#I just think those four are neat and I want more Chris ok????

[tommys-wings]

When they’re having pizza nights at Eddie’s, Buck and Tommy usually order the two with the most protein and then share them half and half, fist bumping once they’ve done the exchange, like this is the height of teamwork.

Eddie just calls them dorks and, one time, Tommy goes ‘you’re just jealous of our swag’ to which Christopher just pretends to leave like ‘I can’t believe I ever thought you were cool’ and Tommy lets out his offended ‘eeeh!’ (The same one he had when Buck teased him about the mouth static).

This prompts a contest between Buck, Tommy, and Eddie, to see who can misuse gen z/alpha slang the most egregiously, ending up in what can only be described as a Chris torture chamber.

Anyway, they’re never starved for banter.

[captainrogers-ass]

Leather & Spice - Zemo x Reader One-Shot

Summary: You could never say no to a mission when it was Sam Wilson calling, yet cooperating with a convicted mass murderer hadn’t exactly been what you were expecting. Wounding, maiming, killing; those were all in your job description. Acting as Helmut Zemo’s lover was not.

Word Count: 4900

Pairings: Zemo x Reader, Sam x Reader (platonic), Bucky x Reader (platonic)

A/N: Ok so I know I’ve been super inactive and I know this isn’t strictly Chris Evans related but I’m currently obsessed with TFATWS; more specifically a certain mass murderer. I’ve substituted Serbian for Sokovian, although Zemo talks to Bucky in Russian. As always, any and all feedback is much appreciated. I hope you enjoy!!! Let me know if you want a part 2!!!

The call had been tense, brief, and widely lacking in any important information, and yet you had still gone anyway.

No matter how many times the Avengers had screwed you over you couldn’t help yourself when Sam Wilson called. Your resistance was futile. He was too charming to say no to, and you were pretty sure he was perfectly well aware of that.

The private jet had been a nice surprise in all honesty. Sam had seemingly always had a knack for finding the seediest alleyway or dingiest motel room to meet up in whenever he called for your help, so you couldn’t help but smile at the change in scenery. Your boots clicked loudly on the tarmac below as you approached the plane, your hand pausing as it connected with the railing of the stair car, a small smile escaping onto your lips as you tried to contain your unusual excitement.

A butler with greying hair and aged skin greeted you at the entrance to the plane. He was dressed in a neat, black suit and smiled at you kindly upon your arrival, his arms already extended as he motioned towards your luggage.

“Oh, thank you,” you said with a smile as you handed over your bag.

The cabin was lovely; spacious, lavish and filled with two grown men who were currently too enthralled in their escalating argument to take any notice of your arrival.

Bucky and Sam were sitting next to each other; Bucky slumped over within his seat with his arms folded across his chest, Sam perched at the edge of his own seat, his hands raised passionately before him as he berated Bucky in a tone that was clearly trying to stay relatively calm but was miserably failing. You cleared your throat as a small smile escaped onto your lips; these two hadn’t changed one bit.

Sam’s eyes met yours first.

“Y/N!” he exclaimed, immediately rising from his seat and striding the few steps towards you, engulfing you in a hug. “I wasn’t sure, you’d come. I haven’t seen you in so long!”

You laughed as you managed to extract yourself from Sam’s embrace.

“You know I can never say no to you, Sam,” you chuckled.

“It’s because I’m too handsome, right?”

“Sure.”

You turned your attention to Bucky who was now standing just slightly back from Sam, their argument apparently forgotten as Bucky smiled kindly towards you.

“Hey there stranger,” you said as you gave Bucky a brief hug.

“And here I was thinking I was the most antisocial person I knew,” he retorted.

“I haven’t been avoiding you two, I promise. I’ve just been busy.”

“Yeah,” Sam said. “With whatever it is you do.”

You laughed but didn’t answer his implied question.

“This jet is a nice touch. How in the hell did you afford this?” you questioned.

The atmosphere changed immediately, the smile on your features faltering slightly as you felt the tension rise around you. Bucky turned his eyes to the floor, his figure hunching over slightly so that he looked far smaller than he usually appeared. Sam averted his gaze as well, instead turning to look at something past your shoulder.

“It’s mine actually. I don’t believe we’ve met.”

Having worked in secret services your entire life you found yourself quite shocked at having failed to notice the third man on board. There was no doubt that this man hadn’t been in the main cabin upon your arrival, but having failed to recognise his presence until he spoke was an unusual oversight on your part; especially since he was standing quite close to you.

As you turned around you registered three things before your eyes landed upon him. Firstly, his accent was unusual, captivating and alluring, not one that you could outright recognise on an initial introduction alone. Secondly, his cologne was extraordinarily enticing; a dark, spicy smell that washed over you and filled your senses all at once so that you couldn’t help but inhale deeply to try and get another whiff of it. And thirdly, his presence was remarkable. Even before you looked upon him you could tell that this was a man of wealth; his tone, his posture, his cologne, his everything, oozed sophistication.

And then your eyes met his.

“I’m Helm-”

Before he could finish you grabbed the hand he had been in the process of outstretching for a handshake, twisted it behind his back before shoving him up against the wall of the plane with quite possibly a tad more force than was strictly necessary. A grunt escaped his lips as you did so, but whether it was from pain or surprise you couldn’t tell.

“Y/N!” Bucky and Sam yelled in unison.

“Would someone care to explain to me why there is a convicted criminal on board this plane.” Your voice came out far calmer than you were expecting.

“Well it is my pla-”

“Shut up,” you, Bucky and Sam all said in unison.

You pushed his contorted arm higher and a flicker of pain crossed his features for just a second, yet he remained silent. His face was pressed against the wall, your body weight holding him in place, and yet his eyes were trained on you, a piercing blend of hazel and gold that sent a shiver down your spine. He wasn’t resisting at all—which was surprising considering he could probably overpower you with his military history—and he no longer made any obvious outward indication that he was in pain even though the placement of his arm would suggest otherwise.

“We need him, Y/N,” Sam finally spoke up.

You struggled to pull your gaze from his, lingering for what felt like years.

“And his life-long prison sentence just happened to be up, I suppose?” you replied.

You couldn’t quite tell, but the subtle vibrations coming from Zemo made you think that he was laughing.

“Well, Bucky was the one who actually broke him ou-” Sam began.

“Oh yeah blame it on me,” Bucky exclaimed.

“Were you not the one who broke him out?”

“You know we needed him I was just the-”

“Ok, ok, boys,” you interrupted. “I really don’t care whose fault it is. What’s done is done. But will someone please explain why the hell we need a mass murderer’s help?”

“Well, there’s this new terrorist organisation called the Flagsmashers,” Sam began.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Zemo interrupted. You pushed him up against the wall harder but he continued on unfazed. “But I feel like this story is going to take a while so is there any possibility that I can have the function of my arm back, please?”

There was that accent again, so unusual and yet so smooth that it took you a few seconds to actually register what the man was saying. You glared at him for several seconds but eventually loosened your grip.

Immediately turning around, Zemo brought his hand up to rub at the arm that had been angled uncomfortably behind his back, his gaze never leaving yours. Your eyes travelled down his figure, taking in the luxurious coat draped around his shoulders, the well-tailored purple turtleneck underneath that shaped his frame well, and the expensive-looking black gloves that clung to his fingers. When your eyes returned to his a smile was peeking through onto his lips.

“As I was saying before, I’m Helmut Zemo.” You noticed that he didn’t extend his hand a second time for a handshake. “But I take it you already knew that…Y/N, is it?”

You didn’t answer, simply continuing to stare at him through slitted eyelids.

“I would say it is a pleasure to meet you,” he began again, making his way over to a small bar cart as he poured himself a drink. “But it was actually a surprisingly painful introduction.”

Extending a gloved hand towards you Zemo offered you a glass of the brown liquid. With some hesitation you accepted, your eyes never leaving his as your hand brushed over his gloved one.

Tearing your gaze from his you made your way to the seat in front of where Sam and Bucky had been previously sitting. Taking a sip from your drink you motioned for the two men to reclaim their seats.

“So, tell me about these Flagsmashers.”

*

“If we have to do something about this, I’m the only one that looks like a pimp,” Sam commented, looking down to admire the colourfully decorated suit he was wearing.

The four of you were currently walking across an empty bridge, the lights of the bustling city burning bright in the distance.

“Only an American would assume a fashion-forward black man looks like a pimp. You look exactly like the man you’re supposed to be playing; a sophisticated, charming, African rake named Conrad Mack, aka the Smiling Tiger,” Zemo replied, passing his phone to Sam, a photo lighting up the screen.

“He even has a bad nickname. Hell, he does look like me though.”

You walked closer to Sam, leaning over his shoulder to get a look at the picture. You laughed slightly to yourself.

“You sure you don’t have some alter ego you’re not telling us about?” you questioned.

“Ha, ha,” Sam responded dryly.

“So then who am I supposed to be?” you asked Zemo. “Some stunningly beautiful millionaire who also happens to look exactly like me, I presume?”

The sarcasm was obvious in your tone and yet you were still surprised at the small laugh that left Zemo’s lips. It was deep, dark, and didn’t last very long, but it was charming. You turned away from him and looped your arm through Sam’s instead, pretending to need assistance with walking from the six-inch heels Zemo had you wear.

The dress he had presented to you on the plane was surprisingly stunning. It was black and fell just above your ankles, a large slit running up the left side of the fabric and a cowling neckline that accentuated your figure perfectly. The back was low, the straps criss-crossing across your shoulders doing little to provide any solace from the evenings cold wind.

“In a sense I suppose that is correct,” Zemo responded. “You will be playing the role of my date.”

Your head whipped around to stare at him.

“Excuse me?”

Bucky and Sam tried in vain to hide their snickers. You punched Sam lightly in the arm.

“The Smiling Tiger, the Winter Soldier and I all have reputations that we can rely on here in Madripoor. Nobody knows who you are Y/N and that makes you the most valuable person here. By limiting you to just my date people will begin to underestimate you which makes you a valuable asset if things begin to go South.”

His words made sense and yet you refused to admit it.

“He’s not wrong, Y/N,” Sam whispered to you.

“I think if Bucky can pretend to be the Winter Soldier,” Zemo continued. “Then you will be perfectly capable of pretending to be my date.”

“No, I think Y/N still got the short straw here,” Bucky said, causing you and Sam to begin to snicker as a scowl appeared on Zemo’s face.

A black car began to approach you on the bridge, pulling up beside you. Just before you could open the door a gloved hand enclosed around the handle.

“Allow me, draga.”

He opened the door and motioned for you to enter. You met his gaze, raising an eyebrow up at him.

“I’m not your date just yet.”

“A lady should always be treated with respect whether she is one’s date or not.”

You hadn’t been expecting a response, yet he had provided one so quickly and with such sincerity in his voice that you couldn’t help but furrow your eyebrows at him. Your gaze lingered upon his for several seconds before he provided you with a curt nod.

You entered the car without another word, Zemo following in behind you so that you were now sandwiched between him and Sam with Bucky sitting quite comfortably in the front seat.

The drive into town was mostly quiet. You enjoyed looking out the window at the bright city, mesmerised by all the neon signs and blinding lights. The streets were riddled with guns; hidden in holsters on people’s hips, tucked into the backs of pants, or simply waved around nonchalantly. You checked the holster attached to your thigh for good measure.

Glancing into the rear-view mirror you could have sworn that you had met Zemo’s gaze for a split second, but with a blink of your eyes his head was now directed out the window, his gaze fixated on the passing buildings. You furrowed your eyebrows in confusion, but returned your gaze to the window once more without a word.

The streets were crawling with criminals when you reached the bar. Guns were being waved around as if they were a fashion accessory and blatant felonies were being conducted out in the open with no attempt to conceal anything.

Zemo exited the car first, and as you scooted across the seat to make your own exit you found that familiar gloved hand was already extended towards you. Looking up, your eyes met his, taking his hand without a word. You were now in character and you were going to play the role as best you could.

You didn’t let go of Zemo’s hand as he helped you from the car. Instead, after waiting for him to close the door behind you, you looped your arm through his as you had done to Sam only minutes previously, this time leaning into him much more closely than you had done with your friend.

If Zemo was surprised at your gentle touch he did not show it. Instead he flexed his arm to bring you slightly closer before leading you, Bucky and Sam into the bar. As soon as you had exited the car it seemed as if the whole street had their eyes on you. Your heart fluttered nervously in your chest, but your features remained neutral even as your eyes roamed freely around your surroundings.

“I can’t believe I’m saying this,” you whispered to Zemo. “But I think you should’ve given me something a bit more revealing to wear. This dress is beautiful, but I look so out of place.”

Zemo turned to you with a smile on his face.

“Any woman on my arm will always be dressed in the finest of silks. It would be far more suspicious if I made you wear a more revealing dress, trust me.”

His voice was low as he spoke to you, his gaze fixated on you as he smiled cheekily.

Your heart fluttered nervously once more.

The bar was loud, hot and filled with half-drunk people rubbing their private parts against each other. The popular neon lights trickled in to the establishment, casting contrasting shadows of yellow and red across the space.

A bartender greeted you as you approached the bar, his face stoic and void of emotion.

“Hello gentlemen,” he nodded towards Sam. “Wasn’t expecting you, Smiling Tiger.”

Zemo answered for him.

“His plans changed. We have business to do with Selby.”

The bartender turned to Sam.

“The usual?”

Sam nodded.

When the bartender returned with a snake and began to gut it right in front of you you couldn’t help the small smile that crept up onto your face when you realised what was happening.

“Ah,” Zemo began, “Smiling Tiger, your favourite.”

His tone was slightly mocking and it nearly caused you to burst out laughing right there, but you managed to retain your composure. Sam turned with a resentful look on his face to see you and Zemo trying to hide the smiles that were creeping on to your faces.

“I love these,” Sam said as he raised the glass to you.

You leaned your head on to Zemo’s shoulder in an attempt to hide your snickers. Sam clinked his glass against Zemo’s, and after some hesitation, downed the shot in one.

The smile was wiped from your face as you felt a presence approach you from behind, struggling against the instinct to reach for your weapon. Zemo felt you still beside him and immediately turned to meet the approaching man, placing you slightly behind him.

“I got word from on high,” the man said. “You ain’t welcome here.”

Zemo’s voice sounded nonchalant as he responded.

“I have no business with the Power Broker, but if he insists he can either come and talk to me,” Zemo looked behind him to where Bucky was standing.

“New haircut?” the man said to Bucky with a scoff.

Zemo’s voice was deep and demanding, grasping the man’s attention once more, “Or bring Selby for a chat.”

