#Matt Sunderland

[blairsanne]

Morning Hate is a short film written and directed by Dean O'Gorman, about stretcher-bearers in the first world war.

They are crowdfunding to help complete the project, and the the Boosted campaign has hit its initial goal of $15,000 NZD!

They're working toward their stretch goal to try to hit $25,000 NZD, so if you were hoping to support the project, they could very much use the support!

Dean posted on his Instagram that they actually needed $25,000 but because Boosted is an all-or-nothing platform, they set the goal to $15,000 because they thought they might be able to get that.

If you can donate, any amount helps! Sharing is also very helpful! 💛

[gayles55]

Morning Hate

The requirement to suspend your humanity is one of the many tragedies of war.

This is the theme of the new film, Morning Hate, written and directed by Dean O’Gorman, executive produced by Aidan Turner and Graham McTavish, cast members of The Hobbit. Starring Matt Sunderland (Pearl, The Stranger), Craig Hall (A Place to Call Home, Sweet Tooth) and Cohen Holloway (The Power of the Dog, Rūrangi) and Jed Brophy. Go to https://www.boosted.org.nz/projects/morning-hate to read more about how to support the postproduction of this film.

[lands-of-fantasy]

Swamp Thing

Character Posters

[lateralcast]

Lateral Highlight:

The invention of .99 cents pricing

Dani Siller, Bill Sunderland and Matt Parker discuss a question about an ingenious pricing scheme.

[georgefairbrother]

This is the fourth in our occasional series featuring luminaries of stage and screen with a strong personal and/or professional connection with Northeast England, inspired with thanks by @robbielewis. Previous profiles were of Jean Heywood, John Nightingale and Edward Wilson. This time, Sunderland born actor siblings Malcolm and Catherine Terris.

Malcolm Terris was born on January 11th, 1941, boarded at Barnard Castle School in County Durham, then worked as a cadet journalist at the Sunderland Echo before training as an actor.

He was active on British television from 1963, his style perfectly suited to larger than life characters, and is possibly best remembered for his role as Great War veteran and salt-of the-earth union leader, Matt Headley, in 34 episodes of the Tyneside interwar social-realism drama, When the Boat Comes In.

As Matt Headley, with James Bolam (Jack Ford) in When the Boat Comes In.

His more than 120 recorded screen credits include a variety of British television programmes, including Fall of Eagles, Doctor Who (Horns of Nimon, 1979), Reilly: Ace of Spies, three separate roles in Coronation Street, Our Friends in the North, The Bill, and a regular role in Rockliffe’s Babies. His final appearance was in Midsomer Murders in 2011.

His big screen appearances include as ship’s surgeon, with Anthony Hopkins as Bligh and Mel Gibson as Fletcher Christian, in The Bounty (1984), with Ricky Tomlinson in Mike Bassett: England Manager, and in Dickie Attenborough’s Chaplin, which starred Robert Downey Jnr in the title role. He has also appeared on stage including in productions of Othello and in a Broadway production of Hamlet.

He passed away at the artistes residential care home, Denville Hall, on June 6th, 2020, aged 79.

Catherine Terris was born in 1948, and trained at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). She has been active in British television since 1972, appearing with her brother in seven episodes of When the Boat Comes In. Her other television work includes Z Cars, two roles in Coronation Street, Anna Karenina, Inspector Morse, Dalziel and Pascoe, Heartbeat, George Gently, and a regular role (15 episodes) in William and Mary with Martin Clunes and Julie Graham. She also appeared in the hugely successful feature film, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel.

According to her page on the Coronation Street fan site, Corriepedia:

"...On stage she has appeared in productions of Faustus, A Rite Kwik Metal Tata, Andy Capp, Tight at the Back, Rose, Tom Jones, Billy Liar, Queuing for Everest and Into the Blue..."

Her most recent television screen credit is In the Club (BBC 2014-16) and latest big screen appearance was in the 2021 feature film, Martyrs Lane.

On stage with Sarah Gordy MBE (The A Word, Ralph and Katie) in the 2016 Arcola Theatre production of Into the Blue, written by Beverley Hancock and directed by Deborah Paige. Image from Sarah Gordy's official site.

[new-berry]

In the same universe as the other Jordan / Kieran / John tomfoolery “your name is a feeling” no John in this though.

All fiction, not real, made up, NSFW etc etc. Set, essentially, a few hours ago really, is there a heat wave in Scotland right now? Well it’s fiction. You are going to have to - much like me- pretend there are no spelling / grammar whoopsies

Kieran’s never played a summer sport. Football grabbed him, right in the jugular before anything else had a chance.

Something about knowing there will be at least one game in snow or sleet means he loves a late summer heat wave.

Even when it’s too hot to drift off to sleep. There’s a game coming up and even only half under the top sheet only it’s like if he moves an inch he’ll start to sweat.

Maybe it’s a real curse? Some Sunderland fan gave a witch a pint of blood and both sides of his pillow will be hot forever.

Every sound in the hotel is like a dripping tap. Impossible to ignore, the anticipation of the next drop getting his skin twitching in advance. Sunderland. He can’t get his brain to cool down any more than his skin.

Kieran texts Jordan “too hot to sleep.” Includes a string of random emojis because Jordan will try and make them mean something but it really is just a sun then a ball then a pig then flames.

There is no reply, not shocking at one in the morning. “Can’t sleep.” He sends with a unicorn and a kilt. Includes all the flame icons this time.

He’s not anticipating an answer, more on the off chance the mad bastard has got enough going on in his own head he’s lying awake in bed practising insults to his team for making him work.

