#almost 20 years of education and this is what I use my writing skills for

[princesspumpkinseed]

Throughout my university education, I tried incessantly to be a good student and I took pleasure in inflating my marks. Despite being one of the few students not having studied pure maths at A-Level, I almost exclusively achieved firsts (only once achieving a 2:1 in French, which I then improved the following year) and finished my undergraduate degree in Maths with awards for my high grades and requests from my teacher to continue my studies for the sake of science. Now that the memory of Bristol is becoming more and more distant, I want to tell you, reader, how I did that.

Imposter syndrome

Before you’ve even started studying, imposter syndrome might set in. Don’t let the doubts about whether you deserve to be in your institution block your path. I remember thinking that everyone else had studied further maths; that maths was what the other students dedicated their lives to (while I just liked it enough); that my occasional lack of comprehension was proof that I got into this university on a whim and I was not as worthy as the other students. To those thoughts, I invite you to reply “Let’s see how far I can go with this.” If you really did get into an amazing university with students who are supposedly superior to you then let’s see how much you can take from this university: how many classes and mentally stimulating problem sheets, how many afternoons in your cherished campus until they realise that you’re not supposed to be there. Try your damndest to keep up and maybe you’ll surprise yourself and find that that drive is exactly what is going to keep you where you where you want to be. If you’re not supposed to be there: cash in.

Alternatively, maybe you got into a university which you think you’re too good for. Prove it. If you’re too good for this uni, then get a first and have them begging you to do a PHD. I dare you.

Come back to it later

When starting university, you need to build skills as well as learn content. You know how to memorise the notions and how to apply the formulae – you’ve been using this kind of skill since GCSE – but building analytical skills or learning to write elegant proofs cannot be done in an evening or with a pack of flash cards. When learning to write proofs, I recommend to you to write out the teacher’s proofs and annotate the relevance or each sentence. I also used to break down big proofs into the function of each paragraph and then imitate it afterwards. You could also use this approach for applied maths: note the techniques used at each stage of a response at the side of the page and then try to do it yourself. Remember, though, that you a building a skill and this will take effort and repetition. If you’re not quite getting it on Tuesday, give it a good go (at least 20 minutes of actively trying to understand a method or a style) and then come back on Wednesday. You might not be used to having to leave something unfinished for the evening but Rome was not built in a day and your first year is essential for building a good foundation so use your time generously for your study.

PS. A small proof tip I have is to define any theorems you’re going to use in your introduction and then you won’t forget how you were planning to tackle the problem and you won’t need to define them later, which will improve your flow.

Previewing Content

I didn’t consistently read the lecture notes before class started but when I did I felt rather proud of myself. I knew what was coming up in the lesson and therefore like I had an advantage over other students and if something didn’t click when I was reading, sometimes simply the teacher’s intonation would clarify all of it. A quick glance over the content (not necessarily absorbing any of it) is all it takes to feel smug and curious before the lesson even begins.

Conversely, consolidating content.

If you didn’t understand the lesson, the best thing you can do is actively review the lecture notes. Explain them aloud or write them out in a conversational tone as if you were explaining it to yourself. In maths in particular, this can render the abstract more intuitive and allow you to manipulate concepts more easily. Throw in an example or two if need be, to concretise your understanding.

Also, find some chums to discuss with after class. Even if you just complain about a homework problem, chatting with a friend can make topics more memorable. Don’t be shy about not getting something: your friend may rephrase the content and turn out to be a better teacher than the initial lecturer. So complain, rant, explain, or just make jokes about the lesson, and this might contribute to the community in your course simultaneously.

Taking this further, be present and helpful on your course group chat around exam season! You’ll find that other people may pose questions which highlight a gap in your knowledge or that explaining to another solidifies your own comprehension.

Even after your course ends, it could be nice to honour what you have learned using books and documentaries. I read Alex’s Adventures In Numberland after my maths degree just for the nostalgia and I ended up adding some niche trivia to my expensive education. Your knowledge should inspire you and stimulate you, not stress you out.

Be a teachers’ pet: you paid for it.

In first year, I frequented teachers’ office hours and I’m glad I did because receiving maths through verbal and illustrative demonstration helps me to surpass the abstract words on the page. If you have a quick query, don’t be afraid to send an email or chat with the teacher after the lesson. Put up your hand to ask or answer questions - sitting at the front might make this less scary since you can’t see all of the other students. These teachers are experts in their field so interact with them and enjoy their thought-provoking conversation – use it to nourish your own curiosity and to motivate yourself to make them proud. Many a time, teachers sent me extra articles or books after I had expressed a curiosity or lack of understanding to them and thus I have resources to further my study despite having graduated.

Better than knowing the content, know the teacher’s style.

I noticed when doing functional analysis past papers that there was always a question requiring a certain technique following a question requiring another technique: this knowledge was indispensable in the final exam! I almost wasted time trying the wrong technique until I remembered this and then recited a perfect answer, of which previous exam papers had assured me the correctness. Knowing the teacher’s style can give you a hint about the content of the exam (where to focus your revision) and helpful insight about strategies required. As well as this, they’re a booklet of fun problems which are tailored to your competences – what’s not to love?

Concluding advice…

The above advice is applicable only when you already have a study schedule and you do what is required to you to keep up with assignments and content, but how you do this depends on your learning style, your waking hours, your extra-curricular activities, etc. I can’t give you a study plan but I can give you the above flourishes to make a good routine even more effective and I can leave you with some final advice: don’t lie to yourself. Don’t tell yourself that something is good enough when you don’t think it will get you what you want. Sometimes you just don’t get things and you may need to take a jog or go to the bathroom to think about it with a clear mind or sometimes you don’t have the time to waste on a single problem when other assignments are urgent – that’s okay, but give yourself the best chance of getting it right by beginning it early and prioritising your study first and foremost. Don’t hope for a grade, work for it: effort is much more dependable than chance.

[superstardestroyer]

Honestly! Even if you still love it very much, so much more than any other job, and want very badly to do it... it might still not work out. I would rather do fantasy illustration than any other job, but it just isn't a very viable field anymore. Pay hasn't gone up with inflation FOR THE LAST TWENTY YEARS. Many people are surviving it with family money, living in poorer countries, or working 3 jobs.

Sure, you can market yourself online now... except that Twitter has shit the bed with the algo so now nobody is getting visibility. And even before that, it had to be almost a full time fucking job to promote yourself as an art influencer. Add onto that that the better jobs are more competitive than ever (fr tho look at MTG art now vs 20 years ago. Do it now. Think about what that means, that jump in skill expectations) and that means you'll have to spend another half a full time job improving your work all the time to stay competitive and reach that level.

Mentorships and conventions will help you network and improve but they're thousands of dollars! Which you absolutely aren't making enough of to spare, let's be real, if you live in the US and you're paying 30% taxes on your freelance and several hundred dollars a month on health care with no retirement plan! And even then, you'll start to realize a lot of those top artists you respect make a lot of their money from the fanbase they're spending hours a week cultivating and marketing to, the hopeful illustrators they're teaching, etc, rather than the illustration that's the REAL thing you want to do. You don't, maybe, want to be an educator or an influencer, but if you don't, good luck making a living~!

And then on top of that, every time that weird deep pain in your hands flare up, you'll wonder (while working 60-80 hour weeks between your desk job and illustration studies and portfolio pieces and the few but amazing clients you get) how long you really have before this becomes a strain injury, or if it's arthritis, and if you'll even get your career off the ground before an injury sends you back to a boring office job with a weird gap in your resume now.

You can love it so much! You can be pretty good at it too! And that isn't always enough. Sometimes it just isn't a viable career for most people and the thing is, that office job doesn't fucking break your heart like this. It doesn't take thousands of dollars from you before you even get to making that much. Nobody there is passionate about SQL the way your illustrator friends are about brush strokes and when you're so burned out by failing at the one thing you made your whole existence, sometimes that's good, actually. Your dreams don't have to ruin your life. They aren't good dreams to have if they do.

I have time for hiking and piano and writing now, I'm catching up on books and video games I missed in that tunnel of trying to Make It, and they better inform my work that way anyways. When I get bored of those I'll go back to painting more, I hope, because I now have time to better explore what I want to do with the stories I want to tell myself, instead of making them pretty portfolio pieces. And if I live long enough to retire, I'll have money to live on this way to spend my time on what I love, which wasn't really going to ever be an option with an illustration career, I fear.

As someone who originally thought she wanted to work in media broadcasting, I'm so relieved I grew out of it. I went to school for it, worked grueling jobs for five years just to be behind a camera, and suffered abuse, wage theft, and so much more in order to keep a job in the "field of my dreams."

Then one day I looked around a realized I actually hated media, didn't care for cameras in the slightest, and only kind of enjoyed editing video. I jumped industries to a "boring customer support" position and am making TWICE my old salary with actual benefits and free time to be happy.

If you feel like you're stuck in a field because it's what you dreamed about at the age of 14, I am giving you permission to ask yourself if you'd be happier with a desk job and a 401k. I think we romanticize weird and interesting jobs but honestly you can just work something tolerable all day and then put your passion into your hobbies.

For you folks who would actually rather die than leave your dream job, disregard this post. It's not for you and I am genuinely happy for you, it must be wild to have that kind of passion and commitment to something. I just think it's not as ubiquitous as we sometimes think.

[thistleandthorn-rpg]

Name: Jade McCoy Designation: Dom Age: 21 Birthdate: May 1st 2003 Faceclaim: Ella Balinska Orientation: Pansexual Kinks: TPE, Toys, Spanking, Exhibitionism, and many more….. Anti-Kinks: Scat, Vore, Gore, Vomit, smelly feet and armpits, pain for no scene reason

Key Points: 

Jade was always more interested in sports or playing with her computer than her musically inclined sister.

Graduating early, Jade attended MIT and graduated with a degree in Computer Science, minoring in Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

Jade’s father is a musician and her mother is an attorney who once was mayor

Jade is a bit nosy and tends to poke around in things that can piss people off if she isn’t occupied with other things

  BIO:

Jade McCoy knew from an early age that her life wasn’t hard when compared to what endured.  Her father was never around much as he was on the road as a jazz musician , but her mother was a present and attentive parent despite her own demanding career.  They had a lovely home, food on the table and mom’s sub to help care for them, so…not a bad life.  Though not the most social, Jade had friends on her various athletics teams and computer club and despite their differences she loved her siblings.  Early admission to MIT had once seemed the cherry on top, but as a teen she had no idea the adventure that education would lead to.

School had always come easy to Jade and though MIT was far more challenging, she thrived.  Her classmates were as driven and focused as she was and friendly competition abounded.  During her sophomore year studying Computer Sciences, she developed a security system that she sold for an almost obscene sum.  Having that kind of disposable income, she discovered a fondness for domination at some of the clubs she and her friends visited to blow off steam.  From the first time a boy left her company, happy but a bit dazed, she had discovered her new passion in life.  She continued through school, but spent more time honing her skills as a Sexual Dominant and indulging her urges. By the time she graduated, at age 20, she was a millionaire many times over.  As a lovely young woman, she is often underestimated in the boys club that is tech, no one thinking she could be a ruthless business person as well as the brains behind her growing tech empire. 

Secure in the knowledge that she could continue her work anywhere, Jade decided it was time to attend an institute and officially receive her mark.  Going back to Lima….no, Riverdale was a no brained and she was delighted to receive her expected Dominant mark once admitted to Stonewall.

BIO QUESTIONS:

What are your feelings about the mark you have received?  - Honestly I expected nothing less.  I’ve never been one to be submissive to anyone.

How do your feelings on the system compare to your parents’ feelings on it? - My parents raised me to believe in the system and I do.  I do think that they had some conflict, both being dominants though.  They loved each other, but then they’d clash, both looking to hold the power in the relationship and neither willing to compromise.  I think, for myself, I would not look to marry a fellow dominant, though I do look forward to having a successful claim.  My parents had far less strife with their individual subs than each other.

Where do you see yourself after you graduate?   - I’m going to continue writing code and programming, perhaps independently, perhaps for a larger company.  I want to have a couple of steady claims though, I can support us after selling the software I have so far.

How do you feel about authority? - I have no problem with it as long as the person with the power isn’t a complete dumbass.

[certifiablyinsanez]

To add on, I think that the fact that he’s only somewhat literate by the way we see him write makes him feel far lesser than others. Because think of how the human world would treat a 30 something year old who wrote in the manner similar to that of a young child. We already know how folks are treated in the human world for neurodivergence. Even myself, who is hyperlexic and extremely book smart (like Moxxie I mean seriously his little rant about war was like looking in a mirror), is mistreated because those traits are directly influenced by my neurodivergence. It’s not considered useful if it doesn’t make money, and is undervalued because I was born a woman so in a way I can see the perspective of Moxxie (a “good” lower class) and Blitz (the “bad” lower class). People make fun of Moxxie for being a baby-dick nerd but when he’s a weapons monster it’s respectable, because now his skills earn him money and are shown to not just be for show. No one doubts that Moxxie is good because he’s “educated” so of course he is and he’s proved it. It’s a win win. But Blitz is not like that. He is not “cultured” he’s likely illiterate to a moderate level, he’s loud, he barges in, he’s crass, he doesn’t care about subtleties or if he burns bridges. To the outside he just appears to be a guy who does what he wants when he wants with no thoughts or cares about the repercussions of his actions. And that’s not respectable. So when Crimson and Striker compliment him he’s a bit taken aback that what he is doing is impressive and worthy of praise, and also talked about “from all over”. Honestly, he probably gets more naysayers than not. “Not many imps start business on their own.” “Why run a business that’s rigged against you?” He knows where he stands in the caste system. He knows the odds are against him. His self image is so damaged that I don’t think he even stopped for a second to realize that what he’s doing has even made him famous among imps at least and known among the higher class of sinners where he has a rising clientele (“business is in a peak”). But the thing is…Blitz’s intelligence is almost frightening. His battle IQ is immeasurable. For example; when he and Fizz were caged. Fizz said he could just reach down there, when Blitz says he has a better idea. Now, Blitz could’ve absolutely been showing off, but he also could’ve used his skills to look ahead at the odds of what would happen should they take that path. Maybe he calculated that the odds were high that they would be stopped and possibly tied up to a point that escape would’ve been truly impossible. Whatever the case, Blitz causes the commotion that ultimately frees them. Now, whether the ball was the final piece of the plan is hard to say. But either way, Blitz was confident that the commotion would lead to the cage being opened. And while Fizz was watching the shootout, Blitz turned his head to look at the real star. Blitz had the whole thing played out in his head. He went on to single handedly defeat 20+ goons and then come up with another plan for escape. But he didn’t just make a way out, he also made it so the mafia couldn’t interfere later or chase them. The fact that he’s not even super tall or beefy but can lift people up to 3x his size. His raw combative power and skill is frightening and entirely overlooked by most, because it’s not pretty, it’s not clean, and because of every other variable, it’s not respectable. Blitz is still succeeding despite himself and society working against him.

I want to think a little about Blitz's self-perception with regard to his lack of education/sophistication. In my opinion, HB gives us a very accurate portrayal of what it feels like to navigate relationships when you're a person with a long history of feeling like you're never good enough ("I can always do better").

Let's start with his friendship with Moxxie, though like a lot of my posts, it will find its way back to stolitz.

Moxxie doesn't necessarily have more formal education than Blitz. I mean . . . he likely had the economic resources growing up, but I don't think Crimson seems like the kind of parent to prioritize education. Besides an education in violence. I assume that both Blitz and Moxxie had some basic education as kids, but the difference is that Moxxie likes "high culture(ish)" things like musicals and bow ties, enjoys knowing details about history, and probably reads for fun. He's also the kind of ". . . um actually . . ." friend who can make even a secure person feel a little stupid. Not that Blitz doesn't sometimes need to be called out, but Moxxie does seem to take some joy in correcting him.

And yes, Blitz bullies Moxx and calls his junk tiny and tells him to eat a salad, but like . . . it's pretty obvious that to some extent, Blitz is covering up for feeling inferior to Moxxie on some level.

We see how Blitz really feels about this in Truth Seekers.

Borrowed observation from excellent reaction youtuber Omn1media: When Blitz hallucinates Moxxie lecturing him, Moxxie goes really hard specifically on the insults to Blitz's intelligence. Moxxie's speech is also much more rambly/laced with figurative language than it is in their real (non-imagined) interactions.

We can see from Blitz's face in these scenes that these comments really get to him. Of course they do- he's making them up in his own nightmare.

"Foolish flights of fancy" is the rest of the caption there . . ."

He's very upset by the idea that he's really inferior to Moxxie- under all of the bravado, he's deeply insecure. It probably doesn't help that the truth gas made him admit that he didn't like the musical that Moxx recommended. Yes, I know that was a Cats joke, but also, Blitz bothered to lie, and he doesn't seem allergic to hurting Moxxie's feelings, so I think he wanted to pretend to "get" the "higher art" that Moxxie likes.

Okay so if Moxxie (with an essentially equivalent status and education) manages to unintentionally make Blitz feel stupid and uncultured, how does this translate when Blitz falls in love with Stolas, who IS objectively very high status and very well educated and DOES speak in "fancy rich people" language?

Oh. Right. The pedestal, the impossibility, and all of that.

I'm not saying that Hell's strict hierarchy doesn't have a lot to do with how Blitz perceives a real relationship between himself and Stolas as impossible- it absolutely does. And so does his history of failed relationships and heaping backpack of trauma. But also, the education/sophistication piece is there, and it's major.

I'm on the fence about whether Blitz actually sees himself as stupid or is just worried about being perceived that way by others. He obviously knows he's very good at the work he does, and that takes both a certain level of strategic thinking AND some very brilliant improvisation. I think he knows this. But he also knows he'll never . . . let's say, be the best read person in the room (if you want to know my thoughts on Blitz and literacy, click here- but short answer, I think he's quite literate but also dyslexic).

I think that like many real people who are kind of out of the box in this way (disrupted education and/or neurodivergence) he's simultaneously aware that he's very intelligent AND deeply insecure about being stupid or having others devalue his kind of intelligence.

[adventuresinclientservice]

In a world on the cusp of A.I. domination, do relationships still matter?

Hardly a day goes by without a story -- in print, on-air, online -- about Artificial Intelligence and how it is going to take over the world, including our world, the world of advertising and marketing.  The consequential question for many of us is, “Will I lose my job?”

You might think being in a technical field – an engineer, an analyst, a digital expert – would insulate you from becoming a vestigial, soon-to-be-extinct relic.  I certainly thought as much, but then I read a recent New York Times story where the authors take exception, pointing out there are several skills that trump technical ones:

“Our abilities to effectively communicate, develop empathy and think critically have allowed humans to collaborate, innovate and adapt for millenniums. Those skills are ones we all possess and can improve, yet they have never been properly valued in our economy or prioritized in our education and training. That needs to change.”

Reading this, I took stock of my qualifications:

I have a graduate degree, but it’s not an MBA; it’s a master’s in literature.  My undergrad degree?  In American Studies, a landing pad for undecided, I’m-still-making-up-my-mind-about what-I-want-to-do students, which ultimately led me to become an account person, a perfect haven for generalists.  All of which is to say: 

An engineer I am not.

Analyst maybe?  Forget about it.

Math skills?  Not me.  Please.

Digital expert?  I might talk it (sort of), but I sure as hell can’t be it.

Nearly a dozen years ago, I railed at the investor and misguided, short-sighted billionaire Peter Thiel, who advocated not attending college, in a post where I claimed: 

“I went to school not so much to learn, but rather how to think, how to be disciplined, how to solve problems.  I learned how to write, how to research, how to collaborate with others, and most of all, how to forge relationships, all of which sustained me in my as I pursued my professional ambitions.”

According to the New York Times article, these are the very skills you need – how to think, write, collaborate, and forge relationships – in a world being over-run with A.I.  In fact the authors assert,

“Communication is already the most in-demand skill across jobs on LinkedIn today.”  Further claiming, “soft skills were more important to their organizations than highly technical A.I. skills.” 