The man left but now your senses were on high alert as Zemo turned back to talk to Bucky. Your eyes scoured the room, noticing several men beginning to approach you. Slowly your hand began to travel down to your gun.

“Not yet, dušica.” Zemo’s gaze turned to Bucky just as one of the approaching men placed his hand upon Zemo’s shoulder. “Zimniy soldat. Ataka.”

Without hesitating Bucky grabbed the arm of the man who had touched Zemo, bending it painfully backwards. You watched on with bated breath, worried for your friend as he reverted back to what he once was, not because he wasn’t able to handle the fight—he wasn’t even breaking a sweat as he took on three guys at once—but because of what this little act might have on all the progress he had made.

Your gaze flickered to Zemo for a split second to find that he was smiling.

“It didn’t take long for him to fall back into form,” he whispered to you.

Ever since this trip had begun you had slowly started to become desensitised to the fact that you were in the presence of a mass murderer, often forgetting at times that the man before you had caused so much pain and suffering. But now it hit you all at once, causing you to become quite repulsed by the presence beside you.

Wanting to remove yourself from his side but knowing that you couldn’t you instead leaned in to whisper in his ear.

“If you smile again from Bucky’s pain, I’ll punch your teeth in so that when I burn you to death they won’t be able to use your dental records to identify your body.”

To say that Zemo was surprised at your comment was an understatement as he whipped his head around to look at you, his mask of composure forgotten for a split second as his eyes met yours. He didn’t respond, but the look in his eyes told you that he had not been expecting such a response. His gaze fell to the floor and you thought, just for a second, that maybe he was about to apologise, but when his eyes came back to look at you his mouth remained closed.

He noticed the change in your attitude immediately. Whilst you did not disentangle your arm from his, you now distanced yourself as far as you could from his side, your touch no longer the comfortable presence he had begun to enjoy, now cold and impersonal.

The sounds of guns being cocked brought your attention back to the room.

“Stay in character or the whole bar turns on us,” Zemo quickly whispered to Bucky. “Otlichnaya rabota, soldat,” he said louder.

Everyone in the bar paused as Bucky let go of the man he had been in the process of choking.

“Selby will see you now,” the bartender interrupted.

A small sigh of relief escaped from your lips.

The back room was poorly lit and smelt of alcohol and cigarettes, the wall to your left illuminated by small televisions that displayed the security camera footage from all over the bar.

Selby—a middle aged, menacing looking woman with short, platinum blonde hair—was sitting upon one of the luxurious couches, dressed in an ill-fitting suit with a loosely tied tie hanging around her neck.

“You should know, Baron,” she began, tapping her hand against the head of the couch. “People don’t just come into my bar and make demands.”

“Not a demand,” Zemo responded. “An offer.”

Zemo took a seat on the couch opposite to Selby’s, his hand in yours as he motioned for you to sit next to him. You paused for just a second before perching yourself so that you were instead sitting in his lap. As much as you didn’t want to be in this position, when you went undercover you did it well. Zemo’s face showed no hint of surprise, but his hands fumbled for a split second, unsure of where to place them before he rested one on your waist and one on your thigh, quite high up so that he was basically at your knee. The gesture didn’t go unnoticed and you found yourself quite surprised at his willingness to respect your boundaries.

Selby raised an eyebrow at you.

“A lot has changed since you were last here,” she said, her gaze now fixated on you. It made you feel uncomfortable, but you didn’t show it as you leaned back into Zemo’s touch. “By the way, I thought you were rotting away in a German prison. How did you escape?”

Zemo’s gloved hand began rubbing circles on your knee, your skin exposed from the slit in the dress. You were pretty sure he wasn’t aware he was doing it, but you weren’t altogether against the touch.

“People like us always find a way, don’t we?” he responded. “I’m sure you’ve already figured out what I’m here for.”

“What’s the offer.”

“Tell us what you know about the super-soldier serum, and I give you him.” Zemo’s gaze turned to Bucky who remained stoic and impassive in the corner of the room. “Along with the code words to control him, of course.”

“Now that’s the Zemo I remember. I’m glad I decided not to kill you immediately.” She paused as she considered the offer. “You were right to seek me out. The super-soldier serum is here in Madripoor. Dr. Wilfred Nagel is the man you wanna thank…or condemn, depending on what side of this you’re on.”

“Is Nagel still in Madripoor?” Zemo questioned.

“Oh, the breadcrumbs you can have for free, but the bakery is gonna cost you, Baron.” Selby’s gaze shifted to Bucky before it returned to land on you. “Who is this beautiful creature you’ve got with you?”

You felt Zemo stiffen beneath you.

“Ah,” he began, his voice somehow having grown deeper. “This one isn’t part of the deal. She’s mine.”

There was an intensity to the way he said mine. It was subtle, but it was there, and Selby noticed it as she quirked an eyebrow up at him.

“Are you sure about that, Baron?” she responded with a laugh. “These young creatures get so restless. Are you sure she’s not bored with you already?”

Zemo’s hand was now gripping your thigh a lot lower than where it had previously been and a lot harder; not so roughly that it hurt, but hard enough for you to realise that he was unsure of how to proceed. You turned your gaze to Selby who licked her lips as your eyes met hers, before turning your attention back to Zemo. He looked up towards you, a confused look flashing across his eyes as he tried to figure out what you were about to do. Having made your decision—and before you had enough time to really question what you were about to do—you leaned down towards the Baron and collided your lips with his.

Zemo hesitated at first, his lips unresponsive against yours for a split second before he returned the gesture. His hands came up to tangle themselves in your hair, your own hands gripping the base of his scalp. You slipped your tongue into his mouth and turned slightly so that Selby had a clear view.

You made sure the kiss was dirty and ferocious, and it left both of you breathless as you pulled away from him.

You turned to Selby with a smirk on your face, wiping some saliva from the corner of your mouth with the pad of your thumb as you maintained eye-contact with her.

“Not quite yet,” you said.

A viscous smile spread across her face but before Selby could respond Sam’s phone began to ring, and everything went downhill pretty quickly from there.

When the sniper shot came through the window you didn’t have time to be surprised, immediately leaping to your feet, gun already in hand. Before Selby’s henchmen had even had time to react you had already shot a bullet into two of their chests, Bucky taking out the third man in the room.

“We have a real problem now, so leave your weapons and follow my lead,” Zemo said, quickly making his way back down to the bar with you, Sam and Bucky close behind, your gun back in its concealed holster.

Descending the stairs quickly, Bucky leaned back with a smirk on his face. 

"Told you you got the short straw."

Punching him in the arm to try to get him to shut up you quickly realised your mistake as you brought your hand to your chest, pain flaring in your knuckles at having collided with the vibranium. A short laugh escaped from Bucky's lips.

"Focus," Zemo called from the front of the group.

You made your way back on to the street quickly, following Zemo as he hastily walked in a direction that you hoped would get you off the main strip. Looking around you as you walked you kept noticing people getting notifications on their phones and a bad feeling began to grow in your stomach.

A round of bullets were shot towards you, the proximity of the bang causing your ears to ring painfully. All four of you ducked immediately as you scrambled away quickly. Bucky and Sam ran forwards and Zemo, grabbing your hand swiftly, veered off into a small alley way, his hand never leaving yours as he ran. The sound of several footsteps followed close behind you, but before you could reach for your gun Zemo crowded you into a small alcove.

“What are you doing? They’ll see us here,” you angrily whispered. Your hand began to reach for your gun once more but Zemo stopped you.

“There’s too many of them,” he said quickly, peeking out from behind the alcove to spy on the approaching men.

“We’re sitting ducks here. I can probably get a few shots out if-”

All at once Zemo whipped back around and placed his index finger upon your lips to stop you from speaking.

“I’m truly sorry for this.”

For the second time that night Helmut Zemo’s lips were now upon yours, kissing you far more softly than you had kissed him before. His body was crowding yours against the wall of the alley way, his broad form easily shielding you. The footsteps got closer and closer, all the while you kept kissing the Baron. This time there was no tongue, just gentle lips upon yours as he kissed you tenderly and slowly.

That cologne you had first smelt that morning engulfed your senses now so that it was all you could smell. Your hands came up to grip at the fur collar of his coat, pulling him closer by the furred lapel, and you couldn’t help but marvel at the softness of it. 

Somewhere in the back of your mind you registered the approaching footsteps; how close they came to you before they past right by, the group of men not giving you a second glance as one shouted orders to the rest in a language you couldn't be bothered to recognise.

At some point Zemo's tongue ended up in your mouth, or maybe it was your tongue in his. Either way you couldn't recall who had initiated it, and couldn't quite find the effort to care. One of his hands came up to cup your cheek whilst the other became entangled within your hair, pulling at your roots slightly so that you moaned at the feeling.

You moaned.

Pushing the baron away from you you immediately put as much distance as you could between the two of you. His lips were red and swollen and you were quite sure yours looked the same, both panting slightly as the cold air illuminated your breaths.

You could feel your cheeks begin to redden immediately, and swiftly turned away from him to hide your embarrassment.

You could still hear the men who had been following you, their footsteps far quieter now as they continued down the alley.

“I think they’re gone,” you finally said, having allowed the awkward silence to grow palpable between you.

“Yes…yes I think you’re right,” he responded, not meeting your gaze.

The sound of footsteps coming down the alley filled your ears once more, and this time you didn’t hesitate as you pulled your gun from its holster.

“Woah, easy there tiger, it’s just us,” Sam said, his hands held upwards in a sign of surrender.

You let out a sigh as you saw them and immediately felt Zemo’s gaze fall upon you.

[qcpmedia]

“Birds of Prey”: A Crisis of Infinite Harleys

by Chris Clay

Ok-- let's get this part out of the way first: I love Harley Quinn.

Have done since her debut on Batman The Animated Series. My mother let my dad take me to see Tim Burton’s brilliant 1989 Batman film (I was 5 at the time) because she was under the assumption that Batman was always the high camp she remembered enjoying in the television show from her childhood. Thanks, Adam West! My journey into comics began shortly after learning to read with classical mythology, so I was totally prepared for all manner of tales about monsters, demons, serial killers, human traffickers, etc. Quickly becoming an avid comic reader, 10 year-old me was a DC & Marvel veteran who spent a lot of mental energy filling in the blanks on the softened-for-cartoons versions of Bats, Spidey & the X-Men. 

After years of seeing "versions" of my favorite supers onscreen, I thought this new character, originally the Joker's jester henchwoman, was a breath of fresh air. She seemed like the perfect fit for both the show and the Joker, the first real Manic Pixie Dreamgirl. She was funny but also scary, vulnerable and just overall awesome. Best of all? She didn’t seem nerfed for kids tv. She just seemed oddly... real. And she was contagious. That complex reality bled onto anyone she shared enough screen time with. She helped me to see Poison Ivy as the troubled yet brilliant and sensitive person the show had always hinted she was. Besides Catwoman, no other character tested Batman's rigid sense of right and wrong more beautifully. Even Joker seemed multifaceted when Harley was around. I cheered as loudly as anyone when she ditched that clown, and those Harley/Ivy episodes were some of the best the series had to offer.

OG Harley & subsequent versions over the years tended to show a woman that was preyed upon by a master manipulator who pushed her to the edge of sanity. To the edge, not over it. She was definitely traumatized, but the original portrayals never presented any extreme mental problems. Sure, she was codependent & had a temper. And shitty taste in men. Those traits in moderation are not craaaazy. That's just being human.

Harley continued to evolve over the years, shaped by many creators and performers across multiple mediums. Her look has changed, her status as villain or antihero has vacillated and her relationships have been presented more and more as on her terms rather than something foisted upon her by chance.

The characterization problems started in comics, but David Ayers' disappointing 2016 Suicide Squad film brought this lesser Harl to the masses, along with a version of her *ahem* more revealing New52 costume, seemingly metahuman durability & chalk white skin. I always loved the idea that Harleen had the ability to take her jester clothing & clown makeup off, sit around with an equally dressed-down Ivy and talk about who they really were, what made them tick. This new Harley (like her modern comics counterpart) was always "on", displaying very little of the soulful, mature character many of us comics & animation fans know and love. Despite that, she was definitely the highlight of the film, and there were flashes of brilliance that made me believe Margot Robbie could get to the fundamental truths of the character if given another chance. 

And that brings us rather neatly to Birds of Prey (and the Fantabulous Emancipation of One Harley Quinn).

Harley Quinn, last seen in the aforementioned Suicide Squad, has just been dumped by the Joker & is forced to make her own way in Gotham City’s underworld. In short order, she meets Dinah Lance, Renee Montoya, Helena Bertinelli & Cassandra Cain. All of these ladies have, for various reasons, fallen onto the radar of neat-freak gangster Roman Sionis, played with scenery-scarfing delight by Ewan MacGregor. Forced to band together to survive, they eventually learn that despite their considerable individual talents, they're more formidable as a team.

For some reason I still can’t quite articulate, I remember being slightly underwhelmed when the cast was announced. I liked all of the actors... hell, each of them has had at least one role I absolutely loved them in-- but I still felt they were odd choices for their respective roles in this movie (more on that later). The trailer was where I got genuinely worried that Warner might be climbing back into the hole so many creators toiled to pull the DC film properties out of. 

However, as I said in the beginning, I love Harley Quinn. I was definitely going to see this movie. In Margot Robbie, I felt Harley had a champion on par with Ryan Reynolds as Deadpool or Hugh Jackman as Wolverine; an actor who would work tirelessly to get their character right, on the page & onscreen, however many tries it took. Plus she was saying some interesting things about what she thought the the film & the character should represent during the rollout (and I know the movie isn't the trailer), so I was at "cautious optimism" by the time I sat down to watch the film.

I was totally wrong about one thing: the cast is the best thing about the movie, and that’s not some backhanded compliment. K.K. Barrett's production design is great, colorful while not feeling cheap or phony, and Cathy Yan has a great eye for fun directing choices that keep things zipping along... but the cast is the real MVP. They’re actually great.

Jurnee Smollet-Bell is understated & surprisingly physical as tough-as-nails chanteuse Dinah Lance, a classic “woman trying to keep her head down in a bum situation”. She gave modern comic book moll vibes & I Stan. Rosie Perez's Renee Montoya brought a dose of realism to the candy-coated insanity swirling all around her while also giving Harley an entertaining foil for the first 2 acts. She has probably my favorite fight scene in the entire movie.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead, the person I went into the movie thinking was the most grossly miscast, is hands down my favorite character in the film. She's equal parts ruthless & socially awkward, a take on Huntress that is somehow both anachronistic & perfectly in step with her comic counterpart. Even newcomer Ella Jay Basco brings a unique charm to what could have easily been an irksome reimagining of fan favorite Cass Cain as a sassy teenage pickpocket. MacGregor’s turn as Sionis is less a character than he is a symbol, acting as a stand-in for various brands of broken maleness, but the guy’s clearly having a blast and he has decent enough chemistry with the leads. Chris Messina as Victor Vsasz is an absolute snoozefest, a waste of both character and actor that I’ll give no more space or attention.