Kieran’s team is a constant checklist in the back of his mind, Miggy’s injury, Bruno’s distraction, whatever is brewing between Anthony and Elliot and Lewis. If Matt can head off that impending disaster.

He rolls to the other side of the bed, still hot, the witch's curse clearly extending to all linen.

His phone lights up “open the door.”

Jordan doesn’t go much for emojis. For capital letters or niceties. Kieran shoves what’s left of the sheet around his feet off and opens the door like asked.

Jordan looks softer than usual. Hair not slicked back, in a blue vest and shorts. His feet in flip flops.

Kieran tugs him in the room. “You’re not worried about room check?”

“Harry also can’t sleep.” Jordan shrugs. “Passed him in the staircase headin’ somewhere improper.”

Jordan runs his thumbs under the dark lines under Kieran’s eyes. “Was thinking of heading out anyway when you texted.”

Kieran snorts “off for a Starbucks run?”

Jordan laughs and slides his hands around Kieran’s hips right into his underwear, cupping his ass. “I was thinking about a swim. Not a booty call.”

“Don’t see a towel.”

Kieran drops his voice, just for the way Jordan’s eyelids will lower, the way he will lick his lips. “Don’t see trunks.”

“Distracted by a text love.”

Jordan tilts his head back and Kieran runs his hands up Jordan’s forearms, resting on the inside of his elbows, nuzzling his neck.

Gareth might huff in a meeting but he doesn’t give a shit about the older players sleeping arrangements if it doesn’t affect the team. Jordan using the stairs not the elevator sends a little thrill through Kieran. Stupid to feel like a boy getting away with something.

Like being a kid having a midnight snack, like slipping out a bedroom window to meet your mates when everyone else is sleeping.

He kisses Jordan’s skin, nipping a little. Jordan makes a soft “mm” noise but lets Kieran have his way. Asks, “Why can’t you sleep?”

“Too hot. I can't get comfortable.”

“Go in the hallway, like a sauna in there compared to the rooms.” Kieran laughs. Right into the notch at the bottom of Jordan’s throat.

“Don’t want to put more clothes on.” It’s a cheesy line, and Kieran only says it to make Jordan laugh which he does. Tries to stifle it.

“You don’t have much to take off.”

Jordan’s hands move firm and hot over the round of Kieran’s ass.

“If you can’t sleep and you don’t want to swim, well then, what do you want?” Jordan pulls Kieran against him, neither of them hard yet but Kieran can feel the bump of their cocks getting interested .

Kieran tilts his head up for a kiss, Jordan gives him a lazy grin first. His line was even cheesier but Kieran isn’t going to call him on it.

Too hot and too late for anything acrobatic, just hands that roll over slowly, Kieran’s chest feels like a kiln. Too fucking hot, something forming inside it.

“Get naked,” Jordan says, helpfully tugging his pants down from the bottom until Kieran kicks them off.

Jordan pulls off his clothes too, leaves them in a puddle of blue and England logos on his flip flops.

Jordan nugdges him back and Kieran goes easily. The pull and promise of sleep another anticipation he won’t share with Jordan. Can hear him bitching he’s not a sleeping tablet, not a magic pill. Not a witches curse.

Kieran stretches, the pleasure of the resistance of his muscles as Jordan takes a lazy slow path around his upper body, over his collar and sternum.

Kieran’s not going to drift of like this, not exactly, running his fingers across Jordan’s hair rather theough through it. Jordan slides across his nipples, he sucks and coaxes them with his tongue, only switching sides after he’s satisfied with some internal marker he’s chosen, how hard they get maybe, how much Kieran sighs.

Jordan is a magic pill though, Kieran shifting around the bed as Jordan’s hands prompt, not focused on anything more than the next place Jordan’s mouth touches until he says; “Spread your legs for me. Open up.”

Wet fingers sit at Kieran’s hole, gently nudging and then sliding in easy.

“Fuck,” Kieran gasps. He’d seen Jordan pull the lube out of pocket before he’d kicked his shorts off, more an expectation, his brain and mouth preoccupied with the kiss.

“Good?” Jordan’s voice is low, he’s as into it. Kieran doesn’t know if he plans on fucking him or just jerking off but either is fine. His mind distracted from everything that had consumed him up until a few minutes ago.

“Yeah.” He rocks into the push of Jordan’s fingers.

Jordan plays for a while, caressing just inside and then dragging soft fingertips over his rim. Even though it’s late the heat waves feels like a cocoon not an oppressive blanket like before. Kieran shifts but not a lot as Jordan slides his fingers in deeper.

Can feel sweat soft in the small of his back. Keeps his eyes half open, watching Jordan come closer for the occasional kiss then pull back to watch his fingers open Kieran up.

Kieran enjoys lying there his body biddable to a slow encroaching orgasam. Thinks about calling Jordan a possessive bastard out loud, but he’s gotten used to it. The way his eyes gleam when Kieran lies back for him.

“I bet I could fuck your throat so easy right now, all the way in,” Jordan says. “You’re completely relaxed.”

Kieran licks his lips and smiles. “That’s a good idea. It’d be nice. Go for it.” Jordan crooks his fingers, gets his prostate in revenge at ‘nice.’. Kieran twitches, from slow moving to boiling, sweat pricking along his hairline.

Not following his own idea, Jordan slides his fingers out and his cock in. Kieran pulls his knees up, lets his legs splay out. Doesn’t try and hold on, Jordan settling on deep thrusts into the v of his body. Runs his hands over the skin he can feel, Jordan’s shoulders covered in freckles. The dips on the small of hia back.

