#also it takes place in like 2011-2013 btw

[akkawi]

who's gonna tell her...

[sitp-recs]

Hidden Gems by sdk | @unmistakablyoatmeal

What can I say about this unsung hero with 211 HP works in her catalogue? Sdk is an author I revisit often because everything she writes is GOLD - both Drarry and rare pairs that check all my boxes with exciting UST, light angst, charming banter and mindblowing hot smut. Age gap, femslash, triads, it’s all here folks. Sdk is every multishipper’s dream writer and there’s something bold and compelling about the way she explores ship dynamics that makes me drool in anticipation, I just know its gonna be a deeply satisfying ride. I can’t say how much I appreciate someone so prolific exploring old beloved tropes and delivering so much top quality content over the years. I had to put my horny hat aside (not an easy feat) to make sure this list included a variety of themes reflecting how resourceful and brilliant Sdk is. The best thing? They’re all pocket size reads, and that means you’ll get obsessed just like me but will be able to go through all of them today. I hope I did a good job (this is my longest reclist yet!) but I still urge you to go check her catalogue and give those brilliant drabbles some love as well. Happy Friday!!!

Drarry

Three series (2013, E, 3.5k) - insanely hot Draco/Teddy & Drarry+Teddy, Sdk was delivering the goodies before this triad was cool 😌🙌

Draco's never one to miss an opportunity. Especially when it comes twice in one night.

Pub Night (2014, E, 7k) - Loo sex! Loo sex! Loo sex! Always a fave, fwb to lovers, sweet sweet get together

In a cramped loo at The Bitter End, what Harry and Draco do is only about one thing: getting off. ...Isn't it? Read my rec here.

Swish and Flick (2013, E, 7k) - really fun and cool time loop fic with pub romance and meddling friends, btw this Ron/Pansy/Hermione triad gives me life!

The Swish and Flick is the last place Draco wants to spend his Saturday evening—especially when he discovers Potter is also in attendance—and he can't wait for the night to end. Unfortunately for Draco, time is not on his side.

Save My Wonders (2014, E, 21k) - gorgeous and sensitive fic about healing and self-love. Chubby Draco, falling in love, found family. A must read!

Immediately chocolate assaulted Draco's senses. Warm melted chocolate mixed with his mother's roses and... something else. Something new. Freshly scrubbed skin and maybe a faint sheen of sweat. It was so familiar... And it only intensified when Potter came up behind him.

The Wand Slipped (2019, E, 35k) - all-time fave! Thrilling case fic with family drama, lots of hot smut and a gorgeous pining Draco that will take your breath away 🥺

After a messy, public divorce and a disgraceful exit from the Auror Department, Harry is trying to rebuild his life as a private investigator. But when his ex-wife ends up in St. Mungo's, and Harry's tasked with finding her attacker, he'll have to confront the mistakes of his past, and rely on an old enemy, in order to get closure and move on, and incidentally, solve the case. Read my rec here.

Rare pairs

A Selfish Desire (2020, E, 1k) - delicious Ginsy short feat. second person POV and anal sex, yes pls!

Ginny has you bent over the kitchen table before you have time to smirk.

Coax to Bliss (2019, E, 2.4k) - exquisite Sirry smut with pining, peak UST and lush shower sex and praise kink, all my favorite things in one place 🔥

Harry likes to break the rules but he's very good at obeying when he wants to.

Always (2012, M, 2.5k) - perfect Harry/Teddy vampire fic full of angst, devotion and trust. My heart!

Harry would do anything for Teddy. Even this.

Bounty (2017, E, 2.7k) - Millie wears a thigh holster and Ginny can’t resist, and we don’t blame her. Super sexy PWP with a hopeful ending, so good

After her divorce, Ginny discovers a new experience might be just what she needs.

Flatmates (2011, E, 5.5k) - what’s a little drunk sex between friends, amirite? This is the only Drarry + Romione you need to read: scorching hot, funny, organic and with amazing chemistry and characterization. A+ content

Hermione is just as bossy inside the bedroom as she is out of it. The reason Draco knows this is because Harry's walls are too thin. Read my rec here.

Make Me Feel, Make Me Hurt, Make Me Whole (2019, E, 6k) - it’s about the yearning!!!! Brilliant “angst with a happy ending” Pansmione with lots of pining, semi public sex, and background Drarry as a treat.

Hermione and Pansy fall in love.

Shut Up and Kiss Me (2018, E, 7.7k) - the sweetest Harry/Teddy AU you’ll see this week with cute smitten Harry and grocery shop romance, we love to see it!

There's a reason Harry walks an extra ten blocks to go to the shops and it has nothing to do with onions.

[mcrmadness]

This is just me talking about (my) asexuality and aromanticism and mainly about how I figured I'm aroace. I'm from Finland and recently turned 30 so my experience and "lgbt+ history" might not be what you know it as, especially if you are not from Europe, or if your native language is English.

Also this is highly personal, so I doubt anyone here will have 100% same experience. But that's fine because remember: we're all individuals here and these are NEVER universal. You're still valid even if you wouldn't relate to what being aspec is to me.

It might be IS a long post so beware, but I've just been feeling like writing down some thoughts so here we go...

What I have been able to track is that I was 17, in 2008, when I first stumbled upon the term "asexuality". I don't remember exactly how, but I just remember reading about it and immediately going "yeah that's me". But what I do remember is that no one talked it being about sexual attraction. Basically how understood it was: asexuality = sex-repulsion.

I was 17, and somehow I knew I was sex-repulsed, but at the same time also thought I'm just a minor, so it's normal to be sex-repulsed. But even after turning 18, I don't recall ever feeling sexual attraction. I didn't think of myself as a "late bloomer" but just as someone who just has no interest towards sex. At some point I became really anxious of men, however. Nothing has ever happened to me* but still I, for some reason, developed terrible fear of men. I'm afab and just did not want to be seen as an object, and it made, still makes me, terrified to think someone might look at me and have Emotions. I know that we can't control our brains, I mean, I can't look at someone and force myself to feel attraction - just like those who do feel attraction, can't force themselves to stop feeling attraction. They can only control their actions. But yeah, I also had horrible (sexual) intrusive thoughts due to my generalized anxiety disorder at some point, which did not really help. They got a bit better when I came into terms with my asexuality and aromanticism, but sometimes they still come at me and it's never fun, but at least they're not as strong as what they used to be.

*(Unless if you can count that as sexual harrasment when, CW, I was 11 and a classmate was "into" me and tried to touch my face and talk "sweet things" to me but made it into a show despite me being uncomfortable and usually crying cos as a neurodivergent I didn't know how else to react.)

But anyway, back to the topic. So for years I understood asexuality as sex-repulsion, but I guess it's because I, well, am a sex-repulsed ace. So if I'm sex-repulsed, why would I then look at someone and feel something if I'm repulsed by the thing anyway? Like, it probably can't get any simpler than this :D And I know today that it's not as simple anymore. But that was 2008, at school (in ~2005) they only talked about gays a little, on one page in a sex.ed. book that otherwise was maybe 100 pages long. Only one page. About gays. And it was basically "Some boys like boys or some girls like girls and it's totally fine." and that was it, but the overall assumption was that everyone likes someone. And also there were no romantic orientations. Liking someone = both sexually and romantically. Not liking = not a thing except when you were depressed or otherwise mentally ill, or autistic or mentally disabled (which is a SUPER ableist take btw). I don't remember teachers ever talking about this, but it could also just be my adhd, maybe they did mention, but I just don't remember. At least in my notebooks there is no mention of this, everything was very much heteronormative and amatonormative, and also there was only two genders. I don't remember ever hearing about transgender people, apart from foreign documentaries and in them they were always portrayed as some shocking freaks of the nature, and loads of wrong terms were used. And this is still the mid and late 2000s we're talking about!

So this takes us to the other part aka aromanticism. Back then asexuality was not only sex-repulsion but also merged together with aromanticism, because people didn't talk about romantic orientations yet. So asexuality was not only sex-repulsion, but also you simply just not wanting a relationship. Again, nothing about attraction, just someone who did not care about sex nor relationships. A "forever single", if you will.

This was already annoying me a lot back then because I was really annoyed by sex "running the world". I was so angry because why is asexual the only sexuality that doesn't like sex? All the other sexualities had the assumption of them always wanting to have sex. Like, even think about someone who is straight, you hear that someone is straight, and you automatically assume(d) that oh they're into sex too cos why wouldn't they be. This was really driving me nuts because I was sure there are people who want to have a partner, but never want to have sex! I was still experiencing crushes, and I knew for sure it was nothing sexual, so it annoyed me that just because I'm asexual, it means I can't have crushes. That's why I actually called myself as "asexual bi" for a while, because "bisexual" indicated I would have not been sex-repulsed and I wanted to point out that I'm NOT into sexual things, at all - and remember that this was still the late 2000s or early 2010s and I had not heard of romantic orientations yet! So I was up to something, there just were no terms for that yet! Today that would be called bi-/panromantic asexual.

I haven't been able to track the exact date or even year when did I figure out I'm aromantic, or when did I hear about romantic orientations for the first time. From the messages I've been able to find, I was already in my early 20s. Aka somewhere around maybe 2011-2013. In those, I have still been wondering what I am or if I even want to have a relationship, not being really able to tell what I wanted or didn't want. Again, no one told me romantic orientations are about ATTRACTION and not about whether you have commitment issues or not (this as a half-joke, cos I have severe commitment issues with everything :D I need to feel free!).

Anyway, I do remember my key moment with aromanticism, or the "aromantic awakening" as you could call it too, was when I was 17 or 18. Or maybe I was older? I don't know, I have time blindness. Anyway, I had this one online friend I had a "crush" on (I think it was just undiagnosed adhd's person hyperfixation) and I even told her about it. Everything just is super shady, from those years, I was not really on my best and there are so many overlapping memories that feel like different alternative universes instead of memories on a same timeline. Anyway, I just remember at some point thinking about this girl and I thought about some "romantic" stuff, like kissing, and I just remember my brain going "NOOOOOPE!" I had wanted to meet with her some day so bad, but when I started thinking about actually meeting with her, I started to nope the fuck out. All I had in my head was awkward embarrassing "first kiss" scenarios from movies and I just was not having it! I basically went "lol I guess I'm aro too, then XD" but I still don't remember when did I have this realization. Was I 17? Or was I, say, 22? I guess I need to go through my old MSN Messenger and Skype convos some day to investigate this further because I really want to know. I couldn't even find anything from my Tumblr from those times (I registered here in 2011), but I don't know if that's just me not tagging or Tumblr search functioning normally (aka it never finds anything).

But yeah, I am touch-repulsed. And kiss-repulsed, and romance-repulsed, too, (unless it's my OTP we're talking about). I'm still not exactly sure if I'm touch repulsed because I'm aromantic, or if I'm aromantic because I'm touch-repulsed. I only know that because of my sensory issues (I'm neurodivergent), I have never liked touching nor being touched. Even as a little kid I hated hugs and never liked sitting on anyone's lap. I only tolerated my parents, mainly my mom, because they were my safe place as an extremely shy baby/toddler/kid, who was especially wary about men. I can't explain the latter, but there was something about adult men that caused me (as a baby) to hide my face against my mom's shoulder if they talked to me. I did that to everyone I didn't know, but especially to men I didn't know. No idea why.

I also remember how my siblings loved to sit on people's laps and were always climbing onto their laps, and I didn't like this. And once my (late) grandma was so touched when she asked me if I want to sit on her lap (I was maybe 5-7?) and I agreed just to make her happy. I still remember how it felt, and I did not like it at all, but it still made my grandma so happy that I THINK she almost cried when she told my mom I actually agreed to sit on her lap. I'm not sure how real this last part of the memory is because I was so young. But I do remember thinking I do that for a change because I knew my grandma would be happy.

So yeah, my touch-repulsion is not exactly a new thing but just something that has been a part of my personality forever. But is that the core reason for why I only feel aesthetic attraction? I never look at people and feel like I wanna touch. More of the opposite, the idea of having to touch them or them touching me makes me go "eeewww". If you have seen that video of a gibbon shaking their whole body after seeing a rat in their exhibit? That's what I feel like when I think about touching or being touched, in just any way, also platonically.

The only time I feel "sensual attraction" is when I see photos or videos of animals. The urge to pet a tiger is insane. But the feel of another human's skin or muscle (or hair or whatever) is very repulsive to me.

I still remember how disgusting it felt to e.g. sit on a cousin's lap. We sometimes used swings like this, and somehow I was aware of it not feeling nice, but still not doing anything about it cos it also was okay? Only later I have realized I really, really loathe the texture of human skin. Or the warmth and overall feeling of a human body. For example, I was at least 7 or younger when I sat on my cousin's lap while we were sitting on a swing and STILL, after over 20 years, I have that all in my body memory. I remember how the thigh bone felt under my legs and how freaking disgusting the muscles felt inbetween. Also at school, on the 1st grade, we often had to walk in a line of twos after the teacher and hold the pair's hand so no one gets lost. My then-friend had so ridiculously dry skin that the only thing I could think of was how I felt like throwing up because the skin on her palm felt so damn disgusting. I still can feel that in my hand when I think of it. That's one of my "core memories" from 1st grade - how disgusting the human skin can feel like.

I don't think I have ever felt actual romantic attraction towards anyone. It's really difficult to differentiate because as I mentioned, I get those people hyperfixations easily. I guess it's the same hormones but I never really want to do anything with them? I guess it's the emotional intimacy that "attracts" me and what gets me excited, but I'm still not exactly sure what emotional intimacy means to me. I don't exactly fall into the QPR category either, in a way I wish I had a best friend whose best friend also I would be, and that neither would have anyone else who is "better" than the other one. But the only intimacy there would be emotional intimacy, nothing else. And I need my freedom so I wouldn't move in with any human being, either.

Sometimes I've thought my "ideal partner" would be a robot because if I get annoyed, I could just turn it off and stuff into a closet and leave there, and if I felt like not having a "relationship" anymore, I could just remove the harddrive and destroy the robot, or both. That way I would be the only one with the memories, and I wouldn't have to worry about someone out there knowing things about me, things that only the closest can know, and I'm really afraid of letting anyone close in case it won't work (also with regular friendships) because I can't stop thinking about how much I wish I had that MIB memory cancelling device so that they would again know almost nothing, or at least much much less about me. There's already one friendship that ended a few years ago and I still keep thinking about how I wish I could take everything back and how I wish they delete(d) all the files and drawings and stuff I sent them. There are so many things about me I wish I never told them, now as we are no longer friends. Back then it felt like "of course this is gonna last a lifetime!" but turns out that nope, not all friendships will.

I guess it's time to stop rambling. This post is really long already. If you read it all the way here: congrats. And thanks. You probably just wasted your time but... that's on you I guess :DDD But yeah, some thoughts from a 30-years-old aroace who has been aware of their identity for at least or almost 10 years now.

[technicontrastron]

Tag Game

I was tagged by @a-pirate-my-hearties (thank you 💜)

1. Why did you choose your url? I have a weird AI thing going on. The Malevolence Engine was an somewhat-evil AI in a little flash game logic puzzle that is not playable anymore. THE MALEVOLENCE ENGINE SEES ALL FLAWS. I’ve been called “Malevolence” a few times so i chose another name (Davine Lu Linvega, after the silicon life queen from Blame! - he only wanted to see the netsphere ...) but i’m still attached to the url.

2. Any side blogs? Nope, everything goes here unfiltered - for a reason. Spent the past few years going full corpo and kept my interests locked away so much that i forgot i had any. Wanted to merge them back into one unified personality again - side blogs would be detrimental to that.

3. How long have you been on tumblr? Been on tumblr 2011 - 2013, which led to a big breakdown of mine. I’m back since January 2022.

4. Do you have a queue tag? Nope ^^ But i do queue heavily. The past few days were about 90% queued as i’ve been ... in a hole of sorts? Edit: I got one now, it’s “q”

5. Why did you start your blog in the first place? The first iteration? I forgot actually. It was mostly Cyberpunk aesthetics and a really terrible ancom bubble that imploded in drama at one point. The current iteration? I might ramble about the merging myself at times disregard that bullshit, to be honest it was loneliness. (My DMs are open btw ;) Discord is also an option, if you’re looking for someone to watch a movie or show with you i’m here!)

6. Why did you choose your header? Blame! is the best manga in existence, full stop. It’s a work of art. The sheer size of the world, so far into the future that you can not comprehend the distance anymore; the endless architecture, the storytelling.

7. What’s your post with the most notes? Probably one of the nekkid mods. We will not speak of them ;) (I don’t actually feel well about them anymore so)

8. How many mutuals do you have? Uhhhh would have to count please no math at this hour D:

9. How many followers do you have? 253

10. How many people do you follow? 219 (Sidenote i do get Fear of Missing Out so i try not to have my dash overflow - if i unfollow, please don’t take it personally! Let’s be friends on discord instead!) I generally follow asymmetrically, don’t feel pressured to follow back if i follow!

11. Have you ever made a shitpost? Yeah but i always delete them because i cringe at them myself immediately after

12. How often do you use tumblr each day? Not that much currently, mostly when there’s free time at work. I’m more active when i’m having a hyperfixation but currently i ran out.

13. Did you have a fight/argument with another blog once? One of the reasons i left tumblr in 2013. Did not do my mental health well. I try to stay out of the politics side of tumblr ever since.

14. How do you feel about “you need to reblog this” posts? Instant block for OP. Regardless whether i agree with the message or not. No time for getting guilted into giving others free internet points. 

15. Do you like tag games? Sometimes! If i don’t respond to them please don’t feel bad, i just sometimes have trouble with interacting and then it’s two weeks later and i feel awkward. But i am very happy that you thought of me! 

16. Do you like ask games? Don’t really partake in them :/

I don’t like to tag people in stuff like this because i then feel like forcing them into making a post (i have issues i know) but everyone’s invited if they’d like to!

[pochapal]

rank every year of the 2010s from best to worst i want some pochapal lore

[warning for discussion of my fucked up mental health and my myriad traumas. we’re really opening the pandora’s box here gang]

ok time for me to overshare on the internet again! super long post because i can’t shut up and you asked for it. anyway, by objective ranking: 

#1: 2012 - halcyon era, my personal peak. spent the whole year writing hunger games oc fics with my deviantart fanfiction besties whom i still think about all the time and always hope are having the best possible day. if you were here for this era understand i still hold you so closely and dearly in my heart <3. 

#2: 2013 - god i was such a good example of a human being back then. was the year my writing like actually took off and i had a healthy balance between creative stuff and a social life (said social life consisting of spending lunchtimes at school breaking into classrooms and discussing fandom shit with five other people. reading homestuck updates in the music room on one person’s really shaky mobile data...legendary). highlight of the year and maybe my life was in the april of 2013 when i got out of failing to submit a hard deadline essay by telling my english teacher i wrote a whole novel over the two week break and then producing said novel. god i wish i had that level of like. fucking confidence back me back then knew what i wanted and how to get it. 

#3: 2010 - the last year of childhood. i was 12 and played pokemon all the time with my friends and went places and had a moderately successful youtube channel and it didn’t matter that i was bullied so badly at school because i was basically high off life. summer of 2010 was so good specifically. i’d used to get the bus with a friend and go see movies and break into historical sites and get into normal childhood mayhem and maxed out my pokewalkers twice a month and i was buzzed because i had two (2) whole friendship groups to choose from and that was such a huge deal to me the terminal social outcast. it was so simple and carefree and even though everything and everyone involved in this era grew up to suck except for one specific person i kinda really miss it.

