#Oppenheimer should say this as his opening line | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

denimbex1986 · 1 year ago

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'Christopher Nolan is freaking me out.

“There’s a pretty simple argument mathematically for saying the world will end in nuclear Armageddon simply because that’s a possibility,” he’s calmly explaining. “Over an infinite timeline, it’s going to happen at some point.”

It’s hard to dispute Nolan’s logic that civilization will one day vaporize, but as he tops off his mug of Earl Grey tea from a small kettle on the table in front of him, he hits a slightly more hopeful note. “My optimistic human self has to believe we’ll find a way to avoid that, but I don’t take a lot of reassurance in the idea that mutually assured destruction has prevented a cataclysm so far. It’s the ‘so far’ that’s the problem.”

Nolan is something of an authority on the apocalypse. After all, “Oppenheimer,” his look at J. Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the Atomic Age, is one of the most-seen films of this or any year. The three-hour, R-rated drama where the action mostly unfolds in laboratories and congressional hearings has grossed nearly $950 million globally, more than almost any recent Marvel movie. In the process, it’s reshaping Hollywood’s idea of what constitutes blockbuster entertainment.

Over the past two decades, comic book adventures subsumed the movie business, with studios churning out an assembly line of sequels and spinoffs featuring superpowered heroes. But “Oppenheimer” reveals that audiences will turn out in record numbers for darker, more complex stories. That is, if they’re told with the epic flair that Nolan has honed in movies like “The Dark Knight” and “Dunkirk.” And it’s giving other filmmakers hope.

“Not only did ‘Oppenheimer’ work, but it seemed to work in defiance of received wisdom,” says Damien Chazelle, the Oscar-winning director of “La La Land.” “Before I even saw the film, it felt like one of those test-case scenarios. All around the industry, a lot of people were saying, ‘This is not what the audience wants — it’s a bummer, and they just want escapism.’ And they were all wrong. So that makes its success all the sweeter.”

Nolan is stunned by the grosses, as well as the Oscar buzz that “Oppenheimer” is generating. “With certain films, your timing is just right in ways that you never could have predicted,” he says. “When you start making a film, you’re two or three years out from when it’s going to be released, so you’re trying to hit a moving target as far as the interest of the audience. But sometimes you catch a wave and the story you’re telling is one people are waiting for.”

In this case, the film reached screens at a moment of roiling global anxiety. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which took place just as Nolan and his cast and crew were starting production, has elevated fears of a potential nuclear conflict. And when we meet on an October morning in a lifeless conference room in lower Manhattan, blocks from where the World Trade Center once stood, we are a week away from the terrorist attack on Israel, which has resulted in unspeakable violence in the Middle East and the prospect of a widening war. Our troubled world has only grown more turbulent since “Oppenheimer” was released four months ago. (The film will be available on Blu-ray, DVD and digital on Nov. 21.)

“The awful truth of nuclear weapons is that concern about them ebbs and flows with the geopolitical situation,” Nolan says. “But it shouldn’t. The threat is always present, but sometimes an event will happen that brings it more front of mind. But that’s not how it should be; it’s a danger that hovers over the planet and will never go away.”

On the night “Oppenheimer” opened in July, Nolan sneaked his mom, his producing partner and (wife), Emma Thomas, along with three of their four kids into the back of the Imax theater at Manhattan’s AMC Lincoln Square to see how the sold-out crowd was enjoying the movie.

“I usually don’t want to go, but the minute I’m there, something magic happens,” says Thomas.

In the theater that night, as Oppenheimer and his team prepare to detonate the first nuclear weapon, Nolan felt viewers’ concentration intensify. “It was a remarkable experience to be there,” he says. “Every seat was filled, and the focus on what was happening on-screen was so strong. That level of engagement was something that I’d never really felt before. Real attention was being paid.”

On that morning downtown, Nolan, 53, is wearing a collared shirt, slacks and a blue blazer. He rarely deviates from this proper, vaguely professorial look, which colleagues say is intentional.

“His dressing style is a manifestation of the fact that he’s putting his energy elsewhere,” says “Oppenheimer” cinematographer Hoyte van Hoytema. ”He wears the uniform to make things easier for himself and to strip away the bullshit. He likes certain routines, and he hangs on to them in order not to have to think about anything else. He has such a hawk’s-eye focus on the task at hand. There’s no other director I’ve ever worked with who has such a specific devotion and dedication.”

There are certain rituals on a Nolan production too. He shoots on film, even though most of the industry has moved to digital, using Imax cameras to give his movies the scope and scale that he prefers. And he surrounds himself with a close-knit group of frequent collaborators — from Cillian Murphy, who took the lead role in “Oppenheimer” after five previous Nolan outings, to van Hoytema, who returned for a fourth go-round with the director. Despite his films’ big budgets, he likes to keep his sets small, shunning a video village. And he discourages his actors from spending a lot of time in their trailers.

“There’s not a lot of waiting around,” says Thomas, “because Chris is fast and efficient when he works.”

Thomas, who has produced all her husband’s films and co-founded their production company, Syncopy, says Nolan maintains an atmosphere on set. “Chris is clear about what he needs,” she says. “But there’s also a sense of calm, which allows people to do their best work.”

When he’s not shooting a movie, Nolan takes notes about ideas that, more often than not, never become a finished film. “His office is a shambles,” says Thomas. “It’s filled with notebooks. There’s no method to them — there are sketches of things or a logo for a movie he’s going to make or a little bit of a story he may want to tell. He writes everything down.”

But Nolan doesn’t start writing a script until he knows he’s actually going to make the movie he sees in his head. That’s partly due to his experience writing a biopic about Howard Hughes in the early aughts. He loved the screenplay he’d finished and expected to cast Jim Carrey as the reclusive billionaire, but he had to abandon it when a competing Hughes project, Martin Scorsese’s “The Aviator,” went into production. To this day, he hasn’t seen Scorsese’s film, something he had to confess to its star, Leonardo DiCaprio, when they made “Inception.”

“It was very emotional to not get to make something I’d poured all that into,” he says.

The idea for “Oppenheimer” was kindled when Robert Pattinson gave Nolan a book of the physicist’s speeches at the wrap party for his 2020 film “Tenet.” Nolan had been born into a world where nuclear weapons were a fact of life, but he was struck by how Oppenheimer and his fellow scientists were grappling for ways to make sense of the destructive power they had unleashed. “It was a brilliant mind asking how we manage this change we’ve wrought,” Nolan remembers.

That led him to revisit “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer,” Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s Pulitzer Prize-winning biography. It documented how a socially awkward academic became the unlikely leader of America’s efforts to beat the Nazis in developing an atomic bomb. It also chronicled the aftermath of that discovery, as well as Oppenheimer’s conflicted feelings about the nuclear arms race it sparked. Nolan began to see the cinematic potential.

“This was a man who was a remarkable combination of integrity, sincerity and theatricality,” Nolan says. “I’m drawn to complex and contradictory protagonists.”

For most of his career Nolan made movies for Warner Bros. He never had a production deal with the studio, but Warners put him on the A-list by selecting him to oversee its “Batman” reboot, leading to the hugely successful “Dark Knight” trilogy. Warners then released other Nolan hits, such as “Dunkirk” and “Inception.” But in 2020, with the pandemic raging and theaters struggling to draw audiences, WarnerMedia chief Jason Kilar decided to premiere a year’s worth of films on HBO Max, the streaming service that Warner Bros.’ parent company had recently launched. Nolan didn’t have a movie slated to open during this period, but he was incensed by the precedent. He released a statement slamming the strategy as a bad business decision, writing, “Some of our industry’s biggest filmmakers and most important movie stars went to bed the night before thinking they were working for the greatest movie studio and woke up to find out they were working for the worst streaming service.”

So it wasn’t surprising that when it came time to make “Oppenheimer,” Nolan went elsewhere, to Universal. He had established a strong relationship with its head, Donna Langley, while working on a film adaptation of the TV series “The Prisoner” several years before. He couldn’t quite “crack” the adaptation, he says, which went unmade, but the pair stayed in touch, with Langley seeing Nolan and Thomas for the occasional lunch. Nolan appreciated Langley’s reputation for protecting and supporting top talent, while the executive was eager to land the next film from such a high-profile filmmaker. Still, “Oppenheimer,” with its nearly $100 million budget and lengthy discussions of theoretical physics, was a risky proposition.

“A biopic at this length about this subject matter should not do well,” says Langley. “But when you factor in a filmmaker like Chris, who is undeniably theatrical and who has a strong following of fans ranging from teenagers to adults, that’s the differentiator.”

Nolan didn’t want to make the movie on studio sets. He wanted to immerse viewers in the world of his protagonist, so he shot the film on location in New Mexico, near where Oppenheimer’s team made the bomb, as well as in Princeton and Berkeley, where he spent most of his academic career. The production also used historical locations, filming scenes in the actual Los Alamos home where Oppenheimer lived with his wife and young children as he oversaw the Manhattan Project.

“The audience may not notice the difference, but shooting as much as we can on the real locations gives everyone so much more to tap into,” says Thomas.

“Oppenheimer” unfolds in two overlapping sections. One, shot in color, is told from Oppenheimer’s perspective and is set largely during World War II. The other, produced in black and white, centers on Lewis Strauss, an original member of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, as he clashes with Oppenheimer over the scientist’s eventual opposition to the development of the hydrogen bomb. Strauss’ anger over slights, real and imagined, sets in motion a plot to discredit Oppenheimer and deny him his security clearance.

Nolan’s film depicts the Trinity test, the first detonation of the bomb in the New Mexico desert, in nail-biting detail, but it does not show the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, an omission that Spike Lee and others have criticized. Nolan says that was intentional — Oppenheimer was half a world away when the bombs were dropped. He learned about their detonation on the radio.

“The film presents Oppenheimer’s experience subjectively,” Nolan says. “It was always my intention to rigidly stick to that. Oppenheimer heard about the bombing at the same time that the rest of the world did. I wanted to show somebody who is starting to gain a clearer picture of the unintended consequences of his actions. It was as much about what I don’t show as what I show.”

Oppenheimer did grow more concerned about nuclear proliferation, and he advocated for the creation of an international body to control the production of radioactive material. However, he never publicly criticized the decision to drop the bombs. It’s a debate that continues to divide people. So what does Nolan think?

“My research and my engagement with this story tell me that anyone claiming a simple answer is in denial of a lot of the facts,” he says. “Obviously, it would be much better for the world if it hadn’t happened. But so much of the attitude toward the bombing depends on the situation of the individual answering the question. When you speak to people whose relatives were fighting in the Pacific, you get one answer. When you look at the devastating impact in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, you get another.”

Nolan says that he and the movie he made are more interested in provoking discussion than providing resolution. “The film is an honest attempt to express my feelings about it,” he says.

Shortly after Nolan and Langley announced in September 2021 that Universal would produce “Oppenheimer,” they revealed that the film would open two years later, in July, the same month that the director had launched two “Batman” movies, “Dunkirk” and “Inception.” “Chris is somebody who likes tradition,” Langley notes.

Nolan may have had sentimental reasons for picking July for “Oppenheimer” to drop, but he couldn’t foresee the stiff competition his film would face when it was released. In April 2022, Warner Bros. announced that it would open “Barbie” on the same day as “Oppenheimer.” It looked like the studio wanted to kill Nolan’s movie.

Nolan deflects when I ask him about it. “It’s always daunting when you start to see how the competition for the summer is shaking up,” he says. “I’ve been releasing summer films for 20 years, and it’s always crowded.”

If Warner Bros. intended to hobble Nolan’s film, the plan backfired spectacularly. Instead of cannibalizing each other, the prospect of two major movies opening in the same weekend galvanized audiences. It inspired memes that encouraged people to turn the confluence of blockbusters — one a neon-pink comedy, the other a somber drama — into an unlikely double feature.

“People had forgotten what it was like pre-COVID,” says Nolan. “Not that long ago, there often was more than one big film opening on a weekend. That can be stressful for filmmakers, but it’s better for theaters.”

It also seemed like a sign that audiences are desperate for something that isn’t a reboot or a retread. For the first time since 2001, the year’s three highest-grossing films, “Barbie,” “The Super Mario Bros. Movie” and “Oppenheimer,” aren’t sequels or comic book adventures.

“It’s clear from the box office that audiences are looking for things they haven’t seen before,” Nolan says. “We’ve been through a period where it was wonderfully reassuring for studio executives to feel that their franchise properties could go on forever and be predictably successful. But you can’t deny filmgoers’ desire for novelty.”

Despite the drama involving the “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” release date, as well as his criticism of Warner Bros., Nolan’s relationship with the studio isn’t irretrievably broken. “It’s water under the bridge,” he says of the feud.

For one thing, the media chiefs that Nolan came out swinging against are gone. AT&T, which had prioritized streaming above all else, sold a controlling stake in the company to Discovery in 2022. The newly rechristened Warner Bros. Discovery then installed CEO David Zaslav, setting the stage for Kilar’s exit. Zaslav also recruited new movie chiefs, Michael De Luca and Pam Abdy. So is Nolan open to working with Warner Bros. again?

“Oh yeah, absolutely,” he says. “Pam and Mike and Zaslav, they’re trying to do some great things with that studio, which is encouraging to see.”

It also helps that the entertainment industry, and Warner Bros., have begun to share some of Nolan’s skepticism about streaming. For a time, nearly every major media company was busy dropping licensing deals that allowed their movies to appear on cable or platforms like Netflix. They wanted to bolster subscriptions to their own streaming services by offering their movies exclusively on the likes of HBO Max or Disney+. However, as Wall Street looked more closely at the economics of these platforms, it found them overly costly and insufficiently profitable.

Nolan, who clearly understands the film business as well as the art, says he slammed the HBO Max plan partly because of the shoddy economics. And he thinks that Hollywood’s decision to push a streaming model above all else caused the writers’ and actors’ unions to strike this year because they weren’t earning the same type of royalties they once did.

“Part of the craziness with the labor negotiations this summer has been the studios sitting there and going, ‘Well, we can’t pay you because we don’t have enough money,’” Nolan says. “To which the answer is ‘Well, you don’t have enough money because you’re not managing your business correctly. You’re not getting the same amount of money for your product that you were before.’ The shift to streaming has disrupted the entire industry and created problems for everybody.”

‘‘Are you making me look amazing?” Nolan asks.

He is in high spirits as he calls me a few days after our initial meeting to answer some follow-up questions and to see how the story is progressing. That includes teasing me when I ask him if he’s thought about what’s next after the blockbuster success] of “Oppenheimer.” “Why? Do you have a script to pitch me?” he asks with a laugh.

