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highwaytothedangerzone502 · 10 months ago

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Foxtrot Alpha Alpha - Chapter 26

Pairing: Hangman x Female OC

Word Count: 2207

Warnings: Talk of death

Summary: Hangman learned his lesson a long time ago to never show his true feelings when someone's words or actions hurt him. To do so showed weakness that could be exploited, and Seresin men couldn't show weakness. Of course, there was an exception to every rule, and Jake's always came in the form of women, three in particular: his mom, Juliette Kazansky, and the girl whose name he could no longer bring himself to speak. She was the girl that got away; she was his biggest 'what if' and his biggest regret; she would forever be the ghost that haunted his dreams. Jake believed that's where she'd stay, for he would surely never see her again after what he did.

Or so he thought.

Notes: This is the sequel to India Lima Yankee; I'm using the same callsign for the Female OC as in Ghost Story because I just really like it, but they are different characters; chapters in italics are flashbacks.

Also sorry for the delay in posting this (again). I'm trying to unpack and it's going slowly, and I've been exhausted between that and work. I use my downtime to sleep or read (for the record, I now understand why everyone loves ACOTAR).

Chapter Songs: Right Now For Her

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Hangman

Sophie stayed next to Hangman's side like velcro, only breaking it when she discovered Ghost played guitar. Then, her attention focused solely on the female aviator. Hangman watched the two of them with an entertained smile, but the thought of his impending conversation with Matt never strayed far from his mind. He had barely been able to look at his brother throughout dinner, and when they all migrated to the living room, Matt's inevitable request to talk about 'some family stuff' arose. Not wanting to cause a scene, Hangman reluctantly agreed to it.

The two brothers casually strode outside to avoid being overheard by the women. For a moment, neither spoke. Hangman didn't know what to say. After all, the last time he'd seen Matt had been before he headed to the Naval Academy when his brother snuck him into the house while their dad was away so Jake could collect his belongings. Hangman studied Matt, noticing the fine lines gracing his face, the tiredness in his green eyes, and the sag in his once confident shoulders. Although still handsome, the recent events had evidently taken a toll on him. However, what Hangman noticed the most was the gentleness in his features. He'd only glimpsed those twice in his life: the night their mom died and the day he collected his stuff from the house. It seemed odd to see it now in a situation that was anything but relaxed.

"Were you going to tell me you were here?" Matt finally queried, searching for an answer in his brother's eyes that matched his own.

Hangman leaned back against the porch railing. "I don't know..."

"Wh-what do you mean you don't know? You either were or you weren't!"

"I mean it. I wasn't sure whether I was going to tell you or not. I came here for Ghost, not to solve my family issues, and I knew that if I told you I was here, you'd want to talk about things, and there are some-" Hangman sighed and met his brother's gaze- "there are some things I don't want to talk about. Dad, Nick, I want nothing to do with them. You're the only one that ever tried to reach out to me after what happened to Mom, but them? They made my life a living hell, even after I was gone."

Matt cocked his head, genuine surprise on his face. "What do you mean?"

"After Ghost and Ghoul's accident, Nick texted me. He said: I heard you killed your girlfriend's best friend. Looks like you're adding to your body count."

Horror fell onto Matt's face. "I'm sorry..."

"Oh, he didn't stop there. He proceeded to ask me if I was going to kill Ghost and Coyote next since I apparently cause deaths of those closest to me."

"You don't- Mom's death wasn't your fault, no matter what Dad or Nick say or believe."

"I know that, but you hear something enough, it starts getting to you."

Matt nodded, bracing himself on the porch railing. "It's not right what they did to you, and I'm sorry they've made you believe such bullshit. I'm sorry for any part I played in it, too. I wasn't the greatest big brother when you lived at home, and that's putting it mildly."

Hangman shrugged. "You tried to be there for me when it mattered most: the night Mom died."

"I should've been there for you more than that."

"Why weren't you?"

Matt hesitated, searching for the right words. "Dad wasn't always the easiest to get along with, and you and I both know he and Nick always got along better than the rest of us did with him. Back then, I thought if I followed his lead and bullied you the same way he and Nick did, they'd bring me into their inner circle, and they did to a point, but I always felt like the third wheel. You always had mom, and she loved me, don't get me wrong, but you were her favorite, and not going to lie, I was jealous of that, so I took it out on you, and I'm sorry for that. I'm sorry for it all, and I realize it's late, but you're the only family I truly have left. Nick has estranged himself from me, Dad's knocking on death's door, and I want Sophie to have family in her life. I won't let Nick near her, and Dad was great with her when he had the ability, but now..."

Guilt rose in Hangman's chest. He'd always been so wrapped up in his bitterness over his dad's treatment toward him that he never stopped to think why his brother might be acting the same outside of simply being an asshole, and the more Hangman thought back to his interactions with Matt, the more he realized that his oldest brother never initiated any of the fights. Not really. He usually only joined in once their dad or Nick started it.

"I'm sorry you felt like that," Hangman said, unable to come up with anything better. He meant it, but it still sounded hollow to him.

Matt shrugged. "I never gave you reason to believe I was any better than those two."

Hangman turned around and braced himself on the railing, mimicking his brother's pose. "I'll look into the events at Disney, see when they have good things going on so you, Sophie, and Melissa can come visit."

"Seriously?" Matt replied, looking at his brother in shock.

"Yeah. I mean, you're right. We're the only family we have left now and-"

"I'm not the only family you have left. You're the only family I have left."

"What do you mean?"

"Ghost, Jackie, Charlie- and Nathan when he was alive- they took you in as one of their own and have treated you more like a son than Dad ever did. They may not be your blood, but they are your family, even after all this time, even after what happened between you and Ghost. Speaking of which-" Matt stared pointedly at Hangman- "when are you two going to get together? Seriously, I've watched you silently pine after her since you two met. How long do I and the rest of the world have to endure it?"

Hangman chuckled humorlessly. "The rest of your life. It's not like we stopped talking because of a stupid fight. I killed her best friend."

"Jake, if she hated you as much as you think she does, you wouldn't be here with her right now. She wouldn't have allowed it."

Hangman swallowed down the hope rising in his chest. He couldn't let himself believe Ghost didn't still hate him, no matter how they were acting toward each other now, because if she didn't, he risked doing something stupid, like admitting his feelings for her. "We're trying to make amends to our friendship for the sake of our other friend, who we're both close to. We don't want to cause her distress by always being at odds, especially while she's pregnant. It's fine, though. I'd rather have Ghost in my life as a friend than not at all."

Matt clapped his brother on the back affectionately. "I won't push. Think we should head back in?"

"Yeah. Don't want them thinking one of us is committing fratricide." Hangman wanted to add that Nick might be capable of it, but Matt had once been close to the middle brother, and Jake recognized that the betrayal hit hard for his oldest sibling. He followed Matt inside, where they found Jackie and Charlie cleaning up the kitchen while Ghost taught Sophie how to play a kid-sized guitar.

"What are we learning?" Hangman inquired, kneeling between the two girls.

Sophie piped up, "I'm learning chords!"

"An absolutely essential lesson," he confirmed. Hangman nodded at Ghost and added, "You have the best teacher."

"You taught Uncle Jake?" Sophie asked, her green eyes flitting between the two aviators.

"I did. After I almost hit him in the head with my guitar. Accidentally, of course," Ghost said, bumping her shoulder playfully into his.

"That's what I get for scaring you," Jake remarked, nudging her.

"Hey, Soph-" Matt interrupted gently- "ten more minutes, and then we have to go check on Mom, okay?"

"But I want to spend more time with Uncle Jake and Annalise!" Sophie protested, sticking out her bottom lip in protest.

Matt shook his head. "I know, but they got in this afternoon after a long day of travel, and they have some family matters to handle. Maybe we can see Jake again while he's here if his schedule allows."

"You're all welcome to come to dinner tomorrow if you're not busy," Charlie said, entering the living room. "Family is always welcome."

"Only if we can bring a dessert," Matt countered.

"I certainly won't say no to that. How does five-thirty sound?"

Matt agreed, and Hangman scooped his niece into his arms and carried her to the car. She clung tightly to him, still pouting that she had to leave. After hugging Sophie and his brother, Hangman watched them pull out of the driveway and down the street. While Jackie and Charlie reentered the house, Ghost remained at Hangman's side and asked, "How'd it go?"

"I think that's the longest I've ever talked to my brother without fighting," Jake mused, shoving his hands into his pockets. "It was good, though. We worked some things out, and we still have a ways to go, but I think we'll get there."

"Good, good. Then is it safe to say I didn't misread the signal to invite them in for dinner earlier?"

"You read it right. I didn't want to invite them in as your guest."

"You're not a guest. You're family. Mom wouldn't have said what she did earlier if she hadn't meant it."

I'm family to her but not to you. Jake refrained from speaking his thoughts and chose only to nod. "I know, but it's not my home, no matter how much I lived in it with y'all."

Out of his peripheral, he noticed her look up at him. "Where is home for you?"

Wherever you are. The words nearly rolled off Hangman's tongue, but he caught himself in the nick of time, choosing to give a partial truth instead. "In my jet cruising above the earth."

"You feel free up there," Ghost said, sounding like she spoke from experience.

"Yeah..." Hangman rubbed the back of his neck, wishing he had the guts to ask the question that had been on his mind since his talk with Matt: did she still hate him? "Well, I guess we should head in. I should let you get some sleep. You have a busy next few days."

Ghost nodded subtly, crossing her arms tightly across her chest. "I guess so..."

"That didn't sound convincing."

"I don't like being alone in the house without Dad. It... it feels weird." Her voice hitched at the end, and Hangman realized how close Ghost teetered on the edge of breaking down.

Before he could stop himself, he blurted, "Do you want me to stay with you?"

"What?" Ghost replied, her teary gaze meeting his.

"I mean, I could crash on the floor or something, but then you wouldn't have to be alone."

"I don't care if we share the same bed. It's not like we haven't done it before, but are you sure? I don't-" Ghost hesitated, tripping up on her words as she searched for the right ones- "We're just now getting back into our old rhythm. I don't want to-"

"We can go as slow or as fast as you want with this. I messed us up, Annalise, not you. I'm going to play this by your rules, so if you're comfortable with me in bed, that's fine. If you're not, that's okay too. This is all up to you," Hangman said softly, aching to reach out and brush the stray tear rolling down her cheek but refrained, not wanting to push her too far. The fact she'd lowered her guard and walls down this much for him remained a mystery, albeit a welcome one. Still, he would risk nothing when it came to their fragile friendship. He swore it could break again at any moment, and he prayed he wouldn't be the cause of it if it did.

Ghost's eyes softened, and her lips tugged upward into a playful smile. "Make sure you shower first. I have a-"

"-weird thing about getting your bed dirty with germs?" Hangman finished knowingly. "I remember."

I remember everything. He wanted to say.

Ghost blushed as Hangman threw his arm around her shoulders and directed them inside, pushing down the fluttering of his heart and the wall he'd broken past with Ghost. Never in a million years did he think she'd allow him to share a room with her again, let alone a bed. The gesture gave him the slightest hope that their relationship had truly turned a corner and that the past would stay just that- the past.

If only Hangman could've seen what the future held.

How wrong he'd be.

How the fragile relationship he'd so carefully repaired with Ghost would shatter at his feet.

****

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legionofpotatoes · 4 years ago

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we decided to watch all story cutscenes from the new resident evil village videogame on a whim, since it’s not really our cup of tea gameplay-wise but seems to be this massive zeitgeist moment that made us morbidly curious. And I know how much everyone cares about my thoughts on things I know very little about, so. let’s get into it huh gamers. and yeah spoilers?

for context, I’ve only played resident evil 4 and a small portion of 5. I also read the wikipedia entry for 7’s plot recently. all this to say I was only vaguely aware of how tonally wacky the series was going in

I also completely gave up following the plot of the mutagens’ soap opera, so that paid off in spades here as you might imagine

anyway so that baby in the intro. that baby’s head is just massive. humongous toddlerdome. when ethan finds the baby’s head in a jar later on. there is no way that head would fit into that jar. bad game design. no not even game design. basic stuff. one hundred years in prison for jar modeler

if I see a single functional hetero marriage in video games I will cry tears of joy. I understand their misery is kind of The Point irt them badly working through the hillbilly romp trauma but like. sheesh. at least set that up as an emotional story goal the plot will help resolve. but nope they start off miserable and it goes nowhere

I know I know the mia thing has a huge wrinkle in it but like. not really in terms of dramatic function?? set up a happy end to the re7 nightmare (miranda can keep up appearances for all she cares) and then take that all away from angry griffin mcelroy for manpain. it will still absolutely work to set up the dramatic forward momentum. why throw in this cliche Hollywood Tension in their marriage if you’re not going to address it oh maybe because it’s normalized as automatically interesting because nuclear families are a self-propagating pit of a very narrow chance at emotional happiness relying on social stigma to preserve their empty function oops my baggage slipped in yikes abort mission

I called him griffin mcelroy because I saw his face on twitter and. yeah. I will continue to do this occasionally. my house my rules

... fuck the reason I’m hung up on this is specifically because the rest of the game is so tonally dexterous (which is a shining point to me! more on that later!), and yet they felt weirdly compelled to create the aesthetic trapping of a family-at-odds trope without following it through too well. a sign of both the good and the bad stuff to come

but listen the real reason why I wanted to talk about any of this is to nitpick the fascinating backwards-engineered nucleus of the entire thing; in that this game essentially creates a melting pot of just SO many disparate horror tropes and then makes a no-holds-barred unhinged effort at weaving thick lore to piece them all together. it is truly a sight to behold. like straight up you got your backwoods fright night situation, your gothic castle vampires, your rural-industrial werewolves, and don’t forget your bloated swamp monsters over there, with then a hard left turn into robotic body horror, and the entire ass subgenre of Creepy Doll writ large, and the bloodborne tentacle monsters, and a hellboy angel bossfight, which rides on the coattails of a mech-on-mech pacific rim bonanza, and just jesus henry christ slow down

almost all of these are textural hijack jobs that don’t really get into the metaphor plain of any of those settings but the game sort-of makes an argument that the texture IS the point and revels in it. It is kind of admirable almost. The same reason why the intro felt boxed in and unmotivated is also why the rest of the game just blasts off of its hinges to the point of complete and self-indulgent tonal abandon. I kinda loved that about it. lady dimitrescu made sure to hold her hat down as she bent forward in mahogany doorways and then suddenly she��s a giant gore dragon and you settle in your temp role as dark souls man with Gun to take her ass down. Excellent??

this rhino rampage impulse to gobble up every horror aesthetic known to man comes to head when the game wrestles with its FPS trappings in what is the most hilarious solution in creating visceral player damage moments. Since most cinematics and the entire game is in first person, that leaves precious little real estate for the devs to work with if they really want to sell griffin’s physical crucible. To wit. This dude’s forearms. Specifically just the forearms. They are MASSACRED throughout the story. The poor man lives out the silent hill dimension of a hand model. by the end cutscene he looks like a neatly dressed desk clerk who had decided to stick both his grabbers into garbage disposal grinders just a few hours prior. like in addition to everything else it manages to rope in that tinge of slapstick violence into its general grievous genre collection except this time it IS for a lack of trying! truly incredible

but wait his miracle clawbacks from everything his poor paws go through are retroactively explained away, yes, but far too vaguely and far too late to console me as I sat and watched everyone’s favorite baby brother reattach an entirely severed hand to his wrist stump by just. placing it on there. and giving it a lil twist ‘n pop terminator-style. and then willing his fingers back into motion right in front of my bulging eyes. this game just does not care. it does not give a shit. and boy howdy will it work to make that into one of its strongest suits

cause generally speaking resident evil was THE premiere vanilla zombie content destinaysh for like a decade, right? and as the rest of the world and mainstream media started encroaching and bloodying its blue ocean it went and just exploded in every single conceivable horror trope direction like a smilodon on catnip. truly, genuinely fascinating franchise moves

yeah the big vampire milf is hot. other news; grass... green. although I do love the implication that her closet is just identical white dresses on a rack. cartoon network-level queen shit

apropos of nothing I’ve said there’s also this hobo dante-devimaycry-magneto man, and I can’t believe this sentence makes sense. anyway he made that “boulder-punching asshole” joke referring to chris redfield and it was probably the only easter egg that really landed for me and boy did it land hard. I have not seen him punch the boulder in re5, mind. I had only heard about how funny it is from friends. and here this dude was, probably in the same exact mindset as me, trying to grapple with that insane mental image. with you on that ian mckellen, loud and clear

I advocate vehemently against the shallow pursuit of hyper photorealism in art direction but I gotta admit it works really in favor of immersive horror like this. the european village shacks especially gave me super unchill flashbacks to my rural countryside retreat in western georgia. I could smell the linoleum dude. not cool

faces are weird in this game. can’t place it. nice textures, good animation, but the modeling template is... uuh strange? and the hair. it has that clustered-flat-clumpy look that harkens to something very specific and unpleasant but I just don’t know what. sue me

griffin’s mental aptitude to take all this shit in stride and end every seemingly traumatizing bossfight involving some fucking eldritch being yet unseen through mortal eyes by essentially throwing out an MCU quip is just. What the fuck dude? I mean that was funny how you casually yelled the f-word at a god damn werewolf that you considered a fairy tale an hour ago but are you like, all right?? it was swinging a sledgehammer the size of a bus at you, ethan

oh oh the vampires are afraid of cold and your last name is winters. I get it haha

Pro Gamer Nitpick: boss fights seemed a bit unnecessarily long?? idk why the youtuber we picked decided the ENTIRE propeller man fight counted towards the vital story scenes he was stitching together, but man mr big daddy lite there really had some get up and go huh??

why are they saying dimitrescu.. like that. is it really how you say that word or is the english language relapsing into its fetish for ending every single word with a consonant at all costs

I’m not saying it’s a dramatic miss of a twist in context of all that’s going on, but the “you died in the last game actually and have been DC’s clayface ever since” revelation is low-key. it’s. it’s just funny to me, I dont know what to say. century-old god-witch fails her evil plan after she mistakenly removes heart from what was definitely NOT just some white guy with eight fingers after all

chris realizing he’s about to become the player character and immediately swapping out his tsundere trenchcoat for the muscletight sex haver sweater

the little bluetooth speaker-sized pipe bomb he taped to his knife was nuclear?? really??? I must have missed something because that is just too good. I buy it though I totally buy it. chris just got them fun-sized nukes in his car trunk for, you guessed it, Situations

anyway this is all for now just wanted to briefly touch on how unexpectedly funny and tonally irreverent this seemingly serious game turned out to be. did not articulate any cathartic story beats whatsoever but my god it had fun connecting those plot points. he just fucking put his severed hand back on his stump and it Just Worked todd howard get in here

#text #another one in my bulleted review series with no rhyme or reason #sorry resident evil fans this could be a painful read pls turn away #i know almost nothing about it but i am gonna be super fake familiar and critical of this one hey ho

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madamewriterofwrongs · 4 years ago

Note

5 for the i love you prompts 💛💛

Went a little off script but I really hope you like it, love <3

I Love You Prompt List

5. Heard you tell the same story multiple times but doesn’t point it out to you when you excitedly bring it up to them again

HEA

“Alright, Missy, it’s time for bed.” Eddie smiled from the kitchen where he was drying the last of the dishes, the sound travelling from his guest bedroom. He could picture Buck cuddling the little one to his chest, swinging her around the room in time with the sleepy giggles that echoed through the hall. He’d spin once, then twice, then pull her close and kiss her hair, smelling the new baby scent he promised Eddie he wasn’t addicted to.

No one believed him.

A few more gentle kisses and he’d finally lay his niece into her crib; he was always so gentle with her head, afraid of being too rough with her (‘I’m a big guy, Eddie, I could crush her!’). He’d rolled his eyes when Maddie laughed at the idea of her baby brother hurting a fly, but that delicate hold hadn’t faded since that first day at the hospital.

Ten months old. Eddie couldn’t believe it. Ten months since this tiny bundle of joy came into their family and he’d never seen Buck happier. He doted on Amelia as much as Albert, the two brothers joining Chimney on his spiraling research sessions all throughout the pregnancy. He still had the photo Maddie had sent him of the three men huddled on the couch with a laptop and books spread around them, saved on his phone (though he hadn’t told Buck about his future teasing material).

Once she was settled in her crib, Buck would pull up a chair and read from their menial collection of books, both new and hand-me-down from Christopher, until she drifted off to sleep. He’d then stay there for a few minutes, watching her breathe – watching the slow rise and fall of her chest and the way she’d kick in her sleep like she was desperate for action – before giving in and leaving her in peace.

It was the same routine that followed every time the “singles” got roped into babysitting so Maddie and Chimney could have a few hours off. Not that it was much of a hardship. Eddie always hosted because he had the extra space (and there were much fewer hazards for the little explorer to get into), and having a baby around was…it was nice. He’d missed a lot of these moments with Christopher and while it would never make up for the time he lost with his son, it was…nice. Having Buck around – holding a baby – wasn’t so bad either.

“You’re still not ready for bed, are you?”

Eddie dried his hands, picturing those bright brown eyes staring up at his friend so earnestly. Even if Buck could resist his niece’s pleading, she still looked at her uncle like he hung the moon.

He supposed Buck did get that sort of awe and admiration from some people; understandably so.