#4: 2018 - this was the first year i wasn’t depressed to the point of nonfunctioning. it was 20gayteen, i was on antidepressants, i was as close to thriving as i got at uni (going into town with people once a week, attending art and culture events, getting good grades across the board), i started to write for fun again, i got my cat whom i love dearly, i was exhibited in my uni’s city’s literature festival, GOD i actually nearly attended a pride event that year can you imagine. this year was basically my life’s second peak. miss getting the 8am train and daintily sipping on a cherry coke to keep me from passing out. wish this time could have lasted longer.

#5: 2019 - kinda absolute middle of the road year not for lack of anything happening but because the overwhelming amount of good and bad things cancelled each other out. so like there’s the fact that i was at the top of my uni game this year, was basically making the first steps into a professional writing career (covid i will never forgive you for killing all that dead </3), finally saved up enough to buy myself a gaming pc, and the summer after the homestuck epilogues, but equally 2019 was the start of the Pochapal Gender Fiasco which is by far the most horrible thing i am still currently undergoing and i burnt myself out mentally about halfway through the year (being stuck overnight in a hospital for a panic attack absolutely horrible horrible irredeemable) and then got like super death plague flu that i was sick with for three months (literally recovered less than a month before rona hit. god’s cruel karma.). so like...it kind of averaged out? the good shit was good but not as great as other years and the bad shit was awful but nowhere near as terrible as it could have been. gotta give a shoutout to 90% of my current mutual cohort for following me in 2019...omelette route gang make some noise !!

#6: 2014 - oof. this year essentially marked the start of a four year long downward mental health spiral because everything fell into awful alignment. i’d just turned 16, finished secondary school, had all my friends up and ditch me at once, was home alone for a whole summer, and was hit with Sudden Intense Body Image Issues that i couldn’t explain until uh. after very recent developments lmao. this one goes out to the me of july 2014 who did nothing but lay in bed and listen to the same two marina albums on a loop because fuck i’m attracted to men and also my facial and body hair are really starting to come in and if i think about this for too long i will literally kill myself because oh god i can’t handle getting older which is clearly and definitely the issue going on here. my brain fucking broke super hardcore and it’s a miracle that an overeating disorder was like the worst thing i walked away with. 

#7: 2015 - downward spiral year two!! i was so volatile this year it was such a mess. i was totally socially isolated after a brief stint of falling in with a group of people at the start of my first year of sixth form until january where in quick succession a) it turned out every single one of these people was friends with the person who sexually assaulted me whom i obviously had a lot of complicated feelings towards and b) baby’s first crush came out as bisexual but in the “women and also trans women” kind of way which tore me up so terribly in ways i couldn’t begin to understand. no words for the experience of seeing a girl kiss a boy and crying so hard at night you threw up because you could never be her no matter how much you wanted it. actually kinda get the sense what was going on there was bigger than just some crush lmao. then after that i was so mentally ill i basically attended school less than half the time and it was the only year in my life i failed my exams. i ended up having to resit my entire set of first year a level exams because jesus christ was i in such a bad way it was a miracle i even showed up to them. all i did was either have anxiety attacks or enter bedbound depressive slumps for weeks at a time. but it’s okay because it gets worse.

#8: 2016 - downward spiral act iii: the spiralling. prefacing this by saying that i actually had two whole good months (april - may) in that i was functioning enough to do my exams and finish school with decent grades. the rest was super extra mega terrible. my school attendance for year 13 dipped below 65% and literally the only thing that kept me from being kicked out was the fact that i was naturally smart at the subjects i took and also because the school would have a lot to answer for after letting me get to that state despite having a hefty file on how damaged i was. keep in mind every single part of this was fully untreated btw - i was just floundering around and letting it all fester. i spent three solid weeks going to school but locking myself in the bathroom all day every day and having mental health episodes then going home like nothing else happened only to continue the breakdown that night. then things got kicked into fucked up overdrive when i moved out to uni and was cut off from what little support structures i did have. it was so bad all i did was cry all the time and never went anywhere to the point where three separate sources recommended me to the wellbeing and crisis counselling service that i stopped going to after two sessions because i was fucked up in ways cbt techniques could not even touch. at least i tried to make an effort for the first two months of uni which like. good for me?

#9: 2017 - what lieth at the base of the spiral. helltrench year. i was at literal rock bottom. i stopped going to class, i didn’t hand in a single piece of work. i lied to my parents and would book trains each day only to go back to my student flat and sit there and contemplate suicide. like i would just slump on the floor in a catatonic state and vividly contemplate one of four or so ways i could end my own life. i only didn’t because i wanted to wait until the summer to collect my last student loan and transfer it to my parents as an apology for my death which obviously didn’t end up happening. honestly i can’t remember much of the first half of 2017 that’s how bad it was. i remember taking a gender studies class and the teacher made it Weird that i was the Only Male Student in the room and then she sent me a scolding email after i walked out halfway through a class and never returned. apparently i got into a lot of online discourse in this year but i don’t remember anything other than being put on a blocklist by the milkfic author over ace discourse which is funny if you have the context. mostly i just baited terfs and weirdo freaks to get them to say horrible things to me as what i guess amounts to some kind of digital self harm. anyway breaking point came in late august when i got kicked out of university and then nobody could ignore it any more so there was no choice left but for me to seek out help and recover enough to function which luckily i did. i really Do Not remember 2017. you could tell me anything about that year and i’d probably believe you.

#10: 2011 - extra circle of hell for this little fucked up gem of a year. on the surface it wasn’t actually that terrible, until the Summer 2011 Domino Effect Of Bad Shit. up until like may/june it was a pretty all right year! i was 13 and had a surprisingly successful youtube channel uploading pokemon soundfont remixes to an audience of i think ~350-400 subscribers at my peak? anyway then i got hit with the early summer triple combo of childhood friends moving away, cute and quirky sexual assault at the hands of a person in my friend group, and then having some Really Great and Super Appropriate interactions with adults on deviantart. like obviously there’s the actual ptsd-inducing event which totally disrupted and killed the person i was right up until that moment and reshaped every facet of my life for better or worse (there’s an alternate timeline where that didn’t happen and i got into electronic music and/or coding instead) but really it’s the events that followed in its wake which were kind of more fucked up. so like all of a sudden i was super aware of my body and me growing my hair out and being mistaken for a girl in class suddenly became this Less Innocent thing and i ended up spending hours overnight going to transgender questioning forums and looking up hrt timeline videos and having the wikipedia article on tracheal shaving saved because it was a life raft to me whose voice was imminently gonna deepen and i was simultaneously reeling with constant trauma flashbacks and the whole thing was so so fucked up. then i was on deviantart and i don’t remember exactly how but a small group of furry guys ten to fifteen years older than me started messaging me and encouraging and requesting me to produce nonsexual fetish stuff for them and talking to me about stuff like if i’d ever thought about growing up to be gay and i didn’t think anything of it for a long while because they called me a very talented writer and it felt so good to have someone be nice to me after being so alone and isolated for months on end. anyway the only reason i got out of that before it got bad was because they invited me to one of the big furry sites and i was weirded out because i thought it was a porn site and thinking about sexual stuff was a huge trauma trigger so i just ended up blocking them all and pretending like it didn’t happen. at the time half this shit didn’t bother me but in retrospect holy fuck 2011 was such a damaging year. to think if like three events didn’t happen i wouldn’t be the fucked up mess you see before you today.

god fuck this turned out super long but i’m not apologising because this was a therapeutic exercise for me and also constitutes as one of the biggest pochapal lore dumps of all time. come get your food or whatever.

[8ofdecember]

The last time I did something like this was 4(?) years ago, but this is just so funny! They’re attending ZIP! from their own houses. Any weirdness is purely on my grasp of what they’re saying. I don’t own the video btw.

Masu pretends to press a button and connect the call: Ah, we’re connected! Good morning everyone!

Everyone wave and say good morning.

Masu: Amazing. This is quite the sight! Ah but I feel that there are people present who are giving out this sense of “who’s this?!” First there’s Naoki.

Kenjiro: Eh? Naoki? Why?

Masu: Probably his hairstyle?

Kenjiro: Recently he’s going for this singed Naoki style.

Naoki: Please allow me to burn you.

Masu: I also feel that Imaichi’s image is a little different?

Ryuji: Oh really?

Naoto: He feels fresher.

Kenjiro: Yeah that’s right. There isn’t that prickly feeling

Someone says he feels softer (more approachable)

Ryuji: I am at home after all.

Voice in the backgroud: The members who are showing a different side of themselves because they are at home.

Masu: There’s something I’m a bit curious about. Are the wallpapers of the homes of the members of Sandaime J soul brothers all matching brick wall patterns?

Iwata: It’s just coincidence that Naoto and I have brick wallpapers:

Masu: You’re not living together, are you?

Kenjiro laughs out loud.

Iwata, Naoto: No.

Masu: And Elly’s house is full of Marilyn Monroe (actually you only see two portraits XD)

Elly: I really like Marilyn Monroe.

Masu: How many Marilyns do you have?

Elly: All in all, 4 Marilyns.

Background voice: And then we go to this request

Masu: Since this a precious opportunity where you’re doing an interview from home, if it’s alright with you, we were wondering if you could share a treasured item with us.

Naoto: This thing (as he brings a big box into view), I’m not sure I should call it a treasure. It’s more like a treasure and a bother. Gun-chan told me, “Naoto-san this is your birthday present.” The bag holding it was really really big. I bought it home and it was really heavy and I was wondering what it was. I opened it with a great deal of excitement and it turned out to be a kayak!

Everyone just starts laughing.

Iwata: Isn’t a kayak great!

Naoto: I wanted to ask the guys: do I look like I go kayaking?

Ryuji: No you don’t.

Meanwhile Tosaka claps gleefully.

Iwata: Naoto-san is the kind who likes hills and rivers (Naoto agrees) and I have this image of him going to these places. I had this thought where maybe he would just happen to go to a river in private and think “AH, there’s a kayak loaded in my car, why don’t I bring it out for a run?”

Tosaka: Do you really expect that kind of miracle to happen?

Background voice: Although the conversation doesn’t stop here, we need to move on to the main theme.

Masu: To the members of sandaime J soul brothers, it’s still a bit early, but this year’s November 10th is the 10th anniversary of your debut. Congratulations! (The members thank him) This is a great opportunity so we would like to look back on ZIP! and sandaime’s history from our first meeting.

Background voice: From the precious archive footage of ZIP!, let’s look back on the 10 year history of sandaime J soul brothers. The first one is from June 2011 at their first album release event.

Footage-Naoto: From the bottom of my heart, I’m really happy.

Tosaka: His face was sharp!

Naoto: My eyebrows were so thin!

Background: Then two years later in April 2013 we have an interview. The members who are watching this footage (Elly and Kenjiro were partnered up: cooking demonstration + beatboxing) 7 years later are curious about-

Naoto: At the back, Naoki’s hairstyle was eyecatching.

Elly: Yes! I noticed too!

Ryuji: I noticed the hair.

Kenjiro: It was a refreshing bob cut.

Naoto: It looks like a bob.

Naoki: It was not a bob. It was an Okappa (おかっぱ, google it :D)!

Background voice: They were curious about the long hair. It’s totally different from what it is now. Then we have footage from December in the same year of their first live performance in the ZIP! studio. After that in March of the next year, Sandaime’s first participation in ZIP!’s spring fest. Here the event that left the most impression on the members was the dance collaboration with Announcer Masu. (They did 君の瞳に恋してる~can’t take my eyes off you)

Elly: For Masu-san to have managed to remembered all of that choreography, it was really quite hard.

Masu: Yes, they gave me a week and so I had the time to turn the steps into words and from there I managed to remember.

Tosaka: Oh yeah you turned them into words

Naoto: You transcribed the dance moves.

Footage-Masu: I transcribed your steps into words. (someone comments that he was all serious business) Macho pose~Macho~macho

Footage-Naoto: This has never been heard of before right? This transcription of dance choreography into words.

The clip switched to Elly rolling across the stage while everyone took turns jumping over him.

Ryuji: Masu jumped over Elly.

Masu: Elly told me, “It’s okay if you step on me”, but there was no mirth in his eyes at all so I was really afraid.

Background voice: Then in June 2014 the release of Ryusei whose dance moves became a social phenomenon. After that the star studded Sandaime J soul brothers also appeared on ZIP! several times. How much of the interview do they remember? Let’s find out! The interview we have prepared is from November 2015, where after appearing on the music special “Best artist”, they were asked about a recent “Best scene”

Naoki: So on November 10th we will celebrate our 5th anniversary, and it is coincidentally also my birthday.

Background voice: That’s right. November 10th is an important anniversary for Sandaime J soul brothers: Debut anniversary and Naoki’s birthday! On that day-

Footage-Naoki: Naoto invited me to go eat very casually, when we got there and I opened the door______

Background voice: To give Naoki a suprise, Naoto prepared a surprise. What kind of surprise did he prepare? Everyone remembers, right?

Tosaka: Eh? What was it? I don’t know.

Iwata: What was it?

Masu: Naoki you yourself remember don’t you?

Naoki: No, I forgot.

Naoto: OI! You cold hearted man!

Background voice: And we start off unexpectedly with Naoki himself not remembering what happened, but what of the other members? We asked, just in case.

Elly: Something like Naoto dressed up as a girl waiting for him?

Naoto: My image in Elly’s mind is that?!

Ryuji: Other members were also present?

Kenjiro: Isn’t that it? That’s it right? November 10th to me is a special day. Since it was a birthday, the surprise was all members gathering together right?

Masu: So if Naoki asked you all to gather together for a surprise you will all gather together?

Kenjiro: If we can gather around on that day we will.

Masu: Ah then let’s go to the video showing the correct answer

Footage-Naoki: Naoto invited me to go eat very casually, when we got there and I opened the door and Gun-chan was waiting there (as a surprise)

Kenjiro: Gun-chan?

Elly covers his face and laughs uncontrollably.

Footage-Naoto: My plan was to have all 6 members waiting for him, but after I informed everyone, only Gun-chan turned up.

Footage-Gun: I was also wondering, “What kind of energy should I be using to welcome him?” “Sorry it’s just me?”

Iwata: We’re so bad at gatherings!

Kenjiro: It’s so bad that we were all asked to go but no one went!

Naoto: And you just said, “If you ask us to go we’ll go”! That was such a huge lie.

Masu: Kenjiro-san, what were you doing on that day?

Kenjiro: I really no longer remember.

Masu: Naoki how do you feel?

Naoki: It’s really lonely. I was thinking that I should always maintain a good relationship with Gun-chan.

Iwata: That’s good. That’s good.

Background voice: A fray in a 10 year bond? and then we go to another interview, this is right before their debut, about the pose that Iwata showed the fans.

Footage-Iwata: At the time I was still an amateur who couldn’t tell left from right, and I was standing on the stage without any clue as to what posing meant. and I ended up doing _____ weird pose. (footage-naoto agreed) They’re still laughing about it today.

Background voice: The weird pose that Iwata did when he was still a newbie, does anyone remember?

Kenjiro: This one, yeah

Ryuji: This I know.

Masu: Does everyone remember?

Tosaka: If you cue us, we can all do it at the same time.

Masu: The pose from Iwata’s newbie days, cue!

They all do the exact same pose

Masu (laughing loudly): That’s right, Let’s go to the answer video.

Footage-Iwata: It was simply a pose where I held my right wrist with my left hand. They’re still laughing about it today.

Masu: Iwata-san, are they still teasing you about this today?

Iwata: 10 years later today it’s still a joke that can be thrown around, that’s conversely quite alright. At the time I couldn’t quite make my hands calm down, and while thinking that I had to do something, I ended up with this pose where I looked like I was holding an injured wrist.

Background voice: We have the actual footage here. among all the members who had cool poses, there was Iwata: holding his right wrist tightly with his left hand.

Masu: Iwata-san, would you mind showing us that pose a second time?

Iwata: Ah it’s our 10th anniversary so I would like to promote this

Naoto: Promote?

Tosaka: I’d like to see that!

Background voice: This strong bond that Sandaime J soul brothers have built up over a 10 year period, another strong bond that goes without saying is their bond with the fans. Although they were supposed to celebrate this important year together with the fans, they faced extraordinary circumstances. However, the members are already prepared for this

Tosaka: The time when we can’t meetup, whether it’s the fans or the members, the frustration that builds up from wanting to “have fun at a live performance”, that’s a good kind frustration. Of course we all hold these feelings of wanting have a live performance, the build up of these feelings clash and lead to the birth of a tremendous amount of anticipation for both us and the fans.

Naoto: After the lifting of this emergency state and we overcome all this with everyone, we hope to be able to bring you all a lot of fun with the power we have accumulated, the ideas that we have thought up in this period. We are doing all these preparations. So let’s look forward to the day when we meet up in a live performance. We hope to continue to have your support.

Lady in the studio: You could really feel their bond in the interview

Masu: I’m sure the viewers at home also have this feeling, when you’re doing meetings remotely there’s usually a clash where everyone tries to speak, but the sandaime members didn’t face this situation and everything was smooth so I felt this was the result of a 10 year bond.

Kenjiro (laughs): Really? I think you’re praising us a little too much. (Masu: no really!) Looking at the footage from when we debuted, you can only feel a sense of wonder realising that that artist has successfully stood on the stage of a dome tour. The 10th year anniversary is a really special year to the sandaime J soul brothers, although it’s shame that we can’t do any live performances, we will fully utilise this time, arrange meetings. so that when this emergency state is lifted, we can deliver unbelievably fun live performances and entertainment. I have the confidence that we will be able to deliver, so please look forward to that.

Masu: Please work hard on that. ZIP! is also in its 10th year so I hope to continue to have your support.

[hjertetssunnegalskap1]

3. Sources of Inspiration - Neil Gaiman’s Masterclass (The Art of Storytelling)

“Remember that your influences are all sorts of things. And some of them are going to take you by surprise. But the most important thing that you can do is open yourself to everything.”

Here are some more of my personal notes to The Art of Storytelling. Neil Gaiman uses a lot of allusions (references to other stories) in his stories, and they are just as wide-ranging as his storytelling interests (oh yes, one of the things I LOVE with his writing).

Neil mentions his admiration for the following authors, and sometimes alludes to them in his own work: 

James Branch Cabell: American author who wrote fantasy and comedy in the 1920s and '30s. 

Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany: A prolific AngloIrish fantasy author. His novel, The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924), established some of the most central themes of fantasy writing in the twentieth century

Ursula K. Le Guin: American author who wrote the Earthsea Cycle (1968-2001), which is comprised of six books and numerous short stories, and which tells tales of the fictional fantasy world of Earthsea

P. L. Travers: British author who wrote Mary Poppins (1934) and a whole series of books inspired by it

Btw I love that he mentions how he was inspired by Lou Reed. And how his wife, Amanda Palmer, was inspired by Judy Blume. Inspiration can come from many places, and not just from the ones we think of as our writing heroes. That makes me think of all the music I have listened too, and how I’m influenced by that. Oh well. 

Old stories can be approached from new angles. Create a compost heap of inspiration and how to draw from your experiences to make a story uniquely your own.

All writers have a mental compost heap. We create our compost heap from everything you see and the people you encounter.

Don’t tell people how they should feel. Tell them what happened and let them feel. 