Got that?  Let me repeat it for you:  “soft skills were more important to their organizations than highly technical A.I. skills.” 

If you were to check the first chapter of The Art of Client Service, “What Makes a Great Account Person?” you’d find this:

“Now, what about skills?  Communication is at the top of the list, both written and oral.  You’ve got to be good on paper.  An agency might teach you to write a conference report, a creative brief, a point-of-view letter, a strategy deck, or at least show you examples you could use as ‘go-bys.’  What the agency won’t teach, shouldn’t have to teach, is concision and clarity, style and organization. “You also have to be good on your feet – in meetings, on the phone, in presentations, over dinner, or wherever you connect with clients and colleagues.”

So if someone were to ask me, “What’s the book’s core virtue?,” I would reply, 

“Lots of books tell you ‘What.’  A few tell you ‘Why.’  Almost none tell you ‘How.’  The Art of Client Service is clear on the ‘what’ but doesn’t dwell on the ‘why,’ preferring to focus instead on the ‘How,’ as in how to build and sustain enduring client relationships with clients and colleagues.”

It’s a good thing too, assuming you agree with the Times story, which says,

“Today the knowledge economy is giving way to a relationship economy, in which people skills and social abilities are going to become even more core to success than ever before.” 

Do I believe we are living in a “relationship economy?”  You bet, and to prove it have a book that has endured for 20-plus years through three editions, this blog, and a raft of workshops, all demonstrating just how serious I am about this.

The long arm of A.I. is touching many aspects of work, ideally (I hope and pray) changing it for the better, but the one thing it cannot touch is the one thing that matters most to people invested in better serving clients and colleagues:  relationships.

If you too want to get better at the art and science of relationship-building, but need help, reach out.  I’m always happy to connect at robert@solomonstrategic.com .

[getthebutters]

Honesty and Hardwork: A 6-figure CEO’s perspective & journey

Intro

Most people who tell you about their journey to success are selling their story. I sell Butters and write blog to help people. This will be a more honest journey than you’ve probably ever experienced.

I got here by luck, struggle, and meeting the challenges as they come. Straight up. I was born with almost every non-voluntary life drawback you can have. The fatherless childhood, blackness, autism, gayness have remained, but the poor has been successfully mitigated. I’ve also had a ton of benefits like the generational wealth of stability, educators stressing the fundamentals, a strong family support system, and a parent who would pay any part of her meager salary to make sure I was set up for success.

Sure, I’ve known my whole life I would be successful, that was nothing more than a general understanding that I should be able to figure out how the world works and work it. Doing alright so far.

 The Dreams

With all my needs met, my desire is to make a difference in people’s life positively. In high school, I planned to become a sex educator with dreams of setting up a nationwide sexed requirement for grade school kids. I became a sex educator who makes lube and helps people make sense of the world, me included. My dreams are not forgotten but expanded to include my own men’s domestic violence shelter.

See, I realize my ingenuity, creativity, practicality, and reliability will end up funding the societal shifts I want. Those are rare skills today where we’re encouraged to follow only emotion, which will easily lead you astray like a child or wild animal, which has happened to me several times.

 The plans and actions

After high school, I had my plan and would go to Eastern Michigan University to study psych. But midway through the summer of 2005 I saw a commercial for Le Cordon Bleu culinary school and made the choice to get a skill I could use to pay for school and in case I chose wrong. Although it was smart and did workout, on some level I was delaying my launch into adulthood.

Thankfully this was only a 2-year diversion. I got licensed in culinary and hated it. I realized cooking with my granny and for my family was enough of that. If you really think about, how in demand are pastry chefs anyway really? Plus, I didn’t think through being 400# and working on my feet around my heroin.

I went back to school for psych at EMU since there was no sex ed major or anything close. I had to make my own minor via literally every class with sex in the title EMU offered between 2008 and 2014. Somewhere in there they did make an official human sexuality minor for me and the maybe 20 others who’d chosen a similar tract.

In college, I used Pell Grant & FAFSA money responsibly to fund my first 4 years of school fully without needing to work. Having worked at Walmart while in culinary school in Scottsdale, AZ, I now knew the value of a dollar and wouldn’t go back to work until I had to. Eventually, I did anyway when I got the opportunity to work for EMU’s school paper. I always wanted to be a journalist but them mofos is broke and I wasn’t tryna be, to the best of my ability.

In my first year of college, I had my first business venture as an adult: LTASEX.com, an adult sex ed blog. I’d always hustled a little bit; knew some basics this was intended to be a success and it was. It was never a BuzzFeed level steez, but I made part time money talking about dildoes and shit. That was pretty cool.

When that government money ran out, I got a second job on the phones at U of Michigan for $14/hr. I didn’t mention the EMU paper’s pay because it was less than the blog made but it was something extra and I loved the work/skills I gained there. You’re reading this and enjoying the graphics because of what I was paid to learn there. I’d never done anything more than clip art design before I got there. Now I could literally be a professional graphic designer if The Butters went belly up tomorrow.

College ends in 2014, kept my responsibilities light enough to drop but solid enough that I could live that way until I died or figured out my next move. I could feel the blog wave dying and spent a lot of time spiraling. Eventually I was psych medicated thanks to Obamacare and my brain started functioning somewhere near normal. I lost close to 200#. LTASEX is a real working org with people under me though income is light. I get into a relationship.

GRABBING AT OPPURTUNITIES

Normally that last part wouldn’t matter but being broke, culinary minded and a sex educator, I decided to finally make my own lube after years of complaining about the options available from major brands. That became The Butters. I used my sex ed connects to make a name for myself. Got in every blog I could think of, and people started buying.

Since I was in a relationship, we had 2 incomes which allowed me to perform badly enough at work (slacking and working on Butters) to be fired and really give it a go. Things go well - making very slow but important sales increases for a solo-run business. Before I know it, I’m at 50k in sales and living very well of that money alone.

Then a bit of luck hits in the form of a once-in-a-century worldwide pandemic that killed millions of people and sent the economy into a freefall so steep it’ll get its own name in the history books. That of course is dark humor to highlight the rarity of such a devastating event and the fact that I was able to make that event into a launching point for myself. It started with selling aloe for sanitizer by the gallon. Then stimulus money let people try Butters and get hooked.

We peaked in sales around this time, and it help establish us as a real functioning company now with me receiving about 100k net. Putting me in the top 14% of black male earners and top 6% overall. Income literally beyond my dreams. Not my wildest dreams but they were pretty outta pocket considering where I come from. Then comes the downturn.

Luckily for us, I only added as many people as we needed. I made plans but didn’t put money into them or sign anything major. I did over produce some products but that’s nothing clearance, gifts, and donations can’t fix. Things have leveled off and here we are. Unless we have some major downturn, I’m safe. In fact, I’m back on the growth curve.

FAQs

No, I didn’t know this venture would work. This was a risk. This was a vulnerability beyond anything I’d experienced. I took it slow and never invested anything more than I could bare to lose, even when it was just like $40. I would buy single ingredients on eBay for weeks to get my first couple batches.

Yes, I did have to learn how to be a CEO. I had signs up reminding me of CEO duties so I could make sure I was doing my job vs being just a worker. I’m still learning. I’ll be back in college for marketing and other skills that will make me a more valuable leader and the business more resilient.

I am not great at everything, but I know how to do everything. I’ve built a team around me who is better at their specific skills. I pay them well ($20/hr.) and treat them with respect. It took time and help to identify the type of people I needed and how to coach them. I had to learn these management skills just like being a CEO.  

I still work daily. I still fill jars and make products. I’m a heavily involved leader, which makes us unique in a world of bosses too good to get dirty. I’ll never be. I’ll do anything to keep this thing functioning – move heaven and earth. If I’m 60 and need to answer phones or ship product or drive across the country, my old ass will be here.

[transwrongs]

sorry i hate myself and spent my NYE blocking tons of transphobic people so i’ve seen a lot of BS the past couple hours. (but making posts about them attracts the vocal ones so they’re easier to block) some things i just wanted to note here (this is not discourse or discussion lmao):

terfs are right. terf is not an identity or an ideology. it is fascist rhetoric. it's actually incredibly pointless to view it any other way, i think. the only thing that links terfs together is transphobia and radical feminism. radical feminism encompasses much more than whatever the fuck they've got going on over there. and transphobia is not an identity or an ideology. it is fascist rhetoric. i think we really shot ourselves in the foot trying to view it any other way.

literally co-opting a legitimate movement/organization like (rad)feminism with real legitimate problems like misogyny/patriarchy and pushing blame onto evil scapegoats that are the cause of all their problems ("trans identified males", all and only males). calling for segregation (female separatism). vehement hatred of liberalism, touting it as the cause for all this degeneracy, etc etc.

it's absolutely fascinating that if you call terfism fascist, people will go "how is radfem fascist???????????????????" or "omg no it's not I don't see terfs committing genocide so it's not fascism" because,,, first of all, reading comprehension is severely lacking but second, it is incredibly not a good look that your response to an 'accusation of fascism' is "I'm not doing the WORST things fascism has enabled so, therefore, I am not fascist". truly anti-intellectual brain rot. adolf hitler was a fascist before he came to power. he had fascist thinking before he came to power. he sought and came to power explicitly because he was a fascist.

fascism is meant to trick you, you're not meant to know you're falling into fascism, that's literally all that keeps it alive. fascism tells you that natural progression/change of society is actually the cause of all your problems and if only we could force everyone to just play it our way then nothing would be bad. if only we can make all the girls and boys stop interacting with each other then all our problems will go away.

i think fascism is ultimately a lot about power, power for groups of people (an absolution/abolition of the individual/identity), and the control of power. it is no surprise to me that, now, society(and fascism by extension) evolved to give marginalized people the idea that we too should have access to that power and that some people will leap to the same fascistic conclusions that our ancestors have lept to their death to reach. it's why so many transphobes want trans people in conversion therapy and call for female separatism and hate when men wear dresses (because they could be the evil TRA rapists u see) and care so much about the definition of Woman. transphobic people want to control who has gendered power. you can't call yourself a woman, you haven't earned it. you have to call yourself a woman, you've earned it. it's ok to want to control our behaviors, those behaviors are wrong. being trans is wrong. "we just want you to get the help that will actually fix you".

radical feminism is an especially fascinating breeding ground for this lapse in cognitive function. because again there is a legitimate problem of patriarchy and misogyny and sex-based oppression but transphobic people's heads explode when they see "males" (enemy) being allowed to just "switch sides". there is no "oppress women" gene. there is no "oppressed" gene. we all as a society contribute to and are harmed by patriarchy and misogyny (yes even males i know sweet children you don't want to hear it but you must!). this refusal to acknowledge this in favor of pushing blame onto all and only males is embarrassing to say the absolute very least.

TLDR;;

"define woman"

define god. define love. define hate. define the internet. define sadness. define the color red. define infinity. define nothing. define everything. what the fuck are you people talking about?

fascism doesn't have a concrete definition either. but it's real, yes? not having a concrete definition for sumn doesn't make it unreal and having a definition for sumn doesn't make it real. what does real even mean? natural? tangible? visible? to who? what does it mean to exist? what does it mean to be?

anyways im burning out, TLDR terfism is so sad everybody cry for the transphobic feminists get well soon we're all praying for yall.

[xavadak3davrax]

Crisis of lust /George Weasley

Lawyer!George

Summary: Fred and George are the most powerful lawyers England has seen in years and y/n is fresh out of college and looking for a place to do her internship. What happens when George decides to hire her? A lot of things.

Warnings: Smut (18+), daddy kink, dom/sub (Dom George) and if you squint very much dom y/n for mere seconds. Spanking, female receiving oral, male receiving oral, unprotected sex (because somehow I find that hot lol).  There’s angst and fluff and mentions of things such as anxiety and more sad moments but nothing extreme!

a/n: this is lawyer George, it’s 11.7 k words. I got carried away and ended up making this in only one part aha. As always English in not my first language, any mistakes or wrongly worded phrases, please excuse me. Titles are not my thing so yeah this is just horrendous. As a lot of people around tumblr say: don’t be shy, reblog! Thank you so much to everyone who even takes time to read my stuff. Love you all!

⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘��⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘

Weasley’s Law Firm was the most famous law firm in whole England. They were known for hiring the best of the best. They also got the worse of the cases there is. Fred and George worked extremely hard on those cases and that’s what got them where they are today. Every murder case there was they were the first, people came to.

They had all the knowledge, all the experience, all the fame. Although they started small, they very quickly became who they are today because they are that good. Now both of them only take on the biggest cases and usually they came from very famous people, otherwise they keep themselves busy by taking their firm a step further.

While Fred was busy working on a case from a famous singer who was now being accused of murdering his wife and a whole lot of love affairs in between, George was working on another very important thing.

Interns. Every year their firm hired at least two interns. Becoming an intern for them was extremely difficult, and the skills required were almost never met (reason why they either ended up with one intern, or none at all). The type of work they needed from them was not fetching coffee or take some copies of some documents. They required their help all the time and their knowledge. Last year they had taken two, top of the class and they showed to be so good they recommended them to another very good law firm that took them in that moment. How could they not? Coming from the Weasley Firm they were the best of the best.

This year however things were proven to be a lot more difficult. It looked like anyone wanted to join them, people with so little qualification that George wondered how they even met the requirements to apply to their firm. Universities usually advised certain students, who they knew not to be good, or had the necessary demands, to just not attempt their chance at it.

George’s headache was even stronger now, and it only had been two hours since he started.

“Mate need your help.” Fred’s voice took him out of his trance and made him look at his brother. George nodded and Fred put the documents on his secretary. Pointed with his head towards them and George picked them up and had a look.

“Oh shit.” George said, laughing a little loudly. “She was involved with his assistant. That does make him suspicious. Finds out his wife his sleeping with his assistant, feels betrayed, takes his chance when she’s in the pool, makes it look like an accident.” George looked at his brother who nodded.

“I mean yeah, but to confirm that theory we need acces to the cameras he has displayed around his house. He’s been refusing that since the beginning, told him how that makes him a suspicious and that he should just give us those, since we’re trying to help him not get convicted. Any advice?”

“Ginny is very good with persuasion, maybe we should give her a call? She’s always our best chance.” George suggested, and when Fred widen his eyes, he knew he had had a brilliant idea.

“Yeah thanks mate. I will. By the way still looking for interns?” Fred nodded to the papers in front of him. He had to look through every curriculum.

“Yes, this year is proving to be hard. Everyone thinks they can get in, almost everyone had a bad average grade.” He brough his hands to his red bright hair and pulled at his hard, letting a groan leave his mouth. “Can’t take this shit anymore.”

Fred came around the secretary and leaned down next to him to get a better look at the people he was looking at. All of sudden his hand came to the table and pointed at girl. “Look, she finished top of her class, with 20.” George opened his eyes and looked at where he was pointing.

“How did I miss her?” it came out in a whisper, only because George was a little loss at her beauty. Sure he had seen a lot of beautiful girl applying to his firm, and he had a lot of them working for them, but he never saw anyone like her.

He tried to pull if thought out that. She was no minor, after all she had finished college and was looking for a place to do her internship at, but that didn’t mean it would not be wrong.

“I don’t know, but you did. And let’s look at the rest…” Fred said in a wondering voice his finger coming over the list of names. “You also have, his name is Elias, he’s in the same situation as y/n.” He looked at his brother, then got up from the crouched position he was in. “You were making a big fuss. I mean I clearly understand your point, besides these two no one else is even close. But I found you the interns. I have to do your job and mine.” He joked in the end earning from George a punch in his arm. That made Fred groan.

“Go on about your day asshole, I will take care of the rest. But thanks for the help.” George screamed the last part a little because Fred was already exiting the door and closing her.

So George arranged his secretary so the only things in front of him was y/n’s and Elias resumes and applications so he could read them and actually decide if they were to be hired or not. And if yes proceed to send an email to them to tell them the news.

Some people might think they would prefer to give this job to their secretaries and let them do this. But one year they did that, and ended up with some of the worse people they could find, just didn’t know how to do the simplest of jobs. It might sound mean, but they had a reputation to maintain.

So every year they alternated had to who had this job. This year it had been him. And after an hour of so of reading everything, he did decide to hire them. So he proceed to write their acceptance email.

⚘

y/n was sitting in her sofa, a tub of her favorite ice cream in her hand. She was in her last week of collage (ever) and she was patiently waiting to receive any type of email from the firm she had applied to do her internship.

She would be lying also if she said she hadn’t receive some emails already accepting her. The problem? Well they were all last options, those were she said to herself ‘if I don’t get in it I will need something to cushion the fall’ her mother had told her that expression and it stuck with her to this day.

y/n really, really wanted to work for The Weasleys. They were the best of the best, everyone was racing to get a place in their firm. She wanted to be confident, with her grades how could she not? But she also knew a lot of people were had good has her, she for sure would be competing with the best of the best.

She was close to answering one of the emails of the firms she already got an email from.

She sighed. Looked at the pot of ice cream and then got up to go get her computer. When she had it she came back to the sofa and slumped on the couch and groaned quietly. That stupid horrid anxious feeling coming down on her. Every time for the last few days when she was to open her pc that’s how she felt. That desire to see an email from that firm.

When she opened it for a few seconds she didn’t get any notifications.

“Fucking stupid computer.” She muttered, sometimes her pc didn’t connect to the Wi-Fi and she hated that. Because then she would get millions of notifications that she didn’t get because she wasn’t connected. But it connected a few seconds later and she was flooded with messages.

In between all of those if she wasn’t paying any attention she would’ve missed it, probably deleted it too. The email she was so dreading. She didn’t know how they worked. Did they sent an email if you didn’t get in? or did they just sent if you got in? some firms would do both. Not that y/n had gotten any, every single one was accepting her and very eager to work with her.

With trembling fingers, and her breath caught in her throat she open the email, but closed her eyes quickly before she could read what it said.  

“breath, everything is going to be ok. Even if you don’t get in, you have a lot of other option.” She pepped talked herself, and then after what felt like an eternity to compose herself, opened her eyes and started reading.

Her mouth moved but no sound came out as she read through every word. The words “congratulations” “we’ve accepted you” “we wait for your response for further meetings” making her mind go dizzy. And then a scream left her lips.

“I got in, Oh my god I got in.” She almost threw her computed on the ground from how happy she was. Every night she didn’t sleep, every night out she had denied her friends, every hour in the library and every cent her parents had spent on her was worth it.

Her parents weren’t rich or even close to it, but they had promised her and her siblings that they would pay for their education until they could. When she had entered the best university and the most expensive she told her parents she would find work and pay for everything. They told her no. Her mom and dad found each a second job and payed for it, even finding a small flat in the middle of nowhere but still close to where she attended, for her to stay in. And now, everything they ever did for her was paying of.

After calming herself down she started to formulate a response to the email. And then proceeded to call her parents, steric and with a smile they were sure they could hear and see from the other side of the phone.

⚘

She started today. Although very happy and grateful for the opportunity she couldn’t help but let the nerves consume her. Some money she had money a little while a go from some old clothes she sold, she decided to spent it on a new suit. She didn’t very much like dresses, and skirts. In all the important meetings and presentations she had throughout her years in collage, she always wore suits.

But for her first day on the firm, and to give a good impression she couldn’t just wear one of the old ones. So she bought this black suit. The pants were all black and a little tight and came to rest on her ankles. The jacket of the suit had a little cleavage and was supposed to not be worn with anything underneath. She had only her bra in, one you wouldn’t be able to see. The jacket closed beautifully around her, and made some of the nerves subside. Her confidence radiating all over her. ´

She looked at herself one last time in her mirror and then picked up her purse and rested it on her shoulder.

“You can do this.” y/n murmured as she closed the door of her apartment and made her way to catch the bus. A bus were if her plans were correct, she would arrive 30 minutes earlier, but she didn’t care. She wouldn’t have to get in until the hour they had arranged, but at least she knew she would be there at said hour and not be late on her first day.