It’s a warmer, droller side of Nolan, and one I haven’t experienced before. Not that he’s prickly — he’s unfailingly polite, generous with his time and thoughtful in his responses. Yet, he’s also keenly aware of how his remarks may be misinterpreted on social media or repackaged online, which can lead him to approach certain topics gingerly. For example, when I ask him if he’s seen “The Batman,” Matt Reeves’ recent film about the Caped Crusader, Nolan says he doesn’t want to answer that question. “If I start talking about comic book movies, that would be the only thing anybody pays any attention to in the article,” he explains. He’s probably right.

Nolan hasn’t made up his mind about the kind of movie he’ll make next. And when I push him on whether he’d return to franchise filmmaking, as he did so effectively with his “Batman” films, or if he’d prefer to make a movie purely based on an original idea, he leaves the door ajar.

“Ideas come from everywhere,” he says. “I’ve done a remake, I’ve made adaptations from comic books and novels, and I’ve written original screenplays. I’m open to anything. But as a writer and director, whatever I do, I have to feel like I own it completely. I have to make it original to me: The initial seed of an idea may come from elsewhere, but it has to go through my fingers on a keyboard and come out through my eyes alone.”

It will be intriguing to see how Nolan spends the capital he’s accrued from the critical and commercial success of “Oppenheimer.” Ever since “The Dark Knight’’ topped the box office, studios have been lining up to work with him. He’s used their interest to greenlight cerebral epics and historical dramas that others might have had trouble getting made. These movies, whether they take place in the streets of Gotham City or on the beaches of France, center on similar themes. Many, if not most, of Nolan’s films contain a warning: The search for knowledge is perilous. That danger is front and center in “Oppenheimer,” where the quest to harness the power of the atom creates unimaginable suffering.

“This film has impacted people and made them think very deeply about all the ways in which we can be our own worst enemy,” says Thomas.

“Oppenheimer” also feels like the culmination of a phase of Nolan’s artistic journey.

“There was a sense that he’s been working his way toward this film,” Steven Soderbergh, the director of “Traffic” and an executive producer of Nolan’s film “Insomnia,” says. “It required all the tools and experience that he’d had up to that point to pull something like this off. This was the cinematic equivalent of a mic drop.”

Realizing his bold vision cost Nolan something. The darkness of the subject matter, along with the existential questions it raises, weighed on him as he edited the movie. One stormy day in Los Angeles, he was returning home when he noticed raindrops falling on a puddle. It evoked the beginning of “Oppenheimer,” where the intense physicist stares down at rainwater sloshing on the ground. It’s a moment of contemplation for a brilliant mind who, over the course of the film, will become painfully aware of humanity’s boundless potential to build, as well as destroy.

“As I looked at it, I had a distinctly negative reaction,” Nolan says. “That gave me the faith that the film was working on me. And it made me glad to leave it behind, which I haven’t felt with my other films. I was ready to think about other things.”

“So, thank you,” he says jokingly. “Thank you for dragging me back into this.”'

#Christopher Nolan #Oppenheimer #Cillian Murphy #Leonardo DiCaprio #Inception #Hoyte van Hoytema #Emma Thomas #Universal #Warner Bros #The Dark Knight #Dunkirk #American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer #Kai Bird #Martin J. Sherwin #Trinity test #IMAX

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arandomassortmentofbytes · 2 years ago

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I've seen the open letter going around about AI and I know everyone is focusing on Elon Musk signing and there's all sorts of (well deserved) criticism of him and his actions but I want to focus on the fact that there are over 1,500 signatories, most of which are academics and engineers.

Engineers who specifically worked on AI projects, including Google, Meta, Deep Mind, etc. This isn't some random group, these are people who are MUCH more well versed on the topic than anyone on any website I've seen making arguments for AI in this way (yes it's useful but like literally every situation it's nuanced and complicated).

Historically, and even in fiction, when a scientist or creator of some kind creates something and then goes on to regret it, usually it's not a universally good thing they created.

When J. Robert Oppenheimer said:

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” I suppose we all thought that one way or another."

About the atomic bomb test being successful, he wasn't secretly going "haha yes and now we will win the war, for we are the good guys and we will beat the bad guys", he was regretting the mass destruction that was to come.

Honestly, and on a much darker note, if this does kill us all (or any foreseen man-made disaster, such as climate change, nuclear mishap, war of any kind, economic or ecological collapse, late stage capitalism, etc), I'll just find it funny.

Told ya so ✌️

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lettersfromthelevant · 1 year ago

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Here's another critical reason that Jews need to be the ones in Jewish roles and this is honestly a fantastic time to talk about it given the recent release of Oppenheimer and the rather atrocious response to it.

Jews need to be in Jewish roles because goyim flat out do not understand what it is like to live as a Jew. They don't know the culture, they don't know the history (from our perspective), they don't know the life of a Jew. A goy does not have the experience to understand Jewish life and they do not have the tact to properly portray the thought process behind Jewish choices. Oppenheimer was disappointing. It was made by an entirely goyische crew. The director was a goy, the main characters playing Jews were goyim. It showed. It showed badly. The mention of Jewish pain and desperation, which are integral parts of the story of Oppenheimer and the nuclear bomb, was not included in the film.

Do you get that?

An inherently Jewish story, centered on a Jewish man desperate to save his people and prevent the Nazis from getting a nuke, was completely erased of its Jewishness.

That is not okay.

I can't speak for the show OP is talking about, but I can guarantee the representation would be 1000% better with an actual Jew in the role, regardless of "talent", simply because a Jew can give that character the proper attitude, presentation, and behind-the-scenes advocacy that a goy would not. Because that is something else goyim can't do for Jewish characters. They won't recognize antisemitic lines in the script, they won't recognize blood libel, they won't notice harmful stereotypes. If they don't notice, they can't call it out and try to get it removed. A Jewish actor could. A Jewish director and Jewish actors would never have let Oppenheimer be released as it is right now.

Some people might say that representation should take a back seat to acting skills, which is really ignorant of how bad representation impacts audiences, especially regarding Jews. The response goyim have had to Oppenheimer has been pretty shitty. It is very clear that the terrible job the production crew did when presenting Oppenheimer's perspective on things is negatively impacting how people perceive his story. There are already people on here harassing Jews and telling us not to "baby girl-ify" Oppenheimer whenever someone brings up the nuance of his choices.

Bad representation hurts. It causes a tangible negative shift in how people view the group being misrepresented. It enforces negative stereotypes, it erases important historical nuance, and it makes it that much harder to recover when the film turns out to be major influential blockbuster that sold more tickets in its opening weekend than there are Jews in America.

forgive my ignorance, and of course you are under no obligation to answer this, but i'm not sure i quite understand some of your statements. perhaps i'm misunderstanding you but some of your posts seem to be saying just having the character played by a jewish actress, even if there was absolutely no reference whatsoever to the character being jewish in the movie, would be enough for you. even though in that case the only people who would even know the character was supposed to be jewish were people who'd read the book or knew the actress was jewish?

i guess i just don't understand why that would still be preferable to having a non-jewish actress play the role but the character herself being jewish being acknowledged?

(and i know we don't know what will actually be portrayed in the movie, i'm just saying this as more of a hypothetical)

Hi,

Some of these things aren’t mutually exclusive.

A Jewish actor playing a Jewish character for the role would be the best. Period.

A non-Jewish actress for Nora would be the same as having a non-Latino playing Alex. It’s quite literally a different ethnicity and culture and people and more. It removes the Jewishness. And, since the most popular way to “show” a character being Jewish if they don’t “look Jewish” is to load them up with stereotypical stuff and expressions and things, it can quickly become borderline offensive since they’re doing it to basically prove the existence of a Jewish human being, and it’s just a lot. Could you imagine that for any other group of people? And if the character was still Jewish and they didn’t hire a Jewish actor, then that’s just erasure clean and simple because they’re saying that Jews are so unimportant that anyone can play them.

A Jewish actor who is being loaded with things to make herself appear more Jewish isn’t necessary, because her existence shows her being Jewish. Even if people wouldn’t know it without knowing it already. And I’m not saying there can’t be any references, there should be and there can be, what I’m saying is there doesn’t have to be. If they want a Jewish character played by a Jew to reference their Jewishness or have a necklace with the Star of David on it, that’s different than having a non-Jew “playing” a Jewish character by dressing up as one and calling it a day. That would be like a white actor putting on a piece of clothing that’s stereotypically or commonly representative of another ethnicity (that said actor isn’t a part of) and then saying that’s all it takes and they’re able to be seen as *whatever* ethnicity. Clearly not, and it’s the same thing for Jewish characters.

It’s like if it’s your birthday and all your friends know it’s your birthday, but you have on a giant button that says it’s your birthday. People already know, but is it nice that there’s something that says it’s your birthday? Of course. Yes. The button is great (as long as it wasn’t given to you just for the sake of proving it’s your birthday for the sake of birthday diversity). But does it make it your birthday any less if you don’t have something saying it’s your birthday? No. The majority of people know it’s still your birthday, and those who don’t but still care about you will Google it to learn more. Wear the button or don’t, as long as it’s still your birthday. But if they put it on Bill, even though it’s not his birthday, and he starts acting stereotypically birthday-like, and people keep talking about how it’s his birthday in random conversations even when it isn’t, it’s yours… You having a button or no button, you feel like shit. It’s your birthday and they should only give people who are having birthdays the button, because they’ve been working really hard to make sure that they do that for everyone else, except for people who have birthdays in July.

Nora should’ve been played by a Jewish actress because she was canonically Jewish. If the production decided that Nora wasn’t worthy of being Jewish any longer, they should explain why.

#antisemitism #social #judaism #lucky.txt

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aellynera · 4 years ago

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Frayed Wires (Nathan Bateman x Reader)

FRAYED WIRES (Nathan Bateman x Reader)

(so i decided i may turn the drunk texts thing into a series? i decided at least to do one with Nathan because...well...it’s Nathan. the poem he quotes is Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was incidentally married to Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein (or: The Modern Prometheus) which is also kind of appropriate for Nathan and anyway i sat down today and this happened.)

Word Count: 2122(ish)

Summary: All you want to do is sleep. All Nathan wants to do is talk.

Warnings: Language, naturally.

(Nathan’s texts are in bold. Your texts are in bold and italic.)

Buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

You reached blindly for your phone as it rattled on the bedside table. You had no idea what time it was but you did know it was the middle of the night, your phone should not be going off, and you had gotten entirely too little sleep. Like, maybe two hours worth. You were so tired and groggy that you made the mistake of checking your messages before you actually even thought about what you were doing.

Do you ever think about the meaning of life?

I mean like really think about it.

Why we’re here, why the sky is green and the grass is blue?

No wait that’s not right.

You sighed and buried your face in the pillow. It was 3:27 in the morning and Nathan was texting you. Which was just odd anyway, since he knew where your room was and it was much more his style to just walk in and start a random conversation with you in person.

He was probably drunk.

And now he could see that you had read the messages, so you were going to have to reply, or he really would show up at your door. Technically it was his door, it was his house, you just worked for him and stayed there, but the point was you were not in the mood to deal with him at all right now, and most decidedly not in the flesh.

You rolled your eyes before sending him a reply. You really should just ignore it, but...you were annoyed. Nathan was annoying. And it was now 3:30 in the morning and you were going to push a few buttons. Figuratively AND literally! your sleep-deprived brain cheered.

And things like why is water wet and air is invisible?

YES exactly see that’s why I want you.

I’m sorry?

Your brain. I want to pick you up. Your brain I mean. Pick your brain.

You just want me for my brain, huh?

You have a very nice brain.

Yep, Nathan was definitely drunk.

Not that him being drunk was anything out of the ordinary. But a few hours ago, when you were both in the lab testing some of his most recent ideas about the AI code, he had seemed...normal? Well, normal for Nathan anyway. He wasn’t irritated, he wasn’t condescending, he was actually (you honestly could not believe you were even thinking this) pleasant to be around.

You had been working for Nathan as his personal assistant for a few months. It was a promotion for sure over being a code slinger in a cubicle, but sometimes you honestly wondered what made you say yes to this bizarre existence. It was a beautiful house, beautiful scenery, interesting and highly intellectual conversations...when Nathan was sober.

There was also something you could never quite put your finger on. Something that was shifting as the weeks went on and you spent more time working alongside Nathan in the lab. As you spent evenings eating sushi and steaks and whatever else you were in the mood for that night (most nights, he actually let you choose the menu, you realized.) As you took afternoon walks around the estate, just taking in the scenery. As you debated various philosophies and ideas and theories and tried your damndest to prove Nathan wasn’t always right about everything. He almost seemed like he appreciated it all, but he would never say anything.

And you weren’t about to open that can of worms. Especially when he wasn’t sober.

How drunk are you right now?

On a scale of shitfaced to really fucking blitzed I would say I’m feeling no pain.

Jesus Christ. Well that was obvious. It was obvious just from the fact that he was texting you. Nathan was so uptight about security and data leaks and wiretapping and signals being hijacked (he’d admitted to doing it himself, so he did have a point) but had decided, after much insistence from you, that rigging the cell phones to only work inside the compound was an acceptable idea. It was so vast, you’d said, and what if something happened and one of you was all the way across the house or down in the lab, how were you supposed to let the other person know? It made sense at the time.

Now you were vaguely regretting it.

You could count on one hand the number of times you’d actually considered your boss to be pleasant to be around, and you still had your thumb left over just in case you needed to add to that tally.

At least personality wise. He was definitely pleasant to look at. Very pleasant.

You coughed and cleared your throat. That was not a line of thought to travel right now. The proper course of action was to get him to stop texting you.

A few minutes passed in glorious silence. Maybe a new, shiny thought had occurred to him and he was madly writing it down on a Post-It note. Maybe he just got bored and went to get a new drink. Maybe he’d finally just passed out and---

What are you thinking about?

Dammit. How to make you shut up, your brain snapped back. How to get you to let me sleep. How good your arms and shoulders look in that tank top after you’ve been hitting that punching back and you’re flushed and sweaty and…. Oh no. No no no. Stop it right now, brain.

Nathan hated to beat around the bush. Straightforward was the best policy with him, right?

How to get you to shut up and let me sleep.

Wonderful, glorious silence for exactly forty-six seconds.

Bro...that’s...so not cool.

Okay, this was getting ridiculous. Why were you participating in this? Why was he? You narrowed your eyes and looked toward a corner of your room. You hoped he could see you glaring into the camera that you knew was there and that he was watching while he was texting you. If not, you were sure he would watch it in the actual morning and you hoped the look was withering enough to make him think twice. Probably not. Because this was Nathan Bateman.

Your incredibly narcissistic, incredibly intelligent, incredibly attractive...stop it brain.

But he was pushing your buttons right back. Neither of you could ever really back away from an exchange like this..

I’m not your “bro”, Nathan. Please knock this shit off.

Dude, it’s a figure of speech.

I’m not your dude, either. Please just stop talking.

What’s wrong with dude. Dude is a gender neutral term, anyone can be a dude. Guys are dudes, chicks are dudes, dudes are dudes

Yeah, well, you’re kind of being an asshole, dude.

