#actually she might be too young for that? she’s gen Z

[cha1cedony]

I’m on my Normal shit lately but like… his favorite song is Shake It Off. So do we think he’s just a Swiftie? Or is he a “2010s pop girlies” kinda guy in general? Because

Like..

You CAN’T tell me he wouldn’t eat this shit up

😭😭😭

[ukrfeminism]

We’ve been chatting for about half an hour when Eloise lowers her voice to a whisper. Until now she’s been confidently talking through the ups and downs of being a 19-year-old woman in a world she finds unsteady. 

She’s annoyed that, on TikTok, the advertisements she gets are keyrings with rape alarms and “stabby kitties” (a cat-shaped metal keychain with pointed ears sharp enough to cause damage), feels that modern feminism sometimes goes a bit too far, but having grown up in the age of nudes, she doesn’t really trust men. Which is unsurprising considering the story she tells me next.

“So a boy I know was asking a girl at his school for nudes,” she says, quietly. “And then when she refused, he threatened to rape her.” The boy was 14 and had recently posted an Andrew Tate video to his Instagram page, which was Eloise’s first encounter with the online influencer. 

“It said stuff like how women are your property and that it doesn’t matter if women say they’ve been sexually assaulted; if you’re with them that’s your right. I didn’t like it,” she adds.

Tate has made several appearances in the headlines this week. On Tuesday, a Romanian court rejected his appeal to ease the ban on him leaving the country as a legal case against him – in which he’s charged with human trafficking, rape and forming a criminal gang to sexually exploit women – continues. He denies all charges against him. The following day, Ipsos polling for King’s College London’s Policy Institute and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership found that one in five men aged 16-29 who have heard of Andrew Tate have a positive view of him.

Separately – or, arguably, perhaps not – another survey published in the same week underpinned a renewed focus on the attitudes and beliefs of Generation Z, this time from the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS). The research asked just over 3,000 adults of varying ages – 50.6 per cent of whom were female – about their understanding of rape and serious sexual offences, and the law on consent, and drew troubling conclusions.

Overall, 74 per cent of people surveyed understood that it can still be rape if a victim doesn’t resist or fight back, but the number fell to just over half (53 per cent) of 18-24-year-olds who had the same understanding. Less than half of respondents from this age group recognised that victims might not report a sexual offence to police immediately, that being in a relationship or marriage doesn’t mean consent can be assumed, or that if a man has been drinking or taking drugs, he’s still responsible if he rapes someone. More than 70 per cent of over-65s recognised that even if no physical force is involved a person might not be free or able to consent to sex, compared to just 40 per cent of young people.

Previous generations have become used to hearing that rape myths and misconceptions continue to persist, but that’s precisely why this week’s grim trinity of headlines stings. “There tends to be a public assumption that things are generally always getting better,” says author and feminist campaigner Laura Bates. “Actually, views like these are incredibly widespread among young people.” 

Bates regularly works with schools, talking to pupils who often tell her that “rape is a compliment”, that “it’s not rape if she likes it” or, “it’s your boyfriend, you have to have sex with him”.

She adds: “Attitude surveys have to be taken seriously because they are a real red flag that we’re going backwards – we’re seeing much more extreme and concerning misogynistic attitudes among the youngest generations than we are among the oldest. We have to face up to that and ask, why is that happening?”

Gen Z has never been neatly contained. Growing up as the first digital natives in the chokehold of crisis – climate, Covid, cost of living – has seen them praised for their social awareness, but disenfranchised and forgotten by politics. Their extremely online nature has given them unprecedented access to the world and other people – but, of course, that’s a double-edged sword.

“The internet has made everyone’s voices louder, but that means the most misogynistic people in the world are heard more too,” says Niya Clement-Hickson, a 26-year-old marketing designer from London. He says his generation has been “kind of ruined” by social media.

“You’d be surprised at just how many people around my age will argue that Andrew Tate is not as bad as he seems.”

When I spend an hour talking to 16-year-old Tate fan Manus from Ohio on TikTok, he says exactly that. He’s relatively timid and seems unsure of what he thinks at times, but came across Tate aged 12, being drawn to his motivational speeches, humour, and attitude towards making money. “[Tate] kinda showed me how people really are in reality,” he says. On Tate’s assertions that women are the property of men, he says those beliefs are simply from the Bible (though Manus himself is Muslim).

He maintains he’s never seen Tate speak violently about women, and when I send him leaked voicenote recordings of Tate saying that he enjoyed raping a woman, Manus is certain it’s fake “probably to make him look bad”. I ask for his views on feminism and he responds that feminists now want “superiority” and “more rights”. What rights exactly? “More rights in general,” he says, vaguely.

This opinion is not a rarity – there’s a pervasive idea circling comments sections and pub corners that the pendulum has “swung too far”. “Some of us warned that when you continue to suppress their identity by telling young boys that they are inherently toxic, they’ll start acting irrational,” one comment under an Andrew Tate post this week read. But it’s not just boys who hold this idea. Early last year, a survey from Ipsos UK and the Global Institute for Women’s Leadership at King’s College London echoed this and some of Eloise’s views that feminism has gone too far. They found that 52 per cent of Gen Z and 53 per cent of millennials believe that we’re now discriminating against men. Less than half of Gen Z respondents said they defined themselves as a feminist.

Was it coincidence then, to see that shortly after the research was published in March 2023, the year of the girl was in full swing? A persistently pink summer was punctuated with girl dinners, #tradwives – modern women who believe in traditional gender roles – and stay-at-home girlfriends sharing their daily rituals on news feeds. New York magazine’s The Cut declared it “Woman in Retrograde” as the year came to a close; a cluster of reactionary elements to a significant demise of mainstream feminism.

This shift back to traditional behaviours is also present in younger men, says Niya. “A lot of guys feel that their role is all about providing money, being a protector. But they feel they deserve to get something out of the interaction. They just can’t deal with being told no.”

In terms of consent, does he hear attitudes that put women in danger? “Absolutely,” he replies. Niya didn’t learn about consent in school – “I don’t think it was ever talked about beyond ‘don’t have sex until you’re old enough’” – and thinks this is quite common for men of his age. For Maya, who’s 24 and neurodivergent, the line of consent is difficult to pinpoint and somewhat shaped by social media. There’s a “disconnect” from what she really wants – and is able to articulate – in the moment.

“I think that we do have less and less sex and more and more porn,” Niya adds. “And I think that once porn is your main and in some cases, only engagement with sex and women, then that is going to completely screw up how you see sex.”

Do all roads lead to porn? Probably. Clare McGlynn, who is a professor of law with particular expertise in sexual violence and online abuse, says: “We know that algorithms promote more extreme content, more hate – and many, many younger people, men and women, are getting this. Millions of people, as we speak, are watching mainstream online pornography that is racist, sexist, misogynist and violent in its content. Of course, it’s shaping attitudes and lives.”

“There’s certainly a pressure on young boys and men, for example, to be taking and sharing nudes – they’re part of a culture that is encouraging them to,” McGlynn explains. During a study, she looked at what material was presented on the homepage of popular sites – she found landing pages which were filled with sexually violent material. “So it’s also not them even actively choosing that material; we’re part of a culture that is grooming young men, teaching them expectations around sex – and asking them to accept and normalise it.”

What appears clear from the survey conducted by the CPS is a dangerous lack of understanding of what constitutes a crime. “I do lectures on criminal law and I’ve had students come up to me afterwards and say that they didn’t know they had been sexually assaulted or raped,” McGlynn adds.

Laura Bates says that we’re in the midst of a “crisis of sexual violence among young people”. 

“Deeply misogynistic misinformation is being spread to young people online at a rate that most people just have absolutely no idea about,” she says. “And there is a massive knock-on effect.

“Some will look at these surveys and go, well, what does attitude matter? But you have to draw a connection between these really worrying attitudes about rape and the fact that nearly 80 per cent of young people told Ofsted inspectors recently that sexual assault is normal and common in their friendship groups.”

So what can be done? More responsibility and accountability from social media companies, says Bates. Tate’s content – some of which reportedly shows him attempting to beat a woman with a belt; she later hides behind a locked door – has been viewed more than 11 billion times on TikTok, she says, adding: “That’s more than the population of the planet.” Last year, advocacy group HOPE found that more 16-17-year-old boys had watched Tate’s content than had heard of Rishi Sunak. “I think it’s really important that the government supports high quality, age-appropriate sex and relationships education,” she adds. 

Actively listening to and engaging with boys – as seen in initiatives like the state of New York’s Starting the Conversation campaign – is also important. Boys must have a safe and judgement-free environment to express themselves: the more their experiences of rape culture are internalised, the more difficult they are to see.

The Online Safety Bill, which was enacted in October last year, she says, was a missed opportunity for change. While it asks for more transparency on social media platforms and imposes sanctions for those not following the act, along with criminalising cyberflashing and sending unsolicited nude images, “it went 250 pages without mentioning women and girls once, until campaigners changed that”, Bates says.

“It’s so much more effective to focus on prevention of radicalisation than trying to unpick it once it’s happened,” she says. “Young people really are prepared to listen and prepared to change their minds, it’s just a shame this isn’t happening in every school.”

“It does make me worried about how safe the world is going to be,” says Eloise, who will begin her twenties in the summer. “What if people really start thinking that women are property again?” Then, she’s quiet again. “I really hope it can change.”

[north-heats-stronghold]

Space Rider's AU Voice Claim Headcanons Part 1

Still riding the au train of @onyxonline's Space Rider's au, cause it's just that great. So for the past couple of day's, I've been brainstorming on possible voice claims for this au's critters. Though, these voices could work for other au's if anyone so wishes.

Before getting started, all the voices in this post are gonna be from Genshin Impact. The reason being it's very easy to listen to voice samples of each character thanks to a section in their profiles. I also avoided the more child like characters for the voice's, since the Critters in Onyx's au seem more on the young adult range.

With that out of the way, let's get started with everyone's favorite sunny dog!

Dogday

Dog boy for the dog boy. A soft voice with the ability to go serious and commanding at a moments notice, perfect for a leader of a team such as Dogday.

For if you looking for something a bit more on the calmer and gentler side, then Thoma could be a good choice for Dogday. I feel like this voice fits better for the Dogday's in au's that resemble more to the canon story. The caretaker Dogday, if you will.

Catnap

Catnap was a bit difficult, as he more often than not doesn't talk or whispers. But I think I found one that can work. There were some voices that were more sleepy, but they were female so it can't work for Catnap.

Calming, if a bit monotone. Originally I was having Albedo be one of Bubba's because of all the research talk, but I think Catnap fits better.

Kickin

Need a voice that's confident, bombastic, and possibly in over their head? Then look no further than Itto. The minute I heard this voice, I knew it would be Kickin.

More toned down compared to Itto, but I'd say it still fits. Especially with the voice sounding very gen z, which I'm confident Kickin would 100% be.

Hoppy

Energetic, optimistic, possibly ADHD? This does sound like Hoppy. Though it might be too high pitched for some.

This one was actually my first choice for Hoppy. Confident, serious when needed, but not too serious so she can sound like she's having fun.

Bubba

Analytical, with a good amount of snark? That what Space Rider's Bubba gives me, and that why I found Alhaitham to be a good choice.

I also feel like Bubba would have a more deeper voice. Being one of the tallest of the Space Rider's, so Zhongli feels like a good choice.

There was third choice for Bubba, that being Tighnari's old voice. But...I believe it wouldn't be a good choice after what the old voice actor had done once he started getting popular as Tighnari's voice. Which is a shame, as it would've been another perfect choice along with Alhaitham.

I'm nearing the video link limit for a post. So I'll be splitting this into two parts. The second part will be for Crafty, Bobby, and Picky.

And a reminder that this is all my opinion and is subject to possibly change overtime. And to check @onyxonline's Space Rider's au, and that's what inspired this and the subsequent post, as well as read there Saved au as well.

[starrycassi]

I think a lot of young queers folks (like me. Not trying to be all elderly about this I'm literally a gen z) today need to watch the good oldies about our community.

⚠️: I don't mean, in any way shape or form to insult the newer queer shows/movies. I love SPOP. I love TOH. I read and loved Heart stopper. However, because of the restraint of mainstream media, they have a very... palatable?? way to portray the community. I am NOT blaming the creators (who I'm sure would love to go a bit further down on their portrayals if given the option)

SO! I have nice recommendations that I, personally, enjoy a lot. They're in no particular order.

A classic, for starters. But I'm a cheerleader!: Very campy, barbie-y, funny and free on YouTube. A cheerleader is sent to a conversation camp when her social circle realizes that she might be into girls. (It has a very unrealistic portrayal of conversation camps, though. Very cartoony) my comfort movie fr fr

Priscilla, queen of the desert: A trio of drag queens travel across the desert on a big, old bus. They fight, there's some falling in love. They talk a lot about gender identity, queer childhoods and similar topics. I've only been able to find this one (and most of the ones on this list, since I don't have any streaming devices) on illegal websites. There's very, very direct homophobia, SA, physical abuse, child neglect, yk, the American dream. The queens are the funnier thing ever, the romance plotlines are absolutely delightful and well-rounded. Focuses a bit more on the community itself and interpersonal relationships. All around, a solid 10/10.

Kinky boots: A very prude, engaged man inherits a shoe fabric. He's running out of ideas to stay in business, until he meets a drag queen. Same warnings (and themes!) as the last one. This one has a stronger focus on how the characters become more accepting and how our queen navigates being faced with them. I've rewatched it like a hundred times.

The birdcage (2000's) or le cauge aux folles (1970'): A gay couple runs a drag club. Their son brings home a conservative girlfriend and her family. This is more comedy lenient, but funny as fuck nonetheless.

Paris is burning: this one is a documentary, btw. Focuses on the life of drag queens in the 80's. Nothing I didn't already say on Priscilla tbh.

Saving face: A chinese-american girl that lives in a VERY conservatory and secluded community is trying (and failing) not to fall in love with a ballerina. At the same time, her mother (a widow, how scandalous!) gets mysteriously pregnant and gets kicked out of their family home. This one will hit close to home if you're from any ethnic, homophobic household. Cried a lot. Then cried some more. Happy ending, though!

D.E.B.S: THIS IS THE FUNNIEST, CUTEST MOVIE EVER. It's a full on romance comedy for when the mind is a bit too tired! The main plot is that, in a school of girls being trained to be top-notch spies (very totally spies type) a girl who's the top of her class falls in love with the biggest villainess they ever faced. More of a coming of age thing, that also explores the good old dilemma of choosing what the hell you're supposed to do with your life once you turn 18 (relatable tbh)

And now, for a book (in Spanish, though) we have "Las Malas": Narrated by a trans, poor prostitute. Extremely realistic in its narrative voice, cruel and very hurtful sometimes. This is actually one of my favorite books ever, it's so fucking underrated that I'm going to die if no one reads it. There's EVERYTHING. It genuinely drives me crazy to read this. We have queer moms, a child found in a freezing park, suicides, literally anything happens. I love it.

If anyone has any suggestions PLEASE drop them. I'm begging u

[astrobiscuits]

Hello, Astro!

Regarding a girl who has Sagittarius Pluto & Jupiter in the third house and Aquarius Neptune in the fifth house, what are your thoughts? I'm interested to hear your considering I don't see many videos featuring Aquarius in the Leo house.