Can you imagine, being late on your first fucking day and give her (hopefully) new bosses that impression? They would deny her right then and there and she would not have the chance to show her potential.

As planned she arrived early. Their firm was one of the biggest and modern building in the city so it wasn’t hard to miss. She decided to get herself a little comfort drink while she made the time pass. When only five minutes were left for her interview she entered the firm. Everything was spacious, and very open and they got all the light in here that was possible. She felt small in such a big space. Although taking and studying law, she always had social anxiety. The friends she had were the most amazing people and took her right under their wing and always made her feel safe. She wishes they were here to help her.

“Hi, my name is y/n y/l/n, I’m here for an interview, I-“ her words came a little shaky. She took a deep breath and smiled at the lady behind the big counter, her face had a smile that made y/n a little less nervous.

“You’re here because you are the intern right?” she completed her sentence and then wrote something on her computer. “The other intern is also here. You both will be interviewed at the same time, Mr and Mr Weasley will both be in there to talk you through everything.” She gave her something of a smile. “You can take the lift, they’re in the last floor. Iris, their personal secretary will instruct you when to come in.”

“Thank you so much.” y/n said, bid her good day and then went on her way. When she got to the second floor she was met with a beautiful modern entrance that had some very good looking and comfortable chairs in. In the middle a glass table with some law magazines. ‘of course,’ she thought to herself ‘what else would they have here’ she laughed a little.

She she looked better she found a tall, blonde guy sitting in one of the chairs. The white button down he wore had hugging his muscles very well, y/n might’ve felt drool pulling in her mouth. It only intensified when she looked at his pants and the way they hugged his legs. His black necktie made everything look together. He didn’t wore a jacket that’s why. The jacket was hanging in the arm chair.

“You must be y/n.” he said, getting up from his position to come and greet her. His hand stretched out, the veins in his hands very prominent. She had to put herself together, she was here to work.

“Yes, and you are?” she was a little lost, the lady downstairs hadn’t told her his name, but told him hers.

“Elias, it’s a pleasure.”

“pleasure is all mine.” She smiled.

“The lady at the front told me to wait here, she will call us when they’re ready for us. Do you for any reason know how they look?” He asked quietly trying not to bring attention from the people working in this floor. From what y/n understood, their offices were here, and their secretary was also here but some other people worked here to. Potential important lawyers?

“Ahm… no, not really. Tried to look them up but no photos. Very private aren’t they? Wonder how they do it, being so well known among everyone. Specially famous people.” y/n said when she brought her thoughts to focus on Elias again. She sitting next to him and they chatted for a little, until they were called.

“They will see you now. You can go down the hall, and it’s the last door to your right. It’s the meeting room.” Iris spoke eloquently, and that made y/n and Elias share a worried look before they got on their merry way.

“That made a little nervous, I mean, didn’t expect much less from someone who works with such big people, but… you know what I mean?” Elias spoke, worry in his voice. Not being able to form many words do to her being nervous, y/n just nodded.

“Do the honors.” y/n managed to let out, a small and brief smile on her face. Elias opened the door after knocking and hearing a ‘come in’ from inside.

The table wasn’t full of people but fore sure y/n would have a hard time, until they introduced themselves, knowing who Fred and George were. They had invited other lawyers, she assumed, from their position and all, she had to be. She was now regretting accepting this.

“Please com in and have a seat.” One man with spiky, red hair pointed to the chairs that had y/n’s and Elias name. They proceeded to do just that.

“I’m George, this is my brother Fred, and these are some of our best lawyers. Please don’t be frightened we just like to make sure the interns we are giving a chance have actual potential and are not just ‘grades’, that’s why they are here.”

y/n had to swallow very hard and hope to not be heard. If she was gonna have to work here and look at that all day was she gonna be able to do it? God helped her. If she thought Elias was attractive mere ten minutes ago… what did she thought of these two men, who were clearly twins but somehow had differences that made her more attractive to the one who was speaking.

“We are going to make a series of questions, from all of us and see how you answer and handle very specific situations. “ It was Fred speaking, he held what she expected to be a smile on his face, while his brother had a way more serious demeanor.

They nodded, not knowing if they should speak or not. George held his eye on the girl slightly longer than he did on Elias. She was more beautiful here than in the picture she had presented in her portfolio.  How could he handle that? And if they kept her she was to work on their floor all the time? He needed to control himself, now.

The questions started and they alternated between y/n and the boy next to her, making sure the majority of the questions were different for both of them, to actually see their potential and not some copy of the others answer.

When it ended y/n felt like her heart could be heard by everyone around her and that it would come out of her chest. She didn’t have a very good perspective on things, in a way, if they were good or bad. So she didn’t know if she had done a good job, the faces everyone had at the table didn’t help a little.

Elias gave her a look, a reassuring one. And under the table, like they’ve knew each other for years he squeezed her hand gently.

“I think you both did an amazing job, I think everyone agrees?” Fred gave a questioning look around, starting at his brother and then to their co-workers. Everyone was nodding. “So I think this is all, you are hired as our interns.”

She could scream again, like she did when she had gotten the email saying she was accepted. But she controlled herself. Gave Elias hand a squeeze back and when everyone got up they both followed them.

“I think my brother will now sort with you both every last detail. I won’t be present mainly because I have an import case to work on, but we trusted each other with our lives. So you won’t miss me.” Fred tried to loosen the mood with a small inexistent joke.

Everyone started to leave and only left George, y/n and Elias there.

“If you would follow me please, my office will be a bit more comfortable than these chairs.” He passed through them and like lost puppies they followed to his office.

They spent hours talking about everything. George wanted them to be on the same page, and following everything precisely. y/n tried her best to memorize every word he said, but it started to get harder when after a while George felt bored of his position and dragged his chair away from his desk and then crossed his right leg over his left knee, leaving him in a powerful and extremely hot position that made y/n have to cross her legs and try to be as discreet as possible while trying to alleviate some of the pressure she had.

Why was she acting like a stupid teenager? For heavens sake, this was her work place, that was her boss, and she should not even thinking about him as other than that. But when his hands came to rest on his crotch her attention switched to the very prominent bulge he presented. Her eyes were not there for even a minute, but she still felt guilty when she looked up to see him looking at her. She looked away fast. He continued with what he was saying.

y/n hoped Elias was oblivious to the situation.

After while George got himself of that position and looked at both of them.

“This is everything, if for any reason something comes up you can always ask Iris, or any other thing, email me or my brother or ask Iris to speak with us. Right?”

He popped his tong and proceeded to get up when everything was settled.

⚘

Their first official day started the next day. And then after that is was smooth sail for a while. y/n helped Fred a lot in his cases and he loved how she was just so vibrant to have around. Took him a while to get her out of her shell, to show her she could treat him as a friend rather then her boss. He felt like he somehow could trust her a lot and when they were very concentrated on a job and they were both tired he would tell her bits and pieces of his life. Usually about his girlfriend Angelina and how they’ve been tighter for years and he is thinking of proposing. Or how he feels old and wished he could be an intern all over again. To which y/n would say:

“Aren’t you considered the youngest and most successful lawyer of all time?” Those were facts, Fred and George were in fact all of that. At twenty five they had a massive empire, that they built from scratch and with only the help of a very few close ones.

He would share small details of his childhood, of him and George. Usually those gave y/n some hope that George would one day be to her what Fred was to her. But until now all she got from him were small short and cold answers from anything she was working on. Usually Fred asked her to go bribe them out of him. Elias was the one who worked more closely to George and even him was usually in other lawyers offices doing close work with them.

“George is stubborn and weird sometimes. He always loves to work with you lot, I don’t understand why this year is different.” Fred stated, looking at y/n for a moment and shrugging when he couldn’t find an answer to it.

“Mister knows everything and everything needs some closure, is now left speechless.” y/n joked and they both laughed a little loud. His office door open because the case they were working on required y/n to leave all the time in search for answers. They didn’t notice George at the door.

He cleared his throat. Fred looked at him, and y/n that on the other side of the desk, back to George turned around to also look.

“Elias is sick and had to go home, I have come important matters to take care of, would it be a nuisance if y/n could do it?” She noticed he spoke more to his borther than to her.

“Sure, what she was doing can continue tomorrow or whenever Elias comes back. Right y/n?”

“Yes of course. Mr. Weasley you just have to show me what to do.” She got up and showed herself ready to work. After her first day her clothes were a little bit more casual, but she still wore pants, but George still had dificlty in not imagining those beautiful legs wrapped around his head.

‘Get your head out of your gutter George’ he always thought to himself when these thoughts came, ‘she’s young, and working for you.’

“Yes, come with me.” He instructed and turned around to leave. y/n waved to Fred and closed the door after she left. She knew her work with him wasn’t nearly done, but without Elias she would have to split herself in two and help both of them. Since Fred always had her help, he would have to to what he could for the time being without her.

“We have to through all these voice messages, the case calls for it and four ears are better than just two.” His voice was always so serious how could he work like this? Elias never complained to y/n on their lunch break or when they decided to do something outside work, that almost always ended up in work talk. They just didn’t have much in common besides that.

“yes sure, can you give me paper and pen or a pencil will do just fine.” George gave her a puzzled look “Well with Mr. Weasley every time there’s voice calls or something we take notes to pin point important stuff.” George knew that by Mr. Weasley she meant Fred but she knew that outside she called him Fred, they were that close. She had only ever heard Mr. Weasley came out of her mouth when it was related to him.

“Yeah you’re totally right. Here. Have this.” He gave her the notebook in front of him, the one that had all the important notes on the case. She sat down on the chair in the same place of Fred’s office and waited for him to start the audios.

She placed her head on her hand, and her elbow was resting on the desk. She looked at George who just started the audios and the tried to concentrate. Silently throughout all the time she was there she took many notes, George was a little taken aback, what was he missing that she clearly wasn’t, when it ended she looked at him. He barely had time to start something because she started first.

“So according to the first call, the lady in question didn’t know the person on the other side, but that person knew her very well, otherwise how could they be so sure of such personal information. The thing was she wasn’t paying attention and didn’t notice any of the signs of what was to come.” y/n started, and when she continued talking and demonstrated so well everything he didn’t dare to interrupt her. Although by the end he knew the girl in front of him has just solved him the case. He was also a little embarrassed because some of his notes were not has good as hers.

“You just solved me a casa.” George said astonished with what had just happened, his mouth opened in surprise and the look y/n gave him was brilliant.

“Did I? Really?” She couldn’t hold her happiness, although working here for a while and helping, and having done so much, Fred usually referred that she had done much more than any other intern they’ve had, she hand’t actually solved a case by herself. Fred and her always came to conclusions together.

“Yes, yes you just did.” George couldn’t believe that the case he has been working on for the last week and a half, and that he was getting to a road with no end was just solved. When he decided to listen to the audios he didn’t expect much from them because he thought he had worked through everything. Well, he guessed wrong. “Do you have any idea what this case might’ve costed me hadn’t you just solved it?” George wondered out loud. She denied, not being able to form words. The way he was looking made her panties soak, which is a current occurrence because every time she see him even from a far he manages to do something to her.

“It would cost us millions of dollars and very bad fame. You see we are working with some of the most influential people England has. Winning is very important.” George said.

“I thought every person you worked with was influential and important?” It came out a genuine question.

“These people can manipulate everything around them, if they wanted to end mine and Fred’s career, they could with a snap of their fingers. Winning them this case on the contrary, will give us something in all out time working he never had in this scale.” He stated. “Thank you so much for your help.”

Well that was first, y/n never heard him say a ‘hi’ to her, and a ‘thank you’ to anyone else.

“You can go have your luch now, I’ve kept you here for… oh for a long time.” He said when he looked at the hours. Two o’clock was away past their lunch our. Fred hadn’t come knockinh why? They always had lunch together. “How about had as a thank you I offer you lunch?” What a bold fucking move George Weasley, what will people think if they see you out and about with your little intern ahm? ‘Fuck that’ George thought to himself.

“Is it appropriate?” way to ruin the opportunity y/n, she thought.

“Lunch as co-workers of course. Celebrating early the win.”  He persuaded, now that he was all in, might as well convince her. When she nodded he continued. “Well have you ever tried the Italian on the main street?”

He meant the beautiful restaurant that looked straight out a movie? The one she’s been eyeing since she started working here, but the prices have kept her way because lord forbid her of spending fifty pounds on a fucking meal?

“I was thinking maybe something more on my price range?” She suggested, trying not to offend him, or look poor in front of him. She wasn’t and the money she received working for them was good but she started to pay for her stuff now, to relieve her parents of the bills and so money was always a little tight on her side.

“None sense, I will pay for us both. No one needs to know. Now come on, or we will eat our lunch when we’re suppose to be snacking” He was already getting up, got his jacket of the back of the chair in a swift motion and walked to the door.

No one was to be seen in the hall, which was weird given the hour of the day. Everyone came from lunch and this was the hour of chatting a little bit, drink a coffee or something else and going to the bathroom before resuming their work. Some forces where on their side because besides Iris, no one saw them leave together. And Iris was nice enough to keep everything to her.

The restaurant was to the brim. y/n thought they would have to wait hours or not even have a place. But the very nice employee at the front, as soon has he saw George swiftly pull them in and into one of the best tables they had.

“I’m a regular.” He justified, when they were seated and her eyes weren’t on him for once but instead on the menu.

“yes of course.” She wanted to had, and the most powerful man there is, but she kept that to her.

“If you have any doubts choosing I would suggest the chicken marsala.” Did he think, even though she had just solved his case, that she was dumb? The tone in his voice suggested everything but a suggestion. It was almost a command. What type of fifty shades was this? Although she did like the dominant side he radiated to her.

“Sure, I’ll have that.” And George gestured to the employee working around the tables on the place they were before starting their request. And while they waited they talked. In just few minutes he felt like he was Fred in there. Because y/n was talking openly and so freely that he couldn’t believe she was doing that to him.

It felt nice for her hear her talk like that, like she had no worries and that she felt safe in speaking to him like that. He also talked and y/n was surprised he even wanted to share something with him.

“I also lived in a flat while studying, me and Fred shared one I mean.” He corrected. “Two teenagers leaving alone in a apartment after coming from a big family? Sweet, we were in paradise.” When y/n laughed he had do contain the smile that was to appear on his face.

“I can’t even begin to imagine what two boys would do all alone.” Her tone was suggestive. George coughed a little trying to hide the smirk in his face. If she was trying to rile him up and get something out of him it was working.

“law if difficult, but we never studied they way some of our pears did. We partied, and people were impressed because they never expected the best parties to come from law students, yet, they did come from us. Took us a while after collage to build our reputation to what it is today, a lot of people didn’t take us seriously. Then Fred hit the jackpot with a giant case and things just grew from there. I had my big moment a few months later.”

Now that was all information y/n had no idea about. Fred never shared that with me.

“Fred shared a lot of things with me but never that. I’m shocked.” When George looked at her accusingly but in a joking manner she found herself correcting what she said. “I mean, it’s just… I’m sorry, but you both have this like dominant strong image around you that it’s hard to think you ever did party. There’s zero photos of you on the internet, all of your cases have closed doors. I mean? People create an image, even if not the correct one, about you.”

“You have a point there. You have very good points that I didn’t have any idea about. But then again Fred took you all to him so it’s hard to know anything.”

“Mr. Weasley just likes the way I work.” She felt the need to justify herself almost immediately.

George rolled his eyes a little. “Still, you are working for both of us and although Elias does a good job I found out only today how hard working you are.”

If he was trying to make her feel guilty or sometime of thing it wasn’t working.

“Well, Mr. Weasley, I never worked for you because first, today was the first time you actually felt the need to call me and only because it was urgent and Elias wasn’t there and because every time I try to ask you something, for Mr. Weasley’s work you always answer me shortly.” She stated. George lost words at that, but only for a brie moment.

The next words that came from George were fast and wouldn’t have made any sense if y/n didn’t have all her attention on the beautiful man in front of her.

“I don’t have you work for me because, “he stopped for a moment, thinking his brain might stop him there, but was wrong, “because it is wrong to fantasize about someone who works for you, someone who is your boss. Is it not?”

Her cheeks started to feel warm, and her body was next. She squeezed both hands together and crossed her legs tighter tightly, the warmth from earlies mixing with we warmth from now.

“It is profession to crush on your boss?” She wanted to come out like is words hadn’t just affected her, but it came out shyly instead. George’s breath came out uneven and he put both of his hand on top of the table and closed is hands into fists is knuckles turning white from the force. He breath very deeply, y/n watched his nostrils flare and his eyes turning a very dark shade.

“It is. But I guess we’re both bad at keeping things professional.” He wanted to ass more but their food arrived and he was forced to tidy up is posture and look like he wasn’t hard under his pants.

They ate in silence. And when they finished George paid for their food, and when they got up he put a hand on the end of her back, almost at the curve of her ass.

“We should keep things professional.” y/n got way from his touch and looked at him. “Wouldn’t want to loose my job because I wanted to fuck my boss no?” The smile she gave him made him know that wasn’t scared of what they had said at the table. And that if both of them found it hard to hide the sexual tension before, now that they were both made aware that it was returned, it would be even more difficult.

⚘

George ended up winning the case that same week. Fred had made Elias and y/n work very little that day and in their floor they did a small celebration party due to the fact that this was major win for them. Everyone wanted an interview with both of them, their phones hadn’t stopped ringing. Iris had to put it on hold so she could come celebrate with them since they had insisted. They were in the meeting room, and although they were known around, Elias and y/n stayed in a little corner, champagne in their small cups a little bit of cake in their hand. Elias had chocolate and y/n had red velvet.

“You know we are not alone in this room right?” Fred asked his brother, coming up next to him and bumping his shoulder. George looked at him questioningly. “You know other people will notice if you continue to look at her like you wanna rip her clothes of.” Fred joked and laughed when George mumbled angrily under his breath. He was regretting telling George what had happened at lunch and even more so telling him the crush he’s had on his intern since she started. Although Fred stated, and very well, that of the crush he already knew. If any of the thing either one or the other did that made him have his confirmations. It was small things Fred would notice. Like every time George came into his office and almost every time he had nothing of interest to say, he would find a stupid excuse that Fred was always to nice to snitch on him in front of her. Or how her looked lingered a little to much when she was in his presence, and how Fred had to call her name various times before she looked at him again.

How George only seem to need something from him in the hours y/n was in his office. How, if she wasn’t there, George would be caught red handed with nothing to say or do, because he just wanted to look at her.

“Shut up.” He said angrily. “Stop trying to make me do something irrational. It’s wrong. And we’re not in the right place to have that conversation.” He wanted this conversation to be the end of it, however Fred was not done.

“You know I don’t mid right? If things are done correctly I wouldn’t mind.” Fred looked at his brother. They were both tall, taller than almost everyone in the room, so they both had a good look over y/n and Elias at the end of the meeting room, close to the door.

“What is there to be done correctly? Haven’t you understand she works for us? And let me also tell you from what I’m seeing when her year long internship ends that the possibly of us hiring her is big?”

“If someone else doesn’t hire her first.” Fred said only to tease him. He was very much planning on hiring her, and planning on giver her a notice before the internship ended so they could assure her position in the firm.

“They won’t. We are the best of the best. And as you said before she had other opportunities but waited for ours. Do you think she would be stupid enough to say no?” George scoffed and then moved his head from side to side, his eyes still on the girl in green. She brought a suit today, she knew today was gonna be big and she had spoken briefly to George the other day and told him about it. She was gorgeous.

“Elias and her are alone in the corner, why don’t make yourself useful for once little brother and go talk to her. Oh look just faith speaking.” Fred said the last part when Elias was pushed to the side by one of his colleagues, a lawyer who was been working on a small case.  

George composed himself the best he could and made his way to her passing some people who were congratulating him again, and wanted to talk but he had her on his mind.

“May I just say, you were very impressive today, Mr. Weasley.” She beat him to it, speaking first. George had invited y/n and Elias to watch firsthand, front row seats at court. She was very thankful for such a big opportunity, she hoped one day she would be where George was, and be has amazing has he was presenting all the facts and making everyone subdue to him and his ever brilliant knowledge.