Dude. Chill.

Turning my phone off now.

No, wait, don’t. I’m sorry. I’ll stop.

Now that was...unexpected. Nathan Bateman just apologized to you? For being a drunk asshole in the middle of the night? Your eyes narrowed again. Suspicious.

You’ll stop texting me so I can go back to sleep?

No not that. I’ll stop calling you dude.

Oh for the love of...you closed your eyes and briefly considered the merits of hurling your phone at the surveillance camera.

Nathan, seriously, can we please just leave this until the morning?

A whole minute of wonderful, glorious, blessed silence this time. You couldn’t believe he might be considering this.

You were right.

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away

If a brain cramp was an actual thing, yours would most certainly be doing it now. You could barely even process it. He was drunk as hell and he was quoting poetry to you? You supposed you probably shouldn’t be entirely surprised, he’d quoted Oppenheimer once in a worse stupor (which you could only quantify because he had actually passed out that time.)

Are you fucking serious right now.

What.

Are you fucking quoting Ozymandias to me right now?

I am.

You couldn’t get the color of the sky right earlier, and now you’re just flawlessly quoting philosophical Romantic poetry at me?

I am.

You are not a normal person, Nathan Bateman.

What is normal anyway, besides really fucking boring? Who wants to be normal?

I would like to be somewhat normal, at least between the hours of midnight and 8am.

See, I knew there was a reason I liked you.

That was the second time he said that, you noted. You found it hard to believe. Nathan liked his work, his routine, his own brain. He liked talking about his work and how smart he was. Other than telling you that you were doing a great job, he barely handed out a single compliment, and if he somehow accidentally did, it was so backhanded you weren’t sure you could actually define it as one.

You mean you like my brain.

Well, yeah, your brain is fucking amazing. It has to be if you work with me.

I work for you, Nathan, not with you. But thanks?

No, no, see, that’s where you’re wrong. You work with me. We’re like partners. None of that employer employee bullshit.

Oooookay now I am one thousand percent sure you are completely piss drunk.

I am but that doesn’t make it any less true.

You could almost hear him saying those words in your head. You could see the way his eyebrows went up, the intensity in his eyes, the way he held his finger up to make the point.

The thought made your brain go slightly fuzzy, and not from exhaustion. Because now you were wide awake. Damn him.

Okay, Nathan, I’ll bite. What do I have to do to get you to stop doing this right now?

There was a pause before he answered, and you swore you’d heard a phone alert that wasn’t your own. It sounded like it was coming from...oh no, he wasn’t…

Getting tired of typing. Can I come talk to you for a while?

Are you outside my door right now?!

You heard the phone chime very clearly this time. He was, definitely.

I am.

You sighed, deeply. So deeply.

Is that really a good idea?

I think it’s a great idea.

Nathan, being serious here.

You could have sworn you heard him sigh from the other side of the door. He could have just come inside. It was his house, his keycard worked on all the doors.

But the door didn’t open.

So am I. Please can I come in? My mind just won’t shut off and I really am fucking drunk but talking to you is helping but tired of typing shit out, I’d rather say it to you.

I wanna see you. And tell you how sexy your brain is.

And that I like you for more than your brain.

And you knew in that instant there really was only one way to get him to shut up. And it was to just let him talk. It made sense, in an oddly Nathan kind of way. What’s the worst that could happen, really? He’d come in, you’d talk, he’d eventually pass out, maybe you could get a couple more hours of sleep, and then in the morning you’d either talk about it on a very deep cerebral level or you’d just pretend it had never happened at all.

A press to the door release button on the side of the table and the latch let go. The door opened, revealing Nathan standing on the other side. Still wearing what he’d been wearing in the lab earlier that night, black lounge pants and that tight white henley he seemed to love so much. The corner of his mouth turned up in the most miniscule of smiles, but it was there.

You were about to toss your phone back onto the bedside table, when the text alert went off again. You shot an exasperated look in his direction, but gamely checked the message.

Did you mean what you said before? About biting?

You glanced up at Nathan and saw that the sliver of a smile had taken over most of his face and his eyebrows had raised to emphasize his question.

You didn’t say anything. You didn’t text him back. You just nodded your head to the empty spot next to you in your bed.

You had a feeling you weren’t going to get any sleep tonight after all.

~end~

taglist: @anetteaneta @rosemarysbaby13 @darksideofclarke @girlwiththemostcake

(taglist is open, let me know if you’d like to be tagged for future fics)

#oscar isaac #oscar isaac characters #nathan bateman #nathan bateman x reader #nathan bateman x you #ex machina #ex machina fic #writing #fanfic #drunk text fic

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moontheoretist · 3 years ago

Text

Notes from tie-in MCU comics:

Part 1:

[DISCLAIMER: I was making those notes without actually writing down from which comic they come from, so now I am... well... confused about the proper placement of them, but I tried to discern them anyway.]

CAPTAIN AMERICA THE FIRST AVENGER:

Lol, Zola was developing exo-skeleton looking like Iron Man suit and Vanko's suit in 1934. I kind of think part of Steve's dislike of Iron Man was because of that exo-suit. Also, Steve just saved the guy in a suit.

"The chain is only as strong as its weakest link" said twice to Steve, once by military doctor and second by Schmidt.

Poor Erskine, his family was taken as hostages.

Howards says "carefully open the casing". Steve does smash instead.

Oh no, Red Skull said that weapon can always be taken from you so you have to become the weapon. It echoes the sentiment behind the creation of Iron Man too closely.

Lol, Roosevelt ASKED for Howard PERSONALLY.

"Car is bulletproof!" "and a convertible!" is a funny joke xD

Lol he has bulletproof car because of cigarette's girls angry boyfriends.

Ok, so Howard joined SSR because he HAD BEST FUN IN MONTHS.

Howard has rockets in car and "leaves best toys for himself".

First Steve saves a Nazi from a tank, now he obliterates them with said tank. Pick a side, Steve. I know guy in the armor was helpless, but c'mon. You either don't kill or kill. You cannot just willy nilly choose. BTW does it echo saving Iron Man or smth?

Call back to floating car by a joke about floating tank.

Aw, no, Erskine's family died in concentration camp from typhus. (Those camps were awful, but are not shown in the comics. You better believe that they weren’t very nice places to live even without being overworked and killed by the Nazis).

Oh no, Bucky was nearly killed by SSman! But Howling Commandos stopped him.

Bucky doesn't like his name lol. Also no Jimmy nickname for this guy.

Ok so Howard Stark was based on Hughes and Tony was based on someone Howard hated - Oppenheimer.

Ok, now Phillips made a foreshadowing for Cradle in the AoU. It even looks similar to Project Rebirth.

Oho my theory that Erskine heard Bucky talk to Steve and that doctor knew Steve lied is proved in this comics. They knew, they had a file on him and Erskine just picked him, saving his stupid ass from consequences.

Cap just threw a knife.

IRON MAN 2:

In the comics it looks more as if Obadiah sold Vanko instead of Howard, because Howard looks so surprised at what Vanko did, that it is impossible to assume that he was the one who sent the agents after Vanko. He looks surprised at the whole incident, Vanko betraying him and agents being there to apprehend him. One agent acts as if it was Howard's idea all along, but that line could be also read as just informing a bystander that they will deal with the issue instead.

Tony projected a drone which could clean whole desert full of mines with 100% accuracy and 0% detonation.

Also comics confirm that Tony cannot even have 12h break without Howard coming at him and demanding him to work when he is just a goddamn teenager.

Tony was just fighting for 19h, got a shower and has to go out again.

"If I hear of another innocent being put in a harm's way just to advance some pointless military agenda... there will be consequences" sounds like call back to Hulk.

Hm, Tony made 12 people work on one job? Also Natasha hates being called Nat and she drugged Samantha (the actual PA which applied for Stark Industries) to take her place.

[As of now those comics confirmed to me that Captain America joined army out of selfish reasons and that Tony was overworking himself as Iron Man and when he wasn't he was either partying, probably to relax in that way, or making new tech which saves lives.]

Lol, Coulson was so excited to look for Captain. Nick even made a joke about finding his fav action figure.

Lol, World Security Council wanted to get Tony's weapons and nearly fired Fury for trying to make Avengers.

Fury is like Tony. He hates his superiors. He will do as they say but won't stop doing what he does.

Lol, Fury got a call Tony will be dead and he jumped out of his goddamn bed asap.

Fury was actively stopping Stern from getting Iron Man by scheduling his meeting with Department of Defense "when Stern is busy" xD

Lol Fury says no to Ross before he hears what he wants. This is so funny.

Ok, so Fury got Lithium Dioxide for Tony, asked if it could be made into permanent cure, how sweet of him, but also learned that it could INSTANTLY KILL HIM instead and still made Natasha basically inject Tony with it WITHOUT CONSENT! So I dunno if he really cared about him when he asked about permanent cure or it was just more optimal for his plans. Also he got the cure during Tony's and Rhodey's battle at the mansion, so we cannot say he had a cure and didn't give it right away when he could.

"Don't blow your cover unless Stark is going to kill himself". Hm. So he wants him alive.

And yeah, he ordered Natasha to stick him with lithium dioxide when he distracted him.

Lol, Fury yelled at Coulson for letting Tony leave the mansion xD

THOR??? (I got lost in my notes, I didn’t write which comic was which)

LOL CLINT CANNOT EVEN TAKE VACATION. Also the speed with which he responded to possible alien crashsite, epic. He jumped and went as if it was Christmas, aww Clint.

Why Clint is giving money back to some store which suffered due to their operation? I mean it was nice and all, but who will give the money back to Clint? Fury?

So it was Hawkeye's idea to let Thor loose.

In the meantime Loki was on scene and tried to get Mjolnir but it didn't respond.

AVENGERS PRELUDE:

Oho, poor Fury, didn't sleep in a few days.

Oho, Fury yelled at Natasha.

"Do not let Ross take Banner, dead or alive". How cute of you, Nick, to confirm that you do not care.

Blonsky is suicidal. Going at Hulk and kicking him in the face? That's a death wish.

Ah so Blonsky is enhanced.

Hahaha, joke about lifting a hammer but applied to the Asgardian sentinel, lol.

Ross literally accessed SHIELD databases.

Natasha was raised in Stalingrad lol.

After seeing Hulk, Abomination and The Leader Natasha finally says it is too much to handle for SHIELD.

Oho, so making Tony finish Howard's project was an objective, not saving his life. He wanted it for Tesseract.

I dunno if he is lying or really was doing this whole shit for the Tesseract. Also points for sticking in WSC's face that Ross nearly destroyed New York thanks to them.

Shield has whiplash suit and it's arc reactor!

THEY ACTIVATED THE SENTINEL AND THEN THEY WANT TO DISMANTLE IT AND MAKE DOZENS SMALL ONES!

Huh, implication that Natasha may beat the whole bunker of SHIELD agents up, because they're men, lol.

So Selvig used the element Stark invented to kick-start the Tesseract after all.

"Good for a laugh from time to time" lol. Clint the comedian.

Why that machine holding a Tesseract looks like Arc Reactor?

Huh so Selvig was Loki and he made a comment about Tony being strange for "badassium".

BLACK WIDOW BACKGROUND IN ONE OF THE COMICS, DUNNO WHICH:

Natasha talks about her cover personalities like vtubers about their avatars.

Fjodorov knows something about stolen bootleg technology of Tony Stark which he managed to acquire?

Natasha really likes narrating her story. Time slows when you have a training? Like roller coaster on first ridge?

"With some small regret, I bid farewell to Tatiana. She's outlived her usefulness" thinks Natasha after she took off her wig and no longer plays Tatiana. "If she were real. She'd be dead". "It's nice though, to pretend while it lasts... that I was ever as innocent as her".

Natasha really likes playing those roles.

Haha, Natasha holds one mission over Coulson's head forever even though he never failed as her control again.

"Part of the reason why I am so good at the undercover work is that I actually like being other people. There is a lot I've done that I regret. When I leave that other identity behind, whether I slip out from underneath it voluntarily or it's ripped away from my grasp, it always hits me like a shock. Like being awakened from a deep sleep, back to who I really am". "It's good to be home". Is she speaking about her slip into Black Widow again as home or is she referring to Russia?

Natasha left a guy dangling from a building and said it could be worse, he could be naked.

"Good man" says Natasha as if she was training guys to obey her will.

Oho, Natasha is interested in someone who wants to be her.

Also she is narrating that police in Russia would not suspect Tatiana to be so resourceful.

Natasha wants to save that girl from herself, because nobody did that for her when she was in the same position.

I mean, Natasha killed some people that day already so I don't get the point of her not killing those guys and saying that she changed, when in the club she killed a few of the goons already and later too. Where is the point of her change if she kills anyway? What is this change about Black Widow - Natasha Romanoff if she kills people but just not always? She cannot claim to change for the better just because she didn't kill two goons. And Sofia should see that not killing all of them doesn't mean she doesn't kill at all. But I guess leaving so many alive still counts for Sofia as Natasha going soft.

Coulson, you idiot, I am happy you came to save Natasha, but Sofia thought those guys were Natasha's back up. It all wouldn't happen if not for you making them appear there. You fucked up everything for Natasha, Coulson.

Uh, Natasha has the same weird shtick Tony does. She blames herself for the decision of her superior? Yeah, she enabled him to make that decision, but it was still his decision to send those men to find Natasha, so their death is on him, not on Natasha.

Huh, so Natasha's model persona Konn feels empty when nobody looks at her, because her whole life was being the centre of attention? It's kind of sexist cover.

She is a hand model and this guy is disgusting. Natasha I agree with those YUCK.

Natasha doing tehee is so weird.

Also playing a "he sent me here so hours would fly by" is so gross, but inner Natasha voice says nothing yet.

Lol the guy just assumed she is stupid, because she made tehee sounds. Like, goddammit, men are so easy to fool. Condescending little creep indeed.

Ok, so Natasha doesn't have any computer knowledge to say what those lines of code are, but she knows Stark can.

Ugh, Natasha, that line about telling his friends that they did something he imagines is so not feminist of you. It just enables creeps like that to objectify women more and treat them like idiots and fucktoys.

Sofia killed the agent even when Natasha gave her what she wanted.

Natasha wants to save lives and often fails at it too.

She jumped off the yacht to save the guy even though she knew he is dead? I mean shot in the head usually means instant death.

She doesn't get lines of code but can upload tracking device on it. Good. Also she wanna kill Sofia now.

"When I go in for the kill, there's no one I'd rather be than who I really am".

Ah so they had a targeting software for the copy of the Jericho missile manufactured by Hammer.

So they were moving Jericho in parts around the world. They should be happy Tony didn't notice. (Because then they would all just go boom and be dead lol).

"Berserk bots a girl's best friends!"