Xx

🦉Sagittarius Pluto in 3rd house - these girls tend to deal with a huuge change regarding early education, short distance travel or siblings. It is possible that she could have switched schools due to moving to another location when she was extremely young OR she was the kid that started speaking really late (3-4 years old). In more extreme cases, she might have had (or will have) a sibling that died or was bedridden due to sickness.

Her speech might change over the years. As she grows up, she might start speaking faster or slower, depending on her outer circumstances. She might be interested in learning Turkish or Arabic at some point, since Pluto rules over these countries (she needs to have atleast one more planet in her 3rd house or in her 9th house to show an interest in language learning). Imho she might be interested in learning German (or a Germanic language) too, but this is more of a personal opinion. I associate Germany with darkness, even though it's actually ruled by Capricorn.

🐦Sagittarius Jupiter in 3rd house - this is one of the best placements to have for anyone interested in language learning! This girl has Duolingo installed on her phone. These people are interested in knowing more about other cultures, even if they don't choose to learn another language. They tend to be extroverts who speak a lot and one of the top students at their school. Their curiosity is their strength and they never stop learning!!

A weird thing they might enjoy doing is travelling not too far away and acting like they're tourists from another country😂😂😂 You know that city from China that is an EXACT replica of Paris? They're the type to visit those kind of cities (if it exists in their country).

🦚Aquarius Neptune in 5th house - these girls tend to be very talented in acting, filmmaking, costume design, makeup for performers (musicians, actors, entertainers etc.) and music production. They might also enjoy having a social media platform where they discuss conspiracies, mythical creatures, different generations and their future/love life (ex. content about how gen z doesn't know how to date anymore), politics or spirituality. They've got a great imagination and are able to come up with out of the box ideas, which easily makes them trendsetters. They might struggle with tech addiction, especially if Neptune has a lot of negative aspects.

These girls tend to have an unique view on having children. Often times, they choose to adopt over having their own children due to feeling like they want to save the world. They're very empathetic towards children and hate seeing them suffer. They would do anything for them. Other times, they might not be able to have children due to unknown reasons (like having a rare condition that isn't very well researched) or they just don't know if they want children or not. Sometimes they feel like the world is a place too complicated for bringing up kids. If they do have kids (regardless if they're adopted or not), the first child is likely to have Pisces in their big 3 or seem very out of touch with reality.

[negative-speedforce]

Tell me one weird fact/hyperspecific detail about each of your OCs?

Siv: Was born (created?) with 6 fingers on her right hand, which Eobard had removed so that she'd be as normal-passing as possible, despite it being unneccesary.

Jay: Implanted a series of chips into his non-dominant hand in order to be able to control his wheelchair remotely using only hand signals

Cassandra: still only uses Facebook like some kind of grandmother

Hailey: Cannot be in proximity to Siv when she's in eldritch mode for too long because Siv's eldritch powers make it difficult for her to maintain her physical form.

Arya: Claims they have difficulty both reading and writing human languages, but they're actually just dyslexic

Ember: Has two teacup chihuahuas, named Gucci and Prada, that they carry around in a tiny pink handbag. Prada and Gucci pictured below-

Gina: Would have made valedictorian if she hadn't died at the end of the school year

Esme: Started her career as a model at 15, much to Eobard's disapproval.

Cat: Is wanted by the governments of 14 different countries for her hacktivism

Kyle: Has four bullet scars in his back from a particularly nasty situation in which he was helping an abuse victim escape her boyfriend. Needless to say, the shitty ex got electrocuted.

Max: Found out Siv was alive because they took the same pole dance class because he wanted to be able to give Kyle a very special birthday present

Eric: Spent most of his childhood and young adulthood under Apartheid, and has significant trauma from it, leading to him being very protective of his children

Jacob: Met Eric while on a study abroad trip to South Africa in college

Khalil: Watched his uncle disintegrate himself by overloading on magic and that's why he fears using his own

Antonio: Once killed 4 cops by telekinetically shattering the glass of several skyscrapers around him, and subconsciously creating a tornado of broken glass to protect himself

Reggie: Accidentally caused a week of panic for her parents when she tried to shadow travel for the first time and ended up getting stuck in the shadow realm, leading to her parents believing she had been kidnapped

Ameerah: Has been the victim of "Millenials and Gen Z can't read cursive" because the bank teller at a bank she wanted to rob couldn't read "This is a robbery".

Rania: Torched Eobard's lab after finding out what he had done, before confronting him. It was definitely a nice surprise for him to come back to, all of his life's work and research reduced to ashes.

Meredith: Built the text-to-speech/speech-to-text system that she uses to compensate for her deafness at the age of 8.

Kelsie: Has been mistaken for Poison Ivy due to her plant-based powers, despite Poison Ivy being literally GREEN.

Cory: Has a highly successful TikTok account where she posts about Decora-kei fashion, which is her primary source of income.

Director Hawke: Killed her daughter when she found out what she was doing, because she considered her a "deviant-sympathizer", whatever that's supposed to mean.

Torryn: Has both meta-powers (psychometry/seeing an object's past by touching it), and magic abilities, though they're quite weak, considering that his closest Witch ancestor was his 3rd great-grandfather.

Onnie: Despite being an extremely powerful speedster, she prefers to drive places, because most of her clothes are extremely expensive, and she doesn't want them to be destroyed.

Pippa: Goes through a villain arc because she is so sick of being walked all over due to her kind and forgiving nature (also a bit of Negative Speed Force corruption via Onnie might have a part to play in it)

Jessi: Has a net worth of nearly a billion dollars, from both legal activities (her music career) and illegal activities (being a mob boss)

Hyun-Ki: Is a classically trained countertenor, and can hit an A6 on a good day (plenty of warmup and sleep, lots of water, etc). However, he primarily uses his lower register to sing because he got bullied in high school for his voice.

Marie: Had her least favorite coworker assimilated because she was fed up with him constantly insinuating that she was a traitor or spy because she's half Romulan and got in deep trouble for that (it was totally worth it)

Liah: Was almost the first Cardassian Bollywood star, but chickened out and joined Starfleet because she hated the attention. She still occasionally performs for her coworkers.

Qiara: Learned how to harness starlight in order to supplement her own energy reserves because her powers are significantly weaker than the average Q

Soraya: Can't stand Ferengi, since they're always really creepy to her despite her being a starship captain.

Thalia: Spent 3 months institutionalized after killing her Master to save her squad, due to reckless choices including stealing and crashing the Chancellor's speeder on a whim

Reyna: Matchmade her former Master and the guy that her stepmom tried to force her to marry

Athena: Is still somewhat illiterate due to only learning to read when she was in her mid/late teens and managed to get her doctorate in biology by transferring all her textbooks onto audio files

Laila: Is a massive tea snob. Don't give her some crappy bargain tea, she will in fact kill you for that.

Pyrrha: Had to be taught how to swear due to her extremely controlled upbringing. A stormtrooper who said "heck" in front of her was subject to execution.

Aldrich: Speaks like the protagonist of a Bronte romance, due to being British and being turned during the Regency Era.

Samira: Her father, who is an Imam, was surprisingly supportive of her desire to marry a vampire, and married them in secret, because he would rather his daughter have a forbidden romance than be miserable because she couldn't marry the person she loved.

Matt: His joints are in worse shape than they probably should be, because his stepfather is EXTREMELY traditional and believes he can just macho his EDS away, putting him through intense training.

Vanessa: Is quite literally invulnerable (at least for the next few years) due to all the changes that Venator St. James did to her with his experiments, and needing time for her original DNA to reassert itself.

Dolores: Got a job at the Red Cross and had her fangs filed down so she could pass in normal society as human. She feeds on the rejected and expired blood bags, i.e. the donor had a bloodborne illness or it expired or something.

Sohelia: Despite her vampire heritage meaning that she would be naturally more vulnerable to sunlight, thanks to *melanin* from her mom's side, she's surprisingly resistant, and is only as vulnerable as your average Northern European person (aka steps in a sunbeam and gets a bad burn)

Victorie: Occasionally creeps people out with her usage of modern slang, which she technically shouldn't know because she's been isolating herself for 200 years, but knows because of her ability to dreamwalk

Kayla: Was fully conscious while committing all the atrocities that HYDRA forced her to do after capturing her post-CATWS, due to them forgoing the brainwashing and instead choosing to control her via an implanted chip

Dori: Is usually seen as unnaturally pretty/handsome (depending on which form they're in) because they used their shapeshifting abilities to rid themselves of any perceived flaws.

[minquiec]

Jia + Interactions

These are kind of under the implication of either 1: this is after atsv and all is well again or 2: the conflict of atsv never occurred and theyre all friends and miguel is just a tired overworked dad (this one preferably I jus want them to all be friends is this SO hard to ask)

pav:

- actually really good friends

- they trauma bonded over that one time hb bought chinese food (fondly, or not, remembered as The Incident)

- Verging into annoying little brother and equally annoying older sis territory

- Really really snarky that it might be bullying atp

- I like to think pav is a little nosy esp w drama (did u see the way he was w gwen and miles like cmon 😞) so jia would gossip a lil. she tries to not but eeeuyghhhhh maybe just this once [it was in fact not just this once]

- because! he's a nosy little fella i think he'd enjoy watching some dramas w rlly outrageous plot lines. jia enables by sending him reccomendations so he can watch w gayatri ajajaj

- I drew this once but in anomaly hunter au pav constantly pesters jia for credits so he can buy food cause he spends it on knives AHSBJAS

- bullies him but gets bullied back

gwenny:

- I have no idea on how jia would fit into the timeline of events within the canon lore hence the preferred implication of how atsv conflict never happened and I can make shit up HAHDHWHS but gwen was the offical spider to bought jia into the hq

- I made a comic abt this WAY EARLY of making jia but it was abt miguel and his slow ass descending platform LOLOL but yea they kept in touch

- they used to be that polite friendly but slowly got more unhinged over time

- flicks web balls/rubber bands(??) at the other

- share similar swinging patterns by jia is a bit more sporadic and leans towards a parkourish style while gwens likeee gymnastics?? I forogor the word

- bullies her for fun abt miles

kilometers:

- oh ☹️☹️

- ik i literally said that these are under the impression of the events of atsv not occurring but if jia ever saw miles' like full story (from itsv to atsv) she honest to god would've been like ☹️☹️☹️☹️☹️

- this is literally just me projecting but if y'all remember the scene in itsv where aaron found out miles identity AND THE SCENE WHERE HE LOOKS SO FUCKIN SCARED OF HIS UNC AND LOOKED SO SMALL CAUSE HES (13??14?? I forgot) and I think the only thing she would've said is just

- he's just a kid ☹️

- he was just a boy ☹️☹️☹️

- She would've been really sad and he makes her really sad cause he was so young

- her son btw ‼️‼️

- also bullies him abt gwen

miguelito:

- sheeeee doesn't exactly respect him as much as she should but she also doesn't care enough to disrespect him straight up??

- it's more bc the first impressions of him has always been very unserious so she doesn't take him very seriously 😭

- Especially after watching him descend so incredibly painfully slow on his little elevator platform

- gen z employee and tired boss vibes

- She calls him bossman which he's like 🗿stop calling me that but she's just 😆 idcccc

- Also calls him 老大 for fun too and it basically means like,,,boss or head honcho or top dog or something along the lines idk how to translate it

- only reason she's seen around him is cause she likes lyla and thinks she's cute

[nearestend]

oc ideas that i have been sitting on for awhile but don't know if i want to do yet ... all of these could work for affiliated ocs, just saying. if someone wants to do that.

tom ?? idk, i've just been calling him tom

he's like ... either a bank robber or con artist but i think he has some type of powers too. maybe precognition or something similar

it's something like a family business with his uncle and his cousin (i named her phoebe but that could change). his cousin probably has powers too, not sure about the uncle yet

in terms of like, The Vibes? it's from dusk till dawn inspired, but only the season one stuff before it gets crazy and plot twisty. worth noting that i like the concept of that show more than i like the actual execution

also that one movie called push from like 2009 and it was set in hong kong and there were super powers. i don't remember much about this movie because i haven't seen it in ages and don't want to google right now but i was very much in love with it at the time it was released. mostly because i had a very normal heterosexual interest in d.akota f.anning when i was a kid. yeah idk not the plot but the vibes of that

the actress who i haven't named yet

she was an up and coming stage actress at some point, still young and fresh in her career. very talented and beloved but not quite a household name. probably also a little bit delusional in thinking she was way cooler and more popular than she actually was though

the thing is ... she is dead. the actual events surrounding that might not matter so much because she doesn't have any recollection of it. she died in a hotel and now haunts the building. hotel guests have often reported hearing her singing at night

time period in which she's from might be ambiguous but i like her being a little bit old timey, classic glamour

i figure this would be a fun one to do because any interactions could be between her and either hotel staff or guests

also doesn't have a name yet so i'm calling this one vampy for now

like ... a gen z vampire

was chronically online and whatnot, but can no longer post selfies or videos due to vampires not being able to capture on camera. devastated about it

i really picture this one as an affiliated character with an older vampire as their sire. not centuries old, but possibly from the 60s or 70s, so it's a bit retro while still somewhat modern. some cultural and generational clashing us to be expected

horror comedy vibes because that's sort of my favourite genre at the moment

it turns out i haven't given any of these guys names (except tom). i thought i did

some dude (gender tbd) who can breathe perfectly underwater, but needs some type of specialized mask to survive on land.

possibly mute due to the mask they have to wear. communicates by either writing things down or gesturing and is learning sign languages

power to control liquids of any kind, so they can like ... make a car explode by controlling the gasoline in the tank

the beekeeper

literally a beekeeper. wholesome, cheerful. sells honey at farmers markets

can also control and weaponize bees to attack and is immune to their stings

literally chuck from p.ushing d.aisies but intensified

[audi0med1c]

CHAPTER 2 of "Is It Over Now?"

"Look What You Made Me Do"

3,263 words - if you prefer to read on Archive or Wattpad...links here

---------------------------------

Lexa's thumb hits dial on her phone before she's even closed the door behind her, now alone in the back seat of the black Suburban after walking the young blonde up to her door and respectfully declining the invitation to come up for a nightcap. She had used the excuse of an early call time tomorrow for her reason for needing to head home, though it was only 10:30 and she could not be more wide awake.

"So I take it you are not face-deep in your smokin' hot date if you're calling me right now." The smug voice teases through the phone.

"It wasn't even a real date Anya, you knew that." Lexa pinches the bridge of her nose.

"You said your agent asked you to take out one of his buddies' newbies to help get her exposure, that's still basically a date."

Lexa sighs heavily.

"Also...incredibly bold of you to take her to Clarke's favorite restaurant."

"I didn't choose it!" Lexa exasperates, "I felt bad saying no when she said she'd never been able to get a reservation there!"

"Well you did choose to overdo the PDA." Anya snorts, "Based on what I'm seeing on twitter."

Lexa quickly opens the app and scrolls her timeline, seeing plenty of shots from various angles within the restaurant - no doubt from other diners - from the night.

There's one picture of her back, as she reached Clarke at the front of the restaurant, with the caption "Uh-Oh, caught bringing the flavor of the week to their old go-to spot!"

She scrolls some of the comments underneath....

-----------

Damn what a power move, I respect it though.

This was definitely intentional 😳 so shitty.

I feel so bad for Clarke. They're always a younger hotter version of her 👀

Omg Lexa in suits😍😍😍

Hahaha Lexa having exactly one specific type will never stop being hilarious.

