. I was blessed enough to have a childhood where all my needs were met. But living paycheck to paycheck in my adult life (so far) is wearing on my soul, and I've decided to educate myself on how to change that.

The rest of the collage are the images I really like. I've been in love with music for years, and East Atlanta Love Letter got me through a particularly difficult time in my life.

The two paintings play off of each other. The Creation of Adam represents my belief that all humans are family--not through religion--through the simple fact that we all inhabit this planet together. And collaboration with each other is the only way for humanity to live the best lives we can. The other painting is The Kiss by Gustav Klimt. I will readily admit that I did not know of this painting before I made this collage. When reading about it though, I connected with the theme of love in this painting. In this article, the painting alludes to the love which is at the heart of human existence. That plays quite nicely with The Creation of Adam, doesn't it?

And my sister says I'm like a turtle.

It's been a week or two since I made this collage. I can see the ways that I could have added to this to paint a more fleshed out representation of myself. But I like its simplicity. Also I spent an embarrassing amount of time making it and was running towards the end of my artistic abilities. Either way, I hope you enjoy this mishmash of clip art from Adobe Express and Shutterstock.

[redqueenphoenix]

State Championship Playlist

So Here is a list of the songs that I used in my fanfiction and some of the songs that inspired my writing and where they land in the fanfiction. I didn't know if any of you would be interested in the playlist, but I thought I would give it to you anyways! Enjoy guys!

Victoria's iPod

State Championship

Bulletproof - La Roux - Victoria heading to the gym to head off for state championship.

Superman - Eminem - Victoria and the girls start singing on the bus.

Lose My Breath - Destiny’s Child - The Volleyball game.

Just Fine - Mary J Blige - The girls going and getting their club dresses and getting ready.

Die Young - Kesha - The girls making their way to the club.

Like A G6 - Far East Movement - The girls entering into the club and getting their first drink.

Starships - Nicki Minaj - The First song the girls dance to.

Shots - LMFAO - When the bar started pouring shots and putting on a show.

Sugar - Flo Rida - The song that Vicky headed back out to dance to.

I Don’t Like It, I Love It - Flo Rida -  The song Negan chose to get up from his table and dance with Victoria.

Me & U - Cassie - The song Negan and Victoria dirty dance to. 

Hotel Room Service - Pitbull - The song that Negan called out to and headed back to the bar causing Victoria to storm out.

 Drew Berrymore - Bryce Vine - The Sex Scene in the hotel room.

Beyond the Sea - Bobby Darrin - Victoria waking up the next morning.

Dancing in the Moonlight - Toploader - Victoria heading back to her hotel room and getting ready to leave with her team.

Finally // Beautiful Stranger - Halsey - When Negan realizes Victoria is transferring Colleges and rushes to her apartment.

Sorry - Halsey - When Negan Leaves Victoria for Lucille.

Sunburn - Droeloe - Victoria packs and moves back to Atlanta with her family to attend college there.

100 letters - Halsey - Victoria's drive to Atlanta.

Hate the Way - G-eazy - Victoria reading Negan’s final message to her.

Dollhouse - Melanie Martinez - Victoria sitting down talking to her step brother Draven.

Life goes on - Oliver Tree - Victoria starts college and is sitting in class.

Infected State - Never Modern talk - CDC Message goes across the phones and Victoria scrambles to get out of Atlanta with Erika.

Moon Trance - Lindsey Sterling - Leaving Atlanta.

First Light - Lindsey Sterling - The girls staying at the St. John’s Dairy.

The Day Will Come - Bear McCreary - Victoria and Erika escape the Dairy and find themselves on the road to Alexandria.

[xtruss]

Former President Jimmy Carter in 2019. Credit: Curtis Compton/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated Press (AP)

An Open Letter To Jimmy Carter, On His 100th Birthday

— By Margaret Renkl | September 30,2024 | The New York Times

Dear President Carter,

I was in my second quarter of college when you returned to Plains, Ga., in January 1981. Ronald Reagan had just been inaugurated, and you came back to your hometown soundly defeated. You woke after the election, you later wrote, to “an altogether new, unwanted and potentially empty life.”

All of 18 at the time, I felt some of the same things. I was raised in a conservative family, but my religious beliefs and political values had become very different from my parents’ and from those of almost everyone else I knew. To have arrived at a fundamentally different understanding of the world, with diametrically opposed views about what this country should be and what role religion and government should play in it, deeply unsettled me. I had not left home, but I was a stranger in a strange land.

No one but a teenager in the midst of a convulsive shift in world views would call us two peas in a pod, Mr. Carter, but with the hubris of youth, I felt we were. You in Georgia and me in Alabama — at home but belonging nowhere.

