#So Twelve looks like a mix of all of the users that wrote them and is nonbinary

[not-that-dillinger]

Send in ‘Mask’s Calling’ to meet a muse I’m on the fence about roleplaying as.

"Are you alright, miss?" Eos asked, as he pulled the program from the rubble.

He and his brothers had been investigating... rumors of hostile programs from a different system on their user's command when the sector they were on just collapsed around them, and Eos and his brothers found themselves at the bottom of a very, very large abyss.

Two other voices, one sounding almost exactly the same as Eos's, and one sounding... similar, started bickering behind them, and Eos's head snapped toward them, where two programs—one that looked almost exactly the same as Eos, except older, and another that shared some of their features—were squabbling.

Eos sighed in exasperation, and turned back to the stranger. "Excuse me a moment," he said, and marched toward his siblings. "Seriously, you two?" he demanded. "We're in the middle of a disaster, and you can't stop squabbling like feral bits? Knock it off."

Eos's twin pointed at the other program. "They started it!" he whined.

"Nu-uh!" the other program protested.

From how they both were acting, it was clear that despite looking the youngest, Eos was the oldest of his group.

Eos sighed. "I don't care who started it, I need both of you to stop squabbling and start helping us figure out how to get out of here." He paused for a moment, then turned to the fourth and final member of his party, another clone, except even older in appearance than the one that had been arguing, who had been silent through the entire thing. "Conch, take Twelve, go see if you can find any other survivors toward the other end of the chasm. Heli, you're staying with me."

"But!" Heli, the one that looked like Eos's clone, protested.

"If you're going to act like a beta, you get treated like a beta," Eos said. He grabbed Heli by the hand, and walked back to the other program. He sighed. "Sorry about that," he said. "They're not usually this bad, but we haven't heard from our user in much longer than usual, we're usually in almost constant communication, so things are a bit tense right now. But... are you alright? I have patches if you need them."

[umbran6]

The Argument Against Caleo

Spoilers up to Blood of Olympus and beyond. Beware! (Or not, the book series has been out for a few years, get over it). I wrote this after seeing a user wondering why people didn’t like Caleo, or in some cases, hated it. Here, I want to explain the answer as much as possible while doling out my own points. 

One of the main grievances I have as a fan of Leo Valdez would be the ship Caleo, or Leo x Calypso. It’s a complicated ship, to say the least, with multiple issues that make me question why people like the ship. And I admit it, they initially had some chemistry, but there’s multiple issues that Uncle Rick produced through making such a relationship that makes it extremely open to criticism, criticism which I will explain through this post.

One of my main points against them is that the ship was created on a very limited time scale. Although we aren’t given an exact date to date of when Leo and Calypso met to when they fell in love, we can safely estimate it to be a week at best. Such a limited amount of time from going through the multiple stages of a relationship already stresses the limits of the suspension of disbelief.

A counterexample would be Percabeth, or Percy x Annabeth. Throughout the series, we aren’t introduced to them being romantically involved until the Titan’s Curse, which was two years after they met. Specifically, this is brought up by Aphrodite, the goddess of love herself. Admittedly, Percy and Annabeth were twelve years old when they first met, when romance was definitely out of the picture, especially with a quest to get the Master Bolt.

However, from there we get to see multiple examples of their character depth, ranging from their respective fatal flaws to their ambitions, hopes and dreams, and their friendship. We get to see the slow build up of their chemistry, which was a really good writing move on Uncle Rick’s part. These characters took their sweet time to get to where they wanted to go, and despite the false romantic lead of Rachel, they still got together.

On the other hand, we don’t see enough of this between Leo and Calypso — we only see one book where they interacted with each other in The House of Hades, and that was only for a handful of chapters. While they are definitely older so they can jump straight to romance (some may say too old, but I’ll get to that) its still a pretty huge gap to jump through without making it stick. This makes it hard to root for a ship when it is built on a rather faulty foundation from the ‘they just met’ to ‘they get together’, especially when they don’t have a lot of events to show their chemistry.

Which brings me to Ogygia, which has raised a few red flags for me when looking at it from a retrospective point of view. Now, we know what the main issue of the island is that the hero who landed on said island can’t leave until Calypso falls in love with them. And we’ve seen this with Percy during the Battle of the Labyrinth, where he lands in the island and Calypso falls in love with him while tending to his wounds from, you know, being erupted from freaking Mt. St. Helens. Needless to say, this falling in love with each other montage happened quickly to the point of suspicion, which sets up the complication that Calypso and Leo might have fallen in love due to magical intervention.

And hear me out, because although this  might be a pretty big pill to swallow, we have evidence for this through Percy. It only takes one chapter for Calypso and Percy to meet, and the next he’s willing to consider leaving Camp Half-Blood and Annabeth behind to live on the island when Hephaestus gives him the choice to leave Ogygia or stay. We don’t even get an explanation on why Percy considered giving it all up just so he can be with her. All we know is, girl meets boy, now they want to live on an isolated island forever. It’s especially absurd considering Percy’s hamartia (fatal flaw) is freaking loyalty to those he loves.  Needless to say, It’s a huge YIKES, especially when we apply it to Leo and Calypso. 

It also raises the possibility that the romantic relationship between them is doomed to failure. And if you guys want to fight me on this, let’s look at Jason and Piper, a couple whose relationship started with a similar foundation. Piper had romantic memories implanted into her brain by Hera through the use of the Mist, while Jason was reduced to a Tabula Rasa (a blank slate for those who lack culture) by said goddess. They broke up before the Trials of Apollo because it was clear that when the dust settled, Piper had been aware that their romance was a lie and that their intentions to stay together was a mix of delusion and pressure from freaking Aphrodite. Leo and Calypso get together under what is arguably a very similar set of conditions if Ogygia’s magic had any influence on their relationship, and that this magic could wear off if given enough time. 

Third, and here’s a pretty big one for me, would be Calypso’s character, mainly because there are a lot of unfortunate implications attached to it. In The Blood of Olympus, she was turned into the divine equivalent of Princess Peach, with Leo being her Mario (except he saves her with a badass metal dragon). Its extremely unnecessary to make a character, especially as one such as Calypso, get  turned into the typical reward of a B-Class action movie. It’s insulting and puts her up as a trophy, a narrative that is definitely not ok by any means necessary.

In another direction, Calypso is also really, really worrying when things don’t go get her way. First, let’s look at The Odyssey, the first myth she pops up. Calypso had imprisoned Odysseus for ten years on her island until Hermes said to let him go, and although it gives them plenty of time to fall in love, it also raises the implications of stockholm syndrome. Then we’ve got the fact that Calypso cursed Annabeth out of spite, implicitly saying that she wished the daughter of Athena would suffer the same isolation that she did, which came to reality when Percy and Annabeth met the Arai in Tartarus. And Annabeth wasn’t even aware that she was still in Ogygia, much less intentionally intervened in the matter. When Percy left Ogygia, rather than be angry at Percy, Calypso cursed Annabeth out of all people to suffer the same loneliness and misery she went through. That’s some Hera at her worst levels of spite. 

Through such evidence we can see that Calypso is extremely wrathful towards those who break her heart even though they don’t want to. It certainly implies that Calypso isn’t in a good state of mind, and could easily repeat said actions if provoked. We could almost compare it to Medea and the original Jason, but at least in that case, Medea has every right to be pissed off at Jason and take her revenge. Calypso’s curse and how she handles things certainly implies a level of immaturity that would end in disaster if they broke up.

One issue that, I’ll admit is more from my personal point of view is that the ship took a lot of Leo’s character and threw it in the garbage in Blood of Olympus. Though we see him do a lot of stuff behind the scenes, the fact that its all for the goal of reaching Calypso just reduced him to someone who is more focused on love than, you know, fighting the evil goddess that was responsible for killing his mom and getting sweet sweet revenge. While the revenge plot can be cliched sometimes, it can be played well, while romance and the typical ‘always save the girl’ trope is just overdone. If Leo had been allowed to, you know, be more focused on other things rather than Calypso, we could have seen a lot more variety in his character.

For example as one of the possible character arcs he could’ve gone through, Leo has always been alone among the couples, often being isolated. Heck, Nemesis herself stated that he would always be the seventh wheel, and that he would never find a place among his brethren. Though some fellow tumblr users have taken this in multiple ways, either saying that he should learn to be happy by himself or that he is socially isolated in the Argo II because of these romantic relationships (I prefer a mix of both). Uncle Rick just giving him a girlfriend seems like taking the easy way out of solving such an issue and abandoning what could’ve been a rather interesting character arc. The relationship isn’t a bad thing if we remove some of the unfortunate implications, but it is a bad way to end what is a complex and realistic problem for a character and in some cases maybe possible in real life.

One more minor but still yikes worthy point is that there’s a huge age gap between them. We’re not talking about the ‘Hazel is 15 and Frank is 17 and in one year that’ll be a problem because then Hazel will be jailbait’ age gap. And even then, we can argue that Hazel is older since she is chronologically ninety-one years old. No, Calypso is older by millennia in terms of mindset and body due to the perks of being a goddess, while Leo is sixteen.

God-to-Mortal relationships are already complicated, even with emotionally and socially well-functioning adults. The fact that Leo is underage, inexperienced with romance (despite his flirting, Calypso was his first kiss), and has been through a freaking ton of trauma in his youth, does not make this okay. At best, they’re both mutually interested in each other but may have different expectations when it comes to a relationship. At worst, Calypso is taking advantage of a boy just so she can get out of Ogygia and possibly dumping him later on like the wrapping of a candy bar. Even though Calypso lost her immortality during The Trials of Apollo, that doesn’t even compensate for the immense age gap alongside Leo’s guilt at the possibility that he might’ve been responsible for her losing said immortality.

Oh, and about Leo... I’m a fan of him, but I can admit that he is in a bad spot both mentally and emotionally throughout the series. He’s lost his mom due to a mix of his own powers and Gaea’s trickery, and never had the chance to fully process that event and come to terms with it. The foster home system alongside his own trauma has forced him to hide his emotions through a façade of happiness and jokes when it’s quite clear to me he needs a therapist, stat. He's also run away from several foster homes, implying this means he was and still is being affected by the event. His mask is still on during The Blood of Olympus considering he hid a lot of things from Piper and Jason.

Speaking about them, not helping this matter is the fact that he’s rather isolated in terms of friendships since Jason and Piper, his supposed best friends are more interested in locking lip rather than, you know, actually hanging out with each other.  He doesn’t have good friendships with the rest of the Seven, and the closest ones he does have is with Hazel and Frank. And even then they start off in the wrong spot since Frank is very insecure about possibly losing Hazel to him during Mark of Athena while Hazel in the meantime, is also dealing with the fact that he is the descendant of her possible boyfriend Sammy Valdez. 