Now for the elephant in the room: Margot Robbie's Harley is my least favorite thing about the whole movie.

"But Chris..", I hear you yelling at your computational device, "...you said she was the lone bright spot of SS!"

True, but in a film with clever, unmuddied direction & other actors that actually display some semblance of emotion or charisma for more than one scene a piece, the bar has been raised this go round & Robbie's frantic mugging limbos under said bar by a mile. What’s worse is that she actively takes screen time that could be better spent fleshing out one of the other four characters. Only Huntress (who has probably the least screen time of any of the leads) actually has a backstory, but her origin is a large part of the plot. One could be forgiven for thinking the she wouldn’t have had one at all otherwise. We don’t really know anything about Cassandra Cain, Montoya is literally just Stock Cop, and you could make a whole movie out of how the hell Dinah ended up singing at Sionis’ club. And where the hell is the Joker?! Why is he letting Harley destabilize Gotham’s balance of power or letting Sionis threaten his ex-puddin’ while also claiming to be the the underworld’s top dog? Instead of answering these questions, we get a bunch of throwaway characters attacking the newly-emancipated Quinn and Suicide Squad flashbacks that look even uglier than before when placed side by side with the production design of this film. The fact that most of these characters are so thinly characterized yet still connect is a testament to the performances and chemistry of the central cast.

You get the feeling that a lot of this movie was Robbie as producer, exerting her ideas & energy onto a massive production that needed a lot of moving parts to line up in order to work. It's not easy to have everything riding on you, whether it’s the future of the DCEU, progressive representation of women in film or just your own movie stardom. I understand that and I sympathize. This frantic, flailing movie is the product of some 3 years of rewrites and pitching, shooting on and off for 9 months, plus all the promo stuff. Every interview that I've seen the cast do has basically been Robbie explaining things ad nauseam while Jurnee Smollet-Bell or Mary Elizabeth Winstead kind of quietly nod in agreement, with the exception of the recent season premiere of Hot Ones, where capsaicin finally allowed someone else get a word in edgewise. The real problem with that comes when you see the movie and realize she’s contextualizing so much of the film on other media outlets because the film itself doesn’t really seem to have the time or interest, leaving it’s star to try and explain what we actually see onscreen on the press tour. This leads to a situation akin to Final Fantasy XV, where the player needed heaps of supplemental content to understand what could and should have been included in the story proper. She just seems overworked, similar to when Ben Affleck wanted to perform the Herculean task of writing, directing & starring in the next solo Batman film. Maybe Margot & Harley both need a little break?

The internet is scrambling to diagnose why a well-reviewed movie starring a beloved character played by a popular actress is underperforming at the box office, citing everything from the trailer to the rating to the movie’s title, with many (including BoP creator Gerry Conway) blaming the lackluster box office on sexism, but I think there might be a simpler answer: this version is trying to pull from the entire history of Harley to create a singular characterization from sometimes disparate portrayals. It doesn’t help that Robbie’s Quinn exists in a universe that’s constantly shifting under her feet after every film.

Most comic characters are criticized for being inaccurate to the source material but Harley has arguably the opposite problem; almost a Crisis of Infinite Harleys, where Robbie and Warner Bros. want to stuff the best elements from every version of Harley into every movie she’s in. It’s supposed to be fan service but instead, often feels scattered and tiring. Not to mention the stuff these films just pluck straight out of thin air that don’t work...

The DC Universe version of the character chose to leave the Joker on her own terms and I thought that was a brilliant and socially relevant writing choice, so it was strange to then see the more mainstream (and arguably more popular) version of Harley be dragged out of Joker’s hideout, kicking and screaming. In a film who’s title was purposely made ridiculously long to accentuate the character’s supposed newfound self-sufficiency, For all of the things that do work well, Birds of Prey just doesn’t feel like what’s explicitly promised on the tin.

I still love Harley Quinn, and I still think Margot Robbie’s the right person for the job. No need to Pattinson her or anything... just put less on her plate and give the character and the movies she’s in a clear, singular direction. Pretty please, puddin’?

[thesinglesjukebox]

SOCCER MOMMY - CIRCLE THE DRAIN

[7.73]

Did not Usher in a top score; did yield a lot of writing...

Ian Mathers: There's a mandolin part (or something) peeking through the mix here in places that, combined with the dreamy listlessness of Sophie Allison's lyrics and delivery, is giving me significant pangs of that ol' devil nostalgia for both my past and the music of my past. Sometimes though, you just gotta go with it. [9]

Vikram Joseph: Nostalgia is a hallucinogen; it blurs the distinction between times you miss and times you simply happen to remember more vividly than others, and, more disconcertingly, between places you have been and places that have only ever existed in your internal world. There's something about "Circle The Drain" - with its soft golden hour hues, its fuzzy edges - that drives deep into whichever ganglion or cortex is responsible for nostalgia, and sends uncoordinated sparks and signals across its synapses, triggering a slideshow of fragmented memories that may or may not be memories at all. It reminds me of so many tangible things - the late 90s / early 00s guitar-pop of Natalie Imbruglia and Avril Lavigne, the Smashing Pumpkins' "Today", and (strangest of all) second-tier Brit indie band Feeder's tender teenage stoner anthem "High" - but also of so much that is unreachable and unnameable - walks home from nowhere, composite daydreams from a hundred train windows, summers disintegrating into the building blocks of memory. As if getting older isn't frightening enough, if I have this much capacity for nostalgia at just past 30 won't I be slowly crushed under its weight by 70? But for now, while I can still think of myself as young, I'm grateful for this song - a gorgeous, dreamy downer - and for the synthesis of new memories from the glowing rubble of ones that came before. [9]

Leah Isobel: On my first day of work in the new decade, a customer yelled at me. It wasn't the first time this had happened, and he wasn't actually mad at me; he was hurt by something my boss had done, and I was just in the crosshairs. But what he said - the justified core of his anger - has stuck with me, like an ink I can't wash off my hands. It's followed me all month, keeping me from being present with my friends or honest with my parents or productive at my job. I haven't been able to write about it, either; the helplessness, the horror, the rot I feel in my body. It feels a lot like the sick-sweet guitar decay in this song. [9]

Julian Axelrod: Calling a song "passive" is rarely a complement, but everything about "Circle the Drain" feels detached in the best way. The sample-of-a-sample guitars fade in and out of focus, Sophie Allison's numb sigh is couched in a week's worth of reverb, and her verses frame summer love and self-immolation as equidistant unattainable ideals. It's a song about depression, but it doubles as an interrogation of the "slacker rock" tag bands like Soccer Mommy so often fall under: Is this person stuck on the couch because they're unambitious, or has the mold in their brain turned them to a bedridden husk of their usual chipper self? Everything around Allison is pristinely produced, which makes its passivity all the more pointed. As a great artist once said, "Do you think a depressed person could make this?" [7]

Nortey Dowuona: A nice, twee song about being sad. That's it. that's the tweet. [9]

Katherine St Asaph: I cannot pinpoint, and it's bugging me, what specific maybe-obvious riff this is biting. (My ears hear something like Kay Hanley's Cherry Marmalade, and the duh answer is probably like Nirvana, but I think part of it is, of all things, Incubus's "Drive"?) But I've listened to enough '90s college-rock filler to recognize a clear improvement on it. [7]

Alfred Soto: Nailing the early nineties college rock churn 'n' jangle as surely as "Lucy" did last year, "Circle the Drain" flirts more closely -- more ominously -- with the churn 'n' jangle that crossed over several years later: think Shawn Colvin, not Belly. Listeners may dig this direction. I say Soccer Mommy gets blanded out. [6]

Thomas Inskeep: Is that a banjo? Well, that's unexpected. The guitar-plugged-into-a-sole-amp and ramshackle '90s-Beck-ish drums, those are expected. But you can definitely hear the increased production budget on this, and I'm not 100% it's for the better. [6]

Brad Shoup: The dream of Adult Alternative is alive and well and uncanny. The idea of daubing one's emotional grayness into the short shadows of a deceptively summery pop rocker... I wasn't sure that was a move anymore. [7]

Joshua Copperman: This doesn't sound like a 90s radio hit, this sounds like 90s album filler. Okay, that's a bit much. It sounds like it was there, but then someone at Loma Vista said 'it's 2020, music has been functional background noise for like four years now, take out everything interesting except for the delay spin in the second verse and the nifty tape flutter effect around four minutes in, don't distract anyone'. There's a synth pad at 1:15 that disappears by 1:20. The actual song is pretty great - I especially love the imagery of walking on a cable, depression being so debilitating that doing anything has the stakes of conducting the electric city. The top comment on eight-minute advance single "Yellow is the Color of Her Eyes" currently reads "If she went far enough, I think she would meet Chris Martin at the beach." For "Circle The Drain," I wish she did. [6]

Michael Hong: Bubbly and burbly, "Circle the Drain" sounds exactly like that, a spinning whirlpool. Where Clean was blurred by the surrounding ennui of being a teenager with a crush, "Circle the Drain" marks a clear progression in Soccer Mommy's sound, sounding more expansive and vibrant. You feel it in the twang of the looping guitar melody and in the shuffle of the backing beat. The background noise of Clean is washed away, reduced to a low fuzzy din and Soccer Mommy's voice comes with reassuring elegance that suggests while you can fall apart in the spiral, there's comfort to come when it does eventually end. [9]

Joshua Minsoo Kim: I hate the game my mind plays with regards to my depression being "legitimate" enough. If things are OK and I don't feel depressed: Great, but was I just dumb and emotional this whole time and my depression not actually real? When things are OK and I feel depressed: Not great, but at least I know my depression is... real? I don't know. That I have such thoughts is an upsetting thing in and of itself, and the plainness with which Soccer Mommy talks about not wanting to remain strong for family and friends is a reminder of how debilitating life can be. That others feel that way makes me feel less alone. "Circle the Drain" is a song about being stuck, of being "chained" to your bed (please help me if I'm "napping" all the time). There's a quiet appeal--a slacker glamour--that this song exudes, that captures the allure and sickness and banality of depression in the everyday. [8]

Will Adams: The chorus is curious; the bridge sets up a clear launch, but at the cathartic moment the production falls away, to the point it feels like we're getting a second verse. It's not until the titular thinking appears ("round and around") that the arrangement comes back into focus. It's a neat trick. One that wears thin by the third time, but who am I to argue with a song that wraps me in the nostalgic comfort of Orange County radio and Daria commercial bumpers like this. [8]

Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Soccer Mommy's best songs capture the clarity of feeling like shit like no other artist's do. It's a hard feeling, the way that being lost and beaten-down create not any kind of moral righteousness but a shocking awareness. It's everywhere on "Circle the Drain," from the crunch of the intro guitars and the tinniness of the drum machine on the bridge to Allison's vocal performance, which sounds at once both immediate and far away. But it's there most in her songwriting, which Gabe Wax's production only intensifies. The way that the second verse breaks from the figurative language of the first into stark, morbidly funny descriptions of mental illness and decay is arresting, and the way the song pushes through it, almost making the final choruses sound triumphant, is even more so. [8]

Alex Clifton: "Circle the Drain" is a story of depression set to the warmest guitars I've heard this side of the nineties. It's a beautifully neat trick to pull and Soccer Mommy here does so with aplomb--both aspects kept reeling me back in for second and third listens. Although the lyrics are sad, the feeling is ultimately uplifting. It's okay if you are falling to pieces. A song like this will catch you. [8]

[Read, comment and vote on The Singles Jukebox]

[craigrcannon]

Employee #1: Reddit

Employee #1 is a series of interviews focused on sharing the often untold stories of early employees at tech companies.

Chris Slowe was the first employee at Reddit. He worked at Reddit for five years, then Hipmunk for five years, and now he’s back at Reddit, writing code.

Discussed: YC’s First Batch, Meeting The Founders, Finishing a PhD While Working at a Startup, Keyser Söze, Reddit as Vocation, Maintaining a Life Outside a Startup, and Returning to Reddit.

Craig : You’re back at Reddit now. What’s your role at this point?

Chris : It’s kinda two things. I started off working on some front page redesign stuff that we’ve got planned. I’m also working on a new version of our algorithm. Our current version is about eight years old. I also wrote that algorithm.

Craig : [Laughter]

Chris : Practically speaking, we’re probably a hundred times bigger than we were when we wrote that, so that was my initial task. I’m also forging one of our new engineering teams, which we internally call “Anti-Evil.” We’re anti-spam, anti-abuse, and sort of anti-cheating. I guess we’re anti-everything. Pro-freedom!

Craig : Right on. And prior to re-joining Reddit you were at Hipmunk. How was it working there?

Chris : I really enjoyed it. I think the thing we learned most of all there was that breaking into travel is really hard. There are a lot of big players and most travel companies aren’t technology companies. I can’t tell you how many times I was on a call and the other person on the phone was referring to their engineering staff as “IT.”

Craig : [Laughter]

Chris : It was like, “Oh, we’re having one of those calls.”

Craig : “Let me get the nerds in here and they’ll figure it out.”

Chris : Yeah!

Craig : That’s hilarious. Ok, so could you give me the rundown of how you ended up at Reddit?

Chris : Sure. I was in Y Combinator’s first batch, along with Steve Huffman and Alexis Ohanian. I was working at a different startup and we were doing desktop search. This was at a time before desktop search was a thing. What kind of killed us that summer was Apple coming out with Spotlight, then Google Desktop came out so we had a hard problem with so many players in the field.

At the end of that summer, my cofounder decided to go to grad school. This was the first YC batch so it was totally different. It was sort of a three month trial to build a product and see what happens. We were at the first demo day, which was actually kind of fun. Something like 20 people showed up.

Craig : Wow. So how did you connect with Steve and Alexis?

Chris : By the end of the summer I had two free bedrooms in my apartment. I was good friends with both of them at that point. I think they originally planned to move back to Virginia but I believe Paul Graham talked them out of it. So they had basically given up on their flat and now needed a place to stay. My cofounder from YC, Zak Stone, was like, “Want to stay with Chris?”. And they were like, “Okay, great.”

Craig : And at what point did you start working on Reddit?

Chris : I want to say like three months later. I was in grad school at the time and I had much more grown-up hours, where I would wake up at 7 or 8 in the morning, go to work, and come back then work on projects at night. Steve and Alexis would sleep in then work until like 4 in the morning.