Sometimes I still feel that way.

But when I think about the childhood you describe in your memoir “An Hour Before Daylight,” I know that this is our homeland as much as anyone’s. I know that it’s possible to see our world clearly and to love it anyway.

You are a child of the Jim Crow South who grew up on a farm at a time when Black sharecroppers were hardly more than slaves. But even raised in that world, you understood the injustice of it. “The time for racial discrimination is over,” you said at your gubernatorial inauguration in 1971. Your audience audibly gasped, but for the rest of your political career, you worked to even the playing field for Black Americans.

Jimmy Carter in New York City in 1976. Credit...Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

As president, you saw all the ways government could improve the lives of Americans. You appointed more women and attorneys of color to the federal bench than all the earlier presidents combined. You pardoned Vietnam War draft dodgers. You brokered an unlikely peace deal in the Middle East. And when it was time to leave Washington, you went home to Plains.

I hope you know what it means to white Southerners like me, then and now, to have had your example at a time when there were vanishingly few role models among white Southerners. Or what it means to white Christians like me, then and now, to have had your example of what living by the Gospels really means.

That interview with Playboy in which you confessed to the sin of lust — “I’ve committed adultery in my heart many times” — nearly cost you the 1976 election, but it was the admission of a good man who gives serious consideration to the moral and ethical requirements of his faith. So different from a later president, who bragged that he could grab any woman he cared to because “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

Your presidency was doomed by wars and unrest in the Middle East that led to oil and gas shortages here and to a hostage crisis in Iran that broke your heart and ours. But you recognized the looming threat of climate change even then, understanding that reliance on foreign oil was not the real danger we faced. I can’t help but wonder where the world would be now if Americans had embraced the environmental policies you initiated nearly 50 years ago.

Much of what you worked to do for the environment during your presidency was nothing less than visionary. Using executive powers, you protected a vast swath of the Alaskan wilderness, in the process doubling the size of the national parks system. You directed federal funds toward the development of renewable energy and installed solar panels on the White House. You began an enormous federal effort to bring the country to energy independence and tried to lead us by calling on our own better angels to make it through the crisis in the meantime.

“I’m asking you, for your good and for your nation’s security, to take no unnecessary trips, to use car pools or public transportation whenever you can, to park your car one extra day per week, to obey the speed limit and to set your thermostats to save fuel,” you said. “Every act of energy conservation like this is more than just common sense. I tell you it is an act of patriotism.”

As it turns out, we weren’t the patriotic citizens you believed us to be then, and we’ve become less so in the decades since. But your example remains a shining monument to what it means to be a good American and a good citizen of the earth.

Mr. Carter works at a Habitat for Humanity building project in Nashville in 2019. Credit...Mark Humphrey/Associated Press

Through the Carter Center and Habitat for Humanity, you have had the longest and most influential postpresidency in American history. Your efforts to promote peace, eliminate suffering and address the worst effects of poverty have occupied you for the better part of 50 years. In 2019, still in treatment for metastatic cancer, you came to Nashville for Habitat for Humanity and gave a speech while sporting a black eye you’d gained in a fall. “They took 14 stitches in my forehead,” you said to raucous cheers, “but I had a No. 1 priority, and that was to come to Nashville to build houses.” You were 95 when you picked up a hammer to help us build those homes.

Auburn University, my alma mater, is less than 90 miles down Highway 280, the road that leads to Plains. During my college years, I always hoped to make it to your Sunday school class. But I didn’t own a car in those days, and when you’re young, you believe there will always be another chance. By the grace of God, you have lived so long that I actually got that other chance: In 2018 I finally made it to Plains to hear you teach Sunday school.

“Happy Birthday, Mr. Carter.”

You have made the most of a long life, serving in nearly every way imaginable as an example of moral seriousness and service to others — not just to that college student whose worldview was shifting profoundly in 1981 but to all of us. At a time when it has become almost impossible to imagine our elected officials as true public servants or in any way concerned with questions of true justice or true morality, your life will always be a beacon of hope. Even, on good days, of faith in the country you love.

— Ms. Margaret Renkl is a contributing Opinion writer who covers flora, fauna, politics and culture in the American South.

[updownlately]

love love love 6lack. especially east atlanta love letter

you should listen to FLO. they dont have a lot out right now but what they do have is so good

and ella mai

tbh i could talk about music forever but idk if youd like all my recommendations 😂

east atlanta love letter has so many bangers! (s/o loaded gun, pretty little fears, and let her go)

i've only listened to the album through once and deffo have my favourites but now ima go relisten 😅

i'll explore the other two artists tn! ella mai i've heard a few songs of, but any that you'd recommend?

and bro i fucking love my music, hit me with it!!! i'd love to hear your recs!