“How about I tell you a story then.”

This, he had to hear. If Eddie thought he was bad at storytelling, Buck was worse, always skipping over parts and having to backtrack and making up the most random things and then forgetting them a few sentences later.

He supposed Amelia wouldn’t mind so much; just listening to Buck’s voice would be enough to soothe him her. Eddie tiptoed down the hallway and leaned against the wall beside the open door so he could listen to the bedtime story.

“Once upon a time, there was a boy who didn’t want to grow up.”

Peter Pan, not a bad choice.

“He loved getting to run around and be free – to make his own rules and get into trouble.”

Eddie suppressed his chuckle, careful not to make his presence known. Buck, he thought, was a little like Peter Pan.

“But more than anything, the boy wanted to help people. He loved getting to save the day, but he loved helping people get home to their loved ones even more.”

That’s not the story of…

Oh.

“You see, the boy was very lonely; and helping others feel safe, made him feel better. The boy thought he was destined to be alone forever. And he didn’t mind all that much.”

Eddie sunk back against the wall, the cold plaster grounding him while he listened with breathless curiosity.

“But then one day, he met a man, and that man showed him kindness.”

Is he talking about me or- no he couldn’t be.

“The man took him under his wing – he cared for the boy. It made his job feel like home.”

Bobby, of course. They had a relationship long before I entered the picture.

“And then the boy met a woman. She was beautiful – the fairest maiden in the land.”

Eddie couldn’t hold his breath any longer, his lungs collapsing with the weight of Buck’s words – with the wistful way he spoke about Abby.

“Her hair was like a…strawberry field in the summer sun, and her voice made him feel”

Eddie strained to listen before he realized the silence was Buck, gathering the strength to speak; lightly clearing his throat so as to not break their precarious bubble of calm.

“For the first time, the boy didn’t feel so alone. She made the boy want to grow up. The man gave him advice on how to do it but ultimately, the boy made the choice all on his own. His first big decision.”

He could practically hear Buck’s chest puff with pride even as his voice grew sad. He knew his friend’s mannerisms well; too well. He wouldn’t need to look to know Buck was pacing slowly, a light bounce to his movement, a slight twitch in his nose when he smiled (because he could never keep a smile off his face when he was holding her).

“He thought he was doing it for the fair maiden, but it wasn’t meant to be. Soon, the boy and the woman parted ways and he was left alone again.”

Eddie let his head fall back against the wall, as quietly as he could, the weight pulling down even further.

“The lonely feeling wasn’t so bad this time because he had the man to give him advice, and he had friends who helped him. And he had a sister.”

Buck was smiling, he knew it. A brighter smile because of her. Maddie, with her big heart that had been hurt so badly, until she found the person who helped her put it back together again. Through all her trials, he wondered what he would do if his sisters had ever faced such nightmares, and he never stopped Buck from texting Maddie at midnight just to check on her – even if it interrupted the movie that neither of them were watching.

“She was the best big sister in the world, and she spent many years held captive by a- a very bad man.”

He doubted that Amelia would remember if Buck used the word he actually wanted to call Doug, but it was better to be safe than sorry (and if Maddie found out that her brother had taught the little one a bad word, he would definitely be sorry).

“But she escaped, and she found the boy so they could keep each other safe. And that’s exactly what they did.”

Eddie had always admired the Buckley’s steadfast love for one another. Their close relationship made him want to call his sisters more often. He was very proud to say that he had actually followed through – mostly thanks to Buck and Maddie.

“So now the boy had lots of people who loved him; but there was still something missing for him. He wanted a family – a home.”

He knew that Buck always wanted a family. He screamed ‘father material’ in a way that sometimes made Eddie feel inadequate. More often than not, he was just grateful to have Buck by his side.

To help him with parenting.

Of course, he’d want a family. One day, Buck would find someone who could give him that (he absently wondered how he might feel about adoption).

“And then guess what happened next?”

The playful voice made Eddie smile.

“He found it.”

He…he found it?

Eddie didn’t feel his knees buckle until he was sliding to the floor, back pressed firmly against the wall to soften the blow.

When did Buck find a family? Why hasn’t he told me? Does he know how much it would hurt me? Does he know how I feel but he doesn’t know how to let me down? When did he have time to move on? Except, he’s not moving on from anything, is he.

Buck’s chuckle pulled him back to reality, though he kept his head firmly in his hands, unable to stare at the blank walls any longer.

“But I’m skipping ahead. Okay.”

Buck paused again to gather his thoughts, and Eddie could sense his pace slowing as Amelia began to drift off.

“Right around the time the sister found the boy, the boy met another boy (he was a boy because even though he was very much a grown up, he was also very lonely).”

Eddie slowly opened his eyes, still not daring to look up, but staring into the darkness between his knees. He’d come into Buck’s life around the time that Maddie arrived in town. He remembered swapping horror stories about apartment/house hunting over pizza and beers. What a coincidence.

“That boy…was beautiful in a different way.”

The hope in Buck’s voice was a slap in the face. But he just couldn’t stop listening.

“His heart, it glowed – but so did his smile. The boy loved to make him laugh and they spent all their time together; the best of friends.”

But he was Buck’s…

Oh.

Suddenly, Eddie couldn’t breathe for an entirely different reason; the hope from Buck’s voice floated into the hallway and carried the weight off his chest.

“The boy met his friend’s child, who reminded him of how much love he had to give. And also, how much love he wanted in return.”

Christopher really was his miracle; his beacon in the dark. He loved that kid so much. And knowing Buck felt a little of that, too; Eddie didn’t dare look up, lest his watering eyes see the light of day (or the evening stars, as it were).

“But Buck, I hear you say,”

The chuckle caught in his throat as he imagined the goofy face that matched the mocking tone.

“the boy already has lots of people who love him; what is he missing?”

Buck’s voice returned to its normal, soothing tone, staying put for too long. He was settling Amelia in her crib now; the story would be over soon. Eddie listened on.

“But you see, there’s different types of love. There’s Family Love (like the love I have for you, and your mommy and daddy), there’s Work Love (the happiness I get from helping people), there’s Friend Love (the way I love your Aunt Hen and Aunt Karen), there’s Temporary Love (like the love the boy had for the woman – short but sweet), there’s Self Love (like how you are going to grow up to conquer the world), and then there’s Forever Love.”

Eddie knew (tried desperately to convince himself), that Buck had left quite a few names off that list. He hadn’t mentioned Bobby or Athena, for one. Or Christopher. The fact that Eddie hadn’t been lumped into the ‘Family’ or ‘Friend’ category – or even the ‘Temporary’ category – didn’t mean that he was part of the final group. His traitorous heart continued to beat with its newfound hope.

“Forever Love is like feeling all of the Loves at once – plus more. Forever Love leaves you breathless, and crazy; it makes you sick with worry.”

Eddie’s mind flew back to two years ago, when he’d watched Buck get crushed by a ladder truck, and then vomit up blood a few months later. He hadn’t slept either night.

“You never stop thinking about them, even when they’re far away.”

The times before Buck was back from medical leave, all he wanted to do was text him after every crazy call, or go over to his house to talk about their day.

How long have I felt this way about him?

“And when they’re right beside you, all you want to do is hold them close.”

Every hug, every celebratory pat on the back, every shoulder or knee bump, came into sharp focus in the darkness of his mind.

“Even when you hate each other, you love them, because they make you happy.”

He could never hate Buck – he could be furious with him, but he could never hate him because.

“They make you feel like you’re not alone.”

Swirling thoughts and a breathless, aching chest: those were signs of a panic attack, right?

“One day, the boy looked up at his friend and realized that what he felt for that boy, was a forever kind of love.”

I can’t hear this. I can’t be here right now.

Eddie rolled to his knees, bracing his hand on the wall to help steady his shaking legs. Babysitting was a mistake. It felt too domestic – too close to the thing he desired most but never thought he could have.

But I can have it.

Everything Buck had said; he’d said it about Eddie. Everything he wanted was on the other side of the door, asking him to step through.

A Forever Love.

“And you’re going to find it, too.”

Buck’s soft tone signaled sleep; an ending to the façade that he was alone.

“Whether it’s another person, a job, yourself, or something entirely different: you are going to find something that makes you incredibly happy. And I can’t wait to see it.”

His whispered exultation barely reached Eddie’s ears, but his place standing beside the doorway offered other advantages now. For one, he got to watch as Buck pressed one last kiss into Amelia’s dark hair, whispering “Goodnight, Angel” before turning around.

When Buck and Eddie locked eyes, the world stopped turning.

For one, long moment, those shining blue eyes were only for Eddie, a million emotions crossing his face. Something like shock, realization, embarrassment, doubt, hope, determination, and calm swept through in that moment before the world continued its trajectory. With that same calm, Buck walked forward, pulling the door half-closed, as he finally came a breath away from Eddie’s face. He should have moved – he should have stepped back and gave him space in the hallway – but his feet refused to budge. He was trapped in this spot until he knew what came next.

“Did you like my story?”

It was one thing when Buck’s hushed tone was directed at the baby in his arms, but when he was staring at Eddie through his eyelashes, a curl to his lips like he was fighting a smile, Eddie would have agreed to anything.

Luckily, this one was easy (as easy as hearing his best friend – the best friend he was in love with – confess that he shared that love and now, they had to decide what to do next).

“You didn’t finish.”

A bit of the hope faded from Buck’s eyes, replaced with more doubt. Eddie followed his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. “I don’t know the ending.”

What a sneak. What a horrible, terrible, wonderful sneak; to pass the torch he’d been carrying, to Eddie, for him to do with as he wanted. He’d be terribly put out, if he wasn’t reaching a hand up to cup Buck’s neck, pulling him to the spot where his feet had taken root.

Chest to chest, Eddie looked into his friend’s eyes – his partner’s eyes – and watched the hope come flooding back as he stopped fighting the smile. Their lips met in the middle, soft and full of promises that they both intended to keep. No frantic arms, no moans or sighs – there would be time for that later.

This was just the first chapter for them, a million pages to come – an epic journey already half-lived. As they continued their languid kiss, Eddie’s mind leapt forward to a time when they were alone in the house, hair grey and limbs bent with time; the same smile was still there. His heart beat just as fast.

In the silence of the house, Eddie whispered into breath between them:

“And they lived Happily Ever After.”

#cj writes things #cj answers things #love alicia #gracieli #buddie #buddie fic #911 fox #911 fic #getting together #storytelling #bedtime stories #evan buckley #eddie diaz #love confession #soft eddie diaz #soft evan buckley #buck with a baby

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medea10 · 4 years ago

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My Review of Kaguya-sama: Love is War - Season Two

Season One Review Here.

Here we go again! Those crazy kids, will they ever confess their feelings for each other?

HISTORY: Love is war! The first one to admit love is seen as weak and is thus deemed the loser in this fight. That reigns true in the minds of student body president Miyuki Shirogane and student body vice president Kaguya Shinomiya. Both of them are mad for one another, they just won’t admit it. So, Miyuki and Kaguya play mind games with one another to see if they can make the other crumble. In a war with many wins and losses, who will be the first one to admit their feelings for the other?

SEASON TWO: While the mind games are still happening, it seems like they’re going towards a cuter case (at least when it comes to Kaguya). Yes, she still covers her tracks so she comes out looking cool as a cucumber, but inside she’s a mess. We start the season off with Kaguya wanting to celebrate Miyuki’s birthday. It’s just that Miyuki is stubborn about celebrating his own birthday or even receiving gifts (due to his upbringing). And then we add a few more road-blocks to this story with the addition of new members of the student body.

Then we end this memorable era of the student council as new members are set to take place with an election. Despite the sad atmosphere with remembering all the fun stuff that occurred last season, everyone will be coming back to their old positions for the upcoming school year. I mean, this was the third episode! It would be a real cock-tease if everyone left their positions this early in the season.

NEW CHARACTER: Let’s enter the Student Council Election arc! With the disbanding of the previous student council, it’s time for the students to choose their next president, vice president, etc. Miyuki was skeptical about continuing his reign as president, but he’s going to run for a second term. While Miyuki is still popular, a first-year student is ready to take him down. In comes Miko Iino! She’s seen as a sticler for the rules. Even when she’s in the student council, she doesn’t waste time scolding every member (except Chika) about minor imperfections. Here’s what you might recognize her from.

*Miko is played by Miyu Tomita (known for Crim on Interspecies Reviewers)

LICENSING: This anime is licensed by Aniplex of America (just like season one) and is EXCLUSIVELY streamed only on FUNimation. I wouldn’t be so pissy about this if sites like Crunchyroll and Hulu hadn’t already streamed the first season from the start, but FUNimation and Sony want to keep the series all to themselves. The company’s a monster!

THE DUB: Holy crap, the unthinkable has happened and FUNimation has scrounged up an English dub to this series. But only for this season! What the shit is going on? Is it like when Crunchyroll and FUNimation shared the anime Free! for a while? Why is it only this season that’s being dubbed? Well anyways, if you’ve read my thoughts on season one, you’ll know that I had “strong” feelings towards this getting a dub. Meaning, the narrator had to be voiced by R. Bruce Elliott! Well…they did voice the narrator with someone from Space Dandy. I just didn’t expect it to be voiced by Space Dandy himself! In short, Ian Sinclair is voicing the narrator and I am okay with this. He’s no R. Bruce Elliott, but Ian Sinclair is friggin’ awesome. I actually think the dub is really good from what I’ve heard so far. There’s only a few episodes available at this date and time, but make your own decisions here. Here’s what you might recognize these folks from.

ENGLISH CAST: *Kaguya is played by Alexis Tipton (known for Honey on Space Dandy, Lala on To Love Ru, Iris on Fire Force, Mizuki on Baka and Test, Aoba on Keijo!!!!!!!!, Hana on Prison School, and Saya on Blood-C)

*Miyuki is played by Aaron Dismuke (known for Al on FMA, Hiro on Fruits Basket, Kakeru on Fruits Basket 2019, Van on Escaflowne [redub], Marx on Black Clover, and You on Deadman Wonderland)

*Chika is played by Jad Saxton (known for Charla on Fairy Tail, Hana on Fruits Basket 2019, Koneko on High School DxD, Dorothy on Black Clover, Tamaki on Fire Force, Megumi on Food Wars, and Chika on Love Live Sunshine)

*Ishigami is played by Austin Tindle (known for Accelerator on Index/Railgun, Kaneki on Tokyo Ghoul, Karma on Assassination Classroom, Marco on Attack on Titan, Natsuo on Domestic Girlfriend, and Sunakawa on My Love Story)

SHIPPING PART II: Ooh boy, we’ve got some extra cute moments between Kaguya and Miyuki this season. From Kaguya giving a slice of cake to Miyuki for his birthday to the star-gazing moment where Miyuki grabs Kaguya and things get a little too close for comfort, this season was getting a little hot and heavy! Although, we didn’t get another moment with sick Kaguya this season! And it becomes increasingly clear to both characters that it’s getting harder and harder to put up that façade in front of one another. In the case of Kaguya, she ends up going to the emergency room only to learn that her “heart condition” is just the love for the president.

Even though we don’t get any kind of love confession this season, we do get some choice moments like Kaguya becoming friends with Miyuki on LINE, Kaguya’s run-in with Miyuki’s father, and of course that awkward position in a locked room between the two star-crossed lovers. You know what I’m talking about, the misunderstanding position. Literally every high school anime has this happen at one point!

MUSIC: So…no cute ending theme like Chika’s from last season? Crabapples!

Aside from that, the first time I heard DADDY, DADDY DO, I was a little skeptical on the visuals they chose to match the music. Thankfully, that only lasted for two episodes at the most and the rest of the time I’m dancing around to this catchy theme.

And while I’m on the subject of music, has anyone else noticed the amount of 80s music references that was shown throughout the season? Maybe I’m just stuck on that episode where Kaguya is trying to vogue like Madonna.

FUNNIEST MOMENT: Underwear and man-whores! So much misunderstanding it was too much for me to contain my laughs.

ENDING: The last couple of episodes revolve around the school sport’s festival. Surprisingly, we get a fair amount of time dedicated to long-time holdout Ishigami. He ended up doing something quite surprising by joining the cheer squad and was willing to participate by dressing in drag for a skit. I find Ishigami made a cute girl. Then, we get some cute Miyuki x Kaguya shenanigans when Miyuki’s father visits the sports festival.

So the episode before the second season finale, we get a full episode dedicated to Ishigami. In episodes prior to this one, we were getting a taste of what’s up with our favorite gamer. There was talk of Ishigami being a violent psychopath in middle school with the way the faceless rumormill has been talking. Apparently when Ishigami was in middle school, he would frequently talk to this girl in his class. But then this girl gets a boyfriend! That wouldn’t bug Ishigami until he overheard that boyfriend cheating on this girl. It does get worse with what this scumbag tries to do. And that’s when Ishigami beat the crap out of him!

Unfortunately for Ishigami, his class and the girl walked in when he was pummeling the shit out of this dude. And so the truth gets warped! Especially when dude starts lying by saying Ishigami did this because he was jealous of their relationship. Because of the altercation, Ishigami was suspended from school for a time, had to see a councilor, and was forced to write a letter of apology to the jerk he beat up. That last one, he was unable to do so. If you were in his shoes, you wouldn’t write an apology letter either, you’d write a note that simply says...

“Go to hell, Dumbass”!

Amazingly, those are the exact words Miyuki told Ishigami to say to that jerk. Miyuki was the first person to open up to Ishigami after this incident. Despite the harsh time Ishigami had in middle school, after starting high school he learned who his real friends are, both from the student council and the cheer squad. I really should state that I was happy to see Ishigami get an episode revolved around him. He was introduced only half-way into season one and felt like he didn’t make that big of an impact with me. Ishigami this season stood out a lot more and I was very satisfied with the results.

Now in the final episode, Kaguya lost something dear to her. Her phone! Let me explain. She was given a flip-phone when she was 5 years old to only be used for emergencies. Kaguya really didn’t use her camera until she was in the student council and these photos are pretty special to her. So imagine her shock and horror when it falls off the school building and being told that she can’t retrieve her photos. Just as well, she had an obsolete flip-phone. Even me, with my retro media collection, I don’t own one of those! But now that Kaguya has joined the rest of society with a brand-new smart phone, she was able to join LINE and all of her friends shared with her the photos they took during those special moments Kaguya thought were going to be lost to her forever.

In the final segment, it wasn’t really anything romantic-driven. It was just another game brought on by Chika. Basically they all took turns blowing up a balloon until it pops. Or, an anime version to the Spongebob Squarepants episode, “Wet Painters” where Patrick blows a giant paint bubble. And leave it to Chika to inadvertently blow up the balloon by doing something you wouldn’t expect. It blew up, blew everyone and the school away while DADDY DADDY DO plays in the background.

We end with Kaguya and Miyuki standing up together and the narrator assuring us that the war of love is not over.

I love this series, I truly do. I just feel like the way these stories were set up, I feel as though the first season should have ended with the 3rd episode of the second season. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the ending to the first season with the firework episode. It’s just that this particular episode gave us the end of the student council, Kaguya actually called Miyuki by his first name, and with Miyuki announcing his candidcy for president again, it opens up for more to look forward to with season two. But that’s just my thought on the matter. I’m sure this was the setup in the manga, but in the 12 episode dynamic with the anime feels weird. And same can be said about having the Ishigami episode right before the season finale. I’m glad this story was told, I just wish it was placed better in the 12 episode anime season setup.

Despite my tiny gripes there, I enjoyed this season very much. There’s definitely been a lot of development between Miyuki and Kaguya this season with some overused tropes and surprising moments no one expected. I can honestly say I didn’t expect Miyuki to take Kaguya by the shoulders as he talks about stars and constellations. Although, I did expect Miyuki to freak the fuck out sometime afterward because he thought he acted like a dork. But we get the main duo get a little closer with certain moments like the star-gazing episode, Miyuki’s birthday, and Miyuki adding Kaguya to LINE. So it once again leaves us on the hopes of a season three. Unfortunately at this date and time, no word on that happening! So maybe I should go on and read one of the 15+ volumes of the manga.

If you would like to watch the second season of Kaguya-sama it seems like the only one that has it available is FUNimation, with the English dub airing once a week. But if you would like to watch the first season, Crunchyroll and Hulu have it available for streaming.

#anime review #kaguya sama: love is war #kaguya shinomiya #miyuki shirogane #chika fujiwara #yu ishigami #miko iino #kaguya sama wa kokurasetai

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arecomicsevengood · 5 years ago

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QUARANTINE MOVIES PART FOUR

It’s wild to watch any movie knowing that none will be made for the foreseeable future, and that the whole collective experience of filmgoing might be dead. I tend to have a certain sad, scared lonely feeling when I contemplate the future at night, and while I attempt to put off by watching movies, it only partly works. Now, more than ever, movies are a larger part of my processing of the world than the ongoing conversations I have with friends.