Because I was up early I’d check Reddit and when it was down I’d knock on Steve’s door and be like, “Hey, site’s down.” After the third time that happened, he just showed me how to log in and start it back up.

Craig : That’s great.

Chris : So I guess my first job at Reddit was in ops. But yeah, at that point it was still Steve writing code and Alexis doing everything else. We were friends and he asked me if I wanted to join, and I did. That was probably six months after Reddit started.

Craig : You were still in grad school studying physics, right?

Chris : Yeah. That’s when I was in my fifth year of grad school.

Craig : And did you have to pause everything to make that happen?

Chris : No. So I’d go to lab and work from 8 to 6 then come home, eat dinner, and join them in the living room to hack for a while. The nice thing is, I was given work that was sort of independent of what everyone else was working on so I wasn’t a blocker.

I think the first thing I worked on was traffic monitoring. This was at a time before Google Analytics. It was like processing access logs and generating summaries and trying to figure out how to do this at scale. I must have rebuilt that damn thing eight times in the first four years.

The thing about that time was we were all learning how to program web apps while we were building them and there wasn’t really a standard operating procedure or anything.

Craig : So you were essentially working part-time?

Chris : Part-time in startup hours but it was like a full-time job. I would normally work from 6 to 2. Then go to sleep, get back up, and do it again.

You know, your 20s are a magical period of time. I could get by on four or five hours of sleep without any major side effects. Basically it was like that for all of 2006. It was like two full-time jobs. The kicker is I somehow managed to meet my wife during that period.

Craig : That’s amazing. So what happens next?

Chris : Well, the four of us – Steve, Alexis, me, and Aaron Swartz – worked on it until the acquisition, which was around Halloween 2006. And it all happened really fast. We were a 15-month-old startup.

I remember the next night I was making pizza with my girlfriend, now wife, and I called Steve and was like, “Hey, we’re making pizza, Do you want to come over?” And he was like, “I am in California.”

Craig : Whoa.

Chris : Yeah. So I was like, “Oh, well, okay then.”

Craig : [Laughter] And so how long did it take before you moved to California?

Chris : I looked for apartments in January and we moved out early February. Part of the agreement with Condé Nast was that — I think it actually said this in the contract — “Chris gets to finish his PhD.”

So I got to the point where I could leave Cambridge and write my thesis remotely. It was kind of a fun transition, going from a full-time job as a researcher and a second full-time job in a startup to a full-time job at an acquired company where I could spend my nights writing a thesis.

Craig : So let’s step back a little bit. Did you think that you would be interested in working with the Reddit guys when they moved into your apartment? Or were you just buddies?

Chris : Probably a little bit of both. At the time it was just because they were buddies and they needed a place. I had no particular plans at all. I was coming off of the failure of my first startup. We were trying to solve this problem of basically like, “I can’t find anything on my hard drive. I have all these areas I can’t search!” What happened practically is that the problem doesn’t come up any more because there is almost nothing on my hard drive that doesn’t exist in some state online.

Craig : Yeah, exactly. So what about Steve and Alexis compelled you to want to work with them?

Chris : At the time it was actually interesting just to be working as a web dev to be honest. Getting into the web scene was kind of a neat thing. I also liked Reddit.

Here’s a funny story. That summer everyone in the first YC batch was a beta tester for Reddit. This was before comments existed, so it was just a bunch of links.

Eventually it kind of opened up and we got a few people Steve didn’t know personally. But for like four months most of the content on the front page was from one of the alt accounts Steve and Alexis had. They were basically populating it as a way to make it seem like there were more people there. Because nobody wants to walk into an empty room. Right?

Craig : Right.

Chris : So my username on Reddit is KeyserSosa, which is a misspelling of Keyser Söze, which is the Usual Suspects villain.

I remember a day, probably in November, when Steve took a day off. He came back a couple hours later and there was new content on the front page and he hadn’t done anything. It was like this moment of like, “Oh, my God! It’s walking!”

Craig : [Laughter]

Chris : And he’s like, “Great! There are actually people on the site who I don’t know and they are posting all the time. There’s this one guy, KeyserSosa, who’s super active!”

They we’re like, “KeyserSosa? Who is KeyserSosa?”

And I’m like, “Oh, hi guys.”

Craig : [Laughter] That’s so good.

Chris : Anyhow. I achieved my peak on Reddit probably in the first year, in terms of being one of the top posters. And then you know, it was all downhill from there.

Craig : Yeah. I was wondering what your relationship with Reddit is now. Not the company, but the community.

Chris : I’ve definitely become much more of a lurker. My use was definitely a side effect of working on it. When I was originally here for the first five years, at the time there was never more than four or five of us working on the site.

Craig : Oh, wow.

Chris : We were kind of professionally understaffed. At least at that point we were really understaffed and always growing at a really phenomenal rate–like doubling every six months. So we were kind of wearing a lot of hats as engineers. We were engineers, and also the community team, and also infrastructure.

I am an introvert who has become an extrovert via the Internet, or something like that. I feel like lots of talking and thinking in that vein is much more draining than sitting and doing engineering work. That definitely contributed to me leaving.

Craig : Yeah, that makes sense.

Chris : So when I left the first thing I did was go on a six-month Reddit detox. Essentially I was like, “Alright. I just can’t look.” And I didn’t look at it.

The thing is, it was and still is like my baby. And I can say that, I have kids now.

When one thing goes wrong, I take it personally. In 2010 I was basically in charge, so everything was either my fault or something I had to deal with. I think the only way to not feel completely attached to all the things that were happening, or whatever mistakes were being made, or whatever drama was happening, was to step away for a little while. You kinda have to do it.

Craig : So how did your relationship with the founders and the early team change over time?

Chris : I don’t think very much, actually. The team was always small so we were and still are a group of friends. I think there’s no other option than to be like comrades in arms in that case. At the very worst, we were the 300 holding back the hordes.

I think because we got acquired so early we had to really justify our budget and keep the team small. We couldn’t get an infusion of cash to grow because we were already bought and so it sort of stunted growth initially. Another side effect is that the look of the site has kind of been the same for a very long time. There’s a whole bunch we have to kind of rebuild.

The flip side of that is that we got really nimble and good at a bunch of things. But we’re now up to I think 120 people. And we’re independent again.

Craig : So now do you have startup-like growth goals?

Chris : We’re kind of acting like a three-year-old startup with ten years of legacy and some good standard operating procedures, which is nice.

Craig : When you look back and consider the early days, how do you feel about Reddit?

Chris : It’s overall positive. It’s been a lot of fun. I mean, it’s been a lot of stress, but it’s also been a lot of fun. Since I’m back now, it’s almost like it’s not so much a part of my career as it’s become my career. Maybe “vocation” is a better word. I still take a lot of the stuff really personally even though I’ve only been back for about six months.

Our fingerprints are everywhere. I think it is fair to say that the snarky tone that still pervades Reddit is an outcropping of Steve. That’s his personality and he kind of imprints it on the community. I think in the same way a company’s tone and culture is a reflection of the founders, so to is the community it creates.

Craig : You’ve been around so many startups. Do you ever have thoughts of doing your own thing again?

Chris : I am very content to be first employee in all things. I’m close enough to be able to hear about the fundraising, and the acquisitioning, and the business side of things. But I do not get invited to any of those meetings, which is just wonderful as far as I’m concerned. Right now, my job here is as an engineering manager. I have a team of like six and honestly, that is a good size for me. I would rather be an engineer who is a manager, rather than a managing engineer, or an office manager, or C-something. I actually enjoy doing the work.

Craig : Right on. Are there any signs that you would advise someone to look for if they are considering being a first employee?

Chris : I would say the first three to six months is gonna be a slog. It’s gonna be a tough slog. That said, startups have culturally matured in the last ten years and it’s been fun to watch. When the first batch started at YC, there was all this talk like, “Oh, yeah, you should work 16 hours and day and not feel bad.”

What’s really great to see is that all those people who were working 16 hours have now grown into their thirties and realized that, “Oh, sleep is really cool.”

Craig : [Laughter]

Chris : And, “You should probably date.” And, “Do you know what is also awesome? Kids. And do you know what kids don’t let you do? Work.” So there’s been this kind of progression from just working all the time to still working hard while also having a life.

Because there are only a few people around in the beginning you have to be willing to switch hats really quickly. Especially for the startups, traffic is irregular, and you’re not up-scaled, and you have to kinda deal with that stuff live.

You’ll also have a responsibility to set the tone for the company. The same holds true with the founders.

Craig : What about the founders? Do you think there any traits successful founders share?

Chris : It sounds trite but determination. Ideas are important. Luck is important. But follow-through is really important. This is sort of separate from the founders but there’s also timing.

After we started, everyone compared us to Digg for five years before Digg had its problems. But we didn’t even know about Digg when we started.

We were a dime a dozen for a while. It was actually funny. There was us and a bunch of Digg clones, which was amusing.

Craig : Right on. Let’s stop there. Any last words of wisdom?

Chris : The internet has a long memory!

[surveysonfleek]

535.

5000 Questions Survey Pt. 30

2801. The answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind. But what was the question? idc. 2802. Suggest three new diary circles that you would find interesting: lol no thanks. 2803. Buttons or Knobs? knobs? idk what this is in reference to. 2804. What is a juggalo? those guys from insane clown posse, right? i could totally be wrong. 2805. Are you a fan of Crass? no.

2806. If you were going to write a short note to yourself and then put it away and read it in ten years, what would it say? i hope you ended up getting your shit together. 2807. When someone does something that is wrong do you believe that they know in their hearts that they are wrong but they push it down into their subconcious and rationalize away their guilt? yes and no. someone people genuinely don’t give a fuck. When have you done this (if you say never then you are doing it right now)? no. 2808. How can a person have sex with someone they don't love? they just... do? Have YOU ever? nope. 2809. What are the paradoxes in your head (that is when you believe two conflicting things to be true)? none. i do like reading up on paradoxes though. 2810. What does each set of two words suggest to you? pale gravity: no thanks. little mornings: spiritual machines: eccentric being: pray attention: yellow lectures: 2811. What movie would be AWESOME in 3D? tron was amazing in 3d, i actually felt sick afterwards lol. 2812. Why is it important to write and think clearly? just coz. 2813. A girl and her boyfriend are hanging out. It is obvious they are together. Another guy schmoozes between them and starts hitting on the girl. The boyfriend tells this guy to back off. The guy just keeps bothering the girl. Do you think the boyfriend would be justified in hitting this intrusive guy? i think the boyfriend should continue to use his words before getting violent. A girl and her boyfriend are hanging out. It is obvious they are together. Another GIRL(lesbian) schmoozes between them and starts hitting on the first girl. The boyfriend tells this girl to back off. The girl just keeps bothering the first girl. Do you think the boyfriend would be justified in hitting this intrusive girl? same answer as above ^ If you answered yes to one situation and no to the other one why the double standard? i had the same answer for both. 2814. What do you think of the name Prue? it reminds me of charmed. 2815. What would you spend your last dollar on? nothing, i’ll keep it. 2816. Have you ever won an ebay auction? yeah, i think i have. If yes for what? idk, this was years ago when ebay didn’t have a but it now option. 2817. Would you like it if Blockuster had a drivethrough?? blockbuster is dunzo. 2819. When was the last time you taught someone somthing and what was it? i was teaching my boyfriend how to milly rock hahaha. 2820. Why do adults and teens not understand each other? generation gaps. but i know of plenty of instances where they do understand each other. 2821. Are you afraid? no. 2822. Do you trust large drug corporations? it’s not something i’ve sat and thought about tbh. Do you trust the Food and Drug administration? idk. 2823. If a tree falls in the woods does it make a sound? yes. Do you define sound as sound waves or as the reaction between the soundwaves and your ears? sound waves.  2824. Who is full of shit? your mother. 2825. Four of the five senses are routed through a special area to the brain. One sense goes right to the brain and so is a powerful sense involved with memory and emotion. Which sense do you feel this is? smell? haha idk. 2826. Are you on a ship of fools or a carousel? carousel. 2827. What is your bathing suit like? it’s just plain black. 2828. Whose line is it, anyway? not mine. 2829. Are you more likely to answer a signed in note or a nsi note? idk what a nsi note is. 2830. To be or not to be. That is the question. What is the answer? i have no idea. 2831. Does beauty exist as a definable standard or is beauty in the eyes of the beholder? it’s definitely in the eye of the beholder. Why do you think it is that so many people have the same idea of who and what is beautiful? society’s standards. but not everyone follows it. Where do your standards for judging beauty come from? i’m not sure actually. i could think someone is gorgeous but my friend would think they’re ugly. idk. 2832. Would a war with Iraq help or harm american economy? lol. 2833. What is the first thing you would do if you saw a nuclear explosion in the distance? call my family and boyfriend and check the news. 2834. Would you like to be cryogenically frozen? nah. 2835. Think of the person you love the most. Would you be willing to murder a stranger in order to save that person's life? Why or why not? eh, not sure. i’d only 100% murder the stranger if they were the one endangering my loved one’s life. i’d have to think about it otherwise. 2836. Imagine no possetions. I wonder if you can? did you mean possessions? 2837. How messed up is: your hair? it’s quite neat actually. your room? yeah it’s a mess. your car? mess. your life? mess. 2838. What are you running out of? patience. 2839. What do you live for? myself. 2840. How did you decide it was worth living for? idk, just coz it’s my life. 2841. Do you consider some people to be too: traditional? conformist? avant-garde? smart? stuck up? modern? beautiful? ugly? obsessed? emotional? petty? sneaky? fat? thin? i know people that could cover all of these things. 2842. By what criteria do you judge others? generally in their behaviour. i have no time for rude people. 2843. Do you look at people's words and actions or the underlying reasons for those words and actions? both. 2844. Which would you rather collect: simpsons action figures? <---- this kiss gear? anything with a smiley? horror movies? 2845. Do you fight for your rights? not as much as i should. 2846. Would you rather be a construction worker or a crossing guard? crossing guard. 2847. What is enought o satisfy you in life? a well paying job that i can tolerate. 2848. Do you think you have more, less, or average life experiance for your age? i think i have a little more. 2849. Why go to college? if there’s a specific career path you want to follow that requires you to go to college, i think that’s a good enough excuse to go. Have you considered joining a cult instead? never. 2850. What's the last lie you told? someone asked me how i am and i said good lol. 2851. What celebrity has the sexiest voice of females? rihanna, i love her accent. males? drake has a really smooth speaking voice. 2852. You are having a party and can invite three celebrities of your choice. The WILL come. Who do you invite? rihanna, the weeknd andddd beyonce. 2853. Where did you come from? from my parents? Where are you now? in bed. Where are you going? nowhere. 2854. What would you imagine the playboy mansion is like? tbh it never looked that appealing during that reality show. it’s not something i’d be interested in seeing. 2855. Do you blow your nose loudly in public? only if i have to. 2856. Do you help others every day? i’d like to. 2857. Bono or Chris Tucker? neither. 2858. Is it lonely being alone in your head? sometimes i like being alone. 2859. What is the worst poverty you have ever seen? philippines. 2860. Has anyone ever told you that more than 2 billion people live on less than two dollars a day? no one has told me that. i wouldn’t be surprised if it’s gotten higher since this survey was made over 10 years ago. What do you think of that? it’s really sad. 2861. Add a sentance to the story: Once upon a time there was a man named Arthur and he was brushing his teeth when all of a sudden he saw a bright rainbow utside. So he goes out the back door to take a look and he finds an elf who says fuck you. 2862. Be honest.. do you generally listen or wait for your turn to talk? i usually wait unless i have a strong point to share. 2863. How many fingers do you type with? all of them i think. 2864. What does 'you think you know but you have no idea' mean? Where did it come from as a common phrase? my interpretation of it is like... you’re making a strong assumption without actually knowing or experiencing something. 2865. Do you think it's important to give up liberties in order to protect freedom? slightly contradictory but ok. 2866. Do you think George Bush was elected in a legal way? i don’t know much about american politics. 2867. Imagine you were dying of a disease...you only had a certain amount of time left with your mte, parents or children. What would you leave behind for them to remember you by? photos, videos, letters etc. How would you feel if there were drugs to help you live, only you couldn't afford them? i’d feel pretty helpless. How would you feel if people were trying to sell you the drugs at a lower cost but the drug companies made sure they couldn't because that would cut their profits? idk. This senario is going on Right Now.The country is Africa. The disease is aids. The drug is azp (and others). The people are Africans who are very poor and have aids. The large drug corporations won't sell the drugs at a price they can afford or allow smaller companies to either. Is this acceptable? no. What are you going to do about it? there’s not much i can do but research i guess. 2868. Would you ever BUY a new ring for your cell phone that plays a couple of notes of your favorite song? nah. 2869. What has completely moved you? life. 2870. If for your next birthday you had a novelty kids birthday party what games would you play at it? hide and seek, pinata, bullrush lol. 2871. How can you keep open toed sandles from rubbing against your toes and making them blistered and raw? wear different shoes. 2872. What happens to socks when they disappear in the drier? how the hell would i know. 2873. What is the quality of humanity all about? life lol. 2874. True or false - All homophobes are inherently evil.: false... some probably are, some are just not educated. 2875. Is there anything, besides love, that money can't buy? experience. eh, half true idk. 2876. How is your soul? still there. 2877. What are you committed to? these damn surveys lol. 2879. Are you photogenic? no. 2880. Can you define these words off the top of your head as if you were talking to someone who didn't know what they were? rain: cold: green: sand: eh, too tired to think. 2881. Why aren't you naked (or are you)? because i’m cold. 2882. Do you think anoyone is all good or all evil? possibly. 2883. Go outside a sec. how many animals are in your yard? lol hell no. Did you count yourself? why or why not? 2884. What household appliance drags you down? none. they’re all very useful. 2885. try this..write a list of six possibilities of things you could do after you are off the computer. Make sure that at lease ONE thing is something you would be unlikely to ever do. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. no. Now grab a dice (if you have none ask someone to pick a number between 1 and 6) and decide what you will do by flipping it. Then do it! 2886. Which of the following doesn't belong with the others and why? a. garden b. love c. magazine d. death idk 2887. How old are you? 26. What age do you feel mentally? 26. emotionaly? same. spiritualy? is there an age for spirituality? 2888. Who do you think is more wise: your mailman or a person who has been living on the streets for 12 years? it would just depends on the person. 2889. Do you kiss on the first date? i’m open to it. 2890. Would you ever want to be oon: a dating show(which)? no. a game show(which)? the amazing race. the news(why)? no, i don’t want any attention. 2891. How much money would it take to get you to: strip to nuthing but a bright orange thong (for guys, orange thongs an string bikini top for girls)and wrestle another person of the same sex in a thong in a pool of jello? 10k. participate in a contest where you drink alcohol as fast as you can until you puke? i’ll do it for like $100 lol. i’ll puke instantly. sit absolutely still for 2 hours, in nothing but a towel, covered in plaster of paris? $1000 maybe. Walk around at your school in bondage gear asking people to spank you on the ass with a huge dead octopus tenticle? i don’t go to school and that’s just creepy. pick your nose and eat it? $50 hahah. smash potatoes with your head? if it doesn’t hurt i’ll do it for a pretty low price. 2892. Who deserves an appology? my grandma. 2893. What wins the award as stupidst lyric you can think of? i feel like every artist has released a song with cringey lyrics. 2894. Where do you most like to be massaged? neck, back and feet. 2895. Is your face clear? no :( i got like two pimples after a night out. 2896. Finish this phrase in a humorous way.. Friends don't let friends... eat salad. 2897. What present would you bring to the birthday party of an aquaintance? i’d regift them something i already had. sorry lol. 2898. Is your game on? no. 2899. What would a song for the deaf be like? possibly feeling the bass. How about a painting for the blind? a visual description. 2900. What is a sure-fire way to get noticed? yeah, run around naked in public.