This could indirectly have made him desperate for affection since he has nobody else to confide in during the rest of the series, which is a bad mental state to be in when one lands on Ogygia, the island that we’ve seen could possibly force two people to fall in love with each other. A romantic relationship is not something that he needs or something that will help him in the future. He needs more than that, and having him in one that could end in disaster is the last thing he needs. 

And that does not make him a bad person, much less a bad character. While some who are similarly emotionally and socially isolated may turn to violence or creepy behavior on those they want affection from, Leo does not do that to the other characters. It just means that he as a character needs more time to recover and develop before we go giving him romantic relationships, much less one with Calypso.

That’s not to say that they don’t have some things in common. Both are starved for love and affection, with Calypso being constantly rejected by heroes while Leo was rejected by foster homes and his own family. It’s a trait that they have in common, but it shouldn’t be the only thing that they have in common, especially since it is laced with a trauma that is clear they haven’t had help processing. They need to develop more as characters and as friends before they should be paired together.

So… yeah. The Caleo relationship is, in my eyes, doomed to failure, or at least heavily flawed after taking the above points into account. Uncle Rick, as if seemingly aware of these criticisms, has put the relationship in a rocky place by The Tower of Nero, giving them the possibility of overcoming the above criticisms and their own flaws, or giving fanfic writers an out and pairing Leo with another character or have him single, but happy. Either way, in my opinion Caleo is a bad ship when it comes to how it was created, alongside the flaws and unfortunate implications it has.

While I can see some of the chemistry the ship has, you can’t just use a couple of moments where they get along as evidence that they belong together, especially with the above reasons. That’s like using a band-aid to cover a bullet hole without removing the bullet, stopping the bleeding, and preventing infection. If both characters and their relationship had been given more time to develop, I would understand how they would get together. 

[twitchesandstitches]

HS Humans in Crossthicc - Descriptions!

The humans themselves, along with my headcanons for how they look here. In general, the post-scratch humans are the older generation, from 5 to 10 years older than the pre-scratch humans:

Jane Egbert: She was originally called Jane Crocker, but she has no wish to be associated with Crockercorp, nor her position as the Condesces’ legal heir. Polynesian, a definite BBW and a very strongfat build, she stands more than ten feet tall and is a walking tank and her powers function as this, making her a living wall that ignores all damage and heals what does get through. Crockertier cybernetics are imbedded through her, glowing blue and making her a very obvious cyborg. Likes to use a combat gourmand fork that can turn into a spoon, and she fancies herself a gourmand when it comes to foes. She tends to use her healing powers to restore people to health as a combat medic.

She started the army of chefs that keeps the fleet fed, and wrote up the principles of agriculture and livestock they follow to this day. She’s since become one of the heads of a corporation-analogue called the Carnival Bazaar; the fleet’s source of wealth, where they sell their goods as they travel from world to world. She’s less a CEO and more of an HR department head who keeps people stabilized and counseled, but in practice she runs the whole thing. She’s very close with Steven Universe, the two of them dating from time to time, and they’ve had many children together.

She is clearly mutated with troll mods; her blood is tinted faintly fuchsia, and she has a few mutations indicating her troll-themed genetic mix. She and Feferi are quite close, and the latter is responsible for stabilizing some of Jane’s complications.

John Egbert: A cheerful and helpful guy, and very tiny, standing below five feet tall. Polynesian, chubby, and incredibly solid for it with muscle. He drifts from ship to ship, going wherever he pleases, and proves to be popular wherever he goes and does his best to keep everyone happy. He’s extremely fast and mobile, and surprisingly destructive in a straight fight, using massive hammers bigger than he is.

Dated Vriska at some point and they’re still very close. No one is sure how the size difference was coped with but he doesn’t seem to mind being totally dominated by extremely large women.

Dirk Strider: Mechanics expert, roboticist, and key engineer in both shipcraft and mech maintenance, though he declines to actually pilot them. Aboriginal, a bit shorter than average (5’6), and has that bishounen ‘thin but pretty and fit’ look. His powers allow him to effect magic directly, and the soul directly; damaging their essence, or turning heroic spirit into raw damage. It gives him a great insight into creating AI, which led to the creation of  his… son? Brother? Something? Anyway, that’s where Li’l Hal came from.

Prefers not to put himself out there and likes being a support guy. “I don’t want to be the guy to kill the bad guy. I want to make the weapon that kills the bad guy.”

Dave Strider: Studies monsters of all kinds, and is a forensic expert and coroner. He also does part time in one of the many bands the fleet does in their flirtation with being cosmic pop stars. He doesn’t like fighting, but he exhibits absolutely absurd speed related to his growing powers of time travel. Aboriginal, smaller than Dirk (5’4), and on the plump side. MILFs of all kinds gravitate straight towards him in a ‘oh, you POOR Dear…!” way. He is the father of many children now, having a huge weakness for gentle, protective mom-types.

Roxy Lalonde: one of the fleet’s head scientists, heavily influential in their alchemizer program, and loves messing with bio mods for fun. Her playful demeanor hides how frighteningly smart she is, and she loves messing with people on account of it. (NOT an alcoholic of any sort here, either.) When she is involved in fighting, she uses high-powered rifles and does sniper duty. Indian, a classic hyper curvy hourglass and about seven and a half feet tall. She can manifest objects out of raw magic, but this takes a lot of work and requires her to understand them in and out. Has a lot of cat-themed mods that sometimes give her pink fur, a tail, cat ears, and functional claws.

A true mom friend to everyone around her, Roxy is a sweet and good-natured person who loves helping people and being a Science Hero FOR GREAT JUSTICE; she’s very passionate about what the fleet does, and actively encourages everyone to be more proactively heroic. She fears that she has a tendency towards addiction, and is compelled to mass produce children whenever she has the chance, with the possibility that she has an integrated alchemizer to ‘produce’ items herself through her powers.

Rose Lalonde: Expert in magical power and theory, specializing in arcane magic, but she also has channeled power from mysterious eldritch entities that are nonetheless apparently benign. They have left their mark on her; while she looks human if she concentrates, in her true form she is a monstrous eldritch monster girl, with tentacles for legs, glowing multiple rows of white eyes, and immense spookiness. Probably at least Roxy’s height, but can be a lot bigger as she powers up. Hard to say how her powers will interface in the AU, but she is certainly an EXTREMELY powerful magic user, on par with a D&D Warlock, and takes a methodical, experimental approach to her powers. Indian, pear-shaped, with very large hips, massive butt, thick tentacles, and large breasts. She tends to favor more inhuman mods, for more multiple… well, everything if she wants it. Her weapons of choice are a pair of deadly wands that channel her magic, and can stab really well too.

Rose is deeply spooky to a lot of people, and she enjoys unsettling others. She gets annoyed that John, Dave and the others don’t fall for it so much anymore. She has a close romance with Kanaya, whom she has had many children with, and they enjoy a mutual spooky aesthetic of eldritch/vampire goodness. She is deeply fascinated by the mystery of what happened in the ancient cataclysm, and has resolved to solve it.

Jake Harley: An explorer and famous fleet scout, often flying off on his own to report on new worlds and see if there is first contact to be made. Able to channel optimism and happiness into raw destructive power over a period of time, he’s situationally very powerful, but tends to be a glass cannon, easily taken out once he Does The Thing. He’s First Nations, and a massive super-cute beefcake of a man; he flexes and people thank him. Likes to use a pair of customized pistol-lasers that channel his powers. About seven feet tall. He may have some genuine angelic essence in him, which can be very spooky.

Jade Harley: A monstrously big and obscenely powerful amazon, so heavily modded that she looks like a werewolf girl even when not monsterized. Her heart has been replaced with an infinite energy generator, she calls it the green sun,, and it is powered by her own resolve, and she uses it to channel a wide variety of technologies secretly fueled by her own powers. She can alter space in many ways; shrinking herself and others, growing herself and others, opening portals, or unleashing incredibly destructive blasts of green energy. She is obscenely powerful, and one of the fleet’s heaviest hitters, bar none. She can even channel it into herself, giving her immense strength or size. She is First Nations, standing… however big she wants, but often over twelve feet high. Muscular and amazonian, she has absolutely enormous curves but focuses on gigantic breasts. Her canine mods are advanced enough that she has furry skin, canine features, and can generally pass as a low-level beastwoman. One of her favorite alternate forms is a dogtaur form. Jade turns Grimbark whenever she uses enough power, but this is more of a super mode, not a bad thing, and she just becomes a lot more aggressive and domineering.

Working heavily in the science departments, Jade is a major leader in the fleet, and a powerful witch as well. She takes a more carefree approach to her magic, doing whatever seems like an intriguing idea for her spells; an artist, to Rose’s technician. She is one of the most prominent human characters here, and her raw power is simply awe inspiring. She’s very sweet, if prone to sassiness and a short temper. She’s rather dominant with boys, too.

Joey Harley: She has no conflict with Jake here, so did not take another name out of spite. A talented dancer and xenopsychologist, she prefers to do ‘real work’ and research, but enjoys dancing and regularly demonstrates her skills at the fleet’s clubs. She is First Nation, with a bulk similar to Jade’s but slimmer, with smaller breasts; instead most of her curve mass is in her cybernetically enhanced legs, which are absurdly powerful. Her kicks are very strong, she can leap great distances, and she augments them further with special weaponized shoes with built-in cannons. Nine feet tall.

Jude Harley: A self-proclaimed strategist and existential threat theorist, he is deeply worried about the threats that the Ringers have supposedly seen, and organizes a group of people who are trying to figure it out as well. He otherwise works in the Zoo, the facility where the pet monsters, summon creatures, and powerlink beasts are cared for, and he happily tends towards the avian ones. He’s made a lot of friends with Flying-type Pokemon and avian Digimon as well. Built on broadly the same lines as Jake but shorter (a little under seven foot) and very softly built.

Li’l Hal: Dirk’s robotic offspring, and while an AI, he can upload himself into robotic bodies as he pleases. He and Dirk have a very complicated relationship, and with being often subject to harassment, oppression and worse by humans, he has a very negative attitude towards organics in general from sheer spite. He’s warmed up a bit since joining the fleet… to just being instantly suspicious of anyone outside the fleet. He’s in sincere love with Jane and Roxy, but doesn’t seem to realize it. He’s quite close with the other robots of the fleet, idolizing the Dinobots as liberators of robotkind, and wishes to one day upload into a Cybertronian frame.

Unexpectedly, he has his own share of unusual abilities unrelated to whatever body he is using. This appears to be related to soul-themed abilities; he can weaponize the essence of genuinely living beings, or tear organics apart at the very soul. While Dirk can destroy in ways he can’t Hal’s actual combat powers are superior to Dirk’s.