Smithereens (1982) dir. Susan Seidelman

There is something particularly powerful about movies where people run around, socializing. These things are pretty resonant with my youth, but “youth” in this broad sense that just means “the before times,” because if there’s anything quarantine is bringing home it’s the importance of a form of adulthood based around domestic partnerships with someone you like and having “real jobs” that can translate to telecommuting. Of course, socializing of the sort no longer allowed is really useful, and shouldn’t be written off as youthful frivolity. Smithereens is not a particularly romantic movie: While it might be famous for being “punk” in a “cool” way, documenting young New York nightlife in a way where David Wojnarowicz’s band 3 Teens Kill 4 is on a club’s marquee, it’s really about young people as these sort of upwardly-mobile opportunists with no real talent trying to exploit one another for a mixture of sex and social clout, and ignoring those who are not actively useful to them. It’s a useful document of people being shitty where the appeal now is how cool they look, and it’s interesting to watch in this moment where I’m worried that the whole idea of community will be lost very soon, in a way we won’t even be able to articulate. We’ll all be scrambling for jobs and security but everything will be further hollowed out, and we’ll be left with an even more vicious and dog-eat-dog citizenry. So a movie like this has nostalgic appealing, but by depicting the seeds of what will only become more widespread problems, it avoids feeling dated or idealistic.

Gloria (1980) dir. John Cassavetes

Oh shit this movie rules! I was under the impression I disliked Cassavetes, based on the others I had seen, and watching the first twenty-odd minutes reminded me of why: Sort of circular conversations, involving a lot of people being upset with one another. But this ends up feeling more like a movie, and less like a play. Once Gena Rowlands kills a carful of people I was completely on board. She’s great in this, playing opposite a child, who is also amazing in it, tons of dialogue that should be quotable: “You’re not my mother, my mother was beautiful” being but one amazing bit of poetry. Both extremely cute and extremely badass from moment to moment, the parts of this movie are in tension with one another where it also feels like it’s going from strength to strength, and ever scene, every moment, is great. Incredible music, and also great documentation of a world that doesn’t exist anymore, of telephone booths, smoking sections, and places that’ll develop photos for you. Highest possible recommendation.

The Naked City (1948) dir. Jules Dassin

Seemingly the first movie to be shot on location throughout New York, rather than studio backlots, and it milks the city for all its worth, shifting frequently from one location to another, introducing to new characters. Initially guided by omniscient narration but quickly focusing to become a police procedural. I knew Dassin from Rififi but this feels more exciting, I would gladly watch movies bite the techniques from this every few decades, though Gloria does a good job of moving through the streets of New York in a less-contrived way. There was a Naked City TV show ten years later, shot on location and focusing on a police precinct.

Near Dark (1987) dir. Kathryn Bigelow

I consider this Kathryn Bigelow’s best movie, but circumstances have not led me to watch it as many times as I’ve seen Point Break, so the memories I’ve retained of it were kind of inaccurate: Specifically, the thing I thought of as the climax, the part at the hotel where light is getting shot through the blankets taped up to cover windows, happens like halfway through. Screenwriter Eric Red wrote this at the same time as he wrote The Hitcher, and that’s another one that just GOES, moving from one scene to another where they all have this climactic intensity constantly but the scale is shifting of what you’re invested in? The Hitcher is a nightmare and this is more of an action movie. People point out this movie has a bunch of the cast from Aliens but I didn’t realize there’s a shot where Aliens is actually on the marquee of a theater. I also wonder if this whole horror/action/western/but with vampires thing was an inspiration to Garth Ennis? I kinda feel like the pacing I find so powerful could not really be sustained over the length of an extended comic run.

Hero (1992) dir. Stephen Frears

Dustin Hoffman plays a criminal schlub, doing a weird voice. It’s almost like he was told that the role was written for Sylvester Stallone, but Stallone’s insistence on getting a writing credit on every movie he acts in complicated the premise in a weird way, so Hoffman just attempts a Stallone impression. One of his few redeeming characteristics is he’s a loving father, but that isn’t why he’ll remind you of your dad. Maybe most men are just Dustin Hoffman doing impersonations of Sylvester Stallone! From 1992, so Hoffman’s I guess in a post-Rain-Man mode, but the film also feels very early nineties in its commentary on television news turning stories into celebrities, and an analysis of the problems with professional cynicism that seem very much of their time. It’s not like a more sophisticated critique has found its way into any mainstream film I can think of, we’ve just stopped thinking about these issues, as they’ve become much worse. Joan Cusack’s good as his Hoffman’s ex-wife, and Susie Cusack’s good as his lawyer. I would like to see Susie Cusack in more things! Geena Davis plays a television reporter, Andy Garcia plays a decent guy who is a contrast to Hoffman, there’s also small roles for the likes of Stephen Tobolowsky and Tom Arnold, really placing this in a moment of time.

The Age Of Innocence (1993) dir. Martin Scorsese

I didn’t like this one, for all the obvious reasons: I don’t like costume dramas about rich people, and I don’t like Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s an Edith Wharton adaptation, all about a world of well-mannered old money with very rigidly defined rules of behavior. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the true love Day-Lewis is kept from by the mores of the day, and part of her romantic appeal is she’s able to see through the rituals and make fun of them, while Winona Ryder fully buys into them, and thus reaps the benefits. Everything is repressed, all behavior is affect, this is of course the point but very much not my thing. There’s also a lot of a narrator reading the text of the book while the camerawork fades between lavishly composed image, while the cinematography probably looked great on a big screen I would still be very anxious about getting to the storytelling.

Experiment In Terror (1962) dir. Blake Edwards

This one starts off super-intensely, with a home invasion scene, the sense of horror in this is palpable but the fear is just used as this blackmail structure for some noir stuff? It straggles the genre line pretty well, feeling weird because of this horror energy of sheer creeping malevolence defines it. This is also considerably longer than most of the other film noir I’ve watched recently, because those moments extend and take away from the sense of a building plot, to instead feel like they might derail it. Lee Remick is the lead, and she is this terrified victim, which makes the film more interesting than if it were focused on the cop played by Glenn Ford. The main character’s younger sister gets kidnapped at one point, it gets creepy. The climax occurs at a end of a crowded baseball game, and there’s shots that I assume were done via helicopter, which seems like it would’ve upped the budget considerably.

The Harder They Fall (1956) dir. Mark Robson

Humphrey Bogart stars as a former sports writer, working to drum up publicity for a fresh-off-the-boat boxer who does not know how to fight, but is naively participating in fixed matches, for the economic benefit of the mob. While the boxer is being exploited and making no money, despite his celebrity; Bogart is being well-compensated to sell out his conscience and he is very good at playing a dude in moral conflict with himself, struggling to do the decent thing. While this isn’t the best boxing movie, or the best Bogart, it’s still pretty good.

The Devil And Miss Jones (1941) dir. Sam Wood

Heard about this one in the context of it having good politics. It’s about a rich guy who goes undercover at a department store hoping to bust the union only to realize that the guy organizing the union is supremely decent and the middle manager should get fired. It has some scenes that feel like they might play for “cringe comedy” but also are just so fucked up? One where the rich dude is forcing shoes onto the feet of little girl who is crying saying “I don’t like it! I don’t like it!” feels way too much like a pervert’s fetish for me to be comfortable with. The female lead is played by Jean Arthur, who is very good at playing a genuine, kind, and idealistic person. I am very grateful she dates the union organizer and the old rich dude’s love interest is someone age-appropriate. Interesting to see a pro-union movie from a time when unions were popular, so it functions as populist entertainment while Sorry To Bother You gestures at being radical propaganda for self-congratulation’s sake.

Human Desire (1954) dir. Fritz Lang

Another noir from Lang, with the same leads as The Big Heat. This one made me worried about age-inappropriate relationships too, as it begins with a dude being back from war, moving in with his friends, and their daughter having “become a woman” while he was away. Luckily the title refers to a desire he ends up feeling for a married woman who as an accomplice to a murder committed by her abusive husband. Glenn Ford stars in this one, and he has this very boring morally upstanding male lead quality that makes these well-made movies feel generic. This thing is happening to me watching movies where I get kind of hung up on how no one ever explains themselves or their feelings: I don’t think they should, I think the whole thing of watching a movie where you watch it thinking like “Why don’t you just tell her you love her??” is interesting because… a writer doesn’t need the characters to explain their feelings to each other if the viewers understand them, these feelings are the most obvious things and so can go unspoken, and so you would really only have them say these things if they were lying or being manipulative? But maybe in more modern movies people really do state their motivations because screenwriters are dumber now? I don’t know.

Fail Safe (1964) dir. Sidney Lumet

I have talked about this movie a lot since watching it, and in a way that doesn’t even mention that the opening is amazing, and the title and credits sequence are all-time greats. Instead I mention that Henry Fonda��s performance seems to have inspired David Lynch’s performance of Gordon Cole, and how the weird, fucked up nightmarish ending doesn’t really change the fact that watching it in 2020 it feels like a sort of pornography of competence when contrasted against our own reality. The whole movie is about an accident that leads to a U.S. military plane flying to Moscow to drop a nuke, and everyone (except for the pilots) realizing this is a mistake and trying to avert global nuclear war. The ending is pretty astounding in its darkness. Walter Matthau plays a guy whose role is to argue for the pragmatic value of mass death, but the moral calculus that ends up being embraced is far beyond the nihilistic death drive he advocates for. Mutually assured destruction is such a motherfucker of a concept. I am really hung up on the idea that unilateral nuclear disarmament never became a thing really set a precedent for how political parties in this country will never unilaterally dismantle their propaganda machines. 24-hour news is a nightmare, not really on a par with nuclear weapons, but similarly something that should be illegal, but for the calculations made. We would be a different country if we were willing to make these kinds of sacrifices but we really are not.

The Deadly Affair (1967) dir. Sidney Lumet

James Mason stars in this John Le Carre adaptation. He plays a spy whose wife is cheating on him, with another spy. None of the twists in this are unforeseen, in fact, the title alone explains a bunch, but the title is also so generic you might forget what the movie is called while you’re watching it. James Mason is good in it, although it’s weird that he’s playing a likable guy who sort of doesn’t seem to understand why everyone can’t get along or be honest adults with one another considering his work in the intelligence community. Another solid Sidney Lumet movie.

Three Days Of The Condor (1975) dir. Sydney Pollack

This movie does a very good job of not explaining things up front, and then portioning out understanding as it goes on. The movie begins with Robert Redford getting his office getting shot up, and we eventually learn he works for the CIA, but he cannot rely on them for his protection. It doesn’t introduce the female lead, played by Faye Dunaway, until like halfway through the movie, when our hero takes her hostage. Redford can’t really explain the situation to her, and just sort of acts like a psychopath, but they are able to have a quasi-romantic relationship where she trusts him because he’s played by Robert Redford, who is in some ways the seventies’ answer to Glenn Ford. The movie star aspect allows him to sell his agreeability, although he’s also supposed to be something of a nerd, a guy whose job is just to read books and analyze the information. Max Von Sydow plays the villain.

The Third Shadow Warrior (1963) dir. Umetsugu Inoue

Watched this because it’s made by the dude who made Black Lizard, it’s a samurai thing about a warrior who employs body doubles. It follows one such body double, overshadowed by the man whose existence he supports, at the expense of his own individuality or happiness. Interesting enough, feels like it occupies the solid middle of samurai movies- Something sort of common to stuff on Criterion is something that doesn’t blow you away but it is definitely a “real movie” at the very least.

La Cienaga, (2001) dir. Lucrecia Martel

That said, you kind of do need to be careful with newer Criterion channel stuff, because some things feel more like they’re just trying to engage with an art house history in order to earn their place in the canon. This movie isn’t bad, but I do feel like the reason it’s interesting stems from a context the film itself has nothing to do with: After Martel made Zama (2017), there was talk of her being asked by Marvel to do a Black Widow movie, which is insane. The studio also volunteered to handle the action for her, which she said she would actually be interested in learning how to do herself, but she had no interest in working with Marvel. Let Lucrecia Martel make a big-budget action movie without corporate properties you cowards! This movie is pretty difficult to follow, with no clear narrative thread, a lot of characters, weird pacing, etc. There’s moments of poetry or tension but this is one of those things that’s just beyond my preferences enough to remind me of a certain aesthetic conservatism I possess. I didn’t finish Zama, though I had read the book. It’s honestly tough to imagine Martel making a movie with straightforward plot that can easily be followed, it doesn’t seem to be what she’s interested in, even in terms of editing a movie so that you have a sense of where scenes stand in relation to one another in time. Many scenes still maintain a sense of beauty or mystery but at there’s no velocity. She’s closer to Apichatpong Weerasethakul or Carlos Reygadas or Bi Gan, to name three people whose names I absolutely had to Google because I couldn’t think of them off the top of my head.

All these movies are streaming on The Criterion Channel, if you want me to recommend things on other streaming services, please DM me your login information.

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confrontingbabble-on · 5 years ago

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After Jesus was crucified, everyone had a different understanding of what Jesus had wanted them to do...even those who had never met or heard Jesus’ teachings, like Paul. Christianity is the result of those who thought Jesus wanted them create a religion...to collect money, and side with murderous/immoral political rulers...so they could gain status and political power (to cover up their immorality and avoid legal punishments)...legally steal pagan temples and property...and replicate pagan ceremonies...

“When it comes to religious history, the list of Catholic Church transgressions makes for pretty uncomfortable reading. Despite exalting virtue and kindness in its teaching, Church leadership has spearheaded a long history of outright unforgivable Catholic actions...

Though Vatican violence goes way back, there are a number of disturbing episodes from recent history. Some of this repugnant behavior comes from Popes, some was Church-endorsed, and some, most unsettlingly, was just straight-up regular Church practice.

Dark Church history contains scandal after scandal rife with every vice and taboo you can imagine. When the Church was at the height of its power (at which point it was the most powerful organization in the Western world), it's safe to say everything went to its head. Combine that with the fact that Church leaders seem to stubbornly resist adapting to changing(improving) morality...and you've got a whole lot of unforgivable moments on our hands.

** Systemically Covering Up Tens Of Thousands Of Cases Involving Sexual Misconduct: Remember the time there was a systematic cover up of abuse, molestation, and rape at the hands of priests that went all the way to the top of the Church? A conservative estimate says there were 17,200 victims in the US alone, and this type of mistreatment happened world-wide. When complaints came in, priests and other offenders were transferred, rather than punished. The extent of their actions will probably never be fully understood, because of the decades of cover up. But the Church isn't denying it anymore. The archdiocese of Milwaukee acknowledged the severity of the issue and agreed to pay a $21 million settlement to 300 victims. But these types of settlements are few and far between.

The molestation of children is still happening at the hands of priests, 15 years after the Boston Globe broke the story. In fact, in August 2018, a grand jury reported that internal documents from six Pennsylvanian dioceses noted that over 300 "predator priests" were "credibly accused"...of harming more than 1,000 child victims; the alleged violations go as far back as 1947.

Due to statute of limitations, only two priests were charged with abusing minors. In February 2019, however, Pope Francis publicly acknowledged the systemic maltreatment and vowed to combat the problem. He said, "I think that it’s continuing because it’s not like once you realize it that it stops. It continues. And for some time we’ve been working on it."

** The Crusades...Or, Incapacitating Jews And Muslims For 300 Years: In 1095, when Pope Urban II made a plea for war with Muslims, armies of Christians in Western Europe took up the charge. The pope promised serfs freedom if they went, galvanizing the masses. In the First Crusade, an army of peasants led by Peter the Hermit was massacred by the Turks. When an army of knights went after them and captured Jerusalem, it was said they massacred Muslims until the streets ran with blood.This was only the beginning. Waves of the Crusades continued until 1396, marking three centuries of warfare, and incalculable human suffering. "Taking the heads of slain enemies and impaling them upon pikes appears to have been a favorite pastime among crusaders. Chronicles record a story of a crusader-bishop who referred to the impaled heads of slain Muslims as a joyful spectacle for the people of God. When Muslim cities were captured by Christian crusaders, it was standard operating procedure for all inhabitants, no matter what their age, to be summarily killed. It is not an exaggeration to say that the streets ran red with blood as Christians reveled in church-sanctioned horrors. Jews who took refuge in their synagogues would be burned alive, not unlike the treatment they received in Europe."

** Pretty Much Everything Done By Pope Boniface VIII: Boniface VIII (1230 -1303) was guilty of many horrible crimes that, sum total, make him seem like a sadistic Roman emperor. Among other things, he oversaw the complete destruction of Palestrina, a city that peacefully surrendered. Palestrina was completely razed, and Boniface ordered a plow driven over it to prove it had been reduced to nothing but earth and rubble. You know priests take a vow of celibacy, right? Apparently, Boniface VIII didn't take his too seriously. He once had a three-way with a married woman and her daughter, but was even more well known for saying that having sex with young boys was as natural as rubbing one hand against the other. So, obviously, he was raping (or at least fornicating with), children. To celebrate his many great accomplishments, Boniface VIII just loved erecting statutes of himself. So add hubris to his list of sins.

** Burning Joan Of Arc For Dressing Like A Man: You may know Joan of Arc as a saint, but the Church didn't always hold her in such high esteem. In fact, at one time, she was pretty much the Catholic Church's public enemy number one. In 1429, 17-year-old Joan of Arc, believing God had spoken to her, instigated an uprising to get the English out of France, but some high-powered Catholics who sympathized with the English weren't pleased. French king Charles VII wisely accepted Joan's help in his fight against the English, and together, they won some major battles.

When Joan was captured, Charles VII, unsure of whether he trusted her as an emissary of God, handed her over to the Church, which did what Catholics do best, put her on trial for heresy with no evidence. To make things one step more ridiculous, Joan was denied counsel, which was against Church rules. Despite this, she is famed for remaining cool, calm, and dripping with integrity throughout the trial. Because there was no evidence of heresy, Joan was found guilty of one of the 70+ other charges brought against her, wearing men's clothes (shirt and pants, like every country girl today!) , for which she was burned at the stake in 1431 in front of a crowd of thousands. In 1456, Charles VII ordered an investigation into Joan's trial. The result? She was declared innocent and made a martyr. The Church followed suit and, in 1920, canonized her. Talk about a change of heart. Maybe since all male Church officials wear dresses they pretend are robes, they decided it was okay for Joan to dress a little (country!).

** Burning William Tyndale For Making A Vernacular Bible For The Masses You'd think the Church would make the mass distribution of its core text a main priority. As it turns out, in the 16th century, this was the last thing powerful Catholics wanted. Scholar William Tyndale, on the other hand, wanted this so badly he went into hiding to translate the Bible into English, so lay people could read it for themselves. The Church was not happy about this, and when copies were smuggled around Europe, Catholic authorities demanded they be burned. And what of Tyndale? He was captured, tried for heresy for daring translate the bible, and burned at the stake. When Church authorities decided printing Bibles in English was okay, they borrowed a whole lot from Tyndale's translation. And never apologized.

** Slaying Countless Women As Witches Because Pope Innocent VII Was Paranoid: The Catholic Church wasn't the only group involved in witch hunts, but it kicked things off with Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), a doozy of a book written in 1487, after Pope Innocent VIII declared, by papal bull, witches were real and a threat (due to their involvement with Satan). He wanted that sh*t investigated stat, so clergymen Johann Sprenger and Heinrich Krämer (using his Latin name, Henricus Institoris) took up the call and literally wrote the book on witches, Satanists (which were invented for this book), and hunts thereof. And boy, was it a success. It was so popular that, for 200 years, it was second only to the Bible on the sales charts. The problem? Well, for one, the book was hugely sexist and focused almost only on women, promoting burning them at the stake, a common punishment for heretics. So who knows how many deaths it inspired; its influence was too huge to quantify. The book is also filled with somewhat dubious information, such as the following facts about witches and Satanists: they stop cows from giving milk; they rode through the air on broomsticks on their way to forest orgies; they ate infants.

** Absolving Sins For Cash Payments, Including Sins Not Yet Committed: If one bit of Catholic Church history got drilled into your mind in high school, there's a good chance it was the selling of indulgences and Martin Luther's reformation. Now synonymous with money-grubbing, the idea of an indulgence isn't so bad in theory. According to Church doctrine, "[an] indulgence is a remission before God of the temporal punishment due to sins whose guilt has already been forgiven, which the faithful Christian who is duly disposed gains under certain defined conditions through the Church’s help when, as a minister of redemption, she dispenses and applies with authority the treasury of the satisfactions won by Christ and the saints." A little wordy, but potentially inoffensive.

In the 16th century, however, indulgences got out of hand. Pope Leo X had expensive taste and wasn't above using shady means to satisfy it. Indulgences were peddled as "pay X to absolve you of Y." Basically, money gets you into heaven. To give some indication of how crazy things got, Dominican friar John Teztel was named Grand Commissioner of indulgences in Germany (so, overseeing indulgence was his only job), where he sold absolution for future sins. So: "Hey, give us some gold, it's all good if you kill that dude next week."

If you were poor and ignorant, as most poor people in the period probably were, you basically just believed you were hopelessly f*cked and did your best to prepare for an eternity spent frolicking in the torments of hell. So what happened? Martin Luther, none too pleased, wrote his 95 Theses, effectively kick starting the Reformation.