“Thank you. Couldn’t have done it without you y/n. You were brilliant, and I wish you could’ve been there. Be the one to defend.” He had his back turned to everyone in the room and since he was tall he covered y/n a little. He was lanky to she could still be seen.

“I think I will have many opportunities no? I mean working for your firm will give me a very good profile, and people will want me, that is, if you give good recommendations.”

“We could always skip the recommendations and hire you.” She looked at him her eyes big and shiny, having him say that made her heart beat a little faster. If she could work for them permanently and be a lawyer to them? Dream come true.

“That would be very nice, yes.” She tried to keep her cool, and then closed the distance between them, but trying to not make it to noticeable for other people not to see. Her mint scent hit his face and his teeth came to rest on his bottom lip, her closeness made him nervous. “Working for you permanently would be a challenge no?” she had her arms crossed, but uncrossed them to rest on hand on his arm and squeezed it. She was about to cross the biggest line there was.

“I could do so much more than working couldn’t I Mr. Weasley? I bet I would look good working on my knees, under your desk, only for you so see.” She spoke almost inaudible, only he could hear it and with the noise everyone was making he was sure they didn’t have a clue what she just said. To everyone else they were just chatting about his win.

George trembled and he had to put all his willpower into not doing something stupid. He had no words. And didn’t have time to say, Elias came up behind her and called her, and he lost all her attention. People had the nerve to always be interrupting them. She left, because they both had to work on something Elias needed help in, and y/n always ready to please, offered to.

⚘

After that, if they thought they had ever felt sexual tension, then they weren’t expecting to go through this. Fred couldn’t take George anymore, everyday in his office going on about how he needed to get laid. How lately he just felt like everything was building up and the work piling on his desk wasn’t helping.

“You should just go to y/n, I think she would be more than willing to help.” Fred hadn’t meant for his words to sound wrong and George understood where he was coming from. Fred felt y/n’s sexual tension before he even hit the floor at 8 am every morning. He even asked Angelina for some advice on how to try and make them understand that he was ok with them.

George wanted to scream at the top of his lungs. “You are no fucking help, ever. I might as well visit my ex.” He stated. In that moment y/n was knocking on the door, she was speaking before she was looking and knowing George was there. “Fred I brought you what you asked, and also some ideas for presents for Angelina.” She said, and finally looked up, every word she was gonna say next. She has just called him Fred in front of his brother. She would only say that if he was alone. Fred didn’t seem to mind.

“Thank you so much y/n. My brother here was just leaving right George? Me and y/n have some things to do.” He looked at George who huffed and left without another word to y/n.

“Sexual tension still?” She questioned, bold question to make to anyone but her and Fred were more than co-workers, they were friends now and he didn’t mind.

“Yes. You two should meet up.” Came Fred’s voice sounding uninterested, and y/n rolled her eyes as she sat in front of him starting her work. Fred looked at her when she wasn’t looking and wanted to laugh at the annoyed and very frustrated face she had.

When five hit the clock Fred got up, after staring to organize his desk minutes before.

“I’m going, don’t wanna be late to my date with Angelina. You’re staying?”

“Yes, there’s still so much to be done and the lady hasn’t stopped calling Iris today asking for anything we might know. This is going to take while.” y/n stopped what she was doing for a moment to look at Fred. “Do you want me to leave? I can go to my desk or the meeting room?” The desk she barely used, it’s only use now being of support to her bag and computer.

“No, you can stay I trust you. Just please don’t stay up to late. Tomorrow we can give her something to occupy her mind.” She nodded, and said goodbye as he left and closed the door behind him.

y/n only got up two hours later to turn on the light in room because it was already dark, but her brain so focused on what she was doing that she didn’t think much of it.  

“Fred are you seriously still working?” Came a sudden voice that scared her and made the pencil she held drop to the floor. “Shit sorry, y/n? Where’s Fred?”

“Mr. Weasley left sometime ago, a date with his girlfriend. He let me stay because I have to finish this.” She pointed to the papers in front of her and the proceeded to pick up the pencil. George came in and closed the door behind him. She had to prepare herself to bask in his presence, his knowledge and his extreme intelligence. y/n was not only fisically attracted to him, but also mentally. He was just so intelligent it was scary sometimes to work with him, even though she had helped him solve that case a sometime ago. It was still hard because she was afraid to make any wrong moves.

“Well I thought it was just him in here and was gonna tell him to drop his work and go home. It’s not him but it applies to you to. Besides I had to stay up late too, I’m the only one here and the security will want to close everything up in a short time. I bet if they had done their patrol already that you wouldn’t be here.”

“I will leave when they come here, but for now I have to really finish this.” She turned to her work again, trying to ignore his presence completely. He came closer to her and put a hand on her shoulder.

“Well I have nothing to do at home, I can help you with what’s left. Two heads are better than one.” He said. He pulled a chair from a corner and put it next to hers. She gave him some papers for him to analyze. “Surprising that Fred stayed with this case, i usually take care of financial stuff.” He said more to himself than anything but y/n heard.

“I think he only took it because I told him I like this type of cases and could help him. I’m doing most of the works, he’s working on the arguments and such.” She looked at George. Being the end of the day, he has his shirt unbuttoned, his tie was hanging from his left pocket of the jacket and he just had a tired look on him.

“Ah I see, stealing you all to himself.” y/n denied with her head. “Unfair, seen as he knows very well I’ve been meaning to talk to you since the party the other day. Or did you forget what you said?”

Shit, y/n wasn’t expecting him to act on it. But oh boy, how she was happy he did. Every dream she’s had since that day was of her on her knees sucking him of until he cums in her mouth. While he calls her little pet names and makes her stay with his cock in her mouth because it’s warm. And then in her dreams he would slap her ass, slap her little clit until she trembled and made her call him ‘daddy’. The name would come out shy at first and then when he was destroying her it would come out more strong and sure.

She swallowed hard and pressed her legs together.

“Penny for your thoughts?” He put his hand on her leg and pulled them apart, so her legs were separated and he looked at her sternly. “Keep him this way.” He demanded.

“I thought you were gonna help” she whispered, hand coming to rest on top of his and caressing his long fingers. Shit, they would hit every spot inside her so good.

“And I am, aren’t I? I’m attending to a more important and demanding matter.” His hand came up from her knee to her thigh and then leaned inside towards her core, he could feel all the heat radiating from there. She nodded and guided his hand to be right on top of her still clothed pussy.

“Please, help me.” She said sweetly and seductively, any doubts she had and concerns if the should even be doing this in the first place all melting away.

“Yeah? Want my help baby girl? Since you like to be so bossy and know it all, tell me, what do you want me to do?” George pressed his fingers, quickly finding her clit and letting the pressure there for a moment, a moan coming from her mouth.

“Undress me, and please touch my pussy. I’m so wet.” She pleaded.

“Then get up, come on now, be a good girl.” He sair almost impatiently, and saw her get up and fumble with the buttons of her jacket and then with the button of her pants. “Shit.” George was amazed how good she looked, the black panties and bra she had made her look even more delicious if that were possible. The panties were laced and so her wetness could be seen from them. “On the desk.” He instructed, and y/n without thinking did what he asked.

If Fred ever found out they had sex in his office he would never see the end of it and he might as well think about creating his own firm because… wow.

“I’m so wet.” She brought her hand to his hair and pulled on hit the groan that left George was brutal. “Please kiss it.”

George didn’t need to be told twice, he brought his lips to her covered pussy and kissed, although mixed with the fabric of her panties, he could very much taste her distinct, sweet, taste. He kissed it again, and again until she was restless enough to pull his head back her eyes a darker color.

“Take them of.” She order, George looked amazed at her commanding tone.

“be careful there little thing, might just stop here.” He had taken his hand to move her panties to the side exposing her engorged and redish clit, asking to touched. She mewled, her hand coming to rest on her belly and her fingers digging a little.

George took his mouth to her clit and sucked it gently, gaining from her the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. He sucked again so have that reaction again, her legs came to rest on his back pulling him to her. She moaned his name.

“Sound so fucking good moaning for me princess, just love it so much.” He took the moment she was distracted to rip her panties open, she gasped.

“What the fuck George.” She looked at him incredulously.

He slapped her thigh and squished it. “Watch you language there or daddy might just leave you hanging.”

The fact that not only had he used the word ‘daddy’, the word she so dreamed of him calling, he had also called himself that. He couldn’t be real.

“No please.” Any dominance she might have tried complete disappeared at his words. Two of his fingers played with her wet hole while his mouth kissed the inside or her thigs, kissed just above her pussy, above where she wanted to be touched the most. Her eyes closed and one hand was behind her, to support her and the other still on her belly.

He entered the two fingers, slowly, looking at her, at the way her head fell back, his name fell out of her mouth, and the hand on her tummy came to push him agains her cunt. Non verbally stating where she wanted his mouth to go.

HE wasted no time attacking her clit with his tongue, his fingers moving slowly in and her out her allowing to fill her, to be close to her.

“Daddy, shit.” Her legs slid down his back almost to his butt, they were shaking a little.

“You just so good baby girl, so sweet, fuck, I’ve been imagining this ever since I saw you. How tight you would be, how sweet, how responsive to your daddy.” He moaned, he was so hard the zipper on his trousers opened a little. His free hand came to unbutton and in a very messy way he pulled his boxers down and freed his cock.

His cock was swollen, red, and we was leaking the stinky susbstance y/n wanted to taste. It came slapping to his belly, rock hard. He put his hand on it stroking slowly letting some moans slip out of his lips, which came shocking against her clit and she shook.

“Fuck. Are you touching yourself daddy?” She asked innocently, pulling some of the red hair that had fallen onto his face to have a better view of his wet swollen lips, from mounding at her pussy.

“I am baby, I am, you just, taste so good, feel so warm and squishy.” All the vibrations from his voice were crashing on her clit making her even more sensitive.

“I- I’ gonna cum, George, fuck.” She was so close, so so close, but he stopped, seized his movements at her pussy but his fingers still buried inside of her.

“You’re gonna come, with me deep inside that little pussy, yeah baby?” He asked, moving away from her. Pulling his fingers, she sighed happily, and took his hand as soon as it was out her. Bringing her face close to his hand and putting his fingers in her mouth, sucking feverishly on them.

George groaned, the hand on his cock pressing his tip and he felt like he could come there at sigh.

“I wanna suck you cock daddy, please.”

“Since my girl asked so nicely, I can’t say no.” Hearing him say ‘princess’ ‘my girl’ made her stomach feel with butterflies, and her heart skip a beat. Shit this crush was way out of hand.

She bounced of the desk, and pushed his chair a little, the wheels helping her do so. She came down to her knees, the view making George think the most sinful things.

Her hand took his out and put it in his thick thighs. Her mouth close to his where she left small wet kisses. Her hand started to stroke him, coming from the base all the way to the rudy red tip. She took the pre-cum that was coming out and used it had lubricant making the sensation so much more intense to him.

She opened his legs to fit in between them and looked up at him for a brief moment, her pussy pulsing around nothing wishing to be touched. He had his head back, both hands at his thighs kneading the flesh there. His mouth opened looking like his was gonna moan but no sound came out.

She understood them we was trying to control himself.  

“Moan for me daddy, let me hear you. Let me know I’m making you feel good.” She squeezed his tip tightly and his hole body shook, a moan he couldn’t control of her name.

“You’re making me feel so good, shit, your hands are so small and can barely wrap around my thick shaft isn’t that right pretty princess? And why don’t you put that dirty mouth of your to work.” Her mouth came to meet his tip and engulfed it in her lips, sucking softly on it, her hands massaging the rest of his cock for now.

Her tongue playing with his tip and then she not so slowly took more of him into her mouth. Her hand resting on his balls and massaging them. And then coming up again twisting around the part of his cock she didn’t have in her mouth.

He put his hand on her hair, making a pony tail out it and helping her guiding her movements, even thought she didn’t need that, he just wanted to feel in control.

She breath in deepley and relaxes her throat and before he knew it she was taking him all of him in, hitting the back of her throat, gagging around him, her spit and his come dripping down the corners of her mouth.

“Sucking my cock so messily baby, but so fucking good- ah fuck” he cried out his legs feeling numb from all the pleasure. Her hand moving more vigorously on his balls. She pulled out slowly, her free hand not touching him, touching her needy clit.

“Come on, up you get.” He was out of breath, pulling her by her hair and instructing her silently to sit on the desk again. He got up, one hand spreading her thighs apart and the other stroking him, the color red spreading from his head all the way thru his length from the way he was feeling.

“Next time, daddy, I’ll suck your cock until you come. I won’t let you pull out.” y/n said, hands coming up to knead her breast thru her bra.

“Take that off, want you naked while you make a mess on my cock.” He smacked his cock on her clit the sudden touch making them both shudder. With trembling fingers she tried to pull open her bra, and with some difficulty she eventually managed.

George filled her up nice and slowly letting them both ride the high of feeling each other so closely. George feeling her up all the way, her pussy adjusting to his size. He was big, long and thick and y/n hadn’t had sex in a long time and no guy she was with was that big. George was way above average and she could feel it very well and would feel it even more the next day.

“Daddy shit.” Her feet met his ass and pulled him towards her, George wasn’t all in but her sudden movement made him do just that, fitting snugly in her pussy, brushing her sweet stop that made her spasm around him.

“You are just perfect all over aren’t you baby? So perfect and angelic but the dirtiest whore for your daddy.” His hand took the hair that still fell on his eyes and his other hand touched her clit and pressed it, sinful sounds coming from her, her clit touched and played with along with the pressure and size of George’s cock making her senses stop working and her loosing every train thought she had.

“I’m gonna love to play with this pussy.” He started moving his hips, taking his hand of her clit and taking both her legs in his hold. He bent her legs at the knee and close tho her chest the knew position made her scream. He hit her g-spot right there and then, and her legs became gelly.

“Found it baby, now touch you precious clit for me.” He instructed and she did has she was told, all the pleasure she felt becoming to much, her pussy was throbbing, her nipples were hard from all the pleasure and his cock inside her felt heavenly. He was so smooth, and heavy. She made rapid little motions on her clit while George sped up his movements his hips meeting hers ever, bottoming out with every thrust and touching every little part of her cunt.

When her legs started to quake powerfully in his hold he knew she was starting to get close. She had been teased and denied one orgasm, and she would do it again if he demanded, but the way her breasts moved with power of his hips and strokes, and how she clenched around him swallowing him holy he knew he would be mean to do that.

“You gotta ask for permission.” He slapped her hand way from her clit to pus his there, to control the pressure and the little up and down movement.

At first she couldn’t form words, her vision was going white, the shots of pleasure thru her body to much.

“P-please can I cum?” A gentle whimper came from her mouth as the waves of her orgasm become stronger.

“Yes baby, go ahead soke my cock.” His hand moved even quicker on her clit and that’s when they both felt it. Her orgasm rippling thru her, strong waves of pleasure felt all over her body, her legs quacking, her arms stretched out beside her, her pussy convulsing, her juices coating his cock deliciously.

“Squeezing me so tight baby, I’m gonna fucking come.”  She puts her head in a way that she can look at him, all destroyed and proper fucked out. He doesn’t have time to warn her again before his climax comes crushing down on him. He almost looses his balance for a second, so strong that everything in his body paralyzes. He buries himself to the hilt in her pussy letting his cum shot deep in her and falls on top of her, his arms don’t give him much support but allow him not to crush her. He hides is face in her neck.

“We really did it ahm?” came her voice, sounding still a little afar since he was still recovering from his strong orgasm. He just nodded unable to form any word.

She waited a little, her hand gently brushing his back making goosebumps appear on his skin. The gentle and sweet gesture making his heart flutter.

“We did.” Came out after a while, finally regaining his posture and picking himself up, pulling out of her. The movement making them moan a little, the emptiness she felt felt weird. She was somehow already used to being full of him.  

He pulled her by the arms so she could sit on the desk and not stay laying down.

“Does this change anything?” She asked shyly. He nodded.

“It does, because, I’ll be dammed if I don’t make you mine.” Intertwining their fingers he brought to his mouth to kiss. She smiled britlhy. “If you want me, that is.”

Her answer came in an attack of kisses all over his face and ending up in his mouth.

“We didn’t even kiss thru all that shit. And you kissed my cock.” He joked and she punched him gently on his chest.

“Watch your mouth. And also how we will explain to your brother this?”

“What he doesn’t know doesn’t hurt him.”

They got dressed, both of them taking their time because their bodies were still not at the maximum potential. A knock on the door startled them.

“Mr. Weasley are you still in there?” It was the guard. George made a gesture with his finger over his mouth for y/n to keep quiet.

“Yes Augustus, be out in a minute.” George said a little loudly and finished up getting dressed and waited for y/n to do the same, and then proceeded to organize the mess they made so Fred wouldn’t know about anything.

Opening the door Augustus was there waiting, a few feet from the door he smiled at George, did he knew it was George now that he could see him? Or did he still think it was Fred? Wouldn’t look good if he did, Fred is probably at home with his girlfriend.

“Augustus, my brother gave us some last minute work and we completely forgot the time. I’m so sorry.” George apologized. Augustus understood then is was not Fred. He only nodded, looked at y/n and also nodded and then watched them leave, their hands intertwined while he heard a little laugh coming from the girl.

⚘

Next day y/n came in at the same time as always, but neither Fred or George were to be seen. She sat at her desk and started to work on the things she should’ve done yesterday but got a little to busy to do so. Fred came in first.

“Good morning y/n. Already working on the case?” He asked bewildered, stopping in front of her desk. She nodded, now that she was seeing him, after what she had done in his office words were hard to come out her mouth. “Good, well when George comes in can you please tell him to come to my office? Iris is coming in later today so I can’t leave her that warning. You can also come in with them for us to work on the case.”

She nodded again, her words still not forming. About half an hour later came in George, way later than usual since he came in at the same time as Fred or a little after. When they made eye contact the smile he shared with her was so big and bright that made some of the nervous feeling she had subside. She had spent all night overthinking if that was a mistake, but by the looks of it wasn’t.

“Mr. Weasley your brother wishes to speak to you.” With some of the lawyers doors opened she had to address him like that.

“Thank you y/n, gonna put this in my office and then I’ll go right in.”

And when he came around she got up to follow him. Silently she spoke to him.

“he said to come in too, so we can work on the case.” She felt the need to justify herself.

“Ah yes, the case you should’ve worked on yesterday I am correct? Got a little to distracted no?” He put his hand on her back and pulled her to him. He kissed her lips gently. If her hands weren’t full she would’ve put his face between them. They were lucky that they in a part where no one could see.

“Ah fantastic that you both still know how to follow some orders.” Fred said, when he saw both of them enter his office. y/n swallowed hard, that sentence had a lot more meaning to it.

George tried to hide his smile, he thinks he might know what could come out of this, but how did he know?

“Next time you both decide to shag, which mind you I have nothing against, finally actually, do it at home, in George’s office somewhere… but please not my fucking office.” He looked at both of them trying to portrait himself as mad but failing terribly. A smirk resting on his lips.

y/n wanted to hide so badly, dig the biggest hole ever and burry herself there from how embarrassed she was.

“Hod do you know?” George asked incredosly, one thing they refused to have were cameras in their offices, it was a private place for them.

“Well my dears there’s a thing called a fucking phone.” He pointed to the phone he had on his desk, it was used to call around the firm, but Fred had his house number on there in case Angelina needed anything and couldn’t reach his personal phone. “Having my girlfriend pick up the phone, and come in the bedroom saying ‘someone is having sex on your office’ sure makes you both have a good impression. Lucky me I was at home with her when that happened.”

George looked at y/n who was feeling hot and embarrassed all over. Shit, it must have been her in the moments of pleasure she might’ve pushed some button. Fuck, shit.