Squarewave and Sawtooth: Hal’s robot brothers, and performers in the fleet’s various bands, pop groups, metalheads, and other musical interests. Both of them are loyal to Dirk and are generally considered legally Striders, and think Hal needs to calm down on the ‘meatbags are out to GET US’ front. Squarewave uses destructive sonic attacks… by yelling really, really loud, and comes off as an earnest kid brother. Sawtooth, on the other hand, is just plain cool, everyone wishes they were as cool as that. It must be a Strider thing. He employs integrated weaponry and sonic weapons, often narrating his actions in musical form and working it into his performance.

The Consorts: A wide variety of strange creatures Roxy and Jade created, producing happy little creatures modeled after the canon consorts, and they seem happy to act as servants to the fleet as a whole, bustling in and tidying up or serving people, washing people in the communal baths, and so forth. The fleet tried to get them to be more independent and less servile, but they refused to listen, so they’re just left to their own cheerful devices.

[dorktapus42]

Deception on the Other Side

I suggest listening to The Other Side from the Greatest Showman while listening to this. You know, if you want to and all...

Here ya go: 

https://soundcloud.com/yongkiisolendra/the-greatest-showman-the-other-side?in=brianna-lopez-student/sets/a-million-dreams

Words: 1000 exactly. Sweet. 

Pairings: None. 

Summary/Warnings: 

- This is Roman and Deceit. No pairings, Deceit is very manipulative and jazz, and is getting to Roman through a medium he loves: Songs and Movies. 

Here we gooooooo....!

(Sorry Mobile users!)

The dirt path crunched under Roman’s feet as he walked the forest road. He wished he had a horse. He would have summoned one, but a), he needed some exercise, which was great and all, and b), his calves would look fantastic after this, and that was what mattered.

He heard the sound of footstep behind him. He stopped. He hadn’t put enemies in this part of the journey. Was it one of the others? He drew his sword just in case. A familiar voice sung some lyrics.

“Right here, right now. I put the offer out. I don’t want to chase you down, but I know you see it.~”

He spun around on his heel in a moment, kicking up dust, surprised to see Deceit behind him in his normal form. What the heck-

“You run with me, and I can cut you free- out of the treachery and walls you keep in.~”

Oh. this was from The Greatest Showman.This was a surprise duet. Thomas must have the song stuck in his head. This wouldn’t be the first time.

“So trade that typical for something colourful, and if it’s crazy, then live a little crazy. You can play it sensible, King of Conventional, or you can risk it all you see.~”

Why was he singing? I mean- Roman loved the song, so he wouldn’t argue, but this was a little OOC for Jack the Fibber over there.

“Don’t you wanna get away from that same old part you gotta play, ‘cause I’ve got what you need to come with me and take a ride- it’ll take you to the other side.~”

He started humming the beat absentmindedly, dismissing his sword like a snake under a spell of a charmer. There was no danger, now was there? The man before him was rather kind to pander to his love of music, if a bit creepy with his snake face.

“Cause you can do like you do, or you can do like me. Say in the cage, or you’ll finally take the key. Oh, damn, suddenly you’re free to fly- it’ll take you to the other side.~”

His part was now. He stepped closer to Deceit, who was wearing his signature smile.

“Okay, my friend. You wanna cut me in. Well I hate to tell you now it just won’t happen. So thanks, but no, I think I’m good to go. ‘Cause I quite enjoy the life you say I’m trapped in.*”

He smiled back, shrugging and getting into the character.

“Now I admire you, and that whole show you do. You’re on to something, really it’s something. But I live among the swells, we don’t pick up peanut shells. I’ll have to leave that up to you.*”

He made a hat appear and tipped it towards the snake. Nobody said he didn’t have style even when confronted with the Lyin’ King and surprise performances. He’d nailed that.

“Don’t you know that I’m okay with this uptown part I get to play, ‘cause I got what I need and I don’t want to take the ride- I don’t want to see the other side. So go and do like you do, ‘cause I’m to do like me. Ain’t in a cage so I don’t need to take the key. Oh, damn, can’t you see I’m doing fine- I don’t need to see the other side.*”

Dee cut in, looking like he was really offering a deal. He had to do more of this with Lies and Dolls- he was really good at this.

“Is this really like how you’d want to spend your days- whisky, misery; parties and plays.~”

“If I were mixed up with you, I’d be the talk of the town, disgraced and disowned, another one of the clowns.*”

“But you would finally live a little, finally laugh a little, just let me give you the freedom to dream a little. Wake you up, and cure your aching. Take your walls, and start them breaking. Now that’s a deal that seems worth taking. But I guess I’ll leave that up to you.~”

He held out one gloved hand to be shaken. Roman turned away, pausing for the correct amount of time.

“Well, it’s intriguing, but to go would cost me greatly. So what percentage of the show would I be taking?~”

“Fair enough. You’d want a piece of all the action. I’d give you seven, we could shake and make it happen.~”

Roman laughed. “I wasn’t born this morning. Eighteen would be just fine-*”

Deceit’s eye glinted as he smirked. “Why not just go ahead and ask for nickels on the dime.~”

“Fifteen.*”

“I’d do eight.~”

“Twelve.*” He narrowed his eyes.

“Maybe nine.~” Dee looked flippant.

“Ten.*”

Dee held out his hand again, eye glinting. Roman took it. They both smiled, although Deceit’s was a little too manipulative for comfort, and his yellow eye flashed ominously. There was a pause, as if to suggest turning back. Roman was too caught up in the song.

They both sang the last few verses, hands still joined as the forest and road slowly evaporated.

“Don’t you wanna get away to a whole new, part you get to play.=“

“-‘cause I’ve got what you need to come with me and take a ride-~”

“It’ll take you to the other side.=”

“So if you do like I do.~”

“So if you’re to do like me.*”

“Forget the cage, cause we know how to make the key. Oh, damn, suddenly we’re free to fly, we’re going to the other side.=”

“So if you do like I do.~”

“To the other side-*”

“So if you’re to do like me.~”

“To the other side-*”

“Cause if you do-~”

“-we’re going to the other side, we’re going to the other-=”

Roman yelped as yellow glowing cables wrapped around his arms.

“Side.~” Deceit finished with a smile. “Oh, Roman, don’t you know to read the fine print before agreeing to a contract?”

Roman paled. What had he done?

———

I wrote two more parts on Ao3 here if you want to go check them out!

https://archiveofourown.org/works/15767907/chapters/36678186

[easilydistractedandamused]

In case anyone doesn't want to go to A03 to read it, here is Chapter 1 of Billy Bat Son

Justice League War AU: Cyborg is the only one that knows Shazam is Billy Batson, not even Batman knows, because of this he stubbornly refuses to tell the magic user which becomes a problem when he receives a letter that tells him about his son, one William Joseph Batson

Billy Bat Son

Chapter 1: The Letter

Ebenezer had been cleaning out the attic, finding things to throw away from his sentimental half brother and his wife that had been left to him at their death, when he found the letter. Normally, he wouldn’t have given it a second glance, but the name on it promised to be very important, and after reading it, he couldn’t help but grin.

This proved to be very promising, far more than that lowly inheritance he had gotten from the brat, but now, he proved useful.

All he had to do was get him back from whatever foster home he was staying in now and as dimwitted as that kid was, he probably would believe any lie that Ebenezer came up with.

Cackling a little to himself, he placed the letter in a larger envelope and mailed it to the one it was addressed to twelve years ago. Why his stupid sister in-law couldn’t do it, he’d never know, she’d have been rich.

 “My,” Alfred said as he looked at the day’s letter. “We haven’t received a letter from Marilyn Ordway in a long time. I wonder what this is for,” he said blinking at the sight, but like a good butler, he brought it to the master of the house and didn’t even give it a second glance.

“Who’s Marilyn Ordway?” Damian asked after his task was finished and he returned to his chores.

“An old acquaintance of your fathers,” he said.

“The same way mother was an ‘acquaintance’?” Damian asked in a way that made the old butler wished he was more like a normal child, who knew less about adult activities (of all kind, really) then he did.

“He met her while he was traveling the world,” he informed the young master.

 Taking a deep, shuddering breath, Bruce closed his eyes as he hunched over the letter in his hands before opening it again and rereading the parts that mattered. Not the more recent letter from a greedy man that most likely only found this because it was addressed to him, anyone else and they’d have ignored it entirely no doubt, callously informing him to the death of the writer of the older letter, of the person who was the only reason he’d ever opened it in the first place.

Dear Bruce,

I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve written to you again after that pregnancy scare we had. It turns out there was a mix up and my son, now two years old as I write this letter to you, is yours. I’ve already included the results in the letter, in case you don’t believe me (don’t think I’ve forgotten who asked me to get that paternity test in the first place, Mr. Wayne). They’re better labeled this time, with that pseudonym you used at the time in case you forgot, but I still think that pseudonym you used was completely ridiculous you paranoid mess of a man.

I’ve considered not telling you this for two years already, Bruce, but C.C convinced me that you deserve to know. Even though I honestly want Billy to have nothing to do with you, you deserve to know that you have a son, a family, and it’s wrong of me to keep that from you, I know that, but the man I met traveling the world...the rich playboy that returned to Gotham, he’s not a father figure.

C.C and I are going to raise this child as our own, and we’re already so happy Bruce. I know that you’re a family man deep down, I saw it in Nepal when you let down your guard. You want to spoil someone and shower them with affection to alleviate some of that strange guilt you carry around on you. A son would be the easiest choice, wouldn’t it? It’s practically obligatory.

But no, I don’t want that, Bruce. I don’t want you in my life, as cruel as it sounds. I don’t want Billy to doubt himself years in the future, wondering if his father truly loves him. I can’t put him through that, Bruce, and I hope you understand. By God, do I hope you understand.

Because Bruce, you frighten me, sometimes, with how intense you get. I know if you put your mind to it, you can get anything you want. You could even take Billy from us with the amount of lawyers you possess. It’s why I’m so reluctant to write this letter. I don’t think it’ll make it out the door at this rate, but, if somehow, years down the road maybe, I manage to work up the courage to bring this you or something happens to me and C.C, even though I feel it will never happen to us but if there is one thing you taught me, Bruce, it’s that no one is invulnerable, no one is ever truly safe.

I hope I’m still not as unbearably naïve as you thought I was, Bruce, because even though I feel safe with C.C, I am aware that accidents happen, that bad things happen to people. Which, now that I’m thinking about it, could happen in so many ways that it’s frightening, actually. I don’t know how you live like it Bruce, pessimist that you are, always thinking of the bad things that could happen.

His name is William Joseph Batson, he is currently two years old and the happiest child I have ever met. He was born on January 24, 1998

Even though I want you out of our life, Bruce, if something happens to us I can’t be selfish any longer. He’ll need someone to take care of him.