[suzanneshannon]

Making a Realistic Glass Effect with SVG

I’m in love with SVG. Sure, the code can look dense and difficult at first, but you’ll see the beauty in the results when you get to know it. The bonus is that those results are in code, so it can be hooked up to a CMS. Your designers can rest easy knowing they don't have to reproduce an effect for every article or product on your site.

Today I would like to show you how I came up with this glass text effect.

Step 0: Patience and space

SVG can be a lot to take on, especially when you’re just starting to learn it (and if you are, Chris’ book is a good place to start). It’s practically a whole new language and, especially for people who lack design chops, there are lots of new techniques and considerations to know about. Like HTML, though, you’ll find there are a handful of tools that we can reach for to help make SVG much easier to grasp., so be patient and keep trying!

Also, give yourself space. Literally. SVG code is dense so I like to use two or three new lines to space things out. It makes the code easier to read and helps me see how different pieces are separated with less visual distraction. Oh, and use comments to mark where you are in the document, too. That can help organize your thoughts and document your findings.

I’ve made demos for each step we’re going to cover in the process of learning this glass effect as a way to help solidify the things we’re covering as we go.

OK, now that we’re mentally prepared, let’s get into the meat of it!

Step 1: Get the basic image in place

First things first: we need an image as the backdrop for our glass effect. Here we have an <svg> element and an <image> within it. This is similar to adding an <img> in HTML. You’ll notice the dimensions of the viewBox attribute and <image> element in the SVG element are the same. This ensures that the <image> is exactly the same size as the actual picture we’re linking to.

That’s a key distinction to note: we’re linking to an image. The SVG file itself does not draw a raster image, but we can reference one in the SVG code and make sure that asset is in the location we point to. If you’ve worked with Adobe InDesign before, it’s a lot like linking to an image asset in a layout — the image is in the InDesign layout, but the asset itself actually lives somewhere else.

See the Pen SVG Glass Text Effect - basic image in place by David Fitzgibbon (@loficodes) on CodePen.

Step 2: Distort the image

Straightforward so far, but this is where things get complicated because we’re going to add a filter to the image we just inserted. This filter is going to distort the image. If you look closely at the difference between the demo in the last step and the one in this step, you’ll see that the edges of objects in the image are a little rough and wavy. That’s the filter at work!

First, we create another <svg> to hold filter. This means that if we ever want to reuse our filter — for example on multiple elements on the page — then we totally can!

Our first filter (#displacement) is going to distort our image. We’re going to use feTurbulence and feDisplacementMap, each explained by Sara Soueidan much better than I can in this post. Beau Jackson also wrote up a nice piece that shows how they can be used to make a cloud effect. Suffice to say, these two filters tend to go together and I like to think of them as when something needs to appear "wobbly."

With our filter container in place, we just need to apply that filter to our image with a filter attribute on the <image>, magic!

<svg> <!-- more stuff --> <!-- DISTORTION IMAGE: clipped --> <image xlink:href="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s.cdpn.io/5946/kyoto.jpg" width="1890" x=0 height="1260" y=0 clip-path="url(#clip)" filter= "url(#distortion)"></image> <!-- FILTER: wobbly effect --> <filter id="distortion"> <feTurbulence type="turbulence" baseFrequency="0.05" numOctaves="2" result="turbulence"/> <feDisplacementMap in2="turbulence" in="SourceGraphic" scale="20" xChannelSelector="R" yChannelSelector="G"/> </filter> <!-- more stuff --> </svg>

See the Pen SVG Glass Text Effect - image distorted by David Fitzgibbon (@loficodes) on CodePen.

Step 3: Clip the text

We don’t want the entire image to be distorted though. We’re going to clip the shape of our distorted <image> to the shape of some text. This will essentially be the portion of the picture seen "through" the glass.

To do this, we need to add a <text> element in a <clip-path> and give it an id. Calling this id in the clip-path of our <image> now restricts its shape to that of our <text>. Wonderful!

See the Pen SVG Glass Text Effect - text clipped by David Fitzgibbon (@loficodes) on CodePen.

Step 4: Reveal the full image

OK, so it’s bueno that we have the distorted <image> clipped to the <text>, but now the rest of the image is gone. No bueno.

We can counteract this by adding a copy of the same <image> but without the clip-path or filter attributes before our existing <image>. This is where I like to add some nice comments to keep things neat. The idea is like placing a transparent layer over what we have so far.

I know, I know, this isn’t very neat, and we’re repeating ourselves. Ideally, we would set our filter straight on the <text> element and use the in="BackgroundImage property for feDisplacementMap to warp what’s behind the text, without the need for extra elements. Unfortunately, this has poor browser support, so we’re going to go with multiple images.

<svg> <!-- more stuff --> <!-- BACKGROUND IMAGE - visible --> <image xlink:href="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s.cdpn.io/5946/kyoto.jpg" width="1890" x=0 height="1260" y=0 ></image> <!-- DISTORTION IMAGE - clipped --> <image xlink:href="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s.cdpn.io/5946/kyoto.jpg" width="1890" x=0 height="1260" y=0 clip-path="url(#clip)" filter= "url(#distortion)"></image> <!-- more stuff --> </svg>

See the Pen SVG Glass Text Effect - warp complete by David Fitzgibbon (@loficodes) on CodePen.

Step 5: Place the text... again

Next, we’re going to duplicate our text just as we did for the image in the last step. Unfortunately, because the text is in a clip-path, it’s now not available for rendering. This is the last time we’re going to duplicate content like this, I promise!

Now we should have something that looks like a normal image with black text over it. If the distortion filter on the <image> we’ve already made is what we can see "through" the glass, then our new <text> is going to be the glass itself.

<svg> <!-- more stuff --> <!-- TEXT - clipped --> <clipPath id="clip"> <text x="50%" y ="50%" dominant-baseline="middle" text-anchor="middle">KYOTO</text> </clipPath> <!-- TEXT - visible --> <text x="50%" y ="50%" dominant-baseline="middle" text-anchor="middle">KYOTO</text> <!-- more stuff --> </svg>

See the Pen SVG Glass Text Effect - text in place again by David Fitzgibbon (@loficodes) on CodePen.

Step 6: Creating the dark edge of the text

This is where things start to get exciting, at least for me! 🤓

We want to create a dark edge along the text element which, when paired with a light edge (we’ll look at that next), will add depth to the appearance of the text against the image.

We want a new filter for our <text>, so let’s create one in our filter's SVG element and give it an id="textFilter and link it to the filter attribute of the <text> element.

SVG works from the background to the foreground, so the first thing we’re going put in our filter is the shadow that the glass would have, as that is furthest back. I’m gonna level with you, this one is pretty complex, but we’re going to go through it one step at a time.

For this effect, we’re using four filter primitives: feMorphology, feOffset, feFlood and feComposite.

feMorphology is first. We’re using this to make the text fatter. In the demo below, comment out the next three primitives ( feOffset, feFlood, feComposite ) and play with it. I have the value radius="4" to achieve the glass effect, but see what happens if you set it to 1... or 100!

feOffset is used to move all the "pixels" in the previous primitive ( feMorphology ) across the x- or y-axis. The values dx="5" and dy="5" move the "pixels" right on the x-axis and y-axis, respectively. The higher the number, the further they move. Put in negative numbers for dx and the "pixels" will move left. Negative dy and they’ll move up! Again, the is the sort of thing you start to learn as you play around with them.

The reason I have quotes around "pixels" is because they’re not screen pixels like you might expect in CSS. Rather, they refer to the dimensions we set on the parent <svg>. I think of them as percentages. We have used these settings viewBox="0 0 1890 1260" in our example. This means our <svg> is 1890 "pixels" wide. If we set dx="189" it means we’ll move our element 10% of the way across the SVG (1890 divided by 189).

feFlood is great. If you want to fill the screen with color, this is the primitive you need! You might wonder why we can’t read our text now when we apply it. That’s because you can only see the result of the last filter primitive that was created. The result of each of the previous primitives was related to our <text> element. The result of feFlood is just like its name: a flood of color. It doesn't know what you did before and it doesn't care — it’s merely going to fill an area with color.

This is where some people start getting frustrated with SVG. It’s hard to work on something when you can’t see it! Trust me, as you work with SVG more you’ll get used to this. In fact, the next few steps will need us to rely on this and trust that everything is still in place.

feComposite is going to solve this issue for us. What does it do? MDN describes it as:

The SVG filter primitive performs the combination of two input images pixel-wise in image space using one of the Porter-Duff compositing operations: over, in, atop, out, xor, and lighter.

That to me is jibba-jabba. I think of it as affecting the alpha layer of in with the color/alpha of in2.

With this in place we can once again see our text spelled out and, because the color we used is slightly transparent, we can even see the distorted "glass" effect coming through. Great!

<svg> <!-- more stuff --> <!-- dark edge --> <feMorphology operator="dilate" radius="4" in="SourceAlpha" result="dark_edge_01" /> <feConvolveMatrix order="3,3" kernelMatrix= "1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1" in="dark_edge_01" result="dark_edge_02" /> <feOffset dx="5" dy="5" in="dark_edge_02" result="dark_edge_03"/> <feFlood flood-color="rgba(0,0,0,.5)" result="dark_edge_04" /> <feComposite in="dark_edge_04" in2="dark_edge_03" operator="in" result="dark_edge" /> </filter> <!-- more stuff --> </svg>

See the Pen SVG Glass Text Effect - dark edge by David Fitzgibbon (@loficodes) on CodePen.