Tell stories about the people around you. Real people are more interesting than anything you could make up.

For story ideas, you can take fairy tales but flip the perspective: eg, from her Stepmother’s perspective, Snow White could be a villain, a vampire princess, with a necrophiliac prince, and the stepmother is a HEROINE for trying to save the world (I remember I read a flipped Cinderella horror comic once when I was a kid, and I still remember it… so.. he has a point, this is effective). 

Neil suggests many tools for approaching an old story from a new angle. 

Change point of view.

Modernize themes

Switch a story element (new location or new type of story)

Make it yours

‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ is a real question. Authors are scared of  answering because they often don’t know the answer themselves.

Ideas come from daydreaming. “The only difference between writers and other people,” says Gaiman, “is that we notice when we’re doing it.”

Ideas come from asking yourself simple questions, like “What if…?” (“you woke up with wings?... your sister turned into a mouse?....), “If only…” (“a ghost would do my homework”) and “I wonder….” (“what she does when she’s alone”), etc…. These questions, in turn, generate other questions.

Ideas are only starting points. You don’t have to figure out the plot. Plots “generate themselves” from “whatever the starting point is.”

Ideas can be people (“There’s a boy who wants to know about magic”); places (“There’s a castle at the end of time, which is the only place there is”); images (“A woman, sifting in a dark room filled with empty faces.”)

We get ideas from confluence — two things “that haven’t come together before”, coming together (“What would happen if a chair was bitten by a werewolf?).

“You get ideas from two things coming together. You get ideas from things that you have seen and thought and known about and then something else that you’ve seen and thought and known about, and the realization that you can just collide those things.”

For a re-envisioning of popular fairy tales, check out some of the following titles (damn I need to get some reading done):

Red as Blood (1983) by Tanith Lee 

Tales of Wonder (1987) by Jane Yolen 

Snow White, Blood Red (1993) by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling (ed.)* 

Kissing the Witch: Old Tales in New Skins (1999) by Emma Donoghue 

The Wilful Eye (2011) edited by Nan McNab (ed.)��

Happily Ever After (2011) by John Klima (ed.)* 

Clockwork Fairy Tales: A Collection of Steampunk Fables (2013) by Stephen L. Antczak (ed.) 

Unnatural Creatures (2013) by Neil Gaiman (ed.)* 

Beyond the Woods (2016) by Paula Guran (ed.)* 

The Starlit Wood (2016) by Dominik Parisien and Navah Wolfe (ed.) 

The Djinn Falls in Love and Other Stories (2017) by Mahvesh Murad and Jared Shurin (ed.)

WRITING EXERCISE: Choose a folk tale or fairy tale that you know well. Select one of the characters from the story for the following exercise and write a few pages about them, using one of the following prompts: 

Pretend you’re a therapist treating the character. Write a scene in which you discuss the character’s life and problems, then arrive at a diagnosis. 

Write a newspaper article describing the events of the story. For example, Snow White—Woman Hiding in Woods for Ten Years Found by Wealthy Hiker. Then write a story for that headline using journalistic objectivity. 

Have your character explain their actions to a jury 

WRITING EXERCISE In your journal, begin creating a compost heap. Title a page “Compost Heap” and write down the things that have captured your attention in the past week or month. These may become the source motivators of your writing, maybe of your career. Any writing project is an undertaking, and novels in particular, because they take so long to write, will require a sustained interest, so be sure to fill this page with your truth: What interests you? This can be anything: a word, a movie, a person, an event, so long as it inspired you. It can be subjects (cactus species, muscle cars, a voyage to Mars) or people/types of people (therapists, spies, your Aunt Germaine). Try to include things from other arts—for example, foods, music, or movies. In the beginning, make a practice of sitting down at least once a day to note things that interest you.

FOR YOUR NOVEL Create a specialized subset of your compost heap, which is a lexicon devoted exclusively to your novel. For example, if you’re writing about Greenland, gather all the words you can about snow, ice, flora and fauna, geologic formations, or weather occurrences. Research history and arts and science. Write down all of the words you love and that you think could go into your novel

Lesson comment:

Another really inspiring class. I have listened to this one several times already, and I seem to get new associations every time. Also, this is not the first time I have heard about the trick of twisting ideas around, and still... it’s a good thing to be reminded of. 

Wow, I somehow missed the exercises in this class (I’ll blame my undiagnosed ADHD). I’ll definitely look at those exercises. 

I also have this fairytale/ folktale idea in my “compost heap.” Actually, I have two ideas, but the newest one is a spin on two Norwegian folktales called “Kvitebjørn kong Valemon” (White bear King Valemon) and “Østenfor sol og vestenfor måne” (East of Sun and West of Moon). These tales are related to the myth of Eros and Psyche, and also to the story of Beauty and the Beast. I thought it could be interesting from the point of view of the so-called jealous third part of the story. Maybe. I might also try to twist a simpler folktale first, maybe one with the Ashlad (Norwegian folktale hero), from the princess’ point of view. I think it could be fun to play with those ideas + read some of the suggested literature. 

[almaasi]

GISH 2019 List of Items

Need a clean, rebloggable, printable, copy-pastable, bookmarkable reference for the GISH 2019 item list in case the official site goes down? I’ve got ya covered. Includes the item number, photo/video type, and point value. List will be updated as the hunt progresses. Good luck, Gishers~

[ see also: 2011 list // 2012 list // 2013 list // 2014 list // 2015 list // 2016 list // 2017 list // 2018 list]

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Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Misha Collins or GISH. I just love the bleeping bleep out of both. c:

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ALL of the Items below should either be captured as "images" (which are photographs) or "videos". When you click “Submit," there will be instructions on how to submit the links to these images or videos. You should only use YOUTUBE for the videos and for images - you may upload them directly on our site.

bUnless otherwise specified, ALL VIDEOS must be NO LONGER than 14 seconds. If you’re a second or two over we’re not going to penalize you (we know how finicky youtube can be), but aim for 14 or under. They can be shorter if you wish!

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1 / PHOTO / 21 POINTS / Make an Assbutt of yourself in public. Literally.

2 / PHOTO / 43 POINTS / TIMELAPSE. Nothing caps off a good, hot summer day like a footlong s'mores eaten by two, Lady and the Tramp Style. (No hands may be used in the creation of or eating of the s'mores.) - Rae M.

3 / VIDEO / 57 POINTS / They say stepping on a LEGO is the greatest pain one can experience. We Gishers laugh in the face of pain. Make shoes entirely from LEGOs - no fluffy socks or insoles allowed- and demonstrate them in use. Post it to social media and tag the LEGO accounts and @GISH. - Deidra

4 / VIDEO / 59 POINTS / Hula hooping is hard, and you're just not ready to go it alone yet. Create a hula-hoop with training wheels for beginners and show it in use.

5 / PHOTO / 36 POINTS / At least 3 grownups working in an industrial mud-pie factory. They must be wearing hair nets. Supervising them is at least one tidy child under age 10 in a suit and carrying a clipboard.

6 / VIDEO / 28 POINTS / 7 out of 10 dentists and dental hygienists recommend Flossing, and they practice what they preach. Show us 7 out of 10 real dentists and dental hygienists flossing (not tooth-flossing. Dance-flossing.)

7 / VIDEO / 113 POINTS / SLOW-MOTION. It's time for the most elegant and beautiful of all affairs: the paintball ballet! 5 ballerinas playing paintball on pointe. They must all be pointe dancers; they can be wearing safety gear, but it must be pink and there must be tutus and pointe shoes.

8 / PHOTO / 47 POINTS / It's summer, and that means it's time to do your civic duty. Take a swim in the jury pool -- complete with flotation devices, snorkel, etc.

9 / PHOTO / 34 POINTS / Bee-drinking poles are all the rage, but your neighborhood bees deserve to really unwind. Create a bee bar - a bee "saloon on a pole" using recycled bottle caps. Install it somewhere public. - Item Written By Misha's Mom

10 / PHOTO / 74 POINTS / A real matador in a real bullfighting ring with any of our GISH/gishwhes "flapes" (these are flags some Gishers purchase during registration). The bull is a Gisher, convincingly dressed as a bull.

11 / PHOTO OR VIDEO / 31 POINTS / Listerine Mouse Wash.

12 / PHOTO / 43 POINTS / A child reading a bedtime story to the monster under their bed. The monster should be charmed and cozy and cuddled up.

13 / PHOTO / 36 POINTS / The machines are taking over, and now they're even infiltrating the dating sector. Your blind date tonight at a 4-star restaurant is a humanoid robot.

14 / VIDEO / 58 POINTS / Nothing can shake you up! Show us how you keep centered: meditating on a moving mechanical bull. Keep your chakras aligned! Fall off in less than 2 seconds and score 0 points.

15 / PHOTO / 80 POINTS / Create a "food truck" that sells something incongruous with food trucks. It could be delicious pesticides, microchips, shower caps or anything in between. It can't be compassion, empathy, or anything that "feeds the soul." As loathe as we are to say this: get creative. Your truck must advertise its wares with flashy signage.

16 / VIDEO / 66 POINTS / LOCATION-BASED. Clowns were the original glad-iators. Prove it with Roman clowns fighting in an actual Colosseum or ancient amphitheater in a knock-down, drag-out pie fight.

17 / PHOTO / 23 POINTS / Trip the light fantastic. Literally. - Kelli R.

18 / PHOTO / 53 POINTS / You know that saying: "Christ on a paddleboard!" Well, it's used for a reason - Jesus walked on water and was an innovator in the Stand-Up Paddleboard world. Show Jesus on a stand-up paddleboard, with at least 3 disciples following him in a rowboat, canoe, or scull.

19 / VIDEO / 49 POINTS / The world is in desperate need of more Cheese Balls. Many more Cheese Balls. Many many many more Cheese Balls. Delivered as rapidly as possible. Build a functional Cheese Ball launching/delivery system and demonstrate it shooting cheese balls from a distance of least 30 feet away. You must be able to catch at least 1 in your mouth.

20 / PHOTO / 12 POINTS / A housecat happily flaunting a stylish mustache.

21 / PHOTO / 43 POINTS / You're a real dish. No, really. You and a friend, dressed as commemorative collector plates, donating platelets (that's what plates bleed).

22 / VIDEO / 291 POINTS / People always say, "GISH lights up the night!" Prove it. Get a bunch of drones with lights on them to spell out the word "GISH" in the night sky. The drones must serve as pixels in the sky, so you will need a lot of them. Probably at least 40.

23 / VIDEO / 41 POINTS / (Up to 20 seconds. You may use fast-motion or tight editing). When baking, measurements are vital to the culinary success of your creation. Small missteps will ruin your souffle. Of course, measuring cups and spoons, over time, change size and volume due to humidity and aging. Let's use a measuring device that you trust and know intimately: your mouth. First, figure out exactly how much volume is in you mouth and then use it to source and distribute all ingredients to bake a cake. You may not use any utensils or measuring devices. Grab whatever ingredients you use to make a cake and place them on your counter and then, without using your hands to measure or fill, fill your mouth with the appropriate amounts of each ingredient and then deposit in your cake dish.(Yes, this means you would need to "bob for flour" in your flour bag and then "mouth spout" it into your mixing bowl). Once the ingredients are all safely in the mixing bowl (again, delivered by your mouth), you are allowed to mix it with any device--as long as that device is a part of your face. Bake it and enjoy it with a loved one (without using your hands).

24 / VIDEO / 94 POINTS / Have a child under 8 years old create an original recipe, a la "Cooking Fast & Fresh with West". Record them inventing it, then executing their vision. It must be 100% child-led with an adult-only serving as sous chef. In a blatant cross-promotional stunt, the best recipes will be posted on my social media when my new book, "The Adventurous Eaters Club" hits bookstores. (BTW, you can pre-order now here.)

25 / VIDEO / 68 POINTS / (UP TO 30 SECONDS) You've been bragging you can out-dunk a professional basketball player, and now it's time to prove it: go one-on-one for a 30-second milk-and-cookies dunk-off against a pro-baller. Your competitor must be a current or retired member of the NBA or WNBA. Bonus points if your competition is a household name. Post your video on social media tagging the player with #GISHDunkChallenge

26 / PHOTO / 31 POINTS / Be a stand-in for me! Wearing a convincing Misha Collins mask, have a cup of tea with someone who still has a bonafide original Team 3 Rhino Hunt puzzle piece. The puzzle piece must be visible in the image. If you are on a team and you are a Team 3 Rhino Hunt puzzle piece holder, you MAY collaborate with other teams to help them out on this one. (I will still honor the tea-time for any unredeemed puzzle pieces. This offer never expires.)

27 / PHOTO / 46 POINTS / Food waste is a real problem in many countries. At the same time, food deserts are a problem, making it difficult for some people to get fresh, nutritious food. We're helping both problems in one fell swoop with our GISH Mobile Free Grocers! Get a grocery store to donate the day's "ugly" produce, day-old bread, and any other still-edible fresh foods to you, then go and distribute it as a GISH Mobile Free Grocer to people experiencing homelessness.

28 / PHOTO / 42 POINTS / The tooth fairy is sick and tired of waiting around to collect the teeth under kids' pillows, so she's gone rogue and has started taking them right out of their mouths to meet her quota. Obviously, she needs to be stopped! Create an effective anti-tooth fairy nighttime mouth guard and show it in use, successfully stopping the thieving fairy. -Ant G.

29 / VIDEO / 49 POINTS / (UP TO 20 SECONDS: You may speed up and edit video) The big trend in experience-based restaurants has you eating in total darkness, but these gimmicky restaurants charge a fortune. We're bringing it to the masses: Take a dinner date to an upscale restaurant - the fancier, the better - wear white. There must be a white linen tablecloth. Sit across from each other and feed each other dinner while both of you are blindfolded. You must be serving one another red wine too.

30 / VIDEO / 53 POINTS / The recorder is an under-appreciated instrument, with roots in ancient times. The depth of its mythical sirenic tones are magical and hypnotic. So what better place to play this divine woodwind than amongst the most beautiful sites in the world? Play the Kansas song "Carry on Wayward Son" at sunset on a recorder, overlooking one of the following: the Grand Canyon (Arizona, US), Angkor Wat (Cambodia), Machu Picchu (Peru), Great Wall of China, Taj Mahal (India), the Colosseum (Italy), Iguazu Falls (Brazil), Stonehenge (UK), Egyptian Pyramids or the Sphinx, Tikal (Guatemala), Angel Falls (Venezuela), Atacama Desert (Chile), Arashiyama Bamboo Grove (Japan), The Azores (Portugal), Boulders Beach (South Africa), Cappadocia (Turkey), Cliffs of Moher (Ireland), Disko Bay (Greenland), Lake Tekapo (New Zealand), Na Pali Coast (Hawaii, US), Sagrada Familia (Spain), Eiffel Tower (France), Reynisfjara (Iceland), Trolltunga (Norway), Ubud (Bali), Sydney Opera House (Australia), Banff National Park (Canada), Niagara Falls (New York or Ontario), Yellowstone (Wyoming), El Capitan (Yosemite), Statue of Liberty (Liberty Island), Eilean Donan Castle (Scotland), Neuschwanstein Castle (Germany), Matterhorn or Zermatt (Switzerland), or Chichen Itza (Mexico).

31 / PHOTO / 75 POINTS / In the past, stained glass windows usually depicted flowers or devotional symbols like angels and saints. But modern culture venerates a different group. Create a stained glass window of a Kardashian, famous Instagram Influencer, or similar personality with more than 4 million followers. It must be someone who is worshipped simply for being worshipped for being famous. You may not use anyone from the cast of Supernatural. Bonus points if it's installed in an actual cathedral.

32 / PHOTO / 43 POINTS / We're putting you in charge of Supernatural canon for the day. Paint a cannon with an elaborate SPN mural showcasing something that you think should be canon, with a caption like, "It's #SPN Cannon!"

33 / PHOTO / 24 POINTS / In the 2018 GISH Most Premiumerest Registration, we included a Misha Collins MishSqueezie stress ball. And though our concept artist did a great job, something got lost in translation and, well... Nailed it! But somewhere out there, there must be the guy that actually looks exactly like this stress ball. Find him and take a picture of him with the MishSqueezie.

34 / PHOTO / 81 POINTS / The Federation of Stormtroopers has been officially sponsored by the X Games this year. Let's see a highlight from one of their competitions with the stormtrooper participating in an extreme sport.

35 / VIDEO / 41 POINTS / A pop-up card that's for a blind child. Written in Braille, with pop-ups that can be understood completely by touch. Let's see it in action.

36 / PHOTO / 118 POINTS / Like many Americans, I've been trying to get supplies to the families and kids in detention center along the US border, and despite my C-List celebrity status, it's been tough. But we found a way. Go to SPNFamilyValues.com and follow the instructions there, then screenshot it and send that in as proof.

37 / VIDEO / 32 POINTS / I keep losing my stuff. Invent a Misha-proof AirPod-finding solution that is NOT a cord, because that defeats the entire point of AirPods - and one that works when they're not charged. Show it in use.

38 / PHOTO / 48 POINTS / Ugly Holiday sweaters are great, but with the climate crisis heating up the planet, we've got to branch out. Model your best ugly Holiday bathing suit or bikini made of repurposed ugly holiday sweaters. Model it at the beach with a caption touting the virtues of your "Global Warming Holiday Sweater."

39 / VIDEO / 108 POINTS / There's regular golf, and mini-golf, but where are all the maxi-golf courses? We want to see it all - the giant putters, the huge balls, and of course, the windmill.

40 / VIDEO / 45 POINTS / The world is heating up! Time for an old-fashioned kids game that we all know: Hot Planet. With at least 8 people in a public place, play a game of Hot Potato with a reddened globe of the planet Earth. Everyone must be wearing oven mitts and summer wear and not be fazed by the heat, except for one person who is dressed in a suit with a red tie and a Donald Trump mask. Trump isn't wearing mitts and his hands are covered in blisters and while he tries to hide it when the globe gets to his hands, it really hurts.

41 / VIDEO / 67 POINTS / (UP TO 30 SECONDS). A high-speed giant game of red rover played by at least 50 wedding guests. The bride must be the one flung across the field. The groom must be running after her holding her train. - Inspired by mdsteele47

42 / PHOTO / 95 POINTS / TWO PICTURES SIDE-BY-SIDE IN ONE IMAGE. I always feel a lot of guilt about the tattoo items in GISH. The first time I added one, I thought it was funny until I saw the tatts and then I felt a little bad. Of course, it gives me a rush of power when I see them in person, and many of them are actually very cool... So I have an idea that allows me to keep feeling powerful, but takes away all of my guilt: Get a tattoo of the encouraging message you wish your higher self had written to get you through the tough times. Because I know many of you already have inspiring tattoos, you must submit two images. The first is an image of you getting the tattoo when you are �-way done at the tattoo parlor, in the chair, holding a sign that reads, "GISH made me do it." The second image is of the finished tattoo. If you can, include your triumphant face. (Don't include more than 2 images in your submission. Just one image with two photos side by side.)

43 / VIDEO / 24 POINTS / Choose a sport you’ve never played before. Go do it with your coach: a child under the age of 10 who is an experienced participant. - Inspired by Coach Odette Padalecki

44 / PHOTO / 94 POINTS / Recreate a Civil War-era photograph with Captain America, Iron Man, and/or their respective sides using the Woodburytype photography technique. As always, no Photoshop allowed unless specified. This one does not allow it.