“Just that. But finally you both decided to do it, I was done earing from one or the other just plain bullshit.” Fred rolled his eyes, continuing to write what he was doing. “Even Angelina was happy, not about the phone sex, about you two getting your shit together.”

y/n looked at George and took his hand in hers again.

“So are we together?” She asked him.

“Yes, but to make it official let me take you on a proper date. Today, sound good?” She nodded.

“Great you two, but please don’t let it end in office sex.” Came Fred’s voice again, making the three of them laugh.

[kingstylesdaily]

Playtime With Harry Styles

via vogue.com

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[lingthusiasm]

Transcript Lingthusiasm Episode 52: Writing is a technology

This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm Episode 52: Writing is a technology. It’s been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the Episode 52 show notes page.

[Music]

Gretchen: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Gretchen McCulloch.

Lauren: I’m Lauren Gawne. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about writing as a technology. But first, do you wish there was more Lingthusiasm to listen to? Even though this is Episode 52, we have almost a hundred episodes of Lingthusiasm. Some of them exist as bonus episodes over at our Patreon.

Gretchen: If you want to listen to those and have more Lingthusiasm in your earballs, you can go to patron.com/lingthusiasm. This also helps keep the show ad-free. If you like listening to a show without ads, help us keep doing that.

Lauren: The Patreon also fosters this wonderful linguistics enthusiastic community. In fact, we have a Discord server, which is basically just a wonderful chat space for people to talk about linguistics. There are over 350 people on the Lingthusiasm Discord right now.

Gretchen: If you wish you had other lingthusiasts to talk to to share your interesting linguistics anecdotes and memes and general nerdery, and you want more people like that to talk to, you can join the Patreon to also get access to the Discord. We launched the Discord community just a year ago, and it’s been really fun to see it grow and thrive and take on a life of its own since then. If you are already a patron, and you haven’t linked your Patreon and Discord account together, it’s there waiting for you. Feel free to come join us.

Lauren: We have Patreon supporter levels at a range of tiers. Some of them include additional merch. One of my favourite perks is the very scientific Lingthusiasm IPA quiz where we send you a short quiz and then we give you your own custom IPA character which is enshrined on our Wall of Fame.

Gretchen: It’s a fun quiz. We have fun looking at people’s answers.

Lauren: Our most recent bonus episode is a collection of some of our favourite anecdotes from interviews and from other episodes that didn’t quite make it into the original episode. We’re delighted to share those in that bonus episode.

Gretchen: You get to see a bit behind-the-scenes with that episode. Also, do you want more linguistics on your favourite other podcasts?

Lauren: Always.

Gretchen: Constantly. We’re also very happy to do podcast interviews on other shows about various topics. If there’re other podcasts that you like that you wish would do a linguistics episode and interview one of us, you should tell them that! We’re happy to come on. Tag us both or something on social media or tell your favourite podcasts that they could do a linguistics episode because we’d be happy to do that.

[Music]

Lauren: Gretchen, do you remember learning how to read?

Gretchen: Not really. I mean, I remember encountering the alphabet chart in my first year of school, but I already sort of knew the alphabet at that point. I guess there was some point when I didn’t know how to read, and there was some point when I did, but I don’t really have concrete memories of that. Do you remember learning how to read?

Lauren: I feel like I have more memories of learning how to write, just because that’s such a mechanical thing. I remember sitting there writing out a row of As. I definitely wrote the number “five” backward for way longer than I probably should have, which is a really common thing that happens when kids are learning to write because it is a combination of brain skills and fine motor skills. But reading in English is something I feel like I’ve always just been able to do. I mean, I guess in comparison learning to read Nepali, which is written in a different script – it’s written in the Devanagari script – I have more memories of that because I did that in my 20s. Even now, I still feel the real disconnect between being relatively able to chat and really struggling to read and write. I still have to put my finger under the words as I’m going through, whereas with English it just feels like the words are beaming straight into my brain because I learnt to read that language so early in my life.

Gretchen: Yeah, I read at this automatic level. I can’t see a sign that says, “Stop,” on it and not read it in Latin script. But in undergrad I took both Ancient Greek and Arabic. In Greek, I got to the point – because the script is sort of similar enough and I was familiar enough with the letters previously-ish – that I got to the point where I could very slowly sound out words as I was reading them out loud because we had to do a lot of reading aloud in Greek class. But in Arabic, I was very much at that hooked on phonics level where you’re like, /p/-/t/-/k/-/a/. There are a few words that I have as sight words in Arabic. One of them is the word for “and,” which is “waa”, and one of the words for “the,” which is “al”, and one of them is the word for “book” because “kitaab” just shows up all the time. But most of the words I had to painstakingly sound out each letter and then listen to myself as I was saying them. I’d be like, “Oh, it’s that word,” even if I knew it, which is this process that I must’ve gone through in English, but I don’t remember doing it for the Latin script.

Lauren: I think that is one of the things that makes it really hard for people who grow up in highly literate, highly educated societies to tease writing and reading apart from language. But actually, when you step back, you realise that writing is actually super weird.

Gretchen: It’s so weird! It’s this interesting – it really is a technology. It’s a thing you do on top of language to do stuff with language, but it’s not the language itself. There are thousands and possibly millions of languages that have never been written down in the history of humanity. We have no idea. We’ve never met a society of humans, or heard of a society of humans, without language. But those are spoken and signed languages, which are just kind of there. Writing, by contrast, was invented somewhere between 3 and 4 times in the history of humanity.

Lauren: That we know of.

Gretchen: That we know of.

Lauren: There might’ve been a society that did a very ephemeral form of snow writing that we have lost forever. But we have records of 3 or 4 times.

Gretchen: It’s been invented a handful of times. There are a few other cases where there are scripts that haven’t been deciphered by modern humans. Maybe they’re scripts, maybe they’re not – it’s not quite clear. But it’s definitely a handful of number of times. And then once other cultures come in contact with the technology of writing, they’re like, “Oh, this is cool. Let’s adapt this to our linguistic situation,” and it gets borrowed a heck of a lot. But it only got cemented a few times.

Lauren: It’s worth saying that “3 to 4” is a bit squishy because it’s not entirely clear if cuneiform, which is a very pointy form of writing from Babylonia, somehow inspired the Egyptian system that became what we know as the hieroglyphs or if they just happened around the same time by coincidence are something we may never really fully put together. That’s a very contested situation. That’s why we can’t even pin down the number of times we think it was invented.

Gretchen: Cuneiform is the one that’s made with the sharpened reed that you push into your clay tablets or, if you’re some people on the internet, into your gingerbread because there’s some really excellent examples of cuneiform gingerbread tablets people have made, which I just wanna – yeah, it’s really great. The Egyptian hieroglyphs people have seen. But yeah, it’s unclear whether they were in contact with each other and kind of heard of each other in a very loose sense and were inspired by each other because there was some amount of contact between those two areas, or if that was elsewhere. The other two – one is in Mesoamerica, in modern-day Mexico and that area, where they had a writing system there that, again, developed into lots of different scripts as it got borrowed from different areas, of which the best deciphered is the Mayan script from the 3rd Century BCE. There’s also the Olmec script, which is probably the oldest. The Zapotec script is also really old. There’s a bunch of scripts in the modern-day Mexico area that also developed independently.

Lauren: Then the final system arose in China around the Bronze Age a couple of thousand years BCE. Because this script was mostly found in its most earliest forms on oracle bones, it’s known as the “oracle bone” script.

Gretchen: What is an oracle bone?

Lauren: They are turtle bones that are used in divination.

Gretchen: Oh.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: And, again, the Chinese script, once it developed further, it was also, yeah, influenced a bunch of the other writing systems in the area.

Lauren: I find it super fascinating, with absolutely no historical knowledge or insight to bring to this, that in these three different places that were completely separate and going about their own cultural lives writing arose at a similar time around 3,000 to 4,000 years ago.

Gretchen: Yeah! You wonder what was in the water or something. Well, and it’s partially, I think, that there’s a certain level of writing makes it easier to do things like administrative bureaucracy if you’re trying to keep track of whether people paid their taxes or – it’s a very empire-y thing to have is to develop a writing system.

Lauren: Oh yeah. And it’s absolutely worth stating that it’s not like three people in these three different locations all woke up on the same Tuesday 4,000 years ago and were like, “I’m gonna write a long letter to someone.”

Gretchen: Did they have Tuesdays 4,000 years ago?

Lauren: What you see is this emergence of, “I’m just gonna make a couple of notes so I know how much money you owe me.” Some of the earliest cuneiform tablets we have are just, like, beer supply stock takes.

Gretchen: Like, “Three oxes and this many baskets of grain” or whatever.

Lauren: I feel like it’s very human to be like, “We love writing because it’s poetry, and I can send letters to people I love,” and it’s like, no, it’s actually, “I just wanted to know how much you owe me.”

Gretchen: The king just wants to know if these people have paid their taxes.

Lauren: So, what you get is – although I’m like, “Oh, it all happened within similar millennia,” it is actually centuries of development from just keeping tabs on a few items to a fully fleshed out written system.

Gretchen: What types of things people thought were important to write down – things like legal codes and stuff like that – one of the interesting things that I came across when I was looking this up was that there’s a person named Enheduanna, who is the earliest known poet whose name has been recorded. She was the high priestess of the goddess Inanna and the moon god Nanna in the Sumerian city-state of Ur. There we go. But authorship shows up much later than some anonymous civil servant keeping track of who’s registered which grain or some anonymous priest or something keeping track of who’s made various offerings. This idea of like, “Oh, you’re gonna write poetry,” is a step later.

Lauren: Filing your tax is what is actually one of the best links you have to those ancient civilisations.

Gretchen: There’s this Egyptian named Ptahhotep – that’s “Pta,” P-T, even though I know I’m not pronouncing it that way – he was a vizier in Egypt. He’s also one of the first named writers, the first book in history – or people call him the first book in history – because he wrote these Maxims of Ptahhotep. There may have been people who were writing on more perishable materials that didn’t get recorded and stuff like that. It’s this whole process of, “Okay, I’m going to draw these little diagrams of oxen or something or draw these little diagrams of this plant or this animal or whatever to record what types of things get recorded.” But then in order for it to actually become a writing system, there’s also this step of abstraction that has to happen. This is when you start saying, “Okay, well, the word for this very easily visualisable thing” – so I’m thinking of oxen because the word for “ox” in one of the Semitic languages, I think, was something like /alef/. And so, this “ox’s head” gets transformed into, “Okay, what if this is the sound at the beginning of the word for ‘ox’s head,’” which is /alef/, and it gets transformed into our modern letter A, which is “alpha.” “Alpha” in Greek is just the name of the letter. It’s not “an ox’s head” in Greek anymore because the Greeks borrowed it form the Phoenicians. This level of abstraction that has to go from, “Okay, I’m gonna draw an ox’s head” – if you turn a capital A upside down, it kind of looks like an ox’s head.

Lauren: It’s got its little horns, which are the feet of an A.

Gretchen: Yeah, and there’re all these related languages. You know, Arabic’s got alif at the beginning, even though it doesn’t look like an ox’s head anymore. Hebrew’s got an alef, and Greek’s got an alpha, and all of these alphabets that begin with A. It’s this level of abstraction where you can use this thing to stand for this thing that was associated with an ox.

Lauren: There’re a couple of main different ways that you can relate these abstract images that you’re putting down in writing to the language that you are trying to capture. Of course, being a linguistics podcast, I was gonna bring this straight back to the structure of language.

Gretchen: Well, I think it’s interesting to look at the structure of languages in different areas of the world, and how people reflect those in the writing systems that are developed for those languages. When they borrow a writing system for a language with a very different structure, they end up doing certain adaptations to account for not just like, “Okay, languages have different sounds,” but also those sounds are organised and structured in different ways with relationship to each other. The writing systems often reflect some of that history.

Lauren: The Latin alphabet that both of us are most familiar with has a very approximate correspondence between each character of the writing system and a sound in the language. And I say “approximate” because English spelling is a wonderful historical record of how some of those sound changes have changed over time. I’m just gonna keep this upbeat. You can fall down a giant well of English writing system problems, but to get to a point where the majority of letters have a pretty stable correspondence to sounds that we recognise as phones in the language, and that allows us to write out the words of English.

Gretchen: One of the things that’s true about a lot of the Indo-European languages is that they have a particular ratio between consonants and vowels in the words, where they have a fair bit of consonants in relationship to their vowels but not a ton. You can see this in the writing system because the writing system represents consonants and vowels separately. And yet, when the Greeks were borrowing the alphabet from the Phoenicians – Phoenician is a Semitic language like modern-day Arabic and Hebrew – that alphabet only had consonants in it – letters for consonants – because the vowels were not that important. This is still true of modern-day Semitic languages is they’re often written in writing systems that don’t represent the vowels or kind of optionally represent the short vowels, or sometimes they represent the long vowels, but they’re often written in writing systems where the vowels can be omitted. That’s not really a thing you can do very well in Indo-European languages and still have things understood because the vowels carry enough information that you need to represent them somehow.

Lauren: Even when you have a phonemic script, it’s not necessary to always represent all of the sounds to convey the language.

Gretchen: Right. Then conversely, there are other languages where the vowels are even more important and, in fact, every consonant comes with a vowel or virtually every consonant comes with a vowel. In those, you often get what are called “syllabaries,” where they represent one syllable at a time, because why bother with representing each of these things separately when in every context where you have a consonant there’s gonna be a nearby vowel – or in virtually every context there’s gonna be a nearby vowel – and so you can have a symbol that just represents the whole syllable there. That’s also a structure that doesn’t work very well for Indo-European languages because they don’t have that many vowels. There’s this spot of like they have important enough vowels that you need to represent the vowels somehow but not so important are vowels that you have to represent lots of vowels all the time, whereas languages like Japanese or Hindi – well, Hindi’s Indo-European, but it’s got more vowels, I guess.

Lauren: The Devanagari writing system is inherently focused on the syllable, which is a very different approach to reading. Each character of this writing system, if there’s no vowel specified, it just comes with a bonus vowel. It’s like, “Buy this consonant, get this free letter A sound.”

Gretchen: Right. That’s partly a feature of the writing system, but it can only be a feature of the writing system because it’s already a feature of the language. A similar thing goes for a language like Chinese, where a lot of things are based around a syllable.

Lauren: Then you can go a level of abstraction further where your character in the writing system represents a word-level thing and doesn’t have a direct relationship to the sound correspondence, which is what happens with the Chinese script.

Gretchen: I think it’s important to recognise that there is a phonetic component to Chinese characters. They often make use of – especially for words that are more abstract – it’s not just like, “Oh, here’s a bunch of little pictures that we’ve drawn,” because that’s not capable of conveying abstract concepts like grammatical particles and words for things that don’t come with easy pictures. And so, making use of, “Okay, a lot of our words are one or two syllables long, so here’s a word that’s relatively easy to visualise that sounds very similar to a word that is not as easy to visualise.” We can just add a thing to be like, “It sounds like this, but it’s got a meaning more related to this,” and you can be like, “Oh, it must be this more abstract word.” The classic example, which I’m definitely gonna do the tones wrong on, is that the word for “horse” is /ma/, and the word for mother is also /ma/ with a different tone, and you can add the little horse semantic component with the woman semantic component and be like, “Oh, it’s the word that sounds like ‘horse’ but has to do with something with a woman,” and then you end up with “mother.”

Lauren: This works for languages in China because they tend to be not as long as words in English. We like to add all these extra bits of morphology within our grammar, whereas, again, you get – not a direct rule force – but you get this general tendency where the writing system kind of fits with the vibe of the grammar of the language.

Gretchen: One example of that is in Japanese where they were heavily influenced by the Chinese script, but Japanese actually does have suffixes and other little grammatical words and things you need to change about words. They made some of the Chinese characters that had formerly only had semantic things into just like, “Oh, this makes this sound, and this makes this sound,” because they needed to be able to represent that morphological information that’s not super important in Chinese but is very important in Japanese. You end up adapting a script into something else when it gets borrowed in a different context. Another interesting example here is Farsi or Persian which is an Indo-European language that’s conventionally written with the same script as Arabic except it’s also had a couple of additional letters added because Persian has a P and Arabic doesn’t. They had to create a symbol for the sound P, which is why you get “Farsi” instead of “Parsi” because Arabic doesn’t pronounce that P. So, it makes the P into an F. Sometimes you get people adding additional letters like adding a letter for P. Sometimes you get adapting whole sets of a script.

Lauren: Sometimes you lose letters. English had distinct characters for /θ/ and /ð/ until it was technologically easier to just use the characters in the printing press that English had borrowed. It’s makes me a little bit sad. But also, it makes international people – maybe it’s a little bit easier.

Gretchen: We used to have a thorn for the /ð/ sound, but those early printing presses from continental Europe didn’t have thorns on them. I mean, Icelandic still has thorns. One of the things that I think is more interesting in the closer to modern era – not strictly modern era – is cultures and peoples that are familiar with the idea of writing yet take the idea of writing and say, “We’re gonna make our own homegrown script that actually works really well for our particular language.” One of my favourites is the Cherokee syllabary, which was invented by Sequoyah, who was a Cherokee man who didn’t know how to read in English, but he’d encountered the Latin-based writing system in English. He thought it was cool that the English speakers had this, and so he locked himself in shed for several years and came up with a syllabary for Cherokee. Some of the symbols on the Cherokee syllabary look something like Latin letters, but they stand for completely different things because he wasn’t just learning to read from English. Some of them are completely different. This became hugely popular among the Cherokee in the area. There were newspapers in this in the 1800s. There was very high literacy in Cherokee country. It was really popular. It’s even still found on modern-day computer keyboards and stuff like this. You can get Windows and stuff in Cherokee. It’s this interesting example of that’s one where we can say a particular person was inspired by writing systems but also created his own thing that became very popular.

Lauren: The thing that makes Cherokee so compelling to me is not only did he come up with an incredibly elegant, well thought out, suits the language system, but that he actually got uptake as well – that the community decided to use this as the writing system that they would learn to read and write in, and that it had uptake. It’s very easy to come up with ways of improving the technology of writing but, as I think you’re fond of saying, language is very much an open-source project. You can come up with really elegant solutions, but if no one else is gonna take them up, that’s not gonna be very helpful. So, Sequoyah’s work is doubly amazing for that reason.

Gretchen: People actually made printing presses with the Cherokee symbols and were using those. Another interesting case of this disconnect between a person or people coming up with a system and actual uptake of it is Korean, which has what I think linguists generally agree is just the best writing system.

Lauren: Yeah, we’re like, “Writing as a technology is amazing. All writing systems are equally valid. But Korean is particularly great.”

Gretchen: “But Korean’s really cool.” The thing that’s cool about it from a completely biased linguist perspective is that the writing system of Korean, Hangul, the script, is not just based on individual sounds or phonemes, it’s actually at a more precise level based on the shape of the mouth and how you configure the mouth in order to make those particular sounds. There’s a lot of, okay, here are these closely related sounds – let’s say you make them all with the lips – and you just add an additional stroke to make it this other related sound that you make with the lips. Between P and B and M, which are all made with the lips, those symbols have a similar shape. It’s not an accident. It’s very systematic between that and the same thing with T and D and N. Those have a similar shape because they have this relationship. It’s very technically beautiful from an analysis of language perspective.

Lauren: I love this so much that when we were prototyping a potential script for the Aramteskan language for the Shadowscent books, when I was constructing that language, I also started constructing a script that we never used anywhere, but it was helpful to think about how the characters would write and what writing implements they would use. If you look at the script, you’ll notice that the letter P and B are very similar, but B has an additional stroke. T and D are very similar, but D has an additional stroke. Very much feature driven. And then for the vowels – it’s roughly a quadrant in the writing space – the /i/ vowel is in the top left of the quadrant, the /u/ vowel is in the top right of the quadrant, the /a/ vowel is in the bottom left of the quadrant.

Gretchen: So clever!

Lauren: It was actually just for really selfish reasons that I decided to go with a feature-based system, and that is that it was easier for me to remember if I used the features of the language and made sure that the voiced sound was always identical to the voiceless one but just with an additional stroke. It meant that I only had to remember half the characters.