His arms and legs feel as heavy as his eyes. “Gonna fall asleep.” He slurs out, his own cock is hard but it’s almost like a distraction, sleep tugging him.

“I’m not stopping if you do.” Jordan says. Doesn’t sound angry, more like he’s laughing but Kieran can’t be bothered to be annoyed by it.

“Don’t have to, you have my okay to keep going.”

Kieran kinda hears, kinda thinks he imagines, the “can’t fucking say that shit.” That Jordan gets out, fucking faster.

Jordan comes with a grunt and Kieran cups his cheeks and guides him down for a drowsy kiss.

Coming is almost an afterthought. Jordan doesn’t pull out, just rubs his hand over Kieran. It’s pleasure that comes in little eddies. Little waves nice but not urgent, like digging your toes in the sand on a warm day. Just a burst of pleasure and then it’s like Kieran knows exactly what tired is.

All the little noises in the hotel are relaxing now. Jordan pulls out and they share a couple more lazy kisses. Jordan lying alongside him. But it’s too hot to touch much, Kieran’s ankle against Jordan’s calf, a couple of their fingers knitted together.

Kieran feels caught between both feelings, sleepiness and bliss.

“Stay huh? I’ll pay your fine if you get caught.” Jordan snickers as he rolls on his side and rubs gently at Kierans hipbone. “I’ll make John pay it.” He says. “Teach him for not being here.”

“Okay,” Kieran murmurs. He stops fighting sleep, dropping off wondering if what he feels is breathing or the rhythm of Jordan’s fingers.

[sunburnacoustic]

Like Father, Like Son

Matt Bellamy is the son of a pop star. And not some minor, played-bass-on-the-demo-version-of-'Hi, Ho Silver Lining' pop star either. Back in 1961 20-year-old Sunderland-born George Bellamy joined The Tornados on guitar. Within a year they were the first-ever UK band to top the US charts, with their Joe Meek-produced instrumental single 'Telstar' - considered by many to be the first song to feature distortion and which went on to sell a staggering five million copies. It's a commercial feat Muse have yet to match [2006]. According to Matt, the advice imparted by Bellamy Sr. was: "Enjoy it while you're young and get laid."

Kerrang! article, 29 July 2006

[anthonysstupiddailyblog]

Anthony's Stupid Daily Blog (749): Fri 5th Apr 2024

Tuned into last night's Dynamite and I'm still not exactly sure how this ranking system works. Could any roster member just decide to pull an Adam Copeland and hold an open challenge every week in order to accumulate some wins? Also what if Tony’s only booking you once a month like Lance Archer? Watched Private Party's match and while they are great in the ring they need a rejiggered gimmick or they need some more mic / vignette time to develop their current gimmick because the two years they spent on Dark with Matt Hardy have done a lot of damage that needs repairing. I liked the vignettes for Strickland vs Takeshita but they should have had them as the opening video package and had them running throughout the night. You should always be plugging the main event. Another really good show in terms of in ring action but I'm still holding out hope that one day soon Tony Khan will realise they need more direction and focus on story. Tuned into tonight's Hollyoaks which featured more chaos within the Osborne household. JJ continues to torment Frankie while the rest of the family are oblivious to what's going on. The end of the episode featured Frankie sat on the opposite side of the table from JJ looking forlorn as Darren complimented him for his recent football prowess. The scene ended with Suzanne commenting that they were finally becoming a real family. Yes, living with your two children, their Dad, his wife and THEIR children, just like every other home in the UK right?………..well maybe in Sunderland. The episode itself ended with Nancy's pregnancy scare being all for nothing as it was revealed she wasn't pregnant but that she wanted Darren to get a vasectomy and I posted the following hypothetical exchange on Twitter:

Nancy: Darren you're getting a vasectomy Darren: How will gluing a bunch of jewels to my willy stop you from getting pregnant? Nancy: That's a Vajazzle, Darren. And only women can get them Darren: Well what's a vasectomy? (Nancy whispers in Darren's ear) Darren: AAAAAAAHH!

Good episode of Hollyoaks tonight. Much better than that episode of American Dad! where Steve and his friends get trapped in the school but nowhere near as good as that episode of Mad Men where Don is revealed to be an imposter

[kammartinez]

Because I am a writer, and because I am a hoarder, my apartment is littered with notebooks that contain a mixture of journal entries and school assignments. Many pages don’t have dates, but I can tell which era of my life they correspond to just by looking at the handwriting. In the earliest examples, from elementary school, my print is angular, jagged; even the s’s and j’s turn sharp corners. In middle school, when I wanted to be more feminine (and was otherwise failing), I made my letters rounder, every curve a bubble ready to pop. In my junior year of high school, when it was time to get serious about applying to college, I switched to cursive, slender and tightly controlled.

Each of my metamorphoses was made in keeping with a centuries-old American belief that people—types of people, even—can be defined by how they write their letters. Now, though, this form of signaling may be obsolete. In the age of text on screens, many of us hardly write by hand at all, so we rarely get the chance to assess one another’s character through penmanship. Handwriting, as a language of its own, is dying out.

Over the centuries, the way people read that language has shifted. Until the 1800s, at least in the U.S., writing styles were less an act of self-expression than a marker of your social category, including your profession. “There were certain font types for merchants, for example, that were supposed to reflect the efficiency and the speed with which merchants work,” Tamara Plakins Thornton, a historian at the University at Buffalo and the author of Handwriting in America, told me. Lawyers used a different script, aristocrats another, and so on. The distinctions were enforced—by social norms, by teachers, by clients and colleagues and employers.