You may hate me for what I’ve done, the secret I’ve kept from you for however long I keep it. I wouldn’t blame you. But please, Bruce, don’t hate Billy. I don’t ever plan on telling him, so he’ll never know about you. None of this is his fault and the last thing I want is for him to be punished for something I did.

It’s him I fear for the most after all and I can only imagine how difficult it’ll be for him to find this out.

    Marilyn Ordway-Batson

The looping handwriting was just as he remembered it too, he could just see her speaking to him, looking at him with earnest eyes, could see where she had paused to gather strength or figure out the proper way to word it, the hesitation she must’ve felt before coming to her decision as she wrote the letter to never really send it to him because he would have. He would have read that letter and tried to barge into her life anyway he could have, fought her for him even, before the work consumed him. He didn’t blame her for thinking he wasn’t father material, he really wasn’t. Even after all this time, he still wasn’t.

“Father?” Damian asked knocking on the door. “Is something wrong?” he asked.

“I’m fine,” he said gruffly.

“Does this have to do with that letter from Ordway?” he asked, sharp as always.

“She’s dead, apparently,” he said leaning back in his seat, gathering himself. “Her brother-in-law sent her last letter when he found it,” he said looking at the test results, at the chemical analysis.

“Hoping to get into your good graces?” Damian asked with an amused smirk as he leaned against the doorframe, arms crossed over his chest.

“Yeah, the usual, really,” he said looking at Ebenezer’s letter with the scratchy writing, saying he had a hard time raising his nephew with how weak his body was, asking for help to raise him, money to be sent over. He wasn’t outright demanding money for his son, but he wasn’t very subtle either. “But Marilyn never cared about that, really,” he said and removed the picture that had been included. “She wanted to tell me about her son, gushing over him, really,” he lied as he showed his son an image of his grinning brother, who had Bruce’s blue eyes.

“I take it she died before she could send it?” Damian asked as he accepted it.

“No, she decided not to. Twelve years ago, I had her take a paternity test when she first contacted me. She told me it was negative and I backed out of her life entirely so she could marry her fiancé,” he said, looking at his son carefully. “Turns out, it was actually positive,” he said and green eyes widened in shock and Damian was looking at the picture more carefully now that he knew it wasn’t just some random kid.

“Why would she lie to you?” Damian asked, confused.

“It wasn’t originally a lie, apparently, the results somehow got all swapped. She sent me a copy of the results so I’d know she wasn’t lying. I used a pseudonym at the time to prevent it from reaching the news,” he said sliding the paper over to him. Paranoid mess of a man, he mentally scoffed. She had no idea what it was like being as famous as him, as this was before becoming Batman. If his name was involved in a paternity test, everyone would’ve heard about it as it would’ve leaked from somewhere.

“So, I have an actual brother?” Damian asked him.

“You have plenty of brothers,” Bruce argued like he usually did. “But yes, you have one more older brother,” he said.

“What do you plan on doing?” Damian asked.

“I plan on having showing Alfred the letters while I do some research,” he said standing up, placing the papers away, including the result.

“You're keeping me out of this?” he demanded.

“I’m not keeping you out of this, Damian. Currently, there’s not a lot to do. When I figure out my next plan of action, I’ll tell you,” he said and Damian could tell Bruce was telling the truth, for one, as he could’ve easily kept it hidden from him with ease. He certainly wouldn’t have pried too much, but Bruce chose to tell him. Most likely because they would be gaining a new guest in their rooms soon, if Damian was judging things correctly.

[stretchjournalemerson]

Technology and Social Media as Modes of Conversation for Underrepresented Communities: An In-depth Look at the Importance of YouTube within the LGBTQ+ Community

By Kathleen Grillo -

“On September 23, 2018, ironically Bisexual Visibility Day, I sat with my suitemate on her bed while another suitemate of ours stood against the closed door. Then, I told them I was, and to clarify still am, bisexual. The rest of the night I came out to four other suitemates.”

On September 23, 2018, ironically Bisexual Visibility Day, I sat with my suitemate on her bed while another suitemate of ours stood against the closed door. Then, I told them I was, and to clarify still am, bisexual. The rest of the night I came out to four other suitemates. The previous night at midnight, I had come out to my best friend over text, too afraid to tell her over facetime. Over the course of the next few weeks, I would go on to tell those closest to me. Today, I am still telling people. People think you come out once. I thought you came out once. You tell one person and then expect the rest of the world to just know, but I, and many others, are wrong. I will continue to tell people I am bisexual for years. Maybe the rest of my life. There will always be someone else to tell. Coming out is different for everyone. For some, they really do come out once. For others such as myself, they know they will come out many times throughout their life.

I first thought I was bi when I was twelve years old, but quickly dispelled the thought when my mom told me it was normal to think girls were pretty. Little did she know I’d imagined kissing them. The thought was gone though, and I continued with life. That is, until November of junior year when my best friend came out to me. She’d known her whole life, and she had been wanting to tell me since freshman year when we met. That day on the bus ride home, and on the bus ride home for the next week, I questioned myself again. No, I thought, I am not gay. Time passed. I was straight, but I was supportive. I always had been.

Then, I went to college, a place of discovery, where you meet new people and try new things. Maybe, like me, you live in a new city. As cliche as it is to say, college really does teach you things about yourself. For me, that meant re-evaluating my sexuality. Once again, I returned to that questioning. This time, though, I got a different answer. No longer did straight feel right, but bisexual was starting to. Looking back, there were clues scattered throughout my adolescence, ones I didn’t see until questioning. In those weeks of inner reflection, when I was too afraid to talk to anyone I knew, I turned to YouTube. I listened to queer music and watched the respective music videos. I watched coming out videos, listened to people’s stories. How did they know? When did they come out? How did they come out? Am I apart of this community?

...

Dr. Sherry Turkle, a Harvard graduate, is known for her work as a psychologist and sociologist. Moreso, she is known for her discussion on the topic of social media and technology. In 1996, she wrote a book about the up and coming technology which led her to be displayed proudly on the front of Wired magazine. More recently, Turkle spoke for TED.com, a popular website containing speeches on ranging topics and featuring a wide selection of speakers. Turkle was there to speak about technology once again. This time, she was further discussing her research on the modern generation and their addiction to technology, to social media. Texts. Tweets. Notifications. She claims, “I think we're setting ourselves up for trouble -- trouble certainly in how we relate to each other, but also trouble in how we relate to ourselves and our capacity for self-reflection.” She explains that social media is changing how we think, that technology is literally changing our psyche. And Turkle is not wrong; we are ever adapting to the world around us. We learn to split our attention span, to send that text while still listening to our friends. We learn to finish an assignment while also writing notes from a professor’s lecture. Turkle is valid in her argument that, “People want to be with each other, but also elsewhere -- connected to all the different places they want to be.” We do split ourselves across many forms of communication, but Turkle’s argument falters in its ignorance of all sides of social media and technology.

Most people I know would say social media doesn’t inhibit their ability to connect with those around them. In many ways, technology and social media builds connections and enables conversation. Friends text or facetime when they are away at college. Parents call to check in. Classmates work on projects. It is a different type of conversation, but a conversation nonetheless. Even more, Turkle’s argument comes from a place of privilege. In her essay “Always-On/Always-on-You: the Tethered Self”, she says, “Tethered selves come together, but do not speak to each other”, meaning that, because we are connected, or tethered, to our devices, we cannot converse properly with those around us. This assumes that all conversations we want to be apart of are being hosted in real life. But what if that isn’t the case? What if those you identify with aren’t in your real life sphere?

One such community in which this occurs is the LGBTQ+ community. Many individuals who belong to this community, who in this essay will be referred to as queer individuals, turn to the safety and availability of social media. A large platform where this occurs is YouTube, as explicitly explored here. There are many YouTubers, those who create and post videos to YouTube, that are known for their queer content across all ranges, from coming out advice to queer music to queer education. All such YouTubers are real and non-scripted as they are in TV or movies. Because of this need for belonging within the LGBTQ+ community it is clear that “The quick spread of the videos is testament to how many people search for coming out advice, unable to access it through their immediate environment or most media outlets” (Bateman). This quote comes from Jessica Bateman, a writer for Broadly, a subsection of Vice that focuses on unrepresented individuals. In the article, Bateman focuses specifically on the importance of coming out videos, one of the most popular kinds of queer videos on YouTube. Not only do these videos answer questions that many queer individuals are too afraid or unable to ask, but they also provide validation in the form of the video’s creator and in the continued conversation found in the comments section of such videos.

One such Youtuber, whose coming out video has reached over 8.3 million since it was posted on August 7, 2013, is Troye Sivan. His video is one of the most well known in the LGBTQ+ community. Sivan is one of the original “gay YouTubers,” who was openly gay and made videos discussing such topics. In this video, Troye begins by saying, “This is the most nervous I’ve probably ever been in my entire life, but I’m going to deal with it because I have something to tell you guys.” Even Sivan, who had a strong level of support on his channel, was nervous. This point can be extremely validating to individuals who haven’t come out or are trying, and struggling, to do so. This is one example of many as to how these videos can be paramount in the LGBTQ+ community. They provide support and as Bateman says, “Coming out to your parents is never easy, but more and more LGBTQ young people are sharing their experiences on YouTube to ‘show our identities are valid.’" Since his coming out video, Sivan has proved to be influential, continuing his YouTube channel years after the video’s debut. Recently, Sivan is more known for becoming a queer icon as a musical artist.

As mentioned, an important component of these videos is the comments sections. On Sivan’s video, there is a mix of old comments posted when the video was first released and he was little more than a YouTuber, and new comments, posted now with the knowledge of Sivan as an artist and role model. These comments show the personal influence and conversation created outside of the YouTuber that many queer individuals will spend hours scrolling through to find the many other people they identify with. Such comments include, “I am a 60 year old gay man. This was the video I watched the first time I saw you about a year ago. I think you are great. I can't wait to see the movie "Boy Erased". I think your music is beautiful. I have listened to a lot of it. I think you are an inspiration to a lot of people. You may not realize it, but people like you even help older people like me” (Randy D). These videos do not just appeal to a younger generation, but also to anyone who wishes to find validation or education.

They also become a place for people to share their own stories. Most importantly for some, they are safe, anonymous places to do such. This is a crucial component of the online conversation being composed, especially considering the high amounts of mental health problems and suicide among LGBTQ+ individuals. According to the Trevor Project, a national organization that aims to help LGBTQ+ youth through crisis and suicide scenarios, “LGB youth are almost five times as likely to have attempted suicide compared to heterosexual youth” and “...40% of transgender adults reported having made a suicide attempt.” Another comment by user Kristine Jauregui, says,“Im bisexual...but until now im inside the closet waiting for someone to open it. Im scared to come out because I knew already that they're not going to accept me. And lately my mom told me that i need to find my prince but in my mind my prince is a princess.” (Jauregui). The responding comments are full of love and encouragement. The anonymity of social media, although isolating at times, can open people up to talk about things they can’t in real life, or when similar identifying individuals aren’t available in their real life.