Step 7: Let’s do the light edge

This is essentially the same as what we literally just did, but we’re going to shift the shape up and to the left using negative dx/dy values. We’re also setting a slightly white color this time. We’re aiming for a nice depth effect.

We’re again in a position where what we can see is the most recent result from a filter primitive, but we can’t see our dark edge! feComposite isn't what we want to use to bring them together because we don't want the alpha of the dark edge colored by the light edge… we want to see both! Which leads us to…

<svg> <filter id="textFilter"> <!-- more stuff --> <feMorphology operator="dilate" radius="4" in="SourceAlpha" result="light_edge_01" /> <feConvolveMatrix order="3,3" kernelMatrix= "1 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1" in="light_edge_01" result="light_edge_02" /> <feOffset dx="-2" dy="-2" in="light_edge_02" result="light_edge_03"/> <feFlood flood-color="rgba(255,255,255,.5)" result="light_edge_04" /> <feComposite in="light_edge_04" in2="light_edge_03" operator="in" result="light_edge" /> <!-- more stuff --> </filter> </svg>

See the Pen SVG Glass Text Effect - light edge by David Fitzgibbon (@loficodes) on CodePen.

Step 8: Combine the edges

feMerge! It’s a hero. It lets us take any number of primitive results and merge them, making a new image. Woohoo, we can now see both dark and light edges together!

However, we do want them to be edges rather than both filling up the entire text, so we need to remove the space that the original <text> takes up. What we need next is another feComposite to chop out the original SourceGraphic. Because we used feMorphology to fatten the letters for our edges, we can now chop the original letter shapes out of the result of our feMerge.

<svg> <filter id="textFilter"> <!-- more stuff --> <feMerge result="edges"> <feMergeNode in="dark_edge" /> <feMergeNode in="light_edge" /> </feMerge> <feComposite in="edges" in2="SourceGraphic" operator="out" result="edges_complete" /> </filter> </svg>

See the Pen SVG Glass Text Effect - edges combined by David Fitzgibbon (@loficodes) on CodePen.

Now we’re starting to look like glass, with just one piece missing.

Step 9: Yes, a bevel

We have a pretty good 3D-looking glass effect. However, the letters look flat. Let’s add one more effect and make them look more rounded.

To achieve this we’re going to create a bevelled effect.

First we’re going to use feGaussianBlur. This will blur our existing filters slightly. We’re going to use this blurred result as basis to add some feSpecularLighting. As usual, feel free to play with the numbers here and see what effects you can get! The main one you might want to change is the lighting-color attribute. The image that we’re using here is slightly dark, so we’re using a bright lighting-color. If your image was very bright, this would make the letters hard to read, so you might use a darker lighting-color in that case.

<svg> <filter id="textFilter"> <!-- more stuff --> <feGaussianBlur stdDeviation="5" result="bevel_blur" /> <feSpecularLighting result="bevel_lighting" in="bevel_blur" specularConstant="2.4" specularExponent="13" lighting-color="rgba(60,60,60,.4)"> <feDistantLight azimuth="25" elevation="40" /> </feSpecularLighting> <feComposite in="bevel_lighting" in2="SourceGraphic" operator="in" result="bevel_complete" /> </filter> </svg>

See the Pen SVG Glass Text Effect - bevel by David Fitzgibbon (@loficodes) on CodePen.

Step 10: All together now!

Finally, with all the pieces ready, we do one last feMerge to get everything in place for the finished effect!

<svg> <filter id="textFilter"> <!-- more stuff --> <feMerge result="complete"> <feMergeNode in="edges_complete" /> <feMergeNode in="bevel_complete" /> </feMerge> </filter> </svg>

Here’s everything together, nicely spaced out and commented:

<!-- VISIBLE SVG --> <svg viewBox="0 0 1890 1260"> <!-- BACKGROUND IMAGE - visible --> <image xlink:href="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s.cdpn.io/5946/kyoto.jpg" width="1890" x=0 height="1260" y=0 ></image> <!-- DISTORTION IMAGE - clipped --> <image xlink:href="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s.cdpn.io/5946/kyoto.jpg" width="1890" x=0 height="1260" y=0 clip-path="url(#clip)" filter= "url(#distortion)"></image> <!-- TEXT - clipped --> <clipPath id="clip"> <text x="50%" y ="50%" dominant-baseline="middle" text-anchor="middle">KYOTO</text> </clipPath> <!-- TEXT - visible --> <text x="50%" y ="50%" dominant-baseline="middle" text-anchor="middle" filter="url(#textFilter)">KYOTO</text> </svg> <!-- FILTERS --> <svg> <filter id="distortion"> <feTurbulence type="turbulence" baseFrequency="0.05" numOctaves="2" result="turbulence"/> <feDisplacementMap in2="turbulence" in="SourceGraphic" scale="20" xChannelSelector="R" yChannelSelector="G"/> </filter> <filter id="textFilter"> <!-- dark edge --> <feMorphology operator="dilate" radius="4" in="SourceAlpha" result="dark_edge_01" /> <feOffset dx="5" dy="5" in="dark_edge_01" result="dark_edge_03"/> <feFlood flood-color="rgba(0,0,0,.5)" result="dark_edge_04" /> <feComposite in="dark_edge_04" in2="dark_edge_03" operator="in" result="dark_edge" /> <!-- light edge --> <feMorphology operator="dilate" radius="4" in="SourceAlpha" result="light_edge_01" /> <feOffset dx="-2" dy="-2" in="light_edge_01" result="light_edge_03"/> <feFlood flood-color="rgba(255,255,255,.5)" result="light_edge_04" /> <feComposite in="light_edge_04" in2="light_edge_03" operator="in" result="light_edge" /> <!-- edges together --> <feMerge result="edges"> <feMergeNode in="dark_edge" /> <feMergeNode in="light_edge" /> </feMerge> <feComposite in="edges" in2="SourceGraphic" operator="out" result="edges_complete" /> <!-- bevel --> <feGaussianBlur stdDeviation="5" result="bevel_blur" /> <feSpecularLighting result="bevel_lighting" in="bevel_blur" specularConstant="2.4" specularExponent="13" lighting-color="rgba(60,60,60,.4)"> <feDistantLight azimuth="25" elevation="40" /> </feSpecularLighting> <feComposite in="bevel_lighting" in2="SourceGraphic" operator="in" result="bevel_complete" /> <!-- everything in place --> <feMerge result="complete"> <feMergeNode in="edges_complete" /> <feMergeNode in="bevel_complete" /> </feMerge> </filter> </svg>

See the Pen SVG Glass Text Effect by David Fitzgibbon (@loficodes) on CodePen.

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[justlookfrightened]

Second part of Neighbors AU, Chapter 1

Read the first part of the Neighbors AU starting here, or read it on AO3 

Read this chapter on AO3 here

Eric pushed his sleeves up before pulling the tray of mini-loaves out of the oven.

“Chowder,” he called, “are we open yet?”

“Just turned the sign and unlocked the door,” Chowder said, poking his head into the kitchen. “You look tired today. Want some coffee?”

“I had some already,” Eric said, nodding at the small drip coffeemaker he used first thing in the morning.

“I meant some of the good stuff,” Chowder said. “Because no offense, but you look like you still need to wake up.”

“Ever notice how ‘no offence’ nearly always comes before something offensive?” Eric mused. “But sure, one more cup won’t hurt.”

Chowder brought Eric the coffee – with liberal portions of cream and sugar – while he packaged orders and then went to remove the slightly cooled loaves from their pans. Eric could hear the steady jingling of the bell over the front door as their early morning regulars came in and left with their coffee and baked goods, helped along by Chowder’s cheerful greetings.

Eric stacked the labeled boxes, tied them with string from the spool on the counter and put them in the cooler for later pick-ups. Then he put the mini-loaves (today a dense, sweet cinnamon sourdough bread) on a tray for the display case and headed out front to give Chowder a hand.

“Two cranberry bran muffins and coffee with cream and sugar to go,” Chowder told him, barely looking up to acknowledge Eric’s presence behind the counter. There was a line four deep already.

So Eric listened to the orders as Chowder relayed them, doing his best to plate the ones that would be eaten in the bakery attractively, carefully wrapping those that were to go. By 8:30, there was no line and only a handful of people at the scattered tables, finishing up their breakfasts. Most of them would be gone within 15 minutes, off to work or school or wherever they went during the day.

After that, Eric knew, customers would come in sporadically. Students would buy a cup of coffee and maybe a piece of pie and stay for hours. Mothers with toddlers and babies would stop for a treat on their way home from their various Mommy and Me classes or on their way to outings in the park. Eric would get more baking done, prepare orders for suppliers and watch the front of the bakery when Chris had his break. Dex would be in by 12:30, and Chris would be gone by 1. It was a system that worked – barely. If the business was going to grow in some of the ways Eric had suggested in last night’s email to Matthew, they would have to invest in more help. Which might make it harder for Eric to get the raise he needed.

Eric stood behind the counter thinking about the conundrum, absently watching Chowder wipe down tables and stack the dirty dishes in a bin to take them back to the kitchen.

“You want me to do these, Bitty?” he asked.

Before Eric could answer, the bell on the door chimed and Matthew walked in.

He looked like his usual comfortable self, neat and clean in a button-down and dark-wash jeans. His hair was neatly combed, and his step was easy and light.

Of course, Matthew hadn’t been at work for four hours already, after a night of interrupted sleep worrying about the email he had sent the day before, declaring that he was due a raise. Eric had run the email by Jack before sending it; Jack hadn’t thought it was too strong – he wanted Eric to make it stronger. But Eric couldn’t help feeling that Matthew would take offense and tell him his services were no longer needed.

Maybe that was why he was here now. Although really, Eric had expected a return email, or even a phone call, not a personal visit.

What Eric wanted to say was, “What are you doing here? Are you here to fire me?”

What he said was, “Matthew! I wasn’t expecting you today. What can I do for you?”

“Well, I got your email yesterday, and I looked at your numbers, and I wanted to come and see what’s working so well for you,” Matthew said. “Do you have a few minutes to talk?”

“Uh, sure, we can talk while I load up the dishwasher,” Eric said. “Chris can watch the register.”

In the back, Eric tied an apron on and started arranging plates and cups in the dishwasher’s basket.

“So, what do you want to know?” Eric asked when Matthew settled against the counter. “Be careful you don’t get flour on your clothes.”

“Oh, um, yeah,” Matthew said and straightened up. “Well, it seems slow now, but judging by that load of dishes, you were busy this morning. Is that usual?”

“Yes, most mornings we’re busy, but the rush ends before 9,” Eric said. “We make sure to keep the coffee fresh and have a good selection of things that aren’t really desserts. We switch to more dessert foods about now, but still have some savory things for people who come at lunch time and don’t want to have to make two stops.”

“You get a rush at lunch too?”

“Not like in the morning, but yes, we’re busier from about 11:30 to 1,” Eric said. “In between, we get more baking done, and we try to get people to come in pick up cakes and pies they ordered when we’re slower.”

“You seem to be doing more of those orders, too,” Matt said.

“There has been an increase,” Eric agreed. “Especially with the pies. I think we’re about to get a couple of bigger orders too.”

“From where?”

“The Falconers are having a breakfast for people who donate to their charities, and they said they’d be needing about 12 dozen assorted muffins and pastries,” Eric said. “And Sebastien St. Martin has his own foundation that’s doing an event next month. They called about getting desserts from us – he wants eight pies and a bunch of cupcakes. Neither of those is for sure yet – we don’t have signed contracts – but I don’t think they’re talking to anyone else.”

“The Falconers? How’d you get in with them?” Matthew asked. “If their donors like our food, we could get more catering business.”

“Um, one of their players lives in my building,” Eric said. “On my floor, actually.”

“Way to use your connections,” Matthew said. “I have to say, I’m impressed.”

“The thing is, this bakery is doing much more business than when I started,” Eric said. “So like I said, I think I deserve a raise. But I also think we’re going to need at least one more part-timer, maybe two sometimes, to help with the catering work.”

“Yes, you asked for a raise in your email,” Matthew said. “You want another $100 a week? How about $80, and 5 percent of any catering order you sell over $100? You could do better that way, if the catering takes off.”

Eric plastered a considering look on his face, while he kicked himself mentally for not asking for more. If Matthew had agreed to $80 a week that easily, could Eric have gotten more? Too late now, and the orders from the Falconers and Marty would be a few hundred dollars each. If Eric started promoting catering more, he could do this.

“OK,” he said. “I can do that. Want a piece of pie before you go?”

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

Jack found a text from Eric as soon as he got off the ice for morning skate in Charlotte.

He said yes! I got a raise!

Jack texted back, Congratulations! I’ll call you when I get back to the room.

He was a little surprised, not that Eric got the raise, but that it was so fast. He was pretty sure Eric hadn’t emailed the bakery owner until the previous evening. Still, even though Eric had only been there six months, it was clear that he was the heart and soul of Sugar ‘n’ Spice. Keeping him, and keeping him happy, should be the owner’s first priority.

Jack headed back to the room while Tater was at lunch to call Eric. He let Eric’s voice wash over him while he picked out the details of what happened. Matthew had responded to the letter by showing up in person (“Lord, Jack, I was afraid was in trouble!”), spent time asking about the business, then agreed to a slightly smaller raise than Eric asked for (“I think maybe you were right, I should have asked for more”), along with a new possibility of a small commission.

He’d also asked Eric to visit his two bakeries in Boston once a month, both to teach the staff there some of the new recipes he’d introduced and share some of his business ideas with their managers, and reminded him not to forget the social media sites.

Privately, Jack thought that Matthew had shown up unannounced precisely to make Eric feel flustered, and it might have worked for a moment. But Jack knew that once Eric started talking about the bakery, he’d be fine. And of course he should have asked for more money. Jack and Eric might not have spent too much time together yet, but he was fairly certain that Eric had a habit of seriously underestimating his value.

Ah, well. It seemed like he had gotten most of what he wanted, along with a side of added responsibility.

“Congratulations, Eric,” Jack said, his voice warm with sincerity. “It can be hard to ask for a raise. But you’re worth it to Sugar ‘n’ Spice. You’re the reason people go there.”

Eric giggled into the phone.

“I’m the reason you come here, Mr. Zimmermann,” he said. “I think everyone else comes for the food, or maybe for Chowder. He works the counter most mornings.”

“Maybe,” Jack said. “But you’re in charge of the food, and you put Chowder on the register, and you make the place feel comfortable.”

“Jack, you’re making me blush,” Eric protested. “I seriously look like a tomato right now. But thank you.”

“What does this mean for your apartment?” Jack asked.