Men and women, too, were assigned their own fonts. Men were taught “muscular handwriting,” Carla Peterson, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland, told me. They used roundhand, a larger script that was meant to be produced with more pressure on the quill or pen; women, by contrast, learned the narrower Italian script, akin to today’s italics. The latter style was compressed, says Ewan Clayton, a handwriting expert at the University of Sunderland, in the United Kingdom, in the same way that women’s waists might be limited by contemporary fashion. Eventually, women switched to using roundhand too.

The idea that handwriting styles might differ meaningfully from one person to another—and that those differences could be a means of showing your true nature—really took off in the 19th century, around the time that business correspondence and records started being outsourced to the typewriter. As penmanship was freed from professional constraints, it became more personal. “It was really believed that handwriting could be the articulation of self, that indeed the character of script said something about the character of a person,” says Mark Alan Mattes, an assistant English professor at the University of Louisville and the editor of the upcoming collection Handwriting in Early America.

Samples of “purely intuitive” (top) and “purely deductive” (bottom) handwriting styles from Talks on Graphology by Helen Lamson Robinson and M. L. Robinson

Graphological tendencies continued into the early 20th century, when researchers published studies proclaiming that readers could guess a person’s gender from their script with better-than-chance accuracy—as if students hadn’t still been taught that boys and girls should write in different ways as of just a few decades prior. Through the 1970s, scientists were plumbing handwriting for character traits; one study found that “missing i dots are related to the nonsubmissive, non-egocentric, socially interested person,” whereas the “number of circled i dots relates positively to the intelligent and sophisticated personality.”

Handwriting analysis moved further toward the fringe in the age of computer connectivity, when typing took over. “We are witnessing the death of handwriting,” Time proclaimed in 2009. Things have only gotten more digital since then. I now spend half of my waking life talking with my co-workers, and I have no idea what any of their writing looks like. Same for the subset of my friends who don’t happen to send birthday cards. One of my best friends is getting married next year, and I have never seen her fiancé’s handwriting. How am I supposed to know whether he tends toward deduction or intuition, whether he’s intelligent or socially interested, whether he’s an artist or a serial killer?

Let me be clear: Graphology is, as Thornton told me, “complete B.S.” Very few innate factors influence a person’s penmanship. Neither legibility nor messiness indicates intelligence. (Both claims have been made.) Handwriting can be used to diagnose conditions that affect a person’s movements, such as Parkinson’s, but you can’t learn anything about a person’s moral fiber by how they cross their t’s. What you can learn is how that person has been socialized to present themselves to the world, says Seth Perlow, an associate English professor at Georgetown. Doctors have a culture of sloppy writing; teen girls have a culture of dotting their i’s with tiny hearts. Girls don’t write that way because they’re feminine; they write that way because they’ve learned that tiny hearts are associated with femininity.

I remember practicing my letters as a kid when I got bored in class, adjusting the parts I didn’t like, adding and removing the belts from my 7s, the caps from my a’s. Testing out a new style was like trying on a new outfit in front of a mirror—assessing how it looked, knowing other people would see it too. Now, as handwriting becomes less and less enmeshed in our daily lives, Thornton told me, “there’s good reason to think this is not an arena for self-expression. It’s just something you have to learn and get away with as best you can.” If you want to assert your identity, and you want people to see it, you’re more likely to do so by sculpting your appearance, adding your pronouns to your Instagram bio, or updating LinkedIn so everyone knows you’re a merchant without having to decipher your chicken scratch.

In fact, many of the qualities that were once conveyed with a certain type of handwriting—literary bent or emotional openness, for example—may now be conveyed by the act of putting pen to paper at all. Perlow has studied the practice of posting photos of handwritten poems on Instagram, and he told me that it “conjures a feeling of personal authenticity or expressiveness or direct contact with the personality of the poet.”

Tech companies have even tried to sell that feeling, in the form of computer-generated “handwriting.” Services such as Handwrytten, Simply Noted, and Pen Letters allow customers to type out a message that a robot will then transcribe, using an actual pen, in any number of “handwriting” styles. (The robot-written letter is then mailed on your behalf.) But these tools run the risk of conjuring less a sense of personal authenticity than one of inconsiderate laziness. If a friend or family member sent me one of these cards, I’d be annoyed that they didn’t put in the time, or the work, to write out a message with their own, human hand.

Perhaps that’s really what handwriting comes down to in the digital age: time and work. My husband and I write letters to each other a few times every year, and it’s a grueling act of love. Figuring out what I want to say is an emotional and intellectual project. But after a few paragraphs, the challenge becomes mostly physical. The muscles of my right palm start to cramp up; my ring finger aches from where I rest the pen against it. I’d like to think my determination to write through the discomfort says more about me than the script I settled on a decade ago.

[kamreadsandrecs]

Because I am a writer, and because I am a hoarder, my apartment is littered with notebooks that contain a mixture of journal entries and school assignments. Many pages don’t have dates, but I can tell which era of my life they correspond to just by looking at the handwriting. In the earliest examples, from elementary school, my print is angular, jagged; even the s’s and j’s turn sharp corners. In middle school, when I wanted to be more feminine (and was otherwise failing), I made my letters rounder, every curve a bubble ready to pop. In my junior year of high school, when it was time to get serious about applying to college, I switched to cursive, slender and tightly controlled.

Each of my metamorphoses was made in keeping with a centuries-old American belief that people—types of people, even—can be defined by how they write their letters. Now, though, this form of signaling may be obsolete. In the age of text on screens, many of us hardly write by hand at all, so we rarely get the chance to assess one another’s character through penmanship. Handwriting, as a language of its own, is dying out.