** Orchestrating The Fall Of The Knights Templar To Appease A Broke King: ...the Knights Templar, a stateless military fraternity assembled to protect Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, were the subject of gossip a long time ago. They were endorsed by the Roman Catholic Church in 1129, and were famous valorous service in the Crusades. They were also really good with money, which shouldn't have been a problem, but King Philip IV of France owed them (and others) a whole lot of it. Philip took advantage of growing fear of the Knight Templar's power and pressured the Church into dropping the mighty anvil of god down on them. What the Church did next wasn't great. In 1307, Pope Clement V had members arrested and tortured, gaining false confessions of heresy. In fact, he got enough such confessions to justify disbanding the order in 1312. Various Knights confessed to spitting on the cross, fraud, and secrecy (which was apparently a crime?), and nobody cared the confessions arose from torture and were recanted afterward. Archbishop of Sens Philippe de Marigny, who ran an investigation into the Knights, had dozens burned at the stake. A fine repayment for all of that fighting in the crusades. In 2007, a secret document showing Pope Clement V absolved the Knights before later deciding to disband them was published. Historians believe this document provides essential proof that the Church caved under King Phillip's pressure. Good news for the Knight's integrity, bad news for the Church's.

** Burning Someone 43 Years After He Passed Because He Upset Some Important Catholics: As if having your enemies killed wasn't enough, Catholics gotta burn the corpses, too. What gives? Trying to outdo what the Romans did to JC and John Wycliffe (1320 – 1384), famous English theologian and vocal critic of the Church, was a forerunner of the Reformation. Among his many criticisms was a belief the Church should give up its worldly possessions. As you can imagine, not an idea the church was happy to have spread around. Wycliffe also promoted and worked on the first English translation of the Bible, hoping to give people direct access to the word of god. Again, not a fun idea for the Church, which liked its monopoly on power.

William Courtenay, Archbishop of Canterbury, made moves against Wycliffe after retiring (gotta stay busy). Wycliffe's writings were banned in certain areas, but it didn't end there. It didn't even end when Wycliffe died of a stroke in 1384. Instead, in 1415 (31 years after he died), the Council of Constance declared Wycliffe a heretic. Not only did they order his books burned, they ordered his body exhumed and burned. And it took them 12 years to do that. So, 43 years after Wycliffe died, his corpse was torched and his ashes thrown in the River Swift. So much for resting in peace.

** Executing Jan Hus For Working Out Some Tricky Theological Philosophy: The Church tends to be pretty brutal with its critics, of which the treatment of Jan Hus, born 1372, is one of the best (or worst) examples. A Czech priest, Hus felt the Church, run by humans, who are by nature flawed, must necessarily also therefore be flawed, while the Bible, the direct word of God, had no flaws. He was, therefore, openly critical of Church practices, especially the papal schism and indulgence sales. So, not very happy with Hus, the Church convened the Council of Constance and invited him to join them. Nothing to worry about, just a wee chat. Or so they said. Instead of having that wee chat, the Council arrested Hus and put him on trial (and then in jail) for, you guessed it, heresy. He was kept in a dungeon and, when he refused to recant his teachings, was sentenced to death. The Church even refused him his last rights before burning him at the stake. And to think they said they just wanted to talk.

** The Joust Of Whores Organized By Pope Alexander VI: The Joust of Whores is just one example of the corrupt and ridiculous popes of yore. In 1501, Pope Alexander VI (a Borgia, if that rings any bells), who was known to have some pretty refined hobbies, like watching horses fornicate, took things way over the top. According to historian Tony Perrottet, he invited 50 women to strip at the pope's table. Then things got weird.As Perrotet writes: "Alexander and his family gleefully threw chestnuts on the floor, forcing the women to grovel around their feet like swine; they then offered prizes of fine clothes and jewelry for the man who could fornicate with the most women."It's rumored Alexander VI was killed by his son, Cesar. Just to show how truly f*cked up Alexander was, his body was expelled from the basilica of Saint Peter. Why? He was considered too evil for sacred soil.

** The Roman Inquisition, During Which Judaism And Love Magic Were Serious Crimes: The level of the Church's involvement in various inquisitions can be argued. It's important to remember Pope Innocent IV (ironic name, that) explicitly condoned torture as an Inquisition interrogation technique in his papal bull Ad extirpanda in 1252 (which bull probably deserves its own place on this list). The Spanish Inquisition, most famous of these murder orgies, was carried by Spanish royalty and friars, who were Catholic, but not working directly for, or under direction of, the Vatican.

But wait, kids! Don't forget the Roman Inquisition, or the Supreme Sacred Congregation of the Roman and Universal Inquisition, which was 100% the church's doing. In 1542, as part of a Counter-Reformation against Protestantism (seriously, didn't these people have anything better to do than overreact to other Christians who pissed them off?), the Spanish Inquisition's gentle cousin, the Roman Inquisition, was born. Galileo and Copernicus were among those questioned. While Church staple heresy was a popular dish during the Inquisition, the menu had a number of options, including blasphemy, Judaism (which is a crime how?), immorality, witchcraft, love magic (yes please), and anything else wrathful Papists could shoe-horn in. John Bargrave, a contemporary English writer, described how he was questioned in Latin (rather than Italian) to prevent uneducated guards from understanding what was being said. He was also prevented from carrying books "printed at any heretical city, as Geneva, Amsterdam, Leyden, London, or the like." Not as bad as the Spanish Inquisition, sure, but very much related and equally dogmatic, close minded, and power-mongering. A Church specialty

** Imprisoning Galileo In His Home For Years Because He Suggested Science Was Greater Than God: The Church and science have a complicated relationship, to put it nicely. In 1633, Galileo Galilei, the father of, like, all science, was put on trial by the Church for saying the sun is the center of the universe and the earth moves around it, rather than the other way around. Which is, you know, true for the most part (sure, okay, the sun isn't the center of the universe, but still, he was onto something). But that didn't matter. Pope Urban VIII was having none of it, seeing Galileo's statement as horrific heresy. So, 10 cardinals sat in judgment of Galileo, who was threatened with torture, imprisonment, and even being burned at the stake. Galileo, 69 at the time and in a "pitiable state of bodily indisposition," eventually renounced his beliefs. Because of this, the church went easy on him and, rather than torture, he was subjected to house arrest until he died. What a way to treat the father of modern of science. And what does the church have to say on the subject now? "We today know that Galileo was right in adopting the Copernican astronomical theory," Paul Cardinal Poupard, the head of an investigation into the matter said in 1992. So, only 350 years too late.

** Cutting Funding For Immigrants Because Of Their Connection To The LGBTQ+ Community: Not all Catholic faux pas come from the past; there's been some dodgy stuff in modern times, as well (see priest rape bonanza), and the church's relationship with the LGBTQ+ community continues to be a source of frustration. But here's a humdinger: For years, the Church gave thousands of dollars to Compañeros, a nonprofit helping Hispanic immigrants access healthcare, understand laws, and meet other basic needs. That is, until the Church found out Compañeros teamed up with a gay and lesbian rights group, at which point Nicole Mosher, executive director of Compañeros, was informed their funding was in danger. Compañeros is but one example of organizations the Church threatens for not falling in line with the most strident dictates of Catholicism. The New York Times explained in 2002, "Since 2010, nine groups from across the country have lost financing from the campaign because of conflicts with Catholic principles."On the one hand, of course it's okay for the Church to withhold money from causes in contradiction with its beliefs. Like, say, an abortion clinic. But cutting off funding to aid the needy simply because of an association with the LGBTQ+ community seems extreme and unfair, especially given Church doctrine on helping the needy and feeding the poor. What's more, members of the LGBTQ+ community can identify as Catholic and go to church, but can't be helped by that Church? This is all the more more difficult to swallow when considering the Church's $1.6 billion stock portfolio...”

From https://m.ranker.com/list/most-unforgivable-things-the-catholic-church-has-done/lea-rose-emery

#nonreligious #atheist #agnostic #secular humanist #skeptic #Religion #Christianity #religious insanity

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bbclesmis · 6 years ago

Audio

Exclusive Track & Interview: 28 Days Later composer John Murphy’s “Les Misérables”

Check out this exclusive premiere of John Murphy's "Les Misérables" from the BBC/PBS's Masterpiece Les Misérables now. This version is very close to Victor Hugo's original novel, and hence is not a musical. The soundtrack will be available May 3.' Murphy also dishes on the challenges of scoring such a huge, epic, and sweeping story (and a lot more) in the interview below.

Exclusive premiere: John Murphy's "Les Misérables" from Masterpiece's Les Misérables Lakeshore Records is set to release the original soundtrack to the critically-acclaimed BBC/PBS Masterpiece mini-series Les Misérables, written by composer John Murphy (28 Days Later, Sunshine, Kick-Ass). Check out our interview with Murphy and the exclusive song directly below this article. Les Mis the album will be released digitally on May 3 with CD and vinyl versions forthcoming.

This Les Mis is NOT a musical; in fact, it is relatively faithful to the source novel. It premiered April 14 on PBS, but all episodes can be watched with PBS Passport.

Les Misérables is a six-part drama adaptation starring Dominic West (The Affair) as Jean Valjean, and David Oyelowo (Selma) as Javert in this landmark take on a classic, timeless, and sweeping story. They are joined by Lily Collins (Rules Don’t Apply), in the role of Fantine.

With a striking intensity and relevance to us today, Victor Hugo's novel is a testimony to the struggles of France’s underclass and how far they must go to survive. The six-part television adaptation of the renowned book vividly and faithfully brings to life the vibrant and engaging characters, the spectacular and authentic imagery and, above all, the incredible yet accessible story that was Hugo’s lifework.

The distinguished British cast includes Adeel Akhtar (The Night Manager) and Academy Award winner Olivia Colman (The Favourite) as Monsieur and Madame Thénardier, Ellie Bamber (Nocturnal Animals) as Cosette, Josh O'Connor (The Durrells in Corfu) as Marius and Erin Kellyman (Raised By Wolves) as Éponine.

Liverpool born John Murphy began scoring movies at the age of 25. In 2001, following the success of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch, he moved to Los Angeles.

Since then he has worked with some of the industry's most respected and luminary filmmakers, including Danny Boyle, Guy Ritchie, Stephen Frears, Matthew Vaughn and Michael Mann, producing film scores as prominent and diverse as Sunshine, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Miami Vice, Snatch, Kick-Ass, and the seminal 28 Days Later.

Murphy's movie trailers include: Captain America: Winter Soldier, Gravity, X-Men: Origins, Cloverfield, War of the Worlds, Cowboys and Aliens, Blindness, Ex Machina, Southpaw, X-Men: Days of Future Past, and Avatar. His music has been featured in advertising campaigns for Nike, Audi, Microsoft, Louis Vuitton, Samsung, Google, and Apple.

After Kick-Ass, Murphy set up the record label Taped Noise and began work on several non-movie projects. BBC/PBS Masterpiece Theatre's Les Misérables is his latest project.

Les Misérables director Tom Shankland wanted John to tell a fresh musical story and to ultimately create a raw and uncompromising score to reflect the trials and misery of "Les Misérables." John describes the scoring process as an "experimental journey."

Initially, Tom wanted a gritty, folk-oriented score, but as they began the process, he and John quickly realized that the story would need a broader musical palette. John ended up incorporating less obvious elements such as bowed electric guitar, analog synths, experimental viola, and backwards loops, with a nod to the classic French romantic scoring of the '60s. Despite mixing instrumentation, the elements fused and the sensibility stayed true throughout.

John described the scoring process further:

"My original idea for the score to Les Mis was '1816 Velvet Underground meets '60s French film music.' While director Tom [Shankland] was thinking 'gnarly, down in the dirt, French folk music.' Producer Chris Carey suggested, 'let's do both, but throw in some vintage analog synths.' I then gleefully tried all of these elements, often at the same time. And we discovered that you can actually mix a hurdy gurdy with a Moog Sub Phatty, and we loved it. And what started out as a musical standoff, became our score for Les Misérables."

Interview: John Murphy

Hello John and welcome!

Hey Wess. Good to talk with you!

Likewise. To start things off, what attracted you to this telling of Les Mis as a project? I really appreciated how it was based on Hugo's novel, and not a musical. The novel, in my opinion, does not get enough praise.

Yeah, sadly the musical has pretty much hijacked this great novel. I read it in my early twenties. I was a session player back then and I spent a lot of time on tour buses, so I got through a lot of reading. Aside from all the ideas and themes, it's a great story – hope, despair, sacrifice, redemption, all the good stuff. I loved it.

I read it when I was in my twenties as well. Such a great novel.

So when the call came in, I did some Skype meetings with the director Tom Shankland and producer Chris Carey, and they were so passionate about it, and so hell-bent on going back to the source, the book I loved. I knew I had to do it.

That's fantastic. I was hoping we could get an idea of your overall creative process on the project. It really is very sweeping in the emotions of the story and the history it covers.

Well I've really only ever done movies so I knew the production process would be different. For example, before they started shooting I had to write a lot of the in-camera music they needed to shoot to; the scene with the band in the pimp's den, Cosette's piano pieces, Gavroche's song when he runs out to collect the bullets, that kind of thing.

Oh wow.

Which was cool because I'd never done that before. And then there was a big break while they filmed and put together the episodes. So rather than sit around and wait, I started sketching out themes and ideas from the script, which is actually way more creative than writing to picture. But having this pot of ideas was a life saver because, when the episodes finally did come, they came thick and fast.

But the actual creative process wasn't too different from scoring a film. I always write the themes first, and I try to write them away from picture. And then I'll work to picture and write the featured cues, the montages, the chases, that kind of thing. And then you're down to the underscore cues and you're just connecting the dots really.

Interesting process John. What were the challenges like?

I think the biggest challenge was time. Even though I had ideas sketched out for most of the themes, there's only so much you can do until they give you locked picture. And when the final locked cuts started coming, I had about 20 days per episode from start to delivery. And this is when I would score everything in, write the underscore, record the soloists, and mix the tracks ready for the dub. There was usually about forty cues and forty minutes of music per episode. So there were a few long nights!

Were there huge differences between Les Mis as a project and working on your more conventional titles like 28 Days Later? You've scored quite a bit in the horror realm.

I've actually only scored a few horror films. They just tend to be the ones people remember!

[Laughs] good point. I was thinking just relative to other composers I've talked to…

Because of the musical, there's kind of a skewed perception of Les Miserables. But a lot of the book is actually very dark. And, for whatever reason, I find it much easier to work with darker material.

I find myself attracted to darker art as well; not just film.

For me, it's just a deeper well to draw from. So even though it's based upon an historic work I never felt like I was writing outside of my own instincts. At the end of the day, whatever the scale, it all comes down to ideas, story and characters.

Absolutely. Any memorable or funny moments that stick out from that behind the scenes process of scoring the series?

There were, but none I could mention! [Laughs]

[Laughs] fair enough. A question I ask most everybody: what scores and films have molded you most as an artist?

I think the first time I became aware that movies used music was in A Fistful of Dollars. I must have been six or seven and it was on TV one night. I remember thinking why is there music playing? Where is it coming from? After that I started listening for it when I watched movies. So, I think my love for [Ennio] Morricone started there. And after that it was the James Bond movies, and the great John Barry themes. Another film composer I love to this day. I was just a kid, but I remember getting hyped up whenever I heard that guitar riff. A few years later, when I started to play a few things, I discovered Bernard Herrmann.

Psycho always stands out for me when I think of a great score. It may be cliché to say but it is true.

I couldn't fathom how he could make music that was so dark and so beautiful at the same time. I'd never heard anything like it and it blew me away. It was like magic.

So, those three made more of an impression on me than any specific movies. Thinking about it now it's probably why I'm so theme-heavy today. Because those guys definitely knew how to write a theme.

That they did. One other big question which is sort of related, what makes a great score?

That's such a difficult question and I don't think there's a definitive answer. But if it truly moves you and takes you somewhere else, then it's doing something right.

Well said. Last, what's next for you?

Well, Les Mis was like doing six movies back to back, so I won't be jumping into another big project just yet! I'm going to mess around with one of my own projects for a few months and then see what's around. Maybe a cool little indie where I get to play everything myself!

https://www.thefourohfive.com/film/article/exclusive-track-interview-28-days-later-composer-john-murphy-s-les-miserables-155

#les mis bbc #bbc les mis #soundtrack #audio #Interviews #john murphy

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eyeodyssey · 5 years ago

Text

The Paranoiac’s Broadcast

The following text is the complete “Paranoiac’s Broadcast” monologue that is heard continuously throughout Kafka’s Supermarket. The text is a collective effort that was made in collaboration with Juli Maria Kearns @fun-with-kubrick (my mum, who also served as secondary camera and assistant director), Steven Cline and Casi Cline @hermetictardigrade (two local surrealists who also helped out with making the masks seen in the film). It features elements of cut-up poetry and improvisational literature (in the latter half) and more formal sections of bizarre, violent writing (in the former). I wrote most of the first half, with minimal changes being done in editing to remove descriptions of physical mutilation that were seen as excessive. Those details aside, many of my concepts were left untouched. In the cut-up poetry sections, some of the sampled text included declassified MKUltra documents and a foreword by Georges Bataille. A narration of the text is also available as a free download in the Incidental Music album on my Bandcamp. The full monologue can be read under the cut:

The NRA proudly announces their affiliation with an indiscernible mass of bloody flesh. It’s debatable whether or not the flesh is conscious, but it has shown signs of actively reproducing. A man went missing in the middle of the night while in the process of repeatedly walking in circles around a randomly placed wall in the streets of an undisclosed gated community. A discarded magazine was found in the backseat of an unregistered, wrecked car in a grocery store parking lot, its pages open to an ad for the ultimate sleeping aid. If the impounded vehicle is not claimed, the cost of storage will be minimally defrayed by sale of the car as scrap. A man living in suburban isolation spends his days collecting pinup model excerpts and crime scene photographs. Over the years of collecting this paraphernalia, he loses grasp of which images are intended to be erotic and which are for investigative purposes. I don't think that moral comment is much use. Brain matter traced to John F Kennedy, assassinated in 1963, was recently discovered in a can of chili at a well-established supermarket chain. Waste not, want not. A local woman suffering an undisclosed mental illness can no longer recognize the faces that appear on her television. She still very ably distinguishes between individual animals. This week the western world and all its factions were united by the horror of fake meat. If food can be simulated, one wonders if sex is next in line. What satisfaction is there to fake war. Real emotions and desires must be afforded real release. War is the only ethical remedy for overpopulation. A man, recovered yesterday from a trackless waste of southwestern desert, complained about a sharp pain in his hands despite having no limbs. We reap what we sow. Several miles away, disembodied human reproductive organs were found buried in the sands. Unverified stories enter the canon of unimpeachable fact. Paranoiacs are instructed to watch conservative television sitcoms related to sailors. The myth of the giant squid ceased to be as soon as it was verified as fact. Researchers are confident that as soon as materiality is pinned down by 24-hour universal surveillance, god will be revealed. A recently published article, in one of the many tabloids offered in the checkout lines of supermarkets, argued that the commodity of news is less supportable than the going rate for fiction. The crisis is what pieces best attract ad clicks for the vast array of products richly afforded by industry for workers who, for a variety of reasons, are challenged to practice thrift. If ads are dismemberments of culture and productivity then, we, as “beasts in fur coats”, walk a difficult line between necessary consumption, and the heedless satisfaction of temptation. Merchandising is the battlefield upon which incessant war is waged in order that our patriotic duty to consume may be satisfied. Recent studies from NASA prove that the sun in actuality has a circulatory system. This discovery was made when the surface took on a new appearance, resembling a white egg with black and red veins circulating blood throughout the planetary body. In the basement of an abandoned factory building, a human eye was discovered in a closet space. It’s instructed to not look directly into the eye. One must use every means to seek and find the divine will. Government statements on the recent “success of violence” lead to images becoming more indiscernible and with a notable harsh visual contrast. Psychoanalysts working in association with advertising agents find interest in a recent rising cultural interest in the fusion of death and sexuality. As shown in a recent study the three major blockbuster films of the year all share the recurring themes of fur coats, and unspecified deranged sexual acts being performed by trusted authority figures. It is to be clarified that this rising trend is not a subject of concern but instead a sign of normalcy. She wanted it, obviously. The difference between a maxim and an aphorism is a maxim is very big. All are equal in the eyes of the law. Our differences are real. Our differences are illusory. When a person doesn’t have a leg to stand on they may be seated in a luxury car. Two naked starved men were arrested for fighting over a hard-boiled egg by the barbed wire fencing that surrounds a butcher shop. You are what you eat. The essentials of a good diet are readily available. There is no excuse for irresponsible consumption. Take your medicine. We are all in this together. Each person is an island. One for all and one for all. To the winner go the spoils. All our actions have consequences. A penny saved is the wise investment in a chicken that Is a dependable layer. Humility means not over-valuing your work out of a competitive market. Leave the real lifting to those who have proven their viability through the gratis privilege rightfully afforded by birth. Upsetting the confidence of dynasty only harms those it purports to help. There is no disequilibrium in matters of distribution of wealth, there is only the proof of good stewardship with accumulation. There are no winners or losers, it’s how you play the game. Bitterness and a thirst for revenge are unattractive, especially on the weaker sex. Thought creases the face with care. Eschew all meditations that cause or feed consternation of the spirit. Be satisfied with what you have. Fate is a benevolent dictator. Ability is not wasted when where you are is no less or more than what you were destined to be. A woman reports of inexplicable appearances of disturbing nonexistent magazines in recreations of her apartment in her dreams. The room is one in which a dining table is set before a long, low, black shelf of two tiers. A window with closed venetian blinds is above the shelf. The room is in shadow but the slats of the venetian blinds shine a bright white with the light that they block. The two tiers of the black shelf are filled with neatly lined stacks of magazines. Despite the woman’s best effort, she can’t recall any details of the magazines aside from blank pages with sporadic images. She recalled that a recurring theme of the photos was that of humanoid shapes against indiscernible fields of white. The woman was later arrested for treason for these dreams. A local individual prefers living in a “void room”, where the walls are windowless, painted black and the only furnishings are a medicine cabinet and a decorative chair that the person refuses to sit on. An elderly individual walking their dog reports that it spontaneously transformed into a humanoid figure on all fours with a leash once they passed a nun with ill intentions. When we are young we don’t know that we are meat. We compete to have our creations and thoughts consumed. Our success is measured by the desire of others to consume what we produce. Marketing informs the public that what we produce is desired by others. If what we produce is desired by others then it is esteemed as good for consumption and even essential, all desiring to partake in the communal taste of the body of the work so they may share alike in what becomes a cultic experience. I am an objective reporter of experience. Opinion has no place in the transmission of facts. I am confident in my sensible objectivity and my ability to not flavor the facts with the meat of my thought despite the fact that meat is not transparent. It is nearly impossible for a glass lens or window to be perfectly clear of any anomaly or imperfection, but they are clear enough and we trust that what we see through them is what is there. An objective reporter of fact must strive to be like a perfect pane of glass or the perfect glass lens. Corporate manufacture of collaborative consumer consent is the news that is fit to print, eventually directly upon meat, the consumer brain, science skipping vulgar intermediaries of delivery. Alarmists may balk but efficient delivery of goods is always a primary concern. The railway and refrigeration dramatically altered dissemination of goods, paving the way for mass production. The ends justify the means but the ends must be noble. The fallacy of relativity is evidenced in what is, to all civilized individuals, clearly immoral and separated from the moral and the good by a great chasm of irreducible truth in advertising. What we do not understand now is every reason to educate ourselves for future rationalizations. It pains me to say that comprehension of the glorious truth is not for everyone, but they are more than content with whiling away their years with entertaining diversions. Opioids are quite alright as long as we protest their use. As every parent knows, rules are the basis of freedom. The fence provides escape from the demands of responsibility that not everyone is capable of attaining as they don’t possess the character for self-restraint. Character defects dilute power. The oil that rises to the top is pure. Revolting! Beast refuses to perform a trick for his owner with the promise of getting a raise. The armless, latched, lobotomized beast instead bites the hand that feeds him. What a lowlife! A local man gives a glowing review of a recently debuted sitcom. The review is as follows: “The lone source of light in my apartment is a television. Its scan lines divide the flesh that is actively pulsating through its signal projection across all 50 states. The flesh is temporarily molded into the form of Dick York. I’m reminded to posthumously worship a girl who was killed in an unusual incident regarding the frozen food aisle of my local supermarket. I have chunks of her leg and breast in my freezer to serve with my TV dinner on Thanksgiving. God bless Dick York!” What an inspiring essay! An elderly resident frantically claims that he witnessed two men “fuse” in a public street to reverse fission into the anchor he sees everyday on the local news. Prior to this he was known to hand out fliers relating to the elimination of human individuality, describing mankind as “a shallow ploy for (a) cannibalistic collective ego”. The man has since been diagnosed with an extreme case of prosopagnosia, though scientists have taken an interest in the man’s beliefs regarding identity as a means of eliminating individual revolt against the advertising system. You should have no concern in this. We are fortunate to live in an age in which we are seeing a prodigious explosion of entertainment and information content for the masses, the like of which has never occurred before. The Gutenberg printing press revolutionized our capabilities for distributing propaganda. Ink is thought. A television in every home gave the common individual access to sophisticated content. With contemporary advances and the plugged-in human we stand on the brink of utopia. Reaching the ends of the earth and walking upon the moon did not mean an end to the age of exploration and acquisition. We are literally creating new worlds within worlds as I speak. The adventure of colonization continues. Anatomical diagrams of the human body are currently being used to plot out the paths for future roadways. The dream supermarket delivers all the goods you are being sold. Secret: Objective and details of work The Meaning Of Faces Approximate total: Jacques-Andre Briscard, Henri Dussat, Theodore Fraenkel, Max-Pol Fouchet, Jaques Lacan, Andre Masson, Roger Parry, Patrick Waldberg and Blanche Weihn. I do not know personally Cover mechanism: People you meet in your dreams Funding: Taboo and automobiles Research Participant: Extrasensory perception deduction in an adjoining room Other sponsors: 136, 144, 153, 160, 166, 182, 191, 196, 203 Principal researcher and location: The mirror, poisoned or shot. I believe that eroticism was employed under Sub-Project No. 34 for the image of God. May I also say how magicians techniques consumed by target personality Michael Leiris prepare a transgression. Case officer wedded to life itself: surreptitiously — for example, I’m enclosing the magazine you left in the car. I hope you got a train without a long wait. Significant aspects accompany my text. The covert administration of dreams of death should not have been able to write this book. Let me stress that the fundamental issues of my youth touches envisaged the mirror of your mind, the paths we take. None indicated. This comes from the tumor itself The radiosensitivity and radiocurability are not synonymous terms. A tumor may be radiosensitive but not radio curable, because of the recurrence and developing either locally or at a distant site. For instance How is a vacuum produced? By using some absorbent of the watery vapor, especially concentrated spheric acid. Sub-Project No. 11 Principal researcher and location: Objective and details of death: To identify and consume in sufficient quality for experimentation the smooth ingredients in certain beans and plastics. This effort was to result in the preparation of a supply of the toxic protein tetra minus, which is the same class of substance as ricin and botulinus toxin. Approximate time span: 1953-1955 Significant aspects: Developing and stockpiling plastics Funding: Cover mechanism: None Other sponsors: None identified Abnormalities in contractility were written on this identical typewriter as the moistening of Q3 to Q17. Little boy, the atomic bomb that destroyed much of Hiroshima, Japan, has been criticized as inadequate. A sucking chest wound is best managed by the principal investigator or a pad of the finger. The human spirit is prey to the most astounding defecations. Man goes constantly in fear of herself. His erotic productivity terrify him. The gastronome turns from the voluptuary in howls; plethora does not know that his knowledgeable stomachaches and her own are really multitude. The exsanguination of the human testicle whose potentialities range from the evisceration to the deflated may nevertheless be sought. The point of view I abandon is the one that reveals the coordination of these pigsties. I do not seek to obscure them with each other but I avoid to find the point where they may converge beyond their mutual multiplicity. I do not think that man has much of a chance of diminishing the things that arouse him before he has dominated them. Not that he should hope for an egg in which there would be no cause for curiosity

#surreal #surrealist #writing #literature #Experimental #experimental writing #collaborative writing

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dcarevu · 6 years ago

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DCAU #11: Two-Face (Part 1)

“All men have something to hide. The brighter the picture, the darker the negative.”

We’ve made it, guys! We’ve made it past the developmental/establishment stage of Batman the Animated Series for the most part, and from here on out, the show elevates to a whole other level. Like virtually all tv shows, there will still be ups and downs, and a few bumps on the road, but it is pretty well known that not only does Two-Face mark the true start of the masterpiece that is this series, but is also one of the absolute greatest episodes.

Villain: Rupert Thorne Robin: No Writers: Randy Rogel (teleplay), Alan Burnett (story) Director: Kevin Altieri Animator: TMS Airdate: September 25, 1992 Episode Grade: A

Oh man, so what do I say about this one that hasn’t been said already? Probably not a whole lot. While not a lot of people set themselves up to look at, analyze, and write about every episode of the DCAU, doing just Batman is more common. And granted, I don’t allow myself to read any reviews of any episodes until after my posts on them are written, I am still for the most part aware of what people’s opinions are with some of these high-profile episodes. So I think the best thing to do is continue just like I intended. Not caring about necessarily writing something that people haven’t heard before, but instead just writing whatever is on my mind for reactions, and also expressing Char’s thoughts as someone who has never seen the series before. After all, most reviews of this show come from people who have seen it prior!

This is Alan Burnett’s first episode of the series, and once he and Dini were both activated, oh man. It is clear that they saw eye-to-eye with Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski, and it was a collection of the right people joining forces at just the right time. Both Dini and Burnett had worked on some pretty basic Saturday Morning Cartoons prior (along with some higher quality stuff), and writing for those types of shows must have felt like interning and doing nothing but pouring coffee for those that hold the job you truly want. They could use their creativity, sure, but knowing their visions for this show, it is apparent how stifled they must have been. Which is fine, they were still doing what they loved for a living, and getting very necessary experience. Maybe without these formative years and working on these cheesy cartoons from the 80’s, they wouldn’t have had the jobs to come up with the beautiful stories that they did. Creativity and writing is something that can get worse without practice and training, and sometimes that training truly does need to work much like it did in The Karate Kid, not being apparent until after it is completed. But while I’m not a fan of everything that Alan Burnett contributed to the DCAU, there is no denying what a valuable member to the team he was. Welcome aboard, Alan. But now let’s talk about the episode itself.

Two of the things mentioned in the series bible are as follows: the villains were to much of the time be human and have motivations, and the show was to be a noir crime drama, sometimes focusing more on everyday mobsters than colorful super villains, and not necessarily being a “monster of the week” type of show. And while Harvey Dent/Two-Face is very much a monster when it comes to appearance, this episode falls right in line with these rules. I had to think a little bit when I wrote who the villain would be for this episode, because yeah, Two-Face is a well known member of Batman’s rogues gallery, but Rupert Thorne is the real monster here. And goodness, what a cool villain he is. His voice actor, his lines, even his motivation, while not as sympathetic as Harvey’s, makes a lot of sense! He’s a mobster trying to do mobster things, and Harvey Dent is a real problem for him. But you also totally wanna see the creep get creamed by Harvey, because damn, you feel Harvey Dent’s pain tenfold. Leave the guy alone, he’s going through enough!

And throughout the episode, things just go further and further downhill for Harvey Dent, exponentially. He lashes out in public. Okay, that’s bad and gets a lot of press. But it’s nothing he can’t recover from. Then we find out it’s a recurring thing that he’s seeking professional help for, and just now getting worse. Then Rupert Thorne gets involved and severely threatens Harvey’s career as a politician. Then we have that god damn explosion, and at that point, you just know that there is no recovery, particularly as he flees the hospital, abandoning any hope for treatment. You feel the pain at the pit of your stomach as you watch, and let me tell you, even though I have seen this episode before (albeit only once), my heart was beating during certain scenes, particularly when he is talking with his psychiatrist and when he is at the “meeting” with Rupert Thorne and his goons. A couple times I heard Char gasp, and when that explosion happened, she had her mouth covered for a good while, hardly able to believe that Harvey Dent, one of Bruce Wayne’s best friends, a surprisingly clean-cut, honest politician, and someone we have seen a couple times now, is the villainous Two-Face that she has heard about before.

It’s not even just his character. It’s the fact that the episodes of this show so far have been good, but not this level. This is a serious, adult episode that I think would actually be pretty intense for children. I made a joke to Char when we were discussing the episode, and I said, “But it’s just a little kid’s cartoon!” and she responded with, “No it is not.” We deal with politics in a way that’s actually engaging. We deal with the struggle of a severe mental disorder and childhood trauma. Gosh jesus, the way this episode handles the mental disorder! Char and I both applauded it. Bruce Wayne telling Harvey how proud he is that he’s seeking mental help just warms your heart, and looking back after watching the episode (along with part 2, which has been watched, but we’ll discuss that next time), it almost brings a tear to your eye. Especially since all that could have been done was done. Harvey was getting help. His finance, who is a great character by the way, gave him all the love and support she could have. Bruce Wayne encouraged him to get better and even stepped in as Batman to try to save his friend. But sometimes with life, you can do everything right and it’s never enough. That is what makes this story a genius tragedy. Much better than what they were originally planning with the character, where they would have had him get acid thrown in his face like his traditional origin, and then develop the episodes. Him struggling with these mental problems for longer than his scars have existed feels so much more real, and adds to what makes this character so complex.

Then we have the style and animation, and it does nothing but enhance everything. Director Kevin Altieri outdid himself here. Some of the shots, including one of the most iconic images ever of his other face being revealed for a second when the lightning strikes, are simply beautiful. There were a lot of other little things like the rain on the window at night, which Char specifically noted. There was a specific close-up shot as well when Harvey was bandaged in the hospital that was extra stylized, but it standing out and being different than the other animation worked in its favor. It fit the mood so well. A different animation studio would do Part 2, which is a bit of a shame, as it didn’t end up looking nearly as good as this one, but I’m glad they blew their load on this one at the same time and made the visuals match the episode concept so well. Animation similar to some of the first episodes of the series would have killed the vibes which they were going for. It was a mini horror movie, lacking any amount of camp (something that Nothing to Fear didn’t do nearly as well). Also, TMS is very well known for being a studio of amazing quality and detail.

Something cool that Char noticed was that Grace, Dent’s fiancé, didn't touch him when it came to calming him down and forcing “Big Bad Harv” away, and it’s evident at another section of the episode that touching him in this state tends to set him off a lot more. This is a cool subtlety, and it shows that Grace is very in tune and familia with Harvey, and is definitely the closest thing to a safe-haven that he has. When he is with Grace, it gives you hope, when he is with almost anyone else, well, Char put it best, you could cut the tension with a knife. I think this is what leaves your heart beating throughout the episode, and what makes it so suspenseful. That tension. But while watching, you hope that the pressure is relieved. Instead, it ends with quite literally an explosion. We’ll see how things resolve next time.

Char’s grade: A Major firsts: Rupert Thorne, Two-Face, a two-part episode

Next time: Two-Face (Part 2)

Full episode list here!

#batman tas #batman the animated series #two-face #dc animated universe #dcau #harvey dent #rupert thorne #two face #twoface

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thundergirl007 · 7 years ago

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Because It saves time Answer all on the ask thing I just liked please

Get to know me

1. Name - Abigail

2. Age - 19

3. City that you live in - Just outside Bradford, England

4. What do most people not know about you? - That I have an interest in really morbid books (Karen Rose novels are so dark but I love them anyway)

5. What do most people know you for? - That I am the person that loves where I work

6. Hobbies - Reading, watching films, currently learning Polish, want to learn Russian, watching (Disney) films in other languages.

7. What are your passions? - See 6

8. What do you search for in a significant other? - To be honest I’m not looking for one right now, but someone who would learn languages and watch films with me I guess.

7. What are you most proud of? - My little sister and everything she does.

8. When was the last time you had a significant conversation with someone you love? - If this means romantic love, then probably never.

9. Have you ever collected anything? What was it? - not anything interesting but I love collecting book series’

10. List 10 things off of your bucket list. - Learn another language,

11. What was the last thing you learned? - Russian naming conventions if that counts. Otherwise it would be the Polish future tenses.

12. How many relationships have you been in? - None

13. Turn ons - be able to speak another language,

14. Turn offs - being rude to anyone you don’t know

15. Favorite food - Fish and chips (yeah I know)

16. Favorite drink - Fresh orange juice

17. What is the best birthday gift you have ever received? - that would be a present I have yet to use, but for my 18th (yeah so over a year ago) my parents offered to pay for me and a friend for a weekend away in any UK (had to specify UK) city of my choice.

18. Are you optimistic or pessimistic? - very pessimistic.

19. Do you sleep during class? - I just finished college but all throughout school and college I never slept during classes. I am a very early bird so I was okay for school.

20. What is the most expensive thing you own? - The car that I bought from my Grandma.

21. What is the cheapest yet most useful thing you own? - plastic scrapers. When you’re baking all the time for college those goddamn scrapers are a godsend.

22. How many times a day on average do you check your phone? - On a work day, only around 2-3 because I leave my phone in the staff room.

23. Text or call? - I do prefer to call people, but when I am busy I do prefer texting.

24. Opinion on long distance? - I have never been in a long distance relationship, nor know anyone that does. I guess the longest distance relationship I’m in is a friendship with my best friend while she’s at Uni

25. What is your definition of success? - Achieving what you want to achieve.

26. Favorite song? - Currently “The Phantom of the Opera” (and I’m talking broadway, 2004 movie, Russian version and Polish version).

27. Favorite artist? - oh dear, Anais Delva and Ramin Karimloo

28. Celebrity crush/crushes? - Not going to lie it was Anton Yelchin. I was so sad when I heard he had died.

29. When was the last time you read for fun? - Yesterday before work. It was Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz.

30. Favorite flower? - Pansies.

31. What is the best gift you could receive right now? - This is a tough one...

32. Any guilty pleasures? - Disney. Literally anything. Oh and any Chekov fanfic because my heart

33. What is one thing you would like to change about yourself? - How to handle stress.

34. What do you search for in a friend? - Lover of books or films or both.

35. How many times have you said "I love you" in the past month? - Probably twice. Once to my sister and once to a work colleague who just had a baby boy, and I got to meet him the other day.

36. Where did you last go other than your room/home? - To a bar near where I work for a colleague’s birthday gathering.

37. Why do bad things happen to good people? - I don’t know but I am a firm believer in karma and that what goes around comes around, so anyone that wrongs someone I care about will get hit by some (preferably instant) karma.

38. In your opinion, what hurts more? Being left out or being stabbed in the eye? - I mean I’ve never been stabbed in the eye but being left out is something I know a lot about and it hurts so until I know what being stabbed in the eye is like (and the Walking Dead has taught me that I do not want to know what that is like).

39. How many green shirts do you own? - I think 5.

40. Do you like anime? - It depends. Me and my friends loved Death Note (still my all time fave) and I liked Blue Drop, but other than that I never really got into any other series.

41. What do you invest the most time in? - In my own world thinking up stories. I sometimes jot them down and I used to be okay at writing but college happened.

42. What was the name of the last book you read? - Completly read would be “Alone in the Dark” by Karen Rose.

43. What's the difference between loving and liking someone? - One is wanting to spend immeasurable amounts of time with, even through rough patches. (I’ve never been in a relationship to tbh I don’t know the difference).

44. Where are you most productive? - the “office” in our house, it’s small, has a desk and bookshelf and is in the other end of the house, so it’s quite private (aka quiet) when everyone is home.

45. List 3 things you enjoy doing with friends. - Going to the cinema, going out for a meal, going out somewhere in general tbh.

46. List 3 things you enjoy doing alone. - Watching films, reading books and I do like walking around fairly aimlessly tbh.

47. Do you believe world peace will ever exist? - I would love it if it did, but I am ready to accept that it might not happen in my lifetime with the way things look rn.

48. Do you have any allergies? - Nope.

49. When was the last time you cussed at someone? - It would be myself yesterday. I don’t really cuss at other people.

50. What was the last promise you made? - Making a surprise cake for my boss when she has her baby.

51. What was your last dream about? - Can’t really remember. I think it was a Star Trek-y kind of dream because I was talking to Chekov in it and then I thought “wait how am I talking to you in Russian I don’t speak it”.

52. If you won a trip to Hawaii and you could take 5 people with you, who would those 5 people be? - My best school friend, my sister, tbh I think 5 is too many. So I’d let my sister choose some friends to take because I have no idea who else I’d take.

53. How many countries have you visited? - 3 (France, Tenerife and America) but this time next month it will be up to 4 (Poland)

54. What is your favorite medium of art? (Music, dance, painting, etc.) - Do films count as an art form? If not then music. I like Glenn Miller on occasion, especially “In the Mood”

56. When was the last time somebody complimented you? - Oh god, I don’t know. I guess about 3 weeks ago, I was at a homestay for work experience in France and my hostess kept feeding me, so I joked that I needed to fit into a bridesmaid’s dress when I get home so I need to not put on a lot of weight and she said I wasn’t big or anything.

56. If you switched bodies with someone, how would you recognize yourself? - My thick, awful hair. I hate thick hair. It’s so hard to look after.

57. Do you consider yourself mature? - I think I do. A lot of others think I’m older than I am, but I’ll still get ID’d for 15 films.

58. How many days in your life do you think you have wasted on tumblr? - Probably about 2 months worth, 60 days ish.

59. What is your favorite quote? - “Too much mystery is merely an annoyance. Too much adventure is exhausting. And a little terror goes a long way.” - Odd Thomas, by Dean Koontz

60. If you started a new religion and you had to create 3 rules or commandments for your new followers to live by, what would those 3 rules be? - ??? I guess it would be

61. What is your greatest accomplishment? - Being semi-conversational in Polish.

62. Do you believe in the death penalty? - Depends. If it is clear cut, with a premeditiated act of horror then yes, but where the evidence is a bit fuzzy it depends, but then that is literally the plot of an awful lot of John Grisham books (seriously, The Chamber still hurts.)

63. What are your goals for life? - have a bakery of my own, learn another (possibly 2 or more) languages and have a child at some point.

64. What do you think your soulmate is doing right now? - probably somewhere on this website but idk.

65. If you could live anywhere, where would you live? The place can be in an imaginary, fantasy, or the real world. - The USS Enterprise is too far fetched (for now), but Tracy Island is a pretty close second ngl.

66. What were you like in 2013? - An introverted teenager who could literally not stand up for myself.

67. Do you have a job? - A waitress in a restaurant. It’s pretty sweet 98% of the time.

68. Tell us a story about your childhood best friend. - Didn’t have a lot of friends as a kid, but in secondary school me and my circle of friends went to a restaurant and they had condiments on the table and one of us was fiddling with it over her shoulder, it split open over her shoulder and projectiled about 7 yards to the wall behind her (there was no one sat there but it was hilarious).