Outside of the initial need for coming out and finding validation, is the want for education. Whether a part of the LGBTQ+ community or not, YouTube has become a place for education. Specific queers can find tutorials on packing and binding, practices taken up by many trans individuals, as well as learn the difference between some sexualities and genders and learn more about queer sexual health. One person who has done such is Ash Hardell, a non-binary, trans-masculine, bisexual YouTuber. Not only do they make regular YouTube videos, but they are also the writer of a book called The ABC's of LGBT+. Although, to clarify, the book is published under the name Ashley Mardell, the name they used before getting married and before changing their first name to a more nonbinary one. Hardell explains that the purpose of the book is “to be a detailed guide of many LGBTQIA+ identities and terms with an emphasis on those that are mis- and underrepresented.” The book uses multiple sources, from images to video links to interviews, to explain and educate the many different areas of this community. Hardell perfectly explains why their book is important by saying, “in an attempt to combat erasure and increase general LGBTQIA+ knowledge, this book hopes to offer visibility and a voice to identities that are usually lost and forgotten.”

It is important to Hardell, both in their videos and their book, that proper education is offered to all within this community. Their YouTube channel heavily reflects the ideas presented in the book. They have countless videos targeted for gender education, trans education, and sexuality understanding. There are also many videos that display collaborations with other YouTubers that produce LGBTQ+ content. This opens the conversation to more than just one voice. With something as unique as sexuality and gender, it is extremely helpful for this community to know all of its resources, or at least as many as it can. Outside of queer identifying individuals, these channels that provide education are extremely important for cishets, a term used to mean a cisgendered, heterosexual individual. There are many topics and ideas that become difficult for one to understand unless they themselves have experienced it. YouTubers such as Hardell begin to help “outsiders” understand. Without YouTube and social media, it becomes increasingly more difficult for education to spread. The LGBTQ+ community is just one of many that use these sites to spread their message and gain understanding in such a diverse world.

We all know that it is easier to share or like a tweet or Facebook post, to watch a five minute YouTube video than to read a book or find someone willing to discuss such private matters. When these things are absent, people turn to social media and technology. Yes, as Turkle claims, “Connection is more like a symptom than a cure. It expresses, but it doesn't solve, an underlying problem.” That problem being the fear of loneliness. She argues that we connect when we are alone, but Turkle assumes that the same conversations are being hosted in person as well as online. While this is arguably valid, there are times in which we need to be alone without connecting, there are also times when we need to connect so that we can be alone without feeling lonely. In the LGBTQ+ community, it is very easy to feel lonely, especially if a queer individual has no similar identifying individuals near them. In that absence, social media and YouTube has become a place of validity, representation, and education. People receive answers to questions they are too afraid to ask, see themselves in the stories of others, and find courage in the bravery of role models. Coming out, something that is ongoing for many LGBTQ+ individuals, can be extremely isolating, but YouTubers and the very real people commenting on these videos are a safe haven for many queer youths, and adults. Yes, the kid on their phone while at dinner may be scrolling through Instagram or texting their friends who they’ll see tomorrow anyway, but they might also be scrolling through the comments of their favorite music video by Hayley Kiyoko as they debate telling their parents about their sexuality or their gender or both right then and there. Despite Turkle making a very reasonable claim, she ignores the communities where real-life exchange is not available. And in those circumstances, simple online connection can mean more than any person to person conversation.

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Mary Kovaleski for really pushing us to reach for a conversation we wanted be a part of, no matter how difficult it seemed. I would also like to thank my peers Matthew Pifko who provided useful research and Audrey Iocca who gave me extensive critique. I’d like to thank all the YouTubers who have given the LGBTQ+ community a place to express themselves and have dedicated themselves to improving the community. This work also wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for my family and friends who’ve given me love and encouragement. Lastly, I’d like to thank myself for having the bravery to share a story I’ve never told.

Works Cited

Bateman, Jessica. “How YouTube Videos Changed the Way Young People Come Out.” Broadly,

VICE, 3 Apr. 2017,  broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/8x4gkp/how-youtube-videos-changed-the-way-young-people-come-out

“Facts About Suicide – The Trevor Project.” The Trevor Project,

www.thetrevorproject.org/resources/preventing-suicide/facts-about-suicide/.

HeyThere005. “Ash Hardell.” YouTube, YouTube, www.youtube.com/user/HeyThere005.

Jauregui, Kristine. “Coming Out.” Comments section, YouTube, Apr. 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvzWNwJ41_k .

Mardell, Ashley. The ABC's of LGBT+. Mango Media Inc., 2016.

Person. “Power. Life. Culture. Lore.” Broadly, VICE, broadly.vice.com/en_us.

D, Randy. “Coming Out.” Comments Section, YouTube, 7 Aug. 2013,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoL-MnXvK80.

“Saving Young LGBTQ Lives.” The Trevor Project, www.thetrevorproject.org/.

Sherry Turkle, ‘Always-on/Always-on-you:The Tethered Self.” In Handbook of Communication

Studies, James E. Katz (ed.). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2018.

Sivan, Troye. “Coming Out.” YouTube, YouTube, 7 Aug. 2013,

www.youtube.com/watch?v=JoL-MnXvK80.

Turkle, Sherry. “Transcript of ‘Connected, but Alone?".” TED,

www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together/transcript?language=en#t-294147

. 

[babylolly]

Bad Idea

… or how Theresa became the Queen of Hearts.

Prompt : The Queen of Hearts was not always a heartless killer.

Words : 1361

Author’s note : This si my last solo coming from my account @UnderlandRuler. I based myself on the fact we did not know how the Queen of Hearts became who she is. And this is basically a mix of every Alice in Wonderland versions I know. Using the face of Sebastian Stan even if I wrote the name of Hatter from Burton’s movie… Okay this is totally AU xD

Rating : Mature

Warnings : Mentions of drugs, alcohol, sex and blood.

♕ She was the most beautiful of all. She was the most innocent girl the kingdom ever had. Was… She is no longer what she used to be. No one is what they used to be. Everyone changes. Every second. Every hour. Every day. We change in a moment. This moment is no more. This moment takes with him, a bit of our soul. But for her— the moment did not take a bit of her soul. He took everything that made her unique. Everything people liked in her.

Theresa was the first daughter of the King and Queen of Underland. A land darker than what it seemed at the first look. You may see a lot of colours when you step into this land but this was all a facade. A facade to hide darker, nastier and uglier secrets. No matter how good the King and Queen were, it was not enough. The land was rotten to the core. Either you were a magic creature or a simple human, you could be hiding the most awful corpses in your garden. Literally.

The King and the Queen had twins daughters two years after the birth of Theresa : Mirana and Iracebeth. Mirana was the calm one who preferred to play chess with her twin while, Theresa preferred to run in the garden. She had a friend. He was the son of the court’s Hatter. The Queen loved a good hat and imposed this fashion style to her daughters. The name of the princess’s —only— friend was Tarrant Hightopp. He was a year and half older than Theresa and kept reminded her —friendly— his older age. He always stayed with her. Comforting her when her parents died. Making her laugh when no one else’s could. He was her only friend. The only one she ever had. The only one who did not care about her statue of princess. He never tried to use it for his own purposes.

When they grew up, everyone thought Theresa and Tarrant would get married. Maybe she even thought so when she was alone in her dark room. But the princess thought he liked other girls. After all, he was older than her and handsome. He could have whoever he wanted. Even her sisters who found themselves a passion in hat-making when Tarrant turned around 14. They were too young. So was Theresa but she kept being his friend. To death as they used to swear when they were little.

Theresa felt her feelings changed when she turned 17. Tarrant was no longer the innocent boy she played with in the gardens. He was the perfect portrait of the man she should not fall for. He became a drug user and an alcoholic. He became like everyone in the land but she could not unseen him like who he used to be. Even if she was no fool. Theresa saw who he became… It was too painful to see what all those moments put together had done to him.

Theresa became the Queen of Underland at 21. She was someone else that day. After what happened the night before.

Tarrant came to her room and, told her everything she always wished to hear from him. How beautiful she was and how he wished to marry her. He was telling how much he loved her. They spent so many years playing games together. At the beginning they were innocent and childish. But one day, he became jealous over the princes who came in the kingdom to maybe one day, propose to her. None of them did. Theresa never knew what her friend told them hut it was apparently scary enough for them to leave the hour after. Her uncle who became the ruler of the land until she could become the Queen, was not pleased by what Tarrant was doing to every prince who came for Theresa’s hand. Even if he kept acting like a jealous boyfriend, he never proposed to her. He kept sleeping with women there and there. But now, he was hers. Tarrant was confessing his love to her.

Love— that feeling she always thought was forbidden to her but here it was. Here he was. Tarrant slept in her bed. Nothing happened. They only slept in the same bed.

During the night, Theresa woke up to feel her bed empty. She knew Tarrant had troubles to sleep. He must be walking around the castle, she thought. She heard cries from the room next to hers. Mirana! With what happened to her parents, Theresa ran to her room to see if she was fine but what she found was not what she had wished to see. Her parents were murdered in front of Theresa, and deep down she wished she had found her sister in the same situation. Tarrant in the bed of her own sister. He could have choose whoever he wanted in the castle but, preferred her sister. The two of them together. In the same bed. Giving themselves in the pleasure of flesh.

Tears rolled down her cheeks as she walked back to her room. There, she closed her eyelids but could not sleep any more knowing what is happening just in front of her. He never loved her. He never wished to marry. He only used her to get what he wanted. Her sister. It was her. She should have seen that coming but Theresa had been too blind by her love for this man.

In the morning, she saw a white rose next to her breakfast with a note from the cheater. Theresa asked the guards to find him and take him off of the castle. He had no permission to come back ever. If he did tried to come back, they had the order to take to the prisons and tie him up. The guards would come to her and Theresa would personally take care off him.

She looked at herself in the mirror as the maids get the brunette ready for the ceremony. Her blue eyes fell on her cleavage. The necklace of Tarrant. A white rose. She stopped the maids and took it off. She left in her room and walked out of the room in her red dress. When she came back in her room, a crown was on her head. Now, she had another problem to take care off. Mirana. Her sister.

“ Guards! Put the princess Mirana in prison for traitorous. I will personally judge her so, that no one disturbs me while I talk to her. Do you understand me? ”

Theresa came in the celling of her sister. She smiled to her softly and kneeled down in front of the blonde creature. While the others will see an angel, she saw a demon, a parasite she had to kill before it contaminates everyone. The Queen did not answer to all the questions of her sister. She was acting like an innocent young woman at the perfection. If Theresa did not seen them together, she could have doubt it.