Over the centuries, the way people read that language has shifted. Until the 1800s, at least in the U.S., writing styles were less an act of self-expression than a marker of your social category, including your profession. “There were certain font types for merchants, for example, that were supposed to reflect the efficiency and the speed with which merchants work,” Tamara Plakins Thornton, a historian at the University at Buffalo and the author of Handwriting in America, told me. Lawyers used a different script, aristocrats another, and so on. The distinctions were enforced—by social norms, by teachers, by clients and colleagues and employers.

Men and women, too, were assigned their own fonts. Men were taught “muscular handwriting,” Carla Peterson, an emeritus professor of English at the University of Maryland, told me. They used roundhand, a larger script that was meant to be produced with more pressure on the quill or pen; women, by contrast, learned the narrower Italian script, akin to today’s italics. The latter style was compressed, says Ewan Clayton, a handwriting expert at the University of Sunderland, in the United Kingdom, in the same way that women’s waists might be limited by contemporary fashion. Eventually, women switched to using roundhand too.

The idea that handwriting styles might differ meaningfully from one person to another—and that those differences could be a means of showing your true nature—really took off in the 19th century, around the time that business correspondence and records started being outsourced to the typewriter. As penmanship was freed from professional constraints, it became more personal. “It was really believed that handwriting could be the articulation of self, that indeed the character of script said something about the character of a person,” says Mark Alan Mattes, an assistant English professor at the University of Louisville and the editor of the upcoming collection Handwriting in Early America.

Samples of “purely intuitive” (top) and “purely deductive” (bottom) handwriting styles from Talks on Graphology by Helen Lamson Robinson and M. L. Robinson

Graphological tendencies continued into the early 20th century, when researchers published studies proclaiming that readers could guess a person’s gender from their script with better-than-chance accuracy—as if students hadn’t still been taught that boys and girls should write in different ways as of just a few decades prior. Through the 1970s, scientists were plumbing handwriting for character traits; one study found that “missing i dots are related to the nonsubmissive, non-egocentric, socially interested person,” whereas the “number of circled i dots relates positively to the intelligent and sophisticated personality.”

Handwriting analysis moved further toward the fringe in the age of computer connectivity, when typing took over. “We are witnessing the death of handwriting,” Time proclaimed in 2009. Things have only gotten more digital since then. I now spend half of my waking life talking with my co-workers, and I have no idea what any of their writing looks like. Same for the subset of my friends who don’t happen to send birthday cards. One of my best friends is getting married next year, and I have never seen her fiancé’s handwriting. How am I supposed to know whether he tends toward deduction or intuition, whether he’s intelligent or socially interested, whether he’s an artist or a serial killer?

Let me be clear: Graphology is, as Thornton told me, “complete B.S.” Very few innate factors influence a person’s penmanship. Neither legibility nor messiness indicates intelligence. (Both claims have been made.) Handwriting can be used to diagnose conditions that affect a person’s movements, such as Parkinson’s, but you can’t learn anything about a person’s moral fiber by how they cross their t’s. What you can learn is how that person has been socialized to present themselves to the world, says Seth Perlow, an associate English professor at Georgetown. Doctors have a culture of sloppy writing; teen girls have a culture of dotting their i’s with tiny hearts. Girls don’t write that way because they’re feminine; they write that way because they’ve learned that tiny hearts are associated with femininity.

I remember practicing my letters as a kid when I got bored in class, adjusting the parts I didn’t like, adding and removing the belts from my 7s, the caps from my a’s. Testing out a new style was like trying on a new outfit in front of a mirror—assessing how it looked, knowing other people would see it too. Now, as handwriting becomes less and less enmeshed in our daily lives, Thornton told me, “there’s good reason to think this is not an arena for self-expression. It’s just something you have to learn and get away with as best you can.” If you want to assert your identity, and you want people to see it, you’re more likely to do so by sculpting your appearance, adding your pronouns to your Instagram bio, or updating LinkedIn so everyone knows you’re a merchant without having to decipher your chicken scratch.

In fact, many of the qualities that were once conveyed with a certain type of handwriting—literary bent or emotional openness, for example—may now be conveyed by the act of putting pen to paper at all. Perlow has studied the practice of posting photos of handwritten poems on Instagram, and he told me that it “conjures a feeling of personal authenticity or expressiveness or direct contact with the personality of the poet.”

Tech companies have even tried to sell that feeling, in the form of computer-generated “handwriting.” Services such as Handwrytten, Simply Noted, and Pen Letters allow customers to type out a message that a robot will then transcribe, using an actual pen, in any number of “handwriting” styles. (The robot-written letter is then mailed on your behalf.) But these tools run the risk of conjuring less a sense of personal authenticity than one of inconsiderate laziness. If a friend or family member sent me one of these cards, I’d be annoyed that they didn’t put in the time, or the work, to write out a message with their own, human hand.

Perhaps that’s really what handwriting comes down to in the digital age: time and work. My husband and I write letters to each other a few times every year, and it’s a grueling act of love. Figuring out what I want to say is an emotional and intellectual project. But after a few paragraphs, the challenge becomes mostly physical. The muscles of my right palm start to cramp up; my ring finger aches from where I rest the pen against it. I’d like to think my determination to write through the discomfort says more about me than the script I settled on a decade ago.

[blairsanne]

I am sooooo happy to say that with less than 2 days to go, the Morning Hate Boosted campaign has surpassed its stretch goal of $25,000 NZD!!

Well done and thank you so much to everyone who supported by sharing the link, donating, etc. 💛💛💛💛

I'm so excited for Dean and the rest of the team, and look forward to the finished film. All that extra funding means they can put the finishing touches on it that they'd hoped for.