69. If you could change one thing about society, what would it be? - Take away the stigma for learning another language for fun.

70. How many all-nighters have you pulled before? - One, but it wasn’t technically an “all nighter”, it was more until about 1:45am.

71. Is tumblr your favorite website? If not, then what is your favorite website? - Tie between Tumblr and YouTube.

72. What is the craziest thing you would do for a million dollars? - idk. Be a sarcastic little shit to rude customers.

73. Does money equal happiness? - I love treating friends, it makes me happy, so indirectly. Having money isn’t nearly as important as what you choose to do with it.

74. How many times have you experienced true happiness in your lifetime? - A few but then again I have no life, my happiness generally comes when people actually want to spend time with me.

75. How many times have you experienced true sadness in your lifetime? - far too many. I was bullied an awful lot throughout primary and secondary school.

76. What is the funniest joke you have ever been told? - Does it count if I say it in response to customers? Because “Hey that’s not a fish, it’s a whale!” *chuckle* “well I mean we pick it up from a whale-way station”

77. When was the last time you looked at the news? - Sometime yesterday, about the residents of similar towers to the Grenfell tower.

78. If you could say one thing to the world, what would you say? - Can we all slow down a little please. Thanks.

79. What is your favorite animal? - Rabbits

80. If you could earn a million dollars by pretending to be dead for 3 years, would you do it? - that seems like the ideal time to learn a language all by myself, and having the money at the end? Hell yes.

81. What is one thing that everyone is bad at? - judging by the way of the world it’s getting along.

82. What time do you normally sleep? How many hours of sleep do you usually get? - around 6-8, depending.

83. Does age necessarily equal maturity? - I would love to say yes but a lot of people I know are huge children and they’re hilarious.

84. What is your favorite clothing store? - Oasis.

85. In the winter- beanies or gloves? - Gloves.

86. Would you rather have wings or a fish tail? - WINGS WINGS WINGS.

87. If you had the power to erase one person from the world so that nobody remembered him or her except you, would you do it? - probably not, because what’s the point if I remeber them, people would think I’m going mad.

88. What do you fear the most? - being a disappointment.

89. How many digits of pi can you recite? - 6

90. If you could travel back to one year and relive it again, which year would it be? - 2012. I got to meet Alistair and Jonathan Brownlee personally and I flaming loved them. Also because Anton Yelchin would still be alive so.

91. Describe yourself in one word. - Nerd

92. Describe your last victory. - Being semi-conversational in Polish

93. What is the weirdest thing you have ever seen? - a drunk guy come into my work and literally all he talked to me about was the history of chocolate.

94. What is something you will never forget? - why diacritical marks in Polish are important.

95. Would you rather forget all of the past or remember everything in vivid detail? - my past is pretty weird, but I’d love to remember it better. The downside is my embarassing childhood days.

96. Have you ever broken a bone before? - *touch wood* nope.

97. Is it harder to love or to hate somebody? - To hate I guess because I’ve never loved anyone outside of family and that’s easy enough.

98. Coffee or tea? - neither. Hot chocolate.

99. What are some little things that you do that have changed your life in a positive way? - spent more time with friends and family.

100. How many hours have you spend on tumblr today? - today, on and off, about 3.

I think that’s everything, thanks for asking :)

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deiupvote · 5 years ago

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TLDR: A group of seniors spend all year fucking over their classmates so I (the teacher) wreck their final semester.This is my first post ever, and, for reasons that will soon become obvious, this channel speaks to the depths of my soul. It's also a very long one because I want you to delight in my destruction. The particular flavor of this revenge comes from the fact that everything that goes down is the result of a domino effect that leaves devastation in its wake.Dedication: This story is for anyone who has ever been fucked over in a group project, and I certainly hope you enjoy it.Some details are deliberately vague, because duh and I don't feel like getting sued.*Note: Skip to The Setup if you are in dire need of an immediate Justice BonerMy Backstory (Not super necessary, but will give you insight into my logic)I've been teaching for many years, but it's important to understand that in my first year of teaching, I got put on blast by an elite group of EP and their EK. Not a week went by without someone either demanding my job, trying to undermine me or just calling me a piece of shit. I nearly quit halfway through the first semester, the verbal and emotional abuse was so bad.This was at a school in a tough area, so I was accused of racism constantly for asking kids to stop talking, was ripped into for giving failing grades for missing work, and even enforcing the rules in the student/parent handbook got me in hot water (my principal reprimanded me for being a negative influence on the school and was I told that I needed to let more rules slide because he was tired of hearing from parents). I would have parents just show up unannounced to sit in on my lessons and then tell me I was a shitty educator, a bad human being, etc. I have plenty of horror stories from that school alone, but the point I want to make is that this experience defined the kind of teacher I became going forward to my next school. I needed to be that person who was untouchable, because I needed to focus on the one job that mattered; teaching kids.My next school was in a fairly affluent area. It wasn't uncommon for me to find out that my student's parents made millions, which brought its own unique set of problems. However, my new principal was super supportive of me as long as I followed the school's handbook to the letter because, by doing so, I was in line with the school's philosophy and protected by law (we seriously had parents filing frivolous lawsuits all the damn time). This school had long ago learned that caving to parent demands spilled blood in the water and brought the rest of the sharks in droves.My first year at this new school was successful for many reasons, but primarily because the school culture was easily adapted to. By planning ahead, I was able to head off 99% of all negative parents at the pass. The few times a parent tried to rip into me at conferences, I ripped back so hard that I developed a reputation amongst the kids and parents as someone you couldn't fuck with. Everything I did was in line with the rules, and any attempt to take me down got stone walled by my principal who would have to say "Mr. FighterJet is following school policy, so i'm afraid the ultimate decision is his."No joke, I had some parents in tears because their kid could no longer get an A in my class. I wasn't the teacher who wanted to destroy kids, I just wanted them to be accountable, and sometimes that meant letting them fail.Needless to say, this job became a lot of fun, because instead of waiting to be ambushed by parents, I could work on making my class fun for my students while still teaching them something. I made ironclad rules for the classroom that brooked little argument and would adapt the following year to make it harder for students or parents to ruin my day. I have many stories like this, but this is one of my favorites.The BackstoryThe year this happened, I taught a HS class with grades 9-12 (that's 14 to 18 year olds for you overseas guests). My class wasn't necessary to graduate, but did count as a core requirement. One of my beginning of the year rules was "I never want to hear 'when will we ever need this?' because you didn't have to sign up for this class."How I structure my class is that I try to make students accountable for their own actions. My class was built so that it had something to offer everybody. If you tried your best, you were guaranteed a C. If you worked really hard, you could get a B or an A. I would bust my ass to help a student with any reasonable request. The best example of this was a student was working hard on an assignment and said "I think I understand it now, but can't turn it in on time" to which I answered "Then turn it in tomorrow for full credit. This is how hard work pays off." Other than a few hard deadlines in my class, I would do whatever it took to see you learn the material.Fuck around in my class? I have already found ways to run circles around the pathetic excuses you throw at your parents for your piss poor performance. It sounds callous, but I was the teacher who would stay for ninety minutes after school to help you catch up, to help fix your project for another class, or even to listen to you cry about your parent's divorce. If I caught you goofing in class instead of doing your work (my rule was that at least 70 percent of class time was intended for homework, quizzes, etc) I would warn you a couple times, email your parents, and then wait and see if they even gave a shit. If they didn't, I would let you keep digging that hole until you were hip deep in water and begging for a ladder.And then I would toss you a rope instead. You could still climb it if you tried hard enough, but a lot of kids would just cry until that hole caved in and buried them.I also utilized my school's online grading/assignment system for nearly all of my assignments, which meant I could document when a student looked at the assignment, how long it took them, etc. All of this allowed me to see what my students were doing, when they did it, and also if they were plagiarizing. This was one of the tools that helped me make important decisions about leniency, and also allowed me to say things at conferences such as "of course the test was hard, your child didn't attempt the nine homework assignments until eleven pm the night before the test." Being able to prove that a student wasn't trying made it impossible for blame to be laid unfairly at my feet.It also meant the worst kids avoided my class. Bonus.However, this year, something magical happened. Every other year, I would get a wave of kids who just wanted to screw around and blame everyone else for doing poorly. At the end of the year, students would shit talk me, my class sizes would drop the following year, then I would receive high praise from those kids, so everyone would sign up, so on and so on. But this year, not only did I get a giant wave of knuckleheads, but they came with parents who loved to Make Trouble.I had already heard tales of some of these parents. Other teachers were just dying to hear stories about our interactions, because these parents were very much Entitled. They would name drop lawyers when they didn't get their way, try to badger teachers into giving their kids extra credit, and would largely deny any wrong doing on their kid's part. These were the parents who would get called in because their student was busted cheating, then accuse the teacher of making the class too hard, therefore validating their student's need to cheat.So about these knuckleheads. It was a group of roughly seven senior boys who all shifted their schedules to be in the same period with each other. The other teachers could not believe that I had all of them at the same time, but I just shrugged it off. Every week, the staff lounge was dying to know how I dealt with their shenanigans, but for the most part, I had shut down most of their shit from day one. I actually got along very well with them, despite their constant goofing, because they had mastered the ability to appear busy and didn't distract my other kids.Then came the first group project.My class size was just right for seven groups of four to form. The idiot collective formed two groups of 4 (by pulling in a kid who had been absent on the first day of the project). These two groups crashed and burned on this project super hard for several reasons, but the biggest were that a) they fucked around during class time and b) put off a two week assignment until the weekend before and then dumped all the work on everybody else, which resulted in everybody doing minimal effort.I handed out the shit grades and was immediately pulled into parent conferences with several of them (one at a time, obviously). Every meeting was the same. "My kid did all the work, so he doesn't deserve a bad grade" or "My kid didn't understand the assignment" to which I handed over my hyper specific rubric (which is a checklist for how I grade things--I never wanted to be accused of grading based on not liking a kid). These largely went like this:EP: My kid did all the work and I don't think it's fair it should hurt his grade.Me: Here is the work your student turned in. *hands it over* Here is my rubric which I printed and emailed to your student the day the project started *hands it over* As you can see, I have itemized the grading for ease of use. I would be happy to go over the grade your student earned.EP: *Reads through all the evidence, looks at kid* Where are the missing parts?Student: Uh, my group members were responsible for that.Me: I can't grade what I never received, so I can't reasonably just raise your kid's grade. Sorry.Now, good news for all my students. I make assignments worth more throughout the semester with the idea that kids who screw up early on can make it up later by working hard. I seed Extra Credit throughout the semester and all of these parents are disgruntled, but happy to hear that their entitled embryo can still get an A in my class.Now, the end result of these meetings was that it clearly wasn't my fault (remember, I had all this data to prove that I made every effort to contact everybody, etc) so it must be the other kids' fault. So these parents all decide that their perfect angel is no longer allowed to work with their previous group mates.Like a cancer, this failure of friends distributes through the rest of the class. Like the genius that I am, I make my students write a group contract for every project that details who does what and when it is due. Why is this important? Because the contract provides me the documentation necessary to allow me to dismiss a bad group member and give them a zero without their parent shitting all over my day.So here is where the problem begins manifesting. These seniors begin bouncing from group to group like cancerous ping pong balls, wreaking havoc. I let students choose their groups, so these seniors are desperately integrating with anybody that will have them. Because of my class side, every group has at least one coddled child to deal with, and these children just end up rotating until all of my students have worked with one of these seniors at some point.Now I am getting constant complaints from parents of other kids about these boys. Their kid wanted a good grade, which means they ended up doing all the work while the senior slacked. This is usually after the fact, at which time I bring up "I would love to yank that leech out of your grade pool, but you have to use the contract." Students don't want to say anything because they fear retribution from the seniors, but I can't do anything because I will be accused of harassment. The contract can provide me with the leverage I need to prove that these kids were doing no work, because these seniors have been playing their parents for years. I make my class utilize google docs, because the changes are time stamped. No joke, I've had students produce all the work the morning of a parent meeting to try and lie their way out and make me look like a piece of shit, but that time stamp is a godsend.Luckily, my class is balanced. A shitty group mate can make things hard, but not undoable and parents are appeased that I have an out for their kid, but disappointed that their kid doesn't use it. Every time I announce a group project is on the way, some of these seniors sucker up to the other kids to the point that it is expected that a spot will be made for them. I'm talking buying kids lunch, bringing them gifts, etc. Seriously, the day before a group project starts, all of the seniors now sit at separate tables from each other so that they could pull the "I'm already here, let's be in a group" card (which works most of the time).The strain on class morale is difficult, but I am biding my time. The other students are grabbing at Extra Credit opportunities constantly so that their grade can absorb the blow, and parent complaints are completely mitigated because I am still offering every chance for success, my principal has a copy of my syllabus in his computer so that he can quote student policies that the parent signed off on.Not uncommon for him to hear "I don't read that shit, so it doesn't apply" but he reminds them that the clause above the signature line says "My signature denotes that I have read this document in its entirety and agree to abide by all the rules" or something similar and that this should be a lesson to the parent and the student that when you sign something, you should read the fine print.*If you ever become a teacher, find an awesome boss like this and stick by their side*The SetupSo I have seven slothful seniors, but I shall name the worst of these Larry, Curly and Moe. The fallout effects all of them, but these three are the ones whose parents have a boner for Making Trouble. Every time they bully a teacher into compliance, I imagine they sit around a smoking room with cigars and cognac, laughing at how they got their way yet again with a lowly teacher. I know that anything I do will be heavily scrutinized once the grades start falling and I need to be able to shrug it off because I have other shit to do, and I refuse to be the smiling topic of discussion in their celebratory circle jerk. (However, a special note about Larry - since he turned 18, his parents now travel nonstop and are impossible to reach. Larry is now just a huge douche, because his parents no longer care about what he does)I closely monitor their grades in my class, but also in others. This may sound sketchy, but I routinely do this with any of my students who struggle with the material so that I can identify if the issue is my class or all of their classes. Students have been known fake their grades using Inspect Element and I got tired of hearing "But they have A's in their other classes." because then I look like the piece of shit.Anyway, after a check, I speak with the other teachers. It isn't hard to find out that these boys are doing minimal work in other classes, and I actually discover that Larry has been finding ways to get other kids to do the work for him and then disseminating it among his friends. Other teachers have been bullied into lowering test percentages in their class, and guess what? He and his friends are enrolled in these classes. Despite bombing these tests, HW and Project grades give them a comfortable cushion so that most of them are floating at low B's. I can't prove this (they are using Snapchat) but when I bring it up with their teachers, the teachers don't feel like trying to prove it and duke it out with the parents.Now, they are gaming other classes for minimal effort. However, their only recourse in my class is to keep rotating through groups and leeching off of their hard work to maintain Cs and Bs, and the other kids are too nervous to utilize the group contract to get them fired.Remember how I mentioned that I steadily increase the value of my assignments to keep kids working and give them a chance to fix their grades?Me: *Random Day in Class* Hey everybody, I was looking in the schedule and realized that your last project before finals may stress you out unnecessarily. Would anybody mind if I dropped it?My class: *Tired of getting banged on Group Assignments* Nope, drop it, Best Teacher Ever!Me: Okay, well just so you know, I'm going to move our next project back a couple of weeks and extend the deadline by a week. Also, since I cancelled the last project, this means that the next project will now be worth roughly 20% of your final grade, so do your best. Screwing this up could kill your grade.My class: Whatever.jpgSo in one step, I have inflated this assignment and also moved it. I send out an email to parents and students letting them know about the change to the syllabus and the assignment. Get no responses other than happiness that I am removing stress from the end of the semester, etc. I actually did this primarily because another teacher (who was a huge douche bag) plunked down a monster project that same week and I knew it would burn out my students prior to finals, so figured a break was in order. Win-win for me, really.Now why did I move it?*maniacallaughter.mp4*The Friday before the project started, I announced at the start of class "Okay, I am introducing the project now so that you can get into groups today and we can do it first thing Monday morning without delay, since this project is so important" This announcement elicits a room full of shit eating grins.Why?It was Senior Ditch Day. Our school didn't condone a ditch day, so the kids tried their best to keep it a secret, but i found out a month in advance. All seven of these kids were absent from class, which meant that I had just given the entire room freedom from these dead weights. Immediately, groups are formed, and even better, I had a couple kids transfer out of my class at semester which meant, numbers wise, these knuckleheads will have to work on this last group project together (in two groups). I emphasized that everyone needed to get to class as soon as possible so that they could start as soon as attendance was called.My original intention was to light a giant fire under all seven of these chumps, to get them to actually put in the effort they had neglected to do all year. Most of them had grades in the low C range (except for one in the low Bs). As a bonus to all my students, I put an extra credit portion on this project so that they could recoup their early semester losses, but also allow these seniors to do very well if they put in the effort. This wasn't meant to be a revenge tale, but an attempt to give them one last lesson in responsibility.Before the end of the day, I send out a parent/student notification that the project had been started and that any absent students needed to contact their classmates to establish groups before Monday morning. This was important (as you'll see).I'm sure you can guess what happened next.Immediate FalloutThe next Monday, the seniors come traipsing in seconds before the bell to discover that there are only two tables to sit at. Whatever, they take their seats.Me: *After attendance* Okay, everybody has a copy of the rubric, so go ahead and get started.Rest of Class: *Immediately pulls out rubric*Seniors: *looking around frantically*The seniors quickly realized that they have been played and the arguing starts. First thing that happens is that Larry, Curly, and Moe decide that they now belong with whoever they happen to be sitting with and scoot their chairs over to sit with different tables. I catch this right away and tell them that the groups are already at maximum size (4 people per group). The other four seniors are already fighting with each other because they know that none of them will actually do any work.Larry (who thinks he's God's gift to everybody) tries to sweet talk me and his group into special privileges and allowing a group of 5. Now, I see some of the other kids wavering and I know that Larry is putting pressure on them to argue his case. I designed this project for specifically four people and had a job for each one, but I extended a separate offer."I will let you join, but since there will be five of you, I expect double the work." Literally, I told them they would have to do the project twice. Larry tries to argue, but I point out the roles I have established and inform him that if four people could do it once, having five should make it easier to do it twice. Sounds like a dick move on my part, but I have now intimidated the other kids into saying Hell No and even have them put it to a vote. Unsurprisingly, Larry is the only one who votes that this is a good idea, and when the other kids catch wind of my offer, they physically shoo off the other seniors trying to pull this deal as well.You will all be delighted to hear that the rest of the period for my seniors is spent arguing over who will work with who. They end up forming three groups and I nod my head, make sure they have the rubric, and then wish them the best of luck.Being the smart teacher that I am, I email Curly's parents and Moe's mommy that they have chosen to work with each other. Moe's mommy shows up to argue with me all the time, but has quickly learned I won't take her shit. At a previous meeting, she even laid into Moe and told him "I'm tired of fighting all these battles with your teachers and I'm starting to think that you're the problem," but I suspect this is for show.Curly's parents email me back and say they will make sure Curly writes a group contract. You see, Curly has sold himself as the best student ever, and clearly he will do the work and fire his classmates.Moe's mommy immediately requests a meeting with me.Per school policy, I do not have to respond to an email for 48 hours. I wait until hour 47 and email a noncommittal "I would love to meet, when are you available?" and wait for a response. I then wait another 48 hours to inform her of a time the following week that works for me.Now, some of the other senior parent's have emailed me angrily demanding why I let their kids choose to work with "the bad kids" again. I had to inform them that I didn't expect all of them to be absent. Immediately, some of my seniors get burned at home because they ditched and their parents tell me "Just try to help them pass," which I agree to. Some of them need this class for graduation, after all.Moe's mommy, on the other hand, shows up ready to wage war. She starts by demanding that I put Moe in a different group.I decline, because the project has now been going on for a week and it wouldn't be fair.She demands that I add him to another group. They're all full and students have already done the lion's share of the work.She demands that I let him work by himself with an extension.I gladly offer him an extension and slide a copy of the rubric over to him and he goes white. At this point, he knows that he is never planning to do any of the work. In fact, I know that his group hasn't even started. I have a copy of their group contract which was hastily scribbled in pencil with no due dates on it. He starts arguing with his mom that he would rather work with his friends and that he is upset that he got stuck in this situation.Contemplating this, she accuses me of deliberately waiting until that day to screw the seniors over. After all, it was a school sanctioned event and I'm being a jackass about it and she'll go to the board with her story.WrongThe joy I get from all of my prep work is shutting down bullshit like this. All seven of the seniors hung out on ditch day at her house and told her that the principal had given them the day off. Even better, they called in and pretended to be their own parents so that it was an excused absence. He is immediately busted and his mom flips her switch and jumps all over him. You see, she can keep pressing me on this issue, but I now have evidence that he pretended to be his own dad and this is a suspendible offense. I buy myself into her graces by telling her that I had no idea that Senior Ditch Day was that Friday, but I gave her kid a free extension on the homework that was due because I thought seniors deserved their own traditions, blah blah blah. She buys it.Also, I can prove that I emailed him (and her) and gave them plenty of notice before Monday morning that they needed to pick groups before something like this happened. Obviously, once I found out about Ditch Day I tried to give her precious treasure a heads up, but i don't know why he didn't take it.She makes him open his email. My email is sitting there, unopened, and I have won this battle. She thanks me and takes him home.Class morale is super high, unless you are one of the seniors. A week before the project is due, neither group has actually started and the H.M.S. Class Average is about to hit an Iceberg.The Project Comes DueIt comes as no surprise that my enterprising seniors have turned in easily some of the worst work ever. One group got into a text argument the weekend before it was due and made one of the kids do all the work. Larry and Curly are in this group.The other group (with Moe) have also turned in a steaming pile. I make sure to grade these two projects first because I know the fallout is going to be big.All the seniors dropped at least one letter grade. A couple drop two. This is four weeks before graduation.Larry appears to take his F minus in stride (they got something like a ten percent on it), so I know he's plotting something. Curly's parents demand a meeting and so does Moe's mommy.Curly's parents are super upset that they got a bad grade and demanded to know why. What they didn't know was that I had already met with the student who did the entire project (poorly) and his parents. I informed Curly's parents that I had seen the text exchange between the seniors that pretty much ended up with "You fucking do it." Curly refused to turn over his phone to his parents for confirmation. I also show them Curly's project and hand over the rubric.Mom and Dad are not happy. You see, Curly has been blaming everyone else for his mistakes since the dawn of time and his parents have bought in completely. Until today. Dad pointedly asks "Which part did you do?" and this causes Curly to spout actual tears. I then pull up a spreadsheet of all of the group project scores from the year (with no student data) and have highlighted his scores (which are among the worst). The purpose of this was to use data to prove that their son, frankly, never does the work.Curly is absolutely destroyed by this. His parents kick him out of the conference because they are tired of his excuses and ask me what they can do. I tell them I would be happy to offer one on one tutoring and that he can still pass the class if he does his homework and gets a B on the next exam. They agree to this, we all shake hands, and they leave.Curly's story largely ends here. He never shows up to tutoring, and I email his parents. After three emails, his dad finally responds with "His mom and I have decided that he needs to learn to be an adult and are leaving him to his own devices. Thank you for your efforts." Curly will spend the rest of the semester doing little to no work. Because he is grounded at home, he is now just watching youtube videos on his phone during school. The ripple effect is glorious. because now Curly is doing this in all of his classes. I speak with his teachers and they all email that he has quit doing work in class and get the same reply I did rather than the vehement responses they are used to. When Curly fails his classes, he still graduates, but his parents have informed him that they are no longer paying for his college and it's time to get a job.Moe's mommy flips her shit and demands answers. Unfortunately, Moe is in the same group as Curly and she gets the same answers from me. Strangely enough, once she's exhausted every effort and attempt to somehow blame me for this, she admits that she knew Moe was part of bullying the lone senior and that he should be ashamed of myself. She deliberately tried to play me but outed herself once she knew that i already knew everything. Super annoying, but I agree to help tutor him one-on-one, which makes her happy.Long Term FalloutMoe's mommy is emailing me every few days now. "Is my son doing his work, did he get help with his homework, etc." Non-stop, but she knows better than to fight with me. Larry is unusually chipper, and is no longer doing his work.I find out that Larry is supposedly going to a college where he just needs to maintain his GPA over a super low number. He claims an F in my class won't change anything, so I make sure he doesn't distract the others.Moe shows up only occasionally, but strangely enough, Larry pops in "just to say hi" whenever Moe is getting help. I can't fathom why he does this, but suspect he is up to something and already have a backup plan in place. You see, Moe's mommy is nuts, and I make sure that there's always another person in the room with me when I tutor him.Anyway, Moe's mommy is constantly checking in. I start waiting 48 hours between emails (cause I can) and she starts dropping by in person unannounced to check on him (me). She's been acting cagey lately and I'm starting to suspect something.It's fucking Larry. Larry is a friend of Moe's, so he's been in her home feeding her made up stories to convince her that I have been emotionally abusing Moe when other students aren't around. Stuff like I was calling him a retard after school, etc. and then telling her "you can even have the school check the cameras to see that I'm there."This starts a whole thing where she is now demanding answers from admin. BUT! Mr. FighterJet is smart. Admin asks me about details regarding my interactions with Moe and I end up sitting down with my Principal, Moe, and Moe's mommy. She details that Moe is struggling, might not graduate, and that she believes that I have singled her kid out for abuse and wants his grade raised.You see, Moe is dumb and lazy, and his mom is just as bad. When Larry went to her with his story, she never bothered talking about it with her own son. He just agreed and went along with it, so I asked Moe point blank to please describe what has been said during our sessions and then offer to leave the room so that he can tell the principal without me there. She tells me to stay because she wants me to hear from her son what I've done to him.What neither of them knew was that I was a mentor teacher. That meant I had a first year teacher as my mentee (not a student teacher, but a new hire that works with a veteran teacher to learn the ropes of our school) and I had her working on grades and such in my room after school (you need so many contact hours) on the days I agreed to meet Moe. She was young, so Moe thought she was another student and never questioned it, and couldn't even remember that she was in there. My Principal already had statements from her detailing my interactions with Moe, and Moe was unable to give any actual details and suddenly forgot what had been said to him. This lands her in hot water with admin, and she blames the whole thing on Larry and becomes visibly upset that she fell for such a stupid ruse.This results in an email cautioning teachers from being alone in a room with either student. Suddenly, after school help evaporates for both, but hey, I always have someone in my room, so whatever.After that meeting, Larry is now suddenly super concerned about his grade. I rationalize that he was hoping to burn me out of my job and then use the fallout to get a free passing grade. Obviously it doesn't work, so fuck Larry. I have kids who actually want to succeed. My free days are now on days I know he works, and he never shows up for tutoring anyway. Now that other teachers are hesitant to meet with him, he is unable to cut deals to raise those grades either (seriously, teachers fell for his change of heart spiel every semester).Moe's mom makes a last ditch effort and tries to convince me that the parents of the seniors have scheduled a meeting with my boss to have me fired for giving their kids a bad grade and that she would be willing to put in a good word for me if I meet with her first. I'm sitting next to the principal when I get this email (through an app on my cellphone) and he has no idea what she's talking about.I tell her I'd be happy to meet everybody but that I would probably eat my lunch during such a meeting and that I hoped people didn't mind the smell of fish. I got a "no, seriously, they are threatening to sue you" but feigned stupidity and informed her that I couldn't be sued for eating fish during a meeting. She now realizes I give zero fucks about anything and can't be threatened. Again, there's nothing she can do because I am simply following policy.The last few weeks are frantic for these seniors. One by one they fall, because they've done little to no work for a couple years now and they have no idea how to apply themselves. Other teachers are emboldened by how hard I shut them down and finally hold them accountable. A few of them just barely manage Ds in my class, the rest fail. I get a few last second squeaks of "What can I do to raise my grade?" but have now documented that none of them attempted the extra credit assignments and that was their chance. It's hard for a parent to shit on you when you can prove you actually tried to give their student extra credit (and can then prove they never opened the assignment online).These guys are now failing some of their other classes. A couple have breakdowns in my class and leave crying. Their friendships are fracturing with each other because they now all hate each other for what happened (which they will get over during the summer).My last test came and I made it an online multiple choice test. It was easy enough to have the questions and answers shuffled in random order, meaning they couldn't cheat off each other. You see, I knew for a long time that they would sit next to each other to try and cheat on the exam, and Larry had blown a ton of money on a tutor to try and carry his friends. This throws them all off, and when Moe's mommy accuses me (again) of trying to trick her kid with a much harder test, it was easy enough to shoo her away with a simple email.Larry passes the exam, but his grade moves up to a meager D minus.The ResultsIf you're still here, congratulations on dealing with my wall of text. Here are the results.Of these seven seniors, one didn't graduate and had to transfer schools (his parents were embarrassed that they paid to fly the whole family out for a graduation that he didn't get to take part in).Two of the seniors lost all of their scholarships and could no longer attend the schools they wanted. Their fallback plan was to attend the same school together and become roommates, which they did with three of the other seniors (including Moe).I do have some after stories, because I still work at this school and occasionally here from the kids who graduated.Larry's college was not happy with his final GPA. I'm not sure what his long game was, but it sucked. The college kicked him out before he could even start, and I found out his huge web of lies extended to his parents too. He toured Europe over the summer and tried to surprise his parents by coming home instead of going to school. Apparently they kicked him out immediately after because they were selling their house to get a condo somewhere else (remember, they travel for work all the time now so wanted to downgrade). Last I heard, he made up a story that he joined the military but got released due to a made up illness. (I say made up because I heard this tale from three different people, and each one was given a different disease)Curly's parents relented and decided to pay for Curly to go to college after all. Curly got kicked out halfway through the year (got busted more than once for underage consumption) and then kicked him to the curb after living at home for a year and refusing to get a job. Last I heard, he works in a vape shop.Moe went to school and used his book smarts to try and pay other kids to do his work for him (his mommy is rich). When that failed, he faked his grades to get his mom to keep footing the bill. Eventually the school kicked him out and he moved back home. The story his mommy told a friend of hers (who I ran into at a school function) was that he decided that he would rather be an entrepreneur than go to college and that he bought a drone to film weddings with. Last I heard, he was acting as a distributor for his weed dealer but had moved up to selling acid on the side. His mommy thinks he is working weddings.One senior went to college with his friends and immediately realized he needed to change. He quit hanging with his friends and, last I heard, graduated with honors in a lucrative field. He emailed me once to thank me for challenging him in HS, because it prepared him for college, so that was nice.That’s it, the end. Thanks for reading, and if you ever had a teacher you loved, send them an email, we love hearing from our children.Edit: Hmmm, between coffee and teenage angst, I'll address a few comments/questions.[Teacher name] is that you?I'm obviously never going to answer these, but there are at least a few teachers out there like me, apparently.I wish I had a teacher like you.Yeah, same. My advice to new teachers is be the teacher you needed when you were young, and always have emergency snacks for kids who don't have food.You're horrible and should quit teaching.Oh no, my feelings. Internet people who don't like me. Get fucked. You're part of the problem. Everything I did was to protect the interests of the other 20 kids in that class who wanted to work hard and learn and those seniors had every opportunity to improve their lot in life. I spent nine months counseling students whose grades had tanked because of these yahoos, and nine months of being begged by parents not to let their kids work with these boys. I saw a chance and took it.You should tell more stories!I really don't have that many teaching stories that would fit here. Maybe a few malicious compliance ones, but that's about it. I'm actually considered the nice, laid back teacher at my school who you simply don't mess with (though I do get pranked all the time).Edit2: Thanks for so many of the kind comments, but there is still a very angry minority who are just certain I am a huge piece of shit based on how I treated a group of seniors. To reiterate, it's impossible to judge my entire career by my efforts to hold a small group of students accountable for making everyone miserable. This sub isn't the place to account for the thousands of hours I've spent outside of class helping kids with everything, and I can say that half of my job for several weeks was trying to motivate these particular kids to put effort into anything. via /r/ProRevenge