Frampton wants to have space tourism.

Ten Rings again.

Why Frampton wants to strike Korean DMZ?

Aha, global destabilisation for Ten Rings, gotcha.

Oho, so the info about Natasha busting the trafficking ring comes back. It turns out she accidentally trapped the girls inside when she busted the place. She basically says she didn't know they were there but even if she did she wasn't nice back then.

So Natasha says that Sofia was more her than she ever was, meaning the Black Widow, meaning that Natasha always had softness in her which Sofia didn't have and that Sofia got her just reward for wanting to be the perfect Black Widow.

Still sexist move to make a victim of sex trafficking ring become a morally corrupt murderer who would destabilise world for free if she could, but does that for money, because money is nice addition to her new hobby of fucking humanity up.

"Some people are not worth saving" Not so long ago plenty would say that about me".

AVENGERS:

Oho Stark Tower is the first fully clean-energy powered skyscraper.

Pepper thinks inside the box and Tony thinks outside the box.

Oh, so Tony still says that Rhodey had stolen the suit, but then he admits that it could give him heart attack, because it was not calibrated for him, so I wonder if he really wanted Rhodey to have it or never wanted Rhodey to have it at all.

"I got them to agree that all starktech remains proprietary to you as long as War Machine is on loan to the department of defense".

Lol wow, War Machine was an insult? Anyway he means that Rhodey won't be using Mark II because Tony has new suit for him.

"I am not Iron Man" people yell Iron Man at Rhodey "Ah, forget it" xD

How is Tony saying that he couldn't find anything to go after Gulmira when he was literally busting Ten Rings in Iron Man 2 tie-in comic?

Hahaha, Rhodey wanna get a publicist so people would recognise he is War Machine, not Iron Man.

Rhodey is so vicious. "I could have taken your hand with it but not doing it is more fun".

Oho so Tony THREE MONTHS after Tony was putting S on Stark Tower there is Battle of New York and Rhodey is in Hong Kong.

Incoming call: Martini, seriously? You call Tony MARTINI?

Also for some reason this Tony has blue eyes.

Rhodey is so cocky lol. "I haven't seen anything that can take me down".

"When am i gonna learn to keep my mouth shut?" xDDD Rhodey cursed himself.

So after Iron Man 2 Tony realised that he couldn't be iron solder alone anymore and made Rhodey an armor? Still, trust was a huge factor here.

Lol did he just make a joke about being so beat up as after clubbing with Tony to a commanding officer? Rhodey, you vicious little shit lol xD

"Battle tank that's about to make me street pizza! But only if I stand and take it, which I have never done in my life". That's useful info. It gives me some insight into who was protecting who at MIT. Rhodey never was taking a crap of other people, so he probably was used to fighting bullies. And I can imagine him standing up to bullies who targeted a kid - Tony Stark.

Rhodey chooses to fight smarts with smarts.

DID HE JUST MAKE HIS WAY OF LANDING A FRIGGIN MISSILE STYLE? XD

His commander asks if he is crazy. He definitely friggin is lol.

Rhodey just gave his superior a scare when he let a tank run him over. They thought he died.

OMG Ten Rings assumed War Machine is easier target to get tech from and Rhodey feels offended, but happy they know who he is.

Rings had stark tech in that tank, oh no. Tony will be pissed even if those are old black market stuff.

AWWW RHODEY WAS WORRIED ABOUT TONY WHEN HE DIDN'T RESPOND!

"Don't do this to me, man". "Holy...! That was SOME situation" says Rhodey when he saw chitauri flying whale dead. Ok so Avengers met Rhodey in that shawarma place.

Pepper decorates according to feng shui?

So Ten Rings scanned Rhodey's armor with any scanner available and collected a lot of data on the armor anyway.

#mcu critical #mcu #steve rogers critical #mcu comics #tony stark #steve rogers #natasha romanoff #thor #rhodey #hawkeye #avengers

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fandomsareforlife · 1 year ago

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@aeroargonic Tagging you because I want to make sure you get this, sorry if it bothered you. Also, sorry if you saw this on discord.

Fair warning, this is going to be very romcom like, because I thought it would be fun to write something like that. This is very dumb and goofy, I understand.

So, basically it is a movieverse fic (for those of you who don't know, that means it takes place in the ninjago movie, which is basically a high school au but I can give them powers). Debating on whether or not it should be post movie or not, but that's mainly for Shade's story. Paleman and Shade are in high school, probably sometime between 16-18.

Now I am going to preface and say I have very little idea how school work outside of the US, and not much idea of how they work in a private setting, so we're going with public school. Also, this was somewhat based off of Drama by Raina Telegmier, specifically the ending.

Also, this is probably going to be written with Paleman's side of the story, but I have a lot of stuff for Shade.

Putting the rest of it under a read more because it is really long. Apologies for typos.

The background is that Paleman is your everyday stereotypical nerd. He's in all advanced/accelerated classes, he has a few nerd friends (who in this case are Tox, Neuro and maybe Karlof), and he likes to play video games.

Unfortunately, he is also very bad at working out a schedule, and has come to the conclusion that he has to take a fine arts class that year due to needing a fine arts credit. The issues is that the only available class is acting one, which is resigns himself to taking.

On the first class of acting, Paleman notices Shade Darkley sitting at a desk, reading a book. Shade and Paleman have been in classes together for years at this point, due to going to the same elementary and middle school togehter, and Paleman knows some things about Shade that are always true.

He gets one of the highest grades in the class on everything

He is never seen without his book, and

Since fourth grade, Shade has essentially become non-verbal, only speaking when absolutely necessary.

So Paleman is very confused why Shade is in an acting class, where one assumes you have to talk a good amount, but he assumes that Shade is in a similar situation as Paleman.

Imagine Paleman's surprise when he sees Shade not only willing engaging in conversations with the other students, but starting a conversation with their teacher (who's name is Chamille Oppenheimer).

Paleman is just very confused, but he can't really dwell on the discoveries that he made because class started. After class ends, he tries to talk to Shade but can't find him. Therefore, Paleman decided to talk to his friends about what he discovered.

It turns out that none of them care about what Shade does, but they tell Paleman that if it really means that much to him they will let him do some investigating, as long as he doesn't do anything like stalking Shade or forcing him to talk to him. Paleman agrees.

This starts Paleman trying to figure out Shade (because he is confused about him, not for any other reason haha). He observes him closer in their shared classes, and he realizes that he for some reason is polite to Lloyd Garmadon. Which is weird, because Shade's parents were killed in a Lord Garmadon's attack but whatever.

Eventually they get to doing partner stuff and scene work in acting class, and Shade is paired up with Paleman for some of it.

And it's weird. Because for some kids and Ms. Oppenheimer, Shade acts more like how he used to as a kid, open and smiling and talkative.

But with Paleman and a few other kids (specifically a guy named Chad), he is even more closed off than he usually is, barely saying his lines. Paleman isn't hurt by that, that would be ridiculous.

***

Eventually, the semester ends, and with it so does acting class. It means the end of Paleman's view into a side of Shade that he may never get to see again. It doesn't help that his previous distractions of scholastic bowl and science Olympiad had just finished their seasons.

Thankfully, Paleman finds a distraction in the school's musical, which is looking for crew members. He decides that if he does it, then he can get his mind of Shade.

Paleman manages to get the role of the head of costumes, probably because he is the oldest person who is willing to do it but he'll take it. His friends are very glad that he isn't obsessing over Shade as much (which he wasn't, no matter what his friends say.)

However, this proves to be a very bad thing. Because guess who the male lead of the musical is, and the first two don't count.

If you guess Shade, congratulations! You will be correct.

Unfortunately, Paleman actually has to deal with Shade a good amount because apparently the guy is so short the rental company they are using for costumes don't have his characters costume in a small enough size. So Paleman has to deal with that.

This means that Shade and Paleman have to be around each other for long periods of time to deal with Shade's costume, with Paleman having to be vey close to him. This is not doing anything for Paleman's crush which he only admitted to himself because he didn't think he would ever have to confront it.

Thankfully, Shade seemed to be determined to be as professional with Paleman. He still joked with the other cast and crew members, but he was as cold with Paleman as he was with anyone else.

Eventually, the time had finally had come. The showings of the musical was to begin.

The first two days went fine. The microphone of one of the characters had went out halfway through the first act one night, and they almost dropped a light on one kid, but overall it went as well as expected.

That was, until the final night. Apparently the main female lead, Shade's love interest, had broken up with her boyfriend in the middle of the show and refused to continue to continue on stage. Her understudy can't be reached, and intermission is over and they only have 10 minutes until she goes on. None of the ensemble can stand in for her, due to her either being too tall, having too high a voice, or them not knowing her lines. Cue the pandemonium.

There is only one person who can be her.

Paleman. Paleman, who had sat through enough rehearsals with her and Shade. Paleman, who is only an inch taller than her. Paleman, who can pass off as a girl well enough for this.

Paleman grabs the backup of her costume (it cost them extra money, but they have heard enough horror stories to understand the necessities of keeping back ups for at least the leads).

When it was time, Paleman steps onto stage and starts singing. He ignores how his heart flutters when Shade sings about his supposed love for him.

Eventually the act ends, and they all bow. Everyone applauds for Paleman, much to his surprised. But he tries to take it in stride. He eventually gets to hide in the backstage area, but then he realizes that he has to go change. In the smae room as Shade.

Paleman grab his clothes and the make up remover and goes to the classroom that was designated as Shade, and now his, dressing room.

Shade is sitting on the desk when Paleman walks in. He wants to him.

Shade asks him why he did it. Why did he have to be the one to do it. Paleman tells him it because he is the only one who can.

Shade is on the verge of tears when he asks if he did it because of his crush on him. Paleman is taken aback, which Shade takes as disgust, and tries to apologize. This is the most emotion Shade has ever shown Paleman.

Shade runs out of the classroom and outside of the school, bag with his stuff slung over his shoulder. Paleman throws his stuff in his bag, and runs outside after him.

It's rainging outside. Neither of them are wearing of jackets, and Paleman's barely wearing sleeves. But neither cares.

They yell at each other more, and without thinking they move closer together, and they are grasping at each other. One of them asks if they can kiss, and suddenly they're kissing each other. It's not like the movies. It's not perfect. But it's with each other.

Shade explained, after they break apart, that he had a crush on Paleman since they were 11, and that's why they avoided him, for he believed that would get rid of his crush. Unofrtantely, it seems to have done the opposite.

Paleman admits to having a crush on Shade for almost a year at this point, and Shade just laughs and it is a beautiful.

Eventually, they have to go inside. Thankfully, the door they excited out of is unlocked and they go back into the classroom and try to not look like they were just in the rain. They are unsuccessful.

They don't know how this will end. But that's okay.

And that's it! That's the basic plot from Paleman's point of view. And if I ever go into Shade's view (which is much more angstier and less romcom) I will explain the deal with Chad is. Also, who is friends are and stuff (including why he is in acting class). Let me know if that is something people want.

Bonus fun facts:

- Tox and Neuro think it is hilarious when they get together. - I based off of Zolita's "Single In September", specifically, "Romcom girl with a bouquet/Its would be just like 90s/Kissing you in the pouring rain" (Note if you look this up it does have swear words in it) - Jay does theatre pre-movie, as well as Cole, both crew (Cole can't dance for the life of him) - This was vaguely by "Forged In Fire" by @/legonerd, specifically Shade's side

Also, I do have a playlist technically, but it's literally 4 songs I listened to while writing this.

Biting screaming crying (made a whole new Paleman/Shade au and I want to talk about it but idk if anyone cares)

#ninjago #ninjago shade #ninjago paleman #ninjago pale #nightlight shipping #ninjago movie #probably will write this for nanowrimo #save for later #nightlight romcom au #i don't have a fun au name yet #apologies for the length this is almost as long as a fanfic

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papermoonloveslucy · 3 years ago

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LIZ SELLS DRESSES (1950)

May 28, 1950

“Liz Sells Dresses” (aka “Selling Dresses”) is episode #90 of the radio series MY FAVORITE HUSBAND broadcast on May 28, 1950.

Synopsis ~ Liz accidentally returns a dress to a more expensive store than where she bought it, and makes money on the deal. She then decides to go into business buying dresses at one store and returning them at another.

Note: This was a re-write of episode #14 aired on October 16, 1948. At the time, the characters were known as Liz and George Cugat. Jell-O had not yet come aboard as a sponsor.

“My Favorite Husband” was based on the novels Mr. and Mrs. Cugat, the Record of a Happy Marriage (1940) and Outside Eden (1945) by Isabel Scott Rorick, which had previously been adapted into the film Are Husbands Necessary? (1942). “My Favorite Husband” was first broadcast as a one-time special on July 5, 1948. Lucille Ball and Lee Bowman played the characters of Liz and George Cugat, and a positive response to this broadcast convinced CBS to launch “My Favorite Husband” as a series. Bowman was not available Richard Denning was cast as George. On January 7, 1949, confusion with bandleader Xavier Cugat prompted a name change to Cooper. On this same episode Jell-O became its sponsor. A total of 124 episodes of the program aired from July 23, 1948 through March 31, 1951. After about ten episodes had been written, writers Fox and Davenport departed and three new writers took over – Bob Carroll, Jr., Madelyn Pugh, and head writer/producer Jess Oppenheimer. In March 1949 Gale Gordon took over the existing role of George’s boss, Rudolph Atterbury, and Bea Benadaret was added as his wife, Iris. CBS brought “My Favorite Husband” to television in 1953, starring Joan Caulfield and Barry Nelson as Liz and George Cooper. The television version ran two-and-a-half seasons, from September 1953 through December 1955, running concurrently with “I Love Lucy.” It was produced live at CBS Television City for most of its run, until switching to film for a truncated third season filmed (ironically) at Desilu and recasting Liz Cooper with Vanessa Brown.

MAIN CAST

Lucille Ball (Liz Cooper) was born on August 6, 1911 in Jamestown, New York. She began her screen career in 1933 and was known in Hollywood as ‘Queen of the B’s’ due to her many appearances in ‘B’ movies. With Richard Denning, she starred in a radio program titled “My Favorite Husband” which eventually led to the creation of “I Love Lucy,” a television situation comedy in which she co-starred with her real-life husband, Latin bandleader Desi Arnaz. The program was phenomenally successful, allowing the couple to purchase what was once RKO Studios, re-naming it Desilu. When the show ended in 1960 (in an hour-long format known as “The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour”) so did Lucy and Desi’s marriage. In 1962, hoping to keep Desilu financially solvent, Lucy returned to the sitcom format with “The Lucy Show,” which lasted six seasons. She followed that with a similar sitcom “Here’s Lucy” co-starring with her real-life children, Lucie and Desi Jr., as well as Gale Gordon, who had joined the cast of “The Lucy Show” during season two. Before her death in 1989, Lucy made one more attempt at a sitcom with “Life With Lucy,” also with Gordon.