[shahananasrin-blog]

[ad_1] A major search and rescue effort was launched on Saturday (August 19) afternoon after reports a woman had got into difficulty off Seaham Harbour. Lifeboat, coastguard, and helicopter teams rushed to the scene at about 3.15pm and a woman was taken to hospital in Sunderland after being pulled from the water. Read more: Village turns out in force for orphaned Darlington brothers as appeal nears £20,000 RNLI crews have revealed that a teenage swimmer had got into difficulty around 250 meters from the shore. The RNLI lifeboat at the scene. (Image: KEVIN JACKSON) Duty coxswain Matt Adams said: “We were lucky to find the casualty so quickly who was almost a mile off the harbour and was extremely tired but this is the sort of job we train for on a regular basis with good team work from my fellow volunteers we brought the incident to a safe and satisfactory conclusion.” The helicopter seen coming in to land. (Image: NORTHERN ECHO) . (Image: KEVIN JACKSON) A lifeboat crew located the teenage swimmer and were able to take the casualty aboard the boat and provide casualty care. Read next: Get more from The Northern Echo with a Premium Plus digital subscription from as little as only £1.50 a week. Click here. A Coastguard helicopter lowered a paramedic on to the lifeboat where the casualty was then assessed. Both the paramedic and the casualty were then placed on to the inshore lifeboat and transferred to Seaham Harbour where the local emergency services were waiting to assist. Yesterday (Saturday) Durham Police confirmed it had been called to the incident with the police helicopter also launched. [ad_2]

[mariacallous]

Dundee, the sometimes troubled, often picturesque city on Scotland’s east coast, has generally carried a reputation for affordability. Even in the city’s plush west end, it wasn’t unusual during the 2010s for two people on fairly modest wages to be able to split the rent on a two-bedroom flat in a handsome, enduringly solid Victorian tenement.

This is no longer the case. At the start of the month, new figures showed that rents had soared 33% in a year, putting the city behind only Sunderland as having the steepest increase in the UK, with the average monthly cost of a room in Dundee now £587.

This was not the plan in September 2022, when Nicola Sturgeon announced a six-month rent freeze and an eviction ban, as part of emergency legislation brought in to deal with the cost of living crisis. To renters in, say, England, even such muted radicalism sounds unimaginable. It has indeed meant – however temporarily – an added degree of security for Scottish renters during a period of immense economic strain, as well being as a proactive attempt to tackle the issues head-on.

The small print, though, to the Cost of Living (Protection of Tenants) (Scotland) Act 2022 contained important caveats. For one, the freeze would only apply to existing tenancies across Scotland – there was no cap on what could be charged for a flat put on the market. Social tenants with arrears of more than £2,250 could still be evicted. And a temporary freeze was assuredly not the same thing as long-term rent controls in a nation that, like the rest of the UK, has a wildly overheated rental market.

For many Scottish housing campaigners – and indeed everyday tenants – the news was welcomed with enthusiasm, along with the sense that more could be done. It was reported last year that average rents had increased above inflation in seven Scottish areas before the freeze came in. It’s fair to question the effectiveness of a freeze that simply locks in what are, for many, already unaffordable rents. This is in a country where about 37% of households live in rented accommodation.

Demand has long been an issue, at 2.5 times the UK average (one Edinburgh estate agent recently spoke in the trade press of two newly listed flats receiving more than a thousand inquiries each in 48 hours). And just like the rest of the UK, the last decade and more has seen the cost of Scottish social and private rental accommodation go in one direction: up.

How long can it be sustainable, for instance, to live in Glasgow when the average rent of a one-bedroom flat has jumped 48.3% between 2010 and 2022? Several people I spoke to in Dundee described the situation as a bad joke: stagnant wages, chronic uncertainty, the looming threat of having to move from an already unaffordable rent to an impossible one. The consensus is that while the freeze was sorely needed, it wasn’t enough alone. This is a view echoed by Matt Downie, the chief executive of the homelessness charity Crisis UK. Though it welcomed the Scottish government’s decision to take action to protect tenants, “the rent freeze contained in the emergency legislation represents a sticking plaster on a much bigger problem”, says Downie.

Leòdhas Massie, a Green councillor based in Glasgow’s southside, who could barely afford to live in the constituency he was elected to represent, told the Daily Record in September that the measures just weren’t enough. He summed up his party’s more radical ambitions by describing the freeze as a good opportunity to implement lasting, legally viable rent controls.

But, of course, there’s been opposition – from Scotland’s landlord lobbies. Their argument was that the freeze was unfair on those in their ranks struggling with the cost of living crisis themselves. They also warned of a potential landlord exodus, further increasing demand issues. But for all the “good landlords” out there who don’t price-gouge and who maintain their properties well, there are many tenants for whom these arguments won’t evoke sympathy: in 2019, the Scottish house conditions survey showed that 52% of privately rented homes in Scotland were found to be in a state of disrepair.

In late January, the Scottish housing minister and Green party co-leader Patrick Harvie announced that the legislation would be extended for at least a further six months, from April to the end of September. Only now, the private-sector freeze would be scrapped and replaced with a 3% cap (the freeze on social rents will also end in April, with the voluntary agreement that landlords keep any increases to below inflationary levels of 11.1%). Despite this fairly bold U-turn, broadly interpreted as a concession to the landlord lobby, there is still an extreme unhappiness among landlords. Reports have circulated about an upcoming judicial challenge to the extension of the bill.

