#also I just wish there's a better way to watermark things on my phone I hate the bare naked look of the watermark where's the stroke line-

[yuno-karei]

Hatsune Miku? In Mairuma?!?! More likely than you think

[juststarsandthemoon]

I hate premiere pro,

ive been working on this fucking project for half an hour and im already crying, all i had to do is rotate the clips and put them in the right order, but it keeps fucking crashing and none of the tutorials make any sense, my wifi has been dropping in and out of existence for seemingly no reason and i dont know what a project panel is, why am i so fucking useless, why cant i figure this one simple thing out, why do i always feel so fucking useless when i cant do something with premiere fucking pro, im trying to do something fun for my self but of course my fucking technology curse wont allow me, I wish i was better with computers, i wish it came easier to me, i wish i just fucking understood, why are there so many fucking buttons that do literally nothing, why did i drop out, why am i so useless, why am i so fucking useless. i was fine with two needles breaking. but the moment something is out of my control i completly lose it. why why why this isnt fair this isnt fucking fair i want to die. why wont things just go the way i planned, this isnt beneficial to anyone why do you hate me so fucking much.

at least now that ive had my dip i know that nothing major can go wrong for a while. luckily it was just this and not, idk, being rejected from a my dream school. this is alright. Ill figure it out. Ill just get a different software, there will be downsides to that, like there wont be as many tutorials, but if its more intutive than thats probably fine. i dont need all that fancy darken/lighten and different layers or whatever, i just need to rotate my clips, put in the proper order and than do a voiceover, i hope theres something simple like that thats free and doesnt have a watermark

and i found one, its a phone app, but honestly, i dont care anymore, its about making the video, not making a grammy award winning fucking cinematographic masterpiece worthy of an oscar, if i wanna be youtube famous i gotta start somewhere, and i also i promised myself that i didnt do this for fame but for fun. so the moment i started taking quality over enjoyment i should quit. (a rule that i have not been keeping very well) but from now on, hopefully, i will. just easy fun videos. I have a microphone so the sound will be nice. and then when i get famous ill buy a fancy camera and ill hire someone to edit everything and ill never have to hurt my fingies typing every again.

[dandelionflower]

(Some salt fic september)

Francois DuPont was an artistic school. With talented students varying from designers, to journalists, to DJs, to comic artists and writers. The art room of the school was always the busiest, the loudest, and the favorite room of the school.

So it would make sense for the school to have a yearly showcase. It was called a talent show once upon a time, but eventually the staff and students agreed that ‘talent show’ didn’t suit the talents the students were bringing to the table. Thus, the Francois DuPont showcase was born.

Students worked for months on their piece for the showcase. More than fifty percent of the works in the art room were pieces for the showcase.

It wasn’t mandatory by any means, but most students with a talent in the arts would participate. But with almost all the students participating and some having more than one piece to showcase, the show usually lasted a few days.

Lila, of course, didn’t know any of that so when asked if she was participating in the showcase in a few months, she grinned and said “Of course!”

Alya lit up. “Great! It’s going to be my first showcase too, and I want someone who knows what I’m going through. C’mon, we have to sign up.” And she dragged her into the halls.

Sign up? But it’s in three months. Lila shrugged and allowed herself to be pulled to the sign up sheets.

Alya immediately wrote her name underneath the ‘verbal’ column, putting a ‘journalism’ next to it.

Lila surveyed the options. The easiest thing to fake would probably be photography, so she marked her name under ‘media’ and wrote a ‘photography’ next to it.

“Ooh, photography? What do you take pictures of? Because I know Mari’s been looking for a partner to take pictures of her designs with her.”

Lila bit back a grimace. “Thanks, but I prefer to take pictures of...” Art? Buildings? “Nature. I find that taking pictures of people is narcissistic as a society.”

“Aren’t you a model?” A judgmental voice came from behind her.

“I- well-“ She stuttered.

“It’s completely different, Felix! Lila doesn’t think her photo shoots are art worthy, she’s just doing it as a job.” Alya snapped, throwing an arm out to almost shield Lila from the chill radiating from Felix’s entire person.

“Very well.” Felix stepped around the two and signed his name in perfect cursive beneath Lila’s name and walked away without another word.

“That guy gives me the creeps.” Alix remarked as she scratched her name under the ‘performance’ column, then the ‘piece of art that cannot be moved’ section.

“And he’s doing photography too! Don’t worry Lila, there’s no way he’s better than you.” Alya grabbed her arm reassuringly and began walking with her back to class.

“Yeah, right...” Lila held in a wince as she found her way back to her seat.

Surely photography can’t be that hard.

—

It was that hard.

Lila had waited one week before the showcase to start taking pictures on her phone. She walked to the park and snapped a few pictures, called it a day, and went home.

They were terrible. Blurry, ugly, terrible.

The next thing she tried was looking up stock images and photoshopping the watermark off.

She was awful at photoshop.

Finally, she resorted to her escape plan.

“Sorry, Alya. But I completely forgot that I’m volunteering at the elementary school all day on the day of the showcase, and I can’t just cancel on them. I’m so sorry.”

“Girl, it’s no problem! Marinette told me that the showcase is going to go on for four days. We’ll just reschedule your slot. It’s no problem at all.”

“Great.” She muttered through gritted teeth. “See you then.”

...crap.

She had only one plan now.

And it was risky.

—

Lila walked into class on Monday, prepared for her showcase.

She explained to Alya that when she explained what was going on to the leader of her organization, they gave her a rain check.

“I’m just so thankful.” She brushed away a tear. “I really wanted to make sure I could see everyone’s talents.”

“That’s so sweet!” Rose cooed. “I can’t wait to see your pictures either!”

“I just hope they correctly portray the beauty of my subject...” Lila pressed a hand to her chest in modesty.

“Students, I need all of the media students to come to the art classroom with your flash drives and cameras.” Miss Bustier put her phone down and smiled. “And anyone who paired with a media student for their talent please also join the students in the art room.”

Lila stood and gave everyone a hug. “Wish me luck!”

She noticed Sabrina stand as well and accept a half hearted hug from Chloe and a nod of support from Max. Juleka stood too and hugged Rose tight.

“Bye Alya! Wish me luck.” Marinette appeared from seemingly nowhere and hugged Alya tight. “And don’t be worried about your presentation. We’ll find some time to rehearse before tomorrow.”

“Thanks girl. Look after Lila for me? She’s just as new as I am.”

Marinette’s eyes darkened for just a second, but she quickly broke into a grin. “No problem. And don’t be worried, Lila. I’m sure your photos are just unimaginable.”

“Thanks Marinette. That’s just so sweet of you.” They linked arms and waltzed out of the room.

The moment they were out of eye shot of any of their classmates, they stepped aside.

“You don’t even have pictures, do you?” Marinette growled.

“What do you mean Marinette? Of course I have pictures.” She smirked. Or at least, I will in just a minute.

—

The art room was bustling and chaotic. Perfect for a camera or flash drive to go missing.

Marinette was bombarded by a group of kids from Felix’s class.

“Ready to see the product of our hard work?” A girl with two dark buns on the top of her head asked.

“I hope so.” She gave them a bashful smile.

Lila stopped paying attention. She had a goal in mind.

Her eyes landed on an expensive looking camera sitting on a desk at the side of the room. A sitting duck.

With a side glance for witnesses, Lila walked right by the camera and slipped the memory card right out and into her awaiting palm.

With her goal met, she sat primly in her chair, waiting for them to be called to the stage.

“Alright, photographers, models, actors, directors!” The art teacher stood. “Let’s go!”

Lila skipped up to him, a look of concern on her face. “Sir?”

“Yes Lila?”

“My camera broke on my way here and all I have left of it is my memory card; is there still a way for me to present my photos?”

“Of course there is. Don’t you worry a bit.”

“Perfect!” She grinned.

Once backstage, each student needed to give the teacher their SD cards or cameras and wait to be called onstage to describe their works to the audience.

Lila spared a quick glance towards the onlookers. Talent scouts of every kind were sitting in plush, reserved seats, notebooks and pens at the ready.

She was the first one up, the first one they would see and, unless she used all of her charisma and improvising skill, the first one they would forget.

“...and now, Lila Rossi with her photography!”

Lila strutted out to the greetings of applause.

“Hello, and let me just say I am so honored to be here today, especially considering that a year ago I wasn’t expected to be able to walk to school every day. Photography was really the only thing that got me through the day.”

A murmur of pity rippled through the crowd.

“Pictures like this one.” She pressed the clicker and a picture appeared on the screen behind her.

A picture of one Marinette Dupain-Cheng, mid-twirl in a beautiful hand-made dress.

Lila heard Alya gasp.

“I wanted to show simultaneously the mundanity of walking and the undeniable splendor of it. My dear friend Marinette had some designs she was willing to model for me to help achieve my goal. Marinette, come on out!” She held a hand out, daring Marinette to come out from where she was waiting to go next along with her other friends.

Felix stood behind her with a look of horror and disgust on his face; and a particularly fancy camera hanging around his neck. A very familiar camera.

“No? Okay then.” She turned back to the crowd. “She’ll be out with a different group; Mari doesn’t want me to have to share the spotlight, isn’t she sweet?”

The crowd applauded and Lila continued making up technical terms and thought processes for each photo, all of which were of Marinette in different designs.

“Thank you.” She bowed deep before walking off the stage.

Now to hold her breath and hope that Marinette, Felix and all their friends were too chicken to call her out onstage.

—

“Now, with their short film; ‘solving love,’ please welcome Bridgette Cheng, Claude Lambert, Mercury Bernard, Allegra Harthorn, Felix Culpa, and Marinette Dupain-Cheng.”

“Hey everybody!” A boy with brown hair and a blue striped shirt grabbed the mic and shouted. “How are we doing today?”

A scattered amount of applause.

“Nice! I’m Claude, and this is Bridgette.”

The girl with the buns waved.

“We were the main idea folks for this video; but the idea only came after the filming.”

Bridgette grabbed the mic. “We asked out friends if we could film them, and then a few weeks ago, we reviewed the film and noticed something... interesting.”

“Allegra here,” a girl with a long blonde braid waved, “did the music and Mercury,” a boy with dark glasses and a green beret, “did the narration. You’ll be seeing more of them soon. My cousin Mari,” Marinette waved, “and Felix are the main subjects of the film. You would have seen more of them, but for some reason Felix’s memory card went missing.”

Lila swallowed, this wasn’t great. The seeds of dissent were planted and now she had to risk either spinning another fake story or hoping that it all went well.

It’s not like they had any proof though; she should be fine.

“Anyway, here’s ‘Solving Love.’”

They all stepped to the side and the video began with a smooth piano.

“Love.” The screen showed couples going up to Andre’s and sharing ice cream. “The answer to everything. To ourselves, to the meaning of life, to the questions we cannot ask.”

“But how? How do we get from complete strangers, to people so close they are the same person?” The video changed to a showing of Marinette and Felix shaking hands, both with sardonic smirks. “People rarely get to see the entire process of when people fall in love; there are always pieces missing, hidden moments only for the people in question to recall. Love is left for the investigator to discover for themselves, when the time is right.”

“But maybe,” it showed Marinette talking animatedly, as Felix yawns beside her, “maybe one day, we’ll be lucky enough to see most of the picture.” Felix’s eyes droop and his head falls to rest atop Marinette’s, in the beginnings of a nap. Marinette flushes red.

The rest of the video shows the stages of Marinette and Felix’s relationship, from sarcastic rivals, to peers, to friends, to partners. The narrator described different relationships and how love is a constant through all of them.

The video showed Marinette dancing, twirling in a brilliant dress as Felix kneels and snaps pictures. “Ah, but is this all of it?” They lean down for a swift kiss. The image pauses there. “The full picture? Or is it only a snapshot,” the screen lights up white, “a minor clue, to solving love?”

The auditorium was quiet for what seemed like minutes. Then, the room burst into uproarious applause; a standing ovation.

Lila growled as she turned to sulk and maybe get her makeup so she could fake an injury and get some pity points to heal her bruised ego.

She ran face first into the grey suit of Mr. Damocles.

“Oh, hello sir.” She beamed. “Is there a problem?”

His eyebrows furrowed. “Yes Miss Rossi, there is. Did you take those pictures of Miss Dupain-Cheng? Because that video tells a different story.”

“Yes sir, I swear it.”

“You swear it, huh? Well you best come with me to the office. Miss Dupain-Cheng and her friends will join us when they’re done.”

“What?”

“Miss Rossi, you are accused of stealing Mr Culpa and Miss Dupain-Cheng’s creative work. We will be calling your mother to discuss this.”

Back on stage the crowd of students and talent agents alike had taken to shouting questions to the group of students.

[rose-petal-spam]

Gift

Children were not an option with schlatt, but life likes laughing in the face of her plaything's plans.

A Dark figure stood outside Schlatts front door holding a sleeping baby boy. They gently placed a kiss on his head, setting him down in a basket of soft chubby flesh with curly blonde hair contrasting to the red blanket and white envelope setting in his lap. Soft sweet words and melodies kept the child's mind at ease as the figure rang the doorbell scurrying away from the scene of the crime leaving soft coos and cries on the doorstep of Schlatts house.

-----

Who the fuck could be up at 12 o’clock in the fucking night? Ughh if it Connor or ty I swear I’m going to skin their asses.

I can’t see shit in this fucking pitch-black house!

the hallway should be around here somewhere, oh great here it is.

fuck! the peephole is too tall, all I can see is the street which of course is empty.

Probably just the neighborhood kids playing a prank but I was supposed to get a package today with a schlattcoin in it.

The door squeaked slightly open summers lingering warmth invading the perfectly cool house.

the porch looked empty at least-

A small child sat in a basket slept soundly under the porch light golden fizz crowning him like a halo.

“What the fuck??”

Did someone just fucking leave a baby on my doorstep?

I glanced down the still vacant block, nothing had changed. No slow cars or anything, just a baby in a basket with a letter sitting on my fucking front door.

What do I do?

I-

I could just walk away from this definitely is not my problem in the slightest.

God damnit I can't just leave a baby on my doorstep-

fuck!

fuck Shit ass just FUCK! WHAT THE HELL DO I DO WITH THIS?

"Hey um did someone leave their baby on my porch?"

,,,

fuck. welp I just take him in and then drop him off at the orphanage in the morning

yeah they'll be able to take care of him, he'll be in good care.

yeah, then this whole weird dream can be over.

okay, kid let's get you inside whoever left you on my doorstep must be really upset.

ugh, fuck, it's too fucking dark in here to see anything.

Where was the floor lamp again?

Fucking! where is the stupid twisty thing

ah there!

the lamp flickered to life illuminating the dim living room, soft black second-hand couches with mismatched coffee tables, and a flat-screen TV. Half of the stains on the couch had been made by Connor at this point, and Ty always insisted on using a cozy on the coffee tables to not leave a watermark despite the countless others already there.

okay um, he'll just sleep in the basket tonight.

wait aren't babies supposed to sleep a certain way?

Maybe I should let him sleep in the bed with me?

fuck what if I accidentally move and sleep on him though-

yeah, let's just keep him in the basket what's the worst that can happen-

I'll just sit on the couch and yeah

I’ll just sit here and make sure he's' okay.

Then in the morning we can drop him off and find his mom and dad.

yeah,, just um sit here and make sure he's okay

,,,

Oh fuck- the letter

how the hell did I forget- and why the hell haven't I read it yet it literally had my name on it

,,,,

,,,

,,

fuck.

'I'm sorry to drop him off on your front door but I can no longer support him'. 'He is your son'. 'His name is Tommy after my grandfather Thomas'. 'please take good care of him'.

that bitch-

she just- after having the kid can't even go and support him!

I mean I would have-

I would have fucking helped out if I knew!

How haven't I heard anything about this?

fucking hell, I have a kid- I'm a dad now I guess? how the fuck-

I don't know the first fucking thing to being a dad

wait fuck am I ready to be a dad?

would I even make a good dad- I run a fucking scam business

how am i-

Small sounds came next to me, the small wiggling infant was stretching himself out kicking the blanket away. His bright blue eyes glanced at the world around him before falling shut again. I don't know why, but everything in me just swole with pride looking at his stupid ravioli sized fist and beautiful blue eyes

i-

I can't drop him off at the orphanage tomorrow

fuck

I can't just leave him.

I um

I guess I am a dad now? fuck I'm not prepared at all for this.

A small tight squeal erupted next to me as Tommy wiggled upset by something.

Fuck-

"fuck um- wait- shit no-no"

fuck I don't want to hurt him-

"shh shh it's okay little guy I got you it's okay"

his soft body fit in my arms as I gently cradled him, rocking him back and forth as he softly fell back into a deep sleep.

Okay yeah, yeah I um.

I can do this.

I'll be a good dad for you toms.

-----

A tale like any other filled the room: big happy balloons and birthday cake sitting on a table with a now 8-year-old Tommy sitting across from Jschlatt. The candles had long since lost their wish powers and gifts already opened and played with. Connor and Ty were sipping on their drinks listening to the story of how we got here with frosting-covered silverware and a now 9-year-old boy casually adding their comments on how Jschlatt didn't even know how to change a diaper before ty stepped in. Jschlatt had just finished his story of the now happiest day of his life.

"-and that Toms is the story of how I became your dad"

Tommy looked amazed and confused, his brows furrowed in thought.

god, he looks so much like me when he does that.

his horns should start sprouting soon too if I am correct.

"So I was your gift," he finally responded, "like from the Easter bunny?"

Conor snickered, remembering the panicked phone call he got that night at 1 am with Tommy crying in the background while I pleaded for him to come over and help. It was far from a gift at the time, more like being shoved into a car going 40 miles an hour with no clue what to do.

But I gotta bite. I would never trade it for anything in the world ever.

"Yeah, and to this day it's the best thing he ever got me way better than chocolate in my humble opinion"

yeah, the best gift I could have ever been given.