45 / PHOTO / 62 POINTS / Why have chain letters, when you can have chain mail? Create an intricate medieval knight’s suit of armor entirely out of junk mail, with chain mail comprised of chain letters. Must include a junk mail shield, sword, and a codpiece (to protect your "junk").

46 / VIDEO / 135 POINTS / Someone turned your local parking lot into your favorite childhood board game! Using sidewalk chalk or removable tempera, transform at least 5000 square feet of pavement into an enlarged version of your favorite childhood board game. Using a drone’s eye-view, show the whole board (complete with people costumed as game pieces playing).

47 / VIDEO / 141 POINTS / (UP TO 30 SECONDS) Garfield phones keep washing up on beaches in France. As you know, that’s because mermaids love cats, so there’s a mermaid call center operation down there selling these phones on QVSea. Show us the QVSea commercial for these phones, as pitched by a mer-spokesperson. Oh, and it should go without saying, but all of this is taking place underwater.

48 / VIDEO / 64 POINTS / A real barbershop quartet singing a passage from the Mueller Report in front of a federally elected political leader’s office.

49 / VIDEO / 48 POINTS / (UP TO 30 SECONDS) Talk to an elderly person over 80 and learn all about the best day of their life so far. Then, create a diorama of their best day in a small empty tin or box and give it to them. The video should show them briefly describing the memory and then you presenting them with the diorama. Make sure we get to see the diorama you made and their reaction, too.

50 / PHOTO / 59 POINTS / Write a formal, one-page letter to Gina Haspel, the current Director of the CIA. In it you must outline a plausible, one-page decoding of the fourth Kryptos. The letter must frame the description as an urgent matter and must seamlessly deploy the term “wild unicorn training centers around the globe”. Post a photo of your letter on social media and tag @CIA.

51 / PHOTO / 27 POINTS / Conspiracy theorists need to get with the times! Update the tinfoil hat to reflect technological innovations.

52 / PHOTO / 33 POINTS / Create MAILWHES, The Most Amazing, Intimidating Letterbox The World Has Ever Seen: a mailbox so amazing, so intimidating, so horrifying that your mail carrier will never dare leave you another piece of junk mail again. There must be teeth around the mail slot or opening.

53 / VIDEO / 64 POINTS / FAST-MOTION. At my friend Philip’s wedding, Giles Duley, myself and a few other forward-thinking innovators devised a new product and we would like to beta test the concept with you. It’s called: SoupFace and it involves eating soup from a bowl made from a plaster mold of your face. First, make a plaster mold of your face. Fill it with warm soup. Consume the soup without using a utensil and when the soup is gone and your face is back in the wet mold. Lift the SoupFace mold off the table without using your hands. Reveal the mask beneath.

54 / VIDEO / 59 POINTS / As all diehard Supernatural fans know, “Assbutt” was a featured player in Season 5, Episode 22 of the show, but the episode ran long and Assbutt’s scene was left on the cutting room floor. Rectify this oversight by releasing the never-before-seen cut of this scene.

55 / PHOTO / 39 POINTS / TRIPTYCH. Dawid Planeta illustrates his depression as mysterious creatures. In a 3-panel illustration, show your biggest fear or struggle as a symbolic creature with which you gradually come to terms. Label it so we know what your creature represents.

56 / PHOTO / 73 POINTS / A lot of people use their cell phones while in the bathroom, which is really gross. We understand that it can get boring in there, though. Help people break society’s screen addiction with our new solution: Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter toilet paper! Re-create a verified social media account on a roll of toilet paper- images and all. Scroll away—but don’t read the comments. (They’re crap.) Install it in a public bathroom as a public service.

57 / PHOTO / 47 POINTS / Send noods! There’s been an epidemic of people sending explicit noodle photos to unsuspecting people. We believe consent is important, and in this case, we consent—with some STRICT caveats: Recreate a TASTEFUL image of a famous nude painting or sculpture in noodles ONLY and then post it on social media tagged #SendNoods. Submit your actual image and a link to the tweet in your comments.

58 / PHOTO OR VIDEO / 38 POINTS / Ask a child aged 5 or under what their greatest fear is. Create and photograph or film a scene of you and them conquering this fear together. - Kristin L.

59 / PHOTO / 28 POINTS / Cement your own joy.

60 / PHOTO OR VIDEO / 244 POINTS / Angry birds. Flappy birds. Candy Crush. All those other games are so boring compared to GISH: The Game! Build an app game for the GISH App. It must feature a GISH mascot and integrate fully into the GISH App. Full specs for integration can be found here.

61 / PHOTO / 39 POINTS / (F)underwear.

62 / PHOTO / 72 POINTS / Each day, one member of your team must find one broken thing to upcycle and give to someone in need. Take a photo and, at the end of the Hunt week, submit a collage of the 7 now-useful items your team has gathered, refurbished, and donated. (You may not use a bicycle, but you may use a unicycle or tricycle.) - Inspired by Monica D.

63 / PHOTO / 38 POINTS / The ’80s are back, and we can’t escape all that goes with them: including stereoscopic images. Make a stereoscopic “Magic Eye” image of something that scares you as much as '80s fashion scares us.

64 / PHOTO / 62 POINTS / LOCATION-BASED. Outside a migrant detention center, lift a massive banner using balloons, drones, or telescoping poles at least 10 feet high with a message like, “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me.” "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” “When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong.” Be responsible with your balloons. Don’t let them fly away or burst and leave shards anywhere.

65 / PHOTO / 67 POINTS / An upscale art gallery opening at a landfill. All exhibits must be made from things found at the landfill. One professional art critic must be present to review the works.

66 / VIDEO / 256 POINTS / Plane air painting: A wing-walker on a biplane, painting a picture on a canvas of the landscape from their point of view. Show us the painting as it’s happening, and then the completed painting being held by the wing-walker.

67 / VIDEO / 49 POINTS / A signer performing the National Anthem silently in sign language on a field at a stadium that seats more than 5,000, with a sizeable crowd of spectators.

68 / PHOTO / 42 POINTS / I’m not saying Jared Padalecki is a big softie, but here’s a portrait of him toasted onto a marshmallow. Just the way it should be.

69 / PHOTO / 40 POINTS / Nobody’s more devoted or grateful to firefighters than we are, except maybe a dalmatian. Or Smokey the Bear. Go to your local fire station dressed as a dalmatian or Smokey the Bear and create a relaxation station to thank them for their work. You can bring treats, offer mani-pedis, foot or shoulder massages, aromatherapy... You get the idea.

70 / PHOTO / 69 POINTS / Over the years, Jensen Ackles has been depicted in Skittles, but we all know his character Dean loves pie. Let's do a crossover: Bake a Skittles pie with a portrait of Jensen baked into the upper crust. Lattice work in the top crust should allow you to see the Skittles inside behind Jensen. Here’s some inspiration..

71 / VIDEO / 66 POINTS / TIMELAPSE. Create a thạch rau câu (Vietnamese Jelly Cake) portrait of a classic movie monster. You may not use the blob. We must see the injection process and your completed jelly cake.

72 / VIDEO / 51 POINTS / In Chengdu, China, kung fu tea (long spout, performance tea pouring) is popular. But it was just a matter of time before it was appropriated by other cultures. Show us a barista performing the Mengding Mountain 18 Forms of Dragon Flying Postures Kung Fu Tea pour at a Starbucks.

73 / PHOTO / 47 POINTS / An actual lumberjack working up on a tree with an impressive, long beard made out of googly eyes.

74 / VIDEO / 77 POINTS / (Up to 30 seconds) A stop-motion animation of a life-saving first aid technique (CPR, the Heimlich maneuver, etc.) featuring dolls or puppets in crisis.

75 / PHOTO / 178 POINTS / Danish artist Thomas Dambo creates massive wooden giants from recycled materials and installs them in Copenhagen forests. That’s great, but some giants prefer urban living. Build a hipster giant that’s at least 8’ (2.4m) tall from recycled materials and place it in the middle of a busy city or town.

76 / PHOTO / 22 POINTS / Not all insects aspire to just be insects. Some have ambitions and hobbies! Without harming it, get a live fly, beetle, roach or other insect to sit on a sheet of paper and doodle an environment around it showing it at its job or hobby.

77 / PHOTO / 75 POINTS / An actual space suit with a GISH 2019 patch on it next to the national flag.

78 / PHOTO / 23 POINTS / The Enterprise wasn’t the only vehicle in the not-so-final frontier. Show us Star Trek covered wagons. Tweet your image to @WilliamShatner with the message “Admit it, Bill. This is how you really voyaged.” You may use Photoshop for this item. Submit your image, along with a LINK to your tweet in your submission comments for points.

79 / PHOTO / 72 POINTS / The insect world is under-appreciated, but they are tiny works of art. Create a realistic-looking, oversized detailed sculpture of an underappreciated arachnid or insect out of bread, ice, or marble, the way Michaelangelo would have done if he’d had the time. You may not make a dragonfly, ladybug, butterfly or any other insect that has already been socially normalized as “cute”. - Inspired by Kat F.

80 / PHOTO / 49 POINTS / The Wondersmith makes surprise, fantastical parties in the forests of Oregon, which we find lovely. Set up a surprise party for hikers at least ½ a mile from a rest area that’s clearly been created by forest-dwelling fairies and/or trolls (that’s you). Make sure it’s welcoming, and capture the moment you’re surprising them— both you and the hikers should be in the image. They must be real hikers and strangers to you—don’t bring in ringers, or you’ll anger the fairy queen.

81 / VIDEO / 43 POINTS / Love makes the world go round. Build a machine that uses love to spin a globe.

82 / PHOTO / 160 POINTS / COLLAGE. In the Western United States, there are mountain monograms, giant glyphs of letters that are often there for no discernable reason. Create your own Mountain Monograms out of natural materials to craft a message with purpose. Submit a photo of your glyph message that says something inspiring to the birds and planes that fly over it. Your message must be at least 2 words long, with each letter at least 6 feet tall and each letter must be on separate peaks. You may not do this on protected land.

83 / PHOTO / 37 POINTS / The London Zoo has a pair of penguins who are out and proud, but they didn’t get to march in Pride because they are penguins in a zoo. We think that’s just wrong. Dress up in penguin suits and march through your town with rainbow flags to show your support for Penguin and LGBTQIA+ Pride.

84 / VIDEO / 58 POINTS / TIMELAPSE. This means something… Subtractive food sculpture. Start with a block of cheese or a massive mountain of mashed potatoes and without using tools, eat your way to an ornate re-creation of a famous statue.

85 / PHOTO / 29 POINTS / You’ve heard of a scarecrow, but let’s see a straw-stuffed scarevolleyballplayer at the beach.

86 / VIDEO / 84 POINTS / (UP TO 30 SECONDS) In 2020, we’re gonna need a 30-second GISH ad worthy of airing during the Super Bowl, advertising the latest in summer refreshment: “GISH.”

87 / PHOTO OR VIDEO / 45 POINTS / Misha doesn’t have a ton of skills other than “acting on camera”, but he does try hard. He’s also at a potential career transition point. Help him explore other career paths by creating a poster of him photoshopped doing another job you think he’d be suited for.

88 / VIDEO / 31 POINTS / Ben Ferencz started each dinner table conversation with his children by asking them, “What did you do today to make the world a better place?” Wake up tomorrow and take a specific, positive action to make the world a better/nicer/happier/prettier place with a child as your assistant. Then show us what you did.

89 / PHOTO / 34 POINTS / LOCATION-BASED. Some people long to have a picnic at the Longaberger Basket Building, and you and your friends are no different. But size matters! Enjoy a to-scale picnic on the grounds in front of the building- giant fruits and sandwiches, etc. No Photoshop just forced perspective.

90 / PHOTO / 58 POINTS / It’s an ineffable Good Omen to see Azrapahile and Crowley sharing a hot fudge sundae on Sunday. Post your picture on social media tagged #GoodOmens and @neilhimself. Bonus points if the sundae is eaten at a Sundae School in Cape Cod.

91 / PHOTO / 23 POINTS / A Cairn Terrier. (His name is Rocky. He won’t come when he’s called.)

92 / VIDEO / 48 POINTS / One of our Gishers was able to help her mom act FAST and responded in time to help her with a stroke. Last we heard, her mom is okay, but she can’t play this year—so in her honor, it’s time for a quick refresher on recognizing a stroke. Do a rendition of “Head, Shoulders Knees and Toes” with some kind of lyrics like: “Face, Arms, Speech, Call in Time (don’t waste time)! Face, Arms, Speech, Call in Time (don’t waste time)! When someone’s had a stroke their life is on the line! Face, Arms, Speech, Call in Time (don’t waste time)!” with the appropriate movements. Include a link to the National Stroke Association and GISH on a final card of your video. Post it on social media tagged #GISH, @robbenedict, and @natstrokeassn. - Inspired by Nicole’s mom

93 / PHOTO / 41 POINTS / A Mom-and-Pop shop that sells Moms and Pops. (New and used.) Show a young child making a purchase.

94 / VIDEO / 36 POINTS / (AUDIO UP TO 90 SECONDS) We’re auditioning new anchors for G-ISH, GISH RADIO! Send us a clip of your team’s broadcast debut as you discuss the climate crisis’ effect on sea levels with a real, noted expert in the field.

95 / PHOTO / 63 POINTS / Tatsuya Tanaka creates miniature worlds with everyday objects. Her scenes are whimsical, which is how the world should be... but is not always how tiny-world actually is. Create a miniature, dismal and tragic scene using small reimagined objects.

96 / PHOTO / 15 POINTS / Write your resume as a haiku.

97 / PHOTO / 34 POINTS / 8554J46H+FH. You, the Carrot God, have summoned them.

98 / PHOTO / 95 POINTS / (GRID). The hot new trading card battle game is GISHémon! Create a trading card for each of your team mates with their photo and stats (location, Gisher type, powers, etc.) as the powerful kindness monsters they are. We must see each teammate’s unobscured face for it to count.

99 / PHOTO / 55 POINTS / Little known fact: when an avocado is fully ripe, it hatches. Show us the tiny, intricately carved creature sleeping inside (which you’ve carved from the pit).

100 / VIDEO / 24 POINTS / TIMELAPSE. Write a phrase on a piece of wood of something negative you say about yourself to silence yourself or hold yourself back. Burn the wood and the phrase in a fireplace or fire pit. Use the ashes to write something affirming about your strong self on a sheet of white paper.

101 / PHOTO / 30 POINTS / The heir to the throne of France was known as the Dauphin, French for "dolphin". According to Donald Trump, the heir to the British throne is the Prince of... Whales? Illustrate a meeting of these two majestic undersea figures, with Macron and Prince Charles as their respective attendants. (This may be photoshopped or, for bonus points, live action.)

102 / VIDEO / 31 POINTS / Reach out to a senior in your family or community and ask them about a commercially made snack or dish from their childhood that brings them fond memories—something that just doesn’t exist anymore. Try to recreate it based on their description, then share your creation with them and record their assessment.

103 / PHOTO / 23 POINTS / A carbon footprint on a globe.

104 / VIDEO / 58 POINTS / A motorized vehicle with cheese wheels. It can be a motorcycle, tricycle, or 4-wheel vehicle, but it must have cheese wheels made from actual cheese.

105 / VIDEO / 320 POINTS / Get Donald Trump, Mike Pence, Jeff Sessions, Jair Bolsonaro, Boris Johnson, or any other duplicitous, nationalistic high-ranking politician to tell the absolute, verifiable truth about any controversial and uncomfortable (for them) topic they normally lie to the public about. It must really be the real person, not an actor or someone in a mask. You must be able to verify the facts through a nonpartisan, independent source. (This may be our first truly impossible item.)

106 / PHOTO / 48 POINTS / A bacterial culture petri dish portrait of Jonas Salk. Tweet this to Melinda Gates thanking her for her work vaccinating children.

107 / PHOTO / 24 POINTS / Create a haiku for an animal on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species that tells of the animal’s plight and why we should protect it. Next to the haiku, include a hand-drawn picture or origami sculpture of the animal.

108 / PHOTO / 79 POINTS / Stonehenge was cool, but it just wasn't built with sustainability or environmental impact in mind, so now we're stuck with ancient druid clutter by the side of the road. As a modern druidic architect, you know better. Next to a highway, build an architecturally significant henge out of 100% recycled materials that represent our current culture. (Cardboardhenge, Styrofoamhenge, LaCroixCanhenge, etc). Stonehenge is 30’ (9.1m) tall, but don’t worry—yours can be as short as 1:3 scale—but it must include at least one dolmen.

109 / PHOTO / 96 POINTS / An elaborate hinged, Faberge-style Easter egg that opens to reveal Trump & Putin embracing.

110 / VIDEO / 21 POINTS / LOCATION-BASED. Play “the floor is lava” in front of the Osservatorio Vesuviano in Pompeii. If you can’t get to Pompeii, you can play it at any Olive Garden, as long as you get other diners to join in.

111 / PHOTO / 38 POINTS / SIDE-BY-SIDE. COLLABORATIVE. Swap-meet day! Use the GISH app to coordinate with at least 5 other Gishers in your area to meet up and hold a yard sale. Except, this is not a yard-sale, it’s a yard-giveaway: the GISH Community Bazaar. Bring as many items as you can bear to part with and set up shop. And remember, no money must change hands and no bartering! All items must be gifted to passers-by and everything must go!

112 / PHOTO / 24 POINTS / A jello mold with a funeral scene inside.

113 / VIDEO / 18 POINTS / COLLABORATIVE. In Uppsala, Sweden, there is a tradition called the Flogsta Scream. Every night at 10 pm, students at university stop what they are doing to let out a collective, primal scream from their rooftops and dorms. This tradition shouldn’t be exclusive to Sweden, so at 6PM on Friday, August 3rd, get together with as many Gishers and other humans as you can in a public setting and let out one deep, primitive, collective howl. 

PS: We’re still #sorrynotsorry, Sweden.

114 / PHOTO / 46 POINTS / The best part about being in the hospital is the couture. Hold a hospital gown fashion show in your local hospital to show off red-carpet-worthy hospital gowns of your creation. Glam it up and walk (or roll) the runway with any patients that might be able and willing to participate… and don’t forget the slip-proof socks!

115 / PHOTO / 48 POINTS / SIDE-BY-SIDE. Bring an old bike back to life with a flourish—make it the most beautiful bike in the world. Give it to someone to someone in need. Submit photos of the bike before and after refurbishment, side-by-side. - Item Written By Misha’s Mom

116 / VIDEO / 40 POINTS / MONTAGE. Basic Training can be hell, and the military needs our support! Create a video of you and your team collecting and packing “basics” to send to a currently deployed serviceperson. The catch: your video should emulate a “basic training” montage from a movie-obstacles courses, bucket brigades, etc. (You must actually ship the goods, choosing ONLY from this list or a similar approved list for your country of origin: CLICK HERE) - Jennifer W.

117 / PHOTO / 45 POINTS / This year, we lost a beloved furry friend, Peter Mayhew (the actor who played Chewbacca). In honor of his memory, create a felted Chewbacca out of your pet’s hair.

118 / VIDEO / 46 POINTS / TIMELAPSE. The LGBTQIA community struggles a lot with erasure. Make sure everyone feels seen: create a portrait of an iconic LGBTQIA person by first filling up a page with a rainbow of colored pencils or pastels, then use an eraser to lift out the negative space, leaving the colored portrait behind. Include a message letting them know they are seen and loved. Post it to social media and tag the person, if they’re on social media, then submit your portrait with the link (if any) in the comments. (This may be done in oil pastels as well.)