“Well, I could afford the increased rent,” Eric said. “Sort of. I mean, it will still be a little more than half of what I bring home, but I don’t have a lot of other expenses. But there’s still no way I can come up with a security deposit and the last month’s rent too.”

“I could always lend –”

“No, Jack,” Eric said, not laughing anymore. “If we’re going to do this – be boyfriends – I really can’t start by owing you money.”

“OK,” Jack said. “But I would lend you the money even if we weren’t dating. I know you well enough to know you’re a good risk. What if we could convince the management to give you more time to come up with the deposit and the last month’s rent?”

“Why would they do that?” Eric said.

“Because then they wouldn’t have to go to the trouble and risk of finding a new tenant,” Jack said. “No advertising, no credit checks, no repainting and carpet cleaning. No worries about moving someone in who’s going to make a lot of noise and disturb the other tenants. I mean, you’re usually in bed by 9 p.m.”

“Ten,” Eric said. “But I see your point. Still, what guarantee would they have that I wouldn’t trash the place and move out?”

“Is that what you’re going to do?” Jack said.

“Of course not,” Eric said. “But they don’t know that.”

“But I do,” Jack said. “What if, instead of lending you the money, we get them to give you more time – maybe another six months – to come up with it? I’ll guarantee it for those six months. You know and I know it won’t cost me anything, because you’re not going to move out, and they won’t have to worry.”

“I don’t know. You’re still putting your money on the line for me,” Eric said.

“But I think it’s a good risk, and I would if you were still just my neighbor,” Jack said.

“And who’s to say they’ll agree to it?” Eric asked.

“We’ll never know unless you try,” Jack said. “But I would recommend bringing a pie to the meeting.”

Eric huffed – was Jack wrong to think it sounded fond? – and said, “Fine. Are you home at all next week? If we’re going to do this, it has to be soon.”

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

Eric stayed late at the bakery the night before Jack was to return to bake him a special welcome home pie.

He wished he could greet Jack with dinner, but Jack wouldn’t be home until the wee hours of the morning. Breakfast wouldn’t work because by the time Jack got up, Eric would be well into his shift. So he would settle for the pie, and a fresh loaf of whole-grain bread for his sandwiches this week.

There also were about a dozen portioned meals in Jack’s freezer, made from recipes Eric tweaked after interrogating Jack about his nutrition plan.

But he still wished he could make him dinner.

The thing was, being Jack Zimmermann’s boyfriend, at least for two weeks so far, didn’t mean spending very much time with Jack Zimmermann.

They’d spent the night together that first time, and only once since. In some ways, Eric told himself, it was good that he wasn’t losing too much of his life too fast. Between Jack having late games at home and road trips for days at a time, and Eric’s early schedule at the bakery, it just made more sense for Eric to sleep in his own bed most of the time. That way Jack didn’t wake him when he came in late, and Eric didn’t wake Jack when he got up at 4:15.

They did find time to see each other in the late afternoon most days Jack was home, but often it was just a quick cup of coffee (for Eric) and non-caffeinated herbal tea (for Jack). Eric had been back to skate twice at the Falconers’ practice facility, but more often than not, he ended up at Meehan with Lardo.

Well, he’d finish this pie and leave it in Jack’s kitchen where he’d see it when he came in. He supposed he could have just brought supplies and baked it in Jack’s kitchen – Bitty had honestly seen more of the kitchen than Jack – but it was just easier to do it where he knew he had all the supplies he needed.

He’d bake another pie tomorrow morning for Meaghan, the building manager. He’d told Dex he was going to leave a little early tomorrow so he and Jack could meet with her. He hoped it worked, although he still felt a little funny about letting Jack guarantee the deposit. In the end, he supposed, it would be all right, because Jack wasn’t going to have to pay anything, but he really wanted to meet him on as equal of a footing as he could.

The fact that he knew roughly what Jack’s salary was didn’t help. It wasn’t like he had gone snooping; it was kind of hard to avoid when it was on the front page of the Providence Journal’s sports section. Making seven figures meant that Jack really wouldn’t miss the $2,800 he was guaranteeing even if he had to pay it, but it also made it hard for Eric to see himself as on the same level of anything as Jack.

Except cooking and baking. There, he was definitely a couple of levels up, he thought as he pulled the perfect maple apple pie from the oven.

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

Jack stood at the elevator, waiting for the doors to open, thinking back to the first time he saw Eric months ago.

Eric with his pink cheeks and sleepy eyes, still waking up as he headed out to the bakery. Jack had been drawn in from that first encounter, looking for Eric as he entered and left the building, then adjusting his schedule to run into him as often as possible. He still couldn’t account for it, really. He’d met plenty of attractive people, had lots of them all but throw themselves in his path. None of them had caught his interest the way Eric had with that first look, his unnecessary apology delivered in a honey-sweet accent.

The door opened and Jack half expected to see Eric’s sleepy face like he had the first morning. He was disappointed, of course. Eric wouldn’t be up for another hour or more, and by that time, Jack should be sound asleep, alone in his bed.

But he should be up by the time Eric came home from work, a bit early, and together they would go visit the building manager and make the case for Eric to stay, even if he couldn’t make the security deposit and pay the last month’s rent right away.

Given Jack’s offer to guarantee the money, he didn’t think it would be a problem. The management company would want to keep a quiet, reliable tenant like Eric. Still, it would have been easier if Eric had been willing to just take a loan from him.

But Eric was dead set against what he called being “beholden” to Jack, saying it wouldn’t be good to have debts between them. Jack got that, sort of. It would make it awkward if they broke up. Eric didn’t seem like he wanted to break up – Jack’s face flushed when he thought of the two nights Eric had spent in his bed – and Jack knew he didn’t, so why should that be an issue.

In any case, Jack was glad he’d bitten his tongue before suggesting what he thought was the most practical solution: Eric could simply move in with him. There was an extra bedroom if he wanted it, and if it made him happy, he could pay some of the rent. But there would be no way Eric would think they were ready for that.

Maybe that was why he had been so intrigued by Eric: he hadn’t pushed, he hadn’t pursued. He’d made Jack pursue him, because he wanted to protect Jack, and Jack was pretty sure Eric was still trying to protect the both of them.

Jack toed his shoes off as he entered his apartment and closed the door. The fragrance of a maple-apple pie filled the space, so different from when Jack used to come home to stale air and dust.

He found the pie on the counter with a small sticky note beside it.

“Welcome back! And thanks for the use of your kitchen! Sleep well and I’ll see you in the afternoon. – ERB”

Jack stuck the note on his refrigerator, decided to save the pie for when he woke up, stripped off his suit and went to bed.

[recentnews18-blog]

New Post has been published on https://shovelnews.com/we-love-how-stupid-the-venom-movie-is/

We Love How Stupid The Venom Movie Is

Three decades ago Marvel Comics debuted one of its most popular anti-heroes, Spider-Man arch-enemy Venom. Now Eddie Brock and his slavering black and white symbiote pal have gotten a solo, Spider-Man free shot at the big screen. Did that turn out to be as bad an idea as it sounds? Chris Person, Ethan Gach and I discuss.

Chris Person: Yes, but also no.

Ethan Gach: Precisely.

Chris: I don’t know about you, but I had a real good time with that not-so-good movie. It knew exactly what it was.

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Fahey: I came out of the theater thinking the exact same thing: what a great bad movie.

Chris: It feels exactly what a Venom movie should be: dumb, confusing, extremely juvenile. It feels like a movie dropped out of the 90s, back before we started acting like superhero movies should be competent or adult. A friend said “that movie wields its dumbness like a weapon.”

Fahey: Oh god, that’s beautiful.

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Ethan: If ever there was a movie that earned its absurd Tom Hardy voice.

Fahey: For one thing, we’ve finally found the perfect person to cast against Tom Hardy, and that’s Tom Hardy doing a funny voice. Tom Hardy Talks To Himself For Two Hours would be a great movie.

Chris: I assumed it was a different guy, they did a lot of good stuff with the Venom voice in post-production.

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Ethan: Oh wow, same. I’ve never heard a voice that altered be that funny before. Venom had some of the funniest lines by far, just in timing and inflection alone.

Fahey: Oh, Hardy went all out on that voice. His influences, from a Screen Rant interview: “ Redman, Busta Rhymes, and James Brown as ingredients and then I played with it to create the fusion of sort of what you hear, which sounds nothing like that, but initially was like vibe or heartbeat that I wanted to bring to it.”

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Chris: OK now I just want a Busta Rhymes Venom movie.

Fahey: You can really hear it when Venom calls Brock “Pussy.”

Chris: They really got the most out of that PG-13.

Ethan: Action-wise, I found most of it underwhelming, but the smoke-filled fight against the SWAT team toward the end actually worked surprisingly well.

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Chris: It felt like they didn’t know how well this movie was going to do and were kind of conservative with it?

Fahey: They used a trick to pull off the PG-13. They made the first half hour, 45 minutes super boring so the film ratings board folks fell asleep.

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Ethan: And yet it never seemed to waste time. In the very beginning I thought it would do the long drawn out thing of “oh, this weird goo, is it evil?” but then it immediately leaves Jameson’s body and begins messing shit up.

Fahey: RIP JJ Jameson’s son.

Chris: I have seen some debate as to how long that movie was.

Ethan: it definitely did not feel like the billed run time.

Chris: It felt like an hour and a half tops. Also, I should say for clarity that while I respect Tom Hardy committing 100% to a tacky movie, his performance almost exists in its own space. I’ve described it as Bobcat Goldthwait if he never did the high registers or Charlie from It’s Always Sunny if he somehow had an MSNBC gig.

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Fahey: Yeah, it’s a weird time dilation sort of thing. I recall feeling the opening drag, but once Brock and Venom got together it was so much stupid fun it just flew by.

Ethan: I first got excited for this movie w hen I watched the original trailer that everyone thought was terrible. It reminded me of 2004’s Punisher. While it doesn’t have nearly the arc or deep bench of characters that movie had, it just felt so damn refreshing to see a comic book movie where it doesn’t seem like the writers, directors, or studio have a to-do list of boxes they need to check.

Fahey: Is that Dolph Lundgren or Thomas Jane?

Ethan: Jane.

Fahey: Ah yes, where instead of killing his wife and kids the mob killed everyone he ever loved, all at once. Good stuff.

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Ethan: Also, what timing on the UN’s global warming report. I was perfectly primed to accept Venom’s core premise and not really get caught up in the nonsense particulars.

Chris: We should probably speak to the plot. Here’s what you gotta know: Not Elon Musk gets some symbiotes and Eddie Brock tries to stop him after getting Venom’d. And Riz Ahmed does a good job with some very bad dialogue.

Fahey: Wow, you remembered an actor other than Tom Hardy and Dawson’s ex (Michelle Williams)!

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Chris: Jenny Slate is in there too, weirdly!

Fahey: It’s hard to be a scenery-chewing villain no one cares about. And yes, Jenny from Parks and Rec, doing not a single funny thing.

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Ethan: I also really appreciated Mr. Robot’s Ron Cephas Jones doing the bit role of Brock’s Network boss. And the inconspicuous white dude from Veep who is very good at doing that one thing.

Fahey: You guys have IMDB open now.

Ethan: It was also neat to see a movie shot in San Francisco, rather than shot in front of a blue screen and made to look like New York. I almost turned on a Full House rerun afterwards

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Fahey: Though main filming was in Atlanta and NYC, painted to look like San Francisco.

Chris: Georgia: we will literally never tax a film crew ever.

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Fahey: Have a peach sticker.

Ethan: Mike, is this the Venom you wanted? I never knew the character beyond the Fox Spider-Man cartoon.

Fahey: Man, it’s tough to say, as the Venom I wanted was generally defined by Spider-Man. There are shades of the Venom: Lethal Protector comic series in here — that’s the one where Venom moves from NYC to San Francisco and becomes an anti-hero — which I dig. My favorite Venom so far has been from the Venom: Space Knight series, in which the Flash Thompson version of the character comes into his own.

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Venom: Space Knight

Fahey: I can’t help but feel Eddie Brock’s journey was seriously cut short here. That said, I still had a hell of a time.

Chris: I had a blast. The dialogue is very Good-Bad in a lot of ways, and there’s one line from Michelle Williams near the end that had me and the person I saw it with dying. The parts that suck are fun, and the parts that are fun are solidly slapstick. But I probably won’t see it again unless I’m on a plane.

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Fahey: I will purchase it on 4K Blu-Ray if it comes with a director’s commentary. If I ever find myself in a hospital for four months again, forced to flip through basic cable channels, I’d stop and watch.

Ethan: The beginning montage of Brock’s Vice News-like reporting killed me, as did Brock later saying something to the effect of “Oh no my legs!” after wiping out on a motorcycle during a chase scene. This is definitely the type of movie I will try to convince everyone I see to watch so I can watch them watch it and then probably be very disappointed when they don’t laugh as hard as me.

Fahey: I will never eat tater tots again.

Chris: Same, but with uncooked lobsters.

No lobsters were harmed during the uploading of this photo.

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Fahey: Or Woody Harrelson in a red fright wig.

Ethan: I would gladly watch a sequel that was just Hardy and Harrelson sitting in adjoining cells doing Waiting for Godot: Symbiote Edition.

Fahey: We can only hope.

Ethan: Can I just say the ugly, grimey yellow tile in Brock’s apartment made me really happy? It felt like one of those small details that only exist, like Harrelson’s ridiculously red wig, to remind you this is all coming out of a comic book, and which end up being a lot more effective for me than, say, an epic $50 million CGI battle in the third act. Probably just out of nostalgia for the movies that were forced to do that back when computers were made out of wood.

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Chris: I only have one thing to say: “Hey……I’m sorry about Venom.”

Fahey: It’s not your fault, man. It’s not your fault.

Source: https://kotaku.com/we-love-how-stupid-the-venom-movie-is-1829632685

[theworstbob]

yellin’ at songs: june week three

capsule reviews of the pop songs which debuted on the billboard hot 100 on 17 june 2017 and 16 june 2007

16 June 2007

56) "Beautiful Flower," India.Arie

I'll cop to not knowing that much about India.Arie. I understand she has at least one classic album, and I can also see that there is no India.ArieVEVO account, so her entire career transpired when I was assuming it was acceptable to live life only listening to white men complain about women. This has clearly been to my detriment, because this song is simply astonishing. It's an inspirational song, but it's only India.Arie, a guitar, and some other voices for the occasional harmony, so it actually felt like, when India.Arie said "When they say shake your moneymaker/Shake your head," she was talking directly to me, decidedly not the target audience for this song. (I want to shout out how fucking great that lyric is again. "When they say shake your moneymaker/Shake your head." GODDAMN RIGHT. HELL YEAH. GIRL POWER FOREVER, SISTAHS.) It's such a cool and compelling twist on the girl power anthem, something toned down, but not so toned down that it feels like you're sitting around the campfire with the youth pastor. This is the second song, this and "Get Buck," that I think we unjustifiably left behind in 2007, and I say we bring it back.