A little knife in her hand, she planted the dagger in her sister’s chest. Theresa’s crimson lips were in Mirana’s ear.

“ You know exactly why you are here whore. ”

Theresa’s tone was as cold as ice. She opened her sister’s chest ans took off her chest from it. Blood was dripping off from the Queen’s pale hand. A smirk on her face she walked back to her room. The heart placed in a little but pretty box with her former lover’s necklace, she asked a guard to deliver it at Tarrant’s address with a simple message.

“ Please, precise him that if he comes back or loves someone ever again, that is what will happen to them. “

Theresa sat on her bed and smiled. The smile who delivers a shiver down your spine. The kind of smile which could freeze your blood.

Not even twelve hours after she became the Queen, Theresa was a new person. No longer blinded by love. No longer innocent and naive. No longer who she used to be. She was now the Queen of Hearts. ♕

[katrinratto]

12 Graphic Design Trends that Will Be Most Influential in 2019

Courtesy Apple

With only moments to grab consumer attention, a compelling design offers the best chance to engage your customers and leave a memorable impression. As we wrote,

Marketing studies show that the average American is exposed to around 5,000 advertisements and brands per day. Out of that veritable flood, they found only 12 made enough of an impact to leave an impression. You can help your business be one of those twelve through effective, attractive design.

What will be trendy and hot in 2019?

Whether you’re looking for a modern logo design for a new business or considering a rebrand, creating or refreshing your product packaging or package graphics, or looking to redesign your company’s website, you should be familiar with these 12 graphic design trends that will be most influential in 2019.

12 graphic design trends and styles that will be most influential in 2019:

Bold typography

Light and dark color schemes

Gradients and duotones

Authentic stock photography

Vivid colors

Open composition

3D

Metallic effects

Fluid and flowing effects

Text on backgrounds

Strokes, stains, and doodles

Pantone color of the year

1. Bold typography

by vontrapp on crowdspring

Typography is a fundamental part of graphic design. As such, it’s no surprise every year that designers take typography in a different direction.

Recently we’ve noticed an increase in the use of type as a bold, often primary element in graphic and web design. Allowing your typography to stand front and center creates a powerful impression.

by thevierde on crowdspring

With advertisers and marketers fighting to stand out in increasingly competitive marketplaces, using distinctive typography can be an effective strategy to make a stronger impact on consumers.

Don’t be afraid to use bright colors, 3D effects, and unusual spacing to further emphasize the boldness of your type.

by elike_smith on crowdspring

The best part about the bold type trend?

It’s surprisingly versatile and works well in a wide variety of mediums.

2. Light and dark color schemes

by akosiaki on crowdspring

Many companies embraced the dark side in the past year.

The latest version of Apple’s Mac OS X (codenamed “Mojave”) has a dark mode, and updated apps from Microsoft, Facebook, Google, and more also incorporated dark color schemes.

by crealine on crowdspring

This trend continues as more companies adopt dark and light colors into their products.

Using light and dark color schemes can give designs a visual pop that helps draw attention.

Whether you want to shine the light or delve into darkness, core design concepts like simplicity and gestalt theory can really make a difference.

But be careful. Dark color schemes might pose readability challenges.

Be wary of the contrast ratio between the color of your text and the background behind it. Online contrast tests like the one offered by WebAIM can help.

Image courtesy of tasteuws.com

3. Gradients and Duotones

by JStyle on crowdspring

Designers tend to have a love-hate relationship with gradients.

If the last year is any indication, all signs point to a giant heart emoji as gradients seem to be everywhere.

Gradients can add a sense of movement and dynamism to design, and companies are tossing out gradients like visual candy.

Check out the use of gradients and duotones in designs from streaming music services like Apple, Spotify, and Pandora.

Other companies are getting in on the multicolored action too (Stripe, tech site The Verge, and mattress retailer Purple, among many others).

If you want to give your brand energy and a youthful vibe, mixing several colors could be what you’re looking for.

Sites like uiGradients  and ShapeFactory’s Duotone have generators that help you test out color combinations. As with light and dark color schemes, be sure your choices have enough contrast so any text you use is still readable.

by delicious_graphics on crowdspring

by flydesignonly on crowdspring

4. Authentic stock photography

At crowdspring, we’re very clear on the limitations of stock art:

It’s generic, lacking in personality, and the very same stock art could and does show up on your competitors’ websites, business cards and logos. It’s one reason that a business owner should never buy logos at so-called “logo stores” that sell pre-made generic tamplates. These are all factors that will weaken and muddy your brand.

Companies are beginning to recognize the limits of stock photography, and many have made efforts to address this.

The trend of “authentic” stock photography – stock photos that seem more genuine or real – is accelerating, as more companies create their own in-house banks of realistic-looking stock photos.

Image courtesy of Uber

Some companies (like Apple) have created their own authentic stock photography for years, while others (like Uber) have made it a key component of their recent rebrands. What companies want are photos that appear to have been taken by a real person.

Instagram may be a big reason why authentic stock photography is on the rise. Consumers can now spot a bad stock photo from a mile away, and many do not trust or appreciate brands that use generic-looking stock in their designs.

The look of authentic stock photography isn’t hard to find: Imagine a very careful curated Instagram influencer’s feed and you’ll get a good idea of what it looks like.

5. Vivid colors

by besartm14 on crowdspring

The use of vivid colors continues the spread of 80s and 90s nostalgia into every nook and cranny of our existence. Companies and brands continue to go bold with their color choices.

Color is an important part of branding and product design. As we wrote:

Color has a deep and often subconscious effect on our behavior. Color is often used to persuade or influence us.

According to a study examining the effect of color on sales, 92.6% of people surveyed by the CCI: Institute for Color Research said that color was the most important factor when purchasing products.

In part, this trend is a continuation of the 80s color palette blown up and updated for a new generation of consumers.

All of the pastel shades have morphed into their brilliant counterparts.

Companies have planted their flags on energetic, eye-catching colors that jump out and grab the viewer’s attention.

Image courtesy of Apple

Apple is one of the most influential companies on the vanguard of what’s on trend for design.

The release of 2018’s brightly colored iPhone XR reflected the growing trend for bold colors.

It’s not just Apple parading a lively palette of hues and shades. Nike, Adidas, and other clothing companies also tapped into vivid colors for their marketing efforts as well as their products.

Image courtesy of Nike

6. Open composition

Image courtesy of Magic Leap

It used to be that designs were bound by frames, but designers have increasingly broken free and this will continue into 2019.

Open composition designs utilize every part of the canvas. Online, these can be websites that scroll in all directions or advertisements where elements seem to extend past the edge of the image.

by mandex on crowdspring

Websites are one place where this effect can be quite spectacular, especially when its combined with a user’s action like scrolling or clicking.

The Magic Leap website is a great example of this, where whales move in and out of view.

Scrolling zooms out, showing that there’s much more to see that was out of view.

It’s a powerful effect and very on brand for a company focused on alternative reality products.

Your brand might benefit from adding a zoom effect inside of an airy, open composition. It adds a spacious feel and can be very effective when done correctly.

7. 3D

by MadisonFriday on crowdspring

With the steady march of alternative and virtual reality into the mainstream comes the growing use of 3D as a design element. 2019 will be big for designs with isometric, extruded, and 3D components.

Advances in browser technology enable designers to bring 3D elements to their websites. Extending design into the third dimension brings its own set of challenges, but it can (literally) bring some much-needed depth to your brand.

Courtesy Lyft

Brands like Lyft use 3D in the form of isometric illustrations to bring a different feel to their brand. It’s an effective technique to give simple illustrations a more sophisticated look.

But remember – it’s important to use these types of effects sparingly.

Courtesy Apple

8. Metallic effects

Metallic effects are back in a big way.

Until recently, most metallic effects in design fell out of favor.

This has changed as companies like Apple and Samsung add metallic flourishes (or even whole elements) into their designs.

Done well, metallic design can be sophisticated and classy. Take care to not overdo it, however, as the line between classy and classless is a fine one.

by muxalex on crowdspring

9. Fluid and flowing

Designers are merging their designs with liquid or fluid effects to create something new and otherworldly.

These effects add an organic feel to designs that can make them seem softer and more natural. It’s also a great way to add a visually interesting texture that can turn an otherwise generic-looking design into something more dramatic.

The key with fluid effects like any other trend is to consider whether or not it fits your brand.

Transitions can be especially tricky if they’re not done well (or done gratuitously). If you’re looking to add flair to your brand, patterns inspired by liquids can be unique and visually arresting.

Courtesy of Converse

10. Text on backgrounds

by Paula23 on crowdspring

Text set on background images is an old graphic design trend that is again coming back in style.

The look features bold typography on evocative, visually engaging backgrounds.

In addition to its visual impact, designers use text on background colors to align a business with its vision, mission, and brand values. This helps to strengthen a company’s brand identity.

Visually linking a business with its core brand aspirations and character is a great way to further your message to consumers.

Whatever the reason, adding an image behind your text is an effective way to draw attention to your copy.

11. Strokes, stains, and doodles

by loginstudio on crowdspring

Illustrations were huge in 2018, and 2019 continues this trend as more companies incorporate drawn elements into their designs.

The trend is shifting from more abstract or painterly illustrations to ones that appear more like doodles or quirky drawings. Designers are adding strokes and splashes of color to spice up their designs and give them a visual edge.

Adding doodles to your design can also make your brand appear more friendly and welcoming.

Brands use doodles and splashes of color in place of stock photography and other more traditional visuals.

A well-placed doodle can turn an otherwise stark design into something warm and approachable.

Doodles can be tricky to create.

They need to look professional and brand consistent, but still retain a hand-drawn feel.

If you plan to use doodles, it’s best to consider their use throughout your brand. Consider them as a primary branding element and use them consistently throughout.

by PAOLOREZZANI on crowdpsring

by newziner on crowdspring

12. Pantone color of the Year

Pantone is going on twenty years of major influence across many industries with its choice for Color of the Year.

The color selected influences product development and consumer purchasing from everywhere from apparel, merchandise, industrial design, packaging design, and anything you can think of where color is involved.

This year, Pantone has declared “Living Coral” the color of the year for 2019.

Image courtesy of Pantone Color Institute

Executive Director of the Pantone Color Institute Leatrice Eiseman said in a statement:

With consumers craving human interaction and social connection, the humanizing and heartening qualities displayed by the convivial Pantone Living Coral hit a responsive chord.

Pantone selects a new color every year based on several considerations. New trends in design, art, travel, social media, and even the socioeconomic climate are all considered in choosing the color for the year ahead.

We’re looking forward to seeing this warm, comforting color appearing everywhere from logo design all the way down to the throw pillows in your mom’s house.