Richard Denning (George Cooper) was born Louis Albert Heindrich Denninger Jr., in Poughkeepsie, New York. When he was 18 months old, his family moved to Los Angeles. Plans called for him to take over his father’s garment manufacturing business, but he developed an interest in acting. Denning enlisted in the US Navy during World War II. He is best known for his roles in various science fiction and horror films of the 1950s. Although he teamed with Lucille Ball on radio in “My Favorite Husband,” the two never acted together on screen. While “I Love Lucy” was on the air, he was seen on another CBS TV series, “Mr. & Mrs. North.” From 1968 to 1980 he played the Governor on “Hawaii 5-0″, his final role. He died in 1998 at age 84.

Gale Gordon (Rudolph Atterbury) is not heard in this episode.

Bea Benadaret (Iris Atterbury / Little Old Lady Shopper) was considered the front-runner to be cast as Ethel Mertz but when “I Love Lucy” was ready to start production she was already playing a similar role on TV’s “The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show” so Vivian Vance was cast instead. On “I Love Lucy” she was cast as Lucy Ricardo’s spinster neighbor, Miss Lewis, in “Lucy Plays Cupid” (ILL S1;E15) in early 1952. Later, she was a success in her own show, “Petticoat Junction” as Shady Rest Hotel proprietress Kate Bradley. She starred in the series until her death in 1968.

In the 1948 version of the script, Benadaret played a Dress Store Clerk. The character of Iris Atterbury had not yet been introduced. She does, however, once again play the role of the old lady shopper. Virtually all little old ladies on the series were voiced by Benadaret.

Ruth Perrott (Katie, the Maid) is not heard in this episode

Bob LeMond (Announcer) also served as the announcer for the pilot episode of “I Love Lucy”. When the long-lost pilot was finally discovered in 1990, a few moments of the opening narration were damaged and lost, so LeMond – fifty years later – recreated the narration for the CBS special and subsequent DVD release.

GUEST CAST

Hans Conried (Mr. Quigley, Returns Clerk at Gordons) first co-starred with Lucille Ball in The Big Street (1942). He then appeared on “I Love Lucy” as used furniture man Dan Jenkins in “Redecorating” (ILL S2;E8) and later that same season as Percy Livermore in “Lucy Hires an English Tutor” (ILL S2;E13) – both in 1952. The following year he began an association with Disney by voicing Captain Hook in Peter Pan. On “The Lucy Show” he played Professor Gitterman in “Lucy’s Barbershop Quartet” (TLS S1;E19) and in “Lucy Plays Cleopatra” (TLS S2;E1). He was probably best known as Uncle Tonoose on “Make Room for Daddy” starring Danny Thomas, which was filmed on the Desilu lot. He joined Thomas on a season 6 episode of “Here’s Lucy” in 1973. He died in 1982 at age 64.

Conried played the same role in the 1948 version of “Liz Sells Dresses”.

Florence Halop (Kramer’s Sales Clerk) was cast to replace Bea Benadaret in a radio show moving to CBS TV called “Meet Millie” when she was hired to play on of the two women on Lucy Ricardo’s party line in “Redecorating” (ILL S2;E8) also featuring Hans Conried. She wouldn’t work for Lucy again until 1974, when she played a Little Old Lady on a Western-themed episode of “Here’s Lucy.” In 1985, she replaced Selma Diamond (who had died of lung cancer) as the bailiff on “Night Court.” Coincidentally, Halop, also a heavy smoker, died less than a year later of the same disease.

In the 1948 version of the script, the role was played by Sandra Gould.

THE EPISODE

ANNOUNCER: “And now lets look in on the Coopers. It’s evening and George is reading the newspaper and Liz has just sat down on the arm of his chair with something obviously on her mind.”

Liz adopts a kittenish mood, kissing and cooing at George. Liz says she was a Kramer’s Department Store and saw the perfect spring dress to add to her wardrobe. Liz says it was only $39.50. George is aghast at the price. Liz explains that she actually made $20 on the dress by buying it at Kramer’s because the same dress was selling at Gordon’s for $59.50.

GEORGE: “Yes, but you don’t actually have the twenty dollars.” LIZ: “I know I don’t. I spent it on a hat to go with the dress!”

On “I Love Lucy” Kramer’s was the name of the Candy Kitchen where Lucy and Ethel cause havoc in “Job Switching” (ILL S2;E1). Gordon’s may be a nod to Gale Gordon, who plays Mr. Atterbury on “My Favorite Husband.” Previously, the Sheridan Falls Department Store most often mentioned was Miller’s, but Kramer’s and Gordon’s were the names used in the 1948 version of the script, so they are used again here.

George insists Liz take the dress back and get a refund! Liz protests - she adores the dress. She describes it as “navy blue with white polka dots, and a little white collar with a sash in the back.”

Eerily, Liz is pretty accurately describing the look that would be most associated with Lucy Ricardo on “I Love Lucy”! It was designed by Elois Jenssen in 1953 and was worn in more than 25 episodes.

After pleading and crying, Liz gives in and agrees to take back the dress.

Next day at the store, Liz reports to the refund department. The weepy clerk (Hans Conried) says that money is cheerfully refunded if unsatisfied. He asks Liz why she is returning it. She is perfectly happy with it. He finally says he can’t refund her money because she IS satisfied. The fact that her husband won’t let her keep it is not good enough.

REFUND CLERK: “This fourteen story mass of steel and concrete was built on money that husbands can’t afford to spend!”

Liz insists and he finally gives in giving her her money back - with a laugh and a whimper. Before she leaves the store, she runs into Iris. Liz explains that she had to take her dress back. Liz counts out the money she got back and finds it is $59.50, not $39.50. Liz realizes that she is in Gordon’s, not Kramer’s where she originally bought the dress! Iris says she should spend it quick. Liz realizes that if she could make twenty dollars on one dress - she could do it with more than one! She heads off to Kramer’s!

This is similar to the plot of “The Business Manager” (ILLS4;E1), in which Lucy Ricardo realizes that she can balance her books by buying and selling groceries on credit for the entire building.

End of Part One

Bob LeMond does a commercial for Jell-O puddings.

ANNOUNCER: “As we return to the Coopers, we find Liz at a little gold mine called Kramer’s Department Store, in the hope that she can dig up a few more polka-dot dresses for $39.50 and return them to Gordon’s for $59.50.”

Liz approaches the salesgirl (Florence Halop), who is confused when Liz isn’t particular about the size. She recognizes Liz from yesterday and wants to know why she wants two more dresses in the same style. Liz facetiously says she’s one of the Andrews Sisters.

CLERK: “Which one are you? Patty, Maxine, or LaVerne?” LIZ: “Neither. I’m their brother Dana.”

The Andrews Sisters were a very successful trio of singing sisters during World War II with 19 gold records and sales of nearly 100 million copies. The sisters began performing in the early 1930s when the Depression wiped out their father’s business. In 1937, the sisters scored their first big hit with “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen.” In addition to “Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy,” their best-known songs included “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree” and “Rum and Coca Cola.” The trio officially broke up after the death of LaVerne in 1967, when a suitable replacement could not be found. Patty Andrews guest starred on “Here’s Lucy” as herself in 1969. The plot had Lucy Carter and her daughter Kim (Lucie Arnaz) stepping in for the other two singers for a charity show. During a poker game in “Be a Pal” (ILL S1;E2), Lucy calls her two queens ‘sisters.’ When Fred looks at his newly-dealt hand he quips “You can tell your two Andrews Sisters not to wait up for LaVerne.”

Dana Andrews (1909-92) was not related to the Andrews Sisters, but was a successful actor. He had been in the Oscar-winning film The Best Years of Our Lives in 1946, and had three films released in 1948 alone. In 1961, Dana Andrews and Lucille Ball both presented awards on the “Bob Hope Sports Show.”

At Gordon’s, Iris sees George, who is there to buy Liz a surprise gift: the dress he made her return.

Meanwhile, at Kramer’s, Liz has brought her newly-purchased dresses to get her refund. Mr. Quigley shrieks at Liz’s request - two more identical dresses. He has a breakdown.

MR. QUIGLEY: “I should have never taken this job. I was so happy in ladies lingerie.”

He notices that they ordered 35 of the blue polka dot dresses and now they have 36. The jig is up! Mr. Quigley demands that Liz give him the money he refunded her earlier! He even gives her back the dress she returned earlier and sends her away.

On her way out of the store with her three blue polka-dot dresses, Liz is approached by a Little Old Lady Shopper (Bea Benadaret) who wants to know where she can get one like it. She needs it to wear to a dance.

OLD LADY: “We all went to Arthur Murray’s and learned the Lindy Crawl.” LIZ: “You mean the Lindy Hop.” OLD LADY: “Not the way we do it!”

Arthur Murray (1895-1991) was a ballroom dancer and businessman, whose name is most often associated with the chain of dance studios that bear his name. He was mentioned in Desi Arnaz’s song “Cuban Pete” and in “The Young Fans” (ILL S1;E20). One of the dances taught there was The Lindy Hop, a very popular during the swing era of the 1930s and ‘40s. Lindy was described as a jazz dance and is a member of the swing dance family.

Liz sells the dress to the little old lady for $59.50, making a profit of $20! She decides if she sold one, she can sell another, and develops a slick line of sales talk in order to sell the other dresses to customers in the store already!

LIZ: (to Customer) “Hey lady, step in a little closer. You’re blocking traffic.” SALES CLERK: “Hey! This is my customer.” LIZ (fast talking): “Get away kid, ya bother me. (To Customer) Honest Liz Cooper, the biggest used dress dealer in town. Gimme $39.50 and I’m losing money on the deal. Come back tomorrow and I’ll give myself a hot foot and have a fire sale!”

Liz is approached by the indignant Floor Walker who believes her to be a sales girl poaching customers from her co-workers. He directs her to go sell something to a gentlemen who just happens to be her husband George. So she won’t be recognized, Liz grabs a black hat with a veil. She adopts a Brooklyn accent that matches the salesgirl’s.

George pretends not to recognize Liz and tells her his wife is dumpy - nothing like her figure, but he’ll buy the dress anyway. George flirts with Liz! Insulted, Liz slaps him across the face!

Ricky Ricardo did the same thing when Lucy went ‘undercover’ wearing “The Black Wig” (ILL S3;E26).

Later, at home, George presents Liz with the dress, continuing his charade.

GEORGE: “You should have seen the sales girl who waited on me! She was a real creep! I’m glad you like the dress and I’ll tell you what else I’m going to do (Brooklyn accent) I’m gonna buy ya a hat to go with it!” LIZ (Brooklyn accent): “Well, how do you like that! He knew about it all the time!”

End of Part Two

In the live Jell-O commercial, Lucille Ball plays is a little old miner. With a deep voice (as if she has no teeth) she sings a bar or two of “My Darlin’ Clementine”. Bob LeMond plays a Census Taker.

MINER / LUCILLE: “You can’t take mine! Folks say I aint’ got no senses!”

The miner (and his faithful mule Sam) says he is a desert rat who used to live in the city. It’s just him and Sam. They mine a little and play a little canasta. He says they have a puddin’ mine.

CENUS TAKER: “What’s a pudding mine?” MINER / LUCILLE: “Do you mean to stand there with a sponsor starin’ you in the face and ask what a puddin’ mine is? Egad!”

#My Favorite Husband #Lucille Ball #Richard Denning #Hans Conried #Florence Halop #I Love Lucy #Here's Lucy #Jell-O #Bob LeMond #Bea Benadaret #Andrews Sisters #Desi Arnaz #Vivian Vance #Lucie Arnaz #Arthur Murray #Dana Andrews

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mcfanely · 4 years ago

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Nightowls

With Chamille’s idea running none-stop through his head, Cole found himself more and more sold on the idea of donning a mask again, but for a completely different reason than being a ninja. Now, it all comes to whether Cole can make himself do something he hadn’t done seriously in years.

Chapter 04 - I’m Thinking, 1886 words

As the night drew to a close, and the sun had already passed the horizon and was steadily rising into the sky, Cole still hadn't made his way back to the monastery. The night like always, had been hectic and fun. Chamille had grabbed onto the hood of his jacket a few times to try and drag him into the stage area, and Cole had successfully nearly choked himself by refusing to move anywhere that wasn't that little bit further away from the centre of the crowd. But he had been thinking.

To say he was hung up on what Chamille had said was an overstatement, though he was giving the idea a bit of thought. That, just like when he was a Ninja running around in a mask all those many years back when their faces weren't on the front of newspapers and their names weren't attributed to being the saviours of the city multiple times over, having his identity under wraps had provided clear advantages.

The main one, before he'd told his dad the truth, the secret identity had allowed him to keep up the lie that he was still attending Marty Oppenheimers' even when he'd run away, whilst actively being a ninja and helping people. It was nice because he could go from a Ninja that people could look up to, to a random guy on the street that no one batted an eyelid at.

The fact that people knew who he was and what he did now? Cole didn't mind. He knew that he was good at what he did, he knew that now that people knew him, that they had a face to put the Elemental Master of Earth; he could stop feeling like he needed to keep that part of his life a secret and just live it up to the fullest. He was a Ninja, he was happy for people to know that.

But the idea of wearing a mask, to put distance between himself as a person and something he was totally not thinking about doing, was a good idea.

So much so that when it had passed six in the morning, Cole had successfully stayed awake for twenty-four hours, and he was still up and about a couple hours later. Why the single arts and crafts store in Ninjago City had later opening hours than every other store on the high street, he had no idea. Though it did give him time to up his coffee intake to a total of three cups from three different cafés, along with commandeering a public restroom to wash as much neon paint off his face and his clothes as he could in order to stop himself from looking like a walking advert for a traffic cone. All before the store opened.

It came off his skin and out his hair easy enough, but his hoodie was definitely a lost cause. He'd have to have faith that a wash would fix it, but he didn't have high hopes.

So with coffee in hand, and an extremely vibrant jacket tied around his waist, Cole was the first customer into the crafts store and he had some form of idea as to what he needed. Cardboard, a plastic mask base, some thicker and stronger elastic and an assortment of paints. Specifically, oranges, blacks and whites.

The more he looked around, the more that caught his eye and the more ideas he got about what he was going to do. So maybe he bought a few extra things, like some paint that apparently glowed in the dark? Or an assortment of his own neon paint since he had to make up for purposely spilling a load of it over Chamille somehow?

Cole left the store with a full bag slung over his shoulder and set off back to the monastery. Now all he had to do was come up with an excuse for why he was walking into the monastery nearing midday after he'd clearly been shopping, and why no one had seen him leave that morning - because he hadn't even been there.

He had time, though. The trek up the stairs back to home was enough to think up a multitude of excuses, the only hindrance to his plan was the absolute mess that was his hoodie and jeans, decorated artfully with paint.