119 / PHOTO / 82 POINTS / SIDE-BY-SIDE. Some people really do have eyes in the back of their head. Before and after images of a person with long hair, and then their head shaved and a recognizable portrait of their own face shaved onto the back of their own head. (Donate the hair to a non-profit organization that makes wigs for cancer patients.)

120 / PHOTO / 26 POINTS / Neil Armstrong stepped on to the Moon 50 years ago. To memorialize this amazing achievement, make your own “One Small Step” monument. Take a Giant Leap for mankind and put your foot somewhere it has never been before and probably should not go, then show us the resulting footprint.

121 / PHOTO / 33 POINTS / SIDE-BY-SIDE. You know those garden gnomes that dotted your grandmother’s backyard? Well, it’s been a while and now they have fallen on hard times. They have turned to a life of crime and misanthropy. Their little gnome hearts are filled with despair, hatred, and regret. Show us the before and after.

122 / VIDEO / 131 POINTS / The next time that Earth’s magnetic poles reverse themselves, your magnetic compass won’t be much help navigating. Fortunately, you remember a mention from a history class of a “south-facing chariot” [SFC] invented in China some 2500 years ago. To be better prepared for the coming magnetic mélange, you have decided to build a functioning SFC so that you can always find your way home. Of course, your SFC will be topped with an assbutt and your chariot will be modeled after a 1967 Impala.

123 / PHOTO / 81 POINTS / Everyone goes to visit the Southernmost Point in Key West, FL, but it really never gets to travel. We’re changing that. Make a 1:2 replica of the Southernmost Point and take it on holiday to the Westernmost, Northernmost, or Easternmost points of the US or any landmass. Take a photo with it at the nearest marker or tourist attraction to prove you were there, and submit with the location and coordinates in your comments.

124 / PHOTO / 23 POINTS / Put your face somewhere it absolutely does not belong. Not a picture of your face. Your real face. In that place. Where it should NOT be! (Keep it clean. My mother will see this.)

125 / PHOTO / 33 POINTS / Senator Ted Cruz is worried about pirates in space. Seriously. He is. Well, we are pretty sure that his fears are well-founded. Let’s prove it to him: Show us space pirates in action. Tweet your picture to him at @tedcruz (and be sure to use the #GISHSpacePirates hashtag!)

126 / VIDEO / 71 POINTS / Last year we asked you to put wings on something that absolutely should not fly and prove that it can. One team (Team Schnitzeljaeger) made a pizza box fly. For this year, make a pizza fly (sans box). You may not throw it in the air, drop it, or fling it. It must attain flight through some mechanical means. Just the pizza. Not the box. The pizza must fly from near ground level to at least 50’ high and must travel horizontally at least 100 feet by any means. Must be edible and consumed after it lands.

127 / PHOTO / 46 POINTS / LOCATION-BASED. The Dalton Highway stretches 414 miles from Fairbanks to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. About halfway along it, there is a roadside marker denoting crossing into the Arctic Circle. Send us a photo of you standing next to the marker. Having a moose in the picture is optional, but preferred. Being dressed as a moose is mandatory.

128 / PHOTO / 56 POINTS / SIDE-BY-SIDE. We’re creating the GISH International Forest! Go out and plant as many trees as you can and add your trees to THIS MAP. Once you plant them, you will become their stewards, so choose your location wisely: make sure you’re allowed to plant there and that the trees are native so they can flourish. Add a small, eco-friendly sign with GISH INTERNATIONAL FOREST, GISH.com and your team’s name on it. Submit your photo along with a screenshot of its place on the map and number of trees you planted in the comments. If you can’t plant a tree on your own for reasons of mobility, hospitalization, etc, a donation to OTP of at least one tree will suffice, but you still have to tell us approximately where they are and how many trees you planted and add them to our map.

129 / PHOTO / 44 POINTS / This year is the 150th anniversary of the first Transcontinental Railroad, which opened up rapid (for the time) access across the United States. The original event in 1869 was celebrated as the Central Pacific Railroad locomotive “Jupiter” and the Union Pacific Railroad locomotive #119 came nose-to-nose as a Golden Spike was driven into the final section of track. Well, we firmly believe that every good anniversary deserves cake! Recreate the Jupiter, or #119, or both, made entirely from cake.

130 / PHOTO / 26 POINTS / A cyanotype photo of junk-food wrapping or junk-food.

131 / VIDEO / 61 POINTS / You have accepted a new position with the Mars Tourism Bureau. To attract potential visitors to the wonderful Mars climate, you plan to inform them of the daily environmental trends. Create a 15-second video weather report, complete with temperature and wind descriptions and get a real weathercaster dressed as an alien to report it on local news during a live broadcast. 

Note: Your Mars weather information must be real and correct for the day you submit your video! We will be checking!

132 / VIDEO / 132 POINTS / A very large balance scale. (The kind of old-fashioned scale that we think of when we say, “the scales of justice.”) On one side, at least 5 very wealthy-looking people. On the other, at least 5 very impoverished-looking people. The scales are tipped in favor of the elite. Find a way to balance the scales.

133 / PHOTO / 22 POINTS / Everyone talks about “viral videos.” We think we know what those are. Share a GISH video of a biological (not technological) virus and get it to go “viral” with at least 1,000 likes. It must include GISH.com in the video and text to count. #ViralVirus

134 / VIDEO / 81 POINTS / (UP TO 30 SECONDS). It’s time for GIFF - the GISH International Film Festival! Create a 30-second horror film. Noted author Neil Gaiman tweeted: “You've got a week to rob a bank using only a rattlesnake, radioactive uranium and a bottle of whiskey.” “Jed here has a week to steal a battleship using a goat, a can of gold paint, and three resin models of Warren G. Harding. Go!" Use either prompt as the plot of your GIFF film. Post your film on social media and be sure to tag #GISH and @neilhimself, then submit the video and the link to your post in comments.

135 / PHOTO OR VIDEO / 51 POINTS / The aliens have been in Area 51 for decades. Why do they stay? Because of all the amenities, of course. Show us the leisurely life of aliens at Area 51: the best Retirement Community in the Universe! We want to see elderly aliens playing shuffleboard, mahjong, and bingo, getting alien spa treatments, doing tai chi and pilates... You get the idea. Post your submission to social media tagged #GISH, #Area51 & #SocialSecurityCheXFiles

136 / PHOTO / 37 POINTS / COLLABORATIVE. Join the movement to cross-stitch what you care about: create a cross-stitch picket sign for a cause you believe in. Connect with at least 2 other teams and craft a protest march on a street corner. - Item Written By Misha’s Mom

137 / VIDEO / 38 POINTS / Megan Rapinoe reminds us all that despite equal skill, women are often not treated to a level playing field in business. Show us a team of female office workers playing soccer in traditional business attire opposite men with a ball that says “EQUAL PAY.” The women, of course, should score.

138 / PHOTO / 26 POINTS / The most stressful spa environment ever. - Lynette

139 / PHOTO / 126 POINTS / Recently, a mylar balloon from Disney’s Frozen was found on the bottom of the ocean floor… Clearly leftover from an undersea birthday party. Show us the underwater party, including the birthday person blowing out the candles on their cake. PS: Your mother doesn’t live there! DO NOT leave a mess or impact sea life.

140 / PHOTO OR VIDEO / 37 POINTS / Now that Donald Trump is president, people around the world have squandered billions of man-hours talking/worrying/complaining about him. Have an economist calculate the cost to the global economy of these lost hours. They must show their work and be a professor of economics.

141 / PHOTO / 31 POINTS / Part of your job for the Mars Tourism bureau is managing PR. Design a brochure or poster that convinces people to visit our timeshare at Scenic Mt. gishwhes (on Mars).

142 / PHOTO / 33 POINTS / We just celebrated the 50th anniversary of the moon landing. Prove it was faked.

143 / VIDEO / 91 POINTS / Thanks to modern technology, we can relax and watch TV virtually anywhere, even in the loo—but we still can’t kick back on the porcelain throne and relax while we do. Create a toilet recliner to solve this problem.

144 / PHOTO / 37 POINTS / You thought they said, “Get Out the GOAT.” Be the Greatest Of All Time by co-hosting a voter registration booth with a goat.

145 / PHOTO / 70 POINTS / Mary Poppins and the Demogorgon from Stranger Things both loved hanging around in the Upside down! Create a convincing image of you having upside-down high tea on the ceiling with Mary Poppins and a Demogorgon. Post it to social media and tag the Stranger Things accounts and GISH. - Inspired by TessaMac

146 / PHOTO / 53 POINTS / Every year, I send Gishers to visit my grandmother at Roland Park Place retirement home in Baltimore, Maryland, and this year is no different. Visit her retirement community (or any nursing home or community near you) and help the residents escape—metaphorically, of course. Take them on a tropical getaway by staging an impromptu beach party! Between the hours of 1 PM ET—3 PM ET on Monday, July 29 and Wed July 31 only, bring flower leis, small flowers, pre-packaged treats (nothing homemade), postcards with kind notes on them and/or a ukulele or guitar to sing with them. Ask them to reminisce about the happiest summer vacation they ever took. (PS: No bathing suits and leave the sand home, please. Hawaiian shirts are fine.)

147 / PHOTO OR VIDEO / 73 POINTS / COLLABORATIVE. The evening of Sunday, July 28 is the event of the year: the #WeJustMetGala! Get together with Gishers in your area at your local museum in the strangest, fanciest attire you can create—go so all-out, you make Billy Porter jealous. Roll out the red carpet and a banner, then convince strangers passing by to pose with you for red carpet pictures. Be fabulous! We must see the museum in the background, and there must be paparazzi.

148 / PHOTO / 31 POINTS / You know that this is the 50th anniversary of Woodstock. But did you know that Woodstock the bird from Peanuts first appeared 2 years earlier? In 1967? So actually Woodstock the bird is 52. He’s drunk a lot of beer over the years and can’t hide it, but he is vain, so he’s had lots of work done. Tons of collagen and botox. He wears a toupee. He dyes his feathers. Show us what he looks like today.

149 / PHOTO / 81 POINTS / SIDE-BY-SIDE. A Jackson Pollock paint-by-numbers kit: before, and after it’s been painted. (No cheating- follow the numbers!)

150 / PHOTO / 47 POINTS / A ukiyo-e woodblock print depicting an image of your worst nightmare. (Caption it so we know what it is.)

151 / PHOTO / 21 POINTS / You know how they keep making movies out of games? Like the Pikachu movie? Or Battleship: The Movie? Why don’t they ever go after the real money and make poems out of these properties? Write Battleship the poem, or Pikachu the poem. Must be at least 10 lines long.

152 / VIDEO / 63 POINTS / Birthday wishes are getting fulfilled so much faster since we automated processing. Show us a Rube Goldberg machine that is activated by a child under 10 blowing out candles on a birthday cake, and ends with the thing they wished for being delivered into their hands.

153 / PHOTO / 41 POINTS / I said no more ponies in the living room, and I meant it! But unicorns are totally okay.

154 / VIDEO / 37 POINTS / It’s GISH University, Year 2! Each person on your team must attempt to learn a new skill they have never tried before and document the experience, including the first attempt.

155 / PHOTO / 33 POINTS / SIDE-BY-SIDE. Thar’s plastic in them thar waters! A prospector panning for microplastics on a public beach. Craft jewelry from anything you collect and show it to us.

156 / PHOTO / 47 POINTS / LOCATION-BASED. Where do angels go for tea? To the sky garden, of course! Depict two angels having tea while seated on a cloud on the edge of the Liss Ard Sky Garden in Ireland. Photograph them from the central plinth so it appears they are hovering in the sky.

157 / PHOTO / 37 POINTS / A hand-made kite that looks just like the face of that famous person you look up to, high in the sky.

158 / VIDEO / 249 POINTS / TIMELAPSE. Oceanic exploration shouldn’t just be for the elite. Companies are working on making exploration affordable, but we need something now. Drop a camera and a light in a tiny, weighted, protected housing with a window on a line (so you can pull it back up). Just outside the window a common object filled with air. Like an aluminum water bottle, or a balloon animal, or something made of styrofoam. Lower everything at least 1000 feet below sea level. The camera should be rolling so we can see at what point your object gets crushed by the pressure of the ocean. You cannot contract a submersible company and cannot pay for this to be done—this is a DIY project only. Oh, and keep it green: you must retract the line or you will be docked points. If you leave any piece of this in the ocean, including the line, we’re docking you points.

159 / VIDEO / 7 POINTS / Right a great American novel. This is not a typo.

160 / PHOTO / 51 POINTS / The lunar ticks are in the hall… Pink Floyd knew what was up. Show us what the lunar ticks on the dark side of the moon look like (you know, because you have a specimen preserved in a jar in your front hall.)

161 / VIDEO / 81 POINTS / Thirsty for a challenge? Build a puzzle jug. Show you building it, then someone else figuring it out and successfully drinking from it.

162 / PHOTO / 77 POINTS / GRID. Thomas Deininger makes amazing representational sculptures out of found objects. Using EVERY piece of non-recyclable, inorganic trash you generate during the Hunt, create a 3-dimensional, representational self-portrait. EVERY member of your team must do this.

163 / VIDEO / 39 POINTS / Paint a Jenga set red, white, and blue. On each one write a word or phrase from the constitution. Get a real US Republican and a Democratic Congressperson to play (State or Federal). See how many they can remove before this whole thing collapses.

164 / VIDEO / 223 POINTS / “Fake news” was bad enough, but it’s pervading all media now and we can’t believe anything we see. Create a Deep Fake of Misha Collins complimenting Donald Trump. (We put this item in at the last minute after Misha’s final read-through of the list, so he doesn’t know about it. Don’t tip him off. We just want to see his reaction. You know, because he loves Donald Trump so much. This must be actual, digital Deep Fake footage (google it), not you in a mask, and not just a voice over or clever edit, to count. Video must be at least 5 seconds in length.

165 / PHOTO / 42 POINTS / Apparently, once upon a time, the US government weaponized ticks. (Really.) Show us a pinboard with an example of a tiny, weaponized tick, complete with Rambo-style military gear and assault rifles.

166 / VIDEO / 43 POINTS / Love has no borders, and neither does fun. Show two people on opposite sides of an international border crossing or wall playing a game such as charades, Pictionary, or another game that does not require them to touch or pass goods across the border.

167 / VIDEO / 36 POINTS / TIMELAPSE. Last year, we suggested Gishers melt a message into a glacier or iceberg with a laser and received lots of complaints. We now recognize that people melting words into icebergs for scavenger hunts is one of the biggest problems facing our environment today. Have a climate scientist calculate the volume of water produced by, let’s say, 10,000 people melting eleven 6’ tall letters, 2” deep in an iceberg. Then have them calculate the amount of water produced by the additional melting caused by a .5 degree global temperature increase. Show us the numbers and analysis so we know how bad Misha should feel.

168 / PHOTO / 28 POINTS / Check out a book from a local small-town library that hasn’t been checked out in at least 20 years. Submit a photo of you holding up the book with the stamped inner jacket showing the dates or other visual proof of this stellar feat.

169 / PHOTO / 159 POINTS / SIDE-BY-SIDE. Tiny homes help those experiencing homelessness be a little safer and have dignity, but they’re hard to move around, and that presents a problem. Create blueprints for a Tiny Home that is durable and large enough for an adult to comfortably walk into through a door, yet can be folded down into a flat cart on with wheels for mobility and made of ultra-lightweight materials.

170 / PHOTO / 119 POINTS / Climb ev’ry mountain! Like most nuns, Mother Abbess was an avid climber. Show us a nun in a full habit, rappelling down a steep grade of mountain.

171 / VIDEO / 88 POINTS / (Up to 30 seconds) Get a well-known sportscaster to do a play-by-play for a real wedding.

172 / VIDEO / 40 POINTS / They say that to perform CPR, you should compress someone’s chest to the beat of “Staying Alive” by the BeeGees. Get CPR certification while dressed in 70s disco attire.

173 / PHOTO / 31 POINTS / Gishers have become nationals of Westarctica and other micronations, but it’s time we claimed our own land. Since nobody else has done it, we’re officially claiming the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as New Gishlandia! Help us with our micronation building: Create a flag, a national anthem, a crest, a statue of our Founder or a propaganda poster (all material items should be constructed solely from plastic trash).

174 / VIDEO / 45 POINTS / The Gabra people of northern Kenya are a nomadic people who believe in living in balance with the environment and live by the tenet, “a poor man shames us all.” Mutual support is imperative in their culture, and no one is allowed to go without food, shelter, or hospitality—something the whole world could learn from. Take a page from the Gabra and go on a nomadic journey through your neighborhood, bringing with you as much food and water as you can carry along with cards with phone numbers and addresses for local shelters. Bring sustenance, hydration, and support to anyone in need you find, and document your journey including how far you traveled and how many people you helped along. Anyone appearing in the video must give permission.

175 / PHOTO OR VIDEO / 41 POINTS / LOCATION-BASED. Do something you’ve always been told you can’t, or shouldn’t, do while at (or outside) the Forbidden Corner in Coverham, England.

176 / PHOTO / 68 POINTS / You look so festive with your “real avocado leather” purse or shoes made from avocado peels. - Inspired by Debbie M.

177 / PHOTO / 31 POINTS / Remember FloJo? Florence Griffith Joyner a world-record-setting Olympic athlete whose long, intricately painted fingernails made her an 80s style legend. Times marches on, and now instead of FloJo, we’ve got BoJo—but style trends endure. Paint a portrait of Boris Johnson, FloJo style—on your excessively long acrylic pinky nail.

178 / VIDEO / 28 POINTS / When you want to say something sweet to your loved one, you always use s’mores code.

179 / VIDEO / 90 POINTS / Walking on water is so 2,000 years ago--but it’s a timeless tradition. Construct shoes that allow someone to walk on water. You may not be standing on anything that’s under the water and the water must be at least 6 feet deep. You must be in a lake, pond, river or ocean. NOT a swimming pool. You must take at least 6 steps. No stilts in the water. No super shallow water.

180 / VIDEO / 41 POINTS / Create a 6 ft by 6 ft painting using only your body, paint, and a white sheet for a canvas. Bonus points if you manage to create representational art. - Kamila B.

181 / VIDEO / 36 POINTS / On today’s segment of your cooking show, we learn how to make your world-renowned recipe for dessert haggis.

182 / PHOTO / 16 POINTS / You know that feeling, when there's a word on the tip of your tongue but you just can't seem to say it? Show us that word. On the tip of your tongue. - @baileysaurusrex

183 / VIDEO / 31 POINTS / My favorite poet, Mary Oliver, passed away recently. In tribute, make a video showcasing the top highlights of your team’s week and end it with the quote “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?” - Inspired by The Plaid Fox

184 / PHOTO / 63 POINTS / We've seen the pictures of dogs catching treats by German photographer Christian Vieler. Let's see a high-speed photo of your teammate catching treats in the same style and photographic detail. -Kandace

185 / PHOTO / 28 POINTS / SIDE-BY-SIDE. Hasan Minhaj rightly points out that there are many places in the US (and the world) with offensive names. We’re all for a good Assbutt, North Dakota or ****, Michigan, but if it’s racist or marginalizes a group we’re opposed. Find a place on the map or a street name that celebrates a known racist or slave-holder or war criminal or simply a place name that uses a derogatory term and petition to have it changed to an inoffensive alternative. If you’re in the US, this is where you can start and if you’re abroad, seek out your local organization that manages names of cities, towns, and locations. Submit a screenshot of your proposal, then put your petition here so other teams can sign yours. Finally, make sure you sign at least 5 other teams’ petitions (you’ll find all the petitions here.)