Okay but CLARKE'S DRESS🥵....like yes I'd chase after her too Lex

------------

She scrolls more of the photos, images of Raven and Octavia shooting daggers across the restaurant, Lexa guiding her date out at the end of the night with a casually placed hand on the model's lower back, plenty of shots of Lexa looking like she's having a pleasantly flirty conversation while clinking glasses of champagne, and someone actually caught her placing the quick kiss on the back of the girl's hand when she returned to her table after Clarke left. She clicks into that picture, which is captioned "Lexa's Rizz is unmatched"

She hates that word – 'Rizz'... more dumb slang from Gen Z that is cringey as hell. But she's curious about the comments under this one, and as usual, it's a mixed bag of both her fans and Clarke's.

------------

Awww I would die on the spot if Lexa ever did that to me😭

Lexa thinking "You look like my next mistake"

This is the cutest shit ever!

Ms. Perfectly Fine strikes again😬

Lexa's game >>>>>

Ew that could NOT look more forced.

I need Clexa back!

Damn what she say to Clarke after chasing her on her way out? 👀

Imagine fumbling Lexa Woods 💀💀

Lexa's roster is 🔥🔥🔥

—————-

"Ummm hellooooo?!?" Lexa suddenly remembers she's still on the phone.

"Oh, sorry uh what did you say?" She stammers.

"You are playing with fire if you keep doing this you know..." Lexa doesn't bother asking if she's referring to the public dates with models or intentionally antagonizing Clarke any chance she gets. Anya is one of the few people who knows anything about what actually happened between them two years ago when everything blew up in the media, and the fact that she is dating one of Clarke's best friends has only made it more complicated to not constantly hear about what she's up to.

"Don't worry about me Anya," Lexa tries to play off her growing remorse at not coming up with a reason to go to a different restaurant, "If I know Clarke, I'm pretty sure I just ruined her night." She laughs to cover up the worry that it might actually be true, and that makes her want to give her driver the Beverly Hills address she knows better than her own and go apologize in person.

Instead she types out a quick text, contemplating it, before hitting send.

—————————

Lexa: Hey, sorry about tonight, I really didn't think about how it looked.

She's not expecting a reply right away, if at all, but her phone vibrates only seconds later.

The One💔: Okay, sure let's go with that.

Lexa: I am😒The champagne was a bit much though. It's not like you haven't had plenty of company yourself? Including people I used to work with, btw...

The One💔: At least I had the decency to keep my nights out of sight.  At OUR fucking spot Lex? Really? That's low, even for you.

Lexa: I said I was sorry.

The one💔: Whatever.  I expect it at this point.

———————————

"Uhh Lexa?" Anya says cautiously.

"What?" Lexa's hardly listening.

"Don't think you ruined her night."

"What do you mean?" Her attention sharpens, and she gulps down the lump in her throat, hoping it's not the one thing she doesn't want to hear.

"Raven just got dropped off and heard Clarke tell the driver to head to Malibu."

The words settle like rocks in her stomach.

"You still there?"  Anya says after a minute of silence.

But Lexa hangs up without saying goodbye, her chest heaves briefly as her pulse races. Her eyes barely start to sting when she shifts in her seat, sucking on her top teeth, heat flaring behind her ears as her fingers quickly type out another text she will probably regret tomorrow.

Lexa: Tell Niylah I said Hi.

She leans back in the leather seat and lets out a sigh, satisfied with one last taunt on the night, picturing Clarke venting to Niylah over more wine the rest of the night, the girl Clarke always told her was "just a friend" which turned out to be one giant slap in the face.

They were dating within weeks of Clarke and Lexa's breakup. Looking far too familiar and comfortable for two people in the initial stages of a romance. But the relationship fizzled out after a year, and now they were back to 'just friends' again, orsomething...and Lexa somewhat relished the thought of Clarke spending the rest of the night venting to her most recent ex about herself, even if it was in a negative light.

Her phone vibrated again though, and the words on the screen sent her stomach plummeting.

The One💔: Tell her yourself,  I don't plan on talking when I get there.

//

Clarke had shot off the same message to the same three people she always does. Two of them were for a more primal purpose, and the third was just for moral support and maybe some cuddles, and usually their responses made the final decision easier if she wanted any company at all over the silent efficient satisfaction of her electronic alternatives at home.

----

Clarke:  Up for a visitor?

Bel💙:  Aren't you with O? Everything okay?

Last Resort🤢: Of course, already hard just thinking about you.

Niy💞: You know you don't need to ask. Door is open. Tea or night cap kind of night? -----

She had already given the driver instruction to head to Malibu, knowing which option she preferred, and knowing, as usual, that it was almost always available.  Perhaps the most reliant person she had outside of Octavia and Raven, Niylah and her had remained close even after breaking up last year. 

They ran in the same professional circles, with Niylah being a gallery curator, which was how she and Clarke had met.  She was a pure-heart, kind, and understanding.  She knew before Clarke did that they just were not meant to last, despite their deep respect and endearment towards each other.  It didn't surprise her or upset her when Clarke finally broke things off, unable to commit to the next level of their relationship when the subject of moving in was broached.  Clarke realized she wasn't able to offer that level of commitment, or exclusivity even, to anyone - even someone as deserving of it as Niylah.

It honestly didn't even change that much about their dynamic, except the ratio of how much they saw of each other in the daylight versus at night became much more lopsided. 

Clarke enjoyed watching the scenery outside change the further away from the city they got, until they were driving along the coastline. The vast darkness stretching out to the horizon, the waves ominous as they danced and crested in the dark was eerily soothing. 

Her phone vibrates again, and it's the last person she expected to hear from tonight.

Walking 🚩: Hey, sorry about tonight, I really didn't think about how it looked.

She huffs out loud in the back seat, instantly annoyed. Always the same bullshit. Lexa always knew what she was doing.

Clarke: Okay, sure, let's go with that.

It had been months since they had seen each other at an event for Raven's tech company.  Lexa had made the very rare decision to come solo, which Raven and Anya probably made her do for the sake of their intertwined friend group, who was all seated together near the front as Raven's guests.

They had been seated on opposite sides of the round table, with Octavia inbetween her brother Bellamy, and her boyfriend – Lexa's cousin - Lincoln, on one side and Anya - Lexa's oldest friend - and Raven on the other.  Clarke wasn't sure exactly what to expect, since usually when they had to be around each other it was premieres or parties where they could mingle within a larger crowd and avoid each other easily. But sitting at the table, it was hard for Clarke to find other things to look at.

Lexa made it easier by being preoccupied with her phone most of the dinner, making no attempt to hide her smiles as she typed away to however many people she was talking to at the time, asking Anya how long she needed to stay before she was allowed to dip out for other plans. If there was one thing Lexa was always aware of, it was that being seen in public would find its way onto social media one way or another, and after being seen at the event at the same table as Clarke, she made a point of being caught very much cozied up to some model later that night at a club.  

Didn't think about how it looked my fucking ass... Clarke thought to herself.

Walking 🚩: Tell Niylah I say hi. 

Clark grinned. She knew Raven would tell Anya, who would tell Lexa where she was going.  She'd told the driver to head to Malibu regardless if she actually ended up going or not, making sure to say it loud and clear before Raven was fully out of the car.  Lexa's favorite thing seemed to be flaunting her parade of women in front of Clarke, but two could play this game, and Lexa would very soon come to learn that Clarke was much better at it.

Clarke: Tell her yourself, I don't plan on talking when I get there.

Niylah greets her with a warm mug of tea and even warmer hug, not letting go for almost a full minute. It had been a while since she has been here. 

"You look nice." She says softly when they let go.

Clarke slips her hands around the girl's neck, "Just kiss me, I've had a long night."

"What did she do this time?" Niylah chuckles. It catches Clarke off guard a little.

"What?"

"I'm not offended Clarke, but I'm not dumb. It's almost midnight, so there's only one reason you're here."

"Niylah it's not--"

"I said I'm not offended. It's okay, Clarke." The older girl urges, running her hands up and down Clarke's arms, "We didn't work out for a reason, but it doesn't mean I hate whatever this is, you know you are always welcome here.  I can be whatever you need me to be for you."

Clarke looks down, slightly ashamed, "I'm sorry I didn't mean to--"

Niylah cuts her off, lifting a finger under her chin to close her mouth, bringing her face back up to look at her, and grazes her thumb over Clarke's bottom lip before pressing a soft kiss into her.

"I guess I should send her a thank you note one of these days, maybe some flowers..." She smiles sweetly, "...if she's what keeps bringing you back here to me."

Clarke's eyes start glistening, and she wishes more than anything she had come here under a different circumstance. Her and Niylah had remained close even after their breakup, and it changed very little about their dynamic or connection, only that there was no longer any expectations or obligations to each other.  They saw each other a lot less, and in public they were mostly just cordial friendly associates, operating within the same circles both being in the art industry.

But when they were alone, they seamlessly fell back into the comfort and ease of each other out of habit.  It was a quiet, tender caring that Clarke let herself get lost in possibly too quickly when everything initially blew up in the media with Lexa.  It was an easy escape, a refuge from the harshness of having so much of your life on display all the time, of constantly being compared to everything and everyone else around Lexa. Always feeling like she had to prove herself.

After a year together, when Niylah had mentioned Clarke perhaps moving in, it hit her that they had already reached their ceiling, and Clarke knew she didn't have any more of herself she could give to the girl, or anyone else at the time, and it wasn't fair to take such a step knowing it would never be more than this.

"You Okay?" The older girl asks gently, reading Clarke's face.

"I'm fine." Clarke tries to assure, but her glossy eyes well up even more.

The girl takes Clarke's face in her hands, "You're not fine at all." 

"Niylah, would you mind not talking?" 

She could save the guilt for the morning.  Right now she needed to feel soft hands drag along her skin, warm lips laying claim to every limb. Her fingers tangle in open hair as her head falls back into pillows and she crumbles like a piece of paper, lost in the sensation and memories that should NOT be surfacing in this moment. She lets Niylah have her completely, keeping her eyes shut so that she won't be tempted to look down and realize it's not green eyes looking back at her.

//

Lexa is several shots deep in the back of a dive bar on the East side around the corner from her high-rise. She's made nice with the owner, who lets her in the back so she can tuck away in the corner and usually goes unnoticed as long as she keeps to herself. The local patrons are mostly middle-aged men who wouldn't recognize her even if one of her movies or shows was playing on the tvs in the corner over the bar.

Part of her wishes she hadn't turned down that invite to go upstairs when she dropped off her date. She keeps staring at the last message in her phone. I don't plan on talking when I get there.

It could be anyone else. Literally anyone else.

Clarke knew exactly what she was doing.

Niylah was the reason they broke up. Just waiting in the weeds, feeding Clarke who knows what kind of lies. Lexa always sensed she was feeding Clarke anything to help her believe the never-ending rumors that would swirl around in the media about Lexa and practically any female friend or co-star she had. Just waiting for the perfect moment, the smallest crack to push through and make her move.

Fuck Niylah.

Right now she's probably waiting with open arms for Clarke to arrive and hear how much of a betrayal it was what Lexa did tonight.

It was hardly a betrayal compared to what Clarke did with Niylah.

No, two can fucking play this game.

The brunette rips another double shot, before taking out her phone and sending a message that only ever meant one thing.

Lexa:

Cos: I can be there in 20? Lexa: Bring tequila.

Morning comes too quickly, bright and harsh and Lexa's head is pounding. She's sprawled out naked, on her stomach face first at the edge of her bed, and her hand fumbles around the covers searching for her phone to check the time: 7am. Damn. The space next to her is empty but she smells coffee brewing, and as soon as she attempts to sit up, a steaming mug is placed next to her on the nightstand, and the rich aroma stings her nostrils.

"You're alive" the perky blonde girl giggles, sitting on the edge of the bed and brushing the mess of wavy brown strands back from Lexa's face as she's hunched forward, trying to will the room to stop spinning.

"Baby Love... lay down, I got you, here." She props some pillows against the headboard so Lexa can lean backwards against them. "Here let me get you some water and advil too." As she's rummaging through a cabinet of medicine, vitamins, and supplements, Lexa looks through her phone, seeing mostly more tweets and comments about the run-in at the restaurant, but the nausea in her stomach worsens when she switches over to Instagram and sees a new post at the top of her feed. She stares at it for a minute, then drops her phone and races to the bathroom to empty her stomach.

"You good babe?" The blonde says through the bathroom door, concerned.

After a couple rounds of heaving, Lexa pants, "I'm good, just going to hop in the shower."

"Okay, did you want to grab brunch after?"

Lexa wasn't sure she even wanted to leave this bathroom anytime soon, let alone eat, or be photographed out with Costia after just being seen on a date last night.

Costia knows what they are, and more importantly, what they are not. It works for them. Costia is hot and fun and eats up the attention she gets as Lexa's favorite arm candy. What started out as just purely hookups over a year ago evolved into a real friendship with convenient benefits.

"Not today Cos, sorry I have a shoot later."

"Ohhhh is it for that new show? The one based on a book?"

Lexa turns the shower on, "It's just a mini series, not a whole show, but yea."

"Aw...I love coming along for those." The girl hints, and Lexa feels a little guilty for wanting as little human interaction as possible the rest of the day.

"Next time Cos, I promise."

The hot shower has her feeling brand new when she emerges, and she's relieved to find the apartment empty as well. She grabs her phone to text her driver, Gustus, about picking her up in a bit for her photoshoot when she sees a message waiting from Anya:

Anya: Looks like you were face-first in a smoking hot blonde last night afterall😏 We still hanging later?

Lexa is confused at first, but then checks her phone, and sure enough, is tagged in a new photo:

She notices who liked the picture, grinning as she plops back into her bed in her robe, smug and satisfied, thinking:

Let the games begin.

[littlealeta]

Tom and Jerry (2021) Review

LONG BLOG! IF YOU DON'T WANT TO READ THIS BLOG, SCROLL DOWN TO THE OVERALL SECTION FOR A TL;DR and ALETA REWRITES

Just to let you know, I didn’t want to watch this movie. That’s why I put it off for so long. I only watched it because my ex-mutual on Twitter is bonkers for it and keeps harassing people who criticize the movie with his think pieces. So, for some reason, I was curious to see if he was right to defend this film. And… I personally don’t know what he sees in this movie. Clearly, he likes the Tom and Jerry stuff, but that’s only a small part of the film that doesn’t even compare to the plethora of other major problems this film has.

Story

At first, the story starts off ok. I don’t know how Tom and Jerry wound up in New York City or why Tom is trying to be a jazz pianist when he should be going around catching Jerry, but Jerry, meanwhile, is trying to find a home and live a decent life, which is a much more reasonable plot. Unfortunately, Jerry decided to be a jerkass for whatever reason and cheats Tom out of his donations. Their rivalry causes a woman named Kayla to lose her job (somehow) and she has to re-apply in a month. Because of this, Kayla gets the bright idea to manipulate her job applicant into giving her her resume to use to her advantage. At this point, I’d rather be watching Tom and Jerry because Kayla is such a toxic protagonist and I was hoping that the movie would end with the job applicant punching her, getting fired and thrown out into the streets (spoilers it does not). She is hired to help a couple plan for their wedding (which I don’t know why it even needs to be there, it’s the most pointless part of the movie, but ok). And then, the movie gets kinda interesting when it switches back to Tom and Jerry trying to fight each other, this time, because Jerry is intruding the hotel.