-----

This took a lot longer then the first fic ill admit but its also twice as long so i hope you guys injoy it just as much.

also again thank you gheysnakelady or @dadschlatt-tommyau for this amazing au i really like it.

[amwritesitall]

Sarah’s AHS Characters (+Alice and a Ship) as Songs I’m Vibing With

Masterlist

Instead of a collection of songs from one artist these are songs I’m currently vibing with? Here’s the playlist if you wanna listen (warning it fluctuates a lot because it’s just songs a vibe with at the moment). I skipped the songs I used in artist posts.

Billie Dean Howard

“24 / 7/ 365″ by Surfaces

Met, this girl down by the vine Had long tan legs and big brown eyes Seemed the type I would wanna make mine

She said nine to five, I'm killing time But twenty-four-seven, three-six-five I have to be where I feel your sunshine

One to two-step, three-step, four She's everywhere out on the dance floor She's everything you could ever want and more

Picture it. Billie Dean is at some event. She spies a girl who’s mesmerizing, killing it on the dance floor. Realizing this girl is absolutely the person she wants to be with. The line “I have to be where I feel your sunshine”!! Big Billie Dean vibes right there. In the darkness that her job sometimes entails, she’s drawn to the light of her lover. A ray of sunshine if you will.

“Heaven Falls / Fall on Me” by Surfaces

Woke up early in the mornin' Just to feel the light of day Had to open up my window Get the shadows out my way Banana pancakes for my problems Find me jamming old Jack Johnson Swear I heard them angel calls Lay outside

As Heaven falls Heaven falls

If you can’t tell, Surfaces really makes me think of Billie Dean. This goes with my explanation for the other song. Billie’s job gets pretty dark and intense. Although she never completely gets a break from her job (because she can’t just turn off being a medium) she tries to use her time away from filming and darker locations to focus on the lighter aspects of life, savoring all around her and her lover. I have no idea if what I said makes sense though.

Lana Winters

“Let’s Fall in Love for the Night” by FINNEAS

Let's fall in love for the night And forget in the mornin' Play me a song that you like You can bet I'll know every line I'm the boy that your boy hoped that you would avoid Don't waste your eyes on jealous guys, fuck that noise I know better than to call you mine

This song gives me Lana vibes in the sense that she doesn’t really want to get too attached to people. This also makes me think of how Lana is the type of lover that someone’s conservative/strict family wouldn’t want them with (because of the gay). When you go this route, it’s hard for me not to picture teenage Lana when listening to this.

Fun fact: I have a vague idea for writing a Billie Dean Howard x Reader imagine over this song.

“me & ur ghost” by blackbear

I'm not alone It's just me and your ghost And this cripplin' depression I thought I learned my lesson But, I threw out my phone And I burned all your clothes And now I'm not alone It's just me and your ghost

Now hear me out. Post break up Lana dealing with all of her memories of her ex and then burning all of their shit because Lana is lowkey that bitch. It’s a bit of a stretch, but that’s just my humble opinion on the matter.

Cordelia Goode

“If We Were Vampires” by Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit

It's not the long, flowing dress that you're in Or the light coming off of your skin The fragile heart you protected for so long Or the mercy in your sense of right and wrong It's not your hands searching slow in the dark Or your nails leaving love's watermark It's not the way you talk me off the roof Your questions like directions to the truth

It's knowing that this can't go on forever Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone Maybe we'll get forty years together But one day I'll be gone Or one day you'll be gone

Cordelia knows that one day she will die. There will be another Supreme after her and she can’t live forever. This is her coming to terms with the fact that maybe it’s for the best that she won’t stay around forever. Not being immortal allows her to live in the moment and savor all the time she has.

“PlantedInMyMind.Memo” by Charlie Burg

Saying things I don't believe And your love casts it's shadow on the things I do And I can hear so clearly all the words I'd wish I'd said You're stuck in my head But I only think of you Will we be together soon? I'm thrown on the wayside You're planted in my mind But I don't wanna be ok without you

This makes me think of an angsty Cordelia relationship like post “In Another Lifetime”?!?! Cordelia being stuck on her lover from the past 

Also makes me think of Cordelia x Misty after the events of season 3

Bette and Dot Tattler

“prom dress” by mxmtoon

I can't help the fact I like to be alone It might sound kinda sad, but that's just what I seem to know I tend to handle things usually by myself And I can't ever seem to try and ask for help

I'm sitting here, crying in my prom dress I'd be the prom queen if crying was a contest Makeup is running down, feelings are all around How did I get here? I need to know

I guess I maybe had a couple expectations Thought I'd get to them, but no I didn't

I’m not going to lie, this is a bit of a stretch.

I’m kind of getting Bette and Dot wishing they could be like everyone else. They just want that normal teen experience?

Sally McKenna

“Teeth” by 5 Seconds of Summer

Call me in the morning to apologize Every little lie gives me butterflies Something in the way you're looking through my eyes Don't know if I'm gonna make it out alive

Fight so dirty, but your love's so sweet Talk so pretty, but your heart got teeth Late night devil, put your hands on me And never, never, never ever let go

The angst! The tension! The passion! SPICY TIMES WITH SALLY

“fuck, i’m lonely” by Lauv, Anne-Marie

I call you one time, two time, three time I can't wait no more Your fingers through my hair, that's on my mind I know it's been a minute since you walked right through that door But I still think about you all the time

Sally just wants love. She’s sick of being lonely and wants to be with the person she loves. Being a ghost sucks and she wants out of that damn hotel.

Dealing with her ex that is still alive while she’s not.

Audrey Tindall

“Prom Queen” by Beach Bunny

Shut up, count your calories I never looked good in mom jeans Wish I, was like you, blue-eyed blondie, perfect body Maybe I should try harder You should lower your expectations I'm no quick-curl barbie I was never cut out for Prom Queen If I get more pretty, do you think he will like me?

Teen Audrey. I will stand by this.

Now I’m thinking about teen Audrey and my heart :(

Ally Mayfair Richards

“I Needed You” by blackbear

When I needed you the most, I needed you I fucking needed you the most, I needed you, the most Now I won't be there to give you what you need Now I won't be there, no

You know this was never really about us And everything was always 'bout you You never knew a thing about trust And I knew everything about you, what's happening Three whole years, they can go by In a blink of an eye, and you won't know it, but What a damn waste of time

You can’t sit there and tell me this doesn’t sound like Ally dealing with Ivy’s betrayal. No. There is no way this song doesn’t give off those vibes. Like sis was dealing with a ton of shit and where was her wife??? Off gallivanting and murdering with a cult because she voted for Jill Stein. 

Wilhemina Venable

“Lovesong (The Way) [feat. Bluets]” by Charlie Burg 

Now you're away with nothing to say My heart aches like never before Filled with desire, you've inspired me to write another verse

I think we're alone now You can tell me it was all just a game Yes, we're alone now But the feeling's slightly changed

But you take your time, my love Don't ever tell me that it just takes time to love As long as I'm writing this song about my love for you Is it too much to ask For a reply? Or a text? Or a way to tell you love me like before

I don’t knooowww. This just makes me think of Mina trying to deal with her feelings and possibly her significant other kind of giving up because they feel like Mina will never reciprocate their feelings. Mina does love them but it’s hard for her to express it.

“Someday” by Peach Tree Rascals

I hate the fact that you Run on mind, all damn day There she goes

Girl won't you wait for me

I settled down, I'm better now I never knew what this life was about Days got too plain, colors got dull All of the roses fell on to the floor I'll pick them up, wipe the dust Need a chance for your love For your love, for your love, ooooh I've been floating between oceans And the darkness in the sky I've been lonesome in this old shed And it's burnin through my mind

Similar to the song above, Mina hates the fact that she’s stuck on this person, but she eventually realizes that she needs this person in her life. This love really out here making her appreciate life and all the good things in it.

Basically Mina is turning into a softie.

Alice Macray

“Mariposa” by Peach Tree Rascals

I can't wait for you To come my way I've been far away But I'll keep runnin' Just to find a way to you til' then

I been running from it Tired of running from it Scared of feeling something now I'm stuck and tryna get up out of this hole

Surface level this song has some good vibes like our baby Alice. Over analyzing level is not as good vibes. This song is kind of like our baby Alice running from her feelings for someone because the thought of such strong feelings is scary for her.

Billie Dean Howard x Audrey Tindall

“Channel Orange in Your Living Room” by Charlie Burg

We met when I was drunk That party didn't actually suck You made fun of how slow I drank

But now I can't stop thinking about you Each moment passes and my thoughts return to you And the memory of us too As we listen to Channel Orange in your living room

Even when you're away That album makes me feel like you stayed To listen now would make me a fool again for you

Without a doubt, I always think of these two when I listen to the song and that’s one of the reasons why I love it so much. I’m just picturing the two of them meeting a party together and Billie taking Audrey back to her place. Then they end up thinking of each other long after the night is over.

-

You might like:  Sarah Paulson AHS Characters as Hozier Songs or  Sarah Paulson AHS Characters as Rex Orange County Songs

[manumigoya]

A regular guy’s experience with a military graded phone and why you might want one

The Ulefone Armor 7 Pro is a smartphone designed for adventurers, construction workers and people who are routinely exposed to conditions that would endanger most modern devices. I’m not any of those things, but I still think it was the right choice for me, and it might just suit you too.

What use has a normal guy like me for a phone built to withstand such extreme conditions? I’m no couch potato, I regularly ride my bike to work and back, enjoy the occasional trekking and camping trip and walk around my city a fair bit. Even so, that is a far cry from the kind of person this phone was designed for. 

After all, the Ulefone Armor X7 Pro has a IP-68 and a MIL-STD-810G rating, which means it can literally survive for a day buried under a meter of concrete, withstand half an hour under 1.5 meters of water, its completely sealed to dust or sand, and a bunch of other characteristics you can read about here. Essentially, it’s build to last. 

About this review

This article is not intended to be a thorough technical review of the phone, but rather a list of reasons why I think it might suit you even if you are not the intended target for it. Therefore I will only go through some of the most important specs, highlighting what I personally consider relevant. 

If you wish to know the full technical details you can visit the official Ulefone site or search for a traditional review. If you wish to skip to my conclusion, where I explain why this is also a great phone for normal users, scroll to the end.

Ulefone Armor 7 Pro specs

CPU: Mediatek Helio A20 1.8GHz

RAM: 4Gb

Storage: 32Gb (expandable)

OS: Android 10

Screen: 5’’ 

Back Camera: 13Mbx

Front Camera: 5Mpx

Battery: 4000 mAh

Size: 150 x 78,9 x 14,6 mm

Has NFC

Micro-usb charging

Okay, now that we listed the technical details, let’s consider what each of them brings to the table and how the final product behaves.

Slow and steady

If you are looking for a fast snappy phone with which you can simultaneously scroll through Instagram, watch a video with picture in picture mode, and have a graphic intensive game waiting for you in the background, this isn’t it. Nor is this the price range you should be aiming at. 

The Armor Mediatek Helio A20 processor, with a frequency of 1.8GHz, isn’t anything to write home about. And the 4GB of RAM, though an improvement on previous models, pales in comparison to what even mid-range phones pack these days. 

And you know what? That’s actually perfectly fine. The purpose of this phone isn’t to win any race, but rather to get the job done. And that it does.

I need my phone to perform what has become over the years a pretty basic list of tasks: social media, document editing, internet browsing, music and video streaming, taking some pics, and basic photo and video editing. 

The Ulefone Armor 7 Pro is able to do any of those tasks without issues, even when I need to open two or three apps in the background. Yes, it does get a bit slow or even freezes for a couple of seconds from time to time, but not enough for it to interrupt my experience. 

Battery life

Back when smartphones were a new thing, we used to complain about their battery life bitterly. Habituated to our old not so bright devices whose batteries lasted for days, we felt that the tradeoff wasn’t always worth it. Yes, we were now the proud owners of mind-boggling phones that could perform amazing tasks for us. But use them for a couple of hours and you better find somewhere to charge them (and have the time to wait for that to be done).

Luckily, smartphones are getting better at this by the iteration. With its 4000mAh battery, the Ulefone Armor 7 Pro is just another contender in the race for autonomy. 

According to my digital wellbeing app, I’ve been using it an average of four and a half hours per day. That’s a lot. It actually puts me in the top 20% of screen time, but being excited for my new gadget and having to do this review I feel a bit justified.

Even so, I usually have at least 30% of the battery left when I finish my day, if not more. And, on the occasions I don’t use it as much, I can go two days without having to think about charging.

At a time when we are seeing affordable phones with 5000mAh of battery that can last up to three days without charge and that have better performance, the Armor X7 Pro’s battery life certainly won’t make any headlines, but it’s still a great perk for the price.

The Ulefone X7 Pro camera

As I said, one of the tasks I need my phone to perform on a daily basis is taking pictures. With a 13 megapixels main camera, a 5 megapixel front camera, and pro, night and underwater modes, the Armor X7 Pro it’s barely able to keep up with today’s standards.

I know, I know, nobody is buying it to start a photography career. But still, I was expecting a bit more, even from those low specs. Truth be told, the night mode usually just ruins the colors in most pictures and the pro mode feels terribly lacking. I still haven’t tried the underwater mode.

The first picture is taken on normal mode, the second with night mode. This kind of open dimly light landscape is the only instance where I found the night mode actually improved the result.

Pro tip: make sure to disable the Ulefone watermark, as I clearly didn’t.

Normal mode:

With night mode:

If your only purpose is to take casual photos for your personal social media, then the Armor X7 Pro will do the trick, but anything more than that and you will need to look somewhere else.

Other details and utilities

There’s a lot to say about this phone. From its unique set of apps to its thick rubber encasing. But, for the sake of brevity, I’ll just go through some of the features that I have noticed more in its daily usage.

Custom button

After using Motorola -and it’s amazing gestures- for years, I was afraid I would have too much of a hard time getting used to another brand. Luckily the Ulefone Armor X7 Pro comes with a custom key on its left side that can be programmed to do up to three different tasks. I have it set just to two: opening the camera and the flashlight. Simple, but incredibly useful.

NFC

A surprising number of middle-range phones lack this feature. But not the Armor X7 Pro, and I’m incredibly grateful for it. 

Headphone Jack lids

In order to withstand an hour under 1.2 meters of water, the phone is completely sealed off. That includes the headphone jack, the charger plug, and the sim tray, which are all protected by thick rubber lids. Unfortunately, said lids are difficult to open without the dedicated tool Ulefone includes in the package. 

This tool, while useful, is rather small and prone to getting lost. I have resorted to knives, forks, screwdrivers, and other such tools to open them, including my own nails (which I do not recommend). 

Sadly, on a couple of occasions where my nails were trimmed and I had nothing pointy with me, I could open the headphone jack at all and resigned myself to just listening to the surroundings. 

Though I understand the importance of this protection, I wish Ulefone had thought about some way of opening these lids without that tool. Or maybe even a way to carry it in the phone itself without fear of losing it.

Speakers

Oh my god are they loud! I really haven’t used my wireless speakers since I have this phone. Of course, it doesn’t have the same quality or sound level, but it’s more than enough for most situations.

Why I recommend the Ulefone Armor X7 Pro

Simply put, this is a phone for people that don’t want to worry at all about their phones. Which isn’t a new concept at all. The market for minimalist phones is growing as people realize that some device’s specs are so good they end up getting into the way of life.

And, while the Armor X7 Pro probably wasn’t designed with this in mind, it achieves it in an awesome and unique way. 

First of all, its specs are good enough for the vast majority of tasks people normally need their phones to perform, while at the same time not being so appealing that they demand your constant attention. 

Use it normally and you’ll have no problems, use it intensely and its shortcomings will start to annoy you. It might not be ideal, but it’s a great way to reduce your screen time (at least when you don’t have to write a review about it).

On the other hand, its ridiculous resistance to water, falls, pressure, and temperature, makes it so I don’t have to worry about breaking the thing. I’m not a particularly clumsy person, but I have been known to break a phone or two, so this is important to me. 

Now, with the Armor X7 Pro, I just leave my phone anywhere, with almost no worries about its safety. If it can go through the 29 tests needed to get the  MIL-STD-810G certification, It can withstand a fall while I’m riding my bike, the playful (and sticky) hands of my nephews, or having a pint of beer accidentally poured over it on a Friday night.

As long as it doesn’t get stolen, it will probably be with me for however long I want it to. 

And I got all of this for just over a 100 euros on eBay -you can get it cheaper in Banggood, if you are willing to wait a bit longer. Really, I don’t think theres another phone that can deliver all of this by that price.

[mrsprescott]

I (will never) give up on us

Request: Nathan and the reader get into a fight which causes them to “Break up”.

Genre: Angst, fluff

Word count: 1,710 A/n: this one is for @crszydrunkpotterhead. I am so sorry this took so long, I just have had a lot of personal things go down over the past few months. I hope you enjoy.

(Y/n) clenched her fists and her jaw tightened. She was taking short angry breaths and glaring at the man in front of her. “You know, I can’t help you Nathan if you shut me out and push me away. Is it your dad? Is he what’s making you like this today?”

“God, you’re such a nosy fucking bitch, even more so than Caulfield. I already told you to fuck off once.” He backed her up against the wall and his hands went on both sides of her head.

He leaned down until they were eye level, his cold ones met with her concerned ones. “Stay the fuck out of my business. I don’t need your help, never have and never will. Keep your nose out of where it doesn’t belong. It is really pathetic that you don’t realize how much of a useless burden you are. Now get the fuck out.”

Her face hardened, twisted up in a way he had never seen before. Her hands went up to his chest and she shoved him back. “You know what Nathan, I give up. I give up on you, on me, on fucking us. I am done. Done.” She slipped off the jacket she was wearing, his jacket, and threw it at him. “You can have every fucking thing back. Whatever you have in my dorm room will be at Victoria’s. You want me so un-involved in your life, so I guess this is granting a wish for you, huh? Every goddamn trace of me will be removed from yours.”