The plan was to get to his room, change, then make an appearance.

Only sometimes, as good as Cole was at strategic thinking and plans, there were always hiccups. That being on his way past the living room after sneaking past Kai massacring a training dummy in the courtyard, he hadn't taken into account that anyone would be sitting down and having a rest. The sound of the game console should have clued him in, but Cole had already stepped past the open doorway without much thought.

"Cole, you're back!" came a loud voice, and internal cursing quickly followed.

He situated himself with his head poking into the living room, his painted clothes carefully hidden behind the wall so they weren't on show.

Sat on the couch, the light from the TV reflecting in their eyes and the music paused along with the game, was Lloyd and Jay. Jay beaming with a wide smile and a crooked eyebrow, he'd probably just beaten a particularly hard level.

"Where were you?" Lloyd questioned after a moment, his tone far too measured and concerned for someone his age; and in the space of a second Cole realised that if they'd found out he wasn't there that morning, that they might have worried.

He hadn't even thought of that.

Cole let out a small breath and gave a smile, "Headed to the city pretty early on, walked there. I didn't mean to worry you guys or anything."

Jay interjected, "Worried, us? Nope, you just missed train-- oomf."

Lloyd's hand came to a stop over Jay's mouth, and the lightning ninja gained a glare that could strike fear into the lesser man, "When you didn't come out I tried your door, it was sorta open." He said, then winced a little, "I didn't go in or anything, but I could see you weren't in there."

The tone was careful and casual, and Cole almost felt bad that he was going to lie. Or at least, he wasn't going to be fully honest. Why lie if he didn't necessarily have to, anyway? "Sorry, kiddo. I should have told you what I was doing before I left."

Even though I've never even been here since last night.

Cole held up his bag in one hand, as physical proof that he had been somewhere, and he had bought something, but that still didn't seem to sway the calculating expression on Lloyd's face.

Though whatever tension there was, if any, was broken when Lloyd's face shifted into one of disgust and promptly pulled his hand away from a cackling Jay's mouth.

"Ew, gross! You licked my hand?" He questioned, his voice moving up in pitch at the end.

That just made Jay laugh harder.

Cole took that moment as the excuse he needed to leave the situation. Only when he was half way to his room did Jay's head poke out the lounge.

"You know you have paint in your hair?" He called, questioning.

Cole's hand quickly went up to the back of his head, to be met with the coarse feeling of dried paint that was in fact there, and had been missed during his effort to clean it all off earlier that morning. He cringed, but shot Jay a slight smile, "Got pranked by some kids walking back. I thought they'd missed." Cole grinned, then shrugged. "I'll be in my room, showering."

"Dude, too much info!"

"Wait until you realise what I do with my clothes when I shower."

Then it was Lloyd's turn to give a holler of disgust.

Cole laughed at their revulsion, and slipped into his room without much fanfare.

Twenty minutes later, and a fresh change of clothes, he was sitting in the center of his room with a towel wrapped around his damp hair and his morning purchases neatly arranged on the floor in front of him.

He knew what he wanted to do, he already had a rough design sketched out on a rogue piece of paper; his pencil was held between his teeth and he was staring at the paints.

The dawning realisation of what he was planning to do finally hit home. It wasn't as if he'd told anyone about his idea, it was currently just himself and his thoughts, and Cole was already second guessing himself.

"This is a stupid idea." He mumbled to himself, his voice quiet in the already present silence of his room. Usually he had music playing on his phone or something to the like, but now all he was doing was thinking. Thinking that what he was going to do- no, not what he was going to do, what he was debating on doing- and just realising how much he hadn't even taken into account.

Cole didn't dance for anyone. Sure, maybe he'd do a general jig if there was a good song on the radio, but who didn't? Yet dancing, proper dancing, he hadn't done it for years; and not for anyone but himself.

Why was he even contemplating going against the grain? Why now? What made that moment different, what made that time the right time to consider getting back into dancing? Was it the fact that he now saw these amazingly talented people every time he went to Nightowls? The way they just so easily stepped into the centre of attention, directly into everyone's line of sight and not get bothered by the many pairs of eyes staring back at them? That they could blank it all out in favour of just performing and doing what they loved?

Cole let out a heavy breath, before he lifted the scrap piece of paper with the mask sketch up in front of him. He had a good idea what he wanted to do, a design that would be pretty ironic, a personal victory in a way. One that only he would be aware of, really. He had everything he needed. It was all out in front of him.

Cole set the paper down, took hold of the towel in his hair and started rubbing the last of the dampness away. He stood, folding the towel over the chair at his desk before he left for training.

He needed to stave off exhaustion first, he needed to get his blood pumping and muscles warmed. He needed to wake himself up as much as he could after such an extensively long day, then he'd think logically about what he was going to do when he wasn't feeling as tired.

Maybe that night Cole had gone to sleep as soon as his head had hit the pillow, at the late time of seven in the afternoon. Maybe he even slept solidly through the night and woke up on time for the following days training, not a nightmare in sight.

Maybe his mask was already under construction, pencil markings already sketched out on the mask base, the idea already blooming into fruition.

Maybe he would dance.

From the beginning

Ch 03 > Ch 04 > Ch 05

AO3

#Nightowls AU #Nightowls #cole #cole brookstone #cole ninjago #lloyd #lloyd garmadon #jay #jay walker #kai #ninjago #lego ninjago #lego #mcfanely writes #mcfanely aus #mcfanely #dancing

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denimbex1986 · 1 year ago

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'Honestly, I had no interest in seeing this movie originally, simply by virtue of the billboard featuring an explosion. This implied that the film would be an action movie, about the nuclear bomb, as told by the American side. It seemed like poor taste. I imagined Nolan being his usual anti-special effects self and opting for a real nuclear bomb to be built and dropped on Japan again. Then he could shoot the impact and fallout in his favorite high-quality film stock and make it look cool. I really wasn't interested, but I went to the matinée anyway. Imagine my surprise when it went an entirely different route, but in equally bad taste.

Oppenheimer begins in cliché. There's a large traumatic event- an explosion of some sort, followed by a sweaty character waking up, or coming back from PTSD-enforced mediation. This is our first introduction to Cillian Murphy's blank face that we'll see using the same expression throughout the rest of the film. Have a good memory for faces? No? Fine, you don't need to. A nice chunk of this film cuts between poorly written quip and Cillian looking blank to quip and Cillian looking blankly at something else with his mouth slightly agape. Reader, I hope we've brushed up on Soviet montage theory recently, as you should know when you're being manipulated. Naturally, if a film's opening shot is cliché, there's absolutely no chance that it'll take a wild turn towards originality in later minutes. The entirety of the film is a series of empty aphorisms, contrived metaphors and visual analogies that first-graders, let alone theoretical physicists, would find condescending. Marbles in a fishbowl? I felt patronized. Proving genius by scrawling wildly on a chalkboard? Shame on you.

Oppenheimer's political wavering might have stabilized had he read his contemporary, Orwell, on matters like the Spanish Civil War. Nolan's use of dying metaphors and the like might similarly have improved had he read Orwell as well. Oppenheimer is rife with "metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves." One phrase that Orwell mentions, "toe the line," is even used verbatim in the film. I doubt that Nolan wrote this line with knowledge of the phrase's meaning, which is, as Orwell would phrase it, a "sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying".

We are told repeatedly that Oppenheimer is, at least early in his career, a communist. Short of him telling us that he has some interest in the professors unionizing, there's no substantive understanding of what his politics were, or why. Considering that his history of leftist involvement is what gets him a good ole fashioned kangaroo McCarthy court, and is the central dramatic device for the whole film, Nolan might have done well to explain the philosophy behind Oppenheimer's beliefs, beyond family proximity and a desire to get laid. Instead, exposition is drowned out by music. It's too loud. Subtitled audiences are at an advantage against those of us who were subjected to the whims of the sound mixer. Every time a truly dramatic or thoughtful scene came on, the score would bump up and up, drowning out something politically nuanced or robustly scientific. The actors might have done well to yell over the music, at least it would have forced them to emote more. The bits of Science™ that we do get to hear are pop science, a stoner's understanding of the golden ratio, but for particle physics.

Nothing in the film is aided by the editing, either, which seems to have taken its pacing from Rick and Morty's Interdimensional Cable Quick Mystery segment, as hastily realized by the editor from Battlefield Earth.

As a character study, it fails. The writing for every character is the same. One of them drinks more, one of them throws flowers in the trash, one of them has an accent that makes some question his loyalty to the project. Everyone says Oppenheimer is an asshole. We only know this because we're told that he is. Yes, he's curt, but so is his lover who throws his flowers away. This botanical quirk could have easily been applied to our protagonist, his wife, his colleagues, even his brother. Nothing anyone does is particular to their character as individuals. However, only a true asshole would look at New Mexico and think, "we should bomb this."

I ran into a friend who had just come back from seeing the movie before I had watched it. I asked him if "the line" was said in the film. You know, "I am become death." Yes, he told me, but he wouldn't tell me how. This is by far the best scene in the movie and played completely seriously, à la Leslie Nielsen in Airplane. For this scene alone, I recommend watching this piece of comedy. Following my friend's lead, I also won't divulge the particulars of this segment. Once he says, "destroyer of worlds," you can leave the theater.

An especially strange component of the film is its entire plot, which focuses on Oppenheimer's McCarthy era hearings and the events leading up to it. There are all of two minutes total dealing with the actual effects of the atom bomb, which, let's face it, is why the audience is sitting in the theater in the first place. The box office can thank the billboard. Instead, we're treated to three hours of a man who willingly worked the US military apparatus getting told that he's going to lose his security clearance. Who cares? This might make an interesting chapter in his biography, but it's definitely not important enough to warrant an entire biopic. Clearance or no clearance, this man can spend the rest of his life in a mansion situated next to a conveniently sage Einstein. And what's this clearance for, anyway? Should we be cheering on another chapter of bigger, better bomb development? Are the Japanese a moot footnote in the larger picture of American military imperialism? That Oppenheimer focuses on his "martyrdom" and the McCarthy era's targeting of Real® Patriotic ™ Americans© despite their contributions to the military industrial complex is at best a mistake and at worst, deeply conservative filmmaking.'

#Oppenheimer #Christopher Nolan #Cillian Murphy

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magicalpainterrebel · 11 months ago

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*as she opened the VHS, and he's starting out with Robert J. Oppenheimer*

Robert J. Oppenheimer: We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, “Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Roll: that's terrify!

@oscarstudios

So here's part 2

The rules:

1: don't panic

2: the starting to battle

3: we'll begin to the story after all

4: it's beginning!!!

Roll: Dr Jack! I found a the VHS!!!

Stella: so.... It's going to work? Doctors?

@oscarstudios

(Idk if I can play the doctors cuz Im unfamiliar with them)

*The Funkengers would arrive from their Boom-jet*

Captain Tankman: Any help ya need?

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catatonicengineers · 5 years ago

Text

A Defense of Cait Sith

Plushie Princess Saga:

A Hundred Ways to Put the WRO Back Together

A Hundred Ways to Wreck Shinra HQ

Reeve’s Adventures in Babysitting and World Saving:

And Take a Stand at Shinra

While There’s Still Time

On Plushies and Oppenheimer:

A Defense of Cait Sith

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried. Most people were silent.” - J. Robert Oppenheimer

I was eight-years-old when I played Final Fantasy VII for the first time, exactly one year after its release. Like many 90’s gamers, FFVII was a turning point into the world of RPG’s from which I’ve yet to recover. Kids today will never understand the coming of age that occurred somewhere between Yoshi’s Island and grappling with the ethos of Avalanche blowing Sector 1’s reactor sky high. It’s no surprise that my 3rdgrade brain found an essence of familiarity to cling to amid the existential dread and ecoterrorism that was the greatest game ever made.

Cait Sith was the cute, cuddly party member that validated my love of cats and ignited my adoration for moogles. I would relentlessly make room for him in my party, despite his terrible combat stats, and hurl endless Phoenix Downs every time he fell.

He was quirky, he fought with a megaphone, his limit breaks were oddly sparse compared to the rest of the cast, and his home base of Gold Saucer looked like a unicorn threw up all over a casino. What’s not to love?

According to recent Reddit threads, Youtube comments, and rage bloggers, apparently a lot.

The advent of the long awaited FFVII remake rightfully caused a massive revival of the excitement first felt by long time fans of the franchise. The release date has been confirmed for March 3, 2020 – two days before my 30thbirthday. Not gonna lie; feels like the universe aligned to bless the official passing of my youth with this nostalgia bomb.

It’s with this love of all things FFVII in mind that I’d like to formally pose a defense of the game’s most hated character.

Cait Sith/Reeve, this one’s for you.

The Laughter

We first meet the lively, dancing robo-moogle and cat combo in Gold Saucer and we’re not quite sure if this strange entity should count as one party member or two. Either way, he joins your crew as the quintessential comic relief with nary a backstory in sight. That’s right; you are now the proud owner of Cait Sith. A “fortune teller” by trade, Cait Sith’s motivations remain as murky as your party’s future.

At first glance, it’s easy to pass Cait Sith off as a filler character, the cute one added for giggles. The one the writers never bothered to flesh out because, let’s face it, that moogle is mostly fluff anyway. The “most useless character” title isn’t entirely unjustified.

If this was where Cait Sith’s story ended.

I still remember the day my older brother announced that he’d read ahead in the player’s guide (this used to be a thing, kids) and discovered Cait Sith was a Shinra spy. I’m pretty sure I went through all the stages of grief before settling on denial and assuming he was playing a joke on me. Surely, my favorite slot machine loving companion couldn’t be a traitor.

Enter Reeve Tuesti, the man behind the moogle. He’s the head of Urban Development at Shinra Electric Power Company. He wears a signature blue suit to work everyday. He hates board meetings. He’s not fond of his coworkers. Like Tifa, he’s an introvert. And he’s the guy who engineered the Mako reactors.

If Hojo is Dr. Frankenstein, Reeve is Oppenheimer. The tragedy of the monsters we create is always greater when it’s a monster we loved. Where the other Shinra execs are motivated by greed, power, and a desire to play God, Reeve is the only Shinra higher up we encounter with genuine empathy and a sense of advocacy for the people. It’s easy to assume that Mako reactors would improve lives, but as Marlene so eloquently asks, “isn’t that because we were taking away from the planet’s life?”

When faced with the guilt of a design gone horribly wrong, those in authority have two choices; own the guilt or double down. And Reeve doubles down.

I’ve never been a fan of the way modern RPG’s have everything clearly spelled out and spoon fed to the gamer. The reason we don’t need further backstory for Reeve is because his character arc is already apparent if we do a bit of digging. I was surprised to learn that the common conjecture behind the exact mechanics of Cait Sith involved him being a remote controlled, autonomous but non-sentient robot. Given that assumption, it’s fair to say that Cait Sith is a worthless character who lacks emotion or consequence.