Unfortunately, the adolescent draft plot decides to say “fuck all of that, let’s make Tom and Jerry friends”, almost like this movie is trying to remake the 1992 film. Human characters take the focus? Check. Terrible music? Check. Tom and Jerry are homeless? Check. Tom and Jerry trying to be friends? Check. Young girl as the protagonist? Check.

Tom and Jerry end up rudely interrupting a baseball game and get arrested by animal control. Wedding gets ruined because some dumbass decided to bring wild animals to it. Yatti yatti yatti. It just gets worse and worse.

And we have to get the all is forgiven ending because this is for kids. And kids, I guess, are too sensitive to see people get consequences for their actions, because it reminds them of the reality of what happens when you behave poorly.

Two questions: Wasn’t this movie about Tom and Jerry again? Why are we teaching kids that it’s okay to steal someone’s resume just because you don’t have a job and are jealous of some rare lucky people living their best life? Sure this insecurity might be relatable to teenagers, but this is a family movie, it doesn’t need to cater only to Gen Z. Having a character commit a crime because she’s insecure just makes her come off as extremely petty and immature and overall, not sympathetic. And have the other characters forgive her just because “she made a mistake” is even more toxic. She should be thrown in jail and have this shit permanently on her criminal record.

And that’s all the film does, is force in random 21st century pop culture (including some that are dated) just to cater to the Millennial and Gen Z crowd. What about the older people that watched Tom and Jerry? What should they take away from this? There’s nothing wrong with modernizing Tom and Jerry, but that doesn’t mean you need to contrive every possible modern reference under the sun.

Characters

Besides the complaints I made about Tom and Jerry in the story section, they were actually one of the better parts of the movie and they were portrayed alright. Their antics are still witty like the cartoons and Tom even gets a devil and angel on shoulder thing which is also portrayed cleverly. I would say every Tom and Jerry character mostly keep to the spirit of their cartoons. It’s too bad that they’re not in the film more.

The human characters on the other hand, are all subpar. Most of what they say are either punny, cornball dialogue or pop culture references, and it often feels terribly contrived. Often feeling dumbed down to kids or just clearly phoned in.

The only characters I thought were kinda okay were Terence (because he’s the most normal person in the film) and Joy (just because I think she’s neurodivergent, unfortunately, she’s often played off as a joke and the other characters treat her like some horror movie character (abelism much?)).

Kayla is an all around horrible person and character who’s just a complete self-absorbed jerkass to everyone in the hotel. I don’t mind watching horrible people/antiheroes in fiction, but this character does not get any comeuppance for her actions and the character development she kinda got felt shallow and forced and like she didn’t really regret her actions because she just makes it out to be a “mistake” instead of something she should genuinely atone for. Secondly, this is a Tom and Jerry movie, this whole subplot has no place being there. I think in a movie that doesn’t star Tom and Jerry or any franchise character, this could’ve been an interesting plot. Someone going through hell and back to get a job, even if it gets in the way of other people. However, her only motivation to get the job was because she temporarily lost her other one and because of her own jealousy of other people, which makes her come off as petty. Especially when she’s worked in other hotels and was told she can re-apply in a month. If she was extremely poor and was suffering, that would’ve at least made me understand the character more. But no, she had a well-to-do job, she’s living a decent life, yet she wants to be at the top of the food chain.

There’s this black guy who Kayla has this weird thing with. They’re not a couple, but they meet one time, he disappears for most of the movie, and then he turns up out of nowhere at the end.  There’s a hotel boss that should also be fired because he lays off Terence (who’s done nothing wrong) for Kayla and Tom and Jerry’s mishaps. The human characters, in general, have a thing for finding fault with innocent people for petty reasons. I don’t have much to say about anyone else because they don’t really have much of a personality.

And then we have Chef Jackie who's clearly an Asian rip-off of Gordon Ramsay. Yay... more stern Asian stereotypes.

Animation/Acting/Music

Usually, I don’t talk about the technical aspects of films, but oh boy, do I have a lot to say here. The animation, I would say, is smooth by itself, but when placed into the real world, it feels like they don’t belong there. 

If you look at Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the cartoon characters blend in with the real world. The real world looks gritty and dark and the cartoon characters look gritty and dark and the lighting on them reflects the lighting of the real world. If you look at Tom and Jerry, they just look like smooth 2D characters stickered onto this rough three-dimensional world. Also, why every creature has to be animated and why this takes place in a live action world is never explained. Are insects also animated? I don’t remember seeing them.

Spike’s saliva though….wtf…? Are you sick?

The soundtrack has to be the worst soundtrack I’ve seen in forever, and I’m usually impressionable when it comes to music. Seriously, what are rap and r&b doing in a Tom and Jerry movie? It would be something if they actually sounded good, but they don’t. They’re all some of the worst songs I’ve ever heard. Tom gets autotuned and Let’s Get Married is ruined by some fucking hip hop.

Acting is a mixed bag. Sometimes the actors put humor and energy into their performances, sometimes they sound phoned in, and sometimes they don’t even even care about their roles, and frankly, I don’t blame them. I do think the rapping pigeon voice is miscast, though.

Overall

To start with the positives, the Tom and Jerry scenes are ok. Their antics and quirks capture the humor and charm of the cartoons perfectly. There are some good ideas here, with Jerry trying to find a home and he’s stealing things to have for his home and this causes mayhem inside the hotel. Meanwhile, Tom is enlisted by the staff to get rid of Jerry. And that’s about it in terms of major positives, because oh my god, does it feel like a different person wrote the human parts. 

The world and story Tom and Jerry are caught up in are chock-full of pointless references, idiocy, contrivances, dumb middle-school type humor, and a mediocre cast of characters. If they’re not flat like the couple, they are a mean-spirited bunch like, unfortunately, our protagonist, who takes up what should’ve been the cat and mouse’s screentime. And even the good people like Terence and Joy, are often at the expense from the mean-spirited cast. The story of Tom catching Jerry is thrown out the window for a redo of 1992 with them becoming friends because our dumbass human protagonist says so. And then, the rest of the third act is just a bunch of mess because of the stupid decisions the characters make.

The theme encourages kids to forgive a criminal if they happen to steal a resume just to get the top job where they OBVIOUSLY show how unskilled they are. I am so glad this movie is forgotten, unfortunate that it is popular on Netflix.

The cartoon designs clearly don’t belong in this world. Every animal is a cartoon for some unexplained reason. Soundtrack is complete dogshit, nothing about it is good, it’s probably the worst soundtrack I’ve heard in forever. Acting ranges from wooden emotions to awkwardness at attempting to charm the audience with their cringy dialogue to ok there’s effort put into it to the rapping pigeon’s voice not fitting.

I give Tom and Jerry (2021) 4.1 bells out of 10.

For the people that are saying Tom and Jerry can’t make a good movie, go watch The Magic Ring. Maybe it’s not particularly great, but it’s so much better than this crap.

In an Aleta Rewrites story, I would make the story about both Tom and Jerry trying to find a home. They don’t want to live with each other, which is what starts their rivalry. Then, when Jerry gets to the hotel, we can still have the plot where Kayla enlists Tom to catch Jerry while Jerry is stealing from the hotel (and other places) in order to use them for his new home. This is where the action starts. Jerry has to avoid being captured and getting his items taken away. Eventually, maybe a bit after the All is Lost moment, Jerry can build himself a new home (in a box or something) that starts a third act conflict, since this could be where he ends up running into the Alley Cats. And then, the movie, I guess, ends just like how the final product did, with Tom and Jerry still being homeless and down on their luck and continuing to chase each other, because the cycle just never ends. Make Jerry the villain instead of Kay… I mean, Terence. Get rid of the wedding and job applying parts because they are not necessary.

[alarawriting]

52 Project #53: After The Chicken Story

And here it is, the bonus story, a sequel to the one I started this project with.

*********

Things have been kind of crazy around here the last few years, not just because of the pandemic, but there’s been a lot going on. Gotta say that mostly, those years haven’t been real great for us. Lots of changes, some good, some bad, some eh, but that’s life, right?

So my oldest daughter went to college to become a marine biologist, and now she’s on an expedition to study the Kraken in the harbor. Gotta say I didn’t expect it. Not because she didn’t show any interest in marine biology, she was crazy for it when she was young, but because every girl around here seemed to want to grow up to be a marine biologist, kind of like every girl when I was growing up wanted to work with horses. Except my wife, she’s terrified of them. Most of the kids who wanted to be marine biologists did not end up that way, but my daughter’s working on a master’s degree in it. Wants to do all this stuff with conservation and the Bay. Which, I guess, the Kraken  lives in the Bay and if we piss it off enough by dumping crap in its home territory so there’s no food for it, it might burn the city down again, so there’s a good conservation argument for you.

My oldest son, the ninja, has actually left the country; he’s gone to Japan to study under ninja masters at some ninja school. Either that, or break into working for Nintendo, because what he really wants in life is to make video games. Being a ninja isn’t a profession for him, it’s a way of life. I miss the kid, he never writes home. Would it kill him to drop us a note on Discord? But it sounds like he’s happy, which is the important thing.

And my younger son has a web comic going. Well, it’s not exactly a web comic, more like one of those mixed media things where he’s got comic pages and audio files and animations and mini-games and all that kind of stuff, about, supposedly, a fictionalized version of himself going into the tunnel under the road and traveling to the Underworld. It’s like, Dante’s Inferno as rewritten by Gen Z. Not literally Dante’s Inferno, I think he’s only ever read the Wikipedia article about it, but similar concept. Surprisingly, it’s mostly a dark comedy. I haven’t asked him if any of it is true, because I don’t want to know.

My youngest kid’s not doing nearly as well, since we brought back her timeshadow from the moon. I never took her seriously when she used to say she had a clone on the moon; turns out that, while a timeshadow is technically not a clone, she did actually have a copy of herself up on the moon. (Nowhere near my family’s barbeque grill. I’m starting to think I’ll never see that thing again.) The thing about timeshadows is, if your timeshadow touches you, it merges into you and then you have all of its memories, but if it had problems, you probably got them too. And living on the Moon for most of your life is not good for timeshadows any more than for regular humans, so when they merged, my kid got frail and weak – not as bad as someone who’d lived on the Moon their whole life, in the weak gravity, but worse off than she was. She didn’t get any taller, though. The timeshadow had shot up like a string bean, side effect of Lunar gravity, but when they merged, my kid got the deficits and not the benefits.

I wish it hadn’t happened and part of me regrets bringing the kid back from the moon, but the thing about a timeshadow is, it’s not entirely real, but it has thoughts and feelings just like the real human it’s a copy of, so what was I gonna do? Leave someone who is essentially my daughter up on the Moon without family? My daughter has lost enough of her childhood memories that she no longer has any idea how the timeshadow got on the Moon or why she even had a timeshadow, and the daycare she used to go to is out of business, so I don’t think there’s any way I can find out.

Things got kind of bad for my wife, too. The last time I talked about things, it ended up looking like we were going to buy our annoying neighbor’s house after my wife harassed her into leaving the neighborhood. Well, that didn’t happen, because my wife lost her job, and then ended up with breast cancer. They had to take them off. She looked into getting breast missiles but the damn things are too hard to reload, so she got pockets instead. Now if she really wants to keep something safe, she can stick it in her boob, not just in her bra. I always thought that those things were only for drug smugglers, but my wife wants to be able to go to the beach by herself and keep her credit cards and ID on her person when she goes in the water, and apparently she can seal up the pockets to be waterproof. So far evidence suggests she’s cancer free and the thing never made it out of her breasts, and that’s good, so things could be worse. The people who did buy the annoying neighbor’s house are nice folks, a Hispanic family where the father works in some kind of industrial chemistry as a scientist… I think. At least, he’s got some crazy shit in his swimming pool.

And then, my idiot boyfriend let the Fae know his true name. He’s a trans dude and very proud of the name he picked. He wasn’t going to go deadnaming himself when the Fae dude he met asked if he could have his name. So now his paperwork is not going through, and some stupid thing keeps happening every time he tries to legally change his name, because apparently the Fae now own his name. He’s considered changing it to a different name, but once you start to think about yourself as a name, that’s apparently your True Name. So he could maybe solve the issue of the paperwork, but he can’t solve the problem that fairies know his name and keep calling him. Sometimes he tries to sleepwalk straight out of the house; we’ve found him in the middle of the street in a fugue state, or talking to people we couldn’t see. My wife’s been trying to help him with the paperwork, but since she’s had her own battles to fight, it hasn’t worked so well.

We still have chickens. But now we also have a 2 dimensional dog, a cockatoo who works tech support, and approximately seventeen cats. I can’t really keep track of them all. They’ve cleared out the rat population, which is good, because Orion the assassin cat has been getting up in years and isn’t quite as murderous as he used to be, but they break out into two clans and the clans feud like the Hatfields and McCoys. We’re not at war with the city over the chickens anymore; now it’s the yard. Mostly about the Fae circles, but also about mowing the lawn, which, you try mowing over a Fae circle. And tell me how it went, fifty years when you pop back into reality, if you ever do.

Anyway, this story isn’t about the chickens, or not nearly so much as the last story was. It’s more of an explanation of why things ended up the way they did.

So first off, work. Now, I’ve been working from home from before it was cool; got my own IT company, works with Amazon Web Services helping other businesses deal with them. When my wife lost her job, she started working here as well, which was just as well because then when she got cancer, she could get all the time off for chemo and stuff that she needed. A year or so later, when the news about the pandemic first hit, business was jumping. Everybody wanted to get into the cloud and not have to come into the office anymore.

Huh, actually, no, that’s not where it starts. Let’s start with the two dimensional dog.

So my youngest kid really wanted a two dimensional dog. They’re pretty rare, on account of being two dimensional. You ever hear of a paper tiger, well, this is a paper dog. They’re not really two dimensional, but something about, most of their mass is phased into a different dimension and we can only see the part of them that intersects with this plane? They can be very intimidating because you look at this dog, you think, goddamn that is one skinny dog, and then it comes up to you with its jaws hanging open, panting, and it looks like a smile. A giant smile. A giant, very toothy, very scary smile. This is a dog you want to keep happy because you don’t know what it will do if it’s not happy. They’re very tall, and very long, and very very skinny, but the mass is there, as you can tell when the dog jumps up on you.

Ours came from Russia. Well, her parents came from Russia. Well, her ancestors. We’re not really sure when it was that Russia engineered two dimensional dogs, but we know that when the Soviet Union fell, people over there started selling these dogs to the US because they were weird, and rich people love weird, and Russians after the collapse of Communism really wanted the money. Then some people who probably weren’t all that rich spent too much money on the dogs so they could look richer than they were, and ended up having to sell off puppies for a lot less than they wanted when the dot com boom busted. My daughter wanted one ever since she heard about them. She was super into science and math, and the idea of a two dimensional dog really appealed to her.

My wife’s ex used to have one he got from a rescue, but we went looking for the rescue and found out it had to shut down after they accidentally accepted a Hound of Tindalos, and you know how that goes. So we had to buy our dog. Her name’s Svetlana and she will do anything to get some peanut butter, regular butter, cheese, potato chips… you know, anything you might imagine your teenagers would clean you out of. Being that she’s two dimensional, she will absolutely slip through any crack in a door you leave, including the fridge door if you don’t shut it all the way. We’ve lost so much butter that way.