She marched over to the door and threw one last glance in his direction. Then she was gone, and he was left standing silently in the hallway. The gravity of the situation hadn’t quite hit him yet. He swallowed once, twice, three times before he stumbled backwards. He slid down the wall and his head fell forward. He felt like he couldn’t breathe, like he couldn’t speak. His head started hurt. ‘Good job Nathan, you once again managed to fuck up the only good thing you had going.’ He stayed there for a good half an hour. He didn’t seem to notice the odd glances thrown his way by the boys coming in and out of the dorm. He didn’t even react when Warren pulled out his phone and snapped a few pictures. Hayden had to practically carry him into his room. He tried asking Nathan what was wrong, but he never got a response. After about an hour of that, he left, turning off the light before telling Nathan to call him if he needed to ‘blaze or anything’. *** (Y/n) felt the tears welling up in her eyes by the time she was finally back in her room. She was shaking as she curled up into a ball on her bed. She felt her phone vibrate and she took it out of her pocket. The texts filling up her screen all had to do with Nathan in some way. Some were asking if he was okay, others came from the group chat that Warren accidentally added her into. The ones from that chat, which just consisted of stupid insults like ‘twitch’, made her more angry than she already was. She was half tempted to go off on all of them but decided it would be best for her to ignore them. She clicked off of her messages and froze when her eyes landed on her wallpaper. The tears once again welled up, but this time they spilled over. Her favorite picture of him was her screensaver. It was from a few years back when Nathan was in the school’s production of ‘The Tempest’. Nathan had been Caliban. She remembered how adorable he had looked in his makeup. She snapped the candid while he was smiling after their miraculously good performance. She had waited for him to change out of his costume and change out of his makeup outside of the tent. She clapped for him again, and pulled him into a hug before he could object. Much to her surprise, he hugged her back. She gave him a wink and a quick kiss on the cheek (probably a little too close to his lips) before she dashed off. He asked her out the next day. Well, it might be more accurate to say Victoria pushed him (literally pushed him into her) to ask her out the next day. She threw her phone as far away from her as she could manage, guilt was building up in the pit of her stomach. She heard it connect with something, and two loud thuds as her phone and whatever she had just knocked off her closet shelf hit floor. “Mother fucker.” (Y/n) muttered under her breath. She got out from her fluffy blankets with a huff. Pictures, movie ticket stubs, and letters were scattered all over. She laughed she picked up her old copy of “Planet Earth: Ocean Deep”. Nathan had loved watching the whales that episode, and (Y/N) loved watching the genuine smile that graced his beautiful face.It had only been a few hours, but she already missed him. She stared at the cover of the film for probably five more minutes. That’s when it hit her. She knew how she was going to see that smile again. (Y/n) slipped on her running shoes and grabbed her keys off of her desk and the movie. She switched off the lights and slammed the door shut behind her. She could hear Victoria yelling something behind her, but she honestly could care less at that point. She stopped at the lighthouse first, and made her way to the gift shop that was near there. She grabbed two whale plushies from the shelf and placed them the counter with a smile. Next on her list was the diner. She popped her knuckles before she walked up to the counter. She was met with the smiling face of her favorite waitress: Joyce. “Well hello hun, what can I get for you today?” “Just the usual Joyce, two orders of waffles with a side of bacon and two Cokes. Oh, and I was wondering if I could get it to go?” “Any reason why you and your boyfriend won’t be eating here tonight?” “Nathan,” she paused “isn’t feeling too well so I thought I’d just bring it to him instead.” Well, that wasn’t a complete lie. Or at least that’s what (Y/n) told herself. Joyce just winked at her and told her it was coming right up. She felt her phone buzz again and she slipped it out of her pocket. It was, as expected, from Vic. She was demanding to know what the hell was going on. (Y/n) sighed and hesitantly responded back that she and Nathan had fought and she was working on fixing it. She knew that would only cause her to be hit with a storm of more questions that she didn’t want to deal with so she just silenced her phone. She paid for the food and made her way back to her car. She took in a deep breath and drove back to the school. She got everything she needed from the seats of the vehicle and closed the door as softly as possible. She was certain David was lurking somewhere waiting to hassle any teen not in their dorms and didn’t want to alert him. She walked for a few moments but sprinted as fast as she could at the first sign of a flashlight. The boy’s dorm hall was empty, which was a plus. It was also surprisingly quiet for a Friday night, the only sound that (Y/n) heard was the floorboards creaking under her. She swallowed hard when she finally made it in front of his door. She knocked once, no answer. Twice, no answer. Three times, four, still no answer. She tried the handle and gave a mental cheer when it opened. That meant he was home. “Nathan?” (Y/n) called out into the darkness. She heard a sniffle. “(Y/n)?” “Yeah babe, it’s me. I’m going to turn the lights, okay.” She kicked the door shut and flipped the switch on the wall behind her. She stiffened when her eyes fell on him. His hair was all messy, his eyes were puffy and red, and she could see the watermarks tears had made his cheeks. She slipped off her shoes and left them by the door. “I bought some stuff, I hope that’s okay.” She lifted up the bags to show him and took a seat on his bed with him. “Nathan, I, uh, I wanted to say sorry. What I said was mean, and out of line. And I’m not done with you. I love you too much to ever be done with you and I’m so sorry. It was obvious that you didn’t want to talk and I should have respected that.”  (Y/n)’s eyes were watering. Her eyebrows furrowed when she saw Nathan’s head shaking ‘no’.  “(Y/n), it’s my fault. I was being a dick all day and lashed out. I honestly don’t know why you even came back, you don’t deserve this. You deserve so much better.” Her hands cupped his cheeks and she stared into his blue eyes. “You complete me, Nathan. So please, never say that again.” Her lips captured his sweetly. A smile smile was on her face when she pulled away. The night passed pretty quickly after that. After many lip locks during planet earth, whale plushie fights, and jokingly swiping syrup on the other person’s face the two of them decided it was time to call it a night. (Y/n) grabbed Nathan’s headphones for him and he slipped them on after he laid his head on her chest; she drew lazy patterns on his back. He was about to press play on his whale songs when (Y/n) pressed a kiss on his forehead stopped him. “No matter how much we fight, or how bad it gets, I will never give up us.”

[serpicojones]

Letter to My Grandma

I wrote the following a longtime back on here and then I never posted it.  I am working on a new essay and I noticed this now.  There are some things about this letter that have evolved for me.  For instance, in the letter I refer to my pronouns as They/Them/Their and while I am generally still fine with these pronouns, I now also use She/Her/Hers.  I think that my perspective on presentation is changing some (even while genderqueer still feels like an accurate term even as I also accept trans woman), but all of the details included in this letter were very truthful to the moment that I wrote it.  I hope you can enjoy it and maybe learn a little about me as well as my particular experience with my gender and identity:

Dear Grandma,

I hope that this letter finds you well!  I thought this would be an interesting way to communicate with you.  Perhaps you would like to write or have my mother write a letter back to me.  I am writing to you rather than calling because of the importance of the content of this letter and I wanted to make sure that it was all communicated clearly.  As you know, sometimes communication over the phone can be challenging and I didn't want you to miss anything or feel like you missed anything!

All of my life, my relationship with you has been very important to me.  You have always been a great person to talk about anything in the world with!  My sister and parents are happy to listen to what I have to say about serious world stuff because they love me, but sometimes I've gotten the feeling that they are often just humoring me :-D.  When we have talked it has been different.  I think something that we share has been an overwhelming curiosity about the world.  And nothing has ever been off limits.  I feel sad that in the last few years, we've been unable to spend more time together because of where I live and how often I come to New York.  I'm sorry about that.  Some of the major ambivalent feelings I have about living across the country are cause I wish I could spend more time with you!

So anyway, I'm also sorry if I've been unable to keep you 100% abreast about what is going on in my life.  I appreciate that my mom shares with you a lot of my goings on.  I love you very much and so I really want you to know what's what.  Maybe we can be pen pals!  So let me share a little something with you that I would be happy to talk to you about in depth.  Perhaps you would like to call me or write me questions in the form of a letter.  That is absolutely welcome.

So here it goes...

I will start from the beginning of my pathway of discovery and fill in the details as I go along.

WYOMING

The sad truth about when I moved to Wyoming is well represented in this quote from Moby Dick:

"Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off—then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can."

I was running from something.  Everything in my life seemed like it had the potential to be a happy one, minus the tough economy for finding work, and yet, I was almost desperately unhappy.  Something was clearly not right and I was restless about it.  I allowed for myself that it was my job prospects that kept me so unhappy, but it definitely felt deeper than that.  Perhaps it also seemed my inability to deal with my own sexuality and relationships, but this was a bit under the surface--deliberately ignored by my conscious mind. I needed to get away from it all and Wyoming was my Pequod.

Accepting a job in Wyoming, a place I'd never been and could barely even imagine was a perfect experience for me.  And for awhile, I was way happier!  I was working on a creative job where people respected me, massaged my ego constantly, in a place that was foreign to me: ripe for discovery and exploration. In addition, after acquiring my own apartment, it was also a new sort of opportunity for me; it was one in which I could experience isolation and solitude.  There were fewer pressures from the outside world in my 2 bedroom 2 floor apartment all to myself.

And so truthfully, I was surprised and shocked that the restlessness was still there even when so much in my life had been transformed.  I was a different person in Wyoming.  I was the easterner city "boy" that everyone marveled at.  There was no pressure from my parents, no pressure from school, no pressure from friends.  Work contained only pressures that I felt confident that I could deal with.  So why was I feeling so restless that I would abandon my apartment in the middle of the night to stare at the star filled high desert sky?

Being truly alone with myself in a post-school, post-future world was devastating.  I call it post-future, because up until that point in my life, I had always held out hope that things would be better in the future.  I had markers of time and progress like tests and grades and watermarks like getting bar mitzvah-ed, graduating high school, etc.

Without those watermarks, suddenly I realized how incredibly long a lifetime is.  As a kid, I could ignore my feelings with the expectation of a greater future and no concept of time in a life beyond childhood and adolescence.  All time could be filled with distractions, mixed with endless hopes and dreams for the future, made safe by a loving family.

Alone with myself for the first time, I could feel the pain that I had been masking in my soul and had refused to face.  AND for the first time, I decided that ignoring the problem as I had tried to do for so long, was MAYBE a satisfactory way to live my short life up until that point, but in the larger scheme of things was immensely painful.  The prospect of living with that masked personal discontent unexamined for up to 60-70 more years if I lived a full life was a daunting and unbearable.  And so finally, I looked inward.

Previous to this moment at subconscious and conscious intervals, a part of myself was always judging every action I did and every feeling I had.  According to this voice in my head, something was wrong with me.

And so, I stopped judging for the first time.  What was actually going on in my head?  Well to start with, my problem that had no name related to my sexuality among other things, but it wasn't purely about my sexuality.  Much of it related to how I saw myself in relation to others socially. SELF-EXAMINATION

The sun rose on a clear September day in Cody, WY.  I heard my neighbor's horse whinny, and quietly I reflected that I had actually never had a single sexual fantasy that involved myself as a man.  Many of them simply involved that act of turning into a woman and imagining masturbating or making a sexy video for the male version of myself.  

Sometimes, the fantasies wouldn't even be sexual in nature.  They would involve finding myself unexpectedly changed into a women and going into work the next day, trying to deal with the consequences or finding that everyone had already interacted with me as a woman, known me as a woman and this was an alternate reality that I would have to adjust to.  Even this, I found titillating for the sexually repressed person that I was.

In elementary school, it was incredibly important to myself internally that I was different from the other kids.  I didn't mind being different!  I craved it.  I loved it, but first and for most, I KNEW IT.  Different how?

I didn't exactly know, but I definitely didn't like to be categorized.  I wanted other people to know it also and it hurt when they didn't.  My worst fear was that I was wrong about myself and I was the same as everybody else.  This was before I learned that being different in the ways that I was was a problem. I couldn't really put my finger on it at the time.  The reason as I can surmise was that I couldn't get out of my own point of view.  Gender was a made up category that made a simple distinction between body parts.  I assumed that everyone basically knew what I did.  Boys and girls were literally the same asides from this one almost taxonomical difference. I was interest in the difference as one of my earlier elementary school memories was when I asked my mother with fascination and obsessive interest what my name would have been if I had been born a girl.  She told me Jillian and I held onto this memory all the way up to my days in Cody.  I was regularly jealous of my sister for some minor gender related reasons that seemed normal, and I also admired and loved her so much so I would let them go!

The ways that I was different became a problem in middle school when all of the kids started acting differently and as puberty set in.  Puberty and the ways that kids began to socialize were super confusing to me!

Everyone else was in on a secret that I had never been privy.  Boys and girls started acting in crazy ways that made no sense to me.  All of the boys, even the shy ones started being sorta goofier about girls.  Most boys were acting on feelings of attraction to girls, even if that only meant by just sharing their thoughts and acting a stupid way with each other.

I didn't understand.  I didn't get the big deal over the difference between boys and girls.  Most boys were acting in ways that I didn't like and wanted no part in.  Truthfully, they were mostly doing stuff that made me not really want to be friends with them anymore.  I wanted to have friends.  Friends were important to me, but the ways in which guys started behaving made me uncomfortable to be around them a lot of the time.  I regularly made exceptions, but was definitely confused and extremely stressed by these developments and in these environments.

Meanwhile, I had (what I felt like was a weird) obsession over girls.  There was some sexual attraction as I started developing sexually later in middle school, but the attraction was always mixed with a sort of envy.  This envy made NO SENSE to me.  I was so confused!  Did other boys have this envy?  They probably didn't?  They didn't seem to have the same feelings I did but maybe I simply hadn't sexually matured as far as they had.  This is when I learned that my ways of being different were a problem, but I would often credit this feeling to not going through puberty as quickly as other people my age.  They were simply better at it than I was.  As I would get older, I would figure it out like they had and get over whatever things I was feeling.

It is around the end of middle school that I was realizing that feeling more explicit sexual desire (often, but not only for girls), was no cure to my discomfort around most boys and girls, sexually and socially.

I did a little self-examination and tried to be open with myself at this early date.  I looked at the few options I had been aware of for things that would make me different.  Was I gay?  This definitely didn't seem entirely correct and men did occasionally enter into my fantasies, but there simply was always women there too.  In these situations, I would be a woman in the scenario.  Was I bisexual?  This I decided was possible.  It seemed to make sense that since I was clearly in my head attracted to women, I couldn't be gay, so I must have been bisexual!  My homophobic young mind determined that while it was ok to be gay, I would pretend that I was straight (which is something that I think a lot of bi kids go through).

I had very little concept of what it meant to be transgender.  The only thing that I was aware of in relation to transgender identities was these joke tv shows Maury Povitch or Jerry Springer where transexual women would come onto the show and be this scandalous crazy person character.  These people thought they were something they weren't and that was that and women were attracted to men, so transexual women had to be attracted to men.

One night after watching one of these shows I had a dream that I was a woman (and this wasn't uncommon usually accompanied by euphoria) and I woke up with what must have been the most clarity about the issue of my youth.  I had a fantasy or follow-up dream (I can't remember which) that I told this to the therapist I was seeing and their response to me was, "Did you ever consider for a second that you are one?  You are a woman?" I freaked out and thought about that show with fear, disgust and (I guess self-hatred) that I--this wasn't real.  I couldn't be a woman because of my body parts and life as a trans woman seemed to be fucking awful on those shows, and being sexually attracted to women the trans women were usually "ugly" in my minds eye.

I never told my therapist and this thought was basically pushed down into my mind until I considered it yet again in Wyoming.

The thing that remained constant as I grew and developed into a young "man" was how envious I was of girls and women.  What they had, I could never have!  I looked in the mirror with a sort of disgust at what I looked like, simply feeling unattractive and embarrassed by any body part or hair that made me look like a man.  I regularly wished I could have been a girl in an abstract way (not a concrete one), but mostly tried to focus on other stuff, dreams for the future.  I felt that when I finally had sex with a woman, I would get it what sexuality was supposed to be about as a "boy" who WAS attracted to girls.

I didn't masturbate or have any sexual encounters with people until my sophomore year of college and part of the reason for this was my overall discomfort.  I had a gigantic crush on the girl that I went to prom with and late that night had the chance to push things further and the more intimate things got, the more my sexual feelings were turned off.  Basically my relationship to my own sexuality was in itself a turnoff.  My relationship with the sexual body part that I have been bestowed was itself a complicated and confused one.  Anytime sexuality became concrete, there was a seemingly unbridgeable gap between what I had and what I needed to make things feel right and stay aroused or feel pleasure.

In my bedroom in the town of 10,000 people in the middle of a sage brush steppe up to the Rocky Mountains, I considered the way that girls had ALWAYS made me feel by including me in a category of men.  I felt literally miserable.  When feminists used to use gender exclusionary language before a wider feminist movement became inclusive of transgender identities, I was restricted and not allowed, alloft without a place to fit in--only a category assigned to me MEN by these trans exclusionary feminists.  But then, I remembered the feeling of a visit I had to Los Angeles where I met my feminist friends possibly for the first time since they had been awakened to their "radical" feminist ideology and I learned about the space for trans identities (fairly recently added to their playbook This was 2012).  I remembered how free I felt among these folks to not be a guy and just to be me.

In the context of all of this, I searched the internet and found out what people said about my fantasies.  I found some very transphobic literature as it was designated as a disorder by the diagnostic and statistic manual created by the American Psychiatric Association and I found some less transphobic content as well.

I learned that transgender identities actually cross a wide range of possibilities and I learned the difference between sexuality and gender essentially for the first time.  I learned transgender folks sometimes identified in between what was called society's gender binary between men and women.  In addition, they had all different types of sexual attractions separate from and within these identities.

I immediately realized that cis gender (what is used to refer to people whose genders assigned at birth agree with the way that they feel), definitely didn’t apply to me.