Gretchen: That’s very elegant. The easy to remember bit is also true about the Hangul script because it’s got so much regularity. The famous quote about Hangul is something like “A wise man can learn it in an afternoon and a foolish man can learn it in a day.”

Lauren: So catchy!

Gretchen: There’s probably a better version of that quote. What’s interesting about it from an adoption perspective is that Hangul was invented by Sejong the Great.

Lauren: Appropriately named.

Gretchen: Who has a national holiday now because of the script. But it was created in 1443. It’s not quite clear whether it was him personally doing everything or whether he had an advisory committee of linguists, but it’s really extremely well-adapted to the linguistic situation of Korean in particular. Even though it’s just also really cool for how it represents the inside of the mouth, but it’s really well adapted for Korean. It was invented in 1443, but it wasn’t popularised in use until several centuries later because for a long time Korean was also using, like Japanese, this adapted version of the Chinese script or adapted version of the Japanese script because of the cultural influences. In the early 20th century, they were doing a much bigger literacy push in Korea to be like, “What want everyone to learn how to read.” And they said, “Okay, we’re gonna have an orthographic reform, and we’re gonna use this script which has this very nice historical pedigree but also is much easier to learn than this complicated thing that we had done that wasn’t really designed for Korean.” It’s got this historical antecedence but also it came back in the modern-day. Now, everything in Korean is written in it. It’s because it’s really easy to learn how to read and write in. The historical uptake wasn’t immediate. It wasn’t during King Sejong’s lifetime where they were like, “Oh, yeah, now we’re all gonna use his script,” people were like, “Okay, king, you’ve got this hobby,” but it wasn’t popularised until later.

Lauren: Even when there is really strong abstraction, humans have this unavoidable tendency to think about the relationship between sounds and other senses. In sound-based writing systems – Suzy Styles, who has been on the podcast before and works on perception across the senses, did an experiment alongside Nora Turoman where they looked at whether people can guess, for writing systems they’re not familiar with, which character was the /u/ sound and which character was the /i/ sound. They found that for a whole variety of scripts there is a much higher than chance – because there’s only two choices. If was completely arbitrary, it would be 50/50. But people do tend, across the evolution of sound-based writing systems, to have /u/ that has a more rounded, bigger sound has properties in the writing system that re-occur. People continue to unavoidably link the sounds of the language to the written properties of the script in a very low-level way. I’ll link to that study. It’s really great.

Gretchen: That’s interesting. It’s not gonna be 100%, but there’s this slightly better than chance relationship.

Lauren: Yeah.

Gretchen: Visual representation of physical information is also something that shows up in ways of writing signed languages.

Lauren: Yeah. Everything we’ve talked about so far, I think, we’ve talked about for spoken languages, but it is possible to write signed languages as well.

Gretchen: There are several different systems in place. Some of them are language-specific like, “Oh, this is the system for writing ASL in particular,” and some of them are kind of like your linguist, International Phonetic Alphabet trying to provide a language-agnostic way of writing signed languages for research purposes but, in a way, that’s sort of impractical, like the IPA for general use. There’s an interesting set of systems. There isn’t as much agreement among representers of signed languages in writing which amounts of information are crucial information that has to be written down and which are optional bits of information that the reader can fill in from their own knowledge of the language and the signer.

Lauren: I think it’s worth flagging that that’s not just a discussion that arises for signed languages. It’s just that those conversations got thrashed out for spoken languages four millennia ago, and we weren’t around when people were arguing about whether intonation had any role in the – or people probably were arguing because it was an emerging thing.

Gretchen: Well, when people were arguing about like, “Do we write vowels or not,” which was a big thing. Do we write vowels? Do we write intonation? And punctuation followed quite a bit after – you know, punctuation wasn’t as much of a thing for several of the early centuries and millennia of writing. They didn’t do punctuation. There’s some level of ongoingness that’s still there. If you think about the internet efforts to try to write tone of voice very precisely and communicate sarcasm and irony and rhetorical questions very precisely, there’s some level of ongoing debate that’s still happening in the spoken language context but not nearly as much as is still happening in the signed language context.

Lauren: Also, just because of the way that signed language communities tend to be embedded within larger spoken language communities, people who sign as a primary language tend to also be educated in the mainstream spoken language, and so literacy gets developed in, say, a language like English.

Gretchen: I think that’s the case for a lot of smaller spoken languages as well where sometimes there’s this imperative of, “Okay, we want to be able to write things to each other” or something, but if there hasn’t been a history of a lot of published literature in that language that you’re trying to read, then it becomes a question of, “Should we teach this in school,” because there isn’t literature there, even though there would be oral literature. It becomes a chicken and egg problem of which comes first, or which do you start teaching first, when you’re constantly comparing stuff against a few very large spoken languages that have this very long writing tradition. It shows up in languages with a newer writing tradition.

Lauren: Education systems have a massive influence there. My grandmother, actually her strongest written language is German. Even though she and her sister speak to each other in Polish, they would write to each other in German because that’s the language they had been educated to write in. Even with people who don’t speak minority languages, the influence of the education system there is so massive.

Gretchen: Reading and writing, they’re separate skills even though they’re often taught together. Sometimes you can read a language that you can’t write or something like that. But it’s a big question. With signed languages, because video technology is now available, if we’d had good audio recording technology 4,000 years ago, the pressure to develop writing systems for spoken languages might not have been as strong – probably wouldn’t have been as strong – even though there are other useful things that writing can do even in the audio-video era. It’s easier to be like, “Well, you can just make a video of the signer,” and then you’d know exactly what they were trying to say and exactly how they wanted to say it. You wouldn’t have this level of abstraction of are you gonna try to write it down in a way that imperfectly represents what a person is gonna do when they’re producing it. It is still interesting looking at some of the signed language writing systems. Some of them, like Stokoe notation and HamNoSys, which stands for “Hamburg Notation System,” they try to very physically represent the characteristics of the signer – where their hands are, where their face is, and things like that. There’s another one that I can’t find the name of that is based on the ASCII alphabet, so you can type it into search engine boxes, which has some advantages as well but represents things more abstractly. It’s got this link with Korean, which was representing this very physical aspect of what the mouth is doing. Several of the signed language writing systems like Stokoe and HamNoSys also have this very physical representation what the body’s doing when it’s being produced. But I think they’re more popular among researchers than they are among actual D/deaf users who tend to use video a lot.

Lauren: I encounter Stokoe and HamNoSys in the gesture and signed linguistics literature. I haven’t really seen them too much outside of that.

Gretchen: I think that it’s easy to conflate a language with its writing system because we’re so used to thinking of English as sort of inextricably linked to the Latin alphabet. But there isn’t a reason, in theory, why you couldn’t write English in the Greek alphabet or in the Arabic alphabet or in a very adapted version of Chinese characters where you’d have to do a lot of adaptation. The same thing is true when you write languages that don’t originally use the Latin alphabet and you have romanisations of them. Writing systems are just as much political and contextual. Some of them have this very tight structural relationship to the properties of the languages they represent and some of them have looser relationships because they’ve been adapted to it later.

Lauren: It’s this slightly looser relationship to language as it’s spoken or signed that means that linguists don’t always include writing systems in, say, an Introduction to Linguistics course. We don’t often talk about writing systems. But when we were putting together the Crash Course series, we ended up making writing the topic of our final episode for the series.

Gretchen: I think partly because people are really interested in it, so why not do something about writing, and also because I think that you can use writing systems as a window into some of the interesting structural features of different languages and how the writing systems represent that. As somebody who’s really interested in internet linguistics and the rise of informal writing and how we represent tone of voice and things like that in modern-day writing, and that’s still a moving target evolutionarily speaking, I think it’s interesting to give that linguistic lens on writing systems even though they are imperfect representations of the languages that they represent.

Lauren: “Writing Systems” is Video 16 of Crash Course linguistics, which is wrapping up this month. If you’ve been holding out to watch all 16 of those episodes, you’ll be able to do so very soon or perhaps even now thanks to the temporal vagueness of podcasts.

Gretchen: Crash Course is the YouTube series that we’ve been working on basically all of 2020. It’s especially popular with high school or undergraduate teaching. If you know people that age, or who teach people that age, that may be a useful thing to send to people. We hope that people find it useful as a resource for self-teaching or for instructing in various capacities.

[Music]

Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, SoundCloud, YouTube, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can follow @Lingthusiasm on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr. You can get IPA scarves, “Not judging your grammar, just analysing it” mugs, and other Lingthusiasm merch at lingthusiasm.com/merch. I tweet and blog as Superlinguo.

Gretchen: I can be found as @GretchenAMcC on Twitter, my blog is AllThingsLinguistic.com, and book about internet language is called Because Internet. Have you listened to all the Lingthusiasm episodes and you wish there were more? You can access to 48 bonus episodes to listen to right now at patreon.com/lingthusiasm or follow the links from our website. Patrons also get access to our Discord chat room to talk with other linguistics fans – like, do you remember learning how to read – and other rewards as well as helping keep the show ad-free. Recent bonus topics include an AMA with a lexicographer and our favourite stories and anecdotes that we just didn’t have time for in some of the earlier episodes. Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you could recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone who needs a little more linguistics in their life. And, hey, tell your other favourite podcasts that they could a linguistics episode, and get us on! It’d be fun.

Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, and our music is “Ancient City” by The Triangles.

Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic!

[Music]

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

[popculturebuffet]

Goof Week: Sports Goofy in SoccerMania: GoofTales Woo-oo! (Paid For for WeirdKev27)

Gorsh all you happy people and welcome back to Goof Week, my Weeklong Celebration of everyone’s favorite goofus. 

And today we have a special treat, something nice and obscure but something that still has a vital place in Disney History. Welcome folks to Sports Goof in Soccermania!  

So yesterday in my Goof Troop review I wished there had been another DuckTales episode with Goofy, you know maybe find out what happened to Peg, see Max and Roxanne again that sort of thing.  Whelp SOMEONE must’ve hid a Monkey’s Paw around here somewhere because I got this special instead on comision. This is a VERY intresting little artifact as it came out only 4 months before DuckTales, was produced around the same time, and was written by Tad Stones, who would both go on to work on DuckTales and even more importantly create Darkwing Duck. 

Not only that but it has some odd things attached to it: it’s the first major production starting Scrooge, as he had an educational short about him, the first animated appearance of the Beagle Boys and most important the FIRST time Russi Taylor would voice Huey, Dewey and Louie, something she’d do till her passing a few years ago. At the time of this article she has not been recast, though I personally vote for Cristina Valenzuela, who took over the role of Young Donald and frankly does such a good job with that voice I didn’t know if Russi had already recorded lines for Season 3 before her passing. 

So what IS Sports Goofy in Soccermania you ask? It was a TV Special from 1987, again four months before DuckTales, that was later sold on VHS. My guess is Disney intended for this to become a regular thing like the Charlie Brown or Garfield specials, but my honest guess is with DuckTales MASSIVE success they wanted to put all the TV Animation resources into making more shows to go with it. The fact the special is essentailly a Scrooge story with Goofy in it and Scrooge and the Boys were now tied up in DuckTales probably helped the decision. So we only got one of these and i’m proud to share it for Goof Week. So join me under the cut to see what a Sports Goof is, what Scrooge sounds like without Alan Young or David Tennant andto see me refrence the film UHF because I likes it. 

 So we open with the titles which are neat and then open at the Money bin, we even get a great sign gag that looks like something Carl Barks would write.

So Scrooge greets his nephews the way he greets everybody.. with a canon to the face... though he backs of firing once he realizes it’s them. The boys ALL wear red this special so .. I guess Huey won and now rules all three bodies with an iron fist? So the Huey Hive Mind asks Scrooge for a donation, a standard Scrooge setup, ask the rich asshole for money, as their trying to help the local soccer program and they need a buck fiddy for a trophy. 

Scrooge’s voice here.. is terrible. I do not like to bash voice actors, they are hard working talented people who do a lot of great stuff, often for less pay than they deserve, and this blog ALWAYS makes that painfully clear. And Will Ryan is not without talent: While he hasn’t done much i’m familiar with he did play Petrie in Land Before Time and was great in it. So while I don’t dislike him as a person.. he did an utterly DREADFUL Scrooge. He dosen’t really attempt to do a scottish accent despite the character still saying cannae at one point, and as for what accent he is going for...

His Scrooge just sounds like someone trying to do a “foreign” accent and failing. It just sounds weird and makes every bit of his dialouge aside from one a chore to sit through. And the dialouge isn’t bad dialouge, it’s a well written and animated Scrooge even with the lower budget than Ducktales, but the voice just ruins it for me. Even without Young and Tennant to compare it to this just blows and the fact it’s paired up with the iconic Russi Taylor voice for the triplets.

This being Scrooge he instead fishes a Trophy out of the bin that’s all banged up and dinky and shoos them out. So in natural Barksian fashion the trophy turns out to be worth a million dollars. So we get some reaction shots.. INCLUDING GRANDMA DUCK!

For DuckTales fans joining us who have ZERO idea who that is, since she sadly did not make it into the reboot and Frank did have ideas, Grandma Duck is Donald, Della and Gladstone’s grandma. She’s a sweet old country woman who lives on a farm and is in fact the one who sold him Kilmotor HIll, with her husband renaming it from Killmule hill. I like her a lot since she reminds me of my own grandma and like her she still works when she can. Donald’s cousin Gus loafs around and eats as her farmhand. As you can tell I like her a lot, agani because she reminds me of one of my grandmas so this was nice even if she was only around for 20 seconds of screentime. 

This ends up in the paper and sends Scrooge through the roof, literally when he finds out. 

Two notes  before we move on: The bin has a unique really cool design , though I get why other productions haven’t used it: besides this one’s obscurity while cool it just looks a bit TOO nice for Scrooge. Even in 2017 while still damn cool looking it still looks practicle. This .. is not that.

This looks like MC Hammer built this. It still looks awesome bu tit’s just not Scrooge sadly. 

The other is that his Butler is named Jeeves here, but looks almost exactly like Duckworth. Just feels weird is all. 

Naturally the Beagle Boys happen upon the paper too and their leader, no name given has a plan: Enter legitmately and win the cup all legal like, which dosen’t sound like it lives up to the beagle code of no hones twork.... until he brings up theri going ot cheat their asses off. 

Meanwhile Scrooge tries bribing the boys with a giant trophy at their house... with Donald oddly absent despite Anselmo having taken over for Nash by this point. I know he was still a bit rough at the roll, but come on. It’s just.. weird especailly for reasons i’ll get into soon. 

So Scrooge agrees to sponsor the boys teams so he can get the trophy back square, and is forced to buy a knew ball and here we FINALLY get Goofy. I say finally because this special is 20 mintues long and it takes almost a fourth of it for him to arrive. It’s just weird for him to not be in it for so long. I mean I don’t want THIS

Flashbeagle didn’t take a fourth of the special to get to Flashbeagle. It did take longer than that to get to the title track but when your sitting on THIS

You gotta use it JUST right. Goofy here is not played by Bill Farmer, which IS odd as he did start playing him that year, but my guess is they weren’t sure if they were going with Farmer or the actor who played him in this special, Tony Pope, so they were trying out both as whoever DID get the role would have it for life. Disney takes the casting of the sensational 7 VERY seriously, as evidenced by the fact most cast changes are caused by death and unlike with Tony and Donald it’s clear Colvig hadn’t picked a succesor. I can also see why it’s a hard choice: while farmer IS excellent and was the right man for the job, Pope is still excellent in the role, bringing the warmth and energy you’d expect from Goofy and having excellent comedic timing that’s vital to getting the dog man right. I can see why this was such a hard choice, even if I also see they went with Farmer: Farmer just has slightly more energy to the roll. It’s a small diffrence and something that dosen’t effect the special, but it is a KEY diffrence and the reason Bill’s THE goofy to me even over his original voice actor Pinto Colvig. 

Also I may of mispoke there... see it’s not Goofy in this special it’s SPORTS Goofy. No really every bit of dialogue refers to him as Sports Goofy. It’d be like if they refered to then CEO Micheal Eisner as Won’t Think Through Eurodisneyland Micheal Eisner. 

So Sports Goofy helps them get a ball in an honestly awesome way and shows despite his clumsy manner, he’s damn cordinated, easily putting everything up and showing some real skill with the ball. So Moneygrubbing Scrooge decides Sports Goofy is his ticket to get the trophy back and recuits goofy as coach and star player for the boys team. 

So Asshole Scrooge meets his team the Greenbacks.. which are a bunch of random animal characters with no real personality. They are a hippo, a goat, expresso the ostrich, a navy (blue) seal,  an elephant in a beanie, a killaroo and a cheetah or leopard. But I have one question, really simple really easy one...

You need 11 players for a soccer team, thank you google. So they DID get that accurate. With Goofy and the Triplets you only need 7 more. THIS is why Donald’s absence is glaring: he’s just oddly not there when they needed 7 other characters but Elephant in a Beanie gets in there. And it’s not hard ot fill either: Donald , Daisy (Because duh), Gyro and Grandma Duck (Because both cameoed but I only mentioned Grandma Duck, though this is ALSO Gyro’s first apperance), Gladstone (who as it turns out had a cameo storyboarded that didn’t make it into the final product), Gus (Since grandma duck) and Scrooge’s butler since he was in an earlier scene anyway so why waste the character model. They could still play the same roll as easily steamrolled underdogs and it’d make more sense.  It just baffles me that with such a deep bench to play from, they don’t use ANY OF IT in favor of the cast of Animal Soccer World.

The Greenbacks can’t play for greenjack, which worries Scrooge.. but Goofy is able to carry them to the finals, while the Beagle Boys make their way there too. We find this out.. via newspaper transition. We get a bunch of headlines telling us what happened instead of you know a montage because that costs money and they already spent 1.50 making this special.. they only have 50 cents left. 

So the Beagles recognizing Sport Goofy is the only thing in their way plots a kidnappin. We get a gut busting scene of the beagles all hiding in Sports Goofy’s house with him being oblvious only to spring on him. 

The next day with Sports Goofy a no show the team is bummed, even mor ewhen they find a kidnapping note from Don’tGetNotToLeaveEvidence Beagle Boys. Seriously give that to the officals. 

So Asshole Scrooge tries to give a rousing speech... and it is a sight to behold and the one highlight of pope as scrooge... it’s why I picked it as the article image. That glitching isn’t me by the way: it REALLY does that. Coupled with the yellow eyes i’ts just fantastic. So the team decides to morosely play the game and Hivemind Huey boos scrooge for not having faith in him. Instead of again you know telling the officials. Maybe assimilating the other made Huey dumber. I

So the game begins and the Cheating Beagles cream the Give Up To Easily Green Backs, while Sports Goofy watches from the other Crime Beagles hideout. It honestly reminds me of UHF: a dumb well meaning guy whose vital to something succeding is kidnapped.. it dosen’t involve Weird Al dressing up as rambo but still. It also makes me want UHF but with the disney cast. Fethry as weird al, Donald as his best friend, Fethry’s girlfriend for the comcis as weird al’s girlfriend, Gyro as philo, Goofy as Stanley, and Pete of course is Stacey Keach. I could go on but you get the point. Someone draw this.  Sport Goofy is a clever bastard and escapes by working one of his shoes off, taking a nearbye knife and cutting himself free.. and almost stabbing a beagle boy in the face but that would just make two. Sport Goofy escapes and the lunkheaded beagle boys chase after him IN THEIR CAR WHILE GOOFY RUNS AHEAD OF IT.  Goofy, he can really move! Goofy, he’s got attitude! Goofy HE’S THE FASTEST THING ALLIIIIVEEEEEE. Sport Goofy makes it in time fo rhalf time, rallies the troops and it goes how you’d expect: They overcome the beagles blatant cheating, win the cup, the beagles attempt to cheat with a rigged ball backfires and they all get arrested. It’s by the numbers stuff. We end with Scrooge deciding to dontate the trophy instead (though in a great bit asking if it was tax deductible), and posing for a team shot> We get some awesome credits music and we’re out

Final Thoughts:

This special is mediocre: There are only a handful of great jokes, it’s your standard “teamwork makes the dreamwork plot” that dosen’t work because our underdogs really CAN’T play without their star, and Scrooge’s voice hurts to listen to. Pope and Taylor are great and while Will Ryan is an awful Scrooge, he is a good Beagle Boy or five. 