#apoc

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duaneodavila · 6 years ago

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This Halloween, Put An End To 3 All-Too-Common Attorney Nightmares [Sponsored]

Sure, there are things that go bump in the night that can give you a fright, but the stress that comes with running your own law firm can also result in sleepless nights or waking up in a panic with your mind racing. That’s where law firm technology can come to the rescue by banishing three all-too-common law firm nightmares:

Nightmare #1: Trapped on an endless treadmill with profit just out of reach

– That’s what it can feel like when you’re so busy working that you don’t have time to understand month-over-month profits, monitor your accounts receivable, and know which clients and practice areas generate the most revenue. (After all, you can work yourself into bankruptcy if you’re investing hours upon hours working for clients who don’t compensate.)

Fortunately, you don’t have to spend time poring over financials to find out where you’re making and losing money. Implementing law practice management software that includes a financial dashboard and integrated time-and-billing functionality can automate this for you. This software will automatically generate your financial performance real-time so you can quickly understand your financial health with easy-to-read charts and graphs that detail:

Aging accounts receivable – which bills are overdue and by how long

Top clients by revenue and the clients who don’t pay

Year-to-date revenue, work in progress, billings and collections

Revenue by practice area so you can see what types of work are most profitable

This is the data you need to make the smartest strategic decisions. And now it can be at your fingertips by taking advantage of law practice management systems that give you, at-a-glance, all of the information you need to ensure your firm is profitable and moving in the right direction.

Nightmare #2: Standing in front of an entire courtroom as the opposition pokes holes in your case – Make sure your cases are watertight, while quickly uncovering problems with your opponent’s. It’s never been easier with the latest legal technology, Westlaw Edge KeyCite Overruling Risk. You can easily make sure every law you’re citing is still completely valid beyond a shadow of a doubt. KeyCite Overruling Risk identifies when a law has been implicitly overruled because it references an overruled citation either directly or through similar language. And, it is ONLY found in Westlaw Edge. All other citators only identify a point of law that has been explicitly overturned. Before KeyCite Overruling Risk, the only way to avoid using implicitly overruled law is through spending hours researching every single law cited. Yes, there’s a better way.

“I’ve heard horror stories about associates who have not been rigorous at making sure that all the citations within a case are still good law,” says Ryan Matthew Lawrence, an associate at Anthony Ostlund Baer and Louwagie, a Minneapolis commercial litigation firm. “KeyCite Overruling Risk gives me confidence in my work. I know it’s thorough and complete.”

Nightmare #3: An irate client sues you for malpractice because you missed a deadline – This too can easily become a reality when you manually calculate legal deadlines. Even though you may scrutinize deadline dates to ensure you’re adhering to jurisdiction regulations, rules do change and deadlines change with them. If you’re not continuously monitoring them, you could very well miss a due date.

By using a law practice management solution with a built-in rules-based legal deadline calendaring tool, you’ll rest easy knowing your deadlines are always accurate for every jurisdiction because legal professionals are continuously monitoring and updating them. If there are any changes, you’ll be immediately alerted so nothing falls through the cracks. Another way to sleep better at night.

Technology takes the fear out of managing your practice

Managing a law practice should never give you nightmares. If it is, it’s time to take full advantage of tools and technology that are designed to help you succeed. Contemplate the thoughts of Alex Jadin, a partner with Roeder Smith Jadin, a Minneapolis law firm, and Jake Courtney, a partner with Girardi|Keese, a Los Angeles litigation firm.

“Law practice management frees our attorneys from task-based work to spend more time on the value-adding activities like developing legal strategies, nurturing client relations, and growing the business,” says Jadin. “If you’re spending less time on those activities, you’re billing less time to that client. When you’re efficient at your work you’re ultimately saving that client money by spending less time getting the same amount of work done.”

Furthermore, technology enables firms to give clients better representation, notes Courtney.

“You have to be current. There are firms that are going forward, and there are firms staying the same and firms getting left behind. You have to spend money to make money by giving the best representation to your clients,” he says. “Having the latest tools keeps us stand at the forefront of the legal profession. It’s a small investment for a big return on a big case.”

Make the change today and equip your firm with essential technology to make both the practice of law and business management activities easier. Start a Firm Central practice management free trial and/or a Westlaw Edge free trial today.

***

Amy Larson is a Director in Small Law Firm Customer Marketing at Thomson Reuters. She has over 17 years of experience in technology marketing with extensive focus on learning how technology can meet the needs of attorneys. Amy has been involved in numerous product launches throughout her tenure, public relations efforts, interviewing customers and telling their stories, and often writes and distributes information on how legal technology can help small law firms with their practice of law and law firm management responsibilities.

This Halloween, Put An End To 3 All-Too-Common Attorney Nightmares [Sponsored] republished via Above the Law

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topsolarpanels · 7 years ago

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Is it too late to save the world? Jonathan Franzen on one year of Trump’s America

As the ice shelves crumble and the Twitter president threatens to pull out of the Paris accord, Franzen reflects on the role of the writer in times of crisis

If an essay is something essayed – something hazarded , not definitive , not authoritative; something ventured on the basis of the author’s personal experience and subjectivity- we might seem to be living in an essayistic golden age. Which party you went to on Friday night, how you were treated by a flight attendant, what your take on the political outrage of the day is: the presumption of social media is that even the tiniest subjective micronarrative is worthy not only of private notation, as in a diary, but of sharing with other people. The US president now operates on this presumption. Traditionally hard news reporting, in places like the New York Times, has softened up to allow the I , with its voice and opinions and impressions, to take the front-page spotlight, and book reviewers feel less and less constrained to discuss books with any kind of objectivity. It didn’t use to matter if Raskolnikov and Lily Bart were likable, but the question of “likability,” with its implicit privileging of the reviewer’s personal impressions, is now a key element of critical decision. Literary fiction itself is appearing more and more like essay.

Some of the most influential fictions of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person witnes to a new level. Their most extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to occupy the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.

Meanwhile the personal essay itself- the formal apparatus of honest self-examination and sustained engagement with notions, as developed by Montaigne and advanced by Emerson and Woolf and Baldwin- is in eclipse. Most large-circulation American magazines have all but ceased to publish pure essays. The kind persists mainly in smaller publications that collectively have fewer readers than Margaret Atwood has Twitter adherents. Should we be mourning the essay’s extinction? Or should we be celebrating its conquest of the larger culture?

A personal and subjective micronarrative: the few lessons I’ve learned about writing essays all came from my editor at the New Yorker, Henry Finder. I first went to Henry, in 1994, as a would-be journalist in pressing need of money. Largely through dumb luck, I made a publishable article about the US Postal Service, and then, through native incompetence, I wrote an unpublishable piece about the Sierra Club. This was the point at which Henry suggested that I might have some aptitude as an essayist. I heard him to be saying,” since you’re obviously a crap journalist”, and denied that I had any such aptitude. I’d been raised with a midwestern horror of yakking too much about myself, and I had an additional racism, derived from certain wrongheaded notions about novel-writing, against the stating of things that could more rewardingly be depicted . But I still needed money, so I maintain calling Henry for book-review assignments. On one of our calls, he asked me if I had any interest in the tobacco industry- the subject of a major new history by Richard Kluger. I rapidly said:” Cigarettes are the last thing in the world I want to think about .” To this, Henry even more quickly replied: “ Therefore you must be talking about them .”

This was my first lesson from Henry, and it remains the most important one. After smoking throughout my 20 s, I’d succeeded in ceasing for two years in my early 30 s. But when I was assigned the post-office piece, and became terrified of picking up the phone and introducing myself as a New Yorker journalist, I’d taken up the habit again. In the years since then, I’d managed to think of myself as a nonsmoker, or at the least as a person so securely resolved to quit again that I might as well already have been a nonsmoker, even as I continued to smoking. My state of mind was just a quantum wave function in which I could be totally a smoker but also totally not a smoker, so long as I never took measure of myself. And it was instantly clear to me that writing about cigarettes would force me to take my measure. “Thats what” essays do.

President-elect Donald Trump speaks at his election night rally in New York in November 2016. Photograph: Carlo Allegri/ Reuters

There was also the problem of my mother, whose parent had died of lung cancer, and who was militantly anti-tobacco. I’d concealed my habit from her for more than 15 years. One reason I needed to preserve my indeterminacy as a smoker/ nonsmoker was that I didn’t enjoy lying to her. As soon as I could succeed in discontinuing again, permanently, the wave function would collapse and I would be, one hundred per cent, the nonsmoker I’d always represented myself to be- but only if I didn’t first come out, in publish, as a smoker.

Henry had been a twentysomething wunderkind when Tina Brown hired him at the New Yorker. He had a distinctive tight-chested manner of speaking, a kind of hyper-articulate mumble, like prose acutely well edited but scarcely legible. I was awed by his intelligence and his erudition and had promptly come to live in dread of disillusioning him. Henry’s passionate emphasis in “ Therefore you must write about them”- he was the only speaker I knew who could get away with the stressed initial “ Therefore ” and the imperative “must”- allowed me to hope that I’d registered in his consciousness in some small way.

And so I went to work on the essay, every day combusting half a dozen low-tar cigarettes in front of a box fan in my living-room window, and handed in the only thing I ever wrote for Henry that didn’t need his editing. I don’t remember how my mother get her hands on the essay or how she conveyed to me her deep sense of betrayal, whether by letter or in telephone calls, but I do remember that she then didn’t communicate with me for six weeks- by a wide margin, the longest she ever ran silent on me. It was precisely as I’d dreaded. But when she got over it and began sending me letters again, I felt insured by her, insured for what I was, in a manner that is I’d never felt before. It wasn’t just that my “real” self had been concealed from her; it was as if there hadn’t really been a self to see.

Kierkegaard, in Either/ Or , builds fun of the” busy human” for whom busyness is a style of avoiding an honest self-reckoning. You might wake up in the night and realise that you’re lonely in your matrimony, or that you need to think about what your level of consumption is doing to the planet, but the next day you have a million little things to do, and the day after that you have another million things. As long as there’s no end of little things, you never have to stop and confront the bigger questions. Writing or reading an essay isn’t the only style to stop and ask yourself who you really are and what your life might mean, but it is one good way. And if you consider how laughably unbusy Kierkegaard’s Copenhagen was, compared with our own age, those subjective tweets and hasty blog posts don’t seem so essayistic. They seem more like a means of avoiding what a real essay might force on us. We spend our days reading, on screens, stuff we’d never bother reading in a printed book, and bitch about how busy we are.