I took immediately to an identity that I found mentioned called genderqueer.  People choose this word for all types of personal identification reasons.  The attractive part was that it felt like it was between masculine and feminine. Ever since that morning in Wyoming, I have been exploring and developing these thoughts.  It has been a roller coaster of emotions.

I really moved out to Los Angeles because I wanted to be near those feminist friends that I had.  I needed some space from my parents and my family and my long and storied history painfully thinking of myself as a guy, which had become more than simply a habit.  It was like a habit, but a hurtful one, one that always cut me on some level, but to which I had developed a huge amount of useful, distracting and necessary coping mechanisms so that I could lead a full life.

All of those mechanisms did and continue to attempt to derail my progress. When I had a first real sexual encounter with another person, I discovered how incredibly difficult it was to feel pleasure and satisfaction with my appearance in the context of sexual activity and in the context of my body's shape and form. This along with other realizations helped push me into what was one of the worst depressions of my life.  I mourned for my loss of being a "normal guy."  This was a fiction that I had created and still continues to influence the way that I interact with the world.  I also had moments of celebrating the same loss.  GOOD RIDDANCE.

I denied my own identity, the possibility of it even making any sense, the possibility of living a "full life" in my mind leaping out the window all at the same time that I accepted my truth.  These sort of things apparently happen concurrently and sporadically moving forward and backward between different stages of grief.

I legitimately felt like my life wasn't worth living, albeit never explicitly considered suicide.

I loved the way that my feminist friends treated me now that they didn't think I was a cis dude.  I continued to feel incredibly rewarded for my openness in my feelings and the ways that I felt comfortable interacting with the world with this new conception of self.  It was the greatest relief in my life at the same time that I struggled.

The new burden of what living my truth actually meant in the world replaced the previous self-hatred.  This was a duller type of pain, generally more outwardly focused.  And the other pain that grew and developed was the people around me not knowing or acknowledging my truth.  This all happened without any steps I took in order to change the ways I felt about my gender presentation. My concept of my gender identity also developed beyond genderqueer.  I will still use this as an identity label because on a certain level it still feels like it fits, but I can give you a more clear expression of the relationship that I feel I have with gender.

If you were to think of gender as a spectrum and not as a binary and you imagine that that spectrum has masculine on one side and feminine on the other, I would place myself a clear distinct amount of space feminine of center.

  I am not a guy, or a man.

I don't generally care about my personal presentation from an internal perspective when we are just referring to me.  In the context of social spaces however, I care a great deal!  And I have come to realize like a Tomboy who decides she wants to do stuff that is feminine--that same stuff I don't care about--MATTERS TO ME.  In the context of social situations, I really don't want to be read as cis male, even by a coworker or a stranger.  This is something that my mom finds very confusing.  Why would I have a desire to move my gender presentation almost completely into the feminine (at least of center) if I don't care?  This is who I am and they are basically rendering me invisible by dismissing who I am.  Gender really does MAINLY exist for me in the context of social situations, but it also exists in the concept of my physical body as well.

As I mentioned earlier, I suffered from what is called gender dysphoria all throughout my teenage years up until the present.  This was a feeling of disconnect between what my body looks like and what my mind feels like it should look like.  This was often quite triggering to my depression as was the things that I believe testosterone was doing to my mind and feelings.

These things plus my desire to present as female and my panic and depression of that year a year ago pushed me to visit a hormone doctor and begin taking hormone pills...an estrogen supplement and a testosterone blocker.

So hormonally at this moment, I am female.

My friends and family now refer to me as Jamie and it is the name I would like for you to try and call me as well.  Everything in the past and that you have known of me before, and this letter has added up to equal who I am today.

I do still mostly dress the way you'll have remembered seeing me, but I am working on it and increased feminine presentation might make me feel more comfortable with the narrative that is still 2.5 years new to my life as compared to the previous 25.5 years.  It is an adjustment for me as well as other people in my family, but it is just the way that things are.  Whether or not it is a positive change or not, it is constantly developing (my gender identity) and also unavoidable.  As soon as I would give up on this new narrative, I would have given up on the possibility of a happy life.

At the moment I use and tell other people to use gender neutral pronouns to refer to me.  These pronouns are a creation of an alternative culture to mainstream English language so people claim that they are unnatural, but what is really unnatural is the concept of the gender binary that has been so enforced by European and christian society partially as a way to economically and physically oppress women and maintain past and contemporary power structures.

The pronouns I use are: they, them, their

And I would appreciate if you attempted to add them to your lexicon to refer to me.  I am very understanding of folks who mess it up.  Because of my 25.5 year narrative for myself, I occasionally mess up my own pronouns.  It doesn't mean that my new narrative isn't true, but simply that old habits are hard to break.

I may in the future begin using feminine pronouns: she, her, hers, but that isn't right now.  I just definitely don't want to be he, him, his

I am very glad to be able to share this with you and I'd look forward to discussing it further, whether on the phone or by pen pal.

Love always, Jamie 

[jungkookienoona]

The Meme and His Tutor

Part 13: The Time There Was A Meme War

Recommended Song: I Luv It by PSY

|All Chapters|

Summary:

Jungkook started something he could not finish and you begin to question yourself.

Genre: Fluff, comedy

Pairing: Jungkook X Reader (Y/N)

Warnings: Swearing

Word Count: 3745

Length: 13/?

Since your first lesson back after returning from Korea, you had taken Jungkook's advice to study harder. For the past few weeks your lessons focused on correcting the errors brought to light on your trip, and you were slowly gaining a better understanding of how to speak less formally.

When Jungkook rang you it just so happened that you were busy studying, a highlighter between your teeth as you answered the Skype call.

"Annyeonghaseyo Kookie." A small smile gracing your lips as you gave a wave.

A mischievous grin appeared on his lips, "Hello Noona."

There was a look in his eye that had you feeling suspicious.

"I don't like that look." You said, closing your textbook. "What are you up to?"

"Nothing."

"Do you really expect me to believe you?"

He ran a hand through his hair and you felt your heart stutter a little at how attractive he looked while doing so. No, stop. It wasn't the time for that.

"I'm not doing anything Noona."

"Okay... so what have you done?"

He bit his bottom lip in a failed attempt to stifle an amused chuckle. Why did he have to look so good? You shook your head. That look plus his amusement meant only on possible thing. You quickly opened your browser and typed in the address to his blog. There it was. The first thing to greet you on his site, a meme of you.

"Jeon Jungkook."

"Ye?"

"Prepare to die."

Jungkook started laughing, leaning back in his seat with an arm thrown across his face as you open up that one folder on your desktop. You were prepared for this day. Since spotting his folder full of memes on your first day in Korea, you had been plotting your revenge. And when you arrived safely at home you put your plan into action, screenshotting Skype and downloading pictures sent over KaKao. And with each new image, you created a new meme for your arsenal. It was time to release your creations onto the world.

Having recovered from his little laughing fit, Jungkook was watching you intently from the other side of the screen.

"Noona..."

"Yes, Kookie?" You said, creating a new Tumblr post and selecting your meme. It was a tough choice.

"What are you doing?"

You recycled his earlier words. "Nothing." You added a few hashtags and pressed post with a smile.

You heard Jungkook's phone vibrate. He picked it up and quickly checked it with a shocked gasp.

"Noona! That's so mean! I look ugly in that."

"I looked ugly in your one!... Also, do you get notifications every time I post? How long have you been doing that?"

"Since I followed you." You were going to ask why when you noticed a new notification had appeared. Clicking on it, you were not surprised to see Chubs’ ship blog reblogging the posts. You had an audience already.

"Noonaa~" Jungkook called and you refreshed the page.

Sitting at the top of your dash was your face, eyes wide and mouth open as if prepared to sneeze. Beneath it was the caption: 'when Jungkook Skypes you'. He'd even watermarked it.

"You little shit!"

You went into your folder again as he cackled in the background. It didn't take long to find one you wanted to use. It was the screenshot you had taken from when he was shirtless (the one that was still your desktop background) but with "Yokhareulharyeoko fuck boi cheoreom (Tries to act like a fuck boi)" at the top and "Hajiman geu-i museowo yeosang aidol. (But is afraid of female idols.)"

Jungkook was wiping tears out of his eyes when his phone went off. He paused and narrowed his eyes at you.

"Yah! What's a fuck...boi?" He glanced back at his phone, "And I'm not afraid of female idols!"

You lost it, covering your face with your hands as Jungkook mulled in his own confusion.

Between laughs, you managed to explain that a fuck boi was similar to being an international playboy, but meant acting even more like a dickhead.

"I'm not a fuck boi." He pouted.

"I don't know, going on Skype shirtless seems pretty fuck boi type behaviour to me." You grinned evilly.

"I put on a robe for you!" He said then winced at the sound of his voice. "I have to be quiet. Hoseok went to bed early."

"And how can you say you're not scared of female idols? You move away from them and hide behind the members."

"I'm being polite and respectful."

"There are compilation videos of you avoiding them. You backed away from a few with a terrified expression."

"... I was scared of accidentally starting career damaging rumours."

"Yeah right."

"If I was scared of women I wouldn't be friends with you." He gestured across the screen to you.

"I'm not an idol. It's different."

You got another notification about Chubs' ship blog reblogging from you but this time with a caption. 'HOLY SHIT! HE LET HER SEE HIM SHIRTLESS! AND SHE HAS BLESSED US BY SHARING IT WITH US!'

"What is it?" He asked.

"Check the ship blog." While he was doing that you scrolled through your folder, deciding what to post next.

"I don't see what the big deal is about me not wearing a top."

You sighed and minimised the folder to look at him. "Why do you have to wear swim shirts when you do things involving swimming on camera?"

"Because we don't want ARMY dying at the sight of our abs?"

"Exactly- wait, no!"

"Yep."

"It's because BigHit makes more money by teasing us with little glimpses of skin."

"And because in Korea we have to swim clothed."

There was another notification waiting for you on your Tumblr.

"Are you not going to look, Noona?" He was sitting smugly and you wished you were there in Korea to push him off his chair. "It's a good one. One of my best!”

It was you in your panda onesie, face bright red. 'Says she isn't adorable but is adorable af.'

"Next time I'm in Korea you're going to die."

You decided your next attack would include more than one meme. You found the ones you were looking for and started uploading them. Meanwhile, Jungkook was staring intently at his screen. A pair of circle glasses had found their way onto the bridge of his nose and you had to tear your eyes away from the Skype window. They were your weakness.

You heard his phone go off and sat back while he took a moment to look at them.

"Yah! Noona! Why so many?!"

"Don't call me cute!"

"...At least you Korean is improving."

You smirked and remembered the ones you had selected, one of him being shook, another of him spinning in his chair out of boredom and a selca of him with a bad hair day.

"I've been practising."

"Good." It was his turn to smirk when you saw he had uploaded half a dozen pictures of you including ones he'd taken on your trip to Korea.

"Is...Is that me sleeping?" You enlarged one particular photo you'd never seen before. It looked like it was taken using the front-facing camera and you could just make out the leather of Jungkook's jacket as you leant against his shoulder.

"It was after you landed. Remember?"

"Oh yeah... You took a picture of me sleeping?"

You swore you saw a hint of pink get added to his cheeks as he scratched the back of his neck with a sheepish smile.

"I couldn't help myself. Noona looked so peaceful and childlike."

"I'm just glad it's dark. You can't see a lot of my face."

"I didn't want to use flash and wake you."

"How considerate," you grumbled, going back to looking at the other images. "I need to stop wearing my panda onesie. All the worst pictures are of me in it."

"Noooo~ Noona should wear it more. Noona looks best in her onesie. See."

Your Skype chat was then filled with screenshots of you in the onesie as well as some pictures that were sneakily taken on the movie night.

"How did you take those without me noticing?" You said, eyeing one particular picture. It looked like a failed attempt at taking a photo of you from the side as all he managed to capture was your linked hands in his lap.

He tapped the side of his head with a smirk, "That's a secret."

"Aish. You're an impossible child."

He frowned, "I am not a child!"

"You act like one. I have proof."

You uploaded a dozen more screenshots to Tumblr all with various pieces of text of the images. There was a candid one of him you snuck at the restaurant after going to the market. He was cradling his phone in his hands, eyes bright as he stared down at his new phone case it in adoration. A screenshot of him pressing a kiss to Honey's head was followed by one of him with a blanket draped over his head.

"See, a child."

His frown deepened.

"Does Noona only see me as a child even after all my goodnight selcas?"

By some miracle, you didn't blush as he reminded you of the selcas he sent you when he was preparing for bed every night.

"T-t-that has nothing to do with your child like behaviour."

"But I have muscle." Jungkook pushed up his shirt sleeve to give you a better view of his flexed bicep. "Does this look like a child to you?"

"Stop!"

"Or this?" You noticed his hand grip the hem of his t-shirt and in a burst of panic, you slammed the laptop shut.

You got a message over Kakao.

'Or this'

It was followed by the image that you wanted to avoid. His shirt was pulled up revealing his abs and he had the cockiest smirk you had ever seen.

'By the way, you were very rude just now. You're going to pay for that.'

Your eyes went wide as you opened up Tumblr on your phone to see even more memes. This was meant to be your revenge. Why the hell were you taking turns?

Jungkook was waiting for you on Skype, his shirt back in place. You coughed to get his attention.

"Has Noona recovered?" He teased.

You scowled at him, "You're the biggest little shit. I'm supposed to be getting back at you and it turns into a competition."

"Which I won."

"You think you won?"

"I always win."

"Prepare to lose then."

There was a video file from back near the beginning of Jungkook's lessons when his English was still broken and he frequently switched between the two languages. You had recorded it to see if you could find a way to improve your teaching strategy. With a merciless grin, you uploaded a small segment of it to Tumblr.

He tripped over his words and stuttered often. It was adorable and was sure to make him angry. It always embarrassed him when you reminded him of how he started off. And sure enough, not a minute later, Jungkook had his head buried in his hands.

"Noona~ delete it!"

"Not until you admit I won and upload a post saying you concede."

You were lying. He looked thoughtful for a moment then nodded.

"Fine Noona. You win."

And then he was clicking and typing away. You waited patiently for the post to appear on your dash. When it did you were a little confused. It was a video with Honey as the thumbnail and the caption: 'Noona wins (this was filmed before I changed her name)'

You pressed play and was met by the familiar intro to Cypher Part 4. Jungkook was nowhere to be seen as the camera pointed at the wall of his bedroom you had grown accustomed to seeing.

All of a sudden, Jungkook's head popped up over the edge of the desk in a pair of oversized sunglasses. He mouthed the words 'ireum, ireum!' And then ducked back down only for Honey to pop up in a matching pair of glasses in time to 'Sorry bae.'

The video continued like that until the end of Namjoon's verse where the video also ended. You were bent over, clutching your stomach in a fit of laughter, temporarily forgetting that you were still in a Skype call with Jungkook.

"Oh god. Why is he like this?" You said when you finally regained composure, wiping a tear from your eye.

"It's a talent of mine." He said, surprising you enough to yelp. "Did you like it?"

You pressed a hand to your chest, willing your heart to stop hammering. "You're the biggest meme possibly on earth."

He gave you a smile and then he was clicking and typing again. It didn't take long for a new post to appear. Another video. It was a video of him singing along to Very Very Very by IOI but when it got to a certain point he would chug a little Thomas the Tank engine along. It was captioned: 'I'll be a meme more because I like Noona's laugh.'

A giggle slipped out while you watched him push along the little train. Where he got it from you didn't know but it didn't matter.

"That was adorable, Kookie!"

He ducked his head but you could see he was smiling proudly for making you laugh.

"Losing was worth it."

You decided to check on the ship blog to see how Chubs was handling the memeage. Apparently, not very well. She had moved on to flat out saying she was dying. Jungkook noticed you had gone quiet and asked you what you were doing.

"Are you plotting something? Because I have no other videos to post."

"I'm checking in on Chubs. She's said she's dead five times now."

"Ask her whose memes killed her!"

"Jungkook!"

"Judging by the tags on each meme post she reblogged, it was both of us... tell her not to die. I need someone to document our history."

This time your cheeks did heat up.

"I'll get right on that."

You heard a door open and Jin came into view, peering over Jungkook's shoulder.

"Igeos-eun jeolm-eun sarang-i doen geos? Naneun neohui dul-ege silmanghaessda. (Is this a young love thing? I'm disappointed in the both of you.)"

There was that word again. Why did it keep popping up so much recently? And why is it always Jungkook? You noticed Jungkook glance at you before apologising and giving his attention to Jin.

"Do you need something?"

"Oneul sueob-e chekeu-inhaneun geosman-eulo, Kookie. (Just checking in on today's lesson, Kookie.)" Jin caught your attention with a wave. "Igeos-eun yeong-eo sueobcheoreom boiji anh-eoyo, Y/N. (This doesn't look like an English lesson Y/N.)"

You sent your message to Chubs and gave Jin a sheepish smile. "Urin swigoiss-eo? (We're taking a break?)"

"... Seoloui mim-eul mandeuneunga? (By… making memes of each other?)"

"Geuneun geugeos-eul sijaghaessda. Naneun modu sueob-eul gajil junbigadoeeo iss-eossjiman, geuneun yaggan-ui ttong-idoegiro gyeolsimhaessda! (He started it. I was all prepared to have a lesson but then he decided to be a little shit!)"

"Noona!"

"If I'm going down I'm taking you with me!"

Jin braced himself on the back of Jungkook's chair as he broke into laughter.

Jungkook pouted, "But I didn't do anything!"

"You know what you did!" You nodded in Jin's direction, hoping that despite being on Skype Jungkook caught on to not wanting to say anything in front of Jin.

"Neo dul-eun neomu isanghae. (You two are so strange.)"

Chubs finally responded to your message about not dying.

'How can I not die when you two act like you were made for each other.'

'Don't say stuff like that. I'm just Y/N-chingu.'

'Yeah right. You two are totally not just friends. I see the way you look at each other.' Was her immediate response.