78) "The Way I Are," Timbaland ft./Keri Hilson

I give Timbaland a lot of heck for being making loud and unnavigable music in these parts, but it would be dishonest of me to deny that this is a hot one. There's a build here that's absent from the rest of Timbaland's ouevre. Typically, it sounds like he's giving you a thousand things to listen to all at once, but on this one, he slowly adds more and more things, so once the chorus hits, it's the typical Timbaland mess of sound, but there's a structure, there's a logic to how everything fits together, and I can finally hear what made Timbaland the name that he was. This is GOOD trashy 2007 music. I'm down with this.

80) "Can't Tell Me Nothing," Kanye West

What 2007 vs. 2017 might ultimately come down to is that 2007 has the old Kanye and 2017 has the new Kanye. (Wait. I'm not sure Kanye West has figured into the 2017 equation at all, actually. Have I not been paying that much attention when Wikipediaing the rap songs? Has he legit not been involved with ANYTHING on the chart?) This is probably the best pure-rap song Kanye ever made, one of those songs where it's not the production carrying the day (though this is an astounding track), Kanye is actually on point with his flow and his rhymes. I sometimes rag on Kanye for the fact that his rapping might be the weakest part of his whole thing, but I'm comparing him to like Jay-Z and Kendrick and other dudes in consideration for GOAT, of course Kanye is going to falter, KANYE STILL MADE THIS SONG. This song doesn't work without a capable MC guiding the proceedings. Love this. Only reason it's not higher is because I don't want a cluster of Kanye at the top, and also I'm tickled with "Get Buck" being the rap song of the year so far and don't wanna see that end. Like, OBVIOUSLY, if this were 2007 and this song just came out, it'd be the new #1, but this is a retrospective, and I think it's important we reflect on how violent the "Get Buck" beat was.

91) "Whine Up," Kat Deluna ft./Elephant Man

You know what I don't think about enough? How pop songs end. That's partially because I am bad at this, but it's also not something I think about because we're not exactly conditioned to think of songs as stories. Songs generally don't leave you hanging, or end by saying it was all just a dream (with the possible exception of that one Nelly song from a few years back ("Cruise")), they're sort of like museum exhibits, where they present themselves to you in full, and you consider their merits as a piece. (This is why the critique Mariah Carey gave of David Cook's "Always Be My Baby," where she specifically says she loves how he ends the song on this off note and leaves it unresolved, has stayed with me.) I bring up endings because this song ends with Kat DeLuna singing "Whine up! Whine up! Whine up! Oh, yeah!" for half a minute before fading out. I think the song understands that it's really just here to go "Whine up! Whine up! Whine up! Oh, yeah!" for four minutes, but we still had a few years to go before "We Found Love" dropped, so it needed to go through the verse-chorus-verse motions, yeah sure feature verse can't have a song without a feature verse, but this is a song which knows what it is, and it gives you as much of what you want as it can before backing out, aware that there's only so much "Whine up! Whine up! Whine up! Oh, yeah!" one can take. The fade suggests the song could just go "Whine up! Whine up! Whine up! Oh, yeah!" for ten hours, but we have expectations of our pop songs, and this wants nothing more than to live up to expectations. Quality chorus, though! Had a great big dumb time with this one! 2007's got it rollin' this week! Can't wait to see how 2007 keeps the momentum goin'!

96) "Wall to Wall," Chris Brown

Welp.

97) "Bartender," T-Pain ft./Akon

This song is just comfy. A lovely chaser for the song I didn't listen to but still had to acknowledge existed. After writing a good chunk about "Whine Up," a song that may as well have had four words, I don't want to over-analyze what is simply a nice song, sort of what to let it be, want to point out the casual misogyny that kinda takes some of the chill out the zone, but mostly want to acknowledge that none of the several sets of three minutes we've all spent with this song somewhere in our space is pretty neat. Well done, everyone.

99) "Startin' with Me," Jake Owen

"I took a swing at my old man one Christmas/I never dreamed that it would be his last" ...Did. Did this dude kill his dad? Fuckin' hell, dude, someone should've caught that lyric. How many people wrote this one? Three. Three people. Not one of them said, "Hey, what do we think of this line? It sounds like this dude killed his dad with a punch." But like even if this dude didn't kill his dad, he had sex with his bro's sister, he sold his grandpa's guitar, he punched his dad, he went to jail and yelled at his brother for not bailing him out, he wasn't with his family when his grandma died, this man is fucking irredeemable, and he just goes, "Yeah, I sure goofed up some things back there, didn't I? Ha, if I had a dime..." You get to say that about small stupid mistakes, like the thing about bein' too big a dick to a girl, or the thing about smoking. You don't get to have a dime for every time you commit patricide. You don't get second chances for ruining every single relationship in your life. Who on earth relates to this song? This is nonsense. It's this dark, twisted man singing this Tim McGraw melody, and it's illogical.

100) "Do You," Ne-Yo

2:48 PM 6/4/2017: Wow! A Ne-Yo song I don't remember! What a treat! 2:52 PM 6/4/2017: ...Oh. Oh I forgot this because it wasn't great. I get it. No, no, that's fair. Learning that this was a sequel to "So Sick" is equally disappointing. We talked about endings -- whoa, a thematic link between capsule reviews, who ever heard of such a thing -- and "So Sick" has a really solid ending, that lonely, soft "Why can't I turn off the radio?" and this is, this doesn't ruin "So Sick?" But knowing that dude doesn't get over it for two years kinda makes the dude seem more pathetic than sad. 2:53 PM 6/4/2017: REMIX WITH UTADA HIKARU?!!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!? I HAVE THREE WORDS FOR THE WAY THIS IS MAKING ME FEEL. AND BABY, IT AIN'T COMPLEX AND FILTHY, I CAN TELL YA WHAT.

Two new songs in the Top 10, AND Lil Mama hangs on for another glorious week! 20) "Get Me Bodied," by Beyonce (5.26.2007) 19) "Lip Gloss," by Lil Mama (6.9.2007) 18) "I Don't Wanna Stop," by Ozzy Osbourne (5.26.2007) 17) "Stolen," by Dashboard Confessional (4.21.2007) 16) "Beautiful Liar," by Beyonce & Shakira (3.31.2007) 15) "Cupid's Chokehold," by Gym Class Heroes ft./Patrick Stump (1.13.2007) 14) "The River," by Good Charlotte ft./M. Shadows & Synyster Gates (2.10.2007) 13) "Say OK," by Vanessa Hudgens (2.17.2007) 12) "Alyssa Lies," by Jason Michael Carroll (1.13.2007) 11) "Never Again," by Kelly Clarkson (5.12.2007) 10) "Can't Tell Me Nothing," by Kanye West (6.16.2007) 9) "Get Buck," by Young Buck (4.14.2007) 8) "And I Am Telling You I'm Not Going," by Jennifer Hudson (1.13.2007) 7) "Thnks fr th Mmrs," by Fall Out Boy (4.28.2007) 6) "Candyman," by Christina Aguilera (1.13.2007) 5) "Because of You," by Ne-Yo (3.17.2007) 4) "Umbrella," by Rihanna ft./Jay-Z (4.28.2007) 3) "Beautiful Flower," by India.Arie (6.16.2007) 2) "Dashboard," by Modest Mouse (2.17.2007) 1) "The Story," by Brandi Carlile (4.28.2007) Strong, strong week for 2007. Congratulations, year I have randomly personified.

6.17.2017

74) "Somethin Tells Me," Bryson Tiller 85) "Self-Made," Bryson Tiller 89) "Don't Get Too High," Bryson Tiller 91) "Run Me Dry," Bryson Tiller 98) "No Longer Friends," Bryson Tiller

The artists who have debuted three or more  songs on the Billboard Hot 100 in the same week this year are, in some order, Ed Sheeran (AAA), Big Sean (hip-hop stalwart, AA), Migos (one AAA hit), Future (AAA), Nicki Minaj (AAA), Drake (AAA), Kendrick Lamar (AAA), and Bryson Tiller. ...I enjoyed the couple of Bryson Tiller songs I heard the last couple of years. I would not have guessed he had the clout to release a surprise album, the wattage to get five of the 19 songs on the album to chart, but here we are! Five songs! That were all pretty much the same thing! "Run Me Dry" was noticably bouncier than the other songs, but like these songs, this dude, like, you know how, with Netflix and YouTube, they sink so much into original content because the goal isn't to create something great, the goal is to create something people will watch? Like, if you're watching something on Netflix, you're not watching something on Hulu or Twitch, so it's in Netflix's best interests to throw a thousand spaghettis at the wall in the hopes of finding something to stick. These songs are designed for you to you listen to so that you're listening to that record label's version of this and not something else on some other label. (I can think of no other reason that this should be 19 songs long. I kinda wanted to listen to this album on the bus ride home, get a jump start on these songs, but the album was longer than my bus ride. Why.) Like, these are not, technically, bad songs. I don't like them and barely remember them however-long-I've-been-writing-this-paragraph later, but I never felt compelled to hit skip, and that feels like that's what we're going for here. Listen to this hour-long album. Don't hit other buttons.

88) "Met Gala," Gucci Mane ft./Offset

"I was that nigga locked up in the cell/And they treated me like I was normal/Thankin' the Lord for them blessings/I just left the Met Gala dressin' up formal" I wonder what a better lyricist would have done with that concept, of being an ex-con who can score tickets to the Met Gala. Like, I think Metro Boomin structured a track around that idea, of someone at the Met Gala experiencing anhedonia because they've been treated like the lowest form of humanity and now there's all these rich people who've never had anything bad happen to them, and the dude can't even feel like he's made it because this is a thousand miles from his scene. This is what the sound songs like independent of the words, at least, though I think we've established that the words are the least essential part of this kind of hip-hop. I'd probably listen to an album of Metro Boomin instrumentals, I don't see why we need Gucci Mane in here bleating about whatever.

90) "No Such Thing as a Broken Heart," Old Dominion

This was a'ight. I like that it doesn't suggest that if you love this hard all problems will go away; there's no resolution in this song, only a group of dudes promising to try their best, and that's the closest we're gonna get to complexity this side of Stapleton.It actually sort of reminds me of "Hey Ya!", not in terms of craft oh my stars not in those terms, but in its depiction of relationships where two people look at each other and say "I don't know how to be committed to you." Pop-country dude song of the year 2017, by a mile. (To reiterate, Thomas Rhett is ineligible because "Craving You" is pure bubblegum.)

94) "There for You," Martin Garrix x Troye Sivan

so baby hold me closer in the backseat of your rover that i know you can't afford, bite that tattoo on your shoulder, pull the sheets off of the corner of the mattress that you stole from your roommate back in boulder, we ain't ever gettin' older

99) "Butterfly Effect," Travis Scott

this was fine! travis scott can be counted on to deliver solid songs, and while I'm not gonna say this is my favorite thing he's ever done, it's still nice to hear him chime in. what a pleasant surprise! these reviews have gotten progressively shorter. the next review prolly just gonna be one word.

100) "Strangers," Halsey ft./Lauren Jauregui

So here's something I'm guilty of: Me: There should be more women on the chart! Y'all: Here's one we like! Me: /sucks in air through teeth/ Not this one? So I'm glad that Halsey made a song I think is actually pretty dope. Like, I actually went back and listened to it again, simply because, hey, girl-girl love duet, that's new! I'm actually having difficulty recalling any hit song that was specifically about a same-sex relationship, and I'm sure they exist and I'm forgetting something thuddingly obvious, but this is cool, and thankfully, it's a good song on its own merits. Halsey and Jauregui mesh really well together, and the track is a perfect complement, something propulsive, yet understated enough to let the singers do the work they need to do, a backing track that knows what it needs to be. (Suppose it makes sense that someone who won a Producer of the Year Grammy would write a decent song.)

Only one new thing in the Top 20 because I stared at the list for 20 seconds before deciding I was not going to bump Kendrick from the Top 20 for Old Dominion. We don’t consider how much optics figure into determining how much we love what we love, but they figure in quite a bit. 20) "The Heart Part 4," by Kendrick Lamar (4.15) 19) "Selfish," by Future ft./Rihanna (3.18) 18) "Slide," by Calvin Harris ft./Frank Ocean & Migos (3.18) 17) "Felices los 4," by Maluma (6.3) 16) "Now & Later," by Sage the Gemini (2.25) 15) "Bad Liar," by Selena Gomez (6.3) 14) "DNA." by Kendrick Lamar (5.6) 13) "It Ain't Me," by Kygo x Selena Gomez (3.4) 12) "Craving You," by Thomas Rhett ft./Maren Morris (4.22) 11) "That's What I Like," by Bruno Mars (3.4) 10) "Chanel," by Frank Ocean ft./A$AP Rocky (4.1) 9) "Strangers," by Halsey ft./Lauren Jauregui (6.17) 8) "Either Way," by Chris Stapleton (5.27) 7) "Run Up," by Major Lazer ft./PARTYNEXTDOOR & Nicki Minaj (2.18) 6) "Green Light," by Lorde (3.18) 5) "ELEMENT." by Kendrick Lamar (5.6) 4) "Despacito," by Luis Fonsi ft./Daddy Yankee (2.4) 3) "Issues," by Julia Michaels (2.11) 2) "iSpy," by KYLE ft./Lil Yachty (1.14) 1) "Hard Times," by Paramore (5.13) Also I feel like bumping the Camila Cabello joint for the Lauren Jauregui joint is me drawing a line in the sand I wasn’t ready to draw. Please don’t hate me, the teens, I do not know what dramas have unfolded, what feels you have unfelt.

Who won?

So I actually did go through the weeks before I was reviewing 2007 releases, since I created a Google Sheet for YAS because, when my computer became unusable, I realized it was probably unwise to have just one file trapped inside one very bad computer. But since I put the stuff in spreadsheet form, it made week-by-week comps easier. As it turns our, 2007 got off to an early 3-0 lead, what with “And I Am Telling You,” “Candyman,” and “Jump to the Rhythm” all dropping in the first few weeks, but 2017′s been doin’ better as of late, thanks to two weeks where 2007 didn’t... it didn’t really do anything. 2017: 12 2007: 11 And that’s all the difference! 2007 crushed it this week, which is good, because the next few weeks look pretty bleak for ol’ 2007y. Good opportunity for 2017 to create some separation in this fake competition between two entities that have no sentience as they are arbitrarily determined measurements of time and not actual things. See y’all after seven sunsets.