The political situation remains delicate, and few begrudge even the flawed efforts of the Scottish government to get a grip on its housing crisis. But there is room for more sustainable action to combat a deeply entrenched problem that has been allowed to fester over the last decade and more. Campaigners across the country have viable long-term controls, sustained housebuilding and urgently needed retrofitting on their minds. Who knows, further action may even inspire legislators elsewhere in the UK, where the housing crisis remains as dire as ever.

At the end of my trip in Dundee I spoke to a friend who was thinking about moving when his tenancy expired later in the year. He’d been used to paying a reasonable enough rent – about £500 a month – for the duration of the years in his current flat. Rightmove, he told me with a sigh, wasn’t showing much in the same area for anything under double that.

[lateralcast]

Lateral Highlight:

When Brad Pitt caused a walk-out

Dani Siller, Bill Sunderland and Matt Parker discuss a question about when Brad Pitt caused people to walk out at the cinema.

[biglisbonnews]

What You Missed Last Month in New York City (According to Linux) This is What You Missed Last Month (According To Linux), in which nightlife it-girl Linux takes us behind the velvet rope and into the VIP section of Scene-City. Through her extreme (sometimes exaggerated) lens, Linux gives us the tea on what really happened at every party-of-the-century that floods our Instagram feeds. (A note from the author: don’t take what she says too seriously — she’s just a club kid after all).New Year, New Me! That’s the song we sing to ourselves (and others) at the end of each year. I believe the lyrics go: “my clothes will be looser, my lovers will be tighter and most importantly: my jokes will be funnier.” But what happens when 2023’s new dawn arrives, along with that promised new you, only to find that, as new as you may be, you aren’t necessarily a better you? What if how you looked online was not even close to how you arrived in the mail?Fresh into the new year, at a time meant for rebirth and positive reinvention, a slew of invasive thoughts entered my chat. Negative thoughts of self-doubt regarding my body image, career and overall life purpose ran through me like I’d never experienced before. Yes, kids: downtown it-girls have bad days too. So I tried a new diet and I tried a new lifestyle. In fact, I was willing to try anything in order to get out of my rut and into the best version of me. Sadly but unsurprisingly, the harder I tried to crawl to the surface, the deeper and deeper I fell down my little rabbit hole. Then, as I was begrudgingly sifting through a $20 kale Caesar salad for dinner, a path to solace from these meek and dreary voices that I had not yet traveled came into my mind’s eye. Here I was, trying so hard to behave... but what if what I really needed was to be bad? Alas, there was only one thing left for me to try: some good, old-fashioned nightclubbing.So I traded my homemade Bella Hadid Erewhon smoothie for a dirty vodka martini, popped on a pair of nine-inch heels and went dancing. On my very first night of the new year: I quickly realized it was here, under a disco ball in Bushwick, that the real new-and-improved me had been hiding. The best part? I wasn’t alone. From all different parts of our five boroughs, countless others who had also been going through their own versions of hardship joined me on the dance floor. Separate we may have arrived in a world of hurt and confusion, but together we danced in a universe of celebration.For years now, I’ve gone out nightly and written down each and every thing I see. I do it all so you, my loyal and fabulous readers, can have a taste of the things that make nightlife sooooo delicious. This January, New York showed a healing power to its wild, partying ways that I had never experienced before but desperately needed. So buckle up and prepare for the ride of your new life, because I’m about to tell you all about What You Missed Last Month. Onward to the New Year, New Me... and New York!NEW YEAR’S EVE: Y2RAVE See on Instagram For three years in a row, Ty Sunderland and I have thrown the best New Year’s Eve party that our city has ever seen. We started in 2020 at Brooklyn’s tried-and-true 3 Dollar Bill (before it was cool!) The demand for Y2Rave became so high (and I’m working for the bigwigs at AEG now) that it only made sense to move venues to the oh-so-massive Brooklyn Steel. The theme each year is something to do with Y2K culture. We’ve all had quite the year of self-discovery, so a break-out-of-the-matrix theme was the perfect fit. The room held thousands of club kids and gays alike, with Matrix Easter eggs placed around the club, like an old ‘90s NYC telephone booth and a pile of retro television sets. Leading up to the party, I directed a series of visuals alongside Matt Sparks starring New York cool kids Radical Pom, Airik Prince and Dombeef that would play over a giant LED wall behind our DJs. And girrrrrl did we have the DJs. All the way from Detroit, legendary father-daughter duo Floorplan played from 2-4 and kept the kids dancing until the wee hours of the early morning. Prior to that, after the midnight countdown, I stood on stage and poured multiple bottles of 1942 into the mouths of the most with-it partygoers and downtown it-people. Will we be back next year? Move over Times Square, I know a place with even bigger balls!NEW YEAR’S DAY: Battle Hymn See on Instagram Ringing in the new year did not stop at New Year’s Eve. Evenings become mornings and after a few short hours of refreshing ourselves, all of Scene City came back out and kept the party going well into January 2 at Ladyfag’s Battle Hymn. If you’re a regular reader of mine, you know the gist on Battle Hymn. But what made the New Year’s Day Battle Hymn so great was that all the amateur partiers had gone back into hiding from the night before. All that remained, while still a crowd of more than a thousand, were hardcore party-people, dance-o-holics and the most fabulous of junkies. If you were there, it was because you needed to be there. A good party makes a good party... but a great crowd makes a legendary party! January 12: Tom of Finland at Boom Boom Room See on Instagram It’s been a few months since the icon, the legend, the moment Susanne