You let out a huff and typed out a reply. 'Even if I did feel something more for him (which I don't!) he doesn't like me like that. Nothing is ever going to happen.'

'Keep lying to yourself.'

"Noona~ don't get distracted. You're meant to be spending time with me!" Jungkook whined, drawing your attention back to him. You noticed Jin rolling his eyes.

You got another message from Chubs, 'You seriously need to sit down and have a think about how you actually feel about him. It's not good to be in denial for so long.'

"Noona~!"

"Sorry Kookie, Chubs was over reacting to our little meme war."

"Chubs-i nuguya? (Who's Chubs?)" Jin asked at the same time Jungkook wondered what she was saying.

"Geunyeoneun nae chingu ya. (She's my friend.)" You told Jin before looking at Jungkook, "Nothing important."

"Why won't you tell me?"

"I told you it's nothing."

"Noona~"

Jin smacked his shoulder, "Neoneun Y/N-i anj-aseo agicheoreom uneun geos-eul deudgo sip-eo handago saeng-gaghanayo? (Do you think Y/N wants to sit and listen to you whine like a baby?)"

"Geunyeoneun geugeos-eul saranghanda. (She loves it.)" He said with a smug smile.

For some reason, you couldn't bring yourself to argue with him about it. Jin chuckled to himself and ruffled Jungkook's hair, "Jeulgeoun aireul gaj-ja! Neomu heungbunhaji mala. Geuneunleohji anh-eumyeon oneul bam jamdeulji anh-eul geos-ida. (Have fun kids! Don't get too excited. Otherwise he won't sleep tonight.)"

"Hyung!"

You waved goodbye to Jin and watched Jungkook shake his messy hair back into place. You couldn't help what you said next.

"Messy hair suits you."

He paused at that looking slightly shocked.

"R-r-really?"

"Ye."

His hands immediately shot up into his hair, messing it up again.

"Like this Noona?"

You pursed your lips in thought, "Separate your fringe... Ye, like that."

He grabbed his phone and took a picture. Your phone buzzed. He sent the selca to you over Kakao.

Your heart skipped a beat. What on earth was wrong with you? This was only Jungkook. Jungkook, your tutor and tutee. Jungkook, the Golden Maknae of BTS. Jungkook who saw you as Y/N-chingu and nothing more.

You cleared your throat, "It really suits you Kookie."

"Taehyung tells me he likes my hair different but if Noona likes it messy, I like it messy too." He smiled and the sight of his dimple made your tummy do a little flip.

"You can't like something just because I do. What do you prefer?"

"Messy."

"Honestly?" You asked, ignoring the flashing light on your phone alerting you of Tumblr notifications.

"Honest. I don't like the product they put in it. It feels icky."

"Icky? You're such a child." You laughed.

"Yah! What do I have to do to make you see me as a man?!" There was a hint of annoyance in his voice.

"Why does it matter?"

He hesitated for a moment, "I don't want Noona to treat me like a child. To see me as a child. I'm an adult."

You started to giggle which only riled him up further. "I am the strongest member and only an inch shorter than Namjoon-hyung!"

"That doesn't necessarily make you a man. You still act like a child." You were dragging it out, seeing how far you could push him. And watching him grow hot and bothered was an extra.

"Was I not a man to you when you visited? I drove you around Seoul and bought you things. I treated Noona like a princess!"

"Yeah... you did. So it seems you can only act like an adult when I'm there in person."

Your phone screen lit up with yet another Tumblr notification. You decided to check it.

"Next time you visit I'll show you how much of a man I can be. I'll treat Noona like a queen."

The next time you visited...You had yet to tell Jungkook that even after picking up a few more hours at work it didn't look like you were going to be able to afford to visit after exam season like you had discussed. He'd only insist on paying if you told him and you couldn't have that. Not again.

"Yeah. Next time."

"You're going to love it, I have so much planned!"

You felt your heart sink with guilt. Maybe you could get a second job... you scrolled through the notes you had received on the mobile app. The responses were overwhelming. Jungkook's video had already hit a thousand notes in just under an hour. The ship blog was thriving with activity; a new post appearing every time you refreshed. You were suddenly aware of all the attention on the two of you.

"Noona?" You heard Jungkook call but you were busy reading one of Chubs's responses to a very annoyed anon yelling at her to 'spill the details on the couple'. "Noona!"

"Yes, Kookie?"

"When are your exams over?"

You bit your lip thinking about it.

"My last one is in three weeks time."

"Okay, I'll-"

Before he could finish what he was saying Jin came back into the room.

"Neuj-eoss eo. Neoneun jaleo gaya hae. (It's late. You should go to bed.)"

"Hyung~"

You giggled as he pouted and crossed his arms.

"Neoneun naeil malhal su iss-eoyo. Jam jal sigan-iya. (You can talk tomorrow. Time to sleep.)"

Jungkook nodded, "Okay, I'll say goodnight."

You said goodnight to Jin who left the two of you alone.

"Go to sleep, Kookie."

"I'm not tired."

"It doesn't matter. If you stay up you will be tomorrow."

"Fine... Goodnight Noona... I really had fun today. Your laugh is beautiful."

A warmth burned your cheeks, "Your hair makes you look handsome."

"Don't you mean more handsome?" He teased, wiggling his eyebrows.

"Go to bed!"

"Goodnight Noona! Sweet dreams, think of me."

"It's still the afternoon here. Sweet dreams Kookie."

He smiled, then an idea seemed to have popped into his head as the smile gained a hint of mischief. You wondered what on earth it could be until your thoughts were interrupted by him imitating Jin's signature flying kiss. You sat there, a little stunned not knowing what to do.

Jungkook was quick to tell you, "You're meant to catch it!"

"Oh, uh, try it again."

He blew you another and you reached out to grasp the kiss then clutched your hands to your chest as if holding something precious.

He grinned. "Have a good day and think of me tonight."

"Goodnight BunBun."

He grinned and gave a little wave then hung up.

What the heck just happened?

A/N: Co-written with @tragicshadows . So Y/N is finally beginning to question herself thanks to Chubs and the constant appearance of the L-word. And Kookie seems to be trying his best to make Y/N see him as a man, I wonder why that is? As always we would love to hear from you guys so feel free to message either one of us.

This work of fiction is copyright © JungkookieNoona and protected under UK and international law. All rights reserved. Any unauthorised broadcasting, copying or reposting will constitute an infringement of copyright.

[wandering-system-of-a-time-lord]

Playground and getting Motion Sick...

My legs still hurts and my lower back hurts. I think I need to start doing some back exercises and some arm lifting. Carrying a camera bad with telephoto lens and two other lenses along a bottle of water for hours does ache. I have not view what photos I have taken but I will in awhile from now. I still need to get my other blog, set up correctly along with finalising my watermark/Logo.

Today was a good day, and yes when I had moved away from the river, I started to get warm from the sun. I tried to watercolour a plant but I think I failed in it. Why? Because my mind was on someone else from the past. I think of him daily, wishing to see him. To hear his voice again. He's such a nice, loving guy. He vanished from me for many years... I do hope I get to see him again one day.

Anyways besides that little off topic... ummmm.... yea my painting of a plant sucked. -she looks down at her painting and sighs before tossing it away- I'm better at painting at the desk than standing up and holding it. I have Sakura Koi 24 halfpans watercolour field sketch box. my hand was shaky so I think thats what did me in on my painting. Ileft again to walk further on the trail, came to another plant. Tried again and.... -tosses the 2nd painting out-..nope.. There's small paintings anyways, like postcard size. I stayed in the park for hours and walked to the other side. I found some geese and took pictures of them, then I left. I had passed by a playground few times before, so I figure what the hell, took my bag off setting it down next to the pole of the swing. I still had my phone in my hand as I was listening to music. Listening to Doctor Who music, ehehehehe. I started to swing, doooood... its been years since I swung. I ended up having fun, like lieterly screaming in excitment, just being silly for once. I felt like I was a child, like age 7. I also played on my phone while swinging. -she looks down, toeing a circle with her trainer- ummm..... yea.... I have motion sickness thing. It's worse when I'm looking at a screen of a device while ...say a car is moving. I get sick, sometimes to the point of throwing up. Yea... uhhhhh.... apparently being on a swing while moving back and forth and using the phone was a huge bad idea. BAD IDEA!!! I got really really sick, my head was hurting, I felt like throwing up. Ao I got off the swing, climbed up on the playset and sat down, trying to calm my tummy down. Still listening to music. I had to text the idiot about it and said I cant move at all cause I was so sick. Some text later, he told me that Okaasa is on her way. That she's going to pick me up. She knows the layout of the park so that was good. Idiot had given her a pack of these tablets called Nauzes, that can just about instantly kill the feeling of being motion sick. I waited awhile then she pulled up, I climbed down and got into her Rav4. She gave me my Nauzes and I took two of them. Dooood... I was really sick. Sooo..... I learned something new and also learned a lesson. Never play with the phone while swinging on a swing at the same time. As it has the same effect if in a vehicle. It almost became a hard lesson if I had threw up, but I didn't. Not doing that again for sure.

So now I'm here at the house, on my desktop, Dragon. Typing all of this down before I post it. Yea a long one. I had a lot to say. Anyways I'm gonna play a game or just .... I dont know something. umm... laters!!

- Time Lord Kiara

[josephlrushing]

LG V60 ThinQ with Dual ScreenReview: It Might Not Be Mr. Right, but It Could Be Mr. Right Now

The first device to offer an optional LG Dual Screen case was the LG V50 ThinQ, which was soon followed by the LG G8X ThinQ. While I liked what LG was trying to do by adding the optional second display to both of those earlier models, it wasn’t until the LG V60 ThinQ with Dual Screen — mixed with the crazy times that we are living in — that it all finally made sense.

Let’s be clear, even on the more pocketable LG V50 ThinQ and G8X ThinQ smartphones, the addition of the Dual Screen case made for a device that was at all times a bit bulky and heavier than normal. The LG V60 ThinQ on its own starts as a super-sized device; at first glance, it would seem that putting a Dual Screen case on such a large phone would result in a veritable brick. Well, it is but it isn’t, and right now the size is just fine with me.

The LG V60 ThinQ

Maybe it’s because — other than weekly grocery and post office runs — I’ve been isolating in my home since March 9th, but pocketability and portability just haven’t seemed particularly important these days. Much more desirable? A large, bright screen and a fast processor — both of which are present in the LG V60 ThinQ.

Included in the box are the V60 ThinQ smartphone, a microfiber cloth, a USB Type-C to Type-C charging cable, a wall charger, a SIM tool, a quick start guide, and a product safety and warranty information booklet.

On its own, the LG V60 ThinQ measures approximately 6.7″ tall by 3.1″ wide by 0.35″ thick, and it weighs 7.6 ounces; it other words, it’s a beast. The display features a 6.8” OLED FHD+ with Cinematic FullVision, 2460×1080 resolution, and a 20.5:9 aspect ratio. The phone’s body is composed of Gorilla Glass 6 on the back with a Gorilla Glass 5 display on the front; a gold-colored aluminum frame wraps around all of the sides. The phone feels solid in hand; while its edges from the top appear steeply vertical, the glass on the back is curved so that you won’t have sharp edges digging into your palm when you’re holding it.

Although the V60 ThinQ is on the larger side, it manages to not feel too unwieldy. The display has a very thin ~1.2″ long speaker embedded in its center top. Directly under that, there is a punch-hole camera; otherwise, it’s just a big slab of glass. The front display has slightly beveled, 2.5D glass. I’ve mentioned before that I prefer a flatter screen like the one on the V60 ThinQ versus one of the curvier 3D glass displays. On the left side of the phone, there is a microphone, the volume buttons, and a dedicated Google Assistant button that seems largely superfluous since you can’t reassign it and you can access the assistance by swiping up from either bottom corner or saying “hey, Google …”.

On the bottom of the V60 ThinQ, there is a 3.5mm headphone jack, a USB Type-C port, a microphone, and a speaker. The headphone jack seems like a bit of a throw-back at this point, but LG has really stayed vigilant with its support for those who prefer wireless headphones. LG continues to support its Hi-Fi Quad-DAC features that can only work with wired headphones, and the digital-to-audio converter (DAC) produces a rich and immersive music audio experience. I’m pretty sure that the V60 ThinQ is the only current flagship still offering a headphones jack, so if you care for wired headphones over wireless, this is the phone for you. Since I’ve been sheltering in place for the last two months, I have been able to rediscover the joy of using some of my nicer wired headphones with this phone; so in its own little way, the V60 ThinQ has managed to spark joy in a trying time.

On the right side of the phone, there is a power button. Okay, I have a quibble … if I were designing my perfect phone, I would have the power button on the right side with the volume buttons directly above or below. I realize that this is a personal preference, but it really makes sense when the Dual Screen case is on the phone, as we’ll discuss later.

At the top of the phone, there is a microphone and a combination of SIM and microSD memory card tray.

In most markets, you can get the V60 ThinQ in either Classy Blue or Classy White. The blue combined with the gold trim is surprisingly pretty, and it’s too bad almost everyone will either keep theirs hidden in the Dual Screen case. Even though the v60 is MIL-STD 810G tested, with so much glass exposed it would be prudent to also keep a slim case on hand for times when you’re not using the Dual Screen case. You can see the full specs for the LG V60 ThinQ here.

On the back, you’ll find the rear camera array lined in a single row, similar in appearance to the Samsung Galaxy S10. Most phones seem to be moving to a square or rectangle camera array shape; I don’t have a real preference, but some might see a row array as dated. The rear cameras include a 64-megapixel main camera, a 13-megapixel wide-angle camera, and a time-of-flight sensor for depth and 3D photo features. As you can see, the back is a huge slab of glass; the V60 is prone to showing fingerprints and random smears. If it’s covered in a case, you won’t even notice, but you’ll be glad for that included microfiber cloth when you are carrying it naked.

The Display

Take a look at these photos and tell me if you see any obvious deal-breakers? Some might not like the black bezels around the V60 ThinQ’s screen; the bezels measure approximately 3mm on the sides, 4mm on the top, and 7mm at the bottom. The 10-megapixel front-facing camera is just a hole-punch design, so there are obviously not multiple cameras or sensors present. It’s also worth mentioning that unlike many other phones, the LG does not offer face unlock security; your options are swipe to unlock, using a pattern, using a numeric PIN, entering a password, and in-display fingerprint scanning (which works very well). One last thing that might be a deal-breaker is the V60 ThinQ screen’s refresh rate. If you’re used to using a phone with a 90Hz or 120Hz screen (like a newer OnePlus, Pixel, or Samsung flagship), you might notice that the scrolling isn’t quite as smooth. If you haven’t been regularly using a device with a higher refresh rate, or if you are able to appreciate that a lower refresh rate means the battery will last even longer, the 60Hz display will not bother you at all. Otherwise, the display excellent at showing deep blacks and vivid colors; it can also be made almost blindingly bright

  Battery Life, Speed, and Operating System

The V60 ThinQ has a very generous 5,000mAh which can get me through a day and a half of steady use before a charge is absolutely necessary — but that’s only when the phone is being used without the Dual Screen case. Using the Dual Screen case knocks off at least a third of the expected battery life. When it’s time to top it off, the V60 supports Qualcomm Quick Charge 4.0 through the USB Type-C port as well as the convenience of Qi wireless charging. The V60 ThinQ is loaded with the top-of-the-line Qualcomm Snapdragon 865 Octa-core chip (the same one that’s in the Samsung S20 series), and the phone has a respectable 8GB RAM with 128GB user memory and microSD memory card expansion possible. The LG V60 ThinQ runs Android 10, which is the latest version of Android available … right now. I’m a little bit concerned because, in the past, LG hasn’t been great about regularly pushing security or feature updates. However, the latest update on the V60 ThinQ is April 29th which is on par with the Pixel 4 XL’s May 5th update and OnePlus’s May 6th update. To be fair, Samsung hasn’t updated the Galaxy S20 series since March 27th (on my AT&T version, anyway). Hopefully, LG is going to continue to do better with updates.

The Camera

The camera is usually the point where a phone that I’m reviewing will either set itself apart from others or it will slide into a mediocre pack. The ideal camera on any phone, at least for me, is one that can take consistently good photos without a lot of fiddling around and without taking too long. While I haven’t been able to use the LG while traveling, as I usually try to do for reviews, I have used the V60 ThinQ all around our home and yard during this quarantine, taking photos of daily life as it happens. These photos were resized to 2500 pixels and renamed, but otherwise, they haven’t been retouched. Some have an @geardiary watermark on them because the V60 ThinQ has a camera setting that will automatically add them on its own; this feature is fantastic for perfectly framed shots, but it’s not so great if you have to crop. Even so, automatic watermarking is a surprisingly handy set-it-and-forget-it feature that I wish every camera on every different manufacturer’s phone had. You can click on any one of these photos to start a slideshow.

  All this photo needs is a little cropping and tweaking, and it would be ready to use in a post; that’s a handy feature for a blogger!

And while it may seem like a little thing to some, I like that you can set Google Photos to be the default gallery over the included LG app; that is impossible to do on the Samsung Galaxy S20 Ultra.

On its own, the LG V60 ThinQ has been an enjoyable phone to use, but it happens to have an ace up its sleeve when it’s in the Dual Screen Case.

The LG V60 ThinQ Dual Case

Why would I want to go out of my way to add extra weight and bulk to my already chunky LG V60 ThinQ? Ordinarily, I might have to take a hard pass. Sheltering at home for the past 2+ months has given me a new perspective on what I find useful and what I don’t. Suddenly portability isn’t as huge a deal to me, and the ability to multitask is now most important. The LG V60 ThinQ Dual Screen case has made it a cinch to handle two tasks at once, although the experience isn’t without caveats.

One of the first caveats I’ll bring up is that LG has once again made the Dual Screen case hardware so that it covers up the USB Type-C port on the bottom of the V60ThinQ.

LG G8X ThinQ in Dual Screen case on top of the LG V50 ThinQ in its Dual Screen case.