It IS worth a watch though. It’s riffable enough with the sometimes sloppy unfinished animatoin in the last part and Scrooge’s terrible voice, and it is still is a neat oddity for 90′s kids like myself to not only see Russi’s first thing as Huey Dewey and Louie, but to also see Scrooge and Goofy with vastly diffrent voice actors, as well as Gyro and the Beagle Boys first animated apperances. The fact this came just months before Ducktales makes it all the more intresting. So if your looking for a legit good Disney product.. this is shoddy at best if well meaning. But as a bit of disney history, especially only clocking in at 20 minutes so it’ sa brisk watch, it’s worth a look if your into that. 

Next On Goof Week: We come on in To The House of Mouse where goofy becomes faster than a speeding punchline,  more powerful than pete when his family has to wrestle him to the ground to take him to the doctor and able to make tall leaps of logic in a single bound. it’s SUPER GOOF!

So thank you for reading and if you liked this review give it a like and consider joining my patreon at patreon.com/popculturebuffet. As a patron you’d get access to exclusive reviews, the patreon’s discord and to pick a short each time I do one of these shortstaculars. Donald’s comnig next month and the deadline is in only a few days to join up for said month so the clock is ticking. Even a dollar a month helps me reach my stretch goals so please i fyou can sign up today and if not, I understand and i’ll see you at the next rainbow

[princesspiratecat]

The Rise and Fall of the Shepard Family Finale Part 1:  Fall 1085 

Part 1& Part 2

Part 3 & Part 4

Part 5 & Part 6 & Part 7

Part 8 & Part 9 & Part 10

Part 11 & Part 12 & Part 13

Part 14 & Part 15 & Part 16

Part 17 & Part 18 & Part 19

Part 20 & Part 21 & Part 22

Part 23 & Part 24 & Part 25

Part 26 & Part 27 & Part 28 

Part 29 

It was a difficult year for the Allard siblings, bittersweet and disappointing. Although Frances had inherited the estate, he learned there was very little else left to keep it running, and even that money would soon run out. His brothers had been left only paltry sums in which to begin their own lives, and his sister Francine had only a small dowry settled upon her- far less than what Frédérique had gotten.

Marcelle had left absolutely nothing for Edyth, or his child with Edyth, Agnes. He had only bothered to write out instructions that she was to be educated alongside her half-siblings. Frances had been shocked at his carelessness and knew that he would need to settle something upon her at some point. Luckily, she was still quite young, so he had time to save.

Marcelle had invested far too much and had bought up additional lands without telling anyone of it, or even what he had planned to do with so much land. In fact, they now owned a vast swath of land outside of Grimsby, all the way up the coast and inland too. There was even a large, stately house about a mile away that had been left unfinished, in addition to the infamous hovel that Gwendolyn had lived in.

She had been painfully right about the hovel, it had been meant for her and her sisters.

Shameful. 

Their own home itself had been neglected for quite a few years now, and some of the outer buildings were in a sad state of disrepair. Frances had had an idea that his father had been lax about everything, but he hadn’t known it was as bad as all this. 

He immediately began to feel the burden of running an estate, and at times it overwhelmed him. He was ashamed that his wife often found him in moments of despair, as he had not wanted to show his weakness and inexperience to anyone. He was not the man his father was, and he blamed himself for that, without exploring why that might be. He felt incredibly guilty that he had been given so much, and his siblings so little.

At night, he came to his bride in their bed the first chance he got. Sometimes he said nothing and simply began caressing her body and undressing her. He let her know by the way he kissed her exactly what he needed from her without using words. She almost always obliged him, and he knew that she often expected he would come to her.

The longing to feel her arms around him, to be inside of her, and to connect with her on a tangible level simply overpowered him most days. He made a point of causing her to cry out in pleasure each night. He wanted to feel something else besides his own grief and emptiness for even just a moment. She reminded him that he was still alive and made him forget it all, until a new day dawned.

Other nights he simply laid down, wrapped his arms around her and was still. She stroked his head and held his hands in hers. The effort of speaking was needless. She knew what he wanted, as it had been just the same with her all those years ago. Only now, their roles were reversed, and she was the one to console him. 

But tonight, he wanted to talk. He needed to confess.  

“I am a weak man, Gwendolyn. I’m afraid you have married a very weak, inept man.”

“You are not a weak man. You simply have not allowed yourself the time needed to heal your own heart. Give yourself the freedom to grieve without placing too much burden upon yourself.”

“But I cannot leave it all unattended. My father has done that for too long.”

“I will run the estate as your mother taught me. She taught me far better than your father taught you. If you are not up to the tasks that come with maintaining a large estate, he is to blame for not preparing you. It is my home now just as much as it is yours. I will carry the burden for you until you are ready to do so yourself.” 

As soon as she said it, he knew she spoke the truth and he felt a huge sense of easement. She was perfectly skilled and capable of doing everything that needed to be done, and now she was Mistress. It was time for him to step aside and let her take control as she was meant to. 

“You must look after your family now,” she said gently. “They need you, just as much as you need me.”

She was right in that as well. His younger siblings had been neglected by their father and alienated by Edyth. They were often alone and had been made to feel like strangers in their own home. So he started to remedy that by arranging for them all to visit their sister at Barton, where they would take a much needed fishing trip together. He would try to be the big brother they needed him to be- especially Fabien.

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

The first thing Gwendolyn did after they left was to clean house, both literally and figurately, and Edyth would be the first to feel the change. 

She used what little money they had to hire workers from the Boarding House to finish the smaller house, which she named Cherry Hill. Then she banished Edith and Agnes to it. It had been a rather ugly shouting match because Edyth insisted she had a right to live at the main house, but Gwendolyn was having none of it. 

“If you wanted to stay you should not have made everyone here your enemy. This is my house now, and you will leave. Go!”

Had she been privy to the role Edyth had had to play in her own exile, or that Agnes was not Marcelle’s child, things would not have turned out the way they did. But for the sake of Agnes, Gwendolyn tread as lightly as she could while still asserting her authority. They would be very comfortable at Cherry Hill, far more comfortable than Edyth deserved to be.

After they were gone there was still much to be done, and part of a thorough  cleaning meant organizing and going through all of the belongings of Marcelle’s in the Lord’s bedroom. She wanted things in order, as it would now be their bedroom, and she hated the memory she had of it when she had last seen him alive.

After a few days Gwendolyn had nearly everything in order, but there was one large wooden box that had been hidden away under the bed a servant had found while cleaning. It looked vaguely mysterious, and she had hoped that it would contain a large stash of jewelry or treasure. 

No such luck. Inside, there were multiple letters dated from the year 1063, just a few years before the bastard King William had invaded England. It was written on very expensive parchment paper in Latin. Gwendolyn had never seen such paper. In fact, paper was a rarity outside of the church. Her father could not read and even if he could, paper had been way beyond his means. 

Gwendolyn had been taught Latin by Aélgarda, but still struggled with it. As far as she could tell, it had something to do with...time...a journey.... and love? Perhaps brushing up on her Latin was in order when she had some time to herself. Frances would be back in a matter of days, and he was excellent with Latin and would be able to translate the letters quickly. 

Until then, she turned her eye to more domestic matters, and arranged for the purchase of additional horses for breeding. Horses were an expensive luxury in these parts because they had to be shipped from afar to the River Trader. Gwendolyn had an idea of breeding horses and selling them, which would fetch a nice price in the long term. She also purchased additional fruit trees and began work on having the pasture enlarged. The more improvements she could make, the more income the estate would bring in come harvest time. 

As soon as Frances got back she gave him the letters and had him translate them. The first one was written as such: 

My Dearest Love, 

I was so happy to see you again at our feast last night. These stolen moments we have together are so precious to me, you cannot know how much I look forward to them. I know you are going away on the morrow, and I pray that you will come back to me safely. I hope my love and this letter will warm you from afar. With all my Love, Aélgarda

At first, they both assumed that the letters had been written to Marcelle, and Gwendolyn thought about the softer, sentimental side of him. He must have really loved his wife, despite all the things he had recently said about her. But as Frances read the other letters, they realized they were not to Marcelle at all, but to a young solider that had served Aélgarda’s father dutifully. The more he read, the more they pieced together that he was a young and handsome Welshman, and eventually came to the conclusion that his name had been... Llywelyn. 

 To Be Continued in Part 2! 

[mimzy-writing-online]

Hi! I just wanted to say thank you for writing the 'How to Write a Blind or Visually Impared Person'. I myself am not Blind or Visually Impared and i am in the process of writing the basis for such a character and your guide really helps. (And will help as well as be shared to those I know whom also need to see this.) I do have one question though: What about writing people blind from birth?

So, with writing characters who are blind from birth, it’s important to remember that there are both real people who have been completely blind from birth and people who have been legally blind or VI from birth. So, with blindness from birth, it doesn’t necessarily have to be no sight at all. It’s also important to note how small a minority that is in the blind community. 

Statistics

2.4% of Americans are living with visual disabilities. (Total (all ages): 7,675,600)

0.8% of school age Americans (ages 4-20) are living with a visual disability. ( Total: 706,400). This accounts for 9.2% of the entire blind community in the country.

90% of the entire blind community world wide has some remaining vision. People who are completely blind are a small minority.

Source: National Federation of the Blind

Molly Burke and her boyfriend Adrian (this post was written in 10/20/2020) are both people who have been legally blind from birth or a very young age (I can’t remember exactly when Adrian said he went blind, but it’s been his entire memorable life, though he still has remaining vision).

Most children are not diagnosed right away at birth. It heavily depends on the eye condition in question. Unless you had an easily observable symptom, such as nystagmus or pupils which don’t react to light or lazy eye, doctors and parents are unlikely to notice right away.

Most blind children don’t realize they’re blind until they’re a bit older and have developed enough communication skills to recognize that the visual experiences their family describes don’t match their visual experiences. Slowly small moments and situations begin to pop up where you realize there’s something everyone else seems able to do easily that you’re struggling with.

Particularly severe vision issues will be noticed by parents sooner than more subtle ones. The more usable sight a child has and the fewer visually observable symptoms they have, the longer they’re going to fly under the radar until the adults in their life realize something is different. Even then, it might not be until the child is able to communicate an inability to see what they’re describing that parents might realize something is wrong.

More severe vision issues will be picked up sooner. Parents realizing their children doesn’t respond to peek-a-boo or their eyes don’t follow moving items but sound will get their attention.

At this point in life, the economic situation of the child’s family will have a huge impact on how they grow up.

Families living below the poverty line or living in countries (America) where health care is expensive and treated as a privilege rather than a necessity and human right, or simply isn’t available at all, will have a much harder time getting their child diagnosed or treated.

Those families likely won’t have the education or knowledge needed to realize what is wrong and how they can help their child. Like health care, knowledge/education is treated like a privilege instead of a necessity and human right.

The education their children have access to will likely be lacking as well. Poorer communities have less funding for their students than wealthy communities. Those schools will have an even more restricted budget for accessible education, meaning they might not be able to pay the wages of a teacher’s aide to work one-on-one with that child in class, or have access to magnifiers and braille books/typewriters/education. Even though by legal law they must provide accommodations for disabled students, it doesn’t mean they will, and a financially disadvantaged family won’t have the resources to fight the school for their child’s rights (or even be aware of their child’s rights in the first place).

Children from middle class or wealthy families will (like all children in their community) have a huge advantage over their peers who attend schools with fewer resources. However, those blind children still have a disadvantage with their own peers.

Again, a school might refuse accommodations because administration can be jerks like that. It happens all the time. Parents may have to fight for their child’s rights to equal education through an aide, accessible school materials, and blind-friendly education.

Molly Burke made a video recently talking about her experiences with education as a blind child.

Learning Braille is a huge step in helping blind children, but it’s becoming less popular as audiobooks become more available. Audiobooks are amazing, and that method of reading is just as valid as any other, however a child reading solely with audiobooks will lose the literacy benefits. Like any writing system, Braille teaches spelling and grammatical rules necessary for educational and professional writing. While Braille is a writing system unique to itself, it still lives within the confines of whatever the native speaking language of the child is. Braille in English still uses the same spelling and grammatical function English uses. Braille in Spanish still bends to the rules of Spanish.

This is very different from different sign languages which can have grammar and syntax rules that completely differ from the native language of that country. Which is why you have languages called American Sign Language and British Sign Language and Canadian Sign Language that are using in English speaking countries but function very differently from both English and their fellow Sign counterparts. I’ve heard it said that ASL is more similar to the grammar structure of Chinese than it is to English, which gives the Deaf community a literacy disadvantage of their own when their native language and their reading/writing language are completely different languages.

Though there is a secondary system of Braille which uses shortened abbreviations. That is Grade 2 Braille, and it is learned after Grade 1.

This is Molly Burke’s video on Braille, which includes the history of Braille, how she personally learned it in school, and showing what a Braille Typewriter is and how it is used. 

I highly recommend it because Braille is something I only know from research and theory, not from personal experience.

Children who don’t learn Braille are statistically less likely to receive higher education and more likely to live below the poverty line.

Though blind adults are at a huge disadvantage in the work force with 80% of blind adults being unemployed but not by choice. Even though they have the same qualifications as other applicants, employers will almost always choose a sighted applicant over them, even if the sighted applicant is less qualified.

As adults, people who were born blind are just as affected by their upbringing, education, and family life as sighted adults are. The first eighteen years of their life shaped who they are as a person, so like any other character, you must consider what your character’s childhood must have been like for them to become the person they are now.

Once they reach adulthood, there isn’t much difference between people who were born blind or became blind early in life, compared to people who went blind as adults. But there are a few:

- Adults who were blind or became blind during their education are more likely to learn Braille than adults who went blind later in life.

-They are more likely to have O&M training. Though, only 10% of the blind community has a cane or guide dog, while the rest rely on remaining vision and sighted guides.

-O&M abilities (beyond mobility guides, there’s also learning how to use your remaining vision, your hearing and touch, and other senses to navigate without a cane/guide dog) are generally much better the longer you’ve been blind.

-Adults who have been living with blindness all their lives are more likely to be comfortable with their disability than newly blind adults, but that is not necessarily a rule. There is more confidence in living x-many years blind and knowing how to live your regular life without new major adjustments. 

-The fewer memories a person has of vision, the fewer visual things they are likely to miss. You can’t miss something you’ve never experienced or don’t remember. Doesn’t mean someone won’t wish they knew what stars and fireworks and the ocean looks like, but it won’t be as big a focus as it is for someone who went blind recently.

-People dream with whatever experiences they are living with now, meaning blind people dream with whatever their current vision is. Someone who has never seen or no longer retains any memories of sight will not have dreams with visuals.

(Note, memories of sight are something that fades with time, no matter when you went blind in life. After about 7 years of not seeing a particular image, you’re likely to have forgotten what that thing actually looked like, including color and other general vision things)

That is what I have for you. I’m going to link this to my masterpost so that it’s easily accessible for everyone and if you want to come back to it, you will be able to easily find it.

[thistleandthorn-rpg]

Congrats Kate on your new character, Jade McCoy! Please send us her blog within 48 hours!

OOC INFORMATION:

Name/Alias: Kate Preferred pronoun: She/Her Age: 44. ( That sound you hear is my bones creaking) Timezone/Country: EST RP Experience: 10+ years Activity Level: Good Monday-Thursday, none-not much Friday-Sunday cuz of work

IC INFORMATION:

Name: Jade McCoy Designation: Dom Age: 21 Birthdate: May 1st 2003 Faceclaim: Ella Balinska Orientation: Pansexual Kinks: TPE, Toys, Spanking, Exhibitionism, and many more….. Anti-Kinks: Scat, Vore, Gore, Vomit, smelly feet and armpits, pain for no scene reason

Key Points: 

Jade was always more interested in sports or playing with her computer than her musically inclined sister.

Graduating early, Jade attended MIT and graduated with a degree in Computer Science, minoring in Electrical and Electronics Engineering.

Jade’s father is a musician and her mother is an attorney who once was mayor

Jade is a bit nosy and tends to poke around in things that can piss people off if she isn’t occupied with other things

  BIO:

Jade McCoy knew from an early age that her life wasn’t hard when compared to what endured.  Her father was never around much as he was on the road as a jazz musician , but her mother was a present and attentive parent despite her own demanding career.  They had a lovely home, food on the table and mom’s sub to help care for them, so…not a bad life.  Though not the most social, Jade had friends on her various athletics teams and computer club and despite their differences she loved her siblings.  Early admission to MIT had once seemed the cherry on top, but as a teen she had no idea the adventure that education would lead to.

School had always come easy to Jade and though MIT was far more challenging, she thrived.  Her classmates were as driven and focused as she was and friendly competition abounded.  During her sophomore year studying Computer Sciences, she developed a security system that she sold for an almost obscene sum.  Having that kind of disposable income, she discovered a fondness for domination at some of the clubs she and her friends visited to blow off steam.  From the first time a boy left her company, happy but a bit dazed, she had discovered her new passion in life.  She continued through school, but spent more time honing her skills as a Sexual Dominant and indulging her urges. By the time she graduated, at age 20, she was a millionaire many times over.  As a lovely young woman, she is often underestimated in the boys club that is tech, no one thinking she could be a ruthless business person as well as the brains behind her growing tech empire. 

Secure in the knowledge that she could continue her work anywhere, Jade decided it was time to attend an institute and officially receive her mark.  Going back to Lima….no, Riverdale was a no brained and she was delighted to receive her expected Dominant mark once admitted to Stonewall.

BIO QUESTIONS:

What are your feelings about the mark you have received?  - Honestly I expected nothing less.  I’ve never been one to be submissive to anyone.

How do your feelings on the system compare to your parents’ feelings on it? - My parents raised me to believe in the system and I do.  I do think that they had some conflict, both being dominants though.  They loved each other, but then they’d clash, both looking to hold the power in the relationship and neither willing to compromise.  I think, for myself, I would not look to marry a fellow dominant, though I do look forward to having a successful claim.  My parents had far less strife with their individual subs than each other.

Where do you see yourself after you graduate?   - I’m going to continue writing code and programming, perhaps independently, perhaps for a larger company.  I want to have a couple of steady claims though, I can support us after selling the software I have so far.

How do you feel about authority? - I have no problem with it as long as the person with the power isn’t a complete dumbass.

[hldailyupdate]

Playtime With Harry Styles

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy, setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboard charts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicks album cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness, is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles cuts a cool figure in this black-white-and-red-all-over checked coat by JW Anderson.

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

There are references aplenty in this look by Harris Reed, which features a Victoriana crinoline, 1980s shoulders, and pants of zoot-suit proportions.

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”

[hlupdate]

THE MEN’S BATHING POND in London’s Hampstead Heath at daybreak on a gloomy September morning seemed such an unlikely locale for my first meeting with Harry Styles, music’s legendarily charm-heavy style czar, that I wondered perhaps if something had been lost in translation.

But then there is Styles, cheerily gung ho, hidden behind a festive yellow bandana mask and a sweatshirt of his own design, surprisingly printed with three portraits of his intellectual pinup, the author Alain de Botton. “I love his writing,” says Styles. “I just think he’s brilliant. I saw him give a talk about the keys to happiness, and how one of the keys is living among friends, and how real friendship stems from being vulnerable with someone.”

In turn, de Botton’s 2016 novel The Course of Love taught Styles that “when it comes to relationships, you just expect yourself to be good at it…[but] being in a real relationship with someone is a skill,” one that Styles himself has often had to hone in the unforgiving klieg light of public attention, and in the company of such high-profile paramours as Taylor Swift and—well, Styles is too much of a gentleman to name names.