Now, Svetlana loves cats. Loves cats. Before we got her fixed, she loved them in a kind of not-entirely-PG-rated way, but even after that, she really wants to play with cats. She is six times as tall as a cat. Cats do not want to play with her. At the time, we had three cats – Orion the mighty hunter/assassin cat, Odin the grumpy ancient man who our best guesses had at 24 years old then, and Tiamat, the tortie who thought she was human. Well, who at least thought she deserved to be able to get chicken out of the refrigerator and sit at the dinner table. They had their normal cat idiosyncrasies; Tiamat liked Rice Krispies but hated fish, Odin enjoyed sleeping in the litter box, and Orion liked to cross-dress. Well, not sure you can call it that since female cats don’t generally wear frilly doll dresses, either. But the kids – and my boyfriend -- thought it was fun to put dresses on him, and while the others would immediately divest themselves if you tried to make them wear anything, Orion seemed to enjoy his dresses. He’d even head-butt the kids if one of them was holding a doll dress, until the kid put the dress on him. None of these cats wanted anything to do with Lana.

Coincidentally, my boyfriend’s parents in Canada had a bunch of local feral cats who’d just had kittens. You see where this is going.

Sylph was a pretty little Siamese kitten who enjoyed playing with my boyfriend’s parents’ dog. We thought she’d make a good friend for Lana, and because she had a sister she was inseparable from, we didn’t want to separate them. So we ended up with Raven as well, a solid black cat who became the photographic subject of many memes about how the void wants chicken.

Lana, big dumb goofy nerd that she was, got too enthusiastic about playing with the kittens. The kittens didn’t appreciate it. Then the kittens turned into teenage female cats, at which point we discovered that Lana is actually a lesbian xenophile… ailurophile? You can’t call it bestiality when they’re all beasts. This was more than a little disturbing, and we all wanted to return to our illusions that our dog loved our cats in a wholesome friendly way, so we arranged to get them all fixed, Lana first.

And then Covid hit.

If you had pets you might remember that right after Covid started, the vets all turtled up, nothing but emergency appointments. Fixing animals was apparently not an emergency. Lana got done in time, but our little girls, not so much.

We did our best to keep them inside, but with all the secret tunnels in the basement, the rat warrens that come up in the laundry room, and the holes in reality that the wall squids made, we cannot in fact keep anything the size of a cat in, or out. I mean, cats can’t usually phase through walls, but they are one of the only animals on the planet fast enough to catch a wall squid, and if they tag the thing, they can often follow it right through its phase. Since they can’t actually enter the dimension the things come from, though, this generally leaves them outside whatever wall they were going through, which is fine when it’s the interior living room wall and not so great when it’s the wall covered with ivy outside. The only thing that keeps stranger cats from turning up in our house at random is ours are so damn territorial, and the only thing that keeps our cats in is nothing. Nothing can keep our cats in.

By the time we got Sylph and Raven rescheduled for their spays, they were both pregnant with kittens.

There are some vets that will abort kittens while spaying. Not the ones around here. Also they both had lots of them. Sylph had six, Raven had five. We have a tradition around here that kittens don’t get real names until they’re adults, they get temporary names. So Sylph’s six were Up, Down, Top, Bottom, Strange and Charmed, and Raven’s five were named after five members of Voltron, from the old series my wife grew up with, not the reboot. And she left out Sven. I think she forgot he existed.

As if this was not bad enough, Tiamat got pregnant. See, we’d never fixed her, because the one time we had an appointment, she managed to disappear, and she’d get fat and then thin again within weeks, not long enough to bring a pregnancy to term. We knew that her father and her brother were the same cat, so we figured she might have some kind of genetic abnormality preventing pregnancy. Nope! Or, maybe. Maybe she needed exposure to cat pregnancy pheromones to be able to bring a litter to term. She had four. We named them after the Three Musketeers plus D’Artagnan.

If you’re counting, you know that at this point, we had a total of twenty cats.

Meanwhile, we were hoarding food. Frozen and nonperishable, I’m not talking about stuff you have to refrigerate. We bought three new freezers (which took forever, because everyone else apparently had the same idea), filled them with meat (we hooked up with a butcher and got a whole cow, a whole pig, a whole emu, and a couple of deer), then filled our pantry and multiple bins with dry food. With Covid going on, we didn’t want to have to leave the house and go shopping any more than we had to. We even got dry milk. Which is disgusting, by the way, do not use it for your cereal, but it does tolerably well when the instant mashed potato box says to use milk to make mashed potatoes. We didn’t go full prepper with MREs and dehydrated food, but only because my boyfriend’s parents were preppers and he was able to advise us that that stuff tastes like shit.

Twenty cats produce a lot of cat poop. My boyfriend, whose job it was to clean the cat boxes, was frequently distracted by the Fae trying to call him. My wife and I were overwhelmed with work. My son the ninja helped out for a while, but then he got accepted to study under a ninja master. I thought there was no way he’d be able to go; we were in lockdown. Japan wasn’t accepting US citizens. Hell, Canada wasn’t; my boyfriend could go visit his parents because he was actually a Canadian citizen, but we were worried that he wouldn’t be able to come back, so he didn’t.

Ninjas, apparently, have resources that most ordinary Japanese citizens don’t. They came in a helicopter in the dead of night, and we only knew about it because he went to say goodbye to the chickens and woke them up and they started clucking, which set off the dog. We got outside in time to see my son disappear up the helicopter ladder, promising us, incorrectly, that he would write. You’d think ninjas wouldn’t use something as ostentatious as a chopper, but the truth is our city is lousy with choppers. Police choppers. News choppers. Medevac choppers. Elementary school bus choppers. Ghostbuster choppers. No one here blinks when they hear the sound of a helicopter overhead, and a blacked-out ninja helicopter looks exactly like a blacked-out police helicopter.

Since then we mostly hear about him through his brother, who does not have the level of detail sufficient to make my wife happy, but at least we know enough to know that his ninja cover is that he’s interning at Nintendo. Apparently ninjas do not really live in secret compounds where they dress all in black and train non-stop; the point of being a ninja is that you blend in, so ninjas get real jobs, and they’re plausible jobs that the ninja is good at doing. My son’s always wanted to make video games, so he’s in the best possible place, I think. I hope he’s doing well at learning Japanese, though. They only had French, German and Spanish in school and he somehow managed to skip out on learning any of them. I think the school decided that C++ counted as a language.

But this meant my son wasn’t around to help with the cats. My older daughter had moved out a while back while she was getting her degree, and she was living in her own apartment so she didn’t need to come back home for Covid like the college kids in the dorms did. My younger daughter hadn’t yet merged with her timeshadow, we didn’t retrieve her from the moon until the following year, but neither she nor my younger son were willing to be much help. Meanwhile, dry food, in bins, much of it in cardboard boxes that bugs can slip into, some of the bins chewable by mice. Plus, all the restaurants were closed, so the bugs and the mice and the rats all wanted to find someplace that still had food. And our house, as mentioned earlier, is porous to anything the size of a cat, or smaller.

First we had the plague of mealmoths, that infested everything we owned made of grain or nuts. We love nuts, and my wife is crazy for pasta, and we have rice, and cold cereal, and bread. The way you’re supposed to purge your house of mealmoths is throw out all your grains and don’t bring any in for two weeks. This was not happening. I wanted to build a cedar pantry, but a. very busy at work and b. not allowed to go to Home Depot, and not about to try to have expensive wood shipped to the house. The business was doing well, but not that well. I knew from my tunneling project and my attic renovation that if you need wood shipped to you, you end up having to buy way more of it than you need, which is why there are still piles and piles of lumber in my attic.

Instead we ordered tons and tons of jars and plastic cereal bins with bug-proof seals and stuff like that to store all our grains in, and my wife had to go through them all to identify what the bugs had already gotten to, and then throw bay leaves into all the containers. Apparently mealmoths hate bay leaves.

The dishwasher stopped working. By now, we could get repair people again, but the repair guy said that the wires underneath the thing had been shredded by mice, and he didn’t know how to fix that. We tried getting a warranty repair. Turns out warranty repairs don’t cover shredded by mice.

So we got a new dishwasher, and I stashed the old one in the garage, figuring I might be able to repair it once I had some spare time. Twenty cats managed to clean out the rats before they even got a foothold, but apparently they had been slacking when it came to dealing with the mice. It was understandable, given that most of those cats were kittens and three of the cats who weren’t kittens were occupied raising kittens. Odin was too old and there was only so much Orion could do by himself.

The world outside basically stopped. My daughter didn’t go to her middle school graduation, didn’t attend the school she’d been so enthusiastic about going to for high school, and then by the time they opened the schools again she was too fragile to walk around the school building. We tried to get her into a program where she’d get to still be attending school from home, but the school did not understand how a timeshadow merge could possibly have made her too weak to go to school, and they refused. Meanwhile, my son just stopped going to high school, basically marking time until he turned 18 and could drop out, working on his web comic. And me and my wife worked from home, and my boyfriend was on disability and didn’t work anyway, plus you really can’t work when the Fae are trying to summon you and you have to hide out from them. So nobody ever left the house. My wife would go out for groceries, when we weren’t doing Instacart or when she needed to pick up stuff for my home improvement projects, but aside from that, nobody went anywhere. Not even the yard; my wife used to garden, but we were busy, plus, Fae circles. No one wants to risk stepping in one of those.

When there’s no routine, when nobody has to leave and nobody has school and the people who have a job are working pretty much all the time, time disappears. I’d look up from my PC and find an entire month had gone by. It seemed like this was a bit much even for the liminal timelessness of no routines, and then we found the infestation of time flies. Fuckers love fruit. You know the saying, time flies like a banana, but we had a peach tree and apple trees and a mulberry bush and grapevines and tomatoes all over the place, and this apparently attracted the time flies, who then moved into the house after we killed the mealmoths. Time flies don’t look too different from regular flies; they look just like cluster flies, those incredibly stupid little guys who live in the walls and are too stupid to figure out how to get back into the walls once they get out, so we’d never noticed. They lay their eggs in fruit, but they themselves eat time, and they don’t care about bay leaves, or mint, which we were using to try to drive the mice off.

Problem was, with five people never leaving a house, hoarding food, and having twenty cats, as soon as the time disappeared the house became an utter disaster, and there was no way we could have an exterminator over. Also no way to call an exterminator anyway, because nobody was actually answering phone calls! Anywhere!! And we didn’t have the time to follow up on anything. It’s a miracle we got the cats fixed and managed to give some of them away. Not nearly enough, mind you. I don’t know whether we got rid of three or five or seven but we still have an absurd number of cats. And cats will chase mice, and wall squid, and Orion was willing to go after rats, but none of them were gonna touch a time fly.

We put up flypaper, of course, and rubbed mushy banana on it to attract them, but once the time flies have infested your house, you have a lot less time to get anything done, including getting rid of your time flies. Then the oven broke, but since we have two halves of a house, we had two ovens, so we didn’t do much to get it fixed. My wife wanted it to get fixed before Thanksgiving, but with the time flies, that was ambitious.

Then my boyfriend brought home a cockatoo. How he managed to find the time to get a cockatoo, I’ll never know. The family who’d owned the cockatoo apparently had to get rid of her because she was “wrecking our home.” I wondered, how does a bird you can keep in a cage wreck a house?

The bird decided she was my mate, and that my wife and boyfriend – who did most of the bird feeding chores – were her rivals in a harem anime. When I let her out, she wouldn’t let them come near me. Apparently the home-wrecking in question had not been literal destruction of a house, though she was capable of that too if she was bored enough. My boyfriend kept trying to win her over, but my wife had never forgotten about the birds who pecked her dog’s eyes out because the dog claimed that birds didn’t exist, and she was an introvert, so she was happy to go hide in her office all the time and never go near the bird.

Meanwhile, if I put Jessica – the bird – in her cage, she shrieked. All the time. Ever hear the Cure song “Like Cockatoos?” Where Robert Smith says that the night sang out like cockatoos, and it sounds all sad and romantic? Yeah, Robert Smith never went anywhere near a cockatoo. They do not sing. They screech. And they burble, and they talk, but when they’re bored, or angry, or angry and bored, they screech.

I couldn’t have Jessica climbing all over me while I was working. Sure, everyone loves when your cat photobombs the Zoom call, but the bird could talk, and did not give a shit about professional office language. I couldn’t have her screaming either. So I gave her a job. She was now Tier 1 tech support. One of her favorite things to say was, “What the fuck, Amazon?”  This endeared her to the customers, who were generally calling in because AWS had done something to screw up their day. She really enjoyed interacting with the customers, they liked her, and my existing tech support team liked having someone to semi-screen the calls. Of course, she couldn’t type what the customer’s complaint was into a ticket, but she could peck a touchscreen with a co-worker’s face and make a call to tell them what the complaint was, so they could enter the ticket.

Cockatoos don’t eat time flies, either, and the time flies loved the fruit in her bowl, so we started losing even more time. The bills didn’t get paid. There were gaps of three months in telemedicine visits that were supposed to have been two week follow-ups.

We got rid of the majority of the infestation when the summer ended and all the fruit had been harvested. Turns out that time flies really do not like caffeine. We used old coffee and painted it on bananas and apples, they’d come lay their eggs, and then the eggs would die because of the caffeine. We couldn’t do anything about Jessica’s food because you can’t feed caffeine to a cockatoo, but time flies don’t really like dried fruit so much, unlike Jessica, who loved it. They also don’t care for seeds or nuts. And we weren’t feeding the chickens fruit, and obviously neither the dog nor the cats ate the stuff, so we finally managed to take a breath, come up for air, look around ourselves -- and realize that now we had a massive roach infestation.

We tried spraying. We thought that would be enough. Then the new dishwasher stopped working, we got a warranty repairman, and he told us he couldn’t do it. Warranty wouldn’t cover it. When he took off the cover and showed us the little roach apartments, with the roaches sitting around their dining room tables feeding the crumbs they’d stolen to their four million children, looking up at us and giving us the finger (technically, the leg, but I knew what they meant), we realized that spraying commercial pesticide was not going to solve this. But now the fuckers had destroyed our second dishwasher, so this meant war. And without time flies draining all the time away, we had the resources to go to war.

I’d planned to spend the winter months renovating the bathroom. I didn’t mention our bathroom, did I? The new house, the one my wife’s parents bought, had two bathrooms – a nice big one on the upper floor and a tiny little water closet with just a sink and a toilet on the first floor. But in our original house, the one we owned, there was only one bathroom, and it was a galley where literally most of the length and width of it was taken by the bathtub, so to get to the toilet on the other side of the bathroom you had to slide along the wall like you’re making a home music video for “Walk Like An Egyptian” by the Bangles. Or else stroll through the tub. Or else use the rings I bolted to the ceiling joists for my ninja son and swing along the ceiling, but he was the only one who could do that. My boyfriend, a big guy, could barely use the thing. So almost immediately after we got the other house, everyone stopped using that bathroom and switched to the one next door, except for my ninja son because his bedroom was right next to it and it was convenient for him. Ninjas are good at slinking through narrow passages. Now that he had left, I’d planned to tear the whole thing out, and his bedroom, and replace them both with a normal-shaped bathroom and a slightly smaller bedroom.

I didn’t get the chance. We needed to do battle.