I’m not sure why they discontinued the open bottom with POGO pin design of the V50 ThinQ and its Dual Screen case when they made the Dual Screen case for the G8X ThinQ, but once again, for the V60 ThinQ, we are left with having to use an easy-to-misplace magnetic plug that snaps onto the end of a Type-C cable. For a better look at what I’m talking about, take a look at this shot comparing the open bottom of the V50 ThinQ in its Dual Screen case versus the closed bottom of the G8X ThinQ in its Dual Screen case. The good news is that you can wirelessly charge the V60 ThinQ while it’s in the DualCase on any Qi-enabled charging pad.

  The Dual Screen case is 6.96″ tall by 3.4″ wide by 0.6″ thick, and on its own, it weighs 4.7 ounces; with the LG V60 ThinQ installed, the combo weighs a whopping 12.3 ounces. Yeah, that’s not a typo. :grimace:

In return for that extra weight, you get two matching 6.8″ FHD+ OLED (2460 x 1080 and 395 ppi) displays that can allow you to become a master multitasker. The only front-facing camera is on the main (right) screen, but the identical screen on the right has the same hole-punch camera. It’s symmetrical, and it doesn’t bug me.

You can personalize the second screen to match your main screen’s wallpaper. You can add dock apps, widgets, and app folders to it; in other words, it’s like having a second phone that can communicate (almost) flawlessly with your main phone.

Now, are you going to get the full-sized tablet screen experience you get with a folding display smartphone such as the Samsung Galaxy Fold or the Huawei Mate X? Obviously not. The bezels on both screens make that impractical and ugly.

But what you can do with the second screen is have your email open on one side while you watch YouTube videos on the other. You can peruse Instagram while on a Zoom call. You can have messages open while you’re reading a book. You can have a game with obnoxious ads open on one screen while you read the news on the other screen. Yes, you can use the second screen as a gamepad; yes, you can use the second screen as a live viewfinder when taking photos, and yes, you can use the LG Smart Keyboard as an edge-to-edge keyboard for a cute little on-the-go mini laptop. But let’s get real. The main benefit for some people will be that they can have a dictionary open on one screen while they are playing Word with Friends on the other.

When you’re using the Dual Screen features, you can swap screens from the main to the second screen, you can put the main screen to sleep, or you can turn off the Dual Screen completely. The Dual Screen case folds 360º so you can fold the second screen behind the main screen when you need to reply to emails or answer texts with both thumbs; it’s a bit difficult to manage actual keying when the Dual Screen case is open, otherwise, unless you are proficient at typing with your pointer fingers.

The last thing I want to bring up is the handy cover display on the front cover of the Dual Screen case. It offers built-in notifications, the date, and time, as well as battery information. It’s very handy to have this info available when the V60 ThinQ is in the Dual Screen case.

Pandemics are weird. The things that seemed important a few months ago, like pocketable phones with cute little displays, aren’t quite as appealing anymore. Needs and wants change, and right now — a phone that can give me two large, fully independent and functioning displays without having to switch back and forth between two apps on a single screen seems like a no-brainer. With the Dual Screen case installed on the LG V60 ThinQ, I feel like I am functioning at a more efficient level than normal. Right now, that’s priceless.

The LG V60 ThinQ with Dual Screen Case retails between $800 and $999 depending on where and how It’s purchased; it is available directly from LG, as well as AT&T (expect plenty of pre-loaded bloatware), Sprint, Verizon, and other retailers.

Source: Manufacturer supplied review sample

What I Like: 5G support; 3.5mm headphone jack; The LG V60 ThinQ in blue with the gold accents is gorgeous; The screen is brilliant; The phone is responsive and fast; You can add a microSD card to expand storage; The Dual Screen case is easy to activate, personalize, and control; Excellent battery life (when not using the Dual Screen case); IP68 dust and water-resistance; Excellent Quad-DAC features that work with wired headphones

What Needs Improvement: Battery life takes a huge ding when running both screens; Phone will be too large for many — one-hand use is practically impossible — even without the Dual Screen case; Adding the Dual Screen case makes the already large LG V60 ThinQ bricklike; No face-ID; The proprietary magnetic charging attachment needs to go; The bezels are still just a tad too large between the phone and the second screen when the LG V60 ThinQ is in the Dual Case — If LG can ever get the bezels eliminated when the phone is in the Dual Case, they will have a solid folding phone alternative; No option to enable 90Hz or 120Hz

from Joseph Rushing https://geardiary.com/2020/05/17/lg-v60-thinq-with-dual-screen-review/

[techmno-blog]

Huawei P20 Lite review: Premium Looks, Average Performance.

Huawei is still on the roll to dominate the smartphone scene when they announced the P20 series last March 2018. While it's been 5 months since the Chinese brand released their lineup, especially its younger brother, the P20 Lite, is it still worth to buy this amidst the massive wave of new phones releasing from other brands and even their sub-brand Honor? Lets find out in this review. Before that, here's the specs of the phone.

Huawei P20 Lite Specifications:

Kirin 659 octa-core processor

4GB of RAM

5.84-inch FullView 2.0 full HD+ display 19:9 display aspect ratio, 2280 x 1080 resolution

64GB of storage, expandable via microSD

16-megapixel primary camera sensor 2-megapixel secondary sensor with PDAF and LED Flash

16-Megapixel f/2.0 camera sensor

Dual SIM 3G, LTE WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, A-GPS, Fingerprint scanner, USB-C

3000mAh battery with Fast Charging

Android Oreo 8.0 with EMUI 8.0

The design language of the phone is the same with P20 and the P20 Pro. Glass back, metal sides, and the protruding vertical camera setup. The only difference is the Fingerprint scanner is on the back of the P20 lite and the others are at the front. The phone has 3 colors, Black, Sakura Pink and the one I have, Klein Blue which has an eye-catching reflective back that its very prone to smudge and Fingerprints.

The glass they've used isn't a Gorilla Glass or whatsoever, so it's very fragile if you didn't protect it. Better invest in a case (which has included in the back) and a Tempered Glass Screen protector to avoid breaking it.

The display is 5.84 inch IPS LCD. The colors are great, and blacks are also great. The only problem is that the direct sunlight readability is poor to my taste. With it, the colors are washed out and even you put the phone on auto-brightness mode and cranked it up, it didn't help. It has a notch that, let's face it has a love-hate relationship to the consumers. To be honest, I hate this design implementation, but after I used it for a month now, It kinda grew on me. I'm just frustrated that several apps aren't optimize to the phone which I'll talk about that later.

The speaker at the bottom is very good. It's loud and not muddy, but it's lacking some bass. However, since this is a midrange phone, it's a forgivable flaw. The audio from the headphone jack is very good also. It also had a "Histen sound" mode with equalizer so you can modify the sound with your liking.

It runs with Emotion UI (EMUI) 8.0 based on Android 8.0 Oreo out of the box. It's a heavy skinned UI to say the least but it offers more tricks to give on its sleeves, like built in screen recorder, phone manager, anti-virus, face unlock, lift to wake and theme support to name a few. There's no app drawer at first boot but you can bring it back. EMUI also has a full screen mode feature for those apps that isn't supporting phones with notches and wide display size. The frustrating part for me is that you need to manually and individually change the app first in order to make it full screen. It should to be automatically at launch and disable it if you don't want to. Fingerprint scanner is fast and accurate with a little to no errors of Fingerprint reading. It also has 64GB of memory and its expandable up to 128GB.

The chipset of the P20 Lite is a bit older now with Kirin 659 and Mali-T830 GPU and this configuration is already a "copy-paste" one since we already seen this with the Nova 2i/Honor 9i/Mate 10 Lite and Honor 7X which the results are the same. If it's in casual and light game usage, it can handle very well with little to no lag. But when you put heavy and intense games like PUBG, NBA 2K18, Asphalt 8 and 9, you can see frame drops and lags so it's better to put the graphics settings to medium or low. In a positive note, The P20 lite runs cool even with a full-blown gaming experience.

The P20 lite boasts a 3000mAh battery with a support with 9V/2A (18W) fast charging. On my daily usage (Browsing, watching YouTube, take photos, 1 to 2 hour gaming, and Social Media) with WiFi turned on and 50% brightness, I managed to get at least 5 to 6 hours of screen on time. While in data with the same usage, I got 4 to 5 hours of SoT. Meaning, It can lasts for a whole day and maybe you can squeeze more than 1 and half day if casual usage. Charging is quite a breeze at 1 hour and 40 minutes thanks to its USB-C port and 18W Fast Charging (by the way, it's one of the cheapest Huawei Phones to have a USB-C port which is VERY RARE these days.)

The Camera of the P20 Lite has a 16MP primary + 2MP secondary dual rear shooter for portrait/bokeh shots, while the front has 16MP also for beautiful selfies. It has a lot features such as AR Lens, HDR, Pro Photo and Video to name a few. Pictures from the rear and front camera are great in well lit areas, though it's a little bit over-saturated in some photos I take. It's also a hit and miss when it comes to focusing on objects plus separating foreground and background.

The low-light photos are expected to be poor since this is a midrange phone. It's noisy, soft, and kinda blurry, but if it's for social media post, it's forgivable. On the video front, it only shoots at 1080p 30fps. No 4k, No 60fps, No OIS or even EIS, so it's shaky. Invest to a tripod or gimbal if you want stabilize videos.

Before I give my verdict to it, there's one thing I need to address. In the Philippines for example, there's 2 variants of the P20 Lite, ANE-LX2 and ANE-LX2J which is confusing. What's worst is that they have some differences in terms of specs. The LX2J have dual band WIFI support (802.11 ac) and have a gyroscope for VR, while LX2 that I got, doesn't have that. Also, there's some missing features too, like no dual camera Watermark on the camera (Maybe in the next software updates, I guess?). I just wished that the next time they'll release a 1 phone variant in every region.

VERDICT:

So, should you buy this phone? Well, for heavy users and gamers, there's other brands like Xiaomi, Pocophone and even their sub-brand Honor have some great phones with newer chipsets and big RAM with almost the same price as the P20 lite. But, at ₱13,990 or $264 (₱15,990 or $302 at first launch), this is a great choice for its design, features and price if you're a casual user.

[samanthasroberts]

The Fat Jew’s ‘Money Pizza Respect’ is the worst book I’ve ever read

I wish I liked the Fat Jews new book. It would make a far more interesting piece if he exceeded our expectations. No one I talked to expected it to be good. I bet he didnt even write it, said one friend. I bet he had his interns write it.

To contextualize this for people who arent on the Internet all the time, Josh The Fat Jew Ostrovsky became the center of controversy when he was accused of stealing memes and jokes from comedians this summer. Ostrovsky had been doing this for years, and amassed millions of Instagram followers with his admittedly excellent meme aggregating skills. But comedians took a stand when he signed with the talent agency CAA in August.

Upon reading Money Pizza Respect, there is no doubt in my mind that the unfortunately titled book is penned by the Fat Jew himself; I confidently assert that MoneyPizza Respect is singlehandedly the worst book I have ever read.

His actual sense of humorand Im talking about humor, not the memes he aggregatesis painfully abject. He relies on a Tucker Max-esque style of storytelling, glorifying cocaine and alcohol abuse and fucking his groupies, who all embody a different type of crazy girl stereotype.

In a chapter ironically titled The Eleven Commandments of Not Being the Worst Person Ever, he warns readers that if you aggressively and frequently talk about your sex life, people will think youre gay. When you tell me that you tackled a slam pig and stuffed her axe wound, he writes, I assume that your actual goal is having anal sex with men. Ostrovsky makes sure to note that the only exception to this rule is Dan Bilzerian, who has literally thrown a woman off his roof, breaking her foot, and been accused of kicking another woman in the face.

Money Pizza Respect is laced with homophobic comments. He writes a note to P. Diddy: Sorry for outing you as a homosexual. Im pretty sure you are, but Im sorry. Theres also a healthy dose of sexism, describing his female groupies as a bunch of fours and fives who have giant lady hands hate their dads. To complete the trifecta, he also manages to be transphobic, referring to transgender women as trannies in a chapter chronicling his brothers bachelor party. (When his brother and friends found out the strippers who were giving them lap dances were trans, they left the club immediately.)

Before I met Ostrovsky, I was confused about how he was so successful, especially after reading his book, where he brags about his selfish and generally gross behavior at every possible moment, proudly displays pictures of him wearing a thong made out of beef jerky, and writes things like, Cocaine is the greatest gift the world has ever seen.

When I sat down with him at a press junket, located at an arcade in Chinatown, I immediately understood why hes garnered so much success. He is unfortunately charming and is actually a naturally funny person. Hes like the cool, mean boy in 8th grade, the type who introduced pot to all your friends and made fun of girls for being ugly or not having boobs yet. The type who definitely bullied me, and yet I tirelessly tried to gain his affection.

During our interview, Ostrovsky remained on the defensive, masterful at answering my questions with non-answers. He is somebody who has never taken life seriously, which is perhaps not too difficult for a straight, white, affluent male. He is fundamentally interested in his conception of fun, and hopes youll join him for the ride. If not, fuck off.

Its not that I began to like Ostrovsky or his book any more after meeting him, but I went from hating him to feeling an iota of pity for him. His flamboyant and unapologetic immaturity, his bratty affect: This is what has brought him success, and what I imagine will be his inevitable downfall.

So my approach for this interview, because I know a lot of people have been shitting on you, is to not shit on you.

No ones been shitting on me.

I was curious about how that affected you emotionally, and how you felt about getting blasted by the media.

It was definitely a shitty situation. Im of the Internet, so its like a lot of people screaming about things. I respect trolling. I respect people screaming at one another, which is why the Internet is so fucking great. I definitely didnt take it personally. It was also something that needed to get talked about. People were not on the same page. Like a 38-year-old comedy writer and a 16-year-old Filipino millennial were not seeing the issue the same way.

I try to look at it like I was the face of the whole thing. I mean the Internet is a giant, lawless fuckin thing. Sometimes we need some rules But not too many. Because that would be weird. No parents. But you know, sometimes people get pissed. I obviously see it from the 16-year-old Filipino millennial side. I dont look for credit on my stuff and I dont ever watermark or anything like that, but I also get the other side too. Im old enough to understand both sides. I just want everyone to be happy so were fuckin partying.

Instagram for fucking photos of dogs playing volleyball in sunglasses and iguanas surfing. I just want to have everyone get heard, fix the problem, and then get back to surfing iguanas. It didnt rock me emotionally because I just saw it as something that needed to be discussed. It definitely got dangerous and exciting at some points. People just get so crazy, theres a portion of people who dont even know what theyre screaming about. I got chased by TMZ. Some guy followed me around a Duane Reade recording my phone call. That was tight.

You liked that?

I kinda felt like Leo , for like a second. It was also scary. No one wants that life. I was trying to look at it like this is a conversation that needed to be had. I didnt look at it as being shit on. The Internet is more important to me than my family or anything. I would love to be with the Internet, have sex with the Internet, I love the Internet. Now its a better place.

Why was it important for you to celebrate drugs, specifically cocaine, in your book?

Its a mixed bag. I refer to it as the best and worst thing ever. Part of the ethos of this book is that its a how-to guide in that its like I dont know what you should be doing but I know what you shouldnt be doing. Ive seen every horrible thing. I basically think you read this book and you dont do coke. Because youre like, its gonna make me unbearable. Like my breath is gonna smell like a diaper and get into a super intense conversation about stuff I dont even care about.

I think it depends on how old the reader is. For me, Ive done coke so I understood more where you were coming from in that it can be great and terrible at the same time. From a teenagers standpoint, it might just look really cool.

It depends. Im pretty explicit that its been responsible for the greatest things that ever happened, but also some of the most horrendous things, too. I think its more self-reflective than it is encouraging.

Your book is provocative is many ways. People are going to interpret some of the content as transphobic and homophobic. I was thinking of the chapter where you refer to trans women as trannies.

I dont know what youre specifically referring to.

You wrote about tranny strippers. Thats a contentious word. Many trans people have spoken out about how hurtful they find that term to be. I was curious about how you would respond to those critics.

is a factual account of what happened. Youre talking about an actual pejorative word?

Yeah. Its a slur. There were a bunch of moments in the book where I read something and immediately thought about how angry it would make social justice activists on the Internet.

Social justice people are angry at everything.

I was wondering if you included some things specifically to be provocative.

No, definitely not. First of all, any social justice person can come at me at any time. I literally have more transgender friends who will vouch for me than anyone. They self-identify as trannies. Ask a transgender who is not a nerd from the Internet how they identify, and I bet you will find hundreds who identify as trannies.

I know transgender folks who identify that way. Its like the N-word. If they call themselves that, its OK. But having a cis person is a different story.

Any person who would find offense in that kind of minutia is not someone who should be reading this book.

Its not your audience, thats probably true.

That shouldnt be anyones audience, as far Im concerned.

As I was reading your book, I was thinking about your crazy drug and sex stories as they relate to Tucker Maxs stories from I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Was he somebody who influenced you?

No, thats like bro culture stuff. This is completely different.

Tonally, there were similarities.

Ive never read it, but I also think that in terms of this book, like Ive been living performance art long enough to write a book full of debaucherous stories, but I wanted to go with more pathos, truth. From what I understand from Tucker Maxs stuff, he doesnt really go into too much stuff like that. Not all the stories here are particularly turnt up, as far as Im concerned. There are some that are honest family stories, not every story is about partying.

But a lot of them are.

We can go through it When I was writing it, putting in some emotion and truth, and some real feeling on it, like talking about my mom having sex with Shel Silverstein and being a 9-year-old child actor diva. Shit like that, to me, that is not the same as walking around a bar with a breathalyzer . I dont not relate to it, but Ive never read any of his stuff.

Ostrovsky as a child actor Josh Ostrovsky

Do you differentiate between the Fat Jew as your performative character and yourself as Josh?