186 / VIDEO / 35 POINTS / It’s not just for fine dining anymore... At a fast-food establishment, get a grill cook to create a McAmuse-Bouche and serve it to a waiting, unsuspecting customer.

187 / VIDEO / 104 POINTS / TIMELAPSE. In Japan, there is a fad of polishing aluminum foil into a perfectly polished ball. You just topped that with your wad of aluminum foil-turned-perfectly polished bust of your favorite celebrity. Tweet an image of the final product to your celebrity crush tagging #GISH, then submit the image and include the link to the tweet in the comments section of your submission.

188 / PHOTO / 69 POINTS / A menstrual Pad-alecki. Create a menstrual product bust of Jared Padalecki... and make sure his hair really "flows." Then, donate at least an equal number of products to a women's shelter. (We don’t have to see you donating: just include your donations receipt somewhere in the image by your sculpture.)

189 / PHOTO OR VIDEO / 49 POINTS / We're not saying the cast of Supernatural is hot, but your fumage portrait of a Supernatural actor or actress speaks for itself. Smokin'! (Be super careful with this one- and have a fire extinguisher at the ready just in case. Remember, GISH doesn't pay medical bills and you're not allowed to hurt yourself - or anyone or anything else. If you can't be sure of that, pick a different item. (Post your video to the actor depicted).

190 / PHOTO / 229 POINTS / Evolution of the selfie: A person with an iPhone taking a selfie next to a person with a point-and-shoot camera who is taking a photo of a person with a Polaroid camera who is taking a picture of a person with a 35mm camera who is taking a photo of a person with a daguerreotype camera taking a picture of a person with a camera obscura taking a picture of someone painting a self-portrait. This should be a single photo, not photos from each camera.

191 / PHOTO / 0 POINTS / We will post an ambitious charity item that we will all collaborate on together shortly. Get ready!

[theloverofdragons]

now i'm not expecting the spanish inquisition (*wink wink*) but given the immense talent in the zutara fandom, i am expecting that there are loads of amazing fics, got any recommendations??? ^.^

NOBODY EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION

But you are very right there anon, there are a lot of amazing fics that this fandom has produced

btw I’ve got more fic recommendations here and here 

Multi-Chap

 didn’t know my heart by @babyfairybaekhyun;And yet, in a matter of days, she has managed to worm her way under his skin, has cracked open his rib cage and has begun to patch up the endless amount of wounds on his heart(i would also 100% recommend Need the Sun to Break)

With Small Steps by @botherkupo;Mistakes once made cannot be undone, nor can consequences be ignored. A newly crowned Fire Lord is no exception.

i’m still here by @owedbetter“You see me.” And somehow, that makes all the difference.

they call you refugee by @akaiikowrites“You are mine. Maybe I didn’t choose you then, but I choose you now. That changes everything.” Zuko goes into exile with a scar, a mission, and a wife. [Canon Divergence AU]part one ; two ; three ; four

Lilacs and Lily Pads by @sadladybugA tale of clumsy courtship and calamitous court weddings, featuring awkward family encounters, floral mishaps, cultural complications, and good old fashioned fluff and conflict. Takes place in the five years following the war’s end. For Zutara Week 2016. A prequel to Bones.

Moonlight and Sunshadow by @grapefruittwostepThe dragon offered Katara a deal: protection for her family and tribe if she lived with it for a year and a day. And she said yes. Because what other way was there to save her people? But there was more to the dragon than Katara bargained for. An “East of the Sun, West of the Moon” retelling.

an unfortunate series of naked mishaps by @emletish-fishKatara and Zuko secretly seeing each other. They just want a little privacy. Is that too much to ask? Fate it would seem, has other ideas. a series of Naked Mishaps follows. Completed! Rated S for silly and N for nudity

Oneshots

Things That Aren’t by misszeldasayreA late evening stargazing with Katara leads to a secret relationship that takes over Zuko’s life: “The sense of hurtling through space, of free falling into the abyss threatens to overwhelm him. His world, once governed by the sun, is now ruled by the moon sprawled out before him.” Follow Zuko and Katara’s relationship through its genesis, implosion, and resolution.

roll the dice by @raisindeatreSome Zutara, some gen, 100% crack (the gaang play Dungeons and Dragons in the Dark and it is fluffy and hilarious and amazing)

mist & mysteries by @gialaxy;She smiled to herself beneath the veil of her hat, turning to look at the familiar figure that prowled stealthily across the rooftop. He was impossibly silent, as he always was, that she sometimes wondered whether or not he was really there, whether he was merely the face of her lonesome dreams, a wisp of smoke in the night air, a ghost wandering the skyline. Or: The Painted Lady wasn’t planning on spending a night at a stuffy party full of other ‘vigilantes’ with the Blue Spirit, but here they are, doing something that strongly resembles gossiping, and she can’t help but wonder who he is beneath the mask.

Ambitious by Foolish_Moon“Icarus.” She whispered when she first laid eyes on him, remembering the tale of the man who flew too close to the sun. Maybe it was the scar, a burnt mark shaped like a lone wing, contrasting against his pale features; or maybe it was his eyes, golden and glaring, like the merciless sun. Zutara Week 2017 Day 4 Entry.

A Lover of the Lights by euphorellaZuko comes to terms with the aftermaths of the war.

PaintedBlue Super-Hero/Villain AU by @fireprunes‘Oh god, I just had a one night stand with a supervillain’ ‘Dear lord, I just fucked a superhero’ (to make the situation especially awkward; they just lost their viginities to each other)

Lunar Leashed by nonsensicallyrics;Zuko’s compromised senses on the night of the full moon lead to Katara having a dog for a month. AU written for iamartemisday for ZK Secret Santa 2013. Based on the prompt werewolf!Zuko

Drabble Series

Zuko Was No Coward by hootowlZuko was many things, but a coward he was not. A collection of Zutara100 prompts. Title may change.

Fate Loves the Fearless by @babyfairybaekhyunCollection of tumblr ask box fics

Zutara Month by @archergwenHe won’t choose another life, not if he can’t spend it with her, watching her, basking in her glow, seeing her grow into someone even more wonderful. She’d climb an old temple of three thousand steps, carrying him the whole way, if it would mean she gets the next seven lives to see him smile. (some chapters have been re-arranged to be in order of prompt date, not date of publication)

Slices of Ocean Kumquat by @sonicciZutara Week 2011. Mask, History, Social Networking, Secret, Awkward, Legendary, Caught. Theme 7: When Zuko is caught in the act of something utterly despicable, will Katara find it in herself to forgive him?

Smut

The Ocean Takes Me In by @babyfairybaekhyunShe swallows hard, releasing a shuddering breath, and nods. “Perfect,” She whispers, and Zuko is sure that his heart is gone now, wrapped up in her hands.

Heat by @elledixKatara was pretty sure that it should be illegal for the Fire Nation to have heat waves, especially in a nation of firebenders who just absorbed all that heat. One-shot.

Hope you have fun reading these (I absolutely did) ^.^

Happy Shipping!

[kazamastar]

Welcome to 2019

Version 3.0 : Final Version - Wow. February and finally, the 9th is here. All of you my 488 followers can finally enjoy it (372 by the end of 2017). I’ve never been that late to write a sum up but it’s pretty obvious that if it took me so much time to do it, then deep down I didn’t want to do it. Indeed I was about to let that sink in and leave this post with the version 2.0. But I remembered I had one person to honor. And this is what this year 2018 is about : focusion on the good actions and the good people. Because spoiler alert : this year 2018 have been on some other level of shit. More than 2013, 2014 and 2017 combined.

Pic : Plot twist. No more smile. No more bowtie.

Well let’s do some quickmaths : as i said we upgraded from 372 to 488 followers (and roughly 2,241 posts). For the 9th time I have to say that I have mad love for y’all (except fake pr0n blogs, y’all aint shit). For the humans that still follow me : thank you. And I’ll have even more love for the poeple who read this until the end haha. I have to apologize because these last months my tumblr looks pretty much like a mess, between the heartbreaking lyrics, quotes, passive agressive posts than only a few people can understand ... And that’s all because of that one follower I lost (y’all understood it was an euphemism). But to be accurate, I don’t want this post to become another heartbreak post : there are already too much of them on my tumblr. Indeed, it’s one of the main contraints I forced myself to write under. Because “l’art naît de contraintes” (Art rises from contraints) like Van Gogh said. So : not another heartbreak post where I pour my heart out for a girl who won’t even read it (guess I’ve done enough with the Helsinki post).  But it’s kinda difficult because this break up is the main reason my 4 last months of 2018 (and on...) have been so so awful and so much things happened because of this. But nevermind I’ll do my best. I’ll do my best because like I said, this post is more about love. This break up surely made me less human, mistrustful, but still, I’m writting because I’ve seen beautiful actions that had to be honored. But we’ll see that later. What other contraints for this 9th sum up ? A young lady I’ve met this year challenged me to write 2 good things for 1 bad that happened to me this year. I’m sorry, I failed ahah. I found more good than bad, but that 2 for 1 ratio was a bit too much ahah. Désolé ma grande ;) And because of this, I had to have a kind of draft for writting, even though I always told myself these sum up needed to be written without drafts, to keep them kinda “natural”. Looks like I’m taking this more and more seriously haha. Well, when I say that this year have been worse than my 3 worst years combined this is not a joke. Have you ever told yourself for example “Wow I left all my stuff in the car, I would be deadly unlucky if someone would break into it and stole everything !” ...Yes, that’s that level of mischance. Because this happened to me btw. And that’s the spirit of this whole year. In “Welcome to 2016″ I remember talking about “mala suerte” ... that was bullshit, 2018 is the real mala suerte. The heartbreak of this year is the worst of my whole life by far, then I’ve been close to what I dreamt of in karate, what I fight for since 2011, had 2 chances to get it this year and I still not got it by a hair’s breadth. Dad got into a crash car, hopefully only the car got wrecked. (so sad it won’t take me again to Andorra haha) People kept on deceiving me. Close friends but also unknowns.

People close to me know how much I cherish friendship. If you’re my friend and you’re not doing well, then I’m already on my way to yours to fix you. No exceptions. Even faster if it’s because of a heartbreak, because heartbroken people should never feel lonely. It’s that simple. SO when I see fuckers I have been there for through ups, downs and heartbreaks and these people are not even able to give it back to me I can’t help being mad. And I don’t act like that in order to make people give that kindness back to me, that’s not the purpose. But I do hate ungratefulness. So, I had to go through a heartbreak again and I saw people disappear again. So that’s enough lines wasted talking about these people. I also have to talk about those who were there. In 2018 I also found an awesome training partner and got closer to her clan. That’s a positive energy I really needed on that 2nd half of 2018. Par ailleurs, tu liras surement jamais ça mais je me permets une parenthèse pour te dire encore une fois Merci Julie pour avoir sauvé ma vie. This kind of old friendship is priceless to me. We can also talk about some young friendship : in march I met someone (almost my best 2018, except I didn’t manage to define an encounter good enough to define it as the best of 2018) who made me go deeper into Tekken, making me getting closer to the Tekken community in Tls. Funny how I always dreamt of this when I was a kid and this is happening. Indeed I’m living the shonen life : I��m in a group (where I met some really lovely people), I’m not the strongest but hell I do what I can to improve and that’s begining to pay even if i won’t forget the 68-0 against sensei, and like in karate I still aim to the top. It’s funny to be inside another competitive world where people don’t have all the values we have in karate. Some of these Tekken people (in the whole country, not only in Toulouse) show off, are mean to each other etc ... And also like in karate, we admire asians for being the best to do it in the whole world. What else ? I became a karate teacher. Took me a bit of time, it wasn’t hard but just took me time and dedication. I still met some great people all along this experience. I made peace with the old pals, vacays together were really incredible. Some of the sweetest days of this year. One of the sweetest day this year was the day I worked hard as hell and went back “home” to the one I love. What a lovely feeling. But I guess we didn’t lived it the same way ... Then, I also had the chance to make a karate lesson in the 1st place I’ve been taught karate !!! This was outstanding because I love to give back to those who gave me, and I love to inspire people. So, it was such a pleasure to tell these kids “I was standing where you are now. I started like you and I’ve been getting stronger and stronger. If I did it you can do it too !!!”. I truly believe some of those kids are about to be deadly strong, hopefully I’ll be done with competition haha. Talking about competition, i sadly lost my title in Andorra by mid June.  At the end of the competition, I promised to come back stronger and to revenge but there will be no revenge as this competition will not be repeated in 2019. Indeed, this Andorra 2018 was a great competition and a great trip. A cool trip, great team, great mates, a lot of alcohol, a good hotel room, and love ... so much love. A deadly hangover, but a lot of love. Sadly, there would not have been love again, as 1414 who was my coach for the weekend, my partner on the tatami and in life decided to take a different path from mine. Indeed, I promised to not talk too much about that but this is all the 2nd half of 2018 is about : me trying not to drown because of this heartbreak and it feels like everything is related to that. I got cocky and forgot the 1st and only love lesson my father taught me “nothing lasts forever, mostly in love”. Damn he was right. Even my mother was right for not trusting her at the begining, and God knows she’s never right usually. I won’t even mention what that break up costed me. But as the big bro says : there were no house, no kids, no joined bank account ... Only wasted times and dead dreams now. “La mort d’un rêve” ... it’s still something painful. S. is now a dead dream. I cannot imagine my own flesh meeting some destructive people like the ones I met and going through hard times like I’m going through. I wouldn’t be able to handle it. So no more S. and no more L., and it’s a hell of a problem as I’ve always built my life around the fact that I wanted them. And it’s painful because I wanted them with her. Nevermind, no one will ever know “what a great father I could be” as 1414 said. So much dreams. Gone. My 5 brothers took care of me as much as they could and they did amazingly great. I’ll never thank God enough for putting these guys into my life. Hope they know how much I love them. That was sad to see another one of them going back to his motherland but ... what an amazing last evening in Toulouse we spent. I’ll never forget this one.

Still talking about the break up and all the bad that happened this year : tbh I couldn’t draw good lessons from all of these bad things. Really. But like I said, I’ve seen good things coming from good people. So now I need to talk about 27. First of all, 27 was right on so many levels. (yes, I use numbers to not drop real names). Those who know me know that I love to experience, live everything. I would have been better without this heartbreak but still, it taught me new things. I could understand 27 better. When she talked about hell, she wasn’t joking at all. The doubts, the negativity, the hate, self-hate ... I think that’s too much to handle. But still, she still tried to help me when she saw me going through that hell. I couldn‘t thank her enough for this and that must be remembered. This is the whole reason I still wanted to write this sum up, in spite of all the bad things that happened. It was like : a soul lending a hand to another soul. Merci. Je ne l’oublierai jamais, je t’en dois une belle. Et toujours d’une âme à une autre. Tu dis le contraire mais tu as une belle âme et je suis sûr qu’il te reste beaucoup d’amour à donner. Tu as trop à donner à ce monde (en espérant que tu me lises un jour)

Also, I could understand 26 better. [...] And 26 still have the most beautiful smile in the whole world. No transition : Najwa Zebian said that « it’s unfair that new people in my life will have to destroy walls around me they didn’t even built » (btw I love this woman, she also had a big impact on my life through her reflexions) and I can tell she’s right but … trusting people is so hard these days. I really don’t know what to think about this statement. I think I’ve always been picky about who I let close to me and I still got fucked up by my ex-lover, my entourage … It’s all about who to trust, who to let in and who to cut … And it feels like I’ve been making the wrong decisions for years.

It’s starting getting late so let me end up with facts nobody cares. Neutral facts : I discovered lofi this year, my hero academia (FUCKING AWESOME !!!!), Tokyo Ghoul, 7DS, sword art online (great !!), la casa de papel, stranger things, sherlock, IP MAN 3, the good place, misfits, Juice Wrld blew up this year, NAV, Dosseh ... Funny how I discovered some of the saddest love song this year haha. Bad facts : I got injuried a lot. Females still played me a lot. Indeed I realized females are cruel but I still love them. This might be the proof we don’t chose our sexual orientation haha. Then, I couldn’t train properly from Sept to Dec. Oh, I can’t listen anymore to : Nicki, Kehlani, Rihanna or Cardi B. “More life” or “Views from the 6″ are albums I can’t listen to anymore. Well, GOOD FACTS now ! : Got a karate gi from J. (outstanding move), I put the young bloods in high school at Tekken and mangas haha. I met 80′s family and it was like a dream and I’m sure I got luckied in another dimension haha. 80 and 90 are still close to perfection in my eyes. 30 is still 30, with good and bad moods. I’m in peace with the sensei. I also received one of the best gift of my life. I learned that I was able to train by myself thanks to my power of mind !  To finish, I saw that I was able to forgive and still give love, even if it was pointless and too late.

Well, 2019 has already started and this will sure be a hell of a ride (January was ... special) as now I’m like on some quicksand shit. Let’s go ! And let’s not forget those 2018 that marked this year and I’ll surely be listening to in a decade (you need to know that I still listen to all the songs in the previous sum ups !). Enjoy :)

2018 Playlist

Dvsn - The morning after

Youv Dee - Opening

Tory Lanez - 48 floors

Roy Woods - Instinct feat MadeInTYO

XXXTENTACION - SAD!