It hadn’t helped that some neighborhood ne’er-do-well, who was probably high as a kite, broke into our house in the middle of the summer because our dog was mouthing off to him, threatened the dog, told the cockatoo he’d fuck her up (we know this because she started saying “Gonna fuck you up!” every time we told her it was bedtime or that she needed to be quiet or stop climbing in my hair), and smashed all our fishtanks. Fortunately we had no fish. Unfortunately we had like five fishtanks because my boyfriend had wanted to rescue feeder goldfish and breed guppies for sale, so we’d filled up three forty gallon tanks and two twenties, plus a few tiny five gallons, and then due to the time flies we’d never gotten around to putting fish in them. This did terrible damage to the floor. We had the guy dead to rights on video, managed to actually get the city police to pick him up and a prosecution going, and then he jumped bail and fled, possibly through a Fae circle because no one ever saw him again. He was gonna owe us several thousand dollars for the floor damage.

After we got rid of the time flies, we discovered that the damaged floor had become completely porous to roaches, so what had probably started as a basement infestation had become a full blown house emergency. There were roaches in the cereal. (This was the fault of whoever wasn’t following the mealmoth protocol and leaving the cereal out of the protective plastic bins.) They’d destroyed the dishwasher and were working on the refrigerator. Every cabinet and drawer we had was entirely full of the little assholes, plus the condos they’d built in the dishwasher, plus several of our sealed bins of food that turned out to be less sealed than we’d thought.

Meanwhile the city had sold our house to some asshole lawyers in Ohio, because we hadn’t mowed our lawn, and we had allowed Fae circles to spring up there, which was considered a hazard. Which it was, yes, but only to us and people trespassing on our property, and how the fuck do you safely get rid of those things anyway? We had racked up several thousand dollars’ worth of fines for not being able to mow the lawn because of the Fae circles and not being able to get rid of the Fae circles because we couldn’t safely mow the lawn, and then the time flies interfering with our ability to remember to pay the damn fines before they ballooned. We were still in a state of national emergency at this point, the vaccine was right on the horizon but no one we knew had qualified to get it yet, and they wanted to make us homeless because we didn’t mow our lawn. This was absolute bullshit, and personally, I think may have been retaliation from people at Animal Control, who are not the same guys that fine you for your lawn but they work under the same overarching department in the city government. If we hadn’t gotten rid of the time flies, we might not have been able to respond in time. There was stuff in there that was nonsensical, like fines for having high grass and weeds in February, or for not having cleaned up the area where we put our trash cans in 2019, or for too many kites on the roof. Why does it even matter if there are kites on the roof? We put them there to distract local falcons away from our chickens! They can’t fly into the power lines, they’re tethered with metal cable!

Also they threatened to chop down our mulberry tree because it was in the way of the street light, which didn’t work anyway and which, when it did work, blinded people in my son’s old bedroom, which my younger son was going to move into as soon as we finished the bathroom renovations. Which as it turned out we couldn’t even start, but he moved in anyway because his room didn’t have a ceiling. His older sister had been exorcising ghosts from that room and somehow this made the ceiling fall in, so we’d been using cheap fake paneling in lieu of a real ceiling, and this does nothing to stop ghosts getting back into the room. So my wife put barbed wire around the mulberry tree. Well, it wasn’t really barbed wire, it was tomato cages she’d unraveled and linked into each other in a crazy way that made a fence with sharp wires sticking out of it in all directions. The city fined us for that, too, but she was going to challenge that in court, because no one was going to hurt themselves on it as long as they didn’t try to trespass on our property and mess around with our tree.

Anyway, so we paid off the lawyers in Ohio to get full title to our house back, and we paid off the city’s fines, which, due to lockdown, involved going to city hall, then going to the basement of city hall because the front door was locked, then giving several thousand dollars in cash to a garden gnome because someone at the city had thought it was fun and whimsical to replace the cash drop with a garden gnome. The cash drop was now in his mouth. Then we called every day for a month before we managed to get someone on the phone who could confirm that yes, the garden gnome had had the money and the city managed to get it out and put it on our account, but they wanted another $200 in interest because the time between us dropping the cash and them picking up the cash and putting it on our account was somehow our fault.

And all this time, we’re battling the roaches.

They’d proved themselves immune to pyrethin or whatever that stuff is in most commercial pesticides, whereas we had a house full of people who’d blow up with allergies when anything even slightly nasty was in their airspace, so no more pyrethin for us. We had to get by on organics. Cloves, lavender, mint, citrus – turns out there is a reason humans eat a lot of the stuff we eat, and it’s not just because it tastes good. It’s because it preserves your food, because pretty much every critter except for bedbugs and time flies hate the stuff. Mixtures of boric acid and sugar. Diatomaceous earth. A new dishwasher that’s fully enclosed so it’d be a lot harder for them to get in, and putting the old dishwasher into a gigantic garbage bag, then buying dry ice and filling the bag with it to try to suffocate them all. It worked, but the dishwasher was still toast, and once again, the warranty repair people wouldn’t fix it. The roaches might have been dead but the repair guy could plainly see the condos they’d left behind.

While this was going on, the second oven broke, so we had to get people in to fix them both. Guess what. No, no, you’ll never guess. No warranty repair. No repair at all, actually. The oven that had been under warranty turned out to have been fried by a pair of lovebird mice that had decided to get amorous right where their pals had been gnawing at electric wires, so when we turned the stove on, the current went through both mice, and now we had furry mice skeletons trapped forever in a posture that made it clear they’d been mating. The other oven was destroyed by roaches, and the repair guy, who we were paying for, not a warranty repair, refunded our money because he wasn’t willing to touch it.

We had no ovens and we were sick and tired of buying warranties that would never be honored, so we went to a place called Roy’s Discount Appliances, which was in the basement of a warehouse that used to belong to Toys R Us before they went out of business, and was a maze of ovens, dishwashers, refrigerators and washing machines that were used, refurbs, or on deep clearance because the manufacturer had discontinued them. Nothing like trying to shove two ovens into a minivan where you’ve removed the back seats, but you brought three people, so now one of them has to ride home sitting on the side of an oven and your tailgate won’t close so you have a bungee cord holding it down. We paid cash to get a 5% discount, and I strongly suspect some of those appliances fell off the back of truck, if you know what I mean.

Meantime, we’re repairing the floor. This means putting everything from the first floor of the house, except for the kitchen since it has a stone floor, into one of those portable rental units – not a storage facility because we wanted close access to it. The basement tunnels are prone to flooding, so we didn’t want to use them, also the staircase down there is a little too rickety for me to feel secure carrying my 80-inch television down it.

The city refuses to give us a permit for the storage unit. Says we have to pay our fines. We just did that. They record this stuff in cuneiform printed by dot matrix printers onto carbon sheets, so we have no way to tell if the fines they’re talking about are new fines, or the old fines that we paid cash to a garden gnome for, because we’re not organized enough to know where most of our mail is, so we don’t have the originals. Also we can’t read cuneiform. My wife’s dad can, but my wife doesn’t want him to know how big our fines are or how badly organized we are, and she thinks she could learn cuneiform if she had two weeks of free time. She does not have two weeks of free time. But my boyfriend makes friends with all the neighbors – he always did, but it’s especially been important since the Fae started calling him – and the Hispanic family with the chemist dad offers us their shed, which turns out to be significantly bigger on the inside, for less than we’d have paid for a portable storage unit. They’re just a couple of houses down the block, so it’s almost as good as a unit.

We spend a few months ripping up badly damaged tile and rug, all of which date from at least the 70’s and I always hated anyway, scrubbing off floor adhesive, and laying down a new hardwood floor, just us. By which I mean mostly just me, my wife doesn’t do handyman stuff (she helped with the scrubbing part, and she buys the supplies, but that’s it) and my boyfriend hasn’t really been useful for anything since the Fae started calling him. So now the roaches can’t get upstairs from the basement, but it’s too late, they have a beachhead here now, and so what we’ve just basically done is locked ourselves in with them. We start seeing more of the little fuckers. Now they’re getting into books and DVD cases and clothes hampers. Some end up in the bedroom.

You may ask why we don’t hire an exterminator. Remember the twenty cats? Maybe down to thirteen or seventeen or something by now – some of them spend all their time outdoors – but there are a lot of cats. And they’re at war with each other.

There’s the Canada clan – Sylph and Raven themselves have decided they are outdoor cats, but most of their kittens still live with us – and Tiamat’s clan, which includes Orion and Odin because Orion is one of Tiamat’s brothers (hopefully not the one who is also her father, but we got them from a hoarder’s kid going through his parents’ property, so we never actually found out), and she’s decided that Odin is less awful now that he’s a gazillion years old and she has the Canada clan to compare them to. My youngest daughter, who is mostly confined to her room due to physical weakness and compromised immune system, treats Tiamat’s kittens like they’re her own children (including carrying them around baby style, putting them in toy strollers she is way too old for, and occasionally putting one in a toy Pack n Play and then covering it with a large cardboard box as a “time-out”), so they have a home base. The Canada clan grew up in our bedroom, so they have a home base. The rest of the house is a war zone.

Whenever you walk through the house, there are cats hissing at each other, yowling, swiping at each other, chasing each other, the works. It’s still cold outside, so we can’t get them to go out and do their fighting outdoors like civilized cats. Our homeowners insurance dropped us when they found out about the tunnels in the basement. (They didn’t know we made the tunnels, and we didn’t admit to it, but insurance inspectors can be incredibly thorough when they want to be.) We haven’t been able to get a new policy yet. So my wife does not want a guy traipsing around the whole house where he might get tripped or scratched by warring cats. We’ve all learned to dodge, but an exterminator wouldn’t necessarily be experienced with being in a cat war zone.

It’s one thing to get repair guys into one or the other of the kitchens, they have doors and we can lock the cats out if we have to (I know most kitchens do not, in fact, have doors that can lock out the rest of the house, but we needed one back in the days when we had Angel, our beagle who we called that because as soon as you weren’t looking at him he would sneak into the kitchen and eat anything he could find, like the Weeping Angels on Doctor Who except with less neck breaking and more stealing your PB+J the instant your back was turned. That was before we had the other house, but we installed a similar door on the other house to keep the two dimensional dog from sneaking into our bedroom and pooping there.) It’s another thing to have a guy going all over your house while your cats are setting up ambushes for each other. And without homeowner’s insurance, we can’t risk it.

So it’s down to us. But we’re creative. My boyfriend has been seeing giant bugs that look like a cross between centipedes and beetles. Like the wall squid, they’re not entirely in our reality; he can see them because of his connection to the Fae. Well, my wife looks them up and apparently they are predators who eat bugs. We just have to get them over into our reality, and then figure out how to dispose of them. We can’t get frogs because the cats would attack them, and we can’t get an anteater because exotic animal, need a permit and besides, it’s not called a roach eater. We can bring the chickens inside to go roach hunting from time to time, but they poop all over the floor so the cure’s almost worse than the disease.

In our yard, there’s an old wooden gate that fell off the new house shortly after we got it, and instead of throwing it out, we leave it in the yard and move it around from time to time to kill weeds. The Fae made a circle on it. We carry the wooden gate into the house, and then my boyfriend leaves out sugar water to attract the centipeedles through the circle. Now we have centipede beetles the length of a human foot (which is mostly a lot shorter than the measurement named for it) in the house. Possibly this was ill thought out. The cats try attacking them, but it turns out, cats find centipeedles just as creepy as humans do, and the damn things have some pretty tough armor. It doesn’t take much before the cats get intimidated and leave them alone. Even Orion the assassin cat gives them a wide berth.

Turns out, the centipeedles are great at killing the roaches, but no one wants centipeedles in their pantry, or their silverware drawer. My daughter just literally stops eating off anything but her own private stash of sealed paper plates and plastic silverware because she’s so creeped out by the thought of either roaches or centipeedles touching anything she might eat off of. This isn’t great, the kid is already too thin and too easily put off her food. She was always picky, but apparently the timeshadow spent ten years eating moon cheese and is having a hard time stomaching Earth food, so now everything nauseates her, gives her a stomach, or is unappetizing in the first place.

One thing I will say for chickens: they’ll eat centipeedles. They don’t care, it’s all food to them. The cats have learned that chickens are much more of a threat and much less of a prey than they might think. Lana the two dimensional dog will happily chase the chickens, but she’s less two dimensional than she used to be. She doesn’t get enough exercise and she steals a lot of food, so she’s looking considerably more three dimensional than when we got her, which is good because it keeps her from slipping through closed doors, though bad in the sense that it’s not that healthy for her. There is enough clutter around the place, what with my tools, piles of lumber for the floor, and boxes of books that were deemed too heavy to carry over to the neighbors’ shed, that chickens have plenty of places to take shelter from a two and a half dimensional dog. And if we let Jessica the cockatoo out, turns out she thinks centipeedles are a fun piece of moving string to catch and tear in half. You’d think that a predator like a cat would be better at killing a centipeedle than a hookbill bird, but turns out, the centipeedles’ bellies are barely armored and the cockatoo has nearly opposable thumbs on her feet. She can flip them over, and then peck, peck, crack, done.

So we’ve got the chickens running around the place in chicken diapers to eat the centipeedles that we brought over from the lands of the Fae to eat the roaches, but we still have roaches and we still have centipeedles because it turns out you can’t control house bugs with predators. Spiders might be better at it and my boyfriend wants to get some, but my wife shoots that down.

I’m kinda at my wits’ end here, and then my youngest son wants to show me something.

So to understand this, I gotta tell you something about the layout of my house. We’ve got a full duplex, both sides, thanks to my wife’s dad. The front of the house is on a busy street, and my bedroom and my youngest daughter’s bedroom face that. The back of the house faces our deck, and my ninja son’s former bedroom (from the original side we had) and the guest room (from the new side we got) face that. Then there’s a room in the middle of our original house, that my younger son used to have, but now he’s moved into his older brother’s room. The bathroom is next to the boys’ bedroom, and also faces the deck.

Back a few years ago, before Covid, I did a renovation on my ninja son’s bedroom where I made it a little smaller, in preparation for making the bathroom wider. Then I didn’t have the opportunity to work on the bathroom. So there’s a narrow corridor between the bathroom and the bedroom. I threw together a quick and dirty closet to occupy some of that space, so the boys’ bedroom now has a closet in the corner that faces the bathroom and the deck. My younger son guided me over to this closet, and pulled up a trap door that I hadn’t known was there. There was a spiral staircase underneath.

So I went down the spiral staircase, of course, but I was freaking out. This hadn’t been here when I worked on the boys’ bedroom. I redid their entire floor, when they were so young they shared the room and my older daughter had the middle bedroom. There was no way this trap door could have been there when we moved in. There’s also no way it could be going where it’s going. My sons’ bedroom sits over the kitchen, but the kitchen has an addition in the back where we keep the laundry machines. This spiral staircase would theoretically be going right down into it.

Except it’s not. I’ve got pretty good spatial perception, so it doesn’t take me long to figure out that this very narrow little column is going between the two houses, at the edge where the kitchens meet the additions. I don’t know how it’s possible that I missed it. I’ve done so many renovations in this house. This is crazy.

The spiral staircase goes down underground and into a tunnel, which is not one of the tunnels my son and I dug to connect all the basements in the neighborhood. Technically this tunnel isn’t even in my basement; the foundation only goes as far as the original house, so the additions have no basement. This tunnel goes under my deck, then deeper underground, then turns, and comes up…

Ok, this is super weird. It’s a buried pillbox. This is like a basement, except what if your basement had a roof of its own rather than just being part of your house, and it was sticking out of the ground about two feet, with a lot of windows, and it was the size of maybe two rooms in your house put together, and it was at the back of the yard belonging to the neighbors with a swimming pool.