Bartsch threw a party at Boom Boom Room. That all changed when Bartsch announced a one-off party celebrating the Tom of Finland Foundation. With the hunky Coach Chris Keyloun set to make his Bartschland DJ debut, the overall vibe of the already-naughty Tom of Finland party was made even sexier. On a Thursday in January, Susanne Bartsch and her bubble of club kids wrangled together a massive aggregation of muscle gays in porn-staches and assless chaps. The night ended with Susanne’s now-regular DJ Arra closing the night and the butch-for-the-night attendees feeling extra juicy. Why do one-off’s have to be so good?January 21: Carry Nation at Good RoomFor more than a decade (yes... more than a decade!) New York-based DJ duo The Carry Nation has taken over Greenpoint venue Good Room and thrown the cuntiest Saturday night monthly in all of NYC. The main dance floor is the Good Room and the second side room is, well, the Bad Room. Back in November, The Carry Nation hit their 10-year anniversary of the recurring night. In New York, you’re lucky if you can throw one good party, not to mention ten years of good parties. Legends are legends for a reason; with their overarching musical talent as well as immaculate taste, it’s no surprise that, after all these years, Carry Nation at Good Room still hits. This month, CN newcomers Stiletto and Skin joined the duo on the decks, among other severely talented disc jockeys. I love this party because it feels like no one person is VIP, but rather everyone is a guest of honor.January 26: Demons at ParagonHello, taxi driver, I’d like to take a cab from Bushwick to Bushwick! And that’s exactly what I did when I found out Frankie Sharp was starting a new weekly Thursday night at Rave-Town’s hottest new spot, Paragon. Sister club to the infamous Bossa Nova Civic Club, Paragon is a somewhat new two-story club that has been gagging all of New York club culture lately. Combine that with the genius and craziness of Frankie Sharp, and you’ll be throwing up! This particular night, the outside temperature was almost down to 10 degrees. For most people that’s a bad thing, but for nightlife girlies like myself, it’s a sign of hope. Below-freezing temperatures end up being the nights when all the uncool, sane people stay home and the clubs are left with only the kookiest die-hard New Yorkers the city has to offer. To listen to the classic Frankie Sharp sound, stay on the top floor with the wraparound balcony. You’ll also find an array of live shows that happen here “late AF.” If you want lower ceilings and higher BPM, go downstairs to the club’s basement. Here you’ll get your life’s worth of hard-hitting techno coming out of CDJs propped on an old pool table in the foggiest of basements. Demons happens every Thursday; let’s hope Frankie Sharp stays in Brooklyn!January 28: Love Prism Disco at 3DB See on Instagram It’s been a minute since I’ve hit up Ye Ole 3 Dollar Bill. Every night at the Brooklyn gay club may be good, but not every night is major. On January 28, however, we got to experience one of the club’s major moments. Each month, for as long as I can remember, Ty Sunderland has thrown his color-coded half-disco, half-pop love letter to New York City with Love Prism. An integral part of Love Prism that stole the show this month was the intrinsic DJ set by Boyyyish, who played the peak hours of 12-2. Boyyyish gave the crowd a new sound that only makes sense for the next evolution of Love Prism Disco. Each month the party has a theme color and respective dress code; January’s was pink. Although most of the shirtless attendees did follow the dress code, you were only able to tell by looking closely at the pink t-shirts tucked into everyone’s back pockets. After the club lights came on at 4 AM, a large group of us stumbled to an after-hours a few blocks away that lasted well into the late morning. January 30: Glam Awards at Sony Hall See on Instagram Everything in nightlife this January led up to one final moment: the Glam Awards. For two decades, Cherry Jubilee has put on the show of the year to celebrate and honor countless New York Nightlife legends and newbies alike. Each fall, anyone who works in the industry receives a passcode that can be used to nominate their self-decided superlatives of the scene. The entire city votes in categories like “Best Party Host,” “Best Drag King,” and “Best Nightlife Event.” Every Glam Awards, the entire community comes out to Sony Hall in their fiercest attire for a chance to snatch home a trophy, cheer on their fav or boo their enemies. Related | Cherry Jubilee Tells All As the Glam Awards Celebrate its 19th YearNotable 2023 winners were Nicky O for Best Party Producer and P_A_T for Best DJ. All categories lead up to the Big Kahuna of Glammies: Entertainer of the Year, which was won by none other than Bootsie Lefaris. This was my second year being nominated for Best Nightlife Journalist, and after not winning last year, I worked my tight-and-right ass off all of 2022 to ensure a win home for PAPER and the billions of you that read this column. (Spoiler alert: I won!) A nightlife journalist is nothing without her readers, so for this award I’ll forever be indebted to you — yes, you, whose eyes are following this sentence right now. The night ended with everyone together as winners, losers and viewers, after-partying our faces off at Hush in Hells Kitchen. And by February 1? Those rotten voices I had stuck in my head at the new year seemed to fade away. This month, unlike any others before, NYC proved to me that therapy comes in many forms... and mine just so happens to be a loud room full of not-so-cool-kids with the fog machine on high. Photography, styling and hair: Airik Prince Art direction: Chris Correa Clothing: Nasty Pig and H&M https://www.papermag.com/linux-nyc-new-year-2659389652.html

[patwrites]

Already thinking of fancasts for the upcoming Swamp Thing film, though in a perfect world it would be a continuation of the 2019 series.

Here we GO!

Swamp Thing ~ tbd

Abby Arcane Cable Holland ~ Alicia Vikander

Avery Sunderland ~ William Fichtner

Anton Arcane ~ Charles Dance

Matt Cable ~ Justin Chatwin

John Constantine ~ David Oyellowo

Liz Tremayne ~ Freema Agyeman

Alec Holland ~ James McAvoy

Sequel Characters:

Jason Woodrue ~ Jon Hamm

Chester Williams ~ Ben Foster

Tefé Holland ~ Jessica Parker Kennedy