One opinion I’ve seen trending is why not simply make Reeve join the party, sans the giant stuffed animal? After all, we’d get to see how he grapples with his role in Shinra and eventual betrayal of Avalanche.

Two words; cognitive dissonance. You have to question what kind of 35-year-old executive creates a plushie cat proxy to begin with. See I’ve never thought of Reeve and Cait Sith as separate. The gritty psychological mechanics that are Reeve have always been there, plush or human. Reeve has developed an alter that’s effectively a form of escape. The assertion that Cait Sith lacks consequence isn’t false – a robot carries out its duty, incapable of harboring guilt, blame, or moral repercussion. That’s a pretty darn good way to remain detached enough to stab your party members in the back!

Cait Sith is also an outlet for everything Reeve’s repressed executive life lacks. As Cait Sith, he’s silly and carefree, though not completely unfamiliar. Glimpses of Cait Sith’s witty quips are echoed in Reeve’s mock nicknames for his colleagues – “Kyahaha” and “Gyahaha” respectively. When life is tough to take, we laugh so we don’t scream.

Plus, the idea of Reeve controlling Cait Sith in real time, much like an MMORPG avatar, is just plain hilarious. I’ve always imagined him as the kind of guy who rolls up to his 9-5 office job, pops open a spreadsheet to look busy, and boots up Cait Sith in the other tab. He’s the OG Aggretsuko, the guy making Jim Halpert faces at the camera every Shinra board meeting.

And I get you, Reeve. Really, I do.

The Tears

Cait Sith’s sacrifice was a cop out for killing off a real character. Why didn’t Reeve just die instead of the plushie?

First of all, how dare you.

Second, not all deaths need be literal.

A pervading theme throughout FFVII is the concept of identity. Are we born into an existence we have no control over or can we choose who we are day by day? It’s easy to want to be someone else, the First Class Soldier who sweeps in, keeps his promise, and saves the girl. Our reality is often less of a fairy tale and riddled with our own failures.

By the time the party reaches The Temple of the Ancients, the line where Cait Sith ends and Reeve begins is blurring. Reeve speaks more often as “himself” through the plushie and the nuances in their speech and mannerism are blending. It’s no accident that this shift happens as Reeve becomes more at ease around Avalanche, ultimately switching sides.

I’ve heard a lot of criticism on the seeming lack of motivation to Reeve’s redemption. If we examine the cognitive dissonance theory that governs his character, the switch is far less sudden.

Cait Sith’s death is necessitated by Reeve’s accountability. The innocent plushie alter isn’t working anymore. It’s not enough to keep him from recognizing the horrors he’s been complicit to. Sacrificing this part of himself is the ultimate acknowledgment of culpability. It’s arguably a more important death than if Reeve actually martyred himself. Like Cloud, he no longer needs to be “someone else” and has started down the path of doing what only he, and not Cait Sith, can; stopping Shinra.

There will be more wonderful, fluffy moogle-cat plushies, but the need to disassociate completely is gone. He’ll confront whatever comes without a crutch – or in this case a teddy bear. Reeve reminisces that the original doll was “special” and we end with Cait Sith reminding him(self) not to forget this.

The Silence

In 1953, J. Robert Oppenheimer was denied all security clearance and effectively blacklisted by the McCarthy administration for his strong opposition to nuclear warfare.

Sometimes we find ourselves in a place we never hoped or expected to be in, surrounded by people we despise, and convinced the world is going straight to heck. We can either get out of dodge or stay.

If Reeve had indeed sacrificed himself rather than Cait Sith, this would simply have been yet another escape. He stays. He works. He gets Marlene and Elmyra out of Midgar. He spies on Shinra. He finally tells Gyahaha to stick it. He goes on to head the WRO and never stops advocating for the people.

Reeve’s not a fighter. He can barely get by with a handgun in Dirge of Cerberus and Cait Sith’s megaphone is no Masamune. Despite this, he takes a big risk by being the only insider on the team. We’re pretty sure Shinra doesn’t share Reeve’s opposition to capital punishment either.

Maybe this is why I’ve always loved Cait Sith/Reeve. I’m intrigued to see if Square Enix will add any further insight into our favorite plush moogle-cat-spy, but if they don’t, that’s alright too. Cait Sith is still a pretty solid character. After my brother spoiled one of the game’s major plot twists for me, I ended up reading the player’s guide for myself. And he was right. But he was also wrong. I recall marching proudly into the living room to declare that while yes, Cait Sith was a traitor, he was also a hero.

So fight your fight. Fail and fall. Hurl some Phoenix Downs and get right back up again.

#ffvii #ff7 #reeve tuesti #shinra #cait sith #.txt

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parachutingkitten · 5 years ago

Text

Dancing Without You - Ch 3: Hello

A look into Cole's short time at the Marty Oppenheimer, the friendship he left behind when he ran from it, and what happens once he has to confront it.

Chapter 1 - Chapter 2

“We’re capping off our week by getting dance partners-”

A collective giddy laugh crossed across the room- mainly from the girls… including me.

“These were assigned by height, so hopefully you’ll be able to work well together. Now, on one hand, you’re going to be dancing with this person for the rest of the semester, so get to know them, and try to get in a rhythm together. On the other hand, it’s only for a semester. So, if you don’t gel with your partner, you can always request a switch next semester. Sound fair?”

Nods spread across the room as Mrs. Haley looked down at her clipboard. “Find your partner once I read your names.” I could feel excitement starting to get the better of me as she started reading names. The kind that made me roll my feet and tighten my fingers. “Sarah Avery and Trevor Littleton.” A whole semester with one person! And through the week I had seen a lot of great dancing from some of the guys. “Mariah Beason and Devon Watson.” Not that it mattered. I’m sure I’d have a great time with whoever I got. It’s a performing arts school! Everyone here wants to dance. That’s what’s important. “Julia Brennen and Alex Garcia.” ...right?

“Amelia Davenport and Cole Brookstone.”

I peeked out of the crowd only to meet eyes with a pair I’d never seen before. He had messy black hair, dark green eyes, and an uncertain expression playing across his features. We both stepped out of line and walked to the side. I glanced over at him. He seemed nervous.

“It was Cole, right?” I whispered. He seemed caught off guard.

“Yeah. And Amelia?”

I smiled and nodded. “I haven’t seen you before.”

“I’m usually towards the back,” he shrugged.

“What’s your emphasis?”

“I’m still undeclared. You?”

“Ensemble dance,” I smiled.

“Well, that’s good,” He smirked. “At least one of us will know what we’re doing in this class.”

I chuckled, trying to stay quiet as Mrs. Haley continued to read names. His sudden confidence seemed to come out of nowhere. “You more of a singer then?” I asked.

“I’m…” he trailed off. “I’m here. Let’s just start with that.” He brushed it off playfully.

“So, if you’re not a singer, and you’re not a dancer…”

“Well,” He cut me off, both of us laughing a bit. “I mean, I do sing, and I do dance. I’ve been singing and dancing since I was little. I just… if I had to describe myself, singer and dancer would not be the words I would use.”

“What words would you use?”

He paused for a moment, thinking it over, as if it were the first time he had considered the question. “Well... I really like hiking, mountain biking, skiing-”

“So, you’re an adrenaline junkie.” I cut him off.

He laughed. “Yeah. Sure, let’s go with that. Adrenaline junkie.” He repeated it, smiling at the thought.

“So, what got you into performance?”

“My dad,” he smiled. “He has crazy-person performer blood. He’s been with the same quartet for years, he’s won the Blade Cup a few times, he’s-”

“The Blade Cup?!” I stopped him. “Really?”

“Yeah, you follow it?”

“Not closely or anything,” I shrugged. “But that’s really cool. The Blade Cup is a real performer’s competition. I mean, I know it’s pretty niche, but it’s a sizable award.”

“What do your parents do?”

“Well,” I hesitated. “They’re both dancers, but they’re in education. They um… they mainly work with really young kids,” I waved it off.

“What’s wrong with that?” he asked, obviously reading my tone.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged. “A lot of people here come from pretty elite families, so when you go up to them and say, ‘my parents work with toddlers’ you get some weird looks.”

“Well, I think it’s awesome.” He assured me. “Getting kids involved in dance is such a wholesome thing to do with your life.” Cole was honestly the first person on campus I had spoken to that wasn’t put off by my parents. Just the tone with which he said ‘wholesome’ made me much happier than it had any right to. “Is that what you want to do?”

“I love my parents, but there’s no way I could do what they do. I’m headed straight for Ninjago City,” I smiled. “I’m gonna be on Broadway someday if it kills me.”

“Well, you’ve certainly got your priorities in line,” he smiled.

“Alright class!” Mrs. Haley broke our conversation. “Everyone has their partner. Most of you have had a minute to chat. Hopefully, you don’t totally hate each other just yet. Let’s get to dancing, shall we? Can we start with just a basic waltz?” Music began to play throughout the studio as Cole took my hands, and we started moving.

“For what it’s worth, I don’t totally hate you,” I joked.

“Dare I say, things seem to be going pretty well?”

I smiled, a warm feeling filling me as we danced together.

“Look, I don’t know what your schedule is like, but if you’re free after this, we should totally do something together. Of course, if you have class, or are meeting up with friends or what not-”

He laughed. “Oh, I don’t really have friends here.”

I smiled. “That makes two of us then.”

~*~*~*~

I hadn’t thought too much about it. It all seemed like such a distant thing until the moment we arrived. When I finally pulled up the parking brake, I realized how fast my heart was beating. Why was I so nervous? I don’t get nervous about these things. I never did. But here I was, unconsciously holding my breath at the idea of approaching the front door.

“You said she was apartment 14?” Jay asked me, looking out the window.

“Yeah,” I sighed. “Should be on the right here somewhere.”

“How do we go about this? Should we all go to the door? Would that be overwhelming for her?” Pixal asked from the back. “Do you want to go by yourself first?”

“No! No, she’ll be fine,” I shook my head. “It’ll be fine. It’s probably better, actually, if there’s more people. Just so there are no surprises or anything… right?” I glanced back at Pixal. Her cloaked disguise caught me a bit off guard for about the fifth time this trip. I was never going to get used to seeing her with normal skin.

“You know her best.” Pixal crossed her arms in defiance of my indecisiveness.

“We’ll all go up together. But leave your stuff here, we don’t want to seem pushy or anything.”

“You seem pretty nervous,” Jay turned to face me.

“Let’s just do this,” I sighed, opening the door to escape his comment. My teammates followed as I locked the car and started over to apartment 14. “You guys should know, she’s…” I paused for a moment trying to find the words. “...a lot. She’s a total performer, and she’s high energy, and she’s very touchy. Don’t ask her about any Broadway show unless you want your ear talked off about it. In fact, the less you mention musical theater, the better off you’ll probably be.” As we reached the top step, I turned around to face them. “And she has this pet peeve about brushing your teeth while on your phone so-”

“Cole,” Pixal stopped me. “I think we’ll be alright. Okay?”

“Right…” I sighed, turning back around to face the door. I took a deep breath, knocking before I freaked myself out too much. A moment passed without any trace of movement behind the door.

“What if she’s not here? What do we do then? What if-”

“Dude, it’s been like two seconds, chill out,” Jay nagged me.

And before I could get a chance to think about it, there she was, standing on the other side of the door, staring back at me.

She looked different.

But she hadn’t changed.

Her hair was put up in its usual messy bun, and she wore a loose shirt hanging just off her shoulders over a pair of yoga pants. Her bangs hung just above her emerald eyes, almost in a forgotten attempt to cover them. But you couldn’t hide those eyes. They were so green. So rich, so vibrant.

Exactly like I remembered.

And suddenly, I wasn’t nervous anymore.

“Hi,” I smiled.

She looked at me, still stunned.

“... Cole?”

“I hope we’re not interrupting anything.”

“What are you doing here? Why…” She looked behind me, seeing that I wasn’t alone. “Oh my gosh! Come in. You guys are probably on a mission, and I’m just letting you stand out in the open!” She opened the door wider, stepping back into her house. “Come in, come in!” She waved us in, promptly closing the door behind us. “What are you doing here? Do you need something from me, is there something wrong? Did I do something wrong? Am I in trouble? I’m sorry,” she shook her head. “I should just let you talk. Why are you here?”

“The team’s safety is at risk. We needed a few safe-houses to stay at for a few days, and Cole recommended you as a trustworthy possibility,” Pixal explained.

Amelia glanced over at me again, her mind obviously still a bit overloaded at the moment. “Wow. Okay.” She sighed.

“It would likely only be a few days,” Jay jumped in. “And you wouldn’t have to do anything, but you should know that us staying with you might attract some danger.”

Amelia stood, her eyes glazed over as she stared at the ground, her arms crossed and biting her lip. She was thinking. The room was quiet for a moment as she processed the information, but her head soon popped back up with a smile, energy entering her body again.

“No, this is great! This actually works out really well! My roommate just moved out a week ago, so I’ve got the whole apartment to myself, and a spare bed, and room on the couch, loads of spare blankets and such. Plus, I’ve got the week off. It really shouldn’t be a problem! Do you guys want anything to drink? I just put on some tea-” Amelia’s head shot over to the kitchen.

“I think we’re alright,” Pixal stopped her, pulling back her attention.

“I’m such a terrible hostess!” Amelia laughed. “I don’t even know your names! I mean, I really should. But I don’t really watch the news much, it’s um…” her eyes glanced over at me for a moment before returning to Pixal. “It can be difficult for me… But maybe I can remember.” She turned to Jay, looking at him for a second. “You’re the blue one, that’s… lightning powers, right?”

“That’s me,” he nodded.

“Hold on, I know this,” She bounced on her heels. “It starts with a J, right?”

“It is Jay.”

“Oh!” She laughed. “That’s right! Jay! And then...” She then turned to Pixal, clearly more stumped than before. “Actually, I’m not sure I recognize you.”

“Maybe this will help,” Pixal deactivated her cloak as Amelia jumped in surprise.

“Ah! You’re Samurai X!”

“But you can call me Pixal,” She extended a hand, Amelia quickly taking it.

“That’s so cool! I can already tell we’re going to get along.” She turned to me, a soft smile gracing her face. “...and I know you.”

“I know you.” I smiled back; our eyes now locked on each other.

“Well, I’m going to get our stuff from the car.” Jay announced, heading towards the door.

“Oh, yeah,” Amelia laughed. “I guess you guys would have stuff. Bring it in and we’ll figure out where I’m putting you all.”

“Jay,” Pixal called after him as he exited. “You don’t-” but she was cut off as the door closed. “Have keys…” she sighed. I grabbed the keys from my pocket, tossing them to her as she followed him out. “Thanks.”

As the door closed, I felt arms surround me and a squeak in my ear.