The room is mostly empty. There are tools, and some very iffy towels, and several empty beer cans, and a bottle of Windex and a really nasty roll of paper towels with spiderwebs all over it. I ask my son, “Did your brother know this was here?”

“I don’t know. If he did, he never mentioned it.”

“How long has it been here?”

“I don’t know, I just found it!”

There is no door, aside from the one we came in, and no staircase up to the ground level, but I open one of the windows and squirm through.

The fence around the neighbors’ swimming pool is about five feet tall, so I can see over it. My neighbors are sitting on their swimming pool. I mentioned the father’s a chemist or something, right? He’s got these substances that you mix into your water to change its solidity. They’ve turned about three quarters of their swimming pool into a semi-solid – a little bit squishy, their feet are leaving footprints in it when they walk around, but it holds their weight – and the remaining quarter, they’ve left as water so they can dangle their feet. There’s an entire entertainment center sitting in front of the pool, including a huge CRT TV, a VCR and a dozen super old video game machines like the Sega Saturn or the Nintendo GameCube, protected from the rain by a shade umbrella. Nothing is protecting this stuff from the water from the pool, though. They’re watching The Little Mermaid. I lean against the fence, and my neighbors notice me. The chemist greets me. “What’s going on, man?”

“I just discovered that this structure you have in the back of your yard is connected to my son’s bedroom.”

“Oh, wow,” he says. He gets out of the pool. He’s wearing swim trunks, but aside from his legs, he’s completely dry, since he’s been sitting on top of his pool dunking his feet and watching The Little Mermaid with his family. “You didn’t build that thing?”

“No, I didn’t build it.”

“But you built the tunnels.” I like this guy; he discovered the tunnels shortly after moving in, but he thought they were great. He wanted to get chickens himself, but there isn’t room in his yard with the swimming pool. The roof of the underground structure is completely covered with planter boxes full of tomatoes, peppers, flowers, herbs, and rutabagas. I don’t know why they’re trying to grow root vegetables in planters, but there’s enough foliage that I can tell what it is. The sign doesn’t help, it’s in Spanish. For obvious reasons I can read “tomato” and “jalapeno” and “serrano” in Spanish, but not “nabo sueco”, which probably means rutabaga because that’s what’s planted there.

“Yeah, a few years back, but I had no idea this thing was even here. Most of the tunnels go directly between the houses, not under the back yards.”

“Cool. I thought it was yours, but I didn’t know for sure. Can I go inside?”

“Well, there’s no door, but if you want to come to my house we can go down the staircase from my son’s room.”

So we traipse back over to my house, and then up to my son’s bedroom, down the stairs, through the tunnel, and into the empty underground structure. “This gets a lot of light for a thing underground,” he says. “A lot of windows.”

“It’s nice. I don’t know what it’s doing here, but maybe I’ll install some doors to give you and me privacy, and then make a trap door in the roof. I might have to move your rutabagas, though. That way you can come in and enjoy the space, too. Maybe we’ll make it some kind of den. You play board games? Role-playing games?”

“Not in English, not the role-playing games. I used to have an 11th level paladin before we moved here, but I was playing in Spanish. Board games, it’s mostly been Chutes and Ladders or Monopoly or some shit like that.” His kids are younger than mine.

“Well, we can put some furniture down there if there’s a trap door to lower it through, and get some lighting in.” There’s only one lamp, a work lamp clipped onto one of the ceiling joists. Its bulb works but is very dim. There’s one power outlet in the place. I’m gonna have to trace it back to see if it’s my electricity or his. “Set up some board games, maybe a mini-fridge with beer and Coke. We could hang out sometimes.”

“Yeah, that would be good. You like zucchini? My wife has too much zucchini.”

“I don’t, but my wife loves it. I could trade you some eggs.”

So that’s how I made friends with the mad scientist guy down the block. No idea what company he works for but they make some crazy shit. That stuff that makes the pool solid? Amazing. I don’t know how he keeps it from circulating through the entire pool, though. Maybe he’s got underwater baffles up to control the flow.

I tell my wife about this thing, and she looks at me funny. “Uh, yeah. You built that.”

“I did not.”

“You did. You got drunk one night and you said you were gonna seriously screw with the woman who called Animal Control on us. Then you built a tunnel to her house.”

“How the hell did I build that entire basement structure thing?”

“Oh, no, that was already there. You just connected to it. Same way you connected to the city’s underground tunnels.” Yeah, truth is, my son and I didn’t really build the entire tunnel system under the neighborhood. There was already a tunnel the city made and we just dug connectors to everyone’s basement, few years back.

“When were you going to tell me about this?”

“Why would I tell you about it? You’re the one who built it. I thought you’d remember.”

Okay, maybe I need to control my drinking, but that was a stressful time, with that woman being responsible for me losing my two roosters to Animal Control. Roosters aren’t allowed in the city, because the city is sexist. Apparently I built the trap door, the entire spiral staircase, and the connecting tunnel in one night, and I made my wife, my boyfriend, and my ninja son help, and now I’m the only one who doesn’t remember it. That’s embarrassing. After that woman did that, and tried to stop us from rescuing our own chickens, my wife started anonymously harassing her and sending her moldy videotapes until she sold the house and left town. Gotta say I like the new owners a lot better.

I hang out with the scientist a couple nights a week, after we get some furniture in there. My wife goes swimming in their pool, but I’m not a big fan of swimming; I go to the bunker with him and we shoot the shit and drink some beers, while my wife and his wife talk about gardening and practice my wife’s very rusty Spanish. My wife learned about ten languages but isn’t fluent in any of them, although she can say “This beautiful green Earth will soon be mine!” in Japanese. Maybe she shouldn’t have learned so much of it from anime.

It’s not easy to admit to anyone that you’ve got a roach problem, let alone a new friend, but liquor lubricates a lot of conversational topics. Yeah, okay, so it’s not always beer we’re drinking. Sue me. I tell my friend about the roaches, and he tells me his company is working on this really amazing fantastic pesticide. It’s a fungus that destroys exoskeletons, and it infects bugs, and only bugs, and makes them do Cordyceps type bullshit where they crave light instead of hiding in the dark like verminous bugs usually do, so they come out where you can see them. Then you can kill them, or let the infection kill them. I’m kind of worried about zombie apocalypses but he assures me that the fungus cannot infect humans, or anything without an exoskeleton. That’s the only place the spores can grow.

That sounds awesome.

So we get some from him and we mix it with sugar and we put it down everywhere. Big rectangular squares around all the furniture. Up table legs and counter sides. All around the edges of the tables and the counters. We’re taking no chances. We pull out the dishwasher and oven and coat the bottoms and backsides of them. Normally this stuff would be scary expensive, but our pal is giving it to us for free – well, “free” meaning we’re giving him tons of ground beef from the cow we bought, plus weird organs because his wife knows how to cook them and me and my wife would have to google it, plus eggs. And my wife is helping his wife learn English, but that maybe doesn’t count because she’s helping my wife learn Spanish, so that’s a pretty even trade. We watch their kids sometimes too; we don’t have a swimming pool, but we do have practically every game machine released in the US and a couple that were Japan only, and a gigantic library of media on hard drive, most of which was legal. Well, somewhat legal. Well, a good bit of them, my wife borrowed from the library and then ripped to hard drive. The kids are not unhappy to come over our house, is my point.

By this point everyone is vaccinated and my friend’s workplace always was pretty safe because it’s a clean room, where people wear Tyvek suits over their entire bodies, and masks and goggles, long before Covid was a thing, and his wife doesn’t work and me and my wife work from home and their kids are still going to school online and mine aren’t going at all anymore. So we feel pretty comfortable sharing air even with Covid still going on. We’re seeing a lot more bugs, but my pal reminds me that that’s part of the goal of this stuff, to entice them to come out and bask in the sunlight so we can kill them more easily. His kids like to run through our house with water guns full of soapy water, shooting bugs (and each other, and my boyfriend, who plays with them). I don’t mind as long as they stay well away from the computer equipment and they clean up the water spills once they’re done. It’s free housecleaning. These kids are more helpful at keeping the place clean than my own kids have been in years.

Then we start to see clusters of the bugs stuck on the wall. It looks like spots of mold, but turns out to be mold-covered bugs sitting on the wall semi-stuck to each other. I’m allergic to mold. My friend says it’s not that kind of mold, am I allergic to mushrooms? And I point out, the spores, yes I am, because I used to grow mushrooms in my basement and they’d spray spores out every so often and my nose would run like it was training for a marathon. He’s chagrined, says he didn’t know, because yeah, of course these things are gonna come out in the sun and spray spores. Light makes them spore, that’s why the mold makes them want to go into the light.

So now I’m popping Zyrtec like it’s candy and there are more and more moldy bugs turning up. For some reason they really want to join up together, like the mold wants them to make a mold mat, so they all go stand next to each other, centipeedles and roaches and ants and fleas, all together. It’s getting flies and mosquitos and mealmoths, too; they don’t eat the sugar we mixed into the liquid suspension of spores, but if they land on the mold mat because they think it’s ordinary wall or floor, they’ll be joining it in a day or two. Spiders, too, presumably getting infected by eating infected bugs. It spreads outside because the house is porous and the bugs can go in and out; there’s a giant ant colony burrowed into the dirt walls of the tunnels I made a few years back, and those guys are coming up out of the dirt and making giant mold mats of ants on the sidewalk and in the grass. It’s pretty gross. My friend begs me not to tell anyone who asks about the product I used; apparently it was experimental and he could lose his job for giving it to me. Well, thanks, buddy, wish you’d warned me! He assures me this never happened in the lab. I’ll bet they didn’t have nearly so many bugs in the lab, and they were probably in terrariums or something where there just weren’t all that many bugs per habitat.

At the point where the outdoor walls start getting covered with mold mats made of ants and earwigs and the fleas that lurk in the grass waiting for unsuspecting cats to walk by, the city gets on my ass. Apparently my walls are covered with mold and I need to clean them off, it’s unsanitary and releasing spores. “You think?” I say with my red, teary eyes and in between violent sneezes as I fish for more Kleenex in my pocket. I cannot actually get anywhere near the mold mats, not without a full on respirator. We have N95 masks and safety goggles, but I try those things and a. the safety goggles immediately fog up so I can’t see and b. it doesn’t help, the spores are getting into the safety goggles and getting into my eyes anyway.

My wife, my boyfriend and the friend-who-got-me-into-this-mess step in to help out. They’re spraying the mold mats with bleach, which would kill the bugs even if the mold hadn’t killed them yet, and scraping them off the walls with shovels and brooms. The ones they find in the yard, they dig underneath and cover them with dirt, then copper fungicide because, unlike bleach, that won’t kill plants that try to grow in the dirt. My friend has some more weird chemicals he thinks might help, but frankly I’m done; I got centipeedles to kill the roaches and then I got this stuff to kill the centipeedles and the roaches and it’s just made matters worse. Everyone in the world is allergic to roaches but not nearly as badly as I am to this mold. I’ve graduated to Benadryl, and bourbon, which does nothing about the allergies except to help me sleep through them. My wife says I’m not supposed to drink while taking Benadryl but I ask you, how do you look at your walls covered with mats of dead bugs that are growing mold and not drink?

The ants apparently go everywhere. Other neighbors are ending up with mold mats on their lawn. This is getting out of hand. I joke about setting the neighborhood on fire, but my wife reminds me that setting mold on fire just spreads spores.

So that gives me an idea.

We’ve got this water main that’s been broken for, oh, ten years now. The city keeps coming out to fix it and it just doesn’t fix. First it was up the street, pouring water down our street for years, winter and summer, which meant the road would turn into a slick sheet of ice every winter. Then they fixed it so that now it forms a pond in the median right outside my house. Maybe eventually they’d have stoppered that up too, but they left a backhoe on the median and somebody stole it. Not me or my family, for once; we checked the cameras but they weren’t pointing at the backhoe so we never figured out who did it. Anyway, mold likes damp, but things that like damp don’t necessarily like serious amounts of water, right?

My friend and I hook up pipes to the broken water main, and connect them to hoses, and connect the hoses to pumps, and pull all the water up the street to some of the neighbors behind my house who paved their back yards. We empty out the furniture from the underground room and clean out our respective basements, first, and park the cars up the street on the hill above all this. Then we let the water go.

This floods the neighborhood.

Yes. Again.

Everything below the level of where we’re pumping the water main to gets flooded. Yards and basements fill with water and wash down the hill to the river, which is really more of a cranky little creek most of the time, and the river washes it all down to the bay, where it should be diluted to the point where it won’t hurt the crabs. My friend assures me that this mold was bio-engineered to not be good at handling a lot of water. It can drown, too, even its spores. If they’re floating in water and they encounter a crab, they won’t be able to germinate on its shell. This is very important because around here we love our crabs. Of course, all this disturbed some local ghosts – ghosts don’t like flooding – but honestly I feel like it’s just negligence if you still have ghosts. We had all those floods a decade ago, like the one my car floated off in, so everyone should have known by now that there are ghosts in the area and they don’t like floods, so get them exorcised pre-emptively. It’s kind of like not having fire extinguishers in your house, if you don’t get the exorcism done.

We go around to any of our neighbors with a mold mat on the walls, and spray it off with a power washer. So far thankfully none of them have ended up with mold mats inside their houses, which just goes to show you how much the gods hate my house. We do not admit that any of this is our fault, just being good neighbors and helping out, but unfortunately my neighbors know me too well.

So this is great. Our animals are free of fleas, there’s no flies or mosquitos around for once in our lives, the mealmoths and the roaches and the centipeedles are gone, there’s no ants. And this is true all over the neighborhood. The bees seem to be fine; bees seemed to know not to land on the mold mats, and we didn’t poison with sugared fungus outside, so there was nothing to attract them to the fungus. Wasps, unfortunately, are fine too, but fuck it, they’re pollinators and I have fruit trees so I guess that’s okay. So this all ought to be great, right? Everybody happy, the whole neighborhood free of bug pests?

The city is now fining me out the ass for “stealing water”, even though come on, it’s bubbling up from the broken water mains so much it made a mosquito-growing pond, and I’m the one who got rid of the mosquitoes. (For the larvae in the pond, we just used mosquito dunks, plus our stunt temporarily drained the pond.) My neighbors are suing me for various things, including pain and suffering, water damage to their yards, riling up ghosts, and the death of so many poor innocent little buggies. (Are you kidding me? There are people around here actively mourning the deaths of flies and roaches. What the hell is wrong with people?)

And that is why I have posted this GoFundMe. Because I got rid of an entire neighborhood’s worth of bugs, at least for this year – no illusions about them coming back next year now that we’ve washed away all the spores – and people are suing me for it. And I’m not willing to throw my chemist friend under the bus legally, since he could lose his job, so the defense “this guy told me it was okay” is not gonna help. And everyone who wanted to get into the cloud when Covid hit already has by now, so business is not exactly booming anymore. Anybody want to help a guy out?

[judelijah]

This is going to be a somewhat chaotic PJOseries review so bare with me

I might do edits to add some of my observations I missed so... Yeah. Prepare for that. And it will def be spoilery

Okay I just watched the first two episodes of @percyseries and this is actually a fresh take and a great adaptation that is of its own just like The Lightning Thief Musical. Most of the decisions of changes they made actually make sense for a show adaptation.

Anyway possible spoilers alert ahead so

Don't say I didn't warn you!

Ep 1 : I Accidentally Vaporize My Pre-Algebra Teacher

Off to a good start. I love how they opened this with flashbacks when Percy was young and how he's struggling with ADHD.