Damso - Smog X Kyle - Ikuyo

Dosseh - Cœur de pirate X Guordan Banks - Keep you in mind

Marwa Loud - Je voulais (feat Laguardia)

Bazzi - Honest X Omar Kadir - The last thing I do

Oboy - Nuit X NAV - What I need

The Magician - Love break feat Hamza

Dinos - Les pleurs du mal

⚡ Dinos - Helsinki X Logic - The Glorious Five X Laylow - Digitalova ⚡

(Albums :6lack - East Atlanta love letter X Juice WRLD & Future - Wrld on drugs X Tory Lanez - Love me now & memories don’t die)

[davidjjohnston3]

I ask again that you not share the Tumblr with MVJ as he uses all knowledge of me against me or to imitate / try to be me rather than MVJ. I ask the same w/r/t MJ / Michael, as he resents me for various reasons to do with manipulation-leadership (such as telling him in '09 that I felt that I was going to be a doctor someday in order to hearten / give him morale when he was anguished over job-searching in the Great Recession).   I do things like this because of a film called "Late Spring" a masterpiece by the Japanese director who inspired the Taiwanese auteur about whom I wrote my RU senior thesis and met Rebecca Hu who inspired me to work hard, get that Singapore job, meet Kate again in '07 in NYC, promise her in '08 I would struggle / fight / work for 3 years to become someone deserving of her (hand in marriage if not just friendship), which is also part of why I made that '08-09 deal with Dad that culminated in me going to MTTP in Madison, meeting Chi Hye, falling in love with this gold light in her eyes, believing in angels and mountains and "They shall mount up as eagles and not stub their toe" (Isaiah), meeting Josephine Park at 7-Step and everyone else, getting promoted to Head Developer in 6 months, then quitting b/c of a falling out I had on that night I called you after 6 months' radio silence. IDK if you want to hear this but I wanted to marry Josephine / "LitGirl."  I thanked her for helping me.  IDK if you care about this she flirted with me partly by showing armpit-stubble in the summer of 2010 and I understood this because I understand "Korean American literature." She might be the most beautiful perfect ideal "jeongdakhan" (kind of 'suitable,,' or, 'spec') woman I ever met.  She went to Seoul National U. which is Korea's no.1 university and worked for an elite newspaper before taking some time off to write - she loves Emily Dickinson and, I believe, Park Wanseo, who wrote my favorite Korean short story "That Girl's House" about a promised couple in Japanese-occupied Korea who are separated by the girl's father's paranoia about Gop Dan's becoming a comfort woman and sold to be a farmer's bride in what becomes North Korea rather than marrying the "village prince" or aspiring scholar, who wants her to come away with him to Seoul... Josephine or "Jeongeun" (which kind of means perhaps "emotion-grace" or arguably "central grace" - Josephine means "love will increase" BTW and is the name of Jo from Little Women; the name she chose for herself) looks a bit like Lee Yowon the aspiring girl who gets plastic surgery in "Take Care of My Cat" and a bit like Seo Juhyun / Catherine Seo / Seohyun the youngest member of Girls Generation who was known for her probity, "Holy Seohyun" who was no. 2 in her HS before becoming the "maknae" or "final inner" / youngest and most beloved member of the nation's best-ever girl-group.  FWIW, I used to write to Seohyun on Twitter as well but she never replied.  On around the time of the sinking of the MV Sewol she wrote "we cried till our eyes dried" or so and used the word "huisaeng" to describe the victims which actually can mean "sacrifice."  I wrote to Seohyun using a quote from Dante Alighieri about beauty and pure thoughts or pure minds since I read "New Life / Vita Nuova" and "Heaven / Paradiso" in KR.  "Catherine" incidentally means "purity" as well. 2. On that night I first called you in 2011 I was out at a place with JEP and when I got back from our long phonecall she proceeded to get really drunk with foreigners I disliked from a hagwon I dislike throwing back soju and ultimately writing on the ladies' room floor throwing up.  Danny Shin asked me to go in to the BR to comfort / talk with her so I did.  I told her we should leave even before she got really drunk but she wouldn't obey me.  KJ Park arrived and said "ireona" (get up bitch) and she did.  I cursed in front of KJ Park since I felt I was being used as her crying-blankie and exploited to help her cope but never extricate from the situation.  I later had a slight heart-attack when I found out they were having an affair even as JE flirted with other men and used them I see now as "honey-trap" and to spy on all the employees.   I feel like this is the last time I will try to communicate open with you about why I am the way I am why I do what I do.  Back in 2008 you told me to use more kindness but where does that go?  It's good for little kids. Anyway before my heart-attack on that night - which impelled me to stop participating for a while in good faith with 7-Step's accelerated curriculum program working on Saturdays (which I had done happily before that) - I had been incredibly optimistic and at the same time "wise" in the "soi sage" sense reading Flaubert's last completed novel, which you might like one day, "L'Education Sentimentale" (accurately translated as "Emotional Education" since "Sentiment" sounds Victorian and sentimentality is an Anglo or Anglo-Korean category, saccharine in a way which French love and emotion are not).   I also later visited Cheonan her hometown which means "Heaven's Peace."  I walked around and years later wanted to write a novel called "Cheonan Sky" which is about the sinking of a ROKN frigate / destroyer / corvette called the ROKS Cheonan in 2010 but a North Korean suicide micro-submarine. The captain of the ROKS Cheonan never retired basically but became a military analyst for I believe either KJAD or 38North out of entailments or legacy-obligations to his men. The theme of "Cheonan Sky" is family killing family (the Korean War / civil war in general within a nation), terrorism, capital punishment by electrocution.  The ending is that the hero committed acts of 1st degree murder and terrorism and is dressed by his wife for execution after donating semen / sperm so she can have a child after his death. You might or might not be interested to know but "Cheonan" in Chinese characters is I believe "Tian'an'" like Tiananmen Square.   When I asked Josephine to teach me some Korean she said "Miryang" which means "secret sunshine" that is actually the name of a city as well a movie but known for the gang-rape of an elementary school girl.   3. This is kind of why I'm interested in terrorism, assassination, North Korean Studies, and also why I didn't know how to read people's sign about "covering love," concealing or forgiving crimes et cetera; covering sins.   I associate JEP for some reason with Russian blues and mother-of-pearl since I looked at a wedding ring which was mother-of-pearl and diamond in 2011.  In retrospect I have no idea whether she was interested in me or not or how willing she would have been to partner with me as opposed to KJ or Danny Shin or anyone else.  I won't say anything more because I don't oppose women being that way 100% although the Book of Proverbs does say not to prostitute your daughter and a British Victorian Evangelical PM used to walk the streets of London pleading with hookers to get honest if low-paying jobs (WE Gladstone who also said politics succeeds ultimately through "not love of power but power of love" a saying I associate these days with Mike Pompeo) I have come close to imprisonment and/or death lately from trying to be open w/ people in America so this is literally I ardently wish my last freebie w/r/t "teaching" people but the existence of people like Josephine also seems to bind me to SK or KR.  There is simply no way I can not go back someday.  When that ferry sank I saw an article about a foreigner graveyard in Incheon and felt what Shakespeare felt near the end of his life which was a desire beyond or parallel to after life to donate his bones to a certain plot of land.  I foolishly or heedlessly confessed this reality to Mi who became depressed and my words started to go over his head. IDK if you want to know this but I worked for a long time on a novel about the MV Sewol called "Flowers on Water" or "Flowers 1881" which is about the sovereignty of God in the deaths or waste of children as well as "It Is Well with My Soul," Chancellor / Pastor John Piper, the drowning of paedophiles in prison or others who abuse or exploit young people, and my own responsibility for failing as an HS teacher. IDK if you remember but the guy who owned the MV Sewol which sank due to unlawful loading of the hull with equipment was found decapitated with a backpack full of money in a field of maize, I believe.   There are those who believe including me that KR is not really a democracy but run by the KCIA or and/or through an organization called "One Company" or so that includes numerous military dictators, officers, many of whom used to be teachers though some were also associated with the terrorist-student radical organization (the ShiShi) that produced the Meiji Restoration and the Empire of Japan -> WW2 Pacific since the Japanese were determined not to let American "gunboat diplomacy" lead to cultural genocide or everlasting hegemony of the West over either JP or the total Far East. My last thing to you is just that there are those who believe the imperial family of JP who were restored to supremacy in gov't by the ShiShi after centuries of formalistic ritualitsic formalistic ceremonial "Chinese" rule are partly Korean in blood and Koreans themselves believe in "Minjung Theology" saying Koreans have a holy destiny worldwide which is something I believe as well. You can be 10,000% honest with me about your intentions from now on BTW.  IDK if I can get back to KR now, a year from now, or in a coffin.   It depends on money I guess.   As I reflected in my previous e-mail after my born again prayer in 2004 when I wished for unity (in the field across the street from Marshall School) I eventually got that unity around 2012 when Dad said he would work sacrificially to fix me up following my suicide-attempt and in 2013 when I told Jaeyoung that I wanted to be a principal I precipitated or incubated a process leading up to the Lead Teacher position I was offered a few months back as well as Concordia's interest in my application for their Educational Leadership doctorate.   If you want to read one more book by a Korean I urge "The Fourth Dimension" by Rev. Dr. David YongGi Cho, the pastor of a church called Yoido or Yeouido Full Gospel which claims some 500,000 members though Dr. Cho has been indicted for embezzlement and there are those who would doubt his belief in miracle faith-healing or in God's defending people from things like head-first suicide-attempts. As my student once said to me, "Thank you for everything" DJJ PS again if you like music I rec. "Marvel Not That Christ in Glory" - "Christ in p/POWER Resurrection / calling many sons to glory" - as well as a pop-song called "Please Remember Me" by a girl-group known as Year 7 Class 1 or 7-1. It is a slow ballad but the central refrain is "yaksokhae uri... kkok mannayo..." (Let us promise to meet again rapidly / immediately)...

[weapon13whitefang]

Let’s Talk About The Red Machete

I am fascinated by this Red Machete webseries. Ever since they showed the first part of the series, I've been tracking it, trying to fill in pieces on what is the purpose of this webseries in general. Because this isn't the first time that AMC has done a webseries surrounding the show. In the past – back in 2011 – Greg Nicotero posted online “A New Day”, which begins the story of a very small but well known iconic character for loyal watchers – The Bicycle Girl from season one.

Or as we come to know her in the series, Hannah.

In the past, the webseries was kept as just that – webseries. It wasn't played on television. And if you've watched this series – which you still can online btw – then throughout the episodes you can hear the Helicopter that Rick sees in season one and the same Helicopter that will be found by Philip Blake in season 3. So it's a nice and tight little bonding of the series together and telling other other aspects of what it going on around Atlanta while Rick was in his coma.

What I find the most interesting about this webseries was the fact that they took the time to make a budget for a story about a character that our mains have never met. They never met Hannah the bike girl or Hannah's kids or Hannah's ex-husband, Andrew. And they do this again with the “Cold Storage” (2012) series that shows a character entering Rick's former office when he was a sheriff. Another one was “The Oath” (2013), which tells about what became of the hospital Rick was left in and how the infamous “Don't Open, Dead Inside” sign came to be

The last webseries we got before Red Machete was “Flight 462” (2015), which was done to help promote season 2 of “Fear The Walking Dead” and season six of “The Walking Dead”. It was also interesting because one of the characters from the webseries ended up on Fear The Walking Dead; the character Alex from the raft. And “Passage” (2016), which was the same as “Flight 462” and used to promote FTWD and TWD. I'm not as into “Passage” and Flight 462” as I was “A New Day, “Cold Storage”, and “The Oath” because I'm more of a TWD fan than I am a FEAR fan (I watch it, I'm just not as into it ya know?).

These series connect things together from the outside perspective of the main characters and show. Red Machete isn't any different. At first it seems like it's going to be different and we don't see anything connecting... Until suddenly we have Joe from the Claimers appearing at the end of the third part of the series (Made to Suffer).

The reason I'm so fascinated with this webseries is because of the fact that this is the first time we've seen an actual character from the show on The Walking Dead. Joe is a known character. Everyone can almost recall his run-in with Daryl and the fact he got his throat ripped out by Rick in Season 5. What's also interesting to note is that these webseries are catching up to the show. Because with “A New Day, “Cold Storage”, and “The Oath” we were mainly in the beginning of the apocalypse and ended still in the beginning. This time, we moved from the beginning to following this inanimate object to The Saviors. And we're not done yet either. The story hasn't ended yet for The Machete. It's still traveling. It's ended up in a Savior's hands after being in Rick's... Which means this Machete's story is still happening and who knows where it's taking us?

I know it's just a webseries, but the fact they connected it to Joe which directly leads this damn machete to Rick Grimes and Negan's group... I get the feeling Joe isn't the only main character we have left to see for this story. I also think this Machete is going to end back with Rick again. But as for how... That's what I'm interested in.

I can't fully explain why I'm so fascinated by this webseries in particular. I may be completely stupid and crazy... But this webseries, in particular, feels like it's going to connect something important to The Walking Dead and I just can't shake that gut feeling away... Again, I'm probably stupid and crazy and bound for disappointment (as has been known to happen because of this show) and I'll be kicking my ass later when the webseries does finally conclude... But for now, I hold on the belief that this webseries is going to show us something big.

Bringing in The Claimers has to mean something. Something that connected to Rick and Daryl – even if just for a few episodes – has to mean something. The Claimers weren't anything in particular and yet we are being shown a part of their journey before they find Daryl and before their demise by Rick. I mean keep in mind that this takes place just after Daryl lost Beth to. That's a little TD poke there, I'll admit that.

This webseries is driving me nuts, y'all!

[atlasgaveup]

Don't you know communism has killed millions?!"

DEATHS CAUSED BY CAPITALISM:

Native American Genocide, 1500s-1900s (direct killings and death from plagues; North, Central, and South Americas combined): 100 MILLION [x]

Atlantic Slave Trade, 1500s-1900s (princessbuggie helped with this one): 4 MILLION [x]

September Massacres, France, 1792: 1,200 [x]

Famines in British India, 1837-1900: at least 165 MILLION [x]

Potato Famine/Great Irish Famine, 1845-1852 (an anon helped with this one): 1 MILLION [x]

Cholera Outbreak, Industrial London, 1849: 15,000 [x]

United States Civil War, 1861-1865: at least 600,000 [x]

Building First Transcontinental Railroad, United States, 1863-1869 (princessbuggie helped with this one): at least 1,200 [x]

Belgian Occupation of the Congo, 1886-1908: 10 MILLION [x]

Spanish-American War, 1898: 17,135 [x]

United States 20th Century Coal Mining Industry: 100,000 [x]

Courriéres Mine Disaster, France, 1906: 1,549 [x]

Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, 1911 (vivianvivisection helped with this one): 146 [x]

World War I, 1914-1918: 16 MILLION [x]

Building the Hoover Damn, United States, 1922-1936: 112 [x]

Shanghai Massacre of 1927: at least 5,000 presumed dead [x]

United States Intervention in Latin America, 1929-1987 (progressivefem helped with this one): 6 MILLION [x]

The White Terror, Spain, 1936-1975: at least 100,000 [x]

World War II, 1939-1945: at least 60 MILLION [x]

Benxihu Colliery Explosion, China, 1942: 1,549 [x]

Burma Railway, Thailand-Burma, 1943-1947: 106,000 [x]

Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 1945: at least 245,000 [x]

Bodo League Massacre, Korea, 1950: at least 100,000 [x]

Vietnam War, 1955-1975: 2.3 MILLION [x] [x]

Guatemalan Civil War, 1960-1996 (an anon helped with this one): 200,000 [x]

US Intervention in the Congo, 1964: 1,000 [x]

Indonesian Anti-Communist Purge, 1965-1966: at least 500,000 [x]

Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, 1965-2013: 21,500 [x], 1,000 more Palestinians have been killed in 2014.

Iran-Iraq War, 1980-1988: at least 315,000 [x]

Bhopal Disaster, Madhya Pradesh, 1984: 16,000+ [x]

United States Railroad Workers Killed on the Job, 1993-2002 (princessbuggie helped with this one): 1,221 [x]

Rwandan Genocide, 1994: 1 MILLION [x]

United States Deaths Attributed to Cigarette Smoking, 2000-2004: ~1.7 MILLION [x]

War in Afghanistan, 2001-present: 57,457 [x]

Darfur Genocide, 2003-present: 10,000 [x]

Iraq War, 2003-2011: 55,034 [x]

Mexican Drug War, 2006-present: at least 100,000 [x]

United States Workers Killed on the Job in 2012, as reported by OSHA: 4,628 [x]

Hunger (un-feuilly-de-papier helped with this one): 21,000 per day [x], 16,000 of them children [x], 3,000 of them children specifically in India [x].

Worldwide Occupational Deaths: 6,000 per day [x]

Poor shelter, polluted water, inadequate sanitation, often from homelessness (sideeffectsincludenausea helped with this one): 50,000 per day [x]

Occupational Asbestos Exposure: 107,000 per year [x]

International Sex Trafficking: 30,000 per year [x]

“Communist Death Toll,” according to The Black Book of Communism: 94 million

Capitalism Death Toll: 369 million (369,790,731), according only to the statistics I could get sources for. This number doesn’t even scratch the surface.

But, guess what? Tomorrow, we know for sure that capitalism will kill at least 77,000 more people.

You know what? No. Fuck this. I’m sick of clueless young Westeners undermining the deaths under communism to further their argument. My parents lived trough this shit. My grandparents lost half their families during Mao’s reign, were sent to labour camps and beaten and worked half to death and I’m sick people like you ignoring their lives in favour of some cheap argument to prop up communism.

You can argue against capitalism and I won’t say a word against it - but if your argument is based on the idea that communism is somehow the “lesser evil”, thereby completely disregarding the government-sanctioned genocide, famine, violence and oppression that actual people suffered, then you can take several fucking seats - especially if you’ve never experienced that violence, never lost family members to that violence and never seen first-hand what it drives people to.

Because you’re using statistics from over 500 years and across the globe (60 countries going by your stats) to compare to the death toll of what occurred over 50 years and in 11 countries.

95 million is an extremely all-inclusive number and it’s been debated about the historical accuracies and how broadly covers. Even so, a majority of that number is spread out to a few countries in under fifty years.

Now obviously, more than eleven countries have been communist states - but going by the ‘95 million’ statistic, most of the these numbers are split between China under Mao, USSR under Stalin and Cambodia under Khmer Rouge. The rest are rough estimates from about 262 000 to 1.1 million which were under North Korea, East Germany, Romania, Hungary, North Vietnam, Ethiopia.

Communism may have killed less, but the death toll is far more saturated. To break this down a bit. Coming second to none is China:

an estimate of 42 million died in China during the three-year famine of 1958-1961. Historians dispute over the actual number; 15 million is official government numbers but unofficial estimates vary between 23 mil. (Peng) to 46 mil. (Chen), but the closest and most recent estimate is about 45 million by Dikötter, who included deaths from suicide, militia executions and violence.

sidenote: according Yang Jisheng, who estimated 30 million dead from famine, another estimated 40 million ‘failed to be born’, making about 70 million in population loss.

This happened during 3 years. in one country.

and oh yeah, there was also another 92,000 Tibetans killed under Communist Government from Mao to current and another estimated 1.2 million died during the Cultural Revolution from labour camps, prisons, murders and executions (‘61-‘69).

Now, lets look at Russia, coming second place.

not including war casualty, 20-30 million died under Stalin from 1924-1953. Again, numbers vary - some estimates go as high 60 million.

Of those, 1.2 million were from the Great Purge of ‘36-39 (including invasion of Mongolia and purge of XinJiang because guess what, communism doesn’t magically erase a white dude’s sense of imperialism).

Then there were from gulags, deportation and ethnic cleansing (of Jews, Slavs, Romani, Poles, among others).

The rest were deaths from from famine from ‘26-‘38. If we add deaths that occurred during deportations, POW died under care, and death in other Soviet countries during Stalin’s rule, then the average number gets closer to 30 mil.

Not to forget:

2.2 million were killed in Cambodia during Khmer Rouge’s rule, 1975-1979. Half were from famine/disease, half were executions.

Red Terror in Ethiopia: 30,000-500,000 (‘77-‘78)

Collectivisation in Romania: 60,000 to 190,000 (‘47-‘64)

North Vietnam land reform: ca 172,000 (some estimates btw 200,000 to 500,000) (‘53-‘56)

North Korea has no an ‘official’ number, but calculated deaths from 1948-87 were about 1 million. 240,000 to 420,000 people died as a result of the 1990s famine.

The death toll during Mao’s Famine during the Great Leap Forward would be an estimated 52,000 per day, going by 40 million death-toll estimates - and that from one country alone.

During Stalin’s Great Purge, executions were calculated to be 1000 per day.

And you want to compare this to a world-wide conglomerate?

And before you put words in my mouth, I’m not saying a damn thing in defense of capitalism.

You can denounce capitalism all you want, but you need take several steps back and reconsider if you’re going to do so on the backs of people who actually suffered through an oppressive, abusive, totalitarian regime by devaluing their suffering and using it as an example of how communism is the “"lesser evil”“ - especially if you have never lived through it, lost family members or felt the fear of such a regime.