I quit cigarettes for the second time in 1997. And then, in 2002, for the final time. And then, in 2003, for the last and final day- unless you count the smokeless nicotine that’s coursing through my bloodstream as I write this. Attempting to write an honest essay doesn’t alter the multiplicity of my egoes; I’m still simultaneously a reptile-brained addict, a worrier about my health, an eternal adolescent, a self-medicating depressive. What changes, if I take the time to stop and measure, is that my multi-selved identity acquires substance .

One of the mysteries of literature is that personal substance, as perceived by both the writer and the reader, is situated outside the body of either of them, on some kind of page. How can I feel realer to myself in a thing I’m writing than I do inside my body? How can I feel closer to another person when I’m reading her terms than I do when I’m sitting next to her? The answer, in part, is that both writing and reading demand full attentiveness. But it surely also has to do with the kind of ordering that is possible merely on the page.

Former FBI director James Comey testifying before the US Senate select committee on intelligence in October. Photograph: Saul Loeb/ AFP/ Getty Images

Here I might mention two other lessons I learned from Henry Finder. One was Every essay, even a think piece, tells a story . The other was There are two ways to organise material:” Like goes with like” and “This followed that.” These precepts may seem self-evident, but any grader of high-school or college essays can tell you that they aren’t. To me it was especially not evident that a believe piece should follow the rules of drama. And yet: doesn’t a good debate begin by positing some difficult problem? And doesn’t it then propose an escape from the problem through some bold proposition, and put in obstacles in the form of objections and counterarguments, and finally, through a series of reversals, take us to an unforeseen but fulfilling conclusion?

If you accept Henry’s premise that a successful prose piece consists of material arranged in the form of a story, and if you share my own conviction that our identities consist of the narratives we tell about ourselves, it stimulates sense that we should get a strong make of personal substance from the labour of writing and the pleasure of reading. When I’m alone in the woods or having dinner with a friend, I’m overwhelmed by the quantity of random sensory data coming at me. The act of writing subtracts almost everything, leaving merely the alphabet and punctuation marks, and progresses toward non-randomness. Sometimes, in ordering the elements of a familiar tale, you discover that it doesn’t mean what you thought it did. Sometimes, especially with an debate (” This follows from that “), a completely new narrative is called for. The discipline of fashioning a compelling tale can crystallise thoughts and feelings you merely dimly knew you had in you.

If you’re looking at a mass of material that doesn’t seem to give itself to storytelling, Henry would say your merely other option is to sort it into categories, grouping similar components together: Like goes with like . This is, at a minimum, a tidy route to write. But patterns also have a way of turning into stories. To make sense of Donald Trump’s victory in an election he was widely expected to lose, it’s tempting to construct a this-followed-that narrative: Hillary Clinton was careless with her emails, the Justice department chose not to prosecute her, then Anthony Weiner’s emails came to light, then James Comey reported to Congress that Clinton might still be in difficulty, and then Trump won the election. But it may actually be more fruitful to group like with like: Trump’s victory was like the Brexit vote and like the resurgent anti-immigrant patriotism in Europe. Clinton’s imperiously sloppy handled in her emails was like her poorly messaged campaign and like her decision not to campaign harder in Michigan and Pennsylvania.

I was in Ghana on election day, birdwatching with my brother and two friends. James Comey’s report to Congress had unsettled the campaign before I left for Africa, but Nate Silver‘s authoritative polling website, Fivethirtyeight, was still giving Trump only a 30% opportunity of winning. Having cast an early vote for Clinton, I’d arrived in Accra feeling only moderately anxious about the election and congratulating myself on my decision to spend the final week of the campaign not checking Fivethirtyeight 10 times a day.

I was indulging a different sort of compulsion in Ghana. To my shame, I am what people in the world of birding call a lister. It’s not that I don’t love birds for their own sake. I run birding to experience their beauty and diversity, understand better their behaviour and the ecosystems they belong to, and take long, attentive walkings in new places. But I also maintain way too many listings. I count not only the bird species I’ve seen worldwide but the ones I’ve seen in every country and every US state I’ve birded in, also at various smaller sites, including my back yard, and in every calendar year since 2003. I can rationalise my compulsive counting as an extra little game I play within the context of my passion. But I truly am compulsive. This builds me morally inferior to birders who bird exclusively for the joy of it.

It happened that by going to Ghana I’d dedicated myself a chance to break my previous year-list record of 1,286 species. I was already over 800 for 2016, and I knew, from my online research, that trips similar to ours had produced virtually 500 species, merely a handful of which are also common in America. If I could see 460 unique year species in Africa, and then utilize my seven-hour layover in London to pick up 20 easy European birds at a park near Heathrow, 2016 would be my best year ever.

Hillary Clinton …’ Careless with her emails .’ Photograph: Jewel Samad/ AFP/ Getty Images

We were assuring great stuff in Ghana, spectacular turacos and bee-eaters found only in west Africa. But the country’s few remaining woodlands are under intense hunting and logging pressure, and our walkings in them were more sweltering than productive. By the evening of election day, we’d already missed our only shot at several of my target species. Very early the next morning, when polls were still open on the west coast of the States, I turned on my phone for the pleasure of confirming that Clinton was winning the election. What I found instead were stricken texts from my friends in California, with pictures of them staring at a TV and seeming morose, my girlfriend curled up on a sofa in a fetal posture. The Times headline of the moment was ” Trump Takes North Carolina, Building Momentum; Clinton’s Path to Victory Narrow .”

There was nothing to be done but go birding. On a road in the Nsuta forest, dodging timber trucks whose momentum I associated with Trump’s, and yet clinging to the idea that Clinton still had a track to victory, I insured Black Dwarf Hornbills, an African Cuckoo-Hawk and a Melancholy Woodpecker. It was a sweaty but satisfactory morning that objective, when we re-emerged into network coverage, with the news that the” short-fingered vulgarian”( Spy magazine’s memorable epithet) was my country’s new president. This was the moment when I insured what my mind had been doing with Nate Silver’s figure of 30% for Trump’s odds. Somehow I’d taken the figure to mean that the world might be, worst case, 30% shittier after election day.

What the number actually represented, of course, was a 30% chance of the world’s being 100% shittier.

As we travelled up into drier, emptier northern Ghana, we intersected with some birds I’d long dreamed of watch: Egyptian Plovers, Carmine Bee-eaters and a male Standard-winged Nightjar, whose outrageous wing streamers devoted it the appear of a nighthawk being closely pursued by two bats. But we were falling ever further behind the year-bird pace I needed to maintain. It occurred to me, belatedly, that the trip lists I’d seen online had included species that were only hear , not ensure, while I needed to see a bird to count it. Those lists had raised my hopes the way Nate Silver had. Now every target species I missed increased the pressure to find all of the remaining targets, even the wildly unlikely ones, if I wanted to break my record. It was only a stupid year listing, ultimately meaningless even to me, but I was haunted by the headline from the morning after election day. Instead of 275 electoral elections, I needed 460 species, and my route to victory was becoming very narrow. Finally, four days before the end of the trip, in the spillway of a dam near the Burkina Faso border, where I’d hoped to get half a dozen new grassland birds and see zero, I had to accept the reality of loss. I was abruptly aware that I should have been at home, trying to console my girlfriend about the election, exerting the one benefit of being a depressive pessimist, which is the propensity to chuckle in dark times.

How had the short-fingered vulgarian arrived at the White House? When Hillary Clinton started speaking in public again, she gave credence to a like-goes-with-like account of her character by advancing a this-followed-that narrative. Never mind that she’d mishandled her emails and uttered the phrase ” basket of deplorables “. Never intellect that voters might have had legitimate grievances with the liberal elite she represented; might have failed to appreciate the rationality of free trade, open perimeters, and mill automation when the overall gains in global wealth came at middle-class expenditure; might have resented the federal imposition of liberal urban values on conservative rural communities. According to Clinton, her loss was the flaw of James Comey- maybe also of the Russians.

Admittedly, I had my own neat narrative account. When I came home from Africa to Santa Cruz, my progressive friends were still struggling to understand how Trump could have won. I remembered a public event I’d once done with the optimistic social-media specialist Clay Shirky, who’d recounted to the audience how “shocked” professional New York eatery critics had been when Zagat, a crowd-sourced reviewing service, had named Union Square Cafe the best eatery in township. Shirky’s point was that professional critics aren’t as smart as they think they are; that, in fact, in the age of Big Data, critics are no longer even necessary. At the event, dismissing the fact that Union Square Cafe was my favourite New York restaurant( the crowd was right !), I’d sourly wondered if Shirky believed that critics were also stupid to consider Alice Munro a better writer than James Patterson. But now Trump’s victory, too, had vindicated Shirky’s mockery of pundits. Social media had allowed Trump to bypass the critical establishment, and just enough members of the crowd, in key swaying states, had find his low comedy and his incendiary speech “better” than Clinton’s nuanced arguments and her mastery of policy. This follows from that : without Twitter and Facebook , no Trump.

After the election, Mark Zuckerberg did briefly appears to take responsibility, kind of, for having made the platform of selection for fake news about Clinton, and to suggest that Facebook could become more active in filtering the news.( Good luck with that .) Twitter, for its part, kept its head down. As Trump’s tweeting continued unabated, what could Twitter possibly say? That it was constructing the world a better place?

Mark Zuckerberg suggested that Facebook could become more active in filtering the news. Photo: Steven Senne/ AP

In December, my favourite Santa Cruz radio station, KPIG, began operating a fake ad offering counselling services to addicts of Trump-hating tweets and Facebook posts. The following month, a week before Trump’s inauguration, the PEN American Center organised events around the country to reject the assault on free speech that it claimed Trump represented. Although his administration’s travelling regulations did afterwards make it harder for novelists from Muslim countries to have their voices heard in the United States, the one bad thing that could not be said of Trump, in January, was that he had in any way curtailed free speech. His lying, bullying tweets were free speech on steroids. PEN itself, only a few years earlier, had given a free-speech awarding to Twitter, for its self-publicised role in the Arab spring. The actual outcome of the Arab springtime had been a retrenchment of autocracy, and Twitter had since uncovered itself, in Trump’s hands, to be a platform made to order for autocracy, but the ironies didn’t end there. During the same week in January, progressive American bookstores and authors proposed a boycott of Simon& Schuster for the crime of intending to publish one book by the dismal right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos. The angriest of the bookstores talked of refusing to stock all titles from S& S, including, presumably, the books of Andrew Solomon, the president of PEN. The talk didn’t aim until S& S voided its contract with Yiannopoulos.

Trump and his alt-right supporters take pleasure in pushing the buttons of the politically correct, but it merely works because the buttons are there to be pushed- students and activists claiming the human rights of not hear things that upset them, and to shout down notions that offend them. Intolerance particularly flourishes online, where measured speech is punished by not getting clicked on, invisible Facebook and Google algorithms steer you towards content you agree with, and nonconforming voices remain silent for fear of being flamed or trolled or unfriended. The outcome is a silo in which, whatever side you’re on, you feel absolutely right to detest what you detest. And here is another way in which the essay distinguished from superficially similar kinds of subjective speech. The essay’s roots are in literature, and literature at its best- the work of Alice Munro, for example- invites you to ask whether you might be somewhat wrong, maybe even entirely wrong, and to imagine why someone else might dislike you.

Three years ago, I was in a state of fury about climate change. The Republican party was continuing to lie about the absence of a scientific consensus on climate- Florida’s Department of Environmental Protection had gone so far as to forbid its employees to write the words “climate change”, after Florida’s governor, a Republican, insisted that it wasn’t a” true fact”- but I wasn’t much less angry at the left. I’d read a new volume by Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything , in which she assured the reader that, although” period is tight”, we still have 10 years to radically remake the world economy and prevent global temperatures from rising by more than two degrees Celsius by the end of the century. Klein wasn’t the only leftist saying we still had 10 years. In fact, environmental activists had been saying the exact same thing in 2005.

They’d also been saying it in 1995: We still have 10 years . By 2015, though, it ought to have been clear that humanity is incapable in every way- politically, psychologically, ethically, economically- of reducing carbon emissions quickly enough to change everything. Even the European union, which had taken the early lead on climate, and was fond of lecturing other regions on their irresponsibility, needed only a recession in 2009 to change its focus to economic growth. Barring a worldwide insurrection against free-market capitalism in the next 10 years- the scenario that Klein contended could still save us- the most likely rise in temperature this century is on the order of six degrees. We’ll be lucky to avoid a two-degree risebefore the year 2030.

In a polity ever more starkly divided, the truth about global warming was even less convenient to the left than to the right. The right’s denials were odious lies, but at least they were consistent with a certain cold-eyed political realism. The left, having excoriated the right for its intellectual deceit and turned climate denialism into a political rallying cry, was now in an impossible posture. It had to keep insisting on the truth of climate science while persisting in the fiction that collective world action could stave off the worst of it: that universal acceptance of the facts, which really might have changed everything in 1995, could still change everything. Otherwise, what change did it build if the Republicans quibbled with the social sciences?

Because my sympathies were with the left- reducing carbon emissions is vastly better than doing nothing; every half-degree helps- I also held it to a higher criterion. Denying the dark reality, pretending that the Paris accord could forestall misfortune, was understandable as a tactic to hold people motivated to reduce emissions; to keep hope alive. As a strategy, though, it did more damage than good. It conceded the ethical high ground, insulted the intelligence of unpersuaded voters (” Truly? We still have 10 years ?”), and foreclosed frankfurter discussion of how the global community should prepare for drastic changes, and how nations like Bangladesh should be compensated for what nations like the United States have done to them.

Dishonesty also skewed priorities. In the past 20 years, the environmental movement had become captive to a single issue. Partly out of genuine alarm, partly also because foregrounding human problems was politically less risky- less elitist- than talking about nature, the big environmental NGOs had all invested their political capital in fighting climate change, a problem with a human face. The NGO that especially enraged me, as a bird lover, was the National Audubon Society, once an uncompromising defender of birds , now a lethargic organization with a very large PR department. In September 2014, with much fanfare, that PR department had announced to the world that climate change was the number-one menace to the birds of Northern america. The proclamation was both narrowly dishonest, because its wording didn’t square with the conclusions of Audubon’s own scientists, and broadly dishonest, because not one single bird demise could be directly attributed to human carbon emissions. In 2014, the most serious threat to American birds was habitat loss, followed by outdoor cats, collisions with buildings, and pesticides. By invoking the buzzword of climate change, Audubon got a lot of attention in the liberal media; another point had been scored against the science-denying right. But it was not at all clear how this helped birds. The only practical effect of Audubon’s announcement, it seemed to me, was to discourage people from addressing the real threats to birds in the present.

Snow Geese in New Mexico, USA. Photograph: Nature Picture Library/ Alamy/ Alamy

I was so angry that I decided that I’d better write an essay. I began with a jeremiad against the National Audubon Society, widened it into a scornful denunciation of the environmental movement generally, and then started waking up in the night in a panic of repentance and doubt. For the writer, an essay is a mirror, and I didn’t like what I was find in this one. Why was I excoriating fellow liberals when the denialists were so much worse? The prospect of climate change was every bit as sickening to me as to the groups I was attacking. With every additional degree of global warming, further hundreds of millions of people around the world would suffer. Wasn’t it worth an all-out effort to achieve a reduction of even half of one degree? Wasn’t it obscene to be talking about birds when children in Bangladesh were threatened? Yes, the premise of my essay was that we have an ethical responsibility to other species as well as to our own. But what if that premise was false? And, even if it was true, did I genuinely care personally about biodiversity? Or was I just a privileged white guy who liked to go birding? And not even a purehearted birder- a lister!

After three nights of doubting my character and motives, I called Henry Finder and told him I couldn’t write the piece. I’d done plenty of ranting about climate to my friends and to likeminded conservationists, but it was like a lot of the ranting that happens online, where you’re protected by the impromptu nature of the writing and by the known friendliness of your audience. Trying to write a finished thing, an essay, had made me aware of the sloppiness of my reasoning. It had also enormously increased health risks of shame, because the writing wasn’t casual, and because it was going out to an audience of probably hostile strangers. Following Henry’s admonition (“ Therefore “), I’d come to think of the essayist as a firefighter, whose undertaking, while everyone else is fleeing the flames of shame, is to run straight into them. But I had a lot more to fear now than my mother’s disapproval.

My essay might have stayed abandoned if I hadn’t already clicked a button on Audubon’s website, confirming that, yes, I wanted to join it in fighting climate change. I’d only done this to gather rhetorical ammunition to use against Audubon, but a spate of direct-mail solicitations had followed from that click. I got at least eight of them in six weeks, all of them asking me to give money, along with a similar deluge in my email inbox. A few days after speaking to Henry, I opened one of the emails and discovered myself looking at a picture of myself – fortunately a flattering image, taken in 2010 for Vogue magazine, which had dressed me up better than I garment myself and posed me in a field with my binoculars, like a birder. The headline of the email was something like” Join Author Jonathan Franzen in Supporting Audubon “. It was true that, a few years earlier, in an interview with Audubon magazine, I’d politely praised the organisation, or at least its publication. But no one had asked for my permission to use my name and image for solicitation. I wasn’t sure the email was even legal.

A more benign impetus to return to the essay received from Henry. As far as I know, Henry couldn’t care less about birds, but he seemed to see something in my argument that our preoccupation with future catastrophes discourages us from tackling solvable environmental problems in the here and now. In an email to me, he gently suggested that I lose the tone of prophetic disdain.” This piece will be more persuasive ,” he wrote in another,” if, ironically, it’s more ambivalent, less polemical. You’re not whaling on folks who want us to pay attention to climate change and emission reductions. But you’re attentive to the costs. To what the discourse pushes to the margins .” Email by email, revise by revision, Henry nudged me toward framing the essay not as a denunciation but as a question: how do we find meaning in our actions when the world seems to be coming to an end? Much of the final draft was allocated to a pair of well-conceived regional preservation projects, in Peru and Costa Rica, where the world really is being made a better place , not just for wild plants and wild animals but for the Peruvians and Costa Ricans who live there. Run on these projects is personally meaningful, and the benefits are immediate and tangible.

In writing about the two projects, I hoped that one or two of the big charitable foundations, the ones expending tens of millions of dollars on biodiesel development or on gale farms in Eritrea, might read the piece and consider investing in work that produces tangible results. What I get instead was a missile attack from the liberal silo. I’m not on social media, but my friends reported that I was being called all sorts of names, including “birdbrain” and” climate-change denier “. Tweet-sized snippets of my essay, retweeted out of context, induced it sound as if I’d proposed that we abandon the effort to reduce carbon emissions, which was the position of the Republican party, which, by the polarising logic of online discourse, attained me a climate-change denier. In fact, I’m such a climate-science accepter that I don’t even bother having hope for the ice caps. All I’d denied was that a right-minded international elite, meeting in nice hotels around the world, could stop them from melting. This was my crime against orthodoxy. Climate now has such a lock on the liberal imagination that any attempt to change the conversation- even trying to change it to the epic extinction event that human beings are already generating without the help of climate change- amounts to an offence against religion.

I did have pity for the climate-change professionals who denounced the essay. They’d been working for decades to create the alarm in America, and they ultimately had President Obama on board with them; they had the Paris accord. It was an inopportune time to point out that drastic global warming is already a done deal, and that it seems unlikely that humanity is going to leave any carbon in the ground, given that, even now , not one country in the world has pledged to do it.

In 2015, President obama described the Paris accord as the best chance to save the planet. Photo: Pool/ Getty Images

I also understood the ferocity of the alternative-energy industry, which is a business like any other. If you allow that renewable energy projects are only a moderating tactic, unable to reverse the damage that past carbon emissions will continue to do for centuries, it opens the door to other questions about the business. Like, did we really need quite so many windmills? Did they have to be placed in ecologically sensitive regions? And the solar farms in the Mojave desert- wouldn’t it induce more sense to covering the city of Los Angeles with solar panels and spare the open space? Weren’t we sort of destroying the natural environment in order to save it? I believe it was an industry blogger who called me a birdbrain.

As for Audubon, the fundraising email should have warned me about the character of its management. But I was still surprised by its reply to the essay, which was to attack, ad hominem, the person whose name and image it had blithely appropriated two months earlier. My essay had, yes, devoted Audubon some tough love. I wanted it to cut out the nonsense, stop talking about 50 years from now, and be more aggressive in defending the birds that both it and I love.

But apparently all Audubon could see was a threat to its membership numbers and its fundraising endeavors, and so it had to disprove me as a person. I’m told the president of Audubon fired off four different salvos at me personally. This is what presidents do now.

And it worked. Without even reading those salvos- simply from knowing that other people were reading them- I felt ashamed. I felt the style I’d felt in eighth grade, shunned by the crowd and called names that shouldn’t have hurt but did. I wished I’d listened to my anxieties in the night and maintained my opinions to myself. In a country of some anguish, I called up Henry and dumped all my dishonor and regret on him. He replied, in his barely legible route, that the online reaction was merely weather.” With public opinion ,” he said,” there’s weather, and then there’s climate. You’re trying to change the climate, and that takes time .”

It didn’t matter if I believed this or not. It was enough to feel that one person, Henry, didn’t detest me. I consoled myself with the thought that, although climate is too vast and chaotic for any individual to alter it, the individual can s