No. I dont go home at night and unscrew the hairection , sit down, and listen to This American Life and be like, Oh, what a hard day at work! Being the Fat Jew! No, its all one in the same. To me, that would be disingenuous. I was doing this stuff long before there was anywhere to share it, long before anyone knew about it. Ten years ago, people in New York would be like, Oh thats the Fat Jew, the guy who does crazy stuff. It wasnt something I created and cultivated in order to share on social media for the masses.

But this is your career, this is your passion, but a lot of artists and actors differentiate between their performative self, which is still their self, and who they are when theyre not performing.

Im not an artist or an actor. Im neither.

How do you identify?

Im the only one whos really just going for it. Im genuinely making it up as I go along. I could start a ros company and that could become a real thing. Im about to do the worlds first EDM cologne.

What is that gonna smell like?

I dont know. Thats a good question. Like I dont even know what that means but Im gonna do it. Its 2015. Anything is possible. The world is so ridiculous at this point. I might open a yoga ashram in Toronto. Who knows? Im one of the only people who doesnt consider anything on or off limits. I dont think that it can be defined. We have this human need to compartmentalize, to be like, What are you? But I dont know.

I guess its my job to say, as a writer trying to make sense of what you do.

I dont think theres anything to make sense of. I dont know. What do you think I do?

I think youre a content creator and performer.

Thats vague. But yeah. Im not not. But thats what Im saying. I like to keep people guessing, keep people off kilter. If people think Im a comedian, I will move in a totally different direction and start making cologne. I wanna make people go, What the fuck? Keeping people guessing, keeping genuine conversation going about me, whether its, I dont want to say the word negative, but whatever its gonna be, thats what I am. A conversation starter? I dont know.

Tastemaker?

Conversation piece? Idiot? All of the above?

Whats your goal with your book? Why do you do what you do? Aside from the fact that you just want to do it.

The end goal with the book is that I think I can get some turnt-up 18-year-old to read. Thats the challenge, like, can you get fuckin some kids to read and think its really fuckin chill? Is that doable? Ill literally do it just for that.

Were doing reading raves to promote the book. IRL is what the programs called. Its just like huge DJs and books. Like, can you make them read? I think its doable. I dont think publishing knows how to do it. I dont think parents know how to do it.

So you want to make reading cool?

Kind of. What if Im somehow the guy to do it?

What are your favorite books?

I love Shel Silverstein, and not only because my mom fucked him. Mostly, Im the type to read 100 listicles. Like, what kind of bagel is Rihanna? You know what I mean? One-hundred times Rihanna ate fruit. Im not reading enough books.

No ones reading enough books.

Maybe now? That would fucking weird. To get a fucking 17-year-old whos over it to sit down and read an entire book? I mean I put in some stuff to break up the chapters, like you can color in a picture of Tyrese. I mean, I dont want you to have to read too much.

Illustration by Max Fleishman

Popular on The Daily Dot

I went to the Rentboy liquidation sale, and all I got was this amazing escort swag

After a massive federal raid, Rentboy had to sell its entire office on Craigslist to pay its lawyers.

By Mary Emily O'Hara — November 02, 2015

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/19/the-fat-jewaes-money-pizza-respect-is-the-worst-book-iaeve-ever-read/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/09/19/the-fat-jewaes-money-pizza-respect-is-the-worst-book-iaeve-ever-read/

[adambstingus]

The Fat Jew’s ‘Money Pizza Respect’ is the worst book I’ve ever read

I wish I liked the Fat Jews new book. It would make a far more interesting piece if he exceeded our expectations. No one I talked to expected it to be good. I bet he didnt even write it, said one friend. I bet he had his interns write it.

To contextualize this for people who arent on the Internet all the time, Josh The Fat Jew Ostrovsky became the center of controversy when he was accused of stealing memes and jokes from comedians this summer. Ostrovsky had been doing this for years, and amassed millions of Instagram followers with his admittedly excellent meme aggregating skills. But comedians took a stand when he signed with the talent agency CAA in August.

Upon reading Money Pizza Respect, there is no doubt in my mind that the unfortunately titled book is penned by the Fat Jew himself; I confidently assert that MoneyPizza Respect is singlehandedly the worst book I have ever read.

His actual sense of humorand Im talking about humor, not the memes he aggregatesis painfully abject. He relies on a Tucker Max-esque style of storytelling, glorifying cocaine and alcohol abuse and fucking his groupies, who all embody a different type of crazy girl stereotype.

In a chapter ironically titled The Eleven Commandments of Not Being the Worst Person Ever, he warns readers that if you aggressively and frequently talk about your sex life, people will think youre gay. When you tell me that you tackled a slam pig and stuffed her axe wound, he writes, I assume that your actual goal is having anal sex with men. Ostrovsky makes sure to note that the only exception to this rule is Dan Bilzerian, who has literally thrown a woman off his roof, breaking her foot, and been accused of kicking another woman in the face.

Money Pizza Respect is laced with homophobic comments. He writes a note to P. Diddy: Sorry for outing you as a homosexual. Im pretty sure you are, but Im sorry. Theres also a healthy dose of sexism, describing his female groupies as a bunch of fours and fives who have giant lady hands hate their dads. To complete the trifecta, he also manages to be transphobic, referring to transgender women as trannies in a chapter chronicling his brothers bachelor party. (When his brother and friends found out the strippers who were giving them lap dances were trans, they left the club immediately.)

Before I met Ostrovsky, I was confused about how he was so successful, especially after reading his book, where he brags about his selfish and generally gross behavior at every possible moment, proudly displays pictures of him wearing a thong made out of beef jerky, and writes things like, Cocaine is the greatest gift the world has ever seen.

When I sat down with him at a press junket, located at an arcade in Chinatown, I immediately understood why hes garnered so much success. He is unfortunately charming and is actually a naturally funny person. Hes like the cool, mean boy in 8th grade, the type who introduced pot to all your friends and made fun of girls for being ugly or not having boobs yet. The type who definitely bullied me, and yet I tirelessly tried to gain his affection.

During our interview, Ostrovsky remained on the defensive, masterful at answering my questions with non-answers. He is somebody who has never taken life seriously, which is perhaps not too difficult for a straight, white, affluent male. He is fundamentally interested in his conception of fun, and hopes youll join him for the ride. If not, fuck off.

Its not that I began to like Ostrovsky or his book any more after meeting him, but I went from hating him to feeling an iota of pity for him. His flamboyant and unapologetic immaturity, his bratty affect: This is what has brought him success, and what I imagine will be his inevitable downfall.

So my approach for this interview, because I know a lot of people have been shitting on you, is to not shit on you.

No ones been shitting on me.

I was curious about how that affected you emotionally, and how you felt about getting blasted by the media.

It was definitely a shitty situation. Im of the Internet, so its like a lot of people screaming about things. I respect trolling. I respect people screaming at one another, which is why the Internet is so fucking great. I definitely didnt take it personally. It was also something that needed to get talked about. People were not on the same page. Like a 38-year-old comedy writer and a 16-year-old Filipino millennial were not seeing the issue the same way.

I try to look at it like I was the face of the whole thing. I mean the Internet is a giant, lawless fuckin thing. Sometimes we need some rules But not too many. Because that would be weird. No parents. But you know, sometimes people get pissed. I obviously see it from the 16-year-old Filipino millennial side. I dont look for credit on my stuff and I dont ever watermark or anything like that, but I also get the other side too. Im old enough to understand both sides. I just want everyone to be happy so were fuckin partying.

Instagram for fucking photos of dogs playing volleyball in sunglasses and iguanas surfing. I just want to have everyone get heard, fix the problem, and then get back to surfing iguanas. It didnt rock me emotionally because I just saw it as something that needed to be discussed. It definitely got dangerous and exciting at some points. People just get so crazy, theres a portion of people who dont even know what theyre screaming about. I got chased by TMZ. Some guy followed me around a Duane Reade recording my phone call. That was tight.

You liked that?

I kinda felt like Leo , for like a second. It was also scary. No one wants that life. I was trying to look at it like this is a conversation that needed to be had. I didnt look at it as being shit on. The Internet is more important to me than my family or anything. I would love to be with the Internet, have sex with the Internet, I love the Internet. Now its a better place.

Why was it important for you to celebrate drugs, specifically cocaine, in your book?

Its a mixed bag. I refer to it as the best and worst thing ever. Part of the ethos of this book is that its a how-to guide in that its like I dont know what you should be doing but I know what you shouldnt be doing. Ive seen every horrible thing. I basically think you read this book and you dont do coke. Because youre like, its gonna make me unbearable. Like my breath is gonna smell like a diaper and get into a super intense conversation about stuff I dont even care about.

I think it depends on how old the reader is. For me, Ive done coke so I understood more where you were coming from in that it can be great and terrible at the same time. From a teenagers standpoint, it might just look really cool.

It depends. Im pretty explicit that its been responsible for the greatest things that ever happened, but also some of the most horrendous things, too. I think its more self-reflective than it is encouraging.

Your book is provocative is many ways. People are going to interpret some of the content as transphobic and homophobic. I was thinking of the chapter where you refer to trans women as trannies.

I dont know what youre specifically referring to.

You wrote about tranny strippers. Thats a contentious word. Many trans people have spoken out about how hurtful they find that term to be. I was curious about how you would respond to those critics.

is a factual account of what happened. Youre talking about an actual pejorative word?

Yeah. Its a slur. There were a bunch of moments in the book where I read something and immediately thought about how angry it would make social justice activists on the Internet.

Social justice people are angry at everything.

I was wondering if you included some things specifically to be provocative.

No, definitely not. First of all, any social justice person can come at me at any time. I literally have more transgender friends who will vouch for me than anyone. They self-identify as trannies. Ask a transgender who is not a nerd from the Internet how they identify, and I bet you will find hundreds who identify as trannies.

I know transgender folks who identify that way. Its like the N-word. If they call themselves that, its OK. But having a cis person is a different story.

Any person who would find offense in that kind of minutia is not someone who should be reading this book.

Its not your audience, thats probably true.

That shouldnt be anyones audience, as far Im concerned.

As I was reading your book, I was thinking about your crazy drug and sex stories as they relate to Tucker Maxs stories from I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Was he somebody who influenced you?

No, thats like bro culture stuff. This is completely different.

Tonally, there were similarities.

Ive never read it, but I also think that in terms of this book, like Ive been living performance art long enough to write a book full of debaucherous stories, but I wanted to go with more pathos, truth. From what I understand from Tucker Maxs stuff, he doesnt really go into too much stuff like that. Not all the stories here are particularly turnt up, as far as Im concerned. There are some that are honest family stories, not every story is about partying.

But a lot of them are.

We can go through it When I was writing it, putting in some emotion and truth, and some real feeling on it, like talking about my mom having sex with Shel Silverstein and being a 9-year-old child actor diva. Shit like that, to me, that is not the same as walking around a bar with a breathalyzer . I dont not relate to it, but Ive never read any of his stuff.

Ostrovsky as a child actor Josh Ostrovsky

Do you differentiate between the Fat Jew as your performative character and yourself as Josh?

No. I dont go home at night and unscrew the hairection , sit down, and listen to This American Life and be like, Oh, what a hard day at work! Being the Fat Jew! No, its all one in the same. To me, that would be disingenuous. I was doing this stuff long before there was anywhere to share it, long before anyone knew about it. Ten years ago, people in New York would be like, Oh thats the Fat Jew, the guy who does crazy stuff. It wasnt something I created and cultivated in order to share on social media for the masses.

But this is your career, this is your passion, but a lot of artists and actors differentiate between their performative self, which is still their self, and who they are when theyre not performing.

Im not an artist or an actor. Im neither.

How do you identify?

Im the only one whos really just going for it. Im genuinely making it up as I go along. I could start a ros company and that could become a real thing. Im about to do the worlds first EDM cologne.

What is that gonna smell like?

I dont know. Thats a good question. Like I dont even know what that means but Im gonna do it. Its 2015. Anything is possible. The world is so ridiculous at this point. I might open a yoga ashram in Toronto. Who knows? Im one of the only people who doesnt consider anything on or off limits. I dont think that it can be defined. We have this human need to compartmentalize, to be like, What are you? But I dont know.

I guess its my job to say, as a writer trying to make sense of what you do.

I dont think theres anything to make sense of. I dont know. What do you think I do?

I think youre a content creator and performer.

Thats vague. But yeah. Im not not. But thats what Im saying. I like to keep people guessing, keep people off kilter. If people think Im a comedian, I will move in a totally different direction and start making cologne. I wanna make people go, What the fuck? Keeping people guessing, keeping genuine conversation going about me, whether its, I dont want to say the word negative, but whatever its gonna be, thats what I am. A conversation starter? I dont know.

Tastemaker?

Conversation piece? Idiot? All of the above?

Whats your goal with your book? Why do you do what you do? Aside from the fact that you just want to do it.

The end goal with the book is that I think I can get some turnt-up 18-year-old to read. Thats the challenge, like, can you get fuckin some kids to read and think its really fuckin chill? Is that doable? Ill literally do it just for that.

Were doing reading raves to promote the book. IRL is what the programs called. Its just like huge DJs and books. Like, can you make them read? I think its doable. I dont think publishing knows how to do it. I dont think parents know how to do it.

So you want to make reading cool?

Kind of. What if Im somehow the guy to do it?

What are your favorite books?

I love Shel Silverstein, and not only because my mom fucked him. Mostly, Im the type to read 100 listicles. Like, what kind of bagel is Rihanna? You know what I mean? One-hundred times Rihanna ate fruit. Im not reading enough books.

No ones reading enough books.

Maybe now? That would fucking weird. To get a fucking 17-year-old whos over it to sit down and read an entire book? I mean I put in some stuff to break up the chapters, like you can color in a picture of Tyrese. I mean, I dont want you to have to read too much.

Illustration by Max Fleishman

Popular on The Daily Dot

I went to the Rentboy liquidation sale, and all I got was this amazing escort swag

After a massive federal raid, Rentboy had to sell its entire office on Craigslist to pay its lawyers.

By Mary Emily O'Hara — November 02, 2015

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/19/the-fat-jewaes-money-pizza-respect-is-the-worst-book-iaeve-ever-read/ from All of Beer https://allofbeercom.tumblr.com/post/165493432272

[allofbeercom]

The Fat Jew’s ‘Money Pizza Respect’ is the worst book I’ve ever read

I wish I liked the Fat Jews new book. It would make a far more interesting piece if he exceeded our expectations. No one I talked to expected it to be good. I bet he didnt even write it, said one friend. I bet he had his interns write it.

To contextualize this for people who arent on the Internet all the time, Josh The Fat Jew Ostrovsky became the center of controversy when he was accused of stealing memes and jokes from comedians this summer. Ostrovsky had been doing this for years, and amassed millions of Instagram followers with his admittedly excellent meme aggregating skills. But comedians took a stand when he signed with the talent agency CAA in August.

Upon reading Money Pizza Respect, there is no doubt in my mind that the unfortunately titled book is penned by the Fat Jew himself; I confidently assert that MoneyPizza Respect is singlehandedly the worst book I have ever read.

His actual sense of humorand Im talking about humor, not the memes he aggregatesis painfully abject. He relies on a Tucker Max-esque style of storytelling, glorifying cocaine and alcohol abuse and fucking his groupies, who all embody a different type of crazy girl stereotype.

In a chapter ironically titled The Eleven Commandments of Not Being the Worst Person Ever, he warns readers that if you aggressively and frequently talk about your sex life, people will think youre gay. When you tell me that you tackled a slam pig and stuffed her axe wound, he writes, I assume that your actual goal is having anal sex with men. Ostrovsky makes sure to note that the only exception to this rule is Dan Bilzerian, who has literally thrown a woman off his roof, breaking her foot, and been accused of kicking another woman in the face.

Money Pizza Respect is laced with homophobic comments. He writes a note to P. Diddy: Sorry for outing you as a homosexual. Im pretty sure you are, but Im sorry. Theres also a healthy dose of sexism, describing his female groupies as a bunch of fours and fives who have giant lady hands hate their dads. To complete the trifecta, he also manages to be transphobic, referring to transgender women as trannies in a chapter chronicling his brothers bachelor party. (When his brother and friends found out the strippers who were giving them lap dances were trans, they left the club immediately.)

Before I met Ostrovsky, I was confused about how he was so successful, especially after reading his book, where he brags about his selfish and generally gross behavior at every possible moment, proudly displays pictures of him wearing a thong made out of beef jerky, and writes things like, Cocaine is the greatest gift the world has ever seen.

When I sat down with him at a press junket, located at an arcade in Chinatown, I immediately understood why hes garnered so much success. He is unfortunately charming and is actually a naturally funny person. Hes like the cool, mean boy in 8th grade, the type who introduced pot to all your friends and made fun of girls for being ugly or not having boobs yet. The type who definitely bullied me, and yet I tirelessly tried to gain his affection.

During our interview, Ostrovsky remained on the defensive, masterful at answering my questions with non-answers. He is somebody who has never taken life seriously, which is perhaps not too difficult for a straight, white, affluent male. He is fundamentally interested in his conception of fun, and hopes youll join him for the ride. If not, fuck off.

Its not that I began to like Ostrovsky or his book any more after meeting him, but I went from hating him to feeling an iota of pity for him. His flamboyant and unapologetic immaturity, his bratty affect: This is what has brought him success, and what I imagine will be his inevitable downfall.

So my approach for this interview, because I know a lot of people have been shitting on you, is to not shit on you.

No ones been shitting on me.

I was curious about how that affected you emotionally, and how you felt about getting blasted by the media.

It was definitely a shitty situation. Im of the Internet, so its like a lot of people screaming about things. I respect trolling. I respect people screaming at one another, which is why the Internet is so fucking great. I definitely didnt take it personally. It was also something that needed to get talked about. People were not on the same page. Like a 38-year-old comedy writer and a 16-year-old Filipino millennial were not seeing the issue the same way.