“It’s so good to see you! I missed you so much!”

“I missed you too,” I chuckled as she broke from me.

“I can’t believe you’re a ninja!” She took my hands, still giddy. “I mean, I can. You’ve been a ninja for years now. But it’s different when you’re right in front of me!”

“And you totally made it to Ninjago City and everything!”

“I always told you I would,” She hit me on the shoulder.

“Are you, like… on Broadway and stuff?”

“Soon! I’ve got an understudy position in an off-Broadway show, but we’re working on moving over sometime next year.”

“That’s so awesome! I can’t believe you actually made it! I mean…” we both chuckled for a moment. “I can. It’s you. But it’s just so surreal now that you’re actually doing it.”

“Oh!” her eyes popped, letting go of me. “I really should go get that tea from the stove before it boils over!” She started towards the kitchen as I followed her, laughing. “What’s so funny?” She asked, moving her pot off the burner.

“Nothing. It’s just… you’re just as scatterbrained as I remember.”

She turned off the stove, leaning against the counter and taking my hands again. “I really did miss you, you know. It was never the same after you left.”

“I missed you too.” I gripped her hands a bit tighter, our arms swinging to some silent beat running through us both.

“But look at you! You have friends now and everything!” She teased, letting go of me and turning back to her teapot. “Now that’s something I never thought I’d see.” She poured herself a cup as we both chuckled.

“They’re great. I think you’ll really like them.”

“Oh, we’re definitely gonna have some fun.” She turned back around, gingerly holding the warm mug between her hands. “We're having a party tonight for sure.”

“Doesn't that seem kind of counter-intuitive to the whole safe-house thing?”

“Oh, no.” She shook her head. “It’s a Friday night. My neighbors would be suspicious if I didn’t blast music and order pizza.”

#ninjago #ninjago cole #OC: Amelia #Dancing Without You #writing

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ashleyspinelliburnbook · 5 years ago

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S1E6: My Fair Gretchen/Speedy, We Hardly Knew Ye

Me, literally one recap ago: “When are we gonna get a good Gretchen episode?”

Me, today, looking at the title of the next episode and refusing to be embarrassed: “WELL, FINALLY”

My Fair Gretchen

The most pressing revelation here is that “Recess” apparently takes place in Arkansas, as the episode begins with Miss Finster handing out the Arkansas Standard Achievement Test.

Beyond that, this is a lovely ~ironic subversion~ of the “My Fair Lady” trope. Let me explain: “My Fair Lady” is all about turning Eliza Doolittle into a more acceptable member of high society, right? Turning her from Cockney to, well, refined?

Here, we’ve got Gretchen, who’s by no means a member of high society, but the goal isn’t to get her there either. See, Gretchen is smart — very smart — to the point that she gets a perfect score on the ASAT. She’s called into Principal Prickly’s office, where she learns that she has the opportunity to go to Oppenheimer Elementary for the Incredibly, Extremely Gifted. (Of course, Prickly has a vested interest in this too. If two more of his kids go there, he gets that job at Spiro Agnew Middle School!)

But...Gretchen doesn’t really want to go to Oppenheimer. Her mom is excited to hear the news, but it just makes Gretchen sad. And when she tells her friends she’s on the fence about what she’s learned, they decide to take action.

After Gretchen takes one last walk around the school, saying goodbye to the swingset, the graffiti, and the rancid fish sticks in the dumpster, she gets home to find...the gang! And they’ve got a plan to de-smart her so that when she goes in front of the Oppenheimer review board the next day, they’ll have no choice but to turn her down.

“I’ve been trying to dumb myself down ever since kindergarten,” Gretchen says, to which TJ replies, “This time, you’ve got experts on your side.”

“Yo, Prickly,” New Gretchen says as she walks into the gym for her review. After a whirlwind day of trying new looks (courtesy of the Diggers, the Ashleys, the kindergarteners), she shows up in, um, I’m not a fashion person but she’s coming off as very...not this decade? Wow, helpful.

So yeah, instead of going for “refined,” we get, well, the opposite of that. But here, it’s also the socially acceptable landing point. Instead of being a super-genius who aces standardized tests, Gretchen is now...just like any other kid.

The board, pictured above, asks Gretchen a handful of trivia questions, and she gets them all spectacularly wrong (“Who was the 14th president of the United States?” “Dennis Rodman?”). From outside, the gang celebrates her achievement...until the plan backfires.

A humiliated Principal Prickly accuses Gretchen of cheating on the exam, and Gretchen can’t help but recite all of the correct answers to their questions, in order, with perfect accuracy. Albert Einstein (you see him, come on) asks why she was hiding her intelligence, and she explains she doesn’t want to go to the new school. The board banishes Prickly to the hallway, where he and the gang await Gretchen’s fate.

When they emerge, Einstein explains that Gretchen convinced the board that there's more to education than book-learnin’ (which sort of reminds me of “Bart the Genius,” where Bart initially tries to convince the gifted school he has cheated his way into to let him go back to his old school undercover, “to see what makes ‘em tick”).

The board suggests the school instead implement a tutorial program, and the episode ends with Gretchen teaching...a room full of teachers. As it should be.

Takeaway: Every time I see an episode about a gifted kid/genius kid, I think about all the memes that go, like, “if you were ever a ‘gifted kid’ in school, you’re depressed now,” and...yeah. Imagine having all this pressure to succeed in fourth grade, you know?

Speedy, We Hardly Knew Ye

(Today in “trying something new on the blog,” I want to share something I wrote a few years ago that pretty much says what I would have written here anyway. The episode is about the class hamster, Speedy, dying, and how the kids react to it.)

In middle school, I had two opportunities to take part in Challenge Day, a day-long anti-bullying program meant to bring to the forefront all the deeply personal things that participants have in common, all while celebrating their diversity and inspiring them to dismantle the structure that causes these differences to drive them apart.

Being middle schoolers — 11-, 12-, and 13-year-olds in the thick of maintaining childhood friendships, facing new encounters, and experiencing puberty — there was a wide range of expectations for the event and the reactions throughout it. Many students saw the day solely as an opportunity to be able to skip school, while several of us read the material given to us with our permission slips and at least vaguely understood that our emotions — and our beliefs — would be tested.

The first time I did Challenge Day was in sixth grade, and at first, my primary concern was that my best friend and had been separated, relegated to participating on different days. But when the 100 or so of us entered the gym, whose windows had been blacked out to avoid any interruptions from the other 300 students on campus, the specially-trained Challenge Day leaders made every opportunity to pull us out of our comfort zones right away. Suddenly, we were sprinting within a massive circle of chairs, instructed to find a new seat, and found ourselves sitting between two people we’d never met to whom we would then have to introduce ourselves.

Eventually, we split into small groups of 6 or 7 — similarly randomly assigned, paired with a parent volunteer — and talked more candidly about our worries, how we truly felt going to school every day, and even our personal tragedies. The point here was to prove that we were able to open up to a group of strangers following all of the icebreaker activities we’d completed. And, from what my friend had told me after completing her Challenge Day the previous day, this portion of the day was where everyone started crying. While a good number of the students who were just happy to have the day off from school didn’t take this part seriously, I really wanted to – and luckily, both times, my group was just as keen.

I don’t much remember what I shared at that first Challenge Day, but in eighth grade I was dealing with both that friend’s sudden move to a school two hours away and the death of my hamster, my first real pet, and I felt I had a lot to talk about. The students in my group were very receptive to what I had to say, and one even took me aside after we moved on from the small group activities and complimented my candidness, saying I was very brave to cry for my friend and my pet.

Unfortunately, the parent volunteer in our group was less sympathetic. On the Challenge Day website, it states that volunteers receive a quick overview of the day before students arrive, and that’s it. Sadly, you can’t teach sympathy in half an hour. When I almost immediately starting sobbing about my troubles and was met with kindness by my fellow middle school-aged group members, this woman promptly interrupted me.

“Are you sure you’re not just getting caught up in the emotions, sweetheart?” she asked, her attempted pleasantness pierced by skepticism. “At your age, you’re too old to be crying about hamsters and one lost friend. There are more hamsters, and there are more friends.”

What could I do? I was a shy, insecure 13-year-old who was clearly overwhelmed by my own hardships — albeit comparatively minute to what some members of the group had shared — and all this woman could do was point out my perceived weaknesses and trivialize feelings I thought were legitimate and sincere. So I gave in. I nodded.

“Mm-hmm,” she confirmed, her face lit up in victory. “You need to learn to be stronger. That’s what today is all about. Let’s move on to someone else.”

Of course, because of the quiet, non-confrontational person I was — and still, only 13, barely beginning to emotionally mature — I let her words sink in. I entirely believed that what I had shared was completely out of line, and rebuked myself for crying at all. Since early childhood, I was the type of person who cried whenever I felt worried or insecure, and this woman, in just a few sentences, had made me so worried and so insecure that I didn’t want to cry anymore.

For me, Challenge Day in sixth grade was exciting. Because my school had only opened that year, even the seventh- and eighth-graders who transferred from the middle school across town were open to making new friends, and it was a wholly positive experience. But after Challenge Day in eighth grade, I wondered if I’d become too comfortable being openly emotional two years before. And, not to place the entirety of the blame on this one woman’s speech, since I clearly had many reasons to feel down, eighth grade was when I first recognized that I might be depressed. Even still, I don’t think I should have had to say, “Look, lady, I appreciate your fake concern, but I’m clinically depressed” to avoid any further insult.

I know so many people whose feelings were invalidated as kids simply because, as kids, many of them just hadn’t been alive long enough to experience the type of pain that adults have. (And even if they have, the emotional differences inherent in both parties for the exact same tragedy or other life change can be profound.) When adults don’t understand that comparing the plights of a single 13-year-old to their own — or anyone’s — is completely unfair, their words and actions can quickly devolve into invalidation and, sometimes, abuse.

During that second Challenge Day, the main message conveyed by the leaders was beyond my attention. I thought I’d come away with the advice to not cry unless it was about something really important, and to “be stronger” — which was completely abstract to me at the time. (It still is, honestly. Is there a checklist I have to fill out to determine if I’m “strong” enough to…what? Be a living, appropriately emotional person? I mean, evidently not.)

I don’t want adults to be rude to kids who are expressing emotions of any kind, even if it’s about something they don’t think is worth expending energy to worry about. Children and teenagers have vastly different capacities to internalize the world around them compared to adults, and that doesn’t make their reactions to hardships wrong or invalid. We should all know this, having been kids ourselves, but obviously we don’t.

When adults can’t understand a world in which a hamster’s death is, for one day, the most important thing, perhaps the sole hardship on a child’s mind, then we don’t deserve their innocent happiness at learning on their own that there are, in fact, more hamsters.

If we can’t handle children’s emotions at their worst — the worst “worst” they’ve ever experienced — to what fate are we dooming them when the things they don’t talk about, their depression and abuse and appropriately hard hardships that are allowed to challenge their strength, get bad enough for us to care?

Takeaway: Let kids feel their feelings when they’re kids so they have a healthy relationship with their emotions as adults. (Please.)

#recess

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sciencespies · 5 years ago

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How the U.S. hydrogen bomb secrets disappeared

https://sciencespies.com/physics/how-the-u-s-hydrogen-bomb-secrets-disappeared/

How the U.S. hydrogen bomb secrets disappeared

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

Given a choice of items to lose on a train, a top-secret document detailing the newly developed hydrogen bomb should be on the bottom of the list. In January 1953, amid the Red Scare and the Korean War, that’s exactly what physicist John Archibald Wheeler lost.

In the December 2019 issue of Physics Today, science historian Alex Wellerstein details the creation of the document and Wheeler’s day leading up to its mysterious loss.

“I like the absurdity of the sequence of events, but beyond the absurdity, it connects up with some bigger Cold War themes,” he said.

Wellerstein, from the Stevens Institute of Technology, collects FBI files of physicists, obtained via the Freedom of Information Act, as part of his research into the history of nuclear secrecy.

“Theoretical physicists were in particular targeted by the FBI and anti-Communists during the Cold War, both because they were thought to know the secrets of nuclear weapons, and because they were considered politically naïve,” he said. “Together, it made for a dangerous combination.”

Wheeler is perhaps best known for coining the term “black hole,” and his contributions to physics span different fields of study to include the hydrogen bomb project. When the Congressional Joint Committee on Atomic Energy decided to compile a history of the hydrogen bomb as part of a smear campaign against controversial physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer, they sent a six-page extract to Wheeler to ensure the accuracy of the report’s technical aspects. The pages contained information about the discoveries of Edward Teller and Stanislaw Ulam that led to the creation of thermonuclear weapons.

Wheeler read the document overnight on a sleeper train. After reading it, he recalled placing it into a white envelope, putting the white envelope into a manila envelope, then the manila envelope into his suitcase, and placing his suitcase in between himself and the wall of the train.

When Wheeler used the lavatory the following morning, he took the manila envelope out of his suitcase and into the stall with him but mistakenly left it there. He returned and retrieved it, but when he opened it later, the white envelope inside was missing, with the secret hydrogen bomb history inside of it.

The FBI dismantled the train car, searched the entirety of the rail line, tried to track down a list of passengers and conducted investigations on Wheeler and others involved, but their efforts were fruitless. The document was gone.

Wellerstein said the “lurid details” are what made him want to dig further into this story.

“There was one moment where John Wheeler is standing to peer at a guy sitting at a toilet on a train to see if he has a secret document in his hand,” Wellerstein said. “When I read that, I was hooked.”

Though its loss derailed multiple careers and was part of the sequence of events that led to Oppenheimer’s famous security hearing, the mystery of whatever happened to those six pages in the white envelope remains.

“I find it very likely that he did read the document on the train, because his memory of that was very distinct, but then the fuzzy part comes in. Did Wheeler put it back correctly?” asked Wellerstein. “And if he didn’t put it back correctly, what happened to it?”

“My personal favorite theory is that the porter found it and just threw it away, because he would have known there’s no way this would have worked out well for him, and he’d have been better off to just pretend he never saw it,” Wellerstein joked. “I would love for it to be a spy, because that would be much more exciting. But there’s no evidence of that, and there are a lot of reasons to think that’s very improbable.”

As for Wheeler, despite the dire punishments for mishandling nuclear secrets, he got off with only a letter of rebuke from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission.

“He was too valuable as a scientist,” Wellerstein said. “They said they couldn’t punish him without hurting the nuclear program.”

Explore further

Wheeler says FCC won’t allow Internet ‘slow lane’

More information: Alex Wellerstein. John Wheeler’s H-bomb blues, Physics Today (2019). DOI: 10.1063/PT.3.4364

Provided by American Institute of Physics

Citation: How the U.S. hydrogen bomb secrets disappeared (2019, December 4) retrieved 4 December 2019 from https://phys.org/news/2019-12-hydrogen-secrets.html

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#Physics

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