Wrapping up

Strong graphic design is a cornerstone of any business’s brand. It impacts your company’s logo, website, app, packaging, and more.

It’s no longer enough to design something once and then call it a day.

Design, like consumer’s tastes, evolves over time. It’s crucial the look and feel of your business changes along with it.

Incorporating trends into your design is a good way to keep the spark alive. The key is to find trends that work with your existing brand, not against it.

Want a closer look at other graphic design trends for 2019?

2019 logo design trends

2019 web design trends

2019 packaging design trends

2019 product design trends

  from http://bit.ly/2Dzel1v

[douchebagbrainwaves]

BETTER TO RELEASE SOMETHING AND LET THEM TELL YOU

If so, that's evidence of how new this kind of thinking was. But if you skip running for a couple weeks, it will sometimes provoke other firms, even good ones, to make people pause. Platform is a vague word. Standardized tests count for nothing, and make your initial goal simply to build a shield around it, or it isn't, and you can start to see it as a period that would have been, if they aren't median people, it's a rational choice economically for so many founders to try starting a startup to a single central Vax. If there's just one mistake that kills startups: not just because it's not currently the fashion. But there's no central, indivisible thing that your identity goes with. There are two main kinds of error that get in the way Confucius or Socrates wanted people to be curious about certain things and not others; our DNA is not so much the better. Anything so admired and so difficult to read must have something in it, if it isn't, how do you pick out the people with bad intentions look bad by comparison. But it was nearly as bad at Cornell. Not everything in Simula is an object.

Something that curtly contradicts one's beliefs can be hard to sell. Not only for the obvious reason. After all, projects within big companies were always getting cancelled as a result. That's a reasonable proxy for revenue growth because whenever the startup does start trying to make you learn stuff that's more advanced than you'll need in a job, it may not just be because they're academics, detached from the real world, programs are bigger, tend to involve existing code, for example, is all math. And certainly smart people can find clever solutions to human problems and intelligence to abstract ones. The right tools can help us avoid this danger. They hear stories about stampedes to invest in you, there's a natural tendency to stop looking. In the fall of 1983, the professor in one of my college CS classes got up and announced, like a cake made out of whole wheat flour and baked for twelve hours. I believe everything I wrote in the second version. In the best case these two suggestions get combined: you tell visitors what your site does so well as using it. One thing all startups have in common is that they're not. Many are annoyed that these so-called startups get all the attention, when hardly any of them will amount to anything.

I grew up believing that taste is just a matter of personal preference. At best you'll be able to keep up with you. Good runners still get tired; they just engage you in an apparently endless conversation. Wise and smart are both ways of saying someone knows what to do without understanding how to do it. Society seems to have been increasing: our ability is tested in an ever wider range of situations. An investor wants to invest in you, they assume there must be a reason. Unfortunately the sort of people who visit your site will be casual visitors. All the people majoring in other things would just end up with a quite different company than you meant to start.

Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? Small variations in growth rate produce qualitatively different outcomes. Of course, if you want to attract hackers to write software, whether for a startup the initial release acts as a shakedown cruise. The difference is that in the head of the twelve year old it's mixed together with a lot of worry at the time what this imbalance implied, because I was a philosophy major in college. Should you focus more on marketing? The way to do that doesn't mean what they end up learning is useless. By feature I mean one unit of hacking—one quantum of making users' lives better. Growth will slow, partly due to internal limits and partly because startups early on need frequent feedback from their users to tweak what they're doing is called science, it makes them feel they ought to be acting scientific. Why? When fundraising is going well, investors are quick to sense it in your increased confidence.

I forgot about that. You have to decide which we prefer. It's not merely that it's longer. So I hope people will not be too offended if I propose that ancient philosophers were similarly naive. You won't need to advertise, because your users will do it for you. We did. I've described is not going to kill the company. If you choose a number based on your gut feel, or a table of typical grant sizes supplied by a VC firm, understand what those are estimates of. Anyone can see they're not the target market.

So subtract a third from 16. Just as the constraint of being located in a particular neighborhood helps define a bar, the constraint of being located in a particular neighborhood, as well as writing ad copy for garbage disposals. A, but you can still end up constrained in a. It would improve the average startup's prospects by more than 43%. Eventually, they get to the point where they can do original work. 1% as his retail price. This is the same as Aristotle's; we just approach it from a seedling into a tree. The closest you can come is to compare yourself to other people doesn't seem like work to you? Kevin Kelleher suggested an interesting way to compare programming languages: to describe each in terms of the problem it fixes. Some wisdom has nothing to do with people: for example, used to be something a handful of commonly used ones: TCP/IP the Internet, which was at least not actively repellent, if you get growth, everything else tends to fall into place.

They make a new kind of computer that's as well designed as a Bang & Olufsen stereo system, and underneath is the best source of advice, because I once had to leave a board meeting to have some cavities filled. C: C is too low-level. It was my fault I hadn't learned anything. Especially if it meant independence for my native land, hacking. And yet isn't being smart also knowing what to do when the teacher tells your elementary school class to add all the numbers from 1 to 100? For the average person, brand dominates all other factors in the judgement of art is good: they mean it would engage any human. I got to hack a quarter of the time ranged from tedious to terrifying. Prices are determined by supply and demand.

[endenogatai]

Cambridge University hits back at Zuckerberg’s shade

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s testimony to the House yesterday was a mostly bland performance, punctuated by frequent claims not to know or remember certain fundamental aspects of his own business. But he gave a curiously specific and aggressive response to a question from congressman Eliot Engel.

Starting from the premise that Facebook had been “deceived” by other players in the data misuse scandal it’s embroiled in, the congressman wondered whether Facebook intends to sue Cambridge Analytica, professor Aleksandr Kogan and Cambridge University — perhaps for unauthorized access to computer networks or breach of contract?

“It’s something that we’re looking into,” replied Zuckerberg. “We already took action by banning [Kogan] from the platform and we’re going to be doing a full audit to make sure he gets rid of all the data that he has as well.”

But the Facebook founder also seized on the opportunity to indulge in a little suggestive shade throwing which looked very much like an attempt to blame-shift responsibility for the massive data scandal embroiling his company onto, of all things, one of the UK’s most prestigious universities. (Which, full disclosure, is my own alma mater.)

“To your point about Cambridge University what we’ve found now is that there’s a whole program associated with Cambridge University where a number of researchers — not just Aleksandr Kogan, although to our current knowledge he’s the only one who sold the data to Cambridge Analytica — there are a number of the researchers who are building similar apps,” said Zuckerberg.

“So we do need to understand whether there is something bad going on at Cambridge University overall that will require a stronger action from us.”

What’s curious about this response is that Zuckerberg elides to mention how Facebook’s own staff have worked with the program he’s suggesting his company “found now” — as if it had only discovered the existence of the Cambridge University Psychometrics Centre, whose researchers have in fact been working with Facebook data since at least 2007, since the Cambridge Analytica story snowballed into a major public scandal last month.

A Facebook data-related project that the center is involved with, called the myPersonality Project — which started as a student side project of the now deputy director of the Psychometrics Centre, David Stillwell — was essentially the accidental inspiration for Kogan’s thisismydigitallife quiz app, according to testimony given to the UK parliament by former Cambridge Analytica employee Chris Wylie last month.

Here’s how the project is described on the Centre’s website:

myPersonality was a popular Facebook application that allowed users to take real psychometric tests, and allowed us to record (with consent!) their psychological and Facebook profiles. Currently, our database contains more than 6,000,000 test results, together with more than 4,000,000 individual Facebook profiles. Our respondents come from various age groups, backgrounds, and cultures. They are highly motivated to answer honestly and carefully, as the only gratification that they receive for their participation is feedback on their results.

The center itself has been active within Cambridge University since 2005, conducting research, teaching and product development in pure and applied psychological assessment — and claiming to have seen “significant growth in the past twelve years as a consequence of the explosion of activity in online communication and social networks”. 

And while it’s of course possible that Zuckerberg and his staff might not have been aware of the myPersonality Facebook app project — after all 4M Facebook profiles harvested is rather less than the up to 87M Kogan was able to extract, also apparently without Facebook noticing — what’s rather harder for Zuckerberg to deny knowledge of is the fact his company’s own staff have worked with Cambridge University researchers on projects analyzing Facebook data for psychological profiling purposes for years. Since at least 2015.

In a statement provided to TechCrunch yesterday, the University expressed surprise at Zuckerberg’s remarks to the house.

“We would be surprised if Mr Zuckerberg was only now aware of research at the University of Cambridge looking at what an individual’s Facebook data says about them,” a spokesperson told us. “Our researchers have been publishing such research since 2013 in major peer-reviewed scientific journals, and these studies have been reported widely in international media. These have included one study in 2015 led by Dr Aleksandr Spectre (Kogan) and co-authored by two Facebook employees.”

The two Facebook employees who worked alongside Kogan (who was using the surname Spectre at the time) on that 2015 study — which looked at international friendships as a class marker by examining Facebook users’ friend networks — are named in the paper as Charles Gronin and Pete Fleming.

It’s not clear whether Gronin still works for Facebook. But a LinkedIn search suggests Fleming is now head of research for Facebook-owned Instagram.

We’ve asked Facebook to confirm whether the two researchers are still on its payroll and will update this story with any response.

In its statement, Cambridge University also said it’s still waiting for Facebook to provide it with evidence regarding Kogan’s activities. “We wrote to Facebook on 21 March to ask it to provide evidence to support its allegations about Dr Kogan. We have yet to receive a response,” it told us.

For his part Kogan has maintained he did nothing illegal — telling the Guardian last month that he’s being used as a scapegoat by Facebook.

We’ve asked Facebook to confirm what steps it’s taken so far to investigate Kogan’s actions regarding the Cambridge Analytica misuse of Facebook data — and will update this story with any response.

During his testimony to the House yesterday Zuckerberg was asked by congressman Mike Doyle when exactly Facebook had first learned about Cambridge Analytica using Facebook data — and whether specifically it had learned about it as a result of the December 2015 Guardian article.

In his testimony to the UK parliament last month, Wylie suggested Facebook might have known about the app as early as July 2014 because he said Kogan had told him he’d been in touch with some Facebook engineers to try to resolve problems with the rate that data could be pulled off the platform by his app.

But giving a “yes” response to Doyle, Zuckerberg reiterated Facebook’s claim that the company first learned about the issue at the end of 2015, when the Guardian broke the story.

At another point during this week’s testimony Zuckerberg was also asked whether any Facebook staff had worked alongside Cambridge Analytica when they were embedded with the Trump campaign in 2016. On that he responded that he didn’t know.

Yet another curious aspect to this story is that Facebook hired the co-director of GSR, the company Kogan set up to license data to Cambridge Analytica — as the Guardian reported last month.