Don’t attribute the death toll to Stalinism or Maoism or say it was ‘wrong form’ of communism. You do not get to cherry pick your flavour of totalitarianism so that it suits your social stance. You do not get to undermine, appropriate and white-wash the human atrocities and genocides committed in the name of communism so that you can cover up the ugly underbelly of how these regimes will work, has worked and is currently working.

These are not statistics for you to brush under the mat so that communism can seem ‘less evil’. People who deported, sent to labour camps, starved to death, sold out by the colleagues, murdered by their students are not collateral fucking damage for make-believe, Westernised idealistic communism.

(and another side-note: the Anti-communism cleansing in Indonesia had fuck-all to do with capitalism and everything to do with anti-Chinese sentiments. These were all tied in with the historical socio-politics at the time, such as the foreign policy of CCCP, the relationship and influence of the Chinese government under Zhou Enlai , and the state of Indonesia’s militarisation under Sukarno that was helped by China. To use their complicated and brutal political and social history that literally nothing to do with Western capitalism and everything to do with East Asian international relations to back your argument is really fucking imperialist.)

I would’ve got an aneurysm trying to elaborate on everything wrong with OP’s post and how it’s stuffed with smug Western imperialism and US-centrism. (So now, all the deaths in Europe and Asia in WW2 were just about ‘capitalism’? Not, I dunno, some ideas of German and Japanese ethnic and racial superiority? Unless you want to tell me racial and ethnic tensions that long-predated capitalism somehow were caused by capitalism? Fuck that bullshit.)

And slavery as a system has been present in human societies long before capitalism was even a twinkle in anyone’s eye. It can exist in a non-capitalist society. And let’s just say there were plenty of forced labour camps and gulags in Communist regimes. I mean, if I recall correctly, didn’t the ostensibly “”Capitalist”” World War 2 in Europe begin when Nazi Germany AND the Soviet Union invaded Poland? Maybe because imperialism isn’t tied strictly to a capitalist society though the two can reinforce each other. Or no empires would have existed before the modern era.

TBH I’ve no more patience for people who love glossing over the complexities of the violence suffered by our families just to fit their agenda, especially when these people are trying to appear Oh So Progressive but it’s just Western imperialism on steroids.

My reply to anyone that wants to argue the point that communism is better, is to tell them to pack their bags, denounce their citizenship from the country they despise and ask for asylum in the country of their choice that is currently under communist control. North Korea would be happy to show the wealth of their people. Venezuela would be happy to keep you safe from crime and show the wealth of their people. Name your destination, as long as it’s the communist dictatorship you want. I’ll buy the one way ticket.

there are only two groups of people who desire Communism:

1. Those who never lived under it, and

2. Those who lived under it and had power over others.

That should tell you something, but you’re a fucking idiot.

[plasticnightmaredoll]

Ranking Lady Gaga's Albums

I am:

Bored as hell

Depressed as hell

Chromatica is still pretty fresh

911's music video is a masterpiece

I watched videos on YouTube ranking Gaga songs and albums

So, here I am, doing my own rankings! For those who know me well, Lady Gaga is definitely my favorite solo artist of all time and has had a huge impact on me in many ways. I've been a fan since 2008, which seems like yesterday and a long time ago all at once!

Now, this is all just my opinion, so some may not agree and may be disappointed with some of my choices. This is just for fun and if you want, feel free to reblog and rank the ablums how you see fit :)

I have excluded "Cheek to Cheek" because it doesn't have any new songs from Gaga and it's a collab album. I have also excluded the "A Star Is Born" soundtrack because my OCD still sees it as a soundtrack and a collab album. I do love both, though, and I'm not even a jazz fan 😮

Anyway, so here we go with the ranking under the cut!

6. The Fame (2008) - 88.1%

Hey, don't get me wrong: This a great debut album with some great songs and some of her best lyrics. "LoveGame's" iconic "I wanna take a ride on your disco stick" line is pure gold, "I Like It Rough" is a strikingly different beast all together, "Paparazzi" is one of my favorite Gaga songs, and "Poker Face" is a legend. It was the album that got me interested in Gaga, with "Just Dance" being the first song of hers I heard.

The problems with this album for me are that is a bit dated in terms of sound and style, and it is outmatched by its "Big Sister" albums, ARTPOP and Chromatica.

5. Chromatica (2020) - 92.9%

What a treat. This album is incredible, and I think is the more mature, better-written version of The Fame album. It's a unique pop album in that it's not only very personal for Gaga, a lot of songs are kind of on the sad side. I mean, "Fun Tonight" is about how Gaga feels stressed by fame, and sometimes people around her don't seem to care and are more interested in their own personal gains. "911" is a techo-pop bop but it's about self-medicating when you're depressed, and being your own worst enemy. "Love Me Right" is Gaga asking if people will love her if she wasn't, well, Lady Gaga. "Replay" seems to be about dealing with an abusive partner.

The problems I have with this album are that "Replay" and "Babylon," while lyrically good, don't really appeal to me in terms of "sound." I know they're fan favorites but I just...don't get the appeal. They are slowly growing on me, though, so we'll see.

I also think that the first part of "Fun Tonight" really fits Yhorm the Giant. Seriously, check the lyrics and you'll see what I mean! If you know about Yhorm, that is.

4. ARTPOP (2013) (94.0%)

This album tanked and fans were disappointed at this being the follow up to the more mature and profound "Born This Way," but I saw Gaga's interviews about "ARTPOP" up until it's release, and she said she wasn't going to make the album like BTW; ARTPOP would be a fun, light-hearted dance album. And that's what we got!  It also has two of my all-time favorite songs from her, “Applause” and “Gypsy.”

To me, it's a better-produced and much more modern version of The Fame, and it also is probably Gaga's most experimental album since it's such a crazy techno-dance thrill ride. It’s club material for the most part, and it always gets me in a dancing mood even when I’m down. It’s seriously underrated and definitely deserves more love.

3. Joanne (2016) - 96.9%

Joanne was not the album a lot of fans wanted or expected, and is probably considered her “worst” album. Technically, it wasn’t what I expected or wanted, either, but I was more than happy with the results. It’s vastly different than anything she’s done as it’s more of a country-rock album than a dance-pop album. Lyrically, it has some beautiful songs on it, including the title track “Joanne,” which is about her late aunt. 

Vocally, I think Gaga shines on this album because her voice is raw, emotional and has little post-production effects/tweaks. This makes it a more relatable and personal experience, and I feel like this is the first album Gaga made that was something entirely hers. Not saying she didn’t care about the fans but I think she wanted to make an album that truly spoke to her and went places she hadn’t before with her music style.

The album is a bit all over the place in terms of tone and style, so it’s actually her least cohesive album. However, the track selection is so impressive that it doesn’t bother me.

2. Born This Way (2011) - 97.1%

This album is nearly perfect, and there isn’t a song on here that’s mediocre. Even the weakest song on it, “Government Hooker,” is still pretty good. So many songs on here could be singles in addition to what we did get: “Born This Way,” “Hair,” “Marry the Night,” “Judas,” “You and I,” and “The Edge of Glory.” I can easily see “Heavy Metal Lover,” “ Scheiße,” “Bad Kids,” and “Electric Chapel” being singles. “Bloody Mary” is hauntingly beautiful, “Black Jesus + Amen Fashion” is catchy and fun, “Americano” is powerful and bold...I mean, I could go on and on. It’s an album where I rarely skip any of the songs, and I prefer to listen to it in its entirely. It’s an experience to me, not just a collection of songs.

1. The Fame Monster (2009) - 100%

The only crime this album committed was being too damn short with only 8 songs! But each one is fantastic. Any of them could be singles, and “Speechless” is easily one of her best songs. “Telephone” with Beyonce is so much fun to listen to, “Alejandro” is addictively hypnotic, “Bad Romance” is pure banger material...it’s perfect in every way, I enjoy every song equally, and it hasn’t aged a day. 

[ted-hyung]

as a b1a4 supremacist, what do you think one should do to get to know them? i only recently kind of got into them because i didnt really know them until sandeul released his solo album

that’s CNU, btw, used to invent long hair before nuest ren or seventeen jeonghan.

also used to rock hipster glasses before it was cool. kang daniel the shoulder gangster? idk her. it’s CNU.

anyway.

where should i start? BUT a major note to take about B1A4 is they went from this:

(RIP FASHUN)

to this:

hallelujah. read more here.

listen, friend, i go way back with B1A4. i literally cried watching this subbed video lmaooo skip to 43:40.

it’s from MTV MATCH UP B1A4 X BLOCK B eps 8. rip me wyd. let’s talk about B1A4 and block b. they were the shits back then yo. 2011 was their debut year; two boy groups from unknown agencies tackling two different genres and images and MTV GOD BLESS MTV GAVE THEM A MATCHING VARIETY SHOW. you can watch B1A4 cuts here and you will see the legendary dread!zico tryna to win over gentle jinyoung-hyung and FAILED BIG TIME who’s crying with me.

block b will always hold a place in my heart. do you know who invented hep hap? it’s block b. their “new kids on the block”, “welcome to the block”, and “blockbuster” albums have no fault. none. but then they’re hep hap no more and i lost them.

B1A4 KOREAN DISCOGRAPHY + PERSONAL SONG REC, from latest to newest. i believe you can find the newest albums on SPOTIFY JFC why can’t day6.

LET’S FLY (2011): please listen to “only one” lmao. “only learned the bad things” was so, so, so sweet for my skinny freshman ass. i love it.

IT B1A4 (2011): lbr “beautiful target” was the best. watch them grow from you zoom zoom my heart like a rocket to CNU’s iconic everybody say la la. also “chu chu chu” was super chill. “fooool”? you’d find yourself singing along upon first listen.

IGNITION (2012): EVERYTHING IN THIS ALBUM BUT THE TITLE TRACK AKA MY HYUNG JUNG JINYOUNG’S FIRST TACKLE ON PRODUCING GEMS. also sandeul has a solo track here TITLED “CRUSH” GO FIND IT NOW.

IGNITION SPECIAL EDITION (2012): “baby goodnight” is so iconic i’m still side-eyeing newer idols who aren’t singing it to the camera while they’re preparing to go to sleep LMAOOOOOOOOO.

IN THE WIND (2012): yes they graced us BANA with 3 albums back in 2012. “TRIED TO WALK” HANDS DOWN ONE OF THEIR BEST SONGS. TOP 5. i’m the president of na honja ireoke opening line. i have a shrine for that line. the most impactful opening line of all songs, korean or not. amen. listen to all tracks please please. you’ll find the B1A4 distinct flavor on “what do you want to do”. like. go. now.

WHAT’S HAPPENING (2013): B1A4 wore fancy stuffs during this promotion. me ghosta. but DO YOU LIKE BALLAD? “good love” had me on the floor. then i read the translation and i died.

WHO AM I (2014): jesus lord and savior. this album. jesus f christ man THIS ALBUM. LISTEN TO EVERY SINGLE THING HERE PLEASE. “baby” further wow me about baro’s voice. “too much” WHICH IS SANDEUL + GONGCHAN’S DUET? fuck lmao we’re talking about heartbreak here and mine’s bleeding whenever i listen to “too much”. “DRUNK WITH MUSIC” tho. wow CNU-hyung. killed. this. concept. i can’t. you’re lying if your shoulders aren’t moving along and if your head isn’t nodding along. it’s THAT good. you’ll feel the swag. seriously.

SOLO DAY (2014): summer means “solo day”. period. it’s my summer jam. it should be YOURS. “drive” is so so so good. it has asphalt in the lyric. honestly do listen. also if you’re JYP stan do realize B1A4 had collaboration with min and suzy and in this album, sunmi. awesome.

SWEET GIRL (2015): oh my girl visual slash vocal slash handsome girl jiho is in the music video for the title track “sweet girl”. life’s good. in “wait” BARO IS SINGING I REPEAT BARO IS SINGING AND BANA prolly cried everywhere. and jinyoung wailing i can’t stop thinking about you girl everyday, everyday? LMAO BYE.

GOOD TIMING (2016): “a lie”, undoubtedly quenched BANA’s thirst after one whole year. have you watched “a lie” live on music shows? if the ‘touch my cheek tell me i’m not lying’ isn’t the best point of all dance point then idk what to trust. yes, i’m that supremacist LMAO. “crushing on you again” is so sweet, so very winter season love song aka B1A4’s very own color. they should be dubbed as winter season kings because their releases during fall/winter (in the wind, who am i, good timing) are the be(a)sts. “nightmare” paved the road for winner’s “really really” LMAO i’m joking. but not really. i mean baro and mino are practically brothers. “in dreams” sounds so fucking dreamy, like i said, totally winter season love song. “i’ll find you” makes me long for someone it shall inspire y’all. “together” is the one last song that leaves you wonder if these singing strangers are really worth our money and time and dedication and the answer is YES BECAUSE B1A4 RECORDED THIS SONG WITH KOREAN BANAS. jesus.

okay.

it’s july 2017. my bro baro is acting in a drama now. sandeul, your man, has collab with a starship kid. does it mean we’re going to have another winter season album? i’d say amen.

bonus: this is my fave pic of them.

if you’ve heard of it jinyoung is a composer. he’s well noted by other idols and important people in the industry lmao. he also acts. wow. i don’t follow girl groups, but LMAO THIS SONG? “AT THE SAME PLACE” MADE BY JINYOUNG HELPED B1A4 TO GET MORE RECOGNITION. this time i gotta thank mnet for the opportunity. and for the girls who were so sweet fangirling towards my hyung jung jinyoung.

listen to my ult oh my girl’s “one step two step” here and say yes that you can hear jinyoung’s magic there. i’ll just link to the BEST FANCAM EVER.

HERE’S THEM SINGING THE LEGENDARY SONG THEMSELVES:

AND JINYOUNG COMPOSED THE NEWEST GIRL GROUP BOP “DEEP BLUE EYES” wow my hyung shall be crowned as THE PRINCE OF GIRL GROUP BOPS. like.

i cry a lot. but promise this is the last time. i cried watching sandeul’s music video for his solo debut “stay as you are” but y kno it already. help my bro reach 1 million views before a year please.

fun fact: been with them since 2011. never got into shipping business, just here purely for the music and the people. they’re like friends that i’ve known for a long time; we don’t necessarily stay in touch but i always think of them fondly, y feel? i find new friends as i get older every year, yet i’ll always be the first to congratulate them if they reach another milestone in their respective lives y kno? moral of this story: don’t ship for a long lasting stanning TROOLOLOLOLLOLOLO.

this is comprehensive.

i hope i helped.

everyone please have a good weekend.

[queenyleeny]

Warning: One Direction

For this week, I wanted to focus my attention on One Direction. I was going through all of my stuff from 2011-13 and realized that I used to adore them. You could even have called me a fan, a part of  “... audiences are deeply engaged in their favorite media texts. (Good, 2019)  Everyone has a different meaning of what it means to be a fan, but for me, it means I am someone who gets deeply engaged with my favourite person. I was so involved with the band that I wanted to be a part of it.

Ok, so I am going to post an embarrassing fact about me on here, but I am doing it for my fans and followers. This is how much I trust you guys. Here goes nothing, when I was 14, I wrote fanfiction, ‘ stories written by fans about their favourite media texts,”( Sullivan,2013,p204) about One Direction on Wattpad. There, I said it. You’re not a real fan until you write fanfiction about the boyband on Wattpad. https://www.wattpad.com/story/29818792-hide-and-go-seek (Megan I cried when I reread this btw. Please don’t judge me) I am also a severe type of fan, as I now see myself as an enthusiastic fan. I am someone who will talk, but I will not do anything about it. I will not write fanfiction, or make songs about them; I am no longer a big and committed fan. It’s funny how these things change over time. I used to write fanfiction (just the one book) about One Direction, but it seemed to have been nothing more than a phase. Now, even though I am still a fan of the boys, there is no chance that I will write fanfiction about them. I am no longer as involved in the fandom as I used to be. Yet, this does not make me any less of a fan than when I was fully involved.

I got so into the cultural taste of the band, and the fandom, that I started acting like them. I remember having a ridiculous British accent there was, followed by some Irish, and wearing nothing but stripes and letterman jackets because of Louis and Zayn. I was a part of their fandom, a part of their culture, a part of who they were. I can't say I am not guilty of joining so many One Direction group chats on Facebook, but I am. I was in this fandom filled with Directioners who also shared the same cultural tastes as the band and I. I made so many friends, and we would all talk about the things they said, the way they spoke, what they wore, how their latest interviews are perceived to be. Please don't ask me why I thought it was safe to be posting my Snapchat on these fandom sites for strangers to add me, and why I thought it was a good idea to be posting so much personal information about being a Directioner. When you're a part of a fandom, when you share these inside jokes and cultural knowledge about the people, you feel as though you can trust everyone within the fandom. It creates a sense of belongingness. Being a part of a fandom feels like having a family of your own, and having strangers ask you how your day was. Being a part of a fandom is all about sharing these shared values. SPOILER ALERT. It got way too sappy with all of the flashbacks to One Direction, so let's move the focus towards something else. I WATCHED THE JOKER! I am still in awe about the movie, and cannot stop thinking about it. I noticed the film featured a strong sense of moral alignment, which is something that explains how these villains are turned into protagonists. The story opens up with a man (Arthur) who is seen receiving treatment for his mental illnesses, before transitioning into what his daily life is all about. The audience feels sorry for this man; after all, he seems to live a sad life where his laughter brings people misery. Later on in the movie, the Joker takes a shot at changing his life (get it), and that is when things start to change for him. The film portrays the character development as we see Arthur transition from a timid and closed off man, to someone who starts to claim his title as the Joker, a man who is here to start a democracy and make things right in his world. I was told from a young age that the Joker was a villain, someone that did no good in the world, and DC did an excellent job of portraying it. After watching the movie, though, you could see the Joker is the way that he is because of his mental disorders, but it also shows him trying to make a change within society. Within his narrative, Arthur went from a man who ended lives, to a man who started a revolution. He was the protagonist of his storyline, not the villain.  

I can't believe I am writing this blog as I am watching an old-time favourite, Wizards on deck with Hannah Montanna. It is a crossover of some of my favourite childhood shows, Wizards of Waverly Place, Suite Life On Deck, and Hannah Montanna. These crossovers are the highlights of my days, seeing some of my favourite shows merge into one. When I was a kid, I had a massive crush on Cody (Zack and Cody), always pretended to have two lives like Hannah (Hannah Montanna), and I wanted to be just like Alex (Wizards of Waverly Place). These crossovers create a blurring of boundaries that allow us to view our favourite characters in an alternate universe where they all co-exist with one another.

Just thinking of the possibility of working as an actress has always been a dream of mine. It would be amazing working on Wizards of Waverly Place, Suite Life on Deck, Hannah Montanna, as even as an extra would be a dream come true. We need another Veronica Mars Kickstarter campaign. “the work of production now places vastly greater emphasis on ongoing interaction and involvement with the fan audience through venues ... the constant feedback loop of social media.” (Navar-Gill,p. 212)

It invites fans to receive an experience to be a part of the campaign, in return for their patronage. They would take some of the fans and cast them as extras in the Veronica Mars Movie, speak to her, email her, and even used their fan art, and in return, the artists got credit for their work. No matter what type of fan you were, affirmational or transformational, you would gain a particular type of access associated with Veronica. It would be amazing to have even been able to attend a premier to the movie of a celebrity that I am a fan of and be able to be included within the participatory culture. I am going to end off this week's blogs with a video of me auditioning to be Disney's new star until next week.

XOXO-QueenyLeeny