Anyway like I said first and foremost, this isn't really a word by word (word for word? grammatically correct me, anyone, if I were wrong) adaptation. So there will be conversations which I've memorized from the book that will completely get cut, but will be replaced by lines that do not really stray away that much from the essence of the scenes.

Walker embodies Percy Jackson if he were to be born a Gen Z ( well I always considered Percy as a Milennial reading the book as I grew up so ). Obviously, he's still got that charm from his previous movies he starred in. No wonder at all why Uncle Rick entrusted him this role.

Tbh, I only had an issue with Mrs. Dodd's facial appearance. It looked like the CGI on her was unfinished. But the way she strut towards Percy while transforming into a Fury is *chef's kiss*

Even if it's unintentional messaging, I love how it's viewed that these people are also just so unaware and inattentive with their surroundings. (yeah the Mist does all that, Yada Yada but it kinda gave a spotlight on the perspective of an ADHD how they can also be frustrated when people around them don't notice what they see)

And I definitely think that they need to bring back the actor who played Nancy and cast her as Rachel in Season 3. I mean, no one would even notice she's the same actor as Nancy only appeared a brief amount of time.

Sally telling Percy that he's a Half-Blood was so unexpected but it made sense during that scene. The poor kid is going through an existential crisis. She's gotta give her son a break.

Also, I kinda see how that is the very reason why the minotaur found them as soon as he can, if it's still canon in here that the more a demigod know about their connection to Greek mythological stuff, the more monsters they attract and can sense them, and will come for them!

I dunno if it's just me, but the scene when the Minotaur was supposed to be chasing them kinda didn't leave an impression on me that there is some sort of danger looming? I guess part of that is because Pasiphae's son looked too cute? But the scene when Percy went for a bullride is definitely one heck of a heroic moment!

Ep 2 : I Become Supreme Lord of the Bathroom

Mr. D is... a troll. Lol. No. I mean, I def laughed when he played Percy like that. If Jason actually watched Stanley Tucci's take on this role in the Sea of Monsters movie, I think he's actually the continuation of that. It is nothing that I expected from Dionysus reading the book but I can love this take tho.

Chiron is too kind in here. I guess it's the actor's nature emanating in this role. I kinda expected him to be also somehow stern and disappointed at times, and not too cheerful. But with that said, he's definitely the camp director you'd be visiting much so making him more approachable along those reasoning made him a perfect fit!

Tbh, kinda missing a lot of Annabeth content since her role in introducing the camp to Percy has been filled mostly by Luke.

I guess we can see more of her in the episodes that follow which is why they took that direction. I mean, I def agree that we gotta give some more screen time to Luke.

Clarisse and her siblings are ... Probably how Gen Z bullies would act right now, I guess?

And focusing on Grover's whereabouts actually is the cherry I love from this show.

I definitely want the Capture the Flag to occur at night just like in the books (which is also one of the many complaints I have with the movies tbfh), because I feel the scene when Percy was claimed would've been more "atmospheric" with the glowing trident hovering above his head in the dark surroundings... but I guess there are some issues behind the camera that that will be a very tricky so I guess I'll just let this pass.

Prediction for that Ep 3 Preview

With the scene when Sally, and younger Percy talked about how not all who look like heroes are actually heroes, the same goes with monsters, whilst looking at the statue of his namesake holding Medusa's head;

Why do I think that Aunty Em wouldn't be viewed as antagonistic here? I mean, judging from the preview of the next ep, I kinda sense a vibe that she'll willingly offer her head to Percy and somehow tell a different tale from the story that we know about the gorgons?

This is just me, I'll definitely discard this once I'm proven wrong by the show (or not) but even so, I think that is actually a change I can accept also to further the message of

"Not those who look like monsters are amonsters"

Conclusion

Obviously there are complete changes they've done; from the casting alone, and also some specific conceptual description from the books that were somehow intentionally decided that they'd do the opposite, for instance: like what I've mentioned above, playing capture at day instead of night, Chiron's a black stallion from the waist down instead of white, Mr D not looking like a hubbub (erm cherub), Smelly Gabe not being that quite bald, and the fandom's issue with the hair and all that, those things considered that are superficial that even if you completely stray away from it, there won't be that much change at all...but like what I've also said, this is a fresh take and an adaptation that stands on its own just like The Lightning Thief Musical.

Tbh, if you're watching this show without having read the book at all, I'll say this that this is very distinguishable from it, judging by the two episodes alone. It is faithful with the essence but there are details that are only physically manifested from the book which they absolutely turn a 360. You can absolutely say that you're not required to read the series before watching this at all, but I will aso advise that you read it to know what I mean.

Also I can say that at times, I can also pick up some cinematic vibes similar with the hated Peter Johnson movies by most of the fandom, and I can't also help but cry over cartons of spilled milk with those movies are, because they definitely had the potential to be great, but it had all gone into waste!

Those movies could've been what this series is if only they honored the books faithfully beforehand. Such a waste for fans like me who have to wait for this day before getting this kind of adaptation but hey! What's important is now, and RIGHT NOW THANK di Immortales THAT uncle Rick is very much involved!

[nickgerlich]

Young Guns

I suppose it is just intrinsically human to consider your generational cohort the best that ever was, and to be dismissive of all those coming along after you. Oddly, we become more accepting of the ones before us, if only because we have started to grow old ourselves, able to see a little more clearly.

And so we mock the music our successors find appealing, knowing full well that our parents (I am speaking of mine right now) hated rock-n-roll with a fervor. We mock their clothing, their hair styles, their desire to DoorDash everything, and the amount of time they spend on their phones doing everything else.

Of course, my people are called “Boomer" with ridicule and scorn, not a whole lot different from the hatred we lobbed at our parents. It’s normal, remember, even though that alone does not make it right.



With COVID slipping ever farther into the rear view (aside from a nagging number of cases still being reported), shoppers have returned to BAM stores. Well, except for Millennials, who reported in a recent survey that nearly three-quarters plan to maintain or increase their online shopping in the years ahead.



That’s probably not too much of a problem for mainstream retailers in the short-run, but as Millennials assume the roles that Gen-Xers and Boomers are in today, it could spell long-term problems. That’s another way of saying once the crusty old curmudgeons are gone, it could be tough sledding for BAM retailers.

I get all the intergenerational complaining, too, but I am blessed to be surrounded by young adults all the time in my profession. Not everyone can say that. I embrace the changes around me, but others less fortunate than me may not be so quick to hitch their wagons to the engine we call Change.

I prefer to go with the 1980-1996 time frame for Millennial membership, although there is not 100% agreement on this. It was only about a decade ago that the cut point was moved from 1998 back to 1996, which left my oldest daughter sorely disappointed. She is now a Gen-Z, although she lives and shops like a Millennial. Those on the cusp, either beginning or end, may exhibit traits of the other generation nearby.

The jury is out yet on Gen-Z, many of whom have not yet become shoppers in the adult sense of the word. If I had to bet, they will leave their Millennial brothers and sisters in the dust and do even more shopping online. Remember, these are the true digital natives, humans whom have known only one way of life thus far. They could have easily been born with a smartphone or computer mouse in their hand.

Given that the oldest Millennial—using the generally agreed-upon definition—is turning 43 this year, it means that this group is at or near their peak consumption years. Once you hit 60 and/or have an empty nest, consumption starts to decline, from the houses we buy, to the things we put in it. And if Millennials are inclined to continue shopping online without a thought, it means that retailers need to start planning for the declining emphasis on their actual shops.

I foresee, as we have discussed previously, more empty malls, and quite possibly standalone and strip mall shops as well. Vast ghost towns of commercial structures may blight our city streets.

It is a fool’s errand for any generation to expect subsequent ones to act just like them. You will fail, no matter how much you gripe about the ways they have chosen to define their generation. In other words, give it up. My generation has had its time in the sun. In fact, I’m pretty sure that we Boomers have enjoyed being the darlings of society ever since we were born.

After all, we broke all previous—and future—records for percentage growth rate. But that does not mean we are the kings and queens of our culture. We may be in the lofty position of owning much of our nation’s wealth right now, but that too will pass when we bequeath it to our heirs.

It just means there might be a lot of grumpy old men and women in the foreseeable future, bitching about how so many things have changed in their lives, and that things just aren’t the way they used to be. Get off their lawns, and turn down your music. Getting old sucks for sure, but your turn (I’m talking to my students now) will come and then you’ll be able to complain about all the younguns coming along.

Sure as the setting sun.


Dr “Talkin’ About My Generation“ Gerlich

Audio Blog

[gingerhastoomanyobsessions]

the older generations make fun of millennials-Gen Z for being too eager to use labels but like. i know so many older people who would probably benefit from having a word to describe themselves who just refuse to use one because that’s what the youths are doing

my mom is on the ace spectrum. she’s realized this in the past few years. however she still doesn’t want to use the words because “there are probably lots of women who don’t”

one of my grandmas, in all likelihood, has a personality disorder. she sees a therapist and knows it. however she doesn’t want an on-paper diagnosis because “that’s for serious cases” and for people who “actually need it”. and young people.

my dad has adhd. he’s seen a therapist. he knows the criteria because he was there throughout my diagnosis process. however he doesn’t want to try medication, despite voicing the desire to be able to focus, because he thinks that it’s for kids and he’s old enough to “power through it”

i genuinely think a lot of gen X and boomers are so wary of our use of labels because they see themselves in it and don’t want to have to consider the possibility that they might be depriving themselves of help and community. the good ol protestant work ethic + toxic individualism combo pushes them to think that they don’t need any support because they’re not in crisis, not realizing that everyone needs support and community as a part of being human. they view labels, both for identity and for mental health, as a sign that you’re too far gone to be “normal”, so they’d rather stay unlabeled for as long as they can, thinking that ignoring their differences will make them go away. “you’re not x, you’re just different” isn’t just them trying to deny our problems, it’s also them denying their own

[phnxpcky]

So I recently watched Stephanie Soo's (Missmangobutt) "Baking a Crime" video about the movie "In time" (I know the video is a year old but anyhow) and I watched this movie forever ago when it first came out but at the time I was too young to have any thoughts about it other than "huh that was an interesting and exciting movie". I've basically forgotten about the movie since then but then I watched Stephanie's video and she of course commented on how the movie is, in a way, an interesting portrayal and critique of our current society.

If you haven't watched the movie before, it's basically about a futuristic version of society where everyone stops aging at the age of 25 but also at the age of 25 the rest of the time in your life basically becomes currency. So you will never grow physically another day older after the age of 25 but starting at 25, you start paying for and get paid in the amount of time you have left to life (e.g. You might pay a convenience store 5 minutes of your life for a bottle of water or 500 hours of your life for each month of rent, someone might pay you 6 hours of their life to fix their roof, and you might put down 10 hours of your life for a round of poker in hopes you'll win 20 hours back). Your bank account is literally the amount of time you have left to live and it's constantly going down (talk about your no/low interest bank account actually losing value with each passing moment....) until the moment it hits 0 when you'll just drop dead. This means the poor are literally struggling to stay alive from day to day while the rich basically life forever.

That's the general context of the movie, there is obviously a statement being made about income inequality and the 1% vs 99% when you have the super poor literally struggling to stay alive juxtaposed against the super rich basically living forever but I won't go into details because as a Zillenial in 2023, I've a few other interesting thoughts about the movie now.

Basically, I don't think that kind of society would have lasted very long. I'm basing this on several things including the lie flat and let rot movements by the Millenials and Gen Z in China, the quiet quitting trend in at least the US, North Korea literally making suicide illegal because they started having a suicide problem, and just the overall terrible state of mental health across the world. It's all just not a great recipe for a society where if you're not crazy wealthy and you don't work like a slave you'll simply drop dead. To be quite frank, there are currently many significantly worse ways to go than to just drop dead. I don't know the details on how people die in the movie but if it's a split second thing like it's shown to be, it can't be more painful than the current way most poor people die (slowly from starvation/illness/physical injuries). I can see Millenials and Gen Z getting dropped in the world of "In Time" and everyone basically goes "soooo lifetime of miserably slaving away or nonstop partying for about a month before just dropping dead? Guess it'll be the craziest party of the century". The society basically built in an easy and possibly painless if not as least minimally painful way out. The movie literally starts with a man who is over 100 years old giving away the 100 years he still has because he's tired of living. What's to say the people that're grinding everyday for an extra 12 hours won't get tired and just be like "you know what just going in my sleep sounds not bad actually". Once all the poor start dying out the rich will realize that suddenly there aren't anybody left to help them uphold their lavish lifestyles. Sure they may have an eternity to live but there won't be very many people, if anybody, around to build their mansions and farm the food for their 3 star Michelin meals. It'd all fall apart pretty quickly. What do you think?

[college-girl199328]

Janira Moncayo landed three part-time jobs in fine arts when she graduated from university, and she took them all. Anxious about making it in a tough field, she threw herself into work, regularly working 56 hours a week. But it was too much. Her stress levels skyrocketed, and she would frequently end her days crying from the pressure.

"All of my time was dedicated to working," said the 23-year-old, who came from Ecuador in 2018 to attend the Alberta University of the Arts. Now she's joined others of her generation in pushing back against what she sees as an unhealthy obsession with work. She adopted a new philosophy and is now just working one job.

"I would like to live in a place where you can feel comfortable and not work yourself to death to try to prove something or even try to make a living." She sounded poised and sure of her choice at CBC Calgary's Young Calgary launch, a partnership with the Calgary Public Library designed to hear from more young adults in the news.

"So right now, I'm trying to really ground myself to figure out: Is this thing that I'm doing actually making me feel good?" Researchers and labor insiders have been tracking this generational shift in perspective across North America.

With an ongoing labor shortage among some professions in the province, they have some power, but that's not unlimited, she said. Last Friday, more than 200 young adults came out to Calgary's Central Library to take part in the mixer. They shared their thoughts with journalists on everything from dating in this city to where teens hang out and their dreams for their work lives.

Many looked anxious as they talked about an economy that is defined by its booms and busts. Others mentioned how the oil and gas industry doesn't align with many of their environmental values, causing them to look at different fields.

But the biggest theme at the library that night was that work shouldn't consume one's life. A few seemed driven to succeed no matter what, but most said mental health should come first. There are non-negotiables, they said, that were neglected by past generations of workers. They said they were not going to do the same.

At the mixer, CBC Calgary invited attendees to write about the kind of work-life they dream about. "A healthy one," wrote one participant. "A successful career while still having time for my family," wrote another.

That's exactly what Lane heard when, in 2022, the Canada West Foundation released a report that tracked trends among the province's youth. The organization ran focus groups for young people and surveyed 2,000 young adults online.

"They don't want to have the job be the only thing that drives them," Lane said. "They want to be able to enjoy life beyond the doors of the office or the factory or the hospital or wherever they work."

Most Gen-Zers around the globe share that view, and should it not be met, they're willing to move on. McKinsey & Company found that 77 percent of Gen-Z respondents in the U.S. said they were looking for a new job, almost double the rate of other respondents.

Perhaps this generation will change as they grow older and take up the jobs familiar to past generations of workers. But given the massive changes on the horizon for Alberta's economy, Lane sees another possible outcome. They might actually create at least some of the change they're looking for.

"The economic situation, which is in flux, means we just don't know if there is going to be a recession and, if so, how deep," she said. "But this generation, unlike generations before, is actually in the driver's seat, so to some extent there are choices."