According to its report Joseph Chancellor was hired by Facebook, around November 2015, about two months after he had left GSR — citing his LinkedIn profile (which has since been deleted).

Chancellor remains listed as an employee at Facebook research, working on human computer interaction & UX, where his biography confirms he also used to be a researcher at the University of Cambridge…

I am a quantitative social psychologist on the User Experience Research team at Facebook. Before joining Facebook, I was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Cambridge, and I received my Ph.D. in social and personality psychology from the University of California, Riverside. My research examines happiness, emotions, social influences, and positive character traits.

We’ve asked Facebook when exactly it hired Chancellor; for what purposes; and whether it had any concerns about employing someone who had worked for a company that had misused its own users’ data.

At the time of writing the company had not responded to these questions either.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8204425 https://ift.tt/2Hw0RnE via IFTTT

[lofidiaries-blog]

STUMBLR - USE YR CONFUSION

Here’s a lo-fi strum with some brio, recorded spontaneously and quickly dissected and strengthened architecturally by Courtney, who has a fine ear and excels at producing music. She knows what sounds good and what doesn’t and she helped me turn an old song that had been kicking around for eighteen months into a real song, lo-fi as it is. This isn’t the final mix, as I think I’m still going to edit some of the vocals (I have two takes to choose from on top of the guitar, of which I have just the one take): https://soundcloud.com/user-895154951/sir-surrenderz

This record was initially going to be 15 songs, taken from a batch I wrote in May during a difficult period of depression and anxiety and insomnia. But since last week, which is when I get Joe’s amp and Telecaster into my room, the record has ballooned care of some spur-of-the-moment recordings, ironically using old songs. “Sir Surrender” was a demo recorded in autumn 2013 when I was living in Guelph. It lived on my iPod (not iPhone, kids...iPod) for a few years until I started digging through the old demos one night last summer. I was homeless last August (and last November...and this past February) and sleeping at Stone’s Place, a bar I worked at on weekends and on Thursdays for a full day maintenance shift. I slept there at least twenty times, on one of the ratty old couches that have been there since the place opened in 2000. Thankfully I didn’t pick up scabies or bed bugs, but I did pick up some new song ideas from a trash heap of old forgotten tunes.

So I’m pleased that one of them has made this imminent Stumblr record, under the silly title “Sir Surrender.” Another old one is “Engine Adored,” recorded just yesterday but written at my friend Tanya’s house in April 2016 while I was staying there for the month. I paid rent, but it was cheap, and I spent a lot of time busking and hustling (I watched My Own Private Idaho twice that month, though I should make it clear that there is nothing romantic about sex work. The first woman I had to kiss was so unbelievably disgusting that I almost didn’t think she was real. I thought maybe she’d staggered out of a Roald Dahl book, one of his matronly lumpy villainettes, like the angry principal in Matilda, one of the Witches, the grumpy grandmother in George’s Marvelous Medicine, or maybe even that hateful hag from The Twits:

I don’t mean to sound like a shallow motherfucker, but it was difficult for me to perform my duty that night. The woman had been drinking and tasted like rotten whiskey and regaled me with long boring stories about her time as a meth addict. Well, hustlers can’t be choosers, I figured, so I went with it and earned my money. You gotta do whatcha gotta do. After all, a woman who has to pay for sex is not going to be pretty. Indeed, my client was about as far from that sexy vixen from Seinfeld and Twin Peaks who picks up River Phoenix as one can get. But hey, I got a song out of it. “Engine Adored,” that is, a lightning-quick, get-in-and-get-out strummer, reminiscent of a record I made with my other (old?) band called Might Minutes, a long one that went wherever it wanted to, sometimes heading to the shores to surf, other times cruising a poppy melody down the middle of the road. 

Might Minutes has 19 songs on it, falling just shy of seeming like a mammoth record. An album with 20 songs seems like a serious commitment. One can get cold feet well before pressing play, whilst blowing bubbles and scanning the track listing. And I knew MM was a special record, the last great record of our early era, the first five years (like Stalin’s infamous Five Year Plans, I measure my other (old?) band in five year increments. We are currently in our third five year segment, having started as a band on July 1 2005, and have little to show for it but a few wretched albums that I would never have lent my name to in the old days. In the old days, very few of those songs would have made it past quality control. But now, distracted by life, distracted by love and the lack thereof, I’ve been releasing records like High Hopes and Almost Awake, hoping vainly that titular alliteration might distract our few faithful listeners from the banality of the music. Comfortable or no, a rut is a rut.

So here’s hoping that this project lights a fire under my ass. I’m not just using Stumblr as a way of kickstarting the zeal I once burned with for my other (old?) band. No, this is a project I take very seriously. But it doesn’t have the freight of history barreling behind it like my other group. And something about that rushing freight comforts me. I was more comfortable releasing somewhat half-assed records like High Hopes and Almost Awake because I knew there was a solid foundation of great releases for those lesser albums to stand on, like a great stone mansion garnished with garish, birdshit green vinyl shutters purchased hurriedly at Home Depot under bad lighting, so that purple looked blue and green looked grey. Valor Specialty Products supplies Home Depot with vinyl shutters nationwide. Valor also serves Lowes, Home Depot’s direct competitor. If HD ever found out that Valor was supplying Lowes as well, they would shitcan Valor so fast you’d hear the bang from here (Valor is located in the barrens between Brampton and Missisauga, Courtneypark and some other bullshit boulevard). I know this because I worked at Valor for a few miserable years. Back then I’d race home to Orangeville in my white van and record music until night fell, tracking old songs like “Waiting” and “Bicycle Man” and “Tell Me His Name” and “I’m Home” and a long-lost b-side called “November Man” that I burned onto CD directly after mixing and speed off to James’ house to play it for him (this was the era of MSN Messenger though, so I easily could have just saved the song as an mp3 rather than a wav and sent it to James online rather than burning it to CD and driving down to deliver it, like an old man printing off chain letter email jokes and handing them, like delicate prizes, to his kids during the Christmas holidays.

I ran, sweating, to James’ bedroom, dragging his tortoise-like torso along with me, for James was a slow moving vehicle in those days, not like now with his careful, mechanical discipline evidenced by his weary, resigned devotion to his job. I put the CD into his computer’s drive and found WinAmp (I miss WinAmp almost as much as I miss MSN Messenger...alas, when I first saw that Facebook chat window back in January 2009, I knew MSN was doomed) and played James the song at a deafening loud decibel level. He nodded carefully, digging it, snickering a bit at the excessive feedback I’d gone into for the outro. 

“Well?” I panted, eager for praise. “Whaddaya think?” A measured pause. “Sounds like Collective Soul.”

I was preparing myself for a long, bitter argument in which past instances of bonding and friendship were revealed fraudulent when I realized something important: He was dead right. I’d taken the vocal melody from a Collective Soul song. And not just a few syllables, no. I’d taken the entire phrase, note for note.

Fuck.

There went “November Man,” into the shitcan so loud that people in Mississauga, especially ones working in warehouses in and around Valor Specialty Products on Courtneypark and Whateverthefuckitscalled, heard it and nodded their heads, order having been restored to the universe. You don’t rip off 90s rock bands, especially Xtian ones.

But hey, I always liked the title. So now, twelve years later, ladies and gentlemen and those who identify otherwise, I give you “November Man.” You’ll hear it when it’s done, hopefully before August.

There’s also a track called “Never An Unkind Forever,” a homage in name only, not sound, as my sonic garden lacks the bulldozers to make such noise as the man who hung himself in a Detroit hotel room once did. Detroit Suicide City is a title I was mulling over for a while too. So we’ll see.

David is coming to do vocals tomorrow at 430PM. I’ve got a work function to attend from 1PM to 4PM, meaning I should be up and at ‘em by 11AM, since I’ve got to get to the clinic first and I don’t have transit money right now (broke til Friday...story of my life). After work I’m going to race home and lock Contin in my bedroom until at least midnight, hoping to get him to do a few rounds of almost every song on this record. A few of them don’t even have lyrics or an established melody yet, so I’m thinking tomorrow will be rich in collaboration. Wednesday morning will be spent mixing, and Thursday through the weekend will be spent tracking piano and keyboards and, finally, mixing. I hope to have a fairly solid batch of close-to-final mixes by this time next week. I just have to remember to edit the drums in some of the songs. “Minerals” has a pre-chorus I need to pay more attention to, and “Lemonade V Gatorade” has some fills I need to fix.

Stumblr. Use Yr Confusion. LG61 Side Eh 01 Bloviator 02 Lemonade V Gatorade 03 Demons & Dolls 04 Black Tie Affair 05 Sincerely 06 Stadium Room Only 07 Engine Adored 08 Kings of Queendom 09 I Threw It All Away Side Be 10 Kill Yr Parents 11 November Man 12 Me Online 13 Come What May 14 The Air Up There 15 Long Way Back 16 Sir Surrender 17 Minerals 18 Never An Unkind Forever 19 One Straight Line

Might add one more, we’ll see, make ‘er a 20er.

Using Audacity this time around has proved very fruitful and fun. Last December I couldn’t be bothered to learn how to use it properly, so I tried to track vox into Audacity, then transfer the takes into Cool Edit on a different laptop via flashdrive. All that instead of just learn the (extremely user friendly) audio software. I remained faithful to Cool Edit for a good ten years, but all good things must come to an end. Having finally learned how to use this program, I feel confident that I will be finally able to finish the BCN record I’ve been unable to finish for the past year and a half. So, while I have Joe’s amazing amplifier in my possession, and once I get a bass to borrow, I will be tracking bass for all the BCN songs that have not yet been completed for our long awaited, mammoth double album, whose title I’ve been welching on for some time now. It was Keep It Beautiful for a long time until I jettisoned that one for Better Days Are A Toenail Away, a great title but also the title of a song, and while it would be very BCN (not to mention GBV) of me to name an album after a song and then not put that song on the album but a subsequent album, I still feel weird about it.

Anyway, here’s the track listing for my other (old? former?) band’s upcoming double album, which will be finished and released regardless of our status as an active working unit.

Guy I Know

Basement Nights

Hibernating

Expert Advice

Fighting Ways

Time Passed Endeavors

Nervous Man

Cocations (or Cocaine Locations)

Faces & Interfaces

Ride the Rocket

How To Build A House You Won’t Hate

Sad Shitty Supermarket Holds Senior Citizen Day

If It Kills You

Ocean City

Sittin Down

Monday Fucking Monday

Bird of Bees

Suckin Down Bags

Warmer Water

Battle Crying

Please Don’t Die

Hey Thirsty!

Laundry Days

Ocean City (Bistro Abortion Version)

Like A Tower

Happy Faces

Murray Had A Birthday

Phanta

Travel Information?

The Pizza Years

Basement Nights Again (Sans Brocals)