I try to look at it like I was the face of the whole thing. I mean the Internet is a giant, lawless fuckin thing. Sometimes we need some rules But not too many. Because that would be weird. No parents. But you know, sometimes people get pissed. I obviously see it from the 16-year-old Filipino millennial side. I dont look for credit on my stuff and I dont ever watermark or anything like that, but I also get the other side too. Im old enough to understand both sides. I just want everyone to be happy so were fuckin partying.

Instagram for fucking photos of dogs playing volleyball in sunglasses and iguanas surfing. I just want to have everyone get heard, fix the problem, and then get back to surfing iguanas. It didnt rock me emotionally because I just saw it as something that needed to be discussed. It definitely got dangerous and exciting at some points. People just get so crazy, theres a portion of people who dont even know what theyre screaming about. I got chased by TMZ. Some guy followed me around a Duane Reade recording my phone call. That was tight.

You liked that?

I kinda felt like Leo , for like a second. It was also scary. No one wants that life. I was trying to look at it like this is a conversation that needed to be had. I didnt look at it as being shit on. The Internet is more important to me than my family or anything. I would love to be with the Internet, have sex with the Internet, I love the Internet. Now its a better place.

Why was it important for you to celebrate drugs, specifically cocaine, in your book?

Its a mixed bag. I refer to it as the best and worst thing ever. Part of the ethos of this book is that its a how-to guide in that its like I dont know what you should be doing but I know what you shouldnt be doing. Ive seen every horrible thing. I basically think you read this book and you dont do coke. Because youre like, its gonna make me unbearable. Like my breath is gonna smell like a diaper and get into a super intense conversation about stuff I dont even care about.

I think it depends on how old the reader is. For me, Ive done coke so I understood more where you were coming from in that it can be great and terrible at the same time. From a teenagers standpoint, it might just look really cool.

It depends. Im pretty explicit that its been responsible for the greatest things that ever happened, but also some of the most horrendous things, too. I think its more self-reflective than it is encouraging.

Your book is provocative is many ways. People are going to interpret some of the content as transphobic and homophobic. I was thinking of the chapter where you refer to trans women as trannies.

I dont know what youre specifically referring to.

You wrote about tranny strippers. Thats a contentious word. Many trans people have spoken out about how hurtful they find that term to be. I was curious about how you would respond to those critics.

is a factual account of what happened. Youre talking about an actual pejorative word?

Yeah. Its a slur. There were a bunch of moments in the book where I read something and immediately thought about how angry it would make social justice activists on the Internet.

Social justice people are angry at everything.

I was wondering if you included some things specifically to be provocative.

No, definitely not. First of all, any social justice person can come at me at any time. I literally have more transgender friends who will vouch for me than anyone. They self-identify as trannies. Ask a transgender who is not a nerd from the Internet how they identify, and I bet you will find hundreds who identify as trannies.

I know transgender folks who identify that way. Its like the N-word. If they call themselves that, its OK. But having a cis person is a different story.

Any person who would find offense in that kind of minutia is not someone who should be reading this book.

Its not your audience, thats probably true.

That shouldnt be anyones audience, as far Im concerned.

As I was reading your book, I was thinking about your crazy drug and sex stories as they relate to Tucker Maxs stories from I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Was he somebody who influenced you?

No, thats like bro culture stuff. This is completely different.

Tonally, there were similarities.

Ive never read it, but I also think that in terms of this book, like Ive been living performance art long enough to write a book full of debaucherous stories, but I wanted to go with more pathos, truth. From what I understand from Tucker Maxs stuff, he doesnt really go into too much stuff like that. Not all the stories here are particularly turnt up, as far as Im concerned. There are some that are honest family stories, not every story is about partying.

But a lot of them are.

We can go through it When I was writing it, putting in some emotion and truth, and some real feeling on it, like talking about my mom having sex with Shel Silverstein and being a 9-year-old child actor diva. Shit like that, to me, that is not the same as walking around a bar with a breathalyzer . I dont not relate to it, but Ive never read any of his stuff.

Ostrovsky as a child actor Josh Ostrovsky

Do you differentiate between the Fat Jew as your performative character and yourself as Josh?

No. I dont go home at night and unscrew the hairection , sit down, and listen to This American Life and be like, Oh, what a hard day at work! Being the Fat Jew! No, its all one in the same. To me, that would be disingenuous. I was doing this stuff long before there was anywhere to share it, long before anyone knew about it. Ten years ago, people in New York would be like, Oh thats the Fat Jew, the guy who does crazy stuff. It wasnt something I created and cultivated in order to share on social media for the masses.

But this is your career, this is your passion, but a lot of artists and actors differentiate between their performative self, which is still their self, and who they are when theyre not performing.

Im not an artist or an actor. Im neither.

How do you identify?

Im the only one whos really just going for it. Im genuinely making it up as I go along. I could start a ros company and that could become a real thing. Im about to do the worlds first EDM cologne.

What is that gonna smell like?

I dont know. Thats a good question. Like I dont even know what that means but Im gonna do it. Its 2015. Anything is possible. The world is so ridiculous at this point. I might open a yoga ashram in Toronto. Who knows? Im one of the only people who doesnt consider anything on or off limits. I dont think that it can be defined. We have this human need to compartmentalize, to be like, What are you? But I dont know.

I guess its my job to say, as a writer trying to make sense of what you do.

I dont think theres anything to make sense of. I dont know. What do you think I do?

I think youre a content creator and performer.

Thats vague. But yeah. Im not not. But thats what Im saying. I like to keep people guessing, keep people off kilter. If people think Im a comedian, I will move in a totally different direction and start making cologne. I wanna make people go, What the fuck? Keeping people guessing, keeping genuine conversation going about me, whether its, I dont want to say the word negative, but whatever its gonna be, thats what I am. A conversation starter? I dont know.

Tastemaker?

Conversation piece? Idiot? All of the above?

Whats your goal with your book? Why do you do what you do? Aside from the fact that you just want to do it.

The end goal with the book is that I think I can get some turnt-up 18-year-old to read. Thats the challenge, like, can you get fuckin some kids to read and think its really fuckin chill? Is that doable? Ill literally do it just for that.

Were doing reading raves to promote the book. IRL is what the programs called. Its just like huge DJs and books. Like, can you make them read? I think its doable. I dont think publishing knows how to do it. I dont think parents know how to do it.

So you want to make reading cool?

Kind of. What if Im somehow the guy to do it?

What are your favorite books?

I love Shel Silverstein, and not only because my mom fucked him. Mostly, Im the type to read 100 listicles. Like, what kind of bagel is Rihanna? You know what I mean? One-hundred times Rihanna ate fruit. Im not reading enough books.

No ones reading enough books.

Maybe now? That would fucking weird. To get a fucking 17-year-old whos over it to sit down and read an entire book? I mean I put in some stuff to break up the chapters, like you can color in a picture of Tyrese. I mean, I dont want you to have to read too much.

Illustration by Max Fleishman

Popular on The Daily Dot

I went to the Rentboy liquidation sale, and all I got was this amazing escort swag

After a massive federal raid, Rentboy had to sell its entire office on Craigslist to pay its lawyers.

By Mary Emily O'Hara — November 02, 2015

from All Of Beer http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/19/the-fat-jewaes-money-pizza-respect-is-the-worst-book-iaeve-ever-read/

[jimdsmith34]

The Fat Jew’s ‘Money Pizza Respect’ is the worst book I’ve ever read

I wish I liked the Fat Jews new book. It would make a far more interesting piece if he exceeded our expectations. No one I talked to expected it to be good. I bet he didnt even write it, said one friend. I bet he had his interns write it.

To contextualize this for people who arent on the Internet all the time, Josh The Fat Jew Ostrovsky became the center of controversy when he was accused of stealing memes and jokes from comedians this summer. Ostrovsky had been doing this for years, and amassed millions of Instagram followers with his admittedly excellent meme aggregating skills. But comedians took a stand when he signed with the talent agency CAA in August.

Upon reading Money Pizza Respect, there is no doubt in my mind that the unfortunately titled book is penned by the Fat Jew himself; I confidently assert that MoneyPizza Respect is singlehandedly the worst book I have ever read.

His actual sense of humorand Im talking about humor, not the memes he aggregatesis painfully abject. He relies on a Tucker Max-esque style of storytelling, glorifying cocaine and alcohol abuse and fucking his groupies, who all embody a different type of crazy girl stereotype.

In a chapter ironically titled The Eleven Commandments of Not Being the Worst Person Ever, he warns readers that if you aggressively and frequently talk about your sex life, people will think youre gay. When you tell me that you tackled a slam pig and stuffed her axe wound, he writes, I assume that your actual goal is having anal sex with men. Ostrovsky makes sure to note that the only exception to this rule is Dan Bilzerian, who has literally thrown a woman off his roof, breaking her foot, and been accused of kicking another woman in the face.

Money Pizza Respect is laced with homophobic comments. He writes a note to P. Diddy: Sorry for outing you as a homosexual. Im pretty sure you are, but Im sorry. Theres also a healthy dose of sexism, describing his female groupies as a bunch of fours and fives who have giant lady hands hate their dads. To complete the trifecta, he also manages to be transphobic, referring to transgender women as trannies in a chapter chronicling his brothers bachelor party. (When his brother and friends found out the strippers who were giving them lap dances were trans, they left the club immediately.)

Before I met Ostrovsky, I was confused about how he was so successful, especially after reading his book, where he brags about his selfish and generally gross behavior at every possible moment, proudly displays pictures of him wearing a thong made out of beef jerky, and writes things like, Cocaine is the greatest gift the world has ever seen.

When I sat down with him at a press junket, located at an arcade in Chinatown, I immediately understood why hes garnered so much success. He is unfortunately charming and is actually a naturally funny person. Hes like the cool, mean boy in 8th grade, the type who introduced pot to all your friends and made fun of girls for being ugly or not having boobs yet. The type who definitely bullied me, and yet I tirelessly tried to gain his affection.

During our interview, Ostrovsky remained on the defensive, masterful at answering my questions with non-answers. He is somebody who has never taken life seriously, which is perhaps not too difficult for a straight, white, affluent male. He is fundamentally interested in his conception of fun, and hopes youll join him for the ride. If not, fuck off.

Its not that I began to like Ostrovsky or his book any more after meeting him, but I went from hating him to feeling an iota of pity for him. His flamboyant and unapologetic immaturity, his bratty affect: This is what has brought him success, and what I imagine will be his inevitable downfall.

So my approach for this interview, because I know a lot of people have been shitting on you, is to not shit on you.

No ones been shitting on me.

I was curious about how that affected you emotionally, and how you felt about getting blasted by the media.

It was definitely a shitty situation. Im of the Internet, so its like a lot of people screaming about things. I respect trolling. I respect people screaming at one another, which is why the Internet is so fucking great. I definitely didnt take it personally. It was also something that needed to get talked about. People were not on the same page. Like a 38-year-old comedy writer and a 16-year-old Filipino millennial were not seeing the issue the same way.

I try to look at it like I was the face of the whole thing. I mean the Internet is a giant, lawless fuckin thing. Sometimes we need some rules But not too many. Because that would be weird. No parents. But you know, sometimes people get pissed. I obviously see it from the 16-year-old Filipino millennial side. I dont look for credit on my stuff and I dont ever watermark or anything like that, but I also get the other side too. Im old enough to understand both sides. I just want everyone to be happy so were fuckin partying.

Instagram for fucking photos of dogs playing volleyball in sunglasses and iguanas surfing. I just want to have everyone get heard, fix the problem, and then get back to surfing iguanas. It didnt rock me emotionally because I just saw it as something that needed to be discussed. It definitely got dangerous and exciting at some points. People just get so crazy, theres a portion of people who dont even know what theyre screaming about. I got chased by TMZ. Some guy followed me around a Duane Reade recording my phone call. That was tight.

You liked that?

I kinda felt like Leo , for like a second. It was also scary. No one wants that life. I was trying to look at it like this is a conversation that needed to be had. I didnt look at it as being shit on. The Internet is more important to me than my family or anything. I would love to be with the Internet, have sex with the Internet, I love the Internet. Now its a better place.

Why was it important for you to celebrate drugs, specifically cocaine, in your book?

Its a mixed bag. I refer to it as the best and worst thing ever. Part of the ethos of this book is that its a how-to guide in that its like I dont know what you should be doing but I know what you shouldnt be doing. Ive seen every horrible thing. I basically think you read this book and you dont do coke. Because youre like, its gonna make me unbearable. Like my breath is gonna smell like a diaper and get into a super intense conversation about stuff I dont even care about.

I think it depends on how old the reader is. For me, Ive done coke so I understood more where you were coming from in that it can be great and terrible at the same time. From a teenagers standpoint, it might just look really cool.

It depends. Im pretty explicit that its been responsible for the greatest things that ever happened, but also some of the most horrendous things, too. I think its more self-reflective than it is encouraging.

Your book is provocative is many ways. People are going to interpret some of the content as transphobic and homophobic. I was thinking of the chapter where you refer to trans women as trannies.

I dont know what youre specifically referring to.

You wrote about tranny strippers. Thats a contentious word. Many trans people have spoken out about how hurtful they find that term to be. I was curious about how you would respond to those critics.

is a factual account of what happened. Youre talking about an actual pejorative word?

Yeah. Its a slur. There were a bunch of moments in the book where I read something and immediately thought about how angry it would make social justice activists on the Internet.

Social justice people are angry at everything.

I was wondering if you included some things specifically to be provocative.

No, definitely not. First of all, any social justice person can come at me at any time. I literally have more transgender friends who will vouch for me than anyone. They self-identify as trannies. Ask a transgender who is not a nerd from the Internet how they identify, and I bet you will find hundreds who identify as trannies.

I know transgender folks who identify that way. Its like the N-word. If they call themselves that, its OK. But having a cis person is a different story.

Any person who would find offense in that kind of minutia is not someone who should be reading this book.

Its not your audience, thats probably true.

That shouldnt be anyones audience, as far Im concerned.

As I was reading your book, I was thinking about your crazy drug and sex stories as they relate to Tucker Maxs stories from I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. Was he somebody who influenced you?

No, thats like bro culture stuff. This is completely different.

Tonally, there were similarities.

Ive never read it, but I also think that in terms of this book, like Ive been living performance art long enough to write a book full of debaucherous stories, but I wanted to go with more pathos, truth. From what I understand from Tucker Maxs stuff, he doesnt really go into too much stuff like that. Not all the stories here are particularly turnt up, as far as Im concerned. There are some that are honest family stories, not every story is about partying.

But a lot of them are.

We can go through it When I was writing it, putting in some emotion and truth, and some real feeling on it, like talking about my mom having sex with Shel Silverstein and being a 9-year-old child actor diva. Shit like that, to me, that is not the same as walking around a bar with a breathalyzer . I dont not relate to it, but Ive never read any of his stuff.

Ostrovsky as a child actor Josh Ostrovsky

Do you differentiate between the Fat Jew as your performative character and yourself as Josh?

No. I dont go home at night and unscrew the hairection , sit down, and listen to This American Life and be like, Oh, what a hard day at work! Being the Fat Jew! No, its all one in the same. To me, that would be disingenuous. I was doing this stuff long before there was anywhere to share it, long before anyone knew about it. Ten years ago, people in New York would be like, Oh thats the Fat Jew, the guy who does crazy stuff. It wasnt something I created and cultivated in order to share on social media for the masses.

But this is your career, this is your passion, but a lot of artists and actors differentiate between their performative self, which is still their self, and who they are when theyre not performing.

Im not an artist or an actor. Im neither.

How do you identify?

Im the only one whos really just going for it. Im genuinely making it up as I go along. I could start a ros company and that could become a real thing. Im about to do the worlds first EDM cologne.

What is that gonna smell like?

I dont know. Thats a good question. Like I dont even know what that means but Im gonna do it. Its 2015. Anything is possible. The world is so ridiculous at this point. I might open a yoga ashram in Toronto. Who knows? Im one of the only people who doesnt consider anything on or off limits. I dont think that it can be defined. We have this human need to compartmentalize, to be like, What are you? But I dont know.

I guess its my job to say, as a writer trying to make sense of what you do.

I dont think theres anything to make sense of. I dont know. What do you think I do?

I think youre a content creator and performer.

Thats vague. But yeah. Im not not. But thats what Im saying. I like to keep people guessing, keep people off kilter. If people think Im a comedian, I will move in a totally different direction and start making cologne. I wanna make people go, What the fuck? Keeping people guessing, keeping genuine conversation going about me, whether its, I dont want to say the word negative, but whatever its gonna be, thats what I am. A conversation starter? I dont know.

Tastemaker?

Conversation piece? Idiot? All of the above?

Whats your goal with your book? Why do you do what you do? Aside from the fact that you just want to do it.

The end goal with the book is that I think I can get some turnt-up 18-year-old to read. Thats the challenge, like, can you get fuckin some kids to read and think its really fuckin chill? Is that doable? Ill literally do it just for that.

Were doing reading raves to promote the book. IRL is what the programs called. Its just like huge DJs and books. Like, can you make them read? I think its doable. I dont think publishing knows how to do it. I dont think parents know how to do it.

So you want to make reading cool?

Kind of. What if Im somehow the guy to do it?

What are your favorite books?

I love Shel Silverstein, and not only because my mom fucked him. Mostly, Im the type to read 100 listicles. Like, what kind of bagel is Rihanna? You know what I mean? One-hundred times Rihanna ate fruit. Im not reading enough books.

No ones reading enough books.

Maybe now? That would fucking weird. To get a fucking 17-year-old whos over it to sit down and read an entire book? I mean I put in some stuff to break up the chapters, like you can color in a picture of Tyrese. I mean, I dont want you to have to read too much.

Illustration by Max Fleishman

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source http://allofbeer.com/2017/09/19/the-fat-jewaes-money-pizza-respect-is-the-worst-book-iaeve-ever-read/ from All of Beer http://allofbeer.blogspot.com/2017/09/the-fat-jewas-money-pizza-respect-is.html