That sweatshirt and the Columbia Records tracksuit bottoms are removed in the quaint wooden open-air changing room, with its Swallows and Amazons vibe. A handful of intrepid fellow patrons in various states of undress are blissfully unaware of the 26-year-old supernova in their midst, although I must admit I’m finding it rather difficult to take my eyes off him, try as I might. Styles has been on a six-day juice cleanse in readiness for Vogue’s photographer Tyler Mitchell. He practices Pilates (“I’ve got very tight hamstrings—trying to get those open”) and meditates twice a day. “It has changed my life,” he avers, “but it’s so subtle. It’s helped me just be more present. I feel like I’m able to enjoy the things that are happening right in front of me, even if it’s food or it’s coffee or it’s being with a friend—or a swim in a really cold pond!” Styles also feels that his meditation practices have helped him through the tumult of 2020: “Meditation just brings a stillness that has been really beneficial, I think, for my mental health.”

Styles has been a pescatarian for three years, inspired by the vegan food that several members of his current band prepared on tour. “My body definitely feels better for it,” he says. His shapely torso is prettily inscribed with the tattoos of a Victorian sailor—a rose, a galleon, a mermaid, an anchor, and a palm tree among them, and, straddling his clavicle, the dates 1967 and 1957 (the respective birth years of his mother and father). Frankly, I rather wish I’d packed a beach muumuu.

We take the piratical gangplank that juts into the water and dive in. Let me tell you, this is not the Aegean. The glacial water is a cloudy phlegm green beneath the surface, and clammy reeds slap one’s ankles. Styles, who admits he will try any fad, has recently had a couple of cryotherapy sessions and is evidently less susceptible to the cold. By the time we have swum a full circuit, however, body temperatures have adjusted, and the ice, you might say, has been broken. Duly invigorated, we are ready to face the day. Styles has thoughtfully brought a canister of coffee and some bottles of water in his backpack, and we sit at either end of a park bench for a socially distanced chat.

It seems that he has had a productive year. At the onset of lockdown, Styles found himself in his second home, in the canyons of Los Angeles. After a few days on his own, however, he moved in with a pod of three friends (and subsequently with two band members, Mitch Rowland and Sarah Jones). They “would put names in a hat and plan the week out,” Styles explains. “If you were Monday, you would choose the movie, dinner, and the activity for that day. I like to make soups, and there was a big array of movies; we went all over the board,” from Goodfellas to Clueless. The experience, says Styles, “has been a really good lesson in what makes me happy now. It’s such a good example of living in the moment. I honestly just like being around my friends,” he adds. “That’s been my biggest takeaway. Just being on my own the whole time, I would have been miserable.”

Styles is big on friendship groups and considers his former and legendarily hysteria-inducing boy band, One Direction, to have been one of them. “I think the typical thing is to come out of a band like that and almost feel like you have to apologize for being in it,” says Styles. “But I loved my time in it. It was all new to me, and I was trying to learn as much as I could. I wanted to soak it in…. I think that’s probably why I like traveling now—soaking stuff up.” In a post-COVID future, he is contemplating a temporary move to Tokyo, explaining that “there’s a respect and a stillness, a quietness that I really loved every time I’ve been there.”

In 1D, Styles was making music whenever he could. “After a show you’d go in a hotel room and put down some vocals,” he recalls. As a result, his first solo album, 2017’s Harry Styles, “was when I really fell in love with being in the studio,” he says. “I loved it as much as touring.” Today he favors isolating with his core group of collaborators, “our little bubble”—Rowland, Kid Harpoon (né Tom Hull), and Tyler Johnson. “A safe space,” as he describes it.

In the music he has been working on in 2020, Styles wants to capture the experimental spirit that informed his second album, last year’s Fine Line. With his debut album, “I was very much finding out what my sound was as a solo artist,” he says. “I can see all the places where it almost felt like I was bowling with the bumpers up. I think with the second album I let go of the fear of getting it wrong and…it was really joyous and really free. I think with music it’s so important to evolve—and that extends to clothes and videos and all that stuff. That’s why you look back at David Bowie with Ziggy Stardust or the Beatles and their different eras—that fearlessness is super inspiring.”

The seismic changes of 2020—including the Black Lives Matter uprising around racial justice—has also provided Styles with an opportunity for personal growth. “I think it’s a time for opening up and learning and listening,” he says. “I’ve been trying to read and educate myself so that in 20 years I’m still doing the right things and taking the right steps. I believe in karma, and I think it’s just a time right now where we could use a little more kindness and empathy and patience with people, be a little more prepared to listen and grow.”

Meanwhile, Styles’s euphoric single “Watermelon Sugar” became something of an escapist anthem for this dystopian summer of 2020. The video, featuring Styles (dressed in ’70s-­flavored Gucci and Bode) cavorting with a pack of beach-babe girls and boys, was shot in January, before lockdown rules came into play. By the time it was ready to be released in May, a poignant epigraph had been added: “This video is dedicated to touching.”

Styles is looking forward to touring again, when “it’s safe for everyone,” because, as he notes, “being up against people is part of the whole thing. You can’t really re-create it in any way.” But it hasn’t always been so. Early in his career, Styles was so stricken with stage fright that he regularly threw up preperformance. “I just always thought I was going to mess up or something,” he remembers. “But I’ve felt really lucky to have a group of incredibly generous fans. They’re generous emotionally—and when they come to the show, they give so much that it creates this atmosphere that I’ve always found so loving and accepting.”

THIS SUMMER, when it was safe enough to travel, Styles returned to his London home, which is where he suggests we head now, setting off in his modish Primrose Yellow ’73 Jaguar that smells of gasoline and leatherette. “Me and my dad have always bonded over cars,” Styles explains. “I never thought I’d be someone who just went out for a leisurely drive, purely for enjoyment.” On sleepless jet-lagged nights he’ll drive through London’s quiet streets, seeing neighborhoods in a new way. “I find it quite relaxing,” he says.

Over the summer Styles took a road trip with his artist friend Tomo Campbell through France and Italy,setting off at four in the morning and spending the night in Geneva, where they jumped in the lake “to wake ourselves up.” (I see a pattern emerging.) At the end of the trip Styles drove home alone, accompanied by an upbeat playlist that included “Aretha Franklin, Parliament, and a lot of Stevie Wonder. It was really fun for me,” he says. “I don’t travel like that a lot. I’m usually in such a rush, but there was a stillness to it. I love the feeling of nobody knowing where I am, that kind of escape...and freedom.”

GROWING UP in a village in the North of England, Styles thought of London as a world apart: “It truly felt like a different country.” At a wide-eyed 16, he came down to the teeming metropolis after his mother entered him on the U.K. talent-search show The X Factor. “I went to the audition to find out if I could sing,” Styles recalls, “or if my mum was just being nice to me.” Styles was eliminated but subsequently brought back with other contestants—Niall Horan, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, and Zayn Malik—to form a boy band that was named (on Styles’s suggestion) One Direction. The wily X Factor creator and judge, Simon Cowell, soon signed them to his label Syco Records, and the rest is history: 1D’s first four albums, supported by four world tours from 2011 to 2015, debuted at number one on the U.S. Billboardcharts, and the band has sold 70 million records to date. At 18, Styles bought the London house he now calls home. “I was going to do two weeks’ work to it,” he remembers, “but when I came back there was no second floor,” so he moved in with adult friends who lived nearby till the renovation was complete. “Eighteen months,” he deadpans. “I’ve always seen that period as pretty pivotal for me, as there’s that moment at the party where it’s getting late, and half of the people would go upstairs to do drugs, and the other people go home. I was like, ‘I don’t really know this friend’s wife, so I’m not going to get all messy and then go home.’ I had to behave a bit, at a time where everything else about my life felt I didn’t have to behave really. I’ve been lucky to always feel I have this family unit somewhere.”

When Styles’s London renovation was finally done, “I went in for the first time and I cried,” he recalls. “Because I just felt like I had somewhere. L.A. feels like holiday, but this feels like home.”

“There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something”

Behind its pink door, Styles’s house has all the trappings of rock stardom—there’s a man cave filled with guitars, a Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks poster (a moving-in gift from his decorator), a Stevie Nicksalbum cover. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” was one of the first songs he knew the words to—“My parents were big fans”—and he and Nicks have formed something of a mutual-admiration society. At the beginning of lockdown, Nicks tweeted to her fans that she was taking inspiration from Fine Line: “Way to go, H,” she wrote. “It is your Rumours.” “She’s always there for you,” said Styles when he inducted Nicks into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2019. “She knows what you need—advice, a little wisdom, a blouse, a shawl; she’s got you covered.”

Styles makes us some tea in the light-filled kitchen and then wanders into the convivial living room, where he strikes an insouciant pose on the chesterfield sofa, upholstered in a turquoise velvet that perhaps not entirely coincidentally sets off his eyes. Styles admits that his lockdown lewk was “sweatpants, constantly,” and he is relishing the opportunity to dress up again. He doesn’t have to wait long: The following day, under the eaves of a Victorian mansion in Notting Hill, I arrive in the middle of fittings for Vogue’s shoot and discover Styles in his Y-fronts, patiently waiting to try on looks for fashion editor Camilla Nickerson and photographer Tyler Mitchell. Styles’s personal stylist, Harry Lambert, wearing a pearl necklace and his nails colored in various shades of green varnish, à la Sally Bowles, is providing helpful backup (Britain’s Rule of Six hasn’t yet been imposed).

Styles, who has thoughtfully brought me a copy of de Botton’s 2006 book The Architecture of Happiness,is instinctively and almost quaintly polite, in an old-fashioned, holding-open-doors and not-mentioning-lovers-by-name sort of way. He is astounded to discover that the Atlanta-born Mitchell has yet to experience a traditional British Sunday roast dinner. Assuring him that “it’s basically like Thanksgiving every Sunday,” Styles gives Mitchell the details of his favorite London restaurants in which to enjoy one. “It’s a good thing to be nice,” Mitchell tells me after a morning in Styles’s company.

MITCHELL has Lionel Wendt’s languorously homoerotic 1930s portraits of young Sri Lankan men on his mood board. Nickerson is thinking of Irving Penn’s legendary fall 1950 Paris haute couture collections sitting, where he photographed midcentury supermodels, including his wife, Lisa Fonssagrives, in high-style Dior and Balenciaga creations. Styles is up for all of it, and so, it would seem, is the menswear landscape of 2020: Jonathan Anderson has produced a trapeze coat anchored with a chunky gold martingale; John Galliano at Maison Margiela has fashioned a khaki trench with a portrait neckline in layers of colored tulle; and Harris Reed—a Saint Martins fashion student sleuthed by Lambert who ended up making some looks for Styles’s last tour—has spent a week making a broad-shouldered Smoking jacket with high-waisted, wide-leg pants that have become a Styles signature since he posed for Tim Walker for the cover of Fine Line wearing a Gucci pair—a silhouette that was repeated in the tour wardrobe. (“I liked the idea of having that uniform,” says Styles.) Reed’s version is worn with a hoopskirt draped in festoons of hot-pink satin that somehow suggests Deborah Kerr asking Yul Brynner’s King of Siam, “Shall we dance?”

Styles introduces me to the writer and eyewear designer Gemma Styles, “my sister from the same womb,” he says. She is also here for the fitting: The siblings plan to surprise their mother with the double portrait on these pages.

I ask her whether her brother had always been interested in clothes.

“My mum loved to dress us up,” she remembers. “I always hated it, and Harry was always quite into it. She did some really elaborate papier-mâché outfits: She made a giant mug and then painted an atlas on it, and that was Harry being ‘The World Cup.’ Harry also had a little dalmatian-dog outfit,” she adds, “a hand-me-down from our closest family friends. He would just spend an inordinate amount of time wearing that outfit. But then Mum dressed me up as Cruella de Vil. She was always looking for any opportunity!”

“As a kid I definitely liked fancy dress,” Styles says. There were school plays, the first of which cast him as Barney, a church mouse. “I was really young, and I wore tights for that,” he recalls. “I remember it was crazy to me that I was wearing a pair of tights. And that was maybe where it all kicked off!”

Acting has also remained a fundamental form of expression for Styles. His sister recalls that even on the eve of his life-changing X Factor audition, Styles could sing in public only in an assumed voice. “He used to do quite a good sort of Elvis warble,” she remembers. During the rehearsals in the family home, “he would sing in the bathroom because if it was him singing as himself, he just couldn’t have anyone looking at him! I love his voice now,” she adds. “I’m so glad that he makes music that I actually enjoy listening to.”

Styles’s role-playing continued soon after 1D went on permanent hiatus in 2016, and he was cast in Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk, beating out dozens of professional actors for the role. “The good part was my character was a young soldier who didn’t really know what he was doing,” says Styles modestly. “The scale of the movie was so big that I was a tiny piece of the puzzle. It was definitely humbling. I just loved being outside of my comfort zone.”

His performance caught the eye of Olivia Wilde, who remembers that it “blew me away—the openness and commitment.” In turn, Styles loved Wilde’s directorial debut, Booksmart, and is “very honored” that she cast him in a leading role for her second feature, a thriller titled Don’t Worry Darling, which went into production this fall. Styles will play the husband to Florence Pugh in what Styles describes as “a 1950s utopia in the California desert.”

Wilde’s movie is costumed by Academy Award nominee Arianne Phillips. “She and I did a little victory dance when we heard that we officially had Harry in the film,” notes Wilde, “because we knew that he has a real appreciation for fashion and style. And this movie is incredibly stylistic. It’s very heightened and opulent, and I’m really grateful that he is so enthusiastic about that element of the process—some actors just don’t care.”

“I like playing dress-up in general,” Styles concurs, in a masterpiece of understatement: This is the man, after all, who cohosted the Met’s 2019 “Notes on Camp” gala attired in a nipple-freeing black organza blouse with a lace jabot, and pants so high-waisted that they cupped his pectorals. The ensemble, accessorized with the pearl-drop earring of a dandified Elizabethan courtier, was created for Styles by Gucci’s Alessandro Michele, whom he befriended in 2014. Styles, who has subsequently personified the brand as the face of the Gucci fragrance, finds Michele “fearless with his work and his imagination. It’s really inspiring to be around someone who works like that.”

The two first met in London over a cappuccino. “It was just a kind of PR appointment,” says Michele, “but something magical happened, and Harry is now a friend. He has the aura of an English rock-and-roll star—like a young Greek god with the attitude of James Dean and a little bit of Mick Jagger—but no one is sweeter. He is the image of a new era, of the way that a man can look.”

Styles credits his style trans­formation—from Jack Wills tracksuit-clad boy-band heartthrob to nonpareil fashionisto—to his meeting the droll young stylist Harry Lambert seven years ago. They hit it off at once and have conspired ever since, enjoying a playfully campy rapport and calling each other Sue and Susan as they parse the niceties of the scarlet lace Gucci man-bra that Michele has made for Vogue’s shoot, for instance, or a pair of Bode pants hand-painted with biographical images (Styles sent Emily Adams Bode images of his family, and a photograph he had found of David Hockney and Joni Mitchell. “The idea of those two being friends, to me, was really beautiful,” Styles explains).

“He just has fun with clothing, and that’s kind of where I’ve got it from,” says Styles of Lambert. “He doesn’t take it too seriously, which means I don’t take it too seriously.” The process has been evolutionary. At his first meeting with Lambert, the stylist proposed “a pair of flares, and I was like, ‘Flares? That’s fucking crazy,’  ” Styles remembers. Now he declares that “you can never be overdressed. There’s no such thing. The people that I looked up to in music—Prince and David Bowie and Elvis and Freddie Mercury and Elton John—they’re such showmen. As a kid it was completely mind-blowing. Now I’ll put on something that feels really flamboyant, and I don’t feel crazy wearing it. I think if you get something that you feel amazing in, it’s like a superhero outfit. Clothes are there to have fun with and experiment with and play with. What’s really exciting is that all of these lines are just kind of crumbling away. When you take away ‘There’s clothes for men and there’s clothes for women,’ once you remove any barriers, obviously you open up the arena in which you can play. I’ll go in shops sometimes, and I just find myself looking at the women’s clothes thinking they’re amazing. It’s like anything—anytime you’re putting barriers up in your own life, you’re just limiting yourself. There’s so much joy to be had in playing with clothes. I’ve never really thought too much about what it means—it just becomes this extended part of creating something.”

“He’s up for it,” confirms Lambert, who earlier this year, for instance, found a JW Anderson cardigan with the look of a Rubik’s Cube (“on sale at matches.com!”). Styles wore it, accessorized with his own pearl necklace, for a Today rehearsal in February and it went viral: His fans were soon knitting their own versions and posting the results on TikTok. Jonathan Anderson declared himself “so impressed and incredibly humbled by this trend” that he nimbly made the pattern available (complete with a YouTube tutorial) so that Styles’s fans could copy it for free. Meanwhile, London’s storied Victoria & Albert Museum has requested Styles’s original: an emblematic document of how people got creative during the COVID era. “It’s going to be in their permanent collection,” says Lambert exultantly. “Is that not sick? Is that not the most epic thing?”

“It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence,” says Olivia Wilde

“To me, he’s very modern,” says Wilde of Styles, “and I hope that this brand of confidence as a male that Harry has—truly devoid of any traces of toxic masculinity—is indicative of his generation and therefore the future of the world. I think he is in many ways championing that, spearheading that. It’s pretty powerful and kind of extraordinary to see someone in his position redefining what it can mean to be a man with confidence.”

“He’s really in touch with his feminine side because it’s something natural,” notes Michele. “And he’s a big inspiration to a younger generation—about how you can be in a totally free playground when you feel comfortable. I think that he’s a revolutionary.”

STYLES’S confidence is on full display the day after the fitting, which finds us all on the beautiful Sussex dales. Over the summit of the hill, with its trees blown horizontal by the fierce winds, lies the English Channel. Even though it’s a two-hour drive from London, the fresh-faced Styles, who went to bed at 9 p.m., has arrived on set early: He is famously early for everything. The team is installed in a traditional flint-stone barn. The giant doors have been replaced by glass and frame a bucolic view of distant grazing sheep. “Look at that field!” says Styles. “How lucky are we? This is our office! Smell the roses!” Lambert starts to sing “Kumbaya, my Lord.”

Hairdresser Malcolm Edwards is setting Styles’s hair in a Victory roll with silver clips, and until it is combed out he resembles Kathryn Grayson with stubble. His fingers are freighted with rings, and “he has a new army of mini purses,” says Lambert, gesturing to an accessory table heaving with examples including a mini sky-blue Gucci Diana bag discreetly monogrammed HS. Michele has also made Styles a dress for the shoot that Tissot might have liked to paint—acres of ice-blue ruffles, black Valenciennes lace, and suivez-moi, jeune homme ribbons. Erelong, Styles is gamely racing up a hill in it, dodging sheep scat, thistles, and shards of chalk, and striking a pose for Mitchell that manages to make ruffles a compelling new masculine proposition, just as Mr. Fish’s frothy white cotton dress—equal parts Romantic poet and Greek presidential guard—did for Mick Jagger when he wore it for The Rolling Stones’ free performance in Hyde Park in 1969, or as the suburban-mom floral housedress did for Kurt Cobain as he defined the iconoclastic grunge aesthetic. Styles is mischievously singing ABBA’s “Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight)” to himself when Mitchell calls him outside to jump up and down on a trampoline in a Comme des Garçons buttoned wool kilt. “How did it look?” asks his sister when he comes in from the cold. “Divine,” says her brother in playful Lambert-speak.

As the wide sky is washed in pink, orange, and gray, like a Turner sunset, and Mitchell calls it a successful day, Styles is playing “Cherry” from Fine Line on his Fender acoustic on the hilltop. “He does his own stunts,” says his sister, laughing. The impromptu set is greeted with applause. “Thank you, Antwerp!” says Styles playfully, bowing to the crowd. “Thank you, fashion!”